commentary by Patrick H. Moore
The law is a funny animal and no matter how hard its pundits and practitioners try to “get it right”, it will always have quirks that stagger the mind of the bemused observer. Take the laws concerning rape and murder in the great State of Pennsylvania.
Let’s say a true miscreant decides to rape some poor hapless victim and then murder him or her to conceal the evidence. The rape prior to the murder would be seen as an aggravating factor that would allow the prosecutors to seek the death penalty. On the other hand, suppose the miscreant murders the victim first and then rapes the corpse as a result of bizarre necrophilia-type urges. Oddly enough, under Pennsylvania law (and many other states), abuse of a corpse including sexual desecration merely rises to the level of a misdemeanor and thus would not result in any possibility that the perpetrator would face the death penalty.
I must go on the record and state that a clean-minded soul such as myself who eschews rape, murder and necrophilia would never have even considered such a strange scenario unless it was brought to my attention by a current case. Oddly enough, there is such a case and it is truly disturbing.
On Nov. 21, a 53-year-old Northampton County Pennsylvania man named Gregory R. Graf allegedly shot his stepdaughter, Jessica Padgett, in the back of the head which resulted in her death. Graf then allegedly buried her body behind a shed on his good-sized property on Covered Bridge Road.
Ms. Padgett, a wholesome-looking 33-year-old woman who had recently married, disappeared that day after she left Duck Duck Goose Child Care in the small city of Northampton. That was apparently the last time anyone saw her alive. According to a police affidavit, her father shot her 10 minutes after she left the day care center. Her body, however, was not recovered until Nov. 26, five days later. In a gesture that will infuriate followers of true crime all across this nation, Graf reportedly joined the search party as family and friends searched desperately for Ms. Padgett.
Once Ms. Padgett’s body was discovered and dug up, Graf did not hold out for long. In fact, according to police he admitted to both shooting her and burying her. In the process of confessing, however, he shocked the investigators by saying that the reason he killed Ms. Padgett was that so he could have sex with her dead body.
Now a confession of this sort will certainly raise eyebrows, but strictly speaking it doesn’t rise to the level of irrefutable evidence. It was sufficient, though, to inspire the investigators to scour the bushes (or in this case the computer hard drive) for solid evidence of a post-mortem sexual assault.
So this is what the investigators did knowing full well that in a large percentage of sexual assaults of any kind, the disturbed perpetrator seems obsessed with a truly overwhelming desire to film his abominable act and save it for masturbatory purposes on either his smart phone or his computer hard drive.
Andres Jaurequi of the Huffington Post reports that according to Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli, after Graf’s confession, the “State police searched Graf’s computer and found a video in which the suspect abuses his dead stepdaughter’s body.”
As a result of this corroborating evidence, which DA Morganelli had only hinted at prior to the discovery of the actual videotape record of the sexual assault, he “filed a misdemeanor abuse of corpse charge against Graf” on Friday. He also made it very clear that based on the visual evidence, there is no doubt that Ms. Padgett was dead at the time of the assault. The video is believed to have been recorded in Graf’s house.
Although the fact that Graf abused Ms. Padgett’s corpse will not turn this into a potential capital case, it certainly provides the evidence of premeditation that the prosecution needs to secure a first-degree-murder conviction. Under Pennsylvania law, to secure a murder conviction the prosecution must prove malice on the part of the defendant, and there is little doubt that the desire to desecrate a corpse will be construed as constituting precisely that. A first-degree-murder conviction will typically result in a life sentence which is sure to be the case here.
In an outrageous request that the judge denied, at a court hearing, Graf requested a public defender even though based on his financial wherewithal (Graf owns a fence company and he and his wife were in the process of building a second home in Florida), he can certainly afford to retain counsel.
In an additional oddity (as if this case isn’t tragically odd enough already), Graf turns out to have been supplementing his fence-building income by growing marijuana. Police reportedly confiscated a substantial amount of cannabis and cash when they searched his residence.
What adds an additional shocking element to this already shocking case is the fact that Ms. Padgett once described Graf on social media as “being like another father to her”.
Ms. Padgett’s grieving family has released a statement in which they called her a “beautiful and vibrant young woman”. Other than that, they have understandably chosen to not address the media at this time.
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Who can fathom the dark and infernal desires that ravage the heart of humankind? This is a key reason we have religion – to explain the darkness that periodically overwhelms both individuals and nations, spreading waste and destruction in its wake.