The Celina Cass Murder Case

     In July 2011 eleven-year-old Celina Cass lived in West Stewartstown, New Hampshire, a village of 800 in the northern part of the state not far from the Vermont/Canadian border. She resided in an apartment with her mother Louisa, her stepfather Wendell Noyes, her 13-year-old sister Kayla and 22-year-old Kevin Mullaney, the son of her mother's former boyfriend.

    Luisa Cass, on July 26, 2011, reported Celina missing. The mother last saw her daughter at nine the previous night before Celina and Kayla slept over at a friend's house. (Details of what happened that night and exactly when Celina went missing were sketchy.)

     Celina's disappearance triggered a massive search that involved 100 police officers, hundreds of searchers, police dogs and thousands of missing person posters. The FBI posted a $25,000 reward.

     At ten-thirty in the morning of August 1, 2011 a person spotted a body at the edge of the Connecticut River about a half mile from Celina Cass' apartment. The corpse, found at a popular fishing spot near a dam and a railroad trestle, turned out to be the missing girl. (For some reason emergency personnel did not pull the body out of the river until ten-thirty that night.)

     The medical examiner, without revealing the cause of death, ruled the case a criminal homicide. Following the autopsy a mortician cremated the corpse. 

     Within a few months following the murder Louisa Cass and Wendell Noyes, her 47-year-old husband, separated. In 2003 psychiatrists diagnosed Mr. Noyes with paranoid schizophrenia and committed him to a state mental facility. The diagnosis and commitment took place after he broke into the home of an ex-girlfriend and threatened to hurt her. After that commitment and release Mr. Noyes was in and out of several psychiatric wards.

     On January 10, 2012 police officers arrested Kevin Mullaney, the son of Louisa Cass' former boyfriend. The 22-year-old stood accused of a variety of crimes that included forging Lousia Cass' signature on a $250 check. Officers booked him into the Coos County Jail on charges of receiving stolen property, reckless conduct and possession of a weapon by a felon.

     A jury on June 12, 2012, found Kevin Mullaney guilty as charged. The judge sentenced him to two to six years in prison.

     In December 2013 with the Celina Cass murder still unsolved the apartment she and her family resided in went up in flames. No one was hurt. (The cause and origin of that fire was not publicly revealed.) Louisa and her daughter Kayla moved in with Kevin Mullaney's father.

     Residents of the New Hampshire community were frustrated that the Celina Cass murder case remained unsolved. New Hampshire Senior Assistant Attorney General Jane Young told an Associated Press reporter in July 2015 that the case was still being actively investigated. However, Marcia Laro, the victim's paternal grandmother told that reporter that she hadn't spoken to an investigator for well over a year.

     The New Hampshire Attorney General's office on June 20, 2016 announced that detectives working on the Cass case had arrested Wendell Noyes, the victim's stepfather. Louisa Cass, the girl's mother, in speaking to a local television reporter, said, "I hope he rots."

    In February 2017 the state attorney general's office dropped the murder charge against the 54-year-old Wendell Noyes on the ground he was mentally unfit to stand trial. Instead Mr. Noyes was committed to the state psychiatric hospital for a minimum of five years. If at any point the patient's doctors considered him mentally fit the murder charge could be refiled. As of September 2024 Mr. Noyes had not been charged with murdering Celina Cass. With a long history of mental illness it was unlikely Wendell Noyes would ever be tried for this murder. Officials with the state when asked by reporters if Mr. Noyes was still a psychiatric patient did not respond.

The Gilbert Collar Police-Involved Shooting Case

     Gilbert Thomas Collar grew up in Wetumpka, Alabama, a town of 6,000 within the Montgomery metropolitan area in the central part of the state. The 135-pound, 5-foot-7 high school wrestling star was enrolled at the University of South Alabama, a 15,000-student university located in Mobile, Alabama. Collar, a social sciences major, wanted to become a high school teacher and wrestling coach.

     A university police officer named Trevis Austin, at 1:23 in the morning of Saturday, October 6, 2012, heard someone banging loudly on one of the campus police station's windows. Upon investigation of this noise the officer encountered Gilbert Collar, nude and crouched into a fighting stance. The muscular young man, who challenged the officer to a fight, obviously appeared to be out of his mind. When Gilbert Collar made an aggressive move toward Trevis Austin the officer drew his weapon, backed-off and warned the threatening 18-year-old to settle down. Collar rushed toward the campus cop several times, and each time the retreating officer ordered the man to stop and desist. The out of control student took a knee, rose and charged the officer again. This time officer Austin shot the young man once in the chest. The attacking freshman stumbled, regained his footing, rushed toward the officer again, then collapsed and died.

     University police officer Trevis Austin was placed on administrative leave pending an investigation conducted by the Mobile County District Attorney's Office and the local sheriff's department. An important aspect of the inquiry involved reviewing the surveillance camera footage of the bizarre confrontation. Some of the questions to be answered included whether or not the student and the officer who shot him knew each other. Investigators also wanted to determine if Mr. Collar had a  history of mental illness and/or drug use. The autopsy and toxicological would answer the question of drugs.

     Jeff Glass, Gilbert Collar's high school wrestling coach told a reporter that "He [Collar] was a kind soul. He was never aggressive to anyone off the mat. He was a 'yes sir, no sir' kind of guy." Chis Estes, an 18-year-old who grew up with Collar reportedly said, "Gil was a very 'chill' guy, mellow and easy-going. That's why I don't understand the story that he attacked the cop."

     According to the toxicology report Gilbert Collar had gotten high on a laboratory drug that mimics the effects of LSD. He had taken the drug at the BayFest music concert on the night of the deadly encounter. Mobile County Sheriff Sam Cochran, at a press conference, announced that the student had assaulted others prior to his death.

     In 2013 a grand jury sitting in Mobile County cleared officer Trevis Austin of criminal wrongdoing in the shooting.

     In the wake of the grand jury no bill, members of Gilbert Collar's family brought a wrongful death lawsuit in federal court against former officer Austin and the university. In 2015, pursuant to that suit, former Tallahassee police chief Melvin Tucker, on behalf of the plaintiff, rendered an expert opinion regarding whether the officer's use of deadly force in the case was appropriate.

     In his report, made public in May 2015, Mr. Tucker concluded that officer Austin had used excessive force in violation of his department's deadly force policy. Melvin Tucker wrote that the officer should either have retreated or used non-lethal means to subdue the student.

     Mr. Tucker noted in his report that over the past 131 years only three police officers in the state of Alabama had been killed by an unarmed assailant. The use of force expert wrote that in 2012 not a single police officer in the United States had died as a result of being disarmed by an arrestee.

     This was one of those difficult cases that no matter how it was resolved it won't satisfy anyone. From the campus police officer's point of view he was confronted by an aggressive, muscular young man who was apparently out of his mind and intent on engaging him in a wrestling match. For all the officer knew he was dealing with a drug-crazed man with supernatural strength. (The officer was 5-foot-eleven and the student 5-foot-seven.) Had these two gotten into hand-to-hand combat there was a possibility that the attacker could have ended up with the officer's gun. Even if the officer had been equipped with a taser device there was no guarantee it would have subdued this aggressive, out-of-control subject, particularly with the LSD type drug in his system.

     Looking at this case through the eyes of Gilbert Collar's friends and relatives it's easy to understand why they had questions regarding this student's sudden and violent death. His mother Bonnie said this to a reporter: "Freshmen kids do stupid things, and campus police should be equipped to handle activity like that without having to use lethal force." Although Gilbert Collar was not a kid, college freshmen are known to do stupid things. But taking off your clothes in the middle of the night and without provocation or notice attacking a police officer goes beyond youthful stupidity. 

The Jovan Belcher Murder-Suicide Case

     Jovan Belcher grew up on Long Island New York where at West Babylon High School he starred in wrestling and football. In 2009 after graduating from the University of Maine he signed with the Kansas City Chiefs as an un-drafted free agent. By 2012 the 6-foot-2, 228 pound former special teams player had made the starting line-up as a linebacker.

     In late October 2012, about six weeks after Belcher's live-in girlfriend Kasandra Perkins gave birth to their daughter, the 22-year-old mother moved out of the split-level house she had shared with the 25-year-old Belcher in southeast Kansas City. The former student at Kansas City's Blue River Campus of the Metropolitan Community College took up residence in Austin Texas with her cousin who was married to a Kansas City Chief's player named Jamaal Charles. Kasandra Perkins and Jovan Belcher had been arguing and there were indications that he had been depressed and under stress.

     Just before Thanksgiving 2012 Kasandra Perkins and her three-month-old baby returned to Kansas City where they resumed living in the quiet, middle-class residential neighborhood with the football player and his mother Cheryl Shepherd. At 7:50 Saturday morning, December 1, 2012, Jovan Belcher's mother called 911 to report a shooting. The police arrived to find that Jovan shot Kasandra Perkins several times with a handgun. (She died a short time later in the hospital. The baby had been in another room.) After the murder Mr. Belcher left the house in his black Bentley en route to the Arrowhead Stadium complex five miles away.

     The football team's general manager Scott Pioli as well as head coach Romeo Crennel and an assistant had just walked out of the practice facility when Belcher drove onto the parking lot and climbed out of his car. The distraught football player walked up to the three men, and while holding a handgun to his temple, thanked them for all they had done for him. Jovan then turned his back on the general manager and the two coaches and shot himself in the head. He killed himself as police cars rolled up to the scene.

     The Jovan Belcher case made a big splash in the media because it featured two subjects of great interest to the public--violent crime and sports. And there were other elements in the tragedy that made it particularly newsworthy. Gun control advocates and sports pundit Bob Costas cited the case as an example of American's gun culture. (The handgun Belcher used on Perkins and himself had been purchased legally.)

     Had this NFL player been taking performance-enhancing drugs or had been hooked on meth, bath salts, or cocaine, the media focus on the murder-suicide would include America's drug culture. There was also the issue of how brutal the game of football had become and the physiological effects of this violence on its participants. Over the past few years scientists and medical researchers found a link between routine hits to the head and brain disease, memory loss, dementia and depression. The suicide of Junior Seau, the former San Diego star, brought attention to the debate over the long-term effects of football on its players.

     According to reports, Mr. Belcher at the time of the murder-suicide had been combining alcohol with pain-killing drugs. Moreover, he had a history of violence against women.

Dr. Ana Maria Gonzalez-Angulo: The Case of the Poisoned Coffee

     Dr. Ana Maria Gonzales-Angulo and her colleague (and lover) Dr. George Blumenschein were on the staff at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. Dr. Gonzales-Angulo, a breast cancer oncologist attended medical school at the University of Cauca in Colombia, completed her residency in Internal Medicine at the Mount Sinai Medical center in Miami then finished her training at the University of Texas Medical School. She had been with the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center since 2003. Dr. Blumenschein graduated from Vanderbilt University and the University of Texas Medical School. As a specialist in lung, heart and neck cancers he had been on the cancer center staff since 2000.

     On May 29, 2013 a prosecutor in the Harris County District Attorney's Office, based upon information received from investigators with the University of Texas Police Department, charged Dr. Gonzales-Angulo with aggravated assault. The doctor stood accused of poisoning Dr. Blumenschein's coffee with ethylene glycol, a chemical used in antifreeze and medical research.

     According to the criminal complaint, the poisoning took place in Dr. Gonzales-Angulo's Houston apartment. Dr. Blumenschein, after sipping a cup of coffee made by Dr. Gonzales-Angulo complained of its sweet taste. Dr. Gonzales-Angulo allegedly informed him that she had added Splenda to his drink and urged him to finish it. After drinking a second cup of Dr. Gonzales-Angulo's coffee that evening Dr. Blumenschein began slurring his speech.

     Sixteen hours after drinking the two cups of coffee paramedics rushed Dr. Blumenschein to a nearby emergency room where doctors diagnosed him with central nervous system damage, cardiopulmonary problems and renal (kidney) failure. (The doctor would subsequently undergo dialysis treatment.)

     Three toxicological tests of Dr. Blumenschein's urine revealed the presence of crystals consistent with ethylene glycol poisoning. (By the time the toxicological analysis took place the ethylene glycol had been metabolized.)

     Police officers booked Dr. Gonzales-Angulo into the Harris County Jail on May 30, 2013. Shortly thereafter she posted her $50,000 bond and was released. Officials at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center placed the doctor on administrative leave. Her attorney, Derek Hollingsworth, told reporters that his client "is completely innocent. She is a distinguished citizen and scientist," he said, "and these allegations are totally inconsistent with her personal and professional life."

     In September 2013 a Harris County Grand Jury indicted Dr. Gonzales-Angulo on one count of aggravated assault.

     At the September 2014 Gonzales-Angulo trial the assistant district attorney put on 22 witnesses. One of these witnesses included a man who said the defendant, just weeks before Dr. Blumenschein's poisoning, had boasted of having killed others in her native Colombia. The prosecutor, in referring to Dr. Gonzales-Angulo in his closing argument, said, "You can't fix evil.

     The Gonzales-Angulo defense consisted mainly of the argument that the prosecution, in this circumstantial case, had not carried its burden of proof.

     On September 26, 2014, a jury in a Houston, Texas courtroom took less than six hours to find Dr. Gonzalez-Angulo guilty as charged. The judge sentenced her to ten years, but in May 2018 she was granted parole and released from prison. 
     

America's Oldest Murder-For-Hire Mastermind

     Dorothy Clark Canfield, born and raised in Montgomery County, Texas in the eastern part of the state, began a life of crime at the rather late age of 57. In 1986 in Huntsville, Texas a Walker County judge sentenced Canfield to seven years probation following a felony theft conviction. A few months after she got off probation in 1993 she pleaded guilty to forgery in Montgomery County. The judge in that case sentenced the 64-year-old forger and thief to ten years probation. In 2009, after being convicted of passing forged checks at the age of 80, Dorothy Canfield was sent to prison for two years.

     Shortly after being released from prison in early 2011 Dorothy Canfield formed a company in Willis, Texas called International Profession Placement Services. Between September 2011 and September 2012 at least seven undocumented residents each paid Canfield to "facilitate" their immigration paperwork for residency or citizenship in the United States. According to a Montgomery County assistant prosecutor, Canfield's operation was a scam. In November 2012 the prosecutor charged Canfield with stealing between $20,000 and $100,000 from her clients. A magistrate set her bond at $100,000.

     On April 4, 2013 while incarcerated in the Montgomery County Jail 30 miles north of Houston, 84-year-old Dorothy Canfield decided to hire someone to murder the assistant district attorney in charge of her case. She also wanted the hit man to beat-up the district attorney so bad he'd be hospitalized for three weeks. Canfield took inspiration from the recent Texas murders of the Kaufman County District Attorney, his wife and one of his assistant prosecutors. By killing the Montgomery County assistant prosecutor Robert Freyer and incapacitating his boss, D. A. Brett Ligon, Dorothy Canfield hoped to buy some time in her theft case.

     In search of an assassin Miss Canfield reached out to a fellow inmate who promptly reported Canfield's inquiry to the Texas Rangers Office. On April 5, 2013 the elderly murder-for-hire mastermind met with an undercover investigator who showed up at the jail posing as a contract killer. In the recorded conversation that followed Canfield offered the phony hit-man $5,000 for assistant prosecutor Robert Freyer's murder and half of that amount for the beating of Freyer's boss, District Attorney Brett Ligon.

     Ten days after the Montgomery County Jail murder-for-hire meeting Texas Rangers Wende Wakeman and Wesley Doolittle showed Canfield staged crime scene photographs depicting the murders of the Montgomery County prosecutors. The elderly inmate, showing no remorse at the sight of the men she had tried to have killed, confessed to the murder plot.

     Dorothy Canfield was charged with solicitation of capital murder and solicitation to commit aggravated assault on a public figure. She remained incarcerated in the Montgomery County Jail under $500,000 bond.

     In August 2014 Dorothy Canfield pleaded guilty to the theft and murder solicitation charges. At her sentencing hearing her attorney asked Judge David Walker to grant the 85-year-old probation. The defense attorney argued that because of his client's poor health and age she was not a danger to society. Unmoved, the judge sentenced the career thief and murder-for-hire mastermind to 53 years in prison. 

The Ronald Samuels Murder-For-Hire Case

     In 1993 Heather Samuels, after five years of marriage to Ronald Samuels, a Pensacola, Florida car dealer who sold drugs and ran with other women, left him and returned to her parent's home in Minnesota. The six-foot-four inch burly Brooklyn born husband who was eighteen years older than his 26-year-old wife immediately moved his girlfriend into the Samuels' house.

     A year later the Samuels divorce became final. A Santa Rosa County judge awarded custody of the ex-couple's three children to Heather and ordered Ronald Samuels to pay her $3,000 a month in child support. Ronald, already angry over the fact he had wasted thousands of dollars in attorney's fees fighting the divorce vowed to fight the child support order. He was not going to allow his ex-wife to raise the children at his expense in Minnesota.

     In 1995 Ronald Samuels married Deborah Love, the woman who had moved into the house in Pensacola following his separation from Heather. Samuels' resentment over the child custody situation turned to wrath in June 1997 when Heather married John Grossman, the son of Bud Grossman the former part owner of the National Football League's Minnesota Vikings. Heather, the children and her new husband, the heir to a multi-million dollar estate, moved from Minnesota to Boca Raton, Florida.

     With his ex-wife and her new husband living in south Florida Ronald Samuels decided it was now possible to have them both murdered.

     After the divorce Ronald Samuels sold his Toyota car dealership. He was now making his living selling cocaine, the proceeds of which he deposited in a bank in the Cayman Islands. In September 1997 he paid Hugh Estes, a 50-year-old cocaine addict, $5,000 to arrange the double murder. Samuels told the former insurance company employee that his ex-wife was a gold-digger who had cheated on him before their divorce. Her new husband, John Grossman, had to be killed because he was abusing the children.

     Hugh Estes, instead of using the hit money to buy a weapon and recruit an assassin, went on a cocaine binge. This forced Ronald Samuels to ask Geoffrey Pollock, another drug addict, for help. A week later at a Denny's Restaurant, Pollock introduced Samuels to Eddie "Slim" Stafford, a third cocaine junkie who said he had found a trigger man, a former Army marksman named Roger Runyon. Eddie Stafford assured Samuels that Runyon was a competent cold-blooded killer who would murder the ex-wife and her husband.

     At the Denny's meeting Ronald Samuels provided Roger Runyon with murder-for-hire intelligence that included photographs of the targets, their address, a description of their cars and an outline of their daily routines. Samuels' murder-for-hire team consisted of three drug-addled accomplices and a man he had just met who claimed to have been in the Army. The mastermind agreed to pay the accomplices in cocaine. Roger Runyon was paid $5,000 down and promised $20,000 when he completed the job.

     Late in the afternoon of October 14, 1997, as John and Heather Grossman sat at a traffic light in Boca Raton, Florida, Eddie "Slim" Stafford pulled up alongside the couple in Hugh Estes' 1996 green Ford Thunderbird. From the back seat of the Ford, Roger Runyon fired two rifle bullets into the Grossman vehicle. The first slug grazed John Grossman's chin, the second severed Heather Grossman's spine, paralyzing her for life.

     Ronald Samuel's hit team had bungled the job. The targets were still alive and the murder-for-hire mastermind instantly became the prime suspect in the attempted murders.

     The victims told investigators that they were certain that Ronald Samuels was behind the ambush. Shortly after the shooting, detectives traced the Ford Thunderbird to Hugh Estes who immediately gave up Stafford and Runyon. The accomplice and the hit man, in return for immunity, identified Ronald Samuels as the brains behind the botched murder plot.

     In May 1998 the drug addicts and the failed hit man appeared before a grand jury which promptly indicted Ronald Samuels on charges of attempted murder, solicitation of murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

     Samuels, who had divorced his second wife Deborah, fled to Mexico to avoid arrest. In 1999 the police in the state of Neueno Leon caught Samuels in possession of thirteen pounds of cocaine. Tried and found guilty he was sentenced to five years in prison. In 2004, when Samuels walked out of the Mexican lockup a pair of United States Marshals took him into custody on charges related to passport fraud. The officers transported Mr. Samuels to New Orleans where he was tried, convicted and sentenced to prison on the fraud case.

     Heather and John Grossman were divorced in 2003. She moved back in with her parents who had moved from Minnesota to Phoenix, Arizona. In February 2005, after serving his federal prison sentence in Louisiana the authorities extradited Ronald Samuels to Palm Beach, Florida where he was scheduled to be tried on the Grossman attempted murder charges. Before the trial got underway in October 2006 John Grossman died of a heart attack. He was 55.

     The prosecutor in West Palm Beach offered Ronald Samuels a deal in return for his guilty plea. Samuels rejected the offer and the case went to trial. The government's key witnesses included accomplices Geoffrey Pollock, Hugh Estes, Eddie Stafford and the hit man, Roger Runyon. Heather, seated in a wheelchair and breathing with the help of a ventilator, took the stand as well. Ronald Samuel's second wife Deborah testified that the defendant really didn't care about his children. He simply didn't like paying child support to a woman he considered a gold-digger. The defendant's second wife described him as a man with a bad temper who threw a fit whenever he didn't get what he wanted.

     The Samuels defense centered around the idea that Roger Runyon and his three helpers were dregs of society without any credibility. The defense attorney portrayed his client as a victim of a wealthy and influential family's revenge for a crime that he did not commit. Against the advice of his attorney Mr. Samuels took the stand and testified on his own behalf. Coming off as arrogant and hostile, he did not make a sympathetic witness. On October 31, 2006 the jury found the defendant guilty on all counts. The next day the judge sentenced Samuels to life in prison plus 120 years.

     Ronald Samuels and his drug-addled murder-for-hire team were stupid and sociopathic. The prosecutor, to convict Ronald Samuels gave Roger Runyon, Hugh Estes, Eddie Stafford and Geoffrey Pollock no prison time. In the world of murder-for-hire prosecutions this is what passes for prosecutorial success and justice.

The Danford Grant Massage Parlor Rape Case

     In 2011, 47-year-old Danford Grant and his wife Jennifer lived in the Seattle suburb of Auburn, Washington with their 5-year-old son, 8-year-old daughter and a 16-year-old boy from Mr. Grant's former marriage. A graduate of the University of Washington School of Law, Mr. Grant was a litigation partner at Bailey Grant and Onsanger, a prestigious Seattle law firm. Attorney Grant had handled appeals before the Washington State Supreme Court and the federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Years earlier he had been a King County prosecutor.

     Grant's 38-year-old wife Jennifer, an attorney herself, worked in the Seattle City Attorney's Office as a supervisor. She had worked in that office since the mid-1990s. To the casual observer these successful attorneys living in the big upscale house with their beautiful children represented the American dream come true.

     As is often the case superficial appearances can be misleading. It seemed that Danford Grant had a problem controlling his sexual urges around women. Because of his unwanted sexual advances female paralegal employees at the law firm nicknamed him "Dirty Dan." And this wasn't the worst of it.

     Early in 2011, using the last name Hunter, Danford Grant received a massage from a 45-year-old Asian masseuse in Bellevue, Washington. After the massage Mr. Grant grabbed the woman and told her to remove her pants. When she refused and broke down in tears he left the parlor.

      Mr. Grant purchased a massage in June 2011 at the Carnation Chinese Massage Clinic in Greenwood, Washington. He grabbed the masseuse and had a condom in his hand when a noise from the hallway outside the room ended the assault. The victim of the attempted rape quit her job at the Greenwood parlor and opened a massage operation out of her home in Shoreline, Washington.

     On August 19, 2012 Mr. Grant had an appointment under the name Pete with the Asian masseuse he had tried to rape in Greenwood. When she cracked her front door in response to his knock she immediately recognized him as the man who had tried to assault her at her previous place of employment. Before the masseuse could close the door he pushed his way into her house and raped her.

     On August 28, 2012 the attorney returned to the massage clinic in Bellevue where he raped the 45-year-old masseuse at knife point. After the assault the victim realized this was the Mr. Hunter who had tried to rape her in early 2011.

     Not long after the Bellevue attack Danford Grant raped a massage clinic cashier in Seattle. He attacked the woman in his Honda Pilot after identifying himself as a police officer.

     Danford Grant, at 9:30 on the night of Monday, September 24, 2012 returned to the massage clinic in Greenwood where, after the message, he pulled out a pocket knife and demanded sex with the Asian masseuse. She said she'd go along if he put away the knife then informed him that she had HIV. To that he replied, "Me too." He then slipped on a condom and raped the victim.

     After the September 24 sexual assault employees of the massage parlor called the police. Later that night Danford Grant returned to the clinic. When employees tried to detain him he fled on foot. Just after midnight on September 25, 2012 police officers arrested Grant and booked him into the King County Jail.

     King County prosecutor Valiant L. Richey, on September 28, 2012, formally charged the prominent Seattle attorney with four counts of first-degree rape and several lesser offenses. The judge set Grant's bail at $3 million.

     In October 2012 Danford Grant posted his reduced bail and was confined to house arrest. Four weeks after the Greenwood massage clinic rape detectives located the suspect's missing Honda Pilot. They found it parked in the garage of Jennifer Grant's aunt. (He had raped the massage clinic cashier in Seattle in this SUV.)

     The day after her husband's arrest Jennifer Grant and her aunt moved Danford's SUV from where it had been parked near the massage parlor in Greenwood to the aunt's house in Auburn. Jennifer insisted that she moved the vehicle at the direction of her husband's attorney, David Allen. She denied intentionally hiding potential evidence against her husband from the police.

     Inside the rape suspect's SUV searchers found a realistic looking pellet gun, a cell phone, an iPad, a laptop computer, a black stocking cap and a bottle of Cialis.

     In November 2012 Jennifer Grant filed a petition for legal separation from her husband. The couple remained married but would divide their assets and debts. Danford Grant, under the terms of the separation would be liable for child support. After six months the couple could ask the family court judge to convert the separation into a divorce.

     On March 6, 2013 The Seattle Times reported that investigators recovered the September 24, 2012 rape victim's DNA from Danford Grant's underwear. One of the suspect's attorneys, Richard Hasen, told the reporter that "Much of the DNA evidence actually favors the defense." The defense attorney acknowledged that his client had been a regular customer at several Asian massage parlors where he had been a problem client. "But that doesn't mean he was raping everyone there," said Hasen.

     On June 2013 Jennifer Grant resigned from her position in the Seattle City Attorney's Office. The Danford Grant rape trial was scheduled for the spring of 2014. If convicted as charged the once prominent attorney could be sent to prison for up to 45 years.

     On May 7, 2014 Danford Grant pleaded guilty to five counts of third-degree rape and one count of first-degree burglary. On May 19, 2914 the King County Superior Court Judge sentenced him to 25 years in prison. The day after the sentencing officers transported Grant to the Washington Corrections Center in Shelton where they placed him in the "intensive management unit," an area segregated from the general prison population. Danford Grant, for his own protection, would spend 23 hours a day in a one-man cell.

Thomas J. Byrnes: The Father of the Third Degree

     The history of American criminal investigation does not begin with thinking detectives inspired by the fictitious Sherlock Holmes, but with a police detective who achieved fame and success by acquiring confessions through rubber hose brutality referred to as the "third degree." Although Thomas J. Byrnes is not as familiar today as the nineteenth century private investigator, Allan Pinkerton, it was Byrnes who set the stage for decades of institutionalized police brutality in the United States. It was Byrnes who practiced interrogation techniques that decades later produced the U. S. Supreme Court's Miranda decision. (Miranda v. Arizona, 1966)

     A Civil War veteran living in New York City, Thomas Byrnes joined the police department in 1863. Following a brief stint as a patrolman, the smart and ambitious young man got promoted into the newly formed detective bureau where he quickly made a name for himself. In 1880, two years after grabbing headlines for solving a $3 million Manhattan bank burglary, Byrnes, now a captain, took charge of the detective bureau made up of two sergeants and fourteen investigators. With thirty thousand professional thieves and 2,000 gambling dens, New York, one-third the size of London, had three times the crime. Businessmen in the Wall Street district overrun by sneak-thieves, forgers, pickpockets and burglars, turned to Byrnes for help. The police captain responded by putting out the word, through a network of paid informants and other law enforcement contacts, that any thief caught south of his infamous Dead Line would be sent to Blackwell's Island for a severe beating; a threat Byrnes carried out with precision and joy until the thieves, having received the message, stayed out of the financial district. The tycoons of Wall Street showed their gratitude by making Captain Byrnes one of the wealthiest police detectives in history. 

     Byrnes, as much a businessman as police detective, found other sources of income. During his tenure as Captain of Detectives he followed the standard policing practice of ignoring, for a price, the city's gambling establishments, brothels and opium dens. One the New York's most notorious madams paid $30,000 a year in police bribes.

     As an investigator Thomas Byrnes, in addition to employing a stable of paid, confidential informants, would let lesser criminals off the hook in return for evidence against the bigger fish. He taught his detectives how to identify criminals, particularly safe-crackers and other signature offenders, through their individualistic crime scene techniques--their so-called methods-of-operation or M.O. The use of informants, criminal intelligence and M.O. were tactics pioneered by Allan Pinkerton, the only investigator in the country more famous than Captain Byrnes.

     It is not surprising that Byrnes, as an ambitious, publicity-seeking detective working in an era before judicial restraints on police behavior, adapted as his principal investigative technique the coerced confession. From a brutally pragmatic point of view the beauty of the third degree was that it was not necessary in the acquisition of a confession to be interrogating the guilty party. By being the first to publicize the fact he would do whatever it took to get a confession, Byrnes established police brutality as a standard operating procedure, making himself the unofficial father of the third degree. For the next fifty some years, until the U. S. Supreme Court in1936 specifically excluded confessions extracted from physically abused prisoners, the third degree became the staple of criminal investigation in America. While Brown v. Mississippi didn't end police brutality, it marked the start of a new era in criminal investigation. However, Byrnes' ghost would inhabit, in varying degrees, interrogation rooms across the country throughout the Twentieth Century.

     Although he worked in the era before the advent of crime statistics--annual crime rates, case clearance percentages and such--Byrnes used statistics, figures no less reliable that their modern counterparts, as indices of success. At one point in his career he claimed credit for 3,300 arrests leading to an accumulated ten thousand year prison sentence. There was no telling what percentage of the men he put behind bars were innocent of the crimes charged. Aware that the investigative reputation of Scotland Yard exceeded that of his own department, Byrnes, in the wake of the 1888 serial killings of five prostitutes in East London, challenged Jack-the-Ripper to ply his trade in New York. When a gutted female corpse washed up on the New York side of the Hudson River shortly after Byrnes' bravado, there was serious concern that the ripper had taken up his challenge. As it turned out that murderer was not Jack-the-Ripper.

     Thomas Byrnes reached the peak of his fame in 1886 with the publication of a book, under his name, called Professional Criminals of America. The massive work contained the mug shots and detailed criminal histories of four-hundred of the city's most active house burglars, safe-crackers, pickpockets, check forgers and con artists. Reprinted for the first time in 1969, it is considered a classic work in the history of property crime in America.

     In 1892, a crusading Presbyterian minister in New York City named Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst launched a religious crusade to clean up vice in the city and to expose the police corruption that allowed it to exist. The crusade led to political hearings headed by a New York state senator named Lexow. In 1894, Byrnes, now a police superintendent, was called before the Lexow Committee to explain how he, a public servant, had become so wealthy. As a result of the highly publicized hearings the mayor resigned and a handful of patrolmen were indicted on charges of bribery. Byrnes, and several other police bigwigs were simply forced to resign.

     After leaving the force in 1895 the 54-year-old father of the third degree took a high paying job as general manager of an insurance company. The Lexow politicians, having enjoyed the limelight, left town, and the moment they did the corruption and vice returned.

     In America the ward and watch system of policing evolved into a better organized more efficient system of bribe giving and receiving. For the next sixty to seventy years American law enforcement would be plagued by corruption and brutality. In the late 1800s, D. J. Cook, the superintendent of the Rocky Mountain Detective Association who had been a sheriff and a deputy U.S. marshal, issued words of wisdom applicable to his time and a generation of future cops: "Never hit a prisoner over the head with your pistol because you may afterwards want to use your weapon and find it disabled."

     In 1910, the week before he died at age 69, Thomas Byrnes transferred to his wife a Fifth Avenue building worth a half-million dollars. Two years later the lawyer-writer Arthur Train, in his best-selling book, Courts and Criminals, described the status of criminal investigation some seventy years following the formation of the New York City Police Department: "The detective business swarms with men of doubtful honesty and morals who are accustomed to exaggeration if not to perjury, and who have neither the inclination nor the ability to do competent work."

Chaos, Violence, and Corruption in the Mississippi Prison System

      In 2019, conditions in Mississippi state prisons were among the worst in the country and had been that way for several years. Due to massive budget cuts and low pay and poor working conditions for correctional officers, the state's prisons were significantly understaffed. With 1,300 positions unfilled, there were empty guard towers. Sixty-five percent of guard personnel were women. Because security officers stared at $26,000 a year, a lot of men don't want the job.

     Many prison guards supplemented their incomes by smuggling drugs and other contraband into the prisons. Moreover, many of the security officers were abusive.

     In May 2019, cell phones smuggled into several of the state's prisons documented the horrific living conditions with photographs posted on social media. These images prompted a state inspection of the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman that revealed cells without lights, pillows or even mattresses. The photographs also showed rats and open sewage.

     According to inmates at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, the prison was run by gangs such as the Vice Lords and the Black Gangster Disciples. The gangs controlled everything including where prisoners slept, where they ate and how much food they received. Some inmates were actually starving to death.

     While politicians talked about the problems in their state's correctional system and blamed each other for it, all hell broke loose in three of Mississippi's correction facilities. Between December 29, 2019 and January 3, 2020 five inmates were killed in gang violence and riots.

     On January 4, 2020, amid the disturbances, two inmates escaped from the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, the site of two of the five inmate deaths. David May, 42 and Dillon Williams, 27 were discovered missing during an early morning emergency count. May was serving a life sentence for two aggravated assault convictions and Williams a 40 year sentence for aggravated assault committed during a residential burglary.

     On January 5, 2020 U.S. Marshals took escapee David May into custody. Shortly thereafter police officers captured Dillon Williams.

     Every prison in the state was in lockdown mode which meant inmates could not leave their cells. 

     In April 2022, following an extensive investigation, the U.S. Justice Department of Justice concluded that conditions at the Parchman prison had not improved. Among other problems, inmates were not receiving adequate health care, and were victims of numerous civil rights violations. 

Officer James Peters: Scottsdale's Dirty Harry

     During the period November 2002 through February 2012, Scottsdale, Arizona police officer James Peters shot at seven people, killing six of them. From this, one might conclude that Scottsdale, the Phoenix area suburb of 220,000, was the site of daily shootouts between the police and a large population of violent criminals. But this wasn't the case. In 2011 the Scottsdale police only shot one person and it wasn't fatal. By comparison the police in Phoenix that year shot 16, killing 9.

     How could one member of a police department made up of 435 sworn officers shoot so many people in a relatively low crime city? After say, the third shooting incident, why wasn't this man psychologically evaluated and at the very least put behind a desk? Moreover, didn't the officer himself ask himself why he was the only guy on the force doing all of the shooting?

     On November 3, 2002 roughly two years after joining the police department, Peters, as a member of the SWAT team, responded to a domestic violence call at the home of a man named Albert Redford. Following a 4-hour standoff James Peters and two other SWAT officers fired seven shots at the suspect hitting him three times. Mr. Redford died a few hours later in the emergency room. As it turned out none of the fatal bullets had been fired from Peter's rifle. An investigation by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office cleared all three officers of wrongdoing

     Officer Peters, on March 25, 2003, responded to a call regarding shotgun blasts coming from the home of a distraught, disbarred attorney named Brent Bradshaw. Three hours later Peters and his follow officers encountered the 47-year-old suspect wandering along the Arizona Canal carrying a shotgun. When Mr. Bradshaw refused to drop his weapon officer Peters killed him with a shot to the head. This shooting was declared justified.

     On October 10, 2005 Officer Peters shot and killed Mark Wesley Smith. High on methamphetamine, Smith was smashing car windows with a pipe outside an auto-body shop.  In justifying his use of deadly force in this case, Peters said the subject had threatened a fellow officer with the pipe.

     Brian Daniel Brown, 28, took a Safeway grocery store employee hostage on April 23, 2006 after he had hijacked a Krispy Kreme delivery truck. After killing the hostage taker the department awarded Officer Peters a medal of valor.

     Peters and Scottsdale officer Tom Myers were in Mesa, Arizona on August 30, 2006 hoping to question Kevin Hutchings, a suspect in an assault committed earlier that evening in Scottsdale. After Mr. Hutchings fired a shot from inside his house the officers had the power company cut off electricity to the dwelling. When the armed man came out of his house to investigate the power outage Peters shot him to death. The city, in this case ended up paying the Hutchings family an out of court settlement of $75,000. Even so, the department declared this shooting justified and Officer Peters kept his assignment as a street cop even though he had killed two people in one year.

     On February 17, 2010 Officer Peters and Detective Scott Gailbraith confronted 46-year-old Jimmy Hammack, a suspect in five Phoenix and Scottsdale bank robberies. When Hammack drove his pickup truck toward the detective Peters shot him. A few days later Hammack died in the hospital. This shooting, on the grounds the subject was using his vehicle as a deadly weapon, went into the books as justified.

The Killing of John Loxas

     John Loxas, 50, lived alone in a trash-littered house near Vista De Camino Park in Scottsdale. In 2010 police arrested him for displaying a handgun in public. On February 14, 2012 Peters and five other officers responded to a 911 call concerning Loxas who reportedly was threatening his neighbors with a firearm. To complicate matters Mr. Loxas, who regularly babysat his 9-month-old grandson, had the child in his arms while intimidating the neighbors.

     When James Peters and the other officers arrived at the scene Mr. Loxas and the baby were back inside the house. When ordered to exit the dwelling, Loxas, still holding the child, appeared in the doorway. As the subject turned to reenter the house and lowered the baby exposing his upper torso and head, Peters, thinking he saw a black object in Loxas' hand, shot him in the head from 18 feet. The subject, killed instantly by the bullet from Peter's rifle, collapsed to the ground still holding the baby. Fortunately, and perhaps miraculously, the infant was not injured.

     As it turned out, at the time Officer Peters killed Mr. Loxas the subject was not armed or within reach of a weapon. Police did find, in the dead man's living room, a loaded handgun hidden between the arm and cushion of a stuffed chair. Farther into the dwelling searchers discovered a shotgun, several "Airsoft"-type rifles and pistols and a "functional improvised explosive device."

     In explaining why he had shot Mr. Loxas, Officer Peters said he had been concerned for the safety of the baby. Peters was placed on paid administrative leave pending yet another police involved shooting investigation by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office. Critics of the shooting, including some of Loxas' neighbors, protested the incident outside the police department.

     Except for the Safeway hostage case in April 2006, most police officers, faced with the choices presented to Officer Peters, probably would not have exercised deadly force. This didn't mean that Peters had committed criminal acts, or that his shootings were even  administratively unjustified. It just meant that most officers wouldn't have been so quick to pull the trigger. If it were otherwise, every year thousands rather than hundreds of people would die at the hands of the police.

     Because Mr. Loxas had been armed shortly before the police arrived at the scene, and Officer Peters thought the subject was holding a handgun when he shot him, this case was ruled a justifiable homicide. Whether or not, under the circumstances, the killing of Mr. Loxas was the right thing to do was another question altogether.
 
     On June 22, 2012 the Scottsdale police board for the Public Safety Retirement System approved Officer Peters' application for early retirement based on some unnamed disability. He received a pension of $4,500 a month for life. Not bad for 12 years of work. No wonder the country was going broke and people in the private sector resented the government.

     In September 2012 the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, on behalf of John Loxas' relatives, sued the city of Scottsdale. The Scottsdale City Council, in June 2013 approved a court settlement of $4.25 million. The Loxas family had originally sought $7.5 million in damages. The city of Scottsdale in this case was self-insured up to $2 million, a sum that would have to be paid by municipal taxpayers. Officer James Peters had been one costly cop. 

The Orlando Hall/Bruce Carnell Murder Case

      In September 1994, 23-year-old Orlando Hall ran a marijuana trafficking operation in Arkansas. That month he and 21-year-old Bruce Carnell drove to Arlington, Texas to confront a man Hall believed had stolen $5,000 from him. At the man's apartment Hall and Carnell encountered his16-year-old sister who was home alone. When Lisa Rene refused Hall and his accomplice entry they broke into the apartment and kidnapped her. In the car on their way back to Arkansas, Orlando Hall and Bruce Carnell raped Lisa Rene. At a hotel in Pine Bluff, Arkansas the men, over at two day period, continued to rape and torture her.

     From the hotel in Pine Bluff, Orlando Hall and Bruce Carnell drove the victim to a nearby park where they dug a grave, hit their victim with a shovel then buried her alive.

     Because the Lisa Rene kidnapping involved the crossing of the Texas/Arkansa state lines the case was handled as a federal kidnapping offense, a death penalty crime when the kidnapped person is harmed or killed.

     Following the kidnapping convictions of Hall and Carnell in1996 federal judges sentenced the men to death.

     In 2019, because Bruce Carnell had an I.Q. of 69, a federal judge reduced his sentence to life.

     On November 19, 2020, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene, Orlando Hall was executed by lethal injection at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Dr. Pamela Fish: The Disgraced DNA Expert

     In 1990 prosecutors in Cook County, Illinois charged John Willis with several counts of rape in connection with a series of sexual assaults committed in the late 1980s on Chicago's South Side. Willis, a petty thief and illiterate, denied raping the women even though several of the victims had picked him out of a lineup.

     The only physical evidence in the Willis case was a scrap of toilet paper containing traces of semen. Police took this evidence to the Chicago Police Lab where it was examined by Dr. Pamela Fish. Dr. Fish came to the lab in 1979 with bachelor's and master's degrees in biology from Loyola University. Ten years later, after taking courses at night, she earned a Ph.D in biology from Illinois Institute of Technology. According to her handwritten lab notes, Dr. Fish determined that the secretor of the semen had type A blood. John Willis had type B blood thereby excluding him as the rapist. Dr. Fish reported, however, in contradiction to her lab notes, that the semen on the tissue possessed type B blood. She testified to this at Willis' 1991 trial. The jury, in addition to believing in Dr. Fish, believed eleven prosecution rape victim/eyewitnesses that identified the defendant as the rapist. The jury found Willis guilty and the judge sentenced him to 100 years in prison.

     Eight years later a south Chicago rapist confessed to these sexual assaults after being linked to the crimes through DNA analysis. An appeals judge set aside the Willis conviction and he was set free. On the day of his release Dr. Fish, now the head of  biochemistry testing at the state crime lab, spoke at a DNA seminar for judges. (The Chicago Police Lab had been incorporated into the Illinois crime lab system in 1996.)

     The Willis reversal led to a 2001 review of Dr. Fish's cases by the renowned DNA expert from Berkeley, California, Dr. Edward Blake. Dr. Blake studied nine cases in which Dr. Fish had testified that her blood-typing tests had produced inconclusive results. Dr. Blake found that Dr. Fish's test results had actually exonerated the defendants involved and that she gave false testimony at those trials. Dr. Blake characterized Dr. Fish's work as "scientific fraud."

     In the summer of 2001 a state representative at a legislative hearing on prosecutorial misconduct suggested to the head of the Illinois State Police that Dr. Fish be transferred out of the crime lab into a position where she could do less harm. (In the public sector this is considered harsh employee discipline.) The police administrator ignored the recommendation.

     In 2002 three more Illinois men in prison for rape since 1987 were exonerated by DNA. Dr. Fish had testified for the prosecution in all three cases. Two years later, after the state paid John Willis a large settlement for his wrongful prosecution and incarceration, the state refused to renew Dr. Fish's employment contract. Rather than firing Dr. Fish the state simply refused to rehire her. 

     In 2006 Marlon Pendleton, two years after his release from an Illinois prison where he'd been wrongfully incarcerated thirteen years on a rape conviction, sued the Chicago Police Department and Dr. Fish. The plaintiff accused Chicago detectives Jack Stewart and Steven Barnes, of manufacturing a false line-up identification against him. (These cops were notorious for this kind of  behavior.) He accused Dr. Fish of perjury in connection with her DNA testimony at the trial, testimony that convinced the jury he had raped the victim. The Illinois Court of Claims awarded Pendleton $170,000 for his wrongful conviction. (In 2011 Mr. Pendleton was convicted of murdering his girlfriend in 2008. The judge sentenced him to 17 years in prison.)

     In 2017 Dr. Fish was employed as a biology teacher at Notre Dame College Prep in Niles, Illinois.