The Birth of SWAT Policing

     In 1967, amid a period of civil unrest in the form of anti-Vietman War protests and race riots, the Los Angeles Police Department formed 15 four-man paramilitary units to protect the department's facilities. Members of these Station Defense Teams possessed street-patrol backgrounds and prior military service. These were not, however, full-time assignments. The concept of combat-trained paramilitary police units came from an officer named John Nelson who passed the idea on to Inspector Darryl Gates who in turn presented the idea to the top brass. Gates wanted to call these units Special Weapons and Attack Teams but this was considered a bit too militaristic for a civilian agency. In 1969 these units became known as Special Weapons and Tactical (SWAT) teams.

     On December 9, 1969 when police officers tried to serve search warrants for illegal weapons at the Black Panther headquarters at 41st Street and Central in Los Angeles the occupants fired on the officers with shotguns and automatic rifles. SWAT teams from around the city were called to the scene. Following a four-hour gun battle between six Black Panthers and 200 officers, the shooters in the house surrendered. Three SWAT team members and three Black Panthers had been wounded.

     Following the Black Panther shoot-out police administrators concluded that SWAT team response times would be improved by reassigning the 15 teams dispersed throughout the county to police headquarters in downtown Los Angeles. In 1971 SWAT team assignments became full-time positions. The Los Angeles Police Department, for several years, was the only law enforcement agency in the country with a paramilitary capability.

     Four years after the Black Panther violence the Los Angeles SWAT force consisted of six, ten-man teams. Each team had two five-man units called "elements" with a leader, two "assaulters," a scout and a rearguard officer. SWAT weapons included a .245-caliber bolt-action sniper rifle, two .223-caliber semiautomatic rifles and a pair of shotguns. Officers were also equipped with service revolvers and gas masks. Dressed in helmets, gloves and body armor, they could not be distinguished from combat troops.

     On May 17, 1974 six members of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) barricaded themselves inside a house on East 54th Street at Compton Avenue and ignored orders from the police to surrender peacefully. The domestic terrorists responded to tear gas canisters lobbed into the premises by opening fire on three SWAT teams and hundreds of regular police officers who had gathered at the scene. The police returned fire, eventually wounding all six occupants.

     When the smoke cleared 3,772 shots had been fired by SLA members. Thousands of bullets had been fired by the police. The shoot-out ended when a fire broke out inside the house, burning the dwelling to the ground. The occupants either died from bullet wounds or from the blaze. Investigators speculated that the fire started when a bullet hit a Molotov cocktail or a tear gas grenade. Millions of people across the country watched as the gun battle unfolded on live television.

     Although there was little sympathy for the terrorists who had fired on the police, the Los Angeles Police Department was criticized for allowing the situation to evolve into a scene of urban warfare. The department responded by tightening SWAT unit admission standards and upgrading the paramilitary training to reduce the occurrence of such spectacular violence.

Arthur Morgan III: A Narcissistic, Remorseless Child Killer

     By November 2011 Imani Benton, a 26-year-old resident of Lakehurst, New Jersey had terminated her relationship with Arthur Morgan III, the father of their two-year-old daughter, Tierra. The couple had fought constantly and on several occasions had taken each other to court. He continued to deny the breakup even after she returned the engagement ring and the other jewelry he had given her. The two of them had also traded accusations of child abuse. Because of Imani Benton's domestic abuse complaints state child protection agents conducted four separate investigations that cleared Arthur Morgan of these accusations. As a result he continued to have access to his daughter.

     On November 15, 2011 Mr. Morgan's boss at Creative Building Supplies Company in Lakewood, New Jersey fired him.

     On November 21, 2011, just eight hours after Morgan called Imani Benton a bad mother and a whore, he made arrangements with her to take Tierra to see a movie about dancing penguins. Four hours after he promised to return the child the girl's mother called the police to report Tierra missing.

     Police officers from thirteen New Jersey law enforcement agencies looked for the girl and her missing father. The search came to an end when searchers found Tierra's body in Shark River Park twenty miles north of her Lakehurst home.

     Homicide investigators believed that Arthur Morgan had dropped the girl's car seat, with her strapped into it, fifteen feet into a creek that ran below an overpass. The partially submerged car seat had been weighed down by a car jack. The drowned girl, still wearing her Pink Hello Kitty hat, had landed in three feet of water. (According to the father who did not deny throwing his daughter off the bridge, he heard her scream as he got back into his car.)

     After leaving his daughter to drown in the creek beneath the overpass, Arthur Morgan drove to a friend's house where he had a few drinks. The next day he boarded a train for San Diego, California.

     At four in the afternoon on November 29, 2011 agents with the U.S. Marshals Service arrested Mr. Morgan at a house in San Diego. (He was arrested on a federal unlawful flight to avoid prosecution warrant. These UFAP warrants are dismissed after the fugitive is returned to the local jurisdiction.)

     Back in New Jersey a few days after his apprehension Arthur Morgan faced the charge of first-degree murder. Over the objection of his court-appointed lawyer the arraignment judge set Morgan's bond at $10 million. Peter J. Warshaw Jr., the Monmouth County prosecutor in charge of the case said he would seek the maximum penalty of life without parole. (New Jersey abolished the death penalty several years earlier.)

     The Arthur Morgan child murder trial got underway in a Freehold, New Jersey Superior Court on March 12, 2014. In his opening remarks to the jury prosecutor Peter J. Warshaw Jr. accused the defendant of killing his daughter simply because he was angry that Imani Benton had ended their relationship. According to the prosecutor Mr. Morgan killed Tierra to get back at his former girlfriend. Mr. Warshaw called the killing a "knowing and purposeful murder" motivated by pride and revenge.

     The public defender told the jurors that her client was merely guilty of reckless manslaughter, a lesser degree of criminal homicide that carried a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Given the undisputed facts of this case that would turn out to be a hard sell.

     The murdered girl's mother, Imani Benton, took the stand as the prosecution's star witness. To the jury Benton read a letter the defendant had sent her from the San Diego jail shortly after his arrest. In that letter, Morgan, in justifying the murder, accused members of Benton's family of abusing Tierra. He referred to their behavior as "heinous and depraved." Morgan also blamed the girl's mother for her death: "You should have come with us to the movie. It would have been so different, I'm sure. That was the plan, to go as a family."

     Regarding the defendant's self-serving letter, Imani Benton testified that, "If I would have gone to the movie, we wouldn't have gone to the movie. We all would be dead."

     One of the defendant's co-workers at the Lakewood lumber yard testified that Morgan had been paid every Tuesday, and by Friday he was broke. According to Tulio Bazan the defendant spent a lot of money on clothes and accessories. "He showed me the Gucci sunglasses, a Gucci wallet and the Gucci shoes." Morgan told the witness that the wallet itself cost him $400.

     In mid-April 2014 the jury in Freehold, New Jersey, following a short period of deliberation, found Arthur Morgan guilty as charged.

     Six weeks after the guilty verdict, at his May 28, 2014 sentence hearing, the convicted murderer apologized to Imani Benton for the breakdown of their relationship. (He didn't apologize for killing their daughter.) "I want to say I'm sorry for the deterioration of what I thought was a beautiful friendship between the two of us that blossomed into a daughter. For anybody that was truly affected by this, I hope we can all heal from the situation, knowing that Tierra is in a better place." (In other words, he was the victim in this story.)

     As one might expect from a narcissistic sociopath with a god-complex, the convicted murderer whined about the media coverage of the trial. He said he didn't like newspaper photographs that depicted him as either angry or inappropriately jolly. He informed the court that had he known that reporters would make negative comments about his designer courtroom attire he would have dressed more modestly.

     The complaining sociopath also rambled on about how badly his murder victim had been treated by members of Benton's family. He contrasted that behavior to how, before he murdered his daughter out of wounded pride, he had been such an excellent father.

     Judge Anthony Mellaci, Jr., before handing down Morgan's sentence, lamented that New Jersey no longer imposed the death penalty. "You'd be candidate number one for its imposition," he said. "Your actions were horrific, unthinkable and appalling. This child was alive when she was placed in the water in pitch darkness. She had to suffer the unthinkable action of having water rush in and fill her lungs while strapped into that car seat. This child suffered before she died."

     Judge Mellaci sentenced the remorseless sociopath to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Murder-For-Hire: The Crime and Its Cast of Characters

     Murder-for-hire cases fall generally into one of two categories: homicides in which the contract for the killing is carried out and crimes in which, due to law enforcement intervention in the form of an undercover operative playing the role of the assassin, no one is killed. The latter offense is one of criminal solicitation.

     The cast of a murder-for-hire plot features three principal characters: the instigator/mastermind who solicits/contracts the homicide, the hit man (or undercover agent playing the triggerman's role) and the victim, the person targeted for death. Supporting players might include a cast of go-betweens and accomplices such as people who put the mastermind in touch with the hit man or undercover cop and helpers brought into the scheme by the triggerman. Murder-for-hire cases frequently include potential assassins the mastermind initially reaches out to but who rejected the assignment. These would-be hit men, often the mastermind's friends, casual acquaintances, relatives or co-workers, after declining to participate in the plot either remain silent or go to the police. Many of the ones who remain silent do so because they didn't take the mastermind seriously.

     While murder-for-hire stories, in terms of the characters involved have a somewhat common anatomy, they differ widely according to the social and economic status of the participants, the nature of their relationships to each other and the specific motive behind the murder.

     Unlike rapists, sex murderers, pathological fire setters and pedophiles, murder-for-hire masterminds do not conform to a general psychological profile. They are men and women of various ages and backgrounds who solicit their murders pursuant to a diverse range of motives. Murder plotters, compared to the murderers themselves, tend to be older, more commonly female and less likely to have histories of crime or violence. Given the pre-meditated nature of a murder-for-hire plot, masterminds, while either sociopathic, desperate, depressed, angry, drug-addled or simply not very bright, are not psychotic and therefore not mentally ill enough to be found legally insane. Without the benefit of the insanity defense, masterminds, when their backs are against the criminal justice wall, tend to throw themselves on the mercy of the court. They often cite, as justification for their murderous acts or homicidal intentions, abuse, depression and addiction to drugs and/or alcohol. Generally these pleas for mercy and understanding fall on deaf judicial ears, particularly when the mastermind was obviously motivated by greed such as avoiding the cost of divorce, benefiting from a life insurance policy or inheriting the victim's estate.

     Masterminds labor under the rather stupid belief that the best way to get away with murder is to pay someone else to do it. They think that having an alibi is their ticket to avoiding arrest and prosecution. These homicide plotters underestimate the reach of federal conspiracy laws, as well as the incriminating power of motive. Moreover, while masterminds do not pull the trigger, wield the bat or sink the knife, they do participate in the crime beyond simply asking someone to commit murder on their behalf. Although detectives won't find their bloody latents at the scene of the crime, masterminds can't help leaving their figurative fingerprints all over the conspiracy. Masterminds also leave behind witnesses in the form of hit men, go-betweens, confidants and accomplices.

     Most murder-for-hire masterminds, before the homicide, make no secret of the fact they want to eliminate the object of their greed or the source of their frustration and anger. To facilitate the murder they pay the the hit men cash upfront and promise the balance following the target's death. The mastermind commonly provides the assassin with a hand-drawn map pinpointing the proposed murder site, a photograph of the victim, the license plate number to the target's vehicle and an outline that details the future victim's daily routine. Masterminds also leave behind records of cellphone calls that can be quite incriminating.

     Some masterminds leave the murder methodology, the modus operandi, to the hit man, while other plotters actively participate in the planning stage. Masterminds who are engaged in the killing process usually want the homicide to look like an accident, a carjacking, rape, mugging or deadly home invasion. What they don't realize is that making a murder look like something else is easier said than done. Besides, the people masterminds hire to do the job are commonly incompetent, indifferent, drug-addled or dimwitted. 

     Paid assassins are almost always men who are younger than their masterminds. They are also more likely to have criminal backgrounds. Because of who they are, hit men do not plan the hit carefully or take steps not to leave behind physical evidence. After the murder they seldom keep their mouths shut about what they have done and who they have committed the murder for. If paid a lot of money hit men usually spend it on drugs or lose it gambling. While hit men are cold-blooded killers, they are nothing like the cool-headed professional assassins seen on television and in the movies. The are disorganized amateurs and bunglers who are easy to catch. Once they are caught they are quick to spill their guts.

     Murder-for-hire targets are not random victims of crime. They are people with whom the mastermind has had some kind of relationship. People targeted for death can be current and former spouses, estranged lovers or the mastermind's parents, children or business associates. Targets can include people the mastermind has previously victimized who are marked for elimination as crime accusers and potential trial witnesses. In cases of revenge involving masterminds who have scores to settle, victims can be judges, prosecutors and police informants. Men who batter woman also become murder-for-hire victims at the hands of the women they have beaten.

     The crime solution rate for murder-for-hire offenses is relatively high, particularly when the defendant ends up negotiating with an undercover cop brought into the case by the person the mastermind either recruited for the job or asked to find a hit man. Undercover operatives and masterminds meet, often in Walmart and shopping mall parking lots, where the conversations are audio and video-taped. Once the mastermind makes clear his or her homicidal intention, perhaps by supplying the upfront money, a weapon or a photograph of the target, the unsuspecting plotter is arrested on the spot. These arrestees are charged with crimes that include solicitation of murder, attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

     Occasionally, masterminds caught red-handed in undercover sting operations plead not guilty by reason of insanity, claim they have been entrapped by the police or raise defenses based on the battered spouse syndrome. But most of the time they confess and hope for leniency.

     Murder solicitation cases, while incomplete in nature, are fascinating because the police-recorded conversations between the undercover cops and the masterminds provides a window into the minds of people with sociopathic personalities intent on having assorted targets murdered. These cases reveal, in the extreme, how badly a marriage or romantic relationship can deteriorate. One gets the sense, after reviewing hundreds of murder-for-hire cases, that America has become a society of depressed, drug-addled sociopaths who will stop at nothing to get what they want.

     Murder-for-hire crimes that result in actual killings are more challenging for investigators. This is because these offenses include crime scenes, physical evidence, autopsies, witnesses and suspected masterminds with alibis they can establish. However, compared to drive-by shootings, drug and gang-related murders and criminal homicides without obvious suspects, murder-for-hire crimes are relatively easy to solve.

     Masterminds generally make it easy for homicide detectives by hiring hit men who are incompetent fools. Murder-for-hire plotters also create future witnesses by casting a wide net in their search for a contract killer. Because hit men are usually careless and have big mouths, these amateur assassins are almost always caught. And when they are arrested, hit men regularly inform on the mastermind in return for a lighter sentence. Murder-for-hire dramas are less about police work, forensic science and criminal justice than they are about sociology, criminal psychology and American culture.

     From a criminal justice point of view, murder-for-hire cases raise interesting questions associated with the comparative sentencing of masterminds and their hit men. Because both the mastermind and the hired killer can be found guilty of first-degree murder, they are eligible, in 32 states, for the death penalty. In most cases, however, the triggerman receives a much lighter sentence that the person who hired him. This is because hit men usually confess first and agree to testify against the mastermind.

     In the recent history of murder-for-hire crime there have been cold-blooded killers who, in return for their cooperation with law enforcement, have been awarded sentences as light as seventeen years in prison while the mastermind was sentenced to death. Although these sentencing disparities have a lot to do with the practicalities of plea bargaining, there may be more to it than that.

     Masterminding a contract murder is generally perceived as more evil than actually pulling the trigger. The particular loathing of murder-for-hire masterminds is reflected in the fact that homicide investigators and prosecutors target the instigator more than the hit man. Amateurs who kill for money, usually petty criminals who do it for peanuts, don't shock us because they are young, male criminals doing what society expects them to do. When middle and upper-middle class people exploit these desperate and pathetic losers by hiring them to do their dirty work, we hold them more responsible for the murder. For masterminds, it's who they are that makes their behavior so repugnant and evil. This is interesting because a nation full of masterminds would be a lot safer than a country full of hit men.

America: The Land Of Litterbugs

     Modern cars and truck are smart. They give you directions to unfamiliar places, remind you to fasten your seatbelts, alert you to a cracked door, a low tire or a problem with your engine. Some vehicles drive themselves. It's too bad some genius hasn't invented an automotive feature that prevents occupants from littering our roads, streets and highways. 

     Notwithstanding ad campaigns against littering, laws against it and millions of trash containers, our country is buried in garbage chucked from cars and trucks; 51 billions pieces of it every year. The debris generated by our modern lifestyle is not only ugly, it can be carried by storm drains into local waterways. At $11.5 billion a year, it is also costly to cleanup. Littering is a huge problem and a national disgrace.

Littering in the First-Degree

     In August 2019, Sergeant Stephen Wheeles of the Indiana State Police, while cruising I-65 in Johnson County, was startled when a dirty diaper tossed out of the vehicle in front of him slapped loudly against his patrol car.

     Officer Wheeles activated his emergency lights and pulled over the car carrying a passenger seated next to a child in the back seat. The litter suspect, while acknowledging that the soiled diaper had originated from that vehicle, blamed wind blowing though the vehicle.  It was a nice try but the trooper wasn't stupid. He issued the subject a ticket for littering. If Indiana had a law on the books called first-degree littering, this incident would have qualified.

     Since all of the Keep American Beautiful measures have failed to stop motorists from despoiling our streets, roads and highways with trash, we will just have to hope for the Automatic Automotive Anti-littering (AAA) feature America so badly needs.   

Criminal Investigation in the High Tech Surveillance Era

Not that long ago, criminal investigators had fewer tools to work with than today's detectives. Investigators who enter the field this century have so many more ways to solve crimes and gather evidence for court. Rapists, for example, can be incriminated by their DNA. A suspect's movements at the time of the crime and afterwards can be tracked through GPS technology. Crimes committed in public are almost always recorded on surveillance cameras. Quite often suspects incriminate themselves on social media, or are incriminated by others on Facebook and other sites. In the old days investigators didn't have Google or latent fingerprint, forensic ballistics and DNA databases. And many criminals today, through their email, give themselves away. Advances in science and technology and the emergence of the surveillance state have not been friendly developments for criminals. Nevertheless, overall crime solution rates have not improved since the 1930s. This is because criminal investigation has never been a law enforcement priority in this country. 

Forensic Firearms Identification

     In the past called forensic ballistics, forensic firearms identification concerns itself with the comparison of crime scene bullets and firing pin impressions on shell casings with the marks on test-fired rounds. If marks on the bullet made as it passed through the test-gun barrel are identical to the scratches on the crime scene slug, the crime site weapon has been identified. If the firing pin impressions on the known and questioned shell casings match, an identification has been made as well. (Semi-automatic weapons also leave ejector marks on shell casing that can be compared and identified.)

     Forensic firearms identification is a science grounded on the principle that no two guns will leave the same marks on the ammunition. Bullet scratches (called striations) and firing pin impressions are as unique as a person's fingerprints.

     Firearms identification also includes restoring filed-off serial numbers, tracing projectile flights, identifying the various types of bullet wounds and determining the range of close shots through muzzle produced powder-stain patterns on the target.

     Experts in the field apply the sciences of metallurgy, chemistry (gunshot residue analysis), microscopy and ballistics. A knowledge of the gun smith trade is also useful. Like forensic document examiners forensic firearms experts are trained on-the-job in crime laboratories.  

The Tiffany Alberts Child Abuse Case

     In 2016, Tiffany Alberts lived with her husband Jason and their two children, a 13-year-old girl and a boy who was 15. The family resided in Wolcott, Indiana, a small town in the northwestern corner of the state. Tiffany worked as a special education teacher in the Tri-County School District.

     In the spring of 2016 Tiffany Alberts' life took a turn for the worse when her husband Jason died. About this time doctors diagnosed her 13-year-old daughter with follicular adnexal carcinoma, a rare form of skin cancer. The local fire department held a benefit for Tiffany to help pay her medical expenses that included her daughter's cancer operation that turned out successful.

     In July 2016 Tiffany Alberts received more bad news when doctors diagnosed her mildly autistic son with leukemia. The 15-year-old was taken to Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis, Indiana where, in the Intensive Care Unit, he began a round of chemotherapy.

     Tiffany Albert's son responded well to the chemotherapy sessions and was discharged in September 2016. But after spending a few days at home the boy was back in the ICU with a fever accompanied by vomiting and diarrhea. A blood test revealed the presence of organisms found in stool. Doctors were at a loss to explain how this substance had found its way into his system.

    After the young patient failed to respond to medication for his infection, members of the Riley Children's Hospital staff suspected that someone was contaminating his IV fluid. To confirm this suspicion staff members installed hidden video cameras in his hospital room.

    On November 17, 2016 Tiffany Alberts was recorded injecting liquid into her son's IV line. That substance was tested and turned out to be the patient's own fecal matter.

     When questioned by an investigator with a child protection service, the 38-year-old mother said she had injected water into her son's IV line to "flush it as the medicine that was given burned." When pressed regarding the plausibility of this explanation, Tiffany Alberts confessed to intentionally injecting her son's own fecal matter into his IV fluid. She said she had started doing this on November 13, four days earlier.

     When asked the obvious question as to why she had intentionally made her son sick, the mother said she had made him ill in hopes of causing his transfer to another hospital unit where he would receive better care.

      Shortly after hospital authorities denied Tiffany Alberts access to her son, the boy quickly recovered. According to the physician who was treating the boy, he could have died of septic shock.

     On November 26, 2016 a Marion County prosecutor charged Tiffany Alberts with six counts of aggravated battery and one count of neglect of a dependent resulting in serious bodily injury. After officers booked her into the Marion County Jail she posted the $80,000 surety bond and was released. A few months later the prosecutor added the charge of attempted murder.

     The Tiffany Alberts case went to trial in September 2019 and resulted in a verdict of guilty on the aggravated battery and neglect of a dependent charges. The jury acquitted the defendant of attempted murder.

     In December 2019 the judge sentenced Tiffany Alberts to seven years in prison followed by five years of probation. Her son survived his ordeal and recovered fully,

     Although the issue was not raised, this case had the earmarks of a crime motivated by a mother with a condition called Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, an emotional disorder in which a caregiver makes the person under her care sick as a way of gaining sympathy and attention for herself. 

Where Is Relisha Rudd?

     In 2014 eight-year-old Relisha Tanau Rudd resided in the D.C. General Homeless Shelter in Washington with her 27-year old mother, Shamika Young, her stepfather and her three brothers. The family had lived in the shelter a year when Relisha's mother on March 1, 2014 arranged to have 51-year-old Kahlil Malik Tatum and his wife Andrea take the girl in and care for her. Kahlil Tatum worked at the homeless shelter as a janitor where he had a reputation of paying a lot of attention to the young girls who lived there.

     On March 19, 2014, after Relisha missed several days of school, the authorities launched a missing persons investigation. Mr. Tatum had also vanished. The janitor and the girl were caught on a D. C. area Holiday Inn Express surveillance camera walking down a hallway on February 26, 2014, a few days before the girl's mother gave her  up.

     Detectives learned that Tatum, on March 2, 2014, had purchased a carton of black 42 gallon self-tie contractor trash bags.

     Police officers on March 20, 2014 found Andrea Denise Tatum's body in a motel room at an Oxon Hill, Maryland Red Roof Inn. She had been killed by a gunshot to the head. Her husband and Relisha Rudd were nowhere to be found. Homicide detectives uncovered evidence linking the dead woman's husband, Kahlil Tatum, to the homicide.

     A Prince George's County prosecutor charged Kahlil Tatum with first-degree murder. On March 26, 2014 the FBI added the fugitive homicide suspect to its "Most Wanted List" and offered a $70,000 reward for information regarding his whereabouts. The Prince George's County Police Department posted a $25,000 reward for information leading to his arrest.

     On March 27, 2014, shortly after a witness reported having seen a man meeting Tatum's description with a girl in Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens in northeast D.C., a party of more than 100 officers searched the 700-acre park. Four days later a searcher came across Mr. Tatum's body. He had committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with the gun used in the murder his wife. Searchers found no signs of Relisha Rudd. On April 3, 2014 the park search was called off.

     The D.C. City Council Committee of Human Services, in the course of reviewing the hiring policy at D.C. General, found that Kahlil Tatum possessed an extensive criminal record. He had been convicted in 1983, 1986, 1987, 1991 and 1993 of various crimes including breaking and entering and grand larceny. He was last convicted of a crime in 2004. In those days he went under his birth name Karl Lee Tatum.

     According to the administrator in charge of hiring at the D.C. homeless shelter, Mr. Tatum, because his last conviction was ten years old, was eligible for employment at the facility. Had any of his offenses involved children he would have been automatically excluded regardless of the date of the conviction.

     Social service authorities, following Relisha Rudd's disappearance, took away Shamika Young's three boys and placed them into foster care. The mother, who herself had grown up in the Virginia foster care system, had been shuttled between foster homes, group homes and mental health facilities. Diagnosed in middle school as "mildly retarded," Shamika reported hearing voices telling her to kill her foster family and herself. She also suffered from depression and a variety of other emotional problems.

     After Shamika Young signed herself out of foster care at age 18 she gave birth to four children from two men. She had no training on how to be a good mother and no way to make a living. Prosecutors over the past years, on three occasions, had charged Young with child abuse and neglect. The cases were all dismissed.

      After Relisha Rudd's disappearance Shamika Young fought to get her three sons out of foster care. This created a heated debate among child protection advocates and Young's extended family, some of whom blamed her for Relisha's disappearance.

    In January 2018 the police received a tip that led to a six hour search for Rudd's body in parts of the Anacostia River. The effort failed to locate the missing girl's remains.

     As of this writing Relisha Rudd remains missing. 

The Susan and Sarah Wolfe Murder Case

     Dr. Sarah Wolfe and her sister Susan grew up in Clinton, Iowa. Their father, Jack Wolfe, headed a law firm in Clinton where his wife Pierrette practiced.

     Since 2007 Dr. Sarah Wolfe, a 38-year-old child and adolescent psychiatrist, had been treating victims of domestic abuse at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The graduate of Iowa University School of Medicine, she also held the position of Associate Professor in the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Psychiatry.

     In November 2012, 44-year-old Susan Wolfe left her job as a special education teacher in the Chicago public school system. She returned to Clinton where she worked at the YWCA. After Susan moved to Pittsburgh in November 2013 she and her younger sister purchased a 93-year-old two-story brick house in the East Liberty section of the city. Susan had accepted a job as a teacher's aide at Hillel Academy in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood. At the school she worked with students with behavioral problems.

     On Friday, February 7, 2014 the sisters' co-workers at the psychiatric clinic and at the academy became concerned when Sarah and Susan failed to show up for work. This prompted a visit to the Chislett Street house by a Pittsburgh police officer.

     The police officer, at forty-five minutes past noon, knocked on the Wolfe's front door. When no one responded he walked around the dwelling and peeked into windows. Seeing nothing unusual inside the house, the officer headed toward his patrol car. Before he drove off, Matthew Buchholz, a man who identified himself as Sarah Wolfe's boyfriend, approached the officer. The resident of Friendship, Pennsylvania possessed a house key the officer used to enter the dwelling.

     In the basement of the home the officer discovered the bodies of Sarah and Susan Wolfe. Susan was nude, her sister clothed. They had been each killed by a single bullet to the head. The killer had poured some kind of liquid over one of the bodies in an effort to destroy physical evidence. Susan Wolfe had been badly beaten as well as shot.

     Detectives at the murder scene found no evidence of a forced entry. Dr. Sarah Wolfe's car, a lime green 2011 Ford Fiesta, was not at the house. The vehicle was last seen by a neighbor at 9:25 PM on Thursday February 6, 2014.

     A police officer at l:15 in the morning of February 8, spotted the Wolfe vehicle parked about a mile from the scene of the double murder. Crime scene investigators processed the Ford for traces of physical evidence that could shed some light on the murders.

     Homicide detectives theorized that when Dr. Sarah Wolfe arrived home that Thursday night she walked into a crime in progress. Police found Susan Wolfe naked and doused with chemicals. Dr. Sarah Wolfe lay nearby at the foot of the basement stairs with her coat half off.

     On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 police officers searched a house next door to the Wolfe sisters' residence and hauled the occupant, a man with a history of burglary and robbery, to police headquarters for interrogation.

     On March 5, 2014 the authorities charged next door neighbor, Allen D. Wade, 43, with two counts of criminal homicide, robbery and theft. A forensic scientist with a private Pittsburgh laboratory found, under Susan Wolfe's fingernails, male DNA. Traces of Wade's blood were found on a pair of gray sweatpants connected to the murder scene. Detectives took DNA samples from the suspect who denied any involvement in the killings.

     In April 2014 at a preliminary hearing before District Judge John Scott Schricker, a prosecutor with the Allegheny County District Attorneys office presented enough incriminating evidence against Allen Wade to justify moving the case to trial.

     Detective Harry Lutton, the lead investigator in the Wolfe double murder testified that the victims' bank cards had been used by Allen Wade at the Citizens Bank ATM across from the East Liberty Target store.

     Deputy District Attorney Simquita Bridges showed clips from nine surveillance videos showing a man believed to be the suspect using the victims' bank cards. The prosecutor also read the results of a crime laboratory report that identified the defendant's DNA as being under Susan Wolfe's fingernails.

     In May 2014 the district attorneys office announced it would seek the death penalty against Mr. Wade. According to prosecutors, the Wolfe case featured two aggravating circumstances that justified the application of the death sentence. The defendant stood accused of killing Dr. Sarah Wolfe because she witnessed the murder of her sister. Secondly, Mr. Wade was suspected of committing the murder during the commission of a felony.

     Given the fact the governor of Pennsylvania had recently placed a moratorium on capital punishment, the death sentence in this case was unlikely.

     On November 16, 2014 the process of selecting a jury got underway in the Allegheny County Courthouse in downtown Pittsburgh. The next day, however, Judge Edward J. Borkowski postponed the murder trial to give defense attorney Lisa Middleman more time to prepare her case.

     In February 2016 defense attorney Middleman filed a motion to require the prosecution's DNA expert to reveal the source code used to make the computerized DNA match against her client. Allegheny County Judge Borkowski denied the motion. In response, the defense attorney filed an appeal with the Pennsylvania Superior Court. As a result Allen Wade's trial, scheduled to start in March 2016, was delayed thirty days.

     The Wade murder trial got underway on May 3, 2016 in Pittsburgh. In her opening remarks to the jury public defender Middleman said she would challenge the states's DNA evidence. According to the defense attorney, prosecutors sought out the private DNA analyst after experts at the Allegheny County Crime Lab failed to make an identification. Middleman said her client was the victim of a "sloppy investigation" and a rush to judgment.

     On May 23, 2016, the jury, after deliberating five hours, found Allen D. Wade guilty as charged. Three days later Judge Edward Borkowski sentenced Wade to life in prison without the chance of parole. 

The David Hilder Murder Case

     On July 3, 2012 a group of foreign students on holiday in Southsea England, a resort town on the English Channel, made a gruesome discovery on the rocks at Portsmouth Beach. They stumbled upon what turned out to be a torso wrapped in a pink shower curtain stuffed inside a plastic bin. Three days later police officers found a pair of legs at another spot on the beach.

     While the Home Office forensic pathologist could not determine the exact cause of death in this case, marks on the torso suggested that the male victim had suffered a "sustained and violent assault sometime between June 30 and July 3, 2013." The authorities identified the remains as 30-year-old David Guy, a Southsea man who lived in a camper van and spent a lot of time in the nearby flat of a friend, David Hilder. According to residents of the area, David Guy, when sober, was polite and helpful. When intoxicated he became violent.

     The dismembered man's longtime friend David Hilder collected and sold scrap metal. He rode around on a bicycle equipped with a butcher's box affixed to the handlebars. Witnesses had seen a man on such a bike in the vicinity of the torso dump site.

   On July 5, 2013 David Hilder showed up at the Shoreham police station where he spoke to police constable Stephen Miles. "I need to speak to a copper," Hilder said. "I think I have killed someone." The dirty, disheveled man, known as "Big Dave," seemed confused.

     "What happened," asked PC Miles.

     "I do not know. I'm not sure what I have done." Hilder told the officer he was having flashbacks of the crime he may have committed. "If I have done what I think I've done, then I'm going to kill myself."

     "What do you think you have done?"

     "I don't know," came the reply.

     Police officers conducted a search of David Hilder's flat and didn't find anything suspicious. When advised of this MR. Hilder seemed relieved. Noting that he may have overdosed on the drug Nurofen, Mr. Hilder said, "It must have been all in my head then."

     A police officer drove Hilder to a nearby hospital where he was examined and discharged. The officer put him on a train back to his apartment on Richmond Road in Southsea.

     Further investigation of the relationship between "Big Dave" Hilder and "Little Dave" Guy revealed a history of violence. Guy frequently accepted food from Hilder and showered in his flat. In return he was supposed to take care of Hilder's cat, Tinker. When Hilder returned home to find his place a mess and Tinker neglected he'd punish Mr. Guy with a beating. In recent weeks the two men had been arguing over Mr. Guy's new relationship with another man.

     Police officers on July 8, 2012 arrested David Hilder for killing David Guy. The suspect denied having anything to do with his friend's death or dismemberment.

     David Hilder's trial got underway in the Winchester Crown Court exactly one year after the discovery of Mr. Guy's torso on the Southsea beach. The defendant stood accused of murder and the lesser offense of manslaughter. In his opening statement to the jury, Nigel Lickley with the Crown Prosecution Service called the murder "painstaking and deliberate." According to the prosecutor the defendant had used his bicycle to dispose of Mr. Guy's body parts. (The victim's head, arms, several internal organs and his genitals had not been found.) Prosecutor Lickley, in referring to the killing and dismemberment said, "It took time, it took clarity of thought, and it took planning."

     Detective Superintendent Dick Pearson of the Hampshire County Constabulary took the stand for the prosecution and described how he collected cat hair follicles from the pink shower curtain that had been wrapped around Mr. Guy's torso. The Hampshire police sent these samples to the United States where they were visually compared to follicles from 493 American cats. The English samples did not look like any of the hairs from the U.S. cat follicle collection. (The death scene follicle looked like Tinker's hair.)

     Scientists at Leicester University's Department of Genetics compared DNA extracted from Tinker's known hair with the DNA of 152 cats from Southsea and other parts of Hampshire County. Tinker's DNA did not match the DNA from any of the hairs from the 152-cat database. When the DNA from the shower curtain hairs were compared to the DNA of Tinker's known samples, the scientists concluded there was only a one in one-hundred chance that the death scene hairs had not come from the defendant's cat. (DNA in cats is less specific than in humans.)

     Dr. Jon Wetton, the scientist who led the University of Leicester's DNA project took the stand for the prosecution. Dr. Wetton, who had done similar work on dog DNA, said, "This is the first time cat DNA has been used in a criminal trial in the UK. This could be a real boon for forensic science as the 10 million cats in the UK are unwittingly tagging the clothes and furnishings in more than a quarter of households. Animal DNA offers a way of linking people to places and items though the transfer of their pets' hairs."

     David Hilder's attorney, without much to work with emphasized his clients low IQ (63) and his learning disability. The defendant also suffered from severe depression.

     On July 30, 2013 the jury acquitted David Hilder of murder but found him guilty of the lesser crime of manslaughter. Justice David Bean sentenced him to a minimum of twelve years in prison.