by Darcia Helle

Allow me to tell you a story about a woman born into the most dismal of circumstances. Her mother is a young teen when she marries a violent man. He is soon arrested and convicted of the rape and attempted murder of a 7-year-old girl. By some reports, her father is schizophrenic. Her mother decides parenting is too difficult and soon abandons her.

Life gets no better for this woman. She’s never given a chance to succeed. Under these circumstances, it’s human nature to feel sympathy for this woman right?

Now what if I tell you this woman became a serial killer? Does that change how you feel about her?

This woman’s name is Aileen Carol Wuornos, and she is considered our most famous female serial killer. She was born in Rochester, Michigan on February 29, 1956. She confessed to, and was put to death for, the murders of six men.

Aileen’s history is murky, surrounded by half-truths and suppositions. The truth is bad enough and needs no distortion. Her parents – Diane Wuornos and Leo Dale Pittman – were married in1954. Sources differ on Diane’s age at the time; she was either 14 or 15-years-old. All sources agree that Pittman was a violent man. He had beaten his grandmother repeatedly, and his favorite pastime as an adolescent was to tie the tails of two cats together, sling them over a clothesline, and watch them fight.

Diane gave birth to Aileen’s older brother Keith in 1955. She promptly became pregnant again but, two months before Aileen was born, Leo Dale Pittman vanished from their  lives forever. Here again accounts differ. Most state that Pittman had been arrested and went to prison, though at least one source has him enlisted in the military in order to avoid petty criminal charges. Either way, Diane left him and Aileen never met her father. At some point, Pittman was arrested for and convicted of the rape and attempted murder of a 7-year-old girl. He died in prison in 1969. Most sources say he hung himself, although there are also rumors that he was strangled by another inmate.

While still a young teenager, Diane found herself the single parent of two babies, and the ex-wife of a child rapist. Those early years appear to have been disastrous for all involved. Unable to cope with her responsibilities, Diane handed Aileen and Keith over to her parents, Lauri and Britta Wuornos. Aileen was four-years-old.

Lauri and Britta raised their two grandchildren alongside their other children. Oddly, Keith and Aileen believed Lauri and Britta were their parents. No clear explanation seems to exist as to how or why these two children were able to simply forget the woman they’d call Mommy so completely.

Britta Wuornos was an alcoholic. Some accounts describe her as “strict”, while others call her abusive. Lauri Wuornos had little patience and would often whip Aileen with his belt. The environment was far from ideal for two young and troubled children. In 1962, when Aileen was six, she and her brother Keith used lighter fluid to set fires. Aileen was badly burned on one occasion and left with permanent scarring.

Some sources say Aileen was selling sexual favors at school by the age of nine, though this information is sketchy and probably not reliable.

Aileen Wuornos claimed that both Lauri and Keith sexually abused her from an early age. There is, of course, no firm evidence for this. Neither her grandfather nor her brother ever made any such admissions, and Aileen did not have the kind of family or social support she needed to turn to for help.

At around the age of 12, Aileen discovered that Mom and Dad were actually her grandparents. This information caused even further turmoil in the children’s lives. They acted out, but no rational adult stepped in to help.

When she was just 14-years-old, Aileen became pregnant. She claimed Keith was the father, though, again, there is no proof of this. She was sent away to a home for unwed mothers and, in 1971, gave birth to a boy who was put up for adoption.

In July of 1971, shortly after Aileen gave birth, Britta Wuornos died of apparent liver failure due to alcohol abuse. Lauri wanted nothing to do with raising his grandchildren alone, and insisted Keith and Aileen be made wards of the state. The two were removed from the home, and soon afterward Aileen ran away. With no education, no family or friends to help her, and no reasonable means of supporting herself, Aileen turned to petty crime and prostitution.

In May of 1974, at the age of 18, Aileen was arrested for disorderly conduct, drunk driving, and firing a weapon from a vehicle. And this was only the beginning.

Within the next couple of years, Aileen’s brother Keith died of throat cancer and her grandfather committed suicide. Aileen was 20-years-old and completely alone, so she stuck out her thumb and took to life on the road.

While out hitchhiking, Aileen was picked up by a 69-year-old, wealthy yacht club president named Lewis Fell. He was love-struck and almost immediately proposed, which might have been the only bit of luck Aileen ever experienced. They were married in Georgia, with the wedding announcement even making it into the society pages. But Aileen was unable to settle into married life. She got into bar fights and was soon arrested for assault. Approximately one month after the wedding, Lewis Fell realized his mistake and had their marriage annulled. In his divorce petition, Fell claimed Aileen had beaten him with his cane.

Aileen continued along her path of destruction for the next decade. She drank too much, did drugs, sold her body, committed robbery, and vandalized property. In 1981, she was so distraught over the breakup with her boyfriend that she planned to commit suicide. She bought a gun and got drunk in preparation, but then changed her mind and instead robbed a grocery store while wearing her bikini. She was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison. After serving 18 months, she was released from prison and went to live with one of her male prison pen pals. This relationship didn’t work, and Aileen was once again on her own.

Aileen was lonely and angry at the world when, in 1986, she met 24-year-old Tyria Moore at a biker bar in Florida. Their attraction was instant and mutual. Aileen went home with Tyria that evening, and the two spent the entire weekend in Tyria’s bedroom. From then on, the two were inseparable. Tyria, known as Ty, provided the unconditional love Aileen had been missing all her life. For a time, Aileen seemed to find an anchor in the raging sea of her life.

But her fairytale was not all bliss. The couple led a nomadic lifestyle, sleeping in cheap motels or in the woods. Aileen continued selling her body for money to survive. While Ty later claimed begged Aileen to stop prostituting herself, there is no evidence that she made an effort to help support them in any way, legal or otherwise. In fact, at the start of their relationship, Ty quit her job in order to spend more time with Aileen. While Aileen was out hooking to buy them food, Ty was typically at the bars drinking away what little money they had.

After a few years of this, Aileen was struggling to support them. Money was tight and problems arose. Aileen feared that Ty would abandon her, as everyone else in her life had. She felt desperate and would do anything to hold on to the one person that she’d ever truly loved. This volatile mix of emotions led Aileen straight to the crisis she’d been working toward all her life.

On November 30, 1989, in Tampa, Florida, Aileen was picked up by Richard Mallory. And this is where it all goes horribly wrong. Until shortly before her execution, Aileen maintained that Mallory tried to rape her, and that she shot him in self-defense. Mallory was known to frequently pick up prostitutes along the interstate. He also had a criminal record, having been convicted of rape in the past, but this information was not introduced when Aileen was eventually brought to trial. Regardless of any initial intent, on that day in November, Aileen shot Mallory three, or possibly four times, stole his money and his car, and drove straight back to Ty.

Aileen told Ty about the murder right away, though Ty later claimed she hadn’t believed her. Still, Tyria didn’t appear worried about where the money and car had come from. The two women packed up Mallory’s Cadillac that night and left the motel in a hurry. Once they’d relocated, they wiped their prints from the car and ditched it near Daytona.

After Mallory’s murder, life for Aileen and Tyria returned to their version of normal. Even so, their lack of money was always a point of stress for Aileen. When Tyria’s sister came to stay with them, Aileen was convinced Ty would leave with her sister and go back to Ohio. Jealousy, fear, insecurity, and anger pushed Aileen over the edge. During that three-week period, she robbed, shot, and killed three more men.

On July 4th, 1990, Aileen and Tyria, during a particularly heated argument, crashed the car they were driving in Orange Springs, Florida. They fled the scene on foot, but a witness described both women to the police. The vehicle they’d wrecked belonged to Peter Siems, a missing 65-year-old retired merchant seaman. The interior of the car showed signs of a struggle. Police obtained a number of palm and fingerprints from the car, and the women’s descriptions were circulated throughout Florida.

Eventually, police connected the murders, realizing they had a female serial killer on the loose. By mid-December, 1990, a number of leads led them to Tyria Moore. They also had three other names – Lee Blahovec, Lori Grody and Cammie Marsh Greene – all of which matched the description of the second woman. When Aileen used her Cammie Marsh Greene ID to pawn a camera that had belonged to Richard Mallory, she was required by law to provide fingerprint identification. She later pawned a set of tools matching the description of those missing from David Spears’ truck. Those fingerprints from the pawn shops matched fingerprints taken from the crashed car belonging to Peter Siems. The information was passed on to the National Crime Information Center, where they were able to connect Aileen Wuornos’s name to the three aliases. By January 5, 1991, the police finally had names for their suspected serial killing females and were ready to move in.

By this time, Aileen had lost her struggle to hold on to Tyria. Devastated over the breakup, Aileen was once again on her own.

On January 8, 1991, two undercover cops spotted Aileen at the Port Orange Pub. They bought her a few beers and later offered her a ride, which she declined. She left the pub around 10 p.m., and they followed her to a biker bar called The Last Resort. There the undercover cops sat with her and bought her a few more beers. The cops left at midnight, but kept Aileen under surveillance. She spent her last night as a free woman sleeping on an old car seat at The Last Resort.

The following afternoon, the decision was made to arrest Aileen rather than to risk losing her. The two undercover cops offered to let Aileen use their motel room to clean up. She accepted the offer, but when she walked out of the bar with them she was arrested on what police told her was an outstanding warrant for Lori Grody, one of her aliases. They did not let on that they knew her true identity. No mention was made of the murders, and the media was not told that Aileen was their suspected serial killer. The police were being extra cautious because they had no murder weapon and had yet to find Tyria Moore.

The following day, on January 10, 1991, Tyria was found. She’d been living with her sister in Pittston, Pennsylvania. Tyria was read her rights but not arrested or charged with a crime. In short order, Tyria gave Aileen up as the killer. Despite later interviews where she claimed not to have believed Aileen’s first murder confession, Tyria told the cops she’d known about the murders from the very beginning. “I told her I didn’t want to hear about it,” she told the police. “And then any time she would come home after that and say certain things, telling me about where she got something, I’d say I don’t want to hear it.”

The next day, Tyria Moore went back to Florida along with the police, not as a criminal, but as a witness to help them ensure Aileen Wuornos’s conviction.

Tyria was put in a motel in Daytona and told to contact Aileen at the prison. Her cover story was that her mother had given her money to come back down to Florida in order to pick up the rest of her belongings. Phone conversations were taped, and Tyria was instructed to tell Aileen the police had been questioning her family about her and the Florida murders.

The first call was made on January 14. Aileen had yet to be charged or even questioned about the murders, and remained under the impression that she’d only been arrested for a weapons violation under the alias of Lori Grody. When Tyria voiced her concerns, as scripted by the police, Aileen reassured her, saying, “I’m only here for that concealed weapons charge in ’86 and a traffic ticket, and I tell you what, man, I read the newspaper, and I wasn’t one of those little suspects.” Aware that prison phones were monitored, Aileen did her best to speak in code. She went on to say, “I think somebody at work – where you worked at – said something that it looked like us. And it isn’t us, see? It’s a case of mistaken identity.”

The calls continued for three days and Tyria played Aileen well. Knowing Aileen would do anything to keep her safe, and to keep her love, Tyria used that advantage as she cried and even suggested she should just kill herself. In listening to the conversations, it seems apparent that Aileen knew something wasn’t right. She even asked Tyria if someone was with her during the conversations. Tyria naturally denied any such thing and played up her fear skillfully. She begged Aileen to tell the cops the truth. On the morning of January 16, 1991, Aileen did just that and confessed to killing six men.

Throughout Aileen’s confession to police, she reiterated two points. First, she adamantly declared Tyria Moore innocent, taking full blame and responsibility for the six murders. The men she admitted to killing were: Richard Mallory, David Spears, Charles Carskaddan, Troy Buress, Dick Humphreys, and Walter Gino Antonio. She denied killing Peter Siems, whose murder police believe she’d committed but whose body was never found. The second point Aileen continually made was that none of it was her fault, not the murders and not the circumstances of her life leading up to them. She insisted all the men she’d killed were aggressive and had either assaulted, threatened, or raped her.

Her public defender, Michael O’Neill, continually advised Aileen to stop talking. She ignored him. Exasperated, he finally said to her, “Do you realize these guys are cops?” Her reply was, “I know. And they want to hang me. And that’s cool, because maybe, man, I deserve it. I just want to get this over with.”

Once the media picked up the story, Aileen Wuornos found instant infamy. Book and movie deals were offered to detectives, relatives, Tyria Moore, and Aileen herself. For a while, Aileen was the media darling and everyone wanted a piece of her. For the first time in her life, people were interested in what she had to say. She relished the limelight, and no doubt enjoyed perfecting and embellishing her story as she went along.

Within two weeks of her arrest, Wuornos and her attorney had sold movie rights to her story. Investigators did the same. Aileen Wuornos’s tragic life story resulted in several books, two movies, and even one opera, called Wuornos by Carla Lucero.

Aileen’s newfound fame brought her an unlikely champion for her cause. Arlene Pralle, a 44-year-old Born Again Christian, ran a horse breeding and boarding facility in Ocala, Florida. After seeing Aileen’s photo and story in the newspaper, Arlene wrote Aileen a letter that began, “My name is Arlene Pralle. I’m born-again. You’re going to think I’m crazy, but Jesus told me to write you.”

Arlene provided her phone number and, on January 30, Aileen called her collect. The two formed an instant bond. Arlene became Aileen’s confidant and defender. On Arlene’s advice, Aileen asked for and received new lawyers. The first public defense team, according to Arlene, was attempting to profit from Aileen’s story. She wanted Aileen to have lawyers who’d work hard to protect her, not to make money off her.

Arlene began speaking to media and tabloids. She appeared on talk shows and arranged interviews for Aileen. When asked about their relationship, Arlene said, “We’re like Jonathan and David in the Bible. It’s as though part of me is trapped in jail with her.” To another reporter, Arlene said, “If the world could know the real Aileen Wuornos, there’s not a jury that would convict her.”

On November 22, 1991, Arlene Pralle and her husband Robert legally adopted Aileen Wuornos because, according to Arlene, God told her to.

Through her defense team, Aileen agreed to plead guilty to the murders of six men in exchange for six consecutive life sentences. But the prosecution was determined to get the death penalty and wouldn’t make the deal. They decided to try her for the murder of Richard Mallory first, since that was their strongest case.

Aileen Wuornos’s trial began on January 14, 1992, with Judge Uriel Blount presiding. The combination of evidence and witnesses for the prosecution was damning. Dr. Arthur Botting, the medical examiner who’d autopsied Mallory, testified that Mallory had taken 10-20 minutes to die an excruciating death. Probably most difficult for Aileen was Tyria Moore’s testimony. Tyria told jurors that Aileen had not seemed upset, nervous, or drunk when she’d returned home and confessed to killing Mallory that day. Not once during her testimony did Tyria meet Aileen’s eyes.

Aileen was damned further by a Florida law called ‘Williams Rule’, which allows prosecution to introduce evidence from pending cases providing they demonstrate a criminal pattern. This enabled the prosecution to tell jurors about the other murders Aileen was suspected of committing, vividly painting her as a vicious serial killer.

Against her lawyer’s advice, Aileen insisted on testifying on her own behalf. The story she told the jury about the night she killed Richard Mallory barely resembled the initial story she’d told on her videotaped confession to police. She now claimed Mallory had raped, sodomized, and tortured her. When the inconsistencies of her story were pointed out on cross-examination, she became agitated and visibly angry. She invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination a total of 25 times.

On January 27, 1992, the jury took less than two hours to return with a verdict: guilty of first-degree murder. As the jury filed out of the courtroom, Aileen shouted, “I’m innocent! I was raped! I hope you get raped, scumbags of America!”

The penalty phase of Aileen’s trial began the following day. Expert defense witnesses testified that Aileen was mentally ill, that she suffered from borderline personality disorder, and that her tumultuous childhood had stunted her emotional growth. Jurors, though, were having none of it and unanimously recommended death. On January 31, 1992, Judge Uriel Blount sentenced Aileen Wuornos to death by electrocution.

That would turn out to be Aileen’s one and only trial. On March 31, she pleaded guilty to the murders of Troy Buress, Dick Humphreys, and David Spears. In her statement to the court, she said, “I wanted to confess to you that Richard Mallory did violently rape me, as I’ve told you. But these others did not. [They] only began to start to.” On May 15, Judge Thomas Sawaya gave Aileen three more death sentences.

In June of 1992, Aileen pleaded guilty to the murder of Charles Carskaddon, for which she received her fifth death sentence.

Finally, in February 1993, she pleaded guilty to the murder of Walter Gino Antonio and was sentenced to death for the sixth and final time.

No charges were brought for the murder of Peter Siems, whose body was never found and whom Aileen still maintained she had not killed.

When evidence was brought to light that Richard Mallory, Aileen’s first victim, had served 10 years in prison for rape, Aileen’s attorneys felt jurors would have viewed that case differently had they been told. For a time, there was speculation of a new trial. But that was not to be. Aileen’s conviction was upheld.

Once sentenced to death, Aileen never wavered in her request that her execution be carried out as soon as possible. For that to happen, she needed to convince the Supreme Court that she was sane and understood what she was asking. In her letter to the Florida Supreme Court, she wrote, “I’m one who seriously hates human life and would kill again.” About this time, Aileen also confessed to murdering Peter Siems, stating she’d killed all seven men for the money. She stressed that she was not a thrill killer as most serial killers were, and had only murdered the men in order to eliminate witnesses. She was a thief, not a killer. Despite confessing to this last murder, she never told anyone and didn’t appear to know the location of Siems’s body. During this same interview, she retracted her claim of killing Mallory in self-defense. She handed everything over in a tidy package so that her execution would not be delayed.

The Court reviewed her letter and all the information, and subsequently allowed Aileen to fire her attorneys and stop her appeals. She was also allowed to choose lethal injection over the electric chair as the manner in which she’d die.

Because the case remained in the media spotlight, Governor Jeb Bush issued a stay of execution and ordered a psychological exam. The execution of mentally ill inmates is against international law. After three psychiatrists deemed Aileen Wuornos sane and able to understand her situation, Bush lifted the stay.

The day before her execution, Aileen gave her final media interview to British producer Nick Broomfield, who had put together a documentary on Aileen in 1993. The interview so rattled Broomfield that, outside the prison afterward, he stated, “My conclusion from the interview is, today we are executing someone who is mad. Here is someone who has totally lost her mind.”

Aileen Wuornos refused her last meal. She was ready to die, resigned to her fate, and maybe even looked forward to the release death would bring.

At 9:47 a.m. on October 9, 2002, Aileen Wuornos was put to death at Florida State Prison. Her last words were, “I’d like to say I’m sailing with the Rock and I’ll be back like Independence Day with Jesus, June 6, like the movie, big mothership and all. I’ll be back.”

In the end, Tyria Moore, the woman Aileen would and did do anything for, both betrayed and abandoned her. Arlene Pralle, her adoptive mother, also abandoned her, and didn’t even know Aileen’s execution date. The only person who remained by Aileen’s side until the end was a childhood friend. The two were committed pen pals throughout Aileen’s prison stay, and they spent some of Aileen’s last hours together

Tyria Moore was never charged with any crime. While it is likely Aileen did commit all the murders on her own, Tyria herself admits to knowing about them from the start. Had she immediately notified the police after Richard Mallory’s murder, Aileen would not have been free to keep killing. Had Tyria gotten a job and taken some financial pressure from Aileen, perhaps things would have turned out differently. Instead, Tyria played a passive-aggressive role, happy to live off the money Aileen brought home after robbing and killing her victims.

Tyria Moore was just the last in a steady line of people who failed Aileen, helping to turn her into the killer she became.

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

The Kidnapping of Mollie Digby: Was the Fair-Haired Stranger Actually Mollie?

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

The characters await you.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

We’ve got us a really sad one here, friends, but a story with more than a modicum of hope and heroism. It’s always heartbreaking to see a beautiful and apparently charming young mother battered with a baseball bat and then shot dead by her war-ravaged boyfriend, who then almost immediately turns the gun on himself, but what would be mere pathos is elevated into something more precious when the lovely young mother dies with her baby in her arms and – somewhat miraculously – manages to save her child from the bat-and-gun-wielding madman in a most unlikely fashion.

Pete Combs of WBSRadio begins our tragic yet uplifting story with the following lead-in:

“She was young, beautiful and tragically killed by her daughter’s father early Sunday morning. Now, Jessica Arrendale, 33, is being hailed by her family as a hero for saving her six-month old daughter’s life, even as she died from a bullet to the head.”

In an exclusive interview with Pete Combs, Jessica’s mother, Teresa Inniello, recounted “the sad details of her daughter’s death and the miraculous survival of her granddaughter, Cobie.”

“It began Saturday night when Jessica and Cobie’s father, 30-year old Antoine Davis, went out for the evening. At some point, Ionniello said, Davis, a former Marine who served in Iraq, became belligerently drunk and abusive. It had happened many times, Ionniello said, but her daughter did not seem able to turn Davis away no matter how often he abused her.”

Thus begins the disturbing tale of an angry, drunken (and probably severely depressed) man taking out his anger and frustration on his relatively helpless girlfriend, who also happens to be the mother of his child. How, where, and why so many men choose to sink this far below ground is beyond me yet it happens with disheartening regularity.

Of course, there are steps along the trail of this descent into the depths. Generally speaking, the fiend will not slaughter the princess out in public; rather, the star-crossed couple will return home, the fiend’s towering rage growing ever stronger before it explodes into an appalling finale in the “sanctity” of the family home.

In this instance, Davis reportedly chased Jessica “up the stairs of her three-story townhome in the Oakdale Bluffs subdivision” of Smyrna, Georgia sometime after the witching hour, according to her mother.

Although it’s unclear who contacted them, the Smyrna police and SWAT team were called, but were understandably reluctant to invade the townhouse, fearful that aggressive actions on their part might incite irrevocable violence. So they waited a full 13 hours hoping against hope that through some miracle anger would be transmuted into calm and a cessation of hostilities.

Rather pathetically, they did send in a robot at some point but the machine was unable to negotiate the stairs in the 3-story building.

In her interview, Jessica’s mother relates that her daughter tried to defend herself from the fiend with a baseball bat, but the former serviceman overpowered her, disarmed her and struck her several times with the bat, apparently also hitting her daughter Cobie in the head. (Cobie is currently hospitalized with a traumatic head injury.)

As is so often the case in endgames of this sort, the terrified victim ended up locking herself in the bathroom, as if this would do any good. Wielding an assault rifle outfitted with a suppressor, the Fiend burst through the door and shot Jessica, who was still holding Cobie in her arms, in the head.

“He shot her and they (police) don’t know how she was able to twist her body and fall literally in the opposite direction,” Ionniello said. Instead of falling onto the floor, Ionniello said her daughter fell over the toilet, dropping little Cobie into the water-filled bowl.

“She had pure will,” Ionniello said. “She wanted that baby to live.”

Jessica’s mother believes that the Fiend intended to kill them both (or perhaps he didn’t give a damn about the now motherless child). In any event, he did what these cowards do so often – after shooting the mother, he walked into the baby’s room and shot himself.

“She was the hero,” Ionniello said, “because her last breath was saving the child.”

13 hours later, the officers finally stormed the townhouse and found the baby in the toilet, covered by her mother’s body.

Colbie remains at Children’s Health Care of Atlanta at Scottish Rite Hospital. Her grandmother hopes to bring her home soon, where she will join her and Jessica’s 15-year old daughter whom she was already caring for.

According to Hilary Hanson of the Huffington Post, Jessica’s friend, Leslie Tidwell Jordan, set up a GoFundMe page to help defray the costs of caring for the baby, as well as Jessica’s older daughter.

Ms. Jordan states on the page that Jessica was the “sole provider for her household”, which, if true, means that the Fiend is not only a murderer of a young mother; he also did not work. The Fund is doing well and as of Tuesday morning, $33,000 had already been raised.

There are allegedly two sides to every story, and the AP reports that according to Tamaira Chesley, who has two children with Davis, he was a good man and a dedicated Marine, who struggled with severe depression and was often sad.

This is no doubt true and we all know that WAR IS HELL and my heart goes out to every military man who served in the Iraqi war, or any war for that matter, but that does not justify killing the mother of his other child. It simply does not and unless Davis was clinically insane, rather than just drunk, furious and stupid over probably very little, there is no excuse at all for what he did.

But whether it was intentional or merely a fortuitous accident, Jessica does appear to have saved her 6-month-old daughter from the Davis’s mindless wrath, and we can only hope that with the help of her grandmother and supportive friends, this now motherless child can grow up to live a life characterized by wholesome values and real accomplishment.

by Patrick H. Moore

Even those who harbor a violent distaste for Karla would probably agree that she is an extremely fascinating woman. If she were dull or ordinary or mundane, she would not be the subject of so much conjecture and the object of so much scrutiny — even if she had been involved in a string of rapes and brutal murders. So the question we must ask ourselves is: what is it about this rapist/serial killer that we find so fascinating? In order to try to shed some light on the question, I’m going to analyze some of Karla’s more provocative quotes as well as certain key incidents in the 1991 to 1993 time frame to see what they reveal about her character.

I think that as we analyze her statements, we initially come to the conclusion that the pieces simply do not add up in a satisfactory manner. Karla is just too darned slippery. But then if we look more closely, we discover that there is a simple, and perhaps, convincing explanation for this. Karla possesses very little rational function. She exists almost entirely on the irrational-intuitive-emotional level. This explains partly why she was (is) so appallingly and gratuitously willful and why she appears to have no conscience. The rational part of her mind, whose job is to balance the emotions and the sub-conscious with everyday rational necessity is extremely undeveloped. At a very essential level, Karla truly could not think straight, at last during the period when she was committing her heinous crimes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exhibit Four: Karla and the Psychic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exhibit Five: Karla and Dr. Hans Arndt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s Wrap This Us:

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

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

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

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

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

Click on the following links to read previous Karla posts:

Watching Karla Homolka: Karla Wheels and Deals but Cannot Beat the Odds

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

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*     *     *     *     *

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

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

Pat Pfeiffer of the Star Tribune writes:

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

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

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

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

During the search, the following items turned up:

three completed bombs,

an SKS assault rifle,

a Beretta 9-mm handgun,

hundreds of rounds of ammo and

a safe with several other guns.

 In chilling detail, a notebook detailed the plan:

first he would kill his parents and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*     *     *     *     *

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

LaDue was infected by this curse.

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

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

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Roxanne Jeskey of Bangor, Maine has just been sentenced to 50 years in prison following a bench trial for the brutal 2011 bathtub murder of her 51-year-old husband Richard Jeskey. There are two sides to this story. On the one hand, at the time of the slaying, Ms. Jeskey was mentally impaired due to a combination of factors resulting from mental deterioration following brain surgery for a chronic seizure disorder. In addition, she suffered from a number of other serious, diagnosable mental infirmities which resulted in her pleading not guilty by reason of insanity.

On the other hand, the murder was incredibly savage and included a variety of bizarre and fiendish tortures. At some point, after the crime, Ms. Jeskey apparently confessed to at least some of her disturbing actions.

In arriving at the 50-year sentence, Superior Court Justice E. Allen Hunter appears to have been influenced far more by the savage nature of the crime than by Ms. Jeskey rather obvious mental deficiencies.

In defending his decision, the judge said he was imposing what is, in effect, a life sentence because the “monstrous way” Roxanne Jeskey murdered her 53-year-old husband was tantamount to torture and involved a sexual assault. He said the mitigating factors — including the fact that she has no criminal history, underwent brain surgery a decade ago that left her with cognitive difficulties, and her mental health problems — called for a sentence of 50 years.

At the bench trial, neuropsychologist Dr. Richard Doiron testified he conducted a number of tests on Roxanne Jeskey after she was arrested for the murder of her 51-year-old husband Richard Jeskey in June of 2011.

The doctor stated that the tests provided a “valid and reliable measure of what she was able to do at that time” of the murder.

Prior to her operation in 2003, Ms. Jeskey suffered from seizures that could not be controlled with medication. Hence, her doctors opted to perform brain surgery which – as is apparently sometimes the case – resulted in post-operative mental functioning consistent with borderline retardation. Dr Doiron stated: “She is brain injured in a significant way consistent with her neurological history.”

Jeskey scored very poorly on cognitive tests. The doctor stated that she is an individual who formerly, i.e., prior to her brain surgery, functioned at a significantly higher level than that at which she now functions.

In addition, Dr. Doiron diagnosed Jeskey with PTSD from incidents in her childhood, a cognitive disorder because of the brain surgery, and schizophrenia. Unsurprisingly, this combination of “brain handicaps” resulted, according to the doctor, in an altered sense of reality.

*     *     *     *     *

As is so often the case in American jurisprudence in the present era, the judge appears to have been far more influenced by the crime itself than by the forces (her brain damage), that led her to commit the crime.

After listening to the testimony, Judge Hunter found Ms. Jeskey guilty on May 30th of intentional and knowing murder and depraved indifference murder in connection with the death. The “depraved indifference” conviction stems from the following alleged actions on Ms. Jeskey’s part, who was reportedly furious because she caught her husband Richard texting his ex girlfriend.

After Richard’s indiscretion was discovered, the pair apparently argued heatedly which, in essence, culminated in the wife going berserk and torturing him for hours as she slowly killed him, after which she phoned the police to report what had happened.

Peter Kotz of True Crime Report writes:

He was found bloody and brutally beaten in the bathtub. His entire body showed signs of massive trauma.

Wrote Detective David Bushey in an affidavit: “These included nose fractures, loss of an eye, rib fractures, rectal incised wounds, and internal hemmorhage from an instrument(s) pushed through his scrotum into his abdomen. Further, Mr. Jeskey was strangled with sufficient force to break the hyoid bone of his neck.”

Roxanne admitted she’d slashed him with a box cutter and beat him with a baseball bat. She’d also taken a pliers to his (testicles). Then she lay down for a nap before finally being sufficiently rested to deal with police and medics.

She said her husband had tried repeatedly to get himself out of the bathtub, only to fall and smack his head multiple times. By the time police arrived, he was already dead.

Hunter said in his written verdict that he found the testimony of Dr. Michael Ferenc, former deputy medical examiner, “compelling.”

At the trial, the M.E. testified that “Richard Jeskey died of strangulation and multiple traumatic injuries that resulted in a great loss of blood. He said the victim had bruises, cuts, scrapes and puncture wounds over all of his body. In addition, his nose and three ribs were broken.”

Richard Jeskey also suffered internal and external damage to his genitals, and. of course, the incisions.

The fact that Richard Jeskey apparently could not defend himself may have been cause by his blood alcohol level of .12 percent and a sleep aid that was found in his bloodstream. According to the M.E., the sleep aid and the alcohol would have caused him to be “drowsy, sleepy and, if unconscious, difficult to arouse.

Dr. Ference did not estimate a time of death but said that the victim had lost so much blood that there was almost none found in his heart during the autopsy.

“Any one of these injuries standing alone manifests a depraved indifference to the value of human life,” Judge Hunter said. “Taken together, they reflect a monstrous savagery and cruelty that defies comprehension.”

*     *     *     *     *

Based on the police reports, the autopsy reports and Ms. Jeskey’s own admissions, there is little doubt that this particular murder rises to an extreme level of depravity. It would also appear that there is no doubt that the defendant needs to be removed from society for a considerable period of time.

Shouldn’t the fact, however, that she was non compos mentis both at the time of the murder, and in general, result in her being locked away in a mental institution rather a state prison? Such a solution would seem far more appropriate given her deteriorated mental state at the time of the slaying. But that’s not the way we roll here in America in our present vengeance-driven legal climate.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

I’ve written before about the fact that child abuse, both physical and sexual, is one of our major social problems, and at times, I’ve even suggested that it is our PRIMARY social problem. My opinion on this has not changed but with the caveat that much of this agony could be avoided if prospective parents of any age would take a long look at themselves and realize that they’re either too immature or too irresponsible to raise children successfully.

This is no knock on those who realize that they would not make suitable parents, and therefore decline to enter the parenthood sweepstakes. In fact, I applaud these sage souls and invoke Socrates’ well-known statement: “Know thyself.”

(‘Know Thyself’ was written on the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Legend tells us that seven sages of ancient Greece — philosophers, statesmen and law-givers gathered in Delphi to inscribed ‘know thyself’ at the entry to its sacred oracle.)

A recent tragic case out of Grand Junction, Colorado hammers home these cruel facts. An 11-month-old foster child named Angel Lane Place was allegedly killed by her foster mother, Sydney Danielle White, who was only 20 year old herself and had at least one other child of her own.

This is crazy. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to determine that a 20-year-old woman may not be the best candidate for the supremely difficult task of foster parenting. Tom Boggioni of Raw Story writes:

An 11-month-old baby girl, taken from her mother by Colorado authorities after her boyfriend admitted to smoking marijuana, was allegedly killed by her foster mother, reports ABC7.

Sydney Danielle White, 20, of Grand Junction took an unresponsive baby, Angel Lane Place, to Children’s Hospital in Aurora, telling hospital staff that she had “accidentally dropped” the infant.

White later admitted to authorities that she had shaken the baby out of frustration because she couldn’t get her to stop crying.

Several points need to be made here. Although Ms. White initially tried to cover up what she had done, she appears to have admitted the truth fairly readily when questioned. Plus, she should be given some credit for taking the baby to the hospital after Angel Lane “became unresponsive”. But shaking an 11-month-old child hard enough to apparently cause her death, out of frustration, is a dead giveaway that Ms. White was in over her head.

And don’t think I am in any way excusing what she did. I’m not. But my point is that at her tender age, she should not have been in this situation in the first place.

The arrest affidavit states that Ms. White held the baby “by the neck with both hands and shook her multiple times.” She ultimately told the authorities that she came to her senses and stopped after one of her children entered the room and said, “Mommy, stop it.”

My God! If Ms. White is 20, her wise child can’t be more than 4 or so, can she? “From out of the mouths of babes.”

The police inform:

“White said the baby initially became lethargic and wouldn’t wake up, but that later she appeared to be doing better. Later that night White took Angel to St. Mary’s Hospital when Angel’s right side became stiff and she was unresponsive.”

Thus, there was conceivably a “window of chance” during which Ms. White could have rushed Angel Lane to the hospital, but she did not, probably out of fear and lack of knowledge. Could the child have been saved if she had taken her to ER? Not necessarily.

This is what we see over and over again in these cases. The severely abused child does not appear to be dying at first. Nothing is done until it’s definitely too late and the child is doomed.

The cause of death is listed as “blunt force head injuries,” and her death has been ruled a homicide.

Now for the next shocking fact in this unfortunate matter. Angel Lane’s biological mother Tierra Place is only 17 years old. That means she was 16 when the deceased child was born. And why was the child taken in by a foster parent? According to Tierra’s explanation, she had lost custody of Angel Lane because she and her boyfriend Ted Place were fighting and Ted admitted to human services that he used marijuana.

Is this an adequate reason to remove the child from her biological parents? I don’t know; I am curious to see what others with far more experience in this sort of thing than me think, and I hope that Lori, our expert in these matters, weighs in with her opinion. If I were to hazard a guess, I would suggest that a combination of factors led to the child’s removal: 1) the mother’s age; 2) the fact she and Ted were fighting; and 3) the fact Ted was smoking weed (which, by the way, is legal in Colorado).

Ladybud writes in her blog Ladybug.Gear:

Both the biological mother, Tierra Place, and the biological father were under the impression that Angel was safe, that the home had been adequately screened, and that Angel was developing in a healthy manner. Tierra says her brother checked in with her every day, and she thought her daughter was safe. In speaking with the local ABC outlet CALL7, she expressed her pain at having her daughter die while not in her custody. “This is like losing her twice. I don’t know how someone could possibly do that to a baby…Inside I know she is walking with God.”

Well, let’s hope the child is “walking with God” but in these “pot-life” matters there are no guarantees that I’m aware of.

And here’s yet another stunning fact:

Tierra Place approved Ms. White as the foster mother because White is her sister-in-law; the brother who “checked in with her every day” may well be married to Ms. White. Child Services has reported that the couple was in the process of adopting Angel.

And then for our final stunner:

Angel Lane’s father Ted Place has threatened to sue Mesa County.

“You know I was seeing pictures of her, seeing videos, you know she was doing good, she was making good progress, and I was ok with the situation she was in,” he said. “And then, all of a sudden, I had just found out that your daughter is in urgent care in Denver, Colorado, and you need to come there. I just want Mesa County to pay for what they’ve done.”

What has Mesa County done? Is Ted suggesting Mesa County was negligent in placing Angel Lane with Ms. White. How can this be, Angel Lane’s bio mother Tierra approved of Ms. White? But as I’ve stated above, considering she was only 20 years old, Ms. White does not appear to have been the best choice for a foster parent.

Of course, Ted is clearly frustrated by what has transpired. And it’s a frustration that will not be soothed by smoking another spliff.

At present, Sydney Danielle White has only been charged with child abuse, but more charges are expected as this tragic case moves forward.

* * * * *

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, let me repeat: None of these folks should have been parents in the first place. Too young, too immature, simply not ready for the awesome responsibility of parenthood. As a result, an innocent life has been destroyed, and many other lives have been irrevocably harmed…

by Starks Shrink

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Schizophrenic Child Killer Sheilla Shea Would “Sell Her Soul” to Bring Her Son Patric Back

The Overheating Death of Cooper Harris: Murder or Tragic Accident?

Why Beautiful Murderesses Inflame the Passions of the True Crime Fan

Going Postal Goes Fed-Ex!

How to Raise a Serial Killer in 10 Easy Steps

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

Luka Magnotta: Man, Boy or Beast?

The Disturbing Truth about Mothers Who Murder Their Children

Teleka Patrick Needed a Psychiatrist, Not a Pastor!

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

Skylar Neese and the Mean Girls Who Killed Her

by BJW Nashe

In early 1994, Aaron Bacon was a 16 year-old living with his parents in Phoenix, Arizona. Aaron was described as a compassionate, highly intelligent kid, but his parents found his recent behavior alarming. He was smoking marijuana and experimenting with psychedelics. He was listening to death metal and writing dark, angry poetry. His grades began to suffer, and he got into some minor accidents with the family car. His parents were worried that he was associating with gang members (hanging around with non-whites?) Confused and afraid, the Bacons decided to look outside the family for help.

The North Star Boot Camp was marketed as a “wilderness-adventure experience” with trained therapists who knew how to get “troubled teens” back on track through survival skills and self-discipline. They convinced Aaron’s folks to try their special brand of therapy, characterized as “tough love” in a professional, caring environment with a quasi-spiritual, outward bound twist. The glossy North Star brochure showed a young man with a backpack standing tall on a desert mountaintop at sunset, pointing up to a shining star. Aaron’s mother thought her son might enjoy his stay at the camp as a kind of extended timeout, a break from his normal routine, a chance to sober up, clear his head, and refocus. She could picture Aaron proudly reaching out to that shining star.

So one morning at 6:00 a.m., two men — one a 280-pound former military policeman — stormed into Aaron’s bedroom. He had no idea what was going on. Hopefully he wasn’t still tripping on some mind-altering substance ingested the night before. His parents were standing nearby, assuring him everything would be fine and telling him they loved him, but insisting that he had to leave with these strangers. Aaron had no choice. His parents had legally released him into the care of North Star staff, who would take him away by force if necessary. The two gorillas made this perfectly clear.

So Aaron was whisked away to North Star’s boot camp in Utah, where he joined a group of other teenage boys. There were no professional therapists. Instead, the boys were placed under the care of untrained survival guides whose job was to “break them down” or “scare them straight” through a regimen of abuse. Nutrition was substandard or nonexistent. The guides would only let the boys eat cooked food if they started a campfire on their own, from scratch. They gave Aaron boots that were too small, a sleeping bag, and a backpack. Food and clothing were withheld as punishment for non-compliant behavior. For three weeks, the boys were starved and beaten and frozen during forced marches through the canyons of Escalante, Utah. In a matter of days, Aaron had lost more than 20 pounds. Soon he was so weak he could barely stand on his own. He became incontinent and complained of abdominal pains. The guides laughed at him. They said he was “gay” and called him a “faker.” To punish him for “whining,” the guides withheld his food and took away his sleeping bag.

Aaron didn’t survive his “wilderness-adventure experience.”  He collapsed on the trail on March 31, 1994, and then died while lying in the bed of a pickup truck parked on Hole in the Rock Road, 15 miles southeast of Escalante. By the time an emergency helicopter arrived, it was too late. The cause of Aaron’s death was listed as acute peritonitis and perforated ulcers. These were treatable conditions, yet no medical assistance had been provided during his nightmare journey into-the-wild. When Aaron’s parents went to identify their son at the morgue, they barely recognized him. He looked like a concentration camp victim.

“Tough Love” on Trial

Aaron’s tragic death was well-publicized. North Star was investigated and its business license was temporarily revoked. Eight North Star employees were charged with felony neglect and abuse of a disabled child. During the ensuing trials held in the small town of Panguitch, Utah, prosecutors argued that North Star staffers ignored the 16-year-old boy’s pleas for medical help and starved him during his 21-day forced march in the canyons. The defense argued that Aaron’s death was an accident, and that North Star employees were being demonized unfairly. Several boys who survived the camp were called to testify as witnesses. Aaron’s journal from the trip was included as evidence. In it, he described several nights spent trying to sleep in freezing temperatures without a sleeping bag or blankets. He told of having no food to eat on 11 out of 21 days. He wrote about the day when he had to eat lizards and scorpions. He mentioned other days when all he had to eat was prickly pear cactus and pine needle tea. He described the punishments meted out for various “infractions.” He detailed the verbal abuse and humiliation. Aaron’s journal is a heartbreaking litany and pain and suffering — none of which was necessary or justified.

The North Star field instructor who led the way during Aaron’s ordeal, 22-year-old Craig Fisher, was found guilty as charged. His third-degree felony conviction carried a maximum sentence of five years in prison. Fisher’s colleagues received little more than a slap on the wrist. Six North Star employees were found guilty of negligent homicide — a misdemeanor in Utah — for which they received three years’ probation, community service, and restitution for legal fees. A seventh employee was able to avoid prosecution through a probation agreement.

Aaron’s parents were stunned that just one of the defendants received jail time. His mother, Sally Bacon, was especially critical of the light sentence handed down to Georgette Costigan, a licensed medical technician who saw Aaron the day before he died, gave him a piece of cheese, and told him to work harder. “She killed my son as surely as she put a gun to his head,” Ms. Bacon told reporters.

It is interesting to note that both of Aaron’s parents had their own history with drug and alcohol abuse. Sally had survived her own battles with drugs during the 1960s and 70s. Aaron’s father, Bob, was a recovering alcoholic who had been sober for nearly a decade. No doubt they thought they were doing the right thing for their son, and felt they were deceived by North Star — which they were. Yet this scenario demonstrates that parents need to beware of foisting their own notions of ”illness” and “recovery” onto their teenage kids. Two years earlier, the Bacons had sent Aaron’s older brother Jarid to the Hazeldon clinic in Minnesota. The treatment there hadn’t worked out that well — which isn’t surprising, because rehabs in fact are rarely effective. (Dr. Drew Pinsky’s whole career inadvertently proves this.) Jarid did manage to turn his life around at a later date, outside of any institutional framework. In any case, the Bacons saw that Hazeldon failed to help Jarid, so they were eager to seek an alternative for Aaron. They were willing to go out on a limb. They lost sight of the fact that just because certain institutions — whether it’s Hazeldon or North Star — claim to be successful at recovery is no guarantee at all. Failure to scrutinize a particular rehab or “boot camp” before sending your kid away is a serious mistake, no matter how worried or desperate you might feel about your kid smoking pot or listening to death-metal.

I am not blaming the Bacons for Aaron’s death. Rather, I am pointing out that the Bacon’s tragic loss is something that other parents might learn valuable lessons from. Perhaps that is the best way, at this point, for us to remember Aaron Bacon.

Exposing the Truth of a Twisted Industry

The most important lesson we can learn from Aaron Bacon’s death is to not trust businesses that seek to profit from human fear, ignorance, and misery by promising amazing solutions. These businesses need to be critically examined, regulated, and monitored. What we now know is that Aaron’s treatment in Utah was not an isolated event or a freak occurrence. It is part of a disturbing pattern running through a “troubled teen” industry that is still burgeoning. In many ways, this industry functions as a group of criminal enterprises. There have been many instances of death, with thousands of young people left traumatized.

During the past few decades — coinciding with the growth of the U.S. prison industrial complex — a new model withing the multi-billion dollar recovery industry has emerged to meet the demand for “rehabilitation” of “troubled teens.” This new industry consists of privately owned and largely unregulated companies bearing catchy names such as Straight, Inc., KIDS, Diamond Ranch Academy, and Turnabout Teens. They all have glossy brochures and gleaming web sites strewn with recovery cliches, self-help slogans, and all sorts of psychobabble. Pleasing graphics are presented along with the crucial pricing information. These places are not cheap. The Bacons had to take out a second mortgage on their home to pay for Aaron’s fatal “adventure.”

Those seeking to turn a profit from the “troubled teen” racket find a ready-made client-base among hordes of fearful and ignorant American parents — mostly middle class or affluent folks (who else can afford it?) worried that their teenagers are “at risk” because they are not conforming to certain standards of behavior. Their teenagers might be smoking marijuana or experimenting with other drugs, listening to weird music, dressing in strange clothes, getting tattooed and/or pierced, running around at night with wild friends. They might be (gasp) having sex. They might be exhibiting signs of (gasp) homosexuality. Perhaps they have an undiagnosed mental illness. Parents are willing to pay exorbitant fees and sign legal release forms to have their troubled teens hauled off to shady behavior modification programs or boot camps that promise a miraculous turnaround.

The obvious question is who are these people running these programs, and what is going on there? Journalists who have investigated the troubled teen industry have discovered widespread and shocking violations of human rights by unskilled and untrained staff — often people simply hired off the street. Programs supposedly committed to helping people are riddled with the type of cruelty and abuse that one associates with Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, rather than therapy or rehab. The word “torture” is not out of place in this context. Many of these organizations fail to meet Geneva Convention standards for treatment of prisoners of war.

The most in-depth research was conducted by Maia Szalavitz, who published a landmark book in 2006 called Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids. Szalavitz estimates that between ten and twenty thousand American teens are forced into boot camps, emotional-growth centers, and behavior-modification programs each year. The industry is unregulated, and some programs owned and operated by U.S. companies place children in facilities outside the country. What these programs all have in common, Szalavitz points out, is the misguided belief that teens should be made to conform to the expectations of parents and society, by whatever means necessary. Techniques widely used in these programs include beatings, extended isolation and restraint, public humiliation, food deprivation, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, forced exercise to the point of exhaustion, and lengthy maintenance of “stress positions.” Sexual abuse also factors into the equation, although we can assume this is a result of a hazardous environment, rather than an official technique. But who knows, with these folks? Szalavitz points to a wealth of research demonstrating that the tough love treatment, far from being effective, is actually quite harmful. Common sense would indicate as much.

Szalavitz has a degree in psychology from Brooklyn College and has worked as a journalist for the Village Voice and as a producer for PBS. She is also an addiction survivor who has studied and evaluated the effectiveness of various treatment models. Many of us who have experienced the wonderful world of addiction have found that the faith-based, 12-step ideology that dominates the recovery community — though helpful to some — is problematic for many, especially when it is used in institutionalized settings at the exclusion of other methodologies. Yet we would be hard-pressed to find adults being tortured in drug rehabs. Why in the hell are teens being subjected to abusive treatment in the name of “rehabilitation?” I suppose if there is money to be made, and there are no legal ramifications involved, certain people will engage in all sorts of inhumane behavior, and then rationalize the behavior with all kinds of nonsense.

Szalavitz traces the roots of the tough-love industry back to the Alcoholics Anonymous offshoot Synanon. It figures there would be an evangelical underpinning to the whole debacle. Synanon was a 1960s treatment program for heroin addicts that evolved into an insane cult and was eventually shut down and discredited. Szalavitz correctly identifies emotional abuse, in the form of incessant verbal attack therapy, as a core component of Synanon. The whole program was geared toward “breaking down” personalities. This is a principle aspect of any organized group or cult that strives for mind and body control. Somehow, this discredited brand of attack therapy was carried over into troubled teen programs. And now the attack therapy has been expanded to include outright physical abuse. Minors are evidently viewed as fair game for control freaks, religious nuts, sadists, and shameless profiteers who get their kicks running a sick and depraved version of teenage Guantanamo.

Why hasn’t the government stepped in to impose some standards? After Szalavitz’s book came out, and following news reports featuring a multitude of scandalous revelations, Congress held hearings on the troubled teen industry in October 2007 and April 2008. No legislation was passed, however. Good luck getting free market-worshipping  Republicans who love to grandstand against crime and drugs to agree on any sensible laws that might reign in private, for-profit rehabs.

“Troubled Teens” Speak Truth to Power

Many of the teens who have been brutalized by these twisted programs have spoken out about the sickening boot camps. In a January 15, 2014 post for Cracked.com, Robert Evans described being shipped off to a teen boot camp in Montana. “In short order,” he writes, “I learned some terrifying truths about an industry dedicated to taking America’s at-risk youth and fucking them up in the worst way possible.” Evans then details six shocking realities about the troubled teen programs:

1) Your parents can hire people to take you away

2) Your parents give you up to a private company

3) Kids die in the car of these companies

4) There is no regulation or oversight of these companies

5) The treatment methods are insane and ineffective

6) The brainwashing stays with you forever

The WWASP Survivors website is a solid resource for promoting awareness and raising support for survivors of the troubled teen industry. It also provides a forum for survivors to speak out on the disturbing nature of the programs and camps.

In digesting all of this information, we need to stress an obvious point: human rights extend to everyone, including teenagers — even teenagers who had the misfortune of being born into the most socially rigid and un-enlightened parts of America. Teenage life involves personal growth and exploration, and it includes the right to experiment with various types of nonconforming behavior (as long as this does not include hurting people). In the process, mistakes will be made, and lessons will be learned. New ground will be broken. People will grow up. This is what progress looks like. It can be messy, but it can also be gloriously inventive. Life necessarily involves some degree of risk. To try to eliminate risk is insane. To demand strict adherence to rigid codes of behavior is absurd and unrealistic.

If American parents are too ignorant, fearful, or narrow-minded to effectively deal with the ups and downs of teenage life, then they are the ones who need “tough love” help — not their kids. As for the sadistic creeps who seek to profit from parental ignorance and fear by running deranged troubled teen boot camps, we can only hope that soon they will be driven out of business, and then some day will rot in hell. We need to spread the word that these places are sick — far worse than anything most teenagers ever dream of doing. We need to wise up the marks — and I’m referring to the parents who are being conned into paying for this crap. In the meantime, it would be nice if Congress could take a break from all the fundraising in order to regulate this out-of-control industry that is harming our youth.

We’ll let Aaron Bacon have the last word. In one of his poems, a sonnet, he wrote the following:

“Dreaming with a heart full of wonder

And a mind full of knowledge

Our thirst for life and love

Does not set with the sun behind us.”

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

A few weeks ago I wrote that the recent unbelievably cruel child abuse death of Gabriel Garcia in an outlying area of Los Angeles County was perhaps the worst case of child abuse in Southern California history. Just yesterday I came across a case out of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania which, although many details have yet to be revealed, appears to be equally awful, although there does not necessarily appear to have been the same degree of outright malice on the part of the parents of the deceased child as in the Los Angeles County case; rather, the abuse seems to have consisted of extreme and appalling neglect — largely sins of omission rather than “sins of commission”, if you will.

In this case the victim was an autistic boy named Jarrod Tutko Jr. At the time of his passing (and in his case dying could be seen as an act of mercy because his life was so painful), Jarrod, who was nine years old was 42 inches tall (3 and ½ feet) and weighed just 16.9 pounds.

To put this in perspective, our little miniature schnauzer Oreo weighs about 17 pounds, half a pound of that is fur, and the little guy is about two pounds overweight.

The average 6-year-old child is about 42 inches tall and weighs almost 50 pounds.

At present, Jarrod’s parents, Jarrod N. Tutko Sr., 38, and Kimberly A. Tutko, 39, have been arraigned before District Judge Barbara Pianka on criminal homicide charges. They have been denied bail. With a preliminary charge of criminal homicide, any one of a number of charges can still be brought ranging from manslaughter to first-degree murder, which in the state of Pennsylvania can result in the death penalty.

Although it’s unclear who tipped them off, the police went to the Tutko home on August 1 based on a report that there was a dead child there. Once they got there, they discovered a true chamber of horrors in and around poor Jarrod. Feces were reportedly smeared on his body and on parts of his bedroom. It was one of those appalling cruel scenes where the door to the bedroom was “rigged so it could be opened only from the outside.”

Jarrod’s  mother, Kimberly Tutko, tried to stonewall it at first telling the “police initially that she had not seen her son for several years”, but she caved, possibly under the duress of intense questioning, and eventually admitted that she had seen Jarrod in the days before his death and that her husband had told her that he had been dead for several days in his third-floor bedroom.

According to law enforcement, four children from Tutko’s first marriage were taken away by the courts, and that Jarrod and the five living children found at the house of horrors were from her current marriage to Tutko.

It appears that neither parent was working and the family reportedly subsisted on a variety of benefit checks that they received monthly.

Thus, is seems apparent that whatever degree of malice was present in this matter, this family was completely unable to cope with the responsibilities of parenthood, and it is very unfortunate that the authorities did not get wind of the neglect/abuse until it was too late for Jarrod. Furthermore, I can’t help but think that Katherine Tutko likely suffers from some form of mental imbalance or deficiency.

I have long had moments of dread in which I imagine something going badly wrong in my life and in the lives of those close to me, the problem serving as a sort of catalyst which creates a domino effect in which the problems compound one another until a tipping point is reached after which there is no going back and no way to regain any sort of equilibrium.

This is what appears to happen in families such as the Tutkos; fixtures and forces conspire to kick the disastrous snowball effect into high gear and it’s Katie bar the door. A workable analogy might be what happens to a body whose cells have been invaded by a virulent form of cancer; parts cease to function properly and connections break down; eventually the organism is doomed.

What is odd about human families, however, is the fact that when the breakdown takes the form of child abuse, one child is often mistreated far worse than the others. If the family is seen as an organism (or body), the abused child can be viewed as a weak or unwanted part of the body/organism that is neglected and/or abused until it dies.

Jarrod was an autistic child who also suffered from the fragile X genetic syndrome. The National Fragile X Foundation provides the following information on the relationship between fragile X syndrome and autism:

Whereas autism is a behavioral diagnosis, fragile X syndrome (FXS) is a medical or more accurately, a genetic diagnosis. When associated with FXS, the autism is caused by the genetic change or mutation in the Fragile X gene. This is similar to other conditions such as Down syndrome. Individuals with Down syndrome can also have other conditions, including autism, hearing loss, diabetes and other behavioral and medical conditions. If a child is diagnosed with autism and then diagnosed with FXS, he or she still has autism, it is just that the cause of their autism is known. It is no different than someone with FXS also having ADHD or any other behavioral symptom of FXS.

Although he was horribly neglected in life, both a pathologist and a forensic dentist appear to have given Jarrod due consideration in death.

The pathologist, Dr. Wayne Ross, discovered the boy had almost no body fat at the time of his death.

David DeKok of Reuters writes:

“He indicated that the lack of body fat was a sign of starvation,” police said in an affidavit filed in the case. “Dr. Ross noted signs of dehydration and malnutrition.”

Dr. Andrew T. Stewart, a forensic dentist, discovered that Jarriod had two badly abscessed teeth that would have caused him terrible pain. There are no records of the boy having ever seen a dentist.

* * * * *

I’d like to think that Kimberly Tutko, and possibly her husband, did the best they could do based on their lack of the essential qualities decent parents must possess. And if I were in a harsher mood, I would be condemning her vigorously. The longer I explore these cases, the more I realize that my responses are often based on fleeting whims and chimeras that change like the moon waxes and wanes.

It may be fortunate that my insufficient response will have no bearing on the outcome of this case. On the other hand, if I were working on the case, I would have access to Discovery and would be able to interview people which would help me assess, at least to some degree, just what kind of a “deck” Kimberly was playing with, which would lend some insight into whether she was operating sadistically (with malice aforethought) or was merely incredibly incompetent based on any number of negative factors.

by Molly Nox

The average person fortunately does not come into contact with dead bodies on a regular basis, but a growing population increases the likelihood that you may have this experience one day, so you better be ready. The Center for Disease Prevention reported that in 2011 there were more than 2.5 million deaths nationwide. This is a lot of deaths; in fact, it’s the highest number of deaths ever recorded in a single year. Finding a dead body can be a traumatic experience, especially if the deceased is someone you know or cared about. Being prepared to react appropriately can reduce stress and help you to avoid dangerous complications. Therefore, in order to survive this uncanny experience, you need to be familiar with these three simple rules: 1) Keep safe; 2) avoid tampering with crime scene evidence; and 3) let the professionals handle the dead body clean up.

Secure Your Own Safety First

Looking after your own safety is the most important thing. An unsecured crime scene is dangerous. It is likely that you could come into contact with biological hazards in these situations. Touching blood, or other elements of human remains puts you at an increased risk of infection. Blood borne pathogens such as HIV, hepatitis B, and hepatitis C can linger. In the case of hepatitis B, the virus is known to survive outside the body for over seven days and can even be transmitted by dried blood. So beware! Always assume that any blood or remains you see are contaminated and avoid them like you would avoid the bubonic plague.

Refrain From Tampering With the Scene

Claims of tampering at Reeva Steenkamp death scene

Police and coroners need to be able to evaluate a situation as it is. After you have determined that there is a dead body, and not someone in need of medical care, do not move the body or tamper with any other objects in the area. When gathering evidence, crime scene investigators need to collect accurate raw data. Do your best to avoid upsetting anything. Fingerprints, hair, and other elements found by police may be useful in identifying those responsible. Coroners use the information at the scene to help establish the cause of death. Making changes to the area makes things harder on everyone and should be avoided whenever possible. (And besides, God forbid that you adjust things at the death scene and end up making the authorities suspicious.)

Call the Professionals

Contact the police by dialing 911 to report the body. Public health and sanitation requires the immediate removal and proper containment of the deceased. The authorities today have more knowledge and better tools than ever before to safely handle these situations. In addition to limiting the spread of infectious disease and solving crimes, providing answers to grieving families is a job best left to the experts.

After a police investigation has been completed and the body is removed by a coroner, there are usually some human remains left behind. Blood and other smaller fragments still need to be dealt with. There is a growing industry of second responders known as crime and trauma scene decontamination technicians. They have developed procedures to properly clean and remove human remains. If the body you have found is on your own property, it is necessary to have the biological waste disposed of. Let specialized decontamination technicians remove blood and other harmful biohazards so that the area is inhabitable again.

And once the body has been removed and all biohazards have been eliminated, don’t hesitate to have a stiff drink, or your favorite cafe latte or whatever you do to indulge yourself. You’ve survived coming unexpectedly upon a corpse and certainly deserve a bit of indulgence prior to stumbling upon your next dead body.

References:

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

http://www.aftermath.com/crime-cleanup-services/decontamination-process/

Molly Nox is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles, CA. When she isn’t writing, you can find Molly doing Pinterest-inspired cooking, outdoor photography, and wearing flower headbands at music festivals. 

by Darcia Helle

You’ve probably fantasized about your dream home. Most of us do. You might want a spacious mansion, a decadent penthouse, or an old farmhouse. Chances are you won’t be fantasizing about a Murder Castle. It’s even less likely that you’ll be designing and building one. But H.H. Holmes did just that.

Holmes was born Herman Webster Mudgett, on May 16, 1861, in Gilmanton, New Hampshire. His parents, Levi Horton Mudgett and Theodate Page Price, were farmers and devout Methodists. We don’t know a lot about Holmes’s early life. Some reports state that his father was a violent alcoholic, though it’s unclear how much, if any, abuse Holmes endured during his father’s drunken outbursts. Holmes claimed to have been bullied as a child, brought on in part by his fear of the local doctor. Hoping to terrorize him, the bullies forced Holmes to look at and touch a human skeleton. This scheme apparently backfired and instead sparked his lifelong obsession with death.

Holmes began his adult life with a con job. On July 4, 1878, he married Clara Lovering with the sole intent of using her money to put himself through medical school. Their son, Robert Lovering Mudgett, was born on February 3, 1880 in Loudon, New Hampshire. We don’t know what kind of relationship Holmes had with his wife and son in those early years. Holmes struggled in medical school, all the while resenting the wealthy, carefree students who didn’t need to work to support a family.

While in medical school, Holmes was exposed to the questionable practice of buying and selling skeletons and freshly dead bodies. Medical schools needed intact skeletons and cadavers for their students, and their methods for supplying those bodies were not monitored by law enforcement or any agency. Though they didn’t flaunt their practices and were careful not to purchase obvious murder victims, their questionable methods were a kind of open secret. Holmes paid attention and soon found ways to use this to his advantage.

Holmes’s descent into the macabre began with stealing dead bodies from the medical school laboratory. He’d take out life insurance policies on the dead under false names, disfigure them so they were unrecognizable, then claim they’d died accidentally so that he could collect the insurance. Not long afterward, he realized it was smarter to use newly dead bodies, since they had yet to be embalmed. This afforded him a double scam. After collecting on the life insurance, he could sell the body to the medical school. And so began Holmes’s career as a killer.

In June of 1884, Holmes managed to pass his final examinations. He’d done so poorly at the medical school that the board had to vote twice before agreeing to give Holmes his license. The problem wasn’t that Holmes lacked intelligence, but rather he lacked the focus and desire to perform well on exams. Not long after receiving his medical degree, he left Clara Lovering, changed his name from Herman Mudgett to Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, and moved to Chicago.

Holmes began his new life working as a pharmacist in a drugstore owned by Dr. Elizabeth S. Holton. She soon sold the business to Holmes, most likely because she’d become pregnant though this is more speculation than fact. By most accounts, Holmes was a well-liked and respected businessman. No one questioned his identity or credentials.

On January 28, 1887, he married Myrta Belknap, despite not having divorced his first wife, Clara. For the most part, Holmes kept Myrta away from his business. Their family home was in Wilmette, Illinois, but he spent most of his time at his pharmacy in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago. Today the travel time is only about 30 minutes by car, but would have been far longer back in the late 1800s. Holmes eventually had three children with Myrta, though again it’s unclear how much time and attention he gave his new family.

Around this time, work began on the World Columbian Exposition – now known as the Chicago World’s Fair – which was expected to be the largest event in history. The site where the fair would be held was only about three miles from the Englewood neighborhood where Holmes worked. Though he had very little money of his own, Holmes managed to con creditors and use further scams to purchase an empty lot across from his drugstore. He immediately began work on the design and construction of what he claimed would be a hotel for the fairgoers. In reality, though, Holmes had other grisly ideas from the very start.

The massive three-story building took up the entire city block, and locals began referring to it as the Castle. Holmes moved his drugstore to the bottom floor, along with various other shops. The two upper floors were a maze containing his office and “guest” rooms. Within this labyrinth were 100 windowless rooms, doorways opening to brick walls, stairways leading nowhere, doors that only opened from the outside, closets with trap doors in the floor, and hallways jutting out at odd angles. Throughout the construction, Holmes repeatedly changed builders, often using workers from out of town, and never shared his completed plans with anyone.

In 1889, during the three-year period of construction, Holmes met the carpenter Benjamin Pitezel. The two formed a relationship of sorts that Pitezel and his family would eventually pay dearly for. Holmes and Pitezel traveled together, sometimes sharing a room. They also schemed together, particularly with insurance fraud. Despite what Pitezel took to be friendship, Holmes seems to have marked his friend as a victim early on.

The city of Chicago was consumed with preparation for the upcoming fair, and so was Holmes. He hired young, single women to work in his Castle as maids and secretaries. All were given life insurance policies as part of their job benefits, which Holmes paid for and was also beneficiary of. While Holmes and Pitezel had plans for insurance fraud, Holmes actually had plans for much more. Although Pitezel believed they were merely scamming the life insurance companies, Holmes was actually murdering the women.

Chicago bustled with activity during the years leading up to the fair. Workers needed to live close by. Supplies were trucked in. The local economy boomed. The surroundings offered the perfect cover for Holmes’s murder spree.

Approximately 27 million people passed through Chicago during the fair’s six-month span. Crime ran rampant. Strangers came and went, filling the city with transients. The fledgling, understaffed police force couldn’t keep up. Holmes found his ideal playground.

The Castle had been made to the specifications of a madman. Secret passages, sound-proofed rooms, and specially greased chutes were only the beginning. Holmes had stocked his Murder Castle with torture equipment, such as an elongated bed with straps thought to be used to see how far the human body could be stretched. Some of the rooms were equipped with gas pipes, so he could slowly poison his guests while they remained locked inside. He’d installed a special furnace that burned hot enough to incinerate bone, and kept vats of acid for eating away flesh. The special chutes gave him a convenient method of moving bodies from the second and third floors down to the basement for disposal.

Of course, at the time no one but Holmes knew the reasons for the odd, maze-like construction. The missing maids and secretaries were easily explained. Young, single women often left to marry. Or went home to visit their families. Guests came and went all over the city. They weren’t known and were rarely associated with a stay at Holmes’s hotel. No one questioned the respected businessman running The Castle.

In October 1893, when the fair shut down, activity in Chicago came to a grinding halt. The economy fell into a slump. Creditors were catching up to Holmes, who’d failed to pay most of the construction costs for his Murder Castle. So he did what he’d become good at, and made plans to scam an insurance company.

Around this time, the Murder Castle caught fire. Dates differ depending on the source. Some cite August 19, 1894 but most claim the fire occurred in November 1893. It’s possible these were two separate fires, with the first being smaller and unsuccessful. Most agree that Holmes was in deep with debt and attempted arson to collect on the $60,000 insurance policy he held on his castle. The insurance company was not as easily scammed as the life insurance companies he’d worked with in the past. Because Holmes constantly changed the building’s ownership papers in order to avoid creditors, the insurance company argued fraud. They refused to pay and Holmes had no choice but to flee. Soon police and firemen were uncovering the gruesome scene Holmes had left behind.

Holmes, unaware authorities were on to him back in Chicago, went blissfully along his murderous path. He traveled to Fort Worth, Texas, where he had property he’d inherited in one of his murder schemes. There is speculation that he attempted to build a second murder castle, but for whatever reasons, he abandoned the project and moved on. He then traveled to Denver, where he married Georgia Yoke on January 17, 1894. The two had met at the fair, and Georgia seems to be the only woman Holmes ever truly loved.

In July, 1894, Holmes – under his new identity of H.M. Howard – was arrested for the first time on charges of horse swindling. While in prison, he met convicted train robber Marion Hedgepeth, and the two of them concocted a plan for insurance fraud. Holmes was to fake his death, Hedgepeth would collect on the life insurance claim, and the two of them would share the money. Hedgepeth gave Holmes the name of a lawyer who was an associate and would happily comply with their scam. But after leaving prison, Holmes quickly forgot about Hedgepeth. Instead he made a similar plan with his friend Benjamin Pitezel, only this time it was Pitezel who was supposed to fake his death.

Holmes and Pitezel devised a scheme, though it’s unclear how much of the plan Holmes intended on sticking. In Philadelphia, Pitezel would assume the identity of an inventor named B.F. Perry. Holmes was to procure a corpse, presumably from a mortuary or medical school. Holmes and Pitezel would then rig a laboratory explosion in which B.F. Perry would be killed, with the cadaver as Pitezel’s stand-in, becoming disfigured and therefore unrecognizable in the blaze. Pitezel’s wife would then collect the $10,000 life insurance policy and they would split the money.

At some point, Holmes came up with a much more elaborate and lucrative plan of his own. Pitezel tended to be melancholy, slightly depressive, and a heavy drinker. Holmes used this to his advantage, feeding his friend alcohol until he’d passed out. After arranging the scene to his liking, Holmes doused his friend in flammable liquid, concentrating on Pitezel’s face, and lit a match. His friend, Benjamin Pitezel, might have been alive when he was set on fire, though this detail is unclear.

Holmes’s wife Georgia had accompanied Holmes to Philadelphia during this time, though she knew nothing about the insurance fraud or the murder. After killing Pitezel, Holmes took his wife back to their home in Indianapolis. He then traveled to St. Louis, where he told Carrie Pitezel, Benjamin’s wife, that Pitezel was in hiding until they’d safely collected on the claim.

In the meantime, on September 4, 1894, a visitor to the Philadelphia office of B.F. Perry arrived to find the door locked. Thinking this strange, she contacted the police who then forced the door open. Inside the office, they found the body of a man with severe burns. A pipe, matches, and a broken bottle with remnants of a flammable liquid similar to benzene, or possibly chloroform, lay nearby. The victim of an apparent explosion, police assumed him to be B.F. Perry, who’d recently rented the office.

About two weeks after the discovery of Perry’s body, Fidelity Mutual Life Association of Philadelphia received a letter from St. Louis claiming B.F. Perry was actually Benjamin F. Pitezel, whose life had been insured by their company. Soon two professional men arrived in Fidelity’s Philadelphia office, claiming to represent the widow Pitezel. One introduced himself as Dr. H.H. Holmes, with the explanation that Mrs. Pitezel was too ill to travel. The other man was Jephtha Howe, Mrs. Pitezel’s attorney. With them was one of Pitezel’s children, 14-year-old Alice. Holmes made the identification, assuring the insurance representatives that Pitezel had certain specific moles and markings enabling him to do so despite the severe burns. The $10,000 insurance claim was paid to Holmes, who was there acting on behalf of the widow Pitezel and her five children.

Fidelity would likely never have questioned any of this if it hadn’t been for an angry, vindictive prisoner Holmes had double-crossed. Marion Hedgepeth, the man Holmes had once share a cell with back in St. Louis, was furious that Holmes had used a version of their scam and the lawyer he’d recommended, but had reneged on his promise to share the money. Hedgepeth gave a detailed account of the scheme to police, who then passed the information on to Fidelity. Though Hedgepeth only knew Holmes as H.M. Howard, it didn’t take long for the insurance company to figure out that Howard was actually H.H. Holmes. They tried unsuccessfully to track him themselves, and soon hired investigators from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to chase him down.

Holmes now had the money in his pocket and assured Carrie Pitezel that he would lead her to her husband, but they had to be careful not to be followed or caught. He also managed to convince her that it would be best if he took three of the children – Alice, Nellie, and Howard – with him, leaving Carrie to travel only with the oldest and the youngest of her children.

Holmes inexplicably took the three children across country, at the same time traveling with his wife Georgia. And so began Holmes’s game of human chess. He managed to move his wife and the children from one city to the next, together but separately. The children were kept hidden away in rooms, hotels, and sometimes houses, without his wife ever knowing of their existence. Each day the children wrote letters to their mother, detailing their experience on the run. Each day Holmes took the letters with a promise to ensure their mother received them, which of course she never did.

While he shuffled the children and his wife from city to city, Holmes had Carrie Pitezel and her two remaining children moving along a parallel route. Holmes devised an elaborate ruse, supplying multiple forwarding addresses for communications. At various times, he told Carrie that her children were safe with a widow in Indianapolis and a wealthy woman in London, and that her husband was safely hiding, first in Canada and later in London.

Amidst all of this, detectives from the Pinkerton Agency somehow managed to track down Holmes. Finally, on the afternoon of November 16, 1894, H.H. Holmes was arrested in Boston as he reportedly prepared to take a steamship to England. Because the insurance scheme and Pitezel’s murder had taken place in Philadelphia, Detective Thomas Crawford brought Holmes back there. The police in Chicago, where the Murder Castle held his many atrocities, were initially unaware of Holmes’s arrest.

During the time Holmes awaited trial and, later, while awaiting execution, he spun extravagant tales about his escapades. He always claimed innocence, and his stories changed frequently. Months passed and the Pitezel children were nowhere to be found. Finally, in the early summer of 1895, Detective Frank Geyer was assigned to track them down.

For reasons never explained, Holmes had kept all the letters the children had written to their mother. The letters were in his possession when he was arrested. Using these letters as a guide, Detective Geyer took a train to the Midwest to begin his search. In Cincinnati, Ohio, Geyer found someone who remembered Holmes traveling with the children. He’d been using the alias Alex E. Cook, which he’d sometimes used in prior business matters. That contact led Geyer to a woman who’d seen Holmes with a boy in a nearby house. But there was no sign of the children.

When those leads dried up, Geyer continued using the letters to follow the trail. He wound up in Detroit, where Alice had written the last of her letters to her mother. In this letter, Alice wrote, “Howard is not with us now.” This, to Geyer, almost ensured that Holmes had killed the boy prior to arriving in Detroit.

Geyer followed more leads to Toronto, Canada, where he questioned real estate agents about a man traveling with two young girls. He was told about a man who’d rented a home for a short time. A woman identified Holmes from a photograph, stating he was in fact the man who’d rented the house. He’d also requested the use of a spade to plant potatoes in the cellar, and had only brought one mattress into the house.

Inside, Geyer found the cellar had a soft dirt floor that appeared recently disturbed. Almost immediately after he began digging, the specific stench of human decay filled the air. Three feet down, Geyer came upon a small arm bone. He stopped digging and had an undertaker continue the job. Soon they had exhumed the bodies of two girls, both naked, believed to be Nellie and Alice Pitezel.

Detective Geyer was now determined to find the body of Howard Pitezel. He knew Howard had been separated from his sisters before arriving in Detroit, so he backtracked the route laid out in the girls’ letters and went to Indianapolis. Eventually, instinct and luck brought Geyer to Irvington, Indianapolis, where he found a man who’d rented a house to Holmes. The man recalled a small boy had been with Holmes.

Geyer checked the basement but found no disturbed dirt and no body. He did find a trunk in a small alcove and sent the description to Carrie Pitezel via telegram. When she replied that the trunk was hers, Geyer knew he’d found the right place.

In the barn, Geyer found a coal stove with stains that looks like dried blood. A local doctor poked through the ash and showed Geyer pieces of charred bone, which turned out to be part of a skull and femur belonging to a male child. Geyer dismantled the chimney, where they discovered a complete set of teeth and a piece of a jaw. A dentist identified these as belonging to a boy 7 to 10-years-old. More grisly body parts were uncovered at the bottom of the chimney, and Geyer had no doubt he’d found Howard.

By this time, Chicago was battling Philadelphia for the right to try Holmes first. Philadelphia prevailed, and Holmes’s trial for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel began on October 28, 1895. On the first day, Holmes decided to fire his lawyers and defend himself. This was unprecedented in the U.S. where no murder defendant had ever before  chosen to represent himself. Various accounts describe Holmes as cool and calm or monstrous and out of control. An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer called his behavior in court “remarkable”.

The trial lasted five days. Despite Holmes’s courtroom theatrics and declarations of innocence, the jury convicted him of Pitezel’s murder and the judge sentenced him to death by hanging. Holmes would not stand trial for the murder of the three Pitezel children or any of the atrocities done at the Murder Castle.

After his conviction, Holmes was paid $10,000 from the Hearst newspaper syndicate to write a public confession. He did so, and the piece was published in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Knowing he had no hope of appeal, Holmes changed tactics and decided to brag about his conquests. Initially he claimed to have killed more than 100 people, though he soon retracted that confession and changed the number to 27. As his hanging loomed ever closer, he wrote, “I was born with the Evil One as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world.“

On May 7, 1896, H.H. Holmes was hanged. His final words were a retraction of all his confessions, and a declaration of innocence:

“Gentleman,” he said, “I have a very few words to say. In fact, I would make no statement at this time except that by not speaking I would appear to acquiesce in life in my execution. I only want to say that the extent of my wrongdoings in taking human life consisted in the deaths of two women, they having died at my hands as the result of criminal operations. I wish to also state, however, so that there will be no misunderstanding hereafter, I am not guilty of taking the life of any of the Pitezel family. The three children or the father, Benjamin F. Pitezel, of whose death I am now convicted and for which I am today to be hanged. That is all.”

The two women’s deaths Holmes admitted to being responsible for were, he claimed, a sort of medical malpractice. When the trap was sprung, the gallows malfunctioned and Holmes’s neck did not snap in the fall. He dangled for about 15 minutes, reportedly twitching, before succumbing to death.

Holmes had been terrified that body snatchers would steal his corpse and sell it for a profit, and so he’d made arrangements with an attorney to have his body buried in a coffin filled with cement. Two Pinkerton guards stood over the grave in Holy Cross Cemetery as the coffin was placed and the entire grave filled with cement. No stone was erected to mark the spot.

In the end, no clear answers or motives were ever provided for Holmes’s gruesome deeds. When Chicago officials went over missing persons records and various registries during the time of the fair, they surmised that his victim count could be as high as 200. We’ll never know what drove Holmes or how many lives he really took. He was only 35-years-old when he died on the gallows.

• While researching this case, I came across a variety of spellings for Benjamin Pitezel’s name. An 1895 issue of the Chicago Tribune has it spelled Pitzel, as does a feature story in a 1943 issue of Harper’s Magazine. One 1894 article in the New York Times has it spelled Pietzel, while another spelled it Pitzel. All later articles have his name as Pitezel, which is the spelling I stuck with here.

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

Modern Day Executioners Despise the Death Penalty

‘Trial by Media’ Is Not a New Phenomenon: The Kangaroo Hanging of Alvin Edwin Batson

“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

The characters await you.

by Lise Lasalle

The trial of 32-year-old Luka Magnotta started Monday, September 29, in a packed Montreal courtroom in Canada. It is expected to last six to eight weeks, with testimony from 60 witnesses and depositions from people as far away as France and Germany.

Superior Court Justice Guy Cournoyer quickly announced that the defendant had admitted to the gruesome killing and dismembering of 33-year-old Lin Jun who was a Chinese university student at the time of the killing and to other facts connected to the crime.

The slaying took place in May 2012, but Magnotta had fled Canada before being arrested in Germany and extradited in June 2012. He was arrested in a Berlin Internet cafe, after going through France.

Even if he admitted committing offences that include indignities to a body and harassing the Prime minister of Canada, Magnotta still pleaded not guilty. His defense lawyer declared that mental illness was to blame and that his client needed in-hospital psychiatric care rather than a long prison term. He intends to present medical files and expert witnesses to demonstrate his client’s long history of mental illness.

“Whether Mr Magnotta is exempt from criminal responsibility will be the matter for your deliberations,” the attorney, Luc Leclair, said in opening remarks to the jury.

Prosecutor Louis Bouthillier is not buying these excuses and called on the jury not to be swayed into believing that Magnotta must be insane in order to have committed such horrific crimes.

This was not the act of a lunatic, Bouthillier insisted, but rather a killing that was “planned and deliberate,” planned at least six months in advance.

Magnotta is accused of using an ice pick to fatally stab Jun Lin, before sexually abusing and dismembering his corpse, and then posting a video of the whole saga online.

A few days after the killing, Montreal police discovered the victim’s torso in a suitcase by the trash outside an apartment building along a busy highway. Lin’s severed hands and feet were sent in the mail to federal political parties in Ottawa; one of the packages was addressed to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and to two schools in Vancouver. The head was found in a Montreal park months later.

Now, Magnotta sits in a glass enclosure in the courtroom where Lin’s father has to face him from one of the few seats in the gallery. Jun Lin’s parents have been totally destroyed by the murder of their son, especially by the gruesome nature of the murder and the publication of the deed online, and they rightfully saw him at first, as the devil incarnate.

Even after being labeled a paranoid schizophrenic, Magnotta was declared fit to stand trial at a hearing following two psychiatric assessments. He is now medicated and obviously appearing more normal. He has been ‘officially’ suffering from mental illness since 2005.

At the time, he was prescribed antipsychotic medications, as well as drugs to reduce anxiety and insomnia. He attended psychotherapy and health education sessions but like most patients, did not take his medication religiously.

Without the drugs, “he would be prone to relapse of his symptoms, which include paranoia, auditory hallucinations, fear of the unknown, etc.,” a psychiatrist told an Ontario court in June 2005 after he was arrested for fraud.

No more than a month before Lin’s death, he had also been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder which causes emotional instability and more often than not, behavioral problems.

Finding jurors for this trial has not been a bed of roses. Never before, have I heard so many excuses coming out of the mouth of potential jurors to avoid jury duty, except in cases of fear of retaliation from bikers or dangerous criminals. Who could blame them? The judge had warned jurors during jury selection earlier this month that they would be confronted with evidence that was likely to be “shocking and disturbing.” And that is an understatement.

Luka Magnotta was born Eric Clinton Newman but used several aliases such as Vladimir Romanov or Angel before changing officially his name to Magnotta in 2006. As if he was constantly on a quest for reinvention.

He lied about his background, his education and almost everything else. Luka is the perfect example of a sick young man who fell through the cracks. His behavior was strange and he managed to do some modeling and odd jobs but his troubled personality would always take over and sink his ambitions.

He had gay lovers to pay for his expenses and managed to keep a few friends before it started literally raining cats and dogs in his life.

As he was becoming more and more disenfranchised and isolated, Magnotta turned to the Internet. It became his virtual world where he could rule everything and invent himself a past, a present and a future. He was putting it all out there: photos, comments and delirium. He bragged about dating Karla Homolka and managed to become well known in the underbelly of the net.

His small and more than modest apartment, soon became the theater of the grotesque and the absurd. He started by posting anonymous videos of kittens he would drown in the bathtub. He would start by petting and cuddling them before finally immersing them in the water.

Kittens were the first step in his descent to madness and it did not go unnoticed by animal activists who desperately tried to get the police interested in his shady activities. There was an underground search going on to find his location. They worked for months on end to unmask him. He would hide his face but there were some recognizable aspects in his videos for the amateur sleuths. Some of them were quite motivated because they were sure that he would graduate to other crimes, which he did. But he was not caught on time even if he advertised the fact that human victims were to come.

In his final masterpiece, Magnotta filmed himself slitting Lin’s throat, decapitating him, slicing his arms and legs, and this time a dog became his co-star as he fed him flesh from the dead body. He also had sex with the limbless corpse. It sure guaranteed him front page news. He instantly joined the ranks of infamous celebrity killers.

Dogs were also part of some of his videos and a small black dog was found dead with body parts from his victim.

Even if the authorities tried to remove the video of Lin online, it still exists in the nooks and crannies of the Internet. We all know that once a cyber-bomb has been dropped, it is never possible to retrieve all the pieces of the carnage.

What is even more tragic is that during the course of his trial, Magnotta’s actions will victimize even more people. The jury and the family of Jun Lin will be exposed to heart wrenching evidence and the murder video. The lawyers, the judge, cops and mental health specialists will also have to relive this event.

You don’t escape this kind of horror without residual scars. One of the first police officer to show up at the scene of a bus beheading in Winnipeg, Manitoba, killed himself last July, He suffered from PTSD for six years after the incident and decided he could not go on living in a constant state of anxiety. The young victim in the bus had been decapitated and partly devoured by a schizophrenic man who was found not criminally responsible for his actions.

John Bradford, the psychiatrist who had to review the videos of the murders filmed by colonel Russell Williams during the commission of his crimes, suffered also from PTSD in the aftermath. He admitted resorting to alcohol and having contemplated suicide. He refused to testify in the trial of Magnotta to prevent another relapse.

The jurors are the most vulnerable group of all because they have no training and no realistic expectations of things to come when they are called in for jury duty. They often risk being traumatized and suffering from PTSD. Research was done on sixty cases in Great Britain and it revealed the dangers jury are exposed to mentally and emotionally. A trauma can implant in the brain not only if you are the victim of a crime, but also if you were associated in any shape or form with the tragedy.

Jurors can sometimes get psychotherapy after the trial and the Great Britain researchers from Leicester University who did the study on this subject recommend getting help during the legal process and not only afterwards.

Thankfully and at the family’s request, the judge has imposed a publication ban preventing any of the photo and video exhibits showing the body of young Mr. Lin from ever leaving the courtroom. Lin Diran, the father of Jun Lin, has pledged to be present throughout the trial and has seats reserved for him in the courtroom. The judge has also made sure to have a small room with a television monitor reserved for the father so he can watch proceedings without being in the presence of the man who killed his son.

“The court has been very sensitive to the needs of the parents. They’ve done more than they needed to do in a gentle and humane way,” said the family lawyer, Dan Urbas, with the father standing by his side.”

Imagine the horror when on the first day of trial, the Crown started showing jurors more than 150 photographs presented and narrated by the crime scene photographer: Knives, an angle grinder commonly used to cut metal, a wardrobe’s worth of men’s clothing, a shower curtain, rubber gloves, the body of a small black dog disposed of along with parts of Lin’s body, pieces of arms and legs, a bloodstained T-shirt, a torso packed into a grey suitcase on wheels.

Welcome to my nightmare.

Jun Lin’s mother and sister stayed in China for the trial. I remember how distraught Mrs. Lin was when she first came to Canada after learning of her son’s demise. It is now up to Mr. Lin to represent his son and he is wearing his pain like a mask. He stands proudly with his volunteer translator by his side, but I wonder how long he will last.

“Every time the mother discusses it, it’s like it happened yesterday,” their lawyer said. “If they’re going to be suffering and going to be unhappy, they might as well be at home. There’s no point. The father is here, he wants his questions answered.”

Several volunteer translators are doing their best to give Mr. Lin some normalcy, taking him to dinner and putting him in touch with Chinese community members who share his language and interest. “We had a nice lunch and it seemed to put him at ease,” his translator said. “But let’s face it, this will never get better for him.”

I realize that a trial is the legal way to decide the fate of Luka Magnotta, but I am hoping for some change in the future for cases of severe mental illness. Jurors are not equipped to decide if a defendant should be incarcerated or given psychiatric treatment. Mental health experts testify for both sides but the decision should not fall on the shoulders of ordinary citizens.

There should be a board of experts from both sides deliberating and rendering the final judgment. The judge would obviously participate in the process. It would spare jurors, the family, the law enforcement officers and all the experts from testifying in a courtroom. It is already such a task to have been investigating this gruesome case. Why put them through the legal grinder again? And to what end? And it would get rid of the beast called media.

The Crown says Luka Magnotta premeditated his crime because he talked about it six months ahead of time. Well, I can tell you that in my neighborhood, where a lot of deinstitutionalized patients ‘reside’ homeless and carefree, I have received death threats and heard many promises of things to come. But they are sick so what they say or plan to do does not constitute intent. One of my homeless regulars tells me every day he will wash my car. Is it intent? Because he is never going to do it. Another one says that I stole his vacuum cleaner. Not that it won’t happen one day, but in my opinion, it cannot be considered as premeditation.

Some like Magnotta, are more ‘normal’ in the sense that they can appear as if their life is mundane. But if you scratch a little under the surface, in this case on his websites, you clearly see the madness within.

He should by no means be given a pat on the back, but let’s call a spade a spade here because his disease spoke much louder than his words. His father who will testify on his behalf also suffers from schizophrenia. Jun Lin’s wonderful mother who decided to bury her son in Montréal instead of China because he loved the city so much, declared at this funerals that she had started to develop sympathy for her son’s alleged killer after undergoing a spiritual transformation.  If she can understand and be forgiving, it is our duty to follow her lead.

I am hoping for a system where Magnotta will be put away and treated. Until then, it is going to rain cats and dogs for quite a while in our courtrooms.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

I remember well how I got my ass chewed for making disparaging remarks about foster parents based on isolated incidents. The gist of the “chewing” was that I was overlooking all the kind, benevolent and hardworking foster parents who do everything in their power to give their youthful charges a better crack at life. I took the criticism to heart and have since gained a new respect for these often saintly women and men. (Although I could be wrong, my sense is that the “foster mothers” are often the ones doing the heavy lifting and the “foster fathers” may frequently be less involved in the lives of the foster children.)

Now, to my horror, we are confronted with a case in which an apparently perfectly competent foster mother lost her life in a most gruesome fashion because her foster daughter was seduced by her foster father, who was clearly all too involved in his youthful charge’s life and in the worst possible manner. In fact, the foster father ultimately persuading the child to brutally murder her foster mother (his wife).

Mark Gillispie of the AP writes:

A northeast Ohio teenager who said she killed her foster mother in 2012 at the urging of the dead woman’s husband was sentenced to life in prison on Monday.

Sabrina Zunich, 19, pleaded guilty last month to aggravated murder in the gruesome stabbing death of Lisa Knoefel, 41, in 2012. The social worker was stabbed and cut more than 150 times with a 10-inch serrated knife, authorities said. Zunich is eligible for parole in 30 years.

The killing occurred nearly two years ago shortly after midnight on Nov. 26, 2012. Lisa Knoefel’s 13-year-old daughter reportedly discovered her mother fighting for her life during the awful encounter with Zunich and called 911 in a desperate cry for help. Unlike in the horror movies, it generally doesn’t take long to kill a person and when Officers from the Cleveland suburb of Willoughby Hills arrived, poor Ms. Knoefel had left the land of the living and Sabrina Zunich, still grasping the knife, was splattered with her victim’s blood,

Prior to her sentencing, Sabrina testified against her foster father Kevin Knoefel during his trial on charges of conspiracy to commit aggravated murder and sexual battery. Sabrina would have been around 16 when she moved in with the Knoefels and according to her testimony, Kevin began giving her the eye soon after her arrival.  According to Sabrina’s testimony, by 2012 they were having sex. Their relationship, which they both appear to have seen in a romantic light, eventually deteriorated into talk of murdering Lisa.

If Sabrina’s’s testimony is reliable, and rerading between the lines, Kevin either already was or became highly unstable at some point during his illicit sexual relationship with Sabrina. (Either that or he was smart like a fox.) Sabrina testified that the day before she assaulted Lisa, Kevin threatened suicide if his wife was not killed. (Not to come across as too much of a cynic, but this is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard. Particularly considering that Kevin stood to receive $750,000 of insurance money, if only his wife would conveniently die.) In her testimony, Sabrina said Kevin even gave her advice on exactly how to execute the fatal stabbing of his wife. Kevin, naturally, was conveniently out of town driving a truck in Michigan when the slaying occurred.

At Sabrina’s sentencing on Monday, prosecutors said it was unlikely they would have obtained the conviction against Kevin without Sabrina’s testimony. A different Lake County judge in August sentenced 44-year-old Kevin Knoefel to life in prison. Like Sabrina, Kevin will be eligible for parole after 30 years.

At her sentencing, Sabrina Zunich seemed suitably chastened. With her wrists manacled in front of her, she spoke briefly stating Lisa Knoefel did not deserve to die.

“I can’t explain how much remorse I have, how much sadness.”

On Monday, Sabrina’s defense attorney, Charles Grieshammer, argued “that she should receive the minimum sentence of 20 years to life. Grieshammer said Zunich had overcome a tough family life, substance abuse and mental health issues to get her life and education back on track before she was sent to live with the Knoefels.”

“Had she been placed anywhere else, she might have made it,” Grieshammer said.

And this, of course, may well be true. Not every foster father is going to sleazily seduce his new foster daughter.

On the other hand, Sabrina moving in with the Knoefels in 2011 seemed to make sense. Lisa Knoefel had a background in social work and had previous experience with troubled teens. Not only that, “she and her husband had hosted foster children before, and there were two younger girls that Zunich could bond with.”

This happy scenario, however, overlooks one critical (and as it turned out deadly) fact. The Knoefels had a troubled marriage.

One wonders how Lisa Knoefel, who presumably had her head screwed on more or less straight, allowed herself to believe that her already estranged husband would comport himself properly with a new 16-year-old girl in the house. But perhaps there had never been any indication that he “sported” a particularly inappropriate “wandering eye”. In any event, Lisa Knoebel clearly thought they could handle it and, tragically, this optimistic appraisal on her part opened the door to disaster.

by BJW Nashe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Over the past many months, All Things Crime Blog has covered numerous incidents in which teachers have been arrested and charged for illicit sexual conduct with their students. Although the students are sometimes younger, in many instances they are 16 or thereabouts when the encounters take place, an age at which in earlier decades, the conduct would likely have been legal in many states. In response to these incidents, I have not seen one single reader defend the conduct as “not really that bad”. My sense is that readers are not necessarily as upset over the age of the victims (at least when they’re at least 16), at they are over the fact authority figures are preying on their young wards.

I recall that when I taught community college from 1990 until 1993, standards were changing dramatically on college campuses and professors and instructors were increasingly being strictly forbidden to have sexual contact with their students, even though the students would have been at least 18 years of age and in many cases much older.

Does this mean that we as a nation are becoming more and more puritanical? Perhaps so. In any event, it is clear that at the national level there is zero tolerance for instructors who rendezvous with their students, typically even if the students are of age.

A new case out of Destrehan High School in Kenner, Louisiana, hammers this point home.

Vanessa Bolano and Tanya Sinkovits of WGNO ABC report that Shelley S. Dufresne, 32, and Rachel Respess, 24, not only allegedly had a threesome with a 16-year-old male student after a football game (don’t forget, high school and college football rule in Louisiana), but somewhat surprisingly, were students themselves at Destrehan High prior to moving on to LSU where they got their college educations.

In fact, Shelley Dufresne, who has been teaching at Destrehan High for ten years and is married with three young children, is the daughter of St. Charles Parish Judge Emile St. Pierre, which of course only adds to the atmosphere of scandal permeating and surrounding this situation.

According to Bolano and Sinkovits, the basic facts of the case are as follows, as presented by Kenner Police Chief Michael Glaser at a press conference on Wednesday.

• The alleged incident happened at Rachel Respess’s home in Kenner after a football game.

• The victim is reportedly a junior at Destrehan High School and law enforcement is looking into the possibility that he videotaped or took pictures of the encounter. (Whatever happened to the days when sexual encounters were virtually never filmed unless they were ersatz encounters filmed in Hollywood?)

• The police inform that Respess taught the victim last year and that until a few days ago when she was removed from her position, Dufresne was his current English teacher. The two young women are thought to have been friends. It is unclear if Respess was also an English teacher.

• Both women grew up in St. Charles Parish which, I believe, is not far from Kenner which is a suburb of New Orleans, but is apparently located in Jefferson Parish.

Shelley Dufresne was arrested Tuesday in St. Charles Parish. Reports indicate that the investigation was initiated last Friday when the sheriff’s office was contacted by St. Charles Public Schools who had discovered that one of the students had been heard bragging about having a sexual relationship with two teachers.

Bolano and Sinkovits write:

Both teachers are facing felony charges of carnal knowledge of a juvenile, contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile and indecent behavior with a juvenile.

At the press conference, Kenner Police Chief Michael Glaser addressed the double standards surrounding the situation involving a male student and female teachers versus a male teacher and a female student. Either way he said the crime is sickening.

“No matter what sex the of the victim is everyone should be outraged,” Glaser said. “You have an educator, I guess, the responsibility is the safety and education of the children and when it goes outside those lines I believe the community should be outraged.”

Michael Wright, a resident of Norco, a small nearby community stated:

“Anytime anyone is put into a position of authority, it’s a responsibility as a human being not to abuse that authority, and so i think it’s pretty sad. I don’t know the circumstances. I don’t know if there’s some kind of mental illness there. I know if it was my child I would pursue charges in a heartbeat.”

Dufresne and Respess are not only facing the legal wrath of the legal system; they also appear to be facing overwhelming community censure, as a statement by Destrehan High parent Antonio Morales strongly suggests.

“Unfortunately as a parent of a son that attends Destrehan High School, it’s a little overwhelming at times, and my son is taking it difficult as well, but I think the whole school is taking it (with) difficultly. When anything happens here at Destrehan, all of Destrehan suffers.”

After her arrest on Tuesday, Shelley Dufresne was released on a $200,000 bond set by Judge Lauren Lemmon. The conditions of her release include the following:

• She has been placed on house arrest.

• She is not allowed to leave her residence except for continued intensive mental health treatment, doctors’ appointments, and church and she must provide the court with proof of continued treatment. (Does this mean that Ms. Dufresne was already in some sort of therapy? If so, this could indicate a history of psychological problems, but we would need to know more.)

• If Ms. Dufresne fails to comply with her conditions, she will be required to report back to jail.

I believe that the reason Ms. Dufresne’s bond is so low could have something to do with the fact her father is a local judge.

* * * * *

What is interesting to me is the fact the two woman, whatever their psychological state, have exercised such bad judgment. They are both rather attractive and surely must have known that the victim was going to tell the world about what he may well view as a dynamic sexual conquest. I can say without reservation that at least some high school boys would consider themselves lucky to have been selected by the two ladies and would experience a strong temptation to brag about it.

I’m uncertain what degree of lasting psychological damage the victim will experience; this is a question best answered by psychologists who have experience with this sort of thing.

More and more we see our authority figures, whether they be teachers or law enforcement personnel or politiians, falling from grace, whether through sexual indiscretions (and in some cases very serious sex crimes including forcible rape) or inappropriate violence. And, of course, we’ve long been plagued by crooked, self-serving politicians. More than most, perhaps, I’m extremely suspicious of politicians of every ilk and might consider banning them if I could. SMH. I don’t know what this seeming breakdown in morality portends for our society as a whole but it certainly is grounds for doubting the strength of the foundation upon which our society rests.

by Rick Stack

It has been said that justice delayed is justice denied. In the case of Florida teenager Jordan Davis, that legal aphorism is not entirely accurate. More than seven months after the jury in the first trial of Jordan’s killer, 47-year old software developer Michael Dunn, deadlocked on first-degree murder charges after deliberating for about 30 hours, a Florida jury convicted Dunn of the first-degree murder after a scant five and one-half hours of deliberations. In the retrial, a mostly-white jury consisting of eight men and four women heard evidence over a period of six days. Under Florida law, Dunn will now spend the rest of his life in prison, without the possibility of parole.

In the previous trial, the jury found Dunn guilty of three counts of attempted murder for shooting in the direction of Davis‘ three companions and one count for firing at the vehicle at the same time that he shot and killed Davis. Dunn had faced as little as 30 years to as much as 70 years in prison for his convictions on those charges (20 years for each count of attempted murder, or a total of 60 years if the sentences were to run consecutively rather than concurrently, plus a 10 year enhancement for his use of a firearm in committing those crimes).

This case tested the outer limits of Florida’s Stand Your Ground (“SYG”) law, sponsored by the neo-fascist group American Legislative Exchange Council (“ALEC”), which promotes a business-friendly, anti-democratic legislative agenda in all 50 states. ALEC, with the assistance of Republican state legislators, is the same group that has promoted voter-suppression laws, restrictions of women’s constitutional right to have an abortion and birth control, and a loosening of gun laws so that citizens can carry guns practically anywhere, even in bars, churches, and schools (note the so-called “Guns Anywhere” law recently enacted in Georgia).

As readers of this blog may recall, on November 23, 2012, Dunn killed Davis in the parking lot of a convenience store following the two men’s argument over the loud rap music blaring from the Dodge Durango SUV in which Davis was a passenger in the back seat. Dunn had pulled up and parked his vehicle next to and very close to the SUV. After Dunn requested the teens to turn down their music, one of Davis’ friends initially obliged but then Davis asked his friend in the front seat to turn the music back up, which he did. An argument ensued between Dunn and Davis, during which Davis allegedly called Dunn a “cracker.” (In this author’s opinion, Dunn could also accurately be characterized as a “WORM,” or a White Old Rural Male). Dunn also testified that Davis called him a “cracker,” pointed a shotgun his way, and then tried to scramble out of the SUV. Dunn then proceeded to fire a total of 10 shots at the teenagers’ SUV, three of which hit Davis. Dunn told the jury, “I’m petrified. I’m in fear for my life. This guy threatened to kill me – and he showed me a gun.”

In the retrial, the prosecution convincingly rebutted Dunn’s claim of self-defense by putting his then-fiancé, Rhonda Rouer, on the stand. During the shooting, Rouer was inside the store buying liquor to enable her and Dunn to continue their private celebration of the family wedding that they had just attended. In tearful testimony, Rouer testified that Dunn had complained to her about hearing “thug” music. In the night and day after the shooting, however, Dunn never once mentioned to Rouer that the teenager had pulled out a firearm or that he had shot someone.

In addition, a police search of the teenager’s SUV, albeit conducted four days after the shooting, failed to turn up any weapon or object which could have been mistaken for a gun or a shotgun, such as a walking stick. Similarly, none of the witnesses to the shooting (including a transient who happened to be in the area) saw a weapon in the possession of the occupants of the SUV.

The jury was unpersuaded by Dunn’s claim of self-defense, apparently because Dunn had left the scene of the shooting with Rouer, had more drinks and ate a pizza with her back at their hotel, and did not even bother to tell Rouer about his violent encounter with Davis at the convenience store. In fact, Dunn did not tell Rouer about his involvement in the confrontation until after they watched news of the killing on television the following morning. Needless to say, the cavalier manner in which Dunn handled this incident and his failure to promptly report it to the police undoubtedly led the jury to discredit his claim of self-defense. In the end, the jury found that Dunn had intended to kill Davis and that he acted with premeditation as he reached into his glove compartment for his gun and fired ten times at the SUV, even after it pulled away to evade the gunfire.

In this trial, the prosecution employed a laser-like focus on Dunn’s actions after the shooting, which it believed cloaked him in guilt. Dunn fled the scene and never called the police, not even after he learned that someone had died. Instead, he and his then-fiancé drove to their hotel, where he walked the dog, poured himself a rum and coke, and ordered a pizza. [Such callous actions are reminiscent of the archetypal hit man who kills someone in his home, makes himself a sandwich from the contents of the victim’s refrigerator, and then proceeds to leisurely dine at the victim’s kitchen table]. The next day, Dunn drove for two and one-half hours back to his house in Satellite Beach, Florida, where the police, who had obtained his license plate number, arrested him. In a news conference after the verdict, the State’s attorney, Angela B. Corey stated, “If you are fighting to defend your life, you don’t then run from the scene.”

After the verdict was announced, Davis’ parents, Ron Davis and Lucy McBath, stressed that this second trial was incredibly difficult for them but they expressed relief that they had finally gotten justice for their son. Ms. McBath gave the following statement at a post-verdict press conference:

“We are very grateful that justice has been served, justice not only for Jordan, but justice for Trayvon (Martin) [who was killed only months earlier by self-appointed neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, who was acquitted of Martin’s killing based on his claim of self-defense under Florida’s controversial SYG law] and justice for all the nameless, faceless children and people that will never have a voice. And Ron and I are committed to giving our lives too walking out Jordan’s justice and Jordan’s legacy. We know that Jordan’s legacy will live on for others.”

Self-defense was at the core of the retrial, where Dunn faced an even less diverse jury the second time around. This time, the jury was comprised of ten whites and two blacks. The mostly white make-up of the jury raised concerns among supporters of the Davis family and legal observers that Dunn would be acquitted of murder. In the end, however, the racial make-up of the jury was immaterial because it fully considered the evidence and served justice upon Dunn. After the verdict, Mr. Davis stated that this case is an example of how the racial make-up of a jury should be irrelevant:

“I wanted Jacksonville to be a shining example that you can have a jury made up of mostly white people, white men, and to be an example to the rest of the world to stop the discriminatory practices, stop discriminating, stop looking where we have to look at juries and say what the makeup of juries are.”

The retrial of this case is indeed a shining example of how much America has changed in the past 50 years. Since passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act (Section 5 of which was gutted by the conservative Supreme Court in its last term), we have now had a black President, a black Attorney General, and a growing black middle class. Now, a mostly white jury in the Deep South has rejected a white man’s spurious claim of self-defense and instead convicted him of premeditated murder of a black teenager. Slowly but surely, and at least in this case, America is achieving its goal of equal justice under the law. In the immortal words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Somewhere up there, Jordan Davis, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown are smiling down broadly upon us as we continue our attempt to form a more perfect union. . .

Rick Stack is a Los Angeles-based tax lawyer working in the private sector. Prior to that, he worked for many years as a Federal Prosecutor in the Tax Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He resides in Los Angeles County and is interested in politics, civil rights, his family and the Chicago Bears. Rick is one of All Things Crime Blog’s earliest supporters and is known for his trenchant and unabashed comments.

by BJW Nashe

Carlos Castaneda’s journey from anthropology student to famous author to New Age cult leader makes for a strange tale that is far more disturbing than anything found in his bestselling books.

At the peak of his career, Castaneda crossed over an invisible line. He turned his back on the clear light of humane, rational thought, and stepped into a shadowy realm of manipulation, secrecy, and lies. It’s tempting to compare this to the metaphorical leap into the abyss that figures so heavily in his writings. Yet Castaneda’s real-life leap had consequences that were quite different from the magical escapades depicted in his writing. Once he became rich and famous and began facing scrutiny, Castaneda shunned the limelight and spent the next two-and-a-half decades pursuing a bizarre alternative lifestyle largely hidden from the public. He proclaimed himself a shaman and a sorcerer and assumed the role of a mysterious guru surrounded by a group of close followers.

When Castaneda passed away in 1998, several of his disciples simply disappeared. To this day, no one knows what happened to them. Since then, others from Castaneda’s inner circle have spoken out about their experiences with “the Nagual.” A highly complex, sinister, and sleazy portrait of the man has now emerged. The most detailed source of information is a memoir published by Amy Wallace (daughter of novelist Irving Wallace) in 2003 called Sorcerer’s Apprentice: My Life with Carlos Castaneda. Robert Marshall’s discussion of Castaneda’s dark legacy in a 2007 article for Salon.com is also very informative, drawing on both Wallace’s book and interviews with other insiders who knew Castaneda well. We are ultimately left with a lasting image of Castaneda as a creepy cult leader who manipulated and controlled his closest female followers — known as “the witches” — to such an extent that they may have been led to end their own lives.

Stopping the World

What we know of Carlos Castaneda’s life prior to his meteoric rise to fame is fairly unremarkable. He was born on December 25, 1925 in Cajamarca, Peru. He immigrated to the United States in the early 1950s and became a naturalized citizen in 1957. In January 1960, he married Margaret Runyan. On August 12, 1961, Margaret gave birth to a son named Carlton Jeremy (“C.J.”) Castaneda. Carlos supposedly divorced Margaret in 1973, although records indicate they remained legally married throughout Castaneda’s life.

As a young man, Castaneda enrolled in UCLA to study ethnography. He may have dropped out for a while — there are conflicting reports on his education — but records show that he graduated with a B.A. in anthropology in 1962. He went on to pursue a doctorate degree at UCLA, continuing his anthropology studies. Post-graduate education in California in the 1960s could be pretty free-wheeling. Castaneda was able to take advantage of this by reading widely in various esoteric disciplines and making frequent trips to the desert to conduct research. It was during his grad student years that Castaneda decided to start writing about his “apprenticeship” with a Yaqui Indian sorcerer named Don Juan Matus, whom he claimed to have met while immersing himself in the rich lore surrounding psychoactive plants in the Sonora Desert. Castaneda aspired to be a “psychedelic scholar” loosely modeled after Aldous Huxley, whose book The Doors of Perception was very influential at the time.

Castaneda’s first book, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, was published  in 1968 by the UC Press, which led to a book deal with Simon and Schuster. Castaneda followed his debut with two further texts, A Separate Reality (1971) and Journey to Ixtlan (1973). All three books were recognized as anthropological field studies, and marketed as popular non-fiction. Journey to Ixtlan was submitted as a doctoral thesis, for which Castaneda received a Ph.D. in 1973. The UCLA faculty were not the only ones impressed with Carlos’s writing. The books found a large audience with counter-culture types — which was a thriving market back in the early 1970s. Scores of long-haired college students, hippie travelers, metaphysical seekers, and dabblers in the occult found Castaneda’s books to be irresistible — a kind of intellectual catnip. These books seemed to be tailor-made to fit their various preoccupations.

The popularity of Castaneda’s early work is not difficult to understand. A talented storyteller blessed with natural wit and charisma, Carlos also had just enough erudition to be dangerous. His first-person accounts of traveling to the Sonora to become initiated into the magical world of Don Juan and his fellow sorcerers make for compelling reading. The desert setting is rendered in vivid detail, the prose is crisp and clear, and the characters are alternately fascinating, eccentric, and menacing. Most important, the subject matter is mind-blowing — a philosophical walk on the wild side, in which the narrator is taught to “stop the world” by breaking free from his habitual ways of thinking and perceiving. Stopping the world allows him to enter another dimension of reality — the “nagual” — that is filled with supernatural intensity. Becoming a “warrior” in this psychic zone involves various outlandish activities such as ingesting powerful hallucinogens, learning to control dreams,  talking to luminous coyotes and dogs, and turning into a crow and flying through the desert sky.

The star of the show is Don Juan Matus, who comes across as a psychedelic Native American zen master with a sharp occult edge. The world of sorcery is fraught with peril, often a life-and-death struggle against powerful dark forces. Yet Don Juan’s teachings contain a strong current of anarchic humor. The second book (A Separate Reality) opens with the narrator “Carlos” paying a visit to Don Juan in order to present him with a copy of the first book, which he is immensely proud to have authored. Don Juan declines the gift, suggesting that it be used as toilet paper instead. Then a new cycle of grueling apprenticeship begins, even more intense than the last time. Once again, Carlos’s mind must be blown to smithereens in order to obtain true visionary power.

Becoming Inaccessible 

Castaneda’s books would go on to sell more than ten million copies during his lifetime (and they are still selling today). He received glowing reviews from the literary establishment. Notable anthropologists from the nation’s top universities praised his work. With fame and success came heightened scrutiny, however. In 1973, Time Magazine ran an article by Sandra Burton that raised serious questions about the details of Castaneda’s biography and the credibility of his apprenticeship with Don Juan Matus. Richard De Mille (son of film director Cecil B. De Mille)thoroughly investigated Castaneda and published a book called Castaneda’s Journey: The Power and the Allegory  that declared the Don Juan books to be fraudulent — little more than a clever hoax. De Mille reviewed library records at UCLA to demonstrate that Castaneda imported the content of Don Juan’s teachings from a slew of historical and metaphysical texts. Castaneda’s true adventure, claimed De Mille, occurred not in the Sonora desert, but among the stacks of the university library. De Mille also argued that Castaneda’s details regarding the Yaqui Indians of Northern Mexico were insufficient or inaccurate. Most damaging, in the eyes of many, is De Mille’s assertion that Yaqui Indians do not use peyote in magical rituals as depicted by Castaneda.

In hindsight, it is hard to believe that anyone — including the faculty at UCLA — considered Castaneda’s writing to be literally true. The books might be based in part on field research and interviews with Native Americans. They may contain a certain level of poetic or spiritual “truth.” So does Paradise Lost, yet few of us today would claim that Milton’s masterpiece is a “true story.” These days, hardly anyone considers Castaneda’s stories about Don Juan Matus to be pure non-fiction — no matter where they are shelved in bookstores. Yet Castaneda’s books remain popular works of metaphysical literature that sit comfortably alongside Gurdjieff, Crowley, Huxley, and Ouspensky.

As criticism of his work intensified, Castaneda stopped talking to the press. He did not retreat from public life altogether; there were still parties to go to, and people to meet. After the Time article in 1973, however, Carlos gave no more interviews, refused to be photographed or filmed, and would not allow his voice to be recorded. He also forbade those close to him from speaking to the press or discussing him in any way without his approval. In a telling move, Castaneda also severed all ties with his estranged wife Margaret Runyan and their son C.J.

Castaneda had no interest in defending his writing as literature. He has been described as a trickster who pulled off the perfect hoax, because he never admitted to any fault whatsoever. In fact, he remained committed to the illusion of truth perpetuated by the hoax. He wanted people to think he had been initiated into a world of secret knowledge. He wanted to be recognized as an actual sorcerer. And he craved followers who believed in his magic. Since he was a famous figure, there were plenty of fans willing to sit at the feet of the master. Castaneda began referring to himself as “the Nagual” — as if he were a supernatural being with all-knowing powers. He was such a compelling fabulist that he apparently brainwashed himself into believing his own BS.

Erasing Personal History 

Castaneda continued publishing books throughout the 1970s and 80s. He also began organizing his followers and channeling their activities in certain strategic directions. Along with the philosophy presented in his writings, he also began promoting a spiritual practice called “Tensegrity,” which is best described as a movement technique somewhat similar to Tai chi. Carlos claimed the technique had been passed down through 25 generations of Toltec shamans. Castaneda established a Los Angeles-based corporation called Cleargreen, which promoted Tensegrity through workshops, seminars, and instructional videos. People paid up to $1200 to attend sessions where Castaneda and his disciples would speak and answer questions, while  Tensegrity demonstrations were performed by black-clad acolytes called “chacmools.” Books and videos were on sale, along with T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan, “Self Importance Kills — Do Tensegrity.”  The workshops were quite successful, often selling out. Castaneda was a marketable brand. (It should be noted that Cleargreen’s outreach continues to this day, with locations in Southern California, Europe, and Latin America.)

Behind the scenes, life at Castaneda’s compound on Pandora Avenue in Westwood was growing increasingly strange. At the core of the Nagual’s inner circle — which numbered up to two dozen people at any given time — was a group of intensely devoted young women who were all at one time or another romantically linked to Castaneda. They were referred to as “the witches.” Once they were lured into Castaneda’s orbit, he instructed them to change their names and cease all contact with their former friends and families. Then they were subjected to various methods of control: hypnosis, verbal and emotional abuse, mind games, bizarre rituals, dubious teachings, and sexual domineering. The women were forbidden from exhibiting any signs of illness, should they ever become sick. They began dressing in a similar style of black clothes and sporting the same short, dyed blonde haircuts. They each claimed to have been instructed by Don Juan Matus in the desert. Two of them were directed by Carlos to write their own books about these “apprenticeships.” The primary task of the witches, however, was recruiting new female members for the Nagual to share his unique magic with.

Within the group, three women were particularly close to Castaneda: Taisha Abelar, Florinda Donner-Grau, and Carol Tiggs. Tiggs at one point defected from the cult, but was eventually lured back by Carlos. Amalia Marquez, who served as president of Cleargreen Corporation, and Kylie Lundahl, a Tensegrity instructor, were also key figures in the Nagual’s inner circle. The individual with the strangest role of all in Castaneda’s inner circle was Patricia Partin, also known as “the Blue Scout.”

Patricia Partin grew up in LaVerne, California. After dropping out of Bonita High School during her junior year, she worked as a waitress for a while, and then at 19 got married to an aspiring filmmaker named Mark Silliphant. At some point during their courtship, Silliphant introduced Partin to Castaneda in 1977. Just 19 days into their marriage, Partin left her new husband and went to live with Carlos. She paid one last visit to her mother, during which she refused to pose for a family photograph. She never spoke to her mother again.

Castaneda renamed her Partin Nury Alexander. He also referred to her as “Claude,” or the Blue Scout. Young and attractive, she soon enjoyed a privileged status as one of his favorite disciples. Carlos claimed she possessed a rare energy that was “barely human.” In an exceedingly odd move, Castaneda officially adopted her in 1995, then explained to the other witches that he had “conceived her with Carol Tiggs in the nagual.” Carlos evidently enjoyed the conceptual incest involved in the adoption arrangement. Within the group, Partin was frequently infantilized. New cult members would be assigned the task of playing dolls with her. Castaneda at times deferred to her judgment regarding serious spiritual matters. He told the group that the Blue Scout had convinced him to start Cleargreen. He liked to use her special status as leverage in the mind games he played with the others.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Amy Wallace, who was closely associated with the group during the early 1990s, has provided us with the clearest picture of what life was like in Castaneda’s cult, with his harem of witches and his adopted daughter, the Blue Scout.

Castaneda first met Amy through her father, novelist Irving Wallace, who was friendly with the younger author. Carlos would often stop by the Wallace home in Los Angeles. Shortly after Irving’s death in 1990, Amy — who was then living in Berkeley — received a phone call from Castaneda in which he said that her father had visited him in a dream, saying that he was trapped inside the Wallace’s house, and needed Amy and Carlos to free him. (This pickup line probably only works if you are a famous New Age author.) Amy agreed to meet up with Castaneda in LA, and the seduction was underway. He told her he hadn’t had sex in the last 20 years (!), and soon persuaded her to join him in bed for a mystical experience. When she worried about possible pregnancy (the Nagual did not use birth control), Castaneda exclaimed, “Me make you pregnant? Impossible! The Nagual’s sperm isn’t human … Don’t let any of the Nagual’s sperm out, nena. It will burn away your humanness.” The vasectomy he’d undergone years earlier was never mentioned.

The courtship with Amy lasted for several weeks, and led directly into mind games and manipulation. At one point, Castaneda told her they were “energetically married.” However, when he noticed her checking the street signs around the compound — as if trying to get her bearings — he flew into a rage and banished her back to Berkeley. When she called on the phone, Carlos refused to speak to her. The witches instructed her to “let go of her attachments.” So she got rid of her pet cats. Then Carlos told her she was “an egotistical, spoiled Jew” who should “go get a job at McDonald’s.” After six months of this treatment, she was finally allowed to return.

Such expulsions were common within the cult, and could occur arbitrarily, without rhyme or reason. If the Blue Scout didn’t like you, obviously you were toast. As in most cult situations, random exercises of power were used to keep the Nagual’s followers fearful and subservient. The obvious question is, why would anyone, including Amy Wallace, ever want to return? Why would anyone stick around in the first place?

We can answer this question in four ways — personal, social, philosophical, and psychological. First, Castaneda could be a charming and charismatic leader, when it suited his purposes. His personal magnetism was augmented by an aura of genius and fame. Certain people were easily seduced by him. Second, group members enjoyed a sense of close family connection that may have been absent from their lives before. Being part of a group — even a dysfunctional, abusive group — is sometimes viewed as preferable to alienation. Third, for people who are seeking something deeper and more meaningful than a normal nine-to-five existence in the business world, the Nagual’s spiritual philosophy and sexual games provided a clear alternative. Fourth, people who join cults often experience — at least temporarily — a sense of joy in being liberated from the responsibilities of decision-making. Freedom can be a burden. When someone else — a charismatic leader — is calling all the shots, one can be carefree in one’s subservience.

So there were certain “benefits” gained from living in Castaneda’s cult. As far as cults go, the benefits of Cleargreen were notable. Still, most of us would soon find these benefits seriously overshadowed by the horrors involved. In a 2012 interview with the Examiner, Amy Wallace explained that her passionate love affair with Carlos was initially intoxicating, yet soon devolved into abuse and humiliation. He berated her in front of the others for being “fat,” even though she was a petite woman who wore a size zero. He blamed her for “killing” him. He flipped out when he discovered that she was taking Prozac. “He believed he was cursed forever because his penis had entered a Prozac-contaminated body.” She witnessed him expel members from the group for drinking, smoking pot, and for getting sick or injured. Meanwhile, Carlos was always on the prowl for nubile young women, sometimes engaging in activities that bordered on kidnapping. In hindsight, it’s surprising that criminal charges were never brought against him. In writing her memoir, Wallace recalled that at one point she felt so tormented that she considered suicide. “Just remembering how close I came still terrifies me. It was horrific to write about.”

Amy Wallace has published several other books on various topics, yet she received her highest praise from readers and reviewers alike for telling her story about life with Carlos Castaneda. She insightfully describes both the seductive qualities that lead people to follow cult leaders, and the nightmare that awaits them once they get caught up in the lifestyle. “My book is very much a warning,” she says.

A Leap into the Void 

In 1997, Castaneda was diagnosed with liver cancer. The diagnosis was kept secret from everyone except the core group of witches, because illness was not supposed to be part of the sorcerer’s playbook. The seminars and workshops continued on as if nothing was wrong. Meanwhile the witches privately supervised traditional and alternative treatments for the Nagual.

With his health declining, Castaneda rarely left the compound. Many of the witches purchased guns, according to Carol Tiggs. This is not a good sign for any cult, since it could lead to random violence or a Branch Davidian-style Waco conflagration. Another bad sign is when the cult leader is bedridden with a morphine drip, gazing at the flickering images of war videos on the TV/VCR, while his closest followers are busy burning his papers. Taisha Abelar was drinking heavily, yet she told Amy Wallace it didn’t matter anymore. “I’m not in any danger of becoming an alcoholic now,” she said, “because I’m leaving. So, it’s too late.” Wallace figures that this was Abelar’s way of indicating that her own death was near.

An end-of-the-world vibe permeated the group. Wallace had another revealing conversation during this tense time period. Tensegrity instructor Kylie Lundahl told her, “If I don’t go with him, I’ll do what I have to do… It’s too late for you and me to remain in the world — I think you know exactly what I mean.”

In April 1998, the witches and other members of the inner circle were packing up the Castaneda compound. A week later, the Nagual died at age 72. He was cremated at the Culver City mortuary. No one knows where his ashes ended up. Within a few days, Florinda Donner-Grau, Taisha Abelar, Patricia Partin, Kylie Lundahl, and Amalia Marquez had their phones disconnected. Then they all vanished, leaving no word with anyone as to their whereabouts (at least, not that we know of). A few weeks later, Partin’s red Ford Escort was found abandoned in Death Valley. Her sun-bleached skeleton would be discovered five years later in the desert.

Within the greater community of Cleargreen associates and followers, few knew that Castaneda was dead. Yet rumors quickly spread, leading to a sense of growing despair. Still, the workshops continued. Carol Tiggs assumed a leadership role within the corporation. She told one member of the inner circle that she was supposed to have“gone with them,” but “a non-decision decision” had kept her here to run the show. Tiggs banned all grieving and mourning within Cleargreen. Many reportedly took to drowning their sorrows in alcohol and drugs. Some contemplated suicide in order to “get close to Carlos.”

When news of Castaneda’s death was finally made public two months after the fact, Cleargreen members stopped answering their phones. A brief statement was soon posted on the web site claiming that “… Carlos Castaneda left the world the same way that his teacher, don Juan Matus did: with full awareness.”

Nobody knows for sure what happened to Partin, the Blue Scout, in Death Valley. Nobody knows the fate of other three women closest to Castaneda who disappeared shortly after his passing. Some Cleargreen people think they are still alive, and have started over in a new setting, with new identities. Most people familiar with the story think they committed suicide. Without the Nagual, they saw no point in going on. Perhaps they had formed a suicide pact. Maybe the Nagual knew all about it. Followers had frequently heard Castaneda and the witches talking about suicide — about “making the leap” together. The path of the Warrior included choosing one’s own death. Carlos reportedly once sent the Blue Scout out to the desert to locate possible suicide locations.

There is no record with the LAPD or FBI of any investigation into at least three of the disappearances — Donner-Grau, Abelar, and Lundahl. No one reported them missing, since they had been estranged from their families for years.

There is an open investigation into the Amalia Marquez case, due to the efforts of her brother Luis. He claims the LAPD ignored his requests for assistance until the skeletal remains of the fifth missing cult member — Patricia Partin — were discovered in Death Valley in 2003 and positively identified in 2006 using DNA testing. Still, Luis Marquez claims the LAPD has been reluctant to visit Cleargreen or question anyone there about possible foul play. When Luis contacts Cleargreen headquarters himself, he is told that the missing women are “traveling.”

In a related incident in 2002, a woman named Janice Emery from Taos, New Mexico, who was a Cleargreen follower and workshop attendee, jumped to her death in the Rio Grande gorge. According to the Santa Fe New Mexican, Emery was suffering from cancer. One of her friends told the newspaper that she ended her life because she “wanted to be with Castaneda’s people.” Another friend said: “I think she was really thinking she could fly off.”

A Different Sort of Leap

An astonishing fact to ponder: so many organizations devoted to spiritual well-being — from mega churches to fringe cults — seem to share a very disturbing characteristic: domination, control, and abuse of women. We see this feature in certain fundamentalist denominations of Christianity and Islam. We see it in the Church of Scientology. We know it was all-too apparent in the Manson Family, the People’s Temple at Jonestown, and the Branch Davidian compound at Waco. I’m sure there are other examples. In this sense, Castaneda’s cult is not exceptional or unique. It fits into a general pattern of misogyny and sexual subjugation seen in many other faith-based institutions and groups.

The domination and control of women is so prevalent in these organizations that one wonders whether it is more than just an ugly tendency or side-effect. Is it too much of a leap to argue that the domination of women just might be the primary goal or mission of the leaders of these groups? Are all of the mystical teachings and metaphysical doctrines just a smokescreen for the true objective? Is religion sometimes just a convenient way for men to control other people — in particular, women? It certainly starts to look that way, when we consider the case of Carlos Castaneda, AKA the Nagual.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Here on All Things Crime Blog we’ve analyzed cases in which parents, for a variety of reasons, should apparently never have had children in the first place. We’ve also seen cases in which one of the parents goes berserk and kills the whole family in a state of ultimate madness. There is a third scenario which is some ways appears to be the most interesting of all. This is when either the mother or the father develops such an unrelenting hatred for her or her spouse that they steal away in the night, child in tow, never to be seen again unless through grit, determination and probably a modicum of luck the wronged parent manages to locate the child who is then recovered, with all the new problems that brings.

If you want to scare yourself really badly put yourself in the place of either a mom or dad and imagine you’ve just come home from work, or have just gone to school to pick up your kid, or any of the other endless situations in which parent and child meet up after being separated, only this time YOUR CHILD DOESN’T COME HOME or DOESN’T MEET YOU in the school parking lot. Why? Because she’s gone, baby, gone.

Perhaps my most frightening moment in a life with more than a few dark edges was the time my then 4-year-old daughter vanished during a family get-together at our townhouse in Santa Clara on the edge of Silicon Valley. One moment she was there; the next moment she was gone. With my heart in my mouth I roamed our complex calling her name with a horrible feeling that wherever she was, she probably wasn’t wandering around outside, which meant someone could have snatched her. It was truly freakout city for yours truly.

Happy ending, the little tyke had fallen asleep under a pile of pillows under the staircase leading upstairs. She was never in any danger whatsoever but that was the day my hair began to turn grey.

Greg Allen wasn’t nearly as lucky in April of 2002 when his estranged wife Dara Llorens took their daughter Sabrina, who was five at the time, from their home in Austin, Texas, on a scheduled weekend visit. At that time Greg had primary custody and Dara had visiting rights. According to the FBI, Dara did the “slip away in the night routine” and took Sabrina with her.

I cannot fathom the anguish Greg undoubtedly felt when Sabrina didn’t return. Whether immediately or shortly thereafter, he put two-and-two together and realized that Dara had snatched his child.

* * * * *

Let us leave Greg with his anguish for the moment and direct our attention to Dara and Sabrina. What do you do when you’ve just stolen your child (of course you probably don’t think of it as stealing) and know with some certainty that your estranged husband will wade through hell and high water to get her back.

What you do is the only thing you can do. You go into hiding. You go underground. You disguise yourself with plastic surgery and you and your daughter rarely see the light of day. This means the poor child can’t go to school but you rationalize it away by convincing yourself that she’s still better off than she would have been with your wretched ex. And in order to get your little charge (also known as your kidnapped daughter) to cooperate, you work day and night to poison her mind against her father.

Alyssa Newcomb and Tony Kerr of Good Morning America write:

“She was effectively a prisoner in a two-bedroom apartment. She has been told that I didn’t want her and that I committed suicide,” Allen said. “She was also told that both of my parents are dead.”

In effect, you turn reality into fiction in a manner that justifies your actions and makes your enemies the villains in your story.

* * * * *

Artist’s rendition of what Sabrina might have looked like

It is possible that Dara underestimated Greg. Or maybe she just hated him so much she was willing to risk it all. But since she had been with him for several years berfore absconding, she must have known that he would never give up.

In any event, Greg did everything in his power to find Sabrina. This meant missing person’s posters, private investigators, a million questions, a million false leads, and a tireless focus of finding her…somehow…someday…someway.

There’s little doubt in my mind that Greg must have had to tough his way through endless nights and perhaps even weeks and months of despair. But he kept his shoulder to the wheel and, lo and behold, after 12 years he got a break.

Newcomb and Kerr write:

Acting on a tip from a confidential informant, Mexican officials worked with a team from private investigator Philip Klein’s office to track Sabrina and her mother, Dara Llorens, Tuesday morning to a small apartment in the state of Tlaxcala, authorities said.

Twelve years of living underground came to a sudden halt when Dara’s hideout was raided, and Sabrina, who is now a pretty 17-year-old girl with chestnut brown hair and who goes by the name Fair, was found at last.

“Sabrina and Llorens were flown back to Texas Tuesday night. Llorens was booked into Travis County Jail on an aggravated kidnapping charge. It was not immediately known whether she has hired an attorney.”

At a news conference Wednesday in Austin, Allen said his daughter was “in pretty bad shape as far as my understanding. Sabrina has been under an intense campaign to hate me for 12 years. She’s currently under the care of a therapist that specializes in cases like this… She was not living a regular life. She has not been going to school.”

Although Greg now faces the supremely difficult task of regaining Sabrina’s trust, given all the heartache he’s already been through and all the patience he’s had to muster up for all these years, one cannot discount the possibility he will ultimately succeed in reaching out successfully to his no doubt bewildered daughter. He’s already working to line up a support team to help her get up to speed on everything she missed.

And Greg’s deepest hope is that his daughter still has some good memories tucked away of their time together from before she was taken away by his angry mother.

“I want to know her. She’s a completely different person, but they say personalities are formed by age five,” Allen told ABC News’ Austin affiliate KVUE-TV in an exclusive interview. “[I'm] hoping she has some memories still.”

* * * * *

And what is Dara thinking as she cools her heels in county jail. This would depend somewhat on whether she is crazy or just ornery and angry. If it’s the former, God only knows what thoughts are rolling through her brainpan, but if it’s the latter, I would wager that even as she gnashes her teeth and girds her loins for what is to come, she still has grim moments of pleasure thinking about all the pain she put Greg through while hoping that her brainwashing of Sabrina took hold completely and that he never succeeds in regaining his daughter’s trust.

Pure hatred is a supremely frightening thing.

We found the following list of the  Ten Wickedest Female Serial Killers Than and Now at Nabanita Dhar’s website. It is noted that Dhar’s original post is titled: Top 10 Most Evil Women in History.  All Things Crime Blog has altered the text significantly but kept close to the spirit of Dhar’s text. And, of course, this list is hardly definitive. There are lots of other female serial killers who could join this “august company”.

10: Charlene Adelle Gallego 

Gallego and her partner Gerald Armond wreaked havoc in Sacramento, California between 1978 and 1980. They kept a harem as sex slaves whom they utilized to spice up their own sex life. They ultimately killed around 10 of their victims. Gallego was apprehended in November 1980 and received a “sweetheart deal” not unlike Karla Homolka’s in return for testifying against her partner. She was not charged in California but pleaded guilty to murders in Nevada and received a sentence of 16 years and 8 months.

9: Ilse Koch

This fiend from hell was the wife of Karl-Otto Koch, commandant of the Nazi concentration camps Buchenwald and Majdanek. Known as the “the concentration camp murderess“, she tortured and killed prisoners without empathy. This hag was an extreme sadist and kept the skin of murdered inmates with distinctive tattoos as souvenirs. The poor people around her called her “The Witch of Buchenwald”and “The Beast of Buchenwald”among other things.

8: Beverly Allitt 

You gotta look out for those nurses, especially when they work in the Children’s Ward. This English serial killer was convicted of murdering 4 children and charged with attempting to murder 3 others. And she caused grievous bodily harm to half a dozen others. She worked fast too; all of her heinous crimes were committed within a 3-month stretch in the spring of 1991 in the children’s ward at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital, Lincolnshire. Unsurprisingly, the authorities described her as a “serious danger to society”. She was repaid for her crimes with 13 life sentences.

7: Belle Gunness

This Norwegian-American female serial killer was tough as nails. Belle Gunness murdered her suitors, boyfriends, two daughters, and probably both her husbands as well as the rest of her children. She is believed to have killed around 25 to 40 people in all over the course of several decades. The true American Bluebird, she would split open the head of her victims with a meat chopper or simply chloroform them while they were sleeping.

6: Myra Hindley 

Myra and her twisted partner Ian Brady were responsible for the Moors Murders between July 1963 and October 1965 in and around present day Greater Manchester, England. Their child victims were between 10 and 17 years of age, and at least four of them were sexually assaulted. She has been labeled “the most evil woman in Britain” by the press. She appealed her life sentence repeatedly with no success. She died in prison at age 60 in the year 2002. Her partner Ian Brady is still alive and has stated many times that he wants to die so that his misery can cease. Brady is usually on a hunger strike and is fed by means of a feeding tube. Oddly, at one point, Ian Brady in an attempt to minimize their horrific actions stated that the rapes and murders were merely “an existentialist experiment”.

5: Irma Grese

Why can fathom the mind of a truly wicked woman? Of engaging appearance, this unsettling young Nazi was nicknamed the Beast of Belsen or the Hyena of Auschwitz. She “found a job” at the Nazi concentration camps of Ravensbrück and Auschwitz and was the warden of the women’s section of Bergen-Belsen. She was promoted to Senior Supervisor by the end of 1943, and was placed in charge of around 30,000 Jewish female prisoners whom she tortured and often murdered in cold blood. She was captured by the British in 1945 and executed for crimes against humanity at the age of 22. So much evil and so very young?

4: Queen Mary I

This fiendish monarch is known for the brutal persecution of Protestants. During her reign, over 280 religious rebels were burned at the stake which earned her  distinctive nickname, Bloody Mary. She was the only child to survive the ill-fated marriage of Henry VIII and his first wife Catherine of Aragon. Queen Mary ruled as the Queen of England and Ireland from July 1553 until her death. She was the fourth monarch of the Tudor dynasty and is remembered for her restoration of Roman Catholicism for a brief period until her death. She is also immortalized in a line from a popular American 2oth century musical, “Bloody Mary is the one I love.”

3: Rosemary West

The Brits seem to be placing extremely high in the female serial killer sweepstakes. Convicted in 1995 of 10 murders, which she committed along with her husband, Rosemary West was a British serial killer who is now imprisoned in Durham. The murders occurred between April 1973 and August 1979. It was the disappearance of Heather West, their daughter, that led to a thorough investigation of the couple and their subsequent conviction. Heather’s body was found at 25 Cromwell Street along with other bodies.

2: Elizabeth Báthory

A undoubtedly striking and sophisticated woman, Elizabeth Báthory was a Countess from the renowned Báthory family in the Kingdom of Hungary and appears to have shared the oft-noted aristocratic thirst for blood. Known  as the “Blood Countess”, she is one of the most discussed female serial killers in history. She along with four of her partners have been accused of committing over 650 murders. Torture was also an integral part of their ritual. Though she was never tried or convicted, she remained confined in a set of rooms in Čachtice Castle upon her arrest in 1610 until her death.

1: Mary Ann Cotton

This sly fiend murdered up to 21 children by poisoning them with arsenic. She first married William Mowbray. Four out of their five children died from gastric fever and then Mowbray succumbed to an intestinal disorder. Oddly enough, her second husband died of a similar ailment. But she didn’t stop there and racked up several more “life partners” who all died of intestinal disorders. The downfall of one of history’s most evil women came shortly after the death of her last husband, Charles Edward Cotton.  She was hanged by the neck until dead in 1873.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Now that the guilty verdict has been delivered in the Michael Dunn re-trial for the death of Jordan Davis, it is a foregone conclusion that he will spend the rest of his life in prison. Jordan Davis’ family feels that justice has been achieved and no doubt Dunn’s supporters believe that a grave injustice has been perpetrated.

Although I believe a second-degree-murder conviction with have been a more reasonable outcome, the evidence and how it should have been construed is not what I will discuss in this sad and remorseful post.

Why sad and remorseful? Simple. I am sad and remorseful because Michael Dunn could not live and let live and as a result Jordan Davis’ young life has been snuffed out and Michael Dunn’s life is destroyed. Assuming he lives for another 40 years, he will spend the next 14,600 days in prison. Thus, if Michael Dunn dies (metaphorically speaking) 68 times per day (approximately every 21 minutes) for the next 40 years, he will die 1,000,000 deaths (metaphorically speaking).

This assumes that Michael will feel utmost despair about three times every hour for the next 40 years which may be a conservative estimate. During this long desert-like stretch, he will never be a free man and he will never have sex with a woman. This is the harsh reality he now faces.

And why? Simple. Because he could not live and let live. When he saw and heard Jordan Davis and his comrades blasting their so-called “thug music”, he veered off into a dangerously aggressive state and ended up, for whatever reasons, blasting away at the young men and their vehicle. All he would have had to have done is simply sit there seething for a few minutes while his girlfriend was in the liquor store. He could then have driven away cursing and gnashing his teeth and no harm would have been done. Jordan Davis would still be alive and Michael Dunn would still be a free man. He could still be driving around locked and loaded cursing young men who play “thug music” and thinking, “What’s the world coming too?”

At this point, Jordan Davis cannot die 1,000,000 deaths (metaphorical or otherwise) because he is already dead. Although Ian Fleming once wrote, “You only live twice”, it seems likely that you only die once. Although I’m not certain, I believe Jordan and his friends could have quickly driven away when the aggressive (and very possibly intoxicated man) approached their vehicle. But sadly Jordan Davis also could not live and let live. Rather, if the reports are correct, he flung some angry words in Dunn’s direction who, at some point, grabbed his gun and started blasting.

Dunn started it, Davis continued it and Dunn finished it. Bang!

The young men were only playing their music, no doubt too loudly but that’s what an awful lot of young people do and have been doing for a long time. In my youth, it was the counter-culture working hard to be obnoxious; we had no finer pastime than pissing off the squares. A few times it almost got me killed or at least seriously injured but I was lucky. In those days, not so many people were driving around locked and loaded.

The Thugs Didn’t Like My Looks

On one occasion in 1967 (at the age of 17) I was hitchhiking on the edge of Madison, Wisconsin. I wasn’t even being obnoxious; I was simply hitchhiking, on my way back to California. A couple of white thugs caught wind of me and decided they were going to FUCK ME UP! They basically charged me from across a deserted parking lot on the edge of town. I have no idea why the parking lot was deserted in the middle of day; it was almost like it was a visitation from a Stephen King novel (the diaboloical parking lot). So the thugs charged and they were big, violent dum-dums and I was a skinny hippie who hadn’t been in a fight since junior high.

I would have either been killed or badly injured; no doubt the former if they had gotten completely carried away once I was down and bleeding. At a minimum, I probably would not have walked away.

Time seemed to pause and the thugs began to race toward me at breakneck speed. Two house painters in a white painter’s van were driving into town; somehow they saw this all unfold, realized I was in grave danger, spun a quick U-turn and pulled up alongside me with the thugs no more than 15 feet away. They flung open the sliding doors of their van and I dove inside with the thugs so close I could practically smell their breath.

I always joke that on that strange day, God saved me and perhaps He/She did. I’ll never know for sure.

I was obviously very lucky and so were the thugs. Because I was snatched away from the jaws of disaster, they came away from this with no blood on their hands. They were not charged with any serious violent crimes and I sped away toward my next adventure.

Jordan Davis was not nearly so lucky. Neither was Michael Dunn. The software engineer could not live and let live and therefore he will die 1,000,000 deaths. Jordan Davis apparently had to get his two cents in and therefore aggravated an already volatile situation, even though he and his friends could apparently have retreated WITHOUT EVEN TURNING THEIR MUSIC DOWN.

I had no such option but Lady Luck was riding with me in the guise of two benevolent house painters in a white painters’ van.

One day I will die but hopefully it will only be one death and hopefully it will not be overly painful. In the meantime, I am filled with sadness and remorse for Jordan Davis and Michael Dunn and all the unfortunate souls whose luck has run out.

Now the sun’s coming up, I’m riding with Lady Luck, freeway cars and trucks…

–Tom Waits “Ol’ 55”