The New York City Bread Truck Heist

     The act of taking something that isn't yours, while against the law and anti-social, is not highly deviant behavior, nor is it commonly driven by mental illness. (For years psychologists and criminologists have been debating among themselves over whether so-called kleptomaniacs are sick or simply criminal.) Theft is a specific intent crime committed in cold-blood, as it were. Schizophrenics don't go around swindling people or stealing cars for chop shops. In court, accused thieves don't plead not guilty by reason of insanity. But in the case of a 30-year-old New York City man named David Bastar, that would change.

     On Monday, May 19, 2014, at three in the morning on Second Avenue near East 99th Street on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the driver of a Grimaldi's Home of Bread truck left the vehicle running in front of a pizzeria. When the delivery man exited the pizza joint, his truck was gone.

     David Bastar, dressed only in a pair of briefs, had jumped into the $60,000 truck and drove off with $8,000 worth of baguettes, whole wheat rolls, loaves of sourdough and other baked products. Instead of meeting up with a baked goods fence, Bastar, working off a set of instructions and a map left on the truck's front seat, delivered product to at least three restaurants.

     Later that morning, while driving the bread truck south on Lexington Avenue, Bastar began throwing loaves of bread out the window. As he crossed the 59th Street Bridge into Queens he became fixated on a Cadillac Escalade limousine driven by 43-year-old Armondo Sigcha. Sigcha was headed to La Guardia Airport to pick up customers.

     Once the stolen bread truck and the limo crossed the bridge, Mr. Sigcha realized that some nut in a delivery truck was following him too closely. The limo driver made several quick evasive turns but couldn't get the truck off his tail. At this point Sagcha asked his dispatcher to arrange to have an officer with the Port Authority meet him at the airport.

     When Bastar pulled the bread truck to a stop behind the limousine near La Guardia's Central Terminal he was greeted by a Port Authority officer. The cop took one look at the underwear-clad bread truck driver and called for an ambulance to deliver him to a mental ward.

     After being evaluated at Elmhurst Hospital's Psychiatric Ward, officers escorted Mr. Bastar to the Queens Criminal Court where he was charged with criminal possession of a stolen vehicle and driving without a license. The judge released the suspect to the custody of his baffled parents.

     Diana Bastar's, the accused truck thief's mother, told a reporter with The New York Post that she had no idea why her son had been bent on delivering bread. "I'm speechless," she said. "He's been estranged from us, so I really can't tell you what's going on."

     Following his arrest Mr. Bastar told police officers he tailed the limousine into Queens because, "I thought I had to follow him to make the deliveries."

     According to an Internet search it appears that Mr. Bastar was not prosecuted for stealing the truck. In all probability he received medical attention instead.

The Mark Stobbe Murder Case

     In the spring of 2000, 42-year-old Mark Stobbe, the former senior advisor to Roy Romanon, the premier of Saskatchewan, Canada, moved his family from Regina, Saskatchewan to St. Andrews, Manitoba, a rural community north of Winnipeg. The new senior communications advisor for Manitoba premier Gary Doer moved his wife Beverly Rowbotham and their two sons into a sprawling old house in the country.

     In his new position as the premier's communications strategist, the tall, 350-pound political operative left his house most days at six in the morning and didn't return until eleven at night. This left his wife Beverly alone all day with their sons in a run-down house in the middle of nowhere. Her husband's new job, and the move, had placed Beverly and the marriage under stress.

     At 2:30 in the morning of October 25, 2000, Mark Stobbe telephoned Betty Rowbotham, his wife's sister, to inform her that Beverly had gone missing. Earlier in the day Beverly had been to the Safeway grocery store in Selkirk, 12 kilometers from the house. Because the boys had acted up in the store she returned home without completing her shopping. That evening Beverly drove back to Safeway to finish the job. Mark said he had fallen asleep in bed with one of his sons and woke up to find that she had not returned from the store. Worried that something had happened to her he called the police and several hospitals.

     Ten minutes after the call Betty arrived at her sister's house. The police were still on their way. Shortly after her arrival Mark went into the backyard where he used a hose to water down something. Ten minutes later he was back inside where he greeted the first officer to arrive at the scene. While the RCMP officer was questioning Mark the detective received a call from his office. They found Beverly Rowbotham dead in her car with massive blunt-force wounds to her head. Her Ford Crown Victoria was parked at a gas station in Selkirk. The police recovered Beverly's purse in the vehicle but her wallet was missing. The killer had also removed the $7,000 ring she had been wearing.

     Based on the RCMP's initial investigation it appeared that Beverly Rowbotham had been murdered in her backyard where investigators found fragments of her skull and clumps of her hair. In the garage, where her Ford had been parked, crime scene officers found two large blood stains on the floor and one on the wall. Also in the garage police recovered two blood-soaked tissues and a bloody towel, evidence that the killer had tried to clean up. In the car abandoned in Selkirk the police discovered traces of blood on the victim's purse. They eventually located Beverly's missing wallet on the bank of the Red River, not far from the gas station.

     In the beginning, investigators figured that Beverly had been murdered sometime that night while her husband and children were asleep in the house. But why would the killer put her body in the Ford and drive it to Selkirk? And how did the killer get to the murder scene in the first place?

     As the investigation moved forward detectives became more skeptical of Mark Stobbe's account of his whereabouts and activities on the night of the murder. They began to suspect that he killed his wife. As Stobbe's questionings became more accusatorial he continued to deny having anything to do with his wife's death. He also insisted that he and Beverly were not having marital problems. Over the next several months the police chased down 240 tips and interviewed 400 people. But it wasn't until the DNA reports started coming in did the investigation start getting some traction.

     According to DNA analysis of the crime scene evidence, the bloodstains in the garage and in the backyard had come from the victim. The blood stains on the towel and tissues belonged to Mark Stobbe. And there were stains that comprised a mixture of his and his wife's blood. There were, however, DNA traces at the scene that belonged to an unidentified male. The spots of blood on Beverly's handbag found in her car had also come from an unidentified man.

     By 2001, RCMP investigators had focused their attention on Mark Stobbe as the primary suspect in the murder. According to his story, Beverly had not completed her shopping that day because one of the boys had misbehaved at the grocery store in Selkirk. But a store surveillance tape showed that she had been in the place almost an hour, and her cash register receipt indicated she had spent $108.32, an amount equal to her average purchase. The investigators also considered Stobbe's differing accounts of his activity on the night of the murder incriminating. He told some people that he had fallen asleep in front of the television, and he told others that he had been in bed with one of his sons.

     In January 2001, the RCMP acquired a warrant allowing them to tap Stobbe's home telephone. After listening in to 1,000 hours of his phone conversations they heard nothing directly incriminating. In a February 28, 2001 conversation between the suspect and Betty Rowbotham, his former sister-in-law, she informed him that the police were gathering physical evidence from his backyard. To that he replied, "Damn it all." Toward the end of the phone call, Stobbe said, "I feel horrible."

     The Rowbotham/Stobbe case eventually hit a wall and for several years lay dormant. In 2008, almost eight years after Beverly Rowbotham's murder, the Crown charged Mark Stobbe with second-degree murder. He was arrested, made bail and pleaded not guilty to the charge.

     On January 16, 2012, Stobbe's trial got underway in the Manitoba Court of Queen's Bench in Winnipeg. Representing the Crown, Wendy Dawson in her opening statement to the jury laid out the prosecution's theory of the case: On the night of October 24, 2000, the defendant, during a heated argument with his wife in the backyard of their house, hit her in the head 16 times with a hatchet. He dragged her body into the garage, hit her again, stuffed the body into her Ford then drove to the gas station in Selkirk. Using a bicycle he had put into the trunk he rode back to St. Andrews. Along the way he tossed his dead wife's wallet into the Red River to lead investigators into thinking Beverly's killer had robbed her. Stobbe also removed her ring. Back at his house he waited a few hours before calling the police and his sister-in-law. Before the RCMP arrived Mr. Stobbe used a garden hose in an attempt to wash away physical evidence in his backyard.

     Stobbe's attorney, Tim Killeen, assured the jury that Beverly Rowbotham had been bludgeoned to death by an unidentified intruder who had been lying in wait outside her house. The defense attorney pointed to the unidentified male DNA found on her purse, and in the garage.  

     During the next several weeks the Crown put 70 people on the stand, including several witnesses who testified that on the night in question they had seen an overweight man riding a bicycle between Selkirk and St. Andrews. None of these witnesses, however, specifically identified the defendant as the man on the bike.

     On March 7, 2012 the defense put on its case which depended almost entirely on the defendant's taking the stand on his own behalf. If just one juror believed Mark Stobbe's account there would be no conviction. If all of the jurors believed that he might be telling the truth there would be an acquittal. It was all up to the defendant.

     Under direct examination by attorney Tim Killeen, Stobbe denied killing his wife. "I've spent a lot of nights looking out that window, wondering," he said. When Stobbe learned of his wife's death, "It was confirmation of my worst fears. What it meant was that I was 50 to 60 feet away when she was killed....I should have been able to stop it. I was completely useless in helping her." The defendant at this point broke down on the stand.

     The following day Crown prosecutor Wendy Dawson began her cross-examination of the defendant. She asked Stobbe why he hadn't filed an insurance claim for his wife's $7,000 ring. "You didn't make a claim," she said, "because the ring wasn't stolen. You took it off her hand before you brutally killed her." Stobbe said he hadn't bothered filing a claim because he just didn't care about the ring's value.

     The prosecutor tried to get the defendant to admit that his marriage was under considerable stress. Didn't his long hours at work with his wife alone in the house with the children have an adverse effect on their relationship? "I think it would be fair to say," he replied, "that she wanted me around more, but...she understood that the long hours were part and parcel of my job. She never made a suggestion to me that I change my career."

     Wendy Dawson cross-examined the defendant for five days. In keeping him on the hot seat for so long, the prosecutor risked making him an object of sympathy in the eyes of some of the jurors. On March 22, 2012 the attorneys made their closing arguments. The prosecutor said she didn't want Stobbe to get away with the "near perfect murder of his wife." She said the circumstantial evidence against him was "overwhelming," and that the defendant had "demonstrated all the hallmarks of a dishonest, lying witness. He couldn't keep his story straight," she said. "Certainly he should have been able to hear a cry for help from his wife, or a commotion in the garage. This was a crime of rage."

     In his closing argument, defense attorney Tom Killeen admitted there were reasons for the police to suspect his client, but suspicion alone was not enough to convict a man of murder. The Crown, he said, has not proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt. "Mr. Stobbe has to prove nothing," he said.

     On March 27, 2012, after 82 witnesses and 100 hours of testimony, Judge Chris Martin gave his instructions to the jury. Mark Stobbe's fate was now in the hands of twelve jurors.

     After deliberating two days the jury found Mark Stobbe not guilty. The prosecutor, with no solid evidence of a motive, no murder weapon, weak eyewitness testimony and the unknown male DNA on the victim's purse simply didn't carry, in the minds of this jury, its burden of proof. Some of the jurors may have believed that Stobbe had murdered his wife, but belief and proof beyond a reasonable doubt are not always the same.  

The Alan Hruby Murder Case

     John Hruby, a resident of Duncan, Oklahoma, a town of 24,000 about 60 miles north of Dallas, owned and worked at a newspaper located in nearby Marlow. Hruby, 50, his wife Katherine and their 17-year-old daughter lived in the Timber Creek subdivision on the north side of town. The 48-year-old Katherine, known to friends and family as "Tinker," also worked at the Marlow Review, a weekly publication with a circulation of 3,500.

     The Hrubys' son Alan, a 19-year-old political science major at Oklahoma University, was charged in July 2013 with theft and fraud. He had used his grandmother's name to acquire a credit card. While in Europe that summer he put $5,000 worth of charges on the fraudulently obtained card. Police arrested him in August 2013 when he returned to the United States from his vacation.

     In February 2014 the judge sentenced Alan Hruby to probation. Pursuant to the terms of his sentence he was not allowed to consume alcohol. The judge also ordered him to attend alcohol and drug counseling sessions.

     Over the October 10 to12 weekend in 2014, young Hruby violated the terms of his probation by traveling to Dallas to attend the Oklahoma University-Texas football game. He stayed at the Ritz Carlton hotel and partied all weekend.

     On Friday October 10, 2014, Todd Brooks, an employee at the Marlow Review, became concerned when his boss and Katherine Hruby didn't show up for work. On Monday October 13, when the Hrubys didn't come to the newspaper office and didn't answer their phones, Todd Brooks' worries about their wellbeing intensified.

     That Monday as the Marlow Review employee wondered if something had happened to his boss and his boss' wife, the Hruby housecleaner made a gruesome discovery when she showed up for work in Duncan. She found John Hruby, his wife and their daughter lying dead on the kitchen floor. They had each been shot in the head.

     Detectives with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI) ruled out double-murder/ suicide in favor of triple homicide. Alan Hruby's black Jeep sat in the Hruby home driveway. OSBI investigators impounded the vehicle.

     On October 15, 2014 OSBI officers arrested Alan Hruby for violating the terms of his credit card fraud probation. Under questioning at police headquarters regarding the murders of his parents and sister he confessed.

     In early October 2014 Alan Hruby stole a 9 mm pistol from his father's pickup truck. On Friday October 10, 2014 he used that gun to shoot his mother twice in the head. He shot his sister to death when she entered the kitchen to investigate the source of the gunshots.

     After murdering his mother and sister Alan waited an hour until his father came home. When John Hruby walked into the room Alan killed his father by shooting him twice in the head. When hit by his son's first bullet, the father said "ouch" then dropped to the kitchen floor. That's when the young man finished the job by putting the second bullet into his victim's skull.

     Alan Hruby told his interrogators that he left his cell phone at Oklahoma University so that when detectives checked it would ping there. He removed the DVR from the home surveillance system and tossed it into a nearby lake along with the murder weapon. After disposing of this evidence he drove to Dallas to enjoy the festive football weekend.

     When asked why he murdered his family in cold blood the college student said he needed to inherit his parents' estate. He owed a loan shark from Norman, Oklahoma $3,000.

     Stephens County District Attorney Jason Hicks charged Alan Hruby with three counts of first-degree murder. The prosecutor said he would seek the death penalty in the case. The judge denied the triple murder suspect bail.

     In July 2015, Alan Hruby, serving time on the credit card conviction at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, wrote a letter to The Oklahoman newspaper in which he said that he welcomed the death penalty. As to why he murdered his family, he said that although it wasn't about money, he still hadn't figured out why he did it. "I didn't feel like myself that day," he wrote. "What occurred was so horrible the death penalty is deserved."

     On March 10, 2016, Alan Hruby pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder in exchange for a sentence of life without parole.

The Nuzzio Begaren Murder-For-Hire Case

      In 1997 in the southern California city of Santa Ana, Nuzzio Begaren married a 36-year-old state corrections officer named Elizabeth. The 40-year-old groom had a daughter from a previous marriage who was ten. Three days after the wedding Nuzzio bought a $1 million insurance policy on his new wife's life. This meant that Elizabeth Begaren stood between her husband and a million dollars. Purchasing life insurance on his wife was the first step on Nuzzio Begaren's path to wealth. Getting someone to murder his wife comprised step two.

     Finding someone to kill his wife was the easy part of Nuzzio's murder-for-hire scheme. He simply offered $4,800 in cash to friends who belonged to a Los Angeles criminal gang. On the night of January 17, 1998, the murder-for-hire mastermind took Elizabeth and his daughter shopping at a mall in Burbank. While shopping in Macy's he gave Elizabeth the cash to hold for him. She placed the money into her purse unaware she was carrying the pay-off for her own demise.

     As Nuzzio, Elizabeth and his daughter drove home in his blue Kia Sportage they were followed by a Buick Regal driven by 24-year-old Guillermo Espinoza. Three other gang members were in the vehicle. At eleven o'clock as Nuzzio Begaren pulled onto the off-ramp of the 91 Freeway in Anaheim the Buick pulled up alongside Nuzzio's vehicle and forced him off the road. Three of the LA gangsters alighted from the Buick and as Nuzzio climbed into the back seat of the Kia to be with his daughter, his wife Elizabeth made a run for it as the hit men approached the car.

     The hit men quickly caught up with Nuzzio's terrified wife. In begging for her life she pulled out her correction officer's badge. That's when Guillermo Espinoza shot her in the head and chest. The shooter grabbed the dead woman's handbag, returned to the Buick with the other three gangsters, and drove off.

     Nuzzio Begaren told officers with the Anaheim Police Department that the men behind his wife's cold-blooded murder had targeted his family at the shopping mall and followed them home. "There was no reason for someone to follow us," he said. "We have no enemies." Nuzzio described the gangsters' car as a dark blue late 1970s Oldsmobile and gave detectives a license number that didn't check out. Nuzzio described the four men in the Oldsmobile as a pair of blacks and two men who were either white or Latino. "When they saw the badge," he said, "they shot her. She was lying face down in the blood with her badge in her hand." Nuzzio Begaren described his wife as someone who had been "full of joy."

      Although detectives didn't believe Begeren's account of the murder, the investigation stalled and the case eventually died on the vine. It looked as though Nuzzio Begaren had gotten away with his crime.

     In February 2012, four years after Elizabeth Begaren's murder, police officers arrested 55-year-old Nuzzio Begaren in Rancho Cucamonga, California. An Orange County grand jury had indicted him for soliciting the murder of his wife. Guillermo Espinoza was indicted as well, but his whereabouts were unknown. (In 2011 when the gangster learned that cold case detectives had reopened the case he went underground.)

      Nuzzio Begaren went on trial on August 21, 2013 in a Santa Ana court for conspiracy to murder his wife for financial gain. (Guillermo Espinoza was still at large.) Orange County prosecutor Larry Yellin in his opening statement to the jury told of a piece of torn-up paper found near the murder scene that bore the victim's handwriting. Elizabeth had scribbled "light blue" and had written down the license number of the car that had been following them. The plate number belonged to a light blue Buick Regal, the vehicle driven that night by Guillermo Espinosa.

     Prosecutor Yellin informed the jurors that gang members Rudy Duran and Jose Luis Sandoval, both of whom had been in the Buick that night, were going to testify for the prosecution. According to these men the defendant arranged his wife's murder for the insurance money. The murder-for-hire mastermind wanted the killing to look like a highway robbery turned fatal.

     Defense attorney Sal Ciula told the jury that state witness Rudy Duran had been pressured into cooperating with the authorities. According to the defense attorney, if Duran worked with the prosecution "he would become a witness instead of a defendant. He [Duran] made the obvious choice."

     The heart of the prosecution's case involved the $1 million life insurance police and the testimony of the alleged hit men Rudy Duran and Jose Luis Sandoval. The essence of the Begaren's defense involved attacking the credibility of these two key prosecution witnesses.

     On September 6, 2013, the jury, after deliberating three days found the defendant guilty of hiring Espinoza and Sandoval to murder his wife. On October 4, 2013 the judge sentenced him to 25 years to life.

     In October 2013, Rudy Duran and Jose Luis Sandoval pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter. Both men were sentenced to time served and were released from jail. On March 4, 2016, after being apprehended in Mexico, the authorities extradited Guillermo Espinoza back to California.

     On August 2, 2017 Jose Luis Sandoval was shot to death in the Los Angeles County town of Downey. He was 41.

     Guillermo Espinoza, in September 2018, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in return for a sentence of 21 years in prison.

Cop Killers Rafael Jones and Chancier McFarland

     In October 2009 a Philadelphia judge sentenced Rafael Jones, a 21-year-old street thug, to four years in prison for a variety of crimes involving firearms. As a juvenile Mr. Jones had a record of drug dealing, auto theft and gun possession. He lived in a North Philadelphia neighborhood with his grandmother, Ada Banks. After serving two years behind bars Rafael Jones walked out of prison on parole. He returned to his high-crime neighborhood where early in 2012 he was shot and wounded by another North Philadelphia criminal.

     Early in July 2012 police officers arrested Jones on a parole violation related to the illegal possession of a gun. While incarcerated in the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, Jones' state parole officer asked his grandmother, Ada Banks, if Jones could live with her under house arrest following his release from prison. She said no. Banks didn't want Jones back in his old neighborhood where he had gotten into so much trouble. She suggested that prison authorities send Jones to his aunt's house in a better part of the city. The parole officer, rather than make the arrangements with the aunt, instructed Jones' grandmother to send the parolee to his aunt's house when he got out of jail and showed up at her place.

     On July 25, at Jones' parole hearing, Common Pleas Judge Susan Schuman set August 8, 2012 as his release date. The judge emailed prison officials to instruct Jones to report directly to his grandmother's house where someone from the state board of probation and parole would outfit him with an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet. (The judge wasn't aware that the grandmother was supposed to send Jones on to his aunt's house.) Signals from Jones' electronic device would be monitored in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. If Jones left the dwelling for an unauthorized reason the parole office in Philadelphia would either receive an email or telephone alert from Harrisburg. Jones, although under house arrest, could leave the premises to look for a job, to complete his GED or to do community service work.

     On August 8, 2012, the day Jones got out of jail, the state parole officer didn't escort Jones from the prison directly to his grandmother's house where he was supposed to be outfitted with the electronic equipment. Instead, the parolee walked out of prison unsupervised. The fact he didn't report to his grandmother's house or check in to his aunt's place should not have shocked anyone. As one would expect, he returned to the streets in North Philadelphia where he wasted no time getting his hands on the tool of his trade, a handgun.

     At six in the morning of August 18, just ten days after leaving prison, Rafael Jones and 19-year-old Chancier McFarland, an associate with a long juvenile record of crime and violence who was currently out on bail in connection with a drug case, were prowling the North Philadelphia neighborhood in search of someone to rob. The two robbers in search of a victim came upon Moses Walker Jr., a 40-year-old Philadelphia police officer. After completing his night shift at the 22nd district police station in North Philadelphia the 19-year veteran of the force had changed into his street clothes and was walking toward the bus station.

     When confronted by Jones and McFarland who had been stalking him for robbery, Walker reached for his sidearm. Before the off-duty officer could protect himself the two muggers shot him in the chest, stomach and arm. Officer Moses Walker died on the street where he was shot.

     Following officer Moses Walker's murder, the city of Philadelphia and the police union posted a reward of $100,000 for information leading to the identification of the cop-killers. Several people came forward with information that led to Jones' arrest on August 24, 2012. Charged with murder and robbery, he was placed in custody without bail. On Sunday August 26 Chancier McFarland was arrested in Alabama.
 
     In June 2014, Chancier McFarland pleaded guilty to third-degree murder to avoid going to prison for life. He also agreed to cooperate in the prosecution of Rafael Jones. The judge sentenced McFarland to 20 to 40 years.

     On December 13, 2014, after a four-day nonjury trial, Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey P. Minehart found Rafael Jones guilty of first-degree murder, robbery, conspiracy and three firearm offenses. The first-degree murder conviction carried a mandatory life sentence. 

     Several of Rafael Jones' relatives were in the courtroom as the judge announced his verdict. "We love you," they said. "This too shall pass."

The Amy Senser Hit and Run Homicide Case

     Amy Senser and her husband Joe lived in Edina, Minnesota, an upscale Minneapolis suburb. Joe Senser, a NFL tight end with the Minnesota Vikings in the early 1980s co-owned four Minneapolis-St. Paul area sports bars. A knee injury ended his 4-year career with the Vikings. The businessman and sports commentator was a well-liked local celebrity. His attractive 45-year-old wife Amy was also well-known and popular. But on the night of August 23, 2011, Amy and Joe Senser's successful lives would take a sudden and tragic turn.

     On the night that changed everything for the Senser family, Amy and her daughters were attending a Katy Perry concert at the Xcell Energy Center in St. Paul. Ninety minutes into the show Amy developed a headache and decided to drive home. She called Joe who agreed to pick up the girls after the concert.

     According to Amy's version of what happened, while driving Joe's Mercedes-Benz SUV on I-94's Riverside exit off-ramp, a poorly lit section of the highway under construction, she felt a jolt and thought she'd hit a pothole or had bumped a construction barrel. In fact, the right front of her vehicle had hit and killed a man from Laos named Anousone Phantauong. The 38-year-old chef at a Thai restaurant was pouring gasoline into his car that had rolled to a stop on the shoulder of the exit ramp.

     After the collision, Amy got lost and called her husband. At one point, in her confusion, she came full circle and got off the interstate using the same Riverside exit. This time the area was lit up with the flashing lights of emergency vehicles. She did not associate this activity with the earlier jolt she had felt from either a pothole or a construction barrel.

     The next morning, according to Amy Senser's account, Joe called her outside and asked how the Mercedes' right headlight and fog light had gotten knocked out. By then they both had seen TV reports of Phantauong's death and the search for the hit and run driver. Realizing what had happened the previous night the Sensers called their lawyer, and later that day, surrendered the damaged Mercedes to the police.

     In speaking to the police Amy Senser admitted that just before the Katy Perry concert she had gone to a nearby restaurant where she had consumed less than a full glass of wine. She insisted, however, that she had not been intoxicated when her car hit and killed Mr. Phantauong. Investigators believed she had been drunk, and because of that did not stop after plowing into the victim. Detectives were convinced she wanted to sober up before reporting the fatal accident.

     In November 2011 the Hennepin County prosecutor Deborah Russell charged Amy Senser with three vehicular related felonies: driving in a grossly negligent manner; leaving the scene of an accident; and failure to promptly report an accident. If convicted of all charges the defendant could face up to 30 years in prison. Because she didn't confess and no witness to the accident came forward, the case against Amy Senser was circumstantial. To find her guilty the jury would have to infer her state of mind that night. If they believed her testimony they would have to acquit her.

     To find the defendant guilty of reckless driving the jury would also have to infer she had been intoxicated at the time of the accident. The fact she clipped Mr. Phantauong, a man who had placed himself in harm's way by standing just off a poorly lit exit ramp, was not by itself enough to establish gross negligence on her part. If the jurors did not find that she was drunk they would probably not find that the accident was a result of reckless driving.

     The highly anticipated media intense Amy Senser trial commenced on April 23, 2012. In an effort to prove that the defendant had been driving drunk that night, prosecutor Russell put a motorist on the stand. Shortly after the accident this witness saw, on I-94, a Mercedes SUV being driven in an erratic manner. The witness passed this vehicle when it slowed to 40 MPH, and when she looked into her rearview mirror, noticed that the car's right front lights were out.

     Defense attorney Eric Nelson put on only one witness, Amy Senser. The defendant denied she had been intoxicated when her car hit what she thought was a pothole or a construction barrel. As for her erratic driving on I-94 she said she had dropped her cellphone between the seat and the center console and was trying to fish it out.

     On May 2, 2012 the jury of 7 men and 5 women, after a grueling deliberation period of 19 hours, found Amy Senser guilty of two of the three felonies. Jurors acquitted the defendant of the gross negligent charge. The defendant, who still faced up to 20 years on prison, showed no emotion as the verdicts were read.

     At a post-trial press conference, defense attorney Eric Nelson said he would appeal his client's conviction on the grounds she had met the requirements of the state accident notification law. One of the jurors who spoke to reporters said, "It was just a very challenging case for us to come to a consensus."

     On July 10, 2012 the judge sentenced Amy Senser to 41 months in prison.

     Corrections authorities, on April 24, 2014 released Amy Senser from the Shakopee Women's Prison after she had served all but six months of her prison stretch. On October 20, 2014, following the completion of a six-month work release program, she was free.

The Sheetal and Rajesh Ranot Child Abuse Case: No Protection For Maya

     In January 2011, Rajesh Ranot gained custody of his 9-year-old daughter, Maya. A family court judge in Queens, New York, at Rajesh's request, issued a protection order against the girl's mother and her 20-year-old brother. The father, of Indian descent, accused his former wife Ramona Roy of abusing Maya.

     Maya moved into the top floor of an Ozone Park, Queens duplex with her father, his second wife Sheetal and her four children. The family resided on a block inhabited by other families of Indian descent by way of Guyana and Trinidad. Mr. Ranot drove a taxi and worked most nights until four in the morning.

     Neighbors began to notice that Maya's stepmother Sheeetal treated the girl differently than the other children in the family. While Sheetal watched TV, Maya cleaned the house, cooked, swept the front porch and did other household chores. Moreover, unlike her step-siblings, Maya wore dirty clothes and looked malnourished. In the winter she wore flip-flops and often didn't have a coat.

     Someone in the neighborhood alerted the New York City Administration For Children Services which led to regular visits to the Ranot home by social workers. A neighbor from Guyana would later tell a reporter with The New York Times that in India, stepmothers didn't like stepchildren and treated them like slaves. The fact that Maya was more like a maid than a daughter was, under the cultural circumstances, normal. But Maya lived in the U.S., not India.

     In December 2012, Maya's teachers and classmates noticed that the girl had lost so much weight it looked as though she was being starved. She also came to school with bruises and scratches on her arms and face. A social worker continued to visit the Ranot home. The child protection agents were told by Sheetal Ranot that Maya stole money from the family to give to her biological mother. The stepmother also claimed that the girl was crazy and giving the family all sorts of problems. When asked by social workers how she had gotten her scratches and bruises, Maya claimed to have fallen. To her friends, however, Maya revealed that her stepmother regularly beat her and locked her in a room.

     On April 16, 2014, the 12-year-old, now weighing 56 pounds, was taken to the Jamaica Hospital Center in Queens with a badly bruised and swollen face. At the hospital, Maya and her stepmother told the doctor, a detective and a child protection worker named Ruby Perez that the injuries had been caused by her falling off a ladder.

     Social worker Perez had visited the Ranot home many times and expressed concern that Maya was being abused. The detective at the hospital told the social worker that he didn't have enough proof to establish an abuse case. As a result the girl went home with her abusive stepmother.

     On May 6, 2014, Sheetal Ranot took her now 46-pound stepdaughter to the emergency room with a deep cut on her left wrist and a laceration on her right knee. According to the stepmother, Maya had tried to commit suicide in the kitchen with a large knife. Although Maya went along with this absurd story, the doctor called the police.

     Finally, after three years of abuse, Maya was sent to live with an aunt. She also began to reveal the details of her ordeal. She had not fallen off a ladder. Her stepmother had beaten her with a rolling pin. Three weeks later she was beaten in the kitchen with a broken metal broom handle. She had not tried to kill herself.

     A prosecutor in Queens, on July 29, 2014 charged Sheetal Ranot with several counts of first-degree assault. In convicted as charged the stepmother faced up to 25 years in prison.

     Rajesh Ranot, at the time of Sheetal's arrest, was in India visiting relatives. Three days after his wife's arrest he returned to the U.S. where at the airport he was met by detectives who took him into custody. Charged with lesser assault related and child endangerment offenses, the father faced up to 7 years behind bars.

     When the news broke about Maya Ranot's three-year ordeal, New York City Commissioner Gladys Carrion thanked the Administration For Children's Services and their social workers "whose diligence and professionalism saved the life of a young girl."

     Investigative journalists with The New York Times looked into the Maya Ranot case and wrote a different story. Social workers, instead of interviewing Maya's teachers, classmates, neighbors and others familiar with the family simply took the word of the stepmother. As a result, the girl almost died from abuse and neglect.

     Ruby Perez, the 29-year-old social worker who in April 2014 expressed concern regarding Maya's wellbeing, posted the following message on her Facebook page in 2010: "I want to quit my job. Now. I can't take it." Perhaps Perez didn't like working for a child protection agency that didn't protect children.

     On July 29, 2016, following a three-week trial, a jury in Queens, New York found Sheetal Ranot guilty as charged. On September 8, 2016, Queens Supreme Court Justice Richard L. Buchter sentenced her to 15 years in prison.

   If Rajesh Ranot was convicted in connection with prolonged abuse of his daughter there is no record of it on the Internet.

The Frye Case in the History of the Polygraph

     The prototype of the modern polygraph instrument was invented in 1921 by a graduate physiology student at the University of California at Berkeley named John Larson. While attending the university Larson worked as a "college cop" at the Berkeley Police Department under the progressive police chief August Vollmer. It was Vollmer who asked Larson to invent a device that could determine if a criminal suspect was telling the truth or lying. In researching the work of others who had tried to find a method of scientific lie detection, Mr. Larson read an article by a lawyer named William Marston who believed that when people lie they come under stress which raises their blood pressure. (Marston, oddly enough, was also the creator of the comic superhero Wonder Woman.)

     Polygraph test results, because of questions of scientific reliability, have never been admitted in a criminal court as proof of a defendant's guilt. Ironically, the case most frequently cited as precedent for polygraph exclusion is United States v. Frye, a federal appeals court decision that arose out of a murder case that had involved William Marston's lie detection methodology. At the time, John Larson's polygraph, a significantly more sophisticated instrument, had not been fully developed.

The Frye Case

     On November 25, 1920, almost a year after John Larson had joined the Berkeley Police Department and a few months before he had read William Marston's article on blood pressure and scientific lie detection, a black man named James Frye shot and killed a wealthy physician, also black, in Washington, D.C. Mr. Frye murdered Dr. Robert W. Brown in his office at 8:45 in the evening. Another physician witnessed the shooting and ran after Mr. Frye as he fled the building. The chase came to an abrupt end when Frye took a shot at his pursuer. The eyewitness did not know James Frye so all the police had to go on was a general description of the killer.

     On August 21, 1921, seven months after the murder, police officers arrested James Frye on a robbery case, and while being grilled on that matter he confessed to killing Dr. Brown. Over the years the facts of this case have become more myth than reality. Dr. James E. Starrs, a forensic science scholar and professor of law at George Washington University, set the record straight in 1981. In a paper Dr. Starrs presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences that year, Dr. Starrs presented the Frye case myth as follows: James Frye admitted to killing Dr. Brown because a friend told him that if he did so he would receive part of the reward money that had been put up by the victim's family. When Frye realized that as the killer he was not eligible for the reward he took back his confession. It was at this point Frye's attorney hired William Marston to test his client's honesty.

     According to the Frye case myth, Marston's lie detection test confirmed that the defendant was telling the truth when he denied committing the murder. But because the trial judge refused to allow Marston to take the stand on the defendant's behalf, the jury found Mr. Frye guilty. The judge sentenced him to life in prison. According to this version of the case, the friend who talked James Frye into confessing admitted killing the doctor. As a result, after serving three years in prison James Frye walked free.

     The above version of the Frye case makes a good story and sheds favorable light on scientific lie detection. If the trial judge had been more open minded an innocent man would not have been convicted. According to Professor Starrs, however, the above account of the Frye case was grossly inaccurate. In reality, the defendant had withdrawn his confession on the advice of his attorney, Richard V. Mattingly. By the time the case went to trial, Frye had concocted an alibi. He claimed that at the time of the murder he had been visiting a woman named Essie Watson.

     In his 1938 book, The Lie Detector Test, William Marston wrote that he had been called into the case by Mattingly a few weeks before the trial because the defense attorney couldn't find any witnesses to support his client's alibi. Marston, on June 10, 1922, gave Frye his systolic blood pressure test, a primitive method that involved nothing more than a standard blood pressure cuff and a stethoscope. After each question put to Frye, Mr. Marston simply took his blood pressure. Compared to John Larson's polygraph, William Marston's technique was crude and unreliable. Larson was a scientist, Marston was an attorney.

     After William Marston administered his lie detection exam he announced that James Frye told the truth when he denied committing the murder. In his book, he wrote, "No one could have been more surprised than myself to find that Frye's final story of innocence was entirely truthful! His confession to the Brown murder was a lie from start to finish."

     James Frye went on trial for the murder of Dr. Brown on July 17, 1922 in Washington, D.C. before Judge William McCoy. Defense attorney Mattingly's case was based entirely on William Marston's lie detection results. When he tried to put Mr. Marston on the stand as an expert lie detection witness, the prosecutor objected on the grounds that scientific lie detection was not reliable. The judge agreed. Without the lie detection evidence, Mattingly had no choice but to put his client on the stand. This did not turn out well for the defense.

     The jury, after deliberating three hours, found the defendant guilty of second-degree murder, a verdict that spared Frye the death sentence. Having been in court during the argument over the reliability of Marston's lie detection technique, the jurors decided not to send Mr. Frye to his death. As Marston put it in his book, "As far as James Frye was concerned, the [lie detection] test undoubtedly saved his life. No jury could help being influenced by the knowledge that Frye's story had been proved truthful by the lie detector."

     Richard Mattingly appealed Fry's conviction on the grounds Judge McCoy had erred in excluding William Marston's lie detection test results. In 1923, the circuit court of appeals in the District of Columbia upheld Judge McCoy's exclusion. Judge Van Orsdel wrote the appellate court's opinion that established the test used today for the admission of expert testimony based upon new scientific principles. Judge Van Orsdel wrote: "Just when a scientific principle or discovery crosses the line between the experimental and demonstrative stages is difficult to define. Somewhere in this twilight zone the evidential force of the principle must be recognized, and while courts will go a long way in admitting expert testimony deduced from a well recognized scientific principle or discovery, the thing from which the deduction is made must be sufficiently established to have general acceptance in the particular field in which it belongs."

     Although Judge Van Orsdel set the general standard for the admission of new scientific evidence, his opinion didn't indicate exactly what he objected to in Marston's lie detection procedure. It was not clear whether the judge questioned the underlying principle that lying causes measurable changes in a person's blood pressure, or if he objected to Marston's systolic blood pressure test as a method of gathering and recording this data for interpretation. The judge may have rejected both the scientific principle behind Marston's test, and the technique itself.

     If the Frye court's rejection primarily involved the lie detection technique rather than the scientific principle behind it, then it was Marston's systolic blood pressure evidence, not John Larson's polygraph that was being ruled inadmissible in the Frye case. If this were true, then it could be argued that the Frye decision has been inappropriately cited all of these years as precedent for the court exclusion of modern polygraph evidence.

     As for James Frye, he was paroled from the District of Columbia Prison at Lorton, Virginia on June 17, 1939. He had served 18 years behind bars, and died in 1953 at age 58. If it hadn't been for William Marston's unsophisticated and unreliable lie detection test, he may have died a lot sooner.    

The Claire Hough Murder Case: A Saga of False Accusations and Suicide

     In early August 1984 14-year-old Claire Hough and her best friend Kim Jamer left their homes in Rhode Island for a two-week vacation in San Diego, California. The girls had arranged to stay at Hough's grandparents' house. The girls spent their days hanging out on Torrey Pines Beach not far from where they were staying.

     On August 24, a day after Kim Jamer returned to Rhode Island, Claire Hough, still in San Diego,  slipped out of her grandparents' house to enjoy the beach at night where groups of teenagers sat around fires drinking beer.

     Claire Hough did not return to her room that night. The next morning a 61-year-old beachcomber named Wallace Wheeler came across her body. She lay dead next to her boombox. Covered in blood on a bloodstained bath towel her left breast had been cut off and her genitalia mutilated. Her killer had filled her mouth with sand. The murder knife was not at the scene and was never recovered.

     The San Diego County Coroner determined that Claire Hough had been strangled to death. The forensic pathologist reported that because he found no traces of semen on her body she had probably not been raped.

     Wallace Wheeler, the man who discovered the body immediately came under suspicion. He was a strange man who, after Claire Hough's murder, kept a correspondence with her parents. In his letters he wrote about his visions and dreams of the man who had killed their daughter. Without a confession, eyewitness or evidence physically connecting Mr. Wheeler to the murder he remained just a suspect. In 1988 Wallace Wheeler jumped to his death from the 13th floor of his apartment building. He was later eliminated as the killer through DNA analysis.

     In 1978, six years before Claire Hough's murder, another teenage girl had been murdered on Torrey Pines Beach. That victim had also been strangled to death, had her left breast cut off and had sand in her mouth. There was no evidence that she had been raped. That case was still unsolved. Because of the similarities in these two murders detectives believed the cases involved the same killer.

     After the Claire Hough murder months turned into years without an arrest. In 2012 a team of cold-case investigators were informed by a DNA analyst that bloodstains on Claire Hough's jeans matched the DNA of a man named Ronald Clyde Tatro. A year earlier Tatro had been killed in a boating accident.

     In 1975 Ronald Tatro was convicted of kidnapping and raping a girl in Arkansas. Following his parole in 1982 he moved to San Diego. Shortly after arriving in California Mr. Tatro lured a teenage girl into his van where he tried to subdue her with a stun gun. She escaped and notified the police. Tatro was arrested, confessed and went to prison for attempted rape. By August 1984, when Claire Hough was murdered on the beach, Ronald Tatro was out of prison.

     Detectives trying to connect Ronald Tatro to the 1978 murder of the girl on Torrey Pines Beach discovered that when that girl was killed he was serving time in Arkansas.

     Because Ronald Tatro was no longer living, the quest to bring Claire Hough's murderer to justice would have ended there. However, semen traces on a vaginal swab from the Hough murder matched the DNA of Kevin Brown. This was surprising for two reasons: according to the forensic pathologist in 1984 no semen traces had been found on the victim's body and Kevin Brown, at the time of Claire Hough's murder, worked as a technician in the San Diego Crime Lab. Because of the sensitivity of this revelation the authorities, pending further investigation, decided not to reveal it to the public.

     So, who was Kevin Brown? In 2002 Mr. Brown retired from the crime lab after 22 years on the job. The 65-year-old lived in San Diego with his wife Rebecca, a Catholic high school teacher who was several years younger than him. They were married in 1993. He had never been arrested.

     A background investigation of the murder suspect revealed that as a younger man he seemed, in the eyes of some, to be obsessed with sex. In fact, his fellow lab workers had nicknamed him "Kinky." A woman who worked with him in the lab told detectives that Brown had shown her a porn film that she described as "sickening." As an amateur photographer Mr. Brown supposedly liked to photograph nude women. However, after his marriage, Mr. Brown settled into to a quiet, conventional domestic life. People who knew him as a married man considered Kevin Brown a very nice person who was a bit of a nerd. Nevertheless, detectives on the case had convinced themselves that Kevin Brown had been some kind of sexual pervert.

     On January 9, 2014 San Diego detective Michael Lambert (who happened to be a former colleague of Brown's at the crime lab) and officer Lori Adams, showed up, unannounced at Kevin Brown's door to question him about the Claire Hough murder case. Seated in the living room with the suspect's wife looking on, the detectives asked Mr. Brown if he remembered the case. He said yes he remember the brutal murder on Torrey Pines Beach.

     The detectives showed Kevin Brown a photograph of Ronald Tatro. Had he ever met this man? Mr. Brown answered no. The detectives informed Mr. Brown that Ronald Tatro was connected to the murder through his DNA. And not only that, semen found at the murder scene had been identified through DNA as his--Mr. Brown's.

     If the detectives had hoped Mr. Brown would confess after learning that his DNA had been recovered from the Claire Hough murder scene they were disappointed. Instead, the suspect insisted that the DNA identification must have been a mistake. He had absolutely nothing to do with the girl's murder and wanted to take a polygraph test to prove it.

     Before the detectives left the suspect's house that morning they executed a search warrant. When they departed they were in possession of Mr. Brown's computer and other personal items.

     Later on the day of his confrontation with the San Diego detectives Kevin Brown took a lie detector test administered by a police department examiner. The polygraph examiner reported that Mr. Brown's response, when asked if he ever knew Ronald Tatro, was "inconclusive." Regarding the subject's denial that he had anything to do with Claire Hough's murder, the polygraph examiner labeled that answer "deceptive." In other words, according to the polygraph examiner, Keven Brown failed the test. While this result encouraged the detectives on the case it could not be used as evidence in a court. When informed that he had failed the polygraph test Kevin Brown knew that at some point he would be arrested for the 30-year-old murder of Claire Hough.

     In early October 2014, law enforcement authorities publicly announced that detectives had, through DNA analysis,  finally cracked the Claire Hough murder case. The suspect in the brutal murder was 67-year-old Kevin Brown, a former employee of the San Diego Crime Lab.

     On October 21, 2014, before police officers had a chance to come to his house and arrest him, Kevin Brown hanged himself.

     Rebecca Brown, in December 2014, brought a civil suit against the San Diego Police Department and others for falsely accusing her husband of murder. The false accusation had pushed the depressed and anxious man to suicide. The plaintiff accused homicide detectives of mishandling the investigation and lying to the magistrate who had issued the search warrant.

     In her lawsuit Rebecca Brown pointed out that in 1984 the forensic pathologist had not found any semen on Claire Hough's body. Moreover, detectives were never able to establish a connection between her husband and Ronald Tatro.

     Following Rebecca Brown's lawsuit, forensic experts reported that when Kevin Brown worked in the San Diego Crime Lab the place was horribly polluted and poorly run. Instead of purchasing bodily fluid specimens as control samples, male lab personnel, including Kevin Brown, submitted samples of their own blood and semen. This, along with other lax and sloppy lab procedures created the possibility of evidence contamination and co-mingling that could explain a false Kevin Brown DNA identification. In any case, had the case gone to trial, due to the conditions of the San Diego Crime Laboratory, the DNA evidence would have been inadmissible. Without the DNA there was no case.

     On February 23, 2020 in a San Diego courtroom the jury hearing the Rebecca Brown civil case against the police department and other defendants awarded her $6 million. In addition, Detective Michael Lambert was ordered to pay the plaintiff $50,000 in punitive damages for his role in the investigation. Rebecca and her attorney indicated, however, that if Michael Lambert apologized, they would reduce the amount he owed them. The detective refused to apologize so the punitive damages remained at $50,000.   

The Fero's Bar & Grill Mass Murder Case

     At one-forty in the morning of Wednesday, October 17, 2012, a Glendale, Colorado police officer on routine patrol spotted flames coming out the back of Fero's Bar & Grill that was situated in a strip mall five miles south of downtown Denver. Firefighters, upon entering the structure to combat the blaze, discovered five corpses.

     One of the four women found dead at the fire scene was 63-year-old Young Fero, the owner of the establishment. The South Korean native assumed sole proprietorship of the 28-year-old business following her divorce from its co-founder, Danny Fero. Fero's Bar & Grill catered to regular patrons and people staying at local hotels. The bar featured a weekly poker game, pool tables and Japanese food. It had not been a particularly busy place.

     A spokesperson with the Denver Police Department at a press conference later in the day announced that on-site evidence indicated that the fire had been intentionally set fifteen to twenty minutes before the bar's regular 2:00 AM closing time. The bodies of the five victims showed signs of physical trauma unrelated to the blaze. As a result investigators were operating on the theory that the victims had been murdered before someone set the place on fire. Detectives believed the murders had been committed by armed robbers who set the fire to destroy evidence.

     Besides Young Fero, the bar's owner and operator, the other victims, all patrons, were: Daria M. Pohl, 22; Kellene Fallon, 45; Ross Richter, 29; and Teressa Beesley, 45. There were no other people in the bar during the robbery, murders and fire.

     On October 18, 2012, the day after the arson-murders, the Denver police arrested three men in connection with the case. Dexter Lewis, 22, Joseph Hill, 27 and his brother Lynell Hill, 24, were each charged with five counts of murder and one count of aggravated robbery and arson.

     Dexter Lewis, engaged to a woman who was seven months pregnant, had been arrested in May 2009 in Jefferson County, Colorado on several counts of assault on a police officer. He pleaded guilty to felony menacing. The other charges were dropped. That year Mr. Lewis also pleaded guilty to felony robbery and was sentenced to three years in prison. When arrested on October 18, 2012 in connection with the Fero's Bar & Grill mass murder case he was out on parole.

     Police in Arapahoe County arrested Lynell Hill in August 2011 on charges of misdemeanor assault, reckless endangerment and harassment. Hill pleaded guilty to harassment involving physical force and in return received a deferred nine-month sentence that allowed him to stay out of jail as long as he stayed out of trouble.

     Joseph Hill, on his Facebook page, called himself a "singer song writer" who is just a ..."great person to know, if you're genuine." Hill, who apparently thought a lot of himself, went on to say, "I'm very hardworking and dedicated and very ambitious as well. I'm chasing my dreams."

     The Denver Medical Examiner's office ruled the manner of the five deaths as criminal homicide. All of the victims had been shot to death before the fire.

     The Hill brothers pleaded guilty to the murders in December 2013. A month later, the judge sentenced Joseph to five life sentences and Lynell to 70 years in prison. As part of the plea agreement the brothers agreed to testify against Dexter Lewis. In May 2014 the prosecutor in the Lewis case announced his intention to pursue the death penalty.

     In August 2014 lawyers representing Dexter Lewis were in court presenting arguments in support of having the upcoming trial moved out of Denver. The defense attorneys also urged the judge to exclude statements their client had made to the police after his arrest.

     On September 30, 2014 Denver District Court Judge John Madden denied 32 pre-trial motions filed by the Lewis defense including a request to sequester the jury. The judge also denied the defense petition to query members of the jury pool on how they felt about the death penalty. (The last time a Denver jury sentenced a defendant to death was 1986.) Judge Madden set the trial for January 20, 2015.

     In November 2014 Dexter Lewis' attorneys were back in court, this time seeking more time to prepare their defense. Public Defender Chris Baumann claimed his legal team needed more time to interview potential trial witnesses. "We have gone to nine cities in seven states so far," he said.

     Judge Madden, in December 2014, granted the defense request to delay the start of the Lewis trial to July 20, 2015. Lewis faced 16 felony counts that included first-degree murder, arson and robbery in the October 2012 massacre of the bar's owner and her patrons.

     In August, 2015 a jury in Denver found Dexter Lewis guilty as charged. A few months later the judge sentenced him to life in prison.  

The Unlucky Traffic Offender

     Being stopped for traffic violations for otherwise law abiding citizens is usually the only direct contact they have with law enforcement. Most citizens, when caught speeding, realize they have broken the law and accept the fine with grace. While traffic offenders don't like being caught and fined, they don't hold it against the cop who stopped them. They know the police officer is doing his or her job, and a dangerous job it can be.

     Citizens, however, do not appreciate unfair traffic enforcement such as speed traps. They also don't like it when an officer is rude, disrespectful or abusive.

     To do their jobs effectively police officers require the support of the law abiding community. That support is fragile and can be destroyed if too many patrol officers do not act like professional public servants. A cop who abuses his or her power of arrest, even in minor cases, is unfit for law enforcement. There is no such thing as a minor abuse of power. In law enforcement zero-tolerance should be a two-way street.

     On April 7, 2018, 24-year-old Sarah Webb, en route to her job at a hair salon was pulled over for speeding outside of Atlanta, Georgia by a pair of officers with the Roswell Police Department. Officer Courtney Brown approached the stopped vehicle and asked Sarah Webb if she knew how fast she had been driving. Webb apologized for driving too fast in the 45 MPH zone and explained that she was late for work.

     In addressing the speeding suspect, Officer Brown said, "The ground is wet and it's been raining. You're going over 80 miles per hour on this type of road. That's reckless driving."

     "I'm so sorry," replied the traffic violator.

     Officer Courtney Brown returned to the police cruiser and conferred with her fellow Roswell officer, Kristee Wilson. Officer Brown allowed that she had not recorded Webb's vehicle on a speed detection device and was speculating on how fast Webb had been driving. Regarding how fast Webb had been moving, Officer Wilson noted that Officer Brown's body camera would have recorded the police car's speed in catching up to the suspect.

     As Officer Brown accessed a coin-flip application on her cell phone, she said, "Hold on." Officer Brown said she would let the virtual coin decide whether or not they would just ticket driver Webb or take her into custody for reckless driving. When the computer coin flip went against the driver, Officer Brown approached Sarah Webb's car and informed her that she was under arrest.

      "Why am I being arrested," asked the stunned driver.

     Officer Brown told Webb, who was now sobbing, that she was being taken into custody for reckless driving and driving too fast for conditions. The officer handcuffed the traffic violator and placed her into the back of the patrol car.

     On Sunday, July 8, 2018, after a local television station aired Officer Brown's body camera video of the coin-flip and arrest, a local prosecutor dropped the charges against Sarah Webb. Up until this point the arrestee had no idea she had been taken into custody on the strength of a coin toss.

      It was not surprising that the airing of Officer Brown's body camera video created public outrage and became a national news story.

    In response to the pubic's disgust regarding this police action, Roswell Chief of Police Rusty Grant told reporters that Officers Courtney Brown and Kristee Wilson had been placed on paid administrative leave pending an internal inquiry. "I have much higher expectations of our police officers," he said. "I am appalled that a law enforcement officer would trivialize the decision making process of something as the arrest of a person."

     Sarah Webb, who characterized the officers' administrative leave as a paid vacation, said this: "These [police officers] are people who are supposed to protect us. It's disgusting to think police officers do stuff like this. It was appalling."

     The authority to arrest people and haul them to a police station constitutes enormous power over the lives and reputations of citizens. As a result, this authority should carry with it equally momentous responsibility. Any police officer who intentionally abuses the power of arrest, at any level of law enforcement, should be dealt with severely. A police officer without empathy is a danger to society. Officers Courtney Brown and Kristee Wilson were unfit for police work.

     On July 26, 2018, Officers Brown and Wilson were fired. According to Chief Grant they were terminated "For treating our freedom and our lives as games."

The Hemy Neuman Murder Case

     In the late 1980s Hemy Neuman, a young American engineer living and working in Israel, met his future wife Ariela, an Israeli-born school teacher. In 2010 the 47-year-old engineer and his stay-at-home wife were separated. Hemy had moved out of their lavish home in Cobb County, Georgia in August of that year. While Mr. Neuman had a high-paying job as a project manager with GE Energy, he was in financial trouble. His expensive lifestyle--the big house, luxury cars, expensive restaurants and elaborate vacations--had caught up with him. His three children were also attending college. Now his wife was filing for divorce.

     Ariela Neuman had kicked Hemy out of the house because she believed he was having an affair with a 36-year-old woman he hired at GE. Neuman and Andrea Schneiderman, his suspected lover, denied the accusation. Andrea's husband, Russell "Rusty" Schneiderman, although he had a MBA from Harvard was out of work. The couple had two young children.

     On the morning of November 18, 2010, Rusty Schneiderman dropped off his 2-year-old son at the Dunwoody Prep nursery school 15 miles north of Atlanta. As the father returned to his car Hemy Neuman walked up behind him, and with a .40-caliber Bersa handgun, shot him several times. Schneiderman fell dead at the scene. Mr. Neuman climbed into a rented Kia minivan and drove off.

     A week before the murder Hemy Neuman, wearing a fake beard, had crept up to Schneiderman's house with the intent of shooting him there. Hemy's plan fell apart when his intended target came out of the house to check on a gas leak and saw this bearded man lying in his yard. When spotted by his murder target Mr. Neuman jumped to his feet and ran off.

     When Hemy Neuman's wife Ariela learned of Rusty Schneiderman's murder in front of the Dunwoody nursery school she knew that her husband had killed the victim over Mr. Schneiderman's wife Andrea. Ariela Neuman called the police and filled them in on her estranged husband's affair with the dead man's wife. Ariela described her husband as a risk-taking control freak obsessed with money and his career.

     Several weeks after the police arrested Mr. Neuman on January 4, 2011 he admitted that he murdered Rusty Schneiderman. He claimed, however, that at the time of the shooting he was so insane he didn't comprehend the nature and quality of his act. In other words, he was so crazy he didn't know right from wrong. After the killing Hemy Neuman regained his sanity, but when he pulled the trigger in front of the nursery school he was so mentally ill he didn't know what he was doing. That was his defense, temporary insanity. Investigators didn't buy it and neither did the prosecutor. If Mr. Neuman was crazy he was crazy like a fox.

     In February 2012, charged with malice murder (other states call it first-degree murder or capital murder) and the use of a firearm in the commission of a felony, Hemy Neuman went on trial in a De Kalb County court in Decatur, Georgia.

     The prosecutor played for the jury of nine men and three women a video taped jailhouse interview of the defendant by psychiatrist Dr. Pamela Crawford. During the interview Mr. Neuman told Dr. Crawford that he initially considered stabbing Rusty Schneiderman to death. But he changed his mind because it would be too messy. The defendant thought about poisoning his victim but rejected that idea as too complicated and unreliable. Staging a fatal accident had also crossed the defendant's mind, but in the end he settled on shooting the man to death at close range. He preferred this method because it was simple and sure-fire.

     Following the video of this interview, Dr. Crawford testified that a truly delusional, psychotic person would not have gone through the above thought processes. A really crazy person would have acted impulsively without all of that thinking and planning. The defendant, in Dr. Crawford's expert opinion, wasn't crazy. The entire insanity defense was therefore a sham.

     For the defense, forensic psychologist Dr. Andriana Flores testified that Mr. Neuman suffered from an undiagnosed and untreated bipolar disorder accompanied by psychosis. (In other words, he had no history of mental illness.) According to the defense psychologist, Mr. Neuman suffered from delusions and a condition called erotomania. As an erotomania sufferer the defendant only thought he was having an affair with the wife of the man he shot to death.  And it got better: Before the killing, Hemy Neuman, according to Dr. Flores, had been visited by an angel who spoke in Oliva Newton-John's voice. This imagined angel informed the defendant that Mr. Schneiderman's children were actually his. This revelation was reinforced by a message from a second angel who sounded like Barry White!

     On March 14, 2012 after two days of deliberation the jury, presented with three possible verdicts--guilty; not guilty by virtue of insanity; or guilty but mentally ill--found Hemy Neuman guilty but mentally ill. That meant that while he would receive mental health treatment, he'd get it while serving his time in prison. The next day the judge sentenced Hemy Neuman to life behind bars with no chance of parole.

     On Thursday, August 2, 2012, Andrea Sneiderman, the wife of the man Hemy Neuman had murdered, was charged with malice murder, criminal attempt to commit murder, racketeering, two counts of perjury, and two counts of insurance fraud. According the Andrea Schneiderman's indictment she and the convicted killer were having an affair. The couple conspired to kill Rusty Schneiderman with the intent of "acquiring property, money and life insurance proceeds." The murdered man's wife had received a $2 million life insurance payment as well as $960,000 in various bank accounts.

     In July 2013, following a two-hour hearing, Judge Gregory Adams dropped the murder, racketeering and insurance fraud charges against Andrea Schneiderman. The prosecutor had lost confidence in the reliability of a key prosecution witness. She still faced thirteen other criminal charges related to the murder of her husband.

     Andrea Schneiderman, a month after the above hearing was convicted of nine felonies in connection with the Neuman case. She did not testify on her own behalf. The jury found her guilty of four counts of perjury, three counts of giving false statements, one count of hindering the apprehension of a criminal and a count of concealing material facts.

     On August 20, 2013 at her sentencing hearing, Andrea Schneiderman's friends and family testified on her behalf. When it came her turn to speak to the court Andrea Schneiderman said, "Please let me go home to my kids. Please don't let them live without their mother." The De Kalb County District Attorney asked the judge to sentence Sneiderman to twenty years. Judge Adams sentenced her to five years in prison.

The Fanatical Sports Fan

      According to experts, the psychology underlying fanatical sports fandom is a product of narcissism, juvenilia and borderline sociopathy. While some sports fanatics are just loud and obnoxious, a few can become violent and dangerous.

     Kurt Paschke, by anyone's standard, was an over-the-top super-fan. The 38-year-old lived in a rented house across the street from his parents in the Long Island town of Holbrook, New York. Kurt worked as a bartender at the Village Tavern in nearby Huntington. A rabid New York Jets football fan and a season ticket-holder, he was one of those guys who paints his face in team colors and religiously wears the team jersey, hat and other gear. But as a fan, Kurt Paschke was so much more.

     To show his devotion to his Jets, Kurt purchased a mini-bus he called the Jets Mobile. Out of this custom painted vehicle he tailgated at the Jets' home games at the MetLife Stadium in Queens. Painted green and white in homage to his beloved team, the bus featured a special Jets vanity plate as well as Jets inspired mud flaps and hubcaps. Kurt's mother had embroidered, for the Jets Mobile, team themed seat covers and interior curtains.

     On October 20, 2013 the hated Boston Patriots were in New York for a game against the Jets. On that Sunday afternoon the Jets, in overtime play, beat the Patriots 30 to 27. As Kurt and his jubilant parents were leaving MetLife Stadium following their glorious victory they were confronted by three angry Boston Patriot fans. Someone said something that sparked angry words and then a fight between Paschke and Boston fans Jaclyn Nugent, Amanda MacDowell and David James Sacco.

     In the skirmish, caught on videotape, Jaclyn Nugent can be seen hitting and kicking Paschke. The Jets fan retaliated by punching the 26-year-old Boston woman in the head. After the blow Nugent lunged at Paschke and the two scuffled. The fight ended on its own before security personnel broke it up. Paschke and Nugent, with bruises and cuts on their faces, parted ways.

     The post-game dustup at MetLife Stadium would have ended there had it not been for the online publication of videos showing a big strapping man in a Jets jersey punching a woman in the face. And the story got even bigger when the media found out more about the man in the Jets shirt.

     Kurt Paschke, as it turned out, was more than just a Jets fanatic who punched a female Boston fan. Decades earlier he had served three years in prison for negligent homicide. (He had since been arrested twice for disorderly conduct and once for serving drinks to a minor.)

     On June 27, 1992, shortly after Paschke graduated from Sachem High School in Ronkonkoma, Long Island he got into a fight with another 17-year-old behind a pizzeria in Sayville, New York. Paschke pulled a knife and stabbed Henry Ferrer to death. Ferrer was not armed.

     In 1995 a jury found Paschke guilty of negligent homicide. In addressing the judge at his sentencing hearing, Paschke said, "I am deeply sorry. I can honestly say I never sought the confrontation, but when it came, I did what I had to do." Paschke served three years in a New York state prison. The judge also sentenced him to several years of probation.

     In the aftermath of Paschke's fight with the Patriot fans, Paschke's mother Colleen, in speaking to a CNN correspondent, defended her son. The 62-year-old from Holbrook said, "If the girl is going to be out of control like that, why can't a guy defend himself? These girls today are really out of control. I really think that they are protected because they are girls and think they can get away with anything." Later, to a reporter with the New York Daily News, Kurt's mother said, "My son is the victim, really."

     Robert Ferrer, the 80-year-old father of the boy Paschke killed in 1992 wasn't in a mood to defend Kurt Paschke. Obviously still bitter over the violent death of his son Henry, Mr. Ferrer said this to the New York Daily News reporter: "He murdered my son and he got a minimum sentence for killing a 17-year-old boy. He got away with it because his father was a sergeant. [Kurt's father was an officer with the Suffolk County Police Department.] I was dead after it happened. I had a very nice house on Long Island [Bay Shore] and I sold it to get away. The guy is a born criminal."

     A Suffolk County prosecutor charged Paschke, Nugent, Sacco and MacDowell with disorderly conduct and assault. Until the case was resolved all four football fans were banned from MetLife Stadium. For Kurt Paschke this punishment went beyond cruel and unusual.

     In March 2014, in the case of punching out the Boston Patriots fan, Kurt Paschke pleaded guilty to the lesser disorderly charge of unnecessary noise. The judge fined him $289. Charges against the other three fans were dropped.

     Paschke, in August 2014 completed a four-hour fan conduct class. Following the completion of the good-behavior course, and a written apology, Paschke was granted the right to return to MetLife Stadium. He got his life back.

     In November 2017 Kurt Paschke was among ten finalists for induction into the New York Jets Fan Hall of Fame. (Yes, there is such a thing.) Shortly after the announcement went public, however, when the induction committee learned of this fan's violent past, Kurt Paschke was no longer up for consideration for the honor. For him, this must have been a terrible blow.

The Shaken Baby Syndrome: The Shirley Ree Smith Case

     When a presumably healthy baby dies in his or her crib for no apparent reason, and there is no evidence of foul play, rather than classifying the cause of death as "unknown," or "undetermined," a coroner or medical examiner will usually call the fatality a "sudden infant death syndrome" (SIDS) case. Although this is the same as ruling the death as "undetermined," it sounds more scientific. At one time the parents of SIDS babies found themselves under clouds of suspicion. Today, as a result of scientific study of these cases, forensic pathologists are attributing natural death causes in infant deaths that earlier would have been classified as SIDS fatalities.

     The "shaken baby syndrome" (SBS) refers to signs of physical trauma found in children under six who have been violently shaken. When a baby or toddler is shaken too hard the victim's brain is jarred against the skull causing it to bleed and swell. Most pediatricians and forensic pathologists believe that to diagnose SBS they must find, at minimum, evidence of subdural hematoma (brain hemorrhaging), retinal bleeding (broken veins in the eyes) and cerebral edema (liquid on the brain that causes it to swell). The conventional wisdom was that a child with these injuries who had neither been in a car accident or fallen from a two-story window had been violently shaken. Supportive evidence of SBS might include trauma to the neck and spine, bruises on the arms and torso and broken ribs.

     In the late 1990s a handful of pediatric researchers began to question the science behind the standard SBS diagnosis.Could cerebral edema and blood in the eyes and brain have other causes such as vitamin deficiency, disease or reactions to vaccines and drugs? Diseases thought to cause symptoms of SBS included hypohosphatasia, a brittle bone disease; Alagilles's Syndrome, a liver ailment; Bylers Disease, a liver disorder common among the Amish; and glutaric acidura, acid buildup in infants that causes paralysis and retinal bleeding. Some experts believe that a relatively short fall to a hard surface, say from three feet, can cause damage to the brain similar to that found in SBS victims.

     Because there is no agreement among pediatricians and forensic pathologists what physical evidence of SBS consists of, homicide trials involving defendants accused of shaking infants to death often involve expert witnesses testifying against each other.

The Shirley Ree Smith Case

     In 1997 a jury in Van Nuys, California convicted Shirley Ree Smith of shaking her seven-week-old grandson to death. The prosecutor convinced the jury that Smith had shaken the baby to stop him from crying. The medical examiner, in explaining why there wasn't as much cerebral bleeding as one might expect in a SBS case, said the baby had been shaken so violently the blood vessels in the brain stem suffered "shearing," causing instantaneous death without bleeding due to the fact the baby's heart had stopped beating. The autopsy had failed to produce evidence of brain swelling or retinal bleeding.

     The Smith defense put two forensic pathologists on the stand who classified the death as a SIDS case, noting that the baby had jaundice, a heart murmer and low birth weight. The jury accepted the prosecution's version of the facts and found Shirley Ree Smith guilty. She received a sentence of fifteen years to life.

     A state court of appeals upheld the Smith conviction. The Ninth Circuit federal court of appeals, however, in 2006, reversed the conviction and ordered Shirley Ree Smith released from prison on the grounds the jury had misclassified the baby's death as a SBS fatality. The state prosecutor appealed the case reversal to the United States Supreme Court.

     On October 31, 2011 the Supreme Court, in a 6 to 3 decision, reinstated Shirley Ree Smith's homicide conviction. This meant she would have to return to prison. The six justices upheld a longstanding legal principle that an appeals court cannot substitute its judgment for a jury's. The high court, recognizing the jury in the Smith case may have relied on the wrong forensic pathologists, reminded the Ninth Circuit Court that judges in jury trials cannot decide the law and the facts. If Shirley Ree Smith had a remedy in law, it would have to be in the form of executive clemency.

     In April 2012 California Governor Jerry Brown commuted the 51-year-old's conviction. Shirley Ree Smith was immediately released from prison. 

A Bad Day For David Sturdivant

     David Sturdivant, a 64-year-old ex-Marine (Purple Heart/Vietnam) was doing okay in Atlanta, Georgia. He lived alone in a two-story house and worked in his own engine repair shop attached to his dwelling. Mr. Sturdivant had recently been the victim of neighborhood burglars who had broken into his shop and stole his HAM radio, various electronic items, a couple of riding mowers and his tools. Thieves had also stolen his two antique Thunderbirds.

     After awakening from a nap at one o'clock in the afternoon on April 8, 2011 Mr. Sturdivant looked out his second-story window and saw a pickup owned by Dennis Alexander. With its tailgate open, the vehicle was parked near a riding mower in Mr. Sturdivant's shop for repair. To Mr. Sturdivant it looked like Mr. Alexander, a man with a criminal history of burglary and theft, was about to steal the mower. David Sturdivant stepped out onto his balcony and yelled, "Get off my property and stop stealing my stuff!" When Denish Alexander mocked the property owner Mr. Sturdivant entered his house and returned with a commercial grade M-14 rifle. From the balcony he fired one bullet into the ground to frighten Mr. Alexander off the property.

      Atlanta police officers in the neighborhood working with a television crew filming a segment for the reality TV show "Bait Car" heard the shot. In less than two minutes they were on the scene shouting at Mr. Sturdivant to drop his rifle. Without taking the time to fully comprehend the situation, three officers fired fourteen shots at Mr. Sturdivant. One of the bullets tore into his stomach. Mr. Sturdivant had not shot at the officers and had not pointed his rifle at them.

     A week after the shooting Mr. Sturdivant was discharged from the hospital. He had lost a kidney and was missing several inches of his colon. Police officers immediately took him into custody and hauled him to the Fulton County Jail in his wheelchair. The district attorney charged David Sturdivant with four counts of aggravated assault for pointing his gun at the police officers. He also stood accused of aggravated assault for shooting at the suspected thief and for possession of a weapon in the commission of a crime. If convicted of all charges Mr. Sturdivant faced up to 105 years in prison.

     While Mr. Sturdivant recovered from his bullet wound in the jail's hospital, looters cleaned out his house and business then burned the dwelling and shop to the ground.

     At a preliminary hearing on October 27, 2011 the suspect turned down the district attorney's offer of a probated sentence in return for a misdemeanor plea. Claiming total innocence Mr. Sturdivant rejected the plea bargain.

     On November 11, 2011 a judge tossed out the prosecutor's case against Mr. Sturdivant. After serving seven months in the county jail Mr. Sturdivant was free. But he had nowhere to go except to the local VA hospital. Mr. Sturdivant lost his freedom, his house, his business, his household belongings, his antique cars, his tools, his kidney and a piece of his colon. He was the victim of criminals and the police.

Elisa Lam's Mysterious and Suspicious Death

     The Cecil Hotel, a downtown 600-room fourteen-story building at 7th and Main near Los Angeles' Skid Row district could be a setting in a southern California noir film. (I'm thinking of the hotel in the movie "Barton Fink.") In the 1920s and 30s several guests and visitors were murdered in the place. A woman jumped to her death from a hotel window in the 1960s. In 1985, Richard Ramirez, "The Night Stalker," occasionally roomed on the fourteenth floor. The hotel put the serial killer in proximity to prostitutes, fourteen of whom ended up dead by his hand. In 1991, during Jack Unterweger's stay at the hotel, the Austrian murdered several of the neighborhood's working girls. The Cecil Hotel's new owners made improvements to the 2-star budget hotel in 2007. Half of the hotel's inhabitants were permanent residents.

     On January 26, 2013, Elisa Lam, a 21-year-old University of British Columbia student from Vancouver, Canada checked into the Cecil Hotel. During the first five days of her Los Angeles vacation she called her parents regularly. She stopped phoning on January 31, and the next day her worried parents, the owners of a Vancouver restaurant, reported their daughter missing to the Los Angeles Police Department. 

     Police officers searched the hotel without result. In reviewing surveillance camera footage detectives came across a two-minute clip of the missing woman standing by herself in a hotel elevator. Lam was seen pushing all of the floor-buttons, obviously frustrated that the elevator door didn't close. For a minute or so she seemed to be hiding in the corner of the elevator before stepping out into the hallway. She was seen just outside the elevator gesturing as though she was talking to someone off-camera. 

     On Tuesday morning February 19, 2013 a maintenance worker on the hotel roof investigating complaints of low water pressure made a gruesome discovery. To his horror he found a young woman's body in one of the four cylindrical tanks that provided the hotel's water. The corpse had been floating in the cistern for two and a half weeks. As suspected, the maintenance man had found Elisa Lam.  

     Guests at the Cecil Hotel had been drinking, brushing their teeth and showering in water contaminated by a decomposing corpse. During the week before the maintenance man's roof-top discovery there had been customer complaints of funky drinking water and showers that started off with a black spray. 

     The Cecil Hotel remained open but was placed on "flush only" status by the Los Angeles County Health Department. (Following the discovery of the body the city added more chorine to the hotel's drinking water.) After the recovery of Lam's remains guests checking into the $64 a night hotel were required to sign waivers warning them they were staying at the Cecil "at their own risk and peril." (People were still checking-in?) 

     Los Angeles detectives treated the case as a suspicious death but did not determine what happened to Lisa Lam or how her body ended up in the hotel water supply. (I presume there was no evidence of foul play in her room.) To get to the hotel roof one had to have access to a locked and alarmed door. The only other way to the top of the building involved climbing the fire escape. 

     According to her parents, Elisa's travel plans had included a trip to Santa Cruz in the central part of the state. No one knew why Santa Cruz was on her vacation itinerary. A few news sources indicated that the young woman might have been "mildly depressed".

     On February 29, 2013 a spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner's office announced that the autopsy did not reveal Elisa Lam's specific cause of death. That meant she hadn't been shot, bludgeoned, stabbed or knifed to death. That left strangulation, smothering or drowning. Apparently the forensic pathologist was unable to determine if she had been dead or alive when she went into the water.

     Toxicological tests determined that Lam had not recently consumed alcohol or recreational drugs. In her system she did have antidepressant medication prescribed for depression and bipolar disorder.

     The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner's office announced, on June 20, 2013, that Elisa Lam's death was an accident. Really? How does one accidentally drown in a roof-top water tank? Did a witness see Lam on the hotel roof? Was she swimming in the tank?  

The Father Michael Kelly Repressed Memory Sexual Molestation Suit

     In 2008 a 31-year-old major in the U. S. Air Force Reserves brought a sexual molestation suit against Father Michael Kelly, the 58-year-old pastor of St. Joachim's Catholic Church in Lockeford, California. The plaintiff, referred to as John TZ Doe pursuant to a court order not to reveal his identify, didn't remember being molested by Father Kelly until 2006. Although the statute of limitations ruled out criminal charges a civil suit could be brought against the priest and the church.

     In the lawsuit John Doe accused Father Kelly of molesting him in the 1980s when he was a 10-year-old altar boy at the Cathedral of the Annunciation in Stockton, California. In September 2007, following the recovery of his "repressed memory," John Doe had filed a complaint with Bishop Stephen Blaine of the Stockton Diocese. Father Kelly, placed on administrative leave, denied the allegations. Following an internal investigation by diocesan officials, Father Kelly, in March 2008 was re-instated at St. Joachim's Catholic Church.

     The civil trial got underway on February 29, 2012 in the San Joaquin County Superior Court. Judge Bob McNatt ruled that the jury could not be told that Father Kelly was the subject of a pending sexual molestation investigation being conducted by the Calaveras County Sheriff's Office. According to the criminal complaint Father Kelly molested a boy during the period 2000-2002 while he was pastor of St. Andrew's Parish in San Andreas, California. (In 2004 Father Kelly was transferred to St. Joachim's in Stockton. Prior to his tenure in San Andreas Father Kelly had been pastor at churches in Sonora, Tracy, Modesto and Ceres, California.)

     Plaintiff's attorney John Manly put on several witnesses who as boys in the defendant's churches had been repeatedly tickled by the priest who also wrestled with them. According to this testimony Father Kelly sexually touched and fondled them during these bouts of roughhousing.

     John Doe took the stand and spoke of being molested by the defendant on a walking trail outside of Stockton, in a motel room and in the priest's living quarters. In the motel room, the plaintiff said he had fallen asleep and when he awoke he and the priest were in bed naked. At the defendant's living quarters Father Kelly had removed the witness' clothing. John Doe said he then fell asleep and when he awoke he was fully dressed. (From this testimony the plaintiff was asking jurors to infer that he had been drugged.) Pointing at Father Kelly the witness yelled, "You raped me, I was just a kid!"

     On March 20, 2012, San Francisco psychiatrist Anlee Kuo testified that in evaluating the reliability of John Doe's recovered memories of events that occurred when he was 10-years-old, she administered several tests that measured the validity of his accounts. The results of these tests convinced Dr. Kuo that his memories were accurate. Dr. Kuo pointed out that the repressed memory phenomenon was recognized by the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association. Moreover, she said that repressed memory was included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. According to the psychiatrist, Father Kelly's sexual molestation has caused the plaintiff, as a 35-year-old adult, to suffer from depression and alcohol abuse.

     The next day defense attorney Thomas Beatty put Father Kelly on the stand. The priest told the jury that he had not sexually molested the plaintiff. On cross-examination, John Manly, the plaintiff's attorney, asked Father Kelly this: "At any time did you get under a blanket with [the plaintiff]?"

     "Of course not," came the reply.

     "Did you ever take him into the bathroom to disrobe?"

     "I absolutely deny it."

     "Did you ever take the [plaintiff] on a hike?"

     "I did not," answered the priest.

     Dr. J. Alexander Bodkin of Harvard University took the stand for the defense. Dr. Bodkin told the jury that repressed memories--also known as dissociative memory--is not a scientifically proven phenomenon. "Peoples' memories don't get better with time," he said. "They get worse. The plaintiff's story is difficult to believe."

     Following the lunch break on Friday, April 6, 2012 the case went to the jury of 10 women and 2 men. Because this was a civil trial only 9 votes were required for the jury to reach a verdict. Moreover, the standard of proof in a civil trial is less rigorous than in a criminal proceeding that requires guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In a civil trial a plaintiff merely has to establish his case by a "preponderance of the evidence." That is the plaintiff's allegations against the defendant are more likely to be true than not.

     After deliberating for a day the jury found Father Michael Kelly liable for three of the sexual molestation allegations. The second phase of the trial, with the same jury, would focus on the dioceses' handling of child abuse allegations against Father Kelly and other priests. One of the other priests was Father Oliver O'Grady who had been convicted of child molestation and possession of child pornography. The O'Grady case had cost the Diocese of Stockton millions of dollars in civil case settlements in more than 20 lawsuits. The jury also had the task of determining how much money to award John Doe.

     Immediately after the verdict the Bishop removed Father Kelly from the ministry Three hours later, speaking to 100 of his parishioners at St. Joachim's Church in Lockeford, the ex-priest said, "The charges against me are untrue." When Michael Kelly reminded his supporters that he had passed two polygraph tests, they cheered. Because polygraph test results were not admissible in court the jury did not know this. The jurors also didn't know about the ongoing sexual molestation investigation involving Michael Kelly in Calaveras County. Under the laws of evidence, jurors, in making their decisions, are kept in the dark about a lot of things.

     Michael Kelly, on April 15, 2015 flew to his native Ireland for what he described as needed medical treatment. He was under subpoena to testify the next day in the second phase of the lawsuit in Stockton. John Manly, the plaintiff's attorney, said that he believed the ex-priest received help in leaving the country. Kelly's attorney, Tom Beatty, said that he was "saddened by Father Kelly's illness and his devastation brought on by the finding of the repressed memory claim of abuse. I believe it is important for Father Kelly to be present during the damages phase of the case but he feels he has lost everything already. I hope to talk to him shortly." John Manly said that whoever helped Kelly to escape out of the country could be arrested for aiding and abetting. (Nothing came of this threat.)

     In August 2015, the Stockton Diocese settled the lawsuit for $3.75 million.