tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-65283779354468659582024-03-18T14:46:51.549-04:00Jim Fisher True CrimeWelcome to the Jim Fisher True Crime blog, a place for people interested in crime, criminal investigation, policing, law, writing, and forensic science.Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.comBlogger5200125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-7864984494039436272024-03-18T06:10:00.000-04:002024-03-18T06:14:41.576-04:00The Lyvette Crespo Manslaughter Case<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Daniel Crespo was born in a Brooklyn, New York public housing project in 1969. Lyvette, Crespo's high school girlfriend, married him in 1986 shortly after graduation. That year they moved to the Los Angeles area and in 1987 had their first child, a baby girl.<br />
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Daniel Crespo earned an associates degree in psychology/family counseling at East Los Angeles College. Two years later he was awarded a bachelor's degree in criminal justice/public administration from Cal State University. The couple's second child, Daniel Jr, was born in 1994.<br />
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After working eight years as a criminal justice youth counselor, Mr. Crespo joined the Los Angeles County Probation Department. In 2001 he and his family resided in the Vinos la Campana condominium complex in Bell Gardens, a suburban community of 43,000 18 miles southeast of Los Angeles. That year he was elected to the Bell Gardens city council.<br />
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In Bell Gardens the city counsel is part time and members take turns serving as mayor. In 2014 Daniel Crespo held the office of Bell Gardens mayor. Before that he worked five years in the Los Angeles County probation department's adult supervision gang/narcotics unit. As a criminal justice practitioner and a Bell Gardens office holder, Mr. Crespo was considered friendly and well-liked. He also had the reputation of being a devoted family man.<br />
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At two-thirty in the afternoon of Tuesday September 30, 2014, paramedics were called to the Crespo residence. The emergency crew found Daniel Crespo in the second floor master bedroom with three bullets in his upper torso. He died en route to a nearby hospital. His 19-year-old son, Daniel Jr, was taken to a hospital where a doctor treated him as an outpatient for facial injuries sustained in a fight.<br />
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Later that day Los Angeles County deputies questioned Lyvette Crespo and her son at a county sheriff's station. According to Lyvette, she and her husband had been arguing in the master bedroom. When their son tried to intervene on her behalf, he and his father got into a fight. She left the room and returned with the handgun she used to shoot her husband three times.<br />
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Following police interrogations of the mother and son the two were allowed to go home. A spokesperson for the sheriff's office announced that investigators would present the results of their investigation of the Daniel Crespo shooting case to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office. Personnel within that office would determine if there was sufficient evidence to charge Lyvette Crespo and/or her son with criminal homicide.<br />
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Two days after the shooting Eber Bayona, Lyvette Crespo's attorney, described his client to the media as a devoted wife and mother who had been the victim of "a difficult and intolerable home life." Attorney Bayona said, "I think the evidence will corroborate that she has been a victim of domestic violence for many years."<br />
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William Crespo, the shooting victim's brother, told reporters that the attorney was simply trying to make his brother look bad. "My brother is not a bad man," he said. William went on to say that the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office should prosecute Lyvette Crespo for second-degree murder. When asked by a reporter if it were true that Daniel Crespo was having an affair with a woman who was pregnant, William Crespo did not answer the question. He did say that his brother was considering leaving his wife.<br />
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In December 2016, following a criminal investigation that revealed that Daniel Crespo had for years physically abused his wife and his son, Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman allowed Lyvette Crespo to plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter.<br />
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On January 20, 2017 Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy sentenced Lyvette Crespo to 90 days in jail and five years probation. While the so-called battered wife syndrome is not recognized as an admissible homicide defense, it is relevant in terms of prosecutorial discretion and sentencing.<br /></div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-47730709651625639312024-03-17T06:10:00.000-04:002024-03-17T06:12:37.265-04:00Frank Costal and the Kadunce Killings: The Satanic High Priest Murder Case <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
At ten o'clock on the morning of July 11, 1978, Rose Butera decided to visit her friend Kathleen Kadunce. Rose, accompanied by her daughter Lori and Lori's boyfriend, pulled up to Kathy Kadunce's two-story house on Wilmington Avenue in New Castle, Pennsylvania, a mill town of 30,000 about an hour north of downtown Pittsburgh. Twenty-five-year-old Kathleen, known to her friends as Kathy, lived in the house with her husband Lawrence and their two children, a four-year-old girl named Dawn and three-month-old Robert Dean Kadunce. (While friends and family called Lawrence Lou or Louie he will be referred to here as Lawrence.) <br />
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When she approached the Kadunce residence Rose Butera noticed that the back door stood ajar. From the doorway Rose heard a baby crying. After no one answered her knock she and the other two visitors entered the dwelling.<br />
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Rose found the Kadunce baby crying in a portable crib on the first floor. Lori climbed the stairs to the second floor where she stumbled upon the mutilated body of the little girl, Dawn Kadunce. Rose, in response to her daughter's screams, found Mrs. Kadunce's nude and bloody body lying on the bathroom floor.<br />
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According to the Lawrence County coroner Kathy Kadunce and her daughter had been each stabbed 17 times. The mother had also been shot in the head. The victims had been murdered earlier that morning. Dr. William G. Gillespy, a pathologist with St. Francis Hospital in New Castle, performed the autopsies. According to Dr. Gillespy Mrs. Kadunce had been shot at point blank range before she was stabbed. The pathologist believed the murders took place sometime between seven and eight-forty-five in the morning. In his report Dr. Gillespy used the words "excessive" and "overkill" in describing the murders.<br />
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Investigators believed the killer or killers had removed Mrs. Kadunce's wedding ring as well as a blue star sapphire ring. Police officers searched the Kadunce house but did not find the murder weapons.<br />
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New Castle detectives questioned Lawrence Kadunce, Kathy's husband of six years. He said that when he left his house that morning his wife and daughter were alive. Mr. Kadunce was a student at the New Castle Business College where he took night courses. He worked during the day at V & R Industries on Grove Street. The 30-year-old was not a suspect in the case.<br />
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In January 1979 detectives working on the double murder caught a break when an anonymous tipster told officers about a man named Michael Atkinson. According to the caller, Mr. Atkinson, a 28-year-old drifter from Ellwood City, a town a few miles south of New Castle, had been involved in the Kadunce murders. Detectives launched an investigation of this man and the more they learned the more they were convinced the anonymous caller had been right.<br />
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On February 11, 1980 police officers armed with a warrant for Atkinson's arrest as a suspect in the Kadunce case interrogated him at the jail in neighboring Butler County. Atkinson had been arrested in connection with the January 1980 shooting death of Rose Puz, his 84-year-old landlady in Ellwood City.<br />
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Atkinson admitted being at the Kadunce house at six o'clock that bloody morning. He said he waited in the car while his companion, Frank Costal, entered the dwelling. When the 50-year-old Costal walked out of the Kadunce house he was, according to Atkinson, covered in the victims' blood.<br />
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Frank G. Costal, after dropping out of New Castle High School in 1950, joined the Army and ended up serving in Korea during the Korean War. After his military service, the veteran with a "confused sexual identify," traveled around the country as a carnival freak known as Frankie Francine, "half-man, half-woman."<br />
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In 1970 Mr. Costal returned to New Castle where he worked odd jobs and lived off a monthly social security disability benefit of $240. (He claimed to have injured himself while working as a laborer in Pittsburgh. He also told people he had been sexually abused as a child.)<br />
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In February 1980 New Castle police officers arrested Frank Costal at his apartment at Highland and Leisure Avenues on suspicion of murdering Mrs. Kadunce and her daughter. In his apartment officers discovered plastic skulls hanging from the ceiling, ceremonial candles, inverted crucifixes and a collection of books on black magic, witchcraft and devil worship. The suspect's walls were also covered with black curtains to give the place a spooky feel. <br />
<br /> Mr. Costal told his police interrogators that he, Michael Atkinson, a man named John Dudoice and Lawrence Kadunce had gone to the Kadunce house that morning to straighten out a drug deal Mrs. Kadunce had interfered with. According to Costal, Kathy Kadunce had found the drugs he had given to her husband and she had flushed them down the toilet. Costal said that yes, he was in the house at the time of the murders, but he was not the one who did the killing. His companions had killed the little girl because she would have been a witness to her mother's murder. Costal denied the killings had anything to do with his interest in the occult. Four months earlier John Dudoice had been shot to death in New Castle. While the case went into the books as a suicide, detectives believed that Dudoice had been murdered by Costal who was worried that if questioned by the police Mr. Dudoice would finger him and the others for the Kadunce murders.<br />
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On March 4, 1980 a jury found Michael Atkinson guilty of raping a 17-year-old New Castle girl in 1978.<br />
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On September 15, 1980 Michael Atkinson went on trial for the Kadunce murders. The Lawrence County prosecutor charged him with the first-degree murder of Kathy Kadunce and the third-degree murder of the victim's daughter. The prosecution theorized that Kathy's murder had been premeditated while her daughter's fatal stabbing had been a spur-of-the-moment killing. (Today the killing of a potential witness to a crime qualifies the murderer for the death penalty.)<br />
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The trial judge allowed the prosecutor to show the jurors the gory murder scene photographs. Atkinson's attorney objected on the grounds these photos unduly inflamed and prejudiced the jury against the defendant. Following the coroner's testimony several police officers took the stand. Frank Costal, the prosecution's star witness, climbed into the witness box and placed himself, the defendant and the others at the murder scene that morning.<br />
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After the prosecution rested its case Michael Atkinson's attorney put him on the stand to speak on his own behalf. Atkinson continued to insist that he had not left the car that morning while Frank Costal killed Kathy Kadunce for destroying the drugs her husband had been entrusted with.<br />
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On cross-examination the prosecutor got the defendant to acknowledge several inconsistencies in his written and oral statements to the police. The defendant also admitted that he, Costal, Duodice and Lawrence Kadunce returned to the murder scene an hour after the killings to retrieve physical evidence that might have incriminated them. Atkinson said Dudoice walked out of the Kadunce house carrying a bloody 14-inch butcher knife, the weapon used to stab the victims and dismember the little girl.<br />
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On October 16, 1980 the jury found Michael Atkinson guilty as charged. The judge sentenced him to life in prison for Kathy Kadunce's murder and ten to twenty years for the slaughter of Dawn Kadunce. Sometime around 2013 Atkinson died while serving time at the state penitentiary in Greene County, Pennsylvania.<br />
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The Frank G. Costal trial got underway on January 5, 1981 in the Lawrence County Courthouse. Because of the regional pre-trial publicity about the murders that extended all the way south to Pittsburgh, the jury had been drawn from the citizens of Crawford County. The prosecutor, in his opening remarks to the jury argued that the ritualistic killings committed by the defendant had been motived by the thwarted drug deal as well as Costal's desire to kill Kathy because he was having a homosexual affair with Lawrence Kadunce. In other words the defendant wanted Mr. Kadunce all to himself.<br />
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Several of the prosecution's witnesses informed the jury of the defendant's participation in satanic rituals held in his apartment. They also described his role as the "High Priest" of a small cult of young, drug-addled naive followers who gathered at his place three or four times a week to smoke pot, drink beer, witness animal sacrifices and other satanic rituals. At these occult events Frank Costal would often conduct marriage ceremonies involving him and a young male lover. (Police found fake marriage certificates in his apartment.)<br />
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According to several witnesses familiar with the defendant's lifestyle, many of Costal's young followers were afraid to cooperate with the police because they believed Mr. Costal had the power to walk through the bars of the Lawrence County Jail.<br />
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Another witness who had participated in black magic rituals at the defendant's apartment testified that many of the "High Priest's" followers, in return for access to the beer and marijuana, shoplifted for him. One of the former attendees at Costal's beer and pot-fueled occult affairs told the jury that he once saw the defendant wearing nothing but a pair of woman's red bikini underwear.<br />
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The prosecutor put a jailhouse informant on the stand who said that while serving time with Costal in a Lawrence County Jail cell, Costal boasted about "carving up the Kadunces." The snitch said Costal had been angry at Kathy for interfering with his relationship with her husband.<br />
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A prosecution witness testified that Lawrence Kadunce had been an active member of Costal's satanic group. She said she had seen him several times in the defendant's apartment. According to this witness, Mr. Kadunce and the defendant had been involved in a homosexual relationship. Another person took the stand and said that Costal had demanded that Lawrence Kadunce leave his wife Kathy. According to this witness, just before the murders, Costal had confided to her that "something bad was going to happen to Kathy."<br />
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An expert on satanism took the stand for the prosecution and said that the defendant's plastic skulls, devil worship posters, robes and books on the occult were consistent with the ritualistic nature of the Kadunce murders. According to this witness (so-called satanism experts have since been discredited) the fact the victims had been stabbed 17 times had satanic relevance. (Detectives who worked on the case believed the defendant's devil worshiping trappings were nothing more than props in furtherance of his desire to seduce young gay men.)<br />
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Michael Atkinson took the stand as the prosecution's star witness. He testified that Frank Costal, John Dudoice and Lawrence Kadunce were in the house committing the murders while he sat outside in the car. Atkinson told the jury that Frank Costal wanted to kill Kathy Kadunce in order to have Lawrence for himself. The witness further implicated the husband by claiming that Lawrence had entered the house that morning armed with a pistol.<br />
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On January 25, 1981 the jury found Frank Costal guilty of two counts of first-degree murder. The judge imposed the mandatory life sentence without parole. Costal died in 2001 at age 71 while serving his time at the State Correctional Institute at Laurel Highlands, Pennsylvania.<br />
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A jury in the summer of 1982 found Michael Atkinson guilty of murdering his Ellwood City landlord, Rose Puz. The judge handed him a second life sentence for the January 1980 murder. (There are those who believed that Michael Atkinson and a man named Raymond Tanner murdered 37-year-old Beverly Ann Withers and 4-year-old Melanie Gargacz on November 7, 1975 in New Castle. When the girl's mother, Marilyn Gargacz, came home that afternoon, the school teacher found her daughter and the girl's babysitter dead from small caliber gunshot wounds to the head. No arrests were made and that case remained unsolved.)<br />
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Lawrence Kadunce, having been implicated in his wife's and daughter's murders went on trial in January 1982 in Lawrence County with Judge Glenn McCracken presiding. Because of the intense local publicity surrounding the case, a jury from Centre County had been impanelled. Mr. Kadunce had been assigned two defense attorneys, Norman A. Levine and Peter E. Horney.<br />
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District Attorney Norman J. Barilla opened his prosecution by putting Sandra Lee Krosen on the stand. The 39-year-old witness from Edinburg testified that Frank Costal had been a babysitter for one of her friends. In 1977 Mr. Costal had introduced Krosen to his good friend, Lawrence Kadunce.<br />
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New Castle police officer William Carbone testified regarding major inconsistencies in statements the defendant made to him on the day of the murder and the day after. Kathleen Kadunce's mother, brother, and sister testified that the defendant had given them different stories regarding his activities on the night before the murders. The family members also noted that Lawrence, at his dead wife's funeral, had laughed and joked with friends who came to pay their respects.<br />
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Michael Atkinson, the prosecution's star witness took the stand on January 21,1982. According to the convicted murderer and rapist, after the defendant and his wife argued in the bathroom about the drugs---she had been about to take a bath--he shot her in the head. After killing his wife the defendant sent Frank Costal to silence his daughter, Dawn.<br />
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Atkinson said that after the murders he burned evidence from the crime scene behind his house on South Jefferson Street. He disposed of the murder knife and gun by tossing the weapons into a pond owned by the Medusa Cement plant near Wampum, Pennsylvania.<br />
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According to Atkinson, Frank Costal had introduced him to the defendant and his wife in 1977 at the Towne Mall in downtown New Castle. The witness described Lawrence Kadunce as a vengeful and jealous husband who had accused him (Atkinson) of having an affair with Kathy. Atkinson said he had caught the defendant and Frank Costal, a man he described as a "blood-maddened drug using homosexual," having sex in Costal's apartment.<br />
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Defense attorney Levine, in his cross-examination of the prosecution's star witness pointed out major discrepancies in Atkinson's testimony at this trial, the Costal trial and at a March 1981 preliminary hearing before District Justice Howard B. Hanna. In Atkinson's two signed statements given to the New Castle police on February 10 and 11, 1980 Lawrence Kadunce was not mentioned as a participant in the murders.<br />
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Attorney Levine also got the witness to admit that in return for his testimony against Lawrence Kadunce, District Attorney Barilla had promised not to seek the death penalty in the Rose Puz murder case. Moreover, in return for his Kadunce trial testimony, Atkinson would receive major dental work paid by the state.<br />
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Two Lawrence County jailhouse snitches took the stand for the prosecution and testified that the defendant, while incarcerated there, made statements to them that incriminated him in the murders.<br />
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When it came time to present his side of the case, defense attorney Levine put Lawrence County Jail warden Joseph F. Gregg on the stand. The warden's testimony, based on jail records, cast serious doubt regarding the veracity of the jailhouse informants' stories.<br />
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Lawrence Kadunce took the stand on his own behalf and denied ever knowing Frank Costal or Michael Atkinson. He told the jurors that he was at work when the murders took place. The jury, on February 10, 1982, found the defendant not guilty.<br />
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Following his acquittal Lawrence Kadunce left the New Castle area. He later remarried and had a son with his second wife. According to that son his father refused to talk about the case. Some members of Kathy's family were not convinced that Mr. Kadunce was innocent.<br />
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In 2004 the murder house at 702 Wilmington Avenue was torn down to make room for a video rental store.<br />
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The Kadunce case is tragic because two innocent victims were drawn into a circle of criminal degenerates who committed a perfectly senseless and horrific crime.</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-90881451434541279942024-03-16T06:00:00.000-04:002024-03-16T06:09:16.771-04:00Philip Righter: Art Forger, Tax Cheat<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Philip Righter was a fraud, a forger, a pretender and a thief. Nothing about this West Hollywood man was on the level. He held himself out as a successful film producer and a serious collector of art. On his Instagram account he posted a photograph of himself wearing a tuxedo and holding an Oscar statue. He also claimed to be an Emmy and Grammy winner. Mr. Righter hadn't won any of these awards and had only produced a short film in 2016 called "One Good Waiter." As for his collection of paintings, they were forgeries he had purchased cheaply on sites like eBay.<br />
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Philip Righter was also a tax cheat. In 2015 he falsely reported on his federal tax form that he had donated valuable paintings to charity. He also claimed that thieves had broken into his home and stole $2.5 million worth of his art. Due to his phony charity deduction and the false theft claim, the government issued Righter a check for more than $100,000.<br />
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While he was cheating on his taxes, Mr. Righter was purchasing paintings online that were painted to look like the work of painters Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring and Jean-Michal Basquiat. He sold $758,000 worth of Haring and Basquiat fakes to an art gallery in Miami, Florida.<br />
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To fool the buyer of these works into thinking they were real, Righter forged accompanying documents in the form of letters of authenticity from the painters' estates.<br />
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In 2016 detectives with the Los Angeles Police Department began investigating Philip Righter for fraud and art forgery. Special Agents with the FBI's Art Crime Team from the Miami Field Division joined in the Righter investigation.<br />
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In July 2018 FBI agents in Los Angeles took Philip Righter into custody of federal charges of mail fraud and aggravated identity theft.<br />
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The 43-year-old forger and thief, on March 13, 2020, pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud and one count of identity theft. At his sentencing before a federal judge scheduled for May 18, 2020, Righter faced up to 25 years in prison. </div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> On July 16, 2020 the federal judge sentenced Righter to five years in prison followed by three years probation. </div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-36218498678439111802024-03-15T06:15:00.000-04:002024-03-15T06:20:08.070-04:00Archaeological Protection Gone Wild: The Lynch Case<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
In 1979 Congress passed the Archaeological Resource Protection Act (ARPA) which made it a federal crime to excavate, remove, damage, alter, and/or deface (without a government permit) archaeological resources from federal and Indian lands. Under ARPA, an "archaeological resource" was an item of past human existence or archaeological interest more than a hundred years old. First time ARPA offenders, in cases where the value of the artifacts and the cost of restoration and repair of the damaged archaeological site was less than $500, could be fined no more than $10,000 or imprisoned for more than one year. However, if the value or restoration costs exceeded $500 the offender faced fines up to $20,000 and imprisoned for two years on each count. Under ARPA, federal authorities could pursue violators civilly or in criminal court, imposing fines and confiscating vehicles and equipment used in the commission of the prohibited activity.<br />
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The Ian Martin Lynch Case<br />
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Although he didn't know it at the time, 23-year-old Ian Martin Lynch made the mistake of his life when he picked up a human skull lying among hillside rocks on an uninhabited island off the shores of southeastern Alaska. In July 1997 Mr. Lynch and two of his friends were deer hunting on public land in an area called the Warm Chuck Village and Burial Site. They had no knowledge of this place, were unaware it had once been the home of Native Americans and were not looking for prehistoric artifacts. There were no indications, other than the skull the men had stumbled upon, that the site was an ancient grave site.<br />
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While exploring the area while his friends were breaking camp, Ian Lynch scraped the dirt away from the back of the skull then picked it up for a closer look. He guessed the skull, and the bones scattered around it, had been there for some time because of the absence of clothing. He had no way, however, of knowing that the remains he had found were archaeological resources.<br />
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Shortly after taking the skull home Mr. Lynch decided to turn it over to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service Office in Anchorage. He described how he had come in possession of it to a government employee and revealed the circumstances surrounding his discovery. A short time later an agent with the Forest Service asked him to come to the federal building for an interview.<br />
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When the Forest Service agent asked Lynch if he knew the skull was old, the interviewee said, "So, I mean, it's definitely been there for awhile. Oh, man, it's definitely old. There's not a stitch of clothing or nothing with it." (To make a federal case against Mr. Lynch the Forest Service agents had to establish he knew, or should have known, that he was taking away a skull more than a hundred years old.)<br />
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The Forest Service archaeologist for the region examined the evidence but was unable to determine the age of the skull. That prompted the Assistant United States Attorney (AUSA) to call in a physical anthropologist to determine, through visual analysis, the age of the head. This expert also declined to scientifically declare the skull an archaeological resource. The AUSA, determined to establish a crime under ARPA, sent the skull out for carbon dating. This analysis revealed that it was at least 1,400 years old. This opened the door for a federal prosecution.<br />
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In 1998 a federal grand jury sitting in Anchorage returned an indictment charging Ian Martin Lynch with a felony ARPA offense. If convicted he faced up to a year in prison and a $10,000 fine. Lynch's attorney filed a motion to dismiss the indictment on the ground the government had not met its burden of proving that Mr. Lynch, in taking the skull, had sufficient knowledge to establish the requisite criminal intent to violate this law. Specifically, the prosecution had not proven that Lynch knew the skull was an archaeological resource.<br />
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The U.S. District Judge, reasoning that Lynch's picking up the skull was "a wrong in itself," ruled that the prosecution did not have to prove that Lynch had specifically intended to commit the crime. Based on this legal rationale the judge denied the defense's motion to dismiss the indictment. In response to this ruling, Ian Lynch pleaded guilty to the single ARPA count while retaining his right to appeal the judge's decision. In 1999 the judge sentenced Lynch to six months in prison and fined him $7,000 to cover the costs of the burial site restoration. (Lynch had picked up one bone, what restoration?) At his sentencing the defendant told the judge he had not intended to offend Native Americans. He remained free on bail pending the results of his appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.<br />
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In 2000 the federal court of appeals overturned the ARPA conviction. Judge Alfred T. Goodwin, one of the three jurists on the panel, wrote: "The Government must prove that a defendant knows or had reason to know he was removing an 'archaeological resource' before that defendant can be found guilty of an ARPA offense."<br />
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The reversal of Lynch's conviction made sense, but what didn't make sense was why the U.S. Forest Service and the federal prosecutor in Alaska went after Mr. Lynch in the first place. Congress, in passing ARPA, intended to punish and deter the for-profit looting of archaeological sites. Mr. Lynch was not even an artifact collector. It's hard to believe that federal law enforcement officers would waste taxpayers' money by pursing such a questionable case. And finally, what kind of judge would sentence a harmless defendant like Mr. Lynch to six months in prison?<br /></div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-4990956204180516322024-03-14T06:45:00.000-04:002024-03-14T06:47:59.982-04:00The Russell and Shirley Dermond Murder Case<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
In 2014, 88-year-old Russell Dermond and his 87-year-old wife Shirley resided in a $1 million, 3,300-square-foot home on the shores of Lake Oconee in Reynolds Plantation, Georgia, a retirement/resort community 75 miles east of Atlanta. Before retiring Mr. Dermond owned franchises in Wendy's and Chick-fil-A fast-food restaurants. Mr. Dermond, a U.S. Navy veteran, grew up in Hackensack, New Jersey. He played golf, liked to read and enjoyed spending time with family and friends. The couple regularly attended the Lake Oconee Community Church.<br />
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Married 68 years, the couple in 1994 purchased the house on the cul-de-sac in the neighborhood of Lakeside Great Waters. The gated community that featured a Jack Nicklaus Signature golf course was considered safe from crime.<br />
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In 2000 one of the couple's three adult children, Mark Dermond, was shot to death after a drug deal went bad in Atlanta. The Dermond's oldest son had been struggling with drug addiction for years.<br />
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On Monday, May 6, 2014, after not hearing from Russell or Shirley Dermond for several days, neighbors went to their house to check on them. They found Mr. Dermond's body in the garage. He had been decapitated and his head was not at the scene. Mrs. Dermond was not in garage or the house. Both of their vehicles were parked in the driveway and the interior of the dwelling seemed undisturbed. There were no signs of forced entry and nothing had been stolen, including Mrs. Dermond's purse that was still in the house.<br />
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Investigators with the Putnam County Sheriff's Office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), based upon the blood spatter pattern in the garage, theorized that Mr. Dermond's head had been cut off after his death. Moreover, he had not been stabbed or shot. Detectives believed he had been bludgeoned to death sometime between Friday, May 2 and Sunday, May 5, 2014.<br />
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Following Mr. Dermond's murder there was no activity on the couple's bank accounts. Since no ransom demands had been made detectives didn't think Mrs. Dermond had been kidnapped for money.<br />
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To help the local authorities locate Shirley Dermond the FBI put up 100 billboard posters and offered a $20,000 reward. Scuba divers searched the lake in the vicinity of the house and officers used cadaver dogs to look for the missing woman in the surrounding woods. Police officers and FBI agents also questioned dozens of residents of the gated community.<br />
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On May 7, 2014 Bradley Dermond, the couple's son, told a local television reporter that the murder of his father and the disappearance of his mother,"makes no sense at all. We're still hoping that our mother is OK." Two days later Putnam County Coroner Gary McEhenney announced the presumed cause of Mr. Dermond's death to be "cerebral trauma." <br />
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On Friday afternoon May 16, 2014 after two fishermen spotted a body, an emergency crew pulled Shirley Dermond's corpse out of Lake Oconee five miles from her house. According to the Putnam County coroner, she had been murdered by blunt force trauma to the head then dumped into the water.<br />
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Investigators believed the intruder or intruders who murdered the couple may have used a boat in the commission of the crime. No suspects, however, were developed in the case. Moreover, the motive behind the double murder remained a mystery. The authorities had not located Mr. Dermond's head and the reason behind his decapitation remained unknown. Some believed the murders could have been a mob hit, but who would want these elderly people rubbed out?<br />
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Residents of this community, following the gruesome double-murder, had their illusion of security shattered.<br />
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In November 2014, six months after the still unsolved murders, Putnam County sheriff Howard Sills, in an interview with a local television news reporter, said, "I go to sleep every night thinking about this case and wake up every morning thinking about it. And I'm not exaggerating." According to the sheriff every potential suspect questioned in the investigation had been cleared. The sheriff said he believed the murders had been pre-meditated and planned. "You can't make me believe there was any kind of randomness to this crime. It bothers me a great deal that someone has committed such a heinous crime and they're still out there."<br />
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On December 9, 2014 Sheriff Sills told another television reporter that his office had received thousands of pages of phone records going back six months prior to the Dermond murders. The Gwinnett County district attorney's office used special software to help investigators analyze the phone data in search for suspects.<br />
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The reward for information leading to the arrest of the killer or killers, raised to $55,000, did not produce any leads in the case.<br />
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In February 2015 Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills revealed to a local TV reporter that Shirley Dermond's body had been held to the bottom of Lake Oconee by two cement blocks. The killer or killers had not accounted for decomposing gases that causes a weighted down body in water to become buoyant. While there was no effort to hide Mr. Dermond's body, the killer or killers did not want his wife's corpse to be found.<br />
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In April 2016, in speaking to a local newspaper reporter, the murder victims' 57-year-old son Keith said, "It's bad enough to lose both of your parents at the same time, but in the way it happened. We would have been devastated if they'd just had a car accident. But to have it all happen this way, and then just compounding with the details and then the fact they haven't caught anybody. They don't even have a clue. We don't even know why."<br />
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On May 6, 2017 Sheriff Sills, on the third anniversary of the Russell and Shirley Dermond's murders, discussed the still unsolved case with a local reporter. The sheriff said that he believed the Dermonds had been targeted victims and that, "Somebody knows who did this." The sheriff admitted that not solving such an important murder case was "somewhat embarrassing" and that his investigators did not have any promising leads.</div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> As of March 2024 the 10-year-old Russel and Dermond Murder case remained unsolved.<br /></div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com34tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-66017153187373364792024-03-13T06:25:00.000-04:002024-03-13T06:25:19.888-04:00The Elliot Turner Rich Kid Murder Case<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Emily Longley at age 9 moved with her family from England to Auckland, New Zealand. By the time she turned 15, Emily, a tall, blonde her friends called "Barbie," had a history of underage drinking and drug use which included Ecstasy. In 2009 Emily's parents sent her back to England where she took up residence with her grandmother in Southbourne.<br />
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In the fall of 2010 Emily Longley started taking business classes at Brockenhurst College in Hampshire. She lived in the southwestern town of Bournemouth where she worked part time at a fashion outlet called Top Shop. She had also signed on with a modeling agency.<br />
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Emily began dating 19-year-old Elliot Vince Turner, a rich kid who worked in his father's jewelry store in Bournemouth. Turner lived in his family's home in Queen's Park, an affluent Bournemouth neighborhood. In April 2011 Elliot Turner became jealous when he came across Facebook photographs of Emily flirting with another man at a bar. The couple started having heated arguments. The fights became so intense Emily Longley began fearing for her life.<br />
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On May 6, 2011 Elliot Turner talked Emily into spending the night with him at his parent's house. That evening they got into an argument. In the heat of the moment he called her a whore. At 9:45 the next morning, Anita, Elliot's mother called 999. (England's 911)<br />
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Upon arriving at the Bournemouth house paramedics found Emily Longley's lifeless body in Elliot Turner's bed. Questioned by the police he said he had gotten up for work around 9:15, and when he touched Emily's arm it was cold. He then notified his parents that something was wrong.<br />
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The police initially thought Emily had overdosed on drugs but the autopsy revealed otherwise. The forensic pathologist found physical evidence that Emily Longley had been strangled. She had scratches on her arms and traces of Elliot's blood and tissue were under her fingernails. Investigators learned that thirty minutes had passed between the time Elliot said he had gotten up for work and the 999 call. Detectives believed that during this period Elliot's parents, Anita and Leigh Turner, had destroyed and removed physical evidence of the murder.<br />
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During the period May 18 to June 14, 2011, through a court sanctioned electronic surveillance of the Turner home, the police listened in on conversations between Elliot and his parents. At one point Elliot said, "I just flipped. I went absolutely nuts...I just lost it. I grabbed her as hard as I could. I pushed her like that." Detectives also seized a computer from the Turner home that revealed Elliot had Googled "death by strangulation," and "how to get out of being charged for murder." (One way to avoid being charged with murder is not Googling the question.)<br />
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In July 2011 the authorities arrested Elliot Turner and his parents. He faced a charge of murder and his parents were charged with perverting the course of justice (obstruction of justice). When taken into custody Elliot said, "I never meant to harm her, I just defended myself." He and his parents pleaded not guilty to the charges.<br />
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The three defendants went on trial at the Winchester Crown Court in Bournemouth on April 10, 2012. Crown Prosecutor Tim Mousley told the jury of eleven men and one woman that Elliot Turner had strangled Emily Longley in a fit of jealous rage, and that his parents had destroyed evidence to cover up the murder. Friends of the defendant testified that Elliot had joked about killing Emily with a hammer, at one point telling one of the witnesses, "I will go to prison for it, and still be a millionaire when I get out." According to one of these witnesses the defendant had also practiced his strangulation technique on a friend.<br />
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On April 18, 2012 Jasmin Snook, one of Emily's 19-year-old friends, testified that in May 2011 Emily had tried to end the relationship with the defendant. He became "obsessive" and couldn't understand why she was making him look like an idiot. According to the victim's friend, the defendant said he was going to smash Emily's face and didn't care if he had to serve ten years in prison for the assault.<br />
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The following day an ambulance technician testified that Elliot's mother Amita, when she called 999, said that a young female was "going blue" and had suffered "cardiac arrest." However, based on signs of post-mortem lividity (a redness of the skin caused by pooled blood in the body), it appeared that the girl had been dead several hours. (There were also initial signs of rigor mortis.)<br />
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On May 2, 2012 Dr. Huw White, a Home Office forensic pathologist, testified that he had found petechiae hemorrhages in Emily's right eye and in both of her eyelids. These tiny beads of blood suggested strangulation. The doctor also said the alcohol level in the victim's system was well over the drunk driving limit. According to this witness, Emily had a history of brittle bone disease, asthma, bulimia and episodes of self-harm. However, none of these maladies had contributed to her death.<br />
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A police officer who had spoken to the defendant on the morning of the 999 call testified that Elliot Turner told him that Emily had gotten upset when he asked her about her self-harming. According to the defendant, when she started kicking and hitting him he "pushed her on the neck to get her off," and said, "I never meant to harm her. I just defended myself."<br />
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The next day the Crown prosecutor presented Darryl Manners, a forensic scientist who said he found mascara marks, make-up and a pink lipstick stain on a pillowcase taken from Elliot Turner's bedroom. Manners testified that this "face mark" in the pillowcase matched the victim's face and make-up. The expert witness said he had examined the defendant's shirt and found, on its right sleeve, smears similar to samples of foundation taken from the right side of Emily's face.<br />
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Nicholas Oliver, a Crown DNA analyst, found the victim's mucus on the sleeve of the shirt the defendant had been wearing on the night he spent with the victim.<br />
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Prosecutor Mousley played conversations picked up by the electronic surveillance of the Turner family home. In one of the conversations, Leigh Turner, the defendants's 54-year-old father, said, "He strangled her to shut her up, to stop her screaming, making so much noise and then he realized he'd done something terribly wrong, and he should have phoned the ambulance to save her, but he didn't because he was scared...That's what's going on in his mind. He knows he's killed her, not deliberately."<br />
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On May 9, 2012, the defense put on its case which mostly consisted of Elliot Turner taking the stand on his own behalf. He was asked by his barrister, Anthony Donne, how many times he had told Emily Longley he would kill her. The defendant said 10 to 15 times, but he never really meant it.<br />
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After three days of the defendant's direct testimony, the witness was turned over to prosecutor Mousley for cross-examination. When Mousley asked Turner if he was in any way responsible for Emily Longley's death, he replied, "No, I do not believe so."<br />
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"So the girl you adored died mysteriously?"<br />
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"I don't know. I'm not a psychic."<br />
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"Have you shown any remorse at all for her death? I'm talking about a basic human instinct. What remorse have you shown?"<br />
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"I feel sad," answered the defendant.<br />
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On May 15, 2012 the defense put the defendant's father Leigh Turner on the stand. In defending his son, Mr. Turner said, "He does not get angry. He's a gentle clown, a stupid clown." According to the witness, as the ambulance was en route to the house, Elliot told him he had packed a suitcase for Spain. Mr. Turner had said, "Don't be silly, you haven't done anything."<br />
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Following the testimony phase of the Turner trial, Timothy Mousely, in summing up the prosecution's case, said, "We submit the defendant is remorseless, controlling, possessive, and vicious, and that he murdered her."<br />
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In his summation to the jury Anthony Donne described his client as a "loudmouth" and "hot air merchant" who was "all talk, no action." The defense attorney also reminded jurors that the Home Office forensic pathologist, Dr. Huw White, had admitted on cross-examination that it was possible that Emily Longley had died a natural death.<br />
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On May 21, 2012 the jury found Elliot Turner guilty of murder and his parents guilty of trying to cover it up. A month later the judge sentenced Turner to sixteen years to life. Turner's parents were each sentenced to 27 months behind bars.<br />
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In May 2013 three appellate judges ruled that Elliott Turner had been convicted on overwhelming evidence in a "fair and proper trial." </div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-39694519503263783982024-03-12T06:15:00.000-04:002024-03-12T06:17:29.472-04:00The Whitney Heichel Kidnap Murder Case<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Whitney Heichel, at 6:45 in the morning of Tuesday, October 16, 2012, walked out of her Gresham, Oregon apartment with the intent of driving her 1999 Ford Explorer to her nearby job at Starbucks. That day she had to attend an early morning employee meeting. Instead of reporting to work she was seen two and a half hours later sitting in the passenger's side of her SUV at a service station in Troutdale, Oregon. (The man behind the wheel had used Heichel's ATM card to purchase gas.)<br />
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A Starbucks employee called Heichel's apartment when she didn't show for work. Whitney's husband Clinton, at 9:56 that morning, called 911 and reported his 5-foot-2, 120 pound wife missing. Ninety minutes later police officers found Heichel's vehicle in the parking lot of the Walmart store in Wood Village. The front passenger's side window had been broken out. The next day children found the missing woman's cellphone in the brush between the service station and the abandoned SUV.<br />
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Detectives began questioning residents of Heichel's apartment complex. They spoke to a 25-year-old acquaintance and neighbor named Jonathan Holt. The investigators grew suspicious when Holt's account of himself on the morning in question contained glaring inconsistencies. Detectives grilled Holt on Wednesday the 17th, and when they interrogated him again the next day he confessed. The police also recovered the 9 mm pistol Holt used to murder the victim. <br />
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On the morning of October 16, 2012 Mr. Holt waited outside the apartment complex for Whitney Heichel. When she came out of her apartment he asked her for a lift. Holt had been in Heichel's SUV about five minutes when he pulled a gun and told her to drive to an area near Roslyn Lake. At the lake Holt forced Heichel at gunpoint to give him oral sex. He then shot her to death.<br />
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After murdering Whitney Heichel Jonathan Holt drove the body to Larch Mountain, a 40 minute drive up winding roads from the apartment complex. After hiding her corpse in the underbrush he drove to the Walmart parking lot where he abandoned the vehicle. (Holt had either broken the passenger's side window to throw off the police or it had been blown out by a bullet when he shot her.)<br />
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Twelve hours after Whitney Heichel didn't show up for work at Starbuck's a pair of Holt's friends spotted Holt walking along 257th Avenue in Gresham. When they offered him a ride he refused, saying, "I just need to finish clearing my head." A short time later Mr. Holt's friends tracked him down and asked him again to get into the car. After accepting the lift he told his friends a strange story. He said that on his way to work that morning at a Swan Island vending company two black men robbed him at gunpoint. Holt later admitted to detectives that this story was untrue. After confessing to Whitney Heichel's murder he admitting to downloading child pornography onto his laptop computer.<br />
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According to Holt's wife Amanda, her husband felt like a failure and this had let "so many things build up. I think he just loses it." <br />
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On Friday, October 19, 2012 police officers found Whitney Heichel's body in a remote spot in the woods on Larch Mountain. Besides the confession detectives linked the suspect to Whitney Heichel's murder through his fingerprints and other physical evidence that crime scene investigators recovered from her SUV.<br />
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According to medical examiner Dr. Christopher Young, Whitney Heichel had been shot four times. On Monday, October 22, 2012 Jonathan Holt, at his arraignment hearing in a Clackamas County court, was charged with aggravated murder. The judge denied him bail. His trial was set for April 2013. <br />
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Jonathan Holt in July 2013, pleaded guilty to the kidnapping, sexual assault and murder of his neighbor. The judge sentenced him to life without the possibility of parole. </div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-26285501566992905722024-03-11T06:25:00.000-04:002024-03-11T06:29:37.191-04:00The Pallavi Dhawan Double Murder-Suicide Case<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Sumeet and Pallavi Dhawan, before becoming naturalized U.S. citizens were married by arrangement in their native home country, India. In 2014 the couple and their 10-year-old son Arnav resided in Frisco, a suburban community north of Dallas, Texas. A computer programmer, Sumeet spent a lot of his time away from home. Mrs. Dhawan had worked in the computer field as well but quit her job to care full time for their special-needs son.<br />
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Arnav, a fifth grade student at Isbell Elementary School was born with a brain cyst and microcephaly, a condition characterized by a smaller than normal head. Pallavi often found herself alone in the house caring for the boy during her husband's extended absences. She found herself coping with mental problems and a marriage that was falling apart.<br />
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On Wednesday, January 29, 2014, Sumeet, while on a three-week business trip received an email from Arnav's school informing him the boy had been absent from class for several days. At 4:30 PM that afternoon, as he was about to arrive home, Sumeet called Pallavi who said she was just leaving the house to pick up Arnav at his after-school tutoring center.<br />
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At 6:30 PM that evening, when Pallavi and the boy had yet to arrive home from the school, Sumeet, concerned about their welfare called the police.<br />
<br /> While police officers were questioning Mr. Dhawan, Pallavi returned home without the boy. An officer asked her about Arnav. Where was he? Instead of answering the officer, Pallavi asked if she could speak to her husband privately. The officers backed away.<br />
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Sumeet became visibly upset when Pallavi, referring to their son, said: "He is no more." The distraught father informed the officers that Arnav was in the locked bathroom.<br />
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Inside the dry bathtub officers found the dead boy wrapped to his neck in a cloth. His body was surrounded by several empty plastic bags.<br />
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The day after the discovery of the dead child the Collin County medical examiner, without issuing a statement regarding the specific cause of death, ruled the case a homicide. The cause of death was withheld pending the results of toxicological tests. According to the forensic pathologist the boy had been dead for two days.<br />
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On Thursday, January 30, 2014, police officers booked Pallavi Dhawan into the Frisco City Jail on the charge of capital murder. Before officers had entered the bathroom to check on the boy one of them asked Pallavi if she had killed her son. She responded by nodding her head in the affirmative. When asked if the body was in the bathroom she also nodded her head yes.<br />
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On Friday, January 31, 2014, just after midnight, Pallavi's attorney David Finn posted her $50,000 bail. Later that day in speaking to reporters the Dallas based defense attorney insisted that his client, when she nodded her head in the affirmative, had responded to the question regarding her son's whereabouts, not to the question about whether she had killed him. The police simply misunderstood and misinterpreted what they saw.<br />
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Pointing out that the boy's body showed no signs of physical trauma and that his lungs did not contain water, defense attorney Finn announced that he would ask Dr. Nizam Peerwani, the Fort Worth based chief medical examiner of Tarrant County to conduct his own postmortem inquiry.<br />
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Attorney Finn said that his client had doted on her son, a happy fun-loving kid. He also claimed that Sumeet Dhawan did not believe his wife had killed their son and that he stood by her. A reporter asked the attorney why the mother didn't notify the authorities immediately after her son's death. "That's the million-dollar question," Mr. Finn replied. Pallavi, he speculated, was probably in a state of shock after Arnav's death. She may have been waiting for her husband to come home.<br />
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In August 2014 Pallavi and Sumeet Dhawan testified before a Collin County Grand Jury looking into the death of their son. In January 2014 the couple petitioned the authorities to return their car, fax machine and passports, items seized pursuant to the investigation of Arnav's death. The Dhawans had been forced to rent a car and needed their passports to travel back to India.<br />
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On September 3, 2014 police officers arrived at the Dhawan residence at three in the afternoon in response to a 911 call regarding a body floating in the home swimming pool. Inside the house, lying on a bed, searchers discovered a man's body. The dead adults were presumed to be Pallavi and Sumeet Dhawan.<br />
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The medical examiner, on September 6, 2014, confirmed the identities of the deceased couple. Sumeet had suffered blunt force trauma to his head. One of his hands had been fractured, probably as he raised that hand in defense.<br />
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In October 2014 a spokesperson for the Collin County Medical Examiner's Office announced that Pallavi Dhawan had killed herself. She had drowned under the influence of the common antihistamine diphenhydramine. Sumeet Dhawan, according to the medical examiner's office, had been murdered by his wife. He had died from a combination of blunt force head injures and a toxic dose of several over-the-counter medications.<br /></div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-7268951937605300092024-03-10T06:25:00.000-04:002024-03-10T06:29:24.663-04:00Ed Buck: How Sex, Drugs and Murder Brought Down a Major Political Donor <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
In the mid-1970s, 21-year-old Ed Buck left his home state of Arizona for Europe where he began his career as a fashion model. After returning to the U.S. in 1980 he bought a courier company that turned him into a millionaire.<br />
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In 2007 Ed Buck, while residing in West Hollywood, California, became a prominent donor to democrat politicians like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. About this time the high profile political activist in the LGBTQ community ran for city council and lost. He continued, however, to line the pockets of his favorite democrat politicians.<br />
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On July 27, 2017 police were called to Ed Buck's West Hollywood apartment in the 1200 block of Laurel Avenue. The officers found, lying dead on a mattress in the 63-year-old's living room, a 26-year-old black escort named Gemmel Moore. The apartment was littered with 24 hypodermic needles, five meth pipes and a variety of sex toys. A gay porn video was playing on the television.<br />
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The forensic pathologist who conducted Mr. Moore's autopsy found that he had died from crystal methamphetamine. The Los Angeles County Coroner ruled that Gemmel Moore's death had been an accident caused by a self-administered overdose. As a result Ed Buck was not investigated to determine what role he may have played in Mr. Moore's death, or if he was operating some kind of drug den for gay homeless men.<br />
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Gemmel Moore's mother LaTisha Nixon, as well as others, voiced their outrage over the Los Angeles coroner's accidental death finding. The district attorney's office, aware of writings in Gemmel Moore's journal detailing how Ed Buck had injected him and other gay men with methamphetamine in order to facilitate Buck's sexual fetishes, apparently ignored this evidence in deciding not to authorize an investigation. One of Buck's sexual fetishes involved photographing men wearing tight underwear.<br />
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LaTisha Nixon accused the Los Angeles District Attorneys Office and the county coroner of protecting the wealthy political donor. By some accounts Ed Buck had given the Hillary Clinton campaign $500,000. He had also given large sums to Barack Obama.<br />
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On January 12, 2019 the police were again summoned to Ed Buck's West Hollywood apartment. This time they found 55-year-old Timothy Dean dead from a methamphetamine overdose.<br />
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Mr. Dean, a six-foot-five black man, had worked at Bloomingdale's and SAKS Fifth Avenue in Los Angeles as a fashion consultant. He had also worked on and off as an actor in gay adult films. As a younger man Timothy Dean had been active in the Lambada (gay) Basketball League. He had once participated in the Gay Games in Paris, France. At age 52 Mr. Dean had earned an associates degree from Santa Monica Community College.<br />
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According to Mr. Dean's family and friends, it had been years since he had used drugs. Nevertheless, as in the Gemmel Moore case, the Los Angeles Coroner ruled his death accidental due to a self-administered methamphetamine overdose. Once again, in the face of evidence to the contrary, the Los Angeles District Attorney's office decided not to file criminal charges against Ed Buck. This decision outraged Timothy Dean's family and friends who considered him a victim of sexual foul play.<br />
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In February 2019 LaTisha Nixon, emboldened by the second overdose fatality in Ed Buck's apartment, filed a wrongful death suit against the wealthy political donor. The plaintiff alleged that Mr. Buck was a drug dealer who had injected her son with a fatal dose of crystal meth. According to Jasmyne Cannick, a political consultant and spokesperson for the Nixon family, Ed Buck had received special treatment from the prosecutor's office because of his political connections and wealth. This was a view shared by many in Los Angeles's gay community.<br />
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In June 2019 Ed Buck met a black, 37-year-old homeless man later referred to in court documents as "Joe Doe." Following a brief exchange on Adam4Adam, a web site designed for men to meet other men "for friendship, romance, or a hot hookup," Buck drove to LA's skid row, picked up the homeless man and brought him back to his apartment in West Hollywood.<br />
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In Buck's apartment, before he had sex with Joe Doe, Buck injected him with crystal methamphetamine. Ed Buck injected this victim every day up to September 4, 2019. On that day, when Joe Doe left the apartment, he sought medical help on the belief that Ed Buck had overdosed him.<br />
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A week after receiving medical treatment for the overdose, Joe Doe returned to Ed Buck's apartment. On that occasion Mr. Buck injected him with a double dose of meth. Thinking that he might die from that shot, the homeless man asked Buck to call an ambulance. When Buck refused Joe Doe asked for a Klonopin pill, medication for seizure disorders and panic attacks. Ed Buck refused that request, and when the heavily drugged man tried to leave the apartment Ed Buck tried to stop him.<br />
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Notwithstanding Ed Buck's efforts to restrain him Joe Doe managed to escape from the apartment that day. At a nearby gas station he asked a passerby to call 911 on his behalf. As he was being treated at a local hospital, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputies responded to Ed Buck's apartment. It was there officers discovered, in addition to drug paraphernalia, hundreds of photographs of men in tight underwear in various sexual poses.<br />
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On September 17, 2019 officers booked Ed Buck into the Los Angeles County Jail on one count each of battery causing serious injury, the administering of methamphetamine and maintaining a drug house. If convicted of all three counts the suspect faced no more than five years, eight months in state prison. The prosecutor in charge of the case asked the judge to set Ed Buck's bail at $4 million.<br />
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At a press conference the Los Angeles District Attorney told reporters that Ed Buck used drugs to lure gay men to his apartment where he manipulated them into participating in his sexual fetishes. The D.A. painted Mr. Buck as a depraved, hedonistic sexual predator.<br />
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Two days after Ed Buck's arrest on the Joe Doe related charges the United States Attorney in Los Angeles, in connection with the July 27, 2017 death of Gemmel Moore and the January 12, 2019 death of Timmothy Dean, charged the suspect with the federal offense of drug distribution resulting in death. This offense carried a maximum sentence of life in prison.<br />
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The United States Attorney, in speaking to reporters, said FBI agents had identified nine more gay men Ed Buck had lured to his apartment for the purpose of injecting them with methamphetamine.<br />
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Gemmel Moore's mother LaTisha Nixon praised the United States Attorney who, unlike the Los Angeles Coroner, didn't believe that Mr. Moore had injected himself with the deadly dose of methamphetamine. Others who had been seeking justice for Gemmel Moore and Timothy Dean were also pleased with the federal charge against Ed Buck.</div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> On July 27, 2021, following a two-week trial in a Los Angeles federal courtroom, the jury found 66-year-old Ed Buck guilty of killing Gemmel Moore and Timothy Dean by injecting them with crystal meth and the date rape drug GHB during "party and play" encounters held in Buck's West Hollywood apartment. </div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> During the trial Ed Buck's attorneys portrayed the defendant's accusers as untrustworthy drug addicts and male prostitutes who sold themselves for drugs.</div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> The federal district judge sentenced Ed Buck to life in prison. When the sentence was handed down spectators in the room cheered loudly.</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-28667975048809271502024-03-09T06:30:00.000-05:002024-03-09T06:34:00.281-05:00Audrey and Edward Cramer: Victims of a Bungled Marijuana Raid<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Although they didn't know it, the nightmare for Audrey and Edward Cramer began in September 2017 when a tree in their neighbor's yard came down. The couple resided in Buffalo Township, a Butler County, Pennsylvania community about 35 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. Edward Cramer was 69 and his wife Audrey 66. They had never been in trouble with the law or had any experience with the police. They were good law abiding citizens, the kind of people who trusted and supported law enforcement.<br />
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On October 5, 2017 Jonathan Yeamans with the Nationwide Mutual Insurance company came to investigate the neighbor's fallen tree claim. In so doing he saw in the Cramer backyard what he believed to be budding marijuana plants. In reality the insurance adjuster was looking at Hibiscus plants. Thinking that he had stumbled upon a marijuana pot growing operation Mr. Yeamans surreptitiously took photographs of the plants and turned them over to the Buffalo Township Police Department.<br />
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Armed with the photographs of the Cramer Hibiscus plants, Buffalo Township police officer Jeffrey Sneddon acquired a warrant to search the Cramer house and property for evidence of marijuana. Apparently officer Sneddon didn't visit the neighbor's house to look at the Cramer plants himself. If he did, he had no experience in drug investigation and no business obtaining a warrant to search someone's dwelling for drugs.<br />
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At noon on October 7, 2017 a drug raiding squad made up of twelve officers armed with assault rifles, showed up at the Cramer house. Audrey Cramer was home alone on the second floor in her underwear and bare feet. Without getting dressed she responded to loud knocking on her door and the voice of a man identifying himself as the police.<br />
<br />
When Audrey Cramer, who had absolutely no reason to expect a SWAT team on her front porch, opened the door she encountered twelve assault rifles pointed at her head. If she had panicked and made what police officers interpret as a furtive move she could have been shot dead.<br />
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Sergeant Scott Hess, the leader of the raiding party, ordered Audrey Cramer to put her hands in the air. "I have a search warrant," he said. The stunned Mrs. Cramer asked if she could see the warrant. Instead of showing her the document Sergeant Hess ordered the partially clothed resident to wait on her front porch while he searched the second floor of her house. When he returned ten minutes later Sergeant Hess placed Mrs. Cramer under arrest, advised her of her <i>Miranda </i>rights and handcuffed her behind her back.<br />
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After being denied the chance to put on a pair of pants and shoes, an officer marched the handcuffed women, in her underwear and no shoes, down her gravel driveway to a police car.<br />
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As the drug raiders ransacked the Cramer house looking for marijuana, Mrs. Cramer, on a 82 degree day, sat in the hot patrol car. When she asked an officer what was going on he told her they were looking for marijuana.<br />
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Mrs. Cramer had been sitting in the hot patrol car two hours when her husband Edward returned home. Officers, with assault rifles pointed at his head, pulled Mr. Cramer out of his car, placed him into handcuffs and sat him in the police car with his handcuffed, partially clad wife. At this point it was impossible to image what was going on in the minds of these helpless, confused and innocent people.<br />
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When under arrest in the police car Mr. Cramer repeatedly asked for the chance to show the officers that what they though was marijuana was really flowering hibiscus plants. His offer fell on deaf ears.<br />
<br />
Four and a half hours after the police stormed the Cramer home looking for marijuana the Cramers were un-handcuffed and removed from the police car. They were told they would not be charged with any crime. The officers had seized the hibiscus plants even though Sergeant Hess acknowledged they were not marijuana. He labeled the fruits of the bungled raid as "tall, green, leafy <i>suspected</i> marijuana plants." Following this mind-boggling fiasco the police left the scene as abruptly as they had arrived, and without an apology.<br />
<br />
On October 26, 2017, Mr. and Mrs. Cramer received a letter from Nationwide Insurance informing them that marijuana had been found on their property, and if they didn't remove it, they would lose their insurance policy.<br />
<br />
Attorney Al Lindsay, on behalf of the Cramers, filed a lawsuit against the Buffalo Township Police and the Nationwide Insurance company. The suit charged the police with excessive force, false arrest, false imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional stress and invasion of privacy. The plaintiffs asked for monetary and compensatory damages.<br />
<br />
On November 19, 2017, Audrey and Edward Cramer gave an interview to a reporter with a Pittsburgh television station. Mrs. Cramer said, "I was not treated as a human being. I was just something they were going to push aside. I asked them if I could put pants on and he [Sergeant Hess] told me no and I had to stand out on the porch." Regarding how the experience had affected her, she said, "I don't sleep at night and you don't leave me at the house by myself."<br />
<br />
Edward Cramer had this to say about the horribly bungled raid: "Sometimes I think they [the police] look for a crime where it doesn't exist in order to justify their existence."<br /></div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> In June 2018 the defendants in the Cramer lawsuits settled with the couple for an undisclosed amount.</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-57790894027340397322024-03-08T06:20:00.000-05:002024-03-08T06:24:45.637-05:00Raiding the Wrong House, Killing the Wrong Man <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> <br />
Eugene Mallory, a retired engineer who had worked for Lockheed Martin forty years resided in an unincorporated community east of Palmdale, California called Littlerock. The 80-year-old shared a home with his 48-year-old wife, Tonya Pate and her grown son.<br />
<br />
Drug enforcement deputies with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's office arrived at the Mallory house at 7:30 on the morning of June 25, 2013. The officers were in possession of a search warrant authorizing them to search the house for methamphetamine and the chemicals used to manufacturer the drug. The probable cause underlying the search was flimsy at best. Officers, from outside the house, claimed to have smelled the odor of the ingredients used to produce meth. The narcotic officers had not orchestrated an undercover buy or had an informant purchase meth in the Mallory house. Moreover, the suspected meth factory hadn't been subjected to a prolonged drug surveillance. All the police had to go on was the smell of meth chemicals. The magistrate should not have authorized a raid on such flimsy evidence. <br />
<br />
After forcing their way into the dwelling without notice, deputies encountered Mr. Mallory in a bedroom at the rear of the house. It was there they shot him six times as he lay in his own bed. Officers justified the lethal force by claiming that the old man had pointed a semi-automatic handgun at them.<br />
<br />
As it turned out, the Mallory dwelling did not contain meth or any evidence that the drug was being manufactured in the home. Deputies did come across a quantity of marijuana in Mrs. Pate's son's bedroom.<br />
<br />
In speaking to the media about the fatal wrong house raid, Los Angeles County spokesperson Steve Whitmore said this: "There was a drug operation that was certainly going on in this house." <br />
<br />
On October 10, 2013 James Bergener, the attorney representing Mrs. Tonya Pate, announced that he had filed on her behalf a $50 million wrongful death suit against Los Angeles County. <br />
<br />
In January 2016 Los Angles County settled the Tonya Pate suit by paying the plaintiff $1.6 million. The officer who killed Mr. Mallory was not charged or even disciplined.</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-37573948334097556512024-03-07T06:15:00.002-05:002024-03-07T06:22:36.391-05:00Rape in India: A Nightmare For Women and Girls<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Because of India's history of infanticide, child marriage, slavery and rape, it was one of the worst places in the world to be a female. Girls and woman who had been raped were routinely blamed for their victimization and discouraged from reporting the assaults to the police. If they did the victims and their families were subjected to public ridicule and humiliation.<br />
<br />
Police officers in this male-dominated society often refused to accept rape complaints. And when they did register rape complaints the crimes weren't professionally investigated. In those occasional instances where rape cases were taken seriously, crime lab delays slowed down the process of identifying the rapists. In India's Forensic Science Laboratory in Rohini, it took 75 days for a DNA report to come back to the investigating officer. These delays were caused by a work backlog caused by a serious shortage of qualified lab personnel. In the rare instance of an Indian rape prosecution the case would drag on for years, and almost always ended with an acquittal. In India rape was treated as a victimless crime.<br />
<br />
Among India's major cities, New Delhi the nation's capital and home to 16 million people, had the country's highest number of reported rapes. Because such a small percentage of these assaults were reported crime statistics did not come close to reflecting India's extremely high sex crime rate. If just half of India's rapes were reported and investigated the nation's crime lab system, unable to cope with the workload, would completely break down. <br />
<br />
On the evening of December 16, 2012, in New Delhi, a 28-year-old software engineer and his 23-year-old female companion boarded a city bus after attending a movie. The woman, from an urban middle-class family, had recently qualified as a trainee physiotherapist in a private New Delhi hospital. The bus driver and five men from the city's slums were the only other people on the bus. The passengers began taunting the woman's friend, then knocked him unconscious with an iron rod. Five of the men then beat and gang-raped the woman. At some point the bus driver turned the wheel over to one of the rapists, walked to the back of the bus and had sex with the beaten and bloodied woman. Before the one-hour ordeal came to an end one of the attackers inserted the iron rod into the female victim's body. The men undressed both victims and threw their nude bodies off the moving bus. <br />
<br />
The unidentified woman was taken to the Safdarjung Hospital in New Delhi with serious brain trauma and severe injuries to her intestines and abdomen. The police, with the help of the rape victim's friend, quickly identified the bus driver and the five other rapists. Shortly after the suspects were taken into custody, the men confessed, telling the police they had tortured and raped the woman "to teach her a lesson." <br />
<br />
On December 26, 2012, following three operations and a heart attack, the authorities flew the victim to Mount Elizabeth's Hospital in Singapore.<br />
<br />
This brutal beating and gang rape on a city bus (operated by a private company) sent thousands of protesters into the streets in several Indian cities. The irate protestors demonstrated against the government's lax attitude toward crimes against women. In New Delhi demonstrators clashed with riot police.<br />
<br />
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, facing serious civil unrest, promised police and legislative reforms. But the public demonstrations continued throughout the country, growing in strength daily.<br />
<br />
On December 29, 2012 at 4:45 in the morning the female victim of the brutal bus attack died in the Singapore hospital. Her body was flown back to India for cremation. The rape victim's cause of death was listed as brain injury complicated by a lung infection.</div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><br />
The fact that Ban Ki-moon, the head of the United Nations voiced "deep sorrow" over this young woman's ordeal and death revealed how this case focused international attention on India's rape culture.<br />
<br />
On the day following the 23-year-old's passing, a human rights organization called on the Indian government to ban the so-called "finger test," a medical procedure routinely given to rape victims. This unscientific and irrelevant measure involved testing the laxity of a rape victim's vagina to determine if she had been "habitual to sexual intercourse." The obvious purpose of this procedure was to humiliate victims and to discourage victims from reporting their rapes.<br />
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Amid the women's rights protests a legislator from the state of Rajasthan, in proposing his own rape prevention measure, suggested replacing girls' school uniform skirts with pants. While many ridiculed this politician and his idea, it reflected how most men in India blamed rape on the rape victim . <br />
<br />
City politicians in New Delhi, facing a wave of public anger, tendered the rape victim's family monetary compensation. Officials also offered one of the victim's unemployed relatives a government job.<br />
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On January 3, 2013 five of the suspects were charged with, among other crimes, rape, kidnapping, and murder. The defendants were Ram Singh, the 33-year-old bus driver; his brother Mukesh, 26 who cleaned buses for the company; Pavan Gupta, 19, a fruit vendor; Akshay Singh, 24, a bus washer; and Vinay Sharma, 20, a fitness trainer. The sixth suspect was a juvenile. He was not charged.<br />
<br />
The male friend assaulted by the men on the bus, in his first public statement about the case, said that he and his friend were lying nude and bleeding on the street for an hour while pedestrians passed by without stopping to help them.<br />
<br />
On January 6, 2013 a popular Indian spiritual guru who called himself Godman Asharam, in a video circulated in the Internet, said, "This tragedy would not have happened if she [the murder victim] had chanted God's name and fallen at the feet of the attackers. The <i>error (</i>italics mine) was not committed by just one side."<br />
<br />
A defense attorney representing three of the accused rapist/murderers announced on January 9, 2013 that his clients would plead not guilty. The attorney also claimed that the suspects were beaten by the police.<br />
<br />
On March 11, 2013 one of the men in custody for the New Delhi bus rape was found dead in his cell. Police say Ram Singh hanged himself. The suspect's father claimed that he had been murdered.<br />
<br />
On September 10, 2013 the adult defendants were found guilty of rape, murder and kidnapping. The guilty men faced the sentence of death by hanging. In May 2017, following numerous appeals, the Supreme Court of India upheld their death sentences.<br />
<br />
On the night of March 15, 2013, in the wake of the gang rape on the New Delhi bus, another Indian rape case grabbed international attention. On Friday night, March 15, 2013, a Swiss couple on a three-month vacation were camped out in the forest 400 yards off a road near the town of Datia in the state of Madhya Pradesh. The couple had ridden their bicycles to the spot from the temple town of Orchha. In the morning they planned to bicycle to the city of Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal.<br />
<br />
The Swiss woman and her male companion, that Friday night in the Indian woods, were set upon by seven men. The intruders beat them, tied the man to a tree then gang raped the woman. After committing the assaults the rapists stole the tourists' cellphone, laptop computer and their money. The rape victim was treated for her injuries at a hospital in the nearby city of Gwalior.<br />
<br />
Two days after the gang rape of the Swiss woman the police in Datia arrested six men suspected of the assault. The next day the suspects were charged with rape, assault and theft. All of the men were poor farmers from villages near the scene of the attack.<br />
<br />
On January 14, 2014, a 51-year-old Danish woman vacationing in New Delhi's most popular tourist spot in the Paharganj District was gang raped after asking a group of local men for directions to her hotel. A few days later New Delhi police officers arrested two suspects.<br />
<br />
On December 5, 2019 a 23-year-old woman who, in March 2019, had filed rape charges against two men, was set on fire as she walked to a hearing on the case. The next day she died in a New Delhi hospital. The police quickly arrested the two men who had burned 90 percent of her body.<br />
<br />
On the day the New Delhi rape victim died from her burns police officers in Hyderabad, India shot and killed four suspected rapists in an unrelated case. While civil rights activists protested the killings as police vigilantism, the women as well as many men in the community, celebrated the rapists' deaths.<br />
<br /> After the December 2012 gang rape and murder of the young woman on the New Delhi bus, rape was viewed as a prominent criminal problem in India. Although the 2012 case focused attention on the issue, sexual violence against women in India did not abate.<br />
<br />
In 2012, 25,000 rape cases were reported to the Indian authorities. In 2016 there were 33,658 reported cases of rape, an average of 92 a day. In 2017 the number of reported rapes dropped slightly to 32,559. In 2018 the Indian government announced the addition of 1,000 fast-track courts to deal with the rape backlog. But there were too many rapists in the country. In 2019, with national court backlog of 127,800 cases, justice still came slow for Indian rape victims if it came at all. </div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> On March 4, 2024 police officers in eastern India arrested three men for the gang rape of a Brazilian tourist and the assault of her husband.</div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> India is still not a safe place for women and girls.</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-38403507973460863792024-03-06T06:20:00.000-05:002024-03-06T06:28:21.781-05:00The Roberto Roman Case: To Kill a Cop<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Just after midnight on January 5, 2010, Deputy Josie Fox of the Millard County Sheriff's Office and her partner were watching from a distance a suspicious car and a pickup truck parked along the road near the tiny central Utah town of Delta. There had recently been a series of burglaries which had drawn the officers to the area. When the two suspicious vehicles departed the scene in opposite directions Deputy Fox followed the 1995 Cadillac DeVille. The officers knew the identity of the man in the other vehicle, the pickup truck. He was a known drug user named Ryan Greathouse who also happened to be Deputy Fox's brother.<br />
<br />
After Deputy Fox called in the license number of the Cadillac, registered to 38-year-old Roberto Miramontes Roman, the police dispatcher forwarded instructions to have the vehicle pulled over. A few minutes later Deputy Fox radioed that she had pulled over Roman and was exiting the patrol car.<br />
<br />
Deputy Fox did not transmit further messages and was not responding to calls from the dispatcher. Concerned that the deputy's encounter with the driver of the Cadillac had resulted in her injury or death, Millard County Sergeant Rhett Kimball proceeded to the site of the stop to investigate. When the deputy rolled up to the scene he saw Fox's patrol car lights flashing and the deputy lying on the road in a pool of blood. The 37-year-old police officer had been killed by two bullets fired at close range into her chest. (The bullets must have pierced her bullet-proof vest.) Roberto Roman and his 1995 Cadillac were gone.<br />
<br />
After fleeing the scene en route to Salt Lake City Roberto Roman got stuck in a snowbank near Nephi, Utah. He called his friend, 35-year-old Ruben Chavez-Reyes, for help. Chavez-Reyes pulled the Cadillac out of the snowbank and from there the two men continued on to Salt Lake City. Along the way Roman tossed the murder weapon, an AK-47 assault rifle, out of the car. When the two men arrived at their destination, Roberto Roman switched license plates with Chavez-Reyes. (He did not, however, clean traces of Deputy Fox's blood off his Cadillac.) Later that morning Mr. Roman told his friend that he had "broke a cop," meaning that he had killed a police officer.<br />
<br />
Deputy Fox's partner questioned Ryan Greathouse at his home. The murdered deputy's brother said he had purchased drugs from the man in the Cadillac, a dealer he knew as "Rob." Greathouse gave the deputy Rob's phone number which identified this man as Roberto Roman. The deputy then informed Greathouse that Roman had shot and killed his sister with an AK-47 assault rifle.<br />
<br />
The next day Millard County deputies arrested Roberto Roman whom they found hiding in a shed in Beaver, Utah. Once in custody Mr. Roman provided the officers with a full confession. The suspect told his interrogators that when the patrol officer pulled him over outside of Delta he was angry because he was being careful not to speed or cross over the center line. Furious that the cop was pulling him over simply because he was "Mexican" he shot her twice with his assault rifle. He did not know he had murdered the sister of the man who had just purchased meth from him.<br />
<br />
The Millard County prosecutor charged Roberto Roman with aggravated first-degree murder as well as with lesser weapons and evidence tampering offenses. If convicted of murdering a police officer, under Utah law, Roberto Roman faced the death penalty.<br />
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In April 2010, more than four months after the shooting death of his sister, Ryan Greathouse was found dead from a meth overdose in the bedroom of a Las Vegas apartment.<br />
<br />
In 2011 Judge Donald Eyre presided over a two-day hearing to determine if Robert Roman would qualify for the death penalty. The judge, after listening to the testimony of psychologists, ruled that the defendant was "mentally retarded" and as such, ineligible under Utah law for execution. This ruling disappointed and mystified a lot of people. (Most cop killers are either high on drugs and/or stupid. Since intoxication and mental dullness are not criminal defenses, people who are not bright should not be spared execution. Moreover, courthouse psychologists think all criminals are stupid and should therefore be treated differently from their more intelligent counterparts.) <br />
<br />
The Roberto Roman murder trial got underway on August 13, 2012 in the Fourth District Court in Spanish Fork, Utah. After the prosecution rested its case in four days the defendant took the stand on his own behalf. Rather than admitting his guilt as he had in his police confession, Roberto Roman offered the jurors a completely different story, one that was both self-serving and implausible.<br />
<br />
On the night of Deputy Fox's death the defendant and the officer's brother Ryan Greathouse were riding around in Roman's Cadillac smoking meth. When Deputy Fox pulled the car over outside Delta, Ryan, who was crouched down in the vehicle, grabbed the AK-47 and shot Fox in the chest, unaware he had just murdered his sister. After the shooting, the two men went their separate ways. The beauty of this story involved the fact Ryan Greathouse was not in position to contest the defendant's version of the murder.<br />
<br />
Prosecutor Pat Finlinson, in his closing summation, reminded the jurors of the physical evidence that supported the prosecution's theory of the case. The victim's bullet wounds indicated that the AK-47 had been fired at an angle consistent with being discharged by the driver of the Cadillac. Moreover, the defendant's fingerprints, not Ryan Greathouse's, were on the assault rifle.<br />
<br />
On August 20, 2012, a week after the Roberto Roman trial began, the jury, after deliberating eight hours, found the defendant <i>not</i> guilty of the aggravated first-degree murder of Deputy Josie Fox. The jurors, in defending their unpopular verdict said that without Roman's confession they didn't have enough evidence to find him guilty.<br />
<br />
Roberto Roman became the first Utah defendant charged with the murder of a police officer to be acquitted since 1973. The jury did find him guilty of the lesser offenses pertaining to the assault rifle and the evidence tampering. On October 24, 2012 the judge sentenced Roman to the ten year maximum sentence for those crimes.<br />
<br />
The not guilty verdict in the Roberto Roman murder trial shocked and angered the law enforcement community, friends and relatives of the slain police officer and a majority of citizens familiar with the case. Had Ryan Greathouse not died between the time of the shooting and Roman's trial this case may have had a different ending. For a stupid person, Roberto Roman had done a good job of beating a strong circumstantial case.<br />
<br />
In May 2013, David Barlow, the United States Attorney for the District of Utah, announced that a federal grand jury had returned an 11-count indictment against Roberto Roman for, among other crimes, the murder of Deputy Josie Fox. U.S. Attorney Barlow said, "The fact that Mr Roman had already been tried before a state court had no influence or affect on the federal murder charge [arising out of the same conduct]." In other words, according to this federal prosecutor, the Fifth Amendment protection against double jeopardy didn't apply in this case.<br />
<br />
The new federal charges against Roman, in addition to murder, included, among other offenses, drug trafficking and illegally firing a gun in the death of a police officer. If convicted as charged, Roman faced a maximum sentence of life in prison.<br />
<br />
In May 2014, Roman's attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the federal indictments on grounds their client should not have to stand trial for a federal murder charge related to the same crime. Attorney Jeremy Delicino said, "In layman's terms, the United States seeks a second chance to rectify what it believes the jury got wrong the first time. In blunt colloquial terms, the United States seeks a do-over."<br />
<br />
In response to the defense motion to dismiss the indictments, lawyers for the prosecution asserted that the U.S. Supreme Court has held that federal and state governments can prosecute a person for separate crimes based upon the same conduct.<br />
<br />
On September 30, 2014, U.S. District Court Judge David Nuffen ruled that prosecuting Roberto Roman for federal offenses related to the police officer's murder did not constitute double jeopardy. The federal case could therefore go forward.<br />
<br />
On February 6, 2017, a jury sitting in a Salt Lake City courtroom found Roberto Roman guilty of eight federal charges that included the murder of Deputy Fox. U.S. District Court Judge David Nuffen, in April 2017, sentenced Roman to life in prison plus 80 years. "Criminals must know that killing a law enforcer in the line of duty means that they will never go free," he said.</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-42223886747097911682024-03-05T06:20:00.001-05:002024-03-05T10:32:50.077-05:00Geraldine Cherry: Natural Born Killer<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Born in 1962, Geraldine Cherry grew up in western New Jersey just east of the Philadelphia metropolitan area. As a kid she was aggressive and bellicose, often frightening her siblings and even her mother who felt the need to lock herself into her bedroom at night. In 1974 when Geraldine was 12, social workers broke the family up, sending Geraldine and her 14 siblings to various institutions and foster homes.<br />
<br />
Shortly after Geraldine turned 14 the authorities, following a series of assaults and disruptive behavior, sent her and one of her sisters to the Ancora Psychiatric Hospital in Camden County, New Jersey. It was there that Geraldine threatened to choke her sister to death while she slept.<br />
<br />
In 1978 at age 18, after assaulting a woman, the judge sentenced Geraldine Cherry to two years at a juvenile detention institution in Burlington County. While living at the medium security facility Geraldine was accused of assaulting 72 inmates and correctional workers. (One would think that after three or four assaults someone in charge would isolate this girl from the rest of the juveniles.)<br />
<br />
In August 1980, shortly after her release from the juvenile detention facility, Cherry, while standing on a platform at the Voorhees, New Jersey train station pushed a woman she didn't know onto the high-speed railway tracks. The victim was pulled to safety before being struck by a train. Following her conviction for assault, the judge, before sentencing, had Geraldine evaluated at the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital. The doctor who conducted the examination diagnosed Cherry as having an antisocial personality disorder.<br />
<br />
Although the train station victim only received scrapes and bruises the judge gave Geraldine Cherry ten years, the maximum sentence for the crime. She served her sentence at the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in Camden County.<br />
<br />
While doing time at Clinton, Cherry was stabbed in both eyes with either a pencil or a shard of glass. Because she was a pathological liar her account of what happened--a prison guard had tried to gouge out her eyes in a fight--wasn't credible. The wounds were either self-inflicted or the result of an altercation with another inmate. The matter remained unresolved.<br />
<br />
In May 1986 correctional authorities accused Geraldine of starting a fire in the prison. Because it was quickly extinguished no one was hurt. Three years before completing her ten year sentence Geraldine Cherry, in 1988, walked out of prison. (She certainly didn't get out early on good behavior. Perhaps the arson hastened her departure.) During the next several years Cherry lived in various group homes and institutions in Illinois and New Jersey.<br />
<br />
In 2012 Geraldine Cherry and a 70-year-old woman named Kathleen McEwan shared living quarters at the Parker Place Apartments in the Roxborough section of Philadelphia. The complex was owned by a Philadelphia based nonprofit social service agency called Resources for Human Development (RHD). McEwan, a former waitress who for years had struggled with schizophrenia had suffered a series of strokes that had rendered her incapable of feeding or dressing herself.<br />
<br />
At six in the morning of June 10, 2012, fire rescue medics responding to an emergency call from the Parker Place Apartments found Kathleen McEwan lying face up in her bed. She had died sometime during the night. Due to her age and medical condition the medical examiner ruled that McEwan had died a natural death.<br />
<br />
Jeff Thompson, the mortician at the John J. Byers Funeral Home in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania who had the job of embalming Kathleen McEwan, made a gruesome discovery. Someone had stuffed a 10 inch length of rope down the dead woman's throat. Because there hadn't been an autopsy in this death the medical examiner had made a bad call. Mr. Thompson, instead of finishing his embalming job called the medical examiner's office.<br />
<br />
Kathleen McEwan's autopsy produced further evidence of foul play. The person who had inserted the rope into the woman had stuffed other things down her throat that included a small bottle of hand lotion, a diaper fragment, and a quantity of Chex Party Mix. This time the medical examiner ruled McEwan's death homicide by suffocation. (Had Cherry smothered McEwan with a pillow she would have gotten away with murder.)<br />
<br />
Shortly after being charged and arrested for murder Geraldine Cherry suffered a series of seizures which required the 50-year-old's hospitalization. A judge ordered another psychiatric evaluation. Although a mental health expert would never say this, Geraldine Cherry was a natural born killer. She should not have been living with another person, particularly one so helpless as Kathleen McEwan.<br />
<br />
In October 2012 following a 60-day mental health evaluation, Municipal Court President Judge Marsha Neifield ruled that Geraldine Cherry was mentally incompetent to stand trial for murder.<br />
<br />
It is doubtful that Geraldine Cherry will ever be adjudicated competent to stand trial. She will never be free either. Too insane to be punished or rehabilitated, this woman will be warehoused for the rest of her life.</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-41011429745025530072024-03-04T06:20:00.000-05:002024-03-04T06:21:39.819-05:00The Michael Salmon Rape Case<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
In the 1970s and early 1980s Dr. Michael Salmon, a pediatrician who specialized in children's growth disorders and neurological problems at the Stoke Manderville Hospital in Buckinhamshire, England, was one of the United Kingdom's most eminent physicians. Dr. Salmon received recognition and praise for his work with children from Princess Dianna and other prominent English citizens. He also became quite wealthy.<br />
<br />
In 1987 Dr. Salmon fell from grace when detectives searching his office in connection with a medical fraud investigation came upon a sheaf of love letters from several of his teenage female patients. The discovery of these letters triggered an investigation of a very different kind that led to an indecent assault conviction. The judge, in November 1990, sentenced Dr. Salmon to three years in prison for the assault of three girls. In 1991 his professional colleagues struck the 56-year-old physician from the United Kingdom medical register.<br />
<br /> Michael Salmon served eighteen months of his three-year sentence at the Grendon Underwood Prison. After his release he managed to reinvent himself as a wildlife expert. He purchased a mansion in a remote area near a national park. He told his neighbors and members of the community that he was a retired hospital consultant from an aristocratic family. In his club and church circles he insisted on being addressed as "Dr."<br />
<br />
In 2011 the Thames Valley police launched an investigation into rape and sexual abuse at the Stoke Manderville Hospital called Operation Yewtree. In the course of that investigation former female patients of Michael Salmon's came forward with stories of sexual abuse that occurred when they were in the teens and pre-teens. The women accused Salmon of having assaulted them in his consulting room at the hospital. His victims, at the time of the alleged offenses, had ranged from eleven to eighteen-years-old.<br />
<br />
A Crown prosecutor, in November 2013, charged the former physician with the sexual assaults of nine girls at the hospital and the rape of a teenager at his home. In the rape case the 16-year-old victim had turned to the doctor for help after learning that she had become pregnant.<br />
<br />
Salmon pleaded not guilty to all charges, calling the allegations "absolute nonsense." He characterized his accusers as "gold diggers" and desperate women looking for attention.<br />
<br />
In December 2014 the Michael Salmon sexual abuse trial got underway at the Reading Crown Court. In her opening statement to the jury Crown prosecutor Miranda Moore said, "On some of the occasions the defendant handled the breasts of the young girls with the pretense of listening to their hearts. He also, on occasion, carried out internal vaginal examinations for which there was no medical need whatsoever."<br />
<br />
On February 6, 2015 the jury found Michael Salmon guilty of nine counts of indecent assault and two counts of rape. As constables led the 80-year-old out of the courtroom to his jail cell his wife who had stood by him throughout the trial, wept.<br />
<br />
In speaking to reporters following the guilty verdict, Detective Sergeant Malcolm Wheeler of the Thames Valley Police Child Abuse Unit, said: "Salmon was a prolific sexual offender who abused his position of power for his own sexual gratification. His victims trusted him, they believed him because he was a doctor and they thought he was trustworthy."<br />
<br />
On February 12, 2015 at Salmon's sentencing hearing Reading Crown Court Judge Johanna Cutts, in addressing the convicted man, said: "It was your conceited arrogance that led to your downfall. All the girls were ill at the time. They were treated as objects of your sexual gratification." Regarding the 16-year-old Salmon had raped twice in his home, Judge Cutts said, "You raped her at the time when she couldn't have been more vulnerable. This court sees a lot of rape cases. It is rare to see such a cold-blooded and ruthless crime."<br />
<br />
Judge Cutts sentenced Michael Salmon to eighteen years in prison. For a man his age this was a life sentence.<br /></div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-4876056377320008002024-03-03T06:25:00.000-05:002024-03-03T06:30:18.966-05:00The Rise And Fall Of A Chief of Police<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> It's not surprising that a crime-ridden city in long decline had a troubled and shrinking police department with a history of disgraced police administrators. Between 2000 and 2010 750,000 middle-class residents of Detroit moved out of the city to the suburbs. Today (2024) there are 400,000 people living in a city that in the 1950s had a population of 2 million.<br />
<br />
In 2012, 300 people were murdered in Detroit, a ten percent increase over the previous year. There were cities the size of Detroit that had under 20 murders a year. In 2012 Detroit's murderers were dumping their victims' corpses around several inner city neighborhoods. Because the police don't patrol these districts the bodies laid around for days, even weeks, rotting and stinking up the city. It was hard to believe there was a place like this in America. <br />
<br />
Because of massive budget cuts the Detroit Police Department grew smaller while the crime problem got bigger. Police response time, even to major crime scenes, had significantly slowed. A man who had committed a murder called the Detroit Police Department and asked to be taken into custody. When no one showed the killer walked to a precinct station to turn himself in. In Detroit it was actually difficult to get yourself arrested.<br />
<br />
When Ralph Godbee jointed the Detroit Police Department in 1986 the city, while a shell of its former self, had not entered its final stage of decline and decomposition. The 19-year-old high school graduate, after just a few years on patrol, was assigned to the elite Executive Protection Unit. In 1995 when officer Godbee was only 26, the chief named him commander of the unit.<br />
<br />
Seven years after taking over the Executive Protection Unit Police Chief Jerry Oliver appointed Godbee commander of the 1st Precinct. In 2005 Godbee made Assistant Chief of Police, but three years later, was demoted. Mr. Godbee retired and started a private security consulting agency. Just a year into Godbee's retirement Chief Warren Evans brought him back into law enforcement by making him the Assistant Chief of Police.<br />
<br />
In July 2010 Detroit Mayor Dave Bing promoted Ralph Godbee to interim chief of police after Chief Warren Evans had to step down as a result of a sexual affair he had with a subordinate police officer. The following month, Mr. Godbee, after having taken up with the same female officer, Lieutenant Monique Patterson, filed for divorce. Notwithstanding Godbee's relationship with officer Patterson Mayor Bing promoted him to the permanent position of Chief of Police. <br />
<br />
The beginning of the end of Chief Godbee's law enforcement career came on October 2, 2012 when Mayor Dave Bing suspended him for thirty days. The assistant chief, Chester Logan, took over his duties. Like his predecessor, Ralph Godbee's problem involved having an affair with a subordinate departmental employee. In Godbee's case the woman was an internal affairs officer named Angelica Robinson.<br />
<br />
Angelica Robinson's attorney said this to a reporter with the <i>Detroit Free Press</i>: "She was trying to cut it off and he [Godbee] didn't like that. And apparently she was very depressed, and the concern was whether or not she was going to take her own life, and Godbee got wind of that. I guess he tried to intervene." Other Detroit media outlets reported that Angelic Robinson became upset after discovering that Godbee may have been attending the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in San Diego with another woman.<br />
<br />
Ralph Godbee, on October 4, 2012, announced his intention to step down as Detroit's chief of police. Retired Detroit police officer David Malhalab, a longtime Godbee critic, in speaking to a reporter with <i>The Detroit News</i> said: "Godbee was a stink bomb waiting to go off. I've said from day one that because of his past actions he shouldn't have been the face of the DPD. But [Mayor Bing] went ahead and appointed him anyway. Now he's reaping the consequences of his bad choices."<br />
<br />
In police work the higher up you go the less power you have. The cop on the street, armed with the discretionary power of arrest, exercises the real muscle. Moreover, the street officer is protected by civil service and the police union. A street cop can abuse his authority and behave in a manner unbecoming a police officer and still keep his job. The police chief, on the other hand, is wedged between the rank-and-file and the major and is vulnerable to politics and bad publicity. Chief Godbee knew this but risked his career and good name anyway. </div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Ralph Godbee's career, like the city of Detroit, started in glory and ended in ignominy. </div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-89688521398157691782024-03-02T06:30:00.000-05:002024-03-02T06:36:05.425-05:00The Gary Michael Morgan Murder Case<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Father Joseph Terra and his assistant pastor, Reverend Kenneth Walker, resided in the rectory of the Mercy Mission Catholic Church in a seedy neighborhood in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. Father Walker, age 29, from New York state had been ordained in May 2012.<br />
<br />
Father Terra, at nine o'clock on the night of Wednesday, June 11, 2014 heard a noise coming from the church courtyard. Upon investigation the 56-year-old priest came upon a man he did not know or recognize. The toothless, long-haired intruder, a man who looked like he lived on the streets, began attacking Father Terra with a blunt object made of iron. Under attack, the priest fled to the rectory where he grabbed a handgun he kept in his bedroom. Because the long-haired assailant had bludgeoned the father's right hand he was unable to fire the gun.<br />
<br />
The intruder wrestled the gun from the priest and ordered him to get down on his hands and knees. After demanding money the unkempt attacker shot Father Terra with the rectory gun.<br />
<br />
Assistant pastor Walker heard the commotion and came to help his colleague. The intruder responded by shooting the reverend as well. With the pastors shot and bleeding the shooter ran out of the church, climbed into Father Walker's 2003 Mazda Tribute and drove off.<br />
<br />
Pastor Walker, thirty minutes after Father Terra encountered the burglar in the church courtyard, called 911 to report that he and the unresponsive pastor had been shot by a white long-haired man in his fifties.<br />
<br />
As Father Walker waited for the police and ambulance crews he administered last rites to his gravely wounded colleague.<br />
<br />
Later that night Father Joseph Terra died while being treated at a nearby hospital. Doctors listed Father Walker in critical condition. He was, however, expected to survive the attack.<br />
<br />
Shortly after the shootings police officers came across Father Walker's Mazda parked four blocks from the church. A team of crime scene specialists processed the vehicle for physical evidence that could link the killer to the church murder.<br />
<br />
Homicide detectives caught a break when a woman called and told them a homeless man recently out of prison had given her a black bag containing a camera. That camera belonged to one of the priests at the Mercy Mission Catholic Church.<br />
<br />
At nine o'clock Sunday night, June 15, 2014, detectives arrested 54-year-old Gary Michael Morgan for the murder of Father Terra and the attempted murder of Reverend Walker. Morgan denied shooting the priests then later confessed to the crimes.<br />
<br />
At his arraignment on Monday, June 16, 2014 Mr. Morgan pleaded not guilty to the charges of murder, attempted murder and aggravated assault. The judge ruled that he be held in the county jail on a $1 million cash-only bond.<br />
<br /> Who was this man who had snuck into a church and shot two priests? In 2005 Morgan had entered a stranger's apartment, picked up a steak knife and stabbed the male resident in the abdomen as he slept. Morgan pleaded guilty to aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to ten years in an Arizona state prison. On April 24, 2014, after serving eight years of that sentence, corrections authorities paroled this violent man.<br />
<br />
On June 9, 2014, after meeting regularly with his parole officer, Mr. Morgan failed to show up for a scheduled appointment. Besides the aggravated assault conviction he had served time for car theft, burglary, and numerous drug related offenses. Since this life-long criminal's release from prison he had been living on the streets of downtown Phoenix.<br />
<br />
In February 2017, in order to avoid the death penalty, Gary Michael Morgan pleaded guilty to charges of aggravated assault and murder. Superior Court Judge Peter Reinstein sentenced Morgan to life in prison. </div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-29572008791508779202024-03-01T05:50:00.001-05:002024-03-02T06:36:53.275-05:00Elizabeth Catlin: Prosecuting a Midwife<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
In the United States only one percent of births are at home. They mostly involve Amish and Mennonite women who are assisted by midwives. In rural America there are 3,000 Certified Professional Midwife (CPM) practitioners whose certification credentials are recognized in 34 states.<br />
<br />
Elizabeth Catlin, a resident of Penn Yan, a small town in upstate New York's Yates County, was a CPM licensed midwife who over the years helped hundreds of Mennonite women give birth at home. (Yates County and the surrounding region is home to 700 Mennonite families. Elizabeth Catlin was not a Mennonite.)<br />
<br />
Fifty-four-year-old Elizabeth Catlin practiced in an area of New York that midwifery advocates call a "maternity care desert." In other words, her services were badly needed among this population of expectant mothers. Catlin's CPM license, however, was not recognized by the state. In New York practitioners of midwifery have to be registered nurses with Master Degrees who were trained in state-approved midwifery programs. Elizabeth Catlin, therefore, did not possess the training and education to lawfully practice midwifery in the state.<br />
<br />
In 2018 a joint criminal investigation conducted by the New York State Police, The New York Education Department and the Yates County District Attorney's Office concluded that Elizabeth Catlin had been practicing midwifery in New York without a license. The state issued an order for her to cease practicing midwifery.<br />
<br />
In December 2018, Yates County District Attorney Todd Casella charged Elizabeth Catlin with the unlawful practice of midwifery. Troopers with the New York State Police showed up at her house, and with her eight-year-old daughter looking on, placed the mother of 14 into handcuffs and hauled her off to jail.<br />
<br />
Because she couldn't afford to make her $15,000 bond Catlin spent the night in the Yates County Jail. (Today, under New York State law, stalkers, robbers, child molesters and arsonists must be released from custody without bond.) The next day members of the Mennonite community raised enough money for her release.</div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br /> Elizabeth Catlin's problems with the New York State bureaucracy and law enforcement were just beginning. On December 17, 2019 a Yates County Grand Jury issued a 51-page indictment charging her with 95 felony counts related to her practice of midwifery in the state. No midwife in United States history has been charged with so many criminal counts.<br />
<br />
In addition to practicing without a license (in a bureaucratic nation a serious offense), Catlin was indicted on charges of identify theft and criminal possession of a forged instrument. But that wasn't the worst of it. Under District Attorney Todd Casella's prompting, the grand jury indicted Elizabeth Catlin on the charge of negligent homicide. This charge involved the death of an infant.<br />
<br />
In October 2018, while assisting a Mennonite woman in a home birth, Catlin called for an ambulance when the patient showed signs of birthing distress. The woman gave birth to the child at the F. F. Thompson Hospital in Canandaigua, New York. The infant was septic and died six hours later while being transferred to the Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York.<br />
<br />
If convicted of every count in the indictment Elizabeth Catlin faced up to 473 years in prison. This in a state that had essentially legalized burglary, simple assault, major drug dealing and shoplifting--a state loath to put real criminals behind bars.<br />
<br />
On January 28, 2020 Elizabeth Catlin and her attorney, David Morabito, appeared in court for her arraignment where she was greeted by a group of 100 supporters that included Mennonite women she had helped, and several midwifery advocates. A handful of reporters and a documentary film crew were also present to witness the event.<br />
<br />
Following her not guilty plea Judge John L. Cook, instead of setting bail on the negligent homicide charge, released the defendant on her own recognizance.<br />
<br />
Vicki Hadley, the President of Midwives of North America, said this about the Catlin case to an Internet news service: "What they're [the state of New York] trying to do, I guess, is make some kind of crazy example of this person--for what I'm not entirely sure. The fact that she is being indicted for criminal homicide is way over the top, since the baby died six hours after being in her care." Hadley called the New York State investigation and subsequent indictment a "witch hunt."<br />
<br />
Yates County District Attorney Todd Casella, in defending the state's actions against the beloved midwife said the 95 felony charges against Catlin were merely "a sample of what we have evidence of." Prosecutor Casella, however, did not reveal the evidence supporting the charge of negligent homicide.</div><div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> In September 2021 the district attorney dropped the negligent homicide case and all but one of the midwife charges. In return Elizabeth Catlin pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorized practice of midwifery. The judge sentenced her to five years probation.</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-84651560625376688342024-02-29T06:30:00.000-05:002024-02-29T06:38:43.101-05:00Chavis Carter's Police Custody Suicide<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
On Saturday night July 28, 2012, in Jonesboro, Arkansas, a town of 67,000 in the central part of the state, a home owner in a residential neighborhood called 911 to report a suspicious pickup truck driving up and down the street with its lights off. At 9:50 PM police officers Keith Baggett and Ron Marsh pulled the truck over. When the driver of the vehicle, 21-year-old Chavis Carter and his two passengers alighted from the truck, the officers patted them down for weapons. The frisks suggested that the suspects were unarmed, but officers found, on Carter's person, a small amount of marijuana. The cops placed him, unrestrained, in the back of the patrol car while they questioned his associates. At this point the police learned that Carter had not given them his real name. When they radioed in for possible outstanding warrants they discovered that Carter, from Mississippi, was wanted in his home state in connection with a drug case.<br />
<br />
The officers brought Mr. Carter out of the patrol car, placed him under arrest, searched him again then handcuffed him behind his back. After finding an electronic scale in his pickup they returned him to the back seat of the patrol car. The officers released his friends who drove off in the truck.<br />
<br />
A few minutes later, when a Jonesboro officer checked on Carter, he found him covered in blood and slumped over in the backseat of the police car. Someone called for an ambulance while an officer tried but failed, because of the position of the body, to remove the handcuffs. Later that night Chavis Carter died from a bullet to his temple.<br />
<br />
In the backseat of the patrol car officers found a stolen .380-caliber Cobra semi-automatic handgun, and a spent cartridge. The compact pistol was less than six inches long and was light in weight. Witnesses at the scene said they did not see any of the officers pull their guns. Police video tapes of the arrest also exonerated the officers of any wrongdoing. The two officers were placed on administrative leave pending an internal investigation of Carter's death. At this point in the case all of the preliminary evidence pointed to a suicide.<br />
<br />
Members of the Chavis Carter's family, and the local chapter of the NAACP, called for an independent investigation of the shooting death. The decedent's mother, Teresa Carter, told a reporter that "My son was not suicidal." Russell Marlin, a Memphis lawyer retained by the family said he was conducting his own investigation into the death. "There is no reason to believe," he said, "that he [Carter] would have killed himself." (By the same token, there is no reason to believe that a police officer would shoot a handcuffed man in the backseat of a patrol car with his own gun.)<br />
<br />
On August 14, 2012 the Jonesboro Police Department released a video of their re-enactment of the suicide. An officer of Carter's stature--5 foot 8 and 160 pounds--was able, while handcuffed behind his back, to lift the pistol to his head and pull the trigger.<br />
<br />
Jonesboro Chief of Police Michael Yates, in speaking to the media on the question of how a man frisked and searched still had access to a handgun, said: "It's obvious they did miss the weapon on the first search. It is likely, since he [Carter] was placed into the [patrol] car un-handcuffed the first time that he had an opportunity to stash the weapon in the car. The second search, which was more thorough and inclusive, did not disclose the weapon."<br />
<br />
Due to the unusual circumstances surrounding Chavis Carter's death, and the fact he was black and the officers were white, this case was racially charged. That meant civil rights activists continued to accuse the police of murder. It was true that had the police recovered Carter's stolen handgun pursuant to the initial frisk he would be alive. But this was a long way from murder, or even negligent homicide. In the final analysis it was Chavis Carter who pulled the trigger that ended his life. <br />
<br />
On Monday, August 20, 2012, a panel of three medical examiners officially ruled the manner of Carter's death a suicide. A report from the Arkansas State Crime Lab revealed that at the time of his death Mr. Carter was under the influence of methamphetamine, anti-anxiety medicine and other drugs.<br />
<br />
In March 2017 a local judge dismissed the lawsuit that had been filed by Chavis Carter's family against the Jonesboro Police Department. </div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-68438342964294900582024-02-28T06:10:00.000-05:002024-02-28T06:12:25.910-05:00Judge G. Todd Baugh<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Police in Billings Montana in 2008 arrested 49-year-old Stacey Dean Rambold, a teacher at the local high school. Rambold stood accused of having a sexual relationship with Cherice Morales, a 14-year-old student. A Yellowstone County prosecutor charged Mr. Rambold with three counts of sexual intercourse without consent. (By law, a person under the age of 16 cannot consent to sex with an adult. In some states the crime is called statutory rape.)<br />
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In 2004, administrators at Billings Senior High School warned Rambold against touching or being alone with female students.<br />
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Cherice Morales, just before her 17th birthday in 2010, committed suicide. At the time of this troubled girl's death the criminal case against her former teacher was pending. The girl's mother, Auliea Halon, sued the the school district for wrongful death. The case was quickly settled for $91,000.<br />
<br />
The Yellowstone County prosecutor, as a result of Morales' suicide, offered Mr. Rambold a deal. If he confessed to one count of sexual intercourse without consent, and promised to enter a sex offender treatment program, the charges would be dropped. Rambold accepted the offer.<br />
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In August 2012, Dean Rambold began skipping meetings with his counselors and didn't tell them about unsupervised visits he was having with girls. In November 2012 the head of the sex treatment facility kicked him out of the program. When Deputy Chief Yellowstone County prosecutor Rod Souza learned that Rambold had violated the terms of their agreement he refiled the original charges against the former teacher.<br />
<br />
Rambold's attorney, Jay Lansing, told reporters that the girls Rambold had visited without supervision were members of his family. Moreover, his client had enrolled in another sex treatment program.<br />
<br />
On August 26, 2013 the Rambold case came before 66-year-old District Court Judge G. Todd Baugh. Before being elected to the bench in 1985, Baugh had served as a federal magistrate. Prior to that he practiced law in Billings. The judge was currently running, unopposed for his fifth term on the bench.<br />
<br />
In September 2011, Judge Baugh had sentenced a 26-year-old defendant to 50 years in prison for the rape on an 11-year-old girl. A year later he sent a man to prison for 25 years for possessing child pornography. Judge Baugh did not have a reputation for going easy on sex offenders.<br />
<br />
At the Rambold hearing, Judge Baugh dismissed the refiled charges against the defendant. The judge said that Mr. Rambold's being kicked out of the sex program did not justify the refiling of the 2008 sexual intercourse without consent charges. The remaining issue before the judge involved Rambold's sentence based upon his 2010 admission of guilt on the single count of sexual intercourse without consent.<br />
<br />
Yellowstone County Chief Deputy prosecutor Rod Souza proposed a 20 year sentence with 10 years suspended. Defense attorney Jay Lansing suggested that because Rambold had lost his job, his license to teach, his house and his wife, he had been punished enough. Attorney Lansing asked Judge Baugh to suspend all but 30 days of a 15-year sentence. The attorney pointed out that Mr. Rambold had continued his sex rehabilitation program with another treatment facility.<br />
<br />
Judge Baugh said that he had reviewed the videotaped police interviews of Cherice Morales. From this he had concluded that even though the victim was 35 years younger than her teacher, she was "as much in control of the situation" as the defendant. Judge Baugh said that the 14-year-old was "older than her chronological age." The judge considered this a major mitigating factor in the case.<br />
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Judge Baugh suspended all but 30 days of Rambold's 15-year sentence. After spending a month in jail the former teacher would be on probation for 15 years. He would also have to register as a sex offender.<br />
<br />
Upon hearing this sentence the dead girl's mother, Auilea Hanlon, stormed out of the courtroom. When she spoke to reporters after the hearing, she said, " I guess somehow it makes a rape more acceptable if you can blame the victim, even if she was only fourteen."<br />
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In a matter of hours following the sentence, local citizens were signing an online petition that called for Judge Baugh to resign. Marion Bradley, the director of the Montana National Organization for Women, told reporters that "Rape is rape. She was 14-years-old, and she was not an age where she could give consent, and he groomed her like any pedophile. Unless we show our outrage, none of our children are safe."<br />
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On the day following his controversial and unpopular sentencing of the former high school teacher, Judge Baugh, in speaking to reporters, stood by his ruling. "Obviously," he said, "a 14-year-old can't consent. I think that people have in mind that this was some violent, forcible, horrible rape. It was horrible enough as it is, just given her age, but it wasn't this forcible beat-up rape. I think what people are seeing is a sentence for rape of 30 days. Obviously on the face of it, if you look at it that way, it's crazy. No wonder people are upset. I'd be upset, too if that happened."<br />
<br />
The next day Judge Baugh conceded that he deserved to be criticized for his "chronological age" comment. He apologized for that but it was too late for apologies. <br />
<br />
Yellowstone County Attorney Scott Twito, in responding to Judge Baugh's sentence, said, "I have no legal authority whatsoever to appeal a sentence handed down by a judge."<br />
<br />
As of August 29, 2013, the day hundreds of anti-Baugh demonstrators gathered in Billings to protest the sentence, the online petition calling for the judges' resignation had collected 26,350 signatures.<br />
<br />
Stacey Rambold was released from jail in September 2013. He would be on probation until August 2028.<br />
<br />
In July 2014 the Montana Supreme Court censured Judge Baugh for the remarks he made about the 14-year-old rape victim.<br />
<br />
Having decided not to run for a fifth term, Judge Baugh, at the end of his term in December 2014, retired from the bench. He told a skeptical media that his retirement had nothing to do with the Rambold sentence and the state supreme court censure.<br />
<br />
In April 2015 the former judge's critics, and there were many, were stunned to learn that the Yellowstone Area Bar Association had awarded G. Todd Baugh a lifetime achievement award.<br /></div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-3946526831852264822024-02-27T06:20:00.000-05:002024-02-27T06:28:23.373-05:00The Luka Magnotta Murder Case<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Tenants in a working-class Montreal, Canada neighborhood complained of a bad smell coming from a pile of garbage behind their apartment building. At ten in the morning on May 29, 2012, when the janitor opened a suitcase at the site of the odor, he discovered a man's bloody torso.<br />
<br />
At 11:15 that morning, in Ottawa, at the Conservative Party headquarters, Jenni Bryne, a top political advisor to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, opened a box that had been mailed to that address. As she opened the package Jenni Bryne was hit by a terrible odor and recoiled at the sight of dried blood. She immediately called 911 which brought the Ottawa police, a hazmat unit and officers with the Emergency Special Operations Section. The box contained a human foot and a note indicating that six other human body parts were in the mail.<br />
<br />
At 9:30 that night the Ottawa police announced they had found a second severed body part mailed from Montreal. It was a hand found inside a piece of mail intercepted at the Ottawa Postal Terminal.<br />
<br />
On Wednesday morning, May 30, 2012, crime scene investigators and hazardous materials officers entered an apartment in the building where the janitor had found the suitcase containing the blood splattered torso. The masked searchers were interested in a second-story studio apartment rented by a 29-year-old tenant named Luka Rocco Magnotta.<br />
<br />
Luka Magnotta, a stripper, model and bisexual actor in low-budget adult films who used the names Eric Clinton Newman (his born name) and Vladimir Romanov, had lived in the apartment about four months. Originally from Toronto, Magnotta had an Internet presence that included uploaded videos of animal cruelty. Two years earlier a video appeared on the Web featuring Magnotta placing a pair of kittens inside an airtight bag then using a vacuum cleaner to suck out the air. He also had a blog under his name called "Necrophilia Serial Killer Luka Magnotta" that featured the following quote: "It's not cool to the world being a necrophiliac. It's bloody lonely. But I don't care." Magnotta was also the author of an Internet article titled, "How to Completely Disappear and Never be Found" in which he laid out a six-step program for changing one's identify.<br />
<br />
On May 25, four days before the gruesome discovery at the Montreal apartment, an uploaded 11-minute Internet video on an Alberta-based website called "Best Gore," showed a man being stabbed, his throat slashed and his head cut off by an unidentified killer in a dark hoodie. The man in the video also severed the victim's limbs, then committed sexual and cannibalistic acts on the corpse. A dog in the dimly lit room ate part of the body. The snuff video was called, "1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick." The Canadian authorities believed the torso found behind Magnotta's apartment building, as well as the mailed body parts, belong to the man seen murdered online. Investigators also theorized that Luka Magnotta was the killer in the video.<br />
<br />
In Apartment 208 crime scene investigators believed they had found the site of the videoed murder/dismemberment. Detectives also thought the torso discovered behind the building originated from this apartment. The walls and floor were splattered in dried blood and in the bedroom they found a blood-soaked mattress.<br />
<br />
A forensic pathologist examined the torso and the two mailed body parts and found that the remains belonged to the same person.<br />
<br />
Luka Magnotta, the subject of a massive international manhunt, was described as a slightly built man who was five-foot-eight with short black hair and blue eyes. The authorities searching for the fugitive believed he was hiding out in Europe under a false identity.<br />
<br />
The man believed to have been killed in the snuff film was identified as a student from China named Jun Lin. The 33-year-old had been attending Concordia University in Montreal. He had been going out with Magnotta and was last seen on May 24, 2012. Lin was an undergraduate in the engineering and computer science department.<br />
<br />
Montreal Police Commander Ian Lafreniere believed that Magnotta was hiding in France. The fugitive was immediately placed on Interpol's equivalent of the FBI's most wanted list. A Toronto transsexual who had a sexual relationship with Magnotta informed the police that the porn actor used drugs and possessed a bad temper. <br />
<br />
In 2010, after Luka Magnotta had posted the disgusting video involving the kittens, a London reporter with <i>The Sun</i> newspaper questioned him for an article. In an email to <i>The Sun</i>, Magnotta warned that his next uploaded snuff video would not involve cats. "Once you kill, and taste blood, it's impossible to stop," he wrote. After the animal cruelty video was published animal rights activists in Canada tried to get the authorities to intervene.<br />
<br />
On Monday, June 4, 2012, seven police officers in Berlin, Germany acting on a tip from a person who recognized Luka Magnotta arrested him in an internet cafe. At first Magnotta gave the officers a false name, then said, "You got me." Magnotta was in the cafe reading about himself on the Internet. <br />
<br />
On the day following his arrest, as Magnotta appeared before a German judge on the matter of his extradition back to Canada, staff members at two private boy's school in Vancouver, British Columbia each received a package that had been mailed from Montreal. The package to the False Creek Elementary School contained a human foot. The parcel opened at St. George's contained a hand. The body parts belonged to Jun Lin. The authorities were still searching for the victim's head. <br />
<br />
Several months following his extradition back to Canada Mr. Magnotta acquired an attorney named Luc Leclain who argued that his client should be tried for the lesser homicide offense of second-degree murder because the Crown could not prove premeditation in Jun Lin's killing. In May 2013, following a week-long preliminary hearing involving thirty witnesses for the Crown, the Court of Quebec judge ruled that the prosecution had enough evidence to justify trying Magnotta for first degree-murder.<br />
<br />
In addition to first-degree murder Luka Magnotta was charged with the lesser offenses of causing indignity to Jun Lin's body (in the U. S. it's called abuse of corpse), broadcasting obscene material, using the postal service to send obscene material and the harassment of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other members of Parliament. The Quebec judge scheduled Magnotta's first-degree murder trial for September 14, 2014.<br />
<br />
Luka Magnotta's murder trial got underway on Monday December 15, 2014 before Justice Guy Cournoyer of the Quebec Superior Court. His attorney Luc Leclair tried to convince the jury that the defendant, a schizophrenic, committed the murder in a psychotic state that had rendered him legally insane and therefore not guilty by reason of insanity.<br />
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The Magnotta jury rejected the insanity defense and found the defendant, on December 23, 2014, guilty of first-degree murder. The jurors also found him guilty of the lesser offenses. Judge Cournoyer sentenced Magnotta to life in prison for first-degree murder and gave him 19 years behind bars for the other offenses.<br /></div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-55904235103632931562024-02-26T06:10:00.000-05:002024-02-26T06:11:45.279-05:00Jody Lee Hunt's Murderous Rampage <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Jody Lee Hunt was not a stranger to crime and violence. In 1999 a judge in Virginia sentenced the 24-year-old to ten years in prison following a kidnapping conviction, an offense that included the use of a firearm.<br />
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In 2014, the 39-year-old Hunt owned the J & J Towing and Repair company in Morgantown, West Virginia, the home of West Virginia University in the north central part of the state. Hunt lived nearby in the small town of Westover.<br />
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Sharon Kay Berkshire, Hunt's 39-year-old former girlfriend, filed a domestic violence case against him in October 2014. In mid-November, one of Berkshire's new boyfriends, 28-year-old Michael David Frum, a car detailer who also lived in Westover, sent Hunt a text message that taunted him for losing his girlfriend to another man.<br />
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Besides the humiliation of losing his girlfriend to Frum and another Morgantown area man named Jody Taylor, Hunt was battling a business competitor named Doug Brady, the 45-year-old owner of Doug's Towing. Brady's company, located just a quarter of a mile from Hunt's towing business had been publicly accused by Hunt of acquiring towing jobs illegally.<br />
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At eight in the morning of Monday December 1, 2014, Morgantown police officers responded to a call regarding a body found at Doug's Towing company. The dead man, Doug Brady, had been shot in the head. Detectives didn't believe that robbery had been a motive for the murder.<br />
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Police officers, less than an hour later, found two more bodies in a house in Cheat Lake, West Virginia just outside of Morgantown. Sharon Kay Berkshire and her lover Michael David Frum had been shot to death execution style.<br />
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A short time after officers responded to the double murder in Cheat Lake they were called to another murder scene, this one on Sweet Pea Road outside of Morgantown. Jody Taylor, Berkshire's other boyfriend, had been shot in the head.<br />
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Because Jody Lee Hunt had a motive to murder all four victims, he became the immediate suspect in the quadruple murder case. Police were looking for Hunt's black 2011 Ford F-150 pickup truck.<br />
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On Hunt's Facebook page detectives found the following message posted on the day of the murders: "I'm deeply hurt by the events that led up to this day! I poured out my heart to her [presumably Sharon Kay Berkshire] only to be manipulated as to what I could give her. Life is short. It's not all games. Don't play a game with a person's heart."<br />
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Also on his Facebook page that day Mr. Hunt had written: "My actions were not right nor were the actions of those who tried to break me down and take from me. This was not the plan but a struggle to see that those who hurt me received their fair pay of hurt like I received."<br />
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At seven in the evening on the day of the four murders the police received a tip that Jody Hunt was seen in Everettsville, a town seven miles from Morgantown in the southern part of Monongalia County. Police officers, in a power line right-of-way cut through the forrest not far from U.S. Route 119 found Hunt's truck. Inside the vehicle they discovered him dead from a self-inflicted bullet wound to the head. </div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-15327050401805181632024-02-25T06:25:00.000-05:002024-02-25T06:29:55.680-05:00It's Insane to Plead Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity in California<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
If you live in California, are seriously mentally ill and have been accused of a violent crime, do not plead not guilty by reason of insanity. If you do, and succeed, you'll end up in a state mental hospital. It's a lot safer in prison, and you'll get better treatment. <br />
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In 2002, in an effort to improve services in California's mental hospitals that treat the criminally insane, the state hired a private consultant to reform the system. The reformer, a professor of psychiatry at Virginia Commonwealth University named Dr. Nirbhay Singh, had come to the United States in 1987 from New Zealand. Having specialized in research on the developmentally disabled, Dr. Singh had no experience treating seriously mentally ill patients with sociopathic and predatory tendencies. He had published articles about Buddhist-inspired mindfulness (whatever that means), and alternative treatments such as the herb kava as a calming agent. Dr. Singh, in reforming California's state mental institutions, among other things, replaced individual therapy with group classes on anger management.<br />
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Notwithstanding Dr. Singh's "reforms," the U.S. Department of Justice stuck it's long nose into the problem by suing California on the grounds the state was violating patients' rights by heavily drugging and improperly restraining these extremely violent and dangerous people. The state, rather than fight the case, agreed to a court-supervised improvement plan at four hospitals with more than 4,000 criminally insane patients. (State hospitals in Norwalk, San Luis Obispo County, San Bernadino and Napa.)<br />
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According to the plan, overseen by Dr. Singh, these four hospitals reduced the use of restraints, isolation rooms and heavy drugs. The reformer dismantled several behavioral programs and placed greater importance on bureaucracy and the production of documentation in support of compliance with the federal mandate. Many health care workers complained that the red tape came at the expense of patient care. Much of the paperwork, according to Dr. Singh's critics, was redundant and clinically useless. Employees, under Dr. Singh's system, had to fill out 300 new forms every month. Staff members said they no longer had time to play cards and chat with patients, activities that the patients missed.<br />
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While he worked as the chief consultant in California, Dr. Singh also worked with mental health systems in Connecticut, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana and Tennessee. In January 2011, two weeks after the <i>Los Angeles Times</i> published an interview with a top State Department of Mental Health official about the effects of Dr. Singh's reforms, Dr. Singh abruptly resigned. Dr. Stuart Bussey, president of the Union of American Physicians and Dentists which represents California's mental hospital's psychiatrists and medical doctors, complained that Dr. Singh's reforms did "very little to create a healthy and safe environment for patients and staff." In fact, according to studies conducted in the four hospitals involved in the federally mandated reforms, three of them had become much more dangerous places for patients and mental health workers. The ban of heavy drugs, restraints and isolation rooms had tripled the incidents of patient-on-patient and patient-on worker assaults in three of the institutions.<br />
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While according to his critics Dr. Singh didn't know beans about how to run a place for the criminally insane, he did know how to make a buck. During his nine year tenure as a California mental health consultant, he charged the state $2,500 a day. His total bill came to $4.4 million. No wonder California was broke.<br />
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Dr. Mubashir Farooqi, a psychiatrist at one of the pilot hospitals called the reform program a "huge, very expensive, very idiotic experiment that failed badly." But in December 2011, notwithstanding the increased violence in the three California mental hospitals, the Department of Justice asked a federal court to extend the oversight, and continue along the same reform path. According to an assistant in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, California's reforms had not succeeded in improving mental health "outcomes" (bureaucrats love that word) at the four institutions. "Are we where we need to be? Absolutely not," he said in an interview. In the meantime, while the federal government dabbled in the care and treatment of California's criminally insane, mental hospitals in the state were dangerous places for patients and the people trying to help them. <br />
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In California, the treatment of the criminally insane has not improved. And the treatment of mentally ill people generally has gotten worse as evidenced by the homeless problems in Los Angeles and San Francisco. As of 2019, notwithstanding billions of taxpayer money, 25 of the state's 58 counties have no impatient psychiatric system.</div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-29167575522057082502024-02-24T06:25:00.000-05:002024-02-24T06:26:19.037-05:00Psychic Detectives: False Leads, Wasted Time and Investigative Nonsense <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"> People believe in such things as ghosts, witches, Big-Foot, alien abductions, spontaneous human combustion and the Loch Ness Monster. Many believe in fortune tellers, soothsayers and so-called psychic detectives who inject themselves into missing person and murder cases. The words "detective" and "psychic" do not belong together. Police detectives who consult these fakes and run down their leads should be put back on patrol. It's all a load of crap.<br />
<br /> In an era of marginal thinking and outlandish beliefs, millions of people buy into paranormal nonsense. The media, particularly television, with supposedly serious shows about ghosts and psychics, adds credibility to this nonsense. Print and TV journalists who know better pretend to take this hogwash seriously because they are popular subjects that attract readers and viewers. These media hacks are part of the problem. Too many Americans have lost the ability to think straight, reason clearly and draw logical conclusions.<br />
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If psychic detectives could do what they claim there would be no such thing as missing children ex-girlfriends and estranged wives. There would be no unsolved murders. No one without inside knowledge of a case, can, by holding a missing murder victim's garment lead the detectives to the body. Harry Houdini escaped locked boxes because he had the keys and psychic detectives claim credit for locating missing persons by embellishing and changing--after the fact--their initial predictions. They get away with it because gullible people want to believe in them.<br />
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Psychics Teresa Nicholas and Tiffany Smith: The Costly Curse<br />
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Psychics Teresa Nicholas and Tiffany Smith, "Psychic Readers & Advisors" doing business in Hingham, Massachusetts, if they could have foreseen their own futures wouldn't have bilked a 69-year-old woman who had stupidly availed herself of their fortune telling services.<br />
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On April 6, 2012, when the victim came to Tiffany Smith for a "psychic reading," Tiffany Smith informed her she was under a "curse and a black cloud." More specifically, the psychic reader told the victim that if she didn't fork over $7,000 to lift the curse the victim's daughter, within a week, would commit suicide. The poor woman wrote a check payable to Teresa Nicholas for that amount. The next day, the victim either came to her senses or spoke to someone with common sense. Either way, the police were notified. Teresa Nicholas, however, had already deposited the check.<br />
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A week later the two psychics were charged with a variety of theft offenses related to swindling and fraud.<br />
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Psychic Detectives in the Disappearance of Etan Patz<br />
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On May 25, 1979 the parents of 6-year-old Etan Patz allowed the boy to make his first unaccompanied trip to the Manhattan bus stop two blocks from his apartment building. They never saw him again. The missing boy was one of the first to have his photograph printed on milk cartons. His case helped fuel the national missing persons campaign that took root in the 1980s. The boy was formally declared dead in 2001.<br />
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From the beginning investigators suspected a friend of Etan's babysitter, a man named Jose Antonia Ramos. Ramos was later convicted of child molestation and sent to prison in Pennsylvania. While never prosecuted in the Patz case, the missing boy's family won a $2 million wrongful death judgement against Ramos in 2004.<br />
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In 2010 Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance reopened the Etan Patz investigation.<br />
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In April, 2012, FBI agents and detectives with the New York City Police Department interviewed a 75-year-old man named Othniel Miller, a former handyman who in 1979 had worked in a small workshop in the basement of the Patz family apartment building on Prince Street in the SoHo section of Manhattan. Etan Patz did chores for Mr. Miller, and on the day before he disappeared Mr. Miller had given the boy a dollar. At the time of the boy's disappearance Othniel Miller was not a suspect because he had a solid alibi. <br />
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After questioning Othniel Miller FBI agents placed "scent pads"--material that can absorb and retain odors--in Miller's old basement workshop. A cadaver dog, upon sniffing the pad indicated the scent of human remains. (This technique is not accepted forensic science.)<br />
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Under the supervision of the FBI and New York City Police workers dug up the workshop's concrete floor and screened the dirt beneath it for signs of Etan's remains. At one point investigators thought they had discovered a suspicious stain on a chunk of cinder block, but further analysis determined it was not blood. After four days of excavating the authorities shut down the operation and began cleaning up the mess. The Etan Patz case remained a mystery.<br />
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In 1979, five days after Ethan Patz left home for the bus stop and never came back, a psychic named Carrie Leight told Etan's father that the first-grader was being cared for in a "blue hospital" that employed a nurse named Mrs. Keanne. Another psychic, under hypnosis, said the boy was "living safely" with a dark-haired woman with a Spanish or Cuban accent who lived on the second floor of a tenement building bearing the number 29. New York City detectives ran down these leads that led them nowhere. They wasted their time. <br />
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On May 6, 2012 Pedro Hernandez, a 51-year-old from Maple Shade, New Jersey confessed to choking Etan Patz to death and leaving his body in a bag in a Manhattan trash can. Hernandez, an employee of a convenience store in the victim's neighborhood had moved to New Jersey shortly after Etan's disappearance and murder.<br />
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In February 2017 a jury in Manhattan found Pedro Hernandez guilty of murder and kidnapping. The judge sentenced him to 25 years to life in prison.<br />
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Psychic Nancy L. Fox and the Christine Ann Jarrett Murder Case<br />
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On the night of January 3, 1991, Christine Ann Jarrett, the mother of two young boys, disappeared from her home in Elkridge, Maryland. Shortly thereafter a local psychic named Nancy Fox, who performed "readings, healings and spiritual coaching," was taken to the Jarrett house where she "immediately had a feeling." Psychic Fox informed those present that the missing woman was dead.<br />
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This psychic from Linthicum, Maryland said she had an image of Christine Jarrett getting into a blue car with a man and that the dead woman would be found within 50 miles of her home. The police, according to Fox, would find clues to her disappearance in southern Pennsylvania.<br />
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Even if this rubbish were true the information was so general it was useless. A blue car? Some man? Southern Pennsylvania? The body somewhere within a 50 mile radius of the house? <br />
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On April 21, 2012, 21 years later, Christine Jarrett's remains were found a few yards from her residence in Elkridge, Maryland, buried under the floorboards of a backyard shed. Her remarried husband, 57-year-old Robert Jarrett, was charged then convicted of her murder.<br />
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When psychic Nancy Fox had her "feeling" she was sitting a few yards from Christine Jarrett's dead body. There was no man in a blue car or clues in southern Pennsylvania. <br /></div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6528377935446865958.post-81941540676943549982024-02-23T06:20:00.000-05:002024-02-23T06:30:52.838-05:00The O. J. Simpson Murders: A "Crime of the Century" <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
In America, the combination of celebrity worship and the fascination with violent crime has produced a dozen or so "crimes of the century." Obscure people, by virtue of their willingness to commit outrageous mayhem can become instant celebrities. In the 20th century, unknown people like Bruno Richard Hauptmann, Mark Chapman, David Berkowitz, Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Kaczinski, because of who or how many people they murdered, propelled themselves into the history books. Assassins Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan committed acts of violence that changed the direction of history.<br />
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In Kansas the 1959 Clutter family killers Richard Hickok and Perry Smith destined to remain relatively obscure despite their mass murder, were immortalized by celebrity author Truman Capote whose book <i>In Cold Blood</i> became a bestseller, a movie, and as a "nonfiction novel," a literary classic. Charles Manson, Erik and Lyle Menendez, Ted Bundy and other convicted killers of the 20th Century were regularly seen on TV as celebrity criminals being interviewed by celebrity reporters.<br />
<br /> The 20th century saw three "crimes of the century": The Lindbergh Kidnapping; The John F. Kennedy Assassination; and the O. J. Simpson case. Charles A. Lindbergh was brought down by an unemployed illegal alien who abducted and murdered his 20-month-old son; President Kennedy by a deranged lone wolf; and O. J. Simpson by himself. These three cases rose above the rest because they involved two famous victims and a famous defendant, all of whom were heroes to millions of people.<br />
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There have been dozens of books written about the Lindbergh and Simpson crimes and more than 500 books on the Kennedy assassination. In the Lindbergh and Kennedy cases many of these works feature revisionist history by crime writing hacks. Notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence of his guilt, there have been authors who have made literary cases for O. J. Simpson's innocence.<br />
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The O. J. Simpson Case and its Aftermath<br />
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From the June 1994 day in Los Angeles when Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were viciously stabbed and slashed to death outside of O. J. Simpson's ex-wife's condo, to Simpson's October 1995 murder acquittal, the O. J. Simpson case dominated the news in the United States and abroad. His acquittal at the hands of a stupid or biased jury shocked the nation. In February 1997 a civil jury found Simpson liable for the wrongful deaths of his ex-wife and her friend, awarding the plaintiffs $8.5 million in compensatory damages. The civil court judge also ordered Simpson to turn over his 1968 Heisman Trophy, an Andy Warhol painting, his golf clubs and other personal assets.<br />
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In September 2007 O. J. and a group of his associates entered a room at the Palace Station hotel-casino in Las Vegas where they stole, at gunpoint, sports memorabilia from a dealer. O. J.'s accomplices, upon arrest quickly agreed to plead guilty and testify against Simpson. A year later, after being found guilty of robbery, assault and kidnapping, Simpson was on his way to prison where he would have to serve at least nine years before being eligible for parole. He was now 67 and serving his time at the Lovelock Correctional Center in Nevada.<br />
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The O. J. Simpson murder case, involving DNA analysis, blood spatter interpretation, shoe print identification and forensic pathology, popularized forensic science. The not guilty verdict also introduced the public to the concept of jury nullification.<br />
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The infamous double murder turned police detectives, defense attorneys, prosecutors and the trial judge into instant celebrities. Several of the major players in the case cashed-in with lucrative book deals. A few became television personalities. The case put CNN on the map and elevated the careers of more than a few talking-heads. In that respect the effects of the Simpson case are still visible.<br />
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The Post-Conviction Lives of Key Simpson Figures<br />
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The chief prosecutor, Marcia Clark, left the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office in 1997 just before the publication of her book (with Teresa Carpenter) <i>Without a Doubt</i>. Clark received a publisher's advance of $4.2 million. (An insane amount for a true crime book, and a much better deal for Clark than the publisher.) Clark, although criticized by many legal scholars and commentators for her handling of the case, parlayed it into a media career. A special correspondent for "Entertainment Tonight," Clark commented on the Casey Anthony trial for Headline News. She was then 65.<br />
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Johnny Cochran, the chief defense attorney, was already known as a celebrity trial attorney before taking on O. J. Simpson as a client. In 1993 he had defended Michael Jackson against accusations of child molestation. At the Simpson trial, regarding the bloody crime scene glove, Cochran issued the now famous quote: "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit." He retired from his legal practice in 2002 and on March 29, 2005 died of a brain tumor. He was 67.<br />
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Judge Lance Ito, the man who presided over the 9-month trial, was severely criticized by legal scholars for letting the proceeding degenerate into a media circus and television soap opera. In his book, <i>Outrage</i>, Vincent Bugliosi, the man who prosecuted Charles Manson and his crew (<i>Helter Skelter</i>) accused Ito of judicial incompetence in the case. Ito retired in 2018 as a Los Angeles Superior Court judge.<br />
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After the Simpson trial Marcia Clark's assistant, Christopher Darden, worked as a legal commentator for CNN, Court TV and NBC. His book on the case is called <i>In Contempt</i>. Darden later wrote several other books, including a crime thriller with writer Dick Lochte.<br />
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If the Simpson case produced a law enforcement villain it was Mark Fuhrman. The Los Angeles police detective was accused of planting the bloody crime scene glove. Convicted of perjury, Mr. Fuhrman was sentenced to three years probation. (There was never solid proof that Detective Fuhrman planted any evidence in the case.) The former Marine, in the years since the Simpson trial, rehabilitated his image by becoming a successful author of nonfiction crime books. In addition to his book on the Simpson case, <i>Murder in Brentwood</i>, Fuhrman wrote <i>Murder in Greenwich</i>, a bestseller about the Martha Moxley case. He was also a crime commentator on Fox News. <br />
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In May 2016 O. J. Simpson came up for parole in the Las Vegas robbery/kidnapping case. The parole board denied his request for early release. On July 21, 2017 the parole board paroled Simpson and allowed him to live in Miami, Florida. </div>
Jim Fisherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03640110709472034191noreply@blogger.com2