The Donna Scrivo Murder Case

     In 1999, Ramsay Scrivo graduated from De La Salle Collegiate High School in St. Clair Shores, a suburban community just east of Detroit, Michigan. He earned a bachelor's degree from Wayne State University four years later. After working briefly as an accountant, Ramsay quit after a supervisor criticized his work.

     After working in the building trade, Scrivo, in the spring of 2013, started a lawn maintenance service. About that time his parents Daniel and Donna Scrivo helped him purchase a condo in St. Clair Shores.

     Notwithstanding the support he received from his parents, Ramsay Scrivo had serious problems. He was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic who suffered depression and bouts of uncontrolled anger when he was off his medication. When he wasn't on his anti-psychotic meds he believed people were trying to poison him. Moreover, he thought someone had implanted a tiny microphone in one of his teeth. Following a simple assault conviction the judge placed Scrivo on probation.

     Ramsay Scrivo's troubled life took a turn for the worse when his father died of an illness in May 2013. After he threatened to hang himself a judge granted his mother Donna Scrivo guardianship of her son. He agreed to mental health treatment at St. John Hospital in Detroit. After 90 days of treatment Ramsay Scrivo was released from the medical center. As long as he took his medication he wasn't dangerous. But almost all schizophrenics, at one time or another, quit their medication because of the side effects. Donna Scrivo moved into Ramsay's condo in St. Clair Shores. She was a registered nurse.

     On Sunday, January 26, 2014 Donna Scrivo reported her son missing. Late in the afternoon of Thursday, January 30 a motorist in China Township 50 miles northeast of Detroit saw a human head that had rolled out of a garbage bag that someone had dumped along the side of the rural road. Inside three more garbage bags found nearby police officers discovered body parts, items of clothing and charred documents.

     Just before five in the morning of Friday, January 31, 2014, a motorist saw another garbage bag alongside an Interstate 94 ramp in nearby St. Clair Township. Inside the bag officers found more body parts.The FBI, through fingerprints, identified the remains as coming from one person, Ramsay Scrivo.

     A neighbor reported seeing Donna Scrivo carrying several garbage bags out of the condo shortly before she reported Ramsay missing. Crime lab technicians found traces of blood in the dwelling as well as in Donna's SUV. There was also evidence in the house that someone had used bleach in an effort to scrub away bloodstains.

     A gas station surveillance camera recorded Donna in her 1995 Chevy Blazer near one of the dump sites.

     Later on the day of the gruesome discoveries deputies with the Macomb County Sheriff's Office arrested Ramsay's 59-year-old mother on charges of mutilation of a corpse and the removal of a dead body without permission from a medical examiner. If convicted of the corpse mutilation she faced up to ten years in prison. The misdemeanor body removal offense came with a maximum sentence of one year in jail.

     On February 3, 2014 at her arraignment the judge appointed Donna Scrivo an attorney and set her bail at $100,000. If bailed out of the Macomb County Jail she would undergo random drug and alcohol testing and would not be allowed to leave the state. The judge also ordered a mental health evaluation.

     At a press conference following the arraignment, a Macomb County prosecutor said that further charges could be filed in the case depending upon the medical examiner's cause and manner of death findings. Not long after that statement the prosecutor charged Donna Scrivo with first-degree murder.

    Donna Scrivo went on trial in May 2015 for the murder and dismemberment of her son. The defendant, as a witness on her own behalf, told the jury that a masked man had entered the condo, pointed a gun at her head, murdered her son then cut up the victim's body with a saw. The prosecutor, on cross-examination, ripped her story to shreds.

     The jurors, following a short deliberation found Donna Scrivo guilty of first-degree premeditated murder. On June 23, 2015, the Macomb County judge sentenced the 61-year-old to life in prison without parole.

The Carla Hague Poisoning Case

     In 2013, Judge Charles Hague lived with his wife of 45 years outside of Jefferson, Ohio in the northeastern part of the state. Since 1993 he had been an Ashtabula County common pleas juvenile/probate judge. Carla, his 70-year-old wife, had retired years earlier as a nurse. The judge and Carla, parents of grown children, enjoyed a reputation in the community as outstanding citizens.

     As is so often the case, outward signs of domestic tranquility are misleading. This unfortunate reality applied to Mr. and Mrs. Hague. The problem within that marriage exploded to the surface on September 15, 2013 when Carla telephoned one of her sons. She said the judge had become ill after consuming a glass of wine. Upon arrival at the house the son took one look at his father and dialed 911.

     Paramedics rushed the stricken judge to a local hospital from where medical personnel flew him to the Cleveland Clinic for emergency care. Following several days of treatment in Cleveland the judge returned home to recuperate.

     Judge Hague's relatives, on September 19, 2013 notified the Ashtabula County Sheriff's Office of foul play suspected in the judge's sudden illness four days earlier. More specifically, the relatives accused Mrs. Hague of spiking her husband's wine with antifreeze. (A toxicological analysis of the judge's blood confirmed the presence of ethylene glycol, a toxic ingredient in antifreeze.)

     Sheriff's deputies arrested Carla Hague on December 2, 2013 on suspicion of attempted murder. Officers booked her into the Ashtabula County Jail. Eighteen days later an Ashtabula County grand jury indicted the suspect of contaminating a substance for human consumption. She also stood accused of attempted murder.

     Carla Hague did not deny putting the antifreeze into her husband's wine. Her intent, she said, was not to kill the judge but to make him slightly ill. He suffered from pulmonary fibrosis, a serious respiratory condition. In Carla's opinion, her husband had been adding to his health problem by drinking too much. She hoped that if the wine made him ill he would cut back on his use of alcohol.

     At her arraignment Carla Hague pleaded not guilty to the charge of attempted murder. She posted her $100,000 surety bond on December 24, 2013.

     On June 16, 2014 the local prosecutor, with Judge Hague's consent, allowed the defendant to plead guilty to felonious assault. In speaking to a reporter judge Hague said, "I have no anger or animosity. I am beyond that. I'm glad to have this huge black spot behind us. I have moved on with my life. Carla can get on with hers."

     Following the guilty plea the judge sentenced Carla Hague to two years in prison with eligibility for release in six months.

The Gregory Graf Murder Case

     Jessica Padgett, a 33-year-old mother of three, was last seen at 12:45 in the afternoon of Friday November 21, 2014 by fellow employees at the Duck Duck Goose Daycare Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Surveillance camera footage revealed that 15 minutes after she left the the center her car was returned to the daycare parking lot by a man whose face was not caught on camera.

     Police and volunteers in the eastern Pennsylvania community searched several days without finding a trace of the missing woman. Investigators feared foul play.

     On Wednesday November 26, five days after Padgett went missing police officers, while executing a search warrant in and around the house in Allen Township where her mother and stepfather resided, found her remains buried behind a shed on the 7-acre plot of land.

     On the day the body was recovered police officers took the victim's stepfather, 53-year-old Gregory R. Graf, into custody on suspicion of murder. At the time Jessica Padgett went missing her mother was in Florida.

     Graf, a dedicated hunter who grew marijuana on his property owned a local fencing company. Under police questioning he initially denied any knowledge of his stepdaughter's disappearance and murder. He said he had no idea how her body ended up in the ground on his land. But when detectives pressed Graf with inconsistencies in his story and confronted him with physical evidence that linked him to the disappearance and murder he broke down and confessed.

     Graf admitted shooting Padgett in the back of the head shortly after she left the daycare center that day. Regarding his motive, he was vague. Investigators believed Graf had raped the victim before he killed her. As it turned out detectives had the order of these acts reversed.

     Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli charged Gregory Graf with first-degree murder. The judge denied the suspect bail.

     On December 5, 2014, a search of Graf's computer revealed a video of the suspect having sex with his stepdaughter's corpse. This act of necrophilia on the remains of a woman he had murdered for that purpose made Graf, under Pennsylvania law, eligible for the death penalty.

     Following the discovery of the postmortem sex video the prosecutor added the charge of abuse of corpse.

     At his arraignment Graf asked the judge to appoint him a defense attorney. The defendant said he didn't want to take resources from his family to pay for a lawyer. The judge denied this request on the grounds the suspect had enough money to pay for his own defense.

     On November 13, 2015, following Graf's four-day trial the jury found him guilty of first-degree murder. In arriving at this verdict jurors deliberated less than ten minutes. The conviction brought a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Vigilante Justice: Ellie Nesler's Short, Troubled Life

     In 1952, Ellie Starr Nesler was born in Jamestown, California, a gold mining community in the northern part of the state. Her family was poor, and as a teenager she worked for a local farmer driving a tractor and digging ditches. Her first marriage ended quickly in divorce. She survived on welfare and part time jobs.

     Ellie Nesler's second husband was a gold miner who took her and their two young children--William and Rebecca--to Liberia in West Africa where he hoped to strike it rich mining gold. When civil war broke out in that country Ellie and the children returned to California. Her husband remained in Africa.

     In 1987, while residing in Jamestown, Ellie Nesler befriended 31-year-old Daniel Driver, a member of her church. Mr. Driver took an intense interest in Ellie's 5-year-old son William and soon became like a father to the boy. Unbeknownst to Ellie Nesler, Mr. Driver was a serial pedophile who was grooming her unsuspecting son for sex.

     In the summer of 1988, Daniel Driver and Ellie Nesler's 6-year-old son attended a two-week summer church camp. When the boy returned home he was a different person--sullen and argumentative. Several months later the boy told his mother that Daniel Driver had repeatedly sexually molested him at the summer camp.

     In 1992, a Tuolumne County, California prosecutor charged Daniel Driver with sexually molesting Ellie Nesler's son and three other boys. On April 2, 1993 Ellie Nesler hid a .25-caliber pistol in her purse and entered the Tuolumne County Court House to attend a preliminary hearing on the Driver sex abuse case. (In those days court houses did not have entrance metal detectors and visitors were not searched.) During a break in the proceeding Ellie Nesler walked up to the defendant and from point blank range shot him in the head and neck, killing him on the spot. Sheriffs Deputies immediately took her into custody.

     When questioned by detectives, Ellie Nesler said, "He deserved to die. Maybe I'm not God, but I'll tell you what--I'm the closest damn thing to it for all the other little boys." When asked why she had murdered the accused molester, she said she had no confidence that her son and the other victims would receive justice in Tuolumne County.

     For some in the Jamestown community, Ellie Nesler was a hero for exacting her own justice against a predatory pedophile. Others condemned her for taking the law into her own hands.

     On July 14, 1993, just three months after the 41-year-old defendant killed the suspected sex offender a Tuolumne County jury found Ellie Nesler guilty of voluntary manslaughter. The judge sentenced her to ten years at the women's prison in Chowchilla, California. After the sentence Nesler said, "I'm sorry that I killed someone and that I'm not with my children. But on the other hand, I wish the judicial system would have taken care of it. I wish I wouldn't have had to."

     A year after Nesler's conviction a California appellate court overturned her conviction on grounds of jury misconduct. In 1995, Ellie Nesler pleaded guilty to manslaughter in return for a three-year sentence. Because she had been diagnosed with breast cancer the judge agreed to the lighter sentence.

    Ellie Nesler had been out of prison about a year when, in 1999, the USA cable network aired a movie about her called, "Judgment Day: The Ellie Nesler Story."

     Following her prison stretch in Chowchilla, California life did not go well for Ellie Nesler. In 2002 a judge sentenced her to six years in prison after she pleaded guilty to the possession and sale of methamphetamine. Claiming that she wouldn't have received a fair trial in Tuolumne County, Nesler returned to prison maintaining her innocence.

     While serving her time at Chowchilla, Elli's 23-year-old son William stomped a man to death in Jamestown. He committed the murder just 30 days after he had been released from a 30-day sentence for an earlier assault.  In 2005 the judge sentenced him to 25 years to life.

     In 2006 Ellie Nesler received an early release from prison. On Christmas day 2008 she died of cancer at the U. C. Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. She was 56.

A Righteous Shooting

     At eight-forty on Sunday morning November 30, 2014, a minister (not identified in the media) living with his wife and three young children on a rural road near Valley Center, Kansas, was forced to make a life and death decision.

     Alerted to an intrusion by his activated  home burglary alarm, the pastor ran into his kitchen to find a window shattered and a man about to enter the house. The minister, to protect  himself and his family, grabbed his handgun and opened fire.

     The intruder immediately retreated and ran off. Deputies with the Sedgwick County Sheriff's Office in responding to the home burglary call came upon a man lying on the side of the road not far from the break-in. Officers rushed the bleeding man to the nearest emergency room.

     Police identified the burglar who was shot while breaking into the pastor's house as Cory Landon. Lucky for him, he had been struck by a single bullet that grazed his forehead. After he was treated at the hospital and released deputies booked Landon into the Sedgwick County Jail on the charge of aggravated burglary. (In Kansas and most states intruding into a dwelling is a more serious offense than breaking into a commercial building.)

     Landon told the arresting officers that he and a few of his friends had been camping out in the area of the break-in.

     Neighbors praised the pastor for his bold anti-intrusion action. Faced with the same situation they all said they would have used deadly force. The neighbors did not believe the pastor's decision, given his position in the community, was immoral. He had reacted as a father and a husband, not as a man of the cloth. "That's an armed citizen taking care of business," one of the neighbors told a local report.

      As for the burglar, breaking into an intrusion-alarmed dwelling in rural Kansas in broad daylight was dangerously stupid.

     In 2015 Cory Landon pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a short prison term followed by probation.

The Infamous Hello Kitty Terrorist Case

    Picture ten thousand elementary school teachers and administrators being shaken through a massive intelligence strainer with openings just large enough for people with IQs over 80 to fall through. When imagining the three or four public educators who remain in the big sieve, think of the drooling idiots who run the kindergarten program at the Mount Carmel Area School District 88 miles northwest of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The trouble is, you can't picture these people because on the surface they look and act like folks who have average intelligence and common sense. One would assume that because these educators are in positions of authority over children they can be trusted not to make mind-bogglingly stupid decisions. In public education, however, this is an invalid assumption.

     On January 10, 2013, as a five-year-old Mount Carmel kindergarten student and her classmates waited for their school bus, she and another girl her age were having a pre-schooler type conversation. One of the kids said that when she and her friend got home from kindergarten that day she intended to shoot her playmate with her pink-colored Hello Kitty gun, a toy in the general shape of a firearm that blew soapy bubbles. According to media reports, a "school official" overheard the insidious reference to gun violence and immediately searched the kid's backpack for the bubble-firing weapon. As it turned out the little girl was unarmed. But she wasn't out of the woods.

     The next day, the owner of the Hello Kitty toy and the would-be target of the bubble assault were interrogated by "school officials." (Presumably the Hello Kitty grilling was conducted by the elementary school principal and other education administrators experienced in interrogating terrorist suspects. It's doubtful these schoolhouse inquisitors warned the little girl her Miranda rights.)  The interrogators left the confused and frightened kid in tears. One of the poor girl's teachers told the pint-sized suspect that the police might get involved in her case. 

     The five-year-old suspect must have spilled her guts because someone in elementary school authority suspended the kindergarten kid ten days for making a "terroristic threat." The Hello Kitty terrorist was also ordered to undergo a psychological evaluation. 

     This kindergarten student's stunned family acquired the services of an attorney who managed to get the school suspension reduced from ten days to two days. The psychologist brought in to profile the girl declared the kid perfectly normal.  The lawyer met with elementary school officials in hopes of getting the little girl's record expunged. After public rage over this incident, it was.

     The Mount Carmel school officials responsible for this child's abuse should have been fired and banned from public and private education for life. They were the ones who needed psychological evaluations. 

The Joshua Besaw Kidnapping/Rape Case

     On May 31, 2019, 30-year-old Joshua Besaw from Thompson, Connecticut, a small town in the northwest corner of the state, was in Webster, Massachusetts where in a park he encountered a 12-year-old girl. Calling himself "Chuck," Besaw enticed the girl to get into his car and drove back to Thompson, Connecticut where, in a wooded area, he raped her. After the sexual assault Besaw and the victim returned to Thompson where he dropped her off in an unfamiliar neighborhood. The rapist drove off in possession of his victim's cellphone.

     Shortly after the rapist drove away the victim borrowed a stranger's phone and called her parents who took her directly to the Thompson Police Department. Later that day personnel at a medical facility conducted a sexual examination and collected biological evidence of the assault.

     A review by law enforcement officers of numerous surveillance videos from sites in Webster, Massachusetts and Thompson, Connecticut quickly led to the identification of Joshua Besaw as the kidnapper/rapist.

     While under local police and FBI surveillance Besaw discarded cigarette butts that were gathered by his followers for DNA analysis. Traces of the suspect's saliva on the collected cigarette butts matched semen specimens taken from the rape victim. DNA science had positively identified Joshua Besaw as the man who had raped this 12-year-old girl.

     On July 17, 2019, local police officers and FBI agents took Besaw into custody at his place of residence in Thompson, Connecticut. An Assistant United States Attorney in Connecticut charged Besaw with kidnapping and transporting a victim across state lines with the purpose of sexual assault.

     On March 13, 2020 Joshua Besaw, confronted with the DNA evidence connecting him to the rape, pleaded guilty before a federal judge. On June 15, 2020 Besaw was sentenced to 20 years in prison. He could have received a sentence of life.