The Elzbieta Plackowska Double Murder Case

      In 2012 Elzbieta Plackowska lived with her husband Artur and their son in Naperville, Illinois, a DuPage County town 25 miles west of Chicago. Born and raised in Poland, Elzbieta came to the United States twelve years earlier on a vacation visa.

     Elzbieta's father in October 2012 passed away and she wanted to return to Poland for the funeral. Artur was against her leaving the country and the two of them argued over this. Their marriage was already strained over the fact that as a long-haul truck driver he was seldom home. Elzbieta resented having to raise their 7-year-old son without out his help. (Their oldest boy was in his late teens and lived with a family friend.) The 40-year-old discontented wife was also angry that she had to work as a housemaid, a job she felt was beneath her. Elzbieta Plackowska was an angry, frustrated and profoundly unhappy woman.

     In September 2012, about a month before her father died, Elzbieta met Marta Dworakowski on an online Polish networking site. Marta, the mother of a 5-year-old girl named Olivia, worked nights as a nurse at a dialysis center and was looking for a babysitter. Marta lived just five miles from Elzbieta in a townhouse in Naperville's upscale Brookdale Manor subdivision. The two mothers came to an agreement and on certain nights Elzbieta brought her 7-year-old son Justin to Dworakowski's home.

     On October 30, 2012, while spending an evening with Justin and Olivia at Dworakowski's townhouse, Elzbieta decided to murder her son. She grabbed a steak knife from the kitchen and entered Olivia's room where the children were playing. She told Justin that this was the night he was going to heaven. After making him kneel in prayer Elzbieta repeatedly stabbed him as he pleaded for his life. She plunged the knife into the boy 100 times then slashed his throat.

     After killing her son and cutting her own hand in the process (common in stabbing cases), the babysitter used the knife on Olivia, stabbing her 50 times before slashing her throat. She killed the 5-year-old because the girl had witnessed Justin's murder.

     After she had slaughtered her son and the girl she was babysitting, Plackowska drove to her Catholic church. It was ten o'clock at night and the place was closed so she called the church and left a message to the effect she had done something bad and needed help. About this time Marta Dworakowski arrived at her townhouse to find the dwelling locked and the babysitter's car missing. She called the Naperville Police Department.

     The police broke into the house and found Olivia on her bed and Justin on the floor next to it. The officers were stunned by the brutality of the double murder. Plackowska had also stabbed to death both of Dworakowski's dogs. The dwelling was awash in blood. Officers found a bloodstained knife in the kitchen sink.

     After murdering the children and driving to the church, Elzbieta Plackowska showed up at the house where her oldest boy was living. She told her son that a robber had attacked her and killed the children. The son called the police. Officers came to the house and took her into custody. (They found a second bloody knife in her car.) Before transporting the suspect to the police station the police had her treated for her knife wielding cuts at Edward Hospital.  

     At police headquarters Plackowska offered up the robbery story, then blamed the murders on a man she claimed had been stalking her. Eventually she admitted killing the children after hearing "demonic voices" in her head. Finally the truth came out: she had murdered her son to get back at her husband. She said she wanted Artur to hurt as much as he had made her suffer. She murdered Olivia because the little girl had witnessed the anger-killing of her son.

     On November 1, 2012, at her arraignment hearing in a DuPage County Court, the judge denied Plackowska bail. At the defendant's next court appearance she was formally charged with two counts of first-degree murder.

     In September 2017 following a short bench trial the DuPage County Judge found Plackowska guilty as charged. The judge sentenced her to life in prison.

The Botched Cheye Calvo SWAT Raid

     On July 28, 2008, drug traffickers in Los Angeles sent by Federal Express a box containing 32 pounds of marijuana to an address in Berwyn Heights, Maryland, a town of 3,000 ten miles north of Washington, D.C. The people who lived at that address had nothing to do with the shipment. The address was a delivery drop site where an accomplice would pick up the package before someone at the house took it inside. Ideal drop locations were homes occupied by childless couples who worked during the day. It also helped if the drop house had a front porch and at least one of the drug conspirators worked for the package delivery company.

     This particular marijuana delivery operation fell apart when, at a FedEx facility in Arizona, a drug dog made a hit on the parcel. The authorities in Arizona, after notifying the Prince George's County Police Department, resealed the box and sent it on its way. In Maryland at the FedEx station in Beltsville narcotics officers with the county police department took possession of the contraband.

     Instead of conducting a cursory investigation to determine the identities and backgrounds of the people who lived at the point of delivery and conferring with the chief of the Berwyn Heights Police Department to determine if there was suspicious drug activity associated with this house, the officers in charge of the case decided to deliver the package and then raid the house after the resident took the box inside. Had they checked with Patrick Murphy, the Berwyn Heights chief of police, the Prince George's County officers would have learned that 37-year-old Cheye Calvo, his wife Trinity, and her mother, Georgia Porter lived at that address.

     Mr. Calvo worked for a nonprofit organization that ran several public boarding schools for at-risk children. His wife Trinity had a job as a state finance officer. These people were not only law-abiding citizens, but Mr. Calvo was the mayor of Berwyn Heights. Had the Prince George's County police enlisted Mr. Calvo's cooperation they could have caught the drug dealers at the point of destination. Instead the county officers acquired a search warrant to raid the Calvo house.

     According to the plan, on the day after the package had been intercepted at Beltsville, a county officer posing as a deliveryman would bring it to the Calvo house at six-thirty in the evening. The police department's SWAT team, however, wasn't available to lead the raid that day. Melvin High, Prince George's chief of police called the police department in Greenbelt and asked if he could borrow their SWAT unit. The chief in Greenbelt said he couldn't help because his unit was not authorized to operate outside the boundaries of the town. Chief High then turned to Michael Jackson, the sheriff of Prince George's County. Sheriff Jackson agreed to send his SWAT deputies into the Calvo home.

     Every police leader in the county knew of the impending raid but Patrick Murphy, the chief of police of Berwyn Heights. Not only were his colleagues planning a wrong-house intrusion, the SWAT team that Police Chief High had recruited had been used mainly to intercede in domestic disturbances. The unit had no experience in conducting drug raids.

     At six o'clock on the evening of the raid, Mr. Calvo arrived home from work ahead of his wife, Trinity. He gathered up Payton and Chase, his two black lab retrievers and took them for a walk. While he was away a police officer approached the residence with the package of marijuana. Georgia, Mr. Calvo's mother-in-law, came to the door and instructed the "deliveryman" to leave the white box, addressed to her daughter, Trinity Tomsic, on the front porch.

     The point of delivery drug trafficking accomplice, realizing that the police had intercepted the package, ran from the scene. Mayor Calvo and his dogs returned from their walk a few minutes before seven. Mr. Calvo picked up the box that sat on a small table near the front entrance then climbed the stairs to change out of his suit.

     A few minutes later Georgia, while preparing dinner looked out the kitchen window and saw a SWAT officer pointing a rifle at her head. A few seconds after she screamed, SWAT officers broke down the front door. From the second floor Mr. Calvo heard his mother-in-law's scream, the front door cracking apart, loud male voices and gunfire. Several deputies rushed into Calvo's bedroom, grabbed him and dragged the stunned mayor down the stairs in his boxer shorts.

     Payton, the seven-year-old lab, lay dead on the living room floor. The officers ordered Mr. Calvo to his knees and told him to remain in that position with his hands cupped on his head. No one would listen as Mr. Calvo tried to tell them he was the mayor of the town and that the raiders had made some kind of mistake.

     One of the SWAT officers, in speaking to another member of the unit, said he thought the subject, who was kneeling in his own living room, was crazy. In the meantime officers were tearing the house apart looking for evidence of the drug trade. Finally, after an hour of ripping the place apart an officer told Calvo they had intercepted a box of marijuana that had been sent to his address. The officer assured Mr. Calvo that the police had a search warrant and what they were doing was perfectly legal.

     With his hands bound behind his back, Mr. Calvo was led into the kitchen where he saw Georgia lying face-down on the floor, her hands restrained behind her back and a rifle barrel pointed at her head. Near her body Mr. Calvo saw his other dog, Chase, lying in a pool of blood. An officer had shot the three-year-old lab as the terrified dog fled into the kitchen.

     Ninety minutes after the intrusion, about the time personnel from an animal control agency hauled away the dead pets, a member of the SWAT team removed Mr. Calvo's plastic hand restraints. A narcotics officer informed him that while the white box delivered to his house by the police was enough to arrest him and his wife on drug charges, they would give them both a break as long as they cooperated with the authorities.

     When Trinity Calvo came home a little after eight, police questioned her in the front yard. Having found no evidence of drug trafficking in the house the invading officers departed, leaving Mr. Calvo, his shaken mother-in-law and his distraught wife with a smashed front door, a ransacked house, a dark cloud of suspicion hanging over their heads and a home without their beloved pets.

     That night Cheye Calvo and his wife cleaned up the blood spilled by their dogs and tried to put their house back together. An officer from the Berwyn Heights Police Department came by at midnight to help the mayor secure the front door. The next morning the couple's friends started calling, offering their support and sympathy. The local and national media took an immediate interest in the story.

     At a news conference held on August 5, 2008, Prince George's County Police Chief Melvin High announced that his officers had arrested two suspects allegedly involved in the interstate scheme to deliver marijuana by shipping packages to unsuspecting homes. The package addressed to the mayor's house in Berwyn Heights was one of six or so parcels intercepted by the authorities in northern Prince George's County. In all, the packages contained 417 pounds of marijuana worth $3.6 million. One of the suspects worked for FedEx.

     Chief High and Sheriff Michael Jackson said they would not apologize for the Berwyn Heights raid which they characterized as legal and responsibly conducted. The sheriff said his SWAT team had been deployed because guns and violence are often associated with drug rings. Chief High, to those assembled at the news conference, said, "In some quarters, this has been viewed as a flawed police operation and an attack on the mayor. It was not. This was about an address, this was about a name on a package. In fact, our people did not know this was the home of the mayor and his family until after the fact." When asked by a reporter if the arrests of the FedEx deliveryman and his alleged accomplice had cleared Mayor Calvo and his wife, Chief High said, "From all indications at the moment, they had an unlikely involvement but we don't want to draw the definite conclusion. Most likely they were innocent victims."

     On August 8, 2008, Chief of Police Melvin High telephoned Mayor Calvo to inform him that Maryland's attorney general had cleared him and his wife of drug trafficking. While the chief didn't apologize for for the SWAT raid, he expressed regret over the killing of the dogs. A month after the Berwyn Heights SWAT raid, Melvin High retired.

     The internal affairs investigators, obviously aware that the killing of the dogs was unwarranted and made the SWAT team look like a squad of armed and vicious law enforcement zombies, did their best to make the killings appear justified. According to a preliminary report issued by the sheriff's office, the officer shot Payton because the dog had "engaged" a deputy. The police killed the other pet because it ran toward an officer.

     A few days after the police made the September 4, 2008 preliminary report public, Mr. Calvo released the results of necropsies (animal autopsies) performed by a veterinarian with the Maryland Department of Agriculture. According to the findings of this expert, the police had shot Peyton four times, twice in the chest/flank region, once in the jaw and once in the neck. Chase had been shot twice, one on the bullets striking his chest and the other his left rear leg.

     In conducting the internal inquiry into the Calvo raid the investigators did not interview Mr. Calvo or his mother-in-law. Quoted in the Washington Post, Calvo said, "The fact they've done an internal review without contacting the victims of their raid, the people whose house they stormed through, shows they're not very interested in the facts."

     In January 2011, Prince George's County attorneys settled the lawsuit Cheye Calvo had brought against the county in 2009. The parties to the civil suit did not disclose the amount of the settlement. 

The Donald Wilder Justified Homicide Case

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Henry Mapps Triple Murder Case

     Reggie Tuttle and his wife Kim lived in Rye, a southern Colorado town not far from Pueblo. The 51-year-old owner of a trucking company and his wife had three children at home and a 33-year-old daughter, Dawn Roderick, who lived with her husband and three children in Pueblo. Kim Tuttle worked on the culinary staff at the Parkview Medical Center.

     Henry Carl Mapps, a former long distance truck driver, resided in the Tuttle's mountainside home where he worked as an in-house handyman. The 59-year-old had once lived in Dimmitt, a town of 4,000 in the Texas panhandle. Prior to being taken in by the Tuttles, Mr. Mapps had lived out of his 2004 Chrysler Town & Country minivan.

     On November 27, 2013 a fire broke out at the Tuttle house. After extinguishing the blaze firefighters discovered the bodies of three adults in the fire-damaged dwelling. According to the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsies, the three victims--Mr. and Mrs. Tuttle and their adult daughter Dawn Roderick--had been shot to death.

     Investigators determined that the killer had set the fire after committing the triple murder.

     When the killings occurred three of the Tuttle children were visiting a relative. Handyman Mapps and his minivan had disappeared.

     A few days after the murders investigators learned that Henry Mapps passed checks drawn on the Tuttle's bank account. This made him a prime suspect in the case. A Pueblo County prosecutor charged him with three counts of first-degree murder as well as arson, identify theft and forgery.

     After the U.S. Marshals Office acquired a federal warrant for Mapp's arrest, police launched a nationwide manhunt for the six foot, 125 pound fugitive with red hair.

     On Saturday night, December 28, 2013, 700 miles from Rye, Colorado, U.S. Marshals and police officers arrested Mapps at a motel in Roland, Oklahoma. When taken into custody the suspect was not in possession of a gun. 

     Homicide investigators believed that Henry Mapps murdered Reggie and Kim Tuttle for financial gain. They suspected he killed Dawn Roderick simply because she happened to be in the house. If this were true, it was one of those instances in which decent, successful people brought a loser into their lives, a man who secretly hated them and resented their material wealth.

     It was also possible that Mapps killed these three innocent victims out of a sense of entitlement to their money. If this were the case he was fortunate that the authorities in Colorado had only executed one person since 1977.

     In May 2014, following his guilty plea to triple murder and arson after the death penalty had been taken off the table, District Court Judge William Alexander sentenced Mapps to three consecutive life sentences.

The Charles Severance Triple Murder Case

 Nancy Dunning 

     In 2003, Nancy Dunning, a 56-year-old real estate agent, lived with her husband who was the sheriff of Fairfax County in Alexandria, Virginia outside of Washington, D.C. A community activist, Mrs. Dunning organized arts festivals and other events including a farmer's market. 

     On December 5, 2003 when Nancy failed to show up for a lunch date at the Atlantis Restaurant in the Bradlee Shopping Center, her husband John and their 23-year-old son Chris went to the house to check on her. They found Nancy lying dead in the foyer. She had been shot several times. There was no forced entry and nothing had been taken from the dwelling. 

     Homicide investigators theorized that the victim was murdered when she answered her front door. Detectives were unable to identify a suspicious man caught on a nearby Target outlet surveillance camera that morning. Just before her death Nancy had shopped at that Potomac Yard Target store. 

     A $100,000 reward failed to attract any productive information. The case remained unsolved for more than a decade. There was some speculation that Nancy Dunning had been the target in a murder-for-hire plot. John Dunning died in 2012. 

 Ronald Kirby 

     Ronald Kirby lived with his wife Anne Haynes and their two children in Alexandria, Virginia. The 69-year-old, in 2013, was the director of transportation planning at the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. He had worked at the agency for 25 years and was a nationally known transportation expert. 

     Mr. Kirby, who took pride in taking the bus or Metrorail to work every day, played tennis and often accompanied his wife to dance classes. He was also an avid Washington Redskins fan. 

     On November 11, 2013, a relative found Mr. Kirby dead just inside the front door to his home. He had been shot several times in the torso. Investigators believed the victim had been murdered that morning between ten and noon. As in the Nancy Dunning case, there was no forced entry and the crime wasn't motivated by theft. Investigators had no idea who committed this murder and no clue as to why. 

 Ruthanne Lodato 

     Norman and Ruthanne Lodato lived in the North Ridge neighborhood of Alexandria a little more than a mile from where Ronald Kirby was murdered. Ruthanne's 89-year-old mother Mary Lucy Giammittoria resided in the house with them. The couple employed a caregiver to help with Ruthanne's mother. Norman Lodato was an active member of the North Ridge Citizen's Association and Ruthanne was a locally well-known piano teacher with a program called Music Together in Alexandria. 

     At eleven-thirty on the morning of February 6, 2014, Ruthanne Lodato and her mother's caregiver were shot when they answered a knock at their front door. The shooter fired several bullets into the 59-year-old Ruthanne Lodato and a single bullet into the caregiver. Mrs. Lodato died on the spot. The other woman survived her wound. 

     Seconds after the two women were shot, a next door neighbor looked out her window when she heard a dog barking. The witness saw a bald man with a beard in a tan jacket run across the Ladato front yard. The suspect appeared to be in his fifties or sixties. The authorities released a sketch of this white suspect's face. 

     There were similarities in the Dunning, Kirby and Lodato murders. The victims lived in Alexandria, Virginia and were shot with a small-caliber handgun in the morning when they answered their front doors. The victims were active, high-profile members of the community and they shared an interest in the arts. They did not, however, know each other. 

     On March 6, 2014, Alexandria Police Chief Earl Cook told reporters gathered at a news conference that ballistics evidence suggested a link between the three murders. The victims were shot by bullets of the same caliber that featured rifling striations that were generally similar. As a result, detectives were looking for a serial killer.

     In February 2014, police arrested a 55-year-old suspect in the Ruthanne Lodato case named Charles Severance. Mr. Severance, with long white hair and a matching beard, was identified by Janet Dorcas, the healthcare aide the shooter had wounded. Another witness had seen Charles Severance driving in the area about the time of Lodato's murder.

     Mr. Severance, an eccentric who had graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in mechanical engineering had run for political office in 1996 and 2000 and on both occasions had lost. As part of his election platform he wanted public educators to incorporate country dancing in their curricula.

     In the suspect's voluminous essays, manifestos and notes, investigators found this passage: "Knock. Talk. Enter. Kill. Exit. Murder." The passage did not, however, mention any victim by name. A forensic psychiatrist for the state diagnosed Mr. Severance as having a "personality disorder with mixed paranoid and schizotypal features."

     As for motive for murdering Lodato, Kirby and Dunning, prosecutors believed Severance killed these three strangers because they represented Alexandria's elite. Following a child custody battle he lost, Severance, as the theory went, developed an intense hatred of Alexandria that he took out on the three high-profile victims.

     The Charles Severance triple murder case went to trial in Fairfax, Virginia in November 2015. Without a murder weapon, confession or physical evidence connecting the defendant to any of the three murder scenes the prosecution's case was relatively weak. A forensic ballistics expert tied the Lodato murder, the one with the eyewitness, to the Kirby and Dunning killings.

     Following the three-week trial, the jury, after deliberating fifteen hours, found Charles Severance guilty of all three murders. The judge sentenced him to three life sentences.

Too Fat To Execute

     America's weight problem has changed the way we live (and die) and has affected how we punish, or can't punish some of our worst criminals. The issue of a condemned man's weight arose in 1994 when a death row inmate argued that he was too fat to be humanely executed. In 1981 Mitchell Rupe shot two bank tellers to death in an Olympia Washington robbery. In 1994 federal judge Thomas S. Zilly ruled that the 425-pound convicted double murderer was too heavy to be hanged.

     Judge Zilly was afraid that when Mr. Rupe ran out of rope his body would keep going without his head. Although not as clean as having one's head severed by a guillotine, this form of decapitation is no less effective. Since the whole point of executing someone is to kill them quickly, it's not clear why Judge Zilly considered hanging Rupe as cruel and unusual punishment. While hanging this man might end up being an unusual way of dispatching a condemned prisoner, how could one method of causing sudden death be crueler than another equally effective technique? From the perspective of the death row inmate, the cruelty lies in watching the clock tick down to the big moment. In Mitchell Rupe's case, Judge Zilly was apparently more concerned with execution aesthetics than effectiveness.

     As it turned out, Judge Zilly, by saving Mitchell Rupe from a quick and painless end, sentenced him to a slow painful death caused by liver disease, advanced cirrhosis and hepatitis C. Rupe died on February 8, 2006 at age 51. At the time of his death his weight had fallen to 260 pounds. As a result of the Rupe case

the Washington legislature in 1996 changed the state's method of execution from hanging to lethal injection.

     In 1981, the year Mitchell Rupe murdered the two bank tellers in Olympia, Allen "Tiny" Davis murdered a pregnant woman and her two children during a home invasion robbery in Jacksonville, Florida.  A year later a jury found him guilty of three counts of first-degree murder. The judge sentenced Davis to death. In 1998 as Davis' execution date approached, the 54-year-old death row inmate's attorney argued that his 355-pound client was too heavy for the state's 76-year-old electric chair. 

     Since it was built in 1923, Florida's "Old Sparky," having dispatched 200 inmates, had done its job quite effectively. However in 1997 during the execution of a prisoner the chair sort of malfunctioned. When the executioner applied the electricity flames shot a foot in the air from the top of the condemned man's head. The following year, with Allen "Tiny" Davis in mind, the prison oversaw the construction of a new heavy-duty electric chair that could accommodate a 350-pound person. On July 8, 1999 the Florida state executioner ran 2,300 volts through the metal cap on Davis' head for two minutes. It wasn't pretty but "Old Sparky II" did its job.

     Executing overweight prisoners through lethal injection has also presented problems for condemned men and their executioners. On May 24, 2007 an executioner in Ohio ran into difficulty killing 38-year-old Christopher Newton. Six years earlier, while serving time for burglary, Newton murdered his cellmate. Now it was his time to go. Because of his weight--Newton tipped the scales at 265--it took the executioner two hours and ten attempts to find a proper vein for the inmate's lethal dose of pentobarbital. During the prolonged execution Mr. Newton was actually granted a bathroom break. Once again the death room aesthetics were not good. While obese people are generally unhealthy and die relatively young, they are apparently difficult to execute. I guess you'd call that a paradox.

     Nineteen-year-old Richard Cooey, in 1986, threw chunks of concrete off a bridge over Interstate 77 near Akron, Ohio causing the deaths of two University of Akron students. As his execution date approached the five-foot-seven 267-pound inmate claimed that prison food and the lack of exercise had made him too fat to execute. According to Mr. Cooey, because of his excess weight, the executioner would have a difficult time locating a vein for the lethal dose. The 41-year-old killer did not prevail in his effort to escape his date with the needle. On October 14, 2008 the Ohio executioner had no difficulty finding a way in for the pentobarbital.

     Ronald Ray Post was on death row at Ohio's Mansfield Correctional Institution for murdering a woman in 1983. According to his attorney, Mr. Post was so heavy at 480 pounds the execution gurney would not be strong enough to roll him to his death. Moreover, because of his morbid obesity (pun intended) Post's executioner would have a hard time locating a good vein for the killing agent. In support of his petition to escape his death sentence Mr. Post submitted evidence that medical personnel at the institution had in the past struggled to insert an IV into the 53-year-old's left arm.

     In 2013, not long after Ohio Governor John Kasich commuted Post's death sentence to life, the murderer died of natural causes while being treated at the Franklin Medical Center in Columbus.

     If candidates for the death penalty are becoming too fat to electrocute, hang or inject, maybe the firing-squad should be brought back. Since there are rifles that can bring down elephants there is no reason to spare the lives of fat murderers whose crimes were so atrocious they qualified for the death sentence. It's not right to allow prisoners to eat themselves out of death row. Since people who have not murdered anyone pay the consequences of overeating, so should inmates scheduled for execution. 

Eric Toth: Pedophile On The Run

     Born in 1982, Eric Toth grew up near Indianapolis, Indiana. He earned good grades in high school where he was considered self-centered and eccentric, and when he wanted to be, charming and manipulating. Abused as a child, he suffered bouts of depression and engaged in compulsive lying.

     The lanky young man enrolled at Cornell University in New York State. A year later he transferred to Purdue University at Calumet (Indiana) where he graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in elementary education. During his college years he told several people he was an agent with the CIA.

     Upon his graduation in 2002, Eric Toth volunteered at an elementary school in Indianapolis. There he worked as a teacher's aide. His intense interest in boys between the ages 8 and 11 led to parental complaints and concerns. The principal, suspecting that Mr. Toth was a pedophile, terminated his association with the school. A lot of parents were glad to see him go.

     In 2003, Eric Toth drifted around the midwest, always inserting himself into environments that put him in proximity to young boys. In 2004 and part of 2005 he worked as a counselor at a boy's camp in Madison, Wisconsin. It was at this camp he made videotapes of himself engaging in various sexual activities with several boys. When his behavior began to raise suspicion he moved on. Moving on is what pedophiles do when too many people get suspicious.

     In the fall of 2005 administrators at the Beauvior Elementary School attached to the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. hired Eric Toth to teach third grade. Many of the students in this small prestigious Catholic School came from families of wealth and political power.

     Toth's enthusiasm for his job included tutoring children for free and babysitting them at their homes. His gung-ho work attitude made him a popular teacher at the school. But his excessive familiarity with his male students, including having boys sit on his lap, raised eyebrows and suspicions.

     In 2008, a fellow Beauvior employee found disturbing photographs on a school camera assigned to Toth. The pornographic pictures featured the teacher and several boys. The school's principal confronted Toth, then fired him on the spot. After a security officer escorted him out of the building and off the campus, the principal called the police. The delay gave Toth the head start he needed to get out of town and disappear.

     Based upon the photographs recovered from Toth's camera, a federal prosecutor charged him with producing and possessing child pornography. This made him a fugitive from the law.

     A month after the Beauvior principal kicked Eric Toth out of Beauvior Elementary, a car that had been rented under the name Jay Kellor turned up at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport.  Inside the Honda, FBI agents found child pornography linked to Toth's tenure as a boy's camp counselor in Wisconsin.

     In the rented vehicle agents also discovered a suicide note signed by Toth. According to the handwritten document, the authorities would find his body on the bottom of a nearby lake. A search of that lake failed to turn up Toth's remains. The FBI considered the suicide note a fake, a ploy to throw agents off his trail.

     Toth, going by the name David Bussone, showed up in January 2009 at the Lodestar Day Rescue Center in Phoenix, Arizona. He volunteered to help homeless men complete their 12-step alcohol and drug addiction treatments. He told his colleagues at the rescue center that he had been an educator at an elite east coast school and that the experience had turned him against wealth and the materialistic lifestyle. He said he had taken a five-year oath of poverty and had re-dedicated his life to helping the downtrodden.

     In the meantime, FBI agents across the country were still searching for him. The federal manhunt received a boost when the Toth case appeared on the television show "America's Most Wanted." One of the homeless men at Lodestar saw the segment and recognized David Bussone as Eric Toth. The next day, realizing that he had been identified, the fugitive pedophile disappeared again.

     In July 2009, under a pseudonym supported by stolen identification documents, Eric Toth turned up at a hippie commune in Austin, Texas. One of the members of the community found him a job at an Austin computer repair shop called P.C. Guru. Toth worked at the store two and a half years during which time he tutored grade school boys for free. He also gave the mother of two of his students financial aid.

     The FBI, on April 10, 2012, replaced Osama bin Laden on the Bureau's Top Ten Most Wanted List with Eric Toth. In October of that year Toth used a fake passport under the name Robert Shaw Walker to flee to Nicaragua. He took up residence in a house in Esteli, a town 90 miles north of the capital, Managua. Toth told people he met there that he had come to Nicaragua to write a book.

     On April 18, 2013, while attending a social function, Toth ran into an American tourist who recognized him. Two days later Nicaraguan police officers surrounded his house in Esteli. Following the arrest officers found 1,100 images of child pornography Toth had downloaded from the Internet onto his personal computer.

     Four days after his capture in Nicaragua, Eric Toth was back in Washington, D.C. sitting in jail awaiting his trial.

     On December 13, 2013 Toth pleaded guilty before a federal judge to three counts of child pornography and two counts of identify theft. He faced up to 30 years in prison.

     On March 11, 2014 the judge sentenced the 32-year-old pedophile to 25 years in federal prison. At his sentencing Toth said, "I don't pretend that anything I could say here today would ever make up for what I did. Everything the prosecutor said about me is true."

The Thomas J. Lee Mass Murder Case

     Thomas Jesse Lee, 26, resided with his 33-year-old wife Christie, her 16-year-old daughter Bailey, Christie's parents Mr. and Mrs. William Burton and an 18-year-old friend of the family, Liaona Green. The clan lived in a suburban home outside of La Grange, Georgia, a town 80 miles southwest of Atlanta.

     On Saturday January 31, 2015, after 69-year-old William Burton, Thomas Lee's father-in-law, didn't show up for work for three days and didn't answer his phone, his employer asked the Troup County Sheriff's Office to check on the family.

     At the Burton home sheriff's deputies didn't get a response when they knocked on the door. Because the dwelling was locked the officers obtained a warrant to enter the dwelling. Once inside the deputies encountered a murder scene comprised of five bodies.

     Deputies found Mr. Burton in the kitchen. He had been severely beaten then shot to death. Shelia Burton, his 67-year-old wife, lay dead in the master bedroom. She had been shot in the head. Thomas J. Lee's wife Christie had been shot to death in their bedroom. The teenage girls, Bailey and Liaona, had been murdered in their room. Liaona had been shot, her sister strangled to death.

     The authorities immediately suspected that Thomas J. Lee committed the mass murder. A local judge issued a warrant for the arrest of the six-foot-three, 190 pound fugitive. He was last seen driving an olive green Mazda Tribute.

     On Monday afternoon February 2, 2015, Thomas J. Lee walked into a church in Corinth, Mississippi 250 miles from the scene of the murders. He told the pastor he had car trouble and needed a lift to Opelika, Alabama. The minister gave Lee money for a bus ticket and a member of the church drove him to the bus station in Tupelo, Mississippi.

     A few hours later, the pastor saw a news report about the Georgia murders on television. The reportage included a photograph of Thomas Lee. Realizing he had just helped a fugitive in a mass murder case, the pastor called the police.

     At five that Monday afternoon police officers took Thomas J. Lee into custody at the Tupelo bus station where he was still waiting for his bus. The next day he was back in Georgia where he was booked into the Troup County Jail on five counts of malice murder. The judge denied him bond.

    On August 12, 2015, Thomas J. Lee pleaded guilty in Troup County Superior Court to five counts of first-degree murder. The judge sentenced the mass murderer to life in prison without the possibility of parole. 

The New York City Bread Truck Heist

     The act of taking something that isn't yours, while against the law and anti-social, is not highly deviant behavior, nor is it commonly driven by mental illness. (For years psychologists and criminologists have been debating among themselves over whether so-called kleptomaniacs are sick or simply criminal.) Theft is a specific intent crime committed in cold-blood, as it were. Schizophrenics don't go around swindling people or stealing cars for chop shops. In court, accused thieves don't plead not guilty by reason of insanity. But in the case of a 30-year-old New York City man named David Bastar, that would change.

     On Monday, May 19, 2014, at three in the morning on Second Avenue near East 99th Street on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the driver of a Grimaldi's Home of Bread truck left the vehicle running in front of a pizzeria. When the delivery man exited the pizza joint, his truck was gone.

     David Bastar, dressed only in a pair of briefs, had jumped into the $60,000 truck and drove off with $8,000 worth of baguettes, whole wheat rolls, loaves of sourdough and other baked products. Instead of meeting up with a baked goods fence, Bastar, working off a set of instructions and a map left on the truck's front seat, delivered product to at least three restaurants.

     Later that morning, while driving the bread truck south on Lexington Avenue, Bastar began throwing loaves of bread out the window. As he crossed the 59th Street Bridge into Queens he became fixated on a Cadillac Escalade limousine driven by 43-year-old Armondo Sigcha. Sigcha was headed to La Guardia Airport to pick up customers.

     Once the stolen bread truck and the limo crossed the bridge, Mr. Sigcha realized that some nut in a delivery truck was following him too closely. The limo driver made several quick evasive turns but couldn't get the truck off his tail. At this point Sagcha asked his dispatcher to arrange to have an officer with the Port Authority meet him at the airport.

     When Bastar pulled the bread truck to a stop behind the limousine near La Guardia's Central Terminal he was greeted by a Port Authority officer. The cop took one look at the underwear-clad bread truck driver and called for an ambulance to deliver him to a mental ward.

     After being evaluated at Elmhurst Hospital's Psychiatric Ward, officers escorted Mr. Bastar to the Queens Criminal Court where he was charged with criminal possession of a stolen vehicle and driving without a license. The judge released the suspect to the custody of his baffled parents.

     Diana Bastar's, the accused truck thief's mother, told a reporter with The New York Post that she had no idea why her son had been bent on delivering bread. "I'm speechless," she said. "He's been estranged from us, so I really can't tell you what's going on."

     Following his arrest Mr. Bastar told police officers he tailed the limousine into Queens because, "I thought I had to follow him to make the deliveries."

     According to an Internet search it appears that Mr. Bastar was not prosecuted for stealing the truck. In all probability he received medical attention instead.

The Mark Stobbe Murder Case

     In the spring of 2000, 42-year-old Mark Stobbe, the former senior advisor to Roy Romanon, the premier of Saskatchewan, Canada, moved his family from Regina, Saskatchewan to St. Andrews, Manitoba, a rural community north of Winnipeg. The new senior communications advisor for Manitoba premier Gary Doer moved his wife Beverly Rowbotham and their two sons into a sprawling old house in the country.

     In his new position as the premier's communications strategist, the tall, 350-pound political operative left his house most days at six in the morning and didn't return until eleven at night. This left his wife Beverly alone all day with their sons in a run-down house in the middle of nowhere. Her husband's new job, and the move, had placed Beverly and the marriage under stress.

     At 2:30 in the morning of October 25, 2000, Mark Stobbe telephoned Betty Rowbotham, his wife's sister, to inform her that Beverly had gone missing. Earlier in the day Beverly had been to the Safeway grocery store in Selkirk, 12 kilometers from the house. Because the boys had acted up in the store she returned home without completing her shopping. That evening Beverly drove back to Safeway to finish the job. Mark said he had fallen asleep in bed with one of his sons and woke up to find that she had not returned from the store. Worried that something had happened to her he called the police and several hospitals.

     Ten minutes after the call Betty arrived at her sister's house. The police were still on their way. Shortly after her arrival Mark went into the backyard where he used a hose to water down something. Ten minutes later he was back inside where he greeted the first officer to arrive at the scene. While the RCMP officer was questioning Mark the detective received a call from his office. They found Beverly Rowbotham dead in her car with massive blunt-force wounds to her head. Her Ford Crown Victoria was parked at a gas station in Selkirk. The police recovered Beverly's purse in the vehicle but her wallet was missing. The killer had also removed the $7,000 ring she had been wearing.

     Based on the RCMP's initial investigation it appeared that Beverly Rowbotham had been murdered in her backyard where investigators found fragments of her skull and clumps of her hair. In the garage, where her Ford had been parked, crime scene officers found two large blood stains on the floor and one on the wall. Also in the garage police recovered two blood-soaked tissues and a bloody towel, evidence that the killer had tried to clean up. In the car abandoned in Selkirk the police discovered traces of blood on the victim's purse. They eventually located Beverly's missing wallet on the bank of the Red River, not far from the gas station.

     In the beginning, investigators figured that Beverly had been murdered sometime that night while her husband and children were asleep in the house. But why would the killer put her body in the Ford and drive it to Selkirk? And how did the killer get to the murder scene in the first place?

     As the investigation moved forward detectives became more skeptical of Mark Stobbe's account of his whereabouts and activities on the night of the murder. They began to suspect that he killed his wife. As Stobbe's questionings became more accusatorial he continued to deny having anything to do with his wife's death. He also insisted that he and Beverly were not having marital problems. Over the next several months the police chased down 240 tips and interviewed 400 people. But it wasn't until the DNA reports started coming in did the investigation start getting some traction.

     According to DNA analysis of the crime scene evidence, the bloodstains in the garage and in the backyard had come from the victim. The blood stains on the towel and tissues belonged to Mark Stobbe. And there were stains that comprised a mixture of his and his wife's blood. There were, however, DNA traces at the scene that belonged to an unidentified male. The spots of blood on Beverly's handbag found in her car had also come from an unidentified man.

     By 2001, RCMP investigators had focused their attention on Mark Stobbe as the primary suspect in the murder. According to his story, Beverly had not completed her shopping that day because one of the boys had misbehaved at the grocery store in Selkirk. But a store surveillance tape showed that she had been in the place almost an hour, and her cash register receipt indicated she had spent $108.32, an amount equal to her average purchase. The investigators also considered Stobbe's differing accounts of his activity on the night of the murder incriminating. He told some people that he had fallen asleep in front of the television, and he told others that he had been in bed with one of his sons.

     In January 2001, the RCMP acquired a warrant allowing them to tap Stobbe's home telephone. After listening in to 1,000 hours of his phone conversations they heard nothing directly incriminating. In a February 28, 2001 conversation between the suspect and Betty Rowbotham, his former sister-in-law, she informed him that the police were gathering physical evidence from his backyard. To that he replied, "Damn it all." Toward the end of the phone call, Stobbe said, "I feel horrible."

     The Rowbotham/Stobbe case eventually hit a wall and for several years lay dormant. In 2008, almost eight years after Beverly Rowbotham's murder, the Crown charged Mark Stobbe with second-degree murder. He was arrested, made bail and pleaded not guilty to the charge.

     On January 16, 2012, Stobbe's trial got underway in the Manitoba Court of Queen's Bench in Winnipeg. Representing the Crown, Wendy Dawson in her opening statement to the jury laid out the prosecution's theory of the case: On the night of October 24, 2000, the defendant, during a heated argument with his wife in the backyard of their house, hit her in the head 16 times with a hatchet. He dragged her body into the garage, hit her again, stuffed the body into her Ford then drove to the gas station in Selkirk. Using a bicycle he had put into the trunk he rode back to St. Andrews. Along the way he tossed his dead wife's wallet into the Red River to lead investigators into thinking Beverly's killer had robbed her. Stobbe also removed her ring. Back at his house he waited a few hours before calling the police and his sister-in-law. Before the RCMP arrived Mr. Stobbe used a garden hose in an attempt to wash away physical evidence in his backyard.

     Stobbe's attorney, Tim Killeen, assured the jury that Beverly Rowbotham had been bludgeoned to death by an unidentified intruder who had been lying in wait outside her house. The defense attorney pointed to the unidentified male DNA found on her purse, and in the garage.  

     During the next several weeks the Crown put 70 people on the stand, including several witnesses who testified that on the night in question they had seen an overweight man riding a bicycle between Selkirk and St. Andrews. None of these witnesses, however, specifically identified the defendant as the man on the bike.

     On March 7, 2012 the defense put on its case which depended almost entirely on the defendant's taking the stand on his own behalf. If just one juror believed Mark Stobbe's account there would be no conviction. If all of the jurors believed that he might be telling the truth there would be an acquittal. It was all up to the defendant.

     Under direct examination by attorney Tim Killeen, Stobbe denied killing his wife. "I've spent a lot of nights looking out that window, wondering," he said. When Stobbe learned of his wife's death, "It was confirmation of my worst fears. What it meant was that I was 50 to 60 feet away when she was killed....I should have been able to stop it. I was completely useless in helping her." The defendant at this point broke down on the stand.

     The following day Crown prosecutor Wendy Dawson began her cross-examination of the defendant. She asked Stobbe why he hadn't filed an insurance claim for his wife's $7,000 ring. "You didn't make a claim," she said, "because the ring wasn't stolen. You took it off her hand before you brutally killed her." Stobbe said he hadn't bothered filing a claim because he just didn't care about the ring's value.

     The prosecutor tried to get the defendant to admit that his marriage was under considerable stress. Didn't his long hours at work with his wife alone in the house with the children have an adverse effect on their relationship? "I think it would be fair to say," he replied, "that she wanted me around more, but...she understood that the long hours were part and parcel of my job. She never made a suggestion to me that I change my career."

     Wendy Dawson cross-examined the defendant for five days. In keeping him on the hot seat for so long, the prosecutor risked making him an object of sympathy in the eyes of some of the jurors. On March 22, 2012 the attorneys made their closing arguments. The prosecutor said she didn't want Stobbe to get away with the "near perfect murder of his wife." She said the circumstantial evidence against him was "overwhelming," and that the defendant had "demonstrated all the hallmarks of a dishonest, lying witness. He couldn't keep his story straight," she said. "Certainly he should have been able to hear a cry for help from his wife, or a commotion in the garage. This was a crime of rage."

     In his closing argument, defense attorney Tom Killeen admitted there were reasons for the police to suspect his client, but suspicion alone was not enough to convict a man of murder. The Crown, he said, has not proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt. "Mr. Stobbe has to prove nothing," he said.

     On March 27, 2012, after 82 witnesses and 100 hours of testimony, Judge Chris Martin gave his instructions to the jury. Mark Stobbe's fate was now in the hands of twelve jurors.

     After deliberating two days the jury found Mark Stobbe not guilty. The prosecutor, with no solid evidence of a motive, no murder weapon, weak eyewitness testimony and the unknown male DNA on the victim's purse simply didn't carry, in the minds of this jury, its burden of proof. Some of the jurors may have believed that Stobbe had murdered his wife, but belief and proof beyond a reasonable doubt are not always the same.