Ali Syed's Killing Spree

     Ali Syed, an unemployed part time student at Saddleback Community College lived with his parents in Ladera Ranch, an affluent suburban Orange County community 50 miles south of Los Angeles. The pudgy 20-year-old spent most of his time in his parents' white stucco condo playing video games. He had never been arrested and had no known history of illicit drug use. Ali did possess a .12-gauge shotgun his father had given to him in 2012.

     At 4:45 in the morning of Tuesday, February 19, 2013, Syed's mother called 911 from the Ladera Ranch condo. "I think somebody was shot," she said. "I heard a gunshot." Deputies with the Orange County Sheriff's Office found, in Syed's room, 20-year-old Courtney Aoki. (There were reports she worked as a stripper.) Aoki had been killed instantly by three shotgun blasts to the head and upper body. Ali Syed fled the murder scene in his parents' black GMC Yukon before the deputies arrived at the dwelling.

     From Ladera Ranch Ali Syed headed north on Interstate 5 where, 20 miles from his home, he exited the interstate and drove into the town of Tustin. Driving with a flat tire he pulled into a Denny's parking lot alongside a man sitting in an older model blue Cadillac. Syed pointed his shotgun at the man and yelled, "Get out!" Instead of complying with the order, the driver of the Cadillac drove off. He didn't get far. Syed raised the shotgun and blew out the fleeing driver's rear window, wounding him in the back of the head. The victim, who managed to escape on foot to a nearby hospital survived the shooting.

     Syed approached a man pumping gas at a Mobile station. "I don't want to hurt you," he said. "I just killed someone. Give me your keys. This is my last day." Syed climbed in behind the wheel of this man's Dodge pickup truck and headed north. On Interstate 5 he drove five miles before merging onto a southbound lane which took him to Freeway 55. He pulled the stolen truck to the shoulder of the highway, stepped out of the vehicle and began shooting at motorists commuting to work, wounding three of them.

     After firing randomly at passing vehicles Mr. Syed climbed into the Dodge pickup, pulled back onto the highway and proceeded to the Edinger Avenue exit from where he drove into Santa Ana. Shortly after pulling into town he approached a man sitting in a BMW. Syed ordered 69-year-old Melvin Edwards of Laguna Hills out of his vehicle. As the victim stood at the side of the street Syed executed him with three shotgun blasts.

     Driving Melvin Edwards' BMW, Ali Syed returned to Tustin. In the parking lot of a computer store he murdered Jeremy Lewis. Mr. Lewis, a plumber from Fullerton, was walking to a construction site at a nearby Fairfield Inn. A construction supervisor saw the shotgun-armed Syed chasing Lewis across the parking lot. The supervisor drove his pickup truck onto the lot in an effort to rescue Lewis, but Syed shot him in the arm and stole his vehicle. It was 5:45 in the morning.

     Just before six o'clock, at an intersection about 25 miles north of Ladera Ranch, officers with the California Highway Patrol caught up with Syed. The video game playing college student, after killing three people and wounding three others in the course of his 75-minute suburban shooting spree, jumped out of the stolen pickup truck while it was still moving. Syed pressed the muzzle of his shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger. He became his seventh victim.

     For reasons that remained a mystery absent a suicide note or some kind of manifesto, Ali Syed shot six innocent strangers. There was no way to know if he had been inspired by other recent high-profile mass murder-suicide cases or if suicide had been his ultimate goal. Why did he murder the young woman in his room and the two men he encountered as they went about their daily routines? These are questions that will never be answered.

     In the wake of homicidal crime sprees, people ask if there were any indications that this person was capable of such mayhem. These events are almost always impossible to predict because it's impossible to know what is going on inside the mind of a mentally disturbed person. 

The Historic Cordelia Botkin Poison Murder Case

     In 1895 30-year-old John P. Dunning and his wife Elizabeth Mary, the daughter of ex-congressman John Pennington of Dover, Delaware, were living in San Francisco. In September of that year, John, while riding his bicycle spotted an attractive woman sitting on a park bench not far from his home. A few days later he and his new acquaintance, Cordelia Botkin, a married woman estranged from her husband in Stockton, California, started an affair. During the next two years John Dunning was a frequent visitor to Botkin's house on Geary Street.

     While cheating on his wife, John Dunning began to drink and lose money at the racetrack. In early 1898 his employer, suspecting that Mr. Dunning had been embezzling company money, fired him. Because Dunning could no long support his family, his wife and her daughter returned to Dover to live with her parents. With his wife and daughter back in Delaware, Mr. Dunning was free to move in with Cordelia Botkin who now resided at the Victoria Hotel on Hyde Street.

     Two months after he moved in with his mistress, Mr. Dunning landed a newspaper job covering the Spanish-American war. As a result, he would be traveling to Cuba and Puerto Rico. Before leaving San Francisco he broke the news to Cordelia that he missed his wife and daughter. The affair, he said, was over. Cordelia did not take this news very well. As far as she was concerned the affair was not over, not by a long shot.

     Back in Dover, Delaware, in the summer of 1898, Mrs. Dunning began receiving anonymous letters mailed from San Francisco that referred to her husband's affair with an "interesting and pretty woman." The letters were signed, "A Friend." That August someone in San Francisco sent Mrs. Dunning a Cambric handkerchief and a box of chocolates. The note accompanying the gift was signed, "With love to yourself and baby, Mrs. C."

     On August 9, 1898, after dinner at the Pennington home, Elizabeth passed the mystery box of bonbons to family and friends gathered that evening on the front porch. The group of four adults and three children included Mrs. Dunning's sister, Leila Deane and Mrs. Dunning's daughter Mary. Mrs. Dunning and her sister helped themselves to the chocolates, and later in the evening became violently ill.

     Eleven days after the candy arrived in the mail from San Francisco, Leila Deane died. The next day, Mrs. Dunning passed away. The presumed causes of their deaths was cholera morbus, a common ailment in the era before refrigeration. John Dunning, still overseas when he received the news, arrived back in Dover ten days later. When his father-in-law showed him the anonymous letters, including the note that had accompanied the candy, Dunning simply said, "Cordelia."

     Mr. Pennington, the father of the dead women, had the uneaten chocolates analyzed by a chemist who worked for the state. The chemist reported that some of the remaining bonbons had been spiked with arsenic. Mrs. Dunning and her sister had not been autopsied because the treating physician believed that the victims' prolonged vomiting had cleansed their bodies of the poison. Had the science of toxicology existed in 1898, a forensic pathologist would have known that although arsenic, a heavy metal poison, is excreted from the damaged cells, traces are sequestered in the victim's bones, fingernails and hair follicles.

     The discovery of the poison in the candy prompted a coroner's inquest. When presented with the facts of the case the coroner's jury ruled that the two women had been poisoned to death by arsenic-laced chocolate mailed from San Francisco.

     Although the deaths occurred in Dover, the authorities in Delaware requested that the case be investigated by the San Francisco Police Department. The man who would conduct the investigation, I. W. Lees, had been appointed chief of police the previous year. Convinced that she would confess under pressure, Chief Lees arrested Cordelia Botkin for the murders of the two Delaware women. When the suspect vehemently maintained her innocence, Chief Lees was forced to make the case the hard way. He traced the arsenic to the Owl Drug Store on Market Street where a clerk said he had sold the poison to a woman meeting the suspect's description. Lees also questioned a Botkin acquaintance who told him that the suspect had expressed concern about having to sign her name when purchasing arsenic. The acquaintance had assured Botkin that she would not be required to sign for the purchase. Chief Lees also spoke to a physician who had been asked by Cordelia Botkin to describe the effects of various poisons on the human body.

     A search of Cordelia Botkin's room at the Victoria Hotel produced wrapping paper that matched the paper that had enclosed the box of poisoned chocolates. To identify the handwriting associated with the case, Chief Lees engaged the services of San Francisco's Daniel T. Ames, one of the most respected questioned document examiners in the country. When Mr. Ames analyzed and compared samples of Mrs. Botkin's handwriting with the questioned writings, he reported that Cordelia Botkin had written the letters and had addressed the deadly package. Two other document examiners, Carl Eisenschimel and Theodore Kytka, after examining the evidence, agreed with Daniel Ames' conclusion.

     Amid intense media coverage, the Cordelia Botkin murder trial got underway in early December 1898. After the prosecution put on its case which featured the three questioned document examiners, the defense had no choice but to put the defendant on the stand. Cordelia Botkin did not deny buying arsenic in June of that year, explaining that she had used the poison to clean a straw hat. Moreover, the arsenic she had purchased was powdered while the arsenic in the candy was crystalline. Following Botkin's direct testimony and cross-examination, the defense rested.

     After four hours of deliberation the jury returned a verdict of guilty. Because the case against her was circumstantial, and juries didn't like to send women to the gallows, the jurors recommended a sentence of life in prison. Instead of serving her time in San Quentin, the judge sent her to the county jail in San Francisco where, in exchange for sexual favors she would come and go as she pleased. A few months after sentencing her the judge saw Cordelia shopping in downtown San Francisco.

     While Cordelia Botkin shopped in San Francisco, her attorney appealed her conviction on a procedural issue. An appellate court overturned the conviction which led to a second trial in 1904. Once again, on the strength of the handwriting evidence, a jury found her guilty. After the earthquake of 1906 destroyed the county jail, Cordelia Botkin was sent to San Quentin. On March 7, at the age of 56, she died in prison of "softening of the brain due to melancholy."        

The Ira Bloom Murder-For-Hire Case

     In the domestic battle over who gets what in a divorce one of the most contentious issues often centers around who will acquire principal access to and responsibility for the children. Parents who believe they have received a raw deal in the custody fight are embittered. Quite often they are fathers who resent supporting children from whom they have become estranged. Some parents who have lost custody to ex-spouses they consider unfit to raise their children have taken the law into their own hands. A few of these parents, motivated by hatred, the need for control and the desire to win, have resorted to murder.

     Zhanna Portnov, a political refugee from Russia, emigrated to the United States in 1992. Two years later she met and married Ira A. Bloom, a violent and sadistic criminal who made Portnov as miserable in America as she had been in her home country. The couple lived in Enfield, Connecticut.

     In the summer of 2004 following a string of restraining orders, Zhanna divorced Mr. Bloom and gained custody of their 8-year-old son. Bloom, dissatisfied with his three-day-a-week visitation schedule, petitioned the judge for full custody. Six weeks before the August 2005 custody hearing Mr. Bloom began planning to have his ex-wife murdered.

     Following their divorce Ira Bloom moved to East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, a town outside of Springfield. From there he would plot his wife's death and commit the mistake most murder-for-hire masterminds make: he reached out to the wrong person to help him carry out his mission. Bloom asked his friend Donald Levesque, a petty criminal and drug snitch who claimed underworld connections, to find a hitman who would carjack Zhanna as she drove home from the chiropractor's office in Enfield where she worked as a receptionist. Bloom wanted the hit man to rape then kill his ex-wife. Pursuant to his plan the killer would dump her body somewhere in Hartford, Connecticut.

     Levesque, snitch that he was, went to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tax and Firearms (AFT) where he informed agents of Ira Bloom's murder-for-hire scheme. (Levesque was a regular paid ATF confidential informant.) Because murder-for-hire is a state as well as a federal offense the ATF had jurisdiction in the case.

     The informant told ATF agents that Ira Bloom had promised him $15,000 out of his dead ex-wife's $100,000 life insurance payout. Working with local law enforcement agencies in Connecticut and Massachusetts the ATF launched its investigation.

     On July 8, 2005 Donald Levesque and Ira Bloom met in a restaurant in Enfield. The snitch wore a hidden recorder and had driven a car to the meeting that was wired for sound. To the amazement of the officers and agents surveilling the meeting, Ira Bloom arrived with a woman he had just met. Seated in a booth Bloom began talking about his battle to regain custody of his son. He said, "I'm really tired of this game anyway. This will save me. I mean, I only owe my lawyer about $500 right now. If we go to court on August 12 I'll owe him about another fifteen grand by then. So everything's gone. I mean, she's dead."

     Before the meeting broke-up Donald Levesque, acting on instructions from his ATF handlers, asked Bloom for a hand-drawn map showing the route to the target's place of employment. "You think I'm gonna give you a map?" Bloom said. "We'll all go to jail." But the snitch persisted and a few minutes later the murder-for-hire mastermind sketched a crude map on a napkin.

     In Levesque's car outside the restaurant he and Bloom with the mastermind's date sitting in the back seat continued discussing the hit. When enough had been said to justify an arrest local police officers and federal agents rushed the car. Just before being yanked out of the vehicle Ira Bloom looked at Levesque and said, "Don, what did you do to me?"

     In October 2006 Ira Bloom was tried in Hartford, Connecticut before a federal jury. While the defendant did not take the stand on his own behalf his attorney, in his closing argument, characterized the conversation in the restaurant as nothing more that his client's blowing off steam to impress his date. The jury after deliberating three hours found the defendant guilty of conspiracy to murder his ex-wife. Following a series of appeals federal judge Alfred V. Covello in April 2008 sentenced the 48-year-old Bloom to the maximum sentence of twenty years in prison.

The Mystery of Criminal Motive: The Streeter Brothers Murder Case

     Douglas Ivor Streeter and his brother John owned and operated the Merino sheep farm near Maryborough, Australia, a town northwest of Melbourne in the state of Victoria. The brothers, in their mid-60s, had worked on the 7,000-acre farm since they were teenagers. They lived in the hamlet of Natte Yallock and attended the local Anglican Church.

     While John Streeter was reclusive, Douglas and his wife Helen were active in the local community. The couple had two adult sons, Ross and Anthony. In December 2012 Douglas Streeter was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease. His son, 30-year-old Ross Streeter lived in the town of Bendigo and worked on the sprawling farm with his father and his uncle.

     At six in the evening of Thursday, March 16, 2013 Douglas Streeter's wife Helen discovered the bodies of her husband and her brother-in-law. Someone had shot the brothers in the head with a shotgun. The double murder shocked this rural community. Who would have reason to kill these too well-respected farmers?

     At eleven-thirty the next morning police officers followed an ambulance en route to Ross Streeter's house in Bendigo where paramedics treated Douglas Streeter's son for unspecified self-inflicted injuries. They transported Mr. Streeter to the Royal Melbourne Hospital where the patient was treated under police guard.

     Investigators believed that sometime after eight in the morning the previous day, Ross Streeter used a shotgun to kill his Uncle John. After the murder the suspect left the farm then sometime before noon returned and killed his father, Douglas.

     On Saturday, March 18, 2013, upon Ross Streeter's discharge from the hospital, police officers placed him under arrest for the two murders. Later that day investigators recovered the murder weapon. Charged with two counts of murder he was held without bail. The motive for the double murder was a mystery.

     On March 14, 2014 Ross Streeter pleaded guilty to both killings. Supreme Court Justice Lex Laspry at the November 2014 sentencing hearing said he was dubious of Streeter's claim that he had no memory of the shootings. A psychiatrist testified that the defendant did not suffer from any kind of mental illness and that his memory loss assertion was probably false.

     The judge imposed a sentence of 34 years. Mr. Streeter, under the terms of his sentence, would be eligible for parole after serving 25 years in prison. That meant he had no chance of freedom until he turned 55.

     Human behavior can be unpredictable, and in some cases inexplicable. 

Christina Schumacher's Involuntary Commitment

     In 2011 Ludwig "Sonny" Schumacher lived in Essex, Vermont with his wife Christina and their son and daughter. They had been married 17 years and their marriage was falling apart. The couple also had problems with their professional lives.

     After retiring from the Vermont National Guard as a Colonel and a F-16 pilot, Mr. Schumacher accepted an executive position with the Timberiane Dental Company in South Burlington, Vermont. Christina worked as a financial officer with the GE Healthcare Corporation, a company she had been with for more than twenty years.

     In July 2011 Christina petitioned a family court judge for an order of protection against abuse from her husband. In support of her request she claimed that their 15-year-old daughter was afraid of her father. "My daughter," she wrote, "is fearful and has said if I do not file this petition she will file her own. She is now staying with friends." According to the protection order petition Mr. Schumacher struck Christina in the face in front of the girl. He also abused his wife by grabbing her arm and pulling her hair. The family court judge denied the protection request.

     In 2012, after Christina's job at GE Healthcare was eliminated, she landed a position with an Internet firm called MyWebGrocer. A few months later she quit that job. Ludwig Schumacher ran into employment problems himself that year. Officials at Timberiane Dental fired him.

     In July 2013, a judge granted Christina a temporary order of protection against her husband after he tipped his 14-year-old son Gunnar's bed upside down with the boy in it. According to the court petition, Mr. Schumacher kept the boy pinned to the floor by pressing his knee against his back. When Gunnar broke free the father allegedly threw him to the floor. Christina cited this and other incidents of her husband's out-of-control rage to illustrate a "pattern of abuse which causes fear" for her and her son.

     Ludwig Schumacher appealed his wife's protection of abuse order and won. The family court judge ruled that the description of events in Christina's petition did not constitute domestic abuse by a parent as defined by Vermont law.

     Christina, on September 3, 2013, filed for divorce on grounds that her 49-year-old husband had been unfaithful, abusive and mentally ill. Shortly after the divorce filing he moved out of the house and rented an apartment in Essex. In cross-filing for divorce, Mr. Schumacher described Christina as mentally ill, noting that during the summer of 2013 she received intensive mental health treatment at the Seneca Center at the Fletcher Allen Health facility in Burlington.

     Ludwig Schumacher, on Tuesday, December 17, 3013, called Essex High School stating that his son Gunnar would be absent two days due to "a family situation." A day later, at two in the afternoon, a friend of Gunnar's went to the Schumacher apartment where he found Gunnar and his father dead.

     The 14-year-old boy had been strangled and his father had hanged himself. Mr. Schumacher left behind a long suicide letter explaining why he had murdered his son and killed himself.

     On the day after the discovery of her dead husband and son, a doctor informed Christina that if she didn't check herself into a psychiatric ward at the Fletcher Allen Health Care facility in Burlington she would be taken into custody by the authorities and put into the hospital without her consent. Because Christina had once told her sister that if anything happened to her children she would kill herself, the doctor felt he was acting in her best interest. Christina insisted that she did not need mental health treatment. All she wanted to do was grieve with her 17-year-old daughter. The doctor followed through on his threat by having Christina involuntarily committed to the mental ward.

     On December 30, 2013 Christina called the Burlington Free Press and asked the newspaper to investigate her situation, saying that the state had no basis to hold her against her will in the mental facility. While Vermont law did not require a prompt judicial review of involuntary mental health commitments, the publicity Christina received from newspaper stories prompted a judicial hearing.

     On January 22, 2014, after three hours of testimony before a Superior Court judge in Burlington, the judge said he disagreed with Christina's mental illness diagnosis and the assessment that she was a danger to herself and others. The judge ordered her release after five and a half weeks in the psychiatric ward.

The Dr. Thomas Dixon Love Triangle Murder-for-Hire Case

     The cast in a murder-for-hire plot features three principal characters: the instigator/mastermind who solicits/contracts the homicide; the hit man (or undercover agent playing the triggerman role); and the victim, the person targeted for death. While these cases, in terms of the principal actors have a somewhat common anatomy, they differ widely according to the socio-economic status of the participants, the nature of their relationships to each other and the specific motive behind the murder plots.

     On July 11, 2012, someone broke a window and climbed into the Lubbock, Texas home of Dr. Joseph Sonnier III, the 57-year-old chief pathologist of the Covenant Health System in that city. The intruder shot Dr. Sonnier to death. He had also been stabbed. The victim lived alone and because nothing had been taken from the house police ruled out robbery as the killer's motive.

     Later on the day of the murder Lubbock detectives questioned Dr. Sonnier's girlfriend in an effort to determine who may have had a reason to kill the doctor. When she mentioned that she had been having trouble with her former boyfriend who insisted on seeing her even though she was dating Dr. Sonnier, the detectives had a suspect and a potential motive. Their person of interest was a 48-year-old prominent plastic surgeon named Dr. Thomas Michael Dixon who practiced in Amarillo, Texas, a panhandle city 120 miles north of Lubbock. Because the homicide detectives didn't think Dr. Dixon climbed into Dr. Sonnier's house through a window and personally shot him, they considered the possibility of a murder-for-hire conspiracy. But who was the hit man?

     Less than a week after the murder detectives caught a break. A longtime friend and former business associate of Dr. Dixon's told investigators that David Neil Shepard killed Dr. Sonnier. According to the informant, Mr. Shepard, who had attempted suicide two days after Dr. Sonnier's murder, told him Dr. Dixon had given him three bars of silver worth $9,000 as an advance on the hit. (On June 15, 2012 David Shepard sold one of the bars for $2,750.) Shepard told the informant he entered Dr. Sonnier's house through a window and murdered him.

     Because the suspected hit man revealed information only known to crime scene investigators, the tipster's story rang true. (Shepard had described, for example, how he had muffled the sound of his gun, and how many times he fired the weapon.)

     The 51-year-old accused hit man had a crime history of two convictions for theft and burglary. Detectives believed David Shepard and the plastic surgeon met on the day before Dr. Sonnier's murder. The fact Shepard had sold the bar of silver at an Amarillo pawn shop tended to support a piece of the informant's story.

     On July 16, 2012 police in Amarillo arrested Dr. Thomas Dixon and David Shepard on charges of capital murder. The suspects were booked into the Lubbock County Criminal Detention Center under $10 million bond each.

     This murder-for-hire case was especially newsworthy because the accused mastermind and his victim were physicians. The case was also unusual because David Shepard was much older than the typical hit man. But the love triangle motive was fairly common.

     In April 2013 the mother and sons of Dr. Sonnier filed a wrongful death suit against Dr. Dixon. However, before the civil action could proceed, the murder case had to be resolved within the criminal justice system.

     The suspected hit man, David Neal Shepard, in September 2013, pleaded guilty to breaking into Dr. Sonnier's home and stabbing and shooting him to death. The judge sentenced him to life.

     Lubbock County prosecutor Matt Powell announced in November 2013 that the state would seek the death penalty against Dr. Dixon, the accused mastermind behind Dr. Sonnier's murder.

     In November 2014, at the conclusion of Dr. Dixon's three-week capital murder trial, the jury of six men and six women, after eight hours of deliberation, were unable to reach an unanimous verdict. Judge Jim Bob Darnell declared a mistrial.

     Doug Moore, the jury foreman, in speaking to the media following the mistrial said that although the case against Dr. Dixon was strong, two jurors refused to find him guilty. The foreman described these jurors as being not very bright. "For me the evidence of guilt seemed very clear," he said.

     Shortly after the mistrial the judge denied the defendant's request for a reduction of his $10 million bond. However, in September 2015, the judge reduced Dixon's bail to $2 million. A few days later the accused murder-for-hire mastermind paid $200,000 and was released from jail pending the disposition of his second trial.

      On November 19, 2015, the jury in Dr. Dixon's second trial found him guilty of capital murder. The judge sentenced him to life in prison without the chance of parole.

The Ka Pasasouk: Quadruple Murder Case

     In Los Angeles, Ka Pasasouk began using drugs, assaulting people and stealing things years before his first criminal conviction as a 23-year-old in 2004. The husky, heavily tattooed street criminal was sent to state prison that year for auto-theft. After serving a few months behind bars, Pasasouk, in 2006, was back in prison after being convicted of robbery and the crime of assault likely to produce great bodily injury. In 2010, after being out of prison for more than a year, a judge sentenced Mr. Pasasouk to three years for stealing cars. On January 18, 2012, after being placed under the supervision of the Los Angeles Probation Department, he was back on the street living his life of methamphetamine, violence and theft.

     On September 19, 2012 Ka Pasasouk pleaded no contest to the possession of meth in a Van Nuys Superior Court before Judge Jessica Silvers. Fateema Johnson, a prosecutor in the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office accepted the plea in return for Pasasouk's promise to enter a county drug rehabilitation program pursuant to a recent voter approved ballot measure called Proposition 36. The goal of this program involved sending nonviolent drug offenders into rehab instead of prison. Since Pasasouk was a violent, habitual criminal he was not the kind of person California voters had in mind when they approved this measure.

     At the September 2012 hearing in Van Nuys, a member of the Los Angeles County Probation Department objected strongly to the terms of Pasasouk's plea arrangement. The probation officer pointed out that Mr. Pasasouk had not checked in with his probation agent since January. Moreover, according to a report submitted to Judge Silvers by the probation department: "The defendant is an ineligible and unsuitable candidate for continued community supervision. It is recommended that probation be denied, and that the defendant be sentenced to state prison."

     Judge Jessica Silvers, on the recommendation of the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office, handed down suspended sentence on the meth possession case, placed Ka Pasasouk back under the supervision of the Los Angeles County Probation Department and ordered him to enter the drug rehabilitation program.

      Ka Pasasouk, who had no intention of entering a drug program, didn't even bother to check in with his probation agent. In November 2012 when he failed to appear in her courtroom to show proof that he was making drug rehabilitation progress, Judge Silvers issued a bench warrant for his arrest.

     At four-thirty Sunday morning, December 2, 2012, Ka Pasasouk and three associates--two women and one man--were outside a rundown unlicensed boarding house in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Northridge in the San Fernando Valley. Pasasouk and his companions were yelling at four people--two men and two women--with whom they had some kind of property dispute. Pasasouk, who was holding these people at gunpoint suddenly shot and killed all four of them.

     Following the quadruple murder Mr. Pasasouk and his accomplices drove to Las Vegas in a black Audi. That night the police in Las Vegas spotted the car parked at the Silverton Hotel & Casino. Following an all-night surveillance while arrest warrants were being prepared in Los Angeles, the police took Pasasouk and the others into custody. They were held in the Clark County Jail.

     A week after the arrests in Las Vegas a spokesperson with the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office admitted that Ka Pasasouk should not have been placed on probation following his meth arrest. In recommending the drug rehabilitation program instead of prison, the DA's office had made a terrible mistake.

     In November 2015 a jury sitting in Los Angeles found Ka Pasasouk guilty of four counts of first-degree murder. In February 2016 the judge sentenced him to death by lethal injection.

     Had Pasasouk been sentenced to prison in January 2012 instead of being placed on probation he would have served his sentence and been out on the street prior to December 1, the date of the murders. However, had the judge in 2010 given him a stiffer sentence he would not have murdered the four people in Northridge. 

The Stacey Sutera Murder Case

     Early in 2010 Robert McLaughlin, a 62-year-old retired U.S. Postal employee from Painesville, Ohio, a Lake County town in the northeastern part of the state, asked Stacey Sutera out for a date. The 37-year-old teacher who lived in Canfield, a suburban town located on the western edge of the Youngstown metropolitan area, informed McLaughlin that she had no interest in him romantically. The two had known each other fifteen years. Mr. McLaughlin gave no indication that he had been hurt and angered by the rejection. Stacey Sutera said she hoped the two could remain, if not friends, at least friendly acquaintances.

     Stacey Sutera's rejection of a much older man who had no reason to expect that he had any chance of developing a relationship with the young, attractive woman changed her life in a way she could not have predicted or imagined. The rejection turned this otherwise unremarkable man into a stealthy and insidious monster.

     Stacey Sutera's prolonged nightmare began on March 26, 2010 when someone used a key to scratch her car in the parking lot of a grocery store. Three months later the superintendent of the Columbiana School District started receiving emails about a sexually oriented website that falsely featured Sutera. The anonymous writer of the emails began sending messages to Sutera in which he threatened to ruin her reputation. These emails were signed, "Your Enemy For Life." During this period Stacey Sutera, who had remained in touch with McLauglin, spoke to him about her problem. He responded with sympathy and concern.

     On July 29, 2010 Stacey Sutera filed a report with the Canfield Police Department which detailed the Internet harassment. She had no idea who hated her enough to wage such a malicious campaign against her. Following the police report her tormentor scratched a derogatory slur on her car and began harassing her with a series of prank telephone calls.

     In September 2010 Stacey Sutera received a fake used condom in the mail, a gag item sold online to people out for revenge. The following month her teaching colleagues received, through the mail, business cards bearing the teacher's name and address. The cards advertised Sutera's willingness to perform sexual acts for a fee. At this point it was obvious that Sutera's stalker had dedicated his life to ruining hers.

     Stacey Sutera's ongoing nightmare intensified on December 1, 2010 when her stalker poisoned her dog to death. A week later Canfield detectives learned that Robert McLaughlin had purchased the fake condom online and had created the sexually explicit websites designed to embarrass and scandalize Sutera. When police officers informed Sutera who had been stalking her she was stunned. What had she ever done to this man to incur his wrath? Why did he think she deserved to be treated like this?

     On December 8, 2010 detectives with the Canfield Police Department searched Mr. McLaughlin's home in Painesville. The officers discovered information linking the suspect to the malicious website, a mailing list of Sutera's colleagues, the phony sex act business cards, photographs of her and miscellaneous pornographic material. The next day detectives arrested McLaughlin on charges of pandering obscenity and menacing by stalking.

     Sutera, on the day of McLaughlin's arrest, filed for a civil protection order before Judge Eugene J. Fehr of the Mahoning County Common Pleas Court. The judge granted the order which barred McLaughlin from possessing a firearm and prohibited him from any further contact with Sutera. The order would remain in effect until July 2015. In her affidavit in support of the protection order, She had written: "McLaughlin's actions are clearly designed to cause me mental illness and fear of physical harm. I live in constant fear. My dog has been killed. My daughter and I are in danger."

     Robert McLaughlin, on December 17, 2010, after eight months of stalking Stacey Sutera pleaded guilty in a Mahoning County Court to menacing by stalking. The judge sentenced him to six months in jail. Six months for ruining a woman's life. This judge had given Sutera just six months of protection from a malicious nutcase.

      Stacey Sutera, on January 8, 2011, filed a civil suit against McLaughlin claiming infliction of emotional stress, libel and invasion of privacy. The plaintiff sought $1.5 million in damages.

     A Mahoning County grand jury, in the spring of 2011, indicted Mr. McLaughlin on the felony charges of pandering obscenity and three counts of possessing criminal tools (his computer). That fall the defendant pleaded guilty to these charges, and on November 29, 2011, Judge Maureen A. Sweeney shocked Sutera, her family and friends by only sentencing this aggressively vicious stalker to five years of probation. McLaughlin was also sentenced to 500 hours of community service and fined $2,500. The judge ordered him to enroll in an anger-management program. He would also have to register in the county as a Tier-I sex offender.

     From Sutera's point of view Mr. McLaughlin's sentence amounted to a slap on the wrist. The fact he would not serve time behind bars guaranteed that he would continue his program of personal destruction. Sutera suffered from multiple sclerosis and ulcers and had nothing to look forward to but a future of worry and fear. Robert McLaughlin, a nobody and loser who couldn't handle being rejected by someone out of his league had ruined the life of a once productive mother and teacher. Anger-management? Community service? Probation? 
     On February 8, 2012, a neighbor found Stacey Sutera lying dead outside her Carriage Hill apartment. She had been shot at close range. That day a Mahoning County judge issued a warrant for Robert McLaughlin's arrest on the charge of capital murder. After harassing Stacey Sutera for almost two years, this stalker, who should have been in prison, waited for his 40-year-old victim to come out of her dwelling. 

     The day after he murdered Stacey Sutera, the 64-year-old McLaughlin used the same gun to kill himself at his mother's gravesite. No one knew why McLaughlin felt the need to take his life near his mother's grave. No one really cared. In McLaughlin's Painesville storage unit, investigators found a suicide note in which he had written out his plans to murder Sutera then kill himself. 

     Stacey Sutera had been powerless to protect herself from a man she knew would eventually kill her. She had reached out to the police and the courts for help and got nothing because local criminal justice practitioners were more interested in protecting Robert McLaughlin than Stacey Sutera.

      Was the sentencing judge so stupid that she thought an anger-management counselor could fix Robert McLaughlin? 

The Alan Goodman Murder Case

     Alan and Lois Goodman in 2012 had been married 50 years. In the early 1960s Alan started an auto parts business in Los Angeles. Lois, who in 1979 became a tennis referee, had risen to the top of her profession and at age 70 was still officiating matches. She and her 80-year-old husband lived in a condominium in the Woodland Hills district of Los Angeles out in the San Fernando Valley.

     On April 17, 2012 Lois Goodman called 911 to report the discovery of Alan Goodman lying on his bed either unconscious or dead. LAPD officers from the Topanga station responded to the scene. According Lois she had been away from the condo six hours during which time she had been refereeing tennis matches at Pierce Community College in Woodland Hills.

     Upon entering the dwelling Lois said she noticed a broken coffee mug on the floor with blood on it. From the mug she followed a trail of blood into Alan's bedroom where she found him unresponsive with a bloody wound to the right side of his head.

     Lois Goodman informed the police officers that her husband, a diabetic with high blood pressure, must have had a heart attack, fallen down a flight of stairs, then somehow made it to his room and climbed onto his bed. Because of Mr. Goodman's age the LAPD officers had no reason to suspect criminal homicide.

     Two fire department paramedics pronounced Mr. Goodman dead at the scene. While neither of the medics were trained homicide investigators, they possessed enough common sense and death site experience to interpret an oddly shaped wound to the right side of the dead man's head as possible evidence of foul play. The medics took care not to disturb the body on grounds it might be part of a murder scene. Police officers, however, relying on Lois Goodman's death narration, allowed the body to be transported to its place of cremation. In a situation that cried out for, at the very least, an autopsy, Mr. Goodman's corpse, and perhaps evidence of murder, were headed for the furnace.

     Whether or not a homicide had occurred in the Woodland Hills condominium, the initial phase of the Goodman case was not how violent, sudden death situations should be handled in the second largest police department in the country, or for that matter anywhere else.

     On April 20, 2012, three days after Alan Goodman's death, an investigator with the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office who had been dispatched to sign Mr. Goodman's death certificate noticed several deep cuts on the dead man's head and ear that seemed too severe to have been caused by an accidental spill down a flight of steps. This death investigator's rather basic observation led to an autopsy of Mr. Goodman's body.

     The next day a forensic pathologist with the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office determined that Mr. Goodman's cause of death to be blunt force trauma to the head from a sharp object. The pathologist found shards of the broken coffee mug imbedded in the victim's wounds. Moreover, Mr. Goodman had not suffered a heart attack. Instead of a flight of stairs, Mr. Goodman had been killed by being struck in the head with a coffee mug. As a result of the autopsy findings the coroner's office ruled the manner of this death a homicide.

     Had Mr. Goodman's body been cremated, the cause and manner of this man's death would have remained a mystery. On the other hand, because the autopsy had been delayed three days, the forensic pathologist could not pinpoint the time of death.

     Los Angeles detectives, on April 21, 2012, searched the Goodman condominium in Woodland Hills. The searchers discovered heavy blood staining on the carpets, on the refrigerator door, inside the linen closet and on a wall near the inside door to the garage.

     In general, an analysis of the blood spatter patterns in the condo did not support the theory that Mr. Goodman had fallen down a flight of stairs. (I don't know if the police had collected the broken coffee mug and its pieces from the crime scene. If they didn't preserve what turned out to be the murder weapon, that was a problem. And even if officers did retrieve this evidence later, that would be a chain of custody problem.)

     Shortly after the delayed search of the Goodman condo, detectives questioned Lois Goodman, this time as a suspect in her husband's murder. According to published police documents she gave conflicting accounts of what she had observed upon entering the dwelling that day. At one point she described the scene as "violent" and suggested that someone may have "positioned" Mr. Goodman's body in his bed.

     Over the next four months Los Angeles detectives, with Lois Goodman as their prime suspect, investigated the murder. This led to the discovery of emails she had exchanged with a man who may have been a lover. In one email Lois Goodman referred to "terminating" a relationship. Investigators suspected that Goodman had murdered her husband for another man. The fact there were no signs of forced entry into the condo and that nothing had been stolen from the dwelling comprised circumstantial evidence that Lois Goodman had been responsible for her husband's violent death. Moreover, when speaking to the responding officers that day, the dead man's wife had gone out of her way to establish her whereabouts at the time of his death, behavior inconsistent with that of a grieving widow.

     In mid-August 2012, after a Los Angeles County prosecutor charged Lois Goodman with the murder of her husband, detectives followed her to New York City where she was scheduled to officiate at the U.S. Tennis Open at Flushing Meadows. On August 21, on the eve of the Open, New York City officers went to her Manhattan hotel room and arrested her on the California murder warrant. That evening Los Goodman found herself in the Rikers Island lock-up under $1 million bond pending her extradition hearing.

     Back in Los Angeles on August 29, 2012, at her arraignment hearing, the judge, assured by Goodman's attorney Alison Triessl that the tennis line umpire was not dangerous or a candidate for flight, reduced her bail to $500,000. In speaking to reporters attorney Triessl, in making the case that her 70-year-old client was physically incapable of killing her husband, pointed out that she had received two full knee replacements and a shoulder replacement. According to the attorney Lois Goodman was "wearing two hearing aids and had rheumatoid arthritis."

     On September 3, 2012 Lois Goodman, after spending two weeks in jail, was released on bail.

     The FBI announced, on October 10, 2012, that Lois Goodman, when asked by a bureau polygraph examiner if she had killed her husband, answered no--and passed the test. The polygraph expert, Jack Trimarco, said there was "no significant reaction" when Goodman answered "no" to the payload question.

     On November 30, 2012, the Los Angeles prosecutor, due to insufficient evidence, dropped the murder charges against Lois Goodman.

     In April 2015 a federal judge dismissed Lois Goodman's false arrest lawsuit against the LAPD. The plaintiff claimed the murder accusation caused her "public humiliation." In setting out his rationale for the dismissal, Judge John A. Kronstadt wrote that the LAPD homicide investigation had produced "substantial details sufficient to support a finding of probable cause to arrest Lois Goodman."

     Lois Goodman, in March 2018, filed suit in federal court claiming the Los Angeles Coroner's Office had deprived her of her civil rights by falsifying her husband's autopsy report. The 76-year-old plaintiff asked for $100,000 in damages to cover the cost of her bail and legal fees stemming from her arrest. The suit was quickly dismissed. 

The Chelsea Becker Murder Case

      On September 10, 2019, 25-year-old Chelsea Cheyenne Becker gave birth to a stillborn baby at the Adventist Health Medical Center in Hanford, California. Child Protective Services had taken Becker's previous three children from her. Her children were taken and placed into other families because of Becker's addiction to methamphetamine and other drugs. In 2016 her son had been born with a meth addiction. 

     Because of Chelsea Becker's history of drug addiction the stillbirth of her fourth child led to a police inquiry. When questioned by detectives shortly after the birth she admitted using meth just four days before the birth. She was in her eighth month of pregnancy. 

     A forensic pathologist with the Kings County Coroner's Office conducted an autopsy and ruled the baby's death a homicide due to "toxic levels of methamphetamine" in the new born's system. 

     Kings County District Attorney Keith L. Faqundes, under Section 187 of the California Penal Code that defined the crime of murder as "the unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice," charged Chelsea Becker with murder. According to the charge, the baby's death resulted from "the reckless or indifferent unlawful conduct of a mother."

     On November 6, 2019, police officers took Chelsea Becker into custody at a house in Visalia, California. She was booked into the Kings County Jail on the charge of murder. The magistrate set her bail at $5 million and appointed her a public defender.

     When the Chelsea Becker murder case became a news item nationally, a team of lawyers backed by Advocates For Pregnant Women took over the case from the public defender. Lawyers with the pro-abortion group filed a petition with a California Superior Court asking for a dismissal of the murder charge on grounds Section 187 of the penal code did not apply to Chelsea Becker's case.

     On June 4, 2020 the superior court judge denied the defendant's motion to dismiss. By doing so the court ruled that Section 187, a law passed in 1970, did apply to stillborn deaths caused by drug addiction. 

     California State Attorney General Xavier Becerra on August 7, 2020 filed an Amicus Curie (friend of the court) brief on Chelsea Becker's behalf before the California Supreme Court. In the brief, Becerra wrote: "Section 187 of the California Penal Code was intended to protect pregnant women from harm, not charge them with murder. Our laws in California do not convict women who suffer the loss of their pregnancy. The law has been misused to the detriment of women, children, and families."

     In a press release associated with the California Supreme Court filing, the state attorney general said: "We will work to end the prosecution and imprisonment of Ms. Becker so we can focus on applying the law to those who put the lives of pregnant women in danger."

     In a statement to reporters, District Attorney Faqundes responded to Attorney General Xavier Becerra's brief this way: "This case is not about a stillbirth, it is a case about a mother's overdose of a late-term viable fetus."

     On December 23, 2020 the California Supreme Court declined to intervene in the Chelsea Becker Murder case. That meant the case would move forward toward trial.

     In May 2021, Kings County Superior Court Judge Robert Shane Burns dismissed the murder charge against Chelsea Becker on grounds related to criminal intent. The judge ruled the prosecution failed to present sufficient evidence that the defendant had taken the drugs with the knowledge that such behavior would cause a stillbirth.

Canada's "Black Widow"

     In 1988 in Ontario, Canada, 52-year-old Melissa Ann Shepard, married to a man named Russell Shepard, met Gordon Stewart, a factory worker with two children whose wife had passed away. They had an affair after which Melissa divorced Mr. Shepard and became Mrs. Stewart.

     On April 22, 1991, after drugging Gordon Stewart with benzodiazepine (valium and restoril), Melissa drove him to a remote stretch of highway near the Halifax airport, pulled his body out of the car and ran over him twice. (Mr. Stewart was probably dead from the lethal dose of drugs before she dumped him onto the road.) Three hours later Melissa Ann reported the incident to the police, claiming she killed her husband while he was attempting to rape her.

     Melissa's account of her second husband's death, in the context of an attempted rape, made no sense. Moreover, Mr. Stewart, before his death had written a letter in which he chronicled how Melissa had cheated on him, repeatedly lied and drained his bank account. The authorities also found traces of the deadly drug in the victim's system.

     In the spring of 1992 a jury in Kingston, Ontario found Melissa guilty of manslaughter. The judge sentenced her to six years in prison. While incarcerated she formed a support group for wives who had been abused by their husbands. After serving just two years of the manslaughter sentence the homicidal sociopath became a nationally known spokesperson for the battered wife syndrome.

     In April 2001, while looking for a husband to kill at a Christian retreat in Ontario, Melissa Ann Stewart met 83-year-old Robert Edmund Friedrich. The next day the 66-year-old "black widow" sent him a letter in which she wrote: "God wants us to be married." Within days of that letter the couple tied the knot.

     When Mr. Friedrich died of cardiac arrest one year after marrying Melissa, she emptied his bank account of $400,000, and continued receiving his social security checks. The happy widow arranged to have him hastily cremated before his body could be autopsied. Because of his age and the quick cremation, notwithstanding some suspicion of foul play, she was not charged in connection with the old man's death.

     In March 2004, about two years after Mr. Friedrich's passing, Melissa Ann hooked up with a Florida man through an Internet dating site. A few days after the online meeting she flew to 73-year-old Alexander Strategos' home in Pinellas Park. The next day the Canadian moved into the recently divorced man's house. Not long after that they were married.

     During the next eight months Mr. Strategos, feeling weak, kept falling and hitting his head, injuries that required eight hospitalizations. His doctors couldn't figure out what was ailing him. During his residence at a rest home, just before he died in January 2005, Mr. Strategos signed over power of attorney to his wife.

     Mr. Strategos' son became suspicious when he discovered, in his father's medical papers, that he had died with the unprescribed drug benzodiazepine in his system. Melissa Ann had also withdrawn $20,000 from her deceased husband's bank account. On January 6, 2005, police arrested her on charges of grand theft and forgery. She pleaded guilty to these offenses and was sentenced to five years in prison. On April 4, 2009, upon her release from custody, the authorities deported her back to Canada. She never faced charges in connection with the mysterious death of Alexander Strategos.

     On September 28, 2012, Melissa, now 77, married Fred Weeks, a 75-year-old from New Glasgow, New Brunswick. While honeymooning a few days later on Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Mr. Weeks fell ill at their bed and breakfast and had to be hospitalized. After nurses noticed signs that the patient had been injected with something, hospital personnel alerted the police. On October 1, 2012 Fred Weeks left the hospital a weaker but wiser man.

     The day after her husband walked out of the hospital the police arrested Melissa Ann on the charge of administering a noxious substance. No doubt her criminal record and the fates of her former husbands influenced the decision to take her into custody. The judge, at her October 5, 2012 bail hearing, denied her bond.

     On June 11, 2013 Melissa Ann pleaded guilty to administering a noxious drug. The judge sentenced the 78-year-old woman to three and a half years in prison. The Crown, without success, had argued that the defendant's age should not be a factor in her sentencing.

     On December 16, 2014 a judge in Nova Scotia denied the black widow's request for parole. The judge ruled that Melissa Friedrich had to serve her entire sentence which meant she would remain behind bars until January 2017.

     Notwithstanding the judges' insistence that Friedrich serve her full sentence, correction authorities in Nova Scotia released her back into society on March 18, 2016. She had been behind bars less than three years.

     In speaking to reporters, the Black Widow's attorney said this about his client: "I never really thought she was trying to kill anyone. If you look at her past, she really wanted to influence them [her poisoned husbands] and have them change their insurance and wills." 

Forensic Science

     The principle role of the forensic scientist is to identify physical crime scene evidence by comparing it to known samples obtained either from a suspect's person or from an object such as a gun, shoe or burglar tool that this person possessed, wore or was associated with. Forensic science relies on the principle that criminals leave part of themselves at the scene of the crime. Evidence left at the site of a crime might include blood, semen, latent fingerprints, shoe impressions, bite marks, hair follicles and textile fibers. Moreover, the suspect will often inadvertently take something away from the crime scene. A criminal might, for example, leave the crime site carrying traces of the victim's blood and tissue under his fingernails.

     The theory that a criminal perpetrator leaves a part of himself at the scene of a crime and takes a piece of the crime site with him was postulated by Edmund Locard, who in 1911 in Lyon, France, established the world's first crime lab. Referred to as the Locard Exchange Principle, this idea, along with the need to reconstruct what took place at the site of a criminal act, is the basic rationale behind crime scene investigation. The term "associative evidence" describes traces of things that, pursuant to the Locard Exchange Principle, associates a person to the site of the offense.

     Simply put, forensic science involves the application of hard science and technology to the investigation of crime, the proof of guilt or innocence at a criminal trial and the resolution of factual issues in civil litigation. The most widely used components of forensic science are forensic chemistry, toxicology, biology, mineralogy, serology (bodily fluids), anthropology (bones), pathology (autopsies and cause and manner of death) and odontology (identification by teeth). The process of firearms identification, once called forensic ballistics, incorporates knowledge and science in a variety of fields including gun-smithing, ordnance, ballistics, chemistry, metallurgy, microscopy, photography and the forensic pathology of gunshot wounds. Latent fingerprint identification and forensic document examination--the identification of unknown handwriting and the analysis of paper, ink and printing instruments--are also within the forensic science field. Blood spatter interpretation and identification by human bite mark impressions, while often treated as forensic science, are not hard science and should not be considered as such.

Forensic Document Examination

     Forensic document examination, also referred to as questioned document analysis, is a branch of forensic science that concerns itself with the identification of handwriting, ink, typewriting, computer printing and various writing instruments. Ninety percent of a document examiner's work has to do with the comparison of known handwriting samples with questioned writing such as bank robbery notes, ransom documents, mail bomb package addresses, threatening letters, handwritten suicide notes and disputed signatures in wills, insurance policies and contracts.

     It's the forensic document examiner's job to determine if the questioned handwriting is genuine or forged. This aspect of the science is based on the principle that a person's handwriting is unique and consistent.

     Forensic document examiners do not draw conclusions about a writer's personality from his handwriting. That is the function of graphology, a branch of psychology that is not hard science. Graphologists who also function as forensic document examiners are not members of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and should not be qualified to testify in court as expert witnesses.

     Graphologists who do testify as expert witnesses belong to their own professional organization called the World Association of Document Examiners. Most judges have not learned the difference between these two sets of handwriting identification practitioners. Because of the graphologists, the dueling expert problem flourishes in this field of forensic science. Many critics of this branch of forensic science consider handwriting identification to be too subjective to be true science. The entire profession has been under attack for decades.

     Legitimate document examiners utilize chemistry, specialized photography, computer science and microscopy in their work. A few specialize in the restoration of charred and burned documents. There are no schools for this kind of work. A document examiner's education and training is in the form of on-the-job experience in federal, state, county and city crime laboratories. A few learn the trade in private crime labs and from examiners in private practice.

     Because documents and handwriting are common pieces of physical evidence in virtually every type of crime, criminal investigators rely heavily on this branch of forensic science. It is therefore important that the field maintains its scientific integrity.

Joseph L. Miller: The Deacon's Secret

     In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on June 12, 1959, 23-year-old Joseph Lewis Miller shot John and Donna Lumpkins with a 12-gauge shotgun. Mr. Lumpkins died of his injuries on July 4 of that year. Donna Lumpkins, his wife, survived her wounds.

     On January 22, 1960 Joseph Miller pleaded guilty to the John Lumpkins murder and the attempted murder of the victim's wife. The judge sentenced him to life in prison. Throughout the late 1960s Mr. Miller made several requests to have his life sentence commuted. On February 9, 1971 Joseph Miller got his wish when Governor Raymond P. Shaffer granted his motion. After serving 11 years and 6 months behind bars Mr. Miller began his life as an ex-con on lifetime parole.

     Governor Shaffer's decision in this case would end up costing another man his life. (Whenever a politician commutes a sentence in a case that did not involve injustice, the politician is saying that he knows better than the judge who issued the original sentence.)

     On January 15, 1981 Joseph Miller, at age 45, shot Thomas Walker to death in the parking lot outside a Harrisburg bar. After being charged with murder and several firearms violations a month later, he was nowhere to be found. He became a fugitive from justice.

     In 2010 in the northeastern Texas town of Mineola, Joseph Miller, now a deacon in the New Life Family Baptist Church, married a 58-year-old member of the congregation named Gennell. He was 74-years-old and living under the name Eugene Eubanks. A wanted murder suspect and convected killer, Mr. Miller had established himself as a pillar of the community. 

     In the early morning hours of April 21, 2014 a team of U.S. Marshals showed up in Mineola with a warrant for the longtime fugitive's arrest. The marshals took Joseph Miller, aka Eugene Eubanks, into custody and booked him into the Wood County Jail where he awaited his extradition back to Pennsylvania. According to the fugitive's wife Gennell Eubanks, Eugene suffered from early stage Alzheimer's Disease and arthritis. He also had been having problems with his heart.

     After the marshals hauled her 78-year-old husband off to jail, Gennell Eubanks told a reporter from Pennsylvania that she had not known her husband's real name. Regarding the shooting death of Thomas Walker in 1981, she said, "Eugene said it was an accident. He was trying to protect his brother because a man was trying to kill him. I believe my husband. He wasn't trying to kill that man; it just happened. He isn't going to lie to me," she said, "because he is a deacon. He was trying to do what's right." As Joseph Miller was being taken out of his house in handcuffs, he said this to his 62-year-old wife: "Take care of yourself, and trust in the Lord. He will see you through."

       Mr. Miller had not told Gennell Eubanks about his 1959 murder of John Lumpkins and the shooting of the victim's wife. She had no idea her husband of four years had spent more than eleven years in a Pennsylvania prison.
 
     The deacon knew how to keep a secret. 

Cynthia Brim: Removing a Mentally Ill Judge

      Cynthia Brim, a black woman from Chicago's south side graduated from the city's Loyola University Law School in 1983. In 1994 the 38-year-old lawyer, after working seven years in the Chicago Law Department, was elected to the position of Cook County Circuit Judge. She presided in the Markham Courthouse in south suburban Chicago. Most of her workload involved simple traffic cases. Elected to a six year term she would remain on the bench until Cook County citizens voted not to retain her. That hadn't happened to a Cook County judge in 24 years. In Chicagoland once on the bench always on the bench. In reality it's a lifetime position.

     By any standard Cynthia Brim was not a competent judge. In 2000, 2006 and 2012, years in which Brim was on the ballot for retention, the Chicago Bar Association did not recommend that voters retain her. According to the bar association, Judge Brim was not qualified nor fit for the relatively simple job of presiding over minor traffic offenses. Notwithstanding the bar association's stamp of disapproval, Cook County voters kept her in on the job.

     On March 9, 2012 Judge Brim turned up at the Daley Center Courthouse in downtown Chicago where she threw a set of keys at and shoved a Cook County Sheriff's Deputy. Officers handcuffed the out-of-control woman and took her to a holding cell in the basement of the courthouse. A Cook County prosecutor charged Judge Brim with misdemeanor battery.

     A court-appointed psychiatrist examined the judge and concluded that when she committed the crime she was out of her mind. The day before her fight with the deputy, while sitting on the bench at the Markham Courthouse, Judge Brim had to be ejected from her own courtroom following a 45-minute rant on racism in the criminal justice system.

     Shortly after her arrest for battery, a panel of Cook County supervisory judges suspended Judge Brim for an indefinite period of time. While the fracas with the police officer represented her first brush with the law, the mental breakdown the day before her arrest fit into a long history of such irrational behavior. The woman was clearly unfit for the bench, but because she held an elected office, stripping Brim of her judgeship was next to impossible. Indefinite suspension was the next best thing. During that period, however, until her term ran out Judge Brim received her annual salary of $182,000 a year.

     Joe Berrious, a Cook County Democratic machine boss told reporters that Judge Brim would receive the full support of the party in her next retention election.

     In November 2012 Cook County voters gave the suspended judge another six years in office.

     Judge Brim went on trial for battery in February 2013. She waived her right to a jury in favor of a trial by judge. Her attorney, in presenting a defense of legal insanity, revealed how unfit his client was for the bench. According to the defense attorney, Judge Brim, since becoming a judge had been hospitalized for mental illness nine times. In describing Brim's skirmish with the deputy sheriff the attorney said, "This was not the action of a rational human being. This is someone acting pursuant to the symptoms of a mental disorder."

     The trial judge in the battery case found that when the defendant unloaded on the deputy she was legally insane. As a result he placed Judge Brim on probation and ordered her to stay on her antipsychotic medication.

     In an effort to get Judge Brim permanently removed from the bench, John Gallo, the attorney for the Judicial Inquiry Board, filed a complaint in August 2013 charging her with conduct "prejudicial to the administration of justice that brought the judicial office into disrepute." Attorney Gallo noted that after the incident in the downtown courthouse Judge Brim had been hospitalized three weeks for bipolar mood disorder.

     Attorney Gallo wrote that the day before the judge's arrest, while presiding over a traffic case, she suddenly launched into a 45-minute tirade in which she revealed that her grandmother had been raped by a white man. She also accused two Cook County police agencies of targeting Hispanics and blacks. "Justice is all about if you're black or white," she said before being forcibly removed from the courtroom.

     In March 2014 Judge Brim's case came before a judicial disciplinary panel comprised of an Illinois Supreme Court Justice, two appellate court judges, a pair of circuit court judges and two citizens. In a bid to save her $182,000 a year job, Judge Brim spoke to the panel. Regarding her rant the day before her run-in with the police officer, she said, "I just broke like a pencil. It was totally inappropriate for me to say what I did at the time--or any other time."

     In an effort to convince the panel members that she was ready to return to the bench Judge Brim said, "I can serve as a judge with full capability as long as I continue to take the medication as prescribed. I've had two years to think about this, and I have a different perspective and understanding of my condition. I realize now I have to stay on my medications and see a psychiatrist on a regular basis."

     Attorney Gallo, in speaking to the inquiry panel voiced his concern over whether it would be proper for Judge Brim to return to the bench. "Judge Brim," he said, "decided to go without any kind of psychiatric treatment of any sort after 15 years of these episodes while she was a sitting judge." Mr. Gallo informed the panel members that she had been hospitalized nine times for mental breakdowns since she took the bench in 1994. In one of her psychiatric meltdowns EMT personnel carried her out of the courtroom on a stretcher after she went catatonic. Gallo pointed out that the judge wasn't diagnosed with a bipolar type of schizoaffective disorder until 2009. By then she had been a judge fifteen years.

     On May 10, 2014, the Illinois Courts Commission removed Cynthia Brim from the bench. The commissioners determined she was unfit to preside over a courtroom. Following her removal, however, she began receiving her pension in excess of $150,000 a year. She also remained registered in the state to practice law.

The Sungee Kwon Suicide-Murder Case

     In 2015, 45-year-old Dr. Raja Fayad, a native of Syria who earned his medical degree in that country, decided to enter academia rather than to practice medicine. That decision brought him to the United States where he taught physiology and anatomy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2008 Dr. Fayad and his wife Sunghee Kwon moved into a house on Lake Murray in suburban Lexington County outside of Columbia, South Carolina.

     Dr. Fayad, an expert on colon cancer, moved to South Carolina to assume his new position as the graduate director and head of the Applied Physiology Division of the University of South Carolina's Arnold School of Public Health.

     While Dr. Fayad enjoyed success in his professional life his marriage to Sunghee Kwon had fallen apart. Although they were divorced in 2012 the couple continued to occupy the house on Lake Murray. In late 2014, however, Dr. Fayad moved out of the dwelling into a suite of rooms at a nearby residence motel.

     At one in the afternoon of Thursday February 5, 2015 Dr. Fayad's former wife showed up at his office on the fourth floor of the Arnold School of Public Health Building in downtown Columbia a few blocks from the Statehouse. She came armed with a 9 mm pistol.

     A few minutes after Sunghee Kwon's arrival at the university, police officers responded to reports from people who had heard the sound of gunshots coming from Dr. Fayad's office and adjacent laboratory.

     Officers that afternoon discovered the dead bodies of Dr. Fayad and his 46-year-old wife. He had been shot several times in the upper torso. After murdering her ex-spouse Sunghee Kwon took her own life by shooting herself in the stomach.

     The 9 mm pistol, its magazine empty, lay near the bodies. There were no witnesses to the murder-suicide. 

The Michigan Sniper

     In 2003, during a three-week period in and around Washington, D.C., snipers John Allen Muhammad and his 17-year-old accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, shot thirteen people, murdering ten of them. During this killing spree the so-called Beltway Snipers randomly shot individuals who were going about their daily business in places they thought were safe. During the time these pot-shot artists were at large, the media paid little attention to the rash of routine shootings that were taking place in the District of Columbia, a place much more dangerous than the sites of the sniper shootings.

     Because of the nature of the Beltway shootings and the victimology, Muhammad and Malvo terrorized an entire region. And that's what snipers really are--terrorists. Although a person is far more likely to be shot by a spouse, it's the sniper that terrorizes. These killers instill fear far beyond the harm they actually inflict. This is what terrorism is all about.

     In mid-October 2012 a sniper began randomly shooting at motorists and pedestrians along a 75-mile stretch between Ann Arbor and Detroit in southern Michigan. 

     At 11:50 in the morning on Saturday, October 27, 2012, an 18-year-old motorist from Canton, Michigan, driving eastbound on I-96 with his girlfriend, became the sniper's 26th target when a bullet passed through the backseat windows of the vehicle. No one was injured.

     Thirty minutes later, Scott Arnold, from Dalton, Michigan, driving eastbound on I-96 on his way to Detroit to attend game 3 of the World Series, became the Michigan sniper's first shooting victim. The 46-year-old, alone in the car, was shot in the buttocks as he approached the Fowlerville Road exit. The wounded driver made it to a service station where he was treated by members of an ambulance crew who took him to St. Joseph Mercy Hospital of Livingston. According to reports the wounded motorist was extremely concerned that he would miss the Detroit Tigers-San Francisco Giants World Series game.

     In terms of the damage the bullet could have done, Mr. Arnold was lucky. The slug just missed an artery and major nerves. With the bullet still in him, doctors discharged Mr. Arnold from the hospital on Sunday, October 29. He missed the game.

     The FBI and ATF offered an $11,000 reward for information leading to the sniper's arrest. (An odd amount.) Local police, based on witness information, were looking for a black Ford Mustang with blue-tinted headlights and a center racing stripe. Officers were also on the lookout for an older model Chevrolet Cavalier. The limited description of the sniper--a young white male--wasn't much help.

     On October 30, 2012 federal officials and CrimeStoppers of Michigan posted a $102,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the Michigan sniper. The police now believed the shooter was driving a 10 to 12-year-old dark-colored sedan in the shape of an old Toyota Camry or an Oldsmobile Alero.

     On November 7, 2012 police officers arrested 43-year-old Raulie Casteel at his home in Wixom, Michigan. A geologist, he was charged with assault with a dangerous weapon and other crimes connected to the sniping incidents.

     Casteel, in March 2014, pleaded guilty to terrorism and numerous weapons charges. Livingston County Circuit Judge David Reede sentenced him to 18 to 40 years in prison. At a press conference following the sentencing, State Attorney General Bill Schuette said, "Raulie Casteel committed calculated acts of violence that terrorized our state, and today the victims of his shooting spree received justice."

     Defense attorney Douglas Mullkoff told reporters that the Michigan legislature did not intent the terrorism statute to fit someone like Casteel who was mentally ill. According to Mullkoff, "The public views my client as sad. Most people feel sorry for him."

     Had this case gone to trial the jury would not have shown much mercy to the defendant. That's probably why the defense attorney agreed to the plea bargain. There are a lot of mentally ill people living among us but very few of them turn into snipers.

Adam Lee Brown: The Pedophile Who Tried to Infect Children

     When 27-year-old Adam Lee Brown was discharged from the Marine Corps in 1990 he was HIV positive. The married military computer technician, while serving in southern California, had picked-up the virus after having affairs with homosexual men. Furious that he had contracted the disease, Mr. Brown told his estranged wife that he would somehow get revenge. He didn't say how or who would be the target of his fury.

     In 1992 Mr. Brown was living in the logging town of Roseburg, Oregon. The son of a pastor, Adam Brown became the lay preacher at the Fair Oaks Community Church in nearby Sutherlin. That year, over a six-month period, he sexually molested and tried to infect dozens of 5 to 10-year-old boys he met through friends and a women he knew who babysat in his neighborhood. Once he had lured a boy to his home he would either drug the child or force him to drink alcohol. He also showed his victims pornographic videos, and after raping them, promised to stab them with knives and scissors if they told anyone. He also assured the boys that if they informed their parents what he had done to them they would burn in hell. One of the boys, a 5-year-old, told his parents and the police that Brown had smeared semen into a scratch on the victim's arm. (The boy obviously didn't use the term semen.)

     In the fall of 1993 Douglas County District Attorney William Marshall charged Adam Brown with 49 counts of rape and attempted murder. This was the first case in the country involving a pedophile who had tried to kill his victims by infecting them with HIV.

     For some reason District Attorney Marshall allowed Adam Brown to plead no contest to only four of the 49 counts. After Brown pleaded no contest to 3 counts of sodomy and one count of child endangerment the judge, in December 1993, sentenced him to 16 years in prison.

     On October 5, 2004, after serving 11 years of his prison sentence, Oregon's corrections authorities released Adam Brown on parole. The freed pedophile was ordered to register as a sex offender and was barred from frequenting places where children regularly congregate. His parole would expire in 2020.

     At two in the afternoon of Sunday, July 1, 2012, Adam Brown, now 49 and still a pedophile, was loitering around the entrance to the men's room at a Wendy's in Portland, Oregon. When an unaccompanied 10-year-old boy approached the restroom Brown grabbed the child, pulled him inside and locked the door. As the abductor stabbed the struggling boy the victim's father heard his screams and ran to help. But the frantic parent couldn't save his boy because Brown had locked the door. When a Wendy's  supervisor unlocked the men's room Brown pushed the wounded boy out of the restroom and locked himself inside. A group of employees held the door closed so he couldn't escape until the police arrived.

     As paramedics rushed the badly injured boy to a nearby hospital patrol officers with the Portland Police Department spoke to Brown through the men's room door. The pedophile refused to come out and claimed he possessed a gun. A hostage negotiator, following a two-hour standoff, coaxed Brown out of the restaurant. When taken into custody he had a knife, but no firearm.

     The district attorney in Multnomah County charged Adam Lee Brown with attempted murder, sexual abuse, kidnapping and assault. The subject was held in the Multnomah County Jail on $2 million bond. The injured child underwent emergency surgery and recovered.

     Adam Lee Brown pleaded guilty in October 2012 to sexual abuse and kidnapping. Judge Julie Frantz, before sentencing the 49-year-old to 33 years in prison said, "The crimes you committed are horrific and absolutely unspeakable."

     It's hard to understand why a pedophile who had raped and tried to infect his victims with the HIV virus was allowed, in 1992, to plead no contest to such a small number of reduced charges. Prosecutors are put in office to protect the public, not to go soft on sexual predators. Offenders like Adam Brown should be imprisoned for life. The notion that pedophiles will not re-offend, or be prevented from victimizing vulnerable children through legal restrictions on where they can live or go is stupid and irresponsible. Under the terms of Brown's parole he was allowed to patronize fast-food restaurants popular with children.

     The Adam Brown case reveals why the only place for a pedophile is in prison and why the public has lost faith in our criminal justice system.     

The Linda Stoltzfoos Murder Case

     Lancaster County and the surrounding area in eastern Pennsylvania is home to the second largest old-order Amish enclave in the United States. Eighteen-year-old Linda Stoltzfoos, a member of that community, resided on a farm with her family in the East Lampeter Township village of Bird in Hand a few miles east of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

     On Sunday morning, June 21, 2020, Linda Stoltzfoos attended church services at an Amish home about a mile from her residence on Stumptown Road. A little after half-past noon, following the service, she left on foot en route to her farm. Before leaving she told her friend Lillian Ebersole that she planned to change out of her formal church clothes before attending the 2:30 PM all-day church youth meeting on Beechdale Road in Upper Leacock Township. From the church service Linda Stoltzfoos began the 19-minute walk to her house. She headed south on the east side of Beechdale Road in bare feet with her shoes in hand.

     At two o'clock the next morning, Linda Stoltzfoos' father called the East Lampeter Township Police Department to report his daughter missing. The missing girl's family believed that after church she had gone straight to the youth group get together. Her friends believed that when she got home from church she didn't feel well and missed the youth event. The brown haired, five-foot-ten, 125 pound Amish girl, when last seen was wearing a tan dress, white apron and a black head covering.

     Surveillance footage from the 500 block of Beechdale Road five miles east of Lancaster showed a man approach Linda Stoltzfoos a few minutes after she departed the church service. He came from a red Kia Rio with black trim, a rear spoiler and a "LCM" sticker on the trunk. The video footage also depicted Stoltzfoos walking with this man to the car. The girl's family and friends did not believe she had accompanied this man voluntarily.

     Investigators identified the owner of the red Kia as 34-year-old Justo Smoker, a resident of the 3200 block of the Lincoln Highway in Paradise, a village five miles east of Lancaster. In 1993, Vernon and Deb Smoker from Lancaster, Pennsylvania adopted seven-year-old Justo. The boy had been living on the street. At Pequea Valley High School Justo Smoker was a wrestling star but at age 21 turned to crime. Between 2004 and 2007 he committed, in Lancaster County, a string of armed robberies and burglaries. He was convicted at least three times for these offense and sentenced to prison. Although he spent a good portion of his adult life behind bars, he did not come close to serving the full terms of his sentences. Otherwise, he would not have been out of prison when Linda Stoltzfoos went missing.

     In the course of the missing persons investigation, several witnesses saw an Amish girl riding in a Red Kia driven by a dark complexioned man who was possibly Hispanic. Justo Smoker met this general description. Moreover, the FBI placed Smoker in the vicinity of the abduction through his cellphone.

     On July 10, 2020 a Pennsylvania State Police forensics team found a bra and a pair of stockings buried along Harvest Road in a rural area the village of Ronks. Witnesses had seen Smoker's car parked near the village which is three miles from the Stoltzfoos farm. The missing girl's parents informed investigators that these garments were what their daughter would have been wearing on the day she went missing. Linda Stoltzfoos herself remained missing.

     Police officers took Justo Smoker into custody on the evening of July 10, 2020. The suspect was arrested at his place of employment, Dutchland Inc., a manufacturing and construction company in Gap, Pennsylvania, a village in Lancaster County's Salisbury Township. The next day he was charged with felony kidnapping and misdemeanor false imprisonment. The kidnapping suspect was held in the Lancaster County Jail without bail. At his arraignment Mr. Smoker pleaded not guilty. The search for Linda Stoltzfoos continued.

     Loren Johns, the recording secretary of the Swiss Anabaptist Genealogy Association and the creator of the largest database of anabaptist families with more that 700,000 records, announced on July 14, 2020 that Justo Smoker's great grandmother Fannie L. Fisher and Linda Stoltzfoos' great great grandmother Susan S. Stoltzfus were sisters. This made Smoker and Linda Stoltzfoos third cousins once removed. This did not mean, however, that the two knew each other.

     On July 15, 2020, according to a corrections officer at the Lancaster County Jail, Justo Smoker stated that he could not be prosecuted for Linda Stoltzfoos' murder if her body was never found.

     On April 22, 2021, searchers found Linda Stoltzfoos' body wrapped in a tarp buried 42 inches in the ground behind Dutchland, Inc., the company in Gap that had employed Smoker. Investigators believed her body had been moved from its original burial site on Harvest Road. The following day, Lancaster County Coroner Dr. Stephen Diamantoni announced that the cause of death was asphyxia caused by manual strangulation with stabbing as a contributing factor. The manner of death: homicide. The victim had been positively identified through dental records.

     According to Lancaster County District Attorney Heather Adams, DNA samples taken from the bra found on Harvest Road matched Justo Smoker. 

     On July 22, 2021 Justo Smoker pleaded guilty to kidnapping and third-degree murder in the case of Linda Stoltzfoos. A month later the judge sentenced him to 35 years in prison. Upon serving that sentence he would have to serve an additional 17 years related to his parole violation. He would get out of prison when he turned 87.

The Robert Kosilek Murder Case: A Killer and His "Offending Genitalia"

     On the afternoon of Sunday, May 20, 1990, Robert Kosilek hailed a cab from a shopping mall parking lot in North Attleborough, Massachusetts. The taxi driver drove him to a store located a half mile from his home in Mansfield where he lived with his wife Cheryl and their 15-year-old son Timothy. Later that evening, Mr. Kosilek called the North Attleborough Police Department to inquire if his wife had been in an automobile accident. She hadn't returned home from work that day and he was worried. The officer he spoke to said, yes, they had found his wife's car. Would he please come to the police station so they could discuss the matter.

     A hour or so before the 41-year-old husband's police call, his wife's body had been discovered in the back seat of her car in the same North Attleborough shopping mall parking lot. She had been murdered by someone who had used a length of wire to strangle her.

     At the police station, after being informed of his wife's violent death, Robert Kosilek said she left the house that morning for work and before coming home planned to shop at the mall. As for his activities that day he stayed home working around the house. The next day, when questioned again, this time as a suspect in his wife's murder, detectives informed Robert Kosilek they had spoken to his son Timothy who told them that when he (Timothy) called the house that day at five in the afternoon no one answered the phone. This contradicted the suspect's story that he had been in the house all day. Mr. Kosilek asked to be excused from the interrogation room so he could go downstairs to buy cigarettes. From the first floor of the police station he called the detective squad and informed the officer that he had terminated the interview and would be hiring an attorney.

     Late that night Mr. Kosilek drove his car into a stop sign in Bedford, Massachusetts. The police officer who responded to the minor accident found him sitting in the car dressed as a woman.

     On May 24, 1990, police in New Rochelle, New York stopped Robert Kosilek for speeding then arrested him for driving while intoxicated. At the police department he said, "You would be drunk too if the police thought you killed your wife. Look, I had a 15-year-old son and a wife....I murdered my wife. Now I need to call a psychiatrist." Officers in New Rochelle called the police in North Attleborough, Massachusetts.

     In October 1992 Robert Kosilek went on trial for the murder of his wife. The prosecutor played an audio-taped interview the defendant had given to a local TV reporter. According to him, on the day of the killing, he and his wife got into a violent argument. She threw boiling water into his face which caused him to punch her to the ground. Cheryl got to her feet, grabbed a kitchen knife and chased him into the living room where she threatened to kill him. According to this self-serving account of the fight, Kosilek picked up a length of wire from a table. That's the last thing he remembered. To the TV interviewer he said, "Apparently, I did take her life. It was probably self-defense." During the trial the defendant was dressed up like a woman, painted fingernails and all.

     The jury didn't buy the self-defense theory of Cheryl Kosilek's death. They found the defendant guilty of first-degree murder and in January1993 the trial judge sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

     Shortly after entering the Massachusetts state prison in Norfolk, Kosilek changed his name to Michelle Kosilek. He was allowed to dress like a female and let his hair grow. A prison psychiatrist diagnosed Kosilek with having a gender identification disorder. In 2000, Michelle sued the state in federal court for denying him/her a sex change operation, claiming this denial violated his/her Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment. Two years later, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Wolf ruled that Kosilek was entitled to be treated for his gender identification disorder, but stopped short of ordering the state to pay for a full sex change operation.

      Although Kosilek didn't get what he wanted from the federal court, the state did provide the prisoner with female hormone therapy, laser hair removal services and psychotherapy.

     In 2005, Kosilek filed a second lawsuit in the same federal court against the Massachusetts Department of Corrections in which he alleged cruel and unusual punishment. In the August 2006 trial his attorney put several psychiatrists on the stand who testified that for this inmate a sex change was "medically necessary." Kosilek's attorney said, "We ask that gender identification disorder be treated like any other medical condition." One of the shrinks testified that if the state denied Kosilek this "medical" treatment the prisoner would kill himself.

     At his 2006 civil trial, Kosilek took the stand and testified that the gender identification condition was equivalent to "biological claustrophobia," and said that the standard treatment for this malady included "surgical correction of the offending genitalia." Holding back tears, the witness said, "The greatest loss is the dying I do inside a little bit every day."

     The attorney representing the state, in summing up his case before the jury, said, "He's doing life without parole for murder...He was 41 when he killed Cheryl Kosilek. He didn't try to get a sex change operation at that time. Now he's 53 years of age, and he wants the state to pay for that?"

     On September 4, 2012, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Wolf, in his 126-page first-of-a-kind decision, held that the state of Massachusetts must pay for the prisoner's $20,000 sex change operation. In justifying his ruling the judge wrote that the operation was the "only adequate treatment" for the now 57-year-old prisoner, and that "there is no less intrusive means to correct the prolonged violation of Kosilek's Eighth Amendment right to adequate medical care."

      Apparently  Judge Wolf was not bothered by the fact there were millions of Americans who have not murdered anyone who do not even receive basic medical care, let alone free sex change operations. What need does a man who will spend the rest of his life in prison have for a vagina? If this is the level of health care taxpayers will have to pay for the population of men serving life terms behind bars, it's time to reverse the trend toward fewer executions. Otherwise, if there is cruel and unusual punishment going on, it involves law abiding citizens having to pay for this kind of health care.

     On September 17, 2012 Judge Wolf ruled that Kosilek was also eligible to have his legal fees--expected to top $500,000-- paid by the government.

     On December 16, 2014 the First Circuit Court of Appeals overturned U.S. District Court Mark Wolf's ruling. The federal appeals justices found that denying the sex change did not violate Kosilek's Eight Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment. Six months later the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Kosilek's appeal of the appellate court's denial.