A Raped Woman's Revenge

     Nevin Yildirim lived with her husband and two children, ages two and six, in a village in southwestern Turkey. In January 2012, her husband left home to work at a seasonal job in another town. Shortly after Mr. Yildirim began working at the other place, a 35-year-old member of the village named Nurettin came to Nevin's house and raped her. This married father of two threatened to shoot Nevin's children if she reported the crime.

     By August 2012, after months of being raped on a regular basis by Mr. Nurettin, Nevin Yildirim was five months pregnant with his child. When she visited a clinic regarding an abortion, a health care worker informed her that her pregnancy was too far along for that option. In Turkey abortions were illegal after the first ten weeks of pregnancy.

     On August 28, 2012, when Mr. Nurettin came to Nevin's house to rape her again, she pulled her father-in-law's rifle off a wall rack and shot him. As the wounded Nurettin reached for his handgun to return fire, Nevin shot him again. Hit with the second slug he tired to run but stumbled and fell. As he lay on the ground cursing her she fired a third bullet, this one into his genitals. The rapist went silent and a few seconds later died where he lay in a pool of his own blood.

     The woman who killed the man who for months had raped her laid down her rifle and picked up a kitchen knife that she used to decapitate him. She picked up the detached head by the hair and carried it to the village square. To a group of men sitting around a coffee house, Nevin, still gripping her rapist's head as it continued to drip blood from the base of the severed neck, said, "Here is the head of the man who played with my honor."

     As the coffee house drinkers looked on in horror, Nevin Yildirim tossed her blood trophy. The severed head rolled along the ground and came to rest in the public square. A short time later a local police officer took the blood-splattered woman into custody.

     A few days after the killing, in speaking to her court-appointed lawyer who came to the local jail, Nevin reportedly said, "I thought of reporting [Nurettin] to the military police and to the district attorney, but this was going to make me a scorned woman. Since I was going to get a bad reputation, I decided to clean my honor, and acted on killing him. I thought of suicide a lot, but couldn't do it. Now no one can call my children bastards....Everyone will call them the children of the woman who cleaned her honor."

     On August 30, 2012 at the preliminary hearing on the charge of murder, Nevin Yildirim told the magistrate she didn't want to keep her rapist's baby and that she wished to die. The public prosecutor advised the court that he ordered psychiatric evaluations of the defendant.

    Nevin Yildirim gave birth to her rapist's child on November 17, 2012.

     On March 25, 2013, the district judge found Yildirim guilty of murder. Before he handed down the sentence the judge ordered police officers to remove feminist protesters from the courtroom.

     After clearing the courtroom of protesters the Turkish judge imposed the maximum punishment of life in prison. Among women in Turkey and others around the world the verdict and sentence created an uproar. Had Nevin Yildirim committed the exact crime in the United States she would have been charged with second or third-degree murder. Her attorney would have had the option of putting on either an insanity or battered woman defense. If found guilty her punishment would not have been anything close to life behind bars. In the U.S. a case like this would likely be resolved through the plea bargaining process that would lead to much lighter sentence.

The Yoselyn Ortega Murder Case

      Kevin Krim grew up in Thousand Oaks, California where he was a high school football star. The Harvard graduate met his future wife Marina at an Italian restaurant in Venice Beach. They were married in 2003. Marina had grown up in Manhattan Beach. Kevin worked in Los Angeles then took a job with Yahoo in San Francisco. The couple moved to New York City in 2009.

     In October 2012 the Krims, with three children--Lucia, age 6, Nessie, 3, and 2-year-old Leo, lived on Manhattan's upper west side in a second-floor, 3-bedroom apartment in the LaRochelle Building on West 75th Street. The $10,000 a month apartment was a block from Central Park and not far from the Museum of Natural History and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Marina, a stay-at-home mother, kept a daily online journal of her children's daily lives.

     In October 2010, the Krims hired 48-year-old Yoselyn Ortega, a nanny who was referred to them by Ortega's older sister Celia who, as a nanny herself, met Marina and Lucia at a ballet lesson. A naturalized U.S. citizen from the Dominican Republic, Yoselyn lived in Manhattan's Hamilton Heights neighborhood then moved to an apartment on Riverside Drive in Harlem a few miles from the Krims. She lived with her son, sister and niece.

     The Krims became very close to Ortega (they called her "Yosi") and in February 2012 accompanied her to the Dominican Republic where they visited her family. Whenever the Krims left town for an extended period with their children they bought Ortega a flight back to her native country. According to the nanny's relatives she had been seeing a psychologist and had financial problems. For extra money she had been selling cheap cosmetics and jewelry to residents of her tenement building.

     On Thursday afternoon on October 25, 2012, Marina Krim took 3-year-old Nessie to a swimming lesson. She left Leo and Lucia in the apartment with the nanny. At 5:25 that evening, when Marina and Nessie returned to the apartment they found the place dark. Marina assumed that Yoselyn Ortega had taken the two children out for a walk.

     Marina Krim and her daughter Nessie returned to the lobby, and from the doorman learned that Yoselyn Ortega and the children had not left the building. Marina re-entered the apartment and when she walked into the bathroom saw Leo and Lucia lying in the bathtub covered in blood. The children had been slashed and stabbed to death with the bloody kitchen knife lying on the floor next to the nanny who was bleeding from a wound in her neck. Yoselyn Ortega had also slashed her wrists.

     Several neighbors heard Marina scream, "You slit her throat!" Later the distraught mother was heard saying, "What am I going to do with the rest of my life? I have no children."

     Paramedics rushed the unconscious nanny to the New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Medical Center where she underwent emergency surgery. Marina Krim was taken to St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital for sedation. Kevin Krim, returning from a business trip to San Francisco, was met at the airport with the news of his children's deaths. He was also taken to the hospital where they sedated him.

     On Friday, October 26, 2012 detectives were unable to question Ortega who was on a respirator. According to the doctors, the nanny was expected to survive her wounds. Investigators believed Ortega murdered the children, then stabbed herself in the neck about the time the victims' mother entered the apartment.

     Yoselyn Ortega was the youngest of six siblings who grew up in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic. Her sister Celia emigrated to the United States in the early 1980s after graduating from accounting studies at Santa Ana College in Santiago. Yoselyn later joined her older sister in America. She worked as the manager of a print shop in Manhattan, then after separating from the father of her son, returned to the Dominican Republic. After awhile, she returned to New York City. According to family members she loved the Krim children. Before the murders she had been acting strangely from some kind of emotional stress.

     Prior to her hospital bed arraignment on November 28, 2012, Yoselyn Ortega's attorney asked the judge to bar the press from the hearing on the grounds his client was too "pathetic" to be seen. Judge Lewis Stone denied the request.

     In a June 2013 Rikers Island jail interview of Ortega by a reporter with the New York Daily News, the murder suspect denied killing the children. "I didn't do that," she said. "Those are all lies." The brief interview ended abruptly when Ortega said, "My lawyer told me not to talk. I'm not supposed to say anything."  Later that month a Manhattan judge at Ortega's competency hearing ruled that she was mentally fit for trial. Ortega's attorney, Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg, appealed that decision.

     In August 2013, before the same Manhattan judge, prosecution witness Dr. Ankur Saraiya took the stand and testified that while Ortega "had suffered some brain damage when she slit her throat, the injury was not enough to interfere with her fitness." The judge reaffirmed his initial finding that this defendant was mentally competent to stand trial.

     In April 2018, after several delays a jury sitting in New York City rejected Ortega's insanity defense and found her guilty of double murder. The judge sentenced her to life in prison.

The Laurel Schlemmer Murder Case

     Laurel Michelle Ludwig married Mark Schlemmer in July 2005. In May 2006 the couple purchased a house in McCandless, Pennsylvania, a suburban community north of Pittsburgh.

     By September 2009 the couple had two sons. The youngest was 18-months-old. His brother was three. Mark Schlemmer was 39 and working as an insurance actuary. Laurel, a former teacher, stayed at home to raise the boys. On September 5, 2009 a patron at the nearby Ross Park Mall noticed a parked Honda Odyssey with an unaccompanied toddler inside. Although the van's windows were cracked the temperature inside the vehicle had risen to 112 degrees. The passerby called 911.

     When Laurel Schlemmer returned to her van she was met by Ross Township police and EMT personnel who managed to unlock a door and remove the three-year-old boy. Due to the fact the mother was gone from the car twenty minutes the boy did not require medical treatment.

     An Allegheny County prosecutor charged the 36-year-old mother with the summary offense of leaving a child unattended in a vehicle. Laurel Schlemmer pleaded guilty to the crime and paid a fine. No one read anything into this incident other than a mother's lapse of due care.

     By 2013 Laurel Schlemmer and her husband had their third son. On April 16 of that year, Laurel, when backing her van out of her parents' driveway in Marshall, Pennsylvania, ran over her two and five-year-old boys. One of the children suffered internal injuries while his brother ended up with broken bones. Both boys survived.

     An investigator with the Northern Regional Police Department conducted an inquiry into the driveway incident and concluded it had been an accident. Personnel with the Allegheny County Office of Children, Youth, and Families conducted an assessment of the Schlemmer family and found no evidence or history of child abuse.

     The pastor of the North Park Church, Reverend Dan Hendley, counseled Laurel in an effort to help her cope with what everybody assumed had been a nearly tragic mishap. Members of the church were supportive of their fellow parishioner.

     At 8:40 on the morning of Tuesday, April 1, 2014, Laurel Schlemmer put her seven-year-old boy on the school bus and waved him goodbye. She returned to her house and told her three and six-year-old boys to take off their pajamas as she filled the bath tub. The fully dressed mother, once the boys were in the tub, held them under water then climbed into the tub and sat on them.

     Laurel pulled the limp bodies out of the water and laid them out on the bathroom floor. She replaced her wet clothes with dry garments. In an effort to hide the wet pieces of clothing she bagged them up with two soaked towels and placed the container in the garage.

     At 9:40 that morning Laurel called 911 and reported that her two sons had drowned in the bath tub. Emergency personnel rushed the Schlemmer children to the UPMC Passavant Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. An hour later three-year-old Luke Schlemmer died. His six-year-old brother remained in critical condition.

     Questioned by detectives, Laurel said she figured she would become a better mother to her oldest son if his younger siblings weren't around. "Crazy voices" told her the younger ones would be better off in heaven.

     Later that day detectives booked the mother into the Allegheny County Jail in downtown Pittsburgh. Mrs. Schlemmer faced charges of homicide, attempted homicide, aggravated assault and tampering with evidence. The judge denied her bond.

     On April 5, 2014, a spokesperson for the Allegheny County Medical Examiner's Office announced that six-year-old Daniel Schlemmer died. The boy had been on life support at UPMC's Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh.

     At a mental competency hearing on April 7, 2014, Dr. Christine Martone, an Allegheny County psychiatrist, testified that Mrs. Schlemmer was psychotic, suicidal and suffered from depressive disorder. Judge Jeffrey Manning, based upon this testimony, ruled the defendant mentally incompetent to stand trial.

     Judge Manning ordered the defendant committed to the Torrance State Hospital in Derry Township, a mental health facility 45 miles east of Pittsburgh.

     In Pennsylvania, defendants are considered mentally incompetent to stand trial if due to mental illness they are unable to distinguish right from wrong or cannot assist their attorneys in their defense.

     In January 2015, Judge Manning postponed the murder trial indefinitely. He also imposed a gag order that prohibited the prosecutor and defense attorney from discussing the case publicly.

     On May 5, 2016 Allegheny County Judge Jeffrey Manning, after the prosecution and the defense could not agree on a plea arrangement, set the Schlemmer murder trial for June 21, 2016. According to the defendant's attorney, Laurel Schlemmer was pursuing a defense of not guilty by reason of insanity.

     Judge Manning, on June 21, 2016, heard testimony from psychiatrist Dr. Christine Martone who opined that the defendant was still too mentally disturbed to be tried. The judge ordered the defendant to be forcibly medicated until she became mentally competent to stand trial for the murder of her sons.

     On March 16, 2017, following a bench trial (no jury) featuring psychiatric testimony on both sides, Allegheny County Judge Manning found Laurel Schlemmer guilty of two counts of third-degree murder but mentally ill. The prosecution argued for first-degree murder but the judge, due to the defendant's mental condition, found she acted in "diminished capacity." In Pennsylvania, a guilty but mentally ill sentence simply meant the convicted person would be given the appropriate mental health medication in prison instead of a mental institution. In Schlemmer's case she was sentenced to ten to twenty years behind bars.

Emily Creno's Self-Serving Hoax

     On the surface there was nothing exceptional about Emily J. Creno. In 2012, the mother of an 8-year-old girl and a boy who was four, lived in Utica, a central Ohio town not far from Columbus. After the 31-year-old's marriage had gone sour her husband John moved out of the house.

     In December 2012, Emily Creno took her son J. J. to a hospital emergency room in Columbus. She told medical personnel he had suffered a series of seizures. Following blood tests, X-rays and EEG monitoring, the physician informed the mother that her son was in good health.

     Notwithstanding her son's clean bill of health, confirmed by subsequent hospital visits and various screening tests, Emily Creno told friends and family that J. J. had been diagnosed with cancer. She said J. J.  didn't have long to live. The child, thinking that he was terminally ill, basically shut down. When John Creno visited his son the boy couldn't speak or get off the couch. (Emily regularly shaved J. J.'s head to give him the appearance of someone being treated with chemotherapy.) Her estranged husband had no idea his son's illness was a hoax orchestrated by his wife. (The couple later divorced.)

     One of Emily's sympathetic friends created a Facebook page for the purpose of soliciting donations for the distraught mother and her dying son. About twenty people sent the family clothes, toys and money. One Facebook reader drove 500 miles to console Emily and the stricken boy.

     In May 2013, a Columbus woman with a daughter suffering from leukemia visited the Creno Facebook page where she read postings about J. J.'s illness and symptoms that didn't make sense. Thinking that Emily Creno was possibly soliciting money and goods on a false pretense, this woman reported her suspicion to an officer with the Utica Police Department.

     Utica detective Damian Smith, in response to the tipster's call, got in touch with the Columbus oncologist who was supposedly treating the Creno boy. The physician said he did not know Emily or her son. Further investigation, which presumably included Creno's interrogation and perhaps a polygraph test, established the fact that her son's terminal illness was nothing more that a product of her imagination and deception.

     Licking County prosecutor Tracy Van Winkle in September 2013 charged Emily Creno with one count of third-degree child endangerment. Shortly thereafter police officers took the suspect into custody on the felony charge. A local magistrate set her bail at $50,000. The prosecutor told reporters she would present the case to a grand jury which could result in additional charges related to fraud and theft by deception.    

     On May 7, 2014, Emily Creno after pleading no contest to charges of theft and endangering a child, was sentenced to 18 months in prison by Judge Thomas Marcelain. The judge also ordered her to pay back the money donated to her phony cause. At the sentence hearing Judge Marcelain said Creno's ploy had been intended to get her husband back, a scheme that got out of hand.

     In terms of motive this could have been a Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSBP) case. Mothers with this disorder make their children ill to gain sympathy and attention from friends, family and hospital personnel. Quite often the MSBP subject is trying to attract the attention of an indifferent or estranged spouse. Even if Emily Creno didn't poison her son to make him ill, her cancer hoax could be explained in the context of this disorder. In other words, the motive behind this dreadful case may have been pathological rather than theft by deception. It should be noted, however, that Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy does not constitute a recognized legal defense. It is not the same as legal insanity because MSBP mothers are fully aware of what they are doing and that what they are doing is wrong. 

Kenneth Markman: The Fall Of A Drug Dealing Defense Attorney

     Kenneth Markman, after graduating from UCLA and Loyola Law School, began practicing criminal defense law in 1991. Between 2000 and 2010 the State Bar Association of California suspended him twice for not paying his membership dues. It was during this period the attorney went from representing drug addicts and dealers to becoming one.

     On October 21, 2011 Mr. Markman was in the attorney's room on the 11th floor of the Criminal Justice Center in downtown Los Angeles. He had scheduled a meeting with his client, Jorge Zaragoza. Zaragoza, a drug-dealing gang member with a history of violent crime, had been convicted of attempted carjacking. In a few days a judge would be handing down Zaragoza's sentence.

     Detectives with the Los Angeles Sheriff's Office suspected that Mr. Markman was smuggling narcotics to his clients who were incarcerated in the Los Angeles County Jail. As the attorney waited for his opportunity to speak with Zaragoza, a sheriff's deputy accompanied by a drug-sniffing dog entered the room. The dog immediately "alerted" to the presence of drugs on attorney Markman's  person and in his briefcase.

     From the inside pocket of the attorney's suit jacket the deputy removed a package wrapped tightly with electrical tape. The bundle contained twenty-six balloons of heroin and methamphetamine. Markman's briefcase contained a quantity of marijuana and three mini-hypodermic syringes. 

     Charged with seven drug-related felony counts, the attorney was booked into the county Inmate Reception Center. The judge set his bail at $145,000. If convicted of trying to smuggle $30,000 worth of narcotics into the Los Angeles County Jail, Mr. Markman faced up to four years in prison.

     The accused attorney posted his bond and was released from custody. On November 8, 2011 a security officer screening visitors to the Antelope Valley Court House noticed something suspicious as Markman's briefcase passed through the X-ray machine. After the attorney grabbed his wallet out of the tray and tried to flee, a Los Angeles Sheriff's deputy caught up to him before he left the building. In his wallet the officer found two bundles of rock cocaine. The attorney's briefcase contained several pieces of drug paraphernalia.

     After being booked again for trying to smuggle drugs to an incarcerated clien, Kenneth Markman made his $25,000 bail.

     In February 2013, Kenneth Markman pleaded no contest to the October 2011 drug smuggling charges. Pursuant to a plea deal the judge, a month later, sentenced the suspended attorney to a year in the Los Angeles County Jail. That sentence included three years of probation which involved one year of drug treatment.

     The State Bar Association of California, following a hearing in August 2013, disbarred Mr. Markman. 

The Daniel DeJarnette Murder Case

     In 2003, 50-year-old homicide detective Daniel DeJarnette, after 21 years on the force, retired. He and his wife Yu Kue moved to the town of Ka'u on the southern tip of Hawaii's Big Island. During his last ten years on the force Detective DeJarnette was a member of the Van Nuys Division's robbery-homicide unit's rape section. During that period he investigated a series of high-profile homicide cases involving sexual attacks.

     By 2006 the retired detective's marriage had fallen apart. His wife Yu Kue told her co-workers at a grocery store in the town of Kona that she wanted to leave him but he wouldn't let her go. They fought all the time and he was physically abusive.

     On November 12, 2006, officers with the Hawaii County Police responded to the DeJarnette home after Daniel called 911 to report that his wife had fallen off a lava embankment while hanging out laundry to dry. The officers found the 56-year-old wife lying dead twenty feet from the house with two gaping head wounds. The officers arrested DeJarnette on suspicion of homicide.

     According to the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy, Yu Kue DeJarnette died from blunt force trauma to the head. Notwithstanding the presence of paint chips in her hair from the suspected murder weapon--a car jack stand--and scrapes on her body suggesting that she had been dragged over the lava to where the police had found her body, the forensic pathologist ruled her manner of death as "undetermined." As a result of this postmortem finding Daniel DeJarnette was released from custody due to lack of evidence.

     In January 2012, more than five years after Yu Kue's suspicious death, Hawaii County Deputy Prosecutor Linda Walton re-opened the case. Employing modernized forensic science a DNA analyst identified traces of the victims's blood on the jack stand. Another crime lab expert connected the paint chips in the victim's head hair to the murder weapon. Forensic scientists also determined that someone had used a bleaching agent in an effort to clean up Yu Kue's blood in the couple's bathroom and other parts of the DeJarnette house.

     On May 14, 2012 a grand jury indicted Daniel DeJarnette of second-degree murder. Police officers arrested the 59-year-old at his Big Island home. If convicted as charged the former LAPD detective faced a maximum sentence of life in prison. A judge set his bail at $300,000.

     Ten months after his arrest DeJarnette confessed to killing his wife. They had been fighting, she slapped him and he struck her in the head with the jack stand. He dragged her body from the bathroom across the lava field to the embankment where the police found her. Just before he killed Yu Kue Daniel purchased a $300,000 insurance policy on her life.

     On March 26, 2013 Daniel DeJarnette pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter while under extreme emotional stress. Two months later a judge imposed the maximum sentence of twenty years in prison.

Ronnie Lee Gardner: The Last Man To Die By Firing Squad

     On the night of October 9, 1984 in Salt Lake City, 24-year-old Ronnie Lee Gardner was under the influence of cocaine when he held up a bar and killed the bartender, Melvyn Otterstrom, by shooting him point blank in the face. The twice-convicted robber netted $100 from the deadly hold up.

     Three weeks after shooting the bartender to death police officers arrested Mr. Gardner at his cousin's house in Salt Lake City. Officers booked him into jail on the charge of capital murder. The judge set Gardner's bail at $1.5 million.

     On April 2, 1985, as Mr. Gardner was being escorted through the underground garage on his way to an upstairs courtroom, he managed to get his hands on a firearm someone had left hidden in the garage for him. The moment he displayed the gun in the courtroom a guard shot him in the chest. Although wounded, Ronnie Lee Gardner shot a bailiff in the stomach.

     As the armed and wounded Gardner tried to flee the building he encountered two attorneys and shot one of them in the eye. A dozen police officers surrounded the armed prisoner before he could leave the courthouse. When he dropped the gun officers took him into custody. The lawyer he shot died a little later in the hospital. The bailiff survived.

     Ronnie Lee Gardner was rushed to a local hospital where he recovered from his gunshot wound.

     In October 1985, Gardner pleaded guilty to both murders and was sentenced to death.

     Two years later, inmate Gardner broke a glass partition in the prison's visiting area and had sex with a woman who was visiting him. The other prisoners barricaded the doors and cheered Gardner and his partner on.

     In 1994, while still housed at the state prison in Draper, Utah, Gardner got drunk on alcohol he fermented in his cell and stabbed a fellow prisoner named Richard "Fats" Thomas. Thomas survived the attack.

     Gardner's death house attorneys, citing their client's troubled upbringing, petitioned to have his death sentence reduced to life in prison. In 2010 the governor of Utah denied the commutation request. Gardner's lawyers appealed that decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. They lost.

     Out of legal remedies, Ronnie Gardner requested that he be executed by firing squad. He said he sought this method of execution because of his Mormon background. It had been 14 years since anyone in the country had been executed this way.

     On June 18, 2010, the state of Utah, pursuant to Ronnie Gardner's request, executed the 49-year-old by firing squad. He was the last condemned prisoner in the United States to be executed by bullet.

Holland's Boy Hit Man

      In 2012,  Joyce Winsie Hau, a 14-year-old member of the Chinese-Dutch community in Arnhem, Holland, fell out with her best friend, a 15-year-old girl referred to by the Dutch authorities as Polly W. Joyce angered Polly and Polly's boyfriend, 15-year-old Wesley C. when she gossiped about their sexual escapades on Facebook and other social media. This anger set in motion a plot, hatched by Polly and Wesley, to have Joyce Hau murdered.

     Polly and Wesley offered Jinhau K., an acquaintance of Joyce's, 16 pounds (roughly $50), to commit the homicide. The pair of teen masterminds over a period of several weeks in late 2011 met frequently with the boy hit man to plan the murder. During these meetings Polly and her boyfriend provided Jinhau with the homicide target's address and other information including when Joyce would most likely be home. After the murder the masterminds promised to take their hitman out for drinks.

     On January 14, 2012,  Jinhau K. showed up at the Hau  residence, and when invited into the house by Mr Chun Nam Hau, the knife wielding boy stabbed the father and his daughter. The attack took place in the hallway just inside the dwelling's front entrance. Mr. Hau survived the attack but Joyce Hau did not. The murder and attempted homicide was witnessed by Joyce's younger brother who was not harmed.

     Shortly after the home assault and murder,  the police arrested Jinhau K. In his confession the boy named the two teen murder-for-hire masterminds. Soon after that the police arrested Polly W. and Wesley C.

     In August 2012, Jinhau K. went on trial as a juvenile before a district court judge in Arnhem. Following testimony from Chun Nam Hau and Joyce Hau's younger brother,  the judge heard from the defendant who testified that he committed the assault and murder out of fear that if he refused to carry out the plot, Polly W. and Wesley C. would have killed him.

     The judge, in ruling that the defendant had plenty of opportunity to pull out of the murder conspiracy, said, "In their reports the psychologist and psychiatrist state that the pressure the defendant says he felt was never so high that he was unable to resist it. There were several moments where the defendant could have called in the help of others, or could have come to his senses."

     On September 3, 2012 the Arnhem judge sentenced Jinhau K. to one year in a juvenile detention center, the maximum penalty under Dutch law for a murderer between the ages 12 to 16. (I don't know why the judge didn't add another year for the attempted murder of Mr. Hau.) Upon completing his one year sentence Jinhau K. would undergo three years of psychiatric treatment at another facility. When the teen hit man turned 18 he'd be completely free from court supervision.

     Members of Holland's Chinese-Dutch community were shocked and outraged by such a light sentence for the cold-blooded murder of a girl and the attempted murder of her father. As for the two teenage murder-for-hire masterminds, the charges against them were dropped. If the hit man only qualified for one year of juvenile detention what was the point of bothering with the degenerate kids who set these bloody crimes into motion?

    In Holland the media called Joyce Hau's killing the "Facebook Murder Case." I would call it the case of the Dutch teens who got away with murder. It's not a snappy case title, but it's closer to the truth.

Sirgiorgio Clardy: The Sociopath From Hell

     Sirgiorgio Clardy was bounced from one foster home to another in Portland Oregon because he was a kid no adult could handle. In 2000 when he was thirteen he attacked his foster dad with a baseball bat. Clardy also threatened and attacked teachers, school administrators and classmates. He took brass knuckles to school and once tried to sexually assault a female student.

     By 2013 the 26-year-old Clardy had been convicted of twenty felonies that included crimes such as forcing young women to work as prostitutes, assault and robbery. When police officers arrested him he'd threaten to rape their wives and children. When he wasn't incarcerated, Mr. Clardy made everyone who come into contact with him miserable, including the teenaged girls he forced into prostitution. This brutal pimp had no business living outside of prison walls.

     In the summer of 2012 several 18-year-old prostitutes, against their will, were doing business for Clardy out of the Inn at the Convention Center, a motel on the edge of downtown Portland. During the course of that operation a john tried to leave the motel without paying one of Clardy's prostitutes. Clardy caught the john before he left the motel. The pimp knocked the free-loader off his feet then stomped his face. With the john on the ground bleeding, Clardy took all of his money. It took plastic surgery to repair the damage to the assault victim's face.

     Police officers arrested Clardy shortly after that attack. A Multnomah County prosecutor charged the violent pimp with compelling prostitution, first-degree robbery and second-degree assault. The suspect pleaded not guilty to all charges.

     In the months leading up to Clardy's trial he threatened and spit on several lawyers appointed to represent him. Eventually Judge Kelly Skye, realizing that no lawyer wanted to be near this man, declared that he would have to defend himself with the help of a legal advisor who would not be required to sit next to him in court. After awhile even the legal advisor asked the judge to be relieved from the unsavory assignment.

     In July 2013, not long after Clardy's trial got underway in Portland's Multnomah County Circuit Court, the defendant spit on sheriff's deputies and threatened the judge. The next day deputies rolled the defendant into court handcuffed to a wheelchair. To keep him from spitting on people the defendant's head was covered in a mesh bag. Because Clardy refused to get dressed for trial officers had wrapped him in a suicide smock.

     A few days into the trial, notwithstanding the presence of nine deputy sheriffs, Judge Skye ordered the defendant into another courtroom where he'd watch the proceedings on a video monitor. The judge considered the defendant too disruptive to be physically present at his own trial.

     The jurors concluded Clardy's two-week trial by finding him guilty of all charges. At the sentencing hearing a few days later the prosecutor put Dr. Frank Colistro on the stand. The psychologist, in practice for thirty years, said, "I've evaluated serial murderers, serial rapists and I'm going to tell you very few of those people reached the evaluation scores we're going to talk about here."

     According to the forensic psychologist, Mr. Clardy was in the 100th percentile of the narcissistic psychopath scale. "People like Mr. Clardy," the doctor said, "are born bad. It's not something we can fix. That's why we have prisons."

      The prosecutor put Dr. Colistro on the stand to counter the defendant's claim he heard voices and wanted to kill himself. Dr. Colistro testified that Clardy exemplified the textbook case of an anti-social psychopath, a man who thought he was smarter, more attractive and better than anyone else. According to Dr. Colistro, Sirgiorgio Clardy was not mentally ill. He was evil.

     Judge Judy Skye, based upon Sirgiorgio Claudy's violent past, criminal record, courtroom behavior and psychological evaluation declared him a "dangerous offender". People so designated, if given the chance, would offend again. As someone beyond the reach of rehabilitation, Judge Skye sentenced Clardy to 100 years in prison with no chance of parole until he served 36 years. Clardy, upon hearing his sentence, swore at the judge and threatened the deputy sheriffs.

     In January 2014, from his cell at the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution, Clardy, through a handwritten, three-page complaint, filed a $100 million civil suit against, among others, Phil Knight, the chairman of the Nike Company. Clardy based his tort claim on the theory that Nike, on each shoe, does not provide a label that warns users that stomping a person's face while wearing this Nike product could cause serious injury to the stomped person. As a result of the defendant's omission the plaintiff experienced "great mental suffering".

     Clardy's lawsuit, the product of sociopathy in the extreme, was dismissed by a judge on October 2, 2014. 

Kenneth Douglas: The Morgue Employee From Hell

     First you are murdered, then your corpse is sexually abused. This represents the ultimate victimization. Having sex with a dead person, while a relatively minor crime, reflects behavior that is beyond deviant, and worse than bad. It's disturbing to know the world is populated with sexual deviants like Kenneth Douglas who can commit their disgusting acts for years without detection. While dead victims cannot speak, advances in forensic science has given them a voice. It's that voice that brought Mr. Douglas to justice.

     From 1976 to 1992 Kenneth Douglas worked the night shift at the Hamilton County Morgue in Cincinnati Ohio. According to his wife who reported him several times to his morgue supervisors, when he'd undress at home after work he "reeked of alcohol and sex." Eventually morgue officials told Mrs. Douglas to stop calling. Apparently they were not interested in knowing if one of their morgue employees was abusing corpses and contaminating evidence. When the 38-year-old left the morgue in 1992 it was not because officials fired him. He simply stopped showing up for work. The situation at the Hamilton County Morgue reflected a typical example of governmental inertia.

     In 1982, ten years before Kenneth Douglas left the morgue, door-to-door salesman David Steffan confessed to beating and slashing the throat of 19-year-old Karen Range after she invited him into her home. The forensic pathologist found traces of semen in the murder victim's body. Mr. Steffen denied that he had raped the victim. (This was before the science of DNA identification.) The judge sentenced David Steffen to death. (In 2016 a federal judge re-sentenced Steffen to life in prison plus 19 years.)

     In March 2008 police officers arrested Kenneth Douglas, the former morgue employee, on a drug charge. A detective ran his DNA sample through a database and came up with a match. The semen found in Karen Range's body was his.

     Following his indictment for abuse of a corpse in August 2008 Kenneth Douglas pleaded no contest to the charge. The judge sentenced him to three years in prison.

     Four years later investigators in Cincinnati discovered that Douglas' DNA matched semen that had been found in two other female corpses in the Hamilton County Morgue. One of these cases involved 24-year-old April Hicks who died in October 1991 after falling out of a three-story window. Kenneth Douglas, when confronted with the DNA evidence, admitted having sex with her body on the day she died.

     The other case involved the 1992 murder of 23-year-old Charlene Appling. Douglas confessed to having sex with her corpse as well. (In 1993 Mark Chambers pleaded guilty to strangling Charlene Appling. Sentenced to 10 to 25 years in prison Chambers was paroled in 2000.)

     Kenneth Douglas shocked his interrogators by confessing to having sex with more than 100 Hamilton County corpses during his tenure at the morgue. He blamed his deviant behavior on crack cocaine and booze. 

     In 2012 relatives of Karen Range, Charlene Appling and April Hicks sued Hamilton County in federal court. The plaintiffs accused the defendant of "recklessly and wantonly" neglecting to supervise Mr. Douglas. In 2013 a U.S. district judge dismissed the suit on grounds the plaintiffs, while perhaps victims of negligence on the part of morgue administrators, failed to establish that their constitutional rights had been violated. The plaintiffs appealed that ruling.

     In August 2014 a three-judge panel on the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the lower court's decision. This meant that the civil case could go forward against Hamilton County.

     In February 2015 Hamilton County settled the abuse of corpse lawsuit by paying the plaintiffs $800,000.