Dr.Thomas Woodrow Price: A Headmaster's Double Life

     In 2007 Dr. Thomas Woodrow Price, known to his friends as "Woody," became the headmaster of the Branson School, a private college preparatory institution in California's upscale Marin County in the San Francisco bay area. Students of the school--320 of them--paid an annual tuition of $39,475.

     The 54-year-old headmaster and his wife resided in the suburban community of Ross. Price's wife was the principal of the Prospect Sierra School, a private preparatory institution in El Cerrito, California. Dr. Price and his wife exemplified the upper middle class rewards of higher education and ambition. They were highly respected members of their affluent community.

     Thomas Price had earned a master's degree in education administration from Columbia University in New York City. He went on to acquire a doctorate in education leadership from the University of Pennsylvania, another Ivy League school. Before moving to Marin County he held administrative positions at the Newman School in New Orleans and the Abington Friends School in Philadelphia.

     On the evening of Friday October 3, 2014, deputies with the Sacramento County Sheriff's Office responded to a 911 call from a young man who said his 21-year-old girlfriend was holed up in a hotel room doing drugs with an older man. The 911 caller identified his girlfriend as Brittany Hall and said she and the man were staying at the Hyatt Place off Highway 50 in Rancho Cordova, a suburban community 15 miles east of Sacramento. The hotel was located about 100 miles from Dr. Price's home in Ross, California.

     When Dr. Price answered his hotel room door he came face-to-face with two sheriff's deputies who asked about Brittany Hall. From the hallway outside of the single room the officers saw a young blond woman lying on the bed. They shouted her name but she didn't respond. The deputies pushed past the headmaster into the room where they revived the young woman who was obviously under the influence of narcotics.

      One of the officers described the hotel room as a "den of drug activity." Deputies seized, among drug paraphernalia, quantities of methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine, and prescription pills. The man who had rented the hotel room identified himself to the deputies as Dr. Thomas Price, the head of a prestigious prep school in Marin County.

     Officers booked Brittany Hall, a resident of Elk Grove, California, into the Sacramento County Jail on charges of drug possession with the intent to distribute. Dr. Price was booked on the same charges. The next day the headmaster posted his $75,000 bond and was released. Brittany Hall spent the weekend behind bars before someone bailed her out.

     Shortly after his arrest Dr. Price resigned from the Branson School. Although he told investigators that Brittany Hall had been a casual hookup, evidence surfaced that he had been involved with her for up to two years. At any rate it became obvious that Dr. Thomas Price had been living a double life.

     On April 2, 2015, Dr. Price pleaded no contest to a pair of misdemeanor drug possession charges in return for three years probation. Brittney Hall received probation as well.

The Mitchelle Blair Murder Case

     On Tuesday morning March 24, 2014, Wayne County court bailiff Lee Gordon and her crew entered an apartment in Detroit to evict the family and clear the property. The subjects of the eviction, 35-year-old Mitchelle Blair and her four children by two men, resided in the Martin Luther King Apartments, a low-income housing complex on the city's east side. Neither of the children's fathers lived in the dwelling and both owed thousands of dollars in child support.

     Shortly after 36th District Court bailiff Gordon and her crew entered the vacant apartment someone lifted the lid to a freezer that sat just inside the dwelling. In the freezer the eviction crew member discovered the frozen body of a girl inside a black plastic bag. Court bailiff Gordon called 911.

     Responding police officers and emergency personnel found, beneath the girl's frozen corpse, the body of a boy, also inside a black plastic container. The girl had on a pink jacket and the boy had been wrapped in a white sheet.

     A neighbor of Mitchelle Blair's told police officers that the mother of the dead children was babysitting a friend's baby in a nearby apartment. When taken into custody Mitchelle Blair said, "They're both dead. I did it." At the police station she confessed fully to killing her 13-year-old daughter Stoni Blair on May 25, 2013. The suspect said she later murdered her 9-year-old son, Stephen Berry. The mother said she made her 17-year-old daughter place the bodies into the home freezer.

     When asked by a detective why she had murdered her two children the suspect said she had killed them because they had sexually molested their 8-year-old brother.

     Officers booked Mitchelle Blair into the Wayne County Jail on suspicion of child abuse and murder.

     Social workers took the other two Blair children, the 17-year-old and her 8-year-old brother, into protective custody. Neighbors told investigators that they rarely saw the home schooled children outside of the housing unit.

     A spokesperson for the Wayne County Medical Examiner's Office said the bodies would have to thaw before autopsies could be performed. The process would have to occur slowly to preserve potential evidence.

      A few days after the shocking discovery in the freezer detectives learned that over the years all four of Mitchelle Blair's children had been repeatedly beaten with a two-by-four board, burned with an ironing rod, whipped and choked with a belt. The bodies all bore scars of prolonged physical abuse.

     Autopsies determined that the two children in the freezer had died from multiple blunt force trauma and burns. The medical examiner ruled their deaths as homicide. The forensic pathologist found physical evidence of prior physical abuse.

     On March 29, 2015, Alex Dorsey, the father of the murdered 13-year-old girl told a reporter that he hadn't seen his child in two years. Every time he showed up at the housing complex to visit his daughter, Mitchelle Blair told him the girl wasn't home. Efforts by Dorsey to gain custody of his other child were contested by the county's child protection agency.

     On March 30, 2015, Mitchelle Blair's attorney, Wyatt G. Harris, told reporters that his client was being held in isolation at the Wayne County Jail. In a statement that was outlandish even for a defense attorney, Mr. Harris said, "She realizes she has some challenges to work through. I met with her and she's doing okay, but there are things she needs to get through and she'll get through them."

     Challenges? Doing okay?  How could this child abuser and double murderer be doing "okay"? Moreover, who cared how she was doing?

     At Blair's arraignment on April 2, 2015 the defendant entered a plea of not guilty to the charges of murder. The judge ordered a team of state and private psychiatrists to evaluate her to determine if she was mentally competent to understand the criminal charges against her.

     A few days after her arrest Wayne County Jail officials took Blair out of isolation and placed her into a cell with another person. Blair, shortly after the transfer, assaulted her cellmate.

     On July 17, 2015, Wayne County Judge Dana Hathaway, following Mitchelle Blair's guilty plea, sentenced her to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Assisted Suicide: The Willard Skellie Case

     In America, suicide is not a crime, but in all states but one, helping someone take their life is a form of criminal  homicide. In New York state the act of assisted suicide is prosecuted as second-degree manslaughter which carries a sentence of five to fifteen years.

     Willard F. Skellie and his wife Kathy lived in a two-story house in Glens Falls, New York 45 miles north of Albany. In 2012 Kathy Skellie suffered from mental illness and clinical depression. The 59-year-old woman also struggled with the side-effects of her anti-psychotic medication and experienced panic attacks whenever she left the house. As a result she spent days at a time locked into her bedroom. Early in 2012 she tried to kill herself with a knife.

     At the end of her rope, Kathy asked her 69-year-old husband to buy a gun and teach her how to use it. Knowing that she intended to use the weapon to commit suicide, Willard purchased a 12-gauge shotgun and showed his wife how to operate it. As he demonstrated how the shotgun worked Kathy made notes on a sheet of paper. When Willard loaded the gun, he altered the first two rounds so they wouldn't fire, hoping that two misfires would discourage Kathy from killing herself. Kathy took the loaded weapon to her room.

     On Friday, December 14, 2012, Willard Skellie went deer hunting in the morning and didn't return until evening. He went to bed that night without checking on Kathy. Early the next morning he went hunting again and when he returned to the house a few hours later forced his way into his wife's bedroom. He found that Kathy had used the shotgun to shoot herself in the head. He called 911.

     Officers with the Glens Falls Police Department asked Mr. Skellie if he had helped his wife take her own life. After he denied helping her in any way a detective asked if he'd be willing to take a polygraph test at the state police headquarters in Greenwich, New York. Mr. Skellie agreed to take the lie detection exam.

     On Sunday, December 16, 2012, when detectives informed Mr. Skellie that the polygraph examiner believed he had lied when he denied helping his wife kill herself, he confessed to his role in her death. Mr. Skellie also admitted destroying the notes Kathy had taken regarding how to operate the shotgun. In his confession, Mr. Skellie said, "She was in mental pain from everything. She just couldn't take it anymore."

     On the day of Mr. Skellie's confession, Warren County District Attorney Kate Hogan charged him with tampering with physical evidence and second-degree manslaughter. Unable to post his $100,000 cash bail Mr. Skellies was incarcerated in the Warren County Jail.

     In May 2013, Willard Skellie pleaded guilty to helping his wife kill herself. Judge John Hall sentenced Mr. Skellie to five years probation and 1,000 hours of community service. 

Removing Judge John F. Russo

     John F. Russo, at age 34, was admitted to the New Jersey Bar Association in 1997. In 2009 he became an administrative law judge, a position he held until 2015 when he was sworn in as an Ocean County Superior Court Judge.

     In 2017, after Judge Russo asked a testifying rape victim if she knew how to prevent sexual intercourse by closing her legs, Assignment Judge Marlene Lynch suspended him from the bench. Once re-instated, Judge Russo's professional behavior continued to draw criticism.

     In August 2018, based on several complaints, the Supreme Court of New Jersey Advisory Committee on Judicial Conduct charged Judge Russo with four counts of misconduct. He stood accused of asking court staff members to do him personal favors; asking preferential scheduling treatment for his son's child custody case; and refusing to recuse himself from a high school classmate's child support case.

     The most serious misconduct allegation against Judge Russo pertained to his asking an alleged rape victim, during cross-examination, if she had tried to close her legs to prevent the assault. The fact he had asked this question to another rape victim a year earlier made this complaint all the more disturbing.

     At his November 2018 disciplinary hearing in Trenton, New Jersey regarding the question he had asked the rape victim, Judge Russo claimed he was simply trying to help a "demoralized witness get re-engaged in the hearing."

     On May 26, 2020, justices on the New Jersey Supreme Court voted unanimously to permanently remove the 57-year-old judge from the bench. Chief Justice Stuart Rabner in his rationale for the decision wrote that Russo's rape case question was "neither appropriate nor tasteful. No witness, alleged victim, or litigant should be treated that way in a court of law. The question also shamed the alleged victim by intolerably suggesting she was to blame."

     Chief Justice Rabner, regarding Russo's judicial behavior in general, wrote: "His conduct breached the public trust. His pattern of misconduct and unethical behavior not only undermined several court proceedings but also impaired his integrity and the judiciary's. His overall behavior reflects a lack of probity [trustworthiness] and fitness to serve as a judge."

The Dr. Bing Liu Murder-Suicide Case

     In May 2020, 37-year-old Dr. Bing Liu resided with his wife in a townhouse on the 200 block of Elm Court in Ross Township, Pennsylvania, a suburban community just north of Pittsburgh. A University of Pittsburgh research assistant professor in the Computational and Systems Biology Department, Dr. Bing worked under Ivet Bahar, founder of the University Bahar Laboratory. The computer scientist, using computational models to study the biological process of the coronavirus, was on the verge of making significant findings regarding the cellular mechanisms of the virus.

     A native of China, Dr. Bing earned his Ph.D. in computer science at the National University of Singapore. He had been a postdoctoral fellow at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University before joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh.

     Dr. Bing, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, had been working at home. Sometime during the morning of Saturday, May 2, 2020 Dr. Bing's acquaintance, 46-year-old Hau Gu, a software architect who lived in the suburban Pittsburgh metropolitan community of Franklin Park, entered Dr. Bing's townhouse through an unlocked door. Once inside the dwelling Hau Gu shot Dr. Bing in the torso, neck and head. After killing Dr. Bing, Hau Gu walked to his car parked nearby. Once inside the vehicle, instead of driving away, Hau Gu committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.

     Dr. Bing's wife, upon her return to the townhouse at noon that day, discovered her husband's body. An hour later Hau Gu's body was found in his car.

     Hau Gu had earned a bachelor and a master's degree in computer science from Tongji University in Shanghai, China. In the late 1990's, after arriving in the United States, Hau Gu earned a master's degree in software engineering at East Tennessee State University.

     A naturalized U.S. citizen, Hau Gu had worked since 2004 at the Eason Corporation, a company based in Ireland with an office in Pittsburgh.

     On May 5, 2020, Ross Township detective Brian Kohlhepp informed reporters that Dr. Bing's murder had nothing to do with his coronavirus research. As for motive, the detective, being intentionally vague, said the murder involved a "lengthy dispute regarding an intimate partner."

The Donna Scrivo Murder Case

     In 1999, Ramsay Scrivo graduated from De La Salle Collegiate High School in St. Clair Shores, a suburban community just east of Detroit, Michigan. He earned a bachelor's degree from Wayne State University four years later. After working briefly as an accountant, Ramsay quit after a supervisor criticized his work.

     After working in the building trade, Scrivo, in the spring of 2013, started a lawn maintenance service. About that time his parents Daniel and Donna Scrivo helped him purchase a condo in St. Clair Shores.

     Notwithstanding the support he received from his parents, Ramsay Scrivo had serious problems. He was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic who suffered depression and bouts of uncontrolled anger when he was off his medication. When he wasn't on his anti-psychotic meds he believed people were trying to poison him. Moreover, he thought someone had implanted a tiny microphone in one of his teeth. Following a simple assault conviction the judge placed Scrivo on probation.

     Ramsay Scrivo's troubled life took a turn for the worse when his father died of an illness in May 2013. After he threatened to hang himself a judge granted his mother Donna Scrivo guardianship of her son. He agreed to mental health treatment at St. John Hospital in Detroit. After 90 days of treatment Ramsay Scrivo was released from the medical center. As long as he took his medication he wasn't dangerous. But almost all schizophrenics, at one time or another, quit their medication because of the side effects. Donna Scrivo moved into Ramsay's condo in St. Clair Shores. She was a registered nurse.

     On Sunday, January 26, 2014 Donna Scrivo reported her son missing. Late in the afternoon of Thursday, January 30 a motorist in China Township 50 miles northeast of Detroit saw a human head that had rolled out of a garbage bag that someone had dumped along the side of the rural road. Inside three more garbage bags found nearby police officers discovered body parts, items of clothing and charred documents.

     Just before five in the morning of Friday, January 31, 2014, a motorist saw another garbage bag alongside an Interstate 94 ramp in nearby St. Clair Township. Inside the bag officers found more body parts.The FBI, through fingerprints, identified the remains as coming from one person, Ramsay Scrivo.

     A neighbor reported seeing Donna Scrivo carrying several garbage bags out of the condo shortly before she reported Ramsay missing. Crime lab technicians found traces of blood in the dwelling as well as in Donna's SUV. There was also evidence in the house that someone had used bleach in an effort to scrub away bloodstains.

     A gas station surveillance camera recorded Donna in her 1995 Chevy Blazer near one of the dump sites.

     Later on the day of the gruesome discoveries deputies with the Macomb County Sheriff's Office arrested Ramsay's 59-year-old mother on charges of mutilation of a corpse and the removal of a dead body without permission from a medical examiner. If convicted of the corpse mutilation she faced up to ten years in prison. The misdemeanor body removal offense came with a maximum sentence of one year in jail.

     On February 3, 2014 at her arraignment the judge appointed Donna Scrivo an attorney and set her bail at $100,000. If bailed out of the Macomb County Jail she would undergo random drug and alcohol testing and would not be allowed to leave the state. The judge also ordered a mental health evaluation.

     At a press conference following the arraignment, a Macomb County prosecutor said that further charges could be filed in the case depending upon the medical examiner's cause and manner of death findings. Not long after that statement the prosecutor charged Donna Scrivo with first-degree murder.

    Donna Scrivo went on trial in May 2015 for the murder and dismemberment of her son. The defendant, as a witness on her own behalf, told the jury that a masked man had entered the condo, pointed a gun at her head, murdered her son then cut up the victim's body with a saw. The prosecutor, on cross-examination, ripped her story to shreds.

     The jurors, following a short deliberation found Donna Scrivo guilty of first-degree premeditated murder. On June 23, 2015, the Macomb County judge sentenced the 61-year-old to life in prison without parole.

The Carla Hague Poisoning Case

     In 2013, Judge Charles Hague lived with his wife of 45 years outside of Jefferson, Ohio in the northeastern part of the state. Since 1993 he had been an Ashtabula County common pleas juvenile/probate judge. Carla, his 70-year-old wife, had retired years earlier as a nurse. The judge and Carla, parents of grown children, enjoyed a reputation in the community as outstanding citizens.

     As is so often the case, outward signs of domestic tranquility are misleading. This unfortunate reality applied to Mr. and Mrs. Hague. The problem within that marriage exploded to the surface on September 15, 2013 when Carla telephoned one of her sons. She said the judge had become ill after consuming a glass of wine. Upon arrival at the house the son took one look at his father and dialed 911.

     Paramedics rushed the stricken judge to a local hospital from where medical personnel flew him to the Cleveland Clinic for emergency care. Following several days of treatment in Cleveland the judge returned home to recuperate.

     Judge Hague's relatives, on September 19, 2013 notified the Ashtabula County Sheriff's Office of foul play suspected in the judge's sudden illness four days earlier. More specifically, the relatives accused Mrs. Hague of spiking her husband's wine with antifreeze. (A toxicological analysis of the judge's blood confirmed the presence of ethylene glycol, a toxic ingredient in antifreeze.)

     Sheriff's deputies arrested Carla Hague on December 2, 2013 on suspicion of attempted murder. Officers booked her into the Ashtabula County Jail. Eighteen days later an Ashtabula County grand jury indicted the suspect of contaminating a substance for human consumption. She also stood accused of attempted murder.

     Carla Hague did not deny putting the antifreeze into her husband's wine. Her intent, she said, was not to kill the judge but to make him slightly ill. He suffered from pulmonary fibrosis, a serious respiratory condition. In Carla's opinion, her husband had been adding to his health problem by drinking too much. She hoped that if the wine made him ill he would cut back on his use of alcohol.

     At her arraignment Carla Hague pleaded not guilty to the charge of attempted murder. She posted her $100,000 surety bond on December 24, 2013.

     On June 16, 2014 the local prosecutor, with Judge Hague's consent, allowed the defendant to plead guilty to felonious assault. In speaking to a reporter judge Hague said, "I have no anger or animosity. I am beyond that. I'm glad to have this huge black spot behind us. I have moved on with my life. Carla can get on with hers."

     Following the guilty plea the judge sentenced Carla Hague to two years in prison with eligibility for release in six months.

The Heath Kellogg Counterfeiting Ring

     In the old days counterfeiters made funny-money the hard way: they laboriously, and with great skill and craftsmanship engraved metal facsimile plates. The quality of their fake twenties and hundred-dollar bills depended upon the engraving detail, the color of the ink, and the softness, strength, and feel of the paper used to approximate the government's secret blend. In those days only a handful of forgers possessed the skill and equipment needed to counterfeit money. This made them easy to identify and to catch. But with ink in their blood, these men, the minute they got out of prison, returned to their illicit trades. The most skillful counterfeiters were driven by the challenge to produce fake money indistinguishable from the real thing.

     In the late Twentieth Century with advances in computer, photocopy, and graphic arts technology, counterfeiters could produce half-decent fake bills by simply copying real money. At that time American paper currency was the easiest money in the world to counterfeit. In an effort to render bills more difficult to replicate, the U. S. Treasury Department redesigned the larger denominations. (At one time the government printed $500 and $1,000-dollar bills. The largest denomination today is $100.)

     The U.S. government's anti-counterfeiting measures included adding holograms, embedded inks whose colors change depending on the angle of light; more color and larger presidential portraits. The first bills to be redesigned were the tens, twenties, and fifties. The government didn't issue the new 100s until February 2011.

     The redesigned currency drove the amateurs out of the counterfeiting business but it didn't discourage counterfeiters like Heath J. Kellogg. In 2011, the 36-year-old counterfeiter owned and operated a graphic and web design shop in Marietta, Georgia. In February of that year, Kellogg, who has a history of forged check convictions, began producing fake $50-dollar bills. (Fifties are rarely counterfeited.)

     Kellogg approximated the security threads in government bills by using pens with colored ink that showed up under ultraviolet lamps. He printed out the facsimile fronts and backs separately then glued the sheets together.

     In May 2011, a bank in Atlanta sent the Secret Service seven fake 50-dollar bills. Three months later, agents arrested a man in Conyers, Georgia who passed $50-dollar bills that matched the seven fakes that passed through the bank in Atlanta.

     The counterfeit bill passer had purchased his fake bills with a face value of $2,000 for $900 in genuine money. The arrestee identified Mr. Kellogg as the manufacturer of the fake fifties and agreed to cooperate with the Secret Service.

     Agents arrested a second member of the counterfeit distribution ring who also became an undercover Secret Service operative. On November 15, 2012, following the execution of two search warrants and two controlled undercover buys of counterfeit currency from the suspect, agents arrested Heath Kellogg.

     The Assistant United States attorney in the Northern District of Georgia charged Kellogg with conspiracy to manufacture and distribute counterfeit U.S. currency. Five other men were charged in connection with the passing of Mr. Kellogg's contraband product. The federal prosecutor believed that Kellogg and his accomplices injected $1.1 million worth of fake $50-dollar bills into the local economy.

     In November 2013, a jury found Mr. Kellogg guilty as charged. On March 24, 2014 the federal judge sentenced him to 12 years in prison.

     Two days after the counterfeiter's sentencing the judge sent accomplice Stacy P. Smith to prison for three years. Following his prison stretch Smith faced three years of supervised release. The judge sentenced four other members of the Kellogg counterfeiting ring in March 2014. Those sentences ranged from 18-months behind bars to five years probation.

The Ralph Wald Murder Case

     In March 2013, Ralph Wald, a 69-year-old retired Army Lieutenant Colonel who fought in Vietnam, lived with his wife Johnna Flores in Brandon, Florida. The couple had been married since October 2012. She was 41.

     On Sunday, March 10, 2013 just before midnight, Wald got out of bed for a drink of water. En route to the kitchen he saw Johnna on the living room floor having sex with a man he didn't recognize. Wald immediately returned to his bedroom where he picked up his .38-caliber revolver. Back in the living room a few moments later he shot his wife's sex partner in the stomach and head. The man died on the spot.

     After shooting 32-year-old Walter Lee Copley who turned out to be one of Johnna's old flames from Riverview, Florida, Mr. Wald called the police. To the dispatcher he said that he had just shot a man he caught "fornicating" with his wife in their home. After the call Mr. Wald laid down his gun and waited for the authorities to arrive at the death scene.

     Deputies with the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office took Mr. Wald into custody that night. The next day Hillsborough County Assistant State Attorney Chris Moody charged Ralph Wald with second-degree murder. A judge denied the murder suspect bail.

      The Wald case went to trial in Tampa, Florida just eleven weeks after Mr. Copley's death. Prosecutor Moody, in his opening remarks, told the jury that the defendant, who suffered from erectile dysfunction, killed the victim in a jealous rage.

     Defense attorney Joe Episcopo argued that his client thought Mr. Copley was an intruder raping his wife. Under Florida's stand your ground self-defense doctrine the defendant had no duty to retreat from his own home.

     On the second day of the three-day trial Johnna Flores took the stand for the defense. She testified that when her husband shot Mr. Copley she was "black-out" drunk from too much cognac. As a result she had virtually no memory of the shooting.

     The defendant followed his wife to the stand. According to Ralph Wald he and Johnna had planned to see a therapist regarding their sexual problem. "In fact," he said, "she would joke a lot with me that we were a perfect couple. She didn't want to do it and I couldn't do it." The witness said he hoped to salvage his marriage. "I love my wife," he said.

     Prosecutor Moody, in his closing argument to the jury, said this about Mr. Copley: "It's a personal insult to conduct that kind of activity in a man's home, his castle. It cuts to the quick. It's brazen. That kind of deep and personal insult when you find another man having sex in your living room and you can't have sex yourself. This would make you want to lash out--and the defendant did."

     Defense attorney Episcopo, in addressing the jurors, said, "This was a military man trained to know what to do with the enemy. You take your gun and you kill the enemy."

     On May 30, 2013, the jury, after just two hours of deliberation found the defendant not guilty. Ralph Wald embraced his two lawyers as his wife Johnna cried tears of joy.

     Members of Walter Copley's family who were in the courtroom when the verdict was read were obviously not happy with the outcome of the case.

     Following the acquittal, the Wald/Flores marriage showed signs of strain. In October 2014 he filed for divorce but a few months later withdrew the case. Police arrested Flores for assault after she hit her husband with a picture frame. That case was dismissed.

     On Monday at ten-thirty in the morning, September 16, 2018, Mr. Wald called 911 to report his wife was unresponsive. Police officers arrived at the couple's house to find 48-year-old Johnna Flores dead on the living room couch. She had been shot with her husband's .38 caliber revolver, the gun he had used to kill Walter Conley. Police officers, at that time, did not take Mr. Wald into custody.

     In January 2020, Ralph Wald was charged with shooting his wife to death. Officers booked the 77-year-old into the Hillsborough County Jail on the charge of manslaughter with a firearm. 

     As of this writing Mr. Wald awaits his second murder trial that has been delayed several months due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The Gregory Graf Murder Case

     Jessica Padgett, a 33-year-old mother of three, was last seen at 12:45 in the afternoon of Friday November 21, 2014 by fellow employees at the Duck Duck Goose Daycare Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Surveillance camera footage revealed that 15 minutes after she left the the center her car was returned to the daycare parking lot by a man whose face was not caught on camera.

     Police and volunteers in the eastern Pennsylvania community searched several days without finding a trace of the missing woman. Investigators feared foul play.

     On Wednesday November 26, five days after Padgett went missing police officers, while executing a search warrant in and around the house in Allen Township where her mother and stepfather resided, found her remains buried behind a shed on the 7-acre plot of land.

     On the day the body was recovered police officers took the victim's stepfather, 53-year-old Gregory R. Graf, into custody on suspicion of murder. At the time Jessica Padgett went missing her mother was in Florida.

     Graf, a dedicated hunter who grew marijuana on his property owned a local fencing company. Under police questioning he initially denied any knowledge of his stepdaughter's disappearance and murder. He said he had no idea how her body ended up in the ground on his land. But when detectives pressed Graf with inconsistencies in his story and confronted him with physical evidence that linked him to the disappearance and murder he broke down and confessed.

     Graf admitted shooting Padgett in the back of the head shortly after she left the daycare center that day. Regarding his motive, he was vague. Investigators believed Graf had raped the victim before he killed her. As it turned out detectives had the order of these acts reversed.

     Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli charged Gregory Graf with first-degree murder. The judge denied the suspect bail.

     On December 5, 2014, a search of Graf's computer revealed a video of the suspect having sex with his stepdaughter's corpse. This act of necrophilia on the remains of a woman he had murdered for that purpose made Graf, under Pennsylvania law, eligible for the death penalty.

     Following the discovery of the postmortem sex video the prosecutor added the charge of abuse of corpse.

     At his arraignment Graf asked the judge to appoint him a defense attorney. The defendant said he didn't want to take resources from his family to pay for a lawyer. The judge denied this request on the grounds the suspect had enough money to pay for his own defense.

     On November 13, 2015, following Graf's four-day trial the jury found him guilty of first-degree murder. In arriving at this verdict jurors deliberated less than ten minutes. The conviction brought a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Vigilante Justice: Ellie Nesler's Short, Troubled Life

     In 1952, Ellie Starr Nesler was born in Jamestown, California, a gold mining community in the northern part of the state. Her family was poor, and as a teenager she worked for a local farmer driving a tractor and digging ditches. Her first marriage ended quickly in divorce. She survived on welfare and part time jobs.

     Ellie Nesler's second husband was a gold miner who took her and their two young children--William and Rebecca--to Liberia in West Africa where he hoped to strike it rich mining gold. When civil war broke out in that country Ellie and the children returned to California. Her husband remained in Africa.

     In 1987, while residing in Jamestown, Ellie Nesler befriended 31-year-old Daniel Driver, a member of her church. Mr. Driver took an intense interest in Ellie's 5-year-old son William and soon became like a father to the boy. Unbeknownst to Ellie Nesler, Mr. Driver was a serial pedophile who was grooming her unsuspecting son for sex.

     In the summer of 1988, Daniel Driver and Ellie Nesler's 6-year-old son attended a two-week summer church camp. When the boy returned home he was a different person--sullen and argumentative. Several months later the boy told his mother that Daniel Driver had repeatedly sexually molested him at the summer camp.

     In 1992, a Tuolumne County, California prosecutor charged Daniel Driver with sexually molesting Ellie Nesler's son and three other boys. On April 2, 1993 Ellie Nesler hid a .25-caliber pistol in her purse and entered the Tuolumne County Court House to attend a preliminary hearing on the Driver sex abuse case. (In those days court houses did not have entrance metal detectors and visitors were not searched.) During a break in the proceeding Ellie Nesler walked up to the defendant and from point blank range shot him in the head and neck, killing him on the spot. Sheriffs Deputies immediately took her into custody.

     When questioned by detectives, Ellie Nesler said, "He deserved to die. Maybe I'm not God, but I'll tell you what--I'm the closest damn thing to it for all the other little boys." When asked why she had murdered the accused molester, she said she had no confidence that her son and the other victims would receive justice in Tuolumne County.

     For some in the Jamestown community, Ellie Nesler was a hero for exacting her own justice against a predatory pedophile. Others condemned her for taking the law into her own hands.

     On July 14, 1993, just three months after the 41-year-old defendant killed the suspected sex offender a Tuolumne County jury found Ellie Nesler guilty of voluntary manslaughter. The judge sentenced her to ten years at the women's prison in Chowchilla, California. After the sentence Nesler said, "I'm sorry that I killed someone and that I'm not with my children. But on the other hand, I wish the judicial system would have taken care of it. I wish I wouldn't have had to."

     A year after Nesler's conviction a California appellate court overturned her conviction on grounds of jury misconduct. In 1995, Ellie Nesler pleaded guilty to manslaughter in return for a three-year sentence. Because she had been diagnosed with breast cancer the judge agreed to the lighter sentence.

    Ellie Nesler had been out of prison about a year when, in 1999, the USA cable network aired a movie about her called, "Judgment Day: The Ellie Nesler Story."

     Following her prison stretch in Chowchilla, California life did not go well for Ellie Nesler. In 2002 a judge sentenced her to six years in prison after she pleaded guilty to the possession and sale of methamphetamine. Claiming that she wouldn't have received a fair trial in Tuolumne County, Nesler returned to prison maintaining her innocence.

     While serving her time at Chowchilla, Elli's 23-year-old son William stomped a man to death in Jamestown. He committed the murder just 30 days after he had been released from a 30-day sentence for an earlier assault.  In 2005 the judge sentenced him to 25 years to life.

     In 2006 Ellie Nesler received an early release from prison. On Christmas day 2008 she died of cancer at the U. C. Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. She was 56.

The Execution of Lester Bower Jr.

     In 1983, 35-year-old Lester Leroy Bower Jr., a graduate of Texas A & M with a good job as a chemical salesman, lived in Arlington, Texas with his wife and two daughters. On October 8, 1983 Bower responded to a newspaper ad regarding a ultralight airplane on sale for $4,000.

     That Saturday afternoon, at a hanger on the B & B Ranch in Sherman, Texas, Bower met with the seller of the plane, 51-year-old Bob G. Tate. Bower had driven to the ranch, 60 miles north of Dallas with the intent of killing Mr. Tate and stealing the building contractor's plane.

     As Bower loaded the small aircraft into his truck after murdering Mr. Tate with a .22-caliver handgun, three of the dead man's friends showed up at the murdered man's ranch to watch the Texas-Oklahoma football game. Caught at the murder scene, Bower shot to death 39-year-old Ronald Mayes, a former Sherman police officer; Philip Good, a 29-year-old sheriff's deputy; and Jerry Mac Brown, a 52-year-old interior designer.

     At Bower's May 1984 trial the prosecutor put on a circumstantial case that led to a guilty verdict. The judge, in accordance with the recommendation of the jurors, sentenced Lester Bower to death.

     On May 20, 2015, 31 years following the guilty verdict and death sentence, the 67-year-old Bower, with his execution date approaching, gave an interview to a local reporter. In referring to his impending death, Bower said, "If this is going to bring some closure to the victims' families, then good. But if they think by this they're executing the person who killed their loved ones then that's going to come up a little short."

     On Wednesday June 3, 2015, after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Bower's last ditch appeal, the condemned man, from his death-house gurney, thanked his lawyers, his wife and his daughters for their "unwavering support."

     By way of a final statement, Bower said, "Much has been written about this case, not all of it has been the truth." Shortly after these last words, the executioner administered the lethal dose of pentobarbital.

     Lester Bower was one of the longest serving and oldest inmates on Texas' death row. 

     In 2020 a woman came forward claiming that Lester Brown Jr. had not killed the four men that day in 1983. According to this person her ex-boyfriend and three of his friends committed the murders pursuant to a drug deal gone bad. Not long after this witness came forward, three others provided information that confirmed key parts of the woman's account of the killings.

A Righteous Shooting

     At eight-forty on Sunday morning November 30, 2014, a minister (not identified in the media) living with his wife and three young children on a rural road near Valley Center, Kansas, was forced to make a life and death decision.

     Alerted to an intrusion by his activated  home burglary alarm, the pastor ran into his kitchen to find a window shattered and a man about to enter the house. The minister, to protect  himself and his family, grabbed his handgun and opened fire.

     The intruder immediately retreated and ran off. Deputies with the Sedgwick County Sheriff's Office in responding to the home burglary call came upon a man lying on the side of the road not far from the break-in. Officers rushed the bleeding man to the nearest emergency room.

     Police identified the burglar who was shot while breaking into the pastor's house as Cory Landon. Lucky for him, he had been struck by a single bullet that grazed his forehead. After he was treated at the hospital and released deputies booked Landon into the Sedgwick County Jail on the charge of aggravated burglary. (In Kansas and most states intruding into a dwelling is a more serious offense than breaking into a commercial building.)

     Landon told the arresting officers that he and a few of his friends had been camping out in the area of the break-in.

     Neighbors praised the pastor for his bold anti-intrusion action. Faced with the same situation they all said they would have used deadly force. The neighbors did not believe the pastor's decision, given his position in the community, was immoral. He had reacted as a father and a husband, not as a man of the cloth. "That's an armed citizen taking care of business," one of the neighbors told a local report.

      As for the burglar, breaking into an intrusion-alarmed dwelling in rural Kansas in broad daylight was dangerously stupid.

     In 2015 Cory Landon pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a short prison term followed by probation.

Murdering Jocelyn Earnest: A Circumstantial Case

     On December 19, 2007, a friend discovered the body of 38-year-old Jocelyn Earnest just inside the front door of her house in Pine Bluff, Virginia. The victim had been shot in the back of the head. Next to her body lay a .357 magnum revolver and a typewritten suicide note that in part read:

     To Mom
          I'm sorry for what I've done. Please forgive me. Wes [the victim's estranged husband] has put us in such a financial bind--can't recover. My new love will not leave the family.
     Love,
     Jocelyn

     The heat inside Earnest's house had been jacked up to 90 degrees and there were no signs of forced entry. The dead woman's dog, a black Lab, was locked in a crate without food or water in a back bedroom.

     Investigators immediately suspected that Jocelyn Earnest had been murdered and the scene had been staged to look like a suicide. Detectives knew that people who kill themselves and leave notes rarely type them. In searching Jocelyn's two home computers investigators did not find drafts of this document. And the word choice and syntax of the note were inconsistent with the writing style found in the victim's handwritten journals. The police suspected that the furnace had been turned up to alter the body's decomposition rate to throw off the biological time of death determination. Apparently the killer had wanted the police to believe Jocelyn had been killed earlier in the day, perhaps to support an alibi.

     Suspicion immediately fell on the victim's estranged husband Wesley Earnest who had moved out of the house a year earlier. As an assistant high school principal he lived and worked 200 miles away in Chesapeake, Virginia. Jocelyn had been employed as a financial services manager in Lynchburg, Virginia. Although together they had been earning $200,000 a year they were deeply in debt. Wesley, over Jocelyn's objection, had built a three million dollar, seven thousand square foot mansion on nearby lake property. The $6,000 a month mortgage on this second home they couldn't sell because it was financially under water had put them $1 million in debt. On top of this, Wesley Earnest found himself faced with the disastrous financial consequences of divorce.

     Wesley Earnest claimed he hadn't been to the Pine Bluff house for at least a year. After he had moved out Jocelyn had changed the locks. Investigators, however, could connect him to the crime scene in two ways: he had purchased the .357 magnum and two of his latent fingerprints were on the typewritten note next to the body. Two days before his estranged wife's death the suspect had borrowed a pickup truck from a friend. When he returned the vehicle two weeks later it had new tires. Detectives believed Wesley had changed out the tires to avoid a crime scene tire track match-up.

     Investigators also read the victim's journal, handwritten in seventeen notebooks. Several of the entries, however, written from Jocelyn's point of view, were in Wesley Earnest's hand. These forged additions portrayed the suspect in a favorable light. However, in one of the notebooks the victim had written: "If I die, Wesley killed me and he probably shot me."

     Wesley admitted to detectives that he had girlfriends but claimed that his wife had known about these affairs and approved of them. At his place of employment in Chesapeake, however, he told co-workers he was single.

     In May 2009, the $3 million house on the lake burned to the ground. Cause and origin fire investigators ruled the cause "undetermined." Because the place was heavily insured the fire accrued to Wesley's financial benefit.

     Wesley Earnest went on trial in March 2010 for the murder of his wife. His attorney, in an effort to uncouple the defendant from the typewritten crime scene note, contested the forensic reliability of latent fingerprint identification. (Perhaps the defendant would have better been served by offering an innocent explanation for the presence of his prints.) The defense attorney also put his client on the stand to testify on his own behalf. The defendant told the jurors that he had purchased the .357 revolver as a gift for his wife so she could protect herself. He portrayed Jocelyn as having been distraught over their financial problems. He also said she was having trouble with the woman who was her new lover.

     The jury, a few days after listening to the defendant, after deliberating less than four hours, found him guilty of murdering his wife.

     A month following the conviction, before Earnest was sentenced, a posting on a newspaper web site revealed that the jurors had read Jocelyn's journal. The trial judge had not wanted the jury to see this evidence. The notebooks had been inadvertently put into a box that found its way into the jury room. In July 2010 the judge declared a mistrial.

     In November 2010, in Amherst, Virginia, Earnest went on trial again for the murder of his wife. His attorney, once again, put him on the stand to claim his innocence. On cross-examination the prosecutor got Earnest to admit that in 2006 he had forged entries into his wife's journal. When asked how he had gotten into the Pine Bluff house he had been locked out of, Earnest said he had climbed through an unlocked window. In so doing the defendant revealed to the jury how he may have entered the house to murder his wife. The second jury found the defendant guilty of first-degree murder. He was subsequently sentenced to life in prison.

     In December 2012, a three-judge panel of the Virginia Court of Appeals upheld the murder conviction and life sentence for Wesley Earnest.

     No one saw Wesley Earnest enter the Pine Bluff house and shoot his wife. No one claimed he had confided to them he had committed the crime. And he never confessed to the police. All the prosecutor had was what looked like a staged suicide, a motive, and a pair of latent prints on a suspect suicide note. But, with these two juries the prosecution had enough evidence to convict.     

No Place is Safe From Domestic Abuse

     Patrol officers spend much of their time responding to late night and early morning domestic violence calls involving alcohol, drugs, abusive men and battered women. Constant exposure to this underbelly of American culture is one of the drawbacks of police work.

     On January 15, 2012, at 7:40 in the evening, police officers in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, a suburban community outside of Philadelphia, were summoned to a domestic disturbance at an unusual place. The 911 call had originated from the maternity ward in Lower Merion's Lankenau Hospital. The victim of the assault (her name was not made public) had given birth two days earlier.

     Richard Lavon Davis Jr. while visiting his girlfriend and the mother of his child became agitated when he and the new mother couldn't agree on the baby's name. Davis, who had been holding the infant, laid it in its crib when the argument heated up. After screaming and cursing, Davis lost complete control of himself. The enraged father kicked a rolling table toward the chair where the mother sat. When she rose to her feet Davis punched her twice in the face knocking her onto the hospital bed. 

     The day after the maternity ward attack Montgomery County Assistant District Attorney Wallis Brooks charged the 23-year-old father with simple assault, a crime that carried a maximum sentence of five years.

     A year later Davis pleaded guilty to punching the new mother in the maternity ward. On February 15, 2013, Montgomery County Judge Joseph Smyth sentenced him to eight to twenty-three months in the county jail. The sentence included 96 hours of community service and mandatory domestic violence counseling.

     In speaking to the press following the sentencing hearing prosecutor Brooks said, "He assaulted a new mother and his conduct was outrageous. It's absurd that an argument over the name of the child would lead to this kind of physical violence against a defenseless woman who is just recovering from one of nature's most beautiful experiences, the birthing of a child."

     The convicted man's attorney, Gregory Nestor, told reporters that his client was "Quite remorseful about what he did." The lawyer, in speaking highly of his client, said, "That by coming into court and pleading guilty and accepting the sentence...indicates his acceptance of responsibility for his actions."

    The sentence in this case was an insult to criminal justice. If Davis was capable of hitting the mother of his 2-day-old baby what else was he capable of? 

The Infamous Hello Kitty Terrorist Case

    Picture ten thousand elementary school teachers and administrators being shaken through a massive intelligence strainer with openings just large enough for people with IQs over 80 to fall through. When imagining the three or four public educators who remain in the big sieve, think of the drooling idiots who run the kindergarten program at the Mount Carmel Area School District 88 miles northwest of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The trouble is, you can't picture these people because on the surface they look and act like folks who have average intelligence and common sense. One would assume that because these educators are in positions of authority over children they can be trusted not to make mind-bogglingly stupid decisions. In public education, however, this is an invalid assumption.

     On January 10, 2013, as a five-year-old Mount Carmel kindergarten student and her classmates waited for their school bus, she and another girl her age were having a pre-schooler type conversation. One of the kids said that when she and her friend got home from kindergarten that day she intended to shoot her playmate with her pink-colored Hello Kitty gun, a toy in the general shape of a firearm that blew soapy bubbles. According to media reports, a "school official" overheard the insidious reference to gun violence and immediately searched the kid's backpack for the bubble-firing weapon. As it turned out the little girl was unarmed. But she wasn't out of the woods.

     The next day, the owner of the Hello Kitty toy and the would-be target of the bubble assault were interrogated by "school officials." (Presumably the Hello Kitty grilling was conducted by the elementary school principal and other education administrators experienced in interrogating terrorist suspects. It's doubtful these schoolhouse inquisitors warned the little girl her Miranda rights.)  The interrogators left the confused and frightened kid in tears. One of the poor girl's teachers told the pint-sized suspect that the police might get involved in her case. 

     The five-year-old suspect must have spilled her guts because someone in elementary school authority suspended the kindergarten kid ten days for making a "terroristic threat." The Hello Kitty terrorist was also ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation. 

     This kindergarten student's stunned family acquired the services of an attorney who managed to get the school suspension reduced from ten days to two days. The psychologist brought in to profile the girl declared the kid perfectly normal.  The lawyer met with elementary school officials in hopes of getting the little girl's record expunged. After public rage over this incident, it was.

     The Mount Carmel school officials responsible for this child's abuse should have been fired and banned from public and private education for life. They were the ones who needed psychological evaluations. 

The Joshua Besaw Kidnapping/Rape Case

     On May 31, 2019, 30-year-old Joshua Besaw from Thompson, Connecticut, a small town in the northwest corner of the state, was in Webster, Massachusetts where in a park he encountered a 12-year-old girl. Calling himself "Chuck," Besaw enticed the girl to get into his car and drove back to Thompson, Connecticut where, in a wooded area, he raped her. After the sexual assault Besaw and the victim returned to Thompson where he dropped her off in an unfamiliar neighborhood. The rapist drove off in possession of his victim's cellphone.

     Shortly after the rapist drove away the victim borrowed a stranger's phone and called her parents who took her directly to the Thompson Police Department. Later that day personnel at a medical facility conducted a sexual examination and collected biological evidence of the assault.

     A review by law enforcement officers of numerous surveillance videos from sites in Webster, Massachusetts and Thompson, Connecticut quickly led to the identification of Joshua Besaw as the kidnapper/rapist.

     While under local police and FBI surveillance Besaw discarded cigarette butts that were gathered by his followers for DNA analysis. Traces of the suspect's saliva on the collected cigarette butts matched semen specimens taken from the rape victim. DNA science had positively identified Joshua Besaw as the man who had raped this 12-year-old girl.

     On July 17, 2019, local police officers and FBI agents took Besaw into custody at his place of residence in Thompson, Connecticut. An Assistant United States Attorney in Connecticut charged Besaw with kidnapping and transporting a victim across state lines with the purpose of sexual assault.

     On March 13, 2020 Joshua Besaw, confronted with the DNA evidence connecting him to the rape, pleaded guilty before a federal judge. On June 15, 2020 Besaw was sentenced to 20 years in prison. He could have received a sentence of life.