True Crime Stories

The Best DWI Attorneys Throughout the State of Texas

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 07:01:00 +0000

Law Offices of Richard C. McConathy has successfully defended 91% of the DWI cases set for trial by either NOT GUILTY or DISMISSAL since 2002. Since then the firm has been dedicated to defending citizens' accused of DWI (Driving While Intoxicated) throughout the State of Texas.

Their goal is to provide citizens with a chance to stand up against the sometimes overbearing system and fight for their rights, to defend the constitution from any attacker of its precious protections, to provide honest and sincere representation of each one of their clients. They strive to be the best DWI criminal attorney in fort worth , Dallas and Denton. They care about their profession, legacy and clients and shall put this dedication into each and every one of their cases.

If you have found their web site, it is very possible that you are one of the thousands of people who are charged with DWI fort worth criminal attorney every year. They understand the frustration you have been going through following your arrest. The confusion and fear when being stopped and asked to exit your car. Not knowing whether what you did was the right decision. Having been arrested and spending hours in jail on a police officer opinion.

If you have been charged with a DWI, you may not know the legal dangers of this type of case. DWI or drug lawyer fort worth, over the past years, has become a highly technical criminal charge. Gone are the days of a simple DWI case, now officers are encouraged to become specialized in conducting DWI arrests by receiving certification to conduct Standardized Field Sobriety Tests. In addition to the police officer, your case may involve a breath sample provided to a breath Test Technical Operators on a Intoxilyzer 5000. This problem will be compounded by the fact that most court have prosecutors who are specifically trained on making this type of case seem that it is based on accepted scientific principals. Their firm, over the years, has dedicated the majority of their practice to DWI DEFENSE.

To set up an appointment, you can reach their offices by phone. Their assistants are standing by to help you.

Law Offices of Richard C. McConathy
(972) 445-4300
(888) 283-9394 TOLL FREE

Online Tutoring for K-12 and College

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 04:00:00 +0000

TutorVista is the leading online tutoring company in the world. They offer an incredible unlimited monthly tutoring package for a very cheap price and for subjects such as Math and Calculus. Students especially K-12 and college can use their service as much as they want, whenever they need it. Tutoring is available 24X7. They provide free demo for first time user where they can try the service for free.

For those who have Math homework or problems can always get answers at Free math tutoring online on TutorVista. No worries because they have Free math homework help and Free math tutoring to help students in solving their problems. Apart from that, you can also get Calculus help and Calculus Tutor with TutorVista to Solve calculus problems.

The advantage with their TutorVista is that you can connect with a tutor using your PC and get personalized attention and one-on-one tutoring at a fraction of what a learning centre will cost you. Also you don't waste time in travel since you study from the comfort of home. Just upload them on their website, their tutors will work on it and e-mail it to you with detailed step by step explanations.

Need more help? Just connect with a tutor available online 24x7 with TutorVista.

Everything You Need About Web Hosting

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:38:00 +0000

Recently, I stumbled upon a site www.webhostingfan.com which talks about web hosting industry news, latest trends, reviews of the best web hosting providers. There are many web hosting company on the Internet nowadays. But, to choose the best one is not easy. But don't worry, this site is perfect for you and highly recommended.

This site not only talks about web hosting industry news, latest trends, reviews of the best web hosting providers, but also useful information such web hosting service tips, web hosting security, blogging tips and how to build a website. Other than that, it also provides information about search engine submission services, increase your visibility with Google webmaster tools, and etc. I must say it's really interesting!!

If you're looking for web site hosting, this site is the right one for you. Don't waste your time now, just visit www.webhostingfan.com for more details about web hosting.

TutorVista - Free Demo for First Time User

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 13:01:00 +0000

TutorVista is the leading online tutoring company in the world. They offer an incredible unlimited monthly tutoring package for only $99.99 a month for subjects such as Math, Algebra and Calculus. Students can use their service as much as they want, whenever they need it. Tutoring is available 24X7. They provide free demo for first time user where they can try the service for free.

For those who have College algebra problems can always get answers with TutorVista. No worries because they have Algebra homework help and Free college algebra help in solving the problems. Apart from that, you can also get Calculus help and Precalculus help with TutorVista. Not only that, for those who have problems in Math, Math answers will help you to solve your problems. And, you can get your Math homework help done online.

The advantage with their TutorVista is that you can connect with a tutor using your PC and get personalized attention and one-on-one tutoring at a fraction of what a learning centre will cost you. Also you don't waste time in travel since you study from the comfort of home. Just upload them on their website, their tutors will work on it and e-mail it to you with detailed step by step explanations.

Need more help? Just connect with a tutor available online 24x7 with TutorVista.

Algebra 1 and Algebra 2 Online Tutoring for K-12 and College

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:56:00 +0000

TutorVista is a leading online tutoring company in the world. They offer an incredible unlimited monthly tutoring package for only $99.99 a month for all subjects - students can use their service as much as they want and whenever they need it. Tutoring is available 24x7. They also provide free demo for first time user where they can try the service for free.

TutorVista offers Algebra 1 online like Algebra 1 help and solve Algebra 1 problems to work on basic concepts and get help with your Algebra 1 homework. Here, you will study with highly qualified tutors who have many years of experience in tutoring students across grades. And they will work with you to ensure that you understand the subject and score well in it. Students can get free Algebra 1 answers here, too!

TutorVista not only offers Algebra 1 but also Algebra 2. For example like, Algebra 2 help, Algebra 2 answers, and Algebra 2 problems. Students don't have to waste time in travel since you study Algebra 1 and Algebra 2 from the comfort of home.

Need more help? Just connect with a tutor available online 24x7 with TutorVista.

Online Tutoring for K-12 and College

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 00:48:00 +0000

Tutornext.com provides high-quality one-on-one supplemental education for K-12 and college students. They offers K-12 and college students high quality Online Tutoring and Assignment Help for example like Online math tutoring. Their Assignment Help and Online Tutoring services are convenient and affordable. Using their services, students can connect to a tutor as often as they need help and just when they are ready to learn.

TutorNext's team of highly qualified tutors make learning fun and easy. Get detailed step by step explanations for a better understanding of concepts, prepare for important tests and quizzes, improve your grades and get your assignments done on time. For those who has problems in subjects like Precalculus, statistics and chemistry, you can get some helps here respectively: Precalculus help, statistics help, and chemistry help.

Since TutorNext is a leading online tutoring company in the world, they have helped thousands of students over the last four years. If you have math problems, for example, you can get math answers almost immediately because their tutors are available 24/7; whenever you get stuck, they are here to help!

Repair Your Credit Now!

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 05:23:00 +0000

Credit Repair is one of the most important financial decisions you can make to fix credit. Ovation helps you achieve your optimal credit profile by making the credit repair process convenient, personal, and effective. Ovation's specialized credit repair processes, legal expertise, and guaranteed customer service make them the best in the industry. They are proud that they have had the opportunity to help tens of thousands of Americans correct their credit reports, credit scores, and credit profiles and they're ready to help you too.

What does the Ovation Advantage mean to you? Results. They offer a comprehensive package of programs and services that you simply can't get elsewhere. As a client of Ovation, rest assured that they will strive to provide the best customer service in the industry, and their results-oriented Case Advisors and Case Analysts are committed to meeting and exceeding your expectations. Take a moment and review their programs and see what Ovation has to offer you.

Algebra Tutoring With TutorVista

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 02:10:00 +0000

TutorVista is the leading online tutoring company in the world. They offer an incredible unlimited monthly tutoring package for a very cheap price and for all subjects. Students can use their service as much as they want, whenever they need it. Tutoring is available 24X7. They also provide free demo for first time user where they can try the service for free.

For those who have College Algebra Problems can get answers with TutorVista. No worries in Solving algebra problems and on How to do algebra problems anymore! TutorVista is a complete Algebra Tutor, appropriate for solving Algebra problems all the way from Pre-Algebra through the Advanced College level.

You can also get your Algebra Homework done online with TutorVista's Homework Help. It is affordable and convenient. TutorVista's Algebra Homework Help service is very easy to use. Just upload your Algebra Homework on their website, their tutors will work on it and e-mail it to you with detailed step by step explanations.

Apart from that, you can get Pre Algebra Homework Help online with TutorVista. The advantage with their Pre Algebra Homework Help is that you can connect with a tutor using your PC and get personalized attention and one-on-one tutoring at a fraction of what a learning centre will cost you. Also you don't waste time in travel since you study Algebra from the comfort of home.

Need more help? Just connect with a tutor available online 24x7 with TutorVista.

Reveal A New You with Murad

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 05:27:00 +0000

Acne is an infection of the skin, caused by changes in the sebaceous glands. The face, chest, back, and upper arms are most common places for acne to happen. Acne is common during puberty, when a person is turning from a child into an adult, because of high levels of hormones. Acne becomes less common as people reach adulthood.

One way of making acne disappear is to use a skincare line of Acne Products like Acne Complex composed by a clarifying cleanser, exfoliating acne treatment gel, skin perfection lotion, and a bonus of acne and Age Spots treatment and clarifying mask. Murad Acne Skin Care Products were developed by the world known dermatologist Dr. Howard Murad a well known specialist in skin diseases and acne treatment.

If you have been suffering acne for a long time then you should consider about using murad acne complex. In fact, you can make online purchasing of this amazing acne product. By ordering now, you'll be enrolled in the Home Delivery Program. In 30 days you will receive a replenishment of the Acne Complex 60-day supply and continue getting a kit every 2 months, and you lock in the special low price of just $29.95 a month plus $6.95 S&H for each shipment.

Do visit Acne Complex web page to get more information on acne treatment products and how you can get them!

High Quality Mailboxes on Sale

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 04:10:00 +0000

Mailboxixchange (pronounced Mailbox Exchange) is a distributor of high quality residential mailboxes and commercial mailboxes. They are dedicated to bringing the widest selection of residential Mailboxes and commercial mail boxes to the internet. Whether you are an individual homeowner or represent a 400 unit residential building, they can provide you with the product depth, knowledge, low prices and customer service needed to find a fully customized mailbox solution.

They have lots of collection of mailboxes, for example like Single-Unit Mailbox & Post Packages, wall mount mailbox, Commercial Mailboxes, Post Mount Mailboxes, Column Mailboxes, Multi-Unit Mailboxes, Locking Mailboxes, Mailbox Posts, Mailbox Components, and Mail Slots/Drop Boxes. They not only selling mailboxes, they also have some collection of Address Plaques and Numbers and Curbside Decor.

For more information please don't hesitate to visit Mailboxixchange.com.

Online Casino Guide

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 02:24:00 +0000

GambleCraft.com is website teaches the basics for casino games like roulette, video poker, slots and many more. Their menu to the left provides links to Online Casino game tutorials, website reviews and software. Their aim is to assist you in learning the proper online gambling strategies so you will have better odds of winning at online casinos.

Gamblecraft.com has a section called Online Casino Reviews. You can find the detailed analysis of every game below including history, rules, player edge and the perfect strategy.

Best Online Casinos offers their picks of the absolute best online casinos found on the web today. While their web site only lists the most credible casinos throughout the pages, this one is reserved for the best of the best. Each month they rank the top 3 online casinos based on player feedback, speed of payouts, customer service and new games introduced.

Also check out the following for other languages:

Beste Online Casinos
Casino Online
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Casino En Ligne

Quality Wholesale Store Online Services

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 03:44:00 +0000

I came across a site, both ATopTaiwan and AsianProducts are the online services offered by Media Federal Co., Ltd., that lets companies of all scales find and order products from suppliers worldwide, at competitive and reasonable prices. Buyers can purchase right away from the most convenient ATopTaiwan online store by just clicking several buttons. Please check out the key services that ATopTaiwan and AsianProducts features respectively.

ATopTaiwan - You can purchase and order products right away

- Purchase products from our convenient online store
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AsianProducts - Contact Manufactures and Suppliers directly

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Don't forget to check them out!!

Buy Home and Garden Products at ShopWiki

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Wed, 27 May 2009 05:23:00 +0000

ShopWiki is revolutionary for shopping since it actively seeks out every store on the internet in a similar way that Google finds every web site, by crawling the web. Traditional shopping sites will only show you stores that have paid for placement, and ShopWiki will give a shopper everything regardless if we can earn anything. For a shopper, this means they can find anything and everything for sale on the web at ShopWiki.

You can easily find and shop by using ShopWiki Directory when searching for information like:

Home and Garden

Garden Hoses

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Furniture

Looking for advice and tips on buying Home and Garden products? It contents Home and Garden guides and helpful tips. Whether you need to update your routine or just want to explore, this is where to start. The shopping guides talk you through the basic facts about home and garden of different products on the market these days. My advice for all shoppers, visit ShopWiki now and enjoy the fun and excitement of shopping online!!

Melvin White - Sexually Assaulted And Killed A Nine Year-Old Girl

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 04:27:00 +0000

On August 4, 1997, nine year-old Jennifer Gravell spent the day at a barbeque in her Texas neighborhood. A 47 year-old man called Melvin White was also at the the party. After having a few drinks, Melvin White headed home a some time between 10:30 and 11 p.m.. For some reason, Jennifer went to his house at about the same time and it was then that Melvin White put her in his truck and kidnapped her.

Melvin White drove Jennifer to an isolated spot and took her behind a water tower where he bound and gagged her before sexually assaulting her with what police believe to have been a screwdriver. Then he killed her by crushing her skull with a tire iron.

Melvin White was arrested when a witness reported seeing him in his truck with a girl in the passenger seat. When they saw him in the truck again at around 1 a.m., Melvin White was the only person in the truck. When Melvin White was presented with this information he confessed to the murder and told the police where to find Jennifer's body.

At Melvin White's trial in June of 1999 he was found guilty of murder. At his punishment hearing a number of other claims were made about inappropriate relations Melvin White was said to have had with children. Melvin White's own daughter reported that Melvin White had offered her $50 a week in exchange for sexual favors on demand. At the hearing Melvin White was sentenced to death.

In May of 2003, Jennifer Gravell's father committed suicide by shooting himself. The family reported that the suicide was related to the trauma of his daughter's murder.

On November 3, 2005, Melvin White apologized to his victims's family before he was executed by lethal injection and pronounced dead at 6:21 p.m.

Source

Child Killers

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:04:00 +0000

Profile of Sadistic Killer, Charles Chi-tat Ng

Charles Chi-tat Ng - A Troubled Teen
Charles Chi-tat Ng was born in Hong Kong on Dec. 24, 1960. His father was a wealthy executive and a strict disciplinarian. Ng was a troubled teen and was expelled from various schools. His father tried to help Ng straighten out his life by sending him to a boarding school in England where his uncle was a teacher. Not long after his arrival, he was caught stealing from his fellow classmates. When he was caught shoplifting from a local store he was expelled from school and returned to Hong Kong.

Ng Comes to the United States
At the age of 18 Ng obtained a U.S. student visa and attended Notre Dame College in California. After one semester, he dropped out and hung around until October 1979, when he was convicted in a hit-and- run automobile offense and ordered to pay restitution. Instead of paying, Ng opted to join the Marines and lied on his enlistment application by putting he was a U.S. citizen and his birthplace was Bloomington, Indiana. The military authorities believed it and enlisted him.

Ng's Military Career - A Career Built on Lies
After a year in the Marines, Ng had become a lance corporal but his career was cut short after a 1981 incident involving the theft of weapons stolen from an armory at the Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station in Hawaii. Ng, along with three other soldiers, stole a range of weapons including two M-16 assault rifles and three grenade launchers. Ng fled before being arrested, but was caught by military police a month later and locked up in a Marine jail in Hawaii to await trial.

Ng Does Time In Leavenworth Prison
Almost immediately after his incarceration, Ng managed to escape from jail and fled to California. It was there that he met up with Leonard Lake and Lake's wife, Claralyn Balasz. The three became roommates until their arrest by the FBI on weapons charges. Ng was convicted and sent to Leavenworth Prison where he served three years. Lake made bail and went into hiding in a remote cabin owned by his wife's parents in Wilseyville, California, located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Ng and Lake Reunite and Their Ghastly Crimes Begin
After Ng's release from prison, he reunited with Lake at the cabin. Shortly after the reunion, the two began living out the sexually sadistic and murderous fantasies of Lake. There seemed no barriers to who the two would murder with the list including Lake's own brother, babies, husband and wives, and friends of Lake's, all totaling seven men, three women and two babies. Authorities believe the number of victims murdered by the two to be much higher, with many of the dead still unidentified.

Ng's Enept Shoplifting Skills Surface Again
Ng's inability to shoplift ended the pair's torturous murder spree. Ng and Lake stopped at a lumberyard to get a replacement for a bench vise they broke when using it to torture their victims. An employee contacted police after seeing Ng shoplift a vise and place it into the pair's car. Realizing he had been seen he took off. Lake tried to convince police it was all a misunderstanding but when one of the officers looked in the trunk of Lake's car, he spotted a .22 revolver and a silencer.

Lake's Lies Fail To Save Him
Officer Wright did a check on the 1980 Honda Prelude that Lake was driving and the registration number matched to a Buick registered in the name of Lonnie Bond. Lake produced his driver's license, and it showed he was a 26-year-old named Robin Stapley. Wright was suspicious since Lake looked considerably older than 26. He ran a check on the serial number from the gun, and it came back as being owned by Stapley. Lake was arrested for owning the illegal gun.

The End of Leonard Lake
Lake sat handcuffed in a room at the police station. When informed that the Honda he was driving was registered to a man who had been reported missing, Lake requested a pen and paper and a glass of water. The officer obliged him and Lake scribbled a note, told the officer his and Ng's real names, than swallowed two cyanide pills he retrieved from behind his collar. He went into convulsions and was rushed to the hospital where he remained in a comatose state until he died.

Ghastly Secrets Uncovered
The police began to investigate Lake, figuring his suicide could be related to a more serious crime. They visited the cabin where Lake and Ng lived and immediately found bones in the cabin's driveway. Ng was on the run as the investigators began to uncover the gruesome crimes that took place on the property. Remnants of charred body parts, corpses, bone chips, and a variety of personal belongings, weapons and videotapes were found.

Operation Miranda
Inside the cabin's master bedroom, police uncovered various pieces of women's bloody lingerie. The four-poster bed had wires tied around each poster and retraints bolted into the floor. Blood was found in various places including under the mattress. Also discovered was Lake's diary where he detailed the various acts of torture, rape and murder that he and Ng had performed on their victims in what he referred to as, 'Operation Miranda.'

Operation Miranda was a confusing fantasy that Lake created that centered on the end of the world and his need to dominate women who would eventually become his sexual slaves. Ng became a partner to his fantasy and the two began trying to turn it into some kind of demented and sick reality.

On the property, investigators found a bunker that was partially built into a hillside. Inside the bunker were three rooms, two that were hidden. The first hidden room contained various tools and a sign with the words "The Miranda" hanging on the wall. The second hidden room was a 3 x7 cell with a bed, chemical commode, table, one-way mirror, constraints, no light, and was wired for sound. The room was designed so that at anytime the inhabitant could be watched and heard from the outer room.

On videotapes found by police, two women at separate times were shown bound, taunted with knives by Ng, and threatened by Lake with death if they failed to concede to being sexual slaves. One woman was forced to strip, then later raped. The other woman had her clothing cut away by Ng. She begged for information about her baby but eventually gave in to the pair's demands after they threatened her life and the life of her baby if she didn't cooperate. Complete details of what the tapes revealed to the investigators was never disclosed.

Ng Changes His Identity to Mike Komoto
As investigators uncovered the grisly crime scene at the bunker, Charles Ng was on the run. Investigators learned from Lake's ex-wife, Claralyn Balasz, that Ng contacted her shortly after running from the lumberyard. She met with him and agreed to drive him to his apartment for clothing and to pick up a paycheck. She said he was carrying a gun, ammunition, two fake I.D.'s in the name of Mike Komoto and that she let him off at the San Francisco airport, but did not know where he was going.

Busted On Shoplifting In Canada
Ng's movement was traced from San Francisco to Chicago to Detroit and then into Canada. The investigation uncovered enough evidence to charge Ng with 12 counts of murder. Ng managed to avoid authorities for over a month, but his poor shoplifting abilities landed him in jail in Calvary after he fought with the arresting police and shot one of them in the hand. Ng was in a Canadian jail, charged with robbery, attempted robbery, possession of a firearm and attempted murder.

Jail Time In Canada Gives Ng Time To Learn
U.S. authorities became aware of Ng's arrest but because Canada had abolished the death penalty, extradition of Ng to the U.S. was refused. U.S. authorities were permitted to interview Ng in Canada at which time Ng blamed Lake for most of the killings at the bunker but admitted to being involved in the disposal of the bodies. His trial for the robbery and assault charges in Canada resulted in a sentence of four-and-a-half years, which he spent learning about U.S. laws.

Cartoons Drawn By Ng Tell All
Ng also entertained himself by drawing cartoons depicting murder scenes, some that contained details of killings that replicated those that went on at Wilseyville that only someone involved in the murders would have known. One other factor that sealed little doubt of Ng's involvement in the pair's killing spree was one witness who Ng had left for dead, but survived. The witness identified Ng as the man who attempted to kill him, not Lake.

Ng Is Extradited To The U.S.
After a six-year battle between the U.S. Justice Department and Canada, Charles Ng was extradited to the U.S. in Sept. 26, 1991 to face trial on 12 murder charges. Ng, familiar with American laws, worked relentlessly to delay his trial. Ultimately, Ng's case became one of the most costly cases in U.S. history, costing taxpayers an estimated $6.6 million for the extradition efforts alone.

Ng Begins To Play With The U.S. Legal System
When Ng reached the U.S. he and his team of lawyers began to manipulate the legal system with endless delay tactics that included formal complaints for receiving bad food and bad treatment. Ng also filed a $1 million malpractice suit against lawyers he had dismissed at various times during his pre-trial hearings. Ng also wanted his trial to be moved to Orange County, a motion that would be presented to California Supreme Court at least five times before it was upheld.

A Taxpayer's Nightmare
In October 1998, after 13 years of various delays and $10 million in costs, the trial of Charles Chitat Ng began. His defense team presented Ng as being an unwilling participant and was forced to take part in Lake's sadistic murder spree. Because of the video's presented by the prosecutors showing Ng forcing two women to engage in sex after threatening them with knives, the defense admitted that Ng 'merely' participate in the sexual offenses.

Ng's Damanging Testimony
Ng insisted on taking the stand, which allowed prosecutors to submit more evidence that helped define Ng's role in all aspects of the ghoulish crimes that went on in the bunker, including murder. One significant piece of evidence presented were pictures of Ng standing in his cell with the telling cartoons he had sketched of the victims hanging on the wall behind him.

A Fast Decision From The Jury
After years of delays, several tons of paperwork, millions of dollars, and many of the victims' loved ones deceased, the trial of Charles Ng ended. The jury deliberated for a few hours and returned with a verdict of guilty of the murder of six men, three women, and two babies. The jury recommended the death penalty, a sentence that trial Judge Ryan imposed.

The List of Known Victims:

* Kathleen Allen and her boyfriend, Michael Carroll.
Investigators believe that Kathleen was lured to the cabin when Lake told her that Michael had been shot. Kathleen was one of the two women who appeared on the video as Lake and Ng mentally and physically tortured her, eventually raping and killing her. Michael was a suspected drug dealer who at one time was a cellmate of Ng's at Leavenworth.

* Brenda O'Connor, Lonnie Bond and baby Lonnie Jr.
Brenda and her common law husband, Lonnie, were next door neighbors of Leornard Lake. Brenda was shown on the video begging for knowledge of her baby's welfare while the two taunted her and threatened her and the life of her baby if she failed to cooperate with their sexual demands. It is believed that at the time the video was made, Lonnie and Lonnie Jr. had already been killed.

* Harvey Dubs, Deborah Dubs and baby Sean Dubs.
It is believed that the family was murdered after Lake answered an advertisement for camera equipment that Harvey was selling.

* Robin Scott Stapley

* Randy Johnson

* Charles "The Fat Man" Gunnar - Leonard Lake's best man.

* Donald Lake - Leonard's brother.

* Paul Cosner - the owner of the Honda.

Other pieces of bone found on the property indicated that over 25 other people were killed by Lake and Ng. Investigators suspect that many were homeless and recruited to the property to help build the bunker, then killed.

Charles Ng sits on death row at San Quentin prison in California. He advertises himself online as 'a dolphin caught inside a tuna net.' He continues to appeal his death sentence and it may take several years for his sentence to be carried out.

Source

Murder, First Class

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:02:00 +0000

By Larry Mouro
Startling Detective
January 1980 (Volume 70, No. 1)

A guest at the swank Sheraton Universal Hotel in North Hollywood, California, came up to the desk on Sunday evening, June 17, 1979, and told the clerk, "That Rolls Royce in the parking garage is a good looking car, but it sure stinks."

"What do you mean?" the clerk asked.

"Just what I said. It smells - bad - like something's died in it."

The clerk called a bellman. He instructed him to check on a maroon and white Rolls Royce on the second level of the parking structure adjoining the hotel.

The bellman located the car. He found that the guest hadn't understated the odor coming from it. He was able to look through the windows of the vehicle but could see nothing that might cause it. There was a parking ticket on the dash indicating it had been there since six o'clock on Wednesday. The putrid smell seemed to come from the car's trunk.

When he returned to the hotel with his report, the clerk said, "I've been thinking. I wonder if it could be Vic Weiss' car. I saw a television news broadcast a couple of days ago showing the police looking for him and his car. They were using a helicopter, thinking he might have run off the canyon road going in to San Fernando."

The name Vic Weiss in the Los Angeles and Las Vegas, Nevada, areas did not need any additional description to identify him. Anyone interested in sports would recognize the wealthy auto dealer and sports promoter. A free spender and high-roller, Vic Weiss was the confidante of big names in sporting events, movie and television stars, the society of the wealthy and a few of the names associated with organized crime.

A likeable, generous man who took flocks of under-privileged kids to baseball, football and basketball games, he was equally at home in a sweaty gym with pugs punching bags as he was around the swimming pool at luxurious homes in Beverly Hills. He was noted for grabbing the check, whether it was a lunch for two or a dinner party for 50. He enjoyed his role as "Mr. Nice Guy" and basked in the limelight of publicity which, incidentally, didn't harm his various business ventures.

They said Vic Weiss had a million friends, ranging from bums who touched him for a quick five-spot to multimillionaires, and never made an enemy. They were wrong. Vic made one enemy who put two slugs in the back of Vic's head.

Vic's wife called the Los Angeles police on Wednesday evening after he failed to meet her at 6:30 at Monty's restaurant in San Fernando and didn't show up at his home Encino later. It wasn't like Vic not to call, even if he was going to be only 15 minutes late.

The police took his disappearance seriously. It was known that Vic often carried as much as $30,000 in cash around with him, and seldom less than several thousand. A friend said he had seen $37,000 in cash on Vic's desk the day before he disappeared. There wasn't any record for a bank deposit of that amount of money.

At first it was thought that possibly Vic had been in an accident. He was driving a rental Rolls Royce while his own Rolls Royce was being repaired. Weiss was a part owner of the Riviera Rolls Royce dealership in San Fernando Valley. Helicopters covered every possible route he could have taken after leaving a business meeting at the Beverly Comstock Hotel in Beverly Hills.

When the police arrived at the parking structure and pried open the trunk lid of the Rolls, they found a corpse neatly wrapped in a yellow blanket. There were two bullet ho,es in the back of the head but the body was so badly decomposed from being in the hot trunk of the car that without identification, it would take fingerprints for positive proof that it was Vic Weiss.

However, the investigators had no doubt about the identify as soon as they saw a diamond ring on one finger big enough to be a headlight on a model train and a $6,000 wristwatch, a gift from movie star Connie Stevens.

The immediate question was how Weiss happened to be in North Hollywood in the trunk of his car, since if he left Beverly Hills it would have been in the wrong direction to the freeways that would have take him either to meet his wife in San Fernando or his home in Encino. There hadn't been a yellow blanket in the Rolls when Vic took it out of the shop. The investigators had already established that the had left the business meeting in Beverly Hills at five o'clock. It left only an hour before the car was parked in North Hollywood.

The business meeting in Beverly Hills had been with Jack Kent Cooked and Jerry Buss. Cooke had just completed a deal in which he had sold his Los Angeles Lakers basketball team, the Kings hockey club, the Los Angeles Forum and a 13,000-acre Bakersfield ranch to Buss for the sun of $67 million.

Buss was looking for a coach to replace Jerry West for the Lakers. Weiss represented Jerry Tarkanian, a long time personal friend.

Weiss had done all right by Tarkanian. After producing some championship basketball teams at Long Beach State University, Weiss obtained a contract for Tarkanian at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. The terms were that Tarkanian would receive a salary of $22,000 a year, $10,000 from television shows, $15,000 for public relations work at Caesars Palace, two new cars, a $100,000 home, $3,000 clothing expense and free medical and dental service for himself and family.

It really wasn't too bad a deal for a university basketball coach. Jerry responded by taking the Las Vegas team to the National collegiate Athletic Association playoffs. But he got into a bit of trouble with the NCAA for some alleged recruiting violation and he and the team were put on probation. Tarkanian immediately filed a suit over the charges but things were a little strained between himself and the university oficials, so Weiss thought it would be the right time to go into professional ball and lined up the deal for him to be a coach for the Lakers.

How much Weiss was able to get for Tarkanian's services was unknown, but Cooke and Buss said that he had a tentative contract for Tarkanian to sign when he left the meeting.

"I saw him shove it in his pants pocket when he got into his car in the parking lot at the Beverly Comstock," Cooke said. It wasn't on his person or in the car when the corpse was found.

Lieutenants Dan Cooke and Ross Lewis with Detective Mike Thiess headed the investigation into the slaying of Weiss. It immediately brought to their minds another murder that had taken place two years earlier, only three miles from where Weiss' body had been found.

It was known that Weiss had long been interested in managing fighters and promoting boxing matches. He purchased the contract of welterwight contender Armando Muniz and was manager of the undefeated lightweight Gonzalo Montellano. Vic spent a lot of time around a fighters' gym in a building that he and a partner owned. He was a close personal friend of Sugar Ray Robinson.

The earlier murder had been that of boxing promoter Howie Steindler. His battered and strangled corpse had been found in his car. No arrest had been made in the case but there had been considerable speculation that Steindler may have made a wrong decision in opposing some organized crime interests in the fight game.

As the detectives probed into the murder of Weiss, they came up with some facets of the colorful man's life that weren't generally known. One was that he had been married four times, twice to the same woman, and had fathered eight children.

Vic Weiss was born in Pennsylvania. He had not finished high school in Beaver Falls when he joined the Marines. After completing his tour of duty, Vic decided to locate in California. He attended Pasadena City College and played some football. He worked as a car salesman.

Vic's fortunes turned when he went to work for Gerald "Jerry" Cutter as manager of his Ford agency in Redondo Beach. Like Vic, Cutter was an Eastern import to California. A shrewd businessman, Cutter parlayed his Redondo agency into a string of a car dealerships, car leasing agencies and real estate in the Los Angeles area, Hawaii and Las Vegas. Weiss was his partner in some of the business ventures.

But while Cutter confined most of his activities to business, Weiss liked to become involved in sports and associate with celebrities. He valued among his friends Lee Walls, the coach of the Oakland baseball team. Walls told reporters that he cried for two days when he heard Vic had been killed.

Among the movie stars who purchased all of their cars from him but regarded him as a friend rather than a salesman, were Gene Barry, Mike Connors and Efrem Zimbalist Jr.

The investigators uncovered other types among the friends of Weiss. One of them was Rosario "Ross" Lantieri, a frequent visitor to the Weiss home. A report from the California Assembly Subcomittee on Rackets listed Lantieri as an associate of Joe and Fred Sica, Nick Lacata and Sam Cuda, all named as recognized syndicate crime figures.

Joe Sica was indicted for extortion after he attempted to muscle in on contracts of professional boxers. He eventually was handed a 20-year sentence on the charge.

The detectives heard talk that Weiss and Lantieri were operating a large layoff bet operation. A "layoff" requires a lot of money and a lot of connections.

A successful bookie makes his money by taking the percentages quoted in the odds for any event. The ideal situation is to have an equal amount of bets for and against with the insured profit from the margin in the quoted odds. There are times when a sentimental favorite will create lopsided betting. If a bookie is caught with a big handle on a sentimental favorite and it should come in a winner, he could be wiped out or in deep trouble.

The "layoff' book takes the lopside wagering from the bookie so his bets are balanced. The layoff operation then makes contacts in other parts of the country to even up the wagering where there might not be the local action for a sentimental favorite. For this assistance, the layoff operators get their profits from the odds percentage plus a percentage of the bookies' profit for the service.

When questioned about this, Lantieri flatly denied that wither he or Weiss had a "layoff" operation. He said he visited Weiss often because Vic was an expert in all sports, particularly boxing and basketball. He said he sought his advice concerning the betting odds.

This facet of Weiss' life particularly interested the investigators when they learned from Cooke and Buss that Weiss had stepped out of the room in the Beverly Comstock, during their discussion of the Tarkanian contract, to place a call to Las Vegas. He hadn't mentioned who he was calling but they assumed it pertained to Tarkanian.

A check on the call revealed it had been to a real estate agent. The agent said Weiss had been negotiating to buy a home in the exclusive Mount Charleston area. Cutter had purchased a home in the wealthy residential section earlier.

Cutter had moved to Las Vegas after a personal tragedy. The body of his wife had been found in her car, fully dressed but in a housecoat, at the bottom of a cliff below their Beverly Hills home. Unexplained was how the new car had rolled out of the driveway and plunged over the steep embankment. The death was listed as an accident.

Cutter and Weiss established the Prestige Motors automobile agency in Las Vegas. The Los Angeles detectives contacted the Las Vegas police with a request to check into any possible connection with Weiss' murder and his interests in Las Vegas.

The Las Vegas file revealed that Jerry Tarkanian, in addition to his pay as a coach and the many fringe benefits, had been under contract at $45,000 a year to an organization whose president was a central figure in a federal extortion and bribery case.

Tarkanian explained that he had taken the job with Royal Reservations Inc., a lucrative business selling reservations to the top casino-hotel attractions, because they wanted his name. He said he had quit after three years and had accepted $15,000 for the remaining two years of his contract, when he was told that the operation might not be completely legitimate.

The Las Vegas file held the information that David Bliss, president of the organization, had come under scrutiny for allegedly being involved in bribing public officials to obtain licenses for businesses that would have been denied to anyone with a criminal record. Bliss was given immunity for his testimony against Eathel "Tex" Gates, who was convicted on 62 counts of extortion, perjury and obstruction of justice. He received an eight-year sentence and $30,000 in fines.

The file concerned things even more interesting concerning Bliss.

It came out of FBI affidavits filed in federal court in Kansas City, in which a 1,088-page document contained conversations from 26 tapped telephnes of alleged organized crime figures, with some of the calls placed to Las Vegas.

The conversations, plus undercover work, alleged that Anthony Spilotro, headquartering in Las Vegas, had taken over as head man of the West Coast mob following the murder of Frank Bompensiero in San Diego in February of 1977.

Spilotro, arrested 20 times on various charges from petty larceny to murder but never convicted, came to Las Vegas in 1972 from Chicago where he was purportedly a key figure in the Chicago organized crime structure.

Federal agents have promoted Spilotro on their list from "the most powerful man in Las Vegas" to "the most powerful crime figure on the West Coast".

Information developed from the Kansas City wire taps indicated that five Chicago-area jewel thieves were executed when they declined to sell their loot in the regular syndicate channals.

A close associate of Spilotro is Joseph Hansen, considered one of the country's most accomplished jewel thieves. A Hansen associate is Frank Velotta, convicted sage burglar and a specialist in burglar alarms. There are recorded meetings between Spilotro and Hansen at the Los Angeles International Airport.

Spilotro opened a shop, just off the Las Vegas Strip on West Sahara Avenue, specializing in expensive jewelry which he named Gold Rush Ltd.

About a month after the swank jewelry store was opened, the FBI obtained a court-approved wire tap. Evidence collected allegedly revealed loansharking activities, illegal gambling and slot machine skimming.

A key witness before the grand jury was FBI Agent Rick Baken, who posed as a buyer of stolen jewelry. He testified that jewelry shown to him, primarily cut and uncut diamonds offered at substantially below wholesale prices, were said by Spilotro to be "hot out of Chicago".

In one of the tapped telephone conversations of a Spilotro associate, the caller said that Spilotro was worried about the testimony of Bliss in the license fixing case and instructed someone to
"take care of him."

The most likely person to have been given the assignment would be Chris Petti. He had been a Bompensiero protege. After the murder of his boss, he joined the Spilotro organization. Federal investigators claim that Petti was used as a collector of debts owed by Californians to the Chicago-connected casinos and loansharking in Las Vegas.

With his early training in Chicago as a "collector", a government agent observed, "He's one of those guys who likes to go out and break a few legs at the appropriate time. It is a talent the mob appreciates."

However, with the exception of Weiss' association with Tarkanian and Tarkanian's association with Bliss, there was no mention in the extensive files in Las Vegas concerning Weiss. And there was only the rumor and no proof that Weiss and Lantieri might have been operating a "layoff" book.

One investigator said, "Of course we don't have all the information. If Weiss had been operating a layoff book and got into trouble, the two slugs in the back of the head and the body left in a car is the modus operandi of a mob hit."

The homicide investigators in Los Angeles were working with the physical evidence and a timetable for the murder. They were able to establish that Weiss played golf with friends on the morning he was slain. He did not have lunch because he was watching his weight.

Vic met with Cooke and Buss at the Beverly Comstock at four o'clock. They discussed the Tarkanian contract for an hour, with ten minutes out while Weiss made his telephone call to Las Vegas.

When Weiss climbed into his Rolls-Royce in the parking lot at the hotel, he hadn't mentined that he had any other meeting. An hour later the Rolls with Weiss' body was parked in the garage in North Hollywood.

The investigators were positive from their knowledge concerning Weiss that he would not have picked up a stranger. They pointed out that if he planned to meet his wife at the San Fernando Valley restaurant, he would have made a left onto the Ventura Freeway instead of the right onto the Hollywood Freeway and to the Sheraton Universal.

A close friend said, "Hell, Vic was a pretty smart guy. He wouldn't be stupid enough to have gone to a known setup on his own volition. Whoever got him or had him set up had to be a friend."

Puzzling, too, was that the killer had left the expensive diamond ring on his finger and the $6,000 watch on his wrist. Unknown was how much cash he might have been carrying, but the known things taken were the Tarkanian contract and his address book.

Cutter told the detectives, "Who in hell would take Vic's address book unless it was somebody who didn't want his name found out? If I had Vic's book, I could tell you the name of the person who killed him. I knew Vic that well. He was one of the finest and most generous persons I've ever known."

He added, "As far as I know, Vic never had any ties to organized crime, but my saying that doesn't mean anything. Like they say, the husband or wife or partner is the last to know. So, I don't know."

Tarkanian, following the murder of Weiss, announced that he was withdrawing as a candidate for the coaching job for the Lakers. Tarkanian's wife, in an interview, told reporters, " It had to have something to do with boxing. Both Jerry and Vic's partner told Vic to get out of boxing because of the weird people involved in that sport, but Vic just loved boxing so much he wouldn't listen."

After several months of investigation, the detectives assigned to the case said that the wealthy sports figure moved so skillfully and secretively in his role of "man about town" to connections with unsavory charactors that it was impossible to tell what the motive might be for his death.

A friend commenting on his wealth said, "Vic's family doesn't need to worry. He was a very wealthy guy. There are a lot of safety deposit boxes around to be opened."

The Weiss case, investigators say, has so many demensions that his death remains as much a mystery at this time of writing as it did when the corpse was first found in the Rolls Royce.

A detective summed it up by saying, "It was so neat, all it needed was a ribbon. It appears that Vic may have been just a good guy who met some bad guys."

The Nepal Royal Massacre

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Thu, 29 May 2008 03:30:00 +0000

Amazon.com Widgets

Few dramas can match what happened at Nepal's Narayanhity Palace on the first night of June, 2001, when gunshots rang out, leaving most of the royal family dead.

Crown Prince Dipendra shot and killed nine members his family and himself. His parents apparently objected to his plans to marry local aristocrat Devyani Rana.

They had reportedly threatened to disinherit him if he did so, and there has been speculation that this conflict between love and duty is what caused his rampage. Rana reportedly comes from a lower clan of nobility in India, and her great-grandmother was also said once to have been a mistress to a member of the Nepalese royal family.

The public rioted for several days after the massacre, incredulous that the carefree prince once known as "Dippy" could be responsible for the violence. There was also speculation that the slain king's unpopular brother Gyanendra, who is now Nepal's monarch, was responsible for the tragedy.

New reports have also emerged ultimately blaming Devyani. They say to placate his parents, Dipendra had agreed to their plan for him to marry another girlfriend and keep Devyani as a mistress. But Devyani reportedly rejected that plan.

Devyani is now in hiding in Europe, and refusing to come home. Without her presence, many questions remain unanswered.

Shortly after the carnage, the new king opened a two-member official commission to understand what happened.

This is a timeline of events, based on what the commission found:

7:30 p.m.: His Royal Highness Crown Prince Dipendra arrives at the locale of a regularly scheduled family gathering.

He plays billiards by himself for some time in the palace billiard room, and drinks one or two pegs of Famous Grouse whisky.

8:00 p.m.: Dipendra leaves the area and heads to pick up the Queen Mother to take her to the gathering. They return, and the Queen Mother stops to talks to Princess Helen Shaha in a small chamber east of the billiard hall. The crown prince returns to the billiards room.

8:12 p.m.: The crown prince talks to Devyani Rana for 1 minute l4 seconds, according to telecommunications records.

8:19 p.m.: The crown prince calls an aide by mobile phone to get him some cigarettes. They are "a special kind of cigarette prepared with a mixture of hashish and another unnamed black substance as per an order." The aide gives them to Prince Paras to give to the crown prince.

Several people see the crown prince in the billiards room "swaying, unable to hold himself upright." There is suspicion that the prince was drunk from the whiskey, and four guests, including Prince Nirajan and Prince Paras help him to his room.

8.25 p.m.: Rana calls the prince's aides after speaking with him. She says she noticed his speech was slurred, and urged his aides to check on him.

The crown prince's aides reach his room and find him prone on the ground trying to undo the clothing on the upper part of his body. They help him take off the clothing and he goes to the bathroom.

One of the aides hears retching noises coming from the bathroom. After coming out of the bathroom the crown prince orders them both to go to their respective rooms to sleep.

8:30 p.m.: King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev arrives on foot from his office. He proceeds to meet other guests in the billiard room.

8.39 p.m.: The Crown Prince talks to Devyani Rana for 32 seconds. The Crown Prince tells her "I am now about to sleep … good night, we'll talk tomorrow."

After the phone call, the crown prince puts on army fatigues — black army boots, a camouflage army jacket and trousers, black leather gloves, black stockings and a camouflage vest.

He comes out of the bed chamber with weapons. One of his aides sees him and asks, "shall the emergency bag be brought sire?" The Crown Prince replies "it's not necessary now." The crown prince then proceeds to the billiard hall.

Billiard Room 1: At the billiard hall, he fires at the ceiling and west wall with a 9 mm Caliber MP-5K automatic sub-machine gun. He also aims and fires at the king who is standing near the east end of the billiard table talking to others.

Dipendra then steps out of the billiard room and throws one of his guns near the stairs to the north of the inner garden edge, east of the hall.

Billiard Room 2: Dipendra enters the billiard room again, shooting at the king, his brother-inlaw Gorakh, his uncles Dhirendra and Khadga. Gorakh is wounded, the King, Dhirendra and Khadaga are killed.

Billiard Room 3: Dipendra moves back to the door, and forward again, firing indiscriminately a third time. Among others, he hits his sister and Gorakh's wife, Princess Shruti; Khadaga's wife Princess Sharada; his aunt Shanti and a cousin, Princess Jayanti. They are all killed.

Chasing the Last Victims: Prince Nirajan and Queen Aishwarya leave the billiard room and head toward the inner garden. Dipendra also leaves the billiard hall and goes east toward the inner garden.

Nirajan is found by palace officials unconscious near the garden and delivered to the hospital. He is pronounced dead on arrival at 9:15.

The queen's body is found in the staircase leading to the prince's room. She is pronounced dead on arrival at 9:15.

Denouement:The crown prince is found lying on his back on a bridge over a little pond near his room. A 9mm caliber Glock pistol, believed to have belonged to the prince, is found in the water of the pond. An M-16 rifle believed to have belonged to the prince is also found nearby.

The crown prince reaches the hospital at 9:24 P.M. on June 1, 2001, and is pronounced dead at 5:57 p.m. at the hospital on June 4.

Source

Helen Golay And Olga Rutterschmidt: Black Widows

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Tue, 13 May 2008 13:36:00 +0000

Hit and Run

On June 22, 2005, a car crept through an alley off Westwood Boulevard in West Los Angeles. The time was shortly after midnight on a Wednesday. Not a lot of people would be out.

The driver slowed to a stop. Then someone got out and pulled an inebriated Kenneth McDavid, 50, from the car and laid him in the alley. With a blood alcohol count of .08 percent combined with the influence of a few prescription painkillers and sleeping pills, McDavid wasn't in any condition to be walking.

The car backed up, and then the driver slowly ran over McDavid, as if to inflict the greatest possible injury. In fact, the car was going so slow that the McDavid's glasses remained on his head, splattered with grease. An autopsy report would later reveal that he had a "flattened chest" with three broken ribs, a fractured spine, and abrasions consistent with being dragged several feet. A tire imprint was left on his jeans.

McDavid was listed on the coroner's report as "transient." No witnesses were located, so the case became just another tragic hit and run. The investigating officer from Los Angeles Police Department's Traffic Division had little to go on and the case languished for about seven months. Until, one morning, he was in the squad room and mentioned to another officer how unusual it was to have two women ask for the police report on a transient hit-and-run who weren't even related to the victim.

Another investigator overheard the conversation and interjected, "I had a case like that six years ago."

Not a Mere Coincidence

As the second detective told it, sometime in the early morning hours of Nov. 8, 1999, an elderly man drew his last breath in an alley near West Hollywood. Someone had run him over with a car and left the scene without stopping. The victim was homeless and carried no identification, so it seemed like just another tragic accident for a John Doe in the City of Angels.

Eventually the man was identified as Paul Vados, 73, but no leads were forthcoming on his death. The two detectives quickly compared notes and were astounded to discover that the same two women had claimed both bodies. Nor could the detectives find any proof that the women were, indeed, related to the decedents.

"It was somewhat unusual that two elderly ladies unrelated to the victim were coming in and making requests for police reports, attempting to gain custody of the body and claiming there was no one else in the world who cared about this poor soul," LAPD Detective Dennis Kilcoyne later told the Los Angeles Times.

The women - Olga Rutterschmidt, 73, of Hollywood and Helen Golay, 75, of Santa Monica - were longtime friends. Further investigation revealed that the women had taken out more than a dozen life insurance policies on the two men and, after they had died, had filed claims worth more than $4 million. So far, the insurance companies had paid out $2.2 million. A few companies suspected the women of murder and balked at paying. The women promptly began legal proceedings to collect.

Rutterschmidt and Golay may have had a motive for killing the men, but finding proof of murder was something else.

Who Were Rutterschmidt and Golay?

The next step was to look at Rutterschmidt and Golay. Both unmarried, they seemed to enjoy getting dressed up and going places where men were plentiful: health clubs, churches and nights on the town. Golay was a real estate broker, owned several pieces of property and lived in a house worth $1.5 million. She drove a Mercedes SUV and kept up her looks with plastic surgery. Rutterschmidt was significantly less well off, living in a small apartment, driving a Honda Civic and having no apparent source of income other than as a scout for Golay's real estate ventures.

It's not clear how they met, although their friendship apparently went back many years. And they were something to look at. With bleached blonde hair, loads of eyeliner and bright lipstick, and flashy clothes, the women were a poor man's version of the Gabor sisters.

So it seemed strange that this pair would go out of their way to gain the trust of homeless men, then put them up in low-rent apartments, help them with errands, and give financial advice. In exchange, the men signed life insurance policies naming the women as beneficiaries.

Suspiciously, the men died after two years of living under this arrangement. Under California law, it's extremely difficult for insurance companies to contest life insurance policy benefits after a two-year period.

After both men died, the women filed claims as the only next of kin. In Vados' case, he did have a living relative — a daughter named Stella who had been estranged from her father for several years. When she learned of his death, she fought an uphill battle to get the remains moved to a family plot and to collect some of the life insurance money.

The Investigation

Detectives were certain that the women committed both murders. They began to follow Rutterschmidt and Golay as they went about their daily lives. Then one day investigators observed another victim apparently being groomed for murder. Detectives watched as Rutterschmidt pulled her car up to a curb and begin talking to an elderly man who was out for a walk. The pair had apparently met before, and the man got into her car.

They drove to a bank and went inside. Detectives followed and watched as Rutterschmidt and the man approached a teller's window. On the way out, Rutterschmidt threw some papers into a trashcan that were retrieved by detectives. They were return reply envelopes to a life insurance company and a bank. Later that day Rutterschmidt was followed to a copy shop where she logged onto the Internet and attempted to open a credit card account under someone else's name.

It now seemed to detectives that Rutterschmidt and Golay intended to murder the old man in the same manner as Vados and McDavid. No doubt about it — the women were dangerous and needed to be in jail, police decided. The murder investigation wasn't finished, but detectives did have enough for mail fraud charges in connection with the life insurance policies.

On May 19, 2006, Rutterschmidt and Golay were charged with eight counts of mail fraud. It was sensational news — two old ladies who could have been at home knitting booties or reading mystery novels were instead themselves plotting the deaths of unsuspecting men. It wasn't long before the media was referring to the pair as the "hit and run grannies" or the "black widows." But unlike their counterparts in the movie Arsenic and Old Lace, these two were not suffering from dementia — they were ruthless killers, police said.

Detectives searched their homes and found more than eight rubber stamps bearing the signatures of various men, including McDavid. It seemed that the men would sign off on one life insurance policy, and the women then used the signatures to obtain stamps that would allow them to apply for additional policies without the men's knowledge.

But the best clue of all came from Golay herself. It seems that someone identifying herself as Helen Golay called a towing service a block from where McDavid had been struck and killed. The call came in an hour before his body was found. The car in question, a 1999 Mercury Sable station wagon, had front-end damage and was towed to a street near Rutterschmidt's home.

Nailing Down the Evidence

Police tracked down the Mercury Sable. It had been impounded after receiving numerous parking tickets and was eventually resold when no one came to claim it. Criminalists verified that it did sustain front-end damage and something far more important - blood on the undercarriage. A DNA test was run against McDavid and came back a match.

At the time of the accident, the Mercury Sable was registered to an Encino woman whose name was found by police on a piece of paper when they searched Golay's car. Detectives later determined that the Encino woman had been a victim of identity theft and never owned the car.

The women were held without bail in a federal jail and lost a motion to be released on bail. A judge ruled that they should remain incarcerated because prosecutors had shown probable cause that the pair had committed murder.

Shortly after, on July 31, 2006, Rutterschmidt and Golay were charged with two counts of murder and the special circumstances of murder for financial gain and multiple murder. This meant that they were eligible for the death penalty. They were also charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit murder for financial gain.

The criminal complaint alleged that Golay had collected $348,000 from Vados' life insurance policies and $1.5 million from McDavid's; while Rutterschmidt had collected $246,000 and $674,000 respectively.

In light of the murder charges, the U.S. Attorney's Office dismissed the fraud case. They retained the option of refiling it at another time if the women were acquitted of murder.

The Preliminary Hearing

In March 2007, the women underwent a four-day preliminary hearing in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom. Gone were the flashy clothes, excessive makeup and bleached blonde hair. Instead, two weary-looking elderly women sat at the counsel table with their natural dark hair. They looked every day of their 70-plus years.

Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Shellie Samuels had no sympathy. She said the victims likely suffered a slow painful death if they had been awake when the car ran over them.

The women had a systematic plan of housing, feeding and clothing the men for two years, waiting for the period to pass when insurance companies could contest the policy. "It was a huge investment," Samuels said, adding that the women were too old to wait for the men to die naturally. "The only way for the fraud to pay off is to kill these victims."

In all, Vados had been covered by more than 12 policies and McDavid, 23 policies, Samuels said.

Other witnesses included Hilary Adler, who testified that her purse had been stolen from a Santa Monica health club in 2003. Her identification had then been used to buy the Mercury Sable. Police later found a copy of her driver's license in Rutterschmidt's home.

A DNA expert also testified that the blood evidence found on the Mercury Sable was McDavid's with such certainty that for it to belong to someone else was a 1-in-10 quadrillion chance.

The case appeared strong enough to go to trial. When the judge told the women that they'd be facing a jury, Golay remained stoic and Rutterschmidt looked like she was going to cry.

The Trial

On Oct. 24, 2007, prosecutors decided that they would not seek the death penalty against the duo, citing their ages. It was the last hurdle that remained before going to trial.

Then, finally, a jury was seated and opening statements were heard on March 18, 2008. Journalists packed the Los Angeles courtroom to see the drama that had made news around the world continue to unfold. Part of the fascination was seeing how these women had fared in jail. Gone were the bleached blonde hairdos, bright red lips, manicured nails and short skirts. Instead, two women aged 77 and 75 sat at the counsel table wearing demure black pantsuits, no makeup and long gray hair that was worn straight without the benefit of hot rollers and tons of hairspray.

"They waited for two years, with murder on their minds each of those days," Deputy District Attorney Truc Do told the jury.

The prosecutor took the jury through a PowerPoint presentation showing the insurance paper trail and then a bombshell: a videotaped conversation secretly recorded between the two women while they were in jail. The pair argued over their predicament, with Rutterschmidt complaining that Golay had caused the situation by taking out too many insurance policies.

Despite this, defense attorneys have said they will vindicate their clients. The trial is estimated to last a month. If convicted, the Rutterschmidt and Golay could be sentenced to a lifetime in prison without any hope of parole, seeing a hairstylist, Bloomingdale's fall sale, or plastic surgeon.

Source

The Jonestown Massacre

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:23:00 +0000

James Warren "Jim" Jones

James Warren "Jim" Jones (May 13, 1931 - November 18, 1978) was the American founder of the Peoples Temple, which became synonymous with group suicide after the November 18, 1978 mass murder-suicide by poison in their isolated agricultural intentional community called Jonestown, located in Guyana, South America. Over 900 people died from cyanide poisoning or gunshot wounds in the aftermath of Jones ordering his men to kill visiting Congressman Leo Ryan and numerous members of his entourage.

Jones was born in Crete, Indiana, to Lyneta Putnam and James Thurman Jones. He would later claim part Cherokee descent through his mother. His interest in religion began during his childhood, mainly because he found making friends difficult, though initially he vacillated on his church of choice.

He graduated from Richmond High School in Richmond, Indiana and became a preacher in the 1950s. He obtained a bachelors degree at Butler University in 1961, and after graduate school at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, Jones sold pet monkeys door-to-door to raise the money to fund his own church which would be named Wings of Deliverance. He later renamed his church the Peoples Temple; it was located in Indianapolis. Jones became an ordained minister in 1964 in a mainstream Christian denomination, the Disciples of Christ. The church was distinctive for its equal treatment of African Americans, and many of them became members of the church. He began a struggle for racial equality and social justice, which he dubbed apostolic socialism. After leaving Indiana, the Peoples Temple made its home in Redwood Valley, California, since Jones believed it was one of the few places in the world likely to survive a nuclear holocaust.

Jones authored a booklet, "The Letter Killeth" pointing out what he felt were the contradictions, absurdities, and atrocities in the Bible, but also stating that the Bible contained great truths. He was particularly fascinated with his ability to manipulate people. Jones perfected his craft and was very skilled in his new found talent. He claimed to be an incarnation of Jesus, Akhenaten, the Buddha, Lenin, and Father Divine and performed supposed miracle healings to attract new converts. Members of Jones' church called him "Father" and believed their movement was the solution to the problems of society; many did not distinguish Jones from the movement. The church gradually moved away from mainstream Protestant Christianity.

In the summer of 1977, Jones and most of the 900 members of the People's Temple moved to Guyana from San Francisco after an investigation into the church for tax evasion had begun. Jones named the closed settlement Jonestown after himself. His stated intention was to create an agricultural utopia in the jungle, free from racism and based on socialist principles.

People who had left the organization prior to its move to Guyana told the authorities of brutal beatings, murders and of a mass suicide plan, but they were not believed. In spite of the tax evasion allegations, Jones was still widely respected for setting up a racially mixed church which helped the disadvantaged. Around 70% of the inhabitants of Jonestown were black and impoverished.

Religious scholar Mary McCormick Maaga argued that Jones' authority waned after he moved to the isolated commune, because he was not needed for recruitment and he could not hide his drug addiction from rank and file members.

Jim Jones And The Jonestown Tragedy

In November 1978, U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan led a fact-finding mission to the Jonestown settlement in Guyana after allegations of human rights abuses by relatives of Temple members in the U.S. Ryan's delegation, which included Don Harris, an NBC network news reporter, along with a cameraman, and a TIME magazine reporter, arrived in Jonestown on November 15 and spent three days interviewing residents. Ryan's delegation was originally denied access to the camp, where it was later learned that the residents were practicing songs and dance. The delegation was granted access on November 17. However, it left hurriedly on the morning of Saturday November 18, after an attempt was made on Ryan's life by a man armed with a knife. The attack was thwarted, bringing the visit to an abrupt end. Congressman Ryan and his people succeeded in taking with them fifteen People's Temple members who had expressed a wish to leave. At that time, Jones made no attempt to prevent their departure. However, People's Temple survivors reported that a group from Jonestown left shortly afterwards in a truck with the intention of stopping the delegation and members from leaving the country alive.

Surviving delegation members later told police that as they were boarding two planes at the airstrip, the truck with Jones' armed guards arrived and began shooting at them, killing Congressman Ryan and five others. At the same time, one of the supposed defectors, Larry Layton, drew a weapon and began firing on members of the party. An NBC cameraman was able to capture footage of the shooting. When the gunmen departed, six people were dead: Representative Ryan, Don Harris, a reporter from NBC, a cameraman from NBC, a newspaper photographer, and one defector from the Peoples Temple. Surviving the attack were former California State Senator Jackie Speier, a staff member for Ryan; Richard Dwyer, the Deputy Chief of Mission from the U.S. Embassy at Georgetown and allegedly an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency; and Bob Flick, a producer for NBC News. Later that same day, 913 inhabitants of Jonestown, 276 of them children, died in what has commonly been labeled a mass suicide. However, because there is much ambiguity regarding whether many who participated did so voluntarily or were forced (or even killed outright), some feel that mass murder is a more accurate description. Some followers obeyed Jones' instructions to commit "revolutionary suicide" by drinking cyanide-laced grape flavored Flavor Aid (often misidentified as Kool-Aid) along with a sedative. Children were given the drink first and families were told to lie down together. The mass suicide had been practiced in simulated events called "White Nights" on a regular basis. Others died by forced cyanide injection or by being shot. A total of 167 church members escaped the mass killing.

Aftermath of the suicides. The vat containing the poison is visible in the foreground

No video was taken during the mass suicide, though the FBI did recover a 45 minute audio of the suicide in progress. Jones can be heard saying, "Do not be afraid to die ... death is your friend ... don't fear the Reaper". Jones was found dead sitting in a deck chair with a gunshot wound to the head. It is unknown if he had been murdered or if he had committed suicide. An autopsy of his body showed levels of the barbiturate phenobarbital which would have been lethal to humans who had not developed physiological tolerance. His drug usage (including various LSD and marijuana experimentations) was confirmed by his son, Stephan, and Jones's doctor in San Francisco.

In MacArthur Park, Los Angeles on December 13, 1973, Jones was arrested and charged with soliciting a man for sex in a movie theater bathroom known for homosexual activity. The man was an undercover Los Angeles Police Department vice officer. Jones is on record as later telling his followers that he was "the only true heterosexual," but at least one account exists of his sexually abusing a male member of his congregation in front of the followers, ostensibly to prove the man's own homosexual tendencies.

One of his sources of inspiration was the controversial International Peace Mission movement leader Father Divine. Jones had borrowed the term "revolutionary suicide" from Black Panther leader Huey Newton who had argued "the slow suicide of life in the ghetto" ought to be replaced by revolutionary struggle that would end only in victory (socialism and self determination) or revolutionary suicide (death).

Jones married Marceline, a nurse, with whom he had two sons, one biological and one adopted. Their biological son, Stephan Gandhi Jones, did not take part in the mass suicide because he was away, playing with the Peoples Temple basketball team in a game against the Guyanese national team. Jones' adopted son, Jim Jones Jr., was African American; he was also playing with the basketball team at the time of the mass suicide. Jones and his wife were the first white couple in Indiana to adopt an African American child.

Jones claimed to be the biological father of John Victor Stoen, who was the legal son of Grace Stoen and her husband Timothy Stoen. The custody dispute over Stoen had great symbolic value for the Peoples Temple and intensified the conflict with its opponents who consisted of, among others, a group called the "Concerned Relatives."

Jim Jones' son Stephan is a businessman and family man who is married with three daughters. He appeared in the recent documentary Jonestown: Paradise Lost which aired on the History Channel and Discovery Channel. He has stated he will not watch the documentary and that he does not mourn his father, only his mother Marceline. Jim Jr., who lost his wife and unborn child at Jonestown, returned to San Francisco. He remarried and has three sons from this marriage. One of them, Rob Jones, currently plays basketball at the University of San Diego.

Source

Angels Of Death: The Doctors

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 08:51:00 +0000

The Nazi Doctors

Children were fond of him, and he brought them sweets and even gave them rides to the place where they were to be exterminated. Joseph Mengele, the doctor of Auschwitz and ultimate Angel of Death, was an anomaly.

A leader in the Nazi biomedical vision, he thrived on experiments with genetic abnormalities. Even surpassing Hitler at times, Mengele has come to embody the archetype of Absolute Evil, perhaps because he so egregiously violated his professional oath to honor and preserve life.

Mengele arrived in Auschwitz on May 30, 1943. He was 32, from a Catholic family, and had long been a Nazi enthusiast. In school, his specialty had been physical anthropology and genetics, and he was fully committed to bringing science into the service of the Nazi enterprise. In fact, he specifically asked to be sent to Auschwitz because of opportunities such a place could provide for his research.

In charge of the "selections" process, he'd show up at the prisoner transports looking quite elegant, and would decide at a glance each person's destiny. If anyone started trouble over being separated from a relative, he might wordlessly beat or shoot them both. He appeared to have no conscience, and sent anyone with an imperfection (including imperfect height) right to the gas chamber. However, he kept the twins, as many sets of doubles as he could find. They were destined for his labs.

Mengele enjoyed his powerful position and was completely at home with his tasks. To uphold the Nazi ideal of racial purification was his driving motivation. Yet no one quite knew what to expect. Even as he separated families and killed with impunity, he might step into the role of concerned physician and whimsically allow some people to live. The power of life and death resided in him.

In his desire to improve the efficiency of the camp as a killing machine, he taught other doctors how to give phenol injections to a long line of prisoners, quickly ending their lives. He also shot people, and by some reports he tossed live babies into the crematoria. Throughout all of this, he kept a detached, efficient demeanor and viewed himself as strictly a scientist.

Mengele's great passion was his research on twins. They were weighed, measured, and compared in every way. Blood was endlessly withdrawn and they were questioned about their family histories. Some he would kill for pathological examinations, dissecting a few himself and keeping a few parts preserved. Others he might operate on without anesthesia, removing limbs or sexual organs. He even did some sex-change operations. If one twin died during these experiments, the other was no longer of use, so he or she was simply gassed.

Substances were injected into living children to see how they reacted, often damaging or killing them. It didn't matter much to Mengele; there were always more on the way. Yet even as he targeted them for mutilation or death, he'd play with them and show great affection. Afterward, he might walk around with their heads or pin their eyes to a bulletin board.

He also studied dwarves and particular types of mutilating diseases, but one odd experiment was his attempt to change eye color to blue. He'd inject the eyes of children with a chemical that caused immense pain and even blindness, but which failed to have the desired effect. Those who worked with him thought him scientifically irresponsible and naive.

Overall, Mengele was caught up with the idea of genetic cultivation of a superior race, and his esteemed position there at the camp fed his desire to be a god. He kept notes on all of his procedures to send to his mentor, but most of these were lost. After the war, Mengele escaped the Nuremburg trials and fled to South America. He died in 1979 and his remains were identified by a team of forensic anthropologists. Even so, his evil lives on in the fictions and fantasies of a cruel doctor who killed without conscience and was responsible for the destruction of many thousands of innocent people.

While some doctors go into the profession precisely for power over life and death, that anyone in the healing profession would so indifferently inflict pain and destruction on those in his care is rather jarring. Unfortunately, doctors who harm are difficult to detect and stop. Some are careful, having vulnerable victims easily within reach, and others are actually protected by the medical establishment. Let's look at a recent case where an obvious sociopath got away with killing because no one bothered to listen to those who complained. In some respects, Dr. Michael Swango practiced his fiendish experiments like a contemporary Mengele.

Swango, The Experimenter

Ruth Barrick was a neurosurgery patient. She'd hit her head and nearly died, but was doing well there at the Ohio State University Medical Center. Dr. Michael Swango, an intern, told a nurse that he was going to check on her. The nurse thought this was strange, and when she later checked on Barrick herself, she found the woman barely breathing. Calling a code, she and the medical team managed to stabilize Barrick's vital signs and she recovered.

Then a few days later, Swango went into Barrick's room again. Another nurse checked on him several times and spotted several syringes. After nearly half an hour with the patient, Swango left, and when the nurse went in to see Barrick, she found the woman once again in a very bad state. While she administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, she heard Dr. Swango come in and say, "That is so disgusting."

Yet her efforts were useless. Ruth Barrick was dead and the nurse suspected that Swango had done something to cause it.

In fact, before he disappeared from the place, five patients died and several grew terribly ill. He'd also given a "spicy" chicken dinner to several coworkers, all of whom had become ill afterward. Swango was clearly a menace.

Even so, throughout his medical career, people had covered for Swango, and the same thing would happen again and again: He was allowed to get away with murder. His fellow students knew that he was unfit for a medical career---was in fact downright weird. They called him "Double-O Swango" because where medical care was concerned, he seemed to have a black thumb. What they didn't realize was that he truly had a license to kill. It seemed he'd entered the medical profession precisely as a cover for what he wanted to do to people. He had no compassion and he certainly had some bizarre ideas on what it meant to be a doctor. Yet this athletic, blue-eyed blonde always managed to charm his superiors into believing in him. Despite a lackluster performance, he always managed to pass through the system.

It wasn't just the medical establishment, either. Even his mother seemed to look the other way when he expressed an intense interest in violent deaths. She'd clip newspaper articles for him, assuring herself and everyone who commented on the oddity of this interest that the "information" would further Michael's medical career. He was learning things.

No doubt that's true, but what he was learning to do was bring about the deaths of other people. He found it exciting to walk out of the ER to inform worried parents of the death of their child, or to rush to an accident scene were bodies were twisted and torn apart. He lived for this kind of high.

In retrospect, it's difficult to understand how he managed to even become a doctor, let alone practice for almost two decades.

In 1983, Swango graduated from Southern Illinois School of Medicine in Springfield, Illinois, although he was a year behind his classmates for failure to complete his assignments. He served his internship at Ohio State University, but when his post was finished, it was not extended---partly because of suspicions that no one seemed to want to address. After he left, the authorities began to investigate him for murder, but found insufficient evidence to charge him with anything. It's not easy to pin a murder on someone giving injections to patients when that's what doctors do.

Swango then started work with a team of paramedics, who seemed to get along with him. Feeling comfortable, he told them his ultimate fantasy: "It's like this," he said. "Picture a school bus crammed with kids smashing head-on with a trailer truck loaded down with gasoline. We're summoned. We get there in a jiffy just as another gasoline truck rams the bus. Up in flames it goes! Kids are hurled through the air, everywhere, on telephone poles, on the street, especially along an old barbed wire fence along the road. All burning."

The others were put off. This guy was sick. They kept their distance.

Then one day Swango brought in a box of doughnuts, and four of his fellow workers who partook of it got severely ill. Another time, he offered soft drinks to two others, who also got sick. They quickly caught on to what he was doing and laid a trap. It soon became clear that Swango was poisoning them. He shrugged off their concerns, yet there was sufficient evidence from the amount of poison found in his locker and home to convict him of six counts of aggravated battery, for which he did less than three years in prison.

Despite that, he was accepted into several more positions in Virginia, South Dakota, New York, and Zimbabwe. All he had to do was lie, fake his credentials, adopt aliases, and misrepresent his past employment history. No one checked, and wherever he went, colleagues became ill and patients died. Each time authorities closed in, he was gone.

When Swango was finally stopped by the FBI, he'd been on a roll for almost two decades in seven different hospitals. In many cases, someone had seen him with a syringe, and several patients who recovered indicated that it was the blond doctor who had injected them before they lost the ability to feel and move.

In 1998, he was charged with killing five patients in a hospital in Zimbabwe, where he had worked from 1994-1996. However, complications with extraditing him to Africa meant that he would not be prosecuted. Then the FBI looked into his history, and agents estimated that he may have been responsible for directly causing well over thirty deaths. Apparently he just liked to see what would happen when he did this or that to a human being, whether patient or colleague.

James Stewart, who wrote Blind Eye after spending two years documenting Swango's swath of death, called him a psychopath who would never stop. "If he is free," Stewart said, "he will find a means and a place to do it again."

Arraigned on July 17, 2000, he finally confessed in September. He pleaded guilty to fatally poisoning three patients in 1993 at a New York hospital, and was convicted of another murder in Ohio. In a plea deal, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The extent of his evil likely surpasses his admissions and may never be known.

Swango is not alone in this type of infamy. Throughout history there have been doctors who killed, and the list of motives is long and complex. Let's have a look at the most common ones.

Motives: Part 1

Killers in the medical profession seem especially heinous because while they take an oath to do everything in their power to keep someone alive, they tend to see their patients as guinea pigs. Their motive for becoming doctors seems to be more about power, control, and gain than about healing and helping. Victims are readily available and it's not that difficult to cover up certain types of murders in a major hospital, especially if the patients are elderly or have a serious illness. What's one more injection?

While nurses tend to be mercy killers, that's been true of few doctors. Some of the more mundane motives include:

Heroism: They find a way to turn a medical case into a dramatic emergency in which they play the lead role. Even if the person dies, they appeared to try as hard as they could to be the rescuer, which wins accolades from colleagues and staff.

Misplaced compassion: Dr. John Bodkins Adams was charged with 21 counts of murder in 1957 when it was found that some forty of his elderly female patients had died under mysterious circumstances. While Adams was acquitted, it was clear that he had built up severe dependency in his patients of morphine or barbiturates as a way to "ease" the passage. He did not consider this to be murder.

To cover up another crime: While it hasn't been proved that he actually molested them, oral surgeon Tony Protopappas fatally overdosed three young female patients, and all of them were attractive. Dr. Marcel Petiot, who was executed for murdering twenty-four people (though he claimed it was sixty-three), apparently did away with a girl in his employ who got pregnant. He also murdered wealthy Jewish patients in the 1940s with strychnine to get away with stealing their worldly goods.

Murder by tacit consent: During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the medical establishment needed corpses to train students. It became a practice to rob fresh graves, and eventually when that activity became difficult, some people supplied the freshest of bodies by simply killing them. One such person was William Burke. Together with his partner William Hare, he would get his victims drunk and then either grab them from behind in an arm lock around the throat or sit on their chests while holding their nose and mouth closed. In nine months, these two managed to kill 16 people and then sold them one after another to the medical school in Edinburgh, Scotland, for an average of ten pounds. While physician Robert Knox noticed how fresh the corpses were and that they obviously had not been buried, he didn't ask questions. He just paid for the bodies. By doing so, he participated in murder---and got away with it.

Domestic issues: Harvey Hawley Crippen killed his wife in England in 1910, in part to escape her domineering ways and in part because he was in love with his young secretary. One night he poisoned Belle, shot her in the head, dismembered her, and buried her parts in his cellar (or tossed some into the canal.) He told her friends that she had left him to join a lover in America, but a Scotland Yard inspector didn't buy it. He questioned the dentist, who subsequently fled, leaving his house available to the detective's search. Bell's parts were found and Crippen was caught, tried, and hanged.

Another case of domestic motives was Dr. Sam Sheppard, which dominated the news at various times from the 1950's, when the murder of his wife Marilyn occurred in the Cleveland area, to a couple of years ago. Handsome, athletic, and philandering Dr. Sheppard claimed that a bushy-haired intruder broke into his home, bludgeoned his pregnant wife to death and knocked him unconscious in two separate incidences, all without waking his young son and the family dog in a nearby bedroom. Police, judge and jury did not believe his incredible story and Sheppard went to prison. Given the prejudicial newspaper coverage at his trial, super lawyer F. Lee Bailey won Sheppard a second trial after which the doctor was acquitted. A sympathetic television series and movie called The Fugitive gave Dr. Sheppard an additional publicity boost. In the late 1990's, his son attempted to have the State of Ohio declare his late father innocent using the latest DNA techniques, but was unsuccessful. Many of the people involved in the original murder investigation, as well as many people in the Cleveland area where the murder occurred, believe that Sheppard was very guilty of murdering his wife so that he could then marry his girlfriend.

Motives: Part 2

Certain doctors actually exploit their position for the express purpose of murder, such as those who kill for the following reasons:

Experimentation: People become doctors because they're innately curious about the human body and the only way to experiment with it without being discovered is to kill the victims. H. H. Holmes is a good example, and if Jack the Ripper was a physician, as some suspect, this may have motivated him, too. Obviously, Joseph Mengele had this motive, although he did not have to find ways to cover it up. He was free to experiment all he wanted on creatures that were considered less than human.

Financial profit: Some doctors participate in schemes to defraud insurance companies by killing people and sharing in the death benefits. Dr. Morris Bolber organized a partnership for this type of crime in Philadelphia in the 1930s. It is estimated that he and his partners killed around fifty people before they were stopped.

Bloodlust: For some, committing a violent death is as exciting as a sexual encounter. They want the heightened feeling that comes from the excitement that results from killing or watching others react to a death. Michael Swango, for example, described a major fatal accident as an ultimate fantasy and also admitted how much he loved coming out of the ER with an erection, knowing he was about to tell parents that their child is dead.

Dr. Francis E. Sweeney was the prime suspect and man who super cop Eliot Ness believed was guilty in a series of thirteen Depression-era murders in Cleveland. Still officially unsolved, the killer was believed to have medical knowledge and, almost uniquely in serial killer history, killed men and women equally by expert decapitation. Sweeney, a brilliant but twisted surgeon, taunted Ness for years about not having sufficient evidence to convict him.

Visionary purposes: Mengele believed that his experiments with people were a way to put science into the service of the Nazi goal of evolving a superior human race. He had a mission to kill.

Punishment and power: Dr. Thomas Neill Cream poisoned four women in part for sadistic pleasure and in part to be their judge and executioner for their immoral behavior. Going to medical school in Canada, he was forced to marry a woman he'd aborted, so he left for England. Then he returned to Canada and that's where he killed a chambermaid who came to him for an abortion. He moved to Chicago where another woman fell victim to his abortion methods. He then killed a man while "treating" his epilepsy because he coveted the man's wife. For that he went to prison for ten years. (Although he claimed as he was hung years later that he was Jack the Ripper, he was in fact behind bars in 1888.) Going to London in 1891, he poisoned four prostitutes with strychnine. Identified and arrested, he was hanged in 1892.

Relief for inner conflicts: Dr. Harold Shipman was convicted in England of 15 counts of murder in 2001. In court, he displayed indifference to the suffering he'd caused many families and contempt for the prosecution, which is indicative of sociopathy. However, according to Dr. Chris Missen, head of forensic psychology at Anglia Polytechnic University, Shipman actually had a secret self that was awash in monumental self-pity. He had watched his mother die when he was seventeen, which he may have interpreted as rejection and abandonment. He wanted the jury to believe that he had an impulse control problem, but in truth, he had been highly organized in the way he altered medical records and adopted the pretense of making proper arrangements. He'd even typed up a will for his last victim and forged her signature. "What might have been perceived as a deep inner hypersensitivity," says Missen, "may have been no more than a swollen ego, in danger of imploding at the least pinprick." Shipman could not handle potential rejection from women the age his mother would have been had she lived, so his older female patients brought out his inner conflicts. That means that what may have become suicidal despair in others turned into a homicidal rage in Shipman. He killed patients to keep from killing himself. If the estimates that his victims number nearly 300 are correct, then he killed an average of one patient a month since his medical career began.

The question can be asked whether it's the position of power that shapes them into killers or whether they're just sociopaths who managed to become doctors. A close look at one of the most flagrant offenders in American history may offer some clues.

America's Arch Fiend

In 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson published a gothic tale called The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Less than a decade later, the public would discover just how frighteningly real such a case could be.

Dr. Holmes liked to swindle insurance companies. Murder for profit was his game, but he also grew to relish his little hobby so much that he began to include torture and other types of experiments prior to death.

His real name was Herman Webster Mudgett, born in New Hampshire in 1860, and he got into the murder business around the same time as Jack the Ripper. While he confessed in 1896, it's not clear how many people he actually killed or whether he told the truth about anything. What is clear is that he did kill men, women, and children, and gave little thought to what he was doing. Had he not been caught, he'd likely have continued to con and kill for the rest of his life.

Even as an adolescent, surgery fascinated him. He'd catch animals and perform anatomical experiments on them. When he was 18, he went to medical school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, graduating at the age of 24. While there, he stole corpses to practice more interesting experiments than the animals had afforded him. He also learned how to use the corpses to defraud life insurance companies, by using acid to obliterate their features and then giving them the fictitious names on the insurance policies that he'd already taken out. He was banned from the place after getting caught with a female corpse, so he moved on to Englewood, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.

There he abandoned his first wife and took on the alias by which he would become renowned: Henry Howard Holmes. He secured a position as a druggist, and it wasn't long before the owner of the business, a widow, disappeared. Holmes used the business to sell fake cures and soon became wealthy. Though not divorced, he married again, although this wife left him after only a year.

Then Holmes built his castle. It was a huge, three-story hotel-like construction that included soundproof sleeping chambers with peepholes, asbestos-padded walls, gas pipes, sliding walls, and vents that Holmes controlled from his bedroom. The sleeping chambers also locked from the outside. The building had secret passages, hallways that went in circles, false floors, rooms with torture equipment (such as a device that stretched people to twice their height), and a specially equipped surgery. There were also greased chutes that emptied into a cellar, and a very large stove in the office.

Into this castle Holmes lured young women to seduce and drug them. Then he placed them into chambers into which he pumped lethal gases. Sometimes he'd ignite the gas and incinerate his victims. He'd watch them react and when they died, he'd slide them down the chutes into his cellar, where vats of acid and other chemicals awaited them. He'd cut up their corpses on a dissecting table and them dump them into the vats, but keep some of the organs. Then he'd sell the bleached skeletons to medical schools.

One of his victims was a woman who'd become pregnant by him. Botching her abortion, he killed her and then poisoned her teenage daughter. Other victims were people who'd rented rooms from him in order to attend the nearby 1893 World's Fair.

Holmes then married a third time and hired a lackey, Herman Pitezel. In fact, Pitezel got into the act by taking out a life insurance policy on himself and planning a way to "disappear." He and Holmes planned to find a suitable corpse to perpetuate the fraud and then split the proceeds. Pitezel should have known what was in store. Holmes was a greedy con artist who wanted all of the money for himself.

But eventually he made a mistake, which put him on the run. To get money, he killed two sisters from Texas and set fire to their house to try to claim the insurance money. (Another version says that he set fire to part of the castle to get insurance money.) Whichever is the case, it prompted an investigation, which scared Holmes sufficiently for him to leave Chicago.

He went right to Texas and started swindling people out of thousands of dollars. Then he stole a horse and the police went after him, catching him in Missouri. He skipped bail and went after Pitezel, who awaited him in Philadelphia. Holmes smothered his accomplice with chloroform and then burned him alive with acid to collect $10,000. Then he persuaded Pitezel's wife and family to escape with him, convincing them that the corpse the authorities had found was not Pitezel. He eventually killed three of the five children, burning the boy in a stove in a rented home and burying the girls in the cellar of yet another place.

Finally, the police grabbed him in Massachusetts and charged him with murder. On the way back to Philadelphia, Holmes bragged endlessly about his criminal career. Some of his alleged schemes seemed wildly improbable, but he did admit that he'd done enough in his life to be hanged twelve times over. He claimed to have the ability to hypnotize people to do whatever he wanted, and when the press got hold of this story, they attributed supernatural powers to the wretched physician. He became known as Bluebeard and even the creature from the recently published Dracula.

While in custody, over fifty people came to the police station to claim that Holmes had victimized them in some kind of con. After locating the bodies of the Pitezel children, investigators soon discovered several complete skeletons and numerous bone fragments in the Chicago castle, but Holmes insisted that he had nothing to do with them. Those people had either taken their own lives, he claimed, or been killed by someone else. He also said he did not kill Pitezel because the despairing man had committed suicide. Even so, a story of grave robbing and a beheaded corpse was traced to Holmes via his own strange tales. It was beginning to look as if his earlier confession might have contained more truth than the police realized, and it soon became clear that Holmes had killed more people than anyone had initially suspected.

In short order, the castle was taken over and remodeled as "Holmes's Horror Castle," to be exhibited as a tourist attraction, but before it opened, it burned to the ground. The police suspected some accomplice of Holmes had done it.

While in prison, Holmes wrote a book to explain how he was innocent of all the charges, but it had little effect on the outcome of his trial. It was so self-serving that no one took it seriously, and there were other more lurid tales about his crimes that made for better reading.

Holmes tried to defend himself at his trial, but was woefully inadequate. On November 4, 1895, he was convicted of the first-degree murder of Herman Pitezel.

Finally, inspired by a considerable payment from the Hearst newspaper syndicate, Holmes wrote out a long confession for The Philadelphia Inquirer, insisting that he was born to be a murderer. It was his aim to become the most notorious murderer in the world, a killer of monstrous proportions, so he said that he'd killed over one hundred people. Having second thoughts, he brought that number down to 27, and did include Pitezel. Giving the public what they wanted in terms of gruesome details on killing and corpses, Holmes claims that he couldn't help but do what he'd done.

"I was born with the Evil One as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world," he lamented. Indeed, he believed that his face was taking an elongated shape of the devil himself, yet he felt no remorse for anything he had done.

Then in one quick move, he recanted the confession, and in fact it turned out that several of his "victims" were not dead at all. Yet so many people who'd rented rooms from him had gone missing that estimates of his true victims reached around 200, although it might have been closer to about fifty.

On May 7, 1896, Holmes was taken to the hangman's noose, and even there he changed his story. He claimed to have killed only two women, and in the middle of a sentence, the trapdoor opened and he was hung.

Because he feared grave robbers---especially physicians who wanted to study his brain---he asked that his body be buried deep and covered entirely with cement. The grave was dug ten feet down and the coffin was so heavy that it tumbled into the hole upside down. That's how it remained.

While Holmes is almost larger than life in his deadly deeds, another physician has brought the anomaly of the killing healer into sharper focus. Rather than target patients, he slaughtered his entire family.

How Doctors Can Kill

Since the motives for murder by a medical professional are all over the map, it's instructive to narrow down the types of killers to serial killers who happen to be doctors and doctors who kill repeatedly for gain or power. Situational murders, such as killing one's wife, are generally easy to explain, as are mercy killings. Doctors who kill over and over, or who kill in some utterly brutal manner, are more difficult to understand.

According to Lawrence Miller, a police psychologist in West Palm Beach, Florida, there's a neurological facet to predatory killing that is linked to the typical hunting behavior of males. While serial killers tend to act out of some intense fantasy, their hunger for violence is on the extreme end of a continuum linked to the stalking and predation that characterize many normal social activities of human life, such as hunting, romantic pursuit, entrepreneurial enterprises, and group combat.

"It is pathological," says Miller, "only in terms of degree, not the nature of the act." In other words, it's not a brain disease that sets them apart in kind. They act out, feel empowered, and continue to want that energy, just as males in battle want the thrill of victory. Some feel better after a murder, others feel better during it.

From the idea that such behavior is on a continuum with normal human behaviors arise theories like that from Robert Jay Lifton. To participate in evil, doctors must possess the psychological mechanism that allows it. He proposes the notion of "doubling" as an explanation for the Nazi doctors, and then generalizes this as a possibility for any other medical practitioner. There's a prior self---the original person before doubling takes place---and the doubled self---the one that emerges from some dark place.

Lifton calls doubling the "Faustian bargain," because one sacrifices something of oneself to gain something one thinks one needs. Doubling is "the division of the self into two functioning wholes, so that a part-self acts as an entire self."

This is not to be confused with a dissociative identity disorder in which the person has two functional personalities, nor a schizoid type of psychosis. Doubling is in fact an adaptive mechanism in the human psyche that under certain conditions helps us to survive, but it can also be stretched too far. The doctor that doubles in order to kill learns to use his ability to adapt as a way to form a self-structure that encompasses all of his behaviors. That is, he can redistribute his sense of morality to accommodate his killing by having one part of himself disavow the other. He's aware of what he's doing but doesn't have to consider the meaning of it.

The doubled self is responsible for what it does—which often involves altering what murder means---and whatever the prior self gains from this shift reinforces the doubling behavior, ensuring more of it in the future.

The doubled self can act autonomously but can still be connected to the prior self from which it arises. That is, a doctor can view himself as a compassionate, humane person and still go out and kill. The killing self provides a means for the prior self to survive as much as possible without guilt. The killing self is the one doing the deeds, not the "real" self.

However, there's always the danger that the killing self can take over and become the dominant self, as seemed to have been the case with H. H. Holmes and many of the Nazi doctors. The killing self may so violate the prior self that it gives way, finally, to evil. Nevertheless, to call forth the evil in the first place was a moral choice, so the prior self is still morally responsible if not actively feeling guilty.

Depending on the personality involved, several types of doubling can occur:

The limited doubler: This person kills only under certain circumstances that he can somehow allow, such as in response to great financial or personal need. In Auschwitz, many doctors did what they were told in order to stay alive.

The enthusiastic doubler: This person is pleased to know that he can kill, get away with it, and still function normally. He has an adaptive affinity to it.

The conflicted doubler: Both parts of the self retain their power, so that killing produces guilt but the person cannot imagine resolution, so the killing continues.

Lifton believes that doctors as a group may be more susceptible to doubling than others, because they're used to skeletons and corpses, and because they learn to develop a "medical self" with a professional demeanor that may hide many things. They become inured to death and learn to function under many diverse demands. Add to that a heroic vision such as that offered by the Nazis and you get a lot of psychological support for doubling. They can be the paradoxical healer/killer, living in associated but separate realities.

Looking back on the cases, the idea of doubling seems to cover them all, although it still doesn't explain why a person would choose to double as a killer in the first place. To adapt to Nazi conditions is one thing, but to kill one's entire family or a succession of vulnerable patients is quite another. Doubling may be more insidious than adaptive, more an acceptance of the capacity for evil than a way to survive.

At least some countries are responding, however, by instituting more agencies to monitor death rates in hospitals and nursing care. Hopefully these safeguards will detect people like Shipman and Swango before they harm many people.

Family Doctor and Sexual Predator by Marilyn Bardsley

It's hard to imagine a family doctor who is more interested in the family's pretty teenaged girls rather than the health of his patients, but Josephakis Charalambous was just that. This was not an isolated incident, but a way of life for this most decadent of physicians.

A Canadian citizen, he had been born in 1952 of Greek parentage on the island of Cyprus, but had immigrated to Canada at the age of eight with his parents and siblings and settled in Vancouver, British Columbia. According to John Griffiths in Fatal Prescription, his father was a harsh man who was hated and disrespected by his family and who was eventually estranged from his wife and children.

Charalambous was indulged by his mother, who did everything she could to help him complete his medical education. Despite what appears to be a reasonably good relationship with his mother and sister, Charalambous had a very negative view of women. They were trash from his point of view: objects to be seduced and then discarded.

His desire to dominate and control women began early in his life and characterized his behavior in high school and university. Intimately tied into his desire to become a physician was his need to be able to attract desirable women with his professional status. However, his medical degree, once attained, was not the automatic magnet that he had hoped for. Women were not flocking to him and he often used prostitutes to satisfy his sexual requirements.

Things started to go seriously off track at age 33 when in 1985 he became obsessed with a 15-year-old girl, Shelley Joel, who was a patient of his, as were the other members of her family. Very much against the wishes of her parents, Charalambous pushed himself on the young woman and alienated her from her family.

Griffiths suggests that Charalambous married Shelley a couple of years later to avoid censure from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Canada. All the time, the brainwashed Shelley was physically and mentally abused by him. And if that was not bad enough, he cheated on her with prostitutes. But that was nothing compared to his next move.

He had set out to conquer two young female patients Sian (pronounced Shawn) and Katie Simmonds. The girls complained to their father that the doctor had crossed the boundary of professionalism with his attentions. In 1991, their father went right to the College of Physicians and Surgeons with his concerns and the girls' formal complaints were lodged.

The subsequent trial transcripts stated: "It wasn't until November of 1992, that Charalambous was told that hearings into the girls' complaints would be held in March of 1993. On the morning of January 27, 1993, between 11:00 a.m. and 12:00 noon, Sian Simmonds was killed in her basement suite in Surrey, B.C. She was shot twice and then beaten on the head numerous times with a blunt object. David Walter Schlender confessed to the killing in exchange for police protection for his family. He entered a plea of guilty to second degree murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment without eligibility for parole for twenty years. The theory of the Canadian prosecutors was that Charalambous hired Brian West to arrange the murder of Sian Simmonds in order to prevent her from testifying against him at the College hearing, and that West had then hired Schlender to carry out the murder.

"David Schlender was a drug user and owed money to Brian West. West told Schlender that Simmonds and her sister had to be killed to prevent them from testifying against a karate instructor friend. Charalambous was a karate instructor. West threatened Schlender and his family several times. Schlender agreed to kill Simmonds and her sister. West provided Schlender with a handgun, silencer, and bullets. West then narrowed his instructions to include only the blonde girl that drove the red jeep and lived at the Simmonds' house.

"On 27 January 1993, after drinking beer and smoking cocaine with a friend named Brian Cann, Schlender drove alone in Cann's car to Simmonds' house. He then returned home and smoked cocaine with his wife. Finally Schlender went back to Simmonds' house armed with a gun. Once at the house, he scratched the door of her jeep with a key. Schlender went to the front door of the house and spoke to the upstairs resident who directed Schlender to the basement. He spoke to Sian Simmonds, telling her that he had accidentally scratched her jeep. She went outside with Schlender to examine the jeep and then the two returned to the residence. Schlender gave Simmonds Cann's insurance documents and went into the bathroom. Schlender emerged from the bathroom with the gun. He approached Simmonds who was sitting at the table and held the gun to the back of her head. Simmonds saw the gun and panicked. Schlender shot her and then beat her to death with the gun."

Clearly, the testimony of Schlender was very damaging to the doctor, but his wife Shelley did quite a bit on her own. Charalambous had told her too many details about the murder that she could not have known otherwise. When she testified about these details that her husband had admitted to her, it carried tremendous weight with the jury.

Charalambous was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole until 25 years of the sentence had been served.

On May 13, 1997 Josephakis Charalambous' appeal was dismissed by the British Columbia Court of Appeal.

Dr. Bierenbaum's Missing Wife - Part One
by Marilyn Bardsley

Gail Katz was an attractive young woman from a solidly middle-class Long Island Jewish family. But she was a troubled girl suffering from low self-esteem, depression and anxiety. A bright girl, she nevertheless dropped out of college, popped Quaaludes and other pills, and drank more than she should. At one point, all of her neuroses, chemical dependencies and too much alcohol ganged up on her and she tried to commit suicide after breaking up with a boyfriend.

Unlike her sister, who was studying to be a lawyer, Gail was drifting without a clear goal in life. She flitted from relationship to relationship, none of them permanent. Then in 1979, at the age of 23 she met Bob Bierenbaum, a young doctor at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City. He had a very high IQ, played the guitar, flew small planes and wasn't bad looking. Better yet, he came from a good family and his father was an accomplished physician.

Bob pressed the relationship and soon they were engaged. Gail's parents were ecstatic: not only was he Jewish, but he was a doctor as well. Gail's practical side finally surfaced and she decided that, even though she did not really love Bob and didn't find him sexually attractive, he was too good a matrimonial catch to ignore.

Before they were married, she told her girlfriends of some unusual incidents that would come up many times in the future. Gail told people that Bob had admitted to inadvertently killing his former fiancée's cat. Then, when a stray cat that Gail picked up annoyed Bob, she claimed that he tried to kill the animal. To protect it, she took it to an animal shelter.

She also mentioned scenes that suggested that Bob was irrational and prone to fits of rage over things like finding her smoking.

Every one to whom she confided these incidents urged her to break off the engagement, particularly since she had serious doubts about her feelings about Bob.

To keep her parents happy and not lose a potentially huge meal ticket, Gail went ahead with the marriage. Things seemed to deteriorate almost immediately. They fought loudly and frequently. Once, she called the police and charged that he tried to choke her.

On the positive side, she went back to finish her college degree, but looked for extramarital relationships to satisfy the gaps in her relationship with Bob. Bob seemed to immerse himself in his career and was making himself into a first-class Manhattan surgeon.

Sunday morning, July 7, 1985, everything came to a head. According to Kieran Crowley, author of the very detailed book on the case, The Surgeon's Wife, "Gail, her pretty face contorted with rage, screeched a final ultimatum at Bob. She told him he was pathetic. She revealed her affairs, including her claimed liaison with an Arab. She declared that she loved another man and that she never loved Bob."

Mae Eisenhower in the apartment below heard the fight and said that it was followed by a loud slamming of a door, suggesting that one of the two combatants upstairs had stormed out of the apartment.

Shortly afterwards, one of Gail's friends called and Bob told her that Gail had gone out.

At 3 p.m., a retired textile executive, Joel Davis, saw a woman in a bagel shop that he was convinced was Gail.

At 3:30 p.m., Bob rented a Cessna at Caldwell Airport for a 2-hour flight. Afterwards, he attended his nephew's birthday party. Then he went to his friend's home and during the evening there called his house a couple of times to see if Gail had returned. Bob went home late that evening to an empty apartment.

The next day, Bob called around to several of Gail's friends, colleagues and relatives to see if they knew her whereabouts. He explained that they had argued and Gail had walked out.

Nobody had seen her and nobody had heard from her. She had simply vanished.

Dr. Bierenbaum's Missing Wife - Part Two
by Marilyn Bardsley

It seemed like all of Gail's friends and relatives knew without a doubt that Bob had killed her. Eventually, the police became persuaded as well. However, there was absolutely no evidence to tie him to Gail's disappearance. And there was Mae Eisenhower who heard the door slam after the argument. Maybe Gail walked out to link up with one of her boyfriends or someone who supplied her with the pills she took.

The police were happy to keep this drama as a missing person's case. Without a body, they were loathe to accuse a doctor from a good family with second-degree murder.

And so the case remained on a shelf for many years to come.

Bob had relocated to Las Vegas and became a very successful plastic surgeon. He was known for his acts of charity and his patients thought highly of him. After a number of brief relationships, he finally met another doctor, Janet Chollet, and they were married. In November of 1998, Janet bore him a daughter.

It looked as though things were finally going well in Dr. Bierenbaum's life. That is, until Andy Rosenzweig, an investigator in the Manhattan D.A.'s office was getting ready to retire. He wanted to close some old cases before he left the job.

New resources were put onto the case and people, especially Bob's old girlfriends and Gail's friends, were interviewed extensively. There were a few titillating discoveries but it was not clear that they were not the result of either bitter broken off relationships between Bob and former girlfriends and exaggerations by Gail in conversations with her friends and psychiatrists.

Still, there was no body and no real evidence to tie Bob to a crime. However, it did not stop a grand jury from indicting him and a jury from convicting him of second-degree murder. The woman judge, who was very hard on crimes against women, gave Bob 20 years to life.

It's not a pretty case: both Gail and Bob had serious personality flaws and never should have married. Bob's bad temper was reasonably well documented, but so was Gail's propensity to use drugs and alcohol to excess. She added a number of extramarital flings to her risky lifestyle. When she apparently stormed out of the apartment that morning in 1985, did she go looking for drugs or companionship with someone that was ultimately responsible for her disappearance? Also, it was well documented that Gail suffered from depression and suicidal tendencies which could have also led to her final disappearance.

It is not beyond reasonable doubt that someone other than Bob was responsible for Gail's disappearance. Furthermore, despite Bob's guilt or innocence, it is disturbing to see a man convicted on such circumstantial evidence. He was, after all, a man of accomplishment who was leading a perfectly respectable life as a member of his community, a charitable surgeon, a good husband and father.

The Science of Fasting

During the turn of the nineteenth century and into the early years of the twentieth, spas for the wealthy that purported to "cure" people of contemporary ills were all the rage. Sometimes they offered genuine service but often they were full of quackery, poised simply to siphon off money from trusting clients. Kenneth V. Iserson, in Demon Doctors, and Gregg Olson, in Starvation Heights, offer an account of a female doctor who used her "medicine" for sinister ends.

Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard set up her operation in 1907 in Seattle, Washington, and offered several versions of a published manual of her special method. One of the few female doctors in the country (trained as an osteopath), she presented herself as the only licensed fasting therapist in the country, and her final domain was a sanitarium, Wilderness heights, in the small town of Olalla, across the Puget Sound from Seattle. It was an isolated place, with no way to communicate with the outside world. Exuding self-confidence, Dr. Hazzard assured people that her method was a panacea for all manner of ills, because she was able to rid the body of toxins that caused imbalances in the body. As strange as it may seem, she managed to persuade people to go without food, aside from some water and a thin tomato and asparagus soup, for long periods of time. As their bodies shed "toxins," she required enemas (a fashionable purgative in many such places) and provided vigorous massages meant to accelerate the process.

As patients weakened, Hazzard found ways to encourage them to turn over to her their accounts and power of attorney. Not surprisingly, several died under her "care" and she grew richer. Her bigamous husband, Sam, helped get the patients, once they were very weak, to change their wills to make Dr. Hazzard their beneficiary. Yet when attacked for her methods as patients died, she insisted that they had been near death when they came, and she could not be expected to work miracles. Even with these dire stories, she still drew both disciples and patients from around the world. Local residents dubbed the place Starvation Heights, and it caught the attention of authorities when two wealthy British sisters came to "take the cure."

The Deadly Result

Claire and Dora Williamson had received a copy of Fasting for the Cure of Disease, Hazzard's publication. It purported to have resulted in remarkable recoveries for people who had found little help elsewhere. Hazzard was a natural salesperson who had spread her ideas to an international audience. She had published testimonials from success stories, and the sisters were impressed. A fan of natural cures, they checked in for the treatment on February 27, 1911.

They did not realize that, once there, they would not be able to just leave. In fact, they would be too weak to do so. They agreed to undergo the rigorous fasting, shedding weight to the point where they were nearly mere skeletons. As they grew weaker, Olson points out, they became more committed to the therapy. Suffering was a sign, they were told, that the treatment was working. Even when they became bedridden after two months, the doctor would not allow them to eat. At the same time, she secured their jewelry and land deeds, to "prevent others" from coming into their apartment to rob them. Then she moved them to her newly completed sanitarium, where they could communicate with no one. At that time, they weighed around 75 pounds each and were often delirious.

Claire managed to secretly find someone to send a telegram, but she eventually died, even as Margaret Convey, a faithful nanny, rushed there from Australia. Convey rescued Dora, now said to be insane, before she met the same fate. Dora had been on the treatment for four months, but with Convey's help, she regained her health and proved to be an effective witness—especially photos of her during the latter stage of the fasting cure--when the case came to trial in 1912—as murder. Hazzard was found guilty of manslaughter. The medical establishment removed her license during the legal proceedings, and she claimed that the verdict was just part of the persecution she had suffered all along. The Town Crier wrote that her gender had saved her from the verdict of murder.

During her appeal, two women and two babies died at her center. She spent only two years in prison, and in exchange for her leaving the country, the governor granted a pardon. She went to New Zealand, but eventually returned to Olalla, writes Iserson, and resumed her treatments. Arrested again when another man died, she was fined for violating medical practice. Since she kept no records, the number of people who died (or were intentionally starved to death) under her "care" cannot be estimated.

Oddly enough, Dr. Hazzard's book is available today on several Webs sites that tout her treatment as scientific and effective, but the Skeptical Inquirer assures readers that the claims Hazzard made for its health benefits are both vacuous and bogus.

Source

Celebrity Crime: Lana Turner And Johnny Stompanato

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 07:43:00 +0000

By Mark Gribben
Source

Lana Turner

Lights, Camera, Murder

It's no secret that the glamorous veneer of Hollywood is paper-thin and that beneath the glitzy surface exists a world of greed, violence and decadence. Like a movie set, the Hollywood facade has no depth and cannot stand too close scrutiny. There is no other place where the difference between style and substance is so great. Hollywood is a dream factory, and dreams are not reality.

One can't blame this all on the people who make the movies. No matter how well built the image is of the hero, behind the mask is someone with all the faults and foibles of an average person. But through the lens of celebrity, everything is larger than life: the successes, the excesses and the failures.

Movies created a new kind of idol. In movies, unlike theater, actors could be on hundreds of screens across the country and became "stars." The idea of hitting it big in Hollywood was a powerful draw, and young innocents from all over flocked to the West Coast. Starstruck young hopefuls fell prey to established actors, agents, directors and producers who promised a big break in exchange for their souls or bodies. Tragedy was often the result and the situation was ripe for scandal.

Hollywood needed a huge publicity machine and the studios created stars whose public personae were as false as the roles they played on the silver screen. Innocent young virgins were actually fast-living sex kittens with a taste for drugs and alcohol. Lovable stars were known for their sexual conquests and more than one hero who made the ladies swoon secretly found young men more to his liking.

When scandal broke, it was hard for the Hollywood public relations machine to keep the stories off the front pages. The very newspapers they courted when things were going well were eager to show Hollywood's dark underside. The public ate up gossip about the lifestyles of the rich and famous. It was all the more exciting when one of those stars crashed and burned in full view of their admiring public.

One of the first stars to see his career ruined by scandal was comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle in 1921. After Charlie Chaplin, Fatty was America's most popular comedian and in September 1921 had just signed a three-year $3 million contract. The former Keystone Cop had just completed three pictures and was in San Francisco for a little R&R.

Hollywood insiders knew that meant booze and broads -- the more expensive the liquor and the more innocent the girls, the better Arbuckle liked them. Chaplin's favorite director, Henry Lehrman, would later tell the tabloids that Arbuckle "often bragged to me that he had ripped the dress off an 'uncooperative' girl and ravaged her. In the end, I told him if he didn't keep away from the female dressing-rooms, I'd have him thrown out of Hollywood on his fleshy ear."

Arbuckle gave a big party in his suite in the St. Francis Hotel and a pretty young starlet named Virginia Rappe came to it. The party was quite a wild one and Arbuckle found Rappe unconscious on the floor of one of the bathrooms. Assuming that she had drunk too much, he put her on a bed and left to change his clothes. When he went back to check on her, she had rolled off the bed and was writhing and moaning.

A doctor was called and for nearly a week, Virginia hovered between life and death. Eventually she died, saying over and over: "He hurt me. Roscoe hurt me." After an autopsy revealed Virginia's bladder had been ruptured, Fatty Arbuckle was charged with murder. The press speculated that her injuries meant Fatty had violated the woman in "a most unnatural way," implying that he had used some sort of implement.

It took more than a year and three trials to find Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle not guilty of murdering Virginia Rappe. The "not guilty" verdict wasn't enough to save Fatty's career. For the first time the public had a peek behind the Hollywood curtain and didn't like what it saw. Arbuckle died a bitter and lonely man almost 12 years to the day after Virginia Rappe.

Six months after Virginia's death, director William Desmond Taylor was found dead in his Hollywood bungalow and, in the aftermath, the public learned that Taylor was probably bisexual and had been trying to help starlet Mabel Normand kick a drug habit. Taylor was murdered; the homicide was never solved. Normand's career and that of another starlet-lover of Taylor’s, Mary Miles Minter, were ruined.

In the years that followed Hollywood and crime mixed it up a few times, but nothing truly noteworthy occurred. There was the Black Dahlia murder case and Charlie Chaplin and Erroll Flynn's statutory rape charges, but these cases weren't front-page news east of Los Angeles.

But before long, the public again had something to talk about. The next Hollywood crime to make the headlines involved one of Hollywood's top starlets, her grown-up-too-fast daughter, a gigolo and a gangster mixed in for good measure. A sex and murder mystery, the slaying of Johnny Stompanato by Lana Turner's daughter had all the trappings of a Hollywood melodrama, but this time it was for real.

Curse of the 'It Girl'

Attaining the status of female sex symbol has always been fraught with peril. While starlets who portrayed the virginal characters seemed to escape scandal, the women who were known as vamps more or less attracted trouble. The first three women who were known especially for their ability to play the vamp, Clara Bow, Jean Harlow and Lana Turner, each struggled with adversity. Their individual troubles and the public's reaction to them is indicative of how standards and values change over time.

A little bit of luck, a lot of talent and drive to succeed put Clara Bow, Hollywood's first sex symbol, on top. Dubbed the "It Girl" because of her natural beauty, sensuality and screen charm, Clara was best known for playing flappers. Her voluptuous body, heavy-lidded eyes and pouting, kissable lips made men desire her and women want to be her. "It," of course, is a polite way of referring to sex appeal, and the name came from her 1927 breakthrough film.

Clara enjoyed several successful years but was brought down by scandal in 1930 when an ex-secretary revealed that Bow was a nymphomaniac who spent her huge salary on no-good gigolos. Her film career faltered as the public was unwilling to allow its sex symbols to emulate their screen roles in real life.

Mae West filled the comedic need for a sexually confident woman and studio executives tapped Jean Harlow to be the next sex symbol. Harlow was the first "Blonde Bombshell" whose on-screen personality was a toned-down Mae West and a stepped-up Clara Bow. She reigned supreme in Hollywood for nearly a decade.

The year 1932 was a busy one for Harlow. She married Paul Bern, starred with Clark Gable and almost immediately began an affair with him. Her marriage to Bern was an affectionate one, despite her infidelity. She and Paul genuinely loved each other, but their intimacy was adversely affected by Bern's still-close relationship with a possessive former girlfriend. Bern ended up committing suicide, and his farewell note to Jean hinted that he killed himself because he was impotent. Harlow's affair, Bern's suicide and the events surrounding his last night alive (the fact that the couple incorporated sex toys in their lovemaking leaked out and was scandalous at the time), seriously damaged Harlow's career. Jean made several films after Bern's death, but she was struck down by kidney failure and died in 1937.

With Harlow gone, Hollywood executives began looking for the next sex symbol. A newspaper editor spotted the perfect girl while she was playing hooky from Hollywood High. He risked a slap in the face when he approached Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner and asked if she would like to be in motion pictures. Hollywood would never be the same after it found the "Sweater Girl."

Legend has it that Turner was spotted by an agent in Schwab's Drug Store on Sunset Boulevard and vaulted to stardom. In reality, the 15-year-old Turner, who was given the name Lana by Warner Brothers studio execs, was discovered by Hollywood Reporter Editor Billy Wilkerson in a soda fountain across from Schwab's. Wilkerson gave Turner his card and introduced her to an agent who managed to get the attractive and well-put-together teen a walk-on part in a low-budget film called They Won't Forget. The rest of the film was forgettable, but audiences and studio executives alike noticed the fresh young girl in the tight sweater. Publicity agents dubbed Lana "The Sweater Girl," a nickname she hated the first time she heard it. Lana thought it detracted from her skill as a serious actress.

She made three more films in 1937, and the next year was working steadily, moving her way up the marquee to stardom across from Lew Ayers in These Glamour Girls (1939). By that time, she was well established and living a glamorous lifestyle. The curse of the It Girl was still years away, but it was coming.

Lana's Loves

Lana Turner was no stranger to violent crime. She was born in an Idaho mining town, the daughter of a miner. Her father supplemented his meager income by gambling and was well known as a skillful card player. One evening after a successful run at the tables, John Turner was robbed and murdered. He made the mistake of bragging that he was going to buy his beloved daughter a bicycle and attracted the attention of thieves. His murder, while the family was living in San Francisco, was never solved. Her mother moved to Southern California when Lana was a young girl and she lived a nondescript life until Billy Wilkerson discovered her at the Top Hat Cafe.

Lana's first attempt at marriage was unsuccessful, a pattern she repeated six more times before her death. Lana and band leader Artie Shaw met on the set of a film featuring Shaw's orchestra, {Dancing Co-ed}, which was Lana's first top billing. Shaw was an arrogant intellectual who was not well liked by the members of his band. He considered himself a scholar who led a band as a means to earn a living, but his true love was writing.

In her biography, Lana: The Lady, The Legend, the Truth, Turner remembers that although she was a star, she was a naive 19-year-old on the rebound from her first love when Shaw entered her life. Had she not been despondent over the end of that relationship, her marriage to Shaw never would have occurred.

The marriage was difficult almost from the beginning. Lana was no dummy and she wasn't a shrinking violet, but Shaw made it clear he did not think her his intellectual equal. He demanded that she dress down, not wear makeup and be on hand to serve his every whim. Artie was jealous of the time Lana spent making films; this drove a wedge between them and doomed the relationship. The marriage barely lasted a year and they parted bitterly.

Stephan Crane, a restaurateur with no formal Hollywood connections, was Lana's second husband, and their relationship caused a bit of a stir when, shortly after their wedding, Crane learned that his Mexican divorce from his first wife was not recognized in the United States.

In the meantime, Lana became pregnant with her daughter and only child, Cheryl. Crane secured a legitimate divorce from his first wife and remarried Turner before Cheryl was born. Unfortunately, that second marriage was no more successful than the first, although Crane and Turner remained friendly.

Hollywood's Hoods

Drawn by the lure of easy money, the criminal element moved west to Hollywood shortly after Nestor Studios began making movies on Sunset Boulevard in 1911. Los Angeles itself was already an immigrant town, and where there were immigrants, there was poverty, and where there was poverty, there was crime.

Hoods of high and low standing were attracted to Hollywood for the same reasons that people from all over came: to be part of the action. Ben “Bugsy” Siegel was the first racketeer to gain a foothold in the movie industry when he took over control of the extras union and started extorting money from actors and studios.

Siegel would shake down his friends by threatening to pull the extras off the set unless the star or the studio coughed up dough. He had the power to do it and he had the backing of the national syndicate. For some strange reason, the Hollywood community not only accepted Siegel, they liked him.

Siegel was a handsome man and was well connected in Hollywood thanks to his lifelong friendship with actor George Raft and his relationship with actress Ketti Gallian. Everyone wanted Siegel at their parties, even while he was twisting their arms for a couple grand in protection money. Siegel was gunned down in southern California in 1947 and no other hoodlum would come close to living as high in Hollywood as Siegel.

Jack Dragna controlled the Los Angeles rackets, dubbed the “Mickey Mouse Mafia” because of its proximity to Disneyland and because of their bumbling methods, under the direction of the East Coast syndicate. Dragna, who had been bumped down in status when Siegel came west, chafed under the syndicate's direction, but he knew which way the wind blew, shaped up and followed orders.

However, Siegel’s wire service and other operations were taken over by his protege, Mickey Cohen, who was at war with Dragna. The diminutive Cohen was a media darling who lacked Siegel 's style but not his propensity for violence. While he interacted with the Hollywood elite, Mickey didn't enjoy the same level of entrée that Siegel did. Siegel would be invited to the parties at the stars' homes, but Mickey was not. It was only through his nightclub ownership that Mickey rubbed elbows with studio powers.

The West Coast mob may have been considered "Mickey Mouse" by the rest of the syndicate, but Mickey Cohen was a tough man. He survived five attempts on his life and was reputed to have the police department in his pocket. He was the real deal with all the trappings of a mobster. If there was a chance to make a buck, legal or otherwise, he was in. Cohen was a driving force in bringing tragedy into Lana Turner's life when he took Johnny Stompanato into his gang.

Johnny

In Lana's autobiography she describes how Johnny pushed his way into her life in 1957 by first telephoning, then sending flowers day after day and then by finding out what kind of music Lana liked and sending her records. He was charming and gentlemanly. Having just divorced her fourth husband, Lana was ready for something different.

"That's how the blackest period of my life began," she wrote. "It started with flowers and an innocent invitation for a drink, and it was to end with screaming headlines, in tragedy and death."

He called himself John Steele and he had the wavy hair and olive-skinned good looks of a movie star with a physique to match. For some reason he told Lana he was five years her senior, when in fact it was the other way around.

Stompanato had already lived a life of adventure by the time he got to Hollywood. A Marine war veteran, he converted to Islam when he married a Turkish woman. He spent time in China after World War II, telling people he ran nightclubs although he was really a government bureaucrat. Johnny's childhood had been troubled, he had been in military school, and he apparently continued down the same path as an adult.

"[Sir Charles] Hubbard was in the United States looking for investments when he took John to California as a companion in 1948," wrote Cheryl Crane in her autobiography, Detour. "During the next two years Hubbard gave him $85,000. John told the IRS he had 'borrowed' the money, but the agency suspected that he was blackmailing Hubbard."

When Hubbard ran into trouble for a marijuana bust shortly after arriving in California, Johnny dropped him and took a job as a bouncer at one of Mickey Cohen's nightclubs. His size, personality and style got Mickey's attention. Before long Stompanato was pulling in $300 per week as Cohen's bodyguard, Crane said. Stompanato was Cohen's moneyman and twice when he was arrested he was found to be carrying more than $50,000 cash. Having a flunky carry all the money was typical in the syndicate. Since the top guys were often harassed by police and arrested on trumped-up charges such as vagrancy, it would be difficult for a flower shop owner like Mickey Cohen to explain why he had so much cash. Since bodyguards are less likely to be arrested and searched, they carried the weapons and money.

Despite his connection with Cohen, Stompanato was still a small-time hood and could be described as a gigolo. He was always on the arm of a beautiful, older woman and he was dependent on them for his livelihood. He was married at least two more times before he met Lana Turner, but nothing lasted more than two years. The evidence that he was a gigolo comes from court records: In the course of his divorce from actress Helen Gilbert (the teacher in the Andy Hardy series), she testified, "Johnny had no means. I did what I could to support him." The police knew this and made a note of it in his dossier. "When the victim's money is dissipated, he becomes interested in another woman. Usually he frequents expensive nightspots to meet wealthy female types," a detective wrote.

Looking back, neither Turner nor her daughter had much good to say about Stompanato. After all, Cheryl Crane stabbed him to death and Lana testified that she was frightened for her life. However, she must have seen something in Johnny, because her relationship with him lasted longer than any other he had in Hollywood. If he had not died, there is no telling how long it would have gone on. Lana recognized this herself.

"I believed the lies a man told me, and by the time I learned they were lies it was too late," she wrote years later. "I was trapped, helpless because of my fear for my own life, for Cheryl's and my mother's."

Forbidden Fruit

Things moved quickly between Lana and Johnny.

"He was utterly considerate, and I began to warm toward him physically," Lana wrote. "His wooing was gentle, persistent and finally persuasive. By the time I found out his real name, we were already having an affair."

Johnny showered Lana and Cheryl, whose relationship was rocky, with gifts ranging from jewelry to a full-length portrait to a horse. Lana said she wore the jewels on screen in Peyton Place and that every time she saw the film after Johnny's death, chills ran down her spine.

It wasn't long after their relationship became public that one of Lana's close friends broke the news that John Steele was actually John Stompanato. Lana said she had mixed feelings about dating a man who was a known gangster. To her he was dangerous and yet appealing.

"Call it forbidden fruit or whatever," she wrote. "This attraction was very deep -- maybe something sick within me -- and my dangerous captivation went far beyond lovemaking."

Lana was in England filming Another Time, Another Place with Sean Connery and she had hoped that when she said goodbye to Johnny in Los Angeles, that he would move on to another woman. Instead, Lana found herself lonely and asked Johnny to join her.

It was in England that Lana said Johnny became physically violent for the first time. He was bored and complaining bitterly about Lana's reluctance to be seen in public with him when the argument escalated into a shoving match.

"I reached for the phone, but he knocked it away and lunged for my throat," she wrote. "As his grip closed around my larynx, I managed to let out a loud scream, though I could feel the strain on my vocal chords."

Since Johnny had entered England illegally (he used a passport with the name John Steele), Lana was able to get him deported. Eventually she would have to return to the United States, where Johnny Stompanato would be waiting.

Oscar & Johnny

But first, Lana decided that she would take a quiet vacation in Acapulco, away from Johnny, Hollywood and Cheryl. At 14, Cheryl had already run away from home, fled a Catholic boarding school and otherwise made foolish teenage decisions that, because of her celebrity mother, landed her in the gossip columns of Louella Parsons, Walter Winchell and the like.

"I think I rebelled against the whole fishbowl life that we were living," Cheryl told CNN's Larry King years later. "You know, every move was fodder for somebody. You know, and I resented it. I just wanted to be Jane Doe."

Lana arranged to keep her arrival in Mexico secret, but when she landed at the airport Stompanato and a phalanx of journalists met her. No studio publicity agent was present, leading her to believe Johnny had set up the press conference.

"To this day I can't tell you exactly how John Stompanato knew when I was leaving England or that I was flying to Mexico via Copenhagen," she wrote. "He proved over and over that he had the power to do anything he wanted."

Johnny continued to be physically abusive in Acapulco, once pulling a gun on Lana when she tried to order him out of her room. Usually he didn't have to use violence, since Lana was terrified into compliance by mere threats.

While she was in Mexico, Lana learned that she had been nominated for an Academy Award for her work in Peyton Place. John was equally excited until she made it clear that he would not be accompanying her to the ceremony. There was no way, she wrote, that she would be seen in public with a known gangster. No amount of pleading or cajoling could change her mind.

She was concerned for her image, but the press was waiting when Lana and Johnny landed in Los Angeles. A photographer was there to capture their reunion with Cheryl and sent the picture of the smiling trio across the wires with the headline "Lana Turner Returns with Mob Figure."

The night of the Academy Awards began as a dream for Lana Turner and ended as a nightmare. She wrote that she didn't expect to win -- she felt her work in The Postman Always Rings Twice was better than as Constance Mackenzie -- and the award went to Joanne Woodward for The Three Faces of Eve. A photo of Lana and Cheryl at the awards dinner shows a stunning Lana in a form-fitting strapless white lace gown, wide, bright eyes, flawless skin, charming smile and beautiful platinum blonde hair, seated next to a very grown-up looking Cheryl Crane in a more modest green taffeta gown. Leaning down between them, paying his respects is Cary Grant in white tie and tails. They look like the quintessential Hollywood stars, down to the extravagant jewelry and martini glasses.

At 730 North Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills, John Stompanato sat home alone with the servants, watching the ceremony on TV and growing angrier by the minute. By the time Lana returned home from the post-Oscar parties (Cheryl had come home earlier), Johnny was raging.

"You'll never leave me home again!" he shouted. "That's the last time."

He berated Lana for not winning and for her increased reliance on alcohol. Then he got physical and began slapping her face.

"He cracked me a second time, this time knocking me down. I staggered back against the chaise and slid to the floor," she wrote. "He yanked me up and began hitting me with his fists. I went flying across the room into the bar, sending glasses shattering on the floor."

Picking her up again, he grabbed her shoulders and peered down at her.

"Now do you understand?" he asked. "You will never leave me out of something like that again. Ever."

In her biography, Lana explains the fear a battered woman has for remaining with her abuser.

"Underlying everything was my shame," she wrote. "I was so ashamed. I didn't want anybody to know my predicament, how foolish I'd been, how I'd taken him at face value and been completely duped."

In the early morning hours of the day after the Academy Awards ceremony, when she should have been sleeping with dreams of her night in the spotlight, Lana lay bruised and bleeding in bed.

Next to her lay a sleeping Johnny Stompanato, blissfully unaware that his time was running out.

The Happening

It all happened so quickly, they both said later. Like in an old-time silent movie, events in Lana's Beverly Hills mansion on that fateful Good Friday 1958 had a disconnected feeling to Lana and Cheryl.

In all the years afterward Lana would only refer to it as "the happening" and Cheryl would not talk about it at all, but in a matter of seconds the lives of Lana Turner, Johnny Stompanato and Cheryl Crane would be changed forever.

The "happening" began on a Friday evening. Lana and Johnny were fighting and Lana would later say she knew this fight was going to be a bad one. They were in her bedroom and Cheryl was in her room next door. Their voices were loud enough that Cheryl could easily hear everything that was being said. Lana had already told Cheryl that that was the night she was going to end her relationship with Johnny.

After the Academy Awards, Cheryl had seen her mother's bruised face and knew John was beating her. Lana forbade her daughter from telling anyone, including her grandmother or father. Cheryl never said she saw Johnny hit Lana, but she did see the after effects in London and after the Oscars.

"There were awful fights, screaming and yelling and smashing glasses and just, you know, things I wasn't used to hearing," Cheryl told Larry King. "And she finally sat me down and told me the whole story about having had him thrown out of England when she was filming there because he beat her so badly. How he had threatened her life, my grandmother's life. She couldn't get him out of the house. She couldn't get rid of him. And my reaction was, 'Well, mother, call the police.'

"And of course, that was last thing in the world she would do because publicity. You know, I mean, it would have been -- she felt -- the end of her career."

Outside the bedroom, Cheryl called to her mother and Johnny, trying to quell the fight.

"I was, you know, hoping to get them apart," Cheryl said later.

"Cheryl, get away from that door!" Lana yelled. "I'm not going to tell you again!"

But Cheryl didn't go away. Instead she begged her mother to stop arguing and open the door. "And she wouldn't open the door," Cheryl said. "She said, 'Go back to your room. John is leaving.'

"And, of course, he didn't leave. And then I started hearing the threats that he was making that he was going to cut her face, that he was going to kill my grandmother. 'And I'll get your daughter, too.'"

As Lana and Johnny argued behind closed doors, Cheryl went down to the kitchen and grabbed a carving knife from a drawer. Johnny and Lana had purchased the knife earlier in the day. She returned upstairs and found herself outside her mother's closed door.

The argument then tapered down and Stompanato was going to leave the house. He went to the closet and took a set of clothes and some heavy, wooden hangers.

Armed with the knife, Cheryl pleaded with her mother to open the door, which an exasperated Lana did. She stood between Cheryl and Johnny. He was facing the door and looking at Lana with a raised arm holding the clothes over his shoulder in such a way that all Cheryl could see was the arm and some sort of weapon.

He moved to go past Lana toward the door, his arm upraised holding … something … and Cheryl thrust out her arm. From Lana's vantage point it looked like Cheryl had punched Johnny in the stomach and he sucked in his breath and jerked like someone who has been hit.

"Oh, my God, Cheryl, what have you done," he gasped. Then he did a small pirouette and fell to the floor. Eyes closed and wheezing awfully, Johnny lay dying on the carpet of Lana Turner's new home. Cheryl backed away, the knife falling from her hand and Lana realized the horror of the event. Cheryl had not punched John; she had stabbed him with the carving knife. Lana went to her daughter, who was sobbing, and helped her back to her room. She returned to tend to John Stompanato.

Johnny was unconscious by the time he hit the floor. His breathing was labored. As if in a trance, Lana picked up the knife and dropped it into the sink in the pink marble bar. Then she called her mother.

Within minutes a doctor and Lana's mother were on the scene. Turner was giving Johnny mouth-to-mouth resuscitation when they arrived. The doctor, a family friend, gave Stompanato a shot of adrenaline directly into his heart, but it was fruitless. Johnny Stompanato, military hero, wannabe actor, small-time hood, gigolo and abuser was dead.

"Get Geisler"

In Hollywood's Golden Age, the criminal defense attorney everyone used was Jerry Geisler. The precursor to celebrity lawyers like Robert Shapiro and Johnny Cochran, Geisler had successfully defended Charlie Chaplin and Errol Flynn on rape charges. He represented Marilyn Monroe in her divorce from Joe DiMaggio four years earlier. He was expensive and worth every penny. No one in Los Angeles could match Geisler's skill before a jury.

"'Get me Geisler.' That was one of the jokes at the time," Lana wrote in her tell-all book. "If you were in trouble, you knew whom to call. Only now it wasn't a joke, it was something unspeakable; all too real."

Lana did a very smart thing in the moments after Stompanato's death. She called a lawyer and then had him contact the police. Geisler was on the scene before the cops.

Soon the Beverly Hills Police descended on Turner's home and with them came the press. It was inevitable that the media would be tipped to the story by police sources. The next morning, crime scene photos of Johnny Stompanato lying dead in Lana Turner's bedroom were on the front page of hundreds of newspapers.

Lana and Cheryl rode to the Beverly Hills Police Station in Geisler's limousine. There had been some questioning at the homicide scene, but formal statements were not taken until after Lana and her daughter had time to strategize with Geisler. That opportunity to confer helped spur rumors that Lana had killed Johnny and tried to blame Cheryl.

Under questioning by authorities, with her mother present, Cheryl recounted the story of Stompanato's death.

"I think that they were so careful to make sure they dotted all their I's and crossed all their T's," Cheryl told Larry King. "And they didn't want anyone to show -- say they showed favoritism, you know, a star's kid or anything like that, because they kept me overnight at the Beverly Hills police station in a cell."

Plan B

Mickey Cohen identified Johnny Stompanato's body, and the former Marine was shipped home and buried with full military honors in Illinois. Then Mickey fell back and regrouped. He knew all about Lana Turner and Johnny Stompanato. In fact, he was the one who helped Johnny gain access to Lana and the muscle behind Stompanato's uncanny ability to know where Lana was and where she was heading. He bankrolled Stompanato's seduction of Lana, not because he was interested in playing Cupid, but because he wanted to use Lana for his own purposes.

She was rich and powerful and he intended to blackmail her. Johnny Stompanato was the one who would help put the plan in place.

"I can't understand it," Mickey told the press, which was all over him. "I thought she liked him very much. We were happy -- Cheryl and Johnny and me. We used to go horseback riding together."

Then, after he went to the morgue to retrieve Johnny's body, he talked to the press again.

"I don't like the whole thing," he said. "There's lots of unanswered questions … I'm going to find some of those answers no matter what happens."

Weeks after the homicide, one of Lana's attorneys stopped by the house with a package. Inside was a series of negatives showing a naked, sleeping Lana Turner. Johnny had taken them.

"He had asked her [Lana's maid] to keep [them] for him just before he met me in England," Lana wrote. "He told Arminda that the contents were extremely valuable to him, and that she should keep it safe until he came to reclaim it."

Other negatives in the roll showed Johnny having sex with another woman.

With a few darkroom tricks, "he could hold them over you for blackmail," Lana's attorney said. Together, they destroyed the negatives and burned them. They flushed the ashes down the toilet.

Mickey wasn't finished yet. The blackmail plan had fallen through, but Mickey knew that Stompanato had kept the love letters he and Lana had exchanged. Cohen dispatched one of his hoods to break into Johnny's apartment and steal them. Then he leaked them to the press. If he wasn't going to make money off Lana Turner, he was damned sure going to arrange it so that she was finished in Hollywood.

The Los Angeles Herald Examiner was the first to break the story, and two days before the inquest they reprinted every word of Johnny's letters to Lana and hers back to him. The letters provided an intimate look at Lana and Johnny's relationship, from steamy early letters talking of "our love, our hopes, our dreams, our sex and longings" (Lana to Johnny) to her pleas for space later on.

"You must let me alone in my 'own world' for a while, to rest, think, rest, think," she wrote to Johnny.

Cohen freely admitted that he leaked the letters.

"I thought it was fair to show that Johnny wasn't exactly 'unwelcome company' like Lana said," he told the Herald Examiner.

Inquest

Two days after the homicide, Los Angeles County District Attorney William B. McKesson held a press conference and made it clear the case would receive no special treatment simply because Lana Turner was involved. Cheryl, who had been held overnight in the Beverly Hills jail, was taken to the county Juvenile Hall until the matter was concluded. There was still no talk of criminal charges, and Cheryl was not being held as a suspect but as a material witness and adjudicated juvenile.

Easter came and went and on Monday morning Cheryl was brought before a probate judge for a predetention hearing. All sides were permitted to address the court. Geisler told the judge that he could prove Stompanato's death was justifiable homicide, and asked that Cheryl be released to her grandmother's custody.

"Let's go to trial," said Beverly Hills Police Chief William Anderson. "I am satisfied that Stompanato was killed with a knife and we have the party who did it."

McKesson recommended that Cheryl not be released on bail. He was afraid that the mob or Lana Turner would pressure Cheryl one way or another. The judge agreed and ordered Cheryl detained.

He further ordered, against the will of the police and the DA, a coroner's inquest to determine whether a crime had indeed been committed. In a coroner's inquest, a jury selected by the coroner examines the circumstances surrounding a suspicious death and renders a verdict. The verdict may identify the person responsible for a death or assign blame to negligent parties. In addition, juries may recommend further investigation and assign blame to negligent parties.

Unlike a grand jury indictment, a coroner's inquest verdict is not binding and law enforcement officials may still charge, or not charge, depending on their preference. Still, it is helpful to law enforcement because it formally establishes cause of death and any elements of the crime. It gives prosecutors a chance to see how evidence influences jurors.

A week after the homicide the coroner convened the inquest. Geisler had managed to get Cheryl excused from testifying because of the trauma she had already been through. Although some policemen were called to testify, there was only one witness that mattered: Lana, the only person who saw Cheryl stab Johnny.

Never before had she had to perform under this much pressure. Some 20 years since she was discovered on Sunset Boulevard, Lana Turner was about to take center stage in her most dramatic and important role ever. This time she wasn't playing for the Academy. At stake was her daughter's life.

Role of a Lifetime

The coroner's inquest into the death of Johnny Stompanato was the most anticipated television event ever. This was no Peyton Place; it was the real thing. Depending on how Lana played it, her daughter was either going to walk away a free woman or be charged with the death of her mother's boyfriend.

In the Hall of Records in downtown Beverly Hills the largest courtroom was reserved for the inquest. Of the 160 seats, 120 were reserved for the press. CBS and ABC announced that they were going to broadcast the inquest live and it would go out over radio, as well.

Interest in the case was overwhelming. Peyton Place, already a popular movie, saw its box office receipts jump by a third the week after Johnny's death. Coincidentally, one of Lana's key scenes in the melodrama was a courtroom interrogation, where she was questioned about crimes committed by her daughter.

The lines formed for the 40 public seats at 6 a.m. Shortly before 9:00, under a merciless sun made all the hotter by the television lights and flashbulbs, Lana, Stephan Crane and Geisler entered the building and quickly made their way to the courtroom.

Mickey Cohen was the first person called to testify, since he had identified Johnny's body at the morgue. Ever the showman, he caused a stir by refusing "to identify the body on the grounds I may be accused of this murder." He spent all of two minutes on the stand and left the building shortly thereafter.

The coroner introduced the autopsy report that showed how "a whole team of doctors" could not have saved Johnny's life. He had been stabbed once in the abdomen. The knife had sliced a kidney, struck a vertebra and twisted upward, puncturing his aorta. The medical examiner also announced that Johnny probably wouldn't have lived another 10 years because of his bad liver.

Then it was time for Lana.

Dressed in a gray silk suit, white gloves and hat, Lana was ready for her close-up. Her platinum hair was impeccable, not a strand out of place, and the best makeup artists had made her look as beautiful as she had ever been. Even though she had not slept at all the night before, Lana's high cheekbones glowed a healthy pale rose that only accented her crystal clear blue eyes, long doe lashes and pencil-thin eyebrows.

She sat down at the witness stand, removed her gloves and took a deep breath. For the next hour, Lana answered questions from the coroner, his deputy and Geisler while a 10-man, two-woman jury watched intently. She barely made eye contact with her questioners, instead staring at the back of the courtroom, where the wall met the ceiling. She broke down twice on the stand.

Speaking quietly, she tried to explain why she stayed with a man who beat her, something she said in her autobiography that she didn't herself understand. Under Geisler's gentle questioning she recounted a moment-by-moment recap of the argument that led to the stabbing.

When she had finished, the coroner asked for a recess and the press immediately surrounded Lana. She was on the verge of fainting when Jerry Geisler moved her out of the center of the crowd. Reporters talked among themselves about the quality of Lana's performance.

Conspiracy?

The inquest wasn't over after Lana left the stand, but most of the drama was gone. Police investigators testified that they were confused by some of the details. First, the knife was new, but it was scratched and chipped as if it had seen significant use before. Second, there were no fingerprints on the knife. Third, there was no blood in the bedroom or on Lana Turner's clothes and the bedroom was not in any sort of disarray. Finally, the blood on the knife contained "several light and dark fibers or hairs," which could not be identified.

As the inquest concluded, a mysterious man jumped up from the gallery and shouted that he needed to testify. As he was escorted from the room, he shouted, "Lies! All lies! This mother and daughter were both in love with Stompanato! Johnny was a gentleman!" Whether the man was a nutcase, a publicity hound or a Cohen plant was never determined, but regardless, he was taken away and disappeared.

The jurors retreated to deliberate and took less than a half-hour to decide that John Stompanato's death was justifiable homicide. Acting out of fear for her life and for her mother's life, Cheryl Crane was justified in using deadly force to stop Johnny, they ruled. The decision was not unanimous, nor did it have to be.

The inquest verdict was not binding on the prosecutor, but the next day McKesson decided not to pursue charges. He did, however, initiate court proceedings to determine Lana's fitness as a parent.

Mickey Cohen was outraged at the coroner's verdict and immediately went to the press. "It's the first time in my life I've ever seen a dead man convicted of his own murder," he said. "So far as that jury's concerned, Johnny just walked too close to that knife."

Johnny Stompanato's family brought a wrongful death lawsuit against Lana Turner and Stephan Crane. The case was settled out of court.

In 1962, Mickey Cohen was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for income tax violations. He was released in 1972 and began a campaign for prison reform. In 1974, Mickey made headlines again when he said he had had contact with people holding Patty Hearst for ransom. He died in 1976 of natural causes.

Cheryl Crane eventually went to live with her grandmother, Lana's mother. There were many years of hardship ahead for this young woman, including more alienation from her mother, but overcoming those obstacles, Cheryl went into the restaurant business with her father. Today Cheryl is a successful businesswoman. She recently helped produce a Lana Turner retrospective on cable television.

Lana Turner's career, which hit a plateau before Johnny's death, was rejuvenated in 1958. She went on to make many more movies and starred on television in "Falcon Crest." Lana and Cheryl mended fences and reconciled long before her death in 1995. Well-respected and honored until the end, the "Sweater Girl" proved to be a survivor who had more than enough mettle to stand up to the curse of the Hollywood bombshell.

Mass Slaughter in the Wealthy New York Suburb

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 14:17:00 +0000

By George Carpozi Jr
Master Detective
February 1980

IN ANOTHER era, the farmers tilling the soil of Bedford Hills were major suppliers of vegetables to the people of Westchester County and neighbouring New York City. These days, however, there are no more gentlemen farmers, for Bedford Hills is now just another suburban dormitory for America's greatest city.

The farms of the gaslight era which became the grand estates of the rich for the first half of this century have almost all been sold or donated to non-profit organizations - or divided by homebuilders into mini-estates occupying anywhere from an acre to four or more.

There are two homes that command our attention for this story - and they are situated virtually within shouting distance of each other in the wealthy and historic section of town known as Succabone Corners.

One of these residences, a huge 16 roomed Georgian Colonial, had been home for many happy years for Corydon and Arden Bondy Sperry and 85-year-old Nellie McCormack, the faithful family governess.

Nellie McCormack emigrated from Scotland when she was a young woman. She carried a thick Scottish burr that never left her for the more than 50 years she served as governess, first in the Bondy household raising, among others, Arden. Then she became nanny to the Sperrys' children, in the order of their birth: Corydon Jr., now 25, nicknamed Corky and an undergraduate at the University of Colorado; Mark, 22, who attends Denison College in Ohio; Christopher, 19, a student at the nearby state university at Purchase; and Cassandra (or Cassie), 17, a senior at the Ethel Walker School of Simsbury, Connecticut - an all-girls boarding school.

The Sperrys had everything going for them. They had a deep and abiding love for each other, their children and the nanny. Sperry himself was a Wall Street investment banker.

For their neighbours, Charles and Helen Frankel, life had real meaning in the seclusion and quiet of Bedford Hills, yet it was only the icing on a far richer existence for this 61-year-old philosopher who was President Lyndon B. Johnson's Assistant Secretary of State from 1965 to 1967. Dr. Frankel, who taught at Columbia University in New York City, was founder of the National Humanities Centre which opened in September, 1968, in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The Frankels lived alone in a sprawling ranch home at 41 Bisbee Lane, about 400 yards down the road from the Sperry residence at the corner of Succabone and Broad Brook Roads.

Thursday, May 10th, 1979, dawned brightly, for the sun on that mid-spring day promised to do its utmost to hurry the blooms on the dogwood trees and azalea bushes that surrounded the Sperry home and the assortment of greenery under glass at the Frankel place.

At 8.30 that morning, a housekeeper left the caretaker's cottage she shared with her husband and walked up the driveway to the huge columned portico. She entered the Sperry house with her passkey. As she stood briefly in the high-ceilinged foyer, an unaccustomed silence greeted the housekeeper, giving her an eerie feeling.

As she climbed the stairs to the second floor, she expected at the least to hear the voice of Christopher Sperry, the only one of the children living at home because he was attending local college, or that of Nellie McCormack, the lifelong governess who was always up and about at that hour tending to Christopher's needs while his brothers and sister were away at their respective schools.

The housekeeper had no reason to expect to find Mr. and Mrs. Sperry at home because she knew they were spending the night in their Manhattan apartment. She'd been alerted to that plan the day before. The Sperrys intended to stay in the city after a benefit in New York for the Ethel Walker School, which their daughter Cassie attended.

In the deafening silence that greeted the housekeeper, it never intruded into her thinking even in the remotest sense to expect what she was about to discover…

First, as she made her rounds, she looked into young Sperry's bedroom. What she saw sent a bolt of shivers up her spine. The room was in disarray - dresser drawers were opened wide, the closet door was ajar and the floor was strewn with personal possessions and clothes, as though rejected by a selective burglar.

But most terrifying was the next sight the housekeeper's eyes took in. Young Christopher Sperry lay on the floor next to the bed in his nightclothes in a state of stillness that left the housekeeper in no doubt that he was dead. A sheet was twirled around his waist and legs, he was gagged - and the housekeeper saw blood on the pillow; later determined to have come from a bullet wound in the back of the head.

TREMBLING WITH shock and fear, the woman stumbled through the hall on her way to the phone to call the police. The she passed governess Nellie McCormick's room - and what she saw there added to her fright. Miss McCormack lay similarly bound and gagged on her bed. And, as authorities would later discover, she had also been shot in the head with a .32-calibre gun.

So terrified now and fearing that the killer or killers might still be in the house, the housekeeper fled screaming to the outdoors and made her way to the home of a neighbour, who promptly summoned the police.

Detective-Sergeant Ted Wyskida and a team of investigators responded to the call and proceeded to uncover evidence that gave them a picture of what had probably happened. They found several doors in the house forced open. It seemed obvious that a burglary was the motivation - and perhaps the victims attempted to resist.

Wyskida phoned Christopher's parents in Manhattan shortly after 9 am, but no mention was made to Mr. and Mrs. Sperry that their son Christopher was dead - only that Nellie McCormack had been murdered. It was shattering news for the couple, yet they maintained their composure.

Out of this preliminary contact with the parents of the slain youth, detectives learned that a 1976 BMW sedan had been parked in the driveway. But the cops hadn't seen the car. Could it have been stolen by the killer, or killers? Undoubtedly, Wyskida concluded. An alert for the missing car was broadcast throughout metropolitan New York.

Shortly before noon, Mr. and Mrs. Sperry arrived home in their blue station wagon. They pulled into the driveway and brought the car to a stop in one of the stalls on the parking apron. Mrs. Sperry was behind the wheel and the cops could see the grief written on both parents' faces.

But this was nothing compared to the shocker the Sperrys were about to be hit with. Wyskida walked to the car and, as the couple got out, he spoke to them in soft, muffled tones. Suddenly, Mrs. Sperry shrieked.

"Not my son!" she cried, lifting her arms in the air in a helpless gesture. Her husband clasped his arms tightly around his wife, her arms wrapped around his shoulders.

THE POLICEMAN escorted the couple to a guest cottage alongside the main house and they remained secluded there for most of the day. But, detectives went into the cottage from time to time to scrounge bits and pieces of information from the Sperrys.

Even as the entire Bedford Hills police force, plus investigators from Westchester County District Attorney Carl Vergari's staff, were digging into this crime, a second shock wave struck like a thunderbolt. It happened late that afternoon, when police received a call from 21-year-old Carl Frankel. He was phoning from New York City to report that his father, the renowned Columbia professor, and mother had failed to appear for a speaking engagement the doctor had promised to keep at the humanities centre he'd founded in North Carolina.

According to Carl Frankel, his parents were to have taken a 7.30 am flight at New York’s LaGuardia Airport to Raleigh. When the Frankels failed to show up, an associate phoned his Bedford Hills home. After he received no answer, he contacted young Frankel in New York City. Carl was immediately alarmed because of the reports he'd heard on radio about the murders of Christopher Sperry and governess Nellie McCormack.

After Carl Frankel's call, the green police cars and unmarked vehicles of the Bedform Hills police sped down the road to the ranch home at 41 Bisbee Lane. The time was a few minutes before 5 pm and only another minute or two was required to assess the situation.

Inside the house, police found the professor and his 61-year-old wife lying dead in separate bedrooms. Both were in their nightclothes and had been shot in the head and body - and bound in a fashion similar to the victims in the Sperry household murders. Mrs. Frankel had been shot once in the back of the head and her husband was hit with .32-calibre bullet wounds in the head, as well as the liver, chest and heart, an autopsy would later disclose.

"Why would a professional burglar kill four people?" asked acting DA Thomas Facelle, in place of his boss, DA Carl Vergari, who was visiting Israel with a group of American lawyers. Facelle was in an angry mood, because the reporters were hounding him with provocative questions about the twin double-killings that he could not answer.

"Let me tell you this," Facelle told the newsmen. "These execution-style murders are the most bizarre I've every witnessed. Among the things that have us stymied is the theft of a safe weighting at least a couple of hundred pounds was taken from the Sperry home…"

Bullets and shells of the same caliber were also recovered in both homes and "we have every indication from the crime scenes that we're dealing with the same people in both double-murders."

Even as Facelle was speaking, police in Brooklyn were beginning to weave the first strand of circumstantial evidence against the Bedford Hills killers.

Less than three hours after the bodies of Christopher Sperry and Nellie McCormack were found and the broadcast went out for the stolen BMW, Patrolman Michael McLaughlin, working out of the Sixth Avenue police station in Brooklyn, responded to a report from an anonymous caller about a "fancy car with the keys in the ignition" parked at the corner of Third Avenue and Warren Street, in the borough's Red Hook district.

McLaughlin later told your reported: "The car was in total disarray. We towed it to my precinct and went over it with a fine-tooth comb. We opened the trunk and found the safe from the Sperry house. It had been torched and burned open. We found a lot of credit cards in Sperry's name - maybe a dozen or more - and some jewellery alongside the safe. But whatever else was in the safe had been taken. The only other thing we found were two bank books showing deposits totaling $80,000 made by Nellie McCormack."

One of the many lawmen working on the investigation with Thomas Facelle, the acting DA, was Peter Liverzani, a New York state police captain. And, less than 24 hours after the four horrendous killings in Bedford Hills, Facelle and Liverzani, were beginning to feel that the probe was heading in the right derection.

"We may by dealing with professionals," Facelle suggested. "There are reports that phone and burglar-alarm wires connected to the Frankels' home were cut. The question confronting us is: Do we go out and round up the usual suspects? I don't think so. We know our burglars and this doesn't look like their work."

Facelle and Liverzani had decided immediately that Bedford Hills' 30-man police force didn't have enough experience to handle such a complicated investigation as the Succabone Corners killings. The last homicide investigated by local officers was back in 1972. Thus a request was made to the Westchester County sheriff's office and the state police for assistance.

In the days that followed the killings, it was suggested that drug-crazed members of the Rastafarian cult were possible suspects in the robbery-massacre in Bedford Hills, particularly as the Sperrys' car had been found a mere few blocks from the sect's headquarters in Brooklyn.

The Rastafarians were known to be militantly anti-white, especially against the rich. Some members were known to use and deal in ritualistic marijuana smoking and other narcotics activity.

Meanwhile, memorial services were held for Christopher Richard Sperry. More than 600 relatives, friends and classmates past and present filled the pews, balcony, rear corridor and side aisles of the Presbyterian Church of Mount Kisco as the Rev. Jack Silvey Miller eulogized the dead young man:

"We do not gather in sanctuary to escape reality, but rather to accept both the evil and the good of the human condition," he said in his sermon.

The memorial service was a bittersweet occasion for many of the congregation who had known the young man and the aged governess. Rev. Miller affectionately recalled their different lives as members of a family that, he said, was as close as any he'd known.

Next day, more than 150 people attended a memorial service for Dr. Frankel at the humanities centre he had directed near Raleigh, North Carolina. Professor William E. Leuchtenburg, who teaches history at Columbia, reminded the mourners about Dr. Frankel's experience with violence, as a member of the Marine Corps for four years during World War II - as well as his membership on a university committee that studied campus unrest in the 1960s.

"He always approached violence and disruption with calm reason," said Professor Leuchtenburg. "It was cruel irony the way he died."

Meanwhile, back in Bedford Hills, a by now very uptight acting DA Thomas Facelle ordered a lid on information to the press about the progress authorities were making into the murders.

"We can't answer all the questions or give all the details!" Facelle snapped. "When we get a suspect, we want to make sure he's the right one. If some nutcase comes in to confess and starts spewing all the details that he has read in the papers, how can we tell if he was really there?"

A fingerprint found in the stolen BMW was trumpeted by police as a "hot clue" and was viewed as a step towards moving in on a suspect. But the suspect "didn't pan out," authorities said later. That prompted another blast from Facelle: "I just wish the police would learn to keep their mouths shut!"

The night of Saturday, May 26th and the early morning hours of Sunday, May 27th, were not memorable for any progress on the investigation into the murders, so far as Bedford Hills was concerned. Yet fate was beginning to shape what would very soon be an electric development in the case.

Again, as when the BMW was found, Brooklyn was to figure in the ultimate outcome of the four murders. But it had the most improbable beginning…

ABOUT 50 revellers had gathered in an apartment at 730 Linden Boulevard, in Brooklyn, to celebrate a birthday. Suddenly, the door flew open and four armed thugs herded the party goers against the walls. Shots were fired and one of the guests was wounded.

"Everybody undress!" one of the gunmen barked.

"Now start handling over money, watches, rings and any jewellery you got on you - and move it!"

Another shot was fired into the ceiling to emphasize that order and underline the urgency the bandits attached to their demands.

Everyone obeyed - and the bandits fled with about $15,000 worth of loot. One of the victims phoned the police and soon detectives were on top of the case like locusts. The victims had vivid memories of their assailants and provided the officers with excellent descriptions.

But that wasn't too necessary because other cops had already seen three men running down the street suspiciously. Alerted to the shoot-'em-up robbery on Linden Boulevard, the police officers seized the three men and brought them to the 67th Precinct in East Flatbush, where they identified themselves as Junius Gray, 40, of Crystal Street, Brooklyn; Jimmy Alen, 40; and Jeffrey Davis, 25, both of Plainfield, New Jersey.

Credit for this collar went to Sergeant John Curry and Patrolmen George Jackson and Al Vitkus, who made what was to be a most significant recovery among an arsenal of five guns the suspects were carrying - a .32-calibre automatic and a sawn-off shotgun.

For the time being, not much thought was given to the weapons, although there was to be a routine follow-up - the weapons would be sent to the police lab. For firing and testing to determine whether they had been used in other crimes, principally unsolved killings.

With Gray, Allen and Davis in custody, the 6 o'clock news went out on TV on the evening of Monday, May 28th. A number of the 100 policemen comprising the murder task force in Bedford Hills were at home watching it. Because it had been a spectacular robbery, the TV cameras had gone to the scene and later to the 67th Precinct, where the cameras focused on the five weapons recovered by Sergeant Curry and Patrolmen Jackson and Vitkus.

One of those off-duty investigators jumped when he saw the .32-automatic with the home-made silencer. He dashed to the phone, spoke to Captain Liverzani, heading the task force - and that was immediately followed by a call to the 67th Precinct.

"We'd like to run a check on that gun," Liverzani said. "It looks like it could be the .32 used up here…"

As the wheels went into motion to test-fire the .32-automatic for comparison with bullets taken from the Bedford Hills victims' bodies, there was more action on the Brooklyn front. New York police were about to have another shining hour, thanks to a tipster who phoned the 67th to report: "If you want Levi Moore, you can find him in his basement apartment… 913 Martense Street. He's got a gun…"

The phone went dead. The 29-year-old Levi Moore was wanted as the fourth member of the shoot-'em-up holdup team."

In minutes, Sergeant Thomas Anderson and Patrolman James Mulligan were outside the door of that basement apartment. Patrolmen Kenneth Monahan and Patrick Adams posted themselves behind the building. Good thing, too - for the instant Anderson rapped on the door, a man leaped out of the window. As the cops moved in, he scrambled to his feet and raced along an alley leading to the street.

"My, my, fella - why are you in such a hurry?" Anderson smiled as he held out his arms to grab the fugitive. There was absolutely no resistance, because Levi Moore felt a chill up and down his spine from the cold steel of the sergeant's revolver pressed against his forehead.

EVEN AS Moore was being brought in, task force detectives from Bedford Hills, armed with search warrants, were swarming over Allen's and Davis' apartments in Plainfield, while other teams were going through Junius Gray's Brooklyn digs for clues.

Nothing much was found in any of those three targets of the searches. But a warrant to examine Gray's gold-coloured Cadillac struck the right note. For, in the trunk, the searchers allegedly found a .35-millimetre Pentax camera, soon identified by its serial numbers as one of the items stolen from the Sperry home.

Later that night, Gray's wife, who was behind the wheel of the 1970 Caddy when the cops intercepted it, was charged with possession of stolen property.

The lode of rich discoveries didn't end there. The detectives made more significant finds when they entered Levi Moore's apartment and gave it a thoroughly going-over. They allegedly uncovered other loot from the Bedford Hills homes, including a stereo, jewellery, silver-ware and a guitar taken from the Frankel home.

The clincher came next day when the ballistics tests were concluded and the experts submitted their findings to Captain Liverzani. The .32-calibre automatic with the silencer was the weapon used in the Bedford Hills murders!

BY NOW, DA Vergari had rushed back from his overseas jaunt and had taken charge of the investigation. He indicated no plan of action to bring charges against any of the suspects - just yet.

"They are suspects. Prime suspects, if you want to use that word," Vergari told reporters. "We're not eliminating anyone who may have been involved in the Brooklyn case. But since the suspects in that robbery are being held in high bail, I see no rush to charge them with the Bedford Hills murders."

After a further six weeks of silence, Carl Vergari finally broke it. He summoned reporters to a press conference in White Plains, the Westchester County seat, and made it known that the grand jury had indicated Junius Gray and Jimmy Lee Allen for the four killings. Both were also charged with possession of the .32 automatic, the alleged death weapon.

Later that day, Gray and Allen were brought in chains from Brooklyn to the Westchester County courtroom.

"It's the same thing as in Mississippi!" cried Allen to reporters. "All they wanted from Day One was someone black! They needed niggers!"

Both men stood in silence before the bench and, with a heavy guard posted behind them, were remanded to their Brooklyn lockup until they could bring lawyers with them to court for their arrangement.

There were many raised eyebrows because Levi Moore, the third suspect, had not been indicted. Could he have decided to give evidence against Gray and Allen at their trial?

"No comment…" DA Vergari said. "We are satisfied that the Bedford Hills crimes were committed by only two persons."

Finally, on August 24th, 1979, Junius Gray and Jimmy Allen appeared before Justice Isaac Rubin in White Plains. Allen stunned the courtroom when he told the judge: "I want you to appoint a female Jewish attorney for me in this case."

"I don't classify attorneys in that way," said the judge.

"I would only accept a female Jewish attorney," retorted Allen. "I'm the defendant. I know who's involved and what's involved. I want someone I can be comfortable with."

When the judge indicated that he would merely appoint a competent lawyer from a pre-determined list of approved volunteers, Allen said that, if his request was denied, he'd go pro se, the legal term meaning he would defend himself.

The two defendants were again returned to Brooklyn, where they must stand trial with Levi Moore and Jeffry Davis for the shoot-'em-up robbery. Then, no matter what the outcome there, they'll be returned to White Plains to stand trial for the Bedford Hills murders.

3 Victims for Laughing Killer

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:20:00 +0000

By Martin Lomax
Master Detective
December 1979

AS A narrative on crime and the criminal mind, Dark Secrets is in a class by itself. This short manuscript of just 84 pages does not have the professional polish of the Vincent Bugliosi best-sellers Until Death Us Do Part and Helter Skelter. Nor does the author of Dark Secrets, a 24-year-old ex-marine, have the literary style of a Truman Capote, author of In Cold Blood. A London publisher might well be skeptical of publishing the manuscripts - for, outside southern California, little is known of the author and the rape-murders of two young women.

Despite these handicaps - and the various shortcomings of a manuscript written by a neophyte author - Dark Secrets is undeniably a powerful story. It is a memoir of a young man who became fascinated with torture and death. It is, too, the story of the victims: A 30-year-old secretary; a 28-year-old mother and her young son; a Las Vegas homosexual out on the make. The Diego judge, a "tremendous indictment against the California Youth Authority, Atascadero State Prison and the US Marine Corps."

Dark Secrets is not for the squeamish. When portions of the manuscripts were introduced as evidence in a murder trial, a man requested to do the reading. "I will not have a woman read those chapters to the jury," ruled Judge Earl Maas. "I may be a chauvinist in saying that, but I must insist that a man read them."

And no wonder. Dark Secrets packs a wallop. Members of the eight-woman, four-man jury and spectators in the tiny, windowless courtroom were visibly upset as portions of the manuscript were read.

The only person who remained calm during the proceedings was Billy Lee Chadd, the diminutive young author of Dark Secrets, on trial for rape and murder.

But Chadd's only concern was protecting the copyright to Dark Secrets. He wanted the manuscript published and he hoped it would make the best-seller list. He expressed no remorse for his victims - they represented nothing more than "research material."

Death was not to grieve over. To Chadd, death was a thrill, a sexual kick, something to enjoy. And when Chadd wrote or spoke of death, he did not leave out mention of his own.

"I fully expect a death penalty for my crimes," he wrote in Dark Secrets. And he went on: "If I don't receive one, I will take my own life, my final murder. I don't want to spend the rest of my life in a cage, animal though I may be. I could not ever live that way."

Few criminals have been so in love with death as Billy Chadd. He described creating the fear of death as a "power high. I am alive for the sole purpose of causing pain and receiving sexual gratification."

A demon ruled his life, he wrote. It urged and coaxed him, turned him into an animal. "I should have recognized it as a sickness and sought help. I thought of it from time to time, asking "Why?' But I could find no answer. Perhaps I just lost the ability to keep this ghastly animal in me in check.

"Do you have a monster in you?" Chadd asked rhetorically. "A monster lurking in the dark reaches of your mind? Wanting to spring out and take control of you?"

Chadd wrote that the monster inside him ruled his thoughts, urged him on to kill and kill again. The monster lived on death and human suffering and "it had to be fed again and again." In one murder, "my monster peeked out. He had been awakened and was watching how I was doing. I tried to stop what was happening, but I couldn't. It wasn't me anymore. It was the creature who thrived on fear and death, a creature who had lain dormant for so long that he would not be denied."

No doubt a "monster" had been responsible for the murder of Patricia Franklin, a 30-year-old secretary with the prestigious Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California. On the night of July 26th, 1974, Miss Franklin returned to her cosy home in Linda Vista and began to get ready for a date she had that night.

She never made it.

The following day, San Diego police found the woman's naked body tied to her bed. The house had been ransacked. Clothing, pulled from bureau drawers, was strewn about the floor. Detective Sergeant Ybarrondo, whose homicide team investigated the case, remembered the Franklin murder as one of the most vicious and savage crimes he had ever investigated.

The woman had been raped repeatedly before her death. One of her nipples had been nearly bitten off during the attack. Detectives counted 15 knife wounds in the neck.

From interviews with friends of the victim, Ybarrondo was able to reconstruct the events which led up to the murder. A boy friend had phoned Patricia about 7.30pm and spoke to her for several minutes. He then called back within an hour, but this time Patricia did not answer. It was during the time between the tow phone calls that police believed Patricia was raped and killed.

Detectives found a bath towel on the floor near the bed and the presence of water on the bathroom floor. They also found scratches on the exterior of the rear door. The house lights were still on when investigators entered the house. From this scanty evidence, Ybarrondo theorized that the victim, having returned home from work and spoken to her boy friend on the phone, entered the bathroom to take a shower. During this time, the killer forced the back door and entered the house. Confronting Patricia Franklin in the bathroom, he forced her into the bedroom. He cut down a Venetian-blind cord and tied up his victim. He then assaulted and killed her.

Investigators learned that Patricia Franklin was a diligent, kind person, not the type to make enemies. When police interviewed the victim's boy friends and acquaintances, they came up empty handed. Workers at Scripp's Clinic were unable to give probers a lead. Neighbours had seen nothing suspicious, heard nothing unusual that night. Police found no footprints outside the house, no physical evidence inside that they could attribute to Patricia's killer. A partial fingerprint was found in the bedroom, but it was not enough for identification purposes. After weeks of painstaking work, the investigators were no closer to finding a suspect in the murder.

Years were to pass before a solid lead developed. On February 15th, 1978, two schoolchildren returned to their Mira Mesa home for lunch and found the body of 28-year-old Linda Hewitt, their babysitter and mother of an infant son, sprawled on the floor, her body punctured by repeated stab wounds.

Detective Bob Quigley of San Diego was one of the probers assigned to the Linda Hewitt murder case. Quigley had investigated dozens of murders during his long career. The Linda Hewitt murder seemed to stand out from many of the others he had worked on. She had not died quickly. The killer had made the young woman suffer agonies before she died.

Her murder reminded the detective of another case he had investigated a few years before. Linda Hewitt and Patricia Franklin had not known each other. They had come from different backgrounds, had lived in different parts of the city and had been killed four years apart. Yet it appeared that the two women shared one thing in common - they had somehow met and been killed by the same man.

Linda Hewitt, like Patricia Franklin, had been savagely raped before her death. The young mother's hands had been stabbed repeatedly with a knife. The placement and repetition of the stab wounds caught the detective's eye. Her throat had been slashed, her spinal cord severe, her kidneys and back punctured several times.

Detectives learned that Linda Hewitt had lived in East San Diego, but had moved a few days before the murder to a trailer park in National City, a blue-collar suburb a few times from the Mexican border. Further investigation revealed that she had broken up with her boy friend only a few days before she moved. Detective Quigley interviewed the boy friend, a sailor, who was able to produce witnesses verifying that he was on board ship during the time the murder was committed.

Quigley next questioned bus drivers in an attempt to learn whether any remembered a passenger matching Linda Hewitt's description. None could. However, Quigley was able to turn up a witness who had seen Linda in Mira Mesa briefly on the morning she was killed.

A box of diapers had been found in the house where the victim had been babysitting. The investigator traced the sales receipt to a Mira Mesa drugstore, where an assistant said he remembered a customer matching Linda Hewitt's description. He said she purchased the diapers, while a man behind her pushed a baby pram. The assistant was unable to remember what the man looked like.

Quigley believed that there was a connection between Linda Hewitt and the man behind her pushing the baby pram. The baby was undoubtedly Linda's. It was unlikely that the mother would leave her baby at home alone while running to the drugstore to buy diapers. Quigley wanted very much to talk to the man. At the very least, he was one of the last person to see Linda Hewitt alive. At most, he could be a suspect in the girl's killing.

The drugstore assistant, although unable to describe the man with Linda, was willing to help in the investigation and agreed to be questioned by police under hypnosis. And it was soon apparent that he had observed more than he was consciously aware of. While in a hypnotic trance, he described the person to be a short man of medium build, somewhere in his early 20s. He wore a tight T-shirt and blue jeans. He was also clean-shaven and wore short hair, such as might be found on men in the military. And although the description was short on details and long on generalizations, it did lead probers to a suspect in the case.

One of the crime-scene investigators had discovered a fingerprint inside the home where Linda was slain. The location of the print indicated that it could have been left by the killer. Though smudged, the print appeared clear enough to be usable for a positive identification if probers located a suspect.

Not until a month later - on March 24th, 1978 - did police come up with a suspect in the two sex-related slayings. On that date, Louisiana sheriff's deputies, acting on an interstate fugitive warrant, arrested a young Marine corporal named Billy Lee Chadd. He was taken into custody in Lafayette, a small college town about 120 miles from New Orleans. The interstate teletype, issued by Chula Vista police, reported that Chadd was the primary suspect in a dual rape case which Chula Vista detectives were investigating.

ON MARCH 2nd, 1978, a Chula Vista woman had awakened to find a man standing in her bedroom, wielding a machete. He'd placed the blade edge of the weapon to her throat and raped her repeatedly. When her 17-year-old daughter entered the bedroom, the intruder assaulted her as well. The disturbance awakened other members of the family, which included the teenager's four sisters and her grandparents. The rapist held them at bay with the machete and herded everyone into the living room, where he directed the eldest daughter to tie and gag her sisters and grandparents.

The mother and daughter were bound and gagged, then forced into a car driven by the assailant. He drove east through Chula Vista and continued until he reached a remote and sparsely-populated section of the county, where he let them out. They were found walking along the roadway by a US Customs officer.

The mother, the wife of the Naval officer, told Chula Vista police that she recognized the man who raped her and her daughter. She told investigators she had visited Balboa Naval Hospital for a doctor's appointment. While waiting to see the doctor, she had talked briefly with a Marine corporal who was on duty at the hospital. The corporal, clipboard in hand, had asked the woman her name and address, saying that he merely needed the information to fill out a benefits form.

The next time she saw the Marine was in her bedroom, holding a machete knife in his hand. The Navy wife said she immediately recognized the Marine. Apparently the rapist was aware that she had recognized him, for on the car trip he kept saying: "You know me, don't you?"

With this information. Chula Vista detectives contacted the Navy, which checked through duty rosters and came up with the name of Billy Chadd, a Marine corporal who had been attached briefly to the hospital. Police rushed to Chadd's home on the small coastal town of Imperial Beach, where the suspect lived with his wife and 6-month-old child. The car was gone from the driveway. And neighbours told investigators that Chadd had been seen packing the car several days earlier, apparently preparing for a long trip. Chula Vista police, suspecting that Chadd was on the run, quickly issued a fugitive warrant.

After Chadd's apprehension, he was brought back to San Diego. The tow rape victims had no trouble in picking him out of a police lineup. After interviewing the suspect, detectives booked Chadd on rape, kidnapping and robbery charges. He was taken to the San Diego County jail to await trial.

Chadd was still awaiting trial when he received a visit from Detective-Sergeant Ybarrondo. The investigator had been tipped off by a prison inmate that Chadd might be responsible for the murder of Patricia Franklin. Chadd, in an expansive mood, had boasted of murdering a woman in Linda Vista in 1974.

Billy Chadd was at first unwilling to discuss the murder. Despite repeated attempts to draw information out of the inmate, the investigator was unable to get the quiet, soft-spoken Chadd to talk.

Then, some months later, in December, Ybarrondo again went to interview Billy Chadd, this time at the inmate’s insistence. Apparently the long months in jail had loosened his tongue, for the accused rapist was eager to discuss the rape and murder of Patricia Franklin and Linda Hewitt.

Under skilled questioning, Chadd detailed the gruesome events that led to the blood-frenzied stabbing death of the Scripp's Clinic secretary.

On the night of July 26th, 1974, Chadd said, he was driving around Linda Vista looking for a place to burgle. He was out of work - he had been fired from his job at a boatyard after he threatened to "rearrange the face of the foreman with a claw-hammer" - and had resorted to robbery to support himself and his family.

He said he saw a light on in a house and sized it up as "a good place to rob." He went to the front door with a 9-mm. pistol in his hand, but suddenly lost his nerve and returned to his car. A short time later, he returned, his courage now bolstered by a few quick beers. He went to the side of the house and forced the door.

"I surprised this chick coming out of the bathroom," Chadd confessed. He said he held the gun on the frightened woman and forced her to the bedroom, where he cut down a venation-blind cord and tied her to the bed. He then started to strangle the woman. When she passed out, he revived her with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Asked why he revived the girl, Chadd smiled. Creating the fear of death was a "high", a "trip" he enjoyed taking. He said he had raped a girl before and had enjoyed the experience. Murder was something new. He said he enjoyed torturing Patricia Franklin. "I brought her back to life so as not to be cheated of seeing her suffer more," he said. After reviving her, Chadd said, he finished her off by plunging his knife into her neck 12 times.

He said he felt no remorse over killing the defenceless woman. He was giddy with excitement when he left the Franklin home. "I laughed on the way home. I wasn't afraid or sorry. I felt good."

AS FOR Linda Hewitt, Chadd said their meeting came about by accident. He had dropped off his car in National City for repairs and was on a bus when he struck up a conversation with the young mother who was sitting near him. He accompanied Linda Hewitt and her 4-year-old boy to Mira Mesa. Chadd said he was attracted to the young mother with the pretty smile - and he became angry when she turned him away at the front door to the Mira Mesa home, where she babysat for the owner's children.

He forced his way into the house and dragged the terrified woman into the bedroom, where he stripped her and sexually assaulted her. Chadd said the woman did not resist him. He held his pocketknife to her throat and threatened to kill her and her son if she did not comply with his animal desires.

After he raped her, Chadd said, he let her get up and get dressed, but then changed his mind. In the living-room, he cut down a piece of cord and tied her hands. Once she was securely bound. Chadd began stabbing his victim.

"I stabbed her in the kidneys, severed her spinal cord, cut her throat," he said with a grin. At one point, he dropped the knife and began to strangle her. Linda's son began to move towards the knife on the floor and Linda cried out for Chadd to move the knife so that her boy would not be hurt. "I had already threatened to break the little bastard's neck," Chadd recalled. He said he picked up the knife and finished Linda Hewitt off, slashing her throat while her startled, uncomprehending offspring looked on.

Again, Chadd was remorseless. "I was laughing as I watched her eyes bulge and her body start to convulse," he recalled.

UNDER YBARRONDO'S questioning, Chadd admitted that the two women were not his only victims. In August, 1975, Chadd said, he was on holiday in Las Vegas and met Delmar Bright, a waiter at one of the city’s hotels. Chadd said Bright propositioned him and paid Chadd to pose in the nude. During the picture session, the waiter asked Chadd cared to engage in. "Bondage," was Chadd's one-word reply.

Chadd, who said he had experienced homosexual lovemaking while an inmate in the California Youth Authority, tied up Bright and stated that he was going to kill him. When Bright screamed for mercy, Chadd grabbed the helpless man and proceeded to strangle and stab him until he was dead. Las Vegas authorities later confirmed that a man named Delmar Bright had been killed in a motel room in the manner described by Chadd.

Chadd also admitted to killing a man in Ellsworth, Kansas, in June, 1974. Chadd related that he got into a fight with an older man and crushed the man’s skull with a rock. He then threw the body into a nearby river.

"I found myself thinking how easy it was to actually kill a person," he later wrote of the incident. "We die quite easily, you know. I wanted to share my new feelings with everyone."

Kansas authorities, however, had no record of finding the body of the man Chadd said he had killed. Though Chadd had no reason to lie, police needed more evidence in order to bring charges against the self-professed murderer.

Following his confession, Billy Chadd was returned to his cell. With time on his hands, Chadd began to write his memoirs, which he titled Dark Secrets - and to plot out his future. It didn't look good. He would be tried on murder, rape, robbery and kidnapping charges in California. If he managed to beat the courts there, then he would stand trial in Las Vegas.

At best, he would end up with a life sentence without possibility of parole. The way Chadd looked at it, a life sentence was a fate worse than death. The cold, grey walls were all he had to look forward to. And he knew he would not last long in that environment.

In the first weeks of December, 1978, Chadd complained of mental depressions and was visited by a county psychiatrist, who prescribed strong tranquillisers for the inmate. Chadd, however, managed to "tongue" the capsules until he had collected 40 pills - enough to literally kill a horse. On January 2nd, 1979, he attempted suicide by swallowing the pills in his cell. Only the quick actions of a sheriff's deputy saved Chadd's life.

THE INMATE'S brush with suicide, however, only whetted his appetite. Obsessed with the torture and murder of others in the past, Chadd was now consumed with the idea of his own destruction. When he first appeared in court, Chadd pleaded guilty to the murder of Patricia Franklin and Linda Hewitt and expressed his desire to sentenced to death.

The plea surprised Judge Charles Snell, who told Chadd that he could not plead guilty to a capital case in Municipal Court. He would have to wait until his case reached Superior Court.

Chadd received the news with little expression. He knew how the courts worked. Three weeks later, he again pleaded guilty to the murders, this time before Superior Court Judge Earl Gilliam. Judge Gilliam, like Judge Snell, refused to accept the plea and ordered Chadd to undergo psychiatric tests.

Two psychiatrists, Dr. Carl E. Lengyel and Dr. Bernard Hansen, gave independent examinations to the slightly-built inmate. On February 7th, they reported to Judge Ben Hamrick in a court hearing that Chadd was mentally competent and very much aware of what he was doing. When one of the doctors asked his why he was trying to plead guilty, Chadd replied: "To save a lot of my time in prison. It will cut the time in prison and bypass some courts. If I get death, I will not stay very long. I prefer death to life imprisonment. I am wanted in three states. One will give me the gas."

On February 16th, one year to the day after Linda Hewitt was raped, tortured and murdered, Billy Chadd pleaded guilty to first-degree murder.

Judge Gilliam listened while the defendant calmly recounted the grisly details of the murder of Patricia Franklin and Linda Hewitt and the rape and kidnapping of the Chula Vista mother and her daughter.

After detailed legal procedures, Judge Gilliam accepted Chadd's plea of guilty. The defendant was then scheduled to appear before a jury, which would decide whether he would get the death sentence former Marine to find pleasure in the torture and murder of three - possibly four - persons and now encouraged him to seek his own death?

Though the answer to that question might never be learned, a clue was provided when an envelope covered with drawings and scribbled Latin phrases was found stuck between pages of Chadd's manuscript.

The envelope showed drawings of a bearded goat's head with horns and a flowing beard, set inside a five-pointed star and a circle. Surrounding the drawing was the inscription: "In Nomine Di Nosiri Satanis, Luciferie Excelsie." The words, translated from Latin, were said to mean: "In the name of our Satan, Lucifer on highest."

A San Diego priest, who has studied cults and lectured on the subject of Satanic worship, said it was his belief that the inscription was a rough translation of Latin and that the writer perhaps meant to say: "In the name of our God, Satan Lucifer on Highest."

The cleric said that the goat's head was the Goat of Mendes, a Santanic symbol since medieval times. He added that the star was also a medieval symbol associated with devil worship.

All of this possibly gives some clue as to why Billy Chadd felt pleasure in torturing and murdering his victims and was able "to laugh on the way home" from the murder of Patricia Franklin.

Perhaps he did worship Satan. Certainly he reveled in the horrors and abnormal lusts that appeal to devil worshippers and other cultists. Or perhaps the trauma of his teenage years, several of them spent in juvenile reformatory, was to blame for his later depraved behaviour. In Dark Secrets, he wrote that he was a wild youth and was frequently in trouble with the police. In 1971, he was sentenced to the California Youth Authority on a rape charge - a crime he maintains he was innocent of. He escaped twice from CYA and "on my second escape, I really did rape a woman, mainly to see what it was like. Later that night, I thought about the rape and I decided it wasn't bad at all. I knew I would do it again."

After his arrest, he was sent to Youth Training School, a facility for juvenile offenders, which young Chadd laughingly referred to as a "Gladiator School." He tried to hand himself, failed miserably, then was sent to Atascadero State Hospital, an institution for the mentally ill.

Therapists and psychiatrists were supposed "to shrink" him back from the edge of madness. Instead, during his stay at the remformatory, Chadd was introduced to heroin use and homosexual relationships.

Such was the early life of Billy Chadd. The jury, however, did not have to determine the difficult question of motivation. Their job was much easier. They had to decide whether the crimes committed by Billy Lee Chadd warranted life imprisonment without possibility of parole - or the death sentence.

Defendant Billy Chadd had expressed his desire for the death sentence. He sat quietly in the courtroom while jurors listened to the evidence. He had refused to take the witness-stand during the penalty phase of the trial.

The evidence, which included portions of Dark Secrets and interviews with police investigators, was more than enough to convince the jurors. They deliberated less than two hours before reaching a verdict. On May 12th, 1979, Billy Lee Chadd was sentenced to die in the gas chamber at San Quentin.

"Death is an erotic experience for him." David Pitkin, the defendant's court-appointed attorney, told reporters after the trial. "He's looking forward to it."

And perhaps he was. As Billy Lee Chadd left the San Diego courthouse, he had a smile on his lips.

The Poison-Pen Murder

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 02:58:00 +0000

By John Mead
Master Detective
December 1979

In the early 1880s, Mme. Lenormand, once a leading Paris hostess and now married to a much younger man, suspected that he was being unfaithful to her. So she got in touch with a private detective agency, one of whose agents - a man called Morin - was destined for a violent death.

It was in August, 1883, that Mme. Jeannette Hugues, the beautiful 28-year-old wife of Clovis Hugues, the Deputy for Marseilles, discovered that Morin was bandying her name about in connection with possible divorce proceedings between the Lenormands.

An incensed Mme. Hugues took a revolver and went to Mme. Lenormand's home, intending to kill her. But her husband followed her and seized the pistol before she could carry out her intention. Then, on September 1st, she was dissuaded from carrying the revolver when, with two friends, she insisted on a confrontation with one Clerget, the head of the detective agency. Clerget was all apologies, insisting that his agency's job was merely to ascertain addresses and it was Morin - who had left the agency - who was slandering Mme. Hugues.

All was quiet for a few weeks - until Mme. Hugues learned that Mme. Lenormand was paying another agency 25,000 francs to implicate her. On October 29th, she tried to visit Mme. Lenormand to insist on a showdown – only to be told that the latter was dying. She did in fact die on November 6th, just as a police investigation into the affair was about to conclude. A few days later, Morin faced his judges and received a two-year jail sentence.

However, his lawyers counseled an appeal. Formalities dragged on - it was not till November 27th, 1884, that he appeared in court again. But for the previous fortnight Mme. Hugues, her revolver at the ready, had been frequenting the central area of Paris, where Morin lived. She couldn't trace him there, but decided to act when she learned the date of his appeal. That day, she waited at the Palais de Justice for him. Only minutes after he emerged from the courtroom, she shot him repeatedly.

The case was a sensation well before her trial opened in Paris in January, 1885. Would she be acquitted, this victim of a long series of poison-pen letters, slanders and gossip? Was she not right to be impatient with the state of the law which seemed powerless to punish her slanderers?

When her trial for premeditated murder opened, the Palais de Justice was under siege from the public, many of whom waited all night to get into court. When the doors were opened, the noisy throng swept in, taking not merely all the public seats, but jostling for places with officials, lawyers and reporters. "It was as though the street and the market had invaded the court," one newspaper recorded.

It took over an hour for the president of the court, M. Bernard des Glajeux, to introduce some sort of order into the densely-packed room. Yet tall, deathly-pale and dressed in black, Mme. Hugues was very much in command of herself - and soon of the court - as she replied in sonorous tones to the president's questions.

He recalled that on November 27th, as Morin was the first to come out of the court, she came up behind him with her husband and her lawyer, Mâitre Gatineau.

Mme. Hugues interjected: "Not at all. Morin followed us. He went by me for a moment and, as he did so, he eyed me up and down in the insolent way he had. Then I seized my revolver which I had hidden under my coat and fired pointblank at him."

The president: "You had planned to strike. On November 13th, you bought cartridges and, on the evening of the 27th, an overnight bag was found packed at your home, in case you went to jail."

Mme. Hugues: "Just so, I'd had enough. I din’t want to be legally investigated side by side with Morin."

"Your hand didn't tremble. A witness has said that you were 'as still as a statue'."

"That's true. I had hesitated several times. But on November 27th, my mind was made up. I was resolved to kill this man – so much so that, thinking that he might have a revolver as well and might kill me, I went on the morning of the 27th to say goodbye to my children.”

"You had an extraordinary calm."

"It was an artificial coolness," replied the defendant. Then she added vehemently: "If I'd had 50 bullets, I would have used them all on Morin."

When the president asked: "Why did you kill this man?" she replied that she was in Marseilles when a telegram from her father brought her urgently to Paris. She found that Mme. Lenormand had involved her in slander, paying witnesses to say that she was once M. Lenormand’s mistress.

Mme. Hugues now told the court: "That's just how it was. I went to Mme. Corbion with my husband and our friend M. Georges Meusy, legal editor of l'Intransigeant. Mme. Corbion told me that she had never uttered the slander that Morin attributed to her. In fact, she had angrily showed Morin the door and said she would help me to nail the lie…

I went to Mme. Lenormand, asking her to repudiate the slander. She refused, then suggested that if I felt aggrieved I should go to law. She laughed at me, saying, 'What's one lover in a woman's lifetime? Lenormand is a handsome chap, so I don't blame you. I fell for him - and I was 15 years older'."

Mme. Hugues went on: "I said I wanted a straight yes or no as to whether she had paid people to slander me. All she would say was that the dossier on the separation proceedings was at my disposal at the office of the legal authorities.

"I had a revolver. But my husband tore it out of my hands."

The president: "So you wanted to kill Mme. Lenormand?"

Mme. Hugues: "If she hadn't given me the satisfaction I demanded, then…" she shrugged her shoulders.

She added that she went to the Parquet (the office of the public prosecutor) in Paris to try to see the "evidence" gathered by Morin. But they referred her to the Parquet of Rouen, who refused to give her details, asking her to wait until the case came up two months later. So she went to Clerget, who told her that Morin was now on his own.

Mme. Hugues added: "I didn't want to spend my life struggling against the plots of Mme. Lenormand. I decided to have done with her and, unknown to my husband, I returned to her place.

"Her son told me that she was dying and tried to stop me. There was a struggle. 'I want to kill your mother' I cried.

And I’ll be back!’ I had my pistol with me. The son snatched it from me with the help of a gendarme.”

When Morin was sentenced, she said she would use her influence to help him - so long as he admitted that he had slandered her. All he replied was, 'To hell with Clovis Hugues and his wife - I'll get out of this by myself! Anyway, I know important people who will say that she was the mistress of Lenormand'."

Mme. Hugues continued: "Meanwhile, my husband kept getting poison-pen letters and filthy postcards about me - so now you can understand my need for vengeance."

The president: "It was the postcard slanders that determined you to kill?"

Mme. Hugues: "Yes."

The president: "The postcards were certainly horrible. Your husband was accused of every natural and unnatural crime. They are so horrible that I cannot read them out in court."

In further evidence, Mme. Hugues said that when she made her offer to Morin, the entire Press - even those most hostile to her husband's political opinions - were united in condemnation of her slanderers.

The president: "Nothing can justify the killing of Morin, nor even explain it. Murder is never justified."

Mme. Hugues: "So you count all my suffering for nothing?"

The president: "You killed him after waiting for 15 months. One would have thought you would have sought immediate vengeance."

Mme. Hugues: "But he had a down on me - he treated me as if I were an insect under his feet. He was at liberty to go on scheming vilely against me. That's why I killed him. If I'd killed him before his case came on, people would have said I was frightened because he knew something about me… I didn't kill Morin the false witness. I killed Morin the persistent slanderer."

The president: "You know that on his deathbed, in that supreme hour when no one lies, Morin saw all the obscene letters sent to you. He couldn't speak, but each letter was shown to him and he was asked whether he knew the writer. He shook his head. Then he asked for a pencil and painfully, with death already paralyzing his hand, he wrote, 'It's not me - I'm innocent, innocent'."

Mme. Hugues: "I know the cards were not in his handwriting. But I'm certain they came from one of his friends."

When the president pointed out that many of the letters and cards were postmarked in Marseilles, where her husband had enemies (and where Morin had never been), Mme. Hugues replied sharply: "Very well - find out their author's identity! Until then, I accuse Morin!"

The president: "Your vengeance was cruel. Morin was tortured for a fortnight, twisting in pain, had a horrible trepanning operation and his hands had to be bound so that he wouldn't tear off his bandages. You suffered, Madame.

But anguish for anguish, moral suffering for physical suffering, which of the two suffered more?"

Mme. Hugues: "I did."

Evidence of the killing was that Mme. Hugues coolly fired six times, "as in a shooting gallery" - and that when she had done so, her husband embraced her, crying: "Bravo, Jeannette, my angel! You've avenged us!"

M. Gobert, a handwriting expert, said that none of the letters and postcards in question were in Morin’s hand. All Morin's private papers had been examined and in none did the handwriting correspond to the poison-pen missives.

M. Bernard, the Advocate-General (prosecutor), argued that Mme. Hugues would have acted more wisely if she hadn't made such a vast stir about an admitted calumny. The Press, he argued, had acted in the public interest in championing her, so surely Mme. Hugues should have been satisfied with such reparation?

M. Bernard contended that no one had the right to take the law into their own hands, especially at a time when so many "crimes of passion" were growing. "A verdict of acquittal," he declared, "would legalise a right to murder."

Maitre Gatineau painted a picture of a deeply-suffering woman pursued by the authors of the filthy vendetta, who had gone so far as to send slanderous cards about her to such public figures as Victor Hugo.

After a two-hour retirement, the jury found her not guilty. As the verdict was announced, the cheering in court could be heard all along the boulevards.

It was a sensational case, but what stayed in the memory of many journalists were the lively scenes when the court was invaded by all and sundry (no less that 40,000) people had applied for official tickets of admission). "It was," said one reporter, "an unheard-of, shameful, disgusting spectacle, with tarts, criminals and riff-raff jostling with respectable citizens to get a glimpse of Mme. Jeannette Hugues."

Pardon Me, Governor... Pretty Please?

noreply@blogger.com (Tips for Makeup and Beauty) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 12:49:00 +0000

By Jack Clements
Detective Dragnet
February 1980 (Volume 24, Number 1)

Driving along the highway that night of August 24th, 1926, Jesse Laster, chief of detectives at Joplin, Missouri, chatted with his wife and their guests, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Sprague.

About nine miles west of Joplin, they entered the State of Kansas and rolled across a bridge spanning Spring River. A short distance beyond the bridge, a broad country lane entered the highway, and Laster decided to turn around. When he completed the turn, he stopped before again entering the highway.

As the car halted, a blinding light was suddenly turned into the eyes of the automobile occupants, and a dark figure stepped from behind a huge pile of mine boulders. The nearby area was dotted with abandoned zinc and lead mines, and this pile of stones belonged to one of these diggings. The intruder was holding a shotgun slightly ahead of the powerful spotlight he was using and the muzzle of the gun was pointing directly at Laster's head.

"Who are you, and what are you doing out here?" a gruff voice demanded. "I'm an officer, so speak up."

The Joplin sleuth laughed. "Take it easy," he chuckled as he spoke. "There's nothing to be worried about. I'm Jesse Laster, chief of detectives in Joplin.'

As the detective spoke, the gunman uttered a string of curses. Then without warning, the shotgun roared while Laster jerked violently forward, then slumped under the steering wheel. The light was extinguished and the shooter vanished.

Mrs. Laster was the first to recover from the terrifying experience. "Quick," she cried, "drive back to Joplin. Jesse is badly hurt." But to the frantic woman’s horror, neither of the Spragues knew how to operate an automobile.

The almost hysterical woman managed to get her mate's limp form from beneath the wheel. She had never driven a car before, but had watched her husband as he shifted the gears in their various machines. Now she managed to get the automobile into gear and she was thankful that the engine had been running when the killer had encountered them. She felt that she could never have gotten the motor to start, had the ignition been turned off. Gritting her teeth, she was able to steer the new auto onto the roadway and turn toward Joplin. It took almost an hour to reach the city, for Mrs. Laster had put the car in low gear as she didn't know how to shift into high gear.

Dr. Mitchell Craig lived only a few doors away and he arrived quickly when Mr. Sprague telephoned. The physician made a hasty examination of the wounded and unconscious officer, than glanced at the anxious wife and friends. Laster was beyond human aid with the back of his head blown away by the shotgun blast.

After listening to the tearful story of Mrs. Laster, the medic called Joplin Police Headquarters. Ten minutes later a carload of officers arrived – Detectives Alec Brown, Edward Hall, Thomas Sweeney and Len Vandeventer along with Police Chief Arch McDonald.

As she talked with these men, Mrs. Laster was still bearing up remarkably well. Keeping a grip on her emotions, she told the investigators what had happened. But both she and her guests were able to furnish only a vague description of the gunman. The blinding light the killer had used had prevented the people from seeing him distinctly. However, Mrs. Sprague volunteered that she had the impression that the murderer had been a middle-aged man of about average height. She explained her description of the criminal. "I didn't actually see him very well, but it seemed to me that he ran like an older man when he left. His voice didn't sound like a youngster's, either."

Upon learning that the crime had occurred in Kansas, Chief McDonald immediately called Sheriff Phil Fisher at Columbus, which is the seat of Cherokee county. The sheriff said he would meet the Joplin officers at the crime scene. The Missouri city and Columbus were about the same distance from the murder spot and the Kansas sheriff arrived there at almost the same time as did the policemen.

Before leaving the Laster home, McDonald had called his office and ordered that all highways leading into Joplin be blocked at once. He had little hope that this move would be likely to snare the murderer, but there was always a chance that the man might have been delayed in some way, if he actually did attempt to leave the area. McDonald also had all off-duty officers notified and called to work. He told the desk sergeant that all suspicious characters should be taken in, and any man who had a reputation for violence should certainly be questioned closely.

Combining the spotlights and head lamps on their cars, the men began searching the side road and the highway. They were not looking for any certain thing, but they had some hope that the criminal might have been around the place for some time before he encountered the Lasters, and could have left behind some indication of his identity or where he lived or worked. They did not believe that the gunman had merely been passing here and had come upon the auto of his victim by chance. They felt, instead, that it was more likely the man had been here for a purpose. They knew that he could not have known that Laster would stop to turn around at this place, so there must have been another reason for the killer’s presence here.

It was Detective Edward Hall who came upon something of interest, a set of truck tire imprints in the somewhat muddy soil. Larger than ordinary automobile tires, it was plain that the truck had been equipped with diamond tread tires, both front and rear. The truck tires had almost wiped out the prints left by Laster's machine, and the sleuths knew that the bigger machine had certainly been driven there after the officer had been slain. It was reasonable to assume that the truck had probably been driven by the gunman, or he had at least been a passenger in the machine.

"There aren't many trucks that use this off-brand highway any more," McDonald said. "So I'd think that some of the people who live around here could have seen this truck and maybe they will even know who drives it. If we're lucky, someone could even be able to tell us why anyone was driving around here at night in a truck. There had to be a reason for them to be here, for very few people ever go joyriding in a thing like that. Most of us know where the scattered houses are located around here, so we'll start talking to these people."

Following the chief’s suggestion, the several officers went in pairs as they began the canvass. There were only a few homes in the somewhat barren mining region and they found all the neighboring citizens at home. But they did not find even one person who said they had heard the shotgun blast that had killed Laster, or who would admit ever having seen any kind of truck stopped in the vicinity.

When the lawmen had again assembled at the murder site, they discussed what the motive might have prompted the cold-blooded murder. They realized that Laster, having been a policeman for some 18 years, was the most likely to have motivated a revenge killing. But they reasoned that he had not been set up or a trap of any kind in his death. There was no possible way for the gunman to have known in advance that Laster would ever visit this spot and especially at night. They agreed that although this has possibly been a revenge shooting, it had not been planned in advance.

There was not a great deal more to be done, so after posting two men as guards, McDonald took his officers back to Joplin, while Sheriff Fisher also returned to Columbus. They would meet again early the next morning.

Not long after dawn, the sheriff and police chief were together again. As they viewed the crime scene in daylight, they were puzzled as to what course to take in their investigation. The Joplin city jail was overflowing with characters who had been picked up for questioning, but these men and youths were slowly being released as they furnished alibis or otherwise satisfied the lawmen that they knew nothing about the murder. This was also true in Columbus, the only difference being that there were not so many potential suspects to be interrogated.

"I think," Fisher suggested "the best thing for us to do is for two men to concentrate all their time on this case. I'll work at it, and you can pick whoever you wish."

"And," McDonald quickly conceded, "I think you're right. I will assign Edward Hall to work with you. I believe he is the best man for the job. He isn't easily discouraged, and I happen to know that he will stick to a case until it is either solved, or he is called off it to work on something which is considered more important."

The Kansas sleuth nodded agreement to this suggestion. He was acquainted with Detective Hall and felt that he could work well with the Joplin office.

At that moment, Hall and Detective Thomas Sweeney arrived and McDonald explained about his decision. Accompanied by Sweeney, the chief departed for Joplin, leaving the two new partners to begin their own investigation.

When he was here before, Hall had noticed a faint path about fifty feet from the murder spot. He pointed this out to Fisher who had also noticed the signs that someone obviously passed this way quite often. The pair began following the marks on the ground and after about two hundred feet, they found that the path seemed to end near several abandoned mine buildings. They could find no trace of it beyond the old shacks and they were puzzled to discover that the path stopped very near the apparently deserted zind mine shaft.

"Someone has certainly been coming to this place on a regular basis," the Kansas lawmen commented. "Probably bootleggers," he went on. "These old diggings are loaded with them and so are the courts and jails. This shaft seems to be dry," he added as he turned the beam of his flashlight into the dark hole, "so suppose we take a look down there. Maybe our killer had been up here when he met with the Lasters and Spragues."

Almost all abandoned mines were flooded with water, but this one was high on a small hill and was dry. It seemed to be approximately 50 feet in depth and heavy wooden cleats were nailed to the timbers that supported the walls.

The lawmen carefully descended into the shaft and saw a large chamber on one side. Turning their lights into this room or "drift" as they are called by miners, the sheriff and city detective were astounded at what they saw. Before them was the most complete liquor still they had ever seen. On one side of the cave-like room was a huge pile of sacked sugar and nearby they saw a number of barrels which contained mash. The mine was at least 100 feet long by 50 feet wide with a 20-foot roof. In one corner a clear spring bubbled across the floor and disappeared into the hole on the other side of the room. Both men knew that this was an ideal location for a still, as fresh water is absolutely required in the making of the spirits. Two powerful gasoline lanterns swung from the roof timbers, while a block and tackle indicated how the moonshiners got the supplies into the place and hoisted the illicit booze to the surface.

Hall's eyes swept over the room. "This place is somewhat damp and I doubt that any fingerprints will be on anything, but we'll get the identification man out here, just in case. If we can't get a line on whoever is running this thing, it may be tough to catch with anyone. Whoever runs this still is certainly aware of the murder having taken place, and I'd say it isn't too likely they will risk coming back here very soon. That will hold true whether they had anything to do with the crime or not."

"So," his companion retorted, "unless we can locate someone who will talk, our only chance to snare the owners of this thing is to simply wait for them to finally venture back. If we can pick up the right character, we’ll find out who runs the still. Whoever he is, he has considerable money invested here, and it will be hard for him to resist the temptation to come back, even if he intends to try and move it to some other spot."

Sheriff Fisher concealed himself near the mine while Hall returned to Joplin to get the police identification officer. Both men hoped that the owner of the still might visit the place and Fisher could nab him.

However, when Hall returned with the ID expert, the Kansas sleuth had to report that no one had appeared during his partner's absence.

The identification man shook his head the moment he saw the illicit still. "Everything is damp down here," he announced, "and there isn't much chance that any prints are here. But I'll take a look." Moments later he began putting his implements back into his carrying case. "No use," he growled. "Just as I thought, there's nothing here at all."

When they were again alone, the two lawmen began a careful examination of every article in the mine. They hoped they would come upon some object which could be traced to whoever had purchased it. But they had no luck. Like most bootleg stills, this one had been constructed from all junk-like material, the origin of which probably dated back for many years and which carried no numbers or other means of finding out from where it had come.

The discouraged investigators were leaving the mine shaft when Hall spoke up suddenly. "We're being stupid," he exclaimed. "They bought all that sugar we saw, and they must have got it from a wholesale house and transported it themselves. It's a cinch they wouldn't let a deliveryman get wise to the still. It's two-to-one that the truck tire prints we saw out here, were made when they hauled the sugar, and no doubt also when they made deliveries of the hooch.

"There's several wholesale houses around here, but we're bound to find the right one sooner or later. I'm not worried about any dealer trying to cover up on selling the sugar. There just isn't enough money involved to pay such an establishment to risk being caught breaking the law if they lied about selling anything that they thought was used in an illegal manner."

At the nearest wholesale grocery, the manager nodded as he listened to Hall's explanation of how they were interested in his sugar sales. "We have very little cash-and-carry business," he said, but he named a smaller concern whose business was mostly of that variety.

When they reached this place, they found that their luck had changed for the better. The owner acknowledged that he remembered two men who had bought sugar in the manner they described.

"They are young fellows in their early twenties," he explained. "They told me they wanted the sugar for a small ice cream plant they had established in Neosho, and they paid cash. I had no reason to suspect that anything was wrong with the deal." He was able to give a fairly good description of the customers, but he did not know their names or where they lived. Nor had he noticed the truck they used to transport the sugar.

Back at headquarters they found that a few more undesirable characters were still being questioned, but nothing new had been learned. All of these men and women were known to have at one time or another been arrested for liquor law violations, but they all swore that they knew nothing about the murder, nor would they offer any suggestions as to the culprit's identity.

None of the lawmen had any confidence that the roundup would result in helping the investigation, but Chief McDonald tried to improve their chances of success by promising each potential suspect that any help would be held in strict confidence and its source never revealed. Despite this guarantee, the men and women insisted that they did not know who owned or operated the still, and they refused to suggest the name of any possible suspect in the murder.

Every member of the Joplin Police Department and the men in Sheriff Fisher's office at Columbus, Kansas, had a let-down feeling a failure. Some even voiced predictions that the killer would never be caught.

The only real exception to this attitude was Detective Hall. Bearing a reputation of never admitting defeat, he was determined to solve this crime unless he should be taken off the case for some unforeseen reason. He was sitting alone as he mulled over the case, when he suddenly had an idea. He beckoned to Sheriff Fisher who was across the room.

"Look," he said in a grim tone, "those guys lied to the wholesaler about why they wanted that sugar," he began, "but why did they pick on that certain small ice cream company and name it as the buyer? There are many legal reasons why they would buy the sugar, so I wonder if it's possible they might have connections with the ice cream business in some way, or maybe just worked at that place or another one? We'd better talk to the manager of the plant. He might have some interesting things to tell us, maybe even the names of the sugar buyers."

"Sounds logical to me," the Kansas sleuth agreed. "It just might work out, and it at least beats twiddling our thumbs and grabbing a lot of scared moonshiners."

An hour later, the partners were talking to the manager of a small ice cream company in Neosho, Missouri, which is twenty miles south of Joplin. Neither man had any police jurisdiction here, but they did have the legal right to ask questions regarding any crime.

Although they both had entertained some hope of success in this move, they were not surprised at what the dealer told them. He said that he had no idea who the customers had been.

"They may be regular customers," he said regretfully, "or they may have even worked here at some time. But I just can't figure out who they could be from the descriptions you have given to me. I'm sorry I can't help you, and you can be very sure that if I should learn anything of value to you, I'll get in touch with you."

As the dejected lawmen started to return to Joplin, it was Sheriff Fisher's turn to come up with a plan of action. "We could still be overlooking something," he observed. "I remember that there wasn't a single empty sugar sack in that mine. Now from the looks of things, that still has been there for quite awhile. Those barrels of mash all had sugar in them, so what did the guys do with the empty bags? They're pretty valuable, and it's possible they sold them to a juckyard. There are also some places that deal only in empty sacks, and one of them could have bought sugar sacks from our bright young men."

When they stopped at a junkyard, they found that none of the regular junk dealers bought empty bags. The merchant told them that there were only two companies in the district where the sole business was dealing in the empty containers. Five minutes later they were talking with the owner of one of these firms.

"I think I know who you mean," the dealer said at once. "They drive an old Dodge truck but I don't know who they are. I did notice that the truck has a Missouri license plate, but the most outstanding thing about it is that although it is pretty trashy looking, it has apparently new diamond tread tires all around."

The lawmen exchanged quick glances at the mention of the tires. They were remembering the many tracks they had seen at the scene of the murder.

The merchant could tell them nothing more, and after he said he would notify authorities if the men should come back to his place, the partners left.

Both men felt somewhat encouraged, for although their progress was somewhat sketchy, they certainly knew a little more about the two suspects than they had previously. "There can't be so many old Dodge trucks around here that we can't come up with the right one," Hall observed hopefully. "It won't be too hard to locate every Dodge outfit in this end of the country."

It was only a matter of minutes after reaching headquarters until they had a list of owners of all Dodge trucks in the area. They decided to wait until the next morning before beginning what they knew could be a long and tiresome canvass of these truck owners.

There were only a dozen such vehicles licensed locally, but when night came and they had exhausted the names on their list, and they had failed to locate the Dodge with the heavy diamond tread tires.

Three weeks passed, and absolutely no progress was made in the investigation. Scores of officers were on watch for the Dodge truck while the old mine was under the eyes of officers night and day. No one came near the still and although every person who was picked up and who had any kind of criminal record was questioned closely, not one seemed to have any information in the murder.

"We're just not ever going to get anywhere unless we figure out some new angle," grumbled Hall as he and Sheriff Fisher again reviewed all that they knew in the case. "So I think we should take that still apart one piece at a time. Maybe, and just maybe, we'll come up with something."

Back at the time they again examined the still and all things they found here. But when they had finished the work, they had uncovered absolutely nothing of value to them.

Back on the surface again, Hall’s eyes wandered over the half-wild countryside. He centered his gaze on a thick growth of brush which had obviously sprung up since the time when the mine had been worked. Although there was actually nothing out of the ordinary about the thicket, for some reason he didn't understand, the detective started walking toward the growth. Without asking any questions, the Kansas sheriff went with him.

When they reached the brush, they found an opening and saw a faintly outlined trail leading toward the nearby forest. They knew it had escaped their notice before because it was invisible when it reached the rocky soil near the mine. Without talking, they followed the path through the heavy woods, each man wondering what would develop from the discovery.

A quarter mile from where they had picked up the trail, they suddenly emerged from the trees and found themselves in a large clearing. At the other side of the clearing was an ancient log house which seemed to be deserted.

Still without saying a word to each other, the two lawmen drew their service revolvers. While Hall cautiously approached the front of the structure, Fisher went to the back. They did not know what to expect, but they did know that if this place should be a hideout for moonshiners, they could be dangerous. This could be true, whether such men had a connection or even any knowledge of the shooting of Detective Laster.

Standing to one side of the closed front door, Detective Hall rapped sharply on the portal with his pistol barrel while calling out to whoever might be inside. He repeated this summons several times without receiving any response, and he then turned the knob of the door which was not locked. Still there was no sound from within, but the long-time peace officer now dropped to the ground before venturing to enter the place. His reason for hugging the earth so closely was because he knew from experience that any gunman who should be inside the building, would be almost certain to fire at about the height of a man's belt buckle and would thus miss his target.

As the city officer inched his way through the doorway, Fisher joined him. But the two soon found that all their caution had been in vain. There was no one in the one-room building. The place contained no furniture, but they saw a large canvas near a rear wall. This cloth was apparently covering something and the sheriff pulled it aside.

The astounded investigators were almost shocked at what was revealed. The canvas had been used to cover a huge pile of canned goods. Included were canned fruit, meat and vegetables along with other things. Judging from the appearance of the dust which had collected on the canvas, the food had been there for some time.

"This stuff must belong to the moonshiners," muttered Fisher, but neither of them touched any of the goods.

"Let's hope that the ID man can come up with some prints here," the county sleuth added, "But I wouldn't bet he will. I'd say this collection has been here for several months. In that case, it isn't too probable that prints will still be around. Unless whoever handled the cans had grease or paint on their hands."

"It's almost a sure thing that this food belonged to the moonshiners, all right," Hall commented, "and they haven't come back for it for the same reason they haven't returned to the still.

With the sheriff staying here to act as a guard, the detective hurried back to Joplin where he got the identification officer. When he expert examined their find, he gave them a bitter disappointment. "These cans are all blurred," he said glumly. "I would say whoever handled them was wearing gloves."

When they heard this announcement, the two investigators looked hard at each other. "The most important case either of us has ever had, and we can't get anywhere on it," muttered Hall.

As they walked back to their parked car, the Joplin officer had another idea. "I've been thinking about how all that food was stored in the cabin," he began, "and it brought something back to me. Do you remember that about two weeks before Laster was killed, burglars carted off over $1,500 in goods from a store in Crane, Missouri? And do you recall that the burglars were using a truck that had diamond tread tires? The sheriff found the tire tracks where the thieves backed the truck having been around here. There just has to be a connection there, and it's almost certain that the burglars and our moonshiners are the same guys. There's also a good chance that they are also the ones who killed Jesse Laster, or they know who did."

"I think," his companion retorted, "that we would be a couple of chumps if we don't follow up on that idea. The sheriff of Stone County caught those burglars a few days ago, but he did not recover all the stolen goods. The two guys both had records and they pleaded guilty to the store robbery. They got 15 years apiece and they're both in the Missouri penitentiary now. So if that Crane merchant can identify the things in the cabin, we'll certainly have the moonshiners and either the killer, or two guys who surely know who he is."

As they began acting on their plan, the lawmen returned to the log shack where they selected a number of samples of the various foods there. Then they set out on the seventy-five mile drive to Crane, Missouri. They watched anxiously as the manager of the big general store began his examination of the cans and boxes of food. They both grinned broadly when the man inspected the things and immediately began nodding. "They're mine, all right." He said at once. "Those are my price marks and code numbers on everything."

The two officers lost no time in heading for the state prison in Jefferson City, about 200 miles from Crane. Warden Leslie Rudolph brought Greco Webb and Linvel Boswell to his office at once. These were the convicts from Joplin who were serving the 15-year sentences for robbing the Crane grocery.

The prisoners were separated and Webb was first to be questioned. To the utter astonishment of the lawmen and the warden, the convict grinned widely, then he actually laughed aloud. "I been wondering when you guys would show up," he chuckled. "What took you so long? I was about to notify you, if you hadn't finally figured it out. Sure we killed Laster. That is, Boswell did. I was standing right behind him at the time. He threw the gun into Spring River and we went on our way. Is there anything else you fellows would like to know?"

Following this startling speech, the prisoner readily wrote out his confession and signed it with the three officials as witnesses.

The men were in for another surprise when they talked with the other prisoner. Like his partner, Boswell was in a friendly mood. He instantly acknowledged that he had been present when the chief of detectives had been slain, but he said it was Webb who had pulled the trigger. He also signed a statement in their presence. Bothe convicts had admitted to operating the still in the mine which they had owned for several months.

Both Boswell and Webb agreed to return to Joplin with Fisher and Hall and the ofiicers started the trip early the following day.

At headquarters in Joplin, Mrs. Laster viewed the two suspects who were placed in a line with several other prisoners. But to the dismay of the detectives, the woman burst into tears as the events of that terrible night were brought back to her, and she said she could not identify any of the men in the lineup.

Webb and Boswell were charged with first-degree murder, but there was one hitch in the proceedings. The crime had been committed in Kansas, and the prisoners were already serving felony terms in Missouri. Therefore, although they might be willing to go to Kansas to face the murder charges, they could not be forced to do so until they had satisfied their obligation to Missouri.

Under the law the authorities explained the situation to the convicts who both laughed. "Yes, we know all about that," Webb said. "Now if you guys want to wait until we finish our terms, your might do all right in court. On the other hand, it will be about eight years before you can try us if you choose to wait. Now I ask you, wouldn't it be nicer for you if our Governor Sam A. Baker, gave us each a pardon in Missouri, then we could go to Kansas and face the music there?"

The Missouri officers realized that the convict was correct in what he had said. The men could not be merely paroled, then forced to stand trial in Kansas. Under the law, they would either have to be pardoned or first serve their 15-year sentences before they could be taken to Kansas. The authorities also knew that although a parole can be revoked and a prisoner returned to prison, this isn't true of an outright pardon. A pardon is final and no further action is possible against an individual who receives one.

The officers also knew that under the Missouri "Good Time" law, in effect the, a felon was required to serve only 7 months for each year of his term. Thus, as Webb had pointed out, he and Boswell would not be free for approximately eight years yet. During such a lapse in time, it would be very difficult to get a conviction, even with the signed confessions of the pair.

"Even though it does look silly for these guys to so freely admit murder instead of just serving their time with a good chance of beating the rap after eight years, they will have to be pardoned before they can be taken back to Kansas on the murder," Joplin Prosecuting Attorney Roy Coyne told the policemen. "And," he added with a grimace, "I wouldn't want to be the prosecutor who tried to convict them after eight years. A lot of juries would regard them as being the victims, instead of Laster."

Therefore, in view of the unusual circumstances, Governor Baker promptly issued a full pardon to both Webb and Boswell. Then the criminal partners sprung still another surprise on authorities. This time it was the Kansas officials who received the jolt. Both Webb and Boswell suddenly offered to plead guilty to first-degree murder, provided they would not be hanged. This was agreeable to all the concerned authorities and Judge John Hamilton sentenced each man to life in the Kansas penitentiary. This was on May 14, 1927.

Apparently that was the end of the case. But only a month went by when a bombshell exploded under the Kansas officials. A Colorado attorney came to see the Governor of Kansas one day. He carried more that a dozen statements from Colorado citizens, all of whom swore that Linvil Boswell had positively been in Denver for several days before Laster had been murdered, and was still there on the day of his death and for more than a week later.

Kansas Governor Ben S. Paulen had Colorado officers check out the signers of these statements. They soon found that Boswell had signed receipts for money he received when he sold a washing machine or other household appliances in Denver at the time in question. There could be no doubt that the man was completely innocent of being involved in any way with the murder of the detective. Therefore, Governor Paulen had no choice. He was forced to issue a pardon to Linvel Boswell and the man was set free at once.

When he was leaving and was asked what had prompted him to pull the legal trick, the man just smiled and said, "Fifteen years is a long time when compared to how long I knew I'd be here."

When Boswell left the prison, he disappeared completely and has never been seen again by any of his former friends or acquaintances.

A few days after his pal's departure, Greco Webb also made an effort to prove that he had been in Colorado at the time of the crime. But ill luck was with him. He had depended on the statements of two prominent ranchers and their families for his alibi. But before any statements could be obtained from these people, they were all killed when they were riding in a car which was struck by a passenger train.

Thus, although it is entirely possible or even true that Greco Webb was innocent of the murder, he failed to gain his freedom and died in prison in 1956 after serving 30 years for a crime he might not have committed.