by Mike Roche

Until last Wednesday, the Darin and Kim Campbell family lived in a rented 1.6 million dollar Tampa mansion, the former home of retired tennis star James Blake. The house sat behind the gates of the prestigious and very private Avila development, which was populated with multimillion-dollar homes and occupied by celebrity powerbrokers and athletes. The neighborhood centerpiece was an exclusive private golf course. Darin Campbell, 49, was a business executive at VASATEC, a digital records management services company. His wife, Kim, 51, was a stay-at-home mom, who was active in the community and at her teenagers’ school. The Campbell children, Megan, 15, and Colin, 18, attended the prestigious Carollwood Day School. Megan was an honors student and dancer. Colin, who had just attended his senior prom, was a talented student and baseball player.

In the predawn hours, this past Wednesday, neighbors of the Campbell’s frantically summoned the fire department as they watched in horror as the opulent home became engulfed in flames. As firefighters battled the blaze, they discovered a grisly scene. Four unidentified bodies were located inside the house. Investigators quickly determined the fire was the result of an arson and the victims were killed by gunshot prior to the fire destroying the home.

Despite the outward appearance that the Campbell’s were the all-American family, there were cracks in the façade. Investigators have learned that in the days prior to fire, Darrin Campbell made several rather unusual moves. First, he purchased several gas cans at a home improvement store at about 8 a.m. on Sunday, May 4^th. An hour later, he bought over $600 worth of fireworks. The sales clerk at the fireworks store noted no unusual behavior from Darrin. On Tuesday, the day before the fire, he filled the gas cans at two separate service stations. He had already previously purchased a handgun in 2013.

Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Colonel Donna Lusczynski said, “Darrin Campbell, with the gun that was registered to him, systematically shot his son, his daughter and his wife in the head. He then placed fireworks throughout the residence. Used an accelerant to assist in lighting the fire. Lit the fire and then shot himself.”

*     *     *     *     *

Darrin and Kim Campbell moved from Michigan to Tampa in 2000 with their children. They built a home in an upscale neighborhood not far Tampa Airport. Their mortgage was a formidable  $546,000. In 2003, they acquired a vacant lot in another affluent development north of Tampa for $338,000. Darrin and Kim were thriving economically. They paid off the mortgage on the lot and sold the land for a handsome $160,000 profit in 2006.

During the Christmas Holidays, the Campbell family home was so lavishly decorated that the pleasing display drew crowds from neighboring communities. For four consecutive years, the home won honors as the “Best Decorated Holiday Home.” The family’s electric bill rose $800 during the holidays and they accepted donations to defray expenses. The Campbell’s then donated the $3,733 in donations to Metropolitan Ministries, a homeless support shelter for indigent families.

At the height of the real estate boom, the couple bought another vacant lot for $294,000 in the same development where their previous vacant lot was located. Although they still owned the new lot at the time of their deaths, the market had soured and the property was now worth one-third of the original purchase price. A lien was placed on the lot due to $7,800 in unpaid homeowner’s association fees. They eventually paid off the lien, but their financial struggles continued, and they were continually delinquent on their property taxes. They refinanced their house several times before selling it in 2012 for $750,000. The Campbell’s made a profit on the deal, but their overhead expenses continued to be steep. Their next big move was to move into the former Blake residence in the Avila estates.

Darrin Campbell was on the board of Carrollwood Day School, and served as treasurer. He formerly was a senior vice president at PODS, a shipping and storage container company. In 2007, Darrin took a position as vice-president at IVANS, an insurance company. After it changed ownership, he became the chief operating officer (COO) at VASTEC, where he recently took a leave of absence. The rent on the former Blake home was estimated to be a tidy $5,000 a month for the 5,000 square foot home. The base annual tuition for Carrolwood Day School was approximately $34,000 for the two children. The additional cost of books, uniforms, various fundraisers, and other educational expenses had to be a drain on the Campbell family checkbook. And of course, college tuition loomed on the horizon with Colin scheduled to graduate in a month.

Darrin Campbell’s mother, Mary, told the Daily News she was searching for answers. “I have no idea what happened. I spoke to him last night.” (the night before the conflagration). Family friends and neighbors heaped accolades on the entire family. It was obvious that they were well-respected and loved within the community.

We rarely have the opportunity to gaze behind the veneer of the façade our neighbors, or even our relatives, erect. We see what they allow us to see, and they often successfully conceal what’s really going on, especially if they have serious issues.

After conducting an extensive examination of the arson scene, investigators are still searching computers and papers found in the home. Interviews of family and friends may uncover ripples, or even violent rapids, sullying the appearance of calm waters. Interviews with employers both past and present may also shed light into Darrin Campbell’s employment stability or any possible inappropriate behavior. A financial audit will reveal the magnitude of the family’s financial problems.

The further up the ladder one ascends, the more difficult it becomes to step down when one’s personal wheel of fortune descends. One of the top ten stressors in life is finances. As individuals become overwhelmed with financial stress, the pressure often intrudes into both their domestic life and their employment. The negative emotional vortex sucks many formerly successful individuals into a life of despair from which they see no way to escape. They view alternatives (translated as a substantially reduced standard of living) as a stamp of failure.

Two-thirds of those who engage in targeted violence and mass murder have contemplated or attempted suicide in the past. When immense personal darkness clutches at these people, their thought processes and judgment become clouded. They become convinced that their family will have to endure the grief of their loss and the humiliation of their tarnished legacy. As a result, they view killing their family as an act of altruism.

Darrin Campbell will now be labeled as a family annihilator. These killers are most often men. In 2012, a study of 313 murder/suicides by the Violence Policy Center found that 90% of the killers were male. Most multiple-victim, murder-suicides involving a male murderer and three or more victims are perpetrated by family annihilators.  69% of murder-suicides falling into this category were perpetrated by family annihilators.  Family annihilators are murderers who kill their intimate partners and children, as well as other family members, before killing themselves.  USF Professor, Dr. Donna Cohen, states that in over a third of these cases, the annihilator starts a fire to cover their crime leaving only ashes. She feels that this is an attempt to deny access to their personal lives.

As surviving friends and relatives of the Campbell family struggle with the grief of this tragic loss, they are left to contemplate the lost contributions that Kim, Megan, and Colin would have provided to the world.

Please click here to view Mike Roche’s previous posts:

The Grisly Details of Serial “Mall Killer” Mike DeBardeleben’s Actions Will Never Be Known

Family Annihilator Darin Campbell Murders His Family and Torches Lavish Tampa Mansion

Alex Hribal Was Desperate and Said He Wanted Someone to Kill Him

Columbia Mall Shooter Darion Aguilar Followed the Model of Notorious Mass Murderers

Peter Lanza Speaks: The Lethal and Unvarnished Truth about His Son Adam

FHP Officer Jimmy Fulford Fields Pipe Bomb Intended for Young Mother with His Bare Hands and Dies Instantly

Fire Department and California Highway Patrol Go 9 Rounds: Win, Lose or Draw?

The Boston Bombers: A Tale of Two Troubled Brothers

Don’t Text at the Movies, The Life You Lose May Be Your Own!

Killers and the Catcher in the Rye

Mike Roche has over three decades of law enforcement experience. He began his career with the Little Rock Police Department, and spent twenty-two years with the U.S. Secret Service. The last fifteen years of his career were focused on conducting behavioral threat assessments of those threatening to engage in targeted violence. He is the author of three novels and two nonfiction works on mass murder and also rapport building. Retired, Mike is currently a security consultant at Protective Threat LLC, and an adjunct instructor at Saint Leo University. He resides in Florida with his family.

Mass Killers: How you Can Identify, Workplace, School, or Public Killers Before They Strikehttp://www.amazon.com/Mass-Killers-Identify-Workplace-School-ebook/dp/B00GHZWC1M/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1389112969&sr=1-2&keywords=mass+killers

Face 2 Face: Observation, Interviewing and Rapport Building Skills: an Ex-Secret Service Agent’s Guidehttp://www.amazon.com/Face-2-ebook/dp/B009991BII/ref=sr_1_6?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1354630000&sr=1-6

The Blue Monster  http://www.amazon.com/The-Blue-Monster-ebook/dp/B0054H8TMA/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1312641741&sr=1-1

Coins of Death http://www.amazon.com/Coins-Of-Death-ebook/dp/B005RPZ256/ref=sr_1_3?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1317860179&sr=1-3

Karma! http://www.amazon.com/Karma-Mike-Roche-ebook/dp/B0054H4OAG/ref=la_B00BHEIF78_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1389724285&sr=1-4

by Lise LaSalle

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.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Ronald Thomas Ford and Ramiro “Rome” Sanchez were 63 and 55 respectively when their lives were cut short when they were bludgeoned to death at their home in the 100 block of North Stuart Street in Denver, Colorado in January of 2011. Ford and Sanchez were reportedly “bon vivants” who had no qualms about enjoying the pleasures of middle age. Shortly after the slayings, a neighbor named Ryan Delve reported:

“I never saw Ms. Puppy lurking around, but the two gentlemen who lived in the house, they were quite frequent boozers, they were out partying, they’d come home at 6, 7 in the morning, just jumping out of cabs, half-dressed. It was pretty weird.”

Ford and Sanchez, who were known for being extremely kind, would probably still be partying and “jumping out of cabs half-naked” at 6 am had they not made the fatal mistake of employing a stone killer and all-around con-man named Daryl Rasmussen as their housekeeper and gardener. For somewhat inexplicable reasons (perhaps he thought they worked him too hard), Rasmussen, an alleged cross dresser who went by the name ‘Ms. Puppy’, bludgeoned the two life partners to death, stashed their bodies in the basement and took off after stealing their car.

The official cause of death was blunt force trauma injuries.

We’ve all heard the expression “no good deed goes unpunished” and that was apparently the case with Ms. Puppy’s victims. According to the Denver Post, Ford and Sanchez, who had formerly operated an upscale Mexican restaurant and catering service in Denver called La Fabula Grill and Cantina, took Rasmussen into their home approximately three months before they were found bludgeoned to death because he was homeless.

Ford and Sanchez clearly appear to have been kind-hearted folks who were not averse to helping people in need.

“It wasn’t surprising that they’d help somebody in need, it was surprising that we didn’t know. We had not heard of this person,” Sanchez’s sister Angie Mingus told 7News. “From what we hear he was a cross dresser. He was looking to get an operation is what we’re hearing so he’s in transition.”

Ms. Puppy might still be roaming the country “hustling people strange to him” was it not for an observant Palm Springs resident who recognized the reprobate at a local bar called “Score” after seeing news coverage on TV and alerting police. According to another report, the man at the “Score” was a former Denver resident who reportedly overheard Rasmussen call himself Ms. Puppy at the bar. The Desert Sun reports that Rasmussen reportedly flashed another man’s driver’s license to Palm Springs police, but was positively ID’d anyway. Denver Police had been looking for him since February of 2011.

At the time of his arrest, Ms. Puppy, who certainly got around, was wanted on two outstanding warrants for parole violations in Texas and Georgia.

It’s was nearly two years after the heinous act that a Colorado grand jury finally returned a multiple count indictment against Rasmussen for two counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Ford and Sanchez and a dozen other counts including theft, identity theft and credit card fraud.

It’s a fortunate thing that the grand jury returned the indictment, because although prosecutors had previously charged Rasmussen for the deaths of his two luckless benefactors, a judge had originally dismissed the case after finding that there was not enough evidence to bind him over for trial.

The grand jury indictment, which also named four co-defendants accused of conspiracy for allegedly helping Rasmussen with Ford and Sanchez’s stolen car and other items, set the stage for the convictions.

It took approximately 30 months from the time of the murder for justice to be carried out, but finally, on Friday July 18, 2014, Ms. Puppy  pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder for killing Ford and Sanchez, and was then sentenced to 30 years in state prison.

The sisters of Ford and Sanchez spoke in court saying that society is better off with Rasmussen in prison.

As for the prosecutors, they said that the 30-year sentence isn’t harsh enough but that hopefully the sentence will give some sense of closure to the victims’ families. Prosecutor Joe Morales stated in court:

“He betrayed them by taking their lives and taking their money. That’s the sad part about this is that these were two men who really gave a lot their entire lives. In fact, speaking with the families that’s what they talked about is that they were always giving, always giving to the family, always giving to the community and unfortunately their gratuity got them killed.”

Which is why they say, “No good deed goes unpunished.” I can just image this creep Ms. Puppy hustling these poor, good-hearted middle-aged gentlemen, and them thinking they were helping out a poor unfortunate soul, something they were clearly more than willing to do.

by BJW Nashe

Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen’s death-trip punk romance culminated in her murder in October, 1978, followed by his death from a heroin overdose in early 1979. For thirty years, the prevailing view held that Sid, the troubled Sex Pistols’ bassist, was the one who fatally stabbed Nancy in their room at Manhattan’s infamous Chelsea Hotel. In 2009, a documentary film called Who Killed Nancy? was released, which drew upon “new evidence” to show that Vicious was most likely innocent of the murder. Several news outlets followed up with stories questioning the established version of events. The main point was that Sid was too incapacitated from drugs to kill anyone on the night of Nancy’s death, so comatose from the massive dose of sedatives (30 Tuinals) he had gobbled that he couldn’t even lift a knife, let alone stab anyone.

So Sid’s legend no longer includes murder. His reputation as a punk icon should survive this relatively minor setback. There’s still plenty of bad behavior on his resume. Sid remains a potent symbol of anarchy and rebellion. Yet make no mistake: the reality of his short life in the limelight was marked by absurdity. He was a bit of a joke. His real name wasn’t Sid, it was John Ritchie, and he wasn’t particularly “vicious.” He grew up as a shy misfit from London’s working class. He became a rock star even though he couldn’t play music. He hardly contributed anything at all to his band’s hit album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. During the recording, Sid was hospitalized with hepatitis. He was famous simply for being famous — the biggest rock star of his era, based solely on his image as the ultimate nihilistic rebel. In the end, despondent over the death of his beloved Nancy, and horrified at the prospect of spending the rest of his life behind bars, Sid didn’t even have the guts to commit suicide. In a gruesome twist, he had his own mother administer the fatal dose.

If the incompetent Sid Vicious didn’t kill Nancy, who did? We’ll probably never know for sure. All we know is she was found lying dead in a pool of her own blood, clad in her black bra and panties, on the floor of the couple’s hotel bathroom. The murder remains shrouded in mystery, clouded over by the hazy recollections of seedy drug addicts and punk rock bottom feeders, many of whom are by now either dead, or too damaged to provide much reliable testimony. Journalist Alan Parker, the director of Who Killed Nancy?, points out that there were fingerprints from six other persons found at the scene of the crime, yet none of them were interviewed by police. Parker claims that a likely suspect is a shady character named “Michael,” who presumably robbed an unconscious Sid of several thousand of dollars of cash he had in the room, and stabbed Nancy in the process. One suitably odd character, a fixture on the scene at the time, was a sometime actor and full-time addict known as Rockets Redglare. Redglare once told a journalist that Nancy was killed during the making of a snuff film. Just imagine the price this foul item would fetch on the murderabilia market. Rockets is long dead from liver failure, however, and he was never a very reliable source of information.

“Who killed Nancy?” Perhaps the more interesting question at this point is “Who was Nancy?”  Nancy Spungen tends to get a bad rap as the insufferable groupie from hell who sank her claws into the great Sid Vicious, the iconic “James Dean of Punk,” and then dragged him to his doom. Anyone who sees the Alex Cox film Sid and Nancy is unlikely to forget Chloe Webb’s shrieking, obnoxious portrayal of Spungen. Yet this is a cinematic caricature, containing only partial truth. Take a closer look, and a more complex character emerges. One of the best pieces of writing on Nancy is Karen Schoemer’s October 19, 2008 piece for New York Magazine. [http://nymag.com/arts/popmusic/features/51394/] In Schoemer’s reassessment, Nancy emerges as a more compelling, albeit disturbing, embodiment of pure punk rebellion and martyrdom than does Sid Vicious, or any of the other Sex Pistols. For Nancy, as well as other women on the scene such as Patti Smith and Deborah Harry and Penelope Houston, one can argue that the stakes were considerably higher than they were for the men. And for Nancy, who didn’t play in a band, to nonetheless become a major player on the scene is fairly remarkable. Nancy is the first superstar groupie. She’s worth paying attention to.

Juliet From Hell

Nancy Spungen was a middle class Jewish girl from the suburbs of Philadelphia. She was highly intelligent, but psychologically and emotionally troubled. Her family didn’t know how to handle her. Nancy was evidently one of those people who seem to have been put here for the sole purpose of raising holy hell. As a child, she screamed and yelled until she got her way. Her parents would give in just to get some peace and quiet, or because they were incapable of seeking alternative solutions. Nancy once attacked her mother with a hammer. She was diagnosed as schizophrenic at age 15, and spent time in a mental hospital. The psych ward didn’t help much, and probably only made her more rebellious. Let’s face it: girls who are “different” in some way have typically been pressured to conform, through outright coercion or with more subtle forms of bribery, rather than encouraged to express themselves via suitable means (art, music, writing, or whatever). As a society, we have made considerable improvements in this regard, with further progress yet to be made. In the sixties and seventies, however, many American girls still found themselves boxed into fairly rigid social and familial structures. As the hippie movement crashed and burned, suburban middle class life remained stifling and restrictive for young women. I’m not trying to blame society, or the Spungen family, for Nancy’s “problems.” I’m just trying to situate her behavior in its proper context.

In any case, Nancy found her upbringing stultifying. As a teenager, she proved to be utterly unwilling to pursue life as a “conventional” American female. In 1975, at the age of 17, she took off for New York City to fling herself into the hard rock scene. She lived on the Lower East Side, and trailed after hard-partying bands such as the Heartbreakers and the New York Dolls. She worked as a stripper and a prostitute on Times Square, then used the money to buy drugs for the musicians she pursued. She soon gained a reputation for wild, reckless behavior. By most accounts, she prowled the groupie scene like a wild, rapacious animal. Nancy didn’t play the standard, submissive groupie role. She was aggressive and in-your-face. She refused to hide her sex-for-money work (other groupies tended to avoid such activity, or keep it secret). Nancy didn’t reject one code of behavior — that of her suburban upbringing — in order to run off to the rock and roll circus, only to conform to another code of behavior — the one pertaining to groupies. Nancy rejected all codes of behavior. She probably didn‘t even know about Crowley, but she instinctively understood his maxim, “Do what thou will, shall be the whole of the law.” Conformists among the rocker/groupie scene naturally came to loathe her. She was too punk even for most of the other punks — some of whom were merely posers, or simply not as extreme as Nancy. Nancy was gonzo. She slept around, got wasted, pushed people down stairs.

In 1977, having worn out her welcome in New York, Nancy traveled to London to dive into the exploding punk rock subculture. There she located a prize suitable for her groupie ambitions. The prize was Sid Vicious, the bassist of the Sex Pistols. One can assume that Nancy, by this point, could eat punk boys like Sid for breakfast. Yet the two clicked in a deeper way. Supposedly a virgin before he met Nancy, Sid quickly fell in love with her. To seduce Sid, Nancy had to be more than just a she-devil. She was quite intelligent, for one thing. Sid came to rely on her brains and her street-savvy as he shambled his way through life as a newly famous rock star. Nancy supposedly could glean whether a person was a con artist or a phony right away — something which Sid struggled with. And Nancy herself was no faker. A lone interview clip — one of the few bits of footage of Nancy that survives from that pre-digital era — is very telling in this regard. While Sid and a member of the band Dead Boys goof around and mumble incoherently, Nancy comes across as a far more spirited and articulate spokesperson for the punk movement. She’s quick-witted, argumentative, and rude. And she’s committed to the lifestyle. The rebellion is not part of some “act” for her. She’s not posing. She’s also not content to sit on the sideline. She’s as important to the scene as Sid. And why not? It’s not as if Sid had some great musical talent she was lacking. Punk in the early days tended to knock down barriers between bands, groupies, journalists, and fans. It was all one big scene. Of course, that would change in time.

In addition to intelligence, Nancy also possessed some measure of kindness, to go along with all the vitriol. Certain punk insiders, such as Legs McNeil, author of the punk history Please Kill Me, have pointed out that Nancy, contrary to popular belief, could be a warm, friendly person. McNeil says that while Nancy’s ill-tempered rages were hard to ignore, this aspect of her personality was over-emphasized and exaggerated — probably because she was a woman. Plenty of the guys on the scene were just as deranged as Nancy. She was no worse than Dee Dee Ramone or Joey Ramone or Stiv Bators or Johnny Thunders. Punk rock was not exactly teeming with stable, well-adjusted, polite over-achievers. Mentally ill drug addicts were everywhere. They were all crazy, but most of them were nice at least some of the time.

No Future

Sid and Nancy’s tumultuous romance scandalized the music world. They were the Bonnie and Clyde of punk, Romeo and Juliet from hell. The term “dysfunctional co-dependency” doesn’t begin to capture the depths achieved during their downward spiral. They took drugs, they fought, and they took more drugs. Sid made enough money for both of them to become seriously addicted. Their lifestyle made a complete mockery of terms such as “relationship” and “career.” They made a spectacle of themselves wherever they went. Their reckless self-destructiveness knew no bounds. Johnny Rotten sneered about having “no future.” Iggy Pop sang a song called “Death Trip.” Sid and Nancy actually took the death-trip. They were what “no future” looked like back in 1978. For many, it was a repulsive, shocking thing to witness. Yet for millions of disaffected youth, Sid and Nancy presented a seductive image of pure rebellion. They were the face of the new “Blank Generation.” They were against everything.

When the Sex Pistols embarked on their brief, incendiary tour of the United States, mainly playing gigs in the Deep South, Sid’s bandmates forbade him from bringing Nancy along. Again, as a woman she was too punk for the punks. Sid spent the tour stumbling through concerts, dressed in leather pants and a dog collar, his shirtless upper torso and his bare, skinny arms bleeding where he’d slashed himself with razor blades. At one point, he carved the words “Gimme a Fix” in jagged letters across his chest and stomach. The tour ended with a show at Winterland in San Francisco. It was the band’s last show. At the height of their fame, the Sex Pistols simply called it quits. Johnny Rotten’s famous last words onstage were, “Do you feel cheated?” While the others went straight to the airport to board a plane back to London, Sid headed across town to a shooting gallery in the Haight, where he supposedly overdosed on heroin. He survived, this time.

Sid and Nancy eventually settled back in New York, where Sid planned to launch his solo career. Nancy lorded her success over the scene that had spurned her. Now she was more famous than any of the New York Dolls and their groupies. But the drug abuse was way out of hand. She and Sid holed up in Room 100 at the infamous Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. The Chelsea, a longtime bohemian stronghold, had once been the home of luminaries such as Dylan Thomas and Thomas Wolfe, who both wrote and drank their way to an early grave there, as well as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, who found the old hotel inspirational and convenient. Andy Warhol’s experimental film Chelsea Girls captured the place in all of its late sixties, speed-freak, transvestite glamour. By the late 1970s, the hotel was a run-down, drug-infested flophouse.

The Chelsea Hotel was perfect for Sid and Nancy, who mainly laid around in bed, nearly comatose, as couriers delivered them drugs. Occasionally, they ventured out to Max’s Kansas City, where Sid fronted an all-star punk band including Mick Jones, Johnny Thunders, and Richard Hell. Nancy sometimes joined him onstage. For even the most hardcore punk fans, Sid’s junkie act, as he nodded off and slurred his way through sloppy punk cover-songs, was growing tiresome. Attendance dwindled. Sid had some success with a new single, his recorded version of “My Way,” in which he ironically made a mess of the tune made famous by Sinatra. By and large, though, Sid’s solo career was going nowhere.

Death

On the morning of October 12, 1978, tragedy struck. Sid woke up from a deep drug stupor and found Nancy lying on the bathroom floor, stabbed to death. Sid called the police, who showed up and charged him with the murder. The knife definitely belonged to him, recently purchased on 42nd Street. Sid made conflicting statements to the cops. He said he stabbed Nancy during an argument, but that he didn’t want to kill her. He said she accidentally fell onto the knife. Then, he said he simply couldn’t remember what happened.

If Sid had been out of control before, now he truly fell apart. Ten days after Nancy’s death, he attempted suicide by slitting his wrist with a smashed light bulb. He spent some time in the mental ward at Bellevue Hospital. On December 8, he was arrested and charged with assault after an altercation with Todd Smith (Patti Smith’s brother) at a concert by the band Skafish. For this, Vicious spent 55 days at Rikers Island. On February 1, 1979, he was released on bail.

To celebrate his release, on February 2, Sid Vicious attended a macabre dinner party at the New York apartment of his new girlfriend, Michele Robinson. Sid’s mother, Anne, herself a long-time addict, showed up to the gathering. Sid, who had undergone methadone detoxification at Rikers, was craving dope, and convinced his mum to score for him. Unaccustomed to his typical large dose, and surprised by an unusually pure batch of heroin, Sid overdosed at midnight. He was revived by his companions. He and Michele reportedly went to bed some time near 3:00 A.M.

What happened next was subsequently pieced together by police and the press. Apparently Sid, his death wish unabated, wanted another dose of heroin. Michele wanted no part of it, and left the room. Sid summoned his mother, who later confessed to journalist Alan Parker that she administered the fatal injection to her son. Parker surmised that she did this because she knew Sid didn’t want to face the horrors of a murder trial, and a likely return to prison. She allegedly found a note in Sid’s leather jacket that explained the death pact he had made with Nancy: “We had a death pact, and I have to keep my half of the bargain. Please bury me next to my baby. Bury me in my leather jacket, jeans and motorcycle boots. Goodbye.”

Whatever the rationale, the end result was that Sid Vicious was found dead on the morning of February 3. He couldn’t be buried next to Nancy, because she’d been laid to rest in a Jewish cemetery. Instead, Sid’s body was cremated and his ashes were scattered over Nancy’s grave.

No Moral to the Story

Sid and Nancy both died too young — she was just 20, and he was only 21. What can we reasonably conclude about this unholy pair? I’d like to think that even if they were a joke, they were a serious joke — the kind of deadly serious, sick joke often needed to shake society from its doldrums. The fact that neither of them had any real marketable talent, yet still achieved great fame and influence, only adds to their punk appeal. “Talent” was just another elitist concept to tear down, smash apart, or deconstruct. As personifications of subversion, Sid and Nancy posed a symbolic threat to the established order — both within the music business and extending outward to society at large. Nancy in particular took punk rebellion to new levels of outrage, especially for women involved in rock and roll. Rock stars often get praised and rewarded for being nonconforming outsiders. Nancy shows us that the groupies and strippers and hookers who are so integral to the scene are often the ones who are truly living on the edge. Usually, they don’t become stars. Nancy did, so she deserves extra credit. She was outrageous.

Even if Sid and Nancy were a sick joke, I’d like to think they were more than just fools. I’d like to think that they did exactly what they wanted to do, and died exactly as they wanted to die. If that doesn’t please us, so what. Rehab and recovery and responsibility wasn’t in the cards for them, which is too bad. But I see no need to moralize about Sid and Nancy. They had a death pact. They never hurt anyone other than themselves. They certainly never claimed to be “role models.” Rather than judge them, I prefer to view them as fascinating creatures, part of life’s rich pageant. They became famous, and went viral, because we ultimately derive spiritual depth and power from the mad, crazy ones among us who cannot be controlled, and who refuse to play by the rules. Sometimes we need outrageousness, especially when it comes to art and music. We need it more than we need a “moral to the story.” And we need it more than we need to solve a thirty year-old crime.

So we might as well let Nancy’s murder serve as the final outrage: it will most likely remain unsolved forever.

All Things Crime Blog has been posting excerpts from Nicholas Frank’s book, Destructive Justice, in which he tells the story of how his 17-year-old son, Nathan, received several life sentences for an armed robbery in which no one was injured. Now, we here at ATCB have been asked to post articles by Nathan himself (whose real name is Tyler). It turns out that there’s more than one good writer in the family.

by Tyler (May 18, 2014)

I awake to the usual sound of toilets flushing. A population of men going about their daily rituals and morning processes. With my eyes remaining closed, I begin to focus on and separate each distinctive noise. I hear the “yard door” open and close, followed by the “grill-gate” (heavy metal bars) informing me that shift change is taking place for the Correctional Officers. A new batch of custody staff, here to begin their own hours of concrete confinement. I know that just like us (convicts), some of those personnel will be irritable, angry, happy, alert, sluggish, and overall not pleased to be here – a wide variety of emotion and personalities for all to contend with.

A man is coughing. It doesn’t sound good. A hacking of the chest, implying medical problems. In fact, there is always a man coughing. Everywhere I have been for the past eleven-plus years, there has been a “cougher of the morning.”

My ears pick up the sound of an argument. Another constant, two men packed into a small space takes work. Irritability does not follow a schedule and oftentimes greets you with a hardy “Good Morning!” Hopefully, the disagreement is minor, preventing an escalation of the situation to something more serious.

My own living companion blissfully sleeps on. I know this to be true because of the pattern of his breathing. Light and quiet, but methodical.

How do I know this? Or better yet, why do I know this?

Hell, habit I suppose. When living a life of close quarters and the experiences from those confines, you pay close attention to detail. It is now second nature to me, something I notice without effort.

I squeeze my eyes shut and forcefully throw the covers off of me. Rise and Shine!

My bare feet hit the cold concrete floor. The constants just keep on coming.

I wash my face and run warm water through my hair. Brush my teeth, pull on my broke-in elastic waistband pants and tie my old worn-out work boots. The day is starting and I have goals to accomplish and daily chores to get through. All-in-all, I am alive, life is life, and I’ve got to live it.

What does that mean? Well, in prison it can mean many different things. To be honest it’s all in how you look at it…

At the age of seventeen I began my life of incarceration. In those early years, my mental thought process was survival and little else. For years I survived one attack on my life after another. My gang ties and alliances created a hostile environment that was unique even to prison. Thankfully, I grew to detest the person I had become. The person my father had raised me to be was finally emerging, and with it a change in my surroundings took place. It was time to live, not just exist.

Here is where the concept can become tricky. How, in an environment like prison, can one live a life?

I do not need a job, for the institution will provide shelter, water, clothing and (debatably) food – “debatably” because “they” call it food. We don’t.

What is the point of education, higher learning and furthering my studies if I have “life” in this hell-hole? Why should I work on myself and on who I want to become as a man if I will never find friends who don’t want to use and manipulate me? If I can’t have love or freedom or time with my family?

So…No job, no career, no friends, family, love or freedom. Where is life in that? I asked my dad that very question. My father has told me so many things that I will never forget. One of them pertains to exactly this. With despair and hopelessness, life did not seem feasible.

Here is what he told me…

“Son, no matter where you are, that is where your life is. It might not be the life you want or the life you would choose, but life is life. Whatever the circumstances are, you can still find meaning within them.”

This made sense. I had only to look at my life from a different perspective. If I have no job, I will create one for myself. I will try to bring purpose to my life through deeds and accomplishments, goals… I will work on self-improvement. Bettering and improving the way I think and live, and hopefully in so doing impact my surroundings.

Why?

Because these are the fundamentals of life. To learn new things, to improve as a person, to have responsibility, work-ethic and discipline.

That is life with meaning. No matter where you are, that is important.

With those basics, my way of being became fuller, much more rich and purposeful.

Surprises began to take place. I started to experience genuine friendship, even if it was few and far. Family had a level of depth and familiarity not felt since childhood. And as for love and freedom? Well, I still have a long life ahead of me.
With my work boots tied, I turn my prison cell light on. The metal door is electronically opened and the population proceeds to the chow hall to partake in some of the “fine dining cuisine.” The chow hall is loud and crowded with convicts – a small roar of voices overseen by officers with assault rifles.

Yup – the day has started and so have I.

Click here to view Tyler’s previous post:

“Behind and Beyond the Wall”: The Gift of Freedom

We here at All Things Crime Blog extend a warm welcome to Yalonda Laugh. Yalonda is a Karla Homolka super-sleuth and is the main author of this post. We thank her for digging deep and providing us with a fascinating depiction of Karla’s childhood.

by Yalonda Laugh with analysis from Patrick H. Moore

The question of who Karla Homolka really is has baffled people all across Canada and the United States (and the rest of the world) ever since the trial of Paul Bernardo in February 1993 , when the ex-accountant from Price Waterhouse and soon to be ex-husband of Homolka was arrested for the rapes and murders of Canadian schoolgirls Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. Followers of this compelling case are universally aware that in return for testifying at trial against Bernardo, Homolka received what many consider to be a “sweetheart” plea deal, a mere 12 years in prison. Bernardo, on the other hand, received the maximum term allowable by Canadian law — life imprisonment. Karla Homolka currently resides in Guadeloupe in the West Indies with her husband and three young children. She has for all intents and purposes reinvented herself. Is she happy? No one really knows except perhaps those closest to her. Does she sleep well at night? Again, no one knows.

What is known, however, is that Karla Homolka is despised by a great numbers of followers of this case, detested with an almost visceral hatred. The cause of this virulent hatred appears to be the fact that Karla is perceived as having been a “normal child” who enjoyed a “normal upbringing” in “normal circumstances.” Therefore, according to this line of thought, she had absolutely no reason or excuse for turning into a conscienceless rapist and murderess. It’s as if your next door neighbor for purely gratuitous reasons decided to rape and murder for the sheer sport of it. Is this view of Karla as a “normal” person who engaged in truly horrific conduct out of sheer self-indulgence accurate? This is the question we will explore in this inquiry. Or as researcher and co-author Yalonda Laugh expresses so pithily:

How could a smart, head-strong young woman from St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada align herself with school-girl killer and Scarborough Rapist Paul Bernardo? That has been the key question informing this frustrating case since Homolka’s plea deal was first made public on May 14, 1993 . Who was Karla Leanne Homolka? Were there clues in her childhood and early years that signaled what she was to become and why she would ultimately be considered “the most hated woman in North America?”

Let us take a journey toward this destination so that each reader can decide for him or herself:

Karla Leanne Homolka was born on May 4, 1970 to Czechoslovakian immigrant Karel Homolka and Dorothy Seger of Ontario. Karel made a living as a traveling salesman, selling black velvet paintings and lighting fixtures from the sidewalks of shopping centers and malls.

Karla Homolka was asthmatic which resulted in frequent hospitalization during her childhood. Her attacks seemed to be triggered by any type of situation where she felt excited or frightened, such as birthdays, holidays or the first day of school.

According to Karla’s mother Dorothy, this obstacle didn’t stop little Karla from blossoming. She walked and talked at an early age. In the 3rd grade, Karla was given an IQ test in which she scored a quotient of 131, which demonstrated conclusively that she was indeed a very bright girl. (For the sake of reference, an IQ score of 135 is associated with the 98th percentile.)  Karla’s teachers described her as “eager” and “a good student.”

One of Karla’s friends from the second grade at Parnell Public School notes that at this early age she was constantly drawing houses. She was always the first one to be seated at her desk, the first one back from recess and the first one to start her work. She seemed almost fanatical when drawing her little houses and was preoccupied with, even unnaturally intent, on staying within the lines.

Thus, this early snapshot of Karla seems to reveal that at a tender age she was already obsessive, but not in a bad way — a hard worker and a perfectionist, more focused perhaps on pleasing the authority figures than on conforming to the expectations of her peers.

Karla showed a soft spot for animals, even at this young age. Once when some boys on the playground were tormenting a beetle with a stick, Karla rushed to the aid of the insect and screamed: “You shouldn’t kill it. It’s wrong to kill anything.”

As she got to know her better, Karla’s new friend started to see that she was a bit bossy and wanted things to be done her way. She wanted to be pushed on the swings, she wanted to go down the slide first, and she demanded that her new friend come spend time with her at her home on Linwell Road. The friend couldn’t help wondering how much the two girls really had in common. At that stage, Karla dressed only in pink frilly dresses and was downright prissy, while the friend was a tomboy — a hockey fan in the best Canadian tradition. The friend wasn’t surprised when she arrived at the Homolka residence and found Karla waiting for her with with over a dozen Barbie and Ken dolls. Karla told her friend that everything about her Barbies was, and had to be, perfect: their clothes, their hair, even their undergarments. The friend recalls Karla fantasizing that one day she would have the perfect life which would include a handsome husband not unlike Ken. In retrospect, it wasn’t much of a play-date for the friend. Karla insisted on rigidly controlling the game. She decided what the Barbies did, where they went, what they wore and what words came out of their little Barbie mouths. When her friend suggested new or different story lines,  Karla reacted huffily and immediately put the Barbies away .

Based on this evidence, it is clear that at the age of 7 or 8, Karla was bossy, controlling and obsessive. This early pattern of selfishness was, of course, her bete noire which would ultimately lead herto the take part in committing the awful crimes that shocked the world.

The friend’s dog Buster hated everyone on the planet except for little Karla, who seemed to have a way with animals. Karla claimed that she had a dog named Lester, an obvious falsehood, which drew stares from the family. Strangely, around this time, animal lover Karla decided it would be fun to make a pillowcase parachute and toss her friend’s hamster out of an upper story bedroom window. The parachute malfunctioned and the hamster hit the ground hard and died two weeks later. After the hamster had been interred for a while, Karla decided it would be fun to dig up the little pet’s corpse and see what the decomposed body looked like. She stared at it for a long time and then exclaimed: “GROSS”.

This behavior is, of course, somewhat reminiscent of Jeffrey Dahmer and his well-known obsession with dead and decomposing bodies. The killing of the hamster could be termed an accidental homicide, or perhaps an involuntary manslaughter. In any event, it appears to be the first time Karla killed a living creature and is an early example of her rapidly-evolving penchant for cruelty.

When she was 10, Karla accompanied a friend, whom she later gifted with a booked called Brainchild, by noted behaviorist B.F. Skinner,  to the park to play baseball one afternoon. While the friend played, Karla became fascinated with a small girl playing in the outfield. The girl arms were deformed, half the normal length. Karla walked up to the girl’s brother and shouted: “Your sister’s a freak. She’s creepy looking. She’s got seal arms and belongs in a zoo.” This made the boy and the small girl cry. Karla clearly got satisfaction out of making the two cry. This incident also reveals her growing pleasure in hurting others.

At around the age of 12, Karla became obsessed with the Hardy Boys and the Nancy Drew mysteries. She bought a crime fighting kit and vowed that she would grow up to be a policeman(woman).

Karla and her friend met again when they were approximately 13. Karla had asked if she could bring her Barbie dolls over, but her friend had stated they were getting too old to be playing with dolls. They met up at Grace Lutheran Church and to her surprise, the friend noticed that Karla was hardly dressed in Barbie-like fashion:

On the contrary, she was dressed in black from head-to-toe, and was wearing black Doc Marten boots. Also noticeable was Karla’s new hairstyle. Gone was her beautiful naturally golden hair replaced by a multi-colored look. Her teeth seemed defective which Karla blamed on her asthma medication. The friend recalls that Karla seemed distant and moody and barely smiled. She wore dark eye makeup and black nail polish and seemed to be affecting a Goth look.

Friends at Ferndale Public School have noted that Karla loved shocking people by screaming obscenities for no reason. She was the only one of her peers to talk back to her parents and slam doors during arguments. Sometimes it was hard to tell who was the parent and who was the child. Friend Lisa Stanton described Karla as loud and stubborn and willful. She refused to ever admit that she could possibly be wrong and never backed down on anything for any reason:

“You couldn’t push her into anything. It didn’t matter if you were a parent, teacher, friend or stranger, Karla always spoke her mind. If she was mad about something she would let you know about it.”

Some sources have remarked  that Karla was a daddy’s girl most of the time. If her mother Dorothy refused to give her what she wanted, she would simply ask dear old daddy Karel. However, when Karel drank he had the bad habit of calling Karla a whore or a slut. This, however, was only after Karla had begun dating Paul. Karel was the only man in a house full of strong-willed women and he would often retreat to the basement when he felt outnumbered. Karla and her younger sister Lori were known to scream “Fuck off” at Karel and they would call him “a dumb Czech” when they didn’t get their way. Karla, however, was kind and attentive to Lori. When Lori was sick with the flu and Karla’s parents were gone for the day, Karla gave Lori a little bell to ring whenever she needed something or merely wanted attention.

The summer before high school Karla began cruising around town with her friends. Karla had the audacity to would wave at boys in cars whom she felt were attractive. She had no compunction about striking up conversations with complete strangers.

Once Karla entered high school, she exhibited all the usual symptoms of a typical depressed adolescent, albeit a boy-crazy depressed adolescent. She anguished over the opposite sex. She told her friends that boys were her main concern and that school was a drag. Her style of dress grew increasingly non-conforming. She wore long johns and boxer shorts complete with ballet slippers to Sir Winston Churchill Secondary School, which made her stand out like a sore thumb. The school was considered to be mainly a preppy school  and the majority of the students were well-off. Karla didn’t try to hide the fact that she disliked the preps and the diehard preps hated her. Karla gave the impression that she really didn’t care what anyone thought of her. She was bound and determined to be her own person.

Friend Kevin Jacoby remembers Karla as open and honest. She was seen as someone weird or different who didn’t hold back and always said whatever was on her mind.

Once in high school, Karla seemed to live in two worlds and certainly exhibited mood swings. Her friends recall that at times she seemed elated and would speak enthusiastically about going to university, becoming a veterinarian or an undercover police officer. At other times, she would hardly speak at all for weeks at a time. Karla often spoke about killing herself and once revealed a small slit moving horizontally across her wrist. If it was a suicide attempt, it was a feeble attempt and her friends remarked that they were sure that it was just to get attention. Karla also claimed that she had tried to overdose on sleeping pills. Her peers struggled to understand how someone as vain as Karla, who was constantly looking at herself in the mirror and fixing their hair, could apparently have such contempt for their own life.

Karla talked frequently about her favorite movies which were mostly horror flicks. “Friday the 13th” made a big impression on her and she loved the story line about young virgins being slashed and hacked up by a psychopath.

Karla got a part-time job at the Number One Pet Center, feeding and watering the animals.

Kevin Jacoby remembers Karla phoning frequently, crying and depressed. She complained of her volatile relationship at home with her father who was frequently drunk. She described fights between her parents and her fights with her mother. “Everything she did or said was taken in the worst possible way when Karel was drinking.”

In contrast to this picture of a depressed, negative and brooding Karla, her mother Dorothy described Karla as smart, sweet ,active, fun-loving, outgoing, a leader, an instigator, academically and socially successful, and always surrounded by friends. She liked quiet time to recharge her batteries and loved to read and think. Dorothy did admit, however:

“Mind you, something did change when Karla got to high school.”

During this period, Karel Homolka told Lynda Wollis that he was in love with her and wanted to leave Dorothy. Lynda told him to go home and keep his mouth shut. Apparently, Karel failed to do so. In any event, Dorothy went to Lynda the next day and told her:

“You could save my marriage if you sleep with both of us.” Nobody knows exactly how this might have affected Karla or if she even knew, but it was well-known that Karel was called “The Pervert” at the Shaver faith-based geriatric clinic where Dorothy worked.

Karla developed an interest in the occult when she entered high school. Her friend Amanda said they would burn candles and incense and talk about spirits and the “Screaming Tunnels” which were near the railroad tracks outside of town. Karla placed ads in the papers to buy a Ouija Board.

Friend Debbie Purdie stated: “When we were in high school she was a little rebel. Nobody ever told Karla what to do (or what to think). She was her own person and her own boss.”

Karla studied music and took voice lessons but she would not sing in front of the class. Friends noticed strange circles carved into Larla’s arms and filled in with nail polish. Karla inscribed in a book, Michelle Remembers, which is about satanism, sexual abuse and the repressed memory syndrome:

“There is always something more left to say.”

Karla admitted that in Grade 10, she smoked dope and experimented with white crosses, an upper of mild to moderate strength..

Karla once told her friend Tracy Collins, “You know what I’d like to do…..? I’d like to put dots all over somebody’s body and take a knife and then play connect the dots and then pour vinegar all over them.” Tracy dutifully reported that to her parents who, logically enough, would no longer let her associate with Karla. They said she was strange and domineering and that Tracy’s grades had slipped during the period of their friendship.

Karla dated a boy named Doug in Grade 12. He found her to be moody and consumed with the thought of death. She was constantly threatening suicide. When Doug moved to — of all places Kansas — Karla, against her parents’ wishes, flew there to visit him. Karla admitted to drinking “Purple Jesus” grain alcohol and snorting cocaine. Karla told her friends she that she had lost her virginity with Doug and described a shocking — and unlikely scene — that involved bondage, dog collars, extremely dirty talk (at least for middle-class teenagers), and strangulation. According to the more conventionally-minded Doug, they had only had normal sex. As Karla related the story to her friends, they noticed that she was detached and displayed no emotion. They wondered who she would get involved with next time. It was clear by this point that unless something or someone stopped her, Karla was heading toward a place that very few of us would like to visit.

At the end of senior year Karla inscribed a friend’s yearbook: “Remember: Suicide kicks and fasting is awesome. Bones rule ! Death Rules ! Death Kicks ! I love death ! Kill the fucking world! “

Oddly, while all of this was going on, Karla and her friends Debbie Purdie, Kathy Wilson and Lisa Stanton formed the Exclusive Diamond Club. Their goal was to recruit rich, good-looking older men, obtain the coveted diamond, marry and live happily ever after.

Friend Kathy Wilson remarked on the fact that Karla was “the tough one of the group.” She kept a pair of handcuffs hanging on her bedroom wall and told friends she was going to become a police officer.

Analysis by Patrick H. Moore:

It is my understanding that many followers of Karla seem to believe that she was the product of a normal upbringing and seem to hold that fact against her as if the products of middle-class homes are given less latitude for aberrant behavior than individuals who are reared in less-privileged environments. It is certainly true that Karla’s family was economically comfortable. Both parents worked and she lived in a decent house in a good neighborhood. However, there are clear signs that her family was at least somewhat dysfunctional. Her father was a heavy drinker, probably an alcoholic, and was reportedly abusive when drunk. There appears to have been an ongoing power struggle within the family as Karla’s father Karel wrestled with the demands of the four strong females with whom he lived. It is also perhaps strange that Karla’s mother Dorothy, when confronted with her husband’s infidelity, suggested they have a threesome as a way to salvage their marriage.

The vast majority of children, however, who grow up in problematic households, do not become rapists and murderers, or even criminals for that matter. Karla’s choice of Paul Bernardo as a partner in crime cannot be explained by her upbringing.

As a child, however, Karla exhibited definite signs that she was not entirely “normal.” The fact that she killed her friend’s hamster by “parachuting” it out of a second story window is not in itself that damning. After all, kids frequently do odd things and she was for the most part an animal lover. However, the fact she dug the hamster’s corpse up after a few weeks in the ground to examine the ongoing decomposition is very unusual and reminds this commentator of Jeffrey Dahmer’s penchant for observing bodies in various decayed states.

By the time Karla had entered the Canadian equivalent of middle school, she had begun exhibiting anti-social tendencies. Her choice of the Goth look and various other non-conforming modes of dress suggest an insecure individual desperate for attention. From the time she entered high school, Karla was clearly depressed, perhaps dangerously so. Her suicide attempt(s) was a red flag that something was seriously wrong, as was her habit of carving peculiar decorations into her arms. The fact that she expressed her desire to play “connect the dots” with a knife on other people’s bodies should have been a warning that she was harboring dangerous fantasies, as was her choice of highly unconventional reading material. Her crowning indication of “strangeness” was her claim that when she lost her virginity with Doug, they engaged in “bondage, dog collars, extremely dirty talk (at least for middle-class teenagers), and strangulation.”

Based on my ten years of experience in working with criminals, there is no doubt in my mind that by the time Karla had completed high school, she was was a soul teetering on the edge of the abyss. Could it have been predicted with any certainty that she would turn into a rapist and serial killer? Of course not. Based on her domineering personality and penchant for darkness, however, it does not seem at all surprising that she was drawn to Paul Bernardo who appears to have shared many of these same qualities. I would posit that once Karla and Paul were together, they brought out the worst in each other with the result being that Leslie Mahaffy, Kristen French and Karla’s sister Tammi suffered horrible and entirely unnecessary fates.

Was Karla a normal child? The answer is a resounding “NO!”

Note: The quotations in the factual basis of this analysis of Karla Homolka’s childhood are derived from Stephen Williams’ “Invisible Darkness,” Nick Pron’s “Lethal Marriage,” and Alan Cairns and Scott Burnside’s “Deadly Innocence,” all of which have been widely disseminated and serve as valuable research tools for Karla followers.

Click on the following links to read previous Karla posts:

Watching Karla Homolka: Karla Just Did As She Pleased

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

by Patrick H. Moore

There is a new Reality TV show called “Parents from Hell and the Children They Abuse” that is Number One with a Bullet. The object of the game is to determine which set of “parents from hell” will stay in the competition until the bitter end and win the Evil Parents of the Year award. The key factors that go into the judging are — in no particular order:

1. The Hideousness of the Child Abuse
2. The Creativity of the Child Abuse
3. The Length of the Prison Sentence the Parents Ultimately Receive

Winners are selected once a month and then the twelve winners compete against each other for the grand prize. The irony of the show is that each winning couple actually loses big time. Doing 30 to 50 years of hard time while wearing the brand of an extreme child abuser is probably not  a pleasant way to spend your “mature” years.

My favorite candidates for the month of November are Brian Gore, 31, and Shannon Gore, 26, formerly of Hayes, Virginia, now residents of the Virginia Commonwealth’s state prison system. The Gores pleaded guilty to felony child abuse and entered an Alford plea on charges of aggravated malicious wounding, according to the Associated Press. An Alford plea is not an outright admission of guilt, but rather a concession that there is enough evidence for a conviction.

Although the Gores were only sentenced to 30 years — a middling sentence in the “severe child abuse” sweepstakes — they are still in the running to win the November “parents from hell” award based on the hideousness of their distinctive form of child abuse combined with their remarkable negligence. Here is the situation that led to their arrest in May 2011, as reported by the Huffington Post:

Their daughter’s “room” was a makeshift cage, comprised of an upside-down crib held in place with a board and boxes stacked on top. In other words, the child was held prisoner in an upside down crib with a bunch of crap on top of it to weight it down so that she could not escape.

The girl was starving, naked, covered in feces, and so cramped in the crib that she could not fully extend her legs, according to the Daily Press.

She was so hungry that she was eating pieces of her own flaking skin, according to ABC News. At age 6, she weighed under 16 pounds.

The girl was born at home, had no birth certificate, and had apparently never been to a doctor. Her father told authorities that she had Down’s syndrome and cerebral palsy, but there were no medical records to support this claim.

Now I realize that it can be argued that this particular form of imprisonment is not overly imaginative, but keep in mind that most of these “parents from hell” are not the sharpest knives in the cutlery drawer.

And to their credit, the Gores, with the help of some determined investigators with a penchant for digging, managed to produce the body of a thoroughly decomposed child who was buried near the house. They say the devil is a logician and Brian Gore, quite logically, told investigators that he did not call 911 after the child, who was born in 2007, experienced trouble breathing because he was afraid the law would discover that he and Shannon kept their daughter in a cage. 

The Gore’s diabolical nature, an important factor in victorious “parents from hell”, is further revealed in the fact they were not charged with the child’s death. Charges could not be brought because the poor thing’s body was so thoroughly decomposed that medical examiners could not determine a cause of death.

And then, just to keep everyone guessing, the Gore’s had a third child, a one-month-old boy, who was healthy and unharmed at the time of their arrest.

A la Ariel Castro, neighbors and people close to the family stated that they were aware of the Gore’s 1-month-old son, but had no knowledge of either the 16-pound six-year-old or the deceased child.

*     *     *     *     *

In an email,the child victim’s attorney, Brian Decker, informed WTKR that she is “progressing as well as you can expect, given the trauma that she has been through.” Decker wrote that she is “trying to be a normal child” and has been placed with a family who puts her needs first.

*     *     *     *     *

One of the criteria for winning the monthly Parents from Hell sweepstakes is that the candidates must inspire such virulent hatred on the part of the judges that they would gladly cast them into a pit of writhing vipers and watch with satisfaction as the venom-laden serpents fanged them to death. I believe the Gores inspire that level of Hatred. Thus, they just might win this month’s competition.

by BJW Nashe

When I lived in Santa Cruz, California from 1982-87, I had no idea that this pleasant seaside town was once dubbed “The Murder Capital of the World.” By the time I moved there to attend UC Santa Cruz, where I majored in philosophy (with an unofficial minor in hallucinogens), there was little or no mention of murder. The mass killing had occurred a decade earlier. The only murders I recall were found in existentialist novels by Albert Camus and Fyodor Dostoevsky. I lived a block and half from the sea. We liked to stroll along West Cliff Drive late at night. Everything seemed perfect.

Only recently did I discover that Santa Cruz was once a murder capital — and I happened upon the information solely by chance. Last month, I was intrigued by a work of fiction by Grace Krilanovich called The Orange Eats Creeps – which I highly recommend, if you’re in the mood for a freestyle gothic tale of teenage-vampire-hobo-junkies misbehaving in the Pacific Northwest. While googling some interviews with the author, I learned that she grew up in Santa Cruz. In one interview, she pointed out that during the early 1970s — before she was even born — her hometown was plagued by an epidemic of serial killings. Sure enough, a quick online search yielded a whole trove of information on these crimes, and the deranged individuals who committed them. Praise the Lord for the bounteous Internet. When it comes to true crime and porn, the World Wide Web really delivers. And it’s fascinating to see how transgressive fiction sometimes bleeds right into true crime.

It may seem odd to realize that one’s college town — the source of so many fond personal memories — has a buried history that includes a bunch of shocking murders. But this shouldn’t seem odd at all, because that’s how it is here in America. Every town has its own buried past, or occult history, which includes an abundance of scandal and crime. Some towns might be considered virtual plague yards. In California, the occult history runs counter to the official version of the Golden State as a success story characterized by progress, wealth, fame, and innovation. The occult history forces us to confront the dark side of the story, which includes child abuse, misogyny, drugs, murder, madness, greed, and exploitation. We might prefer to forget the truly hideous stuff, and hope it all fades away, but it’s still there, waiting to resurface again and again, like some horrible repressed memory that won’t leave us alone until we deal with it effectively once and for all. Perhaps the true arc of human history, as Professor Norman O. Brown used to explain in his seminars at UC Santa Cruz, resembles nothing so much as a patient’s struggle to overcome a debilitating neurosis.

For a town such as Santa Cruz, neurosis is one thing. “Murder capital of the world” takes us to another level altogether. The exaggeration is understandable, however, when you get into the details. During the span of just a few years from 1971-73, three individuals were convicted of 23 separate murders in Santa Cruz County. Several other deaths and disappearances remain unsolved to this day. Given the population and demographics of the region, that’s quite a record. With the high-profile crimes of the Manson Family in Los Angeles and the Zodiac Killer in San Francisco still big news at the time, people in Santa Cruz were justifiably terrified when similar atrocities began to afflict their community.

The murders committed by John Linley Frazier, Big Ed Kemper, and Herbert Mullin in the Santa Cruz area never achieved the same level of national attention as the Tate-LaBianca slayings. Yet the Santa Cruz murders were just as shocking as those committed by the hippie death cult down south. Moreover, the Santa Cruz murders were just as relevant to the troubled zeitgeist of the early 1970s, which was marked by extreme civil unrest, rampant drug abuse, profound disillusionment, and the ongoing tragedy of a doomed war in Vietnam. Even more significant, perhaps, is the fact that all three of the Santa Cruz killers were men suffering from mental illness. One of them was preoccupied with targeting women. Clearly, mentally ill criminals and violence against women are problems that continue to wreak havoc in American society, even in sunny California.

We can think of the following three psychopaths as anti-celebrities starring in their own deranged counterpart to SoCal’s Hollywood Babylon. Think of them as “NorCal Gothic,” or “Breaking Bad in Santa Cruz.” Like it or not, their stories belong to us, are part of who we are, and we need to somehow understand them if we ever hope to move beyond the twisted psychology of murder.

John Linley Frazier — The Killer Prophet

The Santa Cruz murders began on October 19, 1970, when police discovered the bodies of five people at the affluent Soquel home of a well-respected local eye surgeon. Dr. Victor Ohta, his wife Virginia, their two preteen sons, and the doctor’s secretary all had been shot and left floating in the family swimming pool. The victims were blind-folded, and their hands were bound behind their backs with colorful silk scarves. The killer had left a rambling letter behind, which was evidently typed on Dr. Ohta’s typewriter:

“Halloween, 1970. Today World War III will begin, as brought to you by the People of the Free Universe. From this day forward, anyone and/or everyone or company of persons who misuses the natural environment or destroys same will suffer the penalty of death by the People of the Free Universe. I and my comrades from this day forth will fight until death or freedom against anyone who does not support natural life on this planet. Materialism must die, or Mankind will stop.”

The note was signed in a distinctive manner: “Knight of Wands, Knight of Cups, Knight of Pentacles, and Knight of Swords.”

Since several groups of hippies were living nearby, authorities quickly assumed that they were dealing with another Manson-style massacre. In questioning the local long-hairs, however,  cops received a tip that led them to focus on a single suspect — John Linley Frazier. The ensuing investigation painted a distressing picture of a young man driven to random murder by a disastrous combination of mental illness and drug use. The man who penned the “Knight of Wands” note became known as “The Killer Prophet.”

Frazier was considered a “fairly normal guy” growing up in Santa Cruz. A high school drop-out, he worked as an auto mechanic in town, and lived with his wife, who called him a “beautiful person.” As a young man, however, Frazier seems to have developed symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. When he began experimenting with drugs, this condition worsened. His marriage eventually fell apart, and he began espousing increasingly radical environmental views, seasoned with apocalyptic visions and mystical readings of the tarot cards. He quit his job at the auto shop, telling his boss he refused to “contribute to the death cycle of the planet.” Fiercely paranoid, plagued by voices, he didn’t fit in too well with the laid-back lifestyle of the local hippie communes. His intensity frightened the pot-smoking vegetarians seeking harmony together. Frazier tended to tune in, turn on, and freak out. When he took LSD, God told him to do bad things.

Soon isolated from the communes, he began living as a self-styled Aquarian Age hermit, residing in a six-foot-square shack in the woods, not far from Dr. Victor Ohta’s property. Frazier had a good look at Dr. Ohta’s place. Right away, he knew that the owners were “too materialistic.” Once, while the Ohta family was out, Frazier broke into their house to creep around. Before he left, he stole a pair of binoculars.

Not long after the binocular theft, on October 19, 1970, Frazier returned to the Ohta mansion. The doctor’s wife, Virginia, was the only person home. Brandishing a .38 revolver that he found inside, Frazier bound Virginia’s wrists with a scarf and waited for the rest of the family to come home. Soon, the doctor’s secretary, Dorothy Cadwallader, showed up, along with one of the Ohta boys. Then Dr. Ohta returned home with their second son. On arrival, each of them were tied up at gunpoint. Standing with his captives outside by the pool, Frazier lectured them on the evils of materialism and the ways in which it was destroying the environment. Dr. Ohta, no fan of hippies to begin with, started arguing with Frazier, who promptly shoved him into the pool. While the doctor thrashed around trying to get out of the water, Frazier shot him three times. One by one, Frazer then killed all four of the others — Virginia, Dorothy, then the boys, Derrick, and Taggart. Frazier went back inside the house, typed his “Knight of Wands” note, and set the house ablaze. When firefighters showed up they found the five bodies in the pool, and the typewritten note tucked under the windshield wipers of Dr. Ohta’s Rolls-Royce.

When the “Knight of Wands” murder note was published by the local press, several hippies recognized the bizarre discourse as possibly belonging to the man who had frightened them with his crazy talk — John Linley Frazier. They told the police where to find his shack in the woods. Police were also able to lift Frazier’s fingerprints from the Rolls-Royce and from a beer can found at the crime scene. Frazier was apprehended five days after the murders.

The murder trial was a three-part spectacle. Frazier was first convicted in just two hours. A second trial was held to determine sanity, and then a third trial to determine his sentence. For the sanity trial, Frazier showed up in court with one side of his head completely shaved, and half of his mustache and beard shaved off. The jury was treated to lengthy testimony regarding acid trips and messages from God and ecological tirades. Some thought Frazier was putting on an act to win an insanity plea, but his psychologist thought otherwise. While Frazier never confessed his crimes to the police, he did tell his shrink all about it. He said he had broken into Dr. Ohta’s house when no one was home, spotted what looked like an animal-skin bedspread, and went berserk. “It blew my mind,” the defendant recalled. He never noticed that the animal-skin was fake.

In the end, Frazier was found to be sane, and he received the death sentence. He regarded the gas chamber as preferable to “having fascist pigs working on my head.” Frazier’s preference became irrelevant, however, when the California Supreme Court abolished capital punishment in 1972, and commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. Thirty-five years later, “The Killer Prophet” took matters into his own hands. In August of 2009, he committed suicide by hanging himself in his single occupant cell. He was 62 years old.

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

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Although it’s rare, I’ve been known to occasionally go out on a limb and make dictatorial pronouncements that while not intended to offend, nonetheless anger certain folks. Today’s pronouncement is very simple. Children’s social services should routinely check up on any child who is being home-schooled. Why do I say this? Simple. During the many long, painful months we’ve been running All Things Crime Blog, we’ve seen repeated instances of home-schooled children being severely abused by their home-schooling parents. Coincidence? I think not. Rather, I suspect that parents who refuse to allow their kids to attend regular school will prove, in all too many cases, to have something very ugly to hide.

Does this mean that all home-schooling parents are abusing their kids? Of course not. The high rate of abuse among the home-schoolers merely means that extra precautions need to be taken to make sure that the home-schooling is for valid reasons and not simply to hide child abuse from the authorities. The recent case of a 7-year-old West Pennsylvania boy who was nearly starved to death by his abusive, home-schooling parents is an excellent case-in-point.

So go ahead people. Throw things at me. I’m a hard-headed fellow and I will stick by my guns.

Ray Sanchez and Morgan Winsor of CNN write:

A 7-year-old Pennsylvania boy beaten for sneaking food was nearly starved and weighed only 25 pounds when he arrived at a hospital, authorities said. The boy sometimes ate insects he caught on his porch.

The boy’s mother, Mary Rader, 28, and his grandparents, Dennis and Deana Beighley, turned themselves in at the Mercer County District Attorney’s office Wednesday and were charged with aggravated assault, unlawful restraint of a minor, false imprisonment, endangering the welfare of a child and conspiracy, according to court documents.

According to the criminal complaint, as reported in The Sharon Herald by Melissa Klaric:

The boy lived with his mother, grandparents, two sisters (ages 11 and 4) and a brother (9). The two girls were healthy, and the brother was underweight, but not as severely as the victim, Mercer County detectives said.

The boy was taken last month to UPMC Horizon, Greenville, and transferred to UPMC Children’s Hospital, Pittsburgh, when it was found he weighed 25 pounds. Since June 6, hospital officials said the boy has gained 20 pounds.

“The most important medicine used to treat him at the hospital was food. He was within a month of having a major cardiac event that he probably would not have recovered from,” Dr. Jennifer Wolford of UPMC Children’s Hospital Child Advocacy Center, stated.

“It is impossible to me that this severe neglect and active abuse was not visible. He was being starved in his own home around others of normal weight,” she stated.

The interesting thing is Rader had removed her son from Greenville schools so he could be home-schooled in August of 2013. We don’t know what condition he was in at that point, or how he was faring in regular school, but it seems quite likely that his condition worsened dramatically once he was removed from regular school. What is known is that once he was removed from regular school, he was reportedly not permitted out of the house except to go out on the back porch where in desperation due to extreme hunger, he would catch bugs and sometimes eat them.

Based on interviews with the victim and his siblings, he was allegedly fed only small portions of tuna fish and eggs and was reportedly beaten frequently with a belt, especially when he was caught sneaking food, typically bread with peanut butter.

He was not allowed to shower except as punishment with ice cold water. He also had two abscessed teeth which had not been treated and had to be removed after he was taken into custody by the authorities.

“The child was starved. (The victim) is the worst case of medical neglect that I have ever seen in my seven years as a pediatrician,” Wolford stated. “Multiple physicians at Children’s Hospital are in agreement with this assessment. There is not one physician at Children’s who disagree with this assessment.”

All of the children have been placed in the care of child welfare authorities.

The mother and grandparents were released on bond and will appear before District Judge Brian Arthur on July 30th.

* * * * *

First of all, these fiends should not have been released on bond. The two standard issues that must be determined when assessing bail is 1) whether the accused is a flight risk; and 2) whether the accused is a danger to the community. Although these folks are probably not flight risks (in fact, I would bet they rarely travel very far from home), it’s pretty obvious, based on what they did to their son, that they are a danger to the community.

Why am I skeptical about the value of home-schooling, particularly when it’s obvious that public schools all across America are flawed and are often hotbeds of bullying?

My answer is that children need to learn to socialize properly and effectively. This is a broad continuum and I’m not going to try to define what is means to be “properly and effectively socialized.” The point is that we human beings are social creatures and to be healthy and reasonably happy, we typically need to interact more or less positively with our peers. Being locked up, starved, beaten and only allowed to go out on the back porch to catch and eat bugs does not constitute proper socialization.

In my mind, and I’m clearly frustrated by this case, the sort of abuse these adults heaped on this boy is not dissimilar in degree from sexual abuse. This boy will carry this with him for the rest of his life; he will always be plagued with the horrible realization that his own mother used him most cruelly.

Ten years in state prison would not be out of line for this mother and these grandparents.

by BJW Nashe

“Getting away with murder” now serves as a euphemism for avoiding the consequences of just about any kind of bad behavior. In its most literal sense, however, the phrase points to an especially troubling phenomenon — serial killings committed by psychopaths who somehow manage to avoid being caught and convicted of their crimes. The Zodiac Killer, who terrified the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s and early 1970s with a string of murders accompanied by bizarre cryptograms and letters to the press, is probably the most famous murderer who was never captured. The Zodiac is not alone, however.  Our recent history is littered with unsolved mass murders. The following rogue’s gallery — presented in no particular order, since they are all equally hideous — lists some of the ones who got away with the worst crimes imaginable.

The Bone Collector is an unidentified serial killer from the area known as the West Mesa of Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 2009, the chance discovery of a human bone by a dog-walker led police into something closer to an archaeological dig than a typical crime scene. The remains of eleven women, later determined to have been prostitutes, were slowly excavated from the area — which turned into the largest crime scene in U.S. history. Yet not a shred of promising evidence was ever unearthed from this macabre dumping ground — no DNA, no potential murder weapons, no personal clues, nothing at all. Sex workers in the area still live in fear of the killer, even though no murders associated with him have been reported for several years. To this day, the Bone Collector’s identity remains a complete mystery.

The Axe Man of New Orleans was responsible for at least eight killings in New Orleans, Louisiana (and surrounding communities) from May 1918 to October 1919. Typically, the back door of a home was smashed, followed by an attack on one or more of the residents with either an axe or a straight razor. The crimes were not considered linked to robbery, since no items were removed from the victims’ homes. The Axe Man was never caught or identified, and his crime spree stopped as mysteriously as it had started. He wrote a notorious letter to address the public, which was printed in the newspapers. Beneath the heading, “Hell, March 13, 1919,” the Axe Man explained that he was a non-human spirit, something close to the “Angel of Death,” and he vowed to take more victims before he departed earth for his native “Tartarus.” He also made it clear that music was of crucial importance:

“I am very fond of jazz music, and I swear by all the devils in the nether regions that every person shall be spared in whose home a jazz band is in full swing at the time I have just mentioned. If everyone has a jazz band going, well, then, so much the better for you people. One thing is certain and that is that some of your people who do not jazz it on Tuesday night (if there be any) will get the axe.”

Charlie Chop-Off was active in Manhattan between 1972 and 1974. He killed five black children, and attacked another who he left for dead. The nickname comes from the genital mutilation inflicted on the male victims. A principal suspect, Erno Soto, was arrested and did end up confessing to one of the murders. But Soto was considered unfit for trial and sent to a mental institution instead. The case is still considered open.

The Grim Sleeper of Southern California is thought to be responsible for at least ten murders, plus an additional attempted murder, in Los Angeles from 1985 to roughly 2007. His nickname derives from the fact that he appeared to take a Rip Van Winkle style nap, in the form of a 14-year hiatus from crime, during the years 1988-2002. When he was active, there was so much killing going on in L.A. at the time that it was hard to distinguish one murderer’s work from that of another. Thus, the Grim Sleeper was initially confused with the Southside Slayer. In any case, when the May 2007  murder of 25 year-old Janecia Peters was linked through DNA analysis to as many as twelve unsolved murders in L.A. dating back to 1985, a special task force was formed. The Grim Sleeper’s profile emerged as an African-American man who had sexual contact with his victims before strangling or shooting them with a .25 caliber handgun. On July 7, 2010, a suspect was arrested. Lonnie David Franklin Jr., 57, was charged with ten counts of murder, one count of attempted murder, and special circumstance allegations of multiple murders. We still don’t know if Franklin is guilty, though. He has not yet been put on trial for what amounts to a quarter century of killing — with plenty of time off for sleep.

The Cleveland Torso Murderer (also known as the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run) was an unidentified serial killer who killed and dismembered at least 12 victims in the Cleveland, Ohio area in the 1930s. The Torso Murderer always beheaded and often dismembered his victims, sometimes also cutting the torso in half — in the style of the Black Dahlia corpse. Most of the male victims were castrated, and there was also evidence of chemical treatment being applied to their bodies. Although two suspects were investigated for these horrifying crimes, with Elliot Ness in charge of Cleveland police at the time, no one was ever convicted of the murders.

Jack the Stripper was responsible for the London “nude murders” of 1964 and 1965 (also known as the “Hammersmith murders” or “Hammersmith nudes” case). The similarities with the nineteenth century Ripper murders are obvious. The Stripper murdered at least six prostitutes, whose nude bodies were discovered around London or found dumped into the River Thames. Two additional victims are often attributed to him, although these do not appear to fit his modus operandi. The Stripper’s third and seventh victims were allegedly connected to the 1963 Profumo Affair. Also, some victims were known to be involved in London’s underground party and pornographic movie scene. Scotland Yard’s initial investigation included nearly 7000 suspects, which was supposedly narrowed down to just 20 men, then 10, and eventually only three. No one was ever convicted of the crimes, and the Stripper, for whatever reason, ceased his killing spree.

The Doodler was responsible for slaying 14 men and assaulting three others in San Francisco between January 1974 and September 1975. The nickname derived from the perpetrator’s habit of sketching his victims prior to having sex with them and then stabbing them to death. (One wonders whether the sketches ever made it onto the murderabilia market.) The perpetrator met his victims at after-hours gay clubs, bars and restaurants. Police zeroed in on a prime suspect in the case, who was identified by two of his surviving victims. Yet the cops were unable to proceed with an arrest, since the survivors (an entertainer, and a diplomat) refused to “out” themselves by way of testifying. The suspect, who never admitted his guilt, has never been publicly named, and the murders have faded into obscurity.

Bible John reportedly murdered three young women after meeting them at the Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow, Scotland between 1968 and 1969. All three women were raped, strangled, and beaten to death. Just prior to the third murder, the killer supposedly took a taxi ride with the the victim and her sister. The sister said the man, who was named John, was soft-spoken and liked to quote from the Bible. As of 2013, the killer has never been identified, although the location and activities of known Glaswegian serial killer Peter Tobin strongly suggests that he may have been behind the killings. No proof of this has ever been established, however, and the case remains unsolved.

The Phantom Killer is responsible for the “moonlight murders” committed in and around the twin cities of Texarkana, Texas and Texarkana, Arkansas in 1946. The Phantom Killer is credited with attacking eight people, and killing five of them. The attacks occurred on weekend nights, nearly always three weeks apart, and always involved a .32 caliber pistol. The case terrified the entire area, and eventually inspired the 1976 horror film, The Town That Dreaded Sundown. Two of the earliest victims were able to give a description of their attacker — and it only served to heighten the sense of terror. They described a six-foot tall man with a plain white sack worn as a hood over his head, with holes cut out for the eyes and mouth. One suspect, a man named Youell Swinney, was imprisoned as a repeat car theft offender in 1947, and released in 1973. He was never charged with the crimes. Due to the killer’s hooded disguise, some in law enforcement and the press have speculated that the murders may have been the early work of the Zodiac Killer, but this has never been proven.

The Babysitter Killer of Oakland County, Michigan was responsible for the murders of four or more children — at least two girls and two boys — in the years 1976-77. The children were abducted and then held for time periods ranging from 4-19 days, before they were killed by either strangling, suffocation, or shooting. Two of the victims were also sexually assaulted with an object. These atrocious deaths caused extreme public fear bordering on mass hysteria, and triggered a murder investigation which was the largest in U.S. history at the time. The Detroit News offered a $100,000 reward for the killer’s apprehension. A number of suspects were investigated — some authorities even considered John Wayne Gacy to be a likely perpetrator. However, the murders remain unsolved.

A more deranged bunch than this is difficult to imagine. How did they get away with it? Dumb luck? Skillful evasion? Police incompetence? Or all of the above? The truth probably resides in the simple fact that it is often just plain difficult — and very time-consuming – to solve murder cases. We tend to take homicide investigations for granted, and assume that justice will be served. However, given the sheer number of homicides, and the complexities involved in most cases, we shouldn’t be surprised that some of our worst psychopaths are able to slip through the cracks, and get away with murder.

posted by Patrick H. Moore

On February 6, 1943, the famed film actor Errol Flynn, after a month-long trial, was acquitted of the rapes and statutory rapes of Peggy Satterlee and Betty Hansen. The jury deliberated for 13 hours before returning with their unanimous not guilty verdict. According to Trove, Flynn, who had been uncharacteristically subdued throughout the lengthy ordeal, shouted gleefully upon hearing the good news:

Gosh! I feel like whooping!

We’re not sure if “whooping” is a euphemism for sexual intercourse but it certainly sounds like one.  What is known is that while the trial was going on, Mr. Flynn was pursuing and romancing 18-year old Nora Eddington, a teenage redhead who was the lobby cigarette girl at the courthouse. Flynn, who was never shy about expressing himself, explained:

I carefully checked her age. She was eighteen, safe ground. Her name, it turned out, was Nora Eddington.  What I didn’t know was that her father was Captain Jack Eddington of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office.

Flynn later married Nora Eddington, but like his other marriages, it was doomed to fail.

The  jury forewoman, a Mrs. Anderson, explained that during the 13 hours the jury was out, there were seven votes of 10 to 2 in favor of an acquittal. Finally, however, the two “hold- outs” capitulated. While all this was going on, Flynn literally could not  sit still and “lit one cigarette after another while rising from his chair and sitting down again.”

Naturally, the courtroom went wild when the verdict was finally read.  In addition to shouting about the joys of “whooping,” Flynn“jumped from his chair and rushed across the court-room to the jury and shook hands enthusiastically with the forewoman and others. Spectators cheered and crowded around Flynn and thumped his back.”

The Judge stated that he believed that the evidence was evenly divided but that  he felt the verdict was correct.

Flynn, who has been accused of many things including having Nazi leanings, commented in an interview:

It’s wonderful news. I did not become an American citizen for nothing. The fair play I received at this trial proves that. My confidence in American justice kept me hoping for such a verdict.

Peggy Satterlee said: “I knew those women would acquit him. They just sat and looked adoringly at him as if he was their son or something. The trial was an awful strain and the verdict horrible. I wish they had taken Betty Hansen and left me out. I was working and minding my own business.”

Given Errol Flynn’s “skin of his teeth” escape, not unlike his many magnificent escapes in his swashbuckling films, one can’t help but wonder who his adversaries were. Who were Peggy Satterlee and Betty Hansen?

Sir! A Magazine for Males, October, 1954, brings us this on Flynn and the two young ladies:

It seems that Flynn got entangled with two lovely young things at two different times in the space of a year. One was a Miss Betty Hansen, aged 17; the other a Peggy Satterlee of even more tender years.

The girls were irked with Flynn and their parents were irked with him. The State of California, having been duly applied to, decided to try him for both charges at one and the same time.  The public, to say the least, never had it better.

Flynn claimed that the whole thing was ridiculous; although he knew the girls, he had no knowledge that they were under 18. Flynn had a point. Both young women appeared to be of the age of legal consent:

Miss Satterlee danced at N.T.O’s Florentine Gardens, clad mostly in a plunge neckline, and Miss Hansen had come to the coast with movie ambitions.  When dressed for the kill, they could, both of them, have been an attractive pair of youngish grandmothers, what with their warpaint and mascara.

Satterlee and Hansen, however, hardly looked like “youngish grandmothers” in the courtroom. No doubt their attorneys had advised them on the need for innocent presentation:

Miss Satterlee appeared without even powder, clad in a little girl’s billowy dress and flat wedgies, and she had her hair artfully rigged in two long braids down her back caught with fetching bows.

She could have been ten. And Miss Hansen, also eschewing cosmetics, wore flat heeled shoes and a plain drab smock.

Miss Hansen was the first to take the stand. She claimed to have gone to dinner at the home of Flynn’s friend, McEvoy, where she had been given an “evil green drink” which had made her very sick. Always the gentleman, Flynn had taken her upstairs to take a “nap.” He had also helped her undress. On cross-examination, Flynn’s lawyer, the famed Jerry Geisler, inquired of Miss Hansen:

“But when you found you were not going to sleep, didn’t you try and push him away?”

Miss Hansen admitted she had not pushed him, kicked him or scratched him.

Miss Satterlee’s testimony was similar in nature except, in this case, Flynn’s unwanted advances had taken place on his yacht, the Sirocco. She stated that she had not screamed for help even though there were people nearby. She stated quaintly that she had not thought it worthwhile because: “the refrigerator was running.” With logic like that, it’s not surprising that Flynn was acquitted on both charges. Newsweek (yes they had Newsweek way back then) stated:

It happened in the best Hollywood tradition. The defendant leaped joyfully to his feet.  Spectators cheered. Flashbulbs popped…”

Flynn  was innocent. Not one seemed to be particularly put out over the not guilty verdict, not even Betsy Hansen’s mother who issued a statement from her home in Lincoln, Nebraska:

Oh well, nobody got hurt. I have no hard feeling toward Mr. Flynn. Betty is the cutest little thing you ever saw…a clean little Christian girl!

MORE ON THE TRIAL

Jurors are prone to speaking out following verdicts and the Flynn jurors were no exception. Motion Picture in conjunction  with Hollywood Magazine brings us the following:

What really convinced the jury that he was innocent?

With MOTION PICTURE-HOLLYWOOD’S policy of bringing you the inside story behind all front-page Hollywood news, we went to the individual jurors and asked them. Nine women and three men—all mature, intelligent and conscientious—sat in on the fate of Flynn, but because they are respectable citizens with families and want to avoid the spotlight, we have respected their desire for privacy by not quoting any member by name.

One of the jurors told me significantly, “It was not so much Flynn’s testimony that helped him as it was the testimony of both the girls who brought charges against him.”

“Their testimony proved to us that they were not always telling the truth. For instance, Betty Hansen first said that she undressed herself, and then said that Flynn had undressed her. During the preliminary hearing she said that the alleged act took place on a large bed in a large room, but on the stand she said it was a small bed in an alcove.”

The appearance of the girls did their cases no good either, according to the jurors. “There were no tears, no grief in recalling the alleged acts. We felt that a girl whose virtue had been molested would be unable to control her emotions on recalling the incident, but Betty Hansen and Peggy Satterlee were belligerent and displayed no regret.

“Besides, Mrs. Satterlee knew that her daughter was living in the apartment of a married man and was accepting money and gifts from him.”

“I felt sure,” a pleasant-faced, motherly juror told me, “that Betty Hansen first brought charges against Flynn out of hurt feelings and a sudden desire for revenge, and that when her case was weak, Peggy Satterlee was brought in.”

“Betty, on the other hand, was furious at Errol Flynn because he had paid no attention to her at Fred McEvoy’s party which she had crashed. She had come uninvited to that party with the express purpose of playing up to Mr. Flynn to obtain his help in getting into pictures…”

The jury was alert, not only in weighing every word uttered in court, but in making their sage analysis of the evidence displayed. The snapshots of Peggy Satterlee in a bathing suit taken on Sunday a few hours after she said she was attacked, told them plenty. “She looked happy and carefree, not at all like a girl who had suffered a harrowing physical experience as she had claimed.”

Not a thing missed their keen scrutiny. When Peggy told how she and Cathcart-Jones had played tag one night in a mortuary and how she had placed her face next to that of a dead man, they were revolted and arrived at the conclusion that a girl who could do that must be too calloused to be as deeply hurt as she said she was.

The Judge himself admonished the jurors that a birth certificate need not be viewed as conclusive evidence.

“We never felt that the girls were as young as they claimed,” several jurors explained. “Betty told us that she had been graduated from high school and then had gone to Teachers’ Training for two years before she came to Hollywood. Even a very bright girl—which Betty obviously was not—couldn’t have accomplished so much under the age of 17. Peggy looked and acted worldly; and on many occasions had sworn that she was older. For instance, she and her mother insisted that she was 18 when she applied for a driver’s license, and she said she was 21 when she applied for a job at a night club. Apparently she thought nothing of adjusting her age to suit the circumstances.”

One of the jurors stated that Errol Flynn’s reputation as a glamorous Hollywood star had no influence in her decision to vote for acquittal:

“Believe me,” one of the women told me, “I have seen him on the screen only once. I looked upon him as a man seeking justice, not as a dashing film star with a handsome profile…”

How can one argue with such eloquence?

THE week after Errol Flynn’s trial was over, the boys and girls who attended it and wrote it up gave him a party where the whole cast was re-enacted, amidst much merriment. The party was in payment for one Errol threw for them on the ninth floor of the Hall of Justice, while the jury was out cogitating as to his guilt or innocence. Errol had his butler bring down two cases of liquor and lots of sandwiches, and a merry time was had by all except the judge and jury. Errol also wanted time on the radio to thank the Great American Public for giving him such a fair trial. Networks wouldn’t go for it.

FLYNN’S AFTERMATH

Naturally, we can’t help wondering what happened to Fynn after the trial. It is noted that the well-known expression: “In Like Flynn” stems from his acquittal. The website For Shame! brings us the following:

Errol’s career didn’t really suffer from the trial, but rather from negative public opinion when he didn’t enlist during WWII (sidenote: not his fault, he wanted to, didn’t pass the physical, remarkable considering sword choreography prowess which you’d think the Army could use somehow). By the early 50s he’d really embraced a late-Kerouacian diet of cake and whiskey, resulting in alcoholism and weight gain.

But Errol, the scalawag, the rapscallion, had to go out with an inappropriately younger bang: at the age of 50, he met and fell in love with a FIFTEEN YEAR OLD whom he planned TO MARRY and with whom he planned to move to Jamaica. Very, very unfortunately, Errol died of a heart attack in 1959 before he could really love or marry his little island childbride. Sad.

Although the moralists among us may despise Errol Flynn for his caddish, inappropriate and downright sexist behavior (not to mention his alleged Nazi leanings), he never seemed to express any regrets for his many flaws. But what can you expect from a man who stated in his typically flippant manner:

“I like my scotch old and my woman young.”

by Lise LaSalle

On May 19, 1983, Elizabeth Diane Downs and her three small children were shot on a country road near Springfield, Oregon. Her 7-year old daughter Cheryl died but her 3-year old son Danny and her 8-year old daughter Christie survived. Within three weeks, Diane had lost custody of her remaining wounded children and had become the number one suspect in the eyes of the police department and District Attorney’s office.

This case flew under my radar so to speak because it happened before my ‘time’. I had nonetheless heard of the legendary Diane Downs; the cruel sociopath who had sacrificed her own children to be free to pursue a relationship with the man she loved. I must humbly admit that I had not questioned the facts of the case before readily accepting this image of Diane as a cold blooded killer. I know better now than to accept blindly the truth presented to us on a silver platter by the media and the judicial system.

Having recently done research on the Liysa Northon’s case which was the subject of a book written by Ann Rule titled Heart Full of Lies, I came across some very interesting information about the Diane Downs’ case because Rule attended the trial and also wrote a book about the case called Small Sacrifices.

In reality, the whole case turned out to be no small sacrifice for Diane Downs, but it was a huge victory for the State, the media and a very lucrative deal for the Queen of crime fiction herself; Ann Rule.

In her book Heart Full of Lies, Rule took so many liberties with the facts that Liysa Northon sued her. It opened a huge can of worms regarding the real identity of the heart full of lies in this case. Some 287 errors and falsehoods were documented by Liysa and verified by official sources. Rule sued the Seattle Weekly after they published the article titled ‘’Ann Rule’s Sloppy Storytelling,” but she lost and had to make restitution.

The popular TV movie “Small Sacrifices” was based on Ann Rule’s book and it painted a horrid picture of the mother accused of shooting her children on Old Mohawk Road. The role of Diane Downs was played by none other than Farrah Fawcett and her lover was played by Ryan O’Neal who had been Farrah’s love interest in real life. They brought out the big guns to unload on the public, their idea of the truth: Diane Downs was a horrible creature and a jilted lover who shot her three children in cold blood to be free to pursue a relationship with the man she was obsessed with.

My opposition to movies about true crime stories is unshakable. It should be illegal to use real names and facts from a criminal case while influencing the public to falsely believe that the whole content of the film is true. The Lifetime channel constantly makes movies based loosely on the truth; this approach is an effective weapon aimed at swaying public opinion about high-profile cases.

Ann Rule promotes her books as true crime stories so to this day, viewers believe that the book and the movie titled Small Sacrifices document the true story of the Diane Downs’ case; in fact, it is a mix bag of truth, falsehoods, interpretation and plain fiction.

Diane Downs

Diane Downs was born August 7, 1955 in Phoenix, Arizona. Her parents Willadene and Wes were old school Baptist parents who raised her under strict guidelines without much warmth but with complete devotion.

Diane was known for her love of all animals which she treated with great care, and for her independent and wild streak. She was extremely intelligent but her emotional IQ was no match and her desire for freedom, love and affection were dangerously dragging her down a path of self-destruction. In high school, she met handsome Steven Downs who saw her for the great beauty she had become. Growing up, Diane had felt like an outsider and kids had been cruel towards her because of her real or imagined ugly duckling looks and demeanor. She did not fit in and was now anxious to assert her independence  and live her own life.

She learned at a young age to keep her emotions in check and to always present a strong and brave front. That is the way she was brought up, especially at the demand of her rigid but very dedicated father.

After graduation, Steven joined the Navy and Diane was sent to Pacific Coast Baptist Bible College where she failed miserably at remaining pure and chaste, not unlike most girls of her generation who rejected their strict religious upbringing. She was expelled and reunited with Steven against her parents’ wishes. They had dreamt of a good future for their daughter and Steven was not part of it.

Steven and Diane married on November 13, 1973. She was eighteen and soon realized that she had jumped from the fire into the frying pan. Her quest for love had landed her into an unstable and loveless marriage. Her husband turned out to be a player and a very irresponsible guy who did not really love her.

So Diane did what she thought would bring her the deepest satisfaction in life; she became a mother. She felt fulfilled when she was pregnant because she believed it was the road to unconditional love. Christie was born in October 1974 and Cheryl Lynn in January 1976.

This unhealthy marriage survived and became a daily struggle. Diane ran away from her husband many times between 1976 and 1977, but with nowhere to go except her parents’ house, she would come back. And Steven would hunt her down anyway and charm his way back into her life. It was the story of two young people trying to survive without a safety net.

In 1979, Diane gave birth to Danny who was not the biological son of Steven who had no desire to be a father again. As usual, Diane had resorted to the soothing comfort of a pregnancy to pretend life would get better; she would create a nest around her come hell or high water. And Steven was free to follow her lead or not. Surprisingly, he accepted little Danny and learned to love him dearly. But the birth of this little boy did not make this bad boy change his stripes; he remained a cad and a destabilizing force in their lives.

Finally, Diane found a full-time job with the U.S. Post Office in 1981, and was stationed in Chandler. She had always been the bread winner and never wavered in her desire to bring financial stability to her family. She even became a surrogate mother to make money and provide two parents the opportunity to have a child. She entertained the idea of opening a surrogacy agency but the project never really took off. This was ridiculed countless times in the media, but frankly, it can be a very honorable endeavor, depending on how you want to look at it.

In Rule’s book, Diane is portrayed as a horrible selfish mother but her family and friends saw another version; she loved her children dearly and worked hard to be a good provider. She was the first to admit that at times, she yelled too much and was not the best mother but she seemed to have turned the corner and was doing her best with the means at her disposal. From all accounts, her children adored her.

Diane, of her own admission, had plenty of affairs while she worked at the Post Office. And Robert Knickerbocker became one of her lovers. He actually was the one who suggested they become intimate after many friendly, platonic conversations. As a married man, the ball was in his court and he decided to go for it. Diane found with him, the kind of relationship she had never known before: there was actually care and intimacy involved. Robert and Diane even decided to get matching tattoos. He separated from his wife and was going to follow Diane who, by now, had decided to move and work in Oregon to be closer to her parents. What followed was a tragedy subject to many interpretations.

The move to Oregon

If there was one thing Diane knew about her lover, is that he was fickle and did not like trouble of any kind. After asking her to have an affair, he kept vacillating between his wife and her. He strung her along, played with both women’s emotions, and after saying he would join her in Oregon, reneged and stayed with his wife. Moreover, he told her that he did not want her children or any children for that matter. This statement alone would seal Diane’s fate.

After six weeks in Oregon where the children were happily spending time with their grandparents while Diane worked her postal route, the incident happened on a dark road that led to Diane being accused of murder and attempted murder.

The shooting on Old Mohawk Road

After visiting a friend and looking at her new horse, Diane and her kids went for a drive; not at all unusual for this family not living according to middle class rules. When the young ones fell asleep in the car, their mother decided to head home. She saw a man on the road and stopped thinking he needed help. According to Diane, he shot her kids, she struggled with him and managed to escape after getting shot.

She drove to the nearest hospital where the nursing staff and doctors attended to the children. The police were called in and her parents arrived promptly. Right away, the police asked her to go back to the crime scene even though she did not want to leave her children behind. Her father also insisted she try to help catch the shooter. She unwillingly followed the cops in spite of being in pain and not wanting to leave the premises.

In the nurse’s notes, she is described as in shock and unable to grasp the situation. Most people described Diane’s injury as minor or superficial but in reality, it was a very serious injury. Her arm was severely damaged, so shattered that she needed a graft from a hip bone. A steel plate had to be attached and some lead fragments were removed.

Her children were obviously more severely injured because being captive in the car while a shooter aimed at them gave them less of a chance to wiggle out of the situation than an adult outside the car.

Diane’s injury had to be quite painful and she had to be in shock while driving to the hospital and accompanying the detectives to the crime scene. So how she behaved at the time, should not have been a factor influencing the authorities. But her behavior became the most important factor in the investigation that followed.

The investigation

The detectives took Diane to the crime scene and were able to retrieve shell cases on the ground where the incident happened. But strangely, they took no photos of the crime scene and did not lift fingerprints from the car. Diane’s automobile was secured and examined and no gun was found. She also underwent a gun residue test that same evening that revealed that she had not held or shot a gun. She had no blood spatter or gun powder residue on her hands, clothing or hair. Meaning, she could definitely not have been the shooter.

In her book, Ann Rule made sure to mention that Diane went to the bathroom in the hospital and running water was heard, meaning she was washing her hands while the door remained open. First of all, she could only use one of her hands and I doubt that the nurses at the time, were preoccupied by the sound of water in a public bathroom. Plus who leaves the door open when they go to the washroom?

It takes a very deep scrubbing with soap and water to get rid of gun powder residues and a little wash with one hand would not do the trick. Plus, Diane could have never cleaned her clothes and her hair to remove blood and gun powder. So that theory does not hold water.

‘’Gunpowder is one of the toughest stains around, when it comes to removing it from clothes. The fact that – if it gets on your skin – it is like being given a tattoo, should give you some idea what a tough stain it is. Washing soda is your best bet: It includes, among its ingredients, the exceedingly corrosive carbolic acid. If you use this mixed water, you can lift off a gunpowder stain.’’

The bushy haired stranger

Diane described the stranger that shot them on the road and a police artist came up with a sketch. DA Pat Horton declared early in the game to the local paper that ‘the search for the bearded stranger was not very high on their priority list.’’ To the authorities, it was a ridiculous notion that they would not entertain so they did not follow on numerous leads coming from people who had seen someone corresponding to that description.

They already had made up their mind that Diane was the perpetrator so they laughed off the idea of the ‘bushy haired stranger.’ The problem was that they could not find the gun anywhere and they had nothing on Diane.

Teams of people and detectives combed the area for months looking for the gun but it was nowhere to be found. Even prosecutor Fred Hugi was seen walking the grounds to try to find the weapon. They were in a difficult situation because without evidence, they could not charge her for the crime. Yet in their mind, she was already guilty. Sheriff’s Deputy Roy Pond admitted in court that he had already concluded that Diane was guilty and stopped following leads on the orders of his sergeant three weeks after the shooting.

Almost from day one, Diane was perceived as a ‘cancer’ they had to remove. They did not like her attitude and she did not behave the way they expected a grieving mother to act. So it was a relentless game to try to reel her in.

She was fighting back and they did not like it. So they did everything in their power to slant the media and the public in their favor.

This case had many similarities to the Alice Crimmin’s story. An attractive woman whose two children were killed in mysterious circumstances and the cops decided to go after her. They hated her attitude and thought she was promiscuous and showed no sorrow or remorse. Instead of grieving, Alice went partying and had sex. They finally charged her and she did 10 years for the death of her children. To this day, there is not enough evidence to prove her guilt or innocence for that matter.

Not unlike Diane, Alice did not want to share her pain in public. They both fainted when they saw their dead child, but it did not count. The authorities wanted to see them mourn and fall apart. But these women did not show emotions and did not fold when asked to. And these men in black perceived this as an act of war. And they proceeded to go after them with every legal or illegal means at their disposal.

The best policy for Diane Downs would have been to remain silent, but she fought back and smiled at the wrong time and according to them, enjoyed the attention. It did not matter that they had no evidence; they did not like her attitude and she was going to pay for it.

The two mental disorders that cause excessive talking are Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia. If Diane was bipolar, the non-stop chatter would be part of the deal. And the flat affect and sometimes inappropriate smiling would come with the territory so you cannot judge her actions without taking into account that she might not have been acting according to the norms, but it had nothing to do with the evidence of the case. But it is useless labeling anyway.

Christie Downs

Right after the shooting, little Danny would ask the nurses, ‘Why did the mean man shoot me?’ and it would be written down in the daily notes. Christie could not speak but after some rehab, she kept saying she did not know who shot her or her siblings.

The powers that be knew they had nothing on Diane so little Christie became their sacrificial lamb. But to convince this little girl to turn on her mother, they needed to isolate her from her family and work relentlessly on her ‘confession.’

Even Ann Rule in her book, keeps mentioning that they only had a few months to get Christie to talk, otherwise they could not keep her away from her mother any longer.

Three weeks after the crime, Judge Foote from family courts, removed Danny and Christie from the care of Diane Downs and her family. Even if the nurses’ notes indicated countless times that the children asked for their mother and enjoyed her visits, they cut them off from the only family they knew and loved; supposedly for their own protection.

In fact, Diane and her lawyer wanted Christie to be able to heal before being questioned and to be accompanied and taped during the sessions. A very reasonable request that was rejected. It became a judicial kidnapping to obtain a coerced confession.

Christie was only eight, had suffered gunshot wounds and was in shock. She had a stroke and was treated with mood altering Dilantin before and after testifying. She had been isolated from her whole family and being unethically interrogated. It was not unlike brainwashing. Every time, she said she did not know, they told her to think again and made suggestions. And the interrogations were not taped and were barely documented.

The unreliability of children’s testimony has been documented by cognitive psychologists such as Elizabeth Loftus of the University of Cornell and others. The harm done to families by unscrupulous district attorneys who bully children into falsely testifying against their parents has recently been documented in a documentary called “Witch Hunt” by Sean Penn about Kern County (CA) District Attorney Ed Jagels. There is no way that a jury would convict Diane today, based on the clearly coached testimony of Christie.

And the fact that she and her brother Danny were eventually adopted by Fred Hugi who prosecuted Diane Downs is the most blatant case of conflict of interest I have ever heard of.

It took months to get Christie to say that her mother was the culprit ant that is when they arrested her. Everything was in the bag and ready for trial.

The trial

From the very beginning, the DA’s office had their ducks in a row because in an unprecedented move, Judge Gregory Foote who had denied access to the children by all blood relatives and given their care over to the State, was promoted from ‘juvenile’ to ‘senior’ judge to preside over the trial of Diane Downs. It was Judge Foote’s first criminal case and it was against a woman whose children he had removed from her care even though she had not been convicted or sentenced; a conflict of interest and pure madness. They had him in their pocket and with the testimony of little Christie they were in business.

Diane’s father had hired an ex-Prosecutor to defend his daughter and his name was James C. Jagger. It turned out to be a mistake because he was married to a County Circuit Court Judge who would become a colleague of Foote and he had no intention of defending Diane vigorously. You wondered at times, which side he was working for.

Mr. Downs must have had a bad feeling about Jagger because before trial, he tried to retain defense attorney Melvin Belli who had the reputation of fighting for his clients and to win all his cases. Belli filed a motion for a 3-week extension to familiarize himself with the case and declared Diane innocent in a press conference, but Foote denied the motion and declared ‘’you have an attorney, use him.”

Foote ruled in favor of the prosecution and against the defense on most of the admissible evidence questions including all the nurse’s notes about Danny talking about a man shooting him but admitted Christie’s reports about her mother shooting her.

Diane’s brother sat in court one day and saw Foote looking at Hugi before ruling on an objection. The prosecutor would gently shake his head and Foote would follow with a ruling.

Foote refused 30 to 50 reports by detectives of sightings or leads about the shooter but admitted reports from people in Arizona willing to badmouth Diane. It was rigged and the fact that Ann Rule sat in the courtroom ready to produce a Masterpiece of Guilt could only help the prosecution.

The gun

According to the State, ballistics evidence proved that Diane Down was guilty. They claimed to have found two lead cartridges in Diane’s rifle after the shooting but there were discrepancies. The tool marks did not match and the detective lied on the stand. During closing arguments, Fred Hugi mentioned the Ruger model number and said he had the bill of sale, but it turned up at a police raid years later in Perris, California where a detective involved in the case, Dick Tracy, had been employed prior to his move to Oregon. The gun did not match the ballistics from the shooting site. Ruger #14-76187; Diane’s gun, was not the murder weapon. They tried to come up with another story to explain that it was not the gun after all but the jig was up.

It was proven in court that the shooter had to be left-handed to have been able to shoot the kids in the car at the right angle and Diane was right-handed. Hugi had to come to this realization during a demonstration at trial.

Fingerprints at the crime scene were suppressed by the State.

Police witness reports of strangers and confessions were suppressed or not pursued.

Years later, seven witnesses signed affidavits telling of a man named Jim Haynes’ continuing confession that he was the shooter, and he physically resembled the sketch.

Diane’s Mental State

During Diane’s interrogation, Fred Hugi said in front of the jury that she had been diagnosed as a ‘deviant sociopath.’

In fact, Diane had consulted a psychologist after the tragedy and after months of consultation, she was never diagnosed as a sociopath. The definition of ‘deviant sociopath’ does not even exist in the DSM-HI, which is the official psychiatric diagnostic manual. She did diagnose her as suffering from cyclothymic disorder and treated her accordingly. She signed an affidavit to that effect and wanted the jury informed of it but it was never done.

http://www.dianedowns.com/Dr.%20Jamison%20affidavit.pdf

As soon as Diane was found guilty, Hugi demanded that Diane be evaluated by a psychiatrist before sentencing so they could declare her a dangerous offender and give her a stiffer sentence.

Strangely enough, a woman who was seen for 8 months by a psychologist and declared to be in shock, would now be assessed by the ‘State hired psychiatrist’ to confirm the label Hugi conveniently made up during trial. And Hugi seemed pretty sure he would get what he was asking for.

So when Dr. George Suckow from the Oregon State Hospital in Salem was called as a State’s rebuttal witness and he made a professional diagnosis of Diane as histrionics, antisocial and narcissistic, he openly said in court that he interviewed Diane for 1 hour and read evidence presented by the state to make his diagnosis.

It gave Anne Rule carte blanche to use these labels in her book and it stuck. Diane was now labeled as a dangerous offender. Mission accomplished.

The unicorn and Hungry like the Wolf

Anne Rule made a big deal of a brass unicorn engraved with the children’s names that Diane had purchased. It was omnipresent in the courtroom as well as the Duran Duran song Hungry like the Wolf that supposedly was playing when the children were shot in the car.

According to Rule and the court, the unicorn was a memorial to her children that she purchased after premeditating their murder. It was farfetched, unfounded and entirely made up by Rule to boost the sales of her book. There is absolutely no evidence that Hungry like the Wolf was playing when Christie got shot but it is another detail they added to bring a dramatic element to this trial. They played the tape in the courtroom, and the fact that Diane did not break down but tapped her foot to the music, was supposed to be another proof of her guilt. Only in Hollywood and in Ann Rule’s books, would you find such fantasy.

In fact, if someone was Hungry like the Wolf in this courtroom, it was a certain crime author who could already smell and taste the fortune coming her way after the publication of this juicy story.

Fred Hugi was pretty upset when Ann Rule went Hollywood with his case. I am convinced that he did not want too many people to know about the improprieties that happened in his courtroom. But he overestimated the kind of people that would go along with this soap opera. They were not truth seekers and enjoyed a nice burning at the stake instead.

Rule defended her right ‘to earn a living’ and to tell her story. Too bad she did not interview Diane or her family. She talked to Diane for 15 minutes, there was the bizarre and partial Oprah interview that was basically a ‘let’s bash Diane’ event and she wrote to Diane in jail to ask her what she thought of Hugi adopting her children. That was the extent of her ‘investigation’ of Diane’s side.

When Diane’s youngest daughter grew up and reached out to her mother, the media and Rule grabbed hold of her and made sure she would hear nothing good about her mother. Rule even talked about writing a book about her but it never materialized. It probably was not impactful enough for readers.

The foreseeable verdict

Diane was cooked the minute she walked in that courtroom. Evidence or not, they were going to do their best to put her away for life. And their plan worked. The poor jury went along and Jagger did not put much on much of a defense anyway.

Considering the lack of evidence, it seems that she was thrown to the wolves because of her personality. Christie became the star witness against her mother and who could resist such a touching testimony? Her lover and former husband testified against her but it did not represent evidence but character assassination. They had to create this monster as they had no concrete evidence.

There was never a real motive for the crime even if the State insisted that Diane wanted to be free to pursue her love interest. Why would she have driven the kids to the hospital then? And she knew that Knickerbocker hated trouble so he would not have come back to her after an ugly shooting where she had been wounded and her kids damaged.

I do not care if the bushy haired stranger made no sense or if they could not explain the why of the tragedy, I do not care if she was madly in love with a guy because all that counts is proof and evidence in a court of law, and there was definitely a reasonable doubt. Without the media blast and rush to judgment from the police and DA’s office, we might have uncovered the truth.

The aftermath

Years later, Christie was heard saying by classmates that she did not know who shot her. There is also a recording where she says that she had no idea who shot them. The tape is real and probably not admissible but it proves that her testimony was coerced. Caught in the act, Hugi declared that Christie said that only because she was pressed for an answer. Of course, because this is what she does when people ask her questions concerning her mother. After all, she was conditioned this way.

Diane was found guilty and sentenced to life and she has been in prison ever since. She was in solitary confinement for years and even escaped from prison once but was recaptured.

In 1999, a Board Certified Psychiatrist practicing in Oakland, California wrote a letter to the parole board on behalf of Diane Downs to explain how things had changed since 1984 when she was diagnosed with a ‘severe personality disorder.’ He did not consider her a risk factor at all and believed she would do well if released into society, because she had no prior history of violence and never had a problem with violence or bad behavior while incarcerated.

In 2008, a psych evaluation by L. Williams, Ph.D., Chief of Mental Health at Valley State Prison for Women, explained Diane’s lack of emotions and its relationship to her case.

Ms. Downs makes every effort to avoid emotional stimuli in order to reduce the demands made on her. She functions best in highly structured environments where she has a sense of control. She may be highly vulnerable to losing control of her emotions in emotionally charged situations, creating faulty judgment and ineffective and inappropriate behavior.

“She keeps her emotions under tight control, presenting only socially acceptable feelings and burying other contradictory feelings.”

As far as her innocence goes and the possibility of being paroled if she admitted her crime, Diane srongly maintains her innocence. She states, “I did not shoot my children and I can’t say I did. It would not benefit you, my children, or society for me to perpetuate that lie. If I was of a mind to manipulate the Board by giving voice to the words they want me to utter, I’d have sold my soul two decades ago when the lies would have benefited me and my youth passed long ago. It’s too late for me to call myself a murderer (when I am not) just to purchase my freedom. I did not shoot my children.”

She goes on to say that she has deep regret and mourns the loss and death of her children.’

If it was not such a high profile case, Diane Downs would have been paroled a long time ago, considering her good behavior and lack of priors. The Parole Board had an obligation to parole Diane between 1998 and 2002 if she could provide reasonable cause to show she was not a danger to society. According to Oregon law, this would have to be supported by a psychiatrist’s report or a Wardens’ letter and Diane provided both. But the Parole Board refused to hear her.  She followed all the correct Parole Board procedures for two years with no hearing.  She then went through the State (Circuit) Court habeas corpus relief for four years to no avail. She is nowhere near being paroled and if she admitted guilt, I am not even convinced they would release her. Her case was too public and they are afraid of public backlash.

I do not know what happened on Old Mohawk Road on that dark evening, but I know that they did not have enough evidence to convict and try Diane Downs. They should have taken their time to investigate this case thoroughly and without prejudice.

Diane Downs and Alice Crummins were considered sluts and cold-blooded women and were judged on their unusual character. The lousy men in their lives never took a hit because after all, it was these witches’ fault.

It is ironic that you have to be a perfect mother with no lovers to be considered innocent until proven guilty in America.

The lovely Farrah Fawcett who played in the movie Small Sacrifices was known for her epic battles with lover Ryan O’Neil. Her son ended up in jail and O’Neil’s children accused him of neglect and bad parenting. Farrah had trouble with the law because of a passionate love affair with a movie director. So if we started judging people harshly for their flaws, it would never end.

A trial should be based on evidence only and Diane Downs was condemned because of her flaws. She has done her time in prison and I hope that she gets the chance to get out and spend time with her aging parents and siblings who have been fighting relentlessly for her release.

Anne Rule might have inflamed the case with her book Small Sacrifices and her theory of the crime, but in reality, the case of Diane Downs was no small sacrifice. The price of celebrity for her was losing her freedom and her children for life. It does not get any bigger than this.

Diane and her brother James

The Case of Liysa Northon – Who Said True Crime Does not Pay?

http://www.thetroublewithjustice.com/the-case-of-liysa-northon-who-said-true-crime-does-not-pay/

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

There’s little doubt that most of us at times have fantasized about being something (or someone) other than who we are. For example, in my (not so) secret moments, I sometimes veer into the world of dark fantasy and imagine that I am a HIT MAN busily “taking out” enemies real and imagined. Well, not really… But I’ve certainly fantasized about lighting it up in the NBA or passing for 5,000 yards and 50 touchdowns in an NFL season.

The fact of the matter, however, is that there are plenty of otherwise “normal” Americans who fantasize about working in law enforcement, especially in the FBI or the Secret Service, to such a degree that they order more or less authenticate looking badges, rent office space in government buildings, and do everything they can to convince folks that they actually are law enforcement officials. I even represented one of these strange birds 5 or 6 years ago. The judge was amused but not so amused as to give the fellow probation (I believe he was sentenced to about 6 months in a Federal camp for impersonating a Federal officer).

In a new true crime story out of San Francisco, a 35-year-old licensed security guard named Jeffrey Bigai recently impersonated a San Francisco police officer for a completely nefarious purpose. Vivien Ho of SFGate writes:

A licensed security guard from San Francisco posed as a police officer in an effort to sexually assault recent Central American immigrants, authorities said Monday.

Jeffrey Bugai, 35, persuaded at least two men with limited English-speaking abilities to go to his home, police said. Once there, officials said, Bugai would drug or handcuff them or try to coerce them into performing sexual acts.

Bugai was not only nefarious but also diabolically clever. Investigators believe some of his victims have not come forward because he threatened them with deportation or police retaliation. Bugai was known to frequent the Mission and Ingleside districts of San Francisco as well as Oakland and Hayward.

Therefore, according to Officer Albie Esparza, a San Francisco police spokesman, there is no way at present to tell how many victims there might be or how long Bugai ran his scheme.

Bugai was arrested July 10 and has been charged him with two counts of kidnapping to commit a sexual offense and single counts of attempted forced sodomy, attempted forcible oral copulation and assault with the intent to commit a sexual offense.

The SF prosecutor’s office is taking this case very seriously, as well they should. Bugai pleaded not guilty at his July 15 arraignment and is being held on $2 million bail.

Not unexpectedly, Bugai has a history of impersonating people in positions of authority. Fifteen years ago, he was accused of wearing a white coat and posing as a health care worker in Traverse City, Mich. on at least three occasions.

Whether it was an attempt to filch drugs for himself or that he simply wanted to risk a patient’s life, in one instance, he allegedly recommended to a nurse that a patient’s pain medication be increased.

When apprehended, Bugai told reporters that he was just visiting friends at the medical center and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of unauthorized use of a health profession title, resulting in 90 days in county jail.

On a social media platform, Bugai explained he had no trouble becoming a security guard in California writing, “Fortunately no one out here takes (Traverse City) police reports seriously.”

What is frightening is the fact Bugai has been licensed in the state as a security guard since 2002 and has special permits allowing him to carry a gun and baton while on duty.

According to the state Department of Consumer Affairs, if Bugai is convicted, he will be stripped of his license immediately.

Apparently not content with spreading just one oo two lies, Bugai also claimed he had gotten a job with the San Francisco Housing Authority, but a spokeswoman at the agency, Rose Dennis, stated Monday that there is no record of his employment.

“I don’t believe he was ever a police officer. He may have had some security paraphernalia, but we don’t know if he was actually a security officer. He was never one of ours, never with San Francisco police.”

In addition to allegedly being a kind of stealth rapist, Bugai was the recipient of a civil restraining order in San Francisco in 2007. Always eager to even out the playing field, Bugai himself has sought restraining orders against three different men, including a roommate, since 2010.

Investigators are asking people with information to call San Francisco police at (415) 553-0123.

*     *     *     *     *

I glad that this is being taken seriously and that Bugai’s bail is quite high. Imagine the fear his victims must have experienced as this ersatz cop sexually assaulted them. And then add to that the fear and frustration of being a victim and being afraid to go to the authorities because of fear of more “police misconduct” and/or possible deportation. But they’ve got him now and we can only hope that all of his victims find the courage to come forward.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Even though there is no proof he ever said it, Phineas T. Barnum of Ringling Bros. Circus fame is often credited with saying, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Whoever actually coined the phrase is less important than the fact that there’s a lot of truth to it — a fact hucksters throughout history have taken full advantage of. The general population — myself included — is often naive, credulous and easily “taken to the cleaners”. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the recent case of Ron Oneal Morris, an “unlicensed doctor” who specialized in cut-rate butt injections by allegedly using Fix-A-Flat and cement to shape derrieres.

Unbelievable as this sounds, it is all true. The results of the injections are grotesque — so grotesque that the prosecution has struggled to find witnesses willing to testify against Morris. As a result of this reluctance on the part of the victims, Morris was able to cut a deal with the prosecutors which led to her pleading guilty Thursday morning in Miami to one count of practicing healthcare without a license. She was sentenced to 336 days in state prison, at least some of which she has already served.

According to UPI, Morris, who was born a man but considers herself a woman, will begin serving the remainder of her sentence in January.

Morris is reported to have started her cut-rate black market plastic surgery business in 2007.  According to the the New York Daily News, many of her patients were transgendered women who were understandably seeking feminine curves. It is completely appalling that Morris took advantage of these vulnerable souls by pumping their bodies full of bizarre compounds. That being said, the investigators have struggled to find evidence that Morris actually used Fix-A-Flat in her injections, according to CBS Miami. For those of you interested in chemistry, Fix-A-Flat consists of low-density plastics dissolved in naphtha which, by the way, is extremely flammable.

*     *     *     *     *

One transgender individual who did come forward in 2011, but may have refused to testify later on, is Rajee Narinesingh who told CBS Miami that Morris injected her face with a toxic brew investigators allege was a mixture of tire mender, mineral oil and cement. As the picture demonstrates, the injections have left her face markedly disfigured.

Narinesingh told the station that she was desperate to have plastic surgery. She contacted Morris sometime around 2009 after hearing about her through “word of mouth” in the transgender community. Narinesingh explained that many transgendered individuals experience great anguish because although they feel like one sex on the inside, their bodies reflect the opposite sex whom they do not identify with psychologically:

“It becomes so dire that you want to match your outside with your inside that you’re willing to roll the dice and take your chances. As a transgender person, you’re thinking ‘Oh, my God, I can start to look like I want to look like and I don’t have to spend a lot of money.’”

The botched backroom procedures left Narinesingh’s face a lumpy, misshapen mess.

She now has a real plastic surgeon, Dr. John Martin of Coral Gables, who stated that he hoped surgery and therapeutic injections could undo the damage.

“She’s got a long road, thousands and thousands of dollars to correct what was probably two or three hundred dollars to get the injection,” Martin told CBS.

*     *     *     *     *

Morris and an accomplice, Corey Eubank, were arrested in November, 2011, after allegations on the part of alleged victims that they had been injected in their legs and buttocks with a mixture consisting of Fix-a-Flat, cement and superglue, according to NBC Miami.

In July of 2012, Morris was arrested again, this time on manslaughter charges for the death of Shatarka Nuby, 32, who allegedly paid at least $2,000 for treatments to enhance her buttocks, hips, thighs and breasts. Although the specifics of these charges remain murky, it appears that the compounds were allegedly sufficiently toxic to kill Nuby.

NBC Miami reports that the trial for that case is still pending. Obviously, if the manslaughter charge sticks, Morris will be facing a much longer sentence than the 336 days she has received to date.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Just when you think the onslaught of child abuse stories cannot get any worse, along comes another one so awful that, at first blush, it would destroy one’s faith in humanity if one’s faith were not rock-solid. This case comes to us out of Maryland and — unlike what we usually see — is really more the story of teen and young adult abuse than abuse of younger children. An additional disturbing element to this story is the fact that the abuse was allegedly reported to the authorities three years ago but they reportedly chose to look the other way.

David Boroff writes:

A Maryland couple kept their twin 22-year-old autistic sons locked at night in a dark, urine-(soaked) basement with almost no furniture for the last six years, authorities said.

Cops were at John and Janice Land’s Rockville home on Thursday for an unrelated matter when they found the twins locked in the basement. Police observed an “overwhelming smell of urine coming from the room,” according to court documents obtained by the Daily News.

The Lands, who are 57 and 59 years of age, respectively, told Montgomery County police that the reason they locked the room at night was because their sons had often left the house on their own, which the parents felt was dangerous. The parents reported that “the twins are nonverbal and can’t provide for themselves.”

“Janice stated that her sons have a history of eloping from the house and to combat that situation, she had locks installed on all the exterior doors preventing them from leaving the house,” according to the police.

The couple justified the lack of furniture in the basement prison by explaining that they had removed it because it had become soiled and that they would buy new furniture when they could.

There is little doubt that we humans have a great psychological need to handle our processes of elimination in a more-or-less cleanly way and that we find the inability to do so extremely demoralizing. A simple example of this is the fact that we tend to become quite upset when confronted with a stopped-up toilet and quickly seek either a handy plunger or, in extreme cases, that gift from god, the faithful plumber. Thus, to sleep in the urine-soaked basement room had to be very hard on the psyches of the 22-year-old boys.

In the basement, the authorities found a comforter, but no beds for the twins to sleep on. There were no smoke or carbon monoxide detectors, only a tiny basement window too small for either of them to slip through in case of an emergency.

“It’s shameful really,” neighbor Sam French told ABC. “That’s not parenting. I mean that’s just locking someone up for God’s sakes. That’s like being a jailer. Who would do that to their children?”

According to police, the Lands reportedly locked up their kids at 10 p.m. each night and kept them locked up till 4:45 a.m. This had been their regimen every night for the last six years. A neighbor said authorities were told about the deplorable conditions three years ago, but did nothing.

“Our son used to be friends with the Lands, and he told us there was a child locked in the basement that was autistic and never left the basement,” Sharon Drennan told ABC. “We made reports to the authorities and — nobody. There’s been cops in that house several times and never removed those children. And it comes to this — this long?”

“Supposedly, they’d lock them in the laundry room, and they would sleep on the washer and dryer and on the floor,” neighbor Bruce Dennan told the station.

The Lands were each charged with two counts of vulnerable adult abuse and attempted false imprisonment. Oddly, the city of Rockville has officially condemned their home.

“I’m happy that they (twin brothers) were found,” neighbor Natalie Larson told ABC. “I’m happy that they’re alive. I’m happy they can get the resources that they need to thrive. There’s a lot that they can do. Just because they have autism doesn’t mean they need to be locked in a basement.”

* * * * *

It’s obvious that the Lands did not do a good job of handling the fact their children were autistic and apparently became increasingly hard to handle as they moved through mid-adolescence. I’m not in a huge rush to condemn them entirely, however, because I suspect they were bewildered and had no clear idea as to how to handle the situation.

Should they have gone to the authorities for help? Yes. Would the authorities have provided sufficient help? I don’t know. If the authorities had come up with a plan to help the two handicapped boys live a more normal life, would the Lands have complied, or would they have stubbornly told the powers-that-be to “bugger off”. Once again, I don’t know.

I would hope that Lori, our expert in cases of this sort, will advise us with respect to what the Lands should have done, and how effective it might have been.

I think it’s important to realize that the “modern approach” of trying to deal with handicapped children in a beneficent and loving manner runs counter to what had long been the traditional manner in dealing with problems of this sort.

This is perhaps not a perfect analogy, but I have a good friend I will call Ralph. Ralph told me that a few years ago, he discovered that he had a maternal aunt who had apparently exhibited signs of serious mental illness back around 1910. His poor aunt was taken to an asylum where she spent the rest of her natural life. Her existence was suppressed entirely and the younger family members would still not know she had ever existed had the family sleuth not discovered an old photograph of her taken before her incarceration began. The family sleuth then launched an investigation and put the pieces of this tragic puzzle together.

My point is that until fairly recently, the standard technique for dealing with handicapped and/or mentally ill family members was to hide them, in effect, make them vanish, even as they continued to live out their lives in severely reduced circumstances. The Lands’ strategy for dealing with their autistic twin sons would appear to have been in keeping with that approach.

I am in no way attempting to justify this approach; rather, I’m simply explaining that this was “standard procedure” in our society until things began to change around in the middle of the last century. Many members of our society today  – and the Lands are apparently among them — have simply not caught up. Does this mean they should be imprisoned for a lengthy period of time? I’m not sure but I tend to think their punishment should be leavened with compassion and education in the event they are willing to listen to reason and change.

compiled by Patrick H. Moore

As children in school — at least when I was a child in school so long ago — we were taught about “America the Beautiful”, a land of bountiful opportunity where through the dint of hard work, honesty and keeping one’s nose clean, we could all elevate ourselves and our families and take our place on the great mandala of the Manifest Destiny. Sure, we learned about some of the bad stuff — particularly slavery. We never heard a word, however, about the “kinky dark land” in which some of us dwell. For example, we were never taught that the babysitter just might inject our beloved youngster with a “speedball”, i.e., a lethal combination of heroin and cocaine. Yet that’s exactly what happened to 9-month-old Milton Rojas in Philadelphia last year when his babysitters, Oscar Sanchez-Rivera, 24, and Viameri Santana-Berrios, 27, allegedly injected him repeatedly with the deadly combination. The Daily Mail Reporter writes:

A couple have been accused of killing a nine-month-old baby boy by injecting him with heroin and cocaine.

Oscar Sanchez-Rivera, 24, and Viameri Santana-Berrios, 27, were babysitting the boy when he died from a drug overdose.

Doctors found needle marks on his hands and feet as well as undigested heroin and cocaine in his body.

The surprising details of the baby boy’s death were described at a preliminary hearing in Philadelphia where the judge bound Sanchez-Rivera over for trial on murder charges after a medical examiner testified that the young victim, Milton Rojas, had so many drugs in his body that he likened him to a drug mule, i.e., someone who smuggles drugs for a living. Although the analogy is not quite on point, the general idea is clear: the baby boy was full of narcotics.

After a five hour hearing concerning the circumstances of the boy’s death, Sanchez-Rivera’s girlfriend Santana-Berrios was bound over on third-degree murder charges .

Paramedic Dale Schroder testified that he had been called to the home last July after the baby was reported as being unresponsive. Santana-Berrios led him to a bedroom where he saw Sanchez-Rivera standing over the body of a baby who was naked and lying on a towel on the bed. Schroder explained to the court that he recognised ‘track marks’ normally found on drug addicts when he was trying to revive the baby, who was cool to the touch, pale, and unresponsive.

Schroeder’s efforts to revive the child failed. He and his partner then took the child to St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children, in Philadephia, where he was pronounced dead. By the time they reached the hospital, little Milton’s internal body temperature was already too low to register on a rectal thermometer.

According to medical examiner Edwin Lieberman, the examination revealed eight needle marks on the baby’s feet and hands as well as undigested heroin and cocaine in his stomach. Lieberman stated that he had never seen this level of drugs in a child before.

Both Sanchez-Rivera and Santana-Berrios had told the detectives that the baby, who had a history of breathing problems, fell asleep and began snoring before it stopped breathing and turned blue. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the defense attorneys strenuously contested the charges at the preliminary hearing. Sanchez-Rivera’s attorney, Michael Medway, insisted that it made no sense for him to inject and kill a child that he and his girlfriend were only watching for her cousin. ”Why? Because the kid is too much of a pain?” Medway asked. 

But the prosecutors have alleged that the child died within six hours of being injected while in their care:

“For 39-1/2 hours, this baby was in the care of these two people. Take a look at the math and at the level of care and how they acted. The body has track marks. Track marks on a baby.”

The Municipal Court Judge James M. DeLeon ordered Sanchez-Rivera to be held on the murder charge as well as conspiracy and child endangerment charges. Santana-Berrios, a mother with two children of her own, had her bail set at $150,000 based on the lesser third-degree murder charges.

*     *     *     *     *

I’ve never seen a case like this before and am somewhat surprised by the sheer monstrousness of what was done to the child. Although Sanchez-Rivera’s attorney claims that injecting the child makes no sense, there’s little doubt that the heroin would keep him quiet so that he would not be a pain for the babysitters from hell.

by Lorenz

I am an American citizen born and raised in Germany. While I love the USA and this is my home country, my values, I have found, are grounded in those of Western Europe, as I am discovering in my early 40s.

What continues to surprise me is that the US justice system is geared towards punishment, rather than rehabilitation and education. No one in Western Europe would doubt, that this young man had problems, was a criminal, and needed to serve a punishment of several years in prison, but nobody would ever, ever, suggest a life needs to be wasted and conclude a teenager needs to be put away for several life sentences?!??!?! Are you kidding?!

Note: Lorenz is referring to “Behind and Beyond the Wall”: Tyler’s Story of Finding Life in Darkness.

How is that teenager the same person at 17 that he will be when he is 43 like me? We all had problems at age 17! This is horrendous!

In Western Europe, we can admit that young people do dumb things. It’s a much much harsher process here in the US. (Of course, we don’t have supermarket access to guns and then ask ourselves innocently (“dumbly” – yes go ahead critique) how all those “horrible things” could happen on virtually a daily basis).

I am not a lawyer, but I believe that in Western Europe, in Germany (or Austria, or Poland, or France) this young man would have gotten a well deserved 4-6 years in prison. But in the US, the justice system that is completely built on punishment, rather than rehabilitation, is completely lagging more evolved parts of the world; it is lagging and is phenomenally old fashioned…

I once read an article about how the the US, as a society, is 100 years behind Western Europe.

Then, when I read articles like Tyler’s story, I realize…yes, it is!!! 100 years behind Western Europe. And this is not to say that Western Europe is in any way perfect. It’s not. Far from it. But when its judicial system is compared to what we have in the US, it seems like heaven on earth.

Click here to view Tyler’s posts:

“Behind and Beyond the Wall”: The Gift of Freedom

“Behind and Beyond the Wall”: Tyler’s Story of Finding Life in Darkness

shared by Rick Stack with a brief word of explanation by Patrick H. Moore

Yesterday was an interesting day in the brief and sometimes stormy history of All Things Crime Blog. First, I want to thank Lise LaSalle for writing a courageous post in which she lays out the prosecutorial misconduct that she believes (and I agree with her) marred the Diane Downs case. I am happy to report that most readers who have commented on Lise’s post, whether or not they agree with her, have approached it in a fair, non-judgmental, and, in most cases, positive manner.

Curiously, Lise’s post has set off a bit of a chain reaction and we received a fascinating comment from a reader named Gloria who writes:

“I read Ann Rule’s book and also believed that Diane Downs was guilty, but it is important to note that I read the book while in the California Penitentiary serving a sentence of 32-years-to- life for a crime that I did not commit. I was set up by an unscrupulous prosecutor who was prosecuted in 2007 by the Califonia State Bar for what he did to me. Over the years, I was told by other inmates who knew her that Diane Downs was innocent. Luckily for me, I was exonerated and freed by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, but Diane has not been so lucky…she should be released!”

I have asked Gloria to tell her story of wrongful conviction and ultimate exoneration in detail for our benefit, and hopefully she will agree to.

Meanwhile, our resident legal expert, Rick Stack — a man who has worked as both a Federal prosecutor (AUSA) and a criminal defense attorney – has been good enough to provide us with the following commentary on the issue of prosecutorial misconduct followed by an inspiring message by former U.S. Attorney General, Supreme Court Justice and chief judge at the Nuremberg Tribunals, Robert H. Jackson.

Rick Stack writes:

“Gloria, I’m glad to hear that you were ultimately exonerated of the crime for which you were convicted, but sorry to hear that you were a victim of the criminal justice system. Have you received any recompense for your wrongful conviction and/or or been able to obtain a monetary recovery from the prosecutor? Unfortunately, too many prosecutors (and some defense counsel) cut corners and follow the “win at any cost” strategy in order to further their legal or judicial careers. Such behavior corrupts the criminal justice system and seriously undermines public confidence. It’s unfortunate that more prosecutors don’t follow the advice of former U.S. Attorney General Robert H. Jackson (who later was a Supreme Court Justice and chief judge at the Nuremberg Tribunals), as to the proper role of the federal prosecutor:”

Robert H. Jackson writes:

. . . The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America. His discretion is tremendous. He can have citizens investigated and, if he is that kind of person, he can have this done to the tune of public statements and veiled or unveiled intimations. Or the prosecutor may choose a more subtle course and simply have a citizen’s friends interviewed. The prosecutor can order arrests, present cases to the grand jury in secret session, and on the basis of his one-sided presentation of the facts, can cause the citizen to be indicted and held for trial. He may dismiss the case before trial, in which case the defense never has a chance to be heard. Or he may go on with a public trial. If he obtains a conviction, the prosecutor can still make recommendations as to sentence, as to whether the prisoner should get probation or a suspended sentence, and after he is put away, as to whether he is a fit subject for parole. While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst.

* * * * * * * *

Nothing better can come out of this meeting of law enforcement officers than a rededication to the spirit of fair play and decency that should animate the federal prosecutor. Your positions are of such independence and importance that while you are being diligent, strict, and vigorous in law enforcement you can also afford to be just. Although the government technically loses its case, it has really won if justice has been done. The lawyer in public office is justified in seeking to leave behind him a good record. But he must remember that his most alert and severe, but just, judges will be the members of his own profession, and that lawyers rest their good opinion of each other not merely on results accomplished but on the quality of the performance. Reputation has been called “the shadow cast by one’s daily life.” Any prosecutor who risks his day-to-day professional name for fair dealing to build up statistics of success has a perverted sense of practical values, as well as defects of character. Whether one seeks promotion to a judgeship, as many prosecutors rightly do, or whether he returns to private practice, he can have no better asset than to have his profession recognize that his attitude toward those who feel his power has been dispassionate, reasonable and just.

* * * * * * * *

The qualities of a good prosecutor are as elusive and as impossible to define as those which mark a gentleman. And those who need to be told would not understand it anyway. A sensitiveness to fair play and sportsmanship is perhaps the best protection against the abuse of power, and the citizen’s safety lies in the prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes, and who approaches his task with humility.

http://www.roberthjackson.org/the-man/speeches-articles/speeches/speeches-by-robert-h-jackson/the-federal-prosecutor/

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Although it is generally believed that men are typically the “evil beings” who brutally slay their children for no good reason (not that there is ever a “good reason” for murdering your kids), the reality is that a surprising number of American mothers are highly troubled and are completely capable of killing their little ones in an emotionally charged state. What is odd about this appalling syndrome is that in some instances, these same mother-murderesses will experience “buyer’s remorse” after completing the act and turn themselves in to the authorities.

A particularly disturbing example of this occurred in Athens, Texas this week where 25-year-old Stacie Marie Parsons brutally killed her 4-year-old daughter Victoria, possibly out of jealousy, and then allegedly marched down to the police station and turned herself in. When the police rushed over to investigate, they found Victoria dead in the trunk of Ms. Parson’s car with trauma to her head and chest at the suspect’s home in the 400 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Athens.

David Lohr at Huffington Post writes:

Police in Texas say a 25-year-old woman walked into a police station Monday and confessed to killing her 4-year-old daughter.

Athens resident Stacie Marie Parsons has been arrested and charged with one count of capital murder of a person less than 10 years old in the brutal slaying of her 4-year-old daughter, Victoria Wyatt. Parsons is being held on a $2 million bond in the Henderson County Jail, police said.

Parsons allegedly walked into the Athens Police Department at about 8:45 p.m. Monday and confessed to the murder.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Henderson County Sheriff Ray Nutt recounted:

“She walked in and [said] that she had just killed her daughter.”

In a scene so sad that one can hardly grasp it, at about the same time Ms. Parsons was turning herself into the police, her common-law husband, Gary Wyatt, had reportedly found Victoria in the trunk of Parsons’ car and was trying desperately to revive her.

“Oh, God it was awful. Foaming out of her mouth, her head was bashed in,” Gary Wyatt told KSLA through tears. “My baby’s dead, she killed my baby.”

Wyatt told KSLA he had told Parsons on Sunday that he wanted a divorce, which, as one might suspect led to an argument. Then on Monday morning, when he woke up, Wyatt discovered that Parsons was already gone with Victoria, which led him to assume that she had taken their daughter to enroll her in pre-school. Sometime later, when Parsons returned to the house, she parked her car, and walked away. When Wyatt and other family members tried to talk to her, she simply said, “I wouldn’t be in that car if I were you.”

The family then naturally rushed to the car, which is when they found Victoria in the trunk, wrapped in a garbage bag, and tried futilely to revive her in the front yard.

When interviewed, Wyatt said his wife was never violent towards the girl. He did, however, suggest that Ms. Parsons had harbored strongly negative feelings toward the 4-year-old.

“To be honest with you, I think she’s been jealous of that little girl since the day she was born.”

Family friend Randy Dyess thinks otherwise and stated that Parsons made serious threats just a few days before the slaying:

“She said I’d rather kill Victoria and spend the rest of my life in prison, than to put up with you.”

Although Sheriff Nutt declined to discuss a possible motive in the slaying, he made a further statement in which he sounds not unlike Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men philosophizing on the nature of evil:

“It makes you wonder about human nature. About why people do the things they do.”

Victoria’s body has been transferred to the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Science in Dallas for an autopsy, which may well match the preliminary examination which revealed trauma to the child’s head and chest.

The family was not insured, so a Facebook page has been created to raise money for funeral expenses.

* * * * *

This is a rough one and we have the utmost sympathy for Victoria’s distraught father. His statement about Ms. Parsons “being jealous of the child since the day she was born” would appear to be telling, for at least two reasons. First, it suggests she should never have had a child if she was going to resent the little one being “the apple of her father’s eye.” She presumably had some sense that Wyatt was fond of children, probably even before she got pregnant, and this is, of course, something that would please most mothers greatly.

Second, assuming that Ms. Parsons was prone to jealousy, it is possible that Wyatt made it all too clear that he doted on the little girl, and perhaps preferred her to his wife. In a perfect world, there would be absolutely no reason for him to hide his strong affection for the child, but this paternal feeling should probably not have dominated his emotional state to such a degree that he was unable to show equal affection to Ms. Parsons. Furthermore, she may well have sank into post-partum depression that never lifted after giving birth to her daughter.

I do not make any of these suggestions in an attempt to defend the wife and denigrate the husband; rather, I am simply pointing out that the 3-way relationship was clearly complex and became unhealthy and horribly imbalanced which, in turn, paved the way for the disastrous event that cost little Victoria her life.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

In trying to make sense out of the wobbly world of crime, we’re occasionally confronted by a case both gruesome and strange that makes us shake our heads and ask, “What was he/she thinking?” This comes up frequently in cases involving children whether it’s the schoolyard bullying syndrome or teens doing crazy things like locking their parents in their room and setting the house on fire.

Any of us who have experienced the great pleasure of raising a teenager know that it doesn’t matter if they’re boys or girls – either way as a parent you’ve got to be on your guard because sooner or later Jack or Diane will do something that keeps you awake at night. And then of course there’s the problem of the nervous parent who lies awake at night worrying about what Jack or Diane may do even though they haven’t done it yet.

With girls (and sometimes with boys), you may face the best friend gone wrong syndrome. That’s when Diane and Jill who are really close and share everything suddenly inexplicably quarrel —  maybe over a boy, maybe over another friend or even a remark that is taken as explicitly hurtful.

Painful though such a breakup may be, you generally don’t worry that either your daughter or your daughter’s former friend is going to end up a murderess and that the victim is going to be the other party. But that’s exactly what happened in Sinaloa, Mexico a few weeks ago. Andres Jaurequi of the Huffington Post writes:

A Mexican teen is accused of killing her best friend following a dispute over nude photos on Facebook.

Erandy Gutierrez allegedly stabbed Anel Baez 65 times at the victim’s home in Guamuchil, Sinaloa, on March 19, according to Mexican news site Notus.

The girls, both 16, had once been close, but that relationship deteriorated after Baez posted a “humiliating” naked selfie of herself and Gutierrez to Facebook, according to the New York Daily News.

According to the International Business Times, when Baez uploaded a picture of the two girls both naked, Gutierrez became furious and threatened to “bury” Baez before the year was over.

It must be said that the slayer Gutierrez certainly gave Baez fair warning:

“It may seem that I am very calm, but in my head I have killed you at least three times,” Gutierrez reportedly wrote to Baez in her Twitter account, which has since been deleted.

According to Notus, the prosecutors have stated that Gutierrez has admitted slaying Baez as revenge for her posting the naked selfies.

If we are to believe the victim’s family, however, there is some doubt as to whether the photos ever even existed, according to a Huffington Post translation of the website. And Baez’s friends have stated that they never saw the purported photos on Facebook.

These alleged facts, however, do not prove that the offending selfies never existed and could (I realize this sounds callous) merely result from the victim’s family’s natural desire to present poor deceased Baez as completely blameless in this matter.

Furthermore, Gutierrez’s threatening tweets must be in response to something her former friend did.

What is heartbreaking is that Baez would almost certainly be alive if she hadn’t succumbed to her own desire to bury the hatchet with her former best friend. According to a HuffPost translation of Semana, on March 19th, Baez foolishly and fatally invited Gutierrez to her house with the intention that the two teens would resolve their dispute and become friends again.

This is the moment not unlike when Heather Elvis succumbs to Sidney Moorer’s allurements and gets in her car and drives to the boat landing, all the while texting like a madwoman. This is the moment when the viewing audience turns bone-white and entreats the future victim, “No! Nyet! Nein! Ay no! Don’t do it! Don’t you see…”

Tragically, Anel Baez did not see. At some point after Gutierrez arrived at Baez’s house, she allegedly picked up a kitchen knife and stabbed her former best friend in the back with it up to 65 times.

After that Gutierrez fled the scene and reportedly tried to hide her involvement by grieving with friends. At some point, the authorities learned she had been at Baez’s house. They moved in and arrested Gutierrez at the funeral. The purported slayer is expected to be charged with murder this week.

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Since her brutal murder, Anel’s local high school (which was also attended by Erandy) has been hosting lectures and seminars aimed at preventing further similar tragedies, local media reports.

News website Cafe Negro says the ‘therapy’ sessions are being run by rector Juan Eulogio War Liera for a community left ‘sad and outraged’ by the brutal murder.

‘In this community I want to tell you are not alone, we share your pain and anger and can add efforts to overcome the bitter moment,’ the website quotes him as saying.

‘Unity in the family is a way to preserve peace, values​​, tranquility and have a better world.’

If this were a U.S. case, it’s very likely that the 16-year-old Gutierrez would be tried as an adult. In Mexico, however, I think such a barbarism is unlikely. Notus reports that if convicted as a minor, Gutierrez would face a prison term of up to seven years.