Who Killed British Spy Gareth Williams?

     Gareth Williams grew up in North Wales, graduated from Cambridge University, and earned a Ph.D. from Manchester University. A true math genius, he was hired as a codebreaker at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Chetenham, England. A fit, slender man of five-foot seven inches who participated in competitive cycling, Williams kept to himself, and lived a somewhat secret life. The quiet 31-year-old bachelor had become a rising star in the super secret world of counterterrorism.

     In 2010, after ten years at the GCHQ electronic surveillance facility at Chetenham, Williams was transferred to the secret British intelligence gathering agency M16 in London. He lived on the top floor of a 5-story townhouse in the upscale Pimlico neighborhood of west London. The government-issued flat was less than a mile from M16 headquarters.

     In August 2010, Williams, who didn't make a habit of missing work, hadn't been seen at M16 headquarters for more than a week. He was not on vacation or special assignment, and didn't answer his phone. His M16 supervisor did not report him missing, but residents of his townhouse, after not seeing him around, called the police.

     On Monday afternoon, on August 23, 2010, police officers broke into Williams' apartment. In the bathroom, they saw, sitting in the empty tub, a large cylindrical North Face sports satchel (called a duffel bag or holdall). The bag had been secured by a small padlock. After breaking the lock and unzipping the satchel, the police found the decomposing body of a nude man in a fetal position with his arms crossed over his chest. The man in the bag was Gareth Williams.

     Officers with Scotland Yard's Homicide and Serious Crime Command conducted a crime scene investigation. There was no evidence of forcible intrusion into the apartment. (The front door had been locked from the outside which suggests that someone had been in the flat with Williams when he went into the satchel.) The apartment showed no signs of a struggle or theft. Moreover, the crime scene investigators found no latent fingerprints or trace evidence that may have contained DNA. It seemed the death site had been forensically sanitized.

     The day after the gruesome and perplexing discovery, Home Office forensic pathologist Dr. Ben Swift performed the autopsy. Because of the decomposition, Dr. Swift could not pinpoint the time of death. The condition of the corpse also precluded any kind of toxicological analysis to determine if Williams had been poisoned. The forensic pathologist found no evidence of physical trauma on the body, including Williams' fingers and nails. From this Dr. Swift concluded that Mr. Williams had not tried to escape the confines of the sports bag.

     While the manner of Gareth Williams' death--homicide, suicide, natural or accidental--could not be forensically determined, Dr. Swift reported that the likely cause of death was oxygen depletion, or hypercapnia--a build up of carbon dioxide inside the bag. The forensic pathologist speculated that Williams would have suffocated within 30 minutes.

     A series of experiments conducted by two men of Williams' size and fitness, revealed that it was virtually impossible to put oneself in that bag. It would also have been extremely difficult for one person to put a dead body in the satchel. This led some investigators to conclude that Williams, with the help of someone else, had willingly climbed into the bag.

     In Williams' apartment, detectives found $35,000 worth of designer women's dresses, plus 26 pairs of expensive women's shoes. In addition to a bright orange female wig, investigators found cocaine, and a cache of gay pornography. Williams' had also visited several web sites for practitioners of bondage, S & M, and a phenomena called "claustophilia," the experiencing of sexual pleasure by being confined in small enclosures.

     When officials at M16 were informed of Mr. Williams' apparent sexual preferences--his cross-dressing, bondage, and gayness--his supervisors said they had been aware of all of that. In the world of modern espionage, the private sexual lives of their counterterrorism officers was no long of interested to agency administrators. Shortly after the discovery of Williams' body, M16 had released a statement that his death had nothing to do with his work.

     The investigation of Gareth Williams' bizarre death continues to this day. There are those who believe he was poisoned to death--perhaps by potassium cyanide, or the sedative GHB--by either Russian secret service hit men, Al Qaeda operatives, or assassins from other unfriendly countries.

     Another school of thought involves the theory that Williams was murdered by a gay lover. Perhaps the most popular belief is that Williams died as a result of some kind of sadistic or masochistic sexual act gone wrong, something in the line of auto-erotic asphyxiation. If the later is the case, the manner of his death would be accidental. But questions remain. Who helped Williams into the satchel, then locked it from the outside? Who had a key to his flat? And why hasn't this person come forward?

     The Gareth Williams case has received almost no media coverage in the U.S., but in the United Kingdom, it's still a big story. And a big mystery.  

Dr. Henry Lee: Celebrity Expert

     Dr. Henry Lee has come as close to becoming a household name as any forensic scientist in U.S. history. He has achieved fame in a profession whose practitioners generally operate behind the scenes. In the criminal justice field, it's usually the defense attorneys who get the headlines, and in forensic science, it's often forensic pathologists like Dr. Michael Baden and Dr. Cyril Wecht.

     In the 1930s, a pair of criminalists in the Seattle area, Oscar Heinrich and Luke May, achieved celebrity status by solving a number of celebrated murder cases. Clark Sellers, a handwriting expert from Los Angeles, made headlines with his testimony at the Lindbergh kidnapping trial in Flemington, New Jersey. In the 1960s, Dr. Paul Kirk, a forensic chemist from Berkeley, California became something of a celebrity. The peak of his notoriety came in 1995 when he analyzed crime scene blood-spatter patterns for attorney F. Lee Bailey in the infamous Dr. Sam Shepard murder case near Cleveland, Ohio.

     Dr. Henry Lee, because he rose to fame in the era of true crime television, has enjoyed a level of celebrity more intense and intimate than his well-known predecessors. He has made hundreds of television appearances, and hosted a show on Court TV called Trace Evidence: The Case Files of Dr. Henry Lee. Dr. Lee's personality, demeanor, and life story have helped make him a bigger-than-life character. Like sports stars and major film and television actors, he tends to be vain and dramatic. On the witness stand, he informs jurors and, as a charismatic courtroom showman, entertains them. When Dr. Lee testifies for the prosecution, he's the defense attorney's worst nightmare. When he's appearing on behalf of the defense, it's not good news for the prosecutor. In either case, the media loves it, and so do the jurors.

     Dr. Henry Chang-Yu Lee was born in Rugao City, China on November 22, 1938. When Henry was four, the Chinese communists murdered his father. Two years later, his family fled to Taiwan to avoid the communist revolution. After graduating from the Taiwan Central Police College in 1960 with a degree in police science, Henry jointed the Taipei Police Department. Six years later, after rising to the rank of captain, he came to the United States where, in 1972, he graduated from New York City's John Jay College of Criminal Justice with a bachelor of science degree in science. In 1974, he earned a master's degree in biochemistry from New York University. A year later, he was awarded a Ph.D in biochemistry.

     In 1979, Dr. Lee became the director of the Connecticut State Police Forensic Laboratory where he also held the title of chief criminalist. Following his retirement from the lab in 2000, Dr. Lee began teaching at the University of New Haven where he founded the Henry C. Lee Forensic Institute. According to his resume, Dr. Lee has been awarded several honorary degrees, written more than 20 books (most with co-authors), published numerous scientific articles, given hundreds of speeches, investigated 4,000 homicide cases (not possible), and consulted with more than 300 law enforcement agencies.

The Wood Chipper Case

     Dr. Lee vaulted onto the national stage in 1986 when an airline pilot named Richard Crafts went on trial in Connecticut for murdering his wife, Halle. Having incurred her husband's wrath by announcing her plans to divorce him, Halle Crafts had covertly audio-taped his threats to to kill her. Perhaps even more incriminating, Richard Crafts was seen by a motorist, on the night of Halle's disappearance, operating a commercial-grade wood chipper in the midst of a blizzard along the bank of the Housatonic River. The audio-tape and the wood chipper sighting led the police to suspect Crafts of murdering his wife. But investigators had a serious problem: they didn't have a corpse. Faced with one of those maddening cases of a good suspect, but no physical evidence, the homicide detectives called on Dr. Lee

     In the couple's bedroom, Dr. Lee found traces of the victim's blood. When he examined a chainsaw that had been in the suspect's possession, Dr. Lee discovered hair follicles, traces of blood, and tissue that he identified as the victim's. In the rented wood chipper, Lee recovered the same, and at the spot where Richard Crafts had been seen operating the equipment, Dr. Lee found fragments of the victim's teeth and bones, along with follicles of her hair. It wasn't much, but it was enough to establish that Halle Crafts had been murdered. From this evidence, Dr. Lee was able to reconstruct the crime, theorizing that the defendant had bludgeoned his wife to death in their bedroom, frozen her body in a home freezer, cut her into pieces with the chainsaw, then shoved the body parts into the wood chipper which sprayed her remains into the river.

     The Crafts trial jury, obviously impressed with Dr. Lee and his evidence, found the defendant guilty of first degree murder. A few years later, while serving his life sentence, Richard Crafts confessed to murdering his wife. Featuring blood and gore, an attractive victim, a suburban killer, a dramatic trial, and scientific investigation in the mold of Sherlock Holmes, the wood chipper case turned Dr. Henry Lee into a celebrity forensic scientist.

William Kennedy Smith Case

     Five years after his famous Crafts murder trial testimony, Dr. Lee took the stand on behalf of a defendant named William Kennedy Smith who was on trail for an alleged 1991 date rape that dominated the news because of the Kennedy family connection. According to the accused, following a night of drinking in Palm Beach, Florida with his accuser, the two had engaged in consensual sex on the lawn of the Kennedy family estate. Dr. Lee, to help prove that the defendant's partner had consented to sex, testified that he had found no grass stains on the woman's pantyhose, evidence one would expect to find had there been a struggle. To illustrate this point, Dr. Lee produced a grass-stained handkerchief he had rubbed against the grass in his own yard. The jury found William Kennedy Smith not guilty.

     Dr. Lee's testimony in the Kennedy case drew criticism from John Hicks, the director of the FBI Laboratory, who called it "outrageous." Hicks characterized Dr. Lee's handkerchief experiment as unscientific, and labeled the conclusions drawn from it speculative. The crime lab director pointed out that the handkerchief was not made of the same fabric as the pantyhose, and the conditions that had created the handkerchief stains did not necessarily replicate the environment at the alleged crime site. Criticism of this type--that Dr. Lee's testimony is more theater than science--has followed him throughout his career.

The O. J. Simpson Case

     Dr. Lee's testimony on behalf of O. J. Simpson in 1995 did not endear him to many of his forensic science colleagues. In general, Dr. Lee's testimony in that case helped the Simpson defense in five ways. It depicted Los Angeles police detectives and crime scene technicians as incompetent; it suggested that blood evidence had been contaminated; it supported the theory that evidence against the defendant had been planted; it pushed the time of the crime forward 45 minutes which accommodated Simpson's alibi; and it laid the groundwork for the theory than Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman had been murdered by more than one person.

     On the last point, Dr. Lee's testimony contradicted the testimony of the FBI's renowned footwear identification expert, William Bodziak. Dr. Lee identified a bloody stain on an envelope and scrap of paper found in Nicole Simpson's house as a shoe print that didn't match the footwear--the Bruno Magli Italian designer shoes--prosecutors believed the defendant was wearing when he committed the murders. Mr. Bodziak testified that this bloody print had not been made by a shoe at all. Douglas Deedrich, also from the FBI Crime Lab, testified that the bloody pattern was in fact a fabric print.

     At the Simpson trial, Dr. Lee also raised the possibility that a bloodstain on Ronald Goldman's blue jeans had been made by a shoe that was not a Bruno Magli. On cross-examination, when pressed about this blood print identification, Dr. Lee said that if these patterns were footwear marks, they were not made by the Bruno Magli brand.

     Critics of Dr. Lee's testimony in the O. J. Simpson case called it an example of "blowing smoke"--a term referring to the giving of vague defense testimony intended to muddy the water in an effort to create reasonable doubt.

     Since his testimony in the O. J. Simpson case, Dr. Lee has been involved in dozens of celebrated cases that include the JonBenet Ramsey murder, the Scott Peterson case, and the Phil Spector murder case where he was accused of removing a piece of crime scene evidence that might have incriminated the defendant.

     Dr. Lee's participation at various levels in so many cases involving such a variety of evidence and analysis is unusual for a forensic scientist. In the field, he is almost a one-of-a-kind practitioner. At the core of his expertise, he is a forensic serologist, one who examines crime scene biological stains to determine their identify and origin. As a crime scene reconstruction expert, one who determines what happened at the crime site by taking into consideration all of the physical clues, Dr. Lee is also a blood-spatter analyst. As one who studies physical evidence to figure out, after the fact, what occurred at the scene of the crime, Dr. Lee analyzes all kinds of physical evidence, including hair follicles, fibers, bite marks, bone fragments, brain matter, tissue, gunshot powder residue, soil, dust, pollen, and other forms of trace evidence.

     Dr. Lee also studies latent footwear and fingerprint patterns, and analyzes bullet trajectories. He's a generalist in a field of narrowly defined specialists. This has its appeal, and explains why he has been able to insert himself in so many cases. It may also be his weakness, because his expertise and knowledge, over all this forensic territory, is thin. One man can only know so much. Because science and ego are a bad mix, forensic science is best conducted by behind-the-scenes people who are not worried about living up to their press clippings.



       

Father Gerald Robinson: Devil Priest or Innocent Man?

     In 1980, 72-year-old Sister Margaret Ann Pahl worked at Mercy Hospital in Toledo, Ohio as the caretaker of the chapel. A strict taskmaster who didn't suffer fools, Sister Margaret worked closed with 42-year-old Father Gerald Robinson, one of the hospital's chaplains. Father Robinson was a popular priest in the heavily Catholic city of 300,000.

     On April 5, 1980, on Holy Saturday, someone found Sister Margaret's bloody body on the chapel floor. She had been choked to near death, then stabbed 31 times in the chest, neck, and face. Some of the stab wounds in her chest formed the pattern of an upside down cross. The killer had also anointed her forehead with a smudge of her own blood. With her habit pulled up to her chest, and her undergarments pulled down around her ankles, the victim had been posed in a position of humiliation. While not raped, the killer had penetrated her with a cross.

     Although detectives on the case immediately suspected Father Robinson of this ritualistic murder, he presided over Sister Margaret's funeral Mass four days after her homicide. The principal piece of crime scene evidence involved a blood stain on the altar cloth consistent with the form of a sword-shaped letter opener in Father Robinson's apartment. The stain bore the vague print of the letter opener's dime-sized medallion bearing the image of the U.S. capitol. However, because the chief detective on the case was a Catholic, and didn't want to scandalize the church, Father Robinson was not arrested. The investigation floundered, and without a suspect, died on the vine.

     In December 2003, a Lucas County cold-case investigative team re-opened the 1980 murder. Father Robinson, over the past 23 years, had served in three Toledo Diocese parishes. The 65-year-old priest, in 2003, was administering to the sick and dying in several area Catholic homes and hospitals. The case came back to life after a woman wrote a letter to the police claiming that Father Robinson had sexually abused her as a child, molestation that involved Satanic ritualistic behavior that involved human sacrifice. (I don't know if this complainant passed a polygraph test, or made the accusation after some psychologist coaxed the memory out of her. After the Satanic hysteria in the McMartin preschool debacle, and the horrible injustice in the Memphis three case, I'm suspicious of this kind of allegation. Human sacrifice? What did that refer to?)

     Following the exhumation of Sister Margaret's body, a forensic pathologist noted that a stab wound in the victim's jaw could have been made by the letter opener found in Father Robinson's apartment. A DNA analysis of the victim's fingernail scrapings, and underwear, excluded the priest. Nevertheless, in April 2006, the police went to Father Robinson's home and arrested him. From the Lucas County Jail where he was held without bail, the priest denied killing Sister Margaret.

     While there was barely enough evidence to legally justify Father Robinson's arrest--no motive, no confession, no eyewitness, and no physical evidence directly linking him to the corpse--the priest went on trial for murder on April 24, 2006. The prosecutor showed the jury a videotape of the defendant's 2004 police interrogation. Father Robinson told his questioners that he had been stunned when one of the other hospital chaplains accused him of murdering Sister Margaret. When left alone for a few minutes in the interrogation room, the priest folded his hands and began to whisper the word "sister," then bowed his head in prayer. At one point he said, "Oh my Jesus." (I don't know exactly how the prosecution interpreted this as incriminating evidence.)

     A prosecution forensic scientist testified that the letter opener "could not be ruled out" as the murder weapon. (The prosecutor, in his closing remarks, told the jury that the letter opener fit one of the victim's stab wounds "like a key in a lock." Instruments used in stabbings cannot be scientifically linked to their wounds this way. In my view, that statement alone should have been adequate grounds for a reversal on appeal.) The forensic scientist also testified that the altar cloth bloodstains were "consistent with" the general shape of the letter opener. On cross-examination, this witness conceded that a pair of missing scissors could have left the blood stain on the altar cloth.

     On May 11, 2006, the jury, after 9 days of testimony, and 6 hours of deliberation, found Father Robinson guilty. The 70-year-old priest became the second priest in U.S. history to be convicted of criminal homicide. (The first was a priest named Hans Schmidt.) The judge sentenced Robinson to 15 years to life. Incarcerated at the Hocking Correctional Facility in southern Ohio, the priest will be first eligible for parole in 2016.

     Two months after the murder trial, Ohio's 6th District Court of Appeals upheld the conviction. In December 2008, the Ohio Supreme Court declined to hear the case. About a year later, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to entertain the appeal as well.

     While it seemed that Gerald Robinson had run out of legal remedies, his legal team, in 2010, petitioned the state appeals court for post-conviction relief on the grounds that Sister Margaret may have been murdered by a 27-year-old confessed serial killer named Coral Eugene Watts. Watts, a black man, had stabbed 12 women to death in Texas, and at least one woman in Michigan. Police suspected him of killing another 80 victims. Watts had left many of the women with their blouses pulled up to their necks. He had not sexually molested any of his victims. They had all been posed in humiliating positions.

     On April 11, 2011, the Ohio appeals court denied the Robinson petition. According to the appellate judges, Father Robinson's attorneys, at the time of his 2006 trial, knew of Watts as a possible suspect in Sister Margaret's murder, but chose not to pursue this as a defense strategy. Moreover, there were dissimilarities between the serial killer's modus operandi and Sister Margaret's homicide. For one thing, Coral Eugene Watts had typically stalked young women before he killed them outdoors.

     A year later, the Robinson defense team again petitioned the state court of appeals to toss out the 2006 murder conviction. This time the priest's lawyers accused the prosecution of withholding key documents in the case. Regarding the issue of serial killer Watts, Robinson's trial attorneys didn't pursue that line of defense in 2006 because they mistakingly thought he was serving time when Sister Margaret was murdered. As it turned out, on April 5, 1980, Watts was living in southern Michigan, just 40 miles from Toledo. As for modus operandi, the priest's attorneys found Watts' killings and the death of the nun "eerily similar." (Coral Eugene Watts died in 2007 of prostate cancer. He was 53 and serving time in a Michigan prison.)

     Father Gerald Robinson's latest appeal is pending before the Ohio court. While the priest had many supporters who believed in his innocence following his 2006 conviction, it's not clear how many people are still with him, and are closely following his bid to clear his name, and get out of prison. I don't know who murdered Sister Margaret Ann Pahl in the hospital chapel back in 1980, but from what I know of the case against Gerald Robinson, I don't think the prosecution's evidence supported his conviction.

     

An Unlikely Conviction: The William Simmons Case

     Kaelin Rose Glazier, a 15-year-old sophomore at South Medford High School in Rush, Oregon, disappeared on November 6, 1996 after watching a video in a house trailer with 16-year-old William Frank Simmons. The missing girl had skipped church that evening to meet her boyfriend, Clifford Ruhland, at Simmons' trailer. According to Simmons, the boyfriend didn't show up, and after he and Glazier watched the movie, she departed.

     The local police, believing that the missing girl had run away from home, waited 21 days before investigating the case as an abduction and possible murder. Simmons, a big kid who had been in trouble with the law, and was the last known person to have seen the girl alive, became the first and only suspect in the investigation. Years passed, and without the girl's body, the case ground to a halt. Every once in awhile detectives would question William Simmons at the police station, and every time he would deny having anything to do with the girl's disappearance.

     People really don't vanish into thin air, and in 2008, 12 years after Glazier went to Simmons' trailer, a man mowing a field 80 feet from the place she was last seen, uncovered skeletal remains. According to a forensic anthropologist, the bones were consistent with the remains of a 15-year-old girl.

     At the recovery site, investigators discovered a skull wrapped in duct tape, a tennis shoe, part of a bra, and some jewelry that had belonged to the missing girl. While the medical examiner officially identified the remains as being Glazier's, and ruled her death a homicide, the forensic pathologist could not determine the precise cause of her death. The police theorized she had been suffocated or strangled. DNA evidence from the duct tape did not match the victim's boyfriend, or William Simmons.

     On April 10, 2010, the local prosecutor charged William Simmons with murder, and as a backup charge, first degree manslaughter. The motive: he had killed her after she had rebuffed his sexual advances. After killing her, the suspect had supposedly dragged her body to the nearby field. (It's hard to believe it took 12 years for someone to find, 80 feet from where she was last seen, Glazier's remains. Was anybody really looking for her?)

     The Simmons murder trial got underway on February 14, 2012 in the Jackson County Circuit Court. The prosecutor, without an eyewitness, confession, or physical evidence linking the 31-year-old defendant to the murder, had an extremely weak case. The state didn't even have a jailhouse informant, or a murder weapon. All the prosecutor had was the defendant's so-called "motive, means, and opportunity," to commit the crime.

     William Simmons' attorney simply had to point out that motive, means, and opportunity did not comprise evidence. The defense lawyer reminded jurors that the murdered girl's boyfriend may also have had motive, means, and opportunity in the 16 year old case.

     The jury, after deliberating ten hours, voted 10 to 2 to find the defendant guilty of first degree manslaughter. (The reckless killing of a person as opposed to an intentional murder.) In Oregon, a defendant can be convicted of manslaughter on just 10 guilty votes. To find a person guilty of murder, 12 votes are needed. William Simmons now faced a mandatory sentence of 10 years in prison.

     It's surprising that Judge Benjamin Bloom even allowed this case to go to the jury. Motive, means, and opportunity, while guidelines for identifying criminal suspects, doesn't rise to proof beyond a reasonable doubt. (As evidenced in this case by the 2 not guilty votes.) It's not enough, in my opinion, even to sustain liability in a civil wrongful death suit where the standard of proof is merely a preponderance of the evidence. In any other state, the Simmons trial would have resulted in a hung jury.

     By any legal standard, the William Simmons case represents an odd, and unlikely homicide conviction. While he may have been a good suspect, and may have committed the crime, that is not enough to put him behind bars for 10 years. If this were the standard of proof in all murder trials, a lot of innocent people would end up in prison.

   

    

Kenneth Konias: Pittsburgh's Armored Truck Killer Captured

     On Tuesday, April 24, a few minutes before midnight, a small army of law enforcement officers with the FBI, Broward County Sheriff's Office, and the South Florida Violent Crime Task Force, approached a one-story, white house in a run-down Pompano Beach neighborhood. The officers had come to arrest 22-year-old Kenneth Konias, Jr., the former Garda armored truck driver who, on February 28, 2012, had murdered his partner, Michael Haines, and run off with $2.3 million in small denomination cash. (About two trash bags full of bills, mostly $20s.) Since the robbery and murder, committed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Konias has been the subject of a national manhunt.

     When no one answered the door at the Pompano Beach dwelling (a suspected crack house), the officers kicked it in and entered with their guns drawn. In the house they arrested Konias without incident.

     From this shabby house, and a nearby storage facility, police recovered $1.3 million of the stolen Garda money. They also seized Konias's Garda-issued pistol, and another handgun. (One of these firearms will probably be the murder weapon.) In the fugitive's rented bedroom, the officers found stuffed animals, a pack of cigarettes, and a half-empty bottle of whiskey.

     Two weeks before Konias' apprehension, he had rented the room from a stripper who goes by the stage name Summer, a woman he had met online. She became his girlfriend and the recipient of lavish gifts in the form of jewelry and clothing. A week later, after they had a falling out over another woman, Konias locked Summer out of this room. She broke in and stole a duffle bag containing $30,000.

     Because Konia had been walking around in jeans and a polo shirt with two guns tucked into his waistband, used his real name, and bragged about the armored truck heist to a motley crew of pimps, prostitutes, strippers and crackheads, a lot of people, including his ex-girlfriend Summer, knew what he had done back in Pittsburgh. After Summer told another ex-boyfriend about Konias, he Googled the fugitive's name, saw his photograph, and read about the robbery murder. At nine o'clock Monday night, Summer's ex called the Pittsburgh Police Department.

     Based on Konias' behavior in recent weeks, he is either extremely stupid, or simply wanted to be caught. (Another woman who lived in the Pompano Beach house, Shewona Flowers, thought Konias was depressed. He recently told her he was thinking of traveling to Jamaica.) According to a 31-year-old prostitute named Cathy, she had traded sex with Konias for $800 worth of cocaine. She thought he was "nice."

     Kenneth Konias has waived extradition, and should be back in Pittsburgh in a week or so. He is currently being held in a federal detection center in Miami. The police have not found his tan Ford Explorer, the vehicle he had used to flee Pittsburgh after the robbery and murder. (He got around the Pompano Beach area by hiring cabs. Konias had been in Florida about eight weeks. After committing the crime in Pittsburgh, he drove straight to the Miami area in his Ford Explorer.)

     It will be interesting to see how many people helped Konias remain at large, and if any of them will be charged as accomplices after the fact. (For background on this case, see: "The Pittsburgh Armored Car Robbery/Murder Case," March 9, 2012.)

The Garda Loot

     Konias stole $2.3 million, and before fleeing to Florida, stashed $300,000 between his parents' house in Dravosburg, and his great-grandmother's grave site in Munhall. When the police arrested him in Pompano Beach, Florida, they recovered $1.1 million. That leaves $900,000 still unaccounted for. Since Konias couldn't have spent that much money during the 55 days between the crime and  his arrest, there must be a stash of money hidden somewhere in Pennsylvania or Florida.

Michael Haines

     After his arrest, Konias told FBI agents that he shot Michael Haines when the 31-year-old Garda guard pulled his gun to stop the heist. Konias could be tried in state or federal court, and though it's doubtful, could face the death penalty.  

The FBI v. NYPD: The Joint Bank Robbery Task Force Dispute

     In the United States each year, in 5,000 bank robberies, robbers walk off with roughly $43 million. While in the past few years, the U.S. bank robbery rate has increased a bit, there are far less bank heists today than the years 1967-1990. In New York city, there were only 26 bank robberies in 2010, a record low. Last year 44 banks were hit in the Big Apple, still an amazingly small number.

     While bank robbery is both a state and federal crime, the FBI is usually the principal investigative agency in these cases. As a result, most bank robbery suspects are tried in federal court, and if found guilty, go to federal prison. Compared to crimes like burglary, street mugging, and arson, bank robbery solution rates are traditionally high. One reason for this is that bank robbers usually don't stop after their first job, and eventually get caught. Also, a lot of them are either drunk, drugged up, or stupid.

     In New York City, over the past 32 years, bank robberies in the five boroughs have been investigated by the Joint Bank Robbery Task Force staffed by FBI agents and detectives with the NYPD. The city contributed one sergeant and six investigators to the unit. Last year, the FBI only solved one-third of its New York City cases. In 2010, members of the task force solved 80 percent of the bank robberies.

     In explaining the poor case solution rate, an FBI spokesperson blamed the NYPD for withdrawing from the task force in March 2011. Officials with the NYPD, while denying that the personnel shift explains the poor investigative results, say they cannot justify wasting the manpower on so few cases. These officers are needed elsewhere. When the task force was formed in 1980, hundreds of banks were being robbed in the city every year.

     The behind the scenes inter-agency sniping over this issue has heightened tensions between the FBI and NYPD already in a turf war over a couple of terrorism cases. In law enforcement, it's an unfortunate reality that professional jealousy and rivalry has always existed between federal and local, city and county, and state and municipal agencies. Within the federal government, there is tension and conflict between various agencies within the Department of Homeland Security. And the FBI and CIA have never worked well together.

     While inter-agency friction is understandable within a criminal justice system comprised of so many levels of government, it will continue to be a problem that can't be fixed by simply rearranging organizational charts, or adding more layers of bureaucracy.

   



      

Lt. Andriani and the Hoboken SWAT Scandal

     It all started in November 2007 when dozens of photographs surfaced in the New Jersey media showing members of the Hoboken Police Department's SWAT team partying with Hooter waitresses in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Some of the shots were mildly racy, and others featured the Hooter girls handling various SWAT weapons, and clowning around with the officers. The photographs had been taken in the fall of 2006 when the officers, during one of several trips to Kenner, Louisiana, on Hurricane Katrina humanitarian missions, stopped over in Tuscaloosa. No one explained exactly how Louisiana's hurricane victims were served by a New Jersey SWAT team.

     One of the more disturbing photographs featured the commander of the SWAT squad, Lieutenant Angelo Andriani, wearing a napkin with eye holes cut out meant to look like a Ku Klux Klan hood. A month before the photographs became public, five Hispanic Hoboken police officers had filed a lawsuit against Andriani accusing him of creating a racist and hostile work environment. In November 2007, public safety director Bill Bergin permanently disbanded the SWAT team.

     The Jersey Journal, in February 2008, acquired a videotape showing Lieutenant Andriani's gun being passed around at a party in New Orleans hosted by a Louisiana developer and his wife. When the weapon came back around to Andriani, he slipped the magazine out of the gun and distributed the bullets to partygoers. Chief of Police Carmen La Bruno can be seen laughing as the Lieutenant's gun is being passed around.

     The New York Times, in March 2008, ran a story based on an internal police report leaked to the media. According to Hoboken Police Department's internal affairs investigators, SWAT team members had each been contributing $20 a month to an equipment and gear fund controlled by Lieutenant Andriani, and that Andriani had diverted and misused the money. The report also included allegations that Andriani had forced off-duty police officers to work at his home in Verona, New Jersey. Regarding the Hoboken paramilitary unit, the author of the internal affairs report had written that the "SWAT team had provided virtually no meaningful service to the city." A few days after the article appeared, the public safety director placed Lieutenant Andriani on paid administrative leave. Nine other members of the former SWAT squad, while kept on regular duty, received a variety of "behavior unbecoming" citations.

     Hoboken police chief Carmen La Bruno, after 37 years on the job, retired on July 1, 2008 with a $525,000 cash payout, and a $148,000 pension for life. (This does not include benefits.) A year later, the public safety director placed Andriani on an $11,000 per month, two-year suspension, essentially a paid vacation mandated by his employment contract. The lieutenant, insisting that he had done nothing wrong, accused his accusers of being politically motivated.

     In January 2010, Angelo Andriani was back in the news after reportedly creating a disturbance at Tampa International Airport by allegedly flashing his badge and berating airline employees for allowing a flight crew to move ahead of him in a screening line.

     In May 2011, the city of Hoboken settled the lawsuit against Andriani by the five Hispanic police officers. The $2 million in damages would be split evenly among the defendants.

     Before the $2 million dollar settlement, and after Andriani's two-year suspension, he was fired. He challenged the termination, and in October 2010, an administrative law judge ruled that Andriani should have been suspended without pay for three months instead of fired. In March 2012, the civil service commission amended the ruling to a six-month suspension. The city has appealed both rulings.

     Firing a cop is like firing a public school teacher, it can take a lot of time, and cost a bundle. And quite often, after all that time and money, the employee ends up back on the job.

     While I am not familiar with the city of Hoboken, New Jersey, I do think this: taxpayers in that city pay a lot of money for their law enforcement, and I doubt they are getting their money's worth.   

Psychic Detectives: Ethan Patz and Other Cases

     I don't believe in ghosts, witches, Big-Foot, UFOs, alien abductions, spontaneous human combustion, or the Loch Ness Monster. In my opinion, people can't read the minds of dogs and cats, or carry on conversations with the dead. I also don't believe in fortune tellers, soothsayers, and so-called psychic detectives who inject themselves into missing person and murder cases. The words "detective" and "psychic" do not belong together. Police detectives who consult these women, or even run down their leads, should be put back on patrol. It's all a load of crap.

     But in an era of marginal thinking and stupid beliefs, millions of people buy into this paranormal nonsense. The media, particularly television, with supposedly serious shows about ghosts, UFOs, and psychics, lends credibility to this stuff. Print and TV journalists, who know better, pretend to take this hogwash seriously because they are popular subjects that attract readers and viewers. These media hacks are part of the problem. Americans have lost the ability to think straight, reason clearly, and draw the right conclusions.

     If psychic detectives could do what they claim, there would be no such thing as a missing child, teenage girl, ex-girlfriend, or estranged wife. There wouldn't be unsolved murders, and we would have been spared 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy. No one without inside knowledge of the case, can, by holding a missing murder victim's garment, lead the detectives to the body. Harry Houdini escaped locked boxes because he had the keys, and psychic detectives claim credit for locating missing persons by embellishing and changing, after the fact, their initial predictions. They get away with it because gullible people want to believe in them.

Psychics Teresa Nicholas and Tiffany Smith: The Costly Curse

     Psychics Teresa Nicholas and Tiffany Smith, "Psychic Readers & Advisors" doing business in Hingham, Massachusetts, had they looked into their own futures, wouldn't have bilked a 69-year-old woman who had stupidly availed herself of their fortune telling services.

     On April 6, 2012, when the victim came to Tiffany Smith for a "psychic reading," Smith informed her she was under a "curse and a black cloud." More specifically, the psychic reader told the victim that if she didn't fork over $7,000 to lift the curse, the victim's daughter, within a week, would commit suicide. The poor woman wrote a check payable to Teresa Nicholas for that amount. The next day, the victim either came to her senses, or spoke to someone with common sense. Either way, the police were notified. Nicholas, however, had already deposited the check.

     A week later, the two psychics were charged with a variety of theft offenses related to swindling and fraud. I'm not a psychic, but I predict a pair of convictions in this case.

Psychic Detectives in the Disappearance of Etan Patz

     On May 25, 1979, the parents of 6-year-old Etan Patz allowed the boy to make his first unaccompanied trip to the Manhattan bus stop two blocks from his apartment building. They never saw him again. The missing boy was one of the first to have his photograph printed on milk cartons. His case helped fuel the national missing persons campaign that took root in the 1980s. The boy as formally declared dead in 2001.

     From the beginning, investigators suspected a friend of Etan's babysitter, a man named Jose Antonia Ramos. Ramos was later convicted of child molestation and sent to prison in Pennsylvania. While never prosecuted in the Patz case, the missing boy's family won a $2 million wrongful death judgement against Ramos in 2004. He is due to be released from prison in November of this year.

     In 2010, Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance reopened the Etan Patz investigation.

     In April, 2012, FBI agents and detectives with the New York City Police Department, interviewed a 75-year-old man named Othniel Miller, a former handyman who, in 1979, had worked in a 13 foot by 62 foot room in the basement of the Patz family apartment building on Prince Street in the SoHo section of Manhattan. Etan did chores for Miller, and on the day before he disappeared, Millier had given the boy a dollar. At the time of the boy's disappearance, Miller was not a suspect because he had a solid alibi. However, Jose Ramos, the imprisoned child molester, worked for Mr. Miller, and had access to his basement workshop.

     After questioning Othniel Miller, FBI agents placed "scent pads"--material that can absorb and retain odors--in Miller's old basement workshop. A cadaver dog, upon sniffing the pad, indicated the scent of human remains. (This technique should not be confused with  forensic science.)

     A few days ago, under the supervision of the FBI and New York City Police, workers began digging up the workshop's concrete floor, and screening the dirt beneath it for signs of Etan's remains. At one point, investigators thought they had discovered a suspicious stain on a chunk of cinder block, but further analysis determined it was not blood. After four days of excavating, the authorities shut down the operation, and began cleaning up the mess. The Etan Patz case remains a mystery.

     In 1979, five days after Ethan Patz left home for the bus stop and never came back, a psychic named Carrie Leight told Etan's father that the first-grader was being cared for in a "blue hospital" that employed a nurse named Mrs. Keanne. Another psychic, under hypnosis, said the boy was "living safely" with a dark-haired woman with a Spanish or Cuban accent who lived on the second floor of a tenement building bearing the number 29. New York City detectives ran down these leads that led them nowhere. They wasted their time. Since 1979, there is no telling how many psychic detectives have weighed in on this case, and how much time has been wasted paying attention to them.

Psychic Nancy L. Fox and the Christine Ann Jarrett Murder Case

     On the night of January 3, 1991, Christine Ann Jarrett, the mother of two young boys, disappeared from her home in Elkridge, Maryland. Shortly thereafter, a local psychic named Nancy Fox, who performed "readings, healings, and spiritual coaching," was taken to the Jarrett house where she "immediately had a feeling." (I'm wondering if she can tell that I'm having one right now about her.) Psychic Fox informed those present that the missing woman was dead. (Unlike psychics, medical examiners need bodies before they can make such determinations.)

     This psychic from Linthicum, Maryland said she had an image of Christine Jarrett getting into a blue (this must be their favorite color) car with some man, and that the dead woman would be found within 50 miles of her home. The police, according to Fox, would find clues to her disappearance in southern Pennsylvania.

     Even if this rubbish were true, the information is so general it's useless. A blue car? Some man? Southern Pennsylvania? The body somewhere within a 50 mile radius of the house? Wow.

     On April 21, 2012, 21 years later, Christine Jarrett's remains were found a few yards from her house, buried under the floorboards of a backyard shed. Her since remarried husband, 57-year-old Robert Jarrett, has been charged with her murder.

     When psychic Nancy Fox had her "feeling," she was sitting a few yards from Christine Jarrett's dead body. There was no man in a blue car, or clues in southern Pennsylvania. The victim was dead, and her body was found within 50 miles of her house. In the psychic detective business, this qualifies as a successful "reading." However, in the real world, it is something else.  

UPDATE ON PATZ CASE

     On May 16, 2012, Pedro Hernandez, a 51-year-old from Maple Shade, New Jersey, confessed to choking Etan, and leaving his body in a bag in a Manhattan trash can. He had lured the boy to a remote spot by offering him a soda. Hernandez, an employee of a convenience store in the victim's neighborhood, moved to New Jersey shortly after Etan's disappearance.

   
    

Cockfighting: A Blood Sport

     Cockfighting, a pair of conditioned and trained roosters equipped with metal spurs or knives battling each other to the death in a cockpit, is against the law in every state in America as well as in Brazil, Australia, and except for France, Europe. In America, Louisiana didn't ban cockfighting until 2008. Although it's illegal, cockfighting, in certain parts of the country, is still a popular form of entertainment.

     In many countries such as Mexico, Peru, Panama, Ecuador, and the Philippines, cockfighting is not only legal, it's the national pastime. Spectators, whether gathered at illegal, clandestine cockfighting venues, or seated in elaborate arenas, bet money on the outcomes of the bouts. Like dogfighting and bullfighting, cockfighting is considered a blood sport. Unlike the sport of boxing, the participants are animals who have no say in the matter.

     Early in the morning of Thursday, April 19, 2012, 200 men, women, and children were gathered at a weekly cockfight venue on a small Hildago County ranch near McAllen, Texas. Without warning, at least two men wearing masks stormed the site and opened fire with automatic assault rifles. Before pandemonium broke out, most of the spectators were seated in bleachers beneath a corrugated pavilion. When the shooting stopped, three man lay dead, and eight were wounded.

     Two of the dead men were brothers, the 49 and 55-year-old targets of the ambush. Both men had criminal records, and had been suspects in a recent drug war drive-by shooting, the possible motive behind the retaliatory shooting spree. Local police officers believe the third man killed was an innocent bystander. Although the attack took place near the border, the police do not think it was related to the Mexican drug wars.

     The sheriff of Hildago County described the shooting site, littered with bodies, shell casings, pools of blood, beer cans, and twenty dead roosters, as the crime scene from hell. The authorities have charged three people with the crime of cockfighting. If convicted, they could be sentenced to prison from six months to two years, and fined $10,000. As of this writing, the mass murderers have not been identified.

     

     

Fingerprint Misidentification in the Madrid Bombing Case

     On March 11, 2004, terrorists in Madrid Spain bombed a passenger train, killing 191 people. The Spanish National Police sent the FBI digital images of 8 latent prints found at the bomb site. These images were fed into the FBI's Integrated Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), a $640 million supercomputer housed in Clarksburg, West Virginia. The computer selected from its collection of 48 million fingerprints sets, 15 digital latent images as possible matches. Three FBI examiners matched one of the 15 possibles to a latent from Spain that had been left on a plastic bag containing bomb detonators. The FBI experts believed this print belonged to a 37-year-old lawyer from Portland, Oregon named Brandon Mayfield.

     If the FBI fingerprint experts were correct, Brandon Mayfield had been at the scene of the Madrid bombing. The fact that Mayfield, a former army lieutenant, had converted to Islam, heightened the FBI's suspicion that he had been involved in the deadly bombing.

     Fingerprint examiners in Spain agreed that Mayfield's print and the crime scene latent shared 8 points of similarity, but the numerous dissimilarities kept them from declaring a match. The FBI responded by having a fourth bureau expert look at the evidence, and he too, declared a match. Shortly thereafter, FBI agents arrested Brandon Mayfield. In the meantime, the police in Spain announced that the crime scene latent belonged to an Algerian suspect, Ouhane Daoud.

     A team of FBI fingerprint experts traveled to Madrid, and when they compared Mayfield's fingerprint to the actual latent, realized their mistake. Blaming the misidentification on the low-resolution image of the digital print, the FBI apologized to Mayfield. However, when a panel of fingerprint experts reviewed the evidence, they found that the misidentification had nothing to do with the quality of the digitized latent. The four FBI experts had simply overlooked easily observed dissimilarities between the two prints.
They had allowed their eagerness to identify a terrorist override their scientific objectivity. There may also have been an element of group think in the misidentification.

     Brandon Mayfield filed a lawsuit, and in November 2006, the federal government agreed to pay him $2 million in damages. The Justice Department augmented the settlement with an official apology, stating that misidentifications of this nature were rare. University of California at Irvine professor Simon Cole, disagreed. Responding to news of the settlement, he told a Los Angeles Times journalist that "this is a tip-of-the-iceberg phenomenon. The argument has always been that no two people have fingerprints exactly alike. But that's not what you need to have an error. What you need is for two people to have very similar fingerprints, and that's what happened here."

    For years, when FBI experts testified in criminal trials, they claimed that in the history of the bureau there had never been a fingerprint misidentification. They can no longer make this claim which wasn't true then, and isn't true now. Moreover, in the wake of the Madrid bombing case embarrassment, the FBI fingerprint examiner proficiency test has come under attack. According to an FBI whistleblower, the test was not only ridiculously easy, cheating was commonplace.
     

Recent Executions: Say Goodbye to Robert Waterhouse, Mark Wiles, and Shannon Johnson

Robert Brian Waterhouse

     In 1966, 19-year-old Robert Waterhouse, during a home burglary on Long Island, New York, murdered a 77-year-old woman. He pleaded guilty to second degree murder, and was  sentenced to life in prison. But in the state of New York, a life sentence doesn't always mean a life behind bars. In 1975, after serving just eight years, Waterhouse was granted parole, and walked out of prison.

     Four years later, after leaving a St. Petersburg bar with 29-year-old Deborah Kammerer, Waterhouse beat and raped her on the beach, then dragged her body into Tampa Bay where she drowned. In 1980, based on the victim's blood, hair, and other trace evidence found in Waterhouse's car, a jury convicted him of murder. A judge imposed the death sentence. (Waterhouse admitted having sex with the victim that night, but denied killing her.)

     Scheduled to die in 1985, Waterhouse appealed his sentence. Three years later, the Florida Supreme Court invalidated his death sentence because jurors at his sentence hearing  had not been presented evidence that may have mitigated his guilt. At a second sentence hearing before another jury in 1990, jurors recommended the death penalty by a 12 to 0 vote. Waterhouse returned to death row.

     On St. Valentine's day, 2014, after living on death row for 31 years, the 65-year-old double murderer died by lethal injection at the Florida State Prison in  Raiford. Waterhouse was the 72nd inmate to be put to death in Florida since 1972.

Mark Wiles

     In 1983, Mark Wiles, a 22-year-old farmhand, was sent to prison for stealing cash and property from his employers, the owners of the Klima family horse farm in Rootstown, Ohio. Although Wiles had been stealing from the family for some time, Mrs. Klima wrote a letter to the parole board in support of his bid for early release. In October 1984, Wiles left prison on parole.

     Mark Wiles, a serial thief and sociopath, returned to the northern Ohio farm on August 7, 1985 to burglarize the Klima house which he believed was at the time unoccupied. In the dwelling, while helping himself to his former employer's property, Wiles encountered 15-year-old Mark Klima. To eliminate a witness who would have sent him back to prison, Wiles stabbed the boy 24 times, leaving the kitchen knife stuck in his back.

     A panel of three judges, in 1986, found Wiles guilty of capital murder. Notwithstanding testimony on the defendant's behalf that 12 days before the murder Wiles had suffered a head injury that affected his impulse control, the judges sentenced him to death. (If head injuries destroyed impulse control, every person who ever played football would end up in prison. Many do, but not because of head injuries.)

     Following numerous appeals, hearings, and delays, the 49-year-old inmate died by lethal injection on April 18, 2012 at the Southern Ohio Facility in Lucasville. Wiles was the 47th prisoner to be executed since Ohio re-instated the death penalty in 1999.  

Shannon Johnson

     On September 24, 2006, 22-year-old Shannon Johnson shot and killed Cameron Hamilin as Hamlin sat in his car in downtown Wilmington, Delaware with Johnson's ex-girlfriend. The woman managed to flee the scene without injury. Two months later, Johnson tracked her down, but when he tried to shoot her, his gun jammed. Once again, his intended victim escaped death.

     In 2008, a jury found Johnson guilty of capital murder, and recommended the death penalty. The defendant's lawyer argued that because his client was mentally retarded, he was not eligible for execution. (Victims murdered by people with low IQs are just as dead as people murdered by geniuses.)  The Delaware Supreme Court rejected the argument, and upheld the sentence. At that point, Johnson waived his right to further appeals.

     Shannon Johnson, on April 20, 2012, died of lethal injection at James T. Vaughn Correction Center in Smyrna, Delaware. Before dying a few minutes before 3 AM (the execution deadline), the condemned man uttered a few words in Arabic. He was the second  inmate in Delaware to be executed during the last twelve months.  

From A Mother's Arms: The Verna McClain Kidnap Murder Case

     The kidnapping of infants (birth to six months) is not a common crime. From 1983 through 2011, of the 282 infants abducted by strangers, only five are still missing. Most of these babies were taken from their homes, seventeen from pediatric clinics. In 2011, there were eight infant abductions. All of these children were recovered unharmed.

     As vocational nurse, 30-year-old Verna McClain provided basic nursing services under the direction of registered nurses and doctors. Employed at a contract staffing agency, she lived in Houston, Texas. Her estranged husband, Theo McClain, resided in San Diego, California. The couple's three children were being raised by a relative in Houston.

     Engaged to be married, Verna had recently suffered a miscarriage, and was desperate to have a baby. On Tuesday, April 17, at 3:40 in the afternoon, Verna, in search of a baby to abduct, drove her blue Lexus to the Northwoods Pediatric Center in the Houston suburb of Spring. Verna had told her sister, Corina Jackson, that she was going to adopt a child.

     Kala Golden, the 28-year-old mother of four children, pulled her red pickup truck in to the Northwoods Pediatric Center's parking lot with her 3-day-old son, Keegan. Kala was there for the baby's first checkup. Verna watched Kala park her truck, then pulled up next to her. As Kala alighted from her vehicle, and leaned in to lift Keegan and his infant carrier out of the truck, Verna pulled out a pistol and shot Kala eight times.

     As Verna McClain placed the baby into her Lexus, the dying mother, yelling, "My baby! My baby!" lurched at the car. As Verna pulled away with the baby, she hit Kala with the Lexus, knocking the severely wounded woman to the ground. A witness picked up the cellphone lying next to the bleeding woman's body and called the victim's mother.

     Linda Golden, who was babysitting one of her daughter's children, rushed to the clinic where she saw paramedics trying to save Kala. A few minutes later, the bullet ridden mother was on her way to the hospital in an ambulance. She died shortly thereafter. In the meantime, police were looking for a black woman with a white baby in a blue Lexus.

     Not long after the fatal shooting and abduction, Verna McClain called her sister Corina and told her that she had adopted the baby, and was bringing the infant to her house. After leaving Keegan with her sister, Verna drove off in her blood-splattered car.

     Later that evening, after police officers spotted Verna's blue Lexus parked in front of her Houston apartment, they called in the SWAT team. Verna was not home, but before the officers left the scene, she returned to the apartment on foot and spoke to detectives. About this time, an anonymous tip came in directing the police to Corina Jackson's house.

     At 9:40 that evening, the officers recovered Keegan, unharmed. At the police station, Verna confessed fully to the murder and the abduction. The next morning, the prosecutor charged her with capital murder. If convicted, Verna McClain could be sent to death row.

     The baby is being cared for by his father, Keith Schuchardt.  

     

The Pitt Bomb Threat Case: The Odd Couple

     People who make bomb threats are rarely terrorists, or even criminals who lay down bombs. Terrorists intending to blow up buildings full of people seldom call ahead to warn their victims. The vast majority of bomb threats are hoaxes perpetrated by disgruntled workers, customers, clients, patients, ex-employees, high school kids, and college students. The intent is to harass, disrupt, and frighten. Bomb hoaxers are bored, angry, insane or emotionally unstable folks who get a thrill out of seeing emergency vehicles, flashing lights, and people being evacuated out of buildings. As serial offenders, if not caught quickly, they can cause a lot of havoc.

The University of Pittsburgh Bomb Threat Case

     Since February 13, 2012, the University of Pittsburgh's main campus in the Oakland section of the city has received more than 60 bomb threats. While a few have been delivered in the form of handwritten notes, most have been emailed to area reporters through an anonymous remailer that bounces off servers in other countries. As a result, the origins of these threats are virtually impossible to trace.

     The Pitt bomb threats have achieved the goals of the person or persons who have made them. More than 110 campus buildings have been evacuated, and students are frightened. The confusion and inconvenience have also created a lot of excitement and publicity. The case is being investigated by a regional Joint Terrorism Task Force comprised of federal, state, and local law enforcement personnel. Making a bomb threat is a federal offense.

A Couple of Odd Suspects, Or Just An Odd Couple?

     One of the persons who has come under suspicion in the Pitt bomb threat case was born a man (and biologically still is) but lives and dresses as a woman. His/her partner was born as a woman, but lives and dresses up like a man. (In referring to these people, the pronouns "he" and "she" will correspond to their sexual identifies rather than their biological gender.)

     In November 2011, a 22-year-old junior computer science student attending the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown named Seamus Johnston, a female living as a man undergoing hormone treatments, was arrested by campus police and charged with indecent exposure, defiant trespass, and disorderly conduct. Mr. Johnston had repeatedly defied the school's edict not to use men's restrooms and locker rooms. According to the rules, students must use these facilities in accordance with their biological gender, not their sexual identifies. Mr. Johnston, believing that gender identification should be the determinant, challenged the school's restroom policy. (I guess the day will come when colleges and universities have separate sets of restrooms and locker rooms for transgender students. Maybe they will get special dormitories, and an academic department devoted to transgender studies.)

     Mr. Johnston and his partner, Ms. Katherine Ann McCloskey, a 55-year-old man going around as a woman, reside in an apartment in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Ms. McCloskey, a Pitt-Johnstown alumnus, has been living as a female for about a year.

     Pitt administrators, in January 2012, expelled Johnston from the university. Seeking re-instatement, Mr. Johnston has filed a complaint with the Pittsburgh Commission on Human Rights. (Where I presume he will get a sympathetic ear.)

     On April 11, 2012, FBI agents investigating the bomb case questioned Johnston and McCloskey as "potential suspects" in the making of three dozen bomb threats. The agents asked the couple to voluntarily surrender their computers. On the grounds of personal privacy, the suspects refused.

     The day after the interviews, Mr. Johnston and Ms. McCloskey received subpoenas to appear before a federal grand jury investigating the case. Pursuant to the subpoena, the couple must bring their computers to the grand jury hearing.

     On April 17, the day of their grand jury testimony, Johnston and McCloskey refused to have their fingerprints taken. They also refused to provide samples of their handwriting. Within an hour of their refusals, they found themselves standing before federal judge Nora Barry Fischer who threatened to hold them in contempt if they did not comply with the terms of the subpoena. The defendants agreed to cooperate.

     In speaking to reporters, Seamus Johnston said, "I wasn't involved in any of the bomb threats. Personally, I feel the fact they [FBI] continued to investigate me is nothing short of retaliatory on the University's part. I feel they are wasting valuable resources in finding whoever is responsible for threatening the safety of my friends at main campus."

     On the day of the couple's grand jury appearance, FBI agents raided their apartment and seized two computers, CDs, a router, and a cable modem. That day, agents also seized a computer server from a New York internet host through which at least three bomb threats had been made.

     On April 18, the day after Johnston and McCloskey testified before the grand jury, eight University of Pittsburgh buildings were evacuated following a pair of bomb threats.

(Material in this blog is based upon reportage in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.)

UPDATE

     As of May 26, 2012, Johnston and McCloskey have not been charged in the bomb hoax case. In a typical politician's response to a difficult problem, Senator Bob Casey has proposed a new law, the Campus Security Act. At the cost of $2.75 million, the Department of Justice would operate a center that trains, conducts research, develops emergency protocols (we don't have these now?), and enhances cooperation between campus police and local law enforcement. Who in their right mind believes that a new federal law, and another layer of bureaucracy will solve anything?

     

The Cracker Barrel Murders: No Escaping Kevin Allen

     In June 1995, the day he received word that he and his first wife were divorced, 35-year-old Kevin E. Allen assaulted his girlfriend, Janice Koerlin. A few months later, the diagnosed manic-depressive from Kirtland, Ohio, a town 20 miles east of Cleveland, married Koerlin. In September of that year, police arrested Allen after he tried to suffocate his new wife with a pillow. This was a man who obvioulsy had no business being around women. This was a man who needed to be locked up.

     In 2004, Allen filed for personal bankruptcy for the second time. (He had filed for bankruptcy in 1991.) Four years later, the police in North Royalton, Ohio arrested him, now married to his third wife with whom he had fathered two daughters, on charges of theft and burglary. This man was not only an abuser of women, he was a deadbeat, and a thief. (If Allen was found guilty and sentenced to prison on these charges, there is no record of it.) Kevin Allen, by any standard, was a loser. He was also violent. These traits combined to make him a dangerous person. With people like this, all the psychologists and anger management programs in the world are useless.

     In March 2011, Kevin and his third wife Katherina, who went by Kate and was ten years younger than him, lived in Strongsville, Ohio with their daughters Kerri and Kayla. That year Kevin and Kate filed for personal bankruptcy. They were in debt $60,000. Although Kevin Allen, with his short, thinning gray hair, and his trimmed white beard, looked like a friendly guy, continued to be a bellicose, bad-tempered husband. People went out of their way to avoid him. In 2011, Allen went several months without paying his gas bill, and threatened to shoot anybody from the utility company who came to his place to shut if off. A gas company employee did go to the house, but with a police escort.

     In early April 2012, the domestic abuse had gotten so intense and frequent, Kate and the girls moved into a friend's house. On April 12, Kate decided to take Kerri and Kayla to the Cracker Barrel restaurant in nearby Brooklyn, Ohio to celebrate Kerri Allen's tenth birthday. Kate had invited her estranged husband, and in the relative safety of a crowded restaurant, would inform Kevin that she wanted a divorce.

     After the late dinner, while still at the Cracker Barrel, Kate broke the news that she was leaving him. Infuriated, Kevin stormed out of the restaurant, but instead of driving home, he circled the parking lot in his silver Jeep Liberty. Worried that Kevin might become violent, Kate, at 8:40, called 911. "I'm having some spouse problems," she said.

     Kate informed the 911 dispatcher that she had just told her estranged husband that she was leaving  him, and he hadn't taken it very well. At that moment, he was outside the Cracker Barrel driving around the parking lot. A few minutes later, as Kate spoke to the 911 dispatcher, Kevin re-entered the restaurant and approached her and the children carrying a single barrel shotgun. The local police rolled up to the scene just as Kevin disappeared inside the building.

     The police officers, aware that Kevin Allen had gone into the restaurant armed with a shotgun, decided to remain outside. They were afraid that if they went in after him, innocent bystanders could get shot in the cross-fire. The police were also worried that Allen, if confronted inside, might take a hostage.

     When Kevin Allen got to the table, without saying a word, he aimed his shotgun and blasted his wife and two children. Kate, when Kevin walked into the restaurant, was still on the phone with the 911 dispatcher. Their conversation, at this point, went like this:

DISPATCHER: "Wait in the lobby for the officers. Do not go outside. Let them talk to him, okay? "

KATE: "He's here and the police are here, too. I have to...." (Gunfire could be heard on the dispatcher's end.)

DISPATCHER: "Ma'am?"

     After murdering his wife and his daughter Kerri, and seriously wounding Kayla, Allen walked out the front door of the restaurant where he encountered the police. When he refused to drop his shotgun, the police opened fire, killing him on the spot.

     When Kevin Allen strode into the Cracker Barrel carrying the shotgun, bedlam broke out with patrons running for cover. The manager helped many diners exit the place through a rear door. None of the customers were injured.

     Medics  rushed Kayla to a nearby hospital where she was in critical condition. Some people have criticized the officers for not immediately entering the restaurant. But it was a difficult dilemma, and had they gone it, more people could have been killed. There is only so much the police can do. They cannot always save families from abusive, murderous husbands. There was no escaping Kevin Allen.

     

Dr. Nirbhay Singh: The Consultant Who Helped the Federal Government Make Mental Hospitals in California More Dangerous

      If you live in California, are seriously mentally ill, and have been accused of a violent crime, do not plead not guilty by reason of insanity. If you do, and succeed, you'll end up in a state mental hospital. It's a lot safer in prison, and you'll get better treatment.

     In 2002, in an effort to improve services in California's mental hospitals that treat the criminally insane, the state hired a private consultant to reform the system. The reformer, a professor of psychiatry at Virginia Commonwealth University named Dr. Nirbhay Singh, had come to the United States in 1987 from New Zealand. Having specialized in research on the developmentally disabled, Dr. Singh had no experience treating seriously mentally ill patients with sociopathic and predatory tendencies. He had published articles about Buddhist-inspired mindfulness (whatever that means), and alternative treatments such as the herb kava as a calming agent. (Before the Amish man, Edward Gingerich, brutally murdered his wife, the paranoid schizophrenic had been prescribed herbs by a quack chiropractor.) Dr. Singh, in reforming California's state mental institutions, among other things, replaced individual therapy with group classes on anger management. (Murder and aggravated assault as a management problems. Sure.)

     Notwithstanding Dr. Singh's "reforms," the U.S. Department of Justice stuck it's long nose into the problem by suing California on the grounds the state was violating patients' rights by heavily drugging and improperly restraining these extremely violent and dangerous people. The state, rather than fight the case, agreed to a court-supervised improvement plan at four hospitals with more than 4,000 criminally insane patients. (State hospitals in Norwalk, San Luis Obispo County, San Bernadino, and Napa.)

     According to the plan, overseen by Dr. Singh, these hospitals reduced the use of restraints, isolation rooms, and heavy drugs. The reformer dismantled several behavioral programs, and placed greater importance on bureaucracy, and the production of documentation in support of compliance with the federal mandate. Many health care workers complained that the red tape came at the expense of patient care. Much of the paperwork, according to Dr. Singh's critics, was redundant, and clinically useless. Employees, under Dr. Singh's system, had to fill out 300 new forms every month. Staff members said they no longer had time to play cards and chat with patients, activities that the patients missed.

     While he worked as the chief consultant in California, Dr. Singh also worked with mental health systems in Connecticut, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Tennessee. In January 2011, two weeks after the Los Angeles Times published an interview with a top State Department of Mental Health official about the effects of Dr. Singh's reforms, Dr. Singh abruptly resigned. Dr. Stuart Bussey, president of the Union of American Physicians and Dentists which represents California's mental hospital's psychiatrists and medical doctors, complained that Dr. Singh's reforms did "very little to create a healthy and safe environment for patients and staff." In fact, according to studies conducted in the four hospitals involved in the federally mandated reforms, three of them had become much more dangerous places for patients and mental health workers. The ban of heavy drugs, restraints, and isolation rooms had tripled the incidents of patient-on-patient, and patient-on worker assaults in three of the institutions.

     While, according to his critics, Dr. Singh didn't know beans about how to run a place for the criminally insane, he did know how to make a buck. During his 9 year tenure as a California mental health consultant, he charged the state $2,500 a day! His total bill came to $4.4 million. No wonder California is broke.

     Dr. Mubashir Farooqi, a psychiatrist at one of the pilot hospitals, called the reform program a "huge, very expensive, very idiotic experiment that failed badly." But in December 2011, notwithstanding the increased violence in the three California mental hospitals, the Department of Justice asked a federal court to extend the oversight, and continue along the same reform path. According to an assistant in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, California's reforms have not succeeded in improving mental health "outcomes" (bureaucrats love that word) at the four institutions. "Are we where we need to be? (What's this "we" stuff?) Absolutely not," he said in a recent interview. In the meantime, while the federal government dabbles in the care and treatment of California's criminally insane, mental hospitals in the state are dangerous places for patients, and the people trying to help them.  

The Secret Service Scandal: Federal Law Enforcement's Embarrassments and Foul-Ups

     In recent years there have been foul-ups and crimes involving agents with the FBI, ATF, ICE, DEA, and Border Patrol. Federal agents have shot each other, murdered civilians, blown cases, engineered cover-ups, stolen government money and property, taken bribes, invaded privacy, committed perjury, and behaved in conduct unbefitting law enforcement officers. Federal law enforcement in this country is becoming a national disgrace.

The FBI

     Historian Kevin Baker, in the April 1, 2012 issue of The New York Times Book Review, writes about Tim Weiner's new book, Enemies: A History of the FBI. The following are passages from Baker's review:

     "[Author Tim] Weiner lays bare a record of embarrassing, even stunning failure, in which the bureaus' lawlessness was matched only by its incompetence....Botched confrontations with cults and right-wing radicals left a trail of blood from Whidbey Island to Ruby Ridge to the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco. The bureau was penetrated again and again by double agents from Russia, China, Cuba, and even Al Qaeda....FBI turncoats like Robert Hanssen and Earl Pitts went undetected for years, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, and the lives of a 'dozen or more foreign agents who worked for the bureau and the CIA.'...

     "The best terror informant the bureau actually had was dropped for fear he might be a double agent, while as late as 2002, only eight agents cold speak Arabic. The FBI remained a 'pyramid of paper,' mysteriously unable to create a decent computer system; by 2000, 'the average teenager had more computer power than most FBI agents.'...

     "It's infuriating to read of how FBI agents investigating Al Qaeda were stymied from stopping the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, thanks to a bureau misinterpretation of a Justice Department directive about sharing evidence...."

(See my blogs: "FBI: Tarnished Badges, January 3, 2012 and "The FBI Crime Laboratory: The Dark Years," January 30, 2012.)

The Secret Service

           Up until recently, if there was one federal law enforcement agency that had not been tarnished by incompetence, failure, and scandal, it is the Secret Service. There was an embarrassment in November 2009 when a couple of reality show types, Tareq Salahi and his trophy wife Michaele, crashed a state dinner in the White House. Three Secret Service Agents were disciplined, and the White House social secretary, Desiree Rogers, lost her job. In August 2011, a Secret Service agent doing advance work in anticipation of Obama's midwestern bus tour, got arrested for drunk driving in Iowa. In the scheme of things federal, these were small embarrassments.

Secret Service Agents and their Columbian Prostitutes

     President Obama's plan to discuss trade policies at the Sixth Summit of the Americas held on April 15, 2012 in Cartagena, Columbia, did not include the oldest trade of them all, prostitution. (In Columbia it's legal.) Roughly 7,600 police officers, and thousands of military personnel were on hand to provide security for the 30 or more heads of state coming to the city. (Think of the money saved if these politicians talked by phone, and didn't have to look important to voters back home.) Security measures included keeping homeless people and prostitutes out of certain parts of the coastal city.

     President Obama's advanced civilian security detail consisted of 20 or so uniformed and plain-clothed Secret Service agents. Several of the agents were members of the elite, impressively titled, Counter Terror Assault Team (CAT). These CAT agents, known for their heavy drinking and love of partying, are separate and somewhat estranged from the more disciplined president's protective detail. The uniformed and CAT agents, along with members of the White House staff, and press corps correspondents, were staying at the beachfront Hotel Caribe. (The correspondents, instead of filing boring stories about the summit, were treated to a juicy law enforcement scandal.)

     On Friday the 13th, CAT and uniformed Secret Service agents, as part of their Friday night partying at a Cartagena brothel called the Pley Club, invited at least 20 prostitutes to their rooms. Under Hotel Caribe rules, visitors to a guest's room must leave before seven the next morning. People who visit hotel guests have to register at the front desk. At seven in the morning on Saturday, a hotel employee noticed that one of the guests had not signed out of the hotel. When the manager went to the room to investigate, he was denied entry. The manager called the police which led to the discovery that the guest in question was a prostitute. The prostitute said she was not leaving the hotel until the agent paid for her services. The agent said he didn't know she was a working girl. (Sure.) The Cartagena police called the American Embassy, and that's when the pie hit the fan. If the Secret Service agent had just paid his $47 bill. (If this had been a GSA operation, the government would have paid for the girls, some of whom might be underage.)

     The initial inquiry into this international embarrassment has revealed that at least 20 Secret Service Agents are involved in the scandal, including two supervisors. Also in hot water are at least 10 military personnel assigned to the security detail. These military service members are explosive experts and dog handlers from the Navy and the Army. Eleven of the Secret Service agents were immediately sent back to the states, and the military people were confined to their quarters. The disgraced agents were gone when Obama and his people rolled into town Saturday evening. The Pentagon and the State Department have launched investigations.

     New York Congressman Peter King, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he didn't think any crimes had been committed by the Secret Service agents. However, King did consider the alleged behavior a "dereliction of duty." No doubt congressional hearings will be held, and other than a few politicians getting a chance to grandstand on TV, nothing will come of this national embarrassment.

     Ronald Kessler, a former reporter with the Washington Post who has written a book about the Secret Service that details how cutbacks and corner-cutting has seriously attenuated the agency's effectiveness, has called the affair the biggest scandal in Secret Service history. Kessler believes the offending agents should lose their top secret security clearances. (Agents involved in the scandal had President Obama's schedule in their rooms.) Without security clearances, these men cannot remain with the agency. Kessler also believes that Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan should step down. (I doubt this will happen. Presidents hate to fire these people, and they rarely, on their own volition, go quietly into the night. To wit: Attorney General Eric Holder and the Fast and Furious scandal.)




     

CEO Kenneth Melani and his Fellow Executive Bad Boys

     Married Highmark CEO Kenneth Melani recently lost his job after punching out his mistress' husband in a Pittsburgh suburb. The 58-year-old executive's squeeze, 28-year-old Melissa Myler, worked at the heath insurance corporation as a $40,000 a year sports marketing manager. Dr. Melani had hired her in October 2011. The affair, punch-out, Melani's arrest, and the CEO's prompt dismissal from the company, created a major scandal in western Pennsylvania. Dr. Melani was a bad boy.

     In the past, were business leaders and captains of industry bad boys who just didn't get caught? Were they nerds and geeks who couldn't get chicks until they became rich and powerful? Is this why these guys claw their way to the top? Is it to get women who otherwise wouldn't give them the time of day? Is this what it's all about? (Not long ago I read an article about some guy who thinks it would be a good idea for companies to provide their male employees with in-house prostitutes. According to this expert, it would boost morale, eliminate sexual harassment suits, and pump up production.)

     Are there women CEO who are bad girls? Martha Stewart was a bad girl CEO, but all she did was lie to federal officials about stocks she had sold. Big deal.

     Lately, besides Kenneth Melani, several bad boy CEOs have gotten into trouble over women. These stories are much more interesting than stock fraud, and other corporate white collar crimes. A few examples:

Mark Hurd

     In August 2010, Mark Hurd, CEO of Hewlett-Packard, resigned a few weeks before an internal corporate investigation into expenses he had incurred for meals and travel with a marketing contractor named Jodie Fisher. (No relation.) Fisher later quit, and hired the TV friendly, male unfriendly, Gloria Allred who filed a sexual harassment case against Mr. Hurd and the company. (The name Gloria Allred must strike fear in executive suites across the nation.) After resigning from Hewlett-Packard, the former CEO settled with Fisher for an undisclosed sum. But don't feel sorry for Mr. Hurd. His golden parachute departure from Hewlett-Packard cost the company $30 million.

Randy Michaels

     On October 6, 2010, The New York Times published an unflattering portrait of The Tribune Company's (Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times) CEO Randy Michaels and his management style. The article, by David Carr, portrayed the CEO as the ringleader of the type of bawdy, profane, sexual behavior one might find in an unruly college fraternity house. In January 2008, the former radio executive and disc jockey, while accompanied by several of his top executives, offered the waitress at the InterContinental Hotel in downtown Chicago $100 to show her breasts. According to reporter David Carr, "Mr. Michaels and his executives' use of sexual innuendo, poisonous workplace banter and profane invective shocked and offended people throughout the company." A woman who held a senior position at the Tribune Company told the journalist that Michaels and one of his top executives held a loud conversation on an open balcony above a work area about the sexual suitability of various employees.

     During a top-level Tribune Company management meeting, a bad girl executive offered to bring in her assistant to perform a sexual act on one of the executives who seemed to be in a bad mood. In December 2008, the board of directors received an anonymous letter detailing a hostile work environment and a pattern of hiring based on personal relationships.
Two months after The New York Times article, Randy Michaels resigned as CEO. Asserting that he had been forced to quit, Michaels demanded an exit payment of $900,000. (In the CEO world, you get bonuses for quitting under pressure or being fired.) The company agreed to pay Michaels $750,000. Compared to Hewlett-Packard, they got off cheap.

Brian Dunn

     Brian Dunn, the married 51-year-old CEO of Best Buy, the electronics retailer, had been with the company 28 years. Described as a "tech gadget junkie," Dunn became CEO in 2009. Recently, the CEO was accused of misusing company assets to finance a relationship he was having with a female subordinate who worked at the firm's headquarters in Richfield, Minnesota. On April 2, 2012, a week after the company began its probe of the allegations, Dunn resigned. The unnamed employee is still working for Best Buy at its leadership training institute located in Richfield. 

Score One For The Devil: The Arkansas Church Murder

     Every once in awhile you hear of a homicide that reminds you that regardless of who you are, where you are, or what you are doing, you can be murdered. It's a sobering thought, but it's true. There are people among us, ordinary-looking people, pushing carts at Walmart, driving around in SUVs, watching their kids play soccer, sitting in movie theaters, and eating in restaurants, that for little or no reason, will take your life. As Charles Lindbergh said after the murder of his infant son, life is like war. There are too many people on this earth like Rene Patrick Bourassa, Jr.

     On Sunday morning, June 6, 2010, Bourassa, a 34-year-old drifter with a shaved head, an ordinary face, and a tattoo featuring three skulls and a flaming dragon, was driving in eastern Arkansas on Highway 64. Slightly tall, thin, and clean-cut, Bourassa, if placed in a group of men his age, wouldn't stand out. Originally from Danielson, Connecticut, he had recently worked in a Dotham, Alabama barbecue restaurant, and had tended bar in Phoenix, Arizona and Wichita, Kansas.

     At eight-thirty that Sunday morning, as Bourassa drove west toward the small town of Hamlin, Arkansas, 80-year-old Lillian Wilson was alone inside the Central Methodist Church. She had gone there to pick-up donation baskets that had been used to collect money for victims of a recent storm. As Bourassa approached the town, his car broke down. Leaving the vehicle along the highway, he walked to the church, and forced his way into the building.

     About an  hour after Bourassa broke into the Methodist Church, he pulled into a nearby Citgo station driving Lillian Wilson's car. A few miles down the highway from the gas station, he used Wilson's credit card to buy food at a Sonic convenience store.

     As Patrick Bourassa drove west through Arkansas, the pastor of the Central Methodist Church discovered Lillian Wilson's body lying on the floor between two pews. She had been bludgeoned to death with a heavy brass cross.

     On Thursday of that week, police arrested Bourassa in Bremerton, Washington on Kitsap Peninsula west of Seattle. He still possessed Lillian Wilson's car, and admitted to the arresting officers that he had murdered the old woman in the Arkansas church.

     On June 16, after waiving extradition, Bourassa, accompanied by his attorney, stood before a judge in Wynne, Arkansas. Advised that he had been charged with capital murder and several lesser charges, Bourassa pleaded not guilty. If convicted of the murder charge, he could be sentenced to life, or sent to death row. He would await his trial, with no bail, in the Cross County Jail.

     On Monday, April 2, 2012, in Wynne, Arkansas, the jury selection phase of Bourassa's capital murder trial got underway. A week later, the prosecutor showed the jury a video-tape of the defendant re-enacting how he had picked the brass cross off the communion table and used it to beat Lillian Wilson to death. In response to why he had killed an old woman he didn't know, Bourassa said it was because he became enraged when she told him that God loved him, and would forgive him.

     Bourassa's attorneys did not dispute the fact their client had killed Lillian Wilson. It was their mission to convince the jury to find Bourassa guilty of a lesser homicide charge, and save him from execution. To get that result, the defense put two expert witnesses on the stand. A psychologist and a forensic psychiatrist testified that Bourassa was genetically predisposed to violence. These mental health practitioners told the jury that the defendant had suffered childhood abuse, and was bipolar. Moreover, he had a personality disorder. (No kidding.) Because these experts were not saying that Bourassa was not guilty by virtue of legal insanity, the relevance of this testimony is not clear. Surely they were not trying to make the jurors feel sorry for this man.

     On Friday the thirteenth, after four hours of deliberation, the jury found Bourassa guilty of capital murder and the lesser charges. The defendant, at the reading of the verdict, showed no emotion. Having found Bourassa guilty, the jury had to sentence him to either life in prison or death. The next day, after deliberating two hours, the jury sentenced Bourassa to life without parole. The jurors had spared this killer's life because they didn't think Lillian Wilson, the woman he had murdered, would approve of the death sentence. Apparently she had been predisposed to nonviolence. 

The Bo Xilai Case: China and the Politics of Murder

     In the Republic of China, a socialist nation of 1.4 billion run by the Communist Party, crime is often inseparable from politics. With about 30,000 criminal homicides a year (if you can trust their statistics), China has a much lower murder rate than the United States with 314 million citizens, and roughly 1,700 unlawful killings every year. The homicide solution rate in China last year was almost 90 percent compared to 63 percent in the U.S. Of course crime is a lot easier to solve in a country with a criminal justice system without the criminal justice.

     Although the Chinese legislature recently reformed China's criminal procedure code to provide legal representation, and protection against forced confessions, the police routinely ignore these civil rights protections. Political dissidents can be detained indefinitely on vague charges of endangering national security (Critics of the recent passage of America's National Defense Authorization Act think we are, in this regard, impersonating China.), and in criminal cases, the militaristic police still use torture as a means of acquiring confessions. (Citizens of China, due to traditional Chinese values, tend to tolerate the torture of criminal suspects. Chinese crime fiction is mostly about catching the bad guy, then torturing the hell out of him.) Unlike in the United States and other western democracies, criminal suspects in China are not presumed innocent, and have no protection against self-incrimination or unreasonable searches and seizures. There is no due process, freedom of the press, or human rights in the Republic of China.

     The top law enforcement agency in China is the National Police Agency (NPA) which is under the Ministry of the Interior. Departments within the NPA include the National Highway Police, the Harbor Police, and the Criminal Investigation Bureau. Subunits within the Criminal Investigation Bureau include the investigation section, the anti-hoodlum unit, the criminal records office, and the forensic science center. On the city and county level, day-to-day law enforcement is carried out by local authorities who answer to the NPA whose leaders appoint the local police chiefs.

The Bo Xilai Case (The Chinese place the surname first.)

     On November 15, 2011, 41-year-old Neil Heywood, a British businessman who worked and lived in Beijing with his Chinese wife Lulu and their two children, was found dead in a hotel room in the southwestern city of Chonquing. According to Heywood's death certificate, he had died of cardiac arrest from the overconsumption of alcohol. This cause of death stunned his family and friends because he was known as a teetotler. Shortly after his death, Chinese officials cremated his body without his family's consent. (Heywood's wife had initially been told that her husband had simply died of a heart attack.)

     In early April 2012, Chinese police arrested Gu Kailai, a prominent Chinese attorney and businesswoman married to Bo Xilai, a high-ranking Chinese leader with a seat on the 25-member Politburo. Mr. Bo's wife was in police custody under suspicion that she and an accomplice had poisoned Mr. Heywood to death (potassium cyanide) over a business dispute. Following Ms. Gu's arrest, ranking members of the Communist Party removed Mr. Bo from the Politburo on grounds he had interfered with the criminal investigation of his wife.

     The Bo family/Heywood case has created the biggest political scandal and shakeup in China since the 1989 protests and massacre in Beijing. Since the ruling elite in China control the news, it's hard to know how much the Chinese people know about the scandal. Back in Great Britain, the story is headline news. In the United States, most of the in-depth reporting is by journalists with The New York Times.

     Neil Heywood, the British businessman found dead in the Chongquing hotel room, attended Harrow, the exclusive boarding school in London before enrolling at Oxford University. Fancying himself as a dashing young adventurer, Heywood, in the late 1980s, crossed the Atlantic in a yacht, and spent a year working for wages along the Florida coast. In the early 1990s, he moved to Dalian, China where he established himself as a business consultant, advising U.S. and British clients on how to do business in China.

     After meeting Bo Xilai and his wife Gu Kalai, Heywood moved to Beijing where he took up residence at Le Leman Lake, one of the capital's suburban gated communities. His children, George and Oliva, attended school on the Chinese campus of Britain's Dulwich College.

     Heywood, who drove a S-type Jaguar with a Union Jack bumper sticker, was proud of his native country's empirical history, monarchy, and culture. And he didn't hide his contempt for socialism. To his friends and business associates, he liked to hint that he was a spy in the British Secret Intelligence Service (M-16). (The Foreign Office in London has denied any connection to Heywood.) The consensus among those who knew Heywood, on the issue of him being a spy, believe he was a dilettante living a fantasy life.

     Heywood had ingratiated himself with Bo Xilai and his wife by getting their son, Bo Guagua, into Harrow, the $55,000 a year boarding school in London. The now 24-year-old, who has lived more than half his life outside of China, is currently a graduate student at Harvard.

     Bo Xilai, the charismatic 62-year-old son of the legendary revolutionary leader Bo Yibo, had been the party chief of Chongquing, the sprawling metropolitan region in southwest China. Mr. Bo rose to national prominence by successfully cracking down on organized crime. A member of the Central Committee Politburo, Mr. Bo, at the time of his fall from grace, was angling for a promotion to the 9-member Standing Committee, the Communist Party's highest ranking body.

     While Mr. Bo was an extremely popular politician, he had powerful enemies among China's ruling elite who objected to his favoring a larger governmental role in guiding China's growing economy. Certain party leaders were also questioning the source of Bo Xilai's wealth, and suspected he was, through false identities, friends, and relatives (he has an older, very wealthy brother) transferring money to banks and investment houses in Britain and the U.S. When asked how he could afford to sent his son to an expensive school like Harrow, Mr. Bo claimed that his son had been granted a full scholarship. (Bo Guagua's playboy antics at Harrow and Oxford had caused a certain amount of resentment, and embarrassment for his parents.)

     In the Communist Party's upcoming 18th Congress, Bo Xilia had expected to be in the middle of a power struggle over the leadership and control of the Communist Party. Mr. Bo's supporters suspect that the arrest of his wife, and Bo's alleged role in the attempted cover-up, is nothing more than hardball politics, China style.

     Bo Xilai's wife, Gu Kalai, through a firm called Horas Consultancy & Investment, advised foreign clients how to do business in China. She had also been director of eight privately held companies in Hong Kong, and worked closely with Neil Heywood. According to some of her colleagues, Ms. Gu had recently become depressed, neurotic, and paranoid, accusing close business associates of betrayal. She had come under investigation for corruption in 2007, and had allegedly asked Neil Heywood to divorce his wife to show his loyalty to the Bo family. In 2010, she and her husband had a falling-out with Heywood over some business deal. (According to sources close to the Chinese investigation, Heywood had threatened to expose Gu's plan to move large sums of money oversees after a dispute over his cut from the transaction.) Heywood told a few friends that he was concerned for his life, and considered leaving China. The day before he died, Heywood told a friend that he was "in trouble," and had been summoned by the Bo family to Chongquing.

     Wang Lijun, handpicked by Bo Xilia, was Chongquing's chief of police. Following Neil Heywood's death, under pressure from the British government, Wang launched an investigation that revealed how the British businessman had really died. According to Chief Wang, Gu Kailai and a household employee named Zhang Xiaojun, had poisoned Mr. Heywood to death. In February 2012, party leaders in Beijing summoned Chief Wang to give evidence against Gu Kalai. Later, when the chief of police informed Bo Xilai that his wife was under suspicion of murder, Mr. Bo became angry and demoted  Mr. Wang.

     In mid-March, high-ranking communist leaders, accusing Bo Xilia of "serious disciplinary violations," removed him from the Politburo, and confined him to house arrest. Fearing for his life, former chief Wang Lijun sought asylum at the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, a city 200 miles from Chongquing. During his 36-hour stay inside the consulate, Mr. Wang told American officials that Ms. Gu had plotted to poison Mr. Heywood. He turned the entire police file over to the Americans, and gave them a treasure trove of information regarding the internal Chinese power struggle. Denied asylum, Mr. Wang, after leaving the consulate, was taken into custody. He is currently under investigation for treason. (According to Chongquing officials, Mr. Wang is suffering from stress, and is receiving "holiday-style medical treatment.") Things do not look good for Wang Lijun.

     In early April 2012, the Chinese police arrested Gu Kalai on the charge of "intentional homicide." According to Chinese homicide investigators, Ms. Gu had poisoned the victim over "a conflict over economic interest." It is not unreasonable to assume, given the interrogation techniques in China, that a confession is forthcoming.

     Mr. Heywood's wife Lulu wants to leave China with her two children, but that is not likely to happen.

     On April 12, Bo Guagua was seen being escorted out of his luxury apartment near the Harvard University campus by FBI agents. In all probability, the 24-year-old son of Bo Xilia and Gu Kalai will seek asylum in the U.S.