by Starks Shrink

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Beautiful Murderesses Inflame the Passions of the True Crime Fan

Going Postal Goes Fed-Ex!

How to Raise a Serial Killer in 10 Easy Steps

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

Luka Magnotta: Man, Boy or Beast?

The Disturbing Truth about Mothers Who Murder Their Children

Teleka Patrick Needed a Psychiatrist, Not a Pastor!

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

Skylar Neese and the Mean Girls Who Killed Her

by Lise LaSalle

In 2011, Quebec cardiologist Guy Turcotte was found not criminally responsible for the stabbing deaths in February 2009 of his two young children Olivier, 5, and Anne Sophie, 3. He was recently arrested after Quebec’s Court of Appeal ordered him to stand trial again. This time, he is facing two charges of 1st degree murder.

Turcotte was back in the prisoner’s box last week and is scheduled to return to court Jan. 10, 2014 when a new trial date will be set. There will be no preliminary hearing.

This case was one of the most notorious court decisions in Canadian legal history. It led to the creation of new federal legislation designed to put more barriers between those found not criminally responsible and their freedom.

During his high profile 1st degree murder trial, Turcotte admitted stabbing his daughter and son a total of 46 times after a bad breakup with their mother. Because he drank windshield-wiper fluid in a failed attempt to commit suicide, the jury accepted his argument that he had experienced a blackout and had hardly any memories of that fatal night. He was locked up in a mental institution and later deemed fit for release after 46 months of psychiatric care. (Strange irony that he did 46 months for 46 stab wounds).

Now he is back to square one.

My initial reaction to this turn of event was to say Holy Crap! What a mess and a complicated one at that. Having little expertise in psychiatry or advanced psychology, I decided to consult with a couple of professionals I had worked with in the past.

I contacted a retired Montreal psychiatrist and a psychologist who did her Post-Doctoral work at a psychiatric hospital in Boston. I was anticipating interesting assessments.

Well, I kid you not, they both opened up with the same comment: ‘The case of Guy Turcotte, Holy Crap!’

After their initial expletives, they had plenty to say but nothing definitive — the case was just too complex. This psychiatrist told me from the start that he was mighty glad to be retired and not to have been the one to sign Turcotte’s release papers from the Philippe Pinel Institute.

He went on to say that it was an extremely difficult case because you have to be in a psychotic state to kill your own children, but in Turcotte case’s, only depression and adaptation disorders were brought up by the experts at trial. The intensity of his depression was never even discussed. In Europe, they have a crime category called ‘Crimes of passion’ which includes jealousy, revenge, rage, etc., which are considered to be mitigating factors at sentencing, but Canada has no such laws. The psychiatrist thought that the fact Turcotte was a doctor might possibly have played favorably in the jury’s mind. He felt that keeping him in a mental institution for 15-20 years would not have served any purpose either. He added, however, that with him a free man, his ex-wife might feel threatened for the rest of her life, justifiably so or not. The term ‘criminally not responsible’ still echoes in his mind and is a hard pill to swallow. He finds it probable that Turcotte had a personality disorder with narcissistic tendencies that went undiagnosed before the tragic death of his children. But would he have recommended another trial? Probably not.

My second ‘expert’ is the mother of two boys so the expletives lasted a little longer. She really had to practice detachment to give an informed opinion on this case. As a professional, she wanted to know more about Turcotte’s mental incapacity on that fateful night. Was he suffering from chronic depression, did he have a history of psychotic behavior? And mostly, she wanted to know if he really drank the methanol before or after stabbing his children? He testified that he drank it first and decided he did not want the children to find him dead but could that be scientifically proven? How was he able to rationalize this if he was under the influence? She believes that intoxication should not have rendered him criminally not responsible. Because he made a conscious decision to drink it, and as a doctor, he knew it would impair his judgement. She supports the new trial because based on the mild nature of the psychological problems presented at trial, the jury was perhaps not properly instructed on the criminal responsibility he should have faced. The jury’s instructions may have been deficient. A new trial would allow his lawyers to present a more revealing psychiatric assessment of their client.

The appeals court’s verdict leans in her direction: ‘’The burden of proof was on the accused to show that he was suffering from an incapacitating mental illness – distinct from the intoxication symptoms – and it was the jury’s job to decide.’’

The new trial seems to be based on confusion over the instructions offered by the judge and the prosecution while delivering its arguments. The jury might not have had enough of a clear and concise blueprint with which to deliberate. I wonder what those five men and seven women would have to say about that. The fact that they took six days to deliberate shows that they took their jobs very seriously.

The trial was not televised, as it is not an acceptable practice in Canada, but had garnered national media attention. Thirty-nine witnesses testified including Turcotte and his parents and numerous mental health experts. News of the not criminally responsible verdict had spread like wildfire and people on social media discussed the outcome incessantly. Many celebrities expressed their personal disgust on public forums.

Veteran lawyer and former Quebec prosecutor Robert La Haye came out to say that the public’s emotional response was not surprising, but it was important to know that juries were not supposed to be populist. They were supposed to render justice based on evidence.

Not much was said about Guy Turcotte at his trial except for the facts of the case. He had been married to Isabelle Gaston, an emergency room doctor, since 2003, and they had been together since 1999. Their relationship had its ups and downs but nothing out of the ordinary. He had no history of mental illness and never had any trouble with the law. They both came from good, decent hard working families and were high achievers who became respected professionals. As much as the parties tried to dig into his past, they could not find anything significant and it was not from lack of trying.

Even if problems might have been brewing beneath the surface, the visible troubles began when he found out that his wife Isabelle was having an affair with their good friend and personal trainer Martin, whose wife found out that their respective spouses were in love and delivered the news to Turcotte. He was utterly devastated. Having always been more of a loner and an introvert than his bubbly, sociable wife Isabelle, he took it really hard. In many respects it sounded like the typical betrayal story reported by many jilted lovers. When Isabelle finally admitted to the affair, Guy collapsed into her arms and said he couldn’t make it without her.

He did not take the split well and his parents tried to support him throughout the ordeal. He moved out of the family home and was in the process of purchasing a new place for himself and the kids when the tragedy took place. He could not let go and would call Isabelle often. He would visit ‘his house’ without calling first and would get into arguments with her about his former best friend living there and having access to the kids. On balance, very typical behavior during a contentious divorce.

Isabelle Gaston never saw the storm coming. She trusted Guy Turcotte with his children as he had always been a great dad. So when he took them for the weekend to his temporary rental home north of Montreal, she was not worried. As a matter of fact, she was going away with some of her girlfriends and never had any hesitations even though she knew he was distraught. She was moving on and maybe trying to convince herself that everything would be fine.

Meanwhile, the scorned wife of Isabelle’s new beau had found e-mails written by the lovebirds and had sent them to Turcotte. After picking up the kids for the weekend, he arrived at his rental home after having made a stop at the local store to buy food and videos. He had also stopped at the pharmacy to get a rash cream for Anne-Sophie and an asthma medication for Olivier. He said he watched a movie with the kids on the couch and that he cried uncontrollably. Little Olivier tried to comfort him and dried his tears.

After putting the children to bed, Turcotte talked to his mother on the phone and spent time on his computer. His mother testified that he sounded very disconnected and she was afraid he might be contemplating suicide. She tried to talk her husband into driving there to check on him, but he thought his wife was overreacting and suggested going the following morning.

There in the house, Turcotte’s mind turned to the e-mails written by Isabelle and her lover. The two were passionate and seemingly very much in love. Nothing like Isabelle had ever been with him, he said during his testimony. By his own admission, he drank methanol to kill himself but decided he did not want the kids to find him dead in the morning. We have to deduce that he grabbed a couple of knives and eventually went upstairs to stab Olivier and Anne-Sophie 46 times. He testified that he wanted to stab himself in the heart but could not find the knives as he was too disoriented.

When his parents showed up at the house in the morning, there was no answer but the car was parked outside. They called the police and entered the residence. They went upstairs and found the carnage. Their grandkids were covered with blood in their beds. Their son was under a bed. If they had not arrived at the house, Turcotte might have died a slow death from the ingestion of methanol. Downstairs, they found his computer, some documents on ‘narcissism’, and a child video of Caillou still in the DVD player. There was a practically empty container of methanol upstairs.

At the hospital where he was taken by ambulance, Turcotte refused treatment saying he was a criminal. He did not want to sign any authorization. The staff knew him and had to keep their overwhelming emotions in check. He was rambling about having given his wife everything without getting any appreciation in return. He was soon transferred to another hospital because of the clear conflict of interest involved in being treated by his peers, who were revolted by his actions. He was then taken to the Pinel Institute in Montreal for assessment. The patients at this psychiatric institute have all committed violent crimes. During his detention, Isabelle had one phone conversation with her husband. She asked him why he did it. Why the kids? She told him she would have given her life for them and he answered ‘’me too’’. That was it. They exchanged a few very cold letters later on about dividing their assets.

During his three month trial, Turcotte testified that he only remembered the evening in flashes. The court heard that little Olivier tried in vain to talk his father out of killing him, crying ‘’no papa,’’ before being stabbed in the stomach. Turcotte was sobbing during his testimony. Apparently, they found Anne-Sophie with strands of her own hair in her hands, which indicates she was wide awake during her father’s attack.

After the trial, when Turcotte was found not criminally responsible by a jury of his peers, it would probably have been the end of the story if not for the public outrage felt all over Canada.

It just so happened that a wheat and canola farmer from Manitoba named Bob Latimer was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for ten years for the mercy killing of his handicapped daughter who suffered from cerebral palsy. Latimer was ready to risk incarceration to save her from an upcoming ‘mutilation and torture’ medical procedure that would have left her in excruciating pain. She died in his truck from carbon monoxide poisoning. Far from the cruelty of a stabbing. But the jury had no mercy on him. And now we have this father who savagely executes his two children because his wife left him and he is not criminally responsible? What’s next? Dancing With the Stars?

Is the fact that Turcotte was a handsome cardiologist a factor with the jury? Maybe the female jurors saw him as a potential mate for one of their daughters or as superior to a simple farmer? Or was it the intoxication factor?

Does it mean that Jodi Arias would have been let off the hook had she drank a shot of windshield wiper fluid? Or that Drew Peterson should have ingested methanol before drowning his former wife? Farmer Latimer forgot to get intoxicated before letting his daughter die peacefully.

The jury never heard that Turcotte refused to pay for his children’s funerals or that he had told his wife that if she wanted war, she was going to get it. Would it have made a difference? So many questions and so very few answers.

Isabelle Gaston’s life has obviously been a roller coaster of emotions and even if she welcomes this retrial, she is still in shock. She was only starting to regain some sense of normalcy and will now be tossed in the middle of another storm. She intends to be there to represent her two children. She has since remarried.

Public support has always been on Isabelle Gaston’s side but a small faction still thinks she should have shouldered part of the blame. Treating him with such disregard and having an affair with a good friend of the family. Parading that friend in front of the kids in poor Guy Turcotte’s house after he had tried so hard to be a good husband and father. I am convinced that she carries some guilt to this day for not realizing how dangerously troubled her former husband was and for going away on a weekend of fun with the girls while he was minding the kids and falling to pieces.

For some, this is a clear cut case of cold-blooded murder that should land Turcotte behind bars for the rest of his life. For others, it is a case of temporary insanity in a long, productive and upstanding life. Does it mean that he should do time in jail or remain on the outside and work in a subsidized clinic helping the poor and the disadvantaged? That would be rich man’s justice and nobody ever asked poor farmer Latimer to plant wheat instead of doing time. And our justice system should to be fair to all or as some of you would say, unfair to all.

In the name of the father Guy Turcotte, we shall see what this new trial will dredge up; no doubt, a lot of Holy Crap!

Note: After a retrial was announced, Guy Turcotte appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada to contest the decision to overturn the jury trial’s not-guilty verdict in his children’s killings. His appeal was rejected and he will be tried a second time as there is no double jeopardy in Canada.

by Rick Stack

Money (or lack thereof) typically has a HUGE impact on any given defendant’s ability to obtain a satisfactory outcome in his or her criminal  case. An indigent defendant is appointed a public defender (“PD”) who has a large caseload and few resources with which to hire investigators to visit and interview prospective witnesses and to review often voluminous discovery,  in addition to hiring psychiatrists to explore possible mental defenses, and/or to hire expert witnesses such as eyewitness misidentification or crime reconstruction experts (note the slick computer-animated scene of Oscar Pistorius’ apartment that an IT/graphics designer prepared in his case).

Due to their heavy workloads and trial schedules, PDs often have a much greater incentive than a privately-retained counsel to plead out cases quickly rather than to engage in extensive back-and-forth plea negotiations. This is a systemic problem with public counsel representation and is not meant to disparage the ability and dedication of many PDs. Even if an indigent federal defendant is assigned a private attorney from the Federal Indigent Defense Panel, either because the defendant is part of a multi-defendant, case or the Federal PD is otherwise conflicted out, the Criminal Justice Act (“CJA”) offers paltry hourly reimbursement rates for private counsel — $126 for non-capital cases and $180 for capital cases. See http://fdwnc.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CJA-HOURLY-RATES-Case-Maximums-updated-2014.pdf.

So, while the occasional millionaire or billionaire may receive a stiff criminal sentence, that is clearly the EXCEPTION rather than the rule. For every Bernie Madoff in prison for their criminal conduct which caused the greatest economic collapse since the 1930′s, nearly all other high-level financial miscreants evaded justice. How many Wall Street investment bankers or CEOs have been convicted and imprisoned for looting or similar offenses? How many bank executives were prosecuted for fleecing mortgagees and engaging in fraudulent robo-signing in connection with home loan foreclosures? We can probably count such prosecutions on one hand or, at most, two hands. In cases of corporate fraud, the usual “rule” is that the companies are required to pay a large fine (but nowhere near enough to materially affect their bottom-line profits) while the executives who authorized and approved the corporate criminality get off scot-free.

Federal Judge Jed S. Rakoff addressed that topic in his long essay published last year in the New York Times Review of Books. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/12/25/1265127/-Why-No-Corporate-CEOs-Were-Prosecuted-For-Causing-The-Financial-Crisis. Bill Moyers also addressed this problem in his expose detailing the lack of prosecutions in the most recent financial crash compared to the numerous bank CEOs who were imprisoned during the S&L crash of the 1980′s. See http://billmoyers.com/2013/09/17/hundreds-of-wall-street-execs-went-to-prison-during-the-last-fraud-fueled-bank-crisis/.

So, in closing, to paraphrase George Orwell (Animal Farm), all people are created equal in the U.S. but those who are wealthy are “more equal” than others, especially in the criminal justice system.

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

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

I’m sure that most of us have been “caught between the devil and the deep blue sea” at one time or another. It’s not a comfortable place and the fear is that if you are trapped in this unwieldy position, you just might make the wrong choice. This is precisely what happened to a troubled 15-year-old suburban Detroit girl who became so enraptured with her wretched 23-year-old boyfriend — whom of course she met online — that she decided to kill her entire loving family in order to be with this criminal.

And if you think I’m being too hard of the boyfriend, whose name happens to be Michael Rivera, you’ll probably change your mind after hearing the details of this story.

Corey Williams of the AP reports that the 15-year-old “girl and her two younger siblings (had been adopted) from Poland when she was 4½ years old. (S)he had been receiving treatment for depression and ADHD.”

“They came from a very, very, very bad background,” said the girl’s defense attorney Leslie Posner. “They were locked in closets. They were beaten.”

So you see, this girl had problems stemming from her early childhood; it is well-known that children adopted from Eastern Europe sometimes manifest a whole array of behavioral problems which probably stem from abuse in their early formative years.

Corey Williams writes:

The girl’s parents said she and Rivera were in a sexual relationship. The Associated Press isn’t naming the girl or her family members because prosecutors said they may file sex charges against Rivera, since the girl is a minor.

The parents said the girl met Rivera earlier this year through social media. They said they first learned about the relationship after their daughter ran away from home this summer.

“I think it was a big secret. I didn’t know about him,” her mother said.

Now just consider the dismay this girl’s parents must have felt when they discovered that not only had their daughter run away, but that her object of desire was 23 years old and had either encouraged her to leave home, or at the very least, had acquiesced to her desire to leave home to be with him.

(This is why I’m so thankful that my daughter didn’t do anything really dangerous and crazy during her high school years.)

It’s unclear how or why the 15-year-old returned home, but return home she did, which ultimately brought things to a head in such dramatic fashion that no one in this beleaguered family is ever going to be quite the same.

During the days leading up to THE CRISIS, which occurred last Friday, the child and her adult companion apparently decided that the only way to ensure that their “true love” could proceed in a smooth and unruffled manner would be for her to KILL her entire family. To that end, on Friday (with, according to the prosecutors, the BF outside the family’s Plymouth Township home sending her text messages), the child allegedly “stabbed her brother in the throat and tried to stab her younger sister. The boy was treated at a hospital.”

(It’s unclear exactly how the teen was subdued after stabbing her brother.)

“He was using her to do his dirty work. She was under this man’s spell,” the girl’s mother told reporters after the hearing. “She’s never been violent in the past. We had no clue this was going to happen. She’s getting psychiatric counseling. She’s on medications. We’ve done everything in our power to help her.”

The girl is naturally facing adult charges and they are very serious: assault with intent to murder and conspiracy to commit murder, to be precise. At her hearing on Thursday, she wore a red jail jumpsuit. Her parents were in attendance and she reportedly “made eye contact with her parents several times during the hearing.”

The girl’s parents said they are supporting their daughter despite the charges. Her mother addressed the court saying: “Your honor, we have a very strong bond with our daughter.”

Bond was set at $1 million, an issue that will probably be addressed at the child’s prelim which is scheduled for Oct. 31st. The judge did say that if she is released on bond, she will not be allowed to have any contact with her siblings and must wear a GPS monitor at all times.

Michael Rivera’s bond was also set at $1 million. He faces the same charges as the girl, plus a felonious assault charge and possibly an additional charge for having sex with an under-aged girl.

* * * * *

It’s natural to feel some sympathy for the girl considering the fact that she reportedly suffered severe abuse at the hands of her biological parents in Poland. On the other hand, the fact that she made at least an initial gesture toward killing her entire family, starting with her brother, does not cast her in a positive light. Still, to try this obviously troubled child as an adult is absurd.

The fact that her parents are standing by her is very encouraging and hopefully will have real impact as her case proceeds.

Just as I suggested earlier that we consider the dismay her parents felt when she ran away to her “adult” companion, I also invite you to consider the conflict the child must have felt being “stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea” – the “devil” being the boyfriend and the “deep blue sea” being her life at home with her parents and siblings but without Michael Rivera.

It’s a curious fact of human existence that conflict seems to rear its ugly head over and over again as we struggle through life. In fact, it seems in many ways to be the essence of our existence. Crime — in its appalling darkness — is an extreme manifestation of this conflict.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

In the eyes of many, crime in America is often associated with the poorer and less educated segments of our society. The reality, however, is that violent crime and rape occur among the working class, the middle class, and the upper-middle class/wealthy.

In June of this year, a particularly grotesque and repugnant rape was allegedly committed by a wealthy Memphis-area businessman, Mark Giannini, the co-founder of IT company Service Assurance. Giannini resides in Eads which is apparently an exclusive suburb of Memphis.

Michael McLaughlin of Huffington Post writes:

Recently released police documents detail an alleged grotesque rape of a mother of four who wanted a housekeeping job in the home of a Memphis businessman.

The suspect is the businessman himself, Mark Giannini, the co-founder of IT company Service Assurance, according to WREG. He allegedly repeatedly raped a 26-year-old for several hours until she blacked out on June 19.

Giannini possessed expensive handguns, prescription narcotics (some of which apparently had been diverted), a trove of sex toys including handcuffs, and women’s panties arranged by size. He is 49 years old and drives a Lamborghini and a Jaguar. (I say “drives” a Lamborghini and a Jaguar present tense because, somewhat surprisingly, Giannini was released from custody after posting a bond of $150,000).

According to the police report, when the authorities searched his posh residence on June 23rd, they found more than $16,000 in cash, 24 firearms, Viagra, Xanax, hydrocodone and other medications.

(The police report can be accessed here but readers should be forewarned that it contains an extremely graphic description of the alleged rape, unlike anything I have ever read before.)

According to Eric Lipford, Sabrina Hall and George Brown of WREG3, the victim’s reported ordeal began when “she informed a friend she was looking for extra employment. The friend reportedly told Giannini, who the victim said showed up at her job June 17 and told her he needed a house cleaner and office help.”

The woman told law enforcement that she called Giannini two days later on June 19th and told him she was interested “in some work, at which time he told her he would pick her up” and drive her to his home in order to give her “an overview of the house cleaning and office work he needed done.”

Once they arrived at his home, the woman said Giannini gave her an orange-colored drink that he told her was similar to a “pop-up”. She drank it and as she walked around Giannini’s palatial digs, she became uncomfortable, she reports, because “she saw strange things in the house, like a skeleton hanging in the den.”

She then told Giannini that she wanted to go home but instead of acquiescing to her request, “he began kissing her aggressively and pulling her hair.”

This in turn, according to the crime report, led to Giannini allegedly performing (and forcing the alleged victim to perform) almost unimaginably vile sexual acts on the woman against her will. Among other things, Giannini forced the victim to consume urine, blood and fecal matter, while telling her these perverse actions were “part of the job interview, according to WBTV”.

Adding a little touch of Americana to the whole demented scene, much of the rape occurred “over a three hour period on top of an American flag towel.”

According to deputies, when Giannini was finished, he had an employee take the victim to a Motel 6, where her family found her before “taking her to the hospital”.

The woman’s family said she “was in a mentally altered state and in and out of consciousness.”

Staff at Baptist Hospital where she was treated said she was foaming at the mouth with, “similar medical conditions to a seizure or overdose.”

The woman herself says she blacked out and doesn’t know how she got back to the nearby Motel 6 where her family found her.

Naturally, Giannini’s attorney said his client is not guilty and claims he was set up, according to WNCN.

Giannini has hired the so-called dream team Steve Farese and Leslie Ballin to defend him.

“We think the facts will show the he is innocent, that he wasn’t the one who called her. She called him to come get her,” Farese said. “There’s another witness who took her home and this certainly looks like a staged event.”

You think? Will the “facts” ultimately show that this was all a set-up designed to blackmail the rich guy? I hope not but only time will tell… If it was a staged event, it seems odd that she was in such bad shape at the end of the encounter that she was “foaming at the mouth.”

Although it took a few days, after hearing the alleged victim’s report, detectives went to Giannini’s gated home on June 23. A man (not Giannini) spoke to the officers on the intercom system and said the suspect was not home. According to another affidavit, he refused to allow the investigators to enter the property.

Not to be denied, the detectives forced themselves onto the grounds and found wet footprints leading into the woods in back of the home.

Shortly thereafter, Giannini appeared and presented himself to officers on the street outside of his home. According to a detective’s sworn statement, he was “perspiring profusely and had fresh cuts and scratches on his legs.”

The alleged rapist has been charged with two counts of aggravated rape, two counts of possession of a controlled substance and one count of possession of a firearm, according to Fox 13.

* * * * *

It is reported that Giannini’s bail was originally set at $1,000,000 before being reduced to $150,000 leading to his release on bond. The fact he made bond is outrageous. Based on the charges, he is clearly a “threat to the community” and should be behind bars, which, I suspect, is precisely where he would be if he were not a wealthy “shaker and mover.”

But hey, at least they arrested the guy and that’s a start.

UPDATE:

While everyone waits for the case to go to the grand jury, where, I imagine, he is likely to be indicted, the alleged rapist’s defense team is already in place, consisting of Steve Farese and Leslie Ballin, who were dubbed the “Dream Team,” after pulling off a miraculous defense of accused murderess Mary Winkler seven years ago.

Lee Smith, Senior Fox News correspondent, writes:

“I’ve known Mark for many years,” Farese said. “Leslie Ballin, my co-counsel, has also known him for many years. We felt like it’s a case with a lot of strange twists and turns. It did interest me.”

While admitting it might to hard to generate sympathy for his client with a jury, Farese says he and Ballin have been there before representing high-profile, but not necessarily likeable defendants.

“Part of our job is represent those that don’t have a voice for themselves,” Farese said. “We represent unsympathetic people all the time. That is not a deterrent to what we do. It will now have to go to a grand jury. The grand jury will make a decision to indict, and if they indict the state will proceed with the charges.”

*     *     *     *     *

These are slick boys. “Representing those who don’t have a voice for themselves?” And I’m the reincarnation of King Tut and The Wizard of Oz all rolled into one.

John Wayne Gacy’s disturbingly sly and slippery quotes come to us courtesy of Psychological Autopsy. The commentary following the quotes is by Patrick H. Moore

John Wayne Gacy could have been somebody if his father hadn’t harassed and belittled him over his arguably girlish tendencies to such a degree that — in what turned out to be his fatal defense — he closed off a key part of his emotions to such a degree that the intense pain he felt as a child as a result of his father’s cruel and constant badgering transmogrified into a doubly destructive sexual love and intense loathing for teenage boys (his victims) because THEY REMINDED HIM OF HIMSELF, which is why he both loved and hated them.

John Wayne Gacy lost that part of himself that was most real and authentic and as a result of that — even though he could show great tenderness to his sister and mother — his responses to his hideous crimes, as revealed in the following quotes were fraught with a stubborn denial that substituted cleverness for any real insight into self.

“A clown can get away with murder.”  (Although when Gacy acted as a clown for the children, he was reportedly always amiable, his clown figures, as manifested in his notorious “clown paintings” seem to be stripped of all humanity; in short, they are are literally “clowns without pity”.)

“If Jeffrey Dahmer doesn’t meet the legal test of insanity, God help the one that does meet it. I mean, it — it has to really be something. If Jeffrey Dahmer doesn’t meet it, then nobody does; and for me, it’s a psychological ploy to use…” (Gacy, of course, tried the Multiple Personality Disorder defense which failed. His deepest desire was that he not be thought of as homosexual. Here he appears to be rationalizing his own inability to win on an insanity defense by comparing himself to Dahmer. If Dahmer can’t win with the insanity defense, then  nobody can.)

“The whole thing with the State’s case has been a sexual theory, and I have always disagreed with that.” (Gacy cannot accept the fact he was driven to have sex with the boys before murdering them because that would make him a homosexual murderer, a possibility he could not abide. The sad thing is that this is his father’s voice still sounding in his head after all has been lost. His father, of course, could not bear the thought that his son might be gay.)

“No, I would definitely not be homosexual. I have nothing against what they do, and I don’t deny that I engage in sex with males, but that’s — I’m bisexual.”  (Gacy was bisexual, he had wives with whom he cohabited, though it’s hard to imagine his desire for the ladies in his life matching the intensity of his desire for the boys).

“The only thing they can get me for is running a funeral parlor without a license.” (This is the hard, cynical John Wayne Gacy; his namesake, the real John Wayne, would be proud. “Go ahead, punk. Make my day.”

“…hell, I don’t see how you could have found me insane even with the thirteen doctors. It was like playing a board game of chess.” (Gacy was smart and I suspect that he knew all along that his insanity defense was doomed.)

“My personal opinion is the insanity defense does not belong in the courtroom, not in the legal system at all. I don’t even believe it should be used.” (More sour grapes from a man who, try as he might, had no workable alibi. But wasn’t there some validity in his MPD defense? Didn’t he in a sense dissociate dramatically when the sex-and-bloodlust part of his psyche took over, a twisted sub-set of himself that would appear to have little in common with the real and authentic Gacy, the boy who loved to garden with his sister and cook with his mother.)

“What we’re, what we’ve been dispelling is that the thing of it is, they want you to believe that I, and I alone, committed the murders, and I had nothing to do with the murders of anyone.” (Gacy holding his mud. He simply cannot give in and admit that he killed the boys because they were his doubles and because in killing them, he was in some strange way killing himself and pleasing his father at the same time.)

“Well, the idea that I am a homosexual thrill killer and all that — that garbage; and they painted this image of me that, like, I trawled down the streets and stalked young boys and slaughtered them. Hell, if you could see my schedule, my work schedule, you’d know damn well that I was never out there.” (Gacy was talented and he did work hard. But like anyone with an all-encompassing obsession, he managed to fit sex-and-murder into his schedule. Serial killers are funny that way. Despite all obstacles, they just keep carving notches on the headboard.)

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Part of the reason many of us are fascinated with murder is because we want to fathom the state of mind of the killer at the time he or she commits the awful crime, but at the same time we are unable to succeed in fully understanding that state of mind for the simple reason that we are not killers. Thus, the actual state of mind of the killer remains elusive except on those problematical occasions when it is described by actual killers, and even then we can’t help but be aware that we are listening to unreliable witnesses.

This desire of ours to fathom the killer’s state of mind and motivation is no doubt part of the reason for our eternal fascination with the better-known serial killers; post-arrest many (though not all) of them are more than willing to divulge their feelings at the time of the murders, as well as their motivation for their crimes.

For example, in one of his quotes, David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz stated:

“I was literally singing to myself on my way home, after the killing. The tension, the desire to kill a woman had built up in such explosive proportions that when I finally pulled the trigger, all the pressures, all the tensions, all the hatred, had just vanished, dissipated, but only for a short time.”

In one of his interviews, the 6’9” Santa Cruz Ce-Ed Killer, Edmund Kemper, with his I.Q. of 136, waxed enthusiastically about the sexual nature of murder and decapitation:

“I remember there was actually a sexual thrill . . . you hear that little pop and pull their heads off and hold their heads up by the hair. Whipping their heads off, their body sitting there. That’d get me off.”

This level of intense involvement/pleasure goes a long ways toward explaining why the serial killer must engage in repeat performance after repeat performance.

Furthermore, the “high end” serial killer is sometimes eager to provide a social context for his crimes: e.g., Ted Bundy blamed his crimes on violent pornography, and the Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez, implied that he was just doing on a small scale what society does on a much grander scale:

“I don’t believe in the hypocritical, moralistic dogma of this so-called civilized society. I need not look beyond this room to see all the liars, haters, the killers, the crooks, the paranoid cowards–truly trematodes of the Earth, each one in his own legal profession. You maggots make me sick– hypocrites one and all. And no one knows that better than those who kill for policy, clandestinely or openly, as do the governments of the world, which kill in the name of God and country or for whatever reason they deem appropriate.”

Of course, the feelings of “high end” serial killers such as Berkowitz, Bundy and Ramirez may – in some instances – be more rarified or even exalted in a supremely dark way than the mundane thoughts and feelings of your ordinary thuggish killer, even if the thuggish one may have potential to kill again.

A recent case out of Florida provides an excellent example of that.

Here are the facts as reported by Sebastian Murdoch based on “a heavily redacted police affidavit” the Huffington Post obtained:

The corpse of 24-year-old Jennifer Hedges was found Oct. 9 floating in the Indian River. The victim, who police said was a prostitute, met with 45-year-old Lance David Berning, the suspect, on the night of her murder.

In a heavily redacted police affidavit obtained by The Huffington Post, investigators detailed the graphic crime, saying that Hedges had been strangled to death by Berning before her feet were tied to concrete and she was dumped in the river.

According to the police affidavit, Berning met with a friend four days later at a local bar to have a few brews. At some point during the evening, the suspect told his friend that he’d had sex and smoked crack cocaine with Hedges before killing her.

And then this execrable individual described his pleasure in the act, that he “really got off on it”, and that the reason he strangled her was she started getting “prissy” while performing a sexual act on him, which he perceived as sufficient reason to strangle her. The possibility of moving from a single isolated murder to becoming a  serial killer is telegraphed in a remark Berning made to his friend “that he enjoyed the experience so much he planned to kill another victim in about six months.”

Berning got into the drama of it almost as if he were watching a movie, telling his friend that “Hedges put up a fight during the murder, breaking Berning’s windshield and badly biting his palm.” The alleged killer also rated his performance telling his friend that he “would get better at disposing a body next time where they do not find it.”

Another difference between Berning and more famous serial killers is the fact that whereas the well-known serial killers, who are often “careful” souls who value their “freedom”, typically have rather few arrests on their records other than, in some cases, arrests for early murders, Berning is little more than a run-of-the-mill career criminal. An example of this careful approach to life and crime is  Edmund Kemper who served 6 years in a mental institution for killing his grandparents when he was 15 before being released back into his mother’s custody at the age of 21.

Sebastian Murdoch writes:

According to the Orlando Sentinel, Berning had been arrested 20 times in Florida and served time for crimes including intimidation of a witness, battery, and grand theft. In documents obtained by the publication, police said Berning referred to his crime as a new “hobby.”

Although they have no evidence at this point, the police are reportedly worried that Berning could be responsible for earlier unsolved homicide cases in the Brevard County area.

Berning’s beer-fueled braggadocio proved to be his undoing. His friend, apparently aghast at the revelations, went to the police who then arranged for a sting operation:

Police said they got Berning to admit to his crime through a sting operation involving the friend that had learned of the murder. On Oct. 16, a recorded conversation between Berning and his friend culminated in a confession after the friend asked if anyone had seen the crime, according to the report.

“Nobody saw a fucking thing,” the suspect allegedly said. “It was three o’clock in the morning on a deserted fucking street. Nobody saw shit.”

Whereas there is often a dark and demented poetry in the statements of the famous serial killers (e.g. Carl Panzram, who confessed to 22 murders and claimed to have sodomized over 1,000 males, stated memorably: “I wish you all had one neck and that I had my hands on it’), it seems evident that one such as Berning is hardly capable of a deft turn of the phrase.

“Nobody saw shit.”

Well, nobody needed to, Mr. Berning, considering that you implicated yourself with as little thought as if you were merely describing a trip to the mall or a Sunday afternoon spent glued to the television watching the NFL (my current crime of choice).

by BJW Nashe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Darcia Helle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Electric Chair Nightmare: An Infamous and Agonizing History

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

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

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

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

Why Should I Believe You? The History of the Polygraph

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

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

The Terror of ISO: A Descent into Madness

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

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

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

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

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

The characters await you.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

The fact that life is rarely completely fair is something most of us gradually come to accept. This sobering reality is captured nicely in the irony inherent in the old adage: “Be careful what you wish for. It just might come true.”

One of the things a lot of guys and a lot of women desire is to be a magician in bed, a transcendent lover who catapults your partner to dizzying heights of passionate intensity. Well, that’s a lot to live up to but certainly a worthy goal.

But suppose you were that guy who could drive his lover mad with pleasure. Or suppose you were his partner and with your perfect communion with your lover you experienced indescribable pleasure. At first blush, this would seem to be a good thing, wouldn’t it?

But you know what they say about the best laid plans, as an unnamed Italian romancer recently discovered to his dismay in the northern Italian province of Padua. Newser writes:

“There’s a noisy romp between the sheets and then there’s sex so loud it’s considered “stalking” your neighbors. That was the charge a 46-year-old Italian man apparently faced in court, after a dozen of his neighbors filed a civil suit complaining of his loud lovemaking sessions. They took issue with “screams and moans” that “disturbed the peace in the condominium and the building’s decorum,” the Local reports.

It’s unclear, however, exactly who’s doing the screaming. Some of the Italian locals and the New York Daily News report that it was actually Loverboy’s girlfriend’s screams that woke the dead and offended the naysaying inhabitants of the condo complex.

The Local reports that in the court filing, the 12 angry neighbors complained that the “screams and moans disturbed the peace in the condominium and the building’s decorum.”

According to the Articolo Tre news site, the man’s only real crime was being too good at sex, as his girlfriend’s rapturous wails kept the whole building awake.

When his turn to speak came, the 42-year-old reportedly made the logical argument that “stalking” and “noise” were not that the same thing and that he couldn’t help the fact he was “too good at sex.”

The judge was apparently in a churlish mood and was not swayed by Loverboy’s “good faith” argument. Believe it or not, he gave the magnificent c_______ 6 months in jail. It does not appear that he was clapped in irons, however, and is believed to have walked out of the courtroom a free man, stating that he planned on appealing his conviction which is perhaps a common occurrence in Italy.

Before going any further, I think it’s important to note that unless information is being withheld, there is something refreshing about reading about the exciting sex life of a couple who apparently did not feel the need to engage in Erotic Asphyxiation (EA) or other alternative sexual practices, not that there’s anything wrong with alternative practices; rather, this case simply proves that the Creator or whatever alternative force brought us into being knew what he/she/it was doing when endowing humans with the sexual prerogative.

This is not the first time neighbours have filed a case over loud sex. In the UK in 2010, a woman was twice spared jail despite breaching court orders that she stop shouting and screaming during sex.

What is surpassingly strange, though, is the fact that as much fun as the world’s best sex may be, until you get arrested and jailed for being “too good at it,” what apparently really pays off when it comes to lining your pockets with ducats is bad sex, as another Italian couple recently discovered.

Newser has the story:

It’s not your everyday court decision: An Italian couple has been awarded $28,000 in relation to their bad sex life. But the case isn’t quite as crazy as that might seem. Some two years ago, the female half of the couple was hit by a car while crossing the street; the injuries she sustained initially left her bedridden for three months, reports Italy’s La Nazione, and have permanently damaged their ability to have a sex life on par with what they previously enjoyed. And there are also other limitations for the two, who say they can’t ride bikes or travel together.

As you might expect, the attorney representing the insurance company of the driver who hit the poor (un)fortunate woman, did not go down easily. If fact, in the best tradition of that exalted class of men and women known as criminal defense attorneys, the driver’s attorney got right to the point saying that as a middle-aged couple they wouldn’t be having an active sex life anyway, so where was the harm?

According to La Nazione, the Tuscan judge was unpersuaded. “You cannot consider age in the couple’s relationship—whether in sexual, social, or leisure terms.”

It is also reported that due to his wife’s injury, the husband now has to handle all the cooking, cleaning, and chores.

*     *     *     *     *

We live in a strange world. You get paid if you can’t have sex and you go to jail for being too good at it.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

The high school “shooter on a rampage” syndrome struck again on Friday when alleged shooter Jaylen Fryberg, a freshman at Marysville-Pilchuk High School 30 miles north of Seattle, walked up behind his cousins and a girl who had rejected him and opened fire with what is reported to have been a legally-registered 40-caliber Beretta handgun, shooting five students, killing one and wounding three critically.

Curtis Skinner of Reuters reports that “a school district official, who declined to be named, identified the shooter as Jaylen Fryberg, a freshman described by classmates and parents as a popular member of both the wrestling and football teams.”

“He came up from behind and had a gun in his hand and he fired about eight bullets…They were his friends so it wasn’t just random,” student Jordan Luton told CNN.

Greg Botelho of CNN writes describing the halftime scene at an October 17th football game between Jaylen’s school and Arlington High School one week earlier:

“There stood Fryberg, looking dapper in a tie, vest and sneakers, with his long hair tied up tightly. A schoolmate noted Fryberg played football and planned to try out soon for wrestling; then people in the stands applauded him, with enthusiastic whistles and yells of admiration thrown in for good measure.”

It was the sort of scene high school kids dream of; Jaylen had just been named the freshmen class’s “Homecoming Prince”, and his peers were applauding him enthusiastically.

Yet one week later, Jaylen has permanently ended the dreams of one his victims, a ninth grade girl whom he shot and killed, because he was angry that one of the victims wouldn’t go out with him and had begun seeing his cousin.

At a deeply emotional community vigil on Friday evening at The Grove Church in Marysville, hundreds of parents, students and community members packed the aisles holding flowers and weeping.

Curtis Skinner reports:

Outside the vigil, 9th grader Bella Panjeli said she attended a different school but was friends with one of the female victims, calling her “a beautiful girl and so, so sweet.”

Bella explained that Jaylen was in an ongoing dispute with his victim cousin over the deceased girls affections.

“I heard he asked her out and she rebuffed him and was with his cousin,” Panjeli said, adding that she learned of the connection after talking to the victim’s family and friends. “It was a fight over a girl.”

Thus, at this point, the available information suggests that the girl’s death, Jaylen’s death (he eventually turned the gun on himself), and the injuries sustained by four other students, three of whom are critically wounded, all were triggered by Jaylen’s juvenile heartbreak coupled with intense jealousy.

If the situation wasn’t so tragic, it would almost be funny. I mean, c’mon, didn’t most of us suffer high school heartbreak at one time or another? Of course we did. I remember being so lovesick over B, the sweet object of my affections, that she was all that I could think about for weeks, perhaps months, on end. I clearly remember attending a school function with the lass most lovely and to my shock, her former boyfriend, who I knew slightly, showed up with another cool dude and they hung around for an hour or two making us all feel uncomfortable.

On another occasion her ex  showed up at school dead drunk (those were the days, my friend) and B, with a grave look of concern, ignored me completely and raced to his rescue.

I can’t say that I ever fantasized about gunning down my rival and I certainly never considered shooting Sweet B in the back of the head. Furthermore, at that point I was basically the new kid in town and certainly was not nearly as popular as Jason was at his high school. As for the ex, I have no idea what he thought but he appears to have fought off any urge to pick up a gun and come after me or Sweet B.

According to the available reports, Jason, who like virtually all kids these days was active on social media, gave no indications that he had been planning such a rampage. Three days before the shooting, he did tweet concerning his despondency over his lack of romantic success with the girl he ultimately murdered:

“It breaks me…It actually does…I know it seems like I’m sweating it off… But I’m not.. And I never will be able to.”

So what’s the difference? Why did Jaylen snap? He surely didn’t “love” the girl he killed any more than I “loved” Sweet B. Obviously, he was prideful and felt humiliated, but haven’t we all been there?

The difference is actually fairly simple and horribly mundane.

It seems that Jaylen, who was a Native American and a member of the Tulalip tribe, which runs a casino in Marysville, was also “an avid outdoorsman who liked to go hunting and had guns. Just three months ago, he posted a picture to Instagram of himself holding a rifle, along with the words: “Probably the best BirthDay present ever! I just love my parents!!!”

So there it is, my friends. Jaylen was a member of contemporary gun culture which made it easy for him to grab a gun while in the throes of jealous frustration.

It is noted that fellow student Jason Luton reports that Jaylen got into a fight with someone who “said something racist to him” a few weeks ago. According to another source, “there was bullying involved and a couple words said towards him that he obviously didn’t like.” What happened is unclear but it is reported that Jaylen was suspended from school over this incident.

Now if Jaylen had used the Beretta on the alleged racists it would still be 100 per cent wrong but perhaps a bit more understandable. But he didn’t. He used the Beretta on two of his cousins, the girl who rejected him, and two other girls who were also his peers. In a sense, he lashed out at those he was closest too.

“All of the victims of the shooting were under 18, and three were in critical condition with gunshot wounds to the head, said Joanne Roberts, chief of medicine at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett. The fourth wounded victim suffered less serious injuries.

Two of the wounded were boys and two were girls, hospital officials said. The boys, 15-year-old Andrew Fryberg, shot in the head, and 14-year-old Nate Hatch, shot in the jaw, were both in intensive care at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle on Friday night, a spokeswoman said.”

Both boys were reportedly cousins of the shooter.

* * * * *

It’s not enough to simply say the shooting occurred because Jaylen was a member of contemporary gun culture. Why? Simple. Because contemporary gun culture is an integral part of our society and it is not going away. At this point it is as deeply ingrained in our culture as home, hearth, and family; cars, goals, jobs and ambitions; sex, drugs and entertainment; football, pop culture, fashion; it’s probably fair to say that in the eyes of a great many Americans, their right to have and bear arms is one of the three or four most important things in their lives, and wields great force in their psyches.

So what to do, my friends? It seems to me that a society that permits adults to be heavily armed and also permits children to have ready access to firearms needs to figure out how to ensure that these weapons are not used inappropriately. One possible first step would be to require that all incoming high school freshman take a class on Conflict Resolution. The fact of the matter is that when Jaylen got upset, the rational part of his brain shut down completely and the emotional side took over. He might as well have been Karla Homolka in the throes of her infamous rape-murder rampage with Paul Bernardo, a perfectly intelligent young woman who rational function wasn’t working AT ALL.

If you think about, in a sense, Karla wasn’t that different from Jaylen. She was driven by her emotions rather than her rational function. Teenagers, because their brains are not completely developed in the first place, have a severe need to put their emotions aside and learn to think rationally, particularly in times of crisis. We all struggle with this when we get upset, even as supposedly mature adults, but it’s even worse with kids.

So why are Conflict Resolution courses not offered as a matter of course to incoming high school freshman? Once again the answer is simple. For complex and probably self-serving reasons, our society does everything in its power to keep young people from learning to think critically and rationally. All they’re supposed to do is get the answers right in their math and science classes. Other than that, they’re supposed to remain blissfully empty-headed. Their truly human needs are ignored completely by our educational system. Somehow, as a society, we are deathly afraid of having our kids learn to actually THINK. I suspect it has something to do with money and politics and groupthink but this issue is not something I will attempt to unpack in this brief post.

Meanwhile Jaylen is dead and the girl who didn’t “love” him is dead and three other teens are critically wounded. All because Jaylen couldn’t think straight. Why? Partly because for some crazy reason the powers that be apparently didn’t want him to learn to be rational. And they don’t want you to think straight either, my young friends, so you better get that through your head. And because of this societal blind spot and refusal to deal with the real needs of young people, crazy rampages like Jaylen’s are just going to keep happening.

by Patrick H. Moore

In early January of 1993, Karla Homolka, after enduring a particularly brutal beating at the hands of fellow serial killer Paul Bernardo – at the urging of her family – made the life-altering decision to escape from the shadow of Bernardo’s strangely domineering personality once and for all. In this post, we will trace Karla’s “two steps forward, one step back” progress and forays into sexual decadence, not to mention drug and alcohol abuse, during this period, even as she clearly discerns that the Crown desperately needs her to testify against Bernardo to build a case against him.

There is little doubt in my mind that shortly after leaving Bernardo, Karla realized that she was in the perfect position to help engineer the “sweetheart” Plea Deal that resulted in a mere 12-year prison sentence, and has enraged both Canadian and American followers of this compelling case. In effect, Karla did everything in her power to “stack the deck” in her favor. She did this by playing the “victim,” minimizing her own guilt, dropping clues as to the existence of the damning videotape, ingratiating herself with law enforcement, and generally playing the “little lost girl” while simultaneously making herself indispensable to the Crown. Dark, evil and twisted though she was, Karla was nobody’s fool.

On January 10, 1993, Karla moved in with her Uncle Calvin and Aunt Patti Seger in Brampton in Ontario Province. Within a day or two of being given shelter by her concerned relatives, Karla – no doubt already planning how best to put her best foot forward — began keeping a detailed account of the abuse she had suffered in her diary. She also began making phone calls to some of Paul’s friends in an effort to keep tabs on his state of mind and behavior.

On January 19th, Karla returned home briefly to St. Catharines for an appointment with legal aid, a visit to her doctor and to have her hair done. We need hardly state that whatever her other concerns, personal vanity was never far from Karla’s mind.

Karla wrote in her diary on January 21st:

“So confused about what to do with my life…don’t know where I should live or what career I should choose; fear that I will go back to him. I wouldn’t in a million years. I’d rather go to jail…I miss being in the hospital. I should have stayed longer. Dr. Plaskos gave me more ativan; Oh yeah, I just remembered, Paul kicked me in the lower back and there was blood in my urine.” 

Four days later, Karla again returned to St. Catharines to celebrate her father’s irthday and to consult with her new divorce lawyer, Virginia Workman.

On February 3rd, Detective Ron Whitfield of Metro Toronto’s Sex Assault Squad, after finding out that the Forensic Lab had positively identified Paul Bernardo as being the Scarborough Rapist, telephoned the Homolka residence and asked to speak to Karla. Karla was there but she did not take the call; instead, she directed her sister Lori and her mother Dorothy to speak with the detective. Detective Whitfield told Dorothy that it was urgent that he speak with her because Paul had been identified as a suspect in a major case.

This, of course, was the break that Karla had been waiting for. One can easily envision her licking her lips in anticipation. Also, in keeping with the behavior patterns of addicts of every ilk, Karla used this good news as an excuse to get to get laid. One can assume, that by this juncture, she had probably been celibate for at least four weeks, which for someone as hot-blooded (and cold-hearted) as Karla, must have felt like an eternity. In any event, after setting up an appointment to meet with the police the following week, on February 5^th, Karla, her Aunt Patti, and a friend went to a Brampton bar called the Sugar Shack.

It would be interesting to know if it took Karla mere minutes, or an hour or two, but at the Sugar Shack, she met a man named Jim Hutton, with whom she spent the entire night dancing. Oddly, Jim bore a striking resemblance to Paul Bernardo. At the end of what must have been a very agreeable evening, Karla told Jim that she wanted to see him again and they agreed to meet there the following night.

When it came to sex, Karla was not one to “just say no” and – true to her word – she returned to the Sugar Shack to meet Jim. Jim was hours late but he eventually showed up and Karla was there to greet him. After the Shack closed, they wended their way to an after-hours club and from there, to the house of one of Jim’s friends. Jim’s buddy sacrificed his bed to the new couple. I can’t help wishing I had been a fly on the wall to view the fireworks. After it was over, Jim called a cab for Karla and sent her on her way.

On February 9th, Metro Police detectives Ron Whitfield, Mary-Lee Metcalfe and Bruce Smollet traveled to Brampton and met with Karla in an exhaustive five-hour debriefing session. The detectives had been given strict instructions to ask about the Mickey Mouse watch that appeared in the photograph taken of Karla at St. Catharines General Hospital after the brutal beating at Paul Bernardo’s hands that led to her leaving him. The detectives also insisted on taking a fingerprint sample. When Karla asked why they needed the sample, they would not answer.

In addition to answering law enforcement’s question, Karla provided a detailed account of the physical abuse she suffered at the hands of Paul. Again, one wishes to have been invisible but present in the room at the debriefing. It is important to keep in mind that Karla survived this most important meeting with no legal counsel present which would seem to speak volumes as to her poise and ability to present herself advantageously.

Nonetheless, after the exhausting session, Karla was visibly shaken and confessed to her aunt and uncle that Paul was the Scarborough Rapist and the School-Girl murderer. Then, as if she’d been biding her time, she immediately phoned the home of George Walker, a prominant Niagara Falls attorney whom she’d gotten to know while working at the animal clinic. Karla requested an appointment ASAP.

The next day, secure in the fact she had booked her appointment with Walker, Karla accepted Jim Hutton’s invitation to share a pizza. During their tete-a-tete, Karla mentioned that she was married and had recently left her husband. She also explained that he was responsible for her bruises. Jim appeared singularly disinterested in Karla’s past travails. What he was interested in was more sex, including possibly some anal, and they concluded the night by coupling after which Jim dropped her off where she was staying. Strangely, not only did Jim look like Paul; he drove the same late-model Nissan.

Police Work:

As the end of the 5-hour debriefing on February 9th, the police had offered to provide Karla with transportation should she need it. They kept their word on February 11^th and drove Karla to Niagara Falls on this day to meet with George Walker. Karla apparently didn’t want her parents to know she was meeting with a criminal defense attorney. According to the record, on the way to Walker’s office, the three of them made small talk, a peculiar notion considering all that was at stake.

During her meeting with George Walker, Karla told him about the rapes and murders, including the death of her sister, Tammy-Lyn. She also described the video-tapes and how she had been unsuccessful in her attempt to locate them on the night she left Bayview Drive. Karla informed Walker that she was willing to testify against Bernardo — if Walker could get her blanket immunity. This outrageous desire on Karla’s part is indicative of her incredibly narcissistic personality. Walker told her that blanket immunity was probably a long shot, although the Battered Wife defense was a possibility. The problem was most battered women do not assist their partners in rapes and murders.

Later that same night, the Niagara Regional Police appeared at Walker’s door, tipping him off to the fact that they had been in contact with the Metro Toronto police. Detective Robert Gillies alluded to the fact that the Crown might be willing to work out a deal. Based on this, Walker agreed to meet with Crown attorney Ray Houlihan.

When Det. Gillies returned to Niagara Regional headquarters, Inspector Bevan, the head of the Green Ribbon Task Force, was waiting for him. Karla’s fingerprints matched prints found on the piece of map that had been discovered at the site of Kristen French’s abduction. Bevan obviously discerned that Karla had not come close to revealing the full scope of her involvement with Bernardo. The problem was there was no concrete evidence linking Paul to the abduction and murders of either Kristen French or Lynn Mahaffey.

From that point on, Karla was surveilled and a phone tap was discussed. The police also began tailing Bernardo. Inspector Bevan was tasked with working out the particulars of what would become the first plea deal proposed for Karla.

On February 13th, Karla returned to George Walker’s office. In the course of their conversation, he outlined the gravity of her involvement. In essence, he informed Karla that there was no possibility of her avoiding incarceration. Walker also told her that if she hoped to secure any kind of decent deal, it was imperative that she dump Jim Hutton and move back in with her parents.

Two days later, Jim and Karla got together at his apartment for their final encounter. Unsurprisingly, Karla was not her usual bubbly self. It is entirely possibly that up until the point at which George Walker had leveled with her, she had actually believed that she would miraculously escape prison time. She opened up just enough to tell Jim that some bad things had happened, things she was not yet able to speak of. Nonetheless, Jim allowed her to spend the night; they had marathon sex as if Karla realized this might be her last chance for a while to satisfy her constant craving.

 Paul Bernardo’s Arrest and Its Aftermath

Paul Bernardo was arrested just before dinner time at his home on Bayview Drive on February 17th. Naturally, the news was all over the airwaves. The police informed the media that they were still searching for a second suspect when in reality Karla was that suspect.

During the days following Bernardo’s arrest, media coverage was exhaustive, including the enduring footage of Bernardo being led away from his home in hand-cuffs. The newspapers had a field day, plastering the story and everything related to it all over the front page and the local section as well. In these reports, the police are quoted as saying they are speaking to a woman who may have been involved in the deaths and that they are investigating another person of interest, who turned out to be Van Smirnis, Paul Bernardo’s best friend.

Karla meets with George Walker on February 19th and he informed her that this was just the beginning. At this point, the enormity of the situation finally got to Karla. Among other things, she was upset because the media knew all about her requests for immunity. Her parents were in total shock and Jim Hutton refused to talk to her.

Three days later, George Walker met with the Homolkas to discuss gathering bail money to the tune of around $100,000. The plan was that Karla would be arrested and would be let out on bail pending trial. With the help of family and friends, the Homolkas began scraping the money together.

Walker and Crown representative Murray Segal then hammered out the fine details of Karla’s plea deal. It was agreed that she would plead to two counts of manslaughter, each of which would carry a sentence of 10 years each, to be served concurrently. She was required to appear at Niagara Regional Headquarters on Saturday, February 27th to confess. Under the agreement, she would only serve 40 months behind bars. And from this point on, she would be required to make herself available to police at all times for questioning.

Even Karla had her breaking point. She spent the next day drinking heavily and was reportedly “three sheets to the wind” by dinner time. She was also on an assortment of anti-depressants which just made matters worse. Karla met with Walker at 7:00 p.m. to sign the formal plea-bargain. Walker realized Karla was not herself and was behaving strangely. He even thought she might be suicidal and decided to postpone the following day’s arraignment based on her state of mind.

Although Murray Segal ultimately added two years to Karla’s plea agreement, bringing it to the infamous 12 year figure, in reality, that meant that she would still only have to serve 52 months. (In actuality, because she was deemed a risk to re-offend, Karla was required to serve the lion’s share of the 12-year sentence.)

Karla’s state of mind remained precarious over the next week, and on March 4^th, based on Walker’s advice, she was admitted to Northwestern General Hospital for psychiatric evaluation. She would remain there for the next seven weeks.

Note: Many of the factual details of the above post are based on Stephen Williams’ excellent book on the Karla Homolka case, “Invisible Darkness”. The interpretations of these facts are the work of Patrick H. Moore.

Click on the following links to read previous Karla posts:

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

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

Watching Karla Homolka: Karla Just Did As She Pleased

Watching Karla Homolka: The Game Gets Real

Watching Karla Homolka: Karla Stacks the Deck

Karla Homolka Psychological Evaluation, Part One: Abuse Victim or Just Plain Evil?

Watching Karla Homolka: It’s a Family Affair

Was Karla Homolka a Normal Child? The Answer Is a Resounding No

Is Karla Homolka the Most Hated Woman in North America?

The Karla Homolka Files: A U.S. Perspective on Karla Homolka’s Plea Bargain

Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo: Canada’s Most Notorious Serial Killer Case

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

To our dismay, while running All Things Crime Blog, we’ve discovered that child abuse takes myriad disturbing forms ranging from child rape to locking kids in cages and starving them — to making them live naked in the backyard while starving them — to locking them in chicken coops with electronic dog collars around their necks — to chaining them to the porch with chickens (live or dead) tied around their necks — to just beating the living hell out of them – and, of course, recently we had the Texas lad Joshua Beard, a clean-cut young man who stomped his 18-year-old girlfriend’s child to death for no apparent reason other than the kid was no doubt an inconvenience and may have cried a lot.

Now we have another case out of Raleigh, North Carolina, in which the mother, a former NANNY, is accused of systematically breaking her 16-week-old baby’s bones over an approximate six week period and BITING him for good measure.This case is especially upsetting, perhaps because the child was so young that he/she didn’t even have time to act up or be obnoxious, not that such typical kid behavior would in any way justify child abuse.

Ed Crump of ABC11 writes:

Police have charged a 34-year-old Raleigh mother with biting her 16-week-old baby and breaking the child’s ribs and shoulder blades.

Mary Martin Peele, of Okelly St., was arrested by Raleigh Police Department detectives Monday.

She’s charged with one count of felony child abuse inflicting serious injury and one count of misdemeanor child abuse.

According to arrest warrants obtained by ABC11, Peele allegedly broke 12 of her baby’s ribs and both scapula bones. She also allegedly made a deep bite wound on the boy’s shoulder.

The alleged incidents are said to have occurred between the end of May and mid-July of this year.

Working in criminal defense as an investigator and sentencing mitigation specialist, I often thank my lucky stars that I am not a criminal defense attorney for the simple reason that these beleaguered souls often find themselves in truly impossible situations while attempting to defend their clients. (Of course, I don’t make nearly as much money as the defense attorneys, but hey, you can’t have everything.)

In order to show you what I mean, I will embed the ABC11 video of what transpired at Ms. Peele’s preliminary hearing which occurred on Tuesday, July 29th in the Raleigh courtroom of Judge Jacqueline Brewer:

Like any self-respecting criminal defense attorney, Ms. Peele’s lawyer Damon Chetson pointed out that Ms. Peele has no criminal history and worked for years as a nanny with no complaints of her ever mistreating her youthful charges. It’s always good to start out with the facts and Attorney Chetson appears to have done precisely that.

So what can the lawyer, who needless to say is truly fighting an uphill battle in this matter, do once he’s run out of positive facts? He or she must then resort to “spin”, a time-honored mode of conduct that both defense attorneys and prosecutors engage in on a regular basis. In the case of Lawyer Chetson, he opts to trot out the old sentimentality argument, stating that Ms. Peele’s baby is her “dream child” and that she was only able to carry her child to term after “suffering numerous miscarriages.” Now, if this case did not appear to be so “black-and-white”, this strategy might actually be pretty effective; one can hardly fail to sympathize with a mom who suffers through endless miscarriages, all the while dreaming of giving birth at last to her “dream child.”

The problem is the “dream child” defense is undercut by the hideous nature of what Ms. Peele allegedly did to her child. Fourteen broken bones and a deep bite in the shoulder area is no laughing matter.

Nonetheless, Lawyer Chetson plows doggedly onward stating that his client will fight the charges:

“She stands here telling the court she is not guilty of these charges, and she wants to mount a defense.”

At that point, Chetson relinquished the podium, I suspect to his vast relief.

Prosecutor Melanie Shekita then steps to the fore and makes her case. First, she states, logically enough, that the baby’s injuries “were akin to something he might have suffered in a car accident and were not something he could have done to himself.”

Then she gets heavy:

“For the first 16 weeks of this child’s life someone tortured him. I have grave concerns that if this woman had not presented him to the hospital, and I have no reason to believe that she didn’t do that, that he could have ended up dead,” said Ms. Shekita.

And then, just to get it on the record, Ms. Shekita explains that Ms. Peele “has been telling people the baby has some kind of bone disorder, but that is not the case.”

The baby, of course, could have some kind of bone disorder but that would probably not result in 12 broken ribs and 2 broken scapulas. But perhaps Ms. Peele will ultimately come up with an effective defense of some sort. She’s certainly going to need a strong defense because as things currently stand, “she could face up to 32 years, 9 months in prison on the felony intentional child abuse charge alone.”

Ms. Peele’s bond was originally set at $250,000 and she was ordered not to have contact with any minor under the age of 18 without supervision. The prosecutor requested that her bond be raised to $500,000 and the judge ultimately raised it to $400,000.

Ms. Peele wept in the courtroom suggesting she feels bad about what has happened, and it should be pointed out that, she’s apparently the one who took her injured child to the hospital. If she were completely evil, she would have just kept battering the baby until it died.

So I must say, disturbing as this case is, I hope that Ms. Peele and Lawyer Chetson are able to mount some kind of effective defense that demonstrates that she is not responsible for the horrific harm that was done to the child. The problem is I just don’t see where that defense is going to come from for the simple reason I believe Ms. Peele probably is responsible and I suspect that she will ultimately plead out and will be required to serve a long term of imprisonment.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

In the world of capital crime, there may be nothing more fascinating than The Cold Case. The term itself conjures up dark, hidden mystery suspended in time yet forgotten by everyone except the family of the victims, the perpetrators, any determined detectives who refuse to throw in the towel and continue working on the case, and of course diehard crime fans who have memories like the proverbial elephant and never forget an unsolved murder.

One of the curious things about The Cold Case is that even if the resourceful detectives do ultimately bring it to closure, not everyone is going to agree that they got it right. Such would seem to be the case with the brutal murder and disfigurement of a lovely 14-year-old-girl named Claire Hough, whose young life came to an end at Torrey Pines State Beach in San Diego on August 24, 1984. It was death by strangulation with, for good measure, her left breast cut entirely away with fingernail marks lashing her body, according to the autopsy report.

In an excellent San Diego Union-Tribune article dated October 23rd, Kristina Davis and Lyndsay Winkley skillfully break down the case:

For 30 years, investigators worked to unravel the mystery of who killed 14-year-old Claire Hough as she smoked cigarettes and listened to cassettes at Torrey Pines State Beach.

On Thursday, San Diego police said they believe one of the suspected killers was working among them as a criminalist in the same police lab where evidence of the teen’s brutal slaying was examined and stored.

The case was solved largely though DNA matches analyzed in 2012 which established both men’s DNA matched samples taken from the teen’s body. There has apparently never been much other solid evidence pointing a finger at any alleged killers.

According to the authorities, the criminalist in question, Kevin Charles Brown, 62, who retired from the police department in 2002, killed himself this week as officers were closing in to arrest him.

One of the facts which could cast some doubt upon the investigators conclusions is the fact that there is apparently no evidence connecting Brown to the second alleged killer, Ronald Clyde Tatro

“Tatro, is also dead, having drowned in an apparent boating accident in Tennessee in 2011.”

Playing it cool, on Thursday when the case broke, police refused to speculate as to whether the two men had any type of relationship. On the surface, however, “they appeared to lead very different lives.”

For starters, Tatro’s history suggests a possible serial rapist. Not only did he have a lengthy criminal record, but in 1985, one year after Claire Hough’s violent death, Tatro, who was 43 at the time, “was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping and trying to rape a 16-year-old girl in La Mesa, police said. He coaxed her into his van and tried to subdue her with a stun gun, but she screamed and managed to get away.”

This brave teen who refused to be raped and escaped, also managed to give officers Tatro’s license plate number. As police prepared to swoop in, the 16-year-old’s assailant, displaying anything but bravery, slit both his wrists. He got away with pleading to a lesser charge of felony false imprisonment and was sentenced to a mere three years in prison.

Compared to Tatro, Brown’s history is the essence of stability. He worked as a criminalist, first in Mew Mexico for two years, “then for the next 20 years at the San Diego Police Department.” While with SDPD, “he worked in many parts of the lab over the years, from firearms to trace evidence.”

Claire Hough’s death had mystified and frustrated detectives for decades, but what little evidence there is suggested she walked down to the beach that evening to smoke cigarettes and listen to music.

Her body was discovered on a towel under the Old Highway 101 bridge by a passer-by about 5 a.m on the morning after her murder, with a radio, cigarettes and matches nearby.

No one knows for sure why the teen took the short stroll from her grandparents Del Mar Heights home to the beach that fated evening, but her bereaved father reported that she would take similar jaunts down to the bay from her home in Cranston, Rhode Island. In any event, the authorities do not believe there was any coercion involved in her decision to walk down to the Torrey Pines beach. Her grandparents didn’t realize she was missing until 9 am the next morning.

Claire’s family expressed their appreciation to the detectives on Thursday.

“In a way, it doesn’t make any difference who killed her,” her father, Samuel Hough, said from his Rhode Island home. “She’s dead and there’s nothing we can do about that. The important thing for us is what she was and what she became — the fact that she was so positive, so rich, at the time that she died.”

However, Kevin Brown’s widow, Rebecca Brown, is having none of it, claiming this is a clear case of DNA contamination because of her husband’s proximity to the evidence in the Police crime lab.

“The police have hounded my husband all year, and he ended up having a nervous breakdown and killed himself,” Rebecca Brown said Thursday. “They kept hounding him on something he didn’t do. He’s a good, kind, sweet, gentle man.”

San Diego Police Department homicide Capt. Al Guaderrama dismissed Rebecca’s allegations, stating Brown had never been assigned to any part of the Claire Hough investigation and was in no way associated with any of the evidence processed.

“We do not believe that there was any type of contamination in this case at all,” Capn. Guaderrama said. (Well of course not. Even if there was contamination, which is probably not the case here, there’s no guarantee that anyone would report it.)

Most of you reading this post have probably never been in trouble with the law, although a few of you may have been. Having worked with up to 200 criminals over the past 11 years, I can state without reservation that there is no worse feeling than having law enforcement come to your home with a search warrant. Many suspects never fully recover from the shock of hearing that knock on the door, which in some instances is more of a pounding.

Brown’s Chula Vista home was searched on January 9th and I suspect the knock was probably reasonably polite, given his long history of working for SDPD. Rebecca Brown recalls:

“It shocked the whole family.” Investigators seized numerous items: computers, old photo albums, cameras, her mother’s cookbook.

Capn. Guaderrama reports that the DNA match had spurred an exhaustive investigation including interviews around the country, probably mostly having to do with alleged co-killer Tatro. 30-year-old evidence was re-examined.

Although the Captain didn’t specify what precisely it consisted of, he did say several pieces of evidence were found.

After the initial knock/search/seizure, Brown was questioned multiple times throughout the year. So were his family members, friends and neighbors. According to his criminal defense lawyer, Gretchen von Helms, Brown suffered from bouts of anxiety and depression.

Von Helms also stated that Brown passed an independent polygraph test administered by a former police officer. (Of course, polygraph tests are rarely admitted into evidence at trial though they can occasionally play a part at sentencing.

“They haven’t believed him and they’ve kept at it,” his wife said. “They just pushed my husband to an early grave.”

When Rebecca Brown went to work at Mater Dei Catholic High School, where she teaches, last Monday morning, Brown was still in bed. After Rebecca left, he got up, dressed and told his live-in mother-in-law that he had things to do.

He certainly did. His body was found on Tuesday, hanging from a tree at Cuyamaca State Park on Highway 79 near mile marker 7.25, according to Capn. Guaderrama, who has told his widow that no suicide note was found.

* * * * *

Solid DNA evidence, which was presumably present in this case, certainly cannot be taken lightly. What makes me suspect that Brown may well be one of Claire Hough’s co-killers, however, is the fact that under duress, rather than hang on and fight it out at trial, he chose instead to end his life. If he was innocent, he almost certainly would have gone to trial, alleged DNA evidence notwithstanding, wouldn’t he have?

On the other hand, he could have been an unstable personality, but even those types rarely kill themselves when under police duress. Rather, they stew and suffer and complain endlessly.

From my own personal standpoint, I am every bit as comfortable with a case never being solved as I am with definitive closure which I instinctively distrust. But that’s just me. I’m very aware that most people want to place their faith in the “facts” and prefer closure in criminal investigations.

I was probably damaged by going to college and graduate school in the late 1980s when Deconstruction and Post-Structuralism were all the rage and Undecidability was the order of the day. As an old man, I chuckle at what I imbibed at the university back then but it does, alas, seem to have perhaps taken a toll on me.

Or maybe it’s just that I like the mystery of the chase which closure irrevocably puts an end to…

by Heather Piedmont

Using the first fully televised court case as its subject, a recent documentary, Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart, directed by Jeremiah Zagar, examines the question of whether (and if so, how) the televising of courtroom trials have affected the possibility of justice being rendered. In re-examining the case and its key events, the documentary explores the question through interviews with Pamela Smart as well as with experts in the legal field and individuals who were involved in the case.

The Case

On May 1, 1990 Gregory Smart was found dead in front of his Derry, New Hampshire condominium. Four teenage boys, William “Billy” Flynn, Pete Randall, Vance Lattime, Jr., who drove the getaway car, and Ray Fowler, were soon found to be the alleged plotters/killers of Pamela Smart’s young husband.

It was discovered that Billy Flynn, who was 15 at the time, and Pamela, who was Director of the Media Center at the teen’s high school, were having an affair and Pamela was soon convicted of being an accomplice to first-degree murder; conspiracy to commit murder; and witness tampering.

Billy Flynn was convicted of second-degree murder, and his three friends were convicted as accomplices. The court records state that Flynn shot Gregg Smart once in the head as Pete Randall held a knife to his throat. Vince Lattime and Ray Fowler waited in the car.

As of July of this year, all four young men are either free or are in the process of gaining their freedom, as a result of them receiving lesser sentences for agreeing to testify against Pamela. William Flynn was recently moved to a minimum security prison in Maine as part of a work release program. Patrick Randall is now a minimum security inmate at a transitional work center. Vance Lattime Jr. was released on parole in 2005, and Raymond Fowler, who may have have done little other than wait in the car alongside Lattime, received parole in 2003.

Pamela Smart, however, based on her counts of conviction, is serving mandatory LWOP. Although her harsh sentence may have been inevitable, there is a real question as to whether the manner in which she was portrayed by the media hopelessly prejudiced the jury against her.

Character Assassination or Accurate Portrayal?

Smart’s trial was widely watched and was likened to a “media circus.” In addition to Jeremiah Zagar’s recent documentary, the trial spawned a television movie starring Helen Hunt and Chad Allen and inspired the Joyce Maynard novel To Die For, which was adapted into a 1995 film starring Nicole Kidman. The case was also the subject of several best-selling true crime books, including Teach Me To Kill and Deadly Lessons.

As the documentary takes pains to point out, the image that probably best captures the media’s attempt to portray Ms. Smart as a brazen, fallen and conniving woman are the infamous bikini shots that she allegedly used to sexually arouse her teen lover. In reality, however, these photos were actually taken with her best girlfriend to apply to a fashion contest literally years before she started working at the Media Center.

Jeremiah Zagar includes a telling scene that demonstrates that even today as she wearily serves her life sentence, Pamela is still scared to reveal who and what she was at the time of her husband’s murder because she still fears how the media will portray her.

The documentary also discusses how her alleged lack of emotion, once caught on camera, allowed any and all negative labels to be foisted upon her such as the now infamous “Kill for Love” phrase that was plastered all over her case even before the trial began.

It is noted that while in prison in prison, Smart has spent her time tutoring other inmates and has completed two master’s degrees in literature and legal studies, which were paid for with private funds from Mercy College. While incarcerated, Smart became a member of the National Organization for Women, campaigning for rights for women in prison.

Despite her academic success while in custody, Ms. Smart’s time in prison has been no bed of roses:

In October 1996, Smart was severely beaten by two inmates M. Graves and G. Miller, who accused her of snitching about their prison relationship. The attack resulted in a metal plate being placed in the left side of her face.

In 2003, photos of a scantily clad Smart were published in the National Enquirer; after filing a complaint, she was placed in solitary confinement for two months. Smart filed a lawsuit, claiming the photos were taken by a prison guard who had raped her. The lawsuit was dismissed but the following year, Smart and another inmate sued officials of Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, claiming both sexual harassment and sexual assault by a corrections officer, who they said coerced them into posing for the suggestive pictures that were published in 2003. Five years later, Smart received a $23,875 settlement from the state of New York.

Everybody Wants to be a Star

It is human nature that, given the right circumstances, many of us want to be stars and grip tightly onto any opportunity to gain our “time in the sun”. During the trial of serial killer Aileen Wuornos, it was alleged that law enforcement personnel not only worked to gain financially from the story of the murders and eventual capture of the killer, but even conspired with her lover, Tyria Moore, while she was a witness for the prosecution. This unfortunate tendency is demonstrated in Zagar’s documentary, which reveals that the arresting officer wanted to re-write his first words to Pamela at the time of her arrest, or at least his first words as presented to the first reporter on the story, William Spencer.

In fact, what Spencer “thought” about what had happened to Gregory Smart, according to appellate attorney J. Albert Johnson, were set in media-stone by the made-for-television movie, Anatomy of a Murder, which was released to the public two days before the jury was selected.

There was even a mini-accusation of the police giving Ms. Smart a longer than usual perp walk “for the cameras”.

Brief Reflections on the Banality of Pop Culture

As the O.J. Simpson trial evolved, so did the hairstyles and wardrobe of prosecutor Marcia Clark; as the Casey Anthony case progressed, the Assistant State Attorney Jeff Ashton’s ties became national news when he wore a “Stay Dwight” necktie in the courtroom as a futile attempt to convince Dwight Howard to stay with the Orlando Magic.

“One of my sons had this made for me and asked me to wear it,” Ashton said as he touched the neckwear outside the Orange County Courthouse.

The current emphasis on banal inessentials such as State Attorney Ashton’s neckties may have gotten its start, as Zagar points out in his documentary, with the emphasis on Pamela Smart’s hair bow stories. Although this is perhaps to be expected in the world of pop culture, it certainly seems to beg the question…was justice achieved at Pamela Smart’s trial and what in the world do her hair bows have to do with that pursuit of justice?

At Ms. Smart’s trial, even the testimony, in theory the lifeblood of the proceedings, was reflected in true pop culture fashion. One of the “important” facts discussed when Pamela’s lover Billy Flynn took the stand was that one on of their trips together, they went shopping for cars.

The Connections We Make

The most engrossing and important issue the documentary really discusses is how we see what we see. Richard Sherwin of the New York Law School discussed it insightfully when he said that when we view cases like the Pamela Smart case, we see the “Black Widow” story that we know from movies and pop culture, which in turn almost blankets the reality of the situation.

“Ah Ha…I know the Black Widow story…I know the Ice Princess Story,” the legal expert stated. He then continued stating that once we identify the label it is “internalized” and cannot be removed from our perception of the case and that therefore we only reflect on details that support this biased and narrowed understanding of the case.

Even Joyce Maynard, who recounted the story in her now made-infamous-by-Hollywood text To Die For, stated that we all know the archetype that we are supposedly seeing in Pamela as well as a personal and heavily emotionalized archetype of the beautiful woman we love to hate, and love watching as she is destroyed both in the courtroom and through the media-fueled character assassination.

The Result: Was There Justice?

With Gregory Smart’s two main killers of the verge of being released from prison and Pamela Smart being literally scared of her own shadow to this day, what was the effect of the media portrayal on her conviction which inextricably led to her sentence of LWOP? While there were many honest and, therefore, rejected jurors, appellate attorney J. Albert Johnson stated that the jurors may have had their “bell” rung once they learned about the case before even entering the courtroom. In fact, Ms. Smart’s defense requested a change of venue and sequestration, both of which were denied. In the end, we have a woman imprisoned for life….and are left with the burning question: With all of this in the mix of the trial…could justice possibly be served?

And another equally important question: To this day, do we have any actual sense of who Pamela Smart really is? And, of course, we are left to wrestle with the larger question: If we can’t confidently conclude whether the first televised trial brought about justice…what about all the other televised “media circuses” that have followed in its wake?

Heather Piedmont, in addition to being a marketing coach is also a freelance crime writer and reporter. She has covered the Jodi Arias Trial and the Scott Peterson Trial, as well as the Casey Anthony Trial.

by Lise LaSalle

On July 30, 2008, 22-year old Tim McLean, boarded bus 1170 to return home to Winnipeg, Manitoba after finishing a stint as a carnival worker in Alberta. It was 12:01 p.m. when he took his window seat at the rear of the bus.

It was a long 22 hour ride so he had brought his music and was quietly reflecting on his journey when at 6:55 p.m., the bus made a stop at Erickson, Manitoba and picked up a new passenger named Vince Weiguang Li — a tall man in his 40s wearing sunglasses and sporting a shaved head. At first, Li sat near the front of the bus but after a rest stop, he moved to the back to sit next to McLean.

After “barely acknowledging’’ Li, Tim fell asleep with his head on the window pane while wearing his headphones. All of a sudden, according to some witnesses, Li attacked McLean with a large knife and stabbed him in the neck and the chest.

Garnet Caton, a seismic driller who sat one row ahead of McLean, described hearing “a blood-curdling scream”. “I turned around and the guy sitting right behind me was standing up and stabbing another guy with a big Rambo knife….Right in the throat. Repeatedly.’’

Another passenger, Stephen Allison, stated that McLean fought his attacker which gave the other passengers time to get off the bus. The bus driver and two other men tried to come to McLean’s rescue but were chased away by Li who was slashing wildly with his knife.

Li decapitated McLean and displayed his severed head to the horrified passengers who had fled the bus and were gathering outside. They were in the middle of nowhere so they could not escape this horrific situation. Caton reported that he got sick after he saw the severed head. “Some people were puking, some were crying, some were in shock. The attacker just looked at us and dropped the head on the ground. Totally calm.’’

A police officer who had arrived at the scene, saw Li cut off body parts from the victim’s body and eat them. After the bus driver’s failed intervention, Li had gone back to the body to sever other parts and consume some of McLean’s flesh.

What is even more baffling than this gruesome attack on McLean is the fact that law officers who had arrived at the scene did not stop Li. They allowed him to continue decapitating and desecrating his victim’s body in plain view of the passengers. Li would pace back and forth. He had body parts in his pockets and would hold them up for everyone to see.

The bus driver had engaged the emergency immobilizer system to render the vehicle inoperable because Li had tried to escape by driving the bus.

So, the bus had transformed itself into a mobile Theater where the spectators outside could not help but view and in a way, participate, in this gruesome play. It was like the puppet shows that you see in France where the public is sitting in front of this makeshift mobile trailer and reacts very loudly to the drama of the story.

In this case, the spectators were puking, fainting and crying. Some of the male passengers were growing very upset over the inaction of the police and wanted to go in themselves to put a stop to the ongoing horror. But they were obviously ordered in no uncertain terms, to stay out of it.

In fact, the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) had received a report of a stabbing in a bus at 8:30 p.m. They arrived to find the bus driver, and a truck driver armed with crowbar and a hammer, trying to prevent Li from escaping.

By 9:00 p.m., the police summoned special negotiators and a heavily armed tactical unit. Li was dangerous but he only had a knife and the cops had guns and outnumbered him. They stayed there and did nothing while Li was eating parts of the body and pacing around the bus. They started bringing the stranded passengers to the police department to be interviewed. The suspect declared, “I have to stay on the bus forever.’’

It sure looked like it. The police did not seem to be in hurry to stop the carnage. Some of the passengers were growing more and more upset in view of the law enforcement inertia. Were they expecting William Shatner to arrive in his helicopter to serve as their negotiator? It was a farce.

At 1:30 a.m., the suspect, probably tired of being in the bus, tried to break a window to escape. They shot him with a Taser twice, handcuffed him and put him in the back of a police car. You wonder why they did not enter the bus to Taser him long before he tried to get out on his own.

I do not understand to this day why the desecration of this young man’s body was allowed to happen for hours while they had plenty of resources to put a stop to the attack. Hell, I think I could have stopped him myself with a few of my girls and pepper spray.

The bus looked like a butcher shop; they placed parts of the victim’s body in plastic bags. McLean’s ear, nose and tongue were found in Li’s pockets. His eyes and a part of his heart were never recovered and it goes without saying that he ate them. There were some bloody parts strewn across the dashboard.

The Greyhound representatives had to take the passengers to a local store to replace their clothes as nothing left on the bus could be retrieved. They finally arrived in Winnipeg at 3:30 p.m. that day to be met by their loved ones. McLean’s mother, who was so anxiously awaiting the return of her son, had to be told that his tragic final destination had been reached earlier than expected.

In some Canadian towns, the police have been accused many times of shooting without any hesitation mentally ill people that they perceive as a threat.  But in this case, they took their sweet time even though they had the ideal situation at hand; Li was basically encaged. Were they not capable of going from first to second gear? Maybe there is no protocol in place for a bus attack?

In Toronto, they recently shot a young troubled man several times because he was ‘kind of causing trouble’ in a tramway car. Maybe there were no rules in their booklet for a ‘bus cannibal’. Whatever their excuse is, they demonstrated their outlandish incompetence in this specific standoff.

Tim’s mother, Carol De Delley, had heard on the radio that a young man was decapitated in a bus but had no clue it was her son. She even had prayed for him at dinner time with her husband. She finally learned from her former husband that it was her child. She was totally devastated by the death of her son, especially by the gruesome way he was killed.

She could not believe that law enforcement had allowed her son’s body to be desecrated this way and that the rampage lasted almost 5 hours. She was inconsolable. If the term mater dolorosa was ever invented with a purpose in mind, it was to describe the pain suffered by this poor woman. Tim was the doting father of a little girl and from all accounts, a great guy who had not engaged Li in any way, except with a friendly smile.

The entire family of Tim McLean brought a lawsuit of $150,000 against Greyhound, the Attorney General of Canada and Vince Li.

In 2011, two passengers filed a lawsuit against Vince Li, Greyhound, the RCMP and the Government of Canada for being exposed to the beheading. They are seeking $3 million in damages. Pretty ridiculous when you think that the family has been asking for a very reasonable amount of money for themselves.

Vince Li was obviously mentally ill and was under the impression during the attack that he was chosen by God to save people from an alien. He had been hearing voices for a while and was obviously not sane enough to realize that he was afflicted with schizophrenia.

He was born in China in 1968 and had graduated from the University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computers. He immigrated to Canada in June, 2001. He worked menial jobs at a Church to support his wife. The Pastor had no complaints against Li, except the language barrier. He did not show anger issues. But he was apparently hospitalized in 2004 after problems with the police.

He worked as a forklift operator and his wife as a waitress, and he showed no signs of trouble before he quit in 2005. He also worked at Wal-Mart and as a newspaper delivery man in 2006.  Four weeks before the murder, he was fired from Wal-Mart for problems with other employees. A storm was brewing in his mind. He said he had to go to Winnipeg for a job interview and the rest is history.

He boarded a Greyhound bus bound for Winnipeg on July 28. On July 29, he got off the bus in Erickson with three pieces of luggage and spent the night on a bench. He sat there all night staring into space, according to witnesses. On July 30, he sold his new computer to a teenager for $60. It was seized by the RCMP and the boy received a new one for his honesty. He finally boarded the bus going to Winnipeg that was carrying McLean just before 6 p.m.

During the attack, witness Garnet Caton said that Li was in his own world. Not enraged but more like a robot. When Li appeared on charges of second-degree murder, the only words he uttered were pleas for someone to kill him.

Because he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, Lee was found not criminally responsible. The psychiatrist testified that Li performed the attack because God’s voice told him to execute McLean. He was remanded to the Selkirk Mental Health Centre. He had not fully emerged from the psychotic phase at the time but he was starting to realize what he had done.

Chris Summerville, the CEO of the Schizophrenia Society of Canada, held regular meetings with Li. He visited him once every two months after his remand. Summerville believes that there are two victims and two families who are victims of untreated, uncontrolled psychosis. He says ‘’the media was more favorable to the McLean family because the country has entered a period of ‘tough on crime’ with very little attention being paid  to restorative justice, rehabilitation, recovery and redemption or the role of mental illness in this unfortunate incident.’’

Summerville offered this take after his May 19, 2012 meeting with Li:

‘’It is remarkable the positive effects of the medication. Up to 25 per cent of people who will have a psychotic break with reality will never experience another psychotic episode.

Up to 65 per cent will experience a degree of recovery in order to live a meaningful life. Ten per cent will take their life by suicide due to the losses associated with schizophrenia.’’

‘’Of the 300,000 people in Canada who live with some form of schizophrenia, the vast majority lead quiet, law abiding lives hoping for some quality of life. People living with schizophrenia are more likely to be victims of violence rather than being perpetrators of violence.’’

Since 2012, Vince Li has been granted temporary passes out of the Health Centre while supervised by a nurse and peace officer.

Tim McLean’s family was disappointed that Li was found criminally not responsible. They consider that he committed the crime and could still be a danger to society. Tim’s mother is unmoved by Li’s apology and remorse and thinks he should remain locked up.

‘’You’re interviewing an individual who has gone through treatment and meds and come to this place where he’s come to these realizations. Now you take him off those meds for a while and see what kind of an interview you would get,’’ she said.

At the same time, this good woman says she is trying to forgive her son’s killer.

‘’I’m working on it. I think for the advancement of my own soul, I think that that’s going to be a necessary thing,’’ she said.

‘’But it’s an extremely difficult and a very private thing,’’ she added.

The unjustified public fears about Li will probably keep him in a mental-health hospital longer than necessary. The horrific nature of Li’s act has demonized him in the public’s mind, Summerville said.

‘’I don’t think he will be released anytime soon because of public sentiment,’’ adding that the perception of Li is ‘’rooted in fear and in some people, in hate and in vengeance. Some hold a characterization of him that is just not true of him.’’

While he is not advocating Li’s immediate release, Summerville said there is little public understanding of the nature of schizophrenia and its treatment with medication. ‘’Schizophrenia is treatable. Recovery is possible.’’

When I try to put myself in Carol De Delley’s shoes, I can feel her pain and understand her argument but if I do the same for the family of Vince Li, I cannot help but feel compassion. I hope they both can find peace.

by Patrick H. Moore

Perhaps the single most awful thing for a parent is to have your beloved child vanish without a trace. This is what has happened to a heartbroken Texas mother, Jonni Lee McElroy, whose 23-year-old daughter, Christina Marie Morris, disappeared without a trace from a parking garage in Plano, Texas at 3:55 am on the morning of August 30th. This means that Christina was abducted (which certainly appears to be the case here) nearly two months ago, and although a search has been conducted ever since on several fronts, there has been no trace of her.

What adds a peculiar terror and poignancy to this case is the fact that being abducted has been Christina’s worst nightmare since she was a young child.

David Lohr writes for the Huffington Post:

“What is happening to her right now has been her own worst nightmare since she has been little,” Jonni Lee McElroy told The Huffington Post on Monday.

Although it is small comfort, the facts of the case are fairly clear right up until the time the victim vanished. Here is what happened:

Christina, who went to high school in Plano, earned a degree in business and marketing from the University of Texas, Dallas campus, in 2013. She then moved to nearby Fort Worth where she went to work for Great Expectations, a dating service.

(I’m probably being a snob, which is somewhat rare for me, but somehow I find going to all the effort to earn a business and marketing degree from a major university only to then have to take a job at a dating service rather depressing. But hell, it’s certainly better than being unemployed.)

In any event, shortly before her disappearance, Christina, who hadn’t been home to see her  friends for three months, traveled the 49.3 miles from Fort Worth to Plano, presumably via the President George Bush Turnpike. On the evening of August 29th, she went out with her friends to get caught up and just have good time. They either spent the evening at The Shops at Legacy in Plano, which is advertised as an urban lifestyle center with unique shopping, award-winning restaurants and lounges, etc., or ended up there at the end of the evening.

According to her mother, Christina’s plan was to spend the night with one of her girlfriends at the friend’s apartment, but cruel fate intervened in the form of Christina’s boyfriend who for unknown reasons got angry, perhaps because Christina was out socializing with her (girl)friends at all hours of the night. In any event Christina and the unidentified boyfriend, who was waiting for her back at her place in Fort Worth, GOT INTO A TEXT MESSAGE DISPUTE.

(I’m getting more and more upset as I write this.) I know it’s human nature but we guys and gals take this intimate relationship thing far too seriously at too young an age. So they got in a text message dispute? So what? The sky wasn’t falling. Except to poor Christina it was. So what did she decide to do? She decided to drive back down the President George Bush Turnpike to Fort Worth to try and mend the fences with her BF.

(Oh dear God, deliver us all from the accidental yet fatal mistakes that we mortals make all too often without even trying.)

David Lohr writes:

“She met her friends around 9 p.m. the night before she disappeared,” McElroy (Christina’s mother) said. “One of the girls is friends with Enrique (Arochi) and had invited him to come with them.”

“She was upset and wanted to go, so Enrique volunteered to walk her to her car.”

“She would never have gone into that parking garage by herself,” McElroy said. “She never, ever would walk out to her car at night unless someone walked her out.”

Christina’s car was parked in the mall parking garage and she is seen on a surveillance video, at about 3:55 a.m. entering the garage with a man who has been identified as 24-year-old Enrique Arochi, who went to high school with Arochi. She has not been seen since.

“He’s not someone she regularly hung out with,” McElroy said… “She had not seen him since high school.”

David Lohr reports that when contacted by the HuffPost on Monday, the Plano Police Department “did not dispute Arochi was the person captured on video with Morris, but they also did not call him a suspect or person of interest in the case.”

“I can tell you that nobody has been ruled out,” Plano police spokesman David Tilley told HuffPost.

“They walked into the parking garage and, according to him, they split and went in opposite directions,” Tilley said. “He said he went to one side of the garage where he was parked and she went to the other side of the garage, where her car was parked. A lot of people have said that is not the case – what he is saying is not correct – but we don’t know. We don’t have any evidence to support either way.”

Let’s stop right here. This really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, does it? Christina is deathly afraid of abduction; it’s 3:55 am; she’s walking into a presumably deserted parking garage with a man whom she only knows slightly, who “has volunteered to walk her to her car,” and instead of walking her to her car, “he went to one side of the garage where he was parked and she went to the other side of the garage, where her car was parked.” This doesn’t add up. Christina is a perky little blonde with a big smile and no self-respecting dude is going to abandon her in the parking garage at 3:55 am without seeing her safely to her car, is he?

Something fishy here and I suspect the police know full well that something’s fishy. They, however, do not have sufficient evidence to arrest Arochi or even lean on him hard, not yet.

It’s not at all odd that Christina’s silver Toyota Celica “was found in the parking garage” and it presumably had not been moved since she left it there but it’s damned odd that it wasn’t discovered there until “four days later”. (I am informed that Christina’s boyfriend apparently didn’t inform anyone that she was missing until four days after their text message feud.)

Police spokesman Tilley did say that police have obtained additional surveillance videos from the area:

“The video has been withheld, as far as from being released, in case this does turn into a criminal investigation.”

Plano detectives have naturally questioned Arochi, who was reportedly initially cooperative, and they have also questioned everyone else who was there with Christina that fated evening, and they have also been reportedly cooperative:

“We initially were talking to him and all the people that were with Christina that evening,” Tilley said. “They were all cooperative from the initial part of the investigation, but at this point in time, we’re not commenting on what cooperation level they have extended to us.”

So basically the police are being very careful with what they say.

Christina’s family and Texas EquuSearch, have conducted numerous searches for her, but they have all been futile. And a $25,000 reward has been offered for information that leads to her being found.

Morris is white, female, 5-foot-4 and weighs approximately 100 pounds. She has blonde hair and brown eyes.

“Christina is a beautiful girl,” McElroy said. “I am afraid she may have been sold for prostitution. I believe she is still alive — I feel that. I know I would feel it if she wasn’t.”

“I beg anyone with information to think about it as if it is their daughter, mother or sister,” McElroy said. “Have a conscious (conscience?). Feel our pain. This is a nightmare we are living. It’s not fair. We need her back — she needs to be back with us. Someone out there knows something.”

Someone out there definitely knows something. It could be Enrique Arochi who I suspect the police are keeping a close eye on or it could be someone else who abducted her IF Arochi actually abandoned her in the parking lot.

Whatever happened, I’m in a churlish mood and there’s plenty of blame to go around. Her (girl)friends should never have placed her fate in Arochi’s hands. She barely knew the guy, for crying out loud. If Arochi had nothing to do with her abduction, he still is somewhat to blame for abandoning her in the parking garage at 3:55 am (which doesn’t ring true because she was deathly afraid of being abducted). If Arochi is responsible for her disappearance I hope to hell the police unearth sufficient evidence to arrest him and charge him. He would seem to be an obvious “person of interest”, notwithstanding what the police are willing to divulge at this time.

The phone number for the Plano Police Department is (972) 424-5678 or tips can be submitted anonymously at 1-877-373-TIPS or online at ntcc.crimestoppersweb.com.

Poor freakin’ Christina. And her poor mother. Imagine hoping that your daughter has been “sold for prostitution” because you can’t bear to think that she’s dead…

by Patrick H. Moore

You are a three-year-old girl and you live in a house in a place called Mascotte. You also live in a place called Florida which you understand is bigger than Mascotte so you don’t know where it starts and where it ends. Your house is on a busy road and sometimes you and your mom walk along the busy road on the way to your grandmother’s house. Because the road is busy, your mom walks on the outside close to the traffic while you walk on the inside away from the cars. Your mom holds your hand and sometimes she picks you up and carries you.

You have a dad too but he and your mom don’t live together. They used to when you were very little but that was a long time ago. You can talk pretty well now and your mom loves to tell you what a smart girl you are. You know that’s a good thing and you glow inside when she tells you that. Because you’re a smart girl you know a lot of words and one night you asked your mom why she and your dad don’t live together. She looks at you strangely and you can tell she doesn’t want to answer. You think maybe you shouldn’t have asked her but then she decides to answer and tells you that she and your dad can’t get along and that he used to be really mean to her.

Then you remember something you had forgotten or maybe it was just that you didn’t want to think about it. You remember the time your mom and dad got into a huge fight and they screamed at each other and then your dad hit your mom real hard. After that the policemen came in special white cars and they took your dad away and no one would tell you where they took him.

The he was gone for a long time and then he came back and he gave you a huge hug and you asked him not to go away again and he said he wouldn’t. But still he didn’t live with you and your mom and he only came around once in a while. Although he was always glad to see you somehow you knew that he wasn’t happy. Once you said, “Daddy, what’s wrong?” and he said “nothin’ darlin’” but you knew that something was wrong.

*     *     *     *     *

Then came the day you will never forget. Your dad came to your house and he gave you a big hug and you were very glad to see him but then he got real serious and you had the sinking feeling that something was even wrong than usual. Your mom said you and your dad were going to have a talk and then she set you up to watch an Ariel video. You love Ariel and you were riveted to the big screen but then after quite  a while you got hungry and you went to see your mom and she was lying on the floor in the family room and she didn’t look right and your dad wasn’t there any more and you got really scared.

You knelt over your mom and said, “Mommy, I’m hungry” but she didn’t answer and you thought she was asleep and tried hard to wake her but she still didn’t stir and then you found yourself shouting at her, “MOMMY. MOMMY, WAKE UP!” but she didn’t wake up and you were terrified and you sprang to your feet and knew you had to get to your grandmother’s house really fast because you knew she would be able to wake your mom up because she was your grandmother and was good at nearly everything. So you raced to the door in your jeans with the flower patches sewed on the knees and your little top and your tennis shoes which you sort of knew how to tie and sort of didn’t. Your mom had tied them earlier in the morning and they were still snug.

 *     *     *     *     *

Outside the cars were whizzing by on the road really fast and you knew you weren’t supposed to be out there by yourself but you knew you had to get to your grandmother’s so that she could wake your mom up. You stayed as far off the road as you could and trotted along half-running, half-walking and you got tired really fast but you didn’t slow down and after a while it felt like your heart was going to pop right out of your chest and your side hurt but you still didn’t slow down. You didn’t know it but some of the people in the cars whizzing by were looking at you strangely and a couple of times people almost stopped but then thought better of it and kept on going.

When you got close to your grandmother’s house you slowed down and smoothed your hair and wished you had brought your comb because your grandmother always liked for you to look nice. When you saw her house up ahead you felt a rush of hope and then you really ran, your heart pounding and you climbed the steps to her porch and knocked on the door shouting “Grandma, Grandma” and it took a minute but then she came to the door and she took one look at you and said, “Oh my God, child! Oh my God.” And you told her that your mom wouldn’t wake up and then you started crying — you’d been holding it in for all this time but it all burst out and then your grandma started crying too.

*     *     *     *     *

A three-year-old girl walked more than a mile down a busy Florida road to her grandmother’s house to get help after her father allegedly killed her mother, officials said tonight.

Sgt. Kristin Thompson of Lake Bay County Sheriff Department described the actions of the tragic toddler as “kind of heroic” and praised the little girl for managing to cover such a distance to raise help. The little girl knew the route to her grandmother’s house because she had walked it with her mother, Thompson said. “She went down to her grandmother’s and said she couldn’t get her mom to wake up.”

*      *      *      *      *

 The sheriff’s department named Johnny Lashawn Shipman, 36, as the suspect and issued a warrant for his arrest in the death of Kristi Lynne Delaney, 26, of Mascotte, 40 miles west of Orlando.

Updated: Johnny Lashawn Shipman was arrested in the days following his warrant.

Austin L. Miller of the Halifax Media Group writes:

Calm, with a serious expression and little to say, Lake County murder suspect Johnny Lashawn Shipman made his first court appearance via video camera from the Marion County Jail…

County Judge James McCune ordered Shipman, 36, held without bond on a warrant for the first-degree murder of Kristi Delaney, his 26-year-old girlfriend, who was found dead in Mascotte on Monday.

He was arrested by members of the Ocala Police Department’s Special Deployment Unit who received a tip on his whereabouts and went to the Fore Ranch area off Southwest State Road 200 in Ocala, where he was arrested without incident at about 4:55 p.m.

When OPD detectives Dan C. Clark and Jeff Hurst arrested Shipman, he had a shirt wrapped around his left hand, according to Clark’s report. In both hands, Shipman had a jacket, a Bible and a cross made out of Palmetto leaves.

He dropped the items, lay on the ground and put his arms out.

At present, there appears to be no further information available on how Shipman’s murder case is proceeding, although there are reports that he was suicide watch for a period of time following his arrest.

by Patrick H. Moore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One cannot help but wonder and Lionel does:

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

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

After that, Jeffrey grew increasingly strange.  Lionel writes:

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

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

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

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

Jeffrey Dahmer’s Brief Self-Analysis:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Although it may come as somewhat of a surprise to innocent Americans (assuming such genteel folk still exist), even our men in blue get in trouble with the law from time to time. In fact, in my 11 plus years doing criminal defense work, I’ve defended half a dozen police officers for various crimes. Never, however, have I (or my company to the best of my knowledge) defended a police officer whose crime came anywhere close to that allegedly committed by a northern New Mexico deputy sheriff who was charged “with an open count of murder” on Tuesday for firing several rounds in the direction of a colleague who was trying to flee an argument. Naturally, that good ol’ life wrecker alcohol fueled this awful, and seemingly avoidable, catastrophe.

Juan Carlos Llorca of the AP writes:

A northern New Mexico sheriff’s deputy was charged with an open count of murder Tuesday after he allegedly fired several rounds from his handgun as his colleague tried to flee an alcohol-fueled argument at a hotel, police said.

Deputy Tai Chan, a warrant officer with Santa Fe County, was being held without bond at the Dona Ana County Detention Center.

The alleged shooter, Tai Chan, 27, and his victim, Deputy Jeremy Martin, 29, had put in a hard day’s work on Monday transporting a prisoner clear to Safford, AZ, approximately 430 miles from their home base in Santa Fe County. A man gets thirsty transporting criminals across the wide open spaces of the American Southwest and the two officers stopped off in Las Cruces in southern New Mexico to have dinner and a few drinks, apparently planning to spend the night there.

Chan and Martin reportedly went restaurant-hopping Monday night and ended up going to three different eating establishments. At the Dublin Street Pub, they knocked a few back and for unknown reasons, “got into a heated argument.”

In a pattern which is reminiscent of what often happens with ordinary couples who get in fights while out in public, the argument escalated once Chan and Martin were back at the Hotel Encanto. Although the specifics are still unclear, it is known that witnesses “heard arguing and then several gunshots rang out.”

Juan Carlos Llorca writes:

As Martin tried to flee into an elevator, he was shot in the back and arms, authorities said.

Police arrived at the hotel and found Martin staggering off the elevator with multiple wounds, Las Cruces police spokesman Dan Trujillo said.

Martin was pronounced dead at a Las Cruces hospital. Chan was found (presumably in a state of disrepair) in a stairwell near the hotel’s roof. He reportedly surrendered without incident.  “A Glock semi-automatic handgun, believed to be his duty weapon, was found nearby.”

On Tuesday, Las Cruces Police Department personnel collected evidence in the Hotel Encanto’s parking lot “that appeared to be from a deputy’s vehicle.” The authorities are taking this very seriously and reporters were not allowed to approach the scene; in fact,  members of the media were ordered off the property.

Unsurprisingly, the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Department is in a state of shock and disbelief and crisis counselors have been called in to comfort the personnel.

Santa Fe County Sheriff Robert Garcia stated:

“I have grief counselors or crisis counselors here now meeting with a lot of my personnel, but it’s a grieving law enforcement agency.”

The victim, Jeremy Martin, had been a deputy for 2 1/2 years. He had three children, all under the age of 10.

Martin’s widow Sarah did talk to the Albuquerque Journal briefly in a telephone interview. She said that the sheriff came to her home personally early on Tuesday to deliver the bad news.

“He was a self-sacrificing kind of a person and put everyone else first,” she said of her husband. “He was very well-balanced as far as family and career. He had a big heart and gave everyone the benefit of the doubt.”

Tai Chan had been on the force for three years.

At an emotional news conference, Garcia called both deputies “hardworking, committed individuals.”

“I’m lost,” Garcia said. “I’m at a loss for words.”

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This tragedy could have been avoided. Easily. We all know the rule: Do not drink and drink. Well, a new rule needs to be added. Do not drink with guns in close proximity. Np matter who you are. Just don’t. It’s stupid just like drinking and driving. There’s nothing to be gained and as this tragic story demonstrates in point-blank fashion: There’s everything to be lost.