The Kayleigh Slusher Murder Case

     In 2014, three-year-old Kayleigh Slusher lived with her mother Sara Krueger, 23 and Krueger's 26-year-old boyfriend, Ryan Scott Warner. The couple and the toddler resided in Unit 7 at the Royal Garden apartment complex in Napa, California.

     Over the past five years Ryan Warner had been in and out of bay area jails for a variety of crimes including assault and possession of drugs. When his former girlfriend Ashley Owens refused to abort their child, Warner sent her a series of threatening text messages that read: "I hope the kid dies," "I will scalp you," and "I will bust out your teeth with a pipe." Warner was obviously a violent man who didn't like children or women.

     Since June 2012 Napa police officers had been called to the Krueger apartment more than a dozen times on reports of domestic disturbance, theft, vandalism and unwanted persons. By any standard Unit 7 at the Royal Garden complex was a dangerous place to raise a child and relatives and neighbors knew this. The only people who seemed oblivious to the situation were the police and the child welfare authorities. Unfortunately these were the only people with the power to protect Kayleigh Slusher.

     On January 27, 2014 a neighbor called the Napa police and requested a welfare check at Unit 7. According to the caller, Kayleigh Krueger and her boyfriend were using drugs and not feeding the little girl. They were also making a commotion and fighting with each other. Police officers visited the apartment that day and didn't find drugs or evidence of narcotics use. The officers observed Kayleigh who seemed okay. The officers did not notify child protective services. They left things as they found them.

     A Krueger relative, worried about the little girl, called the authorities two days later. On January 29 police officers returned to the apartment, examined the girl and left. This would be the last day of Kayleigh Kreyger's short life.

     At 11:50 AM on Saturday, February 1, 2014 a police dispatcher in the bay area city of Richmond received an anonymous call from a man who had "something to get off his chest" about Sara Kreuger and her boyfriend. According to the tipster, a guy named Brian or Ryan had done something bad to Krueger's daughter.

     That day two police officers arrived at Unit 7, knocked on the door and didn't get a response. A neighbor informed the officers that the day before, January 31, 2014, a man and woman, presumably the occupants of the unit, left the apartment. The little girl was not with them. Using a key they acquired from the apartment complex manager the officers entered the dwelling.

     In one of the bedrooms the officers found Kayleigh in bed covered in blankets up to her neck. Next to her body lay a doll. She was dead and cold to the touch. She also had bruises around her eyes and blood in her nostrils. (A forensic pathologist would determine the cause of death to be "multiple blunt impact injuries to the head, torso and extremities." The pathologist also found evidence of prior child abuse and neglect. Manner of death: Homicide.)

     The following day police officers arrested Sara Krueger and Ryan Warner at a BART station in El Cerrito, California. According to the murdered girl's mother, she found Kayleigh dead when she returned to the apartment on the afternoon of January 30, 2014. Krueger said she placed the body into a plastic bag and stored it for awhile in a freezer before tucking the little corpse into the bed.

     Sara Krueger and Ryan Warner were booked into the Napa County Jail on charges of murder and felony assault of a child causing death. If convicted as charged they faced up to 25 years to life in prison.

     On February 25, 2014, at the murder suspects' arraignment before Napa Superior Court Judge Mark Boessenecker, the couple pleaded not guilty. The judge denied both suspects bail.

     In May 2017, separate juries found Ryan Warner and Sara Krueger guilty of first-degree murder. Napa County Judge Francisca P. Tisher, in July 2017, sentenced both defendants to life in prison without parole.

The Julia Merfeld Murder-For-Hire Case

     Early in 2013, 27-year-old Jacob Merfeld and his wife Julia moved from Keyport, a small Monmouth County town in eastern New Jersey, to Muskegon, Michigan. While they settled into their Muskegon apartment, the couple's two children, a 4-year-old daughter and a boy who was two, were cared for by Jacob's parents in neighboring Wisconsin.

     There was nothing about Jacob Merfeld, a member of the U. S. Coast Guard, or his 21-year-old wife that seemed out of the ordinary. To the outside world they appeared to be a typical middle-class couple doing their best to raise their children and succeed in life.

     In late March 2013 Julia told co-worker Carlos Ramos that she wanted out of her marriage. She said that although her husband was a nice guy who treated her well, she had found someone else, a person she wanted to live with. While Ramos found this revelation mildly provocative, what she said next shocked him.

     Julia, over a period of several days, talked about how her husband's death would be so much better for her than a divorce and all that went with such a prolonged complicated process. For one thing, a divorce would be embarrassing, and it would break Jacob's heart. So this was her plan: She would pay Carlos Ramos $50,000 out of her husband's $400,000 life insurance policy if he murdered him. The money would be paid to the hit man in $10,000 installments.

     When this ordinary unexceptional young wife and mother offered Carlos Ramos $50,000 to commit cold-blooded murder he didn't take her seriously enough to notify the authorities. He figured she was either joking or just blowing off steam. The cool unemotional way Julia discussed having her husband dispatched by a contract killer made the whole proposition, while shocking, seem unreal.

     Carlos Ramos started to change his mind about Julia Merfeld as she continued to talk about her murder-for-hire fantasy and his role in it as her hit man. He eventually decided that she meant business, and that his best course of action involved notifying the Muskegon County Sheriff's Office about her deadly plan. He certainly had no intention of becoming a hired killer. The fact she even considered him a candidate for such an assignment boggled his mind and convinced him there was something profoundly wrong with this woman. She spoke of murdering another human being the way one would speak of squashing a cockroach.

     On April 9 and 10, 2013 an undercover officer with the Muskegon County Sheriff's Office who posed as a hit man met with Julia Merfeld in the officer's car in a Fruitport Township parking lot. With the hidden camera running the murder-for-hire mastermind explained her reasons for such a drastic solution to a common problem: "It's not that we weren't getting along," she said. "But as terrible as it sounds, it was easier than divorcing him. You know, I don't have to worry about the judgment of my family. I don't have to worry about breaking his heart." 

     Julia Merfeld instructed the phony hit man that she didn't want him to kill Jacob as part as a staged burglary that turned violent. Her reason for not wanting him to do that was self-serving: she didn't want to scare off the person she hoped would move into the apartment with her after Jacob's death. Besides, an indoor killing would be, in her words, "messy."

     Julia said she wanted the hit man to do his job in such a way that wouldn't cause Jacob a lot of pain. She recommended the breaking of his neck. (This woman had obviously seen movies featuring trained killers adept at fatally snapping necks. In real life, breaking a person's neck is not an efficient or easy way to commit murder.) The undercover cop remarked that he usually killed people with guns and knives. Throughout the murder-for-hire conversation the officer repeatedly told Julia that he was going to put two bullets in Jacob's "noggin." To that she repeatedly responded, "Okay."

      The murder-for-hire mastermind informed the undercover officer that she did not want to know in advance when he planned to commit the murder. "It would be better if you surprised me," she said. "The more shocked I am when it happens, the better. I just want to make it as non-suspicious as possible."

     At one point during her two meetings with the sheriff's deputy Julia asked, "What happens if you are caught?" The officer assured Julia that as long as he or an associate kept receiving the hit money installments her name would be kept out of the investigation. (It's hard to image anyone stupid enough to believe that a captured hit man would not immediately roll over on the mastermind.)

     Toward the end of their second meeting on April 10, 2013 Julia Merfeld handed the undercover officer $100 in upfront money to show that she was serious about having her husband murdered. She also gave the officer a floor-plan to the apartment, a photograph of  her husband and written directions to the apartment complex where she hoped the hit man would kill Jacob as he walked out of the building. At this point the man Julia thought was a contract killer displayed his badge and placed her under arrest.

     A Muskegon County prosecutor charged Julia Charlene Merfeld with solicitation to commit murder. The local magistrate denied her bail.

     On June 27, 2013, faced with the certainty of a conviction based on the videotapes of her conversations with the undercover officer, Merfeld pleaded guilty to the solicitation charge. Three days later, as she stood before the sentencing judge, the defendant said, "I do not believe I'm above punishment. I know what I did was wrong and I take full responsibility. My tears are for remorse, not pity."

     Julia's husband, the man she tried to have murdered, also spoke at the sentencing hearing. Jacob Merfeld told Judge William C. Marietti that he forgave his wife because she was a "godly woman who did an ungodly thing." Jacob asked the judge not to send his wife to prison.

     Judge Marietti sentenced the murder-for-hire mastermind to six to twenty years behind bars, a light sentence given the circumstances of this case.

Freddie Lee Hall: Should Murderers With Low IQs Be Spared The Death Penalty?

     Throw a ball in any maximum security prison and it will bounce off a lot of stupid men. If these vicious rapists, thugs and murderers were smart, most of them wouldn't be behind bars. Moreover, it's not stupidity that makes a person violent. Most stupid people obey the law and wouldn't hurt a fly. So, just because a cold-blooded sadistic killer has a low IQ is no reason to cut him a break when it comes time for the death penalty. Take Freddie Lee Hall.

     In February 1978 33-year-old Freddie Lee Hall was out on parole in connection with a recent conviction for assault with intent to rape. Given his long history of violent crime it was hard to believe he wasn't in prison. Hall and one of his criminal associates, on February 21, 1978, were in Leesburg, Florida looking for a car to steal for use in an armed robbery.

     That afternoon Hall and his accomplice spotted 21-year-old Karol Hurst coming out of the Pantry Pride Grocery Store. She was seven months pregnant. As Hurst walked toward her car the men accosted her and forced the terrified victim into Hall's vehicle.

     Hall drove off with the abducted woman in his car. The accomplice followed in the victim's vehicle. Hall drove Karol Hurst to a wooded area where the two thugs raped and beat the victim savagely before, execution style, they shot her to death. To hide the body Freddie Hall dragged the pregnant corpse deeper into the woods.

     That night, in the murdered woman's car, Mr. Hall and his friend drove to the convenience store in Hernando County they planned to hold up. As they sat in the parking lot waiting for the right moment to strike, a suspicious clerk inside the store called the sheriff's station. The sheriff's office happened to be across the street from where Hall and his accomplice were casing out the robbery.

     Deputy Lonnie Coburn pulled into the parking lot and confronted the suspicious men. After getting the drop on the deputy, Hall shot the officer to death with the deputy's service revolver.

     A jury found Freddie Lee Hall guilty of two counts of first-degree murder on June 23, 1978. Jurors, by an eight to four vote, recommended the death penalty. The judge, four days later, sentenced Hall to death row.

     At Hall's sentencing hearing his lawyers argued that their client was too stupid to execute. Hall had been classified by public school officials in the 1960s as "mentally retarded." Ten years before his death sentence Freddie Hall had scored as low as 60 and as high as 80 on IQ tests. According to the American Psychiatric Association's Manual of Mental Disorders, an IQ of 70, plus or minus five points, represents the upper range of intellectual disability.

     Over the years Hall's anti-capital punishment attorneys arranged to have him examined by a battery of psychiatrists and other medical practitioners who declared the death row inmate mentally disabled.

     In 2002 the United States Supreme Court barred states from executing "mentally disabled" prisoners. The high court left the determination of who is so afflicted to the states. In Florida, as measured by an IQ test, the threshold for concluding that an inmate is mentally disabled is a score below 70. 

     On March 3, 2014 appellate attorneys appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Freddie Lee Hall. The death house lawyers, in challenging Florida's mental threshold for execution, argued that IQ tests alone were insufficient in establishing mental disability.

     Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out the brutality of Hall's crime and noted that it had taken several steps for Hall to abduct then kill the pregnant woman. The killing of the police officer was certainly premeditated. Didn't the crime itself reflect sufficient mental capacity?

     On May 27, 2014, in a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that defendants whose IQ scores are near 70 should not be executed. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy noted that states should not "view a single factor as dispositive in determining intellectual disability." As a result of this high court decision Freddie Lee Hall avoided execution. 
 
     If a criminal is smart enough to read, get a driver's license, plan a robbery and make an effort not to get caught, he should be smart enough to execute. People who are murdered by stupid people are just as dead as those who are murdered with people with IQs higher than Freddie Lee Hall's. 

The Steven Capobianco Murder Case

     On Sunday night February 9, 2014, 27-year-old Carly Scott, a resident of Makawao, a town on the Hawaiian island of Maui, received a call from Steven Capobianco. Carly Scott's 24-year-old ex-boyfriend and father of her unborn child said his truck was stuck in a ditch off the Hana Highway near mile marker 30 in the Keanae area.

     Carly left her house that night with her pit bull mix Nala in her 1997 Silver Toyota 4Runner. On Monday morning when Carly Scott didn't show up for work her mother reported her missing to the Maui police. That day friends and family of the missing 5-foot-10, 160 pound woman with shoulder-length red hair, drove up and down the Hana Highway looking for her. They were concerned she might have driven off a cliff.

     That morning, February 10, 2014, one of Carly's sisters, Kimberly Scott, spoke to Steven Capobianco who said that after Carly had pulled him out of the ditch the two of them proceeded on the highway with her following behind his truck. At some point he didn't see her headlights anymore.

     At six in the evening of Wednesday, February 12, 2014 Carly's friends came across the missing woman's SUV in Haiku, Maui. The vehicle, completely gutted by fire, had been rolled over onto its side. The burned-out Toyota was lying in a pineapple field off Peahi Road that led to a popular surfing spot known as "Jaws." Carly Scott was not in the vehicle. (Her dog Nala had turned up two days earlier in Nahiku.)

     The day after her friends found Carly's torched 4Runner in the pineapple field, Mileka Lincoln, a reporter with Hawaii News, interviewed Steven Capobianco. The ex-boyfriend confirmed that on Sunday, the night Carly went missing, she helped him get his truck out of the ditch. Later the two of them headed toward Haiku 25 miles up the road. She followed behind and when he reached Twin Falls he looked in his rearview mirror and didn't see her headlights. Capobianco drove home and assumed that Carly had made it back safety to her house.

     "I sent her a text that said, 'Thank you,' but I figured she was working. That's why she didn't get back to me right away." [Apparently Carly had a late night job.]

     According to Steven Capobianco, "It wasn't until the cops showed up at my house at 5:30 in the morning the next day [Monday February 10] that I realized something was wrong." He told the reporter that Maui police questioned him at the police station where he took a polygraph exam. When he asked how he had done on the lie test a detective informed him that according to the instrument he had not told the truth.

     To the reporter Mr. Capobianco insisted that he "absolutely" had not hurt his ex-girlfriend. "I mean," he said, "it's understandable that I'm probably the prime suspect, so they're [the police] not going to tell me details (of the case)." 

     The missing woman's ex-boyfriend said they broke up several years ago but had remained friends. He said that they "occasionally hooked-up."

     "Were you excited about being a dad?" asked the reporter.

     "Sort of. It was unexpected. She didn't tell me right away, but it was growing on me." At one point Capobianco indicated that he didn't know for sure if he was the father of Carley Scott's unborn child.

     On Thursday night, February 13, 2014, 16-year-old Phaedra Wais, the missing woman's half-sister found a skirt, shirt and bloodstained bra in a remote area off the Hana Highway. When she reported the find to the police an officer told her not to disturb the evidence and wait for a detective. The girl ignored this advice and drove the garments to the police station in Kahuiui. Later, police officers found a jawbone, fingertips and hair follicles near this site.

     In an unrelated matter, Maui police, in April 2014, arrested Steven Capobianco on the charge of first-degree burglary. The judge set his bail at $10,000. He stood accused of breaking into a Haiku woman's apartment in September 2013 and stealing two computers and her jewelry. Police recovered the stolen property in a search of the suspect's house.

     The garments found by Phaedra Wais belonged to her missing half-sister. A forensic scientist ended hope that Scott was alive by identifying the jawbone, fingertips and hair as being hers. This meant the missing person case had turned into a homicide investigation.

     On July 18, 2014 a grand jury sitting in Maui indicted Steven Capobianco of murder and arson. According to the language of the true bill the suspect had "intentionally or knowingly caused Carly Scott's death in an especially heinous, atrocious or cruel manner that manifested exceptional depravity."

      Steven Capobianco pleaded not guilty to the murder and arson charges.

     On December 28, 2016 a jury in Maui, in the entirely circumstantial case, found Steven Capobianco guilty of second-degree murder and arson. 

     On March 24, 2017 the judge sentenced Steven Capobianco to 40 years for second-degree murder and 10 years for arson. The sentences were to run consecutively that meant the 27-year-old could serve up to 50 years in prison.

An Amish Nightmare: The Shaken Baby Misdiagnosis

     On December 23, 1999 Liz Glick, the 4-month-old daughter of Samuel and Liz Glick, Amish dairy farmers in Dornsife, Pennsylvania, died in the hospital two days after her parents found her unconscious in her crib. The baby was ill with a fever and had been vomiting. At the Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, pediatricians experienced in treating Amish babies determined that the infant had died of vitamin K deficiency, a genetic and sometimes dietary condition associated with babies born at home and breastfed who were not given the vitamin through precautionary shots or formula. The symptoms of vitamin K deficiency include bleeding in the brain and eyes as well as the presence of bruises caused by normal handling and movement.

     Dr. Michael Kenny, a pathologist at Geisinger, performed the autopsy and, as Kate Rush later reported in "Genomics in Amish Country," concluded the baby died of a "closed-head injury" (as opposed to a "penetrating head injury" caused by a bullet, stabbing instrument or a blunt object.) Since Dr. Kenny was not the medical examiner and it was not his job to make an official manner of death ruling, that decision fell to the county coroner, an elected official without a medical degree. Instead of conferring with pediatricians familiar with Amish patients, the coroner took the unusual step of convening an inquest, a jury-enpannelled hearing to determine if the death was suspicious enough to warrant a full-scale criminal investigation. (The coroner's inquest, as a first step in the criminal justice process, while still available in most states is an antiquated way of determining manner of death.)

     Dr. Kenny's "closed-head injury" finding, combined with the bruises and the brain and eye bleeding led the coroner's jury to rule that Liz Glick may have been the victim of a shaken baby syndrome (SBS) homicide.

     The Glick case became national news when a child protection agency speculated that the other seven Glick children in the wake of the coroner's jury decision were in danger. For their own protection the children were placed in foster homes until the Pennsylvania State Police and perhaps a jury at a murder trial determined if the parents had committed criminal homicide. The Glick children were split up and sent to non-Amish (English) foster parents, an action that stunned and terrified the residents of this traditional central Pennsylvania community.

     The plight of the Glick family caught the attention of Dr. Holmes Morton, a Harvard trained pediatrician who in the 1980's treated Amish patients at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia. Dr. Morton moved to Strasburg, Pennsylvania, where in 1989, he founded a nonprofit clinic in the heart of Amish country called the Clinic for Special Children specializing in the treatment and study of illnesses and disorders affecting the Amish. Supported by donations and fund-raising events the clinic incorporated a state-of-the-art laboratory for the diagnosis and study of biochemical genetic disorders. Dr. Morton should have been one of the first experts consulted by the authorities in the Glick case. He was well-known, had expertise pertinent to the case and was local. No one, however, sought his opinion on the cause of the Glick baby's death.

     Without being asked, Dr. Morton conducted his own inquiry into the Glick baby's medical history. A few days later he announced that the infant had been born with a genetic liver condition that rendered her body incapable of breaking down vitamin K. The symptoms of vitamin K deficiency--the bleeding in the brain and eyes, and the severe bruising--could easily be mistaken for signs of SBS. In Dr. Morton's opinion the Glick child had not been killed by shaking. There had been a terrible mistake; this baby's death had been of a natural cause.

     But criminal investigations are like freight trains--once they get rolling they are hard to stop. Even though Dr. Morton had thrown his body across the tracks the train kept coming. Weeks passed. Finally, in February 2000 the case went before a state medical advisory board of physicians. The doctors heard testimony from several pediatricians who agreed with Dr. Morton's diagnosis. The panel of physicians voted to recommend that the manner of death in the Glick case be changed to natural.

     The local coroner, in light of the physicians' recommendation, changed his cause of death ruling and shortly thereafter the child protection agency gave the Glick children back to their parents. A month later the district attorney announced that Samuel and Liz Glick were no longer the targets of a homicide investigation. One can only guess how far down the criminal justice track the prosecution train would have rolled had it not been for Dr. Morton's intervention. One or both of these parents could have been sent to prison. 

The Pastor Elder Ulysses Woodard Attempted Murder-Suicide

     In 2016, Pastor Elder Ulysses Woodard and his wife Alisha started the True Word of Deliverance Church of God in Prichard, Alabama. In early February 2020 the couple, experiencing serious marital problems, separated. The estrangement from his wife caused Pastor Woodard, a man who had for years suffered from mental illness, considerable distress. The 44-year-old told friends that he was lost without his wife.

     On the night of February 21, 2020,  Alisha Woodard was the featured speaker at the Women of God Through Promise Conference at the True Cornerstone Church in Mobile, Alabama. The event was hosted by Pastor Derek Scott Gandy. 

     Shortly after eleven o'clock that night, at the conclusion of Alisha Woodard's sermon, her estranged husband showed up at the True Cornerstone Church and approached Pastor Gandy. "Pastor," he asked, "can I talk to my wife please?"

     Soon after the Woodards met in the parking lot outside the church they began arguing. With church parishioners looking on Elder Woodard grabbed his wife's arm and pulled her screaming to his car. From the vehicle Woodward retrieved a handgun and shot his wife in the chest. After wounding his wife he climbed into his vehicle and drove off, leaving her bleeding on the church parking lot. 

     Police officers arrived at the scene at 11:23 as paramedics attended Alisha Woodard. The medical responders rushed the wounded woman to a nearby hospital where she was treated for a non-life threatening wound.

     Around midnight police officers spotted Pastor Woodard in his car. The vehicle pursuit that followed led back to the True Cornerstone Church's parking lot. When officers approached the pastor's car he put the handgun to his head and pulled the trigger. Upon killing himself his car lurched forward and crashed into the church.

     A few days after the attempted murder-suicide, Pastor Woodard's sister told a reporter that her brother suffered from mental illness and reached out to his Christian friends for help. According to her the church, having failed to help her brother, was responsible for his death. He was she said, a "true mighty man of god."

The College Student From Hell

     In 2009 Megan Thode, a graduate student at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, looked forward to earning her master's degree in counseling and human services. To acquire the degree which she would need to qualify for a state counseling license Thode had to earn at least a B grade in her fieldwork class taught by Professor Amanda Eckhardt. Professor Eckhardt, however, upset the applecart when she issued Thode a C-plus. That's when all hell broke out at Lehigh University. 

     While colleges and universities have established procedures for student grade appeals, unless a disgruntled student can prove that the professor made an error in calculating the grade, the student doesn't have a chance. Some students, notwithstanding these policies, get their grades changed by becoming such pains-in-the-neck they wear their professors down. In our sob-story culture everyone has a gut-wrenching tale of woe. Kids who brown-nosed their way through high school are the best at this. Megan Thode and her father, a Lehigh professor, met with Professor Eckhardt who explained that the C-plus was based on the fact Thode's score for the class participation phase of the course was a zero out of a possible twenty-five. Ouch. The goose-egg bumped her down a full letter grade. (In the old days, parents of college kids didn't get involved in their academic affairs. Back then, college-aged people were supposed to be entering adulthood.)

     When Professor Eckhardt said she would not change Thode's fieldwork grade the frustrated student filed an internal grievance against her. Thode not only demanded that her grade be changed to a B, she expected the professor to apologize to her in writing for the C-plus, and to compensate her for the adverse financial consequences of being an unlicensed counselor. Thode did not get her grade bumped up, there was no apology and no compensation. Having exhausted her in-house administrative remedies the disgruntled student got herself a lawyer. 

     Through her attorney, Richard J. Orloski, Megan Thode filed a $1.3 million lawsuit against Lehigh University and Professor Eckhardt in which the plaintiff alleged breach of contract and sexual discrimination. (Exactly what contract the school and professor violated was unclear.) As to the sexual discrimination charge, Thode claimed that she had been punished by her professor because she, Thode, was a strong supporter of gay and lesbian rights. (It would be almost impossible to find a college professor anywhere who didn't strongly support gay and lesbian rights. If Thode had supported free speech and gun rights the lawyer may have had a discrimination case.)

     Thode's suit came to trial in February 2013 before Northhampton County Judge Emil Giordano. The plaintiff's attorney, in addressing the bench, said that as a result of the defendant professor's low grade his client had "literally lost a career." 

     Neil Hamburg, the attorney representing Professor Eckhardt and Lehigh University, in making the case that this lawsuit was absurd, said, "I think if your honor changed the grade you'd be the first court in the history of jurisprudence to change an academic grade"

     Judge Giordano indicated his agreement with the defendant's attorney when he said, "I've practiced law for longer than I'd like to admit and I've never seen anything like this."

     Attorney Hamburg, in defending Professor Eckhardt's evaluation of the plaintiff's academic performance, acknowledged that on paper Thode had been an excellent student. But regarding her classroom participation, Hamburg said that the student "showed unprofessional behavior that included swearing in class, and, on one occasion, having an outburst in which she began crying. She has to get through the program," the defense attorney said. "She has to meet the academic standards."

     Since there is nothing in the professor-student relationship that guarantees the student a good grade, or even a passing grade, there was no breach of contract in this case. And without solid proof of the defendant's sexual discrimination based on a dislike of people who supported gay and lesbian rights, the suit failed on that rationale as well.

     If the plaintiff prevailed in her case it would create an employment boom in the legal profession, at least until college grades became a thing of the past. In time, students would be able to acquire degrees without any proof they had learned anything. Eventually, there would be no need for classrooms or campuses. (We are approaching that now.) This would lower the cost of a college education and career fast-food servers would all have Ph.Ds. Students could simply buy diplomas online and colleges professors across the nation would lose their ivory tower jobs and end up flipping burgers with everyone else.

     On February 14, 2013 Judge Giordano ruled in favor of Professor Eckhardt and Lehigh University. He wrote: "Plaintiff has failed to establish that the university based the awarded grade of a C-plus on anything other than purely academic reasons. With this decision Judge Giordano dealt a blow to the legal profession, but saved higher education. 

The Oleg Sokolov Murder Case

     On the night of November 7, 2019, Oleg Valeryevich Sokolov, the decorated Napoleonic era historian, author and professor at Saint Petersburg State University in Saint Petersburg, Russian, physically assaulted his girlfriend, 24-year-old Anastasia Veshchenko. She had been a student of his, and upon graduation moved into his apartment. That night, after being beaten, Veshchenko called her brother and informed him of the assault. She said Professor Sokolov attacked her because she attended a birthday party with a friend.

     That night, not long after notifying her brother of the assault, Anastasia Veshchenko called her brother back and told him that the dispute had been resolved and that all was well.

     During the early morning hours of November 8, 2019 the 63-year-old professor, in his flat, killed Anastasia Veshchenko by shooting her with a sawed-off shotgun. Following the murder he dismembered his victim in the bathtub, placed her body parts in garbage bags and stored them in his spare bedroom. 

     On November 9, 2019, with his dead girlfriend's mutilated body still in his apartment, Professor Sokolov hosted a party.

     On the morning after the party the intoxicated killer walked along the Moika River not far from his flat. He was recorded on a CCTV camera throwing bags into the water. At one point he stumbled and fell into the drink. People who witnessed his fall saved him by pulling him out of the water. Someone called the police.

     When officers searched Professor Sokolov's backpack they discovered a bag containing a pair of female arms. At that point Sokolov informed the police he murdered his girlfriend. He led the officers back to his apartment where they found what remained of Anastasia Veshchenko's body. They also seized the shotgun, several firearms and the saw the professor used to dismember his girlfriend.

     While at the murder scene with the police officers, the professor, in an attempted suicide, stabbed himself with a dagger. Following treatment at a nearby hospital he was arrested on charges of murder and illegal possession of firearms. 

     Oleg Sokolov, not long after his arrest, pleaded guilty to the murder and gun charges. 

     On June 9, 2020, following delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Mr. Sokolov's sentencing hearing got underway in Saint Petersburg. At the proceeding a government witness informed the court that in 2008, in Moscow, Oleg Sokolov tied Ekaterina Ivanova to a chair and beat her. The assault took place because Ivanova threatened to leave him after learning that he was married. Nothing came of that assault.

     A psychiatrist for the state testified that at the time he murdered Anastasia Veshchenko Mr. Sokolov was sane and knew exactly what he was doing.

     The defendant, testifying from within a glass enclosure, explained that he killed his girlfriend in a fit of anger. He said he had thought she was the perfect woman, but instead she "turned into a monster."

     Judge Yulia Maximenko sentenced Oleg Sokolov to 12 years and six months, a term to be served at a "strict regime penal colony." No one, including the prosecutor and Anastasia Veshchenko's parents, objected to the lenient sentence.

Troy James Knapp: Utah's "Mountain Man Burglar"

     In 1986 when he was 28, Troy James Knapp went to prison in Kalamazoo, Michigan for burglary and related offenses. Knapp pleaded guilty to destroying property in 1994 while living in Salt Lake City. Two years later police in Seattle arrested him on the charge of stalking and harassment. In 2002, after serving two years in a California prison for burglary, Mr. Knapp left the state in violation of his parole.

     In 2007 the wilderness survivalist (he survived on other people's stuff) lived in the mountains of southern Utah. In the summers he stole food and gear from cabins in Iron, Kane and Garfield Counties, and moved from one campsite to the next. During the winter months he lived in the cabins he burglarized in the summer. The owners would return to their seasonal dwellings to find bullet holes in the walls and doors. Knapp also left notes with messages like: "Pack up and leave. Get off my mountain." (If everyone had packed up and left Knapp would have starved.)

     Between 2007 and 2013 prosecutors in Iron, Kane and Garfield Counties charged Troy Knapp with 13 felony burglary crimes and 5 misdemeanor offenses. Because of the remoteness of Knapp's break-ins and the fact he kept on the move he eluded capture for more than five years.

     In late February 2013 a man hunting with his son in Sanpete County crossed paths with Knapp about 125 miles southeast of Salt Lake City. Aware they had conversed with the Mountain Man Burglar, the father notified the authorities.

     A few days after speaking with the hunters 9,000 feet up on a mountain near Ferron Reservoir in the central part of the state, forty police officers and a law enforcement helicopter closed in on the fugitive as he trudged through three feet of snow. After firing fifteen rifle shots at the helicopter, Knapp surrendered to the small army of approaching lawmen.

     When taken into custody, Knapp possessed an assault rifle and a handgun. He was booked into the Sanpete County Jail without bond. An Assistant United States Attorney in Utah charged Knapp with several federal firearms offenses.

     In April 2014, pursuant to an arranged plea bargain, Knapp pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to the use of a firearm during a crime of violence. At his sentence hearing on June 9, 2014 federal court judge Ted Stewart handed down the mandatory minimum sentence of ten years in federal prison.

     Knapp's attorney, in addressing the court, said, "There's an admiration for somebody who chooses to live off the land, because he does it while the rest of us wouldn't. Even if he needs a little help from some cabin owners."

     Sanpete County prosecutor Brody Keisel had a different take on the case. He told reporters after the federal sentencing that Knapp was nothing more than a "common crook." 

The Cecilia Chang Murder-For-Hire Case

     In 1975 a 22-year-old student from Taiwan (an island 200 miles off the coast of mainland China) named Cecilia Chang enrolled in the Asian Studies Master's Degree program at St. John's University in Queens, New York. After Chang acquired the degree in 1977 the university hired her as an Asian Studies professor. Three years later university administrators promoted Chang to the position of Dean of the Institute For Asian Studies. Having exhibited the ability to raise money for the program from the Taiwanese and other Asian governments, her job as dean primarily involved fund-raising. She spent the next decade traveling the world, living high on donor contributions to the school and on her university expense account.

     In October 1986 Cecilia Chang's husband, Ruey Fung, filed for divorce and sought custody of the couples's toddler son. Four years later, in the midst of a contentious domestic struggle over money and child custody, Ruey Fung was shot outside a warehouse in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.

     Ruey Fung died from his wounds eleven days after the shooting. But before he passed away homicide detectives were able to question him at the hospital. Unable to speak, Mr. Fung wrote: "I know the man who shot me, but I do not know his name. Cecilia Chang was the person who paid the guy to shoot me." Ruey Fung claimed that his wife wanted him dead so she wouldn't have to split their estate which included a hosiery business. With his death she would also gain custody of their son.

     Because NYC homicide detectives were unable to identity the man who shot and killed Mr. Fung, the investigation died on the vine. Notwithstanding her husband's deathbed murder accusation and police suspicion that Cecilia Chang engaged the services of a hit man, her fund-raising career at St. John's University continued to flourish.

     In 2001, Cecilia Chang began spending an inordinate amount of time in Connecticut at the Foxwoods Casino where she lost tens of thousands of dollars playing high-stakes baccarat. Her wagering strategy of doubling her bet each time she lost compounded her casino losses.

     A grand jury sitting in Queens, New York in 2010 indicted Chang on 205 counts of fraud and embezzlement. She stood accused of stealing huge amounts of money from St. John's University. In addition to embezzling $1 million from the institution, she was accused of using her $350,000 a year expense account and donor money to finance skiing and surfing trips for her son, fund his law school tuition and even pay for his dog's veterinary bills.

     Dean Chang also faced charges of theft, fraud and corruption in federal court. In 2011, after being charged federally, the judge placed her under house arrest. In the fall of 2012 the federal case against Chang went to trial in Brooklyn, New York. When the Assistant United States Attorney rested the government's case it was clear to people following the trial that the defendant was guilty.

     On November 5, 2012, believing that she could convince the jury that she was innocent of all charges, Chang took the stand on her own behalf. It quickly became obvious that the jurors not only didn't like her, they didn't believe her testimony. At one point jurors actually laughed loudly at something she said. At this point in the trial Cecilia Chang realized that in all probability she would be spending the next twenty years in federal prison.

     On Tuesday, the day after her devastatingly bad afternoon on the stand, Chang, in her $1.7 million home in the Jamaica section of Queens, committed suicide. The 59-year-old was found hanging from a ladder that folded down from her attic. Chang had also slit her wrists. She left behind several suicide notes, written in Mandarin, in which, in true sociopathic fashion, she blamed St. John's University for her problems and her suicide.

     Cecilia Chang got accustomed to having all the money she needed to lavishly entertain herself, her son and all of her friends in high places. She felt entitled to use university and donor money to live extravagantly and to cover her gambling loses. The university had some responsibility for Chang's financial excesses. No university employee should be allowed a $350,000 a year expense account. It seemed that at St. John's University no one was watching the store while an employee lived high on other people's money.     

Breaking Into a House Can Be Fatal

     Eighty-year-old Thomas Greer lived in Bixby Knolls, a neighborhood in Long Beach, California. Mr. Greer came home at nine o'clock on the night of July 22, 2014 and found two burglars in his house. He shot and killed one of them who, prior to being shot, said, "Don't shoot me, I'm pregnant. I'm going to have a baby."The homeowner shot her anyway.

     At a press conference regarding the shootings, Long Beach Police Chief Jim McDonnell said the woman, 28-year-old Andrea Miller, showed no outward signs of being pregnant.

     Officers arrested Andrea Miller's accomplice, 26-year-old Gus Adams on charges of residential burglary and murder. Because Miller had been killed during the commission of a felony perpetrated by Mr. Adams, he was charged with criminal homicide under the felony-murder doctrine. The judge set Adams' bail at $1 million.

     Both Andria Miller and Gus Adams had criminal histories involving burglary. Investigators believed the couple broke into Mr. Greer's home three times before. When Mr. Greer returned home that night and encountered the intruders the suspects attacked him, hitting him with their fists and body slamming him to the floor, breaking his collar bone.

     While Gus Adams tried to pry open Mr. Greer's safe, the burglary and assault victim snuck into a room and grabbed his .22-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver. As Mr. Greer opened fire the burglars fled through the garage and into an alley. The homeowner chased after them firing his gun. One of his bullets hit Andrea Miller who died in the alley.

     On July 29, 2014 police officers arrested Gus Adam's 49-year-old mother, Ruby Adams on suspicion she had acted as a lookout in the burglary of the Greer home. The judge set her bail at $175,000.

     The authorities also announced that according to the medical examiner's office Andrea Miller was not pregnant.

     In January 2015 the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office decided not to prosecute Thomas Greer for killing Andrea Miller.

     Ruby Adams, in April 2016, pleaded no contest to residential burglary. The judge sentenced her to three years in prison.

     In August 2016 a jury acquitted Gus Adams of felony-murder but found him guilty of first-degree residential burglary and elder abuse. The judge sentenced him to 12 years behind bars.

The Great Milwaukee Stradivarius Heist

     At twenty after ten on the night of January 27, 2014, violinist Frank Almond, the concertmaster of the Milwaukee Orchestra, walked toward his car in the parking lot outside Wisconsin Lutheran College's auditorium where he had just performed a chamber concert. As the 49-year-old musician neared his car a man emerged out of the darkness and stunned him with a taser gun.  Mr. Almond and his violin fell to the ground. The robber picked up the 300-year-old Stradivarius and jumped into a minivan driven by a woman.

     Almond's Lipinski Strad was given to him on "permanent loan" in 2008 by an anonymous patron. As one of 650 of Antonio Stradivari's instruments still in existence, the stolen violin was valued at $5 million.

     Milwaukee detectives immediately began viewing surveillance camera footage in search of clues. FBI agents assigned to the bureau's art theft unit were dispatched to act as consultants in the case. Investigators notified authorities with Interpol in the event the thieves tried to sell the stolen violin in Europe. A $100,000 reward went up for any information leading to the recovery of the instrument.

     On Monday, February 3, 2014, Milwaukee detectives assigned to the high-profile case arrested two men and a woman. One of the men, 41-year-old Salah Salahadyn, pleaded guilty in 2000 to possessing a $25,000 sculpture that had been stolen from a Milwaukee art gallery in 1995. The judge sentenced him to five years in prison.

     The second man taken into custody, a 36-year-old suspect who went by the name Universal Knowledge Allah, had no criminal record. Both suspects were charged with robbery, an offense in Wisconsin that can bring up to 15 years in prison.

     Court Commissioner Katherine Kucharski set Salahadyn's bail at $10,000, an extremely low amount given the fact he had a lengthy criminal history that included bail jumping. The magistrate set Allah's bond at $500.

     Charges against the suspected female get-a-way driver were dropped. The authorities did not release this woman's name.

     On Wednesday, February 5, 2014, two days after the arrests, Milwaukee chief of police Edward A. Flynn announced that one of the suspects led detectives to the stolen Stradivarius. The violin was found in a suitcase in the attic of a house in Milwaukee. The stolen instrument had never left the city. (Perhaps the woman driver in the case was the one who cooperated with detectives in return for her dropped charges.)

     In July 2014, Universal Allah was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. The Milwaukee County judge, in November 2014, sentenced Salah Salahadyn to seven years behind bars.

The Tyler Deutsch Child Abuse Case

   Tyler Deutsch lived with his girlfriend and her six-week-old baby girl in a trailer house in Roy, Washington, a town of 800 outside of Tacoma. On Saturday, May 25, 2013, while the baby's 22-year-old mother was away from the trailer, Mr. Deutsch closed the baby into a freezer to stop her from crying then fell asleep. An hour later, as his girlfriend walked into the dwelling, the 25-year-old removed the baby. The infant, wearing only a diaper, had been exposed to a temperature of ten degrees.

     The mother of the abused child tried to call 911 but Tyler Deutsch, not wanting to get into trouble with the law, took the phone out of her hand. The frantic mother ran to a neighbor's place where she made the emergency call.

     Paramedics rushed the unresponsive baby to the Mary Bridge Children's Hospital were physicians managed to revive her. The infant, with blisters on her skin, had a body temperature of 84. Doctors also determined that the baby had a broken arm and leg as well as a head injury.

     Deputies with the Pierce County Sheriff's Office took Tyler Deutsch into custody. According to reports he told the officers that by deep-freezing the baby he was trying to help her. A local prosecutor charged him with attempted murder, assault of a child, criminal mistreatment and interfering with reporting domestic violence. The suspect was held in the Pierce County Jail without bond.

    In January 2014 Tyler Deutsch pleaded guilty to first-degree assault. The judge sentenced him to 16 years in prison. The good news was that the abused child recovered fully. The bad news: someday this man would get out of prison.

The Jason Smith Murder Case

     Dr. Melissa Ketunuti, a 35-year-old pediatrician was a second-year infectious disease fellow and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine in downtown Philadelphia. The Thailand native lived in a central city town house not far from the hospital. Except for her 6-year-old pit bull/lab mix she lived alone. Dr. Ketunuti resided at this address for three years and was in the process of rehabilitating the dwelling.

     On Monday, January 21, 2013, Dr. Ketunuti left her town house around nine in the morning to run some errands. She planned to return to her home at ten-fifty to meet with an exterminator with a pest-control company headquartered in Newtown, Pennsylvania. Dr. Ketunuti had mice problems. When the doctor's dog walker came to the house at twelve-thirty she smelled smoke and upon investigation discovered Dr. Ketuniti dead in her basement. The terrified woman called 911.

     Homicide detectives and crime scene technicians arrived at the town house to find a still smoldering badly burned corpse. The victim's face was so severely charred by the fire it was unrecognizable. The fully dressed woman was lying face-down and was hogtied with her wrists and ankles bound behind her back. The killer left a length of cordage around the victim's neck suggesting that before being set on fire she was strangled.

     Based on the dead woman's apparel and other points of identity, investigators assumed the murdered woman in the basement was Dr. Melissa Ketunuti. Detectives found no signs of forced entry or indications of a sexual assault. Because it didn't appear than anything had been taken from the premises, the killer had not been motivated by theft.

     As investigators began tracing the victim's activities that morning and gathering footage from neighborhood surveillance cameras, the city of Philadelphia posted a $20,000 reward for information leading to the identification and arrest of her murderer. The next day a local community group added $15,000 to the incentive.

     On Wednesday, January 23, 2013, homicide investigators were in Levittown, Pennsylvania, a sprawling suburban Bucks County community 25 miles northeast of Philadelphia. The officers were in town questioning a 37-year-old pest-control subcontractor named Jason Smith. Mr. Smith lived in a powder-blue two story house surrounded by a white picket fence still displaying Christmas decorations. The exterminator lived there with his girlfriend, their young daughter and the girlfriend's stepfather.

     Surveillance camera footage in Dr. Ketunuti's neighborhood showed Smith, who had been scheduled for a service call at the murder victim's house that morning, walking toward the doctor's town house at ten-fifty. (The house itself was off-camera.) The tall, thin exterminator wore a NorthFace jacket and work gloves and carried a satchel. Just before noon Jason Smith was video-recorded driving his silver Ford F-150 pickup out of the neighborhood. Before leaving he circled the block two times. While in Levittown police officers searched Smith's house, his trash can and his truck. Investigators took a computer out of the dwelling and from the Ford F-150 seized a jacket and a pair of work gloves.

     The next day at nine o'clock in the evening detectives returned to Levittown to arrest Jason Smith. They took him into custody as he, his girlfriend and their daughter watched "American Idol." Charged with first-degree murder, arson, abuse of corpse and risking a catastrophe (burning down the neighborhood), Smith was locked up and held without bail.  During the arrest the family's dog, a boxer named Tyson, charged the arresting officers and was shot dead.

     According to a statement released by a Philadelphia law enforcement spokesperson, Jason Smith and Dr. Ketunuti, while in the doctor's basement, got into some kind of argument. The suspect punched her to the floor, jumped on top of her and used a length of rope to strangle her to death. In an effort to destroy physical evidence that might link him to the body Mr. Smith set fire to the victim's clothing with his lighter. (The body contained no traces of an accelerant.)

     Jason Smith, except for a 2004 DUI conviction, had no criminal record. He told his interrogators he was addicted to prescription painkillers and that when arguing with the pest-control customer in her basement he "snapped." According to the suspect, when the doctor "belittled" him he flew into a murderous rage.

     A friend of Smith's in speaking to ABC News revealed that Smith as a child had a difficult time controlling his anger. The friend remembered that in his childhood Smith had problems with pyromania.

     In April 2013 at a preliminary hearing before Philadelphia Municipal Judge Teresa Carr Deni, homicide detective Edward Tolliver read Jason Smith's murder confession into the record. According to Detective Henry Glenn, the victim at the time of her violent death was wearing riding boots. Dr. Ketunuti's hands and feet had been tied behind her with a leather strap from horse gear. Smith, in his confession, told the detectives that he had bound the victim's ankles with a riding stirrup. He used a length of rope to strangle her.

     After murdering Dr. Ketunuti in her home Jason Smith drove to another pest extermination job in New Jersey.

     At the preliminary hearing Smith's attorneys, James A. Funt and Marc Bookman did not contest the murder charge but asked the judge to dismiss the arson count because their client did not intend to burn down the building.

     In May 2015 a jury sitting in Philadelphia found Jason Smith guilty of first-degree murder, arson, risking a catastrophe and abuse of corpse. The judge sentenced him to life in prison plus 17 to 34 years.  

     Jason Smith appealed his conviction and his sentence and lost both appeals.

The "Tiger King" Murder-For-Hire Case

      From February to June 2006 the animal rights group PETA conducted an investigation into the activities of a big cat breeder and private zoo owner named Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage. The 42-year-old owner of the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park, a ramshackle petting zoo in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, called himself "Joe Exotic." Maldonado-Passage, in addition to owning the zoo, supplied tiger cubs to the cruel petting zoo industry. 

     PETA activists tried to shut down Maldonado-Passage's operation for several years. The PETA investigation revealed the Wynnewood zoo's tigers were beaten, deprived of food and denied basic veterinary treatment. As a result the U.S. Department of Agriculture fined Maldonado-Passage $25,000 for violating the federal Animal Welfare Act. 

     In 2011 the Humane Society conducted an investigation of Maldonado-Passage's animal park. An undercover Humane Society investigator, after working at the private zoo for four months, reported that tigers were beaten and whipped during training. Moreover, visitors to the zoo were bitten and attacked by tiger cubs that were too old to be near people. Tiger cubs that were so young they hadn't opened their eyes were handled by park visitors, traumatizing the animals.

     The results of these investigations did not result in the shutting down of Maldonado-Passage's operation.

     Joseph Maldonado-Passage, in 2015, ran for the office of U.S. President as an Independent candidate. He had also run for Governor of Oklahoma, a race he also lost.

     In 2016, after the deaths of 23 tiger cubs at the Wynnewood Animal Park, PETA members rescued 39 abused tigers, two bears and two baboons from the zoo. The place was still not shut down.

     Carole Baskin, an animal rights activist and owner of Big Cat Rescue, a 69-acre animal sanctuary in Tampa, Florida tried to put Maldonado-Passage out of the big cat breeding and petting zoo business. She sued Maldonado-Passage for his unauthorized use of her Big Cat Rescue's trademark and in 2016 won a million-dollar civil judgment against him.

     As his debts mounted, Maldonado-Passage harassed Baskin with online videos in which he accused her of all sorts of criminal behavior. In order to escape his financial responsibilities Maldonado-Passage transferred ownership of the animal park to his mother. A federal judge ruled this transfer of ownership void, an attempt by Maldonado-Passage to defraud his creditors. 

     Enraged and desperate, Joseph Maldonado-Passage in November 2017 paid an unnamed man $3,000 to travel to Tampa, Florida and murder his nemesis, Carole Baskin. The murder-for-hire mastermind promised to pay the hit man an additional $7,000 when he finished the job. For some reason the would-be assassin failed to carry out his assignment.

     In December 2017 Maldonado-Passage reached out to another unnamed man and asked him to murder the animal rights activist. This person went straight to the FBI. Later that month Maldonado-Passage and an undercover FBI agent met. At one point during the recorded conversation Maldonado-Passage said, "Just follow her into a small parking lot and just cap her and drive off." Maldonado-Passage offered to pay the FBI agent $10,000 for the hit.

     On September 5, 2018 Timmothy J. Downing, the United States Attorney for the Western District of Oklahoma acquired an indictment against Joseph Maldonado-Passage charging him with two counts of murder-for-hire, several counts of violating the Endangered Species Act and multiple counts of crimes against wildlife.

     FBI agents, two days after the indictment arrested Maldonado-Passage in Gulf Breeze, Florida. He was booked into the Santa Rosa County jail to await extradition back to Oklahoma. 

     The Maldonado-Passage murder-for-hire trial got underway on March 25, 2019. After six days of testimony in which the defendant took the stand and claimed that he hadn't been serious when he solicited Carole Baskin's murder, the jury found him guilty as charged. 

     Several months after the conviction the federal district judge sentenced the 56-year-old Maldonado-Passage to 22 years in prison. Attorneys for Maldonado-Passage said they would appeal.

     Following Maldonado-Passage's sentencing, Carole Baskin, on her Big Cat Rescue website, posted this: "Because of his constant threats to kill me, I have found myself seeing every bystander as a potential threat. My daughter, my husband, my mother, my staff and volunteers have all been in peril because of his obsession with seeing me dead."

     In March 2020 Maldonado-Passage, while serving his time at a federal prison in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, filed a $94 million civil suit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a federal agent and a former business partner he blamed for his arrest and conviction.

     Netflix, in March 2020 aired "Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness," a several part documentary that made Maldonado-Passage a pop culture celebrity. The following month the animal abuser and murder-for-hire mastermind was featured on the cover of People Magazine.

     In June 2020 a federal district judge granted Carole Baskin and her animal rescue group control of Maldonado-Passage's Oklahoma zoo. Homes were found for all of the abused animals.

Serial Killer Samuel Little

     In 2012, FBI agents arrested 72-year-old Samuel Little at a Kentucky homeless shelter on narcotic charges that had been filed in Los Angeles. DNA samples taken from Little in Los Angeles linked him to three unsolved murders committed in the city from 1987 to 1989. The three female victims had been beaten and strangled, their bodies dumped in an alley, a dumpster and a garage. Convicted of these murders in 2014, Mr. Little, with a history of crime going back to 1956, was sentenced to three consecutive life terms with no possibility of parole.

     Following Samuel Little's DNA matches in Los Angeles, authorities in LA asked the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP) to work up a full criminal profile of him. This background inquiry linked Little to several more murders of women.

     In early 2018 Samuel Little revealed to FBI interrogators that between 1970 and 2005 he murdered 93 women. He confessed to killing these victims in California, Kentucky, Florida and Ohio. These women were marginalized vulnerable prostitutes addicted to drugs. He said his M.O. involved knocking out his victims then strangling them. He dumped their bodies in alleys and other hidden places.

     Because this serial killer's victims were not shot, stabbed or bludgeoned to death, many of their deaths went into the books as drug overdoses, accidents or natural causes. Some of the bodies remained unidentified and most of these deaths did not generate criminal investigations.

     The Samuel Little case illustrates that serial killers, due to who they kill, how they kill and where they kill, often escape detection. While DNA science has helped connect multiple homicides to a single killer, without confessions these cases often remain unsolved. 

     On December 30, 2020 the 80-year-old serial killer died in a California hospital of heart failure.

The Justin Schneider Sexual Assault Case

     In 2017, 34-year-old Justin Schneider, a husband and father, worked as an Air Traffic Controller at the Ted Stevens International Airport in Anchorage, Alaska. In August 2017 at an Anchorage service station, he asked a 25-year-old woman he didn't know if he could give her a lift. She said yes and climbed into his vehicle.

     Instead of driving the woman to her destination, Justin Schneider took her to a remote area where he grabbed her, put his hands around her throat and threatened to kill her if she screamed. The victim passed out and when she awoke, Justin Schneider zipped up his trousers after he had masturbated on her. He gave her tissue to clean off his semen. He told her that he hadn't really intended to kill her, that it was just a threat to keep her quiet. She grabbed her belongings and alighted from the vehicle. As he drove off she had the presence of mind to note his license plate number.

     From the side of the road the victim used her cell phone to call 911 in which she provided the attacker's license plate registration. After being examined at a local hospital the victim picked Justin Schneider out of a police lineup.

     Following his arrest a grand jury sitting in Anchorage indicted Mr. Schneider on counts of kidnapping and felony assault, crimes that together carried a prison sentence of up to 99 years. Shortly thereafter the prosecutor in charge of the case dropped the kidnapping charges because the woman had gotten into Schneider's vehicle willingly. (In Pennsylvania and most other states, simply restraining a person in a vehicle against his or her will constitutes kidnapping.)

     Following the indictment Justin Schneider lost his air traffic control job.

     On September 22, 2018 Assistant District Attorney Andrew Grannik allowed Mr. Schneider to plead guilty to one count of second-degree felony assault. Judge Michael Corey sentenced him to two years in prison then suspended the prison time by giving him credit for a year in jail. The judge sentenced this violent sex offender to a year of house arrest. Moreover, Mr. Schneider was not required to register as a sex offender.

     Justin Schneider did not have to register as a sex offender because under Alaska law "physical contact with bodily fluid such as semen" did not qualify as a sex crime.

     It's not surprising that the disposition of this case caused a public uproar. In defending the state's handling of this case a spokesperson with the Alaska Department of Law announced that the plea deal had been based on an expert's opinion that Mr. Schneider would not re-offend. This absurd rationale did not attenuate the criticism of the prosecutor or the judge.

     In responding to the public outrage over the Justin Schneider case, Alaska's governor Bill Walker said he planned to propose legislation that would make "coming in contact with semen" a sex offense that carried a sentence of two to twelve years in prison plus registry as a sex offender. Even those who believed the word of a politician were still angry about how the authorities had handled this case.

     Justin Schneider said the experience had made him a better person. But what about his victim? How did his "experience" affect her? No one asked because no one in Alaska's criminal justice system seemed to care.

The Case of the Sleeping Judge

     On December 29, 2013, 21-year-old Daquantrius Johnson and two of his friends, Keith Hickles and Quanique Thomas-Hammen, pulled into the drive-through lane at a Taco Bell in Wichita, Kansas. As they waited to put in their orders they witnessed the pickup truck ahead of them suddenly lurch forward and crash into the fast-food speaker.

     The pickup truck's driver, 43-year-old Danielle Zimmerman, lost consciousness from a ruptured brain aneurism. Daquantrius Johnson and his passengers approached the unconscious woman's vehicle. They had no intention of rendering aid. Instead, they saw an opportunity for theft. While Hickles and Thomas-Hammen rummaged through Zimmerman's purse and grabbed her wallet, 

daquantrius Johnson pulled her wedding ring off her finger.

     The next day Danielle Zimmerman died at a nearby hospital.

     Daquantrius Johnson and his friends, as they stripped the unconscious woman of her valuables, were recorded on a Taco Bell surveillance camera.

     Not long after Johnson, Hickles and Thomas-Hammen picked their victim clean, they were taken into custody. About a year later Hickles and Thomas-Hammen pleaded guilty to theft and were sentenced to nine and nineteen months respectively.

     In March 2015 Daquantrius Johnson went on trial for aggravated robbery. Following a short deliberation the jury found him guilty as charged. Sedgwick County Judge Christopher Magana sentenced Johnson, who at the time was on probation for burglary, to eleven years in prison.

     In 2016, while serving time for the Taco Bell depravity, Daquantrius Johnson was in a Sedgwick Country courtroom again, this time as a defendant in an unrelated firearms case. On the first day of the proceeding trial judge Benjamin Burgess fell asleep on the bench.

     While everyone in court witnessed the judge's nap the trial went forward and Daquantrius Johnson was found guilty. Judge Burgess sentenced him to eight months in prison, time to be served after he completed his Taco Bell sentence.

     Attorneys representing Daquantrius Johnson in the firearms case appealed his conviction to the Kansas Court of Appeals on grounds that following his nap Judge Burgess should have declared a mistrial.

     In 2017 the three-judge appellate panel in a 2-1 decision denied Mr. Johnson a new trial.

     Johnson's lawyers contested the state appeals court ruling before the Kansas Supreme Court. In November 2019 the state's highest court ruled that while Judge Burgess' courtroom snooze constituted "regrettable misconduct," it did not justify grounds for a new trial. Daquantrius Johnson's firearms conviction would therefore stand.

     While legal scholars argued over the supreme court's decision, very few commentators expressed sympathy for the man who had ripped a wedding ring off a dying woman's finger. There are some crimes that cannot be forgiven, and this was one of them.

The Levi Chavez Murder Case

     Levi Chavez, a 26-year-old officer with the Albuquerque, New Mexico Police Department, at nine o'clock on the night of October 21, 2007 called 911 to report that his wife committed suicide with his department-issued Glock 9 pistol. Responding officers with the APD found 26-year-old Tera Chavez in the master bedroom with a massive exit bullet wound at the base of her skull. Next to her body officers saw the 9 mm Glock that still had a round in its chamber. Nearby lay the fatal bullet's spent shell casing and, detached from the handgun, its clip. It appeared that the barrel of the gun had been inserted into the dead woman's mouth.

     Officer Chavez informed his fellow officers that he and his wife had been having marital problems for years and that on countless occasions the mother of two, who worked at a beauty salon as a hairdresser, had threatened to kill herself.

     Because it was apparent that Tera Chavez had been dead for several hours the crime scene officers wanted to know the circumstances under which Mr. Chavez discovered his wife's corpse. In response to that question he said he last saw his wife on Friday morning, October 19 before going on duty at the APD. That night he decided to stay over at his girlfriend Deborah Romero's house. Romero was also a member of the Albuquerque Police Department.

     According to Levi Chavez, on Saturday, October 20, 2007 his wife Tera called him 176 times. He ignored her calls by turning off his cellphone. Officer Chavez said he spent Saturday night with Romero, and the next day, when Tera didn't call him he began to worry. Later that Sunday evening Levi said his mother told him that Tera had not shown up for work that day at the beauty salon. At that point he rushed home to find that his wife had committed suicide.

     In 2007 the Albuquerque Police Department, due to a series of questionable police-involved shootings and allegations of institutional corruption and departmental cover-ups of officer wrongdoing, was under investigation by the FBI. Shortly after Tera Chavez's sudden and violent death critics of the APD accused the department of helping officer Chavez cover up the murder of his wife by destroying crime scene evidence. Because the police department had such a bad reputation, and a police officer's wife had died under suspicious circumstances, Detective Aaron Jones of the Valencia County Sheriff's Office took charge of the homicide investigation.

     Detective Jones, who suspected that Levi Chavez had murdered his wife eighteen to twenty hours before he called 911, had to back off when Dr. Patricia McFeeley, the state medical examiner ruled Tera's manner of death a suicide. In November 2007 Detective Jones showed Dr. McFeeley crime scene photographs that caused her to change Tera Chavez's manner of death to "undetermined." Despite Jones' efforts the homicide investigation eventually died on the vine.

     In April 2011, three and a half years after Tera Chavez's death, following a cold-case murder investigation, Dr. McFeeley changed the manner of death in the case to "criminal homicide." Assistant Sandoval County District Attorney Bryan McKay charged Levi Chavez, who was no longer on the police force, with first-degree murder in his wife's death.

     The Chavez murder trial got underway on June 3, 2013 before Sandoval District Court Judge George Eichwald. In his opening remarks to the jury, lead prosecutor McKay presented the state's theory that the defendant had murdered his wife sometime between late Saturday night, October 20, 2007 and the early morning hours of Sunday, October 21. After shooting his wife in the mouth with the Glock 9 pistol the defendant staged a suicide by placing the gun, the shell casing and the clip next to her body.

     Levi Chavez's trial attorney, David Sema, a lawyer well known in New Mexico for representing several high-profile criminal defendants, told the jurors that his client's wife had committed suicide over her husband's extramarital affairs.

     Detective Aaron Jones took the stand for the prosecution. According to the Valencia County homicide detective the Glock magazine found next to the victim's body was "unseated." By that the witness meant it wasn't locked into the butt of the gun. This suggested that after the weapon had been discharged the shooter had pressed a button to release the clip.

     DNA expert Alanna Williams, who in 2007 worked for the New Mexico Crime Laboratory but was now employed by the APD, testified that she had tested the Glock and a pair of sweatpants found in the Chavez home washing machine for DNA. Williams said she found blood on the muzzle of the pistol that contained the victim's DNA. On the handgun's grip the forensic scientist found a mixture of Tera's and the defendant's DNA. The sweatpants, believed to have been worn by the defendant, contained DNA from the victim.

     Dr. Patricia McFeeley, now the former medical examiner, testified that the death scene Glock had been inserted at least one inch into Tera Chavez's mouth. The fatal bullet vaporized the victim's brainstem. The forensic pathologist explained that the victim, after being shot, couldn't have pressed the button that released the magazine from the butt of the pistol.

     One of the defendant's mistresses, APD officer Regina Sanchez took the stand. In September 2006 she and Levi began an intimate relationship. A month later, Sanchez, believing that Chavez was in the process of divorcing his wife, allowed him to move in with her. After the witness received an angry call from Tera Chavez he moved out.

     Rose Slama, another of the defendant's girlfriends, testified that he told her that when Tera shot herself he was in the house taking a shower.

     After the prosecution rested its case on June 26, 2013, defense attorney David Sema put Dr. Alan Berman, a suicide expert who lived in Washington, D. C., on the stand. Based on Tera Chavez's diary entries, text messages, medical history and two notes in her handwriting found at the death scene, Dr. Berman said he believed she suffered from low self-esteem and self-hate due to her emotionally abusive relationship with her philandering husband. She had been, in the witness' opinion, depressed as well. According to the psychologist these factors combined to create what he called "acute risk factors for suicide."

     Dr. Berman read several text messages Tera sent to her husband between August and October 2006. In one such message she wrote: "I am a loser. I've failed at everything, especially you. I want to die." In another text she had said, "I'm tired of being your dumb wife. You treat me like shit...please respect me...I have a job."

     Prosecutor McKay, on cross-examination asked the "suicideologist" to read Tera Chavez's last diary entry, dated July 12, 2007, which read: "...so goodbye to the person I used to be. Welcome a new day. Happiness!" Dr. Berman testified that he did not believe this statement was inconsistent with a suicidal mindset.

     On July 1, 2013 a crime scene reconstruction expert took the stand for the defense. In the course of demonstrating to the jury how Tera Chavez after shooting herself in the mouth with the Glock had pressed the button that released the magazine, failed to eject the magazine pursuant to his theory of what happened. In other words the demonstration failed.

     Defense attorney Sema, on July 9, 2013, presented his star witness. Dr. Charles V. Wetli, the former medical examiner of Suffolk County, New York who had testified for the defense in dozens of high-profile murder cases. According to the forensic pathologist, had the defendant shoved the pistol into his wife's mouth he would have broken some of her teeth. According to Dr. Wetli, Tera Chavez, in killing herself, had turned the gun upside down and used her thumb to pull the trigger.

     Prosecutor McKay's associate, Assistant District Attorney Anne Keener, on cross-examination showed Dr. Wetli a death scene photograph that appeared to show that one of Tera's lower teeth had been chipped. When asked if one of the dead woman's teeth had been broken, the forensic pathologist said, "It's possible." Prosecutor Keener asked Dr. Wetli if he visited the death scene or personally examined Tera Chavez's corpse. He said he had not.

     The second major defense witness, the defendant himself, took the stand on July 11, 2013. In describing his discovery of his dead wife on the night of October 21, 2007, Levi Chavez said, "I turned on the light and it was like terror. I couldn't believe what I was seeing." The defendant told the jury that he blamed himself for Tera's suicide and felt that God was saying to him: "This is all your fault." Chavez assured the jurors that he had found religion and had not cheated on his second wife. At several points during his direct examination by attorney Sema the defendant broke down in tears.

     On cross-examination, prosecutor Bryan McKay asked the former police officer why he had left his loaded department-issued gun "with a woman who was depressed and talked about possibly hurting herself. You had small children in the house."

     "We had," the defendant replied, "an attempted break-in. A truck was stolen right out of our driveway when she was there. And yes, I had small children in the home, but this is exactly why I left the gun in the house. (Regarding the theft of Levi's 2004 Ford F-250 truck, Tera allegedly told her fellow beauty salon workers that he and his "cop buddies" had staged the theft as part of an insurance scam. Prosecutor McKay had attempted to get this information before the jury but Judge Eichwald suppressed it.)

     On July 16, 2013, the jury, after ten hours of deliberation, found the defendant not guilty.

Bite Mark Identification in the Ted Bundy Serial Murder Case

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

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

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

The Ted Bundy Serial Murder Case

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Nicolas Holzer Mass Murder Case

     Some of the most disturbing and puzzling murder cases are ones that even from the killer's point of view make no sense. The good-boy Eagle scout who murders his parents in their sleep or guns down teachers and students at his school falls into this category. A young mother who drowns her baby in the bathtub or a longtime employee who shows up at work one day with mass murder on his mind are cases that defy understanding.

     Out-of-the-blue murders committed by noncriminal types who didn't exhibit symptoms of mental illness are frightening because they can't be predicted and therefore prevented. The murderers in these cases simply blindside their victims. Such cases are insidious in their straightforward banality. The feeling they create is this: no place is safe and no one can be trusted. We are all in danger.

     In 2004, after he and his wife Juana were divorced, Nicolas Holzer gained custody of his two sons who were one and three-years-old. Three years later Mr. Holzer and the boys moved into his parents' house in Goleta, California, a town of 30,000 ten miles northwest of Santa Barbara.

     Just after elven o'clock on the night of Monday, August 11, 2014, 45-year-old Nicolas Holzer called 911 and without emotion informed the dispatcher that he had just killed his family.

     When deputies with the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office rolled up to the Holzer house on Walnut Park Lane not far from the University of California at Santa Barbara, they were met at the front door by the composed but bloodstained 911 caller.

     Inside the dwelling deputies discovered the blood-covered bodies of William Holzer, 73, Sheila Holzer, 74, and their two grandsons, Vincent, 10 and Sebastian who was thirteen. They had been stabbed to death by a pair of large kitchen knives.

     A calm and collected Nicolas Holzer informed the officers that he first murdered his father in the den. He then stabbed the boys to death as they slept in their beds. He said he killed his mother last. Officers found her body lying in the hallway outside the boys' bedroom.

     When asked why he had wiped-out his family Nicholas Holzer simply said, "I had to." He added that in killing them he had fulfilled what he believed was his destiny. This, of course, made no sense whatsoever.

     Also dead in the house was the family pet, an Australian Shepherd.

     The Holzer residence had not been visited in the past by police officers responding to domestic violence calls. And detectives, at least in the initial stage of the investigation, found no evidence of prior mental illness.

     Charged with four counts of first-degree murder, Nicolas Holzer was held in the Santa Barbara County Jail without bond. Because California had abolished the death sentence Mr. Holzer, if convicted as charged, faced life behind bars. His attorney, a month after the killings said he planned to plead his client not guilty by reason of insanity.

     Holzer's ex-wife Juana, in August 2016 filed a wrongful death suit against the mass murder suspect.

     In August 2018 a jury in Santa Barbara County, after rejecting the insanity defense, found Nicolas Holzer guilty of four counts of first-degree murder. At his sentencing hearing Holzer's attorney said, "Nicolas Holzer is not evil or heatless and he loved his family very much, but when his delusional beliefs escalated they overtook his ability to be rational.

     The judge sentenced Holzer to four life sentences without the possibility of parole.

The David Wise Spousal Rape Case

     In 2008, Mandy Wise kicked her husband David Wise out of their home in Indianapolis, Indiana. She then filed for divorce. After eleven years of marriage she discovered, on his cell phone, video recordings of him having sex with her. She was unconscious. The tapes revealed she had been surreptitiously drugged and raped by her husband.

     When confronted with the tapes, Mr. Wise responded with the following email: "I was taking advantage of you in your sleep and you kept coming to me and telling me it was not okay. I needed to stop." He did not admit to drugging her, and they never, according to the victim, discussed the matter prior to her discovery of the videotapes.

     In January 2010, not long after the finalization of the divorce, the ex-wife, now going by her maiden name Boardman, complained to the police that her ex-husband had been harassing her with repeated phone calls and text messages. She also claimed that he threatened to kill the man to whom she was engaged. A judge granted her a protection order, but Mr. Wise was not charged with any crime.

     In 2011, two years after the divorce, Mandy reported the rapes to the police. As evidence she submitted a DVD copy of the sex tapes. When asked to explain the delay in reporting and submission of evidence, she said she didn't want their two children to grow up without a father.

     A Marion County prosecutor charged David Wise with one count of rape and five felony counts of criminal deviate conduct. If convicted as charged he faced a maximum sentence of forty years in prison. After spending 24 days in the county detention center David Wise made bail and was released to await his trial.

     The David Wise spousal rape trial began in April 2014 in Indianapolis. Mandy Boardman's testimony for the prosecution comprised the state's principal evidence in the three-day proceeding. She took the stand and told the jury that on numerous occasions she had awaken with the feeling that her body had been "messed with." One time she woke up with a pill still dissolving in her mouth. She had also discovered, in the bedroom, eyedroppers that were not hers.

     Following two days of testimony the case went to the jury. After a brief deliberation the jurors returned a verdict of guilty on all counts. The judge set May 16, 2014 as the sentencing date. On that day the prosecutor asked the judge to sentence Wise to twenty years in prison. The convicted man's attorney argued for two years of house detention.

     Marion County Superior Court Judge Kurt Eisgruber, on May 16, 2014, sentenced the 52-year-old rapist to twenty years, with twelve of those years suspended. David Wise would serve the remaining eight years wearing a GPS monitoring device in his home. Following the house detention he would serve two years of probation.

    Following the sentencing hearing Wise's attorney, Elizabeth Milliken, told reporters that she planned to appeal her client's conviction.

     On Monday, May 19, 2014, Mandy Boardman, in speaking to a reporter with the Indianapolis Star, said, "I was very pleased with the conviction but the sentencing was a punch in the gut by the justice system. During the reading of the sentence the judge looked at me before he gave the final decision. I was told that I needed to forgive my attacker and move on. I received zero justice on Friday."

     Boardman, to a reporter with the Los Angeles Times, added: "I never thought he [Wise] would be at home, being able to have the same rights and privileges that I do."

    On July 24, 2014 Judge Eisgruber put David Wise behind bars for five years after the convicted rapist violated the terms of his house arrest by letting his GPS tracking device's battery go dead. He also failed to maintain contact with correction authorities. Mandy Boardman responded to her ex-husband's incarceration with the following statement to a local reporter: "Now that I know that he will be in prison for the next five years I think I can finally get some peace" 

The Itinerate Lab Technician Who Made People Sick

     David Kwiatkowski traveled around the country working as a hospital temp in cardiac catheterization labs as a radiology technician. From January 2007 to September of that year the 29-year-old worked at the Oakwood Annapolis Hospital in Wayne, Michigan, his home state. From November 2007 to March 2010 Kwiatowski was employed by hospitals in Poughkeepsie, New York, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Baltimore and Clinton, Maryland.

     On April 1, 2010, the itinerate lab technician landed a job in Phoenix at the Arizona Heart Hospital. Eleven days later a fellow employee found him out cold in the men's locker room. After testing positive for cocaine and marijuana the hospital fired him. Less than a week later Mr. Kwiakowski was in Philadelphia working at Temple University Hospital. That job lasted less than a month. That May the roving temp was employed at a hospital in Hays, Kansas. A month after taking the job in Kansas, Kwiatkowski's drug usage caught up with him. He was also diagnosed with hepatitis C. After working a month at the Hays Hospital, the infected temp was working in Warner Robins, Georgia at the Houston Medical Center. 

      In April 2012 David Kwiatkowski began work in the cardiac catheterization unit at the Exeter Hospital in Exeter, New Hampshire. On May 12, 2012, six weeks after the temp started work at Exeter, the hospital experienced a hepatitis C breakout involving 32 patients and former patients.

     Because the infected patients had all received cardiac catheterization procedures at Exeter, David Kwiatkowski came under suspicion. Investigators began looking into his bizarre work history and learned he had been diagnosed with hepatitis C in June 2010. Fellow hospital employees, based on the temp's erratic behavior and the fresh needle tracks on his arms suspected he was a drug addict. Kwiatkowski's roommate told investigators that he found needles in their apartment. When confronted by his roommate Kwiatkowski said he had cancer. The hospital fired the radiology temp on May 24, 2012.

     Following a month-long investigation FBI agents determined that Mr. Kwiatkowski had injected himself with syringes meant for patients. These syringes were filled with Fentanyl, a painkiller more potent than morphine. Patients were then infected with syringes Kwiatkowski refilled with a saline solution. Patients had not only been denied relief from pain, the temp had given them hepatitis C.

     On July 13, 2012, police in Marlborough, Massachusetts responded to a call from a Holiday Inn regarding a guest who had overdosed on drugs. Officers found David Kwiatkowski in a stupor amid pills scattered about the hotel room. He had also written a suicide note. Medics transported him to a nearby hospital.

     A federal grand jury sitting in New Hampshire on July 19, 2012 indicted Kwiatkowski for acquiring controlled substances by fraud and for tampering with a consumer product (the hospital syringes). If convicted of these offenses he faced up to 24 years in prison. On the day of his indictment FBI agents arrested Kwiatkowski at the Marlborough hospital where he was recovering from his drug and alcohol overdose.

     When interrogated by FBI agents, Kwiatkowski denied stealing the syringes and switching out their contents. Moreover, he said he didn't use drugs. When asked how the 32 patients at the Exeter Hospital had contracted hepatitis C, the suspect said, "You know, I'm more concerned about myself, my own well-being. I've learned here to just worry about myself. And that's all I care about now." Spoken like a true sociopath.

     David Kwiatkowski was held without bail in the Strafford County Jail in New Hampshire. In that state alone he had come into contact with more than 3,000 patients, people who had yet to be tested for hepatitis C.

     In August 2013, Kwiatkowski, pursuant to a plea agreement, admitted that he had been stealing drugs for more than a decade and was "killing a lot of people." After pleading guilty to fourteen federal drug theft and tampering charges, the judge sentenced the 35-year-old to 39 years in prison.