Peter Keller: The Survivalist Who Didn't Survive

     On Sunday morning April 22, 2012, firefighters responded to a house fire in North Bend, Washington, a Cascade foothills town 30 miles east of Seattle. When they tried to enter the dwelling through the front door firefighters realized someone had blocked the entrance from the inside with a couch and an easy chair.

     Once the fire had been extinguished, firefighters discovered the bodies of 18-year-old Kaylene Keller and her mother Lynnettee who was 41. The victims were in their bedrooms, and both of them had been shot in the head at close range with .22-caliber bullets. Arson investigators found seven empty gasoline cans at the site. (The fire had been started by placing a skillet on the stove containing a plastic container of gasoline, then turning on the burner.)

     Peter A. Keller, the 41-year-old husband and father of the victims, was nowhere to be found. He and his wife had been married 21 years, and for the last seven years lived in the rented house in this unincorporated community. Mr. Keller's red Toyota pickup truck was missing, and a week earlier he had withdrawn $6,200 from a local bank. Friends of the family told the police that Mr. Keller, a reclusive man interested in guns, body armor and trains, was an avid outdoorsman who spent weekends hiking on the logging trails in the rugged Cascade Mountain foothills. Over the past eight years, Keller, fearing that the end of the world was near, had been building and stockpiling a wilderness fortress/hideout dug into the side of a hill. The cave-like structure he called Camp Keller featured three levels, a wood stove, a sophisticated ventilation system, a generator and several hidden entrances and exits. Although Keller had no history of violence, he owned several guns and a large supply of ammunition.

     On April 25, 2012, the King County prosecutor charged Peter Keller with two counts of first-degree murder and one count of arson.

     The police searching for Peter Keller caught a break on Friday, April 27 when a tipster gave them the location of his pickup truck abandoned on a Rattlesnake Ridge trailhead. From this location expert trackers picked up his trail of deep foot impressions made by someone carrying a heavy backpack. The boot marks led them to Keller's wilderness refuge.

     At five o'clock Saturday evening, April 28, 2012, a group of Seattle police officers and a 30-member SWAT team surrounded the bunker. They figured Peter Keller was inside because they could smell wood smoke coming from his stove. The fugitive didn't respond when ordered out of the structure. Rather than enter a possibly booby-trapped structure to encounter a heavily armed inhabitant, the police pumped teargas into the fort, then waited.

     Following a 23-hour standoff, the officers, equipped with explosive devices, blew the top off Keller's bunker and found him dead inside. He had shot himself in the mouth with a Glock pistol. Among the stockpiled provisions the police recovered 13 rifles and handguns.

     Keller's wife Lynnette, disabled several years ago from a workplace accident, had been receiving a monthly state disability check. Because her husband had been so controlling and tight with money, she often had to borrow money from relatives. 

The Chevonne Thomas Murder-Suicide Case

     In November 2010, 31-year-old Chevonne Thomas, a woman with a history of mental illness and drug abuse, drove to a park in western New Jersey to smoke PCB-laced marijuana. She blacked out in the park and when she came to couldn't remember where she had parked her car. This was a problem because her 6-month-old son Zahree was in the vehicle.

     A local prosecutor charged Chevonne Thomas with child endangerment, and she lost custody of Zahree to the New Jersey Division of Children and Families, a troubled agency known for its failure to protect children from unfit parents. For several years the New Jersey's child protection bureaucracy, after a series of high-profile failures, had been under the supervision of a federal judge. (Did anyone actually believe that putting a useless government agency under a judge's supervision would fix the problem?) The prosecutor in the Chevonne Thomas case, due to some problem with a witness, dropped the charges.

     In April 2011, the state allowed this drug-abusing mother who walked around cursing to herself to regain custody of her son. She had supposedly been under the care of a so-called behavioral health therapist. Where was the supervising federal judge when this decision was made?  Who was looking out for Zahree Thomas?

     In 2012, Chevonne Thomas was living in a two-story house in Camden, New Jersey with Zahree and her older child. At 10:30 on the night of Tuesday, August 21, she and her boyfriend were standing outside the dwelling, and according to neighbors, she was extremely upset over something. The couple disappeared into the house, and sometime before midnight, the boyfriend left the premises.

     Shortly after twelve, Chevonne called 911 to report that her boyfriend had just stabbed her 2-year-old son to death. As the dispatcher talked to the rambling, sometimes incoherent caller, police officers rolled up to the scene. Shortly after the arrival of the police Chevonne informed the 911 dispatcher that she had stabbed Zahree to death.

     Officers entered the dwelling and searched the first floor of the house as Chevonne spoke to the 911 dispatcher from an upstairs bedroom. They discovered the corpse of a decapitated toddler, and in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator came upon Zahree's head. On the chance that Chevonne Thomas, who was still on the phone with the 911 dispatcher, might still be armed with a deadly weapon, the police backed out of the house.

     Later that morning when officers re-entered Camden dwelling they found Chevonne dead from a self-inflicted kitchen knife wound to the neck. According to the forensic pathologist who examined Zahree's body, the child had been stabbed in the chest and an arm before being decapitated. The medical examiner ruled the deaths a murder-suicide.

     The fact this insane PCP abusing mother had custody of two children (the older child was not home at the time of the suicide-murder) revealed something profoundly wrong with New Jersey's child protection system.

     The toxicological report released on December 3, 2012 by the Camden County prosecutor's office confirmed that at the time of the murder-suicide Chevonne Thomas had been smoking PCP-laced marijuana. Known on the street as "wet," this hallucinogen was known to cause extreme violence in some users.

The Pedro Maldonado Murder-Suicide Case

     In 2013, Pedro Maldonado and his wife Monica, citizens of Ecuador, South America, were living in the United States on expired visas. The couple resided in a gated community in Weston, Florida thirteen miles west of Fort Lauderdale. The Maldonado's 17-year-old son Pedro Jose Maldonado Jr. attended Cypress Bay High School where he was a drummer in the band. The older Maldonado son, Jose, was a student at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

     Mr. Maldonado and his 47-year-old wife not only faced deportation back to Ecuador, they were in serious financial trouble. An exporter of police supplies to South America, he had recently lost most of his business. In September 2013 the couple's drivers' licenses expired. As people living in the country illegally they could not renew their licenses and drive legally.

     Due to his citizenship and financial problems, the 53-year-old Maldonado felt helpless and doomed. Facing a bleak future he slipped into depression to the point of becoming suicidal.

     On Tuesday, December 3, 2013 at four-fifteen in the afternoon, Mr. Maldonado telephoned a friend in Miami and gave him some shocking news. According to Maldonado he had killed Monica and their son Pedro in the family's Weston townhouse. Maldonado said he shot them the day before with arrows fired from a crossbow. When asked where he was calling from, Maldonado said he checked into a motel near Lake City, Florida. The stunned recipient of the phone call immediately notified the authorities.

     In Weston, Florida, Broward County sheriff's deputies at six that evening entered the Maldonado townhouse where they discovered the dead bodies of Monica Maldonado and her son Pedro. They had each been shot in the head with small arrows or darts fired from a crossbow that featured a pistol grip. (I assume the victims were shot while they slept.)

     On Tuesday, December 3, 2013, about seven hours after Pedro Maldonado called his friend in Miami with the startling news, deputies with the Columbia County Sheriff's Office spotted his SUV parked outside the Cabot Lodge Motel near the intersection of Interstates 10 and 75 near Lake City, 100 miles east of Tallahassee. Shortly thereafter police officers evacuated the motel and called in a SWAT team and a crisis hostage negotiator.

     SWAT officers, after receiving no response from Maldonado's room, entered the motel at two in the morning on Wednesday, December 4, 2013. The officers found Mr. Maldonado dead in the bathroom. He had used a knife to slit his throat. 

     Investigators in piecing together the sequence of events that unfolded over the previous two days learned that Mr. Maldonado, after murdering his wife and youngest son in the Weston townhouse, drove 460 miles north to Tallahassee where he checked into a motel. Just after seven o'clock Tuesday morning, December 3, 2013, he shot his 21-year-old son Jose in the ear with  a crossbow dart. Having failed to make a killing shot, the father tried to choke his oldest son to death. Following a struggle, the young man managed to escape.

     Jose Maldonado did not report his father's attempted murder until after he learned what had happened to his mother and his younger brother.

     Neighbors in Weston described Mr. Maldonado and his family as quiet people who kept to themselves. The only sounds anyone heard coming from the townhouse involved the boy's practice sessions with his drums. Moreover, Mr. Maldonado did not have an arrest record in the United States and the local police had never been called to the house to mediate a domestic dispute.

     That Pedro Maldonado committed suicide is not shocking. What is a mystery is why he decided to end the lives of his wife and his children. When the American dream ended for the father, he must have decided that if he couldn't have it neither could his wife and two sons. This case reflects the fact that there are things in life and crime that will never make sense. This is particularly true in the world of suicide and murder.

The Bradley Stone Mass Murder-Suicide Case

     Bradley William Stone, a 35-year-old former Marine reservist, resided with his wife Jen, a media analyst, in the town of Pennsburg thirty miles northwest of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They married in September 2013 following his divorce from his first wife Nicole. Nicole filed for divorce in March 2009, and since that time she and Bradley had been embroiled in a bitter custody battle over their two daughters. On December 9, 2014 a family court judge denied a petition from Bradley Stone that ended the court fight in his ex-wife's favor. He did not take this defeat in stride.

     Bradley Stone served as a Marine reservist from 2002 to 2011, during which time he spent two months in Ramadi, Iraq where he monitored a computer screen that tracked missiles. After convincing his superior officers that he suffered from asthma he was sent back to the states.

     In October 2010 Mr. Stone was diagnosed with 100 percent service connected post-traumatic stress disorder. At the time of his honorable discharge in 2011 he had risen to the rank of sergeant. In October 2013 Stone filed 17 VA disability claims for problems that included traumatic brain injury, muscle and joint pain, sleep apnea and headaches.

     Following his military service, and during the height of his domestic war with his estranged ex-wife Nicole, Bradley Stone received psychiatric treatment at the Lanape Valley Foundation in the Doylestown Hospital for post-traumatic stress disorder. (Some former Marines with PTSD questioned Stones' diagnosis noting that he hadn't seen combat.)

     In 2013 a Montgomery County, Pennsylvania judge sentenced Mr. Stone to one year probation following his second driving while intoxicated conviction.

     At four-thirty in the morning of Monday December 15, 2014, six days after Bradley Stone lost the child custody battle, police officers were dispatched to a house in Lansdale, Pennsylvania 28 miles northwest of Philadelphia. Nicole Stone's mother, 57-year-old Joanne Gilbert and her mother, 75-year-old Patricia Hill, resided in that house. Police officers found both women dead.

     Bradley Stone's ex-mother-in-law lay in her bed with a slashed throat. Her mother lay on the floor with a gunshot wound to her right eye. The scene of this double-murder was awash in the victims' blood.

     Shortly after the discovery of the two Bradley Stone ex-in-laws, a 911 call was made from an apartment complex in nearby Lower Salford where Stone's 33-year-old ex-wife Nicole resided. A neighbor in the Pheasant Run Apartments reported hearing a disturbance followed by three or four gunshots that came from Nicole's unit. Following the disturbance the neighbor saw Mr. Stone putting his daughters into a green Ford and driving off. (He dropped the girls off at an acquaintance's house in Pennsburg. They were unharmed.)

     In Nicole Stone's apartment police officers found the victim lying on her bed with two gunshot wounds to her face. On the bed lay the murder weapon, Bradley Stone's .40-caliber Heckler & Koch pistol.

     At eight o'clock that morning in southeastern Pennsylvania, police officers in the town of Souderson discovered three more victims of Bradley Stone's murderous rage. Patricia Flick, Nicole's sister, was found hacked to death in her home. Her husband Aaron and her 14-year-old daughter Nina, also dead, had been bludgeoned and slashed. Anthony Flick, Nicole's 17-year-old nephew, in fighting off an ax-wielding Bradley Stone lost fingertips, sustained lacerations to his hands and arms, and suffered a fractured skull. He survived the attack by barricading himself in a room on the third floor of the house. Paramedics rushed the seriously wounded teenager to Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia. He survived the attack.

     Later that Monday Bradley Smith, the subject of an intense police manhunt, confronted a man walking his dog in Doylestown. Wearing camouflage clothing, Stone demanded the man's car keys. Instead of acquiring access to a vehicle, Mr. Stone found himself looking down the barrel of the man's handgun. The mass murderer was last seen running into a nearby wooded area.

     On Tuesday December 16, 2014 SWAT team officers looking for Stone in Pennsburg came across his body in the woods a half mile from his home. He had managed to hack himself to death.

     Neuropsychology professor Eric Zillmer of Drexel University, in speaking to reporters about the mass murder-suicide, said he didn't believe that Stone's murderous rampage had anything to do with PTSD. 

The Daniel Sanchez Mass Murder-Suicide Case

     Beatriz "Betty" Silva lived with her sister Maria and Maria's husband Max in a mobile home located among 400 modular dwellings in a subdivision outside of Longmont, a town 35 miles north of Denver, Colorado. The 25-year-old student at Front Range Community College worked at a Chipotle fast-food franchise, and as a sales associate with Marshalls Department Store. On November 22, 2012, Thanksgiving Day, she told her boyfriend, 31-year-old Daniel Sanchez, that she found someone new. Sanchez, a quick-tempered violent man flew into a rage. He made threats against the new boyfriend and began stalking and harassing Silva.

     When they were going together, Betty Silva loaned Daniel Sanchez $1,000, money he needed to fix up his truck. He had not paid her back as promised, so on Saturday, December 15, 2012, she arranged to meet him in the parking lot of a Best Buy on the outskirts of Denver where they would discuss how he planned to repay the loan. When the ex-girlfriend climbed into his vehicle Mr. Sanchez called her names, punched her in the face and used her cellphone to text threatening messages to her boyfriend. Against her will, Betty Siva was driven around in Sanchez's truck while he tried to talk her into checking into a hotel where they could resume their relationship. She refused, and after an hour or so, he drove her back to her car and let her out of his truck.

     Betty Silva reported Daniel Sanchez to the Denver police, and on Sunday afternoon, December 16, 2012, officers took him into custody on charges of false imprisonment, second-degree kidnapping, harassment and domestic violence. He spend the night in the Boulder County Jail, and at ten o'clock Monday night posted his $10,000 bond and was released.

     Furious over the fact the woman he loved had turned him in to the police, Daniel Sanchez drove straight from the jail to Silva's mobile home where he parked on the street in front of her dwelling. Armed with a .45-caliber 13-round Glock pistol and an extra magazine, Sanchez entered the Silva dwelling by shooting out the glass panel to the rear sliding glass door. Once inside the home he took Betty, her 22-year-old sister Maria and Maria's husband Max Ojeda hostage.

     At four o'clock the next morning Betty Silva called 911. The dispatcher overheard her say, "No, no, no." The 911 operator next heard gunfire. Following the gun shots, Sanchez came on the phone and informed the dispatcher that he was going to kill himself. Again, the sound of gunfire, then silence. No one else came to the phone.

     Weld County Sheriff's deputies and a SWAT team arrived at the modular home at 4:18 that morning. Officers weren't sure how many people were in the dwelling, or if any of them were alive. At 5:30 AM, after getting no response from inside the hostage site, members of the SWAT unit stormed into the mobile home. Officers found Mr. Sanchez dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. They discovered 29-year-old Max Ojeda and his wife Maria dead in their bedroom. Betty Silva had been shot to death in another part of the house. Officers found 16 spent shell-casings scattered about the murder site.

     In reporting Daniel Sanchez to the Denver police Betty Silva had indicated a reluctance to go forward with the more serious kidnapping related charges. By minimizing the seriousness of Sanchez's crimes against her she may have contributed to her own death and the fate of the other two victims. Had the magistrate been convinced that Sanchez posed a serious threat of life-threatening violence, Sanchez's bail may not have been set so low. There is also the possibility that regardless of the amount of Sanchez's bail, this young woman's fate was sealed once she became this violent, unstable man's girlfriend. 

The Michael Vanderlinden Murder-Suicide Case

     In mid-August 2012, 38-year-old Michael Vanderlinden, a native of Belgium who worked in the information technology field, was about to move out of the new, spacious two-story house he lived in with his wife Linda and their two sons, Julien, age seven and Matthew who was four. Vanderlinden, with a history of mental illness and depression, was seeing a therapist. In November 2010 he attempted suicide by overdosing on pills. His emotional and mental health problems strained his marriage which was the reason he was in the process of moving out of the family home in Van Buren Township outside of Detroit, Michigan. A neighbor saw Mr. Vanderlinden walk out of his house in the Homestead subdivision and drive off at 9:30 in the evening of August 15, 2012. No one in the subdivision saw him after that.

     On Thursday August 16 at 1:35 in the morning on Interstate 94 in La Porte County Indiana just south of the Michigan state line, Mr. Vanderlinden drove out of a rest area via the entrance ramp which put him in the westbound lane traveling east. Moving at a high rate of speed, his vehicle, with its headlights off plowed head-on into a car traveling eastbound on the interstate. Both vehicles burst into flames on impact burning Vanderlinden and the driver of the other vehicle, 45-year-old Julian Nelson, beyond recognition. Mr. Nelson, the victim of Vanderlinden's suicide was from Portage, Indiana.

     Later in the morning of the automobile fatalities on I-94 the Indiana State Police asked officers in Van Buren Township to notify Vanderlinden's wife of his death. At 8:30 AM a township patrolman rang the doorbell to the his home. Seeing a car in the garage the officer assumed that the house was occupied. When the doorbell failed to bring a response the officer tried the front door, found it unlocked and entered the dwelling.

     In the master bedroom the officer found 34-year-old Linda Vanderlinden, a charter school teacher, dead with a stab wound to her chest. She had also been strangled which turned out to be the cause of her death. In separate bedrooms the officer found the murdered children, each with multiple stab wounds from an 8-inch kitchen knife.

     The forensic pathologist with the Wayne County Coroner's Office was unable to determine the exact time the Vanderdindens' had been murdered. Because there were no signs of forced entry into the house, no one had been sexually assaulted and nothing had been taken from the death scene, investigators identified Michael Vanderlinden as the murderer. 

   The Indiana State Police concluded that Michael Vanderlinden had purposely caused the fatal head-on crash.

     In murder-suicides the question is always the same: if a person is going to kill himself why would he take other people with him? In this case Mr. Vanderlinden, for no reason a sane person could understand, slaughtered his family, and in the act of killing himself murdered a total stranger. 

Jody Lee Hunt's Murderous Rampage

     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.

     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. Mr. Hunt lived nearby in the small town of Westover.

     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.

     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.

     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 robbery was the motive for the murder.

     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.

     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.

     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.

     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."

     Also on his Facebook page that day Mr. Hunt wrote: "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."

     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. 

The Strack Family Murder-Suicide Case

     Benjamin Strack, his wife Kristi and their children resided in a duplex in Springville, Utah, a town of 30,000 45 miles south of Salt Lake City not far from Provo. Just before eight o'clock on the night of Saturday September 27, 2014, the oldest Strack child, accompanied by his grandparents, approached the Strack half of the duplex to check on the family. Mr. and Mrs. Strack and three of their children had not responded to emails, text messages or phone calls.

     The grandparents and the oldest child entered the house through the front door that stood wide open. (The back door was cracked open.) In the master bedroom they discovered Mr. and Mrs. Strack and the three children. The 36-year-old parents and the children--Benson, 14; Emery, 12; and Zion, 11--were dead. 

     Police officers at the scene noted that none of the bodies showed signs of physical trauma. Moreover, there was no evidence of a struggle and nothing had been taken from the house. 

     Firefighters tested the air inside the dwelling and did not detect traces of carbon monoxide. The fact that pets in the house were alive and the other residents of duplex were unharmed, pointed away from death by carbon monoxide poisoning. 

     Following the five autopsies the medical examiner announced that none of the Stracks had been subjected to violent assault. The cause and manner of these deaths remained undetermined pending the results of toxicological tests. A police spokesperson told reporters that foul play had not been ruled out in this case. The medical examiner did not reveal when the Stracks had died. 

    On October 28, 2014, reporters learned that investigators believed that the children and their parents had been poisoned to death on September 27, 2014. According to detectives, the children's bodies had been positioned in their parents' bedroom after their deaths. The bodies of Benjamin and Kristi and their children were each lying next to a cup of red liquid. Kristi Stack had red liquid coming out of her mouth.

     From the house investigators removed 14 drinking cups and bottles, a pitcher of red juice, and a purple bucket containing yellow liquid. Searchers also seized a pair of slippers that contained a drop of blood and a towel stained by a red substance. Detectives, in the family's garbage, found empty methadone bottles, 10 empty boxes of nighttime cold medicine, various pill bottles, several empty boxes of sleeping aids, a bag of marijuana and Pepsi cups containing traces of a red liquid.

     In January 2015 the Utah State Medical Examiner declared that the deaths of the children were caused by toxic amounts of diphenydramine and methadone. Kristi Stack died from the same drug plus dextrophan and doxylamine. Benjamin Strack had toxic levels of heroin in his system.

     The medical examiner ruled the parent's death as suicide and the two youngest children's death as homicide. The death of the 14-year-old was listed as "undetermined."

     According to the parents' friends and family, the mentally ill couple were worried about "evil in the world" and wanted to avoid a "pending apocalypse".

Murder in a Small Town: The 1957 Fordney-Barber Case

     In 1957, whenever someone in the United States committed murder-suicide the story almost always made the front page of the local newspaper and led the TV news that night. Today there is an explosion of murder-suicide cases across the nation, but in the 1950s such mayhem, particularly in small town America, was virtually unheard of. But it did happen, and it happened on May 28, 1957 in a small town in western Pennsylvania.

     John D. Barber and his wife Grace, a childless couple, adopted 8-year-old Judy Rose in 1946. The family resided in Grove City, Pennsylvania. In 1953 when Judy turned fifteen the family moved fifteen miles west to New Wilmington, a quiet borough of 1,800 in Amish country ninety minutes north of Pittsburgh. The Barbers took up residence in a modest home at 256 North Market Street near the center of the one-red light town.

     Two years after moving to New Wilmington, the home of Westminster College, Mr. and Mrs. Barber separated. Grace moved a few miles north where she took up residence in Blacktown in adjacent Mercer County. At the time Mr. Barber, a small aircraft pilot and member of the Shenango Valley Flying Club, worked the night shift at a factory twenty miles west in Youngstown, Ohio. Following her parents' separation Judy elected to remain in New Wilmington with her father.

     In September 1956 at the beginning of her senior year at Wilmington Area High School, Judy Barber announced her engagement to Homer Miller, a young man from Grove City who joined the Marine Corps. Notwithstanding her engagement to Mr. Miller, Judy continued to see Theodore George Fordney, a 28-year-old New Wilmington postal worker she had been involved with since July 1956. Early in 1957 following Homer Miller's discharge from the Marine Corps, Judy returned his engagement ring. She continued to go out with Ted Fordney, a man ten years her senior.

     On May 21, 1957 Mr. Barber, in anticipation of Judy's graduation from high school the following week, bought her a car. Although she was a mediocre student with a lot of absences, Judy lined-up a job as a secretary in a department store in the nearby town of Sharon. Having flown several times in a small plane with her father, she aspired to someday become an airline stewardess.

     Ted Fordney, Judy's on and off boyfriend, quit high school in 1945 during his senior year. Ted, a slender, clean-cut kid of average height known as an excellent swimmer and diver, while no more of a prankster than many students in his class, alway seemed to be the boy who got caught. According to his friend Kenny Whitman, Ted was one of those bad luck guys who walked around under a cloud. Before dropping out of school, Fordney and Whitman washed dishes at The Tavern, a New Wilmington restaurant known throughout western Pennsylvania.

     Growing up in New Wilmington Ted was raised by his mother. No one seemed to know much about his father, George A. Fordney. After leaving school Ted joined the Army and was stationed in Fort Lee, Virginia. In May 1947 fresh out of the service he worked at the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company in Youngstown, Ohio. In 1953 he landed a job at the post office in New Wilmington. He also joined the New Wilmington Volunteer Fire Department.

     In 1957, Ted, 29-years-old, still single and working at the post office, resided in a two-story dwelling at 512 West Neshannock Avenue. The house was owned by his mother. His 54-year-old mother, Mary Virginia (Fischer) Fordney, a practical nurse, lived and worked in Florida. For several months Ted had been living with terrible pain caused by a slipped disc in his spine. Because he couldn't stand for any period of time he missed a lot of work at the post office.

     On May 21, 1957 Ted underwent an operation at the Jameson Memorial Hospital in New Castle to repair his ruptured disc. Mrs. Fordney returned to New Wilmington from New Orleans to take care of her son as he struggled to recover from the operation. Mrs. Fordney had been in New Orleans visiting Madeline, one of Ted's three grown sisters.

      Six days following his hospital stay Ted ran into his lifelong friend, Kenny Whitman. When Kenny asked Ted why he hadn't been around to visit, Ted said the pain in his back was so intense he couldn't sit very long in a car.

     Judy Barber, although she continued to date Ted Fordney, occasionally entertained younger men at her house. Whenever this happened a jealous Ted would drive slowly back and forth on North Market Street past her home. On Monday, May 27, 1957, just four days before her high school graduation, Judy and a Westminster College freshman from West Hartford, Connecticut named Warren Howard Weber watched a late night television movie at her house. At one o'clock that night the college student left the North Market Street dwelling and walked back to his dormitory.

     The next morning, May 28, at nine o'clock, John Barber returned home after working the night shift at the factory in Youngstown, Ohio. In the front hallway to the house Mr. Barber discovered his daughter's dead body sprawled out on the floor. She was dressed in a pair of blue polka-dot pajamas and white, knitted socks. An electrical cord from a vacuum cleaner was wrapped tightly around her neck and knotted. There were no signs of forced entry into the house and Mr. Barber did not see any indication that his daughter had struggled with her killer.

     Mr. Barber picked up the telephone and reported his daughter's murder to an officer assigned to the Pennsylvania State Police Barracks in New Castle, a town of 50,000 nine miles south of New Wilmington. After speaking with the Troop D officer, Mr. Barber called Ted Fordney's house and spoke to his mother. Mrs. Fordney, immediately following Mr. Barber's call checked her son's bedroom and saw that his bed had not been slept in the previous night. Where was he? After seeing his car parked near the house, Mrs. Fordney walked into her back yard where she found Ted about five feet from the porch sprawled next to a .12-gauge shotgun. He had blasted himself in the face.

     Back at the Barber house, shortly after officers from the state police arrived at the death scene, Dr. Frank C. McClenahan, a local physician, came to the dwelling to examine Judy Barber's corpse. The doctor, based on the fact that rigor mortis had not set in, estimated that the girl had been murdered sometime between two and four that morning.

     Two state police officers, Sergeant Harold Rise and Corporal William S. O'Brien, were assigned the task of getting to the bottom of the two violent deaths. At the Barber house Trooper O'Brien noticed that the killer had ripped the vacuum cleaner cord out of the wall so violently the plug had detached.

     At the Fordney home investigators found Ted's wallet, watch and some loose change on his dresser drawer which led them to theorize that before killing himself in the back yard he emptied his pockets. On his bedroom walls the officers notices scratch marks that could have been made by the fingernails of a man in severe pain. The investigators did not find a suicide note.

     Later on the morning of Ted Fordney's suicide, after police officers and firemen left the Neshannock Avenue house, Mrs. Fordney called the Sharp Funeral Home a few blocks away. Bob Brush, a 19-year-old who happened to be visiting his friend Pete Sharp at the funeral home that day, accompanied Pete and his brother Bud to the Fordney residence. Bob, a 1956 high school graduate, lived on North Market Street a few houses from the murder scene. While Bob was acquainted with Judy Barber he only knew Ted Fordney as the older guy with a bad back who spent every day during the summer at the New Wilmington public swimming pool. In the back yard of the Fordney house Bob Brush took one look at the man lying next to the shotgun and turned away in horror. 

     Dr. Lester Adelson, the forensic pathologist with the Cleveland Crime Laboratory who three years earlier had examined the body of Marilyn Shepard, the murdered wife of Dr. Sam Shepard, performed the Judy Barber autopsy. Dr. Adelson noticed a fresh abrasion on the victim's left temple that suggested the killer had knocked her out before wrapping and tying the cord around her neck. According to the pathologist's estimation, the five-foot-tall high school senior had died of asphyxiation by ligature sometime between two and four on the morning of Tuesday, May 28, 1957.

     Warren Weber, the Westminster College freshman who had been with Judy just hours before the murder, contacted the state police almost immediately after he got word of her death. That Tuesday afternoon Lawrence County District Attorney Perry Reeher and County Detective Russell McConhay questioned the shaken student at the county courthouse in New Castle. Weber informed his interviewers that between ten-thirty and eleven o'clock the previous night he and Judy had seen a man peeking into one of the living room windows. The only thing Weber recognized about the man was that he had a crew-cut. Judy told him that she thought the window peeper was Ted Fordney.

     Troopers Rice and O'Brien questioned several witnesses who saw Ted Fordney, at ten-thirty Monday night walking toward the Barber house. Witnesses also saw the victim and Mr. Fordney riding around town in her new car the afternoon and evening of the day before her death. According to some of Judy's girlfriends she did not want to marry Ted and was thinking of ending their relationship. Whenever she entertained a boy her age Ted would pay Judy a visit shortly after her date went home.

   New Wilmington weekend police officer John D. Kyle questioned Ted Fordney's next-door neighbor, Mrs. Elmer Newton who said that she and her husband, between four and five o'clock Tuesday morning, heard a noise they thought was thunder. Officer Kyle presumed the couple had heard Ted Fordney shoot himself in the head.

     At this point in the investigation the homicide investigators as well as the Lawrence County District Attorney believed that Ted Fordney had gone to the Barber house an hour or so after the college student went home. Judy let him in, they argued and he punched her on the side of the head. As she lay unconscious on the hallway floor he wrapped and tied the electrical cord around her neck. After returning to his house Ted grabbed his shogun, walked into the back yard and shot himself in the face.

     On Wednesday morning, May 29, the day after the murder-suicide, the dead girl's father allowed himself to be interviewed by reporter Bryant Artis with The Pittsburgh Press. Artis' comprehensive front-page article about the mayhem in New Wilmington featured a large yearbook photograph of Judy Barber. According to John Barber, just minutes after reporting his daughter's murder to the Pennsylvania State Police, he telephoned Ted Fordney. "I called him simply because he knew everybody in town," the father said. Regarding his daughter's relationship with a man ten years older than her, Mr. Barber said, "He wouldn't show up for a month at a time. But they both loved to dance and off they'd go." Asked about his feelings toward Ted Fordney, Mr. Barber said, "It's not fair to accuse him until we know."

     Lawrence County Coroner John A. Meehan, Jr. held the coroner's inquest in New Castle at the country court house on August 6, 1957. Following the three hour session in which six witnesses testified, the coroner's jury, after deliberating twenty minutes, delivered its verdict. The inquest jurors found that Judy Barber had been strangled to death by Theodore Fordney who committed suicide shortly after the murder. This meant there would be no further investigation into these deaths. The case was closed.

     Because no one saw Ted Fordney murder Judy Barber and he did not confess, the case against him was entirely circumstantial. Moreover, there was no physical evidence connecting Mr. Fordney to the killing. According to reportage in the weekly New Wilmington Globe, forensic scientists at the state police crime lab in Butler found hair follicles from the victim on the sweeper cord. Latent fingerprints were lifted from the ligature, but because they were partials they could not be identified.

     Warren Weber, the Westminster College student from Connecticut did not return to New Wilmington. And who could blame him? He had come to a small quiet community to end up having a date murdered just hours after he left her house. It probably dawned on Weber that Ted Fordney could have come to the Barber house that night with his shotgun. Before turning the gun on himself Ted Fordney could have murdered the college student along with the girl.

     Ted Fordney's mother, on February 1, 1996, while living in a convalescent home in Hermitage, Pennsylvania died at the age of 93.

      Ted Fordney did not have a history of criminal violence and he was never treated for any kind of mental illness. So what could have driven this ordinary man to commit murder and suicide? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact he was in extreme pain. It is possible he was taking pain-killing drugs that altered his personality. (In the 1950s patients suffering from post-surgical pain often took a powerful over-the-counter drug called Paracetamol. Even in small doses Paracetamol was known to cause kidney, liver and brain damage. If combined with even small amounts of alcohol the drug was especially dangerous.)

      The memories of Judy Barber and Theodore Fordney, today remembered by a handful of people, are intertwined forever as they lay buried in the same cemetery outside of New Wilmington, Pennsylvania. In criminal homicide the smaller the town the bigger the murder.

Steven Powell And His Son Josh: Voyeurism, Arson and Murder-Suicide

     On December 6, 2009 Josh Powell reported his 28-year-old wife Susan Cox Powell missing. He said she disappeared while he and his two sons were on a camping trip. The family lived in West Valley, a suburb of Salt Lake City. The story didn't make sense and the police didn't believe him. As time passed and Susan Cox remained missing the authorities suspected that Josh Powell murdered his wife for her life insurance. But without the body the case stalled.

     In January 2010 after losing his job Josh Powell and his boys moved into his father Steven Powell's house in South Hill, an unincorporated community in the Puyallup, Washington area. Investigators in August 2011, pursuant to the ongoing investigation of Susan Powell's disappearance and presumed murder, searched Steven Powell's house and were shocked by what they found.

     On videotapes, computer discs and in Steven Powell's diaries, detectives found evidence that Steven Powell had been sexually obsessed with his son's wife Susan, the missing woman. He had also secretly videotaped and photographed, in 2006 and 2007, two girls who lived in the house next door. The girls were age 8 and 10.

     In seven entries in his dairies Steven Powell documented his bizarre fixation on his daughter-in-law. He wrote: "Susan likes to be admired, and I'm a voyeur...I'm a voyeur and Susan is an exhibitionist." In a series of videos of himself ruminating about his daughter-in-law, the senior Powell said he "...would give anything to be with her." In various self-videoed scenes Steven Powell is kissing a pair of her underwear, standing nude with a photograph of her and recalling how giving her a foot rub was "...the most erotic experience of my life." Detectives also found clandestinely taken photographs of Susan in various stages of undress.

     Even more disturbing were the thousands of photographs Mr. Powell had secretly taken of the girls next door. The pictures, taken 40 feet away through a window and an open bathroom door, depicted the youngsters getting dressed and undressed, taking baths, washing and drying their hair and other thing people do in the privacy of their homes. On his computer Steven Powell had hundreds of photographs he had covertly taken of other girls who had passed in front of his house. Searchers also found hundreds of photographs, taken by other people, of naked women and girls.

     In his diary entries Mr. Powell discussed his voyeurism generally, noting that he enjoyed taking video shots of pretty girls in shorts and skirts. In 2010 he recorded himself saying,  "I've been going nuts and nearly out of control sexually my entire life."

     Charged by the Pierce County prosecutor with 24 counts of voyeurism and one count of possession of materials of minors engaged in explicit conduct, police arrested Steven Powell on September 12, 2011. Each count carried a maximum sentence of five years in prison. He pleaded not guilty to all charges.

     About a month after his father's arrest Josh Powell lost custody of his two boys and moved into a rented house in Graham, Washington. On February 6, 2012 his sons made a visit to his home accompanied by a supervising social worker. Powell, with the boys in the house, locked the social worker out of the dwelling. With the social worker locked outside, Josh Powell murdered the boys with a hatchet. He poured several gallons of gasoline around the dwelling then set it on fire. He died in the blaze.

     Steven Powell, with his daughter-in-law missing and presumed dead, two of his grandsons murdered, and his son, the killer of all three, dead by his own hand, went on trial May 7, 2012 in Tacoma, Washington. In a series of pre-trial hearings Pierce County Judge Ronald Culpepper ruled that the prosecution could not introduce any of the evidence pertaining to Powell's obsession with Susan Powell. Moreover, the government could only present 20 of the photographs the defendant had allegedly taken of the girls next door.

     On May 9, 2012, the girls Powell had allegedly photographed and videotaped in 2006 and 2007, now 13 and 15, took the stand for the prosecution. When asked why they had not kept the bathroom door closed, one of the witnesses said she felt safer with the door open and had no idea anyone outside the house could see her. In the summer, because the home didn't have air conditioning, it got hot on the second floor. That explained why all of the upstairs windows had been open during the night. The family had moved to Puyalllup in 2006 from Arizona, and in 2008, left the neighborhood. The girls and their mother had no memory of Steven Powell and were unable to identify him in the court room.

     Defense attorney Mark Quigley did not put any witnesses on the stand. His defense, which revealed itself through his cross-examination of prosecution witnesses, consisted of suggesting that someone else in the Powell house had spied on the girls. At the time, Steven Powell's two sons and one of his daughters lived with him.

     Attorney Quigley, in his closing argument to the jury, pointed out that the state, with no direct proof the defendant had photographed and videotaped the neighbor girls, had not carried its burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

     Prosecutor Grand Blinn characterized the state's case as one involving "overwhelming circumstantial evidence." Blinn told the jury of six men and six women that the defendant had essentially confessed to being a voyeur. "It's difficult to imagine," he said, "anything more disturbing to teenage girls to know that a middle age man next door was taking pictures of them."

     On May 16, 2012, the jury, following just three hours of deliberation, found Steven Powell guilty of all 14 counts of voyeurism. They acquitted him of the possession of child pornography charges.

     The judge, on July 15, 2012, sentenced Steven Powell to 30 months in prison for the voyeurism offenses.

     On October 27, 2014 the prosecutor re-charged Powell on the pornography allegations. A judge later dismissed that case.

     The Washington State Court of Appeals, on March 13, 2016, set aside Powell's voyeurism conviction on procedural grounds related to the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

      Susan Cox Powell's body has not been found.

The John Raymond Sterner Suicide-Murder Case

     Ocean City is a resort town on the southern tip of Fenwick Island off the coast of Maryland. In the summer the population swells to 300,000. In 2003 Reverend David Dingwell, his wife Brenda and their three sons moved to Ocean City from the Canadian Province of British Columbia where he grew up. Father Dingwell came to Maryland to become the priest and rector of St. Paul's By-The-Sea Episcopal Church. He soon became known to his parishioners as Father David.

     Just before ten in the morning of Tuesday, November 26, 2013, a man engulfed in flames stormed into St Paul's Shepherd's Crook Building where volunteers were in the pantry preparing to open that day's food distribution service. The man on fire, John Raymond Sterner, a 56-year-old resident of Ocean City who had been a regular beneficiary of the food service and the church's used clothing outlet, bear-hugged church volunteer Jessica Waters.

     From the pantry Sterner ran into one of the ground floor church offices where the flaming man encountered parishioner Bruce Young who tried in vain to knock him to the floor where he could smother the fire. As John Sterner lay dead in the Church's ground floor office his burning body started a fire that produced a lot of smoke in the building.

     Ocean City firefighters doused the church fire before it destroyed much of the structure. In the second-floor rectory office they found the 51-year-old priest. Paramedics rushed Reverend Dingwell to Atlantic General Hospital where he died from smoke inhalation.

     Jessica Waters, the pantry volunteer who had been embraced by the burning Sterner, received treatment at John Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore. Bruce Young, the parishioner who tried to help the human torch, received minor burns.

     Twenty-five minutes before he ran into the church in flames Mr. Sterner, at a Shell station a quarter mile from the church, was recorded on a surveillance camera pouring gasoline into a red container. Detectives presumed that just before running into the church building he doused himself with the accelerant and lit himself up.

     The autopsies of Father Dingwell and John Raymond Sterner were performed by the Chief Medical Examiner of Maryland.

     The man who started the fire that killed Reverend Dingwell had a history of crime dating back to June 1994. Mr. Sterner had been convicted of breaking and entering, malicious destruction of property, disturbing the peace and numerous offenses related to alcohol intoxication. The police arrested him in July 2013 on the charge of second-degree assault. Police officers took him to the Peninsula Regional Medical Center for psychiatric evaluation after two of his arrests. According to police reports the suspect showed signs of "emotional and mental crisis."

      John Raymond Sterner was just the kind of person Reverend Dingwell and his parishioner volunteers helped every day.

     The fact Mr. Sterner bear-hugged the pantry volunteer suggested this was a case of suicide by fire followed by the intent to kill others. Unlike most murder-suicide cases, this killer died before his murder victim.

Ali Syed's Killing Spree

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christina Schumacher's Involuntary Commitment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Stacey Sutera Murder Case

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sungee Kwon Suicide-Murder Case

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hair Salon Mass Murder-Suicide Case

     Radcliffe F. Haughton, a 45-year-old former Marine who lived in Brown Deer, Wisconsin outside of Milwaukee, was estranged from his wife Zina. He resided with their 13-year-old daughter. Zina Haughton and her 20-year-old daughter from another marriage worked as hair dressers at the Azana Salon and Spa in Brookfield, Wisconsin eleven miles west of downtown Milwaukee.

     Radcliffe Haughton moved to the Milwaukee area ten years ago from Cook County, Illinois where he had grown up in the Chicago suburban communities of Northbrook and Wheeling. When he departed Illinois he left behind a history of arrests for disorderly conduct and domestic violence. In Brown Deer he became known to the local police who arrested him several times for similar offenses.

     In January 2011 neighbors called the police when they saw Haughton throwing clothing out a window then pouring tomato juice on his wife's car. Officers came to the house and saw him through a window holding a rifle. They ordered him out of the house but he refused. After a 90-minute standoff the officers left the scene without taking him into custody. Zina Haughton said she didn't want her husband taken into custody. He was later charged with disorderly conduct but the charges were dropped after he agreed to anger management counseling.

     On October 2, 2012 police officers were called to a gas station in Brown Deer by a witness who saw Zina Haughton barefoot and badly bruised in the face. Zina told the police she had been assaulted by her husband who threatened to kill her. Still, she did not want him arrested. Officers went to the house where they spotted Radcliffe through a window. When he refused to come out of the dwelling the police departed.

     Two days later, when Zina Haughton approached her car in the hair salon parking lot she discovered that someone slashed her tires. The next day police officers arrested Mr. Radcliffe and charged him with disorderly conduct and destruction of property. That day Zina acquired a temporary restraining order against him. The 42-year-old embattled wife also petitioned the court for a permanent protection decree. In her request for a permanent injunction she said Radcliffe was convinced she was cheating on him. In a jealous rage he threatened to kill her by setting her on fire. He also promised to kill her if she reported his threats to the police. She said she feared for her life. On October 18, 2012 the judge issued an order requiring Radcliffe Haughton to avoid contact with his wife for a period of four years. 

     On Sunday morning, October 21, 2012, Radcliffe Haughton pulled up to the two-story, 9,000-square-foot building that housed the Azana Salon and Spa. He alighted from the taxi cab at 11:09 and walked into the salon armed with a .40-caliber semi-automatic handgun. Once inside he opened fire on the helpless occupants. Mr. Haughton shot seven women inside the salon, killing his wife and two other women identified as Cary L. Robuck, 35 of Racine and 38-year-old Maelyn M. Lind from Oconomowoc, Wisconsin.

     Amid the chaos of women fleeing for their lives as Haughton walked around the salon firing and reloading his pistol, he set a small fire in the building.

     When police officers and SWAT units rolled up to the scene women were running out of the smoking salon. Haughton escaped out a back door but when he came around a corner of the building he saw the police and re-entered the salon.

     The four women Haughton had shot but didn't kill made it out of the building and were rushed to the Froedtert Hospital in Wauwatosa. (All of these victims survived their wounds.)

     At four in the afternoon of the deadly rampage, the police, during the course of a search of the building found the shooter. Radcliffe Haughton had locked himself in a room and with the pistol he used on his victims shot himself in the head.

     As is often the case in murder-suicides, some of the people who knew Radcliffe Haughton told reporters that he was a nice and friendly guy. They were shocked that he could do such a thing. These people were probably mere acquaintances who really didn't know him.

A Senseless Murder And Double Suicide

     Nickie Ann Circelli and her husband Sal were divorced in 2010. Due to years of her drug abuse the 36-year-old lifelong resident of Suffern, New York lost custody of her four children. That year police in the town of 12,000 in the foothills of Ramapo Mountains arrested Nickie and a man named Michael Chase in connection with the theft of $4,800 worth of power tools from trucks in a Home Depot parking lot. She pleaded guilty and spent a few months in jail.

     Nickie Circelli moved in with her mother when released from jail.  But when her mother died in 2013 she took up residence with her 70-year-old uncle, William Valenti. Mr. Valenti owned a house in Suffern.

     Another local drug addict, 40-year-old Gary Crockett, also moved into "Uncle Bill's" house. For 19 years Mr. Crockett worked at the Mahwah Warehouse and Delivery Company in Mahwah, New Jersey. But a year earlier he quit his job after having an argument with the co-owner. Gary Crockett didn't like being criticized for "moving too slowly." At the time he was living in an apartment above the Suffern Furniture Gallery.

     Circelli and Crockett while residing under Mr. Valenti's roof were passing forged checks to withdraw small sums of money from his bank account. Mr. Valenti gave the couple a deadline to pay back the $1,500 they had stolen. If they didn't return his money he threatened to report them to the police.

     On Monday morning, April 28, 2014, during an argument over the stolen money, Gary Crockett murdered William Valenti. The Rockland County Medical Examiner determined that the victim died of suffocation. His body was discovered in his bed.

     Following the murder  the couple took the dead man's Chevrolet Malibu and drove it to the Bronx, New York. They parked the vehicle and walked to the George Washington Bridge. Just before noon, about half way across the span, Nickie Circelli and Gary Crockett jumped to their deaths.

     At the Suffern murder scene investigators found two suicide notes signed by Circelli under her maiden name, Hunt. In the note addressed to her family she wrote: "To the four most amazing kids who the world has ever seen and ever will. I beg you to remember the Nickie that I used to be, before I was introduced to heroin."

     The second suicide note read: "I know that I'm taking the cowardly way out. I just don't want to hurt people anymore. Anything that goes into the paper, please make sure my last name is Hunt; I don't want to hurt my kids anymore than I already have." 

The Mandy Matula Murder Case

     Twenty-four-year-old Mandy Matula lived with her parents in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, a town of 60,000 12 miles southwest of Minneapolis. A graduate of the University of Minnesota at Duluth, she worked for the Eden Prairie Public Works Department. In high school Mandy was a standout softball player.

     In September 2012 Mandy Matula ended her relationship with David Roe, a 24-year-old from Victoria, Minnesota who was a classmate of her's at Eden Prairie High School. From 2007 to 2009 Roe attended the University of St. Thomas where he played football. After the break-up he and Mandy remained friends.

     On the night of Wednesday, May 1, 2013 David Roe showed up at the Matula house and asked to speak with Mandy. Leaving her cellphone and purse in the dwelling she and Roe sat outside the house in his 2013 Ford Escape SUV. Around eleven-thirty that night Roe drove off with Mandy in the vehicle.

     Mandy didn't return home that night and didn't show up for work in the morning. This prompted her worried mother to call David Roe to find out what happened to her. According to him they had continued their discussion in Miller Park near the Matula house. Following an argument she got out of his vehicle. He presumed she walked home. Mrs. Matula at eight-thirty that morning called the Eden Prairie Police Department and reported her daughter missing.

     As the last person seen with Mandy Matula, David Roe was the obvious person of interest in her disappearance. For that reason a detective with the Eden Prairie Police Department, on Thursday, May 2, 2013 asked him to come to the police station for questioning. That afternoon, after getting out of his SUV in the police department's parking lot David Roe put a handgun to his head and shot himself.

     Paramedics rushed David Roe to the Hennepin County Medical Center. At three the next morning he died from his self-inflicted head wound.

     As a result of David Roe's suicide investigators lost the best lead they had regarding Mandy Matula's whereabouts and status. A search of Roe's vehicle produced a note that, according to the police contained "limited writing."

     On Saturday, May 4, 2013, 300 volunteers searched Miller Park for Matula's body. In the Victory Lutheran Church parking lot a searcher found a .40-caliber bullet.

     In October 2013 Mindy Matula's body was found in a shallow grave not far from where she went missing. A forensic firearms identification expert determined that she had been shot by the same gun David Roe used to kill himself. Investigators believed the murder had taken place at the Victory Lutheran Church. After murdering Matula, Mr, Roe disposed of her body where it was later found.

The Dr. Bing Liu Murder-Suicide Case

     In May 2020 37-year-old Dr. Bing Liu resided with his wife in a townhouse on the 200 block of Elm Court in Ross Township, Pennsylvania, a suburban community just north of Pittsburgh. A University of Pittsburgh research assistant professor in the Computational and Systems Biology Department, Dr. Bing worked under Ivet Bahar, founder of the University Bahar Laboratory. The computer scientist, using computational models to study the biological process of the coronavirus, was on the verge of making significant findings regarding the cellular mechanisms of the virus.

     A native of China, Dr. Bing earned his Ph.D. in computer science at the National University of Singapore. He had been a postdoctoral fellow at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University before joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh.

     Dr. Bing, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, was working at home. Sometime during the morning of Saturday, May 2, 2020 Dr. Bing's acquaintance, 46-year-old Hau Gu, a software architect who lived in the suburban Pittsburgh metropolitan community of Franklin Park, entered Dr. Bing's townhouse through an unlocked door. Once inside the dwelling Hau Gu shot Dr. Bing in the torso, neck and head. After killing Dr. Bing Hau Gu walked to his car parked nearby. Once inside the vehicle, instead of driving away, Hau Gu committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.

     Dr. Bing's wife, upon her return to the townhouse at noon that day discovered her husband's body. An hour later Hau Gu's body was found in his car.

     Hau Gu earned a bachelor and a master's degree in computer science from Tongji University in Shanghai, China. In the late 1990's, after arriving in the United States he earned a master's degree in software engineering at East Tennessee State University.

     A naturalized U.S. citizen Hau Gu had worked since 2004 at the Eason Corporation, a company based in Ireland with an office in Pittsburgh.

     On May 5, 2020 Ross Township detective Brian Kohlhepp informed reporters that Dr. Bing's murder had nothing to do with his coronavirus research. As for motive, the detective, being intentionally vague, said the murder involved a "lengthy dispute regarding an intimate partner."

Shivinder Singh Grover's Triple Murder And Suicide

     A Sikh is a follower of Sikism, a religion that originated in the Punjab region of India in the 1500s. There are about 500,000 Sikhs residing in the United States.

     Shivinder Singh Grover and his family were active members of suburban Atlanta's Sikh community of a thousand worshipers. The 52-year-old father of two had graduated from the University of Michigan and was an executive with one of the technology companies headquartered in the city's northern suburbs. His 47-year-old wife, Damanjit Kaur Grover, worked for Emory Healthcare in Atlanta. The Grover family resided in a gated apartment community in Johns Creek, Georgia, a town 25 miles northeast of downtown Atlanta.

     One of Mrs. Grover's co-workers, at eleven o'clock in the morning of Monday, February 4, 2013, became concerned when Damanjit, a reliable employee, didn't show up at the office. After her phone calls to the Grover home went unanswered the co-worker called the Johns Creek Police Department and requested a welfare check at the Grover apartment.

     Later that morning, after breaking into the apartment, Johns Creek officers made a gruesome discovery. Officers found Damanjit dead from head wounds caused by a blunt object. The Grover children, Gurtej, aged 5, and Sartaj, 12, had fatal knife wounds in their necks. Shivinder, the presumed murderer of his family, had hanged himself.

     The Fulton County Medical Examiner's Office labeled these deaths a case of murder-suicide. Investigators looked at computer files for a suicide note or something that suggested a reason behind the killings. They found nothing instructive.

     A friend of Mr. Grover's, in speaking to a reporter with a church-related publication, said, "Shivinder was a very respectful person. He talked respectfully to everybody. He was not a person who had any animosity, anxiety, or depression."

     Shivinder Singh Grover's murder of his family and himself shocked his friends, colleagues and family. No one saw this coming and no one had a clue as to what drove this man of quiet intelligence and apparent stability to commit such a violent, unspeakable act. (Some of Mr. Grover's friends wondered if the family had been murdered by an outsider. There was, however, no official investigation into that possibility.)