by BJW Nashe

Superstar Murderer. The scope of Charles Manson’s fame is an odd phenomenon in the history of American culture. Manson was a violent criminal convicted of mass murder in 1970. The fact that he has been turned into something much more — a mythological figure responsible for the “end of the Sixties,” a symbol of “pure evil” in the world, an Antichrist with demonic powers — tells us more about the culture we live in than it does about Charles Manson himself, or the horrible crimes he committed. Manson is more than just a case of our celebrity dream machine run amok. He also serves as a convenient scapegoat for our society’s collective guilt and shame following the turbulent 1960s era.

Manson Media Frenzy. The barrage of books, films, TV shows, and magazine stories about Manson may have slowed down a bit since the heyday of the 1970s, but still continues to this day. There’s an old adage from the newspaper business that says, “If it bleeds, it leads.” The Manson saga bleeds like a stuck pig — with hemophilia. From the moment he made headlines and kicked off the evening news, Manson was a big-time story. To put it bluntly, Manson moved product. Manson sold papers and magazines. Manson got good ratings. He and his cult of followers called the Family weren’t just ripe for exploitation. They were tailor-made for sensationalized media coverage. We have to wonder at this point when the Charles Manson Superstar phenomenon will finally reach its nadir.

A New Book About Manson. Nadir? Well, not quite yet. Manson remains a huge presence on the internet. And another book about Manson is scheduled to hit the stores on August 6, two days before the 44th anniversary of the Tate-LaBianca murders which made Manson a household name. The new book, written by investigative journalist Jeff Guinn, is called Manson: The Life and Times of Charlie Manson. It seeks to provide a detailed account of Manson’s troubled youth, his early life of crime and imprisonment, and his frustrated attempt to gain fame and fortune as a folk-rock musician in Los Angeles. Hopefully the book will help to de-mythologize the man by focusing on the facts of his troubled life. Guinn supposedly emphasizes the failed rock star angle, stressing the fact that the Tate murders occurred at the former house of record producer Terry Melcher, who had snubbed Manson by refusing to give him a record deal. Strange to think that all the carnage might have been averted simply by signing Manson to a record contract. Plenty of lame acts were getting deals back then. Consider Herman’s Hermits, and the Strawberry Alarm Clock. Perhaps Melcher should have just given Charlie a chance. But how was he to know that rejecting Manson’s music would lead to such atrocities? Besides, even if Charlie had been given a record deal, we have no reason to assume he wouldn’t have gone on to commit murder and mayhem anyway. He seemed to be headed in that direction, deal or no deal.

Monstrous Fame. Manson became far more famous as a criminal than he ever would have as a musician. His music is nothing much to speak of — an oddly ineffectual, half-baked hybrid of Bob Dylan and Captain Beefheart. Manson’s crimes, however, are the stuff of legend. Anyone convicted of the random brutal slayings of seven people — one of whom is a beautiful actress — is guaranteed a certain amount of notoriety. Manson, however, achieved a level of fame typically reserved for rock musicians and movie stars. His wild-eyed stare, best captured in the notorious Life Magazine cover photo that appeared soon after his arrest, has become as instantly recognizable as the corporate logos for Coca-Cola and Apple, or the features of Bob Marley and Che Guevara. Manson is now a cultural icon of sorts, similar to other legendary figures such as Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and John Lennon. Now that nearly forty-five years has passed since his conviction, it behooves us to question the dubious nature of the Manson iconography.

Obsessed with Manson. It’s easy to grow obsessed with Charles Manson. I remember reading Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter back in the mid-Seventies, when I was a teenager living in Southern California, just a thirty-minute drive from the scene of Manson’s crimes. Like many, I found the story to be a thrilling antidote to the safe suburban life of middle class America. Helter Skelter had it all, a grab bag of every weird counterculture trend one could think of: an apocalyptic death cult, drug trips, sex orgies, satanism, rock music, outlaw bikers, movie stars, and savage murders. No wonder Bugiosi’s book, based on his investigative work as the prosecutor in Manson’s trial, remains a top bestseller in the history of the True Crime genre. I also devoured Ed Sanders’s book, The Family, which takes us even deeper inside the twisted world of Manson and his cult. It was even darker and stranger than Helter Skelter. And those two books were just the beginning. There seemed to be no end to Manson mania, and it was hard to turn away when Manson’s name turned up in the TV guide listings, or when his face showed up on the cover of yet another book or magazine. Now on the internet we see a vast proliferation of Manson-related materials. Charlie’s own website, maintained by some of his “fans,” is perhaps the most obvious indication of the man’s enduring status. Google “Charles Manson,” and you can spend days, weeks, and even months reading articles (like this one), viewing photos and artwork, watching videos, and listening to music. It’s hard to believe that it all stems from two terrible nights in Los Angeles in the late summer of 1969.

Tate Murders. On the night of August 8, 1969 (the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), four of Manson’s followers drove to 10050 Cielo Drive in the Hollywood Hills. Charles “Tex” Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle, and Linda Kasabian broke into the large mansion and attacked the residents. Terry Melcher had moved out several months ago. Now the home was being rented by film director Roman Polanski and his actress wife, Sharon Tate. Polanski was in London working on a film project. Inside the house with Tate on that night was hair stylist Jay Sebring, aspiring screenwriter Woycek Frykowski, and Abigail Folger — an heiress to the coffee company fortune. Tex Watson initially shot a young man, Steve Parent, who was driving up to the property’s guest house. The intruders entered the home and attacked the four people inside with brutal savagery, chasing them with knives and stabbing them as many as fifty times. Sharon Tate, who was eight-and-a-half months pregnant at the time, reportedly begged her attackers to save the life of her unborn child. Watson and Atkins stabbed her to death. Atkins dipped a finger in Tate’s blood and scrawled the word “PIG” on the front door of the house.

LaBianca Murders. The next night, August 9, the same four attackers, along with two additional cult members named Steve Grogan and Leslie Van Houten, drove to the home of supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, co-owner of a dress shop. The house was located at 3301 Waverly Drive in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles. The attackers broke into the residence, then tied up and killed the LaBianca couple in the same savage manner as the night before. Tex Watson stabbed Leno LaBianca multiple times with a bayonet, and carved the word “WAR” into the man’s chest. Krenwinkle left a steak knife buried in Leno’s neck, and stabbed him several times with a two-tined carving fork, which she left jammed into his stomach. The female attackers took turns killing Rosemary, who received over forty total stab wounds during the frenzy. In Leno’s blood, Krenwinkle wrote the words “DEATH TO THE PIGS,” “RISE,” and “HELTER SKELTER” on the refrigerator door.

Apprehension. Due to a convoluted series of events, Manson was not apprehended for the Tate-LaBianca murders until December 1969. This was only accomplished due to an earlier, seemingly unrelated murder of a man named Gary Hinman. Hinman was killed by Manson Family associate Bobby Beausoleil in an attempt to reclaim money following a bogus drug deal. Following the Tate-LaBianca murders, Beausoleil was arrested for the Hinman killing, along with Susan Atkins, who had participated in the crime. While in jail, Atkins bragged about the Tate-LaBianca murders to a fellow inmate, who then told the authorities what she had heard. Many of the Manson Family, including Charlies himself, had recently been arrested on suspicion of auto theft, only to be released due to lack of evidence. Police had no idea that they had the Tate-LaBianca killers briefly in custody. When Manson, Watson, Krenwinkle, Kasabian, and Van Houten were finally charged with the crimes in December, the story exploded, and a dark star was born.

The Trial. The Manson murder trial was a freakish extravaganza that dragged on from June to November, 1970. A group of Manson’s female followers — barred from the courtroom — gathered in front of the courthouse each day, sitting on the sidewalk and chanting slogans. When Manson carved an “X” onto his forehead, the girls outside followed suit. At one point during the trial proceedings, Manson leaped across the defendant’s table and tried to attack Judge William Keene. President Richard Nixon foolishly told a reporter that he thought Manson was guilty. The next day in court, Manson grinned and held up a newspaper so everyone could see the front page headline: “Nixon Says Manson is Guilty.” The first degree murder charges the prosecution insisted on bringing against Manson were considered controversial to some, since the state had no evidence that placed Manson at either crime scene. In fact, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi made no claim that Manson himself had killed anyone. Rather, Bugliosi’s case consisted of proving to the jury that Manson had ordered the killings, and was ultimately responsible. Bugliosi set out to show how Manson exercised total control over the members of his cult. Manson was in charge of everything his followers did. This included their sexual behavior, the food they ate, the drugs they took, and the crimes they committed. Proving this in court involved hours of lurid testimony from various witnesses. When Manson insisted on making a statement to the court, Bugliosi had the jury removed, because he was wary of exposing them to Manson’s “hypnotic powers.” Manson delivered a deranged speech, during which he said, among other things, “You can’t kill me. I’m already dead.”

Helter Skelter. During the trial, and the ensuing media circus, the American public were introduced to the wild and wacky world of Manson and his Family. They met the runaway girls who were snatched up by Manson and turned into willing sex slaves. They heard all about the LSD trips and the dumpster diving for food and the orgies. They learned about the Family hideouts at Spahn Ranch outside of Los Angeles, and at Barker Ranch in Death Valley. They were lectured on the coming race war that Manson preached would soon break out between blacks and whites. Incredibly, Manson claimed that this was encoded within the songs on the Beatles White Album. The Tate-LaBianca murders were supposedly Manson’s way of showing black people how to start the final conflict — which he called “Helter Skelter.” Manson predicted that blacks would win the race war, while the Family would ride out the crisis in some “bottomless pit” in the desert. Then, the Family would emerge as the chosen ones who would rule over the new society. One would have to be on LSD for this to make any sort of sense. The American public also got a sneak preview at what would soon become a growing American “survivalist” trend, as they heard about the Family stockpiling arms and supplies in the desert, and stealing cars to assemble a battalion of makeshift dune buggies painted in garish psychedelic colors and equipped with gun mounts. The whole thing was quite a mind-bending story, unlike anything else ever heard in an American courtroom. Manson ended up convicted of first degree murder, and sentenced to die in the gas chamber.

Creepy Connections. The Manson story included a staggering series of cultural connections. In prison during the early Sixties, Manson received impromptu guitar lessons from Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, a member of the Ma Barker Gang of bank robbers. After his release from prison, Manson befriended Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson. For a while, the Manson Family was camped out at Wilson’s rented home. He had to flee the premises, leaving the landlord to evict them. The Beach Boys recorded a version of Manson’s song, “Cease to Exist,” which they re-titled, “Cease to Resist.” Manson Family associate Bobby Beausoleil was close to underground filmmaker and occult magus Kenneth Anger. Anger wrote the infamous Hollywood Babylon books, detailing Tinseltown’s most scandalous events, in order to raise money to finance his film projects. Anger had mingled with the Rolling Stones during their “Sympathy for the Devil” days. Anger also worked with Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, who was supposed to do the soundtrack for Anger’s film Lucifer Rising. Page, an avid occultist, lived in Aleister Crowley’s old castle in Scotland. Susan Atkins had worked as a stripper in the Bay Area. During that time, she was hired as a “model” for Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan in San Francisco. Atkins appeared nude in various Satanic rituals and black masses at the church. Jayne Mansfield was also linked to the Church of Satan, prior to her fatal automobile accident. On the night of the Tate murders, Anton LaVey supposedly held a black magic ceremony devoted to the death of the hippie movement. Sharon Tate, who had starred in several B-grade vampire and horror movies, was involved in “white magic” activities related to Wicca. Roman Polanski had directed the film Rosemary’s Baby, in which Mia Farrow starred as a woman who gives birth to the devil. Polanski, who was shattered by Sharon’s murder, was eventually forced to flee the U.S. in the face of statutory rape charges for sodomizing a 13 year-old girl in Jack Nicholson’s bathtub. Terry Melcher, the record producer who snubbed Manson after meeting him, was married to actress Candace Bergen. Manson had fairly close ties to the outlaw biker gang called Satan’s Slaves. Lynne “Squeaky” Fromme, a gung-ho Manson Family member, was eventually arrested for attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford. It goes on and on, like the ourobouros, the snake endlessly devouring its own tail.

Blowing Up the Zeitgeist. In American culture at the end of the Sixties, Manson did more than just strike a nerve or set off sparks; he blew up like a ton of dynamite. He cornered what is perhaps best understood as the “reverse market” of positive hippie icons such as John Lennon. Manson filled the role of the evil Beatle. His Family was the dark double of Ken Kesey’s band of Merry Pranksters. He turned the Summer of Love into the Summer of Death. Manson took Timothy Leary’s LSD slogan, “tune in, turn on, drop out,” and tacked on the words “commit murder.” Hippies were no longer just about peace and love. Now they were associated with Satanism, perversion, and murder. For straight-laced Americans who were shocked at the sight of a half-million hippies wallowing in the mud at Woodstock, Manson became a symbol of everything wrong with American youth. Manson was the dark side of the Sixties’ overriding philosophy of liberation. When Manson’s followers claimed he was Jesus, for many Americans this only confirmed that he was Satan, or the Antichrist. He was the new “face of pure evil.” To counter this, some counterculture types miscalculated, and actually chose to view Manson was an admirable figure. Rolling Stone put him on the cover as their “Man of the Year.” Bernardine Dohrn, one of the leaders of the Weather Underground, called him a “groovy revolutionary.” Some of the Weatherman group spoke of “the year of the fork,” referring to the implement stuck in Leno LaBianca’s stomach. Instead of a sober, clear-headed analysis of Manson and his crimes, public discourse tended to be swept away into an apocalyptic fantasia. Later on, Manson would be celebrated as a dark pop icon, and a source of black humor for various culture jammers. His “murderabilia” was sold at special auctions. Genesis P. Orridge of the band Psychic TV collected material on Manson and made a pilgrimage to Spahn Ranch. Sonic Youth wrote a song called “Death Valley 69,” which they performed with Lydia Lunch, while controversial death-trip filmmaker and pornographer Richard Kern was enlisted to shoot the video. Axl Rose of Guns and Roses sometimes took the stage wearing a Manson t-shirt. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails went to live in the Tate murder house for awhile, setting up a home studio there to record his Downward Spiral album.

Fiction vs. Reality. Despite the intriguing nature of the Manson Family’s connections and associates, and the occult fad that permeated late Sixties culture, much of the Manson-as-hippie-devil hoopla was ridiculously overblown, a media-constructed fantasy that flew in the face of the facts. In reality, Charles Manson was not a hippie or a flower child. He had very little to do with Sixties culture. Born in 1934 to an unwed, alcoholic mother in Cincinnati, Ohio, he was a child of the Depression, not a flower-child of the Sixties. And his childhood was no doubt highly troubled, spent primarily in boy’s homes and juvenile halls, since his mother was unwilling or incapable of caring for him. Early on, Manson was committing crimes such as burglaries, armed robberies, forged checks, and pimping. When he was released from prison in 1967, after completing a ten year sentence, Manson was 32 years old. He had spent most of his life behind bars, where he had most likely experienced routine physical and sexual abuse, as well as lengthy stints in solitary confinement. Prison had not broken him, however. It seems to have only strengthened his will and his sense of resolve. He developed delusions of grandeur, fueled by extreme bitterness and resentment. When he emerged from prison in 1967, he was not merely as an ex-con; he was an ex-con with a mission. He was still just a thief and a con man and pimp, but he had a purpose. He had decided to wage war against a society he felt was rotten to the core.

A Hippie Pimp. The Summer of Love and the hippie movement just happened to provide Manson with the context in which to seek his revenge against those he felt had wronged him. He had no real connection to any youth movement in America. He wanted to infiltrate the popular culture, become a rich and famous musician, and use his fame to preach his gospel of revenge. He wanted to form a doomsday cult that would bring society to its knees. He grew his hair and beard long, adopting the “hippie Jesus” look that was popular at the time. Then he preyed on society’s vulnerable young women, utilizing his pimp charisma to coerce them into submission. Using the women as sexual bait, he was then able to lure men into his orbit, including other criminals, bikers, drug dealers, and rock musicians. Young hippies back then used to say, “Never trust anyone over thirty.” They should have kept that in mind with Manson in L.A. He was a 34 year-old man in 1969, manipulating teenage girls to help him carry out his crazy plans. Those plans, of course, were no more realistic that Alice’s adventures in Wonderland. Frustrated by this fact, Manson ended up lashing out, directing his followers to commit random murder. I fail to discern any metaphysical or spiritual significance to any of this. I doubt whether there is any need, or justification, for large symbolic meanings. I could be wrong, but I find that the only thing remotely “demonic” about Manson is his strange celebrity status. This was achieved through a kind of occult process, namely, the media’s exploitation of Manson, which was so ruthless and extensive that he was transformed from a deranged criminal into an evil icon.

Paranoia Fulfilled. It’s difficult to resist the lure of delusional, paranoid thought processes in regard to Manson. Even a writer as clear-headed and dryly understated as Joan Didion can’t resist indulging in pure, irrational fear, and even tossing in some B-movie horror effects, when it comes to discussing Manson. Consider the following passage from Didion’s landmark essay, “The White Album.” I love the passage; the writing is just plain fun, and spooky, far better than anything I will ever write. Yet, at the end of the day, we have to admit that the thought process is sensationalistic and overblown. Clear analysis is thrown out the window. Maybe that’s the best way to write about Manson, but I’m not sure. Here’s Didion:

“I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going on around town. There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was imaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of ‘sin’ — this sense that it was possible to go ‘too far,’ and that many people were doing it — was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full. On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and I wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised… Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”

The End of Nothing. In fact, Charles Manson was not the end of anything. The Sixties decade was full of calamities and disasters and scandals. The whole era did not hinge on any one event. It’s a mistake to assign that much importance to seven admittedly tragic murders in L.A. in 1969. For many, the Tate-LaBianca murders were surprising. The crimes were an aberration, not some inevitable fulfillment. Dogs did not in fact bark at the full moon every single night, even in Manson’s backyard. Yet people like to speak this way about Manson. It’s part of the Manson mystique. What if, however, there is no greater significance to Charles Manson? Let’s suppose he symbolizes nothing. He means nothing more than the brute facts of his life of crime. A madman and an ex-con, he formed a rag-tag cult of misfits. He was convicted of killing seven people. He received the death penalty. He narrowly escaped the gas chamber because the California Supreme Court just happened to overturn the death penalty while he sat on Death Row. He now sits in Corcoran State Prison, a bent, graying old man with a swastika carved into his forehead. When de-mythologized, Manson is just a sad story of yet another American criminal.

Manson as Scapegoat. But we all sense that Manson is bigger than the mere facts. Because we have made him bigger than that. And I think the reason for this lies in the fact that in 1969, America desperately needed a scapegoat for everything that seemed to be so wrong in the world. Maybe we always seek out larger-than-life villains or demonic figures on whom we can pin the guilt and shame of our troubled, violent society. If we have a recognizable “face of pure evil,” we can then deflect all blame onto that symbol. We can load that symbol up with all of the evil baggage in our world. Rather than analyzing the complex events in our shared history, we can simply point to Hitler’s face, or Osama Bin Laden’s face, or Charles Manson’s face. In any case, America in 1969 seemed especially ripe for scapegoating. The events of the decade, which included assassinations and race riots, were simply too much for many Americans to accept or come to terms with. The Vietnam War, in particular, must be seen as the larger context for Manson’s dubious rise to fame. Let’s face it: there was plenty of evil in American life far worse in size and scope than the evil of Manson or any other acid-crazed hippie. Consider the fact that the 1968 Mai Lai Massacre, during which U.S. soldiers raped and slaughtered nearly 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians, was revealed to the public at the same time as Manson was charged for the Tate-LaBianca murders. Second Lieutenant William Calley, who led the massacre (as platoon leader in what was called, oddly enough, “Charlie Company”), was not considered to be the Antichrist, or the new “face of pure evil.” His “demonic stare” was never plastered across the covers of magazines and newspapers across the nation. Was the Mai Lai Massacre no less of an atrocity than the Manson Family murders? In fact, one can argue that Mai Lai was much worse. And Mai Lai was emblematic of the vast amount of death and destruction America was responsible for in Vietnam. Yet it was Manson who was the “face of evil” in 1969. Rather than take a clear look at what was going on in America, it was easier to focus on Manson as a scapegoat. This reinforced the desire to view the counterculture in general as the real source of America’s problems. Lieutenant Calley was held accountable for his crimes, to some extent. He was convicted in a military court of premeditated murder, for which he served a total of three and one half years under house arrest at Fort Benning. Manson got the death penalty, and then life in prison. Manson became a symbol of everything wrong in American during the Sixties. Who even remembers Lieutenant Calley anymore?

Manson Fatigue. We are nearing the end of the line with Manson. Soon he will turn 80 years old in Corcoran State Prison. Even Charlie can’t live forever. When he dies, there will be the inevitable “tributes” and “retrospectives.” Perhaps then we can turn away from Manson for good, and let his troubled soul rest in peace. I recently watched Nicholas Schreck’s 1989 documentary film, Charles Manson Superstar, which makes some worthwhile points about the problematic myth of Charlie, but ultimately gets bogged down in lengthy prison interviews with Manson, who at the time was wasting away in San Quentin. Charlie likes to hear himself talk, but his act grows old pretty quickly. He comes across like an old-school snake-oil con man with mental problems — like a character out of Naked Lunch. Watching him carrying on, it was hard to imagine anyone letting him even change the breaks on their car, let alone control their life as part of a death cult. In the penitentiary, the gap between the Manson myth and the Manson couldn’t be more glaring.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Ambush in the Mind

When I was a wee lad with stealth and energy but very little brain, one of my great joys was to lie in wait for my brother Tom who in my mind was either a Native American (although they were known as Indians in those far off times), a black hat cowboy, or a Nazi. Occasionally, it was North versus South in our own private family civil war. But it really didn’t matter which bad guy Tom was playing; my goal was simple — to either spring out and confront him and mow him down, or take him down like a sniper, a veritable sharpshooter. On rare occasions, I would charge out and bayonet him. It didn’t get any better than that.

Now that I am reaching that age where a man should grow a long white beard, I look back on those days and smile. Although we made a great show of pretending it was real, we still knew that it was not real – that we were playing a child’s game.

Real Ambush

Today, folks in ever-increasing numbers (either that or it’s publicized more) are lying in wait but they are not wee lads with very little brain; rather they are generally adult males. They are armed with real guns and set up watch in their homes. Their homes are typically equipped with video and audio relay systems that enable them to see around corners and through walls, thus alerting them as to the best moment to attack. Their intention is to shoot and kill the anticipated intruder — no questions asked, no quarter given.

Currently, we have Byron Smith on trial over in Minnesota (closing statements are Tuesday morning) for lying in wait and shooting and killing two teenage cousins with a bit too much enthusiasm. And now we have Markus Kaarma, 29, of Missoula, Montana, who has been charged in the shooting death of a 17-year-old boy. Prosecutors say he set a trap in his garage to catch any would-be burglars because he was frustrated over recent thefts.

Amy Beth Hansen of Huffington Post writes:

Markus Kaarma, 29, of Missoula made an initial appearance in Justice Court on Monday but did not enter a plea to the count of felony deliberate homicide filed in the death of Diren Dede, an exchange student from Hamburg, Germany.

Kaarma’s attorney, Paul Ryan, said his client feels terrible about the death of the young man, but he was also was disappointed that the Missoula County attorney filed the charge.

Court records said Kaarma and his wife, Janelle Pflager, had set up sensors outside the garage, a video monitoring system in the garage and left the garage door open. Pflager said she put personal items that she had cataloged in a purse in the garage “so that they would take it.”

Missoula like Little Falls, Minnesota has teenagers who may have too much time on their hands, or it may be simply that they are drug addicts. Whatever their motivation, it is really stupid to flit around town burglarizing houses. It’s especially stupid when the house has been hit a time or two already. At this moment in time in America’s hell-bent plunge into violence and retribution, such a strategy will literally get you killed as Dirin Dede found out to his dismay (though the moment of recognition when the bullet hits the bone may not have lasted long enough for him to fully grasp his death).

(This is a good argument for the fact that the adolescent’s brain often doesn’t work very well.) (Unfortunately, this story is also a good argument that the brains of adults don’t work much better.)

Sure as taxes, as Kaarma and Pflager anticipated, on Sunday at 12:30 am, the sensors went off. Kaarma and Pflager looked at the video feed and saw that someone was in the garage.

According to court records, Kaarma went outside into the night with his shotgun and headed for the open garage door. Like anyone might be, he was afraid. His story is that when he peered into the darkened garage, he heard a noise that sounded like metal scraping metal, and he was afraid the intruder would come out and hurt him. Without further ado, and without saying a word to anyone, he swept the garage with four shotgun blasts. Dirin Dede was struck in the head and arm and died in a Missoula hospital.

*     *     *     *     *

Kaarma and Pflager were both frustrated. Kaarma said he didn’t want the suspect to get away. Pflager told police that they had been burglarized two times in the last three weeks. Kaarma said that police can’t catch burglars in the act.

According to Attorney Ryan, they felt someone in their neighborhood was watching them. To their credit, they had called the police “(but) nothing was done.”

Then they decided to take the law into their own hands.

Pflager had made a list of the items in the purse thinking that if it was taken, they could attempt to track the thief.

The prosecutors, however, pointed out that it was somewhat suspicious that despite the fact they’d been robbed twice in a three-week stretch, they’d left the garage door open. (Is this like luring a child with candy?)

Ryan countered:

“They certainly didn’t tell the kid to come in (the garage). He entered voluntarily.”

The thing about crime (or even near crime) is that the further you look into it, the worse it usually gets. In this case, assuming the prosecutors are not fibbing, Kaarma blabbed his plans to a female friend who went to the investigators and told them that Kaarma had told her that he had been waiting up for three nights with his shotgun to shoot a kid.

Ouch!

Dede was a junior at Big Sky High School.

Justice of the Peace Karen Orzech set Kaarma’s bail at $30,000. Maybe the economy is still depressed in Missoula.

*     *     *     *     *

Based on the Byron Smith case, and now this one, it appears that at least some Northern prosecutors are going to come after the shooters when there is strong evidence that the shooter took affirmative steps to place himself ahead of time in a good position to shoot and kill the would be intruder.

As for Kaarma, I can certainly understand his frustration but there’s got to be a better way for homeowners to deal with thieves than lying in wait and ambushing them.

by Lise LaSalle

On June 8, 1989, a 44-year old Canadian nurse named Cindy James was found dead in Richmond, a suburb of Vancouver. She had been drugged and strangled, with her hands and feet tied behind her back. She was found in the yard of an abandoned home a mile and a half from a small shopping mall where her car was parked.  She had been missing since May 25th, when her car was discovered in the parking lot. There was blood on the driver’s side door and items from her wallet were found under the car.

When her body was discovered at the abandoned house, it looked like Cindy James had been brutally murdered. A black nylon stocking was tied tightly around her neck and the autopsy revealed that Cindy died from an overdose of morphine and other drugs. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, however, believed her death to be an accident or a suicide. The Vancouver coroner ruled that Cindy’s death was not suicide, an accident, or a murder, claiming that she died of an ‘’unknown event.’’ This was despite the fact that in the seven years preceding her death, Cindy had reported nearly a hundred incidents of harassment beginning four months after she divorced her husband.

To this day, her death remains a mystery even after a public inquest at which 84 witnesses were called to testify. Her father Otto Hack and his wife Matilda never believed that Cindy killed herself or that she would have been able to stage the death scene. Her sister Melany Hack, who was 27 when Cindy died and who is now married with two children and lives in British Columbia, ended up writing a book titled Who Killed My Sister, My Friend. It took her 14 years to conduct research into the toxicology, the autopsy, and the medical and police reports to obtain enough information into her sister’s unsolved death.

This case, which became the subject of the show Unsolved Mysteries and was discussed on some American TV talk shows including A Current Affair and Maury Povich, was not really sensationalized or kept alive to fuel anger towards a specific perpetrator. There was no villain or hero in this story; rather, it was the puzzling case of an upstanding nurse who struggled for seven years with an imagined or real threat and ended up losing her life in the most mysterious and baffling way. This story had legs and created endless speculation.

In 1989, forensics investigation was in its infancy and the technology did not exist to solve a case the CSI way, or to determine if James was creating her own drama. Instead, the investigators had to rely on basic traditional techniques to determine if her stories of attacks, kidnapping and harassment were true.

Cindy was the eldest of six children. At age 19, she had married Dr. Roy Makepeace who was 18-years her senior. She worked as a nurse but also loved to counsel children with emotional problems. From all accounts, she appeared happy but when she decided to end her marriage in 1982 and move on with her life, all hell broke loose.

She had a very close relationship with her parents and she approached them first with stories of harassment. She ended up going to the police because she was getting death threats by phone and by mail. With each incident, this beautiful, vibrant woman took one step down physically and mentally.

Three dead cats were found hanging in her garden, her porch lights were smashed and her phone lines cut. Bizarre notes began to appear on her doorstep and five violent physical attacks were reported. One night, Cindy’s good friend, Agnes Woodcock, dropped by and when there was no answer when she knocked on the door, she went around the back of the house and found Cindy crouched down with a nylon stocking tied around her neck. She had gone to the garage to get something and was grabbed from behind by an unidentified intruder.

Messages were left on the windshield of her car along with a picture of a covered corpse being wheeled into a morgue. Raw meat was delivered to her house and even her dog, Heidi, was found shaking with fright sitting in her own feces with a cord tied tightly around her neck. The harassment would stop and start again, leaving Cindy feeling more and more destabilized. She expressed her despair in her private journals.

Cindy moved to a new house, painted her car and changed her last name. She finally hired Ozzie Kaban, a local private investigator. The police were investigating but as time passed, they were starting to doubt her stories. Ozzie reported later that Cindy would be evasive at times and withhold information.  Her mother thought that her daughter was reluctant to tell the truth because she was threatened and feared for her sister and family.

Her private investigator installed lights at her residence and gave her a two-way radio and a panic button. The police would do surveillance on a regular basis. One night, Kaban heard strange sounds coming from the radio and rushed to the house. He found Cindy on the hallway floor with a paring knife through her hand with a note on it saying ‘you are dead bitch’. He checked her pulse and thought she was dead. She was hospitalized and only recalled that a needle was put into her arm. The police did not take fingerprints and were growing tired of the whole saga. But Kaban was adamant that nobody could have done that to themselves. Cindy subjected herself to several hypnosis sessions and polygraph tests to try to get to the bottom of this but was considered too ‘traumatized’ to be a good candidate.

The threatening phone calls continued but could never be traced because they were too short. Mind you, there were never any calls when the police was doing 24-hour surveillance so you cannot blame them for growing suspicious. The incidents always happened when they were not around. Her parents thought her attacker was smart enough to stay away at the proper times in order to make Cindy look more and more suspicious. Nowadays, we could trace the calls and know exactly who is zooming who.

After an “attack’’, Cindy was found lying in a ditch six miles from her home, wearing a man’s work boot and glove. She was suffering from hypothermia and had cuts and bruises all over her body. She also had a black nylon stocking around her neck, a trademark of her alleged attacks. She did not remember the event and asked her parents to stay with her. One evening, they were awakened by noises in the basement and saw flames. After realizing the phone was dead, they went outside to alert the neighbors. They saw a man at the curb and asked him to call the fire department but instead, he ran off. It was the second ‘arson.’

The police determined that the fire was started from inside the house because they saw no fingerprints on the window they think the perpetrator would have used to gain entry into the house. Therefore, they determined that Cindy had staged the incident. They also found it quite odd that Cindy would walk her little dog alone late at night when she feared being attacked. I must admit that they had a point there.

Her parents saw her condition deteriorating further and feared for her mental state. She was terrified and going downhill steadily. Believing she was suicidal, her doctor committed her to a local psychiatric ward. Ten weeks later, she was released. That’s when she admitted to friends and family that she knew more than she was saying about the perpetrator and would go after him/them herself. Was she falling deeper into delusion or was there a real person behind all this?

Cindy became very depressed because she felt that her credibility was destroyed and that no one believed that someone wanted her dead or was pushing her towards insanity. Her life was a living hell and while hospitalized, she wrote about committing suicide.

She finally told police that she believed her tormentor was her ex-husband Roy Makepeace. They encouraged her to phone him to confront him and they taped the conversation. As a psychiatrist, Roy would have been familiar with the fine art of playing with her mind, but he totally denied any involvement during the conversation. This phone tape was played at the public inquest. In fact, Makepeace gave the police a recording from his own answering machine that contained a death threat. If the poor man had nothing to do with his former wife’s demise, imagine how awful it must have been for his reputation.

Cindy James was either confused, psychotic or totally innocent, but she was sounding more and more confused as her despair deepened. And it all ended when they found her body two weeks after she was reported missing. She had gone to the shopping mall to deposit her hospital paycheck and do some grocery shopping. You wonder why she would bother doing all this if she intended to kill herself. Plus, why not die in her bed quietly and give her family less pain and sorrow? After all, she loved them dearly.

Neal Hall, a Canadian journalist who wrote a book about the case now thinks she killed herself but her investigator Ozzie Kaban disagrees. He does not buy that her body took two weeks to be found when it was so close to traffic and pedestrian walks. He believes her body might have been dumped. She had an injection mark on her arm so she could have never walked a mile and a half to the spot where they found her and then tie herself up after injecting herself. They found no needle close to her car or around the crime scene. The police think she ingested the morphine and had plenty of time to do the rest. But they found no evidence to that effect and no proof of purchase of black nylons.

Cindy also had a lover named Pat McBride who happened to be a cop. The police suspected him and Makepeace but had no concrete evidence against either one of them. The evidence in this case was quite contradictory and incomplete and very baffling but the police opted to blame Cindy. Her ex-husband came to believe that Cindy had multiple personalities and was unaware that she was tormenting herself. She adored her dog and her parents and would have never tortured them willingly. Her father states that the investigation was never aimed at finding a perpetrator but at pinning the responsibility on his daughter.

The only undeniable truth in this story is that Cindy James suffered immensely in this saga and she paid with her life. Her journals tell the heart-wrenching story of a woman tortured mentally and physically — either by her own hand and mental illness or because of an unscrupulous and sadistic perpetrator who wanted to drive her crazy and eventually killed her. If she was an innocent victim, the lack of support from the police must have caused her excruciating pain. In my opinion nurse Cindy James was a victim either way.

Otto Hack died in 2010 after a distinguished career in the military. His wife Tillie passed away in 2012. They believed till the end that their daughter did not commit suicide. Their daughter Melany continues their search for the truth.

by Peter Maiden

“He had been a man it was impossible to dislike. How many do you meet in a lifetime you can say that about?”  This reflection in the mind of world-famous sleuth Philip Marlowe, in Raymond Chandler’s masterpiece The Long Goodbye, sums up the sentiment and the dilemma Marlowe wrestles with in the novel.

In personal desperation because of his wife’s fatal illness, in 1953 Chandler took Marlowe out of the box of the hard-boiled detective novel, where he had reigned since 1939, and pushed him, by the device of delving into his feelings, into the realm of literature.

According to Chandler’s biographer Frank McShane, Chandler stated at the time: “I don’t mind Marlowe being a sentimentalist, because he always has been. His toughness has always been more or less a surface bluff.” Chandler’s literary agent strongly disagreed, arguing that the hero would actually loathe himself for revealing the feelings he describes in The Long Goodbye. Chandler fired the agent, and wound up publishing the book in England, where it sold well, before publishing in the United States, where it became a classic.

Viewers of the 1971 Robert Altman film version of The Long Goodbye who have not  actually read the novel have done themselves a disservice. Rather than portraying a sensitive man who tries to guard his emotions with toughness and machismo, in Altman’s film Eliot Gould played Marlowe as simply numb. Director Altman primarily projected his personal cultural vision into the film, which was only tangentially related to the book.  This was epitomized by Sterling Hayden performing improvised lines in an important supporting role while drunk and stoned.

Substance abuse is treated as reality in the book. It was, in fact, a problem for Chandler in his personal life. In the following passage, Marlowe and his new friend, named Terry Lennox, discuss the problem at Marlowe’s house. Lennox says:

“Maybe I can quit drinking one of these days. They all say that, don’t they?”

“It takes about three years.”

“Three years?” He looked shocked.

“Usually it does. It’s a different world. You have to get used to a paler set of colors, a quieter lot of sounds. You have to allow for relapses. All the people you used to know well will get to be just a little strange. You won’t even like most of them, and they won’t like you too well.”

This was in the early days of Alcoholics Anonymous, and maybe today sobriety can be achieved faster, but the advice is spot on, and deserved, because Marlowe first met Lennox when he was falling down drunk.

Lennox soon finds himself in a worse jam: his unfaithful wife is murdered, and he is the main suspect. Marlowe, full of feeling for Lennox, does what he can for him, which is to try to get him out of harm’s way. He drives Lennox to Tijuana, where Lennox boards a plane.  Marlowe then comes back to Los Angeles, and finds the police at his doorstep.

Marlowe has an ambivalent relationship with the cops. On this occasion, he is brought to the station and beaten by a sadistic captain while the captain’s cohort stands by. When the beating is over, and the captain has uncuffed him, he asks Marlowe if he has anything to say for himself. Marlowe does, and he says this:

“No man likes to betray a friend but I wouldn’t betray an enemy into your hands. You’re not only a gorilla, you’re an incompetent. You don’t know how to operate a simple investigation. I was balanced on a knife edge and you could have swung me either way. But you had to abuse me, throw coffee in my face, and use your fists on me when I was in a spot where all I could do was take it. From now on I wouldn’t tell you the time by the clock on your own wall.”

For some strange reason he sat there perfectly still and let me say it. Then he grinned, “You’re just a little old cop-hater, friend. That’s all you are, shamus, just a little old cop-hater.”

“There are places where cops are not hated, Captain. But in those places you wouldn’t be a cop.”

Marlowe refuses to give Lennox up, but soon discovers that Lennox was found dead by his own hand in a small Mexican town. He receives a letter from Lennox apparently mailed moments before the (alleged) self-inflicted gunshot. Marlowe believes that he has failed Lennox, and it dogs him the rest of the book. It’s a two edged sword — he blames both himself and Lennox.

Shortly after Lennox’s presumed death, Marlowe gets entangled in the case of an alcoholic writer with a mysterious, beautiful wife to whom he is drawn. The couple knew Lennox’s late, murdered spouse, and hint at an answer to the question of what happened when she died. Her father is extremely wealthy, and he warns the “at-the-poverty-line” Marlowe not to disturb his well-guarded privacy.

The wealth of Lennox’ father-in-law leads a policeman, who is on good terms with Marlowe, Lieutenant Ohls, to espouse some social commentary:

“There ain’t no clean way to make a hundred million bucks,” Ohls said. “Maybe the head man thinks his hands are clean but somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut from under them and had to sell out for nickels, decent people lost their jobs, stocks got rigged on the market, proxies got bought up like a pennyweight of old gold, and the five per centers and the big law firms got paid hundred-grand fees for beating some law the people wanted but the rich guys didn’t, on account of it cut into their profits. Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It’s the system. Maybe it’s the best we can get, but it still ain’t any Ivory Soap deal.”

“You sound like a Red,” I said, just to needle him.

“I wouldn’t know,” he said contemptuously. “I ain’t been investigated yet.”

Some critics argued that Marlowe and Lennox portrayed carefully-veiled homosexuals in The Long Goodbye. Chandler himself scoffed at the idea. I’m familiar with gay heroes; I’ve read and enjoyed the David Brandstetter series by the late Joseph Hansen, whose protagonist is a hard-boiled gay insurance investigator. But the “subtext” of a gay relationship in The Long Goodbye, if one exists, is completely overshadowed by the heterosexual attractions Marlowe clearly enjoys throughout the book, including one that will result in marriage in the subsequent volume, Playback. What is more likely at play before Lennox’s death is that Marlowe is  taking a risk and extending himself to connect, to make a friend. In the earlier novels there is no chance of friendship; in The Long Goodbye, Marlowe has to expend a lot of effort and emotion to reach out and break with his solitude.

Lest one think, however, that the novel is devoid of the hard-boiled language that Chandler is known for and his readers loved and expected, it is very much present. The independence, the existentialism, the nihilism, the anti-social bent, in short, the special ingredients that made such prose popular, are found in various places throughout the novel, such as here:

“So passed a day in the life of a P.I. Not exactly a typical day but not totally untypical either. What makes a man stay with it nobody knows. You don’t get rich, you don’t often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or shot at or tossed into the jailhouse. Once in a long while you get dead. Every other month you decided to give it up and find some sensible occupation while you can still walk without shaking your head. Then the door buzzer rings and you open the inner door to the waiting room and there stands a new face with a new problem, a new load of grief, and a small piece of money.”

A review of The Long Goodbye by the late Anthony Boucher, himself a mystery writer and editor from Oakland, California, appeared in the New York Times shortly after the book’s release and still speaks volumes: “It’s a moody, brooding book, in which Marlowe is less a detective than a disturbed man of 42 on a quest for some evidence of truth and humanity.”

Incidentally, the best piece of music ever related to a Chandler book, to my jazz-attuned ear, is Charlie Haden’s The Long Goodbye, from the 1992 album Haunted Heart, which takes as a jumping off point the solo sax of a typical noir theme, and turns it into a long meditation in a minor key. It is a lonely, heart-rending, and nicely updated theme that would suit a fine film based on the movie, were one to be made.

Marlowe would have been loathe to admit it, even in this novel, but as a hero he had a special kind of power, the power that comes from real humanity, not the trappings of power that are derived from official positions or big bank accounts. Guided by a keen inner moral sense, his true accomplishment was finding and defining justice in his own unique way.

Through risky and painful detective work, Marlowe ultimately sets right the mystery of what happened to Terry Lennox. And in the end, he just doesn’t like what he finds out about the choices that were made, and how he can’t square his closely held ideals with the reality of the big open world.

But then, after a while, the door buzzer will ring again . . .

Patrick H. Moore will be interviewed on the radio regarding the controversial IRP6 case out of Denver, Colorado today, Tuesday, April 29, 2014 at 6:00 pm California time. This case involves a group of IT entrepreneurs who appear to have been railroaded by the Feds in what may well have been bogus wire fraud charges. The six convicted men are serving 7 to 11 year sentences at a Federal prison in Florence, Colorado.

The IRP6 support group, A Just Cause, is sponsoring the interview and is working tirelessly to achieve justice for the IRP6.

Please click on this link to listen in:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/ajcradio2/2014/04/30/a-just-cause-coast2coast-irp6-wrongful-convictions-case-in-review-new-updates.

Please click here to view Lise LaSalle’s feature story on the IRP6 case:

The IRP6: A True Story of Debt Collection Gone Wild

Update: The good folks at A Just Cause were kind enough to email me a thoughtful thank you note after I participated in their radio show, which in the manner of the excellent crime writer, Charles Salzberg, I will include here in its entirety:

Dear Patrick,

On behalf of AJC Coast 2 Coast and A Just Cause, we want to thank you for the invaluable contribution you made to our program on 04/29/2014.

We always welcome the opportunity to share in-depth and thought provoking insights with our listeners and we value the time and effort that you brought to our program.

Your willingness to volunteer your time, energy and support is greatly appreciated.  You are now, officially a part of the AJC Family and we look forward to continuing our collaborative efforts, seeking balance and accountability in the judicial process. Your fight for true justice in America does not go unnoticed and together we can and will make a difference.

Thank you again for your time and support given to our program!

 Sincerely,

Sam, Cliff, & Ethel

AJC Coast 2 Coast Team

Good folks and a just cause. I take my hat off to them.

commentary by patrick H. Moore

The psychological torture that Amanda Knox has endured since that fateful day in 2007 when someone or several someones brutally murdered Meredith Kercher is now in the mid-point of its seventh year. For four of these years, both Knox and her boyfriend at the time of the murder, Raffaele Sollecito, were languishing (poor choice of words) in Italian prisons.

Now although I don’t believe that Knox or Sollecito played any part in the slaying of poor Meredith, unlike large numbers of self-styled experts, I don’t know for sure. How could I? I wasn’t there in the Perugia flat where the killing took place. (And it’s a damned good thing I wasn’t there, for if I had been, I might have been fingered as part of the alleged murder team.)

Inasmuch as the Florence court once again found Knox and Sollecito guilty in January of this year, it was required by law to disclose its rationale for the verdict in writing within 90 days of its ruling. And disclose its rationale it has in a 337 page document. (Wow! I’ll be glad to read the court’s voluminous tome but I will need to be hypnotized to keep my mind from wandering as I undertake the arduous task.)

Colleen Barry of the AP writes:

An Italian court that convicted Amanda Knox in her roommate’s 2007 murder said in lengthy reasoning made public Tuesday that the victim’s wounds indicate multiple aggressors, and that the two exchange students fought over money on the night of the murder.

The appellate court in Florence explained the January guilty verdicts against the American student and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito in a 337-page document that examined both the evidence and the motive.

The court said that a third person convicted in the murder, Rudy Hermann Guede, did not act alone, and cited the nature of the victim’s wounds. It noted that at least two knives were used to attack 21-year-old Meredith Kercher and that there were also finger imprints on her body, indicating she had been restrained.

First, I’ve never been totally convinced that Rudy Guede operated alone based on the many knife wounds, both deep and superficial, and the fact that based on the size and contour of the wounds, it is entirely possible that two different knives were used. Guede himself claimed at some point that when he emerged from his famous bathroom escapade (his renowned turd-letting), he saw the killer run from the premises. Of course, like everyone else involved, Guede has changed his story several times and his statements should be taken with a grain of salt.

Yet, in claiming that there was ample evidence of a bad relationship between the two roommates, despite Knox’s attempts to play down differences in court, the Nencini court relied on and cited statements made by Guede while under police questioning. According to Guede, Kercher had blamed Knox for taking money from the British student’s room.

“It is a matter of fact that at a certain point in the evening events accelerated; the English girl was attacked by Amanda Marie Knox, by Raffaele Sollecito, who was backing up his girlfriend, and by Rudy Hermann Guede, and constrained within her own room,” the court document states.

The court also said it was not necessary for all of the assailants to have the same motive, and that the murder was not attributable to a sex game gone awry, as it was out of Kercher’s character to have ever consented to such activity.

Based on the Nencini court’s strange reasoning, the time has come, for the first time in All Things Crime Blog’s brief but checkered history, for a Freudian analysis. Although not a Freudian, I studied Literature and Psychoanalysis in graduate school and am somewhat familiar with The Bearded One’s basic ideas.

Freud combines sex, money, and turds in a rather smelly and not necessarily convincing triumvirate. He also adds babies and penises. Using Freudian logic, the fact that Guede left a large well-shaped turd in the toilet in one of the bathrooms is indicative of the fact that he was anally expulsive. An anally expulsive person is like the guy who carries his money balled up in his pocket in a big wad and loves to whip it out and hand it out to all and sundry.

On the other hand, assuming she really was a clean-nik, poor Meredith Kercher would fall under the rubric of the anally retentive. These are the folks who flush twice or even thrice while pooping and not just because they are afraid of stuffing up the W.C.

The alleged battle between Knox and Kercher over cleanliness at the flat suggests that the messy Knox was anally expulsive, thus the exact opposite of the retentive Kercher.

If we examine the three theories propounded in the various trials we discover that although three distinct theories have been introduced, they are all interconnected based on Freudian (il)logic. At the first trial, the prosecution suggested Kercher’s murder resulted from sex-game gone horribly wrong. Whatever one thinks about sex games, we all know that the spectre of sex is at the center of Freud’s theory.

The second theory, the turd theory, is also Freudian. In Freud’s rather tortured logic, through symbolic substitution at the unconscious level, a turd equals a penis which equals a baby which somehow connects to Freud’s Oedipal theory — the notion that the male child wants to kill the father and sleep with the mother. If I’ve misrepresented Freud’s theory, I’m sure our new resident shrink, The Starks Shrink, will set me straight. Or if he doesn’t, perhaps our friend Pitchforks will.

In the Nencini court’s 337 page rationale, the turd theory presented at the Florence trial has somehow been converted into the money theory. (Apparently evidence was introduced at some point during the Florence trial that Knox and Kercher had argued vehemently over greenbacks.)

Sex games, turds, and money. You replace one with the next and then substitute the third for the second and, inevitably, we end up with DEATH. If we put turds and money aside for the moment, we end up with a simple and tragic equation: Sex (or rather the lack of sex) = Death. Which makes me wonder, if Meredith Kercher had willingly slept with Rudy Guede, would she still be alive today? This question cannot be definitively answered but it’s certainly a possibility.

In any event, as long as the Italian court is stuck in the Freudian paradigm, they will never get to the truth of this case and will always appear somewhat whimsical, just as Freud’s elaborate set of substitutions appears rather frivolous to a modern reader.

*     *     *     *     *

Meanwhile, as Amanda Knox digests the Nencini court’s tortured theory of the case, I’m sure that she must feel she is being tortured afresh.

All she can do now is wait for the Court of Cassation to rule on the appeal that will be forthcoming based on the request of her defense team. This decision will apparently be rendered sometime in September which means she has several torturous months to endure before she knows what the court’s final verdict is.

And, of course, this interminable waiting is also essentially Freudian. You see, the male child is not allowed sleep with his mother, nor can he kill his father. Instead he must wait and wait and wait until he is old enough to find a lover of his own. Only then is he allowed to experience sex and death on terms acceptable to society.

Had Amanda Knox also waited and waited and waited, eschewing sex, perhaps until she had finished her time in Perugia, it is entirely possible that although she might still have been charged, she probably would not have been convicted of murdering Kercher. But she didn’t wait but rather engaged in a few dalliances with a few different young men, which, as a young unmarried woman in Italy, makes her somehow evil in the eyes of certain powerful people and forces, which, quite incomprehensibly in my mind, somehow makes her a likely murderess.

commentary by patrick H. Moore

Tuesday, April 29th, would appear to be an important day in American jurisprudence. This is the day a six-man, six-woman jury of his peers found Byron Smith of Little Falls, Minnesota guilty of the premeditated first-degree murder of two formerly All-American type teenagers, 18-year-old Haile Kifer and 17-year-old Nick Brady. I say formerly All-American because at least one of the teens appears to have been using prescription pain pills which were found by investigators in a vehicle associated with the two kids. It seems incontrovertible that the two teens broke into Smith’s house with the intention of robbing it. It also seems incontrovertible that Smith had decided to kill the kids as opposed to turning them in to the police, which he could have easily done with the help of his firearms.

Sasha Goldstein of the New York Daily News writes:

A Minnesota man who gunned down two teens who broke into his home was found guilty of murdering the unarmed intruders he likened to “vermin.”

A jury took just three hours Tuesday afternoon to find Byron Smith, 65, guilty of the Thanksgiving Day 2012 slayings of Haile Kifer, 18, and Nick Brady, 17. Audio clips of the shootings were captured by a recording system the man had rigged up to capture the burglars in the act.

Little Falls, where the trial occurred and the jury deliberated, is a small town of slightly over 8,000 people situated 100 miles northwest of Minneapolis along the Mississippi River.

In his closing arguments on Tuesday, prosecutor Pete Orput likened the killings to deer hunting from a tree stand as he methodically outlined the preparations the former government employee took before slaying the teens.  Smith stocked up on water, snacks, extra ammo, a book and a tarp in his basement. He also deposited his truck some distance from his home to make it appear that he was not there.

Orput showed the courtroom a picture of the chair where Smith waited, stating, “That’s the deer stand, right there.”

Oddly, Smith incriminated himself to some degree. Audio recordings of the twin killings were found on his recording equipment in his bugged basement. The 15-minute clip of the shooting includes the sounds of Nicky and Haily being gunned down and of Smith dragging their bodies in a tarp to keep their blood from staining his carpet.

What a fastidious fellow!

The prosecutors were able to demonstrate quite effectively that Smith clearly enjoyed slaughtering the teens. After all, on the tape he can be heard toying with his victims, saying, “You’re dead,” after firing a fatal shot into one wounded victim.

It is no stretch to say that the recordings clearly harmed Smith’s chances of being acquitted. The fact that he didn’t tell a neighbor about the incident until the next day, claiming that he didn’t want to ruin anyone’s Thanksgiving also did not help his case. The three hours the jury was out was probably just enough time for the gender-balanced jury to go over the evidence. I suspect there were no real holdouts amongst the jurors.

Smith was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole immediately after the verdict. Fortunately for him, as well as for the Minnesota state budget, life for him may mean another 10 to 20 years.

This verdict sets an excellent precedent sending the clear message that no matter how aggrieved they are for whatever wrongs they may have suffered, homeowners cannot lie in wait for the intruders and then merrily assassinate them. Hopefully, other angry old men (Smith is about a year older than I am) will get the message. It’s a shame when teens get rubbed out because they’re going through a rough stretch in which they do really dumb stuff like robbing people’s house to get money to buy narcotics. I mean, C’MON, can’t they come up with something a little more original?

Click here to view All Things Crime Blog’s previous  Byron Smith trial post:

Minnesota Man Is on Trial for Lying in Wait and Killing Two Teenage Burglars

by BJW Nashe

In the early 1970s, the charming seaside town of Santa Cruz, California was plagued by a series of murders. The main culprits were a trio of serial killers who claimed the lives of at least 23 victims. In Part One of this three-part series, we delved into the deranged mind of mass murderer John Linley Frazier, “The Prophet Killer.” In Part Two, we explore the shocking exploits of Big Ed Kemper, “The Co-ed Killer.” Santa Cruz is cherished in the memories of those of us who have lived there. Like any other American town, however, Santa Cruz has it’s dark side. Big Ed Kemper is about as dark as it gets anywhere in the world of crime.

Big Ed Kemper — The Co-ed Killer

Edmund Kemper was a very bright kid, a near-genius, who unfortunately had to endure a wretched, abusive upbringing. This no doubt helped him to grow up and become a dangerous psychopath who hated women so much he ended up killing eight of them. The twisted Kemper saga is worth recounting in some detail.

Edmund’s parents divorced when he was seven years old. He grew up largely estranged from his father. His mother, Clarnell Kemper, was an alcoholic with borderline personality disorder. A domineering controller with a mean streak, she apparently came from the Bates Motel school of parenting. She raised her son Edmund as if they were playing leading roles in a sequel to the film Psycho. Early on, her mistreatment of Edmund caused him to start acting strangely. This only made her increase the abuse. A vicious cycle was underway. She constantly belittled and humiliated him, blaming him for his father leaving her. She accused him of wanting to rape his sister. She often forced him to sleep in the locked basement of their home. The basement had a trapdoor with a padlock on the outside, so she could control his confinement. Not surprisingly, Edmund’s outlook became morbidly troubled. Preoccupied with fantasies of death and murder, he enjoyed abusing animals and playing with their rotting corpses, which he displayed as trophies in his bedroom closet. He enacted bizarre sexual rituals with his sister’s dolls.

By the time Edmund was a teenager, he was splitting time between his mother’s house in Aptos, CA and his grandparents’ place in North Fork. As a high school freshman, the boy already stood 6’ 4″ tall. One would hope that his grandparents’ home might have provided some welcome relief from “Mommie Dearest.” The problem was that Edmund’s grandmother was nearly as bad — a domineering, verbally abusive woman who only infuriated her already traumatized grandson.

On the morning of August 27, 1965, Kemper snapped. In a fit of psychotic rage following an argument with his grandmother, Edmund shot and killed her as she sat at the kitchen table working on a children’s novel she was writing. Then, fascinated with what he had done, Kemper simply watched her die in a pool of her own blood, staring at her as the life drained out of her eyes. He was just 15 years old.

Realizing how furious his grandfather would be over what he had done, Edmund decided he had only one option: Grandpa also must die. When the elderly man pulled up in the driveway, returning home from the store with a bag of groceries in the back seat, the teenager charged from the house with a .22 caliber handgun and shot him before he had a chance to slam the car door shut. He died instantly.

Edmund called his mother to inform her of what he had done. “Hi, Mom. I just shot Grandma and Grandpa.” Clarnell, apparently not all that shocked by the news, convinced her son to call the police. Edmund ended up at the Atascadero State Mental Facility, where he served less than five years. During his stay at the facility, Kemper’s I.Q. tests showed a very high level of intelligence (scores of 135-145). Using his exceptional smarts, he evidently succeeded in manipulating some of the doctors and facility staff, playing the role of “model patient” in order to obtain their trust. Kemper even worked as an assistant at the hospital, which allowed him access to certain medical records and documentation. Some claim that he was able to memorize the answers to psychological tests to ensure that he received positive scores. Eventually, Kemper was able to convince physicians, attorneys, and various state officials that he was now stable enough as an adult to re-enter society. Kemper was released in 1969, relinquished back into his mother’s custody in Aptos, which is just south of Santa Cruz. Kemper’s juvenile record was sealed.

Fully grown at 6’ 9” and weighing close to 300 pounds, Kemper, now known as “Big Ed,” found himself a free man. He held down a series of menial jobs, eventually gaining a permanent position with the state agency now known as CALTRANS. However, by the start of 1972, his mental state had deteriorated once again. A  psychotic breakdown was imminent. Big Ed wanted a girlfriend, but he had no success in this regard. He grew angry when his mother, who worked as an administrative assistant at UC Santa Cruz, failed to help him meet a female companion among the college students with whom she interacted. Then Mom had the nerve to question his manhood. The house in Aptos was clearly no better than a psychopathology lab. Big Ed’s hatred for his mother turned into hostility toward all women. Even Big Ed’s professional aspirations just led to more aggravation, since he had failed to realize his dream of becoming a police officer. Given what we know of him and his upbringing, it’s probably just as well that he never wore a badge. In any case, his CALTRANS job was not enough to overcome his psychological torments. By early 1972, Big Ed was headed for trouble. He embarked on a horrendous killing spree that included corpse mutilation and necrophilia.

In May of 1972, Big Ed picked up two hitchhiking college coeds, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, both 18 years old. After a tense one-hour journey, he drove them to a secluded area near Alameda, where he smothered and stabbed Pesce to death, before fatally stabbing Luchessa. Big Ed stashed both corpses in the trunk of his car and headed for home. In his room, he took  pornographic photographs of the naked corpses before dismembering them and placing the body parts into plastic bags, which he later abandoned near Loma Prieta Mountain. Kemper had oral sex with Pesce’s severed head before disposing of both girls’ heads in a ravine.

In September of 1972, Big Ed picked up another hitchhiker, this time a 15-year-old named Aiko Koo, who was hoping to catch a ride to her dance class. He kept her captive in the car at gunpoint as he drove to a secluded spot, where he strangled her. He then brought her body back to his mother’s Aptos home, where he had sex with the corpse, dissected and decapitated the body, and buried her head in his mother’s garden. He buried the rest of her remains elsewhere on the property.

In January of 1973, Big Ed picked up 19-year-old Cindy Schall, a student of Cabrillo College in Aptos. He took her to a secluded area, shot her with a .22 caliber pistol, placed her body in the trunk of his car, and drove back to his mother’s house. There, he kept the body in his room overnight until he removed the bullet from her head and decapitated her. He later dissected her body in the bathtub and buried her severed head in his mother’s garden as a kind of sick joke, because, as he later put it, his mother “always wanted people to look up to her.” He discarded the rest of Schall’s remains in a nearby ravine.

In February of 1973, after yet another argument with his mother, Kemper picked up Rosalind Thorpe and Allison Liu, ages 24 and 23, while he was driving around on the UC Santa Cruz campus. Once he had driven away from the university property, he shot them both in the head with his .22 and sped back to Aptos with the two lifeless bodies wrapped in blankets. Safely back at Mom’s house, Big Ed had sex with both of the corpses. There’s no place like home. The next morning, he dismembered and decapitated the bodies, then dumped their remains in San Francisco’s Eden Canyon, where they were found a week later.

Police now were feeling the pressure to apprehend the man known as the “Co-ed Killer.” Ironically, Big Ed liked to hang out at a bar in Santa Cruz called The Jury Room, which was a frequent hang-out for off-duty law enforcement personnel. Kemper was friendly with some of these officers. No doubt he sat and listened to these cops discuss the crimes that he, unbeknownst to them, had been committing.

For some unknown reason, Big Ed decided he was done killing co-eds. He saved “Mommie Dearest” for last. On Good Friday of 1973, fed up with his mother’s endless taunting and complaining, he smashed her in the head with a claw hammer while she slept in her bed. He then cut off her head, used it for oral sex, and placed it on the mantel above the fireplace, so he could use her face as a dartboard. Big Ed also removed his mother’s vocal cords and placed them in the kitchen garbage disposal, which he felt was a suitable end to her “constant bitching.” Apparently, the garbage disposal struggled to break down the tough vocal cord tissue and ejected much of the mess back up into the sink. Big Ed later told authorities that this “seemed appropriate, as much as she’d bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years.”

Big Ed wasn’t quite finished yet. His mother’s best friend, 59 year-old Sally Hallert, had also earned a place on his hit list. He phoned Sally, inviting her to come over and dine with him and his mother. When Sally arrived, she was greeted with a violent punch in the gut, which knocked the wind out of her. Then Bid Ed strangled her to death. He promptly fled the scene of his gruesome final crimes, driving east in a hurry.

Kemper drove on through Nevada and Utah, and into Colorado. After hearing news on the radio about his mother’s death, he stopped at a phone booth in Pueblo, Colorado to call the police. On the phone, he confessed to the murder of his mother and Hallert, but the police didn’t take him seriously at first, and told him to get back to them at a later time. Several hours later, Kemper called again and asked to speak to an officer he knew personally. At this time, he made no mention of his crimes as the “Co-ed Killer.” He just waited inside his car until the cops showed up to arrest him for killing his mother and her friend Sally.

Big Ed cooperated fully with the authorities, confessing to all of his crimes, and even escorting officers to the locations of his victims’ remains. At his trial, Big Ed pleaded “not guilty” by reason of insanity. The jury did not agree that he was legally insane, though. In November of 1973 they found Big Ed Kemper guilty of eight counts of murder. He reportedly asked for the death penalty, but since capital punishment was suspended at the time in California, he instead received life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Authorities at the Correctional Medical Facility in Vacaville have described Kemper as a model prisoner who lives in the general prison population and works at several jobs within the prison. They claim that Big Ed tends to do well in a controlled environment and that he no longer brags about the murders as much as he used to, except during the occasional tours provided to graduating criminal justice students visiting the prison.

Stay tuned for Part Three of “When Santa Cruz Was The Murder Capital of the World”

Click below to view Part One of “When Santa Cruz Was The Murder Capital of the World”

When Santa Cruz Was “The Murder Capital of the World”

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Yesterday a life was spared in Maricopa County. After three days of deliberation (imagine all the back-and-forth that must have volleyed around the jury room during those tension-packed hours), a jury of Marissa DeVault’s peers decided that life in prison in lieu of the death penalty would be sufficient punishment despite the fact that she was convicted of beating her husband, Dale Harrell, to death with a hammer in 2009.

DeVault was convicted of the first-degree-murder on April 8. The prosecutors’ theory of the case was that DeVault killed Harrell in a failed bid to collect on a life insurance policy to repay about $300,000 in loans from her boyfriend. DeVault maintains that she killed her husband in self-defense and told investigators he had physically and sexually abused her in the past.

The attack in the couple’s Gilbert, AZ home was no joke and Harrell, 34, suffered multiple skull fractures. He died nearly a month later at a hospice of complications from his head injuries.

The case had many salacious elements, including testimony about plots to hire a hit man and the fact that DeVault was a former stripper who met her boyfriend on a sugar-daddy dating website. Although these spicy details apparently caught the nose-to-the-ground antenna of HLN who no doubt salivated  thinking Jodi Arias revisited, Judge Roland Steinle kept the lid on brilliantly throughout the trial. Her extensive efforts to keep the trial from becoming spectacle a la Arias was especially appropriate considering that the Arias circus enveloped this same courthouse a year ago.

DeVault’s reportedly seedy past was barely mentioned during the trial.

DeVault initially told investigators that Harrell had attacked her as she slept and choked her until she was unconscious. This part is at least theoretically credible (it could happen) but then the defendant got a little carried away. She told police that when she regained consciousness, there was another man who lived at their home beating Harrell with a hammer.

DeVault must have sensed that the strange man with a hammer defense wouldn’t fly; in any event, she later confessed to attacking her husband, saying she pummeled him in a rage while he was sleeping after he sexually assaulted her.

The prosecution trotted out DeVault’s former boyfriend, Allen Flores, a businessman, who you will see is rather a nasty fellow. Flores who met DeVault on a sugar-daddy dating website and – for reasons I cannot fathom — loaned her $300,000 during their two-year relationship.

On the stand, Flores testified that DeVault wanted to either hire someone to kill Harrell, or kill him herself, after which she would tell police he tried to rape her after a night of drinking.

Flores’ testimony appears to have been damning, but then when it was DeVault’s attorneys turn, they attacked Flores’ credibility. Why? Well, folks often do not testify as key witnesses without their backs being scratched just enough to make it worth their while, and it turned out that Flores was given immunity regarading child-pornography allegations in exchange for his testimony. The child pornography was found on Flores’ computer during a search that was part of the murder investigation, authorities said.

But although this could have affected how DeVault was perceived by the jurors, it is really a separate issue apart from DeVault’s guilt or innocence.

During the sentencing phase of her trial, Devault spoke directly to jurors. She sobbed and wiped away tears as she said she was sorry for the pain she has caused Harrell’s family and she kept talking for 11  minutes.

She also said her actions are in some way a stain upon her three daughters. “I am supposed to protect you, and instead I hurt you,”

But as important as DeVault’s direct appeal to the jurors was, Michael Kiefer of The Republic believes that it’s her children who saved her life. Kiefer writes:

DeVault had certainly plotted the murder of her husband, Dale Harrell. She had taken out insurance policies on him, talked to her lover about having him killed, asked an ex-lover to “take care of him,” had told people he was already dead.

And ultimately, she confessed to caving in his head with a claw hammer in January 2009 in the bedroom of their Gilbert home.

DeVault’s trial began in early February at the Maricopa County Courthouse. DeVault’s claim that Harrell was abusive and that she killed him in self-defense was put to the test. Prosecutors paraded friends and neighbors to the witness stand and they all insisted they had never seen Harrell raise a hand against her.

But then things turned around when DeVault’s oldest daughter, Rhiannon-Skye DeVault Harrell, 18, was sworn in to testify in late March.

“It happened fairly frequently,” Rhiannon-Skye told the jury. She detailed the beatings and testified both at the trial and during the sentencing phase of the trial. Her two younger sisters also testified.

Nonetheless, on April 8, DeVault, 36, was found guilty of first-degree-murder.

A week later, the jury determined that the murder was especially cruel, qualifying DeVault for the death penalty.

The jury began deliberating for about three days of actual discussion beginning on Tuesday, April 22 before finally reaching a decision on Wednesday

*     *     *     *     *

DeVault hugged her attorneys before leaving the courtroom smiling.

“We’re happy with the decision they made, thank God,” said DeVault’s defense attorney with the symbolic name, Andrew Anderson Clemency, outside the courthouse. “They made a decision to spare a life.”

On June 6, a judge will formally impose the sentence and decide whether DeVault can be eligible for early release after 25 years.

*     *     *     *     *

Yesterday was a day of mercy in Maricopa County. We, the people, need more of them.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

When Billings, Montana District Court Judge G. Todd Baugh sentenced school-teacher Stacey Dean Rambold to 30 days in county jail on August 26, 2013 for the rape of a 14-year-old student, Cherice Morales, who later killed herself, it generated tremendous outrage both locally in Montana and all across the country. The outcry was based not only on the short duration of the sentence but also on offensive remarks Judge Baugh made at the time of sentencing.

Matthew Brown of the Associated Press writes:

When Baugh delivered the original sentence, he said the victim was “older than her chronological age” and “as much in control of the situation” as Rambold, who was in his late-40s at the time.

Baugh’s comments galvanized the good citizens of Billing and protesters poured out onto the streets of Billings by the hundreds. Ultimately, more than 56,000 online signatures were collected from people calling for the judge to resign. A disciplinary complaint against Baugh from the Judicial Standards Commission is pending with the state Supreme Court.

Now, however, nearly eight months later, the Montana Supreme Court has overturned a one-month prison sentence given by Judge Baugh to former high school teacher Stacey Rambold.

The rape victim, Cherice Morales, was 14 when the assaults occurred. When she was 16, with the case still pending, she killed herself.

It began in 2008 when Cherice, then 14, was a student at Billings Senior High School and Rambold, then 49, was a teacher. According to Cherice’s mother, Aulelia Hanlon, Rambold “groomed” her daughter in a manner that eventually led to the pair having sex. When school officials learned of the relationship, Rambold resigned. Later that year, he was charged with three counts of sexual intercourse without consent.

As the case meandered its way through the legal system, Cherice committed suicide. She was a few weeks shy of her 17th birthday.

Paul Vercammen and Kyung Lah of CNN report:

“As a result of the sexual assault and its aftermath, (Cherice) experienced severe emotional distress, humiliation and embarrassment and fell into irreversible depression that tragically led to her taking her own life on February 6, 2010,” Cherice’s mother Auliea Hanlon said in a complaint filed against Rambold.

Hanlon told CNN the relationship was to blame for her daughter’s death.

“Well, it definitely had something to do with it,” she said. “A teenager’s whole life is about school and their friends, and he turned everyone against her.”

Scott Twito, a prosecutor with the Yellowstone County attorney’s office, voiced the opinion not only of his department but the community in general:

“This case is very important. As I’ve said before, this resulted in the loss of one of our young people in my community. We take these charges very seriously. And we fight for those victims.”

*     *     *     *     *

Wednesday’s Supreme Court decisions cited in part the actions of District Judge G. Todd Baugh of Billings, who suggested the young victim shared responsibility for her rape.

The Christian Science Monitor reported:

Baugh apologized last week for his comments about the victim in a letter to the editor of the Billings Gazette.While this case has drawn wide attention, it’s fairly typical for victim blaming and other “minimizing of sexual assault cases” to occur, particularly in situations that involve teachers and students or that don’t fit traditional notions about rape, says Jennifer Long, director of AEquitas: The Prosecutors’ Resource on Violence Against Women, in Washington.

“Adolescent victims are consistently blamed for either seducing their rapist or for some other behaviors.”Members of the public have stepped up to protest in previous cases, such as the teen rapes in Steubenville, Ohio, and “to educate their own community and beyond about the importance of not victim-blaming,” Ms. Long says, “but it seems that we are still stuck in this cycle … where [some of] the very people who should know this information – judges, prosecutors, and other professionals – still believe in the myths and still engage in very dangerous practices.”

Based on the State Supreme Court decision, the case now goes back to a new judge for re-sentencing. (This is an ideal situation for the replacement judge to look good in the eyes of the community by talking tough while sentencing Rambold to a substantial amount of prison time.

Rambold’s head must be spinning. He has been free since completing his sentence last fall. Prosecutors for the state say he should serve a mandatory minimum of four years prison.

Naturally, at the appellate proceedings, Rambold’s attorneys argued that the original sentence of 30 days was appropriate. I don’t imagine anyone took them too seriously.

*     *     *     *     *

In case readers are surprised (and still outraged) by the fact the prosecutors are seeking a mere four year sentence, it should be remembered that since the victim Cherice Morales is deceased, she can’t testify or issue a statement about what transpired in her relationship with Rambold. Thus, the prosecution would face evidentiary issues if they were to argue for the ten years or longer that many people believe the defendant should receive.

I agree that the original 30-day sentence handed down by Judge Baugh was much too lenient.

What I am struck by though – legal issues notwithstanding – is this. Let us, for the sake of the argument, give credence to Cherice’s mother’s claim, which is certainly persuasive, that the reason her daughter killed herself is because she was so grievously bedeviled by her peers after her affair with Rambold was made public.

I’m pretty sure that while she was involved with Rambold, Cherice never dreamed that the whole thing was going to blow up and that she’d be denounced by the other kids. But by sleeping with Rambold (if you can call it that), she crossed a line that somehow must have outraged her peers. Rather than viewing her as a sympathetic figure who was seduced and manipulated by a man pushing 50, which of course is what happened, they saw her as a “fallen women”, a veritable Hester Prynne (I wonder if The Scarlet Letter is taught at Billings Senior High School), someone to be condemned and denounced and ultimately destroyed.

Fie on the cruelty of youth.

Click here to view our earlier posts discussing this very troubling case:

Montana Schoolgirl Rapist Released after Serving 30-Day Sentence

Embattled Judge G. Todd Baugh Orders New Sentencing Hearing in Montan Child Rape Case

Teacher Given Only 30 Days for Rape of 14-Year-Old Girl

Outrage Over 30-Day Sentence for Montana Schoolteacher Rapist

Courtesy of The Lair, we present 25 striking quotes from Jeffrey Dahmer. Unlike Ted Bundy, Dahmer does not make excuses. Rather, he reaches for answers to the unanswerable horror that he perpetrated. Dare we give him marginal credit for honesty? That’s a question each reader will have to answer for themselves.

“I think in some way I wanted it to end, even if it meant my own destruction.”

“It’s just a nightmare, let’s put it that way. It’s been a nightmare for a long time, even before I was caught … for years now, obviously my mind has been filled with gruesome, horrible thoughts and ideas … a nightmare.”

“I couldn’t find any meaning in my life when I was out there. I’m sure as hell not going to find it in here. This is the grand finale of a life poorly spent and the end result is just overwhelmingly depressing … it’s just a sick, pathetic, wretched, miserable life story, that’s all it is. How it can help anyone, I’ve no idea.”

“I don’t even know if I have the capacity for normal emotions or not because I haven’t cried for a long time. You just stifle them for so long that maybe you lose them, partially at least. I don’t know.”

“I don’t know why it started. I don’t have any definite answers on that myself. If I knew the true, real reasons why all this started, before it ever did , I wouldn’t probably have done any of it.”

” … Like arrows, shooting through my mind from out of the blue.” …Fantasies

“That night in Ohio, that one impulsive night. Nothing’s been normal since then. It taints your whole life. After it happened I thought that I’d just try to live as normally as possible and bury it, but things like that don’t stay buried. I didn’t think it would, but it does, it taints your whole life.” …Hicks

“Yup, she’s lived in that house a long time.” …’Do you love your grandmother?’

“At about eleven o’clock at night, when everyone was gone and the store was locked up from the outside, I went out and undressed the mannequin and I had a big sleeping bag cover. I put it in that, zipped it up and carried it out of the store, which was a pretty dangerous thing to do. I never thought of them maybe having security cameras or being locked in the store, but I walked out with it and took it back home. I ended up getting a taxi and brought it back and kept it with me a couple of weeks. I just went through various sexual fantasies with it, pretending it was a real person, pretending that I was having sex with it, masturbating, and undressing it.”

“I felt in complete shock. I just couldn’t believe it happened again after all those years when I’d done nothing like this… I don’t know what was going through my mind. I have no memory of it. I tried to dredge it up, but I have no memory whatsoever.” …Steven Toumi

“Am I just an extremely evil person or is it some kind of satanic influence, or what? I have no idea. I have no idea at all. Do you…? These thoughts are very powerful, very destructive, and they do not leave. They’re not the kind of thoughts that you can just shake your head and they’re gone. They do not leave.”

“After the fear and terror of what I’d done had left, which took about a month or two, I started it all over again. From then on it was a craving, a hunger, I don’t know how to describe it, a compulsion, and I just kept doing it, doing it and doing it, whenever the opportunity presented itself.”

“He just wants to make people feel as guilty and lousy as possible. The guy is such a prick.” …His opinion of Geraldo (woohoo!), a statement made prior to the Geraldo Rivera Talk Show broadcast concerning Dahmer’s crimes.

“I decided I wasn’t ever going to get married because I never wanted to go through anything like that”. On his parents marriage

“It was nice, with African cichlids and tiger barbs in it and live plants, it was a beautifully kept fish tank, very clean … I used to like to just sit there and watch them swim around, basically. I used to enjoy the planning and the set-up, the filtration, read about how to keep the nitrate and ammonia down to safe levels and just the whole spectrum of fish-keeping interested me … I once saw some puffer fish in the store. It’s a round fish, and the only ones I ever saw with both eyes in front, like a person’s eyes, and they would come right up to the front of the glass and their eyes would be crystal blue, like a person’s, real cute… It’s a fun hobby. I really enjoyed that fish tank. It’s something I really miss.”

“Yes, I do have remorse, but I’m not even sure myself whether it is as profound as it should be. I’ve always wondered myself why I don’t feel more remorse.”

The following three quotes concern murders that weighed the most heavily on his conscience

“I wish I hadn’t done it.” …Steven Hicks

“I had no intention of doing it in the first place.” …Steven Tuomi

“He was exceptionally affectionate. He was nice to be with.” …Jeremiah Weinburger

…I was very careful for years and years, you know. Very careful, very careful about making sure that nothing incriminating remained, but these last few months, they just went nuts… It just seemed like it went into a frenzy this last month. Everything really came crashing down…

“Something stronger than my conscious will made it happen. I think some higher power got good and fed-up with my activity and decided to put an end to it. I don’t really think there were any coincidences. The way it ended and whether the close calls were warning to me or what, I don’t know. If they were, I sure didn’t heed them… 

“When you’ve done the types of things I’ve done, it’s easier not to reflect on yourself. When I start thinking about how it’s affecting the families of the people, and my family and everything, it doesn’t do me any good. It just gets me very upset. ”

” … If I was killed in prison. That would be a blessing right now.”

“I should have gone to college and gone into real estate and got myself an aquarium, that’s what I should have done.”

” This is the grand finale of a life poorly spent and the end result is just overwhelmingly depressing….. a sick pathetic, miserable life story, that’s all it is.”

by Lise LaSalle

A documentary titled Highway of Tears premiered on March 6th, 2014 at the Human Right Watch Film Festival in Toronto, Canada. The film director, Matt Smiley, announced that additional screening dates will be posted on their official Facebook page ‘Highway of Tears.’

It is the story of the women who went missing or were murdered along a 720 kilometer stretch of highway in northern British Columbia. There are 18 cold cases dating to the 1960’s and most of them went unsolved until a special division of the RCMP (project E-Pana) managed to link DNA from an American drifter from Portland called Bobby Jack Fowler to the 1974 murder of 16-year old hitchhiker Colleen MacMillen.

If you talk to the local people, they will tell you that many more than 18 girls and women have disappeared; some say the number is 33, others 43 and it could even be higher. In Canada, over 600 aboriginal women have been reported missing or murdered since the 1960’s and some are tied to the Highway of Tears. The documentary explains the circumstances of their victimization.

The long stretch of highway between the towns of Prince George and Prince Rupert being dubbed the Highway of Tears is officially named the Trans-Canada Highway 16. Because public transportation is very limited in that region and money does not grow on their trees, many young people through the years have been extending their arm and sticking out their thumb to hitch a ride to neighborhood towns.

Signs have been posted along the road to warn girls not to hitchhike because it is extremely dangerous.  It makes for a strange ménagerie to see a Moose or Bear crossing sign followed by a Killer on the loose billboard!

The warning signs are impossible to miss but you still see the odd hitchhiker on the road; usually young girls feeling invincible and willing to gamble to escape their neck of the woods. And eventually, a car or a truck pulls over to give them a ride. The small towns located off the highway are very secluded and the local young folks probably feel very isolated and disconnected from their friends and activities. Not old enough to drive, they chose the open road and dare travel on Highway 16, convinced no harm could ever befall them.

Having driven on that highway several times, I can attest to the sinister gloom that falls upon you while riding in your car in the middle of this majestic wilderness. A strange overwhelming eerie feeling permeates the air and I can only compare it to listening to Wagner’s music; a penetrating darkness mixed with great beauty. It is a spiritual wailing that can literally be heard if you pay attention and it is gruesomely intertwined with the scenery.

Even if the disappearances started in the 1960’s, a pattern specifically emerged between 1988 and 1995. Young girls mostly aboriginal and aged 15 to early twenties went missing after having been seen hitchhiking along the highway. The murder of Monica Ignas, age 15, was among the first official reports. She vanished on December 1974 and was later found dead discarded in a gravel pit. In 1988, Alberta Williams, age 24, was also found murdered a month after her disappearance.

It wasn’t until 1994 that things really started to happen at an alarming pace. The latest of that series of incidents at the time, was Ramona Wilson, age 15, who was hitchhiking to a friend’s place in June 1994. Her remains were found near the Smithers airport a year later. Roxanne Thiara, age 15, went missing and her body was later found near Burns Lake. There were three murders in a row until they also found Alishia Germaine, age 15, in December 1994.

Six months went by until Delphine Nikal, age 16, from Telkwa disappeared somewhere between Smithers and her home. She has yet to be found. Lana Derrick, age 19, was a forestry student in Terrace who went missing while walking down a street in Terrace in October, 1995. She has never been heard from since. It took another seven years for any other disappearance to be reported officially. Was the murderer in jail? Or perhaps he moved away?

The next casualty was the first Caucasian, Nicole Hoar, who disappeared in June 2002. She was a young tree planter hitching her way from Prince George to Smithers, hoping to attend the Midsummer Music Festival, but she never arrived.

Her family reacted quickly to report her missing to the media and police. Maybe because she was white, a massive poster campaign started, rewards were offered and a fund established to find the 26 year-old. The RCMP used aircraft and helicopters, and there were 200 volunteers plus 60+ professional search and rescue members, all to no avail. She remains on a list of women missing along the Highway of Tears.

In the fall of 2005, ceremonies named “Take Back the Highway” were held in the concerned communities. Marches, minutes of silence, local speakers and prayers to promote awareness and protest violence against these women were organized. But, days later Tamara Chipman, age 22, went missing. She had taken judo for years and was considered a strong girl but she also fell victim to this invisible darkness.

Crystal Lee Okimaw, age 24, vanished from Prince George in January and Aielah Saric-Auger, age 14, was discovered dead east of town in February 2006.

The police drew a list of possible suspects including the possibility of a travelling salesman dressed in a suit who would seem like a trustworthy person to catch a ride with. Maybe a hunter who comes to the wildlife-rich area. Maybe a trucker who is driving in and out of town. Or could it be someone who lives here? Someone who always seems to be at the right place to pick up young women. But when you think of the odds, it could also have been multiple people cruising the area to find a lone and vulnerable female prey.

In an effort to help stop violence, Amnesty International eventually asked the population to write to the Minister of Public Safety asking him to implement new protocols for action on missing person cases, particularly along Highway 16.

The case of Madison Scott is also a mysterious disappearance that took place in the area more recently and that the RCMP is still trying to elucidate. This 21 year-old young woman from Vanderhoof went camping to Hogsback Lake and was reported missing in May 2011. They did search by land, by water and by air with the help of more than 170 people and could not find her.

Six months before Madison vanished, 15 year-old Loren Donn Leslie had disappeared in November 2010. Her ID had been found so police knew something was awry and alerted her father. While searching for her, the officers had come upon a suspicious young man who was speeding away from an unused logging not far from the main highway. They were able to retrace his tire tracks all the way to Loren’s dead body. She had to be identified by a tattoo on her wrist that said Grip Fast because her face had been beaten up with a pipe wrench and disfigured. Her throat was cut and she had been sexually assaulted. Grip Fast was the family motto meaning ‘Hang on tight’ that her dad had come up with to unite them during tough times. Loren excelled at karate and surprisingly, was almost legally blind, but had managed to live life to the fullest with the help of thick glasses and a strong will.

The suspect was 20 year-old Cody Alan Legebokoff and Loren’s friends suspected that she had met him online where he was very active under the nickname 1Countryboy. Loren was too trusting for her own good and her mother worried about her constant trips from Vanderhoof to crime ridden Prince George via Highway 16. She enlisted friends and usually hitched a ride to her destination in spite of her parents’ warnings.

She probably trusted Cody because at first glance, he looked like the boy next door. He worked as a mechanic at a Prince George car dealership and lived in a house with 3 female roommates.  He was popular, had graduated from high school, got along with everybody and had from all accounts, a good upbringing and family. But forensic evidence from his truck led police to suspect him in the murders of Cynthia Frances Maas, age 35, Natasha Lynn Montgomery, age 23, and Jill Stacey Stuchenko, age 35. All three were mothers who apparently worked in the sex trade industry.

‘’He had a good upbringing – everything was perfect, said Mr. Legebokoff’s grandfather, Roy Goodwin. ‘’I hunted with him. I fished with him. We did everything and he was a perfectly normal child. He was no different than you or I when we were younger.’’

When I read what Cody’s grandfather had to say, I could not help thinking that if his grandson started hunting as a boy, it would have been difficult for him to determine if he had any inclination towards cruelty to animals, which is usually a sign of things to come.

Loren’s best friend did not like Cody from the very beginning and had noticed a coldness in his eyes but aside from that, he was the typical small town jock.  It turns out that hindsight is not always 20/20.

His friends rallied around him ‘’Cody has always been in the wrong place at the wrong time, this could have been one of those moments,” wrote someone identifying themselves as CJRM on the website for CPKG-TV, the news channel in Prince George. “He is a great buddy of mine, and I wouldn’t hesitate for one seconde [sic] to get in a vehicle with him and go cruising. He was my two stepping partner nights we would go out dancing, I have seen him in bar fights and I have pissed that boy off a few good times, and not once had he ever shown any signs to lose his mind and kill me or anyone else.”

The ‘boys will be boys’ mentality is often very convenient to justify one’s idiosyncrasies.

But one of his friends admitted that Cody had disappeared for a few weeks right before Loren’s murder and never told them where he was.

One year after Loren’s murder, the RCMP held a conference to announce they had caught a homegrown serial killer in the person of Cody Alan Legebokoff. He was charged with three counts of first degree murder. His other victims had vanished in 2009 and 2010. And the police believed that he might have murdered other women. That meant he would have started his killing spree at age 19 which is very young for a serial killer.

They continued asking help from the public to try to get any information concerning the other missing girls.

Even if the community felt some relief, it was obvious that Cody was far too young to have been responsible for all the murders and disappearances in the area. Other killers were cruising the highway to pick up vulnerable girls and they had to be stopped.

Madison Scott went missing after the arrest of Legebokoff so investigators had to try to find clues about her killer.  Sgt. Wayne Clary was in charge of the investigation and he was determined to solve the case. Several people are convinced that Madison fell victim to a group of young people who showed up at her camping ground to party and not a serial killer cruising the highway.

Clary had to go through over 750 boxes of evidence with thousands of pages of documents; forensic reports, lab reports, witness interviews from all the cases linked to the area. Sixty thousand people had been interviewed and it was a massive undertaking but he knew the truth was buried there somewhere.

They had 1,400 persons of interest and a few of them were driving trucks with no handles on the inside and duct tape and plastic restraints. So imagine the task at hand and the many possibilities of men willing and able to commit this kind of crime against women.

The staggering endless wilderness where the attacks took place did not facilitate their job. How do you patrol and search such landscapes from the Interior all the way to the sea? They used helicopters to fly the 500 miles of highway where some of the missing had been laid to unrest. Clary declared the area ‘’the perfect killing and hunting ground” for predators.

The youngest victim of the Highway of Tears was Monica Jack who was 12 years-old. She disappeared in 1978 and was last seen riding her bike on the side of the road.

In April 1995, two men hunting moose off the main road discovered the remains of Ramona Wilson who had vanished from Smithers in 1994.

Tamara Chipman was 22 year-old when she went missing in 2006 and she left behind a 3 year-old son. Her father still deplores the fact that her body was never retrieved and that he could never know what really happened to her. He spent weeks searching all the logging roads to try to find his daughter but to no avail.

All of a sudden in 2012, the RCMP got a break in the case of Colleen MacMillan who disappeared in 1974 and the culprit was an American. Their task force had matched DNA recovered from Colleen’s clothing to Bobby Jack Fowler, a Texas native who had worked as a roofer in Prince George.

Her family had been waiting 38 years for some answers. The members of the task force were convinced that Fowler was probably responsible for 9 of the murders but they had to tie all the loose ends before claiming victory. Fowler was married with 4 children but his life was nomadic and he drove from motel to motel and town to town. That made it easy for him to pick up girls in bars or hitchhikers that he would sexually assault and murder. In his troubled mind, he believed they were ‘asking for it.’ He lived in 11 states from Texas to Oregon and Newport investigator Ron Benson looked into his past over there to try to establish links to some similar types of violent incidents.

The police believe he may have left another Highway of Tears in the US. Two girls left Beverly Beach State Park one night and came out on the highway where Fowler used to travel, and their bodies were found in the woods five months later in similar condition to the ones in BC. Benson believes Fowler might have committed as many as seven murders in Oregon.

The notorious case of a woman being attacked in an Oregon motel in 1995, led to the end of Fowler’s rampage. After being assaulted and tied up, the victim had jumped out of the motel window naked into the street. She had been lucky enough to escape her attacker. The police rushed to the motel and caught him packing and ready to flee the scene.  He was charged with assault and kidnapping. He died in prison in 2006 but his incarceration allowed the RCMP to make a DNA connection tying him to the MacMillan murder. Her family never had the satisfaction of seeing him brought to justice for the murder of Colleen but it allowed them to close this sinister chapter of their life.

Because Madison Scott disappeared long after Fowler died, it meant that there were one or several more predators roaming Highway 16. So far, the RCMP has been able to identify two serial killers but how many are still out there? It is of small comfort to the families of the victims still missing and not reassuring for the vulnerable girls still tempted to hit the road to get to their local destinations. It is very hard to instill fear in teenagers who by nature, often opt for their way or the highway.

For the RCMP, it is still a marathon they intend to pursue till the finish line on this spectacularly beautiful and haunting Highway of Tears.

”Out in the Backwoods down in the haller

Out in the backwoods working hard for a daller

In the backwoods, yeah we got it done rite

Work hard, play hard, hold my baby tight

Lordy have mersey

It’s a real good life in the backwoods”

by BJW Nashe

The George Zimmerman trial got off to a dramatic start when attorneys delivered opening salvos laced with jokes and profanity. Prosecutor John Guy’s first words to the jury were,  “Good morning,” followed immediately by a quotation of Zimmerman’s own words spoken just prior to the killing of Trayvon Martin: “Fucking punks. These assholes always get away.” Guy emphasized that “those were the words in that grown man’s mouth as he followed a seventeen-year-old boy.” To further drive home the point, Guy repeated the phrase “fucking punks” three times.

Zimmerman’s defense counsel Don West tried to counter by opening with a “knock knock” joke. “Knock knock… Who’s there?… George Zimmerman… George Zimmerman who?… Ah, good. You’re on the jury. West’s attempt at humor fell flat, and confused many of us. Zimmerman is no doubt hoping that West is a better attorney than he is a comedian. Louis C.K. will not be calling any time soon for tips on new material. West continued with a line of reasoning that presumed the sidewalk to be a weapon. How could Martin be considered “unarmed,” in other words, when he had the sidewalk at his disposal, which he could allegedly slam Zimmerman’s held against? With this kind of logic, we surely have nothing to fear.

Courtroom drama is nothing new. People have always enjoyed the theatricality of a good trial — especially highly publicized proceedings such as the State of Florida vs. George Zimmerman.The O.J. Simpson trial seemed to set a new standard for judicial entertainment in our era. Now more than ever — with cameras in the courtroom, feeding directly into our media-saturated culture — we expect pure conflict, raw emotion, surreal moments, strange outbursts, and just plain bad behavior. We seek the raw impact of reality TV, in all of its inglorious, trashy, and often ridiculous splendor.

In court, many Americans are more than happy to oblige. Compared to some of the recent antics seen in courtrooms across the country, the Zimmerman trial so far is rather tame. But there’s still plenty of time for scandal and drama to develop. Hopefully, reason will prevail amidst all of the antics. Meanwhile, consider the following bizarre incidents, which seem better suited to the Jerry Springer Show than to the Halls of Justice.

Nazi Dad in Court. Earlier this month, in the middle of a child custody battle, Heath Campbell decided to wear a Nazi uniform to court in New Jersey. Campbell was petitioning afamily court judge to allow him to see his youngest son. The father claims he lost custody of three older children because he gave them Nazi-inspired names. The state claims there is a history of violence in the home. Campbell was in the news back in 2008 when he raised a fuss because a supermarket refused to write his son’s name on a birthday cake; the kid’s name is “Adolf Hitler Campbell.” Asked whether his Nazi costume would help or harm his child custody case, Campbell replied, “If they’re good judges and they’re good people, they’ll look within, not what’s on the outside.”

Spastic Fits and Coprophilia in Court. On June 5, Tyler Lee Rodgers made a spectacle of himself in the Torrance courtroom where he was being tried for attempted murder. Rodgers ischarged with slashing a store clerk’s throat during a robbery in Manhattan Beach, California.  While three witnesses testified during the hour-long proceeding, Rodgers veered from appearing calm and composed, to rocking back and forth in his chair, demanding medication, smacking his forehead on the defense table, and then being unable or unwilling to rise and be escorted out of the courtroom. He kept repeating, “I want my radio.” The bailiff and deputy had to restrain and drag the spastic defendant off to a holding room. The District Attorney accused Rodgers of “putting on a show,” and pointed out that doctors had deemed the 19-year-old to be healthy and sane. Rodgers has a history of strange behavior in court. Last year, his trial was suspended for a psychiatric evaluation after he put feces on his face in the holding room. He also reportedly ate his own feces during a previous courtroom appearance. This is probably too much even for the Springer show. Other defendants must be wondering, if eating your own feces in court will not get you declared insane in Torrance, what will?

Courtroom Butt-Slap. Former NFL wide receiver Chad Johnson was reprimanded during an early June court appearance when he reached over to playfully whack his attorney on the rear end as they both stood in front of the judge. Johnson was at a hearing in Broward County Circuit Court after being charged with violating probation in regard to a domestic violence case. Johnson had reached a plea deal that would have kept him out of jail, in lieu of counseling and community service. One quick butt-slap in the courtroom, however, changed all of that. Judge Kathleen McHugh scolded the football star for goofing around in her courtroom, and sentenced him to 30 days in jail. There is no word on whether the attorney will file sexual harassment charges. Best to keep one’s hands to oneself in front of the judge!

Flipping the Bird in Court. Penelope Soto of Miami appeared to be struggling with anger management issues during a court appearance in February of this year. At one point she grew so agitated that she gave the judge the finger and blurted out, “Fuck you.” Judge Jorge Rodriguez-Chomat was not amused. He sent Soto to jail for 30 days on a contempt charge. Soto had been arrested for drug possession when she was allegedly found with Xanax. Her court hearing was only intended to determine the appropriate bail. But one thing led to another, the bird was flipped, the judge was irked, and Soto ended up spending time behind bars before her case was even heard. When Soto was subsequently released after apologizing to the judge, she explained that she was under the influence of alcohol and Xanax at the time of her outburst. Evidently the disinhibitory quality of these substances outweighed whatever calming effect they were supposed to induce!

Phone Sex in Court. American jurisprudence reached a new level of salaciousness when defense attorneys in the Jodi Arias murder trial played a lengthy phone sex recording for the jury. Among other things, the kinky conversation included the victim, Travis Alexander, telling Arias how he would like to tie her to a tree and sodomize her. The courtroom phone sex was a field day for the heavy-breathing press, but it failed to sway the jury in Arias’s favor. They found her guilty of first degree murder.

Defendant Punches Attorney in Court. In October 2012, Lamarcus Williamson of Charlotte, North Carolina, pleaded guilty to assault, robbery, and drug charges pertaining to an incident involving a female college student. When the judge announced a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison, Williamson turned and punched his defense attorney in the face. Despite being handcuffed, Williamson was still able to land a knockdown blow. This did nothing to improve his standing with the court. The judge tacked on some additional time to his sentence.

Refusing to Take the Oath. Last October, Otis Jackson Jr., the former General Sessions Court Clerk from Nashville, Tennessee, rejected an offer that could have led to the dismissal of official misconduct charges against him, preferring to go ahead and face trial. During the hearing, Jackson shocked the courtroom by initially refusing to raise his right hand and swear to tell the truth. Special Judge Walter Kurtz told Jackson: “In 30 years and six months, you’re the only person I’ve ever run across that refused to be sworn in court, which I find kind of odd and inexplicable.” After coaxing Jackson to go ahead and take the oath, and even threatening him  with contempt, the defendant simply stated: “I shouldn’t be here.” After several minutes of awkward drama, Jackson finally gave in, and said he would “do his best” to tell the truth.

Dazed and Confused, with Orange Hair. In July 2012, Batman shooter James Holmes made his first public appearance in a Colorado courtroom since his movie theater gun massacre. He looked strangely dazed and unresponsive, with his unruly hair still dyed bright reddish-orange. His demeanor alternated from a sleepy, nearly comatose expression, to a bizarre bug-eyed stare. According to Arapahoe County District Attorney Carol Chambers, there would be no information provided as to whether Holmes was on drugs or some kind of medication. Holmes was being held in solitary confinement and was brought to the courtroom via an underground tunnel. He was also wearing a bullet-proof vest.

The Judge is Packing Heat. In February 2012, a Superior Court Judge in Lumpkin County, Georgia, shocked the courtroom when he pulled out his pistol and brandished it in order to“make a rhetorical point.” Judge David Barrett was presiding over a case in which a woman brought charges of rape and aggravated assault against a former sheriff’s deputy from Fall County. When the victim took the stand to testify, Barrett told her that she was “killing her case” because she wasn’t cooperating fully. The judge then pulled out his gun and pretended to hand it over to her, reportedly telling her, “You might as well shoot your lawyer.” The District Attorney objected and approached the bench to ask the judge to put the gun down. Now that’s what I call a trial. It should be noted that Georgia law allows judges to carry concealed handguns in the courtroom, but it’s a crime to point a gun at another person if there’s no reason to do so.

Rage Against the Machine. In 2007, Anthony Viscussi from Everett, Washington, found himself in a Snohomish County courtroom facing charges of assaulting a woman. He displayed such bizarre behavior, including angry outbursts and screaming at witnesses, that the judge had to have him removed to a holding room, and then strapped to a chair so he could be wheeled in and out of the courtroom. Viscussi was also forced to wear netting over his head and a mask over his face, Hannibal Lecter-style, to prohibit him from spitting at corrections officers. In jail, officers reportedly needed to don riot gear in Viscussi’s presence. Pepper spray was often used to subdue him during his violent rages. A psychologist testified that Viscussi suffers from schizophrenia exacerbated by methamphetamine use. We might sympathize, were it not for the fact that he was accused of beating a woman with a metal rod in front of her 6 year-old son.

by JJ Rogers

I was born in Clarkston, Washington and grew up across the Snake River in Lewiston, Idaho.  The two cities are located in a deep valley at the confluence of the Clearwater and Snake Rivers.  They are not large cities and they didn’t traditionally experience the horrors of serial killers that metropoleis are known for.  That is, until the late 70’s and early 80’s when I was in my teens. That’s when everything changed.  That’s when one man, filled with loathing and complete disregard for human life, selected a series of girls and young women as the objects of his dark desires.

Every spring the Valley filled with excitement in anticipation of the Asotin County Fair, which was held on the Snake River just north of both cities. Everyone who possibly could attended. It was April 28, 1979. I was there. So was Christina White, a 12-year-old child.

At some point during the day Christina felt ill from the early spring heat, and her mother suggested she get a damp towel to cool herself down.  Christina went to her friend’s house, where she was apparently given a wet towel and also used the phone.  She reportedly called her mother, but no one knows what was said. After that, Christina was never seen again.  No one saw her leave the house at 503 2nd Avenue — she simply vanished.  The home belonged to Patricia Brennan, Lance Voss’s girlfriend.  Lance and Patricia were married 26 months later on July 24, 1981.

For the next two years the rumors concerning Christina White’s death swirled like eddies in the mighty Snake River. These rumors created fear in our closely connected region of small towns and cities. For the first time in our lives, our parents admonished us not to walk alone and began locking our doors, even in the daytime.

Kristen David

Then it happened again. It was unthinkable but it happened. On June 26, 1981, 22-year-old Kristen David vanished while riding her bike between Moscow and Lewiston-Clarkston.  About a week later, the dismembered body of the 22-year-old University of Idaho student was found in the Snake River. The rumors spread fast that her dismembered body parts were found in plastic bags floating down the river.

Then in September 1982 it happened a third time. Three people turned up missing who were last seen at, or near, the Lewiston Civic Theatre, where Kristen David, the dismembered biker, had once worked. These three victims were 21-year-old Kristina Nelson, her stepsister, 18-year-old Brandi Miller and Former Air Force Cpl. Steven Pearsall who was 35.

On her last evening on earth, Sept. 12, 1982, Kristina left a note in her apartment for her boyfriend indicating that she and Brandi were going downtown to do some grocery shopping at the Safeway store.  A logical route downtown would have taken them by the Civic Theatre.

Steven Pearsall

Steven Pearsall, 35, worked as a janitor there — he and Lance Voss had recently helped build a pirate ship that rolled on a dolly complete with several ropes for actors playing pirates to slide down.  Steven’s girlfriend dropped him off at the theater around midnight on Sept. 12th. Steven’s plan was to practice his music.  He may have walked in while Kristina and Brandi were being attacked. Steven was never seen again, nor was he ever considered a suspect. He is presumed dead.

The bodies of stepsisters Kristina Nelson and Brandi Miller were found 18 months later in March of 1984 at the bottom of a steep embankment near the community of Kendrick, along with rope that is presumed to have been “borrowed” from the Civic Theater’s pirate ship that Steven and Lance had built together.

The authorities noted that three of the four female victims had similar names: Kristin, Christina and Kristina, and that all three were about the same height.

One person of interest was interrogated by the police, twice. That person of interest was Lance Jeffrey Voss, a big man standing 6’ 5” and weighing roughly 200 lbs. Voss was not only seen at the theater, but actually admitted to being there at the time of the murders, working on the pirate ship for the play with the missing Steven. Voss had also, of course, dated (and later married) Patricia Brennan, the owner the house on 2^nd Avenue where the 12-year-old Asotin girl, Christina White, was last seen alive. In addition, Voss admitted that he often drove the same route taken by 22-year-old Kristen David when she met her grisly fate.

Lance is quoted as stating, “I was in the theater, but asleep; yes, I just saw Kristina.” 

Lewiston authorities believe the same person killed Christina White, Kristin David, Kristina Nelson, Brandy Miller, and Steven Pearsall.  One Lewiston Police Captain went as far as to say he’s “99 percent certain” who the killer is.  But law enforcement doesn’t believe they can prove who the killer is in a court of law. Lance Jeffrey Voss moved back to the East Coast and no similar murders have occurred since he left town. It’s no secret that authorities want to bring formal charges against him, but to this day, they have taken no action.

Voss is a self-proclaimed survivalist who enjoys listening to Rush Limbaugh.  Here is a quote by Voss that I came across while I was researching the case. Hunting is of course very popular in our part of the world but Voss’s quote is certainly not something we would expect a hunter to say:

“By the way, don’t neglect edged tools/weapons in your survival kit.  After you’ve shot your dinner rabbit, preparation is much easier if you don’t have to gut it with a rock.  It can be done, but it’s not fun.”

This case is still open and surfaces from time to time in the Valley. Many of us grew up hearing, telling and re-telling this awful tale and much as we would like to, these are murders we cannot forget.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

We all have folks that we look up to. In some cases, that respect may evolve into adulation and the desire to emulate. For example, how many latter-day schoolboy rock musicians grew up admiring giants such as Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton? The answer is: lots of them. As a fledgling singer-songwriter, in my youth, I admired Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Van “the Man” Morrison. I still do today though my admiration is no longer white-hot.

In the case of John LaDue, the 17-year-old Minnesota wannabe mass murderer, it’s too bad that his natural teenage desire to find and acknowledge heroes was not limited to guitar greats.

He certainly appears to have had a least a modicum of talent and was apparently considered a friendly, albeit shy, kid.

“John was normal in every aspect,” his guitar teacher, Ryan Lano, told the Star-Tribune. “He loved music and his guitar and did really well. He was polite and said thank you after every lesson.”

Although apparently no one has come forward with the names of the musicians LaDue admired, we know precisely which mass school murderers this enigmatic fellow looked up to.

His 180-page “Mass Murderer in the Making” journal is full of details from other school massacres like Sandy Hook and Columbine and it reveals how much LaDue revered Columbine killers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. And, we should not overlook the fact that Klebold and Harris cut rather rakish adolescent figures with their cool hair and clothes and generally anti attitude.

Maybe it’s a good thing LaDue wasn’t way cool and with it in attitude and appearance – if he had been it’s entirely possible that Chelsie Schellhas, the mother who turned him in after spotting him crossing her backyard somewhat mysteriously on his way to his storage unit carrying a backpack, might have thought he was simply the slightly weird loner with the good hair that nobody could quite figure out and that crossing her backyard on his way to the storage unit carrying a backpack was just the sort of thing weird cool kids did to be different.

Officers nabbed the unhinged 11th-grader Tuesday after a tipster reported seeing LaDue skulking in and out of a storage unit where he kept many of his materials.

The caller, Chelsie Schellhas, told the Star-Tribune she had been washing dishes when she looked up and spotted the teen lugging a backpack through her backyard.

“He walked through the puddles when there was a perfectly good road he could have walked on,” she told the newspaper.

“It just didn’t seem right to me because we see people come and go with their trucks, and they don’t come on foot and cut through people’s back yards. It was like he was blatantly trying not to be seen.”

Schellhas said she called the cops after LaDue took a long time opening the unit, leading her to believe he was breaking in.

Three cops found LaDue at the unit at about 7:30 p.m.

A search of the storage unit revealed ammunition boxes, explosive chemicals, a pressure-cooker, steel ball bearings and gunpowder.

It is reported that the 11th-grader said he planned to go to Waseca Junior and Senior High School during lunchtime, where he would toss Molotov cocktails and explode pressure-cooker bombs.

LaDue later told police he would have shot at the officers if he had a gun on him.

*     *     *     *     *

During a press conference Thursday, Waseca Police Capt. Kris Markeson said LaDue was “fully prepared” to carry out the massacre at Waseca Junior and Senior High School and had amassed an arsenal of bombs, assault rifles, handguns and ammo, the Mankato Free Press reported.

Capt. Markeson said that he believes LaDue would have carried out his murderous plot “just because of the amount of preparation and thought he put into this.”

Pat Pfeiffer of the Star Tribune writes:

LaDue had reportedly planned and practiced for 10 months, refining the chemicals in his bombs to try to find a more lethal combination. He set off “practice bombs” on various playgrounds. Some of those bombs were found in March, raising concerns.

The criminal complaint said LaDue told police that he originally planned the attack for April 20, the anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre that killed 13 people in Littleton, Colo., in 1999.

That was thwarted because that day was Easter Sunday and there was no school.

Markeson said police believe the attack would have happened “within the next few weeks” if it hadn’t been for an alert 911 caller who grew suspicious after she saw a tall, white male wearing a backpack open a storage unit, go inside and close the door.

During the search, the following items turned up:

three completed bombs,

an SKS assault rifle,

a Beretta 9-mm handgun,

hundreds of rounds of ammo and

a safe with several other guns.

 In chilling detail, a notebook detailed the plan:

first he would kill his parents and

then he would start a fire in a rural area outside of town to distract first responders.

And of course the obligatory Murderer’s Handbook, in this case a 180-page journal dedicated to his Colorado heroes and the events they spawned and participated in — Sandy Hook and Columbine.

Locals in the southern Minnesota town of Waseca were either nonplussed or scared. His guitar teacher described John LaDue as a polite boy who did well in school and had plenty of friends.

“It’s just too scary to put in words,” said a local Waseca parent to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

“Everybody in town feels sick to their stomach. Scared,” said the mother, who didn’t want her name used. “There were tears today.”

As the photos of the boy began to trickle out Thursday, the whole thing seemed unlikely yet all too real. He appeared to be a typical Minnesota teen who liked deer hunting and playing the guitar. In one photo he’s posing with a gun and what appears to be a live deer.

LaDue was apparently good at hiding the kiss of death that had invaded his being. He was described as a nice kid, on the shy side, who got good grades and had plenty of friends,“normal in every aspect.”

LaDue is being held at a juvenile facility in Red Wing.

The felony charges include attempted murder and bomb possession. The authorities believe that he sought to spill the blood of “as many students as he could.”

*     *     *     *     *

What was once simply unfathomably bad is now an unfathomably bad habit. “Monkey see, monkey do” reigns supreme among a small number of supremely disaffected youth. There could be one of these lethal specimens in any of our towns. The curse of Klebold and Harris has infected their acolytes; Lanza was the most successful among them.

LaDue was infected by this curse.

What is fascinating is the way these peculiar anti-social beings, whose inclination seems to be to hate both themselves and others, are in a sense compelled to follow a long slow trajectory of building up to the supreme sacrifice of the mass killing. It takes time to build the arsenal piece by treasured piece. This peculiar fetishistic aspect of the mass killer’s vision is evident as he constructs his plan brick-by-brick – in his mind and on his computer and in his Handbook, and most importantly, in his collection of instruments of human destruction.

LaDue’s plan was approaching its climax but it was stopped because a woman in her kitchen tipped off the police that a suspicious looking fellow was crossing her backyard walking through the mud buddles carrying a backpack on his way to the storage facility. This was a lucky break for everyone and in a sense it was lucky for LaDue also. Despite everything, there is no blood on his hands.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Every time I hear of a Good Samaritan coming to the aid of a crime victim, I bask in the milk of human kindness and find myself thinking that maybe the world isn’t such a bad place after all. But I’m also very aware that every time you step up to the plate to try and help a crime victim in need, you are placing yourself in an indeterminate amount of jeopardy. After all, criminals who strong-arm, rape or rob folks, oftentimes in public places, are far from the most trustworthy folks coming down the pike.

And, as the man of the house (allegedly), I’ve been asked a time or two by my wife and daughter what I would do if one of them was assaulted by the bad guy from hell and I always tell them that I would lay down my own life to save them if it became necessary, and I think I’m sincere when I say that.

But, of course, you never truly know how you will respond to such a high-stakes challenge until you are actually confronted by one.

During the past few days, we have two disturbing stories – one from California and one from Virginia  — in which good Samaritans WERE KILLED as they tried to aid crime victims. In the California case, the Good Sam was a stranger who just happened to be passing by as the victim was robbed and stabbed by the suspect who was later arrested. In the Virginia case, the Good Sam was the 8-year-old brother of the victim, a 12-year-old girl who was raped by a stranger.

CBS Los Angeles reports:

An Inland Empire man Sunday chased down a purse thief who stabbed a mother in a parking lot, only to be stabbed himself.

Troy Cansler, of Yucaipa, died from his injuries.

The Good Samaritan’s wife is still trying to make sense of it.

“He didn’t think about what might happen. He always thought he was invincible,” Cansler’s wife, Autum, said. “I always thought he was pretty invincible, too…but he wasn’t. But that was pretty heroic what he did.”

According to the police, the attack occurred Sunday night in a parking lot on the 33000 block of Yucaipa Boulevard in the hot town of Yucaipa. (I say ‘hot town’ because Yucaipa, like all Inland Empire communities, is deadly hot much of the year.)

The robbery victim was a young mother with a 2-year-old child. Like many of us do when we are unloading items from our cars, the mom had put her purse down on the roof of her car when the thief snatched it. She confronted him and he stabbed her with a knife.

Mr. Troy Cansler happened along just as the robbery was occurring. He apparently confronted the thief who fled, with Cansler in hot pursuit. The precise interaction between the two men when Cansler caught up with the thief is unclear, but things went South very quickly and he was fatally stabbed during the altercation.  

“He died a hero, knowing that he did something good, and that he saved two people, not only one, by taking his own life. And that’s the ultimate thing you can do,” Cansler’s daughter Jordyn Glazier said.

The mother Cansler helped save is already home from the hospital and is recovering.

As for The Prick (now known more formally as the suspect), the police were able to track him down in a nearby bar after the attacks.

What a freakin’ moron! First he robs and stabs a mother with a baby. Then he stabs and kills the Good Sam. Then he hides in a nearby bar, as if that was going to fly. I’m curious what he was drinking.

“I just want to know why. Why would they want to rob a woman with a baby? What did they think they were going to get from her?” Autum Cansler said.

Jordyn Glazier says she’s trying to stay strong: “I just ask for everyone that knows me and that sees me on here that they just give me hope when I go back to school.”

*     *     *     *     *

The second case of a Good Sam going down hard comes to us out of Richmond, Virginia. Arden Dier of the Newser staff writes:

A gut-wrenching case out of Richmond, Virginia, though the details remain murky: Family members say an 8-year-old boy was killed via a rock or brick to the head when he tried to fight off a teen who was sexually assaulting his 12-year-old sister. The siblings were playing near railroad tracks in their backyard last night when, relatives say, a teenage boy attacked the girl, WRIC reports.

“From what I understand, the sister was raped and (the brother) tried to save her,” the children’s aunt says, per the New York Daily News. “And he was hit in the head with a brick and killed.”

After the rape, the girl was spotted running out of the woods naked and bleeding. The victim initially gave police a false description of her attacker as a white man with facial hair – according to the police because the suspect threatened her before fleeing. Law enforcement eventually tracked down a black, teenage male, WWBT reports.

“Nobody expects something like this to happen to the babies in their family,” says a relative. As for the young girl, “She’s just traumatized.”

*     *     *     *     *

These cases demonstrate the danger of opting to be Good Sam with all the force of a locomotive flashing through town. And yet, suppose none of us ever found the courage to step up help others when they are besieged by (un)common criminals? What kind of a world would we live in then?

My heart goes out to this week’s two Good Sams who, sadly, will not only be mourned by their friends and families until hell freezes over, but even worse, will never again be able to reach down deep at that moment of truth when help is on the way but only if you have the courage to bring it.

compiled by Patrick H. Moore

While sleuthing around online, searching for new information on the San Diego County Brittany Killgore sado-masochism murder case (Killgore is a strange name for someone who was apparently kidnapped, tortured, raped and murdered), I came across the strange saga of Mark “Gator” Rogowski, a vertical skating wizard who once electrified the skateboarding world.  Gator, in an throes of extreme jealousy and mis-directed rage, murdered Jessica Bergsten, a woman he hadn’t talked with in years, when he was really mad at his ex-girlfriend Brandi McClain for dumping him for another man.  An odd twist to the story is the fact that Rogowski had become a born again Christian not long before he murdered Ms. Bergsten.  In fact, the case was cracked because he made a full confession to a “spiritual advisor” at his church.  Rogowski is currently being held at Men’s Colony in California.  He has been in prison since 1992 and will not be up for parole again until 2018.

In a 2012 article available at the COMPLEX SPORTS website,  entitled “The 50 Most Infamous Criminals in Sports History,” Sean Evans gives Gator credit for being the eighth most notorious criminal in the annals of sport.

Sport: Skateboarding
Criminal History: Rape, murder
Time Behind Bars: Currently serving a 31-year sentence

The MURDERPEDIA website provides an in-depth analysis of the deranged Gator and his slide into infamy, some of which we are excerpting here.  And remember, converting to Christianity may not rescue a truly troubled soul.

MURDERPEDIA writes:

Gator’s popularity began to wane as the vert skating of the 1980s gave way to street skating in the 1990s. Gator began to struggle with the harsh reality of being a former “icon”. He converted to a strict Evangelical form of Christianity and changed his name to “Gator” Mark Anthony, saying Rogowski was the name of his father, whom he never really knew. At the same time, Gator had mounting problems with alcohol and drugs.

When his addictions began to take control, his mental issues began to show. When he had began getting into his Christian studies (due partly to an accident in Germany, and mostly to an ex-surfer turned street minister who lived near him in California), as always, he dove in head first, and alienated his girlfriend Brandi (who soon left him, due to his new found beliefs in celibacy before marriage), his fans, and his fellow skaters.

Rogowski said he had considered seeking psychiatric help at the time for his problems, but the born-again Christian sect he was involved with discouraged this, seeing psychiatry as the work of the devil and telling him that Jesus could solve his problems.

After Brandi had left him, Mark became obssessively jealous: breaking into her home to steal the things he had given her, calling her new boyfriend’s home with threats, and threatening Brandi directly. Brandi reported his behavior to the police, who produced a report but did little to follow up.

One fateful night Gator got a call from Bergsten (whom he had not spoken to in years) out of the blue, saying she wanted him to show her around San Diego, as she was moving to California. They spent a day together, shortly after which Bergsten was reported missing.

According to Rogowski, as she was putting on her shoes behind a couch and preparing to leave on March 21, 1991, he had come up behind her and hit her in the head with The Club (a metal auto theft device which locks the steering column).

After knocking her semi-unconscious by way of multiple strikes to her face and upper skull, he dragged her to his bedroom on the 2nd floor and raped her for hours (it’s been speculated to be 2-3 hours). He said he had done the worst things sexually he could think of as he was venting all of his misplaced anger into her.

After hours of rape, he placed her in a surfboard bag because she had begun to get louder and he was concerned about the neighbors hearing the noise, placing his hand over her mouth until she stopped breathing. He then drove out to the desert to bury her body in shallow grave.

A few weeks later, her body was found, but because of the state of decomposition, her identity remained unknown. Plagued by guilt, Rogowski confessed what he had done to his ‘spiritual advisor,’ the aforementioned ex-surfer turned born-again Christian, who encouraged him to confess his crime to the police – which Rogowski did, waiving his legal rights.

The police searched his home and found evidence of massive blood loss, soaked through the carpet padding and into the floorboards in two fairly small spots adjacent to where her head had rested.

by Patrick H. Moore

For two almost magical weeks in February of 1993, Karla Homolka’s actions — although not exactly care-free — were still those of a woman determined to wring every ounce of pleasure out of life. Even while placing her fate in the hands of Canadian law enforcement and her very able lawyer, George Walker, Karla managed to have a torrid love affair (or should we say torrid sexual assignation?) with her Brampton boyfriend Jim Hutton, a handsome young man who bore more than a passing resemblance to Paul Bernardo and even drove the same model vehicle.

As February proceeded on its irrevocable march toward springtime, Karla very gradually appears to have grasped – albeit reluctantly — the ironclad fact that “reality was bound to bite” and that no matter what she did, and no matter how skillfully George Walker negotiated with the Crown, she would inevitably have to sign a plea agreement that, however “sweet”, would still require her to serve a number of years in a Canadian prison.

In the days following Paul Bernardo’s highly-publicized arrest on February 17th, Karla, for the first time since escaping Bernardo’s clutches after a particularly brutal battering in early January, showed all the signs of someone either having– or about to have — a nervous breakdown. The fact that Jim Hutton refused to have anything to do with her probably didn’t help. She began drinking even more heavily than usual and went into a un-Karla like tailspin, prompting George Walker to slow the merry-go-round down by postponing the signing of her plea agreement while she checked into Northwestern General Hospital for psychiatric treatment.

Karla checked into Northwestern General Hospital on March 4, 1993 and stayed there for the next seven weeks. During this period, she consumed copious amounts of psychotropic medications and plenty of painkillers, not to mention alcohol which her family and friends smuggled in to her. She also– in her devious manner– appears to have confused her psychiatrists who, at this juncture. seemed content to view her as more victim than victimizer.

While at Northwestern, however, Karla did take one key step toward “coming clean.” She wrote a letter to her parents and her surviving sister Lori in which she – to a degree – described the part she had played in her sister Tammy’s death.

Dear Mom, Dad and Lori, April 13, 1993

This is the hardest letter I’ve ever had to write and you’ll probably all hate me once you read it. I’ve kept this inside myself for so long and I just can’t lie to you any more. Both Paul and I are responsible for Tammy’s death. Paul was “in love” with her and wanted to have sex with her. He wanted me to help him. He wanted me to get sleeping pills from work to drug her with. He threatened me and physically and emotionally abused me when I refused. No words I can say can make you understand what he put me through. So stupidly I agreed to do as he said. But something, maybe the combination of drugs and the food she ate that night caused her to vomit. I tried so hard to save her. I am so sorry. But no words I can say can bring her back I would gladly give my life for hers. I don’t expect you to ever forgive me, for I will never forgive myself.

Karla — XOXO

Eleven days after writing the letter, Karla was discharged from Northwestern Hospital on April 24, 1993. A few days later, she was seen by her family physician, a Dr. Plaskos, who noted that she had gained 15 pounds and was on a variety of medications.

Inasmuch as Karla’s shared responsibility for Tammy’s “accidental” death was now out in the open, the Crown prosecutor Murray Segal insisted on adding two more years to her plea deal, bringing the total – prior to any good time reduction – to the infamous 12 years. Of course, at that time, it was anticipated that even with the 12 year sentence, Karla would only actually serve 52 months, a belief that ultimately proved to be false. The good news for Karla was that the Crown agreed that no new charges would be brought.

On May 5, 1993, George Walker received official notification that the Crown was offering Karla the12-year plea bargain. She was given one week to sign the now notorious document. The Crown informed Walker —  who dutifully informed Karla — that if she declined to sign, she would be charged with two counts of first-degree-murder for the death of Kristen French and Lynn Mahaffey, one count of second-degree-murder for sister Tammy’s death, and other unspecified crimes which would probably have included various counts of rape or aiding and abetting rape. Walker accepted the offer and Karla reluctantly gave her approval. The plea agreement was finalized on May 14, 1993. Coinciding with the agreement was the understanding that Karla would fully disclose all of her involvement in the murders and associated crimes in proffer sessions with police investigators.

On that same day, Karla and her mother Dorothy traveled to Whitby, Ontario where the provincial government had rented two full floors of a Journey’s End Motel for the meetings, the purpose of which included videotaping “induced and cautioned” statements from Karla which were to correspond with her plea agreement.

Although the specific details of the 3-day rendezvous do not appear to be readily available, the meeting appears to have proceeded apace and the statements were completed and formalized on May 17th.

The Bond Conditions:

The following day, Paul Bernardo was formally charged with two counts of first-degree-murder, and an array of other charges including kidnapping, unlawful confinement, aggravated sexual assault and one count of dismemberment. Karla was charged with a mere two counts of manslaughter. She was released on a $110,000 bond and was given a strict list of 22 conditions to follow which included the following:

She was required to contact Insp. Bevan at least once per day; she was required to inform law enforcement one hour before leaving her home; and she was only allowed out under the supervision of one of her family members. Also, she was not allowed to drink “excessive’ amounts of alcohol, whatever that means.

The Notorious Videotapes:

Coincidentally, it was on May18th that Bernardo’s lawyer, Ken Murray, first watched the notorious “home movie” videotapes. Murray, who was not an experienced criminal defense lawyer, along with co-counsel Carolyn MacDonald, made the potentially unlawful decision to maintain possession of the tapes in order to use them to impeach Karla on the witness stand during Bernardo’s trial. This, of course, could easily be construed as withholding evidence. Between May and October of 1993, Murray and his associates studied over 4,000 case-related documents. Murray has stated he was willing to hand over the tapes to the Crown if they would let him cross-examine Karla at the anticipated preliminary hearing, which, it turned out, was never held.

Karla’s plea bargain had been signed, sealed and delivered before the contents of the videotapes were available for the Crown to review, which certainly contributed to the almost universal belief that Karla was getting off far too easily. Anne McGillivray, an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Manitoba explains that the continuing public antagonism against Karla is partly based on the widespread belief that she had known where the videotapes were hidden, that she had willfully concealed the Jane Doe incidents, and, most centrally, that her claims of being under Bernardo’s control – a central tenet of the plea bargain – were dubious at best. The flames of speculation were fanned by the sealing of Karla’s plea agreement which continued until Bernardo’s trial.

Although many believe that the contents of the videotapes would have almost certainly led to a conviction of murder for Homolka, an inquiry into the conduct of the Crown prosecutors found their behavior “professional and responsible” and the “resolution agreement” that they had established with Homolka “unassailable” under the Criminal Code of Canada. Judge Patrick T. Galligan, reporting to the Attorney General on the matter, stated that in his opinion “the Crown had no alternative but to …[negotiate with the accomplice] in this case” as “the ‘lesser of two evils’ to deal with an accomplice rather than to be left in a situation where a violent and dangerous offender (could not) be prosecuted.” Thus, they really were stuck between the proverbial “rock and a hard place.” Without Karla’s cooperation, Canadian law enforcement would not have been able to prosecute and convict Paul Bernardo.

Karla’s Going-Away Party:

After chafing under her bail restrictions for several weeks, Karla received a short reprieve in the form of an informal “Going Away Party” in her honor thrown on June 6, 1993. Reporters hung around watching hoping to get some good shots of Karla “letting her hair down.” A neighbor or friend was reportedly heard telling Karla:

“Oh what the heck, the girls are dead, you can’t bring them back, why not party.” The reporters were eventually asked to leave because they made the revelers nervous.

The following day, Karla appeared at the St. Catharines courthouse to set a trial date.

On June 10th, sister Lori, Dorothy and Karla, along with George Walker, met with the Warden of Kingston’s Prison for Women to discuss the final details of her incarceration including transportation. Their appointment was wrapped up with a tour of the facilities.

One week later, Sergeant Bob Gillies escorted Karla to Lake Gibson where she pointed out the general area where she thought Paul had tossed the power saw that was used to dismember Leslie Mahaffy. After that, they went on a tour of Bayview Drive during which Karla – with her usual flair for the dramatic – was costumed as a schoolgirl. Karla identified personal belongings that she wanted to repossess and pointed out where Kristen French had vomited on the carpet, a concrete detail that law enforcement could use as biological evidence linking Kristen to the house and to Paul Bernardo.

Karla’s Trial:

After another three weeks of unrelenting restrictions, Karla’s trial began on June 28, 1993. The first three days were consumed by the media’s fight against a publication ban. Lawyers for Karla, Bernardo, the victims and their families, and the media, all argued intensely.

There is no doubt that Karla’s trial had a media circus atmosphere about it. Burnside and Cairns described the defendant:

“Karla sat impassively, wearing a green jacket over a one piece green dress that seemed oversized and somehow too broad for her slender shoulders. On her feet were black shoes with a slight heel. Unlike her court appearance a month earlier, when she wore a schoolgirl’s tartan kilt and blazer, Karla now looked somewhat matronly. Yet her clothes were out of place with the false eyelashes, deep-red lipstick, and heavily caked foundation on her face. If she was matronly, then she was a matronly Lolita.”

On July 2, 1993, court proceedings were adjoined for the long holiday weekend celebrating Canada Day.

Four days later, Presiding Judge Francis Kovacs ruled that the Canadian media could remain in the courtroom but were not allowed to publish anything but the following:

1) The contents of the indictment.

2) Whether there was a joint submssion as to sentence.

3) Whether a conviction was registered but not the plea.

4) The sentence imposed. (Copied from the archives of theToronto Star, July 6, 1993 edition)

The American press were ushered out and the public was not admitted. The remaining reporters sat in shock as the details of the crimes were read into evidence. Up until this point, no one knew any of the details; there had only been speculation, and a ton of rumors had been swirling all over the internet.

Karla was sentenced to 12 years on July 19th. She was then immediately transported to the Canadian Prison For Women (P4W) in Kingston where she would spend the next few weeks in the prison hospital. She was designated as a medium security prisoner.

In a rather macabre addition to an already bizarre set of proceedings, on July 20, 1993,Tammy-Lyn Homolka’s body was exhumed with formal permission given by her parents the day after Karla’s sentencing. The area around the grave site was cordoned off to keep the media at bay; it took four hours to get the casket out of the ground and the body was taken directly to the Coroner’s Office in Toronto for examination. Under direct orders from the Homolka’s, everything pertaining to Paul and Karla, except for one necklace, was removed from the coffin. Tammy was once again laid to rest that evening at 9:00 pm.

On August 3, 1993, Karla was transferred from the prison infirmary to a segregated section of Kingston Prison to spend her first night in the cell that was to be her new home.

In our next installment, we will examine Karla’s life at Kingston Prison for Women.

Note: Many of the factual details of the above post are based on Stephen Williams’ excellent book on the Karla Homolka case, “Invisible Darkness”. The interpretations of these facts are the work of Patrick H. Moore.

Click on the following links to read previous Karla posts:

Watching Karla Homolka: Karla Stacks the Deck

Karla Homolka Psychological Evaluation, Part One: Abuse Victim or Just Plain Evil?

Watching Karla Homolka: It’s a Family Affair

Was Karla Homolka a Normal Child? The Answer Is a Resounding No

Is Karla Homolka the Most Hated Woman in North America?

The Karla Homolka Files: A U.S. Perspective on Karla Homolka’s Plea Bargain

Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo: Canada’s Most Notorious Serial Killer Case

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

There may come a time in the life of any married person when the husband, wife, or same-sex partner considers garroting the other party. Generally, this is a short-lived fantasy and the aggrieved partner either divorces the unacceptable “other” or simply adjusts his or her expectations and carries on.

But as we all know, there are cases in which the aggrieved partner simply cannot banish the homicidal thoughts and ultimately throws caution to the wind and…

The amazing thing about these cases is the fact that more often than not, the “killer spouse” whacks the partner with no real thought of how to dispose of the body or otherwise construct a reasonable alibi.

Thus, the killer’s “victory” is short-lived because he or she is typically arrested within days or hours of eliminating his or her nemesis spouse.

This would appear to be what happened in the case of a 47-year-old Tunisian husband and father who received a lifetime prison sentence on Thursday for torturing his wife before slitting her throat in a Fribourg, Switzerland apartment because, among other things, she “did not know how to cook couscous”.

The killing occurred four years ago in April. By this point the couple had been separated for some time. The husband, a former accountant with the Tunisian Embassy in Bern, had arrived with his wife in Switzerland from Tunisia in 1999. At some point, their relationship soured and the husband lost his job. Unemployed, he resorted to heavy drinking.

One of the routine consequences of separation is the fact that either estranged partner may well become involved in a little extra-curricular bedroom activity. It’s just one of those things that – your wishes notwithstanding – you are powerless to change. In this case, the husband became convinced that his estranged spouse was sleeping with another man. Whether he had any proof is unclear, but he became extremely jealous of his wife and – in rationalizing his decision to kill her – convinced himself of three things, any one of which may or may not be true. The husband’s accusations were (1) infidelity; (2) the wife not looking after their two daughters, who were 9 and 12 at the time of the murder, properly; and (3) she was incapable of cooking couscous.

Clearly, the third alleged sin must have figured most prominently in the husband’s mind. After all, what good is a significant other who cannot cook couscous?

Although the sentencing judge stated that the husband acted with “methodical sangfroid” in the preparations he made to kill his wife, by the moment of truth, his deliberate step-by-step approach had transformed itself into a towering rage which, according to media reports, led him to attack his wife so savagely that she could only be identified through dental records.

According to the 20 Minutes newspaper, it was revealed in Court that after tying his wife to a bed, the man gagged her and stabbed her in the back 15 times before shooting her in the face with an air gun. He then strangled the woman, who was seven years his junior, before cutting her throat with a knife. (Somewhere along the line, he also apparently raped her).

While stating that there were no extenuating circumstances, the judge managed to hold, at least to some degree, to his theory of “methodical sangfroid”, stating that the convicted murderer had displayed “barbarism, cruelty and determination” in his actions.

The man’s actions following the brutal slaying probably didn’t help his cause much in the eyes of the judge or anyone else. According to court testimony, he washed up and changed, and later shared a meal with his daughters, at which time he told his two children that “their mother was out.” 

Then in a eerie and unsettling gesture, that night the man laid next to the body of his blood-drenched ex before turning himself into Fribourg cantonal police the next day.

The man’s two daughters, who are now 13 and 16, have been turned into orphans in a country where they have no other family.

The father was ordered by the court to pay each of the girls 80,000 francs in damages.

The fact that the father has received a life sentence, means that under Swiss law, he will be able to request conditional release after serving 15 years.

He has already spent four years in detention.

The man’s lawyer, had argued earlier that while his client’s acts were “monstrous” the man should not be considered a monster. The lawyer also stated that he likely would be appealing the sentence.

Just to add a little melodrama, the case has attracted Swiss media attention, not just because of its lurid details, but because the accused believed he was being followed by secret police of then Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidene Ben Ali.

*     *     *     *     *

So let’s just suppose that the husband becomes a model prisoner and does get out on conditional release 11 years from now. Not a bad day’s work in a sense. Not only did he get to enjoy what we must assume was for him the immense satisfaction of murdering in ex in most brutal fashion, but if things go well for him, he’ll be released from prison two years prior to turning 60.

by BJW Nashe

A Comeback. J.D. Salinger, who died in January of 2010, is now poised to make a posthumous literary comeback. A probing biography released earlier this year sheds new light on the enigmatic author, whose life has been largely shrouded in mystery. After catapulting to fame in the 1950s, Salinger famously decided to retreat from public life. For nearly five decades, he lived as a New England recluse, closely guarding his privacy, shunning the spotlight of fame, and publishing no new material after 1965. His fans wondered whether he had given up on writing altogether. Now we know that he never gave up; he was writing new material all the time during his long silence. As many as five new books will be published during the next few years. For personal reasons, Salinger stipulated that none of this work be published until after his death.

A Strange Career. Salinger’s life as a great American writer was eccentric in many ways. By far the strangest aspect of his career is the way in which his most successful work, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), was linked to several notorious crimes in the 1980s: the murder of John Lennon, the attempted assassination of President Reagan, and the slaying of actress Rebecca Schaeffer. In each case, news reports informed us that the perpetrator had been somehow inspired by Salinger’s masterpiece. The crimes were so highly publicized, and Salinger’s link to them was so widely reported, that his classic novel became tainted by psychosis and murder. Caught up in a desperate whirl of mass media frenzy, The Catcher in the Rye — a book which is wholly unconcerned with criminal activity — came to be seen as a dangerous, malevolent work. It was even described as an “assassination manual” or “murderer’s handbook.” Salinger had not written a crime story, per se. Rather, he had written a book which inspired people to commit crimes. As ridiculous as this seems, the insinuation has stuck. Google the book now, and the murders inevitably pop up along with all the thousands of hits, tagging along like a cluster of nasty footnotes that won’t go away. In the new biography, an entire chapter — called “Assassins” — is devoted to the murder connection. This is now simply part of the Salinger mystique, stubbornly attached to the legacy of his best novel.

Biography. The reality and the mystique are both explored in the biography Salinger, compiled by David Shields and Shane Salerno. A fascinating read, this volume should keep fans and critics and armchair psychologists busy for quite some time. As the bio takes us through Salinger’s upbringing in New York City, his prep school education, early adulthood, and subsequent rise to fame, the biography provides us with a number of tantalizing details. We learn, for instance, that Salinger only had one testicle, a “deformity” which caused him considerable embarrassment in his extensive love life. Nevertheless, when Salinger heads off to attend the Valley Forge Military Academy, he is by all accounts a tall, handsome, and charismatic young man, eager to participate in the Glee Club, Aviation Club, French Club, and the Non-Commissioned Officers Club. We learn that his development as a writer was a painstaking process, aided in part by a creative writing class at Columbia, with only gradual acceptance from the editors at The New Yorker. We discover that throughout much of his life he was drawn to the company of younger women, often teenage girls not yet on the cusp of adulthood. He befriended them, mentored them, and even romanced them in his own way. There are no accusations of statutory rape — he apparently waited until the girls were 18 before he seduced any of them — but still the tendency is notable. Most important of all is the extent of Salinger’s gut-wrenching, mind-altering experiences as a soldier in World War Two. We are led to conclude that he most likely suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a result of the war. We understand that one way he coped was to withdraw from public life, taking up the study and practice of Vedanta Buddhism, rather than pursuing further wealth and fame and adulation. We learn that the reason he stopped publishing was to forgo the ego gratification involved.

A Controversial Classic. Well before it became tainted by murder, The Catcher is the Rye was viewed as a controversial classic of post-war American fiction, a quintessential portrait of adolescent angst. Since it was first published in 1951, millions have read it and debated its merits. School boards have tried to ban it. Moral proselytizers have attacked it. In hindsight, one struggles to understand what all the fuss was about. How could this compelling novel, filled with so much emotional insight and self-deprecating humor, ever be considered subversive or dangerous? No one denies it is an edgy work, conveyed in razor-sharp language. Yet compared to other books from roughly the same time period — the fever dreams of William Faulkner, the sociopolitical outrage of Richard Wright, or the ruthless amorality depicted by noir writers such as James M. Cain and David Goodis — Salinger’s tale of an alienated outsider is far from incendiary. No doubt Holden Caulfield is a troubled young man, and Salinger skillfully takes us deep inside Holden’s agitated mind as the story unfolds. But Holden never comes close to killing anybody. He never even harms anyone. We might argue that the novel could use a bit of crime, just to liven up the action. Who knows? Perhaps one of the yet-to-be-published Salinger books will be a sequel, in which Holden returns as a truly dangerous psycho. I seriously doubt it, though.

A Troubled Outsider. The story opens as Holden, a 16 year-old student, has just been expelled from prep school. We accompany him as he dons a red hunting cap and leaves his dorm room to spend a “lost weekend” in New York City. He ducks into bars, dances with girls, checks into a seedy hotel, pays for a prostitute with whom he just wants to talk. He gets very drunk. He visits former teachers and hangs out with his younger sister, Phoebe. Through all of this, he delivers a stunning informal commentary — a profanity-laced monologue that is closer to Lenny Bruce than to Charles Dickens. Holden is preoccupied with his personal problems, his sexual hang-ups, his powerlessness, and his inability to deal with life in the “adult world.” A juvenile existentialist, he broods over the meaninglessness of it all, and bitches about the “phonies” he sees all around him. Holden may be frustrated and angry and sarcastic, and he may be having a nervous breakdown, but he is keenly perceptive and quite compassionate. He wonders where the ducks in Central Park go during the winter. He agonizes over the death of his brother Allie from leukemia. He looks out for 10 year-old Phoebe. He daydreams about becoming a savior figure — a “catcher in the rye” — who will be able to rescue children from harm, protecting their innocence from the danger and corruption of the big bad world. The novel closes on what might be seen as a positive note, all things considered. Comforted by the memory of his sister riding a merry-go-round, Holden tells us he has spent some time in a mental institution, and that he now plans to go back to school, where he hopes things will work out better this time. Who knows how he will end up? His psychological problems, his sexual confusion, and his messianic complex are traits shared by many homicidal maniacs. Yet these traits are also shared by many people who never become violent at all. Holden’s compassion, however, probably sets him apart from most dangerous sociopaths. Plus he has a sense of humor. In any case, The Catcher in Rye is a virtuoso performance that succeeds in establishing a heightened sense of intimacy with readers. We feel like we know Holden Caulfield on a deep personal level.  For this reason, the book has struck a deep chord with millions of fans. A small number of these turned out to be seriously deranged.

“I am Going Nuts.” Mark David Chapman was a tormented young man who grew up in an abusive home, dropped out of high school, became a Jesus-freak, and developed mental problems that resulted in hallucinations and suicide attempts. By the end of the 1970s, as he was nearing the end of his tether, Chapman grew obsessed with two things: reading about Holden Caulfield, a character he strongly identified with, and killing John Lennon, whom he fixated on alternately as a hero and a villain. The crazier Chapman became, the more villainous Lennon seemed to be. Chapman evidently considered Lennon to be a “phony” because he was a millionaire rock star who claimed to be opposed to the evils of crass materialism. He was also dismayed by Lennon’s atheism. As Chapman’s mental state deteriorated, the warning signs were on full display. In a letter sent to a friend three months before his final break with reality, he wrote, “I am going nuts,” then signed the letter, “the Catcher in the Rye.” On the night of December 8, 1980, Chapman waited for Lennon outside of The Dakota apartment building in Manhattan. As the ex-Beatle emerged from a limousine and walked toward the building’s entrance, Chapman dropped into a crouch and fired four shots into Lennon’s back. Chapman remained at the scene of the crime, sitting on the sidewalk reading his dog-eared copy of The Catcher in the Rye. Inside the front cover, he had penned the following inscription: “This is my statement. [signed] Holden Caulfield.” As Lennon was rushed to the hospital, where he would soon be pronounced dead,  Chapman allowed police to arrest him without incident. In the days and weeks to come, he repeatedly told authorities that Salinger’s novel had been his primary inspiration for killing Lennon. He explained that he had been living and breathing inside Holden’s story for years, even re-enacting scenes from the book in his real life. As the whole world mourned the tragic loss of a beloved icon and world class talent, Mark David Chapman elicited nothing but revulsion and horror. During the avalanche of media coverage, Holden Caulfield, and his creator J.D. Salinger, were caught up in the undertow of suspicion and confusion.

“I Did it for Jodie.” John Hinckley grew up in the Dallas, Texas area. The son of a successful corporate executive who had ties to the Bush family, Hinckley was a bright student who played multiple sports in high school, excelled at piano lessons, and was twice elected class president. As a young man, however, he exhibited signs of psychological turmoil. He developed a fascination with firearms, and became consumed with various obsessions. Soon he was relying on anti-depressants and tranquilizers. Hinckley devoured The Catcher in the Rye, or rather, The Catcher in the Rye devoured Hinckley. Holden seemed to be reading his mind. The main trigger for Hinckley’s unraveling was not a book, however. He went hog wild over Martin Scorcese’s disturbing 1976 film Taxi Driver, about a social misfit named Travis Bickle who drives a cab in New York City. Brilliantly played by Robert DeNiro (“Are you talkin’ ta me?”), Travis the cab driver gradually becomes more and more unhinged, until he finally snaps, shaves his head into a mohawk, and goes on a murderous rampage. Hinckley saw the film at least 15 times, and grew dangerously infatuated with Jodie Foster, who portrayed an underage prostitute in the film. He went on to stalk the actress while she was a student at Yale University, repeatedly phoning her and slipping notes and poems under her front door. The plan to assassinate President Reagan was hatched in order to somehow impress Foster, and thus “catch her in the rye.” On March 30, 1981, Hinckley fired six shots at President Reagan outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C., seriously wounding the president as well as three members of his entourage. Hinckley was quickly subdued by police before he could do any more damage. A copy of The Catcher in the Rye was found in his hotel room. He reportedly told authorities that if they wanted to hear his defense, they should just read Salinger’s novel. When Hinckley’s trial resulted in a verdict of “not guilty verdict by reason of insanity,” public outrage led many states to rewrite the laws pertaining to criminal insanity. After his trial, Hinckley wrote that the shooting was “the greatest love offering in the history of the world.” Jodie Foster did not agree. Neither did anyone else. Even people who loathed Reagan’s politics were appalled by Hinckley’s actions.

No Exit. Robert John Bardo endured a troubled, abusive upbringing in Tucson, Arizona. After an adolescent suicide attempt, he was placed in foster care. At the age of 15, he was institutionalized for a month due to emotional problems. Bardo dropped out of high school in the ninth grade, and took a job as a janitor at the local Jack in the Box. As a young adult, he was arrested three times on charges such as domestic violence and disorderly conduct. He repeatedly alarmed his neighbors with strange and threatening behavior. In 1986, he began stalking a well-known American film and television actress named Rebecca Schaeffer. He wrote letters to her, attempted to gain access to her on the set of a TV show, and eventually tracked down her home address. He decided to bring a copy of The Catcher in the Rye along with him as he set out to pay her a surprise visit. When Bardo showed up at Schaeffer’s apartment, he told her he was a huge fan, obtained her autograph, and left. Fifteen minutes later, he suddenly returned. When Schaeffer asked him to leave, he grew agitated and claimed he had come to “rescue her.” He pulled a gun out of a paper bag, pointed it at her chest, and pulled the trigger. He then raced away, leaving her to die on the floor. Schaeffer was taken to the hospital by the paramedics, only to be pronounced dead on arrival. Bardo was later arrested when he was found walking around aimlessly in traffic. Police soon found Bardo’s copy of The Catcher in the Rye lying on a rooftop where he had tossed it as he fled the crime scene. Bardo insisted that bringing the book with him to the murder was purely coincidental, and that he was not emulating Mark David Chapman in any way. Oddly enough, Bardo claimed it was a song by U2 called “Exit” that had inspired him to kill Rebecca Schaeffer. At his trial, when the song was played in the court room as evidence, Bardo was seen lip-synching the lyrics.

The Paranoia-Critical Method. Reading Holden Caulfield’s narrative in The Catcher in the Rye as a call to murder is a ridiculous misinterpretation, reminiscent of Charles Manson’s bizarre take on the Beatles’ White Album, in particular the song “Helter Skelter.” I am reminded of Salvador Dali’s “paranoia-critical method,” which involved making random associations among various materials — the more shocking the better — as a way of generating outlandish content for surreal texts, paintings, and films. Dali was just seeking ways to shock the art world, though. Chapman, Hinckley, and Bardo, on the other hand, were deadly serious. They were not surrealists playing with dream-logic; they were bona fide paranoid schizophrenics. Their mental illness was so severe that they probably could have gleaned homicidal messages from a phone book or an automotive manual. Like Taxi Driver and U2, Salinger’s book just happened to be there waiting for them, as it has been waiting for millions of other readers who never committed any crimes. One shudders to think what would have happened if Mark David Chapman had grown obsessed with a truly violent book, such as Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. But then, does it even matter? Surely it makes no sense to blame books — fiction or nonfiction — for real world events. To do so is to lapse into a cause-and-effect fallacy. Influences and inspirations and triggers are not causes. They might form part of the backdrop or scenery of a crime, but they cannot be said to cause that crime. Strip away the faulty reasoning underlying paranoid associations, and we have to agree that murderers are at fault because of their own thoughts and actions, not because of anything that allegedly inspired them. Likewise, people are mentally ill because of faulty brain chemistry or traumatic experiences, not because of the books, films, and music they have been exposed to. The paranoia-critical method is fascinating when it comes to aesthetics. In the context of legality or morality, however, it serves no logical purpose, and only adds confusion to events that are already quite complex.

A Little Misreading. Oddly enough, the title Salinger chose for his masterpiece is based on an act of misinterpretation. In the novel, Holden overhears a small boy singing a popular lyric from Robert Burns. He may be hearing the lyric incorrectly, however. He thinks the boy is singing, “If a body catch a body coming through the rye.” The actual lyric, a piece of folksy Scottish doggerel, reads as follows: “Gin a body meet a body/Comin thro’ the rye/Gin a body kiss a body/Need a body cry?” Either the boy is singing incorrectly, or Holden is hearing it wrong. In any case, Holden goes on to concoct an entire scenario based on this scrap of lyric:

 “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.”

This is eons away from the original Burns lyric, with its raw energy and earthy sexual overtones. Holden has seized upon a faulty or misinterpreted lyric, and then developed his own conception of its meaning in order to satisfy a deeply personal yearning. Salinger is showing us that the paranoia-critical method is utilized more often than we might like to admit — sometimes in useful, creative ways, but often resulting in no more than delusion.

Corporate Media Follies. The fact that the press would latch on to the literary angle of Chapman, Hinckley, and Bardo’s crimes, thus implicating The Catcher in the Rye in the mayhem, is not all that surprising. Media frenzies thrive on this sort of confusion. Television personalities and talk show hosts enjoy their own version of the paranoia-critical method. Anything related to celebrity scandal and murder gets ratings, which makes a lot of money, which is all the establishment media really cares about. And corporate America, which is inherently conservative, tends to view most literary fiction, and most art in general, with deep suspicion. Whenever a work of art can be blamed for a specific atrocity or a certain social problem, the media is happy to jump on the bandwagon, fan the flames of outrage, and hopefully see a spike in ratings. That’s what happened with The Catcher in the Rye. Meanwhile, all around the country, people who should have known better began wondering if there was something evil about Salinger’s masterpiece.

Bad Intelligence. The simple fact of the matter is that regardless of any “psychic violence” that might lurk within Holden Caulfield’s narrative, a few remarks about “killing phonies,” tossed off here and there merely as a way of blowing off steam, do not constitute a “murderer’s handbook.” The stench of crime that follows The Catcher in the Rye is a gross example of guilt by association, which is a travesty. The novel can be discussed in various ways, in regard to numerous topics (mental illness, urban alienation, sexual confusion, dark humor, empathy and compassion, etc.). The text itself, however, has nothing to do with murder or crime, no matter what the schizophrenics say.

Cruel Irony. In the most compelling sections of the new biography, Salinger emerges as our foremost poet of PTSD, and The Catcher in the Rye starts to look more and more like a creative response to wartime trauma. In this light, Holden is best understood as a vehicle the author uses to grapple with his own PTSD symptoms. The PTSD angle then becomes emblematic of a more universal human frailty. Based on what we now know about Salinger’s war experiences, it is difficult to conceive of The Catcher outside of the context of PTSD. Like all great literature, The Catcher is a multi-faceted work, and there is no need to oversimplify. If the text can be likened to an organism, then Salinger’s PTSD might be working on just one organ, rather than controlling the entire being. It may be at the very heart (not the brain) of the novel, pumping lifeblood into all of its various outbursts and digressions and lamentations. All of which makes the “murderer’s handbook” tag line even more cruel and ironic. Despite its sour expression, Holden Caulfield’s story is not a nihilistic descent into madness and death. It is a desperate struggle to maintain hope and compassion in the face of such catastrophes.

Life During Wartime. Salinger was drafted into the army in the spring of 1942. Serving with the 12th Infantry Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, Salinger was involved in the D-Day invasion at Utah Beach, and then spent nearly 300 days in active service. He participated in the Battle of the Bulge, as well as the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. Primarily working with intelligence personnel, Salinger’s main task was interrogating prisoners. Still, he was in the thick of the deadly winter fighting, surrounded by death and destruction. Then, as the war concluded, Salinger was among the first soldiers to liberate one of the satellite sites of the Dachau concentration camp. The reality of the camp was too much to take for even the most battle-hardened solders: mass graves and barbed wire enclosures, piles of starved corpses, charred and smoldering remains, with a few straggling survivors weighing as little as sixty pounds. Many troops broke down weeping, never to fully recover from the shock and horror. For Salinger, who happened to be half-Jewish, seeing firsthand evidence of the holocaust was overwhelming. People say that he walked into that concentration camp in 1945, and never really managed to walk out. Years later, Salinger would tell friends that he could not rid his senses of the smell of burning flesh. How could such an experience not leave psychological scars? How could it not have a profound affect on one’s writing? The philosopher Theodor Adorno once remarked, “After the camps, there can be no more poetry.” New kinds of writing would be necessary now, in the traumatized postwar setting, and Salinger, shaken as he was by PTSD, proved that he was ready and able to rise to the occasion. And he would do so without even mentioning the war.

Poo-Tee-Weet. Salinger carried a draft of the first six chapters of The Catcher in his rucksack throughout his WWII service. Maybe the manuscript’s presence helped him persevere. The work certainly helped him forge ahead once he was back home. Perhaps writing was the best form of therapy. He never wrote directly about his firsthand experience of the war or the holocaust. Not everyone came back from the conflict ready to write an epic war novel such as Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Many struggled to communicate at all about what they had witnessed. Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a WWII veteran who witnessed the firebombing of Dresden as a POW, was open and honest about his own reticence. In the remarkable opening of Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut explains that he has been trying unsuccessfully for years to write his big Dresden novel, and that he is now forced to admit that he finds it impossible to do so. There will be no big Dresden novel. The best he can do is serve up a “jumbled and jangled” absurdist fable featuring Billy Pilgrim, a fatalistic optometrist who serves in the war, and is present at the Dresden inferno, just like Vonnegut was. Rather than attempt to realistically capture the firebombing, Vonnegut merely evokes it in a few brief scenes, then uses it as a springboard for Billy’s odd cosmic adventures. After Dresden, Billy becomes “unstuck in time,” skipping randomly through scenes in his life, even traveling to a distant planet called Tralfamador, where he is held captive by aliens, and forced to mate with a movie star. Whenever something terrible happens around Billy, such as the execution of a man in Dresden for petty theft, Vonnegut sums up the action with either the singing of birds – “Poo-tee-weet” – or the simple phrase, “So it goes.” Slaughterhouse Five is no less of a tragicomic masterpiece than The Catcher in the Rye, and Vonnegut’s book was similarly attacked and criticized for being “controversial.” Both novels spring from the same source of pain — namely, the madness and tragedy of war. Unlike Vonnegut, Salinger wrote no introduction explaining his novel in terms of his war experience. Holden Caulfield is not a WWII veteran; yet his psyche seems haunted by the PTSD associated with the war. We do not need a paranoia-critical method to understand how Holden Caulfield and Billy Pilgrim serve similar purposes for each author. Through these fictional characters, Salinger and Vonnegut were able to articulate a deep source of pain that they could not otherwise find the words for. By exploring these characters fearlessly, dispensing with any obligations to “literary propriety,” each author was able to transcend the original source of pain, and create lasting art. Far from being immoral or depraved or insane, these books served to advance the cause of humanism. In the aftermath of a terrible crisis, they offered the consolation of simple truths in a spirit of wisdom, humor, compassion, and peace. That is ultimately how these books will be remembered.

So it Goes. J.D. Salinger never made any public statement about his three worst fans — Chapman, Hinckley, and Bardo. People who knew the author say he was devastated by the way his novel’s reputation was being tarnished by such horrifying crimes. Salinger was a pacifist who disliked violence and controversy. He didn’t want to be a celebrity, yet he hadn’t withdrawn from the world completely. Like anyone else, he went out shopping, or to dinner and a movie. He liked to read the daily newspapers and watch the evening news in order to keep up with current events. One can only imagine what he was thinking and feeling as his best work became engulfed in a media frenzy and smeared on the basis of insane misunderstandings. No doubt this caused him a great deal of pain. Poo-tee-weet.