Prison Health Care

     There is something profoundly wrong with a government that provides convicted felons with better health care than it does to many sick people who haven't committed crimes against their fellow citizens. Perhaps this is what happens when a criminal justice system is organized around the idea of protecting the defendant. In Massachusetts, for example, a judge ordered the state to finance the sex change of a man who had murdered his wife. If Robert Kosilek hadn't strangled his wife to death taxpayers would not have been forced to pay the cost of changing him into a female.

     In 2005 a judge in California, after determining that prison health in that state was unconstitutionally substandard, granted a so-called "receiver" the power to hire state medical personnel and set their pay levels. In 2004 the prison health care bill cost California taxpayers $1.1 billion. In 2012 the cost of providing California inmates quality health care cost the state $2.3 billion. Between 2005 and 2012 the number of California prison system health care workers--doctors, nurses, dentists, physical therapists and psychiatrists--jumped from 5,100 to 12,000. The system also employed 1,400 health care paper shufflers.

     In 2011, 44 of California's highest paid employees worked in the prison health care system. A psychiatrist who worked at the Salinas Valley State Prison, in 2012, made $803,270. A prison doctor in northern California in 2011 had a base salary of $239,572 plus $169,548 in overtime for working nights and weekends. A registered nurse at the High Desert State Prison pulled down $246,000 that year. In bankrupt California, when it came to health care, nothing was too good for the state's 124,700 state prison inmates. (These prison health care expenses didn't include the tens of thousands of county jail prisoners throughout the state.)

      Beginning in 2006, heroin addicted inmates at Albuquerque's Metropolitan Detention Center, New Mexico's largest jail were treated with methadone to ease the trauma of withdrawal. Warden Ramon Rustin, in November 2012, announced that the $10,000-a-month program was too expensive, that county taxpayers couldn't afford this in-jail drug treatment measure. Rustin, the former warden of the Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with 32 years experience in the corrections field, said he didn't believe the costly program helped drug-addicted inmates stay out of jail once they were released.

     A month after Warden Rustin's effort to save the county money, the  county commissioners ordered him to extend the program two months during which time a study of its effectiveness would be conducted. (This is typical government. In the private sector studies of cost-effectiveness are ongoing, and if a measure wastes money it's immediately cut.) The county also received $200,000 a year from the state to help fund its methadone program.

     When a person commits a crime that is serious enough to land him in prison, any health care he or she receives while in custody should be treated as a privilege rather than a constitutional right. The rule should be this: If you want good health care don't murder anyone, rob a store, break into a home, beat your wife and children or commit a sexual assault. If good health is your priority, exercise, quit smoking, eat right and stay off drugs and booze. Also, get a job. If you want to switch genders while in prison that's fine, but you don't deserve to have law obeying taxpayers foot the bill.

     In the United States, when it comes to health care, crime pays and at the expense of law obeying tax payers. 

Serial Killer And Rapist Joseph Naso

     On April 11, 2011, police officers in Reno, Nevada arrested 77-year-old Joseph Naso on four first-degree murder charges filed against him in Marin County California. The former commercial photographer stood accused of raping and murdering four Bay Area prostitutes between 1977 and 1994. The victims, Roxene Roggasch, Carmen Colen, Pamela Parsons and Tracy Tafoya ranged in age from 18 to 38, and each had first and last names that began with the same letter.

     Forensic scientists connected Naso to two of the victims through DNA. A search of his house produced several nude photographs of women who appeared unconscious or dead. Police officers also found a so-called "rape diary" containing narrative accounts of women and girls who had been picked up and raped. The murder suspect's house was also littered with female mannequin parts and women's lingerie. In Naso's safety deposit box searchers found a passport bearing the name Sara Dylan. (A skull, found years earlier in Nevada matched Sara Dylan's mother's DNA.) Naso's safety deposit box also contained $152,400 in cash.

     The Joseph Naso serial murder trial got underway in San Rafael California in June 2013. The prosecutor in her opening statement to the jury said the state would prove that Naso had drugged, raped and photographed the four victims. He strangled them to death then dumped their nude bodies in remote areas in northern California.

     Naso, who represented himself at the trial, told the jury that he was not the monster the prosecution was trying to make him out to be. The defendant said the nude women he had photographed had been willing models. "I don't kill people, and there's no evidence of that in my writings and photography."

     Following two months of evidence that featured the defendant's rape diary, the nude photographs and the DNA evidence linking Naso to two of the murder victims, the case went to the jury. During the trial, Naso, as his own attorney, made a courtroom fool of himself and tried the patience of the judge. On August 19, 2013, after deliberating seven hours over a period of two days, the jury found the defendant guilty of the four counts of first-degree murder. The verdict also included a finding of special circumstances that made Naso eligible for the death penalty.

     While the jury recommended the death penalty in the Naso case there was no chance the state would put him to death. In 2006 a federal judge had put California's executions on hold until the state modified its execution protocols. That has not been done. Naso would join 725 inmates on California's death row. While some politicians and judges threw roadblocks in the path of the state's death penalty procedure, juries in California continued to impose the death sentence.

     Homicide investigators believe Naso raped and murdered three 11-year-old girls between 1971 and 1973 in Rochester, New York. He was living in the city when these murders occurred. These victims also had first and last names that began with the same letter. One of the girls, Carmen Colon, had the same name of one of the women Naso killed in California. Detectives also believed that Joseph Naso murdered at least ten other women. Following the verdict Mr. Naso insisted that he had not raped or killed anyone.

Bite Mark Identification in the Ted Bundy Serial Murder Case

     The identification of bruises or abrasions usually in the shape of two semi-circles or brackets as a human bite mark made by a particular set of teeth is a function of forensic dentistry referred to as bite mark identification. This form of impression identification, also called forensic odontology, is based on the assumption that no two people in the world have front teeth that are identical in thickness, shape, relationship to each other and patterns of wear.

     The process of comparing a bite mark to a known set of teeth is not unlike the identification of latent fingerprint, footwear and tire track impressions. Bite mark wounds are found on victims of murder, rape, and child molestation. This type of crime scene evidence is preserved by life-size photography, tooth mark tracings onto transparent sheets and dental casts of the impressions themselves. A suspect might be asked to bite down on a pliable surface for an impression sample, have a cast made of his teeth, or both. Usually, connecting a suspect to a victim through expert bite mark testimony will be enough evidence, by itself, to sustain a criminal conviction. For this reason bite mark evidence must be 100 percent reliable. Unfortunately it is not even close to that.

     The field of bite mark identification exploded in the 1980s. Hundreds if not thousands of defendants went to prison on the strength of bite mark testimony. Although bite mark identification has been a recognized branch of forensic science since 1970, it was the 1979 trial of serial killer Ted Bundy in south Florida that put this form of identification on the map the way the O. J. Simpson murder case popularized DNA profiling in the mid-1990s.

The Ted Bundy Serial Murder Case

     After killing 30 to 100 college-aged women in the states of Washington, Utah and Colorado, Theodore Bundy entered a Florida State University sorority house in Tallahassee where he sexually assaulted and murdered two Chi Omega sorority members. The police arrested him a short time later in a stolen car, then put him on trial for murder.

     The prosecutor had plenty of nonphysical evidence against Mr. Bundy, but it was circumstantial and didn't place him in the Chi Omega murder room. The killer had left a hair follicle on a crime scene stocking mask that looked similar under a microscope to samples from Bundy's head. But hair identification wasn't enough by itself to carry a conviction. The rapist had left traces of semen, but these murders were committed more than ten years before the dawn of DNA analysis.

     If the Dade County prosecutor had any chance of convicting Ted Bundy he would have to connect him to the murder scene through a bite mark wound on one of the victims. To do that the prosecutor called on Dr. Richard Souviron, the chief odontologist for the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner's Office. He also enlisted the services of Dr. Lowell J. Levine, a forensic dentistry consultant to the New York City Medical Examiner's Office. To round out his battery of experts the prosecutor brought in Dr. Norman Sperber, an odontologist with the San Diego and Imperial County Medical Examiner's Office in California. These three forensic experts comprised the nation's most renowned bite mark analysts.

     Dr. Souviron took the stand and testified that the sorority house attacker left a postmortem double-bite mark on one victim's left buttock. He had bitten once, turned sideways, them clamped down again. The killer's top bicuspids and his lateral and central incisors had remained in the same position, but he had made two wound brackets with his lower front teeth. When he photographed Ted Bundy's teeth Dr. Souviron noticed they were of uneven length, chipped and oddly aligned, factors that helped individualize the defendant's bite mark pattern. To illustrate for the jury that Mr. Bundy's teeth matched the murder scene wound, Dr. Sourviron laid a photograph of the defendant's teeth, depicted on a transparent sheet, over an enlarged photograph of the bite mark. The bottom edges of Bundy's teeth lined up perfectly with the crime scene wound.

     Dr. Norman Sperber and Dr. Lowell Levine took the strand and lent their expertise to the identification. Bundy, representing himself, brought in his own dental expert, an odontologist from Maryland who testified that "the dental pattern [bite mark] is one I'd expect to find in 20 percent of the population of male Caucasians." The defense expert didn't say the bite mark on the victim couldn't have been Bundy's, he just wasn't willing to identify the wound as coming from the defendant to the exclusion of all others.

     The jury found Ted Bundy guilty as charged. The judge sentenced him to death, and ten years later Ted Bundy was executed. Before his execution he confessed to the sorority house killings and dozens of other lust murders.

     The Ted Bundy case established the credibility and usefulness of forensic bite mark analysis, and for a while placed it on the same level, in terms of reliability, as latent fingerprint identification. But following a series of high-profile misidentifications in bite mark cases, this form of impression analysis was no longer considered as reliable as latent fingerprint identification. Today, in most states, odontologists are not allowed, by law, to state unequivocally that a defendant is the source of a bite mark. The most these experts can say is that the questioned bite mark is consistent with having been made by the defendant's teeth. 

The Thomas Gilbert Jr. Golden Boy Murder Case

     Thomas Gilbert Jr. had all of the advantages in life but one--mental health. His father, a managing partner in a successful New York City hedge fund firm, sent him to an expensive prep school in Massachusetts and later to his alma mater, Princeton University. Upon his son's graduation from Princeton Thomas Gilbert Sr. paid for the young man's high-end apartment in Manhattan's fancy Chelsea neighborhood. The ivy league golden boy also received a family allowance of $1,000 a week.

     Early in 2014, frustrated with his son's inability to stand on his feet financially, Thomas Gilbert Sr. cut the 28-year-old's weekly allowance to $800. By the end of that year, young Mr. Gilbert's allowance had dwindled to $300.

     On January 4, 2015 Thomas Gilbert Jr. showed up at his parents' posh Turtle Bay Manhattan apartment. He informed his mother Shelley that he needed to talk to his father about business. To get his mother out of the apartment he sent her on an errand to fetch him a sandwich and a Coke.

     Upon Shelley Gilbert's return to the apartment with the sandwich and soft drink she found her husband on the floor with a fatal gunshot would to his head. The handgun used to kill the victim was resting on his chest.

     Homicide detectives with the New York City Police Department acquired surveillance camera footage showing Thomas Gilbert Jr., about fifteen minutes after his mother found her dead husband, leaving the apartment building wearing a hoodie and carrying a gym bag.

      Not long after the fatal shooting in the Gilbert apartment detectives arrested Thomas Gilbert Jr. for the murder of his father.

     The Thomas Gilbert murder trial got underway in Manhattan in late May 2019. The issue wasn't whether the son had shot his father to death but whether or not, at the time of the shooting, the defendant was legally insane. (Legal insanity is not the same as clinical insanity. To be legally insane the defendant must be so mentally impaired he or she was unable to distinguish right from wrong. This is such a high bar few defendants claiming the defense succeed in proving it.)

     In an effort to establish the insanity case, defense attorneys put on the stand the therapist who had been treating the defendant. According to this witness the defendant suffered from "paranoid thoughts" and had been prescribed anti-psychotic medication.

     The prosecution did not deny that the defendant had a mental problem. The prosecutor argued, however, that notwithstanding the defendant's mental condition he was sane enough to know that shooting his father to death was an act of criminal homicide.

     In late June 2019 the Manhattan jury found Thomas Gilbert Jr. guilty of second-degree murder, a conviction that could put the 34-year-old in prison for life.

     Cases like this are difficult because it is impossible to know the degree to which the defendant's mental illness played in the murder. Was he driven by his sickness or was he simply a spoiled jerk?

     In August 2019 the judge sentenced Thomas Gilbert Jr. to 30 years to life in prison.

The Keith Little Murder Case

     At ten-thirty in the morning of New Year's Day 2011, police were called to the Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland where they discovered maintenance supervisor Roosevelt Brockington's body in his basement boiler room office. Someone had stabbed Mr. Brockington 70 times in the face, neck, chest and back. The 40-year-old victim had the 12-inch knife still stuck in his neck. This looked like a crime of passion committed by someone who hated the victim.

     Five days after the murder a Suburban Hospital worker reported seeing Keith Little, a maintenance employee, washing a pair of black gloves and a ski-mask in chemically treated water. The police recovered these items from the trash bin outside the boiler room and took Keith Little, already a suspect, into custody.

     On February 3, 2003, in an earlier case, Keith Little had allegedly killed his maintenance boss in Washington, D.C. This victim, Gordon Rollins, had been shot six times. The jury in the 2006 murder trial found Mr. Little not guilty. He walked out of court a free man.

     Investigators in the Bethesda murder case had reason to believe that Keith Little hated Mr. Brockington. In 2009, Little had threatened to "get him" after the maintenance supervisor changed his working schedule. As a result of that adjustment Mr. Little had to give up a second job at the federal court house in Greenbelt, Maryland. More recently the murder victim gave the 50-year-old suspect a negative performance evaluation that kept him from receiving an annual pay raise.

     DNA analysts at the Montgomery County Crime Laboratory determined there was not enough trace evidence on one of the black gloves to declare the presence of blood. A second analysis by a private firm, Bode Technology, found no evidence of blood either, but did find evidence of blood after applying a serology test that can detect more diluted traces. According to these results the glove contained DNA from the victim, Keith Little and an unidentified person.

     Charged with first-degree murder, Mr. Little went on trial on December 2, 2011 at the Montgomery Court House in Rockville, Maryland. His attorney, Assistant Public Defender Ronald Gottlieb, in his opening statement to the jury pointed out that the police found no traces of blood in the defendant's home, car, or work locker. As for the motive behind the murder, attorney Gottlieb asserted that several former maintenance employees could have been angry with the victim. At this point the prosecution had a stronger case than the defense.

     On December 6, 2011, Montgomery County Circuit Judge Marielsa Bernard ruled that the prosecution could not introduce the results of the DNA test linking defendant Little to the glove that supposedly contained traces of the victim's blood. The judge felt the disparity of lab results rendered this evidence unreliable.

      Judge Bernard also prohibited the prosecution from making any mention of Little's previous trial in which he was found not guilty of killing his maintenance boss in Washington, D.C. This information, according to the judge, was too prejudicial to the defendant's current case.

     The Montgomery County prosecutor, notwithstanding the procedural setbacks, went ahead with the case. On February 13, 2012 the jury found Keith Little guilty of first-degree murder. The judge sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole. 

Who Killed the Barajas Children and Murdered Jose Banda?

     On the night of December 7, 2012 the pickup truck carrying the Barajas family--David and Cindy and their four children--ran out of gas on a dark narrow country road near Alvin, Texas thirty miles southeast of Houston. Because they were 100 yards or so from their home, Mr. Barajas asked his boys, David who was 12 and 11-year-old Caleb, to push the truck the rest of the way. At eleven o'clock, when they were within 50 yards of their house, another vehicle plowed into the back of the pickup. The crash killed David Barajas instantly and seriously injured his brother who died later that night in the hospital. Mr. Barajas suffered minor injuries. His wife Cindy and their two daughters were not hurt in the accident.

     Deputies with the Brazoria County Sheriff's Office when they looked inside the vehicle that slammed into the Barajas pickup found 20-year-old Jose Banda. Having been shot once in the head, Mr. Banda was breathing but unresponsive. (I don't know if he had been shot from the passenger's or driver's side of the car.) The officers found him slumped over in the front passenger's seat. He died in the hospital a few hours later. Deputies searched both vehicles and the area surrounding the accident without finding a gun. There were indications that Mr. Banda had been drinking.

     While the county coroner ruled Jose Banda's death a homicide, the person who shot him was a mystery. If David Barajas or his wife had shot Banda for killing their two boys, where was the gun? Could someone besides Jose Banda been behind the wheel of the vehicle that crashed into the pickup? Could that person have shot Mr. Banda and fled the scene with the murder weapon before being spotted by members of the Barajas family? This would explain why the deputies did not find the murder weapon.

     In speaking to a reporter, Brazoria County sheriff's deputy Dominick Sanders said, "We are not sure if Banda was shot before or after the wreck." (If shot before the wreck, the murder might have caused the accident. If this is what happened, was the shooter inside the car or along the road?)

     Deputy Sander did not say if David Barajas and his wife had been subjected to gunshot residue tests to determine if they had recently discharged a firearm. Moreover, the sheriff's office did not indicate if Mr. Banda had been shot at close range, or if a shell-casing has been recovered from the scene. (If the area around Banda's entrance wound featured gunpowder staining, he was shot from a distance no farther than eighteen inches. The more powder staining, the closer the range.)

     A week after the fatal accident and criminal homicide the deceased boys' parents, in hiding following Facebook threats, had not been questioned by the police. According to the boys' uncle, Gabriel Barajas, his brother remembered the accident in a "blur."

    Tests revealed that Jose Banda had twice the legal limit of alcohol in his blood at the time of his death. Forensic gunshot residue tests showed that Mr. Barajas had not fired a gun that night.

     On February 10, 2013, notwithstanding a lack of evidence in the case, a Brazoria County grand jury indicted David Barajas, Jr. for murder of Jose Banda. If found guilty he faced up to life in prison. Upon his arrest Mr. Barajas maintained his innocence.

     On August 27, 2014, after a one-week trial, the jury found David Barajas not guilty. Without a murder weapon, an eyewitness or a confession, the prosecutor simply did not prove his case beyond a reasonable doubt. Moreover, the community supported and had sympathy for the defendant from the start.

The Johnson Family Mortuary: The Funeral Home Horror Show

      On July 15, 2014, James Labenz, the owner of the building in east Fort Worth, Texas that housed the Johnson Family Mortuary, went to the funeral home to evict the tenants. Dondre Johnson, 39, and his 35-year-old wife Rachel Hardy-Johnson owed the landlord $15,000 in back rent. The place looked vacant so Mr. Labenz entered the building. What he saw and smelled caused him to quickly exit the premises and call 911.

     In his report, the police officer who responded to the 911 call noted that he detected, from the funeral home's parking lot, the odor of decaying flesh. Inside the building he found the unrefrigerated remains of several corpses in various states of decomposition. The officer called the Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office.

     Police detectives accompanied by a medical examiner's office crime scene technician encountered a scene right out of a horror movie. But unlike its fictional counterpart, the funeral home tableau featured insects, maggots, leaking body fluids and the overpowering stench of death.

     That day, the medical examiner's office took possession of the remains of two stillborn children and five adults. The partially mummified corpse of an adult lay in a casket inhabited by swarms of flies and other bugs. In a small container the crime scene technician discovered a tiny skeleton. The funeral home's flooring was wet with draining bodily fluids.

     A Tarrant County prosecutor charged the mortuary owners with seven counts of abuse of a corpse. If convicted and sentenced on each count the couple faced up to seven years behind bars. On July 18, 2014, police officers arrested Rachel Hardy-Johnson at the couple's home in Arlington, Texas. The next day Dondre turned himself in at police headquarters in Fort Worth. After putting up their $10,500 bonds the suspects were released from custody.

     The day after he walked out of the Tarrant County Jail, Dondre Johnson said this to a reporter: "This is a funeral home, you can expect to find bodies." 

     Rachel Hardy-Johnson told reporters that she had been absent from the funeral home due to the birth of her child. Dondre, who wasn't good at keeping up with the paperwork associated with either burying or cremating bodies, had been in charge of that aspect of the business. She said that Dondre was all about the pomp and circumstance and show associated with the funeral service.

     Dondre Johnson's lack of administrative skills cost his landlord $8,000 in cleanup fees. Moreover, the macabre publicity associated with the building had significantly lowered the property's real estate value.

     Following the gruesome discovery of the results of Dondre Johnson's gross mismanagement and callous disregard for the postmortem dignity of the deceased in his care, the Texas Funeral Service Commission revoked the Johnson family funeral license. Angered by the revocation, the couple petitioned the state to have their license returned.

     Dondre and Rachel Hardy-Johnson, already in trouble with the law, were indicted on four counts of fraud by a federal grand jury in September 2014. The couple stood accused of obtaining food stamps, a housing subsidy, federal education funding and Medicare benefits without revealing their income and other personal assets. The alleged government fraud took place between April 2010 and July 2012. If convicted on each count the former funeral home owners faced up to 20 years in prison.

     Federal fraud investigators determined that Hardy-Johnson had in 2011 received government benefits while claiming to be an unemployed single mother living alone with her children. During that period she purchased a 2006 Hummer H2 for $26,000 and a 2008 Mercedes-Benz CL S500 for $41,700. The next year, while still representing herself as an unemployed single mother, she bought an expensive Land Rover.

     On January 20, 2015 a Tarrant County grand jury indicted Dondre Johnson and his wife for stealing up to $20,000 from families who had paid for and did not receive funeral services in 2014. If convicted they faced maximum sentences of 20 years in prison and thousands of dollars in fines.

     Rachel Hardy-Johnson, on January 27, 2015, pleaded guilty in federal court to one count of food stamp benefit fraud involving $6,000 in payments from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Stamp program and its successor, SNAP. She was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

     In February 2015, reporters with the CBS television affiliate in Fort Worth discovered that Dondre Johnson and his twin brother Derrick were conducting funerals in Sherman, Texas. Travis Mitchell, the owner of Serenity Chapel Funeral Services told the reporters that he handled the business aspects of the operation while Dondre and Derrick performed the funerals.

     On September 24, 2015 a jury in Fort Worth found Dondre Johnson guilty of two counts of felony theft. The judge sentenced Johnson to two years in prison and a $20,000 fine. He still faced possible prosecution on seven misdemeanor counts of abuse of corpse. 

     In September 2018 Dondre Johnson pleaded guilty in a Fort Worth courtroom to nine counts of abuse of corpse. The judge sentenced him to two years in prison.

The Orville Fleming Murder Case

     In 2012, 53-year-old Orville "Moe" Fleming and his wife Meagan separated after she accused him of cheating on her. That year the 20-year veteran and battalion chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (known as Cal Fire) began dating 24-year-old Sarah Jane Douglas. Douglas came to Fleming's attention through an Internet site that advertised her services as a paid escort. Shortly after they met she moved into his house in south Sacramento County. At this time Fleming worked as an instructor at the fire academy in Ione, California.

     By April 2014 Mr. Fleming's divorce from Meagan was about to be finalized but his relationship with Douglas had deteriorated into turmoil. Having grown weary of his obsessive, controlling behavior Sara Douglas wanted out of his life.

     On April 28, 2014, shortly before the finalization of their divorce, Orville Fleming reached out to his estranged wife with the following text message: "Can we put us and our family back together!?" She replied, "No!!! It's over, sorry. I gave you many chances. Please leave me in peace now. You already hurt me so bad. I'm over it. Never going back to a cheater. Never. But God bless you. Now leave me alone!!!" Fleming responded by texting: "Come and pick me up. We're supposed to grow old together." She did not respond to his plea.

     On Wednesday night, April 30, 2014, Sarah Douglas, her younger sister Stephanie and their mother spent time together at a local gambling casino. During the evening Sarah revealed that she planned to leave Mr. Fleming.

     Just before midnight, after their night out, Stephanie Douglas and her mother dropped Sarah off at the house she had been sharing with Mr. Fleming. Not long after that, Stephanie received a phone call from her sister. In the background she could hear an angry man's voice. Sarah screamed and the phone went dead.

     After the disturbing phone call Stephanie tried but failed to get back in touch with her sister. Sometime after midnight she went to the house to check on Sarah. She found her sister lying face down and dead with a blood-soaked bed sheet wrapped around her neck. Orville Fleming and his vehicle were not at the scene. Stephanie called 911.

     At two-thirty that morning, May 1, 2014, Orville Fleming sent the following text message to his soon-to-be ex-wife: "You should have come and picked me up."

     At the murder scene detectives encountered the stabbed-to-death victim as well as pools of blood and bloodstains scattered throughout the house. A few hours later a judge issued a warrant for Orville Fleming's arrest on suspicion of murder.

     At seven that evening police officers in nearby Elk Grove, California found the fugitive's abandoned white 2007 Chevrolet pickup truck with Cal Fire written on the doors. The vehicle had been sitting there all day.

     Because the firefighter had outdoor skills and a familiarity with the Yosemite Valley and other regions of the Sierra Nevada and Santa Cruz Mountains, officers figured he might be hard to find. Fleming also possessed keys to dozens of state buildings, lookout towers, and storage sheds stocked with food and water. He was also presumed to be armed with two handguns that were registered in his name.

     Fleming's superiors at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, a few days after Sarah Douglas' murder, terminated him from his $100,000-a-year job. (In 2013, in addition to his base salary, Fleming earned $30,000 in overtime pay.)

     On Friday, May 16, 2014, police officers arrested Orville Fleming as he boarded a bus in Elk Grove, California where he had been hiding all along. The following Monday, at his arraignment hearing, Fleming pleaded not guilty to the murder charge. Relatives of the victim were infuriated when the defendant winked at an acquaintance in the courtroom.

     A few weeks after the murder, Meagan Fleming, the murder suspect's ex-wife, told reporters that Orville Fleming and other firefighters had sex with prostitutes on firetrucks at the academy. Moreover, someone had made a sex tape of this activity. She claimed to have seen a tape of her ex-husband and other firefighters having sex with Sarah Douglas. Because of the seriousness of this allegation the Sacramento County Sheriff's Office asked the California Highway Patrol to investigate the claim.

     On Monday December 29, 2014, a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection spokesperson announced that sixteen firefighters, most of whom were instructors at the fire academy, had been placed on paid administrative leave. The spokesperson did not say why these firefighters had been given "administrative time off."

      Amid the fire department scandal, Orville Fleming remained incarcerated in the Sacramento County Jail awaiting his trial for the murder of Sarah Douglas.

     On July 15, 2015, after a jury in Sacramento found Orville Fleming guilty of second-degree murder, the Superior Court judge sentenced him to 16 years to life in prison. 

The Impulse Murder

     Murders cannot always be explained or understood. While the majority of criminal homicides are motivated either by greed, lust, power, fear, rage or mental illness, every once in awhile someone takes a life for no apparent reason. These cases are disturbing because there is a need to make sense out of such deviant, violent behavior.

     In 1958 Dr. Marvin Wolfgang (1924-1998) a criminology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, coined the term "victim precipitation" in his classic text, Profiles in Criminal Homicide. 

     According to Professor Wolfgang, in a high percentage of criminal homicides the victim contributed to his or her fate by being the first to begin "the interplay of criminal violence" such as drawing a weapon or striking the first blow. In terms of motive, these homicides are easy to understand.

     In his 1967 book The Subculture of Violence Dr. Wolfgang found that a high percent of criminal homicides are crimes of passion that are "unplanned, explosive and determined by sudden motivational bursts." These killers act so quickly on their impulses there is simply no time for reasoning or restraint. Homicide investigators are familiar with subjects who have killed people for the smallest of reasons such as a casual argument over an insignificant point, a minor insult or a mild frustration over something trivial. Investigators call these killings "simplicity of motive" cases.

What is Forensic Science?

     The principal role of the forensic scientist is to identify physical crime scene evidence by comparing it to known samples acquired either from a suspect's person or from an object such as a gun, shoe or burglar tool this person possessed, worn or otherwise was associates with.

     Forensic science relies on the principle that the criminal leaves part of himself or something that he's associated with at the scene of the crime. Evidence left at the site of a crime might include blood, semen, latent fingerprints, shoe impressions, bite marks, hair follicles, textile fibers, bullets and tire tracks. Moreover, the suspect will often inadvertently take something away from the scene. A criminal might, for example, leave the crime site carrying traces of the victim's blood and tissue under his fingernails, or follicles of the victim's hair, or fibers from her carpet on his clothing.

     Practitioners of forensic science fall generally into three groups: police officers who arrive at the scene of a crime and whose job it is to secure the physical evidence; crime scene technicians responsible for finding, photographing and packaging physical evidence for crime lab submission; and forensic scientists working in public and private crime laboratories who analyze the evidence, and when the occasion arises testify in court as expert witnesses.

     While uniformed police officers and detectives may be trained in the recognition and handling of physical evidence, they are not scientists and do not work under laboratory conditions.

     Forensic science fields include document examination, firearms identification, toxicology, forensic pathology, forensic chemistry, latent fingerprint identification and DNA analysis. 

The Andrew McCormack Murder Case

     On September 23, 2017, 31-year-old Andrew McCormack and his one-year-old daughter entered their home in Revere, Massachusetts. McCormack had returned to the house after finishing a carpentry job at a friend's place. Shortly after arriving home he called 911 and reported that someone had entered the dwelling in his absence and murdered his wife. 

     Police officers found 30-year-old Vanessa Nasucci lying face down on the bedroom floor with a garbage bag over her head. The bag had been taken from the kitchen trash container. When a first responder removed the bag it became obvious that the Vanessa Nasucci had been brutally beaten. An autopsy revealed she had also been stabbed many times and strangled. 

     The murder bedroom gave off a strong scent of bleach and there were chemical burns on the victim's body. Investigators believed the killer had used bleach to destroy crime scene evidence. A large kitchen knife was missing from the kitchen butcher's block and there was no evidence of forced entry into the house. Moreover, the victim had not been sexually attacked and nothing had been stolen from the dwelling. The fact the killer had taken the time to sanitize the crime scene suggested that Vanessa Nasucci had not been murdered by an intruder. Suspicion immediately fell up the husband, Andrew McCormack.

     Detectives quickly determined that the couple's marriage had been on the rocks. To support his $500-a-day cocaine habit, Andrew McCormack had drained his wife's credit card accounts, forged checks on her bank account and had even stolen her wedding ring. On the day of the murder, after finishing the carpentry job, McCormack took his 1-year-old daughter with him to East Boston where he purchased cocaine from his drug dealer. 

     Shortly before her murder, Vanessa Nasucci, a second grade teacher at Connery Elementary in Lynn, Massachusetts, told her husband that she planned to sell the house and hire a divorce attorney. 

     A week after the killing, police officers arrested Andrew McCormack on the charge of first-degree murder. He was booked into the Suffolk County Jail. Through his attorney the suspect pleaded not guilty. The magistrate denied him bail. 

     The Andrew McCormack murder trial got underway in mid-October 2019 in a Suffolk County courtroom. The prosecution, without a murder weapon, an eyewitness, confession or physical evidence connecting the defendant directly to the murder had an entirely circumstantial case. What the prosecutor had was a strong case of motive, means and opportunity and the argument that, given the facts of the case, it was unreasonable to conclude that anyone other than the defendant had committed this murder.

     The defense relied heavily on reasonable doubt and the argument that investigators never considered the possibility that someone other than Andrew McCormack had murdered his wife.

     On November 16, 2019, following eleven days of testimony, the jury, after deliberating a week, found Andrew McCormack guilty of first-degree murder. At his sentencing hearing on December 2, 2019 the convicted killer said this to the judge: "I did not murder her. There is someone else getting away with murder." 

     The Suffolk County judge sentenced McCormack to life in prison without the possibility of parole.  

The Selena Irene York Poisoned Smoothie Case

     Selena Irene York and her teenage daughter, after falling on hard times, were taken in by 79-year-old Ed Zurbuchen who let them live in his Vernal, Utah home. On September 29, 2008 Mr. Zurbuchen's 33-year-old house guest gave him a peach smoothie. Shortly after drinking it he was taken to the hospital complaining of dizziness, face numbness and speech difficulties. At first doctors thought he had suffered a stroke. After four days in the hospital Mr. Zurbuchen underwent a series of liver and kidney tests that revealed he had ingested ethylene glycol, the main ingredient in anti-freeze.

     Although Selena York had given Mr. Zuburchen the drink that made him sick and herself the beneficiary of his life insurance policy, and had taken control of his bank account, Mr. Zurbuchen didn't want to press charges against her. Without the victim's cooperation and testimony the Uintah County prosecutor didn't have a case. In 2009 the poisoning suspect and her daughter moved to Eugene, Oregon. Although the authorities in Utah believed Selena York had tried to murder Ed Zurbuchen, the investigation went cold.

     On April 2011 the poisoning case came back to life when the Uintah County prosecutor received a letter from Joseph Dominic Ferraro, Selena York's former boyfriend and the father of her child. Ferraro, who was in jail for sexual assault, had been living with her and his daughter in Eugene, Oregon. According to Mr. Ferraro, Selena York had bragged to him about poisoning a man in Utah in an effort to kill him so she could take over his estate. Since she had drained his bank account and sold both his cars while he was in jail, Mr. Ferraro believed her story. And so did the authorities in Utah.

     In June 2011 police officers arrested Selena York in Eugene on the charge of attempted murder. After being extradited back to Utah, she, in exchange for the reduced charges of aggravated assault and forgery, confessed to poisoning Mr. Zuburchen. She said she had purchased the smoothie at a nearby store, dumped out half of its contents then poured in the antifreeze. After his death she planned to gain power of attorney over his estate. Before she left Utah after the failed homicide she forged a check on the victim's bank account for $10,000.

     In December 2011 Selena York was allowed to plead no contest to the reduced charges of aggravated assault and forgery. Two months later the judge sentenced her to three consecutive five-year prison terms.  Had Mr. Zubuchen died of poisoning she would have been eligible for the death sentence. Had she not ripped-off Joseph Ferraro (who was convicted of 21 felony sexual abuse counts) she would have gotten away with attempted murder. 

     Mr. Ferraro, the father of York's child who informed on her was sentenced to ten years in prison on the sexual abuse case. However, he won an appeal that led to the overturning of his conviction. The trial judge improperly denied Mr. Ferraro's motion to postpone his trial in order to acquire more time for his attorney to prepare his defense. The Lane County prosecutor, rather than schedule a second trial, allowed Ferraro to plead guilty to a single count of second-degree sodomy. Sentenced to three years on that charge the sex offender walked free because he had already served four years on the multiple felony conviction. 

Travis M. Scott: The Swindler

     In 2006 Travis Magdalena Scott owned a computer company in Crystal, Minnesota that provided software to the U.S. Military and the private sector. That year the 29-year-old filed a false insurance claim with Lloyd's of London based on a phony lightening strike he said had wiped out his computers and ruined his business. The insurance company paid him $3 million.

     Two years later Mr. Scott was living in a 15-room, 5,300-square foot $1 million mansion in the Twin Cities area town of Eden Prairie. He owned a new computer company and had filed another false insurance claim. This time to indemnify him for another computer destroying lightening strike. The insurer paid him $9.5 million.

     The FBI opened an investigation of Scott in 2010 and in early 2011 a federal grand jury sitting in Minneapolis indicted him for wire fraud, money laundering and insurance fraud. If convicted of all charges the suspect faced up to thirty years in prison. FBI agents seized three of Scott's airplanes, a boat, three vehicles and $5 million from various bank accounts in his name. Scott's mansion, taken over by the bank and put on the market, was now worth $600,000.

     In May 2011, pursuant to a plea deal involving a sentence of between five to ten years in prison, Travis Scott pleaded guilty to all charges. His sentencing hearing before a U.S. District Court judge was scheduled for mid-September 2011.

     A week before his sentencing Mr. Scott staged a suicide by leaving his Kayak on the west shore of Lake Mille Lacs. Inside the overturned Kayak he left a suicide note in which he wrote that he had drowned himself by jumping into the middle of the lake wearing heavy weights. (Had this been true it would have been an odd suicide.)

     Following the staged suicide Mr. Scott flew his Piper airplane from the Flying Cloud Airport near Eden Prairie to the St. Andrew's Airport in Winnipeg, Canada. The aircraft bore fake Canadian registration decals. Three days later Mille Lacs County Sheriff's deputies found the Kayak and the phony suicide note. The local authorities listed Scott as a missing person and various law enforcement agencies in the region searched for his body.

     In Winnipeg, under the name Paul Decker, Travis Scott set up residence in a downtown apartment. He purchased a Jeep and lived with a cat. Things were going smoothly for the missing businessman until December 22, 2011. The Canadian authorities caught up to him 82 days after his staged suicide when, at a Winnipeg pharmacy, he used a forged prescription slip to acquire pills for his anxiety disorder.

     Police officers searching Scott's apartment seized $35,000 in U.S. and Canadian currency. The Winnipeg officers also recovered $85,000 in gold and silver coins. In Scott's Jeep searchers found a loaded .45-caliber handgun. The officers seized Scott's Jeep and Piper aircraft.

     On February 11, 2013, Mr. Scott, now 37, pleaded guilty in a Winnipeg court to possession of a firearm and a customs act charge for failing to report to border officials. The judge sentenced him on the spot to three years and three months in a Canadian prison.

     In Minnesota, on November 19, 2013 a federal judge presided over Travis Scott's sentencing hearing pertaining to his May 2011 guilty plea. At that proceeding the defendant argued that if the judge gave him probation he'd be able to work and pay back the money he had stolen. The federal prosecutor countered that argument by labeling Scott a "manipulative person" who showed no remorse for his crime.

     The U.S. District judge sentenced Travis Scott to 12 years 8 months in prison and held him responsible for more than $11 million in restitution. 

The Suicide of Ross Lockridge Jr.

     A good many creative writers are high-strung, strung-out emotional wrecks. A lot of them are really odd. Many slip into despair, some go mad and a number get hooked on booze or drugs. More than a few end their lives with suicide.

     To writers who are more or less normal there is nothing more morbidly fascinating than the tormented life and self-inflicted death of a fellow author. Ross Lockridge Jr. is a case in point. In February 1949, about a year after the publication of his first book, Raintree County, a bestselling Book-of-the Month-Club selection, the 33-year-old writer gassed himself to death in his garage while seated in his newly purchased car.

     Journalist Nanette Kutner who interviewed Lockridge six months before his suicide wrote this after his death: "He was no one-book author; he never would have been content to live as Margaret Mitchell [Gone With the Wind] lived. But he could not find a remedy for the letdown that invariably comes after completing a big job, the letdown [Anthony] Trollope understood so well he never submitted a novel until he was deep into the next."

     Do writers end their lives more often than people in other lines of work? There is no way to know if writers are particularly prone to suicide. Experts say that statistics on suicide by occupation are not clear on this issue because there is no national data base on line of work and suicide. Experts also believe that because occupation is not a major predictor of suicide this aspect of life doesn't fully explain why people kill themselves. Since writing, for many authors, is more of a way of life than a profession, and is practiced by a lot of unstable people, it probably is a relevant variable.

     Well-known writers who have killed themselves include: John Berryman, Richard Brautigan, Hart Crane, John Gould Fletcher, Romain Gary, Ernest Hemingway, William Inge, Randall Jarrell, Jerry Kosinski, Primo Levi, Vachel Lindsay, Jack London, Malcolm Lowry, Charlotte Mew, Cesare Pavese, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Hunter S. Thompson, John Kennedy Toole, David Foster Wallace, and Virginia Wolff. And this list does not include writers like Truman Capote who killed themselves slowly over time with alcohol and drugs.

The Paul Driggers Murder-For-Hire Case

     Paul Driggers knew that if he filed for divorce his wife Janice (not her real name) would fight for custody of their children. Driggers knew that Janice, because of his background of crime which included a ten year stretch in prison, would win that battle. To solve his problem the 53-year-old Idaho man came up with a plan to file for divorce without his wife knowing about it. The idea behind his plan involved winning the divorce suit through his uninformed wife's default.

     In February 2005, after creating a false mail drop address for himself and his wife in Post Falls, Idaho, Mr. Driggers traveled to Bannock County in the southern part of the state where he filed for divorce. His wife, oblivious to what he was up to failed to respond to the court papers sent to the phony address. Through this scheme Paul Driggers divorced his wife without her knowledge. Janice was also unaware that the judge had awarded Driggers full custody of their son and two daughters.

     Although divorced, Paul Driggers and his clueless ex-spouse continued to live under the same roof as man and wife. In September 2005, after pleading guilty to hitting one of his daughters with a belt, the judge sentenced Paul Driggers to 180 days in jail. Shortly after his release he threatened Janice with a handgun. Because he was an ex-felon the mere possession of the weapon was a crime. Drigger denied the allegation and the prosecutor dropped the charges.

     In February 2006, after Janice learned from a social worker that she and the man she was living with had been divorced for a year, threw him out of the house. Because they had engaged in sex under the false pretense of marriage she filed charges of rape. A judge eventually dismissed that case. Driggers, in an effort to recover some of his possessions that included a wall plaque that read: "Families are Forever" sued his ex-wife. He also filed a report with a county child protection agency accusing her of physically abusing their children. The agency responded by taking the children out of the home. With the children temporarily out of the house, Mr. Driggers made his big move. He asked a man he had met in prison if he know of someone who would kill his ex-wife.

     Early in April 2006, acting on his former prison associate's recommendation, Driggers called a man in Hayward, California named Matt Robinson and offered him $10,000 for the hit. Driggers said he would deposit $1,000 in Robinson's bank account to pay for his trip to northern Idaho where they would plan and carry out the contract murder. Matt Robinson, having left Driggers with the impression he would be thinking over the offer, reported the solicitation to the Hayward police who hooked him up with the FBI. After meeting with FBI agents, Mr. Robinson agreed to help the feds by traveling to Idaho as an undercover murder-for-hire operative.

     On April 25, 2006 Paul Driggers and Matt Robinson met in a restaurant in Coeur d' Alene. They discussed, in addition to the murder, a number of criminal schemes including the manufacture of methamphetamine and the counterfeiting of documents to be used in identify theft. Three months later, on July 21, 2006, Mr. Driggers drove his gold Jaguar onto a Lowe's parking lot in Coeur d' Alene. He was there to meet Robinson who was wired for sound. Driggers handed the man he thought would murder his ex-wife another $1,000. The murder-for-hire mastermind promised to pay Robinson the balance of the hit money in $500 monthly installments. Driggers also gave Robinson a photograph of Janice and a handmade map showing how to get to her house in Priest River. The map, carefully drawn and detailed, included suggested escape routes. In order to maintain contact with his hit man as the plot unfolded, Driggers had purchased a pair of walkie-talkies. He also instructed Robinson on how to dispose of the victim's corpse. This murder-for-hire mastermind was leaving nothing to chance.

     Driggers, in explaining to Robinson that killing his ex-wife was the only way he could acquire custody of  his children, anticipated that the police would suspect him of having her murdered. "They don't like me," he said. "They hate me. They'd like to put a needle in my arm...We've already made some mistakes. I don't want to get hurt on this. The first three months of the investigation is going to be intense. They're going to check everything...I'm the green light, but you're driving the car. You have a couple of options. You can keep the money and go home. You can do it and get it done, or try to do it, and if it's too difficult, you can drop it."

     The following day, July 22, 2006, Driggers called Robinson and gave him the final go-ahead for the operation. Ten days later FBI agents who had been keeping track of Driggers arrested him on the charge of attempted murder-for-hire. When informed that his conversations with Robinson had been taped, Driggers surprised the arresting agents by insisting that he was innocent.

     From his Kootenai County Jail cell a week after being taken into custody Driggers, referring to his ex-wife as a "vindictive schizophrenic," said this to a local newspaper reporter: "I'm the one who's really being abused. There's been such a climate of fear and paranoia in my case that any action I take to try and protect my property is determined as a move toward hurting my ex-wife, to physically hurting my ex-wife." A federal grand jury, three weeks after Drigger's press interview indicted him for using interstate commerce to facilitate a murder-for-hire scheme.

     The Driggers murder trial got underway in the federal court house in Coeur d' Alene on January 3, 2007. The defendant, insisting that he was the true victim in the case promised reporters that when jurors heard his side of the story they would find him not guilty. But before he got the opportunity to defend himself on the stand the jurors heard the conversation Matt Robinson had taped in the Lowe's parking lot. After playing the two-hour recording the government rested its case.

     On January 11, 2007, Driggers, wearing a raspberry colored blazer, climbed into the witness box with the intent of portraying himself as the victim. He had been so distraught over the possibility of losing custody of his children he had gone to bed every night under the influence of sleeping pills and booze. "It was hard to get out of bed in the morning because I'd always hear the voices of my children saying, 'Daddy, daddy, we want you to come home.' I lost the purpose of my life. I had no reason to  live."

     In addressing the issue of his murder-for-hire conversations with Matt Robinson, Driggers dismissed them as a "hypothetical" discussions in which he was merely exploring possible solutions to his "predicament." "There's a difference," he said, "between a statement and an agreement. I didn't want to kill her. I was upset about many things happening in my life."

     The jury, following a brief period of deliberation found Paul Driggers guilty of attempted murder-for-hire. The verdict surprised no one. But the case wasn't over. Drigger's attorney, noting that a copy of his client's rap sheet had inadvertently found its way into the jury room moved for a mistrial. The jurors were not supposed to know about the defendant's criminal history. Although only one juror actually looked at the document the judge had no choice but to declare a mistrial.

     The following month Paul Driggers was tried again on the same evidence. The second jury, also requiring little time to deliberate, found him guilty as charged. The judge sentenced Paul Driggers to the maximum penalty allowed under federal law: a $17,000 fine and ten years in prison.

The Thomas Fritz Murder Case

     Thomas Fritz grew up in Sylvania, a suburb of Toledo Ohio. In 1997 he joined the Ohio National Guard and six years later served a year in Iraq with a Guard military police unit. The 30-year-old graduated from suburban Toledo's Owens Community College in 2004 with an associates degree in criminal justice. His aspirations for a career in law enforcement came to an end in 2006 when, after having sexual intercourse with a woman who had passed out drunk, he pleaded guilty to sexual battery. The judge, who declared Fritz a "sexually oriented offender," sentenced him to one year in an Ohio prison.

     In December 2011 Thomas Fritz moved into a white two-story house in Blissfield, Michigan, a small town in the southeastern part of the state 20 miles northwest of Toledo. The 38-year-old shared the dwelling with his girlfriend, 33-year-old Amy Merrill and her two sons from a previous relationship. Fritz and Merrill also had a toddler of their own. In late June 2012 Merrill ended her relationship with Fritz who continued to reside in the Blissfield house with her and the children.

     Late Friday night on July 13, 2012 there was an altercation in the Blissfield house which at the time was occupied by Amy Merrill, her 24-year-old sister Lisa Gritzmaker and their 52-year-old mother Robin Lynn McCowan. Thomas Fritz opened fire on the family with a rifle, killing Amy Merrill and her sister Lisa Gritzmaker who was 8-months pregnant. The mother, Robin Lynn McCowan was wounded.

     After Mr. Fritz fled the murder scene in his maroon 2002 Honda the wounded Robin Lynn McCowan called 911. Shortly thereafter, Lenawee County prosecutor charged Thomas Fritz with two counts of open murder and one count of assault with intent to commit murder.

     A man Thomas Fritz had worked for owned a remote cabin in Tyler County, West Virginia 80 miles south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Mr. Fritz had stayed at this cabin before. After murdering his wife and her sister and wounding their mother he headed for West Virginia.

     The Tyler County cabin sat deep in the woods off Cow House Road three miles south of a wide spot in the highway called Sistersville, a village comprised of a store and one gas station. Someone who spotted Fritz driving through town called the sheriff's office. On Tuesday, July 17, 2012 a U.S. Marshal saw Fritz, armed with a rifle, enter the cabin. By nightfall the place was surrounded by U.S. Marshals and Tyler County sheriff's deputies.

     That night while surveilling the place officers heard a gunshot from inside the cabin. After firing teargas canisters into the hide-out officers entered the structure where they found Thomas Fritz dead in a back bedroom with a bullet in his head. Inside the cabin officers found two assault rifles, a shotgun and a gas mask.    

Jeffrey Ferguson's One-Drug Execution

      Several years ago anti-capital punishment activists and death house lawyers began making a fuss over the fact that several states had recently executed condemned prisoners with a single toxic drug, pentobarbital. In the past, executioners used a three-drug cocktail. Because the other two drugs were manufactured in countries that opposed the death penalty, these chemicals were no long available for this purpose in the U.S. Since the rope, the electric chair, the firing squad and the gas chamber were no longer execution options, states that still executed perpetrators of the most heinous murders had no choice but to make do with pentobarbital. This fact enraged anti-capital punishment advocates who considered the one-drug send-off as cruel and unusual punishment. But this was nothing new. Capital punishment opponents object to the death penalty, period. They would complain if these ruthless cold blooded killers were tickled to death.

     In Missouri when judges and the governor were confronted with the choice of executing a prisoner with pentobarbital or commuting his sentence to life, they chose the deadly dose. This was not good news for Jeffrey Ferguson, a 59-year-old kidnapper, rapist and murderer who had been living on Missouri's death row for nineteen years.

     At eleven o'clock on the night of February 10, 1989 in St. Charles, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, 34-year-old Jeffrey Ferguson and his friend Kenneth Ousley pulled into a Shell gas station not far from Interstate 70. Across the street at the Mobile station a 17-year-old employee named Kelli Hall was out front checking the fuel level in one of the station's underground gas tanks. The teenager caught Ferguson's eye.

     Ferguson, with Ousley in his Chevrolet Blazer, pulled into the Mobile station. Ferguson got out of his SUV, approached the girl and ordered her at gunpoint into the vehicle. The two men, with the girl in the backseat, drove off with the intention of raping and killing her.

     In a remote area a few miles from St. Charles, Ferguson and Ousley tortured, raped then murdered Kelli Hall by shooting her in the head with a .32-caliber handgun. They dumped her body in a farmer's field in Maryland Heights, Missouri.

     Two weeks after the senseless and random lust killing the owner of the St. Louis County farm stumbled across the victim's corpse near a shed. The teenager was naked except for a pair of socks.

     In1993 Kenneth Ousley pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. The judge sentenced him to life with the possibility of parole. Two years later Jefffrey Ferguson went on trial for kidnapping, rape and first-degree murder. Taking the stand on his own behalf the sociopath claimed that he could not have participated in the rape and murder because at the time he was passed out drunk in his truck. This story contradicted the defendant's confession to detectives shortly after his arrest.

     The jury found Jeffrey Ferguson guilty as charged and recommended the death penalty. The judge sentenced him to death in December 1995. (At that time most Americans were wrapped up in the O. J. Simpson double murder case.)

     After he had been in prison for a few years Mr. Ferguson expressed deep remorse for raping and murdering the 17-year-old girl. He also became religious, counseled inmates and helped start a prison hospice program. All the while his team of attorneys appealed his case to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals and ultimately to the U.S. Supreme Court. They lost all of their appeals.

     Shortly after midnight on March 26, 2014, following a burst of last-minute pleas for a stay of execution, the executioner at the state prison in Bonne Terre, Missouri injected Ferguson with the lethal dose of pentobarbital. While several death penalty sob sisters pointed out in horror that Ferguson did not die quickly, the drug eventually did its job.

     St. Louis County prosecutor Bob McCulloch, in speaking to reporters following the execution, said that Ferguson's good deeds in prison did not make up for what he had done to that innocent teenager. The prosecutor called Ferguson's crime "unspeakable," a word Ferguson's supporters would use to describe his death.

The Jared Remy Murder Case

     Jerry Remy played second base for the Boston Red Sox before becoming a Boston area sportscaster. Jerry's son, Jared, a violent man who abused drugs and women didn't succeed at anything. The only thing Jared Remy became known for was beating up his girlfriends. Between 1998 and 2005 police officers arrested him six times for assault and battery. The crimes usually included terroristic threats and destruction of property. Except for a man he attacked in 2001 with a beer bottle, Remy's victims were women.

     Notwithstanding his arrests for violent offenses against vulnerable victims, Jared's only punishment involved relatively short periods in jail. In most instances he got off light because his victims refused to bring charges. And it didn't hurt that his father, as the color analyst for Red Sox games on the New England Sports Network, was well known among sports fans.

     In 2009 Jared Remy lost his job as a security guard at Fenway Park in Boston after he and another guard were implicated in a steroid scandal.

     In 2013 Jared resided with his girlfriend Jennifer Martel and their 5-year-old daughter in a Waltham, Massachusetts townhouse. The 27-year-old Martel worked as an assistant store manager while pursuing a degree in elementary education at Framingham University. On August 13, 2013 Mr. Remy smashed Martel's face into a mirror. She called the police and he was arrested for assault and battery. The next day Remy walked out of the Middlesex County Jail after posting his bond. In light of the attack and Remy's history of violence against women a judge granted Martel an emergency temporary restraining order.

     Just two days after assaulting his girlfriend Jared Remy returned to his townhouse in violation of the restraining order.  In the outdoor patio in front of his daughter and in view of several of his neighbors Remy pulled a knife and stabbed Martel. One of the witnesses, a neighbor named Benjamin Ray, tried to pull the frenzied Remy off the victim. Mr. Ray had to retreat when Remy threatened him with the knife. Several neighbors dialed 911.

     Waltham police officers arrested the blood-covered 25-year-old at the scene. Jennifer Martel died a short time later from multiple stab wounds. This time Mr. Remy would not be released on bail.

     On September 24, 2013 a Middlesex County grand jury indicted Jared Remy for murder as well as several lesser offenses.

     A week after Remy's indictments a reporter with the Boston Herald interviewed Remy at the jail in Cambridge. Staying true to his sociopathic nature, he, with a straight face, denied stabbing Jennifer Martel to death. To the reporter, the serial abuser of women seemed upbeat and enthusiastic about his chances of an acquittal. On a more somber note, the inmate said, "I know my life is going to suck when I get out of here." ( Only a hard-core sociopath, under these circumstances, would talk about how life was going to be bad for him.)

     During the 30-minute interview Remy complained to the reporter that having a famous father was working against him. "You know," he said, "I think we're just like normal people. But if our name was Smith, you'd never see any of this in the newspaper." (If Remy's name were Smith he wouldn't have been free on bail to murder his girlfriend.)

     Following the Martel's murder, state officials took custody of Jared Remy's 5-year-old daughter. The murder suspect's parents petitioned a judge to turn the child over to them. (Jerry Remy, following his son's murder indictment, took a leave of absence from his sportscasting job.)

     Jared Remy in speaking about his daughter with the Boston Herald reporter, said, "If she choses to know me at some point and wants to see me, that's fine. If she doesn't, that's fine too. I just want her to be happy. I love her. I want her to go to high school, I want her to go to college, I want her to have everything in life she deserves." (In true narcissistic form, it was all about what Remy wanted.) "She's in a good place. She has a dog to play with, which makes me happy, because she loves animals. I'm happy she going to be a veterinarian one day."

     Regarding the inmate's parents who had tried to visit him (he had declined to see them), Remy, said, "I'm sure they're not thrilled with me right now." 

     At his October 8, 2013 arraignment Jared Remy pleaded not guilty to all charges.

     In the aftermath of Jennifer Martel's brutal and predictable murder, Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan came under criticism for her handling of the case.

     In May 2014 Jared Remy pleaded guilty to first-degree murder. The judge sentenced him to life without the chance of parole. Following the sentencing Remy said, "Blame me for this, not my family."(Who in the hell was blaming his family?)

Killing Giggles

     In early July 2013 a family living in Illinois across the state line from Kenosha, Wisconsin rescued a baby fawn that had been abandoned by her mother. The animal lovers who discovered the deer in their backyard called the Society of St. Francis Animal Shelter in Kenosha. Personnel at the no-kill shelter agreed to take custody of the abandoned deer.

     An unidentified busybody shocked that the shelter housed a wild animal without the required state-issued permit alerted the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR). After the agency received the anonymous tip DNR agents dedicated to maintaining the peace and dignity of the great state of Wisconsin sprang into action. Rather than one agent simply driving out to the shelter to inform the St. Francis personnel that they needed to acquire a permit for the baby deer (the day will come when we will have to get government permits for everything) DNR agents assigned to the case arranged for aerial photographs of the animal shelter and the contraband deer.

     Employees of the rogue animal shelter had named the 35-pound fawn "Giggles" because of the sounds she made.

     On July 15, 2013 a heavily armed squad of nine DNR agents accompanied by four deputy sheriffs rolled up to the Society of St. Francis Animal Shelter in several police vehicles. Did these officers expect armed resistance from the shelter workers? 

     As the DNR agents began executing their search warrant, confused and concerned shelter employee were corralled near a picnic area. A false move at this point could have gotten one of them killed. This was serious business.

     The woman in charge of the shelter under siege informed one of the agents that Giggles was being taken the next day to a wildlife reserve. This relevant information fell on deaf ears. Armed law enforcement warriors on important crime-fighting missions do not allow distractions from interfering bystanders.

     Not long after the armed invasion of the animal shelter, a DNR agent walked out of the barn with a body-bag thrown over his shoulder. Giggles, still alive, was in the sack. One of the outraged shelter workers who assumed the agent had killed Giggles asked why he had killed the fawn. (Giggles was tranquilized and dispatched by government officials later that day.)

     The  DNR agent, in response to the obvious question of why, said, "That's our policy." Of course, policy! That explained everything. The government has its policies and we have to shut up and live with those policies. What would a citizen know about policy?

     The animal shelter employee, obviously not impressed with the DNR policy of armed animal shelter raids in search of unlicensed baby deer scheduled for execution, said, "That's one hell of a policy!"

     Following the militaristic raid and execution of Giggles, shelter worker Ray Schultz said this to a local reporter: "I spent 22 years in the Air Force and two years in Vietnam and I've never seen such totally unnecessary, senseless cruelty."

     Cindy Schultz, the president of the Society of St. Francis Animal Shelter described the DNR raid to a reporter: "This was like the Gestapo coming in. Giggles didn't pose any threat. She was petrified. She wasn't even sick. There was no reason to kill her."

     It's bad enough that we have to live under the control of a growing army of mindless bureaucrats blindly enforcing stupid and unnecessary laws and regulations. It's even worse that these people have guns and operate under the delusion they are keeping America safe.

The Dr. Robert Ferrante Poison Murder Case

     In 2013 Dr. Robert Ferrante and his wife Dr. Autumn Klein lived with their 6-year-old daughter in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Dr. Ferrante held the positions of co-director of the Center of ALS Research and visiting professor of neurology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School. Dr. Klein, with offices in Magee-Woman's Hospital in the Kaufman Medical Building, was chief of women's neurology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and an assistant professor of neurology, obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive services at the University of Pittsburgh.

     Dr. Ferrante, twenty-three years older than his wife, met her in 2000 when they lived in Boston where she was a medical student and he worked at a hospital for veterans. They were married a year later. In 2010 Dr. Ferrante left his job at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital to join the University of Pittsburgh's neurological surgery team. Dr. Klein moved to Pittsburgh with him.

     Dr. Klein, who was forty-one, was having difficulty getting pregnant with her second child. Her 64-year-old husband had been encouraging her to take a nutritional supplement to help her conceive. On April 17, 2013 Dr. Ferrante sent Autumn a text message in which he inquired if she had taken the supplement. She wrote back: "Will it stimulate egg production, too?" Nine hours after Dr. Klein sent that message she collapsed in the kitchen of the couple's Schenley Farms home.

     Emergency personnel rushed Dr. Klein to the University of Pittsburgh Medial Center (UPMC) in Oakland. On the kitchen floor next to her body paramedics noticed a bag of white powder later identified as Creatine, a nutritional supplement. Shortly after the patient was admitted into the hospital a UPMC doctor ordered tests of her blood. When a preliminary serological analysis revealed a high level of acid, the doctor ordered toxicological tests for cyanide poisoning.

     Dr. Klein died on April 20, 2013. Three days later, at Dr. Ferrante's insistence, her body was cremated. As a result there was no autopsy.

     Dr. Karl Williams, the Allegheny County Medical Examiner, based on the toxicology reports determined that Dr. Klein had died of cyanide poisoning. The forensic pathologist ruled her death a homicide.

     Cyanide kills by starving the cells of oxygen. A lethal dose for a human can be as small as 200 milligrams--1/25th the size of a nickel. The poison acts fast and metabolizes quickly. The toxic substance can be undetectable from one minute to three hours after ingestion. Had samples of Dr. Klein's blood not been taken upon her admission to UPMC, there would have been no physical evidence of poisoning beyond the contents of the bag of white powder found lying on the victim's kitchen floor.

     Two weeks after Dr. Klein's death detectives with the Pittsburgh Police Department launched a homicide investigation with Dr. Ferrante as the prime suspect. Officials at UPMC placed the neurologist on leave and denied him access to his laboratory. A police search of the lab resulted in the discovery that 8.3 grams from a bottle of cyanide was missing. Detectives learned that Dr. Ferrante had purchased a half-pound of the poison on April 15, 2013, two days before his wife collapsed in their home. Dr. Ferrante had used a UPMC credit card to buy the cyanide and had asked the vendor to ship it to his lab overnight. Detectives believed the suspect, in his laboratory, mixed the cyanide--a substance not related to his work--into the dietary supplement.

     According to friends of the victim, Dr. Ferrante had been a controlling husband who was jealous of his wife's fast-rising career. Moreover, he suspected that she was having an affair with a man from Boston. Dr. Klein had told friends she was planning to leave the doctor. Another possible motive involved the fact Dr. Ferrante did not want his wife to have another child.

     On April 13, four days before she fell ill, Dr. Klein sent one of her friends a text message regarding a trip she planned to take to Boston by herself. In that message she wrote: "Change of plans. Husband is coming to Boston. Told me 'to keep me out of trouble.'"

     "Oh, dear," replied the friend. "Did you know you were in trouble?"

     "I feel like I have been in trouble for a long time now," Dr. Klein answered.

     On July 24, 2013 an Allegheny County prosecutor charged Dr. Robert Ferrante with first-degree murder. The next day, as Dr. Ferrante drove back to Pittsburgh from St. Augustine, Florida a West Virginia state patrol officer arrested him on I-77 near Beckley. According to the doctor's attorney William Difenderfer, his client was on his way to surrender to the Pittsburgh police.

     Dr. Ferrante's arrest for the murder of his wife caused him serious financial problems. Except for $280,000 the suspect was allowed to use for legal expenses and a possible fine, a judge seized his assets. In August 2013 his 6-year-old daughter's maternal grandmother who was caring for the girl in Maryland petitioned a family court judge for child support.

     The Ferrante murder trial got underway on October 20, 2014 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Following jury selection the attorneys for each side presented their opening statements. Assistant Allegheny County District Attorney Lisa Pelligrini asserted that the defendant had murdered his wife because she wanted to have a second child. The prosecutor also said that Dr. Ferrante thought his wife was having an affair.

     Defense attorney William Difenderfer pointed out the circumstantial nature of the prosecution's case, inconsistent crime toxicology reports regarding cyanide in Dr. Klein's blood, and an absence of an autopsy.

     Dr. Christopher Holstege, a University of Virginia professor and the author of the text, Criminal Poisoning, Clinical and Forensic Perspectives took the stand as the prosecutor's key expert witness. Dr. Holstege testified that the victim's symptoms ruled out everything but cyanide poisoning.

     Defense attorney William Difenderfer put three forensic experts on the stand. Dr. Robert Middleberg, vice president of a private crime lab in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania said tests at his facility of Dr. Klein's blood were inconclusive.

     Dr. Middleberg's testimony was backed up by Dr. Shaun Carstairs of the Naval Medical Center in San Diego and former Allegheny County Coroner Dr. Cyril Wecht. Dr. Wecht, a forensic pathologist, had testified in dozens of celebrated murder cases around the world.

     As his last witness, Diffenderfer, in a surprise and risky move, put the defendant on the stand to testify on his own behalf. As could have been anticipated the prosecutor's blistering cross examination revealed numerous inconsistencies in Dr. Ferrante's statements to the authorities.

     On Friday November 7, 2014 the jury found Dr. Ferrante guilty of first-degree murder, an offense in Pennsylvania that came with a mandatory sentence of life without parole.

     Through his appellate attorney Chris Eyster, Robert Ferrante appealed his conviction on the ground that the prosecution had not had sufficient probable cause for the search warrant that produced evidence that incriminated his client. The lawyer also raised questions regarding the laboratory that concluded that the victim had been killed by poison.

     In September 2016 Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey Manning upheld the Ferrante conviction.

     In October 2017 appellate attorney Chris Eyster petitioned a three-judge Superior Court panel to grant Robert Ferrante a new trial. According to Mr. Eyster, Dr. Autumn Klein's post-mortem kidney donation could not have taken place had the organ been irreparably damaged by poison. The lawyer also attacked the reliability of the toxicological tests performed by Quest Diagnostics. In his motion Chris Eyster argued that the Ferrante prosecution failed to reveal before the murder trial that a Quest subsidiary, the Nichols Institute, paid a $40 million fine for a 2009 federal misbranding conviction, and $241 million more to settle the related litigation. Quest/Nichols, according to federal prosecutors in that case sold misbranded tests to various laboratories that were unreliable.

     When the Superior Court judges denied Ferrante's appeal, his attorneys filed a series of new appeals based upon inadequate counsel. In August 2019 Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey manning dismissed most of these appeals but ruled that Ferrante's argument that his trial attorneys had erred when they withdrew his request for a jury drawn from outside Allegheny County had enough merit to justify a hearing.

     In May 2021 the appellate judge denied Ferrente's petition for a new trial. The 73-year-old is serving his life sentence at the State Correctional Institution at Houtzdale, Pennsylvania.

The Matthew Hinson Murder Case

     William C. Pettry lived with his wife and three children 50 miles from Chicago in Lake Villa, Illinois. On Friday, October 7, 2012 the 42-year-old self-employed contractor and his best friend, Nick Viverito, flew to Jacksonville, Florida from Milwaukee to attend a Sunday Chicago Bears-Jacksonville Jaguars pro football game.

     On Saturday, the night before the game, Pettry and his 42-year-old friend were eating and having drinks at an upscale Irish restaurant called Fionn MacCools located near their hotel. Around midnight Pettry and Viverito were sitting at a table on an outside patio visiting with other Chicago Bears fans. Matthew Hinson, his wife and another woman, people who lived in the area were nearby waiting for inside seating. The two men from Illinois exchanged smalltalk with the 28-year-old Hinson and the two women with him.

     Shortly after Matthew Hinson, his wife and the other woman walked inside the restaurant to their table William Pettry walked into the bar to get more drinks. When he didn't return to the patio after twenty minutes his friend began to wonder where he was. About this time a waitress approached Viverito and said, "Hey, your friend, he's not breathing at the bar. He's full of blood." Viverito ran into the restaurant where he found William Pettry on the floor bleeding profusely from his neck. Nurses who happened to be dining at the restaurant were trying to stop the bleeding and resuscitate the seriously wounded man. William Pettry bled to death on the floor of the bar.

     According to witnesses, Matthew Hinson, using a small pocketknife had slit Pettry's throat, then walked out of the restaurant. The two men had been sitting on a bench when Hinson stood up, pulled out his knife and ran the blade across Mr. Pettry's neck. As he left the place Mr. Hinson made a cutting motion across his throat with his finger. Jacksonville police officers stopped his car as he was pulling out of the parking lot. Following a brief scuffle they took him into custody.

     Matthew Hinson admitted to the arresting officers that he had killed the man in the bar with his pocketknife. Angry words had not been exchanged between the two men. The attack had been entirely by surprise, and unprovoked. While Hinson didn't tell the police why he had murdered a total stranger, witnesses informed the officers that he had attacked Pettry out of jealously and rage. He didn't like the fact the victim had spoken to his wife. The murder had nothing to do with sports rivalry.

     Matthew Hinson, charged with criminal homicide, was held in the Jacksonville County Jail without bond. In speaking to reporters county police Lieutenant Rob Schoonover said, "Hinson calmly and in cold blood cut the victim's throat and walked out of the restaurant." In 2006 Mr. Hinson had pleaded no contest in Florida's Clay County to driving under the influence. Beyond that he had no criminal record that anyone could find.

     On Saturday, October 13, 2012, current and former Chicago Bears team members held a fundraiser for the Pettry family. The proceeds came from the auctioning of Bear-related sports memorabilia.

     In crime fiction, because murder is such a deviant and evil act, murderers are either motivated by extreme hatred, greed or lust. But in real-life so-called spontaneous murders--killings without corresponding motivations--are common. They are committed by homicidal time bombs like Matthew Hinson.

     On May 21, 2013 two months before his trial date Hinson pleaded guilty to second degree-murder. At his sentencing hearing on July 18, 3013 his attorney, public defender Kate Bedell, told Circuit Judge Suzanne Bass that his client suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and alcohol abuse.

     The judge sentenced Matthew Hinson to life in prison.

Petra Pazsitka: Lost Then Found

     In 1984 when 24-year-old Petra Pazsitka, a computer science student attending college in Braunschweig, Germany, failed to show up at her brother's birthday party her parents reported her missing. The police in this northern German city launched a massive hunt.

     About a year after the student's disappearance the missing persons case was featured on a popular German television crime show. The public exposure did not create any tips that led to Pazsitka's recovery.

     Not long after the airing of the TV segment a man named Gunter confessed to the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl from the neighborhood where Pazsitka had disappeared. This man also confessed to kidnapping and murdering the missing college student. But after Mr. Gunter was unable to lead homicide investigators to Pazsitka's body the suspect took back his confession and that case was closed.

     In 1989, five years after Pazsitka's disappearance, she was officially declared dead even though her body had not been recovered.

     In September 2015 police in Dusseldorf, Germany were called to an apartment to investigate a burglary. At the scene they spoke to the victim tenant, a 54-year-old woman who identified herself as Mrs. Schneider. Investigators, when they learned that Mrs. Schneider didn't possess a driver's license, social security card, passport, bank account or any other form of personal identification, turned their attention on her.

     As it turned out Mrs. Schneider was Petra Pazsitka. After staging her disappearance 30 years ago Pazsitka lived in several German cities under numerous assumed names. She paid all of her bills with cash and didn't drive a car.

     When detectives asked Petra Pazsitka the obvious question of why she had voluntarily disappeared causing a massive police hunt as well as pain and suffering for her family, she said she wanted to start a new life. She offered no explanation beyond that. Her father had since died. When asked if she wanted to reunite with her mother and brother she said she did not.

Pastor Arthur Burton Schirmer: The Singing Minister of Death

     In 1968, Arthur Burton "A.B." Schirmer, an ordained Methodist minister married his first wife Jewel whom he met while they were 20-year-old students at Messiah College in southeast central Pennsylvania. In the late 1970s, as pastor of the Bainbridge and Marietta United Methodist Churches in southeastern Pennsylvania's Lancaster County, Pastor Schirmer and his wife Jewel sang duets at area churches and camp meetings. Later his son and two daughters joined the gospel group billed as the "Singing Schirmer Family."

     In 1978 A.B. Schirmer and his family moved to the town of Lebanon in southeast central Pennsylvania where he was pastor of the Bethany United Methodist Church (UMC). He and his wife Jewel lived in the church parsonage.

     On April 24, 1999 the 50-year-old Bethany church pastor called 911 at 2:15 in the afternoon to report that when he returned to the parsonage after a jog he found his wife Jewel lying unconscious at the foot of the basement stairs. Jewel Schirmer died the next day at the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.

     The forensic pathologist with the Lebanon County Coroner's Office who performed the autopsy noted that the deceased woman had, wrapped around one leg, an electrical cord from a Shop Vac. She was also barefoot. The pastor's wife had suffered a fractured skull and possessed numerous bruises on her upper body. The coroner's office reported that Jewel Schirmer had died from a traumatic brain injury and ruled her manner of death as "undetermined." While her obituary stated that she had died a "natural death" from falling down a flight of stairs (actually an accidental death), the coroner's office listed Jewel Schirmer's demise as undetermined because her injuries seemed too severe to have been caused by a fall down a flight of steps. Because his wife's death was not ruled a homicide there was no police investigation into the incident and no criminal charges filed against the singing minister.

     In 2001, the year he became pastor of the United Methodist Church in Reeders, an eastern Pennsylvania town in Monroe County, A.B. Schirmer married his second wife, 49-year-old Betty Jean Shertzer, a music teacher.

     On July 15, 2008 motorists driving along State Route 715, a wooded two-lane highway not far from Reeders, saw a PT Cruiser sitting on the shoulder of the road next to a guardrail. Betty Schirmer was sitting in the front passenger's seat that was soaked in blood. She was bleeding from the head and was unconscious. The passersby noticed severe bruising on the right side of her face. The vehicle showed only minor damage and the pastor was uninjured. Although he possessed a cellphone, one of the motorists called 911.

     The next day, at the Lehigh Valley Hospital, Betty Jean Schirmer died of "sustained multiple skull and facial fractures" and "brain injury." At the pastor's request his second wife's body was cremated before it could be autopsied.

     To the officer investigating the supposed traffic accident the pastor said he was driving his wife to the hospital after she complained of a pain in her jaw. While traveling between 45 and 55 MPH he lost control of the car after oversteering to avoid a deer. The vehicle swerved back and forth across the road before slamming into the guardrail. Although Betty Schirmer's head injuries seemed out of proportion to the damage to the car, the authorities did not investigate the 56-year-old woman's death as a possible homicide. The fact the dead woman's husband was a Methodist minister probably had a lot to do with that decision. Had the authorities known about the circumstances surrounding the death of the pastor's first wife Jewel they might have looked closer into Betty Schirmer's suspicious demise.

     On October 29, 2008 violent death raised its ugly head again in Pastor Schirmer's life. On that day, Joseph Musante, the husband of the pastor's personal assistant was found dead in the church office behind the pastor's desk. Mr. Musante had been shot in the head in an apparent suicide. Investigators looking into the case were curious to know why this active member of the Reeders UMC congregation had taken his life in the pastor's office. In pursuing that lead investigators learned that Pastor Schirmer was having an affair with the dead man's wife, Cynthia.

     A.B. Schirmer's proximity to the untimely violent deaths of two wives and the husband of his personal assistant and lover kickstarted a criminal investigation of his second wife Betty's July 2008 death. The fact the pastor was having an affair at the time of the so-called fatal traffic accident on State Route 715 added what had been missing until now: a motive for murder. Pursuant to the homicide investigation the police conducted a search of Schirmer's church living quarters and found incriminating evidence: massive blood stains from Betty Schirmer, stains someone had tried to clean-up.

     The discovery of blood stains in the Reeders Church parsonage provided homicide investigators with a plausible narrative of Betty Jean's death: the pastor had bludgeoned her in the parsonage, put her bleeding body into the PT Cruiser, staged the traffic accident on the remote highway then sat in the car with his unconscious wife waiting for her to die. Before she passed away passing motorists came along and one of them called 911. The next day she died, and shortly after that she was cremated without an autopsy. With the death of the pastor's personal assistant's husband three months later, the path had been cleared for the pastor's third marriage to Cynthia.

     After A.B. Schirmer became a prime suspect in this second wife's death the pastor left the ministry. He joined a three-person evangelical singing group called "Beroean." 

     To bolster their case that this man of God had murdered his second wife, the police consulted an expert in traffic accident investigation. According to this expert the damage to Schirmer's PT Cruiser suggested that when he hit the guardrail he was only traveling 25 MPH, a speed that would not have resulted in Betty Schirmer's severe head trauma and brain damage.

     In July 2010 the county coroner, a forensic pathologist named Dr. Samuel Land, ruled Betty Schirmer's manner of death a homicide. This opened the door to a criminal prosecution.

     Former pastor A. B. Schirmer, on September 13, 2010 in Tannersville, Pennsylvania, was taken into custody by the Pennsylvania State Police. He was charged with the murder of his second wife Betty. He also faced the charge of evidence tampering. At the time of his arrest the gospel singer was engaged to be married for the third time. The ex-pastor awaited his upcoming murder trial in the Monroe County Correctional Facility where he was incarcerated without bail.

     On September 17, 2010 the Monroe County prosecutor convened a grand jury to look into the death of Jewel Schirmer. Dr. Wayne Ross, the forensic pathologist for Lancaster County had studied photographs and other material pertaining to the 1999 death in the Lebanon UMC parsonage. Dr. Ross informed the grand jurors that the skull fracture Jewel had supposedly incurred from a fall down the basement steps would have required at least 750 pounds of pressure, a force way out of proportion to an accidental spill of this nature. Moreover, the forensic pathologist testified that the cuts to the victim's face were "highly suspicious and could have been caused by an object striking her head. There were 14 separate impact injuries to her head and face," Dr. Ross said, "as well as numerous abrasions and contusions throughout her upper body and arms." According to Dr. Ross, one of the bruises was in the shape of a handprint.

     Based on Dr. Ross' testimony and other evidence presented at the Monroe County Grand Jury session, Dauphin County Chief Deputy Coroner Lisa Potteiger changed Jewel Schirmer's manner of death from "undetermined" to "homicide." The Monroe County District Attorney charged the paster with first-degree murder.

     In March 2013, after a jury found Schirmer guilty of murdering Jewel Schirmer, a Monroe County judge sentenced the former minister and possible serial killer to life in prison.

     In September 2014 a jury found the former pastor guilty of murdering his wife Betty Jean in 2008. A Lebanon County judge sentenced him to an additional 40 years in prison.