The Mona Nelson Blow Torch Murder Case

     In April 2010, 44-year-old Angela, the mother of an 11-year-old boy from a previous relationship, married David Davis. The boy, a red-headed fifth-grader named Jonathan Foster lived with his paternal grandmother. In November 2010 the child moved into the Houston, Texas duplex with his mother and new stepfather.

    When he was drunk David Davis became violent. One of his assaults sent Angela to the hospital. On December 14, 2010, after Mr. Davis slapped his stepson in the face, Angela and Jonathan moved a hundred feet away into the apartment of a woman who had befriended her.

     In the early afternoon of December 24, 2010, a woman who referred to herself as Jonathan's babysitter, spoke on the telephone to one of Angela's co-workers at a meat market where she was employed as a cashier. The caller who said she was Angela's babysitter wanted to speak to the mother. The meat market co-worker passed the message on to Angela who said she didn't have a babysitter. Angela called the number left by the woman and she answered the phone. Just before the line went dead Angela heard her son's voice. She rushed home to check on her son. The boy was not in the apartment. Fearing foul play Angela Davis called 911 and reported her son missing.

     Detectives with the Houston Police Department, from the beginning, treated the case as a possible kidnapping. The police, suspecting Angela's estranged husband David, questioned him closely. David Davis said he checked on Jonathan just 25 minutes before Angela came home and found him missing. At that time the boy was playing a video game. "There's no doubt in my mind that he's been snatched," the stepfather said. "I think a pedophile took him."

     As investigators questioned other members of the missing boy's family, neighbors and volunteers handed out fliers. Angela went on television and said this to the abductor: "Don't hurt my baby." On the possibility that Jonathan had been kidnapped by a stranger, detectives questioned fifty registered sex offenders in the northwest Houston area.

     On December 28, 2010, four days after Jonathan went missing, a Houston Police Department's K-9 unit recovery dog detected what turned out to be the boy's badly charred remains. (Jonathan Foster had to be identified by dental records.) The body, bound with twine, had been dumped into a ditch four miles from his residence. Near the corpse detectives found a welder's torch.

     Surveillance camera footage from a building near Jonathan's body showed a silver Ford pickup truck pulling up to the site at six o'clock on Christmas eve. A black woman got out of the vehicle, reached into the bed of the truck, took out what appeared to be a body and placed it into the ditch.

     Detectives quickly identified the woman in the truck as 44-year-old Mona Yvette Nelson, an acquaintance of the woman who had been sharing her apartment with Angela and Jonathan. Two weeks earlier, Mona, a maintenance worker at the apartment complex, had met the boy's stepfather. According to witnesses Mona Nelson had been seen recently in the vicinity of the murdered child's apartment.

     As a maintenance employee, Mona Nelson had worked with acetylene torches and various types of welding equipment. A former boxer, she had been convicted in 1984 of aggravated robbery which brought a ten-year probated sentence. She had since been arrested for various drug charges and for making terroristic threats against another woman. The suspect owned a truck that looked like the silver Ford driven by the woman seen on surveillance tapes dumping the body into the ditch.

     On December 30, 2011 at a press conference, a spokesperson for the Houston Police Department announced that Mona Nelson, charged with capital murder, had been arrested for Jonathan Foster's death. Having been denied bond the suspect was incarcerated in the Harris County Jail. In a search of her northwest Houston residence detectives found twine similar to the cordage found on Jonathan's body. Officers also recovered an acetylene tank used in welding. Sections of Nelson's carpet had been recently burned.

     According to the police spokesperson, Nelson under police questioning admitted dumping Jonathan's body in the ditch. The suspect had not, however, confessed to murdering the boy.

     The day after Mona Nelson's arrest a local television reporter interviewed her at the Harris County Jail. Nelson told the correspondent that one of Jonathan's family members on Christmas Eve asked her to dump the contents of a garbage container. The unnamed relative paid her twenty dollars for the job. She had been drunk on vodka and had no idea what was in the plastic container. "I didn't know what was in it until they were showing me pictures in the interrogation room. I'm not a monster," she said, "I have five grandkids and I love kids."

     Houston homicide detective Mike Miller, in response to Nelson's statements to the TV reporter, pointed out that Jonathan's body had not been found in a container. In describing the murder suspect Detective Miller said, "She is a cold soulless murderer who showed an absolute lack of remorse in taking the life of Jonathan Foster. There's only been one or two people I've ever talked to that had eyes like she did. It was really cold." Detective Miller said that all of the victim's family members, including his stepfather David Davis, had solid alibis. Mona Nelson had acted on her own, he said.

     On Monday, January 3, 2011 Mona Nelson appeared before a judge who asked her if she understood her rights. She said that she did. The judge appointed Nelson an attorney, informed her of the charge and sent her back to jail. A month later Harris County prosecutor Connie Spence presented the case to a grand jury that returned a true bill of capital murder.

     The Nelson murder trial got underway on Monday, August 12, 2013 before district judge Jeannine Barr. The defendant had waived her right to a jury trial, putting her fate entirely in the hands of this judge. Nelson's attorney, Alan Tanner, before the opening statements and presentation of witnesses, asked Judge Barr to quash five recorded statements his client had made to detectives over a stretch of seventeen hours at her home and at the police station. According to the defense attorney the interrogators continued to question Nelson after she complained a dozen times of being ill. The officers did not address Nelson's health complaints until after the interrogation. (Detectives took her to a nearby hospital where doctors found nothing wrong with her.)

     On Tuesday, August 13, 2013 Mona Nelson, pursuant to the procedural law question regarding the admissibility of her police statements, testified that her interrogators had worn her down. Although she asked to consult with an attorney a dozen times the questioning continued. Attorney Tanner argued that the interrogating officers had violated his client's Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. He also asserted that her statements had not been given voluntarily and were therefore inadmissible in court.

     Judge Barr, later that afternoon, made her evidentiary ruling. She excluded the statements Nelson made after she had requested to see a lawyer. Since these requests came late in the interrogation session most of her statements were admissible.

     In her opening remarks before Judge Barr, prosecutor Spence admitted that the state would not be establishing a motive for Jonathan's murder. (While prosecutors prefer to have motive evidence it is not a legal requirement for a murder conviction. All the state has to prove is criminal intent. In substantive law, the why is not legally relevant.) The prosecutor promised the judge she would prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mona Nelson, sometime between 2:15 and 6:08 PM on December 24, 2010 tortured and killed the 11-year-old Foster boy with a blowtorch at her home, then dumped his charred remains in a ditch. Spence said that one of the key pieces of evidence she would introduce involved Jonathan's sweat shirt found in a trash can near the defendant's house. 

     Defense attorney Tanner reminded the judge that just because his client had dumped the boy's body in the ditch didn't necessary mean that she had killed him. In foreshadowing the thrust of his defense, Tanner cast suspicion on the victim's stepdad, David Davis. According to the defense attorney the boy had come between Davis and his estranged wife which may have been the motive behind the murder. All Mona Nelson did was dispose of the contents of a garbage can that had been given to her.

     The victim's mother took the stand as the state's first witness. She was followed by several detectives who testified about the physical evidence they recovered from Nelson's home and how it related to the evidence found near Jonathan Foster's charred corpse. David Davis, the stepfather, took the stand and admitted that he had hit the victim's mother. He said he had never harmed the boy. Through direct examination, prosecutor Spence established the witness' whereabouts at the time of the abduction and the murder.

     Lois Sims, the supervisor at the meat market who took the phone call for Angela Davis on the afternoon of December 24, 2010, described the caller as an angry foul-mouthed woman. The caller wanted the telephone number of the woman leasing the apartment where Davis and her son were staying. "If you don't get her on the phone now something's going to happen. He [Jonathan] won't be here for long."

     Defense attorney Tanner pointed out that the two meat market supervisors described the caller as a white woman.

     On August  19, 2013 two Houston Police Department K-9 officers testified that three cadaver dogs reacted strongly to a box of burned carpeting at Nelson's house. One of the witnesses said, "There was a strong odor of human remains there. An arborist (tree expert) testified that leaves at the dump site had come from oak trees. There were no such trees where Jonathan's body had been recovered, but around Nelson's house there were seven trees of this kind.

     The prosecutor played a videotaped statement from Nelson in which she admitted being at the place where Jonathan's body had been dumped. She said she emptied a garbage container at the site. She said she didn't know the contents of the plastic container.

     The following day a forensic scientist from the FBI Crime Laboratory testified that a Looney Tunes sweatshirt that belonged to Jonathan, recovered from the defendants trash can, contained Nelson's blood and DNA. Two other DNA experts agreed with this analysis. The presence of this trace evidence on the sweatshirt suggested that the victim had put up a fight.

     On Friday morning, August 23, 2013, the prosecution rested its case. Allen Tanner launched his client's defense with the testimony of a woman who gave Mona Nelson an alibi. Following the testimony of two other witnesses the defense rested its case. Mona Nelson did not take the stand on her own behalf.

     The next day defense attorney Allen Tanner delivered his closing argument to the judge. "Mona Nelson," he said, "had absolutely no motive to kill Jonathan Foster. They searched and searched for a motive and there's no reason why she would have killed that boy." In referring to David Davis, the estranged husband, Tanner said, "He wanted to get her back and he told people at work that Jonathan is the root of all his problems...The [prosecution's] case got weaker and weaker...There are more and more unanswered questions now than there were at the beginning. The evidence is clear there could be people who committed this crime and we have no idea at this time who they are."

     When it came her turn to address the judge, prosecutor Spence said, "This defendant took Jonathan Foster back to her house and killed him. We'll never know how she killed him because she burned his body to the point where you can't tell."

     On Monday morning, August 26, 2013, Judge Jeannine Barr found Mona Nelson guilty as charged. The judge imposed the automatic sentence of life without parole. After hearing the verdict Nelson said, "I'm innocent and I maintain my innocence. I wouldn't harm anybody."

     Defense attorney Allen Tanner told reporters he would file an appeal on the grounds of insufficient evidence. "We believe someone else kidnapped this child and someone else killed this child."

     On March 19, 2015, a three-judge panel on the Fourth District Texas Court of Appeals affirmed the Mona Nelson capital murder conviction.

The Shayna Hubers Murder Case

     In 2012 Ryan Poston, a 29-year-old lawyer from a family of prominent attorneys and corporate executives, resided in a condo in Highland Heights, Kentucky. He was involved in an on again-off again tumultuous relationship with a 21-year-old graduate student from Lexington, Kentucky named Shayna Hubers. A 2008 graduate of the prestigious School for the Arts, Hubers was pursuing a Master's Degree in counseling from Eastern Kentucky University.

     In 2011 and 2012 Mr. Poston and Hubers exchanged hundreds of text messages that revealed she was more attracted to him than he was to her. For months Mr. Poston had been trying to get himself out of the relationship. On October 11, 2012 Poston, his mother, his stepfather and Shayna Hubers had dinner at the young attorney's dwelling.

     After dinner that night Shayna Hubers went home but returned a few hours later. Upon her uninvited return the couple argued. Things really heated up when he informed her that he wanted to end the relationship. The argument further intensified when he told her he had a date the following Friday night with the current Miss Ohio.

     At 8:53 PM the next day Shayna Hubers called 911 from Poston's condo and said this to the emergency dispatcher: "Ma'am, I have, I have, I killed my boyfriend in self defense."

     "What happened?" asked the dispatcher.

     "He beat me and tried to carry me out of the house and I came back in to get my things. He was right in front of me and reached down and grabbed the gun, and I grabbed it out of his hands and pulled the trigger."

     Responding police officers found Ryan Poston lying on his dining room floor next to his Sig Sauer .380-caliber pistol. He had been shot in the back, twice in the head and three times in the torso.

     A Campbell County prosecutor charged Shayna Hubers with first-degree murder, first-degree manslaughter, second-degree manslaughter and reckless homicide. Officers booked the suspect into the county jail in Newport, Kentucky. At her arraignment hearing the judge denied her bail.

     The Shayna Hubers murder trial got underway on April 13, 2015 in Newport, Kentucky before Circuit Judge Fred A. Stine. Commonwealth Attorney Michelle Snodgrass, in her opening statement to the jury, accused the defendant of killing Mr. Poston in a fit of jealous rage. According to the prosecutor's version of the killing, the defendant's first shot knocked the victim down. While he lay wounded and helpless on his dining room floor she pumped five more bullets into his body.

     Defense attorney Wil Zevely told the jurors that in an act of self defense his client shot her boyfriend six times before he fell to the floor and died.

     The lead detective in the case took the stand for the prosecution and testified that the death scene, the victim's dining room, showed no signs of a struggle. Several of Mr. Poston's condo neighbors testified they had not heard anything that night that suggested physical violence.

     A prosecution witness took the stand and said that the defendant had sent her a Facebook message regarding her plan to shoot Mr. Poston at a gun range and make the shooting look like an accident.

     The prosecutor played the defendant's recorded police interview in which she said: "I shot him probably six times. I shot him in the head. He was lying like this. His glasses were still on. He was twitching. I shot him a couple more times just to make sure he was dead."

     After Commonwealth Attorney Michelle Snodgrass rested the prosecution's case, defense attorney Wil Zevely put Dr. Saeed Tortani, a toxicologist, on the stand. Dr. Tortani testified that at the time of his death Ryan Poston was taking Xanax and Adderall, drugs linked to aggression and paranoia.

     On cross-examination the prosecutor brought out the fact the victim had been taking this medicine under a doctor's care. The commonwealth attorney also got Dr. Tortani to reveal he was being paid $380 an hour by the defense.

     Shayna Hubers took the stand on her own behalf. By presenting herself as the victim of her boyfriend's verbal and physical abuse, she laid out a scenario consistent with self defense. Her witness box story, however, did not conform to her recorded statement to the police or her 911 call.

     On Friday April 24, 2015 the jury, after deliberating five hours, found the defendant guilty of first-degree murder. The jurors recommended that Judge Stine sentence Hubers to 40 years in prison.

     Four days after the guilty verdict the convicted woman's attorney filed a claim for his client's early parole on grounds she had been the victim of domestic violence. Under the Kentucky statute that created this sentencing exception, Hubers' attorney would have to prove that at the time of the abuse she and the victim had been living together. If Judge Stine ruled in favor of Hubers on this sentencing issue she could be released from prison in five years.

     On August 14, 2015 Judge Stine sentenced Hubers to the recommended 40 years in prison. Pursuant to his ruling she had to serve at least 85 percent of the sentence. That meant she won't be eligible for parole for 34 years. At the sentencing hearing a prosecution psychologist described Hubers as a narcissist.

     On August 26, 2016 Campbell County Circuit Judge Fred Stine announced his decision to overturn Shayna Hubers' murder conviction. The judge based this ruling on the fact that juror Dave Craig, before his jury service, had been convicted of a felony. Under Kentucky law felons are prohibited from jury service. The local prosecutor said she would re-charge Hubers and bring her to trial for a second time.

     In June 2018, while awaiting her second trial in the Campbell County Detention Center, Hubers married a fellow inmate named Richard McBee, a 41-year-old charged with robbery. Huber's second trial had been set for September 2017 and then January 2018 and then postponed again. 

     In August 2018, while being tried the second time for murder, Shayna Hubers married a transgender woman named Unique Taylor. Later that month, the second jury found Hubers guilty of first-degree murder. The judge, following the jury's recommendation sentenced her to life in prison. 

     In January 2019 Hubers and Taylor divorced.  

The Colleen Harris Murder Case

     In 1985, 47-year-old James Batten kicked his wife Colleen out of the house. The estranged couple lived in Placerville, California, a town of 10,000 in the Sacramento metropolitan region. On the night of July 31, 1985, Colleen Batten called the El Dorado County Sheriff's office from her husband's residence and said, "I shot my husband. I think, I don't know, I don't remember. I don't know if I even shot him."

     Police officers found James Batten, Colleen's second husband, lying dead in his bed from two close-range shotgun blasts. The newly minted 43-year-old widow told the officers she shot her husband in self-defense. She claimed he threatened to kill her and rape her daughter from her first marriage.

     Charged with first-degree murder, Colleen Batten went on trial in February 1986. A psychiatrist took the stand for the defense and testified that Colleen didn't remember much about the shooting because she suffered from a condition he called, "limited amnesia."

     At the conclusion of the three-week trial the jury, after deliberating almost two days, returned a verdict of not guilty. One of the jurors, in speaking to a reporter after the trial, said, "The net result was that we felt there was insufficient proof of intent to commit first-degree murder." (The prosecutor made the mistake of not providing this jury the option of finding the defendant guilty of a lesser homicide offense. Faced with sending Colleen away for life or letting her walk, the jurors set her free.)

     Colleen married again, but in 2005 she and her third husband, 66-year-old Robert Harris filed for divorce. The couple remained married, however. Although he resided in a cabin on South Lake Tahoe, Mr. Harris, in late 2012, returned to the Placerville house to care for his estranged wife as she recovered from hip surgery.
   
     On January 6, 2013, Colleen was once again on the phone with the police. For the second time in 27 years she was informing officers she used a shotgun to blow away a spouse. (It was a different shotgun.)

     The police arrived at the Harris residence that night to find the newly widowed 70-year-old in the kitchen washing dishes. In the bedroom the police found Mr. Harris in bed with an upper torso shotgun wound.

    Police officers booked Coleen Harris into the El Dorado County Jail on the charge of first-degree murder.

     The second Coleen Harris murder trial got underway on March 18, 2015 in the El Dorado County Courthouse. In his opening statement to the jury, Deputy District Attorney Joe Alexander said the defendant had murdered her estranged husband in a fit of jealousy. On January 5, 2013, the day before the shooting, the defendant caught Mr. Harris standing outside the house on his cellphone with his overseas lover. This, plus the fact Mr. Harris had revealed his plan to move back to his cabin, had pushed the defendant over the edge.

     Defense attorney David Weiner, the lawyer who successfully represented Coleen Harris at her previous murder trial, did not make an opening statement to the jury.

      Pam Stirling, the murdered man's daughter, took the stand for the prosecution. According to this witness, on the day before her father was shotgunned to death, the defendant sent her a text message that read: "Between you and me, as I sit here wondering who I am married to, your dad just called his Mongolia lover."

     The victim's daughter, in referring to the defendant, said, "Her emotions were going up and down. I was concerned that we would end up where we are today." The witness said her father, as a precaution, had installed new locks on his South Lake Tahoe cabin.

      Pam Stirling was followed to the stand by police officers and detectives involved in the case.

     On March 25, 2015, defense attorney Weiner said his client, on the day of the shooting, had been in a "gray fog."

     Defense attorney Weiner, on April 2, 2015, following the closing of the prosecution's case, put Colleen Harris on the stand. The defendant said that after she and her husband argued over his paramour in Mongolia, she went into their darkened bedroom to console him and to make up. When she reached out to rub his neck, she felt the barrel of a shotgun. "I said, 'Bob, what are you doing? Why do you have this gun with you?' I thought he was going to kill himself."

     The murder defendant testified that in response to her efforts to make up with her husband he cursed and pushed her away. She said she felt a blow to her chest and thought it was the butt of the shotgun. She ran out of the room.

     According to the murder suspect, when she returned to the bedroom that night she reached over to her husband on the bed and asked, "Bob, are you okay?" She said she saw blood on his pillow and thought he was having a nose bleed. "I turned on the light and oh God, I saw the most horrible thing I have ever seen in my life. I said, "No, please! This can't be!' "

     In his cross-examination of the defendant prosecutor Joe Alexander said, "The truth is, Mrs. Harris, you were holding the gun when Bob Harris was killed."

     "I guess I was," she answered. The witness, however, vehemently denied pulling the trigger.

     Prosecutor Alexander, on April 14, 2015 in his closing statement to the jury, said the defendant "entered the room with a shotgun. She aimed it as Bob lay sleeping. She put a finger on the trigger--and pulled that trigger."

     On April 15, 2015, after deliberating less than two hours the jury returned a verdict of first-degree murder. The defendant put her hands over her face and cried. The judge sentenced her to life in prison.

     In speaking to reporters outside the courthouse, Colleen Harris' attorney said, "She took it hard, hard, hard. She is distraught." 

Father Gerald Robinson: Devil Priest or Innocent Man?

     In 1980, 72-year-old Sister Margaret Ann Pahl worked at Mercy Hospital in Toledo, Ohio as the caretaker of the chapel. A strict taskmaster who didn't suffer fools, Sister Margaret worked closely with 42-year-old Father Gerald Robinson, one of the hospital's chaplains. Father Robinson was a popular priest in the heavily Catholic city of 300,000.

     On April 5, 1980, on Holy Saturday, someone found Sister Margaret's bloody body on the chapel floor. She had been choked to near death, then stabbed 31 times in the chest, neck and face. Some of the stab wounds in her chest formed the pattern of an upside down cross. The killer had also anointed her forehead with a smudge of her own blood. With her habit pulled up to her chest, and her undergarments pulled down around her ankles, the victim had been posed in a position of humiliation. While not raped, the killer had penetrated her with a cross.

     Although detectives on the case immediately suspected Father Robinson of this ritualistic murder, the priest presided over Sister Margaret's funeral Mass four days after her homicide. The principal piece of crime scene evidence detectives believed pointed to his guilt involved a blood stain on the altar cloth consistent with the form of a sword-shaped letter opener in Father Robinson's apartment. The stain bore the vague print of the letter opener's dime-sized medallion bearing the image of the U.S. capitol. However, because the chief detective on the case was a Catholic, and didn't want to scandalize the church, Father Robinson was not arrested. The investigation floundered, and without a suspect, died on the vine.

     In December 2003, a Lucas County cold-case investigative team re-opened the 1980 murder. Father Robinson, over the past 23 years had served in three Toledo Diocese parishes. The 65-year-old priest, in 2003, was administering to the sick and dying in several area Catholic homes and hospitals. The case came back to life after a woman wrote a letter to the police claiming that Father Robinson sexually abused her as a child, a molestation that involved Satanic ritualistic behavior that involved human sacrifice. (I don't know if this complainant passed a polygraph test, or made the accusation after some psychologist coaxed the memory out of her. After the Satanic hysteria in the McMartin preschool debacle, and the horrible injustice in the Memphis three case, this kind of allegation was suspicious. Human sacrifice?)

     Following the exhumation of Sister Margaret's body a forensic pathologist noted that a stab wound in the victim's jaw could have been made by the letter opener found in Father Robinson's apartment. A DNA analysis of the victim's fingernail scrapings and underwear excluded the priest. Nevertheless, in April 2006 the police went to Father Robinson's home and arrested him. From the Lucas County Jail where he was held without bail, the priest denied killing Sister Margaret.

     While there was barely enough evidence to legally justify Father Robinson's arrest--no motive, no confession, no eyewitness and no physical evidence directly linking him to the corpse--the priest went on trial for murder on April 24, 2006. The prosecutor showed the jury a videotape of the defendant's 2004 police interrogation. Father Robinson told his questioners that he had been stunned when one of the other hospital chaplains accused him of murdering Sister Margaret. When left alone for a few minutes in the interrogation room, the priest folded his hands and began to whisper the word "sister," then bowed his head in prayer. At one point he said, "Oh my Jesus." (I don't know how the prosecution interpreted this as incriminating evidence.)

     A prosecution forensic scientist testified that the letter opener "could not be ruled out" as the murder weapon. (The prosecutor, in his closing remarks, told the jury that the letter opener fit one of the victim's stab wounds "like a key in a lock." Instruments used in stabbings cannot be scientifically linked to their wounds this way. That statement alone should have been adequate grounds for a reversal on appeal.) The forensic scientist also testified that the altar cloth bloodstains were "consistent with" the general shape of the letter opener. On cross-examination this witness conceded that a pair of missing scissors could have left the blood stain on the altar cloth.

     On May 11, 2006, the jury, after 9 days of testimony and 6 hours of deliberation found Father Robinson guilty. The 70-year-old priest became the second priest in U.S. history to be convicted of criminal homicide. (The first was a priest named Hans Schmidt.) The judge sentenced Robinson to 15 years to life. Incarcerated at the Hocking Correctional Facility in southern Ohio, the priest was first eligible for parole in 2016.

     Two months after the murder trial, Ohio's 6th District Court of Appeals upheld the conviction. In December 2008 the Ohio Supreme Court declined to hear the case. About a year later the U.S. Supreme Court refused to entertain the appeal as well.

     While it seemed that Gerald Robinson had run out of legal remedies, his legal team in 2010 petitioned the state appeals court for post-conviction relief on the grounds that Sister Margaret may have been murdered by a 27-year-old confessed serial killer named Coral Eugene Watts. Watts had stabbed 12 women to death in Texas, and at least one woman in Michigan. Police suspected him of killing another 80 victims. Watts left many of the women with their blouses pulled up to their necks. He did not sexually molest any of his victims. They had all been posed in humiliating positions.

     On April 11, 2011, the Ohio appeals court denied the Robinson petition. According to the appellate judges, Father Robinson's attorneys, at the time of his 2006 trial knew of Watts as a possible suspect in Sister Margaret's murder, but chose not to pursue this as a defense strategy. Moreover, there were dissimilarities between the serial killer's modus operandi and Sister Margaret's homicide. For one thing, Coral Eugene Watts typically stalked young women before he killed them outdoors.

     A year later the Robinson defense team again petitioned the state court of appeals to toss out the 2006 murder conviction. This time the priest's lawyers accused the prosecution of withholding key documents in the case. Regarding the issue of serial killer Watts, Robinson's trial attorneys didn't pursue that line of defense in 2006 because they mistakingly thought he was serving time when Sister Margaret was murdered. As it turned out, on April 5, 1980, Watts was living in southern Michigan, just 40 miles from Toledo. As for modus operandi, the priest's attorneys found Watts' killings and the death of the nun "eerily similar." (Coral Eugene Watts died in 2007 of prostate cancer. He was 53 and serving time in a Michigan prison.) 

     In June 2014, United States District Court Judge James Guin denied a request for the release of Father Robinson. The priest had been ill and, according to reports, didn't have long to live. The judge said he didn't have the jurisdictional authority to grant the motion.

     Father Robinson had a heart attack on Memorial Day 2014 and died on July 4. He passed away in the prison hospital after being told he had 30 to 60 days to live. He was 76.

Pedophile Martin A. Petersime

     In 1992, 39-year-old Martin Alan Petersime, the owner of a successful music store in the northeastern Ohio town of Warren, was a prominent member of the local arts and music community. He had been president of the Warren Symphony Society and a member in good standing of the Fine Arts Council of Trumbull County. Over the years he gave lessons to hundreds of children at his store, Warren Music Center. Many of his students were pre-teen boys.

     Martin Alan Petersime, a married man, prominent citizen and pillar of the community was a serial sexual predator who had been victimizing boys who came unsuspecting to his place of business for music lessons. He committed most of his assaults in the basement of the Warren Music Center and had gotten away with it for years. Then, in April 1992 he was exposed and his life as a serial sex offender came to an end.

     On April 28, 1992, a partially clad 15-year-old boy ran from the basement of the Warren Music Center directly to the Warren Police Department. The distraught kid brought with him a videotape that showed him dancing nude to Van Halen's "Running With The Devil." Martin Petersime was also in the video stripping off his clothes to the music.

     Warren police officers used the videotape to acquire a search warrant for Petersime's music store which led to enough evidence to support a 20-count indictment charging the music teacher with the sexual abuse of seven boys. According to the indictment two of the victims,  an 11 and 12-year-old, had been raped.

     In December 1992, following Martin Petersime's guilty plea to the above charges, the Trumbull County judge sentenced him to ten to 25 years for the two rapes, and two to 15 years for the sexual crimes against the other boys. The sentences were to run one after the other. That meant if Mr. Petersime served out his full term he would not get out of prison until 2032 when he was 78.

     In 2009, while serving his time at the Ohio North Central Correctional Institute, Petersime filed his first motion for early release. The parole board denied his request.

     Two years later, while taking advantage of a prison outreach program that involved taking an online college course at Ashland University, prison authorities discovered child pornography on Petersime's computer.

     The incarcerated pedophile, in 2014, tried again for parole and was again denied being released before serving his full term.

     In August 2019, Martin Petersime, for the third time, filed a motion for parole in anticipation of the board's meeting the following month. The district attorney of Trumbull County who had handled Petersime's case wrote a letter to the Ohio Parole Board recommending that the convicted pedophile remain behind bars.

     In the letter to the parole board prosecutor Dennis Watkins wrote that Petersime "is wired differently and does not learn from his past mistakes." (Mistakes?) Watkins added that Petersime "has no shame." Watkins also pointed out that prison records revealed that Petersime had yet to complete the prison's comprehensive sex program.

     On a Youngstown television program, Prosecutor Watkins called Martin Petersime "a pervert's pervert."

     The parole board, in September 2019, denied Petersime's quest for early release. In April 2024 he was again denied parole and would not be able to apply until May 2027.

Dr. Louise Robbins: The Shoe Print Expert From Hell

     Comparing a crime scene shoe print on a hard surface or an impression in dirt, mud or snow to the bottom of a specific shoe is not unlike the process of latent fingerprint identification. In many crime laboratories latent fingerprint examiners also handle footwear and tire-track evidence and occasionally deal with the identification of tool marks. Compared to DNA analysis, toxicology and various aspects of forensic pathology, the identification of shoe marks, latent fingerprints, crime scene bullets, tool marks and handwriting involves less science than it does informed observation.

     A crime scene shoe print or impression can be identified as part of a footwear group according to size, brand and model. In some cases an impression can be identified as coming from one shoe to the exclusion of all other footwear. Every year 1.5 billion pairs of shoes are sold in the United States. At any given time there could be as many as 100,000 pairs of size 10 Nike sneakers of a certain model and tread design. There could be, say, 5,000 pairs of these shoes in circulation in the Chicago area alone. The criminalistic or incriminating value of a group identification depends upon the size of the group. These group, or class identifications occur when the crime scene print or impression is not detailed enough for a match to a specific shoe or when the shoe that made the mark is not available for comparison.

     The most famous group identification of shoe prints came at O. J. Simpson's double murder trial in 1995 when FBI expert William Bodziak identified several crime scene prints in blood as having been made by a pair of size 12 Bruno Magli Lorenzo shoes, luxury footwear made in Italy. Bodziak's testimony tended to incriminate Simpson in two ways: the identification involved a relatively small footwear group, and Simpson, after denying that he owned Bruno Magli shoes was seen on television wearing a pair. The actual shoes that made the bloody murder scene prints were never located.

     An individual shoe, boot or sandal can be linked to a crime scene print or impression the way a latent fingerprint can be matched to its known counterpart. Instead of comparing ridge configurations the footwear examiner looks at a shoe's sole and heel for unique signs of wear that show up in the print or impression. Every shoe that has been worn for awhile is as unique as a fingerprint. The more wear the more potential for identification.

     Footwear identification, unlike fingerprint matching, does not require a minimum number of similarity points to be admissible in court. The credibility of a shoe identification depends upon the training, experience and objectivity of the examiner as well as the quality, clarity and uniqueness of the characteristics being compared. New methods and techniques are constantly being developed, for example, to lift footwear impressions from dust and even preserve shoe prints made in snow.

     Shoe prints left in dust, blood or soot are photographed (next to a reference ruler) then peeled off the surface the way a latent fingerprint is lifted. Footwear impressions are often preserved with plaster-of-paris casts of the depressions. Shoes and their crime scene prints and impressions can be compared side-by-side or through the use of transparent overlays. To connect a suspect to a crime scene through footwear evidence detectives need three things: a good print or impression; the shoe that made it; and a way to link the suspect to the footwear. In the O. J. Simpson case the detectives had shoe prints in blood but none of the footwear in Simpson's possession matched the murder scene evidence. The prosecution had to settle for a group identification.

Dr. Louise Robbins and her "Cinderella Analysis"

     Fortunately for O. J. Simpson the world's only footwear identification expert who might have identified the crime scene impressions as having been made by shoes worn by him without having access to the actual footwear died eight years before his trial. Dr. Louise Robbins, an anthropology professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro wasn't interested in matching the bottoms of shoes to corresponding crime scene impressions. She would have claimed she could identify the crime scene prints in the Simpson case by examining other shoes in Simpson's possession. Robbin's method of identification, a process she called "wear pattern analysis," was based on her theory that no two people have the same shaped feet or walk in exactly the same way. According to her this unique feature revealed itself inside the shoes people wear and in the prints or impressions they leave behind.

     Dr. Robbins claimed she could look at a crime scene shoe print and determine it had been made by the wearer of shoes other than the shoe that left the crime scene mark. Her critics, and there were many, called this her "Cinderella Analysis." If a defense attorney had a client in a case in which Dr. Robbins was testifying for the prosecution, that defendant's foot always seemed to end up fitting the shoe that had made the crime scene print or impression. The jury, without access to the actual shoe that had made the crime scene mark simply had to take her word for it. It's not surprising that prosecutors with insufficient footwear evidence and weak cases loved this witness. Defense attorneys, on the other hand, called her the prosecution expert from hell.

     In her work as an anthropologist Dr. Robbins frequently exhibited the ability to see things her colleagues could not. When working in Africa she garnered worldwide publicity after identifying a 3.5 million-year-old fossilized footprint as made by a woman who was five and a half months pregnant. Dr. Timothy White, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley who worked with Dr. Robbins in Africa characterized her conclusions as pure nonsense.

     If Dr. Robbins had confined her ideas to the classroom she would have been harmless and no one would have been greatly bothered by her patently ridiculous theories. But in 1976 when she took her nonsense into the courtroom as a forensic footwear identification expert, people not only started to worry, defendants started going to prison. Between 1976 and 1986 Dr. Robbins testified, for fees up to $9,000 a case, in ten states and Canada. During this period at least 12 defendants were sent to prison on the strength of her expert testimony. Her career as an expert witness came to an end in 1987 when she died of brain cancer at the age of 58.

     In the year of Dr. Robbin's death the American Academy of Forensic Sciences sponsored a panel of 135 anthropologists, forensic scientists, lawyers and legal scholars to review her cases and work. The panel concluded that her identification methodology had no basis in science. Marvin Lewis, a law professor at John Marshall University called her work "complete hogwash." Professor Lewis, who operated an expert witness referral service was dismayed that so many judges had qualified Robbins as an expert witness. Russell Tuttle, a professor of physical anthropology at the University of Chicago, in referring to Dr. Robbins, said, "Why do we allow this kind of rot, this pseudoscience, into our courts?" FBI expert William Bodziak, who testified against Dr. Robbins in several murder trials, agreed: "Nobody else has ever dreamed of saying the kinds of things she said."

     Dr. Robbins not only wormed her way into courtrooms and the hearts of desperate prosecutors, she impressed juries. She had a Ph.D, taught at a major university and had been written up in Time Magazine. In 1985 she published a book, Footprints: Collection, Analysis, and Interpretation. As a self-validating expert who used scientific terminology to advance an absurd theory, she came off as extremely confident and sure of her conclusions. Moreover, some prosecutors portrayed her as a pioneer in a new field of scientific identification. One prosecutor in defending Dr. Robbins against her critics reminded the jury that it had taken 400 years for Galileo's theories to gain acceptance in the scientific community. 

Gary Irving: The Bail Jumping Rapist

     In 1978 a jury in Norfolk County, Massachusetts found 18-year-old Gary Irving guilty of three counts of rape with force, unnatural acts and kidnapping. He knocked one of his victims off her bike, dragged her to a secluded area and viciously raped her. He threatened a second rape victim with a knife. The convicted rapist faced up to life in prison.

     Immediately following Gary Irving's guilty verdict and prior to his sentencing, the rapist's attorney asked Judge Robert Prince to extend his client's bail a couple of days so Irving could make final arrangements before being packed off to prison.

     The prosecutor in the case, Louis Sabadini, pointed out that if Gary Irving was not sent straight to prison he would flee. Extending bail to a convicted rapist who was facing at least 35 years in prison was simply out of the question. This young man was a violent sexual predator.

     Judge Prince shocked the prosecutor and the rape victims' families by granting Irving the weekend to settle his affairs before his incarceration. Irving took this opportunity to flee the state. Except perhaps for Judge Prince, Gary Irving's bail jump surprised no one.

     The convicted rapist would remain at large for 35 years.

     In trying to find this fugitive the police received plenty of help from reality television. The Irving bail jumping case was featured on "America's Most Wanted," "Unsolved Mysteries" and "Real Stories of the Highway Patrol." It seemed that Gary Irving had somehow left the planet.

     On Wednesday, March 27, 2013, local police and FBI agents arrested Mr. Irving at his home in Gorham, Maine where the 52-year-old had been living under the name Gregg Irving. He hadn't even bothered to change his last name.

     On July 14, 2014, Judge George Singal sentenced Gary Irving to 47 years in prison. The 57-year-old wouldn't be eligible for parole until he was 84.

     What can you say about a judge who made such a reckless decision? What was he thinking? Could he have been that stupid or were his motives more complicated and perhaps pathological? One can only hope that Mr. Irving, during his 35 years of freedom didn't rape more victims. If he did, Judge Prince was his accomplice. (The judge has since died.)

Kansas v. Hendricks: Institutionalizing Sexual Predators

     While no one knows exactly how many pedophiles roam our streets and inhabit our institutions, anyone who is paying attention knows there are too many. Not only that, each pedophile is a serial offender with dozens of victims. They are serial offenders because pedophiles cannot be rehabilitated. For them there is no cure, no treatment.

     So what can be done to protect potential victims against these sexual predators? Just catching them and sending them to prison isn't enough because they eventually get out and go right back to seducing and sexually violating children. Laws requiring convicted pedophiles to register as sex offenders and restricting where they can live doesn't deal with the problem either. These measures are legislative window dressing to make us think our political leaders are dealing with the problem.

     In 1994 lawmakers in Kansas concerned about children passed a controversial law called the Sexually Violent Predator Act that allowed the state, following a pedophile's release from prison, to involuntarily commit violent sex offenders to mental institutions through a process known as civil commitment.

     The procedure for committing pedophiles and other violent sex offenders under the Kansas law required notifying the local prosecutor handling the case 60 days before the prisoner's release. The prosecutor, upon such notice, had 45 days to file a petition with a state court requesting the involuntary commitment of the offender. Under this law the prosecutor had the burden of proving that the person in question suffered from a "mental abnormality" that made him or her a "sexually violent predator." If a psychological professional found sufficient evidence to support civil commitment on these grounds, a trial would follow.

     If the defendant was found, beyond a reasonable doubt, to be a sexually violent predator, the trial judge would order his commitment to a mental institution. Following the commitment the law required the court to conduct annual reviews to determine if the committed person should remain in custody for another year.

Kansas v. Hendricks, 521 U.S. 347, (1997)

     In 1995, convicted pedophiles Leroy Hendricks and Tim Quinn were scheduled for prison release. Both men had extensive histories of sexually molesting children. As a result a Kansas prosecutor filed a petition under the Sexually Violent Predator Act to involuntarily commit Hendricks and Quinn to a state mental institution.

     At the Hendricks/Quinn commitment trial the defendants took the stand and agreed with the state psychiatrist's diagnosis that they were pedophiles who continued to experience uncontrollable sexual desires for children. Based on this testimony the jury found that Hendricks and Quinn qualified as sexually violent predators. The civil trial judge ordered both men committed to the state mental facility.

     Leroy Hendrick's attorneys asserted that the involuntary commitment of a man who had served his time in prison violated the ex post facto and double jeopardy clauses of the United States constitution. The circuit court judges ruling on the appeal did not address those specific issues but found the Kansas law unconstitutional on grounds the "mental abnormality" requirement was too vague to satisfy the constitution's due process clause.

     Attorneys representing the state of Kansas appealed the circuit court's ruling to the United States Supreme Court. In a 5-4 decision, the high court justices reversed the appellate court ruling, finding that the Kansas Violent Sexual Predator Act did not violate the U.S. constitution's ex post facto, double jeopardy or due process clauses.

     Because only a few states have violent sexual predator laws, and prosecutors in states that do don't have the time or will to go through the civil commitment process, only a few prison released pedophiles remain isolated from society. Moreover, even if there were more laws like this and prosecutors who cared enough to go through the process, there are fewer and fewer institutions where these predators can be confined. As a result, Kansas v. Hendricks was a hollow victory that has not solved the problem of what to do about our pedophiles. Children are still at risk.

     If our political leaders where serious about protecting children, convicted pedophiles would be subjected to mandatory life sentences.

Jose Manuel Martinez: Cartel Hit Man

     Most contract killers are inexpensive amateurs who get caught after their first murder. Their more professional counterparts, career criminals, mostly carry out their murder assignments for organized crime bosses. These hit men are harder to catch because they operate in the shadows of the underworld. But every so often a cold-blooded killer like 51-year-old Jose Manuel Martinez emerges from the shadows.

     In late 2013 authorities on the Mexican-Arizona border arrested Martinez as he tried to cross into the U.S. A warrant for his arrest had been issued out of Lawrence County, Alabama where he was charged with murdering a man execution style in 2013. According to the authorities in Alabama, Manuel Martinez shot the victim because of a disparaging remark he made about Martinez's sister.

     Authorities in Florida also wanted Martinez in connection with a pair of murders in 2006. In California, where Martinez spent brief periods in state prison for drug and theft convictions, the police considered him a suspect in a series of home-invasion robberies. These crimes took place in late 2012 and early 2013.

     Martinez lived on and off in Richgrove, California, a small farming community in Tulare County in the central part of the state about 40 miles north of Bakersfield.

     While incarcerated in the Lawrence County Jail in Alabama where he awaited his June 2014 murder trial, Martinez told detectives that over the past 35 years he operated as a hit man for a Mexican drug cartel. According to Martinez he murdered forty men since 1980.

     On April 8, 2014 prosecutors in two central California counties--Tulare and Kern--charged Martinez with eleven contract killings committed between 1980 and 2011. Nine of the murders took place in Tulare County and two in Kern County. A prosecutor in Santa Barbara County in southern California charged Martinez with the ninth California murder. 

     Manuel Martinez confessed to the following contract killings:

     On October 21, 1980 Martinez shot 23-year-old David Bedolla to death near Lindsay, California. Bedolla was driving to work with his wife, brother and brother-in-law in his car.

     Martinez, on October 1, 1982 shot two ranch workers near Santa Ynez, California. Thirty-year-old Sylvester Ayon died in the shooting. The other ranch hand, a 17-year-old, survived his bullet wounds.

     On October 19, 1982, 22-year-old Raul Gonzales disappeared from his home in the Tulare County town of Earlimart. A rancher in nearby Portersville found Gonzales' body in a field two days after Martinez had shot him to death.

     Another resident of Earlimart, 29-year-old Domingo Perez, went missing from his home on April 8, 1995. Six weeks later a farm worker stumbled upon his bullet-ridden body in an orange grove north of Martinez's home town of Richgrove.

     On the night of February 14, 2000, Manuel Martinez entered the Pixley, California home of 56-year-old Santiago Perez and shot him to death as he slept in his bed. The victim's four young children were in the house when Martinez murdered him.

     Jose Alvarado, a 25-year-old from Kern County, was found shot to death on a dirt road outside of McFarland, California. Martinez executed him by shooting him point blank in the head. This murder took place on February 15, 2007.

     Also in Kern County, Martinez, on March 23, 2009, shot 52-year-old Juan Baustista to death. Martinez committed this murder in an orange grove near McFarland, California.

     On September 27, 2009, in Earlimart, Martinez abducted 45-year-old Joaquin Baragan. Three days later a rancher found the victim's body on the bank of the Deer Creek Canal outside of town. Baragan had been shot in the back of the head.

     Gonzalo Urquieta, another Earlimart resident, was kidnapped by Martinez on February 15, 2011. Two days later, the 54-year-old's body was found in an orange grove near Richgrove. He had been shot numerous times at close range.

     In June 2014 Manuel Martinez pleaded guilty to the 2013 murder in Alabama. The Lawrence County judge sentenced him to 50 years in prison.

     In October 2015 Martinez pleaded guilty in California to the nine Tulare County murders. He also pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of another man in that jurisdiction. On November 3, 2015 the Tulare County judge sentenced this serial killer to ten consecutive life sentences.

The Girl the State of Georgia Failed to Protect

     In 2004 prosecutors in Gwinnett County Georgia charged Emani Moss with assaulting his girlfriend. The couple had a one-year old girl who was named Emani after her father. Because Mr. Moss attacked his girlfriend in front of their daughter the prosecutor also charged him with second-degree child cruelty. In return for his guilty plea the judge sentenced Mr. Moss to probation.

     Six years after the domestic assault, Emani Moss and his daughter resided in Lawrenceville, an unincorporated suburb of Atlanta. Mr. Moss's new girlfriend, Tiffany Nicole Brown lived in the apartment with them. In March 2010 the six-year-old girl told a teacher at Cooper Elementary School that she was afraid to go home with her bad report card.

     Emani's fear of being punished at home prompted an inquiry by the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services. After finding evidence of abuse the child protection agency turned the case over to the Gwinnett County Police Department.

     Gwinnett County investigators determined that Tiffany Brown had repeatedly beaten the girl with a belt. On Emani's body doctors found scars, abrasions, scabs and bruises on her chest, arms, back and legs. A Gwinnett County prosecutor charged Tiffany Nicole Brown, an elementary school teacher, with first-degree child cruelty. The girl's father was charged with child cruelty as well.

     Pursuant to an agreement with the prosecutor, Tiffany Brown was allowed to plead guilty to the lesser charge of second-degree child cruelty in return for probation. Because the couple promised to take parenting classes the charges against Mr. Moss were dropped. (The child services agency signed-off on the plea bargain.) Everybody came out ahead in the deal except the child who remained exposed to abuse. 

     In July 2012 Gwinnett County detectives opened another child abuse case involving Mr. Moss and Tiffany whom he had since married. When investigators were unable to find sufficient evidence to back up the girl's claim that she had been beaten and denied food as punishment, the police closed the case. Shortly after being abandoned again by the government the nine-year-old ran away from home. After finding her the authorities not only returned the child to her private hell, they charged her as a runaway juvenile.

     At four in the morning on Saturday November 1, 2013 Mr. Moss called 911 from the Coventry Pointe apartment complex in Lawrenceville. He told the 911 dispatcher that his daughter had consumed some kind of poison and died. He said he was thinking of committing suicide.

     Gwinnett County police officers encountered Mr. Moss standing in the breezeway outside the apartment complex. The 30-year-old led the officers to a trash can in the recreation area. Inside the garbage bin officers discovered the badly burned body of a girl. The girl in the trash was ten-year-old Emani Moss.

     The county medical examiner's office ruled the girl's death a homicide. According to the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy, she died of starvation. Her body had been burned postmortem. The medical examiner did not believe she had been poisoned.  (A toxicology report would later confirm the lack of poison in the girl's system.) According to the pathologist the dead girl endured periods of up to twelve days without food. She had been dead about three days.

     Emani and Tiffany Moss, charged with first-degree murder, cruelty to children and concealing a body, were booked into the Gwinnett County Detention Center. The magistrate denied them bail.

     On June 8, 2015 Emani Moss pleaded guilty to the charge of felony-murder. As part of the plea bargain deal he agreed to testify against his wife Tiffany. Detectives believed that Tiffany had been the driving force behind the murder. Mr. Moss, according to investigators, played a passive role in his daughter's torture and death. He failed to protect her. In return for his plea Emani Moss was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. If found guilty Tiffany Moss faced the death penalty.

     In November 2017 Tiffany Moss fired her two state appointed attorneys after they recommended that she plead guilty in return for a life sentence. She asked the court to allow her to represent herself.

     In May 2022, after representing herself at the murder trial, the Gwinnett County Jury found Tiffany Moss guilty as charged. Her sentence: death by lethal injection.