7,145,000 pageviews


Friday, February 14, 2025

Japan's Black Widow

       In 2014, Japan was home to one of the fastest aging populations in the world. Japanese people were living longer and fewer of them lived with their adult children. 

     Japanese men and women in their 70s whose spouses had died were lonely and vulnerable to a variety of crimes that included murder. Many of them, desperate for companionship in their so-called golden years, accessed online dating services that catered to lonely senior citizens,

The Black Widow

     In 1964 18-year-old Chisako, (because she was married to so many men and took their last names only her first name will be used) a bright, ambitious high school graduate from Muko, a small industrial suburb of the city of Kyoto, married a truck driver who later started a small printing company. Although Chisako had the intelligence and desire to attend college her conservative parents, not wanting to waste a higher education on a woman, denied her that opportunity. She ended up working as a bank clerk, a job she felt was beneath her.

     In 1994 Chisako's husband suddenly fell ill and died at the age of 54. The authorities determined his death to be natural, and pursuant to custom in Japan, his body was cremated.,

     In 2004 the 48-year-old Chisako married the 67-year-old president of a small drug company. Two years later he got sick and died. With no reason to suspect foul play the authorities listed his death as natural. His remains were also cremated.

     In May 2008, after being married to Chisako for less than two months the*- 75-year-old landowner became ill and suddenly died. Two months after that the 73-year-old clothing boutique owner Chisako was dating suddenly dropped dead. Although this was the fourth man connected to Chisako by marriage or romance to die suddenly, this man's passing did not catch the attention of law enforcement. As a result it was labeled a natural death. It seemed that when it came to partners this woman had a lot of bad luck. She was, however, becoming rich.

     In 201 after Chisako's 71-year-old fiancee fell off his motorcycle and died, the police, now suspicious, ordered a blood test that revealed the presence of the poison cyanide. This man had been murdered and Chisako became the prime suspect in the case.

     While under investigation for the poisoning murder of her fiancee Chisako married again, this time to a 75-year-old man named Isao Kakehi. Mr. Kakehi, a longtime widower, had a substantial savings account and owned his own home. One month after marrying Chisako he ended up dead on the floor of his dwelling. Following the initial cause of death ruling of heart failure, a test of Isao Kakehi's blood revealed a lethal dose of cyanide.

     In November 2014 detectives with the Kyoto Prefectural Police arrested Chisako on suspicion of murder in the death of Mr. Kakehi and the death of the poisoned fiancee who fell off his motorcycle in 2012. When the fiancee died from cyanide poisoning Chisako was dating at least two other elderly men. Chisako's arrest probably saved their lives.

     Detectives in December 2014 recovered a small bag of cyanide that had been hidden in a plant pot Chisako had thrown away.

     According to investigators the suspected serial killer's M.O. had been simple and direct. She used the online dating services to find lonely and moderately wealthy men whom she showered with romantic emails professing her undying love. Shortly after she married these men she pressured them to change their wills to make her the sole beneficiary of their estates.

     Chisako, dubbed by Japan's tabloid media as the "Black Widow," had amassed $8 million of her victims' money. Since she was richer than her last two or three victims, money may not have been her primary motive. She may have killed these men out of anger and resentment against a male-dominated society that did not recognize her worth.

     During her November 2017 murder trial Chisako confessed to murdering three of her husbands and attempting to kill a fourth. The judge sentenced her to death.

    This serial murder case highlighted a problem in Japan's criminal justice system. Because of a critical shortage of forensic pathologists in Japan, autopsies were not conducted on six of Chisako's suspected eight victims. In 2014 only 11.7 percent of Japan's so-called "unusual deaths" resulted in autopsies. In England that percentage was 40 percent. In Sweden, 95 percent. In the United States, with so many drug overdoses, suicides and murder, while no statistics were available regarding this percentage, it was probably lower than Japan's.

Thursday, February 13, 2025

Psychic Detective Sylvia Browne

     While some people believe in fortune tellers, soothsayers, spoon benders, people who communicate with the dead and so-called psychic detectives, the pairing of the words "psychic" and "detective" is beyond ridiculous. Nevertheless there are criminal investigators who take psychic detectives seriously and confer with them. One of the most famous psychic detectives was a woman named Sylvia Brown who died in 2011 at the age of 77.

      Sylvia Browne grew up in Kansas City Missouri. In 1964 she moved to southern California where she set up shop as a psychic. Ten years later, perhaps in an effort to create the indicia of legitimacy, she founded the Nirvana Foundation for Psychic Research.

     During her career Browne wrote 50 "nonfiction" books of which 22 appeared on The New York Times bestsellers list. 

     Sylvia Browne achieved fame and fortune through her regular appearances on the TV shows "Unsolved Mysteries" and "Montel." Her television exposure also helped her promote her books.

     While the psychic detective offered her services in dozens of celebrated crimes her predictions never resulted directly in the solution of a murder or the location of a missing body. (For example, in a missing persons/murder case Sylvia Browne told Montel Williams that the body was on the bottom of a small lake in Connecticut. The woman's remains were later found several hundred miles away.)

     One of Sylvia Browne's high-profile goofs involved the Cleveland kidnapping case featuring Amanda Berry. Browne told the victim's mother that her daughter was dead when in fact she was being held prisoner in Cleveland Ohio by Ariel Castro.

     Psychic detectives wouldn't exist if producers stopped putting them on television. While it is doubtful that any person smart enough to be a TV producer actually believes in psychics, a large segment of the TV-watching public does believe in them. That's why psychic detectives are on TV. Moreover, if you're on the tube you are perceived as legit. Media exposure can be a phony stamp of approval.

     For millions of Americans living in a land of magical thinking, psychic detectives are perceived as visionaries who can see and know things ordinary people can't. In reality, psychic detectives give false hope, create investigative wild-goose-chases and make TV hosts look foolish in the eyes of people who can think straight.

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Leatrice Brewer: The Woman Who Killed But Didn't Murder Her Three Children

     In 2002 21-year-old Leatrice Brewer, while living with her grandmother, had her first baby, a girl she named Jewell. Leatrice and the baby's father Ricky Ward broke up shortly after the birth. Leatrice and her grandmother, Maebell Mickens, lived in New Cassel New York, a suburban community on Long Island 20 miles east of New York City.

     Brewer's grandmother and her mother Pearly Mae Mickens were mentally ill drug addicts. Leatrice, already showing signs of insanity, worked as a filing clerk at a law firm. She also had a part time job as a sales assistant at a Kohl's department store.

     Not long after the birth of her daughter Jewell, Leatrice began dating a man from Queens named Innocent Demesyeux. Less than a year later she gave birth to their son Michael. Leatrice continued to live with her grandmother, Maebell Mickens. Maebell, to help support her drug habit, was not above panhandling on the streets of New Cassel. At this time Leatrice continued to struggle with severe bouts of depression and drug dependancy.

     In 2006 Leatrice Brewer had a second child with Innocent Demesyeux, a boy who inherited his father's unusual first name. Shortly after Innocent's birth Maebell Mickens kicked Leatrice and her children out of her house.

     Leatrice Brewer and her three kids moved in to a small second-story apartment on Prospect Street in New Cassel. Without financial help from the children's fathers Leatrice continued to hold down two jobs. She also received rental assistance, food stamps and a stipend from the federal Women, Infants and Children program.

     As early as 2003 caseworkers from the state's Child Protective Service agency received complaints filed by neighbors and family members accusing Leatrice of child neglect. Every so often one of the fathers would call the local police to report that Leatrice, a six-foot woman who weighted more than 200 pounds, had hit one of the children. Notwithstanding these complaints she never lost custody of Jewell, Michael or Innocent.

     By 2007 Leatrice Brewer was too drug-addled and mentally ill to hold down a job. For days she was absent from the apartment, leaving the child-raising to her 6-year-old daughter Jewell.

     In late February 2008 Leatrice called 911 and informed the dispatcher she had stabbed Jewell and drowned her in the bathtub. The distraught mother said she had also drowned Michael and Innocent. After talking to the 911 dispatcher she tried to kill herself by swallowing a concoction of household cleaning chemicals. When it appeared she couldn't commit suicide by poisoning herself Leatrice Brewer jumped out of her second-story bedroom window.

      The mother's second attempt to kill herself also failed. Instead of the morgue she ended up at the Nassau University Medical Center with an injured back. The next day a county prosecutor charged her with three counts of murder.

     While being treated at the hospital Leatrice Brewer told a visiting relative that "the voices took control and I had to do it."

     According to a battery of court-appointed psychiatrists, Leatrice Brewer suffered from a major depressive disorder that caused her to kill her children. She had been under the delusion that killing her kids would save them from something worse than death--the effects of voodoo.

     In 2009 Leatrice Brewer pleaded not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect. The judge sent her to a state psychiatric facility where the 28-year-old would reside and be treated until mental health experts and drugs made her sane enough to rejoin society.

     The Brewer case came back into the news in 2013 when Leatrice petitioned a judge for her share of her children's $350,000 estate. (I do not know the source of this wealth. Perhaps a wrongful death lawsuit had been filed against the state on the children's behalf that resulted in a court settlement.) Normally, under New York's Son of Sam law, convicted criminals are prohibited from profiting from their crimes. But in this case, Brewer, rather than being convicted of triple murder, had been found not guilty by reason of insanity. This raised the legal question of whether or not, under these circumstances, she was entitled to the money.

     In November 2013 a judge ruled that pursuant to the Son of Sam law Leatrice Brewer was not entitled to a piece of her dead children's estate.
     Leatrice Brewer remains a patient at the Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychiatric Center at Long Island New York. 

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Murder Most Rare: The Anna Mae Blessing Case

     In January 2018 92-year-old Anna Mae Blessing moved into a condo in Fountain Hills Arizona with her 72-year-old son Thomas Blessing and his 57-year-old girlfriend who owned the dwelling.

     Around nine-thirty on the morning of July 2, 2018 Thomas Blessing was in his mother's bedroom arguing with her over plans to send the elderly woman to an assisted living facility. She did not want to live in such a place and said so in no uncertain terms as the argument became heated. With her son's girlfriend looking on Anna Mae Blessing pulled a handgun from the pocket of her robe and shot her son several times at close range. He died on the spot.

     After shooting her son to death the old woman pointed the gun at her dead son's girlfriend who managed, following a brief struggle, to disarm her. At that moment Anna Blessing pulled a second gun from her robe, a weapon the girlfriend knocked out of her hand.

     Once she had separated the elderly shooter from her weapons the girlfriend called 911. At ten that morning members of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office arrived at the scene. The deputies found the 92-year-old sitting quietly in a reclining chair. As officers led the murder suspect from the condo in handcuffs she said, to no one in particular, "You took my life, so I took yours."

     Officers booked the suspect into the Maricopa County Jail on charges of first-degree murder and aggravated assault. A magistrate set her bail at $50,000. At one point during her booking the murder suspect said, "Put me to sleep." An official close to the case speculated that after murdering her son Mrs. Blessing had planned to take her own life.

      In January 2019 Anna Mae Blessing, while awaiting her murder trial, died in the Maricopa County Jail.

Monday, February 10, 2025

The Douglas and Kristen Barbour Child Abuse Case

     Douglas B. Barbour was a prosecutor in the Pennsylvania State Attorney's Office headquartered in Harrisburg, the state capital. The 33-year-old attorney was assigned to the district office in Pittsburgh. He and his 30-year-old wife Kristen resided in Franklin Park, a borough of 14,000 just north of the city. In March 2012 the couple, through a religious organization called Bethany Christian Services, adopted a 5-year-old boy and an 11-month-old girl. The children were from Ethiopia.

     On September 14, 2012 Dr. Rachel Berger at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh examined the Barbour children. The 6-year-old boy had been brought to the hospital with hypothermia, rapid breathing and skin lesions caused by prolonged exposure to urine. He weighed 47 pounds and was severely malnourished.

     The girl, 18-months-old, had breathing difficulties, retinal hemorrhaging, brain injury and healing fractures in her femur and a toe. (Kristen Barbour told Dr. Berger that the toddler had suffered several accidental falls.) As a result of the toddler's head trauma she was blind in one eye, perhaps permanently. The little girl was also malnourished. (Tests would later reveal that the healing bone fractures were not the result of disease.)

     Dr. Berger, suspecting child abuse, notified the Allegheny County Police Department. The boy was admitted to the hospital's urgent care center and the girl placed into protective custody. In the doctor's report she wrote this about the 6-year-old boy: "[He is] the victim of significant neglect and possible emotional abuse over a prolonged period of time."

     After spending six days in the hospital the boy gained seven pounds. He was taken to A Child's Place, a children's abuse facility at the Mercy Health Center in Pittsburgh.

     On October 2, 2012 detectives with the Allegheny County Police Department questioned the boy at the Mercy Health Center. According to the child, whenever he soiled his pants his parents made him eat his meals in the bathroom.

     Two days after speaking to the 6-year-old the police arrested Douglas and Kristen Barbour. They were charged with two counts of endangering the welfare of a child, and in the case of their 18-month-old daughter, aggravated assault. The state attorney general's office suspended Douglas Barbour without pay pending the outcome of the case.

     Detectives searched the couple's suburban home in Franklin Park and found, in the boy's bedroom, nothing but a mattress and a sheet. There were no toys, window coverings, wall decorations or anything else that made the place livable.

     According to an employee of the adoption service, Mrs. Barbour had complained that the boy was "rude, defiant and very difficult." She also complained that both children ate too much.

     On June 23, 2014 Douglas and Kristen Barbour pleaded no contest to two counts each of endangering children. Mr. Barbour pleaded to the misdemeanor counts while his wife pleaded to the felony charges. As part of his plea deal Mr. Barbour received a probated sentence. Although his wife faced three to twelve months in jail, her attorney asked for probation. The couple relinquished their parental rights and the children remained in foster care.

     In September 2014 the judge sentenced Kristen Barbour to six to 12 months to be served at the minimum security prison at Mercer, Pennsylvania. Douglas Barbour, in March of 2015, resigned from the Pennsylvania Bar Association.

Sunday, February 9, 2025

Raymond Clark: The Panhandler Arsonist

     Thirty-eight-year-old Raymond Sean Clark, a homeless panhandler, regularly loitered outside the 7-Eleven store on the Pacific Coast Highway in Long Beach California. Mr, Clark made a habit of annoying customers who patronized the convenience store by begging them for money and cigarettes. He had become an unwelcome fixture in the neighborhood. 

     At five in the afternoon of April 12, 2013, as Jerry Payne sat outside the 7-Eleven store in his Toyota 4-Runner, the 62-year-old was approached by Clark who asked him for money. 

     When Mr. Payne refused to give Raymond Clark a handout the transient poured a bottle of gasoline into the SUV and tossed in a match. The vehicle and its occupant were immediately engulfed in flames. (The fire was so intense customers and employees in the convenience store had to escape through a back door.)

     After Good Samaritans eventually pulled Mr. Payne out of the burning vehicle paramedics rushed him to Torrance Memorial Hospital, a medical facility that specialized in burn patients. With third-degree burns on his chest and face the victim was in critical condition.

     Police officers arrested Raymond Clark around the corner from the fire. Charged with attempted murder he was held in the Los Angeles Inmate Reception Center under $502,200 bail. When Mr. Payne died from his burns the prosecutor elevated the charge against Raymond Clark to murder.
     In April 2014, a year after the deadly assault, Jerry Payne's family filed a wrongful death suit against the 7-Eleven convenience store chain and the city of Long Beach. The plaintiffs based the civil action on the theory the attack had been foreseeable therefore preventable. According to the plaintiffs, both the owner of the store and the police had known that Raymond Clark was aggressive and dangerous.

     Assistant City Attorney Monte H. Machit described Mr. Payne's death as an "absolute tragedy." However, he said, Long Beach could not be held accountable for every "random act of violence that took place in the city."

     In March 2015 the plaintiffs dropped the wrongful death suit against the city of Long Beach.

     Prosecutors in September 2017 announced they would not seek the death penalty against Raymond Clark.  
     In January 2022 Mr. Clark pleaded guilty to murder and arson. The judge sentenced him to 25 years to life in prison.

Saturday, February 8, 2025

The Esteban Manzanares Rape/Suicide Case

     Before becoming a U.S. Border Patrol agent in 2008, Esteban Manzanares, a resident of McAllen, Texas, a town on the Mexican border, worked as a jail guard and served in the Army National Guard. He had been married two years to his wife Susana, a woman he'd met online in 2000.

     In August 2013 Esteban and Susana separated. He moved from their home in Edinburg into an apartment in nearby Mission Texas. The couple's two children, a girl and a boy, one and six-years-old respectively, remained with their mother. The divorce became final in February 2014.

     After the separation the 32-year-old border patrol agent and his 30-year-old ex-wife remained on good terms. As far as she could tell he was mentally sound and remained devoted to his children who both suffered from cystic fibrosis.

      But at work agent Manzanares had gone rogue. Two women who crossed the Rio Grande into Texas illegally reported they were raped by a border patrol agent. The details of the crime and the victim's description of the rapist led FBI agents and border patrol personnel to suspect Manzanares. They did not, however, have enough evidence to charge him or place him on administrative leave.

     A few hours prior to the end of his daytime patrol shift on March 12, 2014 Manzanares encountered a young woman and two 14-year-old girls in a Hidalgo County park a few miles from Mexico. The woman immediately identified herself and the girls as Honduran nationals who had just entered the county illegally.

     Manzanares handcuffed the females and put them into his patrol truck, but instead of taking them to a border patrol station he drove them to a remote spot a few miles away. In this scrub-filled no-man's land Manzanares sexually assaulted the women and the girls, one of whom was the older victim's daughter.

     Following the assaults Manazanares put one of the girls back into his truck and drove off leaving the woman and her daughter in the wilderness. The border patrol agent drove to his apartment in Mission where  he left his victim tied up. Later that night he returned to his apartment and raped her.

     The mother and daughter were later picked up and taken to the McAllen Medical Center. Their description of the man who had assaulted them led to a search of Manazanares' patrol truck. Inside the vehicle searchers found blood stains and pieces of duct tape.

     During the early morning hours of March 13, 2014 two FBI agents showed up at Esteban Manzanares' apartment in Mission. They knocked on the door and heard from inside the dwelling a gunshot. The agents called for backup. Members of the Mission Police Department's SWAT team broke into the apartment. Inside officers found the 14-year-old Honduran girl. She was nude and bound but alive. Manzanares had committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.

Friday, February 7, 2025

Rebecca Hardy's Strange Suicide

     In 2015, 22-year-old Rebecca Hardy resided in a modest home in Port Huron Michigan with her boyfriend Matthew Grattan and their 18-month-old daughter Molly. Port Huron is a small Canadian border town located 60 miles northeast of Detroit.

     On Thursday afternoon December 3, 2015, Rebecca Hardy stormed out of her house following an argument with her boyfriend. In the backyard of another house in the neighborhood she took off her shoes and climbed over a fence that kept the owner's two dogs confined to his property. The dogs, a pit bull and a pit bull-husky mix, immediately set upon the intruder.

     The dogs knocked Rebecca Hardy to the ground and attacked her neck and face. A local resident witnessed the mauling and tried but failed to call the dogs off. Eventually the dogs' owner responded to the attack and subdued his pets. By then the dogs had severely injured the woman who had climbed into their yard.

     Paramedics rushed the severely bitten Hardy to the Lake Huron Medical Center from where she was airlifted to the Beaumont Hospital for emergency surgery. That evening Rebecca Hardy died from her injuries.

     The dogs who attacked Hardy were gathered up by animal control personnel and euthanized the next day. The local prosecutor, following a police investigation, declined to file criminal charges against the dogs' owner.

     On Wednesday, December 9, 2015, Dr. Ljubisa Dragovic, the Chief Medical Examiner of Oakland County ruled the manner of Rebecca Hardy's death as suicide. In his report Dr. Dragovic wrote: "These were attack dogs. They were vicious dogs in an enclosed space. She [Hardy] obviously was aware of that because she climbed over the fence to subject herself to this threat." According to the medical examiner Rebecca Hardy recently attempted suicide after being thrown out of her house.

     Following Rebecca Hardy's gruesome and fatal mauling, Matthew Grattan, her boyfriend and the father of her child, told a local reporter that he disputed the medical examiner's suicide ruling. "I, in no way, shape or form believe that she was looking to hurt herself on that day. She had a little girl. She wanted us to be a family."

     Rebecca Hardy's mother, Terressa Engel, was reported as saying this about her daughter's bizarre death: "I just don't understand how being mauled to death is suicide. They must have a new term for suicide."

     Absent suicide, Rebecca Hardy's fate would have been classified as either an accident or a homicide. Her boyfriend, Matthew Grattan, did not offer an alternative theory as to the manner of her death.

     In January 2016 Dr. Dragovic released the toxicology report that revealed that Rebecca Hardy had alcohol, marijuana and cocaine in her system at the time of her death. 

Thursday, February 6, 2025

The Talking Parrot Murder Case

     In 2015 Martin "Marty" Duram and his wife Glenna resided in Sand Lake, Michigan, a village of 500 in the southwestern part of the state. In their mid-forties the couple had been married 15 years. They each had children from previous marriages.

     According to their children and people who knew them the Durams, both quick tempered, argued a lot over money. They had a so-called love-hate relationship.

     Glenna Duram liked to gamble at local casinos. In 2010 she lost $75,000 to the slot machines. In April 2015 Mr. Duram learned to his shock and dismay that their house was in foreclosure. Glenna Duram, instead of paying their bills, had gambled the money away.

     On the night of May 13, 2015 police and emergency personnel were summoned to the Duram house following a shooting. Officers found the couple in their bedroom lying next to each other. Mr. Duram had been shot five times. He lay dead among six shell casings. Mrs. Duram had a superficial head wound and was conscious.

     When asked by the police who shot her and her husband, Glenna Duram said she didn't know. She also became combative when paramedics tried to take her out of the house for medical treatment. She kept yelling, "Why are you doing this to Marty."

     Police officers at the scene found no evidence of forced entry and nothing had been taken from the house. Mr. Duram was found clutching a clump of hair. Officers also discovered, in the living room, three manila envelopes containing suicide notes signed by Mrs. Duram and addressed to her children. In these notes she apologized for being such a disappointment.

     The dead man's parents, Lilian and Chuck Duram, told the authorities they believed Glenna Duram had murdered their son during a violent argument. At this point the police suspected a failed murder-suicide. When questioned again by the police after she had fully recovered from her head wound, Glenna Duram still claimed to have no memory of the shooting.

     Soon after the murder, Christina Keller, Mr. Duram's ex-wife, took custody of Bud, the former couple's 20-year-old African Gray parrot. In late May 2015 Bud began squawking in voices that sounded like a man and a woman arguing. In the man's voice, Bud said, "Don't f…ing shoot!" Christina Keller video taped the parrot's crime scene re-creation for the police.

     In July 2017 a Newaygo County jury after deliberating a day and a half found Glenna Duram guilty of murdering her husband in the first degree. A month later the judge sentenced her to life in prison.

     While Bud didn't take the stand for the prosecution, Christina Keller testified on the parrot's behalf.  

Wednesday, February 5, 2025

The Andrew Nisbet Murder-For-Hire Case

     In 2006 24-year-old Andrew Michael Nisbet began working as a golf instructor at the Las Positas Country Club in Livermore, California, a suburban community 45 miles east of San Francisco. He quickly became a popular and well-known golf coach. Within a few years Mr. Nisbet was promoted to Director of Instruction. During this period he taught pre-teen and teenage golfers from the bay area as well as from Michigan, North Carolina, Mississippi and Alabama.

     On December 7, 2013, the day before Mr. Nisbet was to receive the PGA's Northern California Section 2013 Junior Golf Leader Award, police officers showed up at the country club and took him into custody. An Alameda County prosecutor had charged Andrew Nisbet with 65 counts of child molestation that included lewd acts and oral sex with three of his former golf students during the period 2009 to 2012. The boys were between the ages twelve and sixteen.

     The alleged sex offenses took place in Nisbet's parked car at the country club, at his home and on out-of-town golfing trips. According to the criminal complaints the coach bought his victims expensive golf equipment, took them to restaurants and showed them pornography on his computer. Whenever one of the boys rebuffed his advances the gifts and other perks would stop.

     Following his arrest, Andrew Nisbet reportedly confessed to the commission of lewd acts. He was booked into the Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, California. The judge denied him bond.

     In late February 2014, from his jail cell the golf coach began exchanging letters with a man Nisbet hoped would murder his three accusers. In the correspondence Nisbet and the potential hit man discussed how much it would cost to kill the three murder-for-hire targets. He said he wanted them "taken care of."

     The solicited trigger man took Nisbet's letters to the Alameda County Sheriff's Office. Shortly thereafter an undercover officer posing as a hit man visited Nisbet at the Santa Rita Jail. During these tape recorded conversations Mr. Nisbet provided the undercover cop with personal information about the targets of his homicidal wrath. The phony hit man told Nisbet he would make the murders look like robberies gone wrong.

     In April 2014 the Alameda District Attorney's Office charged the 32-year-old golf coach with three counts of solicitation of murder.

     In September 2014 Andrew Nisbet pleaded guilty to three counts of solicitation of murder. A month later an Alameda County judge sentenced him to 27 years in prison.

     Parents of the victims expressed dismay and disgust at the leniency of Nisbet's sentence. "This is a sick man who should never be released," wrote one of the parents.

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

The Sandra Layne Murder Case

     Since 2008 when designer drugs first came on the scene hundreds of violent crimes, overdoses and incidents of bizarre behavior have been linked to users of synthetic marijuana. Called Spice, K2, Yucatan, Skunk and Moon Rocks, the drug consists of dried shredded plant material sprayed with chemicals that when smoked produces an intense high. Marketed as a "safe" legal alternative to pot, the drug was sold openly in tobacco shops and gas stations.

     Synthetic marijuana can cause bath salts-like euphoria, paranoia and hallucinations. In addition to becoming agitated, aggressive and violent, users have suffered seizures and heart attacks. Several states made this group of mind-altering substances illegal. One of those states was Michigan, the site of a murder case involving a high school student named Jonathan Hoffman. 
    After his divorced parents moved from West Bloomfield, Michigan to Scottsdale, Arizona, 17-year-old Jonathan Hoffman in the fall of 2011 moved in with his grandparents so he could finish his senior year at Farmington Central High School. He had been accepted to East Michigan University where he planned on majoring in computer science. The boy's father, 56-year-old Michael Hoffman, a prominent divorce lawyer and co-founder of the law firm American Divorce Association for Men (ADAM) had recently retired. He and Jonathan's mother had been divorced six years and were living near each other in Scottsdale so they could spend time with Jonathan's 15-year-old sister. While living at his grandparents' condo at Maple Place Villas in the Detroit suburb, Jonathan was smoking the synthetic marijuana Spice. He had been arrested for possession of the drug and was on probation. This caused friction between him and his 74-year-old grandmother, a former school teacher named Sandra Layne. 
     Late in the afternoon of Friday May 18, 2012 neighbors heard Jonathan and his grandmother yelling at each other from inside the condo. They were fighting over Jonathan's schoolwork and his drug abuse. Hearing several gunshots, several neighbors called 911. Jonathan himself phoned for help, screaming that he'd been shot several times and that he was going to die. Three minutes into his 911 call he exclaimed that he had been shot again. 
     Police officers rolled up to the scene at 5:25 PM and ordered Sandra Layne out of the dwelling. She walked out of the condo carrying a .40-caliber Glock semi-automatic pistol and announced that she had just "murdered" her grandson. 
     Emergency personnel rushed Jonathan Hoffman to Botsford Hospital in Farmington Hills where he died less than an hour later. Police officers transported the 74-year-old mother of five to a holding cell in the West Bloomfield police station. 
     The Oakland County Medical Examiner determined that Jonathan Hoffman had been shot 10 times. (Later, a toxicological analysis showed that the victim had been high on Spice.)
     An Oakland County prosecutor charged Sandra Layne with open murder, a general homicide charge which covered first and second-degree murder. On May 21, 2012, following her arraignment at the West Bloomfield District Court, the judge ordered Sandra Layne to be held without bail in the Oakland County Jail. Her attorney Mitch Ribitwer told reporters that his client, married for 28 years, had never been in trouble before. "She's very distraught, very upset. It's a very difficult time."
    In April 2013 an Oakland County jury rejected Sandra Layne's self defense argument and found her guilty of second-degree murder. The judge sentenced the 75-year-old to a minimum of 22 years in prison.

Monday, February 3, 2025

Rodney King's Historic, Troubled Life

     On March 3, 1991, 25-year-old Rodney King led Los Angeles Police officers on a high-speed chase through LA County. He was trying to avoid a DUI arrest and ended up being a key figure in the history of civil rights and police brutality. 

     Once pulled over, four police officers with 17 looking on hit King more than 50 times with their nightsticks. They also used a stun gun on the man lying on the ground in the fetal position. George Holliday, from the balcony of his apartment, caught the entire beating with his video camera.

     The King beating marked the beginning of the video camera/cellphone era of citizen police surveillance. Over the next two decades officers all over the country were visually recorded beating people. Cops hated citizen video cameras and cellphones, and in many cases seized them to avoid having their behavior exposed. Laws were passed to prevent this.

     The four officers seen on the video pounding Rodney King were indicted (the 17 who watched the assault were not), but a jury in Simi Valley found the defendants not guilty. The acquittals led to riots in April and May, 1992. The following year a federal jury found two of the officers guilty of violating Mr. King's civil rights. The other two officers were acquitted.

     In 1996 Rodney King sued the city of Los Angeles for $15 million in compensatory and punitive damages. The civil jury awarded him $3.8 million in compensatory damages, but nothing punitive. Eighteen years later he published his autobiography. It was not a bestseller.

     In August 2003 Rodney King was spotted speeding and running a red light. When officers tried to pull him over he crashed into a house, breaking his pelvis. At the time of the incident he was under the influence of alcohol. He was fined and given probation.

     While riding his bicycle in November 2007 someone tried to steal King's bike by shooting him in the face, arms and back with birdshot. The shooters were never identified.

     In May 2008 Rodney King, suffering from alcohol and drug addiction, checked into the Pasadena Recovery Center in Pasadena, California.

     At 5:25 in the morning of Sunday, June 17, 2012, Cynthia Kelly, King's fiancee, called 911 from their home in Rialto, California. Responding officers found him on the bottom of his swimming pool. The 47-year-old was wearing swim trunks. A short time later he was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. Although there were no physical injuries on his body, and no other indications of foul play, his body was autopsied. The medical examiner ruled King's death as an accidental drowning influenced by drugs and alcohol.

     A next-door neighbor told officers that she heard a man crying in King's backyard from three to five that morning. The witness also heard Cynthia Kelly trying to coax the crying man back into the house. The neighbor said, "She was just saying, 'Get in the house. Get in the house.'" A few minutes later the witness heard a splash. 

Sunday, February 2, 2025

The Forensic Science Hall of Shame

Albert H. Hamilton 
     In the 1920s and 30s this druggist from Auburn, New York, professing expertise in toxicology, fingerprint identification, firearms analysis and questioned document work, testified falsely in dozens of criminal trials. A pure charlatan, Albert Hamilton was caught switching gun barrels in the Sacco and Vanzetti murder case. He also injected himself as a forensic document examiner into the Lindbergh kidnapping case. After that his reputation was so bad no one would put him on the stand.

Dr. Ralph Erdmann
     Beginning in 1981 Dr. Ralph Erdmann began serving several west Texas counties as a private contract forensic pathologist. During the next fifteen years he performed thousands of autopsies and testified in dozens of homicide trials. Prosecutors loved Dr. Erdmann because he always gave them exactly what they needed. Stupendously incompetent and dishonest, Dr. Erdmann's testimony and bogus cause and manner of death findings sent scores of defendants to prison. While several of these convicted men were later exonerated, there is no way to know how many other Erdmann case defendants were innocent.

Joyce Gilchrist
     The damage a single phony forensic scientist can do to the criminal justice system is enormous. Such is the case of Joyce Gilchrist, a DNA analyst and hair follicle identification practitioner who worked in the Oklahoma City Crime Laboratory in the 1980s and 90s. Gilchrist, through a series of unscientific identifications, was accused of sending dozens of innocent defendants to prison. Like Albert Hamilton and Dr. Ralph Erdmann, prosecutors found this expert witness extremely helpful in weak cases.

Fred Salem Zain
     A West Virginia state trooper who flunked chemistry in college, Fred Zain began working in the state police crime laboratory in 1977 as a forensic serologist. He later became a DNA analyst, and in that capacity, through his recklessly and bogus testimony, falsely linked dozens of innocent defendants to crimes they had not committed. Because Mr. Zain was so flamboyant and prolific in his willingness to tailor his testimony to the needs of prosecutors he was in demand all over the country as a prosecution witness. This was particularly true in Texas. His dreadful career as a phony expert came to an end with his early death in 2002.

Dr. Louise Robbins
     In the 1980s and 90s Dr. Louise Robbins, an anthropology professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, testified for the prosecution in scores of homicide trials involving footwear impression evidence. Prosecutors liked Dr. Robbins because she always linked the defendant to the crime scene shoe or boot print through a methodology with no basis in science. If Dr. Robbins hadn't died early from a brain tumor there is no telling how many defendants would have been falsely connected to crime scenes. Prosecutors would bring Dr. Robbins out of the bullpen when no other forensic expert saw a physical connection between the defendant and the murder scene. No one will ever know if this woman was simply stupid and full of it or motivated by money and attention. For the innocent defendants sent to prison on her bogus testimony it really didn't matter what motivated this charlatan.

Dr. Michael West
     In the 1990s this forensic dentist from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, through his patented "blue light technique," helped convict innocent homicide defendants by testifying to the presence of human bite marks that qualified odontologists could not see. Dr. West later expanded his forensic repertoire into blood spatter interpretation, forensic photography, video enhancement and gunshot-powder analysis. As a forensic scientist Dr. West attacked the criminal justice system like an out of control wrecking ball. Several of the defendants sent to prison on the strength of his testimony were later exonerated through DNA analysis. 

Saturday, February 1, 2025

The Karl Karlsen Murder Case

     On January 1, 1999 when firefighters in the north central California town of Murphys arrived at Karl Karlsen's one-story house the dwelling was already engulfed in flames. The fire had gotten so intense it had blown out the windows. While Karlsen's three young children were safe, his 31-year-old wife Christina did not make it out of the inferno.

     Questioned about the fast-developing house fire, Mr. Karlsen told fire officials and the police that when it started he was in the garage. He managed, he said, to pull his children out of the burning structure though their bedroom windows but had not been able to save his wife.

     An arson investigator looking into the cause and origin of the blaze, after finding what he interpreted as separate areas of deep charring on the floor ( burn patterns suggesting multiple points of origin) suspected that the Karlsen fire had been set. (I don't know if the cause and origin investigator found traces of accelerants to back up his incendiary fire suspicions or if Christina Karlsen had been autopsied to determine if she had been alive at the time of the fire.) The fire investigator, based on the fact there was no physical evidence consistent with the children having been exposed to smoke and soot didn't believe the youngsters had been in the house when the fire started. 

     The speed and intensity of the fire, the multiple points of origin, the condition of the children and the fact a vehicle Karl Karlsen owned had gone up in flames a year earlier, pointed to a possible arson-murder case. (Almost all serious car fires are incendiary, burned for the insurance money.) Notwithstanding suspicions of arson the cause of the fatal house fire went into the books as undetermined. While Christina Karlsen's father, Art Alexander, suspected foul play, no charges were filed in connection with his daughter's death.

     Shortly after the blaze that took his wife's life, Karl and his children moved to Seneca County, New York where he used his $200,000 fire insurance payout to buy a farm near Varick, a small town 55 miles southwest of Syracuse in the Finger Lakes region of the state.

     After moving to New York State Karl married his second wife Cindy who helped him run the farm. On November 20, 2008, Karl Karlsen's 23-year-old son Levi was in his father's garage working on a pickup truck. A graduate of the Romulus Area High School, Levi, the father of two girls, was employed as a machine operator at a glass manufacturing company in nearby Geneva. At eight o'clock that evening Cindy Karlsen called 911 to report an accident involving Karl's son Levi. In the Karlsen garage on the floor near the truck emergency technicians found Levi. He was dead.

     Karl Karlsen told deputies from the Seneca County Sheriff's Office that when he and Cindy left the farm to attend a family event that afternoon at four, Levi had been working beneath the jacked-up truck. When Karl returned to the garage about four hours later he found that the vehicle had toppled off the jack. The father lifted the pickup off his son with the jack and pulled his body out from under the truck. Levi Karlsen was pronounced dead on arrival at the Geneva General Hospital.

     The Seneca County Coroner's Office classified the manner of Levi Karlsen's death as accidental. As a result there was no criminal investigation into his sudden death. (I presume Levi's body was not autopsied, and do not know if officers took photographs of the death scene. Since the body had been moved before the arrival of the deputies such photographs may not have been of much use.)

     In March 2012, more than three years after Levi Karlsen's sudden and violent death, homicide investigators with the Seneca County Sheriff's Office and the New York State Police Violent Crime Investigation Unit became interested in the case. The piece of information that opened the criminal inquiry involved Karl Karlsen's purchase of a $700,000 life insurance policy on his son just days before the young man's demise. According to that policy Karl Karlsen was the sole beneficiary.

     Three and a half years after Karl Karlsen received the life insurance money from his son's death he was in financial trouble. Police arrested him in June 2012 on the charge of passing a pair of bad checks in Seneca Falls, New York. The bogus checks totaled $685.30.  

     On November 24, 2012, four years after Levi Karlsen died in his father's garage, Seneca County District Attorney Barry Porch charged Karl Karlsen with second-degree murder. Based on an eight-month homicide investigation conducted by state and county officers, the prosecutor believed the father had intentionally caused the truck to fall on his son. With Livi pinned beneath the vehicle, Karl took Cindy to the family event. Upon his return to the farm four hours later the suspect "discovered" his son lying under the fallen vehicle. Karl asked his second wife to call 911. Investigators and the district attorney believed that the suspect, when he took out the life insurance on his son, planned to murder him.

     In September 2013, at a pretrial hearing on the second-degree murder charge related to Levi Karlsen's death, the defendant's second wife Cindy (she was in the process of divorcing him) shed new light on the homicide investigation. In early November 2012, after learning that Karl had invested part of his son's $700,000 insurance payout to purchase a $1.2 million policy on her life, she began cooperating with Seneca County investigators.

     Cindy Karlsen agreed to wear a wire and meet her estranged husband in a crowded restaurant in hopes of getting him to admit that he had killed his son. She took the stand at the hearing and testified that "I led him to believe our marriage had a chance if he came clean. I told him he could trust me."

     At the restaurant Karl told Cindy that he removed the truck's front tires and raised the vehicle on a single jack before asking his son to repair the brake and transmission lines. "It was so wobbly," he said.

     "Tell the truth," Cindy replied.

     "It was never meant to be. It was never planned from day one to ever go that way," Karl said.

     A week following the audio-recorded conversation investigators with the Seneca County Sheriff's Office interrogated the suspect for almost ten hours during which time Karlsen denied killing Levi 75 times. Eventually, however, Karlsen signed a statement in which he acknowledged that he had knocked the truck off its jack and walked away. But in the videotaped interrogation, Karlsen insisted that he had not intentionally caused the truck to fall on his son. He told detectives that because he had been taking pain pills for various ailments, his memory of the incident was fuzzy. "In some ways," he said, "it's a blank."

     Immediately following the marathon interrogation detectives took Karlsen into custody.

     On November 7, 2013, the day before his trial, Karl Karlsen confessed to crushing his son to death for the insurance money. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. Six weeks later Seneca Court Judge Dennis Bender, before sentencing Karlsen to 15 years to life, told him he wasn't "fully human."