Kenneth Douglas: The Morgue Employee From Hell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Andres Ordonez Murder Case: Sudden Death in Gangland LA

     Because of heavy gang activity, no place was safe in the neighborhood surrounding the Iglesia Principe de Paz (Prince of Peace) Church on Beverly Boulevard and Reno Street in Los Angeles' Westlake District. Members of the Pentecostal storefront church were immigrants from Guatemala and other Central American countries. When these congregants settled in this part of Los Angeles they probably had no idea they would be living in such a dangerous, lawless place.

    On November 4, 2012, during a Sunday evening service, a male parishioner while checking on the food being set up in the church parking lot, saw a teenage girl spray-painting gang graffiti on one of the church's walls. The churchgoer approached the girl and asked her to stop defacing the place of worship. She responded by shoving the man to the ground.

     After assaulting the churchgoer, the teen continued tagging the wall. Two other worshippers came out of the church and saw their fellow parishioner lying on the pavement. As the men ran to help, a male gang member who was with the young church-tagger climbed out of a parked car and began shooting.

     One of the gunman's bullets struck and killed 25-year-old Andres Ordonez. Another member of the church, a man in his 40s, was seriously wounded. The girl with the spray-paint and her murderous companion drove off as stunned members of the congregation knelt over the victims sprawled out and bleeding on the church parking lot.

     Andres Ordonez and his pregnant wife Ana were parents of a one-year-old son. Andres had come to the United States from Guatemala as a young boy. He had worked long hours as a cook in a local restaurant and had attended this church since he was ten. His widow was the pastor's granddaughter.

     Police believed the gunman and the girl were members of a  gang who were tagging in enemy gang territory. As a result, when the church member approached the girl, the gunman, on edge, exhibited a hair-trigger response. Investigators familiar with gang-related crime knew that witnesses in these neighborhoods, out of fear of reprisals, were reluctant to cooperate with the police. LAPD homicide detective Jeff Cortina told a reporter with the Los Angeles Times that "we need the public's assistance. This wasn't gangster-on-gangster. It [the murder of an innocent citizen] could happen to anybody..."

     At a press conference on November 8, 2012, Mr. Ordonez's young widow asked witnesses to come forward and help the authorities. The city of Los Angeles posted a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the gunman, his female companion and a third subject who had been in the car with the killer. The vehicle in question was described as a red four-door compact. The gunman was a Latino man in his early twenties with a muscular build and short hair.

     The senseless murder of a family man attending church on a Sunday evening by a trigger-happy gang member sparked public outrage and demands for more aggressive anti-gang policing. This came at a time when the LAPD was stretched thin and out of money. Because this case received a lot of local media coverage there was a good chance these gang members would be identified and brought to justice.

     In November 2012 Los Angeles detectives arrested 24-year-old Janeth Lopez, the woman suspected of spray-painting graffiti on the church wall. Officers booked Lopez into the county jail of charges of murder, attempted murder, vandalism and gang related offenses.

     Police officers, in February 2013, took 25-year-old gang member Pedro Martinez into custody on charges of first-degree murder, attempted murder and gang and gun related offenses. Officers also arrested the suspected get-away driver, 33-year-old Ivy Navarrete, on the same criminal charges. If convicted, all three defendants in the Ordonez murder case faced up to life in prison.

     Martinez, Navarrete and Lopez went to trial in Los Angeles Superior Court in November 2014. On December 19, 2014 the jury found the shooter, Pedro Martinez, guilty of first-degree murder, attempted murder and several gun and gang related charges. The jurors, however, deadlocked on the murder and attempted murder charges against Navarrete, woman in the car, and Lopez, the spray painter who assaulted the church goer. They were found guilty of the lesser charges

     On January 30, 2015 the judge sentenced Pedro Martinez to life in prison without parole.

     A Los Angeles Superior Court Judge, in April 2016, sentenced the spray painter, Janeth Lopez, to 40 years to life in prison. The judge sentenced Ivy Navarrette to 60 years to life behind bars for her role in the murder, attempted murder and assault. 

Football Coach Philip Foglietta and the Poly Prep Country Day School Cover-Up

     The Poly Prep Country Day School is an elite nursery to 12th grade private boy's academy located on two campuses in Brooklyn, New York. Poly Prep's middle and high school buildings are located in the Dyker Heights section of Brooklyn while the lower grades are on the Park Slope campus. As is often the case in schools where the sports program plays an important if not vital role in the institution, faculty member and renowned football coach Philip Foglietta enjoyed icon status during the years 1966 to 1991.

     In 1966, Coach Foglietta's first year at Poly Prep, a male student accused him of sexual molestation. A school administrator informed the boy's parents that an internal investigation revealed the accusation to be false. Moreover, if this student continued to make slanderous claims of this nature the boy would face "severe consequences." The administration's handling of this case not only silenced the accuser, it became the school's modus operandi in such matters.

     After 25 years as Poly Prep's most successful football coach, Philip Foglietta unexpectedly retired in 1991. In honor of his legendary coaching career and important contributions to the institution, the school hosted a gala celebration held at the Manhattan Athletic Club. Members of the Poly Prep community and the public at large were not told of the real reason behind the coach's "retirement." He had been forced to quit as a result of accusations of "sexual misconduct."

     Following Coach Foglietta's death in 1998, Poly Prep established a memorial fund and solicited donations in his name. Four years later, in a letter to all alumni, the Poly Prep administration revealed that for years Coach Foglietta was suspected of sexually abusing his students. According to this 2002 letter, administrators had "recently received credible allegations that sexual abuse occurred at Poly Prep more than 20 years ago by a faculty member/coach who is now deceased." Everyone familiar with the school knew that coach was Philip Foglietta. The author of this revealing letter promised a thorough internal investigation of the accusations. (If the school actually conducted such an inquiry, no report of it surfaced. Moreover there was no indication that these "credible" accusations were ever passed on to the police.)

     In 2004, a Poly Prep alumnus named John Paggioli, alleging that as a student he had been sexually molested by Coach Foglietta, filed a lawsuit against the school. A year later a judge, citing New York State's statute of limitations on such claims, dismissed the action. (In New York a sexual abuse claimant must file suit within five years of his or her eighteenth birthday.)

     On October 26, 2009, twelve Poly Prep alumni, claiming sexual abuse by Coach Philip Foglietta, filed a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) suit against the school in the Brooklyn District Federal Court. The plaintiffs alleged a 40-year criminal conspiracy to quash and cover-up student complains of sexual abuse allegedly committed by Poly Prep's greatest football coach.

     According to court documents, current and former Poly Prep headmasters knew that Coach Foglietta had sexually abused "dozens if not hundreds of boys." The plaintiffs alleged "Poly Prep administrators had...knowledge of Foglietta's sexual abuse of numerous boys at or near the school, but condoned and facilitated Foglietta's criminal behavior because he was a highly successful football coach and instrumental in raising substantial revenue for the school."

     In filing a RICO action, a technique the FBI used to cripple the Mafia, the Poly Prep plaintiffs were using this federal law as a way around the statute of limitations. These lawyers were asking the court to consider a sexual abuse defendant's repeated misrepresentations and deceitful conduct as a legal justification to override the application of the statute of limitations. These attorneys were attempting to create a legal exception to the doctrine that bars legal relief in older cases.  

     On August 28, 2012, in a 40-page decision, Judge Frederic Block of the Brooklyn District Federal Court allowed two of the twelve plaintiffs to go forward with their RICO claims against current and former Poly Prep administrators. If these plaintiffs prevailed under the RICO statute, other institutions like universities and churches could be faced with a flood of sexual abuse lawsuits previously blocked by statutes of limitations. For this reason future sexual abuse plaintiffs and their potential defendants were closely following the the Poly Prep RICO suit.

     On December 26, 2012 the school settled the landmark lawsuit out of court. As a result, there would be no legal precedent for other victims in old cases. In February 2014 the school issued a formal apology to all of the students sexually abused by the iconic coach and serial child molester.

The Michael Barbar Murder Case

      In 2009, 51-year-old Michael Barbar, a native of Lebanon, lived with his wife Maysam and their two daughters, ages 10 and 6, in a two-story house in Perris, a Riverside County town of 70,000 in southern California. Michael had a 19-year-old daughter from a former marriage who didn't live with him and Maysam.

     In mid-August 2009, Michael learned that his 43-year-old wife, at the time attending cosmetology school, had not been faithful to him. According to information that had come to his attention, Maysam, over the past six months, had been with three other men. He also learned that 6-year-old Tamara, the child he had helped raise from birth, had been conceived as a result of Maysam's affair with a man in 2000.

     Some time after receiving this disturbing information, Michael Barbar checked Tamara out of school early one day and took her to a McDonald's where he swabbed the inside of her mouth for a DNA sample. On November 6, 2009 the paternity test revealed that she was not his child.

     On the night of November 13, 2009, after handcuffing his wife behind her back during sex, Michael Barbar wrapped an electrical cord around her neck and strangled her to death. He then placed her nude body face-down on the master bedroom floor and covered it with a blanket.

     In Tamara's bedroom Mr. Barbar coiled a television cable around the girl's neck as she slept. When the 6-year-old awoke and struggled he bashed her head against a bedpost twenty times, crushing her skull. In a third bedroom, Tamara's 10-year-old sister heard Tamar's cries and the sounds of violent death. After Tamara's murder the terrified girl heard her father carrying what sounded like trash bags out of the house. The next morning Michael Barbar's surviving daughter discovered her sister's body. The door to the master bedroom was locked. She called 911.

     Following the double murder, Michael Barbar drove to nearby Cabazon, California where, at the Morongo Casino, he played the slots. The next morning he drove east to Deming, New Mexico, a border town 60 miles west of Las Cruces. His plan was to enter Mexico then fly to his homeland of Lebanon. On November 15, 2009 the police in Deming interrupted his escape by taking him into custody.

     In early June 2012, Michael Barbar went on trial in a Riverside County Superior Court for the murders of Maysam and Tamara Barbar. Because he was being tried for a double, premeditated murder, the defendant, under California law, was eligible for the death penalty. Barbar's defense attorney, while he didn't deny that his client had committed the homicides, argued that the killings had not been premeditated. According to the defense version of the case, when Michael confronted Maysam with the paternity test results she had mocked him with a smirk. So enraged by the victim's smirk Mr. Barbar snapped and killed his wife and the 6-year-old who was not his daughter. As a result this was a crime of involuntary manslaughter. (Sometimes defense attorneys are paid to embarrass themselves. This was one of those cases.)

     Prosecutor John Aki offered the jury of seven women and five men a wealth of evidence that showed the defendant's preparation and planning for the killings. Mr. Barbar, in anticipation of his murders, had acquired a set of fake identification, rented a car, researched flight schedules between Mexico and Lebanon and had withdrawn $30,000 from his bank account. On July 13, 2012, after only three hours of deliberation, the jury found the 54-year-old defendant guilty of two counts of first-degree murder.

     On July 30, 2012, the penalty phase of the trial before the same jury got underway. For Michael Barbar the two possible outcomes involved life without parole and state imposed death. On August 10, 2012 the jury recommended that Judge Edward Weber sentence Michael Barbar to death. The judge imposed that sentence.

     Crime scene investigators on the morning after the murders, had found among Michael Barbar's possessions a copy of Truman Capote's nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood. In that book, the two men who murdered a Kansas farm family in 1959 were hanged. Mr. Barbar, however, would not end up dangling at the end of a rope because in California, regardless of the wishes of a jury and the law, they do not execute anyone. 

The Woodrow Karey Murder Case

     Over the past several years places of worship have become places of sudden, violent death. Preachers, a church organist and a handful of congregants have been murdered inside their churches. Most of these homicides occurred during religious services. Some of the killers belonged to the church while others were outsiders. All of these murderers were caught, and most of them were pathologically motivated.

     None of the church murders involved acts of terrorism. Notwithstanding these bizarre incidents, inside a church on Sunday or any other day is still one of the safest places to be. This is not true in many middle eastern countries as well as other places around the world where there is religious persecution and terrorism.

The Killing of Pastor Ronald J. Harris

     Lake Charles, Louisiana is located in the southwest part of the state. At 8:30 Friday evening September 27, 2013, 53-year-old Woodrow Karey, armed with a shotgun walked into the Tabernacle of Praise Worship Center in Lake Charles. Pastor Ronald J. Harris was standing in front of the church preaching to sixty revival service congregants when Mr. Karey blew him off his feet with a blast from his shotgun. As the preacher lay bleeding on the church floor Woodrow Karey stood over him and fired a second shot into his head, killing Reverend Harris instantly.

     As congregants, including the pastor's wife, mother and daughter scrambled for cover, Woodrow Karey walked out of the church. Shortly thereafter the shooter called 911. He identified himself and informed the dispatcher of what he had done. Mr. Kerey said he wanted to turn himself in and informed the 911 dispatcher where the police could find him.

      Shortly after Woodrow Karey's 911 call, deputies with the Calcasieu Parrish Sheriff's Office took him into custody without incident. Before being hauled off to jail the shooter took the officers to a wooded area where he had hidden a .22-caliber pistol and the murder weapon.

     Detectives believed that Woodrow Karey shot Ronald Harris because the pastor and Karey's wife Janet were having an affair.

     A parish prosecutor initially changed Woodrow Karey with second-degree murder. He was held on $1 million bond at the Calacasieu Corrections Center. According to reports, Mr. Karey did not have a criminal record. The authorities did not reveal if he had a history of mental illness.

     In December 2013, pursuant to a plea agreement, a grand jury indicted Karey for the lesser offense of manslaughter. The judge reduced his bail to $500,000. In Louisiana, manslaughter carried a sentence of 10 to 40 years. The defendant's trial was scheduled for late 2014.

     In June 2014 a second grand jury indicted Karey for the more serious homicide of second-degree murder. However, in January 2015, Calcasieu Parish Judge Clayton Davis, on the grounds the prosecution reneged on their promise only to pursue manslaughter in the case, threw out the second indictment.

     In June 2015 an appellate court reinstated the second-degree murder charge. The Karey defense appealed that decision and on September 7, 2016 the Louisiana Supreme Court granted Mr. Karey a stay, further delaying the resolution of this so called "open and shut" case.

     Woodrow Karey finally went on trial in April 2018. The defendant's wife Janet Karey took the stand for the defense and testified that Pastor Harris, over a period of 14 years, had repeatedly raped her. The defendant took the stand on his own behalf and said he killed the minister after learning of what the victim had done to his wife.

     Following the closing arguments the case went to the jury. After deliberating three hours the jury stunned virtually everyone in the courtroom with the verdict of not guilty. After five years behind bars Mr. Karey was a free man.

The Bradley Stone Mass Murder-Suicide Case

     Bradley William Stone, a 35-year-old former Marine reservist, resided with his wife Jen, a media analyst, in the town of Pennsburg thirty miles northwest of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They married in September 2013 following his divorce from his first wife Nicole. Nicole filed for divorce in March 2009, and since that time she and Bradley had been embroiled in a bitter custody battle over their two daughters. On December 9, 2014 a family court judge denied a petition from Bradley Stone that ended the court fight in his ex-wife's favor. He did not take this defeat in stride.

     Bradley Stone served as a Marine reservist from 2002 to 2011, during which time he spent two months in Ramadi, Iraq where he monitored a computer screen that tracked missiles. After convincing his superior officers that he suffered from asthma he was sent back to the states.

     In October 2010 Mr. Stone was diagnosed with 100 percent service connected post-traumatic stress disorder. At the time of his honorable discharge in 2011 he had risen to the rank of sergeant. In October 2013 Stone filed 17 VA disability claims for problems that included traumatic brain injury, muscle and joint pain, sleep apnea and headaches.

     Following his military service, and during the height of his domestic war with his estranged ex-wife Nicole, Bradley Stone received psychiatric treatment at the Lanape Valley Foundation in the Doylestown Hospital for post-traumatic stress disorder. (Some former Marines with PTSD questioned Stones' diagnosis noting that he hadn't seen combat.)

     In 2013 a Montgomery County, Pennsylvania judge sentenced Mr. Stone to one year probation following his second driving while intoxicated conviction.

     At four-thirty in the morning of Monday December 15, 2014, six days after Bradley Stone lost the child custody battle, police officers were dispatched to a house in Lansdale, Pennsylvania 28 miles northwest of Philadelphia. Nicole Stone's mother, 57-year-old Joanne Gilbert and her mother, 75-year-old Patricia Hill, resided in that house. Police officers found both women dead.

     Bradley Stone's ex-mother-in-law lay in her bed with a slashed throat. Her mother lay on the floor with a gunshot wound to her right eye. The scene of this double-murder was awash in the victims' blood.

     Shortly after the discovery of the two Bradley Stone ex-in-laws, a 911 call was made from an apartment complex in nearby Lower Salford where Stone's 33-year-old ex-wife Nicole resided. A neighbor in the Pheasant Run Apartments reported hearing a disturbance followed by three or four gunshots that came from Nicole's unit. Following the disturbance the neighbor saw Mr. Stone putting his daughters into a green Ford and driving off. (He dropped the girls off at an acquaintance's house in Pennsburg. They were unharmed.)

     In Nicole Stone's apartment police officers found the victim lying on her bed with two gunshot wounds to her face. On the bed lay the murder weapon, Bradley Stone's .40-caliber Heckler & Koch pistol.

     At eight o'clock that morning in southeastern Pennsylvania, police officers in the town of Souderson discovered three more victims of Bradley Stone's murderous rage. Patricia Flick, Nicole's sister, was found hacked to death in her home. Her husband Aaron and her 14-year-old daughter Nina, also dead, had been bludgeoned and slashed. Anthony Flick, Nicole's 17-year-old nephew, in fighting off an ax-wielding Bradley Stone lost fingertips, sustained lacerations to his hands and arms, and suffered a fractured skull. He survived the attack by barricading himself in a room on the third floor of the house. Paramedics rushed the seriously wounded teenager to Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia. He survived the attack.

     Later that Monday Bradley Smith, the subject of an intense police manhunt, confronted a man walking his dog in Doylestown. Wearing camouflage clothing, Stone demanded the man's car keys. Instead of acquiring access to a vehicle, Mr. Stone found himself looking down the barrel of the man's handgun. The mass murderer was last seen running into a nearby wooded area.

     On Tuesday December 16, 2014 SWAT team officers looking for Stone in Pennsburg came across his body in the woods a half mile from his home. He had managed to hack himself to death.

     Neuropsychology professor Eric Zillmer of Drexel University, in speaking to reporters about the mass murder-suicide, said he didn't believe that Stone's murderous rampage had anything to do with PTSD. 

The Mary Whitaker Murder Case

     In the summer months for 35 years, 61-year-old Mary Whitaker played violin for the Chautauqua Institution Symphony Orchestra in western New York. She lived in a one-story home outside of Westfield. During the rest of the year the New York City resident played for the West Chester Philharmonic.

     On Tuesday night, August 19, 2014, someone drove 43-year-old Jonathan Conklin and Charles Sanford, 30, from Erie, Pennsylvania to Westfield, New York. Both men, with long histories of crime, had met a few months earlier at an Erie homeless shelter. After their driver dropped them off, Mr. Conklin broke into an apartment near a bar and stole several guns that included a .22-caliber rifle.

     From the site of the burglary the two criminals walked to Mary Whitaker's rural home on Titus Road. With Jonathan Conklin hiding nearby, Charles Sanford rapped on her door. When Mary Whitaker responded to his knock, he said he had run out of gas and needed to use her phone. After she handed him her cellphone Conklin came out of hiding with the rifle in hand and said, "This is a robbery." A moment later he shot Miss Whitaker in the chest. The victim screamed, and when she grabbed Conklin's rifle, the gun went off again. The second bullet entered her leg.

     Following the shooting the robbers dragged the bleeding woman into her garage where they left her to die while they ransacked her house for items to steal. Upon returning to the garage Conklin ordered his accomplice to kill the victim. Charles Sanford complied by stabbing the wounded victim in the throat.

     As Mary Whitaker bled to death in her garage the two cold-blooded killers drove back to Erie in her Chevrolet. They had also stolen her checkbook and credit cards.

     Upon the discovery of Mary Whitaker's body, police in Chautauqua County, aware that Jonathan Conklin had been in the area, immediately suspected him of burglarizing the apartment and murdering the violinist.

     On Friday morning, August 22, 2014, after using Whitaker's credit cards to buy a flat screen television and some clothing at a Walmart store, Erie detectives took Conklin and Sanford into custody.

     On the day of their arrest the suspects appeared before a federal magistrate on charges of interstate transportation of a stolen motor vehicle, carjacking and federal firearms violations. In Chautauqua County, New York, Conklin and Sanford faced state charges of first-degree murder, burglary and robbery.

     A Chautauqua County grand jury in January 2015 indicted Conklin and Sanford on charges of second-degree murder, burglary, robbery and criminal use of a firearm. Four months later the Chautauqua County district attorney announced that the suspects would be tried together in January 2016. Mr. Conklin was represented by an attorney with the local public defender's office while Mr. Sanford had a defense lawyer from Fredonia, New York.

     In September 2015 Charles Sanford pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and agreed to testify against Jonathan Conklin. Conklin, facing a sure-fire conviction, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder a month later.

     In May 2016 the judge sentenced Charles Sanford to fifteen years to life. Jonathan Conklin received a sentence of twenty-five years to life. Both men should have been given the death sentence.

     Cases like this remind us that we live among predatory, cold-blooded killers who should be behind bars but are not.

Raymond Roth: A Scam Artist Who Faked His Death

     On July 28, 2012, Jonathan Roth reported his 48-year-old father, Raymond Roth, missing. Raymond, his wife Evana and their 22-year-old son lived on Long Island in Massapequa, New York. According to Jonathan, his father while swimming off Nassau County's Jones Beach had been swept out into the Atlantic Ocean.

     As officers from the U. S. Coast Guard and various law enforcement agencies searched for Raymond Roth he was relaxing in Orlando, Florida at his timeshare condo. A couple of days into the search for Raymond's body his 43-year-old wife Evana came across emails between her missing husband and their son that laid out their plan to defraud the life insurance company of $410,000.

     According the scheme, Evana Roth would receive the life insurance payout and Raymond would start a new life in Florida. Mrs. Roth, not a party to the fraud, called the Nassau County Police.

     On August 2, 2012 Raymond was driving back to New York. He had agreed to meet with law enforcement authorities in Massapequa. In Santee, South Carolina a police officer pulled him over for driving 90 mph. After Mr. Roth failed to show up for his meeting with the authorities in Nassau County, a prosecutor charged him with insurance fraud, conspiracy and filing a false report.

     Police officers, on August 6, 2012, took Raymond Roth and his son into custody. Both men made bail and entered not guilty pleas to the criminal charges.

     On March 22, 2013 Raymond Roth and a Nassau County prosecutor agreed on a plea deal. In return for his guilty plea, the judge, on May 21, 2013, sentenced him to 90 days in jail and five years of probation. If Roth didn't pay $27,000 in restitution to the U. S. Coast Guard and $9,000 to the Nassau Police Department, the judge would incarcerate him up to four years.

     Jonathan Roth pleaded guilty and was sentenced to probation.

     People who fake their own deaths as a method of defrauding an insurance company rarely succeed. The most common technique in such crimes involves staging phony drownings. Whenever a heavily insured person goes swimming or boating and doesn't come back, and the body is not recovered, alarm bells go off in the insurance company's office. In a world in which we are under constant video and computer surveillance it's hard for these insurance scam artists to remain dead very long.

     Shortly after pleading guilty to insurance fraud, Raymond Roth was in trouble again with the law. In Freeport, New York he identified himself to a woman as a police officer and ordered her into his van. She fled into a nearby store and called the police. Instead of jail, the authorities took Roth to a psychiatric ward where he tried to commit suicide. A local prosecutor charged him with criminal impersonation and attempted kidnapping.

     In April 2014 Raymond Roth pleaded guilty to impersonation of a police officer and attempted unlawful imprisonment. The judge sentenced him to two to seven years in prison.

The Michelle Gibson Murder-For-Hire Case

     Steven Gibson, the owner of a machine shop, lived in Peoria, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix. He resided in the Thunderbird Vista neighborhood with his 41-year-old wife Michelle, their 15-year-old son Steven Jr. and their 17-year-old daughter Alyssa. In November 2012 Steven Gibson was charged with assaulting a police officer following a DUI arrest. Local police officers on several occasions had been summoned to the Gibson house on accusations of domestic violence. No arrests were made because Michelle Gibson refused to press charges.

     At two in the morning of March 1, 2013, Michelle Gibson called 911 and said: "There's blood everywhere! I'm with my kids and I just got home and my husband's out in the garage dead."

     In the Gibson garage police found that the victim had been bludgeoned in the head and stabbed several times in the chest. Since nothing had been stolen from the house the police ruled out theft as a motive. Investigators also wondered what Mr. Gibson was doing in his garage so late at night.

     On March 27, 2013, following a month-long homicide investigation, police arrested Steven Gibson Jr. on charges of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. The next day officers arrested his mother Michelle on the same charges.

     Investigators believed that Michelle Dawn Gibson had recruited her son, her daughter and a friend of her son's to murder her husband. (The friend, 16-year-old Erik McBee, turned himself into the police shortly after the homicide.)

     According to police reports Michelle Gibson told her team of young assassins that Mr. Gibson needed to be killed before he murdered a family member. In discussing the fate of her husband she mentioned that he had a life insurance policy. The accused murder-for-hire mastermind promised to pay Erik McBee $1,000 for his participation in Mr. Gibson's homicide.

     The murder-for-hire plan, as allegedly laid out by Michelle, involved incapacitating her husband with chloroform while he slept in his bed. Using the victim's truck they would haul his body to a nearby park where one of the young killers would shoot him in the back of the head. To make the murder look like a drug deal gone bad the assassins planned to spread pills on and around his body.

     As is often the case in murder-for-hire schemes things did not go as planned. At ten-thirty on the night of February 28, 2013 Erik McBee used a baseball bat to bludgeon Mr. Gibson in the head as he slept in his bed. Steven Gibson Jr. stabbed his dying father three times in the chest, then slashed his throat. Using a dolly, Eric and Steven rolled Mr. Gibson's corpse into the garage. Because Erik McBee fled the scene at the sound of a distant police siren, the dead man never made it to the park. Later that day, Erik, a Popeye's Chicken employee, turned himself into the police.

     When Michelle Gibson returned home around midnight with her daughter she allegedly helped her son clean up the bloody murder scene. At two that morning, after disposing of physical evidence, Michelle called 911 to report the discovery of her husband's body in the garage.

     Michelle Gibson and her son Steven pleaded not guilty to all charges. Erik McBee also pleaded not guilty to murder.

     In January 2014 Erik McBee pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and agreed to testify against Michelle and Steven Gibson. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

     Steven Gibson Jr. pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in August 2014. The judge sentenced him to 22 years behind bars.

     On November 25, 2014 the jury found Michelle Gibson guilty of first-degree murder. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Alfred Fenzel, in February 2015, sentenced the murder-for-hire mastermind to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The Sara Kruzan Murder Case

     While the law of murder is quite clear on what behavior constitutes the crime, occasionally there are cases that make the strict enforcement of that law seem unfair. The Sara Kruzan case falls into that category.

     As a child growing up in southern California in the 1980s, Sara Kruzan had to be hospitalized several times for severe depression. At age eleven she came under the influence of a Riverside California pimp named George Gilbert Howard. In 1994 Kruzan moved to Rubidoux, an unincorporated community in Riverside County where she took up residence with another pimp, James Earl Hamilton. She was sixteen and working as a prostitute.

     On March 10, 1994 Earl Hamilton arranged to have Sara Kruzan meet George Gilbert Howard at the Dynasty Suites Motel in Riverside. That night in the motel room she shot Mr. Howard in the neck from close range. He died on the spot. Sara Kruzan took $1,500 from the dead man's wallet and drove off in his Jaguar.

     Homicide detectives found Sara Kruzan's purse in the murder room. Four days later police officers took the teen hooker into custody. When asked about Mr. Howard she confessed to shooting her former pimp.

     The Riverside County district attorney decided to try Sara Kruzan, as an adult, for first-degree murder.

     At Kruzan's May 1995 trial she took the stand and testified that James Earl Hamilton ordered George Gilbert Howard's murder. The defendant believed that if she didn't carry out the hit, Mr. Hamilton would have killed her and her mother. This homicide was, therefore, an offense committed by a young girl under duress. (Earl Hamilton was never charged in connection with Howard's killing.) The jury of seven women and five men found the 17-year-old defendant guilty of first-degree murder.

     Because the pimp had been killed in the commission of a robbery, and the defendant had been "lying in wait" to murder the victim, the judge sentenced Kruzan to life without the possibility of parole. Corrections authorities sent her to the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla.

     On February 2009 a member of the group Human Rights Watch posted a six-minute interview of Sara Kruzan on YouTube. The inmate described her miserable life as a prostitute and revealed how the pimp she shot to death had abused her physically.

     In 2010 on his last day in office, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger commuted Kruzan's sentence to 25 years to life with the possibility of parole.

     A Riverside County Judge, in January 2013, reduced Kruzan's first-degree conviction to second-degree murder. This made the now 35-year-old prisoner eligible for immediate parole. Nine months later the state parole board ordered her release pending Governor Jerry Brown's approval. The governor signed off on the parole on October 27, 2013. A few days after that Sara Kruzan walked out of prison a free woman. No one objected to her release.

The Mysterious Andrew Steele Murder Case

     Andrew Steele, in June 2014, a month after being diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease) had no choice but to resign his position as a deputy sheriff with the Dane County Sheriff's Office in Wisconsin. The 39-year-old resided in Fitchburg, Wisconsin with his wife Ashlee and their two children, ages 10 and 13.

     The ex-law enforcement officer's wife, following the ALS diagnosis, organized dozens of "ice bucket challenges" that raised $23,000 for his medical expenses.

     Ashlee Steele's recently married sister, 38-year-old Kacee Tollefsbol, visited her sister and brother-in-law in August 2014. At one in the afternoon on August 22, 2014, Kacee Tollefsbol called 911 from the Steele's basement recreation room. She said she had been shot by Andy Steele.

     Police officers arrived at the Steele house shortly after the 911 call but did not enter the dwelling until the arrival of a SWAT team. At 2:20 PM from the basement of the house officers heard a woman screaming, "I am dying, I am dying."

     Kacee Tollefsbol had been shot in the torso and died an hour later at a nearby hospital. Before she died she identified the shooter to police officers as her brother-in-law, Andrew Steele.

     The interior of the Steele house was filled with a haze of smoke that activated a carbon monoxide detector. In the laundry room officers encountered Andrew Steele lying on the floor next to a 9mm pistol. The officers recognized this man as a former law enforcement colleague.

     The basement laundry room was extremely hot from burning charcoal briquettes in an outdoor grill. The dryer was running and had been vented back into the room instead of outside.

    When the police tried to pull Andrew Steele out of the room he surprised them by vigorously resisting. The officers subdued him before paramedics could transport him from what appeared to be an attempted suicide scene to a nearby hospital.

     In the upstairs master bedroom police officers found Ashlee Steele tucked into her bed with a sleeping mask on her face and a pillow on her chest. She had been shot once in the head and appeared to have been strangled with a black zip tie. She was also bound by her wrists with zip ties. The victim's sundress had been pulled up to her thighs.

     The tableau in the master bedroom caused detectives to believe that the killer, for some reason, had posed the body.

     On Andrew Steele's iPhone investigators discovered a long rambling message written the day before the murders. The message had been edited at six o'clock on the morning of the killings. In the note, Andrew Steele spoke of having had numerous sexual threesomes with his wife and dead sister-in-law. He also said the three of them had agreed to a suicide pact. "We had a great run and I wanted to go out with a bang so to speak," he wrote. "Please use all donation money for the kids' needs. Mom and dad, stay in the house, retire and focus on the kids' needs…See you all on the other side."

     The Dane County prosecutor's office charged Andrew Steele with two counts of first-degree murder. The defendant, through his attorney, pleaded not guilty to the murder charges. The arraignment magistrate set his bail at $1 million. A few weeks later, at the urging of the prosecutor, the judge raised the bond to $2 million.

     The Andrew Steele murder trial got underway on Monday April 6, 2015 in the Dane County Courthouse. In his opening statement to the jury, Assistant District Attorney Anthony Jurek accused the defendant of premeditated double murder. According to the prosecutor, Mr. Steele lied to investigators and staged his wife's murder scene to fit his story of having kinky sex with her and her sister. 

     Defense attorney Paul Barnett changed his client's initial not guilty pleas to not guilty by reason of mental disease. Because ALS is not a psychiatric disease and the defendant had been early in the diagnosis, this was a highly unusual and legally inappropriate defense.

     Attorney Barnett told the jury that the defendant had kinky sex with his wife, an encounter that had gone terribly wrong, Although the defendant killed his wife he had no memory of committing the act.

     The lead detective on the case took the stand for the prosecution and testified that physical signs of struggle throughout the house were not consistent with the defendant's story of a three-way suicide pact. Crime scene photographs revealed the suspect had given detectives different false accounts of the killings. Moreover, the bedroom scene looked staged. According to the detective, on the day before the murders, the defendant purchased two 8 pound bags of charcoal and a can of lighter fluid.

     The deputy medical examiner testified that Ashlee Steele's body contained several defensive wounds and did not contain evidence of recent sexual activity.

     A state psychiatrist testified that in his expert opinion Andrew Steele and his wife had not engaged in unconventional sex. A DNA expert said that blood on the defendant's 9mm pistol came from the defendant and Kacee Tollefsbol.

     After the prosecution rested its case, attorney Barnett put the defendant's parents on the stand who said their son had never been a violent person. A defense neurologist testified there is a connection between ALS and a tendency toward violence. On cross-examination the prosecutor asked the doctor, "Do many ALS patients commit homicide?"

     "No."

     "Are there many cases of violent acts?"

     "No, again," said the witness.

     Dr. Douglas Tucker, a forensic psychiatrist, testified how ALS deteriorates the brain.

     On April 20, 2015 following ten hours of deliberation, the jury returned its verdict. Ten of the twelve jurors found the defendant guilty by reason of mental disease. The judge committed Andrew Steele to the State Department of Health Services for the rest of his life.

     The insanity defense and the verdict in this case does not make sense. Mr. Steele was not psychotic when he murdered his wife and sister-in-law. He knew exactly what he was doing. His behavior was deviant, yes, but he had the necessary criminal intent. Why did the defendant go to the trouble of staging his wife's murder. And what was behind all the business about a suicide pact? There is something missing here. What an odd and tragic case.

The Jade Murray Murder Case : No Justice For Skylar Bradley

     Jade Murray lived in Aurora, Missouri, a town of 7,500 in the southwest corner of the state. On December 14, 2013 the 22-year-old took her 4-year-old son Skylar Bradley to a medical facility in Aurora. She told medical personnel she found her unresponsive son in his bedroom. That evening he had been ill and refused to eat. The doctor noticed the boy had bruises on his arms, side and back. From Aurora the critically ill boy was transported to Mercy Hospital in Springfield, Missouri.

     Shortly after arriving at the hospital in Springfield, Skylar Bradley died. According to the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy he died of a ruptured spleen. The medical examiner ruled his death a homicide.

     Detectives with the Missouri State Highway Patrol, suspecting child abuse, questioned the dead boy's mother. Jade Murray denied hitting or otherwise abusing her son. Investigators asked if someone else had beaten the child. The mother insisted he had not been physically mistreated by anybody.

     From people who knew Jade Murray and the boy, homicide detectives received a different picture. According to these interviewees the hot-tempered young mother frequently took out her wrath on her son. Several people had witnessed Murray strike the child with her fist and noticed that he seemed permanently bruised. In one reported incident Jade Murray allegedly spanked him so hard the paddle broke.

     Detectives learned that Murray used illegal drugs and regularly gave her son NyQuil and Xanax to sedate him.

     On June 6, 2014, pursuant to an interrogation conducted by the state investigators, Jade Murray confessed to physically abusing her son. On the night he died she admitted hitting him several times for not obeying. She allegedly struck him so hard she knocked the child off his bed then ordered him to stay in his room. When she checked on the boy 45 minutes later she found him unresponsive.

     Following the confession a Lawrence County prosecutor charged Jade Murray with second-degree murder and second-degree domestic assault. Officers booked the suspect into the county jail. At her arraignment the judge set her bond at $250,000.

     If convicted of second-degree murder Murray faced up to thirty years in prison. The domestic assault charge carried a maximum sentence of seven years behind bars.

     On October 20, 2014 an officer with the Missouri State Highway Patrol took the stand at the preliminary hearing, a hearing to determine if the prosecution had sufficient evidence to warrant a trial in the case. According to this witness the defendant admitted she struck her son hard enough to knock him off his bed. The boy's back hit his brother's bed as he fell.

     Dr. Charles Glenn, the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy, testified that the child had bruises on several parts of his body and died of a ruptured spleen. Under cross-examination by Jade Murray's public defender attorney, Dr. Glenn conceded that the victim's enlarged spleen could have been cased by "some sort of viral illness."

     Sergeant Daniel Nash, an investigator with the state patrol, testified that when he questioned the defendant in June 2014, about six months after the boy's death, she told him that during the week before the boy died he had been ill. But on the day of his death his health had improved. When the suspect was pressed regarding exactly how the boy had died the mother hinted her boyfriend may have had something to do with his death. According to this witness, Jade Murray eventually admitted striking her son. She said she hadn't meant to hit him so hard, describing the incident as an accident.

     Following the preliminary hearing the judge ruled that the state had presented enough evidence to justify a trial in the case. The Murray murder trial was scheduled to be held sometime in 2015.

     In October 2015, pursuant to a plea bargain arrangement between the defendant and Lawrence County prosecutor Don Trotter, Jade Murray pleaded guilty to the charge of second-degree domestic assault. In return for the plea she received a five year prison sentence and credit for two years of time served in the county jail. As a result she was eligible for parole within months of her sentence.

     This incredibly light sentence outraged the community and sparked citizen protests outside the courthouse. In defending the deal, prosecutor Trotter said a murder case against Murray would have been difficult to prove.

The Daniel Sanchez Mass Murder-Suicide Case

     Beatriz "Betty" Silva lived with her sister Maria and Maria's husband Max in a mobile home located among 400 modular dwellings in a subdivision outside of Longmont, a town 35 miles north of Denver, Colorado. The 25-year-old student at Front Range Community College worked at a Chipotle fast-food franchise, and as a sales associate with Marshalls Department Store. On November 22, 2012, Thanksgiving Day, she told her boyfriend, 31-year-old Daniel Sanchez, that she found someone new. Sanchez, a quick-tempered violent man flew into a rage. He made threats against the new boyfriend and began stalking and harassing Silva.

     When they were going together, Betty Silva loaned Daniel Sanchez $1,000, money he needed to fix up his truck. He had not paid her back as promised, so on Saturday, December 15, 2012, she arranged to meet him in the parking lot of a Best Buy on the outskirts of Denver where they would discuss how he planned to repay the loan. When the ex-girlfriend climbed into his vehicle Mr. Sanchez called her names, punched her in the face and used her cellphone to text threatening messages to her boyfriend. Against her will, Betty Siva was driven around in Sanchez's truck while he tried to talk her into checking into a hotel where they could resume their relationship. She refused, and after an hour or so, he drove her back to her car and let her out of his truck.

     Betty Silva reported Daniel Sanchez to the Denver police, and on Sunday afternoon, December 16, 2012, officers took him into custody on charges of false imprisonment, second-degree kidnapping, harassment and domestic violence. He spend the night in the Boulder County Jail, and at ten o'clock Monday night posted his $10,000 bond and was released.

     Furious over the fact the woman he loved had turned him in to the police, Daniel Sanchez drove straight from the jail to Silva's mobile home where he parked on the street in front of her dwelling. Armed with a .45-caliber 13-round Glock pistol and an extra magazine, Sanchez entered the Silva dwelling by shooting out the glass panel to the rear sliding glass door. Once inside the home he took Betty, her 22-year-old sister Maria and Maria's husband Max Ojeda hostage.

     At four o'clock the next morning Betty Silva called 911. The dispatcher overheard her say, "No, no, no." The 911 operator next heard gunfire. Following the gun shots, Sanchez came on the phone and informed the dispatcher that he was going to kill himself. Again, the sound of gunfire, then silence. No one else came to the phone.

     Weld County Sheriff's deputies and a SWAT team arrived at the modular home at 4:18 that morning. Officers weren't sure how many people were in the dwelling, or if any of them were alive. At 5:30 AM, after getting no response from inside the hostage site, members of the SWAT unit stormed into the mobile home. Officers found Mr. Sanchez dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. They discovered 29-year-old Max Ojeda and his wife Maria dead in their bedroom. Betty Silva had been shot to death in another part of the house. Officers found 16 spent shell-casings scattered about the murder site.

     In reporting Daniel Sanchez to the Denver police Betty Silva had indicated a reluctance to go forward with the more serious kidnapping related charges. By minimizing the seriousness of Sanchez's crimes against her she may have contributed to her own death and the fate of the other two victims. Had the magistrate been convinced that Sanchez posed a serious threat of life-threatening violence, Sanchez's bail may not have been set so low. There is also the possibility that regardless of the amount of Sanchez's bail, this young woman's fate was sealed once she became this violent, unstable man's girlfriend. 

The Colin Abbott Murder Case

     Upon his retirement in 2010 as a New Jersey pharmaceutical company executive, 65-year-old Kenneth Abbott and his second wife Celeste bought a 25-acre estate in Brady Township not far from the town of Slippery Rock, the home of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania in the western part of the state. Kenneth and his 55-year-old second wife were married in 2007.

     On July 13, 2011, Melissa Elich, Celeste Abbott's daughter, contacted the New Jersey State Police and asked for information about the car accident death of her mother and stepfather. Kenneth Abbott's son Colin told Elich that Kenneth and Celeste died in a traffic accident on June 8, 2011. According to Colin the traffic fatality had taken place in Plant City, New Jersey. When Elich couldn't find Plant City on a map she called Colin to confirm the location. This time he told her it had happened in Atlantic City. According to the 42-year-old New Jersey resident, his father and Elich's mother were burned beyond recognition in the crash.

     After the New Jersey State Police officer informed Melissa Elich that the state had no record of such an incident, the officer called the Pennsylvania State Police in Butler County and requested a welfare check of the Abbotts.

     On the day of Melissa Elich's New Jersey State Police inquiry regarding the traffic accident, Corporal Daniel Herr and another Pennsylvania State Trooper drove out to the West Liberty Road estate. The officers searched the unoccupied house and several out-buildings. Near one of the two ponds on the property the troopers discovered a pair of metal barrels that had been used to burn something. In the vicinity of the barrels, about 200 yards from the house, the officers came across charred human body parts.

     Later on the day of the gruesome discovery on the Abbott estate, Dr. Dennis Dirkmart, a forensic anthropologist with Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pennsylvania, arrived at the scene with his team of graduate students. Dr. Dirkmart and his forensic crew identified a skull containing the upper teeth along with a lower jaw containing additional dentition. The death scene investigators also recovered a female pelvic bone and several larger bones that were male. (The remains were later identified as those of Kenneth and Celeste Abbott.) Further analysis of the dismembered and burned bodies by a forensic pathologist revealed the couple had been shot. (The police found a spent bullet near one of the ponds.)

     On July 13, 2011 officers with the New Jersey State Police searched Colin Abbott's home in Randolph, New Jersey, a town of 25,000 in the northern section of the state. The search produced incriminating evidence that linked Mr. Abbott to the double murder in Butler County, Pennsylvania.

     From Colin Abbott's house New Jersey investigators recovered Celeste Abbott's red-leather wallet that contained her driver's license and several credit cards. The officers also found a .380-caliber pistol later identified as the murder weapon. In the murder suspect's bank safety deposit box detectives found Kenneth Abbott's will that designated his son the sole beneficiary of the $5 million estate. The will had been changed to that effect in 2010. Investigators believed the suspect murdered his father and stepmother in order to inherit their wealth.

     In Pennsylvania, State Trooper Chris Birckichler questioned Adam Tower, Celeste Abbott's son. Mr. Tower revealed that in speaking to the suspect on July 12, 2011 Colin Abbott ordered him not to contact his father's life insurance company. The suspect made it clear that he would be handling the disposition of the estate.

     On July 14, 2011, the day detectives interrogated Colin Abbott in Randolph, New Jersey, murder charges were being filed against him in Pennsylvania. Officers in New Jersey arrested Colin Abbott that day on the Pennsylvania homicide charges, and a couple of weeks later the suspect was incarcerated in the Butler County Jail awaiting his trial.

     On the day before the trial, February 26, 2013, the defendant pleaded no contest to two counts of third-degree murder. As part of the plea deal, Mr. Abbott avoided the penalties of death and life in prison without the possibility of parole. Butler County Judge William Shaffer sentenced him to 35 to 80 years in prison. If he served the minimum sentence he could regain his freedom when he was 77-years-old. The cold-blooded killer stood before Judge Shaffer and wept.

     Less than a month after his sentencing, Colin Abbott filed a 5-page handwritten request asking Judge Shaffer to allow him to withdraw his plea in the case. At the plea withdrawal hearing on March 28, 2013, the Butler County prosecutor played recordings of jailhouse phone conversations between the prisoner and Deborah Buchanan, his 64-year-old mother.

     Abbott, pursuant to a discussion of his attempt to take back his plea, said this to his mother: "It's a publicity start in the right direction for you; possibly for a book, possibly for other things, you know?" Abbott's mother, a resident of Rockway, New Jersey, owned Deadly Ink Press, a small publisher of murder mystery books. Buchanan had made it known that she was writing a book about her son's case.

     To an Associated Press reporter following this story, Deborah Buchanan said, "I am talking to people about a book deal. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I am a writer. That's not why he [her son] wants to change his plea. He was under a lot of pressure."

     On April 12, 2013, Butler County Judge Shaffer denied Colin Abbott's motion to withdraw his no contest plea.

Protecting Classroom Pedophiles in California

     On January 30, 2012, Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies arrested 61-year-old elementary teacher Mark Berndt on 23 counts of lewd acts against minors. The third grade teacher at the Miramonte Elementary School in Florence Firestone, an unincorporated community in Los Angeles County, stood accused of photographing 6 to 10-year olds in bondage positions, some with live bugs crawling on their faces. A few of the girls were shown holding spoons containing a white liquid up to their mouths. Children were also pictured about to eat cookies allegedly topped with the teacher's semen.

     Because of the influence of the California Teachers Association (CTA) and other education unions in the state, school administrators couldn't fire anyone, including teachers like Mark Berndt. In the Miramonte school, because parents were so outraged and held protests, school administrators managed to get Berndt out of the classroom by paying him $40,000 to retire. That's how bad it was in the Golden State where it was truly golden for pedophiles working in the state's education system. (You can see why in California the firing of a merely incompetent teacher is impossible. The unions simply won't allow it. Rotten teachers who lose their jobs in other states can find a teaching position in California. The pay is outstanding, benefits are out of this world and it doesn't matter if teachers are any good. Moreover, for pedophiles California classrooms are heavens on earth.)

     In 2012, in the wake of the Miramonte school scandal (Berndt wasn't the only pedophile working there), a group called Democrats for Educational Reform introduced legislation in the state senate (S.B. 1530) that made it easier to dismiss teachers accused of sex, violence, or drug offenses against children. That bill, with vast public support passed the Senate on a 33-4 bipartisan vote.

     In the California Assembly, when the Senate-passed legislation came before the Assembly Education Committee, committee members, by refusing to vote on the bill, killed the proposed law in committee. (These politicians didn't have the courage to vote "no"which meant the bill did not reach the Assembly floor for a vote. If it had it would have passed by a wide majority.)

     The committee members who killed this child protection legislation had bowed to the state's powerful teachers' unions, including the CTA. All of the state politicians who killed the bill through their abstentions had been beneficiaries of large CTA political contributions. The fact that the CTA could stop legislation favored by a vast majority of California voters showed who was really running the show in the state. Democracy be damned. Moreover, the undermining of this needed legislation revealed what most citizens of the state already knew--that in California it was unions first, teachers second and students, parents and education third--and a bad third at that. It was no wonder the state had one of the worst public education systems in the country. 

     In California the CTA, backed by an army of 325,000 teachers and plenty of money to bribe and control state politicians was in reality the fourth branch of government. As the biggest political spender in the state its influence dwarfed other special interest groups. From 2000 through 2009 the CTA alone shelled out more than $211 million in political contributions and lobbying expenses. That was twice the amount given to politicians by the second largest bribery machine, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Since 2009 the CTA pumped another $50 million into the state's political community. 

     The fact that teacher's unions in California and other states were destroying the quality of public education in the country was bad enough. Even worse, they were enabling and protecting classroom child abusers. As long as school administrators couldn't protect students from the likes of Mark Berndt classrooms were not safe for children. 

      As for Mark Berndt himself, he pleaded no contest in November 2013 to 23 counts of lewd acts on children. The judge sentenced him to 25 years in prison. A year later the Los Angeles United School District agreed to pay out $170 million in court settlements related to the Berndt pedophilia case. The settlement involved more than a hundred students.          

The Lee Kaplan Rape Case

     On Thursday June 16, 2016, officers with the Lower Southampton Township Police Department, operating on a children-in-danger tip, visited the home of 51-year-old Lee Kaplan. Mr. Kaplan resided in the eastern Pennsylvania town of Feasterville located in Bucks County twenty miles northeast of Philadelphia. When the police officers entered the Kaplan dwelling they encountered twelve girls, ages six months to eighteen. Several of the children responded by running about the house in panic searching for places to hide.

     When questioned by the police Mr. Kapan explained why the girls were living in his house. In 2012 a former Amish couple from the Lancaster County town of Quarryville named David and Salvilla Stoltzfus, in return for money from Kaplan to help the couple keep their farm, gave him their 14-year-old daughter. Mr. Kaplan and the Stoltzfuses were partners in a metalwork business in Quarryville.

     According to Mr. Kaplan he and the Stoltzfus teenager, since 2012, had produced two children. Their daughters were six-months and three years old. The other nine girls in the house were also Stoltzfus children.

     Mr. Kaplan was the only adult living in the Feasterville house. None of the girls had birth certificates or social security numbers.

     Police officers booked Lee Kaplan into the Bucks County Jail on numerous offenses that included rape, statutory sexual assault, aggravated indecent assault and corruption of minors. The twelve girls were placed into protective custody.

     David and Savilla Stoltzfus were also taken into custody on charges of conspiracy of statutory sexual assault and child endangerment. Mr. Kaplan and the ex-Amish couple were held on $1 million bond. Mr. Stolzfus told the police that when he gave up his children he had no idea he was breaking the law. In fact, after researching the issue online, he was convinced the transfer was legal.

     On Saturday June 18, 2016 one of Kaplan's neighbors told a local reporter that she had complained about Lee Kaplan to the authorities three years earlier. Mr. Kaplan's windows were boarded up and his yard was overgrown with uncut grass and weeds. According to this neighbor, the children were occasionally let out of the house, and when she did see them, "They were so sad and fearful. That's what made me call. I've been telling my husband for years that 'something isn't right.' "

     Another one of Lee Kaplan's neighbors in Feasterville told a reporter that Lee Kaplan seemed "weird" and that the neighbor now wished he had called the police.

     On June 18, 2016 police officers executed a search warrant at the Kaplan house. Officers also searched a greenhouse on the property where the long-haired, bearded resident grew Avocado trees. As officers searched the property, several chickens wandered about the place. Inside the house officers discovered several air mattresses, a large catfish tank and an elaborate and expensive model train layout. Following the search the authorities impounded Lee Kaplan's two vehicles, a blue conversion van and a white sedan.

     According to another neighbor the girls were occasionally seen working in Kaplan's vegetable garden. He also took them to a nearby Dollar Store and a local hotdog restaurant. Kaplan and the oldest Stoltzfus girl, according to this witness, had been seen in public holding hands.

     According to the Lower Southampton Township Public Safety Director, "We don't know if maybe there were babies born that were destroyed or whatever, but that's not the case as far as we can tell."

     An investigation of the Stoltzfuses revealed that in 2001 Mr. Stoltzfus borrowed $300,000 from an Amish run institution called the Old Order Amish Helping Program. At the time Mr. Stoltzfus operated a scrap metal business in the small Lancaster County town of Kirkwood. Eight years after taking out the loan to keep his business going, Mr. Stoltzfus lost the property to foreclosure. At this point he left the Amish faith, became a born again Christian and sued the Old Order Amish Helping program for initiating the foreclosure and forcing him out of business. In his lawsuit Mr. Stoltzfus claimed the Amish wanted to close him down because they didn't approve of him doing business "with an individual of the Jewish faith named Lee Kaplan." A judge dismissed the Stoltzfus lawsuit a few months later.

     The scrap metal business was sold at a sheriff's auction for $342,000. The Stoltzfuses, in 2011 filed for bankruptcy.

     In digging into Lee Kaplan's past, investigators learned that he graduated from Cheltenham High School in 1983. In 1994 he and his wife Virginia bought a house in the Melrose Park section of Cheltenham for $110,000, a place they worked hard to refurbish. Kaplan and his wife rented rooms in the house to students at a local university.

     According to a Cheltenham man who had lived next door to the Kaplan and his wife from 1994 to 2003, Mr. Kaplan was "born again, but not as a Christian. He was a born again Jew--a Jew for Jesus."

     In 2003 Lee Kaplan sold the house in Cheltenham for $250,000. Around this time he and his wife got divorced. After that he drastically changed his looks by letting his hair and his beard grow out.

     On June 6, 2017 a Bucks county jury found Lee Kaplan guilty of 17 counts of rape. According to the prosecutor, he "brainwashed the Stoltzfus family seeking "power, manipulation and control." 

     The 47-year-old rapist was sentenced to life in prison.

     A month later the judge sentenced David and Savilla Stoltzfus to seven years behind bars.

The Joyce Garrard Murder Case

      On Friday, February 17, 2012, 27-year-old Jessica Mae Hardin scolded her 9-year-old step-daughter for lying to her grandmother about eating a candy bar. As punishment, Savannah Hardin was told to run, and keep running while carrying an armload of firewood. At four that afternoon a neighbor saw the third grader running laps around the family's doublewide trailer home in rural northeast Alabama. At six-forty-five that evening the stepmother called 911 after Savannah started having seizures. Finding the girl unresponsive, emergency medical personnel rushed her to the Gadsden Regional Medical Center in Birmingham, Alabama.

     On Monday, February 20, 2012 the 9-year-old died. According to the state forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy she had been severely dehydrated with a dangerously low sodium level. Before she collapsed Savannah had been running for three hours.

     Deputies with the Etowah County Sheriff's Office took the stepmother and the victim's 46-year-old grandmother, Joyce Garrard, into custody. The grandmother was charged with capital murder. If convicted she faced either life without parole or the death penalty. The pair were booked into the Etowah County jail, each under a $500,000 cash bond. The stepmother, Jessica Hardin, faced the charge of felony-murder,.

     According to the step-mother's estranged husband (apparently not the girl's father), Joyce Garrard suffered from bi-polar disorder and was a heavy drinker. Both women denied any wrongdoing in the child's death.

     In January 2013, after a judge reduced Jessica Hardin's bond to $150,000, the stepmother posted bail and walked out of the Etowah County lockup. The grandmother remained in custody.

     On August 26, 2014, Etowah County Circuit Judge William Ogletree moved the grandmother's murder trial from September 2014 to February 2015. The judge cited "discovery and procedural issues" as reasons for the delay.

     The Joyce Garrard murder trial got under way in the Etowah County Courthouse on March 9, 2015. Following the selection of jury made up of ten men and six women, four serving as alternates, Chief Deputy District Attorney Marcus Reid made his opening statement. According to the prosecutor, the defendant acted like a "drill sergeant who ran her granddaughter to death.

     Defense attorney Dani Bone told the jurors that her client meant no harm to her granddaughter. The girl wanted to run and to get faster after she had finished second in a race at school. As for the cause of her death, the girl had recovered at the hospital before dying from prior health complications.

     Prosecutor Reid put Dr. Emily Ward on the stand, the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy on Savannah Hardin. The expert witness testified that the victim died from her seizures linked to abnormally low sodium levels caused by "prolonged physical exertion and heat exhaustion." According to Dr. Ward, the victim's left arm had three bruises caused by carrying the firewood as she ran.

     Heather Elgin Gibson, a nurse who was on duty at the Gadsden Regional Medical Center when the girl was brought, in said the victim was unconscious and unresponsive. The witness said she mistakingly "clicked a wrong button" on an electronic chart that made it appear the patient was alert at one point. She was not.

     On March 16, 2015, defense attorney Bone, after the prosecution rested, asked Judge Ogletree to direct a verdict of acquittal on the grounds that the state had not proven its case. Attorney Bone said that if the defendant had wanted to punish the child for a lie there was no reason for her to force the girl to run until she died. "Discipline means teaching a lesson," he said. "How is the defendant going to teach a lesson if she kills her?"

     Prosecutor Reid, in arguing that the state had presented enough evidence to require a defense, pointed out that the defendant had kept yelling at the child to run even after she was on the ground vomiting and begging to stop. "You judge a person's state of mind by what they do," he said.

     The judge ruled in favor of the prosecution which meant that the defense would have to put on its case.

     Donna Johnson, Savannah Hardin's principal at Carlisle Elementary School, testified the defendant had shown concern for her granddaughter. (This countered the testimony given by a physician who had treated the victim. The doctor described the defendant as uncaring.)

     Dr. Deborah Smith, a physician with Quality of Life Health Services took the stand for the defense. Dr. Smith said she treated Savannah Hardin for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Under cross-examination the witness admitted telling investigators she was concerned the patient did not have a normal relationship with the defendant and her stepmother, Jessica Hardin.

     On March 18, 2015 Joyce Garrard took the stand on her own behalf. She testified two hours during which time she became tearful as well as defiant. According to the defendant, she punished her granddaughter that day by making her pick up sticks in the yard for 30 to 45 minutes. As the witness relayed her version of the case she drank freely from a water bottle at her side on the witness stand.

     When asked about the running, Garrard described it as "more of a jog, not a full run." The witness said, "You can't make Savannah run. She runs when she wants."

     "Did you ever intend to hurt Savannah?" asked the defense attorney. "Absolutely not," came the reply. "I would rather die than harm Savannah."

     The defendant denied that Savannah was ever down on all fours vomiting. When pressed about this on cross-examination the witness admitted the girl vomited once then continued with her activities.

     Late in the day on Saturday March 21, 2015, the Etowah County jury found the defendant guilty of capital murder. As the jury foreman read the verdict, Garrard lowered her head and cried. Others in the courtroom expressed their approval of the jury's decision.

     The penalty phase of the trial began on Monday March 23, 2015. Three days later, the jury recommended life in prison for the convicted grandmother. Five of the Etowah County jurors voted for her death.

     On May 11, 2015 Judge Ogletree sentenced Garrard to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

     In June 2016 the victim's stepmother, Jessica Hardin, pleaded guilty to aggravated child abuse. Judge Ogletree sentenced her to twenty years in prison.

The David Tarloff Murder Case

      In 1991 psychiatrists diagnosed David Tarloff with schizophrenia when the 23-year-old was in college. Over the next seventeen years the Queens, New York resident, on twelve occasions, ended up in a hospital mental ward. There was no question that the man was mentally ill.

     Tarloff lived with his mother in a Queens apartment until 2004 when she moved into a nursing home. By 2008 the 40-year-old schizophrenic had convinced himself that his mother was being abused by nursing home personnel. That's when he concocted a plan to rob Dr. Kent Shinbach, the psychiatrist who had initially treated him in 1991. With the money he hoped to acquire by using the doctor's ATM code, Mr. Tarloff planned to pull his mother out of the nursing home and take her to Hawaii.

     In February 2008, after making several phone inquiries, David Tarloff learned that Dr. Shinbach had offices on Manhattan's Upper East Side. In preparation for the robbery he purchased a rubber meat mallet and a cleaver that he packed into a suitcase filled with adult diapers and clothing for his mother.

     On February 8, 2008 Mr. Tarloff showed up at  Dr. Shinbach's office armed with the meat cleaver and the mallet. But instead of encountering his robbery target he was confronted by Dr. Kathryn Faughey, the 56-year-old psychotherapist who shared office space with Dr. Shinbach.

    In the Manhattan doctor's office David Tarloff smashed Dr. Faughey's skull with the mallet then hacked her to death with the meat cleaver. He also attacked Dr. Shinbach when the psychiatrist tried to rescue his colleague. The assailant fled the bloody scene on foot and was taken into custody shortly thereafter. Dr. Shinbach survived his wounds.

     The Manhattan District Attorneys Office charged David Tarloff with first-degree murder. The defendant's attorney acknowledged what his client had done, but pleaded him not guilty by reason of insanity. If a jury found that at the moment the defendant killed Dr. Faughey he was so mentally ill he couldn't appreciate the nature and quality of his act, they could return a verdict of not guilty. Instead of serving a fixed prison term Mr. Tarloff would be placed into an institution for the criminally insane. The length of his incarceration would be determined by the doctors who treated him. If at some point the psychiatrists considered him sane enough for society he could be discharged from the mental institution. (It is for this reason that most jurors are uncomfortable with the insanity defense, particularly in cases of extreme violence.)

     Under American law criminal defendants are presumed innocent and sane. That means the prosecution has to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The defense, in insanity cases, has the burden of proving, by a preponderance of the evidence (a less rigorous standard of proof) that the defendant was out of touch with reality when he or she committed the homicide. Since even seriously psychotic murder defendants are aware they are killing their victims, insanity verdicts are rare. This is particularly true in rural communities where jurors prefer to send mentally ill murderers to prison.

     After years of procedural delays David Tarloff's murder trial got underway in March 2013. A month later, following the testimony of a set of dueling psychiatrists, the case went to the jury. After ten days of deliberation the jury foreman informed the judge that the panel had not been able to reach an unanimous verdict of guilt. The trial judge had no choice but to declare a mistrial.

     The Manhattan prosecutor in charge of the case announced his intention to try David Tarloff again.

     In May 2014, at his second trial, the jury rejected the insanity defense and found David Tarloff guilty of first-degree murder. The judge sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole.     

The Pamela Phillips Murder-For-Hire Case

     In 1986, Gary Lee Triano, a well-known real estate developer in Tucson, Arizona made the mistake of his life when he married 28-year-old Pamela Phillips. Mr. Triano had made millions investing in bingo halls and slot-machine parlors in Arizona and California. He made his fortune before Congress authorized Native Americans to open full-blown gambling casinos.

     In 1992 when Triano was broke, his wife of six years divorced him. The couple had two children. Shortly after the breakup Pamela Phillips took out a $2 million insurance policy on her ex-husband's life. She moved to Aspen, Colorado where she began working as a real estate agent. It was there she met and began dating a 44-year-old man named Ronald Young.

     In 1994, Gary Triano, $25 million in debt, filed for bankruptcy. He told his girlfriend in July 1996 that someone had been following him.

     At 5:30 PM on Friday November 1, 1996, after playing a round of golf at the Westin La Paloma Country Club with his friend Luis Ruben, Mr. Triano climbed behind the wheel of his 1989 Lincoln Town Car. Eight minutes after pulling out of the country club parking lot the vehicle exploded and burst into flames. The blast killed Gary Triano instantly.

     Investigators determined that someone had wired a black powder pipe bomb to Mr. Triano's car. Detectives interviewed the ex-wife and others but ended up with no suspects in the case A year later the case went cold.

     In November 2005, nine years after the car bombing murder of the ex-millionaire, Tucson detectives caught a break in the form of an anonymous tip. According to the tipster, Pamela Phillips had paid Ronald Young $400,000 to murder her ex-husband. The hit man had been compensated out of the $2 million life insurance payout.

     FBI agents in Florida uncovered information connecting Ronald Young and Pamela Phillips in the Triano murder plot. The evidence included incriminating emails between the hit man and the mastermind, detailed records of their business transactions, meetings and even recorded telephone calls in which the two discussed the murder plot.

     Ronald Young, charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder, went into hiding and became a fugitive.

     In September 2006 FBI agents raided Pamela Phillips' house in Aspen, Colorado. On her computer agents found evidence of her involvement in her ex-husband's murder. However, before she was taken into custody, the murder-for-hire suspect fled the country and took up residence in Austria.

     Gary Triano's two children, in November 2007, sued Pamela Phillips and Ronald Young for the wrongful death of their father. (The plaintiffs were awarded $10 million in damages two years later.)

     On October 2008, after Ronald Young was featured on the TV show "America's Most Wanted," FBI agents arrested him in California. The suspected hit man was now 66-years-old. Upon his extradition to Arizona the authorities booked him into the Pima County Jail. The judge set his bond at $5 million. Mr. Young pleaded not guilty to the charges of conspiracy to commit murder and first-degree murder.

     A jury in March 2010 found Ronald Young guilty as charged. The judge sentenced him to life in prison without the chance of parole.

     In December 2010 government officials in Austria agreed to extradite Phillips to the U.S. on condition she would not, if found guilty, be sentenced to death. Prosecutors in Arizona agreed to this condition and the fugitive was sent home to face trial.

     The Pamela Phillips murder-for-hire trial got underway in February 2014 in Tucson, Arizona. Prosecutor Nicol Green portrayed the defendant as a cold-blooded gold digger who hired a former boyfriend to kill Mr. Triano for the life insurance money.

     Defense attorney Paul Eckerstrom painted his client as a victim of overzealous law enforcement. As a successful real estate agent in her own right, the lawyer claimed his client didn't need Triano's insurance money. Regarding the $400,000 she had paid Ronald Young, attorney Eckerstrom characterized the transaction as payment for Young's help in various business ventures.

     In speculating who may have bombed Triano's Lincoln Town Car, Mr. Eckerstrom said, "Gary Triano lived on the edge, the financial edge…He borrowed a lot of money from all sorts of people, many people who might be connected to organized crime."

     On April 8, 2014 the jury found Pamela Phillips guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. On May 22, 2014 the judge sentenced her to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Upon hearing her fate Phillips turned to the gallery and said, three times, "I'm innocent!" 

A Middle School Pedophile and The Teachers Who Supported Him

     In the spring of 2013, Neal Erickson, an eighth grade science and computer education teacher at the Rose City Middle School in northern Michigan, pleaded guilty to one count of criminal conduct with a male student. Back in 2006 Mr. Erickson had ten sexual encounters with the eighth grader at the teacher's house. (The authorities learned of these sex offenses several years later when an anonymous tipster sent the police an old photograph of the student that in some fashion incriminated the teacher. The victim, at the time of the guilty plea, was attending college. Mr. Erickson had left teaching.)

     In anticipation of the former teacher's sentencing, six Rose City educators and two of their retired colleagues wrote letters to the judge on Neal Erickson's behalf asking for leniency. Amy Huber Eagan wrote: "I am asking that Neal be given the absolute minimum sentence, considering all of the circumstances surrounding the case."

     Rose City teacher Sally Campbell in her letter to the judge wrote: "Neal made a mistake. (Losing your wallet is a mistake. Stealing someone's wallet is not.) He allowed a mutual friendship to develop into much more. He realized his mistake [again the mistake] and ended it years before someone sent something to the authorities which began the legal process."

     Middle school teacher Harriett Coe wrote this on Mr. Erickson's behalf: "Neal has plead (sic) guilty to his one criminal offense but he's not a predator. (One could argue that any time a teacher has sex with a student the teacher by definition is a predator.) He understands the severity of his action and is sincere in his desire to make amends."

     On July 15, 2013, Neal Erickson's sentencing day, Judge Michael Baumgartner looked out over his courtroom and noticed that the defendant's teaching supporters were sitting with members of his family. Speaking directly to Mr. Erickson, Judge Baumgartner said, "I'm appalled and ashamed that the community would rally around you. What you did was a jab in the eye with a sharp stick to every parent who trusts a teacher."

     Judge Baumgartner sentenced Neal Erickson to fifteen years to thirty years in prison. The former teacher's courtroom cheerleaders reacted with shock and disgust.

     Following the sentencing, one of Erickson's supporters told a reporter with The Detroit News that Judge Baumgartner had socked it to the teacher because he was a man who molested a boy. Had the defendant in this case been a woman she may have gotten off light. (This may be true but it didn't mitigate Erickson's crime.)

     Not long after Judge Baumgartner handed down the sentence someone burned down the garage owned by the victim's parents, John and Lori Janczewski. An unknown person also spray-painted a threatening message on their house.

     Overall, citizens of this rural community agreed with Judge Baumgartner's hardline approach to pedophilia in the local school. Many asked the school superintendent to fire Erickson's teacher friends. Several parents said that if these sex offense cheerleaders were not sacked they would take their children out of the school system.

     As could be expected the embattled supporters of Mr. Erickson responded to the public's outrage by making threats of their own. If the school superintendent tried to fire them they would fight back by suing the cash-strapped school district. These pedophile supporting educators would not go down without a fight. Moreover, taxpayers and parents had a lot of nerve trying to interfere with public education.

     None of the teachers who supported and defended Neal Erickson lost their jobs over this case. Following the scandal parents pulled 87 students out of the school.

The Christopher Wells Murder-For-Hire Case

     In August 2010 Amara Wells, the 39-year-old wife of 49-year-old Christopher Wells, declared she wanted a divorce. The couple lived with their six year old daughter in Monument, Colorado. The day after he received this news Christopher destroyed $1000 worth of his wife's wardrobe. She and the little girl fled to Castle Rock, Colorado where they took up residence with Amara's sister-in-law and her husband. Within days of the separation Amara filed for divorce and obtained a restraining order, informing the authorities that she feared for her life. The restraining order did not stop Christopher Wells from stalking and harassing his wife.

     On February 22, 2011, El Paso County (Colorado) police arrested Christopher Wells for violating the restraining order. Instead of posting bail he chose to remain in custody overnight. That evening someone entered the Castle Rock home and brutally murdered Amara and her sister-in-law's husband. They were beaten, stabbed and shot at close range. Amara's six year old discovered the bodies at three in the morning the next day. At the time of the killings Amara's sister-in-law was away on business.

     A few weeks after the double murder the police arrested Christopher Wells for masterminding the two homicides. Wells and his accomplices, Josiah Sher, Matthew Plake and Micah Woody had been employed at the Rocky Mountain Auto Brokers in Colorado Springs. Mr. Wells stood accused of paying 26-year-old Josiah Sher of Calhan, Colorado $20,000 for the murder of Amara and her family. Mr. Sher's two helpers were charged with buying the weapons, planning the hit, driving the hit man to the scene and disposing of the evidence. Woody and Plake were each paid $15,000 for their roles in the murders.

     The accused hit man, Josiah Sher, had been arrested in July 2005 for assault, domestic violence and harassment. Five years later police arrested him for speeding, driving with a revoked license and being a habitual offender. At the time of this arrest he was a sergeant in the U.S. Army Reserves.

     Christopher Wells, a hot-tempered drug user, had a history of violence himself. Thirteen years earlier he asked a cellmate in Fairfax County, Virginia to burglarize his ex-girlfriend's home, and in the process beat her up. Wells gave the cellmate, Richard DeLilly, a checklist detailing the M.O. along with a hand-drawn map of the target's neighborhood and a blueprint of the interior of her home. Wells told DeLilly to take what he wanted then destroy the woman's furniture. Instead of going through with the criminal assignment De Lilly went to the police. The intended victim told the officers that Wells, a former Chippendales dancer who did odd jobs and abused methamphetamine, wouldn't take no for an answer. He had called her incessantly, damaged her pickup and jammed the lock on her front door. She considered him extremely dangerous.

     On September 14, 2011 a judge ruled that the prosecutor in the Castle Rock double murder had sufficient evidence against Christopher Wells and the other three to hold the defendants without bond until their separate trials. They were charged with first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and felony murder. All of the defendants were eligible for the death penalty.

   On January 31, 2012 the Douglas County District Attorney's Office announced that prosecutors intended to seek the death penalty against 27-year-old Josiah Sher, the suspected hit man. Two weeks later Christopher Wells entered a plea of not guilty in a Douglas County Court.

     In March 2012 Micah Woody and Matthew Plake each pleaded guilty to  two counts of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. Both men agreed to testify against Christopher Wells and Josiah Sher. The judge sentenced each man to 48 years in prison.

     On January 30, 2014 Christopher Wells and his hit man, Josiah Sher, pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder. The judge sentenced both men to life in prison.