May 23, 2013 

Originally published on Advocate.com May 07 2012 

by Diane Anderson-Minshall

Last March, when gay 24-year-old Daniel Zamudio was beaten so severely, after having swastikas carved into his skin, that he died in the hospital three week s later, the brutal murder shocked Chileans and spurred the government there to fast-track Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) antidiscrimination legislation. A lawyer for Zamudio’s family, Jaime Silva, told TheChristian Science Monitor that the crime was “the most brutal attack we’ve seen since the days of the dictatorship.” As soon as news hit U.S. shores, Zamudio was being called South America’s Matthew Shepard, and his murder a stark reminder of the crimes that have shaken LGBT folks, especially in the U.S., over the last 50 years.

As more than 70 countries prepare to observe the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia May 17, criminologists, activists, and survivors in many cities have been discussing ways to deal with crimes against — and occasionally by — LGBT folks. There have been more than 600 reports of murdered trans people in almost 50 countries since January 2008 (including killings this year in Detroit, D.C., Florida, and California), and there was an overall 13% increase (in 2010, the most recently recorded year) in violent crimes committed against LGBT or HIV-positive people, according to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs. Some murders are so iconic they’re steeped in popular culture: Brandon Teena, murdered by his rapists in Nebraska in 1993; Angie Zapata, a trans woman killed by a transphobic boyfriend (Zapata’s murderer was later tried on hate crime charges, a first for a transgender victim). But there are others that slip under the radar: some in which victims’ families never find justice — like Martha Oleman, a lesbian killed in Sugarcreek Township, Ohio, in 1997, her murder part of the state’s cold case files — and others in which police action is swift but resolution remains murky.

While all crimes change the world, on the following pages are 12 LGBT crimes that won’t soon be forgotten, serving as a reminder of the enduring violence we face daily.

HOUSTON’S STONEWALL

On July 4, 1991, a 27-year-old Houston banker was murdered and his two friends injured by a group of 10 young men who attacked them with nail-studded wooden planks, a knife, and steel-toed boots outside Heaven, a gay bar in the city’s heavily LGBT Montrose district. Paul Broussard died several hours after the attack, and his death led to a flurry of gay protests in front of the home of Mayor Kathy Whitmire (at 2 a.m.), in the affluent Woodlands (where Queer Nation protested near the homes of many of the 10 attackers), and then later throughout the Montrose neighborhood.

The latter was the largest LGBT civil disobedience action in the city’s history. At the time, David Fowler, a founder of the local Queer Nation chapter, articulated what many felt: “This is Houston’s Stonewall. People have finally said, ‘We’re fed up, we’ve had enough, and we’re not going to take it anymore.’” At the time, City Council candidate Annise Parker was as surprised as others that LGBT protesters took to the streets in such volume; she told The Advocate,“Houston is not a city that supports protest well.” Within days of Broussard’s murder, all l5 members of Houston’s City Council (including ones who had opposed gay rights ordinances previously) voted for a resolution asking then-governor Ann Richards to put a hate-crimes bill on the legislature’s agenda.

All 10 men were convicted of the killing. Only one remains in prison today: Jon Buice, sentenced to 45 years in 1992. The coroner had determined that the stabbing — which Buice admitted to — was what ultimately killed Broussard. Buice has been up for parole several times, each time denied.

Broussard’s murder led to a long push for hate-crimes protections, which passed in Texas a decade after his death (but to this day still don’t cover transgender individuals). In the area where Broussard was killed, the Montrose Remembrance Garden was dedicated last year to the victims of anti-LGBT crimes in the area and as a means to foster peace and tolerance. According to the Dallas Voice, there have been 35 people killed in the neighborhood since a pastor’s gay teenage son was killed in 1979, including Aaron Scheerhoorn, who was stabbed in December 2010, escaped his attacker and sought refuge in a local gay club, and was turned away only to be found again by his attacker, who killed him.

THE HAMPTON ROADS KILLER

From 1987 to 1996, 12 gay or bisexual men were strangled to death and dumped in an area of Virginia called Hampton Roads. All but one were found nude. Most had been strangled; the others were too decomposed for the cause of death to be determined. Of the victims, all were last seen at gay bars in Portsmouth or Norfolk. By 1997, the local gay community was up in arms over the lack of police attention to the crimes, but, said Shirley Lesser, executive director of Virginians for Justice, the general public was not.

“It’s not gay-friendly here,” she said. “There is not a public outcry to solve gay murders. Police resources are dependent on where the public wants those resources to go.”

On May 6, 1997, police arrested Jackson Elton Manning for the murder of a gay man named Andrew “Andre” Smith, the most recent of the victims, who had been found strangled by a ligature and dumped in the Hampton Roads area. DNA evidence showed Manning had sex with Smith, and the victim’s blood — along with that of another victim, Reginald Joyner — was also found in Manning’s bed. In 1998, a jury sentenced Manning to life in prison for Smith’s murder, and Chesapeake police chief Richard Justice told reporters that Manning was the killer responsible for all 12 murders. Though Manning was never tried for the other 11 crimes, FBI documents later released to the public showed that the agency firmly believed the 42-year-old man was the Hampton Roads killer as early as 1996 — though his case caused profilers to rethink traditional victimology, as Manning, a black man, had both white and black victims, a rare modus operandi for a serial killer, the majority of whom target one  racial group. After his arrest, there were no more similar crimes in the area.

A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME

Gwen Amber Rose Araujo was an everyday teenager in many ways, a beautiful young woman who liked crop tops and blue jeans and lived in a small community in Northern California, dreaming of one day becoming a Hollywood makeup artist. But on October 3, 2002, she went to a party bravely wearing a miniskirt for the first time, and she never came home. The 17-year-old Araujo was transgender, and after Paul Merel's girlfriend discovered and outed Araujo at a party both girls were attending, four men — Michael William Magidson, 22, Jose Antonio Merel, 22, Jaron Chase Nabors, 19, and Jason Cezares, 22 — beat Araujo, slashed her face, hit her on the head with a shovel and a frying pan, strangled her, hogtied her, wrapped her body in a sheet, and tossed her into the back of a pickup truck. They drove her to a campground about 100 miles away in the Sierra foothills and dumped her body. Her mother didn’t know where she was for days, none of the partygoers reported the crime, and the media didn’t cover her disappearance until Nabors, traumatized by what had happened, led police to her gravesite.

Araujo had allegedly had anal or oral sex with two of the men in the weeks prior to the party; she was a regular friend of Merel’s who hung out at the house with other kids who drank and played dominoes. The men who killed her were all considered her friends.

She was certainly not the first trans woman or trans kid murdered, but her killing was shocking in part because of the extreme violence of the act and by the time and location where it occurred — in Newark, Calif., part of the Silicon Valley, just 30 miles from San Francisco. Her local high school was in the process of rehearsals for The Laramie Project, a play about the antigay murder of Matthew Shepard.

“In essence, the town of Newark lived through what Laramie did as the local school performed a play about the very same experience,” remembers Cathy Renna, the former news director of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. Gwen’s supportive and loving family stood up and demanded justice, Renna says, and with media attention, “good came from evil. To me, the most moving part of Gwen's story is her mother Sylvia [Guerrero]'s on-going fight for her child and her historic legal fight to have Gwen's birth certificate changed to female posthumously.” Guerrero told reporters that the tombstone would read Gwen, and that Araujo would be buried in the prettiest dress she could find.

After an initial mistrial, on September 12, 2005, Magidson and Merel were convicted of second-degree murder, but not convicted of the hate-crime enhancements. Nabors pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in exchange for his testimony against the other killers; he got an 11-year prison sentence. Cazares, who insisted he wasn’t at the party at the time of the killing and said he only covered up the crime, eventually struck a deal with prosecutors and received a six-year sentence.

The San Francisco LGBT Community Center released a statement expressing the disappointment many felt upon hearing that the hate-crimes charges did not stick. “The jury did not see fit to find that these men were guilty of hate crimes. That hate did not play a role in this murder is unimaginable,” it read.

“This was a transgender youth who was interrogated, brutalized, sexually assaulted, and humiliated before her death, based upon her transgender status,” transgender musician and activist Shawna Virago told the Bay Area Reporter. She wanted community pushback after the verdict. “The overkill of the actual murder speaks to the fact that this was a hate crime. We have to remember that any of the freedom we enjoy in being out and expressing our gender comes from the fact that we have been fierce, and we have been proud, and very loud, and I don't see that right now.”

“Gwen being transgender was not a provocative act. She's who she was,” said Alameda County assistant district attorney Chris Lamiero, who prosecuted the case and had to battle at least one defendant’s “transgender panic” defense. “However, I would not further ignore the reality that Gwen made some decisions in her relation with these defendants that were impossible to defend. I don't think most jurors are going to think it's OK to engage someone in sexual activity knowing they assume you have one sexual anatomy when you don’t.”

The Gwen Araujo Justice for Victims Act (AB 1160) was signed into law September 28, 2006, by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was the nation’s first bill to address the use of panic strategies, meaning defendants can’t use societal bias against their victim in order to decrease their own culpability for a crime.

Transgender Law Center represented Sylvia Guerrero in her petition to secure legal recognition of Gwen’s name change. Although requests for posthumous name changes are rare, attorneys with the center argued that the petition was a valid exercise of the court’s jurisdiction. In June of 2004, the same month the jury in Gwen’s murder trial deadlocked, the petition was granted and Gwen’s name was recognized.

THE HANDCUFF MAN

For decades, bartenders, hustlers, and gay clubgoers in Atlanta’s Ponce de Leon corridor — an area where gay sex trade was common — circulated rumors about a mysterious man who mutilated and murdered young gay and bisexual men. There was talk of this urban legend, the Handcuff Man — as locals dubbed him — for years, and many swore that the man would offer men $50 to drink a pint of vodka, sometimes telling them he was studying the effects of alcohol. Often, the next thing the victim would know — assuming he lived — was that he had been dumped in a deserted area, handcuffed, his genitals set on fire. The attacks began in 1968. Many of the victims were afraid to report the crimes to the police, in part because being gay was still forbidden and because they were involved in shadow economies of street work. They were, in fact, easy targets for the Handcuff Man.

Over two decades after the attacks began, in May 1991, 21-year-old Michael Jordan was offered $50 to masturbate in a john’s car, then made to drink drug-laced vodka. Jordan did not regain consciousness until the next day at Grady Memorial Hospital, where he would stay nearly a month to undergo treatment severe burns to his thighs, groin, and buttocks. Jordan had been warned by a local bartender to stay away from a john that night; like many in the area’s gay community, Phoenix bartender Bill Adamson knew exactly who the Handcuff Man was. Jordan’s attack galvanized local lesbian and gay leaders, who then urged police to take the stories of the Handcuff Man seriously, at one point getting police captain Ken Boles to admit that they activists had a point, that the department’s sex crimes unit had been slow to respond (a day later, flacks said Boles was misquoted).

Wealthy local attorney Robert Lee Bennett was identified as the Handcuff Man, but before police made an arrest in the case, editors at TheAtlanta Journal-Constitution, the city’s largest newspaper, agonized over whether to withhold the suspect’s name, as was their tradition, or to print it in the name of public safety. After numerous victims identified Bennett as the attacker, the editors decided to print his name. A day after they did, police in Tampa, Fla., requested Bennett’s information; later they charged him with an attack on Gary Clapp, a Florida man who had been burned so severely that both of his legs had to be amputated.

Prosecutors in Georgia and Florida negotiated a plea bargain for Bennett, in which he would plead guilty to the attempted murder of Gary Clapp as well as two counts of aggravated assault in Georgia, and could serve a concurrent 17-year sentence in Florida for all his crimes. LGBT activists were understandably outraged by the sentence, with Lynn Cothren, c-chair of Queer Nation, telling reporters at the time, “It’s a sad situation when people can get away with torture, intimidation, and hate. There’s obviously a problem with the system.”

Many hypothesized that Bennett’s sexual sadism was a result of his internalized homophobia (he didn’t admit to being gay until he was incarcerated), and he died in prison on April Fools’ Day in 1998. 

LARAMIE’S GREAT LOSS

So much has been written about the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard (who was killed the same year that James Byrd Jr. was murdered in an atrocious antiblack hate crime) that the facts of the case are already etched in many LGBT memories. Matthew Wayne Shepard was a 21-year-old student, a slight and friendly poli-sci major at the University of Wyoming. On October 6, 1998, Shepard met Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney at a bar in Laramie, Wyo.; the men offered to drive Shepard home. Instead they drove to a desolate rural area where they tortured Shepard, robbed him, and tied him to a fence and left him to die. He was discovered some 18 hours later by a bicyclist who thought Shepard was a scarecrow. According to media reports and the book Illusive Shadows: Justice, Media, and Socially Significant American Trials, his face was completely covered in blood, except where tears had washed the blood away.

Taken to a hospital in nearby Fort Collins, Colo., Shepard remained in a coma for several  days before he died of severe brain-stem damage, which shut down his internal organs and his heart; he also had fractures to the front and back of his head and numerous lacerations on his upper body from being pistol-whipped.

The murder was so shocking that candlelight vigils sprang up not just in Laramie but in larger cities like San Francisco and New York, and Shepard’s mother, Judy, became a champion of hate-crimes legislation. Because there was no hate-crime law nationally or in Wyoming at the time, neither of the killers could be charged with one, even though at least one had admitted to his girlfriend that the attack was spurred by his homophobia.

Both Henderson and McKinney asked their girlfriends to offer them alibis. On trial, McKinney tried to employ a gay panic defense, a sort of temporary insanity in response to an alleged sexual advance from the much smaller and unarmed victim. His girlfriend, however, told prosecutors that the two men “pretended they were gay to get him in the truck and rob him.”

Henderson made a plea deal for two consecutive life terms, while McKinney was found guilty of felony murder. Shepard’s parents interceded on McKinney’s behalf, saving him from the death penalty. His father, Dennis, told the Los Angeles Times that life in prison showed “mercy to someone who refused to show any mercy” for his son. McKinney received two life terms without possibility of parole.

While Fred Phelps, leader of the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas, picketed Shepard’s funeral with signs that read “Fag Matt in Hell” and “No Tears for Queers,” the murder led to a sea change in how the public — from Hollywood to Peoria — viewed gay people as well as the need for sexual orientation and gender identity hate-crimes protections.

“Our nation, and our president at the time, was primed for dealing with this issue that was so long ignored,” says Renna. “It was 1998, just as the nation was having more and better national conversations about LGBT people — Ellen had just come out, our organizations were growing. and the Internet was becoming a powerful force for connection and action.”

Judy Shepard wrote a book in 2009, The Meaning of Matthew: My Son's Murder in Laramie, and a World Transformed, and she became one of the most visible activists pressing for change. A decade after Matthew's murder, in October 2009, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act passed Congress and was signed into law by President Barack Obama.

The first federal legislation to include LGBT people was just one of the changes that came from Shepard’s murder. Numerous artists recorded songs about Shepard and his murder (including Elton John, Trivium, Tori Amos, and Melissa Etheridge) and The Laramie Project (a play that became an HBO film, about the reaction of the town) has been performed in hundreds of locales around the globe.

“The Laramie Project and the work of the Shepard Foundation and Judy Shepard's relentless speaking out have been instrumental in creating the foundation upon which we stand in speaking about LBGT youth issues in general,” Renna says. “As someone who went to Laramie days after his body was discovered, was in Laramie when he died, sat through the plea bargain hearing of Russell Henderson and the trial of Aaron McKinney, worked with Tectonic Theater Project and HBO on countless performances and screenings of The Laramie Project, worked on the Epilogue (recently completed) and serve on the advisory board of the Shepard Foundation, there is no other issue that has more profoundly affected my life and the way I do my work day to day. It has informed my work and changed my life. Judy and Dennis Shepard's work and commitment are an inspiration to me and offer me a model for how to live my life as an activist and a parent.”

A TWO-SPIRIT TRAGEDY

In the quiet of Cortez, Colo., in 2001, Fred “Frederica” C. Martinez Jr. — a 16-year-old transgender or “two-spirit” teen who loved Beyoncé so much he often went by her name — traveled to the Ute Mountain Roundup Rodeo. Five days later he was found dead in a sewer pond in a rocky canyon, an area the local teens call “the Pits,” his body decomposed and bludgeoned beyond recognition. Unlike with the Shepard murder, police and media attention was slow at first. Martinez’s mother, Pauline Mitchell, had called to report Martinez missing several times, but police didn’t return her calls until nearly 10 days after he disappeared.

Fred Martinez was a Native American two-spirit or nádleehí, what the Navajo call a male-bodied person with a feminine nature. He felt like a boy who was also a girl; a third gender that was both male and female. His family was accepting, and Martinez often dressed in feminine garb, a signature girl’s headband keeping wispy bangs out of his eyes. By all accounts from teachers, counselors, and friends, he was a healthy, happy, well-adjusted freshman at Montezuma-Cortez High School. But after the rodeo that night, Martinez met 18-year-old named Shaun Murphy at a party and accepted a ride from Murphy and one of his friends. The two dropped Martinez off, but he and Murphy met again later, and the reason has never been fully explained. Murphy later bragged that he had “beat up a fag.”

At the time, Martinez was the youngest person to die of a hate crime in the U.S. Murphy was later arrested and charged with second-degree murder, but both Mitchell and many victim advocates argued the local police should have investigated sooner and informed Mitchell of developments in the case. She reportedly read her child’s autopsy results in the local newspaper; it was the first she knew of the extent of his injuries, which included a slashed stomach, a fractured skull, and wounds to his wrists — and that he died from exposure and blunt trauma.

Murphy could not be charged with a hate crime because, at the time, Colorado’s hate-crime statutes did not cover crimes based on gender identity or expression. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 40 years on June 4, 2002. Ironically, Murphy’s mother, an out lesbian, claimed the 18-year-old wasn’t homophobic, before leaving the courthouse in tears.

Mitchell put photos of Martinez in both male and female dress on his coffin at the funeral, and her unconditional acceptance and fierce love inspired many to rally around her.

“Fred's death had an indescribable impact on his family of course,” says Renna, “but has also changed the local school, police, and rest of the community. The school now has polices related to bullying based on sexual orientation and last I heard, a GSA. The biggest change is the increased attention to LGBT youth issues in general — not just hate crimes, but bullying, suicide, and family acceptance and rejection of youth coming out.”

Renna points to the unprecedented surge in exhaustive media coverage of transgender and gender-nonconforming children, says Renna, “that is informed by the conversations about Fred and the concept of two-spirit people and the Native American culture that gave us this deeply nuanced and spiritual way of looking at gender and sexual diversity. As someone who works on these issues every day, it has been deeply moving to see the lives of these children and youth spoken about and covered with compassion and accuracy.”

Martinez was further memorialized in the documentary Two Spirits, a film a decade in the making that aired in 90% of the country and broke PBS viewing records, and had special screenings attended by over 50,000 people in 100 cities nationwide. In just 19 days, 5,000 people commented on the film and over 2 million read about it on Facebook. The film, which introduces the two-spirit concept to thousands of people who had no awareness of Native traditions around gender, is also up for a GLAAD Award this year.

“Fred and Pauline's stories have moved the hearts and minds of thousands, and I have seen firsthand the impact of this film,” Renna says. “The way the First Nations and Native American LGBT/two-spirit communities embraced the film is, to those of us involved, a powerful affirmation of all of the hard work it took to bring Fred's story to the screen.”

HOOP DREAMS DASHED

Fifteen-year-old Sakia Gunn wasn’t unlike a lot of local teens. She loved to play baseball, got good grades, dreamed of playing in the WNBA, and spent time hanging out with friends. But Gunn, a junior at Newark, N.J.’s West Side High School, also identified as an Aggressive  (or AG) — a gay butch woman of color who dresses in masculine clothes but doesn’t really identify as transgender or lesbian. Her girlfriend Jai was a femme.

On May 11, 2003, Gunn and her friends were waiting at a Newark bus stop after visiting New York’s Chelsea Piers along the Hudson River, an area where scores of young LGBT people would gather on the weekends. Two men in a vehicle pulled over and began asking the girls to come to their car. The girls told the men they weren’t interested in their sexual propositions because they were gay.

There was a police booth within shouting distance, but like many aging police booths — literally security stands, built after the 1960 riots, where police officers could look out and monitor the neighborhood activity — it wasn’t staffed that night. Newark, a heavily African-American city, is no stranger to violence, but Gunn and her friends had walked these roads before and were only minutes away from home.

But one of the men in the car, Richard McCullough, didn’t like rejection. According to Democracy Now, he jumped out of the vehicle and began choking one of the girls. Gunn and her friend Valencia* tried to stop him and Gunn hit McCullough. He turned and stabbed her in the chest before running back to the car and fleeing the scene.

A passing motorist gave the girls a ride to the hospital. Though reports differ, Gunn died in her friend’s arms either en route to or shortly after arriving at the local hospital. It was Mother’s Day.

Gunn’s friends created a makeshift memorial where she had been killed, and hundreds of lesbians showed up nightly. Nearly 3,000 people, many of them young queers, attended her funeral. Her death galvanized the local black queer community, and Laquetta Nelson used that mobilization to start the Newark Pride Alliance. “Sakia and her friends didn't mean anybody any harm that night,” she told reporters at the time. “They were coming back from having fun at the pier in New York, a place where they felt safe to be who they were.”

Lesbians nationwide, especially butch and masculine women, felt for Gunn. How many women had turned down sexual advances from men only to face violence?

“Sakia's murder was, in so many ways, the one that hit the closest to home,” says Renna. “As a self-identified AG, as a butch lesbian who has not infrequently been in the position she was — having men proposition or taunt a more feminine girlfriend or companion — I saw myself in this 15-year-old African-American youth from Newark. My heart broke when the New York community did not respond in nearly the way it did for Matthew Shepard, when Newark was a mere PATH train ride away. I was one of only a small handful of people who were not African-American at her funeral, and seeing the pain in the faces of the thousands. it pained me to not have the larger LGBT community gather in anger, protest, and grief as they did on the streets of Chelsea for Matt. I say this as one who was in Laramie for Matt.”

Indeed, the media, even the LGBT media, gave Gunn’s murder short shift. Professor Kim Pearson from the College of New Jersey did a study comparing media coverage of the Gunn case to 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard using the Lexis-Nexis database. She found that there were 659 stories in major newspapers about Shepard's murder, compared to only 21 articles about Gunn's murder in the seven-month period after their attacks. Pearson also reported that Shepard’s killers were arrested and convicted during that period, but it took almost that long for Gunn's killer to even be indicted.

One only had to do the math, Renna says, to understand why the lack of interest. “Poor. Person of color, gender-nonconforming. Who cares?” Renna says. “Well, we did, and while I was at GLAAD we fought for The New York Times and CNN  to cover her death, which still haunts me, since I would have reacted in exactly the same way she did in her situation. Meeting another accepting and loving family who could not give voice to their grief was painful.”

Some local activists also indicted the black community of Newark, arguing that homophobia kept the mayor and black political leaders from doing more to help LGBT youth and from paying attention to a bias murder where both the victim and the perpetrator were black. Kelly Cogswell and Ana Simo asked in The Gully,“Where are the professionally outraged activists like Al Sharpton who always appear en masse to hold politicos accountable when young black people are cut down by hate and no one is doing anything? After all, he didn't let white censorship and racism stand in the way of protesting the murder of Amadou Diallo in New York, or Timothy Thomas hundreds of miles away in Cincinnati. The reason why Sakia Gunn was killed, and why her murder has faded from the headlines, is that both whites and blacks wish young black queers would disappear. Until things change, they will, thanks to violence, AIDS, and hate.”

As with Shepard, and Brandon Teena, Gunn’s life was memorialized on film in Dreams Deferred: The Sakia Gunn Film Project, a powerful doc that dissects both the homophobia that caused this murder and questions the lack of media coverage of her murder.

Today, that police booth on the corner near where Gunn was killed is staffed 24 hours a day, a promise former Newark mayor Sharpe James made in 2002.

* Last name withheld.

THE HANDSOMEST SERIAL KILLER

A handful of serial killers have been gay men with such internalized homophobia that they struck out at other men (e.g., John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer), but the case of Andrew Phillip Cunanan signaled a turning point in how police and the gay community worked together to prevent predation and capture predators.

Cunanan was a swarthy, bright, and handsome young gay man who was intensely concerned about his appearance and status in life. As early as his teens, he was known to come up with fantastic tales about himself to impress his peers. A preppy son of a stockbroker, Cunanan moved after college to San Francisco’s Castro district, where he developed relationships with many sugar daddies who supported his lifestyle. He was no street hustler, though; Nicole Ramirez-Murray, a San Diego columnist who knew Cunanan, told TheWashington Post that Cunanan modeled himself after Richard Gere in American Gigolo, even dressing like the character. His wealthy, older gay benefactors gifted him with cars, European vacations, and cash.

But youth is fleeting, and Cunanan began to lose his appeal — and his lovers. He started getting sick and had taken an HIV test but never returned for the results, instead convincing himself he was HIV-positive. He became depressed and reportedly let himself go physically after another of his lovers left him.

Jeffrey Trail and Cunanan dated when the two lived in San Diego. Trail was a closeted naval officer during “don’t ask, don’t tell.” When he moved to Bloomington, Minn., to manage a propane delivery company, Cunanan was reportedly heartbroken. On one visit he noticed that another of his former flames, David Madson, had also migrated to the Minneapolis area, and became convinced that Madson and Trail were lovers. After arguing on the phone with Trail, who denied the relationship, Cunanan told a bartender in San Francisco he would be out of town on some unfinished business, boarded a plane, and within hours, on April 25, 1997, he killed Trail with a heavy claw hammer during an argument in Madson’s apartment, where the latter two men had gathered to convince Cunanan nothing was going on. In shock, Madson helped Cunanan cover up the crime, but four days later, Cunanan drove Madson’s Jeep to a country road north of Minneapolis and put three bullets in his skull.

A few days later, Cunanan accosted 72-year-old Chicago developer Lee Miglin, a successful married man, in front of his home just moments after the neighbors saw Miglin standing alone. Police never ascertained whether Cunanan even knew this victim. TruTV reported that  Cunanan marched Miglin into his own garage, bound his wrists, wrapped his face with duct tape “and proceeded to put him through a series of tortures lifted directly from what was said to be Andrew’s favorite ‘snuff’ film, Target for Torture. Pummeling him, kicking him, he then drove a pair of pruning shears into the man’s chest several times, muffling his screams. While Miglin still breathed, Andrew proceeded to slice his throat slowly with a hacksaw.” Afterward, Cunanan drove Miglin’s own Lexus over the body repeatedly.

The murder was so gruesome, it was clear that Cunanan was escalating. After Miglin’s murder the FBI added Cunanan to its Ten Most Wanted list. At this point, the LGBT communities in several cities were on edge, and reports of Cunanan sightings were sent in to police in multiple states. Posters of Cunanan were plastered across the Castro, Miami’s South Beach, and North Carolina’s gay nightclubs in Durham. It was rare for violence to come from within the gay community, and rarer still that the police and federal investigators were listening to gay complaints. After Miglin’s murder, many worried that Cunanan would return to San Francisco for the annual LGBT Pride Parade, and some people considered bowing out of the festivities, which attract hundreds of thousands. Turns out he was miles away.

Less than a week after Miglin’s murder, Cunanan killed 45-year-old William Reese at the Finn's Point National Cemetery in Pennsville, N.J., stealing his truck and leaving his last stolen vehicle there to taunt police and Reese’s bereaved widow, who found him. After that Cunanan headed to Miami, where he managed to evade police without seemingly trying, while going to gay clubs, hanging out at the beach and local tennis courts, and picking up men for occasional trysts.

Then, on July 15, 1997, Cunanan shot Gianni Versace outside the wealthy fashion design star’s home in South Beach and ran away as a witness tried but failed to tail him. There was no connection between the men, and forensic psychologists struggled to determine why Versace had been targeted. Many posited that perhaps Versace, a wealthy, glamorous, and attractive scion of Miami Beach, represented to Cunanan all that he wanted and believed he deserved but ultimately could never have. Versace’s murder led to a manhunt for Cunanan in Florida, and eight days later, as police closed in on a houseboat where Cunanan had been holed up, the serial killer used that same gun that killed Versace — stolen from his very first victim — to kill himself.  He was 27.

THEIR OREGON TRAIL

When Roxanne Ellis and Michelle Abdill were found murdered in the back of their own pickup truck in southern Oregon, the media, their friends, and LGBT activists were quick to call the murder a hate crime. After all, the political climate in Oregon had been volatile for years, and the women — whom friends described as the ideal lesbian couple — had been active in the state’s bitter fights over two Oregon state ballot initiatives: Measure 9, a constitutional amendment that would have declared homosexuality "abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse," and Measure 19, which would have banned libraries from carrying material about homosexuality. The atmosphere in the Medford area was rife with tension as gay groups battled with religious groups fiercely through much of the ’90s.

But the women, both in their 50s and together 12 years, were in many respects, ordinary: respected local businesswomen who ran a property management company and spent their spare time restoring their Craftsman-style house, staying busy with their local church, and spoiling Ellis’s young granddaughter. That all changed on December 4, 1997, when Ellis went to an appointment with Robert Acremant, a 20-something young man, reportedly to show him an apartment for rent.

Ellis and Abdill were found four days later in the back of their pickup, both gagged and bound, shot in the head execution-style, covered with cardboard boxes. The news shocked the town, and as police searched for the killer, numerous organizations issued cautious press releases about the slayings, including the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, which said that “the women's outspoken stance on gay rights has inspired speculation that they might have fallen victim to a hate crime. Police have at least one report that they had been threatened.” Donna Red Wing, who at the time was a Portland-based GLAAD field director, said, "We don't know why Roxanne and Michelle were targeted. Was it because they were lesbian activists or because they were women? Was it a random act of violence? We don't have the answers yet.” The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force asked then-attorney general Janet Reno to have the Department of Justice work with Medford police because the killings should be considered hate crimes.

And yet many in the gay community and on the police force said activists were too quick to call these murders hate crimes. Acremant’s mother called the police saying she believed her son was responsible for the crimes, later telling The Oregonian that she called authorities “because I have to look God in the face. I will do anything in my power to make sure other people aren't hurt.”

After Acremant’s arrest, debate still raged over whether these murders were hate crimes; even The Advocate’s Inga Sorensen wrote about the aftermath of the murders, with a headline that read, “Rush to Judgment.” The killer reiterated repeatedly that the shootings had nothing to do with their sexual orientation, that he was simply robbing the women. But he also said he didn’t “care for lesbians” and believed the women’s lesbianism was sick.

“Bisexual women don't bother me a bit,” said Acremant in a later interview. “I couldn't help but think that [Ellis] is 54 years old and had been dating a woman for 12 years. Isn't that sick? That's someone's grandma, for God's sake. Could you imagine my grandma a lesbian with another woman? I couldn't believe that. It crossed my mind a couple of times — lesbo grandma. What a thing, huh?”

Lt. Tom Lavine of the Medford Police Department told Sorensen that local police considered the possibility that the killings were a hate crime right from the start and regretted telling NPR that antigay bias had nothing to do with them. “I sat up in bed that night and thought to myself, ‘What the heck did I say that for?’ I regret it now because Acremant's story was the weakest I have ever heard. It just didn't hold water. What ultimately motivated him to pull the trigger? We may never know.”

Acremant pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, and on October 27, 1997, he received the death sentence. In 2011, however, a judge reduced the sentence to life without parole after Acremant, who insists he hears voices in his head, was deemed too delusional to aid in his own appeals.

THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL ATTACKS

Rebecca Wright was a smart young woman, a mixed-race master’s degree student, who loved the outdoors and her girlfriend of two years, Claudia Brenner. The two had met at Virginia Tech, and although Wright lived with a boyfriend at the time the two women were still giddy with young love, albeit a closeted one. Brenner, an architecture student, and Wright decided to hike the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania, camping at Furnace State Park, part of the vast public lands that link the trail. The couple camped in an isolated wilderness area reveling in the privacy and the freedom to express themselves — that meant being nude, making love, and cuddling like young lovers. When Wright ran to deserted public restroom nearby on May 13, 1998, she encountered Stephen Ray Carr, a local mountain man who lived in a nearby cave. He was carrying a small rifle.

Spooked by his presence, the women left the campground to find a more private place to set up camp. They ran into Carr on the trail but finally thought they had ditched him. After setting up camp again and making sure they were alone, the two had sex. Unbeknownst to them, Carr was indeed watching. and moments later, Brenner felt bullets piercing her neck, face, arm, and head. Wright was shot too, in the head and back. As Wright collapsed she told Brenner to run for help, and the wounded woman — bleeding significantly from the five bullet wounds — would hike four miles and flag down two cars in order to get help.

Brenner was rushed to the hospital. She was still there when she learned that the police had found Wright, dead, laying exactly where she had been when she was shot. Carr’s bullet had pierced her liver. Brenner, who had never told police the two women were a couple, was left to grieve in silence.

By the time police found Carr — he had been hiding in a local Mennonite community, where locals didn’t have television and thus couldn’t recognize him — the killer had come up with multiple defenses, first saying his rifle was stolen, then at trial claiming that the women “taunted” him with their sexuality by making love in front of him. His attorney blamed his inexplicable rage on the couple’s lesbianism as well as two rapes he had suffered, as a child and later in a Florida prison.

The judge, though, refused to allow the women’s sexual relationship to be brought up in court — a rare and surprising move at the time when gay panic was still a valid defense — and Carr made a plea deal for life in prison almost exactly a year after Wright was killed. Brenner went on to become a crusader against anti-LGBT violence, and wrote a moving memoir of the events that killed her partner, Eight Bullets: One Woman’s Story of Surviving Anti-Gay Violence.

THE JENNY JONES MURDER

The competition among television talk shows in the 1990s was intense, each trying to goose ratings. The Jenny Jones Show certainly wasn’t immune to the pressure. Jones, an affable host, originally set out to do a more touchy-feely, Oprah-esque talk show, but when ratings never materialized, producers moved into terrain that would become ’90s talk show staples, like boot camp teens, confronted bullies, paternity tests, and secret crushes. It was on one such show on March 6, 1995, that Scott Amedure came on the show to confess his “secret crush” on Jonathan Schmitz, a man he knew from his former home in Michigan. Schmitz had assumed his secret admirer was a woman, and though he handled the taping of the show with what appeared to producers a natural aplomb, three days later he drove to Amedure’s home and shot him to death, then called 911 to confess.

There was plenty of speculation in the media, some suggesting Amedure’s sexual advances caused Schmitz to fly into a gay panic rage; others thought Schmitz acted out of internalized homophobia.

Many pointed the blame at Jones and her producers, and in 1999, Amedure’s family won a $25 million judgment against The Jenny Jones Show as well as Warner Bros. and Telepictures (which produced and distributed the show) for negligence in creating an atmosphere that led to Amedure’s murder. It was a verdict that victims’ advocates celebrated, but the Michigan Court of Appeals later overturned it.

At Schmitz’s trial, Amedure’s mother testified that her son had told her the two men had sex after taping the show. Schmitz was found guilty of second-degree murder in 1996, but the conviction was overturned, and he was tried a second time and again found guilty of the same charge. In 1999 he was sentenced to 25 to 50 years.

THE BYSTANDER EFFECT

There’s a psychological phenomenon called the Bystander Effect, in which more people who are present at a crime, the less likely people are to help the victim of the crime. It applies both to crimes and other emergency situations. If there are few (or no) other witnesses to the crime, people act. The theory has been tested in a series of studies, but what led to those studies and the origination of the term (which is also called “Genovese syndrome”) was the brutal 1964 murder of a young New York lesbian named Kitty Genovese.

When 28-year-old Kitty Genovese got off work at Ev’s Eleventh Hour Bar it was already after 3 a.m., so she drove straight home to the apartment she shared with her partner, Mary Ann Zielonko, in the Kew Gardens section of Queens. She was heading toward her apartment door when Winston Moseley approached her. Clearly afraid, the slight young woman ran, but Moseley caught up with her and stabbed her from behind twice. Genovese screamed, shouting, “Oh, my God, he stabbed me! Help me!”

What happened next has been the subject of much debate, numerous botched newspaper reports, and psychological studies. Her cries were heard by several neighbors, and according to American Psychologist, one of them, Robert Mozer, yelled for Moseley to “Let that girl alone!” as the attacker was about to stab Genovese again.

As lights came on in nearby apartments, Moseley ran away to his vehicle, but as the lights went back off again, he got back out and began to follow Genovese, who had reached the doorway of her building. Police reports from that night are fuzzy; some say that the police didn’t take the calls seriously, and others say there was only one caller, nearly 30 minutes after the attack, who reported that a woman had been beaten but she was walking around.

Some newspapers reported the killer hid in his car, others reported that Moseley drove around until it was safe to return to his victim.

What’s not in dispute is that Moseley found Genovese and stabbed and raped her. Genovese had reached the doorway of her building and, according to The New York Times, cried out, “I’m dying.” Greta Schwartz heard those cries, called police, and ran to Genovese, holding her in her arms until the police arrived.

The Times reported that police discovered that 38 people had heard part of the attack on Genovese, and only one, Schwartz, had called police. Later, American Heritage analyzed the case and reported that only a dozen people had heard anything, most of them not realizing what was going on or the severity of the attack.

After the Times article came in 1964, psychologists dubbed this the first example of the bystander effect. But the article was said to be so sensationalized and inaccurate that in 2007, American Psychologist wrote that many modern psychology textbooks had gotten the facts of the case all wrong. While they called the case more of a parable, the editors didn’t dispute the bystander effect, which essentially boils down to the fact that people feel a diffusion of responsibility to act when in groups because they think someone else will. Feminist psychologists later tackled the case, saying that it was better viewed through the lens of male-female power dynamics rather than the bystander effect.

Kew Gardens historian Joseph De May analyzed the case for On the Media and reported that Genovese could not have screamed for the duration of her attack, saying the “wounds that she apparently suffered during the first attack, the two to four stabs in the back, caused her lungs to be punctured, and the testimony given at trial is that she died not from bleeding to death but from asphyxiation. The air from her lungs leaked into her thoracic cavity, compressing the lungs, making it impossible for her to breathe. I am not a doctor, but as a layman my question is, if someone suffers that type of lung damage, are they even physically capable of screaming for a solid half hour?”

The married Moseley was arrested and admitted he set out to kill Genovese because he wanted to kill a woman as women didn’t fight back; he admitted to two other rape-murders as well. He was initially found guilty and sentenced to death, but that was overturned and he was later given life. He has been denied parole 15 times so far.

Films, books, even the graphic novel Watchmen covered the Genovese case (Kitty is why Rorschach becomes a vigilante), though many works used that original and inaccurate New York Times report. Most recently, Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner used the Genovese murder as a case study in the discussion of altruism in their best-selling SuperFreakonomics.

Links:
[1] http://www.advocate.com/
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Eight-Bullets-Surviving-Anti-Gay-Violence/dp/15634...
[3] http://www.onthemedia.org/2009/mar/27/the-witnesses-that-didnt/transcript/

June 13, 2013

Anastasia Solovieva-King (Photo AP)

The murders of two mail-order brides in Washington State led the U.S. Congress to enact the Federal International Marriage Broker Regulation Act in 2005. The legislation was intended to stop abuse of mail order brides by prospective husbands with criminal histories.

by Marie Kusters-McCarthy

The mail-order bride business is booming. In the United States alone there are over 300 such agencies. Clients can peruse information on 150,000 would-be brides on the Internet or catalogues. Many women are enticed by the thought of meeting a wealthy American husband who can offer them a better life.

The vast majority of males using these brokers are from the United States and Western Europe and most brides are Asian, Eastern European or South American. In the United States there are approximately 12,000 mail-order weddings annually through marriage brokers.  Market research shows it is a $2 billion business worldwide and growing.

There are no statistics to prove that mail-order brides are more prone to abuse than women who marry in a more traditional manner. Research has shown that although the divorce rate is high in these marriages, it is still almost 10 percent lower than the U.S. divorce rate. There are no exact figures available as to the number of violent deaths that have occurred in mail-order marriages but there have been several highly publicised ones.

Most of the mail-order bride agencies are reputable and do a thorough check on their potential clients as to their background, criminal records, etc.  However, there have been some instances where the agency did not properly vet the client and lives were put at risk.

The cost for meeting and marrying in this way can vary from $4,000 to $12,000 as it depends on the agency fee, travel to meet the bride, wedding costs and legal fees in obtaining a K-1 Fiancée visa. It is an expensive way of meeting a suitable partner but there are a lot of very happy couples who have met through this method.  

Susana and Anastasia were not so lucky.

Susana Remerata Blackwell

Susana Remerata was born in Cataingan on the island of Masbate in The Philippines to Marcella and Zucino. Masbate is an island with a population of half a million people living in 21 towns scattered around the island. It is one of the 7,100 islands that make up the Philippines and is one of the poorest provinces of one of the poorest nations in Asia.

Susana’s parents, who owned two general stores, were better off than the majority of their neighbors. Even though their home was concrete built it didn’t have a stove, flush toilet or telephone. Owning a car was just a pipe dream. Susana was an honor student at Cataingan National High School. She studied nursing for a brief period but changed to hotel and restaurant management at a college in Cebu, a 12-hour ferry ride away. She was a local beauty queen – Miss Cataingan, Miss Masbate and was a contestant for Miss Cebu.  

Susana was also well educated and she nurtured a dream of leaving her small town in the Philippines for a better life in the United States with the right man. In 1992, at age 21, she entered her photograph and particulars in a catalogue of potential brides. An estimated 20,000 Filipino women leave the country each year to marry foreigners. The majority marry American men who find them attractive because they speak English and are familiar with Western culture. The initial contacts are usually through brokers and conducted by mail.

Shortly after Susana’s particulars appeared in the “Asian Encounters” catalogue she was contacted by Timothy Blackwell who thought she had everything he was looking for in a wife. Mr. Blackwell was a 48-year-old computer technician from Seattle and had trouble meeting women.

The romance blossomed by mail for more than a year before Blackwell flew to the Philippines on March 6, 1993. They were married March 31, 1993.

After a month in the Philippines, Timothy Blackwell returned to Seattle and proceeded with the arrangements needed for Susana to join him. On February 5, 1994 Susana flew to join her husband. In less than two weeks of living with Timothy, she left his home and moved to stay with two Filipino girlfriends, Phoebe Dizon and Veronica Laureta Johnson. She claimed that her husband had been abusive and applied for residency under a battered-wife exception to deportation law.

Lawyers were engaged by both parties and a court date was set for March 1995. The case was complicated as it involved annulment or divorce and deportation. Timothy Blackwell stated that he felt “duped” by Susana and she had used him for money and to gain residency in the United States. He said she was a mail-order bride turned swindler.

When Susana appeared in court she was eight months pregnant by another man. She told the judge that her husband had been abusive from the start but that she had really loved him and had hoped the marriage would work.

On March 3, 1995 final arguments were to be presented to the court. While waiting for proceedings to begin, Susana sat in the hallway of the King Country Courthouse with her friends Phoebe and Veronica chatting. They were approached by Timothy Blackwell wielding a 9mm Taurus semiautomatic handgun and within seconds he shot dead his wife, her unborn baby, and her friends Phoebe Dizon and Veronica Laureta Johnson.

Timothy was quickly wrestled to the ground by courthouse security, taken into custody and within days was charged with three counts of aggravated first-degree murder and causing the death of Susana’s unborn baby.  In Washington State aggravated murder carries a minimum sentence of life imprisonment or a death sentence.

Staff from the King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office's Domestic Violence Unit with Prosecutor Satterberg at API/Chaya candlelight vigil for DV victims April 18, 2013 (Photo King County)

On May 29, 1996 a jury of four women and eight men found Timothy Blackwell guilty of first-degree murder in the deaths of his estranged wife Susana Remerata, Phoebe Dizon and Veronica Laureta Johnson. He was also found guilty of first-degree manslaughter in the death of Susana’s unborn baby. Returning to the court in June of 1996 for the penalty phase of the trial, the jury deliberated for almost two days but could not, unanimously, agree to a death sentence and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Anastasia Solovieva-King                  

Indie King Jr (Photo KOMO 4 News)

Indie King Jr. was the only son of academic successful parents and grew up in a loving home in Mercer Island, Washington with his sibling, Paige. His friends remember him as a bit of a show off, a good student, happy-go-lucky, ambitious and eager to please. He seemed to be obsessed with Nordic blonde women and often spoke about ordering an “obedient” one through the mail.

In 1984 Indie graduated with honors in business from the University of Washington and worked as an accountant with an oil company. He earned a Master’s Degree in finance in 1987 at the University of Chicago Business School. Several short-term jobs followed which allowed him to accumulate air miles and he decided to use these on a visit to the Soviet Union. Upon his return home it was very clear, to family and friends, that he was very impressed with the beauty and decorum of the young women there and began placing advertisements in Russian publications to meet a partner.

Now living in Cincinnati and studying for a doctorate at the University of Cincinnati, Indie soon started corresponding with 18-year-old Ekaterina Kazakova from Siberia.  He invited her to study in the United States. In September of 1993 she moved to Cincinnati as a visiting biology student. Within a month Indie and Ekaterina were married as he told her that she would not be able to remain in the United States otherwise. Soon after marrying Ekaterina, Indie dropped out of the doctoral program and had several short-term teaching positions but none of these contracts were renewed.                                                                 

Ekaterina found work as a pharmacy technician while studying and was the only breadwinner in the household. Indie encouraged her studies as he saw the potential in her future earning capacity. However, he had become physically violent and threatened to kill her if she reported him to the police or tried to leave him. Even though these threats did make her afraid for her life, Ekaterina did report him to the police and got a restraining order. 

In retaliation, Indie filed for an annulment of the marriage on the grounds that it was a fraud by Ekaterina to gain residency in the United States. The annulment was refused and their divorce was made final in July 1997. Ekaterina has since remarried and is a successful practicing dentist who does not wish her new name and location made public.

Indie returned home to Mercer Island a bitter man and told all, who would listen, how he had been duped by Ekaterina to gain citizenship. His old friends were shocked at the change in him. At 5 foot 7 inches, wearing a hairpiece and weighing 290 pounds he was a different person than the Indie they remembered from high school. He soon began searching for another “Mail Order Bride” and began corresponding with 18- year-old Anastasia Solovieva, who had placed her particulars and photograph in a catalogue of prospective brides. Her parents encouraged this as a cousin had found a happy marriage in Florida by that route.                                                                

Anastasia grew up in Kyrgyzstan in the former Soviet Union, spoke three languages and graduated, with top honors, from the Musical College in Bishkek. Indie travelled to Kyrgyzstan and spent a month with Anastasia and her parents, both academics.  Indie and Anastasia were married at the end of the month.

Upon their arrival in the United States, they settled in the Seattle area and Anastasia enrolled at the University of Washington taking business courses. She also found part- time jobs in two local restaurants where she was very well liked by her co-workers. However, it soon became obvious to her friends and colleagues that her marriage was in trouble and they advised her to leave her abusive, controlling husband.

In August 2000, Indie was caught shoplifting some fruit and soft drinks from a local supermarket and told police that his wife was divorcing him and he had no money. This was not true, but one month later Indie filed for divorce. Anastasia then decided to go home to Kyrgyzstan to visit her parents and to discuss her circumstances with them. Shortly after Indie followed her in an attempt at reconciliation. They returned together to Seattle and Anastasia King was never seen alive again.

When her parents did not receive any calls or emails they became very concerned and contacted the police. When questioned by the police, Indie said that he and Anastasia had an argument before flying home from Moscow and he had returned alone. A check by the police proved that they had flown back to Seattle together and police believed that Anastasia had met with foul play by her husband. A close police watch showed Indie making several visits to an inmate in the Snohomish County Jail who had been a lodger in their house in Seattle.                                                               

Detectives questioned this inmate, Daniel Larson, who was in jail awaiting trial for attempting to have sex with a 16-year-old immigrant from the Ukraine. Larson soon broke down and hoping to get off the attempted rape charge, told police that he knew where the body of Anastasia King was and that he had helped her husband murder her. A police search soon recovered the body of Anastasia on a rubbish dump on the Tulalip Reservation.  Indie King was immediately arrested and charged with first degree murder.

In a plea bargain for his testimony, Larson pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for his participation in the crime and was sentenced to 20 years.

Trial

The trial of Indie King began in February 2002. Daniel Larson told the court that Indie wanted to kill Anastasia as he didn’t want to go through another expensive divorce. Larson seemed to have been completely under the influence of the older King and said they were involved in a sexual relationship. He agreed to help in the murder and described how he strangled Anastasia with a neck tie while she was held down by her 290-pound husband sitting on her. Larson testified that he and King then removed her clothing, diamond wedding ring and earrings before dumping her body on the reservation.                                                                

For the defense, David Allen, said that Larson had acted alone because he believed she had wanted him out of the house, had been unfaithful to her husband and he had a dislike of immigrants. He also stressed the point that Larson had been offered a “sweetheart deal” by the prosecution for his testimony. 

On the witness stand King’s own testimony was the most damaging to the jurors as it became very clear that his greed was a major factor in his wife’s murder. He admitted that he had given false information to U.S. immigration to have something to hold over his wife, and prevent her from gaining permanent residency, if things didn’t  work out between them.

He also admitted that during their visit to Kyrgyzstan, in June 2000, he had stolen her passport in an attempt to prevent her from returning to the United States and applying for a divorce. Unfortunately, Anastasia was able to convince him to return her passport and they travelled back to Seattle.                                        

The court was presented with emails taken from King’s computer that showed he was contacting another prospective mail-order bride three weeks before the murder of Anastasia. He stated that he would be a free man within a month.

After a five-week trial, the jury found Indie King guilty of first-degree murder. One month later he was sentenced to 29 years imprisonment for his wife’s murder.

Upon hearing the sentence, King addressed the judge saying “I absolutely accept the verdict of the jury. I don’t want my family affected by me.”

In late 2006 Daniel Larson withdrew his guilty plea to second-degree murder in the belief that his conviction would be overthrown. This negated the plea bargain and enabled the prosecution to bring a charge of first-degree murder. Larson was found guilty and sentenced to 29 years.

Postscript   

President George W. Bush signed the Federal International Marriage Broker Regulation Act in January 2005. This legislation was the result of a campaign following the murders of Susana and Anastasia. The legislation was intended to stop abuse of "mail order brides" by prospective husbands with criminal histories.

Sharon Kinne

She was one of the most remarkable criminals in U.S. history. A housewife, she turned cold-blooded killer. In 1969 she escaped from a Mexican prison and disappeared without a trace.

by J. J. Maloney

In 1960 Sharon Kinne was an attractive 20-year-old Jackson County, Mo., housewife with two children, and was having an affair with John Boldizs, a friend from high-school.

She and her husband, James, 25, were having frequent arguments.  Sharon wanted a new Thunderbird, and she wanted a vacation trip.  She often lied about having paid bills.  The Kinnes were deeply in debt.

On March 19, 1960 -- a Saturday afternoon – James, who – his relatives say -- knew she was cheating on him, reportedly told Sharon he would file for divorce the following Monday.

So Sharon Kinne did the only sensible thing, for her: She shot James in the head while he was napping and said her 2-year-old daughter Danna did it while playing with daddy's gun -- a .22-caliber Hi-Standard pistol. When the Jackson County Sheriff’s deputies arrived at the house just east of Independence, Mo., they found the gun lying on the bed beside James.

Lizzie Borden

When Lizzie Borden axed her stepmother and father to death in 1892 it was unthinkable that a woman of such upbringing could commit such vicious crimes. The savagery of the murders set her free.

by Denise M. Clark

The New York Times headline for Aug. 5th, 1892 read: "BUTCHERED IN THEIR HOME: Mr. Borden and His Wife Killed in Broad Daylight." The first paragraph of the stunning article read:

FALL RIVER, Mass, Aug. 4 -- Andrew J. Borden and wife, two of the oldest, wealthiest, and most highly respected persons in the city, were brutally murdered with an ax at 11 o'clock this morning in their home on Second Street, within a few minutes' walk of the City Hall. The Borden family consisted of the father, mother, two daughters, and a servant. The older daughter has been in Fair Haven for some days. The rest of the family has been ill for three or four days, and Dr. Bowen, the attending physician, thought they had been poisoned.

The horrific axe murders of Andrew Borden and his third wife, Abby, would have been shocking in any age, but in the early 1890s they were unthinkable. Equally unthinkable was who wielded the axe that butchered them an hour or so apart in their own home. The idea that the murderer could possibly be Borden's 32-year-old daughter Lizzie took days to register with the police – despite overwhelming physical and circumstantial evidence that pointed only at her. Nine months later a jury, unable to fathom that a woman could commit such vicious crimes, would find a way to ignore the evidence and set Lizzie free.

By no means had Lizzie Borden committed the perfect crime. The police were quickly able to dispense with the possibility of an outside intruder carrying out the murders. Lizzie – her alibi fraught with inconsistencies – was the only suspect. She alone had both the motive and the opportunity. What would end up saving her was the remarkable violence of the murders: The murders were simply too grisly to have been committed by a woman of her upbringing.

The Borden mystery is captured within a web of falsified statements, suppositions, assumptions and public opinion, all of which revolve around a missing weapon that actually never was missing, a blood-stained dress that was never found, and a young woman's previously impeccable character.

Updated Sept 23, 2003

Madalyn Murray O'Hair

When atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, her son, and granddaughter mysteriously disappeared from their Austin, Tex., home in 1995, the police didn't lift a finger to find the family that had taken God out of America. Five years went by before a determined reporter would unravel the mystery of her disappearance.

by Lona Manning

"There is no God. There's no heaven. There's no hell. There are no angels. When you die, you go in the ground, the worms eat you."

-- Madalyn Murray O'Hair

When David Travis arrived for work on Aug. 28, 1995 at the headquarters of American Atheists in Austin, Tex., he knew something was wrong: The door was locked and a note was posted on it: "The Murray-O'Hair family has been called out of town on an emergency basis. We do not know how long we will be gone at the time of the writing of this memo."

As Travis, a 50-ish former Army sergeant, stood there reading the note, he felt the anger welling up. He couldn't say he was surprised that his employers were gone, and by the looks of things, so was his job as a proofreader. He'd been suspicious that the Murray-O'Hairs were up to something ever since he had opened a letter from New Zealand last spring and discovered a bank statement for an account he had never heard of, for almost a million dollars. And this was when Madalyn Murray O'Hair, his cantankerous boss, was always crying the blues about money and warning him that she might not be able to meet payroll.

O'Hair was always extremely secretive about the financial affairs of American Atheists, which she had founded in 1963 and dominated ever since. All financial records were kept locked up in a little room away from prying eyes. Recently, a seven- foot chain linked fence, topped with cyclone wire, had been built around the property, a fitting emblem of O'Hair's siege mentality. According to her, the world was a hostile place, particularly toward atheists. She and her family had been persecuted for 35 years for their courageous stand for the separation of church and state. But lately, as her health declined, and with it her energy and combative spirit, O'Hair had been known to talk about getting away from it all.

Dec. 1, 2009

Clarence Ray Allen

A coward and a megalomaniac, Ray Allen gave orders that resulted in the deaths of many people.  At age 76, he was the oldest person ever executed by the State of California.

 by Randy Radic

His name was Clarence Ray Allen.  Born in Blair, Oklahoma in 1930, he asserted he was part Choctaw, which meant he laid claim to being a member of the Muskhogean Indian tribe, which included the Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole tribes. 

The Allen family was dirt poor, so Ray grew up picking cotton.  But Ray was ambitious.  Later, he moved to Fresno, California, where he got married and started his own security company.  Charismatic and hardworking, Ray’s company flourished.  He went from renting a shack for $75 per month to owning a ranch where he raised fancy show horses – Thoroughbreds and Arabians – owned an airplane and had a swimming pool in his backyard. 

For some reason, success and wealth weren’t enough for Ray.  There was a discordant element inside Ray.  Maybe he was simply bored.  Some said he simply went insane.  Whatever the reason, his psyche became tainted.  Ray turned to crime, forming his own gang, which he baptized as the Ray Allen Gang.  Because of his outgoing personality, Ray attracted people like a magnet.  Some of those he attracted were young ne’er do wells, impressionable, impulsive and reckless men who sought an outlet for their dissatisfied lives.  

Ray recruited them and gave them direction.  He turned them into criminals.  The Ray Allen Gang’s most important rule was no snitching.  Ray told the gang that snitches would be killed.  To make his point, he pulled out a newspaper article about two people who had been found dead in Nevada, telling his gang that there was only one punishment for snitches.

Dec. 18, 2009

Peter Rollack

Peter Rollack’s Sex, Money, Murder gang found its niche in running drugs from the projects of the Bronx to North Carolina in the early 1990s. By age 19, "Pistol Pete" was a millionaire and had thousands of "soldiers" in new chapters in Brownsville, Brooklyn, Patterson, Trenton and Philadelphia. He thought nothing of murdering slow payers or snitches, particularly snitches. Snitches would do him in at age 24.

by Randall Radic

Soundview is a low-income residential neighborhood located in the south central section of the borough of the Bronx in New York City. The low-income public housing development in Soundview is managed by the New York City Housing Authority. Soundview has a population of 80,000 people, primarily African-American and Hispanic. Most of these people live below the poverty line and receive public assistance, including AFDC, Home Relief, Supplemental Security Income and Medicaid.

In short, Soundview is hell on earth. Poverty, disease, drugs, and violence is a way of life. There’s no hope and only a few find a way out.

During the 1960s, youth gangs became part and parcel of the landscape. The first and most famous gang was The Black Spades, originating in the Bronxdale Houses. The Black Spades rapidly achieved renown and dominated the area, controlling every housing project in the neighborhood. Through sheer brutality, the Black Spades became the most feared gang in New York City.

Sex, Money, Murder (SMM) came on the scene in 1987. SMM was one of the sets (gangs) of the New York Gang Alliance. Because of an ongoing power struggle, where each gang wanted to be number one, SMM flipped. They left the NYG Alliance and became a sanctioned set of the Bloods. The various sets of the Bloods had decided it was in their interests to come together as the East Coast United Blood Nation (UBN). This was in 1993.

At this time, Peter Rollack was the unchallenged leader of Sex, Money, Murder. Because of his tendency to shoot first and ask questions later, Rollack was nicknamed Pistol Pete. And usually, Pistol Pete didn’t bother with the questions.

Oct. 6, 2010

Scott Peterson

For murdering his pregnant wife and unborn son, Scott Peterson became one of the most reviled husbands in the annals of crime.

 by Denise Noe

Laci Peterson is missing!

On Christmas Eve, 2002, Scott Peterson called police to report that his 27-year-old wife, Laci Peterson, was missing from their one-story, ranch-style Modesto, California home. Laci was seven and a half months pregnant. Doctors had given her a due date of February 10, 2003. A sonogram had shown the fetus to be a boy; the parents planned to name him Conner.

When the police arrived, Peterson told them he left home alone that morning for a fishing trip to the Berkeley Marina in the San Francisco Bay, 85 miles to the west. He said his wife told him she intended to walk their golden retriever in a nearby park and then shop. “Scott Peterson asserted that he had returned home to find Laci’s Land Rover in the driveway of their Modesto, California, home, and the couple’s golden retriever, McKenzie, in the backyard, alone, with his leash on,” according to forensic psychiatristKeith Ablow in his book,Inside the Mind of Scott Peterson.

Before calling police, Peterson called his mother-in-law, Sharon Rocha, and said Laci was “missing.” Mrs. Rocha thought her son-in-law sounded strangely calm for a man whose wife’s whereabouts were unknown.

Oct. 28, 2010

Charles Manson

In 2004, Denise Noe wrote "The Manson Myth" for Crime Magazine, an article debunking the charismatic image of Charles Manson propagated by Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi in the best-selling true crime book of all time, Helter Skelter.  Noe wrote that the real life Charles Manson was not some messianic leader gone bad, but a pathetic figure from the beginning.  In 2008 she sent her article to Manson.  When he responded by calling her collect, an unusual relationship began.

by Denise Noe

I first read Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry when I was in high school. I was fascinated by its portrait of Charles Manson: a mesmerizing and charismatic criminal able to thoroughly dominate a band of fanatical followers. According to that book, Manson was able to convince his followers that a worldwide Armageddon between the black and white races was imminent. He believed that this race war had been prophesied in the Bible and in the Beatles’ White Album. Indeed, Manson supposedly thought the very title of the record was a reference to the coming black-white conflict. The helter-skelter theory was that blacks would kill off the white race – all except for Manson and his followers who would take refuge in a “Bottomless Pit” located in the desert.
 
According to the helter-skelter theory of which Manson had supposedly completely convinced his followers, Manson and his people would hide out until the race war was finished and blacks were the only ones above ground. Manson was a racist who believed that blacks would be unable to govern themselves and so would turn the reins of power over to him and the other Caucasians who would emerge from the Bottomless Pit. Thus, Charles Manson would become ruler of the world and his followers a class of aristocrats.

Jan. 10, 2011 Updated April 1, 2012

Shrien and Anni Dewani on their wedding day. (Photo was handed out to the media.)

Both brilliant and beautiful, Anni Dewani was shot to death on her honeymoon outside Cape Town, South Africa during a carjacking that her millionaire husband, Shrien Dewani, survived.  The three men convicted of the murder say the young husband hired them to kill his wife.  London-based Dewani is fighting extradition. 

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

The names of the places sounded exotic: Gugulethu. Lingelethu. Khayelitsha. Chitwa Chitwa. They created images of beautiful people dancing to the beat of drums on a hot summer night.

To the cops in their dark blue uniforms, who stood around the white Volkswagen Sharan, abandoned in the place that bore the name Lingelethu, there was nothing exotic though about the young woman who lay sprawled across the vehicle’s rear seat. Two holes between her shoulders and another in her neck from which her blood had flowed freely so that most of the inside of the car was covered in blood, told them that the young woman was dead.

They knew her name: Anni Dewani.

They were wondering how they were going to tell her husband Shrien, who had in the first hour of that morning reported her missing and was anxiously waiting at a nearby luxury hotel, what they had found.

July 25, 2013

Trayvon Martin

Based on the dictates of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, the jury in the Trayvon Martin murder case had virtually no legal basis to do anything but acquit George Zimmerman of both second-degree murder and manslaughter. 

by Don Fulsom and Alisha Dingus

While it remains true that if George Zimmerman had obeyed the police dispatcher’s directive to remain in his car and to wait for patrol officers to arrive to question the person in the “hoodie,” Trayvon Martin would not have been shot to death.  In the end, it did not matter that Zimmerman had profiled the young black man as a likely criminal up to no good, lacing his conversation with the dispatcher with profanities, using the word “punks” and saying, “They always get away.”

The only one who ended up getting away was Zimmerman himself. A Seminole County, Florida jury of six women – five white and one Hispanic – deliberated for just over 16 hours before acquitting the 29-year-old Zimmerman of second-degree murder and manslaughter in the 2012 slaying.  The verdict by the sequestered jury came late into the night of the second day of deliberations, around 10 p.m. on Saturday, July 13, 2013.

Despite the late hour, more than 10 million people viewed the verdict on the four cable networks that provided extensive coverage and commentary of the trial. The week before in the same time slot, 1.6 million viewers were tuned into Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and HLN, a CNN offshoot that specializes in covering criminal trials.

George Zimmerman

As the trial progressed, it became more and more apparent that the government’s burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman had murdered Martin out of malice or had killed him in an unjustified way, were both hurdles too high to mount. The murder charge required a showing that Zimmerman was full of ill will, hatred, spite or evil intent when he shot Martin.

“Even after three weeks of testimony, the fight between Mr. Martin and Mr. Zimmerman on that rainy night was a muddle, fodder for reasonable doubt,” a front page account in The New York Times read the next morning. “It remained unclear who had started it, who screamed for help, who threw the first punch and at what point Mr. Zimmerman drew his gun. There were no witnesses to the shooting.”

The prosecution’s case against Zimmerman became so befuddled during the course of the trial that his defense attorneys never invoked Florida’s Stand Your Ground law as part of his defense and waived the initial Stand Your Ground hearing. Florida’s Stand Your Ground law did make it into Judge Debra Nelson’s instructions to the jury, and, in reality, left the jury with no plausible way to convict Zimmerman on either charge:  

In deciding whether George Zimmerman was justified in the use of deadly force, you must judge him by the circumstances by which he was surrounded at the time the force was used. The danger facing George Zimmerman need not have been actual; however, to justify the use of deadly force, the appearance of danger must have been so real that a reasonably cautious and prudent person under the same circumstances would have believed that the danger could be avoided only through the use of that force. Based upon appearances, George Zimmerman must have actually believed that the danger was real.

If George Zimmerman was not engaged in an unlawful activity and was attacked in any place where he had a right to be, he had no duty to retreat and had the right to stand his ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he reasonably believed that it was necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.

George Zimmerman bloody

In an article entitled, “Trayvon Martin and the Irony of American Justice,” published in The Atlantic on July 15, 2013, Ta-Heisi wrote, “In trying to assess the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, two seemingly conflicting truths emerge for me. The first is that based on the case presented by the state, and based on Florida law, George Zimmerman should not have been convicted. The second is that the killing of Trayvon Martin is a profound injustice.”

Many state Stand Your Ground laws, including Florida’s, go beyond traditional concepts of self-defense and act as legal immunity to filing criminal charges in self-defense cases. George Zimmerman wasn’t initially charged when the police at the scene determined Florida’s Stand Your Ground law made him immune to criminal charges. Zimmerman, after all, was a member of the volunteer neighborhood watch and had a legal right to be there. Martin, of course, also had a legal right to be where he was.

What makes Florida’s Stand Your Ground such an expansion over the age-old “A Man’s Home is His Castle,” doctrine is that it covers any space where a person is legally present, including public places. The so-called “Castle Law” pertained to using necessary force to defend one’s home against an intruder. Zimmerman’s Stand Your Ground immunity covered him in his car and on foot while he followed Trayvon Martin. 

For 44 days Zimmerman had the benefit of that immunity until public outrage at the killing of an unarmed black teen led first to the firing of the Sanford police chief and then to the appointment by the governor of a new prosecutor who promptly filed charges of second degree murder aginst Zimmerman. The national clamor that led to the indictment was over the perceived notion that Zimmerman had profiled Martin as some sort of criminal because he was black, stalked him, and shot him to death. In essence, Zimmerman was brought to trial to answer for killing Martin simply because of his bias against blacks -- a hate crime, pure and simple.

Zimmerman, however, was never tried on the basis of a hate crime. During pre-trial motions, the judge ordered that no mention of race be advanced by either the proseuction or the defense. The overfiding racial overtones of the case were thus muted. The best the prosecution could do to raise the race motive for Martin's killing was to argue that Zimmerman "profiled" Martin before deciding to pursue him. With the hate crime aspect of the case off the table, Zimmerman's eventual acquittal was a foregone conclusion.

“Every step Mr. Martin took toward the end of his all too-short life was defined by his race,” wrote Professor Ekow N. Yankah of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, in an Op-Ed published in The New York Times two days after the verdict. “I do not have to believe that Mr. Zimmerman is a hate-filled racist to recognize that he would probably not even have noticed Mr. Martin if he had been a casually dressed white teenager.”

Trayvon Martin

The day after the verdict, a Sunday, spontaneous rallies for Trayvon Martin were held in various major cities.

A week after the verdict, thousands of demonstrators gathered in front of a dozen Federal buildings across the United States to mourn Trayvon Martin’s killing. In addition, “Justice for Trayvon Martin” rallies took place in at least 100 U.S. cities, including New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. Jay-Z and Beyonce attended the New York rally. In Oakland, California, demonstrators tied up traffic on Interstate 880 during rush hour; in the Crenshaw area of South Los Angeles, a brief spate of rioting broke out.

Zimmerman will spend the rest of his life linked to the tragedy he precipitated. Although acquitted, he will never be truly free. Pre-trial, while free on $1 million bond, he lived in hiding, the target of numerous death threats. Immediately after the verdict in the gripping, made-for-cable-TV trial, Robert Zimmerman voiced concern for his brother’s safety:  “He will be looking around his shoulder the rest of his life.”   And Zimmerman’s lead lawyer, Mark O’Mara, said those who think Martin was killed for racial reasons might well react violently to George:  “He has to be cautious and protective of his safety.”

Zimmerman remains in hiding and wears a bulletproof vest when he does venture into public. Fox News reported that Zimmerman came out of hiding to respond to a car accident less than a mile from where Martin was shot and killed.

O’Mara’s client must be alert to further legal risks as well.  The U.S. Justice Department is reviewing the case for potential criminal civil rights violations.  In applauding the department’s decision, NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous declared: “The most fundamental of human rights—the right to life—was violated the night George Zimmerman stalked and then took the life of Trayvon Martin.”

Pointing to the same review, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said, “This isn’t over with and I think that’s good.” But a fellow Democrat, former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, argues the Justice Department might be taking a “dicey position.” Spitzer says, “Double jeopardy is a fundamental principle in our American judicial system … so it’s going to be hard for them to come back at the defendant.”

That’s not the only problem the Feds might have in bringing civil rights actions against Zimmerman.  As University of Virginia law professor Rachel Harmon asserts, “It’s not enough to show that Zimmerman followed Trayvon Martin because of his race.  They would have to show that he attacked Martin for that reason.”

Harmon—a former prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division—made the comments to The Washington Post.  The newspaper, citing “current and former Justice Department officials” reports that it “would be extremely difficult and may not be possible” for the government to charge Zimmerman with a hate-crime “because it’s not clear that he killed Martin because of his race.”

Despite widespread public outrage over the jury’s verdict, one of the jurors took to TV just days later to contend that Zimmerman “didn’t do anything unlawful” and was “justified” in shooting Martin.  Appearing as only a silhouette, Juror B-37 also told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Zimmerman’s “heart was in the right place” when he became suspicious of Martin—and that the teen probably threw the first punch.

Four other jurors, however, quickly distanced themselves from B-37. Identified only by their court numbers, they issued a printed statement saying B-37’s views were her own and “were not in any way representative” of their feelings.  And Martin’s parents soon criticized the verdict in several TV appearances.  On NBC’s “Today,” Tracy Martin said, “I think that had Trayvon been white, this would have never happened.  Obviously, race is playing some type of role.”

On July 26, the only minority juror did an interview with Robin Roberts on "Good Morning America" where she said she felt Zimmerman "Got away with murder. But you can't get away from God, And, at the end of the day, he's going to have a lot of questions and answers he has to deal with. The law couldn't prove it but, you know, you know, the world goes in circlles."

Although she did not provide her last name, she allowed ABC to show her face and know that her first name is Maddy. Thirty-six and the mother of eight children, she said that when jury deliberations began she was for convicting Zimmerman on the second-degree murder charge. She called herself the "juror who was going to give him the hung jury" and "she fought to the end" before joining the other jurors in their not-guilty votes.

"A lot of us wanted to find something bad, something we could connect to the laws. But as the law was read to me, if you have no proof he killed him intentionally, you can't say he's guilty," Maddy said.

When Roberts asked her, based on what she learned as a juror in this case, whether Zimmerman should have ever been put on trial, she said no, adding,  "I felt this was a publicity stunt."

The Killing of Trayvon Martin

The nighttime slaying of Trayvon Martin took place on February 26, 2012 in a middle-class, gated subdivision called “The Retreat at Twin Lakes” in the central Florida town of Sanford.  Martin, as he had several times previously, was there with his father visiting his father’s fiancée and her son. He had the free time to be there due to being suspended from his high school at the time. That evening Martin had gone out alone to buy some Skittles and ice tea and was returning from the store when his fatal encounter with Zimmerman took place.

The son of Sybrina and Tracy Martin, Trayvon was born on February 5, 1995.  The couple divorced four years later. Trayvon lived with his mother and older brother in Miami Gardens, Florida.

George Zimmerman was born in 1983 in Manassas, Virginia. Half Hispanic, he is the son of Gladys (Mesa) Zimmerman, who was born in Peru, and Robert Zimmerman Sr., a retired Virginia magistrate. In 2009, Zimmerman moved to Twin Lakes with his wife. He was employed as an insurance underwriter and was in his final semester of a two-year course at Seminole State College, working toward an associate degree in criminal justice. His stated goal was to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a judge.

Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch coordinator at Twin Lakes, was in his car on an errand when he saw Martin, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, walking inside the gated community. Zimmerman, thinking that the young black man in the hoodie might be a criminally minded gatecrasher, called Sanford police and reported what he considered to be suspicious behavior. He said the man was “cutting between houses…walking leisurely for the [rainy] weather” and that “he was looking at all the houses.”  While still on the phone with the dispatcher, Zimmerman exited his car, ignoring the dispatcher’s directive not to confront the suspect and to await the arrival of Sanford patrol officers.

Within minutes after Zimmerman terminated the phone call, Martin was mortally wounded. When police arrived minutes later, Zimmerman claimed that Martin had pounced on him, and that a violent struggle ensued on the rain-soaked lawn. Zimmerman contends he finally grabbed his gun and fired one shot to the chest of his alleged attacker. He was licensed to carry the firearm.

Martin died face down in the grass, only 70 yards from the rear door of the townhouse where he’d been staying.  Physicians who examined the autopsy findings for the Orlando Sentinel believe Martin remained alive for anywhere from 20 seconds to two minutes.

A police photo shows Zimmerman with a scratch on his forehead, along with a bloody and obviously broken nose. Other photos display vertical lacerations to the back of his head. Police at the crime scene report Zimmerman’s back was wet and covered with grass.

Aside from the one bullet wound, an autopsy found only a small abrasion below the knuckle of Martin’s left ring finger. It also turned up small traces of marijuana. The weed—which could have been smoked up to a month earlier—had no apparent connection with Martin’s behavior on the night of his murder, according to one of the prosecutors.

The U.S. Congress was on the verge of passing anti-racial profiling laws—but then 9/11 happened in 2001, and all discussion came to an abrupt halt. Now lawmakers can use “national security” as an excuse to oppose anti-racial profiling legislation. They can invoke the threat of terrorism to keep such legislation from gaining bipartisan support (the End Racial Profiling Act, introduced after Trayvon Martin’s murder, lacked any Republican backers in Congress.) 

Twenty-five states have enacted their own anti-racial profiling legislation, but those laws are regarded as ineffective. Advocates of a national standard say a major reform of Stand Your Ground laws is a good place to start.

While Martin’s parents buried and mourned the loss of their son, Zimmerman spent 44 days as a free man by invoking Florida’s Stand Your Ground law—which gives people the authority to use deadly force if they believe it is the only way “to prevent death or great bodily harm.”  This type of a defense rests on examining a person’s state of mind during a confrontation. So all Zimmerman had to do was tell police that he feared for his life ... and he was free to go home and sleep in his own bed, while Martin’s body lay unclaimed on a slab in the morgue.

A National Uproar

It took a major public uproar for charges to be leveled at Zimmerman. President Obama said shortly after the shooting that if he had a teenage son that his son would look and dress like Trayvon Martin. Under greater magnification, something seemed off about this case: Zimmerman kept changing his story; and it soon became known that 911 dispatchers had warned him not to pursue Martin.

At first, though, because of Stand Your Ground, Zimmerman became a potential crime victim. Fox News and ABC’s Barbara Walters courted him, competing for an exclusive interview. Fox won out after Walters pulled her deal off the table when Zimmerman and his wife requested to be put up in a hotel for a week, on ABC’s tab.

It has to be asked: If Zimmerman were black, would he be shopping around for the best exclusive interview deal and requesting weeklong stays in hotels? Would it have taken 44 days for him to be arrested? Would he have waltzed out of jail after putting down $100,000 of his bail money? Would people be donating to his defense fund? If the case of Marissa Alexander is any indication, the answer is no.

Alexander, also from Florida, was sentenced to 20 years in prison after firing a warning shot during a dispute with her abusive husband. Her attorney claimed self-defense and cited the state’s Stand Your Ground laws.  Yet the jury agreed with the prosecutors that the law did not apply because Ms. Alexander left during the argument, went to the garage and retrieved her gun. The reasoning behind the decision was that because Alexander did not exit through the garage and returned to confront her husband, she acted in anger—not because she feared for her life. Alexander said she was unable to leave home through the garage because of a door malfunction.

Under this same line of logic, George Zimmerman’s defense could well fail at trial.  That’s because Trayvon Martin did not come to Zimmerman’s car. The watch commander made the choice to exit his vehicle and pursue Martin, ignoring the request of a 911 dispatcher who told him to remain in his vehicle.

In his Fox News interview in July of 2012 with Sean Hannity, Zimmerman set off a media firestorm when he said Martin’s death “was all God’s plan.” Zimmerman even admitted that he never feared for his life. When Hannity directly asked Zimmerman, who is 5 feet 8 and 185 pounds, if he felt threatened by the 6 foot, 160-pound teen, he said “No, not particularly.” He chose to go after Trayvon Martin, just as Alexander chose to go back into her house.

State Attorney Angela Corey, who prosecuted Alexander in the case, was assigned the Zimmerman case. So if one were to apply the law in the same way, Zimmerman should be convicted—unless the Stand Your Ground defense failed for Alexander because she is black. After all, Stand Your Ground laws were created, in part, to protect people like Alexander—women who try to defend themselves from abusive men. The laws were not meant to protect neighborhood vigilantes.

So something seems wrong here. A woman who harmed no one is about to spend a big chunk of time in prison, while Zimmerman got away with what his prosecutors consider murder.  In other words, when Zimmerman was acquitted, the entire justice system has to answer for what appears to be a blatant case of racial profiling.

“In a way, the not-guilty verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman for his killing of Trayvon Martin was more powerful than a guilty verdict could ever have been,” wrote Charles M. Blow, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, two days after the verdict was rendered. “It was the perfect wrenching coda to a story that illustrates just how utterly and completely our system of justice – both moral and legal – failed Martin and his family.” 

Consequences of Stand Your Ground Laws

Defenders of Marin argue that with Zimmerman’s acquittal anyone with a gun license will be able to take the law into their own hands. And they have statistics on their side:  Two researchers at Texas A&M University, Cheng Cheng and Mark Hoekstra, found that Stand Your Ground laws do not deter crimes like aggravated assault or burglary, but they do increase homicides. “We find that the murder and non-negligent manslaughter are increased by 7 to 9 percent. This could represent either an increased use of lethal force in self-defense situations, or the escalation of violence in otherwise non-lethal situations. Regardless, the results indicate that a primary consequence of strengthening self-defense laws is increased homicides.” There have been 600 more homicides per year in states that have enacted such laws.

With Zimmerman’s acquittal, this number is only likely to increase.

The Tampa Bay Times reported in June of 2012 that after studying 200 Stand Your Ground cases in Florida that the law has been used to free the aggressors, including one person who shot someone in the back.

With the backing of the National Rifle Association, the Florida Legislature enacted the Stand Your Ground law in 2005, granting legal immunity to people who use deadly force if they reasonably believe their life is in danger.

Since Florida’s law went into effect, two dozen other states have passed similar legislation. The Miami Herald reported that several studies, including the Texas A&M one, show that so-called “justified homicides” have increased significantly in the states that have passed Stand Your Ground laws. Reports have also shown that the law had a disparate impact on racial minorities, and that many of the people who have used the Stand Your Ground defense after killing someone are ex-felons.

In response to the public uproar over Trayvon Martin’s killing, Florida Governor Rick Scott created the 19-member Citizen Safety and Protection Task Force to review Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. The Associated Press reported on November 13, 2012 that the task force, after spending six months traveling the state and taking public testimony, decided not to recommend any changes to Florida’s most controversial self-defense law. The task force refused to review the studies referenced by the Miami Herald.

“The task force concurs with the core belief that all persons, regardless of citizen status, have the right to feel safe and secure in our state,” the task force’s final report to the governor read. “To that end, all persons have a fundamental right to stand their ground and to defend themselves from attack with proportionate force in every place they have a lawful right to be and are conducting themselves in a lawful manner.”

Background Resources:

Drum, Kevin, “George Zimmerman and the “Great Bodily Harm” Doctrine,” Mother Jones, 3 April 2012, http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/04/george-zimmerman-and-great-bodily-harm-doctrine, (accessed 28 December 2012).

George Zimmerman: No Regrets & More—Sean Hannity Interview Highlights, The Daily Beast Video, 18 July 2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/18/george-zimmerman-no-regrets-more-sean-hannity-interview-highlights-video.html, (accessed 28 December 2012)

Samuels, Allison, “What if George Zimmerman Were Black?,” The Daily Beast, 19 July 2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/19/what-if-george-zimmerman-were-black.html (accessed 30 December 2012)

Jonsson, Patrik, “’Stand your ground’ laws: Do they put teens in greater danger?,” The Christian Science Monitor, 29 November 2012, http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2012/1129/Stand-your-ground-laws-Do-they-put-teens-in-greater-danger (accessed 27 December 2012)

Heitzeg, Nancy, “Stand Up to ‘Stand Your Ground’,” Critical Mass Progress, 05 December 2012, http://criticalmassprogress.com/2012/12/05/ci-standing-up-to-stand-your-ground/ (accessed 27 December 2012)

Dahl, Julia, “Fla. Woman Marissa Alexander gets 20 years for ‘warning shot’: Did she stand her ground?,” CBS News, 15 May 2012, http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-57434757-504083/fla-woman-marissa-alexander-gets-20-years-for-warning-shot-did-she-stand-her-ground/, (accessed 27 December 2012)

Aegerter, Gil, “Marissa Alexander gets 20 years for firing warning shot after Stand Your Ground defense fails,” U.S. News, 11 May 2012, http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/05/11/11660804-marissa-alexander-gets-20-years-for-firing-warning-shot-after-stand-your-ground-defense-fails?lite, (accessed 26 December 2012)

Green, Miranda, “After Trayvon Martin: Is it Time to End Racial Profiling?,” The Daily Beast, 13 May 2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/13/after-trayvon-martin-is-it-time-to-end-racial-profiling.html, (accessed 26 December 2012)

July 29, 2013

Aaron Hernandez

Back in 2010, the button-downed New England Patriots discounted the scouting reports that said Aaron Hernandez scored at the bottom of the “social maturity” scale. In 2012, still smitten, the Patriots added $40 million to his contract. On the day Hernandez was arrested for the gangland style murder of Odin Lloyd, the Patriots pre-empted the justice process and disowned him.

by Denise Noe

Not long after a jogger discovered a bullet-ridden corpse in an industrial park in North Attleborough, Massachusetts at about 5:30 p.m. on June 17, 2013, the often troubled life of New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, a handsome and athletically gifted young man who only a year before had been given a $40 million contract extension, began tumbling down.

The murder victim was 27-year-old Odin Lloyd, a semipro football player and a friend of Hernandez who had been dating the sister of Hernandez’s fiancée, Shayanna Jenkins. The secluded industrial park where the gangland style execution took place in the early morning hours, was a half mile from Hernandez’s luxurious home. Inside one of Llyod’s pockets were the keys to a Nissan Altima rental car that turned out to be registered to Hernandez. Lloyd’s sister, Olivia Thibou, told detectives she had been visiting her brother on June 16 and had seen him get into a Nissan. 

Five hours after Lloyd’s body had been found, police arrived at Hernandez house to notify him of Lloyd’s death and to ask about the Nissan he had apparently rented for his friend. According to court documents released on July 9 by the Attleboro District Court at the request of various media organizations, Hernandez immediately became defensive and asked, “What’s with all the questions?” When asked when he had last seen Lloyd, Hernandez said he had been “up this way” the night before and if they had other questions they would need to speak with his attorney. According the court records, Hernandez then went back inside, slamming and locking the door only to emerge minutes later to hand police his lawyer’s business card.

Police then informed Hernandez that “this is a death investigation,” information that did not cause Hernandez to inquire who had died, only to retreat back into his house and slam and lock the door again. In a written statement of the encounter with Hernandez at his house, the police report stated, “Mr. Hernandez’s demeanor did not indicate any concern for the death of any person.”

A Massachusetts Medical Examiner ruled Lloyd’s death a homicide on June 19. He had been shot five times with a .45 caliber pistol. The murder weapon has not been recovered. Police were able to pin the time of death down to between 3-3:30 a.m. A worker at the industrial park was taking his regular nightly break during that time period when he said he heard three gunshots and a car door slam.

After consulting with his attorney, Michael Fee, Hernandez agreed to be interviewed further at the police station the next day and to allow police to search his house without a search warrant.

In searching his house, police found that the home’s internal security system had been damaged. When they requested his cellphone, Hernandez’s attorney turned it over in pieces. It also became known that Hernandez had hired a house-cleaning service only hours before the jogger discovered Lloyd’s body. When the police told reporters the next day that they had not ruled Hernandez out as a suspect in Lloyd’s murder, news helicopters began shadowing the sure-handed, highly tattooed tight end.

The walls were closing in on the former college All-America and NFL All Pro.  

As a result of the cloud over their star receiver, the Patriots asked him to avoid the team’s facilities. On that same day, CytoSport, manufacturer of Muscle Milk and other supplements for athletes or aspiring athletes, announced it was terminating its endorsement contract with Hernandez.

With a search warrant this time, detectives with specially trained search dogs entered the Hernandez home on June 22. They gathered and left with big bags filled with possible evidence. They also removed a safe that contained a scale and a plate, items frequently used by drug dealers.

At 8:45 a.m. on June 26, officers arrested Hernandez outside his home. Handcuffed, the soon-to-be former Patriot was taken in a police cruiser to a station and booked. At 2:45 p.m., Hernandez was formally charged in court with first-degree murder. He was also charged with five counts of illegal possession of firearms.

On the day of his arrest, but before any formal charges had been filed, the Patriots released him. In a news release the Patriots stated, “A young man was murdered last week, and we extend our sympathies to the family and friends who mourn his loss. Words cannot express the disappointment we feel knowing that one of our players was arrested as a result of this investigation. We realize that law enforcement investigations into this matter are ongoing. We support their efforts and respect the process. At this time, we believe this transaction is simply the right thing to do.”

The Patriots, an organization that prides itself on being more than just a cut above other National Football League franchises in terms of class and character, does not apparently subscribe to the notion that someone is innocent until proven guilty. It underscored this sentiment by taking the unprecedented step of offering to allow any fan who had purchased Hernandez’s jersey to redeem it for another Patriot jersey. During the weekend the offer was good, hundreds of fans lined up to rid themselves of jersey No. 81. 

The Arraignment

At Hernandez’s arraignment the afternoon of his arrest, with various national cable stations streaming the proceedings, Bristol County Assistant D.A. William McCauley told the district court that investigators had viewed surveillance camera videos that tracked Hernandez from his home in North Attleborough to Boston and back. They had also traced cellphone pings and text messages that provided a tight timeline that directly linked Hernandez to Lloyd’s murder. In addition, McCauley said there was evidence left in the Nissan rental car and collected in two searches of Hernandez’s house and surrounding areas that placed Hernandez with Lloyd for roughly an hour the morning he was killed, “right up to the minute Lloyd was executed.”

As McCauley presented the evidence against him in a packed courtroom, Hernandez, handcuffed, stood expressionless in a white t-shirt, his heavily tattooed arms visible. McCauley told District Court Judge Daniel J. O’Shea that Hernandez “drove the victim to that remote spot, and then he orchestrated” the murder.

McCauley said that Hernandez had texted two other men that night who were also involved in the murder. McCauley said their names had not yet been released. The prosecutor’s office had protected them from public identification by persuading a judge to impound records and McCauley did not say whether or not they would be charged. McCauley did not specify who actually pulled the trigger. However, the criminal complaint alleges that Hernandez “did assault and beat” Lloyd “with intent to murder such person, and by assault and beating did kill and murder such person.”

The prosecutor stated that the plot to murder might have started on June 14 when Lloyd and Hernandez visited a Boston nightclub. McCauley said Hernandez decided to murder his friend when he saw Lloyd talking with people Hernandez “had troubles with.” McCauley did not elaborate about what those “troubles” were and why merely conversing with those people would lead Hernandez to decide to kill Lloyd.

McCauley asserted that on June 16, Hernandez texted the other two men who met up with Hernandez. The three drove to Lloyd’s home and picked him up in front of his visiting sister, Olivia Thibou.

McCauley suggested Lloyd might have feared something ominous was in store judging from texts he sent his sister just before he got into the car with the trio. Lloyd text messaged his sister, “Did you see who I left with?” Thibou asked, “Who?” Lloyd texted, “NFL. Just so you know.”

According to McCauley, detectives tracked the rental car’s movements to a gas station, to Lloyd’s house, and then to the empty lot in the industrial park where Lloyd was slain. At the gas station, Hernandez purchased gum and that gum was found in the car. Forty-five caliber shell casings were also discovered in that vehicle. The prosecutor claimed that surveillance videos in the industrial park show the four men arriving in the rented Nissan. McCauley said night workers in the vicinity recall hearing gunshots between 3:23 a.m. and 3:27 a.m.

McCauley said surveillance video at Hernandez’s home shows him going through the house with a gun in his hand. When McCauley related this, Lloyd’s mother started weeping. Someone helped her out of the courtroom. Hernandez’s fiancée, with whom he has a 7-month-old daughter, also started crying and exited the courtroom. McCauley continued that surveillance footage from the six to eight hours after the murder was missing from Hernandez’s home security system and that the two weapons seen on the video have not been recovered.

Hernandez pled not guilty to all charges. Massachusetts has no death penalty. The maximum penalty for first-degree murder is life without possibility of parole.

Judge Daniel J. O’Shea ordered Hernandez held without bail. It could be months, perhaps more than a year, before Hernandez comes to trial. As of this writing, Hernandez’s next court date in connection with the Lloyd murder is a probable cause hearing scheduled for August 22, 2013.

Following the arraignment, Michael Fee, Hernandez’s attorney, described the prosecution case as “circumstantial” and “not strong.” Reporting for USA Today, Lindsay H. Jones wrote, “Hernandez is also represented by James Sultan and his partner Charles Rankin, who have a long track record of serving as defense attorneys in high-profile cases and for famous clients.”

On June 27, 2013, a new hearing was held for Hernandez on the bail issue. Attorney James Sulton argued that Hernandez is a professional with a stable home life and should not be regarded as a flight risk. Sulton asserted, “Mr. Hernandez is not just a football player but is one of the best football players in the United States of America.” Sulton suggested house arrest and an electronic monitoring bracelet as possibilities.

Superior Court Judge Renee Dupuis denied bail. She observed, “He also has the means to flee and a bracelet just wouldn’t keep him here nor would $250,000.”

The Arrest of Ortiz and Wallace

From two sets of court documents obtained – one set by the Associated Press and the other by USA Today – in early July, the two men Hernandez summoned by text to accompany him to Llyod’s house in Boston the night of June 16 were Carlos Ortiz, 27, and Ernest Wallace, 41, friends of his from his hometown of Bristol, Connecticut. The documents reveal that surveillance video shows three men, who appear to be Hernandez, Wallace and Ortiz, leaving Hernandez’s home in a silver Nissan Altima at about 1:09 a.m. on June 17. The car is seen returning to Hernandez’s home at 3:26 a.m. with Hernandez at the wheel. Surveillance video from a camera at a home across the street from Lloyd’s house on Fayston Street in Boston show Lloyd getting into a silver Nissan at 2:33 a.m.

On June 26, 2013, Carlos Ortiz was arrested as a fugitive from justice; he was extradited from Connecticut to Massachusetts and he agreed to be held without bail on a gun charge.Wallace, of Miramar, Florida, was arraigned in North Attleboro District Court on July 8 and charged with being an accessory to murder after the fact in Lloyd’s case. His bond was set at $500,000.

In the court documents obtained by the AP, Ortiz told police that after the three of them picked up Lloyd at his home, they drove toward Hernandez’s home in North Attleborough, stopping at an industrial park not far from Hernandez’s home where Lloyd, Wallace and Hernandez got out of the car to urinate. As he sat in the car, Ortiz said he heard gunshots; not long after that Wallace and Hernandez got back in the car and sped away.

Ortiz also informed police that it was too dark for him to see who fired the shots but that Wallace later told him Hernandez fired the shots that killed Lloyd. He said that when they returned to Hernandez’s home, Wallace asked him to get a gun from under the driver’s seat. Ortiz said he handed the gun to Hernandez once they were inside the house. After spending the night at Hernandez’s house, Ortiz said he and Wallace accompanied Hernandez to return the Nissan. Hernandez rented a Chrysler to replace it. Ortiz and Wallace then went to the apartment that Hernandez and other football players used as a “flop house.” On their way back to Bristol later that day is when Wallace told him Hernandez had been the one to shoot Lloyd, Ortiz told the police.

It was Ortiz’s trip to the apartment in Franklin that led police to his door. While there his cellphone slipped between sofa cushions and was found while police were executing a warrant to search the apartment.

While searching the Franklin apartment, police also found several boxes of ammunition. Out in the parking lot, in a Hummer registered to Hernandez, police said they found a loaded .45 caliber Glock magazine in the console.

In addition, the court documents state that Massachusetts State Police ballistic experts determined that the five .45 caliber casings found near Lloyd’s body and the casings found in the Nissan rented by Hernandez were fired from the same handgun.

The release of such detailed court records casts an usually full light on the state’s case against Hernandez in the murder of Odin Lloyd. Normally, such detail would not be provided until a probable cause hearing and even then only in outline form. As the damning information in the court records circulates – particularly Ortiz’s account of Hernandez being the shooter of Lloyd – the chances of Hernandez getting a fair trial are under assault. The potential jury pool is being provided information that in every way points to Hernandez’s guilt before the jury is even empanelled. And as a national figure, the negative information about his guilt is being disseminated throughout the United States.

The University of Florida’s action toward Hernandez – like those of the New England Patriots – are indicative of the extreme bias Hernandez is up against as he sits in a segregated cell without the possibility of equal access to the media to tell his side of the story. On July 25, a spokesperson for the university announced a plan to excise any acknowledgement of Hernandez on the Gainesville campus. A statement issued by the university read, “We put together an immediate plan after the initial news broke to remove his [Hernandez’s] likeness and name in various private and public areas in the facility, such as the south end zone team area, locker room, football offices, Heavener Complex Kornblau Lobby and the brick display entrance to the football facility.” The brick display honors Florida players who won All-America awards.

Other Murders May Be Linked to Hernandez

In the immediate aftermath of news about Hernandez’s alleged role in Lloyd’s death, two other shooting incidents that might be tied to Hernandez surfaced.

Police are investigating Hernandez’s possible involvement in an unsolved July 2012 Boston double homicide. CNN.com reported that a source stated, “The Boston Police Department has located and impounded a silver SUV with Rhode Island registration that police have been trying to find for almost a year, which is linked to the scene of the double homicide.”

The source indicated that detectives believe Hernandez was renting that SUV at the time of the double homicide.

A CBS News article gives more specifics about the unsolved Boston crimes, stating, “The double homicide occurred in the early morning hours of July 16, 2012, in Boston’s South End. Daniel Jorge Correia de Abreu, 29, and Safiro Teixeira Furtado, 28, two Cape Verdean immigrants who lived in Dorchester, were killed when someone fired at the BMW they were in. A third person was wounded. At the time, police said there were two other people in the vehicle, but both ran off before officers arrived.”

Sources indicate it is possible the Boston homicides are linked to the Lloyd slaying because Lloyd – who also lived in Dorchester – may have had information about Hernandez’s possible involvement in the previous case. A law enforcement official told the BostonGlobe:“The case against Hernandez is strengthening” in the unsolved double-homicide matter. A grand jury is investigating Hernandez’s possible involvement in the double-homicide.

Another Shooting Brings a Civil Suit against Hernandez

In addition, Hernandez may face a lawsuit in a shooting case believed to be unrelated to either of the aforementioned murder cases. Four days before Lloyd’s death, a Connecticut man, Alexander S. Bradley, 30, filed a civil lawsuit in Florida contending that Hernandez shot him in the face in February 2013 while the two were in a vehicle after a night of partying at a Miami strip club called Tootsie’s Cabaret. Bradley’s attorneys say the bullet hit him in the arm and traveled until it struck his face and blew out an eyeball. The lawsuit seeks more than $100,000 in damages. The lawsuit was dismissed because paperwork was incorrectly filed. One of Bradley’s attorneys, David Jaroslawicz, states he does not “know why” no criminal charges were filed in the case but asserts that the civil lawsuit will be re-filed.

Police reports show that Bradley was found bleeding outside a John Deere store in Riviera Beach, Florida on the morning of February 13, 2013. The store’s manager said Bradley asked him to call 911, begging, “Tell them to hurry! I’m gonna bleed out.” The manager asked Bradley who shot him and the wounded man replied, “I’m done talking – it hurts too bad.”

Emergency responders found that Bradley was “rude” and refused to cooperate in describing how he had been wounded. Police say Bradley did not name the shooter or shooters but described “both Hispanic and black males” as having been part of the attack.

Hernandez’s Background

The brutal murder of Odin Lloyd and Hernandez’s possible involvement in it inevitably focused media attention on Hernandez’s background. He was born on November 6, 1989. His father, Dennis, was of Puerto Rican heritage; his mother, Terri, of Italian ethnicity. Aaron showed athletic promise early. By the eighth grade he was able to dunk a basketball.  

Aaron apparently inherited his considerable athletic talent from his father. USA Today reports, “As a prep star in Bristol, Conn., in the 1970s, Dennis Hernandez was nicknamed ‘The King.’ Generous and gregarious, he seemingly touched everyone he met.” Hernandez’s mother told USA Today that watching “his sons play sports was Dennis’s greatest joy.”

The major trauma of Hernandez’s youth occurred when his father died unexpectedly following routine hernia surgery. Aaron, then 16, had been especially close to his father and was devastated. His brother D.J, who is three years older, recalled Aaron’s grief when their father died: “It was tough. It was difficult for him.” He also said of Aaron, “He was just lost.”

D. J., who attended the University of Connecticut and starred on the football team as a quarterback and wide receiver, tried to become a surrogate father to Aaron. Aaron recalled, “I just followed my brother’s footsteps. I just tried to follow his work ethic because he did everything the right way. He was always successful.”

“It was a rough process, and I didn’t know what to do for him,” his mother said. “He would rebel. It was very, very hard and he was very, very angry. He wasn’t the same kid, the way he spoke to me. The shock of losing his dad – there was so much anger.”

Even though Hernandez began hanging around with a crowd of rough young men in Bristol, he continued to shine on the football field. As a junior at Bristol Central High School, he set a state record with 1,799 receiving yards. In his senior year in 2006, he scored 17 touchdowns and was named first team tight end on USA Today Sports’ All-USA team.  

Prior to his father’s death, Hernandez planned to attend the University of Connecticut, the alma mater of both his father and brother. After his father’s death, he decided to attend the University of Florida in Gainesville.

He was still 17 and in his freshman year when he was arrested for a fistfight with a bar bouncer. Charged as a juvenile, he received “deferred prosecution” which allowed the charges to be dropped.

Hernandez kept up the athletic achievement in college. He was a star tight end for the Florida Gators. Coach Urban Meyer sensed that the gifted athlete was troubled so Meyer took Hernandez under his wing. Early each morning, Hernandez would visit Meyer’s office. The two read the Bible together. They met once at noon in February when Hernandez was especially upset. Meyer remembered how haunted Hernandez was by the irreplaceable loss of the father to whom he had been so close. “When your guy, your idol, your soul is taken from you, how do you deal with that?” Meyer asks. “I think there’s a part of his life that was not there. He needed discipline. He needed someone to talk to.”

Nevertheless, Hernandez was suspended for the opening game of the 2008 season as punishment for testing positive for marijuana.

A grateful Hernandez recalled about college coach Meyer, “He helped me through a lot of that stuff. I would have horrible days and he taught me to put things aside and work through it.”

His mother believed a corner had been turned when Hernandez was 20. “He’s my Aaron again,” she said. “Just now everything’s getting better and it took him three years. I thought I lost him for good. He wasn’t the same kid. Now he’s back, the same fun loving Aaron.” With Tim Tebow at quarterback, Florida won the national championship in 2008. In the title game against Oklahoma, Hernandez caught five passes for 57 yards in the Gators’ 24-14 win. In 2009, Hernandez’s junior year, he caught 68 passes and won the Mackey Award as college’s football’s top tight end. He then declared for the 2010 NFL draft.

In 2010, Hernandez was selected in the fourth round of NFL draft, rather than the first, due to concerns about his marijuana use and character. The Boston Globe reported that Hernandez had failed multiple drug tests, maybe as many as six, while at the University of Florida.

In a July 3, 2013 article for WSJ.com, Jonathan Clegg reports, “Shortly before the 2012 NFL draft, a scouting service that prepares confidential psychological profiles of players for NFL teams found that Aaron Hernandez enjoyed ‘living on the edge of acceptable behavior’ and cautioned that he could become ‘a problem’ for his team.” Clegg elaborates that, on a personality test, Hernandez “received the lowest possible score, 1 out of 10, in the category of ‘social maturity.’”

The official NFL profile page praised Hernandez as “a savvy pass catcher with outstanding athleticism.” It elaborated, “He has natural hand-eye coordination and consistently reaches out to pluck the ball.” It also remarked, “Hernandez has impressive speed and athleticism” and that he possesses “very natural ball skills, catches away from his body, can bring in off-target throws and can go up for the jump ball.”

In his first year as a pro with the Patriots, Hernandez started out as the youngest active player in the NFL. He became Rookie of the Week during the season’s 15^th week. D.J. Hernandez commented, “He would have made his father proud.”

Aaron Hernandez’s love and respect for his dead father was reflected in the tattoos on both of his muscular arms. One of his father’s favorite sayings is on his left forearm: If it is to be, it is up to me. Another fatherly quote on the tight end’s arm is: The difference between the impossible and the possible lies on a person’s determination.

In 2012, the Patriots offered Hernandez a long-term contract extension that would pay him and additional $40 million through 2018. It included a $12.5 million signing bonus – the highest ever for a tight end. At a news conference announcing the offer, Hernandez wept with joy and gratitude. He immediately donated $50,000 to the Myra Kraft Foundation, a charity founded to honor the late wife of Patriots owner Robert Kraft. Myra Kraft died of cancer in 2011.

That contract, but not the signing bonus, was reduced to dust when the Patriots released Hernandez after his arrest.

Bibliography

“Aaron Hernandez Sued – NFL Star SHOT ME in the Face.” TMZ. http://www.tmz.com/2013/06/19/aaron-hernandez-new-england-patriots-lawsu....

“A Timeline of The Bizarre and Fast-Moving Aaron Hernandez Murder Case.” http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjkiebus/a-timeline-of-the-bizarre-and-fast-moving-aaron-hernandez-mu.

“Aaron Hernandez deal worth up to $40 million.” The Boston Globe. August 27, 2013.

“Bill Reynolds: Browns D.J. Hernandez serves as role model for Pats Aaron.” The Providence Journal. October 22, 2011.

“Boston police search Aaron Hernandez home.” CBSNews.com. June 28, 2013.

Buteau, Walt and Raia, Chris. “Report: Pats’ Hernandez shot man in eye back in February.” WPRI.com. June 21, 2013.

Clegg, Jonathan. “Aaron Hernandez: An Early Warning in 2010 NFL Draft Profile.” WSJ.com. July 3, 2013.

Florio, Mike. “Shooting someone in the face.” NBCSports.com. June 19, 2013.

Jones, Lindsay H. “Aaron Hernandez’s past troubles come into focus.” USA Today. June 24, 2013.

Jones, Lindsay H. “Aaron Hernandez, star legal team face long road ahead.” USA Today. June 27, 2013.

Jones, Lindsay H. “Patriots release Aaron Hernandez, take salary-cap hit.” USA Today. June 26, 2013.

Manahan, Kevin. “Aaron Hernandez charged with murder.” USA Today. June 27, 2013.

National Football League: NFL Draft 2012 – Aaron Hernandez.”

McIntyre, Brian. “Report: Police believe Aaron Hernandez destroyed surveillance system, cellphone.” Yahoo! Sports.

Price, Greg. “NFL Player Charged With Murder: Who Is Suspect Aaron Hernandez? Former New England Patriot Appears In Court, Pleads Not Guilty.” IBTimes.com. June 26, 2013.

Shoichet, Catherine E.; Levitt, Ross; and Castillo, Mariano. “Police are back at Hernandez home.” CNN.com. June 27, 2013.

“Timeline: Aaron Hernandez investigation.” The Associated Press. June 26, 2013.

Whiteside, Kelly. “Florida tight end Hernandez honors father’s memory.” USA Today. 10/11/2009.

Aug. 1, 2013

After an 11-day bender, Bob Wood, the co-creator of the infamous comic book Crime Does Not Pay, admits to beating his girlfriend to death in a whisky and blood-drenched hotel room. This rampage was only one step in the artist’s downfall, and the story of Wood is one of the more lurid true tales in American pulp history.

by Benjamin Welton

I. Origin Story

Around the groves of academe, the trajectory of American literature seems fairly static and contingent upon the socio-political history of our nation. Thus, the transition from detective to criminal begins with the creation of Prohibition and its flexible muscle known as the Volstead Act. Since the ban on intoxicating drinks turned a majority of Americans into either criminals or at the very least citizens in contempt of the law, the writers of the day responded to the cultural mood by replacing the Sherlock Holmes-like figure – a scientific, detached, and somewhat wealthy amateur sleuth with genteel hobbies – with that of the Continental Op, Dashiell Hammett’s short, stocky, and violent private eye who breaks as many bones as he does rules.

Also, according to the same historicist schema of American letters, the Continental Op and Raymond Chandler’s slightly more refined Philip Marlowe (he plays chess and is named after an Elizabethan era playwright, after all) act as transition figures who, while still wielding badges, or rather Photostats proving their right to poke their noses into rotten cases, point towards a darker era in American popular fiction. This particular era comes after the conclusion of the World War II, the great conflagration that engulfed entire civilizations into teeming pools of vengeance mania and genocidal unthinking. From 1945 until the late 1950s, American fiction and film became dominated by noir, a tough-talking sentimentality about history-haunted men and the femme fatales who were after their throats. Rarely does noir embrace the traditional detective figure, and when detectives do appear, they are less like Holmes and more like Inspector Donnelly, the lead investigator in Rudolph Maté’s Union Station, who tells his men to “Make it look accidental.”

There are three major problems with this linear understanding of American literature: 1) It cancels out the police procedural sub-genre which was concurrent with and arguably more popular than noir; 2) it neglects the detective novels of Mickey Spillane, one of the most widely read writers of the day who penned virulently anti-Communist and anti-criminal detective novels that argued for a reactionary and vigilante understanding of justice, and; 3) it completely overlooks the contribution made by comic books during this time period. Besides forgetting the fact that both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway had used criminals as protagonists in the 1920s (The Great Gatsby for the former, and “The Killers” in the case of the latter), the undervaluing of comic books is a truly egregious crime.

In particular, one comic book title not only stood out on the 10-cent shelves of 1940s and 1950s drug stores, but it’s proto-splatter punk ethos would help to pave the way for America’s further descent into exploitative culture. Crime Does Not Pay, a true crime comic book that began in 1942, gleefully filled its pages with the lurid tales of gangland thugs, psychotic juvenile delinquents, and a whole host of other anti-socialites. As America’s first comic book dedicated to presenting real cases of criminality, Crime Does Not Pay updated the older police gazette model, which had shocked readers in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, for a postwar audience that had experienced firsthand the horrors of combat in such places as Bastogne and Iwo Jima. As such, by the time that Dr. Frederic Wertham began publicizing his book The Seduction of the Innocent (1954), a sociological and psychiatric study that reported to find a link between comic books and juvenile delinquency, Crime Does Not Pay was on the top of the list of main offenders for its graphic depictions of violence and its often frank references to adult sexuality.

Much like the violent video games of today, Crime Does Not Pay and its comic book brethren came under intense political scrutiny, especially by presidential hopeful Estes Kefauver, a Democrat representing the socially conservative state of Tennessee. In 1953, Kefauver led the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency and had Dr. Wertham as a witness and as an apostle in the holy crusade against juvenile delinquency, one of the great fears of the immediate postwar years. Against these supposed pillars of law and order stood the comic book industry with its motley assortment of former conmen, perennial losers, Leftists, and Jews. These artists, writers, and publishers were the men responsible for such titles as The Vault of Horror, Tales From the Crypt, and, of course, Crime Does Not Pay.

In the case of Crime Does Not Pay, the three men responsible were Lev Gleason, a New York native and a publisher with a reputation as a dedicated Leftist, Charles Biro, the main writer and a relatively experienced scribbler known mostly for his superhero comics, and Bob Wood, an artist with a gift for creating action-packed scenes and a harmful addiction to liquor and gambling. These three men formed the triumvirate at the heart of Crime Does Not Pay, and despite their outcast status in polite society, only one of them could speak of transgressive behavior with any semblance of confidence.

II. Crime Pays

In the beginning, Biro and Wood were two struggling creators trying desperately to come up with something new in the nascent world of American comic books. By the early 1940s, the superhero craze was beginning to wane, thus opening the way for other types and genres to filter into the colorful pulp pages of the many comic book publications of the day. According to Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey’s The Comic Book History of Comics (2012), the idea of creating a true crime series came to Biro after a stranger offered him the chance to spend a night with a woman in his hotel room. The one stipulation of this offer was that the strange man would be allowed to watch. Biro ultimately said no, and later found out that the man, who was the heir to a margarine fortune, had been keeping the woman as a sex prisoner.

This brief encounter with debauchery deeply affected Biro, and he and Wood decided to create a comic book title that would deal with the depravity of such men. They combined this with a title taken from a 1930s documentary film series that profiled criminals, their deeds, and the abilities of G-men in finding and capturing them. While the documentary shorts strove for a glorification of law and order against the backdrop of Grand Guignol-esque crime, Crime Does Not Pay tacitly offered morality lessons, all the while relentlessly devoting pages of red ink to their amoral protagonists.

Readers apparently appreciated Biro and Wood’s rejection of didacticism, for Crime Does Not Pay flew off the shelves at previously unheard of rates. This popularity inspired imitators, and before long true crime was widely recognized as an economically viable comic book genre.

With visibility comes opportunity hunters with their eyes set on shooting down what they perceive as a social menace. Crime Does Not Pay was targeted by Kefauver, Wertham, and others, and beginning in the late 1940s, Crimes Does Not Pay began the process of forced sanitization. First, the mayor of Chicago, Martin Kennelly, a reformist-minded Democrat who represented the Irish working-class communities of the South Side, banned the circulation of Crime Does Not Pay within the city in 1947. As was feared by many in the press and in public offices, reports of salacious copycat crimes began filling newspapers across the country, thus helping to bolster the rising tide of anti-comic book attitudes throughout most American cities. This wasn’t just confined to the United States. either; Canada banned Crime Does Not Pay outright in 1949 (technically and legally speaking, crime comics are still banned in Canada).

More censorship restraints were put on Crime Does Not Pay throughout the 1950s, and despite Lev Gleason’s backtracking and increased focus on the disclaimers, Crime Does Not Pay, as well as many of other comic book titles, were forced to submit to an internal censorship organ known as the Comics Code Authority. Because Kefauver, Wertham, and other crusaders for American children had placed comic books in the harsh light of the public forum, the Comics Code Authority immediately tried to save the comic book industry by cleaning comics of true crime titles and horror titles. This bleaching helped to denude comics of their previous gritty glamor, and the reemergence of family-friendly superheroes helped to imprison comics in the ghetto of “kid’s stuff” until the British-led experiments in postmodern storytelling in the 1980s. When people speak of pre-code comics, it tends to have the same tantalizing mystique of the pre-code films of Hollywood.

Like a lot comic titles during this time, Crime Does Not Pay could not survive or thrive under this new atmosphere. When the series finally folded in 1955, Gleason, Biro, and Wood were suddenly put adrift in a society that no longer viewed them as economically viable or personally reputable. Gleason and his publishing house folded in 1956, leaving the man behind crime comics out-of-work. Biro would leave the comic book industry, too, but his career ended up on the more successful side. The tall, handsome New Yorker found work in the burgeoning medium of television as a graphic artist, eventually working for NBC. Biro was formally inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2002, his legacy firmly etched into the medium’s so-called “Golden Age.”

Biro’s partner Wood was noticeably less successful after the collapse of Crime Does Not Pay. Wood descended further into alcoholism after assignments started drying up.  From 1956 until his arrest 1958, Wood’s main source of income was drawing for sleazy, soft-core pornographic comics that often blended sex and violence with depictions of recreational drug use and junkie addicts. This was a world that Wood came to know well in the late ‘50s, and on August 27, 1958, the true scale of Wood’s descent became public knowledge.

III. The Final Page

In his masterful The Comic Book Makers (2007), comic book royalty Joe and Jim Simon describe the events surrounding Bob Wood as closely as did the New York Daily News almost 50 years before. According to testimony, a cab driver named Paul Feingold picked up a disheveled and obviously agitated Wood in New York’s swank Gramercy Park neighborhood. Wood helped himself into the back seat and told the driver: “I’m in terrible trouble; I’m going to get a couple of hours of sleep and jump in the river.” In an offhand way Feingold asked Wood if he’d killed anybody, and the former purveyor of uniquely American pulp replied: “Yes, I killed a woman who was giving me a bad time in Room 91 of the Irving Hotel. Why don’t you call someone at a newspaper and make yourself a few dollars.”

New York cab drivers are a hardened lot, and they usually treat such declarations with a modicum of disbelief. But there was something in Wood’s manner that convinced Feingold of his honesty. After dropping Wood off in Greenwich Village at the Regina Hotel, Feingold located a police officer operating out of the East 22nd Street Station. Then, Feingold and the officer questioned the manager of the Regina only to find out that Wood had signed under the false name of Roger Turner. The manager recalled how violently Wood’s hands had shook, and when the police found bloodied clothing in Wood/Turner’s room in the Regina, they no longer doubted the former comic book artist’s tale.

When they entered Room 91 of the Irving Hotel, they found not only a small army of empty whiskey bottles, but they also the battered body of a woman in a blood-drenched negligee. As Wood revealed more of his story, it was discovered that he and the woman, a divorcee who seemed to share Wood’s passion for amber-encased spirits, had spent an 11-day bender together at the Irving. The couple spent most of their time drinking, making love, and, fatefully, arguing. It was one such argument that led Wood to beat the woman to death with an electronic iron, a gruesome murder that would have fitted in nicely with any one of Wood’s illustrations for Crime Does Not Pay. This crime not only added a chilling new wrinkle to the often misogynist images of Biro and Wood’s defunct publication, but it also highlighted how sordid Bob Wood’s world actually was. Wood, a man known amongst comic book industry types for being a little reserved, now exposed his vices for tabloid fodder.

Incredibly, after pleading guilty, Wood was only charged with first-degree manslaughter. The presiding judge blamed alcohol for Wood’s crime, and thus spared the fallen artist from a life sentence. Unfortunately, this good luck would run out. After serving three years in prison, Wood’s murdered body was found on the New Jersey Turnpike the year after his release.

The cause of Wood’s death was due to Wood’s inability to pay back his former acquaintances in Sing-Sing, acquaintances who wanted Wood to pay up on his outstanding loans. Wood couldn’t deliver the dough, and wound up as road kill for all his trouble.

Thus ends the sad tale of Bob Wood. Now, especially since Dark Horse Comics has begun collecting and publishing old issues of Crime Does Not Pay as hardcover volumes, the title established all those many years ago by Biro and Wood has grown to become one of the most respected titles of the “Golden Age.” Modern day maestros of crime comics such as Brian Azzarello and Ed Brubaker openly acknowledge their debt to Crime Does Not Pay, but rarely do they mention the name Bob Wood. Partially because he wasn’t a great artist (a good one and a serviceable one, yes) and partially because he lived the same deviant lifestyle as his creations, both fictional and real, Wood is today only foggily recalled by comic book enthusiasts, and even when he is, it is usually only as a shocking set piece of geek trivia.

July 29, 2013

Aaron Hernandez

Back in 2010, the button-downed New England Patriots discounted the scouting reports that said Aaron Hernandez scored at the bottom of the “social maturity” scale. In 2012, still smitten, the Patriots added $40 million to his contract. On the day Hernandez was arrested for the gangland style murder of Odin Lloyd, the Patriots pre-empted the justice process and disowned him.

by Denise Noe

Not long after a jogger discovered a bullet-ridden corpse in an industrial park in North Attleborough, Massachusetts at about 5:30 p.m. on June 17, 2013, the often troubled life of New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, a handsome and athletically gifted young man who only a year before had been given a $40 million contract extension, began tumbling down.

The murder victim was 27-year-old Odin Lloyd, a semipro football player and a friend of Hernandez who had been dating the sister of Hernandez’s fiancée, Shayanna Jenkins. The secluded industrial park where the gangland style execution took place in the early morning hours, was a half mile from Hernandez’s luxurious home. Inside one of Llyod’s pockets were the keys to a Nissan Altima rental car that turned out to be registered to Hernandez. Lloyd’s sister, Olivia Thibou, told detectives she had been visiting her brother on June 16 and had seen him get into a Nissan. 

Five hours after Lloyd’s body had been found, police arrived at Hernandez house to notify him of Lloyd’s death and to ask about the Nissan he had apparently rented for his friend. According to court documents released on July 9 by the Attleboro District Court at the request of various media organizations, Hernandez immediately became defensive and asked, “What’s with all the questions?” When asked when he had last seen Lloyd, Hernandez said he had been “up this way” the night before and if they had other questions they would need to speak with his attorney. According the court records, Hernandez then went back inside, slamming and locking the door only to emerge minutes later to hand police his lawyer’s business card.

Police then informed Hernandez that “this is a death investigation,” information that did not cause Hernandez to inquire who had died, only to retreat back into his house and slam and lock the door again. In a written statement of the encounter with Hernandez at his house, the police report stated, “Mr. Hernandez’s demeanor did not indicate any concern for the death of any person.”

A Massachusetts Medical Examiner ruled Lloyd’s death a homicide on June 19. He had been shot five times with a .45 caliber pistol. The murder weapon has not been recovered. Police were able to pin the time of death down to between 3-3:30 a.m. A worker at the industrial park was taking his regular nightly break during that time period when he said he heard three gunshots and a car door slam.

After consulting with his attorney, Michael Fee, Hernandez agreed to be interviewed further at the police station the next day and to allow police to search his house without a search warrant.

In searching his house, police found that the home’s internal security system had been damaged. When they requested his cellphone, Hernandez’s attorney turned it over in pieces. It also became known that Hernandez had hired a house-cleaning service only hours before the jogger discovered Lloyd’s body. When the police told reporters the next day that they had not ruled Hernandez out as a suspect in Lloyd’s murder, news helicopters began shadowing the sure-handed, highly tattooed tight end.

The walls were closing in on the former college All-America and NFL All Pro.  

As a result of the cloud over their star receiver, the Patriots asked him to avoid the team’s facilities. On that same day, CytoSport, manufacturer of Muscle Milk and other supplements for athletes or aspiring athletes, announced it was terminating its endorsement contract with Hernandez.

With a search warrant this time, detectives with specially trained search dogs entered the Hernandez home on June 22. They gathered and left with big bags filled with possible evidence. They also removed a safe that contained a scale and a plate, items frequently used by drug dealers.

At 8:45 a.m. on June 26, officers arrested Hernandez outside his home. Handcuffed, the soon-to-be former Patriot was taken in a police cruiser to a station and booked. At 2:45 p.m., Hernandez was formally charged in court with first-degree murder. He was also charged with five counts of illegal possession of firearms.

On the day of his arrest, but before any formal charges had been filed, the Patriots released him. In a news release the Patriots stated, “A young man was murdered last week, and we extend our sympathies to the family and friends who mourn his loss. Words cannot express the disappointment we feel knowing that one of our players was arrested as a result of this investigation. We realize that law enforcement investigations into this matter are ongoing. We support their efforts and respect the process. At this time, we believe this transaction is simply the right thing to do.”

The Patriots, an organization that prides itself on being more than just a cut above other National Football League franchises in terms of class and character, does not apparently subscribe to the notion that someone is innocent until proven guilty. It underscored this sentiment by taking the unprecedented step of offering to allow any fan who had purchased Hernandez’s jersey to redeem it for another Patriot jersey. During the weekend the offer was good, hundreds of fans lined up to rid themselves of jersey No. 81. 

The Arraignment

At Hernandez’s arraignment the afternoon of his arrest, with various national cable stations streaming the proceedings, Bristol County Assistant D.A. William McCauley told the district court that investigators had viewed surveillance camera videos that tracked Hernandez from his home in North Attleborough to Boston and back. They had also traced cellphone pings and text messages that provided a tight timeline that directly linked Hernandez to Lloyd’s murder. In addition, McCauley said there was evidence left in the Nissan rental car and collected in two searches of Hernandez’s house and surrounding areas that placed Hernandez with Lloyd for roughly an hour the morning he was killed, “right up to the minute Lloyd was executed.”

As McCauley presented the evidence against him in a packed courtroom, Hernandez, handcuffed, stood expressionless in a white t-shirt, his heavily tattooed arms visible. McCauley told District Court Judge Daniel J. O’Shea that Hernandez “drove the victim to that remote spot, and then he orchestrated” the murder.

McCauley said that Hernandez had texted two other men that night who were also involved in the murder. McCauley said their names had not yet been released. The prosecutor’s office had protected them from public identification by persuading a judge to impound records and McCauley did not say whether or not they would be charged. McCauley did not specify who actually pulled the trigger. However, the criminal complaint alleges that Hernandez “did assault and beat” Lloyd “with intent to murder such person, and by assault and beating did kill and murder such person.”

The prosecutor stated that the plot to murder might have started on June 14 when Lloyd and Hernandez visited a Boston nightclub. McCauley said Hernandez decided to murder his friend when he saw Lloyd talking with people Hernandez “had troubles with.” McCauley did not elaborate about what those “troubles” were and why merely conversing with those people would lead Hernandez to decide to kill Lloyd.

McCauley asserted that on June 16, Hernandez texted the other two men who met up with Hernandez. The three drove to Lloyd’s home and picked him up in front of his visiting sister, Olivia Thibou.

McCauley suggested Lloyd might have feared something ominous was in store judging from texts he sent his sister just before he got into the car with the trio. Lloyd text messaged his sister, “Did you see who I left with?” Thibou asked, “Who?” Lloyd texted, “NFL. Just so you know.”

According to McCauley, detectives tracked the rental car’s movements to a gas station, to Lloyd’s house, and then to the empty lot in the industrial park where Lloyd was slain. At the gas station, Hernandez purchased gum and that gum was found in the car. Forty-five caliber shell casings were also discovered in that vehicle. The prosecutor claimed that surveillance videos in the industrial park show the four men arriving in the rented Nissan. McCauley said night workers in the vicinity recall hearing gunshots between 3:23 a.m. and 3:27 a.m.

McCauley said surveillance video at Hernandez’s home shows him going through the house with a gun in his hand. When McCauley related this, Lloyd’s mother started weeping. Someone helped her out of the courtroom. Hernandez’s fiancée, with whom he has a 7-month-old daughter, also started crying and exited the courtroom. McCauley continued that surveillance footage from the six to eight hours after the murder was missing from Hernandez’s home security system and that the two weapons seen on the video have not been recovered.

Hernandez pled not guilty to all charges. Massachusetts has no death penalty. The maximum penalty for first-degree murder is life without possibility of parole.

Judge Daniel J. O’Shea ordered Hernandez held without bail. It could be months, perhaps more than a year, before Hernandez comes to trial. As of this writing, Hernandez’s next court date in connection with the Lloyd murder is a probable cause hearing scheduled for August 22, 2013.

Following the arraignment, Michael Fee, Hernandez’s attorney, described the prosecution case as “circumstantial” and “not strong.” Reporting for USA Today, Lindsay H. Jones wrote, “Hernandez is also represented by James Sultan and his partner Charles Rankin, who have a long track record of serving as defense attorneys in high-profile cases and for famous clients.” Rankin said Hernandez would be "exonerated" on the murder charge when he finally gets a chance to answer the accussations and that "a jury of his peers will find that he's not guilty and had no part in the killing of Odin Lloyd."

On June 27, 2013, a new hearing was held for Hernandez on the bail issue. Attorney James Sulton argued that Hernandez is a professional with a stable home life and should not be regarded as a flight risk. Sulton asserted, “Mr. Hernandez is not just a football player but is one of the best football players in the United States of America.” Sulton suggested house arrest and an electronic monitoring bracelet as possibilities.

Superior Court Judge Renee Dupuis denied bail. She observed, “He also has the means to flee and a bracelet just wouldn’t keep him here nor would $250,000.”

The Arrest of Ortiz and Wallace

From two sets of court documents obtained – one set by the Associated Press and the other by USA Today – in early July, the two men Hernandez summoned by text to accompany him to Llyod’s house in Boston the night of June 16 were Carlos Ortiz, 27, and Ernest Wallace, 41, friends of his from his hometown of Bristol, Connecticut. The documents reveal that surveillance video shows three men, who appear to be Hernandez, Wallace and Ortiz, leaving Hernandez’s home in a silver Nissan Altima at about 1:09 a.m. on June 17. The car is seen returning to Hernandez’s home at 3:26 a.m. with Hernandez at the wheel. Surveillance video from a camera at a home across the street from Lloyd’s house on Fayston Street in Boston show Lloyd getting into a silver Nissan at 2:33 a.m.

On June 26, 2013, Carlos Ortiz was arrested as a fugitive from justice; he was extradited from Connecticut to Massachusetts and he agreed to be held without bail on a gun charge.Wallace, of Miramar, Florida, was arraigned in North Attleboro District Court on July 8 and charged with being an accessory to murder after the fact in Lloyd’s case. His bond was set at $500,000.

In the court documents obtained by the AP, Ortiz told police that after the three of them picked up Lloyd at his home, they drove toward Hernandez’s home in North Attleborough, stopping at an industrial park not far from Hernandez’s home where Lloyd, Wallace and Hernandez got out of the car to urinate. As he sat in the car, Ortiz said he heard gunshots; not long after that Wallace and Hernandez got back in the car and sped away.

Ortiz also informed police that it was too dark for him to see who fired the shots but that Wallace later told him Hernandez fired the shots that killed Lloyd. He said that when they returned to Hernandez’s home, Wallace asked him to get a gun from under the driver’s seat. Ortiz said he handed the gun to Hernandez once they were inside the house. After spending the night at Hernandez’s house, Ortiz said he and Wallace accompanied Hernandez to return the Nissan. Hernandez rented a Chrysler to replace it. Ortiz and Wallace then went to the apartment that Hernandez and other football players used as a “flop house.” On their way back to Bristol later that day is when Wallace told him Hernandez had been the one to shoot Lloyd, Ortiz told the police.

It was Ortiz’s trip to the apartment in Franklin that led police to his door. While there his cellphone slipped between sofa cushions and was found while police were executing a warrant to search the apartment.

While searching the Franklin apartment, police also found several boxes of ammunition. Out in the parking lot, in a Hummer registered to Hernandez, police said they found a loaded .45 caliber Glock magazine in the console.

In addition, the court documents state that Massachusetts State Police ballistic experts determined that the five .45 caliber casings found near Lloyd’s body and the casings found in the Nissan rented by Hernandez were fired from the same handgun.

The release of such detailed court records casts an usually full light on the state’s case against Hernandez in the murder of Odin Lloyd. Normally, such detail would not be provided until a probable cause hearing and even then only in outline form. As the damning information in the court records circulates – particularly Ortiz’s account of Hernandez being the shooter of Lloyd – the chances of Hernandez getting a fair trial are under assault. The potential jury pool is being provided information that in every way points to Hernandez’s guilt before the jury is even empanelled. And as a national figure, the negative information about his guilt is being disseminated throughout the United States.

The University of Florida’s action toward Hernandez – like those of the New England Patriots – are indicative of the extreme bias Hernandez is up against as he sits in a segregated cell without the possibility of equal access to the media to tell his side of the story. On July 25, a spokesperson for the university announced a plan to excise any acknowledgement of Hernandez on the Gainesville campus. A statement issued by the university read, “We put together an immediate plan after the initial news broke to remove his [Hernandez’s] likeness and name in various private and public areas in the facility, such as the south end zone team area, locker room, football offices, Heavener Complex Kornblau Lobby and the brick display entrance to the football facility.” The brick display honors Florida players who won All-America awards.

Other Murders May Be Linked to Hernandez

In the immediate aftermath of news about Hernandez’s alleged role in Lloyd’s death, two other shooting incidents that might be tied to Hernandez surfaced.

Police are investigating Hernandez’s possible involvement in an unsolved July 2012 Boston double homicide. CNN.com reported that a source stated, “The Boston Police Department has located and impounded a silver SUV with Rhode Island registration that police have been trying to find for almost a year, which is linked to the scene of the double homicide.”

The source indicated that detectives believe Hernandez was renting that SUV at the time of the double homicide.

A CBS News article gives more specifics about the unsolved Boston crimes, stating, “The double homicide occurred in the early morning hours of July 16, 2012, in Boston’s South End. Daniel Jorge Correia de Abreu, 29, and Safiro Teixeira Furtado, 28, two Cape Verdean immigrants who lived in Dorchester, were killed when someone fired at the BMW they were in. A third person was wounded. At the time, police said there were two other people in the vehicle, but both ran off before officers arrived.”

Sources indicate it is possible the Boston homicides are linked to the Lloyd slaying because Lloyd – who also lived in Dorchester – may have had information about Hernandez’s possible involvement in the previous case. A law enforcement official told the BostonGlobe:“The case against Hernandez is strengthening” in the unsolved double-homicide matter. A grand jury is investigating Hernandez’s possible involvement in the double-homicide.

Another Shooting Brings a Civil Suit against Hernandez

In addition, Hernandez may face a lawsuit in a shooting case believed to be unrelated to either of the aforementioned murder cases. Four days before Lloyd’s death, a Connecticut man, Alexander S. Bradley, 30, filed a civil lawsuit in Florida contending that Hernandez shot him in the face in February 2013 while the two were in a vehicle after a night of partying at a Miami strip club called Tootsie’s Cabaret. Bradley’s attorneys say the bullet hit him in the arm and traveled until it struck his face and blew out an eyeball. The lawsuit seeks more than $100,000 in damages. The lawsuit was dismissed because paperwork was incorrectly filed. One of Bradley’s attorneys, David Jaroslawicz, states he does not “know why” no criminal charges were filed in the case but asserts that the civil lawsuit will be re-filed.

Police reports show that Bradley was found bleeding outside a John Deere store in Riviera Beach, Florida on the morning of February 13, 2013. The store’s manager said Bradley asked him to call 911, begging, “Tell them to hurry! I’m gonna bleed out.” The manager asked Bradley who shot him and the wounded man replied, “I’m done talking – it hurts too bad.”

Emergency responders found that Bradley was “rude” and refused to cooperate in describing how he had been wounded. Police say Bradley did not name the shooter or shooters but described “both Hispanic and black males” as having been part of the attack.

Hernandez’s Background

The brutal murder of Odin Lloyd and Hernandez’s possible involvement in it inevitably focused media attention on Hernandez’s background. He was born on November 6, 1989. His father, Dennis, was of Puerto Rican heritage; his mother, Terri, of Italian ethnicity. Aaron showed athletic promise early. By the eighth grade he was able to dunk a basketball.  

Aaron apparently inherited his considerable athletic talent from his father. USA Today reports, “As a prep star in Bristol, Conn., in the 1970s, Dennis Hernandez was nicknamed ‘The King.’ Generous and gregarious, he seemingly touched everyone he met.” Hernandez’s mother told USA Today that watching “his sons play sports was Dennis’s greatest joy.”

The major trauma of Hernandez’s youth occurred when his father died unexpectedly following routine hernia surgery. Aaron, then 16, had been especially close to his father and was devastated. His brother D.J, who is three years older, recalled Aaron’s grief when their father died: “It was tough. It was difficult for him.” He also said of Aaron, “He was just lost.”

D. J., who attended the University of Connecticut and starred on the football team as a quarterback and wide receiver, tried to become a surrogate father to Aaron. Aaron recalled, “I just followed my brother’s footsteps. I just tried to follow his work ethic because he did everything the right way. He was always successful.”

“It was a rough process, and I didn’t know what to do for him,” his mother said. “He would rebel. It was very, very hard and he was very, very angry. He wasn’t the same kid, the way he spoke to me. The shock of losing his dad – there was so much anger.”

Even though Hernandez began hanging around with a crowd of rough young men in Bristol, he continued to shine on the football field. As a junior at Bristol Central High School, he set a state record with 1,799 receiving yards. In his senior year in 2006, he scored 17 touchdowns and was named first team tight end on USA Today Sports’ All-USA team.  

Prior to his father’s death, Hernandez planned to attend the University of Connecticut, the alma mater of both his father and brother. After his father’s death, he decided to attend the University of Florida in Gainesville.

He was still 17 and in his freshman year when he was arrested for a fistfight with a bar bouncer. Charged as a juvenile, he received “deferred prosecution” which allowed the charges to be dropped.

Hernandez kept up the athletic achievement in college. He was a star tight end for the Florida Gators. Coach Urban Meyer sensed that the gifted athlete was troubled so Meyer took Hernandez under his wing. Early each morning, Hernandez would visit Meyer’s office. The two read the Bible together. They met once at noon in February when Hernandez was especially upset. Meyer remembered how haunted Hernandez was by the irreplaceable loss of the father to whom he had been so close. “When your guy, your idol, your soul is taken from you, how do you deal with that?” Meyer asks. “I think there’s a part of his life that was not there. He needed discipline. He needed someone to talk to.”

Nevertheless, Hernandez was suspended for the opening game of the 2008 season as punishment for testing positive for marijuana.

A grateful Hernandez recalled about college coach Meyer, “He helped me through a lot of that stuff. I would have horrible days and he taught me to put things aside and work through it.”

His mother believed a corner had been turned when Hernandez was 20. “He’s my Aaron again,” she said. “Just now everything’s getting better and it took him three years. I thought I lost him for good. He wasn’t the same kid. Now he’s back, the same fun loving Aaron.” With Tim Tebow at quarterback, Florida won the national championship in 2008. In the title game against Oklahoma, Hernandez caught five passes for 57 yards in the Gators’ 24-14 win. In 2009, Hernandez’s junior year, he caught 68 passes and won the Mackey Award as college’s football’s top tight end. He then declared for the 2010 NFL draft.

In 2010, Hernandez was selected in the fourth round of NFL draft, rather than the first, due to concerns about his marijuana use and character. The Boston Globe reported that Hernandez had failed multiple drug tests, maybe as many as six, while at the University of Florida.

In a July 3, 2013 article for WSJ.com, Jonathan Clegg reports, “Shortly before the 2012 NFL draft, a scouting service that prepares confidential psychological profiles of players for NFL teams found that Aaron Hernandez enjoyed ‘living on the edge of acceptable behavior’ and cautioned that he could become ‘a problem’ for his team.” Clegg elaborates that, on a personality test, Hernandez “received the lowest possible score, 1 out of 10, in the category of ‘social maturity.’”

The official NFL profile page praised Hernandez as “a savvy pass catcher with outstanding athleticism.” It elaborated, “He has natural hand-eye coordination and consistently reaches out to pluck the ball.” It also remarked, “Hernandez has impressive speed and athleticism” and that he possesses “very natural ball skills, catches away from his body, can bring in off-target throws and can go up for the jump ball.”

In his first year as a pro with the Patriots, Hernandez started out as the youngest active player in the NFL. He became Rookie of the Week during the season’s 15^th week. D.J. Hernandez commented, “He would have made his father proud.”

Aaron Hernandez’s love and respect for his dead father was reflected in the tattoos on both of his muscular arms. One of his father’s favorite sayings is on his left forearm: If it is to be, it is up to me. Another fatherly quote on the tight end’s arm is: The difference between the impossible and the possible lies on a person’s determination.

In 2012, the Patriots offered Hernandez a long-term contract extension that would pay him and additional $40 million through 2018. It included a $12.5 million signing bonus – the highest ever for a tight end. At a news conference announcing the offer, Hernandez wept with joy and gratitude. He immediately donated $50,000 to the Myra Kraft Foundation, a charity founded to honor the late wife of Patriots owner Robert Kraft. Myra Kraft died of cancer in 2011.

That contract, but not the signing bonus, was reduced to dust when the Patriots released Hernandez after his arrest.

Bibliography

“Aaron Hernandez Sued – NFL Star SHOT ME in the Face.” TMZ. http://www.tmz.com/2013/06/19/aaron-hernandez-new-england-patriots-lawsu....

“A Timeline of The Bizarre and Fast-Moving Aaron Hernandez Murder Case.” http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjkiebus/a-timeline-of-the-bizarre-and-fast-moving-aaron-hernandez-mu.

“Aaron Hernandez deal worth up to $40 million.” The Boston Globe. August 27, 2013.

“Bill Reynolds: Browns D.J. Hernandez serves as role model for Pats Aaron.” The Providence Journal. October 22, 2011.

“Boston police search Aaron Hernandez home.” CBSNews.com. June 28, 2013.

Buteau, Walt and Raia, Chris. “Report: Pats’ Hernandez shot man in eye back in February.” WPRI.com. June 21, 2013.

Clegg, Jonathan. “Aaron Hernandez: An Early Warning in 2010 NFL Draft Profile.” WSJ.com. July 3, 2013.

Florio, Mike. “Shooting someone in the face.” NBCSports.com. June 19, 2013.

Jones, Lindsay H. “Aaron Hernandez’s past troubles come into focus.” USA Today. June 24, 2013.

Jones, Lindsay H. “Aaron Hernandez, star legal team face long road ahead.” USA Today. June 27, 2013.

Jones, Lindsay H. “Patriots release Aaron Hernandez, take salary-cap hit.” USA Today. June 26, 2013.

Manahan, Kevin. “Aaron Hernandez charged with murder.” USA Today. June 27, 2013.

National Football League: NFL Draft 2012 – Aaron Hernandez.”

McIntyre, Brian. “Report: Police believe Aaron Hernandez destroyed surveillance system, cellphone.” Yahoo! Sports.

Price, Greg. “NFL Player Charged With Murder: Who Is Suspect Aaron Hernandez? Former New England Patriot Appears In Court, Pleads Not Guilty.” IBTimes.com. June 26, 2013.

Shoichet, Catherine E.; Levitt, Ross; and Castillo, Mariano. “Police are back at Hernandez home.” CNN.com. June 27, 2013.

“Timeline: Aaron Hernandez investigation.” The Associated Press. June 26, 2013.

Whiteside, Kelly. “Florida tight end Hernandez honors father’s memory.” USA Today. 10/11/2009.

 Aug. 19, 2013

William Rouse

In an affluent suburban Chicago mansion, 15-year-old Billy Rouse murdered his mother and father in their master bedroom. Fifteen years later, after squandering his $1 million inheritance, he was convicted of their murders.

by Marie Kusters-McCarthy

The Rouse family had long, established roots in Libertyville, Illinois, an affluent suburb of Chicago. Bruce Rouse, 44, often spoke of his family that had settled in the area in the 1880s and were prominent in business and social circles.

In 1957, at the age of 21, Bruce inherited his father’s gas station and within a few years had acquired a chain of gas stations, had invested in real estate, a Ready-Mix-concrete business and a partnership in a cable television station. He met and fell in love with Darlene and they were married after she graduated from High School in 1959. Almost immediately Darlene became pregnant and gave birth to her first son, Kurt, when she was just 18. Within a few years two more children followed, daughter Robin and another son, William, called Billy.

Bruce Rouse

With the success of Bruce’s business, the family moved to a 13-room mansionand it seemed they were living the “American Dream.” However, financial success came at a very high price and meant Bruce was spending more and more time away from home. Darlene struggled to raise three children almost single-handedly and by the time the boys reached their teens they were drinking, using drugs and had meagre respect for authority at home or at school.

By 1980 both boys were extremely troublesome but it was 15-year-old Billy who seemed the more disturbed. He had frequent outbursts of rage, was expelled from school after going on a vandalism spree and setting off the school fire alarm. His use of alcohol and drugs escalated. Twenty-year-old Kurt was also causing havoc in the Rouse household, was barred from the main house and went to live in separate guest quarters at the rear of the residence.

Darlene Rouse

On June 5, 1980 Bruce left for work bringing Billy with him to help in theinstallation of a car spray painting booth at one of the gas stations. That eveningBruce went to a Rotary Club meeting and Billy returned home where he proceeded todrink and use hashish.

Darlene had spent the evening with friends for dinner and playing bridge. When she got home she got into an altercation with Billy about his alcohol and drug useand threatened to send him to a military school. When Bruce arrived home, aswas his usual behavior, he chose not to become involved in the argument. Kurt was in the guest quarters with a girlfriend and Robin was in her bedroom. The home settled down for the night.

Murder

The next morning, at 8:30 a.m. Robin was surprised that her father was not up and ready to leave for work as usual. She went to her parents’ bedroom and was horrified to find them, lifeless, under a bed sheet. It was a ghastly scene: the top of Darlene’s head had been shot off and Bruce’s lower jaw was shattered. A hysterical Robin called 911 and then rushed to wake her brother, Billy. Within minutes police arrived at the home and were met by Robin and Billy. They went to the rear of the home to wake Kurt.

All three children told detectives that they had heard nothing during the night as there had been a thunder storm which must have muffled the gunshots. The police were immediately suspicious of the siblings. In distress, Robin told a detective that one of her brothers was responsible. She didn’t say which one.

The crime scene was horrific. The killer had entered the master bedroom and shotDarlene with a 16-gauge shotgun, killing her instantly. Bruce was then shot in the lower face at point blank range. Apparently, as he was still showing signs of life, the killer then bashed his head with the butt of the gun and finished by stabbing him through the heart with a kitchen knife. The shotgun and knife were never recovered.

Detectives had very strong opinions that one of the children, or all three, wereinvolved but were unable to produce enough evidence to bring charges. Wealthyrelatives formed a protective cordon of lawyers around the children and all threerefused to appear before a grand jury or attend the coroner’s inquest. The motivecould most certainly have been financial as, between Darlene and Bruce, there wereassets of around $2 million. However, without concrete evidence, or aconfession, the police were unable to link the crime to any of the children

The Children Move On

Kurt, Robin and Billy split up and went to live with relatives in different states. In1983 tragedy struck once again when 20-year-old Robin was killed in an unrelated car accident.

The boys inherited their parent’s estate. Kurt married and moved to California. Billy went to live in Key West, Florida, where he continued his drug use, squandered his share of the estate, married, divorced and was almost homeless. He had spent six months in jail in Florida for his involvement in a stabbing and in October 1995 was again arrested on suspicion of attempted bank robbery.

The police, in Florida, aware of Billy’s background and the suspicion surroundingthe deaths of his parents, notified the police in Lake County of his arrest. Detectivesimmediately flew to Florida to question Billy in the faint hope that he would beremorseful and finally talk about his parents’ murders. They videotaped the interviewand were both shocked and pleased when Billy described, in brutal detail, the murderof his parents in 1980 when he was 15 years old, after using alcohol, marijuana andpsychedelic mushrooms. Billy Rouse was arrested, escorted back to Lake County, Illinois, and charged with the murder of his parents.

The Trial

The trial began in August 1996 and David Brodsky, for the defense, objected to theuse of the videotaped confession. Judge Victoria A. Rossetti ruled that the tapeadmissible. The defense tried to paint a picture of the Rouse home as a place poisoned by infidelity, domestic violence and substance abuse. Thedefense also tried to point to Kurt Rouse, the defendant’s brother, as being the killer.

The prosecution’s case was based mainly on the taped confession and Billy washeard, clearly, describing how he was covered with his parents’ blood and brainmatter. “The f--- I had to deal with then was gone” he said. The court was aghast.

Billy Rouse did not take the witness stand in his own defense and satmotionless during the two-week trial. The jury of eight women and four men tookeight hours deliberating and again viewed the taped confession before reaching averdict of guilty.

On October 5, 1996, Judge Rosetti opened the sentencing procedure bysaying she felt “disgusted” that the law, at the time of the crime, did not allow her tosentence Billy Rouse to life and passed two consecutive 40-year sentences. She closed her comments by saying, “That is the injustice that I have to live with.

They gave you life and brought you into this world… they gave you everyopportunity for a future. You did the most hatefully shocking thing when you tookthat shotgun and, at close range, shot your mother who brought you into this world…and then shot your father. You not only took their lives, but you took your own.”

The sentence was the maximum allowed under the law because harsher punishmentfor juvenile offenders was not enacted until shortly after the murders in 1980.

An emotionless Billy Rouse did not speak at his sentencing. He could be eligible forparole in 2035. He is incarcerated in the Pontiac Correctional Centre, Pontiac, Illinois.

Aug. 22, 2013

Sharp family

Cold Case: The most brutal murders in Plumas County history occurred on April 11, 1981 in Keddie, California, a down on its heels resort town that time had passed by. No one was ever charged with the crime.

by Jeni Johnson

Keddie is a small town in the mountains of Northern California, about 87 miles from Reno, Nevada. It was once a thriving resort community that drew people for its natural beauty and the convenience of the railway that transported people between Salt Lake City and Oakland, California. Made up of log cabins, the town was an ideal place to raise a family.

In 1981, Keddie was a tight-knit community where everyone looked after each other’s children and residents never bothered to lock their doors at night. By this time, the town had drastically gone downhill since its formation in 1910 when a hotel and lodge were built for those traveling through Keddie.

By the 1980s, the owner of the resort, Gary Mollath, had no option but to rent his cabins to mostly low-income families. It was also rumored that there was some drug use in the area that consisted mostly of marijuana and hashish. Nevertheless, residents still considered it a decent place to raise a family with minimal earnings. Unfortunately, the murders of four people shocked the residents of Keddie and changed all of that in a matter of hours.

On April 11, 1981 Glenna “Sue” Sharp, a 36-year-old mother of five, was at her home in Cabin 28. She had agreed to let a neighborhood child and friend of her children, Justin, spend the night with her sons Ricky, 10 and Greg, 5. Her 12-year-old daughter, Tina, was also home at the time. Sue’s oldest daughter, 14-year-old Sheila, was just a few feet away staying the night at a neighbor’s house. Sue’s oldest son, 15-year-old Johnny and his friend Dana Wingate, 17, who was known as somewhat of a trouble maker, were in the nearby town of Quincy hanging out with friends for most of the evening. It all seemed to be an ordinary and relaxing night for the Sharp family. But by the next morning news of the murders would rip through Plumas County.

No one knows exactly why or how the murders took place. It is highly believed that Johnny and Dana hitchhiked home and either led the killers to the house or walked in on the killers attacking Sue. What is known is on that night Sue Sharp, Johnny Sharp and Dana Wingate were brutally murdered, Tina Sharp was kidnapped and murdered, and their killers have gone unpunished for over three decades.

Most Vicious Crime in Plumas County History

The crime was the most vicious attack in Plumas County history. The police found stab marks in the walls of the cabin and a large amount of blood on the living room floor. The autopsy reports showed all three victims were tied at the hands and feet, with Sue’s bindings being especially tight. Sue and Johnny were bludgeoned with a hammer and stabbed repeatedly. Dana was strangled to death and also stabbed.

Because the attacks were overkill and seemed personal in nature, many believed that the Sharp family knew their killers. The police concluded that Tina was taken from the house that night. While processing the scene they found a small amount of blood on the sheet of her bed. They also found a bloody fingerprint on a wooden post outside in the backyard. In 1984, three years after she was abducted, Tina's skull was found in Feather Falls at Camp 18, about 29 miles from Keddie, officially making this a quadruple murder. Examination of the skull showed Tina was likely killed the night or soon after she was kidnapped. The manner in which she died is unknown.

When Sheila Sharp came home the next morning she opened the front door and found the gruesome sight of her mother’s body lying under a yellow blanket. She also saw the lifeless bodies of Johnny and Dana lying close to Sue. The boys were tied together at their feet with tape and electrical cord.  Sheila noticed what she thought to be a pocket knife lying near the bodies. It was later determined to be a steak knife that was used to kill the victims. The attacks were so savage that the force from the stabbings bent the blade backward approximately 25 degrees.

Sheila ran from the house and yelled at the neighbors to call the police. Incredibly, Justin, Ricky and Greg were unharmed during the vicious attack. Sheila returned to the cabin to help Justin and her brothers climb through the bedroom window. When interviewed, Ricky and Greg claimed to have slept through the ordeal while Justin's statements about that have been inconsistent through the years. At times, he has claimed to have seen the killers, but other times he says he only had a dream about seeing the murders take place. In this dream he said he covered Sue up with a blanket and tried to stop the bleeding by placing a cloth on her chest. In another story, he has claimed to have seen nothing at all that night. Police did believe Justin touched at least one of the bodies because blood was found on the outside doorknob of the boy’s room. The bedroom door of the boy's room was also partially open when the Plumas County Sheriff's Office arrived at the scene.

A Person of Interest

The Plumas County Sheriff's Office interviewed a number of people and this did produce a person of interest, Martin Smartt. Marty, his wife Marilyn and her two sons (one of the boys being Justin) lived in Cabin 26 just down the road from Cabin 28. Marty also had a friend staying with the family named Severin John "Bo" Boubede, whom Marty had met a few weeks earlier at the VA hospital where he was being treated for PTSD. It is known that Bo, Marty and Marilyn stopped by Sue’s cabin on their way to the local bar earlier in the evening.

Marilyn claimed to have asked Sue to go for drinks with them but Sue declined the invitation. At the bar Marty became angry over the music that was playing and spoke to the manager about it. The three left with Marty still upset and returned to their cabin. Marilyn claimed to have watched TV and then went to bed. Marty said he made a phone call to the bar to complain about the music once again and then he and Bo went back to the bar.

Soon after the investigation started, the Plumas County Sheriff's Office called in the Department of Justice, which was based in Sacramento, California. Detectives for the Department of Justice questioned all three of them and concluded that they were not involved despite the fact that during the interview Marilyn told the investigators that she left Marty the day after the murders. She also mentioned Marty had a violent temper and often abused her, both emotionally and physically. The Department of Justice administered a polygraph to Marty Smartt on April 17, which he is said to have passed. 

The interviews of Marty and Bo, however, reveal a half-hearted attempt by the DOJ detectives, Harry Bradley and P.A. Crim Jr., to examine the two in any depth, asking each of them a series of easy, leading questions and not following up when discrepancies did arise.  During the interview with Bo, Detective Crim mentioned that Bo was a retired police officer – something he never was. This false assumption seemed to lead the detectives to treat Bo with undue deference.

At the start of the interview, Bo indicated he knew which one of the cabins was the one where the murders were committed, but toward the middle of the interview, he said he did not know. Detective Bradley just said "Oh, I thought you'd know. Well, we'll point it out to you on the way back." For reasons unknown, Bo lied and said Marilyn was his niece when, in fact, they are not related in any manner. Bo told the detectives he had lived in Keddie a month when in fact he’d only been around for 12 days. When Bo claimed Marilyn was awake when he and Marty returned from the bar the second time, the detectives said nothing about Marilyn saying she was asleep when they returned. Bo also lied when he said he had never met Sue Sharp.  In Marilyn Smartt's interview she stated she and the two men had gone to the Sharp house on the night of the murders.

Additionally, Bo stated they arrived at the bar between 9:30- 10 p.m. but later changed this time to 12 a.m. to fit his alibi.

During Marty’s interview with the DOJ detectives, the careless, lackadaisical questioning continued. Marty told the investigators that Sue’s son, Justin, could have seen something the night of the murders "...without me detecting him..." This remark gravely implicated Marty in the murders, but the detectives made nothing of it. Marty followed that incriminating comment up by adding that he had heard a hammer was used to beat the victims before they were stabbed to death.  Then, without prompting, he voluntarily told Crim and Bradley his hammer had "gone missing" before the murders. Marty talks a lot about the victims deaths being overkill. He goes on to describe how he would have killed them fast and gotten out of the house as quickly as possible. Crim and Bradley never questioned him further on this either.

After interviewing Marty and Bo, the DOJ investigators did not do any follow-up interviews and they let Marty – a prime suspect – move out of town and relocate in Klamath, California. Bo went back to the Reno VA hospital. In July, Plumas County Sheriff Doug Thomas announced his resignation for unknown reasons. In 1976, Thomas became an insurance salesman and a part-time instructor at Feather River College in Quincy, Ca.

The month after the Keddie murders, Marty called a therapist and told the doctor he was being blamed for the killings. Ten years after Marty’s death in 2000, his therapist came forward and told the Plumas County Sheriff's Office that Marty had confessed to killing Sue Sharp. He also told the police that Marty was a friend of Plumas County Sheriff Doug Thomas and that Marty once let Thomas live with him. The therapist admitted that Marty told him that beating the polygraph was easy. Additionally, Marty said the reason he killed Sue was because she was trying to talk Marilyn into divorcing him. According the therapist, Martin Smartt did not confess to killing Dana, Johnny or Tina and he never said who was responsible for their murders.

The revelations by the therapist caused the sheriff’s office to take another look at solving the case, but with Martin Smartt long dead and Bo having died of natural causes in 1988 nothing came of this.

A Botched Investigation

After the murders of their mother and siblings, the surviving Sharp children went to live with their father. The chatter eventually stopped about the murders and soon no one thought much of the brutal slayings. That is until 2002 when a filmmaker Josh Hancock took on the challenge of making a documentary about what happened in the small town of Keddie. The film included interviews with members of the Sharp family and Wingate family, with Marilyn and Justin and with various members of Plumas County law enforcement. Hancock said his motive for making the documentary was to train a spotlight on a cold case that was apparently swept under the rug. By doing that he hoped to bring justice to the victims and their families. Hancock believes that the Plumas County Sherriff's Office did careless work regarding the investigation of the crime. On his website it states, "Exposing the truth, one liar at a time. Hold Plumas County Sheriff's Office accountable!"

Many questions and rumors abound regarding this murder case. Only one person reported hearing a scream coming from the area of the cabin; yet, all of the cabins in Keddie sat literally feet away from one another.  Why didn't anyone else hear a struggle or screams coming from Cabin 28? Furthermore, how could the children in the house sleep when three people were being brutally tortured and murdered right in the next room? Why was Tina the only one taken that night? Why were the three younger boys left unharmed?

The crime scene was substantially botched. The sheriff's office did not properly secure the scene and failing to call the Department of Justice immediately upon arriving. What may be most damning of all is the Plumas County Sheriff's Office did not realize Tina had even existed or had been kidnapped. Arriving officers refused to listen to Justin even after he told the sheriff's office Tina was taken from her bed on the night of the murders. Because of this discrepancy, the sheriff's office wasted precious hours which should have been spent searching for Tina.

Some believe the Plumas County Sheriff’s Office was too inexperienced for a crime of this magnitude. Others believe the sheriff’s department intentionally bungled and hid information to protect the assailants’ identities.  This belief was bolstered in 2010 when Martin Smartt’s therapist revealed that Marty had once allowed Plumas County Sheriff Doug Thomas to live with him for a while.

To this day the sheriff’s department refuses to discuss the case and will not look into it further. The sheriff’s department also will not accept assistance from other law enforcement agencies. Regrettably, much of the evidence collected was either lost by law enforcement or destroyed due to a leak in the roof at the sheriff’s office. Furthermore, after three decades nothing has been done with the bloody fingerprint that was collected from the scene. Lastly, many wonder why the sheriff’s department let Marty and Bo go.

Postscript

After the murders, Marilyn married and then divorced Marty's best friend. Reportedly she is still living in Plumas County.

If you were to ask most people, they would probably say they have never heard of Keddie, the small town in Plumas County, California. After the murders, the community lived in shock and fear. The atmosphere had changed. The once quiet and peaceful Keddie was all but abandoned by most.  Cabin 28 became a horror house of sorts. Although at least one family lived in the cabin after the murders, locals say the house sat abandoned for years. In 2004 Cabin 28 was bulldozed to the ground. Today there are only a handful of residents that call Keddie Resort home.

The tragedy of these murders was compounded by the botched investigation that allowed the murderers to escape justice and for the case to grow so cold it will most likely never be solved.

Sept. 9, 2013

Menzies Hallett

For 33 years, Menzies Hallett got away with murder because a New Zealand law prohibited Hallett’s wife from testifying against him without his permission. 

by Lisa Agnes

By all accounts, Menzies Hallett was an affable, confident family man who got along with everyone. Yet it only took one anxiety-laden night in mid 1979 for this persona to dramatically unravel, revealing a conflicted, angry man.

New Zealand, in 1979, was not a place known for random acts of violence. The volcanic plateau situated in the middle of the North Island offered stable employment opportunities and a relatively idyllic way of life. But crimes motivated by passionate emotions can explode anywhere. On August 16, Hallett received a letter from his estranged wife denying him custody of their two daughters, prompting him to ring her and threaten to "come down and sort it out."

According to a friend who was with Hallett at the house of his girlfriend later that evening, Hallett had a revolver tucked into the waistbelt of his trousers. At one point, he pointed to a ceramic pot in the kitchen and asked his girlfriend, Margaret Culkin, whether she valued it. Before she could answer he had drawn the pistol and fired, missed, then fired again, destroying the pot and leaving his girlfriend reeling. "I remember there was the television there and I think I collapsed over it," she said. "I didn't know what was going on. I was in shock." Hallett then left in his Ford Falcon 500, intent on some kind of showdown.

A Cold-Blooded Murder

At approximately the same time, some 50 km away, Constable Michael Sullivan was drinking a cup of coffee with his Maori friend, 31-year-old Rodney Tahu, at the Turangi Shell station. Tahu was in sole charge of the service station and, when Sullivan left, it was likely he did not have another customer before closing up and activating the alarm at 1 am. As he was preparing to go home, Menzies Hallett pulled into the forecourt, needing oil for his vehicle after noticing a noise in the engine. According to the confession Hallett made to his wife hours later, Tahu told him that the service station was closed. Hallett replied that was "ridiculous," but when Tahu reiterated the fact, Hallett called him a "black bastard," reached for his gun and aimed it at the man.

Tahu ran off between the petrol pumps and Hallett's first shot missed. However, a second shot caught him in the shoulder and he slumped to the ground. Hallett then walked over and fired for a third time, the gun muzzle just centimetres from his victim's head. Leaving Tahu for dead, Hallett turned around and drove off, back the way he had come.

Tahu's friend Constable Sullivan was among the first to the scene, finding him spread-eagled in a pool of blood on the concrete. An ambulance duly arrived and rushed him to Taumarunui Hospital. Despite paramedics' best efforts, Rodney Tahu died at 5.42 a.m.

Within 24 hours, Menzies Hallett had confessed to his wife, Susan Sharpe, describing how he had been angry at her letter, had been on his way to “get the truth” from their daughter in Palmerston North, and that he had been at a “flash point.” He even showed her the pistol he had used in the killing, flinging it onto the bed in front of her. Eventually he left the house and Ms. Sharpe rang her lawyer, who alerted the police. Meanwhile Hallett took a meandering route back to Taupo, where police were already waiting. Upon seeing the police cars, Hallett made a U-turn. The police pursued.

During a stand-off at a road block, where Hallett remained in his stationary car, a shot rang out. Members of New Zealand's Armed Defenders' Squad moved forward en masse to retrieve him, injured from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was then taken to hospital and later charged with murder.  Two months later, he appeared before the courts.

Justice Denied by the Evidence Act

And this is where the story becomes a bit unbelievable. The law at the time prevented a spouse from testifying unless she had permission to do so, meaning Susan Sharpe could not tell the court what she knew. The magistrate thereby ruled that there was not enough evidence to warrant putting Hallett on trial. And, for the next 33 years, Menzies Hallett effectively got away with murder. Adding insult to injury was the fact than everyone in the general area knew he had committed the crime and were dismayed by this travesty of justice. "He strolled around town as if nothing happened, it was like water off a duck's back, but the whole town knew," says a former aquaintence.

Some regarded Hallett as having a screw loose, rather than as a murderer, remembering him as a "good talker,""a colourful character,""a bit loud after a few drinks," and "unhinged.""There was something a bit creepy about him," a former real estate employer said. "He dressed and talked nicely but, if I had known his past, I wouldn't have given him a job." Now, Hallett apparently could not walk into the yacht club of which he had been a member for years without being ridiculed and tormented, according to club member Brian Garlick. This treatment eventually forced him to move to Rotorua, less than two hours' drive from the location of the murder. "I'm surprised he didn't move further away," Mr Garlick said. "We were all intrigued as to why he wasn't brought to justice."

During his years of freedom, Hallett worked around Rotorua as an insurance agent and a real estate agent. He married Shona Watts in the 1980s, but divorced her a few years later. Watts's brother, Gary, has said that there was some indication of Hallett's character before they married. "My nephew, who was from Taupo, he told Shona before they got married that he had a bit of a shady history, so they must have had a fair idea."

Not long after divorcing Shona, Hallett met his current wife, Joan, an ex-pat Englishwoman working as a theater nurse. Joan has consistantly refused to comment to media.

It was the year 2006 before the Evidence Act changed the outdated notion that marital confidences were “so essential to the preservation of the marriage relationship as to outweigh the disadvantages to the administration of justice which the privilege entails” and it was the year 2011 by the time justice caught up with Menzies Hallett.

The Arrest and Trial

Police investigators spent a year building their case, then approached Hallett as he was shopping in Rotorua township. Shortly after his arrest, he told The Dominion Post newspaper that he knew nothing of the shooting, professing to have "no inkling" as to why he had been arrested. "I've had a two-hour battle with police trying to get me to admit all sorts of things, feeding me all sorts of misinformation," he went on. "I have no idea why he (Tahu) was shot. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time." Police, though, only ever had one suspect from the outset.

At his trial, the now 72-year-old Hallett remained calm and outwardly amenable. In direct contrast to what he had told The Dominion Post, he denied murder but admitted pulling the trigger that killed Rodney Tahu. Yet, in a last-minute about-turn, he retracted that statement, implying that he no longer accepted it was he who had pulled the trigger. This meant that the jury had to decide not only whether the killing was manslaughter or murder, but that the man who pulled the trigger was, beyond reasonable doubt, Menzies Hallett.

However, the prosecution had several people who had learned the truth directly from Hallett over the years to testify against him, including Susan Sharpe. All had the same story. Hallett had confessed in an apparent unburdening of the guilt that had begun to eat away at him. One former colleague who visited him in the court cells during proceedings said that "there was only one word that sprung to mind and that was just that he looked a little resigned."  And resigned he should have been. After nearly 34 years, time and the Evidence Act 2006 had caught up with Menzies Hallett. After a two-and-a-half week trial at Rotorua's High Court, the jury took only two hours and 45 minutes, including a lunch break, to find him guilty of murder.

The police were justifiably pleased. Rex Hawkins, now retired, was one of the men who initially arrested Hallett after the stand-off at the road block. His words echo other officers' sentiments: "Living with the knowledge for 33 years of who the offender was, and not being able to place him before the court, has been difficult. Having seen the pain and hurt the family suffered, it's been very frustrating to know of the admission Hallett made to his ex-wife, knowing that this wasn't able to be used by the prosecution, and me knowing he was the killer. So it's a real relief to see his conviction at long last and I hope it brings some satisfaction to the Tahu family and gives them some closure on this part of the tragic story."

Tahu family spokesman Colin Hair has said that "the hardest part is we've always known who was responsible for this. It was only an anomaly in the law that allowed it to go by, and I've got to say, on behalf of the whole family, a huge thanks to the police for their tenacious work and not just the work of the current people; the original outstanding work that was done by them back in 1979 which enabled this to come together to its conclusion today. We've had wonderful support from a lot of people."

Sentencing

On July 12, 2013, Menzies Hallett was sentenced to life in prison. Although a minimum non-parole term could not be imposed because, in 1979, such a sentence was not allowed under the law, Hallett will serve at least 10 years before becoming eligible for parole.

July 25, 2013

Trayvon Martin

Based on the dictates of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, the jury in the Trayvon Martin murder case had virtually no legal basis to do anything but acquit George Zimmerman of both second-degree murder and manslaughter. 

by Don Fulsom and Alisha Dingus

Update: Less than two months after his acquittal for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman was in investigative detention after his estranged wife, Shellie Zimmerman, called 911 to report that Zimmerman was threatening her and her father. Lake Mary Police Chief Steve Bracknell said the 911 call was placed just after 2 p.m. Monday, September, 9, 2012, and that Mrs. Zimmerman told police that Zimmernan was inside her father's house and that he had "battered her father."

Lake Mary is a suburb of Orlando, near Sanford where Zimmerman shot to death the unarmed, 17-year-old Martin.

During the five-minute 911 call, Shellie Zimmerman is heard saying, "He's in his car and he continually has his hand on his gun and he keeps saying, 'step closer' and he's just threatening all of us with his firearm and he's going to shoot us."  Later duing the 911 call she said, "He punched my dad in the nose. My dad has a mark on his face. He accosted my father and then took my iPad out of my hands and smashed it and cut it up with a pocket knife."

Zimmerman was released from investigative detention later that afternoon.

A week earlier, Shellie Zimmerman filed for divorce in Seminole county. In late August she pleaded guilty to perjury for lying about the couple's financial status during a bond hearing in April of 2012. She had claimed that she and her husband were destitute when in fact they had recently collected about $135,000 in donations in support of Zimmerman's defense.

In the recent past, Zimmerman, according to CNN, has been stopped twice on traffic violations. The first was in Texas where he was given a verbal warning and reportedly told the officers that he had a firearm in his glove box. The second was last week in Florida where he was issued a $256 ticket for speeding.

While it remains true that if George Zimmerman had obeyed the police dispatcher’s directive to remain in his car and to wait for patrol officers to arrive to question the person in the “hoodie,” Trayvon Martin would not have been shot to death.  In the end, it did not matter that Zimmerman had profiled the young black man as a likely criminal up to no good, lacing his conversation with the dispatcher with profanities, using the word “punks” and saying, “They always get away.”

The only one who ended up getting away was Zimmerman himself. A Seminole County, Florida jury of six women – five white and one Hispanic – deliberated for just over 16 hours before acquitting the 29-year-old Zimmerman of second-degree murder and manslaughter in the 2012 slaying.  The verdict by the sequestered jury came late into the night of the second day of deliberations, around 10 p.m. on Saturday, July 13, 2013.

Despite the late hour, more than 10 million people viewed the verdict on the four cable networks that provided extensive coverage and commentary of the trial. The week before in the same time slot, 1.6 million viewers were tuned into Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and HLN, a CNN offshoot that specializes in covering criminal trials.

George Zimmerman

As the trial progressed, it became more and more apparent that the government’s burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman had murdered Martin out of malice or had killed him in an unjustified way, were both hurdles too high to mount. The murder charge required a showing that Zimmerman was full of ill will, hatred, spite or evil intent when he shot Martin.

“Even after three weeks of testimony, the fight between Mr. Martin and Mr. Zimmerman on that rainy night was a muddle, fodder for reasonable doubt,” a front page account in The New York Times read the next morning. “It remained unclear who had started it, who screamed for help, who threw the first punch and at what point Mr. Zimmerman drew his gun. There were no witnesses to the shooting.”

The prosecution’s case against Zimmerman became so befuddled during the course of the trial that his defense attorneys never invoked Florida’s Stand Your Ground law as part of his defense and waived the initial Stand Your Ground hearing. Florida’s Stand Your Ground law did make it into Judge Debra Nelson’s instructions to the jury, and, in reality, left the jury with no plausible way to convict Zimmerman on either charge:  

In deciding whether George Zimmerman was justified in the use of deadly force, you must judge him by the circumstances by which he was surrounded at the time the force was used. The danger facing George Zimmerman need not have been actual; however, to justify the use of deadly force, the appearance of danger must have been so real that a reasonably cautious and prudent person under the same circumstances would have believed that the danger could be avoided only through the use of that force. Based upon appearances, George Zimmerman must have actually believed that the danger was real.

If George Zimmerman was not engaged in an unlawful activity and was attacked in any place where he had a right to be, he had no duty to retreat and had the right to stand his ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he reasonably believed that it was necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.

George Zimmerman bloody

In an article entitled, “Trayvon Martin and the Irony of American Justice,” published in The Atlantic on July 15, 2013, Ta-Heisi wrote, “In trying to assess the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, two seemingly conflicting truths emerge for me. The first is that based on the case presented by the state, and based on Florida law, George Zimmerman should not have been convicted. The second is that the killing of Trayvon Martin is a profound injustice.”

Many state Stand Your Ground laws, including Florida’s, go beyond traditional concepts of self-defense and act as legal immunity to filing criminal charges in self-defense cases. George Zimmerman wasn’t initially charged when the police at the scene determined Florida’s Stand Your Ground law made him immune to criminal charges. Zimmerman, after all, was a member of the volunteer neighborhood watch and had a legal right to be there. Martin, of course, also had a legal right to be where he was.

What makes Florida’s Stand Your Ground such an expansion over the age-old “A Man’s Home is His Castle,” doctrine is that it covers any space where a person is legally present, including public places. The so-called “Castle Law” pertained to using necessary force to defend one’s home against an intruder. Zimmerman’s Stand Your Ground immunity covered him in his car and on foot while he followed Trayvon Martin. 

For 44 days Zimmerman had the benefit of that immunity until public outrage at the killing of an unarmed black teen led first to the firing of the Sanford police chief and then to the appointment by the governor of a new prosecutor who promptly filed charges of second degree murder aginst Zimmerman. The national clamor that led to the indictment was over the perceived notion that Zimmerman had profiled Martin as some sort of criminal because he was black, stalked him, and shot him to death. In essence, Zimmerman was brought to trial to answer for killing Martin simply because of his bias against blacks -- a hate crime, pure and simple.

Zimmerman, however, was never tried on the basis of a hate crime. During pre-trial motions, the judge ordered that no mention of race be advanced by either the proseuction or the defense. The overfiding racial overtones of the case were thus muted. The best the prosecution could do to raise the race motive for Martin's killing was to argue that Zimmerman "profiled" Martin before deciding to pursue him. With the hate crime aspect of the case off the table, Zimmerman's eventual acquittal was a foregone conclusion.

“Every step Mr. Martin took toward the end of his all too-short life was defined by his race,” wrote Professor Ekow N. Yankah of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, in an Op-Ed published in The New York Times two days after the verdict. “I do not have to believe that Mr. Zimmerman is a hate-filled racist to recognize that he would probably not even have noticed Mr. Martin if he had been a casually dressed white teenager.”

Trayvon Martin

The day after the verdict, a Sunday, spontaneous rallies for Trayvon Martin were held in various major cities.

A week after the verdict, thousands of demonstrators gathered in front of a dozen Federal buildings across the United States to mourn Trayvon Martin’s killing. In addition, “Justice for Trayvon Martin” rallies took place in at least 100 U.S. cities, including New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. Jay-Z and Beyonce attended the New York rally. In Oakland, California, demonstrators tied up traffic on Interstate 880 during rush hour; in the Crenshaw area of South Los Angeles, a brief spate of rioting broke out.

Zimmerman will spend the rest of his life linked to the tragedy he precipitated. Although acquitted, he will never be truly free. Pre-trial, while free on $1 million bond, he lived in hiding, the target of numerous death threats. Immediately after the verdict in the gripping, made-for-cable-TV trial, Robert Zimmerman voiced concern for his brother’s safety:  “He will be looking around his shoulder the rest of his life.”   And Zimmerman’s lead lawyer, Mark O’Mara, said those who think Martin was killed for racial reasons might well react violently to George:  “He has to be cautious and protective of his safety.”

Zimmerman remains in hiding and wears a bulletproof vest when he does venture into public. Fox News reported that Zimmerman came out of hiding to respond to a car accident less than a mile from where Martin was shot and killed.

O’Mara’s client must be alert to further legal risks as well.  The U.S. Justice Department is reviewing the case for potential criminal civil rights violations.  In applauding the department’s decision, NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous declared: “The most fundamental of human rights—the right to life—was violated the night George Zimmerman stalked and then took the life of Trayvon Martin.”

Pointing to the same review, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said, “This isn’t over with and I think that’s good.” But a fellow Democrat, former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, argues the Justice Department might be taking a “dicey position.” Spitzer says, “Double jeopardy is a fundamental principle in our American judicial system … so it’s going to be hard for them to come back at the defendant.”

That’s not the only problem the Feds might have in bringing civil rights actions against Zimmerman.  As University of Virginia law professor Rachel Harmon asserts, “It’s not enough to show that Zimmerman followed Trayvon Martin because of his race.  They would have to show that he attacked Martin for that reason.”

Harmon—a former prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division—made the comments to The Washington Post.  The newspaper, citing “current and former Justice Department officials” reports that it “would be extremely difficult and may not be possible” for the government to charge Zimmerman with a hate-crime “because it’s not clear that he killed Martin because of his race.”

Despite widespread public outrage over the jury’s verdict, one of the jurors took to TV just days later to contend that Zimmerman “didn’t do anything unlawful” and was “justified” in shooting Martin.  Appearing as only a silhouette, Juror B-37 also told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Zimmerman’s “heart was in the right place” when he became suspicious of Martin—and that the teen probably threw the first punch.

Four other jurors, however, quickly distanced themselves from B-37. Identified only by their court numbers, they issued a printed statement saying B-37’s views were her own and “were not in any way representative” of their feelings.  And Martin’s parents soon criticized the verdict in several TV appearances.  On NBC’s “Today,” Tracy Martin said, “I think that had Trayvon been white, this would have never happened.  Obviously, race is playing some type of role.”

On July 26, the only minority juror did an interview with Robin Roberts on "Good Morning America" where she said she felt Zimmerman "Got away with murder. But you can't get away from God, And, at the end of the day, he's going to have a lot of questions and answers he has to deal with. The law couldn't prove it but, you know, you know, the world goes in circlles."

Although she did not provide her last name, she allowed ABC to show her face and know that her first name is Maddy. Thirty-six and the mother of eight children, she said that when jury deliberations began she was for convicting Zimmerman on the second-degree murder charge. She called herself the "juror who was going to give him the hung jury" and "she fought to the end" before joining the other jurors in their not-guilty votes.

"A lot of us wanted to find something bad, something we could connect to the laws. But as the law was read to me, if you have no proof he killed him intentionally, you can't say he's guilty," Maddy said.

When Roberts asked her, based on what she learned as a juror in this case, whether Zimmerman should have ever been put on trial, she said no, adding,  "I felt this was a publicity stunt."

The Killing of Trayvon Martin

The nighttime slaying of Trayvon Martin took place on February 26, 2012 in a middle-class, gated subdivision called “The Retreat at Twin Lakes” in the central Florida town of Sanford.  Martin, as he had several times previously, was there with his father visiting his father’s fiancée and her son. He had the free time to be there due to being suspended from his high school at the time. That evening Martin had gone out alone to buy some Skittles and ice tea and was returning from the store when his fatal encounter with Zimmerman took place.

The son of Sybrina and Tracy Martin, Trayvon was born on February 5, 1995.  The couple divorced four years later. Trayvon lived with his mother and older brother in Miami Gardens, Florida.

George Zimmerman was born in 1983 in Manassas, Virginia. Half Hispanic, he is the son of Gladys (Mesa) Zimmerman, who was born in Peru, and Robert Zimmerman Sr., a retired Virginia magistrate. In 2009, Zimmerman moved to Twin Lakes with his wife. He was employed as an insurance underwriter and was in his final semester of a two-year course at Seminole State College, working toward an associate degree in criminal justice. His stated goal was to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a judge.

Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch coordinator at Twin Lakes, was in his car on an errand when he saw Martin, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, walking inside the gated community. Zimmerman, thinking that the young black man in the hoodie might be a criminally minded gatecrasher, called Sanford police and reported what he considered to be suspicious behavior. He said the man was “cutting between houses…walking leisurely for the [rainy] weather” and that “he was looking at all the houses.”  While still on the phone with the dispatcher, Zimmerman exited his car, ignoring the dispatcher’s directive not to confront the suspect and to await the arrival of Sanford patrol officers.

Within minutes after Zimmerman terminated the phone call, Martin was mortally wounded. When police arrived minutes later, Zimmerman claimed that Martin had pounced on him, and that a violent struggle ensued on the rain-soaked lawn. Zimmerman contends he finally grabbed his gun and fired one shot to the chest of his alleged attacker. He was licensed to carry the firearm.

Martin died face down in the grass, only 70 yards from the rear door of the townhouse where he’d been staying.  Physicians who examined the autopsy findings for the Orlando Sentinel believe Martin remained alive for anywhere from 20 seconds to two minutes.

A police photo shows Zimmerman with a scratch on his forehead, along with a bloody and obviously broken nose. Other photos display vertical lacerations to the back of his head. Police at the crime scene report Zimmerman’s back was wet and covered with grass.

Aside from the one bullet wound, an autopsy found only a small abrasion below the knuckle of Martin’s left ring finger. It also turned up small traces of marijuana. The weed—which could have been smoked up to a month earlier—had no apparent connection with Martin’s behavior on the night of his murder, according to one of the prosecutors.

The U.S. Congress was on the verge of passing anti-racial profiling laws—but then 9/11 happened in 2001, and all discussion came to an abrupt halt. Now lawmakers can use “national security” as an excuse to oppose anti-racial profiling legislation. They can invoke the threat of terrorism to keep such legislation from gaining bipartisan support (the End Racial Profiling Act, introduced after Trayvon Martin’s murder, lacked any Republican backers in Congress.) 

Twenty-five states have enacted their own anti-racial profiling legislation, but those laws are regarded as ineffective. Advocates of a national standard say a major reform of Stand Your Ground laws is a good place to start.

While Martin’s parents buried and mourned the loss of their son, Zimmerman spent 44 days as a free man by invoking Florida’s Stand Your Ground law—which gives people the authority to use deadly force if they believe it is the only way “to prevent death or great bodily harm.”  This type of a defense rests on examining a person’s state of mind during a confrontation. So all Zimmerman had to do was tell police that he feared for his life ... and he was free to go home and sleep in his own bed, while Martin’s body lay unclaimed on a slab in the morgue.

A National Uproar

It took a major public uproar for charges to be leveled at Zimmerman. President Obama said shortly after the shooting that if he had a teenage son that his son would look and dress like Trayvon Martin. Under greater magnification, something seemed off about this case: Zimmerman kept changing his story; and it soon became known that 911 dispatchers had warned him not to pursue Martin.

At first, though, because of Stand Your Ground, Zimmerman became a potential crime victim. Fox News and ABC’s Barbara Walters courted him, competing for an exclusive interview. Fox won out after Walters pulled her deal off the table when Zimmerman and his wife requested to be put up in a hotel for a week, on ABC’s tab.

It has to be asked: If Zimmerman were black, would he be shopping around for the best exclusive interview deal and requesting weeklong stays in hotels? Would it have taken 44 days for him to be arrested? Would he have waltzed out of jail after putting down $100,000 of his bail money? Would people be donating to his defense fund? If the case of Marissa Alexander is any indication, the answer is no.

Alexander, also from Florida, was sentenced to 20 years in prison after firing a warning shot during a dispute with her abusive husband. Her attorney claimed self-defense and cited the state’s Stand Your Ground laws.  Yet the jury agreed with the prosecutors that the law did not apply because Ms. Alexander left during the argument, went to the garage and retrieved her gun. The reasoning behind the decision was that because Alexander did not exit through the garage and returned to confront her husband, she acted in anger—not because she feared for her life. Alexander said she was unable to leave home through the garage because of a door malfunction.

Under this same line of logic, George Zimmerman’s defense could well fail at trial.  That’s because Trayvon Martin did not come to Zimmerman’s car. The watch commander made the choice to exit his vehicle and pursue Martin, ignoring the request of a 911 dispatcher who told him to remain in his vehicle.

In his Fox News interview in July of 2012 with Sean Hannity, Zimmerman set off a media firestorm when he said Martin’s death “was all God’s plan.” Zimmerman even admitted that he never feared for his life. When Hannity directly asked Zimmerman, who is 5 feet 8 and 185 pounds, if he felt threatened by the 6 foot, 160-pound teen, he said “No, not particularly.” He chose to go after Trayvon Martin, just as Alexander chose to go back into her house.

State Attorney Angela Corey, who prosecuted Alexander in the case, was assigned the Zimmerman case. So if one were to apply the law in the same way, Zimmerman should be convicted—unless the Stand Your Ground defense failed for Alexander because she is black. After all, Stand Your Ground laws were created, in part, to protect people like Alexander—women who try to defend themselves from abusive men. The laws were not meant to protect neighborhood vigilantes.

So something seems wrong here. A woman who harmed no one is about to spend a big chunk of time in prison, while Zimmerman got away with what his prosecutors consider murder.  In other words, when Zimmerman was acquitted, the entire justice system has to answer for what appears to be a blatant case of racial profiling.

“In a way, the not-guilty verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman for his killing of Trayvon Martin was more powerful than a guilty verdict could ever have been,” wrote Charles M. Blow, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, two days after the verdict was rendered. “It was the perfect wrenching coda to a story that illustrates just how utterly and completely our system of justice – both moral and legal – failed Martin and his family.” 

Consequences of Stand Your Ground Laws

Defenders of Marin argue that with Zimmerman’s acquittal anyone with a gun license will be able to take the law into their own hands. And they have statistics on their side:  Two researchers at Texas A&M University, Cheng Cheng and Mark Hoekstra, found that Stand Your Ground laws do not deter crimes like aggravated assault or burglary, but they do increase homicides. “We find that the murder and non-negligent manslaughter are increased by 7 to 9 percent. This could represent either an increased use of lethal force in self-defense situations, or the escalation of violence in otherwise non-lethal situations. Regardless, the results indicate that a primary consequence of strengthening self-defense laws is increased homicides.” There have been 600 more homicides per year in states that have enacted such laws.

With Zimmerman’s acquittal, this number is only likely to increase.

The Tampa Bay Times reported in June of 2012 that after studying 200 Stand Your Ground cases in Florida that the law has been used to free the aggressors, including one person who shot someone in the back.

With the backing of the National Rifle Association, the Florida Legislature enacted the Stand Your Ground law in 2005, granting legal immunity to people who use deadly force if they reasonably believe their life is in danger.

Since Florida’s law went into effect, two dozen other states have passed similar legislation. The Miami Herald reported that several studies, including the Texas A&M one, show that so-called “justified homicides” have increased significantly in the states that have passed Stand Your Ground laws. Reports have also shown that the law had a disparate impact on racial minorities, and that many of the people who have used the Stand Your Ground defense after killing someone are ex-felons.

In response to the public uproar over Trayvon Martin’s killing, Florida Governor Rick Scott created the 19-member Citizen Safety and Protection Task Force to review Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. The Associated Press reported on November 13, 2012 that the task force, after spending six months traveling the state and taking public testimony, decided not to recommend any changes to Florida’s most controversial self-defense law. The task force refused to review the studies referenced by the Miami Herald.

“The task force concurs with the core belief that all persons, regardless of citizen status, have the right to feel safe and secure in our state,” the task force’s final report to the governor read. “To that end, all persons have a fundamental right to stand their ground and to defend themselves from attack with proportionate force in every place they have a lawful right to be and are conducting themselves in a lawful manner.”

Background Resources:

Drum, Kevin, “George Zimmerman and the “Great Bodily Harm” Doctrine,” Mother Jones, 3 April 2012, http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/04/george-zimmerman-and-great-bodily-harm-doctrine, (accessed 28 December 2012).

George Zimmerman: No Regrets & More—Sean Hannity Interview Highlights, The Daily Beast Video, 18 July 2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/18/george-zimmerman-no-regrets-more-sean-hannity-interview-highlights-video.html, (accessed 28 December 2012)

Samuels, Allison, “What if George Zimmerman Were Black?,” The Daily Beast, 19 July 2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/19/what-if-george-zimmerman-were-black.html (accessed 30 December 2012)

Jonsson, Patrik, “’Stand your ground’ laws: Do they put teens in greater danger?,” The Christian Science Monitor, 29 November 2012, http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2012/1129/Stand-your-ground-laws-Do-they-put-teens-in-greater-danger (accessed 27 December 2012)

Heitzeg, Nancy, “Stand Up to ‘Stand Your Ground’,” Critical Mass Progress, 05 December 2012, http://criticalmassprogress.com/2012/12/05/ci-standing-up-to-stand-your-ground/ (accessed 27 December 2012)

Dahl, Julia, “Fla. Woman Marissa Alexander gets 20 years for ‘warning shot’: Did she stand her ground?,” CBS News, 15 May 2012, http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-57434757-504083/fla-woman-marissa-alexander-gets-20-years-for-warning-shot-did-she-stand-her-ground/, (accessed 27 December 2012)

Aegerter, Gil, “Marissa Alexander gets 20 years for firing warning shot after Stand Your Ground defense fails,” U.S. News, 11 May 2012, http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/05/11/11660804-marissa-alexander-gets-20-years-for-firing-warning-shot-after-stand-your-ground-defense-fails?lite, (accessed 26 December 2012)

Green, Miranda, “After Trayvon Martin: Is it Time to End Racial Profiling?,” The Daily Beast, 13 May 2012, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/13/after-trayvon-martin-is-it-time-to-end-racial-profiling.html, (accessed 26 December 2012)

Aug. 22, 2013

Sharp family

Cold Case: The most brutal murders in Plumas County history occurred on April 11, 1981 in Keddie, California, a down on its heels resort town that time had passed by. No one was ever charged with the crime.

by Jeni Johnson

Keddie is a small town in the mountains of Northern California, about 87 miles from Reno, Nevada. It was once a thriving resort community that drew people for its natural beauty and the convenience of the railway that transported people between Salt Lake City and Oakland, California. Made up of log cabins, the town was an ideal place to raise a family.

In 1981, Keddie was a tight-knit community where everyone looked after each other’s children and residents never bothered to lock their doors at night. By this time, the town had drastically gone downhill since its formation in 1910 when a hotel and lodge were built for those traveling through Keddie.

By the 1980s, the owner of the resort, Gary Mollath, had no option but to rent his cabins to mostly low-income families. It was also rumored that there was some drug use in the area that consisted mostly of marijuana and hashish. Nevertheless, residents still considered it a decent place to raise a family with minimal earnings. Unfortunately, the murders of four people shocked the residents of Keddie and changed all of that in a matter of hours.

On April 11, 1981 Glenna “Sue” Sharp, a 36-year-old mother of five, was at her home in Cabin 28. She had agreed to let a neighborhood child and friend of her children, Justin, spend the night with her sons Ricky, 10 and Greg, 5. Her 12-year-old daughter, Tina, was also home at the time. Sue’s oldest daughter, 14-year-old Sheila, was just a few feet away staying the night at a neighbor’s house. Sue’s oldest son, 15-year-old Johnny and his friend Dana Wingate, 17, who was known as somewhat of a trouble maker, were in the nearby town of Quincy hanging out with friends for most of the evening. It all seemed to be an ordinary and relaxing night for the Sharp family. But by the next morning news of the murders would rip through Plumas County.

No one knows exactly why or how the murders took place. It is highly believed that Johnny and Dana hitchhiked home and either led the killers to the house or walked in on the killers attacking Sue. What is known is on that night Sue Sharp, Johnny Sharp and Dana Wingate were brutally murdered, Tina Sharp was kidnapped and murdered, and their killers have gone unpunished for over three decades.

Most Vicious Crime in Plumas County History

The crime was the most vicious attack in Plumas County history. The police found stab marks in the walls of the cabin and a large amount of blood on the living room floor. The autopsy reports showed all three victims were tied at the hands and feet, with Sue’s bindings being especially tight. Sue and Johnny were bludgeoned with a hammer and stabbed repeatedly. Dana was strangled to death and also stabbed.

Because the attacks were overkill and seemed personal in nature, many believed that the Sharp family knew their killers. The police concluded that Tina was taken from the house that night. While processing the scene they found a small amount of blood on the sheet of her bed. They also found a bloody fingerprint on a wooden post outside in the backyard. In 1984, three years after she was abducted, Tina's skull was found in Feather Falls at Camp 18, about 29 miles from Keddie, officially making this a quadruple murder. Examination of the skull showed Tina was likely killed the night or soon after she was kidnapped. The manner in which she died is unknown.

When Sheila Sharp came home the next morning she opened the front door and found the gruesome sight of her mother’s body lying under a yellow blanket. She also saw the lifeless bodies of Johnny and Dana lying close to Sue. The boys were tied together at their feet with tape and electrical cord.  Sheila noticed what she thought to be a pocket knife lying near the bodies. It was later determined to be a steak knife that was used to kill the victims. The attacks were so savage that the force from the stabbings bent the blade backward approximately 25 degrees.

Sheila ran from the house and yelled at the neighbors to call the police. Incredibly, Justin, Ricky and Greg were unharmed during the vicious attack. Sheila returned to the cabin to help Justin and her brothers climb through the bedroom window. When interviewed, Ricky and Greg claimed to have slept through the ordeal while Justin's statements about that have been inconsistent through the years. At times, he has claimed to have seen the killers, but other times he says he only had a dream about seeing the murders take place. In this dream he said he covered Sue up with a blanket and tried to stop the bleeding by placing a cloth on her chest. In another story, he has claimed to have seen nothing at all that night. Police did believe Justin touched at least one of the bodies because blood was found on the outside doorknob of the boy’s room. The bedroom door of the boy's room was also partially open when the Plumas County Sheriff's Office arrived at the scene.

A Person of Interest

The Plumas County Sheriff's Office interviewed a number of people and this did produce a person of interest, Martin Smartt. Marty, his wife Marilyn and her two sons (one of the boys being Justin) lived in Cabin 26 just down the road from Cabin 28. Marty also had a friend staying with the family named Severin John "Bo" Boubede, whom Marty had met a few weeks earlier at the VA hospital where he was being treated for PTSD. It is known that Bo, Marty and Marilyn stopped by Sue’s cabin on their way to the local bar earlier in the evening.

Marilyn claimed to have asked Sue to go for drinks with them but Sue declined the invitation. At the bar Marty became angry over the music that was playing and spoke to the manager about it. The three left with Marty still upset and returned to their cabin. Marilyn claimed to have watched TV and then went to bed. Marty said he made a phone call to the bar to complain about the music once again and then he and Bo went back to the bar.

Soon after the investigation started, the Plumas County Sheriff's Office called in the Department of Justice, which was based in Sacramento, California. Detectives for the Department of Justice questioned all three of them and concluded that they were not involved despite the fact that during the interview Marilyn told the investigators that she left Marty the day after the murders. She also mentioned Marty had a violent temper and often abused her, both emotionally and physically. The Department of Justice administered a polygraph to Marty Smartt on April 17, which he is said to have passed. 

The interviews of Marty and Bo, however, reveal a half-hearted attempt by the DOJ detectives, Harry Bradley and P.A. Crim Jr., to examine the two in any depth, asking each of them a series of easy, leading questions and not following up when discrepancies did arise.  During the interview with Bo, Detective Crim mentioned that Bo was a retired police officer – something he never was. This false assumption seemed to lead the detectives to treat Bo with undue deference.

At the start of the interview, Bo indicated he knew which one of the cabins was the one where the murders were committed, but toward the middle of the interview, he said he did not know. Detective Bradley just said "Oh, I thought you'd know. Well, we'll point it out to you on the way back." For reasons unknown, Bo lied and said Marilyn was his niece when, in fact, they are not related in any manner. Bo told the detectives he had lived in Keddie a month when in fact he’d only been around for 12 days. When Bo claimed Marilyn was awake when he and Marty returned from the bar the second time, the detectives said nothing about Marilyn saying she was asleep when they returned. Bo also lied when he said he had never met Sue Sharp.  In Marilyn Smartt's interview she stated she and the two men had gone to the Sharp house on the night of the murders.

Additionally, Bo stated they arrived at the bar between 9:30- 10 p.m. but later changed this time to 12 a.m. to fit his alibi.

During Marty’s interview with the DOJ detectives, the careless, lackadaisical questioning continued. Marty told the investigators that Sue’s son, Justin, could have seen something the night of the murders "...without me detecting him..." This remark gravely implicated Marty in the murders, but the detectives made nothing of it. Marty followed that incriminating comment up by adding that he had heard a hammer was used to beat the victims before they were stabbed to death.  Then, without prompting, he voluntarily told Crim and Bradley his hammer had "gone missing" before the murders. Marty talks a lot about the victims deaths being overkill. He goes on to describe how he would have killed them fast and gotten out of the house as quickly as possible. Crim and Bradley never questioned him further on this either.

After interviewing Marty and Bo, the DOJ investigators did not do any follow-up interviews and they let Marty – a prime suspect – move out of town and relocate in Klamath, California. Bo went back to the Reno VA hospital. In July, Plumas County Sheriff Doug Thomas announced his resignation for unknown reasons. In 1976, Thomas became an insurance salesman and a part-time instructor at Feather River College in Quincy, Ca.

The month after the Keddie murders, Marty called a therapist and told the doctor he was being blamed for the killings. Ten years after Marty’s death in 2000, his therapist came forward and told the Plumas County Sheriff's Office that Marty had confessed to killing Sue Sharp. He also told the police that Marty was a friend of Plumas County Sheriff Doug Thomas and that Marty once let Thomas live with him. The therapist admitted that Marty told him that beating the polygraph was easy. Additionally, Marty said the reason he killed Sue was because she was trying to talk Marilyn into divorcing him. According the therapist, Martin Smartt did not confess to killing Dana, Johnny or Tina and he never said who was responsible for their murders.

The revelations by the therapist caused the sheriff’s office to take another look at solving the case, but with Martin Smartt long dead and Bo having died of natural causes in 1988 nothing came of this.

A Botched Investigation

After the murders of their mother and siblings, the surviving Sharp children went to live with their father. The chatter eventually stopped about the murders and soon no one thought much of the brutal slayings. That is until 2002 when a filmmaker Josh Hancock took on the challenge of making a documentary about what happened in the small town of Keddie. The film included interviews with members of the Sharp family and Wingate family, with Marilyn and Justin and with various members of Plumas County law enforcement. Hancock said his motive for making the documentary was to train a spotlight on a cold case that was apparently swept under the rug. By doing that he hoped to bring justice to the victims and their families. Hancock believes that the Plumas County Sherriff's Office did careless work regarding the investigation of the crime. On his website it states, "Exposing the truth, one liar at a time. Hold Plumas County Sheriff's Office accountable!"

Many questions and rumors abound regarding this murder case. Only one person reported hearing a scream coming from the area of the cabin; yet, all of the cabins in Keddie sat literally feet away from one another.  Why didn't anyone else hear a struggle or screams coming from Cabin 28? Furthermore, how could the children in the house sleep when three people were being brutally tortured and murdered right in the next room? Why was Tina the only one taken that night? Why were the three younger boys left unharmed?

The crime scene was substantially botched. The sheriff's office did not properly secure the scene and failing to call the Department of Justice immediately upon arriving. What may be most damning of all is the Plumas County Sheriff's Office did not realize Tina had even existed or had been kidnapped. Arriving officers refused to listen to Justin even after he told the sheriff's office Tina was taken from her bed on the night of the murders. Because of this discrepancy, the sheriff's office wasted precious hours which should have been spent searching for Tina.

Some believe the Plumas County Sheriff’s Office was too inexperienced for a crime of this magnitude. Others believe the sheriff’s department intentionally bungled and hid information to protect the assailants’ identities.  This belief was bolstered in 2010 when Martin Smartt’s therapist revealed that Marty had once allowed Plumas County Sheriff Doug Thomas to live with him for a while.

To this day the sheriff’s department refuses to discuss the case and will not look into it further. The sheriff’s department also will not accept assistance from other law enforcement agencies. Regrettably, much of the evidence collected was either lost by law enforcement or destroyed due to a leak in the roof at the sheriff’s office. Furthermore, after three decades nothing has been done with the bloody fingerprint that was collected from the scene. Lastly, many wonder why the sheriff’s department let Marty and Bo go.

Postscript

After the murders, Marilyn married and then divorced Marty's best friend. Reportedly she is still living in Plumas County.

If you were to ask most people, they would probably say they have never heard of Keddie, the small town in Plumas County, California. After the murders, the community lived in shock and fear. The atmosphere had changed. The once quiet and peaceful Keddie was all but abandoned by most.  Cabin 28 became a horror house of sorts. Although at least one family lived in the cabin after the murders, locals say the house sat abandoned for years. In 2004 Cabin 28 was bulldozed to the ground. Today there are only a handful of residents that call Keddie Resort home.

The tragedy of these murders was compounded by the botched investigation that allowed the murderers to escape justice and for the case to grow so cold it will most likely never be solved.

Nov. 4, 2013

Natalee Holloway

In 2005, 18-year-old Natalee Holloway was in Aruba on a high school senior trip. On the last night of her vacation she took a late-night ride with islander Joran van der Sloot and two of his friends, brothers Deepak and SatishKalpoe. She was never seen again.The author took it upon himself to try to find her body.

by Ken Close

I like cruising because you only unpack once, then your hotel takes you to different vacation destinations each day. In May 2012 my family and I booked a Caribbean cruise which would take us to three islands we had not yet visited: Grand Turk, Aruba and Curacao. When I noticed we’d land on Aruba on May 30, something compelled me to check Google. I quickly discovered that May 30^th marked the seventh anniversary of the disappearance of Natalee Holloway. I didn’t know Natalee or anyone in her family, but I remember reading about her disappearance.

In 2005, 18-year-old Natalee Holloway was in Aruba on a high school senior trip. On the last night of her vacation she takes a late-night ride with islander Joran van der Sloot and two of his friends, brothers Deepak and SatishKalpoe. She is never seen again.

Her disappearance launches an intensive international search effort conducted by special agents of the F.B.I., soldiers from the Dutch Army, Aruba police officers and hundreds of volunteers. Joran was held as the prime suspect in her disappearance, but he was eventually released because Natalee’s body could not be found.

Joran van der Sloot

In the following years Joran makes money by charging for interviews, telling different stories about Natalee’s disappearance. But the media eventually tires of his lies.In 2010 he takes a $25,000 payment from Beth Twitty, Natalee’s mother, pledging to tell the truth. But instead of revealing what happened that night, he flees to Peru. After gambling away his extorted money he murders, and then robs Stephany Flores in Peru on May 30, 2010. In 2012 Joran was convicted of his crimes against Ms. Flores. He is currently serving a 28-year prison sentence in Peru.

I think it is quite a coincidence that we’ll be in Aruba for the first time on May 30^th.  So I tell my eldest daughter, Michelle, that maybe this means we should solve the mystery of Natalee’s disappearance. She apparently takes me seriously, and when we leave Toledo at 5 a.m. to drive to Miami, our port of departure, she hands me a book on CD titled, Portrait Of A Monster, by Lisa Pulitzer and Cole Thompson.The book chronicles the Holloway and Flores cases, and Joran’s involvement in each. Thus begins our search for Natalee Holloway.

First Expedition: May 30, 2012. Listening to the book takes about 12 hours during our two-day, 19-hour drive. My wife Pat, Michelle and her husband Brian, my youngest daughter Carol and her husband Matt, all listen intently when they aren’t connected to iPods or sleeping. I hear it all, and tell them when we get to Aruba we need to rent a car and go find the California Lighthouse. To me, that is where the mystery begins.

Deepak drives his brother, Natalee and Joran to the California Lighthouse after the nightclub Carlos & Charlie’s closes at 1 a.m. on May 30, 2005. Deepak later tells police that they arrived at the lighthouse around 1:20 a.m. The boys’ original story is that they drive to the lighthouse and then take Natalee back to her hotel, the Holiday Inn. When security tapes prove they never return to her hotel, Joran tells other stories. I notice that each subsequent story he tells takes Natalee further and further from the lighthouse.

Back in the office, co-worker Jason asks me about our search for Natalee. I tell him, based on the evidence and our efforts, I think Joran drowned her and buried her in the swash zone of Arashi Beach. But I can’t prove it without a ground penetrating radar to locate her remains.

He tears a sheet of paper from a tablet and hands it to me. Its letterhead is for a ground penetrating radar company. His brother-in-law Casey works for them. While Casey works in Tennessee, the company’s headquarters is in Toledo – about half a mile from my house in the building next to where my wife used to work.

That’s yet another odd coincidence. It seems that just when I thought I was out of Aruba they pull me back in!

Natalee needs to be found – and she has to be somewhere.

______________________________________________________________________________

Ken Close is a retired lieutenant colonel, having served in the U.S. Army from 1972 to 1992. He holds a Master’s in Applied Economics from the University of Michigan, and is currently a self-employed Certified Financial Planner. He is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, and a life member of Mensa.