The Vincent Viafore Murder Case

     In 2011, Vincent Viafore, a 1986 graduate of Roy C. Ketcham High School in Wappinger, New York, met 31-year-old Angelika Graswald at the Pickwick Pub in Poughkeepsie. At the time, Viafore was going through a divorce. Graswald, a native of Lativa (maiden name Lipska), had been previously married.

     In 2015, the engaged couple planned to get married in Europe on the Baltic Sea.

     At four in the afternoon of Sunday April 19, 2015, Vincent and Angelika entered the choppy waters of the Hudson River in Kayaks. They were en route from Plum Point in the Cornwall-on-Hudson area to Bannerman's Island.

     Three hours and forty minutes after they set out on the Hudson River in Kayaks, Angelika Graswald called 911 to report that, forty minutes earlier, her fiancee had fallen out of his kayak into the river. She capsized as well and had been rescued by a boater. Mr. Viafore was still missing.

     As Graswald received treatment for hypothermia at a local hospital, police and rescue crews launched a search for Vincent Viafore. According to Graswald, Mr. Viafore had not been wearing a life jacket.

     The next day, while searchers continued to look for Vincent Viafore's body, Graswald went on Facebook to thank everyone for reaching out to her with sympathy. "Please keep your prayers for Vince," she wrote. "Miracles ARE possible. The authorities are doing everything they can." Graswald also posted a number of photographs of herself and Viafore captioned: "I miss you my love."

     On April 21, 2015, with the search for Viafore still underway, Graswald spoke to a local television reporter about how she and her fiancee had fallen out  of their kayaks into the cold, choppy waters of the Hudson River. According to Graswald, he had said, "I don't think I'm gonna make it." She had responded, "What are you talking about? Of course you will."

     Detectives questioned Grawald on April 28, 2015, nine days after the still missing Viafore capsized on the Hudson. Investigators came away from the interview doubting Graswald's account of the incident.

     On Tuesday April 30, 2015, New York State Police Major Patrick Regan announced at a press conference that Angelika Graswald had been charged with second-degree murder in connection with the death of the still missing Vincent Viafore. "Initially," he said, "we believed Graswald to be a survivor of a tragic accident."

     Without elaborating, Major Regan said, "Graswald made statements to us that implicated herself in the crime. We believe we know what happened."

     Orange County District Attorney David Hoovler, regarding the absence of a corpse, told reporters that "It's not unheard of presenting a murder case without a body." (True, but with an autopsy providing a cause of death, the case against the accused would have to be otherwise very strong. With no eyewitness, confession, a strong motive, or physical evidence linking Graswald to the murder, the prosecutor will have an uphill battle.)

     Angelika Graswald was held in the Orange County Jail without bond on the charge of second-degree murder.

     On May 3, 2015, Graswald gave another television interview, this time from the Orange County Jail. She said the police arrested her after reading entries in her diary in which she had written that at times she wished her fiancee dead. She explained that these passages had been written "during tough times under stress." The murder suspect insisted that she loved Viafore and would never have caused him any harm.

     Graswald, on July 24, 2017, pleaded guilty to negligent homicide in connection with her fiancee's kayak death. Under the plea agreement, she will receive a sentence of 15 months to four years in prison. Since she has spent 27 months in jail awaiting her trial, she will be released from custody late in 2017. 

Writing In The FantasyGenre Is Not Easy

So many writers think fantasy is easy. All you have to do is rip off some elves, goblins, and a few other things from Tolkien and spend about 10 minutes making up imaginary words and another 10 minutes working up a rough idea of the country and a little local history and bingo, you're in business. You're a fantasist. It's not like that. What made Tolkien unique is that he spent 50 years building his world, and he built it from the inside out.

Peter S. Beagle in The Writer's Handbook, edited by Alfrieda Abbe, 2004 

Defendants' Courtroom Attire: How Stupid Can You Get?

Many defendants dress casually, even for felony trials. The collared shirt is a rarity. Most wear what they might don to watch Saturday morning cartoons, like a shirt that says Lucky Charms or flip-flops and shorts. Or an oversized football jersey and their good jeans, the ones with the embroidered dragon on the rear pockets. Defendants will show up for trial on a marijuana sales case wearing a shirt with a marijuana leaf design--not on a dare, or as some kind of political statement, but because they're so oblivious that they put the shirt on and don't think anything of it.

Adam Plantinga, 400 Things Cops Know, 2014 

The Benefits of Writing

We [women] have come to think that duty should come first. I disagree. Duty should be a by-product. Writing, the creative effort, the use of the imagination, should come first,--at least for some part of every day of your life. It is a wonderful blessing if you will use it. You will become happier, more enlightened, alive, impassioned, light-hearted and generous to everybody else. Even your health will improve. Colds will disappear and all the other ailments of discouragement and boredom.

Brenda Uleland, If You Want to Write, originally published in 1938 

The Five Ws in Modern Journalism

[Print and TV] reporters in journalism textbooks try to provide readers and viewers with what they need to know and try to produce stories that answer Who?, What?, When?, Where?, and Why? Journalists in real world news markets are driven, either consciously or indirectly, to produce stories that are generated by a different set of Five Ws: Who cares about information? What are they willing to pay, or others willing to pay to reach them? Where can media outlets and advertisers reach them? When is this profitable? Why is it profitable? These economic concerns help predict media content and explain why information in news reports differs from an accounting of a day's most significant events.

James T. Hamilton, All the News That's Fit to Sell, 2004

Linsey Attridge's Outrageous Crime and Ridiculous Sentence

     In 2008, Linsey and Gary Attridge were married in the central Scotland town of Grangemouth. The 26-year-old bride had grown up in Grangemouth where her mother worked as a seamstress and her father was a window cleaner. Linsey and her new husband, a financial advisor, honeymooned in Malta.

     Less than two years after the wedding, Linsey was unhappy with her marriage. In August 2010, after meeting kickboxing instructor Nick Smith online, Linsey and her daughter moved into the 32-year-old's house in the northern city of Aberdeen. By the summer of 2011, that relationship had fallen apart after Linsey confessed to having sex with one of Nick Smith's friends while Nick was in the house asleep. Although they were no longer a couple, Nick allowed Linsey and her daughter, to whom he had become a surrogate father, to continue living in his house.

     In August 2011, while browsing through Facebook pages, Linsey came across a photograph of 26-year-old Philip McDonald, a cook at a downtown Aberdeen cafe. He was pictured with his 14-year-old brother James. Philip lived outside of the city in a modest flat with his partner Kelly Fraser and their daughter. To Linsey, Philip and James McDonald were total strangers.

     A few days after stumbling across the Facebook photograph, Linsey Attridge, in a scheme to rekindle her relationship with Nick Smith, decided to falsely report that that Philip and James McDonald had broken into her house and brutally raped her. Before alerting the authorities, she staged the crime by overturning furniture, punching herself in the face, and ripping her clothing.

     Police officers who responded to the false rape report found a woman who looked and acted as though she had been beaten and sexually assaulted. She submitted herself to various physical examinations including tests for sexually transmitted diseases. In an act of extreme self-centered cruelty, LInsey Attridge identified Philip and James McDonald as her rapists. (Since they were total strangers, I don't know how Linsey explained knowing who her attackers were.)

     Two days after receiving the false crime report, police officers arrested the younger brother at his mother's house. James McDonald was a student at a residential school for teenagers with behavioral problems. (This made him an ideal rape suspect.) Less than a hour after taking James into custody, police officers walked into the cafe where Philip worked as a cook.

     On the worst day of Philip McDonald's life, the detectives who showed up at the cafe told Philip that he and his brother were the prime suspects in a brutal rape case. The officers asked the shocked and frightened young man to accompany them to the police station for questioning. In the police vehicle en route to police headquarters, the officers identified the victim and described the home invasion and crime. Philip broke down and cried. (The officers probably took this as a sign of guilt.)

     At the police station, detectives photographed, fingerprinted, and swabbed the rape suspect for DNA. During the five-hour interrogation, when a detective revealed exactly when the crime had taken place, Philip was relieved. While the two men were supposedly raping Linsey Attridge, Philip was at home putting his daughter to bed. Several members of his family were in the house with him that night. His relatives would vouch for his whereabouts at the time of the rape. He had an alibi.

     The detectives questioning Philip were not interested in his so-called alibi. Everyone had an alibi. Big deal. Philip didn't realize that police investigators, once they have a suspect in their cross-hairs, are extremely reluctant, even in the face of exonerating evidence, to change targets.

     Over the next two months Philip McDonald's life was a living hell. He couldn't be out in public without being harassed, and had to enroll his daughter in another school. By October 2011, Linsey Attridge's story began to unravel. When pressed by detectives who had finally become skeptical, she admitted that she had made the entire story up. She had done it in an effort to attract attention and sympathy from her estranged boyfriend, Nick Smith. In so doing, she had put Philip and his brother through hell, wasted police resources, and made the detectives look like monkeys. Cops hate people who lie to them about as much as they hate rapists.

     Shortly after Linsey Attridge's false report confession, a pair of detectives walked into the cafe to inform Philip that he was in the clear. That was it. Out of the blue he was accused of rape, and out of the blue he was told that his ordeal had ended. The cops left the restaurant without offering even an insincere apology. Like their counterparts in American, and probably throughout the world, police officers never say they are sorry. Why? Because they are not sorry.

     A local prosecutor charged Linsey Attridge with the crime of filing a false report. In June 2013, the defendant pleaded guilty to the charge in an Aberdeen courtroom. The judge shocked everyone by sentencing Attridge to 200 hours of community service and two years probation. Nick Smith, her former boyfriend, was in the courtroom that day. He told reporters outside the court house that he thought the judge's sentence was "ridiculous." He was right.

      

Bernard Shaw on Literary Critics

I have never been able to see how the duties of a critic, which consists largely in making painful remarks in public about the most sensitive of his fellow creatures, can be reconciled with the manners of a gentleman. But gentleman or no, a critic is most certainly not bound to perjure himself to shield the reputation of the profession he criticizes.

Bernard Shaw in Never in Doubt by Peter S. Prescott, 1986 

Handwriting Identification Versus Graphology

     Please don't confuse handwriting identification with handwriting analysis [graphology]. Handwriting identification is a science; handwriting analysis is considered by many people to be a pseudoscience. Handwriting identification attempts to decide who did, or sometimes who did not, write a particular document; handwriting analysis attempts to discern the personality traits of the person who did the writing.

     Handwriting identification looks at many factors, some of them conscious but many of them so habitual they are totally beyond conscious control. These include the slant of the letters, the way the letters are joined or separated, the use of capitals in place of small letters and vice versa, the shapes of individual letters, the shapes of buckles on letters such as K, the tails of letters such as Y and J. What the professional handwriting examiner looks at and what the amateur hoping to identify handwriting looks at are often totally different; therefore, what an amateur may think is an exact replica of someone's signature may, to a handwriting examiner, betray dozens of major points of difference….

     When a questioned signature is absolutely identical with a known signature, it is likely to be a tracing, which can almost always be identified microscopically by the types of hesitations that do not occur in fluent natural handwriting.

Anne Wingate, Ph.D., Science of the Crime, 1992 

The Value of Rewriting

Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it's where the game is won or lost. That idea is hard to accept. We all have an emotional equity in our first draft; we can't believe that it wasn't born perfect. But the odds are close to 100 percent that it wasn't. Most writers don't initially say what they want to say, or say it as well as they could. The newly hatched sentence almost always has something wrong with it. It's not clear. It's not logical. It's verbose. It's klunky. It's pretentious. It's boring. It's full of clutter. It's full of cliches. It lacks rhythm. It can be read in seven different ways. It doesn't lead out of the previous sentence...The point is that clear writing is the result of a lot of tinkering.

William Zinsser, On Writing Well, originally published in 1975

Sherlock Holmes on the Power of Knowledge

A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library where he can get it if he wants.

Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Five Orange Pips."