The Donald Greenslit Arson Dismemberment Case

     Prior to his domestic assault conviction in October 2011, Donald Greenslit lived with his common-law wife Stacie Dorego and their two young children in a two-story house in Johnston, Rhode Island. Following Greenslit's conviction, probated sentence and no-contact court order, he moved out. The couple's relationship had been a tumultuous one, marred by numerous arrests for domestic violence. He beat Stacie Dorego, and beat her often.

     During the early morning hours of Monday, January 22, 2012, Johnston firefighters and rescue personnel were dispatched to the Pershing Road home after receiving a call regarding smoke coming from the house. Mr. Greenslit met the responders at the front door of the smoke-filled dwelling. The 52-year-old, after assuring the firefighters that all was well, ordered them to leave his property. Police officers pushed Greenslit aside so the emergency personnel could extinguish the fire and check on the children.

     Greenslit's children, found in their second-story bedroom, were rushed to the Hasbro Children's Hospital where they were treated for smoke inhalation. Firefighters quickly got control of the fire, but in the process made a gruesome discovery.

     In the fireplace the emergency responders found the dismembered and smoldering remains of a woman wrapped in a blanket. At the Johnston Police Department later that morning Mr. Greenslit admitted dismembering his wife with a power saw and setting fire to her mutilated corpse. Yes, he had stabbed Stacie Dorego to death, but in self-defense after she had attacked him with a knife.

     According to Dr. Christina Stanley, the Chief Medical Examiner for Rhode Island, the 39-year-old victim died from multiple stab wounds. The forensic pathologist ruled the death a criminal homicide.

     On January 23, 2012 a Providence County prosecutor charged Donald Greenslit with domestic murder, two counts of child abuse, the obstruction of fire officers, disorderly conduct and the violation of a non-contact order. Two months later a grand jury sitting in Providence indicted Mr. Greenslit on all charges. In April at his preliminary hearing the defendant pleaded not guilty to domestic murder and the other offenses. He recanted his statement to the police that he killed Dorego in self-defense.

     The Donald Greenslit murder trial got underway on March 1, 2013 in a Providence Superior Court. Following the selection of the jury and the opening statements, the prosecution on March 4, 2012 put two firefighters on the stand who testified the defendant tried to deny them entry into the smokey house. A Johnston detective described what he had found in the basement after the fire had been extinguished. The officer recovered a piece of flesh that bore Stacie Dorego's tattoo of a butterfly.

     Special Assistant Attorney General Sara Tindall-Woodman, on March 6, put a jailhouse snitch named Alex Boisclair on the stand. This witness said that he shared a cell with the defendant and after being cellmates for one day Greenslit confided in him that he stabbed his common-law wife five times. According to the police informant Donald Greenslit said he burned Dorego's body parts because he knew she had, upon her death, wished to be cremated. 

     Defense attorney Mark Dana, on cross-examination, accused this witness of incriminating Greenslit in return for prosecutorial leniency on his own behalf. Mr. Boisclair, in denying a prosecution deal, said he was simply doing what he thought was the right thing.

     On March 7, 2013 a DNA analyst testified that blood found on a circular saw recovered from the defendant's basement came from Stacie Dorego. The DNA expert was followed to the stand by the state's chief medical examiner who said Stacie Dorego's heart had been pierced three times by "something with a single edge." Following Dr. Christina Stanley's testimony the prosecution rested its case. 

     On Friday, March 8, 2013 defense attorney Mark Dana rested his case without putting the defendant on the stand. (While jurors are not supposed to take this as evidence of guilt they usually do.) Mr. Dana, in his jury summation, told jurors the police didn't test for DNA at the death scene because they didn't want to discover that someone else had committed the murder. He pointed out that without a confession, eyewitness or physical evidence linking his client to the crime scene, the prosecution's case was weak and circumstantial. The defense attorney also attacked the credibility of the jailhouse snitch.

     On March 11, 2013 the jury of ten women and two men found Donald Greenslit guilty of murder.

     On May 15, 2013 Judge Susan McGuirl sentenced Donald Greenslit to life in prison without the chance of parole.

Forensic Pathology

     Forensic pathologists are physicians educated and trained to determine the cause and manner of death in cases involving violent, sudden or unexplained fatalities. The cause of death is the medical reason the person died. One cause of death is asphyxia--lack of oxygen to the brain. It occurs as a result of drowning, suffocation, manual strangulation by ligature (such as by rope, belt, or length of cloth), crushing or carbon monoxide poisoning. Other causes of death include blunt force trauma, gunshot wound, stabbing, slashing, poisoning, heart attack, stroke or a sickness such as cancer, pneumonia or heart disease.

     For the forensic pathologist the most difficult task often involves detecting the manner of death--natural, accidental, suicidal or homicidal. This is because the manner of death isn't always revealed by the condition of the body. For example, a death resulting from a drug overdose could be the result of homicide, suicide or accident. Knowing exactly how the fatal drug got into the victim's body requires additional information, data that usually comes from a police investigation. When the circumstances of a suspicious death are not ascertained or are sketchy, and the death was not an obvious homicide, the medical examiner (or coroner) might classify the manner of death as "undetermined."

     The autopsy along with the crime-scene investigation is the starting point, the foundation, of a homicide investigation. If something is missed or mishandled on the autopsy table, if the forensic pathologist draws the wrong conclusion from the evidence, the investigation is doomed.

     Up until the 1930s, before the English forensic pathologist Dr. Bernard Spilsbury glamorized the profession through a series of high-profile murder case solutions, forensic pathology was called "the beastly science." Today, in the U.S., there are about 400 practicing forensic pathologists. For medical examiner and coroner systems to work properly we need at least 800 of these practitioners. On average, about 35 of the 15,000 students who enroll in medical school every year graduate to become forensic pathologists.

     Forensic pathologists in the United States are overworked. Given the nature of the job they are under constant pressure from politicians, prosecutors, homicide investigators, families of the deceased and the media. The pay is relatively low, they often work in unsanitary morgue conditions, and in some jurisdictions run out of space to store dead bodies. Many forensic pathologists burn out and more than a few have had mental breakdowns.    

The History of American Forensic Science

     By 1935 crime laboratories were up and running in New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. The FBI Lab opened its doors in 1933. The bureau's national fingerprint repository had been operating in Washington, D.C. since 1924, the year J. Edgar Hoover, an early advocate of scientific crime detection, became the agency's fourth director. August Vollmer, the progressive police administrator from Berkeley, California and Dean John Wigmore of Northwestern University Law School were tireless crusaders for forensic science and physical evidence as an alternative to coerced confessions, eyewitness testimony and jailhouse informants. Wigmore and Vollmer were the main forces behind the formation in Chicago of the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory in 1930. In 1938 the private lab became part of the Chicago Police Department.

     In the 1930s a pair of private practice forensic chemists and crime scene reconstruction analysts in the northwest, Oscar Heinrich and Luke May, were grabbing headlines by solving high-profile murder cases. Stories involving crimes solved through the scientific analysis of physical evidence had become commonplace features in the fact-crime magazines so popular at the time. Numerous textbooks and manuals had been published on the subjects of fingerprint identification, forensic ballistics, questioned documents, trace evidence analysis, forensic serology, forensic medicine, scientific lie detection (polygraph) and forensic anthropology, the identification and analysis of skeletal remains.

     Criminal investigation textbooks of this era contained detailed instructions on how to protect crime scenes, render crime scene sketches, photograph clues, mark and package physical evidence, dust for latent fingerprints, make plaster-of-Paris casts of tire tracks and footwear impressions, and in the case of sudden, unexplained or violent death, look for signs of criminal homicide. By the mid-thirties virtually every court in the country accepted the expert opinions of practitioners in the major forensic fields and jurors recognized the advantages of expert physical evidence interpretation over the more direct testimony of jailhouse snitches and eyewitnesses.

     Today, notwithstanding DNA science and computerized fingerprint identification and retrieval capabilities, crime solution percentages in the United States have not improved since the mid-thirties when the FBI started collecting crime statistics. The emphasis on street policing (order maintenance), the escalating war on drugs and the threat of domestic terrorism diminished the role of criminal investigation and forensic science in the administration of justice. At a time when DNA technology advanced far beyond the imaginations of the pioneers of forensic serology (Dr. Paul Kirk and others), rapists, pedophiles and serial killers escape detection and arrest due to DNA analysis backlogs created by a shortage of funds and experts.

     Ironically, one of the byproducts of DNA science has been the release of hundreds of innocent people convicted on the strength of coerced confessions, unreliable eyewitnesses and the testimony of jailhouse informants. In the small percentage of trials that involve the analysis of physical evidence, jurors are commonly exposed to conflicting scientific testimony. When faced with opposing experts jurors tend to disregard the science altogether. The forensic pioneers of the twenties and thirties would be appalled by this hired-gun phenomena and the low productivity of today's investigative services.

     During the first decade of the 21st Century, due to forensic misidentifications caused by substandard lab conditions and incompetent personnel, crime laboratories in, among other places, Houston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit and Boston had to be temporarily closed. During this period, for the first time in the history of the science, there were numerous high-profile fingerprint misidentifications. Moreover, modern forensic science has seen an infusion of pseudo-science and bogus expertise into the nation's courtrooms.

      In March 2009 the National Academy of Sciences, an organization within the National Institute of Justice, after an eighteen month study published a report criticizing the state of forensic science in America. The writers of the widely publicized report recommended that Congress create a federal agency to insure a firewall between forensic science and law enforcement; finance more research and personnel training; and promote universal standards of excellence in the troubled fields of DNA profiling, forensic firearms identification, fingerprint analysis, forensic document examination and forensic pathology. From this, one might reasonably conclude that modern forensic science, weighed against the hopes and dreams of its pioneers, has not lived up to its potential.

The Jerome Isaac Arson-Murder Case

     Arson-murder cases fall into three categories. It becomes arson-murder when the victim, for example, is shot to death and the killer sets a fire to cover the crime. A fire-setter who burns down a building for the insurance money and in the process kills an occupant no one knew was in the structure has also committed  arson-murder. And finally, using fire as the agent of death comprises arson-murder. The latter form of arson is the most unusual of the three.

     On Saturday December 17, 2011 in Brooklyn New York a crime took place that fell into the third arson-murder category. It involved the cruel, cold-blooded and sadistic murder of 73-year-old Doris Gillespie.

     Shortly after four in the afternoon as the victim returned from grocery shopping and was about to exit the elevator that stopped at her apartment floor, she encountered a man dressed like an exterminator who wore surgical gloves and a white dust mask perched atop his head the way Jackie Kennedy used to wear her sunglasses. The thin middle-aged man held a canister with a nozzle, a Molotov cocktail and a barbecue-style lighter. He methodically sprayed the victim and her grocery bags with a fine mist of gasoline then ignited the rag sticking out of the flammable liquid filled bottle. As he backed out of the elevator he tossed in the fuse-lit Molotov cocktail. The compartment filled with smoke and the victim, engulfed in flames, burned to death as she crouched against the rear wall of the elevator. Two video cameras recorded the murder.

     The following morning 47-year-old Jerome Isaac, with burns on the left side of his face, turned himself in to the New York City Police. He said he had been hired by the victim to clean out clutter from her apartment. He said she had fired him after accusing him of theft. After Mr. Isaac harassed this woman for the $2,000 he thought she owed him he set fire to her in the elevator.

     At Isaac's arraignment the magistrate denied him bail. The police, other than the fact Isaac didn't have a criminal record and had been seen around the neighborhood collecting bottles and cans, didn't know much about him except he'd been treated for mental illness.

     On January 11, 2013 Brooklyn Judge Del Giduice sentenced Jerome Issac to fifty years in prison. The judge called the crime the most brutal he had seen in his judicial career. "That is not something one can take from one's mind," he said.

     What makes this case so disturbing, beyond the nature of the crime itself, is that everywhere we go we are surrounded by people like Mr. Isaac who look and act harmless until something sets them off. There is nothing the police can do to protect us from people like this. All they can do is react, and by then it's too late.

The Catherine Walsh Murder Case: The Power of DNA Evidence

     A man kills a woman, does not get caught, and moves on with his life. Then one day 32 years later cops knock on his door, put him in handcuffs and haul the stunned suspect off to jail on the charge of murder. Before 1995 a story like this was the stuff of fiction. The advent of DNA technology, however, has made scenarios like this one not only possible but fairly common.

     In the old days (in the context of DNA science), when a murder investigation petered out and the trail grew cold detectives shelved the case, and, except for the victim's family, it was forgotten. Maybe the detective who had tried but failed to solve the murder thought about it every so often. But with dead witnesses, failed memories, lost documents and no leads, the old murder remained as dead as the victim. With the passage of enough time even the killer might forget the killing, or pretended it never happened. It used to be said that murder will out, but that was a lie.

     Thanks to DNA science old murder cases involving biological evidence such as hair follicles, saliva traces, bloodstains and semen residue can now come back to life and haunt killers who thought they had escaped detection. It's justice delayed but a lot better than no justice at all.

The Catherine Walsh Murder Case

     At noon on September 1, 1979, Peter J. Caltury Sr. entered the duplex in Monaca, Pennsylvania where his 23-year-old daughter Catherine Janet Walsh lived by herself. He found her dead, lying face-down on her bed with her hands tied behind her back with a bathrobe cord. Dressed in a nightgown and partially covered by the bed sheet, the victim had a blue scarf wrapped around her neck. When Mr. Caltury called the Monaca Police Department Officer Andrew Gall responded to the scene.
 
      It became apparent that robbery hadn't been the motive for the Walsh murder. The doors to the house had been locked when the victim's father checked in on his daughter and there were no signs of a struggle. Based on these conditions, investigators assumed the victim had known her killer.

     Murder was rare in Monaca, a Beaver County town on the eastern bank of the Ohio River 35 miles north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The fact Catherine Walsh had been sexually assaulted and murdered in her own bedroom shocked the residents of this small community.

     Catherine, a year out of Monaca High School, married Scott E. Walsh in August 1976. In December 1978 he filed for divorce on the grounds she had "violated her marriage vows." Catherine moved into the duplex after the separation. At the time of her death, however, she was still married to Scott Walsh.

     The Beaver County coroner determined that Catherine Walsh had been strangled to death and ruled the case a homicide. Detectives questioned, as the obvious suspect, Scott Walsh the estranged husband. Investigators also interviewed a man named Gregory Scott Hopkins from the nearby borough of Bridgewater. Mr. Hopkins admitted he had had a sexual relationship with the married victim but said it had ended a month before her death.

     Although detectives worked hard on the Walsh murder case they were unable to acquire the evidence they needed to arrest a suspect. Years passed and the case went dormant. Detectives worked on other crimes and the Walsh case suspects went on with their lives. Gregory Hopkins became a successful building contractor, and in November 2010, was elected to the Bridgewater Borough Council. He married his first wife in 1967 and divorced her in 1980. He married again in 1983, divorcing this wife in 1999. In 2001 he married Karen L. Fisher.

     In 2010 the Pennsylvania State Police, working off a federal grant, re-opened several old homicide cases that featured biological evidence that could be linked to murder suspects through DNA analysis. One of these cold-case investigations included the September 1979 murder of Catherine Walsh. In December 2011 a state forensic scientist took DNA samples from several people, including Gregory Hopkins. After comparing biological trace evidence from the victim's nightgown, the bathrobe cord and the crime scene bed sheet to Gregory Hopkins' DNA sample, the scientist declared a match.

     On January 29, 2012 detectives arrested Gregory Hopkins at his home for the murder of Catherine Walsh. They booked the Bridgewater Councilman into the Beaver County Jail. Six days later, James Ross, Hopkins' attorney, asked the judge to grant his client bail. The judge, ruling that Catherine Walsh's murder was a non-bailable crime, denied the defendant's request.

     Gregory Hopkins' attorney, promising a "vigorous" defense, told reporters that "Mr. Hopkins is a very reputable man in the community, has been in business for 40 years, served on the borough council and I think the arrest comes as a shock to many people." 

     On November 5, 2012 Common Pleas Judge Harry E. Knafelc ruled that the state could not use a report by the well-known Pittsburgh-based forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht. According to Dr. Wecht, the murder scene DNA evidence revealed that Mr. Hopkins had been in the victim's bed lying on top of her when the murder took place. Judge Knafelc, in ruling Dr. Wecht's analysis inadmissible as evidence, cited insufficient scientific data to back up his expert opinion.

     The Hopkins murder trial got underway on November 10, 2013 in the Beaver County Courthouse. Assistant District Attorney Brittany Smith, in her opening statement to the jury, placed the defendant at the murder scene through his DNA found on the bed sheet, nightgown and the bathrobe cord tied around the victim's wrists.

     Defense attorney James Ross told the jurors that his client's DNA was at the murder scene because he and the victim had engaged in sex the summer before her death.

     Defense attorney Ross, in his cross-examination of retired state trooper Richard Matas, got the prosecution witness to concede that when he processed the Walsh murder scene he had not seen semen stains on the body, the bed or the nightgown. Attorney Ross showed the witness a photograph depicting a bedroom trash can with a piece of tissue beside it. Ross asked the witness why the tissue hadn't been collected as potential evidence. "In hindsight, perhaps I made a mistake," replied the former officer.

     Andrew Gall, the former Monaca patrol officer, testified on cross-examination that he had not worn gloves at the site of the Walsh murder.

     At the close of the prosecution's case which featured the expert testimony of several forensic scientists, the 67-year-old defendant took the stand and testified he had not been in the victim's apartment when she was murdered. According to him the last time he visited her apartment was several weeks before her death.

     On November 22, 2013 the jury of five men and seven women found Gregory Hopkins guilty of third-degree murder. Judge Henry Knafelc, on February 26, 2014, sentenced him to 8 to 16 years in prison.

     In the Walsh case crime scene mistakes made by the police did not diminish the prosecutorial power of DNA evidence.

The Isiah Murrietta-Golding Police-Involved Shooting Case

     On April 14, 2017 in Fresno, California, 19-year-old Eugenio Ybarra, his 17-year-old brother and three of their friends got into an argument in a pizza shop parking lot with 16-year-old Isiah Murrietta-Golding and his 17-year-old brother. When Ybarra and his four passengers drove off they were followed by the Murrietta-Golding brothers. As the vehicles approached the Ybarra residence one of the Murrietta-Golding brothers in the vehicle behind them fired a shot into their car. No one was hit but the shot caused the driver of the car to smash into a tree, killing Eugenio Ybarra. Isiah Murrietta-Golding and his brother drove away from the scene of the crash.

     On Saturday, the day after Eugenio Ybarra's death, police officers while surveilling the Murrietta-Golding house spotted a car pass by with Isiah Murrietta-Golding in the front passenger's seat. Police officers pulled the vehicle over in a nearby shopping plaza parking lot. One of the officers, his gun pulled, ordered the car's occupants, Murrietta-Golding and two other teens to get out of the vehicle with their hands over their heads. The suspects were told to walk backwards toward the police officer. Two of the teens complied, Isiah Murrietta-Golding fled.

     With Sergeant Ray Villalvazo in pursuit, Murrietta-Golding climbed a picket fence and landed on the other side which was the property of a closed daycare center. Officer Villalvazo, from a distance of about 35 feet fired a single shot at the fleeing 16-year-old. The bullet struck the teen in the back of the head causing him to collapse unconscious to the ground.

     The officer approached the fallen suspect and with his gun out searched for but did not find a weapon on him. Officer Villalvazo rolled the boy onto his stomach, pulled back his arms and placed him into handcuffs.

     When medics arrived at the scene one of them requested that the handcuffs be taken off the dying suspect. Officer Villalvazo informed the medics that the cuffs would be removed at the hospital.

     The shooting of Isiah Murrietta-Golding on the daycare center property was captured on the school's surveillance camera.

     Isiah Murrietta-Golding died shortly after arriving at a nearby hospital.

     Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer ordered an internal investigation of the fatal police-involved shooting. When questioned by police department investigators looking into the case, Sergeant Villalvazo said he had feared for his life when the fleeing murder suspect reached into his waistband several times in what the officer interpreted as reaching for a weapon.

     That April a prosecutor charged Isiah Murrietta-Golding's 17-year-old brother with one count of murder and three counts of assault with a deadly weapon in connection with the death of Eugenio Ybarra the day before Isiah was shot to death by officer Villalvazo.

     In March 2018, police chief Jerry Dyer announced that the internal police inquiry into the fatal police-involved shooting of Isiah Murrietta-Golding cleared officer Ray Villalvazo of any wrongdoing. According to the chief, the officer acted within the department's use of deadly force policy. The police department did not, however, make the daycare center surveillance video available to the public.

     Stuart Chandler, the attorney representing Isiah Murrietta-Golding's father, filed a wrongful death suit against the city of Fresno and the police department. The attorney had viewed the daycare center surveillance video, evidence he intended to introduce at the civil trial scheduled for sometime in 2020.

     Attorney Chandler, informed by what he had seen on the video, said this to reporters: "There absolutely is no way the officer's life was in danger. He [the suspect] was running away and he was trying to hold up his pants."

     In April 2018, Isiah Murrietta-Golding's 17-year-old brother, in connection with Eugenio Ybarra's death, pleaded guilty to assault with a deadly weapon. At the juvenile's sentencing hearing he told the court that it was his brother Isiah who fired into the car that crashed into the tree killing the 19-year-old Ybarra.

     In October 2019, attorney Stuart Chandler released the daycare center video of the fatal police-involved shooting. Regarding officer Villalvazo's putting handcuffs on the downed suspect, the attorney said: "He's unconscious and in the process of dying. What is the threat? They just saw him as an animal who had to be shot."

     Following the release of the surveillance video depicting the shooting, a video that could be seen on social media, the new Fresno chief of police, Andrew Hall, defended officer Villalvazo's use of deadly force on the grounds that Isiah Murrietta-Golding was a murder suspect known to be armed.

Volga Adams: New York City's Infamous Psychic Swindler

     Mrs. Frances Friedman of Manhattan's Upper West Side had been a widow for eight years. In September 1956 she visited a psychic parlor on Madison Avenue run by Volga Adams, a self-appointed gypsy princess. Adams advertised her services in the form of a large drawing painted on her storefront window of a hand, palm facing out. Mrs. Friedman hoped the psychic--"Madam Lillian"--would read her horoscope and identify the source of her depression.

     Volga Adams, a gypsy psychic well known to detectives on the NYPD Pickpocket and Confidence Squad, quickly diagnosed Mrs. Friedman's problem. "There is evil in you," she proclaimed with great authority. Adams instructed her client to go home and wrap an egg in a handkerchief that had belonged to her dead husband then put these two items into a shoe made for a left foot. The psychic instructed Mrs. Friedman to return to the parlor the next day with the handkerchief and the egg. At this point Mrs. Friedman should have had the good sense to walk out of the shop and not return.

     As instructed, the prospective mark returned to the gypsy psychic's place of fraud. Adams cracked an egg she had switched with the one brought to her. The phony egg contained a small plastic head. The greenish-yellow head featured a pair of horns, pointed eyebrows and a black goatee. According to the psychic the presence of the devil's head in the egg was an ominous sign. It meant that Mrs. Friedman was cursed. But why?

     Phase two of Volga Adam's psychic confidence game involved handing the victim a dollar bill that had a rip in it. Friedman was told to take the currency home, put it in a handkerchief and wear it near her breast for two days.

     Upon her return to Volga Adam's scam parlor, Madam Lillian, following a prayer in a foreign tongue, opened the handkerchief to find a mended dollar bill. This "miracle" supposedly revealed the source of Mrs. Friedman's curse. The money her husband left her upon his death was the problem. Money, the root of all evil, had cursed the widow. If Mrs. Friedman wanted to rid herself of the monetary curse she would have to give Madam Lillian all of that money, cash she would ritualistically burn. Once that was done the widow's happiness would return. Divesting herself of the filthy money would also clear up her troublesome skin rash. Who would have guessed this gypsy princess was also a dermatologist.

     A few days after the miracle of the mended dollar bill Mrs. Friedman withdrew money from six bank accounts and cashed in all of her government bonds. She delivered the $108,273, stuffed in a paper bag, to the Madison Avenue psychic parlor. 

     Volga Adams suggested that Mrs. Friedman, having rid herself of the evil money, leave the city for a few days to enjoy some "clean air." This ploy in confidence game terminology is called "cooling the mark." The next day, as Madam Lillian left town herself, her mark headed for the Catskill Mountains in eastern Pennsylvania. A perfect score.

     For a period of a year after Volga Adams bilked Mrs. Friedman out of her life's savings she continued "cooling the mark" with regular phone calls, made collect, from various places around the country. Back in Manhattan in the fall of 1957, Adams informed Mrs. Friedman that she needed another $10,000 to remove traces of the lingering evil underlying the victim's curse. Mrs. Friedman, obviously unaware that she had been swindled, gave Adams the cash. She turned over the money on the condition that the psychic not destroy it and later return it to her. After she had given the swindler $108, 273, Mrs. Friedman barely had enough money to support herself. A couple months after walking off with the $10,000, Volga Adams called the victim and announced that she could only return $2,000 of the $10,000. The psychic said she was in Florida and would be returning to New York City soon.

     The con game had run its course. Volga Adams did not return to Manhattan and she quit calling the mark. Thanks to Madam Lillian, Mrs. Friedman not only remained cursed with depression, she was now broke. Finally, she picked up the telephone and called the police. When detectives with the Pickpocket and Confidence Squad heard Mrs. Friedman's story they recognized the M.O. and knew that Madam Lillian was Volga Adams, one of the city's most notorious con artists.

     Following her indictment in New York City for grand larceny, the 42-year-old defendant went on trial in February 1962. Five weeks later the jury of five women and seven men informed the judge they were deadlocked and could not reach an unanimous verdict. The judge had no choice but to declare a mistrial.

     The Manhattan prosecutor scheduled a second trial for May 1963. Volga Adams avoided that proceeding by pleading guilty to a lesser theft charge. After the judge handed the defendant a suspended sentence she left the city. But before she departed for Florida Volga Adams placed a curse on the prosecutor. "No woman will ever love him," she predicted.

     Volga Adams continued preying on vulnerable women. A few years after Madam Lillian left Manhattan, Frances Friedman died. At the time of her death she was lonely, humiliated and depressed. Thanks to the gypsy princess, Mrs. Friedman died broke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     In October 2012 the Montgomery County District Attorney announced he would be asking for the death penalty at the upcoming Verna McClain trial.

     Verna McClain in November 2013 pleaded guilty to First Degree Murder to avoid the death penalty. A few months later the judge sentenced her to life in prison without the chance of parole.

The Red Sash Murder Case

     In September 1995 the daughter-in-law of Josephine Galbraith found the 76-year-old woman dead in the guest bedroom of her Palo Alto, California home. Josephine Galbraith's husband, 79-year-old Nelson Galbraith, a retired music school owner and insurance salesman, said he was watching TV in another room when she passed away. A detective from the Palo Alto Police Department and an investigator from the Santa Clara Coroner's Office arrived at the scene to find Josephine lying face-up on the bed with three superficial cuts on her left wrist and a red bathrobe sash tied around her neck. Next to her body investigators found a bloody eight-inch knife, a razor blade with some blood on it and a white 5-gallon bucket containing a small quantity of blood.

     The bathrobe sash, 62 inches in length, was tightly wrapped around Josephine Galbraith's neck three times. After each wrap the sash had been tied with a double-knot. The three cuts on her wrist, referred to as "hesitation marks," were typical of the half-hearted attempt of a suicidal person who couldn't bring herself to make the deeper more painful slashes necessary to cause death by bleeding. There was no suicide note. The coroner's investigator, a man who had been on the job 28 years recognized the scene as a suicide. The Palo Alto detective, based on the evidence at the scene, agreed with this assessment.

     The investigators figured that if Josephine Galbraith had been murdered the killer would not have made the hesitation cuts. Moreover, the pattern of blood spatter did not suggest a struggle. And the presence of the bucket intended to make the scene less messy was not consistent with a murder scene. Both investigators also knew that while people cannot manually strangle themselves (they pass out before they die) people can strangle themselves to death by ligature--the use of a rope, electrical wire, necktie or other length of cloth such as a bathrobe sash. They also knew that Josephine Galbraith's death would have been slow enough to allow her to wrap and tie the sash three times. Given the nature of the people involved and the physical evidence at the scene, the investigators had no doubt that this woman had taken her own life.

     Two days after the death Dr. Angelo Ozoa, the Santa Clara County Coroner, performed the autopsy, a procedure that took him only 45 minutes. Dr. Ozoa found the cause of death to be "asphyxiation by ligature." This did not surprise anyone. What did shock a lot of people, including the investigators, was his manner of death ruling: "strangled by assailant." Dr. Ozoa based this finding on two assumptions: Josephine Galbraith was too old and frail to have tied the three knots so tightly; and even if she did have the strength, she wouldn't have remained conscious long enough to complete the task. Since Nelson Galbraith was the only other person in the house at the time of his wife's death, if she had been murdered he must have been the assailant.

     Just days before her death Josephine Galbraith was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, an illness that five years earlier had caused the slow and painful death of her sister. Even before the diagnosis she told friends and relatives that she wanted to kill herself. She informed one of her sons that she would like to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge and asked another son, a physician, to provide her with the drugs to end her life. He refused.

     Nelson Galbraith, the man implicitly incriminated by Dr. Ozoa's manner of death ruling, had severe arthritis of the hands which would have made it difficult, in not impossible, for him to have tied the knots around his wife's neck. Moreover, there was nothing in Mr. Galbraith's background or in his relationship with his wife that made him a likely murderer. Investigators, urged on by the county prosecutor's office, nevertheless pushed forward with the case against him, albeit at a snail's pace. In the meantime Mr. Galbraith's life became a living hell. He complained to a journalist about being referred to in the media as the "Red Sash Murderer" and was spending thousands of dollars on his defense. (Ultimately his defense costs would reach more than $300,000.)

     Palo Alto Police, guns drawn, stormed Mr. Galbraith's house in January 1997 and hauled the 81-year-old suspect away on the charge of first-degree murder. In August 1998, almost three years after his wife's death, Nelson Galbraith, who had been allowed to make bail, went on trial for murder. The prosecution's key witness, Dr. Ozoa, told the jury that in all his years as a forensic pathologist he had never heard of a woman killing herself by ligature. (Suicide by ligature, however, was a well-recognized method of death that was well documented in textbooks and scientific journals.)

     The defense called to the stand forensic pathologists who disagreed with Dr. Ozoa and argued that the defendant could not have physically committed the crime. Following two and a half weeks of testimony, the jury deliberated for one day and returned a verdict of not guilty. Following the acquittal the prosecutor's office sought the opinion of a forensic pathologist in the Santa Clara County Coroner's Office regarding the manner of Josephine Galbraith's death. The pathologist agreed with the defense experts: the poor woman had killed herself.

     Nelson Galbraith, convinced he had been maliciously prosecuted, sued Dr. Ozoa for $10 million. To bolster his case Mr Galbraith spent $10,000 to have his wife's body exhumed and sent to Salt Lake City to be examined by Dr. Todd Grey, the medical examiner for the state of Utah. According to Dr. Grey, Dr. Ozoa's incorrect finding of homicide was predicated on an incomplete autopsy. Dr. Ozoa had, among other things, neglected to dissect the dead woman's neck, a procedure that could have helped determine how long it had taken her to die. He had also failed to interpret the swelling in her brain and the broken blood vessels in her face and eyes as evidence of a slow death. Dr. Ozoa, when confronted with Dr Grey's opinion of his work in the Galbraith case, insisted he had performed a complete autopsy and that the woman had been murdered.

     In 2002, almost seven years after Dr. Ozoa's autopsy in the Galbraith case, the Medical Board of California, citing Dr Ozoa's work in that case, voted to suspend the 77-year-old's license to practice medicine in the state. Two months later Nelson Galbraith died. Two of his sons kept the civil case alive, and in 2008, Santa Clara County settled the matter for $400,000. 

The Douglas Prade Murder Case

     At ten-thirty in the morning of Thanksgiving Day 1997 a medical assistant found 41-year-old Dr. Margo Prade slumped behind the wheel of her van in the doctor's office parking lot. The Akron, Ohio physician, shot six times with a handgun at close range, had fought with her murderer. Physical evidence of this struggle included buttons ripped from Dr. Prade's lab coat, a bite mark on her left inner arm and traces of blood and tissue under her fingernails.

     A few months after the murder, Akron police arrested the victim's husband, Douglas Evans Prade. Captain Prade, a 29 year veteran of the Akron Police Department, denied shooting his wife to death. He insisted that at the time of the killing he was in the workout room of the couple's Copley Township condominium complex.

     In 1997 DNA science compared to today was quite primitive. As a result DNA tests of trace evidence from the bite mark and the blood and tissue under the victim's fingernails were inconclusive. DNA analysts were unable to include or exclude Captain Prade as the source of this crime scene evidence.

     Video footage from a security camera at a car dealership next to the murder scene revealed the shadowy figure of a man climbing into Dr. Prade's van at 9:10 in the morning of her death. A hour and a half later the man exited the murder vehicle and was seen driving out of the parking lot in a light-colored car. Homicide detectives never identified this man who could not have been taller than five-nine. The suspect, Captain Prade, a black man, stood over six-foot-three. Had investigators focused their efforts on identifying the man in the surveillance video they may have resolved the case. But detectives had their minds set on the victim's husband and ignored all evidence that pointed in a different direction.

     To make their case against Captain Douglas Prade detectives asked a retired Akron dentist named Dr. Thomas Marshall to compare a photograph of the death scene bite mark to a dental impression  of the suspect's lower front teeth. According to Dr. Marshall, the only person who could have bitten Dr. Prade was her husband. The suspect's known dental impressions, according to the dentist, matched the crime scene evidence perfectly. At the time, before advanced DNA technology exposed bite mark identification analysis as junk science, Dr. Marshall's identification carried great weight.

     In September 1998, following a two-week trial in a Summit county court, the jury after deliberating only four hours found Douglas Prade guilty of murdering his wife. The only evidence the prosecution had pointing to the defendant's guilt was Dr. Thomas Marshall's bite mark identification. Without the dentist's testimony there wouldn't have been enough evidence against Douglas Prade to justify his arrest.

     Following the guilty verdict the defendant stood up, turned to face the courtroom spectators, and said, "I didn't do this. I am an innocent convicted person. God, myself, Margo and the person who killed Margo all know I'm innocent." Common Pleas Judge Mary Spicer sentenced Douglas Prade to life without the chance of parole until he served 26 years. Shortly thereafter the prisoner began serving his sentence at the state prison in Madison, Ohio. At that point he expected to die behind bars.

     In 2004, attorneys with the Jones Day law firm in Akron and the Ohio Innocence Project took up Douglas Prade's case. After years of motions, petitions, reports and hearings an Ohio judge ordered DNA tests of the saliva traces from the bite wound, scrapings from the victim's lab coat and scrapings from under Dr. Prade's fingernails.

     In August 2012 DNA analysis of the crime scene trace evidence revealed that none of the associative evidence came from Douglas Prade. (The DNA work was performed by the DNA Lab Diagnostic Center in Fairfield, Ohio.) Summit County Judge Judy Hunter, on January 29, 2013, ordered the release of the 65-year-old prisoner.

     On March 19, 2014 an Ohio appeals court decided that the new DNA evidence did not prove that Mr, Prade didn't murder his wife. The appellate judge said that Mr. Prade's release from prison was a mistake and that he should be taken back into custody. The morning after that decision Mr. Prade found himself back behind bars.

      In March 2018 the Ohio Supreme Court refused to hear his case.

     Douglas Prade's attorneys began appealing his conviction through the federal appellate court system. After the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Prade's motion for a new trial the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court. On November 6, 2019, America's highest court refused to hear the appellant's case. This essentially exhausted Douglas Prade's legal remedies.

    Douglas Prade is serving his time at the Lorain Correctional Institution in Lorain, Ohio. The 72-year-old will be eligible for parole in 2025.

     In June 2025 Mr. Prade's first parole request was denied. His next parole hearing is in 2033. 

Journalistic Ethics in The Naemm Davis Subway Murder

     At 12:30 PM on Monday, December 3, 2012, 58-year-old Ki-Suck Han stood with other New Yorkers waiting for their trains at the Times Square subway station at 49th Street and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. Mr. Han, who was currently unemployed, had once owned a midtown dry cleaning business. He had come into Manhattan from his home in Queens to renew his Korean passport. That day, Naemm Davis, a 30-year-old homeless man wandered about the platform above the tracks mumbling to himself and alarming some of the subway travelers. Mr. Han (who reportedly had been drinking) asked Naemm Davis to stop bothering the other people. The two men exchanged angry words, and following a brief scuffle, Davis threw Mr. Han off the subway platform onto the tracks below.

     Dozens of subway patron looked on as Mr. Han struggled to pull himself off the tracks and back up to the armpit-high platform. He couldn't make it, and after being on the tracks for about a minute was hit by a southbound train that did not have time to stop. A medical student from the Beth Israel Medical Center went to Mr. Han who was face down on the tracks and still alive. The student rolled him over and tried to save him by beating on his chest. Some of the people standing on the subway platform used  their cellphones to video Mr. Han as he lay on the tracks below. A short time later Ki-Suck Han died at Saint Luke's Hospital.

     The next day police officers arrested Naemm Davis in midtown Manhattan. While being questioned by detectives he said, "He [Han] wouldn't leave me alone, so I pushed him. I saw him get hit by the train. I said to him, '[expletive], get out of my face.'"

     On Tuesday, December 4, 2012, the day of Naemn Davis' arrest, the New York Post on its front page published a large photograph of Mr. Han standing between the tracks and the platform wall with the back of his head to the camera as he looked toward the oncoming train. The oddly tranquil photograph, taken just moments before impact, featured the headline "DOOMED" and the caption: "Pushed on the subway track, this man is about to die." The photograph had been taken by R. Umar Abbasi, a freelance photo-journalist who just happened to be on the train platform that day. Mr. Umar sold the image to the New York Post for an undisclosed amount.

     The subway station murder, a homicide that in its own right would have created widespread fear and anger, sparked public outrage over the fact no one on the train station platform reached down and pulled Mr. Han to safety. People also wondered why Mr. Abbasi, instead of getting a dramatic and newsworthy photograph, hadn't dropped his camera to save this man. And editors at the New York Post were under fire for simply publishing Abbasi's picture.

     R. Umar Abbasi, against a tidal wave of criticism, tried to defend his behavior on the New York Post website. The photographer wrote that he flashed his camera 49 times with the intent of catching the attention of the subway motorman. "I wanted to help the man," he wrote, "but I couldn't figure out how to help. It all happened so fast. I had no idea what I was shooting. I'm not even sure it was registering with me what was happening. I was just looking at that train coming." Mr. Abbasi said he didn't understand why others who were closer to the tracks didn't try to save Mr. Han.

     Some media critics took issue with the New York Post for what they considered the unethical journalistic act of buying and publishing Mr. Abbasi's photograph of the doomed Mr. Han. A pundit named Lauren Ashburn called the act "profit-motive journalism at its worst."

     Howard Kurtz, the host of CNN's "Reliable Sources," a weekly TV talk show about the media, in recognizing that Mr. Han's murder comprised every subway traveler's nightmare, was less critical of The New York Post. Mr. Kutz did "wonder why the photographer's first instinct was to take pictures." The answer to that question was perhaps this: Mr. Abbasi was a photo-journalist. He was not a police officer, firefighter or paramedic. Mr. Abbasi was not in the business of saving lives but in the business of taking pictures.

     On Wednesday, December 5, 2012, Charen Kim, a lawyer representing Ki-Suck Han's wife Serim told reporters the family had been shocked by the New York Post photograph. The family didn't understand why no one helped Mr. Han. During the press conference the lawyer didn't mention Naemm Davis, the man responsible for Mr. Han's death.

     Naemm Davis was held without bail on the charge of second-degree murder. He had a history of drug related arrests in Pennsylvania and New York.

     In a December 7, 2012 jailhouse interview with a reporter with the New York Post, Naeem Davis said he had been coaxed into shoving Mr. Han off the platform by voices in his head that he couldn't control.

     At his January 15, 2013 arraignment hearing Mr. Davis pleaded not guilty to the murder charge. According to police documents he told investigators that the victim had "rolled like a bowling ball" when he fell onto the subway tracks. Because Naemm Davis was seething over a comment an acquaintance made two days earlier about his Timberland boots, his "head wasn't where it was supposed to be that day. He [Ki-Suck Han] came at the wrong time."

     At the arraignment hearing Defense attorney Stephen Pokart argued that  Mr. Han, who started the fight, was pursuing his client. Prosecutor James Lin countered by pointing out how the defendant's statements revealed that he did not feel threatened and had acted out of anger and malice.

     In 2013 the victim's daughter, Ashley Han, sued the New York City Transit Authority for $30 million.

     In March 2016 Naemm Davis pleaded guilty to the reduced charge of manslaughter. The judge sentenced him to 22 years in prison.

The Infamous Bell, California Public Corruption Case

     The Los Angeles Times in July 2010 exposed public corruption in Bell, one of the poorer suburban communities in Los Angeles County. Investigative journalists revealed that the city manager, his assistant, members of the city council and the chief of police of this town of 40,000 were being paid salaries that were, even by California standards, outrageously high.

     Robert Rizzo, the city manager, made $800,000 a year as part of a combined annual salary and compensation package. Mr. Rizzo lived in a mansion and was wealthy enough to raise thoroughbred racing  horses. His assistant, Angela Spaccia, pulled in $375,000 a year. Six of the part-time city council members each made $100,000 a year for essentially doing nothing. The clueless taxpayers of Bell, California were being taken on a ride.

     In March 2011, following criminal investigations by the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office and investigators with the state, Robert Rizzo and seven other Bell city officers were indicted on various charges of public corruption. Mr. Rizzo faced 50 counts of misappropriating public funds, conflict of interest, falsifying documents and giving himself and Angela Spaccia raises without council approval. The eight defendants were accused of stealing just under $6 million from the taxpayers of this small, debt-ridden town.

     Randy Adams, the 59-year-old hired by Robert Rizzo as Bell's chief of police in August 2009, was not among those indicted for public corruption. Chief Adams, who had been the chief of police of the Glendale, California Police Department, had been given a sweet deal by city manager Rizzo. Besides his whopping salary of $457,000 a year, Randy Adams was immediately declared physically disabled notwithstanding his impressive time at a 5 K race he ran a month before starting the job. In the Golden State, being declared officially disabled (in Adam's case a bad back and knees) meant that he could retire whenever he wanted and receive a pension equal to one-half of his salary--for life. (City manager Rizzo and his assistant were charged with falsifying public records to show that the chief was only being paid $200,000 a year.)

     Although patrol officers in California routinely made over $100,00 a year, being paid $457,000 a year to run a police department with 40 employees was excessive, even in California. For example, Charles Beck, the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, an agency that employed 13,000, made $307,000 a year.

     After the Los Angeles Times broke the story of the corruption in Bell, the taxpayers revolted and threw the bums out of office.  Randy Adams left the police department in August 2010. After working a year as its chief he was entitled, pursuant to his employment contract, a pension of $22,000 a month.

     In August 2012, Randy Adams, instead of quietly enjoying the good life at the expense of Bell's struggling taxpayers, sued the city for the one-year severance pay he said he was owed by the municipality. (A year earlier the angry ex-chief sued the city for not reimbursing him for the legal costs he had incurred defending himself against the public corruption scandal.)

     In Bell, California and who knows how many other places in the Golden State, crime didn't pay nearly as well as crime fighting, assuming you could tell the difference between the two.

     On October 23, 2012 a judge ruled against Randy Adams in his suit to recover severance pay and legal expenses.

     In January 2013 former city manager Robert Rizzo, his assistant Angela Spaccia and four members of the city council were convicted of public corruption. The former city council members were each given the light sentences of five years probation. The judge sentenced Robert Rizzo and Angela Spaccia to 12-year prison terms.

The Stiletto Heel Murder Case

     At four in the morning on Sunday, June 9, 2013 a resident of the Parkline condominium high rise in Houston's upscale Museum District called 911 to report a possible domestic disturbance in an adjacent apartment. When police officers knocked on the door of the 18th floor residence they were met by a woman covered in someone else's blood.

     The woman who answered the door that morning was 44-year-old Ana Lila Trujillo, a former message therapist who was visiting the home of a University of Houston research professor employed in the school's  biology and biochemistry department. The officers found Professor Alf Stefan lying face-up in a pool of his own blood. The 59-year-old researcher in the field of women's reproductive health lay sprawled on the floor in the hall between the entranceway and the kitchen. The dead man had ten puncture wounds in his head and fifteen to twenty such wounds to his neck and chest. The death scene had all the markings of an overkill murder committed by someone who was enraged and out of control.

     The blood-covered Trujillo told the Houston police officers that the professor, her boyfriend, had physically attacked her. In defending herself she struck him with the stiletto heel of one of her pumps. When questioned by detectives at police headquarters she asked for a lawyer then clammed-up.

     Later that Sunday Ana Trujillo was booked into the Harris County Jail on the charge of murder. The next day she walked free after posting $100,000 bond.

     Since Ana Trujillo and Professor Stefan were alone in his apartment the prosecution would have to make a circumstantial case of murder based upon the physical evidence and the character of the defendant and the history of her relationship with the professor.

     On April 10, 2014 a jury in Houston, Texas found Ana Trujillo guilty of capital murder. The prosecutor successfully portrayed her as a self-serving violent woman who lived in her own world. The Trujillo defense failed to make the case that she killed an abusive lover in self-defense.

     Based on the advice of her attorney the defendant did not take the stand on her own behalf.

     The judge sentenced Ana Trujillo to life in prison.  

The Adam Kaufman "Spray Tan" Murder Case

     Adam Kaufman, on November 7, 2007, called 911 from his home in Aventura, Florida. Sounding hysterical, the 34-year-old south Florida real estate developer informed the dispatcher that he had awaken that morning to find his wife, Eleonora (Lina) slumped unconscious in the bathroom, her neck draped over a bar on a magazine rack. Paramedics rushed the 33-year-old to the hospital where she died later that day.

     One of the responding officers with the Aventura Police Department touched the hood of Adam's car and found it warm. Another officer noticed that only one side of the couple's bed had been slept in. As a result, the police didn't believe Adam Kaufman when he claimed to have slept all night next to  his wife.

     Associate Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner Dr. Chester Gwen conducted the autopsy. Although the forensic pathologist found injuries on Lina's upper-back and abrasions on her chin, neck, left shoulder and chest as well as hemorrhages in her interior neck muscles, declared her cause and manner of death "undetermined."

     Without a finding of death by homicide, the Kaufman case remained in limbo for 18 months. In May 2009 Miami-Dade County Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Bruce A. Hyma ruled that Lina Kaufman had died by mechanical asphyxiation, that she had been strangled. The following month the prosecutor, even though he didn't have evidence of marital strife or a motive, charged Adam Kaufman with second-degree murder.

     At Adam Kaufman's bond hearing his attorneys revealed the defense version of the death: Lina Kaufman, with a history of fainting spells, had applied a spray-on tanning substance that resulted in a violent allergic reaction causing respiratory failure. When she collapsed she fell with her neck draped over the magazine rack bar.

     Adam Kaufman's trial commenced on May 7, 2012 before Judge Brownyn Miller in Miami, Florida. A week later, following the jury selection process, defense attorney Bill Matthewman, in his opening remarks, unveiled the new defense version of Lina Kaufman's death: while sitting on the toilet she had a heart attack and fell forward with her neck hitting the bar of the magazine rack. In addressing the prosecutor's case, attorney Matthewman said, "The state's evidence cannot even prove that a homicide occurred, let alone that Adam Kaufman did it....The case is a tragedy of errors. An innocent man was charged with a non-existent crime."

     Prosecutor Joe Mansfield in his opening speech to the jurors said that Lina Kaufman had been a "healthy, active woman, arguably in the best shape of her life. All of that ended because of the actions of that man, her husband."

      In this case the outcome would come down to how Lina Kaufman had died, naturally or by the hand of her husband. That meant that the important testimony would be of a medico-legal nature.

     On May 16, 2012, Dr. Bruce Hyma took the stand for the prosecution. The Chief Medical Examiner for Miami-Dade County testified that Lina Kaufman had died from strangulation and not a heart attack. Dr. Tracy Baker, the plastic surgeon who had enhanced Mrs. Kaufman's breasts told the jury that when he examined her a few months before her death she was in good health. Defense attorney Albert Milian asked Dr. Baker on cross-examination if Lina could have lied to him about her medical history. The witness answered yes.

     Dr. Chester Gwen, the former Miami-Dade County forensic pathologist who had performed the autopsy in 2007, testified that the injuries he found on Kaufman's body had not been caused by emergency personnel who had tried to revive her. On cross-examination Dr. Gwen admitted that in April 2012 he had said that in his expert opinion the cause of Lina Kaufman's death was still a mystery to him. The forensic pathologist also said that Dr. Hyma, before he ruled the death a homicide by strangulation, had not consulted with him.

     Larissa Adamyan, a friend of the deceased woman, took the stand on behalf of the prosecution. As it turned out her testimony helped the defense more than the prosecution. The witness described the relationship between the defendant and his wife as a "loving marriage." Ten hours before Lina's death, in anticipation of Adam's brother Seth's upcoming wedding, she had gotten a spray tan.

     Aventura police officer Robert Meyers took the stand and said that at the hospital the day Lina died he overheard the defendant tell three different versions of what he had seen that morning in the bathroom. According to this witness the defendant said he found Lina's neck resting on the toilet bowl; her body slumped over the toilet; and her head hung over the magazine rack. On cross-examination defense attorney Milian got the witness to admit that none of this information was included in his police report.

     Dr. Bruce Hyma re-took the stand on May 2, 2012 to explain why it had taken 18 months to declare Lina Kaufman's cause and manner of death as a strangulation homicide. The forensic pathologist attributed this passage of time to a delayed toxicological report and the fact he wanted to be sure he made the right call. On cross-examination the defense attorney accused the medical examiner of caving to pressure from the prosecutor to declare Lina Kaufman's death a homicide.

     Prosecutor Mathew Baldwin, during the direct examination of a friend of the deceased woman, asked if the witness had been aware that the defendant, shortly after his wife's death, had been carrying on with another woman. This question brought an objection from the defense. Judge Miller called the attorneys to the bench and excused the jury. In justifying this line of questioning, prosecutor Baldwin said, "He's [the defendant] is asking this girl out with his dead wife's wedding ring on his finger the next month in December 2007. [Lina died in November.] By January and February they're having regular sex. He was not exactly devastated by his wife's passing. The best analogy I can think of is when Casey Anthony was getting a tattoo [after the death of her child]."

     Judge Miller asked the prosecutor if the state had evidence that the defendant had been unfaithful to his wife. The answer was no. Judge Miller ruled that the prosecution could not present evidence of the defendant's post-death dating. At his point defense attorney Matthewman asked the judge for a mistrial on the grounds the jury had heard the question which had planted the idea in jurors' minds that the defendant had not been a good husband. Judge Miller denied the motion. She had told the jurors to disregard the question.

     That afternoon a Miami-Dade crime scene technician testified that Lina Kaufman's fingernails contained traces of her blood and tissue, suggesting she had clawed at something around her neck. The prosecutor also called a physicist to the stand who said it would have been physically impossible for Lina to have fallen off the toilet and land with her head draped over the magazine rack. With that, the prosecution rested its case.

     On Thursday, May 24, 202l the defense launched its case by calling Lina's mother Frida Aizman to the stand. This witness told the jury that she and her family loved the defendant and after Lina's death they had become even closer. The witness also testified that in the weeks leading up to her daughter's death Lina had complained of headaches and feeling weak. She tried yoga to relieve her headaches.

     Miami-Dade fire rescue captain Joseph Carman, the first responder to enter the Kaufman house, testified that he found the defendant giving Lina CPR. According to the witness, Mr. Kaufman was wearing a t-shirt and boxer shorts. The defense presented this testimony because it was consistent with Adam Kaufman's story that he awoke after a night of sleep to find his wife collapsed in the bathroom.

     Thomas Hill, a Broward County Sheriff's Office crime scene investigator took the stand for the defense and criticized Kaufman case investigators for not collecting important physical evidence. The witness said they had failed to gather Adam Kaufman's clothing, magazines from the bathroom rack and bedding from the master bedroom. The crime scene investigator also said he could see no evidence of a struggle in the small bathroom. "My goodness," he said, "she would have been kicking those walls in, and I don't see any of that." The witness said that if Lina had been strangled, the defendant would have had gouge marks on his arms from her trying to claw them from her neck.

     Dr. John Marriccini, the former Palm Beach County Chief Medical Examiner, testified that the forensic pathologists in the Kaufman case had overlooked Lina Kaufman's history of health problems which included heart disease. Celebrity forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden climbed into the witness box and said, "Lina Kaufman did not die of unnatural causes. There was no homicide, there was no murder. She died of natural causes." Dr. Baden testified that in his expert opinion Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner Bruce Hyma based his homicide ruling on the work of two rookie forensic pathologists who had gotten it wrong. Dr. Baden said Lina Kaufman died of a heart attack and that the injuries to her throat from hitting the magazine rack had been exacerbated by bungled resuscitation attempts by the defendant and paramedics. Following Dr. Baden's testimony the defense rested its case without putting the defendant on the stand.

     On May 31, 2012, because the defense had portrayed the Kaufman marriage as blissful, Judge Miller allowed the prosecution to put Fara Corenblum, a rebuttal witness, on the stand. According to Corenblum, she and the defendant started an affair a month after Lina's death. The witness said she ended the twice-a-week relationship after she realized he was not ready to move on following his wife's death. For the prosecution, Corenblum's testimony, by casting a sympathetic light on the defendant, may have done more harm than good.

     Both sides made their closing arguments on Monday, June 4, 2012. The next day the case went to the jury. At five o'clock that evening the jury returned with its verdict: not guilty.

A Police Officer's Unlawful Requests

     In 2014, 27-year-old Patrick Quinn worked as a uniformed patrol officer for the Cypress-Fairbanks School District in suburban Houston, Texas. On August 11 of that year, while driving his patrol vehicle, officer Quinn pulled over a motorist in northwest Harris County. Following the stop, the officer examined the female driver's insurance card and found that her car insurance had expired. Quinn also informed the driver that he detected the odor of marijuana in the vehicle.

     Officer Quinn, after he secured the stopped driver's permission to search her car, placed the suspect in the backseat of his patrol vehicle. A search of the motorist's car resulted in the discovery of a marijuana grinder. Officer Quinn advised the detainee that he could arrest her for possession of drug paraphernalia. At that point the patrol officer stunned the woman with the revelation that he had a foot fetish. If she allowed him to sniff and lick her bare feet he wouldn't take her into custody.

     Not wanting to be arrested, the motorist removed her boots and socks. But instead of availing himself of the woman's feet, officer Quinn asked her to remove and give him her underwear. Before the woman could comply with that request, the patrol officer changed his mind and let her go.

     The day following her harrowing encounter with the disturbed cop, the woman reported the bizarre and frightening incident to the authorities. Detectives with the Harris County District Attorney's Office launched an investigation.

     Police officers arrested Patrick Quinn after detectives identified him through his latent fingerprints on the victim's insurance card.

     The Cypress-Fairbanks School District fired Mr. Quinn after a Harris County prosecutor charged him with two counts of official oppression. In the course of the investigation leading up to the arrest, detectives found three other women who had been victims of the officer's deviant propositions.

     On October 22, 2015, in a Houston Courtroom, Patrick Quinn pleaded guilty to one count of official oppression. The judge sentenced him to a year in the Harris County Jail.

The Alexander Hilton St. Andrews Poison Case

     In 2011, Alexander D. Hilton, a 20-year-old rich kid from Princeton, Massachusetts attended St. Andrews University in Fife, Scotland. The sophomore prep school graduate (St. Johns) had moved to the United Kingdom to study economics at this ancient and prestigious institution of higher learning.

     On March 5, 2011 on the eve of the annual St. Andrews ball, Alexander Hilton and a group of his fellow students were participating in a dormitory drinking game. One of the drinkers, Robert Forbes, an American from Virginia, after gulping down a bottle of red wine given to him by Hilton, became seriously ill. The 19-year-old suffered loss of balance, severe nausea, had trouble breathing and temporarily lost his eyesight. He spent a week in the hospital. Doctors said that had Robert Forbes not received medical treatment he could have died.

     A few days after the dormitory drinking game, local investigators questioned Alexander Hilton about the incident. The authorities suspected that Hilton, known around the school as an anti-social oddball, had intentionally poisoned Robert Forbes. Hilton denied mixing anything into the wine. The Scottish authorities didn't have enough evidence to charge the American with a crime, but urged him to leave the country. He was also kicked out of St. Andrews. On March 18, 2011 Alexander Hilton returned to his parents' home in Princeton, Massachusetts.

     Back in Scotland, toxicological tests revealed that the red wine that made Robert Forbes so sick had been spiked with methanol, an ingredient found in antifreeze. The sweet-smelling liquid, also known as wood alcohol, is colorless, highly flammable and deadly. A search of Hilton's computer determined that he had investigated the toxicological effects of combining red wine and methanol. In Hilton's dormitory room investigators found a funnel.

     After Alexander Hilton returned to the United States he enrolled in a college in New Mexico. About a year after the St. Andrews drinking party he learned the authorities in Scotland planned to charge him with the attempted murder of Robert Forbes. Upon learning this Hilton dropped out of the college in New Mexico and returned to his parents' house in Princeton, Massachusetts. Seven months later, in the fall of 2012, the prosecutor in charge of the case in Scotland charged Alexander Hilton with attempted murder.

     On February 4, 2013, under an extradition treaty the United States had with the United Kingdom, United States Marshals took Alexander Hilton into custody. The federal authorities hauled the former St. Andrews student to the Central Falls, Rhode Island Detention Center where he was placed under suicide watch.

     Hilton, on February 21, 2013, appeared at his bail hearing in federal court in Boston before a U. S. magistrate judge. Assistant United States Attorney David J. D'Addio, in arguing against bail for this defendant, said, "This is an attempted murder case, a serious case, and we can't lose sight of that. The evidence before us is that Mr. Hilton deliberately poisoned a student at St. Andrews."

     Hilton's defense attorney, Norman S. Zalkind, argued that because his client was seriously mentally ill bail should be granted in order that the defendant could continue taking his medication and not be denied psychiatric therapy. According to the defense attorney, if Alexander Hilton remained in custody he was "...going to get sicker and sicker and sicker." Mr. Zalkind described Hilton as an extremely intelligent person with the socialization skills of a 14-year-old. The defense lawyer wondered why someone at the university didn't notice Hilton's mental problem after he started flunking his classes. 

     The U.S. magistrate judge withheld Hilton's bail decision pending the outcome of his extradition hearing scheduled for March 7, 2013.

      On March 7, 2013, the federal judge certified Hilton's extradition to Scotland. Following that ruling the U.S. magistrate judge allowed the suspect to post bail. Hilton's attorneys immediately appealed the extradition certification to a federal court of appeals.

     Robert Forbes, in March 2013, filed a personal injury suit against Alexander Hilton in federal court. A federal judge later dismissed the civil lawsuit. (It may have been settled.)

     The federal court of appeals, in February 2014, granted Alexander Hilton a stay of extradition on grounds he was mentally incompetent to stand trial in Scotland.

     Alexander Hilton, in May 2015, was extradited to Scotland to stand trial in the attempted murder case. In July 2015 the defendant pleaded guilty as charged pursuant to the claim that, at the time of the poisoning he had been mentally ill. Judge Lord Burns of the High Court in Edinburgh sentenced Mr. Hilton to three years in prison. 

The Krystal Marie Barrows Police-Involved-Shooting Case

     Eleven people were inside a mobile home near Chillicothe, Ohio when, at 10:30 PM on December 11, 2013, a dozen or so members of a local drug task force unit rolled up to the dwelling with a no-knock warrant to search for guns and drugs. One of the occupants of the trailer house was a teenage girl.

     Just before breaking into the home one of the heavily armed U.S. 23 Task Force officers tossed a flash bang grenade through a window. At the moment the device detonated officers forced their way into the house.

     Following the initial chaos created by the SWAT-like raid, officers found Krystal Marie Barrows slumped on the living room couch. The 35-year-old mother of three had been shot in the head. She died shortly after being flown by helicopter to the Wexner Medical Center in Columblus.

     The raiding police officers arrested two women and four men for illegally possessing pistols, assault rifles and heroin. The task force cops also recovered stolen goods and a significant amount of cash. During the raid none of the mobile home occupants pulled a gun or fired a shot. This meant that Krystal Barrows had been shot by one of the task force officers.

     According to the results of a preliminary police inquiry into Barrows' death, she had been shot by Ross County sergeant Brett McKnight. The eleven-year veteran of the Ross County Sheriff's Office had accidentally discharged his sidearm outside the trailer when the flash bang grenade went off. The bullet pierced the trailer home's exterior wall and hit Barrows in the head.

      Other than a misdemeanor drunk and disorderly conviction, Krystal Barrows did not have a criminal record. Her sons were aged 19, 14 and 9. Detectives with the Ohio Bureau of Investigation looked into the case to determine if Sergeant McKnight had fired his gun recklessly.

     In March 2015, after a Ross County grand jury declined to indict Office McKnight for criminal homicide or lesser charges, the officer returned to work without any disciplinary action.

     Two years after the grand jury refused to indict the officer, the Ross County Sheriff's Office and other wrongful death defendants settled a lawsuit filed by Krystal Barrows' family for $156,000.

Failing to Stop a Murderous Serial Stalker

     Scottye Leon Miller, a violent, sociopathic stalker of ex-girlfriends and other women unfortunate enough to have crossed his path, lived in Burien, Washington, a King County town of 33,000 located south of Seattle. Between 2002 and 2010 Mr. Miller stalked, harassed, threatened and assaulted several women. His arrest record featured 15 domestic violence related convictions and six court protection order violations. It was just a matter of time before he killed one of his victims.

     In 2008 the violent ex-con started dating Tricia Patricelli, a 30-year-old mother of two daughters who lived in the nearby city of Auburn. In January of the following year Scottye Miller forced his way into Patricelli's apartment and assaulted her in front of her children. A local prosecutor charged the 30-year-old subject with burglary and third-degree assault. The defendant pleaded guilty and received a short sentence in the King County Jail. (Because home intrusion is a violent felony the judge should have sentenced Miller, given his criminal record, to twenty years in prison.)

     Miller served less than a year in jail on the Patricelli burglary/assault conviction. In January 2012 Tricia Patricelli called 911 and reported that Miller had threatened to kill her and was chasing her in the parking lot of the apartment complex. "Please hurry, he is going to kill me!" she screamed. The police arrived and took Miller into custody. To the responding officers, Tricia Patricelli said, "You don't know who you are dealing with. He is going to kill me."

     Scottye Miller, convicted of fourth-degree assault and harassment, was sentenced to another short stretch in the King County Jail. The fact he was behind bars, however, did not stop this man from continuing to terrorize his victim. While serving his time Miller wrote Patricelli letters in which he promised to kill her when he got out of jail. Apparently in King County, Washington victims of stalking and assault did not get relief even when their offenders were in custody. For a victim of this type of crime this reality must have been frightening.

     Scottye Miller on October 12, 2012 walked out of jail a free man. This meant serious trouble for Tricia Patricelli, the object of this serial stalker's obsession and pathological wrath. The criminal justice system, at this point, had no solution for Patricelli's life-threatening predicament. It didn't take a psychic detective to predict bad things for this vulnerable woman.

     At eight-thirty in the morning of October 30, 2012, just two weeks after Miller's release from the King County Jail, neighbors heard the screams of a woman coming from Tricia Patricelli's apartment. Moments after the woman went silent witnesses saw a man meeting Miller's physical description walk out of the building. Someone called 911.

     Responders to Patricelli's apartment found that Scottye Miller had stabbed Tricia Patricelli to death in the bathroom. He had stabbed her in the face, neck, torso and back--22 times in all. Police arrested him shortly thereafter at a nearby bus stop. Miller denied any knowledge of the stabbing but admitted that he had sent the dead woman text messages in which he had threatened to kill her. Miller told the arresting officers that he had been dating the victim for four years and had lived with her, on and off, during half of that time.

     Shortly after Patricelli's murder, investigators found three bloody knives, a pair of blood-stained gloves and the victim's cellphone at the foot of a fence near the apartment complex. During a second interrogation Scottye Miller confessed to the killing. He said that in the midst of a fight in Patricelli's apartment he just "snapped." After "snapping," Miller slipped on a pair of gloves, and using the three knives he had brought with him to Patricelli's dwelling, started stabbing her. The bloody assault ended up in Patricelli's bathroom where she died.

     On November 15, 2012 a King County judge arraigned Scottye Miller on the charge of first-degree murder. The homicidal stalker was back in jail under $1 million bond.

     In December 2013 a jury found Miller guilty of first-degree murder. Two weeks after the verdict the judge sentenced him to 50 years in prison.

     The Scottye Miller case reminds us of a frightening truth about our criminal justice system. The police cannot arrest dangerous people for what they might do. Law enforcement authorities only spring into action after the harm is done. In this case it was too late to protect the victim's life. Our system of criminal justice is designed more for the protection of the criminal than it is for the safety of the victim. Women being stalked, threatened with death and assaulted by pathological criminals like Scottye Miller cannot look to the police or the courts for protection. They either have to flee and hide, hire a contract killer or buy a gun and do the job themselves. None of these options are good, but neither is being hounded, assaulted, then murdered in your own bathroom by some low-life sociopath.  

Prison Escape By Computer

     Inmates have been known to tunnel, climb, sneak, saw, assault and bribe their way out of prisons and jails. But in central Florida a pair of convicted murderers managed to escape by forging court documents.

     On September 27, 2013, an official with the Florida Department of Corrections ordered convicted killer Joseph Jenkins released from the Franklin Correctional Institution where he had been serving a life sentence. In 1997 Jenkins murdered Roscoe Pugh in an Orlando robbery that went bad. The 34-year-old's ticket to freedom was a phony court document that reduced his life sentence to fifteen years. The release order bore the signature of Chief Circuit Judge Belvin Perry. The forged corrections paperwork included a motion filed by a local prosecutor in support of the new sentence. The phony documents had been processed by the Orange County Clerk of Courts Office.

     On October 8, 2013 another convicted murderer serving a life sentence at the Franklin County prison near Tallahassee walked out of the prison. Charles Walker had killed Cedric Slater in 1998. At his trial Walker claimed that because the victim bullied him he fired three shots to scare him off. Instead of scaring Slater, Charles Walker shot him dead. The Orlando jury found him guilty of second-degree murder.

     Corrections authorities released the 34-year-old Walker after receiving the same set of forged documents that freed Joseph Jenkins. It was extremely rare for a trial judge in cases involving convictions affirmed on appeal to order reduced sentences. Moreover, prosecutors rarely supported shortened sentences. To say that someone at the Florida Department of Corrections was asleep at the switch would be an understatement. After their releases both men went to the Orange County Jail where they registered as felons as required by law.

     According to investigators with the Florida Department of Corrections, the forging lifers had either been helped by a jailhouse lawyer with computer skills or an outside person with paralegal experience.

     Judge Belvin Perry told an Associated Press reporter that "Someone with the aid of a computer lifted my signature off previously signed documents, which are public record." [Judge Perry, in 2011 presided over the Casey Anthony trial. As a result his signature was available on public documents and accessible online.]

     According to Judge Perry, "In my 35 years in the judicial system, I have never seen the state of Florida file a motion to correct an illegal sentence. One of the things we have never taken a close look at is the verification of a particular document to make sure it is the real McCoy." 

      
     At 6:40 PM on October 19, 2013, U. S. Marshals and officers with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement arrested Charles Walker and Joseph Jenkins at the Coconut Grove Motor Inn in Panama City. A tip from a person who knew both men led to their arrests. 

Anthony Novellino: The Pig Mask Murder Case

     In 2010 after years of marriage, Anthony Novellino and his wife Judith, a teacher at Morris Catholic High School in Denville Township, New Jersey, couldn't stand each other. She accused him of being verbally abusive and controlling. He claimed that because she was such a lousy housekeeper the house was always a mess. To back up his accusation he emailed photographs of the unkempt home to family and friends.

     The couple also fought over their oldest son Anthony A. Novellino Jr., a resident of nearby Parsippany. Over the past few years police officers arrested Novellino Jr. for possession of drugs. He had also been charged with auto theft. Judith Novellino treated her drug-addicted son with compassion and accommodated his needs such as giving him money. The father, fed up with his son, believed that tough-love such as jail was the best way to deal with the problem.

     Judith Novellino filed for divorce and on June 8, 2010 it became final. According to the divorce settlement she would receive $110,000, her share of the house, plus $150,000, her half of their IRAs and bank savings. Mr. Novellino made no secret of the fact he felt cheated in the distribution of the family assets.

     On June 19, 2010, eleven days after the finalization of the breakup, Anthony Novellino came home and found Judith in the house retrieving her personal belongings. They argued and he became enraged. The confrontation came to a bloody end when he stabbed her 84 times with an 8-inch kitchen knife. Before he packed some of his belongings and walked to his car, Mr. Novellino slipped a pig mask over his former wife's head.

     Christina German, the divorced couple's daughter, discovered her mother's body in the bathroom when she came to the house to help the 62-year-old move her belongings to an apartment in Parsippany.

     Five days after the brutal murder police in Puyallup, Washington took Anthony Novellino into custody. The 66-year-old fugitive had driven across the country to be with a woman he had met on the Internet. Assistant Morris County prosecutor Maggie Calderwood charged Mr. Novellino with murder and several lesser offenses.

     When interrogated by detectives in New Jersey the suspect claimed he had "hit" his former wife twice with the knife in self defense. The judge denied Novellino bond. Officers booked the suspect into the Morris County Jail where he would await his day in court.

     The Novellino trial got underway in a Morristown Superior Court on July 7, 2014. In his opening remarks to the jury the defendant's attorney, Michael Priarone, said his client, in a fit of temporary insanity attacked his wife. This act of violence, according to the defense attorney, was entirely out of his client's character. As a result, attorney Priarone wanted the jury to find Mr. Novellino guilty of what he called "passion provocation manslaughter," an offense that carried a maximum sentence of ten years in prison.

     Anthony Novellino's attorney moved to have the death scene pig mask excluded from evidence on the grounds it was "highly prejudicial" to his client. The judge denied that request.

     On July 22, 2014, after just three hours of deliberation, the jury found Anthony Novellino guilty of murder, hindering apprehension, tampering with evidence and two counts of illegal weapons possession.

     At the September 12, 2014 sentence hearing the judge sentenced 70-year-old Anthony Novellino to 50 years in prison. The overkill and the pig mask had sealed his fate.

The Tomeikia Johnson Murder Case

     Off-duty California Highway Patrol Officer Tomeikia Johnson and her husband Marcus Lemons started arguing while having drinks on February 21, 2009 at the T.G.I. Friday bar in Compton, California. At 11PM, after the 32-year-old cop paid the bill, she and Lemons, a barber and locally known amateur bowler, left the restaurant with the CHP officer behind the wheel. About an hour later Tomeikia Johnson pulled up to her parents' Compton home with her husband's dead body in the BMW. Mr. Lemons had been shot point-blank in the head with his wife's handgun. Tomeikia Johnson's mother called 911.

     Pending the results of the homicide investigation conducted by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office, the CHP re-assigned Johnson to desk duty. She told investigators that she and her husband, after they left the bar, continued to fight. When she pulled the car off the road he became physical. As they struggled for control of the gun it went off and killed him. According to her account of the shooting she was defending herself against an abusive husband.

     Detectives looking into the shooting believed that Johnson had pulled the car off the road, reached into her purse, took out her gun and shot Markus Lemons in the head. The Los Angeles County deputy district attorney handling the case believed that Johnson had murdered her husband. In January 2011 sheriff's deputies arrested Tomeikia Johnson on the charge of first-degree murder as she sat at her CHP desk. (From the beginning the CHP had cooperated with the investigation.) Initially held in the county jail on $2 million bond she made bail and was released.

     In January 2012, with the defendant's family seated on one side of the courtroom and her dead husband's relatives gathered in the other half of the gallery, the Yomeikia Johnson trial got underway in downtown Los Angeles. In her opening statement to the jury Deputy District Attorney Natalie Adomian laid out the prosecution's theory of the shooting. According to the prosecutor, after Johnson pulled the BMW off the road, she pulled out her gun, pressed the muzzle against his head and pulled the trigger.

     Over the next several days prosecutor Adomian, to support the state's assertion the killing had been intentional, put a blood spatter interpretation analyst as well as a gunshot residue expert on the stand. The experts testified that the pattern and location of the blood and powder staining did not support the defendant's account of the shooting. The forensic scientists were followed by a series of witnesses who portrayed the defendant as having an aggressive personality and a drinking problem. These witnesses characterized Marcus Lemons as a peaceful, nonviolent husband who had taken a lot of abuse from his wife. Since Johnson hadn't confessed and there were no eyewitnesses to the shooting, the prosecution's case was entirely circumstantial.

     To establish that his client had been an abused wife, and that the shooting had occurred during a life and death struggle for the gun, attorney Darryl Stallworth put the defendant on the stand realizing that the outcome of the case depended upon Tomeikia Johnson's credibility. Defense attorney Stallworth, to make the case for his client's innocence, had to put Marcus Lemons on trial. He had to attack a dead man, always a risky move in a murder trial.

     According to the defendant, a week before her husband died while trying to kill her, he had given her reason to fear for her life. They had gotten into an argument while driving back to Los Angeles from a bowling tournament in Las Vegas. She told him to stop the car, and when he pulled off the road, she ran to a nearby truck stop and called 911 and reported that her husband had gotten possession of her gun and wanted to kill her. (No charges were filed against Lemons.) Johnson also testified that in 2008 Mr. Lemons attacked her in a Las Vegas hotel room, injuring her neck. No charges were filed in that case either.

     After giving testimony intended to establish Marcus Lemons as the abuser in the marriage, Johnson provided her account of how he died: After leaving the T.G.I. Friday bar in Compton she and Lemons continued to argue. He became so angry he reached over and started choking her, forcing her to pull off the highway. He grabbed the keys out of the ignition and told her to walk home. She climbed out of the BMW and started running. Worried that he would take the gun out of her purse (left behind in the car) and shoot her, she returned to the vehicle. As she and her husband reached for the gun it fell to the ground. When she picked it up the pistol went off, killing him.

     "Did you want to fire that weapon?" asked the attorney.

     "No."

     "Did you want to kill your husband?"

      "No," the defendant replied.

     The defense rested. Following the closing arguments and the judge's legal instructions the case went to the jury. If jurors believed Johnson's account of the shooting they would acquit her. If not, she would not be walking out of the courthouse a free person.

     On January 23, 2012, the jury, after deliberating slightly more than a day, found Tomeikia Johnson guilty of first-degree murder. She fainted and paramedics rushed to the defense table and wheeled her out of the courtroom on a gurney.

     At Johnson's March 9, 2012 sentencing hearing before Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Robert Perry, her attorney asked the judge to reduce the murder charge to manslaughter. Judge Perry denied the request and sentenced Johnson to 50 years to life. Apparently the judge didn't buy her story either. As Johnson wept, her mother yelled "I love you Tomiekia!" This set off a raucous back and forth in the gallery between the opposing families.