Did Pastor Richard Shahan Murder His Wife?

     In 2013 Richard Shahan, the 53-year-old associate pastor of the First Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama lived in Homewood, Alabama with his wife Karen. Reverend Shahan functioned as the church's children and family pastor and facilities director. Karen Shahan had a job at a nearby Hobby Lobby store. The couple lived in a rental house owned by the church.

     After graduating in 1985 from the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, Richard Shahan joined the staff at the First Baptist Church in Bryon, Texas where he was the Associate Pastor of Education and Family Development. From 1989 to 1999 he served at the Shades Mountain Baptist Church in Birmingham. In 2000 Shahan became Associate Paster in Education and Administration for the Hickory Grove Baptist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina where he worked seven years. From 2007 to 2009 he was employed by the Kimble Knight Ministries in Brentwood, Tennessee. From Brentwood in 2009 he and his wife moved back to Birmingham where he joined the First Baptist Church in that city.

     In 2003, while working in Charlotte, North Carolina, Richard Shahan formed his own company, an Internet-based curriculum provider called One Vine, Inc. In 2010, while living in Birmingham, Pastor Shahan and his wife filed for personal bankruptcy. According to court records the couple listed $443,500 in assets and $505,665 in debts. At the time they had a monthly income of $5,874 which did not include a $2,516 monthly housing allowance from the church.

     In September 2012 Pastor Shahan took a leave of absence from the First Baptist Church in Birmingham in order to travel to Kazakhstan where he acquired a visiting professor position at the Bible Institute in Almaty, Kazakhstan. He returned to Birmingham in May 2013.

     On July 23, 2013 Karen Louise Shahan's co-workers at Hobby Lobby became concerned when the 52-year-old pastor's wife didn't show up for work. Calls to her home went unanswered. At 11:15 that Tuesday morning police officers with the Homewood Police Department, pursuant to a welfare check, made a gruesome discovery. The officers found that someone had stabbed Karen Shahan to death in her bedroom. The victim's blood had been spilled throughout the dwelling. A crime scene investigator told reporters that this was the most brutal murder site he had ever witnessed.

     Pastor Richard Shahan was not home the morning police discovered the body of his repeatedly stabbed wife. Detectives believed that the victim was murdered Monday night or early the next day. There were no signs of forced entry and nothing from the house had been stolen. The victim had not been sexually assaulted. Suspicion immediately fell upon the husband. The fact he was a pastor meant nothing to homicide detectives who know there is no such thing as an unlikely murder suspect.

     Detectives on August 7, 2013 questioned Pastor Shahan at the Homewood police station. When asked to account for his whereabouts that Monday night and Tuesday morning he said he had been out of town visiting one of the couple's two sons.

     On August 8, 2013, the day after the station house interrogation, detectives took Shahan into custody "for investigative purposes." Under Alabama law a suspect can only be held for investigation 48 hours. If the arrestee is not charged with a crime he or she must be released.

     Following the suspect's 48 hours behind bars the authorities released him because the prosecutor didn't have enough evidence to level a homicide charge. Because he was a suspect in his wife's brutal murder, officials at the First Baptist Church placed pastor Shahan on paid administrative leave.

     A Jefferson County prosecutor, shortly after Pastor Shahan announced on December 16, 2013 that he would be leaving the United States to do three years of mission work in Germany, charged him with first-degree murder. On New Years Day, 2014 police officers in Nashville, Tennessee arrested the pastor as he was about to board a plane to Germany.

     Jim Roberson, chief of the Homewood Police Department told reporters that, "Once he [Shahan] got over to Germany or Russia the chances of extraditing him are pretty nil. We can't get Snowden [the NSA leaker], probably wouldn't get Shahan back either."

     On January 7, 2014 Richard Shahan, though his attorney said that he would waive his right to an extradition hearing. Less than a week later the authorities in Alabama booked the murder suspect into the Jefferson County Jail.

     The Shahan case prosecutor did not reveal what evidence the state had against the former pastor. Some of the unanswered questions in the case involved whether investigators had identified the murder weapon. Also, did physical evidence connect Mr. Shahan to the bloody murder scene; and did detectives break the suspect's alibi? It appeared the motive in the case was money.

     On October 23, 2014 a local grand jury indicted the former pastor for the murder of his wife. The suspect avoided jail by posting his $100,000 bond. He was, however, pursuant to the terms of his release, under house arrest at his mother's dwelling in Homewood, Tennessee.

     In March 2016 a Jefferson County judge postponed Richard Shahan's murder trial nine months to January 9, 2017. The judge did not reveal the reason for the delay. In murder cases delays often help the defense at the expense of the prosecution.

     The defendant's murder charge was dismissed on April 10, 2017 when the Alabama Attorney General's Office declared there was not enough evidence to prosecute the former Pastor.

      As of September 2024 no arrests have been made in the Shahan murder case.

Officer James Peters: Scottsdale's Dirty Harry

     During the period November 2002 through February 2012, Scottsdale, Arizona police officer James Peters shot at seven people, killing six of them. From this, one might conclude that Scottsdale, the Phoenix area suburb of 220,000, was the site of daily shootouts between the police and a large population of violent criminals. But this wasn't the case. In 2011 the Scottsdale police only shot one person and it wasn't fatal. By comparison the police in Phoenix that year shot 16, killing 9.

     How could one member of a police department made up of 435 sworn officers shoot so many people in a relatively low crime city? After say, the third shooting incident, why wasn't this man psychologically evaluated and at the very least put behind a desk? Moreover, didn't the officer himself ask himself why he was the only guy on the force doing all of the shooting?

     On November 3, 2002 roughly two years after joining the police department, Peters, as a member of the SWAT team, responded to a domestic violence call at the home of a man named Albert Redford. Following a 4-hour standoff James Peters and two other SWAT officers fired seven shots at the suspect hitting him three times. Mr. Redford died a few hours later in the emergency room. As it turned out none of the fatal bullets had been fired from Peter's rifle. An investigation by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office cleared all three officers of wrongdoing

     Officer Peters, on March 25, 2003, responded to a call regarding shotgun blasts coming from the home of a distraught, disbarred attorney named Brent Bradshaw. Three hours later Peters and his follow officers encountered the 47-year-old suspect wandering along the Arizona Canal carrying a shotgun. When Mr. Bradshaw refused to drop his weapon officer Peters killed him with a shot to the head. This shooting was declared justified.

     On October 10, 2005 Officer Peters shot and killed Mark Wesley Smith. High on methamphetamine, Smith was smashing car windows with a pipe outside an auto-body shop.  In justifying his use of deadly force in this case, Peters said the subject had threatened a fellow officer with the pipe.

     Brian Daniel Brown, 28, took a Safeway grocery store employee hostage on April 23, 2006 after he had hijacked a Krispy Kreme delivery truck. After killing the hostage taker the department awarded Officer Peters a medal of valor.

     Peters and Scottsdale officer Tom Myers were in Mesa, Arizona on August 30, 2006 hoping to question Kevin Hutchings, a suspect in an assault committed earlier that evening in Scottsdale. After Mr. Hutchings fired a shot from inside his house the officers had the power company cut off electricity to the dwelling. When the armed man came out of his house to investigate the power outage Peters shot him to death. The city, in this case ended up paying the Hutchings family an out of court settlement of $75,000. Even so, the department declared this shooting justified and Officer Peters kept his assignment as a street cop even though he had killed two people in one year.

     On February 17, 2010 Officer Peters and Detective Scott Gailbraith confronted 46-year-old Jimmy Hammack, a suspect in five Phoenix and Scottsdale bank robberies. When Hammack drove his pickup truck toward the detective Peters shot him. A few days later Hammack died in the hospital. This shooting, on the grounds the subject was using his vehicle as a deadly weapon, went into the books as justified.

The Killing of John Loxas

     John Loxas, 50, lived alone in a trash-littered house near Vista De Camino Park in Scottsdale. In 2010 police arrested him for displaying a handgun in public. On February 14, 2012 Peters and five other officers responded to a 911 call concerning Loxas who reportedly was threatening his neighbors with a firearm. To complicate matters Mr. Loxas, who regularly babysat his 9-month-old grandson, had the child in his arms while intimidating the neighbors.

     When James Peters and the other officers arrived at the scene Mr. Loxas and the baby were back inside the house. When ordered to exit the dwelling, Loxas, still holding the child, appeared in the doorway. As the subject turned to reenter the house and lowered the baby exposing his upper torso and head, Peters, thinking he saw a black object in Loxas' hand, shot him in the head from 18 feet. The subject, killed instantly by the bullet from Peter's rifle, collapsed to the ground still holding the baby. Fortunately, and perhaps miraculously, the infant was not injured.

     As it turned out, at the time Officer Peters killed Mr. Loxas the subject was not armed or within reach of a weapon. Police did find, in the dead man's living room, a loaded handgun hidden between the arm and cushion of a stuffed chair. Farther into the dwelling searchers discovered a shotgun, several "Airsoft"-type rifles and pistols and a "functional improvised explosive device."

     In explaining why he had shot Mr. Loxas, Officer Peters said he had been concerned for the safety of the baby. Peters was placed on paid administrative leave pending yet another police involved shooting investigation by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office. Critics of the shooting, including some of Loxas' neighbors, protested the incident outside the police department.

     Except for the Safeway hostage case in April 2006, most police officers, faced with the choices presented to Officer Peters, probably would not have exercised deadly force. This didn't mean that Peters had committed criminal acts, or that his shootings were even  administratively unjustified. It just meant that most officers wouldn't have been so quick to pull the trigger. If it were otherwise, every year thousands rather than hundreds of people would die at the hands of the police.

     Because Mr. Loxas had been armed shortly before the police arrived at the scene, and Officer Peters thought the subject was holding a handgun when he shot him, this case was ruled a justifiable homicide. Whether or not, under the circumstances, the killing of Mr. Loxas was the right thing to do was another question altogether.
 
     On June 22, 2012 the Scottsdale police board for the Public Safety Retirement System approved Officer Peters' application for early retirement based on some unnamed disability. He received a pension of $4,500 a month for life. Not bad for 12 years of work. No wonder the country was going broke and people in the private sector resented the government.

     In September 2012 the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, on behalf of John Loxas' relatives, sued the city of Scottsdale. The Scottsdale City Council, in June 2013 approved a court settlement of $4.25 million. The Loxas family had originally sought $7.5 million in damages. The city of Scottsdale in this case was self-insured up to $2 million, a sum that would have to be paid by municipal taxpayers. Officer James Peters had been one costly cop. 

The Kyle Dube Murder Case

     On the night of May 12, 2013 in Glenburn, Maine, 15-year-old Nichole Cable left her parents' home to meet a friend down the road from her house. She was under the false belief that the message she had received on her Facebook page was from Bryan Butterfield. The high school sophomore did not return home. The morning following her disappearance Nichole's mother reported her missing to the police.

     At the request of investigators officials at Facebook traced the message ostensibly from Bryan Butterfield to a 20-year-old man named Kyle Dube who lived in his parents house in Orono, Maine. Detectives questioned Dube's girlfriend Sarah Mersinger who revealed that Dube had used the fake Facebook account to lure Nichole out of the house that night so that he could kidnap her.

     According to Kyle Dube's brother, the idea behind the abduction involved the kidnapper's plan to abduct the girl wearing a ski mask, then later play the hero by rescuing her. But something went wrong and the victim ended up dead. Dube's brother told detectives that Kyle had dumped the body in the woods near the community of Old Town, Maine. The brother said that Kyle's sexual advances toward the 15-year-old had been rejected. Dube's harebrained kidnapping plot and phony rescue scheme was motivated by his desire to have sex with the girl.

     Police officers from a dozen police agencies with the aid of cadaver dogs and hundreds of civilian volunteers searched the woods near Old Town for Nichole's body. In the evening of May 20, 2013 one of the searchers came across the corpse.

     The next day police officers arrested Kyle Dube on the charge of murder. In confessing to his interrogators Dube said he had used the phony Facebook account to lure Nichole out of her parents' house. As she walked down the road to meet her friend Byran Butterfield he hid in the woods wearing a ski mask. After ambushing the victim he covered her mouth with tape and put her in the back of his father's pickup truck. When he checked on Nichole after driving to a remote spot near Old Town he discovered that she had died from suffocation. He left her body in the forest covered in branches.

     On May 22, 2013 a Penobscot County grand jury indicted Kyle Dube on the charge of murder. He was held in the county lock-up without bail.

     A jury in March 2015 found Kyle Dube guilty of murder. Two months later the judge sentenced him to sixty years in prison.

The Orlando Hall/Bruce Carnell Murder Case

      In September 1994, 23-year-old Orlando Hall ran a marijuana trafficking operation in Arkansas. That month he and 21-year-old Bruce Carnell drove to Arlington, Texas to confront a man Hall believed had stolen $5,000 from him. At the man's apartment Hall and Carnell encountered his16-year-old sister who was home alone. When Lisa Rene refused Hall and his accomplice entry they broke into the apartment and kidnapped her. In the car on their way back to Arkansas, Orlando Hall and Bruce Carnell raped Lisa Rene. At a hotel in Pine Bluff, Arkansas the men, over at two day period, continued to rape and torture her.

     From the hotel in Pine Bluff, Orlando Hall and Bruce Carnell drove the victim to a nearby park where they dug a grave, hit their victim with a shovel then buried her alive.

     Because the Lisa Rene kidnapping involved the crossing of the Texas/Arkansa state lines the case was handled as a federal kidnapping offense, a death penalty crime when the kidnapped person is harmed or killed.

     Following the kidnapping convictions of Hall and Carnell in1996 federal judges sentenced the men to death.

     In 2019, because Bruce Carnell had an I.Q. of 69, a federal judge reduced his sentence to life.

     On November 19, 2020, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene, Orlando Hall was executed by lethal injection at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Dr. Pamela Fish: The Disgraced DNA Expert

     In 1990 prosecutors in Cook County, Illinois charged John Willis with several counts of rape in connection with a series of sexual assaults committed in the late 1980s on Chicago's South Side. Willis, a petty thief and illiterate, denied raping the women even though several of the victims had picked him out of a lineup.

     The only physical evidence in the Willis case was a scrap of toilet paper containing traces of semen. Police took this evidence to the Chicago Police Lab where it was examined by Dr. Pamela Fish. Dr. Fish came to the lab in 1979 with bachelor's and master's degrees in biology from Loyola University. Ten years later, after taking courses at night, she earned a Ph.D in biology from Illinois Institute of Technology. According to her handwritten lab notes, Dr. Fish determined that the secretor of the semen had type A blood. John Willis had type B blood thereby excluding him as the rapist. Dr. Fish reported, however, in contradiction to her lab notes, that the semen on the tissue possessed type B blood. She testified to this at Willis' 1991 trial. The jury, in addition to believing in Dr. Fish, believed eleven prosecution rape victim/eyewitnesses that identified the defendant as the rapist. The jury found Willis guilty and the judge sentenced him to 100 years in prison.

     Eight years later a south Chicago rapist confessed to these sexual assaults after being linked to the crimes through DNA analysis. An appeals judge set aside the Willis conviction and he was set free. On the day of his release Dr. Fish, now the head of  biochemistry testing at the state crime lab, spoke at a DNA seminar for judges. (The Chicago Police Lab had been incorporated into the Illinois crime lab system in 1996.)

     The Willis reversal led to a 2001 review of Dr. Fish's cases by the renowned DNA expert from Berkeley, California, Dr. Edward Blake. Dr. Blake studied nine cases in which Dr. Fish had testified that her blood-typing tests had produced inconclusive results. Dr. Blake found that Dr. Fish's test results had actually exonerated the defendants involved and that she gave false testimony at those trials. Dr. Blake characterized Dr. Fish's work as "scientific fraud."

     In the summer of 2001 a state representative at a legislative hearing on prosecutorial misconduct suggested to the head of the Illinois State Police that Dr. Fish be transferred out of the crime lab into a position where she could do less harm. (In the public sector this is considered harsh employee discipline.) The police administrator ignored the recommendation.

     In 2002 three more Illinois men in prison for rape since 1987 were exonerated by DNA. Dr. Fish had testified for the prosecution in all three cases. Two years later, after the state paid John Willis a large settlement for his wrongful prosecution and incarceration, the state refused to renew Dr. Fish's employment contract. Rather than firing Dr. Fish the state simply refused to rehire her. 

     In 2006 Marlon Pendleton, two years after his release from an Illinois prison where he'd been wrongfully incarcerated thirteen years on a rape conviction, sued the Chicago Police Department and Dr. Fish. The plaintiff accused Chicago detectives Jack Stewart and Steven Barnes, of manufacturing a false line-up identification against him. (These cops were notorious for this kind of  behavior.) He accused Dr. Fish of perjury in connection with her DNA testimony at the trial, testimony that convinced the jury he had raped the victim. The Illinois Court of Claims awarded Pendleton $170,000 for his wrongful conviction. (In 2011 Mr. Pendleton was convicted of murdering his girlfriend in 2008. The judge sentenced him to 17 years in prison.)

     In 2017 Dr. Fish was employed as a biology teacher at Notre Dame College Prep in Niles, Illinois.

The Jason Hendrix "Good Boy" Murder Case

     Kevin Hendrix and his wife Sarah lived in a middle class neighborhood in Corbin, Kentucky with their 16-year-old son Jason and 12-year-old daughter Grace. Mr. Hendrix, a beekeeper, sold honey at a farmer's market in the small, southeastern Kentucky town. His wife, Dr. Sarah Hendrix, worked as a professor at Union College in nearby Barbourville.

     In December 2014 Jason was baptized at the Forward Community Church where he and his family were active members. The church, founded in 2012, held its services in a local movie theater. Besides being involved in church activities Jason Hendrix participated in his high school ROTC program.

     Late Wednesday afternoon February 11, 2015, two days after Jason's parents disciplined their son by taking away his computer privileges, the boy, in a most cold-blooded way, murdered his family.

     The 16-year-old shot his father twice in the head the moment he came home from work. The young killer ambushed his mother with two bullets to the face when she entered the kitchen after parking her car in the garage following her day at work. His 12-year-old sister Grace lay dead in the house from two shots to her head. She had also been shot in the arm. In the close-range shootings Jason fired through pillows to muffle the sound and shield himself from the victim's blood spatter.

     A few hours after executing his parents and his sister Jason met up with some friends at his church. There was nothing in his demeanor that suggested he had just massacred his family.

     The day after the triple murder, Jason, armed with four handguns and a backpack full of ammunition, drove out of town in one of the family cars, a green Honda Pilot.

     Late Saturday morning, February 14, 2015, a Maryland state trooper tried to pull Jason Hendrix over for speeding in Harford County 500 miles from the still undiscovered bodies in his house back in Kentucky. Jason, having no intention of being pulled over by a cop, led the officer and others on a car chase that took them into Baltimore County where police officers in that jurisdiction joined in the pursuit.

     The high-speed chase came to an abrupt end when the teenager crashed his SUV into another vehicle. When six officers with the Baltimore County Police Department approached the green Honda, Jason Hendrix shot at the officers, striking one of them. All six of the officers returned fire, killing the boy at the scene.

     The wounded officer received treatment at the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center and was discharged the next morning. All of the officers involved in the shooting were placed on administrative leave pending an investigation.

     That Saturday, a Baltimore County detective called the authorities in Corbin, Kentucky and requested a check of the address on the Honda's registration. If the occupants of the house were related to the boy they needed to be informed of his death.

     At five o'clock that afternoon officers with the Corbin Police Department entered the Hendrix house on Forest Circle. Inside they found the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Hendrix and their daughter. Following a cursory investigation the authorities in Corbin concluded that the boy killed by the police in Maryland had murdered his family.

     Friends and relatives of the family as well as residents of the community were stunned by the news of these violent deaths. As is often the case in "good boy" murder cases, no one saw the bloodshed coming.

Amish-Mennonite Pastor Kenneth Miller's Underground Railroad

     Lisa Miller, as a teenager and young woman in Virginia, struggled with an addiction to pills and alcohol. She also participated in self-mutilation. After a failed marriage and a suicide attempt Lisa began dating women.

     In 1997 Lisa met Janet Jenkins at an alcoholics anonymous meeting in Falls Church, Virginia. They became a couple and in 2000 traveled to Vermont, the first state to offer homosexuals civil unions, to get married. The pair, after being civilly united by a judge adopted the surname Miller-Jenkins and in 2002 bought a two-story house in a small southern Vermont town called Fair Haven.

     On April 16, 2002 after becoming pregnant through in vitro fertilization, Lisa, at age 34, gave birth to Isabella. But in September 2003 when Isabella was 17-months-old Lisa and Janet split-up. After the break in the relationship a family court judge in Vermont granted Janet regular child visitation rights.

     In 2008, after trying but failing to terminate her former partner's visitation rights, Lisa Miller moved to Lynchburg, Virginia where a Christian anti-gay marriage activist named Janet Stasulli befriended her. Lisa, under Stasulli's guidance and influence, became a born-again Christian, and pursuant to her new religious beliefs denounced homosexuality as a sin. In October 2009 the family court judge in Vermont granted Janet Jenkins primary custody of Isabella.

     Kenneth Miller (no relation to Lisa), a 43-year-old Beachy Amish-Mennonite pastor from Stuarts Draft, Virginia, a town of 9,000 30 miles north of Lynchburg, conceived of a plan to get Lisa and Isabella out of the country to keep the 7-year-old out of the custody of a lesbian parent. On September 21, 2009 Philip Zodhiates, an evangelical leader and owner of a Lynchburg Christian direct-mail company drove Lisa and her daughter to Buffalo, New York. Shortly after midnight the mother and daughter crossed the boarder into Canada in a taxi. They were met on the other side by a Canadian evangelical pastor named Ervin Horst who drove Lisa and Isabella, disguised in long skirts and head scarves of the type worn by the Amish-Mennonites, to the Toronto airport. Later that day the fleeing mother and daughter flew to Managua, Nicaragua. 

     Pastor Kenneth Miller, indicted by a federal grand jury sitting in Burlington, Vermont for the offense of abetting an international parental kidnapping, went on trial on August 8, 2012. If convicted the Amish-Mennonite leader faced up to three years in prison.

     Fifty Amish-Mennonite supporters looked on as the Assistant United States Attorney, Eugenia Cowles and defense attorney Joshua M. Autry made their opening remarks to the jury. According to the defense version of the case, Pastor Miller did not know that by leaving the country Lisa Miller was violating a lawful child visitation order. Defense attorney Autry argued that his client, therefore, did not possess the requisite criminal intent to obstruct the court order giving Janet Jenkins primary custody of the child.

     Federal prosecutor Cowles told the jurors that Pastor Miller had selected Nicaragua as the point of destination because that country and the United States did not have an extradition treaty. Moreover, the preacher made sure to book a flight from Canada to Mexico that didn't touch down in America.

     Philip Zodhiates, Janet Stasulli and Ervin Horst, the evangelists the defendant had called upon to carry out his anti-homosexual underground escape, took the stand as reluctant prosecution witnesses. Isabella's custody parent Janet Jenkins testified that she hadn't seen the girl since January 2009, eight months before the evangelists snuck her out of the country. The government rested its case on August 12. 2012.

     Defense attorney Joshua Autry put on a pair of character witnesses then rested his case without bringing Pastor Miller to the stand to testify on his own behalf. On August 14, 2012 the jury, after deliberating four hours, found the defendant guilty of abetting international parental kidnapping. Outside the federal building a group of 100 Amish-Mennonite supporters stood around singing gospel hymns. Pastor Miller remained free on bail until his sentencing.

     Just hours after the verdict Janet Jenkins filed a civil lawsuit against Philip Zodhiates, Ervin Horst and Janet Stasulli, the people who had helped Pastor Miller kidnap her custody child.

     On March 14, 2013 the federal district judge sentenced Pastor Miller to 27 months in prison. The Paster would not, however, begin his sentence until a federal appeals court reviewed and ruled on the case.

     On October 8, 2014 federal prosecutors charged Philip Zodhiates with conspiracy and international parental kidnapping for his role in the abduction. Zodhiates pleaded not guilty to the charges.

     In March 2017 after being convicted as charged the federal judge sentenced Mr. Zodhiates to 36 months in prison.

     Pastor Kenneth Miller lost his appeal in February 2016 and a month later was sentenced to 27 months in prison. In April 2018 after serving just under two years in federal custody Pastor Miller was released from custody.

The Michael Vanderlinden Murder-Suicide Case

     In mid-August 2012, 38-year-old Michael Vanderlinden, a native of Belgium who worked in the information technology field, was about to move out of the new, spacious two-story house he lived in with his wife Linda and their two sons, Julien, age seven and Matthew who was four. Vanderlinden, with a history of mental illness and depression, was seeing a therapist. In November 2010 he had attempted suicide by overdosing on pills. His emotional and mental health problems had strained his marriage which was the reason he was in the process of moving out of the family home in Van Buren Township outside of Detroit, Michigan. A neighbor saw Vanderlinden walk out of his house in the Homestead subdivision and drive off at 9:30 in the evening of August 15, 2012. No one in the subdivision saw him after that.

     On Thursday August 16 at 1:35 in the morning on Interstate 94 in La Porte County Indiana just south of the Michigan state line, Mr. Vanderlinden drove out of a rest area via the entrance ramp which put him in the westbound lane traveling east. Moving at a high rate of speed, Vanderlinden's vehicle, with its headlights off plowed head-on into a car traveling eastbound on the interstate. Both vehicles burst into flames on impact burning Vanderlinden and the driver of the other vehicle, 45-year-old Julian Nelson, beyond recognition. Mr. Nelson, the victim of Vanderlinden's suicide was from Portage, Indiana.

     Later in the morning of the automobile fatalities on I-94 the Indiana State Police asked officers in Van Buren Township to notify Vanderlinden's wife of his death. At 8:30 AM a township patrolman rang the doorbell to the his home. Seeing a car in the garage the officer assumed that the house was occupied. When the doorbell failed to bring a response the officer tried the front door, found it unlocked and entered the dwelling.

     In the master bedroom the officer found 34-year-old Linda Vanderlinden, a charter school teacher, dead with a stab wound to her chest. She had also been strangled which turned out to be the cause of her death. In separate bedrooms the officer found the murdered children, each with multiple stab wounds from an 8-inch kitchen knife.

     The forensic pathologist with the Wayne County Coroner's Office was unable to determine the exact time the Vanderdindens' had been murdered. Because there were no signs of forced entry into the house, no one had been sexually assaulted and nothing had been taken from the death scene, investigators identified Michael Vanderlinden as the murderer. 

   The Indiana State Police concluded that Michael Vanderlinden had purposely caused the fatal head-on crash.

     In murder-suicides the question is always the same: if a person is going to kill himself why would he take other people with him? In this case Mr. Vanderlinden, for no reason a sane person could understand, slaughtered his family, and in the act of killing himself murdered a total stranger. 

The Candice Walton Arson-Murder Case

     Tasha Vandiver lived in Monroe County Georgia a few miles southwest of Forsyth, a rural town of 3,700 in the central part of the state. The 46-year-old resided in a house with her 21-year-old learning disabled son Gerald Walton and her 16-year-old daughter Candice Walton.

     At three-thirty in the morning of Thursday February 27, 2020 someone reported a fire at the Vandiver/Walton house. When firefighters arrived at the scene the structure was fully involved.

     Firefighters while sifting through the debris found two bodies. Tasha Vandiver and her son Gerald were identified as the fire scene casualties. A cause and origin investigator determined that the house fire was incendiary--intentionally set. From this point on the case was investigated as an arson-murder. The fire was started on the living room couch and spread so fast the occupants of the dwelling, Tasha Vandiver and her disabled son Gerald Waltan, were unable to get out of the house in time. The victims died from carbon monoxide poisoning. 

     Notably missing from the destroyed house was 16-year-old Candice Walton. Because the family car, a 1967 white Chevrolet Malibu was also missing from the dwelling, investigators assumed that the teenager had taken off with the car. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) opened a missing person case and issued broadcast alerts for the girl's apprehension.

     At three in the afternoon that Thursday, about 12 hours after firefighters put out the fire, a sheriff's deputy in McCracken County, Kentucky near the city of Paducah spotted Candice Walton sitting at a gas station in the white Chevrolet Malibu. The deputy detained the girl until U. S. Marshals took her into custody. She was arrested 450 miles northwest of her home in Monroe County, Georgia.

     The day after Walton's arrest GBI agents questioned her at the McCracken County Juvenile Detention Center. A search of the white Chevrolet Malibu produced evidence that connected the teenager to the house fire and deaths of her mother and brother.

     A Monroe County, Georgia prosecutor charged Candice Walton with two counts of murder, one count of arson and several counts of theft.

     At her arraignment in McCracken County the suspect refused to waive extradition. That meant the state of Kentucky had 60 days to hold an extradition hearing. In the meantime, Candice Walton was held in Kentucky without bail.

     Once back in Georgia, Candice Walton was held at the Macon Regional Youth Detention Center. The Monroe County prosecutor indicated that Walton would be prosecuted as an adult.

     After confessing to stealing cash from her mother's tax rebate, Candice Walton said she set the fire and stole her mother's car so she could drive to Oregon to start a new life with her boyfriend. In February 2022 she pleaded guilty to all counts and was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole when she turned 48. 

Homicidal Schizophrenics: Individual Rights Versus Public Safety

     In February 2009 Joseph Hagerman III, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, stopped taking his antipsychotic medication. He had stopped taking his medicine twice in the past and had experienced psychotic episodes. This time, however, he decapitated his 5-year-old son and injured his wife who tried in vain to protect the boy.

     Following his arrest Mr. Hagerman in a jailhouse interview with a local TV reporter said he had killed his son because he believed the boy had become the antichrist.

     A few months after the homicide, a jury in Virginia Beach Virginia found the defendant not guilty by reason of insanity. Under Virginia law this meant that Mr. Hagerman would be sent to a mental institution instead of prison. He would remain at the hospital until his doctors and a judge declared him sane enough to rejoin society.

     In late 2016 doctors at the Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg Virginia recommended to the court that Joseph Hagerman be granted conditional release from the institution. According to the psychiatrist, this patient, over the past few years had been given 48-hour passes that had not caused any problems. He had been, according to the hospital staff, a model patient.

     A Virginia circuit judge acting upon the psychiatric recommendation ordered that Mr. Hagerman be given two independent mental health evaluations.

     On May 9, 2017, following the testimony of two psychiatrists and Mr. Hagerman's father, the judge ordered the patient's conditional release from the mental hospital. Pursuant to this decree Mr. Hagerman was required to live at an adult foster care facility during the week. On weekends he would reside with his parents.

     Under the judge's order Mr. Hagerman would also receive periodic visits from social workers and psychiatrists who would check to make sure he was still taking his antipsychotic medication.

    At the conclusion of the sanity hearing Mr. Hagerman's sister told a local television correspondent that, "I just want to let the community know that my brother is a very loving, generous, Christian man. He had a wonderful family, and it was an unfortunate incident. [Italics mine.] Everyone needs to get educated on mental illness."

     The fact that a child died because his mentally ill father, for the third time, had stopped taking his medication was perhaps cause for concern. Compassion for the mentally ill is well and good but so is the need to protect people who cross this man's path. One doesn't need to be highly educated on the subject of mental illness to know that the behavior of a homicidal schizophrenic is extremely unpredictable. 

Donald Harvey: America's Worst Angel of Death

     In 1975, after working briefly as a hospital orderly in Lexington, Kentucky, 23-year-old Donald Harvey took a job with the Veteran's Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio. As the years passed a pattern emerged. When Harvey was on duty patients died. Finally, after ten years and the deaths of more than 100 patients on his watch, the orderly was fired. He was terminated because several hospital workers suspected he was poisoning patients under his care. After he left the medical facility the death rate plummeted. Terminating Donald Harvey turned out to be good medicine, at least at the VA hospital.

     Shortly after his firing Mr. Harvey was hired across town at Drake Memorial Hospital where the death rate began to soar. As he had done at the VA facility, Donald Harvey was murdering patients by either lacing their food with arsenic or injecting cyanide into their gastric tubes. The deaths at Drake Memorial, like those at the VA hospital, were ruled as naturally caused fatalities. While suspicions were aroused it was hard to imagine that this friendly helpful little man who was so charming and popular with members of his victims' families could be a stone-cold killer.

     As clever and careful as Donald Harvey was, he made a mistake when he poisoned John Powell, a patient recovering from a motorcycle accident. Under Ohio law victims of fatal traffic accidents must be autopsied. At Powell's autopsy an assistant detected the odor of almonds, the telltale sign of cyanide. This was fortunate because most people are unable to detect this scent. The forensic pathologist ordered toxicological tests that revealed that John Powell had died from a lethal dose of cyanide. Donald Harvey had been the last person to see Mr. Powell alive, and John Powell would be the last person he would murder.

     The Cincinnati police arrested Donald Harvey and searched his apartment where they found jars filled with arsenic and cyanide and books on poisoning. Notwithstanding this evidence the Hamilton County prosecutor believed that without a confession there might not be enough evidence to convince a jury of Harvey's guilt. The suspect, on the other hand, was worried that if convicted he would be sentenced to death. So the serial killer and the prosecutor struck a deal. In return for a life sentence Donald Harvey confessed to the murders he could remember. Over a period of several days he confessed to killing, in Kentucky and Ohio, 130 patients.

     When asked why had he murdered all of those helpless victims, the best answer Harvey could muster was that he must have a "screw loose." Forensic psychologists familiar with the case speculated that the murders had given Harvey, an otherwise ordinary and insignificant person, a sense of power over the lives of others. Harvey pleaded guilty to several murders and was sentenced to life.

     On March 28, 2017 Donald Harvey was found severely beaten in his cell at the Toledo Correctional Institution at Toledo, Ohio. Two days later the 44-year-old died from his injuries. In May 2019 fellow inmate James Elliott was charged with Mr. Harvey's murder.

Team Stomping and Kicking

     California University of Pennsylvania, one of 14 schools in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Learning, sits on 290 acres in California Borough 35 miles south of downtown Pittsburgh. A good number of its 8,600 students came from southwestern Pennsylvania. (California University is now part of the three-campus Penn West University made up of Edinboro and Clarion Universities.)

     Shortly after midnight on Thursday October 30, 2014 California University student Shareese Asparagus, a 22-year-old from West Chester, Pennsylvania, walked out of a restaurant on Wood Street in the college town. She was with her 30-year-old boyfriend, Lewis Campbell, also from West Chester. He did not attend the university.

     The trouble started outside the restaurant when a California University football player, accompanied by four of his teammates, said something to the young woman that offended her. This led to an exchange of angry words that prompted Lewis Campbell to step in to defend his girlfriend.

     The football players reacted to the situation by punching and kicking Mr. Campbell to the pavement. As he lay injured on the ground, the assailants kicked and stomped him into unconsciousness. As the teammates strolled away from their battered victim, they chanted, "football strong!"

     As paramedics loaded Mr. Campbell into a medical helicopter they noticed a shoe print on his face. Emergency personnel flew the unconscious man to Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh where physicians determined that the lower part of Mr. Campbell's brain had shifted 80 degrees. The beating had caused the victim serious brain damage.

     Later on the day of the gang assault in front of the off-campus restaurant, as Mr. Campbell lay in the intensive care unit, police officers showed up at football practice armed with arrest warrants for four California University players. Taken into custody that afternoon were: James Williamson, 20, from Parkville, Maryland; Corey Ford, 22, from Harrisburg, Rodney Gillin, 20, from West Lawn, Pennsylvania; and D'Andre Dunkley, 19, from Philadelphia.

     Police officers booked the four college football players into the Washington County Correctional Facility on charges of aggravated assault, reckless endangerment, harassment and conspiracy. The judge set each man's bail at $500,000.

     On Friday October 31, 2014, interim California University President Geraldine M. Jones issued the following statement: "California University does not tolerate violent behavior, and the four student-athletes charged in connection with this incident [incident?] will face university sanctions, along with any penalties imposed by law. The police investigation is continuing and the rights of these accused will be upheld. But in light of these allegations, I asked Coach Keller to cancel Saturday's game [with Gannon University]. Behavior has consequences, and all Cal U students, including student-athletes, must abide by our Student Code of Conduct if they wish to remain a part of our campus community. [Aggravated assault hardly falls into the category of a college code of conduct violation.] At the same time, it must be clearly understood that the actions [crimes] of a small group of individuals are not representative of our entire student body, nor of all Cal U student-athletes. [Then what do these "actions" represent?] I ask our entire campus community to recommit to our university's core values, and to demonstrate through their words and their actions the best that our university can be."

      This was a mealy-mouthed public relations department response to a vicious attack worthy of a violent street gang. Where was the outrage in this statement?

     The charges against James Williamson were dropped after surveillance footage revealed that he had not participated in the beating. In response, Williamson filed a lawsuit against the district attorney, the police and the borough. The lawsuit was later dismissed.

     After doctors placed Lewis Campbell into an induced coma, he was discharged several days later with serious brain injuries. 

     Corey Ford, on June 7, 2016, pleaded no contest to assault. He received, in return, a sentence of one to two years in prison. (Ford had earlier pleaded guilty to a hit-and-run that killed a bicyclist in Washington, D.C. In that case the judge had sentenced him to 36 months in federal prison.)

     In July 2016 Rodney Gillin and D'Andre Dunkley, in return for their guilty pleas, received sentences of probation.  

The Kayden Powell Kidnapping Case

     On February 2, 2014, 18-year-old Brianna Marshall gave birth to a six-pound 20-inch boy she and her boyfriend Bruce Powell named Kayden. The couple resided in Beloit, a town of 7,700 50 miles south of Madison, Wisconsin near the Illinois border.

     At four-thirty in the morning of Thursday, February 6, 2014 Brianna Marshall called 911 and reported that Kayden was missing. The mother told responding officers with the Beloit Police Department that when she checked the baby's crib, located in the room where she and her boyfriend slept, the infant was gone. Police officers found no evidence of a break-in and there was no ransom note.

     According to the parents they last saw Kayden at one-thirty that morning when their houseguest, Brianna's half-sister, Kristen Rose Smith, left Beloit en route to her home in Denver, Colorado.

     A police officer reached Kristen Smith by calling her cellphone. At five-thirty that morning she pulled into the Kum and Go gas station off Interstate 80 in West Branch, Iowa. From the gas station and convenience store 180 miles from Beloit she flagged down a local police officer.

     After searching Smith's car and finding baby clothing but no infant, officers with the West Branch Police Department took the half-sister into custody on an outstanding warrant issued from Texas. She was wanted in that state on charges of tampering with government records and fraud. Officers booked Kristen Smith into the Cedar County Jail.

     Back in Beloit, 40 officers representing the FBI, Rock County Sheriff's Office and the Beloit Police Department were working on the missing persons case.

     The missing baby's mother, in speaking to a local CNN reporter on Friday, February 6, 2014, said: "I held that baby one time and that was the last time I seen that baby and held him." Brianna Marshall said that she, her boyfriend and the infant were about to move to Denver, Colorado. She and the baby had planned to ride there in her half-sister's vehicle. That explained the baby clothing in Kristen Smith's car.

     At a press conference held on the afternoon of Friday, February 7, 2014 Beloit chief of police Steven Kopp announced that Baby Kayden Powell had been found alive and well that morning. The infant had been swaddled in blankets inside a tote bag in an exterior storage crate at the Kum and Go gas station in West Branch. The baby had survived for 29 hours in subzero temperatures.

     After being taken into custody in Iowa, Kristen Smith agreed to take a polygraph test. When she denied abducting the baby she failed the exam. Following the infant's recovery, she admitted she had taken the baby and was pretending to be pregnant. Before flagging the police car at the gas station she hid the baby for later retrieval. Police officers had disrupted that plan by taking her into custody on the Texas warrants.

     Remarkably, the baby had no signs of frostbite or hypothermia. A physician at the University of Wisconsin Health Center explained that infants possess a thin layer of fat they can metabolize into heat.

     A federal prosecutor charged Kristen Smith with kidnapping.

     In July 2014 a jury sitting in the Madison, Wisconsin federal court found Kristen Smith guilty of kidnapping baby Kayden Powell.

    United States District Court Judge James Peterson, in October 2014, before sentencing Kristen Smith, said, "You would have let him die rather than admit you had taken him. Your life is a pattern of misrepresentation which frankly continues even now." The judge sentenced Smith to 25 years in prison.

Parents Versus State: Control Over a Child's Healthcare

     In Ohio, doctors at Akron Children's Hospital in April 2013 diagnosed 10-year-old Sarah Hershberger with lymphoblastic lymphoma, an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The Amish girl's parents, Andy and Anna Hershberger, when told that 85 percent of the patients treated for this illness survive, agreed to a two-year chemotherapy program. After the first round of the chemotherapy the tumors on Sarah's neck, chest and kidneys were diminished.

     In June 2013, after a second round of chemotherapy treatment made their daughter extremely ill, the Hershbergers decided to stop the treatment. They took this action against the advice of cancer doctors who warned them that without the chemotherapy Sarah would die.

     The hospital authorities, believing they were morally and legally bound to continue treating the girl, went to court to take away the parents' right to make medical decisions on their daughter's behalf.

     Andy and Anna Hershberger, in September 2013, took Sarah to an alternative cancer treatment center in Central America where doctors put the girl on a regimen of herbs and vitamins. When the family returned to the United States hospital scans showed no signs of the lymphoma.

     On October 13, 2013 an Ohio appellate court judge granted Maria Schimer, an attorney and licensed nurse, limited guardianship over Sarah Hershberger. The guardianship included the power to make medical decisions on her behalf over the objections of her parents.

     Shortly after the court ruling the guardian sent a taxi out to the family farm near the village of Spencer, Ohio to fetch Sarah and take her to the hospital in Akron for additional chemotherapy. When the cab arrived at the Medina County home, located 35 miles southwest of the Cleveland metropolitan area, the family was gone.

     A few weeks later, pursuant to a welfare check on Sarah Hershberger, deputy sheriffs went to the farm and found the place still unoccupied. No one in the Amish community seemed to know where the Hershbergers had gone. If members of this Amish enclave knew the family's whereabouts they weren't cooperating with the authorities. Attorneys for the Hershberger family appealed the guardianship ruling to the Ohio Supreme Court on issues related to religious freedom.

     If Sarah Hershberger's fate remained in her parents' hands and she died from cancer, Mr. and Mrs. Hershberger could face negligent homicide charges. Moreover, people who helped them avoid the authorities could be charged as accomplices to the crime. The right of religious freedom did not match the right of a child to receive life-saving healthcare. Being given vitamins and herbs as a cancer cure, while less painful than the immediate aftermath of chemotherapy, did not qualify, in the eyes of the medical profession and the law, as adequate healthcare.

     On December 6, 2013, according to media reports, the court appointed guardian decided not to force Sarah Hershberger to undergo further chemotherapy treatments. The family's whereabouts were still unknown.

     In October 2015 MRIs and blood work performed at the Cleveland Clinic revealed that Sarah Hershberger showed no signs of cancer and appeared to be in perfect health. As a result of these medical tests the family judge ended the court-ordered guardianship of the Amish girl. 

     As of this writing Sara Hershberger is still healthy and cancer-free.

Cop Killer Ronell Wilson

     New York City detectives James V. Nemorin and Rodney J. Andrews arranged an undercover gun buy to take place on Staten Island on March 10, 2003. The officers purchased a .357-Magnum revolver from Ronell Wilson the day before. The detectives showed up at the meeting place with $1,200 in cash to buy a Tech-9 handgun from Wilson. Instead of making the deal, Wilson, who intended all along to rob the undercover officers, shot each of them in the head with a .44-caliber handgun.

     Ronell Wilson was convicted of the murders in 2005 and sentenced to death. But his death sentence was set aside a few years later when New York State's death penalty statute was declared unconstitutional.

     In December 2006 Wilson was found guilty in a federal district court in Brooklyn of murdering the police officers. The judge sentenced him to death under the federal law. Wilson's attorneys challenged the death sentence on the grounds that Wilson was mentally retarded and therefore ineligible for the lethal injection. Wilson's lawyers presented his case before a Brooklyn federal judge in November 2012.

     In August of 2012 prison informants at the Metropolitan Detection Center, a federal lock-up in Brooklyn, told correction authorities that Ronell Wilson had been having sex with a female guard named Nancy Gonzales. (Gonzales and Wilson had been having sex since March 2012.) In an effort to avoid the death sentence, Wilson intended to impregnate the corrections officer. (Not bad thinking for a mentally retarded guy.) In a letter to another inmate, Wilson wrote, "I just need a baby before the pigs try to take my life."

     The 29-year-old prison guard, in a recorded telephone call to her boyfriend, an inmate in a New York state prison, admitted having sex with Wilson in his cell. "I took a chance because I was so vulnerable and wanted to be loved," Gonzales said. "And now I am carrying his child."

     On February 5, 2013 FBI agents arrested the eight-month pregnant prison guard at her home in Huntington, Long Island. At her Brooklyn arraignment the judge charged Nancy Gonzales with having sexual intercourse with an inmate. If convicted of this federal offense she faced up to 16 months in prison.

     On Wednesday February 6, 2013 the 72-year-old father of NYPD detective Rodney Andrews in speaking to a reporter with the New York Daily News said he didn't believe the man who murdered his son should receive mercy just because he impregnated a female corrections officer. "Put him to death for what he did. If he had 20 children I wouldn't change my mind. That baby will be better off with that father not being around."

     In February 2014 at Nancy Gonzales' sentencing hearing following her guilty plea, the defendant told the judge that she had been sexually abused as a child by family members. Moreover, she claimed to have been sexually assaulted while serving in the National Guard. The judge sentenced Gonzales to a year and a day in prison.

     Ronell Wilson was on death row at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. 

     In March 2016 a federal appeals judge ruled that because Ronell Wilson was "mentally handicapped" he was ineligible for the death penalty under the Eighth Amendment cruel and unusual punishment doctrine. He is now serving his life sentence in a federal prison in Waymat Pennsylvania. 

The Suspicious Deaths of Max Shacknai and Rebecca Zahau

     Rebecca Zahau was born on March 15, 1979 in the town of Falam in northwestern Burma. Her family moved to Nepal and then to Germany before coming to the United States in 2000. The family settled in Saint Joseph, Missouri.

     In 2008 Rebecca Zahau was living in Scottsdale, Arizona and married to a man named Neil Nalepa. At this time she started dating 50-year-old Jonah Shacknai, the CEO and founder of Medicis Pharmaceutical Company. The unmarried mogul with a pair of former wives lived in Scottsdale. In 2011 Jonah Shacknai moved into a historic mansion in Coronado, California that had been built in 1908 by John D. Spreckel. Mr. Spreckel had owned the nearby Hotel del Coronado as well as other southern California real estate. The 13,000 square-foot dwelling featured 27 rooms and a guest house.

     In February 2011 Rebecca Zahau divorced Neil Nalepa and moved into the San Diego County mansion with Jonah Shacknai and Max, his 6-year-old son from his second wife. The 32-year-old live-in girlfriend worked as a technician in an ophthalmologist's office.

     On July 11, 2011 Rebecca Zahau and her visiting 13-year-old sister Xena were in the Coronado mansion looking after 6-year-old Max Aaron Shacknai. That morning Rebecca called 911 to report an accident. Max, while running down an elevated hallway or balcony above the lobby-like entrance to the house had gone over the banister.  Next to his body lay the large chandelier that had hung from the ceiling not far from where the boy had fallen. Investigators with the Coronado Police Department assumed the boy had grabbed the chandelier to break his fall. He suffered spinal cord injuries and serious head trauma and slipped into a coma.

     The next day Rebecca Zahau drove Xena to the airport for her flight back to Saint Joseph, Missouri. She also picked-up Jonah Shacknai's brother Adam who had arrived on a flight from Memphis. That evening, Zahau, Adam, Jonah and a friend of Jonah's ate dinner at a McDonald's. Adam and Rebecca returned to the mansion while Jonah and Max's mother, Dina Shacknai (nee Romano), sat at their son's bedside. Later that night Jonah Shacknai called Rebecca to report that Max wasn't going to make it. They were taking the boy off life-support.

     The next day, July 13, 2011 at 6:45 in the morning Adam Shacknai called 911 and reported that he had discovered Rebecca Zahau hanging by the neck from the balcony. She was nude. Acting on instructions from the 911 dispatcher Adam cut down the body.

     Deputies from the San Diego Sheriff's Office found the dead woman lying on the back lawn of the mansion. She had been gagged with a blue, long-sleeve cotton T-shirt that was also wrapped around her neck with the sleeves tied into a double knot. Her hands were bound behind her back with a length of red rope. Her ankles were also tied together with a piece of the red cordage. On a bedroom door not far from where Adam Shacknai found Rebecca hanging, someone in cursive writing using black paint had written: "She saved him you can save her."

     Dr. Jonathan Lucas, the San Diego County Medical Examiner, performed Rebecca Zahau's autopsy. He found four hemorrhages under her scalp (but no lacerations) and evidence of tape residue on her legs. The forensic pathologist found traces of blood on her legs as well.

     On July 16, 2011 Max Shacknai died. Ten days later Dr. Lucas announced that the boy had died from brain swelling and cardiac arrest. The medical examiner determined the manner of death to be accidental. Dr. Lucas's ruling in the death was immediately questioned by a trauma physician who had treated the boy. In this doctor's opinion someone had tried to suffocate the child before throwing him off the balcony. In other words, he had been murdered.

      With news of Rebecca Zahau's bizarre death people began speculating about whether or not a murderer had staged a suicide. Some of these commentators said that no woman had ever taken off her clothes, gagged herself, bound her hands and ankles then hanged herself. Late in July, 2011 San Diego Sheriff's Office Sergeant Roy Frank said this to a reporter: "There are documentations of incidents throughout the country where people have secured their feet and hands to commit suicide. They do it to make certain they can't escape if they change their minds."

     On September 2, 2011 San Diego Sheriff Bill Gore, amid rampant speculation of foul play, announced that Rebecca Zahau's death was a suicide. Distraught over Max Shacknai's accident on her watch she had hanged herself. The sheriff's office had therefore closed the case.

     Four days after Sheriff Gore's press conference Dr. Jonathan Lucas, in response to a massive wave of skepticism regarding his manner of death ruling, issued the following statement regarding the hemorrhages under Zahau's scalp: "Because there was evidence that she went over the balcony in a non-vertical way she may have struck her head on the balcony on the way down." In addressing the blood on Zahau's legs, the forensic pathologist identified the cause as either her menstrual period, or an intrauterine device. The medical examiner offered no explanation for the presence of the tape residue on her legs.

     The next day, September 7, 2011, Dr. Maurice Godwin, a private forensic consultant from Fayetteville, North Carolina with a Ph.D in criminal psychology told a reporter that Zahau's death had all the earmarks of a "ritualistic killing" and that the suicide had been staged. In Dr. Godwin's opinion someone had dazed Zahau with a blow to the head then tossed her off the balcony.

     In the same newspaper article Dr. Lawrence Kobilnsky, a DNA expert who taught at City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, opined that the medical examiner's suicide manner of death determination was "premature." Dr. Kobilnsky said he believed that someone had delivered a substantial blow to Zahau's head. The forensic scientist said, "The chances of bumping into the railing, going over the balcony and hitting your head four times is highly unlikely."

     Dr. Werner Spitz, a highly respected forensic pathologist, in the same piece, said he thought the San Diego medical examiner's manner of death ruling in the case made sense.

     In the summer of 2011 Rebecca Zahau's family hired a lawyer from Seattle named Anne Bremner to represent their interests in the case and to pressure the San Diego Sheriff's Office to re-open the investigation of Zahau's death. According to one of Zahau's sisters, a nurse practitioner who had spoken to her almost every day, Rebecca had no psychiatric history and had never attempted suicide. Attorney Bremner, pursuant to the family's quest to have the case re-investigated, asked the San Diego County District Attorney and the state Attorney General to get involved. The district attorney's office and the attorney general declined.

     On November 15, 2011 Dr. Cyril Wecht, the well-known forensic pathologist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, appeared on the "Dr. Phil" television show to voice his professional opinion regarding the cause and manner of Rebecca Zahau's strange and sudden death. Dr. Wecht, at the behest of attorney Anne Bremner, had performed a second autopsy of the victim's exhumed body. While he found Dr. Lucas' initial autopsy thorough, Dr. Wecht questioned the medical examiner's suicide manner of death determination. Wecht said the four hemorrhages beneath the scalp could not have been caused by hanging. "You have to have blunt force trauma for that," he said. "You have something of a rounded, smooth surface that impacts against the scalp, this not producing a laceration." According to Dr. Wecht, Rebecca Zahau could have been knocked unconscious which would explain why her body did not have any defense wounds from a struggle. The former coroner of Allegheny County agreed that the woman had died from hanging, but believed her manner of death should be changed from "suicidal" to "undetermined."

     Dina Shacknai, Max Shacknai's mother, in order to acquire the boy's autopsy photographs filed a suit against the San Diego Medical Examiner's Office on April 12, 2012. Dina and her supporters were looking for proof that someone had murdered the 6-year-old boy. They did not believe the wounds on his head had been caused by the fall. (It's not clear if they suspected Rebecca or her sister Xena or what motive they assigned to the homicide.)

     On July 16, 2012, the one-year anniversary of Max Shacknai's death, Dina Shacknai and her attorney Angela Hallier held a press conference in Phoenix. According to the lawyer the family possessed information from "privately retained experts" that proved the 6-year-old had been murdered at the Coronado mansion.

     On August 6, 2012 a spokesperson for the Coronado Police Department confirmed they had met with Dina Shacknai and her attorney regarding Max Shacknai's death. Police investigators agreed to read the report containing the opinions of forensic scientists who believed the boy could have been murdered. One of those experts, Dr. Judy Melinek, a forensic pathologist with the San Francisco Medical Examiner's Office, reportedly believed that Max was too small to have gone over the balcony railing. Moreover, she believed his head injuries were not consistent with a fall.

     So, what happened to Max Shacknai and Rebecca Zahau? Within a period of two days they both went over different balconies in the same house. What were the odds of that? If Rebecca had killed herself over the boy's fall why did she do it in such a bizarre and suspicious way? And what was the meaning of the message painted on the bedroom door? And who wrote it?

     Assuming that Max had been thrown off the balcony to his eventual death, who did it, and why? If Rebecca had been murdered was it in revenge for the boy's homicide? And finally, will these questions ever be answered?

     On September 10, 2012, a spokesperson for the Coronado police announced there would be no reinvestigation of 6-year-old Max Shacknai's death. 

     In July 2013 Rebecca Zahau's family, believing that her death was the result of criminal wrongdoing, filed a $10 million wrongful death lawsuit against Adam Schackai. The plaintiffs alleged that the defendant battered Rebecca then hanged her from the mansion's balcony.

     On March 11, 2016, following a flurry of defense motions in response to the plaintiffs' suit, a San Diego Superior Court judge ruled there was sufficient evidence for the case to proceed to trial. 

     In January 2019 the jury in the wrongful death case found Adam Schackai responsible for Rebecca Zahau's death. The jury awarded the plaintiffs $5 million in damages.

The Beth Potter/Robin Carre Murder Case

     At six-thirty in the morning of Tuesday, March 31, 2020 a jogger in Madison, Wisconsin came upon the bodies of a man and a woman lying in a ditch. The man was dead and the woman was near death. She died a few hours later in a nearby hospital.

     Dr. Beth Potter, 52, and her partner Robin Carre, 57 were found on the University of Wisconsin campus near the entrance to a 1,200 acre arboretum (a place where many kinds of trees are grown for exhibition and study). The park-like area was also a popular recreational site

     The Dane County Medical Examiner's office issued the rather vague statement that the manner and cause of the couple's death was "homicide related trauma." (The couple had been shot to death with a handgun.)

     Dr. Potter had been director of the Winga Family Medical Center operated by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Robin Carre had worked as an independent educational consultant who helped high school students and their parents with the college admissions process. He had also been director of a local youth soccer organization. The couple had three children, two sons and a daughter.

     Detectives with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Police Department took charge of the double murder investigation. A spokesperson for the department told reporters that the victims had not been randomly killed. They had been, in his words, "targeted."

     On Friday, April 3, 2020 police officers arrested 18-year-old Khari Sanford. A senior at Madison West High School, Sanford knew the murdered couple's children who attended the same school. The victims' daughter, according to her Facebook page, had been in a relationship with the murder suspect.

     Khari Sanford was booked into the Dane County Jail on two counts of first-degree intentional homicide. The magistrate denied him bail.

     In late 2019 the high school football player, when his foster parents were visiting Africa, disabled the home surveillance cameras and drove off in the family car. Because he wasn't allowed to use the vehicle, a relative notified the police. A few days later officers located Sanford in the Madison area sleeping in the vehicle.

     Charged with auto theft, Khari Sanford was admitted into a deferred prosecution program that involved counseling and community service. Once he completed the program the charge would be dropped and his record wiped clean. In January 2019, while still going through the deferred prosecution program, Sanford posted on his Facebook page a photograph of himself posing with a pistol. He also posted comments about policing the police.

     In 2018 Khari Sanford had written the following on his Facebook page: "We gon (sic) change this world, cause it's time to let our diversity and youth shine over all oppressive systems and rebuild our democracy.

     On the day of Khari Sanford's arrest University of Wisconsin Chief of Police Kristin Roman said this about the double murder: "It was calculated, coldblooded and senseless."

     On April 4, 2020 the University of Wisconsin Police Department spokesperson announced that on Saturday, the day after officers took Khari Sanford into custody, they arrested his friend, Ali'jah J. Larrue. The 18-year-old was booked into the Dane Count Jail on two counts of being a party to first-degree intentional homicide. Larrue also attended Madison West High School.

     On April 7, 2020 Khari Sanford and Ali'jah Larrue were arraigned via a video-conducted hearing. Assistant District Attorney William Brown testified that on the night before Dr. Potter and Mr. Carre were found in the arboretum ditch, Sanford and his accomplice entered the victims' home to rob them. Sanford allegedly shot both victims in the back of the head while they slept. After what the prosecutor labeled "an execution," Sanford and his accomplice hauled the deceased Mr. Carre and the dying Dr. Potter to the arboretum where they were found the next morning. Dr. Potter was wearing pajamas and socks. Robin Carre was found in his underwear.

     The Dane County magistrate set the suspects' bail at $1million each. 

     Ali'jah Larrue in May 2022 pleaded guilty to two counts of felony murder and kidnapping. Later that month he testified for the prosecution at Khari Sanford's first-degree murder and kidnapping trial that resulted in a conviction on both charges. In September 2022 the judge sentenced Larrue to eight years in prison followed by ten years of probation. Khari Sanford received a sentence of life in prison.

Lara Prychodko's Mysterious Death

     In the decade prior to 2015, 46-year-old Lara Prychodko lived the life of a wealthy, New York City socialite. Her husband, David Christopher Schlacet, was co-founder of a New York City construction company called Taocon, Inc. The couple owned a condominium in Toronto, two homes in the Hamptons and a pair of apartments in New York City. But by 2016 there was a problem: Lara Prychodko's drug and alcohol problem had caught up with her. In 2012 she was convicted of driving while intoxicated and in 2015 lost custody of her ten-year-old son, Talin. As part of the custody settlement with her estranged husband the domestic court judge ordered Prychodko to undergo regular drug and alcohol testing which she regularly failed.

     In 2016 Lara and her husband separated and began the process of going though a divorce. That year, Mr. Schlacet's construction company Taocon, Inc. filed for bankruptcy. The firm owned creditors $3.4 million and had assets of $550,000.

     Lara Prychodko resided in a luxury apartment in Union Square, Manhattan called Zeckendore Towers.  By 2018 she and Mr. Schlacet were trying to work out how to divide the marital property.

    At 4:10 in the afternoon of July 18, 2018 one of Lara Prychodko's neighbors on the 27th floor of Zeckendore Towers heard a noise coming from the hallway. When the neighbor stepped out of her apartment to investigate, she saw a purse sitting on the carpet near the door to the trash compactor chute. (The handbag was later identified as Lara's.)

     A Zeckendore Towers maintenance employee, at 4:40 that afternoon, came upon the topless body of a woman inside the basement trash compactor. Responding New York City police officers pronounced the woman, identified as Lara Prychodko, dead at the scene.

     As part of the sudden, unexplained death investigation, detectives viewed a Zeckendore hallway surveillance video that showed, about the time the 27th floor neighbor heard the noise near the trash compactor door, Lara Prychodko stumbling about the hallway in what appeared to be a state of intoxication. Based on the dead woman's history with drugs and alcohol, and what appeared on the surveillance video, detectives wound up the investigation by concluding she had died as the result of a "drunken accident."

     On September 18, 2018 New York City Medical Examiner Barbara Sampson ruled Lara Prychodko's death from the 27-floor plunge into the trash compactor, "Undetermined." In her report the medical examiner wrote: "The circumstances around this death are unclear; however, there is no suspicion of foul play."

     Following the New York City Medical Examiner's cause and manner of death rulings the Manhattan District Attorney's Office closed the case.

     Lara Prychodko's father, Nicholas Prychodko, who believed his daughter might have been murdered, asked the famed forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden to review the official autopsy inquiry into the death. Dr. Baden agreed to take the case at no charge.

    After studying the autopsy report, X-rays, laboratory results and death scene photographs, Dr. Baden, in a July 15, 2019 letter to Mr. Prychodko wrote: "Lara Prychodko may have died because of homicidal ligature strangulation and placed in the garbage chute." Dr. Baden considered the fact the victim's blouse was off as possible evidence of violence. He also found on Prychodko's body what he considered physical signs of a struggle.

     In February 2020 Dr. Baden expressed his views on Lara Prychodko's death to an interviewer on Fox News

     The Manhattan District Attorney's Office and the investigating officers with the New York City Police Department continued to maintain no foul play in Lara Prychodko's death. The case remained closed.

     Nicholas Prychodko at a press conference said, "I no longer accept the validity of their [the New York City Medical Examiner's Office] autopsy report and its conclusions." Mr. Prychodko announced that he had hired a private investigator to look into the case.

     In July 2023 Lara's father, Nicholas Prychodko filed a wrongful death suit against Christopher Schlachet alleging that he, for financial gain, hired an un-named hit man to kill his estranged wife. The plaintiff alleged further that Mr. Schlachet had installed software on his wife's computer to track her whereabouts. 

     As of August 2024 the civil case had not come to trial and the case had not been re-opened as a criminal investigation. 

The Brittany Killgore Sex Dungeon Murder Case

     After two years of marriage to Lance Corporal Cory Killgore, 22-year-old Brittany Killgore, on April 11, 2012 filed for divorce. The Marine was serving in Afghanistan. Brittany lived in Fallbrook California, a San Diego County town of 38,000 not far from Camp Pendleton, the U.S. Marine base.

     At two in the afternoon on Saturday April 14, 2012 one of Brittany Killgore's friends called the San Diego County Sheriff's Office to report her missing. The caller had last seen Killgore at 7 PM the day before when she stopped by her friend's apartment to borrow a dress. Killgore said she was going on a date with a 45-year-old Marine staff sergeant named Louis Ray Perez who was picking her up in less than an hour. They were going into downtown San Diego.

     At 7:45 that Friday evening the friend received a text message from Killgore's cellphone that read, "Help." The friend texted back, "What? R U okay?" When Brittany didn't respond the friend texted "Brittany are U okay? I am freaking out here." At 8:05 PM the friend received another message from Killgore's cellphone that read, "Yes I love this party." The worried friend considered this text suspicious because Killgore always used the word "yeah" instead of "yes" in her text messaging. That was the last the friend heard from Killgore's phone. (A transient in downtown San Diego later found Killgore's cellphone in the doorway of a Comfort Inn.)

     A detective with the San Diego Sheriff's Office called Marine Sergeant Louis Perez (who didn't have a criminal record) and asked if he'd come in for questioning regarding the Killgore missing persons case. Louis Perez showed up at the sheriff's office shortly after the call.

     According to the 16-year veteran of the Marine Corps he had gone to Killgore's apartment at four o'clock Friday afternoon to help her pack for her upcoming move to another place. He asked her if she'd like to go out on a dinner-dance boat that evening in downtown San Diego. Killgore declined, saying that she was tired. Soon after Perez left Killgore's apartment at 5:10 PM she sent him a text saying she had changed her mind. Perez returned to her place at 7:30 for the date.

     According to the Marine's statement he dropped Brittany off in downtown San Diego in front of a club called the Whisky Girl Night while he looked for a place to park. Fifteen minutes later, when he arrived at the club on foot he couldn't find her. Perez looked around for 30 minutes then headed home to the house he shared in Fallbrook with his girlfriend, 36-year-old Dorothy Grace Marie Maraglino and her friend, Jessica Lynn Lopez, 25.

     The deputy who interviewed Perez that afternoon asked if he could take a look inside the white Ford Explorer the Marine had driven to the sheriff's office. Perez said he had no problem with that.

     The first thing the detective noticed about Perez's car was the fresh mud caked on the underside of the vehicle and in its wheel wells. The Marine's shoes were also muddy. Perez told the officer that the car had gotten that way when he recently collected firewood near Camp Pendleton. The deputy took a plastic bag from inside the car that contained a pair of blue latex gloves which appeared to be blood-stained. (A presumptive luminal test confirmed it was blood and later DNA analysis identified the blood as Brittany Killgore's.) Perez also possessed a stun gun that had a human hair follicle attached to it. At this point in the investigation Sergeant Perez became a suspect in Brittany Killgore's disappearance and possible murder. The deputy, after recovering a stolen AR 15 assault rifle from Perez's Ford Explorer, arrested him on a charge of theft. The "person of interest" in the Killgore case was taken to jail where he was incarcerated under $500,000 bond.

     From Perez's cellphone investigators collected messages sent from his phone to Killgore's. The first message, sent at 9:20 PM on Friday, April 13, almost two hours after Killgore's "help" text, said, "Your friends are calling me worried." Later that evening at a time investigators believe Killgore was dead Perez had texted, "Now I am worried too."

     When the San Diego detectives questioned the suspect's housemate, Dorothy Maraglino, the 37-year-old said Perez had returned home Friday night sometime between 10 PM and midnight. He remained in the Fallbrook house until he left for San Diego the next day in response to the call from the sheriff's office.

     On April 15, 2012 San Diego deputies searched the Perez/Maraglino/Lopez house in Fallbrook where they suspected Brittany Killgore had been murdered. The searchers discovered that one of the rooms in the dwelling had been set up as a "sex dungeon" equipped with a variety of "sex apparatuses, toys and tools" such as handcuffs, whips, leather restraints and chain shackles. When asked about this sadomasochistic playroom Dorothy Maraglino and Jessica Lopez explained that they participated in erotic master-servant and master-slave role-playing. Dorothy identified herself as the dominatrix and said that Louis Perez enjoyed spanking women.

     The Killgore missing persons/murder investigation took an even more bizarre turn on April 16, 2012 when investigators learned that Master Dorothy and her slave Jessica had checked into the Ramada Inn located in the Point Loma section of San Diego. Deputies showed up at room 105 at 9:30 that morning. Lopez, in a drowsy voice, told the officers she was too exhausted to come to the door to let them in. When a deputy cracked the door open as far as the interior door chain would allow the officer saw blood on the floor. Another officer kicked the door open and the police stormed into the motel room.

     The sheriff's deputies found Jessica Lopez, naked from the waist up and covered in blood from self-inflicted superficial knife wounds on her neck and wrists. (Maraglino had left the motel.) A message in lipstick scrawled on the mirror above the dressing table read: "PIGS READ THIS." Below this message lay a 7-page handwritten murder confession signed by Jessica Lopez.

     In the confession Jessica Lopez admitted using a ligature in the sex dungeon in the Fallbrook house to strangle Brittany Killgore to death. She killed the victim out of fear Louis Perez would be seduced by her. After half-hearted attempts to dismember Killgore's body Lopez doused the naked body with bleach to destroy physical evidence. She wrote that she "hid the body of that whore in almost plain sight" near Lake Skinner, noting that the police would find handcuff marks on the victim's wrists. Lopez said she had deposited the knife she had used in her attempts to "chop her up" in a beach restroom in Oceanside. The police would also find a pair of handcuffs with the knife. In her statement/suicide note Lopez said she was taking full responsibility for Brittany Killgore's murder.

     At 2:30 that afternoon, searchers located Killgore's naked remains lying in the brush along the side of a road near Riverside County's Lake Skinner, 23 miles north of Fallbrook. The police arrested Jessica Lopez on April 17, 2012 on the charge of first-degree murder. Louis Perez, already in custody on the gun theft case, was charged with first-degree murder as well. Dorothy Maraglino, also charged with first-degree murder, was taken into custody on May 10, 2012. The three suspects were held on $3 million bond and all pleaded not guilty.

     At a Killgore murder case preliminary hearing that got underway on March 11, 2013 in Vista County Superior Court the victim's best friend Elizabeth Hernandez testified that she and Killgore became acquainted with Marine Sergeant Louis Perez, Jessica Lopez and Dorothy Maraglino in 2011 after Hernandez responded to an ad selling a fertility monitor on a website used by military families. Hernandez said she befriended Maraglino because the two of them were trying to get pregnant. After that Brittany Killgore regularly visited the house where Maragalino resided with Lopez.

     Hernandez testified that Sergeant Perez, Lopez and Maragalino openly discussed their sexual lifestyle that involved Perez as the master, Maragalino as the mistress and Jessica Lopez as the slave. In their sex dungeon they had painted a giant spider web on the wall and bars on the ceiling. According to the preliminary hearing witness Elizabeth Hernandez and Killgore made it clear they were not going to participate in the sex games.

     In 2012 Elizabeth Hernandez and Britany Killgore had a falling out. At that time Killgore was preparing to divorce her husband, Lance Corporal Cory Killgore. Hernandez testified that she discussed the souring of their friendship with Louis Perez, Lopez and Maragalino. After that Jessica Lopez and Dorothy Maragalino began referring to Killgore as "the disease" and "herpes." According to Elizabeth Hernandez, Perez and Maragalino said they could get rid of Killgore but they wouldn't because they knew Hernandez would miss her. Hernandez said she thought they were joking.

     On March 14, 2013 Deputy Medical Examiner Craig Nelson testified that the victim had been strangled with some kind of ligature and that her body had been moved to where it was found near Lake Skinner. The forensic pathologist said there were two marks on Killgore's neck and tiny hemorrhages in her eyes that indicated strangulation as the cause of death. Dr. Nelson had also discovered cuts on the victim's left wrist and left knee that suggested that someone had attempted to dismember the body. The cut to the left leg was so deep it reached the bone. The bone contained tool marks that indicated a saw had been used in the dismemberment attempt. This had occurred postmortem.

     A woman followed Dr. Nelson to the stand who said she had lived in the Maraglino house for three months in late 2010. According to this witness she had been Dorothy Maraglino's sex slave for a time and knew that Maraglino and Louis Perez enjoyed choking their sex partners.

     On March 16, 2013 Vista Superior Court Judge K. Michael Kirkman ruled that the prosecution in the Killgore case had presented enough evidence against the defendants to justify a murder trial.

     On April 8, 2014, murder defendant Dorothy Maragalino, represented by the fourth attorney assigned to her since 2012, was back in court filing motions that would delay the progress of the case. Initially Maragalino had insisted on representing herself then changed her mind. After dismissing her next two lawyers the judge assigned her a public defender who asked to be removed from the case. Attorney Jane Kinsey, the fourth defense attorney, needed more time to prepare. Judge Kirkman granted the motion.

     That April Jessica Lopez's attorney, Sloan Ostby, asked the judge for more time to study the 7,345 pages of documents he acquired from the prosecution on discovery. Ostby said he also had to review 165 DVDs that had been supplied by the state. The judge granted this motion.

     Attorney Brad Patton, representing Louis Perez, the accused sex dungeon master, filed a series of pretrial motions in 2014 that slowed progress in the case. On December 12, 2014, perhaps in an attempt to move things along, the district attorney's office announced it would not seek the death penalty against the defendants.

     On June 6, 2015, at a pre-trial hearing, Judge Kirkman denied a motion by defense attorney Sloan Ostby to exclude writings by Jessica Lopez that described, in detail, the victim's torture, murder and dismemberment. Attorney Ostby, characterizing the writings as the product of his client's fantasies, argued that the material was so gruesome it would unduly prejudice a jury. Judge Kirkman said he would allow the writings into evidence with deletions of the most disturbing parts.

     The handwritten "Pigs Read This" document had been found in the hotel room along with Jessica Lopez's suicide note. In denying the motion to completely suppress this evidence, Judge Kirkman said, "It is a document that very much has relevance."

     In earlier court related statements prosecutor Patrick Espinoza compared the defendants to the Manson family. Defense attorneys objected to this and asked the judge to forbid such comparisons in the future. Judge Kirkman granted that request.

     On August 14, 2015 the San Diego County Medical Examiner's Office released its Brittany Killgore autopsy report. The document confirmed that Killgore had been strangled. Moreover, attempts had been made to dismember her body. The victim was initially identified by a small tattoo on her left wrist. According to notes made by Deputy San Diego Medical Examiner Dr. Craig Nelson, "On the left side of the [victim's] neck and face were two small, paired brown marks that were suggestive of use of an electrical weapon…The victim's left knee had a large but bloodless incised wound suggestive of attempted dismemberment."

     On September 8, 2015, in Vista, California, jury selection began in the Dorothy Maraglino, Louis Perez and Jessica Perez murder trial. Two months later the defendants were convicted of murder and kidnapping. The judge sentenced all three to life in prison without the chance of parole.

The Bill Cosby Sexual Assault Saga

     Bill Cosby, married to his wife Camille for more than 50 years, was one of the most recognizable comedians in the world. A graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia where he starred in track, the 77-year-old, in 2014, still resided in eastern Pennsylvania. When the former TV star began criticizing certain aspects of black culture he became a somewhat controversial figure. While many considered him a courageous speaker of the truth, liberals and some members of the black community considered him a traitor to his race.

     In November 2014 Mr. Cosby's good name and wholesome image came under public attack in connection with allegations of past behavior that violently clashed with his longstanding public persona. On November 16, 2014 64-year-old Joan Tarshis told a CNN interviewer that Cosby, in 1969 when she was nineteen, knocked her out with a drugged drink and raped her.

     Tarshis said she met Bill Cosby in 1969 over lunch in Los Angeles. She accompanied him back to his bungalow on the set of "The Bill Cosby Show" to work on some comedy routines. After she drank a Bloody Mary he had mixed for her she passed out. She awoke to find him removing her underwear. In an effort to avoid being sexually assaulted she told him she had an infection that he'd pass on to his wife. Instead of raping her Mr. Cosby allegedly forced her to give him oral sex. She did not tell anyone, not even her mother, about what had happened.

     Cosby later called Tarshis at her home in New York to invite her to watch him perform at The Theater at Westbury. She accepted drinks at Cosby's hotel and in his limousine before the performance. While at the theater she began to feel drugged. She asked the chauffeur to take her home. She passed out in limo. The next morning she woke up naked in a hotel bed next to Cosby.

     Out of "guilt and shame," Joan Tarshis did not reveal that Cosby had sexually assaulted her for the second time. She didn't think that anyone would take her word over a man revered as America's dad.

     On Saturday November 16, 2014 Scott Simon, in an interview on NPR, repeatedly asked Cosby if the rape allegations were true. Each time Cosby simply shook his head no.

     The Cosby rape allegation scandal intensified the next day when a reporter with Village Voice wrote about a comedy routine on a 1969 Cosby album involving "Spanish Fly," a drug that supposedly made women beg for sex. As part of the comedy bit Bill Cosby joked that when he visited Spain he tried to acquire the drug.

     Janice Dickinson, the 59-year-old former supermodel sat for an interview conducted by "Entertainment Tonight" co-host Kevin Frazier that aired on November 18, 2014. According to Dickinson, Bill Cosby had sexually assaulted her in 1982 after they had dinner in Lake Tahoe. He had invited her there to open a show for him. After dinner at his hotel he gave her a pill and a glass of red wine. She passed out. "The last thing I remember," she said, "was Bill Cosby in a patchwork robe, dropping his robe and getting on top of me."

     Dickinson told the "Entertainment Tonight" interviewer that she wanted to expose Cosby in her 2002 memoir, No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World's First Supermodel. The publisher, however, got cold feet when Cosby and his lawyers threatened a lawsuit.

     Cosby's lawyer, Martin Singer, in a letter to the Associated Press, claimed that Dickinson's allegations were "false and outlandish." According to the lawyer she contradicted her story in her memoir where she described stopping at Cosby's hotel room door after they had dinner. When she declined to enter the room he said, "After all I've done for you, this is what I get."

     On November 19, 2014 a detailed and damaging article about Bill Cosby and another alleged rape victim, 41-year-old Andrea Constland, came out in the Internet publication, "Mailonline." In November 2002 the 29-year-old former Temple University basketball star met Bill Cosby. She became a regular dinner party guest at his home and considered him a mentor.

     Constland, while visiting Cosby at his home in January 2004 told him she had been stressed at work. To help her relax Mr. Cosby allegedly gave her what he called a "herbal medication." Shortly after consuming the three blue pills she became dizzy and her knees began to shake. A little later she was unable to move her arms and legs. At that point Cosby gave Constand another drug. He led her to the sofa where she passed out. When she awoke her outer clothes and her underwear were in disarray.

     Constand waited a year before reporting that Bill Cosby had raped her. She had returned to Canada, her native country. It was there she reported the assault.

     Bruce Castor, the then district attorney of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, the site of the alleged rape, was informed by the Canadian authorities of Constand's allegations. He launched an investigation. In the "Mailonline" article the former prosecutor lamented the fact he didn't have enough evidence to file charges against Bill Cosby. "I wanted to arrest Cosby,"  he said, "because I thought he was probably guilty." But being able to prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt and thinking that a suspect is guilty are two different things."

     Mr. Castor, in the "Mailonline" piece, pointed out that Constand's one-year delay in reporting the crime hurt the case. "We couldn't test for hairs, fibers, DNA and drugs that might have linked the victim to Cosby or his house."

     In March 2005 Andrea Constand sued Bill Cosby for causing her "serious and deliberating injuries, mental anguish, humiliation, embarrassment, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, sleeplessness, anxiety and flashbacks." The plaintiff asked for $150,000 in damages. Her attorney had rounded up thirteen other women who supported her claim that Bill Cosby was a rapist.

     In 2006 Bill Cosby settled the Constand civil suit out of court. Given the damaging publicity the trial would have brought him, and the relatively small amount asked for by the plaintiff, this was not surprising. Some took this as a sign of his guilt while others simply considered it a good business decision on his part.

     Shortly after the "Mailonline" article came out executives at Netflix postponed Cosby's comedy special that was scheduled to air on November 28, 2014. NBC followed suit by scrapping a Bill Cosby project that was in development. TV Land cable network stopped airing reruns of "The Bill Cosby Show."

     On Friday night, November 21, 2014 Bill Cosby appeared at the Maxwell C. King Center For The Performing Arts at Eastern Florida State College in the central Florida town of Melbourne. Following his 90-minute set he received a standing ovation from an adoring audience. One of the male attendees to the show, in speaking to a reporter with the Los Angeles Times, said, "If he raped all these woman why did they not say something before?"

     The University of Massachusetts Amherst, where Cosby earned his master's and doctorate in education in the 1970s, cut ties with the comedian on November 28, 2014. According to a university spokesperson "Bill Cosby has agreed to resign as an honorary co-chair of UMass Amherst's Capital Campaign. He no longer has any affiliation with the campaign nor does he serve in any other capacity at the university."

     In late 2014 the unsealed records of the Constand civil suit revealed that Cosby, in a deposition, admitted using the sedative methaqualone in connection with having sex with several young women. He also acknowledged knowing that using the drug in this way was illegal. Cosby incriminated himself this way because he was told by the district attorney this information would not be used to prosecute him.

     In December 2015, the new district attorney of Montgomery County, believing that he was not bound by the former district attorney's promise to Cosby, charged him with the aggravated indecent sexual assault of Andrea Constand. 

     The Cosby/Constand criminal trial in June 2017 ended in a mistrial.   

    On September 25, 2018 following his second trial, Cosby was convicted of the 2004 aggravated sexual assault of Andrea Constland. The judge sentenced him to three to ten years in prison. Following the sentencing hearing he was led out of court in handcuffs. 

      Bill Cosby would serve his time as prisoner number NN7687 in a single cell at Montgomery County's State Correction at Phoenix 20 miles from his former home.

     In May 2021 the Pennsylvania Parole Board denied Cosby's request for early release on grounds he had refused to participate in the prison's sex offender programs.

     On June 30, 2021 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, on a procedural issue of due process, vacated Bill Cosby's sexual assault conviction. According to the state's highest court, Mr. Cosby had not received a fair trial because the second district attorney had violated the terms of the former prosecutor's agreement regarding the use of Cosby's incriminating civil trial testimony. (In effect he had been induced to incriminate himself under false pretenses.) Moreover, pursuant to the 5-4 decision, Mr. Cosby could not be retried on the same charges. The 83-year-old walked out of prison a free man. 

     Unsurprisingly, Cosby's release from prison was not popular with many people, including friends, relatives and supporters of the 60 women who accused him of sexual abuse.