The Free Speech Hating Politician

    It's ironic that the people we elect to protect free speech often hate it the most. Politicians hate it because it's hard to control an electorate that can speak freely. To a politician so-called "hate speech" is simply speech they don't like. Criminal law has always restricted what we can do, now some of our more fascist oriented politicians are determined to also restrict what we can say. If the people in power can control speech they can control us. The best we can hope for regarding this frightening trend is that a lot of these politicians are pandering hacks who are not bright. Beyond that we have the U.S. Constitution.

     In May 2019 a Massachusetts state legislator named Daniel J. Hunt introduced a bill titled "An Act Regarding the Use of Offensive Words." (Italics mine.) Mr. Hunt's proposed law read: "A person who uses the word 'bitch' directed at another person to accost, annoy, degrade or demean the other person shall be considered to be a disorderly person." At first blush one might think this was a joke or fake news. It was neither.

     Under Mr. Hunt's bill, if a victim of this outlandishly unconstitutional law could produce a witness who overheard the outlawed word uttered with intent to, let's say, annoy, the perpetrator with the criminal tongue could be fined $150.

     If the word "bitch" came out of the convicted criminal's mouth again and annoyed the same person the violator could be sentenced to up to six months in jail. 

     If free speech-hating politicians get control of our government they certainly won't stop with the word "bitch." Americans could go to jail for uttering thousands of other words such as "bastard," "fat," "crazy," "stupid" and "ugly." Words often used to describe politicians such as "asshole," "moron" and "hack" would certainly be outlawed and possibly classified as felonies. 

     Legislator Hunt's proposed bill did not become law. 

Jessica Herrera's Vehicular Homicide Trials: When Is An Accident a Crime?

     All drivers occasionally speed, cross the center line, roll through stop signs and get distracted. There is no such thing as perfection behind the wheel. No one wants to cause an accident, particularly one that results in injury or death. Whenever a driver's carelessness causes or contributes to a traffic accident that results in the death of another driver or passenger, a prosecutor has to decide if this act of negligence rises to the level of criminal homicide. Ordinary negligence that falls short of recklessness--the total disregard for the safety of others--is treated as a civil wrong rather than a criminal act. Vehicular homicide applies to motorists who are driving extremely fast, are drunk, high on drugs or fleeing from the police.

     On June 11, 2011 in Santa Barbara County, California, Christopher Martinez slowed down on Highway 246 east of the town of Lompoc to turn into a driveway that led back to a winery. The 28-year-old was showing up for his first day of work. As he slowed to negotiate the turn, Jessica Herrera, driving the car behind him rear-ended his vehicle. The collision pushed Martinez's car into the opposite lane where it was struck broadside by a pickup truck carrying two people.

     Paramedics rushed Christopher Martinez to the Marian Regional Medical Center in Santa Maria with severe head trauma and a collapsed lung. He died the next day.

     A Santa Barbara County prosecutor charged the 22-year-old Herrera with misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter, a crime that carried a maximum sentence of one year in jail and a $1,000 fine. In May 2012, the Herrera trial jurors voted seven to five for conviction which caused the judge to declare a mistrial.

     Prosecutor Mark Smith decided to retry Herrera on the vehicular homicide charge. On February 8, 2013 the second trial got underway in the Santa Barbara County Court in Lompoc. In his opening remarks to the jury prosecutor Smith accused the defendant of driving too fast for conditions (65 mph in a 55 mph zone) and being inattentive.

     Herrera's attorney, Dillon Forsyth, argued that the crash that took Christopher Martinez's life was a tragic accident. To the jury he said, "There is no evidence a crime occurred. This is a circumstantial case. There is really no credible evidence that what occurred was anything but an accident. The fact is we simply don't know what happened." The defense attorney also pointed out there were no signs that a driveway was coming up and that brake lights and turn signals on Martinez's car might not have been working.

     On February 13, 2013, after more than a day of deliberation, the jury reported to the judge that it was deadlocked eleven to one in favor of conviction. Another hung jury, another mistrial.

     It is surprising that so many jurors in these two trials had voted for conviction. Even assuming Jessica Herrera had been driving ten miles over the speed limit at the time of the accident she was not criminally responsible for Christopher Martinez's death.

     On February 28, 2013 at a hearing in the Santa Barbara County in Lompoc, Judge James F. Iwasko dismissed the Herrera case after prosecutor Mark Smith said the district attorney's office would not seek a third trial. To have gone forward with a third trial in this case would have amounted to prosecutorial misconduct.  

James Wolcott aka James St. James: Mass Killer to Professor

     In 1967 when he was fifteen, James Gordon Wolcott lived in the central Texas town of Georgetown, the home of Southwestern University. His father, Dr. Gordon Wolcott, headed up the university's Biology Department. His mother Elizabeth, an outgoing woman, was active in the religious community. James and his 17-year-old sister Libby attended Georgetown High School.

     At ten o'clock on the night of August 4, 1967, James Wolcott and his his sister Libby returned home after attending a rock concert in nearby Austin. Just after midnight James sniffed model airplane glue to give himself a "boost." Armed with a .22 rifle he walked into the living room and shot his father to death by shooting him twice in the chest. In his sister's room James killed her by shooting her in the chest and in the face. The teenager found his mother in her bedroom where he shot her twice in the head and once in the chest.

     With his father and sister dead, and his mother in her room dying, James Wolcott hid the rifle in the attic crawlspace above his bedroom closet. After he disposed of the weapon he ran out of the house and flagged down a car occupied by three college students. After telling these students that someone had killed his family, they returned with him to the house. Inside the dwelling the students found Mrs. Wolcott barely alive in her bedroom. One of the young men called for an ambulance and the police. (This was pre-911.)

     On the front porch of the Wolcott house,James kept yelling, "How could this happen!" He, of course, knew exactly how it happened. When it occurred to the college kids that the killer could still be in the dwelling they fled the scene.

     Later that morning Elizabeth Wolcott died at the hospital. A minister who happened to be a Wolcott neighbor took James to his parsonage. A few hours later, when a Texas Ranger asked James if he had killed his family,the youngster said, "Yes, sir." At that point James had the presence of mind to describe in detail what he had done. At the killing site he showed police officers where he hid the rifle.

     When asked the obvious question of why, James said he hated his family. He later told psychiatrists that his mother chewed her food so loudly he had to leave the room. His sister had an annoying Texas accent and his father made him cut his hippie hair and wouldn't allow him to wear anti-Vietnam war buttons or attend peace rallies.

     Several psychiatrist interviewed James at the Williamson County Jail. From the young mass killer they learned that he had been sniffing glue for several months. James also told the doctors that he had contemplated suicide. He said that his parents and sister had tried to drive him insane. He killed them before they had a chance to murder him.

     Although James Wolcott and members of his family did not have histories of mental illness, the psychiatrists concluded that the boy suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. (There may have been doctors who disagreed with this conclusion.) One thing was certain, with an I Q of 134, the boy was no dummy. Notwithstanding the diagnosis of schizophrenia the psychiatrists declared the defendant mentally competent to stand trial as an adult.

     As could be expected, the murder defendant's attorney, Will Kelly McClain, set up a defense based on legal insanity. In October 1967, following a short trial, the all-male jury found James Wolcott not guilty by reason of insanity. The jurors believed that James had been so mentally impaired he had no idea that killing his family was wrong. (Since the Wolcott verdict only a handful of Texas murder defendants have been declared not guilty by reason of insanity. This rarely happens because there is no such thing as a mental illness so severe that it completely destroys a killer's appreciation of what he is doing. In the history of Texas jurisprudence the James Wolcott case is an anomaly.)

     In February 1968 the trial judge sent James Wolcott to the Rusk State Hospital in Nacodoches, Texas. He was to be incarcerated there until he regained his sanity. That sentence placed his fate in the hands of psychiatrists.

     In 1974, seven years after the mass killing in the Texas college town, Rusk State Hospital psychiatrists declared the 24-year-old killer sane. The young man had made a remarkable recovery for someone who had been so mentally ill that he didn't realize that shooting his family to death was wrong.

     As the only surviving child of his deceased parents, James Wolcott inherited their estate and started receiving a monthly stipend from his father's university pension fund.

     Upon his departure from Rusk State Hospital James Wolcott took up residence in Austin, Texas where he enrolled at Stephen F. Austin University. Just two years later he had a Bachelor's Degree in psychology.

     At some point in the late 1970s James Wolcott changed his name to James David St. James. In 1980, Mr. St. James, having acquired his Master's Degree began his doctoral work in psychology at the University of Illinois. In 1988 Dr. St. James began teaching psychology at Millikin University, a Presbyterian liberal arts institution in Decatur, Illinois. No one at the school knew that the psychology professor had shot three members of his family to death twenty years earlier. Had he included this background information on his job application it is doubtful the university would have hired him. Having been declared criminally insane in the field of academic psychology is not a job-hunting selling point.

     In July 2013 a Texas journalist named Ann Marie Gardner published an article that revealed Dr. St. James' homicidal past. When the story broke the academic, who did not have a family of his own, headed the Behavioral Sciences Department at Millikin University. While the secretive professor's colleagues and students were probably shocked, no one at the school voiced disapproval. In fact, at least in academic circles, Dr. St. James emerged from his exposure as a hero, a poster-boy for the power and glory of the behavioral sciences. (Had he been working for a plumbing company he would have been fired.) If the professor's colleagues and students were stunned by the creepy irony of Dr. St. James' story, no one said so. 

     There were probably members of the Wolcott family who were still psychologically scarred by James Wolcott's killing spree. There was no indication, however, that what took place that night in 1967 had any lingering affect on the killer himself. And there was no evidence that Dr. St. James was still a schizophrenic. This was interesting because the disease is incurable. 

     One possible explanation for James Wolcott's rapid and apparent total recovery from this devastating disease is that he wasn't insane in the first place. Following his arrest James told his interrogators that he had been thinking about killing his family for a week. Moreover, if he wasn't aware that what he had done was wrong, why did he hide the gun? Is it possible he was a brilliant sociopath who fooled the psychiatrists and gamed the criminal justice system?

Courtroom Psychologists and Criminologists

     As trial witnesses, experts are brought into the courtroom to help jurors understand things beyond their knowledge as laypersons. Unlike ordinary witnesses experts can express their opinions which because they are experts carry extra weight. Through exhibits and testimony these specialists can point out similarities or dissimilarities between, say, a defendant's known fingerprint, hair follicle, DNA or handwriting to a crime scene fingerprint, strand of hair, bloodstain or a questioned document. A forensic pathologist in a murder case might be able to tell jurors when, where, and how the victim had been killed. While these courtroom experts work with physical evidence and apply science to their inquiries, even they don't always draw the same conclusions after analyzing the same evidence. For the administration of justice this is not good.

     In terms of disciplines and fields of study, the more courtroom experts there are and the less stringent the legal standards are for who qualifies as an expert, the worse it is for the trial process. Today there are too many trials featuring dueling expert testimony. Instead of helping jurors determine the facts of a particular case the competing experts render the process more difficult and unreliable. This is why, especially in the soft-science disciplines of criminology (sociology) and psychology, trial judges should deny these practitioners expert witness status. In other words, when it comes to courtroom testimony, we'd be better off if they kept their opinions to themselves.

Psychologists in Child Abuse Cases

     Pennsylvania is the only state where prosecutors are not permitted to call psychologists to the stand as expert witnesses in child molestation cases to help jurors evaluate the credibility of young accusers. Specifically, in cases where victims of sexual abuse waited months or even years to come forward, prosecutors want psychologists to explain why this doesn't mean these accusers are not believable. These expert witnesses, according to prosecutors, can help jurors understand the psychology of this form of victimhood.

     Defense attorneys, on the other hand, object to this form of expert testimony on the grounds it usurps the role of the jury and the power of common sense in deciding if a particular accuser is a credible witness. In performing this duty, jurors do not need the help of a psychologists whose opinions on such matters are no better than anyone else's. Moreover, history has shown that too many psychologists testifying for the prosecution lose their objectivity by thinking of themselves as members of law enforcement teams. (For a good example of this phenomena look up the historic McMartin preschool sex abuse case.)

      In American jurisprudence there are expert witnesses testifying on virtually everything under the sun. It has become a racket. Expert witnesses cost a lot of money and are corrupting the trial process. Some experts will testify for whoever will pay them. Others specialize in helping one side or the other. Too many of these witnesses claim expertise in fields and disciplines that are themselves bogus, and many come into court with phony resumes. In selecting between dueling experts jurors might side with the hired-gun who looks the best or is the most persuasive. A complete phony can look and sound more credible than his or her more credentialed counterpart.

     Psychologists and criminologists, among others in the soft sciences, should not be qualified as expert witnesses. The jury process and the criminal justice system would be better off without their conflicting opinions.

Heather Elvis: Missing and Presumed Murdered

     Heather Elvis, a 20-year-old employee of a bar and restaurant in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, lived with a female roommate at the River Oaks Apartments in the city. Her parents, Terry and Debbie Elvis, lived nearby. At three in the morning of Wednesday, December 18, 2013 Heather called her roommate from her cellphone about 45 minutes after being dropped off at River Oaks by her date. She called to report how the evening with the young man had worked out.

     On December 19, 2013, Heather Elvis' abandoned 2001 Dodge Intrepid was found parked at the Peachtree Landing along the Waccamaw River in the town of Socastee just outside of Myrtle Beach. The dark green vehicle had not been involved in an accident. Parked about nine miles from the River Oak Apartments, the car did not contain Elvis' purse or her cellphone.

     On Friday December 20, after Heather Elvis failed to show up for her scheduled shift at the Tilted Kilt Pub and Eatery, her parents Terry and Debbi Elvis reported their 5-foot-1 inch, 118-pound daughter missing.

     The next day, under the supervision of the Horry County Police Department, 300 people spent ten hours combing the woods and ponds in the vicinity of the abandoned car.

     On January 3, 2014 another search party made up of law enforcement officers and volunteers, aided by several K-9 units and searchers riding horses and ATVs, continued the hunt for the missing young woman.

     Lieutenant Robert Kegler with the Horry County Police Department, on January 6, 2014, told a Fox News reporter that detectives had questioned several people in connection with the disappearance. While the young man who had dropped Heather off at her apartment after the date in the early morning hours of December 18 was not a suspect, some of the uncooperative men interviewed by detectives were being scrutinized.

     At 8 PM on Monday, January 6, 2014, television crime host Nancy Grace devoted a segment of her show to the Heather Elvis missing persons case. A $25,000 reward was posted for information leading to the discovery of the missing young woman.

     At seven o'clock on the morning of Friday February 21, 2014, officers with the Horry County Police Department, South Carolina State Police and the U.S. Marshal's Office executed a search warrant at a house in Myrtle Beach occupied by 37-year-old Sidney Moorer and his 41-year-old wife Tammy. Officers spent eleven hours at the dwelling. Cadaver dogs searched the property without result. Two pickup trucks were taken away from the house and officers were seen placing several boxes into a white police van.

     A prosecutor, following the search of the Moorer house, charged Sidney and Tammy Moorer with indecent exposure and obstruction of justice. It was reported that Tammy Moorer, angry at Heather because she and Sidney had been involved in a sexual relationship, sent her nude pictures of herself and Sidney. In January 2014 Tammy Moorer told a reporter that Sidney had sex with Heather Elvis in his car "a total of three times." According to Tammy, Sidney ended the relationship when he realized that "something wasn't right about her."

     On February 24, 2014 a Horry County prosecutor charged Sidney and Tammy Moorer with Heather Elvis' kidnapping and murder. They were held without bail. Elvis' body had not been found.

     In 2016 the Horry County prosecutor, without Heather Elvis's body, dropped the murder charges against the Moorer couple. That year Sidney Moorer was tried for the kidnapping of Heather Elvis. That trial ended with a hung jury. A few months later a jury found Sidney Moorer guilty of obstructing justice in the Heather Elvis kidnapping case. The judge sentenced him to ten years in prison.

     In October 2018 Tammy Moorer was tried for kidnapping. After testifying on her own behalf the Horry County jury found her guilty. The judge sentenced Tammy Moorer to 30 years in prison.

     In September 2019 Sidney Moorer was retried on the kidnapping charge. The jury found him guilty and the judge sentenced him to 30 years behind bars.

     As of April 2024 the body of Heather Elvis has not been found.

The Albert Jackson Sterling II Murder-For-Hire Case

      Life had been good to Roxanne Sterling, or so it seemed. She lived in a $400,000 house, was married to an ambitious man who made good money and was eight months pregnant with her second child. Early in the afternoon of November 21, 2006, before leaving the house to go shopping, Roxanne said good-bye to her husband, Albert Jackson Sterling II. In an hour or so Albert would be driving from the couple's home in Allen, Texas to nearby Dallas to catch a flight to his parents' home in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

     At four o'clock that afternoon, with her husband on the plane to New Mexico, Roxanne pulled her car into the garage and entered her house. She walked into the master bedroom and nearly fainted when she came face-to-face with a man wearing gloves and holding a black leather belt. The intruder rose from the edge of the bed and said, "Your husband wants you dead." Keeping his voice calm, the intruder asked the terrified woman not to panic. He had changed his mind. Instead of killing her, he was there to warn her of her husband's intentions. She was free to call the police. Roxanne, moving as fast as she could, ran to a neighbor's house. The neighbor called 911. The emergency operator could hear Roxanne sobbing uncontrollably in the background.

     Officers from the Allen Police Department found the intruder, Jeffrey Boden Thompson, waiting for them at the Sterling house. Thompson told the officers that Albert Sterling had given him the leather belt which he was to use in strangling the victim. Thompson said he had instructions to haul the corpse, in the victim's car, to a predetermined site in Dallas. After dumping the body, Thompson was to abandon the vehicle at another spot in the city. Mr. Sterling, the murder-for-hire mastermind, had designed his plan to fool the police into thinking that Roxanne had been carjacked and murdered in Dallas. For his efforts Mr. Thompson would have earned $2,500.

     Because Jeffrey Thompson was willing to cooperate with investigators, the Collin County district attorney decided not to charge him with burglary. To show his willingness to help, Thompson played detectives a message Albert Sterling had left on his cellphone before flying to New Mexico. "The chicken has flown the coop," Albert said, referring to his wife's leaving the  house. "She will be there [back at the  house] in an hour. Just have patience."

     With detectives listening in, Thompson called Albert Sterling in New Mexico with the message he had been told by the mastermind to leave upon completion of the hit: "The chariot (the victim's car) is in south Dallas and the trash (her body) is in west Dallas."

     The next day, in Alamogordo, police officers arrested Albert Sterling on charges of soliciting the murders of his wife and unborn child. The officers booked him into the Otero County Jail where he would await extradition back to Texas. Through his attorney, Mr. Sterling denied having arranged his wife's murder, stating that she had caught Thompson in the act of burglarizing their house. The burglar, according to Sterling, had made up the hit murder business to avoid being charged with the break-in.

     Albert Sterling's family, friends and neighbors were shocked that he had been accused of murder-for-hire. From all appearances he and Roxanne had been happily married and looking forward to the birth of their baby. People who knew Albert refused to believe that a well-educated man with a good job would hire someone to murder his pregnant wife. Albert not only possessed a good job in the computer industry, the 38-year-old worked as a trainer/instructor in a 24-hour fitness club in Dallas. There had been rumors of a girlfriend who was one of his students in his other business, Al's Punch Time, a boxing gym. Still, no one believed he would have his pregnant wife murdered simply because he had found another woman.

     On December 7, 2006 Albert Sterling was brought back to Texas and placed in the Collins County Jail under $500,000 bond. Two weeks later a Collin County grand jury indicted him on two counts of murder solicitation. Late in January 2007 a judge released the suspect on bail on the condition he wear an electric monitoring device and report once a week to the court bailiff. Mr. Sterling also had to relinquished his passport.

     While awaiting his murder trial, Albert admitted to Roxanne that he had been involved in an extramarital affair. She not only forgave him, she told the Collins County prosecutor that despite what she had been told by Jeffrey Thompson, she believed that her husband was an honest, trustworthy man who had never plotted to murder her and their baby. She stunned the prosecutor by saying that she would testify on his behalf at his upcoming trial.

     Albert Sterling, through his attorney, Russell Wilson, denied attempting to hire Jeffrey Thompson, an ex-convict, to kill his wife. According to the defense attorney, his client had been working on a car insurance scam with Mr. Thompson when Thompson chose to burglarize his house. When Roxanne walked in on him the intruder made up the murder-for-hire story.

     On February 13, 2009, a Collin County jury of six men and six women, after a short period of deliberation, found Albert Sterling guilty as charged. The judge sentenced him to two concurrent 30-year prison sentences. Throughout the trial Roxanne remained loyal to her husband. She took the stand for the defense and at the sentencing hearing testified on his behalf.

     Six months after the sentencing of her husband, Roxanne divorced him. When asked by reporters if she still believed in Albert's innocence, she didn't respond. After the sale of the house she and Albert had shared, the 39-year-old moved into a rental house not far from her former residence. 

O. J. Simpson and The Revisionist True Crime Genre

     William C. Dear, the owner of a private investigation agency in Dallas, Texas, had over the years published a handful of nonfiction books featuring his adventures as a larger-than-life PI. A master of self-promotion in the mold of Allan Pinkerton, William Burns and J. J. Arms (remember him?). Mr. Dear was in the news following the release of his 2012 book, O. J. Is Innocent and I Can Prove It. (A bold if not artistic title.)

     As if exonerating one of America's most hated men is not enough, William Dear was accusing O. J.'s son Jason of the June 1994 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. When revisionist true crime writers exonerate celebrated criminals by incriminating others, they usually accuse dead people who can't sue them for libel. Jason Simpson, who was 24-years-old when the Los Angeles police arrested his father was alive at the time of the accusation.

     In the other twentieth century "crime of the century," the state of New Jersey, on April 3, 1936 electrocuted Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the 1932 murder of 20-month-old Charles Lindbergh, Jr. In the 1980s and 90s a half dozen hack true crime writers produced books that exonerated Hauptmann and incriminated Charles Lindbergh, Al Capone, John F. Condon, Ellis Parker and a host of others. At least three of these books make the case that the Lindbergh baby wasn't even murdered, that the authorities had misidentified the corpse found two miles from the Lindbergh estate. In reality, the evidence against Hauptmann had been substantial while the "proof" against the literary suspects turned out to be flimsy, and in many cases, bogus. Readers familiar with the history of the Lindbergh case, including several serious Lindbergh biographers, saw the revisionist books for what they were--fiction passed off as nonfiction. Nevertheless these "Hauptmann is Innocent and I Can Prove It" books attracted a lot of attention and drew more than a few dedicated followers.

     Unlike real investigative journalists, the authors of revisionist true crime books start with a theory and point of view and ignore or try to explain away any facts that do not support or conflict with their thesis. In making the case against their suspects true crime book revisionists frequently present negative evidence as either incriminating or exonerating. For example, in the Lindbergh case, Hauptmann must be innocent because the police didn't recover his latent fingerprints from the crime scene. In this genre of nonfiction crime writing a revisionist's suspect can be guilty simply because he didn't have an alibi. That's how they do it. When you break these books down there's nothing there but conjecture, speculation, wishful thinking and the authors' beliefs. And quite often, evidence is presented that is simply fiction.

     True crime revisionists get away with their literary tricks because we live in an era where facts and knowledge get little respect, and there is no such thing as objective truth. Today, what one believes is true trumps what one knows is true. People who want criminals like Bruno Richard Hauptmann and O. J. Simpson to be innocent eagerly go along with the joke.

    What was written (or not written) on the dust jacket of William Dear's book revealed it was not a work to be taken seriously. For example: "Once Dear established in his own mind that O. J. Simpson was innocent, he focused his attention on six possible suspects." In all probability, Dear began with a single suspect, then cleared away the debris that conflicted with his theory. If O. J. was in fact innocent, and his son was guilty, then the evidence against Jason Simpson should be much stronger, and more convincing than the evidence that was presented against his father. It was not. Here was William Dear's "startling new evidence that is certain to change everyone's perception of O. J.'s guilt:"

     In Jason's abandoned storage locker, Dear found a hunting knife. (This knife, however did not contain a mixture of Jason's and the victims' DNA or any other evidence to establish it as the murder weapon.)

     After the murders, Jason Simpson retained an attorney.

     Jason Simpson did not have an airtight alibi.

     Jason was depicted in a photograph wearing a knit cap similar to the one discovered at the crime scene. (If the crime scene hat contained hair follicles from Jason's head, and bore traces of the victims' blood, that would be incriminating.)

     Two months before the murders, Jason Simpson allegedly assaulted his girlfriend. According to a criminal profiler, Jason's personality was more homicidal than his father's.

     According to William Dear, while O. J. was present at the crime scene, he did not commit the murders. (This was helpful because it explained away the physical evidence connecting O. J. to the victims.) According to Mr. Dear, O. J.'s only crime was that he took steps to cover-up the fact his son had killed Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman. So, why did Jason Simpson kill Nicole? He murdered her because she had decided, at the last moment, not to dine at the restaurant where he worked as a chef. This was, therefore, a double murder motivated by injured pride.

     In reality, William Dear's revisionist version of the O. J. Simpson case didn't offer enough evidence to indict the proverbial ham sandwich. Patterson Smith, the antiquarian bookseller from New Jersey who knows more about the literature of true crime than anyone, wrote the following about the true crime revisionist genre:

     "Of all crime books published, those posing revisionist theories tend to attract the greatest media attention. They are 'news.' Far from merely adding to our knowledge of a past event or re-embellishing a tale previously grown stale in the retelling, they say to us, 'You've been wrong about this case.' And if someone is thought to have been unjustly convicted and executed, the news is all the stronger.

     "It has, after all, been observed that Americans have a greater sense of injustice than of justice. When a revisionist account reaches reviewers, the arguments put forth by its author can seem extraordinarily compelling, for very often the book does not aim for balance but selects only those facts that support its divergent thesis.

     "Moreover--and this is very important--the reviewer of a book on crime written for the general public often has little or no background in the case which could help him weigh the author's novel contentions against countervailing evidence. The reviewer sees only one side of the story, and it usually looks good."

    O. J. Is Innocent and I Can Prove It didn't contained nearly enough evidence to convince many readers that O. J. was innocent and that his son was the guilty party. 

     O. J. Simpson died on April 11, 2024. He was 76. Notwithstanding several more revisionist book accounts of the murders, most people familiar with the case consider Mr. Simpson guilty as charged, and that his murder acquittal was a travesty of justice.

Lying For Lance

     Racing cyclist Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France every year from 1999 to 2005. He lost all seven of his titles, however, after he admitted using performance enhancing drugs. The truth came out in 2013 after years of lying to racing authorities and to the public.

     The icon in a sport most Americans aren't interested in, as a result of the doping scandal, went from hero to heel. Since his fall from grace, the word frequently associated with Armstrong and his athletic career is "disgraced."

     Disgraced athletes, particularly disgraced celebrity athletes, have been able to at least partially rehabilitate their reputations. If Armstrong's legacy of cheating and lying had been in the process of rehabilitation due to the passage of time, good deeds and fading memories, the possibility of this came to an end after the stunt he and his girlfriend pulled in Aspen, Colorado.

     On December 28, 2015, the 43-year-old Armstrong and his 33-year-old live in girlfriend Anna Hansen were mingling with the rich and beautiful at the St. Regis Resort in Aspen, Colorado. They had been invited to the gala event in honor of the Aspen Art Museum.

     The couple left the party after midnight with Armstrong behind the wheel of his GMC Yukon. As he rounded a corner driving too fast he lost control of his SUV and smashed into two parked vehicles, a Jeep Wrangler and a Toyota Four Runner.

     The collision could be heard from the inside of the homes of the people who owned the damaged cars. Anna Hansen climbed out of the GMC and spoke to a man looking over his crumpled SUV. She identified both herself and Lance, apologized for the accident, left her phone number and promised that Lance Armstrong would pay for the cost of the repairs.

     After speaking to the man whose vehicle Lance Armstrong had damaged, Anna climbed back into the GMC. Not bothering to wait for the authorities, the couple drove off. In Colorado, it's against the law to leave the scene of a traffic accident before the arrival of the police. The man Anna spoke to called 911 and reported the collision.

     When an officer with the Aspen Police Department questioned Anna Hansen the next day she gave an account of the car accident that didn't square with the conversation she had with the man at the scene the previous night. She told the accident investigator that she had been the driver of Armstrong's GMC.

     The investigator took this information with a great deal of skepticism because he had questioned the St. Regis valet who had seen Lance Armstrong climb into the driver's seat when the couple left the party.

     On December 31, 2014, just three days after the accident, Anna Hansen came clean to the police. She admitted that she had lied to protect Lance Armstrong. According to the police report, she explained her fabrication this way: "We've had our family name smeared over every paper in the world in the last couple of years, and honestly, I've got teenagers. I just wanted to protect my family because I thought, 'Gosh, Anna Hansen hit some cars, it's not going to be a national story.' " [Perhaps she should have thought: "Gosh, if Anna Hansen lies to the police and gets caught, it's going to be an even bigger story."]

     When the traffic investigator asked Anna if Lance Armstrong had pressured her into taking the blame for the accident, she said the lie had been a "joint decision." She assured the officer that Lance had not been intoxicated when he plowed into the parked cars.

     The Pitkin County prosecutor's office decided not to charge Anna Hansen with the crime of filing a false report. A prosecutor did, however, charge Lance Armstrong with failing to report a traffic accident, a misdemeanor offense that carried a maximum sentence of 90 days in jail and a $300 fine. Armstrong also received a traffic summons for driving too fast under the conditions, an infraction involving a $15 to $100 fine.

     In January 2015 Lance Armstrong pleaded guilty and was fined $238.50 and court costs.

     For Lance Armstrong, the consequences of this case had less to do with the criminal justice system and more to do with the damage to his already weakened reputation. Traffic accidents happen to everyone, but not everyone lets someone else take the blame.

From Hero to Heel

     In September 2007 when Richard De Coatsworth was a 22-year-old rookie on the Philadelphia Police Department, he pulled over a suspicious vehicle occupied by four men. Three of the suspects jumped out of the car and fled. As the young officer alighted from the patrol car to give chase, the fourth suspect blasted him with a shotgun. Notwithstanding the gunshot wound to the lower portion of his face, officer De Coatsworth chased the gunman while calling in for help. Although he eventually collapsed, other officers apprehended the shooter. The assailant was later convicted and sentenced to 36 to 72 years in prison.

     Officer De Coatsworth, following his medical recovery, was promoted to an elite highway patrol unit. In 2008 the National Association of Police Organizations named him that year's "Top Cop."

     In February 2009, Vice President Joe Biden invited Officer De Coatsworth to sit next to Michelle Obama at the President's address to the Joint Session of Congress. The officer was seen on national TV sitting next to the First Lady in his ceremonial police uniform. In his brief law enforcement career, officer Richard De Coatsworth had achieved full hero status. It was at this point that his life and career began to deteriorate.

     Just seven months after appearing with Michelle Obama, De Coatsworth was accused of excessive force after he shot a motorcyclist in the leg. In November 2011 the hero-cop was under investigation by the Internal Affairs Office for fighting with a fellow officer. A month later, after having amassed during his brief tenure as a police officer nine civilian complaints of assault, abuse and misconduct, Mr. De Coatsworth retired from the force on full disability.

     Two months after leaving the police department Richard De Coatsworth was charged with threatening a woman in the Port Richmond section of the city.

     On May 1, 2013, De Coatsworth, after meeting a woman in a downtown bar, allegedly sexually assaulted her at the Day's Inn on Roosevelt Boulevard. At two in the morning of Thursday, May 16, 2013, De Coatsworth showed up at this woman's home in the Fishtown-Kensington section of the city. At her residence Mr. De Coatsworth allegedly forced the 21-year-old and another woman her age to perform oral sex on him at gunpoint. The next day, immediately after the ex-cop departed the house, the woman he allegedly assaulted at the Day's Inn called the authorities.

     On Saturday, May 18, 2013 a prosecutor charged Richard De Coatsworth with rape, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, trafficking in persons, false imprisonment and aggravated assault. At his arraignment the magistrate judge set the defendant's bail at $25 million for each of the women. The judge added another $10 million bond in connection with an unrelated charge involving De Coatsworth's alleged May 9 assault of his live-in girlfriend. In total the ex-police officer was charged with 32 felonies. His bail was the highest in the history of city, and probably the state.

     In January 2015 Richard De Coatsworth pleaded guilty to promoting prostitution, simple assault and drug possession. The judge sentenced him to 18 months probation. 

Pastor John Douglas White: The Devil in Disguise

     In 2012, John Douglas White, the 55-year-old pastor of the Christ Community Fellowship Church located just west of Mount Pleasant, Michigan, lived by himself in a mobile home park in Broomfield Township near the town of Remus. This self-appointed man of the cloth possessed a background more in line with a person serving a life sentence in prison than a preacher of a tiny church in rural central Michigan. Pastor White, a perverted lust killer, had no business living outside prison walls where he could take advantage of women while masquerading as a man of God. He was a predatory sex killer in preacher's clothing.

     In 1981 John White, then 24, choked and stabbed a 17-year-old girl in Battle Creek, Michigan. The victim survived and Mr. White was allowed to plead no contest to assault with intent to do great bodily harm.  The judge sentenced him to five years in prison. Corrections authorities let White out on parole after he had served two years behind bars.

     John White and his wife, in 1994, were living in Comstock Township near Kalamazoo, Michigan. On July 11 of that year, 26-year-old Vicky Sue Wall was seen getting into White's pickup just before she disappeared. Shortly after Wall's relatives reported her missing the 37-year-old violent sex offender checked himself into the Kalamazoo Regional Psychiatric Hospital. In September 1994 police found Vicky Sue Wall's decomposed body in the woods not far from her home. Arrested at the psychiatric facility, John White admitted strangling the victim to death. According to him, he and the victim were having an affair and she had threatened to tell his wife. So he killed her.

     In the Vicky Sue Wall murder case the authorities allowed White to strike a deal with the prosecutor. In return for his guilty plea to the ridiculous charge of involuntary manslaughter, the judge sentenced this degenerate to eight to fifteen years. At his May 1995 sentencing hearing White told the judge that Vicky Sue Wall's death had been a "tragic accident." John White walked out of prison in 2007 after serving twelve years of his sentence. His wife had divorced him.

     In 2012 Pastor John White was engaged to a woman in his congregation whose 24-year-old daughter--Rebekah Gay--lived a few doors from him in the mobile home park. Because White was a preacher engaged to her mother Rebekah allowed him to watch her 3-year-old son. She had no idea her babysitter watched necrophilia pornography and fantasized about having gruesome perverted sex with her.

     On October 31, 2012, at six in the morning, John White entered Rebekah Gay's trailer, struck her in the head with a hard rubber mallet then strangled her to death with a zip tie. After performing perverted sexual acts on the victim's body, he hauled her 5-foot-3, 118 pound corpse in his pickup to a ditch behind a stand of pine trees about a mile from the trailer park. It was there he dumped her body.

     After hiding his victim's corpse White returned to his trailer where he cleaned himself and his truck with paper towels. He walked to Gay's dwelling, stole into her car and drove it to a nearby bar and parked it there. He had also tossed Rebekah Gay's cellphone into a dumpster and threw away the murder weapon. From the bar White walked back to Gay's mobile home, dressed her son in his Halloween costume, then drove the boy to Mount Pleasant where, as prearranged, the boy's father picked him up for the day.

     Crime scene investigators processed the victim's trailer for physical clues and searched White's mobile home where they found the bloody towels and other incriminating evidence. When questioned by detectives with the Michigan State Police John White confessed and led the officers to Rebekah Gay's body.

     On November 1, 2012 John White was arraigned in an Isabella County District Court on the charge of first-degree murder. The judge denied him bail.

     The church member who had hired John White as pastor said this to a reporter with The Detroit News: "He [White] was absolutely contrite. All kinds of people turn around and meet the Lord and they are a different person. He [White] was doing a lot of good in the community...He was doing a lot of good and Satan did not want him doing good, and Satan got to him."

     So, according to one of Pastor White's congregants, White's cold-blooded lust murder of Rebekah Gay was the devil's wrongdoing.

     In April 2013, White pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for killing Rebekah Gay. The judge sentenced him to prison for 56 years and three months.

     On August 28, 2013 a prison guard at the Michigan Reformatory Correctional Institution in Ionia, found John White dead in his cell. He had hanged himself.