commentary by Patrick H. Moore

As those of us who have been following the crime news know, in the last few months, there have been several rather dramatic cases in which children with autism have been mistreated and/or killed by their parents, often because their parents either despaired of helping them, or were at the end of their ropes from the strain of caring for their handicapped children, which in a sense is the same thing.

A case which drew a great deal of attention was that of Kelli Stapleton, a former autism blogger and campaigner from Battle Creek, Michigan, who was sentenced to a lengthy prison term after pleading guilty to first-degree child abuse after attempting to kill herself and her 15-year-old autistic daughter, Issy.

And of course, there is the case of pharmaceuticals entrepreneur Gigi Jordan, 54, who is at trial for admittedly ending her autistic son’s life at Manhattan’s Peninsula Hotel. Ms. Jordan has testified that she killed her son to protect him from his father and/or stepfather who she claims were abusive. The trial is winding down and the defendant’s lawyers are seeking a manslaughter conviction.

A less publicized case that is still pending is that of a severely-autistic 11-year-old boy in Anaheim, California, whose parents were charged with child endangerment and false imprisonment after he was found locked in a dog kennel.

A case in some ways similar to the Anaheim case, which has been reported by multiple news services, but without a great deal of detail, comes to us from out of Huron County, Michigan which is 90 miles north of Detroit.

The Independent reports:

“Two pensioners have been charged with unlawful imprisonment after a 19-year-old with autism was found locked in a cage on a wooden bed.

A 65-year-old woman and 66-year-old man were arrested at the home and authorities removed three adults from the property on 20 October.”

Brad Devereaux of MLive Michigan reports Huron County Sheriff’s Department Deputy Steve Bismarck was dispatched to the home on Minden Road south of Priemer to investigate a civil dispute on Monday, Oct. 25. at about 4 pm.

Mr. Devereaux writes:

“Upon speaking with parties involved, permission was granted for Bismack to enter one of the bedrooms, where he found a 19-year-old mentally challenged male in a caged bed with the door on the cage chained shut, the sheriff’s department said in a prepared statement.”

The imprisoned man apparently had a thin blanket on a wooden “bed” platform to lie on but that was about it.

After discovering the man in the cage, Deputy Bismarck “contacted the Department of Human Services emergency center and personnel were dispatched to the scene.”

Later that evening at around 10 pm, the “parents” were removed from the home. Further investigation ensued and based on court action the following day, one more adult was removed, according to police.

“Further court action on Friday, Oct. 25, ordered the final two children removed from the home. Two deputies from the sheriff’s office also assisted on Friday evening, police said.

It is noted that according to department spokesman Bob Wheaton, the home is not a licensed care facility, but is rather a private residence.

The “parents” have been charged with unlawful imprisonment and misdemeanour abuse of a vulnerable adult. They are currently being held in the Huron County Jail.

The adult protective services office of Michigan’s Department of Human Services is reportedly is reportedly investigating the incident.

*     *     *     *     *

In an article posted in the Independent Voices section of The Independent, written by Mathieu Vaillancourt and dated August 12, 2014, this young man, who suffers from autism, writes revealingly about his condition:

“I know what autism is like firsthand. I was diagnosed with it at the age of 13, after suffering from depression and experiencing a psychotic breakdown. A year later, in 2003, I was sectioned by my own will at the psychiatric wing of a children’s hospital. Ever since my diagnosis, I have been on medication, and been lucky enough to have incredible parents who have always been there to support me.”

Mr. Vaillancourt explains that although he was plagued by teasing and bullying in school, he always did well academically and earned a university degree in International Development. Today he works part time for a large corporation with a job in “policy analysis” which would appear to be closely related to his field of study. He readily states that he is uncertain whether he “can work one day without medication, or if (he is) independent enough to live alone.”

Mr. Vaillancourt discusses his OCD tendencies:

“I like doing repetitive things and I am obsessive for many things. I am a bibliophile, and buy endless amounts of second-hand books. I also enjoy writing a lot of electoral statistics during my spare time. I don’t know if this is something chemical, but if I don’t do these things, I feel bad, as if there is something missing in my life.”

Thus, and this I think is key, Mathieu feels compelled to ‘act out” his compulsions. In this is he really that different from the rest of us with our habits, rituals and obsessions? I suppose it is a question of degree and where the one posits the “borderline” between “normal” and “abnormal” behavior.

Because of his condition, Mr. Vaillancourt, who is obviously very intelligent, has some social difficulties although he is “able to have a few close friends, and can get by in large groups.” He then explains that due to his social difficulties, “at the age of 25 I still don’t know how to have a romantic relationship.”

Mr. Vaillancourt suggests that autistic people tend to be tenacious and that they are in demand for certain jobs that require a high degree of patience and technical ability. There have long been suggestions that “technology centers” like Silicon Valley are to a large degree driven by autistic brain power.

I strongly suggest that you read Mr. Vaillancourt’s entire article.

* * * * *

What I am struck by in mulling over this issue is how broad-based the autism spectrum appears to be, ranging as it does from mild to severe. Mathieu Vaillancourt’s condition may well be somewhat mild. What is also of great importance is the degree of  nurturing that is available for the autistic child. Mathieu reports that he was aided immeasurably by his “incredible parents who have always been there to support me.”

Could it be that an unfortunate young man like the 19-year-old recently liberated by the Huron Sheriff’s Department from the cage his caregivers kept him in might have been helped greatly and might even be gainfully employed and living a more or less normal life if he had been nurtured like Mathieu?

To draw a perhaps imperfect analogy, let’s take “college level writing”. In another lifetime, I was a part time English instructor teaching remedial writing to college students at suburban Northern California community colleges. Like most part timers (freeway flyers), I was thrown into the mix with little sense of how to proceed. It was sink or swim for both me and my students. So I did my best…

While I did certain specific technical things to try to help the students improve their writing, the most important factor in their success (and many of them improved dramatically) was my attitude. I was uniformly encouraging. I may have been the easiest grader in the history of those schools. It wasn’t hard to get a B- from Patrick H. Sometimes this got me in trouble with the brass, but I largely stuck to my guns. I was quite a popular instructor and not just because I was an easy grader. I was popular because these students, many of whom were kids who had always hated English and had been told endlessly that they “sucked at writing”, were suddenly learning to write, obviously not at a high level, but they were learning and improving and by the time the semester ended, their writing was no longer alarmingly weak.

It’s obvious where I’m going with this. Handicapped kids need the same kind of encouragement I gave my remedial writing students. They need to be worked with in a kind and considerate manner. They need to be praised for their small successes. They need a great deal of extra help but if they receive that help, many of them will improve/succeed and sometimes that success will be quite dramatic.

by The Starks Shrink

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlie Bothuell V May Have a Very Sharp Axe to Grind

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

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

Why Beautiful Murderesses Inflame the Passions of the True Crime Fan

Going Postal Goes Fed-Ex!

How to Raise a Serial Killer in 10 Easy Steps

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

Luka Magnotta: Man, Boy or Beast?

The Disturbing Truth about Mothers Who Murder Their Children

Teleka Patrick Needed a Psychiatrist, Not a Pastor!

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

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

A 78-year-old South Seattle grandfather named Honorario Yano has committed the ultimate sin and if there is eternal justice he will surely pay a heavy, heavy price (and though I’m not usually an eternal justice guy, at times like this I lean in that direction).

Let’s begin with Yano’s 11-year-old granddaughter Anahlia Cowherd, a fifth-grader at Aki Kurose Middle School, whom he shot and killed on Monday night. Anahlia, who was active on her social media Wattpad blog, had been crying out for help for some time because she claimed Honorario had been constantly sexually abusing her.

Just hours before her grandfather shot and killed her and her mother on Monday night before turning the gun on himself, Anahlia posted what Andy Campbell of Huffington Post rightly calls a “final panicked entry”:

“Help… Me…” she wrote. “He threatened me… He actually threatened to KILL my family. Right now I’m in my mom’s room, the door locked, my dog close, my brother here, my Grandpa somewhere, my Grandma is not home… My mom is coming… I’m so scared.”

Sadly, poor Anahlia might as well have been talking to the cruel North Wind. No one had any help to bring and around 8 pm that evening, Yano shot his 39-year-old daughter, Christine Dela Isla, and Anahlia, before turning the gun on himself. The only one to survive the carnage was Anahlia’s 10-year-old brother.

Andy Campbell writes:

Police found all three bodies after the killer’s 10-year-old grandson called 911 at 8:17 p.m., according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The boy told police that he escaped after his grandfather pointed a pistol at his mother and sister and shot them. He said he fled after he saw Yano shoot himself.

Strange that the grandfather spared Anahlia’s brother but he did and the boy, who is now staying with relatives, will somehow have to try to pick up the pieces.

KIROTV reports:

A neighbor named Jerome Mannan reports that he saw a young boy, barefoot and limping, leave Anahlai’s home on Monday night.

“He was frightened, you could see that. I feel sorry for him because he looked traumatized,” said Mannan. “The fact that three people are dead? That’s horrific.”

Anahlia’s father is named Terrell Cowherd. Mr Cowherd, who hadn’t seen his daughter since she was six years old, was able to find Anahlia’s Wattpad blog online after simply searching for her name. Though her username is anonymous, Anahlia names herself in one piece she wrote more than six months ago, in which she details long-term sexual abuse at the hands of her grandfather.

It’s not clear why Terrell was searching for his daughter online the day after she was killed. In any event, he says “he found his daughter’s blog alleging abuse from the grandfather on Tuesday morning and called police. While he waited for a call back from Seattle Police Department, he received a call from another detective telling him about the deaths.

“When I Googled my daughter’s name, the blog popped up,” Terrell said. “The only conclusion I can come to is that she must have actually got to the point where she was about to call police, and I guess that was his way of preventing her from doing so.”

It takes tremendous courage for a sexually abused child to go to the authorities (assuming the accusations are true), and the tragedy here is that Anahlia put her faith in her blog and the kindness of the cyber world, which, as is often the case, did not respond, at least not in time. It’s also odd (though not unusual in this era) that her father found out about the sexual abuse by going on his daughter’s blog.

Honorario Yano

For his part, Terrell Cowherd believes that what his daughter wrote is the horrible truth:

“I’m Anahlia Cowherd … and I’m gonna bring justice to all girls who have been touched.”

Rarely have I seen the call for justice spelled out in such point-blank and moving fashion. It’s both inspiring and heartbreaking but it doesn’t do a damned bit of good.

Neither did Anahlia’s mother Christine do a damned bit of good, not that she didn’t want to, but because she waited too long and didn’t have the strength (and quite possibly had been abused herself by the despicable Honorario.)

In one of her posts in which the child described years of sexual abuse at the hands of her grandfather, she wrote, “My mom said the next f—— time he does this she’s gonna call the police.”

But of course “her mom” very possibly would have done nothing, like she had apparently had been doing for far too long.

In a kind but sadly ineffectual gesture, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray rushed to the house to join police after the shooting.

“Three citizens of this city are dead, and it involves guns,” Murray said.

The police, speaking technically, say Yano had no criminal history. I would say, based on Anahlia’s allegations (if they are true), he has nothing but criminal history.

The police also say that a motive for the killings hasn’t been established.

Terrell Cowherd, however, has revealed what he thinks Yano’s motive was, the fact that Anahlia was on the verge of going to the authorities.

* * * * *

When I began lashing this post together I was so furious I could barely see straight. Now I have a thought, one of my suggestions, and I know damned well it won’t be instituted but here goes:

First of all, although our school system is full of child molesting teachers, the fact remains that most of these molesters go after teens, not little boys and girls.

Here is what should be done:

No later than the second grade, every school in America, public or private, should hold special classes in which improper touching and sexual abuse of any kind is clearly explained. Every child should be urged in the strongest possible terms to report any such improper touching to the authorities. A good way of doing this would be to teach the kids that they can call 911 to report these incidents.

I realize that this will result in some false accusations, which is a problem. On the other hand, if children who are being violated have no recourse (which of course is all too often the case), the abuse will continue and with each awful act on the part of the abuser, another piece of the child’s young soul will be chipped away.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Halloween is coming and we can expect a certain amount of ghoulish behavior from celebrants. In fact, Eric Badia and Larry McShane of the New York Daily News write that Dale Silverman, 59,  thought it was some sort of Halloween prank when she spied a woman’s body lying on one side of a Farmingdale. Long Island street, and a head lying on the other side on Tuesday evening just before 8 pm.

“I saw the head first — long black straight hair and a partial face,” said Silverman. “I did a double-take, thinking it was a stupid little shrunken head you would hang as a Halloween thing.”

To her dismay, Ms. Silverman looked closer and discovered it was not a prank at all; rather it was a real woman’s body on one side of the street and her severed head on the other.

The body and head belonged to Patricia Ward, a highly respected retired college professor who had taught at Farmingdale State College, a branch of the New York State University system, for the better part of three decades. It turned out that she had been brutally murdered and decapitated for unknown reasons by her son, Derek Ward.

Derek, who was 35, had only a minimal rap sheet (45 days behind bars after a 2006 conviction for possession of 100 Valium pills and a 9-mm. Smith & Wesson handgun.) He did, however, have a psychiatric record dating back a decade, which suggests that he could have been in the throes of some sort of psychotic episode when he used a knife to kill and then behead his mother. After completing the grisly act, he dragged Patricia’s head and body outside depositing them on either side of the street.

It is frightening to speculate on what horrific thoughts were circulating in Derek’s  mind both during and after the murder. It appears however, that he may have regretted his actions — as I suspect killers often do — once it was too late, although we have no way of knowing for sure.

What is known is that Derek Ward stepped in front of a LIRR Ronkonkoma-bound train near the Clinton St. crossing, less than a mile away from where his mother’s remains were found, a fact confirmed by MTA police 20 minutes after the body was found.

In an odd twist, Ms. Ward met her tragic fate in her luxury apartment on Secatogue Ave., which she and Derek had just moved into three months earlier.  As a respected professor for many years, she probably earned a decent income and may also have had other monetary sources, thus allowing her to live comfortably. None of this did her any good, however, when Derek ran amuck.

According to neighbors, Patricia Ward was a quiet person who was often seen walking a small white dog down the street. She and her son moved into the building about three months ago.

“She would sometimes give me a half-a-smile, but she was like very serious,” said a neighbor.

More and more my heart goes out to well-meaning mothers who have the incomprehensibly bad luck to give birth to children who, for whatever reason, suffer from severe mental disorders. I know my limits and my weaknesses and every day I thank the powers that be that my three kids do not suffer from any serious mental disorders. If any of them did I fear I would have a devilishly hard time adjusting to that cruel fate and I have the greatest respect for every mother (and father) who does his or her best to care for a highly unbalanced child.

“Patricia Ward was a member of the campus for 28 years,” Farmingdale State College announced in a statement. “She was well-known, well-liked and well-respected. The campus is a very sad place today.”

The police report that Derek’s already unstable mental health took a turn for the worse last year after his paternal grandfather died, which suggests that his grandfather may have exercised a calming influence over the troubled young man.

It is entirely possible that Derek suffered from delusions in which he somehow saw his mother as an agent of evil, which in turn triggered his horrific act, although we have no way of knowing for sure. The fact that he was once arrested with a bottle of valium could suggest that he was prone to intense anxiety, which, of course, is common in individuals suffering from serious mental disorder. The three months that he had been living with his mother could have been sufficient time for him to convince himself that she was either “after him” or was somehow responsible for his problems/condition. But, the issue of Derek’s motivation is unlikely to ever be answered with any certainty.

by Lise LaSalle

On June 8, 1989, a 44-year old Canadian nurse named Cindy James was found dead in Richmond, a suburb of Vancouver. She had been drugged and strangled, with her hands and feet tied behind her back. She was found in the yard of an abandoned home a mile and a half from a small shopping mall where her car was parked.  She had been missing since May 25th, when her car was discovered in the parking lot. There was blood on the driver’s side door and items from her wallet were found under the car.

When her body was discovered at the abandoned house, it looked like Cindy James had been brutally murdered. A black nylon stocking was tied tightly around her neck and the autopsy revealed that Cindy died from an overdose of morphine and other drugs. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, however, believed her death to be an accident or a suicide. The Vancouver coroner ruled that Cindy’s death was not suicide, an accident, or a murder, claiming that she died of an ‘’unknown event.’’ This was despite the fact that in the seven years preceding her death, Cindy had reported nearly a hundred incidents of harassment beginning four months after she divorced her husband.

To this day, her death remains a mystery even after a public inquest at which 84 witnesses were called to testify. Her father Otto Hack and his wife Matilda never believed that Cindy killed herself or that she would have been able to stage the death scene. Her sister Melany Hack, who was 27 when Cindy died and who is now married with two children and lives in British Columbia, ended up writing a book titled Who Killed My Sister, My Friend. It took her 14 years to conduct research into the toxicology, the autopsy, and the medical and police reports to obtain enough information into her sister’s unsolved death.

This case, which became the subject of the show Unsolved Mysteries and was discussed on some American TV talk shows including A Current Affair and Maury Povich, was not really sensationalized or kept alive to fuel anger towards a specific perpetrator. There was no villain or hero in this story; rather, it was the puzzling case of an upstanding nurse who struggled for seven years with an imagined or real threat and ended up losing her life in the most mysterious and baffling way. This story had legs and created endless speculation.

In 1989, forensics investigation was in its infancy and the technology did not exist to solve a case the CSI way, or to determine if James was creating her own drama. Instead, the investigators had to rely on basic traditional techniques to determine if her stories of attacks, kidnapping and harassment were true.

Cindy was the eldest of six children. At age 19, she had married Dr. Roy Makepeace who was 18-years her senior. She worked as a nurse but also loved to counsel children with emotional problems. From all accounts, she appeared happy but when she decided to end her marriage in 1982 and move on with her life, all hell broke loose.

She had a very close relationship with her parents and she approached them first with stories of harassment. She ended up going to the police because she was getting death threats by phone and by mail. With each incident, this beautiful, vibrant woman took one step down physically and mentally.

Three dead cats were found hanging in her garden, her porch lights were smashed and her phone lines cut. Bizarre notes began to appear on her doorstep and five violent physical attacks were reported. One night, Cindy’s good friend, Agnes Woodcock, dropped by and when there was no answer when she knocked on the door, she went around the back of the house and found Cindy crouched down with a nylon stocking tied around her neck. She had gone to the garage to get something and was grabbed from behind by an unidentified intruder.

Messages were left on the windshield of her car along with a picture of a covered corpse being wheeled into a morgue. Raw meat was delivered to her house and even her dog, Heidi, was found shaking with fright sitting in her own feces with a cord tied tightly around her neck. The harassment would stop and start again, leaving Cindy feeling more and more destabilized. She expressed her despair in her private journals.

Cindy moved to a new house, painted her car and changed her last name. She finally hired Ozzie Kaban, a local private investigator. The police were investigating but as time passed, they were starting to doubt her stories. Ozzie reported later that Cindy would be evasive at times and withhold information.  Her mother thought that her daughter was reluctant to tell the truth because she was threatened and feared for her sister and family.

Her private investigator installed lights at her residence and gave her a two-way radio and a panic button. The police would do surveillance on a regular basis. One night, Kaban heard strange sounds coming from the radio and rushed to the house. He found Cindy on the hallway floor with a paring knife through her hand with a note on it saying ‘you are dead bitch’. He checked her pulse and thought she was dead. She was hospitalized and only recalled that a needle was put into her arm. The police did not take fingerprints and were growing tired of the whole saga. But Kaban was adamant that nobody could have done that to themselves. Cindy subjected herself to several hypnosis sessions and polygraph tests to try to get to the bottom of this but was considered too ‘traumatized’ to be a good candidate.

The threatening phone calls continued but could never be traced because they were too short. Mind you, there were never any calls when the police was doing 24-hour surveillance so you cannot blame them for growing suspicious. The incidents always happened when they were not around. Her parents thought her attacker was smart enough to stay away at the proper times in order to make Cindy look more and more suspicious. Nowadays, we could trace the calls and know exactly who is zooming who.

After an “attack’’, Cindy was found lying in a ditch six miles from her home, wearing a man’s work boot and glove. She was suffering from hypothermia and had cuts and bruises all over her body. She also had a black nylon stocking around her neck, a trademark of her alleged attacks. She did not remember the event and asked her parents to stay with her. One evening, they were awakened by noises in the basement and saw flames. After realizing the phone was dead, they went outside to alert the neighbors. They saw a man at the curb and asked him to call the fire department but instead, he ran off. It was the second ‘arson.’

The police determined that the fire was started from inside the house because they saw no fingerprints on the window they think the perpetrator would have used to gain entry into the house. Therefore, they determined that Cindy had staged the incident. They also found it quite odd that Cindy would walk her little dog alone late at night when she feared being attacked. I must admit that they had a point there.

Her parents saw her condition deteriorating further and feared for her mental state. She was terrified and going downhill steadily. Believing she was suicidal, her doctor committed her to a local psychiatric ward. Ten weeks later, she was released. That’s when she admitted to friends and family that she knew more than she was saying about the perpetrator and would go after him/them herself. Was she falling deeper into delusion or was there a real person behind all this?

Cindy became very depressed because she felt that her credibility was destroyed and that no one believed that someone wanted her dead or was pushing her towards insanity. Her life was a living hell and while hospitalized, she wrote about committing suicide.

She finally told police that she believed her tormentor was her ex-husband Roy Makepeace. They encouraged her to phone him to confront him and they taped the conversation. As a psychiatrist, Roy would have been familiar with the fine art of playing with her mind, but he totally denied any involvement during the conversation. This phone tape was played at the public inquest. In fact, Makepeace gave the police a recording from his own answering machine that contained a death threat. If the poor man had nothing to do with his former wife’s demise, imagine how awful it must have been for his reputation.

Cindy James was either confused, psychotic or totally innocent, but she was sounding more and more confused as her despair deepened. And it all ended when they found her body two weeks after she was reported missing. She had gone to the shopping mall to deposit her hospital paycheck and do some grocery shopping. You wonder why she would bother doing all this if she intended to kill herself. Plus, why not die in her bed quietly and give her family less pain and sorrow? After all, she loved them dearly.

Neal Hall, a Canadian journalist who wrote a book about the case now thinks she killed herself but her investigator Ozzie Kaban disagrees. He does not buy that her body took two weeks to be found when it was so close to traffic and pedestrian walks. He believes her body might have been dumped. She had an injection mark on her arm so she could have never walked a mile and a half to the spot where they found her and then tie herself up after injecting herself. They found no needle close to her car or around the crime scene. The police think she ingested the morphine and had plenty of time to do the rest. But they found no evidence to that effect and no proof of purchase of black nylons.

Cindy also had a lover named Pat McBride who happened to be a cop. The police suspected him and Makepeace but had no concrete evidence against either one of them. The evidence in this case was quite contradictory and incomplete and very baffling but the police opted to blame Cindy. Her ex-husband came to believe that Cindy had multiple personalities and was unaware that she was tormenting herself. She adored her dog and her parents and would have never tortured them willingly. Her father states that the investigation was never aimed at finding a perpetrator but at pinning the responsibility on his daughter.

The only undeniable truth in this story is that Cindy James suffered immensely in this saga and she paid with her life. Her journals tell the heart-wrenching story of a woman tortured mentally and physically — either by her own hand and mental illness or because of an unscrupulous and sadistic perpetrator who wanted to drive her crazy and eventually killed her. If she was an innocent victim, the lack of support from the police must have caused her excruciating pain. In my opinion nurse Cindy James was a victim either way.

Otto Hack died in 2010 after a distinguished career in the military. His wife Tillie passed away in 2012. They believed till the end that their daughter did not commit suicide. Their daughter Melany continues their search for the truth.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

In the King James version of the Bible, Jesus says, “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.” — Matthew 10:34

Naturally, biblical scholars debate what exactly was meant by this and Jesus, who appears capable of contradiction, later chastises one of his prize disciples, Peter for lopping off a servant’s ear when some of the Saviour’s enemies are giving him a hard time:

“Then Simon Peter having a sword drew it, and smote the high priest’s servant, and cut off his right ear. The servant’s name was Malchus.” — John 18:1

A young Stillwater, Oklahoma self-styled Christian with psychotic tendencies appears to have taken the biblical swordplay passages as rules to live by.

Jonathan Sutton, Kyle Hinchey and Nolan Clay of NewsOK write:

A young Stillwater man was charged Thursday with first-degree murder in the near-beheading of a former high school classmate.

Charged was Isaiah Marin who police say has confessed to the killing.

Killed Wednesday was Jacob Andrew Crockett, 19, of Stillwater. Crockett is the son of an Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper, police said. Marin and Crockett were one-time classmates at Stillwater High School, the school’s principal said.

As is so often the case, now that the victim is dead, the assailant, Isaiah,  seems to be regretting his actions. “At a video arraignment Thursday afternoon at Payne County District Court, Marin’s voice sputtered and he appeared to cry as he answered a judge’s questions.”

We’ve all heard the old saw about “not doing the crime if you can’t do the time”, but sadly, many a violent criminal doesn’t seem to realize the terrible blunder he or she is making until it’s too late.

Marin is facing one count of first-degree murder and apparently will not be getting out on bail, which is not necessarily unwise.

Stillwater police Capt. Randy Dickerson stated that Marin admitted to authorities “that he had fantasized recently about committing multiple homicides.”

Now it’s not that unusual to fantasize about whacking people, and I suspect many of us have toyed with the notion from time to time, but only in the most fanciful manner. Things get problematical when the borderline between idle fantasy and the actual acting out of murder get blurred.

Although what has happened is undeniably tragic, the backdrop to the killing is really quite fascinating, at least to a jaded soul such as me. We have heavy metal, Satanism and bizarre Christianity zealotry all wrapped together in a distinctly homicidal package. We also have the brothers of both the victim and the assailant describing what happened.

This was sort of an “all in the family” type of quarrel and Court records show that Isaiah’s brother Samuel Marin, the deceased man Jacob Crockett, and Jacob’s brother, Jesse Crockett, were roommates in an apartment at 416 S Oakdale, No. 6, in Stillwater, with Isaiah apparently a regular visitor.

The following information is all set forth in the police affidavit that forms the basis of the case.

1) The victim’s brother, Jesse, explained to police that Isaiah is a “religious zealot” and “heavy drug user.” (This is clearly a no-no. The first rule of Christianity is that you are supposed to eschew drugs and intoxicants. Thus, Isaiah is not really a Christian, or at least not a good Christian. He just thinks he is.)

2) Isaiah’s brother, Samuel, explained that “in the past Jacob and Isaiah had disagreements because Jacob and Jesse were practicing witchcraft and Isaiah had strong Christian beliefs.” [Again, we see the stark logical breakdown. Samuel is also convinced that Isaiah is a “strong Christian” but this is impossible because no true “strong Christian” is also a “heavy drug user”. the whole point is that when you become a Christian (are born again), you get off the damned drugs. As to Samuel’s claim that Jacob and Jesse were “practicing witchcraft”, who knows? The sons of a State Highway patrol man should not by messing around with witchcraft or Satanisn but you know kids these days…

But despite what I think, in Isaiah’s mind, he was a card-carrying Christian. In fact, Samuel told police, “Isaiah had been watching YouTube videos related to his Christian beliefs and the Book of Matthew” earlier.

Or as I stated at the beginning of this confused post:

“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.” — Matthew 10:34

3) In any event, Samuel recounted that he and Isaiah Marin were playing cards there at the crib with Jacob in the room when “Isaiah picked up a large black sword and removed it from a sheath … and began swinging the sword around.” (Big mistake. Unstable people should never have weapons close at hand. Unfortunately, they often do.)

4) Samuel, who is nobody’s fool, told Isaiah to be careful and his loving brother replied, “I would never cut you bro.” (By the same token, a loving brother will never tase his bro. It is noted that I have a very close friend, who is kind of like a bro, who keeps a very scary taser device at his crib but I’m fairly confident he will never use it on me. Of course, I’ve been wrong before.)

5) It’s a little unclear what happened next, but according to the detective (we’re getting all of this second-hand so who knows what to believe?), Samuel reported that he heard the unmistakable sound of someone (that someone was Jacob) getting stabbed. Samuel then saw “Jacob stand up and blood gushing from his chest.”

6) Samuel then got the hell out of Dodge but Isaiah followed him, trying to calm him down. In order to get his Bro to relax and cool out, Isaiah very logically told him “he would explain why he killed Jacob from letters he would write while he was in prison.” (Thus, we see a kernel of sanity even amidst Isaiah’s madness which is not going to help him if down the road he tries to mount an insanity defense. Also, never name your son Isaiah. Being named for perhaps the most famous Old Testament prophet is just too heavy a burden for am unstable young man to bear.)

7) At some point, Isaiah called 911 and said, “I murdered someone.” He then began rambling about “sacrificing and magic.” When asked how he performed the killing, Isaiah answered truthfully: “I hacked them to death with a machete.” (If this were not a capital case, the fact that Isaiah almost instantly “accepted responsibility” for his actions might help him get a mitigated sentence. Given the nature of the hacking death, however, it may not do him that much good.

8) Isaiah Marin was taken into custody after he was found by police jogging along State Highway 51, carrying what was allegedly the murder weapon, i.e., the black sword.

9) Jeff Watts, the police officer who wrote up the affidavit, reported that Jacob Crockett had what appeared to be multiple deep slash and stab wounds and his “head was mostly severed from his body.”

10) Isaiah certainly knows how to draw attention to himself. Witnesses reported that they saw a blood-covered man walking near a car dealership along the highway. In fact, Trish Ellis, a saleswoman at the Janzen Toyota car dealership along SH 51, said “We saw him coming through the parking lot covered in blood. I thought it was a Halloween costume at first, but then people started to get frightened when they saw his weapon.”

According to at least one witness, notwithstanding Samuel’s claims that Jacob and Jesse had been practicing witchcraft, and they were reportedly in a “heavy metal band,” they may not have been not real card-carrying devil-worshippers.

“They were outstanding guys, they were always really respectful,” a neighbor stated on Thursday.

The police report that Jacob was a student at the Northern Oklahoma College campus in Stillwater. And, no one believes that the fact Jacob’s father was a state trooper was in anyway a motivating factor in this case (although it’s not likely to help Isaiah at sentencing).

* * * * *

Oh boy! Isaiah is clearly criminally insane, but the fact he came to his senses so quickly is not going to help him if he tries to mount any type of insanity defense. When you do something like this, you can’t keep flashing in and out of sanity. What he probably should have done is march into the Toyota dealership, all gore-bespattered and carrying the black sword, and told Trish Ellis, the saleswoman, that he needed a 2015 Toyota Camry fast because he was a handmaiden of the lord and was getting married on Saturday, all the while waving the black sword wildly above his head.

But he didn’t. Instead, he phoned 911 and turned himself in. It doesn’t look good for Isaiah. But at least he’ll get plenty of attention. Which after all is half the battle in this lonely world.

compiled by Patrick H. Moore

David Lohr of the Huffington Post reports that notorious Pennsylvania cop-killer Eric Frein, after making like Houdini for the past 48 days, and leading authorities on what will go down in history as one of our most expensive and frustrating manhunts ever, is now in police custody.

Pennsylvania State Police spokeswoman Connie Devens stated in an email Thursday evening:

“I can confirm that we have taken Eric Frein into custody. No further information will be released or confirmed at this time.”

The 31-year-old Frein, a self-styled military enthusiast and survivalist with an extreme animus toward law enforcement, ambushed two innocent state troopers during a shift change at the Blooming Grove barracks on September 12th. Cpl. Bryon Dickson was killed in the attack while trooper Alex Douglass was seriously wounded and is still undergoing rehabilitation therapy as of this date.

Frein, who has extensive training as a marksman and knows the Pennsylvania Poconos Mountains like Beethoven knew the keyboard, appears to have shot the officers with the greatest of ease, a suggestion he supports in a handwritten note law enforcement found at one of his campsites near Canadensis. Law enforcement, however, responded to the attack with near astonishing speed, which put the kibosh on the alleged killer’s initial escape plans. Frein writes:

“Got a shot around 11 p.m. and took it. He dropped. I was surprised at how quick. I took a follow-up shot on his head, neck area. He was still and quiet after that. Another cop approached the one I just shot. As he went to kneel, I took a shot at him and he jumped in the door. His legs were visible and still. I ran back to the jeep. I made it maybe half-a-mile from the GL (game land) road and hit a road block. I didn’t expect one so soon — it was only 15 to 20 minutes. I did a k-turn a quarter mile from them and pulled into a development I knew had unfinished access roads. Hearing helos (helicopters), I just used my marker lights, missed the trail around a run off pool and drove straight into it. Disaster. Made half-attempt to stash AK and ran.”

Except for his occasional grammatical faux pas, Frein’s literary style is excellent — clear, crisp, economical, hard-boiled and detailed. It seems to leap right off the page. The man clearly missed his bet. He could be making good money writing survivalist thrillers and self-publishing them on Amazon. Instead, he choose to be a “a man of action”, and an evil one at that, gunning down innocent people purely to feed his inexplicable hatred of the men in blue.

It seems clear that based on his journal entries, Frein anticipated that people would want to read about his exploits. We can only assume that he penned his journal entries while lolling around camp between escapes.

The arrest was reportedly made inside an abandoned airport hangar at the Pocono Mountains Municipal Airport. No shots were fired during the arrest, according to FOX News.

Here is a truncated timeline of some of the key events that occurred during the epic manhunt as provided by Rachel Blidner of the New York Daily News:

9-12:  The shootings occur on Sept 12.

9-15:  Three days later the police find Frein’s 2001 Jeep Cherokee partly submerged in a lake, complete with shell casings matching those found at the shooting scene, camouflage face paint, empty rifle cases and military gear.

9-18:  Frein is added to the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List”.

9-20:  Gunfire is exchanged near the home of Frein’s parents. Residents are cautioned to stay inside and lock all doors.

9-21:  Frein’s Ak-47-style weapon and ammunition are recovered.

9-23:  A video of a Vietnam War reenactment surfaces with the hubris-laden Frein bragging about his military history and expertise.

9-24:  Frein is spotted but eludes capture. His journals and soiled diapers are found.

9-29:  Police recover two pipe bombs and handwritten notes describing the attacks in the woods of Pike and Monroe Counties.

10-2:  Two state troopers are injured after falling out of a tree  while on a search party.

10-4: Frein’s sister Tiffany tells him to turn himself in.

10-9:  Barrett Township cancels Halloween ahead of time by banning trick-or-treating and postponing the 50th annual Halloween parade.

10-16:  Surviving state trooper Alex Douglass is released from the hospital and enter a rehab facility.

10-27:  Police deploy a $180,000 surveillance balloon equipped with cameras. The mission fails due to weather problems. (It seems clear from this that by this point,the authorities were beginning to get desperate).

10-30:  Bingo! Frein is captured Thursday afternoon at the abandoned airport hangar.

The Pennsylvania authorities should be given great credit for remaining patient throughout this ordeal, despite the immense pressure they were under, and ultimately managing to take Frein into custody without injuring or killing him. Had they exchanged fire and killed him, it would have only served the fan the flames of hatred that convulse the souls of many survivalists and militiamen. Based on the clean capture, Frein will have his day in court and justice will  be served when he is convicted of first-degree murder with a lying-in-wait enhancement.

Click here to view our earlier Eric Frein post:

Cop-Killer and Survivalist Eric Matthew Frein Plays a ‘Twisted Game’ of Hide-and-Seek with Law Enforcement

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*     *     *     *     *

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

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

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

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

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

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

There is apparently no end to the cruelty a jilted spouse is capable of in extreme cases and, sadly, it often concerns the kids. Before I get into the grim details of how a vindictive English father incinerated his two prepubescent sons in an attic fire in their playroom, I want to say a few words about the possibility of “letting go.”

Throughout my life, I’ve been genuinely startled on numerous occasions when close personal male friends have fallen apart, literally for years, when the old lady gives them the boot. Like any other guy, I’ve been indoctrinated with the notion that men are supposed to be strong, even stoic in the face of adversity, but have, to some degree, disregarded the “stiff upper lip” doctrine as so much hot air.

Rather, as an at least partly modern dude, I’ve tended to think that the best way to deal with the heartbreak of breakup is to face your grief head-on, feel it deeply and then breathe a sigh of utmost relief as it slowly fades away.

When I was 40, my spouse of 11 years and I came to the grand finale.  She fell headlong into a full-tilt mid-life crisis. Through a bizarre pattern of psychological displacement, she decided her father, who of course was the enemy, was like my father, and since I was like my father, therefore I was like her father, which in turn made me the villain.

Was she right? Who is to say but realist that I sometimes am, I realized the gig was up. I had raised her two bio kids for a decade and was very close to both of them. Therefore, I was losing not only my significant other but my kids as well. In short, disaster.

I’m not one who enjoys being kicked around, which she was bound and determined to do, so I knew I had to deal with my grief and find the strength to get out of Dodge. Here’s what I did:

I got in my car, which was probably the worst Detroit-manufactured car of all time (I’m too embarrassed to identify it by name; let me just say I bought it from my father-in-law), and drove for hours day after day listening endlessly to the most depressing CD of all time, “Disintegration” by The Cure. I must have listened to the depressing masterpiece at least 100 times.

100 hours of pure Disintegration complete with utterly maudlin lyrics such as:

“If only I had thought of the right words
I could have hold on to your heart
If only I’d thought of the right words
I wouldn’t be breaking apart”
(from “Pictures of You”)

I’ll be damned if it didn’t work. After listening to the CD 100 times which meant approximately 50 two-hour sessions behind the wheel spread out over about two months, I was Cured. I had worked through my heartbreak sufficiently to move on. That was nearly 25 years ago.

Now my three friends, who I mentioned at the beginning of this somewhat maudlin post were not able to find an approach to Cure their grief as easily as I was. Dudes were “cracked up on the highway” for quite a while.

But to their immense credit, in the throes of their very real sadness, unlike the subject of this post, a murdering English arsonist father named Darren Sykes, they never took it out on the kids. They simply suffered alone and in silence, which, if you think about, is rather an honorable way to suffer.

Not Big Darren Sykes. Big Darren decided that if the old lady was going to give him the boot, he was going to make her PAY and PAY and PAY.

Here’s what he did, as reported by the Daily Mail and numerous other media outlets:

A father ‘murdered’ his two sons by luring them into an attic playroom and setting the house on fire, it was claimed yesterday.

Darren Sykes – who also died in the blaze – tricked Jack, 12, and Paul, nine, into believing they could play on a new train set he had bought for them.

He started a fire using fuel downstairs, went into the attic room and closed the hatch as the fire began to rip through the building, said his ex-wife.

Jack and Paul’s bereaved mother, 42-year-old Claire Sykes, states that her beloved children were caught ‘like rats in a trap’ by their cruel father.

Somehow Jack managed to escape the initial death trap by escaping the attic room. It did no good, though; he suffered terrible burns in the lower reaches of the house and died in the hospital five days later with his mother by his side.

Neighbors called the firemen who burst in wearing breathing apparatus and pulled both boys and murderous Big Darren out of the inferno but it did no good. All was lost…

In the aftermath of the cruel arson, Claire Sykes stated that her ex-husband ‘murdered’ their sons:

‘He was adamant I wouldn’t get anything following the divorce and this was his way of making sure of that.

‘I want people to know they were murdered by their father. I can just see them running hell for leather up those stairs (to play with the train set). They had no chance.’

Stealthily, Big Darren had been texting the boys all days about the new train set and how cool it was.

‘They must have shot straight into the attic not knowing what he had planned. He has set it up as a playroom for them and as soon as they were in he shut the hatch.

‘They were like rats in a trap and fell for his cold, calculated plan,’ said Mrs. Sykes.

Claire Sykes described her ex, who was employed as a carpet estimator, as ‘violent and controlling’. She had moved out of the family home in Penistone, South Yorkshire, prior to the divorce.

It all happened oh so fast. Big Darren, who had five hours of visiting rights per week, picked Jack and Paul up at their grandmother’s house late Wednesday afternoon. Twenty minutes later the house was ablaze.

Although an inquest will be held at a later date, it’s obvious that Big Darren is responsible for the double murder/suicide. ‘Police and fire investigators (have) said evidence pointed to the fire being started deliberately and they were not looking for anyone else in connection with the tragedy.’

* * * * *

Damn! A few days ago we had the alleged pedophile Honorario Yano in Seattle murdering his daughter and granddaughter before turning the gun on himself.

Skip across the pond to Merrie Olde England and here comes Big Darren murdering this kids in the most painful way possible while ending his own life, simply to spite his ex.

You would think these bastards would at least stay alive themselves to gloat or something, awful as that sounds. But no, they’re too gutless to even do that. Or is it that they recognize, perhaps not consciously, that by offing themselves along with their victims, they make it impossible for the relatives of the victims to ever gain any kind of closure through the judicial process, thus — in a sense — making their cruel deed all the crueler?

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Opinions differ as to the validity of vigilante efforts in criminal matters and — for the most part — it’s probably a good thing that non-law-enforcement personnel are typically not in a position to mete out justice. Last June, however, in a rural area of Lafayette Parish, La., it was the family of kidnap victim Bethany Arceneaux, 29, of Duson, La, that rescued her from her abductor, Scott Thomas, in an abandoned house on the edge of a sugar cane field after law enforcement had searched for her fruitlessly for nearly two days. This is yet another true crime story in which the facts could easily be poured into a captivating crime novel.

Alexis Shaw of World News writes:

The family of a kidnapped Louisiana mother tracked down and killed the father of her child in the abandoned house where he was allegedly holding her prisoner, authorities said.

Bethany Arceneaux, 29, of Duson, La., was abducted in the parking lot of a daycare where she was picking up her 2-year-old at approximately 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Department Captain Kip Judice told ABCNews.com.

Witnesses saw the suspect, Scott Thomas, allegedly force Arceneaux into his white Buick LeSabre, before driving off…

Although they were not married, according to Captain Judice, Thomas, 29, of Leonville, La., was the father of Bethany Arceneaux’s child. As a result of relationship problems, Bethany filed a police complaint on June 15, claiming Thomas locked her in a house and threatened to kill both her and her son. A protective order against Thomas was issued June 17 and Thomas was arrested on Aug. 8th, and later released, for violating the order.

At the time of the abduction, Bethany’s child was left behind in her car at the daycare center. Bethany’s mother arrived later and was allowed to take the child home with her. Meanwhile, the search for Thomas and Bethany kicked into high gear. Later that evening, law enforcement officials found Thomas’ car near an abandoned sugarcane field in a rural area of Lafayette Parish, La.

One of Bethany’s shoes was found in the Buick LeSabre; the other had been left in the parking lot of the daycare center.

After locating Thomas’ vehicle, the authorities searched the sugarcane field Wednesday night and all day Thursday, but to no avail. The sugar cane towers two feet above a typical man’s head and it was brutally hard for the rescue team to fight their way through the dense cane.

It wasn’t until Friday morning that a break came resulting from a determined search mounted by Bethany’s own family members. They came upon a secluded, abandoned house behind a cluster of trees directly across the street from the field where Thomas had abandoned his car. According to Captain Judice, only the home’s roof was visible from the road:

“[The family] converged on a piece of property about a mile from where the car was found. One of the family members heard what he thought was a scream.”

Arceneaux’s cousin (it is unclear whether he was the family member who heard the scream) then approached the home, kicked in the door in and entered. There was Thomas holding the beleaguered, and considerably the worse-for-wear, Bethany captive. At the sight of her cousin, Thomas began stabbing Arceneaux, and a confrontation ensued.

“The cousin, who was armed, began firing several shots at Thomas,” Judice said. “After a couple of shots, [Arceneaux] was able to get free of him and they escorted her out of the house.”

Meanwhile, officers who heard the gun shots fired surrounded the home. Upon entering, they found Thomas, who had sustained several gunshot wounds, lying lifeless on the ground.

Arcenaux, who had suffered multiple stab wounds, was transported by ambulance to Lafayette General Medical Center, where she is in stable condition.

Oddly, Captain Judice — in what would appear to be pre-autopsy protocol — stated that Thomas’ cause of death is not known. The captain also stated that Thomas did not own the abandoned home.

Bethany, who was extremely weak and had not eaten or drunk anything since her abduction on Wednesday, told investigators that the home was the only place she remembers being held hostage.

Unsuprisingly, no charges have been filed against the cousin who shot Thomas, and according to Captain Judice, it is unlikely that the man will be charged:

“In the state of Louisiana, you have a right to protect yourself and others from imminent bodily harm. We believe at this point, based on evidence and statements collected, that this guy was acting in defense of Ms. Arceneaux and thus, was within the state law.”

*     *     *     *     *

Carol Kuruvilla of the New York Daily News writes:

The family has been praised for their actions, but the case has also raised questions about why the police were second on the scene. Bethany’s cousin, Dawnetta Roy, found it “upsetting” that her family had to find the missing woman themselves.

But Cpl. Paul Mouton, a Lafayette Police Department spokesman, said that police were on the hunt as well. He claimed it was coincidence that the family found Bethany first.

“While we were looking on one side, they were looking in another and they came upon her. It just so happens where they were looking was where she was found,” Mouton said. “If we weren’t looking at all and they were searching, that would be different.”

“I’m so happy. God is good,” Monica Arceneaux-Henry, Bethany’s aunt, said. “We followed our faith and believed she was alive. God answers prayers.”

 *     *     *     *     *

Although I’m not generally an advocate of vigilante justice, which all too often can deteriorate into mob violence, in this case it seems that it was both effective and necessary. Although some readers will no doubt feel that he had it coming, we’ll never know for certain, however, whether the shooting of Thomas was actually necessary.

compiled by Patrick H. Moore

This compelling yet horrifying array of 51 disturbing quotes from 19 disturbed serial killers is drawn from the public domain. Although I’m quite certain that each and everyone of these killers had their moments of intense terror and loneliness, I am struck by the fact that some of them seem far more unhappy than others. For example, Aileen Wuornos may have been one of the most unhappy women that every lived. Compared to her, suave Mr. Bundy seems to to be feeling only moderate pain, while the deadly Dahmer appears to be consumed with guilt over his actions. What all of this boils down to is that although serial killers may well shares many basic personality characteristics, they are all different which makes it tough to generalize effectively about them.

Aileen Wuornos  (the saddest woman who ever lived)

 “May your wife and children get raped, right in the ass. (to the jurors who convicted her) “

 “To me, this world is nothing but evil, and my own evil just happened to come out cause of the circumstances of what I was doing.

David Berkowitz  (was no doubt possessed by something though probably not the devil)

“A ‘possessed’ dog in the neighborhood won’t let me stop killing until he gets his fill of blood.”

“Hello from the gutters of New York City, which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood.”

“I am a monster. I am the Son of Sam. I love to hunt.”

“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.”

“The demons wanted my penis.”

Ed Gein  (the inspiration for Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of the Lamps. Gein lived in my home state of Wisconsin)

“She isn’t missing. She’s at the farm right now.”

“I had a compulsion to do it.”

“They smelled bad.”

Edmund Kemper (Big Ed was tall, large and reportedly had the I.Q. of a genius. He has been a model prisoner.)

“Even when she was dead, she was still bitching at me. I couldn’t get her to shut up!”

“I just wanted to see how it felt to shoot Grandma.”

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

“The first good-looking girl I see tonight is going to die.”

“With a girl, there’s a lot left in the girl’s body without a head. Of course, the personality is gone.”

H.H Holmes (completely unique in that he built his notorious Murder Castle where he apparently did in his victims)

“I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing..I was born with the evil one standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world, and he has been with me since.”

Henry Lee Lucas (Henry was without a doubt the victim of bad parenting. The cult film, “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” is loosely based on him and possibly Ottis Toole. I strongly recommend it but keep in mind, it is not for the faint at heart.)

“I hated all my life. I hated everybody. When I first grew up and can remember, I was dressed as a girl by mother. And I stayed that way for two or three years. And after that was treated like what I call the dog of the family. I was beaten. I was made to do things that no human bein’ would want to do.”

“Sex is one of my downfalls. I get sex any way I can get it. If I have to force somebody to do it, I do…I rape them; I’ve done that. I’ve killed animals to have sex with them, and I’ve had sex while they’re alive. “

Ian Brady (Brady, killer of children along with his partner Myra Hindley, was apparently quite the intellectual. He is old and ill now and has expressed his fervent desire to die but the British authorities insist on keeping him alive by means of a feeding tube.)

“Contrary to popular perception, the so-called Moors Murders were merely an existential exercise of just over a year, which was concluded in December 1964.”

Jeffrey Dahmer (What can you say about Dahmer that has not already been said and re-said?)

“I carried it too far, that’s for sure. “

“I’ve got to start eating at home more..”

“My consuming lust was to experience their bodies.I viewed them as objects, as strangers. It is hard for me to believe a human being could have done what I’ve done”

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

John Wayne Gacy (I don’t like this guy at all though I am weirdly enchanted by his Clown Paintings.)

“A clown can get away with murder.”

“The only thing they can get me for is running a funeral parlor without a license.”

Peter Kurten  (known as The Vampire of Dusseldorf)

“After my head has been chopped off, will I still be able to hear, at least for a moment , the sound of my own blood gushing from my neck? That would be the best pleasure to end all pleasure. “

Richard Ramirez (The Night Stalker was smart and could have done much good in the world if he’d had a decent childhood.)

“Big deal, death comes with the territory. See you in Disneyland.”

“I’ve killed 20 people, man. I love all that blood.”

“Even psychopaths have emotions, then again, maybe not.”

“We’ve all got the power in our hands to kill, but most people are afraid to use it. The ones who aren’t afraid, control life itself.”

“You maggots make me sick, I will be avenged. Lucifer dwells within us all.”

Ted Bundy  (There’s something quintessentially creepy about Bundy. Monster Smooth is a little too suave and self-serving for my taste.)

“I haven’t blocked out the past. I wouldn’t trade the person I am, or what I’ve done – or the people I’ve known – for anything. So I do think about it. And at times it’s a rather mellow trip to lay back and remember.

“I just liked to kill, I wanted to kill.”

“You learn what you need to kill and take care of the details…Its like changing a tire…The 1st time you’re careful…By the 30th time, you can’t remember where you left the lug wrench.”

“You feel the last bit of breath leaving their body. You’re looking into their eyes. A person in that situation is God!”

Albert DeSalvo (Although DeSalvo was definitely a rapist, it has not been definitively settled whether he was actually a murderer. That could be why his quote seems unlike those of the “real” serial killers. His remains have been exhumed in hopes of obtaining DNA matches.)

“It wasn’t as dark and scary as it sounds. I had a lot of fun…killing somebody’s a funny experience.”

Albert Fish (Like Henry Lee Lucas, Fish was very likely prone to exaggerating his evil deeds. He was one of the early lucky fellows to “ride the chair” at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York.)

“I always had the desire to inflict pain on others and to have others inflict pain on me. I always seemed to enjoy everything that hurt. The desire to inflict pain, that is all that is uppermost. “

 ”I saw so many boys whipped, it took root in my head.”

 ”I like children, they are tasty.”

Arthur Shawcross (This execrable human claimed to have eaten the vaginas of 3 of his 11 known female victims.)

“I took the right leg of that woman’s body, from the knee to the hip took the fat off and ate it while he stared at the other girl. When I bit into it she just urinated right there.”

“She was giving me oral sex, and she got carried away . . . So I choked her.”

Dennis Rader ( “BTK” was his infamous signature. It stands for “Bind, Torture, Kill”.)

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

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

Charles Manson  (You have to admit that Charlie is quite the character.)

“I’ve killed no one. I’ve ordered no one to be killed. These children who come to you with their knives, they’re your children. I didn’t teach them, you did.”

“Total paranoia is just total awareness.”

“Believe me, if I started murdering people there’d be none of ya left.”

“You know, if I wanted to kill somebody, I’d take this book and beat you to death with it. And I wouldn’t feel a thing. It’d be just like walking to the drug store.”

Carl Panzram (Panzram confessed to 22 murders, and to having sodomized over 1,000 males. He was hanged for having murdered a prison employee at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in 1930.)

“I wish you all had one neck and that I had my hands on it.”

 “Today I am dirty , but tomorrow I’ll be just dirt.”

“Hurry up, you Hoosier bastard, I could kill ten men while you’re fooling around!”

The Zodiac Killer Quotes (The Zodiac was very smart although he certainly might have been brought to justice if modern forensic techniques had been available during his “reign of terror”.)

“If the blue meanies are going to get me they’d better get off their asses and do something.”

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

At the risk of sounding like a brain-dead child, I would like to point out that the alleged job of police departments across America is to serve and protect. Although the precise job of our politicians is less clear, it’s probably not to rape and record rape. Yet if recent news is any indication, it appears that all too often our law enforcement personnel, rather than protecting the citizens from rape, robbery and other crimes of violence, seem to be busily raping the vulnerable among us just because they can. As for our latest politician to fall from grace for rape and the recording of rape, I’ll get to that later.

Of course, if these just because they can boys get caught, they just might find themselves facing, just because it’s the law, serious criminal charges.

The latest case of a cop getting caught with his pants and his victim’s pants down is 35-year-old former Boynton Beach, FLA Officer of the Month, Stephen J. Maiorino. Maiorino appears to be quite the swinging dick; his exploits include acting in an episode of “Cops” in 2010.

The alleged facts, as reported by Anne Geggis in the Sun Sentinel, are as follows.

• On Oct. 15, the alleged victim is left stranded in Boynton Beach. Her companion is arrested on a DUI and their car is towed.

• Our shining knight in armor Maiorino (don’t forget the inspiring words: “to serve and protect”) drives to where the alleged victim is stranded. His task is to drive her to the police station where her relatives are supposed to pick her up. This is according to the police affidavit.

• A lot of bad thoughts can pass through the mind of a corrupt officer of the law while escorting a vulnerable woman back to the station and based on what followed, it appears that Maiorino began fantasizing on how much fun it would be to forcibly have his way with the woman.

• By the time they got back to the station, Maiorino had apparently made up his mind. Anne Geggis writes: “(S)he tried to get out of the car, but Maiorino grabbed her by the wrist and demanded she perform oral sex on him, she told investigators. He told that if she didn’t comply, she would face a DUI arrest herself, the affidavit said.”

• The victim later told the case investigators that she complied out of fear. (Imagine, friends, if this happened to your daughter, and in today’s climate it could?) Maiorino, apparently, was just getting warmed up. He drove the victims “a short distance” away. He then forced her to take off her clothes. He then reportedly held her face down on the hood of the police car and raped her.

• During her statement after turning Maiorino in, the victim stated she could see the gun in the patrolman’s hand as he raped her. When it was over and she got dressed, Maiorino allegedly pointed the gun at her and “told her he would kill her and her family if she told anyone.” Nonetheless, she showed real courage and lodged a complaint six hours later.

• The victim took investigators to the crime scene the following morning. There they found a condom wrapper and a condom. Preliminary reports revealed the woman’s DNA was on the condom, the wrapper, and Maiorino’s underwear. OUCH!

• A review of Maiorino’s travels on the night of the incident shows that it took the suspect 54 minutes to transport to victim from where he picked her up to the station, even though the distance was a mere 20 city blocks.

Anne Geddis writes:

Maiorino turned himself in to the Palm Beach County Jail on Thursday. He is now on unpaid administrative leave and “will be fired,” Police Chief Jeffrey Katz said.

Maiorino, 35, was charged with armed sexual battery, armed kidnapping and unlawful compensation or reward for official behavior, according to a statement from Boynton Beach Police.

Police Chief Katz is not feeling good about what has transpired. Speaking the King’s English, he stated:

“I would like to say that I am both disturbed and disgusted by the nature of the complaint, the findings of the investigation, and indeed the very prospect that a law enforcement officer … could possibly exploit this trust in such a vile and inexcusable way.”

This could easily have been avoided if law enforcement personnel were routinely held to a standard commensurate with “serving and protecting”. Although Maiorino, an 8-year veteran of the force, received plenty of commendations including Officer of the Month during his first years with the Department, he has been slipping up badly for the past 3 years:

• He was slapped with a two-day suspension in 2011 for unsatisfactory performance and mishandling evidence.

• He received a one-day suspension in 2012 for violating prisoner transport and pursuit policy.

• He also crashed his patrol car on more than one occasion, including one time in April of this year when he ran into a fire hydrant.

Tsk, tsk, tsk…

David Ferguson of the Raw Story points out that in addition to Maiorino’s alleged rape, there have been several other recent presumably solid allegations of sexual and other misconduct by law enforcement personnel.

“In August, Officer Daniel Holtzclaw of the Oklahoma City Police Department was arrested and charged with threatening women with arrest if they did not comply to his sexual demands. Seven women have come forward to testify against Holtzclaw, who has is being held on $5 million bail.

In Nevada, Marshal Ron Fox was caught on video assaulting a woman in a Clark County courtroom, then arresting her for trying to report the attack, accusing her of false testimony against a law officer.”

Mr. Ferguson’s examples of sexual misconduct by law enforcement personnel are provided as backdrop to a new story that epitomizes the cavalier and contemptuous attitude of many police officers toward female victims of rape and sexual misconduct.

On May 18th, two Austin patrol officers were bragging and generally acting stupid after handling a minor fender bender. There’s nothing really wrong with that (as we all know, boys will be boys, though some would argue “boys” shouldn’t carry “guns”. In any event, an apparently attractive woman passes by and the following conversation ensues:

Officer 1: Look at that girl over there.

Officer 2: (blows his police whistle) Go ahead and call the cops. They can’t un-rape you. (laughter)

Officer 1: You didn’t turn your camera off, did you?

Officer 2: They can’t un-rape you.

An attorney found the cam footage while reviewing for a case and it has become public. The Austin Police Department is conducting an investigation and of course is stating that “the attitude and commentary depicted within this video are not consistent with the level of professionalism we expect of our officers and does not represent the values of the Austin Police Department.”

The obvious point here is that with law enforcement personnel committing various acts of sexual violence against women, rank and file cops on the street should not be acting as if the rape of women is one big joke. And keep in mind that the officers who have been arrested, are possibly only the tip of the iceberg.

The officers caught in the cam footage are still on duty pending the outcome of the investigation. Although they are liable to be reprimanded, I would be shocked if they were terminated over this matter. Rather, they will get a slap on the wrist and yuk it up all the way to their next pay check.

And now for our alleged criminal sexual allegations against a politician. David Edwards of Raw Story writes:

(It is noted that in this instance, law enforcement, to its credit, comes to the rescue of the women being allegedly raped.)

“The chair of a county Republican Party in Georgia was recently arrested after he was allegedly broadcast on Skype sexually assaulting and attempting to rape a woman.

On Wednesday, the North Georgia News reported that Union County Republican Party Chairman Billy Joe Turnage, 76, was facing charges of sexual battery and criminal attempt to commit rape.”

It’s not exactly clear who reported the incident to 911 dispatchers, but they were apparently informed of an ongoing “assault and rape” of a 39-year-old female at Turnage’s residence last week, which, curiously, was being transmitted on Skype.

Union County Sheriff Investigator Staff Sgt. Darren Osborn and deputies responded, began an investigation, the end result of which was the arrest of Chairman Billy Joe after two days of interviews. The victim is not believed to have been physically injured.

Billy Joe will be held in the Union County Jail until a bond hearing occurs at which time he is expected to make bail. Well of course…

* * * * *

So there you have it — cops and politicians in a good old-fashioned rape till you get caught  free-for-all. And let’s not forget the endless incidents of high school (and occasionally middle school) teachers (many of them women) endlessly seducing/molesting their young charges.

Or as the legendary English blues rocker John Mayall once sang:

“It’s a mean old scene when it comes to double-crossin’ time.”

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

Apparently neither the children of Georgia nor their parents have gotten the message that schoolyard bullying has had its day and that it’s time for children (and adults) to learn to treat one another with respect. Wishful thinking on my part? Well, perhaps, but let’s not forget that there was a time when women were disenfranchised (weren’t allowed to vote), not to mention the fact that as recently as the 1950s and 1960s, Jim Crow was the de facto law of the land throughout much — if not all — of the South.

With respect to bullying, however,we still have a long ways to go as the events in Carroll County, Georgia, graphically demonstrate.

Michael Walsh of the New York Daily News has the story:

A little girl, third grader Aolani Dunbar, 8, of Rootville, Ga. has been bullied unmercifully by her classmates for the last three years. In other words, she’s been targeted by her so-called “classmates” ever since she started school. The viciousness  of the harassment intensified after Aolani had extensions put into her hair on Sept. 28. The other children, egged on by two small, aggressive boys, began pulling her hair — HARD!

“The following Monday, kids started teasing her, telling her she was stupid to have a wig on her hair,” said Sarah Charles, Aolani’s mother. “We called the school on Tuesday saying that her hair was being pulled.”

The school either did nothing or did not do enough. The bullying and hair-pulling continued. Aolani’s mother continued to call Rootville Elementary School for the next two weeks, asking for the school to launch a real investigation. But either the message did not get passed on or the school did not care enough to take steps to solve the problem. In any event, according to Aolani’s family, no effective steps were taken to protect the girl from her tormenters.

Although Sarah Charles appears to have been quite diligent in calling the school administrators, she did not catch on to how severe the hair-pulling was for quite some time. Also, Aolani apparently kept the degree of the damage to herself for over two weeks. Then on Oct. 15, Sarah noticed an “ungodly smell” coming from Aolani’s head.

Sarah and other family members began removing the extensions to see what was causing the odor.

“There was a humongous sore,” Charles said. “The doctor at the emergency room had never seen anything like that.”

You can imagine the shock and sorrow Sarah must have felt when when the surveyed the damage. The continuous tugging and yanking had actually torn off part of Aolani’s scalp.

The massive wound on the crown of the child’s head was so serious that it was treated in the emergency room as if it were a burn.

Doctors say Aolani’s hair might never grow back on the damaged part of her scalp and she may need a skin graft. She also had to have the rest of her head shaved to avoid infection.

Although Aolani is recovering physically, she is still a wreck psychologically. She has been out of school for nearly three weeks now suffering from “severe headaches, anxiety and extreme humiliation.” She will be transferred to another school within the same district, according to Sarah.

*     *     *     *     *

WSB-TV, the first station to cover the case, reported that Aolani shaved her head to decrease the risk of infection. Several family members and friends shaved their heads as well in a gesture of solidarity.

The family said that two little boys were responsible for encouraging a larger group of students to “have a tug” at her hair. One of the boys got an in-school suspension, but the other has not been disciplined.

The Carroll County School District released a statement saying the “administration immediately investigated and dealt with the students who had engaged in the behavior and appropriate disciplinary action was taken against them.”

*     *     *     *     *

Yeah, right. Until the boys choose another victim to pick on. But I am reminded of what our friend Pitchforks points out in his post, “Leading Lambs to Syllabic Slaughter.” Pitchforks argues that it’s really rather senseless “to let the buck stop” with the child perpetrators. When children act out in cruel fashion, says Pitchforks (albeit far more eloquently than I am capable of), they are reflecting what they have been taught by their parents at home. Their cruelty doesn’t come out of nowhere. The parents are largely to blame and should be called out for their lousy parenting.

Suppose the parents of the two little boys who instigated the vendetta against Aolani were required to serve 300 or 400 hours of community service to demonstrate that they “get it” and will do their level best to ensure that their kids stop picking on the weaker children.

Of course, it will be a cold day in hell before this happens. Or will it? Time will tell, my friends. In the meantime, children like Aolani who are somehow perceived as being different or weird or somehow unacceptable to the mindless majority will continue to be scapegoats in this dishearteningly cruel world.

by BJW Nashe

A Comeback. J.D. Salinger, who died in January of 2010, is now poised to make a posthumous literary comeback. A probing biography released earlier this year sheds new light on the enigmatic author, whose life has been largely shrouded in mystery. After catapulting to fame in the 1950s, Salinger famously decided to retreat from public life. For nearly five decades, he lived as a New England recluse, closely guarding his privacy, shunning the spotlight of fame, and publishing no new material after 1965. His fans wondered whether he had given up on writing altogether. Now we know that he never gave up; he was writing new material all the time during his long silence. As many as five new books will be published during the next few years. For personal reasons, Salinger stipulated that none of this work be published until after his death.

A Strange Career. Salinger’s life as a great American writer was eccentric in many ways. By far the strangest aspect of his career is the way in which his most successful work, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), was linked to several notorious crimes in the 1980s: the murder of John Lennon, the attempted assassination of President Reagan, and the slaying of actress Rebecca Schaeffer. In each case, news reports informed us that the perpetrator had been somehow inspired by Salinger’s masterpiece. The crimes were so highly publicized, and Salinger’s link to them was so widely reported, that his classic novel became tainted by psychosis and murder. Caught up in a desperate whirl of mass media frenzy, The Catcher in the Rye — a book which is wholly unconcerned with criminal activity — came to be seen as a dangerous, malevolent work. It was even described as an “assassination manual” or “murderer’s handbook.” Salinger had not written a crime story, per se. Rather, he had written a book which inspired people to commit crimes. As ridiculous as this seems, the insinuation has stuck. Google the book now, and the murders inevitably pop up along with all the thousands of hits, tagging along like a cluster of nasty footnotes that won’t go away. In the new biography, an entire chapter — called “Assassins” — is devoted to the murder connection. This is now simply part of the Salinger mystique, stubbornly attached to the legacy of his best novel.

Biography. The reality and the mystique are both explored in the biography Salinger, compiled by David Shields and Shane Salerno. A fascinating read, this volume should keep fans and critics and armchair psychologists busy for quite some time. As the bio takes us through Salinger’s upbringing in New York City, his prep school education, early adulthood, and subsequent rise to fame, the biography provides us with a number of tantalizing details. We learn, for instance, that Salinger only had one testicle, a “deformity” which caused him considerable embarrassment in his extensive love life. Nevertheless, when Salinger heads off to attend the Valley Forge Military Academy, he is by all accounts a tall, handsome, and charismatic young man, eager to participate in the Glee Club, Aviation Club, French Club, and the Non-Commissioned Officers Club. We learn that his development as a writer was a painstaking process, aided in part by a creative writing class at Columbia, with only gradual acceptance from the editors at The New Yorker. We discover that throughout much of his life he was drawn to the company of younger women, often teenage girls not yet on the cusp of adulthood. He befriended them, mentored them, and even romanced them in his own way. There are no accusations of statutory rape — he apparently waited until the girls were 18 before he seduced any of them — but still the tendency is notable. Most important of all is the extent of Salinger’s gut-wrenching, mind-altering experiences as a soldier in World War Two. We are led to conclude that he most likely suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a result of the war. We understand that one way he coped was to withdraw from public life, taking up the study and practice of Vedanta Buddhism, rather than pursuing further wealth and fame and adulation. We learn that the reason he stopped publishing was to forgo the ego gratification involved.

A Controversial Classic. Well before it became tainted by murder, The Catcher is the Rye was viewed as a controversial classic of post-war American fiction, a quintessential portrait of adolescent angst. Since it was first published in 1951, millions have read it and debated its merits. School boards have tried to ban it. Moral proselytizers have attacked it. In hindsight, one struggles to understand what all the fuss was about. How could this compelling novel, filled with so much emotional insight and self-deprecating humor, ever be considered subversive or dangerous? No one denies it is an edgy work, conveyed in razor-sharp language. Yet compared to other books from roughly the same time period — the fever dreams of William Faulkner, the sociopolitical outrage of Richard Wright, or the ruthless amorality depicted by noir writers such as James M. Cain and David Goodis — Salinger’s tale of an alienated outsider is far from incendiary. No doubt Holden Caulfield is a troubled young man, and Salinger skillfully takes us deep inside Holden’s agitated mind as the story unfolds. But Holden never comes close to killing anybody. He never even harms anyone. We might argue that the novel could use a bit of crime, just to liven up the action. Who knows? Perhaps one of the yet-to-be-published Salinger books will be a sequel, in which Holden returns as a truly dangerous psycho. I seriously doubt it, though.

A Troubled Outsider. The story opens as Holden, a 16 year-old student, has just been expelled from prep school. We accompany him as he dons a red hunting cap and leaves his dorm room to spend a “lost weekend” in New York City. He ducks into bars, dances with girls, checks into a seedy hotel, pays for a prostitute with whom he just wants to talk. He gets very drunk. He visits former teachers and hangs out with his younger sister, Phoebe. Through all of this, he delivers a stunning informal commentary — a profanity-laced monologue that is closer to Lenny Bruce than to Charles Dickens. Holden is preoccupied with his personal problems, his sexual hang-ups, his powerlessness, and his inability to deal with life in the “adult world.” A juvenile existentialist, he broods over the meaninglessness of it all, and bitches about the “phonies” he sees all around him. Holden may be frustrated and angry and sarcastic, and he may be having a nervous breakdown, but he is keenly perceptive and quite compassionate. He wonders where the ducks in Central Park go during the winter. He agonizes over the death of his brother Allie from leukemia. He looks out for 10 year-old Phoebe. He daydreams about becoming a savior figure — a “catcher in the rye” — who will be able to rescue children from harm, protecting their innocence from the danger and corruption of the big bad world. The novel closes on what might be seen as a positive note, all things considered. Comforted by the memory of his sister riding a merry-go-round, Holden tells us he has spent some time in a mental institution, and that he now plans to go back to school, where he hopes things will work out better this time. Who knows how he will end up? His psychological problems, his sexual confusion, and his messianic complex are traits shared by many homicidal maniacs. Yet these traits are also shared by many people who never become violent at all. Holden’s compassion, however, probably sets him apart from most dangerous sociopaths. Plus he has a sense of humor. In any case, The Catcher in Rye is a virtuoso performance that succeeds in establishing a heightened sense of intimacy with readers. We feel like we know Holden Caulfield on a deep personal level.  For this reason, the book has struck a deep chord with millions of fans. A small number of these turned out to be seriously deranged.

“I am Going Nuts.” Mark David Chapman was a tormented young man who grew up in an abusive home, dropped out of high school, became a Jesus-freak, and developed mental problems that resulted in hallucinations and suicide attempts. By the end of the 1970s, as he was nearing the end of his tether, Chapman grew obsessed with two things: reading about Holden Caulfield, a character he strongly identified with, and killing John Lennon, whom he fixated on alternately as a hero and a villain. The crazier Chapman became, the more villainous Lennon seemed to be. Chapman evidently considered Lennon to be a “phony” because he was a millionaire rock star who claimed to be opposed to the evils of crass materialism. He was also dismayed by Lennon’s atheism. As Chapman’s mental state deteriorated, the warning signs were on full display. In a letter sent to a friend three months before his final break with reality, he wrote, “I am going nuts,” then signed the letter, “the Catcher in the Rye.” On the night of December 8, 1980, Chapman waited for Lennon outside of The Dakota apartment building in Manhattan. As the ex-Beatle emerged from a limousine and walked toward the building’s entrance, Chapman dropped into a crouch and fired four shots into Lennon’s back. Chapman remained at the scene of the crime, sitting on the sidewalk reading his dog-eared copy of The Catcher in the Rye. Inside the front cover, he had penned the following inscription: “This is my statement. [signed] Holden Caulfield.” As Lennon was rushed to the hospital, where he would soon be pronounced dead,  Chapman allowed police to arrest him without incident. In the days and weeks to come, he repeatedly told authorities that Salinger’s novel had been his primary inspiration for killing Lennon. He explained that he had been living and breathing inside Holden’s story for years, even re-enacting scenes from the book in his real life. As the whole world mourned the tragic loss of a beloved icon and world class talent, Mark David Chapman elicited nothing but revulsion and horror. During the avalanche of media coverage, Holden Caulfield, and his creator J.D. Salinger, were caught up in the undertow of suspicion and confusion.

“I Did it for Jodie.” John Hinckley grew up in the Dallas, Texas area. The son of a successful corporate executive who had ties to the Bush family, Hinckley was a bright student who played multiple sports in high school, excelled at piano lessons, and was twice elected class president. As a young man, however, he exhibited signs of psychological turmoil. He developed a fascination with firearms, and became consumed with various obsessions. Soon he was relying on anti-depressants and tranquilizers. Hinckley devoured The Catcher in the Rye, or rather, The Catcher in the Rye devoured Hinckley. Holden seemed to be reading his mind. The main trigger for Hinckley’s unraveling was not a book, however. He went hog wild over Martin Scorcese’s disturbing 1976 film Taxi Driver, about a social misfit named Travis Bickle who drives a cab in New York City. Brilliantly played by Robert DeNiro (“Are you talkin’ ta me?”), Travis the cab driver gradually becomes more and more unhinged, until he finally snaps, shaves his head into a mohawk, and goes on a murderous rampage. Hinckley saw the film at least 15 times, and grew dangerously infatuated with Jodie Foster, who portrayed an underage prostitute in the film. He went on to stalk the actress while she was a student at Yale University, repeatedly phoning her and slipping notes and poems under her front door. The plan to assassinate President Reagan was hatched in order to somehow impress Foster, and thus “catch her in the rye.” On March 30, 1981, Hinckley fired six shots at President Reagan outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C., seriously wounding the president as well as three members of his entourage. Hinckley was quickly subdued by police before he could do any more damage. A copy of The Catcher in the Rye was found in his hotel room. He reportedly told authorities that if they wanted to hear his defense, they should just read Salinger’s novel. When Hinckley’s trial resulted in a verdict of “not guilty verdict by reason of insanity,” public outrage led many states to rewrite the laws pertaining to criminal insanity. After his trial, Hinckley wrote that the shooting was “the greatest love offering in the history of the world.” Jodie Foster did not agree. Neither did anyone else. Even people who loathed Reagan’s politics were appalled by Hinckley’s actions.

No Exit. Robert John Bardo endured a troubled, abusive upbringing in Tucson, Arizona. After an adolescent suicide attempt, he was placed in foster care. At the age of 15, he was institutionalized for a month due to emotional problems. Bardo dropped out of high school in the ninth grade, and took a job as a janitor at the local Jack in the Box. As a young adult, he was arrested three times on charges such as domestic violence and disorderly conduct. He repeatedly alarmed his neighbors with strange and threatening behavior. In 1986, he began stalking a well-known American film and television actress named Rebecca Schaeffer. He wrote letters to her, attempted to gain access to her on the set of a TV show, and eventually tracked down her home address. He decided to bring a copy of The Catcher in the Rye along with him as he set out to pay her a surprise visit. When Bardo showed up at Schaeffer’s apartment, he told her he was a huge fan, obtained her autograph, and left. Fifteen minutes later, he suddenly returned. When Schaeffer asked him to leave, he grew agitated and claimed he had come to “rescue her.” He pulled a gun out of a paper bag, pointed it at her chest, and pulled the trigger. He then raced away, leaving her to die on the floor. Schaeffer was taken to the hospital by the paramedics, only to be pronounced dead on arrival. Bardo was later arrested when he was found walking around aimlessly in traffic. Police soon found Bardo’s copy of The Catcher in the Rye lying on a rooftop where he had tossed it as he fled the crime scene. Bardo insisted that bringing the book with him to the murder was purely coincidental, and that he was not emulating Mark David Chapman in any way. Oddly enough, Bardo claimed it was a song by U2 called “Exit” that had inspired him to kill Rebecca Schaeffer. At his trial, when the song was played in the court room as evidence, Bardo was seen lip-synching the lyrics.

The Paranoia-Critical Method. Reading Holden Caulfield’s narrative in The Catcher in the Rye as a call to murder is a ridiculous misinterpretation, reminiscent of Charles Manson’s bizarre take on the Beatles’ White Album, in particular the song “Helter Skelter.” I am reminded of Salvador Dali’s “paranoia-critical method,” which involved making random associations among various materials — the more shocking the better — as a way of generating outlandish content for surreal texts, paintings, and films. Dali was just seeking ways to shock the art world, though. Chapman, Hinckley, and Bardo, on the other hand, were deadly serious. They were not surrealists playing with dream-logic; they were bona fide paranoid schizophrenics. Their mental illness was so severe that they probably could have gleaned homicidal messages from a phone book or an automotive manual. Like Taxi Driver and U2, Salinger’s book just happened to be there waiting for them, as it has been waiting for millions of other readers who never committed any crimes. One shudders to think what would have happened if Mark David Chapman had grown obsessed with a truly violent book, such as Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. But then, does it even matter? Surely it makes no sense to blame books — fiction or nonfiction — for real world events. To do so is to lapse into a cause-and-effect fallacy. Influences and inspirations and triggers are not causes. They might form part of the backdrop or scenery of a crime, but they cannot be said to cause that crime. Strip away the faulty reasoning underlying paranoid associations, and we have to agree that murderers are at fault because of their own thoughts and actions, not because of anything that allegedly inspired them. Likewise, people are mentally ill because of faulty brain chemistry or traumatic experiences, not because of the books, films, and music they have been exposed to. The paranoia-critical method is fascinating when it comes to aesthetics. In the context of legality or morality, however, it serves no logical purpose, and only adds confusion to events that are already quite complex.

A Little Misreading. Oddly enough, the title Salinger chose for his masterpiece is based on an act of misinterpretation. In the novel, Holden overhears a small boy singing a popular lyric from Robert Burns. He may be hearing the lyric incorrectly, however. He thinks the boy is singing, “If a body catch a body coming through the rye.” The actual lyric, a piece of folksy Scottish doggerel, reads as follows: “Gin a body meet a body/Comin thro’ the rye/Gin a body kiss a body/Need a body cry?” Either the boy is singing incorrectly, or Holden is hearing it wrong. In any case, Holden goes on to concoct an entire scenario based on this scrap of lyric:

 “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.”

This is eons away from the original Burns lyric, with its raw energy and earthy sexual overtones. Holden has seized upon a faulty or misinterpreted lyric, and then developed his own conception of its meaning in order to satisfy a deeply personal yearning. Salinger is showing us that the paranoia-critical method is utilized more often than we might like to admit — sometimes in useful, creative ways, but often resulting in no more than delusion.

Corporate Media Follies. The fact that the press would latch on to the literary angle of Chapman, Hinckley, and Bardo’s crimes, thus implicating The Catcher in the Rye in the mayhem, is not all that surprising. Media frenzies thrive on this sort of confusion. Television personalities and talk show hosts enjoy their own version of the paranoia-critical method. Anything related to celebrity scandal and murder gets ratings, which makes a lot of money, which is all the establishment media really cares about. And corporate America, which is inherently conservative, tends to view most literary fiction, and most art in general, with deep suspicion. Whenever a work of art can be blamed for a specific atrocity or a certain social problem, the media is happy to jump on the bandwagon, fan the flames of outrage, and hopefully see a spike in ratings. That’s what happened with The Catcher in the Rye. Meanwhile, all around the country, people who should have known better began wondering if there was something evil about Salinger’s masterpiece.

Bad Intelligence. The simple fact of the matter is that regardless of any “psychic violence” that might lurk within Holden Caulfield’s narrative, a few remarks about “killing phonies,” tossed off here and there merely as a way of blowing off steam, do not constitute a “murderer’s handbook.” The stench of crime that follows The Catcher in the Rye is a gross example of guilt by association, which is a travesty. The novel can be discussed in various ways, in regard to numerous topics (mental illness, urban alienation, sexual confusion, dark humor, empathy and compassion, etc.). The text itself, however, has nothing to do with murder or crime, no matter what the schizophrenics say.

Cruel Irony. In the most compelling sections of the new biography, Salinger emerges as our foremost poet of PTSD, and The Catcher in the Rye starts to look more and more like a creative response to wartime trauma. In this light, Holden is best understood as a vehicle the author uses to grapple with his own PTSD symptoms. The PTSD angle then becomes emblematic of a more universal human frailty. Based on what we now know about Salinger’s war experiences, it is difficult to conceive of The Catcher outside of the context of PTSD. Like all great literature, The Catcher is a multi-faceted work, and there is no need to oversimplify. If the text can be likened to an organism, then Salinger’s PTSD might be working on just one organ, rather than controlling the entire being. It may be at the very heart (not the brain) of the novel, pumping lifeblood into all of its various outbursts and digressions and lamentations. All of which makes the “murderer’s handbook” tag line even more cruel and ironic. Despite its sour expression, Holden Caulfield’s story is not a nihilistic descent into madness and death. It is a desperate struggle to maintain hope and compassion in the face of such catastrophes.

Life During Wartime. Salinger was drafted into the army in the spring of 1942. Serving with the 12th Infantry Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, Salinger was involved in the D-Day invasion at Utah Beach, and then spent nearly 300 days in active service. He participated in the Battle of the Bulge, as well as the Battle of Hürtgen Forest. Primarily working with intelligence personnel, Salinger’s main task was interrogating prisoners. Still, he was in the thick of the deadly winter fighting, surrounded by death and destruction. Then, as the war concluded, Salinger was among the first soldiers to liberate one of the satellite sites of the Dachau concentration camp. The reality of the camp was too much to take for even the most battle-hardened solders: mass graves and barbed wire enclosures, piles of starved corpses, charred and smoldering remains, with a few straggling survivors weighing as little as sixty pounds. Many troops broke down weeping, never to fully recover from the shock and horror. For Salinger, who happened to be half-Jewish, seeing firsthand evidence of the holocaust was overwhelming. People say that he walked into that concentration camp in 1945, and never really managed to walk out. Years later, Salinger would tell friends that he could not rid his senses of the smell of burning flesh. How could such an experience not leave psychological scars? How could it not have a profound affect on one’s writing? The philosopher Theodor Adorno once remarked, “After the camps, there can be no more poetry.” New kinds of writing would be necessary now, in the traumatized postwar setting, and Salinger, shaken as he was by PTSD, proved that he was ready and able to rise to the occasion. And he would do so without even mentioning the war.

Poo-Tee-Weet. Salinger carried a draft of the first six chapters of The Catcher in his rucksack throughout his WWII service. Maybe the manuscript’s presence helped him persevere. The work certainly helped him forge ahead once he was back home. Perhaps writing was the best form of therapy. He never wrote directly about his firsthand experience of the war or the holocaust. Not everyone came back from the conflict ready to write an epic war novel such as Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Many struggled to communicate at all about what they had witnessed. Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a WWII veteran who witnessed the firebombing of Dresden as a POW, was open and honest about his own reticence. In the remarkable opening of Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut explains that he has been trying unsuccessfully for years to write his big Dresden novel, and that he is now forced to admit that he finds it impossible to do so. There will be no big Dresden novel. The best he can do is serve up a “jumbled and jangled” absurdist fable featuring Billy Pilgrim, a fatalistic optometrist who serves in the war, and is present at the Dresden inferno, just like Vonnegut was. Rather than attempt to realistically capture the firebombing, Vonnegut merely evokes it in a few brief scenes, then uses it as a springboard for Billy’s odd cosmic adventures. After Dresden, Billy becomes “unstuck in time,” skipping randomly through scenes in his life, even traveling to a distant planet called Tralfamador, where he is held captive by aliens, and forced to mate with a movie star. Whenever something terrible happens around Billy, such as the execution of a man in Dresden for petty theft, Vonnegut sums up the action with either the singing of birds – “Poo-tee-weet” – or the simple phrase, “So it goes.” Slaughterhouse Five is no less of a tragicomic masterpiece than The Catcher in the Rye, and Vonnegut’s book was similarly attacked and criticized for being “controversial.” Both novels spring from the same source of pain — namely, the madness and tragedy of war. Unlike Vonnegut, Salinger wrote no introduction explaining his novel in terms of his war experience. Holden Caulfield is not a WWII veteran; yet his psyche seems haunted by the PTSD associated with the war. We do not need a paranoia-critical method to understand how Holden Caulfield and Billy Pilgrim serve similar purposes for each author. Through these fictional characters, Salinger and Vonnegut were able to articulate a deep source of pain that they could not otherwise find the words for. By exploring these characters fearlessly, dispensing with any obligations to “literary propriety,” each author was able to transcend the original source of pain, and create lasting art. Far from being immoral or depraved or insane, these books served to advance the cause of humanism. In the aftermath of a terrible crisis, they offered the consolation of simple truths in a spirit of wisdom, humor, compassion, and peace. That is ultimately how these books will be remembered.

So it Goes. J.D. Salinger never made any public statement about his three worst fans — Chapman, Hinckley, and Bardo. People who knew the author say he was devastated by the way his novel’s reputation was being tarnished by such horrifying crimes. Salinger was a pacifist who disliked violence and controversy. He didn’t want to be a celebrity, yet he hadn’t withdrawn from the world completely. Like anyone else, he went out shopping, or to dinner and a movie. He liked to read the daily newspapers and watch the evening news in order to keep up with current events. One can only imagine what he was thinking and feeling as his best work became engulfed in a media frenzy and smeared on the basis of insane misunderstandings. No doubt this caused him a great deal of pain. Poo-tee-weet.

compiled by Patrick H. Moore

Beth Thomas was the angry little girl featured on the remarkable, albeit disturbing, HBO documentary, Child of Rage, which was released around 1990. She suffered from severe Reactive Attachment Disorder.

In an excellent blog post by marilyn4ever, posted on October 30, 2010, Marilyn details Beth Thomas’s story with empathy and apparent clarity. I strongly suggest you read Beth’s post and a second post critiquing a controversial treatment program for RAD called Attachment Therapy, as well as Marilyn’s follow-up post on Attachment Therapy called Beth Thomas, Candace Newmaker and Attachment Therapy Controversy.

Beth Thomas as an adult

(Disclaimer: This information is entirely new to me and I have no informed opinion as to Beth Thomas’s mental health (or lack thereof today) or the pros and cons of Attachment Therapy. I do think the Beth Thomas story and this general topic is quite fascinating and strongly recommend that anyone interested click on the provided links to learn more.)

Part One:

Here is a quick sketch of Ms. Thomas’s early childhood and alleged recovery:

Beth’s mother died when she was one year old. She and her infant brother Jonathan were left in the care of their sadistic father, who sexually abused her to an appalling degree. Beth and Jonathan were rescued by Child Services when she was 19 months old. By this point, she was horribly scarred. Beth and Jonathan were adopted by Tim and Julie, sincere church people, who had no biological children. Shockingly, Tim and Julie were told nothing about the children’s abusive background.

It wasn’t long until Tim and Julie discovered the horrible truth about Beth and Jonathan’s upbringing. Beth had recurring nightmares about a  “man who was falling on her and hurting her with a part of himself.” Beth masturbated several times a day until she bled and had to be hospitalized. She also poked pins into her brother. After some time had passed,  she smashed her brother’s head into the cement floor which required stitches. As Beth admits in Child of Rage in her soft, rather affect-less voice, her desire is to kill her brother. She also wants to kill her adoptive parents. Although Beth is perfectly intelligent and is well aware that her actions are wrong, she experiences no remorse. Based on the mounting danger that Beth is going to kill Jonathan, in early 1989, her parents took her to a therapist named Connell Watkins, who diagnosed Beth with a severe case of Reactive Attachment Disorder and began a course of intensive behaviour modification.

Based on the treatment plan, at first, all of her freedom was radically restricted. She was locked in her bedroom at night so she couldn’t escape or hurt anyone. Beth began to improve and the restrictions were slowly removed. Within one year, she was so much better that she was permitted to share a bedroom with the therapist’s own daughter. Measured by any yardstick, it was remarkable. She learned empathy and remorse and regretted her own cruelties and would weep openly when describing some of the bad things she had done, especially to her brother Jonathan.

Marilyn reports (and I believe many would agree) that Beth Thomas grew into a mentally healthy woman. She studied nursing, earned a degree, and has authored a book entitled “More Than a Thread of Hope.” She and her second adoptive mother, Nancy Thomas, established a clinic for children with severe behaviour disturbances. Nancy Thomas has written a book entitled Dandelion on my Pillow, Butcher Knife Beneath (Coping with Personal Problems). Their website is www.attachment.org.

Part Two:

Connell Watkins and the Death of Candace Newmaker

Although Connell Watkins arguably has done an amazing job of helping Beth Thomas recover from her intense abuse through a regimen consisting largely of strict rules and the gradual earning of privileges, by the time Candace Newmaker’s adoptive parents brought their troubled child to Ms. Watkins for therapy, Watkins had begun using far more controversial techniques including something called “rebirthing”.

Connell Watkins

The script for that fateful day called for Candace to be “wrapped in a flannel sheet to simulate a womb”. She was then told to extricate herself from the womb, the expectation being that the process “would help her “attach” to her adoptive mother.” What was peculiar about this was the fact that as Candace sought to “extricate herself”, four adults including Connell Watkins “used their hands, feet, and large pillows to resist her attempts to free herself”. It was all videotaped and the evidence shown at trial shows Candace screaming for help and air. Candace repeatedly stated “she was dying, to which Waktins co-therapist Julie Ponder responded, “You want to die? OK, then die. Go ahead, die right now”. At some point, Candace vomited and fouled herself inside the sheet. Her “therapists” still would not let her go.

Some 40 minutes into the session, Candace’s adoptive mother, Jeane Newmaker, asked her: “Baby, do you want to be born?” Candace faintly said “no”. This was the last word she ever uttered.

Julie Ponder responded in frustration, “Quitter, quitter, quitter, quitter! Quit, quit, quit, quit. She’s a quitter!”

Julie Ponder

Adoptive mother,Jeane Newmaker, felt rejected by Candace’s inability to be reborn and was asked “to leave the room, in order that Candace would not “pick up on (Jeane’s) sorrow”. Ultimately, only Watkins and Ponder were left in the room with Candace. When they finally unwrapped her from the sheet, “she was motionless, blue on the fingertips and lips, and not breathing.” Paramedics were called and were able to restore the girl’s pulse. She was helicoptered to a Denver hospital and declared brain-dead the next day, as a result of asphixia.

At trial, Watkins and Ponder were convicted of reckless child abuse resulting in death. They were each sentenced to 16 years in prison. Jeanne Newmaker pleaded guilty to neglect and abuse charges and got a four-year suspended sentence. Her charges were later expunged from her record. Watkins was paroled in June 2008 after serving 7 years, and placed under “intense supervision” with restrictions on contact with children or counseling work.

*     *     *     *     *

Although I stated at the beginning of this post, that I would not state an opinion on the pros and cons of attachment therapy, after reading about Candace Newmaker’s tragic demise, it’s hard not to. Please keep in mind that Nancy Thomas is Beth Thomas’s second adoptive mother, having replaced the church people, Tim and Julie, sometime after Beth’s recovery.

Marilyn writes in her blogpost, Beth Thomas, Candace Newmaker and Attachment Therapy Controversy:

It is Nancy Thomas’s association with Watkins and Ponder that I find worrisome in her work with Beth (Thomas). Nancy worked with Watkins and Ponder during the Newmaker murder. (It’s not clear what Nancy Thomas did during the death of Candace Newmaker. I see no evidence she was in the room at that time and she certainly was not charged with anything.)

Marilyn points out that Thomas owns two clinics “Families by Design” and “Stop America’s Violent Youth“. As an advocate and practitioner of Attachment Therapy (AT), she allegedly engages in techniques that include “screaming in the child’s face, shaking the child’s head violently, forcing the child to perform-type military exercise, isolation, food deprivation, taunting, rebirthing, and humiliation.”

This is some scary stuff, particularly considering what happened to Candace Newmaker. The fact that Beth Thomas works with Nancy Thomas is also worrisome and perhaps suggests that Beth has never truly moved beyond her own intense childhood trauma and re-visits it — in  a sense — each time she and Nancy Thomas engage in questionable therapeutic techniques with a client. But keep in mind, I am only speculating and I invite you to do the same.

by BJW Nashe

SerialKillersInk.net recently came out with their new Serial Killer Trivia Game. You can purchase it online at their web site. You can also purchase arts and crafts and mementos from an entire menagerie of convicted murderers. Same thing with web sites such as Supernaught.com and MurderAuction.com. Manson is a big attraction, of course. Plenty of his handicrafts are for sale. You can also find items pertaining to criminals such as Richard Ramirez, Ted Bundy, Kenneth Bianchi, Angelo Buono, Jeffrey Dahmer, etc. This is now a growing industry catering to folks who, for various reasons, enjoy collecting anything remotely associated with notorious criminals. No matter how much the self-proclaimed “defenders of public decency” try to shut it down, this market for “true crime collectibles,” or “murderabilia,” keeps on thriving.

Perhaps the infamous “killer clown” John Wayne Gacy, and his “artwork,” is where it all started. Gacy’s amateur paintings now fetch hefty prices of several thousand dollars apiece on the murderabilia market. While Gacy was living out his final days in jail prior to his execution, a Baton Rouge mortician named Rick Staton became his exclusive art dealer. Staton went on to become one of the top collectors of murderabilia in America. Some well known buyers of murderabilia include painter Joe Coleman, musicians Lux Interior and Poison Ivy from The Cramps, and shock-rock performer Marilyn Manson. The Son Of Sam Law does not allow killers to profit from their crimes (i.e. from movies or books), but murderabilia has flourished on the Internet (despite being forbidden on eBay), and new laws have been difficult to pass, due to obvious first amendment concerns. Sales and purchases of these alternately morbid and ridiculous items is likely to continue.

Some of the loudest critics of murderabilia inadvertently have only served to draw more attention to this whole weird brand of commerce. John Walsh from the TV show “America’s Most Wanted,” and Andy Kahan, a former parole officer in Texas who now runs the mayor’s crime victims’ office in Houston, have both condemned murderabilia as a “sick and disgusting business.” What better marketing could you hope for, if you are an entrepreneur operating way out on the cultural fringe?

One can easily understand how murder victims’ families might be upset about their loved ones’ killers being glorified by the murderabilia market. Sometimes, however, it seems that they just want a sizeable piece of the action. They are less likely to be upset if the majority of the proceeds ends up in their pockets. When the U.S. government auctioned off a small fortune worth of junk that belonged to Unabomber Ted Kaczinski, there were no cries of outrage, because all of the money went to the victims’ families. Likewise, when Jeffrey Dahmer was murdered in prison before a deal could be finalized regarding book and movie rights — once again with all money going to the families of the victims — those families were apparently dismayed that they would be missing out on some good hard cash. And who can blame them, really? But doesn’t that implicate these families in the whole murderabilia racket? In an excellent article for the Media/Culture Journal in November 2004, David Schmid analyzes this quandary at some length:

“…When Jeffrey Dahmer was murdered in prison in 1994, the families of his victims were delighted but his death also presented them with something of a problem. Throughout the short time Dahmer was in prison, there had been persistent rumors that he was in negotiations with both publishers and movie studios about selling his story. If such a deal had ever been struck, legal restrictions would have prevented Dahmer from receiving any of the money; instead, it would have been distributed among his victims’ families. Dahmer’s murder obviously ended this possibility, so the families explored another option: going into the murderabilia business by auctioning off Dahmer’s property, including such banal items as his toothbrush, but also many items he had used in commission of the murders, such as a saw, a hammer, the 55-gallon vat he used to decompose the bodies, and the refrigerator where he stored the hearts of his victims. Although the families’ motives for suggesting this auction may have been noble, they could not avoid participating in what Mark Pizzato has described as “the prior fetishization of such props and the consumption of [Dahmer’s] cannibal drama by a mass audience.” When the logic of consumerism dominates, is anyone truly innocent, or are there just varying degrees of guilt, of implication?”

None of the artwork or handicrafts or tools or vats or refrigerators associated with the criminally insane has any special value in and of itself. They are only “collectible” because of the horrible crimes with which they are tainted. They have some spooky aura about them, I suppose, like primitive idols or sacrificial altars. But they are basically nothing more than trash, when you get right down to it. The flotsam and jetsam of society, randomly assembled. At the online stores, you can view terrible paintings and drawings, cheap jewelry, crummy knicknacks, illegibly signed documents and postcards, used candy wrappers, even nail clippings and skin scrapings. It’s all on sale. Items that cost more than $50 or so can be accompanied by a “certificate of authenticity.” It’s rather surprising just how banal so many of the items are. Imagine the frenzy that would ensue if a pair of Jodi Arias’s panties appeared on this market.

In the end, these “collectibles” strike me as being no more interesting than the criminally insane individuals they are linked to. Which is not all that terribly interesting. Others may have a different opinion. But I think just about everyone would agree that, regardless of ethics and values, and no matter how “sick and disgusting” it may appear, the murderabilia market’s continued success is a fascinating phenomenon. The way in which these items are obsessively sought after and advertised and collected is intriguing on many different levels. The culture of murderabilia seems to serve as a kind of bizarre parody of American capitalism and commodity fetishism in general. It raises all sorts of questions regarding the value we assign to things, and the type of things we use as identification markers for ourselves and our communities. No doubt, the murderabilia market forces us to confront the horribly important role played by murder in the history of our society.

Anyone want to buy a Christmas card from the Son of Sam?

by Darcia Helle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Modern Day Executioners Despise the Death Penalty

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

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

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

Frank Lloyd Wright and the Great Gasoline Mass Murder

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

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

The Electric Chair Nightmare: An Infamous and Agonizing History

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

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

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

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

Why Should I Believe You? The History of the Polygraph

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

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

The Terror of ISO: A Descent into Madness

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

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

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

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

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

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

One of the burning questions in the world of crime is whether vigilante justice is ever justified. Many of us, deep within our being, probably sympathize with people who “justly” take the law into their own hands to obtain rough justice in an even rougher world. On the other hand, even as we empathize with the wronged individual, and perhaps even — to some degree — cheer them on as they reap their revenge, we are also painfully aware that the meting out of justice should be left to the courts and that, in fact, a defendant’s right to due process is absolutely essential if we are to live in a civilized society.

In the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s great yet highly disturbing film, The Virgin Spring, a proud and noble father, upon encountering the herdsmen who have raped and murdered his beautiful daughter, literally murders them with his bare hands.

After it’s all over, the father repents and asks God’s forgiveness for his vengeful actions. He also states that he will build a church on the site of his daughter’s murder. But despite his repentance and desire for atonement, he also cannot help asking why God would allow such a horrendous thing to be visited upon his family.

Now, we have a somewhat similar situation arising in Northern India, with the important differences that the victim child was raped but not killed, and the father, who sought and obtained problematical “justice” by killing the rapist, now faces serious criminal charges. Thus, unlike in the Bergman film, where the proud father has only God to answer to, in our modern scenario, the father must now face the wrath of the state.

Here is what happened, according to Ananya Bhardwaj, writing in the Journalism of Courage section of the Indian Express:

A day after a father tortured his daughter’s alleged rapist to death, he told police that he did not mean to kill but could not bear that his pregnant 14-year-old would find no justice.

Because the rapist, who appears to have been the Indian equivalent of a pharmaceutical agent, threatened the victim child with dire circumstances if she told anyone about the sexual assault, the child kept the awful news to herself and the family only found out after taking the child to the doctor.

Ms. Bhardwaj writes:

The father told police that he found out about his daughter’s alleged rape only a week ago, after doctors at a local hospital informed him about her being pregnant. “She started complaining of morning sickness and dizziness. We took her to a doctor and we were told that she is pregnant. We were shocked,” the mother of the girl said.

Once her pregnancy was revealed, the child finally mustered up the courage to tell her parents that the agent, who lived in an apartment in the same building, and often took care of the girl and her siblings, had taken her to his room and raped her while the family was away.

Thus, it’s not unreasonable to surmise that the rapist may have been planning to make his move for some time, and at the very least, had been lusting after the child in the dark corners of his mind. (All men know that it’s not unnatural for the male of the species to occasionally think a wayward thought about or cast a wayward glance at an under-aged teenage girl, but all men also know that should this occur, propriety demands that we put the thought out of our minds and go on to something more appropriate like cricket or losing money in the stock market. Under no circumstances are we allowed to act upon our wayward desire.)

The poor mother poignantly describes how her daughter changed after the rape and the ensuing pregnancy:

“She stopped smiling. She stopped eating properly or going out with her friends.”

After the father learned what had happened, he reports that his initial response — after deciding not to go to the police for fear popular opinion would blame the whole thing on his daughter – was to invite the alleged rapist to dinner at his apartment to ask him why he had raped his daughter. But, the father reports, when questioned, “instead of feeling sorry, the victim started to use offensive language.”

Big mistake. At that point, the father reports he lost it, and after torturing the agent by burning his genitals with hot iron tongs, he killed him, probably by suffocation. After the father confessed, a forensic team was sent to the crime scene. The “body of the agent was found on the bed, with his hands and mouth tied with a towel,” according to the police.

The fact that the iron tongs were not only available but were used on the agent may suggest that the father had a backup plan in readiness in the event the agent was uncooperative. It could also suggest that the father was never intending on listening to the alleged rapist’s “side of the story” in the first place (as if a rapist can have a valid “side of the story”).

In any event, the father stated that after he killed the agent, he sat next to the body weeping. He then went to the police station to surrender where he stated:

“He was dead…I did not want to kill him.”

Thus, once again we see the futility of useless regret after the damage has already been done.

The police report that they recorded the father’s statement and took him into custody and that the victim’s body was sent out to be autopsied.

Tragically, the deceased agent, who was 45, had six children, four of them daughters.

The alleged killer is 36 years old.

* * * * *

I have little sense of what kind of prison sentence the father is now facing. I am also concerned that the pregnant daughter will be chastised by the society in general. India is a land where rape appears to be even more common than it is here in the States, and that’s a scary thought.

The father’s understandable desire for vigilante justice notwithstanding, his hot-headed actions have caused far more harm than good. The sad truth is that the impulse to take the law into one’s own hands rarely results in much good for anyone involved. Although Bergman’s classic film makes for great theater, it provides little solid practical advice for dealing with the perils and pitfalls of real life and the infernal problems it sometimes presents.

adapted by Patrick H. Moore

Sooner or later we all face that moment of truth — the Grim Reaper comes knocking and there’s no way to talk him out of it. Some of us will handle it bravely; others may flinch and quail. I suspect that in our private moments many of us wonder whether we’ll be up to the task when that day of reckoning comes. Here, therefore, as a sort of twisted inspiration, are some truly badass final statements by some strong — and in some cases evil — condemned men. The list was compiled by Ian Cheesman of Cracked, who also gets credit for much of the humor and for calling the statements “badass”, which they truly are. The quotes are in the public domain.

Carl Panzram, Serial Killer, about to be hanged:

“Hurry up, you Hoosier bastard, I could kill ten men while you’re fooling around!”

Panzram also stated on another occasion:

“I have no desire whatever to reform myself. My only desire is to reform people who try to reform me. And I believe that the only way to reform people is to kill ‘em.”

Chief Sitting Bull’s final words when he was about to be shot by 43 members of the Bureau of Indian Affairs:

 ”I am not going. Do with me what you like. I am not going. Come on! Come on! Take action! Let’s go!”

The Chief also stated on another occasion:

“I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle.”

George Engel, union activist and founder of the Socialistic Labor Party of North America as he awaited hanging:

“Hurrah for anarchy! This is the happiest moment of my life.”

Engel was convicted of Conspiracy in the famous Haymarket Square labor riots in Chicago in 1893 which resulted in the death of seven policemen and four civilians.

Giles Corey, colonial farmer and accused Massachusetts Bay Colony witch, while being crushed with stones, in a futile attempt to make him confess his crime:

“More weight. Add more stones.”

Corey never did confess as the life was slowly squeezed out of him. I’m convinced he was innocent. You probably are too.

James French was a convicted murderer serving life in prison in Ohio. He decided a life sentence was just too long and decided to force the issue by killing his cell mate. His plan worked and he was given the electric chair. Unphased by it all, but glad to be going, French quipped as they strapped him in:

“Hey fella! How about this for a quote for tomorrow’s paper? ‘French fries.’”

French is not known to have made any other notable statements.

While facing the Irish Free State firing squad, Irish nationalist Robert Erskine Childers insisted on shaking hands with every marksman and then encouraged them to:

“Take a step forward lads — it’ll be easier that way.”

Childers was also a poet and novelist and wrote three respected spy novels: Riddle of the Sands; The Great Impersonation; and The Czar’s Spy.

And then there was Tom “Black Jack” Ketchum, a thief, a murderer, and worst of all a “morning person.” He was wide awake for his early morning hanging and full of “piss and vinegar”.

“I’ll be in hell before you start breakfast! Let her rip!”

Ketchum’s executioners apparently didn’t appreciate being subjected to his racket so early in the day. They accidentally on purpose gave his line some additional slack which caused him to be decapitated when he dropped through the gallows.

by Darcia Helle

August 15th of this year marks the 100th anniversary of the most gruesome mass murder Wisconsin has ever seen. The story has all the makings of a New York Times bestseller or blockbuster movie. We have the wealthy and world-famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who had the sense of entitlement that often accompanies being born into a respected and prestigious family. We have a torrid love affair, the ensuing scandal, and, of course, the crazed killer.

The roots of this tragedy go back to Chicago, circa 1909. By this time, 42-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright was already well-known as the leader of the “Prairie School” school of architecture. He’d been married to Catherine Tobin for 20 years and they had six children together. His life was, on the surface, idyllic. But Wright did the unthinkable; he fell in love with a client’s wife. Her name was Mamah Borthwick Cheney, and their affair rocked Chicago society.

Wright abandoned his wife and children, fleeing to Europe with his mistress and her two children, John and Martha. Not wanting to face the scandal back in Chicago, but wanting to return to the US, Wright decided to build a home on his maternal family’s land in Wisconsin. This new home was a sprawling one-story estate with multiple surrounding buildings, situated on 31.5 acres of land. And, like all proper estates, this one had a name. Because the estate sat on the brow of a hill, leaving the top of the hill unencumbered, Wright called it Taliesin, meaning “shining brow”.

In 1911, Wright, Borthwick — who by then had dropped her married name — and her two children quietly moved to Taliesin. Eventually the press discovered their presence, but the ensuing frenzy came and went. Wright and his new family then settled into a routine, with him back at work and Borthwick caring for the children and watching over the home. Their household staff included Julian and Gertrude Carlton, a married couple from Barbados. Gertrude did the cooking, while Julian filled a variety of roles from handyman to butler. Julian was considered well-educated and likable, though beneath that façade he apparently hid something dark and vicious.

On August 15, 1914, Frank Lloyd Wright was in Chicago on business. Mamah Borthwick had a house full of staff and workers, including a carpenter and his 13-year-old son. That afternoon, per family custom, Julian served dinner to the men in a separate room reserved for workers. Mamah and her two children ate on the veranda. As the men were eating, Julian entered the worker’s room and asked William Weston, the carpenter, for permission to get some gasoline in order to clean a rug. Weston gave his consent.

In retrospect, it was strange that Julian Carlton bothered to seek permission to get some gas. From this point on, the facts are fuzzy, but the order of events following his peculiar request seem to be as follows:

Julian, hatchet in hand, went to the veranda where Mamah and her two children were eating lunch. Catching them completely off guard, he first swung at Mamah Borthwick, killing her with a single blow to her face as she sat in her chair. Julian then turned to John, aged 11, quite literally hacking into the child before he had a chance to move. Martha, aged 9, tried to run, but Julian easily caught and killed her. He then poured the gasoline over their bodies and lit them on fire.

Julian took his hatchet and the rest of his gasoline back to where the men were dining. He poured the gasoline under the door and set the room ablaze. The room erupted in flames. One of the workers, Herbert Fritz, happened to be by the window, and was able to break it and dive out. This caught Julian unprepared and Fritz was able to escape. He broke his arm in the fall and his clothes were on fire, so he rolled down a hill to extinguish the flames which saved his life.

Emil Brodelle came next, but this time Julian was ready and he swung his hatchet taking his life. William Weston and his son Ernest then fled the flames straight into Julian’s bloody blade. Julian struck William as he launched himself through the window. William stumbled, then got to his feet and ran across the courtyard. Julian raced after him, striking him with the hatchet a second time. Weston crumbled to the ground and, likely thinking he was dead, Julian left him and returned to his carnage.

David Lindblom got past Julian with a nasty but non-fatal blow to the back of his head with the blunt edge of the hatchet. He was not so fortunate in escaping the fire. Despite Lindblom’s severe burns, he and William Weston managed to run to a neighboring farmhouse a half-mile down the road to call for help. Lindblom remained at the neighbor’s home, while Weston returned to the Wright’s estate to help the fire brigade extinguish the flames. The efforts, though, were futile. In less than three hours, most of Taliesin’s main house was reduced to ash.

In all, seven people lost their lives at Julian Carlton’s hands. They were: Mamah Borthwick, John and Martha Cheney, Emil Brodelle, Thomas Brunker, Ernest Weston, and David Lindblom, who later died as a result of the burns. Only William Weston and Herbert Fritz managed to survive the ordeal.

Hours after the fire, Julian Carlton was found hiding in the basement’s fireproof furnace. He’d swallowed muriatic acid (household name for hydrochloric acid) in a failed suicide attempt. An angry mob attempted to lynch him, but the police intervened and safely transferred him to county jail. Over the following two months, Julian starved himself to death. He refused to talk or explain his actions, and died without ever offering a reason for the brutal murders.

Gertrude Carlton was found in a nearby field that fateful day, apparently unaware of her husband’s intentions. She was taken into custody, but released shortly afterward with $7 and a train ticket to Chicago.

Survivors don’t offer us much in the way of insight. Later testimony stated Julian Carlton had once accused everyone in the Wright household of “picking on him”. One theory is that Julian’s primary intent was to murder Emil Brodelle, who had called him a “black son-of-a-bitch” just days before the massacre. Some claimed Julian had a disagreement with Mamah Borthwick and she’d fired him, giving him two weeks’ notice. Others said his wife Gertrude wanted to return to Chicago, and so he’d given notice on his own.

Whatever the truth is, we do know that Julian had been showing signs of psychological disarray. Gertrude stated that he’d been agitated and paranoid in the days leading up to the murders. He’d been acting strangely, staring out the window long into the night and sleeping with his hatchet beside the bed. Sadly, either no one tried or no one was able to intervene before his mind snapped and he went on his brief but gruesome rampage.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s grief struck deep. He could not bear to hold a funeral for Mamah Borthwick, but he did fund and attend services for all his employees. Angry about the hurtful gossip that had followed them throughout their relationship, Wright made a final tribute to the woman he loved in a letter he addressed “To My Neighbors”. It reads, in part:

Mamah and I have had our struggles, our differences, our moments of jealous fear for our ideals of each other—they are not lacking in any close human relationships—but they served only to bind us more closely together. We were more than merely happy even when momentarily miserable. And she was true as only a woman who loves know the meaning of the word. Her soul has entered me and it shall not be lost.

For months afterward, Wright suffered from conversion disorder, which is a psychological disorder thought to be brought on by severe stress. His symptoms included insomnia, weight loss, and temporary blindness. His sister, Jane Porter, took care of him during this time. As we know, Frank Lloyd Wright eventually recovered and continued on with his career, and came to be known as the most famous architect in American history. Julian Carlton, however, forever altered the course of his life, separating him forever from his dear Mamah.

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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.

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