by BJW Nashe

1. Dog Soldiers, by Robert Stone

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

2. Gorky Park, by Martin Cruz Smith

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

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

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

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

5. Mystic River, Dennis Lehane

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

6. Baise Mois, by Virginie Despentes

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

 7. Clockers, by Richard Price

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

8. Let it Bleed, by Ian Rankin

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

 9. The Snowman, by Jo Nesbo

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

10. Bangkok 8, by John Burdett

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

11. Dark Places, by Gillian Flynn

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

 12. Sick City, by Tony O’Neill

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

We here at All Things Crime Blog extend a warm welcome to Yalonda Laugh. Yalonda is a Karla Homolka super-sleuth and is the main author of this post. We thank her for digging deep and providing us with a fascinating depiction of Karla’s childhood.

by Yalonda Laugh with analysis from Patrick H. Moore

The question of who Karla Homolka really is has baffled people all across Canada and the United States (and the rest of the world) ever since the trial of Paul Bernardo in February 1993 , when the ex-accountant from Price Waterhouse and soon to be ex-husband of Homolka was arrested for the rapes and murders of Canadian schoolgirls Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. Followers of this compelling case are universally aware that in return for testifying at trial against Bernardo, Homolka received what many consider to be a “sweetheart” plea deal, a mere 12 years in prison. Bernardo, on the other hand, received the maximum term allowable by Canadian law — life imprisonment. Karla Homolka currently resides in Guadeloupe in the West Indies with her husband and three young children. She has for all intents and purposes reinvented herself. Is she happy? No one really knows except perhaps those closest to her. Does she sleep well at night? Again, no one knows.

What is known, however, is that Karla Homolka is despised by a great numbers of followers of this case, detested with an almost visceral hatred. The cause of this virulent hatred appears to be the fact that Karla is perceived as having been a “normal child” who enjoyed a “normal upbringing” in “normal circumstances.” Therefore, according to this line of thought, she had absolutely no reason or excuse for turning into a conscienceless rapist and murderess. It’s as if your next door neighbor for purely gratuitous reasons decided to rape and murder for the sheer sport of it. Is this view of Karla as a “normal” person who engaged in truly horrific conduct out of sheer self-indulgence accurate? This is the question we will explore in this inquiry. Or as researcher and co-author Yalonda Laugh expresses so pithily:

How could a smart, head-strong young woman from St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada align herself with school-girl killer and Scarborough Rapist Paul Bernardo? That has been the key question informing this frustrating case since Homolka’s plea deal was first made public on May 14, 1993 . Who was Karla Leanne Homolka? Were there clues in her childhood and early years that signaled what she was to become and why she would ultimately be considered “the most hated woman in North America?”

Let us take a journey toward this destination so that each reader can decide for him or herself:

Karla Leanne Homolka was born on May 4, 1970 to Czechoslovakian immigrant Karel Homolka and Dorothy Seger of Ontario. Karel made a living as a traveling salesman, selling black velvet paintings and lighting fixtures from the sidewalks of shopping centers and malls.

Karla Homolka was asthmatic which resulted in frequent hospitalization during her childhood. Her attacks seemed to be triggered by any type of situation where she felt excited or frightened, such as birthdays, holidays or the first day of school.

According to Karla’s mother Dorothy, this obstacle didn’t stop little Karla from blossoming. She walked and talked at an early age. In the 3rd grade, Karla was given an IQ test in which she scored a quotient of 131, which demonstrated conclusively that she was indeed a very bright girl. (For the sake of reference, an IQ score of 135 is associated with the 98th percentile.)  Karla’s teachers described her as “eager” and “a good student.”

One of Karla’s friends from the second grade at Parnell Public School notes that at this early age she was constantly drawing houses. She was always the first one to be seated at her desk, the first one back from recess and the first one to start her work. She seemed almost fanatical when drawing her little houses and was preoccupied with, even unnaturally intent, on staying within the lines.

Thus, this early snapshot of Karla seems to reveal that at a tender age she was already obsessive, but not in a bad way — a hard worker and a perfectionist, more focused perhaps on pleasing the authority figures than on conforming to the expectations of her peers.

Karla showed a soft spot for animals, even at this young age. Once when some boys on the playground were tormenting a beetle with a stick, Karla rushed to the aid of the insect and screamed: “You shouldn’t kill it. It’s wrong to kill anything.”

As she got to know her better, Karla’s new friend started to see that she was a bit bossy and wanted things to be done her way. She wanted to be pushed on the swings, she wanted to go down the slide first, and she demanded that her new friend come spend time with her at her home on Linwell Road. The friend couldn’t help wondering how much the two girls really had in common. At that stage, Karla dressed only in pink frilly dresses and was downright prissy, while the friend was a tomboy — a hockey fan in the best Canadian tradition. The friend wasn’t surprised when she arrived at the Homolka residence and found Karla waiting for her with with over a dozen Barbie and Ken dolls. Karla told her friend that everything about her Barbies was, and had to be, perfect: their clothes, their hair, even their undergarments. The friend recalls Karla fantasizing that one day she would have the perfect life which would include a handsome husband not unlike Ken. In retrospect, it wasn’t much of a play-date for the friend. Karla insisted on rigidly controlling the game. She decided what the Barbies did, where they went, what they wore and what words came out of their little Barbie mouths. When her friend suggested new or different story lines,  Karla reacted huffily and immediately put the Barbies away .

Based on this evidence, it is clear that at the age of 7 or 8, Karla was bossy, controlling and obsessive. This early pattern of selfishness was, of course, her bete noire which would ultimately lead herto the take part in committing the awful crimes that shocked the world.

The friend’s dog Buster hated everyone on the planet except for little Karla, who seemed to have a way with animals. Karla claimed that she had a dog named Lester, an obvious falsehood, which drew stares from the family. Strangely, around this time, animal lover Karla decided it would be fun to make a pillowcase parachute and toss her friend’s hamster out of an upper story bedroom window. The parachute malfunctioned and the hamster hit the ground hard and died two weeks later. After the hamster had been interred for a while, Karla decided it would be fun to dig up the little pet’s corpse and see what the decomposed body looked like. She stared at it for a long time and then exclaimed: “GROSS”.

This behavior is, of course, somewhat reminiscent of Jeffrey Dahmer and his well-known obsession with dead and decomposing bodies. The killing of the hamster could be termed an accidental homicide, or perhaps an involuntary manslaughter. In any event, it appears to be the first time Karla killed a living creature and is an early example of her rapidly-evolving penchant for cruelty.

When she was 10, Karla accompanied a friend, whom she later gifted with a booked called Brainchild, by noted behaviorist B.F. Skinner,  to the park to play baseball one afternoon. While the friend played, Karla became fascinated with a small girl playing in the outfield. The girl arms were deformed, half the normal length. Karla walked up to the girl’s brother and shouted: “Your sister’s a freak. She’s creepy looking. She’s got seal arms and belongs in a zoo.” This made the boy and the small girl cry. Karla clearly got satisfaction out of making the two cry. This incident also reveals her growing pleasure in hurting others.

At around the age of 12, Karla became obsessed with the Hardy Boys and the Nancy Drew mysteries. She bought a crime fighting kit and vowed that she would grow up to be a policeman(woman).

Karla and her friend met again when they were approximately 13. Karla had asked if she could bring her Barbie dolls over, but her friend had stated they were getting too old to be playing with dolls. They met up at Grace Lutheran Church and to her surprise, the friend noticed that Karla was hardly dressed in Barbie-like fashion:

On the contrary, she was dressed in black from head-to-toe, and was wearing black Doc Marten boots. Also noticeable was Karla’s new hairstyle. Gone was her beautiful naturally golden hair replaced by a multi-colored look. Her teeth seemed defective which Karla blamed on her asthma medication. The friend recalls that Karla seemed distant and moody and barely smiled. She wore dark eye makeup and black nail polish and seemed to be affecting a Goth look.

Friends at Ferndale Public School have noted that Karla loved shocking people by screaming obscenities for no reason. She was the only one of her peers to talk back to her parents and slam doors during arguments. Sometimes it was hard to tell who was the parent and who was the child. Friend Lisa Stanton described Karla as loud and stubborn and willful. She refused to ever admit that she could possibly be wrong and never backed down on anything for any reason:

“You couldn’t push her into anything. It didn’t matter if you were a parent, teacher, friend or stranger, Karla always spoke her mind. If she was mad about something she would let you know about it.”

Some sources have remarked  that Karla was a daddy’s girl most of the time. If her mother Dorothy refused to give her what she wanted, she would simply ask dear old daddy Karel. However, when Karel drank he had the bad habit of calling Karla a whore or a slut. This, however, was only after Karla had begun dating Paul. Karel was the only man in a house full of strong-willed women and he would often retreat to the basement when he felt outnumbered. Karla and her younger sister Lori were known to scream “Fuck off” at Karel and they would call him “a dumb Czech” when they didn’t get their way. Karla, however, was kind and attentive to Lori. When Lori was sick with the flu and Karla’s parents were gone for the day, Karla gave Lori a little bell to ring whenever she needed something or merely wanted attention.

The summer before high school Karla began cruising around town with her friends. Karla had the audacity to would wave at boys in cars whom she felt were attractive. She had no compunction about striking up conversations with complete strangers.

Once Karla entered high school, she exhibited all the usual symptoms of a typical depressed adolescent, albeit a boy-crazy depressed adolescent. She anguished over the opposite sex. She told her friends that boys were her main concern and that school was a drag. Her style of dress grew increasingly non-conforming. She wore long johns and boxer shorts complete with ballet slippers to Sir Winston Churchill Secondary School, which made her stand out like a sore thumb. The school was considered to be mainly a preppy school  and the majority of the students were well-off. Karla didn’t try to hide the fact that she disliked the preps and the diehard preps hated her. Karla gave the impression that she really didn’t care what anyone thought of her. She was bound and determined to be her own person.

Friend Kevin Jacoby remembers Karla as open and honest. She was seen as someone weird or different who didn’t hold back and always said whatever was on her mind.

Once in high school, Karla seemed to live in two worlds and certainly exhibited mood swings. Her friends recall that at times she seemed elated and would speak enthusiastically about going to university, becoming a veterinarian or an undercover police officer. At other times, she would hardly speak at all for weeks at a time. Karla often spoke about killing herself and once revealed a small slit moving horizontally across her wrist. If it was a suicide attempt, it was a feeble attempt and her friends remarked that they were sure that it was just to get attention. Karla also claimed that she had tried to overdose on sleeping pills. Her peers struggled to understand how someone as vain as Karla, who was constantly looking at herself in the mirror and fixing their hair, could apparently have such contempt for their own life.

Karla talked frequently about her favorite movies which were mostly horror flicks. “Friday the 13th” made a big impression on her and she loved the story line about young virgins being slashed and hacked up by a psychopath.

Karla got a part-time job at the Number One Pet Center, feeding and watering the animals.

Kevin Jacoby remembers Karla phoning frequently, crying and depressed. She complained of her volatile relationship at home with her father who was frequently drunk. She described fights between her parents and her fights with her mother. “Everything she did or said was taken in the worst possible way when Karel was drinking.”

In contrast to this picture of a depressed, negative and brooding Karla, her mother Dorothy described Karla as smart, sweet ,active, fun-loving, outgoing, a leader, an instigator, academically and socially successful, and always surrounded by friends. She liked quiet time to recharge her batteries and loved to read and think. Dorothy did admit, however:

“Mind you, something did change when Karla got to high school.”

During this period, Karel Homolka told Lynda Wollis that he was in love with her and wanted to leave Dorothy. Lynda told him to go home and keep his mouth shut. Apparently, Karel failed to do so. In any event, Dorothy went to Lynda the next day and told her:

“You could save my marriage if you sleep with both of us.” Nobody knows exactly how this might have affected Karla or if she even knew, but it was well-known that Karel was called “The Pervert” at the Shaver faith-based geriatric clinic where Dorothy worked.

Karla developed an interest in the occult when she entered high school. Her friend Amanda said they would burn candles and incense and talk about spirits and the “Screaming Tunnels” which were near the railroad tracks outside of town. Karla placed ads in the papers to buy a Ouija Board.

Friend Debbie Purdie stated: “When we were in high school she was a little rebel. Nobody ever told Karla what to do (or what to think). She was her own person and her own boss.”

Karla studied music and took voice lessons but she would not sing in front of the class. Friends noticed strange circles carved into Larla’s arms and filled in with nail polish. Karla inscribed in a book, Michelle Remembers, which is about satanism, sexual abuse and the repressed memory syndrome:

“There is always something more left to say.”

Karla admitted that in Grade 10, she smoked dope and experimented with white crosses, an upper of mild to moderate strength..

Karla once told her friend Tracy Collins, “You know what I’d like to do…..? I’d like to put dots all over somebody’s body and take a knife and then play connect the dots and then pour vinegar all over them.” Tracy dutifully reported that to her parents who, logically enough, would no longer let her associate with Karla. They said she was strange and domineering and that Tracy’s grades had slipped during the period of their friendship.

Karla dated a boy named Doug in Grade 12. He found her to be moody and consumed with the thought of death. She was constantly threatening suicide. When Doug moved to — of all places Kansas — Karla, against her parents’ wishes, flew there to visit him. Karla admitted to drinking “Purple Jesus” grain alcohol and snorting cocaine. Karla told her friends she that she had lost her virginity with Doug and described a shocking — and unlikely scene — that involved bondage, dog collars, extremely dirty talk (at least for middle-class teenagers), and strangulation. According to the more conventionally-minded Doug, they had only had normal sex. As Karla related the story to her friends, they noticed that she was detached and displayed no emotion. They wondered who she would get involved with next time. It was clear by this point that unless something or someone stopped her, Karla was heading toward a place that very few of us would like to visit.

At the end of senior year Karla inscribed a friend’s yearbook: “Remember: Suicide kicks and fasting is awesome. Bones rule ! Death Rules ! Death Kicks ! I love death ! Kill the fucking world! “

Oddly, while all of this was going on, Karla and her friends Debbie Purdie, Kathy Wilson and Lisa Stanton formed the Exclusive Diamond Club. Their goal was to recruit rich, good-looking older men, obtain the coveted diamond, marry and live happily ever after.

Friend Kathy Wilson remarked on the fact that Karla was “the tough one of the group.” She kept a pair of handcuffs hanging on her bedroom wall and told friends she was going to become a police officer.

Analysis by Patrick H. Moore:

It is my understanding that many followers of Karla seem to believe that she was the product of a normal upbringing and seem to hold that fact against her as if the products of middle-class homes are given less latitude for aberrant behavior than individuals who are reared in less-privileged environments. It is certainly true that Karla’s family was economically comfortable. Both parents worked and she lived in a decent house in a good neighborhood. However, there are clear signs that her family was at least somewhat dysfunctional. Her father was a heavy drinker, probably an alcoholic, and was reportedly abusive when drunk. There appears to have been an ongoing power struggle within the family as Karla’s father Karel wrestled with the demands of the four strong females with whom he lived. It is also perhaps strange that Karla’s mother Dorothy, when confronted with her husband’s infidelity, suggested they have a threesome as a way to salvage their marriage.

The vast majority of children, however, who grow up in problematic households, do not become rapists and murderers, or even criminals for that matter. Karla’s choice of Paul Bernardo as a partner in crime cannot be explained by her upbringing.

As a child, however, Karla exhibited definite signs that she was not entirely “normal.” The fact that she killed her friend’s hamster by “parachuting” it out of a second story window is not in itself that damning. After all, kids frequently do odd things and she was for the most part an animal lover. However, the fact she dug the hamster’s corpse up after a few weeks in the ground to examine the ongoing decomposition is very unusual and reminds this commentator of Jeffrey Dahmer’s penchant for observing bodies in various decayed states.

By the time Karla had entered the Canadian equivalent of middle school, she had begun exhibiting anti-social tendencies. Her choice of the Goth look and various other non-conforming modes of dress suggest an insecure individual desperate for attention. From the time she entered high school, Karla was clearly depressed, perhaps dangerously so. Her suicide attempt(s) was a red flag that something was seriously wrong, as was her habit of carving peculiar decorations into her arms. The fact that she expressed her desire to play “connect the dots” with a knife on other people’s bodies should have been a warning that she was harboring dangerous fantasies, as was her choice of highly unconventional reading material. Her crowning indication of “strangeness” was her claim that when she lost her virginity with Doug, they engaged in “bondage, dog collars, extremely dirty talk (at least for middle-class teenagers), and strangulation.”

Based on my eleven years of experience in working with criminals, there is no doubt in my mind that by the time Karla had completed high school, she was was a soul teetering on the edge of the abyss. Could it have been predicted with any certainty that she would turn into a rapist and serial killer? Of course not. Based on her domineering personality and penchant for darkness, however, it does not seem at all surprising that she was drawn to Paul Bernardo who appears to have shared many of these same qualities. I would posit that once Karla and Paul were together, they brought out the worst in each other with the result being that Leslie Mahaffy, Kristen French and Karla’s sister Tammi suffered horrible and entirely unnecessary fates.

Was Karla a normal child? The answer is a resounding “NO!”

Note: The quotations in the factual basis of this analysis of Karla Homolka’s childhood are derived from Stephen Williams’ “Invisible Darkness,” Nick Pron’s “Lethal Marriage,” and Alan Cairns and Scott Burnside’s “Deadly Innocence,” all of which have been widely disseminated and serve as valuable research tools for Karla followers.

Click on the following links to read previous Karla posts:

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

Watching Karla Homolka: Karla Just Did As She Pleased

Watching Karla Homolka: The Game Gets Real

Watching Karla Homolka: Karla Stacks the Deck

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

Watching Karla Homolka: It’s a Family Affair

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

Is Karla Homolka the Most Hated Woman in North America?

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

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

by JJ Rogers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Darcia Helle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Aileen Wuornos’ final interview with Nick Broomfield one day before her execution, she starts out calmly enough and appears to have made her peace with dying. She believes in an afterlife and seems to have no fear of what lies ahead. But then she gets angry and starts dissing on the system. In her mind, she has been used, abused and manipulated by society. Like many people who have been badly hurt, given the chance, she is quick to place the blame on others. Many people who have viewed her final interview, including Nick Broomfield, believe that Ms. Wuornos had succumbed to madness as the final hours of her life ticked away.

Yet, if we examine a selection of Ms. Wuornos’ quotes (brought to us courtesy of brainyquote.com), we find a fairly lucid individual who seems to assess herself unflinchingly without pulling any punches. So what does it all mean? Hard to say for sure but we can be confident on one important point. Aileen Wuornos had been deeply hurt by life and it had rendered her a very angry woman.

• I am a serial killer. I would kill again. (She appears to know herself quite well.)

• I wanted to clear all the lies and let the truth come out. I have hate crawling through my system. (She is in a sense relieved that her killing spree is over but now all that remains is her self-hatred and loathing for the human race that has so damaged her.)

• I need to die for the killing of those people.  (An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. This makes me wonder how I would react if I was a serial killer who had been arrested and was facing execution. Would I want to live or die? How precious is life if you are serving life with no chance of parole?

• I’m one who seriously hates human life and would kill again. (Again Ms. Wuornos expresses her deep loathing for the human race. I am reminded of an angry acquaintance who ultimately killed himself. In a final statement, he wrote: “All men are zombies. Do you agree? Because all men are zombies, the only humane thing to do is to kill. Do you agree?” In this mindset, we see a reversal of the normal human desire to help, not harm, others. The serial killer (or potential serial killer) projects his or her self-loathing onto the entire species.

• I really got tired of it all. I was angry about the johns. (Understandably, Ms. Wuornos was worn down psychologically by working as a prostitute. I’m sure the attitudes of prostitutes toward their “work” and their customers varies greatly from person to person, and Ms. Wuornos falls into the category of those “ladies of the night” who despise their johns. I’ve known two prostitutes personally, both of whom were drug addicts. One was reasonably fond of her customers, especially the old guys whom she described as gentle and grateful. The other woman never said anything about her johns. My sense is they were merely a means to an end — the drugs she so desperately desired.)

• My main concern is if this composer has been made aware of the fact that I’ve come clean in all of my cases. I killed in pure hate, robbing along the way. So if this person hasn’t, then I’d sure appreciate it if someone would inform him or her of it. (Ms. Wuornos seems to have a strong need to set the record straight and likes to talk about how pure and undiluted, albeit negative, her motives were.)

• I robbed them, and I killed them as cold as ice, and I would do it again, and I know I would kill another person because I’ve hated humans for a long time. (This is why she is, in a sense, glad that her murderous spree came to an end. Somewhere deep within there is the lost part of Ms. Wuornos’ psyche which has been buried and eroded by “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” that would prefer to live in a kinder and more compassionate world.

• “May your wife and children get raped, right in the ___.” (To the jurors who convicted her.) (Hopefully, the powers that be were not listening. Too many people are already victimized in this manner.)

 Click here to view Darcia Helle’s compelling Aileen Wuornos post:

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

by BJW Nashe

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

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

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

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

Juliet From Hell

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

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

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

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

No Future

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

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

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

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

Death

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

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

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

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

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

No Moral to the Story

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

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

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

by The Starks Shrink

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlie Bothuell V May Have a Very Sharp Axe to Grind

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

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

Why Beautiful Murderesses Inflame the Passions of the True Crime Fan

Going Postal Goes Fed-Ex!

How to Raise a Serial Killer in 10 Easy Steps

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

Luka Magnotta: Man, Boy or Beast?

The Disturbing Truth about Mothers Who Murder Their Children

Teleka Patrick Needed a Psychiatrist, Not a Pastor!

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

compiled by Patrick H. Moore

On February 6, 1943, the famed film actor Errol Flynn, after a month-long trial, was acquitted of the rapes and statutory rapes of Peggy Satterlee and Betty Hansen. The jury deliberated for 13 hours before returning with their unanimous not guilty verdict. According to Trove, Flynn, who had been uncharacteristically subdued throughout the lengthy ordeal, shouted gleefully upon hearing the good news:

Gosh! I feel like whooping!

We’re not sure if “whooping” is a euphemism for sexual intercourse but it certainly sounds like one.  What is known is that while the trial was going on, Mr. Flynn was pursuing and romancing 18-year old Nora Eddington, a teenage redhead who was the lobby cigarette girl at the courthouse. Flynn, who was never shy about expressing himself, explained:

I carefully checked her age. She was eighteen, safe ground. Her name, it turned out, was Nora Eddington.  What I didn’t know was that her father was Captain Jack Eddington of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office.

Flynn later married Nora Eddington, but like his other marriages, it was doomed to fail.

The  jury forewoman, a Mrs. Anderson, explained that during the 13 hours the jury was out, there were seven votes of 10 to 2 in favor of an acquittal. Finally, however, the two “hold- outs” capitulated. While all this was going on, Flynn literally could not  sit still and “lit one cigarette after another while rising from his chair and sitting down again.”

Naturally, the courtroom went wild when the verdict was finally read.  In addition to shouting about the joys of “whooping,” Flynn“jumped from his chair and rushed across the court-room to the jury and shook hands enthusiastically with the forewoman and others. Spectators cheered and crowded around Flynn and thumped his back.”

The Judge stated that he believed that the evidence was evenly divided but that  he felt the verdict was correct.

Flynn, who has been accused of many things including having Nazi leanings, commented in an interview:

It’s wonderful news. I did not become an American citizen for nothing. The fair play I received at this trial proves that. My confidence in American justice kept me hoping for such a verdict.

Peggy Satterlee said: “I knew those women would acquit him. They just sat and looked adoringly at him as if he was their son or something. The trial was an awful strain and the verdict horrible. I wish they had taken Betty Hansen and left me out. I was working and minding my own business.”

Given Errol Flynn’s “skin of his teeth” escape, not unlike his many magnificent escapes in his swashbuckling films, one can’t help but wonder who his adversaries were. Who were Peggy Satterlee and Betty Hansen?

Sir! A Magazine for Males, October, 1954, brings us this on Flynn and the two young ladies:

It seems that Flynn got entangled with two lovely young things at two different times in the space of a year. One was a Miss Betty Hansen, aged 17; the other a Peggy Satterlee of even more tender years.

The girls were irked with Flynn and their parents were irked with him. The State of California, having been duly applied to, decided to try him for both charges at one and the same time.  The public, to say the least, never had it better.

Flynn claimed that the whole thing was ridiculous; although he knew the girls, he had no knowledge that they were under 18. Flynn had a point. Both young women appeared to be of the age of legal consent:

Miss Satterlee danced at N.T.O’s Florentine Gardens, clad mostly in a plunge neckline, and Miss Hansen had come to the coast with movie ambitions.  When dressed for the kill, they could, both of them, have been an attractive pair of youngish grandmothers, what with their warpaint and mascara.

Satterlee and Hansen, however, hardly looked like “youngish grandmothers” in the courtroom. No doubt their attorneys had advised them on the need for innocent presentation:

Miss Satterlee appeared without even powder, clad in a little girl’s billowy dress and flat wedgies, and she had her hair artfully rigged in two long braids down her back caught with fetching bows.

She could have been ten. And Miss Hansen, also eschewing cosmetics, wore flat heeled shoes and a plain drab smock.

Miss Hansen was the first to take the stand. She claimed to have gone to dinner at the home of Flynn’s friend, McEvoy, where she had been given an “evil green drink” which had made her very sick. Always the gentleman, Flynn had taken her upstairs to take a “nap.” He had also helped her undress. On cross-examination, Flynn’s lawyer, the famed Jerry Geisler, inquired of Miss Hansen:

“But when you found you were not going to sleep, didn’t you try and push him away?”

Miss Hansen admitted she had not pushed him, kicked him or scratched him.

Miss Satterlee’s testimony was similar in nature except, in this case, Flynn’s unwanted advances had taken place on his yacht, the Sirocco. She stated that she had not screamed for help even though there were people nearby. She stated quaintly that she had not thought it worthwhile because: “the refrigerator was running.” With logic like that, it’s not surprising that Flynn was acquitted on both charges. Newsweek (yes they had Newsweek way back then) stated:

It happened in the best Hollywood tradition. The defendant leaped joyfully to his feet.  Spectators cheered. Flashbulbs popped…”

Flynn  was innocent. Not one seemed to be particularly put out over the not guilty verdict, not even Betsy Hansen’s mother who issued a statement from her home in Lincoln, Nebraska:

Oh well, nobody got hurt. I have no hard feeling toward Mr. Flynn. Betty is the cutest little thing you ever saw…a clean little Christian girl!

MORE ON THE TRIAL

Jurors are prone to speaking out following verdicts and the Flynn jurors were no exception. Motion Picture in conjunction  with Hollywood Magazine brings us the following:

What really convinced the jury that he was innocent?

With MOTION PICTURE-HOLLYWOOD’S policy of bringing you the inside story behind all front-page Hollywood news, we went to the individual jurors and asked them. Nine women and three men—all mature, intelligent and conscientious—sat in on the fate of Flynn, but because they are respectable citizens with families and want to avoid the spotlight, we have respected their desire for privacy by not quoting any member by name.

One of the jurors told me significantly, “It was not so much Flynn’s testimony that helped him as it was the testimony of both the girls who brought charges against him.”

“Their testimony proved to us that they were not always telling the truth. For instance, Betty Hansen first said that she undressed herself, and then said that Flynn had undressed her. During the preliminary hearing she said that the alleged act took place on a large bed in a large room, but on the stand she said it was a small bed in an alcove.”

The appearance of the girls did their cases no good either, according to the jurors. “There were no tears, no grief in recalling the alleged acts. We felt that a girl whose virtue had been molested would be unable to control her emotions on recalling the incident, but Betty Hansen and Peggy Satterlee were belligerent and displayed no regret.

“Besides, Mrs. Satterlee knew that her daughter was living in the apartment of a married man and was accepting money and gifts from him.”

“I felt sure,” a pleasant-faced, motherly juror told me, “that Betty Hansen first brought charges against Flynn out of hurt feelings and a sudden desire for revenge, and that when her case was weak, Peggy Satterlee was brought in.”

“Betty, on the other hand, was furious at Errol Flynn because he had paid no attention to her at Fred McEvoy’s party which she had crashed. She had come uninvited to that party with the express purpose of playing up to Mr. Flynn to obtain his help in getting into pictures…”

The jury was alert, not only in weighing every word uttered in court, but in making their sage analysis of the evidence displayed. The snapshots of Peggy Satterlee in a bathing suit taken on Sunday a few hours after she said she was attacked, told them plenty. “She looked happy and carefree, not at all like a girl who had suffered a harrowing physical experience as she had claimed.”

Not a thing missed their keen scrutiny. When Peggy told how she and Cathcart-Jones had played tag one night in a mortuary and how she had placed her face next to that of a dead man, they were revolted and arrived at the conclusion that a girl who could do that must be too calloused to be as deeply hurt as she said she was.

The Judge himself admonished the jurors that a birth certificate need not be viewed as conclusive evidence.

“We never felt that the girls were as young as they claimed,” several jurors explained. “Betty told us that she had been graduated from high school and then had gone to Teachers’ Training for two years before she came to Hollywood. Even a very bright girl—which Betty obviously was not—couldn’t have accomplished so much under the age of 17. Peggy looked and acted worldly; and on many occasions had sworn that she was older. For instance, she and her mother insisted that she was 18 when she applied for a driver’s license, and she said she was 21 when she applied for a job at a night club. Apparently she thought nothing of adjusting her age to suit the circumstances.”

One of the jurors stated that Errol Flynn’s reputation as a glamorous Hollywood star had no influence in her decision to vote for acquittal:

“Believe me,” one of the women told me, “I have seen him on the screen only once. I looked upon him as a man seeking justice, not as a dashing film star with a handsome profile…”

How can one argue with such eloquence?

THE week after Errol Flynn’s trial was over, the boys and girls who attended it and wrote it up gave him a party where the whole cast was re-enacted, amidst much merriment. The party was in payment for one Errol threw for them on the ninth floor of the Hall of Justice, while the jury was out cogitating as to his guilt or innocence. Errol had his butler bring down two cases of liquor and lots of sandwiches, and a merry time was had by all except the judge and jury. Errol also wanted time on the radio to thank the Great American Public for giving him such a fair trial. Networks wouldn’t go for it.

FLYNN’S AFTERMATH

Naturally, we can’t help wondering what happened to Fynn after the trial. It is noted that the well-known expression: “In Like Flynn” stems from his acquittal. The website For Shame! brings us the following:

Errol’s career didn’t really suffer from the trial, but rather from negative public opinion when he didn’t enlist during WWII (sidenote: not his fault, he wanted to, didn’t pass the physical, remarkable considering sword choreography prowess which you’d think the Army could use somehow). By the early 50s he’d really embraced a late-Kerouacian diet of cake and whiskey, resulting in alcoholism and weight gain.

But Errol, the scalawag, the rapscallion, had to go out with an inappropriately younger bang: at the age of 50, he met and fell in love with a FIFTEEN YEAR OLD whom he planned TO MARRY and with whom he planned to move to Jamaica. Very, very unfortunately, Errol died of a heart attack in 1959 before he could really love or marry his little island childbride. Sad.

Although the moralists among us may despise Errol Flynn for his caddish, inappropriate and downright sexist behavior (not to mention his alleged Nazi leanings), he never seemed to express any regrets for his many flaws. But what can you expect from a man who stated in his typically flippant manner:

“I like my scotch old and my woman young.”

by John Paolucci

The investigation into the Cleveland kidnappings is in many ways just beginning.  It brings to mind the case of a murdered 8 year old Hasidic boy by the name of Leiby Kletzky, who was dismembered, packed into a suitcase and discarded in a dumpster by the perpetrator Levi Aron, who performed the dissection of the child in his Brooklyn apartment.  Aron kept a souvenir of the incident, the boy’s feet, which he stowed in a freezer in the apartment.  In the Cleveland kidnappings, like in the Kletzky case, there appears to be a wealth of incriminating evidence against the perpetrators.  In cases like these, the investigators need to have the scenes speak to them, hopefully answering the question, “Are there more victims?”

What we did not have in the Kletzky case was a living victim who could provide investigators with patterns of the perpetrator’s behavior and habits.  Kletsky’s Brooklyn community has its own “Shamrim” patrols, and they generally do not call the police unless it is absolutely necessary.  Therefore, although we were able to learn that Levi Aron had twice been banished from the community, there was no paper trail to follow as to what activities caused this expulsion.  It was rumored that he had behaved inappropriately towards children, but no one would come forward and provide more specific details. Individuals like Castro and Aron exhibit behavior so abhorrent and predatory that investigators will adopt the theory that there are other victims besides those that are already known, and believe that the crime scenes will likely hold clues as to their identity if they exist.

Levi Aron was identified as the person who abducted Kletzky while the investigation was still being carried as a “Missing Persons” case, so in both the Kletzky and the Cleveland cases there was a presumption that there are living victims in the locations who are in danger, thereby giving first responders an exigent circumstance exception to the fourth amendment, allowing them lawful entry into the residences for the purpose of preserving life.  Once it is determined that no civilians’ personal safety is in danger, the residence must be secured until a search warrant is issued so as not to risk the suppression of any evidence at the subsequent legal proceedings.

So the Question Is: What Are the Investigators Looking For?

The Search:  Aron was a hoarder, so the apartment had to be documented in stages, as layers of Aron’s accumulated possessions were moved and removed, to allow overall and detailed photographs, sketches and measurements to be taken. The primary scene (apparent location of the murder) was the third floor wherein there was no air conditioning to provide relief from the humid, New York July heat.  Since it was confirmed that Aron kept a trophy from his victim in the form of body parts, we needed to be certain that nothing as small as a nail clipping was overlooked while searching the stinking mound amassed throughout the years of a child murderer’s life.  Items in jeopardy of perishing in that harsh climate, such as blood evidence, were given immediate attention to ensure their preservation for laboratory testing.  The items of evidence were methodically collected, packaged, documented and made ready for transport.  A police box truck transported evidence to a central location where it was logged in, bar coded and vetted according to the information that was available as the investigation progressed. Aside from the residence, there was also 1) the dumpster in which the suitcase was recovered which was removed to our forensic garage and processed for fingerprints and DNA, 2) Aron’s vehicle which he used to abduct Kletzky, and 3) Aron’s locker and work space at his job, where he showed up to work in the interim between abducting Kletzky and killing him.  It was unclear how Aron was able to leave a live 8 year old in an apartment, go to work and return to kill the child without any other residents hearing anything.

The Evidence:  As commanding officer of the unit in the NYPD’s Forensic Investigations Division responsible for managing all DNA evidence collected in New York City, I had over 1,400 items of evidence seized from the Aron residence.  The evidence was categorized and assigned to the appropriate unit for respective analyses.  I would expect a similar strategy to be deployed in Cleveland.  At a meeting prior to commencing the search of the Aron residence, the Chief of Detectives told the Crime Scene Unit, “I want that place down to f**kin’ 2x4s when we leave!” So it began.  The following are some of the categories of evidence and the types of analyses requested and possible results that were anticipated (certain details and results are being withheld to preserve the integrity of the case):

DNA Evidence:  Leiby Kletzky’s DNA profile was compared to blood evidence recovered from the apartment.  Blood saturated rugs and mattresses recovered at the scene, and specific areas on these items were sampled, analyzed and compared to Kletzky’s DNA, and DNA collected from Levi Aron, to determine if any of the profiles developed were foreign and possibly that of another victim.  All blood evidence matched Kletzky’s DNA profile.  Items such as stuffed animals and women’s clothing were scraped and swabbed to collect skin cells that revealed DNA profiles foreign to the victim and perpetrator, some of which were female.  Through investigative leads, it was revealed that Aron had a brief marriage to a woman in Tennessee, who when contacted identified the clothing as hers, and provided DNA exemplars from herself and her child. When these exemplars were analyzed they matched the foreign profiles. Therefore, the DNA avenue of this investigation yielded no leads as to additional victims.  Though this was good news, it was not satisfying to any of us because we believed that no killer performs a precise dissection of his victim on his first “at bat”.  The search continued.

Digital Multi Media (DMM):  All laptop and desktop computers and accessories, all CDs and DVDs, thumb drives, cell phones, cameras, video equipment and anything that stores electronic data, which Aron had plenty of, was seized.  A task force of computer crimes Detectives was assigned the duty of decrypting, downloading, reviewing and analyzing all data from these items.  Communications via telephone and email helped to establish a timeline of his travels and document persons with whom he associated and locations where he spent time while banned from returning to Brooklyn.  We sent Detectives to Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee tracking down his acquaintances and searching local records for missing children. Several of Aron’s associates had police records involving minor sexual related offenses, arousing further suspicions that Aron had committed other offenses.    The digital evidence was also searched for photos of children or child pornography.  Time and again, all leads were exploited, but no fruit was harvested.

Controlled Substance Evidence: Evidence collected from the apartment in the form of prescription bottles containing pills proved to have significant value in the investigation.  The NYPD Crime Laboratory Controlled Substance Analysis Section documented each prescription and tested the pills to determine if the contents matched the label, many of which were labeled “Controlled Substance”.  Results were forwarded to the Office of Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) Department of Toxicology, where post mortem samples, collected at autopsy from Kletzky, were analyzed for the presence of these controlled substances.  The horror of Levi Aron’s deed was amplified when it was revealed through the toxicology examination that he had combined several of these controlled substances and made Kletzky ingest this noxious cocktail, rendering him unconscious, which would explain how the child remained silent while Aron went to work that day. The controlled substance analyses were vital in corroborating the series of events we believed had transpired just prior to the child’s murder.  It also explained how some of the incisions performed on this tortured child were made ante mortem.

In Cleveland, nothing will be “out of play” when searching the Castro house.  The victims have already provided DNA exemplars and may have to provide things such as hair samples and undergo other very personal examinations to assist with the investigation.  Remains as small as a miscarried fetus that was essentially beaten out of the mother could be hidden anywhere in the house if not discarded with the trash.  There is hardly an area or an item in that house that can immediately be ruled out as not probative.  Searches, swabs, photos, sketches, presumptive tests, DNA analysis and comparisons to the victims and Castro, floor boards to be pulled up, walls to be opened – there shouldn’t be anything but f**kin’ 2x4s left when they are done searching!  My heart goes out to the victims, their families and the investigators in Cleveland.

Please click here to view John Paolucci’s previous posts:

Dead Body at the Crime Scene – What Forensic Value Does It Have?

New York City Housing Police: A Bygone Era Worth Talking About

About the Author:  John Paolucci is a retired Detective Sergeant from NYPD who worked his last eight years in the Forensic Investigations Division, four of them as a Crime Scene Unit supervisor.  He was the first ever to command the OCME Liaison Unit where he managed all DNA evidence in NYC and trained thousands of investigators in DNA evidence collection and documentation. He developed a strong alliance between the OCME Forensic Biology Department and NYPD.  He also worked as a Narcotics Undercover and Patrol Officer in the Housing Projects of the South Bronx.   He is currently the president of Forensics 4 Real Inc., where he provides forensic support to private investigations, international and domestic.  He also trains students and law enforcement in forensic evidence and crime scene investigations and provides consultations with movie and television writers, directors and developers working on real crime shows and dramas.  www.forensics4real.com.

by Patrick H. Moore

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

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

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

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

*     *     *     *     *

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

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

 *     *     *     *     *

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

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

*     *     *     *     *

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

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

*      *      *      *      *

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

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

Austin L. Miller of the Halifax Media Group writes:

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

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

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

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

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

by Mike Roche

The Darin and Kim Campbell family lived in a rented 1.6 million dollar Tampa mansion, the former home of retired tennis star James Blake. The house sat behind the gates of the prestigious and very private Avila development, which was populated with multimillion-dollar homes and occupied by celebrity powerbrokers and athletes. The neighborhood centerpiece was an exclusive private golf course. Darin Campbell, 49, was a business executive at VASATEC, a digital records management services company. His wife, Kim, 51, was a stay-at-home mom, who was active in the community and at her teenagers’ school. The Campbell children, Megan, 15, and Colin, 18, attended the prestigious Carollwood Day School. Megan was an honors student and dancer. Colin, who had just attended his senior prom, was a talented student and baseball player.

In the predawn hours of what would have been a springtime morning in 2014, neighbors of the Campbell’s frantically summoned the fire department as they watched in horror as the opulent home became engulfed in flames. As firefighters battled the blaze, they discovered a grisly scene. Four unidentified bodies were located inside the house. Investigators quickly determined the fire was the result of an arson and the victims were killed by gunshot prior to the fire destroying the home.

Despite the outward appearance that the Campbell’s were the all-American family, there were cracks in the façade. Investigators have learned that in the days prior to fire, Darrin Campbell made several rather unusual moves. First, he purchased several gas cans at a home improvement store at about 8 a.m. on Sunday, May 4^th. An hour later, he bought over $600 worth of fireworks. The sales clerk at the fireworks store noted no unusual behavior from Darrin. On Tuesday, the day before the fire, he filled the gas cans at two separate service stations. He had already previously purchased a handgun in 2013.

Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Colonel Donna Lusczynski said, “Darrin Campbell, with the gun that was registered to him, systematically shot his son, his daughter and his wife in the head. He then placed fireworks throughout the residence. Used an accelerant to assist in lighting the fire. Lit the fire and then shot himself.”

*     *     *     *     *

Darrin and Kim Campbell moved from Michigan to Tampa in 2000 with their children. They built a home in an upscale neighborhood not far Tampa Airport. Their mortgage was a formidable  $546,000. In 2003, they acquired a vacant lot in another affluent development north of Tampa for $338,000. Darrin and Kim were thriving economically. They paid off the mortgage on the lot and sold the land for a handsome $160,000 profit in 2006.

During the Christmas Holidays, the Campbell family home was so lavishly decorated that the pleasing display drew crowds from neighboring communities. For four consecutive years, the home won honors as the “Best Decorated Holiday Home.” The family’s electric bill rose $800 during the holidays and they accepted donations to defray expenses. The Campbell’s then donated the $3,733 in donations to Metropolitan Ministries, a homeless support shelter for indigent families.

At the height of the real estate boom, the couple bought another vacant lot for $294,000 in the same development where their previous vacant lot was located. Although they still owned the new lot at the time of their deaths, the market had soured and the property was now worth one-third of the original purchase price. A lien was placed on the lot due to $7,800 in unpaid homeowner’s association fees. They eventually paid off the lien, but their financial struggles continued, and they were continually delinquent on their property taxes. They refinanced their house several times before selling it in 2012 for $750,000. The Campbell’s made a profit on the deal, but their overhead expenses continued to be steep. Their next big move was to move into the former Blake residence in the Avila estates.

Darrin Campbell was on the board of Carrollwood Day School, and served as treasurer. He formerly was a senior vice president at PODS, a shipping and storage container company. In 2007, Darrin took a position as vice-president at IVANS, an insurance company. After it changed ownership, he became the chief operating officer (COO) at VASTEC, where he recently took a leave of absence. The rent on the former Blake home was estimated to be a tidy $5,000 a month for the 5,000 square foot home. The base annual tuition for Carrolwood Day School was approximately $34,000 for the two children. The additional cost of books, uniforms, various fundraisers, and other educational expenses had to be a drain on the Campbell family checkbook. And of course, college tuition loomed on the horizon with Colin scheduled to graduate in a month.

Darrin Campbell’s mother, Mary, told the Daily News she was searching for answers. “I have no idea what happened. I spoke to him last night.” (the night before the conflagration). Family friends and neighbors heaped accolades on the entire family. It was obvious that they were well-respected and loved within the community.

We rarely have the opportunity to gaze behind the veneer of the façade our neighbors, or even our relatives, erect. We see what they allow us to see, and they often successfully conceal what’s really going on, especially if they have serious issues.

After conducting an extensive examination of the arson scene, investigators are still searching computers and papers found in the home. Interviews of family and friends may uncover ripples, or even violent rapids, sullying the appearance of calm waters. Interviews with employers both past and present may also shed light into Darrin Campbell’s employment stability or any possible inappropriate behavior. A financial audit will reveal the magnitude of the family’s financial problems.

The further up the ladder one ascends, the more difficult it becomes to step down when one’s personal wheel of fortune descends. One of the top ten stressors in life is finances. As individuals become overwhelmed with financial stress, the pressure often intrudes into both their domestic life and their employment. The negative emotional vortex sucks many formerly successful individuals into a life of despair from which they see no way to escape. They view alternatives (translated as a substantially reduced standard of living) as a stamp of failure.

Two-thirds of those who engage in targeted violence and mass murder have contemplated or attempted suicide in the past. When immense personal darkness clutches at these people, their thought processes and judgment become clouded. They become convinced that their family will have to endure the grief of their loss and the humiliation of their tarnished legacy. As a result, they view killing their family as an act of altruism.

Darrin Campbell will now be labeled as a family annihilator. These killers are most often men. In 2012, a study of 313 murder/suicides by the Violence Policy Center found that 90% of the killers were male. Most multiple-victim, murder-suicides involving a male murderer and three or more victims are perpetrated by family annihilators.  69% of murder-suicides falling into this category were perpetrated by family annihilators.  Family annihilators are murderers who kill their intimate partners and children, as well as other family members, before killing themselves.  USF Professor, Dr. Donna Cohen, states that in over a third of these cases, the annihilator starts a fire to cover their crime leaving only ashes. She feels that this is an attempt to deny access to their personal lives.

As surviving friends and relatives of the Campbell family struggle with the grief of this tragic loss, they are left to contemplate the lost contributions that Kim, Megan, and Colin would have provided to the world.

Please click here to view Mike Roche’s previous posts:

The Grisly Details of Serial “Mall Killer” Mike DeBardeleben’s Actions Will Never Be Known

Family Annihilator Darin Campbell Murders His Family and Torches Lavish Tampa Mansion

Alex Hribal Was Desperate and Said He Wanted Someone to Kill Him

Columbia Mall Shooter Darion Aguilar Followed the Model of Notorious Mass Murderers

Peter Lanza Speaks: The Lethal and Unvarnished Truth about His Son Adam

FHP Officer Jimmy Fulford Fields Pipe Bomb Intended for Young Mother with His Bare Hands and Dies Instantly

Fire Department and California Highway Patrol Go 9 Rounds: Win, Lose or Draw?

The Boston Bombers: A Tale of Two Troubled Brothers

Don’t Text at the Movies, The Life You Lose May Be Your Own!

Killers and the Catcher in the Rye

Mike Roche has over three decades of law enforcement experience. He began his career with the Little Rock Police Department, and spent twenty-two years with the U.S. Secret Service. The last fifteen years of his career were focused on conducting behavioral threat assessments of those threatening to engage in targeted violence. He is the author of three novels and two nonfiction works on mass murder and also rapport building. Retired, Mike is currently a security consultant at Protective Threat LLC, and an adjunct instructor at Saint Leo University. He resides in Florida with his family.

Mass Killers: How you Can Identify, Workplace, School, or Public Killers Before They Strikehttp://www.amazon.com/Mass-Killers-Identify-Workplace-School-ebook/dp/B00GHZWC1M/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1389112969&sr=1-2&keywords=mass+killers

Face 2 Face: Observation, Interviewing and Rapport Building Skills: an Ex-Secret Service Agent’s Guidehttp://www.amazon.com/Face-2-ebook/dp/B009991BII/ref=sr_1_6?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1354630000&sr=1-6

The Blue Monster  http://www.amazon.com/The-Blue-Monster-ebook/dp/B0054H8TMA/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1312641741&sr=1-1

Coins of Death http://www.amazon.com/Coins-Of-Death-ebook/dp/B005RPZ256/ref=sr_1_3?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1317860179&sr=1-3

Karma! http://www.amazon.com/Karma-Mike-Roche-ebook/dp/B0054H4OAG/ref=la_B00BHEIF78_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1389724285&sr=1-4

by Starks Shrink

On July 2nd 2005, Oklahoma resident Sheilla Shea took a knife and stabbed her six year old son, Patric, to death in front of her other three children, one of whom wrestled her to the floor and took the knife. Her 10-year-old son ran across the street to Shea’s mother-in-law’s home to tell her what had happened. The mother-in-law, Pauline Shea, told police the police that Sheilla suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. When police spoke to Sheilla, she admitted that she had fatally stabbed Patric and had intended to kill all her children and herself. She apparently believed that someone was trying to kill her children and decided that if she killed them first, it would be more humane. Certainly, not a rational thought but there are very few of those when someone is in the grip of psychosis.

Sheilla Shea wisely followed her attorney’s advice and waived a jury trial. Her case was heard by a judge and he rendered a verdict of guilty by reason of insanity. I know states vary with respect to the actual availability of guilty by reason of insanity verdicts, and I imagine our resident attorney and legal expert, Rick, will check in on this account. Had Sheilla opted for a jury trial, the results could have been disastrous, based upon recent comments in social media. Instead, she was committed involuntarily to a psychiatric facility, where she remained in custody for nine years until she was released just last month.

I first heard of Sheilla Shea just last week and only because she appeared on a television show about Justin Ross Harris and the car seat death of his child Cooper. When interviewed, Sheilla claimed that she knew what Harris was going through because she had also killed her child. Apparently, she also gave an interview on “Dr. Drew” about the horrific event. I have not seen the interview, nor have I been able to find it online. Why did she make a statement about Harris? I believe that she is not judging his culpability, only expressing her empathy with a parent who knows they have fatally harmed their child, be it through neglect or as a result of mental illness.

My curiosity piqued, I dug a little bit into this case and was left with a number of questions that were never answered satisfactorily but invite discussion.

Pauline Shea, Sheilla’s mother-in-law, told police that Sheilla was acting “off” and had told her and other people that she thought people were trying to crawl in through her window. In the days prior to the killing, she had kept the children indoors out of fear for their safety. This makes me ask the question: why didn’t Pauline do something? If she knew that Sheilla had schizophrenia, wouldn’t fantasies like this raise a red flag that something was seriously amiss?

Additionally, I discovered that a year prior to Patric’s death, Shea’s husband, Milton Eugene “Gene” Shea, was arrested for the production and possession of methamphetamine. This is when Pauline states that Sheilla “went off the deep end”. After Gene went to prison for his drug crime, Pauline claims that she took Sheilla to a mental crisis center, where she remained for up to three weeks while Pauline cared for her children. Twice during that period, reports were filed with health services. One report stated that Sheilla was being abused and forced to take drugs, and another claimed that she was abused and someone attempted to set her on fire. An ensuing investigation determined that the children were in no immediate danger and they referred Sheilla to counseling services. It’s my best guess that Sheilla herself was having delusions and made the reports herself. The investigation did note that the living conditions in the home were substandard – also a sign of mental illness. There are no indications that Sheilla herself ever abused methamphetamine, and in fact her mother-in-law claims that the couple often fought over his drug abuse.

In 2011, Sheilla was granted a conditional release which was intended to reintegrate her into society and build her self-reliance. She lived in her own apartment, filled her own prescriptions and attended her counseling appointments. This is a vital part of the treatment to ensure that the client will become and remain compliant with their treatment plan. Last month she was granted a full release from the psychiatric hospital. In essence, she is now a free woman. Her meth-cooking husband died in 2011, her children have forgiven her and understand, after extensive counseling themselves, that their mother was an extremely ill woman and incapable of acting differently. The public, however, is relentless. After her interview on HLN aired, many people were calling for her to be put into prison and worse. Their rationalization was that in the interview, Sheilla appreciated the enormity of her actions and didn’t seem mentally ill. Part of me wants to scream “DUH”; she’s been in a mental hospital for nine long years. They stabilized her medication so that she was no longer psychotic, and she underwent extensive therapy to deal with the after-effects of her actions, once she was able to fully understand what she had done. The rational part of me sees that the public-at-large does not understand serious mental illness/psychosis and how devastating it can be to the person who has to live with it.

I’m not sure why Sheilla Shea decided to go public with her story. She says she would sell her soul to have Patric back. I would hope that people could learn from the story of her family’s tragedy and intervene when someone is showing clear signs of mental illness. Regrettably, the masses seem to only scream for blood and ignore the stark reality that mental illness is a serious problem that we as a society need to provide care for in order to prevent occurrences such as that which befell Patric.

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

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

Why Beautiful Murderesses Inflame the Passions of the True Crime Fan

Going Postal Goes Fed-Ex!

How to Raise a Serial Killer in 10 Easy Steps

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

Luka Magnotta: Man, Boy or Beast?

The Disturbing Truth about Mothers Who Murder Their Children

Teleka Patrick Needed a Psychiatrist, Not a Pastor!

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

Skylar Neese and the Mean Girls Who Killed Her

by BJW Nashe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Darcia Helle

“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

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by Darcia Helle

In 1870, New Orleans was a city divided by politics, class, and race. The Civil War had left much of the south reeling, and now the government’s Radical Reconstruction attempted to force change by integrating the black population into the white-dominated hierarchy. Some whites rebelled, clinging to their Confederate roots, while others who supported the change suffered ridicule and disdain within their community. The atmosphere was tumultuous. Racism was not only openly practiced but encouraged.

Former United States Supreme Court Justice John Campbell, who resigned in order to join the Confederacy, illustrates this point well. He had this to say to his fellow New Orleanians: “We have Africans in place all about us, they are jurors, post office clerks, custom house officers & day by day they barter away their obligations and duties.”

Racial strife was not the only or even necessarily the biggest cause of violence. New Orleans’ wealthy class had a hair-trigger temper when it came to real or perceived slights. Duels to the death continued to be a favorite way of settling these disputes, earning the city of New Orleans the title of ‘Dueling Capital of the South’. The reason for this ran to the core of their values. Class and reputation were vital to the people of New Orleans. They believed the way a person dressed, spoke, and carried him/herself to be a statement of character. A person’s reputation was unquestioned, upheld by the community, and so the residents held a zero tolerance policy toward slander.

By 1870, this self-appointed elite class had become the minority. Foreign born immigrants made up 75% of the city’s population. Prejudices went much deeper than skin color. Irish and German immigrants were considered lowlifes, their presence tolerated by the upper class only slightly more than the presence of African-Americans. This hostile environment made New Orleans one of the most dangerous places in America during the late 1800s.

Thomas and Bridgette Digby were two of the city’s Irish immigrants living in relative obscurity. They had fled their country during the mid-1800s, along with thousands of others known as the “Famine Irish”. By June of 1870, the couple had three children and were living in a working class section of New Orleans. Thomas drove a hackney cab, and Bridgette took in laundry and sewing from the wealthy residents. Nothing about them or their lives was remarkable at the time. Certainly nothing suggested that their names would be committed to history.

That all changed on the afternoon of Thursday, June 9. At the end of each workday, the Digby’s street bustled with activity as people made their way home from their various jobs. On this day, two of the Digby children were in their front yard playing while Bridgette cooked dinner. George Digby, age 10, was playing with a group of friends. Seventeen-month-old Mollie was being watched by Rosa Gorman, a white teenage neighbor who sometimes babysat for Bridgette. Rosa was standing by the sidewalk, holding Mollie in her arms and occasionally conversing with the passersby.

Two African-American women who’d been walking by stopped to chat with Rosa. This was not unusual, despite the racial tension within the city. Irish and German immigrants shared that part of the city with free northern blacks and former slaves. They frequently conversed and even did business with one another. The two women were familiar to Rosa. She’d spoken to them before, though she did not know their names.

As they stood talking, Rosa noticed smoke and flames coming from a storefront two blocks away. Soon the fire engine, pulled by a horse, raced by with its bell clanging. An excited crowd followed to watch Seligman’s Photographic Studio burn. Rosa wanted to join the procession to watch the firefighters at work. She called to George Digby to take his sister. While George grumbled, the taller “mulatto” woman extended her arms and offered to take Mollie so that Rosa could go. Rosa happily handed Mollie off, leaving the two children in the care of the two African-American women on the sidewalk.

In today’s society, this would seem an insane thing to do. We don’t leave our children with strangers, regardless of race or color. But communities were different in the late 1800s. Relying on one’s neighbors was not unusual. The main factor here was probably that these two African-American women were well-dressed, well-spoken, and familiar. In the city of New Orleans, where people based their opinions on appearance, this meant the two women were trustworthy.

This one incident on that June afternoon taught an entire community that looks are deceiving.

After Rosa raced off behind the horse-drawn fire engine, the shorter of the two women called to George, Mollie’s brother, and asked if he knew where a particular seamstress lived. He said he did, and so the woman took him by the hand and asked if he would take them there. The two African-American women, one holding Mollie in her arms and the other holding George by the hand, made their way through the crowded streets.

According to George’s later account, he soon pointed out the home of Mary Cooks, the seamstress in question. The shorter woman told George he was mistaken, that it wasn’t the home they were looking for. And so they walked on.

New Orleans in 1870 was racially divided, but it wasn’t unusual to see black women with white children. African-Americans and black Creoles often worked as nannies for white families. No one paid the four of them any attention as they joined the crowds on the busy streets.

Eventually they reached a public market. The woman holding Mollie, described as tall and wearing a “seaside hat”, handed George some money, directed him to a booth to buy some bananas for his sister, and said they would wait for him. When George returned, the women – and Mollie – were gone.

The events following Mollie Digby’s kidnapping created chaos within New Orleans. The city was in the midst of Radical Reconstruction, already bitterly divided by racial issues, and now two black women had stolen a white child. The rumors didn’t take long to start circulating. People claimed Mollie had been taken for voodoo sacrifice. Others said she’d been sold to roaming Gypsies. Then there were those who speculated that she’d been abducted as revenge against Thomas Digby for some perceived slight, or that she was being used to extort money from a former lover by claiming the child to be his.

As rumors swirled and people pointed accusing fingers, the newly integrated police force struggled to gain traction in the case. In June of 1870, 28% of the New Orleans police force was African-American. While the majority, and all ruling officers, were white, this did nothing to ease the minds of conservative – bigoted – white New Orleans citizens. They wanted someone to blame for the police department’s failure to find Mollie and her kidnappers. White Police Chief Algernon Sidney Badger, along with Jean Baptiste Jourdain, the detective in charge of the case, became easy targets.

At a time when newspapers had limited circulation, before TV news gave us images of tragedies across the country, and long before the Internet put this all at our fingertips, the Digby case made national news. The missing child, however, was not the driving factor. Sadly, kidnappings and missing children were fairly common occurrences back then. The interest here stemmed partly from the circumstances, with well-dressed, well-mannered African-American women stealing a white child. But, more than that, the nation paid attention because this was the first case ever to be handled by a black police detective.

The details of this case are too complicated and convoluted to share here. For a full account of this story, as well as fascinating details of the historical period, I highly recommend reading The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case: Rage, Law, and Justice in the Reconstruction Era by Michael A. Ross. The short version of this story is that the outraged and outspoken media and citizens pushed the police department toward an arrest. In fact, they demanded nothing less. The following is a typical newspaper quote during the weeks after Mollie’s abduction:

“We may say to the police of New Orleans, that unless this child be found, they will suffer a burning disgrace – a lasting shame.” ~ The Picayune

Nonexistent witnesses were conjured up, people embellished or outright lied, and police interrogated and threatened anyone thought to be even remotely involved. The intense emotions surrounding the case fractured the relationship between white and black Creoles. Before this, black Creoles and African-Americans existed on different planes, with black Creoles enjoying a higher status within their community. They were longtime residents, businesspeople, respected by the white-dominated population. With Mollie’s disappearance and the ensuing investigation, they found themselves scrutinized in ways they hadn’t experienced. Prejudice stung them as black Creole women became the lead suspects. The racial divide carried them along, lumping them in with the now freed slaves who couldn’t be trusted.

Eventually two black sisters – Ellen Follin and Louisa Murray – were arrested, after having been identified by three white ‘witnesses’. The preliminary hearing and criminal trial became the most talked about events in the city, as well as entertainment for the nation. The media was not so much concerned with facts of the crime, since the white-dominated papers, at least initially, assumed the women to be guilty unless proven innocent. The details the newspapers chose to share say much about the era and the mentality of southern society:

A reporter from the Picayune noted that Louisa Murray wore “a dress of brown checked summer silk and a very light brown and fleecy veil.” She was “a handsome quadroon” with “small features, thin drawn up lips”, and “a wealth of glossy hair”.

Another reporter noted that the two sisters were much alike. “Both are tall beyond the average women, and slenderly formed. They are… mulatresses, but are by no means deficient in good looks. They dress with exceeding care and evince in their appeal a great deal of taste.”

Perhaps the most astonishing part of this entire case, given the time period, the outright persecution of someone black to blame, and the lackluster defense, is that the two sisters were found innocent by a jury of ten whites and two Afro-Creoles. Not only were they found innocent, but the jury took a mere eight minutes to deliberate. Again, the newspapers played a large role here, though not in the way one might expect. As the investigative details became public, reporters latched on to the glaring improprieties made by police

The Commercial Bulletin wrote that it was “next to impossible that an inquest [could] be conducted with less regard to the rules of evidence, the suggestion of common sense, the proprieties of judicial proceedings, or the law indicating the duty of a committing magistrate.”

While the tumultuous times certainly contributed to Louisa Murray and Ellen Follin’s arrest, these same times also helped, on some subconscious level, to aid their defense. The sisters were well-known, well-respected, and well-educated Afro-Creole women. Had they been poorly educated African-American women, the trial’s outcome would likely have been far different. Also, Mollie Digby’s abduction came at a unique historical period. In 1870, New Orleans was a somewhat enlightened southern city. Just a few years earlier would have placed them in the midst of the Civil War, when Confederates demanded control and wanted to subjugate all people of color. Just a few short years later, this area of the south was taken over by White Supremists, ensuring no person of color held any position of power or authority. But during this seven month period, from June 1870 to February 1871, a racially divided city managed to look beyond color to see the core of injustice.

An especially intriguing aspect of this case is that, before the trial or even the arrests, Mollie Digby was found and returned home. Or so the story goes. A fair-haired child of the same age was certainly handed off to the Digbys, though we will likely never know for sure whether that child was indeed Mollie. When the child was first given to Thomas Digby, her father, a mere couple of months after her disappearance, he could not say for sure whether the child was Mollie. In fact, he initially denied she was Mollie and didn’t want to take her. With some cajoling from those who found her, he opted to take her back home to let his wife decide. Bridgette Digby saw her husband return home with the child in his arms, and she immediately declared that child to be Mollie. Most took her at her word, believing Bridgette Digby to know her own child. Others had doubts rooted in the fact that Bridgette had been institutionalized because of her inability to cope with the loss of her daughter. She’d only recently been released and, perhaps, was so desperate to have her child back that she deluded herself into believing the fair-haired stranger was hers. There appears to be no record of Mollie’s reaction to being reunited with her parents or, possibly, the two people who claimed her as their own.

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

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

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

The Electric Chair Nightmare: An Infamous and Agonizing History

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

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

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

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

Why Should I Believe You? The History of the Polygraph

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

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

The Terror of ISO: A Descent into Madness

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

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

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

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

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

The characters await you.

by Patrick H. Moore

The Alphabet Serial Killer Joseph Naso enjoyed one helluva run but even his luck ran out when a Marin County jury recommended the death penalty for the 79-year-old former photographer convicted of the decades-old killings of four Northern California women. Naso, who represented himself at the trial, asked the jury to spare his life but to no avail. He will be formally sentenced at a later date by Superior Court Judge Andrew Sweet.

Why the peculiar nickname Alphabet Murders? A brief history lesson is in order:

The first phase of the “Alphabet Murders” (also known as the “double initial murders”) took place in the early 1970s in and around Rochester, New York, where three young girls were raped and strangled. Each of the girls’ first and last names started with the same letter and each body was found in a town whose name started with the same letter as each girl’s name (Carmen Colon’s body was found in Churchville, Wanda Walkowicz’s in Webster and Michelle Maenza’s in Macedon).

The Rochester Victims

Carmen Colon, 10, disappeared on November 16, 1971. She was found two days later, 12 miles from where she was last seen. Although her body was discovered in the town of Riga, the village of Churchville is the town’s center, and the town of Chili is nearby.

Wanda Walkowicz, 11, disappeared on April 2, 1973. Her body was found the next day at a rest area off State Route 104 in Webster, seven miles from Rochester.

Michelle Maenza, 11, disappeared almost eight months later on November 26, 1973. She was found two days later in Macedon, 15 miles from Rochester.

The Suspects

While hundreds of people were questioned, the killer was never caught. One man, considered to be a “person of interest” (he committed suicide six weeks after the last of the murders), was cleared in 2007 by DNA testing. In the case of Carmen Colon, her uncle was also considered a suspect until his suicide in 1991.

Kenneth Bianchi, who at the time was an ice cream vendor in Rochester at vending sites close to the first two murder scenes, was also a suspect. If you recognize Bianchi’s name, it’s because he later moved to Los Angeles, and in tandem with his cousin Angelo Buono, Jr., committed the Hillside Strangler murders between 1977 and 1978. Bianchi was never charged with the alphabet murders, and has tried repeatedly to have investigators officially clear him but to no avail. There is circumstantial evidence that his car was seen at two of the murder scenes and he remains under suspicion.

The California Alphabet Murders

The man convicted of the four California Alphabet Murders, which also date back to the 1970s, 79-year-old Joseph Naso, was  a New York native who lived in Rochester in the 1970s. He was arrested in Reno, Nevada on April 11, 2011. The California murder victims, like the New York victims, all had double initials: Roxene Roggasch, Pamela Parsons, Tracy Tofoya, and Carmen Colon (a different Carmen Colon than the Rochester, NY victim.) All four women have been described by authorities as prostitutes. Naso is also considered a “person of interest” in the New York Alphabet Murders . In his preliminary hearing in Marin County, CA, on January 12, 2012, his alleged “rape diary” was entered into evidence. It mentioned the death of a girl in the “Buffalo woods,” a probable allusion to Upstate New York. Naso was a professional photographer who traveled between New York and California extensively for decades.

Solving the Crime

The four killings were cold cases until 2009, when probation officers in Reno, Nev., conducted a routine firearms search of Naso’s home, who was on probation at the time for a felony larceny conviction in California. Inside his house, a macabre collection of evidence was discovered that led to his conviction. Naso apparently was a collector of sorts who was obsessed with the collectings references to the murders that he had committed. Police found a “List of 10″ featuring references to the killings, photographs of women appearing drugged or dead, and a journal with detailed descriptions of rape and violence toward underage girls and women.

• No. 3 on Naso’s list was “Girl from Loganitas,” who prosecutors believe was Roggasch. Her body was found near Lagunitas, a small town near the coast in Marin County. Court documents show Naso might have used his then-wife’s panty hose to strangle Roggasch in 1977.

• No. 2 on the list was “Girl near Port Costa.” Colon’s decomposed body was found in 1978 near Port Costa in Contra Costa County. Authorities have said DNA evidence collected from her fingernails tied Naso to her slaying.

• Parsons was found in 1993 in Yuba City, where Naso was living at the time with his son. Prosecutors presented evidence during the trial that Naso had photographed Parsons.

• Tafoya was also killed in Yuba City while Naso lived there. Her body was found on the side of Highway 70 near Marysville Cemetery in 1994.

Investigators also found news clippings of the slayings in Naso’s safe deposit box.

During the penalty phase of the trial, the prosecutors also presented evidence tying Naso to the unsolved killings of Sharileea Patton, whose body washed ashore in Tiburon in 1981, and Sara Dylan, a Bob Dylan groupie whose skull was found near Nevada County in 1992. Naso was not charged in those cases.

Naso was convicted of the murders on August 20, 2013. After hearing closing arguments from Naso, who said he “was not the monster that killed these women,” and from the prosecutors, who — in arguing for the death sentence — had presented grisly photos of the lifeless bodies, the jurors deliberated for a mere four hours before deciding on the death sentence. Naso will be formally sentenced at a later date by Marin County Superior Court Judge Andrew Sweet.

*     *     *     *     *

It should be noted that even if Judge Sweet agrees with the jurors and sentences Naso to death, it is rather unlikely that he will actually be executed. There are 725 inmates already on California’s Death Row and executions have been on hold since 2006, when a federal judge ordered an overhaul of California’s execution protocol.

It will take at least another year for prison officials to properly adopt the state’s new single-drug execution method and have it cleared by the judge.

by Bob Couttie

Many years ago, on another planet, I drank champagne on the French Riviera and bedded a princess. Outside the shuttered windows a clear blue Mediterranean Sea sparkled below the stuccoed wealthy villas of Cap Ferrat and the decaying remains of Victorian grandeur in the backwaters of Antibes. It was here I said ‘No’ to the French Connection.

It would be indelicate to say much about the Princess. She was very tall and English, I was relatively short and English. When we went out she wore high heels and I wore the lowest heeled shoes I could find. We’d go to the Algerian quarter, where the law allowed only the weakest beer, and eat authentic cous-cous surrounded by swarthy, and initially suspicious, North Africans.

It’s unwise to venture into Algerian quarters. They can be dangerous places so our sojourns had much the same thrill for us as that experienced by a Japanese diner tucking into a plate of globefish. It certainly gave extra piquancy to the cous-cous.

The princess helped bring about my fall. She was a secret alcoholic, getting up in the mornings to throw down several “eye-openers” before I woke up. She hid it well.  A bill was quietly growing.

We lived in a modest place called the Taverne Nicoise in the Place du Safranier, main square of the Commune Libre Du Safranier – the free commune of the saffron sellers. It was nestled within the larger town of Antibes where in centuries past saffron traders bought and sold their delicate dried flower stigmas to merchants from the nearby port. It remains, nominally at least, an independent town within a town.

It was a place of cobble-stones and maze-like streets lined with the homes of fishermen, artists, sculptors and the occasional writer like Paul Gallico, Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess and Nikos Kazantzakis, who wrote Zorba The Greek. With every step one breathed art and literature.

Awakened by the sound of a carpenter’s buzz saw and the smell of new-cut wood from the shop next to the hotel, I would take coffee and croissants and then make my way up the short tarmacadamed road to the ancient thick stone walls of the ramparts. If I turned right I faced an art gallery, if I turned left I faced the Chateau Grimaldi with its fine collection of Picassos.

It was that sort of place.

A friend and I had started a company selling English specialty beer to sceptical Frenchmen. We had an investor and I was point-man. Things went wrong in short order. The princess’s second ex-husband arrived from Paris and spirited her away to a rather pleasant cottage in Biot up in the mountains behind Antibes. The investor bailed without warning. That left me down and out in a beautiful town on the Riviera.

I wrote a letter to a friend in the UK telling him I needed 50 pounds to get back to what I then still called home. In those pre-electronic days, I would be lucky to receive the money in less than 90 days.

Having pushed my credit as far it would go, and weighted down with the bills from my life with the Princess, I packed my clothes and snuck out of the hotel. These were desperate times requiring desperate measures.

During the days that followed I tried sleeping in the deepset windows of the ramparts. The cockroaches disturbed me.

I moved to the beach below the ramparts. My bag became a pillow but the warm Mediterranean air grew chill at night and the sounds of enthusiastic lovers cavorting on the sands disturbed what little shivering sleep I could get. Antibes, after all, is a place of romance.

There was a public shower on the beach and, within the old town, an ancient public washing shed which I used gratefully.

I coralled what little money I had left, a pitifully small amount but at least enough for food for a few days. I knew it wouldn’t last.

So it was that I became a bar entertainer, doing cards tricks for a few francs and sometimes a beer and the occasional snack. It wasn’t much but it was survival.

Over the course of several days a man I’ll call Frank made my acquaintance. He said he was an engineer and claimed to have worked on Donald Campbell’s final and ill-fated attempt to break the water speed record in his boat Bluebird. He claimed to know why the boat suddenly flipped and tore itself and Donald Campbell into pieces.

Frank had that frayed-at-the-edges-too-much-booze look that one finds among the world’s ex-pats who live on the edge of the illegal and sometimes cross the line.

One day Frank said:

“There’s someone in Nice I think you should meet. He might have some work for you”.

Cabaret, I thought, I can handle that.

In Frank’s clapped out car with its windows missing from its doors we drove through darkness along the coast to the hinterlands of Nice and through a maze of ill-lit back alleys.

This is French Connection country. Starting at Marseille and stretching across the Riviera to the Italian border lives a “fingers-in-every-pie” organised crime syndicate, lesser known than the Mafia, with its roots in Corsica. This is the true-life Union Corse of Ian Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Finally we stopped, got out of the car and Frank led me through winding streets, counter-surveillance as if we were trying to avoid a tail. At the bottom of a hill he said: “We have to wait here”.

All I could see were the coloured lights of what looked like a cafe at the top of the hill and the dark shape of a car in front of it.

Minutes later the headlights of the car flashed. It was our signal. Frank said “Let’s go”.

At the top of the hill was, indeed, a cafe, rather rustic, with checkered cloths on the tables. Parked outside it was a white Jaguar, which Frank claimed was the only one in France at the time.

The interior of the cafe was nothing special except for the two large, casually-dressed heavies on either side of the door and a several more lounging along the walls inside.

Sitting at a table, lieutenants on either side of him, was a man I’ll call Jean-Marc. He was not tall but he was heavyset with short curly hair and broad peasant’s shoulders. He wore a white polo shirt and looked as if he’d just consumed an excellent meal, or made someone an offer they could not refuse.

Truly powerful men speak little, are soft-spoken when they do speak, and are very polite. Jean-Marc spoke little, spoke softly and was very polite.

He waved me towards a chair in front of him and I sat down. Frank said: “Show him your stuff.”

I went through my paces, pulling aces out of the deck at will, calling out cards before I displayed them, and on it went. At one point Jean-Marc stopped me and tossed me a fresh deck of his own to me to use. Since I wasn’t using a special deck I completed my routine without difficulty.

When I was finished there was a pause. Jean-Marc was thinking, his fingers rubbed his chin. He nodded at me. Frank said: “Do it again.”

Normally I refuse to repeat a trick but this time obedience seemed the better part of valour. I went back through my stuff routine, throwing in a stunning Paul Curry routine of which I’m very fond and knew was a baffler.

At the end there was a pause. Everyone was silent, their attention on Jean-Marc.

He leaned towards me and spoke. Here was the deal: I would play high stakes poker for him using the skills I’d demonstrated. He would put up 10,000 francs and we’d split the takings 50:50.

10,000 francs was what I owed the Taverne Nicoise.

I thought about the sort of people he’d play poker with. Two immediate thoughts came to mind. First, I had a vision of my dead left hand poking out of the sand holding five forlorn aces. Or possibly a dismembered head with the ace and queen of spades artfully arranged in its mouth.

My second thought was: I don’t know how to play poker. I’d found out early on that a magician playing cards was a lose-lose situation. If I won it was because I’d cheated. If I lost I was a fool. So I’d always stayed away from card games.

But I couldn’t tell him that.

So I explained, in a businesslike way, that the techniques I’d used were convincing in a casual environment but would not stand close scrutiny over long periods of time. If I was caught, or even suspected, it would put him and his reputation at risk, it wouldn’t be fair to him for me to to take him up on his very attractive offer

We shook hands and separated. I made my way back to Antibes, with feelings of relief and regret. I’d said no to the French Connection.

Eventually I got a job as a gardener and cook for a lady who’d been the mistress of the Aga Khan which saw me through until the money arrived three months later. I never saw Jean-Marc or Frank again.

As for the Princess, after I returned to England I had lunch with her first ex-husband. She had given up the booze and had fallen in love with a British sea captain. At the age of 33 she died of heart failure aboard ship on her way to marry him.

Click here to see other posts by Bob Couttie:

My First Murder – The Blue Anchor Scandal

Dispatch From Cambodia: Murder In A Sleepy Town

U.S. Navy Cold Case : A Sister’s Persistence Restores the Honor of Murdered Ensign Andrew Lee Muns

The Moors Murderers: Myra Hindley and Ian Brady

by Darcia Helle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Electric Chair Nightmare: An Infamous and Agonizing History

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

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

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

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

Why Should I Believe You? The History of the Polygraph

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

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

The Terror of ISO: A Descent into Madness

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

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

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

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

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

The characters await you.

compiled by Patrick H. Moore

It’s no secret that serial killers often masquerade as everyday good citizens. To some degree, Alaska’s most prolific serial killer, ‘Butcher Baker’ Robert Hansen, did precisely that. Hansen, who confessed to murdering 17 women and raping 30, mostly in the Alaskan wilderness, died recently at Alaska Regional Hospital after being in declining health for the past year. During his life as a free man, prior to his conviction in 1984, the Butcher Baker ran a bakery in Anchorage, Alaska and lived across town with his wife and children who had no idea that Dad was a deranged rapist/serial killer.

Serial killers naturally vary considerably in their techniques and BB added an unusual and particular cruel wrinkle to his murder technique. Some of you who are ancient like me may have read a short story by Richard Connell first published in 1924 in Collier’s called “The Most Dangerous Game”. It’s the scintillating tale of a New York big-game hunter Rainsford who falls off a yacht and swims to an obscure island in the Caribbean where he is hunted in the jungle by a jaded Cossack aristocrat. Naturally, since it’s an adventure tale, Rainsford ultimately turns the tables on the Cossack, feeds him to his own dogs, and sleeps comfortably in his bed.

The Butcher Baker may have read Connell’s gripping tale; if not, he came up with a similar scenario on his own. His victims of choice were strippers and prostitutes who were plentiful in Boomstate Alaska during the 1970s and 1980s.

Rachel D’Oro writes:

Construction of the 800-mile trans-Alaska oil pipeline in the 1970s brought prostitutes, pimps, con artists and drug dealers to Alaska’s largest city, all aiming to separate construction workers from some of the big money they were pulling in. Many who looked for quick riches left as abruptly as they arrived in Anchorage, making sudden disappearances commonplace.

According to retired trooper Glenn Flothe, who helped put Hansen behind bars, Hansen initially targeted any woman who caught his eye, but soon learned that due to their transient lifestyle, strippers and prostitutes were harder to track and less likely to be missed.

After selecting a victim, Hansen would abduct them and take them to remote places outside Anchorage. He was clever and would vary his modus operandi. Sometimes he would drive his victims to their doom, and other times he would fly them out into the middle of nowhere in his private plane. Sometimes being a licensed pilot comes in handy. Furthermore, he wouldn’t always kill the women he raped but would sometimes return them to Anchorage, warning them not to contact the authorities. “The Most Dangerous Game” connections stems from the fact that on other occasions, he would transport the women out into the wilderness, set them free, and then hunt them down with his rifle.

The Butcher Baker’s reign of terror began to show chinks in 1983 when he met 17-year-old Cindy Paulson. Hansen had offered Cindy $200 for oral sex, but when she got into the car, he pulled a gun on her and drove her to his house where he tortured and raped her. His exertions apparently wore him out; he chained her by the neck to a post in the basement and took a nap

When he woke up, he put her in his car and drove her to the Merrill Field airport where he kept his Piper Super Cub. He told her his plan was to “take her out to his cabin” in the Knik River area of the Matanuska Valley, which was accessible only by boat or bush plane). While Hansen was busy loading the cockpit, Paulson made a run for it and escaped. Had she not gotten away, it’s very likely she would have been one of Hansen’s hunting victims.

She reported her nightmare to the police who questioned Hansen who of course denied the accusations and claimed Paulson was just mad because he wouldn’t kowtow to her extortion demands.

Amazingly, although Hansen had had several prior run-ins with the law, his meek demeanour and humble occupation as a baker, combined with a strong alibi from his friend John Henning, kept him from being considered as a serious suspect, and the case went cold.

Dead bodies had begun turning up, however, with some evidence they had been killed by a hunter. Detective Frothe consulted with FBI agent Roy Hazelwood, and a criminal psychological profile was developed. Hazelwood believed that the killer would be an experienced hunter with low self-esteem, and would therefore, as is often the case, feel compelled to keep “souvenirs” of the murders, such as jewelry. With the help of the profile, Flothe investigated possible suspects and ultimately came to Hansen, who fit the profile and owned a plane. The remains of 23-year-old Sherry Morrow had been discovered in a shallow grave near the Knik River, which of course was accessible only by plane.

The screws were tightening and Flothe and the APD obtained a warrant to search Hansen’s plane, cars, and home. On 27 October, 1983, the investigators struck gold. They found jewelry associated with some of the missing women hidden in the corner of Hansen’s attic and an aviation map with little x marks on it secreted behind Hansen’s headboard.

After that, it was only a matter of time, and Hansen finally confessed to more than a decade of attacks beginning as early as 1971. His earliest victims were teenagers, not the prostitutes and strippers who led to his discovery.

Hansen was serving a 461-year sentence at the time of his death which means he would have had to live to be as old as Methuselah to complete his sentence. Still, 30 years is a pretty decent stretch.

The Associated Press attempted to interview Hansen 22 years after his conviction in 2006, but he rejected their request, writing in a unsigned note.

“I do not care so much for myself, but you journalist (sic) have hurt my family so very much.”

Hansen was the subject of a 2013 film titled, “The Frozen Ground,” which starred Nicolas Cage as an Alaska State Trooper investigating the slayings. John Cusack played Hansen.

* * * * *

Hansen’s childhood provides at least some insight into the origins of his bloodthirsty ways. Although he was eventually to marry twice and have two children, he was a loner as a child and had a terrible relationship with his domineering father. To make matters worse, he stuttered and had bad acne, which led to bullying at school. Hunting was his escape and he served a year in the United States Army Reserve, and later worked as an assistant drill instructor at a police academy in Pocahontas, Iowa.

When he was 21, he was arrested for burning down a Pocahontas County Board of Education school bus garage, which led to him serving 20 months of a three-year prison sentence. His first wife, whom he had married shortly before burning down the garage, filed for divorce while he was incarcerated. After he got out, he was jailed several more times for petty theft. Thinking a change would do him good, in 1967, Hansen moved to Anchorage, Alaska, with his second wife, whom he had married shortly after his release from state prison.

The amazing thing is the fact that in Anchorage, Hanson was well liked by his neighbors. His great prowess was as hunter and he set several local hunting records, quite a feat in big-game Alaska.

Ten years after moving to the north country, he went to jail for stealing a chainsaw. Later, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and prescribed lithium which he may or may not have taken.

Without peeling back very many layers of the Serial Killer Onion, we see that the Butcher Baker had at least four qualities often associated with serial killers, and if we knew more about his childhood, we might discover more. He was 1) a loner; 2) had a dysfunctional relationship with his father; 3) loved killing animals (his specialty); and liked setting things on fire.

He was rather a late-bloomer, however, and apparently didn’t murder his first victim until 1971 when he was 32 years old.

by Starks Shrink

Donna Kay Tapani paid three misfits to murder Martha Gail Fulton, the wife of her former lover, George Fulton. That’s the simplest story; the motivations and complexities of this case run much deeper than what’s readily apparent on the surface.

Gail Garza was a devout Catholic girl who grew up in small town Texas. She met George and they dated but she still maintained her college aspirations and completed a degree in speech pathology. In the meantime, George went off to West Point and a career in the Army. He reunited with Gail and they soon married, anticipating a typical peripatetic military existence.

Gail soon had three children, born at different duty stations, including locations in Germany and the US. She was a devoted and doting mother and wife, believing it to be her destiny as sanctioned by her faith. George, however, if rumors are to be believed, had a wandering eye that was followed by other body parts. One documented dalliance occurred when the couple was stationed in Panama which led Gail to return home abruptly to her home town in Texas. During this period, Gail reportedly became very depressed and lost so much weight that her family was concerned she was anorexic. Gail had severe self-esteem issues and her weight loss was always an indicator of unhappiness. Perhaps she thought that exercise and slimness (about which she was obsessive) would make her more attractive to her husband, or more likely, this was her obsessive reaction to the pain she couldn’t seem able to stop.

George eventually retired from the Army and Gail assumed that they would lay down roots amongst her family in Texas, as they had always planned. That was not to be; George, flailing about to find a career after military service, decided unilaterally to move the family to Lake Orion, Michigan, a small community outside of Detroit. Reluctantly, Gail, as always, gave in to her husband’s wishes.

Gail settled into life in that community with her husband and two of her three children. The move was so abrupt that her oldest child opted to remain in Texas with Gail’s mother while she pursued a college degree. Gail’s two younger children — Emily and Andrew, still in high school, made the big trek to Michigan with their parents. It’s fairly clear from Gail’s friends and family back in Texas, and her children, that she was not very happy during that time. Gail always seemed to lose weight and become anxious and stressed when her life presented difficulties, and during this interval she was rail thin and looked old beyond her years. Mostly she dealt with adversity through talking with her priest, praying and doing her nightly rosary beads, convinced that God would see her through the difficult times. Sadly, her life in Michigan would have more challenges than joys and Gail wasn’t always up to the task.

The job that precipitated George moving his family to Michigan dissolved in a matter of months, and once again, he began seeking the brass ring. He thought he found it in an opportunity in Florida, working with a company called Concerned Care Home Health (CCHH). In truth, however, it was the beginning of disaster. While in Florida on business, George had a chance encounter with a vivacious, outspoken woman, quite the opposite of his wife Gail, named Donna Kay Trapini. She seemed smart, articulate, driven and extremely interested in sex, which presumably after 21 years of marriage, he felt that his wife could or would not provide. He embarked upon a passionate physical affair that was to last nearly two years before his long suffering spouse discovered their relationship.

Gail kept the home fires burning while her husband traveled and worked to keep food on the family table. While she was intelligent and well educated, Gail was guided by her abiding Catholic faith and believed that her place was with her children and her family. However much she tried to maintain her steadfastness through faith, the chinks in her armor showed through, however. Gail often talked of suicide when her husband was away and in her heart, she knew he was unfaithful. She shared these suicidal feelings with her teenage children who lived at home, and as a result, they were constantly in fear for her safety. With their father always gone on business and their mother expressing suicidal ideations, the children had an unsteady and frightening introduction to young adulthood. All these feelings started to come to a head in the late spring of 1999, when George’s mistress and, by this point, boss, began to extend their relationship beyond their adulterous bed and into his family home.

George somehow thought that he could have whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it. He actually left his wife, Gail, to move in with his mistress Donna Trapani in Florida in early 1999. He never told Gail, however, that he was moving out; rather, he simply told her that he needed an apartment in Florida to pursue his fledgling business. Somehow Gail bought into this. So George moved in with Donna and soon got to know his mistress, perhaps more than he wanted to. Donna turned out to be a woman of many faces.

Donna Kay Trapani was born in mean circumstances in Louisiana to a mother who hadn’t education or wealth, and a father who’d skipped out before she set foot into the world. Donna struggled with her weight throughout her years in school and finally had bariatric surgery in her early college years. Her ensuing weight loss boosted her self-confidence and she went on to participate in collegiate pep squads as well as the active dating life she had always desired but had been denied in her early years. Even Donna’s mother, who to this day believes in her innocence, admits that Donna was obsessed with her appearance and success both before and after her surgery. Narcissism is typically self-loathing and insecurity masquerading as bravado. Donna met and married her husband, an aircraft mechanic, and moved to the Florida panhandle. There are reports that Donna and her husband were unable to conceive a child; perhaps that’s true, I cannot say. However, Donna had ambitions for herself and wasn’t content to simply be the wife of a mechanic. Nursing degree in hand, she started an employment agency for visiting nurses and was determined to become a business tycoon. Reports from many of her previous employees indicate that Donna was volatile with a vile temper, and often lashed out at people over the smallest of infractions. They also indicated that she was a habitual liar, something she demonstrated herself when she took the stand in her own defense at trial. Her stories were wildly improbable, but she would cling to them as though by simply telling them, she could make them true or even believable.

When she met George, Donna was CEO of her company CCHH, and was often out on the town at the bars with the single nurses from her firm, despite having a husband at home who disapproved of this behavior. We get the sense that Donna did whatever Donna wanted; she was always in charge and always needed to be the commander. At any rate, she and George inevitably struck up a physical relationship which grew from there to take on epic proportions, which would ultimately cost Gail her life.

Donna was pretty clear about her intentions throughout the affair. She wanted what she wanted, and she wanted it on her terms. She wanted George, sans wife, and she would do whatever it took to get there, including murder. George, on the other hand, did what he had done his whole life; he manipulated, cajoled, lied and did the expedient thing to get what he wanted in the moment. George wanted hot sex on the side and a reverent obedient wife at home. So he told Donna what he believed she wanted to hear and didn’t tell Gail much of anything. Gail wanted what she wanted too, but she prayed to God to give it to her instead of facing her issues and addressing them with her husband. She did resort to threats of suicide and tried to inflict guilt on George in the hope he would change. Clearly, her efforts could not succeed and the situation grew increasingly volatile.

There have been untold numbers of love triangles, with unfaithful husbands, leading to divorces and families shattered by the sins of the flesh, but this triangle was a mix of personalities that seemed doomed to end in tragedy. A prime example of how these three dysfunctional personalities interacted is their behavior over the 4th of July weekend in 1999. What all three of them did is nearly incomprehensible to most people involved in normal relationships. Donna, having been thrown over by George some months earlier, sent him a letter on doctor’s letterhead, stating that not only was she pregnant but that she had terminal lymphoma as well. George, being either completely gullible or wanting to have his cake and eat it too, invited Donna up to Michigan for the holiday weekend so that she could search for an apartment near his home. He said his goal was to be able to take care of Donna and the anticipated child in her time of need. To facilitate this misguided plan, George set up a meeting between his wife and his mistress at Donna’s hotel. This, of course, was a total failure. Gail became hysterically distraught and Donna turned cruel and vicious, and became even more possessive. George decided to spend the night with Donna in her hotel room, had sex with her, and then dumped her the following morning. The fact that Gail let him back into the family home after this is an indication of her complete lack of self-esteem and total dependence upon George. This disastrous weekend turned out to be the trigger that would set the murder in motion.

Donna Trapani was infuriated over being dumped and became obsessive about winning George back. She began a torrent of phone calls to his home, letters, emails and faxes in which she first tried cajoling and wheedling, then laid on the guilt trip, and finally resorted to vitriol in order to make George come back. Much of the venom was directed at Gail, whom Donna viewed as the barrier to their relationship. When all her attempts failed, as they were destined to do simply based on the hysteria of the communications, she hired three misfits to take out her rival in a hail of bullets. She enlisted one of her habitually errant employees — 38 year old Sybil Padgett, and Sybil’s 19 year old boyfriend, Patrick Alexander, to plan and carry out the murder. They, in turn, connected Donna to Kevin Ouellette, the intended trigger man, a cold opportunist who would do anything for a fast buck. Promised $15,000 from Donna, the hit squad headed to Lake Orion from their Florida home to execute Gail Fulton. Donna’s big mistake was not realizing that if you hire killers, you probably need to actually pay them. Since she failed to follow through on her part of the bargain, all three of her co-conspirators rolled over on her and she was eventually arrested for first degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Kevin and Patrick were offered plea deals in return for their testimony against Donna and Sybil, but the prosecutors had no intention of offering any such deal to the women, both of whom were convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Both subsequently lost their appeals.

I believe Donna suffers from Borderline personality disorder with marked narcissistic features. When you analyze her actions with her employees, her ex-husband, her ‘recruits’ for murder, and her behavior afterwards, it’s clear that she is disorganized in thought and deed. She is prone to dramatic mood shifts, outbursts of anger and delusional thought patterns. Her constant self-aggrandizing precludes all feelings of conscience for her actions. She truly feels that any means justify the ends, which in her case are whatever she happens to desire at the moment. In this, she reminds me of Jodi Arias. Both believe that they deserve the object of their desire. Both believe that this “object” will propel their lives beyond the mundane existence they believe they currently have and fantasize that a life with this person will enhance their lives far beyond their current state. Both were devastated when the object of their desire rejected them, and they acted out in the only way they apparently could – with fury and destruction. Both told wild tales about their actions with seemingly no compunction, both on and off the witness stand, and both gave TV interviews over their attorneys’ objections immediately after their convictions. Sadly, both were destined to lose their ‘prizes’ because their intrinsically flawed psyches would ultimately preclude them from any type of successful relationship that would fulfill their needs. It’s a tragedy that people fell victim to them, but it was perhaps inevitable given their manipulative, determined natures.

What made Gail Fulton’s murder even more tragic was her complete innocence and probable naivete. While her death was no one’s fault but Donna and her cohorts, Gail contributed to the situation by not standing up for herself or insisting that George behave in a manner appropriate for a husband and father. By allowing George to mistreat her, disrespect their marriage, and return home forgiven, despite his lack of remorse or apology, she gave him free rein to do as he pleased. George must have thought that he had the perfect situation. His wife would never leave him nor kick him to the curb. He could fulfill his sexual desires and still maintain the semblance of a stable home and family life. George essentially loaded the gun that was Donna Trapani. Did he know that she had severe issues that could turn deadly? It’s not likely that he did, but his willful ignorance when her behavior became obsessive and erratic placed his family in grave danger. The toxic mess resulting from these three personality types being thrown together and placed under extreme duress inevitably exploded killing Gail Fulton and destroying lives and families in both Florida and Michigan.

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