Franc Cano and Steven Dean Gordon: Serial Sex Offenders On Parole

     In 1992, 23-year-old Steven Gordon, a resident of Orange County, California was convicted of two counts of lewd and lascivious acts with girls under 14 and 10-years-old. He was convicted and spent three years behind bars. In 2002, in Riverside County, California, Mr. Gordon was sent to prison on a kidnapping conviction.

     Twenty-one-year-old Franc Cano, another Orange County sexual predator, went to prison in 2008 for rape.

     In April 2012, Steven Gordon was on parole and wearing a federal GPS device. His friend Franc Cano, also on parole, wore a state-issued ankle bracelet. That month the two transients removed their tracking devices and under the names Dexter McCoy and Joseph Madrid boarded a Greyhound bus for Las Vegas.

     On May 8, 2012 federal agents apprehended the two paroled sex offenders at the Circus Circus Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Returned to California, the men pleaded guilty to failure to register as sex offenders. Instead of sending them back to prison where they belonged, the parolees were ordered to provide DNA samples. As further "punishment", their computers would be monitored by parole and probation authorities. They were also required to check in once a month with the Anaheim Police Department. New GPS tracking devices were attached to each man and they were set free.

     On October 10, 2013, Kianna Jackson, a 20-year-old from Las Vegas disappeared while in Santa Ana, California. In Santa Ana she had been charged with prostitution and loitering to commit prostitution. Kianna Jackson wasn't the only sex worker that went missing in southern California during that period. Thirty-four-year-old Josephine Monique Vargas was last seen on October 24, 1913 after attending a family birthday party at a Santa Ana Red Roof Inn. She had a history of drug abuse and prostitution.

     Martha Anaya, a 28-year-old Santa Ana woman with a history of prostitution was last seen on November 12, 2013. Before her disappearance she asked her boyfriend to pick up her 5-year-old daughter so she could work her trade.

     On March 14, 2014 the naked body of 21-year-old Jarrae Nykkole Estepp was found on a conveyor belt at an Anaheim trash-sorting plant. Estepp was known to work on a strip of beach in Anaheim known for prostitution. She had moved to southern California from Oklahoma.

     On April 11, 2014, Anaheim police officers arrested Franc Cano, 27 and his traveling partner Steven Dean Gordon, 45, near the trash sorting facility in Anaheim where Jarrae Estepp had been raped and murdered. (I presume the suspects were linked to this victim through DNA.)

     On Monday, April 14, 2014 an Orange County prosecutor charged Cano and Gordon with four felony counts of special circumstances murder and four counts of rape. If convicted as charged these men faced sentences of life without parole. While they were also eligible for the death penalty, no California judge had imposed that sentence for decades. 

     Anaheim Police Lieutenant Bob Dunn at a press conference on April 15, 2014 said the suspects may have raped and killed more women in southern California. The officer would not say if the bodies of the other three prostitutes had been found. According to Lieutenant Dunn, the suspects, when they raped and murdered the four victims, were wearing their GPS tracking devices.

     Just prior to his December 2016 Orange County murder trial Steven Dean Gordon fired his public defender so he could act as his own defense attorney. In his opening remarks to the jury the defendant did not deny murdering the four women. Instead, he blamed Franc Cano and the parole and probation department for not monitoring him more closely.

     On December 16, 2016, the jury just took one hour to find Gordon guilty as charged. He was sentenced to life.

     Four years later, after Franc Cano pleaded guilty to four counts of rape and four counts of murder, the judge sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Richard Savage: The Classified Ad Hit Man

     In January 1985, Richard Savage, a Vietnam veteran with a criminal justice degree and a brief stint as a police officer, placed the following ad in Soldier of Fortune Magazine: "Gun-For-Hire: 37-year-old professional mercenary desires jobs. Vietnam veteran. Discrete and very private. Body guard, courier and other skills. All jobs considered."(Italics mine.) 

     In response to Richard Savage's ad, people asked him to guard gold in Alaska and to find men still missing in Vietnam. But most of the people who answered his ad wanted him to kill someone.

     Within weeks following the publishing of Savage's gun-for-hire ad he accepted his first assignment, the murder of a 43-year-old businessman from Atlanta named Richard Braun. Savage dispatched a crew of three hit men to Atlanta to kill the murder-for-hire target.

     In June 1985, just before Mr. Braun climbed into his van it blew up. He survived the blast, but two months later, Savage's hit men killed him with a hand grenade attached to his vehicle.

     Savage's murder-for-hire gang, in August 1985, were in Marietta, Georgia to kill Dana Free, a building contractor. Richard Savage had been paid $20,000 for the hit by a Denver woman who was furious with Mr. Free over a business investment. Two of Savage's men planted a grenade under Mr. Free's car. The murder-for-hire target drove around for a day with the unexploded grenade attached to the underside of his vehicle. The following night, one of the hit men slid under the target's car to make adjustments. The next morning, as Mr. Free backed out of his driveway the grenade shook loose and rolled out from under the car. After that, Mr. Free got the message that someone was trying to kill him. He went into hiding.

     In late August 1985, Richard Savage accepted a murder assignment from Larry Gray who wanted his ex-wife's boyfriend, a Fayetteville, Arkansas law student named Doug Norwood, killed. In October 1985, when Doug Norwood started his car in a University of Arkansas parking lot it exploded. The law student escaped the blast with minor injuries.

     In January 1986, as Doug Norwood drove from his home to the university he realized he was being followed. The murder-for-hire target called the campus police department and officers pulled over the suspicious vehicle. From the car, officers recovered a machine gun and arrested the driver, Michael Wayne Jackson, a member of Richard Savage's murder crew.

     When questioned by the police, Michael Jackson confessed that he had been hired by Richard Savage to kill Doug Norwood. According to Mr. Jackson, the mastermind, Larry Gray, found Richard Savage through his gun-for-hire ad in Soldiers of Fortune magazine.

     In the spring of 1986, Michael Wayne Jackson and Richard Savage were convicted of a murder unrelated to the Doug Norwood case. The judge sentenced Savage to 40 years in prison. A year later, Savage was convicted of the attempted murder of Doug Norwood and was sentenced to 20 years behind bars.

     In 1986, Soldier of Fortune magazine discontinued publishing the gun-for-hire ads.

     Doug Norwood, in January 1987, sued Soldier of Fortune for publishing Richard Savage's ad. Attorneys for the magazine filed a motion to dismiss the suit on grounds the First Amendment right to free speech protected the magazine. The judge denied the magazine's First Amendment claim.

     In 1989, Richard Savage and three members of his crew were convicted of the 1985 bombing murder of Atlanta businessman Richard Braun. Mr. Braun's son, in 1990, filed a wrongful death suit against Soldier of Fortune magazine for running the hit man's classified ad. In 1991 a jury in Atlanta awarded the plaintiff $12 million. The trial judge later reduced the damages to $4.3 million. An appeals court, in 1992, upheld the wrongful death verdict. In so doing the appellate judge wrote:"The publisher could recognize the offer of criminal activity as readily as its readers obviously did."

     In August 1992 the magazine settled the Doug Norwood lawsuit out of court.

     Beginning in April 2016, after 40 years of publishing the magazine in print form, Soldier of Fortune became an online magazine. At its peak in the mid-1980s the magazine sold 150,000 copies a month. 

The Steven Fortin Murder Case: Conflicting Bite Mark Testimony

     In 1994, police officers found the body of 25-year-old Melissa Padilla in a concrete pipe along Route 1 near Woodbridge, New Jersey. Naked from the waist down, she had been beaten and sexually assaulted. The killer had bitten her on the chin and left breast. Padilla wa abducted the night before from a nearby convenience store in the Avenel section of Woodbridge. The police had no suspects and the investigation quickly died on the vine.

     In April 1995, state police in Maine contacted the Padilla case investigators with a lead. They had arrested 31-year-old Steven Fortin for the sexual assault of a female state police officer who had been bitten on the chin and left breast. Fortin was also living in Woodbridge at the time of Padilla's murder. Although the suspect denied involvement in the New Jersey homicide, he pleaded guilty in November 1995 to the assault in Maine. The judge sentenced him to 20 years.

     Five years after entering prison in Maine, the authorities in New Jersey put Fortin on trial for the murder of Melissa Padilla. The prosecution's key witness, FBI criminal profiler Robert Hazelwood, connected the defendant to the Padilla murder by noting similarities in its criminal MO to the sexual assault in Maine. The jury in New Jersey on the strength of this testimony found him guilty. In February 2004 the New Jersey Supreme Court overturned the conviction on the grounds it was not supported by sufficient evidence.

     New Jersey prosecutors retried Steven Fortin in 2007. This time they had physical evidence connecting him to the victim. A DNA analyst testified the defendant could not be excluded as the primary source of the saliva recovered from the Marlboro cigarette butt found near Padilla's body. According to this expert, only one out of 3,500 people could be linked to this evidence. Moreover, the defendant could not be excluded as the DNA source of the blood and tissue traces found under the victim's fingernails.

     Dr. Lowell J. Levine, one of the pioneers in the field of crime scene bite mark identification, a forensic odontologist from upstate New York, compared photographs of the victim's bite mark wounds (The photographs did not include a ruler measuring the marks because the photographer didn't recognize the bruises as teeth marks.) with photographs of the defendant's front teeth. Dr. Levine noticed a space between Fortin's lower front incisors that corresponded to a space in the mark on the victim's left breast. Dr. Levine testified that although he could not say to a scientific certainty that the defendant had bitten the victim, he could not exclude him as the biter.

     Dr. Adam Freeman, a forensic dentist from Westport, Connecticut, testified that in his study of 259 bite mark cases, the largest study of its kind, he found only five cases in which the attackers had bitten their victims on the chin and the breast. Dr. Freeman's testimony had helped link the defendant, circumstantially, to the sexual assault in Maine for which he had pleaded guilty.

     Steven Fortin's defense team countered Dr. Levine with another world renowned forensic odontologist, Dr. Norman Sperber, the chief forensic dentist with the California Department of Justice. Dr. Sperber had testified for the defense at the first trial, but the jury had disregarded his testimony. He, like Dr. Levine, had testified for the prosecution in the 1979 trial of serial killer Ted Bundy. Since then, Dr. Sperber had appeared as an expert witness in 215 trials. According to his analysis, Steven Fortin could not have made the bite marks on Melissa Padilla's body. According to Dr. Sperber: "The tracing of his [Fortin's] teeth doesn't even come close to the crime scene bite marks." The forensic odontologist went on to say that bite mark analysis has limitations as a form of crime scene associative evidence. It was not as reliable, he said, as DNA and fingerprint identification. "Skin is a serious limitation for bite mark analysis because it rebounds and is movable," he said. "Bite mark evidence is not a true science."

     On December 4, 2007 the jury of nine men and three women, after deliberating nine hours, found Steven Fortin guilty of first-degree murder and first-degree sexual assault. The judge sentenced him to life plus twenty years. 

     In June 2020, a New Jersey appellate court, in finding other "strong evidence" besides bite marks to connect Steven Fortin to the New Jersey murder, denied his appeal.

Shane M. Piche: The Sex Offender Who Got Off Light

     In 2018 Shane M. Piche drove a school bus for the Watertown City School District in upstate New York. For a year the 25-year-old driver had his eye on one of his passengers, a 14-year-girl he had been communicating with on social media. In June 2018 Mr. Piche invited the girl and her friends to his house outside of Watertown. It was there he provided his bus riders with alcohol, and it was there he and the 14-year-old engaged in sex. In New York a girl under 17 is incapable, by law, of consenting to sexual intercourse. In the eyes of the law, and anyone with a sense of decency, Shane M. Piche raped that 14-year-old girl.

     In September 2018 Watertown police officers took Shane Piche into custody and booked him into the Jefferson County Jail on charges of second-degree rape. He also faced the charge of endangering the welfare of a child. Second-degree rape in New York carried a maximum sentence of seven years in prison. The school district also fired him.

     In February 2019, pursuant to a plea agreement between Jefferson County Chief Assistant District Attorney Patricia Dzuiba and defense attorney Eric Swartz, Shane Piche was allowed to plead guilty to third-degree rape, an offense that could result in a sentence of four years in prison. The prosecutor, in justifying her decision to let Piche plea bargain down to the lesser felony said she wanted to spare the victim the ordeal of testifying before a grand jury and a rape trial.

     Two months after Piche's guilty plea, Judge James P. McClusky sentenced the former school bus driver to ten years probation. In addition, the judge fined him $1,375. As a Level One sex offender Mr. Piche would not be added to the Department of Criminal Justice Service's online sex offender registry. That meant when someone looked him up on the computer his name wouldn't show up on the site. Had Piche been convicted of second-degree rape as initially charged, his name would have been included on the sex offender registry.

     The 14-year-old rape victim's mother, in a victim impact statement she did not read in court, wrote: "I hope Shane Piche spends time in prison for the harm he caused my child. He took everything from my daughter... and has caused her to struggle with depression and anxiety."

     In responding to public outrage over the light sentence Judge McClusky said that because Shane Piche had no other known rape victims he did not believe there was a high risk that this rapist would re-offend. The judge, elected to a 14-year-term on the bench in 2011, insisted that his sentence was well within the guidelines for third-degree rape.

     Amid the public outrage over the outcome of this case Assistant District Attorney Patricia Dziuba came to Judge McClusky's defense with this statement: "The sexual contact occurred between the defendant and the victim was away from school property and a good point in time after they met on the school bus..." 

     Not long after Shane Piche's sentencing offended residents of Jefferson County circulated a petition calling for Judge McClusky's removal from the bench. While 70,000 residents of the county signed the petition the judge kept his job.

     Advocates for harsher sentences in rape cases make the argument that rapists should not be given one "free" rape before they become serial offenders. The Piche case is an example of how practitioners in our criminal justice are more concerned about the welfare of the criminal than the victim. Most people would agree that a 25-year-old school bus driver who takes sexual advantage of a 14-year-old student deserves at least some time behind bars.

Abolishing The Insanity Defense

     On March 23, 2020, the United States Supreme Court, in Kahler v. Kansas ruled that it is not unconstitutional for a state to abolish its insanity defense. The insanity defense allows a criminal defendant to be found not guilty due to a mental illness that deprived the offender of knowing right from wrong. In other words, the defendant was too mentally impaired to form criminal intent. Instead of being guilty of the crime, the defendant is found not guilty by reason of insanity. These defendants, instead of serving a sentence in prison, are committed to a mental hospital where they remain until doctors determine they are sane enough to return to society. Because juries are skeptical of the insanity defense, it is successful in only one percent of insanity defense cases.

     In November 2009, in a Kansas killing rampage, James Kahler murdered his two daughters, his estranged wife, and his wife's mother. His attorneys claimed that he was insane, but because the state had made the insanity defense unavailable in 1995, Kahler was convicted of four-counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. In 2011, Kahler's attorneys challenged the constitutionality of the elimination of the insanity defense. The case worked its way up to  the United States Supreme Court which ruled 6 to 3 in favor of the state. Justice Elena Kagan wrote the majority opinion.

     While Kahler v. Kansas allows states to abolish the not guilty by reason of insanity defense, defendants can present evidence of mental illness to establish a lack of criminal intent to reduce say, first-degree murder to a lesser homicide offense. Moreover, it can be used post-conviction at a sentence hearing as a mitigating factor.

Invade Home, Get Shot: The Paul Slater Case

     On Friday, January 6, 2013 in Loganville, Georgia, a town of 11,000 30 miles east of Atlanta, Melinda Herman was at home watching her 9-year-old twins. She was working in her second-floor office. At one o'clock that afternoon Melinda looked out a window and saw a man she didn't recognize pull up in front of her upper-middle-class suburban home. The man, later identified as 32-year-old Paul Ali Slater had been released from jail in August 2012 after serving six months for simple battery and three counts of probation violation. Since 2008 this thief and burglar had been arrested seven times. He had six children.

     Melinda watched the man approach the house. He knocked on the front door and when she didn't answer he laid on the doorbell. Frightened, Melinda called her husband Donnie at work. (In late December, Donne had taken his wife to a shooting range where she learned to fire a .38-caliber revolver.) Donnie told Melinda to take possession of the firearm then hide in the attic with the children. He called 911.

     When Melinda looked out the window again she saw the man coming toward the house with a crowbar in his hand. As Paul Slater used the tool to break into the Herman home, Melinda and the twins hid in a crawlspace closet.

     From inside the attic closet Melinda Herman could hear the burglar rummaging through the family's belongings. She became extremely alarmed when she heard the intruder enter the attic. Suddenly the closet door opened and there he was standing a foot from her and the children. Melinda raised the six-shot revolver and fired all of its bullets. Five of the slugs hit Slater in the face and neck. Four of these bullets passed through his body.

     The shot intruder fell face-down on the attic floor. As the blood started leaking from his bullet-ridden body he begged Melinda who was still pulling the trigger of the empty gun to stop shooting. Melinda and the children stepped over the home invader's body and ran out of the house. As they took refuge in a neighbor's place Mr. Slater managed to get to his feet and stumble out of the dwelling. He made his way to the SUV but a few houses down the street ran his car into a tree.

     The bloodied and badly wounded burglar crawled out of his SUV and collapsed on a nearby driveway where deputies from the Walton County Sheriff's Office found him. "Help me," he cried. "I'm close to dying."

     Emergency personnel rushed the wounded intruder to the Gwinnett Medical Center where he was placed on a ventilator.

    The local prosecutor charged Paul Ali Slater with first-degree burglary and other offenses.

      Paul Slater, following a remarkable recovery, pleaded guilty in April 2013. At his sentencing hearing a month later, he said, "I knocked on the door. I tried to take every precaution to make sure I was going into a vacant house. The times were tough for my family and I made the decision to commit a crime. I was going into the house to steal some jewelry.

     The judge sentenced Paul Slater to 10 years in prison.

Watery Graves: The Mystery of Foss Lake

     There's no telling how many murder victims lay on the bottom of America's lakes, rivers and ponds. Most people don't realize that these boating, swimming and fishing sites are also the unmarked graves of people who have gone missing and might never be found. It's a sobering thought.

     Whenever a lake goes dry or is drained law enforcement officers often gather to recover guns, knives, cars, safes, cellphones, computers, wallets and other potential indicia of foul play. Occasionally, the remains of missing persons are exposed as well. When that happens one mystery is solved and another is created.

     On September 10, 2013, Oklahoma Highway Patrol officer George Hoyle, while testing a sonar detection device from a boat on Foss Lake 110 miles west of Oklahoma City, discovered a pair of vehicles sitting under twelve feet of murky water.

     A week after the vehicles were detected, Darrell Splawn, a member of the state's underwater search and rescue team, dove into the lake for a closer look. At this point officers believed they had found a pair of stolen cars.

     When officer Splawn opened the door to one of the vehicles and probed its interior his hand came in contact with a shoe. He also discovered, near the car, a human skull. The diver surfaced to report his finds. When the diver slipped back into the muddy water to check on the other vehicle he saw skeletal remains inside the second car.

     Once the heavily corroded cars--a 1952 Chevrolet and a 1969 Chevy Camero--were pulled out of the reservoir they revealed their gruesome secrets. Each vehicle contained the skeletal remains of three people. Officers also recovered, among other items, a muddy wallet and a purse.

     On April 8, 1969, 69-year-old John Alva Porter, the owner of a 1952 green Chevy, went missing. In the car with him that night were his brother Arlie and 58-year-old Nora Marie Duncan. These three residents of nearby Elk City, along with the Chevy, disappeared without a trace. No one had any idea what had happened to them.

     Jimmy Williams, a 16-year-old from Sayre, Oklahoma, a town of 4,000 a few miles from the lake, owned a 1969 Chevrolet Camero. On the night of November 20, 1970 he and two friends--Thomas Michael Rios and Leah Gail Johnson--both 18, were riding in Williams' car. Instead of going to the high school football game in Elk City the trio went hunting on Turkey Creek Road. The teenagers and the Camero were never seen again.

     While the six skeletal remains were presumed to match the two sets of missing persons, it would take months to scientifically confirm their identities. Forensic scientists in the Oklahoma Medical Examiner's Office compared DNA from the bones with DNA samples from surviving family members. Dr. Angela Berg, the state forensic anthropologist, determined the gender, general stature and approximate ages of the people pulled out of the lake. She did this by analyzing leg and pelvic bones along with the skulls. This data was compared with information contained in the missing person reports.

     What the 44-year-old remains did not reveal was the manner and cause of these deaths. While the six people presumably drowned, they could have been murdered by gun, knife or blunt instrument then dumped into the lake. To rule out foul play, the forensic pathologist and the anthropologist looked for signs of trauma such as bullet holes, knife wounds and smashed or broken bones. The forensic scientists also attempted to determine if the fates of the people inside the two cars were somehow connected.

     Custer County Sheriff Bruce Peoples told an Associated Press reporter that it was possible that these underwater victims had been driven accidentally into the lake where they drowned. "We know that can happen even if you know your way around," he said. "It can happen that quick." 

     In October 2014 the forensic pathologist officially confirmed the identities of the six sets of remains. Two months later the medical examiner's office ruled out foul play. Some of the victims' family members, however, remained skeptical and suspected otherwise.

The Marissa Edmunds Murder Case

     Just before midnight on January 11, 2018 in Ypsilanti, Michigan a resident of the Ypsilanti University Green Apartments looked out his window and saw two men wearing ski masks walking out of another section of the complex and climb into a car. As the vehicle sped off someone screamed, "They've killed her!" The apartment resident called 911.

     When Ypsilanti police officers responded to the 911 call they encountered 26-year-old Maxwell Flynn lying in the hallway near the crime scene. He had been shot in the chest but was alive. Inside the apartment officers found a 29-year-old man who had been grazed in the head by a bullet. The shooting victims were rushed to a nearby hospital. (They both survived their wounds.)

     Maxwell Flynn's 25-year-old girlfriend, Marissa Joy Edmunds, was found dead in the apartment from a gunshot wound to the head. None of the victims were students at the nearby Eastern Michigan University.

     The day following the shootings a spokesperson for the Ypsilanti Police Department informed reporters that detectives were looking for two men in their late twenties. One of the suspects, a black male, had been dressed in black and carrying a black backpack. The intruders left the murder scene in possession of personal items and drugs they stole from the victims.

     In February 2018 Ypsilanti police officers arrested 29-year-old Orlando L. Whitfield of Ypsilanti Township. The second suspect in the case remained unidentified.

     Officers booked Mr. Whitfield into the Washtenaw County Jail on one count of open murder, one count of using a firearm in the commission of a felony and three counts of armed robbery. At his arraignment Orlando Whitfield pleaded not guilty to all of the charges.

     Orlando Whitfield had a criminal record. In 2006 he was convicted in Wayne County, Michigan of operating a motor vehicle with an invalid driver's license and fleeing from the police. The judge sentenced him to three years probation.

    In 2008, while still on probation from the Wayne County conviction, Orlando Whitfield was convicted in Washtenaw County of sexual conduct and assault with intent to commit sexual penetration. He was sentenced to ten years.

     Whitfield, a registered sex offender, had been out of prison two months when he was arrested for the murder of Marissa Edmunds.

     In July 2018 while incarcerated in the Washtenaw County Jail Whitfield was charged with possession of a homemade knife or shank. At that time he was scheduled to be tried in February 2019 for Marissa Edmunds' murder but due to motions filed by his attorneys the trial had been delayed several times. During his stay in the Washtenaw County Jail Whitfield had been disciplined numerous times for fighting with his fellow jail inmates.

     On May 2, 2020, a Washtenaw County judge, in response to a motion filed by defense attorney Erika Julien, ordered the release of Whitfield from jail. He was placed under house arrest until his trial. According to his attorneys, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the diminished functioning of the local court system, their client, already behind bars for 28 months, was being denied a speedy trial. The defense team also argued that due to the shutdown they had been unable to acquire information from the prosecution that would help them with their defense.

     Marissa Edmunds' sister, Amanda Edmunds, responded to Whitfield's release this way: "Every [court] delay has been because of him [Whitfield]. He needs to be behind bars where he belongs. It all has to do with COVID-19, open the jail doors and let everyone out."

     After serving a period of time under house arrest Whitfield shed his electronic monitoring device and fled. A local judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest.

     On June 22, 2021 Orlando Whitfield turned himself in and was placed into the Washtenaw County Jail. Five days later he was found dead in his cell. According to investigators there was no indication of foul play in his death. 

The Forsythia Owen Murder Case

     On September 25, 2002 19-year-old Forsythia Owen and her boyfriend of nine months got into an argument in the living room of her Denver Colorado apartment. Before the fight broke out she impaired him by slipping a drug into his drink. In the course of the dispute Forsythia Owen grabbed a knife from the kitchen and stabbed her boyfriend in the chest.

     Paramedics rushed the victim to a nearby hospital where he survived his puncture wound. (I don't know who called 911.) Forsythia Owen greeted police officers at the scene by saying, "I'm the one who stabbed him. Arrest me." And that's what the officers did.

     A local prosecutor charged Forsythia Owen with assault with a deadly weapon causing serious bodily harm. Pursuant to a plea deal the assistant district attorney allowed Owen to plead guilty to the lesser offense of felony assault. The prosecutor dropped charges related to Forsythia Owen's assault of police officers while she was in custody.

     In January 2003 the judge sentenced Forsythia Owen to four years probation.

     Owen, a serious abuser of cocaine, alcohol and methamphetamine, had been diagnosed as having a "mood disorder" and "attention-deficit/hyperactivity." Because of her substance abuse, psychiatrists were unable to determine the degree to which she may have been psychotic as well. 

     Ten months into her probation a drug treatment administrator kicked Forsythia Owen out of the program for "non-compliance" and "minimal progress" for continuing to use cocaine and meth. Rather than send her to prison, probation officials enrolled her in a Denver community corrections program. After refusing to cooperate with the social workers the judge, in December 2004, sent her to prison for three years. If they couldn't fix this woman the authorities could at least get her off the street.

     In 2013 the 30-year-old ex-felon lived in the Denver suburb of Englewood with her 12-year-old daughter. On Sunday morning, September 22, 2013, Englewood police officers responded to a 911 call concerning a badly beaten man lying in an alley. Officers found 42-year-old Denzel Rainey in the alley bleeding from a severe blunt force head wound and other injuries. Paramedics rushed Mr. Rainey to the Swedish Medical Center where he died a short time later.

     Mr. Rainey, a married man with three children struggled with alcohol abuse that led to his homelessness. He was attacked in the alley where he slept at night.

     According to the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy, Mr. Rainey had a fractured skull, lacerated liver, broken arms, fractured left hand and six broken ribs. The medical examiner's office listed the cause of death as blunt force trauma. The manner of death: homicide.

     On Monday the day after the attack in the Englewood alley detectives spoke to a man who said that one of his neighbors, a woman named Forsythia Owen, had come to his house on Sunday with a story about a man who had inappropriately touched and abused her daughter. The man she accused was the homeless guy who had just been murdered in the alley.

     Later that day when questioned by detectives, Forsythia Owen admitted beating the man in the alley with a baseball bat. After confronting him about molesting her daughter she started swinging the bat. Advised of her Miranda rights Owen said, "I need a lawyer."

     An Arapahoe County prosecutor charged Forsythia Owen with first-degree murder and assault with a deadly weapon causing serious bodily harm. A magistrate denied her bond after the police booked her into the Arapahoe County Detention Center.

     Denzel Rainey, other than having driving under the influence convictions and an arrest for marijuana possession, did not have a criminal record. Moreover, there was no information on record regarding accusations of sexual offenses. Mr. Rainey's widow, Lisa, told reporters that "I just don't know what caused her to do that to Denzel. If he did anything to provoke the attack I need to know the answers for closure for me and closure for my kids."

     In speaking to a correspondent with a Denver television affiliate, Lisa Rainey said, "I think Owen is covering for somebody and I want to know: what was the real reason why she did that to my husband. He doesn't deserve to be dead. He would never hurt a child."

     At a March 17, 2014 pre-trial hearing Forsythia Owen's attorney Joe Archembault pleaded her not guilty by reason of insanity. Judge Marilyn Antrim ordered the defendant to undergo psychiatric evaluation at the mental health Institute in Pueblo, Colorado.

     The Arapahoe County prosecutor dropped the first-degree murder charge against Owen to second-degree murder and added first-degree assault and the charge of tampering with evidence.

     The Forsythia Owen murder trial got underway on February 4, 2015. Ten days later the jury, having rejected the insanity defense, found the defendant guilty as charged.

     On May 9, 2015 Judge Marilyn Leonard Antrim sentenced the 32-year-old Owen to 38 years in prison.

Rickie Lee Fowler's Felony-Murder Death Sentence

     Sexually abused as a child and addicted to methamphetamine, Rickie Lee Fowler lived a life of violence and crime. On October 25, 2003 while riding in a van driven by David Valdez, Jr., Fowler tossed burning road flares out of the moving vehicle. The 22-year-old, angry because he and his family had been evicted from their home wanted to start fires.

     During the next nine days the twelve wildfires that swept southern California's San Bernardino foothills scorched 442 square miles of land and burned 1,000 homes to the ground. Five people died of heart attacks while evacuating their fire-threatened dwellings.

     In 2004, after being interviewed as a possible arson suspect, Mr. Fowler was sent to prison on a burglary conviction. Two years later, David Valdez, Jr., the driver of the van was shot to death.

     Fowler, while serving time on the burglary case was convicted of repeatedly sodomizing an inmate. The judge in that case sentenced him to three terms of 25 years to life.

     In 2009, after Fowler confessed to starting the October 2003 wildfires, grand jurors in San Bernardino indicted him on one count of aggravated arson and five counts of murder. The homicide indictments were based on the felony-murder doctrine. Fowler, because he had committed a felony that directly led to the killing of five people, was criminally responsible for their deaths. While he intended to commit arson, he should have foreseen the deadly consequences of his criminal acts. In most states convictions based on the felony-murder doctrine bring sentences of twenty years to life. No one convicted of an unintended homicide had ever been sentenced to death.

     In August 2010, when Rickie Fowler learned that the prosecutor was seeking the death penalty in his case he took back his confession. Two years later a jury in San Bernardino found him guilty of arson and five counts of murder. The jurors also recommended the death penalty.

     On January 28, 2013 the trial judge sentenced Rickie Fowler to death. This unprecedented death sentence made the Fowler felony-murder case historic in the annals of law. Fowler's attorneys immediately appealed the sentence sentence as cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment.

      In December 2020 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the death penalty in this case did not violate Fowler's Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment. His death sentence stood. He remains on death row.