by Darcia Helle

In our modern, enlightened American culture, we keep our executions quietly behind closed doors. There was a time, though, in the pre-modern world, when this would have been regarded as no better than murder. Executions were public events. When our ancestors decided a person needed to die for his/her crimes, the entire town was expected to attend.

Many people of that time believed executing a criminal privately robbed that person of the right to say his final words, which was often a full-blown speech. A private execution also deprived the government of its show of power, as the criminal was paraded through town in an elaborate spectacle.

Staging state-sanctioned murders as public entertainment made for a wide array of imaginative and gruesome methods, prolonging death ever longer, as leaders continually looked for new forms of cruelty to punish the condemned. Here are some once popular death penalty options that make the electric chair look comforting.

Breaking The Wheel – Also Known As The Catherine Wheel

This method was popular from the Middle Ages into the 19th century. The condemned person was strapped to a large, heavy wooden wheel, his arms and legs stretched out and tied to the spokes. The executioner carried a hammer or large iron bar and, as the wheel was turned, he stuck the hammer through the spoke and pressed it against the limb, so that the pressure would crush the victim’s bones. The victim was left in excruciating pain, alive, but helpless, and could take days to die.

Occasionally a sympathetic court ordered ‘the mercy blow’. In this case, the executioner struck the victim on the stomach and chest, typically two or three times. Afterward, the victim was strangled for a quicker death.

Vicious beatings while the condemned was strapped down to the wheel were also common. Criminals convicted of major offenses were bludgeoned ‘bottom up’, starting with their legs, in order to inflict the most possible pain while keeping the victim conscious. Those convicted of lesser crimes were beaten ‘top down’, starting with the throat, which might have allowed them to slip into blissful unconsciousness.

Sometimes fires were lit beneath the wheel, adding tremendous heat in order to heighten the victim’s pain.

Historian Joseph Ben Matthias (Flavius Josephus) wrote about an account he witnessed, with two criminals being executed on the wheel:

“The executioners were ordered to bring the Christian prisoner in. His tunic was torn off and he was bound hand and foot with thongs, and fixed to the great wheel. All his joints were dislocated and all his limbs smashed. The wheel was stained with blood and the burning coals in the grate beneath it were extinguished by the blood pouring into it. Lumps of flesh clumped around the axle and everywhere there were bits of flesh and bone. Another was fastened to the wheel and stretched and burned with fire. Sharp spits, heated until they were red-hot, were applied to his back and stuck in his sides and inwards, burning him dreadfully.” 

Mystery surrounds Catherine of Alexandria, who was sentenced to be broken on the wheel but, perhaps miraculously, did not die there. Catherine was a Christian who lived in the early fourth century, during the time when the pagan Emperor Maxentius relentlessly persecuted Christians. A beautiful girl of just 18, Catherine was perhaps also a bit of an activist. She went to Maxentius and berated him for his religious tyranny. Maxentius must have been enticed by her beauty and, rather than putting her to immediate death, he commanded 50 of his best philosophers to convince her to take his side. Instead of becoming a convert to paganism, Catherine managed to persuade several of the philosophers to convert to Christianity.

Further intrigued by her charms and ability, Maxentius then tried to seduce her. He asked the entrancing young woman to become his new bride. Catherine refused, stating that her spouse was Jesus Christ and to him she’d pledged her virginity. The irate Maxentius had her whipped and thrown in prison.

Unbeknownst to Maxentius, his wife had become fascinated by Catherine. When he left on a trip to inspect his military camp, the empress visited Catherine at the prison. By the time the emperor arrived back at his castle, the empress and 200 of the soldiers had converted to Christianity. They were all put to immediate death, though historians do not provide details on how that was done, and Catherine was sentenced to death on the wheel.

Catherine, evidently, wasn’t about to make things easy on Maxentius. After she was strapped to the wheel, her bonds inexplicably came apart and the wheel broke. Maxentius then demanded Catherine be beheaded, which she wasn’t able to escape. Legend tells us that, when her head was severed, a milky substance flowed from her veins.

Flaying

Flaying dates back to the time of the Assyrians, and was most popular around 1,000 years ago in the Middle East and Africa. The torture-killing involved removing skin and small bits of flesh from the body of a live prisoner, and was typically reserved for captured soldiers and witches. The condemned prisoner was tied to a stake in a public area. The executioner then carefully cut away strips of skin until the flesh beneath was fully exposed over the victim’s entire body. The victim would usually die of shock or blood loss. Afterward, the skin was nailed to a wall as a warning for others to obey the law.

One African tribe adapted their own form of flaying as punishment for adultery. The guilty couple would first be starved, then tied naked to two posts about four feet apart. Throughout the ordeal to follow, they were given only salt water to drink. The resulting dehydration probably helped speed their deaths.

On the first day of their public execution, the villagers watched as the executioner cut a piece of the woman’s flesh and forced her lover to eat it. On the second day, the executioner cut a chunk of the man’s flesh and force-fed it to the woman. Meanwhile, the executioner’s assistant worked to immediately staunch blood flow from the wounds, in order to keep the victims alive longer. The back-and-forth procedure continued until one of the lovers died. The survivor, though, was given no reprieve and was continually fed bits of flesh until he/she finally – and probably thankfully – died as well.

The execution technique called Lingchi closely resembles flaying. Also translated as death by a thousand cuts, slow slicing, lingering death, and slow process, this ancient Chinese style of execution became somewhat of an art form. The term was derived from a classical description of ascending a mountain slowly.

Lingchi’s use in executions began in China around the year 900 and continued until its abolition in 1905. Reserved for crimes considered particularly severe, such as treason and killing one’s parents, the process entailed slowly slicing off chunks of the condemned person’s flesh.

Execution took place in a public area, where the condemned would be tied to a wooden frame or cross beside a table holding a basket of razor-sharp knives covered by a cloth. Each knife bore the marking for a particular part of the body. The executioner would reach beneath the cloth and pull out a knife. He would then slice the area designated by the knife’s inscription. The torture came to a merciful end only when the executioner pulled the knife with the marking for the heart.

This method appears to have been later changed to a more deliberate procedure, using a specific sequence of slicing and only one knife.

In later years large amounts of opium would first be given to the accused, although it is unclear as to whether this was an act of mercy or to prevent fainting and prolong torture. The condemned fortunate enough to come from wealthy families could offer the executioner a bribe to hasten death.

For less serious crimes, the executioner would first slice the victim’s throat. The slicing away of flesh then became symbolic rather than torturous.

To the condemned, Lingchi was physical and psychological torture, as well as publicly humiliating. The principle behind the slicing of flesh lay in the spiritual belief that the victim’s body would not be intact in the afterlife. For the Chinese of that time, this may have been more horrifying than the actual torture.

In 1895, Sir Henry Norman witnessed a Lingchi execution. In The People and Politics of the Far East, Norman wrote that the executioner sliced off pieces by “grasping handfuls from the fleshy parts of the body, such as the thighs and the breasts”. He went on to state that “then the limbs are cut off piecemeal at the wrists and the ankles, the elbows and knees, the shoulders and hip. Finally the victim is stabbed in the heart and his head cut off.”

In 1904, in a public square in Beijing, China, accused murderer Wan Weiqin was put to death by a thousand cuts in front of a crowd of onlookers. He is among the last to have suffered this form of capital punishment.

Boiling

Archeological evidence shows this ancient form of torture and execution has been practiced throughout much of history. Boiling is exactly what it implies. The condemned were immersed in enormous pots of boiling water, oil or tar and left to cook until they died. Eventually executioners began using frying pans instead of pots, so they could flip the victim’s body over like a piece of meat or a fried egg.

Healthy prisoners with strong hearts did not die quickly. Much of the flesh could be cooked and fall away from the bone before the heart, lungs, and brain succumbed to the heat.

In 1530, Richard Roose was convicted of poisoning a pot of both intended for the Bishop of Rochester, his family, and his parish. King Henry VIII passed a special act decreeing he be boiled alive for the offense. Henry’s act, with death by boiling as punishment for poisoning, remained on the law books in England until 1863.

 *      *     *     *     *

While our modern society looks at these archaic death penalties as horrifying torture, those societies would have considered our secret government prisons cowardly and our closed prison executions nothing more than murder. Perhaps it’s time we put the super-sized frying pans and the electric chairs to rest.

Please click to below to view Darcia’s Helle’s previous posts:

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 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 Jaclyn Lambert

From Hollywood-dramatized shootouts at a Blackjack table to underworld Mobster racketeering, our culture is collectively fascinated by the cliche of a street-smart thief dressed all in black. However, the following examples of infamous crime capers didn’t spring from the fictional realms of film or literature, but were pulled off by real-life villains — some of whom never even got caught!

The Brinks Robbery

by John W. Taylor (July 14, 2015)

“I think if I live to be a hundred, I wouldn’t be able to tell you everything that happened that night.” – Darlie Routier (Court Transcripts, The State of Texas No. F-96-39973-J vs. Darlie Lynn Routier A-96-253, Sandra M. Halsey, CSR, Official Court Reporter. Significant errors have been found in the court transcript, which ultimately resulted in the court reporter losing her license. Changes to the transcript could affect the analysis.)

In the early morning hours of June 6, 1996, a 911 dispatcher received an emergency call from a hysterical woman at 5801 Eagle Drive, in Rowlett, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. (The Darlie Routier Case, The Facts, http://darliefacts.com/case-background/, accessed June-July, 2015.)  Darlie Routier called 911 after an intruder attacked her and two of her children in the middle of the night. She was badly injured and two of her children were dying.

Darlie, and her husband Darin, had three boys: Devon, age six; Damon, age five; and Drake, who was an infant. About a week prior to the attack, Darlie started sleeping downstairs because Drake’s crying disrupted her sleep. On the night of June 5, Darlie fell asleep on a couch in the living room on the first floor. Devon and Damon fell asleep on the floor nearby while watching television. Darin and Drake slept upstairs. (Court Transcripts, The State of Texas No. F-96-39973-J vs. Darlie Lynn Routier A-96-253, Sandra M. Halsey, CSR, Official Court Reporter. )

In the middle of the night, Damon woke Darlie by calling her name and pushing her on the shoulder. As she slowly came out of a deep sleep, she saw an intruder at the end of the couch walking toward the kitchen. She got up and followed him into the kitchen. He dropped a knife as he walked through the utility room and climbed out a garage window. Darlie picked up the knife and placed it on a counter. Darlie then turned on the lights and realized she was bleeding. She then looked at Devon laying on the floor and noticed he had large, gaping stab wounds in his chest. Darlie screamed for Darin. Though Damon initially appeared unharmed, she turned him around and saw numerous stab wounds in his back. (Ibid.)

Upon hearing Darlie’s screams, Darin raced downstairs. He administered CPR on Devon while Darlie called for help. (Ibid) Darin’s attempts were futile, as Devon was already dead. Damon was barely breathing. Darlie brought wet towels to Damon as they waited for help to arrive. Darlie also sustained injuries, but they did not appear life-threatening. The police and emergency personnel arrived and began treating Damon and Darlie. Both were rushed to the hospital, though Damon eventually succumbed to his injuries. Darlie survived the attacked, but incurred several scars. Luckily, Darin and Drake escaped the attack unscathed.

When the police arrived they immediately searched the house for the intruders, though none were found. The police also searched the neighborhood looking for the perpetrators, but to no avail. No valuable items had been taken from the house, even though jewelry was sitting out in the open. (Darlie Routier Fact & Fiction, Affidavit for Arrest Warrant, subscribed and sworn June 18, 1996, http://www.darlieroutierfactandfiction.com/.) There appeared to be no motive other than the murder of two young boys.

The intruder likely entered [and exited] the house through a cut screen in the garage. The police were left with two dead bodies, a bloody knife, a cut screen, and Darlie’s statements. Since Darlie picked up the knife when she pursued the intruder, the police had no evidence linked to the intruder. (911 Transcript, http://www.fordarlieroutier.org/911Call/transcript.html, Recorded by The Rowlett Police Department, transcript created by Barry Dickey, June 6, 1996. This transcript was done based on an “enhanced” version of the recording and is not considered completely accurate by some involved.They had limited leads to pursue.)

Though Darlie had no recollection of the attacks, her wounds indicated that she incurred a horrific beating. Darlie received numerous wounds of varying severity. Her hands and arms were badly bruised and cut in a manner consistent with defensive wounds. Darlie’s throat was also slashed within two millimeters of her carotid artery. (The Darlie Routier Case Website, http://www.fordarlieroutier.org/Evidence/Wounds.html, Accessed June-July, 2015.) She barely escaped with her life.

Even though Darlie incurred various injuries, the police were immediately suspicious of her. The scene looked staged with what appeared to be random items strategically tipped over or broken. Darlie’s explanation was inconsistent with the crime scene, and key elements of her story kept changing. Whether it was the totality of the circumstances or just gut instinct, the police suspected Darlie’s involvement in the murders within twenty minutes of their arrival.

Police officers are forced to make quick assessments whenever they enter a situation. They must determine imminent risk, level of danger, and who needs assistance versus who may pose an additional threat. These quick decisions often save lives. However, if an officer is unwilling to reassess his initial judgments, it can result in a one-dimensional investigation.

Darlie and Darin cooperated with the police. Though the police may have pursued initial leads for suspects outside the immediate family, it was not clear how much these initial suspicions of Darlie impacted how the investigation unfolded. Regardless, most investigations start close to the victims and work their way outward. Inevitably, the police would have to determine whether or not Darlie deserved additional attention as a person of interest. Darin was eliminated as a suspect fairly quickly based on his statements, the crime scene, and Darlie’s statements.

Darlie’s story did not match the forensic evidence. The murders and home invasion simply could not have happened in the manner in which Darlie described them. There was no blood on the couch where Darlie’s alleged attack occurred. There were also no puncture holes or other damage to the couch. (Darlie Routier Fact & Fiction, Affidavit for Arrest Warrant, subscribed and sworn June 18, 1996, http://www.darlieroutierfactandfiction.com/.)

The vacuum cleaner was knocked over and there was broken glass in the kitchen, which both appeared to be the result of the intruder. However, Darlie’s bloody footprints were underneath the vacuum cleaner and broken glass. Since the footprints were beneath the items, Darlie walked through the kitchen after the attacks, but prior to when the glass was broken and the vacuum was overturned. (Ibid.) Testing also determined that someone attempted to clean up blood in the vicinity of the kitchen sink prior to the police arriving.

The Routier’s had a dog known for barking incessantly though the dog did not bark on the night of the murders. The Routiers also had a hostile cat that was kept in a cage because it was so aggressive toward people. The cat’s cage was in the living room on the night of the murders, but the cat also failed to make any noise at the intruder’s presence. (Court Transcripts, The State of Texas No. F-96-39973-J vs. Darlie Lynn Routier A-96-253, Sandra M. Halsey, CSR, Official Court Reporter. Significant errors have been found in the court transcript, which ultimately resulted in the court reporter losing her license. Changes to the transcript could affect the analysis.)

The police had a forensic scientist examine the knives seized from the Routier’s kitchen. The butcher block on the kitchen counter contained eight knives. Upon testing the knives, the examiner found fiberglass rods on the serrated bread knife. He found the fiberglass rods to be microscopically identical to the fibers taken from the cut screen in the Routier’s garage. (Darlie Routier Fact & Fiction, Affidavit for Arrest Warrant, subscribed and sworn June 18, 1996, http://www.darlieroutierfactandfiction.com/.) Someone had cut the window screen and then returned the knife to its allotted position in the butcher block in the kitchen.

Though there was compelling circumstantial evidence pointing toward Darlie as the perpetrator of her sons’ murders, she had many strong supporters. They cite many factors as to why they believe in Darlie’s innocence. They cite police errors at the crime scene and during the investigation, a rush to judgment, and manipulation of witnesses and testimony. Her supporters point toward an unidentified hair in the Routier family room, a bloody sock found outside the house, and an unidentified bloody fingerprint as proof of an intruder. (The Darlie Routier Case Website, http://www.fordarlieroutier.org/HerProof/index.html, Accessed June-July, 2015.)

Finding an unidentified hair at a crime scene is hardly evidence of an intruder’s presence. Some reports have referred to it as a pubic hair, which begs the question as to how an intruder left a pubic hair when there were no indications of a sexual assault, and Darlie described the intruder as wearing pants.

The police found a bloody men’s tube sock outside the Routier’s home. The sock tested positive for both Devon and Damon’s blood. (The Darlie Routier Case Website, http://darliefacts.com/blood-evidence/, Accessed June-July, 2015.) The sock does not point toward or away from the intruder theory, but it does confirm that someone involved left the house after the murders transpired.

The pubic hair and the bloody sock should not be discarded as exculpatory evidence, but their value is limited. However, the bloody fingerprint extracted from the glass coffee table in the family room could conclusively prove the presence of an intruder. A bloody fingerprint was most likely tied to the murders. Some sources indicate that all police, emergency personnel, and members of the Routier family were excluded, while others sources were less definitive.

An expert for the State contended that Darlie’s right ring finger print could not be excluded as a match to the bloody fingerprint. During trial, he testified that the print likely came from a juvenile, but stated the partial print was not enough to make a match. (Court Transcripts, The State of Texas No. F-96-39973-J vs. Darlie Lynn Routier A-96-253, Sandra M. Halsey, CSR, Official Court Reporter.) On the contrary one could argue that an unidentified bloody fingerprint conclusively proves Darlie’s innocence. However, there is significant forensic evidence pointing toward Darlie as the perpetrator, and there is no reason to place more emphasis on this evidence than others. The fingerprint came from the same supposedly contaminated crime scene, and it was collected by the same technicians who collected the other evidence. At this point, the fingerprint does not point toward or away from Darlie, but it is an additional piece of evidence that must be evaluated within the totality of the information collected.

Based on forensic evidence and Darlie’s inconsistent and illogical statements, she was arrested on June 18, 1996. During her trial, Darlie’s injuries were an area of contention. The State downplayed Darlie’s injuries and often referred to them as “superficial,” while the defense highlighted the severity of her neck wound, extent of medical care, and the number of injuries she sustained. (Ibid.) The underlying assumption was that the more severe her injuries the less likely they were self-inflicted.

If Darlie is guilty, it means she viciously stabbed her children to death. There is no more callous an act than this. If a woman is capable of brutally killing her children, cutting her hands and arms is relatively insignificant. Even slicing a portion of her neck pales in comparison to plunging a knife into her sleeping children. Another explanation could be that Darlie intended for her neck wound to be superficial, but accidently cut deeper than she intended. Alternatively, Darlie may have been trying to kill herself, but was unsuccessful.

If Darlie did not kill her children, then the thought of her inflicting these injuries is unthinkable. However, if she did kill her children, her injuries were consistent with her other vicious, psychopathic actions. Regardless, the severity of her injuries is unimportant in the determination of her guilt, it merely validates what one has already concluded.

A more relevant question is, how did Darlie obtain her injuries? She claimed to have no recollection of any interaction with the intruder, though she initially told police on the scene that she fought with the intruder. As a result, one is left to conclude that she received her injuries while fighting with the intruder as she slept. Under this scenario, Darlie incurred her wounds while lying on her back on the couch.

The intruder had a large knife, which he plunged deep into Damon’s and Devon’s sleeping bodies. Darlie sustained no such injuries. For her version of events to be plausible, Darlie had to have slept through the vicious, deadly attacks against her boys, but have awoken before the intruder started to attack her. Otherwise, the first strike against Darlie would have been a deep penetrating stab wound to the body, which she did not sustain. What woke her during this narrow window of time?

Darlie also sustained excessive bruising on her arms. The bruising most certainly resulted from a blunt instrument, yet the intruder had a knife not a baseball bat. Neither of the boys’ bodies exhibited severe bruising. Darlie also had a cut on her neck, yet the intruder would have been driving down with the knife as he stood over her. For Darlie’s version of events to be true, she either experienced some kind of traumatic amnesia or exhibited the skill of a Brazilian Jiu-Jitzu black belt while sleeping.

The two boys were attacked before Darlie, though she could have put up significant resistance. Anyone determined to kill Damon and Devon in the presence of their mother should have killed or immobilized her first. According to Darlie, the intruder was standing at the foot of the couch when Damon woke her. Why did the intruder leave two eyewitnesses to a murder? He could have easily killed them both, but instead opted to walk out of the house. What was his motive if it was not murder?

Evidence technicians found Darlie’s bloody footprints between the kitchen sink and the living room. However, they failed to detect any shoe or boot prints in the blood. (Darlie Routier Fact & Fiction, Affidavit for Arrest Warrant, subscribed and sworn June 18, 1996, http://www.darlieroutierfactandfiction.com/.) How did Darlie track blood through the kitchen, but the killer did not? The evidence appeared to be tied to Darlie, not an intruder, but it was all circumstantial.

Shortly after the attack, Darlie dialed 9-1-1. Her statements and responses were the most unrehearsed and least contemplated statements she has or will ever make regarding the night of her children’s murders. Here is the beginning of the 911 call*:

911 Operator #1: …Rowlett 911…what is your emergency…

Darlie Routier: …somebody came here…they broke in… (911 Transcript , http://www.fordarlieroutier.org/911Call/transcript.html, Recorded by The Rowlett Police Department, transcript created by Barry Dickey, June 6, 1996.)

*If there was a discrepancy or ambiguity in the transcript of the 911 call, the analysis defaulted to the original recording.

Darlie stated to the operator that “somebody” came here. “Somebody” is singular and an all-inclusive term, which could have referred to a man or a woman. “Came here” was a casual description of what had transpired. It certainly did not convey a sense of urgency or the life-threatening nature of the situation.

Darlie then clarified by stating, “They broke in.” She immediately replaced the singular pronoun with the plural. Darlie later claimed to have only seen one man, yet she referred to him as “they.” Inconsistent pronouns can often indicate deception. The person is not remembering, but creating the story as she is speaking. Darlie had not fully decided what her story was going to be, thus she wafted back and forth on the number of intruders in the house. This is clearly not something one would forget or confuse.

Darlie ended the clarifying statement with “broke in.” Her children were either dead or dying, yet she felt compelled to tell the operator that someone broke into the house. The call continued:

911 Operator #1: …ma’am…

Darlie Routier …they just stabbed me and my children… (Ibid.)

Her second statement again identified the intruder in the plural as “they.” Throughout the call, Darlie shifted between the plural and singular regarding the intruder(s). Darlie’s second statement conveyed a sense of urgency and relevance.

With the survival of her child in the balance, Darlie made the following statement on the call, “…we got to find out who it was…” At a different juncture during the call, she repeated “Who would do this?” twice. Ensuring that her son lived should have had a higher priority than trying to determine who stabbed him. Darlie placed undue and excessive emphasis on the intruder(s) when the obvious focus should have been on saving her children.

At one point during the call, Darlie attempted to explain what happened:

Darlie Routier: …some man …came in …stabbed my babies …stabbed me …I woke up …I was frightened* …he ran out through the garage …threw the knife down …my babies are dying …they’re dead …oh my God… (Ibid.)

*Prosecution claimed she said “fighting.”

In this statement, Darlie referred to the intruder as an individual, but added his gender. She also provided a fairly detailed description of what transpired prior to her call. As would be expected, Darlie told the story in chronological order. All of her statements were in chronological order, except one. The one item out of place chronologically was the segment “threw the knife down.” Changes to chronology are done for a reason. A break in chronology can indicate deception as the out-of-place item was not being drawn from memory, but created. According to Darlie, the intruder dropped the knife in the utility room prior to entering the garage though in this utterance she placed the dropping of the knife after the intruder left the garage.

In another statement on the emergency call, Darlie confused pronouns and chronology:

Darlie Routier: …no …he ran out …uh …they ran out in the garage …I was sleeping… (Ibid.)

Darlie changed “he” to ”they” during this statement, apparently correcting herself. She also placed the intruder(s) running out of the house before the fact she was sleeping, though it would have happened after she awoke.

On the emergency call, Darlie stated that the intruder(s) ran away. However, she stated during her trial testimony that the intruder [singular during this recollection] walked away from her. (Court Transcripts, The State of Texas No. F-96-39973-J vs. Darlie Lynn Routier A-96-253, Sandra M. Halsey, CSR, Official Court Reporter.) He walked out of the house. It is a detail one would not confuse. Darlie should have a clear visual image of the intruder in her house if it was a recollection.

Darlie experienced extreme duress during the 911 call. One could argue that her grammatical and speech errors were understandable and explainable due to the circumstances. However, her misspoken statements only occurred where she would have had to fabricate information if she did kill her boys. It is also noteworthy that Darlie did not refer to her boys as girls or call her husband by the wrong name. She never said someone shot her or used future tenses to describe what happened. Her word choices unintentionally revealed more information than she desired.

During her murder trial, Darlie chose to testify. While Darlie was on the stand, her attorney walked her through her testimony until he arrived at the night of the murders. At which time, he shifted to a more open-ended question and answer approach to his direct examination.

Defense attorney: All right. Darlie, what is the very next thing that you remember, that you either felt or heard or saw?

Darlie Routier: The next thing that I remember is Damon hitting my right shoulder, and he said “Mommy,” or he said “Mommy, Mommy,” I’m not sure, but he said, “Mommy.” I looked up, and you’ve got to remember that I’m in a — I am not completely awake, you know, when you first wake up, you are not completely wide awake. And there was a man, that was down, going away from the couches, walking away from me. I started to get up and when I stood up, I heard noise like glass breaking. I started to walk towards the kitchen, Damon was behind me, and when I got to the kitchen, I put my hand back here for Damon to stay. And when I got to the kitchen, I could see the guy going into the utility room. (Ibid.)

When a person makes the statement “the next thing I remember,” she is usually leaving out critical elements of the story. The phrase enables her to jump over critical details. Darlie utilized the phrase in this same fashion, but she claimed to have a reason to segue because she allegedly slept through the murders. As a result, Darlie began her story from the moment her recollection began. Even though she slept within a foot of one of her sons, she did not recall hearing him or his brother being stabbed to death, nor did she wake during her own vicious attack. However, her son calling her name and tapping her shoulder woke her.

Darlie’s first sentence was repetitive, but fairly straight-forward. However, in her second sentence Darlie used the phrase, “…you’ve got to remember…” when she referenced her state of consciousness. Darlie felt she needed to emphasize her low level of cognition. She needed to convince the jury she was not fully awake. She lacked confidence in her statement, and she may have felt it lacked believability. She followed her intro by starting and stopping a statement. She stated “…I’m in a–…” What was she going to say? “I’m in a dream state” or “I’m in a trance.” We do not know what she was going to say because she chose not to continue her thought. Often times, people stop a statement because it would reveal something they did not want to say. She then stated, “I am not completely awake,” which was the wrong tense. She used the present tense rather than past tense. Many times the use of present tense indicates the person is creating the story currently rather than remembering.

She continued with the phrase “you know,” which distanced her from her statement. Darlie stated, “you know,” but we do not know what happened. Rather than telling us, she placed the burden on the listener to fill in the blanks. She went on to say, “when you first wake up, you are not…,” which further distanced her from her statement as she spoke in the second person rather than the first. She was not testifying about herself, she spoke hypothetically.

Continuing with her explanation, Darlie stated “I started to get up…” Unless something stopped her from getting up, “I started” was filler. It was unnecessary. The phrase “I started” implied that there was a beginning, a middle, and end to her action, yet most people consider getting up as one action. Darlie followed this by stating, “I started to walk towards the kitchen…” Once again she began with “I started.” Nothing stopped her from getting to the kitchen.

Darlie continued answering her attorney’s questions:

Defense attorney: Where was the man by this time?

Darlie Routier: He was gone, he was out of my sight… I got into the kitchen, and I got to where the island was, and it was at that moment that I realized that I had blood on me. And I kept going, walking a little bit, and I saw a knife laying in the utility room. The knife wasn’t completely the whole way in the utility room, it was just like, a little bit into the doorway of the utility room. It was an instinct — I picked up the knife, it was an instinct to pick up the knife. I didn’t think about it. It was just an instinct. I picked up the knife, I brought the knife back to the kitchen counter, and set it up on the kitchen counter… (Ibid.)

Darlie’s statement placed a tremendous emphasis on the found knife. She stated three times that she picked up the knife. Repetition is done for emphasis. Darlie felt it was important for the jury to know she touched the knife. Darlie exhibited no obvious maternal instincts pertaining to saving the lives of her children, but she felt an instinctual need to pick up the knife used to kill her two boys. She also stated that she placed it on the kitchen counter, which was an odd decision considering she was following a murderer through her house. Her survival instincts were not well honed either.

The questioning shifted toward the intruder’s attack against Darlie:

Defense attorney: Okay. Do you have any recollection of this man attacking you and beating you severely and cutting you?

Darlie Attorney: I don’t have any — what you would say that, I mean, that I can remember him doing that. I have assumed that that is what he has done, because common sense tells you that that is what he has done. (Ibid.)

The correct answer should have been “no;” yet, her response varied sharply from the expected answer. The question triggered a stressful reaction by Darlie. Her first phrase was the beginning of a question followed by the filler phrase “I mean.” Both answering a question with a question and utilizing filler words provided her person with more time to answer the question. Even though she knew the question would be asked, she hesitated. Darlie also did not use the words “attack” or “beating.” Instead, she provided a confusing assortment of words, “…that I can remember him doing that.” She replaced action verbs with “doing that,” which distanced herself from her statements.

When referring to the attack, Darlie spoke theoretically. She referenced common sense, rather than providing the information, which required the listener to arrive at his own conclusions. Her answer was implied. Since Darlie claimed that she did not remember the incident, it might seem reasonable for her to draw this conclusion, but she should have simply answered, “No.”

Darlie’s husband, Darin, was allegedly asleep upstairs during the attacks. He had knowledge of what transpired in the house after he responded to Darlie’s screams, and he also provided insight into family dynamics, stressors in the family, and potential enemies they may have had.

Part of the State’s case against Darlie involved establishing a motive. Though not required, the State found it necessary to explain why Darlie killed her two boys. The State contended that she was severely depressed due to a confluence of stressors. Darlie likely suffered from post-partum depression after the birth of Drake, compounded by weight gain, trouble sleeping, and financial problems. The State postulated that these factors caused Darlie’s depression and resulted in her killing her boys. (Ibid.)

Darin has steadfastly maintained his belief in Darlie’s innocence. (Darlie Routier Fact & Fiction, Affidavit for Arrest Warrant, subscribed and sworn June 18, 1996, http://www.darlieroutierfactandfiction.com/.) Understandably, he said and did everything he could to protect her. As a result, many of his statements reflected this bias. He was not a disinterested party, but one set on skewing facts to best support Darlie.

Darin owned a business, which had been quite successful; however, during the beginning of 1996, it was struggling. A close look at the family’s finances showed a delicate situation where the slightest adverse shift in Darin’s business would impact the family’s ability to meet its financial obligations. The family had minimal savings, substantial debt, and several past due bills. (Darlie Routier Fact & Fiction, Affidavit for Arrest Warrant, subscribed and sworn June 18, 1996, http://www.darlieroutierfactandfiction.com/.) Darin drew a sizable six figure income, but the Routier’s outspent it.

Darin had recently applied for a loan in order for the family to take a vacation. Compounding the problem, his loan request was declined. Darin responded to the allegations of financial distress by indicating that the family had plenty of money. (Ibid.) Did Darin really believe the family’s finances were sound or was he merely downplaying the severity of the situation? An argument could be made for either one or both. Darin believed in Darlie’s innocence; therefore, the family finances were irrelevant. On the contrary, it is fairly reasonable to assume a man who fostered an environment that lead to this perilous financial situation would be unconcerned. Money came in; money went out. It was how he ran the business and family finances. To Darin, taking out a loan to pay for a vacation when he pulled in a six figure salary was uneventful.

Another aspect of the State’s motive theory pertained to Darlie being suicidal. About a month before the murders, Darlie wrote out what appeared to be a suicide note in her journal. After writing it, she called Darin and begged him to come home from work. He went home and after much discussion, Darlie appeared to be past her suicidal ideations. (Ibid.)

Darin was asked about his wife’s emotional state leading up to the murders and specifically, the day she contemplated suicide. Darin referred to Darlie’s emotional state as “…having the blues a couple of times…not concerned.” Darin claimed he was not worried because she did not go through with killing herself. (Ibid.) Was Darin downplaying his wife’s emotional problems, or was he truly not concerned at the time? He had reason to protect his wife; she faced the death penalty. However, from almost all accounts, he loved Darlie dearly. He would have likely gotten Darlie help if he thought she was truly suicidal, yet he did not.

Darlie had numerous reasons to be depressed, but only Darlie knows how the stress affected her. She may have been severely depressed and even suicidal, but it does not mean she killed her two sons. It was the State’s theory for motive, yet motive is elusive and complex. People want to know the why, but it is not a rational or reasonable thought process that leads one to kill. Therefore, postulating on motive is often ill-fated; however, the prosecution must attempt to explain the unexplainable, because juries want to understand why.

Presenting a motive likely helped, because the jury found Darlie guilty of murder on February 1, 1997. Since her conviction, her defense team has filed numerous appeals, and she has maintained her innocence. However, her claims of innocence are usually indirect denials in second person. Similar to her comments on the 911 call and statements during her trial, her denials lack confidence or believability.

Though the circumstantial evidence compiled against Darlie was quite compelling, she was entitled to fairness within the legal system. During her trial, the State employed “character assassination” against Darlie which could have prejudiced the jury and diverted them away from the facts of the case. Supporters of Darlie accused the prosecution of witness testimony manipulation. (The Darlie Routier Case Website, http://www.fordarlieroutier.org/HerProof/index.html, accessed June-July, 2015.) Further, Darlie’s court transcript contained countless typos, omissions, and material errors, which ultimately resulted in the state board decertifying the court reporter. (“Routier Court Reporter Decertified,” Lubbock Avanlache-Journal, http://lubbockonline.com/stories/060799/sta_060799013.shtml#.VaJyQflViko, June 7, 1999.) Many of the actions by the State weakened the impartiality of the judicial process and provided Darlie with numerous grounds on which to appeal.

Recently, a judge ordered additional forensic testing of various crime scene items. (Wilonsky, Robert, “CNN, new book and judge’s order shine fresh spotlight on convicted child-killer Darlie Routier,” The Dallas Morning News, http://crimeblog.dallasnews.com/2015/07/cnn-new-book-and-judges-order-shine-fresh-spotlight-on-convicted-child-killer-darlie-routier.html/, July 13, 2015.) If the testing discovers unaccounted for DNA, it could result in Darlie receiving a new trial. However, the facts of the case have not changed. People seem to think they have the ability to know whether someone is capable of murder or not. Personality traits and gut instinct factor significantly in this determination. No one wants to believe a kind and caring person could also kill. It is much easier to deny or discredit evidence than change the very foundation of security and belief one has.

Darlie slept in the living room because Drake’s moving and crying in his crib disrupted her sleep. Yet, she claimed to have slept through the brutal murders of her two children and the attack against her. It does not seem like Darlie should have had any problem sleeping near a crying baby. Darlie’s story collides with common sense and logic. One must also suspend reason and ignore the forensic evidence to believe her version of events.

John W. Taylor writes in the true crime genre at www.truecrimewriting.com. He has written short pieces and articles on the death of Marilyn Monroe, JFK, and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others.  John wrote and published Umbrella of Suspicion: Investigating the Death of JonBénet Ramsey and Isolated Incident: Investigating the Death of Nancy Cooper in 2012 and 2014, respectively. 

John’s interest in the darker side of human nature has compelled him to conduct numerous research and writing projects on various unsolved crimes.  He currently resides in Raleigh, North Carolina. 

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.

Overview:

Jerry Bledsoe’s series of critically acclaimed true crime sagas, originally published in the late 1980s and 90s, have been made into various movies (including Before He Wakes and Honor Thy Mother) and now television shows (Bitter Blood has inspired a new episode of Killer Couples on the Oxygen Network), but until recently, the books have been hard to find in print, and unavailable in ebook. After coming across four of Bledsoe’s titles last year, however, Diversion Books decided to bring the books back into publication with a series of re-releases in ebook. Now, at long last, three of Bledsoe’s best titles with be available in print on July 28th, alongside the bestselling Bitter Blood in ebook.

Before He Wakes, Blood Games, and Death Sentence deal with some of the most chilling domestic murders in the history of crime, and delve into the twisted minds of the murderers who wore masks of sanity that fooled even those closest to them. The books will be available on Amazon, B&N, and other online retailers.

Before He Wakes:

Barbara Stager appeared to be a devoted mother, loving wife, and dedicated church leader in her Durham, North Carolina, community. When she “accidentally” shot her husband, popular high school coach Russ, the police were inclined to believe her—until they found out ten years earlier her first husband had died in a strangely similar way. Detective Rick Buchanan’s relentless investigations into Stager’s life revealed a stunning vortex of compulsive lying, obsessive spending, and sexual promiscuity.

With every shocking new discovery, more of Barbara’s impeccable image unraveled. But the greatest shock—a damning piece of evidence Russ Stager left behind—revealed the nightmare truth about Barbara. New York Times bestselling author Jerry Bledsoe takes us deep into one of the most spellbinding cases of double life, lethal lust, and almost perfect murder.

Purchase Link for Before He Wakes

Blood Games:

Wealthy Lieth von Stein lay dead and his wife Bonnie near death in their North Carolina home after a vicious assault with knife and baseball bat as they slept. The crime seemed totally baffling until police followed a trail that led to the charming von Stein stepson, Chris Pritchard, and his brilliant, drug-using, Dungeons-&-Dragons playing friends at N.C. State University. Blood Games is the shattering true story of degraded young minds—and a son’s gruesome greed turned horrifyingly real. Jerry Bledsoe masterfully reconstructs the bloody crime and its aftermath, as he takes us on a riveting journey into the secret twisted hearts of three young murderers.

Purchase Link for Blood Games

Death Sentence:

When North Carolina farmer Stuart Taylor died after a sudden illness, his 46-year-old fiancée Velma Barfield, was overcome with grief. Taylor’s family grieved with her—until the autopsy revealed traces of arsenic poisoning. Turned over to the authorities by her own son, Velma stunned her family with more revelations. This wasn’t the first time the born-again Christian and devout Sunday school teacher had committed cold-blooded murder. Tried by the “world’s deadliest prosecutor,” and sentenced to death, Velma turned her life around and gained worldwide attention.

With chilling precision, New York Times bestselling author Bledsoe probes Velma’s stark descent into madness. From her harrowing childhood to the shocking crimes that incited a national debate over the death penalty, to the dark, final moments of her execution—broadcast live on CNN—Velma Barfield’s riveting life of crime and punishment, revenge and redemption is true crime reporting at its most gripping and profound.

Bitter Blood (Only available in ebook):

The first bodies found were those of a feisty millionaire widow and her daughter in their posh Louisville, Kentucky, home. Months later, another wealthy widow and her prominent son and daughter-in-law were found savagely slain in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Mystified police first suspected a professional in the bizarre gangland-style killings that shattered the quiet tranquility of two well-to-do southern communities. But soon a suspicion grew that turned their focus to family. The Sharps. The Newsoms. The Lynches. The only link between the three families was a beautiful and aristocratic young mother named Susie Sharp Newsom Lynch. Could this former child “princess” and fraternity sweetheart have committed such barbarous crimes? And what about her gun-loving first cousin and lover, Fritz Klenner, son of a nationally renowned doctor?

In this powerful and riveting tale of three families connected by marriage and murder … of obsessive love and bitter custody battles, Jerry Bledsoe recounts the shocking events that ultimately took nine lives, building to a truly horrifying climax that will leave you stunned.

Purchase Link for Bitter Blood

Bio:

Jerry Bledsoe has won numerous awards for his newspaper work, including two Ernie Pyle Memorial Awards and two National Headliner Awards. From 1972-1975, he was a contributing editor at Esquire Magazine. His work also has appeared in New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Good Housekeeping and numerous other newspapers and magazines. He is the author of 20 books, four of which were turned into films.

Most recently, his book Bitter Blood was the basis for an episode of Killer Couples on the Oxygen Network. You can watch the Oxygen interview here.

by Patrick H. Moore

Great Good News, Dear Friends and Comrades. Thanks to a wise Federal judge in Newark, New Jersey, the 900 pound stone that has been sitting on Patrick H’s (and by extension All Things Crime Blog’s) head ever since the blog and Old Man Mo’ were sued by an angry person who insisted Moore and the blog were guilty of libel and defamation, has been rolled away and Moore and All Things Crime Blog are breathing a sigh of relief. Please join me in a toast of celebration.

In short, all charges against us have been Dismissed with Prejudice, which means the plaintiff cannot bring a fresh lawsuit against Moore and the blog based on the same evidence (or lack thereof).

I want to thank each and everyone of you who was so supportive during this difficult time, and there were a lot of you. It meant worlds to me knowing that there were so many of you out there who gave a damn and wished me well. You know who you are and I will always remember your kind support.

I also want to thank my skilled lawyer, Jared Geist, who works for a New Jersey law firm named Garces, Grabler & LeBrocq. Mr. Geist wrote several highly cogent and persuasive briefs in our defense, and based on the strength and logic of his reasoning, the outcome was probably never really in doubt. Nonetheless, Old Man Mo’ was naturally sweating it out and is glad things have ended on this positive note.

Mr. Geist performed his valuable services for a very reasonable retainer, which I certainly appreciate(d). He has also expressed interest in writing a post on the right to Free Speech based on this case, which I assured him I would be delighted to post here on ATCB. Hopefully, he will find the time to put something together for us. He is a strong believer in Free Speech, which, I believe, is part of the reason, he represented us for such a reasonable rate.

The judge’s criteria for dismissing the allegations are clear and bode well for bloggers everywhere who want to report and analyze news of any kind. The judge’s Opinion is an excellent example of clear and cogent legal analysis, the gist of which is that the statements made by All Things Crime Blog and three other media outlets who had the charges against them Dismissed with prejudice are protected under New Jersey’s “fair-report privilege.”

My dad (Pops) was originally from New Jersey, and as a few of you may remember, I had a few hella fine adventures in the Garden State when I was still quite young, so I’m glad to see N.J. is capable of and willing to Do the Right Thing.

Personally, at this juncture, I’m mostly focusing on writing my second crime novel, which may or may not be titled The Playing Field. Those of you who read and enjoyed Cicero’s Dead, which has been selling at a decent clip since April 28th, can assume that with luck, skill, sufficient time in front of the keyboard, and good editing, Nick Crane’s second adventure MAY also prove to be interesting.

Although I don’t plan on writing many true crime blogs in the near future, I will when time (that precious commodity) permits, and I still welcome crime posts of any ilk from contributing crime writers.

And with that, let’s raise another glass in celebration. And remember, “neither a libeler nor a defamer be”.

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 Patrick H. Moore

Those of us who are getting a bit long in the tooth or have even reached the backside of 30 probably remember that unforgettable day when Jared Fogle first burst upon the scene. In 1999, Jared lost 245 pounds in less than a year, going from an alarming 425 pounds with a 60″ waist to 180 pounds with a 34″ waist.

I’m sure most of us felt good for Jared. His was a tale of overcoming a severe life-threatening “disease”; not only that, he apparently greatly enjoyed eating those delicious Subway sandwiches.

By 2000, he was the celebrity spokesperson for Subway, with dramatic “before and after” shots, and also appeared on Oprah and the Today show. No fool (at least we assumed he was no fool), he also earned a business degree at Indiana University.

During the next few years, Jared inspired a Jimmy Fallon parody and a South Park episode. Around that time, a long term Subway employee stated that Jared’s positive impact on Subway sales was completely unprecedented.

During subsequent years, Jared at times packed back on a few of the pounds he had so manfully shed, but hey, who could blame him – he was famous and undeniably prosperous, although not quite as svelte as he had been back when he first became a fixture on our T.V. screens.

Now, I make no claim to labor under the curse/blessing of clairvoyance, but despite Jared’s smashing success, I always sensed that there was something a bit odd about the guy; I couldn’t put my finger on what it was but every time I saw a Jared commercial, I thought: “There’s something about Jared.”

Now it goes without saying that many of us have our share of dark secrets and/or skeletons in our respective closets. As some of you may have sensed, even Old Man Mo’ is (or at least has been) far from an angel at times.

One thing we followers of true crime probably have in common is the sense that we humans, as a species, are conspicuously flawed. Members of our benighted species rape, cheat, lie, steal and murder, and some folks manage to do all of these things.

But in the case of Brother Jared, I certainly never expected him to dramatically fall from grace in such appalling fashion; I just sensed the dude was a little different. But fall from grace he certainly has… On Wednesday in Federal Court in the Southern District of Indiana, Jared expressed his intention to plead guilty to one count of distributing and receiving child pornography and one count of crossing state lines in order to engage in sexual acts with minors. Both counts of conviction carry five year minimum sentences and much higher maximum sentences.

In his Plea Agreement, the parties have thrown out the Federal Sentencing Guidelines and instead agree on the following: The Government promises to ask for no more than a 151 month sentence; Jared agrees to ask for no less than a 60 month sentence, which is the least he can serve by law based on the mandatory minimums. In addition, Jared has agreed to pay $1.4 million in restitution to ten female minor victims.

Based on the evidence, it seems certain that Jared’s “hands-on” victims were all teenagers. No one seems to be implying that he sought out “little children”. Thus, he does not appear to fall into the classic pedophilia category. His partner is crime, however, Russell Taylor, possessed a large number of videos of children in sexually compromising situations, videos that were filmed with hidden cameras. The children were reportedly unaware that they were being filmed in a lascivious manner by Mr. Taylor and his cameras.

In short, it was a “sneak operation”. It’s unclear to me how Mr. Taylor managed to arrange all of this. What is known is the fact Jared received videos depicting these children in sexual poses from Mr. Taylor on numerous occasions and had them in his possession when his house was raided.

My sense is that Jared is likely to receive a sentence of at least 10 years in Federal prison. Because of the nature of his crime, he will not be allowed to serve his time at a Federal prison camp (Club Fed). He is likely to be housed with other sex offenders for his own protection. Sex offenders in Federal custody rarely have to worry about being beaten or killed by other self-righteous inmates. Rather, they wile away their weary hours in the company of others not unlike themselves; in short, they gaze into a sort of mirror from which there is no escape as long as they are imprisoned.

Once released, Jared, like all sex offenders, will have to register with the proper authorities. In theory, he will never be free of surveillance/scrutiny. Thus, even if he gets 10 years or less, he will never again be a truly free man. And keep in mind, although it’s somewhat unlikely, the judge could give Jared a sentence far in excess of the 151 months the Government will be requesting.

* * * * *

So where does this leave us? Very simple. If you or you or you have a problem with desiring children below the age of consent, even if it’s “just” looking at pictures, you need to get help ASAP. That’s just the way it is. Do not pass go. Do not tell yourself, “This is the last time.” Once is already one time too many.

Most of us have weaknesses, obsessions, bad habits, if you will. In most instances, these bad habits will not destroy our lives, or if they do, the destruction will be slow, albeit perhaps painful. But if you suffer from the sexual vice, your demise when apprehended will be fast, dramatic and horrific. Get help while you still can, my friend. Seriously. After all, you don’t want to shake hands with Jared in the sex offenders’ wing of one of our Federal prisons, do you????

by Patrick H. Moore

My best beloveds, well do I remember that dreadful day when I first began running posts on the Amanda Knox – Meredith Kercher case. I was still very much a true crime greenhorn at the time and didn’t realize that — right or wrong — true crime fans are incredibly passionate about the cases they follow. Within minutes of our first posting, we found ourselves in the middle of a shit storm such as I have rarely endured. Oh myfreakin’god, it was nasty.

Now, nearly a lifetime later (slight exaggeration), the Italian Supreme Court has followed up its March 2015 exoneration of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito with a blistering 52 page condemnation of the prosecutors and their endless faux pas (plural) and alleged errors. The Supreme Court not only states that there was not sufficient evidence to link Knox and her computer savvy boyfriend to the death of poor Meredith Kercher; the high court goes much further and flat-out states that Knox and Sollecito had nothing to do with the murder.

Enuff said… or is it?

What if the Italian Supreme Court in all its majestic wisdom has GOTTEN IT WRONG? After all, we know that this case was highly politicized in good old Italy, so it’s just possible that there may be more to this than meets the eye (although the high court does appear to do a workmanlike job of demonstrating that, unlike Rudy Guede, who is fast-tracking his way to freedom, and whose DNA was all over the victim’s body, there was apparently not a shred of forensic evidence linking Knox and her boyfriend to the crime.

In any event, in the interests of ultimate truth, please humor me while I list a few possible reasons why Ms. Knox COULD CONCEIVABLY be among the perpetrators of the crime. This is not to say she is but simply that she could be. After all, the Italian Supreme Court does not rule out the possibility that Guede had accomplices; it simply states that Knox and Sollecito WERE NOT among the accomplices.

Without further ado, here are my reasons Knox could be guilty of some kind of crime, though not necessarily murder:

• Her nickname was Foxy Knoxy which suggests some kind of hidden agenda. Never mind the fact she allegedly got the nickname on the soccer fields of suburban Seattle based on the foxy strategic ploys she employed to will her team to victory. With a name like Foxy Knoxy, you just know she’s a crafty one. Could that “craft” include the taking of an innocent life? Probably not but we don’t know for sure, do we? Do we ever know for sure who murdered whom unless we witnessed the bloody act ourselves, or even worse wielded the instrument of death with our own trembling hands?

• When first questioned by Italian law enforcement, Ms. Knox apparently got bored and started doing handstands. This is clearly a sign of both some kind of hidden guilt and excellent coordination. And we all know how much good coordination helps when offing someone. The grim Dahmer allegedly had the fine coordination of a freakin’ Olympiam. And the agile Mr. Guede was allegedly quite the basketball stud. Could this be a sign of Knox’s culpability? You be the judge.

• When first questioned by the Italian police, Ms. Knox apparently got bored and also started doing yoga exercises. Could this be a sign of hidden guilt? After all, exercise yoga is an effective way to calm the nerves, and if Ms. Knox was nervous based on some deep dark secret, this would explain her untoward actions? What do you think?

• For some reason, even though according to her autobiography, Ms. Know was relatively inexperienced sexually when she arrived in Italy, the tabloid press turned her into a freakin’ sex goddess. This, of course, goes along with the Foxy Knoxy riff. And let’s face it, she was a pretty young lady. I know many men who have said…well, never mind what they’ve said. In any event, we all know about sex goddesses, femme fatales, and bad women in general. Both Sigmund Freud and Raymond Chandler were well aware of the close relationship between sex and death. Is it possible that since Ms. Knox allegedly became more sexually active after arriving in Italy, that this acting out of primitive, instinctual desires may have also unleashed the killer within? You gotta admit, although it’s unlikely, it’s a possibility… How many of you esteemed readers have murdered someone in conjunction with “indoor sports”? A lot of you, right? It happens all the time.

• Also, Ms. Knox went to Italy with dreams of becoming a writer. All through history, writers have been held in disrepute as immoral, lazy good for nothings. If the shoe fits, wear it. As much of a literary luminary as the great Nathaniel Hawthorne (who incidentally wrote some of the first great crime novels) carried guilt around inside his voluminous brain for his entire life because instead of doing something useful, he chose to become “a scribbler of tales.” Therefore, the fact that Ms. Knox had dreams (and probably still does) of writing her way to glory could suggest an innate and highly problematic character flaw, couldn’t it? Could this flaw rise to the level of taking another human life? Maybe. Maybe not.

• And finally, Ms. Knox accused the Congolese pub owner for whom she worked of having killed poor Meredith Kercher. Therefore, she must have done it herself, right? It’s clearly a case of her trying to find some poor sucker to deflect the blame on. Right? Blame it on a black man… Hasn’t that always been the American way? When in danger or in doubt, blame it on a black man… On the other hand, when she made the accusation, Ms. Knox had been under intense interrogation for many long frightening hours. She was undoubtedly extremely frightened by this point in time. Have you ever been interrogated by aggressive cops for hours on end? No? For shame. Why not? I certainly have been…approximately 48 years ago, and let me tell you, after hours of intense interrogation, you’ll do damn near anything to “cool out” the constabulary. But that’s another story for another place and time.

On balance, I’m extremely glad that Ms. Knox and the Mr. Sollecito have been exonerated. But does this mean true justice, that most elusive of chimeras, has occurred. Yeah, I’d say in this case,  it probably does. But am I certain? No, I’m never certain. Which according to some is the biggest crime of all…

review by Patrick H. Moore

I get asked to read a fair number of true crime books. The writers, like writers everywhere, are working hard to promote their creations and are eager for exposure. I hate to say “no” to these requests, but inwardly I sometimes groan as in, “How in the world am I going to find time to read, much less review, another crime book?”

Thus, it was with considerable pleasure and more than a little relief that I discovered that COLD SERIAL: The Jack the Stranglers Murders, by Brain Forschner, provides a fascinating extended snapshot of a string of unprovoked rapes and murders committed in or around Dayton, Ohio between 1900 and 1909. Based on the modus operandi of the killer, the reader comes to the unavoidable conclusion that the murders are the work of a single cold-hearted killer, what today we would term a serial killer.

Edgar Allan Poe once stated “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,” and in COLD SERIAL the victims are all beautiful (or at least attractive) young females. However, these females are not quite women, rather they are girls – girls who although varying somewhat in temperament and age (11 to 19) are similar in that they all appear to be very decent individuals who are hardworking, full of life and eager to please (in the best sense of the phrase) the world in which they find themselves.

Ada Lantz

The five victims (with the exception of victim #1 who is only 11 years old) share a normal, healthy interest in the opposite sex, despite the fact that they live in rather restrictive times where girls are expected to maintain virtuous decorum at all times. Because victims #2 through 5 are pretty young ladies, they have no dearth of suitors, and the reader gets the impression that they are quite willing to share passionate kisses, or in some cases a bit more, with their boyfriends.

It is not their boyfriends they need to fear, however, as becomes increasingly clear as this tragic true tale progresses. Rather, they should be terrified of the serial rapist/murderer who is shadowing their movements as they go about their business, a fact they only learn when it is already too late.

Anna Markowitz

The killer’s technique bears little in common with the flamboyant serial killers of the modern era. No torture, no anal sex, no oral-genital contact, no dismemberment, no skinning, and no freezing and eventual eating of body parts. Rather, our serial killer is an eminently practical man. He accosts his victims, overpowers them, strangles them, rapes them and then disposes of their bodies. Though, for the sake of accuracy, it should be pointed out that the killer does display a penchant for necrophilia. This characteristic, however, would appear to be more of a practical measure than an indication of kinky desires; i.e., it’s much easier to rape someone who is not moving than a reluctant victim fighting hard for her life. It should also be noted that the killer does appear to be a fetishist, certain items belonging to the victims are invariably missing when their bodies are discovered.

Mary Forschner and Dona Gilman

The author, Brian Forschner, became interested in this story when he was researching his family tree and discovered a relative named Mary Forschner, from the early 1900s, whom he had never heard of and who had apparently died inexplicably at the age of 15. Mr. Forschner began to research Mary’s life and soon discovered that she was the fourth of five young girls to meet a horrific and agonizing fate in the same Dayton neighborhood within the short span of a few years. From this point on, his research expanded ultimately resulting in COLD SERIAL.

The book is divided into six discrete parts. Chapters One through Five chart the cruel fates of the five luckless victims. Chapter Six – well, I don’t want to talk about Chapter Six because I don’t want to spoil things. Let me just say that Chapter Six provides a satisfying, and perhaps unexpected conclusion.

Map linking the five murders

Along the way, the reader is treated to a vivid depiction of American life in heartland during the first decade of the 20th Century. Hardworking, well-meaning teenage girls go to work in factories at around the age of 15 to help put food on the table. Sometimes, they read romantic poetry during their lunch breaks or while taking the trolley car to and from work. All too often, they are raped and murdered.

100 years ago the good citizens of mid-America were less likely than they are today to sit back and let law enforcement work unilaterally to solve high profile murders. In fact, many of the good folk of Dayton and its environs want nothing more than to catch the perpetrator and lynch the bastard. Law enforcement, however, prides itself on avoiding lynchings at all costs and does a good job of protecting its suspects. Its suspects, on the other hand, should probably never have been suspects in the first place, as you will see when you read Mr. Forschner’s gripping tale.

Elizabeth Fulhart

The five victims of Jack the Strangler are Ada Lantz (died at age 11); Dona Gilman (died at age 19); Anna Markowitz (died at age 18); Mary Forschner (died at age 15); and Elizabeth Fulhart (died at age 18).

COLD SERIAL profits from excellent editing. It is vivid, succinct and quite captivating. Not a word is wasted. A vivid portrait of mid-America circa 1900 is provided. I strongly recommend this book to any true crime fan interested in adding to his or her knowledge of both the history of serial killers in America and the curious manner in which the “ways and means” of at least one early 20th century serial killer differed strikingly from the appalling methods of certain of our modern breed.

Brian E. Forschner, PhD, has a unique voice that has been shaped by many different experiences in his life, including seminary training, the operation of halfway houses, and university teaching. More recently, Brian has been involved in the building and operation of affordable housing for families and elderly Americans, retirement and nursing homes, home health, and post-acute services for a major health system. During his career his role has spanned from one of minister, teacher, writer, counselor, and consultant, to CEO. His passion is social justice. Today, Brian lives in Cincinnati, OH.

by John W. Taylor

After a drawn-out battle over money and custody, Drew Peterson finally divorced his third wife, Kathleen Savio, in October of 2003. He married Stacy Cales (“Peterson”) days after he finalized his divorce. On March 1, 2004, a neighbor found Kathleen’s lifeless body curled up in her bathtub. Though several of Kathleen’s family members thought Kathleen may have been a victim of foul play, the autopsy report identified the cause of death as an accidental drowning and the police concurred. That was the end of it until Peterson’s fourth wife, Stacy, went missing.

In the months leading up to her disappearance, Stacy told several people of her desire to divorce Peterson. Tensions were rising in the marriage, and Stacy was concerned. Days before her disappearance, she told family and friends that she feared for her life. Stacy’s friend Pam Bosco claimed Stacy told her, “…If anything happens to me, he [Drew Peterson] killed me. It wasn’t an accident.”

On October 28, 2007, Stacy planned to meet her sister, Cassandra Cales. After a brief morning call where Stacy postponed their meeting, Cassandra received no additional contact from Stacy during the afternoon or evening. Cassandra drove to the Peterson house around 11:00 p.m. that night. According to one of the Peterson children, Drew and Stacy had a fight. Stacy left and Drew went looking for her. After later talking to Drew Peterson on the phone, Cassandra filed a missing person’s report with the police.

According to Peterson, Stacy called him around 9:00 p.m. stating that she was leaving him for another man. No one other than Peterson received a phone call or visit prior to Stacy’s sudden and unexpected departure. She did not contact her friends, family, or children to tell them she was leaving. Further, no one knew of this other man. They only had Peterson’s word.

Two days later, Peterson’s stepbrother, Thomas Morphey, attempted suicide after he believed that he inadvertently helped Peterson dispose of Stacy’s body. He claimed he helped Peterson carry a large, blue plastic container from Drew’s bedroom to his vehicle around the time Stacy went missing. He described the container as warm to the touch and heavy. Morphey feared Stacy’s remains were in the container. After moving the blue container, Peterson allegedly stated to Morphey, “This never happened.” Several neighbors also saw Peterson and an unidentified man carry a 55-gallon container out of the house around this time.

According to Morphey, on the day before Stacy went missing Peterson told him Stacy was a problem that needed to be taken care of. Peterson then asked Morphey if he would kill for him. Though his story was quite incriminating for Drew Peterson, Morphey had credibility issues associated with a long history of substance abuse and emotional instability.

Peterson refuted the entire blue container story. However, Peterson’s statements about these events lacked an actual denial. On CBS2 Chicago, Mike Puccinelli interviewed Drew Peterson on February 6, 2009.

Puccinelli: How can you explain Thomas Morphey and his involvement [in the disappearance of Stacy]?

Peterson: Thomas Morphey is a drug and alcohol addict. There’s plenty of explanations for Thomas Morphey… why he is saying what he is saying, I don’t know. I can’t even explain what’s going on through his mind.

In his response, Peterson never said Morphey lied. He never addressed the actual issue at hand, the assertions Morphey made regarding Peterson’s actions. He made derogatory statements about Morphey, but he failed to dispute his statements.

With suspicion swirling around the disappearance of Stacy Peterson, the authorities reexamined the death of Kathleen Savio. A forensic pathologist, Dr. Larry Blum, stated that the positioning of the body, combined with several bruises to the front and back of her body, were not consistent with an accidental fall. Dr. Blum also did not believe a slip in the bath tub could have caused the deep, inch-long wound to the back of her head. After reviewing dozens of bathtub-related fatalities, Dr. Blum indicated that Savio’s death fell far outside the pattern for an accident. The revised autopsy concluded that the cause of death was homicide. With the new autopsy findings, the prosecutors now had a murder case.

The newly drafted autopsy report provided renewed focus on Kathleen’s death. Stacy Peterson had provided Peterson with an alibi for the time when Kathleen died. However, with her absence, Peterson lacked corroboration on his whereabouts during the crucial time.

In the two years prior to Kathleen’s death, it was reported that the police responded to the Peterson house for domestic-related issues over a dozen times. Kathleen also wrote an Illinois assistant state attorney expressing fear that Drew Peterson might kill her. A man by the name of Jeff Pachter came forward and claimed that Drew Peterson offered him $25,000 to find someone to kill Kathleen Savio. Further, prior to Stacy vanishing into thin air, she allegedly confided to several people that Peterson told her he had killed Kathleen. Most notably, she told her pastor, Neil Schori.

According to Reverend Neil Schori, Stacy told him that Peterson killed Kathleen Savio and made it look like an accident. Stacy told him Peterson left the house about the time Kathleen died and returned with women’s clothes, which he put into the washing machine. According to Schori, Stacy also indicated that Peterson coached her for hours on how to lie to the police in order to secure his alibi.

With these circumstances coming to light, the police suspected Peterson had a role in Kathleen’s death. However, the evidence linking Peterson to the murder was weak. Not all forensic pathologists viewed Kathleen’s death as a clear murder. When police thought the death was accidental, the attending forensic pathologist agreed the attending death was an accident. Yet, when the police thought the death was suspicious, the assigned forensic pathologist determined the cause of death as homicide.

The domestic issues between Drew Peterson and Kathleen Savio were troubling, but circumstantial to her death. And unfortunately, Stacy’s statements to others were hearsay and not were admissible in court. Though her statements may have led a reasonable person to conclude Peterson killed Kathleen, within the criminal justice system the information amounted to nothing. Though the police and prosecutors suspected Peterson, they were stymied. There was minimal useable evidence.

Drew Peterson felt compelled to engage the media, but his explanations and rationales came across as overly confident and taunting. He called into a radio station on April Fools’ Day with the prompt, “I have a confession to make.” Apparently, it was Peterson’s attempt at humor as he was not confessing to any crime. Further, he seemed to relish in the spotlight, forgetting that his fame was actually infamy.

Peterson was articulate and well-spoken during most of his interviews. He answered questions with ease, as he enjoyed talking about himself. During most interviews, Peterson tried to set the parameters and control the interview, but reporters still managed to ask him questions about Kathleen’s death and Stacy’s disappearance. During the same interview with Mike Puccinelli, the following exchange took place:

Puccinelli: They’re saying that she [Stacy] didn’t abandon. That you killed her.

Peterson: No, that’s totally false. None of that’s true.

Peterson’s response conveyed a direct denial though it was not clear where his denial was directed, since the interviewer made the mistake of asking two questions. He may be responding to the statement “didn’t abandon,” rather than whether or not he killed Stacy. Abandon means to leave completely and finally, thus enabling Peterson to assert such. The interview continued.

Puccinelli: How do you explain what happened to…Kathleen Savio and Stacy Peterson then? It seems like an unbelievable vortex of coincidence.

Peterson: Without a doubt it’s unbelievable and it’s suspicious by nature. If I was looking at it from the outside, I’d agree with that, but that’s just not what happened.

Puccinelli questioned Peterson’s account of events surrounding Kathleen’s death and Stacy’s disappearance. Peterson responded, “Without a doubt it’s unbelievable…” Peterson acknowledged the lack of believability in what he claimed. He did not believe his own story; as a result, neither should we. Following up on Peterson’s answer.

Puccinelli: What did happen?

Peterson: I believe Kathleen had an accident, a household accident. People say that’s impossible but it’s not… So I believe she slipped, she fell and she drowned and the bathtub drained out and I really believe that happened…

If Peterson is innocent, then he should not know what happened. Instead, he attempted to explain what he thought happened. Peterson stated, “I really believe that happened…” The use of really was unnecessary. Unnecessary words can convey deception. Really changed the meaning of the statement from “I believe that happened” to “I actually or truly believe that happened.” When one utilizes really or actually, the person indicates that their statement is different than one would expect.

With regard to Stacy’s disappearance, there were many inconsistencies and logical flaws in Peterson’s claims that Stacy left him, her small children, and family without notification. During a February 5, 2009 interview on InSession, commentator Lisa Bloom asked Drew Peterson several poignant questions on this topic.

Bloom: And you’ve said, Drew, right after Stacy’s disappearance, that she called you about nine PM on that Sunday night and said that she’s going off with another man. If that’s so, why isn’t there a missing man?

Peterson: Don’t know. Is there a man missing? The thing is if there’s a man who may be keeping in touch with his family and they’re aware of it, why would he be called in as missing?

Peterson answered the question with a question. Answering a question with a question is a stall technique. It provides the person time to think by placing the burden back on the interviewer. Though Peterson successfully avoided answering this question, Bloom continued the line of questioning.

Bloom: Why wouldn’t she tell anybody else but you that she was leaving with another man so that they wouldn’t worry?

Peterson: Ma’am! Ma’am, it’s my understanding this conversation was to focus on my relationship with Chrissy [Peterson’s then fiancé].

As the questioning continued, Peterson put a stop to it. Bloom’s line of questioning made him very uncomfortable. Peterson not answering the questions demonstrated his sensitivity to this topic. By withholding answers, there were things Peterson did not want people to know.

During the interview with Puccinelli, he also asked about Stacy Peterson.

Puccinelli: Do you expect to see Stacy alive ever again?

Peterson: I kind of do. I really do…

Rather than providing a direct answer, Peterson filled his short answer with unnecessary words. Yes or I do would have been sufficient, yet he added kind of to the first part of his response and really to the second portion. If Stacy left him for another man then Peterson should have no reason to not believe Stacy will resurface. Instead, Peterson had no confidence in seeing Stacy alive again. What would keep her from contacting her family ever again? If she was alive, she would eventually contact someone, and his response demonstrated what he already knew: Stacy will never be seen again.

On the show, Verdict with Dan Abrams, Peterson was asked a series of questions.

Abrams: Did you try to convince her [Stacy] not to leave [during the last call]?

Peterson: I much [sic] said, you know, ‘What am I supposed to do with me and the kids and what are we supposed to do now?’ And she seemed kind of snotty in the phone conversation, so it was a pretty quick conversation. And then I was abruptly – she terminated it.

Though Peterson was quite articulate during most of his interviews, this question clearly flustered him. His initial response did not make sense and he finished it with the filler phrase, you know. You know can be a common phrase, but Peterson rarely utilized this phrase during interviews. The use of the phrase here provided him time. It also conveyed the idea that the person asking the question already knew the answer; therefore, there was no need to respond. ‘You already know what she said’ is what Peterson insinuated. Compared to his normally well-delivered responses, he delivered several disjointed and misspoken lines. His response did not flow, and it appeared Peterson created the information in his head rather than remembering what was said. Peterson was not expecting this question or prepared to answer it. Abrams followed with another question that elicited stress from Peterson.

Abrams: And what have you done to try to find her?

Peterson: Oh, we have private investigators working right now. And basically, they‘re kind of limited to computer activity, or you know, monitoring charge cards and that type of thing. But I just don‘t have the resources to go traipsing the globe to, you know, find her at the beaches or, you know, other parts of the world where I think she possibly is.

Peterson utilized the phrase you know three times during his response, which significantly differed from his normal verbiage. Peterson needed to think about his answer and the unnecessary words provided him time to formulate his response.

If Drew Peterson was telling the truth, then Stacy was alive, and he should have been doing everything possible to find her. Finding Stacy would indicate that no murder occurred and would restore his alibi in Kathleen’s death. It would have likely ended all criminal investigations and potentially kept him out of prison. Yet to the contrary, Peterson’s answer conveyed a minimal effort directed toward finding Stacy. Peterson never asked Stacy to come forward, which was the obvious thing he should have done if he believed she was alive. His statements conveyed otherwise.

In an interview on Fox News, Shepard Smith asked Drew Peterson how he and his family were handling the fact that he was a suspect in Stacy’s disappearance. Peterson compared it to having cancer. He continued by stating, “You’re just looking for that miracle cure to make it all go away.” Peterson realized that there was a tremendous amount of suspicion around him and the only way out was a miracle. However, it only required a miracle if Peterson killed Stacy. If Stacy were still alive, no miracle was needed. Stacy just needed to reappear. Peterson’s need of a miracle revealed his knowledge that Stacy was already dead.

Though many police investigators thought Peterson had killed Kathleen Savio, there was little actual evidence. Through his numerous television and radio interviews, he flaunted his freedom. During a media interview, Peterson was asked about the attention he received. He responded, “…It’s kind of comical. I have fun with it. I’ll go out somewhere and I’ll be recognized…” Peterson’s cockiness and cavalier attitude garnered extra unwanted attention from law makers.

In a very rare maneuver, the Illinois legislature passed a law that allowed courts to consider statements from “unavailable witnesses,” if prosecutors could prove to a standard of more likely than not that the defendant murdered a witness. The legislature specifically passed this law for Drew Peterson. It is commonly referred to as “Drew’s Law,” though he is likely not a strong proponent of it.

As a result of “Drew’s Law,” in May of 2009, Peterson was indicted for the murder of his third wife, Kathleen Savio. In September of 2012, a jury convicted Peterson of murder, and he received 38 years in prison. During Peterson’s murder trial, the prosecution successfully argued that he intentionally prevented Stacy from testifying, which enabled them to introduce statements made by Stacy to third parties. Several of the jurors acknowledged that the hearsay evidence played a decisive role in Peterson’s murder conviction. One juror, Ron Supalo, indicated that he believed the recently-enacted hearsay law was unconstitutional, but ultimately decided his role was to assess the evidence rather than the law. Supalo stated, “If there was no hearsay in his case — Drew Peterson goes free.”

The prosecution of Drew Peterson was driven primarily by what the authorities knew rather than what they could prove. The new law allowed them to circumvent the justice system. When using hearsay evidence, the accused is unable to confront their accuser. No one knows what the person meant, the tone utilized, or if the statements were truthful. The legal maneuvers utilized in this case were ripe for error and misadministration of justice.

Trials are about demonstrating what one can prove, not determining the truth. However, the truth was too much for many to bear in this case. Justice had to be served, even if it meant circumventing it. The removal of a killer from society was a significant victory, but it came at a cost. The State utilized a potentially unethical and dangerous maneuver; however, no one will lose sleep over the murder conviction of Drew Peterson.

Works Cited

Barrett, Kate, “’Love Me… Enough to Kill for Me?’ Stepbrother Says Peterson Asked,” ABC News, http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/LegalCenter/story?id=7082749&page=1, March 15, 2009

Chatzky, Paul, “Illinois Hearsay Law and the Drew Peterson Case,” Law Offices of Paul Chatzky, http://www.chatzkylaw.com/blog/illinois-hearsay-law-and-the-drew-peterson-case/, April 23, 2013.

Hosey, Joseph, “The Horror of What Kathleen Savio Went Through Before She Died,” Bolingbrook Patch, http://patch.com/illinois/bolingbrook/the-horror-of-what-kathleen-savio-went-through-before-she-died, August 16, 2012.

McClish, Mark, “I Know You Are Lying,” The Marpa Group, 2001.

Miller, Colin, “The Purpose-Driven Rule: Drew Peterson, Giles v. California, and the Transferred Intent Doctrine of Forfeiture by Wrongdoing,” Columbia Law Review, http://columbialawreview.org/the-purpose-driven-rule-drew-peterson-giles-v-california-and-the-transferred-intent-doctrine-of-forfeiture-by-wrongdoing/, December 2012.

Tarm, Michael, “Drew Peterson Trial: Pathologist Testifies That Kathleen Savio Was Murdered,” Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/16/drew-peterson-trial-patho_1_n_1790847.html, August 16, 2012.

Associated Press, “Hearsay Rule Vexed Jurors in Illinois Murder Case,” New York Times, New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/us/hearsay-rule-vexed-illinois-jurors-in-drew-peterson-murder-case.html?_r=0, September 8, 2012.

“The Drew Peterson Case: An Illustration of Hearsay Evidence in Illinois,” Ralph E. Mecyk & Associates, http://www.meczyklaw.com/Articles/The-Drew-Peterson-Case-An-Illustration-of-Hearsay-Evidence-in-Illinois.shtml.

Fox News, Drew Peterson interview with Shepard Smith, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OmhMcKCIuA, date unknown.

Justice Café, News and discussion about the cases of Kathleen Savio and Stacy Peterson, wives of Drew Peterson, https://petersonstory.wordpress.com/, accessed September 2015.

Click below to view John W. Taylor’s intriguing post on the Darlie Routier case:

The Deep Sleeper – Darlie Routier’s Plight for Innocence

John W. Taylor writes in the true crime genre at www.truecrimewriting.com. He has written short pieces and articles on the death of Marilyn Monroe, JFK, and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others.  John wrote and published Umbrella of Suspicion: Investigating the Death of JonBénet Ramsey and Isolated Incident: Investigating the Death of Nancy Cooper in 2012 and 2014, respectively. 

John’s interest in the darker side of human nature has compelled him to conduct numerous research and writing projects on various unsolved crimes.  He currently resides in Raleigh, North Carolina. 

by BJW Nashe

When I lived in Santa Cruz, California from 1982-87, I had no idea that this pleasant seaside town was once dubbed “The Murder Capital of the World.” By the time I moved there to attend UC Santa Cruz, where I majored in philosophy (with an unofficial minor in hallucinogens), there was little or no mention of murder. The mass killing had occurred a decade earlier. The only murders I recall were found in existentialist novels by Albert Camus and Fyodor Dostoevsky. I lived a block and half from the sea. We liked to stroll along West Cliff Drive late at night. Everything seemed perfect.

Only recently did I discover that Santa Cruz was once a murder capital — and I happened upon the information solely by chance. Last month, I was intrigued by a work of fiction by Grace Krilanovich called The Orange Eats Creeps – which I highly recommend, if you’re in the mood for a freestyle gothic tale of teenage-vampire-hobo-junkies misbehaving in the Pacific Northwest. While googling some interviews with the author, I learned that she grew up in Santa Cruz. In one interview, she pointed out that during the early 1970s — before she was even born — her hometown was plagued by an epidemic of serial killings. Sure enough, a quick online search yielded a whole trove of information on these crimes, and the deranged individuals who committed them. Praise the Lord for the bounteous Internet. When it comes to true crime and porn, the World Wide Web really delivers. And it’s fascinating to see how transgressive fiction sometimes bleeds right into true crime.

It may seem odd to realize that one’s college town — the source of so many fond personal memories — has a buried history that includes a bunch of shocking murders. But this shouldn’t seem odd at all, because that’s how it is here in America. Every town has its own buried past, or occult history, which includes an abundance of scandal and crime. Some towns might be considered virtual plague yards. In California, the occult history runs counter to the official version of the Golden State as a success story characterized by progress, wealth, fame, and innovation. The occult history forces us to confront the dark side of the story, which includes child abuse, misogyny, drugs, murder, madness, greed, and exploitation. We might prefer to forget the truly hideous stuff, and hope it all fades away, but it’s still there, waiting to resurface again and again, like some horrible repressed memory that won’t leave us alone until we deal with it effectively once and for all. Perhaps the true arc of human history, as Professor Norman O. Brown used to explain in his seminars at UC Santa Cruz, resembles nothing so much as a patient’s struggle to overcome a debilitating neurosis.

For a town such as Santa Cruz, neurosis is one thing. “Murder capital of the world” takes us to another level altogether. The exaggeration is understandable, however, when you get into the details. During the span of just a few years from 1971-73, three individuals were convicted of 23 separate murders in Santa Cruz County. Several other deaths and disappearances remain unsolved to this day. Given the population and demographics of the region, that’s quite a record. With the high-profile crimes of the Manson Family in Los Angeles and the Zodiac Killer in San Francisco still big news at the time, people in Santa Cruz were justifiably terrified when similar atrocities began to afflict their community.

The murders committed by John Linley Frazier, Big Ed Kemper, and Herbert Mullin in the Santa Cruz area never achieved the same level of national attention as the Tate-LaBianca slayings. Yet the Santa Cruz murders were just as shocking as those committed by the hippie death cult down south. Moreover, the Santa Cruz murders were just as relevant to the troubled zeitgeist of the early 1970s, which was marked by extreme civil unrest, rampant drug abuse, profound disillusionment, and the ongoing tragedy of a doomed war in Vietnam. Even more significant, perhaps, is the fact that all three of the Santa Cruz killers were men suffering from mental illness. One of them was preoccupied with targeting women. Clearly, mentally ill criminals and violence against women are problems that continue to wreak havoc in American society, even in sunny California.

We can think of the following three psychopaths as anti-celebrities starring in their own deranged counterpart to SoCal’s Hollywood Babylon. Think of them as “NorCal Gothic,” or “Breaking Bad in Santa Cruz.” Like it or not, their stories belong to us, are part of who we are, and we need to somehow understand them if we ever hope to move beyond the twisted psychology of murder.

John Linley Frazier — The Killer Prophet

The Santa Cruz murders began on October 19, 1970, when police discovered the bodies of five people at the affluent Soquel home of a well-respected local eye surgeon. Dr. Victor Ohta, his wife Virginia, their two preteen sons, and the doctor’s secretary all had been shot and left floating in the family swimming pool. The victims were blind-folded, and their hands were bound behind their backs with colorful silk scarves. The killer had left a rambling letter behind, which was evidently typed on Dr. Ohta’s typewriter:

“Halloween, 1970. Today World War III will begin, as brought to you by the People of the Free Universe. From this day forward, anyone and/or everyone or company of persons who misuses the natural environment or destroys same will suffer the penalty of death by the People of the Free Universe. I and my comrades from this day forth will fight until death or freedom against anyone who does not support natural life on this planet. Materialism must die, or Mankind will stop.”

The note was signed in a distinctive manner: “Knight of Wands, Knight of Cups, Knight of Pentacles, and Knight of Swords.”

Since several groups of hippies were living nearby, authorities quickly assumed that they were dealing with another Manson-style massacre. In questioning the local long-hairs, however,  cops received a tip that led them to focus on a single suspect — John Linley Frazier. The ensuing investigation painted a distressing picture of a young man driven to random murder by a disastrous combination of mental illness and drug use. The man who penned the “Knight of Wands” note became known as “The Killer Prophet.”

Frazier was considered a “fairly normal guy” growing up in Santa Cruz. A high school drop-out, he worked as an auto mechanic in town, and lived with his wife, who called him a “beautiful person.” As a young man, however, Frazier seems to have developed symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. When he began experimenting with drugs, this condition worsened. His marriage eventually fell apart, and he began espousing increasingly radical environmental views, seasoned with apocalyptic visions and mystical readings of the tarot cards. He quit his job at the auto shop, telling his boss he refused to “contribute to the death cycle of the planet.” Fiercely paranoid, plagued by voices, he didn’t fit in too well with the laid-back lifestyle of the local hippie communes. His intensity frightened the pot-smoking vegetarians seeking harmony together. Frazier tended to tune in, turn on, and freak out. When he took LSD, God told him to do bad things.

Soon isolated from the communes, he began living as a self-styled Aquarian Age hermit, residing in a six-foot-square shack in the woods, not far from Dr. Victor Ohta’s property. Frazier had a good look at Dr. Ohta’s place. Right away, he knew that the owners were “too materialistic.” Once, while the Ohta family was out, Frazier broke into their house to creep around. Before he left, he stole a pair of binoculars.

Not long after the binocular theft, on October 19, 1970, Frazier returned to the Ohta mansion. The doctor’s wife, Virginia, was the only person home. Brandishing a .38 revolver that he found inside, Frazier bound Virginia’s wrists with a scarf and waited for the rest of the family to come home. Soon, the doctor’s secretary, Dorothy Cadwallader, showed up, along with one of the Ohta boys. Then Dr. Ohta returned home with their second son. On arrival, each of them were tied up at gunpoint. Standing with his captives outside by the pool, Frazier lectured them on the evils of materialism and the ways in which it was destroying the environment. Dr. Ohta, no fan of hippies to begin with, started arguing with Frazier, who promptly shoved him into the pool. While the doctor thrashed around trying to get out of the water, Frazier shot him three times. One by one, Frazer then killed all four of the others — Virginia, Dorothy, then the boys, Derrick, and Taggart. Frazier went back inside the house, typed his “Knight of Wands” note, and set the house ablaze. When firefighters showed up they found the five bodies in the pool, and the typewritten note tucked under the windshield wipers of Dr. Ohta’s Rolls-Royce.

When the “Knight of Wands” murder note was published by the local press, several hippies recognized the bizarre discourse as possibly belonging to the man who had frightened them with his crazy talk — John Linley Frazier. They told the police where to find his shack in the woods. Police were also able to lift Frazier’s fingerprints from the Rolls-Royce and from a beer can found at the crime scene. Frazier was apprehended five days after the murders.

The murder trial was a three-part spectacle. Frazier was first convicted in just two hours. A second trial was held to determine sanity, and then a third trial to determine his sentence. For the sanity trial, Frazier showed up in court with one side of his head completely shaved, and half of his mustache and beard shaved off. The jury was treated to lengthy testimony regarding acid trips and messages from God and ecological tirades. Some thought Frazier was putting on an act to win an insanity plea, but his psychologist thought otherwise. While Frazier never confessed his crimes to the police, he did tell his shrink all about it. He said he had broken into Dr. Ohta’s house when no one was home, spotted what looked like an animal-skin bedspread, and went berserk. “It blew my mind,” the defendant recalled. He never noticed that the animal-skin was fake.

In the end, Frazier was found to be sane, and he received the death sentence. He regarded the gas chamber as preferable to “having fascist pigs working on my head.” Frazier’s preference became irrelevant, however, when the California Supreme Court abolished capital punishment in 1972, and commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. Thirty-five years later, “The Killer Prophet” took matters into his own hands. In August of 2009, he committed suicide by hanging himself in his single occupant cell. He was 62 years old.

Stay tuned for Part Two of “When Santa Cruz Was the “Murder Capital of the World”

by John W. Taylor

Joanna Madonna moved to the Raleigh, North Carolina area in 2007 with her second husband, three daughters, and elderly father. After divorcing her second husband a couple of years later, Joanna married Jose Perez, a much older and severely ill and disabled Vietnam veteran. Jose’s primary physician, Dr. Robert Falge, described him as “one of the most ill people I have ever seen who was able to continue functioning.” With Jose collecting disability from the government, Joanna periodically taught high school. Though their income was limited, the couple managed to live in several very nice homes in the Raleigh suburbs, primarily due to financial contributions by Joanna’s father.

Almost all relationships are complex and intricate, and Joanna and Jose’s was no exception. Though love and affection were present at the beginning, their relationship became troubled early on. Their bond appeared to be more of a co-dependence than an intimate connection. Jose was a chronic liar and recovering alcoholic. Joanna was a recovering drug addict and alcoholic with numerous emotional issues from her childhood. Joanna viewed Jose as controlling and jealous, while Jose constantly tried to please her. They argued frequently, but there was no indication of physical abuse by either party. As time passed, the anger boiled toward the surface.

On June 15, 2013, Joanna drove to South Carolina in Jose’s jeep to visit relatives. During the visit, she informed her family that she was leaving Jose. She also told them that she was concerned about nearby break-ins and felt she needed to protect herself. Joanna asked her cousin to help her buy a gun. After failing to find an affordable gun at a pawn shop, her cousin let her borrow his Taurus .380 revolver. Telling her that she would not be able to carry the gun without a permit, he also gave her a knife.

It was not clear what ultimately pushed Joanna toward divorce, but she had recently discovered an online intimate exchange between Jose and another woman. Joanna messaged the woman through Facebook demanding she leave Jose alone. Upon returning home from South Carolina and armed with this information, Joanna left the gun and knife on the back seat of the jeep. She asked Jose to go for a drive. It was the last time Jose Perez was seen alive.

The following day, June 16, 2013, a man discovered Jose’s dead body lying face down in a ditch next to an isolated, dead end road. Though he did not have any identification on him, the police identified Jose through his fingerprints. That evening the police went to an address linked to Jose’s name, 12412 Schoolhouse Road in Raleigh, North Carolina.

When the police arrived, Joanna was at her former therapist’s house. The two were in the early stages of an affair, which the prosecution later used as one of her motives for killing Jose. Joanna’s daughter called her, informing her of the police’s presence. When Joanna returned home, she immediately notified the police that she had spoken to an attorney. Moments later the police delivered the death notification to Joanna. Oddly, she never asked how Jose died. During discussions with Wake County lead detective Darcy Weaver, Joanna provided conflicting stories as to the last time she saw Jose. She initially told Detective Weaver that she drove Jose to a rehab center, but then she said he left the house on foot heading toward his sponsor’s house.

The police were immediately suspicious. After securing a search warrant, the police found Jose’s clothes and medications in a garage trash can and what appeared to be blood on the garage floor. The police also interviewed one of Joanna’s daughters who provided details about Joanna’s arrival home the previous night. According to her daughter, Joanna left with Jose, but then came home without him. Joanna was sweaty with a cut on her arm. According to Joanna’s daughter, Joanna told her that she and Jose had a fight, but he would not be coming to the house. Her daughter told her to call the police, but Joanna refused. Based on the totality of the circumstances encompassing Joanna Madonna, the police arrested her for first degree murder. Prior to her trial, Joanna changed her story again and claimed she killed Jose in self-defense.

Jose was shot at least once and stabbed approximately a dozen times, including five times in the back. The gun and knife used on Jose were both Joanna’s. Jose took dozens of medications to combat his many ailments and his doctor painted a picture of a weak and feeble man who barely had the hand strength to pull a gun’s trigger. Joanna incurred only a few minor scratches from her alleged life-and-death fight with Jose. She also failed to contact the police after the incident. Joanna’s claim of self-defense appeared nebulous at best.

Though Joanna’s statements to friends, family, and even the police neglected to mention many relevant details, she attempted to set the record straight when she took the stand in her own defense. Throughout Joanna’s testimony she regularly used the phrase “you know” and paused with “ums.” Both filler phrases can be indicative of deception; however, Joanna consistently paused and hesitated throughout her testimony. Neither usage appeared to be associated with troubling questions, but rather an indication of her contemplating and nervousness prior to or while providing answers.

Joanna testified for many hours over two days. Her answers were generally long-winded and detailed. She remembered dates with ease, even pertaining to activities or events from decades prior. Her testimony came across as authentic and forthright. There were no indications of deception, until she discussed the events surrounding the death of Jose Perez.

The most striking change in her responses was the use of the present tense. Up to this point, Joanna had not utilized the present tense when discussing past events. She had detailed traumatic scenarios, including several times she was raped. Joanna appropriately maintained the use of the past tense during those descriptions. During one of her rape stories, she described the circumstances of the attack and her attacker as follows: “Sometimes I ended up with dangerous guys. I had seen him around.” However, when she described the actions involved in Jose’s death she switched to the present tense. The use of the present tense can indicate an individual is creating the story rather than recalling what occurred in the past. Since the person is crafting the story as she is telling it, she may inadvertently utilize the present tense.

According to Joanna’s version of events, she and Jose went for a drive together, which provided her an opportunity to tell him she wanted a divorce. After notifying him of her intentions, Jose faked a heart attack forcing her to pull over. Joanna stated:

He started getting loud… He starts looking like he is panicking… He starts clinching his chest.

Prior to discussing the incident with Jose, Joanna had testified for hours. There was a lot of opportunity to gain a baseline on how she told a story or explained circumstances. She did not use the phrase “started to” or other similar phrasing prior. Started to is a filler phrase that usually conveys no additional information, unless something stopped the action. Why did Jose “start to get loud” rather than “He got loud”? Why did he not just look panicked rather than starting to look panicked? This definitive change in speech can be indicative of deception. Joanna also shifted from the appropriate past tense to the present tense.

Joanna said that after she stopped the car, Jose grabbed her newly acquired gun from the back seat. As she got out of the jeep, Jose allegedly fired a shot at her and missed. According to Joanna, Jose then turned the gun on himself. Feeling he would kill himself, Joanna went for the gun and a struggle ensued. Joanna then stated:

The gun went off at that point and shot him in his face…The gun went off again.

Guns do not normally go off. Someone pulls the trigger causing the gun to fire. By indicating the gun “went off,” Joanna demonstrated a distancing and lack of responsibility with what transpired. Based on her testimony, we do not know who actually pulled the trigger.

After the incident with the gun, the couple regained their composure and decided to drive to the hospital rather than call for help. Jose again claimed he was having a heart attack. Joanna pulled the car onto an isolated road in order to attend to Jose. According to Joanna, after getting out of the car, Jose again attacked her, but this time with her knife. He knocked her to the ground and jumped on top of her on the roadside.

When describing the attack, Joanna bounced back and forth between the past and present tenses, which may indicate she provided some truthful statements coupled with fabrications. She stated, “[he] knocked me in the chest” and “I didn’t see the knife in his hand.” Both of these statements were in the past tense and likely true. However, she also stated, “I’m fading and I feel like I am going to die.” This was in the present tense and as a result, she probably created this memory rather than recalled it. Based on the oscillating nature of her statements, a struggle probably occurred, though it transpired quite differently than she conveyed. Based on Joanna’s word choices and phrasing, the attack was not in self-defense, but driven by some other motive or combination of motives.

Joanna described Jose straddling her while she was on her back on the side of the road. Jose initially had a knife in his hand, but chose to drop it on the ground. He allegedly placed his forearm across her upper chest, cutting off her breath, thus causing her to believe that she would imminently pass out and eventually die. However, there was no indication of trauma to Joanna’s neck. With Jose supposedly above her, placing his forearm across her upper chest, it would have been nearly impossible for him to have exerted pressure on her without his arm sliding onto her neck. If she struggled or moved at all it would have further increased the likelihood his arm would have ended up on her neck. This did not happen, which reduces the probability this scenario occurred. Joana also did not have any injuries indicative of having been shoved to the ground.

Joanna claimed that while in this situation, Jose indicated that he was going for Michelle [Joanna’s daughter from a previous marriage, who did not get along with Jose]. Joanna believed this statement meant Jose intended to kill Michelle. When reciting this exchange while on the stand, Joanna stated: “He said, ‘he was going for Michelle.’” At this point, Jose had only inflicted minor wounds on Joanna, yet seemed to be moving on to his next victim. When retelling what Jose said, Joanna did not use natural phrasing. She failed to use the words he would have used. If this had actually happened, Jose would have said, “I’m going for Michelle,” not “he was going for Michelle.” Joanna’s failure to use the words and phrasing Jose would probably have utilized raises doubts about the authenticity of her assertions.

According to Joanna, when she heard those words, she basically snapped. She grabbed the knife from the ground and started swinging. At this point, she blacked out. Her blackout conveniently allowed her to avoid discussing repeatedly driving a knife into Jose’s flesh. The blackout was very short and it appeared more like difficultly remembering than an actual blackout. Joanna remembered everything until she grabbed the knife and she remembered everything immediately after she got up from stabbing Jose. And even during the knife attack, she remembered swinging the knife. The only thing she could not recall was how many times and where she stabbed him.

Joanna left Jose on the side of the road, thinking he was still alive. She did not realize how many times she had stabbed him or the extent of her attack. After returning home from the incident, Joanna engaged in numerous activities designed to cover-up what had occurred. She cleaned up the blood in the jeep. Joanna threw away Jose’s clothes, his medications, and her wedding and engagement rings. Joanna told her daughters that she dropped Jose off at his sponsor’s house. Joanna later acknowledged that these statements were deliberate lies. Utilizing Jose’s phone and not identifying herself as the sender, Joanna texted Jose’s friends and family indicating that he moved to Florida and would be getting a new phone. Further, she posted on Jose’s Facebook page the same information and then proceeded to delete his account.

Though her post-incident actions were extremely incriminating, Joanna claimed those actions were about anger rather than concealment. She wanted to believe he would get up off the road and walk to his sponsor’s house. She claimed to be unaware of the extent of his injuries. The family computer had several Google searches on it from the day after the incident pointing to the contrary. Forensic analysts found searches such as: “Raleigh dump hours,” “declare someone dead if missing,” and “upon death of veteran.” Yet, the home computer also had a Google search for “restraining orders,” somewhat bolstering Joanna’s claim of believing Jose was still alive. Joanna also asked a family friend, David Whitcomb, to change the locks on the house, as if she feared Jose’s return.

Though it is not necessary to prove motive in most murder trials, the prosecution will provide the jury with a reason for the murder. People want to know why someone committed such a heinous act, but knowing or proving the why is almost always a futile exercise. No one knows what was in the killer’s mind and selecting out-of-context emails or statements does little to conclusively cement a motive for murder. The prosecution attempted to apply reason to an unreasonable act. In the case of Joanna Madonna, the State asserted that Joanna killed Jose because of love and money.

The love component came from Joanna’s intimate and inappropriate relationship with her former therapist. The prosecution presented countless emails and texts demonstrating the extent of the relationship. Though Joanna readily acknowledged the relationship, the prosecution acted as if they caught her in a lie. Further, there was no indication Joanna killed Jose to be with her former therapist.

With regard to money, Joanna gained nothing financially from Jose’s death. And any potential financial gain she or her children could have received was equal to or less than what they could have received if Jose was alive. As with the love angle, the financial motive argument was hallow and without basis.

Though it did not fit into the prosecutor’s carefully crafted narrative of a loveless marriage where Joanna only wanted Jose for his money, the prosecution did not present jealousy or rage as potential motives. Joanna had recently uncovered what she perceived as unfaithfulness by Jose. She lashed out at the woman via Facebook. However, this motive would certainly call into question the idea of premeditation, though there is no specific passing of time requirement for premeditation to have occurred in criminal law. This is a case where we know who, but we do not know why.

Joanna Madonna went to trial in September of 2015. After an almost two week trial, the jury deliberated for less than three hours and convicted her of first degree murder. Though a clear motive seemed to be absent, the jury had little difficulty concluding the presence of premeditation and intentional, deliberate murder. She is currently serving life in a North Carolina prison.

Works Cited:

Bythe, Anne, “Madonna Recounts Killing Her Husband,” The News and Observer,
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/crime/article36274380.html, September 23, 2015

Lamb, Amanda, “Defense: Madonna Fought Back from Husband’s Attack,” WRAL, http://www.wral.com/trial-begins-for-former-wake-teacher-accused-of-murdering-husband/14901563/, September 15, 2015

Leone, David, “Friends Struggle to Believe Wakefield Woman Killed Husband,” Wake Forest Weekly, http://www.wakeweekly.com/murder-charge-a-shock/, June 20, 2013

Sleuthchic, “Wakefield Stabbing Update!” Musings on Murder, http://www.musingsonmurder.com/, August 1, 2013

“Trial to Begin for Former Wake County Teacher Accused of Killing Husband,” ABC11,
http://abc11.com/news/jury-selection-begins-in-teacher-murder-trial/983385/, September 14, 2015

WRAL Videos, Joanna Madonna Murder Trial, http://www.wral.com/news/local/asset_gallery/14903481/?navkeyword=joanna+madonna&s=0, accessed September – October, 2015. Supplemented by in person court observation of Joanna Madonna Murder trial.

Click below to view John W. Taylor’s previous posts on All Things Crime Blog:

The Deep Sleeper – Darlie Routier’s Plight for Innocence

Drew Peterson – A Legend in His Own Mind

John W. Taylor writes in the true crime genre at www.truecrimewriting.com. He has written short pieces and articles on the death of Marilyn Monroe, JFK, and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others.  John wrote and published Umbrella of Suspicion: Investigating the Death of JonBénet Ramsey and Isolated Incident: Investigating the Death of Nancy Cooper in 2012 and 2014, respectively. 

John’s interest in the darker side of human nature has compelled him to conduct numerous research and writing projects on various unsolved crimes.  He currently resides in Raleigh, North Carolina. 

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 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.

review by Patrick H. Moore

I was recently contacted by a liberal Zionist novelist and humanitarian named Howard Kaplan who wrote two first-rate Israeli spy novels back in  the 1970s and 1980s. To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Kaplan is a religious man, and like most Zionists, strongly believes in the cause of modern day Israel. On the other hand, Mr. Kaplan is by no means a right-wing Zionist reactionary and he decries the wickedness and cruelty that all too often emanates from factions among both the Israelis and the Palestinians. Mr. Kaplan’s stance on this seemingly intractable problem is that the fighting and terrorist acts coming from the radicals on both side must stop, and in its place, a spirit of reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians must arise.

This is not a new stance on Mr. Kaplan’s part; he is the author of two Israeli spy thrillers in which the message of the need for reconciliation between the Jewish and the Arab worlds is subtly woven into his texts. His first thriller, The Damascus Cover, was published in 1977 and was on the Los Angeles Times best seller list for 3 months. His second novel Bullets for Palestine, was published 10 years later.

Both novels have recently been re-released and The Damascus Cover has just been made into a movie called Damascus Cover, which is directed by Daniel Zelik Berk and stars Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Olivia Thirlby, Sir John Hurt and Jürgen Prochnow. The film, Damascus Cover, is scheduled to premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2016.

Here are the links to both re-released novels:

The Damascus Cover

Bullets of Palestine

In The Damascus Cover, Dov Elon, a young Israeli spy is being held prisoner by the Syrian Secret Police and is being viciously tortured in a Damascus prison. He has valuable information that his captors want, and if he doesn’t provide it, his torturers will shoot off each of his limbs one at a time.

Ari Ben-Sion, is a tired, middle-aged, burnt out Israeli spy who was once a respected member of Mossad. The one thing he still excels at is seducing (or being seduced by) women, and as the story begins, he is in bed with a woman on Cyprus when Dov Elon sends a message asking for help. Ari is, shall we say, preoccupied, and doesn’t respond to Dov’s desperate call for help. He is then recalled to Jerusalem and is essentially cashiered by the Colonel, the leader of Mossad. Like many an adrenaline junkie, Ari flails helplessly when not on the job out in the field. Before long, desperate to get back in the game, he takes an assignment he would have scoffed at in his prime — smuggling Jewish children out of the Damascus ghetto. His cover is Hans Hoffman, an ex-Nazi lieutenant at Dachau, now in the import-export business. As we might expect, once Ari arrives in Damascus, complications abound and things are hardly as they seem. Ari soon realizes he’s being followed and his assigned partner is nowhere to be found. What initially appeared to be a routine assignment unravels to reveal a string of murderous conspirators. Ari discovers he is marked for death and caught in a maddening puzzle, and he must race for survival as Kaplan’s tautly drawn novel proceeds to its highly disturbing climax.

Much of the strength of this work stems from the author’s intimate knowledge of the Middle East, where he traveled widely as a young man. In a review, the Los Angeles Times stated: “In the best tradition of the new espionage novel. Kaplan’s grasp of history and scene creates a genuine reality. He seems to know every back alley of Damascus and Cyprus.” The American Library Association wrote in in a starred review: “A mission inside Syria, a last love affair, and the unfolding of the plot within a plot are handled by the author with skill and a sure sense of the dramatic.”

In conceiving of this skillfully executed thriller, the author was inspired by the tragic story of Eli Cohen, an actual Israeli spy, who in real life worked his way high up in the ranks of the Syrian government and was publicly hanged after his cover was blown.

The theme of reconciliation in Kaplan’s novel is subtle and is driven by the concept that even when two perennially warring nations seem to want nothing more than to destroy each other, there are always wise individuals on both sides who see the fallacy of nationalistic antagonisms and are willing to risk their own lives, against all odds, to bring about some form of mutual understanding and cooperation.

Thus, The Damascus Cover is, in a sense, emblematic of the current struggle on the West Bank, where certain Palestinian and Jewish men and women of reason and good conscience dedicate their lives to bring about fair play and mutual respect between the two groups, even as right-wing Jewish elements and radical Palestinians elements are convulsed with hatred which they foist upon one another in the form of endless violence and cruelty.

As a pure spy thriller, The Damascus Cover is exceptional, the characters are vividly drawn, the setting is entirely believable, and the reader is soon brought to the edge of his seat and remains there throughout the story.

Bullets of Palestine

Bullets of Palestine is a novel in which fictional characters intertwine with real-life events. A real life terrorist named Abu Nidal finds Yasser Arafat’s PLO too conciliatory and targets PLO officers, Israeli officials, synagogues and airlines across Europe. In the opening scene, Abu Nidal’s men gun down Shlomo Argov, the Israeli Ambassador to Great Britain, in a recreation of the actual assassination.

The same Colonel who ran Mossad in The Damascus Cover is now retired and is growing old gracefully on an Israeli kibbutz. He devises a plan in which a middle-aged Israeli agent, Shai Shaham, is sent to win the trust of a moderate Palestinian agent, Ramzy Awwad. Although Abu and Ramzy are ostensibly natural enemies, the former being an Israeli spy, the later a Palestinian agent, they have common ground in that they both decry the blind hatred and useless destruction that Abu Nidal is wreaking on both Palestinian and Israelis. Their common goal is to eliminate Abu Nidal, no small task, and in order to do so they must trust one another with, literally, their lives. Things are complicated by the disturbing fact that Shai has secret orders from the present head of Mossad to eliminate Ramzy after Abu Nidal is killed. Ramzy’s own choice to cooperate is tested when he is trapped in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps (another recreation of an actual event), where Christian Phalangists, who are supposed to kill only the PLO fighters in the camps, instead massacre the old men, women and children who have remained there after the fighters fled.

The plot of this novel is excellent and tightly drawn and most readers will find Bullets for Palestine a completely satisfying reading experience. Personally, I was a bit disappointed because as the plot, which is genuinely thrilling, builds to a fever pitch, the personal relationship between Shai and Ramzy does not develop sufficiently to allow them to truly find their common humanity despite their cultural and political differences.

Nonetheless, Bullets for Palestine is a first-rate spy thriller and should be read in tandem with The Damascus Cover.

Given Howard Kaplan’s obvious talent as a writer of spy thrillers combined with his humanitarian stance, I would like to see him forego making a living and raising a family (or whatever he has been doing since Bullets for Palestine was first published in 1988) and get back to writing fiction. With all the seemingly unsolvable problems that are facing Israel, Palestine and the rest of the Middle East today, a new work of fiction focused on these issues by a writer of Kaplan’s talent and stature would be most appreciated.

by Jared Keever

Author’s Note: The name Tony Harris, as mentioned in the following story, is fictitious. In the interest of privacy, and because I have not personally spoken to some of them for many years, I have also changed the names of my own friends mentioned in the story.

It seems strange now, after all that happened, but what I remember most about Herb Baumeister was the absurd, white Land Rover — complete with cargo rack — that he drove around my hometown of Westfield, Indiana. In the flatlands of the Midwest, it was unnecessary. As an ostentatious vehicle, I guess it served its purpose, but it was over the top for affluent, but understated, Hamilton County.

I remember seeing it parked in front of Marlow’s Cafe most Saturday mornings during the mid 1990s, back when I was in high school. Occasionally I would glimpse Herb, wearing an equally absurd Panama hat, walk to the truck with his wife Julie and drive off.

Marlow’s was just around the corner from my father’s hardware store, where I worked on Saturdays during the school year and most weekdays during the summer. The Baumeisters seemed, for a time, to have made Saturday morning breakfasts at the little cafe a regular thing — driving there each week from their 18-acre estate on the southern edge of town.

There wasn’t much strange about that, other than Land Rover. Had the truck not looked so silly parked on the suburban street, I probably would never have known Herb ever ventured into town. But one day the Land Rover stopped showing up. I don’t remember when, exactly, and I don’t recall ever noting its absence.

I certainly wouldn’t remember it today if Herb Baumeister hadn’t turned out to be a serial killer who preyed on the gay men of Indianapolis.

Police now attribute at least 11 murders to his name and suspect he may well have been the serial killer known as the “I-70 Killer” who took nine other male victims on the interstate highway between Columbus, Ohio and Indianapolis.

I knew who Herb Baumeister was before all of that though. That’s because Westfield was a small town.

I graduated from the town’s high school in 1997 with just over 100 students in my class.

Baumeister’s kids attended Westfield schools until high school when, like many students from the wealthier families, they were sent to one of the private schools in Indianapolis, just a 20-minute drive south on U.S. 31.

His oldest daughter was a year younger than me. My sister knew her. His younger son was good friends with my friend Brad’s younger brother.

The Baumeister family was only on my periphery. But I still remember what happened. Most who lived in Westfield at the time do too.

I don’t know exactly how I first found out. I have tried to remember, and can’t. But at some point during the summer of 1996, people in town learned that police, while conducting a ground search at the Baumeister estate, had found human remains scattered on the property behind the house.

The news travelled fast. It made the newspapers and the nightly news shows. News trucks parked along both sides of 156th Street, just outside the entrance to the property known as Fox Hollow Farm.

That area, south and west of downtown Westfield, borders the larger and more affluent city of Carmel. Fox Hollow Farm was one of the area’s many horse farms — large, wooded properties usually surrounded by a low, brown wooden fence. Baumeister’s estate was no exception. The Tudor style home sat back off the road and boasted an indoor swimming pool. There were riding stables on the property.

For summer work, many of my friends worked on some of the larger horse farms. They had what I thought was the dream summer job, working outside every day bailing hay, mowing grass, and cleaning fence rows.

Two of my good friends John and Phillip, worked on a farm adjacent to Fox Hollow Farm.

After the initial discovery of bones by the police, authorities swarmed the property, conducting an archaeological-style survey, searching for more remains.

While that was going on, John and Phillip found a few bones in a swale that ran between Fox Hollow Farm and the farm where they worked. They pointed police in the direction of their discovery. They would later tell a group of our friends that their grisly find kept the investigation going and led to the discovery of additional victims.

At the time, though, Baumeister wasn’t being investigated for murder. Police maintained, as they continued their gruesome discoveries, that they were merely investigating the disposal of human remains on the property.

But people, including John and Phillip, were convinced Herb Baumeister had murdered the men whose bones now littered the back acres of Fox Hollow Farm.

Herb gave them both the creeps. He had hired my two friends in the summer of 1995 to do some mowing on the property. Phillip said in a recent email he remembered Herb just stood behind the house, watching them the whole time while they worked.

Herb approached the two in 1996, before police found the bones, and asked them to repeat their summer work. Remembering their uneasy feeling from the previous summer, they declined the offer.

Summer meant I spent most days in town, working for my father. As more and more bones were discovered, the police called in off-duty officers and fire fighters to help with the digging. I remember seeing them in town during lunchtime, eating at Marlow’s or the cafeteria next to my dad’s store. They didn’t say much about the ongoing investigation as they walked to and from their cars, just that they were working on “that property south of town.” I seem to recall selling them a few shovels.

But as the body count grew, police decided they wanted to question Herb. He had been out of town, visiting family in northern Indiana. Before they were able to get to him, though, he slipped over the border into Canada. He was later found dead, in an Ontario park, of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.

It was about the same time news of his death reached Westfield, that people in town learned police had discovered at least eight bodies on Fox Hollow Farm. That number would later grow to 11.

The suicide meant there wouldn’t be a trial. And for some time, it seemed the story of what happened out at the farm might never get told. But as in most small towns, it didn’t take long for the rumors to start circulating

Officials from the sheriff’s office and members of the investigation team said Baumeister had staged a sort of sexual playground around his indoor swimming pool. There were stories that the pool area was surrounded by mannequins, posed in sexual positions. Most believed that the pool was where the murders took place. They said Herb was picking up gay men in Indianapolis and bringing them back to his home, while his family was away, and getting those men drunk, having sex with them and ultimately strangling them.

Rumors spread that the bodies had been dismembered, burned and buried in shallow graves in the woods behind the house.

Brad, my friend whose brother knew Herb’s son and played in those very woods, told us that Baumeister’s son had found a skull a few years prior to police showing up on the property. The son, it was said, took the skull to his mom who confronted Herb with it. Herb told her the skull came from old research skeleton that had belonged to his father, who was a doctor.

I remember the night Phillip and John told us about the bones they found. A group of about six of us were gathered in Phillip’s backyard. It was late, and we were probably planning an early morning fishing trip. When the conversation turned to Baumeister, it took on a hushed tone like we were telling a ghost story.

That’s how the whole thing felt at the time — like a real-life ghost story we had brushed up against.

We speculated that night about what Brad’s brother must be feeling, knowing he had played in and around Baumeister’s makeshift graveyard.

Our proximity to the horror made it all the more exciting. We didn’t question if the stories were true. For a while it was as if the stories my friends and I were telling each other had their own energy, compelling that they be told. Truth was irrelevant. The retelling of each tale made those few weeks seem all the more interesting and haunted.

But I had grown up working in a small-town hardware store listening to small-town liars tell small-town lies. I knew how simple stories could get blown out of proportion. There was always, through that whole summer, a very small voice in the back of my head telling me it couldn’t be as bad as they said it was.

The summer ended, school started and eventually my friends and I graduated and went separate ways. I never forgot Baumeister. Occasionally I would tell the stories to some new acquaintance or a crowd gathered at a college party, but I always wondered, at least for a few years, if I was repeating lies.

I wasn’t.

Now we all know what happened. The story has been told by reporters and those who worked on television documentaries and even by two authors — Fannie Weinstein and Melinda Wilson — who wrote a book about the Baumeister case titled Where the Bodies are Buried.

Numerous online sources, relying on Bodies and a lengthy interview with Indianapolis private investigator Virgil Vandagriff, retell the Baumeister story. All of the details match, almost exactly, to those I learned that summer before my senior year of high school.

That police ever wound up at Baumeister’s door can be attributed, mostly, to the bravery or foolishness of one gay man who is identified in those stories by the name “Tony Harris” — a name that was created to protect his identity.

Harris contacted Vandagriff in 1994 because he knew the investigator was looking into the disappearances of at least three men who had vanished from the Indianapolis gay bar scene. One of those men was Harris’ friend, Roger Goodlet. Harris told Vandagriff that he believed a slightly built man who went by the name “Brian Smart” had abducted and possibly murdered Goodlet.

His proof was a fantastic story about allowing himself to be picked up from a bar by Smart and taken to a secluded home north of Indianapolis.

Harris told Vandagriff that Smart had taken him to a home, on a large piece or property, where they had “partied” around an indoor pool surrounded by mannequins. Harris said he refused a drink made by Smart, but believed Smart had used cocaine while at the home.

The two engaged in erotic asphyxiation as Harris danced dangerously close to his own murder. Harris did it all, he said, because he was trying to find out more about this man who he believed had given him a fake name. He said Smart had given him the creeps and talked about his sexual fantasies. Harris allowed Smart to choke him during sex. That might have been his end had he not feigned unconsciousness causing Smart to loosen his grip.

Eventually, Harris said, Smart passed out and he searched the home, which was obviously inhabited by a family.

That didn’t match the story Smart had told him about watching an empty house while living in the basement near the pool. When Smart woke up, Harris convinced him to take him back to Indianapolis.

He left the home convinced he had spent the evening in the company of a man capable of murder. His only problem was, he didn’t know where he had been.

The back roads just off U.S. 31 are dark and they all look the same, especially at night. Twenty years ago it would have been worse. If Smart had gotten off the highway well south of Fox Hollow Farm it is entirely possible that Harris would not have known which cross street he was on.

The story was compelling for Vandagriff who had already decided the men he was investigating had probably fallen victim to a serial killer. But without knowing Brian Smart’s true identity or where Harris had been that creepy night by the pool, the story was of little use.

It took nearly a year before Harris saw Brian Smart again. But when he did, he got the license number of the car Smart drove away from the bar.

That number gave Vandagriff the name of Herb Baumeister and led him and Indianapolis police investigators to Fox Hollow Farm. By then, it was 1995.

Police first approached Baumeister at one of his Sav-a-Lot thrift stores. That was the chain of children’s clothing stores — unrelated to the supermarkets that go by the same name — that Herb ran with his wife. The police asked Herb if they could search his Westfield property. He refused.

Police then approached Julie asking for permission, but she had been coached by her husband to refuse the request.

It wasn’t until six months later that Julie relented and let police conduct a ground search of the estate. Herb was out of town with his son. The always-fragile marriage was, again, on the rocks and a divorce seemed imminent. Julie said she had grown concerned by Herb’s erratic behavior and was becoming suspicious so she decided to let police conduct their search.

It was June 1996 and police almost immediately discovered the bones.

Now, almost 20 years later, the old news articles and old interviews that I wanted to believe, and went ahead and repeated, have all been proven true.

The stuff about the mannequins and the sexual playground was confirmed by Tony Harris’ chilling experience.

The unbelievable story about Herb Baumeister explaining away the presence of a human skull in his backyard? Julie Baumeister told that story herself, on the record, more than once.

John and Phillip finding those additional bones? Had I added that to make my own retelling of the story more interesting? Had I told the lie so many times that I now believed it? I emailed Phillip recently to check. I just asked him to tell me what he remembered. He confirmed every one of my recollections.

That he and John got the creeps that summer of 1995 certainly doesn’t seem silly in retrospect.

Julie even went on the Oprah Winfrey Show and told her story of living with Herb.

The story that has now emerged, told mostly by Julie herself, is that Herb was always erratic. She said they had sex fewer than 10 times during the course of their decades-long marriage. She said he never allowed her to see him naked because he was embarrassed by his scrawny body. And it was later reported Herb was diagnosed as schizophrenic as a child but never treated.

Julie Baumeister said she and the children spent a good deal of time away from the home. Herb often stayed behind, sometimes to tend to the couple’s business and sometimes because the couple was arguing. She said she accepted the story about the skeleton because she had other things going on in her life. She never gave it another thought.

As his life and marriage began unravel in 1995 and 1996, Herb grew more violent with his store employees and they suspected he was drinking heavily during the day. The business was failing.

After he slipped into Canada, he was questioned by an Ontario Provincial Police officer who approached his car because it was parked under a bridge. Baumeister told the officer he was a tourist and had grown tired and was just catching a quick nap. That officer later said Baumeister had a stack of videotapes in the back of his car.

Harris suspected Smart had a hidden video camera trained on the pool area the night he visited. And some speculate those tapes were recordings of Baumeister’s murders.

They were not in the the car when Canadian police later discovered his body.

His suicide note did not mention the bodies found on the property or that he was suspected of murder. It only mentioned his failing business and marriage, citing those as the reasons for his suicide.

Police later said they found the remains of 11 bodies at Fox Hollow Farm. Only eight of those bodies were ever identified. They all belonged to gay men, known to have disappeared from Indianapolis.

When police developed the theory that Baumeister was responsible for the nine men left along I-70, Julie confirmed that Herb had travelled that route, for business, over 100 times during the period of time the murders were thought to have occurred.

Fox Hollow Farm is still there. The sign bearing its name still sits on 156th Street marking the entrance to the estate.

Many of my friends from those days, like me, have moved away from Westfield. Many of our parents, who lived there because it had good schools and was a good place to raise children, have also moved on.

My family is still there.

Westfield is more populated than it was in the 1990s. I don’t recognize parts of my hometown these days.

I was there recently for Christmas. As I drove the once empty backroads that are now lined with crowded housing subdivisions I wondered how many zip past Fox Hollow Farm without ever realizing what happened there.

Herb Baumeister’s known victims: Johnny Bayer, 20; Allen Wayne Broussard, 28; Roger A. Goodlet, 33; Richard D. Hamilton, 20; Steven S. Hale, 26; Jeff Allen Jones, 31; Michael Kiern, 46; Manuel Resendez, 31

Steven Hale — 26 years old

Roger Allen Goodlet — 34 years old

Richard Hamilton — 20 years old

Manuel Resendez — 31 years old

Alan Broussard — 28 years old

Sources:

Herb Baumeister — The Dark Side — Crime Library

Herbert Richard Baumeister | Murderpedia, the encyclopedia of murderers

While Julie Was Away : People.com

Click here to view Jared Keever’s previous post:

Up Close and Personal: Tracking the Daytona Beach Serial Killer

About Jared Keever: Jared is a full-time writer and journalist living in southeast Georgia. He has lived in Indiana, Montana, Washington state, and Florida. His interests include history, literature and true crime. When he isn’t reading or writing he is usually on a bike or spending time with his family. 

compiled by Patrick H. Moore

Rainey Bethea, age 27, was the last person to be publicly executed in the United States. Bethea had confessed to the rape and murder of a 70-year-old woman named Lischia Edwards, and — under Kentucky state law — was sentenced to be publicly hanged in Owensboro, where the crime had allegedly been committed. Blunders in performing the actual execution and the surrounding media circus (nothing new here) contributed to the end of public executions in the United States.

The Hanging

Rainey Bethea’s last meal consisted of fried chicken, pork chops, mashed potatoes, pickled cucumbers, cornbread, lemon pie, and ice cream, which he ate at 4:00 p.m. on August 13, 1936 in Louisville. Nine hours later, at about 1:00 a.m., Daviess County deputy sheriffs transported Bethea from Louisville to Owensboro. At the jail, the hangman’s assistant, a farmer from Epworth, Illinois, named G. Phil Hanna, visited Bethea and instructed him to stand on the X that would be marked on the trapdoor.

It was estimated that a crowd of 20,000 people gathered to watch the execution, with thousands coming from out of town. The actual hangman, Arthur L. Hash, a former Louisville police officer, who had offered his services free of charge (offer accepted), arrived at the site intoxicated, wearing a white suit and a white Panama hat. At this time, no one but he and the sheriff of Daviess County, a woman, Florence Shoemaker Thompson, knew he would be pulling the trigger.

Bethea left the Daviess County Jail just before 5:30 a.m. and walked with two deputies to the scaffold. He then took off his shoes and put on a new pair of socks. He then ascended the steps and stood on the large X as instructed. He did not deign to make a final statement to the crowd. He did, however, confess to the presiding priest, a Father Lammers of the Cathedral of the Assumption in Louisville. The black hood was then placed over his head, and three large straps placed around his ankles, thighs, arms and chest.

The hangman’s assistant Hanna placed the noose around Bethea’s neck, adjusted it, and then signaled to Arthur Hash to pull the trigger. Hash, however, perhaps due to his intoxication, did nothing. Hanna shouted, “Do it!” and a deputy leaned onto the trigger which sprang the trap door. Throughout all of this, the crowd was hushed. Bethea fell eight feet, and his neck was instantly broken. About 14 minutes later, two doctors confirmed he was dead. He was buried in a pauper’s grave at the Elmwood Cemetery in Owensboro.

Afterwards, Hanna complained bitterly that Hash should not have been allowed to perform the execution in his drunken condition. Hanna further complained that it was the worst display of “hangman’s technique” he had ever witnessed in the 70 hangings he had supervised.

Many newspapers were also outraged, having spent considerable sums of money to cover the execution, believing that it was to have been carried out by Sheriff Florence Shoemaker Thompson, which would have made it the first public hanging of a man by a woman. Several of the newspapers assuaged their anger and frustration by taking extreme liberties liberties with their reporting, falsely claiming that the crowd of 20,000 rushed the gallows to claim souvenirs. Some reporters even wrote that Sheriff Thompson fainted at the base of the scaffold.

The Crime

Rainey Bethea grew up an orphan. Little is known about him before he arrived in Owensboro in 1933 when he was 24 years old. He worked for the Rutherford family and lived in their basement for about a year. He then moved to a cabin behind the house of Emmett Wells. He worked as a laborer and rented a room from Mrs. Charles Brown. On Sundays, he attended a Baptist church.

In April of 1935, Bethea was caught stealing two purses from the Vogue Beauty Shop. He was convicted of a felony, grand larceny, and served a year in the Kentucky State Penitentiary at Eddyville. He was paroled on December 1, 1935.

On returning to Owensboro, Bethea continued to work as a laborer and was paid about $7.00 per week. Less than a month later, he was arrested again, this time for house breaking. On January 6, 1936, this charge was amended to drunk and disorderly. He was unable to pay the $100 fine and remained incarcerated in the Daviess County, Kentucky Jail until April 18, 1936.

During the early morning of June 7, 1936, Bethea entered the home of Lischia Edwards at 322 East Fifth Street by climbing in through her bedroom window. Bethea then allegedly woke her, choked her and violently raped her. He then searched her room for valuables and stole several of her rings. In the process, he removed his own black celluloid prison ring, and inadvertently left it in the bedroom. He then hid the stolen jewels in a barn not far from the house.

The next morning the Smith family, who lived downstairs, realized that they had not heard Ms. Edwards stirring in her room. (How they had failed to hear the rape in the wee hours is unknown.) Fearing she might be ill, they knocked on the door of her room, attempting to rouse her with no success. Ultimately, Smith obtained a ladder and climbed into the room through the transom over the door, and discovered that Edwards was dead.

When summoned, the Owensboro police found the room tidy, but with muddy footprints everywhere. The coroner also found the celluloid prison ring, which Bethea had left behind.

Rainey Bethea quickly became a suspect after several residents of Owensboro stated that they had previously seen him wearing the ring. Since Bethea had a criminal record, the police were able to use what was then a new identification technique – fingerprints – to establish that Bethea had recently touched items inside the bedroom. For the next four days, the police searched for Bethea, finally apprehending him on a riverbank trying to board a barge. When questioned, Bethea claimed his name was James Smith. After his arrest, Bethea was identified by a scar on the left side of his head.

The judge of the Daviess Circuit Court ordered the sheriff to transport Bethea to the Jefferson County Jail in Louisville, fearing a lynch mob because the suspect was a black man. En route to Louisville, Bethea confessed that he had raped Edwards and strangled her to death. He also lamented the fact that he had incriminated himself by leaving his ring at the crime scene.

Once incarcerated, Bethea made a second confession, this time before Robert M. Morton, a notary public, and George H. Koper, a reporter for The Courier-Journal. The presence of the notary and the reporter was requested by officials anticipating that Bethea, or someone else, might accuse them of coercing his confession.

On June 12, 1936, Bethea made a third confession and told the captain of the guards where he had hidden the jewelry. Owensboro police searched the barn in Owensboro and found the jewelry.

The prosecutor decided to charge Bethea solely with rape which could be punished by public hanging in the county seat where the crime occurred. If he had also been charged with murder and robbery resulting in the death penalty, by statute, the means of execution would have been electrocution at the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Eddyville.

Although Bethea made gestures suggesting he wanted to go to trial, he changed his mind and pleaded guilty at the start of the trial. The case was still presented to the jury, since it was tasked with deciding the sentence.

During his opening statement, the Commonwealth’s Attorney Herman Birkhead said:

“This is one of the most dastardly, beastly, cowardly crimes ever committed in Daviess County. Justice demands and the Commonwealth will ask and expect a verdict of the death penalty by hanging.”

The prosecution called 21 witnesses, none of whom were cross-examined. Under the law, Bethea could receive “not less than ten years nor more than twenty years, or death.” The sentence was never really in doubt and after only four and one-half minutes of deliberation, the jury returned with a sentence: death by hanging.

The Appeal

Back in Louisville, Bethea acquired five new black lawyers – Charles Ewbank Tucker, Stephen A. Burnley, Charles W. Anderson, Jr., Harry E. Bonaparte, and R. Everett Ray. They worked pro bono to challenge the sentence, something they saw as their ethical duty for the indigent defendant. On July 10, 1936, they filed a motion for a new trial which was summarily denied on the grounds that under Section 273 of the Kentucky Code of Practice in Criminal Cases, a motion for a new trial had to have been received before the end of the court’s term, which had ended on July 4, 1936.

Bethea’s lawyers then attempted to appeal to the Kentucky Court of Appeals, which was also not in session. On July 29, 1936, Justice Gus Thomas refused to permit the appeal to be filed on the grounds that the trial court record — which only included the judge’s ruling — was incomplete. Bethea’s lawyers knew the appeal would be denied; this was only a formality in order to exhaust state court remedies before they filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus in a federal court.

Bethea’s attorneys filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky at Louisville. At the hearing on August 5, 1936 before United States District Judge Elwood Hamilton, Bethea claimed that he had not wanted to plead guilty but had been forced to by his lawyers, and that he had wanted to subpoena three witnesses to testify on his behalf, but the lawyers had also not done this. Bethea also claimed that his five confessions had been made under duress and that when he signed one of them, he did not know what he was signing. The Commonwealth brought several witnesses to refute these claims. Judge Hamilton denied the habeas corpus petition and ruled that the hanging could proceed.

The End of Public Executions in the United States

Although the media circus surrounding the Bethea execution was quite an embarassment to the Kentucky legislature, it was powerless to amend the law until the next session in 1938. Meanwhile, two other men were hanged for rape in Kentucky, John “Pete” Montjoy and Harold Van Venison, but the trial judges of both of those cases ordered that the hangings be conducted privately. On January 17, 1938, William R. Attkisson of the Kentucky State Senate’s 38th District (Louisville), introduced Senate Bill 69, repealing the requirement from Section 1137 that death sentences for the crime of rape be conducted by hanging in the county seat where the crime was committed. Representative Charles W. Anderson, Jr., one of the attorneys who assisted Bethea in his post conviction relief motions, promoted the bill in the Kentucky House of Representatives. After both houses approved the bill on March 12, 1938, Governor Chandler signed it into law, and it became effective on May 30, 1938. Chandler later expressed regret at having approved the repeal, claiming, rather absurdly, “Our streets are no longer safe.” 

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.