Math Teacher Joyce Quiller: Hero or Victim?

     In January 2014, students and parents filed complaints against a veteran math teacher at Ribault High School in Jacksonville, Florida. The teacher, 51-year-old Joyce Quiller, taught tenth and eleventh graders enrolled in Bridge to Success, a program created to help students two or more years older than normal for their class levels. In other words, most of Quiller's students were not the best nor the brightest. The 21 year classroom veteran had the difficult and unrewarding job of trying to teach math to mostly unmotivated and undisciplined teenagers.

     In the context of today's lax public school education standards, Joyce Quiller had the reputation of being a strict demanding teacher who didn't dumb-down and didn't suffer fools. She expected her students to show up for class with pen, paper and completed homework assignments. When students didn't live up to her academic expectations they failed the course. She gave 77 percent of her students Fs with all but a few of the rest receiving Ds. It seemed this teacher had imposed a toll on the so-called Bridge to Success, and most of her students didn't want to pay it. It's easy to see why this woman was not a popular teacher among students, their parents, and school administrators.

     The six or so complainants accused Quiller of being foul-mouthed and insulting in the classroom. In speaking to a student who showed up for class without pen or paper, she allegedly said, "What's the point of coming to this motherf--ing class if you don't bring materials?" Moreover, according to her accusers, she told another kid to "shut the f---up."

     Joyce Quller also faced the allegation that she called her students "stupid" and "ignorant," and once used the n-word. (The complainants in this case were black and so was the accused.)

     This was not the first time Joyce Quiller had been called on the carpet for using inappropriate classroom language. In 2001 and again in 2013 the school superintendent reprimanded her for telling a student to "get out of my f--ing class." She also supposedly instructed a kid to pull up his pants. (Wow, the kid must have been devastated.)

     In response to the accusations of unprofessional classroom demeanor, Quiller submitted a written statement that she was "appalled and disturbed" at the allegations against her. She denied using profanity in class and accused the complainants of having a vendetta against her.

     In March 2014, following an internal inquiry and a hearing, the superintendent of the Duval County School District sent Joyce Quiller a letter of termination. She appealed her firing to an administrative law judge.

     Administrative law judge Bruce McKibben, in August 2014, ruled that the school district had violated the terms of Quiller's employment contract by skipping step three of a three-step system of punishment. According to the judge's interpretation of the case, the school superintendent should have suspended Quiller without pay. The judge ordered the school system to reinstate Joyce Quiller.

     In his 21-page decision, Judge McKibben found that a preponderance of the evidence (a standard of proof less demanding than proof beyond a reasonable doubt) supported the claims she used profanity in class. He did note, however, that one of Quiller's B students testified that she had never heard the teacher swear.

      Regarding Quiller's work environment at Ribault High School, Judge McKibben wrote: "Quiller was placed in an almost untenable situation. She did not have all the tools needed to work with students, and her classes were too large. Nevertheless, she was expected to maintain her composure and professionalism."

     The judge, perhaps out of political correctness, did not point out the obvious fact that many of Quiller's students were probably idiots. More school supplies would not have solved that problem.

     On September 8, 2014, after Joyce Quiller answered questions and pleaded her case before the Duval County School Board, board members ignored the administrative judge's reinstatement ruling by voting again to fire the former math teacher.

     Three Florida appellate court judges, in July 2015, ruled that teacher Quiller should have been suspended, not fired, and ordered the school board to rehire her.

The Gary Castonguay Case: Paroling a Cop Killer?

     In 1976, 32-year-old Gary Castonguay was convicted of shooting into the homes of two police officers in Bristol, Connecticut. The attacks took place at night when the officers were home with their families. Castonguay told people that he wanted to kill cops.

     Instead of being locked up in prison for attempted murder, a judge found Castonguay legally insane and sent him to a psychiatric hospital for six months. Once released from the hospital he was free.

     In 1977, caught breaking into a home in Plainville, Connecticut, Castonguay fled from police officer Robert Holcomb. As Holcomb was about to catch and arrest him the burglar turned and shot the 26-year-old officer. Castonguay, with the officer down, was free to escape. But instead of running off, he stood over the fallen officer and shot him three times in the chest, killing him on the spot.

     Following his conviction and life sentence for the cold-blooded killing of a police officer, Castonguay's attorney filed several appeals on his client's behalf. The appellate courts rejected all of the appeals. As a result the conviction and the life sentence remained in effect.

     On January 9, 2015, members of the Connecticut Board of Pardons and Paroles, in a two to one vote, agreed to grant the 70-year-old cop killer a parole. The board members made this atrocious decision after Castonguay's self-serving testimony that he hadn't intended to kill officer Holcomb. In an effort to escape, he panicked, blacked out and had no memory of the shooting.

     These ridiculous arguments hadn't worked at Castonguay's trial and had been rejected by all of the appellate courts. But decades later the cop killer was able to use these absurd justifications to convince two parole board idiots to send him back into society.

     None of officer Holcomb's relatives were notified of the Castonguay parole hearing. When the relatives learned of the granted parole they were understandably shocked and outraged. Also outraged were members of the general public who flooded the parole board with angry emails and letters.

     As a result of the public outcry over the parole board's ruling, the board agreed to hold another hearing to give the slain officer's relatives a chance to express their anger and disbelief that this cold-blooded cop killer had been granted parole.

     At the March 25, 2015 hearing the same board members voted three to zero to rescind the cop killer's parole.

     This case begs the question: where do they find these sob-sister parole board members? If Castonguay had killed a police officer in Texas, Missouri, Florida, Ohio or Oklahoma, he'd be dead by now and the dead officer's relatives would not have to worry about a couple of corrections fools setting him free. 

The Ethan Estevez Sexuial Abuse/Murder Solicitation Case

     In August 2012, the Harford County Maryland School District hired 29-year-old Ethan Estevez to teach biology in the town of Aberdeen. The resident of Churchville, Maryland would teach alternative education students at the Center for Educational Opportunity. According to the center's website, "Alternative Education provides a continuation of educational services to students who may have experienced crises. This program also exists to meet the individual needs of those students who have dropped out of school or not have been successful in a traditional school environment."

   
      In February 2014, members of the center's teaching staff came to suspect that Estevez was engaged in a sexual relationship with a female student, a relationship that had been going on since September 2012 when the girl was fifteen. The girl told some of her friends and her mother that she and the teacher had been involved romantically. The mother, along with teachers from the school, reported Estevez to the Harford County Sheriff's Office. 

     A few days after filing the criminal complaint against the teacher, the alleged victim's mother, with a detective listening in on the call, phoned Estevez and asked him if her daughter's allegations were true. Estevez explained that he and the girl were in love and planned to get married. (Estevez, however, already had a wife.) The teacher denied that he and the girl had engaged in anything beyond kissing.

    On March 7, 2014, a school administrator placed Estevez on administrative leave. A month after that, detectives searching the girl's iPhone came across a February 2014 text message to one of her friends that revealed a murder-for-hire plot involving Estevez as the mastermind and his wife as the target. The girl had written: "Like it has to look like an accident because of life insurance and stuff." In another text message the girl said she "just needed it to really happen before Sunday." 

     Questioned about the text messages by detectives, the student claimed that the teacher never really intended to have his wife murdered. Yes, they had talked about it but he was just joking around. 

     On June 4, 2014, a Harford County grand jury indicted Ethan Estevez on charges of sexual abuse. On that day the head of the school district fired him. After a few hours in jail Estevez posted his bond and was released to await his trial.

     A month after Estevez's sexual abuse arrest, Harford County detectives questioned a girl who had exchanged text messages with the suspect's alleged student victim. According to the ex-teacher's student/girlfriend, he had initially spoke of making his wife's murder look like a hit-and-run accident. Later he changed the murder plan to have the hit man orchestrate a fake drive-by shooting outside of a restaurant. To make the hit look like a random crime and throw suspicion off himself, Estevez wanted the assassin to shoot him in the arm. (That was stupid because hit men are amateurs who usually don't shoot straight.) This girl also told detectives that her friend said the hit man would kill the teacher's wife for $600. 

     In August 2014, an assistant Harford County state's attorney charged Ethan Estevez with conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. At the defendant's bail hearing the prosecutor argued that the suspect posed a danger to the community and to his wife. District Court Judge David Carey said he could not ignore the seriousness of the charge. He said, however, that Mr. Estevez was entitled to bail which he set at $75,000. The next day the murder-for-hire and sexual abuse suspect posted his bond and walked out of the Harford County Jail.

     In February 2015, the prosecutor in charge of the Estevez case dropped the murder solicitation charge in exchange for the former teacher's guilty plea to a fourth-degree sexual offense related to the student. Hartford County Circuit Judge Stephen Waldron sentenced Estevez to one year in the county jail. Pursuant to this lenient sentence, Estevez was deemed eligible for work release. (He had found a job at an insurance company.) The judge also sentenced Estevez to five years probation.   

Bones in the Furnace: The Historic Webster-Parkman Murder Case

     Over the past 100 years science has played a vital role in tens of thousands of criminal cases. The publicity associated with some of these investigations and trials has advanced the cause of forensic science. In many of these cases a clever criminal is outfoxed by a well-trained, dedicated investigator relying on physical clues and expert analysis. This is the image that has helped advance forensic science and criminalistics by sparking public interest and court acceptance of physical evidence and expert testimony. (Ironically, it was the O. J. Simpson double murder, a case that involved poor police work and a criminal who was not clever, that popularized DNA.)

      Celebrated cases remind us that good police work can triumph over bad criminals and that justice can be achieved. Cases that have captured and held the attention of the media and the imagination of the public have tended to involved heinous crimes, cases involving diabolical or unlikely suspects, circumstantial evidence in the form of physical clues, defendants who vigorously maintain their innocence, inspired detective work and satisfying and/or dramatic verdicts.

     In America, science first played a vital and dramatic role in a celebrated criminal investigation and trial that took place more than 160 years ago.

The Webster-Parkman Case

     On Friday afternoon November 23, 1849, Dr. George Parkman, a 60-year-old physician and former anatomy professor at Harvard's Massachusetts Medical College in Boston, paid a visit to Dr. John Webster, a highly respected professor of chemistry and mineralogy at the institution. Dr. Parkman, having given up the practice of medicine to engage in real estate and other business ventures, came from a prominent New England family and was quite wealthy. The purpose of Dr. Parkman's visit that day to Dr. Webster's college laboratory was to collect on a series of loans he had made to the chemistry professor. It seemed that Dr. Webster enjoyed a rather extravagant life-style that kept him in debt to Dr. Parkman and other creditors.

     Dr. Parkman was seen entering the little building that housed Dr. Webster's laboratory at 1:45 that afternoon, the last time anyone saw Dr. Parkman alive. Dr. Parkman's mysterious disappearance created a lot of attention and concern among his family, friends and colleagues. The college posted a $3,000 reward for information leading to the identify and apprehension of the doctor's abductor or abductors.

     The following Saturday, Dr. Webster appeared at the home of Dr. Parkman's brother, Reverend Francis Parkman, and informed him that he had last seen his missing brother in his (Webster's) chemistry lab the previous Friday. Dr. Webster even acknowledged that Dr. Parkman had come to see him about a debt.

     On Thursday, Thanksgiving Day 1849, Dr. Webster, who had been acting rather strangely since Dr. Parkman's disappearance, gave the college janitor, a man named Ephraim Littlefield, a turkey. Littlefield had been helping Professor Webster in his laboratory the day Dr. Parkman went missing. Although the janitor was not in the room during Dr. Parkman's visit, he had overheard bits of their heated conversation. When Littlefield learned of Parkman's disappearance he became suspicious.

    After receiving the turkey from Dr. Webster, the janitor felt certain the chemistry professor had something to do with his creditor's disappearance. The next day Littlefield snuck into Webster's chemistry lab to search for Parkman's body. When he touched the brick wall of the assay oven it was still warm. (The oven was built inside a vault that was locked.) To see what was inside, Littlefield, with his wife standing guard as a lookout, broke through the wall with a chisel and crowbar. Inside he saw what looked like a human pelvis and two parts of a leg. He notified the authorities.

     When told he was under arrest for the murder of Dr. Parkman, Dr. Webster denied any knowledge of the crime. When one of the arresting constables informed him of the discovery in the assay furnace, Dr. Webster, referring to the janitor, said, "That villain! I am a ruined man!"

     Shortly after being placed into his jail cell Dr. Webster tried to kill himself by taking a strychnine pill.

     On December 13, 1849, the coroner's jury announced its verdict: "All the remains have been demonstrated to be parts of one and the same person; and those parts of the human frame have been identified and proven to be the remains and parts of the body and limbs of Dr. George Parkman...that he was killed...by blows and wounds inflicted upon him by the hands of Dr. John W. Webster."

     A grand jury indicted Dr. Webster for first-degree murder on January 26, 1850. He trial was scheduled for March 19 at the Supreme Judicial Court House in Boston.  Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw would preside. The case would be prosecuted by George Bemis, the assistant attorney general of Massachusetts.

     Dr. Webster tried to retain the legal services of two prominent defense attorneys of the day, Daniel Webster (no relation) and Rufus Choate. Both lawyers declined to take the assignment. As a result, Webster retained the services of a less well-known but competent attorney named Pliny Merrich.

     The Parkman murder case made headline news in America for nine months. On the opening day of the trial thousands of people gathered outside the Boston court house. Many had been standing outside the building all night in hopes of getting a courtroom seat. During the twelve-day trial two thousand spectators witnessed the proceeding.

     The heart of the prosecution's case consisted of the medical and dental testimony pertaining to the identity of the remains in Dr. Webster's assay furnace. In order to convict the defendant of murder, the state would have to establish the corpus delecti, which in this case consisted of the victim's skeletal and dental remains.

     The prosecution's first medical witness, Dr. Woodbridge Strong, an expert in anatomy and the burning of human flesh, informed the court how he disposed of cadavers by burning them in fires fueled by wood. "There is always a difficulty in getting rid of human remains by fire," he said, "on account of attracting suspicion by the smell. I have been called upon by neighbors or the police several times on this account." Dr. Strong testified that he had looked at the human parts found in Dr. Webster's furnace and "there was nothing dissimilar from what I should have expected to find in Dr. Parkman's body."

     Dr. Frederick S. Ainsworth, a professor of anatomy at Harvard College, testified that the remains in question had not been dissected in his department. (Dr. Webster claimed the remains in his furnace belonged to a cadaver.) Dr. Ainsworth said, "All subjects in my department are injected with fluid to preserve them from decomposition. In these remains which were produced by Littlefield [the janitor] I saw no appearance of the use of such fluid. My impression was that the person who cut them up had no anatomical knowledge."

     The next medical witness, Dr. Charles T. Jackson, testified that he "knew the late George Parkman very well. He was a tall, slender man of somewhat peculiar figure. I saw nothing in the remains dissimilar from what I should suppose was Dr. Parkman's formation."

     The physicians and police officers who had examined Dr. Webster's laboratory had noticed what looked like bloodstains on the wall near a sink and stains on the laboratory floor. In 1850, the ability to scientifically distinguish human from animal blood didn't exist. As one witness put it: "I can distinguish human blood from that of lower animals but not from that of higher animals such as an ox, for instance."

     On the fourth day of the trial, the prosecution put on its most important witness, Dr. Nathan Keep, a surgeon-dentist who had practiced in Boston for 30 years. Dr. Keep testified that he had made teeth for Dr. Parkman and that "Dr. Parkman's mouth was a very peculiar one, so marked in respect to its shape and the relation of the upper and lower jaws that the impression of it on my mind was very distinct." Dr. Keep said that when he saw the teeth that had been found in Dr. Webster's furnace along with the other remains, he "...recognized them as being the same teeth that I had made for Dr. Parkman three years before....On comparing the largest fragment with the model [a plaster cast of Dr. Parkman's dentition] the resemblance was so striking that I could no longer have any doubt they were his." Every so often, in the midst of his testimony, Dr. Keep would break down and cry.

     Oliver Wendell Homes, the famous writer and physician and professor of anatomy and dean of the medical college had examined the fleshy parts found in the assay furnace--the thorax, pelvis, two thighs, and the disarticulated leg--and found them consistent with Dr. Parkman's anatomy.

     Most of the fifth day of the trial was taken up by the testimony of the janitor and his wife. Three days later the prosecution rested.

     The Webster defense opened with witnesses who said they had seen the defendant in places other than the college on the day of the murder. Next came the character witnesses, then the testimony most vital to the defense. Dr. William T. G. Morton, a dentist who made false teeth took the stand and said: "I see no particular marks about these teeth [the furnace remains] to identify them. I should think nothing should be judged from this material....My impression is that if [the furnace teeth] were placed among a dozen others which I can produce, I should not be led to pick it out from any peculiarity." (The dueling expert problem is as old as forensic science itself.)

     The defense rested without putting Professor Webster on the stand. In Massachusetts at that time, defendants in capital trials were not permitted to take the stand on their own behalf. Murder defendants, because of their self-interest, were considered too biased to make competent witnesses. They were, however, allowed to address the jury directly prior to its deliberation. These speeches were not given under oath or subjected to cross-examination. Professor Webster, in his fifteen minute address, denied his guilt and criticized his own counsel.

     Three hours following Dr. Webster's speech, the jury found the defendant guilty of murder. The judge sentenced him to death. Six months later, with his execution just a few days off, the condemned man wrote out a full confession. After killing Dr. Parkman with a stick of wood, Webster dragged the body into an adjoining room and stripped off his clothing which he burned. Then came the dissecting part. "My next move was to get the body into the sink which stands in the small private room. By setting the body partially erect against the corner and getting up into the sink myself, I succeeded in drawing it up. There it was entirely dismembered. It was quickly done as a work of terrible and desperate necessity. The only instrument used was the knife found by the officers in the tea chest and which I kept for cutting corks. While dismembering the body a steady stream of water was running through the sink carrying off the blood in a pipe that passed through the lower laboratory. There must have been a leak in the pipe for the ceiling below was stained immediately around it."

     On August 20, 1850, Dr. Webster was hanged.   

The Mary O'Callaghan Police Brutality Case

     The vast majority of police brutality complaints are filed against male officers. This is not surprising since most officers are men. Moreover, male officers tend to be more physically aggressive than their female counterparts. Out of the thousands of excessive force complaints filed against male officers, only a handful result in civil court settlements. Even fewer of these cases lead to criminal prosecutions.

     Female police officers are rarely sued for excessive force and almost never prosecuted for police brutality. But in Los Angeles a female cop was charged with felony assault in connection with the beating of an arrestee named Alesia Thomas.

     On July 22, 2012, 35-year-old Alesia Thomas left her two children outside the Southeast Police Station in South Los Angeles. Suffering from bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and drug addiction, Thomas knew she couldn't take care of her kids who were age three and twelve. She felt she had no choice but to leave her children at the police department.

     Police officers arrested Thomas that day at her home on charges of child abandonment. As officer Mary O'Callaghan struggled to put the arrestee--wearing handcuffs and leg restraints--into the patrol car, she was caught on another cruiser's dashboard camera kicking Thomas in the stomach and groin area. The police officer, a former Marine and 19 year veteran of the force, was also recorded punching Thomas in the neck.

     The officers at Alesia Thomas' house called for medical assistance after the arrestee lost consciousness in the back of the patrol car. Notwithstanding the efforts of the responding paramedics Thomas died a short time later at the hospital.

     A police administrator, pending an internal departmental investigation, placed O'Callaghan on unpaid leave.

     The forensic pathologist with the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office who performed Thomas' autopsy listed cocaine intoxication as a "major factor" in her death. Because the pathologist was unable to assess what role, if any, being kicked and punched by officer O'Callaghan played in the arrestee's death, Thomas' official cause of death went into the books as "undetermined."

     In the course of the internal affairs investigation, detectives learned that two of the arresting officers that day had disregarded Thomas' request for medical help. Moreover, a third officer at the scene may have lied to investigators looking into the incident. According to the internal affairs inquiry, a police sergeant involved with the case had failed to provide supervisory leadership. In other words, there may have been a cover-up.

     On October 9, 2013, a Los Angeles County assistant district attorney charged officer Mary O'Callaghan with felony assault. The ambivalence regarding Thomas' cause of death ruled out the charge of voluntary manslaughter. If convicted, O'Callaghan faced a maximum prison sentence of three years. Following her arrest she was released on $35,000 bail.

     In speaking to a reporter with the Los Angeles Times, the dead woman's mother, Sandra Thomas, lamented the time it took to charge O'Callaghan with a crime. "I am sure," Thomas said, "that Charlie Beck [the chief of police] saw this [dashboard] video long ago. I would like to see that video. They're charging that officer, but what about all of the other officers involved? They did nothing to stop this."

    On June 5, 2015, a jury of eleven women and one man found Mary O'Callahan guilty of felony assault by a police officer. Following her conviction O'Callaghan asked the judge to send her directly to jail where she would start serving her sentence.

     The trial judge, on July 25, 2015, sentenced O'Callaghan to three years behind bars. The judge then suspended twenty months of the sentence. That meant the former police officer would spend about 16 months in the Los Angeles County lockup.

     Had the forensic pathologist in the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office determined the manner of death in this case to be homicide, O'Callahan might have been convicted of criminal homicide and sentenced to a lot more time.

The Darell Avant Sr. Murder Case

     At eleven in the morning of December 18, 2013, an official at the Pershing Elementary School in Pine Hills, Florida, a community of 60,000 near Orlando, asked Darell Avant Sr. to come to the school and take his son home. The principal had suspended the 5-year-old for kicking a teacher.

     Perhaps the unruly boy had learned his bad behavior from his father. Since 2003 the 26-year-old Avant had been arrested in Orange County 25 times for domestic violence and other crimes including assaulting a pregnant woman, drug possession, aggravated assault and grand theft.

     At seven in the evening on the day Avant removed his son from the school he called 911 to report that the boy was unconscious and wouldn't wake up. Twenty-five minutes after the emergency call, a member of the Orange County Fire and Rescue crew pronounced the boy dead at his father's apartment.

     In speaking to Orange County Sheriff's deputies Darell Avant said that after picking up his son from school, he spanked him and sent him to his room. Later that day the father punished the boy by making him do push-ups and squats. According to Mr. Avant, after twenty minutes of this the child became dizzy, collapsed and lost consciousness.

     Avant told investigators he tried to awaken his son by shaking and slapping him. When that didn't revive the boy he called a friend who came to the apartment to resuscitate him. That didn't work either. Finally, Avant called 911. Mr. Avant didn't explain why he didn't call for professional help immediately after his son lost consciousness.

     Deputies at the death scene and officers at the morgue noticed fresh contusions and bruises on the boy's back, stomach, chest and arms. His mother told detectives that when the child left for school that morning he did not have those injuries. Investigators believed that the boy had been severely beaten.

     Police officers booked Mr. Avant into the Orange County Jail on charges of domestic violence and several lesser offenses. A social worker with the Department of Children and Families took the dead child's younger sibling into protective custody.

     On December 20, 2013, the medical examiner, following the autopsy, announced that the 5-year-old had died from multiple blunt-force trauma. The medical examiner ruled the death a criminal homicide. Shortly after the medical examiner's ruling an Orange County prosecutor upgraded the charges against Darell Avant to first-degree murder. If convicted as charged, he could be sentenced to death. The judge denied him bail.

     In June 2018, a jury in Pine Hills, Florida found Darell Avant Sr. guilty of first-degree murder. A few days later the judge sentenced him to prison for life without the possibility of parole.

The Allen and Patricia Prue Murder Case

     St. Johnsbury, Vermont is a town of 6,200 in the northeast part of the state 40 miles south of the Canadian border. It is home to St. Johnsbury Academy, the prestigious prep and boarding school established in the 1840s. This was not a place where people got murdered.

     Melissa Jenkins had been a science teacher and the girl's basketball coach at St. Johnsbury Academy since 2004. The 33-year-old single mother was completing her Masters Degree in Education and was employed part time as a waitress at Creamery Restaurant in nearby Danville where she had worked 12 years.

     On Sunday evening, March 25, 2012, 30-year-old Allen Prue and his wife Patricia, a couple from Waterford, Vermont, were riding about in their car. Allen made his living driving around the area delivering the local newspaper. In the winter he plowed driveways. Two years before he had plowed Melissa Jenkins' driveway, but after he had asked her out a couple of times, she discontinued his service. In the fall of 2011 Prue showed up at her house drunk and asked if he could resume plowing her driveway. She declined his offer.

     As Prue and his 33-year-old wife drove around that evening, he said he wanted "to get a girl." The girl he had in mind was Melissa Jenkins. Patricia Prue approved of the idea. To lure the intended victim out of her home she called Jenkins and said that she and her husband had broken down near her house. Could Melissa give them a lift?

     Before Jenkins left her house to help people she barely knew, she called her former boyfriend to report she had just received a "weird call from a girl and guy who used to plow her driveway." In case something happened to her Melissa Jenkins wanted someone to know where she had gone. After speaking to her ex-boyfriend she put her 2-year-old son Ty in the car and drove off to help the Prues.

     The moment Jenkins climbed out of her car Allen Prue, with the school teacher's son looking on, grabbed and started strangling her. He pushed the stunned woman into his vehicle where, as he drove to his house in Waterford, Patricia Prue continued choking the victim "to make sure she wasn't breathing." The Prues left the Jenkins boy behind unharmed in his abducted mother's car.

     The Prues carried Jenkins (she may have been alive but unconscious) into their house where they removed her clothing, repeatedly stomped on her then laid her badly bruised corpse onto a tarp. After pouring bleach on her body the Prues carried the tarp-wrapped victim back to their vehicle. They drove to a spot along the Connecticut River near Barnet, Vermont. At the river's edge in a wooded area they tied a cinderblock to Jenkins' body and rolled it into the water.

     Back in Waterford the murderers burned the tarp, Jenkins' clothing and the garments they had been wearing.

     Melissa Jenkins' former boyfriend, two hours after she had notified him about the "weird call" she had just received, tried but failed to get back in touch with her by phone. He drove to her house, and nearby, found Jenkins' idling SUV with her 2-year-old boy asleep inside. Next to her car he found one of Jenkins's shoes. Fearing foul play he called the police.

     An investigator with the Vermont State Police traced the "weird call" Jenkins had received back to the Prues. Confronted by the authorities, Allen Prue confessed.

     On Monday afternoon, March 26, 2012, the day after the murder, the police found Jenkins' body along the river about ten miles from her house. At the scene officers recovered condoms and condom wrappers. The victim's feet had been tied with a length of white rope. Bruising of her face, neck, torso, arms and legs suggested that the Prues had given Jenkins a severe beating. 

     Charged with first-degree murder, kidnapping and conspiracy to commit murder, the Prues were held without bond at the Northeast Correctional Facility in St. Johnsbury. They pleaded not guilty. The medical examiner ruled Melissa Jenkins' death as "homicide by strangulation."

     The Allen Prue murder trial, following a change of venue, got underway in Burlington, Vermont on October 7, 2014. In her opening statement, Caledonia County state's attorney Lisa Warren told the jurors that the Prues who had been engaged in a sexual relationship with a neighbor, wanted somebody they could "play with" on the night of Melissa Jenkins' murder.

     Defense attorney Robert Katims, in his opening remarks, blamed the murder on the defendant's wife. "Patricia Prue strangled the victim," attorney Katims said, "because in her crazy, twisted mind Patricia had become obsessively jealous of Ms. Jenkins. The evidence will show that Patricia Prue strangled Melissa Jenkins without telling Allen she was going to do it, without planning it with him and without Allen Prue agreeing in any way, shape or form with the idea of harming Ms. Jenkins in any way."

     The defense attorney informed the jurors that Patricia Prue suffered from multiple personality disorder and had complete control over her weak-minded husband who quit school at age 16. It was the defendant's low I.Q. that allowed detectives to break him down in a seven hour interrogation. The defendant's murder confession, according to attorney Katims, had been coerced and was therefore false.

     Following the testimony of the medical examiner, prosecutor Warren played the audio recording of the defendant's confession to the jury. She next called Patricia Prue to the stand who invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. A few days later, a Vermont state detective testified that Patricia Prue had used her laptop computer in 2011 to research tips on how to kidnap and rape a girl without getting caught. A search of the defendant's computer revealed that it had been used to shop for a stun gun. (The Vermont State Chief Medical Examiner had testified that a stun gun had been used on the victim the night she died.)

     On October 22, 2014, following nine days of testimony and the attorneys' closing arguments, the case went to the jury of six men and six women. After deliberating six hours the jury found the defendant guilty of first-degree murder as well as the lesser crimes. The judge sentenced Allen Prue to life behind bars without the possibility of parole.

     On February 12, 2015, Patricia Prue pleaded guilty to the charge of first-degree murder. The next day, at a sentencing proceeding that had been initially scheduled as a mental competency hearing on her former not guilty by reason of insanity plea, Prue apologized to Jenkins' family. She said she wished she had received the mental health help she so desperately needed. "I'm not sorry we were caught," she said to thirty family members present in the courtroom. "I am sorry that it ever happened."

     Patricia Prue's attorney, Brian Marsicovetere, used the sentencing hearing to call for more support for mental health services in the state. He said his client suffered from post-traumatic stress and various personality disorders. She also had panic attacks as a result of intense anxiety.

     Caledonia County State's Attorney Lisa Warren told the judge that Patricia Prue had spent months plotting Melissa Jenkins' murder. "The couple stalked Jenkins, acquired a stun gun and bought a prepaid cellphone to call the victim and ask for help," she said.

     The judge sentenced Patricia Prue to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The Madrid Bombing Case: Fingerprint Misidentification

     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 eight 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 who 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 eight 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 named Ouhane Daoud.

     A team of FBI fingerprint experts traveled to Madrid and when they compared Mayfield's fingerprint to the actual latent they realized their mistake. Blaming the misidentification on the low-resolution image of the digital print, the FBI apologized to Mr. 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 allowed their eagerness to identify a terrorist override their scientific objectivity. There may also have been an element of groupthink 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 could no longer make this claim which was never true. Moreover, in the wake of the Madrid bombing case embarrassment, the FBI fingerprint examiner proficiency test came under attack. According to a FBI whistleblower, if the test was not so ridiculously easy,cheating would be commonplace.

     While juries and the American public believe deeply in the reliability of fingerprint identification, it is not hard science, and there will be identification mistakes.

The Dr. Anthony Garcia Murder Case

     In 1999, Dr. Anthony Garcia, after attending the University of California at Davis, graduated from the University of Utah Medical School. Dr. Garcia, shortly after he entered the residency program at St. Elizabeth Family Practice in Albany, New York, yelled at a radiology technician. This, along with other incidents of unprofessionalism, caused Dr. Garcia's supervisors to terminate his residency. According to doctors at St. Elizabeth, Garcia's conduct "left serious doubt as to his future ability to successfully practice medicine."

     Dr. Garcia was given a second chance in June 2000 when he began a residency in the Pathology Department at Creighton University Medical School in Omaha, Nebraska. A year later, he was fired for "unprofessional conduct toward a fellow resident and his (the resident's) wife." Two high-ranking members of the twelve member department, Doctors Roger Brumback and William Hunter, approved Garcia's discharge from the university.

     In 2003, Dr. Garcia managed to acquire a residency in Chicago at the University of Illinois. From Chicago, he bounced around the country working on the fringes of the medical profession. In 2007 he was given a medical school residency in psychiatry at Louisiana State University in Shreveport. In February 2008, the head of the LSU Psychiatric Department fired Dr. Garcia after the state rejected his request to practice medicine. Based on letters received from Doctors Roger Brumback and William Hunter, Garcia was denied a medical license for not mentioning his termination from the Pathology Department at Creighton University. LSU removed Dr. Garcia from its residency program for "falsifying his application to LSU regarding his attendance at Creighton." At this point, Dr. Garcia believed that Doctors Brumback and Hunter were killing any chance he had pursuing a career in medicine.

     On March 13, 2008, two weeks after LSU dismissed Dr. Garcia, Dr. William Hunter returned home from his day at Creighton University to find the dead bodies of his 11-year-old son Thomas and Shirlee Sherman, the doctor's 57-year-old housekeeper. Both victims had been stabbed in the neck near the carotid artery.

     Residents of the exclusive Omaha neighborhood reported seeing, around the time of the murders, an "olive-skinned" man in a gray or silver SUV drive slowly past the Hunter house. This man, wearing a dark suit and a white shirt, climbed out of his vehicle after parking it a block from the Hunter dwelling. Carrying a briefcase or satchel, the man knocked on Dr. Hunter's front door and was let inside. Shortly after entering the house this man returned to his SUV and drove off.

     Homicide detectives were baffled by what appeared to be a double-murder without a motive. In the months following the killings, detectives questioned former Creighton medical students who had played video games with Dr. Hunter's son. They also questioned disgruntled former employees of the university. A FBI criminal profiler classified the slayings as a random attack by a transient serial killer. No one had reason to suspect that the boy and the housekeeper had been murdered by Anthony Garcia.

     In May 2010, Garcia resided in a middle-class community called Village Quarter on the east side of Terre Haute, Indiana. Having been granted a temporary Indiana medical permit, he worked at a high-security federal penitentiary. In the fall of 2012, the Indiana Professional Licensing Agency denied Dr. Garcia's request for a permanent license to practice medicine in the state. The denial was based upon a letter from Dr. Roger Brumback of Creighton University who informed the Indiana medical authorities that Dr. Garcia had been fired in 2001 for "unprofessional behavior."

     In his November 2012 re-application for an Indiana medical license, Dr. Garcia wrote: "I feel my actions do not rise to the level of denial of my medical licensure application. I have been aggrieved and adversely affected by not being able to work as a physician in the state of Indiana."

     A few months before Dr. Garcia's letter to the Indiana Licensing Agency, the still unsolved 2008 double-murder in Omaha was featured on the television series, "America's Most Wanted." Investigators in Omaha were desperate for a solid suspect in the case.

     On May 14, 2013, a piano mover, upon his arrival at Dr. Roger Brumback's house in Omaha, found the front door ajar. The 65-year-old physician had just retired from Creighton University. He and his wife Mary were in the process of moving to West Virginia to begin their retirement lives. The mover stepped into the house to find Dr. Brumback and his wife dead from stab wounds to their necks. The doctor had also been shot.

     Just inside the front door a crime scene investigator discovered the clip to a 9 mm pistol. A firearms identification expert reported that the clip had been used in a Smith & Wesson model SD 9 handgun.

     Members of a task force comprised of local, state and federal investigators noticed the similarity between the Brumback murders and the stabbing deaths of Dr. Hunter's 11-year-old boy and the physician's housekeeper. Dr. Anthony Garcia, because he had a history with both physicians, emerged as a suspect in the murder cases.

     Dr. Garcia became the prime suspect when homicide investigators learned that on March 8, 2013 he had purchased a Smith & Wesson SD 9 at a Gander Mountain store in Terre Haute. Moreover, detectives were able to place Garcia in Omaha around the time of both killings.

     Police officers in Terre Haute, in the pre-dawn hours of Monday, July 15, 2013, raided Dr. Garcia's house. At the time of the raid, because Garcia had been under 24-hour surveillance, officers knew that he was not in the dwelling. Later that morning, officers with the Illinois State Police took Anthony Garcia into custody after pulling over his car in the southern part of the state. The arrest took place near the town of Jonesboro.

     On July 18, 2013, Garcia, charged with four counts of first-degree murder, was transported from the Jackson County Jail in Illinois to Omaha, Nebraska.

    Anthony Garcia, in December 2013, filed a wrongful arrest lawsuit from his cell in Douglas County, Nebraska. He asked for $20 million in damages. On February 25, 2014, U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf dismissed the federal case on procedural grounds.

     On February 27, 2014, Douglas County District Judge Duane Daugherty, based upon a request by Garcia's attorneys, ordered a psychiatric evaluation of their client. At that hearing, Garcia complained to the judge that he did not trust his lawyers.

     At another pre-trial hearing on May 9, 2014, a state psychiatrist testified that the defendant was mentally competent to stand trial.

     On February 14, 2015, Garcia's attorneys were back in court trying to have evidence against their client excluded. The defense lawyers argued that in July 2013 the police officers in Illinois did not have probable cause to arrest their client. The attorneys also asked that the jury in Garcia's upcoming murder trial be sequestered. If Judge Dougherty granted that request, the jury would be prevented from any contact with all forms of news media. According to the defense motion: "This case has been extensively covered and attended by local media outlets to an extraordinary degree. Even if an untainted jury is able to be selected from Douglas or Lincoln County, it would be highly unlikely and almost impossible that the jury selected could avoid prejudicial contact with news and media outlet coverage if not sequestered. (Garcia's lawyers had earlier filed a motion for a change of venue.)

     Judge Daugherty, in April 2015, denied the change of venue and sequester requests as well as the motion to exclude evidence acquired pursuant to Garcia's July 2013 arrest in Terre Haute, Indiana.

     At yet another Garcia case pre-trial hearing on May 7, 2015, defense attorneys put an expert witness on the stand who testified that the person who murdered Dr. William Hunter's son and housekeeper was not the perpetrator who killed Dr. Roger Brumback and his wife. Douglas County prosecutor Brenda Beadle, during her cross-examination of crime scene investigation expert Brent Turvey, showed him photographs of the knife wounds on the necks of 11-year-old Thomas Hunter and Mary Brumback. (There had been knife wounds to the neck on all four victims.) According to the witness, "a knife wound to the neck is so common it's not even funny. It's definitely not distinct or unique." The witness accused investigators of coming up with a suspect then "cherry-picking" evidence to fit the defendant in the 2008 and 2013 murders.

     At the conclusion of the hearing, prosecutor Don Kleine asked Judge Dougherty to try the 2008 and the 2013 murder cases together. The defense urged the judge to separate the cases. Judge Gary Randall denied the defense motion for separate trials.

     Since his arrest in July 2013, the quadruple murder suspect had five trial dates. The trial was postponed in April 2016 after Judge Randall removed Garcia's lead attorney, Alison Motta because Motta had implicated another person in the 2008 Omaha, Nebraska murder case. Motta claimed that DNA evidence pointed to this suspect's guilt. This defense claim was debunked after the testimony of a DNA expert.

     On June 14, 2016, Judge Randall set the Garcia murder trial for September 26, 2016.

     In October 2016, the jury found Dr. Garcia guilty of four counts of first-degree murder. Following several delays, Dr. Garcia's death penalty hearing was rescheduled for June 2018.

     On September 14, 2018, Anthony Garcia entered the courtroom in a wheelchair and appeared to sleep as a panel of three judges sentenced him to death.

Robert Van Handel: The Profile Of A Pedophile

     In 1994, Robert Van Handel, a 48-year-old Franciscan priest and former rector at St. Anthony's Seminary School in Santa Barbara, California, pleaded guilty to sexually molesting an 8-year-old student. He had been accused of molesting fifteen other boys between the ages 8 to 11, but those cases were too old to prosecute. In preparation for his sentencing hearing, the psychiatrist who evaluated Van Handel at the Pacific Treatment Associates in Santa Cruz asked him to write a history of his sexual life. Van Handel complied, producing a detailed 27-page memoir of a life devoted to sexually abusing boys.

     Van Handel's revealing description of his perverted thoughts and behavior provided a rare look into the twisted mind and life of a sexual predator. The document didn't come to light until 2006, the year the Franciscans, in a civil court settlement, paid twenty-five clergy abuse victims $28 million in damages. The church, in an attempt to keep Van Handel's revelations from the public, fought several newspaper organizations all the way to the California Supreme Court. The church lost. What follows is based  on Van Handel's account of his life as a priest, teacher and pedophile.

     In 1956, at age 10, Van Handel and his family of seven settled in Orange County, California. Three years later, the 13-year-old, to escape his strict, demanding father who forced him to read a sex education manual that scared the hell out of  him, enrolled in the Franciscan run St. Anthony's Seminary School in Santa Barbara. Two years later, while in the infirmary with a fever, a priest sexually molested him. According to the seminarian pedophile who attacked him, this activity would, by making the sick boy sweat, draw the fever out of him.

     Over the next nine years, while at St Anthony's, Van Handel collected magazines featuring child pornography and used a telephoto lens to take clandestine photographs of children. While he fantasized about having sex with young boys, Van Handel did not actually molest anyone during this period.

     In 1970, at age 24, Van Handel moved to Berkeley, California to pursue his master's degree at the University of California. While there he formed a neighborhood boy's choir and molested a 7-year-old choir member. He also, during this period, raped his 5-year-old nephew.

     Robert Van Handel, as an ordained Franciscan priest, returned to St. Anthony's in 1975 where he taught English. He also became the director of the school choir. In his sexual memoir, the priest acknowledged that the school choir provided him with a steady supply of victims. An 11-year-old boy, a student he had been abusing since the child was 7, resisted for the first time after four years of molestation. In his memoir, Van Handel said that he was shocked by the rejection. He wrote, "He started to cry and that snapped something in my head. For the first time, I was seeing signs that he really did not like this." In another passage, the priest wrote: "There is something about me that is happier when accompanied by a small boy. Perhaps besides the sexual element, the child in me wants a playmate."

     Van Handel's relationships with his students and choir boys exemplified typical pedophile behavior. The priest rubbed their backs, photographed them tied-up in ropes, wrestled with them and invented tickling games. (The Penn State pedophile, coach Jerry Sandusky, called himself the "tickle monster.") In his memoir of perversion, Van Handel, noted that the fact the boys couldn't stop him from doing what he wanted, turned him on. He wrote, "It was though I could do anything with them that I wanted."

     In 1983 Robert Van Handel became rector of St. Anthony's. As head of this enclave of pedophilia, he was asked to investigate another priest who had been accused of molesting two boys who were brothers. As it turned out, Van Handel had also sexually assaulted these students.

     Van Handel's tenure at St. Anthony's came to an end in 1992 when the parents of one of his victims wrote a letter to the head of the Franciscan order. Within months of this letter, Van Handel was removed from the ministry.

     After the defrocked priest's guilty plea in 1994, the judge sentenced the 48-year-old pedophile to eight years in prison. (Such a light sentence makes you wonder about the judge.)

Byron Mitchell: The Roommate From Hell

     In January 2016, 23-year-old Danielle Cabo Jones was in search of a roommate after the person who had been helping her pay the rent for their downtown Miami apartment unexpectedly moved out. If Jones couldn't find a roommate, she would have to move out herself because the rent was more than she could afford. So, out of desperation, she placed an ad on Craigslist for a roommate.

     After responding to Jones' Craigslist solicitation, 35-year-old Byron Mitchell, on February 1, 2016, moved into the apartment with Jones. The Air Force veteran and personal trainer quickly became romantically interested in his new roommate. Jones made it clear to him that she wasn't interested in him in that way. Mitchell refused to take no for an answer. This led to frequent arguments and accusations by Jones that he was harassing and stalking her.

     On February 14, 2016, after they had shared the apartment for just two weeks, Byron Mitchell, in the midst of a heated argument, chased Jones into bathroom where he threw her to the floor and started punching and choking her. As she lay on the floor with broken teeth, a swollen face and a fractured skull, he stabbed her several times.

     With Jones bleeding and unconscious on the bathroom floor, Mitchell took a shower, deleted his text messages from her phone, then dropped her cellphone into a sink full of water. He next called 911 and informed the dispatcher he had stabbed his roommate when she rushed him with a knife.

     Police officers and medics found Danielle Jones lying in a pool of blood next to the knife. She was rushed to a nearby hospital where she remained in a coma for two weeks. She survived the attack, but had incurred permanent damage to her brain.

     From the beginning, detectives did not buy Mitchell's self-defense story. She was five-three, 115 pounds and he was six-two, 190.  Officers also didn't believe Mitchell when he said he had not sought Jones' affection. Investigators discovered text messages the suspect had sent to his sister asking for advice on how to break the ice with his new roommate. He also Google searched "Rohypnol," a common date-rape drug.

     On February 15, 2016, Miami-Dade County prosecutor Sara Imm charged Byron Mitchell with aggravated assault and attempted murder. The magistrate denied him bail.

     Byron Mitchell went on trial in June 2019. The lead detective in the case testified that the defendant had a record of serious psychological problems during his time in the Air Force. He also had a long history of stalking his former girlfriends. When detectives asked Mitchell about his problem with women, he replied that they just didn't understand him.

     Danielle Jones took the stand and described how the defendant had become immediately obsessed with her, and when she informed him she wasn't interested in that kind of relationship, he harassed and stalked her. She also described the vicious attack in her bathroom that had almost cost her her life.

      Byron Mitchell did not take the stand on his own behalf. His attorney, in his closing argument to the jury, tried to make his client more sympathetic by noting that as a child he had been bullied. The defendant, according to his attorney, also had mental problems due to a childhood head injury. The attorney also blamed the Air Force for not providing Mitchell psychiatric help.

     The jury, after a brief deliberation, found Byron Mitchell guilty as charged.

     On December 10, 2019, at Mitchell's sentencing hearing, Danielle Jones discussed how the assault had changed her life: "I wanted to go to school for criminal justice and psychology and now, I have my 11-year-old brother help me with my math, what was my best subject in school."

     Byron Mitchell, in addressing the court, issued a weak, self-centered apology, then in a lecturing tone, infuriated everyone in the courtroom by saying this to the woman he had permanently damaged: "Don't let a single incident hold you back."

     Judge John Schlessinger sentenced Byron Mitchell to life in prison. 

Miranda and Elytte Barbour: The Craigslist Killers

     Of all the motives behind premeditated murder, killing for the fun of watching someone die reflects a degree of evil that's inhuman. People who kill for the thrill of it are as dangerous as they are diabolical. Because these murderers are incapable of comprehending why normal people consider them monsters, they are beyond the reach of psychology, psychiatry and anger management. To not execute these murderers constitutes, in itself, a crime against civilization. For born killers, there should be no mercy.

     Elytte Barbour and his 18-year-old wife Miranda resided in Selingsgrove, an eastern Pennsylvania town 100 miles northwest of Philadelphia. On October 22, 2013, after moving to Pennsylvania from North Carolina, the couple got married. Through various Internet sites, Miranda offered her services to lonely men looking for female companionship. For fees that ranged from $50 to $850, she would make herself available for conversation over dinner or during a walk around a shopping mall. Sex was not part of the deal. (Her claim.)

     On November 11, 2013, Miranda, through one of her escort postings on Craigslist, offered to meet Troy LaFerrara at the Susquehanna Valley Mall in Selingsgrove. That night, the 42-year-old from Port Trevorton parked his Chevy S-10 pickup in the mall parking lot and got into a 2001 Honda driven by Miranda Barbour. Unbeknownst to Mr. LaFerrara, Miranda's 22-year-old husband Elytte was hidden in the SUV behind the front seat.

     Miranda drove from Selinsgrove toward the nearby town of Sunbury. At some point she pulled off the road and came to a stop. Elytte rose up from behind the seat and wrapped a cord around Mr. LaFerrara's neck. With her passenger choking and grasping for air, Miranda got back onto the road and continued driving toward Sunbury.

     In Sunbury, Miranda pulled to a stop and grabbed a knife from between the front seats. With Mr. LaFerrara still being strangled by Elytte, Miranda stabbed the dying man twenty times. After taking the dead man's wallet (but not his cellphone) the couple dumped his corpse in a residential alley.

     From the alley, the Barbours drove to a department store where they purchased cleaning supplies. Once they had removed the victim's blood from the Honda, Miranda and Elytte drove to a strip club in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania where they celebrated his birthday.

     The day following the LaFerrara murder, November 12, 2013, the occupant of a house whose backyard reached out to the alley, discovered Troy LaFerrara's body. Investigators, from the victim's cellphone, acquired the lead that eventually led them to the married killers.

     On Friday, December 6, 2013, police officers took the couple into custody. According to Miranda, she had stabbed her passenger after he groped her. She claimed that after she had stabbed LeFerrara four times she "blacked out." As a result, she had no memory of what took place in the immediate aftermath of the killing. (Psychopaths, because they lack insight and empathy, are lousy liars.)

     Elytte Barbour confessed fully to the cold-blooded murder of the complete stranger. He told his interrogators that he and Miranda had planned to "murder someone together."

     Dr. Rameen Starling-Romey performed the LaFerrara autopsy at the Lehigh Valley Hospital in Allentown. According to the forensic pathologist, LaFerrara had died from multiple sharp force trauma.

     While the Barbours were in custody without bail, investigators were looking into the possibility that Mr. LaFerrara was not their first murder victim.

     In February 2014, Miranda Barbour, in an interview with a reporter with the Daily Item, a newspaper in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, claimed to have murdered, over the past six years, at least 22 people in Alaska, Texas, North Carolina and California. That meant she started killing when when she was thirteen. According to Barbour, the killing started when she joined a satanic cult in Alaska before moving to North Carolina.

     Sunbury police chief Steve Mazzeo told reporters that his detectives had been in contact with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies in those states.

     A judge, in February 2014, granted Miranda Barbour's defense attorney's request to have his client evaluated by a forensic psychiatrist. Her husband Elytte had already been examined by a court-appointed mental health expert. Investigators were skeptical regarding Miranda Barbour's claim to be a teenage serial killer. Why didn't she tell her police interrogators about these murders? If she was lying about this, she was either delusional or perhaps setting up an insanity defense. Where were the bodies?

     In a second, March 2014 interview with the reporter with The Daily Item, Miranda Barbour claimed that before the murder of Troy LaFerrara, two other targeted victims escaped death when they failed to respond to her offer of female companionship.

     In May 2014, Northumberland County Judge Charles H. Saylor ruled that prosecutors could seek the death penalty. Miranda Barbour's attorney had asked the judge to take the death penalty off the table.

     In August 2014, to avoid the death penalty, the Barbours pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for the killing of Troy LaFerrara. The following month Judge Saylor sentenced the couple to life in prison without parole.

     Holly LaFerrara, in her victim impact statement after the judge handed down the sentences, said, "If it was up to me you would each be strapped to a lethal injection gurney or seated in an electric chair. I say you both got off lucky today…You were bad enough to do the crime. Now let's see how you like doing the time. Lots and lots of time. There aren't many guarantees in life, but you can take this one to the bank. My family and I will make sure you stay in jail, right where you belong."

     The authorities had come to the conclusion that Miranda Barbour had lied about the other killings. 

P.J. Williams and the Florida State University Football Hit-And-Run Case

     At two-forty in the morning of October 5, 2014, in Tallahassee, Florida, Florida State University cornerback P.J. Williams and two passengers in his Buick Century drove into the path of an oncoming Honda CR-V driven by 18-year-old Ian Keith. Keith was returning home from his job at a nearby Olive Garden. Williams and his friends, one of whom was a teammate, had been celebrating the previous afternoon's football victory.

     Both vehicles in the accident were totaled. Keith's Honda sat in the street leaking fluid with its front end crumpled amid auto part debris. Bruised and cut from his deployed airbag, the teen climbed out of his car and waited for the police.

     P.J. Williams, the 21-year-old football star who had been named the most valuable defense player in the former season's national championship game, fled the scene on foot with his friends. The accident had clearly been his fault and he had been driving on a suspended license. He had also been drinking.

     Officers with the Tallahassee Police Department responded to the scene. They asked Ian Keith where the occupant or occupants of the other vehicle had gone. Keith said the three men in the Buick had run off. A check of the Buick's license plate revealed it was registered to P.J. William's grandmother in Ocala, Florida.

     Twenty minutes after fleeing the accident scene, Williams returned with several friends and teammates. He apologized to the officers for leaving the scene of an accident, explaining that he "had a lot on the line." As the local football star rambled on incoherently, a female friend told him to stop talking. "You sound like you've been drinking," she said.

     The Tallahassee officers did not give Williams a field sobriety test or even ask him if he had been drinking or using drugs. Instead, they called two ranking officers with FSU security (no doubt ex-cops) and the director of the athletic department. Because the accident was off-campus, the security officers had no jurisdiction in the case and no business being there.

     At three-thirty that morning the director of football player development came to the scene and drove Williams home. Ian Keith rode home in a tow truck.

     The FSU campus police officials did not write up a report on the accident. The Tallahassee officers, without conducting an investigation, submitted a report stating there was no evidence of alcohol or drug use associated with the accident. The crash involving the football star went unreported in the local media.

     Rather than being charged with hit-and-run, the police issued Williams a ticket for making an improper left turn and a ticket for driving on a suspended license. His fines totaled $392. Had Williams not been a Florida football star, the officers would have placed him in handcuffs and hauled him off to jail where he would have been tested for alcohol and drugs. He would have been charged with hit-and-run, driving under the influence, and driving without a license. Had he not been a local football star he would have been in big trouble.

     Two days after the accident, Williams paid $296 in overdue fines related to an earlier speeding ticket. (Who gave him the money for that?)

     In the American criminal justice system, citizens are not all treated equally under the law. That's how it is and the way it has always been.