by BJW Nashe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Patrick H. Moore

Texas troopers in both the Dallas and the Houston areas have sunk to a new low (or perhaps it’s just standard procedure in that part of the country). In a pair of videos posted online, female state law enforcement officers are shown probing the genitals and anal regions of three women they claim to suspect of possessing marijuana. One of the women was pulled over for littering. The other two were stopped for speeding. In one of the videos, a woman is seen bent over and grimacing as an off-camera police officer conducts the search. Before one of the searches, a male officer explains to the “victim” that he is calling a female officer over to do the search“because I ain’t about to get up close and personal with your woman areas.”

In both videos, a male officer asks the women if they have any marijuana in the vehicle and the women state that they do not. The troopers, using the sort of “mind like a steel trap” logic that compromises their integrity, decide that the women must be lying. And if there’s no marijuana lying around in the car, it stands to reason that it must be concealed within the women’s bodily orifices. After all, everyone knows that a lot of women are cruising up and down the Texas highways with the “killer weed” hidden deep within.

In the case of the littering victim, the “trooper logic” probably went something like this:

“Okay. She threw something out the window. Must be drugs. Therefore she must have more drugs. And if the drugs aren’t in the car, they gotta be inside her.”

Now clearly, if you’re driving along the highway carrying weed, you’re not going to throw it out the window just for the fun of it. People carrying weed usually want to hang on to it long enough to smoke it or hand it off to somebody else. They don’t want to just throw it away.

“Wait,” you say. “Perhaps she tossed it after she noticed the tell-tale red light flashing. She didn’t want to get caught with it.”

“Well then,” I say, “if that’s the case, the weed wouldn’t still be in one of her “cavities,” would it?”

Never mind, the troopers were certain that there was weed inside the women. I’m not sure if they were certain“beyond a reasonable doubt” or were merely going by Vegas odds, but they were pretty darned sure it was there. So they called in the female troopers to perform the searches.

In one of the videos, just before conducting her search of one woman’s genitals, the female officer informs the victim that if she“hid something in there, we’re going to find it.”

And it must be noted that in all three cases, the female trooper conducting the search used the same gloved finger to search both the victim’s anus and her vagina.

And although it nearly a moot point, it must be stated that all of this supremely invasive effort turned up not so much as a gram of the killer weed.

*     *     *     *     *

Although police do have broad latitude to search a vehicle when they have probable cause to believe that they will uncover contraband inside it, there is no legal precedent that extends this right to searching the suspects’ intimate parts. The Supreme Court held in a 2009 decision regarding a student who was strip searched by school administrators:

“Both subjective and reasonable societal expectations of personal privacy support the treatment of such a search as categorically distinct, requiring distinct elements of justification on the part of school authorities for going beyond a search of outer clothing and belongings.”

Admittedly, the Supreme Court’s decision rested in part upon factors specific to that case, such as the youth of the person subject to the search. Nevertheless, the Court stressed the fact that the authorities had no “reason to suppose that [the student] was carrying pills in her underwear.” This means that if officials want to conduct an unusually intrusive search into a suspect’s  private areas, they must have a case-specific reason to believe that contraband will be found in those private areas. And as I’ve suggested above, it’s very doubtful that Texas troopers had any valid reason to truly believe that the three women searched in these videos were carrying marijuana in their body-cavities.

According to the New York Daily News, one of the officers involved in these incidents, Jennie Bui, was fired on June 29. Another officer, Trooper Kelley Helleson was also fired and charged with two counts of sexual assault. Two of the other officers are believed to be under suspension.

Click on this link for an in-depth discussion of this case and its aftermath.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Charles Manson may be the most infamous mass murderer of all time (though he was insidiously clever at having his followers do his dirty work for him), but no one can deny that he always had a way with the ladies. When he was let out of state prison while still in his early 30s, he hightailed it up to the Haight-Ashbury which then in full flower and began collecting women. Like a little little bearded leprechaun with his guitar slung over his shoulder, according to the stories — which may be apocryphal but are true in essence — Charlie would wander up to a lost hippie maiden, fix her with his hypnotic gaze and say something like, “I’m the gardener and I want to plant you in my soil.”

No doubt it didn’t work every time but it clearly worked often enough as became horribly evident when his girls and a few of his guys went on the infamous killing rampage in Los Angeles in the summer of 1969 which resulted in the death of screen siren Sharon Tate and numerous other privileged Southern Californians including hairdresser-to-the stars Jay Sebring and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.

Manson, now 79, would probably have long since received the death penalty but because it was temporarily abolished in California in 1972, he is still alive costing the taxpayers money and giving him — curiously enough — the opportunity to make himself available to any misguided women that might come along.  He is incarcerated at California’s Corcoran State Prison, where he walks with a cane and sports chipped prison dentures.

It’s now reported that Manson not only has  a young female admirer but that she is determined that he and she will “walk down the aisle together” or however marriages are handled in the notorious California State Prison system. Her name is Star and she is a 25-year-old brunette who’s been loyally visiting Manson in jail since she was 19 years old. She maintains several websites devoted to defending her man and his pro-Earth environmental causes. Star told Rolling Stone that she became enchanted with Manson’s environmental stance, which he calls ATWA — air, trees, water, air — when she was only 19.

In 2007, Star moved to Corcoran to be near Charlie, whom she visits each Saturday and Sunday for up to five hours a day. She makes him gift boxes packed with snacks, clothes and guitar strings.They are only allowed a kiss at the beginning and end of their visits and are always under the supervision of prison guards. Star regrets the fact that inmates with life sentences are not allowed conjugal visits. She states that “California lifers no longer get them,” and adds that if they were an option, “we’d be married by now.”

“Yeah, well, people can think I’m crazy,” she says. “But they don’t know. This is what’s right for me. This is what I was born for.”

Star hails from a town on the Mississippi River near St. Louis, where her deeply religious Baptist parents feared she’d lost her way (“I was smoking marijuana, eating mushrooms, not wanted to go to church every Sunday,” she explains). Although they probably should have sought some form of counseling, instead, they locked her in her room for most of her high school years. The turning point came when a friend gave her some of Manson’s environmental writing. Impressed, she started corresponding with him. Manson apparently reciprocated in kind and when Star was 19, with the help of $2,000 she’d saved up working in a retirement home kitchen, she hopped a train to Corcoran.

After meeting in person a few times, Manson named her Star. In his honor, she recently carved an X onto her forehead.

Many people have commented on the fact that Star bears a resemblance to former Manson Family member Susan Atkins. This does not please Manson’s young devoted admirer and she works hard to distinguish herself from Atkins who was incarcerated for her role in the Tate-LaBianca killings until her death in 2009.

“That bitch was fucking crazy,” Star told Rolling Stone. “She was a crazy fucking whore. ‘Oh Charlie, I did this for you.’ She didn’t know what she was doing.”

Star believes she can prove Manson is more devoted to her than any other girl. Who these other girls are is somewhat of a mystery. Are there a bunch of other Star-like devotees running around enchanted with the old misfit?

“I’ll tell you straight up, Charlie and I are going to get married,” she stated. “When that will be, we don’t know. But I take it very seriously. Charlie is my husband. Charlie told me to tell you this. We haven’t told anybody about that.”

Manson, however, in his typically cynical fashion, refused to corroborate Star’s impassioned statement. “Oh that,” he says. “That’s a bunch of garbage. You know that, man. That’s trash. We’re just playing that for public consumption.”

On another occasion he told Rolling Stone: “Star! She’s not a woman. She’s a star in the Milky Way!”

Star no doubt would disagree.

*     *     *     *     *

I find it disheartening that this misguidedly idealistic young woman carries a torch for the old devil. Had he even a modicum of basic decency, he would not be leading her on like this.

Click here to view our earlier Charles Manson post:

Charles Manson: Murderer, Scapegoat, Superstar

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

It’s only natural for homeowners to fear being burglarized; most folks work hard to provide their children with a happy and secure home, and in addition to the loss of property, a burglary has the unwanted side effect of making a family feel vulnerable.

Even worse than being burglarized is a home invasion/robbery. All bets are off when this occurs in today’s violent world; death or injury can easily result at the hands of ruthless burglars/violent criminals.

The ultimate nightmare would be a home invasion/robbery in which a parent or child, or both, winds up dead. This is precisely what occurred in a suburban Chicago home on October 27, 2011 when a simple burglary apparently turned into a home invasion/robbery when 14-year-old Kelli O’Laughlin had the bad luck to come home during the robbery which, tragically, led to her alleged death by stabbing at the hands of parolee, John Wilson, Jr.

The particular crime had an added layer of cruelty which, if the prosecution’s theory is correct, is unlike anything we’ve come across here on All Things Crime Blog.

David Lohr of Huffington Post writes:

Prosecutors allege Wilson broke into the O’Laughlin’s Chicago home on October 26, 2011, with the intent of burglarizing it. However, during the course of that criminal act, Kelli O’Laughlin unwittingly walked in on him.

“[Wilson] could’ve just run out and left the house,” Prosecutor Guy Lisuzzo told jurors Wednesday, according to Myfoxchicago.com. “[But] he didn’t. He confronts and stabs her repeatedly.”

On Wednesday, during the first day of trial testimony, Kelli’s mother Brenda O’Laughlin described finding her daughter’s body still warm when she came home and found her dying. She said she touched her daughter and spoke to her in a gentle voice while waiting for the paramedics to arrive:

“I was trying to comfort her.”

The paramedics could do nothing and Kelli was pronounced dead at a local hospital a short time later.

But as bad as this was, according to the prosecutors, Wilson devised a novel way to psychologically torture Kelli’s mother Brenda. In addition to killing her teen child, he allegedly stole her cell phone and proceeded to text Brenda on several occasions beginning the next day.

The first text read, “Hello Brenda,” and a second informed Brenda that Wilson, assuming he was the one texting,” “love(d) her pic”.

With the third text, Wilson raises the stakes:

“She wanted me to tell you something before I killed her.” This was followed by, “Think I’m in love with you Bren.”

Brenda O’Laughlin testified that she did not respond to the first few text messages because she was waiting for instructions from law enforcement.

Apparently frustrated, Wilson then texted an ultimatum:

“You got 2 min to text me before I break this phone.”

At that point, Brenda replied:

“Who are you and what do you want?” to which Wilson quickly replied, “You will know soon when I come see you.”

The messages stopped shortly thereafter.

Brenda O’Laughlin testified that when she first returned home, and saw an 8-inch-carving-knife taken from her own kitchen lying next to her daughter’s bleeding body on the family room rug, she initially thought her daughter may have taken her own life. Further evidence, however, strongly suggests that such was not the case.

After stating that there was a killer in the courtroom and that his name was John Wilson, Jr., Assistant State’s Attorney Lisuzzo said Wilson used a landscaping rock wrapped in a knit cap to break into the family’s home and, revealingly, that Wilson’s DNA was found on the cap.

The prosecution believes that after killing Kelli, Wilson returned home by paying for a taxi ride with coins stolen from the family’s home.

The 38-yer-old parolee was arrested a few days later on November 2, 2011 and charged with first-degree murder and residential burglary.

* * * * *

Although the prosecution seems quite confident in its theory, Wilson’s defense team isn’t buying it. In fact, defense attorney John Paul Carroll “called the case against his client a great story but cautioned jurors not to believe everything they hear”, suggesting in his opening statement that Kelli’s death may actually have been a suicide disguised to look like a home invasion and that (now this is rather unbelievable but Carroll actually said it) the alleged victim, Kelli O’Laughlin “may have staged the ransacked house to avoid the stigma” of suicide.

Wow! Is this hitting below the belt or is it possible that, unlikely as it seems, Kelli, in a suicidal rage, ransacked her own house before stabbing herself multiple times, or, alternatively, could Brenda, in a bizarre attempt to make it look like a home invasion/robbery, have ransacked her own house after returning home and finding her daughter on the brink if death?

After all, Brenda did say that she initially thought Kelli may have stabbed herself…

On balance, though, the defense team’s strategy seems far-fetched, desperate, and some no doubt will think, in very bad taste. But this is not the first time we’ve seen defense attorneys come up with seemingly outlandish defenses. After all, it’s part of what they’re paid to do.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

There are few things more heartbreaking to a parent than discovering that your son or daughter is the target of that most despicable group of young humans — the schoolyard bully boys and girls. What makes it especially tough is the fact that there are seldom any easy answers to what may seem like (and, in actuality, may be) an unsolvable problem. Sometimes, if your targeted child is still of elementary school age, where alliances often shift rather quickly, the problem may work itself out. If your child, however, is in high school, there may literally be no way to cut out this malignancy other than changing schools and even then the harassment may continue on social media.

Teri and Meredith Pallet, a same-sex couple living in Council Bluffs, Iowa, have a 15-year-old son who suffers from epilepsy and attends Lewis Central High School. He has been the target of concerted verbal and physical harassment for the last 18 months. According to Meredith, the bullying had gotten so bad that it had resulted in “lasting physical injuries.” The family had reported the bullying both to the school and to police but, sadly (and perhaps predictably), the authorities just “sat on their hands.” Furthermore, perhaps for per diem reasons, the school would not agree to release the boy so that he could transfer to another location within the district.

‘He has been bullied for about a year and a half now… He’s been hazed… beaten. The school refuses to discuss this matter at all,’ said Meredith Pallat. ‘We’ve been just trying to get the bullying to stop. All we want to do is get our child a safe education. No one will do anything.’

On Monday, Dec 16, Teri, who is 39 years old and describes herself as “an everyday person”, decided she wasn’t going to take it anymore and posted a message on her Facebook page that read:

 ‘And they asked why do people shoot up schools, well this is exactly why and when our son does it cause I know he will have nobody to blame but the administration and I promise everyone he will only get the ones that caused this. He is an excellent marks men [sic].’ 

Teri’s timing was not fortuitous, occurring as it did only days after a student armed with a shotgun wounded at least two classmates at a suburban Denver, Colorado, high school Friday before taking his own life.

According to the police, someone at the school spotted Teri’s threatening message on Facebook Monday afternoon and contacted law enforcement. Teri was then arrested and charged with making a terrorist threat. She posted a $10,000 bond and was released from custody on Tuesday pending charges.

When contacted by Reuters, Teri said that she could not discuss the matter in detail but thought the response to the message was overblown:

‘I can’t believe this. I am just an everyday person. Facebook is what this is all about,’ said Pallat.

Naturally, Lewis Central High School expelled Teri and Meredith’s 15-year-old son almost immediately after discovering the Facebook threat. Keep in mind that this is the same child they reportedly chose not to help during his 18 months of bullying.

Council Bluffs Police Sergeant Chad Meyers chimed in stating that in light of the rash of school shootings around the country, threats like this one are ‘investigated to the fullest extent possible.’

*     *     *     *     *

Although Teri Pallat obviously made a serious mistake by posting the threatening message on Facebook, it’s hardly as if she and her partner Meredith have not tried other channels in seeking redress. Last month, Meredith Pallat ranted on her Facebook page that no one at her son’s school ‘will do a damn thing’ about his bullying.

‘SHame [sic] on every single one of you for failing him,’ she wrote. ‘He has epilepsy it was not his choice and it has changed his life profoundly but you will not win just like the epilepsy will not win.’

Pallat then added,’ I am one pissed off Momma.’

At some point, the 15-year-old did admit to police officers that ‘he would in fact like to “hurt” the bullies of which he listed ten names,’ according to The Smoking Gun.

The boy noted, however, that he had no intention of carrying out the threat. On Monday, his mothers agreed to have him undergo a psychiatric evaluation.

Following Teri Pallat’s arrest, Meredith again resorted to Facebook, writing that school administrators have failed their son. She added: ‘Karma will kick them all in the a**.’

Teri is now facing a charge of making terrorist threats, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison, and one count of harassment, which is punishable by up to two years. It’s very hard to gauge what sort of sentence she might actually receive, but my feeling is she might serve at least a year or two in prison for trying to help her son, albeit in a clearly inappropriate fashion.

So far this year, there have been 28 shootings on U.S. school grounds during school hours, according to a tally kept by the gun control advocacy groups, Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense.

And, of course, everyone remembers that it was one year ago this month, when Adam Lanza killed 20 first-graders and six adults before killing himself at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

*     *     *     *     *

There is a bizarre irony at work here. The 15-year-old who was bullied unmercifully, both physically and verbally, for 18 months, has now been expelled from school and is required to undergo psychiatric evaluation. His mother, Teri Pallat, who became exasperated after putting up with both the bullying and the high school’s inability or refusal to do anything about it, now faces state prison time.

As for the bullies themselves, this cowardly group of sub-standard humans, they may face no reprisals whatsoever. I would be curious to know if they are members of the “In Crowd”, or mere misfits, or if they may fall into both categories. As for the bullies’ parents, they too should be required to shoulder some of the responsibility, but it’s not yet clear if they will even be contacted by the authorities.

afterword by Patrick H. Moore

Capital punishment has been eradicated in all of western Europe and most of eastern and central Europe. Most of the countries of the Americas have also abolished the death penalty. Indeed, it was repealed in South Africa after the end of apartheid, where it clearly had been one of the tools of repression used by whites against the black majority. (Countries still using the death penalty include China, Japan, and many Muslim nations.)

Michael Roberts of Denver Westward Blogs compiled the following group of ten U.S. executions that went horribly and inexcusably wrong. He culled the text for the first nine items from Radelet’s item “Examples of Post-Furman Botched Executions,” shared by the Death Penalty Information Center. The final item is derived from Alan Prendergast’s 2012 post “Eddie Ives’s botched execution and replacing the noose with the gas chamber.”

So without further ado:

Frank James Coppola.

August 10, 1982. Virginia. Electrocution.

Although no media representatives witnessed the execution and no details were ever released by the Virginia Department of Corrections, an attorney who was present later stated that it took two 55-second jolts of electricity to kill Coppola. The second jolt produced the odor and sizzling sound of burning flesh, and Coppola’s head and leg caught on fire. Smoke filled the death chamber from floor to ceiling with a smoky haze.

Jimmy Lee Gray

Sept. 2, 1983. Mississippi. Asphyxiation.

Officials had to clear the room eight minutes after the gas was released when Gray’s desperate gasps for air repulsed witnesses. His attorney, Dennis Balske of Montgomery, Alabama, criticized state officials for clearing the room when the inmate was still alive. Said noted death penalty defense attorney David Bruck, “Jimmy Lee Gray died banging his head against a steel pole in the gas chamber while the reporters counted his moans (eleven, according to the Associated Press).” Later it was revealed that the executioner, Barry Bruce, was drunk.

John Evans

April 22, 1983. Alabama. Electrocution.

After the first jolt of electricity, sparks and flames erupted from the electrode attached to Evans’s leg. The electrode burst from the strap holding it in place and caught on fire. Smoke and sparks also came out from under the hood in the vicinity of Evans’s left temple. Two physicians entered the chamber and found a heartbeat. The electrode was reattached to his leg, and another jolt of electricity was applied. This resulted in more smoke and burning flesh. Again the doctors found a heartbeat. Ignoring the pleas of Evans’s lawyer, a third jolt of electricity was applied. The execution took fourteen minutes and left Evans’s body charred and smoldering.

Raymond Landry

December 13, 1988. Texas. Lethal Injection.

Pronounced dead 40 minutes after being strapped to the execution gurney and 24 minutes after the drugs first started flowing into his arms. Two minutes after the drugs were administered, the syringe came out of Landry’s vein, spraying the deadly chemicals across the room toward witnesses. The curtain separating the witnesses from the inmate was then pulled, and not reopened for fourteen minutes while the execution team reinserted the catheter into the vein. Witnesses reported “at least one groan.” A spokesman for the Texas Department of Correction, Charles Brown (sic), said, “There was something of a delay in the execution because of what officials called a ‘blowout.’ The syringe came out of the vein, and the warden ordered the (execution) team to reinsert the catheter into the vein.”

Jesse Joseph Tafero

May 4, 1990. Florida. Electrocution.

During the execution, six-inch flames erupted from Tafero’s head, and three jolts of power were required to stop his breathing. State officials claimed that the botched execution was caused by “inadvertent human error” — the inappropriate substitution of a synthetic sponge for a natural sponge that had been used in previous executions. They attempted to support this theory by sticking a part of a synthetic sponge into a “common household toaster” and observing that it smoldered and caught fire.

Stephen Peter Morin

March 13, 1985. Texas. Lethal Injection.

Because of Morin’s history of drug abuse, the execution technicians were forced to probe both of Morin’s arms and one of his legs with needles for nearly 45 minutes before they found a suitable vein.

Pedro Medina

March 25, 1997. Florida.  Electrocution.

A crown of foot-high flames shot from the headpiece during the execution, filling the execution chamber with a stench of thick smoke and gagging the two dozen official witnesses. An official then threw a switch to manually cut off the power and prematurely end the two-minute cycle of 2,000 volts. Medina’s chest continued to heave until the flames stopped and death came. After the execution, prison officials blamed the fire on a corroded copper screen in the headpiece of the electric chair, but two experts hired by the governor later concluded that the fire was caused by the improper application of a sponge (designed to conduct electricity) to Medina’s head.

Stephen McCoy

May 24, 1989. Texas. Lethal Injection.

He had such a violent physical reaction to the drugs (heaving chest, gasping, choking, back arching off the gurney, etc.) that one of the witnesses (male) fainted, crashing into and knocking over another witness. Houston attorney Karen Zellars, who represented McCoy and witnessed the execution, thought the fainting would catalyze a chain reaction. The Texas Attorney General admitted the inmate “seemed to have a somewhat stronger reaction,” adding “The drugs might have been administered in a heavier dose or more rapidly.”

Rickey Ray Rector

January 24, 1992. Arkansas. Lethal Injection.

It took medical staff more than fifty minutes to find a suitable vein in Rector’s arm. Witnesses were kept behind a drawn curtain and not permitted to view this scene, but reported hearing Rector’s eight loud moans throughout the process. During the ordeal Rector (who suffered from serious brain damage) helped the medical personnel find a vein. The administrator of State’s Department of Corrections medical programs said (paraphrased by a newspaper reporter) “the moans did come as a team of two medical people that had grown to five worked on both sides of his body to find a vein.” The administrator said “That may have contributed to his occasional outbursts.” The difficulty in finding a suitable vein was later attributed to Rector’s bulk and his regular use of antipsychotic medication.

Eddie Ives

Ives, a barber and burglar, had been convicted of the fatal shooting of a cop after Denver police crashed an illegal booze party on Curtis Street. (A second officer was wounded in the 1928 shooting, only to be slain a few days later by a nurse at Denver General Hospital who happened to be his spurned lover; Denver’s scandal-crazy dailies pumped that case into a Roaring Twenties version of “the crime of the century,” as detailed in my 2003 feature “Love Crazy.”) He managed to stall his execution for months by pretending to be insane, dipping his chow in the toilet in his cell and babbling in strange tongues.

After that ploy failed and he was pronounced sane, Ives won another delay when a riot at the state penitentiary gutted three cell houses and left twelve dead, including seven guards. One of the casualties was Jack Eeles, 77, who’d been the prison’s hangman for thirty years.

Ives, who weighed only eighty pounds, had a longstanding belief that he was going to beat the noose. “Hell,” he reportedly told a Denver detective years before he got the death sentence, “they couldn’t hang me if they wanted to. A noose couldn’t crack my neck. I’m too small to spring the trap.”

But time ran out for Ives on January 10, 1930. He was escorted to the gallows, the noose tightened around his neck. A guard pulled a lever that sent a weight hurtling down a chute. The weight was supposed to pull the rope taut; then the prisoner would break his neck as he fell through the trap. But Ives was too light. As the weight fell, he went hurtling toward the ceiling. The rope jumped off the pulley and Ives fell to the floor, gasping for breath.

“You can’t hang a man twice,” he said.

But they did. According to one witness, it took three attempts. Ives was strangled for 23 minutes before he was pronounced dead. At that time, the executions were closed to the press, but word leaked out of his slow and excruciating demise. “Colorado has one of the most ghastly hanging machines possible,” Thomas Tynan, a former warden for the penitentiary, told the Rocky Mountain News. “More than half of the men executed have not been hanged at all. They have strangled.”

 *     *     *     *     *

I’ve long thought that the sensible and merciful way to execute inmates would be to simply give them a massive dose of narcotics. It could be given to them in their food or administered by a simple intra-muscular injection. No need for all that nasty probing for a vein. The inmates would die peacefully and painlessly. There would be very little drama and no possibility of human error. So why hasn’t this common sense approach been adopted? You tell me, my friends…

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

One of the peculiar (and deeply disturbing) things about pedophiles (and child molesters in general) is that – unlike many serial killers who typically work alone – many child sex offenders revel in sharing their horrifying escapades with each other  anecdotally on “chat rooms”. They also eagerly share images of child pornography, and in the worst cases, engage in group molestations.

Law enforcement is well aware of this which has resulted in many dozens (if not hundreds) of FBI agents nationally “going underground” working the chat rooms where the sex offenders get together to titillate each other with their horrific tales and fantasies. In a sense, these grotesquely immature adults, who clearly suffer from some form of seriously arrested development, are not unlike children “egging each other on” to do increasingly bad things.

Thus, the Federal agent who “works the chat rooms” starts corresponding with pedophiles and/or molesters. The agent will sometimes describe an alleged fantasy of his own and will then wait to see who takes the bait. Once someone “bites”, the agent will play along before ultimately suggesting that the two of them get together to buy, sell or share a child. Part of the “rush of pleasure” for many molesters seems to be having partners in crime to “share the spoils”.

Thus, the agent’s job is, in a sense, not unlike the job of an undercover DEA agent with a few critical differences. First, the DEA agent is trying to catch drug traffickers while the “sex agent” is trying to catch child sex offenders.

In setting up their “sting operations”, DEA agents are notorious for sometimes trying to convince small-time drug dealers to engage in larger and larger transactions so that when “the hammer comes down”, the amount of drugs in question will result in very long prison sentences. I’ve been involved in several cases of this nature where small-time dealers are transformed into real live drug traffickers by resourceful agents who keep raising the ante.

The key difference, I think, in cases where “sex agents” entrap child molesters is that if the agent didn’t “catch the fish” by setting him up, the “fish” might eventually get to that point on his own or in association with other molesters/pedophiles. The reason for this is that unnatural sexual desires take on many of the qualities that are commonly associated with addiction. As time passes, the addict needs greater and greater “kicks”, which, in the case of sex offenses, translates into doing increasingly horrible things to the child victims; for example, a collector of child pornography might “graduate” to hands-on child sex offenses

Therefore, it is certainly possible that every time a “sex agent” puts a child sex offender out of business, he may well be saving one or more potential child victims from a fate worse than death. This contrasts with the DEA agent who often entraps formerly small time dealers into engaging in large-scale drug transactions that he/she would otherwise have never considered.

In a truly awful child sex case that led to a 60-year term of imprisonment in U.S. Federal Court in Florida on Friday, the perpetrator, a certain William Edward Osman, seems to have needed no encouragement from “sex agents”. In fact, it would have saved a baby from indescribable anguish if an agent had managed to entrap Osman before he committed his offenses.

This case also clearly reveals the child sex offender’s predilection for sharing his dirty deeds with others of similar inclination.

Kevin P. Connolly of the Orlando Sentinel writes:

An Orlando man who sexually abused a tot and fantasized about having a “baby orgy” with another Central Florida man was sentenced to 60 years in federal prison for child pornography, agents say.

William Edward Osman, 34, will serve a lifetime of supervised release and register as a sex offender if he leaves prison.

Osman, who pleaded guilty in February to the production, distribution, and possession of child pornography, was sentenced by Senior U.S. District Court Judge John Antoon, II.

According to the case records, in order to produce the child pornography, Osman began sexually abusing a 1-year-old child in December 2012, and used his cellphone to document the attacks.

The “birds of a twisted feather syndrome” kicked in nine months later in September 2013, when Osman traded some of those images with another man, Michael Glascock of Merritt Island.

“The two met when the Brevard County man responded to a personal ad Osman had placed on Craigslist,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a statement.

That’s when they shared their mutual interest in a “baby orgy”, federal agents said.

Fortunately, the “baby orgy” never took place because the two child sex offenders had scheduling conflicts that kept them from acting out their horrific fantasy.

Glascock, 39, pleaded guilty last month to one count of using a minor to produce images depicting child pornography and one count of attempting to induce a minor to engage in illegal sexual activity. He faces up to life in Federal prison and will receive, I imagine a sentence of anywhere from 40 to 60 years.

Although the U.S. Attorney’s Office has not revealed how the sex agents discovered the nefarious deeds of either of these two men, it is known that agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations searched Osman’s home in October of 2013 after obtaining a warrant.

At the time of the search, the agents found the images Osman had produced with the 1-year-old baby and images of Glascock molesting a different child. In addition, the investigators “found 194 movies and 588 images of child pornography on Osman’s media storage devices.”

“Most of the movies and images depicted prepubescent children and/or sadomasochistic conduct.”

In Federal criminal parlance, images “depicting prepubescent children and/or sadomasochistic conduct” often translates into pictures of grown men sexually penetrating very young children. In the world of serious violent crime, there is “bad” and there is “worse” and there is “the worst of all.”

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.

Update

Molly Born and Max Radwin write for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

A packed Mercer County courtroom burst into applause Thursday after a judge ordered three adults accused of starving and abusing an 8-year-old boy to stand trial and set a bond that probably will keep them jailed until then.

Mary Rader, 28, the boy’s mother; Deana Beighley, 48, his grandmother; and Mrs. Beighley’s husband, Dennis Beighley, 58, of Greenville, were held for court on all charges, including attempted first- and third-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first- and third-degree murder.

The three had previously been charged with aggravated assault, aggravated assault of a child under 13, false imprisonment, unlawful restraint, endangering the welfare of a child and conspiracy.

Mercer County District Attorney Robert Kochems stated that the intentional starvation of the victim, Antonio Rader, was the focus of the new charges of attempted murder.

“It’s an agreement — doesn’t have to be in writing — with the intent to end in death,” he told reporters after the hearing. “What else do you do if you starve someone? I think that’s common sense.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Patrick H. Moore and BJW Nashe

One by one, all of the old MKULTRA spooks and shrinks are dying off. A few months ago, we noticed that Gerald D. Klee had died at the age of 86. Dr. Klee was a retired psychiatrist and LSD expert who had participated in experiments with the hallucinogenic drug on volunteer servicemen at U.S. military installations in the 1950s. Dr. Klee studied at McGill University in Canada, which was a center for secret CIA-sponsored research during the Cold War. He then went on to work on various studies conducted as part of the MKULTRA program, now widely seen as one of the most controversial aspects of modern American history. News reports on Dr. Klee’s death have tended to focus on his willingness to speak publicly about his role in the government’s LSD experiments.

Yet LSD is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to MKULTRA. As details of the program began to emerge during the 1970s, Americans learned that their government had engaged in massive human rights violations, all in the name of top secret research undertaken in the fight against Communism.

MKULTRA was the sinister brainchild of some of our most clandestine cold war warriors, a peculiar group of extreme anti-Soviets who would stop at nothing in their maniacal desire to win the Cold War and expand U.S. power and influence globally. CIA Director Allen Dulles named the research project MKULTRA in 1953. It had existed under previous names such as Project Bluebird and Project Artichoke. One of the goals of MKULTRA Director Sydney Gottlieb was to develop a real-life “Manchurian Candidate,” a trained assassin programmed to kill with a fixity of purpose that would be the envy of any of our Special Forces. Brainwashed assassins trained using LSD sounds pretty far-fetched–which may be one reason why this particular feature of MKULTRA has received so much coverage over the years. Such schemes make the whole endeavor seem like a science fiction-inspired lark. After all, by the 1970s, LSD experimentation, however foolhardy, wasn’t all that horrifying anymore; to many Americans, it was simply part of the menu for any given Friday night. Drugs, however, were just one part of MKULTRA’s overall program designed to break down individual personalities and then supposedly rebuild them with new identities and behavior patterns. The breaking down part was handled with brutal effectiveness. As for the re-building, well, that was never very successful.

As much as we would like to think of MKULTRA as some aberration from the distant past, the truth is not so simple or reassuring. As Naomi Klein argues in her excellent book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, at the height of the MKULTRA program in the 1950s, institutions such as McGill University in Montreal, Canada, became, in effect, torture laboratories where the most widely practiced modern techniques for breaking down prisoners were in large part pioneered. These techniques did not disappear when MKULTRA ceased as a program. In fact, we have seen them utilized all too often throughout the world, right up to the present day, and often under the auspices of U.S. agencies. The methods commonly used include sensory deprivation, induced sleep, isolation, sensory overload, use of electroshock, and a whole array of mind-altering drugs. Naomi Klein makes the case for a clear connection between McGill University in the 1950s to our contemporary Guantanamo Bay. Over the years, techniques “studied” at McGill have been used in Vietnam, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Iran, Chile, and of course at numerous “black sites” maintained in support of the War on Terror.

*     *     *     *     *

Gerald Klee made no attempt to deny his involvement in the MKULTRA LSD research. He should be given credit for speaking out when he did. Of course, he might have figured he was better off coming clean about the acid, which was far less damaging, in a way, than much of the other activities going on in the torture laboratories. You can understand why he would prefer to leave that stuff in the dark, on the sidelines of the whole conversation. We can only assume, however, that Dr.Klee, as a graduate of McGill University, must have had some connection to the notorious uber-boss of McGill University’s MKULTRA activities, Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron. It’s hard to imagine that Dr. Klee was simply a mild-mannered “LSD researcher” in the midst of Dr. Cameron and his ilk. But who really knows, at this point?

A Los Angeles Times obituary published on March 8th of this year (via Frederick N. Rasmussen of the Baltimore Sun) puts the emphasis on the LSD trips, and clearly downplays the criminality of whole MKULTRA enterprise:

In 1975, Klee made headlines when he confirmed reports that the University of Maryland School of Medicine’s Psychiatric Institute had been involved in secret research between 1956 and 1959, when hundreds of soldiers were given LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide.

He said that in addition to LSD, the Army was experimenting with other hallucinogens as part of its chemical weapons research program.

Klee said the Army had negotiated a contract in 1956 with the University of Maryland’s Psychiatric Institute to conduct physiological and psychological tests on the soldiers.

In his mea culpa, Klee couldn’t resist dissing on Timothy Leary for his so-called irresponsible use of LSD while defending the Army’s “sensible” usage.

“A large proportion of the people who have gotten involved in research in this area have been harebrained and irresponsible — Timothy Leary being the most notorious example — and a lot of the stuff that has been published reflects that,” Klee told the Baltimore Evening Sun in 1975.

“We didn’t have any axes to grind, and the university’s role was to conduct scientific experimentation,” he said. “The interests of the University of Maryland group were purely scientific, and the military was just there.”

Indeed, the military was just there.

Klee said soldiers from military posts around the country were brought to the Edgewood Arsenal and Aberdeen Proving Ground installations in Maryland to participate in experiments involving various drugs and chemical warfare agents, of which the hallucinogens were a small part.

“They were mostly enlisted men — there were a few commissioned officers — but they were mostly unlettered and rather naive,” Klee said. “Now the people knew they were volunteering, the bonus was leave time — seeing their girlfriends and mothers and that kind of thing. They had a lot of free time, and most of them enjoyed it.”

Dr. Klee was apparently not impressed with the intelligence of the guinea pigs.

Klee said he and his colleagues from the university tried to explain to the volunteers what to expect.

“They were told it was very important to national security,” he said in the Evening Sun interview.

Before the experiments commenced, Klee experimented with LSD.

“I figured that if I was going to study this stuff, then I’ve got to experience it myself,” he told the newspaper. “I felt obliged to take it for experimental reasons and also because I didn’t think it would be fair to administer a drug to someone else that I hadn’t taken myself.”

The doctor is all heart.

The LSD was slipped into cocktails at a party in the soldiers’ honor. While this approach garnered criticism, Klee said the Army and civilian researchers acted responsibly.

“I was there and I didn’t like it, but thought I might be of help to the victims,” Klee told the Washington Postin the 1975 interview.

If he didn’t like it, why did he do it?

The civilian team quickly learned about those who had experienced “bad trips.” He said he did not know of any lasting ill effects on the soldiers but added that university researchers followed the cases only during their month stay at Edgewood.

“What the Army did after that, I don’t know. I’ve given many hours thought to that. I wish I did know,” he said in the interview.

“I think he felt unease about this,” said a son, Kenneth A. Klee, an editor and writer.

In an email, the younger Klee wrote that his father and his colleagues accepted the military money because they thought it was “important science.” He added that because they were World War IIveterans and the nation was mired in the Cold War, it “didn’t seem unreasonable.”

“I do know my dad did his best to do right (and conduct real science — the two were closely linked for him) and that he disapproved of the unethical acts he witnessed. Hence his willingness to be vocal on the subject a few years later,” his son wrote.

In 1975, the Army admitted that it had administered LSD to nearly 1,500 people between 1956 and 1967.

Klee later led an unsuccessful effort to persuade President Nixon to renounce the use of LSD as a chemical weapon.

Dr. Klee’s story might appear to be no more than a ridiculous and unintentionally comic attempt at disinformation. Sure, LSD trips in the Army are odd, to say the least. But we know too much at this point. The true story of MKULTRA is far more sinister and damaging than Dr. Klee probably wanted to admit.

*     *     *     *     *

According to Stephen Lendman of the Philadelphia Independent Media Center, the general purpose of the MKULTRA experiments was to learn new and better techniques to control human behavior. Mr. Lendman writes:

It aimed to control human behavior through psychedelic and hallucinogenic drugs, electroshock, radiation, graphology, paramilitary techniques, and psychological/sociological/anthropological methods, among others – a vast open-field of mind experimentation trying anything that might work, legal or otherwise on willing and unwitting subjects.

Ongoing at different times were 149 sub-projects in 80 US and Canadian universities, medical centers and three prisons, involving 185 researchers, 15 foundations and numerous drug companies. Everything was top secret, and most records later destroyed, yet FOIA suits salvaged thousands of pages with documented evidence of the horrific experiments and their effects on human subjects.

Most were unwitting guinea pigs, and those consenting were misinformed of the dangers. James Stanley was a career soldier when given LSD in 1958 along with 1,000 other military “volunteers.” They suffered hallucinations, memory loss, incoherence, and severe personality changes. Stanley exhibited uncontrollable violence. It destroyed his family, impeded his working ability, and he never knew why until the Army asked him to participate in a follow-up study.

He sued for damages under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), his case reaching the Supreme Court in United States v. Stanley. Argued and decided in 1987, the Court dismissed his claim (5 – 4), ruling his injuries occurred during military service. Justices Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan and Sandra Day O’Conner wrote dissenting opinions, saying the Nuremberg Code applies to soldiers as well as civilians. In 1996, Stanley got $400,000 in compensation, but no apology from the government.

Perhaps the true horror of MKULTRA cannot be adequately conveyed through a figure such as Dr. Klee, who, for all we know, may have been the pleasantest, most well-intentioned man in the world.  Instead consider one of his higher-ups and a leading luminary in the MKULTRA hierarchy: Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, big-league world psychologist and head honcho at McGill University, where Dr. Klee did his undergraduate work. When McGill was a top research site for the CIA during the 1950s, Dr. Cameron was the man in charge of the secretly funded activities. The fact that Cameron, who had been President of the American Psychiatric Association, President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and President of the World Psychiatric Association, would become so deeply involved in MKULTRA human rights violations and outright torture, is shocking and reprehensible. Cameron’s experimental procedures on helpless mental patients is a monumentally dark chapter in the history of Western medicine.

Stephen Lendman of the Philadelphia Independent Media Center states in his article:

CIA became interested in Montreal Dr. Ewen Cameron’s work at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute. With full knowledge of the Canadian government, he was funded to perform bizarre experiments on his psychiatric patients, including keeping them asleep and isolated for weeks, then administering large doses of electroshock and experimental drug cocktails, LSD and PCP angel dust among them.

Though clearly unethical, Cameron believed by blasting the human brain with an array of shocks, he could unmake impaired minds, rebuilding them with new personalities cleansed of their previous state. It was voodoo science and it failed, but CIA gained a wealth of knowledge it’s used to this day.

In 1951, the Agency engaged McGill’s director of psychology, Dr. Donald Hebb, and others to conduct sensory-deprivation experiments on volunteer students. They showed intense isolation disrupts clear thinking enough to make subjects receptive to suggestion. They were also formidable interrogation techniques amounting to torture when forcibly administered.

These early experiments laid the foundation for CIA’s two-stage torture process – sensory deprivation followed by overload. University of Wisconsin historian Alfred McCoy documented them in his book, “A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror,” calling them “the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in more than three centuries.”

CIA developed and codified them in manuals, used extensively in Southeast Asia, Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and at secret black sites globally. McCoy referred to an offshore information extraction mini-gulag during the Cold War and War on Terror. Out of sight, nothing is banned, including physical harshness and psychologically crippling mind control methods that turn human beings into mush.

MK Ultra Subproject 68 was one of Cameron’s ongoing “attempts to establish lasting effects in a patient’s behavior” using a combination of particularly intensive electroshock, intensive repetition of prearranged verbal signals, partial sensory isolation, and repression of the driving period carried out by inducing continuous sleep for seven to ten days at the end of the treatment period. During research on sensory deprivation, Cameron used curare to immobilise his patients. After one test he noted: “Although the patient was prepared by both prolonged sensory isolation (35 days) and by repeated depatterning, and although she received 101 days of positive driving, no favorable results were obtained.” Patients were regularly treated with hallucinogenic drugs, long periods in the “sleep room”, and testing in the Radio Telemetry Laboratory, which was built under Cameron’s direction. Here, patients were exposed to a range of RFand electromagnetic signals and monitored for changes in behavior. It was later stated by staff members who had worked at the Institute during this time that not one patient sent to the Radio Telemetry Lab showed any signs of improvement afterwards.

In light of this information, Gerald Klee’s account of LSD trips as a kind of quirky, misguided Cold War research falls short of the mark in terms of full disclosure. Since we know that Dr. Klee studied at McGill University and then was tasked with overseeing LSD experiments on U.S. servicemen, it seems highly unlikely that he did not have at least some knowledge of the extent of Dr. Cameron’s diabolical assault of human rights and freedom.

MKULTRA abuses first came to light during the Church Committee Congressional investigations in the 1970s. The Rockefeller Commission, under vice president Nelson Rockefeller, also examined the domestic activities of the CIA, FBI, and military intelligence agencies. By 1975, Americans had learned that the CIA and Department of Defense had conducted illegal experiments on willing and unwitting subjects as part of an exhaustive program to influence human behavior through psychoactive drugs (including LSD and mescaline) and other chemical, biological, and psychological methods.

Several of the victims of the McGill University atrocities received settlements from the Canadian government many years after the damage was done. But no amount of money can ever make up for the torture these individuals endured, or the torture that was subsequently endured by people all around the world. Because the same kind of techniques pioneered and perfected in the torture lab at McGill University were then sent out into the global arena. When Dick Cheney infamously stated, following 9-11, that we would need to “work the dark side” in fighting the War on Terror, he knew that he had plenty of prior research to draw on. He wouldn’t need to make anything up from scratch.

In The Shock Doctrine, as well as in a February 2007 piece for The Guardian, Naomi Klein has examined in detail the tragic case of Jose Padilla. His treatment as a captive “enemy combatant” closely mirrors the horrors endured by the earlier patients of Dr. Cameron at McGill University. Klein writes:

Arrested in May 2002 at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, Padilla, a Brooklyn-born former gang member, was classified as an “enemy combatant” and taken to a navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina. He was kept in a cell 9ft by 7ft, with no natural light, no clock and no calendar. Whenever Padilla left the cell, he was shackled and suited in heavy goggles and headphones. Padilla was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days. He was forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who punctured the extreme sensory deprivation with sensory overload, blasting him with harsh lights and pounding sounds. Padilla also says he was injected with a “truth serum”, a substance his lawyers believe was LSD or PCP.

“According to his lawyers and two mental health specialists who examined him, Padilla has been so shattered that he lacks the ability to assist in his own defense. He is convinced that his lawyers are “part of a continuing interrogation program” and sees his captors as protectors. In order to prove that “the extended torture visited upon Mr Padilla has left him damaged,” his lawyers want to tell the court what happened during those years in the navy brig. The prosecution strenuously objects, maintaining that “Padilla is competent” and that his treatment is irrelevant.”

MKULTRA as a federally funded program has been consigned to the dustbin of history. Dr. Cameron is long dead, as well as most of his associates. Dr. Klee is perhaps in LSD heaven, sharing psychedelic anecdotes with Timothy Leary or Ken Kesey or Jerry Garcia. The torture practices that formed the core of the MKULTRA “research,” however, have continued to play an ugly role in recent history, and remain as a dark stain upon our national character. One wonders whether President Eisenhower understood the full extent of the problem when he warned us, on leaving office, that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

We LA drivers are a patient bunch. We have to be. For most of us, it’s many miles of bad road from home to work and vice-versa. Our freeways are legendary, not because of their high quality (many of them are in disrepair), but rather because there are so many of them and we come to know them like the back of our hand(s).

When I moved here from Northern California, I remember being surprised the first time I had to change lanes on the freeway – smooth as silk, no resistance on the part of the driver I pulled in front of. We’re all in the same boat here; we all have cars (many of us have many cars); and for the most part we co-exist peacefully as we tool along plugged into our electronic devices.

This is not to say you don’t need to keep your eyes open – you do. The other day I nearly got clipped in, of all places, a narrow gloomy 6-story parking structure across the street from MDC-LA (Metropolitan Detention Center – Los Angeles).

And we do have our share of surly drivers. A few months ago I did something (don’t remember what) that pissed off a young dude in a truck. As luck would have it, when I pulled up next to him at a traffic light he shouted, “I’m going to kill you!” but fortunately some unseen force stayed his trigger finger and I am still here. And perhaps the fact that I ignored his threat and kept my “steely greys” locked upon the road in front of us helped avoid further trouble. Who knows?

43-year-old Derek Flemming of Livingston County, Michigan would have done well to emulate my peaceful example on Tuesday afternoon. If he had, he might still be in the “land of the living” instead of lying in state in a Michigan funeral parlor. This is not to say he did anything wrong; it’s just that sometimes the best policy is to avoid unnecessary confrontations.

Travis Gettys of Raw Story has the story:

A Michigan man and his wife had just eaten lunch Tuesday afternoon and were on their way to pick up their children from the first day of school when they were cut off by a speeding pickup truck.

Police said 43-year-old Derek Flemming got out of his SUV at the next stoplight, approached the Dodge pickup, and asked the driver: “What’s your problem?”

The other driver then rolled down his window and shot Flemming in the face, killing him, police said.

OhMyGod! Another senseless killing. Based on the available photos, the alleged shooter, 69-year-old Martin Zale appears downright un-neighborly. For their part, local law enforcement appears to have done reasonable due diligence and investigated for two days before charging Zale with open murder, two counts of felony firearms, and discharge of a weapon from a vehicle.

It is noted that Michigan law does not require prosecutors to choose between first- or second-degree murder, even at trial, and a jury may determine the appropriate charge based on the evidence.

Livingston County Prosecutor William Vailliencourt commented on the case:

“I fully support the right of individuals to keep and possess firearms, but it’s when they misuse those weapons that it becomes a problem.”

The prosecutor stated that he was quite sure Zale, who has a concealed carry permit, was not acting in self-defense when he shot Flemming square in the face with his handgun.

“You can’t shoot someone because you’re not happy with them,” Vailliencourt remarked philosophically.

According to investigators, Flemming was not carrying any weapons, and witnesses said he did not make any verbal threats. (I’m not sure how witnesses could be certain of this unless they were standing right next to Mr. Flemming when he was shot, which does not appear to be the case.)

According to another report in the Livingston Daily written by Lisa Rooose-Church:

Witnesses indicated that the younger man appeared to be “upset” or “angry” as he approached the vehicle, but investigators believe there was no physical contact between the men.

You obviously cannot blame Mr. Flemming for being pissed off. I just wish that he had done the unmanly thing (translated as un-macho) and stayed in his vehicle. Since Zale had already passed him, he probably would have just kept on going. On the other hand, he had reportedly slammed on his brakes which could mean he was just going to sit there obnoxiously, blocking the traffic.

Based on a report by the deceased man’s wife, Amy Flemming, Mr. Flemming had plenty of provocation:

Amy Flemming said Zale was “screaming down a side street” in his pickup, and she and her husband believed he would crash into their Ford Escape as he tailgated their SUV.

She said the pickup cut them off turning onto another road, and Derek Flemming moved into the right lane to allow him to pass.

Zale then pulled in front of their SUV and slammed on the brakes, Amy Flemming told police.

Ms. Flemming explained, quite logically, that her husband intended to confront Zale about his driving when they stopped.

As shown in the family photos, the Flemmings have two school age children, a 6-year-old daughter who had a birthday two days after her father was shot and killed as well as a 7-year-old son

The children “are asking where their father is,” the family’s attorney said.

* * * * *

This is so freakin’ sad. These “right to carry” laws result in far too many senseless and unnecessary deaths.

Whatever happened to men settling their differences man-to-man with their fists. Of course, that’s against the law too.

Meanwhile, we have two more fatherless children and an old man who will likely spend the rest of his life where he appears to belong – in a state penitentiary.

In this post, Karla Homolka super-sleuth Yalonda Laugh and Patrick H. Moore of All Things Crime Blog map the “up close and personal” aspects of the Homolka and Bernardo rape and murder case and focus on the incredible loyalty Karla’s family displayed in rescuing her  from Paul Bernardo’s psychopathic clutches.

by Yalonda Laugh with help from Patrick H. Moore

On June 14, 1991, Paul Bernardo kidnapped 14-year-old Leslie Mahaffy and brought her back to the house he shared with Karla Homolka. Together, they raped, tortured and murdered poor Leslie. Shockingly, Paul and Karla were married 15 days later, on June 29^th, in a lavish wedding ceremony. The photos reveal a poised and attractive young couple, seemingly radiant with the infinite youth and potential.

Even more shockingly, also on June 29^th, Leslie Mahaffy’s dismembered body was found encased in concrete in Lake Gibson near St. Catharines.

On April 16, 1992, nine and one-half months after their wedding, Bernardo, with the assistance of Homolka, kidnapped a second school-girl, Kristen French from a church parking lot. After raping, torturing and killing her, they discarded her body naked in a ditch, with her hair cut off. Ms. French’s body was discovered two week later on April 30^th.

It was probably very much to humanity’s benefit that the abuse Paul Bernardo subjected Karla to gradually increased in frequency and severity over the next 18 months, culminating in a particularly vicious beating with a flashlight in early January of 1993 that left her battered and terrified with severe bruises and lacerations and two black eyes. Had Bernardo not “pushed the envelope” to such a degree, Karla might never have left him and together they might well have committed further brutal rapes and murders.

The above facts are well-known by most – if not all – followers of Karla and Bernardo. In this post, we will focus on how Karla’s family and friends essentially saved her life by interceding forcefully after the savage January beating:

It’s a Family Affair

On January 4, 1993 Wendy Lutczyn , an employee at the Martindale Animal Clinic and friend of Karla Homolka , urged another friend in the strongest possible terms to call Karla’s mother Dorothy and tell her that Karla was in serious trouble and needed help. Dorothy had received another call earlier that week telling her the same thing. Although it is perhaps surprising that Karla’s friends waited so long to actively involve Karla’s parents, it is undeniable that when “the s___ hit the proverbial fan” they did what they could to help. Dorothy responded to the clear urgency of the messengers and loaded Karla’s sister Lori and her father Karel  into the family van and drove to 57 Bayview where Karla resided with her husband Paul Bernardo. When no one came to the door after repeated knocking, Lori called the police and ambulance workers. With no legal grounds for emergency intervention, the workers came to the house but took no further action. Lori kept calling the house every 15 minutes until Paul finally answered and put Karla on the phone. Lori recalls that her sister sounded normal and said nothing to indicate that anything was wrong.

Dorothy wasn’t satisfied and the next day she made a surprise visit to the clinic and was shocked to see Karla with severely bruised and blackened eyes, bruises around her neck and a swollen head. She and Lori made the decision to pick up Karla and her personal belongings that evening at her house. Lori Homolka stated:

“(She had) bruises everywhere on her body/Disgusting. Disgusting. I was angry, confused, upset. Angry that she could stay with someone who could do that to a human being.”

It took almost an hour of the most intense cajoling for the three Homolkas to convince Karla that she had no choice other than to leave the house and leave Paul for good. Karla was weeping and bordering on hysteria and – in the end — Karel Homolka had to physically carry her out of the house to the van.

Karla was taken to Brampton, a city of around 500,000 in southern Ontario to stay with Dorothy’s relatives. Paul Bernardo phoned the Homolka residence but was rebuffed. He then shoved his way into Dorothy’s office at the Shaver Clinic and demanded to speak to Karla. Dorothy stood firm stating: “You hurt my baby. I don’t want you to see her ever again.” Paul warned them that there would be hell to pay for not allowing him access to Karla. Lori would not even speak to him so he shadowed her in hopes of seeing if Karla was staying at the Homolka’s residence.

In typical Karla fashion, while in Brampton, she immediately started seeing a man named Jim. After getting cozy on the dance floor, within a few nights they had gone to bed together and Karla had – in her peculiar fashion — introduced him to anal sex.

On February 9, 1993, Toronto law enforcement visited Karla and questioned her about Bernardo in connection to the murders of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. She admitted nothing at that juncture but eventually told her relatives the entire story. On February 11th, Karla consulted with criminal defense lawyer George Walker in Niagara Falls, which rapidly led to the negotiations with the Crown that ultimately culminated in Karla’s controversial plea deal and her testifying against Bernardo at his trial. Bernardo was arrested for the murders 6 days later on February 17^th, although formal charges had not yet been brought. The police sealed off the Bayview house and begin an intensive search for evidence that lasted for 71 days. Surprisingly, they did not find the infamous videotapes which clearly demonstrated that Karla had played a much larger role than she initially led the authorities to believe.

On February 18, 1993, Karla’s friends Kathy and Alex Ford made the three hour trek from New York City to visit the Homolkas in St. Catharines to extract whatever information was available as to why Paul Bernardo had been arrested for the murders of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. “Karla must not have known,” suggested Kathy. They recalled that Karla had told them her house on 57 Bayview was haunted and that she frequently heard noises coming from the basement. Kathy and Alex continued to hold on to the comforting belief that Paul had kept Karla in the dark regarding his criminal activities and that she had been entirely unaware.

It was obvious to everyone – including the authorities — that Karla was in grave need of psychiatric care and she was admitted to Northwest General Hospital in Toronto for treatment and observation on March 4, 1993. She remained in the hospital for 7 weeks until her discharge on April 23, 1993.

Kathy and Alex Ford visited Karla frequently while she was hospitalized. Other friends also stopped in to see her as she underwent her barrage of psychiatric tests. She never mentioned the crimes or any beatings by Paul. She spoke of her dog, and all the medications she was receiving, and told her well-wishers:

“I’m getting the help I need.” When Kathy Ford asked if Paul had something to do with Tammy’s death, Karla stated: “I can’t believe how much you guys know. When I am allowed you will be the first I talk to.”

When Karla’s family visited, they brought her bottles of wine, which she drank eagerly. She seemed content to stay loaded most of the time.

In response to all of the stress he and the family was under during this period, Karel Homolka drank even more heavily than usual and generally appeared semi-comatose. The atmosphere at the house was dreary and oppressive and their telephone never stopped ringing. There was an endless deluge of calls from reporters and television and radio stations eager to hear the story. The Homolkas were saddened to discover that relatives and friends had been giving interviews and selling videos and pictures. The family spent their evenings huddled around their T.V. sets. The case was receiving massive coverage and the Homolkas were repulsed and mystified by what was being reported. When it was reported that a second suspect was more than “a person of interest,” the family was unaware that the second person was Karla and they naturally conjectured as to who the possible suspect could have been:

“Damn, she’s going to be in a lot of trouble for this. Why didn’t she just tell someone?” asked friend Lisa Stanton rhetorically.

Karel and Dorothy were horrified to find that Paul had been beating Karla:

“Why didn’t she tell us? We just didn’t know. We had no idea.”

When someone suggested that maybe Paul Bernardo had something to do with the death of Tammy Homolka, Dorothy and Karel were shocked:

“It was just an accident. NO ! This is enough. I’ve had enough ! I can’t deal with this any more!”

Dorothy later confided in a friend that during the period leading up to Karla’s trial, there was great tension at the Homolka residence at 21 Dundonald Street. She and Karel were both drinking heavily and she went to work as much as possible to avoid being home. They put their house up for Karla’s bail which was $110,000. Dorothy told friends and family that Karla was going to receive a great college education while she was in prison. They bought her a new television, a microwave, a small refrigerator and even her favorite Mickey Mouse bed sheets.

On May 14, 1993, Karla’s 12-year plea bargain deal was finalized, and she began four days of intensive interrogation by police. Four days later, on May 18, 1993, Bernardo was formally charged with two counts of first-degree murder and seven other serious crimes in connection with the deaths of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. Karla was also charged with two counts of manslaughter.

Karla Homolka’s Trial

Karla’s trial began on June 28, 1993. During the trial, her sister Lori would take Karla’s arm and walk her out of the courtroom. On July 6, 1993, Homolka’s plea bargain was officially approved. She was sentenced to 12 years in prison, and the judge banned the publication of all evidence and the plea itself. Karla was then transferred directly from court to the Kingston Prison for Women Medical Center. She had already toured the prison and met with the warden on June 10^th.

Somewhat remarkably, over the July 4th weekend, just a few days before her sentencing and direct remand to prison, Dorothy and Karel gave her a “going away pool party.”

Paul Bernardo’s Trial

Paul Bernardo’s murder trial began in St. Catharines before Justice Patrick LeSage of the Ontario Court General Disvision on May 4, 1994.

Dorothy Homolka was one of the first witnesses to take the stand. She admitted she had never considered that Paul could have been abusing Karla. They had seemed lovey-dovey before and throughout their honeymoon, and even after the wedding. She said Karla had several chances to confide in her but that she never divulged that she was under any particular stress, and had never mentioned any beatings, and especially not the rapes or murders, including the death of Tammy Homolka.

On September 1, 1995, the jury found Paul Bernardo guilty of all counts against him including first degree murder.

Outside the courthouse on the day of the Bernardo verdict, Karel Homolka said little except to tell reporters that the verdict vindicated his daughter.

Afterward by Patrick H. Moore

One wonders whether Dorothy and Karel and Lori Homolka would have come to Karla’s aid in the manner they did if they had known, prior to rescuing her, the extent of Karla’s involvement in the two rapes and murders and the “accidental” death of Tammi Homolka. We will never know for certain. I, for one, am touched and heartened by the loyalty this beleaguered and rather dysfunctional family displayed for Karla Homolka in her time of need. Their loyalty — although perhaps misguided — is the stuff that holds all of our families together, for better or worse. Without it the world would be a much lonelier place.

Click on the following links to read previous Karla posts:

Paul Bernardo Engaged to Lovely and Sensitive 30-Year-Old Woman?

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 Darcia Helle

“I didn’t do it, but I know who did.”

Imagine you are a 20-year-old, uneducated man-child who has spent his entire life in a small, crime-infested community. Your family defines dysfunctional, but you don’t think about that because you don’t know what a functional family looks like. Add to this the fact that you’re a minority in a city where prejudice runs rampant. One day you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, and suddenly you find yourself arrested and charged with the brutal murder of a young woman. You tell everyone who will listen that you did not kill her. In fact, despite your fear, you provide police with the name of the real killer.

You have confidence in the justice system. They will see that you are not the killer. They will find the real killer and set you free. You believe this up until the moment the state puts you to death for a crime you did not commit.

The Wrong Carlos: An Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution is the true story of our imagined young man. Carlos DeLuna was arrested in February, 1983 and executed on December 7, 1989. This case was pushed through the Texas courts with alarming speed. The average US death penalty case takes about 13 years to go through the appeals process. Carlos had six years from arrest to death.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this case is old and things like this don’t happen anymore. We have far more sophisticated science. We have DNA tests. Sadly, you’d be mistaken in your trust of our modern judicial system. Carlos DeLuna’s case could just as easily happen today. We need to acknowledge all the wrong in our justice system before we can hope to get things right.

Let’s go back to the beginning. In 1960, Carlos’s mother, Margarita Conejo, moved to the La Armada housing project in Corpus Christi, Texas, with her six children after having divorced their father Francisco Conejo. There she met Joe DeLuna, and together she and Joe had three children in the three following years. Carlos DeLuna was the middle of these three children, born on March 15, 1962.

Joe DeLuna couldn’t be bothered to hang around and take care of his children. Margarita found herself with nine children, no money, and no patience. The job of raising Carlos was left to his older half-siblings.

By all accounts, Carlos was emotionally stunted, learning disabled bordering on mildly retarded, and “childlike”. In March of 1974, school psychologists diagnosed him with a “language-learning disorder”. Two years later, another school evaluation found him to have “fine-motor difficulty,” “specific learning deficits,” and “possible neurological difficulties.” Neither school officials nor his mother found the time or the right programs to help Carlos get even the most basic education. In the spring of 1977, at the age of 15, Carlos dropped out of school after having struggled through to just the eighth grade.

Carlos was no angel, nor did he claim to be. He was arrested multiple times for theft, intoxication, and sniffing paint. He was very much a boy left to fend for himself in a harsh and unforgiving environment. But Carlos was never violent. Despite multiple arrests, at no time was Carlos ever in possession of any sort of weapon. Anyone who knew Carlos said the same thing: he did not carry or even own a knife.

Carlos Hernandez, on the other hand, was not childlike or even remotely innocent.  Born on July 14, 1954, Hernandez spent his life in the same neighborhood as Carlos DeLuna. They were never friends, but they did know one another. Everyone knew Hernandez, and everyone feared him.

In 1960, when Hernandez was just six years old, his father was arrested for rape and his mother placed him in foster care. He returned to his mother a year later, though life never got easier. His father did not return home and his mother would not be winning any parenting awards.

In 1972, Hernandez was arrested on three counts of armed robbery of a gas station/convenience store. While in county jail, he was raped by at least one older inmate. This pushed the already unbalanced man who was prone to violence right over the edge. From then on, Hernandez always carried a knife. He cultivated a tough guy image, brandishing his knife and bullying people into doing what he wanted.

Over the following years, Hernandez was arrested multiple times for assault and even suspicion of murder. Hernandez always had a specific type of fixed-blade knife on him. He was also known to be extremely abusive to the women in his life. Despite his reputation, Hernandez managed to evade any hard prison time. When necessary he expertly manipulated the justice system, though often he slipped through the cracks without much effort at all.

With this history in mind, we move forward to February 4, 1983. Wanda Lopez, a young, single mother living in the same neglected neighborhood, was murdered while working the night shift at Sigmor Shamrock gas station. But telling you she was murdered is putting a shiny gloss on a dirty, vulgar act. Wanda was gutted with a knife. She was sliced up, dragged about, beaten, and left for dead. This act was brutal and personal. This was not a robbery gone bad, though the homicide detectives did their best to spin it that way.

At the exact time of Wanda’s murder, she was on the phone with 911 – for the second time – asking for help. Moments earlier, she’d made her first 911 call. She’d told the dispatcher that a man with a knife was outside the store and she was afraid, but the dispatcher had refused to help unless and until the man actually did something. When the man walked into the store, she called again. This time she was connected to a different dispatcher, and he made her repeat her story. He questioned her as if she was the suspect, demanding to know all the specifics. By the time he agreed to send help to Wanda, she was already being attacked. This is captured on the 911 recording, which you can listen to here: http://www3.law.columbia.edu/hrlr/ltc/media.html?type=audio&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmedia.law.columbia.edu%2Fjliebman%2Fmedia%2F35-911-call-by-wanda-lopez.mp3

You might have guessed that the man in the store was Carlos Hernandez. At the time he was deciding to murder Wanda Lopez, Carlos DeLuna was standing across the street. He saw what was happening and ran. He was terrified of Hernandez and also terrified of the police. He was a child running for cover.

Hernandez left Wanda for dead, pushed out the door directly past a witness stepping inside, and raced off in the opposite direction from which Carlos DeLuna had run. The witness who came face-to-face with Hernandez saw which way he ran. But other people passing by the area saw Carlos DeLuna running the opposite way, and they assumed he was the killer. These conflicting eye-witness accounts were inconvenient to detectives arriving on the scene. Within minutes, police had compressed the differing descriptions into one person. Carlos DeLuna became that person when he was quickly found hiding beneath a truck nearby.

Police then bullied the reluctant witnesses into participating in a “show-up” identification. Carlos was driven back to the crime scene and witnesses were assured they had their man, and that he’d been found hiding under a truck. One-by-one, the witnesses were walked to the squad car, where Carlos sat in the back. A cop shined a flashlight directly in Carlos’s eyes so, according to the detectives, he wouldn’t be able to see the witnesses. Out in that dark parking lot, these terrified witnesses with disjointed stories who’d been told Carlos was the killer, were prompted to identify him. When a couple of them were reluctant, they were, for lack of a better word, coerced.

The one man who’d nearly walked into the killer hesitated but eventually agreed that Carlos DeLuna was the person he saw running out of the store. Years later, the authors of The Wrong Carlos questioned him:

Baker didn’t mince words. He had trouble recalling Hispanic names; they were all “Julio” to him, he said. And he had trouble telling Hispanics apart and judging their age. “It’s tough,” he said, “to identify cross cultures.”

This is not simply an issue of prejudice. All of us, regardless of how liberal our thinking, have more difficulty identifying and remembering specific features of people outside our own race. Add to that inherent shortcoming the fact that these witnesses were under tremendous stress, both from being involved in a murder scene and from the police pressure to help them make an arrest, and it’s not surprising that they instead got it horribly wrong.

The Innocence Project has this to say about eyewitness identifications:

Eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in nearly 75% of convictions overturned through DNA testing.

And this leads us straight to the issue of DNA. Had Carlos DeLuna been arrested in 2014 instead of 1983, would DNA evidence have saved him? The answer is maybe.

First, to understand how absurd the arrest was from the start, I need you to picture the scene. As I mentioned, Wanda Lopez’s murder was brutal. There was quite literally blood everywhere. There were puddles of it in the store. The killer had dragged her through it. His bloody footprints tracked along the floor and out into the parking lot. When Carlos DeLuna was pulled out from beneath that truck, he did not have one speck of blood on him. None. Police explained this by saying he’d washed it off in a puddle. Corpus Christi had 1/8-inch of rain early the morning of Wanda’s murder. More than twelve hours later, it’s difficult to believe Carlos would find a deep enough puddle to fully wash away every trace of blood, all while desperately running away.

Furthermore, Carlos DeLuna had never been known to carry a knife and had never been violent. His first words to the cops who found him were: “I didn’t do it, but I know who did.” Those cops told him to shut up. Even much later, when Carlos finally broke through his fear of Hernandez and gave his name to police, not one person looked into the possibility that Carlos DeLuna was telling the truth. This, despite the fact that Hernandez was known to carry the exact same knife and had a history of violent behavior.

So much was wrong with this case from the very beginning. Some other highlights: Evidence was not collected. The lead homicide detective had never worked a homicide on her own. She spent one hour inside the store, then allowed the owner to scrub everything clean. She did not collect blood samples from inside, did not swab all the areas, did not look closely at the footprints in the blood or the handprints by the cash register. She completely ignored the fact that there was money scattered all over the floor and the owner told her that, at most, $20 was missing. Also, despite this being a vicious murder, no one questioned the fact that, aside from living in the same area, Carlos DeLuna had absolutely no connection to Wanda Lopez. He had a regular job, and none of the money in his pocket held even a tiny speck of blood. Given the magnitude of this botched case, it’s difficult to know how or if DNA could have helped. Really, all that was needed was for someone to listen to Carlos.

The topic of DNA is interesting in itself. The prosecution collects the evidence and decides which tests, if any, to run. If they feel their case is strong enough without DNA, they won’t bother. DNA tests are expensive and it’s better for their budget if they can avoid the cost. On the flip side, and showing my cynicism, maybe they also won’t initiate testing if they feel the results might muddle their chances of a win. The state is under no obligation to perform any forensic tests. Furthermore, and this is vital, the state is also under no obligation to approve the costs of these tests if the court appointed defense attorney requests them. Carlos DeLuna was poor, and poor men can’t afford private attorneys. They must make do with whichever lawyer the court appoints for them. And that lawyer must do his/her job under the constraints of a miniscule budget. This disparity is one major reason you will likely never see a wealthy person on death row.

According to this book’s authors:

The worst problem with executions is that the truth about them can so easily die with the executed prisoner. Sadly, the certainty that DNA and other forensic testing now makes possible has not changed this situation. This is because once executions occur, the same officials whose deadly mistakes might be exposed by DNA testing are given control over the crucial physical evidence in the case and consistently bar forensic testing of – or, as in Carlos DeLuna’s case, simply lose – the evidence. The public has no recourse to freedom of information laws or the courts to obtain forensic testing. The steadfast refusal of legislators, judges, and prosecutors to allow forensic testing that could provide unassailable proof of the accuracy, or not, of executions makes it difficult to credit those officials’ repeated assurances that the men and women whose executions they have sanctioned were undoubtedly guilty.

The details of this case are far too dense and convoluted for me to do justice to here. Carlos DeLuna was pushed through a system that did its best to ignore his innocence, while Carlos Hernandez fell through every crack and blissfully went on to rape and murder again. Carlos DeLuna went to the death chamber professing his innocence, pleading for just one person to do his/her job correctly and find Carlos Hernandez. Even in the moment of his state-sanctioned murder, Carlos DeLuna was not offered a shred of dignity. The first of three injections, meant to render Carlos unconscious, failed, and Carlos was conscious when the second, paralyzing drug entered his system and began suffocating him to death.

http://www.thewrongcarlos.net

Please click to below to view Darcia’s Helle’s many excellent posts:

 “Met Her on the Mountain”: Cold Case Social Worker Hog-Tied, Raped and Killed in Appalachia

Jovial Private Bartender Snaps; Assaults and Drags Obnoxious 84-Year-Old Club Patron

Frank Lloyd Wright and the Great Gasoline Mass Murder

Edward Elmore Rode the Legal Railroad to 30 Years on Death Row: His Crime? Simple! He Was Black and Poor

 “The Wrong Carlos”: Non-Violent Manchild Executed for Murder He Did Not Commit

The Electric Chair Nightmare: An Infamous and Agonizing History

Autopsies: Truth, Fiction and Maura Isles and Her 5-Inch-Heels

Don’t Crucify Me, Dude! Just Shoot Me Instead! Spartacus and Death by Crucifixion

To Burn or Not to Burn? Auto-Da-Fé Is Not Good for Women or Children!

The Disgraceful Entrapment of Jesse Snodgrass: Keep the Narcs Out of Our Schools

Why Should I Believe You? The History of the Polygraph

“Don’t Behead Me, Dude!”: The Story of Beheading and the Invention of the Guillotine

Aileen Wuornos, America’s First High-Profile Female Serial Killer, Never Had a Chance

The Terror of ISO: A Descent into Madness

Al Capone Could Not Bribe the Rock: Alcatraz, Fortress of Doom

Cyberspace, Darknet, Murder-for-Hire and the Invisible Black Machine

Darcia Helle lives in a fictional world with a husband who is sometimes real. Their house is ruled by spoiled dogs and cats and the occasional dust bunny.

Suspense, random blood splatter and mismatched socks consume Darcia’s days. She writes because the characters trespassing through her mind leave her no alternative. Only then are the voices free to haunt someone else’s mind.

Join Darcia in her fictional world: www.QuietFuryBooks.com

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

One of the things I find most remarkable is the way a great many parents with handicapped children nevertheless manage to bestow the same degree of love and care on those children as they would had they been blessed with “normal” children. I say this because, recognizing myself for the selfish person I am, I suspect I’d have a very tough time caring for a handicapped child properly.

On the other hand, here on All Things Crime Blog, we’ve covered several cases where the parents of handicapped children have grievously abused them. I suspect there is a third group of parents who do a reasonably good job of caring for their handicapped child but, at a certain point, withdraw just enough so that they may not recognize signs of trouble when they occur.

A particularly tragic case that may (or may not) fit into this last category comes to us from Kearns, Utah, where Alicia Marie Englert, who reportedly suffered from undefined birth defects that appears to have affected her in adult life, faces murder charges for hiding her pregnancy from her parents and secreting her newborn in a neighbor’s trash can. Fortunately, the baby was rescued and taken to the hospital where she appears to be recovering, although the child is not yet completely out of the woods.

Brady McCombs of the AP writes:

A Utah woman accused of dumping her newborn in the trash in an attempt to hide her pregnancy from her parents has been charged with attempted murder, Salt Lake County Attorney Sim Gill said Friday.

Alicia Marie Englert, 23, deliberately tried to kill the baby by depriving her of food and medical care before leaving her in the bottom of her neighbor’s trash underneath other bags of trash, Gill said.

The reported details of what transpired in the “36 hours leading up to the baby being found by a neighbor in the Salt Lake City suburb of Kearns” are as follows:

According to Attorney Gill, Ms. Englert gave birth in a basement bathroom inside the family home at around midnight on Aug. 24. She is then believed to have wrapped the baby in a towel whereupon she left it on the floor of the bathroom.

It’s unclear what Ms. Englert’s state of mind was over the next day-and-a-half. What is known is that she went to work the following day without feeding the child. When she got home that evening, the child was still wrapped up in the towel. She once again left it there and apparently passed a more-or-less normal evening, though without knowing more about her mental state, it’s impossible to know what thoughts may have been going through her mind.

In any event, the following morning, Ms. Englert deposited the baby under several trash bags in her neighbor’s trash can.

After Ms. Englert had left the infant there, it emitted a sound that was described by a neighbor as resembling the purring of a cat. The neighbor investigated and after moving several trash bags out of the way, “she spotted the baby.” When the lady discovered she couldn’t extricate the child from the trash, she ran next door to the Englert’s house for help.

Ms. Englert’s father, Robert Englert, responded, and together they managed to remove the infant from the trash can.

Emergency responders arrived at the scene and placed the baby on a life-flight helicopter. She was flown to a hospital, examined and put on a ventilator. County Attorney Gill stated that the baby was dirty, smelly and had a blood-borne infection, and that, “If the baby had not been discovered and not received medical condition, it certainly would have died.”

This is one tough child. After being in critical condition when she arrived at the hospital on Aug 26th, she has improved steadily and is now in “fair condition”.

“It’s certainly a testament to how resilient these babies can be,” Gill said. “It’s quite remarkable that the baby is doing well and is improving steadily.”

The Utah Child and Family Services Agency has taken custody of the child. Ms. Englert is being held in Salt Lake County Jail on $500,000 bail.

The investigators have stated that they don’t believe other family members knew about the baby being in the house, which means that they were not aware that Ms. Englert was pregnant. (When I first started hearing about cases of this sort, I didn’t believe that a pregnant women could hide her condition from those around her, but I’ve been corrected by women who know better.)

In an earlier Fox News article, the AP reported — based on a probable cause statement — that Ms. Englert told the police she hid her pregnancy from her parents and hoped her newborn would die, thus solving her problems.

In what appears to be an attempt to heap aspersions on Ms. Englert, much has been made of a photo that was given to a Salt Lake TV station that purportedly shows the defendant holding a beer and standing with another woman in a nightclub, as if this will somehow reveal the essence of her character. This seems a bit preposterous to me; Ms. Englert was of age and there is nothing unusual about drinking a beer in a nightclub.

Ms. Englert’s father Robert said on Friday that his daughter “has a learning disability and has only recently begun to understand what she has done.”

“I know she didn’t realize, obviously didn’t realize, what she was doing.”

(This seems to me to be am attempt to minimize to some degree; Ms. Englert was obviously aware that she was trying to end her child’s life. She may well, however, have been essentially unaware of the moral issues at play here.)

In a more measured statement, Alicia Englert’s cousin, Vania Schmidt, stated that the extended family has been devastated and is quoted as saying:

“She knew she could reach out to any one of us, we would have taken her in, gotten her to a doctor, gotten her help.”

Ms. Schmidt further stated that “Alicia Englert was partially raised by her aunt. As a child, she took an unusually long time to begin talking, Schmidt recalled, and while playing with other children, she would sometimes bite or scratch for no apparent reason.

“I could see innocence, I could see confusion, not knowing where she fit in.”

Schmidt also said that she hasn’t talked to her cousin often in recent years.

The family is planning a weekend fundraiser to aid in the care of the baby and a candlelight vigil.

Sounding much like a typical prosecutor, County Attorney Sim said they had no evidence of Ms. Englert suffering from any disability and that it was not a factor in his decision to charge her with with attempted murder. Sim did say that if Ms. Englert suffers from any condition, “that issue will be dealt with as the case moves through the courts.”

* * * * *

What tangled webs we mortals weave. A mere glance at Ms. Englert suggests that she is handicapped, to an unknown degree. I have no sense of what an appropriate disposition in this case would be, but I hope she is treated fairly.

I am concerned that the baby may also suffer from birth defects and sincerely hope she wasn’t damaged further by the lack of food and care during the first few days of her life.

compiled by Patrick H. Moore

Based on the photographic evidence, 18-year-old Isabella Guzman of Aurora, Colorado is quite an attractive young lady. Her Facebook page contains selfies which seem to combine poise and a natural loveliness that are striking. Nonetheless, Isabella now stands charged with 1st-degree murder for slashing her mother, 47-year-old Yun-Mi Hoy’s, throat and stabbing her a total of 79 times in the upstairs bathroom of their suburban home on the evening of August 28, 2013.

It’s not yet clear what specifically caused Isabella to go berserk as if she were a psychopathic monster. Yet she did.

There had been signs since Isabella’s early childhood — when she was sent for a period of time to live with her biological father after her parents separated — that all was not right between her and her mother, but no one expected matters to deteriorate to this point of no return. After Isabella’s arrest in a parking garage the following day 16 hours after the slaying, homicide detectives were unable to offer any clues as to a motive for the brutal act. Isabella’s stepfather, Ryan Hoy, however, informed them that raising the teenager had been a challenge.

In fact, Ryan Hoy told the detectives that on the day of the murder, Isabella’s mother had called the police because of the ongoing strife between Isabella and her mother. Hoy stated his step-daughter had become “more threatening and disrespectful” toward Yun-Mi Hoy in recent days. In fact, according to the arrest affidavit, Isabella Guzman had allegedly threatened Yun-Mi Hoy in an email telling her, “You will pay.” The police had reportedly told Isabella that her mother could kick her out of their home if she did not shape up.

In an attempt to ameliorate the situation, Isabella’s father, Robert Guzman, had spoken to her about her “teen rebelliousness” about three hours before the 911 call.

“I went to talk to her because her mother was worried and wanted me to talk to Isabella,” Guzman told 7News. “So, I went to talk to Isabella and we sat down in the backyard looking at the trees and the animals and I started to talk to her about the respect that people should have for their parents. And I was trying to let her know that she should be obedient to her parents, not rebellious, that she should try to listen more and everything was going fine.”

“In the conversation, I thought that I made progress,” he added. “But obviously it didn’t do nothing, because hours later, this thing happened.”

*     *     *     *     *

The police report states that Aurora police dispatch received a 911 call just past 10 p.m. on August 28 from Ryan Hoy. Hoy told dispatch that Yun-Mi Hoy had come home from work about 9:30 p.m. Wednesday and had taken a shower. Soon after, he heard a “thumping” and his wife calling his name. Hoy moved quickly to investigate but he couldn’t get in the bathroom, because — according to the affidavit — Guzman was holding the door closed from the inside. A separate report states that Hoy could not get in the bathroom because the door was locked.

In any event, Hoy could see blood seeping out from under the door. Hoy raced downstairs to call the police, and when he returned he said he saw Isabella — dressed in a pink sports bra and turquoise shorts — standing in the bathroom doorway holding a knife. His wife on the floor, covered in blood. There was a baseball bat beneath her.

“He never heard Guzman say anything, and she didn’t speak to him as she exited the bathroom,” the affidavit says. “Guzman was just staring straight ahead when she walked past him.”

After Isabella fled, Ryan attempted to revive his wife, but to no avail. Her throat had been slashed and by the coroner’s count, she suffered 31 stab wounds to the face and an additional 48 to her neck.

*     *     *     *     *

Although Isabella may still have been in the area when the police arrived, she managed to elude capture. At 11:30 a.m. the next day, officers were called to a parking garage at 2851 South Parker Road based on a report that a body had been spotted inside a car. That proved to be a false alarm, but the police did detect items that they linked to the previous evening’s violence.

More cops arrived and began to canvass the area. Eventually, someone spotted Guzman trying to walk out of the garage. She was then taken into custody, and on Friday, she was formally charged with first-degree murder, appearing before Arapahoe County Judge Stephen F. Collins, who ordered her to remain in custody without bond on suspicion of first-degree murder. During the proceedings, Isabella sat there silently in an orange jumpsuit, a bandage on her right wrist.

*     *     *     *     *

Isabella Guzman looks neither poised nor particularly attractive in her mug shot. Rather, she looks like someone who may just be starting to catch on to the enormity of what she has done — now that it is too late.

Update:

Isabella Guzman, 18, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to first-degree murder charges for stabbing her mother 79 times. The troubled teen entered the plea during a hearing in early December, according to Arapahoe County court records. She was later sent to the Colorado Mental Health Institute in Pueblo for a psychiatric evaluation.

It appears from court records that officials expect Guzman’s psychiatric evaluation to be lengthy. A judge scheduled the next hearing in the case for Feb, 28, but said Guzman does not have to appear, she does have to appear for another hearing March 21.

According to an arrest affidavit filed against Guzman, she had been feuding with her mother in the days leading up to the attack.

Hoy’s husband and Guzman’s stepfather told police that two days before the attack, Guzman threatened her mom and spit in her face.

2nd Update:

Michael Roberts writes that a judge has accepted  Guzman’s not guilty by reason of insanity plea and she has been remanded to a state hospital in Pueblo, Colorado where she will receive treatment. Naturally, it is far to early to know whether she will everbe released back into the community.

by Lise LaSalle

On March 10th, 2014, the Canadian newspapers, especially in Ontario, were abuzz with headlines such as “Toronto panhandler loses stabbing appeal of man who refused to give cash’’ and “Panhandler loses appeal of her second-degree murder conviction.’’

The ‘Panhandler’ they are referring to in these articles is Nicole (Nyki) Kish who was charged and convicted of second-degree murder on March 1st, 2011 and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 12 years in the stabbing death of Ross Hammond.

Kish was not a panhandler but a young lady who had worked hard to be able to travel and experience life on the road as many others have done at her age. She had no criminal record and was an artistic girl who loved to sing and write songs. She was also an advocate for many causes dear to her heart. At the time of the encounter with Hammond, Kish was with her boyfriend and hanging out with some transient young people exploring the wild side of life. At times, some of Kish’s companions would ask a brother to spare a dime but it was not her way of life and she was by no means a panhandler standing in the street asking for money.

Nicole has steadfastly maintained her innocence since the 2007 death of Ross Hammond after a large street brawl near the Toronto intersection of Queen and Bathurst. In fact, the scene of the ‘crime’ was such a melee that despite all of the merchants and street witnesses who were present, none of them actually saw the crime. We know that Hammond ended up dead and that the scene was very chaotic. Numerous witnesses did see Mr. Hammond with a knife in his hand, and they all stated that he was drunk, angry and very abusive the night he was killed. That is the only certainty in this case. But no one saw anyone stab him. A young man called Jeremy Woolley was also stabbed — very likely by Hammond.

Hammond was stabbed in the chest 4 or 5 times and he did not die immediately. When the police showed up, they questioned him as they waited for the ambulance. He was asked twice about the knife and both times, he answered, “No comment’’.

On the night Ross Hammond died, Nicole Kish had been in Toronto for only a day and was walking on busy Queen Street celebrating her 21st birthday with her boyfriend and other young people.

Ross Hammond and his work buddy George Dranichak were downtown that night with some of their colleagues having a drink to try to boost their morale as the company they worked for was struggling. The media referred to them as ‘Internet marketers’ and described Nicole and her friends as ‘panhandlers’. This image was pushed hard by the media and because of some recent problems Toronto the Pure had been having with panhandlers and street safety in general, they were instantly wrongly perceived. The City wanted to rid its streets of dangerous people and well-dressed jocks like Hammond and Dranichak could do no wrong.

In reality, the two men were mostly purveyors of porn, and Dranichak, who was in the country on a visa, had a history of violence in the US. It was in his best interest to avoid trouble and any negative perception from the media or the police. Thus, his account of the events was sketchy to say the least, and nonsensical at times.

On the night of Hammond’s stabbing death, he and Dranichak, who were highly intoxicated, walked to a bank machine to withdraw some cash. They were approached by a woman identified as Faith Watts who allegedly asked them for some change. At a preliminary hearing, Dranichak testified that he and Hammond made sexually derogatory remarks and asked her to perform certain sexual acts if she wanted the money. He admitted that their persistence had caused the confrontation.

During his early interrogations, Dranichak never said that she demanded $20, but two years after that fateful night, he came up with this figure in an attempt to justify their outrage and inappropriate outburst.

Watts was carrying a knife and had taken drugs that day. She quickly got into a pretty heated argument with the two men and they traded insults. Her boyfriend joined in to help her. He ended up being pushed around and then beaten unconscious and Watts admitted pulling a knife because she was afraid. Nine spots of Hammond’s DNA was found on Watt’s clothing. Kish and Watts were similar in appearance and were often confused by witnesses including Dranichak who could not distinguish between the two of them at times.

Bystanders took notice of the fight and many joined in. There were surveillance cameras along the streets but they were lost while in police custody: the footage of one was recorded over and the other was lost entirely. Detective Giroux, who was working on the case, said that by the time the evidence box where the video was placed came into his possession, the video had vanished. Justice Nordhiemer attributed the loss of the video to the “frailties of human nature.’’

The fight was in full force on both the south and north sides of the street, and some think that Dranichak was the south side combatant with Hammond on the north side one. But as Dranichak heard police sirens, he made a coward’s escape leaving his friend behind. He jumped in a cab. Behind him was a guy named Hal Amero, who was known to have been involved in 18 knife fights, and could easily have killed Hammond. Kish was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time, in the middle of the melee probably trying to help and pull people away from the attacker.

Witnesses reported seeing this Hal fellow throw a knife in a drainage sewer but the police never followed up on this tip.

Because Kish was stabbed in the arm during this attack, Justice Nordheimer  said that since she had been stabbed, there is an ‘’irresistible inference’’ that she must have killed Hammond. And the fact that Watts had blood from the victim on her clothes and boots was attributed to the ‘’limitations of physical evidence.’’ Although the knife belonged to Watts, Nordheimer suggested that it had changed hands three times before fatally wounding Hammond. What a strange roundabout way to avoid a straight line to the truth.

The police, the media and the Crown wanted the ‘panhandler’ case solved so that the good citizens of Toronto would feel safe again. So no one protested that strange and bizarre way of arriving at the conviction of a 21-year-old girl who just happened to be stabbed. And, this same girl stayed at the scene of the crime until the police and medical help arrived. Wouldn’t she have fled the scene like the others if she had anything to hide?

So, we might ask, how did the police end up charging Nyki Kish for this crime?

The facts  

• Out of 20 witnesses, no one saw Hammond being stabbed.

• Consequently, no witness saw Kish stab Hammond.

• Kish’s blood was on the knife Ross Hammond used to stab her.

• Ross Hammond’s blood was also on the knife.

• Hammond had cuts on his hands that were bleeding profusely.

• Hammond was stabbed multiple times.

• Hammond was conscious when police arrived. He never said Kish stabbed him and on a video (this one did not vanish) he stated, ‘’No comment’’ when asked about the knife.

These are the known facts.

And with this, the Canadian police charged Nyki Kish and a Canadian Court found her guilty.

What witnesses saw

Some witnesses saw a young man while leaving the scene stopping to show another witness that he had been stabbed by lifting his shirt. He also bragged about having been stabbed in earlier fights. His image is captured on a video showed by the media. But the police never found him or did they even look for him?

A video from a nearby pasta store was used to describe or ID four “major” participants. At the same time, many other “participants” were there at the scene but for some reason these other persons are allegedly “unidentifiable”. The police did not bother to question or ID Hal Amero, the likely killer, or his brother ‘Twitch’, for that matter, the two people who were later described by three separate witnesses as being the guys who, while leaving the crime scene, stopped to chat and brag about being stabbed, and even showed the stab wound(s) to all three.

The pasta video clearly shows Hammond and proves, apparently, that he not only had no knife, but that he had not yet been stabbed.

As the judges eliminated the other suspects, and with an assist from the defence, resolved that the Watts knife was the murder weapon, they seemed to think that they proved beyond any doubt that Nyki carried the knife across the street. 

Such a leap of nonsense

It was a bench trial (no jury) and you would think that a judge would have seen through this nonsense, but Kish was nonetheless found guilty of second degree murder.

The overwhelming question in this whole saga for me was why on earth didn’t Nicole Kish take the stand to tell her story? When the police first came around to question her, she was medicated and told by her family and legal aid not to say anything. When the trial came around, her lawyers told her not to testify. She wanted to tell her side of the story very badly but they insisted that she remain silent.

Fifty witnesses presented confusing and contradictory testimony on the witness stand so the last thing Nicole’s lawyers wanted was for her to testify and sound like she was not being truthful or to simply confuse the matter even more. Because they had no jury to persuade, they probably were very confident that a judge could never find her guilty on such mixed and flimsy evidence or lack thereof.

But her not testifying was perceived negatively by the family of the victim and the public at large, who believed that the only reason she did not take the stand was because she had something to hide. It must have been excruciating for her to remain silent under these circumstances but lawyers are supposed to know best.

For reasons unknown even to her own defense attorneys, Faith Watts, who owned a knife and allegedly started the whole saga, as well has having numerous spots of Hammond’s DNA on herself while Kish had only a tiny speck of blood on her shoe because she walked near the ambulance where Hammond had bled, was allowed to return to the States and was not charged.

The media had damaged the public perception of Kish’s character, and when she was out on bail, she was prohibited from speaking publicly about the case. So no one heard about who she really was and that violence is not part of her makeup. She has always been a fighter for causes but never a violent fighter. Despite the negative media coverage, Nicole’s conviction sparked a ‘’Free Nyki’’ campaign advocating her release.

As an appellant, she raised two grounds of appeal: First, that the trial judge accepted and relied on unreliable evidence by concluding that she was the female armed with a knife on the south side of the street. Second, the judge failed to consider important exculpatory evidence that could have contributed to the existence of a reasonable doubt. Most significantly, the judge did not consider the possibility that Faith Watts, Jeremy Wooley, or the unknown third man involved in the final fight could have been the stabber.

The Ontario Appeals Court declared that it is not necessary for Kish to have done the actual stabbing to convict her on the 2nd degree murder charges. The OAC says that even if Wooley had done the stabbing, Kish was convictable simply by being involved in the melee on that side of the street.

[125] If Wooley administered the fatal stab wounds, the appellant would still be
guilty of second degree murder as a party (to the second fight, and as the transporter of the knife).

Justice Nordheimer put together a scenario which patently does not describe (by ALL accounts) a confusing, nighttime street melee where a good number of the principals and witnesses are inebriated, including the eventual victim.

There is also “hint” in the appellate decision that their own hands were tied because the defence did not attack Nordheimer’s simplified scenario; all the defence offered, really, was that “Faith Watts may have done it.”

Odd things about the rejection of this appeal

The Pasta video is used to confirm that Hammond was not injured or armed at the time he appears in it. Nonetheless, it could logically be argued that Hammond was carrying the knife and was already bleeding from a chest wound. The video is not of high enough quality for the court to really conclude anything about Hammond.

All four judges ignored the fact that Hammond was in possession of a knife and had it with him when lying wounded on sidewalk. Watts had testified that it was her knife which she used to scare Hammond to protect her boyfriend and that Hammond took it from her. No other witnesses ever saw a girl with a knife on the north side. And the ones who saw a girl on the south side admitted they could have easily mixed the two girls up.

After testing Kish’s items five times and finding no Hammond DNA, they tried a 6th time and it was fruitful. There was a trace of Hammond’s DNA near the sole of her shoe. Meanwhile, Watts has Hammond’s DNA all over her. She also had a bite mark on her arm and when she was arrested, she head-butted a police officer. In court, the Crown claimed that Kish was the aggressive one. Watts, who had a criminal record in California with more than a dozen arrests for drugs, theft and altercations with law enforcement, and the two males, Fresh and Wooley, who had entered in Canada illegally, were deported before Kish’s trial.

If Kish is the accessory then who was she accessory to and why did they release this killer without any charges? Remember that Watts admits to owning and brandishing the knife, which in any case is too short to have caused the fatal wound, but could have caused the minor back wounds.

It seems that the review of this case involving two well-dressed men and ‘panhandlers’ fell flat on its face. Brother can you spare a Dame?

Nyki’s parents are her champions and they visit her every week. Their goal has always been to make sure that their daughter comes out of this ordeal with the least amount of damage possible and to keep some normalcy in her life. Her mother Christine reads her a lot of stuff from Facebook, she plays her songs that have been written for her, and prints a lot of pictures and art made by supporters. They spend a lot of time talking on the phone.

Nicole’s sister is 7 years old and was 6 months old when Nyki got bail and spent 3 and 1/2 years on house arrest. They are extremely close and she has been visiting her at the Kitchener prison with the rest of the family on a regular basis. They even have sleepovers right there in the prison in the private family visiting house, where they live like a regular family for three day stretches. They cook, dance, make art and sing songs, watch movies and play in the backyard.

Nyki’s friends also visit her regularly. She is lucky that her family lives only an hour away as many women prisoners rarely get visits due to distance.

When the news of the rejection of her appeal came down yesterday, her family and her supporters were devastated. Nicole will remain strong because of her family, friends and supporters, who now are ready to continue the fight in the court of public opinion and this time, Nyki will lead the parade. It’s time to turn the tide and get this Dame a break!

I feel for the tragic passing of Ross Hammond and do not want his memory in any shape or form tarnished but in my opinion, his death is as much of a mystery as Nyki’s conviction.

Excerpts from “A Message from Nyki”

So the system is more corrupt and broken than even I believed. I believed in the appeal I just lost. I have believed since the day I was charged that somewhere within the system one of the many pairs of eyes that comprise it would see what has happened and stop it. Now last night I found myself lying awake wishing that I was guilty like they say I am, terrible as it sounds because then I could at least understand. But then I let my tears out and I stopped wishing such a terrible thing…

In my frantic state on my birthday in 2007, I did not even realize that anyone had been hurt but me. I screamed and screamed for those police to come and I was so angry at them when they came and told me that I was not their priority. But I called for the police, I did not run away that night, I had no reason to.

I never spoke about that night again though. This system has told me not to for this reason or that every single day since. But now, I have no reason not to speak. There are no avenues or safeguards in the system left to hold on to. I am confronted with the reality that I am systemically abandoned.

* * * * *

I am sorry I don’t reply to all the kind and caring letters I receive and I am sorry that I have left people fight for me outside without fighting beside you in here. I lost my hope but I have again found it and I will never let it go again, to speak not just for me but against the whole insane state of the institutions of law and justice. There is no equality or justness within them.

Thank you for the continued love and support of everyone out there who care about the truth or who care for me or who care about people doing the right thing. I’ll do my best to do the right thing too from in here. And that starts by ending the silence I’ve let occur.

So much love and solidarity

Nyki Kish

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Here on All Things Crime Blog, we’ve seen several stories in which abusive parents lock their children in cages as part of an overall pattern of abuse. Now we have a new story in which a full grown woman, 30-year-old Joelle Lockwood, was held captive in a wooden cage in a mobile home in Indiana by a twisted couple, reportedly for baby-making purposes, which means she was raped regularly by the man of the house, a certain Rick House.

Joelle was kidnapped on July 9th by House and his girlfriend, Kendra Tooley. In addition to being raped and generally abused by the demented couple, she was forced to wear a dog collar and go around half-naked much of the time. Joelle would still be in captivity were it not for the heroic rescue efforts of Kendra Tooley’s ex-husband, Ronald Higgs.

Nina Golgowski and Jason Molinet of the New York Daily News write:

Higgs said it was his ex-wife, Kendra S. Tooley, who asked him to come over to the mobile home to financially help her and her boyfriend, Rick H. House Jr., on Thursday afternoon.

Higgs said he initially didn’t want to, but for a reason he couldn’t explain, he did.

(Higgs now believes that it must have been God’s doing that brought him to the mobile home to rescue Joelle.)

Once Higgs, who has a heart condition and had just gotten out of the hospital, decided to go visit Tooley, 44, and House, 37, it was agreed that he would spend a few days there.

Although Higgs is a giant of a man and was a biker for 30 years, he appears to be rather modest and unassuming. He told the Tristate Homepage that when he first saw Joelle and the giant wooden cage, he didn’t know what to think.

According to Regina Avalos of Mesa Top News Examiner, Joelle was not kept in the cage at all times:

“When she was not locked up in the cage, the couple forced her to do chores around their mobile home naked. House and Tooley rarely fed or gave water to Lockwood during her time in the home.”

At first, Higgs didn’t realize Joelle was being held against her will, but by Friday afternoon, the captive had clued him in to the fact she was being treated in truly abominable fashion. Higgs described their conversation in an interview with WFIE:

“She said, ‘please,’ with tears in her eyes, ‘Don’t leave here without me.’ And I promised her. I promised her. If I have to give my life to get you out of here, I will.”

In another interview, Higgs told the Tristate Homepage:

“I didn’t really know what I could do because I’m nowhere near the man I used to be, but I’m not leaving this house without her. I don’t care what I have to do. She’s coming home.”

Higgs reports that once he decided to rescue Joelle, he first offered to buy her from the couple. This would seem quite logical given that House and Tooley needed money. The couple refused, however, forcing Higgs to resort to more drastic measures, which he instituted late Saturday afternoon.

Meanwhile, Higgs gradually realized that Joelle was being used as a sex slave for baby-making purposes. He recounts:

“The whole time during it all they was talking about a baby. ‘She’s not leaving here until she has the baby. I’m not selling her, you’re not taking her, you’re not doing nothing.’ She told me Ricky was raping her, making her have oral sex. Kendra can’t have more children and Ricky doesn’t have any children of his own. I hate to say this to the public or even her even hearing it, but I think they were just going to have a baby and we would never see her again.”

On Saturday afternoon, Higg’s phoned one of his daughters and rather cryptically told her that if wasn’t home by 5:15, she should call the police and tell them where he was, that he was in danger, and that he had something (or someone) they were looking for.

When Higgs ultimately made it clear that he was not leaving without Joelle, he and House brawled. At one point, House confronted him with a shotgun and at another point, Higgs head-butted House and reportedly knocked him across the room (which must have been extremely painful).

It’s not precisely clear how he and Joelle eventually managed to leave the house trailer from hell, but my sense is, it was a combination of two things: 1) House and Tooley knew the police would come looking for Higgs if they didn’t release Joelle (and of course knew where he was); and 2) Higgs told the kidnappers that he would tell the authorities that he had found Joelle wandering the countryside in a state of disrepair.

In any event, after Higgs and Joelle left the trailer, they soon went to the police. Sometime after that, Joelle was reunited with her family. The Evansville SWAT team then raided the home and arrested the kidnappers.

“I would say their state when they were taken into custody was emotionless,” Posey County Sheriff Greg Oeth told the Courier & Press of House of Tooley and House’s arrest.

The couple was formally charged with rape and criminal confinement on Monday.

Although Higgs is being hailed a hero, which he of course is, he is working hard to deflect the praise:

“Everybody’s calling me a hero. I’m just a pure-bred American that believes in freedom” he told WFIE.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Note: David Lee Simpson’s trial is apparently set for September 15th. Let’s hope it goes forward this time.

It is well-known that a great many of the women who closely followed the Jodi Arias trial despise the very ground (or currently concrete) that she walks upon. I imagine it is some combination of the fact that she brutally slaughtered the fresh-faced Travis Alexander — with his boy next door good looks and his apparently pleasing motivational-speaker ways — combined with the fact that Jodi is perceived by many as a prevaricating, promiscuous, manipulative, anal-sex loving, prima donna.

It turns out, however, that there are some men wandering about this land who actually prefer Jodi to Travis, and in some cases even had (or still have) powerful crushes on the allegedly good-looking young murderess. Fortunately, I do not fall into that category. With my monk-like ways, I am largely indifferent to Jodi’s personal appearance and simply find poor Travis to be very dead. That much is clear. My feelings toward him are no different than my feelings toward any unfortunate soul who has the bad luck to be murdered as a result of a love affair gone wrong.

But this brief post is not about me and my feelings for Jodi and poor Travis. This post is about an arguably dangerous man named David Lee Simpson, a 48-year old resident of Bath, New York, who is charged with three felony counts of computer tampering and two felony counts of stalking, based on online threats he made against HLN’s Nancy Grace and Jane Velez-Mitchell and an unnamed Phoenix  newswoman. David Lohr at Huffington Post has the story:

According to Maricopa County prosecutor Edward Leiter, Simpson — who had apparently become infatuated with Jodi — became so incensed and hostile toward Nancy Grace and Jane Velez-Mitchell because of the negative things they were saying about Arias both before and during the course of the trial that he tweeted in June that he wanted to tie them to a “tree naked and leave them to suffer all night” and then “slit their throats.” Although this may or may not have been quite enough on its own to land Simpson in the slammer, he made it much worse by allegedly telling a co-worker at an auto repair shop in Bath that he wanted to gut one of the TV commentators “like a deer.”

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has reiterated that Simpson made the threats because he was “infatuated with Jodi Arias” and was upset with all the nasty things that the two broadcasters were saying about her while covering her  murder trial.

The coffin nail for Simpson was that during a (not so) routine traffic stop on July 17th, while still in New York but reportedly on his way to Georgia to “take care of business” with Nancy Grace, the police searched his vehicle and allegedly found guns, handcuffs, zip-ties, binoculars, a knife and a police radio. The detectives also found a news article about the Newtown shooting.

“This suspect was on his way south with enough weapons in his car to do serious harm to someone,” Arpaio said at a press conference following Simpson’s arrest.

Now although I usually take what Sheriff Joe says with a grain of salt, this time he may be on the level. Simpson appeared in court on Oct. 16 at a pre-trial conference hearing before Maricopa County Superior Court judge Margaret Mahoney. At the hearing, Simpson’s lawyer, Casey Martin, told the judge he has been in talks with the prosecutor about a possible plea deal for his client.

In response, Judge Mahoney ordered both parties to appear at a settlement conference to discuss the matter.

Simpson, who was extradited to Arizona in July, had previously entered a not guilty plea to the charges.

As is well-known, Arias — the unwitting motivation behind Simpson’s alleged actions — was convicted in May of killing her ex-boyfriend, Travis Alexander. The jury determined she stabbed Alexander nearly 30 times, slit his throat and then shot him in the head at his Arizona home. The Arias jury, however, failed to reach a unanimous decision on whether she should receive life in prison or the death penalty. A second sentencing phase jury is scheduled to commence deliberations this coming September. If this jury fails to reach a verdict, the death penalty is off the table and the judge will sentence Ms. Arias.

*     *     *     *     *

At Simpson’s settlement conference, a resolution was not reached which is why it is now preceding to trial.

I don’t have a strong sense of what would be a fair resolution in the David Lee Simpson matter. The threats alone certainly need to be taken seriously, but then, when you toss in Simpson’s “stalking arsenal” complete with the Newtown news article, the profile of a potential psycho-killer begins to emerge. Would 5 years in prison be enough? 1o years? If he was to receive a 5-year term to be served in the Arizona State penitentiary, it would cost the Arizona taxpayers somewhere in the vicinity of $150,000. Would this be a small price to pay to protect the public? It’s a difficult question that doesn’t lend itself to easy answers. A Psychological Evaluation is certainly in order and, I would think, will most likely occur at some point in the proceedings. And if we are to be brutally honest (something we sometimes try to avoid), isn’t obvious that Mr. Simpson’s ultimate sentence should be served in a lock-down state mental facility as opposed to a state penitentiary?

by John Paolucci

11:30 at night, South Bronx, NYC, in the basement of a Housing Project, a dozen cops congregate in the back of a dingy room. Some are sitting, some standing, talking, smoking, writing in their memo books. Any sign of shoe polish or even the original black dye have been scuffed from their leather boots and gun belts.  The leather thumb locks on their holsters have been worn to a suede texture from drawing and holstering their revolvers so many times.  The backing plates for their shields are piled high with medals and memorial bars worn to commemorate fallen officers.  A Sergeant walks in:

“Thanks for showing up, guys.  Time for roll call.”

Housing “precincts” were called “PSAs” which stood for “Police Service Areas”.  Each borough had its own PSA, located in the basement of a Housing project.  Lesson Number One was to always look up when walking into a PSA.  Some of the residents liked sending “Air Mail” projectiles which might include frozen water bottles, paint cans or even bed frames thrown from roof tops and apartment windows, aimed at your head.  We joked about saddling up some of the resident “critters” we shared space with — the rats, squirrels and water bugs — and riding them into roll call.  The conditions we worked under were light years from CSI New York, but we were proud of what we did.

As the roll call continued, vehicles, partners and sectors were assigned, against a backdrop of raucous shop talk from another room where the previous shift was changing into their civilian clothes. They had survived another day and were getting ready to unwind at a local bar.  Nobody walked out the door without their shield, ID card and firearm for the two block trek to the parking lot where their cars were waiting, hopefully none the worse for wear.

The Sergeant finished briefing the “Midnight” or “1^st Platoon” roll call and advised us of any extreme conditions to be aware of such as stolen vehicles and perpetrators that we might come across during our tour of duty, then wrapped things up by saying:

“Call me if you REALLY need me.  And be safe out there.”

If you were lucky enough to get in your car without a backlog of calls to respond to, you threaded your way to wherever you could get a decent cup of coffee (no easy task in this neighborhood), and downed your first cup of the night.  No donut shops where we worked and no offense taken when civilians started making with the cop/donut jokes in an attempt to get under our skin.  Generally, by the time I’d be taking the last few sips of that first coffee, my feet would be doing a two-step in one of the puddles of urine that sloshed around on the floor of damned near every elevator in the South Bronx Housing Projects.  Just another day at the office for a Housing cop.  They kept me busy right from my first day on the job.

“Housing Police!  Don’t move!  Don’t Laugh!” Jimmy Barnes, my field training officer stood in a mock combat stance with his hands simulating a firearm.  Then he laughed.  “Don’t worry John, you’re gonna love this job. Just so you know, the first thing everybody’s gonna ask you is ‘Do you guys have guns?’  What do they know?  They wouldn’t drive through here in an armoured car! Now let’s go get a collar.”

Summertime 1992, the crack epidemic still in full swing, as Mayor David Dinkins and NYPD Police Commissioner Lee “Out of Town” Brown tried to wrestle with a murder rate that was on track to exceed 2,000 for the year – again.  Making a “collar” wasn’t rocket science, and motivated Housing cops were free to make all the self-initiated arrests they could manage.  We were far from the political spotlight, patrolling areas that the newspapers paid little attention to.  Violence was a part of our daily routine and it would take at least a triple homicide to attract media attention. A Housing cop involved in a shooting was less likely to make the papers than our NYPD counterparts.

Jimmy and I walked through the mean streets amidst death stares and trash talk: “Woop-woop.  It’s the Po-Po, yo”.  We rounded a corner and Jimmy pulled me into the lobby of a building.

“D’jasee that kid with no shirt and the gold teeth?  See that potato chip bag he just tossed, see the way it hit the ground. Somethin’ funny about that bag. Now c’mon.  And keep smiling.” 

I followed Jimmy while he broke into a boisterous fishing story, complete with animated gestures. We walked towards the “posse” who were fronting a playground, loitering in front of the park benches.  I could feel the adrenaline coursing through my legs with each step — ready to pursue, take cover or whatever else the moment called for. This was what I had been waiting for; this was why I’d toughed the training and everything else I’d gone through to get here. With an exaggerated ‘fish this big’ gesture, fast as lightning Jimmy grabbed Gold Teeth’s arm and twisted it up into the small of his back, bending him over the wrought iron fence.

“What’s in the bag Johnny?” I picked up the chip bag and opened it.  Small plastic vials with purple tops containing a white rock like substance where the chips once were. Just like that, we had a felony narcotics arrest.  As I prepared to cuff the perp, a dirty diaper followed by a sea of water bottles began exploding on the sidewalk in front of us.  Jimmy dragged me and Gold Teeth under a convenient overhang and started talking into his radio.

“Housing 1-3-0 K.  Show us with 1 under, front of 3-1-5 East 1-4-3.  We’ve got air mail here!”  This transmission was answered by two of our Housing brethren in a sector car:

“Housing 9-2-2-5.  Show us responding.  Have that unit eighty-five us in the rear of 3-1-5 East 1-4-3.”  I cuffed Gold Teeth and a short siren blast informed us that we could dash out the back door to safety with our prisoner.  As Jimmy, Gold Teeth and I sat in the back seat, the sector car sped through the project playground, jumped the curb and hit the street. Jimmy and the driver made small talk.  No lights, no sirens, no stopping on red; we were inspired lawmen in a lawless town.

I learned a lot from the old timers, adding my own little twists to their techniques as I became more comfortable in that environment.  We would set up observation posts in vacant project apartments and study the activities of drug dealers, observing where they stashed their drugs and their proceeds. Then we’d set out to take-down the perps who either fought or fled. Sometimes we’d get hurt but more often it was them. Whoever made the collar would walk into the PSA with a pile of crack cocaine, money, and sometimes firearms. It was a great feeling to count it all out in front of the desk officer.  No need to call a Sergeant; we all knew the protocol.

I recall watching a NYPD foot post standing on a corner with a dealer selling crack vials a few feet away.  When I collared the dealer and recovered his stash from the pay phone, I asked the cop, “You guys didn’t know he was selling crack under your noses?”

“We knew.  We’re not allowed to make drug collars.”

Many of us carried a bag of tools on patrol to assist with the various situations we’d regularly encounter.  Things like pry bars, lump hammers and bolt cutters could make all the difference when the need arose to gain entry to a location in pursuit of some “Skell”.  Housing cops knew just how and where to kick a project door in when our subjects proved inhospitable.   We resolved family disputes, found missing kids, made arrests for violent assaults with the perpetrator still on the scene, seized large quantities of narcotics and money, all without ever requesting a Sergeant’s response, unless he was the only one available for backup or to give us a ride if we were on foot post. We were treated like grownups, and given a lot of freedom and responsibility which in turn made us feel important, like we made a difference out there in the badlands. The crummy conditions of our PSA and in the Housing Projects, coupled with the violence and danger we faced every day acted as a super-glue, bonding us all together.

In 1995, Mayor Giuliani merged the Housing Police and the Transit Police with “City”, which was the term for NYPD when there were three separate agencies.  “Housing” was no more.  Our funny looking orange & blue cars were painted blue & white. We went from one Housing patch on the left shoulder to a NYPD patch on each shoulder.  Supervisors who never worked the projects were suddenly our bosses and they showed up at all of our radio runs.  Roll calls lasted longer and the tone was a lot less friendly.  We had to polish our boots but whoever was urinating in all the elevators didn’t even have the decency to stop leaving puddles out of respect for our new image!

Shortly after the merge or “Hostile Takeover” as we liked to call it, I started working U.C. in Narcotics which was like a three year leave of absence from the Police Department.  It was there that I received my promotion to Detective, and then passed the test and was promoted to Sergeant which meant a return to uniform duties.  I was assigned to the Housing Bureau in Central Harlem, due to my prior experience in the projects.  Now that everyone was “NYPD”, the personnel assigned to the projects were considered to be part of the “Housing Bureau”. We were no longer “Housing Cops.”

I was unaware of all the changes that had transpired in the “Post Merge” era due to the fact that I was undercover while all this was taking place. I had an old Housing cop, Bill Parker, as my driver when I first went out on patrol as a Sergeant in the “NYPD”. I went to backup some young cops chasing a knife-wielding perp who had just carved up his girlfriend before committing the rude gesture of locking himself in an apartment.  The cops pointed out which door and I braced myself against the opposite wall to get the leverage to perform the old Housing mule-kick. The door jumped but it would take more than a single kick to bust it down.

Bill grabbed my arm:  “Sarge, you gotta call the Lieutenant!”

“Really Bill?  He must be a pretty strong SOB?”

“No Sarge.  You can’t do that stuff anymore.  You gotta call the Lieutenant!”

So I did, very reluctantly, and he called the Captain, who called the Duty Inspector, and finally, in a sea of white shirts, the decision was made to call the Emergency Service Unit who have all the official tools to break down a door, just a wee bit more sophisticated than the old Housing tool bags that we had carried on patrol just a few years earlier.

I watched this trend continue and little by little virtually all decision-making power was removed from the line level responders.  It spread like a virus into the investigative units where a young Captain who never worked crime scenes or homicide investigations would walk around telling Detectives with 20 years experience how to do their jobs.  Units once commanded by a Lieutenant now had a Deputy Inspector as the Commanding Officer and a Captain as the Executive Officer.  Morale declined steadily as seasoned veterans had their wings clipped, and the focus shifted from catching the bad guys to scoring points for the Captain at the next Compstat meeting.

We could argue that the homicide rates are dropping, but that’s illusory because once again shootings are way up. Some of the credit should go to the crackerjack ER Trauma teams and the dramatic advances in the medical field. We original “Housing” cops still congregate now and then and tell war stories of how we handled things when we had nearly total freedom, back during that incredibly violent era in New York City history.  Ironically, many of us old timers do give thanks to the new style of management for one thing: the decision as to whether or not it’s time to retire has been made a whole lot easier.

About the Author:  John Paolucci is a retired Detective Sergeant from NYPD. He worked in the New York City Housing Police in the South Bronx for four years and undercover in Harlem for another three years. After being promoted to Detective Sergeant, he spent his last eight years on the force in the Forensic Investigations Division, four of them as a Crime Scene Unit supervisor.  He was the first ever to command the OCME Liaison Unit where he managed all DNA evidence in NYC and trained thousands of investigators in DNA evidence collection and documentation. He developed a strong alliance between the OCME Forensic Biology Department and NYPD. John is currently the president of Forensics 4 Real Inc., where he provides forensic support to private investigations, international and domestic.  He also trains students and law enforcement in forensic evidence and crime scene investigations and provides consultations with movie and television writers, directors and developers working on real crime shows and dramas.  www.forensics4real.com.

Click here to view Officer Paolucci’s earlier post, Forensic Dispatch From New York City: Searching a House of Horror:

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Although it doesn’t exist in reality, it almost seems that there is a nationwide conspiracy among child abusers to come up with new and creative ways to abuse children. A recent alleged abuser, Adam Morton, 27, of Berlin, New Hampshire appears to have come up with a novel form of abuse that was very painful to the victim and virtually effortless on his part. He merely placed the victim in his girlfriend’s clothes dryer, turned it on and gave the boy a “ride”

The 2-year-old boy had second-degree burns on his back and arms, blisters on his feet, and bruises all over his body. The burn pattern allegedly matched the drum of a clothes dryer and there was a series of cuts and lacerations that matched the bolts on the inside of the appliance, according to a probable cause affidavit filed by Bangor detective Tim Shaw.

Nok-Noi Ricker of the Bangor Daily News writes:

A New Hampshire man accused of placing his girlfriend’s 2-year-old son in a clothing dryer at her Bangor home last month and turning on the machine remained behind bars Monday.

Adam Morton, 27, of Berlin, New Hampshire, was charged with aggravated assault Aug. 28 and remained in custody at the Penobscot County Jail in Bangor.

“Mr. Morton admitted that on August 2, 2014, he put [the boy] into the dryer, shut the door and turned it on,” Shaw wrote in the affidavit, referring to the injured child. “He stated that [the child] was not in the dryer for very long. He indicated that the dryer made only one revolution.”

Now the ghastly truth is, if the child was actually in the dryer for only one revolution, it seems unlikely that he would have sustained second-degree burns as well as the other damage unless the perp had warmed the dryer up for quite a period of time so that it was RED-HOT. Furthermore, if the child was really only taken on a one-revolution ride, the dryer probably wouldn’t have picked up enough speed to cause “bruises all over his body”, etc. Therefore, I suspect the poor child was probably in the dryer for a lot longer than one revolution.

In fact, Dr. Lawrence Ricci, a Portland physician who consults with the Maine Department of Health and Human Services in child abuse and neglect cases, told the police:

“Based on an analysis of the lesions, this trauma could only have occurred inside the dryer. It is also likely that the child was in the dryer for a fairly prolonged period of time, and the dryer, indeed, may have been turning.”

In order to see for themselves, the police tested the dryer and determined it could reach temperatures of up to 180 degrees by running for three minutes.

At the time of the alleged crime, the child’s 24-year-old mother, whose name has apparently not been revealed, had recently split up with the father of the victim and his three older siblings, and had been dating Morton for only a short period of time.

The child’s mother returned home from work at around 4 p.m. on Aug. 2, only to discover her two-year-old was badly injured. She immediately took him to the emergency room at Eastern Maine Medical Center.

The mother does not believe, however, that her new boyfriend is the one who subjected her child to this torture. Nok-Noi Ricker writes:

“For me, I don’t believe for a second Adam did it,” the mother said Monday, standing on the front steps of her apartment holding her scarred child. “It just doesn’t make sense to me. For me, [the evidence is] inconclusive.”

“Somebody had to do something to him. He was really beat up,” she said later. “He has three older brothers, and boys get crazy and play rough.”

It is the mother’s contention that the police pressured Morton into confessing to a crime he didn’t commit:

“The detective said things would go a lot smoother if he confessed. It was weeks of pressure. It wasn’t just two interviews. I told him to get a polygraph. I told him not to confess to something you never did.”

“It’s not because of my feeling for Adam. It just doesn’t make sense. I can’t explain what happened. I can’t explain how he got the burns.”

Detective Josh Kuhn and Tim Shaw reportedly interviewed Morton twice in Berlin, New Hampshire, where he moved to from Bangor shortly after the incident. Morton apparently confessed on August 27th.

“I asked him if he ‘snapped,’ he told me he did,” Shaw wrote. “He stated he was remorseful and regretted that it had ever happened.”

According to the affidavit, Morton’s story changed several times during the course of the questioning. He initially said he did a load of laundry while he took a shower. At another point, he accused the older boys of injuring the child before finally admitting to the aggravated felony assault that could result in up to 10 years in prison.

The mother’s protestations notwithstanding, I suspect that Morton did put the child in the dryer, turned it on and left him there for way too long.

Although his bail is only $2,500, Morton has been unable to post it and remains in jail at present. Superior Court Justice Ann Murray has barred him from contacting any children under the age of 6.

As is often the situation in cases of this nature, Morton is likely to be indicted by the Grand Jury, and was not asked to enter a plea at his initial appearance.

The victim and his three brothers are reportedly still living in Bangor with their mother.

The boy’s father, Mike Sousa of New Hampshire, feels that a potential 10-year prison stretch is hardly sufficient for a crime of this magnitude.

“The charges were aggravated assault, which I kinda question. If he’s a 30-year-old man, and my son is a 2-year-old boy and he admits to putting him in a dryer. I don’t know what world we live in today, but that’s definitely … attempted murder at least.”
Sousa justified his opinion, in part, by describing the boy’s injuries:

“It was really awful. There was like a yellow pus on his really bad burn on his [right] elbow, and it stretched [across his back] to his left shoulder blade.

* * * * *

It goes without saying that what Morton did is really awful (assuming he is guilty). What I also find to be of concern is the fact the victim’s mother entrusted the care of her four boys to Morton when she hardly knew him. As any experienced parent knows all too well, trying to keep four lively boys in check is no easy task, especially when they don’t know you and may, in fact, be suspicious of the fact you are “getting naked” with their mother. Just a bad situation all around.

I am curious, however, as to what Morton was thinking. Did it really think he was going to get away with it? This assumes guilt, of course, but it seems somewhat unlikely that he would have confessed to a crime this serious if he were innocent, no matter how hard the police leaned on him.