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

We’re all probably familiar with the horrible dream scenario where you’ve been having a bad dream and you wake up, only you’re not completely awake, and you remember your bad dream with a sinking heart wondering if it really happened, and then as the cobwebs start to slowly lift you gradually realize that the “dream” was only a “bad dream” and a feeling of vast relief floods your system.

But what if this is precisely your situation and what if it wasn’t a dream but rather a TV show about a murder and as you watch it (or afterwards), you realize to your horror that YOU ARE THE MURDERER? Worthy of Edgar Allan Poe or the Twilight Zone, you say?

This is the peculiar scenario a 53-year-old man named Pedro Hernandez finds himself in concerning the now 35-year-old disappearance of missing poster child Etan Patz.

On the morning of Friday, May 25, 1979, six-year-old Etan Patz left his SoHo apartment in New York City. It was his first time walking the two block from his house to the bus stop by himself. Etan wore a blue captain hat, a blue shirt, blue jeans and blue sneakers. He never reached the bus stop. When he did not come home when school ended, his mother called the police. Etan’s disappearance helped spark the missing children’s movement, including new legislation and various methods for tracking down missing children, such as the milk-carton campaigns of the mid-1980s. In fact, Etan was the first ever missing child to be pictured on the side of a milk carton. He was declared legally dead in 2001.

Etan’s case was officially re-opened in 2012 and on April 19, 2012, FBI and NYPD investigators began excavating the SoHo basement of 127B Prince Street, near the Patz home. It had been discovered that case files revealed the basement had been newly refurbished shortly after the boy’s disappearance in 1979. The basement had been the workshop and storage space of a carpenter who had previous contact with Etan as well as many others in the neighborhood at the time. After a four-day search, investigators announced there was “nothing conclusive found”, including any skeletal or human remains.

It was while watching a TV show about the search of the basement workshop that Pedro Hernandez realized (or re-realized) that he had murdered Etan Patz by strangling him. But although he was quite sure he was the killer, he was not 100 per cent certain.

Jennifer Peltz writes for the AP:

“‘Did I (do) it?’ . It was just a thought that came into my head,” Pedro Hernandez recalls in the psychologist’s report, part of a recent court filing that adds new details about his defense in a case that galvanized the missing-children’s movement. “I was, like, nervous and questioning myself … trying to make sense.”

Hernandez would soon tell police he did choke 6-year-old Etan Patz in 1979, confessing after investigators were tipped (off) that he’d spoken of having harmed a child. But defense psychological experts later found him unsure of whether the brutal scenario he’d described was real or imaginary.

“I believed it in my mind that I did it, but I don’t think I did it,” Hernandez, 53, told one psychologist.

It turns out that Hernandez’ belief that he may have been the killer was not an entirely new realization for him in 2012 after watching the TV show. In fact, back in the early 1980s, he had reportedly told various people including his ex-wife (with whom he’d remained friends) and a church prayer circle that “he’d hurt an unnamed child in New York City.”

But although Hernandez may have confessed his alleged crime to various people 30 years ago, when questioned by the authorities, these folks provided widely varying tales. One person remembers him saying he’d dismembered a boy, while another recalls him strangling a child after being hit with a ball. The reports were all over the map and “even the child’s race varied, according to one of three recently filed defense psychologist’s reports.”

But based on the reports, old and inconsistent though they were, the investigators met with Hernandez in May of 2012 and questioned him for more than 6 hours. At some point in the interrogation, Hernandez confessed on video that “he choked Etan, put the still-living boy into a plastic bag, stuffed the bag in a box and dumped it on a street.”

“I felt like something just took over me.”

Hernandez has been on anti-psychotic medication for the past ten years. He has been diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder, the characteristics of which include social isolation and odd beliefs.

In the course of his police interrogation, Hernandez said that he’s seen visions of his deceased mother. In his conversations with defense psychiatrists, he explained that he has heard voices ordering him around intermittently since his teens. He’s also seen furniture move without any sign of moving men and has observed people no one else sees hanging around around his house. He told his doctors that “a voice told him to approach Etan and that several mysterious people followed along during the attack, though he also said the memory “feels like a dream,” according to the psychologists’ reports.

Defense psychologist Bruce Frumkin believes that Hernandez’ psychological problems and intellectual limitations (his IQ in the bottom 2 percent of the population) put him “at much greater risk than others” of falsely confessing and make it difficult for him to distinguish real life from fantasy. Frumkin writes:

“His delusional thinking and hallucinatory experiences could have easily caused him to convince himself he was somehow responsible for the boy’s death when in fact he was not.”

This week the judge ruled that at Hernandez’ trial set for early next year, the jurors will be allowed to hear his confession, and that it will be up to them to decide how much weight to give it. Thus the curious borderland between belief and reality “is shaping up to be a central issue in his murder trial.”

Needless to say, the prosecution insists that his confession was entirely legitimate and they will be attempting to limit the admissibility at trial of “expert testimony on the psychological phenomenon of false confessions.”

“We believe the evidence that Mr. Hernandez killed Etan Patz to be credible and persuasive and that his statements are not the product of any mental illness,” the Manhattan district attorney’s office stated.

The prosecutors naturally have their own psychologists’ evaluations of Hernandez, which to date they have not disclosed. They do note, though, that Hernandez was never hospitalized for psychological problems before his arrest and that he’d been able to hold jobs, apply for government benefits and, on occasion, discuss religion.

Technically, the prosecution has requested that the judge limit any potential false confession expert testimony to factors accepted by the “scientific community,” based on a New York legal standard. Hernandez’s lawyer, Harvey Fishbein, stated, however, in court papers filed by the defense, that testimony provided by Hernandez’ doctors will meet the criteria propound by the “scientific community”.

* * * * *

I suspect that in reality the jurors get it wrong much of the time. How often? 20 per cent of the time? 30 per cent of the time? My point is that the evidence provided at trial often does not provide solid and unequivocal proof of who did what. Just last week, I read a 1,000 page trial transcript and came away from it quite certain that based on the evidence, it was impossible to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt whether the defendant was actually guilty. Yet the jurors chose to convict in relatively short order.

In the case of Pedro Hernandez, I suspect that there is no way on earth that the jurors will be able to conclude with certainty whether or not his confession was valid. Yet, more than likely, they will reach a hard and fast verdict to acquit or convict (probably the latter) at the end of the trial.

In a sense, the jurors will find themselves in a position not unlike Hernandez himself.

Hernandez: Did I kill Etan Patz? I think I did but I’m not sure.

Jurors: Is his confession valid? We think it is but we’re not sure.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?”

“We have, your Honor. We find Pedro Hernandez _____ of the murder of Etan Patz…”

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

You know I feel so dirty when they start talking cute
I wanna tell her that I love but the point is probably moot — “Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield

Most of us have struggled with romantic jealousy from time-to-time, especially when we were young. If you are young and you find yourself in this uncomfortable position, I suggest that you find some effective way to distract yourself from the green-eyed monster. If you’re a guy, you might plunge body and soul into the NFL (Hell, I’ve done that for much of my life and still haven’t sustained a concussion) or find a new subject for your romantic desire. If you’re a girl, you may want to turn to your best friends to commiserate or go out on the town for some fine cuisine, or, when the time is right, find a new boyfriend.

When Pedro Bravo found himself in this position in 2012, he did not turn to the NFL. Nor did he find a new subject for his desire. (Note that I avoid using the word “object”. Women (and men) are not “objects” and should not be thought of in that manner.) Instead, he allegedly concocted a plan to murder his longtime pal Christian Aguilar.

Allegedly is probably no longer the operative term here considering that on Friday, a jury of his peers needed only a few hours to find Pedro guilty of  seven charges which unfortunately included kidnapping and murder.

On the witness stand, Pedro argued that although he intended to kill his best friend Christian (never kill a Christian; it’s bad karma), he couldn’t go through with it and instead injured him and left him lying by the side of the road. Although I suppose this could be true, the jury certainly didn’t see it that way.

That fact that Christian ended up good and dead undoubtedly did not help Pedro’s cause. This, in combination with other strong evidence sealed the deal.

Deborah Hastings of New York Daily News writes:

It took only hours after both sides finished arguing the case for the jury to come back with a guilty verdict on all seven charges, which included murder and kidnapping.

One hour after the verdict, a judge sentenced Bravo to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the murder conviction. A shackled Bravo denied he killed his friend before the sentence was handed down.

“I did not kill Christian Aguilar,” Bravo told the court. “I did not do anything to hurt my friend beyond that point that caused him to die. I know in my heart what I did and God know(s) what I did. I’ll take whatever sentence is given to me … and I will do it.”

Based on the judge’s sentencing decision, however, Pedro has little choice other than to accept the sentence meted out to him.

There were two very powerful pieces of evidence that worked against him:

First, Bravo purchased a shovel, sleeping pills, duct tape and a knife in Gainesville, where he and Christian were attending the University of Florida, shortly before taking him on his final ride.

During closing arguments, prosecutor Bill Ezzell put it this way:

“He literally bought the murderer’s starter pack.”

While testifying on his own behalf on Thursday, Bravo claimed that he purchased the items because he intended to kill himself, but then couldn’t go through with it.

The problem with this explanation, as I see it, is that Bravo had no way to explain away the shovel simply because once dead, he would have no way of burying himself. Though if you really wanted to get technical, I suppose he could have dug a grave for himself prior to swallowing the pills. He could then have climbed down in the grave, duct taped his mouth and nose to start the process of asphyxiation, and then ran himself through with the knife. Then, while bleeding copiously, with his last remaining strength, he could have reached up and pulled the dirt down over him, covering himself. At least that’s how I would have done it.

But to return to our starting point, it was jealousy that caused Bravo to kill Christian. He and Aguilar had been friends for years, but according to the authorities, they had a falling out over a girl, Erika Friman, who used to date Bravo. The relationship did not work out and Erika began seeing the 18-year-old Aguilar.

All three young people had all attended Doral Academy and then ended up in Gainesville to attend college.

The second strong piece of evidence that the prosecutor brought up in court was the fact that Bravo asked his iPhone Siri app where to find a proper remote location to bury Aguilar’s body. According to the evidence, Siri asked Bravo: “What kind of place are you looking for?” and provided possible locations including ‘swamps’, ‘reservoirs’, ‘metal foundries’ and ‘dumps’.

To make it worse, WFOR-TV claims that Bravo’s statements to police concerning the night Christian died kept changing.

Apparently, Bravo initially stated that “he and Aguilar had been riding in his car when the two argued over Friman. But on the witness stand Thursday, Bravo admitted he had physically attacked Aguilar and the two got into a fistfight.”

“I strike him with an open palm on the face and I strike him again on the other side of the face and then I slip and hit him with an elbow,” Bravo testified.

Bravo told the Court that he then left Aguilar on the side of the road, injured but still alive.

Bravo was arrested shortly after Aguilar’s body was found weeks later in a field.

*     *     *     *     *

Although some commentators have been having a bit too much fun with this story, riffing on Bravo’s lack of “smarts” (and I’m also obviously guilty of this), the fact of the matter is one young man is dead and a second young man will spend the rest of his natural days in a Florida state penitentiary, all because Bravo allowed himself to become convulsed with jealousy when Ms. Friman started dating Christian. I can’t help but wonder to what degree the fatal flaw of machismo figured into this off-kilter equation.

by Lise LaSalle

On June 27, 2010, 25-year old Emma Czornobaj stopped on Highway 30 west of Montreal to rescue some ducks crossing the road. She parked on the left-hand lane, put her blinkers on and proceeded to get out of her Honda Civic to push the ducks out of harm’s way. A first motorist went around to avoid her car but a second one carrying a father and his 16-year-old daughter riding in the back, collided with her car and they both died as a result.

Even with no criminal intent attached to her actions, Emma was convicted of an offence that carries a maximum life sentence; the jury that deliberated four days, found her guilty of two counts of criminal negligence causing death and dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing death which could lead to a maximum sentence of 14 years.

Emma was ready to plead guilty to some of the charges but with no jail time. Her lawyer Marc Labelle tried to negotiate a deal with the Crown but nothing came of it. The case was in the media so they wanted their pound of flesh and insisted she did jail time.

Labelle insists to say that Canadian criminal law is not designed to handle such a case that found his client guilty of criminal negligence causing death. At trial, Labelle acknowledged his client’s action was ‘’open to criticism’’ and even ‘’dangerous’’, but he vehemently denied it was criminal.

“There may be room here in this case. But we’ll evaluate that: (whether) to ask the (Quebec) Court of Appeal if the way that a jury has to (consider) criminal negligence in Canada should be revised. Here we have a situation where the act was considered dangerous by the jury — that’s obvious. But there was no ill will at all — no alcohol, no speeding, no race. In a case like this, the instructions that the judge gave (to the jury) are a little bit unjust for a citizen in this situation.”

He also specified that he didn’t have a problem with the instructions Superior Court Justice Éliane Perreault provided to the jury before they deliberated.

“What I’m saying is that the instructions (all) judges are obliged to give on criminal negligence can’t suit a case like this. What the jury is asked is: consider the act, if it is dangerous, objectively, then you may infer there was a crime.’’

This case is stretching the limits of the criminal negligence definition and dangerous driving. Emma was an animal lover and when she stopped on the highway to avoid a family of ducks, she did put her hazards light on and never imagined that the outcome would be the loss of human lives.

Soon after she stopped, the motorcycle driven by André Roy and his daughter Jessie slammed in her car but he was driving exceedingly fast and wearing no helmet. A woman driving behind Emma had managed to avoid hitting her before Roy crashed into her car.

Her lawyer said she made a decision open to criticism with no ill will. She wanted to rescue some ducks. “You can’t judge this based on the type of animals involved. For example, what if this were four Labrador puppies.’’ Some people are having a field day because she cared about ducks.

Her lawyer, fiercely defends her saying it wasn’t a crime and that while she certainly has a fair amount of critics, her actions are not criminal and do not warrant prison.

Some factors beyond Czornobaj’s control included the position of the setting sun that night as drivers were headed west, and the speed at which Roy was driving his Harley-Davidson when it crashed.

Pauline Volikalis, the wife and mother who lost two family members in this accident says she doesn’t blame the young woman who will be charged in their deaths. When asked by reporters if she wants Emma to go to prison, she had no comments and said that she wished nothing of the sort for the defendant.

Volikakis insisted tat she had not pushed for charges against Czornobaj and was unable even to say whether she considered it a good thing the trial was held.

“It’s not me that’s bringing her to court,” she said. “I have no expectations concerning this trial.”

But she hopes the publicity will reinforce a basic message to drivers.

“Future and present drivers should know that we don’t stop on highways, and it’s very dangerous. Even if it’s a small animal that we like or that we want to preserve, we should not stop on the highways,” she said. “It’s not a place to stop.”

Czornobaj was willing to plead guilty as recently as April but refused to do jail time. She now has a sentencing hearing scheduled for August.

Lawyer Marc Labelle said his client was shocked by the verdict. He said the jury decided there was a criminal element to what she did. He said he might file an appeal.

“So now we are at the sentencing stage in this case. The question we have to ask is that considering the nature of the facts, it is rare that we have criminal negligence where there are no bad elements. This was not a race. This was not a person who took a chance and drove drunk. This is not about someone who was speeding and took a risky maneuver,” Labelle told reporters while suggesting his client might only merit a sentence that can be served in the community.

During the trial, a witness testified that she saw Czornobaj on the left-hand side of the highway, bent over and motioning to some ducks.

“I shouted to my children: ‘What is she doing there? She’s going to get killed,’” she noticed that the driver’s door of the parked car was open and she saw her car lift up in the air from the impact.

Emma, as a professed animal lover, told the court that she did not see the ducklings’ mother anywhere and planned to catch them and bring them home. She could easily would have been the one killed. Her actions were naïve but well-intentioned.

Labelle said he will use the next few weeks to decide if he will ask for a pre-sentencing report when the case comes back to court on Aug. 8. The report would involve a criminologist looking at many aspects of Emma’s life, as well as her attitude towards what she’s been convicted of, and make recommendations to the judge. Czornobaj, a financial analyst who graduated from Concordia’s John Molson School of Business, has no criminal record. She also made the dean’s list at Concordia while she studied there.

Emma’s actions are hard to understand but no one can deny that she intended to help animals and never imagined that she would cause a highway accident.

The fact that Pauline Volikalis does not blame her for the loss of her family, considering the circumstances, should have been sufficient to let her cut a deal involving community service. But as usual, the media glare made the Crown eager to shine in the spotlight.

When it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a duck and Emma is not a criminal but a fine young lady who made a huge mistake. She should not end up in prison for it. She will no doubt, live the rest of her life haunted by this ride to hell and the two people who lost their lives because of her impulsive decision to save baby ducks.

 Update: 

Sadly, the wife and mother of the two victims, Pauline Volikakis, has changed her mind and now says she wants Emma Czornobaj to face a sentence that reflects the gravity of her decision. She made her case against leniency at Czornobaj’s sentence hearing. 

The Crown is seeking a nine month prison term for Czornobaj and 240 hours of community service. The defence agrees with the 240 hours of community service, but is arguing for a suspended sentence with three years of probation, saying there was no criminal intent. 

Despite a public apology to Volikakis from Czornobaj in an interview with CBC News in July, the grieving wife and mother said Czornobaj should have done so sooner — and to her personally.  

“Why didn’t she do so following the accident? She never once tried to contact me. During the trial she had opportunities to speak to me,” Volikakis said. 

Czornobaj’s mother, Mary Hogan, told during the hearing that her daughter is sorry about the accident, which has affected her profoundly. 

“It changed who she was, at her very core… It was something she couldn’t talk about or share with us at all… She just couldn’t accept that it had happened,” she said.

Visit Lise Lasalle’s website, The Trouble with Justice

by BJW Nashe

The Zodiac Killer is responsible for the most confounding series of murders in the history of American crime. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Zodiac terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area community with senseless shootings and stabbings, followed by a series of bizarre letters and phone calls which taunted the press and police, and threatened the public at large with further violent acts. Despite years of frenzied investigation, he was never captured. To this day, his identity remains a mystery.

This mystery has captivated the imaginations of many. The stories of obsession that follow in the wake of the Zodiac are just as fascinating and disturbing as the crimes themselves. Leading the pack is Robert Graysmith, whose true crime book, Zodiac and its follow-up, ZodiacUnmasked , was made into a brilliant 2007 feature film by David Fincher, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., and Mark Ruffalo in leading roles. Graysmith, who worked as a political cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle at the time of the Zodiac murders, had an insider’s perspective on the case, which served as the foundation for his subsequent investigation, resulting in the books that have made him famous.

At times Zodiac reads like an edgy thriller written by Don DeLillo or Bret Easton Ellis or Chuck Pahlaniuk, which is altogether fitting, since the Zodiac himself is our most infamous postmodern serial killer.

To grasp what I mean by this, consider the JFK assassination, by way of comparison. JFK’s death in Dallas in 1963 can be viewed as our nation’s first major postmodern event, insofar as the central truth of what happened on that November day has remained elusive, or absent, while a whole plethora of different interpretations, based on a seemingly never-ending supply of information, continues to expand and multiply. Famous English author J.G. Ballard used to quip that the Warren Commission Report on JFK’s death was the greatest novel of the 20th century. Painstaking descriptions of the arrangement of boxes in the book depository, for instance, or the design of the presidential limousine, are considered by Ballard to rival the best experimental fiction produced by nouveau romanciers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet. Though sorely lacking in “truth” (and in fact more concerned with obscuring, than revealing, the truth), the Warren Commission Report more than delivered the goods in terms of weird fiction. A more “unreliable narrator” for those tragic events, and that mass of details, would be hard to find.

Likewise, the Zodiac Killer inhabits a similar zone of manic indeterminacy. The horrific murders remain unsolved, the full truth never revealed, and the criminal’s identity and motives remain shrouded in mystery. Meanwhile, the investigations and interpretations continue to spiral outward, generating more and more complexity and confusion. From each crime scene, we are led directly into the prison house of language, where we must struggle to make sense of the Zodiac’s letters and cryptograms. These strange “clues” supplied by the killer only lead us deeper into a labyrinth of never-ending interpretation. This is both maddening, and to some extent fascinating, depending on your point of view. It’s easy to see how anyone interested in crime can become more than a little obsessed by the case. And it’s no wonder that the articles and books and films keep on appearing.

The historical context here is crucial. It seems only fitting that the Zodiac Killer should emerge during the tumultuous late 1960s. The year 1968 in particular was remarkable in many ways. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy left the nation reeling in anger and sorrow. Race riots erupted in cities across the nation. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago turned into an ugly, televised streetfight between cops and protesters. The Tet Offensive in Vietnam led to some of the bloodiest fighting in that conflict. The hippies’ 1967 “Summer of Love” had quickly devolved into hard drug abuse, mass arrests, and homelessness.

Yet life in the sleepy East Bay town of Vallejo, located some 30 miles north of Oakland, probably seemed rather detached from the insanity of the nightly news, and big city problems such as violent crime and drugs and riots. On December 20, 1968, the man who would become known as the Zodiac changed all of that. When David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen, two teenagers from Vallejo who had driven to a remote area off of Lake Herman Road in Benicia, were found late that night, killed by multiple gun shot wounds from a 9 mm Luger, the brutality and randomness of the crime shocked the entire community. Local police struggled to find any leads or possible motive for the murders.

On July 4, 1969, another young couple was attacked while parked in a car at the entrance of the Blue Rock Springs Park and Golf Course in Vallejo. Michael Mageau and Darlene Ferrin were both shot multiple times, again by a 9 mm Luger. Ms. Ferrin was pronounced dead at the hospital. Mr. Mageau managed to survive despite being shot multiple times in the neck, face, and chest. Within an hour of this incident, the killer placed a phone call to the Vallejo Police Department, claiming responsibility for the crime, as well as for the previous Lake Herman Road murders. The police traced the call to a phone booth at a gas station located less than a mile away from Ferrin’s home, and only a few blocks from the Vallejo Police Department.

Then the letter-writing campaign began. And it is here, in the letters and cryptograms attributed to the Zodiac, that we see the case take on its own particularly postmodern flair–and its own unique horror. The only possible precedent is the frenzy of speculation surrounding Jack the Ripper’s murders in London. The Zodiac, however, proved to be far more prolific than the Ripper. And the Ripper didn’t draw up any cryptograms.

On August 1, 1969, three letters prepared by the killer were received at the Vallejo Times Herald, the SF Chronicle, and SF Examiner. In addition to taking credit for the shootings at Lake Herman Road and Blue Rock Springs, each letter also included one-third of a 408-symbol cryptogram which the killer claimed contained his identity. The killer demanded they be printed on each paper’s front page or he would“cruse [sic] around all weekend killing lone people in the night then move on to kill again, until I end up with a dozen people over the weekend.” 

On August 7, 1969, another letter was received at The San Francisco Examiner with the salutation, “Dear Editor, This is the Zodiac speaking.” This was the first time the killer used the name which would become his calling card. The letter was a response to Police Chief Stiltz’s request for more details that would prove he had killed Faraday, Jensen and Ferrin. In it, the Zodiac included details about the murders which had not yet been released to the public, as well as a message to the police that when they cracked his code “they will have me.”

On August 8, 1969, Donald and Bettye Harden–a couple of amateur sleuths from Salinas, California — managed to decode the 408-symbol cryptogram. It contained a misspelled message in which the killer claimed that his purpose was collecting slaves for the afterlife. No name appears in the decoded text; in fact, the killer indicated that he would not give away his identity because it would slow down or stop his slave collection.

The Zodiac’s third attack was even more chilling than his first two. On September 27, 1969, two college students picnicking at a secluded spot on the shore of Lake Berryessa in Napa County were attacked. Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard were approached by a man armed with a gun and wearing a black executioner’s-style hood with clip-on sunglasses over the eye-holes and a bib-like fabric on his chest that had a white 3″x 3″ symbol of a circled cross on the front. The hooded man claimed to be an escaped convict from Montana, where he had killed a guard and stolen a car. He explained that he needed a car and some money to get to Mexico. Despite Hartnell’s attempts to reason with him, he tied up Hartnell and Shepard with lengths of plastic clothesline. He then drew a knife and viciously stabbed both of his captives over and over again. Leaving both victims for dead, the attacker then hiked 500 yards back up to the road to draw a circled cross symbol on Hartnell’s car door with a black felt-tip pen. Beneath the symbol, he wrote: “Vallejo/12-20-68/7-4-69/Sept 27–69–6:30/by knife.”

Hartnell and Shepard were rescued by park rangers after a man and his son, both fishing nearby, heard their cries for help. Shepard died after lapsing into a coma on the way to the hospital. Hartnell would eventually recover from his wounds. Both Shepard, prior to her death, and Hartnell while hospitalized, were able to provide police with a detailed description of their ordeal. Shortly after this attack, Zodiac again placed a call to the police–this time to the Napa County Sheriff. The call was traced to a pay phone just a few blocks away from the Sheriff’s Office.

The brutal savagery of the knife attack, along with the frightening hooded costume and circled cross insignia, the eerie message scrawled on the car, and the audacity of the follow-up phone call, only served to heighten the growing terror. It appeared that a homicidal maniac was on the loose. While writers of crime and horror fiction live to dream up this kind of material, to have it play out in real life was nearly too much for the public to handle. People were afraid to send their kids off to school.

To add to the sense of cultural shock, down in Los Angeles at this time, the murder of Sharon Tate and her friends at the hands of Charles Manson’s deranged followers had the entire Southern California region gripped in fear. Late summer and early autumn in 1969 was quite a time for Golden State. And there was still the Rolling Stones free concert at Altamont to look forward to. The Hells Angels would be hired to keep everybody safe.

Up in the Bay Area, the Zodiac wasn’t finished yet. On October 11, 1969, he entered a taxi cab driven by Paul Stine at the intersection of Mason and Geary Streets in downtown San Francisco. Near the intersection of Washington and Cherry Street, Zodiac shot Stine once in the head, took Stine’s wallet and car keys, and tore away a section of the man’s bloodstained shirt tail. Three teenagers witnessed the crime in progress from across the street, and notified the police. However, the police dispatcher inexplicably sent out an alert for a black man as the suspect. In an excruciating twist to the whole story, at one point, a mere two blocks from the crime scene, Officer Don Fouke, responding to the call from dispatch, observed a stocky white man walking along the sidewalk. Fouke actually asked this man–presumably the Zodiac, if he had seen anything strange. The Zodiac said he had seen a man running in the other direction with a gun, and the cop car sped off. The was the closest anyone would ever come to catching the Zodiac Killer. But it was not to be, due to a linguistic slip involving a racial mix-up. An intensive search ensued, but no possible suspects were found. A police artist worked with the three teen witnesses  to prepare a composite sketch of Stine’s killer.

Following the taxi cab murder in the city, San Francisco Detectives Bill Armstrong and Dave Toschi were assigned to the case. Toschi, a charismatic figure at SFPD, would be the inspiration for the Harry Callahan character in the 1971 film Dirty Harry, in which the villain, referred to as “Scorpio,” was clearly modeled on the Zodiac.

The San Francisco Police Department investigated an astonishing 2,500 suspects over a period of many years following the Stine murder, all to no avail. Both Toschi and Armstrong would be tormented and enraged by the Zodiac, their own personal health and well-being jeapardized by their inability to crack the case. It is worth pointing out that at the time, police departments from different cities and counties were not too willing to fully cooperate with each other on cases. Inter-departmental task forces were not exactly standard practice. Police were not geared for cross-country murder sprees. When Robert Graysmith, researching his Zodiac book, began to look at the evidence from all four attacks as a single unfolding story, he was able to uncover more information and make more connections than any of the actual detectives.

At the time, however, without the benefits modern forensics science, and with no murder weapons and no matching fingerprints, what the detectives mainly had to work with, in addition to witness statements, were the letters. Handwriting analysis took on a newfound sense of urgency with the Zodiac. The case became an exercise in semiotics. Psychologists and criminologists were consulted. The killer’s mental state was analyzed. The letters seemed to indicate a degree of sexual sadism. Toschi speculated that the Zodiac must have been masturbating as he wrote them. In any case, there was ample opportunity to explore various interpretations, because the letters kept coming in, with the now customary opening line, “This is the Zodiac speaking.” The killer clearly thrived on the public attention and notoriety he was receiving, typically demanding that the newspapers print his deranged missives in their entirety, or else he would retaliate by going on a rampage. At one point he insisted that people in San Francisco start wearing “Zodiac buttons” around town. This trend never quite caught on.

• On October 14, 1969, the Chronicle received a letter from the Zodiac, this time containing a bloodstained fragment of Paul Stine’s shirt tail to prove he was the killer. The letter also included a threat about killing schoolchildren on a school bus. Zodiac claimed that his plan was to “just shoot out the front tire & then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.”

• On November 8, 1969, the Zodiac mailed a card with another cryptogram consisting of 340 characters. The 340-character cipher has never been decoded. Numerous possible solutions have been suggested, but none can be claimed as definitive. Perhaps it is just gibberish.

• On November 9, 1969, the Zodiac mailed a seven-page letter ridiculing the two policemen who pulled over and spoke with him just three minutes after he shot Stine in the taxi cab. Excerpts from the letter were published in the Chronicle on November 12. That same day, Officer Don Fouke wrote a shamefaced memo explaining what had happened that night.

• On December 20, 1969, exactly one year after the murders of David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen, the Zodiac mailed a letter to famed San Francisco Attorney Melvin Belli, “the Duke of Torts.” In this letter, which included another swatch of Stine’s shirt, the Zodiac claimed he wanted Belli to help him:

“Dear Melvin, This is the Zodiac speaking. I wish you a happy Christmass [sic]. The one thing I ask of you is this, please help me. I cannot reach out for help because of this thing in me won’t let me. I am finding it extreamly [sic] difficult to hold it in check I am afraid I will loose [sic] control again and take my nineth [sic] and possibly tenth victom [sic]. Please help me I am drownding [sic]. At the moment the children are safe from the bomb because it is so massive to dig in & the trigger mech requires much work to get it adjusted just right. But if I hold back too long from no nine I will loose all control of my self & set the bomb up. Please help me I can not remain in control for much longer.”

Spelling was clearly not one of the Zodiac’s strengths. Or were the misspellings just a ruse? Likewise, was the plea for help in fact genuine? Or some sick joke? The Zodiac, or someone claiming to be the killer, had reached out to Belli once before, with a request that either Belli or F. Lee Bailey appear on the local television show “A.M. San Francisco,” hosted by Jim Dunbar. Bailey was not available, but Belli was able to rush over to appear on the program. In a truly surreal episode in TV history, Dunbar appealed to the viewers to keep the lines open, and eventually, someone claiming to be the Zodiac called several times, saying his name was “Sam.” Belli engaged in a series of on-air conversations with the caller about headaches and aspirin and chiropractors, and agreed to meet with him outside a thrift shop in Daly City. The suspect never showed up. The caller was later identified as an inmate of a mental asylum, not the actual Zodiac.

The Zodiac’s threats to detonate bombs or shoot at school buses induced terror throughout the Bar Area community. None of these threats ever materialized, however.

On March 22, 1970, another deadly attack was apparently attempted, but narrowly averted, in Modesto, California. A woman driving from San Bernardino to Petaluma with her ten month old daughter was experiencing car trouble. A man offered to give her a ride to a nearby service station. Inside the car, he may or may not have threatened to kill her. Evidently he drove around for 90 minutes without stopping. She may have leaped out of the car and fled with her child. It is unclear exactly what happened, due to conflicting statements and reports. The man did match the description of the Zodiac. And the Zodiac did claim to be the man involved in subsequent letters. But who knows?

Who indeed? It is impossible to do justice here to the incredible twists and turns of this meandering case as it dragged on through the years. Police began to suspect that the Zodiac may have been responsible for the murders of Robert Domingos and Linda Edwards, who were shot and killed on June 4, 1963, on a beach near Gaviota. Likewise, police considered a possible link to the murder of Cheri Jo Bates, who was stabbed to death and nearly decapitated on October 30, 1966, at Riverside City College in Riverside. And police were also concerned that the disappearance of Donna Lass might be the Zodiac’s doing. Ms. Lass was last seen on September 6, 1970, in Stateline, Nevada. A postcard with an advertisement for a condominium complex near Lake Tahoe on the back was received at the Chronicle on March 22, 1971, and has been interpreted as the Zodiac claiming Lass was one of his victims. However, no evidence was uncovered to definitively connect Donna Lass’ disappearance with the Zodiac.

Throughout 1970, the Zodiac continued to send regular letters and greeting cards to the Chronicle. He threatened to bomb school buses. He took credit for multiple killings that could not be verified. He kept score of how many killings he had committed (his final tally was 37). He sent a ghoulish Halloween card and death threat letter to reporter Paul Avery, who had been writing up the Zodiac story for the paper.

Then, abruptly, the letters stopped. No new crimes were boasted. No threats issued. Nothing, for three whole years. Was the Zodiac running out of steam?

It wasn’t until January 29, 1974 that the killer was heard from again. On that day, the Chronicle received a letter from the Zodiac praising The Exorcist as“the best saterical comidy [sic]“ that he had ever seen. The letter included a snippet of verse from an executioner’s song in The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan, as well as an unusual symbol at the bottom that has remained unexplained by researchers. Zodiac concluded the letter with a new score, “Me = 37, SFPD = 0.”

A handful of other letters were sent during 1974, but their authenticity is debated. The avalanche of publicity that had engulfed the Zodiac story during the past several years had produced plenty of copycat activity, including fake letters and prank calls. And police were presented with innumerable leads that turned out to be simply wild goose chases or attempts at revenge. If you were angry at your ex-husband or your step-father, one surefire way to get even was to claim that he was the Zodiac Killer. No wonder Detectives Armstrong and Toschi were nearly driven mad by the case. Red herrings were everywhere. The cops could never seem to zero in on a single suspect and obtain enough evidence to even come close to an arrest, let alone pursue a conviction.

And now the Zodiac seemed to by laying low. The question is why? One can’t help but assume that a serial killer who craved attention and notoriety would keep pushing the envelope. The natural progression, in fact, would seem to culminate in a highly publicized arrest and trial. Many serial killers probably want to be captured; this ensures them some degree of personal celebrity. Thus Ted Bundy and Richard Ramirez get to enjoy stacks of fan mail and love letters in prison. John Wayne Gacy was able to see his clown paintings sell for thousands of dollars apiece. Charles Manson gets to do interviews with the tabloid media, while his fans manage his website and sell his murderabilia.

One of the strangest things about the Zodiac case is that by the mid 1970s he eschews this sort of celebrity altogether. He simply stops communicating. He presumably stops committing crimes (though we can’t be sure), and has no desire for further attention. Why? Did he get sick and die? Did he become too incapacitated to function anymore as a serial killer? Did he retire? Was he somehow cured of his mental illness? What happened? We simply do not know. If nothing else, the Zodiac remained a true enigma.

In a March 30, 1978 front page re-cap of the Zodiac case for the San Francisco Examiner, Detective Toschi stated:

“I think he’s alive. It’s almost a gut feeling. But, if he had been killed in an accident or committed suicide or been murdered, I believe someone would have gone into his room. And I think he would leave us something to find.”

Toschi went on to explain that, “He got his pleasure by telling us about the murders. My guess is that he hasn’t been killing. Ego is what forced him to kill and write letters, knowing the media would broadcast and print it. I think he is in a period of remission and that some symptoms abated. Perhaps during this period, he had no desire to kill.”

A month after this statement to the Examiner, Toschi himself became embroiled in a controversy that seems emblematic of the strangeness of the Zodiac case as a whole.

Shortly after Toschi’s statements to the Examiner, it appeared that the Zodiac had broken his silence. A letter to the Chronicle, dated April 24, 1978, was initially deemed an authentic work from the Zodiac. This would have made it the twenty-first letter from the killer since 1969. The letter read as follows:

“Dear Editor, This is the Zodiac speaking. I am back with you. tell herb caen I am here, I have always been here. That city pig toschi is good. But I am smarter and better he will get tired then leave me alone. I am waiting for a good movie about me. who will play me. I am now in control of all things.”

The letter was big news. Toschi, and his principle case and personal obsession, were back in the news. Then, a few months later in July, Toschi’s world came crashing down. “Shocker in S.F. Zodiac Case,” screamed the headline in the Oakland Tribune. After eighteen years as a star of the elite homicide squad at SFPD–nine of those years spent relentlessly chasing  the Zodiac–Toschi was being demoted to Pawn Shop Detail. The story that unfolded was both silly and scandalous.

Apparently a complaint against Toschi had been filed on June 6, 1978 by Chronicle columnist Armistead Maupin (and his publicist). Maupin thought that the tone of the recent Zodiac letter was similar to certain anonymous letters he had received praising Toschi. Maupin had featured Toschi as an advisor to one of his characters in his “Tales of the City” serial. In the serial, Toschi helps to arrest a Zodiac-like serial killer known as “Tinkerbell.” Maupin suspected that the anonymous fan letters praising Toschi were in fact written by Toschi himself–as a form of self-promotion. Thus, Maupin claimed there was reason to suspect that Toschi had also forged the last Zodiac letter.

Toschi admitted to writing and sending the fan letters to Maupin. It was a lark, he said, a way for he and his family to have fun with his characterization in Maupin’s popular column. But he dismissed as absurd the notion that he forged any letter from the Zodiac. Experts tended to agree with him. Nonetheless, Toschi’s reputation was damaged. And his enemies at SFPD, who resented his fame, were able to capitalize on his indiscretion. Armistead Maupin garnered a fair bit of publicity. And somewhere, if he was still around, the Zodiac was no doubt having a good  laugh.

The April letter’s authenticity continued to be debated. In his book Graysmith claims that his own deep analysis of the letter led him to a kind of breakthrough. He asserts that he came to the realization that the Zodiac didn’t actually write any of the letters, so much as he traced their contents using a stenciling method, whereby each character was drawn according to outlined characters compiled from the handwriting of various others.

It’s all very complicated and strange–a fine example of how a particular controversy can emerge and then morph into some new discovery, which in turn leads to a whole new set of questions and any number of possible theories. There’s no end to this, when it comes to the Zodiac case. After April 1978, though, there were no further communications attributed to the Zodiac himself.

By 1986, when he finally publishes his meticulously researched book, Graysmith claims he has solved the mystery of the Zodiac’s identity. And while the case Graysmith builds against the man named Arthur Leigh Allen is made fairly convincingly, the proof does not lead us beyond a reasonable doubt. No doubt Graysmith has enough circumstantial evidence to make Allen a leading suspect. Which is what Detectives Toschi and Armstrong thought all along, and which is why they investigated Allen at considerable length. They simply could never obtain any physical evidence to arrest him and press charges. Allen was a sociopath, a possible child molester, and all-around unpleasant person. He made incriminating statements, owned a typewriter that may have produced the letters, wore a Zodiac watch, and most importantly, could reasonably be placed at the scene of each murder. But whether he was without a doubt the Zodiac Killer–we just can’t be sure at this point. And since Allen died in 1992 of natural causes, he will never be prosecuted for any of the crimes. Readers of Graysmith’s books will have to make up their own minds. These books have their admirers and their detractors. Regardless of whether you agree with his conclusion or not, Graysmith’s Zodiac is a tremendous book which reads frighteningly well. It certainly presents a thoroughgoing account of the whole baffling affair, and all of the personalities involved.

Of course, one’s enjoyment of Graysmith’s true crime writing may depend on one’s comfort level with a high degree of indeterminacy and doubt. With the Zodiac Killer, we remain trapped in a kind of hall of mirrors. There is no truth in this funhouse, no certainty, no confidence. Just horrible crimes, accompanied by a confusing jumble of partial evidence, conflicting information, hearsay, and theories. No matter how obsessed we might become with all of this material, we only seem to end up with more questions. The books and films may be brilliant, yet we must, in good conscience, remain unconvinced. In the end, the cryptograms turn out to be indecipherable. The letters have no ultimate meaning.

Perhaps the Zodiac was French deconstructionist philospher Jacques Derrida. I don’t have any hard proof, but it makes sense, when you think about it. The Zodiac case seems to deconstruct itself as it proceeds with each new set of ciphers, and each new theory.

In any case, it’s hard to conceive of any other high profile case that could log so many police hours, and generate so much discourse, and yet still remain unsolved. Imagine if the Tsarnaev brothers, for instance, instead of being killed or captured following the Boston bombing, were to spend the next several years hiding out, setting off a few more bombs and there, and sending out bizarre letters to the press, without ever being caught. This would be unthinkable for us, in our present context.

Which leads to a final question worth pondering: in our current society, with our rapid flow of digital information and our advanced surveillance and DNA testing and paramilitary police forces, is a postmodern serial killer such as the Zodiac now rendered obsolete? Would such a phenomenon even be possible anymore? We shall see what our new “information age” has in store for us.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

There may be no way to adequately re-create the process by which our canine friends were domesticated and transformed into “man’s best friend”. My fantasy is that in various parts of the world long ago, while our cave dwellers were holed up in their humble shelters trying to steer clear of the marauding beasts that roamed the dark night, they became aware of random canines or canine precursors sniffing around outside, intent on coming in out of the cold. Some of the more imaginative among our earliest ancestors may have offered the olive branch to the canine creatures and somehow, as the centuries passed, dog and man learned to first tolerate one another before tapping into the peculiar destiny of (man + faithful dog = unbreakable unit till death do us part).

My fantasy on how the domestication process developed is almost certainly dead wrong, however. Wikipedia, in an article, describes how dogs were really domesticated:

The origin of the domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris or Canis familiaris) began from a single domestication of a now-extinct wolf-like canid in Western Europe 11 to 16 thousand years ago. This period predates the rise of agriculture and implies that the earliest dogs arose along with hunter-gatherers and not agriculturists. Conceivably, proto-dogs might have taken advantage of carcasses left on site by early hunters, assisted in the capture of prey, or provided defense from large competing predators at kills. This era towards the end of the last ice age is known as the Magdalenian period dating from around 17,000 to 12,000 years ago, and refers to one of the later cultures of the Upper Paleolithic in western Europe at that time.

But whatever the exact particulars of the canine domestication process may have been, we know the process took root and literally changed the world. For many of us, it’s hard to imagine living in modern America and not having dogs as honorary family members who enjoy special privileges within the family hierarchy.

But dogs do not simply give comfort and solace by their mere presence; they also alert us to marauders (who are more likely to be humans these days than saber-toothed tigers) and in some cases, our finely-furred friends will actually lay down their lives to protect their beloved human masters and mistresses.

This is precisely what happened this week in Atlanta, GE where a family’s faithful German Shepherd sacrificed itself to protect its human family from a crazed gunman in the throes of deadly road rage.

Here’s what happened, according to Charles Roberts of Opposing Views:

A German Shepherd from Atlanta reportedly went out as a hero this week after jumping in front of a group of children who were fired upon during an alleged road rage incident.

According to 11alive.com, the dog in question found itself in the middle of a tense situation when a man followed a family’s SUV to a strip mall on Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard. When the cars were in close enough proximity to one another, the gunman allegedly opened fire on a Chevy Suburban that had “at least three children” inside of it.

Sensing possible disaster, the Shepherd sprang into action jumping in between the shooter and the back of the Suburban.

“They hit the back of his car (with bullets),” a witness told 11alive.com. “The dog, I guess, jumped in front of the bullet to save one of the children and the wife.”

Another person verified the first witness’s account.

“The dog took the bullet for the kids so the kids would be safe.”

Perhaps the shooter was distracted by seeing the Shepherd fall. In any event, after shooting the canine and missing the family, the shooter took off in his blue-gray Taurus. He is believed to still be on the lam.

After taking the bullet, the Shepherd Noah got back on its feet and — in the dignified manner of dying beasts — immediately wandered off behind a nearby building, lay down and died.

Atlanta police Sgt Gregory Lyon summed it up in the following manner:

“They were fired upon and their family was terrorized. They survived that only to find that their pet is now gone. It’s sad for the whole family.”

It’s somewhat unlikely that my own dog will ever have to take a bullet to save my life or the life of one of my loved ones, but should it prove necessary, I would be curious to see how our little guy would respond. Though, actually, based on his sterling example, I would probably have to do the right thing and dive between him and the shooter thus saving my pooch and saving my family but sacrificing myself in the process.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

There’s little doubt that I could perhaps justly be accused of being an overly permissive parent. My beloved daughter is occasionally insubordinate and gasp may not always respect her dad and mom. On the other hand, she graduated from high school with an academic GPA of over 3.5 and will be attending a fine university in the fall. To my surprise, she even managed to pull a “B” in Calculus, which is more than her Dad could ever have done. She has a positive self-image and does not feel compelled to use drugs or go on drunken binges.

So although I would hardly claim to have been a model parent, I could probably have done much worse; in fact, I could have been like adoptive parents Johann and Kimery Jorg of Peoria, Illinois.

Johann and Kimery, who are 61 and 54 years old respectively, are apparently devout Christians of the “spare the rod and spoil the child” variety. They started out as foster parents before adopting their four children who range in age from 7 to 13.

Although the Jorgs reported favored their two younger children, they are accused of severely abusing their 11 and 13-year-olds.

Karen Brown of Arizona Family writes:

A Peoria couple are accused of abusing the children they adopted.

Police said over the last five years, the four girls, ages 7 to 13, had been fostered and then adopted by Johann and Kimery Jorg.

When Peoria police went to the home last week, they said they found a list of the punishments used on the two older girls, which allegedly included making the 13-year-old live in the backyard off and on since Christmas naked without even a bathroom.

The teen and an 11-year-old are reported to have been extremely malnourished and emaciated.

The fact that the Jorgs were abusing their two older girls came to the attention of Child Protective Services in a most curious manner. After several years of ladling out the abuse in a most appalling manner without much success (i.e., the girls still allegedly misbehaved), in desperation, these two model Christian parents consulted with a local behavioral health facility seeking help and advice on how best to discipline their two older daughters.

Here’s what the behavioral health facility learned, according to Peoria police spokeswoman Amanda Jacinto:

“The 13-year-old daughter was put in the backyard in what they call ‘deep prison’. She would live in the backyard. She would be forced to wear a diaper or sometimes not even a diaper. They would have bathroom facilities out there that involved a bucket. She would live out of a tent.”

Jacinto stated that one of the Jorgs’ creative punishments consisted of forcing the 13-year-old, who clearly got it the worst, to run for an hour or more barefoot in the oppressive Illinois heat and humidity. Another “winner” was swatting the poor child on the buttocks with a wooden paddle so often and so hard that she reportedly gradually grew a protective (and highly unnatural) leathery covering where she should have had normal skin. The couple also allegedly shaved the 13-year-old’s head as a punishment, reportedly telling her that she was so bad she didn’t deserve to have hair.

According to at least one report, the child was also forced to recite certain Bible verses ad nauseum.

Spokeswoman Jacinto informed that the punishments were mainly for stealing and lying. The 13-year-old admitted she had stolen some food because she was so hungry. One can hardly argue with her logic considering that although she stands nearly 5-feet tall, she only weighed 61 pounds when she was separated from her parents.

Fortunately, when the Jorgs told workers at the health facility how they had been disciplining the girls, the facility called Child Protective Services who then passed the “glad tidings” on to the police.

In a rather bizarre twist, when police went to the couple’s home to investigate, they found Post-it notes all over the kitchen reminding the suspects of what punishments still needed to be doled out to the girls.

The court documents state that Kimery Jorg explained to law enforcement that the girls have so many punishments she often doesn’t have time to apply all of them, so she writes the notes to remind herself of the remaining punishments the girls still “owe” her.

Are we getting sick yet?

“When we brought them in, they again stood by the fact that this was in the best interest of the girls,” Jacinto said.

As is so often the case with these demented types, the Jorgs played favorites and their two younger adopted daughters, ages 7 and 8, were not subjected to the same type of cruel treatment.

All four girls are now in the protective custody of CPS. The 13-year-old remains in the hospital due to severe malnutrition. Apparently in a case like this, the doctors have to be very careful to only re-introduce the victim to a normal diet slowly and carefully.

The Jorgs were arrested Thursday and are each facing four counts of child abuse. Each is being held on $100,000 bond.

* * * * *

It would appear that the Jorgs will ultimately be serving pretty substantial stretches in jail or prison.

Naturally, my first response is to wish I could beat these fiends senseless and them beat them some more as soon as they regain consciousness. But then the rational function kicks in and I realize that the Jorgs almost certainly learned these inappropriate parenting techniques from their parents and/or guardians. The specter and lineage of child abuse is a violation of all that is sacred and, sadly, is as American as apple pie.

by Darcia Helle

“I didn’t do it, but I know who did.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Innocence Project has this to say about eyewitness identifications:

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to this book’s authors:

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

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

http://www.thewrongcarlos.net

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

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

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

Frank Lloyd Wright and the Great Gasoline Mass Murder

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

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

The Electric Chair Nightmare: An Infamous and Agonizing History

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

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

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

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

Why Should I Believe You? The History of the Polygraph

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

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

The Terror of ISO: A Descent into Madness

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

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

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

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

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

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

A Modest Proposal: All teenage boys between the ages of 14 and 21 should be placed in suspended animation until they turn 21, at which point, if and only if they can pass the “good sense” test, they can then be released into society at large.

I realize that my proposal is a bit extreme and I’m painfully aware that we do not yet have the necessary technology to place millions of teens into a kind of enforced hibernation. But it would be a good idea. Why? Because all to often teenage boys conduct themselves with such extreme stupidity that it makes one shakes one’s head in disbelief.

What triggers this uncharacteristic diatribe on my part? Simple. On Sunday in South St. Louis four male teens, three of them between 15 and 17 years of age, assaulted an innocent Bosnian man named Zemir Begic and beat him to death with hammers. There are rumors that the kids were black and/or Latino and some have suggested that the murder of Mr.  Begic was a revenge killing based on the death of Michael Brown.

No one really knows for sure why the kids did it, however, and it is my contention that whatever their rationale may be, it is the undoubtedly the sort of fallacious reasoning that plagues far too many emotional young people and militates powerfully toward adopting my Modest Proposal and placing these misguided fools in the deep freeze until they’re at least 21.

According to Mr. Begic’s wife, Arijana Mujkanovic, her husband placed himself in harm’s way to protect her during the confrontation.

Andres Jaurequi writes for the Huffiungton Post:

The wife of a Bosnian man who was brutally beaten to death Sunday says that her husband’s final act was to protect her from her attackers.

Police said Zemir Begic, 32, was allegedly beaten to death by a group of four teens wielding hammers in a confrontation in South St. Louis early Sunday morning.

Speaking at a Bosnian community rally on Sunday night, Arijana told KSDK:

“The last thing he did before he actually died was pull me out of the way and put himself in front of me, basically giving up his life for me.”

Doc Rivers — coach of Los Angeles Clippers

According to reports, the couple were in their car at 1:15 am when the teens allegedly advanced on them and began striking their vehicle (with the hammers). It was at this juncture, for unexplained reasons, that Mr. Begic made the fateful decision that was to cost him his life. Instead of staying in his vehicle and driving away from the teens at the earliest possible moment, even if he had to drag a few of them with him on his bumper, the Bosnian got out of his car to confront them. And when I consider the fact it was freakin’ 1:15 am when this happened, I am completely astounded by Mr. Begic’s poor decision. It is possible that he had never heard Doc Rivers explain that Nothing Good Ever Happens after Midnight.

What we are dealing with here are the basic twin issues of bravery and competence. Mr. Begic undoubtedly demonstrated real courage in getting out of his car to deal with the teens. Yet doing so made absolutely no sense unless he was capable of taking on all four teens in a pitched battle — whether by shooting them, stabbing them or beating the living hell out of them.

It turned out that he had no such capability. He had barely gotten out of the car, apparently using himself as a human shield to protect his wife (it’s unknown whether she actually exited the vehicle), when the boys set upon him with hammers, beating him on the head, the face, the mouth and the abdomen. By the time he arrived at the hospital, he was dead.

The moronic teenagers may have scared themselves with their own savagery. In any event, immediately after the attack, they fled on foot. Investigators arrested two suspects, ages 15 and 16, on Sunday, and a 17-year-old suspect turned himself in later that day, according to KMOV. As of Monday, the fourth suspect was still at large.

It appears that Mr. Begic may have been the second man the teens confronted that night. Seldin Dzananovic, 24, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he was attacked by a group of teens with hammers in Bevo Mill an hour before Begic was killed, but that he managed to fight the boys off.

“I’m just lucky. God is on my side,” Dzananovic, who suffered only cuts to his neck and hands, told the paper.

God was clearly not on Mr. Begic’s side.

According to family members, Begic had come to the States from Bosnia in 1996 and settled in Iowa. It was his bad luck to move to St. Louis a few months ago in order to marry Arijana Mujkanovic ,whose family lives in the area.

“He loved America,” his sister, Denisa Begic, 23, told the newspaper. “We come from Bosnia because we were getting killed and our homes and families were getting destroyed. Never in my life did I think he would get murdered.”

Mr. Begic’s death sparked a spontaneous protest in the Bosnian community.  Demonstrators blocked off traffic at Gravois and Itaska Sunday night stating the protests were in response to recent violence the neighborhood. It is noted that in early November, a robbery occurred at a local Bosnian cafe, and in the summer of 2013, a Bosnian store clerk was murdered.

A memorial of flowers and teddy bears is growing at the edge of the parking lot where Begic was killed.

“I want everybody to know I take your safety and everyone in the community’s safety very seriously,” said St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson. “I heard your message loud and clear. You want to make sure you are safe. I want to make sure you are safe in every neighborhood in our city.”

Chief Dotson also said that there was no indication that Begic was targeted because he was Bosnian.

*      *     *     *     *

So why was Mr. Begic targeted? Chances are it was random; that is, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and the moronic children (AKA teenagers) decided they were going to f___ somebody up and it was just his bad luck to be that somebody. Sure, the kids may have had a reason in their collective pea-brains. Maybe it was misdirected anger over the death of Michael Brown. Maybe it was something else. I would bet that they weren’t even planning on killing Mr. Begic and simply got carried away once they started raining down hammer blows. None of that does the victim any good, though, and now we have four teens who have — for all intents and purposes — thrown their lives away while taking the life of an innocent man, simply because he made the bad decision to do the macho thing and get out of his car when he should have stayed put.

Bravery does not necessarily equal competence, and one can be extremely competent without being particularly brave.

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 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

There comes a time when a no longer young man moving into his 40s realizes that his mother truly is the enemy, and that the only reasonable thing to do for all concerned is to kill her expeditiously. This does not mean torture her, or bash her in the head with a claw hammer, or rape her violently before delivering the death blow. Not ever mother killer shares Big Ed Kemper’s deviant tendencies and techniques; the more typical mother killer (assuming such a creature exists) may merely want to delete Mom from the human race simply and cleanly in much the same manner in which the great Hemingway wrote his sterling prose.

Which brings us to the ultimate question – how best to whack Mom without engaging in a grotesque parody of a proper killing?

A disgruntled 42-year-old resident of Mary Esther in Okaloosa County, Florida, with the rather innocuous name of Michael Watson, appears to have come up with the perfect solution to this pressing question early Sunday morning. Not only that but he arguably had a valid reason for whacking Mom.

The AP writes:

A Florida man told police he shot his mother with a gun and a bow-and-arrow and then stabbed her Sunday because he claimed she “stole his diamonds and also gave his father cancer,” authorities said.

(These are both solid reasons for sending Mom to the Happy Hunting Ground. No diamond thief should ever get away scot-free and as for giving a loved one cancer – that is simply unacceptable.)

Reuters sets the scene:

A deputy responded to a call (received at 2:48 am) from next-door neighbors of Watkins who said someone was knocking over Christmas decorations in their front yard and yelling, the sheriff’s office said.

(Boy am I disillusioned! I was with M. Watkins every step of the way – in spirit if not in body, but I simply cannot look the other way when Christmas decorations are being desecrated. It’s anti-Christian, anti-American and, worst of all, anti-Santa Claus.)

When an Okaloosa County deputy arrived, the neighbors explained that an argument had been going on next door. The deputy thanked the neighbor and went next door, where he was met with what must certainly have been one of the stranger crime scenes he had been called upon to investigate. There sat 65-year-old Gloria Watkins slumped forward in a chair with arrows protruding from her head.

I repeat: “slumped forward in a chair with arrows protruding from her head”.

According to the arrest report, M. Watkins admitted his crime with little hesitation:

“You see that, that’s death,” he said, pointing at his mother.

(This upsets me – not M. Watkins choice of words but rather the fact he pointed. How many times were we all told as children: “Don’t point, it’s not polite.”)

In addition to claiming that his mother “stole his diamonds and also gave his father cancer”, M. Watkins also insisted that “he had to kill her because she was trying to kill him.” He did not elaborate on how precisely Mother planned on carrying out the slaying, but we can be fairly certain she would not have wielded a bow-and-arrow with consummate skill in the manner of M. Watkins.

According to the Sheriff’s Office, although the deputies asked politely, M. Watkins ignored repeated commands to get down on the ground. He finally did comply, but then apparently thought better of it, jumped back up and extracted a large knife from a sheath on his belt. Although he eventually relinquished the knife, Watkins was not enchanted with the deputies’ handcuffs, which led them to reluctantly resort to a little “taser action” which apparently took the wind out of his billowy sales.

Watkins has been charged with pre-meditated first degree murder and resisting arrest without resorting to violence. An autopsy will be conducted on the victim Gloria to determine the exact cause of death.

* * * * *

Although I obviously cannot, in truth, condone the fact M. Watkins killed his mother, and it does appear that he is suffering from major mental illness based on his obvious delusions concerning his mothers and her intentions, I still must congratulate him for choosing the bow-and-arrow approach to mother killing. This demonstrates a pleasing respect for our Native American forebears as well as, perhaps, at least a trace of environmental consciousness. I realize that M. Watkins also shot poor Gloria, and may have also knifed her, which is certainly not to his credit, but I’m fairly certain (or at least I like to believe) that he gained a kind of aesthetic pleasure by choosing the bow-and-arrow as his primary weapon of destruction.

by BJW Nashe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by John Nardizzi

A summer film, “The Iceman”, claims that the film is “based on a true story,” namely the sordid, violent life of Richard Kuklinksi, a New Jersey man who claimed to have murdered over 100 men using almost every means imaginable: guns, knives, bow and arrow, cyanide, and even rats. He earned his nickname for his experiments involving deep-freezing corpses in order to throw off the time of death estimates during the police investigations. Some of Kuklinski’s murders were contract killings for La Cosa Nostra crime families; others were spontaneous spasms of rage that saw the powerfully built, 6’5” behemoth, kill people who looked at him cross-eyed. Hollywood directors stoop only to a mud-level standard of proof in films “based on a true story”, and “The Iceman” contains glaring errors in the telling (the film is based on one biography in particular, The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer by Anthony Bruno). Glossing over Kuklinski’s decades-long abuse of his wife to focus on his role as a (surprisingly caring) father to his children, many of the Iceman’s killings remain undocumented to this day (he was convicted on just 5 counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison). Several of the most prominent murders Kuklinski claimed credit for — Jimmy Hoffa, mob boss Roy DeMeo, and even the godfather of the Gambino crime family, Paul Castellano — have been called into question as other details have emerged from trials of other mobsters.

Kuklinski’s mother, Anna, grew up in tough Jersey City in the 1900s. His father, Stanley, was a Polish immigrant. Kuklinski’s childhood was a horror of endless beatings by his father, and cold neglect by his distant mother. He himself was knocked unconscious several times by his father, who later abandoned the family. Kuklinksi claims his father killed his baby brother by smashing his skull in a drunken rage and then made his wife lie about the death by claiming the boy fell down the stairs (how Kuklinski came to learn this is not clear). What followed was a sadly predictable pattern too familiar to those in the criminal justice system: the abuse led to the angry young man experimenting with lashing out against animals, torturing cats, classic serial killer behavior. Finally, Kuklinksi graduated to his first murder, the bludgeoning of a housing project bully. He then led a small gang, Coming Up Roses, in a series of heists until they stupidly robbed a Mafia card game, leading to Kuklinksi (who was not aware of the robbery) being ordered to kill his associates. He does so and later moves on to working in a mob-owned lab pirating pornographic films. Soon he takes on jobs, including contract murders, for Roy DeMeo of the New Jersey-based DeCavalcante crime family.

Much of Kuklinski’s infamy was solidified in a series of HBO interviews as well as another biography, Philip Carlo ’s The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer. There are entire passages in Carlo’s book where inexplicable gaps in details about certain murders simply go unexplained. In 1954, Kuklinksi allegedly began to experiment and perfect murder techniques by hunting down victims along the rotting, desolate piers off West Street in New York City. According to Carlo, the underbelly of the city became kind of a personal killing laboratory for Kuklinski. During my work as a private investigator on defense cases, I am always wary when a witness fails to provide the kind of visceral specific details of an event, or has unexplained gaps in time. Here, Carlo simply reports that Kuklinski murdered dozens of men in this era in spectacular fashion with a morbid gallery of weapons: ice picks, knives, rope (hanging one man by the neck by bracing the rope over his shoulder; Kuklinski bragged: “I was the tree”). Not once does Kuklinski provide a single name of even one victim, or a specific description of the locale. Carlo explains that these were “throwaway people”, street people without address or anyone to care. It seems an overly convenient notion that Kuklinski got off to a roaring start in his murder career by bagging dozens of corpses — all before before turning twenty years old.

Kuklinski’s recollection of other murders come off as absurd, if entertaining theater. Kuklinski tells of binding men with duct tape to the floor of a cave in rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania. As he withdrew from the darkness, rats would emerge and eat the men alive as they screamed in agony. For a man who bragged about the painstaking procedures he took to facilitate a hit, Kuklinski took awful risks (according to Carlo) as he bound a mark in duct tape and left him for the rats  onthe cave floor:

“Richard calmly went back to his car. He retrieved the camera and tripod and a light and motion detector that would trigger both the light and camera when the rats came out. Richard carefully set up the camera, the light and motion detector just so. Satisfied he cut the mans clothes off—he had dirtied himself—and left him there like that.”

Good thing no one stumbled on the backlit cave replete with a camera (and with finger prints probably, and maybe a tag that identified the porn lab where Kuklinksi worked). Perhaps the film footage could confirm this murder by rats? No one has ever seen a copy of it. No one has reported finding these rat-infested caves either. Could the bones of some of Kuklinski’s victims remain hidden in a cave in Bucks County? That question has come up to more than a few detectives.

“Richard Kranzel, who wrote about the county’s caves for the National Speleological Society, was interviewed about the long-closed Durham Mine, the only place large enough to hide human remains. The mine opened during the Revolutionary War before closing in 1908. The thing is, Kranzel said, a lot of people have trekked inside the mine since Kuklinski’s time. And no one has reported coming across human bones. Durham Mine, which sits on private property in upper Bucks, has played informal host to spelunkers and party-goers. … Kranzel said he’s skeptical of Kuklinski’s claims, especially those of flesh-eating rats. The only rats I have encountered in caves are ‘cave rats,’ and they are reclusive and shy creatures, and definitely not fierce as Kuklinski claims,” Kranzel said. “The fact that he states that his cave was in granite does place it on the hills though, as the valley floor is limestone.”

Among the most notorious killings Kuklinksi claimed responsibility for involve those of Gambino godfather Paul Castellano. As recounted on the Swallowing The Camel website, which challenges popularly held assumptions:

It would not be possible to overestimate the importance of this assassination in Mafia history. …It was a seismic event, and once the dust settled, the terrain of the Gambino family was never the same.

The plan was cooked up by Gotti, Robert DiBernardo, Joseph Armone, and Sammy Gravano. Their people allegedly broached the idea with three of the five New York families, and received unofficial sanction for their hostile takeover. Frank DeCicco provided vital inside information; Castellano would be meeting with a trusted group of capos – himself included – at Sparks Steakhouse in Manhattan at 5:00 PM on December 16, 1985. Gotti chose eleven assassins for the job. Four of them would wait near the entrance to Sparks and take out Castellano and Bilotti as they approached.

The hit went off precisely as planned. The four gunmen swarmed Castellano’s Lincoln Town Car and fired a hail of bullets into the two men. All team members escaped in getaway cars. (8)

Again, Kuklinski’s account deviates significantly from the known details of the event.

His claims are in bold:

- Gravano told him straight out that Bilotti was his target. The eleven guys handpicked by Gotti were not given their targets until just hours before the hit.

- He walked to Sparks by himself, window-shopping along the way. He did not know who the other assassins were, or where they were. The assassins met in a nearby park for a “dress rehearsal” shortly before 5:00.

- He chose a spot across the street from Sparks. The gunmen had already selected their positions by the time they arrived. This would not have been left to chance; it was a tightly coordinated hit.

- He fled on foot and hailed a cab. The assassins had getaway cars waiting for them on Second Avenue. What kind of hit man hails a cab from a crime scene, anyway?

Kuklinski claimed a part in the Jimmy Hoffa disappearance  as well (although he never mentioned his involvement with Hoffa until years after a series of interviews on HBO made him a homicide superstar). Kuklinski said he gutted Hoffa in the back of the neck with a hunting knife and then drove back to New Jersey with the body.

Though he had talked about his work at great length with the HBO crew years earlier, Kuklinski waited over 20 years to publicly confess his role in Hoffa’s disappearance. I don’t know how you feel about all this, but my response was basically skeptical.

The thing with Hoffa’s disappearance is that isn’t as mysterious as the average person thinks it is. ….the feds had a pretty good idea who was involved, and who was connected to those guys. Kuklinski’s name did not come up once. Former FBI agent Robert Garrity, one of the investigators of Hoffa’s disappearance said, “I’ve never heard of him, and I’ve never heard of the writer [Carlo].” Bob Buccino, the former head of the New Jersey Division of Criminal Justice’s organized crime division and a member of the task force who ultimately brought Kuklinski down, was reportedly also skeptical of the claims in Carlo’s book.

Other gangsters have mocked the idea that Kuklinski was making up to $50,000 per hit, noting that younger members of the Italian Mafia take on contract murders to cultivate a reputation and “make their bones” so they progress up the hierarchy. No mobster would subcontract out work to one man for 50 grand when he can order three young men, fiercely loyal, to do the job for free.

No one doubts that Kuklinski was killer who thrilled at hunting down his victims, all the while maintaining a real family life and trying to be a solid father to his children (but paradoxically, assaulting his wife repeatedly over decades of marriage). As the aging murderer rotted in a New Jersey prison in the late 1990s, a cable TV show about a New Jersey mobster called The Sopranos began its epic run into pop culture mythology. To pass the gray years, was Kuklinski tempted to grossly exaggerate his murderous impulses to paint an Impressionist view of a real life Mafia hitman, full of whirl and color but impossible to pinpoint any hard lines? If you have ever entered a prison, the sense of marking time is unlike anything on the outside. Kuklinski flashed a weird upturned grin to that outside world, smirking at his final hit—the tragic truth of the Iceman, who left a legacy of wasted time, senseless violence and the terrible deception of his family.

John Nardizzi is an investigator, lawyer, and writer. His writings have appeared in numerous professional and literary journals, including San Diego Writers Monthly, Oxygen, Liberty Hill Poetry Review, Lawyers Weekly USA, and PI Magazine. His fictional detective, Ray Infantino, first appeared in print in the spring 2007 edition of Austin Layman’s Crimestalker Casebook. In May 2003, John founded Nardizzi & Associates, Inc., an investigations firm that has garnered a national reputation for excellence in investigating business fraud and trial work. His investigations on behalf of people wrongfully convicted of crimes led to several million dollar settlements for clients like Dennis Maher, Scott Hornoff and Kenneth Waters, whose story was featured in the 2010 film Conviction. He lives in the Boston area and supports AS Roma and Barcelona.

Please click here to read All Things Crime Bog’s review of John’s crime novel, Telegraph Hill.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

As improbable as it sounds, some children miraculously survive their teenage years. In fact, the statistics show that most teens make it to the age of 21 more or less intact. But, sadly, there are those who do not. Some of these children take their own lives; others die in accidents or from drug overdoses. And then there are the occasional unlucky souls who are murdered randomly or have their lives snuffed out by predators they meet online.

Although people from all over the world have been coming to America since the first explorers reached our shores 600 or 700 years ago, it is not that unusual for American citizens to move abroad permanently. For example, I have a niece who has been residing in Merrie Olde England for about seven years now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she chooses to become a permanent resident of that island nation.

While it’s not clear when Breck Bednar, and his Michigan-born mother, Lorin LaFave, moved to England, it appears that the pleasant-looking teen adjusted to his new environment without too much difficulty. He attended a Christian school and was a member of the British air cadets. His mother Lorin describes him as “a relaxed and warm-hearted boy who had plenty of friends.”

Like many young people raised in our modern technological era, Breck loved computers and became “addicted” to playing online games with his friends after school.

One of the unavoidable dangers inherent in cyber communications is the possibility that an individual, whether young or old, will hook up with a dangerous or unsavory character. Breck’s mother was very aware of the potential dangers her son could face interacting with strangers in cyber-space.

At some point, while happily gaming with his cyber friends, Breck began interacting online with a baby-faced, 19-year-old computer engineer named Lewis Daynes, who resided with his family in Grays in Essex, approximately 30 miles from Breck’s home. Lorin LaFave learned about their friendship and sensed that there was something distinctly rotten about Lewis Daynes. She told her son that he was not allowed to interact with Lewis, either online or in person. Lorin was so concerned that she took the following somewhat drastic steps:

She “limited his access to electronics, installed parental controls and forbade him from using the same server as” Lewis Daynes. One would have hoped that this would have been sufficient to drive a wedge between Breck and Lewis but such was not the case.

Meanwhile Lorin LaFave hoped and prayed that Lewis was growing out of his “gaming addiction” and “would finally be interested in girls and go back to enjoying time with his family.”

Nonetheless, Lorin was so concerned that she actually took the rather unusual step of reporting her concern that Lewis Daynes might pose a danger to her son to the British police who, unsurprisingly, did nothing.

Lorin LaFave’s deepest fears were realized in February when she “got a text message from her ex-husband saying Breck had not showed up, although he was supposed to stay with his dad for the weekend. Breck evidently had gone to meet Lewis Daynes, instead.”

It’s horrible to reflect on the anguish Lorin must have felt upon getting the news. There she was helpless to do anything to help her naive son. Although it must have seemed like forever, it was only a few hours after her ex’s text message when “Breck’s siblings started receiving messages from friends saying their brother had been killed. According to LaFave, Daynes took photos of Breck and posted them on social media.”

(The peculiar way in which a death or a murder is somehow not complete in today’s world until news and/or photos describing it are posted online is truly bizarre. It’s almost like the posting of the awful news serve as a sort of “climax” to the event.)

Once the police were alerted, they went to the Daynes’ house in Essex where they found Breck in the process of dying from knife wounds. First aid was rendered “but the Christian school student was declared dead by medical staff a short time later.” When the police arrived, Daynes was apparently still at the crime scene and was arrested and charged with murder. In November, in what has been described as “an unexpected turn of events”, he pleaded guilty to stabbing Breck. He will be sentenced on January 12, 2015.

Louise Dewast writes for ABC News:

Now, LaFave is behind an effort to raise awareness about what she says are dangers of online gaming.

“I want Breck’s tragedy to help open the eyes of everyone to recognize the dangers of online predators,” she said in a statement. “It is a very real danger today.”

“People think it only happens to anti-social kids, but it’s just not true,” she told ABC News.

One month after her son’s death, Lorin created The Breck Bednar Memorial Fund which is designed to promote  awareness for teenagers and their parents of the dangers of online interaction with strangers. Lorin’s watchword is: “Play virtual, live real.”

The LaFave family is understandably upset over the fact the police failed to act when Lorin warned them about Lewis Daynes “and is filing a legal action against Essex and Surrey Police” over the way they handled the case.

In truth, though, it seems improbable that British law enforcement, without solid legal grounds, would have had any effective way to short-circuit Lewis Daynes’ murderous intent. The moral of this story is that online gaming and online interactions of any kind between teens and/or teens and adults posing as teens can be and sometimes are incredibly dangerous. I certainly salute Lorin LaFave’s courageous effort to increase public awareness of this very real problem and hope that her message is received and acted upon by concerned parents whose only wish is to protect their children so that they too can reach the ripe old age of 21.

“We serial killers are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere. And there will be more of your children dead tomorrow.” (Probably an exaggeration. Although there are certainly plenty of serial killers, I feel confident they are still a very small segment of the population).

“You feel the last bit of breath leaving their body. You’re looking into their eyes. A person in that situation is God!” (God? Or the Devil? Or just a demented sicko?)

“Sometimes I feel like a vampire.” (Figure of speech or did Bundy actually feel this way?)

“Murder is not about lust and it’s not about violence. It’s about possession.” (Possession equals absolute control.)

“There lots of other kids playing in streets around this country today who are going to be dead tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day and month, because other young people are reading the kinds of things and seeing the kinds of things that are available in the media today.” (Bundy liked to blame society for his problems. This is a cop-out of the first order.)

“I’m the most cold-hearted son-of-a-bitch you’ll ever meet.” (This may well be true.)

“I’ve met a lot of men who were motivated to commit violence just like me. And without exception, without question, every one of them was deeply involved in pornography. “ (Probably an exaggeration but another good example of Bundy blaming his murderous ways on society and outside factors.)

“I didn’t know what made people want to be friends. I didn’t know what made people attractive to one another. I didn’t know what underlay social interactions.” (Ted was apparently not an advanced student of the “rules of attaction”.)

“What’s one less person on the face of the earth, anyway?” (Bundy was in a flippant mood, either that or he was a firm believer in population control.)

“I don’t feel guilty for anything. I feel sorry for people who feel guilt.” (I too feel sorry for people who are obsessed with their feelings of guilt; however, there are some things that one should feel guilty about.)

“I just liked to kill, I wanted to kill.” (Speaks for itself.)

“… I deserve, certainly, the most extreme punishment society has and society deserves to be protected from me and from others like me, that’s for sure.” (A rare moment of honesty.)

“Well-meaning, decent people will condemn the behavior of a Ted Bundy, while they’re walking past a magazine rack full of the very kinds of things that send young kids down the road to be Ted Bundys.” (Once again, Bundy is making excuses for his aberrant behavior.)

“I’m as cold a motherfucker as you’ve ever put your fucking eyes on. I don’t give a shit about those people.” (Another moment of lucidity.)

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.

(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”.

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!”

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.

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

About the worst thing that can happen to a man (or woman) is to be accused of raping a child, especially when the suspect didn’t do it. It gets ten times worse when the suspect is arrested and thrown in jail while his case makes its slow way through the legal system. Once in jail awaiting trial, the innocent suspect naturally fears for his life for the simple reason that pedophiles and child molesters are not very popular among rank-and-file inmates.

This nightmare scenario might make a good book or movie, but only if the suspect is tried and wrongfully convicted and sentenced to 20 years or more in prison and is exonerated years later based on the heroic efforts of a pro bono lawyer who dedicates his or her life to getting the suspect’s wrongful conviction overturned because he believes in him.

On the other hand, if the suspect’s charges are dismissed prior to trial because the police recognize on the eve of trial that they have the wrong man, it would typically not make such a good book or movie, but nevertheless the innocent suspect’s life, reputation and job prospects would probably be ruined, particularly if he is from a relatively small community where the word gets around.

This is exactly what happened to a 50-year-old North Carolina man named Tommy Keith Wall who was mistakenly linked to a pedophilia and child pornography ring based on bogus evidence. Let’s start with Mr. Wall’s charges. In late July, Mr. Wall who had served his church faithfully and had worked at the same job for 23 years, was arrested and charged with first-degree rape of a child, first-degree sex offense against a child and felony conspiracy.

These are hella serious charges and could result in a sentence of upwards of 20 years in state prison.

Here’s how Mr. Wall was linked to the child pornography ring. David Lohr of Huffington Post writes:

The events that led to Wall’s arrest were set in motion in early January, when detectives began investigating Bailey Joe Mills, 33, after an exchange of inappropriate Facebook messages with a 12-year-old girl.

Police said they located videos taken by Mills of himself sexually molesting several children between the ages of 1 and 14. Authorities said they found approximately 10,000 images of child pornography on Mills’ computers, as well as 100,000 images of child erotica and adult pornography, WNCT.com reported.

The execrable Mills, who was already a convicted sex offender, was brought up on numerous charges including first-degree rape of a child and manufacturing child pornography. At present, he has pleaded guilty to one count of manufacturing CP and is awaiting sentences. One can be certain that based on the heinous nature of Mills’ charges, he will not be walking free any time soon.

Several other individuals were arrested with Mills including his wife, a Fort Bragg soldier and the innocent Mr. Wall.

Wall became a suspect based on two surveillance videos. One was of him visiting Mills’ wife Elizabeth in 2011. Innocuous enough on its own, Mr. Wall became a suspect when the police obtained another surveillance video which they insisted depicted him “sexually assaulting a child”.

Mr. Wall’s attorney, Fred Webb, agreed that was first video was definitely Mr. Wall dropping off a load of lumber at the Mills’ house. The second video of the child sex assault, however, convinced the police that Mr. Wall was a child molester even though he resolutely denied any involvement in sex crimes with the child in the vido or any other child.

In poor Mr. Mills’ case, telling the police he was innocent was undoubtedly like talking to a rock. He was thrown into the Harnett County jail and spent the next 3 and ½ months living in abject fear. David Lohr writes:

Wall sat behind bars for 105 days — fearing he’d be stabbed or worse the whole time — before the prosecution played the supposed evidence in court. That was the moment, Wall said, that the sheriff’s office and prosecutors realized they had made a big mistake.

“When they did show it, they noticed I was not the man in the video,” Wall said. “I have tattoos on my back, the guy in the video did not. The voice was different, the hair was different, the glasses were different, the man had a big mole on his head — everything was different.”

Because of the prosecutorial habit of not disclosing evidence until they absolutely have to, Mr. Wall’s attorney, Fred Webb, was not permitted to view the video, which of course turned out to be exculpatory, until the day of the hearing. Understandably, Mr. Webb states that “he was shocked that authorities had not bothered to closely examine it prior to Wall’s arrest.”

“It was crazy,” Webb said. “The detective finally admitted that he was absolutely sure it was not Mr. Wall. Well why didn’t he watch it to begin with? You’d think that would be first thing they would do when arresting someone on a charge like that.”

Mr. Wall’s long overdue release came on October 30th.

Although Mr. Wall is now a free man, his reputation was ruined, a stain that he may never be able to expunge.

“I served my church, was working a career and overnight it was all gone,” Mr. Wall told The Huffington Post.

Fred Webb, who was also interviewed by HuffPost, said:

“He was charged with one of the most horrible crimes and that can never be recovered from. Not only was he charged, but it was plastered all over the Internet.”

Upon his release from jail, Webb found himself homeless, unemployed and in debt. He is now living with his mother and his employer of 23 years has declined to rehire him.

“It’s a very bad ordeal. I was involved in the church and youth ministry and all that came to a stop when they arrested me.”

Despite all, the brave Mr. Wall is not bereft of all hope. He is in the early stages of trying to put his life back together and is looking for a job. Naturally enough, he is also considering filing a lawsuit against the Harnett County authorities.

Fred Webb stated unequivocally that the purpose of the lawsuit is not damages but rather Mr. Wall regaining his good reputation in the community:

“It’s not about that (money). The money will not recover his reputation. His reputation is ruined and that’s what he’s trying to get back.”

* * * * *

Personally, I hope Mr. Wall is awarded a small fortune in damages. He obviously should never have been charged in the first place. Shoddy police work of this nature is unconscionable and the county should be held responsible.

On a more personal level, just imagine how you would feel if something like this happened to you or one of your loved ones. Your fury would know no limits. Nor should it…

Click here to view our earlier post on the Elizabeth and Bailey Joe Mills child pornography case:

‘Sweet’ North Carolina Woman Faces 30 Years for Running Child Pornography ‘Day Care Center’

commentary by Patrick H. Moore

We all know how irritating it can be when the neighbor’s dogs will not stop barking. Across our back fence and one house to the east, there is a “pack” of, I believe, four dogs who unleash a great unkepmt howling around 1:00 am 3 or 4 nights a week. For unknown reasons, they don’t burst forth with this “natural form of noise pollution” on a nightly basis. If they did, I would have to grab my Glock 9, vault the fence and send them to doggie heaven in a volley of hot lead. Actually, that probably won’t be necessary.  Our neighborhood is pretty safe. The worst acts of malicious mischief we have ever been subjected to are the following: 1) One complete and rather artistic TPing. It was artistically rendered but pissed me off plenty — it took me 30 minutes to clean it up; one very thorough egging –my windshields looked like the bottom of a frying pan; and 3) one equally thorough ketchupping. Yuck! The freakin perps should be horsewhipped! Not!

I wish I were a little more alert and would manage to catch them in the act. Would they turn on me and slash my throat and stab me 79 times, like Isabella Guzman did to her mother in Aurora, Colorado, or perhaps blow me away with a handgun? Maybe. But somehow I doubt it. Not in our town…

A different Moore family — the Bruce Moore family of Phoenix, AZ — was not nearly so lucky on Oct 26, 2013. Bruce, his autistic 17-year-old grandson Shannon, and Shannon’s parents, Michael and Renee, and 2 of their 5 dogs, were shot and killed by a reportedly depressed individual named Michael Guzzo in a town home the family had owned for decades, according to the police. Neighbors have reported that Guzzo often argued with pet owners about barking dogs in the development, and police have stated that Guzzo shot at another dog-owning neighbor on Saturday, after which he returned to his own unit and killed himself with the same pump-action shotgun he used for the slayings.

JJ Hensley and Laurie Merrill of The Arizona Republic write:

Michael Guzzo’s life ended as his former wife predicted — at his own hand — but Janet Guzzo said she never envisioned her ex-husband killing anyone else as he sought to end his own deep depression. Guzzo shot a family of four, including an autistic 17-year-old boy, before killing himself with a shotgun in his Phoenix apartment on Saturday morning.

On any other Monday, 66-year-old Bruce Moore, would have escorted Shannon Moore, 17, to the bus, neighbors said, so Shannon could attend classes at a Phoenix high school dedicated to meeting the needs of special-education students in a small-school environment.

Instead, grief counselors met with students at the Desiderata school where Shannon had transferred in April. Many of the conversations centered around one theme: Why Shannon?

“He was such a nice kid. How could this happen to him? Why him?” said Craig Pletenik, a Phoenix Union High School District spokesman who related the questions that the counselors received. “He was at home. Are any of us safe? If you are not safe in your home, where are you safe?”

 The police believe that the answers to the questions Shannon’s classmates were grappling with probably died with Guzzo on Saturday.

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Janet Guzzo, however, who was married to Guzzo for more than a decade before they divorced in 1999, provided some input into this tragic situation, stating that the barking dogs and the presence of a weapon, coupled with Guzzo’s extreme depression and increasing isolation, probably all contributed to Saturday’s catastrophe.

“He always was just such a troubled individual,” said Janet, a psychiatric nurse. “You just knew it was coming. I said, ‘Mike, something bad is going to happen if you can’t get a handle on that rage and anger.’ “

Janet said her ex-husband had never complained to her about his neighbors. According to her, however, his deep-seated depression, which grew worse with age, made anyone who set him off a potential victim.

“It was a case of mental illness, and (he) chose not to address it.”

“Sadness, isolation. It’s hard to get your hand around it because it’s not tangible. He is a nice person, and he wasn’t a bad person; he did a very bad thing,” Janet said. “They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

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A neighbor of Bruce Moore’s — who has lived in the complex for more than 40 years — explained that Bruce had moved to the unit to care for a relative and that his daughter and her family had joined him within the last few years.

Other neighbors mentioned that Bruce’s daughter Renee and her husband Michael had recently returned from China. Renee was reportedly excited to get her five dogs out of quarantine. Charise Hatchett, a neighbor, explained that Renee left a note on Friday asking Hatchett to drop off her dog for a grooming appointment.

The Arizona Humane Society took possession of the three dogs that survived the shooting.

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I often wonder why my town — which is just an ordinary, racially-mixed, working middle-class community — is so generally peaceful and why the children are relatively good-natured. Whenever I’m over at the high school for parent-teachers conferences or any other event, I’m struck by how polite the kids are. They smile at Old Man Moore and offer pleasantries.

Just this morning, when I was driving my kid to school (now the child is off at college), I asked the child how come he/she didn’t make plans to murder her mother and me when we tell her “no”, which does happen on occasion. The child looked at me in exasperation and cranked up the hip-hop on the car radio. I then asked the child if any of the kids at the high school plotted to murder their parents. The child looked at with increasing exasperation and barked, “No dad, if they did they wouldn’t still be at school.”

How could I argue with that? We listened to the new Eminem and Rhianna duet and I dropped the kid off. Sometimes I think I’m very lucky. Other times I know I am.

But the fact that our town seems reasonably safe and pleasant does not mean that there might not be a Michael Guzzo-type brooding silently behind closed doors. As long as guns are readily available anyone could flip out and wreak havoc with the neighbors or at the high school or at the shopping mall. I just pray that it does not happen. One of the tools that helps me get through each day is my fond belief that our town is somehow a “good place” where violence is scarce and where the kids are more or less decent. I would hate to be proved wrong.