The Justin Harris Murder Case

     Justin Ross Harris, a 2012 graduate of the University of Alabama, lived in suburban Cobb County outside of Atlanta, Georgia with his wife Leanna and their 22-month-old son Cooper. On the morning of Wednesday, June 18, 2014, with the toddler strapped into his carseat in the back of his father's 2011 Hyundai Tucson, Justin Harris drove straight to the administrative offices of Home Depot where he worked. Instead of first dropping Cooper off at the boy's day school he left his son in the car.

     At noon that day, with the temperature in suburban Atlanta at 92 degrees, Mr. Harris ate lunch at a restaurant not far from Home Depot then returned to work. When he climbed into the sweltering vehicle at four o'clock the boy was still in the carseat.

     The boy's father drove to a nearby shopping center where, within hearing range of several people, he yelled, "Oh my God, what have I done? My God my son is dead!" Someone at the scene called 911.

     About an hour after responding to the shopping center parking lot, paramedics, unable to revive the boy, pronounced him dead. Officers with the Cobb County Police Department took Justin Harris into custody on suspicion of murder, felony-murder and cruelty to a child in the first degree.

     Following an interrogation at police headquarters a Cobb County prosecutor charged Mr. Harris with the above three offenses. At his arraignment the suspect pleaded not guilty. The judge denied him bond.

     According to investigators, Justin Harris' wife Leanna said this to him at the police station following his interrogation: "Did you say too much?" Employees at Cooper's day school told police officers that when they called the boy's mother to inform her that he had not been delivered to class that morning she said, "Ross (Justin) must have left him in the car."

     Following a search of the suspect's dwelling and office, detectives discovered that Justin and Leanna had conducted Internet searches on the subject of hot car death. One of their inquires read: "how long does it take for an animal to die in a hot car?" When confronted with this incriminating evidence Mr. Harris explained he had been fearful about his son dying inside a hot car. Detectives didn't buy the suspect's explanation.

     Leanna, in filling out a routine victim's statement form, in the place for the victim's name wrote "self" rather than Cooper Harris.

     Upon completion of the victim's autopsy the medical examiner ruled that the boy's cause of death was consistent with dying from heat inside of a vehicle. The forensic pathologist wrote that "investigative information suggests the manner of death as homicide."

     Shortly after police officers took Justin Harris into custody his family and friends established an online petition calling for the prosecutor to drop the felony-murder charge. According to the petition, Cooper Harris' death was "a horrible accident. The father loved his son immensely. They were loving parents who are devastated. Justin already has to live with a punishment worse than death." The Harris support group also created an online fundraising account for the suspect and his wife.

     On August 9, 2014 Leanna Harris' attorney, Lawrence Zimmerman, told reporters that he was concerned that the Cobb County District Attorney's Office would bring homicide and/or child cruelty charges against his client.

     As the January 2015 trial approached, Justin Harris' attorney, Maddox Kilgore, insisted that the child's death was a tragic accident and not an act of criminal homicide. The prosecutor, on the other hand, believed the death had been an intentional killing motivated by the suspect's desire to live a child-free life.

     From the Harris home detectives acquired 120 computer discs containing videos, photographs, cellphone records, emails and the contents of other material on the suspect's computer hard drives. From this data investigators learned that on the day of Cooper Harris' death Mr. Harris was exchanging sexually graphic texts with a minor girl and another woman. This evidence led to the additional charge of dissemination of pornography to a minor.

     On November 16, 2016, following a five-week trial featuring Leanna Harris as the defense's chief witness, a jury in Brunswick, Georgia found Justin Harris guilty of first-degree murder. Following the verdict, Assistant District Attorney Chuck Boring told reporters that Harris, in killing his child, "had malice in his heart."

     On December 16, 2016, the judge sentenced the 36-year-old Harris to life in prison without the chance of parole. 

Annette Morales-Rodriguez and the C-Section Murders

     In October 2011, Annette Morales-Rodriguez, a 34-year-old mother of three, lived with a boyfriend who expected that she would give birth to their baby within a matter of days. But that wasn't going to happen because she had been faking her pregnancy. Morales-Rodriguez had lied to this man twice before about being pregnant, and in the past, to avoid exposure as a liar and a fake, she had falsely reported a pair of miscarriages. Running out of time and desperate, Morales-Rodriguez decided to kidnap a woman about to give birth and steal the fetus by performing a crude Caesarean section using knowledge she had acquired from watching a show on the Discovery Channel.

     In search of a victim and her baby, Morales-Rodriguez showed up at a Hispanic community center in Milwaukee where she encountered 23-year-old Maritza Ramirez-Cruz who was in her 40th week of pregnancy. Morales-Rodriguez lured her intended victim into her car by offering her a ride home. Along the way, Morales-Rodriguez stopped at her house to change her shoes while the unsuspecting Ramirez-Cruz waited outside in the car. When Morales-Rodriguez didn't make a timely return to the vehicle, her passenger walked up to the house, knocked on the door and asked if she could use the bathroom.

     Shortly after letting the pregnant woman into her home, Morales-Rodriguez smashed her in the head with a baseball bat, then choked her until she passed out. After binding the victim's hands and feet and covering her nose and mouth with the duct tape, Morales-Rodriguez sliced into the pregnant woman's body with a X-Acto knife exposing the fetus. After removing the baby boy from his dead mother, Rodriguez realized she had killed the newborn as well.

     After she deposited Rameriz-Cruz's blood-soaked body in her basement, Morales-Rodriguez called 911 and informed the dispatcher she had just given birth to a baby that wasn't breathing. Paramedics who rushed to the scene confirmed that the infant was dead. At this point the emergency responders had no reason to suspect foul play. They cleaned off the infant, wrapped it in a towel, and handed it to the woman who had just murdered it.

     When the medical examiner performed the autopsy it became obvious that the baby had been removed from its mother's body by an amateur. This crude procedure caused its death. A police search of Morales-Rodriguez's house resulted in the discovery of the disemboweled corpse with the duct tape still in place. According to the forensic pathologist, Ramirez-Cruz died of blood loss and asphyxiation. The baby had been stillborn.

     Following her arrest, in a videotaped interrogation at the Milwaukee police station by detective Rodolfo Gomez, Morales-Rodriguez explained in Spanish how her boyfriend's expectations caused her to kidnap and home-C-section the young pregnant woman. In other words, she murdered a pregnant woman to save her relationship with her boyfriend.

     Charged with two counts of first-degree murder, Morales-Rodriguez went on trial in early September 2012. She pleaded not guilty to the murder charges on the ground it had not been her intention to kill the mother and her baby.

     On September 20, 2012, the jury of six men and six women found the defendant guilty as charged. Because Wisconsin doesn't have the death penalty, Annette Morales-Rodriguez faced a mandatory life sentence. It was up to the judge to determine if she would be eligible for parole.

     Given the fact this woman had brutally murdered a stranger and killed the victim's baby through a crude C-section, Judge David Borowski, on December 13, 2012, sentenced Rodriquez to life in prison with no chance of parole. 

The Joseph Oberhansley Murder Case

     On Wednesday night September 10, 2014, Tammy Jo Blanton, following an argument with her boyfriend Joseph Oberhansley, threw him and his belongings out of her house. A few hours later Blanton's father changed the locks on her Jeffersonville, Indiana dwelling.

     The next day at three in the morning Tammy Blanton called 911. Her 33-year-old ex-boyfriend had returned and was trying to break into her house by kicking in the back door. Police in the southern Indiana town confronted Oberhansley at the Locus Street residence.

     Instead of taking Joseph Oberhansley into custody for attempted burglary and threats, officers ordered him off the property and told him to stay away from his former girlfriend. Oberhansley, just before he drove off in his 2002 Chevrolet Blazer, complained to the officers that the police aways favored the woman in domestic disputes.

     From his 46-year-old ex-girlfriend's home Mr. Oberhansley drove to his mother's place. He got her out of bed and complained about his mistreatment at the hands of Tammy Blanton and the police officers his ex-girlfriend had summoned. He left his mother's home at three-thirty that morning.

     The Jeffersonville police must have known that Joseph A. Oberhansley was an unstable and dangerous man. In 1998, outside of Salt Lake City, Utah, shortly after Sabrina Elder, Oberhansley's 17-year-old girlfriend gave birth to their child, he shot her to death. He shot the victim's mother in the back and in the arm when she tried to protect her daughter. The mother survived her wounds.

     After shooting his girlfriend and her mother Joseph Oberhansley put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. The bullet entered his frontal lobe and damaged his brain. A year later he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sent to prison. He got out of prison in 2012 after spending eleven years behind bars.

     In March 2013, after putting a man into a chokehold and fighting the Jeffersonville police when they broke up the fight, a Clark County prosecutor charged Joseph Oberhansley with assault and resisting arrest. He posted his bail and was released from the county jail.

     In July 2014 Mr. Oberhansley led Jeffersonville police officers on a vehicle chase that ended with his arrest in Louisville, Kentucky. Due to a bureaucratic screwup the judge set Oberhansley's bail at $500. Once again Oberhansley walked out of jail a free man.

     On Friday September 11, 2014 when Tammy Jo Blanton did not show up for work, the police at ten o'clock that morning returned to her house. They were met at the door by Oberhansley who had a fresh cut across the knuckles of his right hand. Officers searching him found a bloody folding knife in his back pocket.

     Officers discovered Tammy Jo Blanton's body beneath a vinyl camping tent draped over the bathtub. She had been stabbed numerous times in the chest and head. Her killer had also slashed her throat. Her torso had been cut open and several of her internal organs were missing.

     Officers at the murder scene found a piece of skull sitting on a bloody dinner plate. A kitchen skillet contained traces of blood as did the handle to a pair of tongs. Searchers found hunks of human flesh in the victim's garbage can.

     Confronted with this physical evidence of horrific violence, Joseph Oberhansley confessed that he stabbed and slashed his ex-girlfriend. He cut out her heart, her lungs and other internal organs that he claimed to have eaten. Some of the body parts he cooked, others he consumed raw.

      Charged with murder, abuse of corpse and breaking and entering, Mr. Oberhansley appeared before Clark County Judge Vickie Carmichael on September 15, 2014. At the arraignment hearing the defendant took back his confession. "Obviously you've got the wrong guy," he told the judge. Moreover, he claimed that he was not Joseph Oberhansley but a man named Zeus Brown. The suspect also asserted that he didn't know how old he was or if he were a U.S. citizen. The judge denied him bail.

     To reporters after the arraignment, Clark County prosecutor Jeremy Mull said, "There's a motive and a reason behind Oberhansley's denial of guilt. There's no doubt in my mind he is responsible for Tammy Jo Blanton's murder."

     On March 8, 2017, Clark County Circuit Judge Vicki Carmichael, pursuant to a defense motion declaring the defendant mentally incompetent to stand trial, ordered additional psychiatric examinations of the accused killer. These examinations were to be conducted by mental health experts selected by the court, not by parties to the case. At the time Oberhansley was receiving psychiatric treatment at the Logansport State Hospital in Logansport, Indiania.

     In October 2017, after the testimony of three mental health experts, Judge Carmichael ruled that Oberhansley was unfit to stand trial. However, on August 9, 2018, after an Indiana state psychiatrist testified that the defendant was mentally competent, Judge Carmichael ruled that the murder trial could go forward. 

     On September 18, 2020, after six days of testimony the Clark County jury found Joseph Oberhansley guilty of murder and burglary. Judge Carmichael sentenced him to life in prison. 

     The criminal justice system failed to protect Tammy Jo Blanton.

The History of the Polygraph

      The polygraph was invented in 1921 by Dr. John Larson, a 27-year-old University of California Berkeley medical student with a Ph.D. in physiology. Dr. Larson worked as a part-time police officer at the Berkeley Police Department under Chief August Vollmer. Larson had read a 1908 book called On The Witness Stand by the Harvard psychiatrist, Hugo Munsterberg who had been searching for a method of scientific lie detection since the turn of the century.

     In his chapter "The Traces of the Emotion" Dr. Munsterberg wrote that three physiological events take place whenever a person lies. First, the liar's blood pressure and heart beat increase; second, there are respiratory alterations; and third, telling a lie changes the person's galvanic skin response, or GSR. To measure GSR Dr. Munsterberg used a galvanometer that picked-up variations in the body's resistance to electricity. (Munsterberg found that when the brain is excited emotionally the individual's sweat glands alter the body's resistance to electricity.)

     In 1921 Chief Vollmer asked his "college cop" to fashion a lie detection instrument detectives could use to detect deception in the people they interrogate. After working several weeks on the project Dr. Larson informed Vollmer that he had rigged an apparatus that could detect truth and deception, an instrument he called the polygraph.

     The cumbersome tangle of rubber hoses wires and glass tubing was five feet long, two and a half feet high and weighed thirty pounds. The device could be taken apart and moved from one place to another, but it took an hour to set up.

     Larson's instrument advanced Munsterberg's technique in four ways. The polygraph recorded the physiological responses on a continuous graph while the subject was being questioned. This was an improvement over the technique of asking a question then taking the examinee's blood pressure. The second advantage involved the ability to adjust the instrument in order to control such variables as high blood pressure or extreme nervousness. Larson's invention also produced a tangible and permanent record of test results that could be later analyzed by other experts. And finally the polygraph detected and recorded the subject's breathing patterns in addition to blood pressure and pulse rate.

     In the spring of 1921 John Larson tested the polygraph on Chief Vollmer and members of the Berkeley Police Department. The results of these experiments convinced Vollmer that Larson had invented a device that would revolutionize the art and science of criminal investigation. Larson, as the department's polygraph examiner, began using the instrument to solve a series of petty theft cases at the University of California.

     Today, for a polygraph result to be accurate the instrument (vastly more sophisticated than Larson's invention) has to be in good working order. Moreover, the examiner must be properly trained and experienced in question formation and line chart interpretation. (Police polygraph examiners have to fight against their own bias.) Subjects have to be willing participants in the process, not under the influence of drugs or alcohol, be obese, retarded or mentally ill. People who are very old or under fourteen do not make reliable polygraph subjects.

     In 1988 the U.S. Congress passed a law making it illegal for private employers to use the polygraph as a pre-employment screening device. Police departments and federal law enforcement agencies, however, use the polygraph for this purpose. At present no court in the country allows the admission of polygraph results as evidence of defendants' guilt. On the other hand, defense attorneys can use polygraph findings as evidence of innocence.  

Serial Killer Paul Dennis Reid

     In 1988 a judge in Texas sent a drifter named Paul Dennis Reid to prison for twenty years. Seven years later a parole board set the 27-year-old serial armed robber free. Reid left the state in 1995 for Nashville, Tennessee in hopes of becoming a country western star. Instead of performing at the Grand Ole Opry, Mr. Reid ended up washing dishes at a number of Shoney's restaurants in and around Nashville.

     On February 16, 1997, the day after the manager of a Shoney's fired him, Paul Dennis Reid walked into Captain D's restaurant in Nashville and shot, execution style, two employees. On March 23, 1997 he murdered three McDonald's workers in Hermitage, Tennessee. A month later Reid killed two Baskin-Robbins employees in nearby Clarksville.

     Police officers arrested Reid in June 1997 in Cheatham County, Tennessee. He was taken into custody while trying to kidnap one of his former Shoney's restaurant bosses.

     Convicted of seven first-degree murders in 1999, Paul Dennis Reid landed on death row at the Riverbend Maximum prison in Nashville. He claimed that the "military government" had him under constant surveillance and was the force behind his murder convictions. Reid said his trials had been "scripted" by the government.

     Immediately after the serial killer's convictions his team of lawyers began appealing his seven death sentences on the grounds he was too mentally ill to execute. By 2002 several execution dates had come and gone. It was around this time that Reid informed his attorneys to stop appealing his case. Arguing that the death row prisoner was not mentally competent, and therefore couldn't determine his own fate, his attorneys ignored his request.

     In 2003, to a newspaper reporter with Clarksville's Leaf-Chronicle, Reid said he had "sincere, profound empathy" for his victims' families. (I'm sure that made them feel better.) "I would say to them that if I have violated you or offended you in any manner, I plead for your forgiveness." 

     A pair of Tennessee courts in 2008 ruled that Mr. Reid was mentally sound enough to be executed. Four years later the state supreme court declared that Reid's attorneys could not continue to appeal against the condemned man's wishes. By now he had been on death fourteen years.

     At six o'clock on the evening of Friday, November 1, 2013, after being treated two weeks at a Nashville hospital for an undisclosed illness, Paul Dennis Reid died on his own. He was fifty-five years old.

     Doyle Brown, the father of one of Reid's victims at the McDonald's in Hermitage, said this to an Associated Press reporter who asked him how he felt about the death of the man who had murdered his daughter: "I'm glad he's dead. I wish it happened through the criminal justice system several years ago rather than him just getting sick and dying."

     Members of Reid's family, people who fought for years to keep him from being executed, mourned his death. They didn't view their relative as an evil cold-blooded serial killer but as a victim of severe mental illness.

     Since sane people can fake mental illness and crazy people can on occasion act perfectly normal, Mr. Reid's true nature will remain a mystery. However, since most mentally ill people are not violent, the fact that some are violent suggests that crazy people can also be evil. Mentally ill or not, Dennis Reid was evil. Therefore the legal effort to save his life was a waste of time and money. Attorneys should have better things to do. 

Linsey Attridge's False Rape Report

     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 Attridge 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 he was in the house asleep. Although they were no longer a couple, Nick Smith allowed Linsey and her daughter, to whom he had become a surrogate father, to remain in his house.

     In August 2011, while browsing through Facebook pages, Linsey Attridge 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 Attridge 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 responding to the false 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. 

     Two days after receiving the false crime report police officers arrested 14-year-old James McDonald at his mother's house. He was a student at a residential school for teenagers with behavioral problems. Less than an hour after taking James into custody police officers walked into the cafe where Philip McDonald worked as a cook.

     On the worst day of Philip McDonald's life the detectives told him 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 Philip McDonald 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 a solid alibi.

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

     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 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 incompetent fools. 

     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 he had been cleared. The officers left the restaurant without even offering an insincere apology. Like their counterparts in America, and probably throughout the world, police officers rarely say they are sorry. Why? Because many of them are not sorry. The rest are afraid of being sued.

     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 her 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." By that he meant lenient. He was right. This woman should have been locked up for at least five years.

The Marissa Edmunds Murder Case

     Just before midnight on January 11, 2018 in Ypsilanti, Michigan a resident of the Ypsilanti University Green Apartments looked out his window and saw two men wearing ski masks walking out of another section of the complex and climb into a car. As the vehicle sped off someone screamed, "They've killed her!" The apartment resident called 911.

     When Ypsilanti police officers responded to the 911 call they encountered 26-year-old Maxwell Flynn lying in the hallway near the crime scene. He had been shot in the chest but was alive. Inside the apartment officers found a 29-year-old man who had been grazed in the head by a bullet. The shooting victims were rushed to a nearby hospital. (They both survived their wounds.)

     Maxwell Flynn's 25-year-old girlfriend, Marissa Joy Edmunds, was found dead in the apartment from a gunshot wound to the head. None of the victims were students at the nearby Eastern Michigan University.

     The day following the shootings a spokesperson for the Ypsilanti Police Department informed reporters that detectives were looking for two men in their late twenties. One of the suspects, a black male, had been dressed in black and carrying a black backpack. The intruders left the murder scene in possession of personal items and drugs they stole from the victims.

     In February 2018 Ypsilanti police officers arrested 29-year-old Orlando L. Whitfield of Ypsilanti Township. The second suspect in the case remained unidentified.

     Officers booked Mr. Whitfield into the Washtenaw County Jail on one count of open murder, one count of using a firearm in the commission of a felony and three counts of armed robbery. At his arraignment Orlando Whitfield pleaded not guilty to all of the charges.

     Orlando Whitfield had a criminal record. In 2006 he was convicted in Wayne County, Michigan of operating a motor vehicle with an invalid driver's license and fleeing from the police. The judge sentenced him to three years probation.

    In 2008, while still on probation from the Wayne County conviction, Orlando Whitfield was convicted in Washtenaw County of sexual conduct and assault with intent to commit sexual penetration. He was sentenced to ten years.

     Whitfield, a registered sex offender, had been out of prison two months when he was arrested for the murder of Marissa Edmunds.

     In July 2018 while incarcerated in the Washtenaw County Jail Whitfield was charged with possession of a homemade knife or shank. At that time he was scheduled to be tried in February 2019 for Marissa Edmunds' murder but due to motions filed by his attorneys the trial had been delayed several times. During his stay in the Washtenaw County Jail Whitfield had been disciplined numerous times for fighting with his fellow jail inmates.

     On May 2, 2020, a Washtenaw County judge, in response to a motion filed by defense attorney Erika Julien, ordered the release of Whitfield from jail. He was placed under house arrest until his trial. According to his attorneys, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the diminished functioning of the local court system, their client, already behind bars for 28 months, was being denied a speedy trial. The defense team also argued that due to the shutdown they had been unable to acquire information from the prosecution that would help them with their defense.

     Marissa Edmunds' sister, Amanda Edmunds, responded to Whitfield's release this way: "Every [court] delay has been because of him [Whitfield]. He needs to be behind bars where he belongs. It all has to do with COVID-19, open the jail doors and let everyone out."

     After serving a period of time under house arrest Whitfield shed his electronic monitoring device and fled. A local judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest.

     On June 22, 2021 Orlando Whitfield turned himself in and was placed into the Washtenaw County Jail. Five days later he was found dead in his cell. According to investigators there was no indication of foul play in his death. 

Rickie Lee Fowler's Felony-Murder Death Sentence

     Sexually abused as a child and addicted to methamphetamine, Rickie Lee Fowler lived a life of violence and crime. On October 25, 2003 while riding in a van driven by David Valdez, Jr., Fowler tossed burning road flares out of the moving vehicle. The 22-year-old, angry because he and his family had been evicted from their home wanted to start fires.

     During the next nine days the twelve wildfires that swept southern California's San Bernardino foothills scorched 442 square miles of land and burned 1,000 homes to the ground. Five people died of heart attacks while evacuating their fire-threatened dwellings.

     In 2004, after being interviewed as a possible arson suspect, Mr. Fowler was sent to prison on a burglary conviction. Two years later, David Valdez, Jr., the driver of the van was shot to death.

     Fowler, while serving time on the burglary case was convicted of repeatedly sodomizing an inmate. The judge in that case sentenced him to three terms of 25 years to life.

     In 2009, after Fowler confessed to starting the October 2003 wildfires, grand jurors in San Bernardino indicted him on one count of aggravated arson and five counts of murder. The homicide indictments were based on the felony-murder doctrine. Fowler, because he had committed a felony that directly led to the killing of five people, was criminally responsible for their deaths. While he intended to commit arson, he should have foreseen the deadly consequences of his criminal acts. In most states convictions based on the felony-murder doctrine bring sentences of twenty years to life. No one convicted of an unintended homicide had ever been sentenced to death.

     In August 2010, when Rickie Fowler learned that the prosecutor was seeking the death penalty in his case he took back his confession. Two years later a jury in San Bernardino found him guilty of arson and five counts of murder. The jurors also recommended the death penalty.

     On January 28, 2013 the trial judge sentenced Rickie Fowler to death. This unprecedented death sentence made the Fowler felony-murder case historic in the annals of law. Fowler's attorneys immediately appealed the sentence sentence as cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment.

      In December 2020 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the death penalty in this case did not violate Fowler's Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment. His death sentence stood. He remains on death row.

Watery Graves: The Mystery of Foss Lake

     There's no telling how many murder victims lay on the bottom of America's lakes, rivers and ponds. Most people don't realize that these boating, swimming and fishing sites are also the unmarked graves of people who have gone missing and might never be found. It's a sobering thought.

     Whenever a lake goes dry or is drained law enforcement officers often gather to recover guns, knives, cars, safes, cellphones, computers, wallets and other potential indicia of foul play. Occasionally, the remains of missing persons are exposed as well. When that happens one mystery is solved and another is created.

     On September 10, 2013, Oklahoma Highway Patrol officer George Hoyle, while testing a sonar detection device from a boat on Foss Lake 110 miles west of Oklahoma City, discovered a pair of vehicles sitting under twelve feet of murky water.

     A week after the vehicles were detected, Darrell Splawn, a member of the state's underwater search and rescue team, dove into the lake for a closer look. At this point officers believed they had found a pair of stolen cars.

     When officer Splawn opened the door to one of the vehicles and probed its interior his hand came in contact with a shoe. He also discovered, near the car, a human skull. The diver surfaced to report his finds. When the diver slipped back into the muddy water to check on the other vehicle he saw skeletal remains inside the second car.

     Once the heavily corroded cars--a 1952 Chevrolet and a 1969 Chevy Camero--were pulled out of the reservoir they revealed their gruesome secrets. Each vehicle contained the skeletal remains of three people. Officers also recovered, among other items, a muddy wallet and a purse.

     On April 8, 1969, 69-year-old John Alva Porter, the owner of a 1952 green Chevy, went missing. In the car with him that night were his brother Arlie and 58-year-old Nora Marie Duncan. These three residents of nearby Elk City, along with the Chevy, disappeared without a trace. No one had any idea what had happened to them.

     Jimmy Williams, a 16-year-old from Sayre, Oklahoma, a town of 4,000 a few miles from the lake, owned a 1969 Chevrolet Camero. On the night of November 20, 1970 he and two friends--Thomas Michael Rios and Leah Gail Johnson--both 18, were riding in Williams' car. Instead of going to the high school football game in Elk City the trio went hunting on Turkey Creek Road. The teenagers and the Camero were never seen again.

     While the six skeletal remains were presumed to match the two sets of missing persons, it would take months to scientifically confirm their identities. Forensic scientists in the Oklahoma Medical Examiner's Office compared DNA from the bones with DNA samples from surviving family members. Dr. Angela Berg, the state forensic anthropologist, determined the gender, general stature and approximate ages of the people pulled out of the lake. She did this by analyzing leg and pelvic bones along with the skulls. This data was compared with information contained in the missing person reports.

     What the 44-year-old remains did not reveal was the manner and cause of these deaths. While the six people presumably drowned, they could have been murdered by gun, knife or blunt instrument then dumped into the lake. To rule out foul play, the forensic pathologist and the anthropologist looked for signs of trauma such as bullet holes, knife wounds and smashed or broken bones. The forensic scientists also attempted to determine if the fates of the people inside the two cars were somehow connected.

     Custer County Sheriff Bruce Peoples told an Associated Press reporter that it was possible that these underwater victims had been driven accidentally into the lake where they drowned. "We know that can happen even if you know your way around," he said. "It can happen that quick." 

     In October 2014 the forensic pathologist officially confirmed the identities of the six sets of remains. Two months later the medical examiner's office ruled out foul play. Some of the victims' family members, however, remained skeptical and suspected otherwise.

The Un-Great Escape

     On May 12, 2002 34-year-old Steven L. Robbins got into a fight at a party in Indianapolis with a man from Kentucky. During the altercation Mr. Robbins shot 24-year-old Richard Melton to death. Eighteen months later the Gary, Indiana native was found guilty of first-degree murder. The judge sentenced him to sixty years in prison. (Robbins wasn't eligible for parole until 2029.)

     On Tuesday, January 29, 2013 Steven Robbins, now 44, was transported from the state prison in Michigan City, an Indiana town 50 miles east of Chicago, to the Cook County Jail. He had a court hearing the next day pertaining to a 1992 Illinois felony charge.

     On Wednesday, after the judge informed Mr. Robbins that the old charge against him had been dismissed in 2007 (why did they summon him to Illinois to tell him that?) the prisoner was returned to the Cook County Jail.

     Corrections officers responsible for hauling Robbins back to Indiana, on Thursday, January 31 called the Cook County Jail to alert officials they would pick up Robbins for his trip back to prison. That's when the Indiana authorities learned that Robbins had been released from custody the previous evening at seven o'clock. Because no one at the Cook County Jail knew that he was serving a sentence in Indiana for murder he simply walked out of the massive lock-up through the main door.

     The fact that Steven Robbins had been transported to Chicago to face charges that were dismissed five years earlier suggested there was something profoundly wrong with the corrections bureaucracy in both states. It went without saying that a major bureaucratic SNAFU led to Robbins' easy escape from the Cook County Jail.

     On February 1, 2013 police in the northern Illinois town of Kankakee arrested Robbins at the home of a friend. He was watching TV. The Cook County Sheriff, in an unusual move, took responsibility for the foul-up. "We let people down, no mistake about it." Fortunately, while loose, Robbins did not commit any serious crimes. For Robbins, the easy part was getting out of the Cook County Jail. Staying out proved more difficult.