commentary by Patrick H. Moore

The issue of self-defense in your own home is a complex one, but here in America I believe people are justified in possessing firearms for self-defense and are justified in using them BUT ONLY in cases of extreme necessity. I wish it wasn’t this way and I wish I could state unequivocally that no one should have guns in their home for self-defense because no one needs guns that purpose.

However, in our violent and often vicious society, in which people in real need of protection cannot count on over-taxed law enforcement agencies coming to their rescue, there unfortunately are times when an otherwise defenseless house or apartment dweller has little recourse other than to pull the trigger. A new case out of Las Vegas appears to be emblematic of this appalling situation.

Phil Caulfield of the New York Daily News writes:

A Nevada woman blasted two shots into an obsessed former flame’s chest after he broke into her home, and later reportedly posted a photo showing the bullet-pocked door under the title, “I shot my stalker.”

The woman, who wasn’t identified, shot and wounded Douglas Eugene Jackson, 22, after he kicked down the door of her Las Vegas pad at about 1 a.m. Sept. 26.

The good news is that the shooter did not kill Jackson; in fact, after the victim shot him he managed to flee the apartment “but was later tracked down in some bushes by police K9 units and taken to a hospital, FOX Las Vegas reported.”

Hilary Hanson writes for Huffington Post:

According to Fox 2, the woman wrote in a reddit post days earlier that the man had been stalking her for six months, after the two had dated for one month. The post says he incessantly called her, texted her and harassed her online, at one point threatening to taser and rape her “using [her] boyfriend’s blood as lube.” She even moved to a new residence, but he allegedly managed to find out where it was and showed up on her doorstep multiple times, but always fled before police arrived, according to the post.

So it seems very clear that this young woman did everything in her power to avoid trouble from Jackson, including, according to one report, taking out a restraining order against him. The problem is that if an individual is truly sufficiently dangerous and determined to ignore a restraining order, chances are he (or she in some cases) will ignore the restraining order as if it were never issued.

In fact, according to Graham Noble of Liberty Voice, the stalker, who referred to himself as “Doug” stated:

“…a restraining order is just a piece of paper.”

The woman reports that’s Doug’s behavior was obsessive to such a degree that he would call her multiple times on a daily basis, send her 50-page text messages and threaten to kill her and her family. Doug soon figured out where she had relocated to “and he would frequently bang on her door and ring her doorbell repeatedly, in the early hours of the morning.”

The woman’s reddit blog was essentially a cry for help and she tried to find a private investigator to find out where Jackson was now living. (He had apparently also moved.)

In her online call for help, the woman wrote quite persuasively:

“People overuse the word ‘stalking’ so much these days that no one takes it seriously anymore. As soon as someone doesn’t like someone anymore they call them a stalker. This isn’t staring at your ex’s new lover’s timeline longer than you healthily should. This is the real ‘scared to sleep at night’ deal. I have felt the fear before and it’s eating away at me. I need help. Badly.”

It’s interesting to note that in the final analysis, despite her pleas for help, no one came to the woman’s aid. She had to help herself and she did. Sometime after she shot Jackson and after he had been captured, she posted on a photo of her door on a photo hoisting site called Imgur with the caption:

“I shot my stalker tonight.”

In an accompanying post, she writes:

“I awoke around 1:15 a.m. to the sound of the door giving way after one kick, followed by the sounds of my stalker struggling to dislodge the chair while forcing his way inside.” (She had kept a chair wedged against her door for some time at night.)

“I jumped up and grabbed the gun I’ve learned to do everything even shower with.”

“I stood at the top of my stairs and fired twice. Hitting him in the chest, I hear his scream, his disbelief that I’d stood up for myself … 0 to 100 in milliseconds.”

She also described shaking while watching the K9 units “drag him out from … under a bush.”

“For months of him evading the police I began to question whether he was unstoppable. Untraceable. Houdini, he would murder me and get away with it.”

“As of now I’m in a haze of guilt, surprise, relief and disbelief … I survived, where so many people do not. Holy s–, I survived.”

Jackson was treated for his injures at University Medical Center of Southern Nevada. According to Fox Las Vegas, he’s charged with home invasion and aggravated stalking.

* * * * *

Wow! If I ever need a bodyguard, I know who I’m going to hire.

In all seriousness, this case provides strong justification for keeping a weapon in your home for self-protection here in our dark and bloody land in the event you feel it’s necessary.

That being said, having a firearm to use in your home in cases of TRUE self-defense is a far cry from blasting away with insufficient provocation as we’ve sometimes witnessed during our 19 months of traversing the American crime terrain. Responsible gun ownership means precisely what it says: Responsible gun ownership!

The case also demonstrates the need to be extremely careful in choosing who to become involved with in relationships, even casual ones. Of course, how can you ever know for sure if a person is reliable? The human race is a deceptive race and nowhere is this more true than in matters of the heart and loins.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*     *     *     *     *

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

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

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

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

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

by BJW Nashe

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

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

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

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

Juliet From Hell

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

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

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

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

No Future

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

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

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

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

Death

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

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

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

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

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

No Moral to the Story

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

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

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

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

A new and particularly bizarre child abuse case out of Oklahoma City adds a new element of theater to this heinous occupation. It seems that Geneva Robinson, a 49 year old grandmother, is accused of abusing a 7-year-old girl by dressing up as a witch, hanging her from her armpits in the garage and beating her with a horsewhip.

This is so weird that one is initially tempted to reject the report as not credible. In fact, several of Geneva’s neighbors say the charges are preposterous. After careful scrutiny, however, the evidence suggests that, indeed, the child was abused in the manner described above with lots of other nasty added ingredients.

First, let’s look at the evidence against Geneva and then we’ll examine statements made by her supporters.

According to Joleen Chaney of News9 the abuse first came to light when Geneva took the 9-year-old victim to the hospital “to be admitted,” because “she could not control her anymore.”

According to the police, the signs of abuse were the following:

1. The child was malnourished and very thin.
2. Her armpits were bruised with evidence of small cuts.
3. She had scratches and whelps (welts?) on her face.
4. There was scarring on the back of her neck
5. Whelps (welts?) and bruises were discovered along her jawline; and
6. Skin was peeling off the child’s infected ankles

The above was enough for the hospital staff to suspect child abuse and they called the Department of Human Services (DHS). The hospital reports that the little girl told them Robinson “would dress up as a witch, wearing a green mask, and would take her out to the garage, bind her up at night and make her sleep on a pair of jeans, because she was in trouble.”

The child explained that the witch was named Nelda and the marks under her arms were the result of Nelda taking a pink dog leash and hanging her from the ceiling of the garage by looping the leash under her arms. Then Geneva would hit her with an orange and black whip and would also take a wand knife and “put it to her neck”.

Who does Geneva think she is? Gilles de Rais?

The psychological torture Geneva allegedly foisted upon the child is just as hideous as the physical abuse. The victim said that Geneva told her “the creatures in the attic were going to come and get her at tonight.” She also talked about being burned with fire.

Geneva’s neighbors simply are not buying the alleged victim’s claims and state that Geneva “is good to the four children in her care.”

Ed Mazza of the Huffington Post writes:

“If it wasn’t serious, it would be laughable,” neighbor Tracie Spillman told NewsChannel 4. “I can’t believe it. I just think that’s not true.”

“I don’t believe it at all,” neighbor George Finley told the station. “She’s too nice and takes care of those kids.”

Based on what the police found when they went to Geneva’s house, there appears to be considerable validity to the victim child’s story, especially when you combine their discoveries with the physical signs of child abuse noted by the hospital staff.

Joleen Chaney reports:

Pretty flowers sway in the wind outside an Oklahoma City home, but police said inside was an ugly nightmare. …there were four children living inside the home, ranging in age from five to eight years old.

When the police searched Geneva’s garage they found the following inculpatory items, most of which seem to jibe with the child’s story:

1. A pink dog leash connected to a black dog leash attached to the garage door railings that stretched across the ceiling with the garage door in closed position
2. A horse whip
3. A dagger
4. A witch’s hat and a black wig
5. A costume with a hooded cloak and red eyes

To add fuel to the fire, one of the other children living in the house reported to officials that Geneva cut his finger with a pair of scissors and threatened to amputate it. A third child said the victim was forced to eat different food alone in the garage.

The four children have all been taken into protective custody. Robinson was charged with child abuse and released on bond.

* * * * *

So friends, you are of course free to decide for yourself if you think Geneva was truly taking part in The Theater of Cruelty.

For my part, learning about Geneva’s cruel antics reminds me of the time back in the summer of ’68 when I was fortunate enough to escape from a “witch” who nearly had me in her clutches. Permit me to set the scene:

I’m living in Beach Haven on Long Beach Island down on the shore in Jersey, a fair distance south of Asbury Part. I have a tough but satisfying job working in a bakery. Full-time, $1.25 an hour; I’m raking it in. It was actually pretty satisfying work and I was learning the rudiments of a useful trade.

My only problem was I hadn’t found a place to live, had very little money and was sleeping on a piece of plywood in back of the bakery. No one seemed to mind; after all, it was summertime down on the shore 46 years ago, and folks were perhaps more easygoing then than they are today.

But I wanted a room and had my feelers out. One night after work when I’m hanging out near the beach with “all the young dudes”, a middle-aged woman comes peddling up on her old-fashioned bicycle complete with a basket in front. She was a dead ringer for the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. All she needed was a witch’s hat. So we get to talking (this was before I had learned that some people are better off avoided) and when I tell her I have a day job she says that an ambitious fellow like me should moonlight, get a graveyard shift job on the weekends, bring in a little extra money.

How could I argue with that? She tells me where to apply and I’m hired instantly. Summer jobs on The Island were easy to come by.

She had also told me she had a room for rent and that I should come on by. So with some reservations, I do – I’m feeling pretty good, two jobs, a few coins rattling in my jeans.

She lives in what is best described as an old dilapidated ship captain’s house complete with eaves, gables, lightning rods and a weather vane.

I knock on the door and she’s waiting for me. Of course she was… We sit down in an antiquated parlor like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story, complete with an ornate ship in a bottle crazily askew on the mantlepiece. We talk or rather she’s talks and I listen. She babbles on about ambition and how I shouldn’t hang out with “all the young dudes” and after a while she fetches me a tureen of turkey neck soup. OhMyGod it was nasty! I try to choke some down.

I’m at a terrible disadvantage because even though I was a rebellious kid, I still had that (un)natural tendency to be respectful to adults. Occasionally, she licks her upper and lower lips – old and pinched though they were – with a kind of gleeful gusto. I realize she is literally licking her chops. I sense that this is all part of the bewitching process and that if I don’t get out of Dodge very soon I will be lost forever and no one will ever see me again.

My heart is beginning to pound and I realize that I may have to catch her off guard by throwing the soup in her face and make a run for it. She says, “In just a minute I will take you to your room.” I’m sure my face must have been ghastly but if she noticed, she didn’t let on. Instead, she remembered that she might have left something burning on the stove and told me not to go anywhere and that she’d be right back.

She was barely through the door when the angel’s wings sprouted between my shoulder blades. I had never flown before but there’s a first time for most everything. Never did sleeping on a piece of plywood feel so good.

afterword by Patrick H. Moore

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

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

So without further ado:

Frank James Coppola.

August 10, 1982. Virginia. Electrocution.

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

Jimmy Lee Gray

Sept. 2, 1983. Mississippi. Asphyxiation.

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

John Evans

April 22, 1983. Alabama. Electrocution.

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

Raymond Landry

December 13, 1988. Texas. Lethal Injection.

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

Jesse Joseph Tafero

May 4, 1990. Florida. Electrocution.

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

Stephen Peter Morin

March 13, 1985. Texas. Lethal Injection.

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

Pedro Medina

March 25, 1997. Florida.  Electrocution.

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

Stephen McCoy

May 24, 1989. Texas. Lethal Injection.

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

Rickey Ray Rector

January 24, 1992. Arkansas. Lethal Injection.

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

Eddie Ives

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

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

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

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

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

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

 *     *     *     *     *

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

by BJW Nashe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Most of us can endure endless violent stimulation in the form of movies, video games and news (online and traditional) without turning into serial killers or other forms of violent madmen. Occasionally, however there may be a more delicate susceptible soul who might be influenced by this onslaught of violent fare to such a degree that he/she begins to act out in a horrific manner, particularly if this “delicate soul” has an alter-ego voice in his head telling him to murder and dismember.

The Press Association has recently reported on an interesting case out of England in which a 17-year-old-boy with a “Dexter” fixation stabbed and dismembered his 17-year-old girlfriend after his alter-ego, a voice in his head named “Ed”, told him to do so. The Press Association writes:

A 17-year-old boy with a fixation on the TV serial killer Dexter has been jailed for 25 years for stabbing to death his 17-year-old girlfriend and dismembering her body.

Steven Miles, who was 16 at the time, killed Elizabeth Thomas at his family home in Oxted, Surrey, on 24 January.

After stabbing her in the head and back, he dismembered her legs and arm, wrapped them in clingfilm and put them in bin bags.

I’m not aware that individuals such as Steven, who have been diagnosed as suffering from an autistic syndrome, have any particular propensity toward violence or that they are any more likely to succumb to violent acting out then non-handicapped members of the general population. In any event, when Steven’s sister returned home to their flat about an hour after the bloody crime, he told her:

“Ed made me do something bad.”

At the sentencing hearing at Guildford crown court, it was revealed that Steven “had a fascination with horror films and the macabre and had wanted to emulate the actions of Dexter, the lead character of an American TV series about a police forensics officer who is also a serial killer.”

Thus, it appears that the antics of the redoubtable Dexter, which merely amuse and titillate most of us, may – along with other negative influences – have had a very deleterious influence on Steven.

In the restrained and considerate manner of the Brits and our Canadian neighbors to the North, the judge, Christopher Critchlow, warned those assembled that the case involved details that were “extremely unpleasant and may cause considerable distress to anyone listening”. The judge then advised anyone with a nervous disposition to leave.

It was my lot to spend a good part of my childhood watching Gilbert and Sullivan light operas performed by a local Milwaukee, Wisconsin theater troupe. The work of these English masters is delightful and did not appear nearly as dated in the 1950s as it may today. In any event, the lyrics are memorable and many of them still stand out in my mind. A couplet from one of their songs called “A Policeman’s Lot Is Not a Happy One”, goes something like this:

“With constabulary duties to be done, to be done/A policeman’s lot is not a happy one.”

The same might be applied to a “judge’s lot”. Judge Critchlow in this matter felt compelled to address both the assemblage and Steven Miles directly:

He said to Steven: “This is a case of the utmost gravity, the horrific features of which are rarely heard in any court. Nothing this court can say or do, no sentence this court can impose can alleviate the pain suffered by Elizabeth Thomas’s family for a death in such a terrible manner. There must be a life sentence.”

As the judge spoke, Steven, dressed somberly in a white shirt and black tie, stared straight ahead, showing no emotion. Were this an older novel, the author might depict him as “staring down at his shoes.”

The Crown Court further described the impact Elizabeth’s murder would have on her parents:

“It’s hard for this court to remain unemotional. Their lives have been changed forever. It’s difficult to find the right words to describe the enormity of what you did to an innocent girl of 17 and a half.”

And now comes the worst part of all. The victim, Elizabeth Thomas, had become involved with Steven despite his handicap, and had stood up for him, yet she was betrayed most foully. The Judge stated:

“You decided, at the age of 16, you had to kill somebody, you chose Elizabeth Thomas, who tragically befriended you and who had stood up for you when people described you as different. It’s chilling to read that you described her on occasion as your project.”

The judge said that he would have given Steven life in prison if he had been an adult but since he was under-aged that was not permissible by law and therefore he was sentencing him to 25 years. Judge Critchlow also pointed out that “eminent psychiatrists had agreed that Miles was not schizophrenic and therefore did not have a defence of diminished responsibility.”

Here, I must take some exception. I don’t know who these “eminent psychiatrists” were/are and I don’t always trust “eminent psychiatrists.” After all, Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron of McGill University in Canada was at one time the President of the American Psychiatric Association and he just happened to be a major player in the appalling MKULTRA brainwashing conspiracy in the dark days of the cold war.

It seems to me that Steven had severe mental problems that probably went beyond just falling into the autistic disorder continuum, and I would warrant that he would be a more suitable candidate for long-term psychiatric care (would could stretch to 25 years) than prison, but because I have absolutely no influence on the outcome of this case, my opinion is merely that — an opinion.

My suggestion is a practical one, however, because we should keep in mind that Steven is only 17 and will therefore be barely over 40 when he is released (assuming that under British law he does the full 25 years). Thus, if he is untreated, he would seem to pose far more of a threat to society than he might with proper treatment. This, though, presupposes that the treatment, which would presumably be administered by “everyday” rather than “eminent” psychiatrists, would be helpful. And of course, the British penal system may be much better at providing needed psychiatric care to its prisoners than is the case here in the US where state prison inmates with severe mental problems are often treated with appalling indifference.

In a gesture which appears to set forth in bold relief how different the British justice system is from our own (every other system is different from ours), even Steven’s defense attorney seemed to gang up on him. (An American defense attorney would typically have tended to try to mitigate the situation, no matter how impossible such a task may seem.)

Not Steven’s lawyer, Lewis Power QC, who “described the murder as a “chilling, blood-curdling and sustained” killing inspired by the TV series Dexter. He said: “He had pleaded guilty to a horrendous crime which is beyond belief because of its horrific nature.

“This was a truly gruesome killing ripped from the pages of a hit TV script. The evidence points to the defendant trying to emulate the actions of the character Dexter, who he idolised. The case is a sad testament to the perils of how young people can become entrenched in modern TV blockbusters involving violence which shockingly led to a copycat killing in real life.”

What is telling is that Power, QC, did address the “Ed alter-ego issue” stating:

“(T)he phenomenon” of Ed was not fully understood by psychiatrists but they agreed that the defendant was not psychotic.

Well how can they be so damned sure he’s not psychotic if they don’t understand the “phenomenon” of Ed. Without “Ed” rattling around in his brain telling him to “kill and dismember”, it’s entirely possible that Steven’s love and admiration of Dexter would not have led him to commit the awful crime that took Elizabeth’s life. It’s my sense that the judge, who oddly enough has come under fire in the past for handing out overly lenient sentences in domestic violence cases, was unable to get beyond the hideous nature of the offense and, thus, was unable to give proper weight to the “Ed” phenomenon.

Police corruption has long been a major problem in the United States. Some police officers, of course, turn bad to line their own pockets through ripping off drug dealers and, sometimes, even dealing the stolen drugs themselves. Others try to cover up their own acts of brutality, murder and even torture. And then, there is the third and no doubt largest category, officers who knowingly arrest the wrong man (or woman) for offenses, write them up, and never blink an eye when the prosecutors bring a case against them. In fact, sometimes these corrupt officers will even offer false testimony against the innocent parties in a court of law.

No one group has a monopoly on police corruption. It happens in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans and every major U.S. city and is conducted by officers of all races, creeds and colors.

Casey Gane-McCalla of NewsOne Original brings us the following list of the top 5 most corrupt U.S. police officers of all-time:

5. Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa:

Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa worked for the NYPD, at least they punched a NYPD time clock,  but in reality, they worked for the mafia. Caracappa was a member of the Organized Crime Homicide Unit which meant he investigated the very people he was working for.

In reality, Eppolito and Caracappa took their orders from the Lucchese crime family for whom they served as hitmen as well as moles in the NYPD. In 2006, the two former partners were convicted of racketeering, obstruction of justice, extortion and eight counts of murder and conspiracy. They were sentenced to life in prison. On appeal, they convictions were upheld.

4. Joseph Miedzianowski:

Joseph Miedzianowski was a Chicago police officer who is sometimes considered to be the most corrupt cop of all time. Miedzianowski served as both police officer and drug kingpin and used his knowledge of the streets and gangs to shake down drug dealers.

For most of his 22-year career, Miedzianowski ran the Chicago Gangs Unit, simultaneously running his own drug gang. His corrupt run came to an end in 2001 when he was convicted of 10 counts including drug conspiracy and racketeering .

3. David Mack And Rafael Perez:

David Mack and Rafael Perez worked together for the infamous LAPD Ramparts division. Oddly enough, they also worked for Suge Knight at Death Row Records and were members of the feared Bloods street gang.

Mack had the audacity to receive the LAPD Medal Of Honor for killing a drug dealer who allegedly pulled a gun on him. But he would also later be convicted of robbing a bank and be implicated in the murder of the rapper, Notorious BIG.

Perez shot and framed an unarmed gang member during his tenure. He also stole eight pounds of cocaine from an LAPD evidence locker. This is not what they teach you at the Police Academy.

2. Jon Burge:

Jon Burge is in a class of his own. He was a former Chicago Police Department detective who oversaw the torture of hundreds of Black men resulting in false confessions between 1972 and 1991.

Burge would burn suspects with radiators and cigarettes, and “put the juice” to their testicles.

Ironically, Burge was protected by the statute of limitations for his crimes, but was convicted for lying about the torture in January of 2011.

Update:

Steve Nesius of the AP writes:

A former Chicago police commander who for decades ran a torture ring that used electrical shock, burning and beatings on more than 100 black men has been released from federal prison after spending less than four years behind bars.

This is a truly shocking development. To release Burge after only three and one-half years is a slap in the face to every black man who ever suffered at his hands. This, however, is the sort of thing we’ve come to expect from out many-tiered justice system. At least, it’s unlikely that Burge will ever again don a police uniform.

1. Robert Gisevius, Kenneth Bowen, and Anthony Villavaso:

At the top of our list stand Robert Gisevius, Kenneth Bowen, and Anthony Villavaso. They were members of the New Orleans police department during Hurricane Katrina. The three men were charged with first degree murder for killing 17-year-old James Brissette who was unarmed and innocent when they came across him on the Danzinger bridge while the waters were cresting. Brisette was simply looking for shelter when the cops pounced on him and  – for all intents and purposes — executed him.

Bowen, Gisevius and Villavaso were found guilty of falsifying reports and bringing false prosecution in their conspiracy to cover-up the shooting. They received sentences of 6 to 65 years.

by Lise LaSalle

Thursday was International Wrongful Conviction Day around the world

The name of Guy Paul Morin is always brought up by activists and lawyers when talking about wrongful convictions because of the text book mistakes made in his case.

Information from Torstar News Service:

Some experts have established 10 things they have learned from the wrongful conviction of Morin:

The dangers of tunnel vision

“We learned that wrongful convictions most often occur when somebody is an outsider – someone who seems strange to the rest of us: a loner: part of an unusual family; a ‘weird type of guy,’ as one of the police investigators so artfully described Morin in his notes,’’ says award-winning author Kirk Makin, whose book Redrum the Innocent remains the main read on this case.

1. The police were highly criticized for fixating right away on Morin because they saw him as a weird individual.

The dangers of demeanor evidence

“Makin calls this drawing conclusions based on ‘’whether someone looked or behaved the way ‘we’ expect them to act under certain circumstances.’’

1. Morin was criticized for his inappropriate facial expressions and the fact that he did not search for little Christine Jessop’ body or attend her funeral.

The need to be skeptical of ‘’experts

“Win Wahrer started the Guy Paul Morin Defence Committee to help prove his innocence and he declared ‘’we learned about junk science – the unreliability of so-called expert witnesses.’’

1. In Morin’s case, hair and fibre evidence was incorrectly presented to the jury, making him appear guilty.

The need to take a broad look at the system and wrongful convictions

A commission presided by Fred Kaufman, a former Quebec Court of Appeal Judge, looked deeply into the institutional conditions that made the Morin conviction possible and made strong recommendations to improve the system. The wrongful conviction of Morin is often associated with the wrongful convictions of Canadians Donald Marshall and David Milgaard. “It was hopefully a crash course in the lengths to which lazy/inexperienced/over-heated/crusading police will go to get a conviction when they become convinced that somebody is their man.”

1. The ‘’Three M’’ cases ‘’were a cold water shower for anyone who thought that when someone is arrested, the police must know they did it,’’ Makin says.
2. ‘’The Morin case led to the creation of AIDWYC,’’ Makin says. ‘’It was formed out of the Guy Paul Morin Defence Committee, whose members decided there were too many systemic problems not to create something permanent. That’s a hell of a legacy in itself.’’
3. The Guy Paul Morin Defence Committee subsequently became the Toronto-based Association in Defence of the Wrongfully Convicted (AIDWYC), with high-profile lawyers like James Lockyer.

The need for police not to bond too tightly with a victim’s family

1. “We learned that police have to make effort to keep a victim’s family as a discreet distance from the investigation, lest officers be influenced by their lobbying and personal beliefs, and lest they feel a compulsion to make a premature or ill-considered arrest,” Makin says.

The dangers of jailhouse snitches

Kaufman had very harsh words for Robert Dean May, a fellow inmate of Morin at the Whitby jail.

1. “May was diagnosed by mental health experts at the second trial as a pathological liar,” Kaufman writes. “He had a deficient conscience and was skilled at deceiving others.”
2. Kaufman does not mince words in the chapter of his report that focuses on jailhouse informants, and how the Crown used their words to build the false case against Morin.

The realization that prosecutors are capable of misconduct

1. “Their relationship with the police at times blinded them to the very serious reliability problems with their own officers,” Kaufman writes.

The dangers of withholding evidence

1. Fibre evidence that supported Morin’s case was not provided to the court by the Centre for Forensic Sciences. Then this same fibre evidence was incorrectly summarized in the Crown’s closing argument.

The dangers of cutting a deal to avoid trial

1. Morin’s first lawyer initially wanted him to cut a deal. He later hired a top criminal defence named Clayton Ruby and successfully fought to prove his innocence. But without the financial help of his parents, it could have never happened. If he was indigent at the time, he would probably still be in prison.

The need for full and accurate records of interviews with witnesses

“Hours of untaped interviews might be reflected in a single entry in a notebook or in an incomplete précis or description of the interview contained in a supplementary report,” Kaufman wrote.

The case of Guy Paul Morin

On July 30, 1992, Guy Paul Morin was convicted of the first degree murder of his nine-year old neighbor Christine Jessop who had been abducted from Queensville, Ontario, on October 3, 1984.

Morin was found not guilty at his first trial, but the Justice system opted for a do over and found him guilty at his second trial based on the false testimony of a fellow inmate and flimsy evidence. He was arrested, imprisoned and convicted.

Not surprisingly, the real killer has never been found because the investigation focused right away on Morin who was stigmatized and victimized by these criminal proceedings.

Christine Jessop was murdered on or after October 3, 1984 and Guy Paul Morin was charged on April 22, 1985 with her murder. On February 7, 1986, he was acquitted. A new trial was ordered by the Court of Appeal for Ontario on June 5, 1987 and that order was affirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada on November 17, 1988.

After the new trial, he was convicted of murder on July 30, 1992. He was subsequently acquitted by the Court of Appeal on January 23, 1995 on the basis of fresh evidence tendered by the Crown and defence counsel.

A Commission was created to inquire into the conduct of the investigation into the death of Christine Jessop and of the Centre for Forensic Sciences in relation to the maintenance, security and preservation of forensic evidence into the criminal proceedings.

That same Commission had to deliver its final report including its findings, conclusions and recommendations to the Attorney General on June 30, 1997.

When the Attorney General announced the appointment of this Commission, he said this, in part:

An inquiry cannot wipe away the years of pain and turmoil Mr. Morin suffered, but it can examine the complex circumstances surrounding the case, and allow us to learn from it and prevent any future miscarriage of justice.

As expected in a high-profile case, despite these public acknowledgements, some individuals still believed, despite Guy Paul Morin’s exoneration through DNA testing, that he was nonetheless guilty. Perhaps he committed the crime with others; perhaps the DNA testing was flawed. As the evidence which supported his conviction was revisited at this Inquiry, the case against Guy Paul Morin undeniably unraveled before our very eyes.

The gullible public can be hard to convince when contaminated by the media and the authorities. Janet Jessop and Ken Jessop who was 14 when his sister was murdered, reached a reconciliation with Morin. But Ken had the nerve to express doubts about Morin’s guilt years later during an interview. Bob Jessop broke ties with his family after the investigation process uncovered evidence that Ken and two other boys had sexually abused Christine. I would imagine that Janet stuck by her adopted son because she could not bear losing another child. What a difficult choice it must have been to side with her child instead of her husband after going through such a tragedy.

Guy Paul Morin’s family  

Guy Paul Morin is French Canadian and had four sisters and one brother. Their cultural difference made them stand out in the Ontario neighborhood of Queensville because his family was very tight knit and could be perceived as bizarre according to typical Anglophone’s standards.

At twenty-four, Morin still lived at home, drove his parents’ car, kept bees in the backyard, played the saxophone and clarinet in three bands and loved the swing music of the 1940s. He worked for a furniture manufacturer and was, by all accounts, a responsible and serious employee.

They lived in a house with a very unkempt backyard littered with several car carcasses and various stuff perceived as junk by close neighbors. The siblings often stayed out late  in the yard where they would dance, fiddle with motors or even wrestle on each other’s shoulders under the light of a regular indoor floor lamp plugged outside. They had developed a strong bond and their mentality was one of ‘us against the world.’ They actually seemed quite happy within their own family circle.

The abduction of Christine

When Janet and Ken Jessop arrived home on October 3, 1984,  and Christine was nowhere to be found, but her school bag was in the kitchen, they indicated several times that they arrived home at 4:10 p.m. They were coming from the dentist’s office and this was corroborated by the staff.

At the second trial, Janet Jessop testified for the prosecution and indicated that she and Ken came home at 4:30 to 4:35 or even later. Ken Jessop was called by the defence and also testified to coming home a this later time. Then, at the Inquiry, Janet Jessop and Ken Jessop firmly maintained that they got home at 4:10. Ken Jessop stated that he lied at the second trial.

The alibi

When Guy Paul Morin was first interviewed by detectives on February 22, 1985, he initially estimated that he returned home from work on October 3, 1984, at approximately 4:30 pm: Morin: That particular day I was starting in the morning about 7:00 and finished at I think was, ah, 3:30, then went shopping, got home around 4:30. It only takes me about 45 minutes to get home from where I work.

Later, in the untaped portion of the interview, he adjusted his arrival time home to between 4:30 and 5:00 p.m. His parents, Alphonse and Ida Morin supported their son’s evidence that he came home with groceries, took a nap and worked on renovations to the family home after dinner.

It is quite clear that the Jessops altered their arrival time to allow Morin to be the culprit. He could not have come home after them and be the guilty party so they stretched the truth to keep the case against Morin from crumbling.

In fact, Mr. Morin’s time card documented that he did not leave his place of employment until 3:32. A police timing run confirmed the drive from Mr. Morin’s workplace to his residence to be 42 minutes.

Upon his arrest on April 22, 1985, almost seven months after Christine’s disappearance, Morin had this conversation with the Detectives relating to his arrival home: Morin: I got home at maybe 5:00 – 5:30 for sure.

Shephard: You told us 4:30, Guy.

Morin: Gosh 4:30 look it takes me an hour easily. I’m sure I’m quite sure, I know I had easily good, groceries bags. It takes time to shop and my time was immediately out of touch with Christine Jessop.

Shephard: You told us you were home at 4:30, you told us that 3 or 4 times.

Morin: You think I was home around 4:30, okay let’s say I was, if that’s what I told you I mean time usually I would get home around 4:30 but that day I told you I even went shopping. I remember coming in with all the grocery bags. Devine was there too, I do remember that for sure but even if I was home at 4:30 I have no idea, I never saw her that day.

The cops were fishing and trying to adjust his schedule so that he would have had enough time to kidnap and kill Christine even if 4 different witnesses corroborated his arrival home at 5:30. It was humanly impossible for Morin to have done this in so little time. And who remembers the exact time they get home, especially if they stopped for groceries? You usually have to reflect on it first. They had tunnel vision and during this precious time, Christine’s murderer was slipping away.

The investigation focused on demeanor evidence: why was he so calm? Why didn’t he participate in the search of the missing girl and why didn’t he attend her funeral? And finally, what a weird guy he was.

The investigation

On the day of Christine’s disappearance, after Janet had scoured the neighborhood in a panic to find her daughter, she called the York Regional Police for help. Within minutes, a team arrived at the Jessop residence, including 15 emergency vehicles, 17 police offices, and the K-9 dog handler unit. They combed the neighborhood for clues and gathered evidence.

A few months later, on December 31^st, 1984, her body was found in a ditch approximately 56km from her home. She had been sexually assaulted and murdered. There were traces of sperm but DNA testing was not an option at the time.

On the day of the disappearance, when the cops went next door to ask if they had heard or seen anything, Ida Morin was interviewed and the officer later stated that Guy Paul sat silently and looked straight ahead during the whole time. That’s all it took to direct all of their attention on him because they perceived his behaviour as suspicious.

The dog handler also reported that the police dog had placed its paws on the passenger side window of Guy Paul’s car.

Ken Jessop was asked to provide a statement that was later lost by the sergeant. No fingerprint evidence was collected at the Jessop’s home and Janet was coaxed into changing her time of arrival.

Even after uncovering that Ken and some of his friends had molested Christine before her disappearance, that Janet Jessop’s husband was in prison at the time and that the kidnapping might have meant an earlier release for him, or that Janet was strangely calm, Guy Paul Morin remained the main suspect.

Fibre and hair evidence

After finding fibres and hairs on Christine and in Morin’s car, the police obtained an arrest warrant. He proclaimed his innocence through a six-hour-long interrogation. The inquiry proved that the hair and fibre evidence collected from the body site, from Guy Paul Morin and from his car and home was essentially valueless even if it was crucial to the trial.

The Morin and Jessop families were in contact with one another. Morin’s father sat in the Jessops’ car to help them search for their daughter. Morin’s parents paid the victim’s family a condolence visit after Christine was buried. Morin himself assisted them with their furnace. All of these occasions provided an opportunity for various fibres to be transferred back and forth between the families.

But perhaps even more significant, is the fact that the Morins and the Jessops used the same laundromat.

The police were made aware of that fact and even if after a fibre transfer test was conducted, and it became obvious that it was a normal laundry transfer, they sat on it and kept it quiet. This illustrates the dangers of withholding evidence. 

The Final Verdict

After the appeal was filed and the traces of semen were tested with new DNA techniques that proved Morin’s innocence, he was finally a free man and had his criminal record changed to indicate a complete acquittal.

The judicial enquiry into the case took place in 1997. It discovered that the inmates’ testimony was not reliable, as the court had been led to believe, since the prisoners obtained benefits in return for testifying against Morin. It also discovered that the analysis of the hairs and fibres was not as rigorous as had been first assumed. The laboratory where the forensic testing had taken place had been identified as having contamination problems, as the scientists did not always wear lab coats, so fibres from their clothing may have found their way onto microscope slides. Also, the importance of the evidence had been overstated – the hairs and fibres found on Christine Jessop had similarities with those found in Guy Paul’s car, but that did not prove that the girl had been in the car.

The final report made 119 recommendations. Many of them have been implemented since then, including the establishment of the DNA bank in 2001, and policies in Canadian Law are regularly under review with the aim of preventing miscarriages of justice in future.

Following the enquiry into his wrongful conviction, Guy Paul received a settlement of 1.25 million Canadian dollars to compensate him for the time he lost after spending 18 months in prison and having the charges hanging over him for more than ten years. A huge chunk of that money went to his parents because of the fortune they spent to hire excellent defense attorneys. After his acquittal, Guy Paul managed to rebuild his life, married in 1995 and now has a family of his own. He continues working as a handyman but as a private contractor. His love of music and good nature have not faded a bit. The Jessops have suffered a lot and after their divorce, they both moved away from the area. They both hope the case will be solved one day.

International Wrongful Conviction Day is a great initiative to remind us all that things are not always as they seem and we must be very careful not prejudge a defendant because he stands on his head in the interrogation room, does not show the emotions expected, plays the banjo, smirks or seems plain weird. We have to be vigilant and keep an eye open so the system does not repeat the same tragic mistakes.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Dennis Lynn Rader is one of our more famous living serial killers, in part because of his penchant for writing taunting letters to the police and local newspapers in which he would demand attention from the press while describing the details of his heinous acts. Like any writer with an ear for an audience, he came up with several “signatures” until he found one that stuck, The BDK killer, BDK standing for Bind, Torture, Kill.

The oldest of four sons, Rader was born in Pittsburgh, Kansas in 1945 and grew up in Wichita. As a child he demonstrated several of the earmarks of a typical serial killer. He reportedly tortured animals and developed a fetish for women’s underwear. Once his killing spree began, as he cut a swath through Wichita neighborhoods, he began stealing underpants from his victims which – like Colonel Russell Williams – he would then wear himself.

Between 1974 and 1991, Rader murdered ten people in the Wichita area. He then went underground for the next 13 years and very possibly would never have been apprehended had he not once again began writing “look at me” letters in 2004 which led to his arrest in 2005 and subsequent convictions.

He was sentenced to one life sentence for each murder and is currently serving 10 consecutive life sentences at El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas.

Not unlike John Wayne Gacy, Rader appeared normal in almost every way. He was a member of a local Christ Lutheran Church and at one point was elected president of the church council. He was also a Cub Scout Leader. Just a good neighbor in every way.

Not only that. According to The Wichita Eagel, Rader states in writing that “he loves his family very much”. He reports that his wife, Paula Rader, knew nothing about about the 10 murders until he got caught, 31 years after his spree began.

“The family knew nothing about my ‘Dark Deeds.’ I carried that secret until the day I was arrested.”

Ironically, from 1974 until 1988, during the period he was actively binding, torturing and killing, Rader worked installing alarms for a Wichita company at homes whose occupants had contacted the alarm company because they feared the BTK Killer. Imagine their surprise had they known that the BTK Killer himself was in their homes installing their alarms.

Like many a wannabe writer and many a serial killer, for that matter, Rader had the knack for coming up with pithy phrases. Two of his best-known are the following:

“When this monster entered my brain, I will never know, but it is here to stay. How does one cure himself? I can’t stop it, the monster goes on, and hurts me as well as society. Maybe you can stop him. I can’t.”

“I actually think I may be possessed with demons, I was dropped on my head as a kid.”

Now, nearly a decade after receiving his eight consecutive life sentences, Rader is once again back on the Serial Killer Radar (Terrible Pun) based on his plan to cooperate in the writing of a book about his ten victims in order to help out their families monetarily.

The AP describes Rader’s planned project based on information provided by The Wichita (Kan.) Eagle.

“I can never replace their loved ones, my deeds too ‘dark’ to understand, the book or movies, etc. is the only way to help them,” writes Rader.

In a four-page, handwritten letter labeled “From the Desk of: Dennis L. Rader,” the BTK Killer, who once served as a city code compliance officer, is careful to explain that he will not be profiting at all from any proceeds stemming from his crimes. The Wichita Eagle reports that he signed over his media rights to the families of his victims after he was packed off to El Dorado State Prison in 2005.

According to James Thompson, a Wichita lawyer representing most of the BTK victim families, a percentage of any profits will go to the surviving loved ones and Rader has stated that “the long work on a book is close to a deal,” which suggests it has not been easy to get this project off the ground.

And don’t think this book will be a lurid tell-all tabloid-style work. In fact, Katherine Ramsland, the author working with Rader on the project, “envisions an academic book that will help investigators and criminologists understand killers like Rader.”

“I’m trying to make this a serious effort that will have some benefit for people who study this kind of crime,” said Ramsland, who is a forensic psychology professor at DeSales University in Pennsylvania and has written 54 mostly academic nonfiction books.

Wow! Ms. Ramsland is a veritable writing machine but this may be her first crack at plumbing the depths of the mind of a serial killer.

What I personally find fascinating is the way Rader, like a surprising number of other serial killers including John Wayne Gacy and Keith Jesperson, the Canadian “Happy Face Killer”, on the one hand lived a very ordinary life while simultaneously committing his atrocities. This “doubleness” is curious and I think many true crime fans also possess it but only vicariously; i.e., we like thinking, reading and learning about serial killers and their bloody machinations, but we would never in a million years plan and execute their brutal excesses.

Over the years, Rader has “turned down many media attempts to talk with him in the past nine years because he was attempting to stay true to the court agreement with the victims’ families.”

“I mean to burn no bridges,” Rader wrote, “and hope some day to open up. People like me, need to be under stood, so the criminal professional field, can better understand the criminal mind. That would be my way (of) helping (to pay my) debt to society.”

I’m just a bit skeptical about this last claim. Of course, we all would like nothing better than to understand the criminal mind, but would an enhanced understanding of this serious social issue keep a single potential serial killer from going on his or her rampage. I suppose it could in theory, at least in some cases, if society was geared to investigating those among us who were “just a little too different” and focused on stopping them before they went off the deep end.

But it seems that society, in part due to financial necessity, has little real interest in identifying violent criminals ahead of time, before they run amuck. Not only would it would be cost prohibitive, but I wonder if it would actually work? I would bet that out of every 100 individuals who demonstrate “serial killer symptoms” in childhood such as bedwetting, torturing animals, and lack of impulse control, only a tiny percentage actually graduate into the rarified air of the bona fide serial killer. There just aren’t that many serial killers kicking around.

Now what would be a great boon to society and would cut the violent crime rate tremendously would be if we, as a society, could eliminate child abuse – physical, sexual and emotional. That would truly make a difference. The problem with such a project is that it would be singularly unexciting. It would be drab, tedious and entirely without titillation. Endless parenting classes. Licenses based on demonstrated competence prior to being allowed to have children. Endless visits from earnest social workers. Serial killers on the other hand are endlessly fascinating as most true crime fans would probably readily admit. There are far fewer of them, however, than there are abusive parents who haphazardly inspire their offspring to become criminally-minded young adults.

compiled by Patrick H. Moore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*     *     *     *     *

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

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

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

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

*     *     *     *     *

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

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

*     *     *     *     *

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

Update:

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

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

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

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

2nd Update:

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

by Darcia Helle

Throughout world history, criminals have been executed as punishment for their crimes. Early methods were brutal and torturous. Held as public events, entire towns gathered to watch the accused be drawn and quartered, hanged, beheaded, or burned at the stake.

Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin came into this unforgiving world on May 28, 1738 in Manchester, England. Some say his mother went into premature labor after witnessing a criminal being broken on the wheel of the public scaffold at Saintes. The victim’s screams were too much for her. Guillotin initially obtained a Master of Arts degree from the University of Bordeaux. The essay he wrote for his degree so impressed the Jesuits that they persuaded him to join their order. Guillotin then took the position of professor of literature at the Irish College at Bordeaux.

Within a few years, Guillotin left the college and travelled to Paris to study medicine. In 1768, he earned his diploma from the faculty at Rheims.

Oddly enough, Guillotin opposed the death penalty. Elected to the National Assembly in Paris on May 2, 1789, he directed most of his attention toward medical reform. On October 10, 1789, during a debate on capital punishment, Guillotin stated that “… the criminal shall be decapitated; this will be done solely by means of a simple mechanism.” This mechanism was defined as “… a machine that beheads painlessly”.

Beheading had become a common, if imprecise practice in France during the 1700s. Most often, several strikes of the sword or axe were needed before a victim died. The executioner would miss. The process could be grisly. Furthermore, considered a noble death, beheadings were reserved for the privileged class. Commoners of that time were typically hanged. Dr. Guillotin believed that the public would be more appreciative of their rights if all capital punishment was done by mechanical decapitation, regardless of class.

Guillotin also took issue with the fact that a criminal’s family suffered monetary punishment for the criminal’s misdeeds. Property was confiscated and family members were not allowed to inherit anything of worth. Guillotin opposed this practice, believing that the criminal alone should be held responsible for the crimes and that his or her family should not suffer because of those actions.

A civil rights activist of his time, Guillotin believed that adopting a more humane method of execution was the first step toward total abolition of the death penalty. Opposed to the public spectacle these events had become, Guillotin also worked toward making the execution more private. He wanted to spare people the trauma of witnessing these executions.

In 1789, Guillotin helped pass a law requiring beheading be done by machines, rather than swords or axes. Guillotin stated that “… the privilege of decapitation would no longer be confined to nobles, and the process of execution would be as painless as possible.”

At a follow-up meeting, Guillotin spoke of his ideal machine. In his exuberance, he said, with a flourish, “Now, with my machine, I cut off your head in the twinkling of an eye, and you never feel it!” His statement elicited laughter and quickly became a popular joke. Within days, a comic song about Guillotin and “his” machine forever linked the two together.

Primitive machines for beheading had been in use for approximately 500 years. By the 1700s, beheadings of the elite by machine were routine in Italy, Germany, Scotland, and Persia. The most popular machine of the time, the Italian Mannaia, made its first appearance in France in 1631. The device held an axe that descended between two perpendicular slipboards. Other beheading machines of the time included the Scottish Maiden and the Halifax Gibbet. None of these machines held the body still, which allowed for slips and misses.

The design of this new killing machine fell to the king’s physician, Dr. Antoine Louis. He sought expert advice from Charles-Henri Sanson, the official executioner. Sanson believes that the problem with current beheadings was that the accused often lacked the “firmness which was absolutely necessary for such executions”. Criminals who were made to kneel for their beheading often fainted. He or she would fall sideways, blunting the effect of the first swing of the sword or axe. Sanson’s solution was to confine the criminal’s body to a horizontal position.

Sanson then conferred with Tobias Schmidt, a German instrument maker. Schmidt sketched the design of what would later become the guillotine.

Dr. Louis approved the design, though he questioned the crescent-shaped blade. Sanson and Schmidt agreed that a diagonal blade might be better. Both were put to the test.

On March 20, 1792, a carpenter by the name of Guidon was paid 5,500 francs to make the first prototype. Upon completion, Sanson tried it out on three corpses in the courtyard of a prison at Bicetre. The first two strikes with the diagonal blade were successful. The third try, using the crescent-shaped blade, was not. The diagonal blade then became a permanent part of the design.

This new killing machine initially took the name Louison or Louisette, after the king’s physician, Dr. Louis. Some time later, the French began calling it the guillotine, after Dr. Guillontin, the perceived inventor. An English poet added the extra ‘e’ for easier rhyming.

On April 25, 1792, at the Place de Greve on the Right Bank, the guillotine made its first public appearance. The victim was Nicolas Jacques Pelletin, a common criminal. Upon facing his death sentence, Pelletin fell into a dead faint. This would have made beheading by sword or axe impossible. The guillotine was an instant success.

For the first seven months, the guillotine primarily took the heads of common thieves and forgers. However, France’s political situation quickly grew more volatile and the machine soon found uses in political executions. Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were among the guillotine’s most famous victims.

Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin died in 1814 of natural causes and is now buried in the Pere-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. The association of their name with this killing machine so embarrassed Dr. Guillotin’s family that they petitioned the French government to rename it. When the request was denied, the Guillotin family changed their last name.

In 1870, assistant executioner and carpenter Leon Berger made improvements to the guillotine. Berger added a spring system, stopping the mouton at the bottom of the grooves. He also added a lock/blocking device, as well as a new release mechanism for the blade. All guillotines built after 1870 incorporated these improvements.

The murderer Hamida Djandoubi holds the dubious honor of being the last victim of the guillotine. The execution took place on September 10, 1977 in Marseilles, France.

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 BJW Nashe

1. Dog Soldiers, by Robert Stone

 Dog Soldiers may be the best thriller ever written by an American. Set in the tumultuous early 1970s, the story follows John Converse, a journalist on his way back to California from Vietnam, who decides that sending a shipment of heroin on ahead of him might be a good way to earn a small fortune. The deal goes horribly wrong, and Converse is swept up into a whirlwind nightmare featuring gung-ho soldiers, amoral drug dealers, corrupt DEA agents, and psychotic hippies. Dog Soldiers, which won the National Book Award in 1975, is both a gripping crime story and a profound exploration of post-sixties disillusionment — when the idealism of the civil rights and peace movements was obliterated by drug addiction, moral depravity, political corruption, and mass violence. Stone captures the era of Altamont, Manson, and the Weather Underground better than anyone else has. A must-read.

2. Gorky Park, by Martin Cruz Smith

Cruz Smith’s classic is set in late 1970s Moscow — a full decade before the eventual fall of the Iron Curtain, but you can already tell that the center will not hold. Homicide Investigator Arkady Renko seems to sense the inevitable Soviet slide. In the dogged, cynical, yet ultimately humanistic Renko, Cruz Smith has created one of the most compelling protagonists in all crime fiction. Arkady is assigned to a triple murder case when three corpses are discovered frozen solid in Gorky Park. When the murder trail leads to an American fur dealer, Arkady must navigate through a menagerie of shady characters that stretches from Moscow to New York City. He even manages to fall in love in the midst of all the intrigue. This sophisticated, vodka-drenched mystery, so rich in character and culture, accomplishes far more than the average, run-of-the-mill police procedural.

3. The Quality of Hurt and My Life of Absurdity, by Chester Himes

What to do if you’re an intelligent African-American man who’s run afoul of the law, spent five years in the Ohio State Penitentiary, and is sick to death of Jim Crow racism? If you’re Chester Himes, you head over to France, travel around Europe, drink too much, chase beautiful women, and write a series of brilliant noir thrillers. In these two volumes — which basically constitute a single autobiography, Himes pulls no punches in telling how it all went down. Essential reading for anyone interested in the politics of race, the European literary scene in its existential heyday, and the life of one of America’s greatest crime writers.

4. American Tabloid, by James Ellroy
Why not turn the Rat Pack Era and the Age of Camelot into a lurid, blood-drenched crime drama? Plenty of scandal, corruption, and violence comes ready-made with this material. All Ellroy has to do is apply his signature ultra-hardboiled style, crank up the intensity level, and presto, we have an assassination conspiracy novel so feverish that it makes Oliver Stone’s JFK film seem like an after-school sock hop. All the big players are here–the Kennedys, J. Edgar Hoover, Jimmy Hoffa, Howard Hughes, the Mob bosses. And Ellroy skillfully invents a whole cast of schemers, fixers, and thugs to do their dirty work. The language used to tell the tale is brutal and offensive; the rapid-fire prose and jittery pacing are relentless. Dense plotting unfolds like a flow chart from hell. At the end we’re not left wondering who really killed JFK, so much as we’re casting around for anybody who wasn’t somehow involved.

5. Mystic River, Dennis Lehane

Lehane’s novel is an emotionally wrenching tour de force that explores the lives of three working class Boston men and their families. One man is struggling to deal with the emotional scars caused by his childhood abduction, a second is devastated by the murder of his nineteen year-old daughter, and a third is a homicide cop investigating the girl’s death. Lehane is clearly a master of plotting and suspense. What’s most impressive here, though, is the depth and compassion he uses to explore the thoughts and feelings of his characters. Lehane understands that daily life for “ordinary working Americans” is often not that “ordinary”. His prose can veer from rock hard to razor sharp, to cynically humorous, to richly poetic — often in the same paragraph. This is American realism striving to achieve the scope and grandeur of Greek tragedy within a rock-solid crime novel framework. Ultimately, Mystic River succeeds not just as modern noir, but as a gutsy requiem for the dreams of all Americans forced to confront the harsh realities of class and crime.

 6. Baise Mois, by Virginie Despentes

Think women can’t write disturbing crime fiction? We dare you to read Baise Moi (which  translates as “F—k Me”). Despentes is a well-known in France as a radical post-punk feminist author, filmmaker, and provocateur. Here she takes two reckless women, arms them with guns and a ton of attitude, and turns them loose on a thrill-seeking, nihilistic, sexually-charged crime spree. Picture Thelma and Louise as vengeful ex-prostitutes or sex-workers, starring in a French version of Natural Born Killers. This book delivers a swift kick in the groin to patriarchal society. The film version (co-directed by Despentes) featured a couple of porn actresses in the starring roles.

 7. Clockers, by Richard Price

Nobody writes dialogue better than Price. When his characters talk, they come alive on the page. They keep on talking in your ear even when you’re done with the book. In Clockers, Price alternates between two main characters as they grapple with the crack-addled mean streets of a tough New Jersey town called Dempsy. Strike Dunham is running a crew of dealers selling rocks on the street, but his panic attacks and dangerously unstable drug-king boss lead him to consider a possible change in lifestyle. Rocco Klein is a homicide cop six months away from retirement, struggling to curry favor from an actor who might portray him in a movie. Dunham and Klein’s treacherous paths of self-discovery and revelation intersect in a series of highly dramatic, nerve-shattering plot twists. This masterpiece of urban storytelling is both a searing character study and a clear indictment of American drug policy. There are no winners in the violent drug trade, and nobody ever wins the war on drugs.

 8. Let it Bleed, by Ian Rankin

Edinburgh in winter time is no place for sunny dispositions or happy talk. Detective John Rebus will never win any “employee of the month” awards. He drinks too much, has a smart mouth that tends to talk trash to those in charge, and likes the jagged, shambling sounds of the Rolling Stones at their peak in the early ‘70s. He also has a distinctive way of digging deep into the most baffling crime investigations. Here a possible kidnapping and double suicide launch him on a back-alley pub crawl that leads takes us through the underbelly of Scottish society all the way up the ladder of power. Rankin has re-invigorated the British crime novel by incorporating elements of the best American noir, injecting a serious dose of rock and roll energy, keeping the IQ level high, and never taking his foot off the gas pedal. Let it Bleed is one of his best. Should be prescribed by doctors to anyone caught bemoaning the current state of crime fiction.

 9. The Snowman, by Jo Nesbo

Nesbo’s Detective Harry Hole is the Norwegian cousin of Rankin’s Rebus. Both are lone wolves with problematic reputations. Hole’s drinking problem is much more severe, though. Hole intersperses his brilliant crime investigations with deadly alcoholic binges, frequently emerging from blackouts to somehow pick up the pieces and get on with his nightmarish but strangely addictive job. All of Nesbo’s books are worthwhile, but The Snowman marks a definitive step forward in terms of overall plotting, depth of character, and level of suspense. Hole’s attempt to solve a series of murders lead him into a dense maze of tangled psycho-sexual guilt and obsession.

 10. Bangkok 8, by John Burdett

Horrific crime, wry black comedy, Buddhist philosophy, and Thai exotica are blended together in this shrewd concoction. Burdett’s first-person narrative, from the endearing perspective of Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, is one of the most compelling voices in modern crime–alternately amused, cynical, outraged, and humorous. He frequently addresses his farang (foreign) readers directly, as he patiently explains the absurdity of his travails. The juxtaposition of Buddhist meditation, acceptance, and nonchalance with the lurid, peep-show decadence and corruption of Bangkok is both insightful and entertaining. The story starts off with a man locked inside a car and executed by cobra bites. It only gets more bizarre from that point forward.

 11. Dark Places, by Gillian Flynn

This powerful piece of crime fiction takes an In Cold Blood style Kansas family farm massacre and updates it to include our contemporary obsession with Satanic cult killings. The narrator, Libby Day, survived the murder-spree 25 years ago. Her brother is in jail for the crimes. Narrating from the present day, with flashbacks to the day of the tragedy, Libby lets us in on her current dilemma: a group of amateur sleuths and true crime fanatics called the Kill Club don’t believe her brother is guilty. They offer Libby money to help find out the truth, which leads to a gripping confrontation with the dark side of Middle America. A tremendous book by a great writer. Flynn is getting more famous each year, and she deserves it.

 12. Sick City, by Tony O’Neill

An outlandish, grotesque display of cutting edge fiction straight from the bowels of Los Angeles. The story involves a couple of drug casualties who meet in rehab and end up trying to cash in on what they think is a secret Sharon Tate group-sex film. Needless to say, this scheme has its downside. O’Neill’s book reads like Celebrity Rehab turned into an x-rated Tarantino freakfest. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the new gonzo noir style, which uses extreme dark humor as a filter for the worst tendencies of contemporary culture. O’Neill’s throw down on the ridiculous, exploitative pretensions of media recovery gurus such as Dr. Drew is highly worthwhile.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore & Others

The “evil Gods” are alive and well in Clemmons, North Carolina. And since every high priest of evil needs at least one acolyte, our Ungodly Man of the Day, a 35-year-old curiosity who goes by the name of Pazuzu Illah Algarad, has two loyal female retainers: Amber Nicole Burch, 24, and Krystal Nicole Matlock, 28.

Naturally, our man Pazuzu, who appears to be the sort of cannibal-murderer who prefers to dispose of the skeletons of his murder victims in his own back yard rather than dumping them in secluded nether regions, lives just off Peace Haven Road. How he worked this one out is anybody’s guess, but facts are facts.

Like last month’s prize model for peculiarity, Caius Veiovis, Pazuzu has also adopted a flashy pseudonym. His real name is the far more pedestrian John Lawson.

Now I want to make things perfectly clear and I do not want to come across as a complete ass. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a young man adopting a “look at me” persona in an attempt to draw attention to oneself. I did it myself when I was one of the “young dudes” and it is not something I regret or am ashamed of. Rather, I think, it’s just part of growing up for insecure souls who feel the need to be noticed and are not sure how to accomplish that without putting on a bit of the Dr. Strange.

This behavior pattern, however, becomes highly problematic when it leads to serious crime, which, if the jury got it right, is what happened in the case of the Horned-Man Veiovis,. If the allegations are correct, such is also the case with the majestic Pazuzu, whose name reportedly comes from the mythological king of the demons of the wind.

Pazuzu is currently charged with one count of murder and one count of accessory after the fact to murder.

WXII News writes:

Two people whose skeletal remains were found buried in a Clemmons backyard Sunday were killed in 2009, Forsyth County deputies allege in court documents obtained by WXII Tuesday.

The remains were found in the 2700 block of Knob Hill Drive off Peace Haven Road. No names have been released, though warrants identified one of the bodies as a male.

Pazuzu Illah Algarad, 35, of Clemmons; Amber Nicole Burch, 24, of Clemmons; and Krystal Nicole Matlock, 28, of Winston-Salem, have been arrested so far in the ongoing investigation.

Like Pazuzu, Ms. Burch, who apprently lived with him at the address on Knob Hill Drive, faces one count of murder and one count of accessory after the fact to murder. Both of them are being held without bond in the Forsyth County Detention Center.

The deputies allege that Pazuzzu killed one of the victims sometime after June 1, 2009, and Ms. Burch helped him bury the body in July of that year. They also allege that the third defendant, Ms. Matlock, also helped Pazuzu perform the burial.

With a name like Pazuzu and with two acolytes standing by, the burial should have been performed with pomp and circumstance, but based on the fact the bodies were found buried in shallow graves, this may not be the case.

Pazuzuz’s charge of accessory after the fact to murder stems from the fact that he allegedly helped Ms. Burch dispose of the body of a victim she had murdered in early October of 2009, the second of the two bodies recovered in the twin shallow graves in Pazuzu’s backyard.

The remains of both bodies have been transported to Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center for further evaluation and, hopefully, positive identification.

It appears that the act of murder, like most if not all all bad habits, can be habit-forming, and based on Pazuzu’s example, it appears that acting as an accessory after the fact can also be addictive. In 2010, almost precisely a year after the first of the 2009 murders, he was again charged with accessory after the fact in connection with the shooting death of Joseph Emmrick Chandler, also of Clemmons, a legally blind man, whose body was found on June 7, 2010, at the Yadkin River Access at Donnaha Park.

In the Chandler case, Pazuzu got off rather easily, receiving a 5-year split sentence that included probation.

Digging up dead bodies and scouring property can be time-consuming and according to neighbors, the investigation of Knob Hill Road began on Sunday morning and SBI tents were still erected on the property on Tuesday morning.

Unsurprisingly, there had long been rumors to the effect that Pazuzu may have buried corpses in his backward. Sebastian Murdoch of Huffington Post writes:

Bianca Heath claimed she lived with Algarad for a month in 2005, and that he had spoken of the bones in his back yard.

“Paz told everyone,” Heath told The Huffington Post. “But I never believed him. I’m sure no one else believed him either. He laughed about the skeletal remains when telling the story on why he did what he did.”

According to Ms. Bianca, Pazuzu laughingly informed her that he had picked up two prostitutes at two separate locations, after which he killed and ate them before burning the leftovers in a fire pit prior to burying the skeletons.

“I never once saw the skeleton bodies, I honestly thought he was lying, now I’m not sure what to believe,” Heath said.

An anonymous post on an online message board dated 2012 states:

“He has bragged to other members of my family about sick things he has done and told them he has killed other people and has buried other bodies.”

Like anyone dedicated to self-promotion (which at this point includes a large percentage of social media conscious Americans), Pazuzu has/had what he no doubts considers a very cool Facebook page featuring “a large collection of pictures featuring demonic creatures and upside down crosses.”

In her interview, Ms. Heath described Pazuzu as a worshipper of “evil gods.”

Although eye-catching murderers such as Pazuzu certainly have at least a modicum of entertainment value (assuming he is guilty of the charges), it is sobering to think that he is apparently just one of a huge number of twisted young men capable of taking life in a most cavalier fashion.

On Monday morning, in response to the “wannabe Dexter” post about Steven Miles, who murdered and dismembered his 17-year-old girlfriend, retired parole officer Stephen Daniels wrote:

As a retired high risk parole agent, I had the opportunity to interview and/or research files of nearly 200 convicted murderers.

First, there are many youth who are teetering on the brink of killing. They are inundated with violent images, and with other stimuli, such as drugs, games, etc, have a difficult time sorting out the noise of violence that surrounds them. (Not) all kids who are involved with violent images become killers, but it is simply one more ingredient in the stew.

Second, I think it is time to define the serial killer mentality qualitatively, not by quantity of victims. I would imagine this young boy in the “Dexter” story fits many of the serial killer red flags.

What is striking to me about Pazuzu’s “serial killer style” (and with one murder to his credit and two accessory after the fact allegations, he certainly seems to more or less fall into the general serial killer category) is the utter casualness with which he approaches his craft, telling his pals and lovers about his foul deeds as if they are mere trifles rather than the brutal taking of lives.

This is some scary stuff: to take someone life is arguably the most serious of crimes, but to take life and laugh about it, as if it was just good jovial fun, is a quintessentially disturbing phenomenon.

by The Starks Shrink

Skylar Neese was just 16 years old when she climbed out of her bedroom window for the last time on July 5, 2012 at around midnight.  She was a bright teen, with a strong work ethic in both school and her part time job at Wendy’s.  But she had a taste for the party life, as many teens in small towns do.  This wasn’t her first time sneaking out of her home late at night, as was evident by the stool she’d left outside beneath her bedroom window to facilitate getting back into her room undetected by her parents. Mom and Dad were none the wiser.

When her father came home from working the night shift to drop off his car for Sklyar, she was nowhere to be found. Her mother wasn’t too disturbed – after all, Skylar was 16 and it was summer; she could be out with her friends shopping or swimming.  Dad called around to some of Skylar’s friends to see if they’d seen her, but came up empty. When the manager at Wendy’s called to ask if Skylar was coming to work, red flags went up for mom, since Skylar never missed work. The police were then called in. Weirdly, however, law enforcement presumed Skylar to be one of the many kids that run away from home each summer in a quest for independence and adventure. The Neese’s were not convinced of that and as the summer wore on turning to autumn, they became increasingly certain that this was not a choice that Skylar had made for herself.

They were comforted and aided in their search for their daughter by one of her best friends — Shelia Eddy.  They’d known Shelia for years and thought of her as another daughter. In September, when school started, Skylar still hadn’t surfaced. Her bank accounts, social media accounts and cell phone had not been touched. Now, the climate began to change. The Neese family had a Facebook page that Mary (Skylar’s Mom) had set up to help people exchange information and hopefully help in the search for her daughter. Shelia Eddy was one of the posters on that page, posting about how she missed Skylar and hoped she’d come home.  Sadly, in reality, Shelia already knew all too well that Skylar would never be returning to her mother’s embrace.

What is fascinating about the quest to find Skylar is how it played out on social media, particularly on Twitter. You see, Skylar had two best pals — Shelia Eddy and Rachel Shoaf.  She’d known Shelia for many years while Rachel had only joined their little posse about a year or so before.  But of course, in high school, a year can be an eternity. But now it is September; all the kids except one are back in school and they are talking. And talking. And they do it on social media, unlike any generation before them. Many of the kids suspected Shelia and Rachel of doing something to Skylar, or at the very least, knowing something.  What was amazing was that many of the details of the actual events that some of these kids tweeted about turned out to be the truth. In October and November, Skylar’s body hadn’t yet been found but kids at the school were tweeting to Rachel and asking about the big cut on her leg that she’d had in the days just after Skylar’s disappearance.  They tweeted to Shelia but she was much more brazen and impervious to the harassment.  Much of this was done via ‘subtweets’, which don’t call out a particular person, but those who are close to the subjects are completely aware of the context. And then the sock puppet accounts showed up.  They were anonymous and were very blatant in their accusations. This was in December of 2012. The two suspect girls were called  “pretty little liars” based on the TV series about mean girls who murdered.

It was in December that Rachel Shoaf cracked.  She’d had a blowout with her mother who decided that Rachel needed more help than she could provide and called police who hauled her off to a local mental hospital for several weeks.  I give credit to Rachel’s mother for having the courage to intervene like that.  It had to be hard for her but it turned out to be the thing that broke the case.

Rachel, apparently guilt-ridden, went to a lawyer after her stint in mental care and confessed all.  And I mean ALL. Her attorney worked out a deal with authorities and in January, Rachel led them to Skylar’s remains which had been concealed in a remote area of Pennsylvania since that fateful night she’d crawled out her bedroom window.

In the meantime, one could watch the breakdown of Rachel and Shelia’s trust on Twitter. Rachel had cooperated with police and FBI in order to get a plea deal and implicated Shelia in the process. Shelia was the ultimate mean girl.  Her hubris was evident from her demeanor on Twitter and she clearly thought that she was above punishment for killing her best friend. She even tweeted “Yes it’s true, we went on 3” – referring to the fact that Shelia and Rachel had planned the attack on Skylar and stabbed her to death on the count of three.

This year both girls were finally brought to justice, with Rachel getting 30 years for her plea to 2nd degree murder and Shelia getting 15 to life for her plea to Murder One.  The horrific details came out at Rachel’s sentencing when the prosecutor read from Rachel’s confession.  They had lured Skylar from her home intending to kill her.  They had driven to a remote area in Pennsylvania, just over the border from West Virginia.  They got her behind the car and on the count of three they both stabbed her to death with kitchen knives.  They stood over Skylar until she stopped breathing and then concealed her body with leaves and brush. They cleaned up with the cleaning supplies that Rachel had brought along and changed their bloody clothing.  They then drove home and went to bed.  These were children. Teens. How do teens plan, perpetrate and conceal a crime such as this? Skylar was murdered in July, Rachel broke in late December and Shelia was arrested the following May. I believe that social media played a part in breaking Rachel and it certainly played a role in demonstrating how cold and callous two teenage girls could be.  Shelia and Skylar’s twitter accounts are still up, though Rachel locked hers during her breakdown.  It’s a forensic psychologist’s dream since you can watch the plot unravel over time.  No one really knows the why the “mean girls” ran amuck. Rachel’s confession states that they “just didn’t want to be friends with her anymore”. Can the motive for murder really be as mundane as that?

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

The Sad and Tragic Story of Jamarion “Please Kill Me” Lawhorn and His Victim Connor Verkerke

Charlie Bothuell V May Have a Very Sharp Axe to Grind

Two’s Company, Three’s a Deadly Crowd: The Cruel Killing of Martha Gail Fulton

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)

The following 10 somewhat bizarre yet prophetically fatal facts about Ted Bundy (Monster Smooth) during his youth and young adulthood come to us from Bukisa.com and Wikipedia. Bukisa’s interpretations of these facts have been, in some cases, augmented and/or altered by Patrick H. Moore.

1)  Ted Bundy was not his birth name.

The man the world would come to know as Ted Bundy Bundy was born Theodore Robert Cowell at the Elizabeth Lund Home For Unwed Mothers (now the Lund Family Center) in Burlington, Vermont on November 24, 1946. His mother Eleanor Louise Cowell (known for most of her life as Louise) moved to Tacoma when Ted was four and changed his last name to Nelson. Within a year, his mother met Johnnie Culpepper Bundy. When they married, Johnnie Bundy legally adopted Theodore and changed his last name to Bundy.

2)  Ted Bundy thought his mother was his sister for many years.

To avoid the social stigma of having an illegitimate grandchild born to a young mother, his grandparents claimed him as their own. They told Ted that Louise was his sister and not his mother. Although Ted likely suspected that something didn’t quite add up, he did not definitively discover the truth of his maternal parentage until the end of high school or early in college.

3)  No one is really sure who his biological father was.

Louise gives us two different stories. The name affixed in the father slot on Ted’s birth certificate was Lloyd Marshall. However, she later spoke of being seduced by a war veteran named Jack Worthington. There’s still another option, however, though it may be mere speculation. Some members of Bundy’s family think that his grandfather Samuel Cowell may also be his biological father. Samuel Cowell was a tyrannical bully and a bigot who hated blacks, Italians, Catholics, and Jews, beat his wife and the family dog, and swung neighborhood cats by their tails. He once threw Louise’s younger sister Julia down a flight of stairs for oversleeping. He sometimes spoke aloud to unseen presences, and at least once he flew into a violent rage when the question of Ted’s paternity was raised.  Bundy described his grandmother as a timid and obedient woman who periodically underwent electroconvulsive therapy for depression and feared leaving their house toward the end of her life.

I don’t want to belabor the obvious but it sounds a bit dysfunctional to me.

4)  He showed violent tendencies as young as three years old.

Ted showed an unsettling predilection for violence from a very early age. His maternal aunt Julia recalls lying down for a nap and waking up surrounded by knives with a smiling 3-year-old Bundy at her side. If this is true, it is totally freakish and as Bukisa says, paints an eerie, strange picture of an eccentric (in the worst sense of the word) toddler arranging knives around his sleeping aunt.

5)  Bundy’s grandfather (who he thought was his father and indeed may have been) tortured animals.

AND, Bundy describes incidents of his grandfather Samuel abusing the family dog. Samuel would also swing neighbourhood cats around by their tails, and Ted himself reportedly mutilated animals with the ubiquitous knives that seemed to fascinate him so much. Ouch!

6)  Young Ted was active in the Methodist Church and even served as Vice President of the Methodist Youth Fellowship.

Oddly enough, despite his anti-social and no doubt sociopathic tendencies, Ted, like John Wayne Gacy, was a joiner. In addition to the Methodist Church (Note: Patrick H’s family went to the Methodist Church in Campbellsport, Wisc for several years when he was a kid and he narrowly escaped becoming a serial killer), Ted joined the Boy Scouts of America club. It all seems like somewhat of a charade, however, a fact Bundy seemed to intimate when he later stated: “I didn’t know what made people want to be friends. I didn’t know what made people attractive to one another. I didn’t know what underlay social interactions.” you get the sense that Ted may have been thinking all the wrong thoughts both in Church and at Scout meetings. He was often described as shy and introverted at this age.

7)  His criminal activities began before he finished high school.

Ted tendency to be dangerously different, which manifested early with his penchant for knife arranging, was always apaprent in one way or another. According to some reports, he was a habitual liar. and a compulsive shoplifter. Although Bundy’s later claims must be met with some skepticism, he did say that he had gone the voyeuristic route at a young age and was a “peeper”. Bundy was arrested twice as a juvenile but the records were later expunged.

8)  He majored in Psychology and graduated with a degree in 1972.

Despite what might be called demonstratively anti-social tendencies, Bundy also had a confoundedly conforming side. Just like any up and coming lad, he was off to college after graduating high school in 1965. He went through a period when he was engrossed in Oriental Studies and later seems to have settled on Psychology. He was a desultory student at first, though, which he believed cost him the love of his life, a well-appointed and well-off California girl, possibly from the San Francisco Bay Area, who for reasons of decorum, shall remain nameless. After his first and perhaps only love broke up with him for his lack of ambition, he rededicated himself to Psychology and earned his degree in 1972. He was well-liked by his professors and graduated with honors. He started dating a young mother (a relationship that lasted six years) while covertly re-establishing his relationship with his former girlfriend who dumped him. Ted ultimately proposed to the first woman and she accepted. Then two weeks later, he dumped her and began his killing spree. Nonetheless, he did not end his six year relationship to the woman with child until he was arrested for kidnapping in 1976. The general consensus is that most of his victims looked like his original girlfriend who dumped him (long dark hair parted in the middle).

9)  He volunteered at a suicide crisis center alongside a now famous crime author, Ann Rule.

In conjunction with his psychology classes, he volunteered at a suicide crisis center where, it is believed, he quite effectively talked people out of killing themselves. At this point, Bukisa can only state: “Completely bizarre.” At the crisis center, Ted worked closely with Ann Rule who is now a well known crime writer. Ironically, at a certain point, she began researching the crimes Ted was committing, not knowing it was her friend who committed them. She later published a very readable book called : The Stranger Beside Me detailing her relationship with Ted, his numerous crimes and his trials.

10)  Ted was heavily involved with the Republican Party.

Whatever his faults and they were legion, Ted was an activist. In 1968, he managed the Seattle office of Nelson Rockefeller’s presidential campaign and attended the Republican Convention in Miami. After his graduation in 1972, he went to work for the state Republican Party. He was later involved in a minor scandal when the Democrats discovered that stealthy Ted had been following one of them around posing as a college student, taping their speeches and pirating the information back to his home office.

So where do we go from here? Hopefully, as time permits, we will have the chance to take a close look at various phases in Monster Smooth’s incredibly diabolical life.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

In the Elizabethan poet Christopher Marlowe’s version of the Faust legend, “The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus”, Faust, the scholar and tragic malcontent, says at the sight of the legendary and undeniably beautiful Helen of Troy:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless  towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

Ain’t it the truth? There’s just something about a pretty face…and it doesn’t have to be a female pretty face…

Sadly, there are those among us who, instead of feeling delight at the sight of such loveliness, are convulsed with rage and want nothing than to lash out and destroy…

Yeah! Envy can be a son-of-a-bitch as we all know… The Cinderella story is a good example of this. The shabby manner in which Cinderella’s two ordinary-looking sisters treated her, however, was nothing compared to what two vicious teenage girls did to two neighborhood beauties in Argentina last Friday. Bryan Llenas of Fox News Latino writes:

Two teenage girls in Argentina have been viciously slashed in the face – badly scarred – in separate attacks by other teenage girls, reportedly for being too pretty.

Last Friday, in the northern city of Formosa, 15-year-old Julia Alvarez was attacked by her two neighbors – sisters aged 16 and 18. The two girls hit and punched Alvarez, pulled out knives and slashed her multiple times along her face and her back.

“We are going to leave your face like Chucky, we’ll see who calls you pretty now,” the girls said to Alvarez, according to Alvarez’s sister Yeni, in reference to the horror movie character.

Poor Julia’s sister Yeni told the Clarín newspaper that as the two older teenagers insulted and beat her sister, they made it very obvious exactly why they were meting out the horrific punishment — because Julia was “too pretty” and “too preppy.”

Based on the available images depicting the neighborhood where this took place, it’s very clear that the local families are distinctly working class and that the “too preppy” accusations mean that in the eyes of the assailants, Julia was trying to look wealthier than her neighbors, which was apparently an unforgivable sin. Thus, she was assaulted not only for being good-looking but for, in the eyes of the attackers, “putting on airs”.

Yeni posted more than a dozen photos of her sister bandaged and stitched up on her Facebook page.

“She looks in the mirror and cries all of the time,” said Yeni.

Although the fact that Yeni posted these pictures may seem a bit odd, according to several reports it was absolutely necessary to nudge the local police into action, who apparently were going to do nothing about the attack prior to it being publicized on Facebook.

The police have detained the 18-year-old. At her home, they found a switch blade, another knife and bloody clothes, according to the Clarín newspaper. The 16-year-old sister has not detained, because of her age. (As we all know, if this had occurred in the U.S., the 16-year-old would not only face serious charges — which she probably should considering the vicious nature of the attack — but would very possibly be tried as an adult.)

But wait! There’s more to this and it ain’t pretty. The mother of the two alleged attackers is trying to turn the tables claiming that a week before the incident, Julia had attacked her younger daughter who was then  a month pregnant, which caused her to lose the child.

Someone please wake me up from this nightmare…

“Not so fast,” says Yeni, who claims that the mother of the alleged knife-wielding teens has threatened to kill Julia and burn down their home. Yeni says her family is afraid to even leave the house.

If nothing else, this nasty tale demonstrates that the U.S. is not the only country plagued by teen bullies.

Julia’s family has reached out to specialists in Buenos Aires in the hope of developing a reconstructive surgery plan to restore her beauty to whatever degree possible and brave Yeni has vowed:

“I promised my sister that her face would not stay that way and I’m going to follow through.”

*     *     *     *     *

Disfiguring lovely faces for kicks is apparently all the rage in Argentina. On the same night that Julia was attacked, something very similar happened 500 miles south of Formosa at a nightclub in Villa Constitución, where a 16-year-old girl named Pilar was slashed in the face with broken glass by a 17-year-old girl named Karen.

The attack at the Empalme club left a 5-inch gash from her right eye to her ear. The victim’s mother says her daughter could have lost her eye and that Karen, the alleged attacker, had menaced her daughter two months earlier.

“She threatened her that she was going to disfigure her for acting like she’s pretty and preppy at Empalme,” the mom told Clarín newspaper.

Karen, bless her wicked little heart, was taken into custody and, but not before she posted on Facebook that she carried out the attack.

I don’t understand what all this flak about acting “preppy” is all about. First of all, I seem to recall that the “preppy” era peaked in the early 1980s, right around the time I had finally dragged my lazy ass up to Foothill Community College and was just starting to accrue some college credits. Second, while scoffing at preppies back then was kind of a popular pastime in some circles, it was hardly grounds for face-cutting. So maybe in this particular area, we Americans are not such Neanderthals.

by JJ Rogers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Life = Challenge after Challenge after Challenge. I suppose that without challenges we wouldn’t have the gumption to even wake up in the morning. Two of the toughest challenges that parents sometimes face are 1) maintaining proper (and stable) focus on the children if the marriage breaks up; and 2) caring properly (and lovingly) for a handicapped child whether or not the marriage is intact.

Therefore, we can assume that the penultimate challenge for a mother may be continuing to provide adequate and selfless care to a handicapped child when you have recently split up with your husband of many years and suddenly find yourself up to your ears in a relationship with a new boyfriend.

The obvious question becomes: Can you put your own desires for love and intimacy with your new boyfriend aside sufficiently to continue to give your handicapped child the care he or she needs. And here’s where it can get really rocky: Suppose your new boyfriend resents the presence of your handicapped child who obviously requires a great deal of extra care?

I bring this up (without jumping to any conclusions) because of a new heart-rending case out of Vermont where a mother, Melissa Robitille (a noveliest and book editor) and her new boyfriend, Walter Richters III (I don’t know what Walter does), are charged with second degree murder for allegedly poisoning Melissa’s 13-year-old handicapped son by placing a lethal dose of alcohol in his IV, which he required for daily fluids and medications.

Let us read an entry from Melissa’s blog about her handicapped son from a year or so ago. At the time this was written, Melissa was still married to her former 64 year old husband:

‘Little Man’ is my son Isaac Robitille. He’s 12 and he has holoprosencephaly – an anomaly in which the fetal horseshoe-shaped brain doesn’t fully divide into two hemispheres. The doctors said he wouldn’t live to be six months old. He’s got a bunch of other differences, but he’s a delightfully happy little boy, loves math, hugs, kisses, and his dog (her name is Tickle – he named her!), and hates physical therapy. He speaks mostly tactile ASL. He was medically fragile for a long time after he was born, so writing took a back burner for me, but I can’t say that I regret it since I adore him and my skills as a writer have improved by leaps and bounds since 1999.

Based on Melissa’s blog entry, this last thing on earth we would expect is the news that she and her new boyfriend slipped alcohol into Little Man’s IV, allegedly to kill him. Yet, according to law enforcement, that’s exactly what happened.

Meg Wagner of the New York Daily News writes:

A Vermont mom and her boyfriend killed her disabled son by dumping a deadly dose of alcohol in his IV tube, police said.

Melissa Robitille and Walter Richters III were charged with second-degree murder Tuesday for 13-year-old Isaac Robitille’s August death, WCAX reported.

Police believe the two poisoned an IV normally used for fluids and medications with liquor — when he died, his blood-alcohol content was .146, nearly twice the legal limit, police said.

Of note is the possibility that Isaac condition worsened between the age of 12, when Melissa wrote her blog entry, and 13 when he met his fate. It’s not clear to me at what age he first required a feeding tube and intravenous tubes to stay alive.

In any event, on Aug, 22, Melissa called 911 to report she found Isaac dead and the toxicology report later revealed his blood’s high alcohol content.

Both Melissa and her boyfriend are in police custody in Hardwick, awaiting arraignment.

An article by Melissa Howell of WCAX News states that neighbors report that “they rarely saw the special needs child outside prior to his death.”

“I haven’t seen him for quite a while,” says Barbara Larabee, who lives next door. “Knowing he had all that to deal with and then parents that would do that, it’s just heartbreaking.”

Another next door neighbor, Elijah Morgan, says, “Family and stuff would help him in his wheelchair and stuff, walking around…I was outside playing basketball and I hear the ambulance going by.”

*     *     *     *     *

First, I am a bit surprised that Melissa and Richters are only being charged with second-degree-murder, though I suppose putting alcohol in Isaac’s IV could have been a spur-of-the-moment decision in a fit of passion, pique or frustration.

Second, how are we to explain Melissa’s dreadful decision, notwithstanding whatever influence Richters may or may not have had on her? She had clearly sacrificed immensely for a very long time to maintain the best quality of life possible for her son, and based on her earlier statements, she loved him dearly.

But the parents of severely handicapped children sometimes reach a breaking point and suddenly engage in seemingly irrational behavior that is completely antithetical to their many years of self-sacrifice. This would appear to be what happened to Kelli Stapleton who has just been sentenced to 10 to 22 years for her attempt to end her daughter Isabelle’s life. Ms. Stapleton was allowed to plead to first-degree-child abuse in order to avoid the specter of a life sentence. At present, it is unknown if the Vermont prosecutors would be willing to contemplate a similar resolution in the case of Isaac.