True Crime Stories

Buy Home and Garden Products at ShopWiki

noreply@blogger.com (Putty) — 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

Outdoor Entertaining

Bird Baths

Hedge Trimmers

Garden Accents

Housewares and Home Maintenance

Home Furnishings and Decor

Home Accessories

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 (Putty) — 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 (Putty) — 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 (Putty) — 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 (Putty) — 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 (Putty) — 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 (Putty) — 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 (Putty) — 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 (Putty) — 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 (Putty) — 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 (Putty) — 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 (Putty) — 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 (Putty) — 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.

O, What A Tangled Web He Wove

noreply@blogger.com (Putty) — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 12:51:00 +0000

By Curt Norris
Detective Dragnet
February 1980 (Volume 24, Number 1)

The 1923 winter winds howled a desolate song in the New Hampshire backwoods, a tune that sighed through the pines, whistled past craggy ledges, and moaned like a dirge around a simple, isolated wooden house.

Inside the house, an obscure spider advanced upon a fly newly ensnared in its web. Down in Boston, private investigator James R. Wood was continuing to build a national reputation based on his uncanny deductive skills. Soon the spider, the fly and the private detective would play leading roles in solving one of New Hampshire’s most puzzling crimes.

The house belonged to Samuel Houston, who had gotten kind of lonely down home in the rural stretches of Berwick, Maine. So the tall, muscular cattle dealer with the snow-white hair framing a kindly face decided to spend his remaining years closer to civilization.

"I'd like to have more company when I get old," he'd explain later to folks in North Barrington, a picturesque community in the foothills of eastern New Hampshire.

"Civilization" to Sam Houston in 1917 meant buying a 100-acre farm on a back country road where he lived alone. He was well past 70 at this time, but few of his neighbors considered the striking-looking Mainer an old man. He drove down to Rochester several times each week to buy food and kerosene for his oil lamps, and other days worked as hard on his farm as would a man half his age.

As the years passed, some of the neighbors, aware that they lived too far away to offer immediate help, suggested that Houston should have someone living with him to keep him company. Sam always replied that he had company once a year, and that this was sufficient dissipation for a man of his years. This company, two nephews from down Boston way, always spent several weeks with him each fall hunting season.

But as the years passed, Sam did get tired. He performed fewer farm chores and his trips to Rochester became less frequent. He admitted to his nephews in the fall of 1923 that, at the age of 78, he tired easily. He planned to either close his farm, or, using his savings, hire someone to come out and live in with him. His friends in town were happy when this news spread through the rural grapevine.

In November, Sam Houston hired Summer Clow for $25 a month and keep to serve as a companion and helper around the farm. Clow was the good-natured son of a prominent Rochester businessman and soon proved to be a real help. After the day’s chores and a comfortable supper, Houston looked forward to the evening spent in the large living room with its piano and cheery fireplace. The forgotten glow of friendly companionship returned to warm Houston’s waning years.

Then the glow flickered. Weeks passed and early on the morning of December 8, neighbor Allen Long was awakened by pounding on his door. He slipped reluctantly from his warm bed and groped towards his window.

"What's the matter?" he called down.

A dim figure looked up and identified itself as Summer Clow. "Get the sheriff as fast as you can," Clow ordered. "Sam Houston has been shot!"

Long rushed downstairs and let the shivering Clow inside. "What happened?" he asked.

"Don't know," Crow responded. "I found Mr. Houston by the front door when I came down this morning to start the chores."

"Sit by the fire and thaw out," Long told the handyman. "I'll call the sheriff." Clow refused, saying he couldn't sit still while the old man was lying as he was. Houston might still be alive and in need of help. Clow buttoned his coat and left in a run for the Houston farm while Long spread the alarm.

Long reached Stratford County Sheriff Stephen W. Scruton in Dover. Sheriff Scruton contacted his deputy, Frank Callaghan, in Rochester and then placed a call to his fellow townsman, County Solicitor F. Clyde Keefe.

The three men reached the lonely Houston farm at daybreak. They noticed a human form sprawled across the front door threshold as they drew to a stop.

As the authorities left the car and approached the still body lying in a huge pool of blood, they noticed the broken glass fragments of a kerosene lamp lying beside the man. The glass panels of the open door behind the body were also shattered.

Scruton and Keefe bent over the glassy-eyed and cold form of Houston as Callaghan stood by in silence. The sheriff noted that Houston had been killed by a shotgun, a weapon that had been fired from a considerable distance away. The dead man's heart and lungs had been riddled by the blast. The three took care not to disturb the body, pending the arrival of the medical referee (as medical examiners were called in those days), and stepped into the hall.

They glanced inside the large living room and then proceeded down the narrow, old-fashioned passage. Callaghan pushed open a closed door and steeped into the kitchen. He immediately noticed a form huddled by the kitchen stove.

"Hello, Summer," he said.

Clow turned and greeted his old boyhood friend. "I'm sure glad you're here," he said.

The deputy took a seat beside Clow and asked what had happened. Clow recounted how the two had eaten supper together the night before and then spent the evening in the living room, as was their custom. Houston went into the kitchen around 9 pm. He returned with a kerosene lamp to tell Clow that he was going to bed.

"I'm going to finish this story I'm reading," Crow said he told the old man. Houston went upstairs while Clow continued to read for another half hour. Then the handyman fixed the fires, checked to see that the house was secure, and went upstairs himself. "was tired," Clow explained, "and I went to sleep at once."

Sometime later he was awakened by automobile headlights reflecting off the walls of his room. He heard several voices, thought little of them, and went back to sleep. Maybe it was even a dream, he admitted.

"What happened next?" the Sheriff wanted to know.

"I woke up at my regular time, maybe a little before 6 am. I lit my lamp and got dressed, noticing all the while that the house seemed much colder than usual. When I stared downstairs, I saw the front door was open although I remembered distinctly locking it the night before. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I saw Mr. Houston lying where he is now."

Callaghan asked Clow if he had any idea what time the automobile stopped outside.

"Oh, maybe between three and four o'clock. I wasn’t too concerned about it because I thought some people had stopped to make repairs to their machine (the old records usually refer to automobiles as 'machine')."

"You heard no shot?"

"No, nothing at all."

The impromptu meeting broke up and the party went outside. It was now broad daylight. The sheriff looked around for empty shotgun shells, extending his search to the dirt road where Clow reported the machine had stopped. The sheriff looked around for tire tracks, but the ground had been too frozen the night before. The investigation proved fruitless, and the group returned to the house.

As far as Clow knew, Sam Houston didn't have an enemy in the world. Everyone seemed fond of the old man and in their quiet evening conversations, the old man had never mentioned any enemies to Clow. The handyman said that the few visitors to the house were neighbors who were above suspicion.

Well, reflected the sheriff, there were rumors that Sam Houston was rich. "What do you know about that?" he asked Clow. "In the seven years he's been in New Hampshire, there have been all kinds of stories about the large amount of cash he had hidden in this house to carry on cattle deals."

"Those were rumors, not fact," Crow replied. "He had only about $400. I tried to make him bank it, but he said it was safe enough here." Keefe asked if Clow knew where the money was hidden.

"Sure", came the quick answer. "He kept it in a tin box behind the top row of books in the living room bookcase." A search revealed the tin box was missing.

As Keefe and Callaghan began to look around, the county solicitor noticed a long, narrow door next to the pantry. He gave it a yank and peered inside. "Nothing in this closet but a couple of guns in the corner," he observed. Clow raised his head - he had been complaining of a headache throughout the preliminary investigation. A neighbor woman appeared and prepared medicine for the handyman. Saying he now felt better, Clow explained about the weapons.

"Those shotguns belong to Mr. Houston's nephew. They come down here every fall to hunt."

Scruton came over to the odd-shaped door. He shone a flashlight into the closet and focused it upon the two dust covered weapons. A spider had spun a triangular web across the muzzles of a double-barreled shotgun. More spider webs encircled the breech of the other single-barreled gun.

"As far as I know, those guns haven't been touched since last fall," Chow observed. "The old man didn't like guns and told me to leave that closet alone."

"Where did Houston get that lantern he used last night?" the sheriff asked.

Clow pointed to a shelf above the sink. There was an empty space between two lamps with highly polished chimneys. The old man, Clow said, had gone out into the kitchen and brought the lamp into the living room where he lit the wick from a "spill" (a slip of wood or paper used for lighting lamps). Then he had gone upstairs.

At this point, the three law officials conferred and agreed to postpone further investigation until the attorney general arrived on the scene. At that time, in New Hampshire, the attorney general was responsible for all murder investigations.

Keefe left the others to call the attorney general's office in Concord and learned that Attorney General Irving A. Hinkley was not available. He had gone deep into the logging woods investigating another murder with Deputy Sheriff Walter French of Lime, and Detective James R. Wood of the Wood Detective Agency n Boston.

Hinkley wasn't able to appear on the scene of the Houston murder until early Sunday morning. He stepped from his car and passed through a circle of heavily armed deputies to greet the waiting county solicitor. Detective Wood accompanied him.

"We moved the body yesterday for autopsy in Rochester upon orders from the medical referee," Keefe told Hinkley. "Otherwise, everything has been left as we found it when we were called."

Hinkley was 33 years old at that time and was believed to be the youngest man in the United States to hold such an important office. He nodded soberly as he asked if the medical referee had made any report yet.

"Only preliminary reports," the county solicitor replied. "Houston was killed with a 12-gauge shotgun." As the three walked towards the house, he acquainted the two new arrivals with further facts of the case.

Wood and Hinkley quickly examined the premises, then Wood questioned Clow in some detail about the car which had stopped outside the house before daybreak on the morning of the murder. Finally, Wood asked to see the two guns in the kitchen closet.

Wood studied the two weapons for some time with interest and spent more time examining the dust-covered closet floor. Hinkley watched the Boston detective in silence, puzzled but respectful of Wood's proven abilities in solving many of New England's most puzzling crimes.

Wood finally looked up at Hinkley and suggested that the two look at the front hall. The two men went to the spot where Houston's body had been found lying half across the threshold. The two carefully studied the scattered glass fragments of the broken kerosene lamp and the wick fixture, which was lying a short distance beyond.

Wood looked puzzled as he turned to his companion. "I'm still wondering," he said, "how it was possible for the old man to fall across the threshold if the door was only partly open. Especially if the death charge from the shotgun came through these glass panels. It looks here as though he must have been behind the glass door panels when the charge was fired."

"Maybe he was opening the door when the murderer fired," the attorney general offered. "If that was true, he instinctively pulled the door open and fell outside."

"Well," Wood countered, "that doesn't explain the broken lamp." The two then went inside where Wood singled out Keefe and Scruton. "I think it would be a good idea if we had Clow re-enact, step by step, the movements of the old man beginning from the time he made ready for bed."

The two agreed and, despite his continuing headache, Clow was more than willing. The handyman walked over to the kitchen shelf, removed an oil lamp from the shelf, and brought it into the living room where he placed it on the table near the parlor stove. He reached for a paper spill from a nearby pile, lit it, and started from the room.

"Stop right there for a moment," Wood commanded. Clow stopped, lamp in hand.

"You're sure he came in as you showed us, lighted the lamp as you did, and then went upstairs?"

"I am positive", Clow answered. "He stood right where I am standing right now."

"Then explain this," Wood questioned. "How could he have lighted it and taken it up to bed when the wick we found from the broken lamp is bone dry and hasn't seen oil for some time? Furthermore, why isn't there any trace of spilled oil upon the floor?"

"There are several lamps in the old man's room. Maybe he picked up the wrong one."

Wood's voice carried authority as he answered. "There was no other lamp. You killed Sam Houston and then broke the lamp where you did, forgetting that its fragments would have dropped on the floor behind the door instead of where you planted them."

"But," Clow protested, "I loved the old man. Why would I, of all people, kill him?"

"For that $400," Wood replied.

"I didn't do it. I don't even have a gun."

"That was the detail which helped trip you up. You used that 12-gauge shotgun that belonged to one of the nephews. After the killing, you placed a spider's web containing a dead fly across the muzzle to throw us off. But you outfoxed yourself.

"No spider leaves a victim in his web unless the spider himself is destroyed. After devouring his prey, a spider discards his victim from the web. I checked the floor carefully by the guns and there was nothing there."

Deputy Sheriff Callaghan entered the room at this dramatic point, and the accused man appealed to his childhood friend.

"You believe me, don't you Frank?" he asked. "You don't think I killed Sam Houston, do you?"

"I'm afraid I do," the deputy returned gravely. "If I hadn't been your friend, I would have seen it hours ago."

"I never killed him," Clow repeated again. But several hours later, after a hot meal in a Rochester restaurant, he signed a full confession to the crime, asserting that he murdered the old man for the $400 which, incidentally, authorities never recovered despite several searches in the nearby woods with Clow. The money remains missing to this day.

Early in January, 1924, Clow appeared before Chief Justice William H. Sawyer in Superior Court at Dover. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

As the years passed, the crime preyed so much upon Clow's mind that he became hopelessly insane complaining of hearing voices and seeing images. In April, 1928, he was transferred from State Prison to the State Hospital, where he remained until death released him from his torments.

Mary Ann Cotton

noreply@blogger.com (Putty) — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 05:06:00 +0000

Mary Ann Cotton (October 1832 – 24 March 1873) was an English serial killer believed to have murdered up to 20 people, mainly by arsenic poisoning.

Gastric Fever

Young Charles Cotton was dead. The doctor couldn't deny that. His stepmother, Mary Ann Cotton, claimed the seven-year-old boy had died from gastric fever, but the neighbors had noticed that a few too many in the Cotton household had died by similar stomach ailments in recent months, and gossip and suspicion ran rampant through the West Auckland neighborhood in County Durham, England. Slowly, investigators and gossips began looking into the background of 40-year-old Mary Ann.

The deeper they dug, the more Mary Ann's life looked like something out of a gothic horror novel: a childhood of near-abuse and near-poverty, an early marriage to flee an unkind stepfather, and a long string of family members who had succumbed to the mysterious "gastric fever" or other curious circumstances while Mary Ann was ominously close by.

In his book Mary Ann Cotton: Her Story and Trial, researcher Arthur Appleton notes that Mary Ann Robson, born in the small English village of Low Moorsley in October of 1832, did not have a happy childhood -- but neither did most children born in lower-class England in the early 19th century.

Mary Ann's father was ardently religious, a fierce disciplinarian of Mary Ann and her younger brother Robert, and active in the local Methodist church’s choir and activities. No doubt his daughter feared him and his punishments. When Mary Ann was eight, her parents moved the family to the town of Murton, and her father continued working in the mines until one day about a year after their move when he fell down a mine shaft to an early death.

As Dickens would chronicle repeatedly in his classic writings, life for a lower-class family (especially one headed by a newly widowed woman) was extremely harsh in 19th century England. The specter of being sent to a workhouse, or being separated from her mother and brother, cast dark shadows over Mary Ann’s girlhood and was the cause of many nightmares.

Mary Ann never went into the workhouse, however, because her mother remarried. Her new stepfather did not like Mary Ann, and the feeling was mutual. Mary Ann began looking for an escape from her childhood home, although she owed one thing to her stepfather: his salary had kept her and her family from becoming homeless and destitute. Mary Ann learned at an early age that to avoid the miserable fate of her nightmares, she had to keep a steady flow of money coming her way – no matter what the method.

Mrs. Mowbray

Perhaps partly to escape the daily life with her stepfather, Mary Ann left home at the age of 16 to work as a servant in a prosperous household in South Hetton. The quality of Mary Ann's work caused no complaint, although she began what would become a life riddled with sexual scandals. Soon after Mary Ann began working in the household, the South Hetton gossips were busy spreading tales about illicit meetings between Mary Ann and a local churchman.

After three years of service in South Hetton, Mary Ann left to train as a dressmaker and to marry a miner named William Mowbray, by whom she had become pregnant. After their wedding in July of 1852, the newlyweds moved around England as William got work at various mining sites and on railroad construction projects throughout England.

In the first four years of their marriage, William and Mary Ann had five children, although four of them died in infancy or soon after. Even though child mortality rates were high at the time, this was a bit extreme. However, Mary Ann and William were probably viewed as particularly unlucky parents suffering from grievous personal losses.

Mary Ann and William did not have a happy marriage. They argued frequently about money, as Mary Ann was still obsessed about never becoming poor. The quarrels grew so heated that William, in an apparent attempt to get some peace, landed a job on the steamer Newburn out of Sunderland, and was often away from home. Mary Ann and the surviving children followed him and took up residence in Sunderland, and the number of her children lost to indefinable illnesses continued at an alarming rate.

In January of 1865, William returned to the house to nurse an injured foot, and Mary Ann helped him with his recovery. Later that month, despite a doctor's care, William died from a sudden intestinal disorder, which he had not shown evidence of before benefiting from Mary Ann's care. Soon after William's death, the doctor went to the Mowbray house to console the grieving widow but was surprised to find Mary Ann dancing about the room in a new dress she had bought with the money from William's life insurance.

Mrs. Ward

Soon after William Mowbray's death, Mary Ann moved her remaining children to Seaham Harbour, where she struck up a relationship with Joseph Nattrass, a local man who was engaged to another woman. Apparently unable to break up the engagement, Mary Ann left Seaham Harbour after Nattrass's wedding (and after burying her 3 ½ year old daughter, leaving her with one living child out of the nine she had given birth to). Nattrass would reappear in Mary Ann's life several years later.

Mary Ann decided to return to Sunderland and found employment at The Sunderland Infirmary, House of Recovery for the Cure of Contagious Fever, Dispensary and Humane Society. Her remaining child, Isabella, was sent to live with her maternal grandmother, and would remain in her grandmother's care for more than two years.

At the Sunderland Infirmary, Mary Ann kept the wards clean with a mixture of soap and arsenic, and the Infirmary staff admired her diligence and friendliness with the patients. She chatted with many of them, but one in particular, engineer George Ward, took a fancy to Mary Ann. Soon after he was discharged from the Infirmary, he and Mary Ann were married at a church in Monkwearmouth in August of 1865. Although now settled into a new marriage and a steady household, Mary Ann did not fetch Isabella from her mother's house.

Despite having been released from the Infirmary, George Ward developed health problems soon after marrying Mary Ann – and despite various treatments by his doctors, he died in October of 1866 after a long bout of paralysis in his limbs and chronic stomach problems. The doctor attending George was accused of incorrectly treating his patient, a point of view that Mary Ann actively encouraged, probably hoping to redirect any doubts away from herself.

Much later, at Mary Ann's trial, people would wonder why nobody became suspicious of this woman who left a trail of husbands and children dead from startlingly similar illnesses over a very short time. But as Mary Ann had different doctors attend to her dying family and she relocated frequently, suspicions never built in a single community.

According to her pattern, after George Ward's death in Sunderland, Mary Ann needed to move on.

Mrs. Robinson

Pallion shipwright James Robinson needed a housekeeper to care for his house and children after the death of his wife, Hannah. In November of 1866, Mary Ann applied for the position and was hired. Two days before Christmas, the baby of the family was interred after having developed, perhaps not surprisingly, gastric fever. Overcome with the grief of the recent deaths of his wife and then of his infant son, James turned to Mary Ann for solace and support. She provided comfort and apparently then some, as she was soon pregnant with Robinson's child.

A new marriage seemed in the forecast, but Mary Ann was diverted in March of 1867 by a sudden illness of her mother. Mary Ann returned to her mother's home to help nurse the elderly lady back to health. As always, one of Mary Ann's first tasks was to clean the house from top to bottom with soap and (her favorite cleaning additive) arsenic, of which she usually had an ample supply.

By the time Mary Ann arrived, however, her mother was doing much better, but Mary Ann decided to stay and look after her anyway – and to visit her own daughter Isabella, who was still living with her grandmother. Soon after being in Mary Ann's care, her mother began complaining of stomach pains and died only nine days after Mary Ann's arrival.

Returning to the Robinson household with her mother, young Isabella (who had enjoyed a life of good health while living away from Mary Ann) soon developed an incapacitating stomach ailment, as did two of Robinson's children, and all three were buried within two weeks of each other at the end of April.

James Robinson must have grieved further over the loss of two more of his children, but apparently did not suspect any wrongdoing on Mary Ann's part. He put his mourning aside in time for his wedding to Mary Ann in early August (at which Mary Ann stated her surname as "Mowbray" -- apparently her 14-month marriage to George Ward had slipped her mind). The couple's first child, Mary Isabella, was born in late November but had succumbed to illness by the first of March of 1868.

James now began to become suspicious of his new wife, not only by the frequency of deaths in the household since Mary Ann's arrival, but also by her constant requests for money and her pressing desire for him to insure his life.

Always punctual in his household finances, James was surprised when he received letters from his building society and his brother-in-law detailing debts Mary Ann had run up without his knowledge. He questioned his remaining children and found that they had been coerced by their new stepmother to pawn valuables from the house and give her the money. Irate, he threw Mary Ann out of the house, and she left – taking their young daughter with her.

In late 1869, after wandering the streets in the kind of life that Mary Ann had anxiously feared, Mary Ann and her daughter visited an acquaintance. During the course of the visit, Mary Ann asked her friend to watch the girl while she went out to mail a letter. Mary Ann never came back and the daughter was returned to James on the first day of 1870.

Mrs. Cotton

After weeks of desperate living, the year 1870 began well for Mary Ann. Her friend Margaret Cotton introduced her to her brother Frederick. Like James Robinson, Frederick was a recent widower and had lost two of his four children to early deaths. His sons Frederick Jr. and Charles were all that was left of his family. His sister acted as mother substitute for the family, although in late March she died from an undetermined stomach ailment – which left the opportunity wide open for Mary Ann to console the grieving Frederick and, in an echo of her relationship with James Robinson, she was soon pregnant with Frederick's child.

The couple were married in September of 1870, Mary Ann again signing the register as "Mary Ann Mowbray," ignoring the fact that her surname was legally Robinson and that she was not divorced from James, who was very much alive. Mary Ann added bigamy to her growing list of crimes.

Mary Ann quickly set up housekeeping in Cotton's house and just as quickly insured the lives of Frederick Cotton and his two sons.

After giving birth to a son, Robert, in early 1871, Mary Ann learned that her former paramour Joseph Nattrass was not married and was living in nearby West Aukland. Under some pretense Mary Ann moved the family there, and she quickly rekindled the relationship with Nattrass and became less interested in Frederick Cotton.

In December of 1871, Frederick died of gastric fever and Joseph Nattrass soon became a lodger in the three-time widow Mary Ann's house. To keep her fears at bay and to keep money coming in, Mary Ann worked as a nurse to John Quick-Manning, an excise officer recovering from smallpox. Mary Ann apparently saw Quick-Manning as a better match than Nattrass, and soon became pregnant by him.

A marriage to Quick-Manning was hindered by the presence of the remaining Cotton household, so Mary Ann apparently went to work quickly and Frederick Jr. died in March of 1872 and the infant Robert soon after. Upon the death of her infant, Mary Ann stated that she did not want to bury the baby immediately, because Joseph Nattrass had also become ill with gastric fever, and she would wait and handle both burials at once. Nattrass obligingly passed away soon after Robert, but not before revising his will to leave everything to Mary Ann.

Only one of her husbands, James Robinson, had escaped a relationship with Mary Ann with his life. Other husbands, children, and most stepchildren had succumbed to gastric fever or stomach ailments - except for young Charles Cotton and Robinson's children. The Robinson children were safely away from Mary Ann's motherly care, but the insurance policy Mary Ann had taken out on Charles's life still waited to be collected.

The Trial of the Green Wallpapers

In late spring of 1872, Mary Ann sent Charles to a local chemist to purchase a small quantity of arsenic. The chemist refused to sell the poison to anyone under the age of 21, as was the law. Undeterred, Mary Ann asked a neighbor to purchase the substance and in July Charles died of gastric fever.

But Mary Ann had either been in the West Aukland area too long - or the neighbors were more readily skeptical - because suspicions were immediately aroused in neighbors and physicians.

The first person Mary Ann told about Charles's death was Thomas Riley, a minor government official that she had consulted previously about the possibility of sending Charles into a workhouse. Riley had said that it would only be possible if she went with him, which she declined. She told Riley that the boy was "in the way" of a marriage with Quick-Manning, and predicted that, "I won't be troubled long. He'll go like all the rest of the Cotton family." Riley said the boy appeared completely healthy, and so he was surprised when Mary Ann stopped him only five days later to say that young Charles had died.

Riley went to the village police office and to a doctor and outlined his growing suspicions. The doctor was similarly surprised to hear of the news, as he and his assistant had tended to Charles five times during the previous week and had detected nothing dire, let alone life threatening, in the young boy. Riley convinced the doctor to delay writing a death certificate until he could look into the situation further.

Mary Ann, instead of going to fetch the doctor after the boy's death, hurried to the insurance office to collect on Charles's policy. She learned that they would not issue the money until they had a death certificate, so she returned home to get the document from the doctor. Instead of receiving the certificate, Mary Ann received the startling news that she would not be receiving a signed death certificate until after a formal inquest was held.

A brief inquest was held and initial evidence did not indicate death by unnatural causes. Angry at Riley for initiating the investigation, Mary Ann told him that he could be responsible for the costs of Charles’s burial.

The young boy's internment would most likely not have been the end of the story, and Mary Ann would have gone on with her plan to marry Quick-Manning and probably continue obtaining insurance monies from other gastric fever victims – but the local newspapers latched onto the story. They reported on the inquest but also alluded to the neighborhood gossip that Mary Ann was an active poisoner. These reports fanned the fires of rumors and hearsay and the feeling toward Mary Ann within West Aukland became bitter and suspicious. Quick-Manning was appalled by this type of gossip about his intended, and was apparently distressed enough to sever all connections with Mary Ann.

Mary Ann began preparations to leave the area, although her friends warned her that it would look suspicious if she did. Unknown to her, however, suspicions were already building and were about to close in around her. A doctor from the inquiry had kept samples of Charles's stomach so that he could test them later in his lab. He did so, and the samples tested positive for arsenic. The doctor went to the authorities, who arrested Mary Ann and ordered Charles's body exhumed and fully tested. The body of Joseph Nattrass was also dug up (after six exhumations of other corpses - the elderly sexton of the church couldn't remember exactly where Nattrass was buried) and tested positive for the presence of arsenic. There was debate and talk of further exhumations, but it was decided to proceed with the single murder charge of young Charles Cotton – although the trial was delayed until after the delivery of the daughter fathered by John Quick-Manning.

Her trial began in March of 1873. The prosecution brought forth numerous witnesses who testified about Mary Ann's purchases of arsenic, the long list of gastric fever victims in her past, and about her statements regarding Charles being an obstacle to her marrying Quick-Manning.

The defense claimed that Charles may have obtained the arsenic that killed him from inhaling loose airborne particles of arsenic that was used as a dye in the green wallpaper of the Cotton home. The judge dismissed this theory and the jury retired for only 90 minutes before finding Mary Ann guilty of the murder of Charles Cotton.

Mary Ann continued to proclaim her innocence and wrote numerous letters to her friends and supporters. A letter to her estranged husband, James Robinson, asked him to bring her child and two stepchildren to visit her in prison. She went on to beg Robinson "if you have one spark of kindness in you – get my life spared…you know yourself there has been…most dreadful lies told about me. I must tell you: you are the cause of all my trouble. If you had not (abandoned me). I was left to wander the streets with my baby in my arms…no place to lay my head."

Robinson ignored her letter, so she wrote him again and asked him to visit her. Robinson sent his brother-in-law to the prison in his stead. Mary Ann was upset that Robinson did not come himself, but asked the man about the children and requested that a petition be circulated in her support. Petitions were eventually created and signed by Mary Ann's former employers, ministers, and other supporters. As her execution date neared, she was cheered by a letter from the couple who had adopted the infant she and Quick-Manning had conceived. She replied to the letter, asking the couple to "kiss my babe for me."

On March 24, 1873, Mary Ann was led to the scaffold where the elderly hangman misjudged the logistics of the execution – so instead of dying quickly, Mary Ann struggled after the trapdoor was released, and it took at least three minutes for her to be slowly and painfully strangled by the noose.

Chances are, some of Mary Ann's alleged victims died from natural causes or reasons other than poisoning by her hands. Later researchers of the case would estimate her victims as numbering anywhere from 15 to the full count of 21 people who died while living with or near Mary Ann: ten of her children by various husbands, three of those husbands, five stepchildren, her mother, Cotton's sister Margaret, and her lover Nattrass. Theories of motive range from the collection of insurance money to the desire to rid herself of people that she felt were "obstacles" - or a combination of both.

Because she maintained her innocence to the end, it will never be known for sure how many victims Mary Ann claimed in her endless quest for the money that made her feel secure. Her notoriety continues with her fame as Britain's first female serial killer and in a popular children's rhyme:

Mary Ann Cotton --
She's dead and she's rotten!
She lies in her bed
With her eyes wide open.

Sing, sing!
"Oh, what can I sing?
Mary Ann Cotton is tied up with string."

Where, where?
"Up in the air -- selling black puddings a penny a pair."

Source

"I Killed 30 or 40 People Last Year"

noreply@blogger.com (Putty) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 07:37:00 +0000

By Peter Weston
Detective Dragnet
February 1980 (Volume 24, Number 1)

When the middle aged, dog-faced man walked into the West 100th Street Station in New York City, the desk sergeant yawned and demanded, "Well, what do you want, buddy?"

"I want to make a confession," the man replied. "I killed my wife yesterday. Stabbed her a dozen times and left her body on the bedroom floor. Up in Dutchess County."

The sergeant was jolted to full wakefulness. Maybe the man was one of those oddballs who confessed to anything just for attention. And maybe he wasn't. There is no alternative for police in those situations. The man has to be checked out.

"What's your name?"

"Joe Fischer - Joseph Fischer. I'm 50. I might as well tell you something else. I'm an ex-con. Got out of Rahway State Prison over in Jersey last year. Did a stretch for murder."

"Where did you kill your wife?"

"It was up in Dutchess County. A little town called Wassaic, outside of Poughkeepsie. I got a trailer in a trailer colony up there. My wife's name was Claudine. She used to be Claudine Eggers, and she was a lot older than me. She wrote me a lot of letters when I was in stir, and I wrote back to her. When I got out I married her. She was 78, and I was 50. That was the trouble. She was too old for me..."

This dramatic episode on June 27, 1979, was the beginning of a saga of coast-to-coast murder which, as it gradually unfolded, shocked and intrigued law enforcement officers all the way from Maine to California - one which promised to crack as many as 20 homicides which had been written off as "unsolved".

After extensive questioning in the 100th Street Precinct, the New York authorities notified police in Poughkeepsie, a pleasant river town some 70 Miles up the Hudson. The Poughkeepsie detectives came to New York City the following day and took Fischer in handcuffs to Poughkeepsie, the seat of Dutchess County, and lodged him in jail there.

Mrs. Claudine Eggers Fischer was slain by repeated stab wounds on the day before Fischer walked into the 100th Street Precinct and the body was found on the floor of the trailer the couple had occupied in Wassaic.

Fischer told Poughkeepsie detectives that he had slain his wife after they returned to Wassaic following a two-day trip to Cooperstown, N. Y.

Checking up on his record, the investigators found that the prisoner had set a pattern of murder for himself over the past 30 years.

His first crime was the mugging of soldier for $5 in his home town of Belleville, N. J. About this time he recommited himself to the Essex County Hospital Center in Cedar Grove, N. J., where he had already undergone half a year's treatment for an "emotional disorder". For the mugging, Fischer served a term of five years in New Jersey's Bordentown Reformatory.

Just two weeks after doing this stretch he killed a 16-year-old youth, Harry Powell 3rd, with a rock and took $2 off his body in Branch Brook Park in Belleville. He showed the police where he had concealed the body in a small gully. For this crime he was given a life sentence, but was paroled after spending 24 yeard behind bars.

It was 13 months following his parole that his elderly wife was stabbed to death.

"But that isn't the half of it," Fischer was quoted as saying. "Besides my wife, I killed more than 20 people from coast to coast."

Manuel Sanchez, a detective with Troop K of the New York State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation, was skeptical. "Suppose you tell us all about it."

"Well," said the tattooed Fischer, "I told my wife I wanted to tour every state in the union, and she gave me the money to finance my trip. I went alone, and I was gone the last of 1978 and the first half of 1979..."

Sanchez could tell that Fischer was overwrought - he seemed to feel a great compulsion to relate his bloody history to the officers. He admitted that he had a drinking problem, and he said that most or all of his crimes were committed while he was under the influence of alcohol.

In the continued quizzing, Detective John Crodelle took a part. Fischer told him he had murdered a 26-year-old woman named Pamela Nolen of Ruidoso, N. M., on October 30, 1978. He pickup truck was found abandoned in a wooded area three miles from her home, but her body could not be discovered.

Fischer gae the troopers and the Poughkeepsie detectives a photograph of Miss Nolen, and he supplied travel records that showed he had without doubt been in New Mexico. Later, the authorities of that state informed the New York police that the photo was, indeed, a likeness of Miss Nolen. The New Mexico police said they were anxious to question Fischer about this slaying.

"About the same time," Fischer declared in his rambling confession, "I killed another woman in New Mexico; I stabbed her several times until the stopped moving."

Then, in Moore, Okla., a suburb of Oklahoma City, Fischer declared, he was alone in a house with a 38-year-old woman whom he murdered. He stuffed her body into a closet and nailed the door shut. For this crime, the Oklahoma authorities promptly issued a warrant for the prisoner.

"Then there was a guy I met in the Salvation Army Center in San Francisco," Fischer went on. "We traveled together to Flagstaff, Ariz., and in a house there I beat him to death with my fists."

After a July 4th celebration last year, Fischer related, he picked up two prostitutes - he intended to get into bed with both of them - and it turned out that they wanted to rob him. So he murdered them.

The police chief of Norwalk, Conn., informed the New York investigators that such a double murder had, indeed, occurred, and he said he was anxious to question Fischer.

"Then there were three Bowery bums in New York," Fischer said. "I knocked them off one at a time in Arpil, May, and June of this year."

At the time he was on the trip upstate with his wife. Later on, the prisoner boasted, he was alone with a man in a rowboat on Otsego Lake. He beat the man unconscious and tossed him overboard. (Divers searched the bottom of the lake, but failed to find the body.)

Fischer told Detective Sanchez that he had a suitcase filled with newspaper clippings about his multiple crimes and with the possessions of some of his victims. He declared he left the suitcase in a beach bungalow he rented in Keansburg, N. J., In July, 1979, and in corroboration he showed a rent receipt. The bungalow was searched, but the suitcase was not found.

"Let's get back to the killing of your wife for a minute," said one of the Poughkeepsie detectives. "Didn't you feel terrible after you stabbed her and letf her on the floor of your trailer in Wassaic? After all, she had been very good to you. She wrote to you in prison - maybe she even visited you - and she gave you a large sum of money for your crosscountry trip."

Fischer shrugged and spread out his hands. "I felt O. K.," he said. "Nothing to feel bad about."

"Were you intimate with her?"

"A few times. But I used to go out and pick up a young whore, or maybe a couple of them. I used to like two girls."

"Didn't your wife suspect that you might kill her someday?"

"Oh, no. I didn't tell her anything about anything."

For three or four days in July of 1979, Fischer was in Portland, Me., and he intimated that he committed at least one murder there.

A further check on the mass-murder suspect's background disclosed that he had undergone some psychiatric observation and treatment during the years he was confined to prisons in New Jersey. The New York State Police sought to obtain the psychiatric findings and evaluation, but the New Jersey Correction Department refused to disclose it because "it is confidential medical information."

Before Fischer finally won release from prison in New Jersey in the summer of 1978 - he was released in the custody of the Salvation Army center in Paterson, N. J. - his applications for parole were turned down 13 times. A condition of his release was that he participate in Alcoholics Anonymous programs and receive "intensive supervision".

The quizzing of the prisoner, conducted by alternating teams of detectives headed by State Troopers Crodelle and Sanchez, went on day after day. And as it proceeded, it appeared that the death toll might be considerably higher that anticipated. Joseph Fischer claimed that he had stabbed, choked, shot, or beaten more than 30 people to death in his mad coast-to-coast rampage!

He added Oregon and Washington to the list of states in which the alleged murders occured. He recalled shooting a man in Oregon and slaying a woman in Seattle, Wash. Also, he claimed he murdered a total of six people in Oklahoma - four more that he previously had confessed to.

Furthermore, numerous documents in Fischer's possession - including airline tickets and other travel receipts - placed him in the vicinity of several of the killings at the time the homicides occurred, according to the investigators.

"Now how about that murder up in Oregon?" queried detective Sanchez.

"Oh, that one. It was somewhere near Bend. Out in the woods. I was drunk, and I stumbled on this man sleeping in one of those sleeping bags. There was a gun lying on the ground near him, so I just picked it up and sent a bullet through his head."

He was asked why he would shoot and kill a total stranger as he slept.

"I guess I just said, 'The hell with it, '" he replied. "I had knocked over so many already, what difference did one more make?"

"What time of the year were you around Bend?"

"It must have been in the spring or summer, because I remember it wasn't cold. All I was wearing at the time was a heavy jacket."

Three New York City detectives, led by Deputy Inspector Gene Martinez, arrived in Poughkeepsie to question the suspect. For once, Fischer cited a logical motive for murder. "I killed those bums," he said, "right after they got their welfare checks. I forged the names on the checks and was able to cash them without any difficulty."

After the quizzing Deputy Inspector Martinez said he believed the suspect's story. "He gave us mor than the average person would have known about the murders," the investigator declared.

"Some of those cases got into the newspapers, but others did not. Only the killer could have known the details. The guy's accounts are a bit hazy at times because he admitted he had been drinking heavily at the time he committed the crimes."

Other investigators who came to Poughkeepsie to question Fischer included detectives from the Maine State Police, and from San Francisco and Oklahoma City.

A good picture of the alledged mass-murderer was given by a reprter for the Poughkeepsie Journal, who interviewed him with the consent of the court:

"Mass murder suspect Joseph Fischer was dog-tired. Sitting in the stuffy chapel of the Dutchess County jail, a bleary-eyed Fischer rubbed his temples as he explained how he had at through six hours of interviews, telling his story over and over agian until, he said, he sounded like a broken record."

(These interviews were conducted by tow television stations, the U. P. I., The New York Daily News, the Newark Ledger, and the Poughkeepsie Journal.)

"Traffic in the jail was heavy as reporters and camera crews stalked the halls waiting for their chance to interview the man who claims to have murdered more that 25 people in a cross-country killing spree."

"I feel much better," he said after unburdening himself to the media. "When I die and got to Claudine, I'll go to her clean. She will accept me when the truth is out."

"Later, Fischer broke into tears briefly as he said he sometimes feels his wife is watching over him. On more than one occasion Fischer has referred ominously to his own death and to meeting Claudine once again..."

The police declared that Joseph Fischer matched a "psychological profile" made of the killer of the two prostitutes in Norwalk, Conn., who were stabbed 100 times in the face and the breasts and then dumped in a wooded area. That profile also fit the description of the slayer of the Bowery bums in New York.

According to the profile, the killer of the prostitutes had probably committed murder before and probably would again and had never been caught.

Fischer was arraigned on a charge of murder before Judge Raymond Aldrich in Poughkeepsie and held for trial without bail.

"I've been living with this for a long time," he told the judge, "and I am anxious to get it off my chest."

An indication of how the suspect hoped to die so that he could join his slain wife was given in an interview to a reporter for the New York Daily News.

"I believe firmly in the death penalty," he said, "and I want to be prosecuted in a state where I will face the death penalty... All of this (his alleged multiple murders) would never have happened if I had just been executed after I killed that boy in Newark in 1953. If more kids knew that they had the death penalty it would stop a whole lot of what is going on today."

The prisoner revealed, in the interview, a possible motivation for his slaying spree.

"A lot of my female victims looked like my mother who was a whore - that's why I had to kill them - and a lot of my male victims looked like the guys who used to pay my mother. Also, the girls I killed looked just like my mother when they asked me to give them money."

Fischer said sometimes his mother copulated with "Johns" while he was a witness. Sometimes he even was in the same bed with them.

Present during many of Fischer's jailhouse interviews were his lawyer, James R. Brown Jr., and William L. Paroli, chief investigator for the Dutchess County public defender's office, which was representing the suspect.

Fischer related that he grew up in Belleville, N. J., the son of a laborer. His father, he said, left his mother after the boy told him he had seen the mother in bed with other men. (One of the detectives suggested that Fischer's bloody crime spree would have been a fit subject for Freud, the famous psychoanalyst who tied human emotional ills to childhood traumas.)

Fischer said that his father forged some papers to get him into the Marines when he was only 15, and that he saw combat on Guadalcanal, Guam, and other Pacific battlefields during World War II.

Fischer, who is about 5-feet-9 and weighs 170 pounds, wore a maroon T-shirt, khaki pants, and moccasins. Jail doctors said he was constantly under medication.

"After I was sprung from prison in '78," Fischer said, "I was scared to death. I couldn't cope with nothing... Now it's bugging me that a lot of people don't seem to believe what I tell them. I'm not a liar. Telling the truth is about the only thing I've got left... I don't want to be free again - I want to be with my wife."

At a hearing in Dutchess County court to determine Fischer's fitness to stand trial, two pychiatrists told Judge Aldrich that the suspect "does not lack the capacity to understand the proceedings against him or to assist in his defence."

Fischer was subdued in court. He seemed to understand his serious predicament. At a previous court hearing he had stood up and angrily demanded that he be given permission to grant jailhouse interviews. After hearing the psychiatrists' statements, the judge granted him this permission.

The prisoner told the authorities and reporters that he had begun drinking heavily about the age of 12 or 13, spent "most of my life drunk," and drank heavily behind bars in New Jersey on smuggled and homemade booze. He accused state police of having plied him with beer and never warning him of his rights during his interrogation.

On one of his murder rampages, he said, he had a companion. This was the slaying of the two prostitutes in Norwalk, Conn. He said he and his friend picked up the ladies-for-hire in a bar. He simply meant to copulate with them, but when one of them reached into his pocket for money he grabbed his knife and killed them both.

Fischer refused to disclose his companion's name. "What do you think I am?" he said. "I'm no stoolie."

On his cross-country murder jaunt Fischer often took odd jobs in towns he visited. He was a maintenance man in a motel, a landscaper, and a painter. Meanwhile, he was drinking heavily - as much as two quarts of Canadian Club whisky a day - and frequently suffered blackouts.

"In Oklahoma City," he recalled, "I worked as a pizza cook for two weeks without even knowing I was working there. Finally I talked to a waitress at the restaurant when I sobered up a little. I asked her how long I had worked there, and she said two weeks."

Fischer told reporters that he was treated well in the Dutchess County jail. But he was afraid of the other prisoners because he thought they wanted to kill him in reprisal for all the murders he had committed.

Police in Cooperstown, N. Y., the home of the baseball hall of fame, checked motel records and found that he had stayed there on the dates he specified. And in Portland, me., the local authorities similarly discovered that he had stayed in a motel there from July 18 to 20, 1979. During that period he allegedly committed at least one murder.

In the Moore, Okla. murder, where Fischer killed a woman and then stuffed her body into a closet and nailed the door shut, police identified the victim as Betty JoGibson, her body was not found until a month after the crime had taken place. The body had been horribly bludgeoned.

In Hartford, Conn., the two prostitutes slain were identified as Ronnie Tassiello, 18, and Alaine Hapeman, 19. Their bodies had been carried into a wooded area.

In Newark, N. J., police said that the woman bludgeoned to death was JoAnne E. Franklin, 18, of East Orange. She was killed near the Branch Brook Park.

The Dutchess County jail physician, Dr. George Brown, who is also a psychiatrist, examined Fischer and found that he was suffering from alcoholism and auditory hallucinations. He prescribed sedation for him.

In practically all the cities and towns where Fischer's alleged murders occurred during his long rampage, indictments were voted against him on charges of murder. There were enough charges filed, in fact, so that it appeared he would never agian enjoy freedom.

The court machinery of Dutchess County, meanwhile, clanked into action for a trial of Fischer on the charge that he killed his 78-year-old wife, Claudine Eggers Fischer. As yet, no date for the trial has been set.

At this writing, Joseph Fischer sits in his jail cell in Poughkeepsie and awaits his fate. It will of course, be up to a judge and jury to determine the truth or falsity of his mass-murder claims.

He keeps a scrapbook of all the newspaper stories about his case and often reads and re-reads them.

Money for Nothing

noreply@blogger.com (Putty) — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 04:39:00 +0000

Women's "gifting circles" are the fastest-growing -- and cruelest -- scam around.

A Tantalizing Fantasy

Gina DeJoy used to take people at their word. At her Maine antiques store, customers could ask for things to be put aside, on hold, no deposit necessary. These days, DeJoy would like to be paid in full first, thank you very much. After what she's been through, it's hard to blame her.

Three years ago, DeJoy, 43, told an acquaintance that she was in a tough spot financially. Every six weeks she was flying to Virginia -- missing work each time -- to get her mother through chemotherapy. Her credit cards were maxed out, but she couldn't bear to let her mother suffer alone. DeJoy's friend said she had a solution.

There was a local group set up to help women just like Gina. Called A Woman's Project, it was a "gifting circle" that worked like this: Give $5,000 to another woman in need, and in a short time your gift would come back to you eightfold -- $40,000.

How could money multiply so magically? Simple: by more women being inducted into the group. The groups, usually made up of 15 women, are known as "circles" but are best understood as pyramids: eight women on the bottom layer, four above that, two above them, and one at the top. The woman with the most seniority (the one at the peak of the pyramid) collects $40,000 when the bottom level is filled -- that is, when each of the eight newest initiates give her a $5,000 "gift." After the top woman collects, she leaves the group, which splits in two. At this point, all remaining members move up a level, and both groups start trolling for eight new bottom-level members.

A Woman's Project seemed heaven-sent to DeJoy. At her first meeting -- a potluck lunch held at a local hairdresser's house -- she felt as if she'd been invited to join a secret sorority. Among the 40 or so attendees, there were familiar faces, including her bank tellers and grocery-store cashier, but no one used last names, making the group feel both intimate and mysterious. The idea was that everyone had gathered for a charitable purpose -- to raise money for a good cause. Many of the women had brought donations for a local food bank, and the pile of canned goods sat in the middle of the crowded living room, a symbol of A Woman's Project's good intentions.

"We're women who help women," gushed one of the promoters, an inspirational speaker who said she had participated in a successful group in Texas. "That's what it's all about." Then came the pitch: The woman you help could be you. Eight of the attendees told stories about receiving $40,000. They encouraged newcomers to mortgage their homes to finance the initial gift. They mentioned money-back guarantees.

Of course, the two parts of the hook -- giving to charity and making a quick buck for yourself -- have nothing to do with each other. But for DeJoy, as for many other women, those two parts merged into a persuasive and tantalizing fantasy.

DeJoy talked it over with her husband and borrowed $5,000 from a bank. Then she wrapped the cash up like a present. At an afternoon tea attended by 18 Woman's Project participants and potentials, she handed the package to her host, a woman she'd never met. Though DeJoy was "scared to death," the others burst into applause. The next day she headed to Virginia to take care of her mother. Soon, she thought, the gifting-circle money would allow her to hire a private nurse.

Pyramid Scheme

Instead, within a week, things began to fall apart. DeJoy's husband called to tell her there had been a story in the local paper -- the gifting circle was in fact an illegal pyramid scheme. Frantic, DeJoy phoned the woman she had "gifted" to try to get her money back. The woman told her she didn't have it, and the others in the group were "just as mean and cold and heartless as could be," DeJoy recalls.

As her mother grew worse, DeJoy fell deeper into debt. A nurse was now out of the question. She had to borrow money from relatives. Her mother died, and DeJoy returned to Maine, where her husband tried to hang on to the antiques business while she took a job in a bakery -- on top of teaching art, weeding gardens and cleaning houses, almost anything to catch up on her bills.

And the money DeJoy had given, supposedly to help someone in a jam? The $5,000 really was gone. The head of the circle had spent the money -- received from DeJoy and seven others -- on "necessities" like a new car and a Caribbean cruise.

Pyramid schemes have been around nearly forever -- almost as long as there have been gullible people with money in their pockets. In the 1920s, Italian-born con man Charles Ponzi promised an eye-popping 400 percent interest on the cash that eager Boston residents "invested" with him. Before his arrest, Ponzi separated as many as 40,000 people from a total of $15 million.

Unfortunately for DeJoy and thousands of others like her, Ponzi's spirit lives on in today's gifting circles. First detected in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1990s, gifting circles are classic pyramid schemes, according to experts, but with a twist. They target women almost exclusively, and often draw in those who can't afford to lose any money at all. "There are a lot of people out there who are desperate," says Jim McKenna, an assistant attorney general in Maine. "It's not because they're greedy, but because they've fallen on hard times."

But it's not just the poor -- or even the financially naive -- who get taken. Gina DeJoy had experience running a business. Holly DeIaco, 32, a consultant who lost $2,500 to a similar scheme, has a master's degree. "I'm successful at what I do," she says. "How could I not see this?" The woman DeIaco gave her money to said she was writing a book -- a seemingly worthy cause to support. Only later did DeIaco find that the woman lived off credit cards and the money she made from gifting circles.

Far from being isolated cases, what happened to DeJoy and DeIaco is increasingly common. Hundreds of thousands of women have been swindled, losing what may add up to hundreds of millions of dollars. In Wisconsin in 2000 and 2001, sheriffs and district attorneys reported illegal gifting circles in 61 of the state's 72 counties. New Mexico's attorney general called it the No. 1 scam in her state in 2002. Last fall, the Sacramento sheriff's department broke up a network of gifting circles that involved 20,000 women and $15 million in losses.

If those numbers seem big, here's why: By its very nature, a pyramid scheme must grow exponentially if people at the top are going to get paid. But sooner or later the bubble will burst. "There's a finite number of people in your circle of friends and acquaintances," says Susan Grant, director of the National Fraud Information Center/Internet Fraud Watch. "There's no way you're going to keep bringing in new people to fuel the circle." Nine out of ten women are sure to lose their entire investment.

Fighting Back

To deflect potential victims from that grim mathematical reality, the perpetrators of these schemes cloak their scams in touchy-feely New Age language or appeals to sisterhood. Authorities say people who originate gifting circles are almost always career con artists. But if a circle sustains itself after an initial cycle or two, subsequent "winners" might genuinely not realize they are committing a crime.

Once a woman has joined a circle by putting up cash, there's a powerful incentive to stay -- even if things begin to look odd. Gifting circle victim Heather Wolfsmith, a 31-year-old financial advisor in New York City, quickly learned to keep her questions about the legality of the circle to herself. "The prevailing feeling was 'Don't ask,' " she says. "It was like you were afraid to live your dream, and that's why you're having these doubts."

Kathy Guardipee, 55, of Browning, Mont., kept quiet about her concerns for a different reason -- one that had a unique female appeal. "There are a lot of women going through abusive relationships, and this is their way out," she remembers being warned. Gina DeJoy was told the same thing.

While they may be poorer, Guardipee, Wolfsmith, DeIaco and DeJoy decided not to keep quiet. All three asked for their money back, and were refused. So they took action.

Wolfsmith has had the most success. In September 2001, she and five others in her circle, including DeIaco, filed suit in small-claims court against the women they "gifted." Victory was sweet. Ruling that the defendants -- who were involved in multiple circles -- showed "malicious intent," the judge awarded triple damages. The decision was upheld last year.

Not everyone will be so fortunate. State laws governing scams vary, and some courts may rule that merely participating in -- not just profiting from -- a pyramid scheme is a criminal act. Helping a gifting-circle victim get her money back would then be like helping a person recoup losses from an illegal poker game. And defendants, even if found guilty, can claim bankruptcy to avoid their debt.

There are some bright notes, though. In New York, the attorney general recently "unwound" a gifting circle, returning more than $170,000 to the proper pockets. In Wisconsin, an amnesty program got $1.2 million back to its rightful owners. Maine authorities are trying to do the same for DeJoy and her fellow victims, and have managed to settle a number of cases in their favor. But DeJoy turned down a settlement offer for one-fifth of her original investment -- $1,000 -- in hopes of getting all her money back.

Whatever happens, she can already claim at least a modicum of revenge. Despite the embarrassment of getting taken, she's been heartened by the response from other women in her area. "It was nice to have people come out and say, 'Yeah, we almost did it. You weren't a complete nitwit.' "

In fact, she might be wiser than the crooks who hatched the scheme. For all the talk about building a community, A Woman's Project fell apart the minute the chance to make money evaporated. By contrast, DeJoy and two other Maine women duped by gifting circles have begun getting together each week for lunch, and may, indeed, become friends for life.

By Shea Dean (From Reader's Digest)

They Took My Life

noreply@blogger.com (Putty) — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 02:40:00 +0000

His wrongful arrest led to 12 years in jail. David Shephard can't make up for the lost time -- but he's determined to try.

Fear of Freedom
The euphoria washed over David Shephard the instant he walked out of prison, and didn't let up for hours, not until he finally collapsed from exhaustion, safe back in his mother's house. But after spending so much time in jail, Shephard had changed -- and so had his world. Within days the exhilaration of freedom vanished, replaced by a crippling paranoia that dogged him all day, every day.

For weeks he couldn't leave the house. When he finally did venture out, he made sure to save his bus ticket in case he had to prove where he had been. "I wanted to get back to my life," Shephard says, "but I was afraid it could all happen again."

If you stop and think about it, Shephard's paranoia is understandable. Wrongly convicted of raping a 19-year-old New Jersey woman, he spent 12 years behind bars, until an advanced DNA analysis proved his innocence. After all he'd been through -- arrested at work, ripped from his future wife and baby son, jailed for a third of his life -- starting over wasn't as easy as walking out of a cell. Nine years after his release, Shephard, now 41, is still trying to shake the notion that if it happened once, it could happen again.

To date, 143 U.S. prison inmates have had convictions overturned using DNA evidence, including 13 on death row. While these exonerations have exposed deficiencies in the judicial system, they also make an old truism painfully clear: Nothing can make up for lost time. There's simply no amount of money or job support or training or counseling that can guarantee a smooth re-entry for an innocent man who's been jailed for years.

"Prison can make healthy people literally insane. Most prisoners assume that when they get out, they'll be able to just step back into their old lives," says Dr. Laurie Vollen, a forensic scientist who is developing the first national support network for the wrongly convicted. "But they come out to nothing. If they're lucky, they'll get bus fare and a newspaper headline."

David Shephard hardly had a fair shot in the first place. His father took off before he was born. To support her three children, his mother worked a double shift as a cellular telephone operator. When Shephard was a high school junior, he dropped out to take care of his baby sister, Nataly. He'd been a good student, taking advanced classes, but he took the adjustment in stride. "I tried to make the most of my free time," he says. "I was never one to sit around." He volunteered for a local community policing program, where he met his wife, Erica Calloway, a fellow volunteer. She fell for him instantly. "David was different from the others," she says. "He was a real charmer. He was charismatic."

Shortly after the two began dating, Shephard landed a job on a ramp crew servicing planes at Newark International Airport. By the fall of 1983, when he was 20, he'd moved up to head the graveyard shift, and Erica had just given birth to their son, LeMarr. The couple were making plans to buy a house. "We were building a future," Erica says.

One morning in late December, Shephard clocked out after his shift and then headed to his car. A couple of Hillside, New Jersey detectives stopped him. They wanted to talk about a stolen vehicle. He rode with them to the police station -- the first one he had ever been in -- where the officers began pressuring him to confess not only to the car theft but to a sexual assault. They told him that a young white woman had been abducted on Christmas Eve by two black men outside the Woodbridge Mall, south of the airport. They forced her into her car and drove to a quiet area, where they beat and raped her before leaving her by the side of the road.

Injustice
Shephard recalls that he was strangely unfazed by the allegations. "I told them, 'I don't know what you're talking about.' I'm thinking about what I'm going to do when I get home. We were going to look at a house; we were going to buy a car. Those were the things that were on my mind."

When the detectives started questioning him about his whereabouts on Christmas Eve, Shephard faltered, just for a moment. First he said he'd been out with Erica. Then he remembered he had been baby-sitting Nataly. "They must have repeated everything three times," Shephard says. "They interrogated me for almost six hours. Nothing made sense in the end." Still, he wasn't worried. "I never for a moment thought I would end up being charged or doing time for this."

But the police had put together enough evidence to link Shephard to the crime. The victim remembered one of the men who assaulted her calling the other Dave. And, unbeknownst to Shephard, police had brought her to his workplace, and she had identified him as one of her attackers.

After producing an arrest warrant charging him with aggravated sexual assault, kidnapping and robbery, the officers let Shephard phone his mother and Erica to tell them what had happened. Then they led him to a holding cell and closed the door.

Several weeks later, a standard test of semen found in the victim's car matched Shephard's common blood type. During a one-week jury trial in the fall of 1984, both Shephard and his mother testified, offering an alibi and pleading injustice. But after the victim identified Shephard once again as her assailant, both his public defender and the judge urged him to accept a plea bargain in exchange for a reduced sentence. Shephard refused. "I always thought I would go home," he says. "I had tremendous faith in the system." When the verdict was read and the judge handed down a 30-year sentence, Shephard's world collapsed.

In the aggressive, testosterone-driven environment of prison, Shephard's spirit was quickly crushed. Because rapists occupy a low level in the institutional hierarchy -- somewhere just above child abusers -- he was a target from day one. A gang wielding weight bars attacked him in the gym. An inmate sliced him with a razor blade. Another routinely stole his food and cigarettes.

Finally, a veteran inmate pulled Shephard aside and advised him that if he didn't start sticking up for himself, he would die. A fuse was lit. The next time the thief approached, Shephard grabbed a metal dinner tray and hit him over the head. "Make no mistake," says Shephard, who has the bulky form of a nightclub bouncer, "prison changes you. You can't turn the other cheek. They'll take everything from you."

He struggled to make sense of his conviction and filed regular appeals, but gave up hoping for sympathy. "You can't go around prison saying you're innocent, because then you're really going to get hurt." Instead, Shephard began to carve out an existence inside the penitentiary. He finished his high school degree, ran a football pool, took a job in the laundry room.

Meanwhile, his connections to the outside world grew weaker. For months, he forbade his mother and sister to come see him. He told Erica to get on with her life, and she reluctantly began to date other men. He watched LeMarr grow up over the course of a hundred sterile Saturday visits to the prison. "We never got to know each other," LeMarr, 20, says.

Back in the Game

While working in the penitentiary library one day, Shephard came across the case of Gary Dotson, an Illinois man serving time for rape. In 1989 Dotson became the first U.S. inmate to use DNA evidence to clear his name. Shephard spent hours trying to make sense of the technical and legal data in the Dotson case, and in 1992, when New Jersey courts allowed DNA evidence in appeals, he filed a petition for DNA testing of the biological evidence from the crime scene in his case, still locked away in a police vault.

Three years later, his petition was granted and the testing carried out. The results were indisputable. The semen samples disclosed two separate DNA patterns, confirming there had been two assailants. But with nearly 100 percent certainty, they also showed no match to Shephard's DNA. On April 28, 1995, Union County prosecutors moved to drop all charges against him. Shephard was free.

Shephard moved back home with his mother but quickly reunited with Erica, who says she never doubted his innocence. He took a job as a janitor at Newark's City Hall, even though it paid half what he'd been making at the airport. With money in his pocket, he tried too hard, too fast, to catch up on all he had missed while in prison. The cravings were innocent at first: Cherry Cokes, cheesecake. But they became more desperate and destructive as he squandered his money on booze and clothes. He started coming home late and missing work. "I felt like I was 19 again," he says. "I wish somebody would have grabbed me and told me to relax."

"What would you expect from a guy who lost a decade of his life?" asks Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, a New York law clinic that represents prisoners with claims of wrongful convictions. "His peers had started their careers and families. David was left behind. It's impossible to just step back into the game."

Through a mutual friend, Shephard met New Jersey attorney Louis H. Miron, who had an interest in exoneration cases. The two began speaking at local high schools about the criminal justice system and Shephard's experience. Then they went on radio programs. Occasionally, skeptics would challenge Shephard's innocence; the former inmate refused to be drawn in, saying there was nothing to prove. "I've never seen him angry," Miron says. "He just rolls with it."

But in 1996 the system turned on him again. The state tried to recover $16,000 in child support paid by the welfare department to Erica during Shephard's incarceration for the care of LeMarr, on the grounds that once prisoners return to the workplace, they are responsible for child support they didn't pay while incarcerated.

"They weren't happy to take 12 years of my life," Shephard says. "They wanted more." Again, Shephard found himself in court as Miron argued against penalizing his client, given that he'd been wrongfully incarcerated.

From there, the logical question was: Who should pay, and how, for the errors that cost David Shephard so much lost time? Shephard and his attorney explored the possibility of filing a civil suit, but because no one had acted maliciously (the police had placed faith in the mistaken testimony of the victim), and since DNA testing was not available at the time of Shephard's trial, there was no cause of negligence. "Nothing could have been done differently," says David Hancock, prosecutor of Shephard's 1984 case. "The science that exonerated him was not available back then."

Compensation

At the time, New Jersey had no law in place offering compensation to the wrongfully convicted, so Shephard went to work to create one. For two years, he lobbied state legislators to allow people jailed for crimes they didn't commit to collect an award of at least double their annual pre-conviction salary for each year of incarceration. On August 25, 1997, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman signed the compensation bill, and Shephard subsequently settled for $240,000.

"In the end, what David got is still not enough," says Pace University law professor Adele Bernhard, who has studied compensation issues. "He'll probably forever relive the nightmare of his time in prison. A million dollars wouldn't change that."

Shephard's settlement disappeared quickly. Some of the money went to legal fees, and to pay the debts of his mother and sister, both of whom passed away within a few years of his release. What was left went toward renovating the basement of Erica's parents' home, where the couple now live with their daughter Ciara, eight, LeMarr, and Nataly's daughter, Miechai, ten, whom they adopted after her mother's death.

In 1997, Shephard lost his job as a janitor. By then, he'd stopped his boozing and big spending, and felt hopeful he would find more meaningful work. But the 12-year gap on his résumé raised questions from potential employers. Eventually, he landed a position in the Newark public defender's office, and then worked as a counselor at a halfway house. When the local economy soured a few years ago, he was laid off.

For two years afterward, Shephard had little to do except collect his daughter and niece from school each day or watch LeMarr play on his football team. Plagued with painful rheumatoid arthritis he attributes to the long days he spent working in the prison laundry, he passed much of the time sitting alone in the apartment. "I'm not blind to the fact that I am back in a cell again," he said then. Looking back, he realizes he was profoundly depressed and wishes he'd sought treatment.

But lately, Shephard has begun to chip away at the invisible walls that confine him. Last spring, he and Erica attended a conference in New York for people exonerated by DNA testing. At the gathering, Shephard, one of the longest out of prison, found himself in the role of counselor. "The only way to get through this is by taking it one day at a time," he told former inmates as he passed out his phone number.

Some two weeks later, Shephard suffered a heart attack. But he recuperated, and now takes medication to lower his blood pressure. He also gets injections in his knees for arthritis; for the first time in years he is without throbbing pain. He has finally landed a good job working at a local county welfare agency, where he helps evaluate families applying for government assistance. "He's got purpose now, so he feels better," Erica says. "He's been in chains, but he's still very proud."

"I know it can all disappear in an instant," says Shephard, "but it's nice to have a reason to get out of bed. And I feel like I'm making a difference."

David Shephard now has dreams that aren't simply fantasies to get him through the bad times. One of these days, after he retires, he would like to move his family to Florida or California -- somewhere that's near the water, and where it's warmer. He'd also like to be a counselor again, or maybe a school football coach. But there is no rush, even if he is a few steps behind where he should be. "I'll get there," he says. "It may take longer than other people, but I'll get there. I've got the rest of my life to live."

By Graham Buck (From Reader's Digest)

Partners In Crime

noreply@blogger.com (Putty) — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 14:01:00 +0000

By Max Alexander (From Reader's Digest)

This new Bonnie and Clyde robbed $500,000 from a half-dozen banks, then lived the highlife on the lam.

Gifted
For winter recreation, it doesn't get much better than Mt. Bachelor, with its 3,365-foot vertical drop and 350 annual inches of snow. The Oregon ski resort has it all when you throw in some kick-off-your-shoes nightlife; the area's Upper Castle Keep Lounge warns, "Choose one of our other facilities if you can't handle too much fun!"

But too much fun wasn't a problem for good-looking Brent Wilson "Wil" Hicks and his athletic girlfriend, Alex Santini. The couple pulled into nearby Bend in December 1998, anticipating a fast-paced season of snowboarding and partying. An Internet stock trader, Hicks could work anywhere that had a high-speed connection for his laptop. After renting a two-month condo, paying $1,800 cash for ski passes and joining the local Gold's Gym, Hicks and Santini settled into a daily routine of a little work, and a lot of play.

At night in the Lounge, the couple made friends with Carey Black, a cocktail waitress, who didn't know that Hicks, whose real name was Craig Pritchert, was in fact a career criminal and a wanted man. At age 37, he'd already done time for bank robbery. Santini was Nova Guthrie, a 25-year-old college grad with no criminal record but a taste for high living. Over 16 months from 1997 to 1999, authorities now say, Craig, often with Nova's help, pulled off precision, armed "takedown" heists in banks from Oregon to Texas, netting as much as half a million dollars. The robberies earned them comparisons to Bonnie and Clyde, the bank-robbing lovers who eluded cops for four years before perishing in a rain of police bullets in 1934.

Shortly after arriving in Bend, Craig and Nova began checking out the Klamath First Federal Bank. It was the kind of bank Craig liked: in a small town without a lot of cops and across from a busy shopping center, where a getaway car could blend in quickly. Best of all, it was open until six on Fridays -- after dark during winter.

On a Friday in late February, Nova was behind the wheel of a silver Subaru that pulled into the parking lot of the Timbers Bar & Grill, just down the street from the bank. It was just before six, and as darkness settled in, authorities allege that Craig donned a latex mask-and-wig likeness of a bearded old man. He grabbed a walkie-talkie and a white canvas bag, zipped up his ski parka and headed for the bank. Nova stayed in the car with the other walkie-talkie and a police scanner. Her job was to listen for the words "211 in progress" -- cop code for a bank robbery -- then alert Craig.

But Craig didn't give the bank's three employees time to trip silent police alarms. He burst in wielding a semiautomatic handgun and ordered manager Bill Olsen to lock the door. "At first I thought it was a joke," says Olsen, "but he got my attention when he cocked the gun and threatened to blow my head off." This was not the Craig who charmed waitresses and swapped stock tips at the bar. "Every other word was an obscenity," Olsen recalls. "He knew how to terrorize."

Craig told the operations officer, Rhonda Dent, to draw the shade over the drive-up window and open the vault. As Dent filled a bank bag, Craig ordered Olsen and teller Laurie Morin to their knees, and bound their hands and ankles with plastic flex ties. When Dent couldn't cram any more bills into the bank bag, Craig whipped out another and demanded she fill that one too. Then he tied up Dent, grabbed both bags and bolted out a side door. It was over almost as soon as it began.

Back in their condo, Craig and Nova counted $120,000 in cash. It was a stunning haul, but their day's work wasn't done. Craig lit the wood stove and tossed in the mask, the remaining flex ties and his ski jacket. On Saturday, he got rid of the radios. On Sunday, in what seemed an amazingly generous gesture, the couple gave Carey Black, their friendly cocktail waitress, the title to their silver Subaru. Then they disappeared in a BMW.

Even before he met Nova, Craig had been eluding cops, and baffling those close to him, for years. Raised in a middle-class, Catholic family in Scottsdale, Arizona, Craig stood out from the crowd -- and not just because he was handsome and gregarious. He was a gifted outfielder and switch-hitter at Coronado High School; the team won the state baseball championship in his senior year. There he met his future wife, Laurie, a pretty blond cheerleader and the homecoming queen. "He said all the right things," recalls Laurie. "You felt like he knew so much."

After graduating, Craig played in a summer league with future batting champ Mark McGwire; at Arizona State University in 1982 (a year after he and Laurie married), he landed on a dream team with Barry Bonds and other soon-to-be major-leaguers. With Craig on track to be a high draft pick for the majors, he and Laurie settled down to raise a family, ultimately having three kids.

But Craig couldn't keep his eye on the ball, so to speak. Frustrated with sitting on the bench as Bonds and other heavyweights took the field, he dropped out of ASU after one year. He could have transferred to another Division I school or simply cooled his heels, waiting for Bonds to move on. "He had no patience," says Laurie.

Beneath Craig's charismatic exterior was a controlling, manipulative person who craved danger. Unbeknownst to his wife, he had been living a life of petty crime and deception for years. "He gets off on it," says Laurie. "I found out that in high school he was stealing tires off cars at fancy dealerships, and then selling them at a swap meet the next day."

Perfect Partner
Tire theft escalated to more daring crimes during the late '80s, when the couple separated, in part because of what Laurie says was Craig's repeated infidelity. He seemed to enjoy taunting her, at one point frolicking in the hot tub of her apartment complex with another woman. While she worked full-time as a bank teller to support her kids, her estranged husband was robbing banks to support his taste for the good life. Laurie once spotted him driving a silver Porsche Carrera.

The couple divorced in 1990, and later that year the FBI caught up with Craig in Honolulu, where he'd relocated with a girlfriend. Arrested and convicted of robbing a Las Vegas bank in April of that year, Craig served five years in Arizona's Black Canyon federal penitentiary. There he read The Wall Street Journal every day and dreamed of making a fast buck as a day trader when he got out.

After his 1996 release, during a visit with his kids, he told Laurie's second husband, John Pulzato, that robbery was like a drug -- and it was his drug of choice. "There is no better high," Craig said, describing how he would sit in his car before a heist and pump himself up, like an athlete getting ready for the big game.

Clearly, he hadn't put crime behind him, which became evident soon enough. On August 12, 1997, investigators say, Craig held up a Scottsdale Norwest Bank. That same day, Laurie was working as a teller at a Norwest branch in nearby Mesa. She believes his choice of banks was no coincidence.

That afternoon, local cops came close to nabbing their man during a spectacular getaway that included a diversionary car fire and a cat-and-mouse chase through a luxury shopping mall, with Craig buying -- and changing -- clothes several times. In the end, the cops found Craig's car, strewn with wads of cash and a bank money-tracking device -- but no Craig. A few weeks later, the bank robber walked into a restaurant in Farmington, New Mexico, and met Nova.

She was a dark-haired beauty from the tiny rural town of Boone, Colorado. Her steelworker dad and schoolteacher mom were strict Christian fundamentalists, and Nova showed little sign of straying from the flock. A member of the National Honor Society as well as the Christian Student Fellowship in high school, she went on to earn a premed degree from Morningside College in Iowa. "She was very intelligent," says her college roommate, Tina Laskie. Laskie says Nova attended church on campus, but also had a bit of a wild side. "She wasn't afraid to get dirty, and she didn't let anybody push her around."

But why did she throw it all away for a life of crime? Family members can offer little more than sighs of disbelief. Was it true love? Perhaps, but people who know Craig believe Nova was swept up by his forceful personality. "He could sell ice to Eskimos," says John Pulzato.

When she met Craig, Nova was helping her brother Gerald sell vacuum-cleaning supplies in New Mexico. Although Craig was 12 years older, she once said she saw something in him that matched something in her. For his part, Craig has said he had never met any woman like her.

Craig had a reputation as a ladies' man, but as far as cops knew, he had always kept his love life and his crime life separate. Yet Nova became Craig's perfect partner in love -- and crime.

Their spree began on Halloween 1997 when cops say Craig and Nova, along with an accomplice still at large, held up a Bank of the Southwest branch in Durango, Colorado -- cleaning the vault out of $60,000. They avoided big cities, hitting one-horse towns like Aztec, New Mexico. Nova would case a bank by going in for a money order, then studying the layout. And Craig figured out you could dunk stolen loot in a bucket of water (which Nova kept in the getaway car) to disable tracking devices. "I consider Craig one of the more intelligent bank robbers," says Tom Van Meter, a robbery detective with the Scottsdale Police Department.

But he was an even better fugitive. Using a host of fake names, bogus IDs and unstoppable charm, Craig and Nova managed to hide in plain sight -- from the slopes of Mt. Bachelor to the beaches of Belize. The money dwindled quickly, especially given Craig's appreciation for sharp clothes, watches and premium liquor. To fund their "permanent vacation," the pair continued the holdups. Thanks to several appearances on "America's Most Wanted," Craig and Nova sightings started flowing in, and FBI agents say they came close to them several times -- just not quite close enough.

Then the cops got a break. On March 8, 1999, about two weeks after the Bend heist, Nova turned herself in -- possibly following a fight with Craig. "I think I'm wanted," she told a Baptist minister, who drove her to an FBI office in Denver. During a four-hour interview with agents, she spilled the story of their life on the lam. Based on the information she gave them about Craig, all charges against her were eventually dropped, and she was allowed to leave.

Permanent Vacation
Enter Special Agent Mike Sanborn of the FBI's Fugitive Task Force in Phoenix, a burly ex-Marine with a nose for hard cases. Sanborn studied Nova's FBI interview, searching for clues. The couple often stayed in Super 8 Motels, so he sent photos of the pair to every Super 8 in the country. When Craig's oldest son played in the state high school baseball playoffs, the stadium was swarming with FBI agents and local cops. But Craig never showed. "It was my feeling they weren't in the country anymore," says Sanborn.

The special agent now believes that after Craig and Nova hooked up again, they fled to Belize. There they spent about eight months on the island of Ambergris Caye, a snorkeling and fishing paradise. With robbery money running low, Nova probably worked in a local restaurant, while Craig occupied himself day-trading. Eventually, agents say, Craig and Nova moved farther afield, spending time in London, Athens and Cyprus. After the September 11 attacks, Sanborn figures, the couple decided it would be too risky to re-enter the United States, given tighter security checks. But where in the world were they?

In July 2003, four years after Nova's disappearance, Sanborn got a tip that the pair was seen at a nightspot in Cape Town, South Africa. The tipster said Nova was working at the Bossa Nova Club under the name Andi Brown. Sanborn thought it was far-fetched at first, "but several things made sense," he recalls. Nova had worked as a waitress before, and often used aliases that were "four-letter names." So he e-mailed the FBI's legal attaché in Pretoria and asked about Cape Town.

"I got a one-sentence response," says Sanborn: "Cape Town is a fugitive haven." In less time than it takes to park at the airport, Sanborn "Googled" a website for the Bossa Nova that included hundreds of photos from theme parties, where costume-clad regulars and employees danced the night away. "I got to about picture 300, and there she was, plain as day."

The photo, labeled "Giorgos & Andi," shows an attractive, dark-haired woman, smiling cheek-to-cheek with club owner Giorgos Karipidis. But Sanborn had never met Nova in person, and he needed to be sure. "I sent the photo to the Denver agents who had interviewed her, and they said, 'Hey, nice picture of Nova. Where'd you get it?' "

Sanborn then assigned undercover agents from the FBI along with South African police to stake out the club. (South Africa has an extradition treaty with the United States.) Andi had an American accent, agents noticed, and a large sunburst tattoo on the small of her back -- just like Nova's. But Craig was nowhere to be seen. Then, Craig -- or "Dane," as he was known around the bar -- walked in. When he greeted "Andi" warmly, the jig was up. "The two of them hugged and kissed," says Sanborn, who was directing the stakeout via cell phone from Phoenix, 10,000 miles away.

Four nights later, South African police arrested Craig and Nova without incident as they were sitting down to a dinner of Chinese takeout in their $325-a-month sparsely furnished apartment in a mixed oceanside neighborhood. Cops found a pile of fake passports in the apartment, but no guns -- or wads of cash. "They were living near the poverty level," one of the arresting agents observed.

Bossa Nova owner Karipidis, who says he frequently loaned cash to Craig and Nova, had become close with them during their two-year stay. When he heard they'd been arrested, "I thought it was a joke," he recalls. He says Nova managed the club and had access to his bank codes and accounts. "They could have taken close to half a million dollars," he explains. "It seems obvious to me they came here to change." They left in handcuffs -- after a final embrace that Karipidis arranged through a friend in Immigration.

It was likely their last kiss. Nova, now in custody near Denver, pleaded guilty in May to three robberies and will get a sentence of up to 20 years, but could serve much less. The following month, Craig, while being held in Arizona, also pleaded guilty to three counts of armed robbery, as well as a gun charge. He is looking at 20 to 22½ years behind bars.

Karipidis says Craig and Nova's crime-free life in South Africa should be considered by prosecutors or parole boards. "They're not the same people they were," he says. "And they never hurt anybody."

Laurie Pulzato, who no longer works as a bank teller after being robbed at gunpoint herself, disagrees. "The mental duress during robbery is extreme," she says. "What flashes through your mind is your kids, and you're just praying, Please don't kill me." She says Craig's real victims are their children, who've spent years being stigmatized in classrooms and on the same baseball diamonds where Craig once shone, because of their father's misdeeds.

It's not too much of a stretch to view Nova as yet another of Craig's victims. "He feels responsible for her," says Karipidis, who spoke to Craig in prison. "He feels he's the one who got her into trouble."

But Nova's mother says blaming Craig is too easy. "Had she served the Lord and not strayed from what she knew," says Delores Guthrie, "this would not have happened." Nova's brother Gerald puts it another way: "We all follow a path, don't we? He had a life to lead, and she had a choice to follow."

Married To The Mob: Mafia Wives And Mistresses

noreply@blogger.com (Putty) — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 14:37:00 +0000

By Anthony Bruno (Source)

Behind Closed Doors
In an episode of the hit television series “The Sopranos” the fictional mob boss Tony Soprano scrambles to collect all the cash he has at home. He grabs a ladder and goes to his hiding place in the house, pulling thick packets of money from behind the ceiling panels. His long-suffering but ever-loyal wife, Carmela, holds a plastic garbage bag open as he drops his stash into it. At no point does she ever ask where all this money came from, nor does she seem surprised that it’s there. Like all good Mafia wives—the real ones included—Carmela “doesn’t wanna know nothin’.” A mob wife’s operating principle is simple: As long as her husband can bring in enough income to support his family and maintain a respectable lifestyle, the wife doesn’t care to know where it all came from. And if she’s smart, she won’t ask.

Most mafia wives exist in a unique state of denial. To the outside world, these women swear that their husbands are not thieves and killers. They’re businessmen and independent contractors harassed by law enforcement because they happen to be of Italian descent and are therefore unfairly tarred with the Mafia brush. But among themselves, Mafia wives exhibit a different kind of denial. Generally they all know what their husbands do for a living, even if they aren’t always privy to the specific scams. But even with each other, these women rarely acknowledge the obvious. They might socialize together, shop together, discuss their kids and share their personal problems, but they rarely discuss mob business.

Karen Hill, wife of Lucchese family associate Henry Hill, who was the subject of the best-selling book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family by Nicholas Pileggi, recalled her first encounter with other mob wives on a visit to their husbands in prison: “They knew the good prisons and the bad ones. They never talked about what their husbands had done to get sent to jail. That just wasn’t ever a part of the conversation. What they discussed was how the prosecutors and the cops lied. How people picked on their husbands. How their husbands had done something everybody was doing but had just had the bad luck to get caught.”

Like their husbands who must abide by the rules of omerta, the Mafia code of silence, in order to survive and prosper, Mafia wives follow their own code of silence. Large houses, luxury cars, expensive clothes, lavish restaurant meals and generous amounts of spending money ensure that their lips remain sealed. As long as the goodies keep coming, the wives don’t ask and they don’t tell.

Every member of law enforcement interviewed for this story declined to go on the record with their opinions and observations about the mates of Mafiosi, but they all agreed that Mafia wives are not as innocent of their husbands’ doings as they often claim. These officers’ intimate knowledge of life inside a wiseguy’s home mostly comes from telephone wiretaps. An investigation of a given mobster can generate hundreds of hours of secretly taped telephone conversations, and the officers and prosecutors who monitor these tapes learn a lot about domestic life inside a mobster’s family. However, only material pertinent to the charges brought against the accused can be used in a court of law and thus released to the public. Everything else is sealed. So when it comes to the details of Mafia wives, law enforcement knows but cannot say.

The Wives of "Trigger Mike"
According to an old Sicilian saying, wives should be kept at home, barefoot and pregnant. The updated version says that a wife should see only the kitchen and the bedroom ceiling. As misogynistic as these sentiments are, they are the underlying rules of many Mafia marriages. Ann Coppola, the second wife of New York capo Michael “Trigger Mike” Coppola, suffered much more than most. Her husband added “bloody” to the list of things a good mob wife should be.

Coppola, who was known for his violent temper, ran lucrative narcotics and numbers operations in Harlem in the 1940s and ‘50s. He married his second wife Ann Augustine in 1955 after the tragic passing of his first wife Doris. He told Ann that Doris died in childbirth, but it wasn’t long before Ann had reason to suspect that Doris’s death was more sinister than “Trigger Mike” had revealed.

When Ann became pregnant, Coppola told her emphatically that he didn’t want any more kids. He’d had two by Doris, and Ann’s daughter by a previous marriage was living with them as well. As reported by organized crime historian Allan May, Coppola told Ann not to worry. “Just leave everything to me,” he assured her.

One day after the children had gone off to school, a physician came to the house. Coppola greeted him at the door and showed him in, introducing him to Ann simply as “Dr. D.” The doctor spread a sheet over the kitchen table and performed an abortion on Ann while Coppola stood by and watched, grinning throughout the entire procedure. Afterward, he made sure that Ann knew that the abortion had cost him $1,000.

Three months later, Ann was pregnant again, and Dr. D returned. Once again Trigger Mike watched the whole thing, obviously enjoying it. Two more abortions followed. Ann came to realize that the only reason her husband had sex with her was to get her pregnant so that he could watch the abortions. Perhaps Doris, whose remains were cremated at Coppola’s insistence, had had one abortion too many.

Ann endured regular beatings from her husband, but he also lavished her with fine clothes and jewelry. “He gave me this vast amount of material things,” she said, recalling her marriage, “to prove to people how big and successful he was and to feed his ego until he himself believed that he was God Almighty.” He once blackened both her eyes by poking them simultaneously with his index and middle fingers Three Stooges-style.

After five years of unspeakable abuse, Ann finally walked out on him and filed for divorce. At about the same time, Coppola was indicted on four counts of tax evasion. He pleaded guilty on orders from the mob hierarchy, who feared what Ann would reveal if there was a trial and she was called to the stand. Coppola was sentenced to serve a year and a day.

While Coppola was in prison, Ann moved to Italy and took her own life one day in a hotel room, overdosing on Scotch-and-barbiturate cocktails. Among the many goodbye notes she left was a last request to be cremated and have her ashes dropped from an airplane over Trigger Mike’s house.

Ann Coppola’s marriage is an extreme example of the pitfalls of being married to the mob, but not all wiseguys are so heartless. Many gangsters have been known to treat their wives well and not just in terms of material possessions. Frequently mob wives are often charged with crimes along with their husbands, and many mobsters will agree to a plea bargain to get their wives off the hook. Reputed Bonanno family soldier John “Porky” Zancocchio was just such a goodfella when it came to his wife and family.

Zancocchio ran a major New York bookmaking operation, which, at its height, pulled down $280 million a year. Among his high-rolling clients was banished former baseball great Pete Rose. But in 1990 Zancocchio was hauled into court on federal tax evasions charges. The feds turned up the heat on Porky by charging his wife Lana with mail fraud. They also threatened to charge Porky’s mother, who had allowed her son and his capo to buy a pizzeria in her name, which they called Mama Rosa’s. Putting the women in legal jeopardy had the desired effect. Zancocchio pleaded guilty to failing to file an income tax return and was sentenced to one year in prison with a fine of $100,000.

It was a noble gesture on Porky’s part, but mobsters—and their wives—don’t always learn from their lessons. Eleven years later, in 2002, Zancocchio was again hit with tax fraud charges and so was Lana. The charges stretched from 1995 to 2000, and the combined weight of the alleged offenses made a plea bargain impossible. Both husband and wife ultimately pleaded guilty, although the charges against her were lighter. Porky faced up to 71 months in prison and fines up to $300,000. Lana could have been sentenced to 16 months, but her attorney was able to negotiate a deal where she could serve her sentence at home and continue to raise her children.

Henry Hill, the mob associate whose story was the inspiration for Martin Scorcese’s classic Mafia film, Goodfellas was blessed with a tremendously loyal wife. Hill, an associate in the Lucchese crime family, could never become a “made” member of the Mafia because he wasn’t 100% Italian, but that didn’t stop him from participating in some major crimes in the New York City area, including the infamous 1978 Lufthansa heist in which more than $4 million in unmarked cash was stolen from a warehouse at Kennedy Airport.

As recounted in Pileggi’s Wiseguy, Henry’s wife Karen endured more hardships than the average American wife. When Henry was flush, life was sweet, but when his scams weren’t paying off, they had to scrounge like paupers. When Henry went away to prison, Karen was left alone to fend for herself and raise the kids. Worst of all, Henry’s cocaine dealing led to addiction, and Karen was sucked into that seductive whirl as well.

In Pileggi’s book, Karen Hill took the long view of her relationship with a mobster: “I suppose if I wrote down the pros and cons of the marriage, lots of people might think I was nuts to stay with him, but I guess we have our own needs, and they’re not added up in the columns. He and I were always excited by each other, even later, after the kids . . . I would listen to my friends talk about their marriages and I knew that for all my troubles, I still had a better deal than they did.”

The Goomatta
The inevitable bane of every mob wife’s life is her husband’s “goomatta.” Whether pronounced “goomah,” “goomar” or “goomatta,” the word is the Americanized corruption of the Italian word comare, which means “mistress” or “girlfriend.” According to the glossary in The Sopranos: A Family History, “No self-respecting wiseguy is without one.”

How a mob wife reacts when she learns of her husband’s goomatta is usually determined by the wife’s age. The younger wives tend to lash out and demand their husband’s fidelity, but in time these women learn that the goomatta is a fact of mob life. To keep the goodies—the house, the cars, the furs, the jewelry, etc.—the mob wife has to put up with the mistress. The flashy young girlfriend is a necessary accessory for a man of honor, like a Lexus or a Rolex. Having a woman on the side is a symbol of the man’s success and power. It says to the world that, not only is he potent enough to keep two women satisfied, he clearly rules the roost and doesn’t have to worry about retaliation from the woman he married.

This, at least from the man’s point of view, is the ideal. The reality, however, is sometimes quite different. Goomattas are not always pliable play things, and they aren’t always centerfold material. And it often seems that the higher in rank the mobster is, the more trouble his goomatta becomes.

Ralph Natale, former boss of Philadelphia’s Bruno-Scarfo Family, was a little too public with his goomatta, and as a result earned the resentment of many of his underlings. Natale came to power in the confusion that followed the government’s successful prosecution of his predecessor, the hard-nosed, Sicilian-born boss John Stanfa.

While serving a 16-year sentence for arson and drug convictions, Natale and his cellmate, Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino, had carefully planned how they would take over the disorganized Philly mob. They agreed that Natale, the older of the two, would become the new boss. Natale, who was in his early 60s, was not a made member of the Mafia at the time, although Merlino, then 32, was. Natale’s induction ceremony took place in a hotel room near Philadelphia’s Veteran Stadium after he was paroled in 1994.

With the old boss Stanfa in prison and out of the picture, Natale and Merlino were free to realize their mob dreams. During Merlino’s 2001 trial in which the government took on the whole Philly mob for an unprecedented third time, witnesses claimed that Skinny Joey tolerated Natale because he felt that the older wiseguys wouldn’t obey him if he ever tried to take over as boss. Natale had been close to Angelo Bruno, the legendary “Docile Don” who had ruled the Philly mob for decades; Merlino needed an elder statesman to provide a figurehead while he, as underboss, ran things his way. In fact, the city of Philadelphia became Merlino’s territory because the conditions of Natale’s parole stipulated that he could not enter the city without prior approval from his parole officer. Natale was forced to run things from his home in Pennsauken, New Jersey, across the Delaware River from Philly.

Natale’s daughter Vanessa had a good friend who spent a lot of time at the Natale’s New Jersey home. Her name was Ruthann Seccio, a slender blonde who had seen some tough times on the streets of South Philadelphia. A former drug addict and gang member, Ruthann had turned her life around and was supporting herself as a waitress. Natale found the outspoken young woman irresistible despite the fact that she was 34 years younger and three inches taller than him.

Natale romanced Seccio shamelessly and set her up in a condominium in Voorhees, New Jersey, 10 miles from the home he shared with his wife Lucy. When Ruthann fell for him, she asked why he wouldn’t leave his wife. Natale told her that Lucy was very ill with both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, that her hearing was terrible, and that she had to wear a heart monitor all the time. After 42 years of marriage, he couldn’t just dump his wife, Natale told Ruthann. Ruthann later found out that Lucy Natale suffered from none of these afflictions.

Despite his decision to stay married, love bloomed with Ruthann. He gave her extravagant gifts—including a Cadillac and a long-haired Himalayan cat named Dusty—and took her to the best restaurants. Ruthann was so smitten she had a red rose tattooed on her left hip with the word “Ralph’s” engraved in blue underneath. But their bliss was cut short in 1998 when Natale’s parole officer caught him meeting with other mobsters at restaurants were he claimed to be selling fish, which supposedly was his legitimate job. Natale was sent back to prison for violating his parole, and he called Ruthann every day, often several times a day. He asked Joey Merlino to take care of Ruthann as well as his wife Lucy while he was away.

But what should have been a short stretch in prison turned far more serious when federal agents threatened to charge Natale with financing a methamphetamine ring. If convicted on another drug charge, Natale would spend the rest of his days behind bars. The feds made the boss an offer he apparently couldn’t refuse: testify against Merlino and the rest of the Philly mob and they’d put him in the Witness Protection Program where at least he’d have his freedom. With just five years under his belt as a man of honor, Natale decided to take their offer and rat on the mob. The government was delighted. Natale, they crowed, was the first sitting boss to turn state’s witness.

Ruthann, who in her heart would always be a street tough, was stunned when she read the headline of the Philadelphia Daily News on August 20, 2000. Her boyfriend was being called “King Rat.”

“I’d rather die than rat,” she told Daily News staff writer Kitty Caparella. “I believed in ‘death before dishonor’ long before I met Ralph.” Ruthann said she took repeated showers because she felt “dirty and violated.” Though unable to sleep, she said she sandwiched herself between mattresses to try to “keep the world out.”

Unlike Ralph’s wife, Ruthann didn’t suffer in silence, and she agreed to do interviews with several local reporters. Even though she had never been popular in Philly mob circles, she took the mob’s side against her old lover once it was revealed that he would be testifying against Merlino and four of his mob cohorts.

In April 2001, Natale took the stand for two straight weeks. He looked fit and well-rested as he recounted his criminal experiences with Merlino and the other defendants. Natale succeeded in keeping his composure for the most part, but at one point he angrily gave Merlino the finger while testifying that the younger Mafioso had reneged on a promise he had made to Natale. Merlino had discontinued the agreed-upon monthly payments to Natale’s wife Lucy ($3,500) and Ruthann ($1,000). This broken promise had apparently played a big part in Natale’s decision to turn state’s witness. Merlino and his co-defendants were ultimately convicted but not on the most serious charges brought against them.

Ruthann was offered a place in the Witness Protection Program, but she adamantly refused, and her decision was not applauded by the mobsters she had so staunchly defended. To them she was still Natale’s goomatta, and since Natale was King Rat, she was no more than the rat’s girlfriend.

Ruthann Seccio remains bitter. “I guess they don’t have a Mafia Women Support Group,” she told the Philadelphia Daily News. “That’s what I’ll start in the future for us misfits.”

"Big Paul's" Maid
From 1976 to 1985, Paul “Big Paul” Castellano was the capo di tutti capi, boss of all bosses, of New York’s Gambino crime family, then the most powerful of the city’s five families. But Castellano is remembered more for his death than for what he accomplished in life. He was gunned down in front of his favorite steakhouse in midtown Manhattan in the middle of rush hour. It was the boldest, most spectacular gangland slaying in modern mob history. Castellano’s execution was as much a statement as a power play orchestrated by John Gotti who muscled his way onto Castellano’s throne and became the next boss of all bosses.

Gotti’s main beef with Castellano was that the boss favored taking the family into legitimate businesses at the expense of the bread-and-butter rackets that are the cornerstones of mafia money-making. Specifically Gotti wanted freer reign to steal from the New York airports.

In their personal styles, the two men were worlds apart. Gotti relished the tough-guy role, quick to retaliate against anyone who stood in his way. Castellano, who was tall and gentlemanly, saw himself as a businessman, though he didn’t hesitate to use violence when he deemed it necessary. Gotti lived in a middle-class neighborhood in Queens. Castellano lived in a mansion nicknamed the White House in the exclusive Todt Hill section of Staten Island, far removed from the rough and tumble activities of his underlings. But what might have been the last straw for Gotti and his supporters was Castellano’s choice of goomatta, his Colombian maid, Gloria Olarte.

Olarte was a most unlikely candidate for a boss’s mistress. She wasn’t the kind of flashy beauty wiseguys prize. She was small and dark with coarse black hair, a shy immigrant hired by Castellano’s wife Nina to work as a domestic. But for reasons that Castellano took to the grave, at the age of 70 he became hopelessly smitten with the maid who spoke almost no English. They carried on in his home in the presence of his wife, and in so doing, Castellano crossed a line that likely contributed to his undoing.

When it comes to the women in their lives, Mafiosi hold a double standard. While a real man must have a goomatta, the mother of his children remains sacred. Affairs are conducted outside of the house, and wives should be spared the embarrassment of their husbands’ extracurricular activities as much as possible. By the Mafia rules of etiquette, Nina Castellano, though grandmotherly by this time, deserved her husband’s respect, and Castellano more than anyone should have known that. His inappropriate, lovesick behavior with Olarte was further proof to his enemies that he was out of touch and needed to be replaced.

Gloria Olarte started working at the Castellanos’ mansion in September 1979, and it wasn’t long before Big Paul started flirting with her. Because she knew so little English, Nina had bought a handheld electronic English-Spanish translator so that she could communicate with the maid and tell her what chores she wanted done. When Castellano got ahold of the device, he used it to send flattering little messages to Olarte in Spanish, complimenting her eyes, her smile.

Castellano’s infatuation with the maid soon turned into a full-fledged love affair. Big Paul and Gloria acted like teenagers with little concern for who was watching. Gloria became quite outspoken around her lover’s associates, which didn’t win her any points with them. Castellano took her on vacations and even bought her a hot sports car, a red Datsun 280Z, even though she didn’t know how to drive. Through all of this, Nina Castellano stood her ground. The White House was her home, and she wasn’t going to budge for a pipsqueak like Olarte. If her husband wanted to act like a fool, let him. This queen wasn’t about to give up her castle.

But the depths of Castellano’s feelings for Gloria surprised even the FBI. On St. Patrick’s Day 1983, after two years of planning, FBI agents got by Castellano’s elaborate electronic security system as well as his Doberman pinschers and successfully planted a listening device in a lamp on the boss’s kitchen table. They knew from prior surveillance that Castellano often conducted business from his home, and he was most comfortable in the kitchen. In the three months that the bug operated, agents listened in on conferences between Castellano and his mob associates. The agents, by default, also heard personal conversations between Big Paul and Gloria. What the agents learned one day left them speechless.

Castellano had left the White House one day to travel to Tampa, Florida. The reason for his visit, according to his lawyer, was elective surgery. But further investigation by the U.S.
Attorney’s Office in Tampa revealed the true nature of this surgery. Big Paul had received a penile implant, a device that when unfolded would give him a mechanical erection. The implant telescoped inside of him like a manual car antenna.

This bit of information raised more than a few eyebrows within law enforcement. Castellano had never been known as a ladies’ man, but now in the autumn of his years, he was getting himself fixed, presumably to satisfy his new love. Knowing this, the agents listening in on the conversations in Castellano’s kitchen started paying more attention to the exchanges between Big Paul and Gloria.

Eventually Nina Castellano moved out of the house, having finally had enough of the lovebirds’ shenanigans. Gloria, whose English was improving, was triumphant. In her mind, she was now the lady of the house. But Gloria’s victory was short-lived. Within a year Paul Castellano’s lifeless body would be sprawled on a Manhattan sidewalk next to the open front passenger door of his black Lincoln Continental, blood seeping from multiple gunshot wounds to the head. It’s uncertain whether John Gotti knew or even cared about Paul Castellano’s penile implant. What Gotti thought of Big Paul’s affair with his maid is not public knowledge. To this day, Gotti, who is imprisoned for life in Marion, Illinois, abides by the Mafia code of silence, omerta.

Perhaps former FBI Special Agent Joseph O’Brien, co-author of Boss of Bosses: The Fall of the Godfather—The FBI and Paul Castellano, best characterized Gloria Olarte’s position within the Gambino family. O’Brien, who was one of the agents who planted the bug in Castellano’s house, called her “the Yoko Ono of the Mob.”

“The bandleader thinks he’s found the love of his life,” O’Brien’s says in his book, “the other guys think he’s lost his mind. He thinks she’s exotic, they think she’s wildly inappropriate. He thinks he’s been set free, they think he’s making a total ass of himself.”

Child Killing

noreply@blogger.com (Putty) — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:32:00 +0000

Alcolu is a small town off Route 521 in Clarendon County, South Carolina, about 50 miles east of Columbia. The first African-American woman to play tennis at Wimbledon, Althea Gibson, was born here. So was Peggy Parish, famous author of children’s books. Five governors of South Carolina were also born and raised here (http//www.clarendoncounty.com). Forest products are a major output of the region, along with tobacco, cotton and corn. Cucumbers are grown in abundance in Clarendon County. It is primarily an agricultural area that features only one small city: Manning, whose population in 1944 was less than 3,000. Essentially, the county was, and still is, a quiet farming community whose routine was rarely, if ever, interrupted by such a climatic event as child murder.

On the sunny afternoon of March 24, 1944, Betty June Binnicker, age 11, and her friend , Mary Emma Thames, age 8, had just left their homes to pick flowers. They were alternately walking and riding Betty’s bicycle along the railroad tracks that ran through Alcolu. The girls often played in this area on the opposite side of the town. By any measure, it was a beautiful spring day: the trees just beginning to bud, the first flowers of the season blooming among the tall grass along the tracks. As they ran and skipped their way through the grass, they saw a young black man along the same path. He also lived in this small lumber-producing town and both girls knew him. Everyone knew everyone else in Alcolu, it was that kind of place. However, within minutes, both girls lay dead on the ground, their skulls brutally bashed in by a huge railroad spike. Their bodies were dragged through the grass and dumped into a small ravine. Immediately after the murders, the killer hid the bloody weapon in the bushes and began the leisurely walk home. He seemed unconcerned and it is doubtful that he truly understood the repercussions of what he had done.

The killer of these children was a child himself. His name was George Junius Stinney Jr., 14 years old, the illiterate son of a local mill worker. And incredibly, in less than 90 days, George would meet death himself, tears streaming down his face, strapped to the electric chair inside the bleak walls of the Central Correctional Institution in Columbia. But the public would barely notice his death. For in June 1944, the country had its eyes fixed firmly upon the beaches of Normandy, where a million American sons were locked in the desperate battles of D-Day while the fate of a world hung in the balance. These were hard times in America. The daily newspapers were filled with graphic stories of killing and destruction on a scale that can scarcely be imagined today. No one had time or compassion for a black teenage killer of little white girls. Nevertheless, history would be made at the Central Correctional Institution on June 16, 1944. For on that day, George Junius Stinney Jr., age 14 and 7 months, would become the youngest person to be legally executed in the United States during the 20th century.

The history of juvenile execution in America reads like a novel with no plot: it seems to have no sense of purpose or destination. Since the early 17th century, 356 juvenile offenders have been executed in the United States (Grossfield, p. 4). USA Today reports: “the first known execution of a juvenile on these shores was in 1642: Thomas Graungery, 16, of Plymouth Colony, Mass. was hanged for bestiality” (Edmonds, p. 11). Some executions become appalling to us when we consider the age of some of these defendants. Contrary to what is generally believed, however, capital punishment in colonial America was a controversial issue. Although it was common to hang offenders in England for crimes like burglary, robbery and theft-related offences, this was rare in America (Friedman, p. 42). Lawrence Friedman writes in Crime and Punishment in American History: “All things considered, the colonies used the death penalty pretty sparingly” (p. 42).

And it must be said that any interpretation of past executions from the 18th and 19th century has to be viewed within the time frame they occurred. For it seems unrealistic to apply today’s standards, values and beliefs to a society that existed hundreds of years ago which can have no valid comparison to today’s world from a social and legal perspective. During colonial times the age of the defendants was often not considered in certain crimes. For example, in the State of New York, two young girls identified only as “Bett” age 12, a slave belonging to Phillip van Rensselear and “Dean”, age 14, a slave belonging to a Volkert Douw were executed on March 14, 1794. They were accused and convicted of starting a fire that burned down a large portion of the City of Albany on November 17, 1793 (Reynolds, pg. 384). It is difficult to identify the youngest person legally executed in American history, but it surely may be a Cherokee Indian who was hanged for murder in 1885. He was ten years old (Grossfield, p. 4). In modern times, there have been relatively few juvenile executions although 70 juvenile offenders presently sit on death row in America. In 1988 a ruling in the Supreme Court “prohibits the death penalty for juvenile offenders whose crimes were committed before they were 16” (Grossfield, p. 5). Prior to 1988, though it was not frequent, execution of children younger than 16 was permitted.

Within a few hours of the Alcolu murders on March 24, 1944, the families of the missing girls were already frantic. It was very unusual for the girls not to return home on time. Since they were always playing in the woods and were familiar with the local countryside, it was unlikely they were lost. The local lumber mill, Alderman Lumber Company, organized a search party that consisted of their employees and almost everyone who lived in Alcolu. The operation was under the direction of B.G. Alderman, owner of the lumber company, and included both blacks and whites. Although they searched throughout the night, they could not find the missing girls. Then, at about 7:30 in the morning of the next day, some of the men found small footprints in the soft ground. They followed the trail and soon discovered a pair of scissors. It was already known that Betty June had taken these same scissors from her home to cut flowers. Within minutes, the search party came upon a water filled ditch, surrounded by thick, thorn covered bushes. The bushes showed signs of being crushed. In the ditch, the faint outline of a child’s bicycle could be seen under the water. “There’s the girls!” one of the searchers screamed. Scott Lowden, a member of the search party, jumped into the muddy hole and the bodies of the missing girls were finally found. Betty June had severe head wounds in the back of the skull. Mary Emma had five separate skull fractures. The cause of death in both cases was later determined to be severe trauma to the head. The girls had been viciously beaten with a heavy, blunt object.

After a few hours of investigation, the local sheriff deputies located and arrested George Stinney Jr. who neighbors had seen in the area where the girls were found. He was brought to the local sheriff’s office where police interrogated him. Since 1944 was long before the Warren Court era, there were no Miranda Warnings, even to a juvenile. The interrogation continued without a parent being present or attorney representation. Clarendon County Sheriff's Deputy H. S. Newman and a representative did the questioning from the Governor’s Office, Officer S.J. Pratt ( The State, March 26, 1944). In less than one hour, Stinney confessed to the crime.

Deputy H.S. Newman later described the event for the court: “I was notified that the bodies had been found. I went down to where the bodies were at. I found Mary Emma she was rite at the edge of the ditch with four or five wounds on her head, on the other side of the ditch the Binnicker girl, were laying there with 4 or 5 wounds in her head, the bicycle which the little girls had were side of the little Binnicker girl. By information I received I arrested a boy by the name of George Stinney, he then made a confession and told me where a piece of iron about 15 inches long were, he said he put it in a ditch about 6 feet from the bicycle which was lying in the ditch” (from Deputy Newman’s written statement, March 26, 1944). Later that same day, Stinney voluntarily led police to the crime scene, a short distance outside of the town, where the murder weapon, a large railroad spike, at least 14 inches long, was recovered.

Immediately, there was grief and outrage in Alcolu. Never before had such a horrendous crime occurred in Clarendon County. Mill workers were especially angered since both girls had relatives who worked at the mill. Passions became further inflamed when details of the crime, supplied by Stinney, became public. The young defendant told police that he killed Mary Ellen because he wanted to have sex with Betty June, the older girl. Angry townspeople and mill workers gathered together in Alcolu and they quickly formed into a mob. On the night of March 26, 1944, a mob of angry whites headed for the Clarendon County jail to administer mob justice. Although, lynching was actually rare in the 1940s, the bitter memories of Southern vigilantism from the 1920s and 30s are a sad part of America’s history. But sheriff’s deputies wisely escorted Stinney out of the county jail to the City of Columbia in adjoining Sumter County where he was held in a more secure facility for his own safety.

On April 24, 1944, just one month after his arrest, Stinney went on trial for his life. The trial would take place at the county seat in the City of Manning. Since angry residents already ran the Stinney family out of town, George had virtually no one on his side. The county court appointed a local attorney to assist in his defense. He was a 30-year-old aspiring politician named Charles Plowden. His goal in the case was simple: to provide a bare bones defense that would fulfill his responsibilities as a defense attorney and, at the same time, not anger the local residents. Since Stinney already confessed to the police and his guilt was firmly established, there was a general feeling that a trial was only a formal requirement.

By the time the trial began on April 24 at the Clarendon County Courthouse, the case was well known throughout the region, though outside the county, it was not widely reported. Outside South Carolina, it was virtually unknown. At the courthouse, it was standing room only, for well over 1,500 people had come to witness the spectacle. The stairways and hallways were filled to capacity. At 10 AM that morning, jury selection began. The State, published in Columbia, reported that “the state rejected four and the defense eight jurors before the jury was impounded at 12:30” (Rowe, p. 1). Even more ominous, however, was the jury composite. The panel consisted of 12 white men: no blacks and no women. Of course, racial make-up of a jury does not guarantee nor prevent justice. The only standard, in 1944 as well as now, is that a juror must be able to maintain a degree of fairness and objectivity that displays no bias to either side.
Given the publicity of the murders and the nature of the crime, the defense would certainly have been better served by a change of venue. Defense Attorney Charles Plowden, however, made no such motion. After a brief lunch, testimony began. “The trial began at 2:30 PM after eight minor cases had been disposed of in the morning” (The Daily Item, April 25, 1944).

Prosecutor Frank McLeod introduced Stinney’s statements of March 25 into evidence. In his initial statement to Deputy Sheriff Newman, Stinney explained that he was near his own home outside Alcolu when the oldest girl came along and asked him where she could pick some flowers. As he attempted to show the girls where the flowers grew, he said, the younger girl accidentally fell into a ditch. As he tried to help Mary Emma, both girls suddenly attacked him. Stinney admitted to hitting the girls with the railroad spike but claimed he did so in self-defense.

In the second statement, also given to Deputy Newman and Officer Pratt, Stinney gave a different version of the event. He told police he was indeed at his own home when he first saw the girls go by. He stated that he then followed the girls into the woods. Stinney said that he was interested in the older one, Betty June. In order to have Betty June to himself, he killed Mary Emma first by hitting her with the railroad spike. Betty June then attempted to run away and Stinney chased and caught her. When she continued to resist his sexual advances, he battered her with the same railroad spike. The State reported that Judge P. Stoll, who was from Kingstree, just 15 miles from Alcolu, halted the testimony to give women in the courtroom a chance to leave prior to “morbid details” (Rowe, p.1).

Scott Lowden, who found the dead girls, was called to the stand. He testified as to the condition of the bodies when they were found. He described a broken bicycle, which lay over the girls. The bodies were entangled with each other and lay submerged in the water where Stinney had dumped them. Betty June’s sister testified that it was she who gave the scissors to the girls to cut flowers.

The prosecution then called Dr. R. F. Baker to testify. It was Dr. Baker and Dr. A. C. Bozard of the Tuomey Hospital in Sumter who performed the post mortem examination of the dead girls. The autopsy reports were read into testimony: “We examined the body of eleven year old white girl. There was evidence of at least seven blows on the head of the child that seemed to have been made by a blunt instrument with a small round head about the size of a hammer. Some of these have only cracked the skull while two have punched definite holes in the skull” (Dr. Bozard’s autopsy report). Although Dr. Baker was unable to positively state that a rape or sexual assault had occurred, he did say that it was possible (Rowe, p. 1). Stinney, dressed in blue Junes, maintained a calm demeanor throughout the afternoon; “He remained calm and apparently little concerned” (Rowe, p. 1).

The presentation of the case, led by McLeod, moved quickly. Too fast, some say. Plowden and his assistant, attorney J.W. Wireman of Manning, presented no witnesses or evidence for the defense of Stinney. Instead, Plowden attempted to portray Stinney as a child who was too young, by law, to be held responsible for his crimes. In retaliation, the prosecution introduced Stinney’s birth certificate, which indicated he was born on October 21, 1929. Under South Carolina law in 1944, an adult was anyone over the age of 14. George Stinney was 14 years and five months old. That was the end of the case. It had begun at 2:30 in the afternoon and was over by 5:30 PM. “The jury retired at five minutes before five to deliberate. Ten minutes later it returned with its verdict: guilty, with no recommendation for mercy” (Brock, sec. D). The entire court proceeding from opening statements to sentencing had taken less than 3 hours. George Stinney “only when asked to arise and be sentenced, did he appear nervous and slightly excited” (Rowe, p.1). Judge Stoll sentenced him to die in the electric chair at Central Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina on June 16, 1944. Stinney was quickly escorted out of court. He had less than two months to live.

The weeks passed as Stinney languished in prison. Some local organizations, like the N.A.A.C.P., churches and unions appealed to Governor Olin D. Johnston to stop the execution. The Daily Item reported on June 13, 1944 “The A.M.E. Church protested to Governor Olin D. Johnston in a telegram the imminent execution June 16 of a 14 year old Negro boy convicted of the murder of a young white girl”. A few days before the scheduled date, the Associated Press published a story on the Stinney case. The Governor’s office received hundreds of pleas to intervene in the name of mercy and fairness. Many cited Stinney’s age as an extraordinary factor that deserved consideration. One message received by the Governor’s Office read: “Child execution is only for Hitler” (Brock, p. D2). Others, however, had their own reasons for Stinney to die: “Sure glad to hear of your decision regarding the nigger Stinney” (Bruck, p. D2). Governor Johnston was unmoved by public sentiment and decided not to intervene. The Daily Item wrote: “The Governor said Friday he had studied the case and found no reason to intervene making this statement after the C.I.O., Tobacco Worker’s Union, the National Maritime Union and the White and Negro Ministerial Unions at Charleston asked him to commute the sentence to life imprisonment (June 13, 1944).

On the morning of June 16, 1944, a year in which 120 other convicts were executed in America’s prisons (U.S. Department of Justice), George Junius Stinney Jr. began his last walk on this earth at 7:30 AM. He carried a bible under one arm as he was escorted to the electric chair by prison guards. Stinney was of slight build. The teen-ager weighed just over 90 lbs and stood 5 feet, 1 inch tall. Since the electric chair was designed and constructed for adults, the attendants had a difficult time strapping him firmly into the seat. The mask that fitted upon the face also did not fit properly. Witnesses to the execution included Betty June’s father and brother Raymond. “Stinney refused to make any statement when given the opportunity by prison officials” (Daily Item, June 17, 1944). It was reported that the force of the electricity caused the mask to slip away from Stinney’s head, exposing his face to the gallery. Witnesses, it was said, would never forget the horror etched on Stinney’s childlike face in those final moments. He was pronounced dead less than four minutes later.

Although legitimate questions linger concerning the quality of Stinney’s defense team, no appeal was ever made. Politics may have played a strong role in that decision. In 1944, Plowden was scheduled to run for public office on the state level. There was speculation that he did not want to disrupt the community by appearing to be too enthusiastic about defending a killer who many felt deserved to die for his offense. Years later, in an interview, Plowden commented on the case: “There was nothing to appeal on” and added the Stinney family had no funds to continue the case (Bruck, sec. D).

Initially, it may appear that Stinney’s trial and execution were the product of a racist justice system, but it isn’t that final. Perhaps a case could be made as to the objectivity and fairness of the judicial process. The judge, prosecutor, defense attorney and jury all had friends, relatives and co-workers who lived in Alcolu. The Alderman Lumber Company employed hundreds of workers in the area who participated in the search. The crime and its lurid details were highly publicized and the racial nature of the case certainly influenced some of the community as well. However, nothing illegal was done during the investigation and prosecution of the case. All the procedures utilized by the police, courts, prosecution and prison system conform to the existing standards and legal requirements of the time and place. The court was well aware of Stinney’s age but the laws of the time allowed for a capital prosecution of a 14-year-old defendant.

The day after Stinney’s execution, June 16, 1944, a small, three-inch article appeared in The State newspaper, which contained the following line “Stinney, 14 years and five months old, was the youngest person ever to die in the chair”.

Incredibly, the crime for which he was executed had occurred just 81 days before, a time span that seems unthinkable to us today. In modern times, it is common for many years to pass before a convicted killer faces an execution. Stinney was buried in an unknown location and immediately forgotten by everyone except his family. In 1994, on the 50th anniversary of the case, Stinney’s sister, Catherine Robinson was interviewed. She stated that her brother wrote to her parents while he was on Death Row in Columbia, South Carolina. George told them he was innocent (The State, June 17, 1994).

However, Vermelle Tucker, Betty June’s sister, had this to say in the same article: “All my dad said was ‘Thank God he won’t do it to anybody else’” (The State, June 17, 1994). Indeed, he never would. But George Junius Stinney Jr., on June 16, 1944, became a tragic and unwilling fragment of American history as the youngest person legally executed in America during the 20th century.

Author: Mark Gado

A Killing in Central Park

noreply@blogger.com (Putty) — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 12:40:00 +0000

Handsome bad boy Robert Chambers murders attractive young Jennifer Levin in the park.

The Jennifer Levin murder case captivated New York City and mesmerized the public with its sordid tale of "rough sex" and a freewheeling lifestyle among the city's spoiled youth. Fueled by the tabloids, which featured such titillating headlines as SEX PLAY GOT ROUGH, JEN'S SEX DIARY and the now notorious, HOW JENNY COURTED DEATH, the case dominated front-page news for two years.

The media turned Chambers into the victim, blaming a very young woman for her rape and murder. Jennifer Levin, 5 foot 3 inches and 120 pounds, roughed him up a little too much during sexual play behind Manhattan's Museum of Art. He said that he was forced to act in self-defense when he accidentally choked her to death.

Now "preppie" killer Robert Chambers is charged on multiple felony drug counts.

On a crisp, sunny morning in August 1986, a dedicated cyclist pedaled her way through Central Park in New York City near the back of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The path she rode led in an easterly direction, twisting through the trees and bushes that grow in the shadow of the museum. Several times a week, Pat Reilly, 34, cycled this route before she left for work. She guided her bike carefully through the area known as Cleopatra's Needle. It was a little past 6 a.m., the day's first light was just about making its way between the canyons of 5th Avenue and E. 82nd Street. Most of the time, the trip was safe and uneventful, but in the park, one had to be aware of the surroundings. As Reilly made her final turn approaching the museum, her eye caught the image of a person lying on the ground. It appeared to be a woman. Not such an unusual sight in the park, but what piqued her interest was the absolute stillness of her body.

She steered her bike over to the spot where the woman lay under a large, leafy elm tree whose branches hung low to the ground. She dismounted and had to walk in order to get closer. Reilly came to a halt about 20 feet away. She was already nervous and knew that something was very wrong. "Her clothes were around her waist and around her neck, but I knew that I was looking at the front part of a naked woman," she later said.

Pat Reilly saw that it was the body of a partially clothed girl. Her mini-skirt was pushed up past her waist and her bra and shirt were pushed above her chest. Nothing was covering her breasts. Her neck had large, red colored bruising on both sides of her throat. There were various items of clothing strewn about the scene. The young girl had short brown hair and looked to have a recent tan. And she appeared to be dead, though without checking her pulse, the cyclist could not be sure.

Pat Reilly quickly sped off and when she came upon a phone in the park, she stopped to call the police. She found all the phones in that area were ripped off their columns by vandals and thieves. She then went to 5th Avenue outside the park to look for the cops, but there were none to be seen. Finally she found a telephone at 90th and Madison Avenue and she was able to reach the police department to report what she found.

And so began one of the most sensational murder cases in New York City's history: the brutal killing of 18-year-old Jennifer Levin that came to be known as the Preppie Murder Case. Its lurid details of freewheeling sex among the city's privileged youth and the often-infuriating conduct of the accused killer and his legal defense kept New York City mesmerized for nearly two years. The city's ravenous tabloid press catered to an insatiable public who couldn't read enough about the ongoing drama that played out daily on the six o'clock news and in the city's courts where justice is frequently mangled. At the center of the storm was a man who told a ludicrous story of a sexual assault committed by a 5'4", 130-pound girl upon a 6'4", 200-pound man. A man who portrayed himself as the poor, unfortunate victim of an aggressive female who was so determined to have sex with him that he had to kill her in order to stop her.

The Scene
When the uniformed police from the Central Park precinct arrived at the scene on the morning of August 26, 1986, they found the body of a young, attractive girl who had the typical signs of being raped or sexually assaulted. Her legs were spread eagled, her clothes were mostly off or pushed out of the way and she had obvious neck wounds, which indicated strangulation. Detectives were notified and within minutes cops, forensic people and photographers invaded the area. Although a dead body found in a public place in Manhattan in the 1980s was truly no big news, (there were at least 1,592 homicides in NYC in 1986), because of the location, the event attracted attention. News reporters, who monitor the police radio frequency in New York City, quickly responded.

The girl was lying on her back. Her mini-skirt had been pushed up to her waist. Her bra and shirt were pushed up to her neck. Her panties, if she had been wearing any, were missing. There were no stab wounds or gunshot injuries, only the very obvious red marks on the girl's throat. She also had bruises, bite marks and cuts on her body, which indicated a lost fight for life. Most officers at the scene believed she had been walking or jogging in the park, which was very common, and came upon her attacker. Unlucky, but not so unusual.

A few hundred feet away, by a stone wall, pedestrians and joggers watched the police work the scene. Susan Bird, a local real estate broker and jogger who had just finished her morning run, stood by the wall. Next to her, within an arm's length, a young man sat on the rocky ledge. He was tall, had "a nice face" and appeared to be about 20 years old. She asked him what was happening. The man said he thought the police found a body. She asked him a few more questions but noted that the young man's responses seemed indifferent. They remained together by the wall for the next 15 minutes. Then Susan Bird walked off. The next time she would see this young man, his photograph would appear in the daily newspapers. His name was Robert Chambers.

As the N.Y.C.P.D.'s Crime Scene Unit (CSU) searched the body, they found a credit card identifying the dead girl as Jennifer Dawn Levin. A number of rings and bracelets were collected, along with her wallet. Several photographs were found in her jacket, which lay nearby. Investigators from the Central Park precinct soon arrived and assumed control of the scene. Detective Michael McEntee was assigned the case, his very first homicide investigation. As he searched the area around the body, he discovered a pair of white panties approximately 50 feet away. The underwear lay under another tree, crumpled up into a small, round lump. The panties appeared to have been rolled down when they were removed.

The Assistant Medical Examiner, Maria Luz Alandy, arrived at 9:45 a.m. By then, this area of Central Park was filled with senior-ranking cops, press people and hundreds of civilians who watched every minute of the unfolding drama. A veteran of more than 1,000 autopsies, Alandy made several observations about the girl. She saw that the eyelids had tiny points of bleeding called "petechial" hemorrhages. These injuries are usually an indication of interrupted blood supply to the brain. Although this condition can be found in other parts of the body, when they are found in the eyelids, it usually indicates death by asphyxiation: strangulation. Dr. Alandy also noted that rigor mortis, the stiffening of a human body after death, had already begun but not yet fully set.

Rigor mortis, long used by coroners to establish time of the death, is caused by the absence of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is needed by muscles to perform their contractions. Once death occurs, production of ATP ceases and the muscles begin to stiffen. Normally, rigor mortis begins within two to four hours after death, but it is not permanent. As decomposition begins, rigor mortis fades. Estimating time of death is a very inexact science because accuracy depends on a wide variety of shifting factors. Dr. Alandy estimated the time of death in this case as approximately 4 hours earlier.

Soon, detectives were able to trace the name of Jennifer Levin and eventually located her father, Steven Levin, at his office in lower Manhattan. Detectives responded and broke the news of his daughter's death. He called one of Jennifer's friends and found that she had been at a bar on the Upper East Side the night before called Dorrian's Red Hand.

Dorrian's Red Hand
The Upper East Side of Manhattan, along 1st, 2nd and 3rd Avenues are lined with bars, restaurants and clubs where young people gather to drink, party and meet each other. They crowd into these bars almost every night of the week, where underage drinking, drugs and sex are part of the scene, especially during the 1980s when the minimum drinking age was still just 18 years old. A certain image developed during that time, which portrayed these young people as affluent, spoiled and self-indulgent. They went to private schools and vacationed in the Hamptons. They drove their fathers' BMWs and coveted MBAs and law degrees. They wore designer clothes and knew all the right colleges. They hung around the East Side bars spending money they didn't earn and drinking booze they couldn't legally buy.

One of these bars was Dorrian's Red Hand at the corner of E. 84th Street and 2nd Avenue, which became a favorite of Jennifer Levin and her friends. During 1986, her group visited Dorrian's several times each week and they frequently met there both before and after they went out on dates or to the movies. The place was always crowded and they were sure to bump into someone they knew because everyone knew everyone else at Dorrian's. The owner, Jack Dorrian, was a familiar sight to the preppie crowd. He was sort of a friend and a father figure to lots of the kids, according to Jennifer's friends. The place was like their own private club. When parents called looking for their kids, they were relieved to find that they were at Dorrian's rather than some strange place somewhere else in the city.

During late August 1986, the bar was packed with high school graduates who were having a last summer fling, saying good-bye to each other before going away to college. They drank Summer Breezes and Rum and Cokes, which they bought with phony IDs, and made elaborate plans to meet again. It was here, at Dorrian's Red Hand -- where romances began and ended, where the partying seemed to go on forever and the illusion of youth stretched out before them like an endless carpet -- Jennifer Levin first laid eyes on Robert Chambers.

Robert Chambers
Perhaps because of her humble beginnings on a farm in County Leitrim in Northern Ireland, Phyllis Chambers had desires for a higher social standing. Later, when her son Robert was born, whom she believed to be talented and destined for bigger things, she focused all her attention upon him. She sent Robert to the very best schools that she could afford although she did not have a high paying job. Trained as a nurse in Dublin, she was able to get a job as a caregiver to affluent families in New York City. Her contact with the social elite of Manhattan made her strive even more for her son. Phyllis was upwardly mobile and never missed an opportunity to improve Robert's social skills. She enrolled him in the Knickerbocker Greys, an elite military drill group where the Vanderbilts and the Roosevelts had been members. It was a prestigious organization that could help his future and maintain the kind of image that his mother wanted for him.

Robert Chambers as a teenager was an attractive young man. Standing 6'4" and weighing two hundred pounds, he often towered over his friends at the bars. Girls were naturally drawn to him and he knew it. He had blue eyes and the well-proportioned features of a movie star. During those years, he attended a series of prep schools where he continuously ran into difficulties, mostly of his own doing. Either he had failing grades or behavioral problems that included rumors of stealing and drug abuse. After attending summer school to make up required work, Chambers finally graduated from York School in Manhattan. Ironically, his "bad boy" image probably improved his prospects with the impressionable girls at Dorrian's. Undaunted by his poor performance in prep school, his mother managed to get him accepted into Boston University in 1984. But still, his erratic behavior got him into trouble once again. Before the second semester began, Robert was asked to leave the college. He had gotten into a jam over a stolen credit card.

Once he arrived home, he couldn't hold a job. He was unreliable and never seemed to fit in. It soon became obvious to his friends that Robert Chambers was using drugs. He also did a few burglaries with an accomplice; breaking into apartments on the Upper East Side when he knew the owners weren't home. Later, he sold the proceeds in local stores and pawnshops. He was questioned by the police about the crimes but denied any involvement. A heavy drinker for years, his alcohol and drug abuse became severe enough for him to seek treatment at the Hazelden Clinic in Minnesota.

Nevertheless, when he returned to New York several months later, Chambers continued with his old ways. The police wanted him to stand in a line-up concerning the old burglaries and his mother was after him to get a steady job or get back in school. But he ignored them all. One night, after he left Dorrian's, police issued Chambers a summons for disorderly conduct when they found him screaming obscenities in the middle of the street. As they drove away, Chambers tore up the summons and yelled: "You fucking cowards, you should stick to niggers!"
During the summer of 1986, while Chambers was at Dorrian's with friends, he met Jennifer Levin. He had told one of her friends that Jennifer was "the best-looking girl in the world." Jennifer was elated. She had seen Chambers several times at the bar but had never spoken to him. She thought he was gorgeous. Jennifer's friend told her that he wanted to talk with her but his girlfriend was in the bar. That night though, she left Dorrian's with Chambers for the first time and soon, they had sex together.

Jennifer
Jennifer Levin was outgoing, pretty and had lots of friends. She was raised on Long Island and during the early 1970s, her parents, Ellen and Steven divorced. Jennifer and her mom soon moved to California but returned to New York in 1979. Later, Jennifer graduated from Baldwin School, a private school on E. 74th Street in Manhattan. During the summer of 1986, she worked as a waitress in football player Doug Flutie's Pier 17 restaurant on South Street. Although the work was tough, she managed to save some money for college in the fall. She planned to attend Chamberlayne College in Boston that September.

She eventually moved in with her father, a successful real estate broker, in a spacious loft in Soho, the region South of Houston Street in lower Manhattan. Because her parents were divorced, Jennifer may have craved love and attention, which is common among children from broken homes. She tended to fall in love easily and had sexual relationships with others before Chambers. She was extroverted, loved to have fun and go out with friends. She visited all the trendy spots in Manhattan, like Studio 54 and Hard Rock Café.

Though she was only 17, Jennifer looked older than her age. She had short brown hair, a freckled complexion and a wide engaging smile. She wore sexy clothes like ripped jeans and tight mini-skirts. But she always dressed well as a friend once said: "Nobody knows as much about style as Jennifer." People liked having Jennifer around and she frequently attended parties at the clubs in Manhattan and sometimes at the Hamptons, which she visited frequently during the summer months.

But her love life faltered. She went through several boyfriends who somehow always disappointed her. She felt rejected and used. "Boys are so strange," she told a friend, "When you haven't had sex yet, all they want is to get you to do it. But if you've had it, they're scared of you."

Throughout 1986, she and her friends hung around Dorrian's where they would meet up sometimes after they went out. They were well known there by all the bartenders, including John Zaccaro Jr., son of Rep. Geraldine Ferraro who would make history one day as the first woman to run for Vice-President. One night, before the summer began that year, she saw a tall good-looking guy standing at the bar. When she asked around, she learned he was Robert Chambers. She liked the way he looked, his body language, the way he combed his hair. So when he took notice of her, Jennifer was elated. "Maybe this time," she may have thought, "maybe this time I'll luck out."

The Interview
When Detectives Al Genova and Frank Connelly of the N.Y.P.D. tracked down Robert Chambers on the morning of the murder, they had no idea what to expect. They went to his home at 11 East 90th Street, just off 5th Avenue and next door to the Carnegie mansion, where Phyllis Chambers answered the doorbell. Det. Genova explained that a girl was missing and they needed to talk with Robert. When he emerged from the bedroom, the police were momentarily shocked at his appearance. He had scratches on his face and arms. And they were very fresh.

Det. Genova said that a girl was missing and that he would like to talk with Robert at police headquarters. Robert agreed. Within minutes, he and the two detectives drove over to the Central Park precinct. Phyllis, perhaps accustomed to dealing with the police, decided to wait it out at home after she was assured that Robert was needed to help the cops find the missing girl. It was just about 3 p.m.

The Central Park precinct, known as the "two-two" in the police world, was built in the 19th century to shelter horses for the park maintenance crew. During the 1920s, the building was converted to a police precinct and little by little, furniture, desks, communications equipment and the bare essentials for a police station were brought in. But the building itself retained its original design and charisma, which was unique in New York. It was constructed of dark, dingy brownstones and from the outside, it looks like a small castle from some distant era.

"Did you notice the scratches on Robert's face?" Genova asked Det. McEntee at the precinct. Everyone who saw Chambers that morning noticed the blatant injuries to his face and hands. It was a detail that spoke silent volumes of what may have happened the night before.

"How did you get those scratches on your face?" asked Det. McEntee."Oh, my cat scratched me," Chambers said."What happened to your hand?""I was sanding floors for a woman who lives upstairs from me, and the sanding machine jumped around and cut my fingers," replied Chambers without missing a beat.

Throughout the afternoon and into the evening, Chambers maintained his composure, exhibited confidence and seemed to be cooperating fully, even if some of his answers strained credibility.
At about 5 p.m. that day, in another room at the station house, a throng of reporters had gathered for a press conference about the murder. They had no idea that a suspect was being questioned a few feet away. But the story was already gaining momentum in the media.
By early evening, Manhattan North Detective Mike Sheehan and A.D.A. Steve Saracco joined in the interview. Chambers offered several explanations concerning his movements the night before. At first he said that Jennifer left Dorrian's without his knowledge and he never saw her again. Then he said that she walked across the street to buy cigarettes. But Jennifer did not smoke. After the detectives expressed doubt, Chambers said he walked outside the bar with her and she left for the night. Chambers changed his story several times to conform to the questions he was asked. Sheehan developed something of a rapport with Chambers and began to express sympathy for the young man. The seasoned detective knew that sometimes the best way to elicit a confession from a suspect is to express empathy. Chambers seemed responsive to Sheehan although he insisted that he last saw Jennifer when she left Dorrian's alone. Sheehan told Chambers that he had witnesses that placed him and Jennifer together leaving Dorrian's.

"Yeah, well I did leave the bar with her, I guess," said Chambers. For the first time, Chambers seemed taken aback. His eyes filled with tears. He shifted uneasily in his seat and seemed unsure of his words. It was the beginning of a long and detailed confession that would leave detectives speechless and shaking their heads in disbelief.

"The First Man Raped in Central Park!"
Soon, Chambers related what he said was the true story about how he had first seen Jennifer the night before in Dorrian's. A.D.A Saracco decided to tape the confession. In 1986, videotaping the statements of suspects was still new but not unknown. Sometimes the results of confessions on videotape can work against prosecutors. But at about midnight, in the presence of Det. Sheehan, Det. McEntee and A.D.A. Saracco, Robert Chambers gave his version of the death of Jennifer Levin.

Saracco read Chambers the Miranda warnings. Then, Chambers was asked how he came to be with Jennifer at Dorrian's the night before. He said that he was in the bar with friends when his girlfriend, Alex, began to argue with him in front of everyone. He said this embarrassed him and got him angry. Within a few minutes, Jennifer came over and said that she wanted to talk to him.

"I had a shot of tequila…and I did my shot and went outside and I met Jennifer. And then we started walking to 86th Street," Chamber said on the videotape. He said that he told Jennifer that he didn't want to see her anymore but she wouldn't hear of it. She wanted to go to the park.

"No, no, I want to go home," he said to her. In spite of his initial refusal to go to the park, Chambers said they both wound up in a grassy spot behind the museum. "I didn't even want to be with her," he said. Chambers described Jennifer as very sexually aggressive and he had to push her away several times. More than once, he said that he rejected her attempts at sex. They sat down on a bench and Jennifer disappeared into the bushes for a minute.

"The next thing I recall is she grabbed me from behind and tied my arms up behind my back with her panties," Chambers said.

"She started to take off my pants, she started to play with me. She started to jerk me off. She was doing it really hard. …And I-you know-I started to say, 'Stop it! Stop it! It hurts!" Chambers said. "She like sat on my face and then she dug her nails into my chest and I have scratches right here," Chambers said as he showed the cuts to the camera. "She was just having her way…I just could not take it…she was leaning forward, jerking me off and squeezing my balls and laughing, and I managed to get my hands free. So I kind of sat up a little and just grabbed her," Chambers said. "It-it was just really quick, she just flipped over and then landed, and she was kind of twisted on the tree. On her side." And that was it. That's how Jennifer died. That was the explanation offered by Chambers: she died by accident when he pushed her off of him after she tied him up with her panties, forced him down on the ground and groped his penis. In summary, he was defending himself against rape.

When the detectives expressed doubt on his story, Chambers became rigid and defensive. "She was having her way with me. Without my consent. With my hands tied behind my back," he said. But no matter how he tried to explain the event, Chambers could not explain the injuries to Jennifer's neck and body. He stuck to his story as improbable as it sounded.

After he saw that Jennifer was not responding, Chambers said he simply left the area and walked over to a nearby wall. "Then I went across and I sat on the wall and the lady with the bike came and then the police came and an ambulance came," he said. And after the killing, after he knew that Jennifer was dead? "And then I just walked through the park all the way up to Ninetieth Street…And I just, I went upstairs and got undressed and went to sleep," he said.
"I've been in this business for a while, and you're the first man I've seen raped in Central Park," Saracco said. The video ended and Chambers was formally placed under arrest and charged with the murder of Jennifer Levin. Before booking, he was allowed to visit with his father who was waiting out by the front desk. When he walked into the room, Chambers stood up and blurted out a statement that his father later said he didn't hear.

"That fucking bitch, why didn't she leave me alone?" he said.

"Wild Sex Killed Jenny!"
The campaign to demolish the reputation of Jennifer Levin began almost on the day of the murder. Press reports on the case, which reflected a blatant bias in favor of Robert Chambers, bordered on the hysterical. Headlines like "Sex Play Got Rough," which appeared in the N.Y. Daily News on August 28, two days after the murder, were typical of the tabloid's view of the crime. From the very beginning, the press embraced the idea that Jennifer somehow caused her own death by her irresponsible behavior and by her "teenage vamp" image that was promoted and sustained by the print media. Chambers was seen, strangely enough, as a victim who was on an equal plateau with the dead Jennifer. The killing was a tragedy, not a murder.

Within a few days of the crime, the majority of the press corps was inclined to accept at face value, the statements of Chambers who said that he was defending himself against a sexual assault. Of course, the fact that both victim and suspect traveled in circles that most city dwellers never see was also a part of a story that one reporter called "irresistible." A slaying in Central Park that revolved around young good-looking people, sex and the socialite class was the kind of event that newspaper editors dream about, a story that made its own headlines.
Stories about Chambers and Levin almost universally described them as gorgeous, rich and from an ill-defined upper level of society. Whether or not they were gorgeous is a matter of opinion. But they were not rich nor did their origins come from Manhattan's social register. The media's labeling of the event, as "The Preppie Murder," was also inappropriate since Chambers was not a "preppie." He had already attended college and was thrown out. His entire scholastic record was one of failure and disappointment.

Chambers, from the day he was arrested was described in the press as "handsome", "extremely good-looking" or "Romeo." His future was "promising" and "bright." The murder was perceived as almost a temporary setback for what he was to accomplish in his charmed life. Jennifer Levin on the other hand, was described in newspaper articles as " sexy," "worldly" and stories on her background focused mostly on how many boys she dated. References were made to her sexual past as if to say, "yeah, she's the kind of woman who would try to rape a guy."

On August 29, the N.Y. Daily News ran this headline: "How Jennifer Courted Death." There it was. It was now official, in a sense: Jennifer caused her own murder. The idea that was implanted in the public mind, and everything that followed afterwards, had to conform or in some way support this theory: a girl who drinks in a bar with a man late at night and goes to the park for sex, deserves what happens to her. Reporters from the city's newspapers, including the Times, who struggled to find some sort of moral lesson in the murder, followed this line of reasoning for months. And much of that reporting was the result of personal bias, as one N.Y. Times reporter said: "I felt so offended by the lifestyle that these kids lived." Robert Chambers received lots of good press. His arrest and indictment for the burglaries he committed, his past drug abuse and poor reputation among friends was conveniently ignored. In contrast, Levin's past was fair game for every kind of scrutiny and innuendo. It was only months later that stories began to appear that examined the negative past of Chambers.

But the damage was done. The groundwork was laid for a contentious legal battle that was at times, infuriating, hurtful and preposterous. On one side was a dedicated prosecutor, a champion for victim's rights and feminist causes. On the other was a brilliant trial lawyer, Harvard graduate and defender of the accused. And together, they would fight to a bitter end in which neither side could claim a total victory.

Battle Lines are Drawn
Jack T. Litman, 43, was hired to defend Robert Chambers. Litman was no stranger to New York's courts or controversy. He was already one of the city's most well-known defense attorneys and in years past participated in several high-profile trials. As a young graduate from Harvard Law School, his first legal job was as a prosecutor with the Manhattan D.A.'s Office where he developed a fine reputation, losing only one trial. But his heart was not in prosecutions. After several years, he left the D.A.'s office and went out on his own. He took several dramatic cases to trial involving police shootings, winning them all. Litman also defended several accused murderers who were convicted on lesser charges.

But Litman's most famous trial to date was the Bonnie Garland murder, a case that became known for its "blame the victim defense." Garland was a 20-year-old Yale University student in 1977 who was sleeping in her own bed at home in Scarsdale, New York. A man, later identified as fellow student Richard Herrin, broke into her room and bludgeoned her to death with a hammer. Herrin was a former boyfriend who was spurned by Garland. When the case came to trial, Litman offered the defense that Herrin was acting under a sort of diminished capacity because he was mistreated by Garland. Eventually, Herrin was convicted on a lesser charge of manslaughter. But Litman suffered through a great deal of criticism from an angry press and a fed-up public who saw his tactics as a further degradation of the victim. The Bonnie Garland murder was well remembered in 1986 and soon, protesters marched in the streets carrying signs that denounced Litman for his role in the Chambers case.

Linda Fairstein, 39, a veteran A.D.A. out of the Manhattan office, was named as the prosecutor. Fairstein was a graduate of prestigious Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and the University of Virginia Law School in 1972. She spent most of her career in Manhattan prosecuting rape cases and, as a result, developed a genuine empathy for sexual assault victims. During the 14 years she was part of the D.A.'s office, the rape conviction rate rose from 10% in 1973 to almost 75% in 1985. Although she was widely respected in the courts, the Chambers case would be her first murder trial. But Fairstein was determined not to have Jennifer's name or memory dragged through the mud. In reply to Litman's motions, Fairstein said in court papers: "In more than 8,000 cases of reported assaults in the last ten years, this is the first in which a male reported being sexually assaulted by a female." Ironically, her very first job when she arrived at the Manhattan District Attorney's office was to assist a young prosecutor named Jack T. Litman. They remained in touch throughout the years. Of Litman, she once said, "He's a brilliant lawyer. Our passions are very different, and I'm glad I don't do what he does, but I certainly respect his right to do it."

On September 29, Litman asked the court for bail. In support of the request, he supplied the names of dozens of character witnesses including a letter of support from Archbishop Theodore McCarrick of Newark, New Jersey. McCarrick knew Phyllis Chambers and Robert from the time she worked as a nurse for Cardinal Cooke of New York. He wrote that Robert was an outstanding young man who surely would not hurt anyone. Although most murder defendants were denied bail, Judge Howard E. Bell was persuaded. He set bail at $150,000 and added one condition. If released, Chambers would have to report regularly to a Monsignor Leonard in a church in Washington Heights. Fairstein was outraged. In the Bonnie Garland case, the defendant was also released on bail and also placed under the supervision of the Catholic Church.

When Judge Bell announced his decision to grant bail, he told the court he was "deeply concerned about the families on both sides in this case. The court finds that bail in this case is appropriate." Ellen Levin burst into tears when she heard the ruling and ran from the courtroom. The Chambers family tried to raise the cash but could not get all the money together. Jack Dorrian, owner of Dorrian's Red Hand, posted the remaining bail. Concerning the propriety of providing bail money, Dorrian said, "At least his mother has the comfort of having him out of jail for now. I'm sure the mother of the victim would understand that." But, of course, she didn't. The vision of her child being viciously strangled in the darkness of Central Park obscured her ability to see things as clearly as others.

"Blame the Victim!"
In November of 1986, word leaked to Jack Litman that the prosecution had read a diary that belonged to Jennifer Levin. To make matters worse, it was rumored that the diary contained a detailed litany of Jennifer's sexual activity including the names of many different young men. Litman claimed that Fairstein first mentioned this diary to him and in doing so said there was an abundance of sexual material in its pages. Fairstein denied this allegation, but Litman submitted court papers asking that the diary be made available to the defense. He said that the diary contained information that could be beneficial to his client and therefore under the rules of evidence, he was entitled to it.

The press immediately dubbed the book the "sex diary." It became linked with Jennifer's name for the duration of the trial and helped to denigrate her reputation as well. Whatever image she had as a young and innocent college girl took a battering in the press who consistently referred to her as "rich," "bubbly," "sexy" and "privileged." Headlines that emphasized the sexual aspects of the case appeared daily in the city's tabloids and the N.Y. Times. Fairstein, trying to stem the tide of bad press, told reporters: "There isn't a sex diary. There is a school date book, but nothing chronicling Jennifer's sex life."

Ultimately, the contested diary was turned over to Judge Bell for a private review. After a reading, Litman's request was denied. Judge Bell wrote that the diary "contained no admissible evidence and nothing that was relevant and material to the defendant's case. He added that Chambers should not be permitted to take "an unrestrained tour of investigation." However, the diary issue was an ominous development for the prosecution team. They feared it was the opening barrage of what was to come in the weeks and months ahead. Would there be no limits to what steps the defense would take to exonerate their client?

An organization called "Justice for Jennifer" was formed by some of her friends and other interested parties who were outraged at the attempts to destroy the victim's reputation. They wore pins whenever they appeared in public and frequently spoke to reporters, condemning the tactics of Chambers' defense team. The spokesperson for the group, Rose Jordan, told the Times that women who are murdered "are victims of the same distortions to justify the violence against them." But there were supporters of the defense tactics as well. A law professor from N.Y.U. School of Law told reporters: "Not only is it not unethical to try to cast aspersions on the character of the victim, it's ethically the lawyer's duty to do that if it will succeed in a not-guilty verdict or conviction of a lesser charge."

But the specter of a "trash Jennifer" defense did not sit well with most people. Although in 1985 changes were made in the rape laws in New York, which restricted testimony into the sexual past of a victim, they did not apply to murder cases. And Jennifer was not around to take the stand in her own defense. The Village Voice said it best in an article titled "Who's On Trial?" when author C. Carr wrote: "The Chambers\Litman story is that of a 'bad girl' who gets what she deserves and a helpless man defending himself from her sexual voraciousness."

"I Think I Killed It!"
The case moved forward at a snail's pace. Chambers' videotaped confession was ruled admissible, though in a slightly edited version. Edited out was D.A. Saracco's sarcastic questioning on the night of August 26, 1986, in which he expressed obvious doubt about Chambers' responses. Statements made by Saracco such as, "If I was sitting here telling you this story, you'd be laughing" and "I really don't believe what you're saying!" would never be heard by the jury.

In the meantime, Chambers complained to many people that he would have to go to jail. To his family and acquaintances, he played the role of the victim. It was he who was being sent to prison, it was he who was being vilified and persecuted. This was the theme Chambers repeated over and over again. The entire year of 1987 went by while Litman filed motion after motion in Judge Bell's court. Each motion had to be addressed, argued and decided upon. This ate up a great deal of time. The press grew tired of the delay and said so in several editorials. But unknown to the public, Chambers did not stay at home and sulk while waiting for trial. He attended parties, went out to the local bars and often met with friends to socialize and talk about his future.

In December of 1987, Chambers attended such a party given by a friend who had once attended York Prep while he was a student. Her name was Melissa Buschell. She invited several of her girlfriends over and after drinking for a time; they came up with the idea of videotaping themselves. When Chambers arrived, he joined in the fun and Melissa taped the scene while the girls fooled around and performed comedy routines for the camera. Chambers began to roll on the floor mugging for the camera. He took a woman's wig and placed it on his head and in his crotch area as the girls giggled continuously. He choked himself with his own hands as he gagged loudly. He picked up a doll and held it close to the camera while he twisted its neck. Chambers spoke in a high female voice as he said, "My name is" The head to the doll suddenly came off the body. "Ooops," he said in a maniacal voice. "I think I killed it!" The room erupted in laughter. The girls, some who were Jennifer's friends, perhaps did not realize the symbolism of Chambers' wretched behavior. The tape was placed aside and forgottenfor a time.

The Trial
After months of pre-trial maneuvering and motions filed by the defense, New York's most anticipated trial opened on January 4, 1988. On the bench sat Judge Howard E. Bell, whose rulings infuriated both sides during the many legal questions prior to trial. The press reported every development in court and hardly a day went by that a newspaper editorial didn't condemn Litman for his "blame the victim" defense.

The prosecution began by putting the police officers and forensic investigators on the stand for the first few days. They detailed the crime scene, the location and condition of the body. But the handling and processing of the evidence at the crime scene was not perfect. At times, it was less than acceptable and Litman was able to cast doubt on much of the critical evidence offered by Fairstein concerning the crime scene.

A parade of young people who were friends of the victim, or who were at Dorrian's on the fateful night, took the stand to testify.

Medical Examiner Dr. Maria Alandy testified to the post mortem examination and stated that compression of the victim's neck had to be substantial in order to effect death. It was crucial testimony; for Chambers' explanation was that he grabbed Jennifer by the neck for a moment and threw her off of him. For her final witness, Fairstein put on a Dr. Werner Spitz, the chief medical examiner for the city of Detroit who would give his opinion as to the nature of Levin's injuries. But it was Litman who originally contacted Spitz to testify for the defense. The doctor had taken an immediate dislike for Litman and was not shy about it on the stand when Litman questioned him.

Q: We had a conversation two days in a row, don't you recall them?

A: No. I have no recollection of speaking to you more than once. I don't think I'll forget that phone call for a long time.

Q: In that call, did I convey to you ideas, suppositions, I had about this case?

A: It was a shouting match, and you paid no attention to what I said. You tried to influence my opinions.

Q: Do you remember my telling you things that Chambers had said?

A: Maybe, I don't recall. I felt bulldozed, and I completely turned you offI was on the phone, but I wasn't listening to what you were saying.

This contentious line of questioning continued for some time as Litman tried to elicit favorable testimony from the defiant Dr. Spitz. Essential was the estimate of time it took to strangle Jennifer and the two men argued, debated and screamed over that point for virtually the entire time Dr. Spitz was on the stand. And once, when Litman tried to get Spitz to agree to a point he was trying to make, the doctor became enraged.

Q: I'm challenging you, Doctor, to tell us how the blouse was tightened into a rope around her neck! Can you or can't you tell us which part was against the side of her neck?

A: I can't tell you.

Q: The fact is that you can't do it, can you?

A: If you want, I'll demonstrate to you right now, on yourself!"

On March 2, Jack Litman opened his defense. He had only five witnesses to testify for Chambers including Dr. Ronald Kornblum, chief medical examiner for Los Angeles, who refuted Dr. Spitz's observations as best he could. By March 10, the defense rested and the case later went to the jury.

For nine nail-biting days, the jury debated the issue of guilt or innocence. Reports indicated that the atmosphere in the deliberations room was tumultuous and undecided. At one point the vote was 8-4 for acquittal. A later poll was 9-3 for conviction on second-degree murder. One black juror complained that other members of the panel were racists. Several times, jurors asked to be excused because of the mounting pressures. In an interview with the N.Y. Times, Debra Cavanaugh, the jury forewoman, said, "Both sides proved their points. Both sides' stories could be true." Another juror said: "Our feelings went back and forth so much, I can't say what it was."

Chambers Cops a Plea
However, unknown to the jury, who was sequestered in another room, a deal was being worked out behind the scenes. Litman and Fairstein were talking about a possible plea bargain. Pivotal in the talks was the outcome of pending charges for the burglaries committed by Chambers in 1986. Those felony charges combined with a possible conviction on manslaughter could put his client behind bars for a long, long time. While the jury was completing its ninth day of deliberations, word leaked out in the courtroom that a deal had been struck.

Chambers, as it is said, copped a plea. He would plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter and faced a sentence of five to 15. He had to serve a minimum of five years. In addition, he had to plead guilty to one count of burglary for his thefts in 1986. The significance of that plea was important, since it made Chambers a two-time loser. If he should be convicted of a third felony sometime in the future, it would mean life in prison. The news swept through the courthouse like a tornado.

While the jury was out of the room, the plea in court began. Chambers stood with his attorney to hear Judge Bell ask the questions.

"Is it true, Mr. Chambers, that on August 26, 1986, you intended to cause serious physical injury to Jennifer Levin and thereby causing her death?" he said.

"Looking back on everything, I'd have to say yes, but in my heart I didn't mean for anything to happen," Chambers said as he stared at the floor. Fairstein interjected.

"Your honor we're asking about his mind and his hands, not his heart!" she said.

The judge repeated the question and this time, Chambers replied: "Yes, your honor." But he shook his head back and forth as if to indicate "no."

"Is there any question in your mind about causing her death?"

"There is no question, your honor," Chambers replied. He also had to plead out to the burglary charge. Sentencing was set for April 15. At 5:40 p.m., the jury was brought back into the courtroom and for the first time, they learned that a deal had been made. Judge Bell gave them the news.

"This matter has been disposed of. Thank you very much for your services," he said to the jury.
Some of the panel began to cry as they marched out of the box. The media crush was everywhere, trying to interview anyone who would talk. A few minutes later, outside the court, Ellen Levin spoke to the TV cameras.

"I don't think we could have withstood another trial," explaining her fears about a possible hung jury. "We could not have sustained that strain and tension for another year and a half." It was what a lot of people were thinking. For better or worse, it was over.

Epilogue
After the trial, as the excitement of the case subsided, the forgotten "party" videotape ignited passions again. The TV program Current Affairs heard rumors about the existence of a strange video recording in which Robert Chambers did some extraordinary things: like choking himself and tearing the head off a doll. There were young girls in their underwear on the tape too. And it all took place while he was awaiting trial for murder and under the bail supervision of the Catholic Church. Current Affairs tracked down the owner of that tape and it was reported that the owner was paid $10,000 for the recording though the price was never confirmed.

During April 1988, Current Affairs played the tape for its TV audience. The reaction was immediate. Again, Chambers caused a sensation. Outtakes from the video played on all the television networks. There was outrage and disgust at his behavior. Many saw it as a further denigration of Jennifer Levin. The image of Chambers laughing and mugging for the camera while young girls in their underwear cavorted in the background was too much for the public. Whatever support he may have had in the community turned against him. The press finally hammered away at Chambers.

In 1989, a TV movie called The Preppie Murder was made about the case. It starred Billy Baldwin as Chambers and Lara Flynn Boyle as Jennifer. Det. Mike Sheehan served as a consultant on the project. The Levins did not cooperate with the production of the film. Neither did Linda Fairstein. Jack Dorrian also refused any filming inside the Red Hand bar.

There was a $25 million dollar wrongful death suit filed by Jennifer's parents. Chambers did not fight the lawsuit and the Levins won a judgment against any of his future earnings. Since Chambers would surely be released from prison one day, he still had the potential to make money. To his supporters, he later wrote, "I came to the decision to plead 'no contest' to end this circus once and for all." But his troubles were still not over. While incarcerated, he violated prison rules several times including an incident where he was found to be in possession of marijuana. These infractions added time to his sentence and also affected his eligibility for parole. As of September 2001, Robert Chambers was still in custody at Auburn State Prison. He has a parole hearing scheduled in December 2002.

February, 2003 Update
Valentine's Day is for lovers. It is supposed to be a time of romance and candlelight dinners in secluded restaurants. But for the family of Jennifer Levin, murdered at the age of 19 by Robert Chambers in 1986, this year's holiday will likely be a difficult one. On February 14, Chambers, the misnamed "preppie killer" is scheduled to walk out of New York's Auburn prison a free man at the age of 36. He will have served his maximum sentence for Jennifer's murder: 15 years.
Actually, he is due out February 16. But because that date falls on a Sunday, he will be released the Friday before, Valentine's Day. Chambers could have been released as early as 1997, but he committed a series of infractions in prison that added to his time.

In 1986, the Jennifer Levin murder case captivated New York City. The killing in Central Park mesmerized the public with its sordid tale of "rough sex" and a freewheeling lifestyle among the city's spoiled youth. Fueled by the tabloids, which featured such titillating headlines as SEX PLAY GOT ROUGH, JEN'S SEX DIARY and the now notorious, HOW JENNY COURTED DEATH, the case dominated front-page news for two years. A home video, made by a friend of Chambers shortly after the murder trial, was shown on prime time news in 1988. It showed a smirking Chambers ripping off the head of a female doll and mugging for the camera. "Oops! I think I killed it!" he said in a high-pitched voice during the video. It was a disturbing reference to the actual murder. A TV movie was later produced starring one of the Baldwin brothers as Robert Chambers. The film generated a great deal of anger among citizens that has not yet totally subsided.

Ellen Levin, Jennifer's mother, recently described the agonizing ordeal of losing a child on "Larry King Live." "It was horrible," she said. "I felt like I was getting hit over the head over and over again. We all suffered. My whole family was in disbelief over what had happened." The Levin family attended the trial every day and sat a few feet away from her daughter's accused killer. "He took my daughter's life and I hate him for that," she said.

Over the years, she accumulated tens of thousands of signatures on petitions and showed up at parole hearings to make her feelings known about possible freedom for her daughter's killer. As for Chambers, he has never shown any public remorse for what he has done. At a 1995 parole hearing, he made the curious statement: "I guess I could also give you the party line and say I have learned my lesson, I will never do this again, but that's not how I feel at the moment."
During the murder trial, Chambers' attorney used a "blame the victim" defense. The 6-foot-4-inch Chambers claimed that Jennifer Levin, 5 foot 3 inches and 120 pounds, roughed him up a little too much during sexual play behind Manhattan's Museum of Art. He said that he was forced to act in self-defense when he accidentally choked her to death. To support that contention, Jennifer Levin's life and reputation were put under a critical microscope for the world to see. She was said to be promiscuous, drunk, spoiled and worse.

Chambers was frequently described as a "preppie," which he was not; "handsome"; "promising"; and deserving of an exciting future that was just out of his grasp. The more negative aspects of his past life, like drug abuse, thefts, burglaries and expulsions from several schools were rarely mentioned and never emphasized. But those tactics ultimately backfired. It brought the "blame the victim" strategy to the forefront of public attention. Many victim's rights groups were formed, and Ellen Levin spent the last 12 years working for changes in laws that emphasize the right of criminals. She has also counseled parents who have lost their children to murder.

In the meantime, Robert Chambers has been confined to the Auburn facility where he has been in involuntary protective custody confinement since April 6, 2002. Inmates that are high-profile, like Chambers, are susceptible to attack from other prisoners. As a precaution, they are frequently placed in confinement for their own safety. During his time at the facility, Chambers has been less than a model prisoner. A recent Associated Press report said that between July 1988 and June 1997, Chambers was docked for 75 months of good time due to seven violations of prison rules. He has spent nearly five years of his sentence in solitary confinement. All of that becomes history after February 14 when Chambers walks out of Auburn for the last time. Since he has served his complete sentence, he will not even be under parole supervision. Under the eyes of the law, he will have paid his debt to society in full for killing Jennifer Levin.

Phyliss Chambers, the mother of Robert, was an Irish immigrant who stood by her son during the 1986 trial. Before the murder, she was full of hope that her handsome son would become a successful businessman or perhaps a politician. She lobbied continuously with no success over the past 15 years for the release of her son. The Chambers' family attorney, Brian O'Dwyer, recently told CNN, "There will be no statements from the family prior to February 14." But for a mother who has endured the ultimate tragedy as a parent, the suffering will go on. "I think she's incredibly lucky to get her son back," Ellen Levin told the New York Daily News recently, "because I'm not getting my daughter back."

Preppy Killer Arrested
Nearly everyone in the upscale building on E. 57th Street in mid-town Manhattan suspected what was going on in the seventeenth floor apartment. For months, unfriendly strangers would show up at the front door at all hours of the day or night, enter and leave within a few minutes. Some of the visitors were sleazy and scary, and many seemed high on drugs. Neighbors in the high-rise complained about the suspicious activity, and police were summoned to the building on several occasions.

The show came to an abrupt end on the night of October 22, 2007, when police, armed with a no-knock search warrant, showed up at the front door of apartment 17-B. After breaking down the door with a battering ram, police entered and arrested two suspects, Robert Chambers, 41, and his girlfriend, Shawn Kovell, 39. They had been living there since 2003, when sympathetic landlord Connie Hambright let the couple rent the space though she suspected they couldn't afford it. At the time of his arrest, Chambers allegedly fought with police, injuring three cops in the struggle. The story might have attracted little attention, since this type of drug raid is performed every day by New York Police Department drug teams and Drug Enforcement Agency agents. Except Chambers wasn't an ordinary suspected crack dealer.

The once-handsome Robert Chambers may be better known as the Preppy Killer. In August 1986, he was arrested for the strangulation murder of eighteen-year-old Jennifer Levin after a night of partying in Manhattan's trendy East Side bars. Coverage of the case reached remarkable heights of media frenzy, featuring lurid headlines such as "Sex Play Got Rough" and "How Jenny Courted Death." New York tabloids especially received a great deal of public criticism when some seemed partially to blame Levin for placing herself in harm's way by taking the fatal late-night stroll with Chambers in Central Park.

In his defense, Chambers claimed that Levin was the instigator and that he was trying only to defend himself from her aggressive advances. In the midst of a sensational trial, in which Chambers had as many supporters as detractors, he suddenly pleaded guilty to a charge of manslaughter and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He was released from prison in February 2003 and remained out of legal trouble until 2005, when he was charged with heroin possession and later served one hundred days in jail for the offense.

Inside the E. 57th Street apartment on Monday, police found what seemed the squalid crash pad of a drug abuser. The $1,800 a month dwelling was a shambles, filthy and littered. A mural of a lizard or a dragon adorned the wall behind the headboard of an unmade bed. Uneaten food and dirty dishes lay about the kitchen, and dirty clothes littered each room. According to news reports, police found crack pipes and several bags of cocaine, which may lead to additional charges. The New York Daily News reported that the apartment was the scene of "heavy drug traffic in recent months, and undercover cops bought a quarter-kilo of coke with a street value of $20,000." The New York Post differed in its assessment, reporting that "in all, they purchased nearly $10,000 worth of drugs during seven different sales."

"My heart is broken," Connie Hambright told Daily News reporters after the arrest. 'I think it happened out of desperation, financial desperation." Other neighbors, tired of the apparent drug activity on the 17th floor, were not so understanding. "It was absolutely horrible," one tenant said to reporters from the Post. "What can you possibly say about him, except, 'Put him away for good'?" said another.

Chambers was charged with multiple counts of selling drugs in the first degree; each charge is an A-1 felony in the State of New York and more than enough, given his prior record, to put him away for the rest of his life. Kovell, a long-time friend of Chambers, was also charged with drug sales. She was one of the pretty girls seen in the notorious 1987 video tape shot while Chambers was awaiting trial for Levin's murder. In the video, he was seen mugging for the camera with Kovell and her friends, ripping the head off a doll. "Oops!" he said in an affected voice. "I think I killed it!" When the news program A Current Affair broadcast the tape in April 1988, public outrage was immediate and vociferous.

When reporters tried to talk with him after his most recent arrest, Chambers seemed confused about what had happened. "I don't even know why I'm here," he said to a Daily News reporter. In court, Chambers told the judge that he did not know why he had been arrested nor what the charges were. His appearance was a far cry from the suave, cocky image he had projected throughout his 1988 trial, when young women packed the courtroom and swooned over the handsome, 6'5" defendant. When he appeared this week in Manhattan Criminal Court, Chambers seemed much older than his years, unshaven, dirty and thin. The promising future that once seemed his is long gone. The only future he seems to have left is one behind bars.

"I would expect he would spend the rest of his life in jail," said District Attorney Robert Morgenthau to Post reporters.

Source