by Lise LaSalle

On May 26, 2014, 21-year old Valérie Poulin-Collins dressed as a nurse and entered the Trois-Rivières hospital in Quebec where she proceeded to abduct a day-old baby girl called Victoria Boisclair. She actually tricked the parents into handing her their infant and was subsequently arrested three-and-a-half hours after the incident and put on a ventilator in the same hospital for 48 hours before being well enough to appear in court.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

There have undoubtedly been cases where young men and young women have overdosed on heroin and died in the arms of friends or loved ones – perhaps on the way to the emergency room, perhaps at their house or apartment, or perhaps in a shooting gallery with other lost souls. Never, however, have I heard of a case in which a 2-year-old dies of a methadone (a heroin replacement) overdose in his mother’s arms when – weirdly enough – his mother is the one who gave him the overdose. Yet, that is exactly what happened in the case of little Aiden Goff of Tooele, Utah on Friday Jan. 31st.

According to the police, Aiden’s mother, Jill Goff, accidentally gave him a drink of liquid methadone that she stored in a Gatorade bottle. When Aiden complained that it didn’t taste good, in what can only be seen as a rather odd response, Jill gave it to his five-year-old sister who agreed it was disgusting. Then, apparently playing a game of Follow the Leader, Aiden’s eight-year-old brother tasted it and said it tasted like medicine.

“The children had told us there was a sippy cup passed around between the three of them that mom had prepared for them and it didn’t taste right,” Tooele Police Captain Paul Wimmer told KSL.

According to Captain Wimmer, the investigators believe that Jill Goff inadvertently gave little Aiden methadone, which had been stored in the Gatorade bottle, rather than serving him actual Gatorade.

Methadone is a pain reliever that can also be used to help recovering addicts withstand withdrawal symptoms. It is a powerful synthetic opiate and its side effects are similar to heroin – a pleasant drowsiness and possibly a sense of euphoria or well-being. Methadone is also used – oddly enough – as a legal heroin replacement. In many states, an addict, upon demonstrating through a blood test that he or she has opiates in their system, can register for the local Methadone Program (every community worth its salt in America provides some sort of methadone program.) Once accepted into the program, the addict can pop into the clinic each morning and get their pink plastic cup of methadone.

In the case of Jill Goff, it’s possible that she was/is a regular methadone drinker who was weaned off of heroin by converting to methadone. The police have indicated that they believe the methadone was legal. The other possibility, of course, is that Jill (or someone else in the house) suffers from severe chronic pain and has been prescribed methadone based on its efficacy as a powerful painkiller.

In any event, it appears that Jill was prescribed the methadone and in a quantity greater than the daily clinic dose. The fact that she was storing it in the Gatorade bottle is incomprehensibly dumb. And as we will see, this mother, who appears to be perfectly loving and good-hearted, did not handle things that well once she realized what she had done.

According to the Daily Mail Reporter, the police statement said that when Jill Goff realized that she had switched the liquids, she tried to get little Aiden to throw up. Then she gave him a bath and put him down for a nap.

So we see that after screwing up royally, Jill then did her best to be a caring and concerned mother. Unfortunately, she did not do the one thing that would have saved her son’s life. She did not call for help, she told the investigators, because she was scared.

An older sibling eventually tried to wake up Aiden but he wasn’t responsive. At that point Jill called 911.

The police arrived at around 6pm on Friday. Jill Goff was very possibly holding Aiden when they arrived but he was not breathing. Emergency responders tried to save him, but he died at the home.

Then the two other kids, the 5-year-old sister and the 8-year-old brother, went to the emergency room. The police told the Salt Lake Tribune that they both tested positive for methadone.

The boy was not in good shape — he had broken out in a rash and his eyes were swollen. But both of the children survived.

At the hospital the two recovering children told relatives and detectives that their mother had given Aiden a drink but he did not like it.

The police have stated that Goff has no prior record and they believe she did not intend to kill her son. Nonetheless, she was arrested on suspicion of homicide, two counts of child abuse and endangerment of a child or vulnerable adult. She remains in the Tooele County jail.

In a statement, Captain Wimmer equivocated to some degree:

“While we don’t have any evidence that suggests that she was trying to harm the children with it, there is a certain level of care that is required with such a dangerous substance and medication.”

Unless those that knew Jill Goff are pulling the wool over our eyes, she is likely a loving mother. In her photos she looks rather beneficent (not that that can’t be deceiving). Facebook images show her doting over her five children and proudly posing with Aiden.

The four surviving children – aged 5, 8, 11 and 14 – have been placed with relatives.

Although only she knows if this is actually true, Jill wrote on her Facebook page on Friday, “I want to let you all know my baby boy Aiden Goff passed away in his momma arms tonight.”

*     *     *     *     *

We’ll have to see what Rick Stack thinks about this one. I’m not convinced Jill Goff is only going to have her wrist slapped. She might get hit a little harder than that. The child abuse and child endangerment charges will almost certainly carry some weight considering that Aiden is dead.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Although unlike Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy rarely elicits much sympathy or compassion from the “typical” true crime fan, oddly enough, his death by electrocution in the Florida State Prison, in the aptly named town of Starke, appears to have aroused compassion in the minds and hearts of certain individuals who witnessed his death, some of whom spent time with him prior to his execution. It must be admitted, however, that the vast majority of the crowd assembled near the prison were over-joyed by Mr. Bundy “frying in the hotseat.”

In an LA Times article dated January 24, 1989, Barry Bearak describes the scene with real poetic flair:

Ted Bundy, the notorious serial killer, died today in the electric chair after a night of weeping and praying, just as the sun rose over the north Florida plains.

Gone was the storied cockiness. He was ashen as two guards led him into the death chamber to be executed for the 1978 rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl. They strapped his chest and arms and legs to the shiny wooden chair.

Bundy’s eyes searched for familiar faces behind the glass. He nodded to some of the 42 witnesses, including the men who had prosecuted him. His lips moved in a faint mumble.

Then his head bowed. The shaved skull glistened where an ointment had been applied. It would enhance the work of the electrodes.

His Last Words

As is customary at these peculiarly American events, the Supt., a Mr. Tom Barton, asked Bundy if he had any last words at which point the murderer of more than 30 young women was momentarily at a loss for words. Them, his voice quivering, the man who has gone down in history as one of our most famous serial killers, spoke:

“Jim and Fred, I’d like you to give my love to my family and friends.”

Jim Coleman was one of Bundy’s lawyers. He nodded solemnly. So did Fred Lawrence, a Methodist minister out of Gainesville, Fla., who had spent the night with Bundy in prayer.

(Now this is downright odd. Could a just god forgive Bundy his most heinous crimes, even assuming his repentance was real, which was not necessarily the case. Furthermore, it’s well known that Bundy desperately hung on to life and did everything in his power to keep getting his day of destiny postponed.)

Barry Bearak writes:

With that, it was time. A last thick strap was pulled across Bundy’s mouth and chin. The metal skullcap was bolted in place, its heavy black veil falling in front of the condemned man’s face.

Barton gave the go-ahead. An anonymous executioner pushed the button. Two thousand volts surged through the wires. Bundy’s body tensed and his hands tightened into a clench. A tiny puff of smoke lifted from his right leg.

A minute later, the machine was turned off, and Bundy went limp. A paramedic opened the blue shirt and listened for a heartbeat. A second doctor aimed a light into his eyes.

At 7:16 a.m., Theodore Robert Bundy–one of the most active killers of all time–was pronounced dead.

One it was over, as he left the Q Wing of Florida State Prison, a witnessing newsman raised his hands to signal the news to the 500 or so civilians who were waiting eagerly in a dewy cow pasture cross the street. Based on the reports, these individuals were hardly among the sympathetic souls; on the contrary, they seemed to delight in what must have been an agonizing death.

Some of the onlookers began chanting with much enthusiasm, if not much originality, “Burn, Bundy, burn!” Others reportedly sang or hugged or banged on the frying pans they had brought along to “make a joyous noise”.

David Hoar, a policeman from St. Augustine, Fla., remarked moronically, “I wish I could have been the one flipping the switch.”

A Few Somber Souls

Following the execution, some of the witnesses came outside and began pacing the field. They were reportedly a somber bunch, and some are believed to have been shocked “at the celebration that filled the chilly morning air.”

“Regardless of what Bundy did, he was still a human being,” said Jim Sewell, who was police chief of Gulfport, Fla. Sewell, however, who was apparently suffering from post-execution stress disorder (PESD), stated that he felt great relief knowing that Bundy was finally dead.

The famous story, of course, is that of religious broadcaster James Dobson, who interviewed Bundy the night before his death. This is the interview in which Bundy “talked at considerable length about the process of desensitization” he underwent while raping, murdering and sometimes eating literally dozens of women in Washington, Oregon, Utah, Colorado and Florida.

Well, yeah… Of course, Bundy became desensitized while committing the awful murders with increasing regularity.

Many crime fans may also be somewhat desensitized merely from reading about and viewing endless violent crimes; I know I am. I don’t recall raping or murdering any comely females lately, though, which I guess is to my credit.

In his interview with Dobson, Bundy talked about how his addiction to pornography and subsequent thirst for more and more violent pornography had increased exponentially until “there was nothing more that would give him that high” other than rape and murder.

Bundy Claimed to Be Remorseful

James Dobson made a point of emphasizing Bundy’s remorse, “He wept several times while talking to me. He expressed great regret, remorse for what he had done, for the families that were hurting.”

Perhaps I am a cynic, but I am somewhat skeptical as to the validity of Bundy’s remorse. His weeping for the girls and women he raped and murdered could easily be mere projected emotion, displaced sorrow over the fact that he was going to die for his crimes. Bundy was a charismatic hustler and could easily have “pulled the wool” over Dobson’s eyes, who as a compassionate Christian probably wanted to believe Bundy felt sincere remorse and contrition.

The Killer’s Final Phone Calls

Another peculiar part of the Executioner’s Song are the final phone calls, both of which Bundy placed to his mother in Tacoma, Washington.

According to the Tacoma News Tribune, at the conclusion of his second phone call, Bundy’s mother told him, “You’ll always be my precious son.”

*     *     *     *     *

Bundy was convicted of three Florida murders, and was blamed for dozens more.

Technically, the murder that broke the camel’s back was the 1978 slaying of 12-year-old Kimberly Leach of Lake City, Florida. After killing her, Bundy dumped her body under a collapsed hog shed.

George Robert Dekle, who prosecuted that case, and witnessed Bundy’s death, had this to say:

“The thing that kept going through my mind was the awful crime scene I saw 11 years ago. I kept saying to myself that is where it started and this is where it ends.”

*     *     *     *     *

I realize that my take on this is rather churlish but I can’t help it. I might feel differently if Bundy had murdered one or two women and then turned himself in so that he wouldn’t (indeed couldn’t) re-offend. But that’s hardly what happened. At the time of his arrest, he was going berserk and stepping up the pace of the killings sharply, much as Jeffrey Dahmer had done prior to his apprehension. If Bundy hadn’t been stopped when he was, he would have violated and murdered many more women and girls, with a tally reaching, perhaps, into the hundreds for the simple reason that he had utterly lost control and nothing short of arrest was going to stop him.

Click here to view our previous Ted Bundy post:

14 Cold-Blooded Quotes by Serial Killer Ted Bundy

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Most Americans would no more dream of having sex with a baby than they would fantasize about dousing themselves with gasoline and lighting a match or sticking their head in an oven. Yet, as I peruse the daily crime news, it is becoming increasingly clear that a sizable number of Americans are obsessed with pedophilia (defined as engaging in a sexual act with a child under the age of 12) and are more than willing to risk everything to act out their aberrant and disgusting desires. And oddly enough, a great many of these foul deeds are perpetrated by couples, married or otherwise, acting in collusion in complete disregard of the fact that their victims are tiny vulnerable beings. This was evidenced once again on Friday when 25-year-old Heather Koon, a child daycare worker in Elyria, Ohio was arrested when a video of her having sex with an infant being discovered on her boyfriend James Osborne’s laptop computer.

In was only through a stroke of luck that Koon’s reprehensible actions were even discovered. Her boyfriend, convicted sex offender James Osborne, had been brought in for questioning based on him providing an incorrect address on a Lorain County sex offender registration form. When his laptop computer was confiscated and searched, police — to their horror — came upon video(s) of Koon raping at least two infants. Osborne was arrested immediately and Koon was taken into custody shortly thereafter.

As Koon sat behind bars with Osborne — whose previous offenses include pandering obscenity involving a minor  – the infant’s father was livid over how ABC Kidz, the daycare center where the rapes occurred, initially handled the situation.

“I still haven’t wrapped my mind around it. It’s every parent’s worst nightmare,” the baby’s father, who has chosen to remain anonymous, told WOIO. According to the child’s father, ABC Kidz was initially vague about what had happened to his baby. ”They tried to act like it was a simple assault. A few hours later they called us back again and asked us to keep it discreet.”

In order to help the investigation, the anonymous father was required to identify his baby from still photographs.

As his family’s nightmare unfolds, the horrified dad has the following advice for other parents whose children have been cared for at ABC Kidz:

“Any child that’s old enough to talk, they should talk to. Any child that’s not old enough to talk should be taken to a physician.”

When contacted by media, ABC Kidz management naturally declined to comment, citing the sensitivity of the “ongoing investigation.” On what appears to be the daycare center’s website, they stress having a staff of “qualified teachers” and “age appropriate curriculum” in a“nurturing & creating environment.”

Based on the open-ended nature of the case, Lorain County Chief Deputy Sheriff Dennis Cavanaugh told a local newspaper that “this is just the beginning” suggesting that there may be other victims and/or perpetrators who have not yet been identified.

*     *     *     *     *

I guess the obvious question is what produces these monsters — nature, nurture or some combination thereof? Thirty or more years ago, conspiracy theories claiming that multi-generational “incest families” “home-schooled” their children in the ways of  incest and pedophilia were rife. As the years passed, these theories were largely discredited until now anyone who gives them credence is likely to be written off as a “conspiracy” kook. Yet the fact remains that there are an awful lot of these fiends out there perpetuating their damage. Are most of these violators born this way, or are they conditioned to a life of pedophilia and child molestation? It’s a valid question which bears looking into. Meanwhile, with disquieting frequency, we are confronted with cases more or less similar to that of Heather Koon and James Osborne.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

When we think waterboarding we are cast into the clandestine world of torture and all that entails.

In our ignoble but all too human moments, some of us may have breathed a sigh of relief believing that the waterboarding and the torturing is done to them over there, rather than to us here at home.

Yet it turns out that an American doctor living in Delaware, a retired pediatrician no less, may have practiced the delicate art of waterboarding in a somewhat modified form on his stepdaughter as a kind of experiment in behavior modification.

Randall Chase of AP writes:

A girl who claims she was waterboarded by her mother’s companion, a former pediatrician, told a Delaware jury on Monday the man held her face under a running faucet several times as punishment.

Swiveling back and forth in the witness chair and smiling at times, the 12-year-old recounted how Melvin Morse, who she learned only recently was not her father, punished her in a variety of ways, including waterboarding and putting his hands over her nose and mouth.

The girl said Morse used the term waterboarding, and she was punished for spilling milk, shaking a ketchup bottle and vomiting into a cat’s litter box after being made to eat too much.

“Sometimes I think I heard him yell ‘Die!’” she said, describing the waterboarding.

*     *     *     *     *

This is an exceptionally interesting case.

The former doctor Morse appears to be a bit of a maverick with at least some clout. He has authored several books and articles on paranormal science and near-death experiences involving children. His TV cred is good with appearances on “Larry King Live” and the “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to discuss his research. He has been featured on an episode of “Unsolved Mysteries” and in an article in “Rolling Stone” magazine.

This 60-year-old is not exactly the kind of guy you’d expect to be facing endangerment and assault charges. Yet he is.

Defense attorney Joseph Hurley told has jurors that the girl and her mother, Pauline, have told many conflicting and false stories to authorities over the years and that the waterboarding charges are unfounded.

Morse has specifically denied the accusation that he may have been experimenting on the girl, who testified that she ran away from home in July 2012, following an incident that led to Morse’s arrest.

The allegation is that the former Dr. Morse grabbed the child by the ankle and dragged her across a gravel driveway into the family’s home. This led to his arrest. The girl told investigators that Morse also had disciplined her at least four times by waterboarding, which in turn led to additional charges against Morse and the girl’s mother, Pauline Morse.

During Monday’s testimony, the girl described how she decided to run away the morning after the driveway incident. She said that Morse had punished her that night and had scared her when he told her, “there will be more.”

“I was scared he was going to hurt me…. I thought he meant, like, more pain.”

The prosecutors have presented inconclusive photographs of scratches and bruises on the girl. She said herself on Monday that several of them came from a bicycle she was pushing along the road when she ran away from home.

Much more damning were the four homemade videos documenting Morse’s encounters with the girl in which he tries to influence her behavior.

If the first video is any indication, Morse was determined to make the girl recognize the need to “fix the damage” when she misbehaves. You might say he’s looking for some kind of practical retribution.

“Why don’t you try to repair things when you do something wrong, sweetheart?” he calmly asked the girl.

Something about this guy bugs me. The child could be exaggerating plenty but I still don’t like him. It gets worse in another video where Morse asks the girl why she doesn’t recognize that it us “a major crime” to break the house rules. At some point in the conversation, he demands:

“Has your therapist ever told you that you have to obey your parents?”

To her credit, the girl responds affirmatively. But she got her digs in during Monday’s testimony when she said referring to the video:

“It kind of gets on my nerves the way he talked to me.”

Although she was very young, Morse gave her antidepressants, which, of course, is not uncommon today.

Now if it wasn’t for the four alleged waterboarding/drowning allegations, not to mention dragging the child across the driveway by the ankle, the doctor’s regimen of rules, though repellant, would not result in criminal charges (unless they were against the girl for losing it and murdering the stepfather which fortunately did not come to pass).

Naturally, a twisted martinet like the Doc had to put it in writing to give it an official stamp. He kept a “behavior book” in which he added or subtracted points to determine her disciplinary “level.”

Level One meant you were on the shit list. No television, no allowance and you are not allowed to eat with the family. At Level Two you’re allowed to come back to the table; At Level Three you get to choose your own sandwich. The girl never made it to Level Four.

And of course there were other punishments designed to drive the girl crazy such as being forced to stand with her arms outstretched and her head against the wall. A real nasty one was confining her in her room without access to the bathroom, forcing her to wet herself or use her toy box as a toilet.

“I tried to stay out of his way so he wouldn’t see me and remember something and make me do stuff,” she said.

And yet the child is psychologically tied to the martinet. She acknowledges trying to contact him twice after his arrest, including sending him an email in December of 2012.

“Are you okay. I’m okay. I accept all apologies,” she wrote.

And she misses him as she explains in a voicemail:

“I was confused and I was wondering if he was feeling the same way,” she explained. “… I just kind of wanted to say hello and I miss you.”

 *     *     *     *     *

Lacey Johnson of Reuters reports on Tuesday’s testimony:

The child’s mother Pauline has struck a deal to plead guilty to misdemeanor child endangerment charges and to testify against Melvin Morse.

Her testimony included the somewhat laughable claim that she refrained from intervening in order not to undermine her celebrated husband, Dr. Melvin Morse, the best-selling author on near-death experiences.

In what is certainly some of the key testimony to date, Pauline described the time she saw the Doc holding her daughter’s head under a faucet. “He called it ‘washing her hair,’ but I knew it wasn’t washing her hair because there was no soap or anything,” she said inanely. “It didn’t occur to me what was happening.”

Pauline told the court that when she walked into the kitchen and saw Morse holding the child’s head under the faucet, Morse released the girl, who then started coughing and crying.

The girl’s credibility was impugned somewhat during cross on Tuesday when she admitted that she had lied under oath about being molested by a family member in 2010.

Morse’s attorneys have claimed that the girl had a history of lying to adults, including counselors.

According to Pauline, however, shortly after Morse was arrested, they “talked about ways of trying to cover it up” while he was home on bail.

*     *     *     *     *

Scary doctor. Particularly when you figure that he heads the Institute for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.

It seems pretty clear that this guy doesn’t like children very much. I wonder how he is with animals.

by Jimmy Macias

Prison gangs have been in the news. When the Aryan Brotherhood was recently suspected of having had a hand in the killing of two Texas District Attorneys, law enforcement publicly acknowledged that the power and reach of prison gangs goes beyond the prison walls.   Although the Aryan Brotherhood is undoubtedly the largest and most powerful of the primarily Caucasian gangs, it is in competition with the infamous Mexican Mafia, called La Eme by those in the know.  La Eme was founded in 1957 at the Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy, California by a dozen juvenile inmates. Since then, it has grown into one of the most powerful and feared gangs both in and out of prison.  Many books have been published about the inner dealings of La Eme. None resonate as violently and compellingly as Chris Blatchford’s, The Black Hand.

A key figure in the rise of the Black Hand was former Eme heavyweight, Rene “Boxer” Enriquez.  Enriquez, who was born in South Central Los Angeles, was a high ranking member of La Eme until he decided to cooperate with the authorities and abandoned the gang in 2003.  Using Enriquez as his key source, Blatchford recounts detailed anecdotes about La Eme, stories such as the stirring saga of Rodolfo “Cheyenne” Cadena, La Eme co-founder.  Newly arrived at San Quentin, Cadena, all 5’4” and 120 pounds of him , was confronted in the lower prison yard by a 6’5” 300 pound African-American inmate who planted a kiss on his cheek and announced to anyone listening that from now on the skinny teenager was going to be his “bitch.” Cadena returned a short time later with a jailhouse shank and skewered the big man, clearly demonstrating to those in the yard that he would back down to no one.

In The Black Hand, Blatchford tells numerous stories of prison inmates “disrespecting” the Mexican Mafia and not living to talk about it.  Many of La Eme’s leaders and founders are discussed in Blatchford’s book.  One La Eme jailhouse legend is Joe Morgan, a tall, bald-headed Croatian who was raised in East Los Angeles.  Although he was not of Mexican decent, he joined La Eme when he was 40 years old.  Morgan was the closest thing La Eme had to a de facto leader.  When La Eme member Salvador “Mon” Buenrostro bad-mouthed Morgan, he was stabbed 26 times in the attorney room at the Los Angeles County Jail as retribution. Legend has it that Benjamin “Topo” Peters shouted: “Die like a man, you punk!” as he carried out the hit on Buenrostro.   Morgan’s propensity for violence was legendary.  Blatchford tells how he beat his 32 year old girlfriend’s husband to death with a hammer when he was only 16.

The book is structured around Enriquez’s rise and eventual departure from the Mexican Mafia.  In an interview with the authorities, Enriquez stated:

“I believe I’m a cut above the rest.  As a mafioso, you have to be an elitist. You have an elitist, arrogant mentality…that’s how you carry yourself in the Mexican mafia. That’s how you project yourself.”

Enriquez’s first brush with La Eme was in Soledad Penitentiary in 1981.  He was only 18 years old but already had an extensive rap sheet for robbery and drug trafficking.  Blatchford recounts how Enriquez explained that no one asks to join La Eme, membership is by invitation only. In order to get La Eme’s attention, Enriquez beat an inmate from a rival gang, Nuestra Familia, which consists of Latino inmates from Northern California.  As a result of his attack, Enriquez was sent to a disciplinary unit called Management Control Unit for “advocating unrest and violence.”

On his first day in his new unit, he received cigarettes and a “calling card” from Daniel “Black Dan” Barela, a respected fully made member of La Eme. Barela’s was known for his “kill first talk about it later attitude.”  On one occasion, Barela beat a defense attorney who he believed had done a lousy job in his friend’s federal drug conspiracy case. After beating the attorney, Barela demanded reimbursement of the $8,000 legal fee warning the attorney that this was only a “love tap” and that if he reported the incident, he would kill him.

By 1982, Enriquez was transferred to San Quentin, and joined many other La Eme heavyweights including Joe Morgan.  It was here that Enriquez began working as a runner and moved up in the ranks.  As his status grew, Enriquez gradually grasped the political structure of La Eme.  Blatchford describes how La Eme hard liners secretly plotted to kill member Nick “Nico” Velasquez for crafting a peace accord with rival black inmates and for pulling rank on other La Eme members.  La Eme leader Raymond “Huero Squire” Garduno overheard the conspirators and recruited some followers including Enriquez, to quell the conspirators. Huero Squire and his followers warned the conspirators that if they tried to kill Velasquez, they would be next in line. It worked for a while but Velasquez was killed a few months later in Tehachapi State Prison.

Blatchford skillfully breaks down how La Eme is not structured like a large corporation with a CEO and one board of directors who has the final word, but is rather controlled by numerous strong quasi-independent cliques of La Eme members in various prison facilities and how the loyalties are ever changing.  This leads to constant turmoil and strife between the cliques as they strive to maintain and consolidate their power.

On parole in the late 1980’s, Enriquez and other recently paroled La Eme members decided to reestablish their presence in the streets.  By the 1990’s, La Eme controlled most Latino street gangs in Southern California and banned all Latino-on-Latino drive by shootings in an infamous gathering of nearly 1,000 gang members at Elysian Park in Los Angeles.  La Eme also began collecting taxes from street gangs in return for promising to protect their members when their time came around to go to prison.

As La Eme grew more powerful it grew much bolder.  In 1994, when then California Governor Pete Wilson was promoting  Proposition 187, a controversial ballot measure designed to ban undocumented immigrants from receiving public education and other social services, many La Eme members saw this as race baiting.  But the disdain for Wilson’s measure also stemmed from a sense of betrayal.  According to Blatchford, conservative Latino community activist Rachel Ortiz had campaigned to deliver Latino votes to Pete Wilson and had served as his key advisor throughout his career as a city councilman, mayor, U.S. senator, and governor.  Oddly, Ortiz was also linked with La Eme members and was in constant communication with various gang members including Enriquez.  La Eme felt betrayed by the anti-Latino flavor of Proposition 187 and they spoke openly about assassinating the governor.  Although this never materialized, Blatchford ends this chapter in his book with the following quote from Enriquez:

The real hidden secret was that Governor Wilson was so close to the Mexican Mafia.  Rachel Ortiz listens to us [Eme], and those people who work with her listen to her.  We may never be able to get next to [in a political sense] a governor or a mayor, but people we know do.

The Mexican Mafia was also frustrated with actor Edward James Olmos, who directed the motion picture American Me, which portrayed the rise and fall of fictional La Eme character, Montoya Santana.  According to Blatchford, La Eme members resented the fact that leading character, Santana, was sodomized during his first night in juvenile hall.  In the movie, Santana, rose to become La Eme’s boss in Folsom State Prison.  La Eme members claimed that none of their leaders would have been the victims of prison rape.  True or false, this reveals a certain sensitivity among the gang members. They also disliked the fact that Santana was loosely based on La Eme legend and co-founder Rodolfo Cadena.  In the movie, Santana was ultimately killed by members of his own gang. In real life, Cadena met his demise at the hands of rival gang Nuestra Familia.  The implication that one of their founders would be killed by their own was insulting to La Eme.  As a result, two consultants who worked on the film were assassinated and Olmos himself was “green lighted.”

As exemplified in The Black Hand, the reach of this prison gang has been beyond the prison walls for quite some time.  They have earned the loyalty of many street gangs who wear their allegiance on their backs with the “13” linked to their street gang name.  The number 13 represents the thirteenth letter in the alphabet, M, which in Spanish is pronounced “Eme.”  Currently, La Eme controls a large portion of the North American drug trade and is closely linked with the drug cartels.  The original group of a dozen or so fearless inmates, who were simply trying to create a name for themselves and establish power within a prison yard, has turned into a most powerful criminal enterprise that brings in millions of dollars worth of revenue annually from their criminal activities.  And don’t think that this organization has any plans to slow down in the near future. Whatever you choose to call it — La Eme, The Black Hand, or the Mexican Mafia — they are here to stay.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

As the days pass and one violent crime follows hard on the heels of the previous violent crime, I find myself beginning to despair – the world is badly askew — and although the statistics apparently show that violent crime is not nearly as out of control as it was prior to 2,000, you wouldn’t know it based on the daily crime news.

Violent criminals seem to have endless bad reasons for taking their victims’ lives, or in some cases, attempting to take their victims lives. Just this morning, a case came my way via the Crime Library which may be the supreme head-scratcher with respect to why did this moron try to kill an innocent woman and her daughter?

Cora Van Olson of Crime Library writes:

Jessie White, 25, a business management student at DeVry Universtiy, had apparently just relieved himself in the basement of an abandoned coach house and was casually sitting on the nearby steps of Chicago’s St. Pancratius Church on Tuesday afternoon. He watched as a young mother walked her daughter, 8, home from school. White would later reportedly tell police that the two seemed happy, and that it overwhelmed him with rage. That’s when, prosecutors say, White attacked them.

Assistant State’s Attorney Erin Antonietti described the situation at a hearing the next day, “He saw the 26-year-old woman and her child and how happy they were, and it made him angry.” According to Antonietti, “When [White] sees a happy situation … his reaction is to violently attack this woman and try to kill her.”

Now we all know that envy is a very dangerous and negative emotion and that it can make people do things that, in some cases, they will regret for the rest of their lives. Although I certainly can’t speak for Mr. White, given the mess he’s gotten himself into, it may be safe to assume that he wishes that he had not reacted violently to the sight of the happy mother and child.

Here’s what this peculiar business management student reportedly did:

First he launched himself at mother and child, knocking the girl to the ground. Then he pulled a knife on the woman and pressed it to her throat. The child tried to come to her mom’s rescue by throwing her backpack at the assailant as her mother screamed for help. The woman appears to have fought for her life valiantly; in any event, White was unable to quickly slit her throat. As they struggled over the knife, the blade became disconnected from the handle and slid out, apparently falling to the ground, which meant that when White tried to stab the woman in the head, there was no blade, and all he managed was to strike her in the head with the blunt handle.

Along with fighting a truly good fight, the girl’s mother had the presence of mind to shout for her daughter to get help and she had followed her instructions to the letter after ineffectively flinging her backpack at White.

According to prosecutors, after failing to stab his intended victim, White dragged her into the basement of the abandoned coach house which he knew was unlocked because he had just urinated there. (How the prosecutors know about White bathroom habits is somewhat of a mystery unless White told them, but the same could be said about his anger management problems.) In any event, once White had the victim in his power in the basement, he reportedly struck her repeatedly and strangled her to unconsciousness while shouting, “I’m going to kill you! I have to kill you!”

Luckily, at this point, the woman’s husband arrived followed by police. White was pulled off the battered woman, arrested and charged with attempted murder and multiple counts of aggravated battery.

Erin Meyer of DNA info Chicago writes:

A staff member at St. Pancratius Church at Sacramento and 40th Place said White was not affiliated with the church, and no one at the church witnessed the incident.

The mother he allegedly attacked is recovering from bruises to her neck and body and other minor injuries, prosecutors said.

White was ordered held without bail.

Judge Maria Kuriakos Ciesil called it a “stranger-danger situation involving a mother and a child,” and ordered White held without bail.

*     *     *     *     *

If the allegations turn out to have substance, we can probably safely assume that the only “business management” White will be doing for the next several decades is managing the sale and re-sale of prison contraband.

The fact that he flew into such a rage at the sight of a happy mother and child suggests that his own childhood may have been unhappy and perhaps abusive, though at this point, we don’t know for sure.

What is unsettling is the fact that in today’s America, it is actually possibly for a mother to be attacked and nearly killed simply for having a happy child whom she apparently loves dearly.

by Lise LaSalle

Recently, I had the pleasure of discovering an older movie called “Six Degrees of Separation”, a film adaptation of a play written by Pulitzer Prize winner John Guare. The story was inspired by real-life con artist David Hampton who impersonated Sidney Poitier’s son and managed to fool many people in upper crust circles.  In the movie, Stockard Channing was magnificent playing a socialite married to art dealer Donald Sutherland. Will Smith got jiggy with it and gave a super performance in the role of David Hampton. This movie is a real gem.

The title refers to a theory that all people on Earth are connected to one another by no more than six separate individuals. Not unlike the idea of  “it’s a small world.’’ The theory maintains that through a series of connections or steps, all people have the potential to know one another on a first name basis through mutual acquaintances.

Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy first proposed the theory in 1929 but had little to support it. In the 1960s, the Milgram’s Small World Experiment run by a researcher at Harvard University conducted various not entirely scientific experiments testing the truth of the theory. They asked initial participants to mail a letter to friends who would then mail it to their friends, then friends of friends, until it would reach a designated stranger in Massachusetts. Usually, the packets that reached the targeted recipients got there after five to six mailings.

Facebook, along with the University of Milan, organized a study in 2011.  They analyzed  information from 721 million active members. Researchers found that the average number of connections from one randomly selected person to another was 4.74.  And if you limit it to just the United States, it was just 4.37.

On Twitter, a network is created when users follow each other. According to a study by social media monitoring firm Sysomos, five or less steps separate almost all of Twitter’s 5 billion users.

Even Hollywood had its own version of Six Degrees of Separation with Kevin Bacon. The game “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon” began in 1994 at Albright College in Pennsylvania, where three friends holed up in a room watching TV realized that Kevin Bacon was everywhere.

Google has incorporated the ‘’Sig Degrees of Kevin Bacon’’ in its search function. This game lets you connect any actor, living or dead, to Bacon.

Let’s try one more: say, Tom Cruise.

“A FEW GOOD MEN”

TOM CRUISE: (As Lt. Daniel Kaffee) “Colonel Jessup, did you order the code red?”

GREENE: “Oh, yes, that famous line from “A Few Good Men,” which also starred Kevin Bacon. They were side by side. So that gives Tom Cruise a Bacon number of one.”

The Six Degrees game can apply to anyone really so for a laugh, a friend and I decided to play the “Six Degrees of Separation of Nancy Grace.”  I find it scary to think that I could be separated from her by only six people or less, but it was worth a shot.

As she is not a famous actor, but a television crime ‘fighter’ and mommy dearest of twins, I had to find people connections related to her life.

In order to be able to connect the dots, we needed a little biography on our girl Nancy. And it had to be a real one, as she has a knack for twisting the truth.

As she says in her TV promo: “I like to investigate.’’ So do we, Nancy, so do we!

She was born in Georgia and even after the death of her supposed fiance, she studied law at New York University and found her way to the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office in Atlanta where she served as Special Prosecutor. Her aggressive approach led her to be hired as a TV co-host with Johnny Cochran and on Court TV and finally HLN.

She was accused of prosecutorial misconduct several times in her career and sued a few times while on CNN because of her outrageous lies and slander of people involved in the crime stories she reported on. She is a huge liability but the producers prefer paying up and keeping their sacred cow until the milk stops flowing. Viewers are attracted to her like honey to the bee when she spews her hatred. It is quite a spectacle to see her go after Casey Anthony, Jodi Arias, the Duke Lacrosse players or anyone her heart desires as long as she can shred them to pieces. TV host and funny man Jon Stewart has made some laugh out loud videos about her exploits.

According to Nancy, in 1980, her fiance Keith Griffin, was shot five times in the head and the back by a 24 year old stranger and thug who stole $35 from his wallet.  Police tracked the killer and he denied involvement. At trial, again according to Nancy, she testified and waited for three days for deliberations to end.  The DA asked her if she wanted the death penalty and she said no. The verdict was guilty – life in prison – and appeals ensued. She describes her suffering and her subsequent rise to the status of bulldog prosecutor and anchor on Court TV and HLN as crusader for victim’s rights and professional vilifier.

Great story but most of it turned out to be false; she claims she was engaged to Keith Griffin who was murdered and the man who killed him is serving a life sentence. Her engagement, however, was ‘secret’ so we will never know if she was really supposed to marry this lucky guy.

In fact, Griffin was shot by a former co-worker whose name was Tommy McCoy and he was only 19 and had no prior convictions.  He confessed to the crime the evening he was arrested. The jury convicted him in a matter of hours, not days. Prosecutors asked for the death penalty but didn’t get it, because the young man was mildly retarded.  Nancy was never consulted and McCoy never filed an appeal; he filed a writ of habeas five years ago, and it was rejected. Nancy also misreported the date of the incident – it was 1979, not 1980 — and Griffin was 23, not 25.

Nancy talks incessantly about her fiance’s murder and knowing what we know, it makes you wonder if she is living in the same dimension as the rest of us. She also talks about her twins all the time and we know they exist because she waves their pictures on her show and they were on display during her stint on “Dancing with the Stars.”

With all this in mind, we had to find Six Degrees to Nancy.”

Here is what I came up with and it was way too easy:

I follow Mark Geragos on twitter and he recently wrote a book in which he calls her one of the “blond angry women” he has had to deal with. And it’s not a compliment. So I went on my account and wrote to Geragos that after reading his book, I thought it was true that angry blondes had more fun. He replied gregariously that it was very true. As he had been on her show many times, I had my connection. So it was a win!

There was only one degree between us.

But that was too easy because on Twitter, you can be connected to anyone. I then decided to try through my people channel.

It turned out to be more difficult.

I did not know anyone in Georgia or on CNN and I could not channel her dead fiance and the twins are off limits.

But I thought of my ex who was a lawyer and had gone to the Playboy Mansion.

Nancy would never have been invited to the Mansion or God help us to pose in the Magazine but she was a guest of Larry King who had Hugh Hefner on his show several times. Bingo! It was only 3 degrees of separation.

I was actually amazed at how easy it was. And it makes you go through your whole Rolodex of names and acquaintances.

But my friend had to find her Six Degrees to Nancy Grace and not through my connections.

She had a cousin who was a cop and he went on a trip to Florida while Cayle Anthony was missing. He met and talked to a volunteer who knew another volunteer who knew Tim Miller from EquuSearch who happened to be on the Nancy Grace show.

She was 4 people away from Nancy.

So believe it or not, we all have Six Degrees of Separation to Nancy!

End of the game or was it? As amusing as it was, I found it too simple for my taste until I realized that there were other degrees of separation that connected Nancy Grace to a truly critical part of the legal process: jury selection.

It so happens that during voir dire for Casey Anthony’s jury selection, the lawyers decided to ask the potential jurors if they watched the Nancy Grace show. They were quizzed about it. Did they watch it? How often? What did they think about the show? So if a juror was a regular viewer of her show and lapped it up, you could pretty well determine that they were pro-prosecution and out the door they went.

The defense had hired famous jury consultant Richard Gabriel for this case and his choice of jurors turned out to be a total success because they won an acquittal. Gabriel wanted ‘’jurors who were strong enough to ask the hard questions and resist the public’s demand for a conviction unless they felt the prosecution had proved their case.’’ The win was not because of Jose Baez who frankly, was lacking in experience, but because of the carefully picked citizens that were sitting in the jury box. In fact, the only juror that faced the cameras to give an interview after the verdict, declared that there was no place on the air for shows like Nancy Grace. Proof is in the verdict!  The 6 degrees of Separation of NG became a tool to weed out the jurors leaning towards conviction.

The legal game of degrees of separation of Nancy has picked up more steam. During the George Zimmerman voir dire, defense attorney Mark O’Mara asked the jurors if they watched the Nancy Grace show which led to another win for the defense!

During the trial of Dr. Martin MacNeill, the game was not played during voir dire, but the degrees of separation came in handy during the cross examination of prosecution witness, forensic pathologist Dr. Joshua Perper. This sober medical examiner was called to debunk the defense theory that the victim died of heart problems. Perper’s theory was that the victim had drowned after ingesting too many drugs and  implied that it was with the ‘help’ of her husband who was on trial for her murder. But the defense decided to play six degrees with the doctor. ‘’Weren’t you on the Nancy Grace show to discuss the case?’’ He actually had been and his testimony on the stand contradicted what he had said when questioned by Nancy. He also admitted that the cause of death was undetermined so it did not bring a victory to the defense but it definitely rattled the prosecution to once again have used Nancy as a potential defense ‘tool’. This time, the jury was already picked so the game was less successful. So it seems to work its magic best during voir dire but who knows? The sky is the limit with such a valuable tool to measure people’s gullibility vis-a-vis HLN.

So any degree of separation with Miss Disgrace could mean you have a chance to win your case. Who knew that this fake justice seeker would one day be used to really fight crime? Every time someone is associated with her, no matter to what degree, they are immediately identified as trouble and the case has a better chance to be solved with less bias. Maybe it is poetic justice after all.

If you are not sure about any legal question, find the six degrees of separation of Nancy Grace. This game is a winner and I am thinking of asking Google to incorporate it in its search engine.

by Starks Shrink

You’ve decided you want the fame of being a serial killer but don’t want to commit the awful crimes. No problem, you can still raise your very own serial killer. It takes dedication and commitment but with this handy guide, you can be the proud mother of a notorious serial killer. Since murderabilia seems to be so popular, you may even make a few bucks on the side.

I’ve addressed this guide to the moms because they seem to figure prominently in the serial killer’s psyche, though you will have to be careful not to become his first victim. You will need to raise a male child, which will lead to the highest probability that you will succeed in creating a little monster.

1.  Step one is to select the killer’s father. You will need to do this carefully. Choose an abusive alcoholic that will assist you in abusing the child when he is a toddler and then disappear into obscurity once the child has been sufficiently marred. You may have to endure considerable abuse in the presence of the child for the first couple of years. This will imprint the child with images of a dominant male and a woman who is unable to protect him. He will fear men and loathe women while at the same time craving their attention.  **Note, you do not need to physically bear the child; adopting him from a close relative and keeping it on the down-low is equally effective.

2.  Dress the young boy as a girl and send him out amongst his peers. You could give him a girl’s name too, but then he might just turn into a country singer, and that’s definitely not part of the plan. Be sure to sneer and berate him as he parades around in dresses. This will confuse his gender identity which will lead to sexual confusion later in adolescence and young adulthood.

3. Try to drop the boy on his head frequently as an infant and toddler, or try to inflict head injuries through the frequent beatings you will administer without warning for minor infractions, such as spilling is cereal at breakfast. Do not get medical care for head injuries; they will heal on their own and the trauma can contribute to lesions and neurological disorders.

4.  Be careless about his toilet training; alternate harsh discipline with periods of inattention. This will confuse the boy and foster bed wetting. Allow him to sleep in his wet bed for several days at a time before loudly condemning the child as a failure for not catching on to toilet training. Invite other youths in his neighborhood to the house during these episodes to ensure he will have an extremely limited social circle and few healthy interactions.

5.  Create an atmosphere of promiscuity and disposability in human relationships. You will need to frequently invite unsavory men into your bed and engage in loud, animalistic sexual behavior in front of the child. Preferably, keep the toddler’s bed in your own room while this is occurring. Children often equate the sounds associated with sexuality to violence, which will serve him well later on. You will also cultivate his voyeuristic side, a key component in a serial killer.

6.  Send the child for extended visits to elderly relatives who have very strict, Calvinistic tendencies which will contrast markedly with the chaos in your own home. The boy will come to see religious practices and the accompanying rigidity as punishment. The contrast to his own abnormally chaotic home will make his usual existence seem quite normal to him, thus warping his sense of what is acceptable to society in general.

7.  Drugs and alcohol need to play a large part in the child’s upbringing. However, you need to appear functional to those outside the home so that others will not interfere and remove the child from the home before you’ve completed your mission. Leave alcohol and marijuana within easy reach of the child. He will move on to other substances on his own.

8.  Befriend a seemingly kind male who is a known child molester and invite him frequently to your home to babysit the child. The child will cling to this one kind anchor in his pathetic life and be lulled into participating in unnatural sexual practices. He will likely never report it. The abuse will confuse his sexuality even further, wracking him with guilt and hatred for both the molester and foryou for allowing it to occur, even encouraging it.

9.  Collect or allow the child to collect a variety of stray animals. Be sure to abuse them within the home. Do not feed them and never clean their cages. Act as though their life is worthless. If the boy gets attached to an animal, be sure that it is removed from him by force and cruelly destroyed. However, by this point, it is doubtful that you will have to resort to barbarism yourself as the child will enjoy having a sentient being upon which to vent his anger and lack of self-esteem. He will embark on that long heralded hallmark of sociopathy — animal abuse. Never comment upon the abused animal corpses you may find around the home — let it be his secret as that will engender his mounting sense of power and control.

10.  Cultivate a fascination with fire. Again, this is an area that will likely develop on its own if the previous steps are adhered to correctly. But you can encourage this by leaving lighters, matches and accelerants lying haphazardly around the domicile. Accidentally set kitchen towels alight in the boy’s presence to pique his interest and fascination with pyromania. Pyromania can be considered powerful as well as destructive and the youth will learn to lust for both.

If you’ve adhered to all these suggestions faithfully, you are well on the way to harboring the next great serial killer. Success is not guaranteed, though; serial killers are an elusive and rare breed and children can be remarkably resilient. But consistent chaos, belittling and social isolation will certainly make your chances of succeeding far greater. And as a side note, keep any drawings or art projects the child may create along the way, taking great care not to let him think you cherish them, as that could destroy all of your hard work. Instead, save them for after his arrest or death, since murderabilia has become a growth industry and you should reap some rewards for your efforts, in addition to the self-satisfaction you will attain from seeing your child achieve your dreams.

Please click here to view The Starks Shrink’s Other Posts:

The Julie Schenecker Tragedy: Negligence, Finger-Pointing and the Death of Children

Luka Magnotta: Man, Boy or Beast?

The Disturbing Truth about Mothers Who Murder Their Children

Teleka Patrick Needed a Psychiatrist, Not a Pastor!

Rehabbing the Wounded Juvenile Will Save Their Souls (and Ours)

Skylar Neese and the Mean Girls Who Killed Her

by Patrick H. Moore

Even those who harbor a violent distaste for Karla would probably agree that she is an extremely fascinating woman. If she were dull or ordinary or mundane, she would not be the subject of so much conjecture and the object of so much scrutiny — even if she had been involved in a string of rapes and brutal murders. So the question we must ask ourselves is: what is it about this rapist/serial killer that we find so fascinating? In order to try to shed some light on the question, I’m going to analyze some of Karla’s more provocative quotes as well as certain key incidents in the 1991 to 1993 time frame to see what they reveal about her character. I think that as we analyze her statements, we initially come to the conclusion that the pieces simply do not add up in a satisfactory manner. Karla is just too darned slippery. But then if we look more closely, we discover that there is a simple, and perhaps, convincing explanation for this. Karla possesses very little rational function. She exists almost entirely on the irrational-intuitive-emotional level. This explains partly why she was (is) so appallingly and gratuitously willful and why she appears to have no conscience. The rational part of her mind, whose job is to balance the emotions and the sub-conscious with everyday rational necessity is extremely undeveloped. At a very essential level, Karla truly could not think straight, at last during the period when she was committing her heinous crimes.

Exhibit One: In this quote Karla muses on what it was that attracted her to Paul Bernardo:

“The first time I met him I knew I’d marry him. He puts women under a spell. I fell in love that night. Of course, that’s no excuse. You see, I’m really an old-fashioned girl, a stay at home girl, (the kind who wants to) have a bunch of kids, have doors opened for me kind of girl. He treated me like a princess. He swept me off my feet. You have to understand. I liked him back then. He was one guy that was very nice to me. He never bored me like the others. With the other guys I could always do what I wanted and that was boring. In all my other relationships I was in total control. I never cared what others thought.”

Several things come to mind. First of all, Karla is impulsive and extremely romantic. On the night they met and had wild sex for the first time, she knew instantly that they were destined to marry. Because he put a spell on her. He was a wizard so serve as counterpart to Karla the Witch. Thus, Karla is basically irrational, a creature of whims, fantasies and desires – someone who is controlled by a chain of contradictory desires. She senses that at some level she is an old-fashioned girl who wants a bunch of kids and wants doors opened for her by her Prince Charming, but at the same time she adores rough sex and wants her sweet Prince to take her anally, apparently on a regular basis. And why is this? Very simple. Karla’s personality is so dominant, controlled by powerful sub-conscious undercurrents, that she needs a man who can put her in her place, keep her subservient, and if anal sex is what it takes, so much the better. This is not something that she thinks through rationally, but something that she intuits, senses, somehow just knows.

Exhibit Two: Karla describing the murder of Leslie Mahaffy, how she felt about it and what it was like having Father’s Day dinner with her parents that same evening.

“I gave Leslie some of my sleeping pills and Bunkie to hold. I didn’t want her to feel any pain. Holding onto Bunkie, Leslie just went to sleep.”

“I knew she’d get killed. I was there when he strangled her. But I didn’t watch. I couldn’t stand it. I saw so many animals killed at work, but with a person it’s different. I saw discoloration and I had to help him (Paul) carry her down to the root cellar because it was Father’s Day and my parents were coming over for dinner.”

When Karla’s mother, Dorothy, volunteers to go to the root cellar for potatoes, where Leslie’s body was lying, Karla said: “No no, I’ll get them. Don’t be silly. Sit down. But it just grossed me out, going down and getting the potatoes right beside Leslie’s body.” (Father’s Day, June 17, 1991)

Here again, we see Karla’s bizarre non-rational personality in all its contradictions. She and Paul have been raping and torturing Leslie Mahaffy for days and Karla has clearly been enjoying every twisted minute of it. Finally, they’re running out of time because it’s Father’s Day and Karla’s parents are coming over for dinner. So they have to decide: Do they release Leslie or murder her? They decide to murder her. Then as Leslie’s moment of doom nears, Karla transforms into “caring considerate Karla”; a kind and feeling being; she gives Leslie sleeping pills and a teddy bear to hold so that she will feel no pain as she dies. She also claims she couldn’t bear to watch which makes no sense. After all, she’d played a key role in the two-day rape and torture. But yet the statement that she couldn’t bear to watch is credible on a feeling level.

The glimpse of a caring being that comes through in the Bunkie passage is representative of one side of Karla’s sub-conscious nature. From twisted fiend to caring sentimentalist with nothing in between. There is no rational being there, merely a sea of emotions that veers from utmost cruelty to occasional vague compassion.

Exhibit Three: Karla’s father Karel wants Karla to help him and Dorothy pick out a casket for recently deceased Sister Tammy. In response to her father’s requests, Karla snarls: “Fuck off.”

In a similar vein, around this same time (Dec. 25, 1992), instead of lamenting the death of her sister Tammy, Karla was drinking heavily and weeping, telling anyone that would listen that she wanted to have a child with Paul.

Both the “Fuck off” and Karla bawling about wanting to have a child with Paul are perfect examples of how she is driven by her feeling states and how those feeling states result in a truly incredible degree of pathological self-absorption. She has no rational self to guide her as to what is and is not appropriate. She merely follows her feelings.

Exhibit Four: Karla and the Psychic

Psychic Lori D’Ascenzo worked in a shop next to Karla’s place of employment, Martindale Animal Clinic. When interviewed, Lori related that during the period following the disappearances of Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy, Karla became very agitated and consulted with her on a sort of informal basis. According to Lori, Karla said:

“First there was the girl from Hamilton or Burlington or wherever, then the local girl who disappeared last November, Terri Anderson, and now Kristen. Whoever is targeting these girls has an attraction for blonde hair.” Karla told Lori she was afraid that she would be next.

It’s strange that Karla would bring up Terri Anderson when referring to the two victims she and Paul had already murdered. And for that matter why say the killer targeted blondes? Kristen had very dark hair.

The answer may be fairly simple and, if I’m correct, fits nicely with our theory that Karla largely lacks a conscious, rational mind. Since she and Paul have been committing rapes and murders together (and it makes no difference who actually “pulled the trigger”), the reference to blonde hair suggests that Karla fears that she could be one of Paul’s victims.

In May of 1992, Karla once again visited Lori. She told her that someone was watching her and that Paul’s personality had changed. She asked Lori if she thought that maybe there was a spirit in her house.

Lori told her it wasn’t a spirit but a ghost, a woman’s ghost, and it didn’t like her husband. This ghost had died suddenly or violently and didn’t know she was dead. (Yes, friends – there it is. Paul killed either Kristen or Leslie. Of course, psychics can also get it wrong on occasion.)

Karla asked Lori how to get rid of the ghost. Lori told her to pour ammonia down the drains because ghosts cannot abide ammonia. She also gave Karla an amythyst and told her it would absorb all the bad energy in the house.

Two weeks later Karla told the psychic that the ghost had left and that she and her husband were no longer fighting.

This episode serves as powerful proof that Karla was capable of dwelling on the irrational plain of disembodied beings. This is in keeping with her romantic, highly emotional, non-rational nature. A highly rational person would not even notice that there was a ghost in the house whereas one such as Karla, stripped as she was (is) of nearly all rational function, is vulnerable to the “spooks”.

Exhibit Five: Karla and Dr. Hans Arndt

At the behest of her lawyer George Walker, Karla was directed to see psychologist Hans Arndt, Ph.D. to determine if she was sane enough to stand trial. Her first appointment was on March 3, 1993.

Karla was taken to Northwest General Hospital in Toronto by her mother Dorothy Homolka and admitted under the name Karla Seger (Dorothy’s maiden name) the following day March 4, 1993.

When admitted to Northwest General, Karla Homolka was diagnosed by Dr. Arndt and his colleagues as suffering from dysthymia, also known as reactive depression, and a serious post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as defined in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic Manual, D.S.M. 111-R.

In Karla’s interaction with Dr. Arndt, we observe the rather comical results of an overly-rational, highly cerebral doctor interacting with and trying to understand a young woman with a glaringly underdeveloped rational function.

In her typical cocky fashion, Karla told Dr. Arndt that she had a very high tolerance to drugs based on the fact that she drank at least 16 ounces of alcohol on a daily basis while married to Paul.

In response, Arndt wondered, “If she was drunk all the time, then how did she go to work every day and function?”

This is ludicrous. Many people are high-functioning alcoholics and drug addicts and manage to live something closely resembling a normal life, at least if viewed superficially.

Dr. Arndt wondered why Karla continued her relationship with Jim Hutton and sent him nude photographs of herself because THAT didn’t fit in with the diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Arndt also noted that during Karla’s six months at Northwest General Hospital, “upon waking, Karla would note and record the time she woke up.” Again, this was apparently atypical of someone suffering from depression or PTSD.

At one point Arndt stated: “I don’t know if this girl is mad or just bad.”

Of course, Karla’s actions are not those of someone suffering from PTSD. Karla’s actions are those of an individual who lacks the normal rational function and therefore simply follows her whims and fancies. She sends to sexy photos to Jim because she wants to maintain their relationship and because she loves showing off her hot body. It’s perhaps her best asset and she knows how to use it.

Arndt wants to pigeonhole Karla into a specific psychological diagnosis, in this case PTSD, but lacking a reasonably developed rational side, Karla simply does not fit comfortably into any diagnostic niche. I believe that although Karla’s various doctors differed – to some degree — in their diagnoses, none of them were able to truly get a handle on her.

Let’s Wrap This Us:

So where does this leave us? I would say that what we have here is a willful creature who is controlled by her whims and unconscious desires. Because she lacks a developed rational side, she is largely indifferent to society’s values and mores which – in essence – are rational constructs designed to maintain stability within society.

Another way of putting this is to state that at the time of her crimes, Karla had no conscience and just did as she pleased.

It is curious to note that Karla’s present situation – living with her husband and three children on Guadeloupe – appears to rather precisely mirror what she claimed she always wanted — an old-fashioned existence “with a bunch of kids.”

Does this mean that her incredibly powerful dark side — the side that reveled in the rape, torture and murder of innocent schoolgirls – is permanently relegated to some musty, unused portion of her sub-conscious mind? Perhaps it does, but then again, perhaps it does not.

What is for certain, however, is that Karla will always remain a clear and present danger to society unless she is able to develop and maintain a healthy, rational side, which – after all – is the very essence of being normal.

Click on the following links to read previous Karla posts:

Watching Karla Homolka: The Game Gets Real

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

Right around 1980 when I was 30 years old and working as an estimator in the computer box-building industry, I worked with a good-natured, sex-obsessed young man named G___ who has been a successful businessman for decades now after, fittingly, inheriting his father’s mattress business. G___ and I were great pals but he had one habit which got on my nerves. He used to routinely refer to people as “real sick puppies” which was a common phrase at the time.

Things change and we live and learn and now, for equally inexplicable reasons, I rather like the phrase. It rolls right off of the tongue and is really quite evocative.

Well, as we know from following true crime so religiously, every state has its quota of “real sick puppies” and in the last week, it has come to light that Florida has produced one of “the sickest puppies” of them all who is fortunately now behind bars where he will probably remain until I am dead and in the grave.

Amy Pavuk and Rene Stutzman of the Orlando Sentinel write:

A Longwood man wanting to get his start in the child-pornography business planned to slash the throats of a mother and father so he could drug and rape their 9-year-old daughter, videotape their sex acts and then kill her, too, state law-enforcement agents said Friday.

Shawn Ryan Thomas, 29, was arrested Thursday night on charges of premeditated attempted homicide, attempted sexual assault of a child and 10 counts of possession of child pornography.

He told a police informant that the 9-year-old would be the first victim but that he planned to do the same thing over and over again and sell a DVD for $1,000, according to his arrest report.

During a brief court hearing Friday in Sanford, Seminole County Judge Jim DeKleva ordered Thomas held without bail.

Sometimes the authorities are “Johnny-on-the-Spot”, and they were certainly onto this guy after receiving tips back in March that he was downloading child pornography, but Sick Puppy Thomas still might have slipped through the cracks had he not been reported in early June to local Longwood law enforcement.

According to the arrest report, Thomas told the potential victim family that he was a film student was making an independent movie in which he wanted their daughter to appear.

His plan was to first kill the father first, slashing his throat with a knife. He would then eliminate the child’s mother in the same grisly fashion. That way they would be unable to file a missing-child report about their daughter after he raped and killed her.

What makes this even more hideous is the alleged fact that Thomas’s plan was to sell the videotape of him raping the child after he had completed his dirty work. It appears that video would not include him killing the child.

At some point, Thomas told a police informant that he had been plotting the combination abduction, rape and murders “for so long” and that once he had violated his first victim, he would do it over and over again for he would “not be able to stop.”

His business plan was for him to sell a DVD showing a number of child rapes for $300 per chapter, or for $1,000 overall, according to the arrest report.

*     *     *     *     *

According to the agents, Thomas met with his first intended target in Longwood on June 7th. Instead of a father, mother and child, however, the threesome consisted of a father, grandfather and child.

The arrest report said that Thomas lured the family to a vacant house on East Orange Avenue in Longwood, but the grandfather, who apparently possesses a certain protective intuition, had driven by the house earlier in the day and had seen a “for sale” sign in the yard. Once they actually went inside the house, ostensibly so that Thomas could start filming, they discovered there was no furniture. In one room, there was plastic sheeting on the floor. In another room, there was a tripod.

This was apparently way too “avant-garde” for the family and they left, we can assume, hastily.

The arrest report apparently does not state who then tipped off local law enforcement.

*     *     *     *     *

Thomas’s roommate, Anthony DeRosa, told the Orlando Sentinel on Friday that Thomas definitely acted strangely on June 7th.
That morning, according to DeRosa, Thomas showered, shaved, dressed neatly, and then left the house on foot carrying a bag, even though it was raining.

The vacant house where Thomas intended to swing into action was less than a mile away.

DeRosa told the Sentinel that when Thomas returned (after having his plans thwarted by the alert grandfather), “he was really quiet.” Then he stayed in his room the rest of the day. God only knows what was going through his head. He continued his reclusive ways for the rest of the week and didn’t go to work.

Thomas’ Facebook page states that he attended Edgewater High School and Lockhart Middle School and that he supports libertarian politician Rand Paul. He also enjoys Samuel Adams beer and reading The Canterbury Tales by the famous medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer.

(The Canterbury Tales are a collection of bawdy tales about English life during the middle ages full of cuckolded husbands and various types of entertaining raunch written in Middle English which makes reading them a bit tricky unless you have plenty of patience. To my knowledge, there is nothing about molesting children in The Canterbury Tales.)

Thomas’s record is shadowy. He told associates that he was working on a student film for Full Sail University, but the school has apparently stated that it has no record of Thomas ever attending a class there.

DeRosa has been friends with Thomas for about nine years. He said that Thomas moved into his home about three weeks ago, claiming he’d gotten into a fight with his father and needed to move out of his parents’ house in the Orlando area .

There was no indication, DeRosa said, that Thomas was violent or even unsavory.

“This scares the crap out of me,” said DeRosa.

*     *     *     *     *

When FDLE (Florida Department of Law Enforcement), in conjunction with the Longwood police, arrested Thomas, according to agents, he had a knife, plastic sheets, zip ties, a camera and tripod and a sex toy.

When agents searched his home, they found more plastic sheeting, a receipt for the sex toy and 10 images of child pornography.
The images were horrific, depicting children ranging from 1 to 5 years of age engaged in…

Assistant Statewide Prosecutor Diane Checchio told reporters in Orlando on Friday that agents have gathered “a plethora” of evidence against Thomas, that additional charges will be filed, and that he potentially faces hundreds of years in prison.

The prosecutor noted that Thomas tried to recruit girls using talent agencies and Craigslist.

Amy Pavuk and Rene Stutzman write:

After his unsuccessful attempt June 7, Thomas complained to a friend that if he’d had an accomplice or a gun with a silencer, he could have pulled off his plan that day, according to his arrest report.

*     *     *     *     *

I’m not generally one for long sentences but this particular sick puppy probably needs to spend the rest of his life in prison for the protection of society.

adapted by Patrick H. Moore

Sooner or later we all face that moment of truth — the Grim Reaper comes knocking and there’s no way to talk him out of it. Some of us will handle it bravely; others may flinch and quail. I suspect that in our private moments many of us wonder whether we’ll be up to the task when that day of reckoning comes. Here, therefore, as a sort of twisted inspiration, are some truly badass final statements by some strong — and in some cases evil — condemned men. The list was compiled by Ian Chessman of Cracked, who also gets credit for calling the statements “badass”, which they truly are. The quotes are in the public domain.

Carl Panzram, Serial Killer, about to be hanged:

“Hurry up, you Hoosier bastard, I could kill ten men while you’re fooling around!”

Panzram also stated on another occasion:

“I have no desire whatever to reform myself. My only desire is to reform people who try to reform me. And I believe that the only way to reform people is to kill ‘em.”

Chief Sitting Bull’s final words when he was about to be shot by 43 members of the Bureau of Indian Affairs:

 ”I am not going. Do with me what you like. I am not going. Come on! Come on! Take action! Let’s go!”

The Chief also stated on another occasion:

“I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle.”

George Engel, union activist and founder of the Socialistic Labor Party of North America as he awaited hanging:

“Hurrah for anarchy! This is the happiest moment of my life.”

Engel was convicted of Conspiracy in the famous Haymarket Square labor riots in Chicago in 1893 which resulted in the death of seven policemen and four civilians.

Giles Corey, colonial farmer and accused Massachusetts Bay Colony witch, while being crushed with stones, in a futile attempt to make him confess his crime:

“More weight. Add more stones.”

Corey never did confess as the life was slowly squeezed out of him. I’m convinced he was innocent. You probably are too.

James French was a convicted murderer serving life in prison in Ohio. He decided a life sentence was just too long and decided to force the issue by killing his cell mate. His plan worked and he was given the electric chair. Unphased by it all, but glad to be going, French quipped as they strapped him in:

“Hey fella! How about this for a quote for tomorrow’s paper? ‘French fries.’”

French is not known to have made any other notable statements.

While facing the Irish Free State firing squad, Irish nationalist Robert Erskine Childers insisted on shaking hands with every marksman and then encouraged them to:

“Take a step forward lads — it’ll be easier that way.”

Childers was also a poet and novelist and wrote three respected spy novels: Riddle of the Sands; The Great Impersonation; and The Czar’s Spy.

And then there was Tom “Black Jack” Ketchum, a thief, a murderer, and worst of all a “morning person.” He was wide awake for his early morning hanging and full of “piss and vinegar”.

“I’ll be in hell before you start breakfast! Let her rip!”

Ketchum’s executioners apparently didn’t appreciate being subjected to his racket so early in the day. They accidentally on purpose gave his line some additional slack which caused him to be decapitated when he dropped through the gallows.

Commentary by Patrick H. Moore

It’s Father’s Day and in a few hours my wife and daughter will take good ol’ Dad out for lunch at one of his favorite restaurants. Dad isn’t getting much rest this weekend; he’s working very hard on an incredibly difficult case in which he’s trying to save a worthy client from prison. The old adage “there’s no rest for the wicked” may apply here, and, god knows, Dad was a bit wicked at times during his restless youth.

Whatever wickedness Dad engaged in, however, does not even register on the “Richter scale of evil” when compared to what a father recently did to his sweet-faced 13-year-old daughter in Tunis when he caught her walking home with a boy.

Safa Ben Said of Tunisia Live writes:

A Tunisian man is accused of burning his 13-year-old daughter to death for walking home from school with a male classmate May 28 in Ibn Khaldoun, a suburb of Tunis.

Aya, a middle school student, died on June 7 from fourth-degree burns, Kapitalis and other local news sources reported.

“The father has been arrested since the incident occurred,” Allala Rouhma, a spokesperson for the Tunis Court of First Instance, told Tunisia Live. The father’s name has not been released.

Aya spent nine days in the Ben Arous Hospital for Burns and Injuries before succumbing to her injuries.

Assuming the reports are true, and there’s no compelling reason to believe they are not, we can only react in utmost horror to the despicable act perpetrated by this unnamed father. To view this crime in context, it is essential to realize that along with being an individual crime, this is a cultural crime, a crime that is condoned by portions, probably small, of the society in which poor Aya lived.

Safa Ben Said writes:

Aya’s death has been seen as resulting from an ‘honor crime,’ a killing committed in response to perceived shaming of the family. Such practices are almost unheard of in modern Tunisia.

These crimes target mostly women. Extramarital sex, or even suspicion of it, is a major cause.

Aya’s death shocked the country and sparked an indignant response from many Tunisians.

A group of activists has called for a silent march in Aya’s memory on June 19. The event, which is sponsored on Facebook is named, ‘Aya, Voice of the Victim,’ and calls on Tunisians to participate and denounce her death and the concept of honor killings.

To date, 2,100 people have said they will be attending the march on June 19.

“This act is nothing more than a sign of a sick and suffering society that continues to demonize the female gender,” said the event’s page.

“What happened is strange in our society,” said Feten Abdelkafi, one of the event’s organizers, to Tunisia Live.

“The poor girl was just returning from school with her classmate. I can’t believe that a father could do such a thing to his daughter,” added Ms. Abdelkafi.

Activists are calling for greater media coverage of Aya’s death. With the exception of Opposing Views, in a post written by Kathryn Schroeder, which was posted Saturday, the Western Press has apparently not commented on this atrocity.

“I cannot believe that this case could fall into oblivion. What happened is an unacceptable crime. Further, the reactions of some people who justify this barbaric act reflect the degree of ignorance that prevails in the country,” activist and blogger Lina ben Mhenni wrote in a Facebook post.

The Facebook page, which is called “I Too Was Abused”, was created in solidarity with and to commemorate Aya’s cause. The page has launched a hashtag #moi_aussi_j_ai_été_violentée, French for “I too was abused,” to encourage women to tell their stories and take a stand against all forms of violence.

*     *     *     *     *

The poor child… Based on her photograph, she appears to be sweet and kind, and I can almost guarantee you that all she wanted was to be “normal”. This, however, was apparently not permissible in the eyes and evil heart of her father. I am curious to see what the outcome of this case will be in the Tunisian court. If this had happened in the States, he would almost certainly receive life in prison, and it would be much-deserved. My heart – scarred though it is – goes out to the child Aya and all victims of culturally-based hatred, and hate crimes, of any kind.

by Patrick H. Moore

Move over Jerry Sandusky! Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr., has been sentenced to 28 years in prison for routinely sentencing children to private jails and prisons for periods of time two to three times longer than what normally might have been required.  Ciavarella was found guilty of racketeering earlier this year. His case is a textbook example of the abuses that can result from the privatizing of prisons.

Ciavarella, who was known for his harsh and autocratic courtroom demeanor, pocketed millions of dollars for filling the beds of private jails with children who were often no older than 10 and who were often first-time offenders convicted of minor crimes such as petty theft. Ciavarella’s unconscionable courtroom style included ordering the youths to be immediately shackled, handcuffed and hauled away without even the chance to say good-bye to their families.

This case, which became known as the “kids for cash” operation, resulted in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturning 4000 convictions of kids in cases that the judge had been involved in between 2003 and 2008.

Kristen Watts of the Daily Unconstitutional writes:

It’s was called by prosecutors a $2.8 million “kids for cash” scheme, and was not limited to judge Mark Ciavrella Jr. It also involved Robert Mericle, builder of the PA and Western, PA Child Care juvenile detention centers, but judge Mark Ciavrella Jr. was at the middle of it all.

Judge Ciavarella has been accused of perpetrating a “profound evil”. He has been found guilty of illegally accepting money from a private juvenile detention facility developer to sentence minors who were seen in the court he presided over to time in the juvenile detention facility. He sentenced thousands of young people to incarceration that otherwise would have had much lighter sentences or been found innocent.

Ms. Watts cites examples of the young people affected by Ciavarella’s immoral and illegal behavior:

• 15-year-old Hillary Transue was sentenced to three months at a juvenile detention center for mocking an assistant principal on a MySpace page.

• 13-year-old Shane Bly was sent to a boot camp for two weekends after being accused of trespassing.

• One of the saddest cases is that of Edward Kenzakoski, a 17-year-old  all-star wrestler who was expected to be awarded a college scholarship before he landed in Ciavarella’s courtroom on a minor drug paraphernalia charge.  Edward, who had no prior criminal record, “spent months at the private lockups and a wilderness camp and missed his senior year of high school.”After his ordeal, which included God knows what kind of abusive behavior, “Kenzakoski emerged an angry, bitter and depressed young man. He committed suicide last June at the age of 23.”Naturally, Edward’s mother, Sandy Fonzo, feels ex-Judge Chiavarella is responsible for her son’s suicide.

After lengthy proceedings, Chiavarella was convicted in February on 12 counts that included racketeering, money laundering, mail fraud and tax evasion. In addition to being sentenced to 28 years in prison, Ciavarella was ordered to pay nearly $1.2 million in restitution. At his sentencing, Ciavarella, who made no secret of his contempt for the proceedings, “acknowledged his illegal acceptance of money from Mericle, but he denied ever jailing a juvenile in exchange for money.”

This appalling story was discussed in detail in an excellent article by Ian Urbina that appeared in the New York Times on March 27, 2009. Mr Urbina writes:

Things were different in the Luzerne County juvenile courtroom, and everyone knew it. Proceedings on average took less than two minutes. Detention center workers were told in advance how many juveniles to expect at the end of each day — even before hearings to determine their innocence or guilt. Lawyers told families not to bother hiring them. They would not be allowed to speak anyway.

“The judge’s whim is all that mattered in that courtroom,” said Marsha Levick, the legal director of the Juvenile Law Center, a child advocacy organization in Philadelphia, which began raising concerns about the court to state authorities in 1999. “The law was basically irrelevant.”

According to the indictment, and more than 40 interviews with courtroom workers and other authorities, the scheme began in June of 2000 when “Robert J. Powell, a wealthy personal-injury lawyer from Hazleton, Pa., and longtime friend of Judge (Michael) Conahan (who was also indicted), wanted to know how he might get a contract to build a private detention center. Judge Ciavarella thought he could help.”

Thus began the scheme that county officials would later describe as a“freight train without brakes.” Ciavarella put Powell in touch with an old friend, developer Robert K. Mericle, who was tasked with finding a site for the detention center. In early 2002, Judge Conahan was named “President Judge,” which gave him control of the courthouse budget. Conahan then signed a secret deal with Powell agreeing that the court would pay $1.3 million in annual rent, in addition to “tens of millions of dollars that the county and the state would pay to house the delinquent juveniles.”  Conahan then systematically knocked out the competition “by eliminating financing for the county detention center.”

“They were unstoppable,” said Judge Chester B. Muroski, who sent a letter to county commissioners raising concerns about detention costs, only to be transferred days later to another court by Judge Conahan. “I knew something was wrong, but they silenced all dissent.”

After county controller, Steve Flood, leaked a state audit describing the state’s lease of the center as a “bad deal,” the center’s owner filed a “trade secrets” lawsuit against him, and Judge Conahan sealed the suit to make sure the other documents did not see the light of day. Conahan’s decision was later overturned.

“Everyone began to assume that the judges had some vested interest in the private center because they were pushing it so doggedly,” one courthouse worker said.

The ambulance-chasing lawyer Robert J. Powell, who built the private detention centers, was not charged, apparently in return for cooperating with the investigators. Powell claimed that the judges had coerced him into paying the kickbacks.

Various county officials, including probation officers who fought for lighter sentences, say that they were overruled at every turn.

The prosecutors have stated that Judge Ciavarella was typically sentencing juveniles to twice the state average.  By late 2003, the two judges were struggling to hide their windfall, which led them to buy a $785,000 condominium together in Florida to help conceal the payments.

“We did what we could to stop it,” said Commissioner Stephen A. Urban, who repeatedly argued that the county should build its own center rather than lease the private one. “There were so many red flags that no one could mistake them as any other color.”

One red flag was the 56-foot yacht in front of the judges’ Florida condo, where they and Mr. Powell started spending much of their time. Owned by Mr. Powell, the $1.5 million boat was named the Reel Justice.

Click here to read the rest of of the New York Times article:

This case highlights the disturbing manner in which even self-made men such as Judge Ciavarella (he grew up in a rough East End neighborhood in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania) can be corrupted by power, greed and opportunity. It is especially distressing when children are the victims of a corrupt individual and his cronies. It is noted that Judge Michael Conahan was sentenced to 17 and 1/2 years in prison in 2011.

It would be ironic if Judge Ciavarella ended up sharing a prison cell with convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky. The two might have a lot to talk about.

.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

This is the order of crime that makes crime fans gnash their teeth in rage while conjuring up the direst of fates for the perpetrators.

Am I in a rare vengeful mood? Possibly. If ever there was a case that will make virtually everyone see red, this is the case. And don’t think we’re capping on Florida again, or our new whipping boy, California.

Hell, no! It turns out that we have a new player in the Awful Un-American Crime Hall of Fame. North Ogden, Utah is the locale and its diabolical offspring Eric Millerberg, 38, is the foul excuse for a human being that has just just been convicted in near record time for child abuse homicide.

McKenzie Romero of the Deseret News writes:

It came down to two stories, a husband’s and a wife’s, in a trial over the death of 16-year-old Alexis Rasmussen.

Jurors believed the wife.

Alexis Rasmussen looking wholesome

Following three days of testimony — half the time the trial was expected to take — the jury deliberated for less than 90 minutes Friday night before finding Eric Millerberg, 38, guilty of child abuse homicide in the teenager’s death following a night of drugs, sex and alcohol when she was supposedly baby-sitting at the Millerbergs’ North Ogden home on Sept. 10, 2011.

In addition to the child abuse homicide conviction, Millerberg was also found guilty of obstruction of justice, unlawful sexual conduct with a minor and abuse or desecration of a human body.

As you might imagine, a man capable of the above abominations was completely capable of sitting stone-faced as the forewoman of the five-man, three-woman jury delivered the verdict. The Rasmussen family, however, could not contain their grief and broke into sobs after the reading of each count.

When it was all over, 2nd District Judge Scott M. Hadley thanked the jury for their prompt decision and complimented them for their willingness to continue working into the evening.

“You can see it in your faces, the hard work you’ve done,” Hadley said. “It’s hard work and it’s never pleasant, frankly, to judge another human being.”

Dea Millerberg

This is a case where a wife’s testimony and the prosecution’s promise of immunity was necessary to lay out the execrable Millerberg. According to court records, Dea Millerberg, who is 40, filed for divorce in 2012 and is awaiting trial on charges of desecration of a dead body. The careful reader will note, however, that Dea appears to be getting “one sweetheart of a deal” given that the evidence shows that she is just about as guilty as Eric Millerberg.

But that was hardly the final step. In July of 2011, Alexis reportedly announced to the Millerbergs that she wanted to become sexually intimate with them.

In her testimony, the brazen Dea soft-peddled the moment they all stepped over the line.

“Eric and I started kissing and having sex. Then Alexis jumped in.”

The end of Alexis’ journey to nowhere came on September 10, 2011. In theory, the couple was supposed to go birthday shopping for their daughter. That was why they needed Alexis to babysit.

This was one shopping trip that never got off the ground. When Alexis arrived, Eric Millerberg immediately began pumping her full of meth and heroin, injecting her in the neck and the arm.

According to Dea Millerberg, when Alexis was “as high as she had ever been,” Dea and her husband performed oral sex on each other. This time around Alexis was much too wrecked to take part in a threesome.

The Millerbergs realized belatedly that Eric has miscalculated badly. Alexis was cold and disoriented and began “freaking out”. Then she took a warm bath in the couple’s master bedroom.

45 minutes later she was still cold. Dea wrapped her in a blanket and told her to lie down.

Then the couple left for a smoke (What the hell? They left her there.) They came back 30 minutes later. She was – as they say – not responding. (Keep in mind that while all this is going on the Millerberg’s kids are presumably there at the house taking it all in.)

Alexis Rasmussen looking less wholesome

“She wasn’t breathing. She had mucousy stuff coming out of the right side of her mouth,” said Dea. A licensed nurse, Dea tried to resuscitate Alexis and failed.

“It really was a panic. The idea of it was, we will lose our kids and go to jail, and there was nothing we could do to bring her back,” she told the court.

At this time, Eric Millerberg, who was/is a white supremacist and a member of the Silent Aryan Warriors was on parole for burglary and firearm charges.

The Millerbergs transferred Alexis’s unresponsive body to a foot locker which they placed in the trunk of their car.

When they dumped Alexis in an isolated area of Morgan County, Utah, they reportedly put her purse in one dumpster with the box holding her body, and put the carpet from the car in another dumpster.   The body was found five weeks later.

Utah law defines child abuse as inflicting injuries that impair a child’s health, which includes preparing and administering narcotics. Alexis’s, Brenna Cain, testified that she and Alexis often secretly got drugs, alcohol and sex from the Millerbergs, and when Alexis disappeared, they were the first people she approached.

Detective Mike Tribe stated that Rasmussen’s corpse was found kneeling face down, covered in brush in a rural area of Morgan County. Her neon toe nail polish, ankle bracelets and jawline helped to identify her.

*     *     *     *     *

by Lise LaSalle

On September 3, 2013, Kelli Stapleton published a blog describing an IEP (Individualized Education Program) meeting where it was decided that the district school would not offer services to her 14-year-old autistic daughter named Issy. The girl had been discharged recently from an 8-month inpatient program in Kalamazoo, MI (three hours from her home) where she was being treated for, among other things, aggressive behavior related to her autism. While attending treatment, Issy had developed a good rapport with a teacher and the Stapletons were hopeful.

commentary by Patrick H.Moore

One thing you don’t expect when attending your high school reunion is for some miscreant to gun you down like a mad dog. In fact, I’ve gone to 4 or 5 reunions at my alma mater, the now defunct Ellwood P. Cubberley High School, without ever catching a bullet. Hell, I’ve never even considered the possibility of swallowing lead at one of these functions.

Sadly, danger erupted in a most unsettling fashion at the East Peoria Community High School (Class of 1999) high school reunion on Saturday night in good ol’ Peoria, Illinois. Perhaps it a Midwestern kind of thing, but whoever organized the reunion decided it would be held at The Fifth Quarter Sports Bar and Pizzeria, located on North Main Street, across from the Par-a-dice Hotel and Casino. (Maybe it’s because I went to high school in the snooty town of Palo Alto, but our reunions are generally held at rather posh country clubs, but hey, “whatever’s right.”)

The appalling thing is that the shooter, who did not miss, has the same last name as yours truly, as did one of his victims, who just happened to be the killer’s ex-wife.

WEEK Producer writes:

A high school reunion in East Peoria Saturday night turned deadly when a man walked into a crowded bar and shot a woman and man at point blank range.

Within seconds, an off-duty law enforcement officer at the scene jumped into action, firing his weapon, killing the suspect.

According to the Peoria County coroner, the female victim is Lori A. Moore, 33, of Morton, Ill. She was pronounced dead at OSF St. Francis Medical Center at 9:16 p.m. Saturday.

The male victim is Lance E. Griffel, 36, of Peoria, Ill. He was pronounced dead at OSF St. Francis Hospital at 9:39 p.m. Saturday.

Both victims were shot in the head, according to the coroner.

Not only were the two victims robbed of their life and happiness, but all of the class of ’99 graduates had their fun-filled evening cut short – very short, for the simple reason that the killer, Jason A. Moore, burst into the sports bar at 7:50 pm (when the party must have barely been getting started) and opened fire.

Although the authorities appear to have been stumped initially with respect to motive, it all became clear once law enforcement realized that the shooter was Lori Moore’s ex-husband. In short, Jason Moore appears to have killed his ex and her new boyfriend (the divorce was finalized in May of 2013) purely out of jealousy.

It’s probably very fortunate that the off-duty officer, who is reportedly FBI, happened to be hanging out at the Fifth Quarter. Given that Jason Moore had clearly become unhinged, for all anyone knows, he might have just continued shooting was it not for the agent’s expedient actions. Thus, yet another mass shooting may have been averted.

Max Buedal of the Journal Star writes:

East Peoria Police Chief Dick Ganschow said investigators were reviewing video of the incident recorded at the bar, and crime scene investigators were gathering evidence. Interviews of friends and relatives of the shooter and the victims will continue in the coming days to determine the background that led to the deadly shooting.

People vary in how they react to an incident of this nature. The rubber-necking crowd naturally likes to hang around taking it all in. A group of bikers wearing the regalia of the Outlaw Motorcycle Club, however, chose to get out of Dodge quickly and left the bar immediately after the shooting. The bikers were followed by police to a clubhouse on Farmington Road in Peoria County. The police said later, however, that they were witnesses to the incident and not suspects.

(It’s quite possible that the motorcycle’s gang’s rapid exit was triggered by the fact that being “outlaw” bikers, they may have a natural aversion to the law. Or, alternatively, a few of them could have been holding contraband and/or unregistered weapons.)

Needless to say, the police treated the fatal incident with the utmost seriousness. They, and other emergency response vehicles, blocked the portion of Main Street that led from the entrance of the sports bar to a Shell gas station at the Route 116 intersection.

Speaking of rubberneckers, a crowd of curious onlookers gathered on the other side of Route 116 near the entrance to the gas station, and clustered on the other side of the yellow crime scene tape the police had set up to prevent witnesses from leaving the sports bar parking lot. One couple reportedly embraced tearfully over the tape. The police later lifted the yellow cordon to allow vehicles to depart one-by-one.

Kim Beeware of Huffington Post writes:

East Peoria Police Chief Dick Ganschow credited the off-duty officer — who asked news outlets not to identify him — with averting a larger-scale shooting.

“It’s very difficult to say,” Ganschow told the Journal-Star. “You can play the ‘what if’ game over and over again, but I think it’s pretty clear in his case the presence of this officer and his ability to take very quick and very decisive action prevented a further tragedy.”

The shooting has been classified as a domestic violence-related incident.

“Domestic situations are extremely volatile, whether they end up in this kind of situation or your average domestic. There is a certain level of volatility and unpredictability that are involved. The emotion level is high and sometimes they just reach a point and people snap,” Ganschow told NBC.

*     *     *     *     *

Lori A. Moore and Lance E. Griffel

How truly sad! Given Jason Moore’s truly irrational actions, it’s not unreasonable to assume that Lori Moore, who as his ex must have known him very well, may have felt a huge sense of relief thinking she was disentangled from him after her divorce was finalized. As for her now-dead boyfriend, Lance E. Griffel, we can also probably assume that the last thing on earth he expected was that the ill-fated high school reunion at the Fifth Quarter Sports Bar and Pizzeria was the last reunion he was ever going to attend.

by Patrick H. Moore

The fiendish machinations of serial killers fascinate and terrify, in part because there is no definitive explanation as to what forms these monsters.  Jeffrey Dahmer, the mild-mannered monster from West Allis, Wisconsin falls squarely into the group of serial killers who were neither abused nor deprived during their formative years.  Nonetheless, Jeffrey managed to rape, torture and murder 17 victims between 1978 and 1991. At times, he dismembered and devoured their body parts. He always said that what he really wanted was a friend but that he could never keep one for long.

Experts in the field have dedicated their lives to studying and analyzing the nature of the serial killer, yet are unable to reach any real consensus as to what motivates these psychopaths. This unsettling fact is set forth in a number of scholarly works on the subject which are available at the website of the National Criminal Justice Reference Service:

D. Lester, author of Serial Killers: The Insatiable Passion, discovers that most serial killers in modern times have been white and that they largely eschew the use of firearms in committing their crimes.  He also opines that, in the final analysis, it is difficult, if not impossible, to construct a solid profile of serial killers.

In Overkill: Mass Murder and Serial Killing Exposed, authors J.A. Fox and J. Levin state:

“Most serial murderers do not kill for love, money, or revenge, but rather for the psychological stimulation and relief that it brings from an intolerably painful, powerless, and mundane existence.”

M. Newton, in Hunting Humans: An Encyclopedia of Modern Serial Killers, avers:

“Motives were often psychological, with strong sado-sexual overtones and evidence of compulsive behavior. Six percent of the cases involved greed. Since 1969, 8 percent of the cases involved practitioners of Satanism, while another 5 percent involved members of the medical profession.”

It is tacitly accepted by many, however, that some form of psychological wounding, both as a child and continuing into adulthood, is intrinsic in the development of these individuals. The wounding, however, is not necessarily the result of mistreatment per se on the part of the killer’s parents but may stem from something more subtle and inscrutable. Such seems be the case with Jeffrey Dahmer.  Both of his parents were, shall we say, a bit peculiar.

In his book, A Father’s Story, Jeffrey’s father, analytical chemist Lionel Dahmer, searches for answers. Given his obvious shame and guilt for siring a monster, his observations should perhaps be greeted with some skepticism. He does appear to have some insight, however, which bears consideration. In general, Lionel believes that Jeffrey’s mother’s hysteria and psychosomatic illnesses during her difficult pregnancy with Jeffrey may have played a key role.

Throughout her pregnancy, according to Lionel, Joyce Dahmer vomited constantly, as if her body was sickened by having Jeffrey inside her. Far worse, however, were her bizarre seizures.  Lionel Dahmer writes:

“At times, her legs would lock tightly in place, and her whole body would grow rigid and begin to tremble. Her jaw would jerk to the right and take on a similarly frightening rigidity. During these strange seizures, her eyes would bulge like a frightened animal, and she would begin to salivate, literally frothing at the mouth.”

One cannot help but wonder and Lionel does:

“Why was she so upset all the time? What was it that she found so dreadful?”

While Lionel seems largely content with implicating Joyce as a kind of biological contaminant, he does admit to having been fascinated by fire and bombs throughout his own childhood, and in the context of telling the Dahmer’s family’s dark tale, he gradually reveals many of his personal oddities. Be that as it may, little Jeffrey was not your typical child.  At age 4, he became transfixed by the sight of bones. Around the same time, he suffered from a painful double hernia that required a difficult surgical procedure, which left him temporarily convinced that the surgeon had cut off his penis.

After that, Jeffrey grew increasingly strange.  Lionel writes:

“This strange and subtle inner darkening began to appear almost physically. His hair, which had once been so light, grew steadily darker, along with the deeper shading of his eyes. More than anything, he seemed to grow more inward, sitting quietly for long periods, hardly stirring, his face oddly motionless.”

Both father and son found solace in scientific experimentation.  In early adolescence, Jeffrey spent much of his time riding around their neighborhood on his bicycle, trolling for dead animals which he dissected at home or in the woods. On one occasion, he impaled a dog’s head on a stake. Lionel Dahmer writes: “In the lab, I found a wonderful comfort and assurance in knowing the properties of things, how they could be manipulated in predictable patterns.” As time passed, Jeffrey grew increasingly fearful and isolated, apparently mirroring his father’s youthful development. Lionel writes that he sees his son as a “deeper, darker shadow” of himself and warns that instead of guiding our children toward a healthy future, “Some of us are doomed to pass a curse instead.”

Lionel Dahmer’s cautionary tale suggests that it’s easy for a parent to be blind to his or her own destructive tendencies, traits that may be passed on to the next generation in far more virulent fashion. Lionel sums up the problem:

“Fatherhood remains, at last, a grave enigma, and when I contemplate that my other son may one day be a father, I can only say to him, as I must to every father after me, ‘Take care, take care, take care.’”

Jeffrey Dahmer’s Brief Self-Analysis:

In an interview conducted by television journalist Stone Phillips in 1994, shortly before he was beaten to death by other inmates in a Wisconsin penitentiary, Jeffrey Dahmer, though hardly as verbally facile as his poetic, albeit introverted, father, described his first murder:

“When I woke up in the morning, my forearms were bruised. And his chest was bruised, blood was coming out of his mouth, he was hanging over the side of the bed…  I have no memory of beating him to death, but I must have.”

Dahmer admits to striving for total control over his victims, which seems to be his motivation for committing the crimes. When questioned about the pleasure he acquired from the actual act of killing, Dahmer replied almost poignantly:

“The killing was just a means to an end; that was the least satisfactory part, I didn’t enjoy doing that. That’s why I tried to create living zombies with muriatic acid and the drill. But it never worked.”

Read more at http://www.ranker.com/list/top-10-most-chilling-interviews-with-famous-killers/jennifer-lee#GfZtGiVCgzZOQmvs.99

In an article extracted from the archives of the New York Times entitled “Jeffrey Dahmer, Multiple Killer, Is Bludgeoned to Death in Prison “(originally published on November 29, 1994), Don Terry writes:

Jeffrey L. Dahmer, whose gruesome exploits of murder, necrophilia and dismemberment shocked the world in 1991, was attacked and killed today in a Wisconsin prison, where he was serving 15 consecutive life terms.

Mr. Dahmer was 34, older than any of his victims, who ranged in age from 14 to 33. He died of massive head injuries, suffered sometime between 7:50 and 8:10 A.M., when he was found in a pool of blood in a toilet area next to the prison’s gym, said Michael Sullivan, secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. He was pronounced dead shortly after 9 A.M.

A bloodied broomstick was found nearby, and a fellow inmate who is serving (a) life sentence for murder, Christopher J. Scaver, 25, of Milwaukee, is the prime suspect, the authorities said.

E. Michael McCann, the Milwaukee County District Attorney, who sent Mr. Dahmer to prison in 1992, said, “This is the last sad chapter in a very sad life.”

“Tragically,” Mr. McCann said, “his parents will have to experience the same loss the families of his victims have experienced.”

It is somewhat unusual for the authorities to express sympathy regarding the death of a serial killer with 17 victims etched in acid upon his soul, but that seems to be the case in this peculiar matter.  Finally, we are inevitably left with a sense of unrest that is almost uncanny.  Jeffrey Dahmer’s mother was highly neurotic and his father was introverted and prone to dark fantasies. This in itself is not that unusual.  A large percentage, if not the majority, of children grow up in families that are flawed. Sometimes, the flaws are dramatic, yet, the vast majority of these children do not grow up to rape, torture, murder, and sometimes cannibalize.  Why was Jeffrey Dahmer different?  We may never know the answer. But we do know one thing. What Jeffrey really wanted was a friend who wouldn’t go away.

Commentary by Patrick H. Moore

It is perhaps somewhat of a cliché to tell someone that he or she needs to get their priorities straight and most people will certainly bristle a bit when some well-meaning, albeit officious, soul tells them to do precisely that. We humans are congenitally stubborn and simply don’t like being told what to do.

On the other hand, someone can have their priorities straight in their own mind and discover that society (and law enforcement ) see things quite differently.

This appears to be what happened to Carlo Lissi, a darkly handsome soccer fan who used to live with his wife and his two children in a villa in Motta Visconti near Milan.

Lissa, a 31-year-old IT consultant, appears to have lined up his priorities in the following eminently reasonable (in his mind) manner:

1) Seduce the young female colleague at work with whom he had become deeply infatuated. Unfortunately, the colleague apparently would not cooperate, perhaps because she did not view Lissa as the ideal man with whom to tango. Lissi decided that the problem was that Miss Desirability didn’t want to make beautiful music with him because he was tied down – married with children.

2) Thus, logically enough, Lissi decided his best hope would be to murder his 38-year-old wife and his two young children. That way his family – whom he had come to view as excess baggage — would be out of the picture, and he could present himself to the young woman whose image was carved upon his heart as a free man. Of course, it’s entirely possible that Lissi had never told Miss Sweet that he was married and had a family. On the other hand, his co-workers may have informed her – we don’t know.

3) Lissi’a third priority, once he had dispatched his poor family to god knows where, was to under no circumstances miss Saturday’s critical World Cup soccer match between England and Italy. Therefore, he had to whack the wife and kids before the game so that he could watch it in peace knowing that he had improved his chances of winning Miss Sweet’s heart.

4) This brilliant tactician’s fourth priority was arranging the crime scene to make it look like an intruder had burst in, probably to burglarize the place, and had botched the job killing his wife and kids in the process.
With this plan in mind, Lissi began to execute matters, presumably never losing sight of his ultimate goal of overcoming his would be precious angel’s resistance.

His first step was to place his wife, Maria Cristina Omes, in a vulnerable position so that killing her would be easy. This he carried out with aplomb. First, after making sure that the kids were sleeping upstairs, he seduced poor Maria on their living room sofa. Maria was apparently quite willing; they proceeded to get naked then and there and consummated the act.

We don’t know if Lissi was fantasizing about Miss Delicious while he and Maria were having sex on the sofa. What we do know is that once they were through, Lissi suddenly attacked his wife, hitting her repeatedly before stabbing her to death.

He then went upstairs and knifed four-year-old Giulia and 20-month-old Gabriele.

Once they were dead, he washed any blood off his person, got dressed (we don’t if he wore an Italian National team soccer jersey like he might have if he were an American) and drove to the pub, tossing the murder weapon – a kitchen knife – down a storm drain on his way to the pub. (The murder weapon was later recovered.)

According to statements his friends at the pub made later to police, Lissi had been “completely calm” while watching the game (at least as calm as you can be while watching an exciting soccer match), and had cracked jokes and cheered when Italy was victorious by the score of 2 to 1.

It’s unclear exactly when Lissa returned home, but at some point he called police to report that his house had been robbed and his family murdered. When the police arrived, he told them he had returned home at 2 am only to discover a scene of horror — his wife and two children were very dead with their throats cut.

The Italian investigators have reported that after looking around, they immediately became suspicious. Although the house had been partially ransacked and the safe had been opened, there was no sign of any force and there was no sign of forced entry to the villa.

Therefore, like detectives the world round, they began grilling their suspect. It took more than 24 hours (as we know from another case that has been in the news, the Italian investigators are experts at long, intense interrogations) and Lissi, who may well be guilty of the murders, finally allegedly broke down and confessed.

According to the police report, Lissa told law enforcement that he came to consider his wife and children as obstacles standing in his way of his “unrequited love” which is why he murdered them.

Or as the old saying goes, “Love unrequited robs me of my rest.”

Once it was too late and he had allegedly confessed, Lissi asked that he be given the maximum sentence for his crimes, according to prosecutor Gustavo Cioppa.

Nick Squires reports from Rome for The Telegraph:

At the IT company where Lissi worked, colleagues said they were “speechless” and “staggered” when they heard about the triple murder.

A neighbour of the family told the Ansa news agency: “It seems impossible, he was so affectionate as a father. He told me just a few days ago that he was going to put a paddling pool in the garden for the kids.”

*     *     *     *     *

This is plenty damned weird. If this story had not been reported by reputable tabloids (an oxymoron if there ever was one), I would say someone is shucking and jiving us. But it apparently did happen. And as we know from following the crime news, weak minds are snapping left and right all over this whole fallen world. Lissi’s wife and children are dead and he will spend a long time in an Italian prison no doubt dreaming of Miss Delicious and what could have been.

And, if Lissi is very lucky, Italy just might win the World Cup.

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.