The Beth Carpenter Murder-For-Hire Case

     When Kim Carpenter met Anson "Buzz" Clinton III in the summer of 1992, she was a 22-year-old divorcee living with her two-year-old daughter Rebecca in her parents' house in Ledyard, Connecticut. Buzz, a 26-year-old exotic dancer with a son who was three, had been divorced as well. Buzz and Kim got married that winter in Lyme, Connecticut at the Clinton family home. Buzz, having given up exotic dancing, had a job as a nurse's assistant in the a southeastern Connecticut convalescent home. Kim was three months pregnant with his baby.

     Before Kim and Buzz were married, Kim's parents, Richard and Cynthia Carpenter, had taken care of Kim's daughter Rebecca. They had become quite attached to their granddaughter and were concerned that Kim and her new husband, a man they did not consider worthy of her, would not be suitable parents. The grandparents wanted Rebecca back under their roof.

     In November 1993, the Carpenters, alleging that Buzz Clinton was abusing their granddaughter, went to court to to gain legal custody of the little girl. Kim and Buzz denied the allegation and fought  to retain custody of her. The family court judge ruled against the Carpenters, denying them custody of their granddaughter. Kim had since given birth to Buzz's child and was pregnant again. There was so much bad blood between Buzz and Kim's parents, he began making plans to move his family to Arizona. The Carpenters were sickened by the possibility that their beloved granddaughter might be taken out of their reach by a mother who couldn't  care for her and a man they believed was abusive. The grandparents felt helpless, and were on the verge of panic.

     On the morning of March 10, 1994, a motorist exiting the East Lyme off-ramp on I-95 saw the body of a man lying along the highway not far from an idling 1986 Pontiac Firebird. It was Buzz Clinton. He had been shot five times then driven over by a vehicle as he lay dead on the road.

     Detectives with the Connecticut State Police learned that earlier that morning someone had called Buzz about a tow truck he was selling. Because investigators were unable to identify this caller, the case stalled. Whoever had murdered Buzz Clinton had not done it for his wallet, or anything else of value. Without a motive or a suspect, detectives quickly ran out of leads. In the meantime, Kim and Rebecca, and the two children fathered by Buzz Clinton, moved in with the Carpenters in Ledyard.

     On May 25, 1995, ten months after the murder, the Connecticut State Police received a call that brought life back to the investigation. The caller, who didn't identify herself, said that her ex-boyfriend and one of his associates had been involved in Buzz Clinton's murder. The anonymous caller named the principals, the tipster's ex-boyfriend, 40-year-old Joseph Fremut and and a biker dude from Deep River Connecticut named Mark Dupres. The caller didn't say why Buzz Clinton had been killed. Both suspects had criminal histories involving petty crimes and drug dealing. But neither man, as far as detectives could determine, had any direct link to Buzz Clinton.

     Detectives looking into Mark Dupres' background eventually found an indirect and rather thin connection between the biker and the murder victim. Dupres' lawyer, Haiman Clein, worked in the New London law firm that employed Kim's sister, Beth Carpenter. When questioned by detectives, Joseph Fremut, the tipster's ex-boyfriend, said that Mark Dupres had been the one who had murdered Buzz Clinton. Fremut said he had been involved in the planning phase of the homicide but had not been with Dupres when the shooting took place. According to Fremut, Dupres' lawyer, Haiman Clein, had paid Dupres to do the job for another attorney who worked at the New London law firm.

     A few days after his initial interview, Mark Dupres confessed to detectives with the Connecticut State Police. He admitted being the person who had called Buzz Clinton to inquire about the tow truck he was selling. Accompanied by his 15-year-old son Chris, Dupres, on the morning of the murder, had driven to Buzz Clinton's house. From there, Dupres and his son, in their Oldsmobile Cutlass, followed Clinton to the place where he kept the vehicle for sale. As they were coming off exit 72 in East Lyme, Dupres blinked his lights signaling Clinton to pull over. As Clinton approached the driver's side of the Oldsmobile Dupres got out of the vehicle to meet him. Between the two cars, Dupres, using a revolver, shot Clinton five times.

     As Dupres pulled away from the murder scene with his son Chris still in the vehicle he drove over Clinton's body. Detectives asked the suspect why he would kill a man in front of his son. Dupres, who apparently didn't get the point of the question, shrugged his shoulders and said that the boy hadn't done anything wrong.

    Mark Dupres told the detectives he had killed Buzz Clinton on behalf of his attorney, Haiman Clein. In payment for the murder, the lawyer had given him $1,000 in upfront money. According to their agreement, Dupres would receive $4,000 after the hit. As it turned out, Clein only paid the hit man an additional $500.

     Detectives learned that Haiman Clein, who didn't know Buzz Clinton, was just the middleman. The 53-year-old attorney had allegedly arranged the murder for Beth Carpenter, a beautiful young attorney in the New London law firm who was the murder victim's sister-in-law. Clein and the 30-year-old blonde were having an affair.

     Mark Dupres told detectives that he had met with Beth Carpenter in Haiman Clein's law office. On that occasion, the three of them discussed the murder plan in some detail. From Carpenter, Dupres acquired a photograph of the murder target, his work address, and the license number of his Pontiac Firebird. Beth Carpenter said that she wanted Buzz Clinton dead because he had been abusing her niece Rebecca. The young lawyer said her parents had tried but failed to gain legal custody of the little girl. That's when Beth, without her parents' knowledge, began planning Clinton's murder. It was all about Rebecca. Shortly before Dupres murdered Buzz Clinton, Beth Carpenter moved to London, England.

     Charged with capital murder and conspiracy to commit murder, Joseph Fremut and Mark Dupres, pursuant to plea agreements, promised to testify against Attorney Haiman Clein and Beth Carpenter. In Dupres' case, the prosecutor, under the agreement, would recommend a prison sentence that didn't exceed 45 years. The triggerman's son Chris, having been granted immunity from prosecution, also agreed to testify against the two lawyers.

     Haiman Clein avoided arrest by fleeing the state. Beth Carpenter told FBI agents stationed in London, England that Mr. Clein had been the mastermind behind the contract murder. Claiming total innocence, Beth denied prior knowledge of the murder. She agreed to help the FBI find the missing Clein who every so often called her from a public telephone. In February 1996, FBI agents arrested Clein as he stood by a telephone booth in Long Beach, California. He had been awaiting a call from Beth Carpenter.

     Following his arrest Clein insisted that he was innocent. But sixteen months later he accepted a plea bargain arrangement similar to the one given his former client and friend, triggerman Mark Dupres. Betrayed by Beth Carpenter, he identified her as the mastermind and himself nothing more than a middle-man in the deadly scheme. This gave the prosecutor enough evidence to charge Beth Carpenter, on August 26, 1997, with capital murder and conspiracy to commit murder. No longer living in England, she had moved to Dublin where she was living under her own name. In November 1997, the Irish police took her into custody.

     Claiming that she had been framed by Haiman Clein who sought revenge because she had ratted him out to the FBI, Carpenter fought extradition to the United States. Because the prosecutor in Connecticut sought the death penalty, the authorities in Ireland, pursuant to a policy that forbade extraditing foreign fugitives who could be executed in their home countries, refused to send her back. The following year, as Carpenter sat in an Irish jail, Dupres and Clein pleaded guilty. They were each sentenced to 45 years in prison.

     In June 1999, after the Connecticut prosecutor promised not to seek the death penalty in the case, the Irish authorities sent Beth Carpenter back to the U. S. to face charges that she had orchestrated the murder of Buzz Clinton. Because she had already spent 19 months behind bars, the judge in Connecticut released her on $150,000 bail. The defendant was allowed her to await her trial under house arrest in her parents' home.

     The televised murder trial (Court TV) began in February 2001, eight years after Mark Dupres pumped five bullets into Buzz Clinton as he walked toward the killer's car parked alongside the I-95 off-ramp. Appearing for the prosecution, the victim's mother, Dee Clinton, described how the defendant's parents had fought to wrest custody of Rebecca from her son and his wife Kim. The custody battle had created bad blood between her son and the Carpenter family. This provided the motive for the murder-for-hire killing.

     The hit man's son, Chris Dupres, testified that until the shooting took place he had no idea what his father had planned to do. As they left the murder scene that morning the car rolled over the victim's body. Ten minutes after the killing his father smashed the murder weapon with a hammer and tossed the pieces into the woods.

     Haiman Clein, now 61-years-old and disbarred, took the stand on March 8, 2002. In December 1993, shortly after the Carpenters lost their custody battle for Rebecca, the defendant told Clein that as long as Buzz Clinton was alive Rebecca was in danger and beyond the reach of her protection. Eventually Beth came right out and asked if Clein would arrange to have someone kill the source of the problem. At first Clein wasn't sure she was serious but when Beth kept bringing up the subject he realized that she really wanted Buzz Clinton dead.

     According to Clein's testimony, in late January 1994 he brought Beth Carpenter and Mark Dupres, his client and friend, together in his office to discuss the murder. A month before Dupres was to perform the hit he got cold feet and called off the murder. A couple of weeks after that, the contract killing was back on his schedule after Beth came to him in tears claiming that Buzz Clinton had just locked Rebecca in the basement and burned her with a cigarette.

     At four in the morning on March 11, 1993, less than twenty-four hours after the murder, Beth Carpenter called Haiman Clein and said she was worried sick and had to see him. In bed with his wife, Clein got dressed and drove to Norwich to calm his anxious mistress. When he got to her apartment she refused to discuss the murder because she was afraid the FBI had bugged the place.

     Haiman Clein testified that when Mark Dupres told him he had taken his son along on the hit the attorney was furious. How stupid could you get? If the kid talked they'd all end up in prison. Now Clein himself had something to worry about.

     Mark Dupres, the prosecution's most important witness, took the stand and implicated himself, Clein, and the defendant. Following the hit man's testimony the state rested its case. As murder-for-trials go the prosecution had presented a solid case, one that would require a strong defense. To provide that defense, Beth Carpenter's attorneys put their best witness on the stand, the defendant herself.

     Beth Carpenter testified that when Haiman Clein found out about Buzz Clinton and what he was doing to Rebecca he arranged the hit on his own volition to solve the problem for Beth and her niece. After she found out what he had done on her behalf she didn't turn him in because, "I needed to be with him. I wasn't a whole person." Shocked by what he had done, she said to him, "Only someone who is crazy would do something like this." To that Clein had allegedly replied, "Don't you see? You don't have anything to worry about anymore."

     On April 12, 2002, the jury found Beth Carpenter guilty as charged. The defendant and her attorneys, thinking that Clein and Dupres had not been believable witnesses, were stunned by the verdict. Four months later, the judge complied with the terms of the Irish extradition agreement by sentencing Beth Carpenter to life in prison without parole.

Literary Talent

What is literary talent? A nimble fluency. A way with words. An imagination that's easily aroused, quick to see, to hear, and to feel. An ear for the music of the language and a tendency to become absorbed in the mysterious movements of its significance and sound. A sense of audience. Skill at organizing verbal concepts solidly, effectively, and fairly swiftly. An aptitude for catching the elusive forms and figures of a vivid imagination and a knack for pinning them down on a page.

Stephen Koch, Writer's Workshop, 2003

If You Write, Don't Drink

A short story can be written on the bottle, but for a novel you need the mental speed that enables you to keep the whole pattern inside your head and ruthlessly sacrifice the sideshows. I would give anything if I hadn't written Part III of Tender is the Night entirely on the bottle.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1938

The Shortest Science Fiction Story

Written anonymously, the shortest science fiction story in history is simply this: "The last man on Earth sat in a room. There was a knock on the door."

The Jullian McCabe Murder Case

     Jullian McCabe, 34, lived with her husband and 6-year-old son in Seal Rock, Oregon, a coastal town 130 miles southwest of Portland. The boy, named London, suffered from severe autism. The child's father, Matt, also had health problems. In 2012, doctors found that Matt McCabe had multiple sclerosis and a mass on his brain. He had been unable to work.

     In late 2013, Jullian McCabe appealed for help on a fundraising website called YouCaring.com where she posted the following message: "If you are a praying person, pray for us. I love my husband and he has taken care of myself and my son for years and years and now it's time for me to take the helm. I am scared and I am reaching out." Through the site, she raised $6,831, considerably less than the stated goal of $50,000.

     In September 2014, Jullian McCabe posted a YouTube video showing her husband in a hospital bed with their son pushing the button that raised and lowered it. Speaking to the camera she said, "I'm sorry but to wake up one day and your whole world is topsy turvy in a world that was already topsy turvy with our son." In that video she also said, "I have thought of pulling a Thelma and Louise." [Movie characters who ended their lives by driving off a cliff.]

     At six-thirty in the evening of Monday November 3, 2014, Jullian McCabe called 911 and reported that she had just thrown her son off the Yaquina Bay Bridge in nearby Newport, Oregon. Officers met her at the scene and took her to the Newport Police Department for questioning.

     At the police station, McCabe calmly informed detectives that voices in her head had instructed her to toss the boy into the water 133 feet below the bridge.

     At ten-thirty that night, while Coast Guard and other searchers looked for the child, a person sitting in a restaurant overlooking the bay at the Embarcadero Resort, noticed a small body floating in the water near a marina. The authorities quickly identified the corpse as London McCabe.

     Shortly after the recovery, officers booked the mother into the Lincoln County Jail on charges of aggravated murder, murder, and first-degree manslaughter. The judge set McCabe's bond at $750,000.

     In speaking to reporters, members of McCabe's family described her as mentally unstable. They said her problems started after her father died and her husband fell ill and couldn't work. She had been simply overwhelmed, they said.

     Investigators learned that McCabe had planned her son's death for three years. On her computer she had searched the phrases "hearing voices," "child off bridge," and "insanity defense." In February 2016, McCabe pleaded guilty to murder. She said she had killed the child because she couldn't handle the responsibility caring for him after her husband had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The Lincoln County judge sentenced McCabe to life in prison without eligibility for parole until after she served 25 years of her sentence. 

The History of Kleptomania

     The birth of criminal anthropology codified scientists' ideas that kleptomaniacs, mostly women, were born to steal. In The Female Offender (1893) Cesare Lombroso wrote: "Shoplifting, which has become so fashionable since the establishment of huge department stores, is a form of occasional crime in which women specialize. The temptation stems from the immense number of articles on display. We saw that fine things are not articles of luxury for women but articles of necessity since they equip them for conquest." This, according to Lombroso, resulted in "women's organic inability to resist stealing."

     The idea that kleptomania arises out of female sexual repression was made popular around 1906 by Freud's disciples, who attached the Oedipal myth to the disease, attributing it to infantile revenge fantasies and the castration complex, and sometimes equated shoplifting with sex. Best known as a charismatic anarchist, free-love advocate, and cocaine addict who influenced expressionism and Franz Kafka [a novelist], Otto Gross was the first psychoanalyst to champion kleptomania as sexual release.

Rachel Shteir, The Steal, 2011

Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood"

     In the movie "Infamous," there is a scene in which Harper Lee [a novelist] and Truman Capote are discussing the book he is writing about the Clutter murders, the brutal slaying of a Kansas family in 1959.

     When Capote refers to his book as a novel, Lee is perplexed, telling him a book is either fiction or non-fiction. Capote disagrees--he wants to reveal the intentions, emotions and thoughts of the real-life characters he portrays, giving it the depth of a novel.

     His book, In Cold Blood, was subsequently recognized as an exemplar of a new genre--creative non-fiction. [While universally known as a true crime classic, because of created characters, scenes and dialogue, In Cold Blood is more of a novel than nonfiction.]

Joanna Penn, The Creative Penn, August 17, 2017

Reconsidering Charles Dickens

     After Charles Dickens died in 1870, his reputation--though not his popularity--dipped. Yes, he was a supreme entertainer, but the author of "A Christmas Carol" and "A Tale of Two Cities" couldn't really be considered a serious writer in a world of Hardy and Meredith and Conrad and James. And other popular writers had come along and won large readerships--Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard and, of course, Kipling, the most talented of them all, whose reputation has fluctuated even more that Dickens's, given his fatal identification with imperialism. 

     But, as these things happen, before the end of the century the tide had begun to turn. A reconsideration of Dickens by the impressive novelist and critic George Glassing, published in 1898, made large claims for his art, and then, in 1906, the prodigious young G.K. Chesterson (long before his "Father Brown" mysteries made him, too, a popular writer) published a reconsideration of [Dickens] with such wit, sympathy and sheer brilliance that Dickens was back in play as a major literary force. Meanwhile, of course, the world had gone on reading him, happily ignorant that he was a has-been.

Robert Gottlieb, "Dickensworld," The New York Times Book Review, November 8, 2021

The Woman In The Locked Room

     The English writer John Fowles published a horror novel in 1963 called The Collector. Fowles' protagonist, a neurotic butterfly collector, wins the British Football Pool which allows him to buy an country estate. The former city hall ribbon clerk, after converting his cellar into comfortable living quarters, kidnaps a beautiful young art student he has secretly admired. His purpose is not to rape or ransom, but to "collect" this desirable specimen. The girl he has added to his collection of beautiful objects takes ill and dies. Following her death, the collector reads her diary and is shocked to discover that she had not fallen in love with him. The novel closes with the protagonist planning to abduct and imprison another young woman who has caught his attention. (The film version of the book came out in 1965.)

 The Michael Mendez Case                                                              

     One could describe law enforcement as looking under rocks in search of criminals and evidence of their crimes. Every so often the police turn over a rock and are surprised by what they find. On August 9, 2012, members of the New Jersey State Police Street Gang Unit, while searching an apartment in Paterson for drugs, discovered something they hadn't anticipated. They found a woman who may have lived ten years locked inside a bedroom. The apartment belonged to a 42-year-old suspected drug dealer and member of the Latin Kings street gang named Michael Mendez.

     Most of Mendez's public housing neighbors had not been aware that the woman, 44-year-old Nancy Rodriguez Duran, had been living in the former roofer's apartment. (Mendez, because of lung problems and bipolar disorder, has been on disability for several years.) Over the past decade, only a few of his fellow apartment dwellers had seen Duran outside of the three-story brick complex. Even those sightings were rare. Mendez had resided in the third floor apartment for more than twelve years.

     Inside Duran's small bedroom, padlocked from the outside, officers found a pail used as a chamber pot, a bed, a television, and a telephone. Searchers also discovered, in Mendez's possession, 4,200 prescription pills, 190 grams of marijuana, and $23,000 in cash. The pills alone had a street value of $100,000.

     New Jersey State Police Officers took Michael Mendez into custody at the Paterson apartment and hauled him to the Passaic County Jail. Charged with possession of controlled substances with the intent to distribute, kidnapping, false imprisonment, and criminal restraint, Mendez was held on $l million bail. The authorities transported Nancy Rodriguez Duran to a nearby hospital for medical evaluation. While Mendez had two previous convictions for aggravated assault, he had only served three months behind bars.

     On August 14, 2012,  before Mendez's preliminary hearing in Paterson, Nancy Rodriguez Duran, in speaking to reporters, denied having been held in Mendez's apartment bedroom against her will. "He padlocked the door with my consent," she said. "I like being inside, I don't like to go out. It's not that he was keeping me there. Why would he keep me in a room for ten years? How could I be so healthy? I should be dead by now."

     The New Jersey State Attorney General's office took charge of the case. The central legal question involved whether or not an adult can consent to being locked in a room for the better part of ten years. And in a case like this, what constitutes "consent?" Perhaps Duran had been abducted against her will, then over the years, developed the so-called Stockholm Syndrome, a psychological state in which the prisoner develops empathy for her captor. This woman may have been the victim of what psychologists call "traumatic bonding."

     In March 2013, Mendez pleaded guilty before Superior Court Judge Greta Brown in Paterson, New Jersey to third-degree criminal restraint and possession of marijuana and prescription pills with intent to distribute. The judge sentenced him to five years in prison.

     Five years behind bars for keeping his victim locked up for ten.

Where to Begin

Reading about first draft writing tactics has made me realize how many I've unconsciously developed over the years. [Shouldn't that be subconsciously?] One key anxiety reducer I've learned is not to worry about beginnings. It's too easy to panic while waiting for the perfect opening. Fiction writers typically know the conclusion of a story they set out to write, but rarely know how it will begin. Good leads usually show up late. In my own writing and that of my students, I generally find the best opening deep within a narrative. This opening only makes itself known as I read drafts, see what catches my eye, something that sets a tone, that gets the piece up and running. Knowing this, I don't concern myself with beginnings until the end.

Ralph Keyes, The Courage to Write, 1995

Successful Literary Journalism

To produce successful literary journalism or creative nonfiction, the writer must achieve two goals: journalistic credibility and artistic merit.

Mark Masse, Writer's Digest, March 2002 

Literary Theft

In any art you are allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.

Ernest Hemingway, 1936

Structuring a Documentary Film Story

As a documentary film storyteller, you decide where to begin and end the story. You can begin in the middle, go back to the beginning, catch up with your story, and then move ahead to the end. You can start at the end before moving to the beginning to ask, "How did we get here?" You can flash forward or back. The only thing you can't do, in a documentary that's driven by a narrative sequence of events, is change the important facts of the main underlying chronology. [A lot of documentaries are, in my opinion, chronologically artsy-fartsy and confusing. I prefer stories that start at the beginning, move to the middle, and conclude at the end.]

Shelia Curran Bernard, Documentary Storytelling, 2007 

The Online Hook-Up From Hell

     In September 2010, Mary Kay Beckman, a 46-year-old mother of two from Las Vegas, met 50-year-old Wade Mitchell Ridley via the online dating service, Match.com. The couple had eight dates before Beckman realized there was something wrong with him and ended the relationship.

     On January 21, 2011, four months after his last date with Beckman, Ridley, armed with a butcher's knife, broke into her garage and waited for her to return home. When Beckman pulled into the garage and got out of her car, Ridley stabbed her ten times. In his attempt to murder his victim, Ridley also stomped her head and neck. Ridley left the garage that night thinking that he had killed Mary Kay Beckman.

     Mary Kay survived the brutal attack, but had to undergo surgeries to repair her jaw, preserve her eyesight, and to have a section of her skull replaced by a synthetic material.

     Shortly after the burglary and attempted murder, Las Vegas police arrested Wade Ridley. While in police custody, he confessed to the Beckman assault. Ridley also informed his interrogators that a few weeks before stabbing and stomping Mary Kay Beckman, he murdered a woman in Phoenix. The suspect said he had used a butcher's knife to stab 62-year-old Anne Simenson to death in her home. Just before murdering Simenson, a woman he had met on Match.Com, Ridley had stolen painkilling drugs from a pharmacist he had robbed at knife-point.

     On February 15, 2011, a prosecutor in Clark County, Nevada charged Wade Mitchell Ridley with the attempted murder of Mary Kay Beckman. In Arizona, a prosecutor charged Ridley with the murder of Anne Simenson.

     In September 2011, Ridley entered an Alford pleas to attempted murder with the use of a deadly weapon and armed robbery. (In so pleading, Ridley didn't admit guilt but acknowledged the state had enough evidence to convict him.) The judge sentenced Ridley to 28 to 70 years in prison.

     On May 17, 2012, a prison guard found Ridley hanging in his cell. The medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.

     Mary Kay Beckman, on January 25, 2013, filed suit against Match.Com in a Las Vegas federal court. Her attorney, Marc Saggese, told reporters that the basis of the $10 million civil action "is the advertising that is utilized by Match.Com, lulling women and men into a false sense of security." It is the plaintiff's contention that the dating service has a legal duty to warn its online customers that there might be people in the dating pool who are dangerous.

     The lawyer representing Match.Com responded to this assertion by saying the notion his client was liable for the behavior of a Match.Com member was absurd. The attorney for the defendant said the plaintiff was the victim of a "sick, twisted" man.

     If Match.Com lost this lawsuit, owners of bars where men and women meet could be held liable for hook-ups that led to one of the parties being criminally victimized. It would make fixing-up friends a risky proposition for match-makers. Who doesn't know that going out with a stranger met online, in a bar, or at a college fraternity party, isn't risky business? While Mary Kay Beckman was the victim of a terrible crime she was not a victim of Match.Com.

     On May 29, 2013, a federal judge in Nevada threw out Beckman's case against the online dating service. 

Crafting Escape Entertainment

The difference between the writer of serious fiction and the writer of escape entertainment is the clear difference between the artist and the craftsman. The one has the privilege and the faculty or original design; the other does not. The man who works from blueprints is a thoroughly respectable character, but he is of another order from the man who makes the blueprints in the first place.

Wallace Stegner, Teaching and Writing Fiction, 2002 

Hunter Thompson On Writing

I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.

Hunter Thompson (1937-2005), The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967, 2012

Samuel Cohen: The Unrepentant Con Man

     In 2002, Samuel Cohen, a 44-year-old San Francisco con man, talked the founders of a nonprofit foundation called Vanguard into investing millions into his company, Ecast. Vanguard, created in 1972 by actors Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte, issued grants that helped support environmental, anti-war, and other liberal causes.

     Cohen told his investors that Ecast, the manufacturer of electronic jukeboxes for bars, was about to be acquired by Micosoft, and that the acquisition would make Vanguard and its donors a lot of money. Relying on Cohen's word, the foundation's founders, and a hundred other investors, gave Cohen, over a six year period, more than $30 million. Cohen kept the scam going by telling his marks that regulators in the U.S. and Europe were holding up the acquisition. He needed the money to pay the fees and bonds needed to get the deal approved. His victims bought his spiel, and the money kept rolling in. In typical con man fashion, the product Cohen was selling was himself. And the marks went along because they thought they were going to make a killing.

    Confidence games cannot go on forever, and in 2008, Cohen's swindle fell apart. A federal prosecutor in San Francisco charged him with wire fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion. His victims were devastated, and the Vanguard Foundation collapsed.

     Samuel Cohen had pulled off what criminologists call the "long con" by using his ill-gotten money to create a facade of enormous wealth that impressed and influenced his marks. He rented a $50,000 a month mansion in Belvedere, the exclusive enclave just north of San Francisco. The fake financier hung fake art on the walls of his rented palace, and bought his wife a $1.4 million diamond ring with money he had lifted from his investors. In his rented garage sat a $372,000 Rolls Royce, and a $260,000 Aston Martin. Cohen spent $6 million flying around in a rented jet he boasted that he owned. (Two of his celebrity passengers were Elton John and Jennifer Lopez. While they were not marks, they were props.)

     Con man Cohen lured his victims to the mansion where he held lavish parties in their honor while separating them from their money. It was easy. The scam artist even bilked his father-in-law out of his retirement savings. For the con man, it's not the money so much as the thrill of making suckers out of trusting people. 

     The federal prosecutor, after a San Francisco jury found Samuel Cohen guilty in November 2011 of 15 counts of wire fraud, 11 counts of money laundering, and 3 counts of tax evasion, asked Judge Charles Breyer to send this con artist to prison for 30 years, order him to pay $60 million in restitution, and fine him $250,000. In justifying what would be the stiffest penalty in the history of white collar crime (Jeff Skilling at Enron got 24 years, 4 months), the prosecutor pointed out that Cohen, instead of experiencing remorse for his on-going, cold-blooded swindle, blamed everyone but himself for the harm he has caused so many victims. (When con men are caught, in their minds, they are the victims.)

     Cohen's attorney, in arguing for a more lenient penalty, requested a prison sentence of under 7 years. The defense lawyer told the judge that 30 years behind bars is excessive punishment for a 53-year-old first time offender. Moreover, Mr. Cohen had given $2 million to charity. (Yes, but with stolen money.)

     Judge Breyer, in May 2012, sentenced Cohen to 22 years in prison, and ordered him to pay $31.4 million in restitution. Calling the con man "nearly sociopathic," (nearly?) the judge said the sentence would have been more severe but for the sentencing guidelines holding him back. If Cohen serves his full sentence, he'll be 75 when he gets out. Many of his victims will be dead, and the ones who are not, might still be broke.

Dialogue in a Memoir

     A fellow memoirist and reviewer writes: "I'm reading a memoir now where the author has written four chapters full of dialogue for events that occurred when she was four years old. Over half the book occurs before she is ten and it's all about what people said and felt. I don't see how much of this could be possibly true."

     My friend's got this right: Nothing makes a reader question memoir more indignantly than the things set aside by quotation marks.

     Unless you walked around your entire life with a tape recorder in your pocket, dialogue will become one of the greatest moral and storytelling conundrums you will face when writing a memoir. You may feel that you need some of it, a smattering at least, to round-out characters, change the pace, dissect the rub between what was thought and what was actually said. You may need dialogue because in life people talk to one another and readers want to know what they said. They want to know the sound of the relationships.

     Dialogue isn't, strictly speaking, absolutely necessary in a memoir. But when it's done right, it feels essential. It seems to bring one closer to the story's heart.

Beth Kephart, Handling the Truth, 2013

Watch Me Write

     Sitting down to write isn't easy. A few years ago, a local high school asked me if a student who is interested in becoming a writer might come and observe me. Observe me! I had to decline. I couldn't imagine what that poor student would think, watching me sit, then stand, sit again, decide that I needed more coffee, go downstairs and make some coffee, come back up, sit again, get up, comb my hair, sit again, stare at the screen, check e-mail, stand up, pet the dog, sit again.

    You get the picture.

Dani Shapiro, Still Writing, 2013 

No Cure For Writer's Block

The best way of all for dealing with writer's block is never to get it. Some novelists never do. Theoretically there's no reason one should get it, if one understands that writing, after all, is only writing, neither something one ought to feel deeply guilty about nor something one ought to be inordinately proud of. The very qualities that make one a novelist in the first place contribute to block: hypersensitivity, stubbornness, insatiability, and so on. Given the general oddity of novelists, no wonder there are no sure cures.

John Gardner, On Becoming A Novelist, 1983 

The Gregory Eldred Church Murder Case

     In 1982, after graduating from Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania, Darlene Sitler began teaching music to students in kindergarten to sixth grade. For thirty years she taught at the Northern Potter School District based in the tiny borough of Ulysses. Her husband, Gregory Eldred, taught music at the elementary school in Coudersport, the capital of Potter County, 20 miles south of Ulysses in the central part of the state. He was also a clarinet player with the Southern Tier Symphony. The couple attended the First United Presbyterian Church in Coudersport where Darlene played the organ and directed the choir. In April 2010 Darlene filed for divorce. The marital split became official four months later.

     On Sunday, December 2, 2012, about twenty minutes into Pastor Evon Lloyd's service at the First United Presbyterian Church, Darlene's 52-year-old ex-husband, wearing a hooded beige jacket, entered the building through a side door. Eldred walked up the center aisle, and with a .40-caliber handgun, shot Darlene as she sat at the organ. The single shot caused her to fall into the organ pit. As the stunned congregation looked on, Eldred walked calmly out of the church. One of the churchgoers called 911 as several witnesses to the shooting ran to the front of the church to attend to the wounded organist.

     About three minutes after the shooting Gregory Eldred walked back into the church. When Pastor Lloyd and others pleaded with him to put down his pistol, the music teacher threatened to shoot anyone who got in his way. "I want to finish this," he said. "I've got to see if she's dead." Eldred walked up to the organ pit and fired two bullets into his ex-wife. If she wasn't already dead these two shots killed her.

     Several members of the congregation swarmed the shooter and in the course of subduing him he fired off another shot that didn't hit anyone. A Pennsylvania State Trooper assigned to the Coudersport barracks arrived at the scene shortly thereafter.

     After state police troopers escorted Gregory Eldred out of the church the entire congregation climbed aboard a school bus and were driven to a place they were questioned by a team of police officers. (Very few murders are witnessed by this many people.) Eldred, charged with first-degree murder, was held without bond in the Potter County Jail.

     On July 10, 2013, Gregory Eldred pleaded guilty to first-degree murder. The judge sentenced him to life in prison.

     In April 2015, from his cell at the Forest State Correctional Facility in Marienville, Pennsylvania, Gregory Eldred petitioned the state court to withdraw his 2013 guilty plea on grounds that his  attorney, Bill Hebe, had been ineffective counsel.

     The Potter County judge denied Eldred's plea withdrawal petition.

     In 2015, a woman who had witnessed Gregory Eldred murder his wife, under a victim restitution law, sued the convicted killer for $1,427, the money she had spent for counseling services. A judge awarded her the sum in late 2016. In January 2017, Eldred appealed the award on grounds this woman was merely a witness to a crime and not a victim as proscribed by law. He lost his appeal.

Reality Crime Writing

Crime fiction can offer an author escape from reality and have great therapeutic value. Conversely, true crime writing is a cold, hard plunge into someone else's reality where you have little or no control over the story. There is no escapism for the true crime writer sifting through the memories of a bereaved mother or listening to a murderer in gory detail, yet that's what you're expected to deliver. 

Jax Miller, American crime novelist, August 17, 2020 

Flash In The Pan Novelists

     There will always be that flash in the pan, that one-off novel that strikes the fancy of publishers, sells a few million copies, and gets made into a successful--or unsuccessful-film before the person who wrote it fades into permanent obscurity, laughing, as they say, all the way to the bank. These types of writers have always existed.

     The creators of those largely forgettable and sometimes laughable pieces of prose bang them out, often with nothing more to recommend their work than a fairly decent idea badly realized, a fairly bad idea decently realized, or a schtick of some sort--author as former policewoman, forensic pathologist, weight lifter, beauty queen, seriously abused child, seriously abusive adult come to the Lord or an excellent publicity campaign that worked like a charm.

     What these creators of fiction have in common tends to be that they got lucky. They wrote their novels without an idea in the world what they were doing and then managed to pull it off. Problem was, though, they could not do it again.

Elizabeth George in Sometimes the Magic Works by Terry Brooks, 2005

Bad Sentence Contest

"On their first date he'd asked her how much she thought Edgar Allan Poe's toe nails would sell on eBay, and on their second he paid for subway fare with nickels he fished out of a fountain, but he was otherwise charming and she thought that they could have a perfectly tolerable life together."

Jessica Sasishara's entry in the annual Bulwer-Lytton opening bad sentence contest, 2012

Clever Book Inscribing

When I'm sitting in a bookstore, autographing a book for a customer, I dread hearing the words: "You're the author. Why don't you sign it and write something clever?

Tess Gerritsen, Murderati (blog) "A Writer's Life" December 30, 2018

The Curse of Fame

Very few writers achieve fame through their books. The best an author can hope for is being respected and known by a fair number of readers and members of the literary community associated with his or her genre. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, after her baby had been murdered in 1932 in what became the so-called "Crime of the Century," wrote in her journal that fame was a form of death. Amanda Foreman wrote that "Fame is like a parasite. It feeds off its host--infecting, extracting, consuming its victim until there is nothing left but an empty husk. With this emptiness comes the possibility of a long afterlife as one of the blowup dolls of history." A character in B. Traven's story, The Night Visitor, says: "What is fame after all? It stinks to hell and heaven. Today I am famous. Today my name is printed on the front page of all the papers in the world. Tomorrow perhaps people can still spell my name correctly. Day after tomorrow I may starve to death and nobody cares. That's what you call fame." 

The Celebrity Killer

The killer, or at least the version of the killer who hogs most of the airtime, is set apart from the rest of humanity because of his bad deeds, but that apartness also marks him as special. Something of the animal is in him, and also something of the artist. He's a mastermind, someone who doesn't play by the same rules as the rest of us. (This celebrity killer is almost always a "he," both because the vast majority of all murderers are male, and because the stereotypical roles allotted to female killers--the bad mom, the jealous ex, the gender-nonconforming monster--are less easy to glamorize.)

Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession, 2019

The Last Guillotine Execution

On September 10, 1977 at Les Baumettes Prison in France, Hamida Djandoubi was the last man in the world executed by guillotine. The Tunisian agricultural worker, while employed in Marseille, France, tortured and murdered his former girlfriend, 22-year-old Elisabeth Bousquet. 

Violent Imagery

One of the problems with studies that examine the effects of violent imagery is that they typically use mentally healthy psychology students. If you want to do a meaningful study show movies like "Body Double" and "Copycat" to a group of sexual psychopaths the day before you release them. [That might be great for science, but not great for the future victims of these psychopaths. Here's a better idea: don't release them.]

Dr. Park Dietz, Forensic Pathologist, 2000

No Young Biographers

Aspiring writers find biography a less attractive form of creative nonfiction because they like to write about themselves, and unlike memoir, poetry, fiction, and drama, biography offers little chance for self-expression.

Philip Furia in Writing Creative Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard, 2001 

Female Serial Killers Get No Respect

Female serial killers haven't received anywhere the same amount of attention from the media or from criminologists as males have. Even researchers on psychology have tended to focus on male populations. There's a common erroneous assumption that because females are "nurturing," they won't be violent. But we have had female serial killers who have shot, stabbed, smothered (with enormous weight), and even used chainsaws and ice picks.

Dr. Katherine Ramsland, nonfiction author of forensic psychology books, 2009

Sensing Danger

Just as we look to government and experts, we also look to technology for solutions to our problems, but you will see that your personal solution to violence will not come from technology, it will come from an even greater resource that was there all the while, within you. That resource is intuition. 

Gavin de Baker, The Gift of Fear: And Other Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence, 1997 

Boy Scouts of America: Diminished by Pedophiles

        In February 2020, Boy Scouts of America, with hundreds of sex abuse lawsuits pending against the organization, filed for bankruptcy. Future plaintiffs with claims of forced sex, fondling, and/or exposure to pornography, were told to bring their cases against the organization before November 16, 2020. In the weeks leading up to the deadline, 90,000 sexual abuse suits were filed. 

     Although Boy Scouts of America is uniquely chartered by the U.S. Congress, not one member of Congress publicly mentioned the bankruptcy or the decades of sexual abuse that scandalized and diminished the organization. 

     Documents show that Boy Scout of America's leaders identified many known abusers within the organization but failed to notify the authorities or the parents of the victims. 

     At its height, the Boy Scouts had more than 4 million members. Now, even though membership has been opened to girls, there are less than 2 million scouts.

Misanthropes

Misanthropes have some admirable if paradoxical virtues. It is no exaggeration to say that we are among the nicest people you are likely to meet. Because good manners build sturdy walls, our distaste for intimacy makes us exceedingly cordial "ships that pass in the night." As long as you remain a stranger, we will be your friend forever.

Florence King (1936-2016) Novelist, Essayist

The Legal Windfall

Americans feel that if something untoward happens to them, someone else ought to pay. In Richmond, California in the mid-1990s, lawyers had a field day. An explosion in the local chemical works spread fumes over the city. Within hours a swarm of lawyers descended on the town and persuaded 70,000 of them to issue claims. The insurers of the plant were obliged to pay out a total of $180 million, of which the lawyers creamed off $40 million.

Ronald Irving, The Law Is An Ass, 2011 

Insecure Narcissistic Losers

Within just about every serial predator, there are two warring elements: a feeling of grandiosity, specialness, and entitlement, together with deep-seated feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness and a sense that they have not gotten the breaks that they should.

John E. Douglas, The Killer Across The Table, 2019

Women Who Love Serial Killers

Hybristophiliacs are women who are sexually attracted to serial killers. For every serial killer in the news, an average of 100 women write them fan letters. Ted Bundy, during his murder trial, received 200 fan letters a day and married Carole Anne Boone. The wedding ceremony was held in the courtroom. Doreen Lioy, a magazine editor with a college degree in English literature, fell madly in love with Richard Ramirez the moment she saw his picture. Ramirez was the serial killer known as "Night Stalker." Lioy wrote Ramirez dozens of love letters and attended his trial. She also purchased pieces of his clothing. According to psychologists, hybristophiliacs are usually submissive, narcissistic enablers who are attracted to power.

Learning Through Writing

I've heard it said that everything you need to know about life can be learned from watching baseball. I'm not what you'd call a sports fan, so I don't know if that is true. I do believe in a similar philosophy, which is everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write. [Baseball? Really?]

Dani Shapiro, Still Writing, 2013 

Rousseau and Franklin: Shaping the History of Autobiography

When Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) completed his Confessions in 1770 he introduced the secular hero into European literature and recounted his own life in a form and style which influenced male life histories well into the twentieth century. Rousseau set the pattern which required the autobiographer to record the shaping influences of his childhood and the emotions of his maturity. But even as Rousseau set down his denunciation of aristocratic privilege and contrasted his real emotional life with received values, an American contemporary, Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), was forging another male life plot, which preempted much of the foreground of nineteenth-century male autobiography. Franklin's self-presentation defined for the first time the archetypal figure of the capitalist hero, rebellious against inherited privilege, scornful of inefficiency and of waste, driven by economic motives which never figured in Rousseau's wildest dreams. While Rousseau wanted to compel an inattentive society to recognize his literary and dramatic genius, Franklin describes himself as content to accumulate wealth, and to instruct the rest of the world about the moral and economic qualities which earned him his wealth, and through it status and public recognition.

Jill Ker Conway, When Memory Speaks, 1998 

The Novelist's Crutch

Many novelists use alcohol to help themselves write--to calm their anxiety, lift their inhibitions. This may work for awhile, but eventually the writing suffers. The unhappy writer then drinks more; the writing then suffers more, and so on.

Joan Acocella, The New Yorker, June 21, 2004 

J. Edgar Hoover's Legacy: A Street Agent's Perspective

      Clint Eastwood's film, "J. Edgar," came out in 2011. Starring Leonardo Di Caprio as J. Edgar Hoover, the film interested me because of its emphasis on the Lindbergh kidnapping case, and the fact I was a street agent during Hoover's last six years in office (1966-1972). The film's version of the Lindbergh case overplayed the FBI's role in the crime scene investigation near Hopewell, New Jersey as well as in the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann two and a half years later in Flemington, New Jersey. As for J. Edgar Hoover himself, except for scenes with his dominating mother (Judi Dench) and Clyde Tolson, his right-hand man who loved him (Arnie Hammer), the film did catch the flavor and essence of Hoover's 48-year career as director of the FBI as America's most famous and powerful lawman.  

     Looking back on my six years as an FBI agent, I will say this without equivocation: Hoover's agents did not imagine him as presented in the film by Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black. We did not see the director as a repressed homosexual who was scared to death of his mother. Agents saw him as a powerful figure who terrorized presidents and was so devoted to the bureau and his own image as an incorruptible crime fighter and warrior against the internal communist threat he would destroy anyone who tarnished him or the FBI. As a result, in the minds of Hoover's street agents, crime fighting almost became secondary to avoiding the director's wrath.

     Pursuant to Hoover's impossible standards of performance and agent comportment, every field agent, every day, couldn't help violate one or two of the director's thousands of rules and regulations. Agents who got caught breaking these rules, rules continuously promulgated by Hoover and his palace guards, paid the price in the form of disciplinary transfers to undesirable field offices. More than a few rules violators were fired "with prejudice." Nobody knew exactly what "with prejudice" meant except that it was not good. When agents of the Hoover era tell each other war stories, their tales are usually not about their cases. Most likely they feature in-house horror stories.

     J. Edgar Hoover's career can be viewed from the perspective of twentieth century history or from the field agent's point of view. What follows is the latter take on J. Edgar Hoover as an employer and law enforcement administrator during his last six years in office.

    Before the magnificent FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, new agents attended seven weeks of classwork in the Old Post Office Building in Washington, D.C., and seven weeks of firearms training on the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia.  Every day in D.C., FBI instructors came into the classroom armed with horror stories designed to instill fear of the director. To a man, these instructors had that "I'm-dead-but-still-walking persona". One of them, a SOG (Seat of Government) agent from the D.C. administrative headquarters, a man who conjured up the image of a demented butcher, kept reminding the class that to survive in Mr. Hoover's FBI one had to have balls made of brass. (Back then there were no females in the FBI.) I took this to mean we were in for a lot of low blows.

     New agents were reminded over and over again that the worse thing they could do was embarrass the bureau. Blowing an investigation was one thing, but embarrassing the bureau was serious. By bureau, the instructors meant J. Edgar Hoover. The director did not forget, did not forgive, and took everything personally. Every infraction--a missed bureaucratic deadline, putting a scratch on a bureau car, not reporting in to the office every two hours when not at work or at home (there were no cellphones)--constituted a personal assault on Hoover's good name. It was simply un-American to embarrass the director of the FBI.

     Hoover's ideal FBI agent consisted of a thin white male with high morals, a clean-cut appearance, and a law degree. Over the years the director had managed, through careful media manipulation, to make the G-man a cultural hero. He turned gangsters like John Dillinger, once glorified, into villains. Physically, if a job candidate didn't fit Hoover's model of the all-American agent, it didn't matter how smart, brave, or moral he was. Hoover didn't tolerate mustaches, beards, pot bellies, long hair, or missing teeth. If you had a tattoo, forget it. The director didn't accept anyone who was color-blind or had less that 20-20 vision. Short, slightly overweight, and bulldog-faced, Hoover, based on looks alone, would not have hired himself. There were a handful of black men in the bureau but no Hispanics or Asians.

     Once in the FBI, agents had to maintain a height/weight ratio that conformed to ideal life insurance policy standards. Most agents, as they approached middle age, had trouble keeping their weight under control and dreaded the monthly weigh-ins held either in the chief clerk's office or in the SAC's (special agent in charge) office under the supervision of the boss's secretary. Notwithstanding the weight restrictions, there were a lot of older agents obviously over the pound limit.

     Within the weight control program, as in all of Hoover's bureaucratic obsessions, cheating and false reporting with the knowledge and approval of the field office brass were rampant. But according to the regulations, an agent who was more than ten pounds over the weight limit two months in a row could be transferred to another office. The bureau's weight program gave the SAC a lot of power. If he wanted to unload an agent he didn't like, the boss could enforce the weight rule. So could a SOG inspector on a field office witch hunt. The office transfer, as a means of punishment, gave Hoover a powerful and arbitrary tool that disrupted families and broke up marriages. This from a never married man who disapproved of divorce.

     Director Hoover also enforced a severe and detailed dress code. Agents had to wear blue, brown, gray or black suits. He forbade pin stripe suits and colorful buttoned-down or patterned dress shirts. Approved bureau footwear did not include suede shoes, loafers, or cowboy boots.  Agents playing it safe shoe-wise went the wing-tip route. As for head wear, all agents were supposed to wear those felt, narrow-brimmed business hats even though a bareheaded President Kennedy had rendered the fedora out of style.

     In a dress code more detailed and complicated than the U.S. Constitution, an agent caught wearing a sports coat or a loud tie could get written-up. Unlike modern agents who wear jackets and ball caps emblazoned with the letters FBI, or walk around in combat gear, Hoover's men looked like 1950s insurance salesmen.

     To distinguish his agents from uniformed cops and city detectives who supposedly killed a lot of time hanging around donut shops and diners drinking coffee, Hoover forbade his agents to drink coffee on the job. Taking clandestine coffee breaks with other agents therefore required a lot of trust (agents had to be aware of office snitches) and made a common workplace ritual an act of subversion. Agents were constantly on the lookout for safe coffee drinking hideaways. Bureau coffee drinkers couldn't get attached to a single restaurant or diner because to avoid detection, they had to keep moving.

     One of Hoover's most unreasonable and counterproductive rules, a decree that reflected his lack of experience as a criminal investigator, concerned when agents could tackle the heavy paperwork burden the director had himself mandated. Between 9 AM and 5 PM, agents were only allowed to be in the field office ninety minutes. They were supposed to use this limited time to review their case files, make phone calls, and dictate reports and FD 302s (witness statements) to office stenographers. Agents were to spend the rest of the day out on the street investigating crime, tracking down fugitives, and uncovering subversion. As opposed to the image of the lazy detective hanging around the office all day drinking coffee and shooting the bull, Hoover wanted his investigators to be men of action.

     The director's office-time restriction ignored the fact that in detective work, every hour of investigation can create two hours of paperwork. To meet Hoover's strict reporting deadlines, agents had to do much of their pencil-pushing in parked cars, public libraries, restaurants, and for those brave enough to risk it, at home. Otherwise, if an agent saved all of his paperwork for the office after 5 PM, he'd end up preparing 302s and written reports well into the evening.

     In the morning, agents were expected to sign-in for work before seven. For those who worked in big city offices, that meant getting up at five. Agents were also required to log in plenty of overtime which meant the sign-in and sign-out registers never came close to reflecting reality. For example, when an agent arrived at the office at seven, the guy just ahead of him would be logging in at five-thirty. If the agent who signed in just after this person wrote down his actual time of arrival, he had committed an act called "jumping the register," a serious violation of the agent's unwritten code of conduct. In Hoover's FBI, honesty was not always the best policy.

    One of J. Edgar Hoover's greatest sins was the way he abused his personnel. From a street agent's perspective, that is Mr. Hoover's legacy.        

Cheating the Executioner

The average death row inmate lives 15 years between his sentence and his execution. Nearly a quarter of death row prisoners die of natural causes during this period.

Election Choices

In philosophy seminars, the choice is usually between good and evil. In the real world, the choice is often between a bad guy and a worse guy.

Dinesh D'Souza, author, film maker, 2018

California's Anti-Affluenza Defense Bill

     [In December 2013], after a 16-year-old boy said to be suffering from "affluenza" was sentenced to rehabilitation instead of prison for killing four people and maiming two others in a drunk-driving crash, California Assemblyman Mike Gatto introduced a bill that would prohibit attorneys from invoking "affluenza" as a defense at trial or as a mitigating factor for sentencing.

     Gatto knows there is no universally agreed upon definitions for the term. [There is also no case law that establishes affluenza as a criminal defense.] In the bill, Gatto defined affluenza as "the notion that an affluent or overly permissive upbringing prevents a defendant from fully understanding the consequences of criminal actions." [What is and what is not a viable criminal defense should be left to the courts to hammer out. This politically feel-good legislation was aimed at fixing a problem that didn't exist and usurped the discretion of judges and juries. The proposed bill was voted down in 2017.]

Robin Abcarian, the Los Angeles Times, January 15, 2014    

Opposition Research

Why waste your money looking up your family tree? Just go into politics and your opponent will do it for you.

Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Steven L. Nelson: Born to be Executed

     When he was 3-years-old, Steven L. Nelson set fire to his mother's bed. His father abused the boy, and by the time he was ten, Steven was being medicated for attention deficit disorder. But the child's emotional and personality problems were deeper than that, and the drugs only made him more hyperactive and impossible to control.

     As a teen, Steven continued to be a disciplinary problem in school and got into trouble with the law. He seemed to enjoy disturbing the peace, causing trouble, and inflicting pain on others. He ended up in juvenile detention centers in Oklahoma and Texas. One didn't have to be an expert in deviant behavior to predict bad things for this young man as well as the people unfortunate enough to cross his path. Had he been accidentally run over and killed by a bus, it would have been a gift to society.

     On March 3, 2011 in North Arlington, Texas, the 25-year-old sadistic sociopath, in the course of robbing a Baptist church, murdered the pastor, 28-year-old Clint Dobson. He beat, bound, then with a plastic bag, suffocated his victim. Nelson also viciously assaulted Judy Elliott, the church secretary. Left for dead, she survived the attack.

     A week after the murder of Pastor Dobson and the attempted murder of his secretary, the police arrested Nelson. Although this cold-blooded killer was off the street, he was still an extremely dangerous man. While incarcerated in the Tarrant County Jail in Fort Worth, Texas, Nelson, while in the recreation area of the lockup, attacked another inmate. Nelson beat 30-year-old Jonathan Holden with a broom handle, then strangled the mentally retarded man to death with a blanket. After murdering Holden, Nelson showed-off to inmates who had witnessed the homicide by doing the Chuck Berry hop, using the broomstick as his guitar.

     Knowing that he was going to be convicted for murdering Pastor Dobson, Nelson, with nothing to lose, had killed another man just for the thrill of it.

     On October 8, 2012, after a week-long trial, a jury in Fort Worth, Texas found Steven Nelson guilty of capital murder in the brutal, sadistic killing of Pastor Dobson. Following the verdict, the penalty phase of the murder trial got underway before the same jurors. The jury would have to decide whether to sentence this man to life in prison without parole or condemn him to die by lethal injection.

     After a week of testimony from prosecution witnesses, Nelson's defense attorneys put experts on the stand in a futile attempt to make their client slightly more sympathetic than the vicious, recreational murderer that he was.

     Dr. Antoinette McGarrahan, a psychiatrist with the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, labeled Nelson a violent psychopath and said he will pose a danger to people exposed to him in prison. This prosecution witness also debunked Nelson's claim that he had multiple personalities. On October 16, 2012, the jury, after deliberating Nelson's fate for 90 minutes, issued their sentence verdict: death by lethal injection.

     Nelson, true to form, was not done creating havoc. After sheriff deputies placed him into a courthouse holding pen, he flooded the cell, and the courtroom, with black, fire-retardant infused water from the sprinkler head he had broken. Courthouse personnel scrambled to save boxes of evidence from being ruined by the foul-smelling liquid. As the courthouse people rushed to save the evidence, they could hear Nelson howling like a wolf in his cell. Firefighters who responded to the scene shut off the water to the sprinkler system.

     As of this writing, Steven L. Nelson awaits his date with the executioner.

A Criminal Atrocity in China

     On August 24, 2013, outside the Shanxi Province town of Linfen in rural northeast China, a woman grabbed 6-year-old Guo Bin as he walked along a path not far from his home. This woman lured the boy into a field where, in a shocking act of brutality, she used a sharp instrument to gouge out his eyes. Several hours later, a member of Guo Bin's family found the boy, his face covered in blood, wandering in a field on the family farm.

     In China, due to a donor shortage, corneas were worth thousands of dollars on the black market. As a result, investigators considered the possibility that the boy had been victimized by an organ trafficker. The authorities abandoned this theory when at the site of the attack, crime scene investigators recovered the boy's eyeballs with the corneas in tact. Police officers also recovered a bloody purple shirt presumably worn by the assailant.

     A witness reported seeing the boy that afternoon with an unidentified woman wearing a purple shirt. According to Guo Bin, the woman who attacked him spoke with an accent from outside the region. She also had dyed blond hair. The victim told investigators that this woman had used a sharp stick to cut out his eyeballs. Based on the nature of the boy's wounds however, doctors believed he had been attacked with a knife.

     According to physicians, Guo Bin, with a visual prosthesis, might someday regain partial vision. Following the attack, the boy's family received $160,000 in donations from members of the public.

     Six days after the gruesome assault, 41-year-old Zhang Huiyang, the victim's aunt, killed herself by jumping into a well. While Guo Bin did not identify his aunt as the assailant, and she did not match his description of the attacker, the authorities, through DNA, linked her to the purple shirt found at the crime scene.

     The boy's mother, in speaking to an Associated Press reporter, pointed out that in the days and weeks following the assault, her traumatized son had been disoriented. "It is easy to understand why he wasn't clear about the situation," she said.

     Since there was no rational motive behind such a senseless assault, the Chinese authorities assumed the boy's aunt was mentally ill.

The Ghostwriter

A ghostwriter who has only a lay knowledge of the subject will be able to keep asking the same questions as the lay reader, and will open up the potential readership of the book to a much wider audience.

Robert Harris, The Ghostwriter, 2010

One's Writing Vocabulary

All of us possesses a reading vocabulary as big as a lake but draw from a writing vocabulary as small as a pond. [Our speaking vocabulary is somewhere in between.]

Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, 2006

Behind the Wheel: Drunk and Narcissistic

     On October 13, 2015, 23-year-old Whitney Beall, while driving from one bar to another in her 2015 Toyota Corolla in Lakeland, Florida, recorded her alcohol intoxication by video on the social media app Periscope. "Let's have fun! Let's have fun!" she repeatedly exclaimed into the little camera. Also: "Hi everybody in different countries. I really hope you don't mind that I drive, because in the USA it is really important."

     Beall declared herself unfit to drive when she said, " I'm driving drunk and this is not cool. I haven't been arrested yet, and I really don't hope so." A few minutes later she announced this into the video camera: "I'm driving home drunk, let's see if I get a DUI."

     Several people watching the live-steamed video called 911 to report the drunken driver who was exhibiting her condition to the world.

     Lakeland patrol officer Mike Kellner spotted a 2015 Toyota Corolla being driven on the wrong side of the road. He pulled the car over and encountered the social media sensation, Whitney Beall.

     Beall and her car reeked of alcohol, and her eyes were bloodshot and glassy. In addressing the officer, Beall made a series of slurred, rambling statements that included the claim she was lost and driving on a flat tire.

     After failing the field sobriety test, Officer Kellner took the suspect into custody. After refusing to take a breathalyzer test, officers booked Beall into the Polk County Jail on the charge of driving under the influence. It was her first DUI arrest.

     The day following her DUI charge, Beall made bond and was released from custody. To a reporter she said, "It was a big mistake and I'm learning my lesson." Fortunately, her "big mistake" and learning experience didn't kill someone.

     In February 2016, Beall pleaded no contest to driving under the influence. The judge sentenced her to a six month license suspension, ten days of vehicle impoundment, and a year of probation.

Crime Statistics

Criminal statistics are based on recorded criminality. This criminality consists of offenses which, having come to the notice of public authorities through complaints lodged by private citizens or directly as a result of police patrol, etc., are registered by such authorities. This recorded criminality is only a sample of the total criminality, the latter being an unknown quantity. [Police agencies are notorious for fudging local crime statistics to make it appear they are preventing crime and the jurisdiction is much safer than it really is.]

Thorsten Sellen, "The Significance of Records of Crime," in The Criminal in Society, Leon Radzinowicz and Marvin Wolfgang, Editors, 1971 

Finding Stories

There are stories in everything. I've gotten some of my best yarns from park benches, lampposts and newspaper stands.

William Sydney Porter, pen name, O. Henry (1892-1910) American short story writer known for his surprise endings

Against the Death Penalty

Our criminal justice system is fallible. We know it, even though we don't like to admit it. It is fallible despite the best efforts of most within it to do justice. And this fallibility is the most compelling, persuasive, and winning argument against a death penalty.

Eliot Spitzer, former governor of New York, 2018

History of Fingerprint Testimony

As finger print evidence is comparatively new, difficulty is frequently experienced in convincing a jury that the testimony of finger print experts is competent and positive evidence.

Frederick Kuhne, The Fingerprint Instructor, 1916

Serial Killer Culture

In the 1990s there were all sorts of secondary stories related to serial killing. First was the movie Silence of the Lambs, which introduced into mass consciousness the idea of FBI profilers and the character of serial killer Hannibal Lecter. The controversies of Bred Easton Ellis's book American Psycho, the marketing of serial killer trading cards, AOL's closing of Sondra London's serial killer web site, the market for artworks created by serial killers, and online auctions of their artifacts all contributed to a prevailing serial killer culture.

Peter Vronsky, Serial Killers: the Method and Madness of Monsters, 2004

Loyal Readers

Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR on the covers of their books.

Stephen King, Bag of Bones, 1998

Pathologist Dr. Michael Baden

I thought I could contribute more to society by looking at people on the autopsy table and feeding back the findings so that lots of people could benefit, rather than just treating patients one at a time.

Dr. Michael Baden, forensic pathologist, 2005

Forensic Science Practitioners

Practitioners of forensic science fall generally into three groups: police officers who arrive at the scene of a crime and whose job it is to secure the physical evidence; crime scene technicians responsible for finding, photographing, and packaging that physical evidence for crime lab submission; and forensic scientists working in public and private crime laboratories who analyze the evidence and, if the occasion arises, testify in court as expert witnesses. While uniformed police officers and detectives may be trained in the recognition and handling of physical evidence, they are not scientists and do not work under laboratory conditions. As a result, a lot can--and does--go wrong between the crime scene investigation and the courtroom.

The Golf Shot

     Jeff Fleming lived in a house adjacent to the 16th hole fairway on the Lakeridge Golf Course in Reno, Nevada. In September 2012, when a golfer hit a ball through one of Fleming's windows, the 53-year-old imposed a unique penalty on the wayward ball striker. As the golfer addressed his dropped ball not far from the window he had broken, Mr. Fleming made a shot of his own. He fired a shotgun at the terrified golfer who dropped his club and ran for his life. Mr. Fleming, apparently, had not yelled "fore!"

     Fortunately for the golfer, Mr. Fleming was off-target with his shot as well. The golfer, hit by a few pellets from a single shotgun round, was treated at a nearby emergency room for minor arm and leg injuries.

     Immediately after the golf course shooting, Jeff Fleming drove to his attorney's office to turn himself in. Police officers arrested him at the law office. A Washoe County prosecutor charged Mr. Fleming with assault with a deadly weapon, a serious crime that could put Fleming behind bars for twenty years.

     In October 2013, the man who fired a shotgun at the golfer who broke his window pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of battery with a deadly weapon. Even so, he faced a maximum sentence of ten years in prison. However, when Fleming was sentenced in December, 2013, the judge put him on probation. The fact he didn't have a criminal record, and had expressed remorse shortly after the shooting, kept him out of prison. 

Pro Gun

I simply like guns because you can't shoot people without them.

Florence King (1936-2016) Novelist, Essayist 

The Donald Wilder Justified Homicide Case

     Caleb A. Gordley, a 16-year-old junior at Parkview High School, lived with his father and his 13-year-old sister in Sterling, Virginia, a suburban community on the Maryland state line in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area. His mother Jennea lived elsewhere. Caleb played on the varsity basketball team and aspired to be a rapper.

     Just before midnight on Saturday, March 16, 2013, after being grounded for several days, Caleb sneaked out of his bedroom and walked down the street to a party at a friend's house. For the next two hours he joined the others in drinking shots of vodka.

     Caleb left the party at two in the morning and headed home. The boy was so intoxicated he climbed through an unlocked window at the rear of a dwelling two doors from his house. When Caleb entered his neighbor's place he triggered a motion detection intrusion sensor that awoke the homeowner, Donald Wilder. The 43-year-old lived in the suburban house that looked like the Gordley home.

     The burglar alarm activation caused Mr. Wilder to grab the 40-caliber pistol he kept near his bed. From the top of the stairs, Mr. Wilder saw, in the light produced by the intrusion alarm, the figure of a six-foot person standing in his kitchen. The homeowner yelled at the intruder to get out of his house. Caleb, probably thinking that he was being yelled at by his father, ignored the command and headed up the stairway.

     With an intruder walking up the steps toward him, Mr. Wilder fired a warning shot to turn the invader back. The shot, however, did not cause the home intruder to retreat. When Caleb brushed past the homeowner at the top of the stairs, Mr. Wilder fired a second shot. The bullet hit Caleb in the back. The boy turned around and said, "You just shot me." He turned back around, took a few steps, collapsed and died.

     The next morning, Shawn Gordley awoke to find that his son was not in the house. A little later he heard the news about a fatal shooting that had occurred in the neighborhood. The father did not connect the incident to his missing son. Later that day the bad news reached him.

     In speaking to a local television reporter on the Monday following his son's death, Mr. Gordley said, "I definitely don't blame him [Donald Wilder]. I know he was trying to protect his family. I forgive him." Caleb's mother, Jennea Gordley, about a week after her son's homicide, said, "It was not absolutely necessary for my son to lose his life." Rather than suggesting measures to keep alcohol out of the hands of teenagers, she called for better training for gun owners.

     On September 10, 2013, following an investigation by the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office, Commonwealth Attorney Jim Plowman announced his decision not to file criminal charges against Mr. Wilder. The prosecutor believed Mr Wilder had a reasonable fear for his life. Based on the doctrine of self defense, the case was deemed a justifiable homicide.

     Shortly before the Loundoun County prosecutor's announcement, Shawn and Jennea Gordley received copies of the sheriff's office investigative report. Caleb's parents, after reading the police report, questioned Mr. Wilder's judgment. Jennea Gordley, in speaking to a reporter with ABC News, said, "If you're really in fear of danger of your life and your family's life, why would you allow a person that appeared to be dazed walk right past you and then you shoot him in the back?"

     Shawn Gordley, having once forgiven Mr. Wilder, said, "He could have shot Caleb in the leg. Instead he lined himself up at the perfect angle to shoot a hollow point bullet through my son's lung and explode his chest and then a fourth shot at his head for good measure."

     Donald Wilder, in a written statement wrote: "As you can imagine, the incident was an unfortunate tragedy on every level."

     While Shawn and Jennea Gordley questioned the necessity for the fatal shooting, they did not call for the criminal prosecution of Mr. Wilder. On that issue, Jennea Gordley said, "Do I hate him [Mr. Wilder]? No. Do I want him put away? No. I don't think that's going to solve anything."  

The Sungee Kwon Suicide-Murder Case

     In 2015, 45-year-old Dr. Raja Fayad, a native of Syria who earned his medical degree in that country, decided to enter academia rather than to practice medicine. That decision brought him to the United States where he taught physiology and anatomy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2008, Dr. Fayad and his wife Sunghee Kwon moved into a house on Lake Murray in suburban Lexington County outside of Columbia, South Carolina.

     Dr. Fayad, an expert on colon cancer, moved to South Carolina to assume his new position as the graduate director and head of the Applied Physiology Division of the University of South Carolina's Arnold School of Public Health.

     While Dr. Fayad enjoyed success in his professional life, his marriage to Sunghee Kwon had fallen apart. Although they were divorced in 2012, the couple continued to occupy the house on Lake Murray. In late 2014, however, Dr. Fayad moved out of the dwelling into a suite of rooms at a nearby residence motel.

     At one in the afternoon of Thursday February 5, 2015, Dr. Fayad's former wife showed up at his office on the fourth floor of the Arnold School of Public Health Building in downtown Columbia a few blocks from the Statehouse. She came armed with a 9 mm pistol.

     A few minutes after Sunghee Kwon's arrival at the university, police officers responded to reports from people who had heard the sound of gunshots coming from Dr. Fayad's office and adjacent laboratory.

     Officers that afternoon discovered the dead bodies of Dr. Fayad and his 46-year-old wife. He had been shot several times in the upper torso. After murdering her ex-spouse, Sunghee Kwon took her own life by shooting herself in the stomach.

     The 9 mm pistol, its magazine empty, lay near the bodies. There were no witnesses to the murder-suicide. 

Social Media's Role in Jury Selection

     These days, the process of jury selection has been transformed by the prevalence of online conversations. Choosing the best jurors for your case no longer depends exclusively on each person's answers to a questionnaire and their responses during the voir dire interviews.

     Due diligence when empaneling a jury now includes checking each potential juror's social media posts to ascertain the person's perspective as it affects the case. This background checking process involves looking deeper than simply searching for any comments about the actual case that is being tried.

     You also need to examine social media profiles to gain an overall view of each person's general worldview, lifestyle and political stance. For example, a potential juror with very strong online statements related to gun control may not be able to be unbiased when seated on a jury for a gun-related crime.

Peter Hecht, Magna Legal Services, October 24, 2016

A Good Story is Not Enough

You can't just come out and say what you have to say. That's what people do on airplanes, when a man plops down next to you, spills peanuts all over the place and tells you about what his boss did to him the day before. You know how your eyes glaze over when you hear a story like that? That's because of the way he's telling the story. You need a good way to tell your story.

Adair Lara, Naked, Drunk and Writing, 2009

Novelist Carl Hiaasen

Any good story will have some humor somewhere, whether it's in the situation, the dialogue, the action. But if I want laugh-out-loud funny, I'm going to grab anything by Carl Hiaasen, and I know I'm going to get a good story with memorably quirky characters along with the laughs.

Nora Roberts, The New York Times Book Review, February 11, 2015 

The Mind of the Terrorist

Religion allows people to feel qualified in acting out their primal instincts, that is, to assault, destroy, rape, and murder others who they judge as being different and inferior to themselves.

Robert Black, 2005

Violent Crime as Entertainment

American culture as a whole has cultivated a taste for violence that seems to be insatiable. We are a people obsessed with violence, and consequently, our entertainment industry is driven by such violence. The violence of our popular culture reflected in movies, TV programs, magazines, and fact or fiction books in the latter part of the twentieth century has made the shocking realism of this violence a routine task that we all face. Our own sense of humanity is anesthetized to the point of losing consciousness. [The trend has continued into the twenty-first century. A recent study showed that movies rated R in the 1990s are much milder than their modern counterparts. Moreover, the Internet is a venue for people who enjoy the aftermath of criminal deviance and raw violence.]

Steven A. Egger, The Killers Among Us, 1998

Conspiracy Laws

Making it a crime to conspire with another person or persons to commit a crime gives the government too much power. Law enforcement should only be concerned with crimes committed or attempted. People should not go to prison for thinking about or planning a crime. The conspiracy crime legislation came into existence in the late 1960s to take down the Mafia. Used in combination with electronic surveillance and the witness protection program, it played a major role in diminishing the power and influence of organized crime. The overuse of conspiracy laws has created a powerful federal prosecutorial bureaucracy frequently used by politicians in power against their political enemies. These laws invite governmental abuse of power and should be abolished. 

Television Versus Books

Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of television is the madness of human life.

Camille Paglia, Author, Social Critic, 1996

Crimes Against Women

Crimes against women are often committed by people close to them: around two-thirds of murdered women are killed by family members or intimate partners, while roughly 10 percent are killed by strangers. (For comparison's sake, about a third of male homicide victims are killed by people they don't know.)

Rachel Monroe, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession, 2019

Origins of the Pedophile Priest

 In the early fourth century, the Council of Elvira, in Spain, became the first provincial body to require priests to renounce sex. But it wasn't until 1123 that priestly celibacy became church-wide law. Pope Callistus II called hundreds of church leaders to Rome for the First Lateran Council. "We absolutely forbid priests, deacons or sub-deacons to live with concubines and wives," the council declared in its canons that year. "Marriage contracts between such persons should be made void and the persons ought to undergo penance." The new laws, which incited strenuous protest from clergy, did less to eliminate sex than to drive it underground. Many male clergy continued to have secret wives, concubines, gay lovers, illegitimate children and, in at least one London parish, a special brothel where "only men with a tonsure, the shaven circle representing Christ's crown of thorns, were admitted." The abuse of children by priests, which mushroomed into a global scandal in the twenty-first century, is seen by many critics as the gravest unintended consequence of mandatory celibacy.

Ariel Sabar, Veritas: A Harvard Professor, A Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife, 2020

The Immigrant Protagonist

During the late 1990s, we saw the rise of a new literary subject: the postcolonial immigrant. In the metropoles of the North Atlantic--in London and New York, Paris and Toronto--the protagonist emerged: a parvenu, an outsider with a sturdy work ethic, a grocer or taxi driver seeking to make it in his or her new home. There were geographical variations, but central to these narratives was the direction of movement. The postcolonial subject moved from the outside in, from the former colony to the metropole, from beyond to the imperial center. Gatsby-like, he or she often tested the outer limits of the American dream--that still regnant myth about capitalist self-making. The narrative arc was that of the arriviste: a story not only of assimilation and the arduous passage toward citizenship but also of accumulation and the trials of "making it."

David Marcus, "Dangling Man," Bookforum, Dec/Jan, 2015 

The Unlikeable Witness

In a medical malpractice case, our expert was a Harvard-educated, well-credentialed expert who literally "wrote the book" on his topic. However, he was also an arrogant jerk--rude, demanding, and a total pain in the ass. As we approached the trial, I truly dreaded my interactions with him and could not wait to get the case over with so that I would never have to speak to him again. He did what we asked of him--he came and testified for our side and I thought, based on his credentials, that he was an impressive witness. However, his personality was still the same at trial and we lost the case. The judge allowed us to talk to the jury after the verdict and it was pretty clear the jury hated him too--he might have had prestigious credentials, but they didn't like his arrogance and felt that he was condescending toward the defendant doctor. Instead of persuading the jury, he ended up generating sympathy for the defendant. The take-away from this experience? If I don't like the witness, I should not expect the jury to like him either.

Bruce James, Trial Attorney, 2004

"Crooks" Versus "Criminals"

There's a difference between criminals and crooks. Crooks steal. Criminal blow some guy's brains out. I'm a crook.

Ronald Biggs (1929-2013) The man behind England's Great Train Robbery of 1963

Society Made Me Do It

Everything in the environment has been blamed for crime. I have a file that lists everything including cholesterol, dungeons and dragons, cycles of the moon, and global warming. The psychological field has promulged this view that forces outside the individual propels them to crime. Crime resides in the mind of the person.

Dr. Stanton Samenow, Inside the Criminal Mind, 2014

Dystopian Science Fiction

     "It's so easy to make money with science fiction stories that say civilization is garbage, our institutions will never be helpful, and your neighbors are all useless sheep who could never be counted on in a crisis," says David Brin, a science fiction writer who thinks we've gotten too fond of speculative technological bummers. Movies like "Blade Runner," "The Matrix," "Children of Men," "The Hunger Games," and "Divergent," all express some version of this dark world view.

     Neal Stephenson, the author of Cryponomicon, usually writes exactly those kinds of dystopian stories. In his fiction, he tends to explore the dark side of technology. But a couple of years ago he got a public wake up call.

     On stage at a writer's conference, Stephenson was complaining that there were no big scientific projects to inspire people these days. But Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University, shot back, "You're the one slacking off." By "you", Crow meant science fiction writers.

Adam Wernick, pri.org, July 29, 2014 

Criminology

     Criminology professors don't agree on anything except this: There is no such thing as a good criminology textbook. Some texts focus too much on the criminal justice system, others criminal law, and others on crime typology. Criminalists also criticize criminology texts for being too theoretical. (They are also too expensive.)

     Perhaps the problem is not the textbooks, but the subject itself. It's possible that criminology is an unnecessary discipline, a redundant mix of criminal law, political science, sociology, and abnormal psychology. Criminology was mostly taught as a sub-topic of sociology until the explosion of criminal justice degree programs in the early 1970s. It's a useless discipline no one pays any attention to. As a college major it's a total waste of tuition money.

Safecracking

     The first and easiest way to gain entry into a safe is, if the safe is small enough, to remove it from the premises where it can be worked on without worry of detection. [A "safe" is designed to protect its contents from heat. A "money chest" is designed to protect its contents from theft.]

     The safe door is the strongest point of a small safe. By turning a small safe upside down, you can often use a sledgehammer and chisel or a pick and axe and, by brute force, smash a hole into the bottom of the safe.

     If you drill a small hole in one corner of the safe door, thereby missing all of the extra anti-theft protection, you may be able to peel back the layer of steel [covering the safe insulation material] exposing any locking mechanism. This peeling is accomplished with a pry bar, chisel and hammer. [It's a matter of popping the spot welds.]

     To make certain that the safe contains valuable items, you may first want to go on a scouting expedition. This is accomplished by drilling a small hole into one of the four walls of the safe and inserting a small video camera with a light unit to illuminate the contents of the safe.

Mauro J. Corvasce and Joseph R. Paglino, Modus Operandi, 1995