The David Wise Spousal Rape Case

     In 2008, Mandy Wise kicked her husband David Wise out of their home in Indianapolis, Indiana. She then filed for divorce. After eleven years of marriage she discovered, on his cell phone, video recordings of him having sex with her. She was unconscious. The tapes revealed she had been surreptitiously drugged and raped by her husband.

     When confronted with the tapes, Mr. Wise responded with the following email: "I was taking advantage of you in your sleep and you kept coming to me and telling me it was not okay. I needed to stop." He did not admit to drugging her, and they never, according to the victim, discussed the matter prior to her discovery of the videotapes.

     In January 2010, not long after the finalization of the divorce, the ex-wife, now going by her maiden name Boardman, complained to the police that her ex-husband had been harassing her with repeated phone calls and text messages. She also claimed that he threatened to kill the man to whom she was engaged. A judge granted her a protection order, but Mr. Wise was not charged with any crime.

     In 2011, two years after the divorce, Mandy reported the rapes to the police. As evidence she submitted a DVD copy of the sex tapes. When asked to explain the delay in reporting and submission of evidence, she said she didn't want their two children to grow up without a father.

     A Marion County prosecutor charged David Wise with one count of rape and five felony counts of criminal deviate conduct. If convicted as charged he faced a maximum sentence of forty years in prison. After spending 24 days in the county detention center David Wise made bail and was released to await his trial.

     The David Wise spousal rape trial began in April 2014 in Indianapolis. Mandy Boardman's testimony for the prosecution comprised the state's principal evidence in the three-day proceeding. She took the stand and told the jury that on numerous occasions she had awaken with the feeling that her body had been "messed with." One time she woke up with a pill still dissolving in her mouth. She had also discovered, in the bedroom, eyedroppers that were not hers.

     Following two days of testimony the case went to the jury. After a brief deliberation the jurors returned a verdict of guilty on all counts. The judge set May 16, 2014 as the sentencing date. On that day the prosecutor asked the judge to sentence Wise to twenty years in prison. The convicted man's attorney argued for two years of house detention.

     Marion County Superior Court Judge Kurt Eisgruber, on May 16, 2014, sentenced the 52-year-old rapist to twenty years, with twelve of those years suspended. David Wise would serve the remaining eight years wearing a GPS monitoring device in his home. Following the house detention he would serve two years of probation.

    Following the sentencing hearing Wise's attorney, Elizabeth Milliken, told reporters that she planned to appeal her client's conviction.

     On Monday, May 19, 2014, Mandy Boardman, in speaking to a reporter with the Indianapolis Star, said, "I was very pleased with the conviction but the sentencing was a punch in the gut by the justice system. During the reading of the sentence the judge looked at me before he gave the final decision. I was told that I needed to forgive my attacker and move on. I received zero justice on Friday."

     Boardman, to a reporter with the Los Angeles Times, added: "I never thought he [Wise] would be at home, being able to have the same rights and privileges that I do."

    On July 24, 2014 Judge Eisgruber put David Wise behind bars for five years after the convicted rapist violated the terms of his house arrest by letting his GPS tracking device's battery go dead. He also failed to maintain contact with correction authorities. Mandy Boardman responded to her ex-husband's incarceration with the following statement to a local reporter: "Now that I know that he will be in prison for the next five years I think I can finally get some peace" 

The Itinerate Lab Technician Who Made People Sick

     David Kwiatkowski traveled around the country working as a hospital temp in cardiac catheterization labs as a radiology technician. From January 2007 to September of that year the 29-year-old worked at the Oakwood Annapolis Hospital in Wayne, Michigan, his home state. From November 2007 to March 2010 Kwiatowski was employed by hospitals in Poughkeepsie, New York, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Baltimore and Clinton, Maryland.

     On April 1, 2010, the itinerate lab technician landed a job in Phoenix at the Arizona Heart Hospital. Eleven days later a fellow employee found him out cold in the men's locker room. After testing positive for cocaine and marijuana the hospital fired him. Less than a week later Mr. Kwiakowski was in Philadelphia working at Temple University Hospital. That job lasted less than a month. That May the roving temp was employed at a hospital in Hays, Kansas. A month after taking the job in Kansas, Kwiatkowski's drug usage caught up with him. He was also diagnosed with hepatitis C. After working a month at the Hays Hospital, the infected temp was working in Warner Robins, Georgia at the Houston Medical Center. 

      In April 2012 David Kwiatkowski began work in the cardiac catheterization unit at the Exeter Hospital in Exeter, New Hampshire. On May 12, 2012, six weeks after the temp started work at Exeter, the hospital experienced a hepatitis C breakout involving 32 patients and former patients.

     Because the infected patients had all received cardiac catheterization procedures at Exeter, David Kwiatkowski came under suspicion. Investigators began looking into his bizarre work history and learned he had been diagnosed with hepatitis C in June 2010. Fellow hospital employees, based on the temp's erratic behavior and the fresh needle tracks on his arms suspected he was a drug addict. Kwiatkowski's roommate told investigators that he found needles in their apartment. When confronted by his roommate Kwiatkowski said he had cancer. The hospital fired the radiology temp on May 24, 2012.

     Following a month-long investigation FBI agents determined that Mr. Kwiatkowski had injected himself with syringes meant for patients. These syringes were filled with Fentanyl, a painkiller more potent than morphine. Patients were then infected with syringes Kwiatkowski refilled with a saline solution. Patients had not only been denied relief from pain, the temp had given them hepatitis C.

     On July 13, 2012, police in Marlborough, Massachusetts responded to a call from a Holiday Inn regarding a guest who had overdosed on drugs. Officers found David Kwiatkowski in a stupor amid pills scattered about the hotel room. He had also written a suicide note. Medics transported him to a nearby hospital.

     A federal grand jury sitting in New Hampshire on July 19, 2012 indicted Kwiatkowski for acquiring controlled substances by fraud and for tampering with a consumer product (the hospital syringes). If convicted of these offenses he faced up to 24 years in prison. On the day of his indictment FBI agents arrested Kwiatkowski at the Marlborough hospital where he was recovering from his drug and alcohol overdose.

     When interrogated by FBI agents, Kwiatkowski denied stealing the syringes and switching out their contents. Moreover, he said he didn't use drugs. When asked how the 32 patients at the Exeter Hospital had contracted hepatitis C, the suspect said, "You know, I'm more concerned about myself, my own well-being. I've learned here to just worry about myself. And that's all I care about now." Spoken like a true sociopath.

     David Kwiatkowski was held without bail in the Strafford County Jail in New Hampshire. In that state alone he had come into contact with more than 3,000 patients, people who had yet to be tested for hepatitis C.

     In August 2013, Kwiatkowski, pursuant to a plea agreement, admitted that he had been stealing drugs for more than a decade and was "killing a lot of people." After pleading guilty to fourteen federal drug theft and tampering charges, the judge sentenced the 35-year-old to 39 years in prison.

The Kevin Harris Bomb Case

     Kevin Harris lived by himself in a modest one-story house in a quiet residential neighborhood in the southern California city of Costa Mesa. The 52-year-old, by covering his home in aluminum foil, attaching copies of his anti-government newsletters to a front yard tree and videotaping his neighbors revealed that he was strange and probably mentally ill. He had also established himself as an anti-social loner with his Internet writings that included the statement: "I am the only one who can get into my house. I think it may be dangerous for you to come to my house alone."

     In America we have more than our share of oddballs. Most of these people, usually men, are harmless eccentrics. Some of them, however, are psychotic, paranoid and dangerous. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, fell into this category. Unfortunately there's no sure-fire way to distinguish the Ted Kaczynski types from the common garden variety conspiracy kooks. When the distinction becomes clear it's usually too late.

     Mr. Harris, in a 17,000-word Internet-published manifesto called, "The Picker: A True Story of Assassination, Terrorism, and High Treason," described the nefarious and clandestine activities of government agents. The author of this rambling manifesto had obviously convinced himself that secret government operatives were using a weapon called a "picker," a device that deposited germs on a victim's skin on contact. Government agents armed with these secret devices were infecting dissenters with illnesses like cancer and AIDS. According to Harris government agents also used the deadly tool to cause various enemies of the state to die in freak accidents.

     The Costa Mesa conspiracy theorizer, in his manifesto, said: "I have had personal experience with both domestic and foreign operatives using pickers within the U. S. at the request of the U. S. Government. The rationale stated here should give you a reasonable indication that pickers are used in this country, but it is not absolute proof. The diseases of the ex-spouses, which I will describe, provide a proof so strong that some of these attacks will have to stop....

     "Many years ago I met a woman who had just divorced a government agent. She had also just had a radical mastectomy. She was afraid of her ex-husband, afraid for her life. That a woman should have to live (and die) in fear of this 'public servant' struck me as very wrong. Since then I have met a couple of other women who have broken off marriages with government agents. In each case the woman was diagnosed with cancer within a year of breaking up...

     "These women didn't get cancer because divorce and mortal fear are stressful. Emotional stress as a factor in carcinogenesis can account for a few percentage points at most. That is too small an influence to be reliably detectable. This is a cancer rate that is thousands of percent too high. Among other things, several attempts on my own life have confirmed to me that these cancers are intentional assaults..."

     At six-fifteen in the evening of Sunday, April 14, 2013 several of Kevin Harris' neighbors called 911 to report  that he was sprawled out on his front lawn. After the ambulance rolled up to the aluminum-wrapped house, Mr. Harris refused treatment. The paramedics drove off and Mr. Harris disappeared inside his strange looking dwelling.

     Ninety minutes following the medical emergency, neighbors called 911 again to report a powerful explosion at the Harris house. Police arrived to find the front entrance to Harris' dwelling shattered from an explosion. The resident of the home lay dead in the doorway. Near his corpse Costa Mesa police officers saw an unexploded pipe bomb.

     Dozens of homes in the neighborhood were evacuated as FBI agents, the Orange County Bomb Squad and a Huntington Beach hazardous materials team searched the Harris dwelling for additional bombs and explosive substances. They found three more pipe bombs on the premises.

     Because Kevin Harris was alone in the house when one of his pipe bombs detonated the authorities had no way of knowing if he had killed himself intentionally or had accidentally triggered one of his explosive devices. Perhaps he had mistakenly set-off a booby-trap of his own making.

     One of Mr. Harris' brothers told a reporter that Kevin was the youngest of five boys. Although all of his siblings were highly educated professionals, Kevin was the smartest one in the family. (His manifesto suggested that Kevin was well-educated as well, possibly in the hard sciences.)

     The day after the Costa Mesa house explosion, terrorists detonated two bombs at the Boston Marathon. 

Adding Insult to Injury in a False Arrest Case

     At 1:45 in the morning of September 26, 2007, a couple returning to their home in Millcreek, a suburban community adjacent to Erie, Pennsylvania, encountered a pair of burglars. When one of the intruders pointed a gun at the home owners the husband tried to disarm him. In the scuffle the burglar fired a shot into the ceiling, then, accompanied by his partner ran out of the house. The burglars sped from the scene in a white minivan.

     Shortly after the incident a pair of Erie police officers looking for the fleeing burglars happened upon Maria Jordan parked in front of her house in a white minivan. Maria was about to pick up her husband, the night shift manager at a local Taco Bell.

     The police officers ordered Maria out of the van at gunpoint, ordered her to the ground then handcuffed the prone woman behind her back. Once they placed Maria into the patrol car (calling her an "idiot" and "retard") the officers entered the Jordon house where at gunpoint they hauled Maria's 10-year-old stepson out of bed and arrested Maria's father. After handcuffing the boy and Jose Arenas, the officers searched the dwelling. They found nothing incriminating in the house, removed the handcuffs from the people they had arrested, then took leave of the citizens they had traumatized. 

     In 2009 Maria, her father and her stepson sued the Erie Police Department in federal court for violating their civil rights. According to the complaint, the false arrests and police manhandling had caused the family "worry, humiliation and anxiety." In defense of their actions, the officers said they should not be sued for doing their jobs. (Since when is making false arrests part of the job?) The city offered to settle the case out of court for $10,000. The plaintiffs turned down the offer and the suit moved forward.

     On May 11, 2012, following a 4-day trial in the Erie federal court house, the jury found that the two Erie police officers had in fact violated the plaintiffs' civil rights. While finding that the defendants had acted improperly, the jurors didn't believe the false arrests and house search had significantly harmed the family. As a result, in what could be interpreted as an insult, the jury awarded Maria Jordon $2 and her stepson and father $1 each.

     If the plaintiffs were angered and insulted by the token damages they didn't let on. In fact, Maria's husband told a local reporter the family was pleased by the verdict because they had sought justice not money.

     On May 26, 2012 the assistant city solicitor, unwilling to leave well enough alone, filed a motion asking the federal judge to order the plaintiffs to pay some of the city's legal costs created by the lawsuit. According to the Erie solicitor, Pennsylvania law "obligated a prevailing plaintiff to pay the defendant's post-offer costs after rejecting an offer more favorable than the judgement." The city wanted the judge to order the Jordons--the wronged parties in the suit--to pay $5,085 of the city's legal expenses.

     In March 2013 the judge dismissed the solicitor's case.

Jerome Murdough's Jail Cell Death

     After graduating from a Queens, New York high school in 1976, Jerome Murdough joined the Marine Corps. He served a tour in Okinawa, Japan before his Honorable Discharge. Shortly after he returned to New York City, Mr. Murdough started drinking heavily and taking drugs. In his thirties, after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, he found himself living on the street and in homeless shelters. He joined the growing number of mentally ill Americans living on the fringes of urban society. To maintain a semblance of sanity he had to keep taking his anti-psychotic medication. He also took anti-seizure pills and continued to medicate himself with alcohol.

     Over the years, New York City police officers, on a dozen occasions arrested Mr. Murdough for the misdemeanor offenses of drunk in public, trespassing and drug possession. On February 7, 2014 a police officer in Harlem, New York arrested the 56-year-old homeless man for trespassing. Jerome Murdough had been sleeping in an enclosed stairwell in a public housing project.

     The arresting officer booked Mr. Murdough into Rikers Island, the nation's second largest jail system. At any given time Rikers Island is the temporary home of 1,200 prisoners, almost half of whom are mentally ill. At his arraignment the judge assigned Murdough an attorney from the public defender's office and set his bail at a prohibitive $2,500.

     On February 14, 2014, a week into his incarceration, jail officials transferred Murdough to the Anna M. Kross Center, the jail system's massive mental health unit. They placed him into a 6-by-10 foot cinderblock cell at 10:30 that night. Pursuant to jail policy pertaining to prisoners in the mental observation unit, corrections officers were supposed to check on him every fifteen minutes.

     At 2:30 the next morning, four hours after Murdough's transfer to the mental health unit, a corrections officer discovered him dead on his cot. The first thing the guard noticed was the intense heat coming out of the cell. The temperature in the enclosure had risen to well about 100 degrees due to a heating system malfunction.

     While the forensic pathologist with the New York City's Medical Examiner's Office was unable to articulate the exact cause of death without more testing, initial indicators pointed toward extreme dehydration otherwise know as heat stroke. Since psychotropic medications can impair the body's ability to cool itself by sweating, Murdough's prescription regime may have been a contributing factor to his death.

     Jerome Murdough's 75-year-old mother learned of her son's fate a month after he essentially baked to death. She learned of  his passing from a reporter with the Associated Press. Mrs. Murdough hadn't been in contact with her son for three years.

     On April 3, 2014, a spokesperson for New York City's jail system announced that the warden of the mental health unit had been demoted over the incident. Two corrections officer were placed on thirty-day suspensions for not "following basic procedures."

     In October 2014, pursuant to a civil suit filed by Jerome Murdough's family, the city of New York authorized a $2.25 million settlement.

The Battered Wife Syndrome

     Traditionally, courts have not recognized the battered-wife syndrome as a valid defense in homicide trials in which a battered wife kills her abusive husband at a time when she is not being attacked. To successfully employ self-defense in a homicide case the defendant must prove by a preponderance of the evidence that deadly force was necessary to avoid the imminent threat of serious bodily injury or death. Under standard self-defense rationale the careful planning and execution of an abusive husband's death is first-degree murder. (Crime historians believe that before the science of toxicology, wives were able to dispatch abusive husbands by slowly killing them with arsenic.)

     For years activists concerned with domestic violence lobbied courts and legislatures to make the battered-wife syndrome a valid murder defense in cases where the defendant was not in immediate danger of serious bodily injury or death.

CASES

Queens, New York

     In 2008, 47-year-old Barbara Sheehan shot and killed her abusive husband, the retired New York City police sergeant she had been married to for twenty-four years. Charged with first-degree murder, she went on trial in September 2011. The defendant took the stand and described years of marital abuse and terror.

     According to the Sheehan prosecution, the morning the defendant killed her husband she was on the computer looking for travel bargains. The assistant district attorney called the killing a "self-serving execution." On October 5, 2011, after deliberating three days, the jury found Barbara Sheehan not guilty. Proponents of the battered-wife defense saw this case as a referendum on this issue. The Sheehan acquittal raised a difficult legal question: Is the premeditated killing of someone who will hurt you in the future self-defense or first-degree murder?

Memphis, Tennessee

     In 1985, Gaile Owens hired a hitman to kill her abusive husband. Found guilty of first-degree murder, she was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection. In 1986 the governor of Tennessee commuted her sentence to life in prison. In September 2011 the Tennessee Board of Probation and Parole released Gaile Owens from prison after twenty-six years behind bars. The hitman was still serving his time for the contract killing. Notwithstanding the fact that no crime is more cold-blooded than murder-for-hire, the general feeling in Tennessee was that Gaile Owen's sentence of death, under the circumstances, exceeded her crime.

     The message here may be this: If you're a battered woman, call for help. Do not call a hitman. But if you do, and get caught, call the lawyer who represented Barbara Sheehan.   

The Historic Fingerprint: The Jennings Murder Case

     In Chicago, Illinois on September 19, 1910, a noise at two in the morning coming from her 15-year-old's bedroom awoke Mary Hiller. She slipped into her robe and ventured into the hall where she noticed that the gaslight outside her daughter's room had been turned off. Fearing that an intruder had entered the house, Mrs. Hiller returned to the master bedroom and shook her husband awake.

    Clarence Hiller, on the landing en route to his daughter's room, bumped into Thomas Jennings, a 32-year-old paroled burglar in possession of a .38-caliber revolver. The men struggled then tumbled down the stairway. At the foot of the stairs, Mr. Jennings, the bigger man, got to his feet, pulled his gun and fired two shots. The first bullet entered Mr. Hiller's right arm, traveled up through his shoulder and exited the left side of his neck. The second slug slammed into his chest, piercing his heart and lung before coming out his back. The gunman left the scene through the front door, leaving behind a screaming Mary Hiller, her dead husband and a terrified 15-year-old girl who had been sexually molested.

     About a mile from the murder house, Thomas Jennings, walking with a limp and bleeding from cuts on his arm passed four off-duty police officers waiting for a streetcar. When questioned about his injuries, Jennings said he had fallen off a trolley. One of the officers patted him down and discovered the recently fired handgun. The officers placed him under arrest and escorted the suspect to the police station.

     A few hours after the arrest, detectives at the murder scene found the two .38-caliber bullets that passed through Clarence Hiller's body. Today a forensic firearms identification expert would be able to match the crime scene slugs with bullets test-fired through the suspect's gun. But in 1910 this type of forensic identification was 15 year in the future. Investigators also determined that the intruder had entered the Hiller house through a kitchen window. A detective who was ahead of his time found four fingerprint impressions on a freshly painted porch rail outside the point of entry. (Paint in those days dried slowly.) A technician with the police department's two-year-old fingerprint bureau photographed the the finger marks that had been left in the dark gray paint. (The science of fingerprint identification first came to America from England in 1906 when the St. Louis Police Department started the country's first fingerprint bureau.) Mary Hiller, traumatized by the murder of her husband failed to pick Thomas Jennings out of a police lineup. While roughed up and the recipient of a third-degree interrogation, Thomas Jennings did not confess.

     At Jennings' May 1911 murder trial two Chicago Police Department fingerprint examiners, a fingerprint technician from the police department in Ottawa, Canada and a private expert who had studied fingerprint science at Scotland Yard testified that the impressions on the porch rail matched the ridges on four of the defendant's fingers, placing him at the scene of the murder. While the idea that fingerprints were unique had been around for 20 years, this was the first U.S. jury to be presented with this form of impression evidence. The chance of convicting Jennings was not good because the prosecution's case--the defendant's arrest one mile from the house, his injuries, his possession of a recently fired gun and his murder scene fingerprints--was based entirely on circumstantial evidence. In those days, and to some extent today, jurors prefer direct evidence in the form of confessions and eyewitness identifications.

     Prior to the testimony of the four fingerprint witnesses, Mr. Jennings' attorney objected to the introduction of this evidence on the grounds this form of forensic identification had not been scientifically tested and was therefore unreliable and inadmissible. The trial judge, in allowing the fingerprint testimony, relied on a 1908 arson case, Carleton v. People, in which the defendant had been linked to the fire scene by impressions left by his shoes.

     The jury, following a short deliberation found Thomas Jennings guilty of first-degree murder. To arrive at this verdict the jurors placed more weight on the physical evidence than on the defendant's claim of innocence. The judge sentenced Thomas Jennings to death.

     On appeal Thomas Jennings' lawyer argued that there was no scientific proof that fingerprints were unique. By admitting the testimony of so-called fingerprint experts the trial court had sentenced a man to the gallows on pseudoscience and bogus expertise. The Illinois Supreme Court, on December 21, 1911, ruled that the Jennings trial judge had not made a judicial error by admitting the fingerprint testimony. This was good news for forensic science and bad news for Thomas Jennings who died in 1912 at the end of a rope.

     People v. Jennings laid the groundwork for forensic fingerprint identification in America. By 1925 virtually every court in the United States accepted this form of impression evidence as proof of guilt. In medicine, illness leads to cures, and in law enforcement some murder cases lead to advances in forensic science.  

A College Kid's Crime Spree

     On Sunday morning, November 2, 2014, paramedics in a Poudre Valley Hospital ambulance responded to an emergency involving an intoxicated student at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. When the paramedics rolled the student out of the building they found that someone had stolen their ambulance. (The patient had to be transported to another hospital in a backup vehicle.)

     Through GPS technology the police located the missing ambulance 12 miles away in Loveland, Colorado. Officers found the vehicle, its doors wide open and its front-end badly damaged and leaking fluid, sitting in the middle of Highway 34. The officers also encountered the thief, 18-year-old Stefan Sortland standing thirty yards from the wrecked ambulance. The Colorado State University sophomore, decked out in an EMT safety vest, was holding a blanket, a cellphone and a box of Wheat Thins.

     According to witnesses the ambulance hit the raised median, jumped the curb, struck a highway sign, careened the wrong way and crossed back over the median before coming to a stop.

     When the college boy refused to obey the police-issued commands they stunned him with a Taser. Referring to the police vehicles surrounding him Stefan Sortland asked, "Why are those lights flashing on those cars?" On his way to the Loveland Police Department Sortland informed the officers that he and the stolen ambulance had been en route to Vail, Colorado. For the most part, however, the college student rambled on incoherently.

     At the police station Mr. Sortland said he took the drug molly along with some cocaine at a Halloween concert where security officers kicked him out of the event. He also said that his friends and roommates, having all committed suicide, were dead and in heaven.

     While awaiting his transportation to the local jail the drugged-up college kid kicked a police department bench and a wall then started masturbating. (Apparently he wasn't handcuffed behind his back.)

     At the Larimer County Jail, while in the booking area, Sortland attacked two jail employees who brought him lunch. He punched one of the deputies in the face. A short time later officers booked Sortland on charges of aggravated vehicle theft, obstructing emergency medical personnel, reckless driving, hit-and-run, criminal mischief, unlawful possession of a controlled substance and assault.

     Stefan Sortland's father told detectives that his son had no history of mental illness and was not on medication. His father did say that on Halloween his son had sent him some odd text messages.

     On May 17, 2016,  Stefan Sortland pleaded guilty to the felony counts of motor vehicle theft and second-degree assault of a police officer. Chief Judge Stephen Schapanski gave him a four-year deferred sentence. That meant that if he remained law abiding during that period he would not be sent to prison. According to his defense attorney the 20-year-old was now taking anti-psychotic medication. 

The Historic Disaster at Waco

     The April 19, 1993 FBI raid of the Mount Carmel Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, which resulted in the deaths of 80 cult members, is a worst-case example of how the militaristic approach to law enforcement can lead to disaster.

     Fifty-one days before the FBI raid, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tax, and Firearms (ATF), at the conclusion of a seven month investigation, had stormed the compound to arrest cult leader David Koresh and search for a cache of guns that ATF agents suspected had been illegally converted to fully automatic weapons. That raid ended after a brief shootout in which four ATF agents were killed and 16 wounded. The officers retreated, leaving an unknown number of Branch Davidians dead and wounded.

     The AFT agents prior to the raid had several opportunities to arrest David Koresh outside the Mount Carmel compound. These chances were missed because Mr. Koresh was not under a 24-hour surveillance. Had the ATF taken him into custody when the opportunity presented itself the raid might not have been necessary. The ATF had also lost the element of surprise, and they knew it when two National Guard helicopters circling above the compound with agency supervisors aboard took gunfire from below. The supervisors launched the invasion anyway. Although several AFT agents had been trained at Fort Hood by Green Beret personnel, most of the agents participating in the 9:30 A.M. attack had not been appropriately trained or armed. Many of the 76 agents who charged the compound carried semi-automatic handguns.

     Following the AFT fiasco the FBI took charge of the stand-off. Following the 51-day siege and a series of failed negotiations several FBI SWAT teams, in full battle gear armed with shortened variants of the standard M-16 assault rifle and supported by Bradley Fighting Vehicles and M-60 tanks, stormed the compound. Forty minutes after 400 canisters of CS gas had been shot inside the building through holes punched in the walls by the armored vehicles, the structure burst into flames and burned to the ground. David Koresh and 17 children were among the 80 dead. Attorney General Janet Reno, operating on unreliable evidence that the Davidian children were being sexually mistreated authorized the assault. The Waco fiasco turned out to be the deadliest police action in American history.

     Attorney General Reno, in the wake of the Waco disaster, asked former Missouri senator John C. Danforth to investigate the government's role in the raids. In 2000, following a 14-month inquiry Danforth determined that FBI agents had not started the fire by firing bullets into the compound. The former senator also found the military's role in the raids as lawful.

     Several months after the Danforth inquiry Thomas Lynch, the director of the CATO Institute's Project on Criminal Justice published a report characterizing the Branch Davidian raids as "criminally reckless," and Danforth's investigation as "soft and incomplete." According to the CATO investigation FBI agents in National Guard helicopters fired rifle shots into the compound, a finding that contradicted the FBI's claim that the helicopters had been deployed merely to distract the Davidians.

     At a news conference Senator Danforth defended the integrity of his inquiry and attacked the CATO report. The debate over who started the fire at the Davidian compound remained unresolved. Regardless of what FBI agents did or didn't do on April 19, 1993, many believe the militaristic ATF and FBI raids should not have been launched in the first place. 

The William and Christopher Cormier Murder Case

     Sean Dugas was an active participant in the community of enthusiasts devoted to the role-playing fantasy game "Magic: The Gathering," a more violent version of "Dungeons & Dragons." The 30-year-old former reporter with the Pensacola Journal News shared a house in Pensacola with 31-year-old twins William and Christopher Cormier. At one time the brothers had been part of the so-called "Magic community" but had lost interest.

     According to the police version of events, during the early morning hours of August 27, 2012 the Cormier twins murdered Sean Dugas by bludgeoning him with a hard object. Motivated by the intent to steal Dugas' $25,000 to $100,000 collection of Magic game cards, the murder took place in the rented Pensacola dwelling.

     Later on the morning of Sean Dugas' death, his girlfriend, with whom he had made plans to have lunch, stopped by his house. She knocked on the door and when no one answered left a note. Over the next couple of days Mr. Dugas did not return his girlfriend's phone calls or text messages.

     On September 7, 2012 Dugas' girlfriend returned to his house to find it unoccupied and, except for a TV set, empty. She couldn't believe Dugas had moved out of the house without telling her. According to a neighbor two men four days earlier had been at the house with a U-Haul truck. The girlfriend, after another week of not hearing from Mr. Dugas reported him missing.

     On September 3, 2012 the Cormier twins, after buying a large plastic container at Walmart for Dugas' body, loaded up the U-Haul truck. Later that day they rolled up to their father's house in Winder, Georgia, a small town 45 miles northeast of Atlanta. They dug a hole in their father's backyard, lowered in the plastic container holding Dugas' body then filled the grave with concrete. (The brothers told their father they had buried a dog.)

     Police investigators in Pensacola learned that the Cormier twins sold Magic fantasy cards in Florida, Tennessee and Georgia. People who knew Sean Dugas told the police that he had recently spoken of moving to Georgia with William and Christopher Cormier.

     On October 8, 2012 detectives in Pensacola asked the police in Winder to locate the twins. At the Cormier house officers noticed the fresh digging in the backyard. Shortly thereafter a crew unearthed Dugas' concrete entombed remains.

     Police arrested the Cormier brothers the day the remains were uncovered. They were initially charged with concealing the death of another. Two days later, after a forensic pathologist identified Mr. Dugas' body through dental charts and facial bone CT scans, a prosecutor in Pensacola charged the defendants with first-degree murder. Pending extradition to Florida the brothers were held without bail in Georgia.

     In February 2014 the Cormier twins, in separate Pensacola murder trials, were found guilty as charged. In William Cormier's case the jury deliberated only thirty minutes before reaching its verdict. The judge sentenced William Cormier to life without parole. His brother received a sentence of twenty-five years to life.