July 22, 2007Updated November 12, 2013

Ryan Ferguson 

In a case rife with DNA and other physical evidence, not one shred of evidence linked 17-year-old Ryan Ferguson to the murder of Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune sports writer Kent Heitholt in 2001. Ferguson's conviction in 2005 proved only how far the police and prosecution would go to close Columbia's only unsolved murder. A Boone County (Mo.) Judge, at a three-day-evidentiary hearing in mid-July 2008, heard testimony of how the police and prosecution withheld exculpatory evidence from Ferguson's trial attorneys and manipulated and threatened witnesses who dared not support their trumped-up case against Ferguson.

(Editor's Note: CBS's "48 Hours Mystery" broadcast a re-investigation of the case on March 26, 2011 and June 15, 2013)

by Jane Alexander

Update: Ryan Ferguson Released From Prison A Week After His Sentence Was Vacated  -- A three-judge panel of the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Western District ruled on November 5, 2013 to vacate Ryan Ferguson's 40-year sentence for the murder of Columbia Tribune sports columnist Kent Heitholt in 2001. "Under the facts and circumstances of this case, we conclude that Ferguson did not receive a fair trial," Judge Cynthia Martin wrote in summary of the court's decision. "His verdict is not worthy of confidence." In particular, the judge noted that the prosecution withheld information that supported Ferguson's innocence from his trial attorneys. The U.S. Supreme Court established in 1963 that withholding such exculpatory evidence from the defense was grounds for a new trial.

The court ordered Ferguson released within 15 days if the prosecutors do not file an appeal or notice of a retrial by then.  On November 12, the Missouri Attorney General's Office announced that Ferguson would not face any further state charges nor would the state appeal the court's ruling to vacate his sentence. Later that day, Ferguson walked out of the Boone County Courthouse a free man.

Ferguson was convicted in 2005  

On a warm Halloween night in 2001, Kent Heitholt, the sports editor of the Columbia Daily Tribune, worked into the night. He logged off his computer at 2:08 a.m., chatted with some colleagues, and made his way out of the Tribune building to his car in the newspaper's parking lot. There he had a conversation with colleague Michael Boyd that lasted until approximately 2:17 a.m. Minutes after that, Heitholt was brutally beaten, hit 11 times over the head with a metal object, and strangled to death with his own belt.

About five minutes later, Shawna Ornt, a cleaning lady on the night shift, exited the rear of the Tribune building and noticed something amiss near Heitholt's car. She went back inside to alert her supervisor, Jerry Trump. Together, they returned to the loading dock at the rear of the building overlooking the parking lot, and saw Heitholt's body lying on the ground in a pool of blood near his car. They spotted two males near Heitholt's car, one at the back of the car, with blond hair and wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt, and the other at the front of the car, with black hair and described as being six feet tall and weighing approximately 200 pounds. The male at the back of the car called out to Ornt and Trump, "get help, someone's hurt."

Ornt called 911 to raise the alarm at 2:26 a.m. Columbia police officers, detectives, and a K-9 tracking dog responded to the scene.

Despite the fact that there was a good deal of evidence at the murder scene – fingerprints, bloody footprints, a hair in the victim's hand, and DNA – the case baffled the police until they had occasion to interview 19-year-old Charles "Chuck" Erickson 860 days later, on March 10, 2004.

Erickson attended a New Year's Eve party in 2003, and while under the influence of alcohol, had been overheard saying he'd had a dream and feelings about possibly being involved in a murder, but had no memory whatsoever of actually being involved for two years, until this time. In February 2004, he mentioned being involved in the murder to a friend, Nick Gilpin, and a week later told another friend, Art Figueroa. Despite telling his friends about being involved in the murder, Erickson was not able to give any actual details, only vague generalizations, and was under the influence of alcohol each time he mentioned the murder. Another friend, Jonathan Alder, subsequently made a report to the police, which led to Erickson's interrogation.

Erickson, a junior high school classmate of Ryan Ferguson, and a known drug and alcohol abuser, was seen by his friends as a person prone to telling outrageous stories. His story on March 10, 2004 was no exception.

He was first interviewed by Columbia Police Det. John Short, and subsequently interrogated by him in a videotaped interview shortly thereafter. During the course of the 52-minute videotaped interview, Erickson "confessed" to the murder and robbery, and implicated Ryan Ferguson.

Although Erickson and Ferguson were only 17 years old at the time of Heitholt's death, Erickson stated that they were at a Columbia nightclub called By George, and had run out of money. He claimed they left the club before 1:30 a.m. when Ferguson suggested they go and rob someone for money. He claimed they went back to Ferguson's car parked nearby and that he grabbed a tire tool from the trunk.

He claimed they then walked to the Columbia Daily Tribune building and saw Heitholt in the parking lot. Erickson claimed he struck the victim over the head once, became sick and vomited at the scene. He claimed Ferguson then strangled the victim with his bare hands.

He claimed they then saw a cleaning lady and he called out to her. He claimed he sat down for a moment, and then they ran off towards the intersection of Providence and Ash, where within seconds of leaving the crime scene, he said they saw and spoke to a friend, Dallas Mallory, who was supposedly in his car with two female companions and stopped at a red light at the intersection. Erickson claimed he told Mallory what they had done. He claimed he washed the blood off his hands in a nearby creek, and they returned to Ferguson's car to dispose of the tire tool, before they went back to By George, arriving after 2:30 a.m.

Throughout the course of this interrogation with Det. Short, Erickson was confused and could not provide any accurate information relating to the murder. Short repeatedly asked questions specifically relating to the murder, and Erickson simply could not answer accurately.

Short realized this, and proceeded to spoon-feed specific details to Erickson. Whenever Erickson could not answer his questions accurately or in detail, Short provided the answers, and a confused, scared and easily manipulated Erickson simply went along with whatever the detective was saying.

One key element of Erickson's "confession" was the number of times he said he hit the victim. Short asked Erickson, "How many times did you think you hit him all together?" Erickson replied, "Just the once." Short, knowing the victim was hit 11 times, and knowing Erickson was wrong, asked, "Just the once? Well, the only problem I have with that is I know he was hit more than once," to which Erickson simply replied, "Yeah", and that, "I'm saying I just hit him once." Short continued, "You just hit him once? You didn't hit him more?" to which Erickson replied, "No", and again stated, "I didn't hit him more than once." Erickson never claimed Ferguson hit the victim.

Another key element of Erickson's story related to Ferguson's supposedly strangling Heitholt. Erickson had no problem in clearly saying that Ferguson strangled the victim, yet he had absolutely no idea how or what with. He first indicated that Ferguson had strangled the victim with his hands while the victim lay on his back on the ground. When later asked by Det. Short what Ferguson strangled the victim with, Erickson replied, "I think it was a shirt or something." Short, knowing Erickson was wrong again said, "Well, I know it wasn't a shirt." Erickson, clearly having no idea what to say, started guessing, "Maybe a bungee cord or something from his car." Unhappy with the answers given, Short again spoon-fed Erickson and decided to just tell him, "Well, we know for a fact that his [the victim's] belt was ripped off of his pants and he was strangled with his belt." Surprised to hear this, Erickson said, "Really?" and went on to say, "I don't remember that at all."

Short changed the subject, then later returned to the subject of the strangling and asked, "So it's possible Ryan could have strangled this guy with his belt, got the keys, and you not know about it?" Again confused, Erickson asked, "The guy – the man's belt?" to which Short replied, "Yeah". Still confused and surprised, Erickson continued, "His own belt?" Short answered, "Yes. Does that ring a bell?" to which Erickson replied, "Not at all." Short then asked, "But you saw Ryan strangle him though?" and now not as certain as he was earlier, Erickson replied, "I thought I did", and said, "I might not even know what I'm talking about now."

After this interrogation, detectives took Erickson on a videotaped drive around the crime scene and surrounding area. It was during this time that Erickson asked the detectives to show him where the murder had taken place. One would think that in confessing to a murder, one thing Erickson would be sure of was where it took place.

After their drive around, Erickson was again interrogated in a 22-minute videotaped interview by another detective, Jeff Nichols. It was during this interrogation that the detective threatened Erickson, saying that Ferguson would talk and blame Erickson for the whole event. Erickson replied, "I don't know. I mean, I don't even really know, it's just so foggy, like I could just be sitting here fabricating all of it and not know. Like, I don't know. I don't."

Erickson also said, "This is after reading the newspaper article in October and this is kind of what I put together with, I mean I don't know if I'm just flipping out or whatever, but I mean this is kind of what I put together with what could have happened", and, "I'm just presuming what happened. I'm making assumptions based on what I read in the newspaper."

Det. Nichols told Erickson that he had provided specifics that no one else could know. Erickson asked, "Like what?" and the detective said the cleaning lady, which Erickson said he read in the newspaper.

At this point, Nichols became aggressive and said, "I'm not going to sit here and listen to this kind of gibberish ok? I'm not going to waste my time doing that." He raised his voice and pointed his finger at Erickson, saying "I'm gonna start talking and you're gonna start listening." He again threatened Erickson and told him that Ferguson would talk and blame him, and "It's you that is on this chopping block." (Click here to view a video clip of this interview).

Erickson became scared and was still confused. Det. Nichols moved closer to Erickson and continued pointing his finger at him aggressively and said, "I don't want to hear 'all of a sudden I just think I may have fabricated all of this.'" The detective then went back to the beginning of his story, probing for more details that Erickson simply didn't know, so the detective told the story himself, and Erickson went along with it, too scared to say otherwise.

Despite the gaping holes in Erickson's story, the fact that he was confused, knew very little details of the crime, and said on numerous occasions that he didn't know what he was talking about and was making it all up, the police arrested and charged him with second-degree murder and robbery.

That same day, March 10, 2004, 19-year-old Ferguson was arrested at 12:35 p.m. in Kansas City. He was transported to Columbia and interrogated for nine hours. Ferguson repeatedly pleaded his innocence. Knowing he had nothing to do with Heitholt's murder, he felt he did not need an attorney during the interrogation. Detectives tried numerous tactics to obtain a confession, but Ferguson remained steadfast in maintaining his innocence.

Part 1

Part 2

(Click here Part 1 and Click here Part 2 to view video clips of this interview).

Ferguson maintained that he and Erickson went to By George on that night, arriving around 11:30 p.m. He stated they left at 1:15 a.m., before it closed at 1:30 a.m. He made his first phone call to his sister, Kelly Ferguson, at 1:18 a.m. He then drove to Erickson's home to drop him off, before returning home himself, at around 1:40 a.m. He then made five telephone calls, and received another three calls between 1:41 a.m. and 2:10 a.m., and talked continuously during that time. He maintains that after this time, he went to bed.

Nevertheless, Ferguson was arrested and charged with first-degree murder and robbery. Astoundingly, and despite the fact that he had no criminal record, his bail was set at $20 million, the highest bail ever set in the history of the United States for one count of murder.

Columbia detectives were not able to link any of the physical evidence at the crime scene to either Ferguson or Erickson. There were bloody footprints leading away from the scene. A match to these was never found. There was a hair in the victim's hand, and fingerprints at the scene, which did not belong to the victim. The Federal Bureau of Investigation Laboratory tested the mitochondrial DNA found at the scene, but was not able to link this evidence to Ferguson or Erickson.

Police searched Erickson's home on March 10, 2004, and performed luminol tests (a special liquid chemical that illuminates traces of blood, even after many years, or when cleaned and invisible to the human eye) but there was no evidence found to connect Erickson to the crime. Ferguson's car was similarly luminol tested, and not one trace of blood was found. Ferguson's tire tool was tested, and it was determined that it had no connection to the crime. How is it possible for these two to have committed such a horrific and messy crime, bashed a man who was six-foot three-inches tall and weighed 315 pounds, with a metal object 11 times, which produced pools of blood, yet not get any blood on their clothes, or in the car they drove that night?

Shawna Ornt, the only person able to provide a detailed description of the men she saw, provided information to Det. Nichols in November 2001 to produce a composite drawing of the man she saw behind Heitholt's car. She described him as being in his early 20's, six feet tall, around 200 pounds and with blond hair. Erickson and Ferguson were barely 17 years old at the time, and between five-foot five inches and five-foot six inches tall, and weighed between 140 and 150 pounds. Det. Liebhart stated that Jerry Trump "could not provide a detailed description of either of the individuals."

Copy of portion of the police report (#10) stating Trump could not provide a detailed description.

Strangely, Ornt was asked to provide information for another composite drawing of the same man on March 25, 2003, some 17 months later. It begs belief to think that she could provide enough information to produce a second composite drawing 17 months after she saw a man in the early hours of the morning, less than 25 feet away from where she was standing, for only a matter of seconds. Nevertheless, neither of the composite drawings based on Ornt's descriptions bears any resemblance to Erickson or Ferguson.

The K-9 tracking dog followed the scent of the killer/s from the crime scene south down Fourth Street, crossed Broadway, behind a diner, and continued south to Locust Street, where the dog then headed east along Locust Street, and south down Fifth Street to the University of Missouri and McReynolds Hall, where the scent was lost.

Heitholt's colleague, Michael Boyd, was the last known person to see the victim alive. He had a conversation with Heitholt in the Tribune parking lot just minutes before his death. A few hours after the murder, Boyd was questioned via telephone that morning and again later that evening in person. On that day, he told two very different stories. In one story, he stated Heitholt left the Tribune building before him, and once outside, they stood by Heitholt's car for a few minutes, and had a conversation about a stray cat that Heitholt frequently fed. He then went back to his car and drove off.

In another story, he stated that he left the Tribune building before Heitholt and was in his vehicle and adjusting the radio for a couple of minutes, before he saw Heitholt exiting the building and walking to his car. He then backed out of his parking spot and drove through the parking lot, stopping at Heitholt's car. He rolled down his window and had a conversation with Heitholt. They discussed a possible problem with Boyd's car, the stray cat, and some work-related matters, before he drove off.

Despite the fact that Boyd told two different stories that day, and was the last known person to see the victim alive, he was never investigated. He would alter his story three more times, in February 2005, July 2005 and June 2006, with changes ranging from which parking lot he was in, and even the color and model of the vehicle he was driving that night.

In October 2004, some seven months after the arrests, easily manipulated Erickson was offered a deal to plead guilty and provide testimony to convict Ferguson. In return, his sentence would be drastically reduced from life to 25 years, with a possibility of parole after 12 years. As a result of his deal, Erickson's story changed significantly.

Erickson now "remembered" that he hit the victim 11 times. He now "remembered" exactly how Ferguson supposedly strangled the victim. He also now mentions for the first time seeing Boyd, a "white man," talking to the victim before he attacked him, yet Boyd is African-American. The only way Erickson knew about Boyd was from reading the police reports, and he believed Boyd was white because the police had incorrectly designated Boyd as a "white man" in their reports.

Copy of portion of the police report stating Boyd was white. Click here to view full page of report.

Erickson also completely changed his story about the way they left the crime scene. He claimed they did indeed head in the same direction as the K-9 tracking dog, although unlike the dog, they headed back to By George. He stated they went in the complete opposite direction of his original story.

There are huge inconsistencies in his story. Erickson stated they went back to the club after the murder, thereby arriving after 2:30 a.m. The club closed at 1:30 a.m. There has never been any evidence to support that the club was open after 1:30 a.m.

Erickson claimed the motive was robbery and that they needed more money for drinks, yet the victim's wallet, which was in a console inside his car, was not taken. The only missing items were Heitholt's watch, a portion of his belt, and the keys to his car.

Erickson claimed they couldn't leave the club because there were police in the parking lot, yet there is no record of any police activity at the club, and if the club were open after 1:30 a.m., as Erickson stated, the club likely would have been given a citation.

Erickson claimed they drove past the crime scene after leaving the club around 4 a.m. and saw the victim being placed in a body bag, yet it is impossible to see the crime scene from the street, and the body was not placed in a body bag until 5:20 a.m.

Erickson claimed Ryan's father, Bill Ferguson, found a wallet, which Erickson alleged was the victim's, yet the victim's wallet was never taken. Erickson claimed he vomited at the scene, yet no vomit was found.

Erickson initially claimed Ferguson strangled the victim on his back, yet the victim was strangled on his stomach. Erickson claimed they were chased from the scene, yet no one chased the perpetrators.

Erickson claimed he beat the victim with a tire tool, yet not one of the 11 blows to the head resulted in a skull fracture. It is widely believed that had a tire tool indeed been the weapon, at least one of the blows would have fractured the victim’s skull. It is therefore believed that the weapon was not a tire tool as claimed by Erickson.

Erickson claimed they saw Dallas Mallory in his car with two female companions stopped at a red light at the intersection of Providence and Ash, yet the Missouri Department of Transportation stated that there was only a flashing yellow light at that time. Regardless, Mallory did not hold a valid driver's license, and did not own a car. Was he driving an imaginary car without a driver's license? If what Erickson says were true, then why were the two female companions not identified and interviewed?

On the day of the arrests, Mallory was interviewed by a group of detectives. He denied seeing or speaking to Erickson or Ferguson on the night of the murder. The detectives would not accept his statement, so they yelled obscenities at him, tried to intimidate him, and even threatened to charge him with the murder.

The detectives told Mallory that Erickson claimed he saw him on the night of the murder, and that Mallory had been wearing a police uniform as a Halloween costume. Upon hearing this information, Mallory realized he must have seen Erickson that night, however was adamant it was not in the early hours of the morning after the murder, as he was not in the vicinity of the crime scene at that time.

It was later established that both Mallory and Erickson were at a Halloween party hours before the murder occurred, and were photographed together, with Mallory wearing the police uniform costume. This is how Erickson knew Mallory was wearing a police uniform that night, not because they spoke after the murder. That simply did not happen. The only time that Mallory mentioned seeing Erickson on the morning of the murder was under severe police duress. Since that time, Mallory has maintained that he did not see or talk with Erickson or Ferguson on the morning of the murder. On Dec. 1, 2004, Mallory provided an affidavit in such terms.

On Jan. 4, 2005, the prosecutor interviewed Mallory. It was during this interview that a subsequent paragraph was added to the follow-up police report, for the first time claiming that Mallory saw Ferguson that night, as this was previously omitted in the original report. Mallory subsequently read this report, and explained that the police falsified the portion of the report pertaining to his supposedly seeing Ferguson on that night, when in fact he did not.

Add these to the previously mentioned inconsistencies, and one wonders how any of this was believed. Despite all of this, Ferguson stood trial in October 2005 at the Boone County Courthouse in Columbia, Mo., presided over by Judge Ellen Roper. In his opening statement, Prosecutor Kevin Crane told the jury there was no physical evidence to connect Ferguson to the crime. The prosecution only had the concocted testimony of Erickson and Ornt's supervisor, Jerry Trump, to pin the crime on Ferguson.

During the course of the five-day trial, Erickson testified against Ferguson, and this time, during questioning by the prosecution, he was confident, concise and much clearer in the details than before. He admitted on cross-examination having rehearsed his testimony over the course of several weeks and role-played the assault with the prosecutor and investigators from the prosecutor's office. If he knew the details as clearly as he claimed, why would he need to rehearse?

On cross-examination by the defense, Erickson also admitted that he had been guessing in the videotaped interrogations on the day of his arrest, and that he was confused and didn't know many details of the crime at that time, and was making presumptions based on the newspaper articles. He further admitted that during the course of the interrogation on March 10, 2004, he was trying to tell detectives that he didn't know if he committed the crime. He also testified that he had found many errors in the police reports.

During cross-examination, he was unable to clearly explain his lack of memory of the crime at the time of his arrest and was often vague and had difficulty in explaining his answers to the defense's questioning, prompting the defense to ask questions more than once. He testified that he was currently on psychotropic medication, which affects the central nervous system and alters brain function, which results in changes to a person's mood, cognition, perception and behavior, and that his jail psychiatric records over a year-and-a-half, brought into evidence during the trial by the defense, showed no problems with his memory and that his memory was intact.

He further admitted to having undergone testing by psychologists at the University of Missouri weeks after the murder, including memory testing, but made no mention of the crime. He admitted to having graduated from a substance abuse treatment program in October 2001, despite his continuing use of marijuana during the course of the program, and his use of a detoxifying substance to clear the body of the traces of marijuana to pass drug testing. He also testified that he had been under the influence of alcohol and cocaine when he first told friends of his dreams about the murder.

Kent Heitholt's wife, Deborah Evangelista, was called by the prosecution, and testified that Heitholt often worked late into the night at the Tribune, and that the day he was murdered was his fifth year anniversary of his employment at the Tribune. During Evangelista's testimony, the prosecution tendered photographs of Heitholt, including a photograph taken on Oct. 31, 2001 some hours before his death. Evangelista identified Heitholt's watch and belt, items he was wearing in the photograph taken on the day of his murder, which were taken from the crime scene.

The prosecution then called William Hawes, an investigator with the Boone County prosecutor's office. Hawes testified that on Aug. 2, 2005, he was instructed by the prosecutor to walk the route Erickson described that he and Ferguson took on the night of the murder from By George nightclub to the Tribune building and back to the club after the murder. Hawes testified that this took him 17 minutes and 1 second.

On cross-examination, the defense pointed out that while Hawes walked this route from the Tribune building back to the By George nightclub, he failed to allow for the time Erickson claimed he took washing the blood off his hands in a creek, going back to Ferguson's car to dispose of the tire tool, and having the conversation with Dallas Mallory. Nevertheless, it was agreed by Hawes that the earliest possible time Erickson and Ferguson could have returned to the club would have been 2:26 a.m., almost an hour after the normal closing time.

The prosecution called Shawna Ornt's supervisor, Jerry Trump, a registered sex offender, who earlier had told police he could not provide a detailed description of the man he saw in the Tribune parking lot. Trump now identified Ferguson as that man. They also called Ornt, the person who provided the composite drawings, who did not identify Ferguson as the person she saw.

Kent Heitholt's colleague, Robert Thompson, a sports writer for the Tribune, testified for the prosecution that he worked with Heitholt on the night of the murder. He testified that Heitholt left the office at his usual time after 2 a.m. with colleague Michael Boyd, and that 15 to 20 minutes later, Ornt went to the sports department in the Tribune building and asked, "Where's Kent?" Thompson testified that Trump then arrived at the sports department and stated there were two people by Heitholt's car and that he thought Heitholt had been hurt. Thompson testified that he ran out to Heitholt's car and saw him laying half underneath his car and slumped on the left side of his stomach, face down. He noticed there was blood "everywhere", so he shook Heitholt in an attempt to wake him up.

Thompson testified that he then noticed that Ornt and Trump had returned to the rear dock of the Tribune building, so he called out to them that Heitholt was hurt badly and they should call 911. Thompson was unaware that 911 had already been called. His co-worker, Russ Baer, then came out to Heitholt's car, and together they checked for a pulse, but did not find one, so they rolled him over.

Thompson further testified that police and paramedics soon arrived at the scene, and the paramedics cut Heitholt's shirt open and tried to revive him, using cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and a defibrillator machine, but to no avail. He further testified that police then sealed off the crime scene and the entire Tribune parking lot and began its investigation.

The prosecution then called Det. Jeff Nichols of the Columbia Police Department Major Crimes Division. He testified that he arrived at the crime scene at around 3 a.m. on the morning of the murder. He said he observed two pools of blood, one on the pavement near the rear wheel of Heitholt's vehicle, and another right next to the victim's head, and that he saw a belt buckle and a portion of a belt about a foot from the victim's head.

Det. Nichols identified the pants, t-shirt and sweater worn by Heitholt at the time of his death, and testified that they were all covered in blood. He said that there were blood spatters on the inside of the driver's door window and on the floor of Heitholt's vehicle. He further stated that there was blood on the wheel of the vehicle, which was transferred from Heitholt's bloody head hitting the wheel.

Nichols testified that on Nov. 3, 2001, he performed luminol tests on the sidewalks leading from the Tribune building south on Fourth, across Walnut and ending at Broadway. He testified that there were two different types of bloody shoe prints found, and he believed the shoe prints showed that two people were initially walking away from the scene, and then they started running. He testified that this luminol testing was done to check that the K-9 tracking dog was going in the right direction on the night of the murder.

Nichols also testified that he processed Heitholt's vehicle and obtained fingerprints from the interior and exterior of the vehicle, and was unable to obtain the source of these fingerprints, and they were therefore unknown. He further testified that he found the victim's wallet inside a console in the vehicle.

Nichols said that he attended Heitholt's autopsy, performed by Dr. Edward Adelstein at the Medical Examiner's Office, and that he had placed bags on the victim's hands at the crime scene to preserve evidence. He said he collected a hair sample from the victim's hands during the autopsy.

On cross-examination, Nichols was questioned about the luminol tests performed on Nov. 3, 2001, admitting he stopped the testing near Walnut and Fourth, to proceed to McDavid Hall and Flat Branch Park to perform luminol tests in those locations. This was the route the K-9 tracking dog and Officer Todd Alber had followed. He testified that no blood was found at either of these locations, so they headed back to Walnut and Fourth and proceeded towards Broadway.

The defense asked Nichols if it were possible to see the victim or his vehicle on the night of the murder from Providence Road, as Erickson said he had. Nichols confirmed it was not.

The defense then extensively questioned Nichols about Erickson's interrogations on the day of his arrest. Nichols admitted that during the videotaped drive around the crime scene, Erickson didn't appear to know where the crime took place. He said, "He [Erickson] didn't seem to know specifically where it occurred, and so I did show him. I did tell him. I pointed out the specific location", and, "He [Erickson] was having a hard time recalling exactly where this location was. And he was having a hard time or seemed to be having a hard time figuring out exactly what his route of travel was from the parking lot."

Nichols further admitted that during the third videotaped interrogation on the day of the arrest, Erickson, "seemed like he had a hard time recalling details." The defense asked Nichols if he was really trying to find the truth from Erickson by not allowing him to say he was confused and unsure. Nichols evaded that question by giving general comments about interrogation tactics.

The prosecution then called Dawn Kliethermes, a criminalist and latent print examiner with the Missouri State Highway Patrol Crime Laboratory. Kliethermes testified that there was an unknown fingerprint found on the rear inside passenger window of Heitholt's vehicle, three unknown fingerprints found on the driver's side of the vehicle, one unknown fingerprint on the rear-view mirror of the vehicle, and one unknown fingerprint on papers on the driver's seat of the vehicle.

On cross-examination, the defense pointed out that this amounted to six unknown fingerprints in this case, and questioned Kliethermes whether these fingerprints matched Ferguson, Erickson, Heitholt or Heitholt's daughter, Kali, to which she testified that they did not.

Cary Maloney, the DNA technical leader of the Missouri State Highway Patrol Crime Laboratory, was called by the prosecution and testified that he performed DNA tests on Heitholt's shoes, t-shirt, pants and sweater worn at the time of his death, and all of the DNA on these items belonged to Heitholt. On cross-examination, Maloney admitted that none of the DNA tested in this case belonged to Erickson or Ferguson.

The prosecution's final witness was Dr. Edward Adelstein, deputy medical examiner. He testified that there were abrasions on the right side of Heitholt's cheek, bruising and hemorrhaging to his eyes, bleeding under the skin, multiple injuries to the tops of both hands, which were possible self-defense wounds, and abrasions and hemorrhages to the neck. He also testified that Heitholt was struck 11 times in the head by a dense object.

Dr. Adelstein further testified that Heitholt's hyoid bone (a bone in the neck which separates fluid and air) had been broken, and that it would take a great deal of pressure to break the hyoid bone. He testified that Heitholt was strangled from behind, and that the cause of death was asphyxia due to compression of the neck caused by strangulation.

On cross-examination, Dr. Adelstein testified that the lacerations to Heitholt's face were likely to have been caused by a different object to the lacerations on his head, or that it was possible that it was the same object, but that two different ends of that object were used. He also testified that the strikes to the head could have been caused by a variety of instruments, and that it was possible that there were two different instruments used in the beating. The defense questioned whether these types of injuries were consistent with street robberies, and Dr. Adelstein responded that these types of injuries usually occurred during a serious fight.

The prosecutor failed to provide the defense with details of exculpatory evidence that two of his investigators, William Hawes and Ben White, had obtained from two witnesses, Melissa Griggs and Kristopher Canada, who were questioned before the trial. This is a violation of the Brady Rule, a federal law requiring prosecutors to turn over to the defense any information or evidence favorable to the defendant uncovered during the crime's investigation. The witnesses were an employee and a patron of By George. They told investigators that the club had indeed closed at 1:30 a.m. The judge acknowledged this violation, noting this was improper conduct and that all information should be passed onto the defense, but the jury was never informed.

The prosecution did not call their lead detective, Det. John Short, to give evidence. It is rare in criminal trials that the prosecution does not call the lead detective to give evidence. They did not call Dallas Mallory, the only person who could have corroborated Erickson's story, because he had provided the defense with a sworn affidavit stating he did not see or talk with Ferguson during the early morning hours of the murder.

In his closing argument, the prosecutor deceived the jury about the hair in the victim's hand. In Det. Nichols's deposition, he stated that a hair was adhered to the bloody fingers of the victim, and that he had taken a photograph of this hair. This hair is a crucial piece of exculpatory evidence in this case, and is believed to belong to the killer, yet a match to this hair was never found. In his closing argument, the prosecutor told the jury there was no hair found in the victim's hand. The prosecutor deceiving the jury about this crucial piece of evidence is a form of prosecutorial misconduct.

Ferguson's defense team, which consisted of lead attorney Charles Rogers, Kathryn Benson and Jeremy Weis, called Ryan Ferguson's sister, Kelly Ferguson, who testified that, together with her friend Christine Lo who knew the bouncer at By George, she had arranged for Erickson and Ferguson to be allowed to enter the club on the night of the murder, despite them being underage at the time. She testified that they met Erickson and Ferguson at the front door of the club and they entered together, and that they split up once inside, and she only saw her brother in the club once after that time. She further testified that the lights in the club came on between 1:15 a.m. and 1:30 a.m., and that the staff began to push people out the door during that time, as it was closing time.

The defense then called Ronald Singer, a forensic scientist and crime laboratory director of the Tarrant County, Tex., Medical Examiner's Office Crime Laboratory. After receiving reports from the defense, as well as photographs of the crime scene and Heitholt's vehicle, Singer examined the blood spatter patterns and evidence. He testified that he was able to provide a general reconstruction of what took place in the attack, and that the blood spatter patterns were consistent with a beating.

Singer testified that there was blood on the inside of the driver's door of Heitholt's vehicle, which indicates that the attack began with the driver's door open, and with Heitholt standing upright near the door. Heitholt then moved and was attacked near the driver's side rear tire of his vehicle. Singer testified that at one point, Heitholt's head was at a similar level to the hubcap, and his head came into contact with the hubcap, and that he was then struck while his head was on the ground. He also testified that the blood spatter pattern showed cast-off blood, which was blood from a blunt object being sprayed off the object while the object was in motion, presumably due to the beating.

The defense called Jenny Smith, a forensic chemist at the Missouri State Highway Patrol Crime Laboratory. She testified that she tested the hair found in Heitholt's hand, plus samples belonging to Heitholt from his hair brush, and samples from Erickson and Ferguson. She concluded that the hair found in Heitholt's hand was not consistent with either Heitholt, Erickson or Ferguson. Smith further testified that she sent the samples to the FBI Lab in Quantico, Va., for mitochondrial DNA testing.

The defense then called Karen Lanning, a physical scientist in the Trace Evidence Unit of the FBI Lab in Quantico. She testified that she conducted tests of the hair found in Heitholt's hand, and compared it to hair samples from Heitholt's hair brush, and samples from Erickson and Ferguson, and concluded that the hair found in Heitholt's hand did not belong to Heitholt, Erickson or Ferguson.

Catherine Theisen, a forensic DNA examiner in the Mitochondrial DNA Unit of the FBI Laboratory in Quantico, was then called by the defense. She testified that she conducted mitochondrial DNA testing of the hair found in Heitholt's hand, and compared it with buccal swabs (swabs taken from inside the mouth) of DNA from Erickson and Ferguson, and a blood stain from Heitholt. She testified that she extracted mitochondrial DNA from each of these samples, and confirmed that the hair found in Heitholt's hand did not match Heitholt, Erickson or Ferguson.

The defense called Holly Admire, a high school friend of Ferguson and Erickson. She testified that she spoke to Ferguson on her cell phone in the early hours of the morning on Nov. 1, 2001. The defense submitted her cell phone records as evidence, which showed telephone calls between Admire and Ferguson after 1:30 a.m. on the night of the murder.

The defense then called Melissa Griggs, an associate of Ferguson and Erickson. She testified that she attended By George on the night of the murder, and recalled seeing Erickson and Ferguson at the club. She further testified that the club closed at 1:30 a.m. that night.

The defense called Kristopher Canada, a barman at By George. He testified that he worked as a barman at the club on the night of the murder, and that the lights of the club came on between 1:10 a.m. and 1:15 a.m. that night, and that at that time the bouncers told everyone to leave, and the doors were locked and the club closed at 1:30 a.m.

Both Griggs and Canada were located by the defense team on day three of the trial. The defense discovered that they had both been contacted by investigators from the prosecutor's office prior to the trial. Griggs told the prosecutor’s investigator that the club had closed at 1:30 am that night. Canada told them that he had worked at the club that night, and also confirmed that the club closed at 1:30 a.m. This information was not passed onto the defense.

The defense subpoenaed Columbia Police Officer Todd Alber, who was the K-9 dog tracker who accompanied the dog following the trail of the killer/s on the night of the murder. Officer Alber did not receive the subpoena before he went on vacation, and therefore did not testify. As a substitute for Officer Alber, the defense requested to call Officers Rugstadt or Hatton, who followed Officer Alber and the dog that night in order to provide security for them. The court would not allow these witnesses to be called, due to the lateness of them being identified. This was prejudicial to the defense, as they were unable to inform the jury of the route the K-9 tracking dog took, to confirm that it was the opposite direction of what Erickson claimed during his interrogation on the day of his arrest.

Ferguson took the stand in his own defense and testified that he had no involvement in the crime. He was asked by the defense whether he went to the Tribune building or parking lot and whether he saw Heitholt anywhere that night, to which he replied, "No." He was also asked by the defense whether he participated in the murder, to which he again replied, "No." Using a map, he also pointed out to the court where he had parked his car near the club that night, and the route he drove after leaving the club to Erickson's home, before returning home himself.

In his cross-examination, the prosecutor tried to intimidate and agitate Ferguson, but he remained calm and answered each question clearly and respectfully. He stated that he never thought he would be arrested for a crime he didn't commit.

The defense called Professor Elizabeth Loftus, a memory expert and author of many publications on false memories. She testified that it was her opinion, after 30 years of studying memories and based on her vast research and experience, that Erickson's was a false confession. She was of the opinion that a person cannot forget something as significant as committing a murder, and not have any recollection of doing so the next day, the next week or the next two years, and then suddenly regain a memory of it at a later time.

The defense also submitted Ferguson's cell phone billing records as evidence, which provided details of the time and duration of the calls made and received by Ferguson on the night of the murder, between 1:41 a.m. and 2:10 a.m., and showed that he talked continuously during that time. These calls included five outgoing calls made by Ferguson to various friends, lasting a combined duration of 10 minutes; and three incoming calls received by Ferguson lasting a combined duration of 15 minutes. Ferguson testified that these calls were made and received after he returned home, while he sat on the curb outside his home.

Due to the lapse of time involved, the cell phone company's records no longer provided details regarding which cell-phone towers transmitted the calls Ferguson made. Thus the defense could not establish that the calls were made from Ferguson's home as he alleged. These calls, if the defense could have established that Ferguson had made them from his home, would have excluded Ferguson as the murderer.

The defense further highlighted the lack of physical evidence in this case, and the fact that it was never determined who the DNA, fingerprints, footprints and hair in the victim's hand belonged to.

Ferguson's defense team made fundamental errors in its handling of the case and the running of the trial. The defense failed to interview Dallas Mallory and Michael Boyd, and did not call these critical witnesses to give evidence during the trial. Neither did they call rebuttal witnesses to show that Erickson was untrustworthy, a drug and alcohol abuser, and prone to exaggeration.

They similarly failed to call character witnesses to attest to Ferguson's upbringing, good nature, and lack of prior criminal or violent behavior. Potential character witnesses could have testified as to Ferguson graduating high school early, and obtaining the rank of Eagle Scout, the highest ranking in the Boy Scouts of America. Without these witnesses, the jury was given no insight into Ferguson's character and personality, to demonstrate that he was not the cold-blooded killer the prosecution made him out to be.

The defense failed to locate further witnesses to confirm that By George had closed at 1:30 a.m. that night. It also failed to obtain official records showing that the club had never received any citations for being open after 1:30 a.m. The closing time of the club is one of the major inconsistencies in Erickson's story. Therefore, the defense's failure to locate witnesses to attest to the club's closing time and thereby refute Erickson's story was severely prejudicial to their client's case.

The defense failed to enlist an expert witness to examine the victim's injuries, and attempt to discredit Erickson's story. This denied the defense the potential to further question Erickson's story, challenge his credibility, and highlight the countless inconsistencies in his testimony and apparent recollection of the murder.

The defense failed to produce an adequate map of the crime scene and surrounding area, and failed to label correctly and use the map it did have. The defense's lack of preparation with regards to the map caused confusion when witnesses were unable to accurately identify various areas on the map and show their whereabouts and the routes taken on the night of the murder.

In its closing argument, the defense focused on there being no physical evidence linking Erickson or Ferguson to the crime, that Trump's testimony was unreliable, and that Erickson's story was inconsistent, continually changing, and unreliable, and that there was no-one able to confirm Erickson's story. They also highlighted the major points of the testimony of the defense witnesses, and Ferguson's cell phone calls on the night of the murder.

However, the defense failed to list a number of the obvious inconsistencies in Erickson's story to highlight to the jury, including the fact that there was no vomit found at the crime scene, that Dallas Mallory vehemently denies that he saw Erickson and Ferguson that morning, that Erickson did not know how Ferguson supposedly strangled the victim, how many times he hit the victim, the direction they left from the crime scene, and that they supposedly drove past the crime scene and saw the victim's body being placed in a body bag, which actually happened over an hour after Erickson claimed.

Given that Erickson's story was the majority of the prosecution's case against Ferguson, and that his story is inconsistent and unreliable, thereby making the majority of the prosecution's case unreliable, tearing apart Erickson's testimony should have been the primary focus of the closing argument. Destroy Erickson's credibility, destroy the case against Ferguson. The defense should have also demonstrated that Trump's original statements to the police proved he could not identify Heitholt's assailants. If the defense could have discredited Erickson and Trump, the government's case against Ferguson would have dissolved.

The defense made blatantly unprofessional errors during the trial by repeatedly becoming confused and mixed-up with Erickson and Ferguson's names, which was not only embarrassing, but potentially confusing to the jury.

What must have made this case so difficult for the jury was the fact that Erickson had already admitted to being involved in Heitholt's murder. The jury knew that Erickson would be spending the next 12 to 25 years of his life in prison as a result. This is powerful information for any juror to digest. Who could imagine that Erickson was not involved in the murder if he had already admitted to it? This type of knowledge apparently allowed the jury not to be bothered by the lack of evidence or the countless inconsistencies in this case. They were not bothered by the fact that this case was investigated by detectives who were disinterested in the truth, or that the case relied on the word of Erickson, an unreliable witness given the major inconsistencies and changes in his story over the one-and-a-half year period between the arrests and the trial, and the word of a registered sex offender who previously could not provide a detailed description, yet four years later identified Ferguson as the person he saw. After only five hours of deliberation, the jury returned a guilty verdict.

Five members of the jury were later interviewed by "48 Hours Mystery" and several stated they had already made up their minds about Ferguson's guilt before the defense began its case. This is tantamount to jury misconduct.

In December 2005, Ryan Ferguson was sentenced to 40 years in prison – 30 for the murder and 10 for the robbery. He will be eligible for parole in 2040.

The murder of Kent Heitholt was hideous and brutal. It took the life of an innocent man. The conviction of Ryan Ferguson makes him the crime's second innocent victim. In the prosecution and police's zeal to close Columbia's only unsolved murder, Ryan Ferguson was the scapegoat for a crime he had nothing to do with, where not one shred of evidence implicated him. All the prosecution had was the fabricated testimony of a delusional, confused teenager and the specious, concocted testimony of a sexual offender.

Ryan Ferguson's court-appointed appeal attorney, Ellen Flottman, appealed his conviction in late 2006 to the Missouri Western District Court of Appeals. That court denied his appeal on June 26, 2007, upholding his conviction.

Ferguson's new appeal attorney, Valerie Leftwich, filed a Rule 29.15 Motion for Appeal in the Boone County Court on March 3, 2008, citing various grounds, including Brady violations and ineffective assistance of counsel.

As stated in the Movant's (Ferguson's) Proposed Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law, Order and Judgment, the test to determine whether counsel were ineffective is "whether counsel failed to exercise the customary skill and diligence that reasonably competent counsel would have exercised under similar circumstances, and whether Ryan was prejudiced as a result, that is, whether there is a reasonable probability the outcome would have been different."

An evidentiary hearing was held in relation to this appeal on 16, 17 and 18 July 2008 at the Boone County Courthouse, presided over by Judge Jodie Asel.

Ferguson claimed two distinct Brady violations, relating to Ronald Hudson and Shawna Ornt. Both testified at the evidentiary hearing in relation to information they provided to the police investigating Heitholt's murder and/or Prosecutor Crane, which evidence was not disclosed to the defense prior to Ferguson's trial.

Ronald Hudson's attorney, Rob Fleming, testified that Columbia Detective Bryan Liebhart interviewed Hudson in his presence on Nov. 22, 2002 at the Boone County Jail. Hudson had previously informed Fleming that he had information in relation to Heitholt's murder and wanted to exchange this information as part of a plea agreement for a pending robbery charge.

Both Fleming and Hudson testified that Hudson had told Detective Liebhart that in February or March of 2002 Hudson was standing outside Labor Ready in Columbia and was talking with an African-American man named Clarence Mabon. Mabon told Hudson that he had been involved in "the incident with the newspaper reporter" and that the sketch the police were showing was not of the people involved in the murder. Hudson provided Detective Liebhart with other information about his past incarceration and about how he had met Mabon.

Fleming and Hudson testified that Detective Liebhart ended the interview, with the detective saying they were not interested in his information, as it "did not jive" with the information the police had. Fleming testified that he was given the impression that the main reason for this was that Mabon was African-American, whereas the police were focusing on two white males.

Fleming and Hudson further testified that on December 3, 2002 a second interview was conducted between Hudson and Detective John Short, with Fleming present. After this second interview Detective Short informed Fleming that Hudson's information did not fit with the information the police had from witnesses, again relating to their belief that they were looking for two white males, not an African-American man.

Detective Liebhart testified at the evidentiary hearing that he did not write a report regarding the interviews with Hudson.

Ferguson's trial attorneys testified that they were never provided this information, that is, information that another person had admitted to being involved in Heitholt's murder some two years prior to Erickson and Ferguson's arrests. They testified that had they received this information, they would have investigated it further. This would have been valuable information to provide to the jury, and further evidence to support Ferguson's innocence. Mabon was never investigated in relation to Heitholt's murder, despite his claim of being involved, and despite there being no valid suspects at the time of these interviews with Hudson.

Shawna Ornt, who testified at Ferguson's trial in October 2005, also testified at the evidentiary hearing. During Ferguson's trial Ornt was not asked by either the prosecution or the defense whether she could identify Ferguson as the person she saw in the parking lot on the night of the murder. During the course of the evidentiary hearing, it became abundantly clear why the prosecutor never asked this crucial question.

Ornt testified that she had repeatedly told Prosecutor Crane that she had seen pictures of Ferguson and Erickson, both in the newspaper and on television, and that neither of them were the people she saw that night. She testified that after the arrests she was invited to meet with Crane, and she told him that neither Ferguson nor Erickson were the people she saw. She testified that Crane told her that he knew these were the right people and that Jerry Trump had also said so. Ornt continued to tell Crane that they were not the right people, but Crane was persistent in trying to change her mind and have her agree with him. She testified that, "He [Crane] made me feel like I was wrong about what I was saying".

She further testified that she again met with Crane prior to the trial for "trial preparation", where she again told him that neither were the people she saw on the night of the murder. She described the boys in the pictures (Ferguson and Erickson) as being younger than the people she saw. Despite feeling intimidated by Crane, she was adamant that they were not the right people, and she told Crane she would not identify Ferguson in Court.

Perhaps the most telling portion of Ornt's testimony at the evidentiary hearing was her statement that if she had been asked during Ferguson's trial, by either the prosecution or the defense, whether Ferguson was the person she saw, she would have said no. Therefore, clearly the prosecutor could not ask this question of her, as he already knew her answer, but it is bewildering why the defense failed to ask this pertinent question.

Ferguson's trial attorneys testified at the evidentiary hearing that the prosecution did not disclose this information to the defense prior to trial, that is, that Ornt had told them on numerous occasions that she would not identify Ferguson in court. This is clearly a violation of the law, and was severely prejudicial to Ferguson. Had his defense team received this information, they would have investigated further, and presented this information to the jury.

During such an investigation the defense would have discovered that Ornt also told others that neither Erickson nor Ferguson were the people she saw. In fact, during the evidentiary hearing Ornt stated that "I told everybody I knew" that they were the wrong people.

One such person that Ornt told was the owner of the cleaning company she worked for, Alicia Shelton, who testified that Ornt had told her that she had seen the pictures of Erickson and Ferguson on television after their arrest and that they were not the people she saw. Had the defense presented this information to the jury, it could have substantially altered the outcome of the trial.

[Click here to watch a video of excerpts of Ornt and Shelton's testimony during the evidentiary hearing.]

Further in relation to Ornt, Ferguson claims his counsel were ineffective in that they failed to investigate her ability to identify him. The defense deposed Ornt prior to the trial, but failed to ask whether he was the person she saw on the night of the murder. Had they asked this, they would have known her answer would be no, and they could have presented this information to the jury.

Ferguson has also made various claims of ineffective assistance of counsel, predominantly relating to trial preparation and important witnesses who were not called to give evidence during the October 2005 trial.

The issue of subpoenaing Columbia Police Officer Todd Alber was again raised during the evidentiary hearing. It was again explained that the defense failed to subpoena Officer Alber prior to the trial and prior to him leaving for vacation, and he was therefore unable to testify. He did however testify at the evidentiary hearing in relation to the route the K-9 tracking dog took on the night of the murder.

Officer Alber testified that the dog followed the same trail as the luminol trail (performed by Detective Nichols on November 3, 2001) for approximately two blocks, but the dog continued past where the luminol track ended. The dog went behind the Broadway Diner and continued in a southeasterly direction towards the University of Missouri campus, ending at McDavid Hall. Officer Alber further testified that once past the Broadway Diner the dog continued tracking on a different path than what Erickson testified to at trial. He stated that according to Erickson's testimony, the path he and Ferguson traveled that night headed east at the Broadway Diner before continuing west and north back to By George, rather than the dog heading southeast to the University campus.

Map showing both of Erickson's routes and the K-9 tracking dog route.

Ferguson's trial attorneys testified that they wanted Officer Alber to testify at the trial, as his testimony in relation to the path the dog took would have impeached Erickson's testimony, as it was in complete contrast to his version of the route they apparently took. This would have been powerful evidence for the jury to consider, but they were not given the chance to hear this, due to the attorneys not subpoenaing Officer Alber in time.

In the alternative to Officer Alber testifying, the defense should have shown the jury a videotaped recreation of the path Officer Alber and the K-9 tracking dog took, which was prepared by the Columbia Police Department. This video was in the possession of the defense, and showed Officer Alber and the K-9 tracking dog running the route they followed on the night of the murder. During the evidentiary hearing Officer Alber testified that this video accurately reflected portions of the route they took.

The defense should have and could have submitted this video, which would have shown the flaws in Erickson's testimony, especially in light of Officer Alber being unavailable to testify at trial.

The most important person Ferguson believes should have been called during his October 2005 trial is Dallas Mallory. Mallory testified at the evidentiary hearing that on March 10, 2004 the police attended his work, Forum Cleaners, and took him to the Police Department to interview him. He told the police that he had not seen Erickson or Ferguson on the night of the murder. He testified that the police yelled at him, called him a liar, and threatened to charge him with Heitholt's murder if he didn't tell them the truth. He stated that they threatened that they would make a note of his vehicle registration details and all police officers would pull him over at any time his vehicle was seen, to take him in for more questioning. He became very scared during the interview and was crying as they continued to yell at him and call him a liar.

Mallory continually told the police that he was telling the truth, but they would not believe him. He testified that he told them that he had been in a police uniform costume and that he had been drinking rum since 3:00 pm that day and had consumed a large portion of alcohol.

He was interviewed for a second time on September 14, 2004, and was so scared from the abuse he received at the first interview that he simply told the police whatever they wanted to hear, in an effort to avoid their abuse and threats. He testified that the police report of September 14, 2004 did not contain information that he had given them, but rather what the police told him they had received from Erickson. Mallory denies the contents of that report.

Mallory further testified that he signed an affidavit on December 6, 2004 which stated that he did not see Erickson or Ferguson in downtown Columbia on the night of the murder, and that he never told police that Erickson told him they had "beat someone down", as Erickson claims. He further stated in that affidavit that he did not have a driver's license at that time and did not have a car. He testified that all of the information in this affidavit is true and correct.

Mallory's supervisor at Forum Cleaners, Donna Beck, testified that she remembered the police attending Forum Cleaners to take Mallory to the police station to interview him, and that upon his return to work he was very upset and it was obvious he had been crying. She stated that Mallory told her that the police had been yelling at him and that "he was getting dragged into something that he knew nothing about". Beck testified that she knew that Mallory did not have a car or a driver's license on Halloween 2001. She further testified that had she been contacted by Ferguson's defense team, she would have testified at his trial.

Ben White, an investigator with the prosecutor's office, testified at the evidentiary hearing that he had spoken with Mallory on a number of occasions. He further testified that during the trial in October 2005 he told Mallory that if he testified as to what was in his affidavit, he would testify that Mallory told him something different and he would look like a liar.

Detective Liebhart also testified at the evidentiary hearing, stating that he had also interviewed Mallory, and that he had said the same thing as in his original interview with Officer James Harmon. Officer Harmon's report says that Mallory denied seeing Erickson and Ferguson, and stated that he appeared to be completely truthful during their conversation.

Ferguson's trial attorneys were well aware of Mallory and the information he could provide to the jury, but failed to call him. In fact, Mallory was present at the courthouse during the trial, and could easily have been called to testify, and would have done so if he had been asked. Mallory's testimony would have cast serious doubt on Erickson's version of events and would have gone a long way to discrediting his testimony.

Mike Schook was also not called to testify at Ferguson's trial. Schook worked at By George Nightclub on the night of the murder. He testified at the evidentiary hearing that he had worked at the club for approximately two years and that during that time the doors to the club were never open to the public after 1:30 am, and that he had never stayed at the club beyond 2:15 am. He testified that on Halloween night of 2001 he had to disconnect the speaker wires because the DJ had continued to play beyond 1:15 am while the lights were on and staff were clearing patrons from the club.

He further testified that the standard procedure for closing the club each night was to turn the lights on at 12:50 am and start clearing patrons by 1:15 am. Once all patrons had left the club, he would go out into parking lot and ask everyone to leave, so that by 1:30 am there would be no patrons or cars in the area of the club. The staff would then clean the club, which was normally finished by 2:00 am.

Had the defense called Schook to testify during Ferguson's trial, he would have provided this information to the jury, which would have been in direct contrast to Erickson's story that he and Ferguson went back to By George after the murder, arriving around 2:30 am; an hour after the club was closed, and that they had stayed there for a further hour until approximately 3:30 am.

Further, Ferguson's defense team failed to obtain records relating to By George prior to trial from the Missouri Division of Alcohol and Tobacco Control – Licensing (Liquor Control). Had they obtained these records prior to trial, they would have shown that in the ten-year history of the club they had never been cited for being open after hours, i.e. after 1:30 am.

Ferguson's trial attorneys failed to investigate three cellmates of Erickson at the Boone County Jail and call them to testify at trial. Keith Fletcher, Eric Gaithings and John James were all housed with Erickson prior to Ferguson's trial in October 2005, and all spoke to him about the murder. All of these were known to the defense prior to trial, and should have been called to testify.

Fletcher testified at the evidentiary hearing that he was in the same pod as Erickson from the first day he was brought to the jail. Erickson told him that he had dreamed that he and Ferguson had killed Heitholt, and that the police had told him everything that happened, and he went along with it because they told him he was guilty. He further testified that Erickson told him he believed he could go home if he confessed, and that he was unsure whether he had actually committed the crime. Erickson said he was going to take the plea to get it over with. Fletcher and Erickson also wrote to each other numerous times after Fletcher left the Boone County Jail.

Gaithings testified at the evidentiary hearing that he was moved into the same cell block as Erickson a few months after Erickson's arrival at the jail, and that they spent many hours together and knew each other well. Erickson talked to him about the case, and would change his story on a daily basis; some days he would say he dreamed he did it and believed it, and on other days he would say he didn't do it at all.

James testified at the evidentiary hearing that he shared a cell pod with Erickson and they talked every day. He further stated that Erickson was very scared. He told him about a dream he had about the murder where he committed the murder with someone else, not Ferguson. He told him that he didn't know if he committed the murder or not, and that he "just keeps having this dream and it won't go away". James further testified that Erickson had smoked two bowls of marijuana prior to his interrogation, and believed that if he went along with the police they would go easier on him. He also testified that during his time in jail with Erickson, on several occasions where events broke out, the other cellmates would tell Erickson to take the fall for them, and he would. James said, "He was easy to talk into things like that".

Ferguson's defense team testified that they wanted to interview these three cellmates of Erickson but "just didn't get it done". The testimony of Fletcher, Gaithings and James would have highlighted to the jury that Erickson knew very little about the crime, had dreams about it and had no idea whether he actually committed it or not. This would have gone towards explaining Erickson's inconsistencies and state of mind.

Psychologist Dr. Delany Dean, who examined Erickson on two occasions, should have been investigated by Ferguson's attorneys and called to give evidence as to Erickson's mental health. Dr. Dean testified at the evidentiary hearing that she was retained to examine Erickson. She first examined him at the Boone County Jail on July 12, 2004 at the request of his attorney, Mark Kempton, and again on September 8, 2005 at the request of the Boone County Prosecutor's Office, after his plea negotiations. The purpose of the second examination was to determine his current mental status and any condition that might affect his capacity to provide testimony at Ferguson's trial. Dr. Dean testified that it was unusual to be contacted by a prosecutor to evaluate an adult witness prior to trial testimony.

Erickson's Boone County Jail records indicate that he was diagnosed with various conditions, including obsessive compulsive disorder, major depression, post-traumatic stress syndrome, history of conduct disorder, and alcohol, cannabis and cocaine abuse while at jail, and was prescribed medication for these conditions.

Dr. Dean testified that her examinations of Erickson were over a year apart, and that his ability to remember the events on the night of the murder was about the same on each occasion; that is, his memory of the events were no clearer in September 2005 than they were in July 2004. She testified that Erickson consistently used the term "spotty" to describe his memory of the night of the murder, and that in September 2005 his memory of that night was "like a movie". She further testified that Erickson told her that seeing Mallory the night of the murder was very clear in his mind, as opposed to other events which were "spotty".

Dr. Dean testified that obsessive compulsive disorder, which Erickson was suffering from, is an anxiety disorder listed in the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV", which features recurrent obsessions or compulsions that are severe enough to be time consuming or cause marked distress or significant impairment. The manual states that the most common obsessions are repeated thoughts about contamination and repeated doubts, such as wondering whether one had performed an act such as harming someone.

Had Dr. Dean been called to testify at Ferguson's trial, she would have been able to explain this disorder to the jury, and show that Erickson's testimony against Ferguson was unreliable. She would have also been able to explain why Erickson believed he committed the murder and adopted what the police told him as his own memories.

Jerry Trump was one of the prosecutor's main witnesses during the trial and Ferguson's attorneys failed to fully investigate him to enable them to provide impeachment testimony against him. Had they done so, they would have discovered Christine Varner, who worked at the Job Center through which Trump was employed at the time of the murder.

Varner testified at the evidentiary hearing that she spoke with Trump at the Job Center about the murder the day after it happened. Trump told her what had happened that night, and that he could not clearly see the people in the parking lot. He also said that he had been scared and didn't want to be seen by them so he stood back so they couldn't recognize him. She testified that she watched the "48 Hours Mystery" program in relation to the murder and saw Trump identify Ferguson during the trial. She stated that when she saw that, she said, "Well that's not what he said [to me], it just really stood out".

[Click here to watch video of excerpts of Varner's testimony during the evidentiary hearing.]

This testimony would have severely discredited Trump's identification of Ferguson, one of the most compelling pieces of evidence against him, and could have significantly changed the outcome of the trial.

Ferguson believes his trial attorneys should have called a false confession expert to testify at his trial, such as Dr. Richard Leo, Ph.D., J.D. Dr. Leo testified at the evidentiary hearing in relation to false confessions. He stated that there are certain things to look for in a false confession, including police techniques, the confessor's personality and vulnerability, the indicia of reliability in the story and mistakes made in police work. Dr. Leo testified that highly suggestible people tend to accept and repeat back information that is suggested by another. He further stated that an innocent confessor will not be able to supply accurate details of the crime unless they guess them, and will not be able to lead police to new information or explain unique aspects of the crime. He stated that the false confession will not be corroborated by existing objective evidence, and will usually contain guesses and errors which are inconsistent with, or contradicted by, the objective case evidence.

Dr. Leo further testified that there are three types of false confessions; voluntary false confessions, compliant false confessions, and persuaded false confessions. It was his opinion, upon viewing videos of Erickson's interrogation, that his was a persuaded false confession. In this type of confession, the confessor is uncertain about their guilt, but because of what they learn during the interrogation they come to believe they probably committed the crime even though they cannot remember doing so. Dr. Leo testified that Erickson's interrogation was full of uncertain language, including him saying "I don't know" 24 times, and improper police interrogation techniques such as feeding facts to Erickson and correcting his statements when they were wrong.

Had Dr. Leo, or a similarly qualified false confession expert, been called to testify at Ferguson's trial, he would have explained false confessions to the jury and cast serious doubt over Erickson's confession which, being the majority of the prosecution's case against Ferguson, would have had significant ramifications in the trial.

Ferguson's trial attorneys failed to submit the articles from the Columbia Daily Tribune dated November 1, 2001 and November 1, 2003 relating to Heitholt's murder, to show what facts Erickson had read prior to his interrogation. Erickson claimed the only facts of the case he knew were from what he read in the newspaper, and that he was making presumptions based on what he had read in those articles. Therefore the articles would have helped explain to the jury how he knew facts about the murder when he was not involved.

Ferguson's trial attorneys also failed to adequately prepare an aerial photograph of the Columbia area for use during witness testimony, specifically during their cross-examination of Erickson. A large portion of their cross-examination related to the route he claimed he and Ferguson took on the night of the murder. During the cross-examination both a juror and the prosecutor pointed out to the defense that the photograph was incorrect, specifically in that the By George Nightclub was incorrectly marked on the photograph and the Broadway Diner was not on the photograph at all. The defense were then forced to change exhibits in front of the jury, which would have undermined their credibility.

Ferguson has also cited a variety of specific legal issues, including his trial counsel's failure to include various issues in their Motion for a New Trial. One such issue was the court not allowing Officers Hatton and Rugstadt to testify in relation to the route the K-9 tracking dog took on the night of the murder. Another issue related to the instruction to the jury regarding intoxication. Both of these issues should have been included in the Motion for a New Trial.

His trial attorneys also failed to object to a number of issues during the trial, and include these issues in their request for a new trial. During the empanelment of the jury Ferguson's counsel failed to object to the prosecutor speaking about Erickson's plea agreement with the State. During the prosecution's direct examination of Erickson, the defense failed to object to Crane's "improper bolstering" of Erickson, and intertwining his personal opinion into his questioning of Erickson, which insinuated that he had special knowledge of his guilt.

Most importantly, the defense failed to object to Crane deceiving the jury in his closing argument in relation to the hair found in Heitholt's hand, when he said, "Number one, ladies and gentlemen, and we went through excruciating detail on this, there's no evidence that that hair was ever in his hand. And there was no evidence that it was bloody". This statement is against the State's own evidence and this should have been highlighted to the jury.

Copy of portion of Laboratory Analysis Request form for testing of hair in victim's hand. Click here to view the full form.

[Click here to view a video in relation to the hair found in victim's hand and the prosecutor lying to the jury about this hair.]

During the trial the prosecution objected to Ferguson's videotaped interrogation being admitted into evidence and shown to the jury, specifically during the defense's redirect examination of Ferguson. During their cross-examination of Ferguson the prosecution tried to impeach him by asking him questions in relation to whether he told the police during his interrogation the same information he was testifying to. Ferguson's attorneys requested the court to allow the interrogation video to be shown, to counter the prosecution's claims of fabrication. The court would not allow this, so the video was not shown.

Ferguson's attorneys were ineffective in that they should have cited the "curative admissibility doctrine" in an effort to have the video shown. The doctrine "applies after one party introduces inadmissible evidence. In that situation, the opposing party may introduce otherwise inadmissible evidence of its own to rebut or explain inferences raised by the first party's evidence". In this case, the defense should have argued that in light of this doctrine, and the prosecution effectively "opening the door" on what was on Ferguson's videotaped interrogation, the video be allowed, however they failed to do so.

Further, Ferguson's initial appeal attorney, Ellen Flottman, failed to include this issue in the original appeal. Had this issue been included, it could have changed the outcome of the appeal and he may have been granted a new trial as a result.

Following the filing of the Rule 29.15 Motion for Appeal, Ferguson filed a further appeal, for habeas corpus relief, in the Cole County Court on August 13, 2008, citing that he was denied his rights to due process, equal protection under the law, and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment due to the Lincoln County jury selection process.

By agreement, Ferguson's jury for his October 2005 trial was selected from Lincoln County, specifically from Troy. On July 28, 2008 Ferguson's lawyer discovered information in relation to the selection process of the jury for his trial.

An evidentiary hearing in relation to this appeal was held at the Cole County Courthouse in Jefferson City on December 15, 2008, presided over by Judge Richard Callahan.

During the evidentiary hearing, District Defender of the Public Defender's Office in Troy, Missouri, Thomas Galen, testified that in July 2008 he discovered a document which, amongst other things, included the term "$50.00 Jury Duty". Unaware of what this related to, he asked court personnel and was informed that this referred to potential jurors being able to pay the sum of $50.00 to remove themselves from jury duty. Potential jurors were offered the choice of participating in jury duty or undertaking six hours of community service which attracted a supervision fee of $50.00. Galen further discovered that this policy had been implemented by Judge Dan Dildine, who had been using it for several years. The policy was in use during Ferguson's October 2005 trial.

Circuit Clerk for Lincoln County and former Deputy Clerk, Grace Sinclair, testified at the evidentiary hearing as to the Lincoln County jury selection procedure. She testified that there are three terms per year for jury selection with each term lasting four months. Each person in the jury pool is sent notification two months prior to the beginning of their term. The notice includes a request that potential jurors contact the court if they believe they are unable to participate. The jury pool relating to Ferguson's trial included 848 potential jurors, with the term running from October 4, 2005 to January 31, 2006.

The "Lincoln County Jury Pool Excused/Disqualification Report" was submitted as evidence during the hearing, and Sinclair testified that this report contained the names of jurors excused by the court during this term, including their reason for excusal. Sinclair testified that there were 13 people in this pool excused from jury duty prior to Ferguson's trial, by having performed six hours of community service. She further testified that the $50.00 fee did not come into effect until 2006, and accordingly, the 13 jurors were not required to pay this fee.

Ferguson stated that his jury was not randomly selected or selected from a fair cross-section of the community, and was not selected in accordance with the laws of Missouri. A writ of habeas corpus can be issued "when a person is held in detention in violation of the constitution or laws of the State or Federal Government". Ferguson claimed that because his jury was not correctly and legally selected, his trial was unfair, and as he is incarcerated solely as a result of that unfair trial, he is currently being held in violation of the law, hence the claim under habeas corpus. He therefore requested that his conviction and sentence be vacated.

Ferguson's habeas corpus appeal was denied on January 9, 2009. Judge Callahan ruled that the claim was procedurally barred as it should have been brought up earlier, either during the trial or in a previous appeal. This however was impossible, as Ferguson's lawyer only discovered this information in July 2008. Judge Callahan further ruled that the selection of the jury was not in compliance with the statute, however it was not "substantial non-compliance" as it effected only 13 out of the pool of 848.

Ferguson’s Rule 29.15 appeal was denied by Judge Asel on June 12, 2009.  The defense filed the Movant’s Proposed Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law, Order and Judgment on September 15, 2008.  The prosecution filed the State’s Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law, and Judgment on September 29, 2008.  Nearly nine months later, Judge Asel merely adopted the judgment prepared by the prosecution, signing the same in the prosecution’s favor, to deny each and every ground of appeal put forward by the defense in what can only be described as a heavily biased judgment.

Arguably, Judge Asel’s 40-page decision was replete with factual errors and misinterpretations of the evidence presented at the July 2008 hearing.  It included findings that no Brady violations occurred and that Ferguson’s trial counsel were not ineffective (despite significant evidence to the contrary in relation to both of these findings), and that Ferguson “failed to show that his conviction or sentence violates the Constitution or laws of this State or of the United States”.

Obviously dissatisfied with the judgment, Ferguson is now in the process of appealing Judge Asel’s decision to the Western District Court of Appeals in Kansas City.  He has now appointed Kathleen Zellner of Illinois to represent him in this next phase of the appeal process.

In a new development, in November 2009 Erickson provided Zellner with a sworn videotaped statement saying that he alone committed the murder, and that Ferguson was not involved, but was merely a bystander who tried to stop him.  Erickson has taken sole responsibility for the murder, and admits that he lied during his testimony when he claimed Ferguson strangled the victim.

Erickson’s sworn statement has been added to Zellner’s appeal brief, which was filed in February.  The prosecution had been granted a two-month extension to file its response documents, which are now due in May.  An oral hearing will then take place before a decision is made as to whether or not the appeal is allowed and a new trial is granted.  This process could take many months.

Another Lost Appeal

On January 30, 2013 attorneys for Ryan Ferguson filed a 154-page petition with the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Western District, challenging the October 2012 ruling by Cole County Circuit Court Judge Daniel Green denying Ferguson a new trial. The appeal argues that Judge Green made eight errors is his application of the law as well as several errors in his factual findings.

“The case is about actual innocence,” the petition states. “No direct evidence tied Ryan to the victim’s murder. No physical evidence even placed him at the scene. The only circumstantial evidence against Ryan was the exhaustively impeached testimony of [Chuck] Erickson and the identification made by [Jerry] Trump. Both of those witnesses have now admitted that their trial testimony linking Ryan to the murder was false.”

Ferguson was convicted in 2005 of murdering Keith Heitholt in 2001, the sports editor of the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune.

In April of 2012 Ferguson was granted an evidentiary hearing in Cole County Circuit Court before Judge Green. During the five-day hearing, the only two trial witnesses who linked him to the murder both testified that they had perjured themselves at murder trial. The recantations by Chuck Erickson, a teenage friend of Ferguson’s, and Jerry Trump were part of a habeas corpus petition submitted by Ferguson’s attorney, Kathleen Zellner of Chicago. Based on the trial testimony of Erickson and Trump, Ferguson was convicted of the Halloween night 2001 murder and sentenced to 40 years in prison. No one other than Trump and Erickson ever placed Ferguson at the crime scene.

In ruling not to grant Ferguson a new trial, Judge Green stated to found both recantations “not credible.” Of Erickson’s he wrote, “Erickson’s recantation is a textbook example of why the law views recantations with suspicion and caution.”  He noted that Erickson had knowledge of unique facts of the murder during his trial testimony.

In making this observation, Judge Green exposed one of the errors Zellner argued in Ferguson’s pending appeal, namely that the police fed Erickson the “unique facts” he testified to at trial about Heitholt’s murder. In the article that follows, “One Murder, Two Victims,” video-taped police interviews of Erickson demonstrate detectives feeding him information about the murder he clearly did not know about.

To deny Ferguson a new trial, Judge Green had to ignore a mountain of evidence that clearly establishes Ferguson’s innocence. For example, none of the forensic evidence gathered at the crime scene – including fingerprints, hair clutched in Heitholt’s hand and bloody footprints – linked Ferguson or Erickson to the crime. What the forensic evidence did reveal was that Heitholt’s murder had taken six to eight minutes to occur.

The judge also had to discard the importance of testimony provided at the April evidentiary hearing from Michael Boyd, a sports writer at the Daily Tribune who was the last to see Heitholt alive in the Tribune parking lot, where Heitholt had been attacked and eventually strangled to death with his own belt. Boyd testified that as he was driving away from the parking lot around 2:20 a.m. that morning, he saw two individuals walking toward the Tribune parking lot.

Boyd was not called at trial by the prosecution because his timeline would have destroyed the prosecution’s timeline that the attack occurred between 2:12 a.m. and 2:20 a.m. In addition, Boyd told police at the time he was not sure of the race or gender of the two individuals he saw in the alley.

At Ferguson’s trial, two Tribune janitors testified they saw two while males near Heitholt’s car at 2:21 a.m. One of them was Trump and the other was Shawna Ornt. Orrnt testified she could not identify either of the two males she saw that morning. Trump said he could and he identified Ferguson and Erickson, thus corroborating Erickson’s testimony about himself and Ferguson’s role in Heitholt’s murder.

It is hard to imagine how Judge Green could not find Erickson’s recantation credible. His trial testimony was far more bizarre and unbelievable. At the time of Heitholt’s murder, Erickson, like Ferguson, was a high school junior.  Two years after Heitholt’s murder, Erickson began telling friends that he was having “dreams” that he and his friend Ferguson had murdered Heitholt. These comments quickly brought the police to Erickson’s door.

In his 2011 affidavit, Erickson averred, “Ryan Ferguson did not harm Kent Heitholt in any way.” In the years after Ferguson’s conviction, Erickson has been saying that he has no memory after midnight of what transpired the morning Heitholt was murdered because he [Erickson] had “an alcoholic blackout.” At the evidentiary hearing in front of Judge Green, he admitted he lied at trial to save himself from the death penalty. For his testimony against Ferguson, Erickson was allowed to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of 25 years.

The same could be said of Trump’s recantation. It had the ring of truth because of its specific details. Trump, who was on parole at the time for molesting a teenager, told police the day after the murder that he saw two men in the parking lot but could not see them clearly enough to identify. He also said the same thing to his supervisor and several co-workers.

At Ferguson’s trial, Trump told the jury that while he was in prison for a parole violation, his wife sent him a newspaper article with photos of Erickson and Ferguson and from those he was able to positively identify both teenagers as Heitholt’s assailants. He testified he then contacted Boone County D.A. Kevin Crane and became the prosecution’s second witness.

In his affidavit, Trump said his testimony was a lie: it was Crane who met with him in December of 2004 after Trump had been released from prison and showed him the photos of the accused and told him it would be in his interest to identify Ferguson as one of the men in the parking lot the night Heitholt was murdered.

Crane is now a Boone County circuit court judge. Crane’s campaign for election to the circuit court heavily touted his winning conviction of Ryan Ferguson.

Ferguson's next appeal will be before a three-judge panel of the Missouri Court of Appeals Western District. A ruling is expected sometime in November of 2013.

Dedication: This article is dedicated to the memory of Andrew Bartrop, who inspires me to fight for justice for the innocent, such as Ryan Ferguson

For more information on this case, Ryan Ferguson may be contacted by writing to him at:

Ryan Ferguson #1137593
Jefferson City Correctional Center
8200 No More Victims Road – (3-House)
Jefferson City, MO 65101

Ryan's outside contacts are his parents, Bill and Leslie Ferguson. They can be contacted at Freeryanferguson@aol.com, or send a comment through FreeRyanFerguson.com or JusticeForRyanFerguson.com.

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: Zimmerman Arrested on Domestic Violence Charges -- Threatens Girlfriend With Shotgun

Just over four months after his acquittal for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman was arrested on charges of agravated assault, battery, domestic violence and criminal mischief. The complaint was filed by his girlfriend, Samatha Scheibe, who called 911 on the afternoon of November 18, 2013, to report that Zimmerman had broken a glass table in her house, threatened her with a shotgun, pushed her out of her home with the shotgun pointed at her face and barricaded himself inside by pushing furniture up against the front door. Scheibe's home is in Apopka, Florida, about 15 miles from Orlando.

On the 911 tape Scheibe, 27, is heard yelling at Zimmerman: "You put a gun in my freakin' face" and then telling the dispatcher that "He knows how to do this. He knows how to play this game."

Zimmerman was arrested without incident.

At the bail hearing the next day, county prosecutors in Sanford, Florida, told Judge Fred Schott that Scheibe was afraid for her own safety, saying she said that Zimmerman had chocked her during an unreported incident a week ago. She told the prosecutors she was in the process of breaking up with Zimmerman when he forced her out of her own house. Scheibe said Zimmerman, who had been living with her since August, kept a shotgun, an AR-15 rifle and two handguns in her home.

Although prosecutors asked for bail to be set at $50,000, Judge Schott set it at $9,000 and Zimmerman was released on bail that day. The terms of bail include no contact with Scheibe, Zimmerman must remain in Florida, he may not posess firearms or ammunition, and he must wear an electronic bracelet until his arraignment on January 7, 2014.

Two months earlier, Zimmerman was in investigative detention after his estranged wife, Shellie Zimmerman, called 911 to report that he was threatening her and her father. Lake Mary Police Chief Steve Bracknell said the 911 call was placed just after 2 p.m. on 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 when Mrs. Zimmerman refused to press charges.

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)

Oct. 14, 2013

Dr. Arthur Warren Waite

Dr. Arthur Warren Waite was a consummate fake. Everything about him, including being a dentist, was a fake. A gold digger par excellence, he married into the Pecks of Grand Rapids family with a plan to murder the entire lot and inherit its considerable fortune.

by Robert Walsh

Look at the photograph and ask yourself ‘What kind of man was he?’ Handsome? Attractive? Smartly dressed? Perhaps very plausible to anyone who didn’t know him very well? Maybe he looks superficially charming with a witty, entertaining, debonair approach that men admire and women find difficult to resist.

Dr. Arthur Warren Waite had all of these character traits. He was also a textbook psychopath who figured that if all his in-laws should pass away his wife would become a very wealthy woman and, not long after, Waite himself would be a very merry widower.

Waite was a fake dentist with fraudulentmedical qualifications and dark motives.Born into an impoverished family of Michigan farmers, his lack of wealth and status bruised his ego and fuelled his lifelong resentment. Couple that with an ironclad sense of permanent entitlement to things he wanted (for no other reason than he wanted them) and a total lack of conscience.  

The Pecks of Grand Rapids, on the other hand, were one of the leading families in Michigan. John Peck had made the family fortune in the timber trade and the Pecks were worth millions. Their social standing as leading figures in Michigan industry and extreme wealth gave them an equally high profile. It also made them prime targets for Waite, who saw as clearly as anybody the Pecks’s place in the world. Only he saw their wealth as something to covet rather than celebrate, something to be relentlessly acquired by any means necessary.

The Pecks had two children, Percy and Clara. Waite had courted Clara for a while before embarking for Glasgow in 1909 and moving onto South Africa. Upon returning to Michigan in 1914, Waite renewed his relationship with Clara. She was more than attracted to him. Percy, on the other hand, roundly disliked Waite and was suspicious of him for no other reason than he instinctively disliked him and felt that there was something not quite right about him. What inspired Percy’s dislike was that Waite was just that little bit too plausible, unnecessarily charming and overly ingratiating himself with the Peck family, especially Clara and her parents.

Unfortunately for Percy (and the Peck family as a whole) he was outnumbered. Clara loved Waite and married him. Her parents and her Aunt Catherine were all very impressed by Waite’s tales of foreign travel, a flourishing dental practice in New York City (well, he’d been outside the United States so he wasn’t being entirely dishonest) and his talent for tennis (Waite was New York Metropolitan amateur champion at one time). All these things supposedly spoke volumes for his professional talents, sporting ambition, hard work and outward respectability (he was certainly ambitious, at any rate).

A Consummate Fake

In reality, Waite had been thrown out of dental school in Michigan in 1909 for plagiarizing another student’s work. He then had used fake qualifications from Michigan to enter postgraduate dental study in Glasgow, which allowed him to take up the position of company dentist with a major mining company in South Africa.  He was only able to hold that position for two years. His employment was terminated when the mining company discovered large quantities of money were missing and suspected Waite of embezzlement.

Waite’s consummate fakery even extended as far as adopting a British accent that any British citizen would almost instantly have spotted. His “flourishing dental practice” in New York consisted of a few disgruntled patients (largely dissatisfied with both his poor dentistry and that he spent more time playing tennis than fixing teeth) and, when he wasn’t playing tennis, he was secretly conducting a torrid affair with society beauty Margaret Horton, wife of a prominent New York aeronautics businessman.As it was, his fakery went undetected until it was far too late.

So did the rather strange habit (for a dentist) of suddenly taking a strong interest in bacteriology. Waite, claiming to hold a postgraduate degree in dentistry from Glasgow University, started private studies at Cornell Medical School without ever being formally enrolled there. He was able to do this by using his personal connections within the medical fraternity and because private study was not governed by the same rules as regular admission. Something else also slipped under Cornell’s radar. Waite’s studies centered only round the deadliest of germs. Typhoid, cholera, diphtheria, tuberculosis, anthrax and others were on his shopping list and he developed a habit of complaining that the bacterial strains available at Cornell were simply not lethal enough for the experiments he was conducting. Again, nobody seemed to think this was odd, but they didn’t know the real reason for his studying lethal diseases. It wasn’t to cure the sick and dying.

A Textbook Psychopath

Having successfully wormed his way into the affections of most of his in-laws and already gaining a decent allowance and rent-free apartment on exclusive Riverside Drive from his wife’s parents, no matter how much Waite obtained it wasn’t enough and probably couldn’t be enough. Waite’s thought process was simple (for an intelligent man) but was also typically psychopathic: His in-laws had money and he had an insatiable desire for money. If all his in-laws died then his wife would inherit millions and, should his wife die suddenly, Waite himself would have picked up the entire Peck fortune.

Waite possessed a thoroughly chilling, twisted logic reflecting the complete lack of conscience of a textbook psychopath, but logical nevertheless.Psychopaths tend to be endlessly acquisitive and greedy. They live for the hunt and for securing things and people they want or need, only to dispense with them as soon as they cease to be useful. People don’t have any intrinsic value, they merely serve some purpose. Once they’ve served it they can be bartered, used and sacrificed. The classic psychopath treats life as his or her personal chessboard and other people as pieces and enjoys playing the game for the game’s sake. Hence, even the most forward-thinking psychiatrists tend to agree that, currently, a full-blooded psychopath can only be diagnosed and, at best, little or nothing can be done to treat what is nowadays described as “Antisocial Personality Disorder” or “ASD.”

In a sense, the Pecks were perhaps partly responsible for their own soon-to-come downfall. After only a few months of their daughter’s marriage, they began to become increasingly impatient with what they came to regard as their son-in-law’s lack of discernible success and equal lack of motivation to achieve it. They began increasingly sharing Percy’s disapproval of Waite, though not his outright suspicions of Waite’s motives for marrying into a wealthy family and their daughter found herself fending off increasingly disapproving remarks in letters and conversations about him.

On one occasion Clara was reduced to defending her husband by citing his having won the New York Metropolitan Amateur Tennis Championship, as though spending more time playing tennis than building his dental practice was some sort of virtue. His other principal defender was Clara’s Aunt Catherine, who was charmed by her niece’s handsome husband. 

The Mother-in-Law Dies First

His in-laws’ increasing disapproval meant that Waite was under ever-greater risk of exposure as a fraud and a gold-digger. Something had to give and Waite decided that his mother-in-law was the first to be marked for death. She came to stay with her daughter and son-in-law just after Christmas, 1915and, only weeks later, was wheeled out of their apartment having died of what started as a bad cold and became a fatal case of diphtheria,

Waite had studied diphtheria at Cornell, using his fake medical credentials and the apparent credulity of the staff. He’d also stolen samples of diphtheria and several other diseases.During Mrs. Peck’s illness Waite had been the soul of kindness and compassion. He warmed her feet, mopped her brow, played her favorite records while crooning the lyrics in a smooth, soft tenor voice, he couldn’t have seemed kinder. He was also the one who’d caused her cold by leaving windows open and dampening her bedsheets and then pressed her to use a specially made nasal spray of his own devising that, unknown to anybody else at the time, contained a toxic blend of diphtheria and anthrax.

To use Waite’s own words: “I started poisoning her from the very first meal after she arrived. I gave her six assorted tubes of pneumonia, diphtheria and influenza germs in her food. When she finally became ill and took to her bed I ground up 12 five-grain Veronal tablets and gave her that too last thing at night… I woke up in the small hours. My mother-in-law was dead. I went back to bed again so that it would be my wife who would discover the body.”

Mrs. John Peck died on January 30, 1916 and was certified as having died of “natural causes.”

Her devastated son-in-law was also the soul of compassion for his fellow bereaved relatives. He advised a swift funeral and equally swift cremation, citing his desire to make things as quick as possible, limiting everybody’s grief and ensuring his former in-law was decently interred as soon as possible. In their grief (and over Percy’s disapproval) the Pecks allowed Waite himself to organize the funeral and cremation which he managed with surprising (and suspicious) speed.

Mr. Peck Was Almost Immune

Next on Waite’s list – only two months after killing his mother-in-law – was his father-in-law. John Peck proved far more resistant to Waite’s laundry list of germs and poisons. Waite put ground glass in his food, soaked his bedsheets and left windows open to induce pneumonia, let off small canisters of chlorine gas in Peck’s bedroom after he had fallen asleep, fed him calomel to further weaken him, tried his patented nasal spray (now with tuberculosis added to the anthrax and diphtheria) and absolutely nothing worked. John Peck seemed to have more lives than a cat. Eventually, Waite’s insatiable desire for money outweighed his icy logic.

One evening, after failing in multiple attempts to make John Peck die in a conveniently plausible (if not natural or lawful) manner, Waite simply slipped the old man a massive dose of white arsenic, no less than 18 grains. John Peck still didn’t die, instead lingering in terrible pain. Insatiable greed having now entirely outweighed logic and planning, Waite opted to finally finish the job. He muzzled his annoyingly lively father-in-law with a chloroform-soaked rag, firmly holding a pillow down over that. Everybody has a breaking point and even as tough a victim as John Peck can only take so much. He died not long after receiving the chloroform, but it was as much the sealing of Arthur Waite’s doom as John Peck’s.

Again, to use Waite’s own words regarding his six-week struggle to murder his maddeningly stubborn father-in-law: “I used to insert tubes of typhoid, pneumonia, influenza and diphtheria in his soups and rice puddings. Once I gave him a nasal spray filled with tuberculosis bacteria. Nothing seemed to affect him so I used to let off the occasional tube of chlorine gas in his room hoping the gas would weaken his resistance like it did with the soldiers at the front. I used to put some stuff on the electric heater so that if he noticed a funny smell I could say it was something burning.Still nothing happened. I tried to give him pneumonia by putting water in his rubber boots, damping his sheets, opening his bedroom window and wetting the seat of his automobile before taking him out for a drive. That didn’t work either.”

Describing how he finally finished his deadly work, Waite stated: “On the night of March, 12 he was in great pain and he wanted some ammonia and ether. I couldn’t find any, but in Clara’s medicine chest there was some chloroform, so I gave him that. It did him good, so I gave him a second dose to make sure and then I held the pillow over his nose and mouth until he was finished.”

Undone by a Letter from “K. Adams”

Waite tried for another quick funeral and cremation, the same as for Mrs. Peck. Unfortunately for Waite, Percy Peck’s suspicions were now not only aroused by Waite’s pressing for a swift funeral and cremation, they were positively inflamed, especially when a letter arrived bearing the words: “Stop funeral. Demand autopsy. Suspicions aroused.” The letter was signed“K. Adams.”

K. Adams was actually Elizabeth Hardwicke, sister of Dr. Cornell (head of Cornell Medical School) and who held a similar distrust of the deadly dentist. She’d known Waite through his strange appearances at the medical school and was one of the few people there who thought it odd that a dentist would be so keen on lethal germs. She became more suspicious when Mrs. Peck died and when Mr. Peck promptly passed away as well she could see only two common factor in their deaths, unexpected lethal diseases and Arthur Warren Waite.

Percy Peck immediately went to see homicide detectives of the New York Police Department, showing them the letter and describing in detail his now abject suspicions regarding the deaths of his parents. It wasn’t long before the detectives were as convinced as Percy Peck and promptly headed directly to Waite’s dental practice. They found him unconscious, having attempted suicide with an overdose of Veronal (the same pills he’d used on Mrs. Peck). After emergency treatment at the scene, Waite was rushed to Bellevue Hospital and promptly arrested on two charges of capital murder. With the scale of evidence that would be presented, this was one of only two temporary delays that Arthur Waite was going to get before meeting his fate in Sing Sing Prison’s most notorious resident, the infamous electric chair grimly nicknamed “Old Sparky.”

An Insanity Gambit

Under questioning Waite’s first line of defense was ludicrous at best, indicating that he was either so arrogant that he thought he’d never be caught (so had no need to prepare any defense in advance) or so desperate that he’d try absolutely anything, no matter how outlandish. In the end he opted for a pathetic plea of periodically losing his mind to another personality Waite described as a reincarnated Egyptian Pharaoh:  “I believe that, although my body lives in America, my soul lives in secret in Egypt. It is the man from Egypt who has committed these foul crimes…”

NYPD homicide detectives quickly discounted this hokum and Waite eventually delivered something rather more clever and calculated. He thought, quite rightly, that the police would soon have enough to see him tried and, since the criminally insane weren’t considered fit to stand trial (especially not in capital cases, New York State at the time provided mandatory death sentences for murderers) his best route to showing he was mad was to confess his every crime while laughing, smiling and joking with investigating officers. Waite’s motive was simple and his act almost worked. He gave detailed descriptions of the murders of the Pecks, described his attempt to murder Aunt Catherine (one of his staunchest defenders) by putting ground glass in marmalade (it didn’t work, but did little to encourage her to further support him).

Describing his attempts to kill perhaps his second-most staunch defender: “I gave her repeated doses of germs, then some arsenic and after that some ground glass. I also injected some live germs into a can of fish before presenting it to her.”

Waite admitted giving up his attempts to murder Aunt Catherine, but then dug the hole deeper for himself by admitting that he’d only given up trying because his mother-in-law represented bigger, more lucrative prey.

Waite even admitted that he’d tried to get his wife, Clara, to try his “special nasal spray” during a cold she’d had only for her to refuse point-blank to use it (suggesting that some of Percy Peck’s suspicions had started rubbing off on Clara as well). Waite chillingly described his attitude towards Clara: “She was not my equal in anything. When I had got rid of her I meant to find a more beautiful wife…”

The principal issue now was whether or not he was fit to stand trial at all. Re-enter his now very scared and angry old flame, Margaret Horton. Horton described how Waite had invited her, while he was already under suspicion, to his lab and had shown her various germs before answering her simple question about his guilt with the words: “Yes, it’s true. I did.”

Horton also described the contents of a damning letter Waite had written to her (which she had then destroyed) in which Waite stated that he thought he’d be executed, but lived in hope of being regarded as insane and being confined to an institution for a few years before being released to rejoin her.

Her testimony proved the only evidence the judge needed to deny Waite’s plea of insanity and rule him fit to stand trial for his life. Criminals don’t usually discuss faking insanity or in so calculated a manner unless they’re not actually insane. Waite might have been considered mad in a strictly medical sense, but being legally insane is predicated on whether a defendant knows the nature of his or her acts and knows that those acts are wrong. Waite undoubtedly knew his acts were criminal, for otherwise he’d have had no reason to attempt to conceal the murders as ordinary illnesses or pretend to be psychotic when he obviously wasn’t.

The Trial and a Date with “Old Sparky”

The trial was a mere formality. There was solid medical evidence that John Peck had been poisoned with both arsenic and chloroform. There was Waite himself confessing and openly describing his crimes to the somewhat shocked jury (no doubt hoping that the jury would think anybody facing the electric chair simply must be mad to sit in court describing every detail while freely confessing guilt). There was solid witness evidence from Percy Peck, Clara Peck, Aunt Catherine and Margaret Horton and, barring some major botch in trial law or other legal procedures, Waite was a step further down his “last mile” with every day that passed.

Throughout the trial, which lasted from late-April until early May, Waite kept up an able pretence of somebody too calm and open about his crimes to be considered sane, but neither judge nor jury were buying. It probably didn’t help his case that Mr. Peck’s embalmer, Eugene Kane, and Dora (Arthur Waite’s housemaid) both testified that Waite had offered them sizeable bribes. Dora stated that Waite offered her $1,000 not to admit she’d seen him putting white powder (probably arsenic) into Peck’s food. Kane testified that Waite had cornered him by a phone booth and stuffed $9,000 into his pocket and demanded that Kane contaminate the sample of “Falcon” embalming fluid he was to deliver to the district attorney by adding some arsenic.

Arthur Waite was found guilty and given the mandatory death sentence in May, 1916. His case would drag on for another year through appellate courts and the New York State Lunacy Commission, a three-man body that would have the final say over his mental and psychological state only days before his scheduled execution in May, 1917. The commission’s belief in Waite’s sanity under the law was solid and the governor refused to intervene.

It was May 24, 1917 when Arthur Waite began the somber ritual. When guards, the prison warden and the prison chaplain approached his cell he was calmly reading the Bible, interspersed with passage from his favorite poet, John Keats. Waite remained in total control as he sat in the chair, watching the straps and electrodes as they were attached to his body. His last words seem almost disinterestedly curious, as though he were watching an execution instead of suffering one: “Is this all there is to it..?”

Warden Osborne raised his hand and the executioner threw the lever. Arthur Waite received two jolts of up to 2,000 volts each before being certified dead moments later. The autopsy conducted immediately after his execution revealed two curious facts about his physical state. One was a scar from meningitis, a disease Waite had previously suffered from during childhood and which may partly account for his psychopathic disposition. The other was perhaps the last thing anyone expected in so cold-blooded and remorseless a killer as Arthur Waite: He had an abnormally large heart.

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.

Jan. 3, 2014

Elizabeth Short

When the severed, mutilated corpse of Elizabeth Short was discovered in a vacant lot in Los Angeles on January 15, 1947, the search for the murderer of the “Black Dahlia” began its futile run. Over the intervening decades many theories have been advanced about who this killer was, but none have given serious consideration that he was a jilted boyfriend who stalked her as she emerged into the night from the Biltmore Hotel.

by Stephen Karadjis

In crime lore, the murder of Elizabeth Short, a/k/a the “Black Dahlia,” has achieved iconic status. Speculating on the murder of the Black Dahlia has turned into a cottage industry, with books and movies advancing a wide array of perpetrators. The truth is it remains the ultimate cold case, but there is the possibility she was murdered by an enraged, jealous boyfriend who stalked her from San Diego to the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles.

The enigma of Elizabeth Short and her brutal mutilation-murder brings two very
different pictures to mind. The first is a photograph of a vibrant and vivacious young
woman, very beautiful and self-possessed. The second is a horrible image of a defiled and besieged corpse, lying naked, drained of blood, and severed in two on a weed-infested vacant lot on Norton Avenue in Leimert Park, Los Angeles on the morning of January 15, 1947.

The gruesome discovery sent shock waves across the country. About a day and a half later the dead woman was identified by fingerprints. When news broke of the name of the 22-year-old victim a few people came forward to Los Angeles police to say they knew her. Police quickly established the last sighting of Elizabeth Short as being the night of January 9, at the time she left the Biltmore Hotel.

The medical examiner surmised from the extent of bruising spread over a wide area of her corpse that she had been severely beaten. There was no evidence of sexual assault because the killer had washed and scrubbed the body clean.

John Gilmore in Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia and the anonymous author of Infamous Murders– published by Chartwell Books in 1989 – report that the homicide bureau speculated Short had been tied up spread-eagled, either in a standing or supine position or suspended head first by a makeshift system of ropes and pulleys. That she was kept bound in this position for the period of her internment, as in a coarse and crude bondage session. The tell-tale signs being ligature marks at the wrists and ankles and impressions made by rope knots indented on the front of her forehead and neck. Numerous cuts had been inflicted by a sharp-bladed instrument in a criss-cross pattern over her pubic area, and pubic hair was torn out by hand. A knife was used to cut open her cheeks from each corner of her mouth, leaving a gaping injury from ear to ear. She was then cut in half at the waist and her body drained of blood.

No one knows the complete picture of her suffering.

The ‘Black Dahlia” Myth is Born

Overnight Short was dubbed “The Black Dahlia” by a sensation-seeking press. Kenneth Anger in Hollywood Babylon II and Steve Hodel in Black Dahlia Avenger suggest that reporters en masse, in their efforts to learn more of Short’s movements and lifestyle, talked to acquaintances already referring to her with this term.  

When Elizabeth Short first arrived in Los Angeles she lived in Long Beach and frequented a drug store. She wore her hair dyed black and outfitted herself in black garments. She was possessed of a fair complexion and striking, classic looks and the contrast of dark and light accentuated her beauty.

The drug store owner, Arnold Landers, told reporters that customers had already begun calling her the “Black Dahlia.”  A “B” movie, The Blue Dahlia, had opened about 10 days earlier at a nearby theater with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake playing the lead roles. Lake was a voluptuous golden-blonde and patrons of Lander’s shop who became friendly with Elizabeth Short began referring to her as “The Black Dahlia.” When newspapers across the United States began splashing this moniker on their front pages, Elizabeth Short was on her way to an ironic form of immortality.  

Elizabeth Short in Hollywood and San Diego

In the late 1940s, Hollywood resonated images of sunshine and prosperity. With the dark days of war over and the passage of time, a new era dawned. The motion picture industry pulsated. Thousands of people across the vast expanse were beckoned. Elizabeth Short would be one of these, arriving by train at Union Station in Los Angeles in July, 1946.  Like in Nathanial West’s The Day of the Locust, as a newcomer to town, she quickly gravitated to strangers and odd individuals of like-mind for support and company.

According to www.theblackdahliainhollywood.com, Short’s stay in Los Angeles had been a hit-and-miss affair. In four and a-half months she had lived in nine locations, moving eight times. Her first residence was at the Washington Apartments in Long Beach in late July. From there she rendezvoused with Gordon Fickling, an ex-U.S. Air Force pilot she had known from back east. They moved in to the Brevort Apartments on Lexington near Vine Street in Hollywood, but separated soon afterwards. Short then contacted Marjorie Graham, a girlfriend from Boston living in Hollywood and the two women roomed together, sometimes with a third person, at five different locations from late August until October 22, when Marjorie returned to Massachusetts. Their temporary residences included the Hawthorne Apartments in Hollywood, later the Figueroa Hotel in downtown, the private home of Florentine Gardens Nightclub owner Mark Hanson, and the Guardian Arms Apartments, also in Hollywood.

Short’s last residence in Los Angeles was a small and cramped apartment at the Chancellor in Hollywood, where she bedded down with seven other women in one main room, consisting of double-bunk beds alongside each of the four walls. A corridor separated this room from a narrow kitchen at the other end of the apartment, with a bathroom in between, off the small corridor.

On December 8 she took the Greyhound bus south to San Diego. Later that day she fell asleep in the Aztec Picture Theater and was awakened by Dorothy French, a 21-year-old cashier and usherette. Short spent a month living with Dorothy, her mother Elvira, and younger brother Cory in their home in Pacific Beach, just north of the city limits. During this time she dated a number of men, one of whom was Robert “Red” Manley, a 26-year-old travelling salesman from Huntington Park, in Los Angeles. On January 9, 1947 it would be Robert Manley who would drive Elizabeth Short back to Los Angeles and let her off at the Biltmore Hotel.

Short was discovered dead the following Wednesday, January 15. Betty Bersinger, a local resident, was out walking hand-in-hand with her 3-year-old daughter along Norton Avenue, when she came upon the shockingly mutilated remains of a young woman. She gasped in horror as she halted, frozen in fear. Then upon regaining her composure collected the child in her arms and ran to the nearest house, and immediately raised the alarm.

The press and police rapidly descended and soon a crowd of onlookers swarmed, agog to the stark sight that met their gaze. The chilly winter added an eerie and uneasy feeling. The gruesome spectacle that winter’s morning was one that was to go down as America’s most infamous cold-case murder mystery of the 20^th century. What people set their eyes upon that day was the body of a young woman severed completely in half at the waist. The two sections lying slightly at diagonals of each other were drained entirely of blood and grotesquely mutilated.

The Killer Calls the Editor

On the afternoon of Thursday, January 23, 1947, J.H. Richardson, the editor of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, received a brief telephone call from a man who alluded to himself as the killer. The caller promised to mail Richardson some of Short’s belongings as proof of his claim. (Richardson later in For the Life of Me: Memoirs of a City Editor recounted his conversation with the supposed killer. He perceived the man to be an egomaniac, a “superman” as Richardson worded it, who wanted to show the world what he could do and get away with it. This claim by Richardson was never made public at the time.)

Two days later, the only genuine item of mailed correspondence known to have come from the killer was intercepted by a sharp-eyed employee at the U.S. Postal Service on January 25, 1947.

Letters cut from the pages of a daily newspaper were pasted to the front of an envelope which read, “Los Angeles Examiner and other Los Angeles Papers. Here! Is Dahlia’s Belongings, Letter to Follow.”  The small packet-sized envelope measured 8 inches by 5 inches. It was carefully and delicately pried open by the police.

 Pacios in Childhood Shadows- The Hidden Story of the Black Dahlia Murder’ itemizes the contents of the packet as a Greyhound claim-check; Short’s birth certificate; a Western-Union telegram signed “Red”; some snapshots; an assortment of business cards; a hand-sized, leather-bound address-book with the name “Mark Hansen” embossed in gold lettering on the front cover; and newspaper clippings of Mat Gordon’s obituary. Hodel in Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder writes that the envelope was dropped into a public mailbox at a downtown Los Angeles location and franked January 24, 1947 6:30 p.m.

The same day the envelope was posted the black handbag Elizabeth Short was carrying and the black suede high-heeled shoes she had been wearing at the Biltmore were recovered from the Los Angeles dump. Robert Hymans, who operated a cafe at 1136 South Crenshaw Boulevard, a few blocks from the death site, had noticed the shoes jutting out from the handbag where they had been tossed atop a garbage can, then driven away by the garbage truck. The killer had obviously mailed the contents of the handbag as he had told editor Richardson he would then dumped the handbag and shoes.

The small packet-sized envelope seized by police reeked of gasoline, causing detectives to surmise that the killer had momentarily toyed with the idea of burning the envelope, then decided to mail it after all. Other law enforcement reasoned the shrewd culprit soaked the packet to remove fingerprints.

Fingerprints however were enhanced by the LAPD crime-laboratory and despatched forthwith to the FBI for cross-matching, but no match was retrieved from existing files. The public has never been privy to whether the prints were complete and intact or partial, hazy smudges. But with no match on file in 1947, the Los Angeles Homicide Bureau concluded the perpetrator had never, up until murdering Elizabeth Short, been arrested for a crime and had never been fingerprinted and that the crime was a one-off aberration.

As decades passed with still no match forthcoming, detectives further deduced that the person responsible never again fell foul of the law.

A Special Grand Jury Convenes

Despite all the years having elapsed since the discovery of the murder of Elizabeth Short, the LAPD “Black Dahlia” files are still closed to the public. The files are contained in four filing-cabinet drawers. Only one LAPD homicide detective, aptly referred to as the “gatekeeper,” has the exclusive access to these drawers until the privilege is passed on to the next gatekeeper. This secrecy over the files is now obsolete. Almost every person associated with Elizabeth Short has died. Short herself would have turned 90 years old on July 24, 2014.

 In early 1949, the office of the L.A. District Attorney empanelled 12 civilians to form a special grand jury to investigate police corruption throughout the ranks of the LAPD. The other prime-purpose was to look-into the failure of the LAPD to solve the “Black Dahlia” murder and a string of other brutal slayings and abductions of women across the same time period. This monumental undertaking lasted the entire year.

The grand jury findings brought to light an avalanche of corruption at the highest levels. Inter-departmental jealousies and secrecy prevailed and were wide-ranging and it was found that very often information was not passed on. These revelations led to a complete shake-up of the LAPD, throughout the ranks.

Although many positive actions came in terms of bleeding out any festering corruption within the LAPD, there was little forward movement in solving the murder of the “Black Dahlia.”  One result of the grand jury’s deliberations was to cull the list of 22 suspects the D.A. investigators identified as possible suspects to a handful for follow-up investigation.

Profiling the Killer

Two theories prevail about the “Black Dahlia” homicide. One was that Short had never met her killer and the other that she knew him. What supports the second view are the mutilations inflicted on her corpse. To some investigators they are signs of a personal vendetta. Renowned FBI criminal profiler and author John Douglas adheres to this theory.

Douglas formed the view that the killer knew the victim well and held an emotional attachment toward her. He sees the killer as someone who lived alone, had a high school education, engaged in manual labor, and was under great personal and financial strain at the time of committing the murder. Douglas also suggests the murderer was not averse to wallowing in blood and could have worked as a butcher or in a similar profession or perhaps was a person who was accustomed to hunting animals and was likely as a child or youth to have mistreated or abused animals. The killer Douglas believes may also have been burdened by a personal physical defect or disability.

To Douglas, the ferocity and violence perpetrated on Elizabeth Short, the horrific mutilations to her corpse and the disposing of her severed body on public land for passerbys to discover are all telltale signs the killer knew the victim. The message being conveyed is that this was personal and based on a perceived wrongdoing the killer believed Short had done to him.

This personal association or perceived emotional closeness the killer felt he had to Short, coupled with individual criteria known about each suspect can be used as a premise to eliminate suspects from the DA’s 22 suspect list. From this list there were only seven suspects who were proved to have known Short on a social or personal level.

The D.A.’s Short List of Suspects

Of the seven suspects, only one deserves special mention. George Bacos, head usher at NBC Studios at Sunset and Vine in Hollywood, was an ambitious 23-year-old who was employed on a commission basis at a record promotion company, Jay Faber Associates. As another sideline to an already busy schedule, Bacos contracted entertainment talent to nightspots around town, including the Crown Grill located two blocks south of the Biltmore Hotel. Short frequented this establishment and was last seen walking in this direction.

Bacos had met Short while dating Short’s roommate, Lynn Martin. During the four plus months Short lived in Los Angeles, Bacos took Short out 12 times. When Short was identified as the murdered woman, police sought Bacos for questioning. His statements to police contained comments that were both disingenuous and derogatory towards his slain acquaintance. Website www.theblackdahliainhollywood.com provides the following quotes, attributed to him:

            I used to see her with a lot of people. As a matter of fact, for my part I tried to avoid her as much as possible. I was new in radio and made contacts, and she dressed kinda cheaply, you know too obvious and everything... I didn’t want to kiss her because of all that goop she used on her face. I’m used to nice cultured girls.

Photographs of Short taken in Los Angeles during the second-half of 1946 convey a strikingly attractive young woman who was discerning and elegant in the manner she dressed. Her blouses were buttoned to the neckline. There was nothing cheap or revealing. In fact she dressed with a taste for quality, contemporary fashion and outfitted herself in classic black. Her favourite colors were pink and blue.

Bacos says he was used to “nice cultured girls” yet he confessed to dating and having had sexual relations with Lynn Martin who was found to be 15 years old. She had lived with Short and Marjorie Graham at several hotel apartments in Hollywood and downtown. She essentially lived off the generosity of boyfriends and associates and from casual employment. Young women living on the fringes were easy targets for men of means like Bacos.

Jack Egger was head-usher at CBS Studios at Columbia Square on Sunset Boulevard near Gower Street. He liaised with Bacos on a professional level. Egger said of Bacos, to DA investigators, “I don’t like him very well. He is very conceited; I just don’t care for him myself. Never very close to him, just speaking acquaintance.” Egger related that Bacos frequented Brittingham’s Restaurant and Cocktail Bar adjacent to the CBS building. Bacos told investigators in response, “That used to be my hangout. I’d see her in there. I’d say hello, be as nice as possible, try to get away.” Remember this is what Bacos said after Elizabeth Short was found, the victim of a brutal mutilation-murder – a person he had dated a dozen times.

Bacos went on to become a television-writer in the 1960s and 70s. He received critical acclaim for writing a three-episode segment of the “Kojak” television series named “Night of the Piraeus.’ At age 80 in 2003 he wrote the novel Warriors Down. The setting is the backdrop of the Vietnam War with guerrilla fighting and news-reporting rampant. The lead character is a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Michael Traynor. Traynor’s forte at journalism is brilliant and raw but far too honest and clean for some in the U.S. government – too close to the brutal truth. Those in positions of high office wanted his reporting contained. Feeling ostracised, alone and betrayed Traynor, now diminished, holds three criteria close to his heart which are worth living for: They are to reclaim his good name and self-respect and last in capital-letters REVENGE.

It is strange and uncanny that Bacos writes a novel late in life that has revenge as its principal theme. Revenge is destructive and insidious and at odds with reclaiming self-respect and one’s good name. Short’s murder is believed by many to be a crime based on incredible anger stemming from revenge.

Both the LAPD and the DA investigation held him to be a good suspect. There was no direct evidence but it is interesting that nearly three years following Short’s murder the DA had him on their condensed list of 22 suspects, aligning themselves with the LAPD.  Bacos is a definite possibility.

Debunking the Black Dahlia Literature

There have been several film adaptations and a number of books written recounting the murder of Elizabeth Short.

James Ellroy’s “The Black Dahlia,” a superbly drafted work of fiction, was published in 1987. Its main thrust was not so much about the murder and Elizabeth Short herself, but about the people around her and those investigating her murder, who become obsessed with Short and what happened to her. This is a theme that continues to the present day. There has been a number of non-fiction books authored afterwards and released onto the market.

Severed - The True Story of the Black Dahlia by John Gilmore is original, daring and masterfully written, depicting late 1940’s shadow-land noir Los Angeles. He builds his case outlaying the known facts with an interconnecting series of cameos or fabled stories coloring the pages. Jack Anderson Wilson is identified as the killer, a petty criminal harboring a long rap sheet, which lists burglary, theft and violence as his mainstay code of offenses. Despite continuing decades of similar activity intermingled with prison time, Wilson restricted his bad deeds never graduating to harder crime.

Severed was the first non-fiction work to be written and when released went down as a resounding success and was triumphantly acclaimed. For example Kenneth Anger is quoted as saying “My God, this is a frightening tale....The most famous murder in L.A., and we suddenly see that we knew nothing before, only the glitter and red of blood. This, now, is Pandora’s Box.”  Charles Higham was quoted as saying “This project stands as the only authentic true-crime book written on America’s most bizarre and haunting murder case.” But in the years since its release in 1994 there have been many detractors.

Gilmore did not provide any footnotes or endnotes, nor an index or bibliography. There is no way to clarify a lot of the things he has written. People have tried. One is Los Angeles Times journalist Larry Harnisch, who in 1997 wrote a story for the Times on the eve of the 50^th anniversary of the “Black Dahlia” murder. Harnisch who did his own research then and in the years since is quoted as saying that Gilmore’s book is 25 percent mistakes and 50 percent fiction. Gilmore expounds a number of cameos within the pages of Severed. Harnisch has said he has never been able to establish the existence of any of these characters Gilmore wrote about.

There is no evidence whatsoever Elizabeth Short ever met or knew Jack Anderson Wilson. None of her associates in Los Angeles ever mentioned him. Neither the Los Angeles Police at the time or the DA investigators mention him or held him to be a suspect.

One of the main selling points of his book was his theory that Short had infantile genitalia and was incapable of having intercourse and was a pseudo-hermaphrodite. This has, since the release of Gilmore’s book been disproven. Detective Harry Hansen and the LAPD found three people who had sexual relations with Short. The coroner’s autopsy report states that Short’s reproductive organs and system were “anatomically normal.”

Until Gilmore wrote his book there was little research or interest on the “Black Dahlia” murder but its releasesparked a renewed popularity and devotees and researchers have since taken him to account. John Gilmore is without doubt a highly talented writer and Severed is spellbinding and chilling, but the pages are cluttered with fairy tales.

Janice Knowlton in Daddy was the Black Dahlia Killer asserts that her father George Knowlton impregnated Short in November 1946 and because of this pregnancy murdered her. Don Wolf in The Black Dahlia Files reports that newspaper mogul Norman Chandler, owner of the Los Angeles Times impregnated Short after she had serviced Chandler as a call girl through notorious madam Brenda Allen, and that gangster Bugsy Siegel murdered her on Chandler’s orders and that Gilmore’s suspect Wilson was an accomplice. These claims make great fiction but are preposterous. The autopsy report confirms Short was not pregnant.

Both Knowlton in Daddy was the Black Dahlia Killer and Wolfe in The Black Dahlia Files assert that Short was a prostitute. Knowlton even claims that Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Short worked together as a double act. These claims are totally refuted by the DA investigation and by the Los Angeles police. Detective Harry Hansen in charge of the murder investigation stated “there was no record of any solicitation, offering or resorting or prostitution in any way, shape or form. She was no pushover. She’d bait and take all she could get and give out nothing. She did not put out.” 

Steve Hodel in Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder nominates his own father George Hill Hodel as the killer. Dr. Hodel was a very distinguished medical practitioner and highly regarded. But his reputation was totally destroyed when in 1949 his teenage daughter Tamar Hodel accused her father of incest and threw in for good measure a statement naming him as the “Black Dahlia” killer. Following the fallout from these allegations and his trial, even though he was acquitted of the incest charge, his reputation in tatters, he left Los Angeles early the following year, 1950. He was thoroughly investigated by the Los Angeles police and by the District Attorney’s office. Both agencies came to the conclusion that he had nothing to do with Short’s murder. One blundering Hodel makes within his 500-plus pages is to tell readers that two photographs displayed in clear black and white are of Elizabeth Short. Neither bust-shot looks anything like her. Hodel was forced to retract a few years back now when one of the women still alive came forward to say she was one of the young women and that she was a friend of the late Dr. George Hodel.

William T. Rasmussen’s Corroborating Evidence: The Black Dahlia Murder is a thoroughly documented and very informative work. The author makes the case linking the “Black Dahlia” murder to the “Cleveland Torso” murders of 1934-38. But along with Don Wolfe’s Black Dahlia Files he jumps on the bandwagon and backs Gilmore’s suspect Jack Anderson Wilson as the serial killer. There is no evidence of Wilson’s involvement in either case. No evidence he was even a killer at all.

Lastly Childhood Shadows: The Hidden Story of the Black Dahlia Murder was written by Mary Pacios, a childhood friend of Elizabeth Short from Boston. A very definitive and well written look at Short’s life prior to her arrival in California, her book provides an invaluable insight into the real person and the private world of Short. Pacios, incredibly, names wonder-boy Orson Wells, the actor and director and star of Citizen Kane, as the killer.  

Over the years several films detailing the “Black Dahlia” homicide have come to the screen. The Blue Gardenia, a 1953 Warner Brothers picture, was the first loosely based adaptation. “Who is the Black Dahlia,” a 1975 made-for-television movie was next starring Lucy Arnaz and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. In 1981 True Confessions followed, starring Robert DeNiro and Robert Duvall. Finally 2007 saw the release of The Black Dahlia, based on the 1987 book by James Ellroy.

An Alternative Scenario

There is an alternate scenario never put forward in any books or movies that may explain what happened to Elizabeth Short: She was being stalked by a jealous boyfriend she went out with in San Diego. Of major support to the stalking theory is that no one in Los Angeles knew when Short would return. In fact, after a month in the San Diego area, she even came back a day later than she had planned to.

When Manley gave his statement to homicide detectives following the murder, he revealed a peculiar anomaly that interrupted the drive. He noticed Short craning and twisting her head round to the left as cars were passing in the same direction, and back toward those vehicles travelling south in the opposite direction. The logical explanation for this odd manifestation was that she was concerned someone she knew might be following her. Call it intuition or premonition, but it is not an uncommon occurrence for intensely appealing women to be stalked and this might have happened to her in the past.

Manley also told detectives he had noticed scratch marks on the outside of Short’s upper arms and a trickling of fresh blood. He said Short had told him she had a very jealous boyfriend who was of Italian descent. But the jealous Italian boyfriend she referred to could only have been one person, Sam Navarra.

 From the police investigation of her time in San Diego, a day-to-day time-table of Short’s movements established who she had been out with and how she filled in her time during that month. Website www.blackdahlia.info outlays this timetable.  The only man of Italian descent was Sam Navarra. Short had stepped out with Navarra on the last night she spent at the home of Elvira and Dorothy French at Pacific Beach, January 7, 1947. When LAPD detectives interviewed Navarra he told them that Short had said she was leaving the next morning to return to Massachusetts.

Manley arrived outside the French’s Pacific Beach home the next morning, January 8, and following an exchange of farewells the two were under way. But instead of heading off to a bus station for Short’s announced trip back to Massachusetts, they drove only a few miles before pulling in at the Mecca Motel where they booked a cabin for that night. Manley, working as a travelling salesman, had calls to make the following morning and Short made a decision to bide her time and wait until the next day January 9.

With the whole day in front of them they made the most of it. They had something to eat and drink and went out dancing in the evening. The following afternoon they set off along the Pacific Coast Highway for Los Angeles.

The day had gone and darkness had closed in as they approached the downtown area. Manley pulled in at the Greyhound terminal where Short checked her bags into a locker. Deposited were a suitcase, a small bag and hat box. They drove on a short distance, arriving outside the formidable facade of the Biltmore. It was dusk.

Elegantly attired in a black-collared suit with fluffy-white blouse and white gloves, black nylon stockings, high-heeled black-suede shoes and a full-length beige coat borrowed from her actress-friend Anne Toth, she stepped from the vehicle and walked toward the double-fronted doors which were opened by the hotel doorman.

Over the next four hours Short was seen passing the time, perambulating and loafing about the Biltmore’s marbled interior, every now and again stopping at the period phone booth to make a telephone call.

It is most likely she was soliciting known acquaintances for a place to spend the night. But the people she had met in Los Angeles were short-term associates and not friends of long-standing. Some she knew better than others. It is also possible she was telephoning the same person time and again. This is more likely because following her identification as the murdered woman no one came forward to say Short had telephoned them that night.

Somewhere around 10:30 p.m. she strode out into the night and disappeared into the maze of dark streets. Everything after this point is blackness, like turning off a television set, left to the imagination.

This is pure speculation, of course, but Navarra may have arisen early the morning after his night out with Short and was parked nearby to watch as Manley and Short departed. He perhaps followed them only to see the pair drive onto the grounds of the Mecca Motel. Then later, now incensed with rage, was there to observe the two retire for the night behind closed doors.

He may have been infuriated about her lying to him about going back to Massachusetts.  Perhaps by now he had made up his mind to take revenge and murder her. He stalked them all the way to Los Angeles and waited till she walked from the Biltmore Hotel and surprised her. Perhaps with no place to sleep the night and not having the chance to think she got into his car. He may simply have asked to talk to her. From there he most likely would have driven back to San Diego and then tied her up once inside his home. Navarra was said to have lived on Columbia Street, adjacent to the ocean. But it is possible he had a place in Los Angeles. No one would have seen him as it was late at night.

When Short’s corpse was discovered she had been savagely mutilated, her legs were lying spread-apart and a handful of grass-stalks were found protruding from her exposed vagina. Later during the autopsy the coroner found a hunk of flesh gouged from her left thigh which contained the tattoo of a small rose lodged full-inside her vagina. Her corpse was also dumped alongside a suburban footpath for all to see. The message the killer was conveying was that this was a woman of easy virtue, that she had done wrong by him and he had taken revenge upon her and taught her a lesson. The killer wanted the world to know this.

Navarra probably had an alibi given to police by unsuspecting family members or friends. At the time detectives were focused on someone with medical training and people like Navarra where the alibi checked out were disregarded as potential suspects and rapidly overlooked.

Navarra may not have been the killer but everything seems to fit in-place for it to have happened this way.

There are only three concluding possibilities remaining. The first is that Elizabeth Short eventually got through on the telephone to the man she had been trying for several hours to call and he agreed to pick her up outside the Biltmore Hotel. Then once back at his residence something happened to set things off leading to murder. The second possibility is that Short was abducted by a stranger. The third is that she was being stalked by a very jealous suitor. The Los Angeles Police made numerous inquiries in the San Diego area and must have been thinking along those lines of the possibility the killer came from that city.

Sam Navarra continued to live in San Diego the rest of his life, dying in 2006 at age 84. There is a photograph of Elizabeth Short pictured in a series of three snapshots taken in a photo-booth. The man pictured with her is described as “unidentified boyfriend.” The pictures are found in Gilmore’s Severed- The True Story of the Black Dahlia. These photographs look very much like the photograph of Navarra on www.theblackdahliainhollywood.com . The unmistakable bags under both eyes give away his identification.                   

Jan. 20, 2014 Updated Jan. 30, 2014

Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito

The murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy on November 1, 2007 caused a global controversy. Not so much for the crime itself, although it was certainly a brutal murder, but because of the disputed guilt or innocence of two of the three defendants, American Amanda Knox and Italian Raffaele Sollecito.

by Robert Walsh

On January 30, 2014, an appeal court in Florence, Italy found Amanda Knox and her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, guilty for a second time of the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, a British student attending the University of Perugia.  Knox, in absentia, was sentenced to 28 1/2 years and Sollecito to 25 years. She refused to attend the latest trial, opting to send a long email to the court while remaining in the United States – asserting her innocence and that of Sollecito – a move which has antagonized some Italian officials.

Both Knox, who also attended the university as an exchange student and was a flat mate of Kercher’s, and Sollecito were originally convicted in 2009. Two years later, an appeal court overturned both convictions, ending four years of imprisonment for both defendants. Following that ruling, Italy's highest court, the Court of Cassation, departed from its normal role of dealing with legal technicalities and ordered a retrial before the appeal court based in Florence.

Those proceedings, before two judges and six lay jurors, began in November. At the retrial, the prosecution did not produce any new evidence or proof that Knox or Sollecito were in the bedroom when Kercher was stabbed to death in 2007. It merely changed its theory of the case from some sort of ritualistic sex game gone bad to Knox murdering her flat mate because Kercher criticized her lax housekeeping.

Although Sollecito, now 29, attended a good portion of the retrial along with his father, he was not in the courtroom when the verdicts – after 11 ½ hours of deliberation – were announced. Knox, 26, returned to Seattle following her 2011 exoneration.

The question that is fair to ask, given their shaky original case, mishandled forensic evidence and continuing public relations problems over the case, is why were Italian prosecutors still pursuing Knox and Sollecito? To be blunt, the most plausible answer was a vendetta born of anger at being ridiculed at home and abroad and a stubborn reluctance to accept that there may well have been a miscarriage of justice. Italian authorities had already expended enormous amounts of time and resources on this case. They've also had to put up with hostile global media coverage, repeated high-profile criticisms of their investigations and handling of the case and they didn’t want to be seen to endure so much trouble and have squandered so much time and effort only to publicly admit an error. The more they pursued this case, the worse the criticisms will be. The worse the criticism, the less they wanted to be seen to admit a blunder.

Another possible cause of this vendetta may have been inspired by the 2013 publication of Knox’s book, Waiting To Be Heard, allowing Knox to achieve a good dose of vindication and a $4 million advance from Harper-Collins. The book recounts the over-the-top police interrogations she was submitted to, her four years in an Italian prison, and her exoneration on appeal in 2011. In a post-publication interview with the National Post, Knox said most of the advance has already been used to pay legal fees and expenses incurred during her trials, imprisonment and appeals. She also told the National Post she will not change her story regarding alleged police misconduct simply because of threatened defamation lawsuits by Italian police and prosecutors.

Soon after the verdicts were announced, defense attorneys vowed to appeal the reinstatement of the original convictions to the Court of Cassation once the Florence court publishes its justification of its verdicts in late April of 2014.

“It’s evident we will appeal,” said Luciano Ghirga, one of Knox’s attorneys. “We continue to say that there is no evidence,” The New York Times reported the next day. An attorney for Sollecito, Giulia Bongiorno, said the trial had been “empty of proof and evidence” and pledged to appeal. These appeals could easily take two or more years to make their way through Italy’s convoluted justice system.

A request by the prosecutor to issue arrest warrants for the defendants was rejected by the Florence court. The court ruled that Knox was legitimately in the United States and that Sollecito only be required to surrender his passport and not leave Italy.

Only if all subsequent appeals are denied could Italian authorities begin extradition proceedings for Knox’s return to serve her sentence. The decision to honor Italy’s request for extradition rests solely with the U.S. Secretary of State. Because Knox was exonerated previously, the United States will most probably not agree to extradite her to Italy. Doing so would be a violation of the U.S. Constitution's prohibition against double jeopardy. But then, again, one never knows what might happen in the politically charged atmosphere this case has generated.

Now that Knox has been re-convicted she will be unable to enter any European Union country without almost certainly being arrested and held pending an Italian extradition request. European law and various EU treaties would oblige other EU nations to do so.

Furthermore, if she enters any country with a vested interest in either pleasing the Italians or displeasing the U.S. State Department, then they may opt to detain her and offer her to the Italians as a fugitive.

Contrary to popular belief, countries do not need a standing extradition treaty to detain fugitives of another state and offer them for extradition. A notable exception to standard extradition is the EU itself which refuses to extradite prisoners to any country where they even might face the death penalty. As neither Knox norSollecito (who, unlike Knox, has attended the latest trial) would face execution if convicted, that rule wouldn’t apply.

Knox, now 25, is currently enrolled at the University of Washington in Seattle and expects to graduate in 2014.

To many observers, it was a farce for the Court of Cassation to order a retrial. Judge Hellman of the original appeal court – the court that exonerated Knox and Sollecito – was outraged by the decision to allow another retrial. Hellman has claimed unequivocally that the Court of Cassation has stepped outside its own authority by interpreting trial evidence instead of strictly confining itself to legal technicalities as required under Italian law. Hellman is suggesting the Court of Cassation effectively retried the original murder case rather than assessing the lawfulness (or otherwise) of the original investigation and trial. Hellman has also made it clear, to use his exact words, that the “Ruling has explained to the judges in the new trial how they should convict the two accused.” His prediction about that was borne out by the new guilty verdicts.

One of the distinctive aspects of the case has been the level of international media coverage. That a murder case involving a British victim and African, American and Italian defendants would attract multinational media attention is no surprise at all. What has given the case a quite tacky aspect has been the kind of media coverage it has attracted. Amanda Knox has suffered from negative publicity as much about her alleged lifestyle in Perugia as her alleged guilt in the murder. She’s been vilified for behaving like a libertine by many Italian media outlets which used her “party girl” lifestyle to sell papers while lambasting her as some kind of scarlet woman. British tabloids have used her looks to her disadvantage, labelling her “Foxy Knoxy” and suggesting she fits the profile of a cold-blooded femme fatale.

U.S. media, on the other hand, have largely been more supportive towards her, not that this has necessarily helped Amanda Knox. No country likes to see its own system of justice pilloried by foreign media and Italy is no exception. It has been suggested that, far from helping Knox’s case, U.S. media criticism of Italian justice was what hardened the resolve of Italian prosecutors to continue pursuing the case against her.

The Murder of Meredith Kercher

The murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy on November 1, 2007 caused a global controversy. Not so much for the crime itself, although it was certainly a brutal murder, but because of the disputed guilt or innocence of two of the three defendants, American Amanda Knox and Italian Raffaele Sollecito.

Rudy Guede admitted to being present at the crime scene when the murder was committed and watching as Kercher bled to death, but denied being the actual killer. However, the forensic evidence points firmly to Guede’s guilt. A bloody handprint of his, covered with the victims’s blood, was on Kercher’s bedroom wall. Italian forensic police testified that Guede’s DNA was inside the victim.

Following his trial, Guede was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison. That sentence was reduced to 16 years during his appeal hearing when Guede agreed to testify against Knox and Sollecito. Guede becomes eligible for parole in 2014 due to his reduced sentence. Just because he will be eligible for parole is no guarantee he will be released.

Following Guede’s trial and conviction, Knox and Sollecito went on trial in 2009 for their alleged roles in the murder of the 21-year-old Kercher. Both were found guilty and sentenced to more than 25 years. Under the Italian two-tier trial system, the case was then referred to the higher-level court to be heard a second time, after which judges would either confirm or reject the lower-level court's verdict. In 2011 the higher-level court overturned the initial convictions, issuing a ruling lambasting the police’s handling of the investigation. Judges also singled out major defects in the collection, handling and analysis of critical forensic evidence used by the prosecution.

Unlike in the United States and Great Britain where exonerated defendants are protected against being retried for the same crime, Italy operates under the Code Napoleon which offers no protection against double jeopardy. Under Italian law prosecutors have the same right to appeal acquittals as defendants to appeal convictions. Both prosecutors and defendants can go from the higher-level tribunal to the Court of Cassation (Italy's highest judicial body, equivalent to the U.S. Supreme Court). Prosecutors appealed the higher-level ruling and, in March 2013, Italian prosecutors won. The higher-level ruling quashing the murder convictions was itself overturned and the court granted a prosecution request for a retrial. That retrial began in November 2013 and lasted until January 30, 2014, when the Florence appeal court upheld their 2009 convictions.

Amanda Knox refused to leave the United States to stand for retrial, but Raffaele Sollecito, frequently in the company of his father, attended a good portion of the retrial. He was not present in the courtroom when the verdicts were announced.  

The Victim

Meredith Kercher

Meredith Kercher had a passion for Italy and its people, language and culture. She started a degree course at Leeds University in 2007 studying European Politics and Italian, electing to spend her foreign study year at the University of Perugia. While at Perugia she studied modern history, political theories and the history of Italian cinema. She was fluent in Italian and supported herself with the usual low-paid student work including promotional work for a local company, working as a tour guide and bar work at local nightclub Le Chic, owned by a Congolese immigrant, Patrick Lumumba.

It was through Lumumba that she met Amanda Knox when Knox took a job at Le Chic. Through Knox she met co-defendants Rudy Guede and RaffaeleSollecito.(Knox has denied ever having met or known Guede, but Candace Demspey, author of Murder in Italy, has stated unambiguously that Knox did meet him at least once. In a recent letter to Italian authorities Knox herself stated she met Guede only once, but never after that.)

Picturesque Perugia is a popular place for students, especially foreigners. The nightlife is vibrant, foreigners – both tourists and students – come and go in large numbers and local people generally welcome foreigners.Kercher lived with two Italian students and Amanda Knox. They shared a flat at Via Della Pergola 7, regarded by locals as one of Perugia’s less desirable neighborhoods, and seemed to get along well. Doubtless there were the usual occasional flatmate arguments, but nothing serious. Just two typical students abroad, sharing a flat and picking up casual work to pay the bills.

Knox, originally from Seattle, had enrolled at the University in Perugia to study Italian, German and creative writing on a one-year course, starting in 2007. She secured a room in the same flat as Kercher just prior to the start of the 2007 academic year in September. She met Sollecito at a classical music concert in mid-October 2007 and the two became a couple only a week before Kercher’s murder.

Sollecito came to Perugia from the town of Bari. A couple of years older than Knox and Kercher, he was nearing the end of his own course in computer engineering. His grades were good and there was nothing unusual about either Sollecito's background or lifestyle.

On November 1, 2007 Kercher was found dead on her bedroom floor. She had been physically restrained, sexually assaulted, beaten and slashed with a knife. The cause of death was two stab wounds to her neck. Suffocation also played a part, her naked body being discovered on her bed covered from head to foot with a quilt. An upstairs window had been broken into and Kercher’s two cellphones were missing along with her house keys, two credit cards and some cash. At first the broken window and stolen property suggested a burglary gone terribly wrong. Police soon discounted this theory. The broken window was around 12 feet above ground level and the missing cellphones were soon found in a nearby garden. The other stolen items and cash were never recovered which did indicate theft was a motive.

Ensnaring Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito

Kercher’s murder was discovered by her Italian flatmates, who immediately notified the police. The flatmates initially reported a break-in. After finding bloodstains, they found Kercher’s bedroom door was locked and, despite repeatedly calling her to open it, they got no answer. Fearing for her safety, they broke it down and found her body.

The police quickly began investigating and started by interviewing people closest to the victim. Murder investigations frequently involve starting with the victim and then those closest to him or her. Knox and Sollecito being among the first interviewed implies nothing about either their guilt or innocence. Murder is very often a personal rather than professional crime. Knox (Kercher’s flatmate) and Sollecito (Knox’s new boyfriend) were interviewed separately and their stories compared for discrepancies. As they were being interviewed as witnesses and not (at the time) interrogated as suspects, nothing they said was admissible in court under Italian law. But their status as witnesses also meant they weren’t given the standard protections afforded to suspects such as immediate access to lawyers. Nor were any audio recordings or film footage taken of their initial interviews. .

Sollecito and Knox initially claimed they were together at Sollecito’s flat at the time of the murder. Knox had been told by a text message from bar owner Lumumba that she had the night off. Business was slow that night and it didn’t look like she’d be needed. Both Knox and Kercher worked at Le Chic as barmaids.

The stories Knox and Sollecito told didn’t hold water for very long.

Both were interviewed several times over the next few days. It was Sollecito who changed his story first. (His account originally agreed with Knox's, claiming that they'd spent the whole evening at his flat. He now changed his story, stating that he'd only been with Knox for part of the evening, wasn't entirely sure when she'd left his flat and that he'd spent the rest of the evening at home alone using his computer.

According to Sollecito, investigators told him that Knox had cracked and implicated him in the murder. Sollecito later alleged that police had heavily pressured him to save himself by implicating Knox, threatening to prosecute him for the murder unless he named Knox as the ringleader. Sollecito further claimed that, while he himself had no intention of cracking, he wasn’t sure they wouldn’t bully Knox into implicating him. He was sure that they were trying to do exactly that.

Knox alleges that, once she formally became a suspect instead of a witness, police employed physical abuse, verbal threats and intense pressure to force a confession. At her appeal Knox claimed police slapped her at least twice during questioning. She also accused them of denying her food, drink, sleep and bathroom breaksand that, as she spoke little Italian, the police interpreter not only mistranslated her words but attempted to twist them and pressurise her still further.Italian officers present during her interviews deny all those allegations.

At one point investigators told Knox they had transcripts of the text messages between her and Lumumba when he gave her the night off. Knox claims police interpreted her use of the common phrase “See you later” in her final message to mean that Knox and Lumumba were co-conspirators planning to meet later and commit the crime. It was then that Knox did something very foolish. She accused Lumumba of murdering Meredith Kercher. She claimed he was obsessed with Kercher and she was sure of his guilt.

In doing so she both changed her initial story (of being at Sollecito’s flat for almost the entire evening) and made an entirely baseless accusation against Lumumba.That false accusation would have serious consequences for both of them. She was now claiming that she'd met Lumumba at the Piazza Grimana, accompanied him to her flat and actually seen him murder Kercher.

Why an innocent person would implicate herself in a murder while falsely accusing an innocent man is hard to understand, but Knox herself alleges that police mistreated her during her questioning and kept pressing her to admit her involvement in the crime. The statement containing these new claims was in Italian, a language Knox wasn't fluent in and wouldn't have been able to read fully before signing it.

Knox also acted oddly both immediately after the murder and during her initial interviews. Her emotional state regularly fluctuated between apparent indifference, crying fits and seemingly clowning around which only increased police suspicions. It also generated increasingly hostile media interest and public opinion. Her unpredictable behavior isn’t evidence of guilt so much as of stress, fear, mental fatigue and perhaps not fully realizing the seriousness of her situation. That said, it isn’t hard to see how it could be considered inappropriate by conventional expectations and suspicious to police officers.

Knox admits she practised yoga techniques at the police station between interviews. She’s also admitted spending some of her time between interviews sitting on Sollecito’sknee.

Other students and mutual acquaintances told police that Knox’s initial response toKercher’s murder seemed disinterested and seemingly callous. When questioned about her apparent aloofness and “inappropriate” behavior Knox stated, understandably, that individuals deal with stressful situations in their own ways. She also said she was under immense stress and pressure and that she never intended to offend anybody or arouse any suspicion. Contrary to police claims, Knox also denies that, in addition to yoga, she also performed cartwheels while waiting to be interviewed.

As a result of Knox’s accusation regarding Lumumba, the bar owner was arrested. He spent two weeks in detention until his alibi (being at Le Chic throughout the night of the murder) was verified. He was released without charge and eliminated as a suspect. During the investigation, his detention and subsequent lawsuit against Knox for calunnia (an Italian form of slander prosecuted as a crime, not as a civil case) he incurred substantial legal fees. His business also suffered greatly. The negative publicity forced him to sell Le Chic to pay legal fees and business debts.

After successfully suing the Italian police for false imprisonment and the loss of his good name and business, Lumumba was awarded 16,000 Euros. His successful lawsuit against Knox brought further compensation when Knox was ordered to pay his legal fees for both his initial two weeks in jail after her false accusation and for his successful lawsuit for slander. The judgment required Knox to pay 62,000 Euros to Lumumba in damages and to serve three years in prison. The prison term was later reduced to time served after Knox won her initial appeal on the murder conviction. It is not known whether she has paid Lumumba.

If things were difficult for Lumumba they were about to get much worse for Knox and Sollecito. Sollecito had also changed his story. He now claimed that Knox had not been at his home for the entire evening and that he’d spent most of it alone using his computer. Changing his story did nothing to allay police suspicions, especially when police examined his computer and refused to accept he’d been using it on the evening of the murder. They also wanted to know why, after Knox’s texts with Lumumba, both Knox and Sollecito switched off their cellphones for three hours that coincided with the murder. Knox claimed she wanted to avoid Lumumba changing his mind and calling her into work that night. Investigators clearly didn’t believe her, although the response was reasonable.

By changing his story –and only making his own situation worse – Sollecito destroyed Knox’s original alibi. With those facts and Knox’s inappropriate behavior, Italian police stopped viewing them as witnesses to be interviewed. Now they became suspects to be interrogated and anything they said could be used against them in court.

 The Ivory Coast Drifter

Rudy Guede

So far, investigators had Knox and Sollecito facing possible murder charges and Patrick Lumumba facing financial and personal ruin. There was only one other suspect to examine more closely. That suspect was Rudy Guede. He’d already had run-ins with Italian police on suspicion of burglary, threatening behavior involving a knife and was suspected of dealing cannabis and hashish.

Both Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito came from law-abiding, respectable backgrounds. Rudy Guede's background was more turbulent and rather less law-abiding. Originally from the Ivory Coast, Guede, from age 5, had lived in Italy since 1991. His father had returned to the Ivory Coast in 2004 and left Guede in the care of friends, family and a local priest before he was adopted by a local family at the age of 15.

Guede became an underachiever, dropping out of college courses in hotel management and computing. At the time of the murder he had been fired from a job as gardener for his adopted parents who had also evicted him after finally losing patience with his lifestyle and behavior. Guede became a petty criminal, arrested more than once on suspicion of burglary and drug-dealing. His most recent arrest occurred only days before the murder when he was picked up for suspected burglary during which he allegedly threatened the homeowner with a long-bladed knife while escaping.

Police came to believe that Guede’s alleged drug-dealing was how he first met Knox and Sollecito, who both used marijuana freely. As he knew Knox and Sollecito, he also met Meredith Kercher. He first became acquainted with all of them only a couple of weeks before the murder. He knew Knox and Kercher’s address and had previously been found inside their flat. Residents didn’t know how he entered or why he was there. They did know that they had found him sitting asleep on the toilet. Some say he took a particular interest in Meredith Kercher.

Guede was suspected by police of having burgled a lawyer’s office by breaking in through an upstairs window. Only days before Meredith Kercher’s murder, the owner of a nursery school in Milan had caught Guede burgling the nursery school. When confronted Guede allegedly threatened the owner with a long-bladed knife to make his escape. According to Italian forensic experts working the Kercher case that knife was similar to the weapon used to murder Meredith Kercher.

On hearing the police wanted to question him, Guede promptly disappeared. He left Italy and turned up in Germany where he was promptly arrested as a fugitive and returned to Italy. Guede presumably thought leaving Italy put him outside the reach of Italian police. Within European Union member states there’s often considerable co-operation between national police forces. The European Arrest Warrant allows (and obliges) member states to return fugitives wanted in other EU countries. If Guede thought he was safe simply by entering a different EU country, he was wrong.

Guede was formally charged and held in preventive detention to await trial. Rather than plead not guilty and try clearing his name, Guede opted for a so-called “fast-track” trial which was his right under Italian law. Guede was returned to Italy on November 20, 2007. His trial began in February, 2008.

At trial, his claims of non-involvement in Kercher’s murder were thoroughly discredited by forensic and DNA evidence. His DNA was found all over Kercher’s bra strap. A bloody handprint was found on the bed under her body and it matched Guede’s handprint. Prosecutors could prove that he knew Kercher, that he had been present at the crime scene and that his DNA was found not only at the crime scene but also on and inside Kercher’s body.

Guede’s claim that Kercher had invited him into the flat and consented to sex was given no credibility by the panel of trial judges. On October 29, 2008 Guede was convicted of murder and sexual assault. He drew 30 years (later reduced to 16 years on appeal) and will soon be eligible for parole. It’s possible that he might be leaving prison before Knox and Sollecito’s cases are adjudicated.

Despite Guede being by far the most likely suspect, Knox and Sollecito were still regarded by prosecutors and police as prime suspects. With their changing, contradictory stories, seeming lack of verifiable alibis and Italian forensic experts claiming to have found solid evidence of their participation, including DNA evidence linking Knox to what prosecutors claimed was the murder weapon and linking Sollecito to the clasp of Kercher’s bra, it wasn’t long before they were both formally charged with her murder and held to await trial. Their situation looked bleak.

On November 8 they came before Judge Claudia Matteini. It was during an adjournment that Knox met her trial lawyers for the first time. Having met her lawyers only that day, Knox had no time to discuss her case with them or prepare a case for being granted bail. Judge Matteini denied bail for both Knox and Sollecito and ordered that both be detained for a year, long enough for a trial to be arranged.

Knox and Sollecito remained in jail until their trial started on January 16, 2009. They would be tried not before a jury, but before a presiding judge, a deputy judge and six lay jurors. The Italian system is based on the Code Napoleon, a different legal system common in Continental Europe. The Code Napoleon system isn’t used in the United States or the United Kingdom where a single judge and 12-person jury are the norm in criminal trials.

The First Trial of Knox and Sollecito

Their trial began before Presiding Judge Cristiano Massei, Deputy Judge Beatrice Cristiani and the six lay jurors at the Perugia Court of Assizes. The prosecution claimed that Knox and Sollecito teamed with Guede to attack, rape and murder Meredith Kercher, that the supposed burglary was faked by Knox and Sollecito (hence the easily-recovered stolen cellphones) and that the murder was either a group sex game gone wrong or the result of a feud between Knox and Kercher. The prosecution claimed that they had DNA evidence, that Knox and Sollecito had changed their stories under interrogation, that they had improvised a cover story and that Knox had falsely implicated Lumumba to protect their real co-conspirator, Rudy Guede.

The prosecution also alleged that Kercher couldn’t have been physically restrained by a single person and that Knox’s “inappropriate” behavior after the murder and at the police station suggested guilt.

A police crime scene photograph.

The physical evidence, according to the prosecution, was heavily in favor of Kercher being overpowered by more than one person. Prosecutors claimed that a knife found in Sollecito’s cutlery drawer was the murder weapon and that, on searching his flat, they noticed a strong smell of bleach which, police claimed, was evidence of the knife having been thoroughly cleaned after the murder. Guede’s shoe prints, fingerprints and DNA had been found all over the crime scene and, as prosecutors alleged he was a co-conspirator with Knox and Sollecito, that this too pointed to their guilt.

According to the prosecution case Knox performed the actual murder while Guede and Sollecito helped restrain the victim and fake the burglary. As evidence of there being more than one attacker they cited the fact that Kercher had no defensive wounds on either her hands or arms. Defensive wounds are very common on victims trying to escape an attacker armed with a knife. Their absence from Kercher’s body was a circumstantial piece of evidence used aggressively by prosecutors. They claimed that Knox had repeatedly banged Kercher’s head against the bedroom wall, forcibly gripped her face to restrain her, forcibly undressed her, repeatedly slashed her with a knife and finally stabbed her twice in the neck while Guede and Sollecito restrained Kercher. They also suggested that two knives might have been used to commit the crime, rather than just the one police had actually found. Proof of Sollecito’s involvement, according to the prosecution, came from his DNA being found on the clasp of Kercher’s bra, which was found at the scene having been cut away from the rest of the garment.

The defense case was, arguably, somewhat more solid. No shoe prints, clothing fibres, hairs, skin cells or DNA from Amanda Knox were found either on Kercher’s body or at the crime scene. Defense DNA experts claimed that DNA on the alleged murder weapon (alleged to be Sollecito’s by the prosecution) consisted of a trace too small to be identifiable as the victim’s. Claiming that police forensic experts had incorrectly collected, handled and analyzed the evidence the defense demanded the prosecution provide dates for the examination of each individual exhibit. If exhibits were examined on the same day (and examined incorrectly) then the risk of contamination was greatly increased.

Police experts refused to provide those dates and were not ordered to by the trial judges. The defense also asked the judges to order the evidence be turned over to an independent forensic and DNA experts for re-examination. They especially wanted new DNA tests and to confirm whether the victim’s wounds actually matched the knife claimed by prosecutors as being the murder weapon. The judges denied their request.

Prosecution claims that Knox and Kercher had a fractious and confrontational relationship despite being flatmates was also challenged by the defense. They produced their own selection of text messages between the defendant and the victim to support their claim that the two women were perfectly friendly and didn’t have any feud with each other.

Defense lawyers freely used their clients’ allegations against the police. Both defendants accused police of using brutality, threats, intimidation and frequent attempts to turn them against each other. Knox claimed that police deprived her of basic necessities during her initial questioning. They also claimed that police ensured Knox had no access to a lawyer, any representative of the American Consulate or Embassy or even a visit from her relatives until after she had been charged. The defense alleged police knew that Knox’s mother was due to arrive in Italy and, the day before she was scheduled to arrive, police increased their pressure on Knox in an effort to make her crack before her mother visited and could involve U.S. consular officials.

Another defense angle came from the initial interviews with the defendants. The absence of film or audio recordings neither proved nor disproved the defendants’ claims of police misconduct. But, according to the defense, police couldn’t disprove those allegations either. It was a somewhat shaky plank in the defense case that, bluntly speaking, came down to whether the judges believed the police or the defendants. At the original trial they clearly believed the police.

The defense was unsuccessful. On December 5, 2009 both defendants were found guilty. Knox received 26 years (with an additional fine and three years added later for falsely accusing Lumumba). Sollecito received 25 years. Both were sent to Capanne Prison to await their mandatory appeal to the higher court.

The Appeal

Italian criminal courts operate under a two-tier system as part of the Code Napoleon. Having been through the first grade level (primo grado) the judgments had to be confirmed or rejected at the second grade (secundogrado) after which they would officially be convicted. If confirmed by the second-grade court then their only option for appeal would be to the Court of Cassation (the Italian Supreme Court). Appeals there could only be brought over legal technicalities or mistakes made during the investigation and first-grade trial. Fortunately for the defendants their lawyers had a number of points to raise at the second-grade hearing.

The second-grade hearing is effectively a second trial. It began on November 24, 2010, presided over by Judges Claudio Hellmann and Massimo Zanetti. This time the judges did order independent reviews of the DNA and forensic evidence as originally requested by the defense team. The independent review was damning for the prosecution, police forensic experts and the police themselves. Sapienza University experts Carla Vechiotti and Stefano Conti, both widely respected within the European forensics field, reviewed the DNA-related evidence and submitted a report running to 145 pages. Much of their report detailed incompetence and carelessness on the part of detectives and police forensic experts.

Forensic expert Patrizia Stefanoni was castigated by independent analysts.

Junk Science

According to Conti and Vechiotti, the work of forensic expert Patrizia Stefanoni was bungled and flawed, failing to conform to internationally accepted standards of proficiency. They further accused Stefanoni of the much more serious error of giving evidence in court that was unsupported by her own laboratory findings. Vechiotti has also stated that, from the time she was chosen to perform the independent review, unspecified “important documents” were being withheld from her.

The independent experts stated that DNA found on the alleged murder weapon was of insufficient quantity to identify it as Kercher’s. They also quoted some of Stefanoni’s own testimony during the first-grade trial where she herself admitted that she perhaps should have double-checked her own scientific findings but hadn’t actually done so. Regarding the bra clasp used by the prosecution and confirmed as having Sollecito’s DNA, the experts noted huge errors in collection and handling of the clasp. On crime-scene pictures the clasp is obviously marked for collection and examination. It was also found some distance from the rest of Kercher’s bra.

By Stefanoni’s own admission police and forensic experts then forgot about the clasp and it wasn’t actually collected until 46 days after being found at the scene. Even then, the clasp itself was found in the middle of a pile of other objects found at the crime scene. If any of those objects had Sollecito’s DNA on them then being left in an unsorted pile for so long could easily have transferred his DNA to the clasp. Equally important, while Guede’s DNA was found all over the straps of the bra, Sollecito’s was found only on the clasp.

Anybody with even basic forensic knowledge is unlikely to consider such evidence as having huge evidentiary value. The risk of cross-contamination is simply too great. And how, if as the prosecution claims, Sollecito was physically restraining Kercher during the actual crime, could his DNA not be found on her clothing or her body? The experts also questioned the validity of the clasp as evidence when they requested it be re-examined. They were told that it was now too rusty and unfit for re-examination because it had been incorrectly stored by police forensic experts. This wasn’t as conclusive as test results proving cross-contamination, but it certainly bolstered defense claims that evidence-handling by the police forensic experts was substandard. Further proof of that claim was presented in the video footage of the clasp being recovered by the police forensic team themselves. That footage clearly showed the clasp being handled by Stefanoni wearing a visibly dirty latex glove.

Another important shot fired by the defense concerned DNA evidence used against Amanda Knox. According to the prosecution they had Guede’s DNA all over the victim and the crime scene. They had what they considered incriminating DNA from Sollecito on the bra clasp. What they didn’t have was any forensic traces of Amanda Knox on Kercher’s body or in her bedroom which was the crime scene itself. No shoe prints, fingerprints, hairs, clothing fibres or DNA from Amanda Knox were found either on Kercher’s body or in her bedroom.

The second-grade hearing could have confirmed the findings of the first-grade hearing. It could have rendered a verdict of “not proven” rather than a full acquittal. What the judges did was to quash the murder convictions against Knox and Sollecito while upholding Knox’s conviction for falsely accusing Patrick Lumumba. Even after they increased her fine and prison sentence for libelling Lumumba they still ordered her release, ruling her libel sentence had already been served while awaiting her murder trial and appeal. Both Sollecito and Knox – imprisoned for the last four years – were now freed. The judges’ ruling placed the police firmly in the firing line.

Their ruling was damning for police detectives and forensic experts. According to the appellate judges the verdict against Amanda Knox “Was not corroborated by any objective element of evidence.” They disputed the testimony of a supposed witness, a tramp named Curatolo, who claimed he saw Knox and Sollecito near the crime scene at the time of the murder. The judges felt that homeless heroin addicts are seldom the most reliable witnesses. They criticized the original trial judge, Massei, especially the fact that he used the word “probably” at least 39 times in his written ruling deciding their guilt.

They also criticized the police regarding their interrogations of Knox. They described her interrogations as being “Of obsessive duration,” stating that in their opinion her changes of story and fluctuating emotional state were signs of extreme mental pressure and stress rather than guilt. They also noted that, despite the police and prosecution claiming that Knox and Sollecito conspired with Rudy Guede, there was no evidence of phone calls or text messages between either Knox and Sollecito and Guede himself.

In short, although the second-grade finding didn’t explicitly state that Knox and Sollecito were either railroaded or convicted through incompetence that was the impression that was left.The appellate judges excoriated both the police and the prosecution’s forensic experts in their ruling. In a British or American case that would almost certainly have been the end of the matter. It wasn’t.

Jan. 13, 2014

Countess Erzsébet Báthory

by David Robb

Lady Macbeth is perhaps the most famous fictional female villainess in all of literature, but in 1606, while William Shakespeare was creating her bloodthirsty character, one of the world’s worst real life villainess was on a serial murder spree like no other.

All but forgotten today, Countess Erzsébet Báthory was descended from one of the noblest families in the Hungarian region of Transylvania. But Erzsébet wasn’t like other girls – she liked to torture and murder them. All told, she may have murdered more than 650 young girls and virgins. The exact number won’t be known until the government of Hungary makes public her diary, which reportedly contains the names of all her victims – a diary so shocking that Hungarian authorities have kept it under lock and key for over 400 years.

Testimony from the ensuing trial revealed that she bit hunks of flesh from the bodies of her victims while they were still alive. Legend has it that she bathed in their blood, believing that this would preserve her youth. No one knows for sure why she did it. What is known is that she murdered at least three-times more young women than did Jack the Ripper – and possibly 100-times more. She was the most prolific female mass murderer of all time, and perhaps the most prolific serial killer – male or female – ever to live. 

Born in 1560, Erzsébet Báthory was a strikingly beautiful 15-year-old girl when she married Count Ferenc Nadasdy, whose wedding gift to her was Cachtice Castle, a majestic, medieval palace set atop a hill overlooking a beautiful valley.  It was here that she would commit a series of ghastly murders. It was, without a doubt, the most picturesque mass murder site of all time.

 Cachtice Castle

Initially, Erzsébet’s husband took part in her sadistic sex games, which she practiced on her servants. Together, they would pierce the servants’ lips and nipples with pins and needles, stick sharp objects under their fingernails, whip them, stab them and bite them – but not to the point of death. They would cover them in honey and let insects bite away at them, or stand them in the freezing snow and douse them with water.

But when her husband left to fight in one of Hungary’s many wars with the Turks, Erzsébet’s thirst to inflict pain and suffering became unquenchable.

Testimony from the hair-raising trial would uncover a catalogue of depravity, mayhem and mass murder.

Erzsébet set up a torture chamber in the castle’s basement where no one could hear her vicitims’ screams. Young girls would be abducted from the nearby village or lured to the castle with the promise of work, and then Erzsébet would tear into them. 

Assisted by her majordomo, her childrens’ nanny, a washerwoman and several other servants, Erzsébet would beat the girls with boards, burn them with hot pokers, freeze them, drown them or starve them to death – all the while ravaging them sexually. Cutting, stabbing, poking and piercing were her favorite pastimes. Their hands were cut off, their eyes gouged out, their breasts and vaginas mutilated. She particularly enjoyed burning the girls’ noses and lips off with a red-hot flatiron, or ripping their jaws off with her bare hands. Erzsébet would bite pieces of flesh off their faces, attack them with knives, and set their pubic hair on fire with a burning candle. Once, a servant testified at trial, while torturing two girls, Erzsébet stuck needles under their fingernails and scowled, “If it hurts, you whores, then simply pull them out!” And when the girls pulled the needles out, Erzsébet cut their fingers off. Then they were killed.

This went on for decades.

But what to do with all the dead bodies? They were dumped in pits and canals, or buried in shallow graves in the surrounding fields or on the castle grounds.

Rumors began circulating about atrocities going on at the castle in 1604, but it wasn’t until 1610 that King Matthias sent someone to look into it. When the king’s envoy finally arrived at the castle, he and his men found one girl dead, another one dying, and many more locked up and hysterical.

The king wanted Báthory beheaded, but his advisors cautioned that this would reflect badly on the other nobles. Instead, Báthory was locked up and her four accomplices were put on trial, during which one testified that 36 young girls had been murdered; another said that the number was 37, and the other two claimed it was more than 50. Local townspeople claimed that as many as 200 bodies had been removed from the castle, and a witness who saw her book said it contained the names of 650 victims.

In the end, three of her accomplices were found guilty and executed. The other defendant was acquitted. Báthory herself was never tried, and was found dead in her cell on Aug. 21, 1614.

The Boston Marathon bombings were the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since the World Trade Center catastrophe on September 11, 2001. That the suspected bombers are immigrants of Chechen heritage who had been nurtured for over a decade in Cambridge made it all the worse.

by J. Patrick O’Connor

The conditions were ideal for the 117^th running of the Boston Marathon. Under partly sunny skies, with the temperature in the 50s and minimum wind, the most venerable of all U.S. races began shortly after 9 a.m. on April 15, 2013. Some 23,342 starters, representing 92 countries, converged in waves at the starting line at Hopkinton Green. The elite women went off at 9:32 a.m., followed at 10 a.m. by the elite men. By noon over a half-million spectators lined the fabled course.

A year after the modern Olympics resumed in Athens in 1896, John Graham, a member of the Boston Athletic Association and the team manager for the inaugural U.S. Olympic team, organized the running of the first Boston Marathon. Fifteen runners participated in the inaugural race, with 10 finishing. The Boston Athletic Association, which still runs the event, set the date as April 19 in honor of Patriot’s Day – a regional holiday commemorating the beginning of the Revolutionary War when shots “heard ‘round the world” were fired at Lexington and Concord on April 19,1775.  If Patriot’s Day fell on a Sunday, the marathon was moved to the following Monday. In 1969, Patriot’s Day was officially designated to be the third Monday of April.

For the first 12 years the marathon consisted of 24.5 miles from Irvington Oval in Boston to Metcalf’s Mill in Ashland. In 1908, to comply with Olympic standards, the marathon’s distance was increased to its current length of 26.2 miles.  The route was basically reversed, beginning now at Hopkinton Green and ending at Copley Square in the heart of downtown Boston, alongside the Boston Public Library and Trinity Church.The course follows winding roads on various state routes through Boston’s western suburbs of Ashland, Framingham, Natick, reaching its half-way point at Wellesley College, where hundreds of co-eds cheer on the runners through “Scream Tunnel.” From there the course begins its ascent, covering the four hills of Newton that culminate in Heartbreak Hill, a span that runs for four-tenths of a mile between mile 20 and 21. The last five miles weave through Brookline and into Boston where the route then turns left onto Beacon Street continuing to Kenmore Square, and then follows Commonwealth Avenue inbound. The course turns right onto Hereford Street – against normal traffic flow – then left onto Boylston Street, finishing near the John Hancock Tower in Copley Square.

The Bombings

Long after the winners and elite runners had crossed the finished line, thousands of marathoners were still on the course; over 5,500 runners had yet to make it to the half way marker, but a steady trickle of runners appooached the finish line. And then the unthinkable happened: A home-made bomb exploded at 2:49:43 p.m. on the left side of the finish line, followed 13 seconds later by a second detonation. The bombs were hidden inside dark nylon backpacks that were deposited about 100 yards apart on the sidewalk. The bombs – designed to kill and maim – were housed in ordinary kitchen pressure cookers, filled with nails, ball bearings, BBs, and black powder – triggered by egg timers.

The blasts were so powerful that debris could be found 12 city blocks away.

Despite the fact that there could have been a number of more bombs set to go off in short intervals, many of the people around the finish line, including some of the runners, ran toward the carnage and danger instead of away from it. Bystanders were seen immediately kneeling on the pavement, removing belts or bits of clothing to fashion makeshift tourniquets to stanch the bleeding of numerous people who would have otherwise bled to death before help could arrive. One runner, a pediatric resident who was approaching the finish line, jumped over police barricades to aid the victims. These quick, decisive, brave actions undoubtedly saved numerous victims from bleeding to death before professional medics arrived.

The medical tent directly behind the finish line – set up to treat dehydrated runners – was instantly transformed into a triage station. Within minutes, ambulances arrived to treat the most grievously wounded and ferry them to nearby hospitals – all of which were now on full alert and prepared to receive mass casualties. Some of the wounded would be in surgery within a half hour of the explosions.

Three persons were killed by the blast and over 260 were wounded. Fatally injured were Martin Richard, an 8-year-old who was at the finish line with his mother and sister, both of whom were gravely injured; Krystal Campbell, 29, of Arlington, a restaurant manager who rarely missed attending the marathon; and Lu Lingzi, a 23-year-old Chinese graduate student at Boston University. The injured ranged in age from 7 to 71. Doctors performed 18 amputations on 16 victims – half of the amputations were above the knee. “It sounds grotesque, but if could imagine, it’s like putting your leg into a garbage disposal,” said Dr. William Creevy, an orthopedic surgeon at Boston Medical Center where five amputations were performed.

One of the above-knee amputees, 35-year-old Marc Fucarile, a delivery truck driver from Stoneham, Massachusetts, said the burns he sustained on his remaining leg are so painful that he thinks life would be easier if he had lost it too.

“Many victims survived with injuries that might well have killed them were in not for an army of medical professionals and quick-thinking volunteers at the marathon finish line – and several top notch hospitals nearby,”The Wall Street Journal reported on April 29.

The Hunt for the Terrorists

It would be difficult to imagine that whoever placed these bombs had any intention of going undetected. The finish line during a Boston Marathon is one of the most photographed and tightly cropped areas in the world. In addition to all the cellphones, TV station cameras, and digital cameras recording and memorializing the marathon, many of the retail establishments in the area provide 24-hour closed-circuit TV coverage. It would only be a matter of time before police investigators reviewed these surveillance tapes and spotted something out of the ordinary.  

There were over 13,000 videos and 120,000 still photos taken during the marathon, most of these by people with cellphones as the runners entered Boylston Street heading for the finish line. Thousands of these images were flown to the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia. Twenty-four hours after the bombing, one of the injured bystanders, Jeff Bauman, told police when he stabilized after double-amputation surgery that he had stood next to someone he thought was one of the bombers and gave a description.

By Wednesday morning, the FBI had photo images of two bombing suspects, but no idea who either one was.One photo showed the men standing together – one wearing a white cap and the other a black one. What the videos and photos showed were two young men entering Boylston Street, coming from Gloucester Street, at 2:38 p.m. toting black backpacks. These two were designated by the FBI and the police at “Bomber No. 1” and “Bomber No. 2.”

Bombing Suspects (Photo released by the FBI)

Video from a Lord & Taylor department store camera showed Bomber No. 2 wearing a white baseball cap turned backward. At 2:42 p.m. the video camera at the Forum restaurant shows Bomber No. 1 walking past, in the direction of the finish line. At 2:45 p.m. Bomber No. 2 is taped in front of the Forum restaurant placing his backpack on the sidewalk. He is shown remaining in place for about four minutes, occasionally checking his cellphone and even appearing to take a picture with it. Then he seems to check his cellphone again, speaking into it.

A few seconds after he finished the call, the large crowd of people around him can be seen reacting to the first explosion about 100 yards away. The first bomb was placed outside of a Lens Crafters shop. It blew out the store’s windows, two windows directly above and the ground floor windows of the Marathon Sports store next door. Many victims in this area suffered injuries to the backs of their legs as they viewed the finish line from behind a security fence.

Everyone in the crowd outside the Forum restaurant, other than Bomber No. 2, turns to the east – toward the finish line – and stares in shock and alarm at the carnage unfolding. Bomber No. 2 is then shown walking away in the opposite direction without his backpack. As he makes his way toward Fairfield Street, one of the marathon runners who had finished the race snaps a photo of him in his white cap worn backwards. Seconds after that the second bomb explodes outside the Forum restaurant.

The Boston police and FBI debated whether to release the images of the two suspect bombers to the public, with the FBI against it on the grounds that it would alert the suspects to flee, and the Boston police commissioner, Ed Davis, arguing for the release on grounds of public safety.  Davis was afraid the two would set off other bombs in Boston if not apprehended. The debate was not settled until the FBI agreed to release the images to the media around 5 p.m. on Thursday. From his hospital bed, Jeff Bauman informed the police that one of the men pictured – the one in the black cap – was the man he saw. 

Every TV station in Boston and all the cable news networks rushed to display the photos of the two bombing suspects and urging anyone who recognized the suspects to call the police. The coverage was incessant. Shortly after the photos began airing, Robel Phillipos, a student at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth was on the phone talking with fellow student Dias Kadybayev when he saw a photo of another student, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, flash on the screen. After he told Kadybayev about the resemblance, Kadybayev texted Tsarnaev that he looked like one of the bombers. “LOL,” Tsarnaev texted back. “If you need something in my room, take it.”

Kadybayev and two other friends went to Tsarnaev’s dorm room. His roommate told them he had left several hours earlier. As they waited for him to return they watched a movie. One of them spotted Tsarnaev’s backpack and noticed it contained fireworks mortars that had been emptied of their powder. With the empty mortars clearly implicating Tsarnaev, Kadybayev and friends went into cover-up mode, taking the backpack and Tsarnaev’s computer to Kadybayev’s off-campus apartment. The backpack was tossed into a dumpster there.

Catching Themselves

Five hours after the FBI released photos of the bombing suspects, MIT campus police officer Sean Collier was shot to death from behind as he sat in his patrol car waiting for his shift to end 30 minutes later at 11 p.m. The apparent motive of the attack was to steal the 27-year-old officer’s gun which was secured in a triple-lock holster the assailants could not force open.

No one knew if the murder of the MIT officer was related to the Boston Marathon bombers, but the killing of a police officer brought scores of police from around the metro area to Cambridge. Just before midnight a 911 call reported a carjacking, claiming the hijackers were the marathon bombers. A man with a gun had forced the driver of a Mercedes SUV to drive to another location where another man awaited. The two men then loaded something into the trunk. Back inside the car, the two men took $45 and a bank card from the driver and told him to drive to a Shell gas station nearby. When the two men went into the gas station’s food mart, the driver fled on foot across the street to a Mobil gas station, rushed through the door and yelled, “Call the police. They have bombs. They have a gun. They want to kill me.”

The Mobil store attendant thought the man was drunk, but when the man ran behind the counter and into a back storage room and locked himself in, the attendant knew he was serious and dialed 911.

“I tried not to look outside at anything,” the attendant, Tarek Ahmed, said. “I wanted it to appear as if nothing was wrong. I was hoping the suspects didn’t see where he went. At the same time, I told the police what happened. As I’m talking to the police, I back up slowing and knock on the storage room door, and I handed him the phone.”

Tamerlan and Dzkokhar Tsarnaev

The two carjackers did not attempt to pursue the escaped hostage. Instead they drove away in the Mercedes, heading in the direction of Watertown. Police were able to track the SUV’s movements by monitoring the carjacking victim’s cellphone that remained in the car.

When police caught up with the SUV on a residential street in Watertown, the men in the Mercedes threw at least two pipe bombs out of the car and shot several rounds at the seven Watertown police arriving at the scene. An intense firefight broke out. More police arrived, encircling the SUV, creating a dangerous crossfire situation.  Over 200 rounds were fired by the police, including one critically wounding a transit police officer during the gunfight.

About 20 minutes into the firefight, one of the men in the SUV exited the car. As he fired at the police a bullet sent him to the ground. As police attempted to drag him to safety, the other man in the SUV then drove straight ahead, barely missing one of the officers but running over the body of the fallen shooter and dragging the body under the car a few yards. After that the SUV struck a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority office, seriously injuring him. Somehow the SUV threaded through the parked police cars and disappeared into the night.

The man on the ground was dead. From his fingerprints the police learned that he was 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a long-time immigrant from the Russian region of Dagestan who had been living in Cambridge since he was 14 years old. Police also now knew that his brother was 19-year-old Dzkokhar Tsarnaev, a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth who had become a naturalized U.S. citizen on September 11, 2012 and had lived in Cambridge since he was 7 years old. 

Abandoning the SUV and smashing both of his cellphones, Dzkokhar searched for a place to hide. Bleeding from gunshot wounds he sustained in the firefight, he took up refuge in a 22-foot long motorboat parked in a backyard a few blocks away. There he spent the night and the following day as police from all over the metro area combed the Watertown area in a house-by-house search. State officials had put the entire metro area on lockdown Friday morning, shutting off all public transit and ordering residents to remain inside their homes until further notice. This directive was called “Shelter in Place.” One of American’s largest cities was paralyzed by the search for one teenaged terrorist.

Shortly after 6 p.m. on Friday, the curfew was called off and people were allowed to leave their homes. When Dave Henneberry stepped outside his Watertown house around 7 p.m. he noticed that the tarp covering his motorboat – aptly named The Slip Away II– was not fastened down all the way. He went to his garage and got a ladder and laid it up against the boat. Three steps up the ladder he noticed blood on one side of the deck and wondered if he had cut himself the last time he was on the boat. Then he saw blood on the other side of the deck. Looking over the rest of the boat he saw a body.

“I levitated off the ladder,” Henneberry said later. He returned to his house and told his wife, “Lock the doors,” before calling 911.

A massive phalanx of law enforcement converged on Henneberry’s back yard. A SWAT team with heavily armored vehicles approached the boat. At least two concussion grenades were tossed inside the boat and multiple rounds of gun shots were fired at the boat. Although Dzkokbar had made no threatening moves or even shown himself, police feared he might ignite another pressure-cooker bomb or some other explosive device. They also feared he was armed. A state police helicopter using thermal imaging technology showed where the suspect was hiding in the boat; a robotic arm attached to a police vehicle pulled the tarp back exposing the insides of the boat. After FBI negotiators made verbal contact with him, Dzkokhar surrendered without incident around 8:45 p.m. There was no gun or any explosives found in the boat. The gun Tamerlan had used at the Watertown shootout was recovered at the scene.

“Fuck America”

Inside the dry-docked boat, Dzkokbar, who friends would later describe as a “copious pot smoker,” had scrawled various messages during his 18 hours hiding out. “The U.S. government is killing our innocent civilians”; “I can’t stand to see such evil go unpunished…We Muslims are one body, you hurt one, your hurt us all”;“Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop;” “Fuck America.” He also wrote that he did not “like killing innocent people” because “it is forbidden by Islam,” but wrote that because of what had been done to Muslims such violence “is allowed.”

Critically wounded, Dzkokbar was taken by ambulance to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, one of the hospitals where numerous marathon victims had been and many were still being treated. He had sustained numerous gunshot wounds to his legs and hands as well as having been shot in the mouth and head. The shot to his head fractured his skull. It also damaged his pharynx, middle ear and cervical vertebra. The bullet that struck him in the mouth exited through the left side of his lower face. Trauma Surgeon Ray Odom called that wound “A high-powered injury.” The more serious wounds had been most likely inflicted while he lay sprawled in the motorboat. It was a miracle he was still alive.

Dzkokbar underwent extensive surgeries on Friday night and Saturday. On Sunday a special team of interrogators was dispatched from Washington to question the prisoner.  In interviewing him, the Obama administration invoked the “public safety exception” to the Miranda rule which permitted them to question him without reading him his right to remain silent or his right to have an attorney present. The interrogators wanted to determine if he had any possible connections to other Islamic extremists. Dzkokbar, who could only communicate by writing his responses because of the wound to his throat, wrote that he and his brother had acted alone – that no one else had been involved in the attacks. He also told the investigators that the bombings were masterminded by his brother and that they were motivated by their Islamic fervor and anger over the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  He also informed them they had learned how to make the bombs by logging onto and English-language magazine produced by an al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen called Inspire. The magazine inaugural issue came out in 2010 and contained bomb-making instructions in an article entitled “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”

At the request of his three federal public defenders, Judy Clarke, a nationally prominent death-penalty attorney from San Diego, agreed to join Dzkokbar’s legal team on April 29. In the past she has represented Susan Smith, who was convicted of drowning her two children; Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and Jared Loughner, who killed six people at an event held by U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, where the congresswoman was shot in the head and grievously wounded.  All of these defendants escaped the death penalty and received life sentences.

On the Monday after the bombings, Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler, after reading Dzkokbar his Miranda rights, charged him with using a weapon of mass destruction that resulted in three deaths and injuries to over 170 people. Three public defenders assigned to defend him were present at his bedside in ICU as were two U.S. attorneys. Earlier the White House had stated that the younger Tsarnaev could not be tried as an enemy combatant. Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said it was illegal to try an American citizen in a military tribunal. The Military Commission Act of 2009 specifically forbids military trials of U.S. citizens. An “enemy combatant” is defined as one who is a foreign national associated with al Qaida and associated groups.

A week later, Dzkokbar was transferred to the Federal Medical Center Devens, about 40 miles west of Boston at Ft. Devens Army base. The medical center is a mixture of high-security prison cells with hospital rooms. The men-only prison hospital houses just over a thousand inmates and about 130 others at an adjacent minimum-security camp.

Dzkokbar, pronounced Jo-Har, is confined to a small, one-person cell with a steel door and observation window and a slot for passing food and medicine. He is not allowed to mingle, speak or pray with other prisoners. He may leave his cell for one hour a day to go to an isolated small open space to exercise, but does so infrequently. He has no access to radio or TV, but is allowed some books and selected reading material. The newspapers and magazines he have been stripped of classified ads and letters to the editor, a precaution the government takes to prevent coded messages reaching him. The only visitors allowed are a mental health consultant, his legal team, and members of his immediate family. While members of his legal team have been to see him about every other day, his two older sisters are his only family in the Boston area and they rarely visit. His parents live in Dagestan.

The arraignment in federal district court in Boston on July 10, 2013, marked the first public appearance for Dzkokbar since his arrest. He had come a long way since winning a $2,500 scholarship from the City of Cambridge to attend college in 2011. At the time of the bombings, Dzkokbar owed $20,000 to the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth and was failing many of his courses. His friends said he had become a “copious pot smoker,” and was dealing in dope to survive. His brother, whom he idealized, had made a worse wreck of his own life.

About three dozen victims and family members attended the arraignment. Dzkokbar appeared in an orange jumpsuit, his face swollen and his hand bandaged. His left forearm was in a cast. The New York Times reported that he seemed “drowsy or tired and he wiped his mouth and his nose several times, rubbing the back of his neck and grabbing at his jumpsuit, his curly hair flopping over his forehead.” Represented by Judy Clarke and Miriam Conrad, he pleaded not guilty to the 30 counts against him. Seventeen of the counts carry the death penalty. The hearing lasted eight minutes. As soon as it concluded, federal marshals bound his hands and led him out. As he left he smiled at his two sisters and made a kissing gesture toward them.

The trial, which the prosecution estimated would last up to three months, is scheduled for November of 2014. The fact that the defense has hired a mental consultant may indicate that the defense intends to put on a mental illness defense – that he was under the domination of an out-of-control older brother who took him off the deep end.

Ethan Couch (Photo ABC)

“Affluenza” – a condition fostered by wealthy and permissive parents whose children grow up believing normal rules do not apply to them – was the buzz word at the sentencing of a Texas teenager whose drunk driving resulted in the deaths of four people and left another paralyzed for life.

by Denise Noe

The mood in a courtroom is inevitably tense right before sentencing. That is especially so when the crime has cost innocent people their lives and left survivors with severe injuries – and when there is a realistic possibility that the sentence could be either very severe or quite light.

All of the above were in play at the sentencing of 16-year-old Ethan Couch as he sat in a Tarrant County, Texas courtroom before State District Judge Jean Boyd on February 5, 2014.

Months earlier, Ethan had pled guilty to four counts of intoxication manslaughter and two counts of intoxication assault causing serious bodily injury. His drunk driving had caused a crash that killed four people and left one person permanently and severely handicapped.

Although minors charged with serious offenses are often tried as adults, Ethan was tried as a juvenile. Since he had pled guilty, the only question before the court was what his punishment would be. The maximum to which Ethan could be sentenced was 20 years imprisonment – although that sentence would have allowed the possibility of parole after two years in juvenile hall. The law also allowed for probation. Ethan had waived his right to have a jury decide his sentence so Judge Boyd would make that decision.

Prior to that day, Judge Boyd had heard defense attorneys Scott Brown and Reagan Wynn argue for leniency. They asserted that mitigating factors in Ethan’s background encouraged reckless and law-breaking behavior.

Psychologist G. Dick Miller testified that Ethan’s parents had allowed him “freedoms no young person should have.” Miller claimed Ethan possessed an “intellectual age” of 18 but an “emotional age” of 12. The psychologist said, “The teen never learned to say that you’re sorry if you hurt someone. If you hurt someone, you send him money.” Miller used the term “affluenza” to describe Ethan. Miller explained that “affluenza” was a condition fostered by wealthy and permissive parents who encourage their children to believe normal rules do not apply to the affluent.

Brown and Wynn requested probation. The attorneys acknowledged that Ethan had personality defects and would benefit from psychotherapy. They suggested a treatment facility in Newport Beach, California, the Newport Academy.

Prosecutors Richard Alpert and Riley Shaw pushed for the 20-year maximum, contending leniency would just reinforce the message Ethan had received from his parents that he does not have to obey the normal rules. Alpert argued that just as his lawyers blamed parental permissiveness for Ethan’s drunk driving, he would blame light sentence from Judge Boyd for a future offense. Alpert said, “There can be no doubt that he will be in another courthouse one day blaming the lenient treatment he received here.”

Judge Boyd sentenced Ethan to 10 years probation. She also ordered that he be taken to the Newport Academy in California to receive psychotherapy as a live-in patient. She ruled that he must spend at least two years at the Newport Academy. The judge indicated that she felt it was absolutely vital that Ethan receive appropriate psychotherapy. Addressing the prosecution assertion that counseling is available in prison, the judge said she feared he would not receive it there.

Writing for the Star-Telegram, Mitch Mitchell reported, “[Judge] Boyd said that she is familiar with programs available in the Texas juvenile justice system and is aware that he might not get the kind of intensive therapy in a state-run program that he could receive at the California facility suggested by his attorneys. Boyd said she had sentenced other teens to state programs but they never actually got into those programs.”

Although the sentence indicated Judge Boyd found the defense convincing, she made a point of telling Ethan that he, not his parents, was responsible for his crimes. She also informed him that if he violated probation conditions, the probation could be revoked and he might serve as long as 10 years in prison. Among other strictures, the probation conditions forbid Ethan from driving. They also forbid him from drinking alcohol.

Judge Boyd had to realize that the loved ones of those killed and badly injured were sorely disappointed by the sentence. She probably saw dismay on their faces. Speaking to them directly, she said nothing she might do could ease their pain.

Indeed, relatives of the victims were terribly upset by the leniency.

Alex Lemus is the elder brother of Sergio Molina, who was rendered permanently paralyzed and brain-damaged by the crash. Lemus said he was “disappointed, so outrageously angry that I couldn’t say anything…That kid killed four people and crippled my little brother and doesn’t even have to serve one year?”

Eric Boyles, who lost his wife, Hollie Boyles, 52, and a daughter, 21-year-old Shelby, in the accident, commented, “Money always seems to keep [Ethan] out of trouble. Ultimately today, I felt that money did prevail. If [he] had been any other youth, I feel like the circumstances would have been different.” The grieving husband and father also remarked, “Nowhere in this process did Ethan ever say to the families, to the court, ‘I’m so sorry for what happened.’ Nowhere did Ethan express any remorse or anything.”

Coddling A Criminal Because Previously Coddled?

The sentence stirred up a storm of controversy, with many accusing the judge of supporting a double standard that bestowed more privilege on those already privileged. Psychologist Gary Buffone pointed out that “affluenza” is a term popularized by The Golden Ghetto: The Psychology of Affluence, a bookby Jessie H. O’Neill and is not a diagnosis officially recognized by mental health community professionals.

Buffone said “affluenza” is sometimes cited when children of wealthy parents misbehave but he contends, “The simple term would be ‘spoiled brat.’” Buffone argued that the sentence is a continuation of the very pattern of coddling that the defense claimed led Ethan to act irresponsibly: “Not only haven’t the parents set any consequences, but it’s being reinforced by the judge’s actions.”

Drexel University law professor Daniel Filler asserted, “The real truth is that our criminal justice system is suffering from ‘affluenza’ because affluent people can afford better attorneys and get better outcomes.”

Psychologist Suniya Luthar decried what she called “a double standard for the rich and poor.”

Ethan’s lawyer Scott Brown commented, “I never used the word ‘affluenza’ and never would have used such a cute word in such a serious tragic case. That’s just been blown completely out of proportion.”

In post-sentencing interviews, psychologist Miller said he regretted calling Ethan’s problem “affluenza.” Miller explained, “I wish I hadn’t used that term. Everyone seems to have hooked into it.” He defended the leniency, saying, “I don’t believe going to the penitentiary was best for him or the state of Texas and [the judge] concurred.”

Was Ethan An Accident Waiting To Happen?

At the time of the crash, Ethan resided in a Burleson, Texas mansion his parents had provided for him – to live in by himself. In Mail Online Will Payne and Daniel Bates report that Ethan “regularly boasted to friends that he lived in his own mansion, completely unsupervised by his parents.” Teenager Anthony Lamanna described Ethan’s personal mansion: “There was no furniture except for a big couch, a widescreen TV, and his X Box. It definitely looked like the kind of place a teenager would live in.”

Ethan enjoyed throwing parties at his mansion. Alcohol freely flowed at those parties as Ethan and other adolescents merrily pounded back the booze that was legally forbidden to them as minors.

Ethan’s fondness for drinking landed him in legal trouble in February 2013. In WFAA.com, Teresa Woodard reports, “Police in the town of Lakeside, northwest of Fort Worth, found Ethan Couch with a 12-ounce can of beer and a 1.75-liter bottle of vodka. Just before 1 a.m. February 19, [2013], a Lakeside officer gave Couch two citations – one for being a minor in possession of alcohol, the other for consuming alcohol as a minor.” He pled no contest to both charges in March 2013. His mother paid $423 in court costs and Ethan was sentenced to probation.

Apparently Ethan was impervious to the lessons of the alcohol-awareness class as he continued merrily hosting parties at which he and other teenagers drank heavily. Lamanna attended such a get-together on June 12, 2013. Payne and Bates report that Lamanna remembered that Ethan “had been boasting that he was a thief and on the way to his house he stopped off at a shop in Burleson and him and a friend stole some beers.”

In his failure to learn from experience, Ethan followed in the wayward footsteps of his parents.

The Sins of the Parents

Fred Couch and Tonya Couch, who divorced in 2007, are Ethan’s parents. Fred owns Cleburne Metal Works, a sheet metal manufacturing company. Both parents have arrest records for driving violations and other offenses; neither has been incarcerated. Fred’s driving offenses include going 95 m.p.h. in a 60 m.p.h. zone and driving without a license. He has paid small fines for traffic violations several times.
In 1996, while the Couches were still married, police arrested Couch for assaulting his wife. According to police records, Couch hit her “on or about the face with his hands causing Tonya to fall” and grabbed her “on or about the neck with his hands, scratching her neck.” Mrs. Couch filed an affidavit of non-prosecution; the charge was dismissed.

In 2003, Tonya Couch was charged with misdemeanor reckless driving. Police alleged that she “intentionally and knowingly drove a motor vehicle in a willful or wanton disregard for the safety of persons or property.” Payne and Bates report, “Court records say she pulled up behind a fellow motorist” and then pulled alongside the vehicle, forcing the driver onto the road’s shoulder. She was sentenced to pay a $500 fine and a six-month community supervision order was placed on her.

The Catastrophic Crash – and Lives Crushed

Ethan's Truck (Photo NBC 5 News)

On the evening of June 15, 2013, Ethan and some friends replayed the petty theft scene Anthony Lamanna described as occurring three evenings before. Ethan and other teenagers were partying at his mansion when he and some pals left to go to a Wal-Mart. Possibly fancying themselves daring outlaws, the callow youths stole two cases of beer. After stealing the booze they returned to Ethan’s home for more partying.

At some point, a girl at the party said she wanted a feminine hygiene product. (News articles are not more graphic but it seems logical to surmise that the teen girl wanted something to ensure cleanliness during her menstrual period.)

Ethan and seven other partiers piled into a red Ford pickup truck that was the property of Fred Couch’s company; six squeezed into the cab and two had to ride in the bed of the truck.

At about the same time during that evening Ethan and his guests headed for his pickup, Breanna Mitchell was driving her 2000 Mercury Mountaineer on Burleson-Retta Rd. Mitchell’s SUV suddenly had a blow out. The flat tire led her to maneuver the disabled vehicle onto the shoulder of the road. It is likely Mitchell was not only upset due to the inconvenience but scared since her car had broken down after dark. The distressed woman knocked on the front door of a nearby house.

Although Hollie Boyles, 52, and daughter Shelby Boyles were strangers to Mitchell, they sympathized with her plight. Hollie and Shelby went with Mitchell to her broken down car.

Youth pastor Brian Jennings, 43, was driving home from his son’s graduation party when he noticed the trio gathered around the SUV. Teenagers Lucas McConnell and Isaiah McLaughlin were in the car with Jennings. He parked his Chevrolet Silverado on the north side shoulder. McConnell and McLaughlin stayed in the Silverado while Jennings went to offer assistance.

Impaired by booze, Ethan ignored the 40 m.p.h. posts. His foot went heavy on the accelerator and he sped along at almost 70 m.p.h. Suddenly the drunk teenager lost control of his speeding vehicle. His wildly careening truck clipped Breanna Mitchell’s car before slamming straight into Mitchell, Hollie and Shelby Boyles, and Jennings. The impact flung Mitchell and the three Good Samaritans about 60 yards into the air. Not surprisingly, all four were killed.

Then Ethan’s out-of-control truck plowed straight into Jennings’ car causing the Silverado to slam into a moving car occupied by two people. The teenagers in the parked vehicle and the two in the car into which it slammed survived without severe injuries.
The two teenagers riding in the bed of the truck Ethan drove were hurled out of the vehicle. One of them, Sergio Molina, 15, was left brain damaged and paralyzed. In The New York Times, Manny Fernandez and John Schwartz report that Sergio is in a “minimally responsive state” and expected to remain so for life. The other person tossed from the bed, Solimon Mohmand, was also severely injured, with internal injuries and several broken bones.

Others in the truck, including Ethan, sustained minor injuries.

Although it is illegal in Texas for minors to drive with any alcohol in their systems, tests showed that Ethan’s blood alcohol level was 0.24 – three times the legal limit for adults.
Victims File Multiple Lawsuits

Months before the sentencing, victims’ families began filing lawsuits. Those who have filed lawsuits include Eric Boyles, Shauna Jennings (Brian Jennings’ widow), and Marla Mitchell (Breanna’s mother).
The families of three injured teenaged passengers in Ethan’s car are also suing. Kevin and Alesia McConnell, parents of Lucas McConnell and Timothy and Priscilla McLaughline, parents of Isaiah McLaughlin, are suing.

Maria Lemus and Sergio Molina, parents of the most severely injured survivor who bears the same name as his father, Sergio Molina, are asking for $20 million in their lawsuit. In their suit, they point out that Sergio requires round-the-clock care and that Maria quit her job to help care for him after he was released from the hospital.

All six lawsuits name Ethan, Fred, and Cleburne Metal Works as defendants (the business is being sued because the pickup Ethan drove was company property); four of the suits also name Tonya, Ethan’s mother.  

On January 6, 2014, District Judge R. H. Wallace consolidated five of the lawsuits. Couch family attorney Randy Nelson commented, “It makes sense to have these cases in one court. If there are multiple cases involving the same incident, it is common to combine them in court for judicial economy.” District Judge Bill Harris told reporters that combining the suits should save both time and court costs.

Therapy At Newport Academy

According to David McCormack in Mail Online, Newport Academy resembles a “luxury resort.” McCormack reports, “Newport specializes in equine-assisted psychotherapy where patients get to ride horses.” They may also take cooking lessons, martial arts lessons, make use of the swimming pool, gym, and basketball court, and receive massages. McCormack notes, “The apparently idyllic conditions at Newport are a world away from those at juvenile prison in Texas, where extreme overcrowding means several inmates are expected to share a cell.”

Newport Academy CEO Jamison Monroe Jr. makes it clear that, regardless of its resemblance to a resort, Newport is a treatment center. “We do have strict guidelines and rules. People can’t just do what they want to whenever they want to. People have to follow our schedule and abide by our guidelines.” He added that if Ethan fails to follow Newport guidelines, that failure will be reported to the court.

Equine therapy does not just mean riding horses. It means that patients at Newport are assigned a horse for which the patient is responsible. Taking responsibility for a horse may help develop the sense of responsibility that is so sadly lacking in delinquent minors like Ethan.

It seems likely that the role of “affluenza” in Judge Boyd’s decision was grossly over-estimated. In The New York Times, Manny Fernandez and John Schwartz report, “Criminal defense lawyers said it was not uncommon for minors involved in serious drunken-driving cases and other crimes to receive probation instead of prison time.” The journalists elaborated, “Other experts said it was part of a growing trend of giving a young person a second chance through rehabilitation” instead of trying them as adults.

Liz Ryan, president of the Campaign for Youth Justice, an organization that advocates emphasizing rehabilitation for juvenile offenders, supports the sentence. She said adolescents are especially “prone to impulsive behavior” but are also especially “capable of change.”

Alex Lemus is right to complain, “If he were poor like us, he would’ve gotten 10 years, I bet.”

Luthar asked, “What is the likelihood [that] if this was an African-American inner-city kid that grew up in a violent neighborhood to a single mother who is addicted to crack. . . what is the likelihood that the judge would excuse his behavior and let him off because of how he was raised?”

Judge Boyd did not excuse Ethan. She decided that two years of therapy and eight more years of probation, rather than two years in juvenile hall, would be the best place for him. Is this decision reasonable? McCormack observes, “The apparently idyllic conditions at Newport are a world away from those at juvenile prison in Texas, where extreme overcrowding means several inmates are expected to share a cell and amenities are severely restricted due to budget cuts. As a result, an atmosphere of drugs and violence pervades.”

Liz Ryan noted that adolescents are especially “prone to impulsive behavior” – and also especially “capable of change.” That they are especially “capable of change” should mean that there should be a special emphasis on rehabilitation with them. Therapy would be far more likely to be successful with an adolescent – someone whose brain is still developing – than with an adult. Despite this, an impoverished juvenile who drove drunk or otherwise behaved recklessly with tragic results, would be likely to be placed in an overcrowded system in which “an atmosphere of drugs and violence pervades.” Thus, that adolescent would reach adulthood with criminal tendencies reinforced and exacerbated. Any chance of positive change would be lost. A delinquent juvenile shoved into this overcrowded and brutal system will invariably mature into an even more callous and dangerous adult.

Perhaps the scandal in this case is not that Ethan Couch will receive psychotherapy in a healthy environment but that his impoverished counterpart would not.

Bibliography

Alcindor, Yamiche. “What’s the future for ‘affluenza’ defenses?” USA Today. Dec. 14, 2013.

Christian, Carol. “Victims’ families in Texas ‘affluenza’ case file multi-million dollar lawsuits.” Chron. Dec. 18, 2013.

“Civil suits against Couch family combined.” Cleburne Times-Review. Jan. 10, 2014.

“Couch, parents named in 6^th civil lawsuit.” Cleburne Times-Review. Jan. 3, 2014.

Fernandez, Manny; Schwartz, John. “Teenager’s Sentence in Fatal Drunken-Driving Case Stirs ‘Affluenza’ Debate.” The New York Times. Dec. 13, 2013.

Harris, Byron. “DA seeks jail time for Ethan Couch; more details arise in teen’s background.” WFAA.com. Dec. 17, 2013

McCormack, David. “Horseback riding, massages and cooking lessons: Inside the luxury $450k per year rehab center that ‘affluenza’ teen will attend as punishment for killing four in DUI.” Mail Online. Dec. 17, 2013.

Mitchell, Mitch. “Teen sentenced to 10 years probation, rehab in 4 deaths.” Star-Telegram. Dec. 13, 2013.

Patinkin, Felicia. “’Affluenza’ DUI Case: Prosecutors Try Again to Put Teen Behind Bars.” ABC News. Dec. 18, 2013.

Payne, Will; Bates, Daniel. “EXCLUSIVE – Sins of the ‘affluenza’ boy’s parents: Millionaire father and mother of teen let off despite killing four in DUI crash have been accused of more than TWENTY crimes and traffic violations.” Mail Online. Dec. 16, 2013.

Plushnick-Masti, Ramit. “’Affluenza’ isn’t a recognized diagnosis, experts say after ‘brat’ spared from jail in drunk driving case.” Associated Press. Dec. 12, 2013.

Szoldra, Paul. “Psychologist For Teen Drunk Driver Who Killed 4 And Got No Jail Time Defends ‘Affluenza’ Diagnosis.” Business Insider. Dec. 13, 2013.

“Texas judge combines 5 of 6 lawsuits against Ethan Couch.” United Press International. Jan. 9, 2014.

Woodward, Teresa. “Teen driver involved in deadly crash had prior alcohol citations.” WFAA.com. June 21, 2013.

John Gilbert ‘Jack’ Graham, smiling as he enters Colorado’s Death Row. 

The bombing of United Airlines Flight 629 on November 1, 1955, that killed all 44 persons aboard was the most unusual, destructive and ultimately futile acts of mass murder in American history.

by Robert Walsh

At Denver’s Stapleton Airport, United Airlines Flight 629 bound for Alaska was cleared for take-off at 6:52 p.m. on November 1, 1955, 15 minutes after its scheduled departure time. The “Mainliner” made a perfectly normal take-off and disappeared out of sight. Eleven minutes later it exploded near the town of Longmont and wreckage was strewn over several miles. All 44 passengers and crew were killed.

Terrorism? Accident? Mechanical failure?

Once investigators recovered the wreckage their first job was identifying the victims and establishing the cause of the explosion. They found no signs of structural fatigue, faulty parts or botched maintenance. The fuel lines and tanks seemed normal. Nothing suggested any ordinary malfunction. Interviews with ground crew and maintenance crews showed the plane was sound when it took off.

Investigators then noticed two very disturbing facts. Parts of the fuselage covering Cargo Bay 4 showed scorch marks. A sizeable hole in the airframe had its edges blown outward, suggesting an explosion inside the cargo bay. Investigators noticed a strong chemical smell coming from passengers’ luggage, particularly remnants of an unidentified suitcase. The aircraft wreckage identified as parts of Cargo Bay 4 smelt similar: Both smelt of explosives.

The FBI examined the wreckage and the suitcase, confirming the suitcase had contained a large amount of dynamite. Parts of the wreckage tested positive for chemicals used in the manufacture of dynamite. They also confirmed that Cargo Bay 4 was loaded at Stapleton Airport. That didn’t confirm a bomb as passengers are sometimes foolish about what they put in their luggage. But it certainly made a bomb the most likely source and Stapleton as where it had been loaded.

The remains of United Airlines Flight 629. 44 passengers and crew died when a 25-stick dynamite bomb exploded in Cargo Bay 4, 11 minutes after take-off.

In the mid-1950’s, before terrorism became commonplace, airport security was almost non-existent, especially on domestic flights. A bomb could easily be slipped aboard an airliner. Only a few years earlier a Canadian airliner was destroyed by a bomb in a passenger’s luggage. Albert Guay and his two accomplices had wanted to kill his wife. Killing 23 other passengers and crew was collateral damage. All three had been hanged only a couple of years previously.

Their next job was to identify the passenger whose suitcase reeked of explosives. It belonged to Daisie King. King’s personal effects included a newspaper clipping about her son, Jack Gilbert Graham, regarding his latest criminal trial. It wasn’t his first time in court. That instantly made him very interesting. A full background check gave detectives many reasons to look more closely.

A Fraudster

Graham wasn’t a son to be proud of. Aged only 22, he’d already collected several convictions in Colorado and Texas and was suspected of many more crimes. Fraud was his specialty, passing forged checks and using other people’s property to secure loans. Petty theft from his workplaces and suspiciously bad luck with expensive items of property also provided ready cash. Whenever Graham needed extra money he always had some type of “accident” and collected the insurance. In addition to claiming for a pickup truck destroyed when he stalled the engine on a railroad crossing (in front of an oncoming train) there had been an unexplained gas explosion and fire at his mother’s diner and a break-in. Graham, employed there, claimed insurance for both accidents.

At the time of the bombing, Graham was helping his mother run her diner. His earnings were low as he was under a court order to repay money embezzled from a previous employer. In 1951 Graham had been working at a Denver factory. He’d removed 42 checks and forged the owner’s signature, pocketing $4,200. His long-suffering mother made a deal with Colorado authorities: In return for no jail time she returned $3,000 of the stolen money. She also agreed that Graham would work for her, paying the remainder out of his wages. He also drew five years of probation. Records showed regular payments. Further checking showed he hadn’t gone straight. Graham used some of the diner’s equipment to secure a loan without informing his mother. Given his repeated crimes, pathological dishonesty and barely existent work ethic, their relationship grew increasingly bitter. In turn, Graham’s resentment of his mother and what he saw as her constant meddling mutated into hatred.

Graham’s mother and principal victim, Daisie King. He viewed the other 43 victims as collateral damage.

Graham’s father died in 1937 when he was 3. His mother put him to an orphanage where he spent the rest of his childhood.  Even though his mother remarried in 1941 she left her son at the orphanage. He didn’t live with her again until 1954 when her new husband died. Her son bitterly resented that. Placing him in an orphanage and leaving him there longer than absolutely necessary began a bitter rift between them. It didn’t help that she was a bossy, domineering mother, seldom missed an opportunity to further entrench herself in his life.

By the time of the bombing, Graham was living with his wife in a house bought by his mother, on condition that she could stay there whenever she visited Denver. She employed him at her diner. She helped him whenever he was in trouble, putting him increasingly in her debt financially and psychologically. To Graham, being beholden to her became increasingly infuriating. He wanted her out of his life permanently, no matter how he did it.

From Suspect to Prime Suspect

Detectives considered him a prime suspect. They invited him to identify his mother’s luggage and answer some routine questions. Smarter criminals know full well that can spell disaster; detectives don’t usually interview people unless they’re already suspicious. However, Graham felt being obstructive would arouse much more suspicion. He arrived, answered some questions and positively identified the suitcase remnants.

He also mentioned her carrying shotgun cartridges in her suitcase as she’d intended to hunt caribou during her trip. What he didn’t realize was that he’d upgraded himself from a prime suspect to the prime suspect. After talking to Graham detectives firmly believed he was their man. Soon after questioning him they had overwhelming proof.

Investigators began sifting through his friends and acquaintances looking for further evidence. They found plenty. Graham’s half-sister filled them in on his darker side. According to her, Graham had a violent temper. Confrontations he couldn’t worm his way out of were resolved violently. His mother had been terrified by him several times. His half-sister avoided him on account of his having assaulted her more than once. She told investigators that he assaulted his wife.

Graham had married Gloria, 22 at the time of the bombing, only two years earlier. They lived together with their 20-month-old son Allen at the home bought for them by his mother. In her opinion he harbored enormously repressed fury mostly focussed on his mother.

Gathering Evidence – Dynamite and Insurance Policies

Police files revealed his considerable criminal record. They soon found evidence of bomb-making ability as well.

Investigators went all round the Denver area interviewing people who sold explosives, fuse wire and blasting caps. Strange though it might seem, explosives were available over-the-counter in hardware stores in Colorado at the time. Soon enough, a store owner in Kremmling positively identified Graham as having bought 25 sticks of dynamite, two blasting caps, batteries and wire.

Another storekeeper remembered him buying an electric timer. Graham was remembered because he returned a few days later, exchanging it for a different type. They also turned up another crucial witness. Graham had briefly taken another part-time job and his choice was hugely significant. He’d work at a store selling and repairing electrical goods. It was a good place to learn how to wire a timing device correctly and investigators had no doubts that Graham did so.

With the new evidence it was easy for police to justify searching his home. Hidden behind a shelf, investigators found a $37,500 insurance policy taken out on Daisie King at Stapleton Airport before her flight. In the 1950’s nervous passengers often bought such policies from vending machines. Provided they remembered to sign them, they were perfectly valid. This particular policy wasn’t signed, making it worthless. There were two other policies as well, bringing the total insurance to $40,000 if Daisie King died. All the policies listed Graham as sole beneficiary.

Detectives also found tools, along with yellow wire and batteries similar to those in the bomb. One particularly damning discovery was a large box of shotgun cartridges. According to Graham his mother had had put them in her suitcase, thus offering a suspiciously ready-made explanation for what had happened. Unfortunately for him they were found at his home.

His next disaster involved a gift he’d slipped into his mother’s luggage. He’d denied adding anything to her bags before take-off. His wife Gloria also denied him doing so. They were lying. Other witnesses reported Graham as spending considerable time looking for such a gift. Witnesses at the airport reported seeing him put it in her suitcase. Then, despite his previous denials, he conveniently remembered a large toolkit for making jewellery. Daisie King was keen on arts and crafts so it was a fairly obvious choice. Detectives soon identified the kind of kit. It was easily done as that type was seldom sold in Denver. Detectives obtained a similar toolkit for comparison. The box was big enough to hold 25 sticks of dynamite and a timer. The steel used in that box forensically matched the remaining unidentified fragments in the wreckage.

Other airport witnesses were questioned. They’d seen Graham in the airport café for some time after Flight 629 departed and noticed his extremely nervous state. The reason for his anxiety was simple. He’d set the bomb to explode 25 minutes after take-off. Had it taken off on time the “Mainliner” would have exploded over the Rocky Mountains. In mountainous country recovering even some of the wreckage would have been far more difficult and made Graham’s chance of getting away with it much greater. The delay was only a tiny hitch but, as any experienced detective can tell you tiny details often ruin the cleverest plots.

A United Airlines employee recalled Graham calling them after the explosion, asking if his mother was all right. On hearing his mother was dead Graham’s replied “Well, that’s just the way it goes.”

Investigators now had means, motive, opportunity and a perfect suspect.

Sane or Insane?

Graham broke and confessed everything. Barring the trial, now a virtual formality, there was nothing between him and the gas chamber. His best prospect was pleading insanity and spending the rest of his life in a psychiatric institution.

Graham was held at Denver County Jail. Strange though it sounds, in 1955 bombing an airliner wasn’t a federal offense. State prosecutors didn’t need it to be. They had overwhelming evidence for 44 counts of first-degree murder. They only needed one conviction for a death sentence, mandatory for first-degree murder in 1955 under Colorado law. With so many victims, prosecutors obviously chose one most likely to secure a death sentence. Not surprisingly, they prosecuted for Daisie King’s murder.

The trial was a media sensation. It began in January, 1956 and lasted until May. The sheer amount of evidence, witness testimony and complex forensic evidence took months to present. Graham recanted his confession and pled insanity. Given his crime, this was far more credible than in many murder cases. Psychiatrists concluded he was legally sane and fit to stand trial. This might seem strange, but legal insanity and medical insanity are very different. To be certified medically insane is complex. Legal insanity is simpler, consisting of establishing whether the defendant knew what he or she was doing and that it was criminal. If criminal responsibility is established even defendants with multiple mental illnesses can still stand trial. Graham knew exactly what he was doing. He plotted the bombing for the maximum likelihood of evading detection and hampering rescue and recovery operations. He knew full well his bomb would probably kill all the passengers and crew. He simply didn’t care.

Having established Graham’s legal sanity, the court considered whether the massive media coverage was in the best interests of justice and the defendant. The Colorado Supreme Court decided freedom of the press took precedence and the trial judge could decide what coverage was permitted. Judge McDonald gave the media a virtually free rein and Graham’s trial became the first American trial to be televised. Viewers could watch lawyers arguing, watch Graham try to escape justice, see much of the evidence and draw their own conclusions from their own living rooms. This unprecedented move not only catered to the huge media interest, but increased that interest still further.

The verdict was virtually a foregone conclusion. The question wasn’t whether Graham was guilty or innocent. It was whether he would be ruled insane and sent to a psychiatric institution or ruled sane, meaning either death or life imprisonment. Graham’s attitude was ambivalent. He recanted his earlier, highly detailed confession, adopting a cold, callous, disinterest throughout. His demeanor displeased the judge, jury, media and TV audiences. Graham was widely regarded as exactly the kind of defendant the gas chamber was invented for. The prosecution presented an overwhelming case comprising witness testimony, forensic evidence and Graham’s own confession.

With so little to work with and such overwhelming opposition, Graham’s defense lasted only two hours. His lawyers brought witnesses disputing the testimony of the storekeeper who sold him dynamite, batteries, blasting caps and wire. Graham refused to testify, asking that his wife be barred from testifying too. At the time, wives couldn’t testify against their husbands and his request was granted. With no alternative arguments, an obstructive client and the overwhelming prosecution case, no meaningful defense was possible. In May, 1956 the jury delivered the verdict after deliberating for only72 minutes: Guilty. It only remained for Judge McDonald to pass sentence and he wasted no time doing so. The death sentence was promptly passed. Graham was to be removed from his cell in Denver to the Colorado State Penitentiary at Canon City. There he would be lodged on Death Row under constant observation until execution.

Graham’s indifferent attitude continued. He was outwardly aloof, seemingly no more interested in his own death than the deaths of others. He fought his court-appointed lawyers when they appealed the sentence. His lawyers appealed anyway, without his co-operation and against his wishes. Graham made his feelings clear in a note to appellate judges stating clearly that he wanted to forgo any appeals. Effectively he was volunteering, trying to hasten his execution as much as possible.

In September, 1956 Graham attempted suicide, fashioning a makeshift noose from a pair of socks strengthened with strong cardboard. He almost died, but was discovered and revived before being permanently strapped to a bed with teams of four guards maintaining a 24-hour watch. If he was hoping this would persuade judges to rule him insane he was disappointed. After treatment he was moved back to Death Row.

On the Fast Track to the Gas Chamber

Neither Graham, the State of Colorado nor the victims’ families had to wait much longer. In the 1950’s capital cases usually concluded far more quickly than today. Many were executed within a few months of sentencing. Some died within weeks. Graham was on the fast track to the gas chamber.

His execution on January 11, 1957 was fairly standard as executions go. Graham received a final visit from his wife and took his last meal in his cell. He would be the 26^th inmate gassed in Colorado since the chamber replaced the gallows in 1930. His would be the 96^th execution since Colorado achieved statehood in 1890.

Jack Graham’s final destination, now displayed at the Colorado Prison Museum.

Not long before the scheduled time, Graham was stripped down to a pair of shorts so wisps of cyanide gas wouldn’t be caught in his clothes, endangering guards who would later remove his body. At 8 p.m. Graham was escorted on the short walk between his cell and the chamber, placed in the chair and firmly strapped down. A custom-made stethoscope was attached to his bare chest, connected via an airtight tube running outside the chamber. A black sleeping mask went over his eyes. Guards exited the chamber and sealed the airtight steel door. At a signal the lever was pulled, dropping several eggs of cyanide into a vat of acid beneath the chair. As the gas swirled up around him Graham’s resolve finally crumbled. He started screaming and struggling against the restraints. Less than 10 minutes later he was pronounced dead.

Jack Graham, his mother and 43 other people died because of his obsessive desire for revenge and an insurance policy that was worthless even before the bomb exploded. Graham’s last words summed up his attitude:

"As far as feeling remorse for these people, I don't. I can't help it. Everybody pays their way and takes their chances. That's just the way it goes."

The kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Marion Parker by William Edward Hickman in 1927 was considered a clear indication of the “moral imbecility” of the Jazz Age.

by Benjamin Welton 

We should not stop with Hickman; in fact, we need not wait to begin with him. The city has plenty of moral imbeciles that we might well dispense with.

--Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1928.   

Paul French opens his brilliant 2012 book Midnight in Peking with a brief, but fascinating taste of Chinese folklore. In a book about an unsolved murder in Peking (today’s Beijing) from 1937, such material is appropriate. In particular, considering the gruesome murder of Pamela Werner that forms the central point of the book, French’s decision to highlight the story of the often carnivorous fox spirits, or the huli jing, proves disturbingly apt:           

By day the fox spirits of Peking lie hidden and still. But at night they roam restlessly through the cemeteries and burial grounds of the long dead, exhuming bodies and the skulls upon their…Having lured their chosen victims, they simply love them to death. They then strike their tailsto the ground to produce fire and disappear, leaving only a corpse behind.

(A Japanese kitsune detailed by Utagawa Kuniyoshi)

Such tales can be found throughout Asia, from the Japanese kitsune to the Korean kumiho. These ancient fox spirits (who can be easily discerned because of their nine tails) are somewhat of a cross between the shape shifting werewolves of Central Europe and the Greek lamiae, and more often than not these fox spirits change into beautiful women in order to seduce and destroy young men. The kumiho is particularly vicious and is known to eat both the liver and the heart from their victims.

In Europe and North America, foxes usually denote trickery or underhanded thievery. Foxes, after all, are always raiding the chicken coop, or like the French Reynard, trying to pull the wool over the eyes of unsuspecting or clearly incompetent humans. No matter the culture, foxes are traditionally an animal to avoid, no matter how lovely their coat.

“The Fox”

It’s likely that William Edward Hickman knew only a little about these legends when he signed his name as “The Fox” in one of his four ransom notes to Perry Parker, the father of Marion Parker. On December 15, 1927, the 12-year-old Marion was abducted from Mount Vernon Junior High School. The daughter of a prominent banker in Los Angeles, Marion’s kidnapping made headline news almost instantly.

On that fateful winter day, the kidnapper presented himself to Mary Holt, the school’s registrar, and claimed that Marion’s father had been injured in a serious accident. He had come, he claimed, to take Marion to her father’s side. Without a struggle, the kidnapper whisked Marion away to a grisly fate.

Within days, a completely healthy Perry Parker began receiving strange and taunting letters from the kidnapper. These letters were ransom notes. They demanded $1,500 in cash (or as some sources claim in $20 gold certificates), and furthermore they demanded that Parker himself drop the money off at an agreed upon rendezvous. Each letter bore a strange signature, including “Fate” and “Death,” but it was one, bearing the signature “The Fox,” that truly imbedded itself in the public’s mind. Like the central villain in Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood’s popular play The Bat, the name “The Fox” conjured up images of a devilishly capable and deviously brilliant master criminal. After all, only a truly heartless malefactor could abduct a beautiful young girl in broad daylight after first lying about so personal a topic.

The true depth of The Fox’s wickedness would not come to light until December 19. On that day, a distraught Perry Parker paid the ransom, which he housed in a black bag, to a young man waiting in a parked car. Next to the man was Marion, who sat quietly in the passenger seat. The young driver drove off before Mr. Parker could get to his daughter or even get her confirmation that she was okay. In that moment, Mr. Parker would’ve agreed to any condition in order to get his daughter back. For his part, the kidnapper might have felt the father’s desperation, and that is why he dropped off Marion at 432 South Manhattan Place.

Tragically, what the kidnapper dropped off was only a piece of Marion, for the young girl was not only dead, but she had been graphically mutilated. The corpse that Mr. Parker and the police found was missing its legs, internal organs, and several other parts that were eventually found spread throughout Los Angeles. Even more sickening was the fact that the killer had wired Marion’s eyes open in order to make it appear that she was still alive during the ransom drop-off.

In the wake of this ghastly discovery, a search began for the killer that included not only police but also volunteers from the American Legion. The force totaled somewhere near 20,000 and it would be the single biggest manhunt in LA history until the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, aka “The Black Dahlia.” In order to appeal to public tips or other amateur detectives, the city of Los Angeles posted a $100,000 reward for any clues leading to the apprehension of “The Fox.”

Marion Parker (Murderpedia)

For a week, “The Fox” lived up to his name and successfully avoided capture. Los Angeles and the rest of America watched in horror as the days dragged on without justice. Making matters worse, 1927 was only three years removed from the so-called “Trial of the Century.” In that year in the grimy and oh-so dangerous city of Chicago, two young, wealthy, and well-educated Jewish boys – Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb – abducted and murdered another nice young Jewish boy, 14-yearp-old Robert “Bobby” Franks. Their capture and confessions scandalized an already cynical nation, and the subsequent trial not only became a feeding frenzy for the yellow press tabloids, but it also put into the limelight the growing power of alienists (what we would today call psychiatrists and other practitioners of criminal psychology) and their findings concerning the metal make-up of criminals. Thus the age of serious and scientific criminology was born.

Motive?

Besides questions concerning the mental states of either Leopold or Loeb, the other major point of public discussion concerned their motive. Both Leopold and Loeb had undergraduate degrees (from the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan respectively) and both had earned them at very young ages (Loeb remains today the youngest person to ever graduate from the University of Michigan), but neither young man seemed all that interested in public life or using their incredible brains for anything other than self-aggrandizement. Loeb in particular wasted his talents on becoming a petty thief – an act that thrilled him like no book or lecture could. Loeb’s need for further excitement eventually pushed him towards committing the “perfect murder,” and in order to accomplish this he brought in his friend and sometime lover Leopold, an intellectually strong but emotionally weak individual who thought of Loeb as a god. 

Nathan Leopold, left, and Richard Loeb, right. (Criminal Minds Wikia)

Since both Leopold and Loeb were adherents to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, they found the rationale for their crime in Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch, which is most often translated as “Superman.” The cultivation of the Superman, according to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is the ultimate goal for humanity. Intellectually and spiritually superior, the Superman transcends the moral and legal order created by common men, and as such these feeble constructions do not apply to him. An extension of Plato’s ideal of the philosopher king, the idea of the Superman appealed to the vanities of Leopold and Loeb and it only pushed them further towards completing their deranged goal of attempting the “perfect crime.”

Like Leopold and Loeb, who also sent ransom notes and were similarly caught not too long after the discovery of their victim’s body, “The Fox” proved to be a killer motivated by ego and an unshakable belief in himself. After a week of running, “The Fox” was recognized by two officers in the small town of Echo, Oregon (some sources say Pendleton, Oregon). According to the wanted poster, the man’s name was William Edward Hickman and he had once been an employee of Perry Parker. Because Mr. Parker had caught Hickman stealing and forging checks, the young hoodlum had done prison time, which of course meant that his fingerprints were on file. These fingerprints just so happened to match those on one of the ransom notes. And when these same prints were found on the stolen car that had been used during the ransom exchange, the police knew that it was only a matter of time before they caught their “Fox.”

Before being conveyed back to Los Angeles for further questioning, Hickman put the blame on one Andrew Kramer. Although Hickman admitted to being guilty of the kidnapping, he claimed that it was Kramer who had killed the girl. In order to further prove his innocence, Hickman told authorities that: “Marion and I [Hickman] were like brother and sister. She liked me but she did not like Kramer, and she said she would like to stay with me all the time.” In an odd move, Hickman quickly threw away the depiction of himself as a 19-year-old gentleman by confessing to several drug store robberies, one of which ended in murder. In another twist, after researching the name “Andrew Kramer,” authorities found a conman who had been in jail since August. This solid alibi left Hickman as the sole perpetrator behind both the kidnapping and the murder.

While on the train to Los Angeles from Oregon, Hickman confessed to Marion Parker’s murder to three lawmen from Los Angeles: Chief of Police James E. Davis, Chief of Detectives Cline, and District Attorney Asa Keyes. In the eyes of these three veteran law enforcement agents, Hickman was a monster who seemed to enjoy recounting the gory details of his crime. He told them that he had killed Marion the day after the abduction, and furthermore he gave them the prosaic reason for her death: “I was afraid she would make noise.”

As for motive, Hickman’s explanations varied. In one instance, he claimed that he needed the $1,500 for college. Hickman wanted to study the Bible, and as an ex-con he desperately needed the money. In other another instance, Hickman blithely stated “I am like the state; what is good for me is right.” While this utterance points to Hickman as yet another wannabe Nitezschean, most considered him a young punk simply out for revenge against the Parker family and its patriarch.

Whatever the motive, Hickman was doomed regardless. Even though Hickman’s defense used the then newly established plea of “not guilty by reason of insanity,” the jury, the public, and the press weren’t buying it. Earlier, not longer after his capture in Oregon, Hickman had been examined by Dr. W.D. McNary, who had found the youth clear-headed, coherent, and far from insane. After a short trial, “The Fox” was convicted of the murder and sentenced to death in California’s San Quentin prison. On October 19, 1928, Hickman was dropped from the gallows and died 15 minutes later.

By the time of Hickman’s execution, Angelinos were busy with another crime: the disappearance of Walter Collins. The subsequent cover-up by the LAPD and the unveiling of what came to be known as the Winesville Chicken Coop Murders became the major story of 1928, and 80 years later the chilling story got the big screen treatment with Clint Eastwood’s Changeling. Still, while the rest of the city and the country moved on to more lurid tales, several authors continued to search the Hickman case for further clues concerning human degeneracy or the possibilities underlying Hickman’s supreme declaration of self-interest.

(Ayn Rand sits in attendance at a session of the House of Un-American Activities, 1947.)

In one corner stood Edgar Rice Burroughs. Most famous for creating Tarzan, Burroughs covered the Hickman trial for the Los Angeles Examiner. The columns that he published showed the pulp maestro at his most tetchy, with most acting as loud denunciations of psychiatry. In one article, Burroughs mockingly admitted that “I cannot look at the outside of a man’s head and say that he is a murderer, yet, after watching Hickman all day I will venture the assertion that if he is crazy, I am Professor Einstein.” For Burroughs, the “alienists” were wasting their time in trying to figure out Hickman’s psychology. Hickman was, Burroughs believed, a hereditary criminal – a born human malignancy who could only be treated with death. In offering a solution, Burroughs wrote on February 10, 1928: “There always have been Hickmans in the world...There will always be Hickmans. The best we can do is to discourage the uncaught Hickmans from plying their chosen profession and to destroy those whom we do catch.”

While Burroughs fumed about the need for eugenics and the sterilization of what he termed “moral imbeciles,” another writer was working on a novel called The Little Street. Its protagonist, Denny Renahan, was specifically drawn as a Hickman with a purpose greater than murder and degeneracy. After being intrigued by what Hickman “suggested to her,” the author, Ayn Rand, decided to make The Little Street into rumination about the Nitezschean Superman. While Hickman’s declaration of “I am like the state” appealed to Rand (who would later develop the theory of Objectivism, which is centered around the concept of rational self-interest, or what many call “ethical egoism”), her later journals reveal her disgust with the “purposeless monster” Hickman.

Despite Rand’s rejection of Hickman, many left-leaning journalists and bloggers such as Michael Prescott and Salon’s Jan Frel have used Rand’s early flirtation with Hickman as a reason for denouncing Objectivism, which is decidedly right-wing, as a vile-hearted philosophy only capable of appealing to cold-blooded murderers. Frequently, these commentators highlight one of Rand’s more infamous quotes, which described Hickman’s “I am like the state” declaration as the “best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I have ever heard.” While this quote is certainly chilling given the gravity of Hickman’s crimes, it pales in comparison to those post-World War II academics, such as Eric Hobsbawm, who used their enlightened pulpit to excuse mass murders such as Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot. Compared to Tony Benn’s admiration for Mao Zedong and his assertion that the Chinese Chairman “will undoubtedly be regarded as one of the greatest – if not the greatest – figures of the 20th century,” Rand’s championing of Hickman’s declaration seems far less damaging.

For better or worse, this is what has become of William Edward Hickman and the murder of Marion Parker. Once considered a shocking crime and a clear indication of the “moral imbecility” of the Jazz Age, the case has become merely another sticky point in the battle between Right and Left. “The Fox” is now a tool for spin doctoring rather than for doctoring of the alienist type. Burroughs, in all his rants against criminal psychology, would have never imagined such irrationality.

Mark "Chopper" Read (photo ABC)

When death stares them in the face, even cold-blooded murderers sometimes feel the need to unburden themselves before they go. Perhaps they do it so they can leave the world with a “clear conscience” or maybe they do it to benefit the people they will leave behind. Some of these deathbed murder confessions are harrowing in the extreme.

by Siobhan Pat Mulcahy

Australia's most notorious killer makes four more murder confessions from his deathbed

Mark "Chopper" Read offered a callous confession to four murders, including two unsolved cases, in his final interview just 16 days before dying from liver cancer. Read, who shot to international fame when the 2000 film "Chopper" based on his book How to Shoot Friends and Influence People was released, spent 23 years in jail but was never convicted of murder.

During his interview with Australian current affairs program, “60 Minutes,” the “Chopper” claimed to have carried out four murders. In a candid recounting of three shootings and the hanging of a child-killer in his jail cell, Read denied feeling any remorse and said he felt “nothing at all.”

Among his alleged victims were two unsolved murders – that of trade union official, Desmond Costello in 1971, and Sydney Collins, president of the Outlaws motorcycle gang – missing since 2002.

Read was just 17 when he claims to have shot Costello and said the union official had been "insulting" him.

Years later, Read spent six years in jail for shooting Sydney Collins in the stomach during a dispute over money. Collins told police Read was responsible and Read was determined to get his revenge.

He said he got his chance when Collins showed up at one of his stand-up comedy performances in 2002 and asked that "bygones be bygones."

“This time I was shooting to kill him,” Read told his interviewer. “I stuck him in a hole and filled the hole in.”

His other two alleged victims were a pedophile child-killer whose death was recorded as a suicide in Pentridge Prison in 1974, and a man known as “Sammy the Turk,” who Read claimed (in court) he had shot in self-defense.

“When I killed Sammy the Turk that wasn't self defense, that was outright fucking murder,” he said.

Read claimed to have been shot once, stabbed seven times and also run over by a car. He also claimed he had a claw hammer embedded in his head and to have been made to dig his own grave. His most notorious deed was persuading a fellow inmate to hack off both his ears so he could gain access to a prison's mental health wing during a war between rival factions.

Terminally ill Londoner confesses to strangling a man and burying him under concrete

Police search outside Roy Heath's house (photo Daily Telegraph)

After receiving a tip-off, London police discovered the skeletal remains of Mohammed Taki, aged 53, who had been buried under a patio for 12 years. The police used radar equipment to reveal his body which had been covered with several layers of concrete. The body was found “lying in the fetal position with both the wrists and ankles tightly taped.” There was insufficient evidence to help identify the remains but police showed photographs of the clothing found on Taki's skeleton to the friend who had reported him missing and when he was shown a picture of a hat, he burst into tears.

Roy Heath, aged 52, confessed to strangling Taki when police interviewed him at a west London hospice. He said he had strangled Taki after a heated argument at his Fulham flat.

Because Heath was terminally ill at the time of his confession and under the care of a psychiatrist for “anger management issues,” police were only allowed a few hours to interview him over the course of several days.

Heath died in 2010, 13 days after his confession.

The murder had taken place during 1998 though Heath claimed he did not remember precisely when. The coroner published its finding of “unlawful killing” in June 2012.

Pillar of the community makes deathbed confession to murder so he could “cleanse his soul” then he doesn't die

James Brewer (photo Crime Library)

In 1977 James Brewer was arrested in Tennessee on suspicion of killing his neighbor in a fit of jealous rage. Brewer had indeed shot and killed Jimmy Carroll because he believed he had been trying to seduce his wife.

But Brewer, a “respectable member of the community,” was granted bail and fled to Oklahoma where he and his wife began a new life together under the names Michael and Dorothy Anderson. They became active members of the local church where Mrs. Brewer established a Bible study group. They also had a married daughter and became grandparents.

In 2009, Brewer had a serious stroke, and thinking he was dying, he felt compelled to confess to the crime that had weighed on his conscience for over three decades. His wife called the police to his hospital bed saying her husband wanted to confess to a murder. Brewer told the police everything that had happened with his wife's help – she acted as “translator” because of the effects of her husband's stroke.

The only problem with this deathbed confession is that Brewer didn’t die. When he was released from the hospital several weeks later, Brewer surrendered himself to Tennessee authorities and appeared in court with the same lawyer he had used almost 32 years earlier when he skipped bail.

The pastor at Mrs. Brewer's Bible group, said: “I don’t know what their former life was but I do know they were both dedicated to the Lord. They’ve been in their own prison for 30 years. I think they’ve done their time.”

Shop worker kills two women for making fun of her being a lesbian

Diane Crawford

In 1967, Carolyn Hevener Perry, 20, and Constance Smootz Hevener, 19, were shot to death while working at an ice cream shop in Staunton, Virginia. Each had been shot once in the head at closing time and about $138 was stolen from the store.

Over the years, police worked the case but with no luck. Then in November 2008, police were led to Diane Crawford by new information revealed by a witness. When police went to question her, she was at the end-stages of heart failure and chronic kidney disease.  When confronted by the evidence, she confessed in detail to the murders she had committed over 40 years earlier.

On the night of the shooting, Crawford who was 19 at the time, said she went to the store where she worked part time to tell the women she could not work the next day and ended up in a shoving match with them.

Crawford then took out a .25 caliber pistol and shot the two women because they had “made fun of me for being a lesbian.” Perry was the first to be shot at near-point-blank range and when Hevener rushed to her aid Crawford shot her too. She then took money from the store as she fled which led the police to think it was a robbery.

Diane Crawford moved away from Virginia after the killings, got married and had two daughters. She returned to Staunton 20 years later, without her husband and moved in with a woman and lived with her new partner until her death.

Crawford died in January 2009, two months after confessing to the murders.

Pedophile told his daughter he was the murderer but police have never found the body

Moira Anderson

In 1957, 11-year-old Moira Anderson went missing in North Lanarkshire, Scotland. She has never been found. The case shocked Scotland and beyond. The 11-year-old was last seen on a bus to Coatbridge, which was driven by Alexander Gartshore, a convicted pedophile. (Prior to 2002 when the Vetting and Barring law was enacted, sexual offenders were not prohibited from working with children.)

Some 49 years later Garshore’s daughter publicly accused her father of the murder following a confession he made on his deathbed. Sandra Brown said her father had confessed to being “haunted” by the girl’s murder and said he wanted “forgiveness.”

In her book, Where There Is Evil, Brown repeated her claims about her father in detail.

Brown's claims were supported by a fellow criminal, James Gallogley, who linked Gartshore to the girl's disappearance during his own deathbed confession in 1999.

Despite the exhumation of several graves in the North Lanarkshire area, Moira Anderson's body has not been found and police say they “remain unable to close the case.”

Norwegian felon confesses to rape and murder after innocent man spends 18 years in jail

Fritz Moen

Fritz Moen, who was deaf and suffered from a speech impediment so severe he needed an interpreter to communicate effectively, was arrested in 1978 for raping and killing 20-year-old Torunn Finstad in Trondheim, Norway. There was no physical or forensic evidence linking the 36-year-old to the crime and no witnesses saw him with Finstad. Moen was found guilty of the murder and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment.

Several years later, police claimed that Moen had confessed to the 1976 murder of 20-year-old Sigrid Heggheim. During seven interrogation sessions, Moen's confession was given during the one time he did not have the benefit an interpreter. He was found guilty of this murder as well and sentenced to an additional 5 years in prison.

In 1996 after spending 18 years in prison Moen was released and placed under preventative supervision.

During the next several years Moen’s lawyers tried desperately to clear his name. In 2004, he was acquitted for the murder of Sigrid Heggheim when the appeal court found that “reasonable doubt should have acquitted him in the first place.”

Then in December 2005, a convicted felon called Tor Hepso confessed to three nurses in the hospital where he was dying that he had murdered two women: Heggheim and Finstad.

After Hepso’s deathbed confession was thoroughly investigated, Moen was finally exonerated of the murders. Unfortunately, Fritz Moen died of natural causes earlier that year and was not alive when he was declared innocent of the both crimes.

This case was publicly criticized as one of Norway’s most shameful miscarriages of justice.

American housewife confesses to shooting her husband and storing his body in a freezer

Geraldine Kelly's freezer

Geraldine Kelly told her young children that their father had died in a car accident. In reality, after suffering years of domestic violence, Geraldine Kelly had shot and killed her husband in 1991 and stored his body in a freezer at the family home in Ventura, California.

Seven years later, when she decided she and her children would move back to her home town of Somerville, Massachusetts, she had her moving company take the freezer with the body inside and drive it across the country to a local storage facility in Somerville.

In 2004, 13 years after the murder, Kelly was gravely ill with breast cancer and confessed to her daughter that she had killed her father. She then told her daughter where the body could be found.

Police discovered the human remains in a locked, unplugged freezer in a Somerville storage room. The body – which had been “mummified” – was easily identified as John Kelly as he had several distinctive tattoos - including a panther, a Kewpie doll and a skull. A post mortem revealed the cause of death had been “a close-range gunshot to the back of his head”.

Somerville's District Attorney said he was unsure if Geraldine Kelly wanted to unburden herself before she died or if she wanted her children to know so they wouldn’t be blamed if the body had been found.

London crime boss confesses to a previously unknown murder but refuses to give the name of his victim

Ronnie and Reggie Kray

The most feared East End crime boss, whose very name terrified other London criminals in the 1960s, told a BBC documentary that he had murdered a man nobody knew about. His victim is believed to have been Edward “Mad Teddy” Smith, who has been missing since 1967.

Reggie Kray made the confession after inviting BBC cameras into the Norfolk & Norwich hospital a few days before he died of cancer in October 2000.

He spoke of the murder of Jack “The Hat” McVitie, for which he served nearly 33 years in prison, and was asked if he had committed any other murders.

He replied: “One, one,” but he refused to elaborate.

During the documentary, Kray associate, Leonard “Nipper” Read said: “I should imagine that was Teddy Smith. He suddenly disappeared.”

During the program, Kray also refused to apologize for his violent past.

He said he murdered McVitie because “I didn't like the fellow... he was very uncouth...a vexation to the spirit.”

He added, “But I suppose if I've been a bit too violent over the years, there's little I can do about it now.”

Reggie was released from prison in August 2000 after spending nearly 33 years behind bars for McVitie's murder. He died two months later.

Klu Klux Klan member confesses to murdering a black man but blames the victim for not running away when he had the chance

Willie Edwards

In 1957 the body of a 25 year old black man, Willie Edwards , was washed up on the shores of the Alabama River. Officials said that “decomposition” had made it impossible to determine the cause of death. More than 20 years later, an aggressive attorney general re-opened the Edwards case and four Klansmen were arrested including Henry Alexander. One of the men gave a sworn affidavit (in exchange for immunity). In the statement, the man described how he and three other men beat and forced Willie Edwards to jump off the Tyler-Goodwin Bridge because he said something offensive to a white woman. Even with this sworn testimony, Alabama Judge Frank Embry dismissed the charges because no “cause of death” was ever established. He concluded that “merely forcing a person to jump from a bridge does not naturally and probably lead to the death of such person.”

In 1992, Henry Alexander, now 63, was near death from lung cancer and decided to confess to his wife. He said he and the other Klansmen gave Edwards a choice to run or jump and didn’t think he would jump. He said. “If he’d a run, they would never have shot him.”

After her husband’s confession and subsequent death, Mrs. Alexander wrote a letter of apology to Mr. Edwards’s widow. In the letter she said: “I hope maybe one day I can meet you to tell you face to face how sorry I am. May God bless you and your family and I pray that this letter helps you somehow.”

Hollywood actress confesses to killing a movie director but the crime remains “unsolved”

William Desmond Taylor was an actor and top U.S. film director of silent films in the early days of Hollywood. When Taylor was shot to death in 1922, it became one of Hollywood’s most famous scandals.

In 1964 – 42 years after the murder – a reclusive old woman living in the Hollywood hills suffered a heart attack and called for a Catholic priest. When no priest was available, she asked to speak to one of her nearest neighbors. 

As she lay dying on her kitchen floor, Gibson told her neighbor she had been a silent Hollywood film actress called Margaret Gibson and that she had shot and killed a man called William Desmond Taylor. She is alleged to have been involved romantically with Taylor but she gave no motive for the killing.

The neighbor who witnessed Gibson’s confession said his mother (who had been a friend of Gibson’s) later said that when they were watching a historical TV piece on the Taylor murder together, Gibson became hysterical and blurted out that she had killed him.

Taylor’s murder remains officially “unsolved” even though Gibson had nothing to gain by her confession. William Desmond Taylor and Margaret Gibson starred together in the silent Hollywood film, “The Kiss” made in 1896.

Farmer confesses to murder after the victim's wife is hanged

In 1884, William Lefley ate the rice pudding his wife Mary left in the oven for him while she called to a nearby town. Lefley died shortly after his meal, screaming in agony.

Four months later, Mary Lefley was hanged at Lincoln County Gaol for lacing her husband’s pudding with a lethal dose of arsenic. Mrs. Lefley did not go to the gallows quietly. Shrieking in terror, she had to be dragged to the execution chamber – still protesting her innocence.

She had never admitted to the crime, and the prosecution had never been able to show that she had purchased any arsenic.

The defense claimed William Lefley might have committed suicide as he had attempted it once before but the prosecution laughed at the suggestion. Another outlandish defense hypothesis was that some “unknown third party might have snuck in and poisoned the morsel” but this was also dismissed by the court.

Then in 1893, a dying farmer known only as “Mr. Saul” confessed to having done exactly that. He said that he had poisoned Lefley's rice pudding because of a long-standing financial grudge. He confessed because he said he wanted “God's forgiveness” before he died.

Mary Lefley believed she was convicted of poisoning her husband because she had known the notorious Lincolnshire poisoner, Priscilla Biggadyke — who was hanged for poisoning her husband in 1868.

“They are hanging me for my past!” Lefley screamed as she was dragged to the gallows.

A mother tries to implicate her son in a murder then asks him not to tell police she did it

On the afternoon of January 11, 1867, the residents of Dayton, Ohio were horrified to learn that the body of Miss Christine Kett, a pretty German girl about 18 years of age, was found brutally murdered at her parents' home. Parts of her skull and brains were found in the basement of the house and her body was discovered above the cellar steps.

The girl's hysterical mother accused every stranger in town and the boy her daughter had been “stepping out with” but police found no evidence connecting any of the suspects to the crime.

Neighbors spread rumors that it was Mrs. Kett who killed her own daughter. They had often heard the two arguing at all hours of day and night.

Police were reluctant to accuse the girl's mother and accepted that she had been “running errands” in town when the murder took place.

Seventeen years later, Mrs. Kett (also Christine) lay dying of inflammation of the bowels and she called her son to her deathbed. She confessed to killing her daughter by striking an axe to her head three times because she was too slow preparing the family dinner. She also said she had planted a pistol near the body to confuse the police. In fact, her son had been one of the many suspects in the case as it was his gun found near the body.

Mrs. Kett asked her son to keep her secret until just before his own death and he agreed. When his mother died the next day, he contacted the police and said he “could not live with the burden.”

The Dayton Daily News summed up the case: “Mrs. Kett is said to have been of sullen and almost vicious disposition, while in appearance she had none of the gentleness peculiar to her sex.”

“She did not shed a tear at her daughter’s funeral, but stood like a stone at the grave while her pretty little girl was being lowered.”

The Principality of Monaco leapt onto front pages across the world on May 6, 2014 when an assassin fired a volley of gunshots at billionaire Hélène Pastor and her chauffer. Both would die later from their wounds. More scandal soon followed when police arrested the long-time companion of Pastor’s daughter, Wojciech Janowski, Poland’s honorary consul to the tiny principality since 2007.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

Prince Albert, ruler of the Principality of Monaco, remains angry over how the English playwright and novelist Somerset Maugham had described his country decades ago as “a sunny place for shady people.”

The description has done the small city-state of less than one-square mile no harm because now it has more millionaires per capita than any other country in the world.

To make these millionaires feel safe, Monaco also has more CCTV surveillance cameras on its streets than one will find in any other country. Crime in and around the city’s luxury designer boutiques is almost nonexistent.

However, on May 6, 2014, Monaco’s tranquil security was shattered when one of its millionaires -- no, billionaires -- was felled by a volley of gunshots.

The murder

Hélène Pastor

It was a spring Tuesday that promised to be just another day of luxury to those living in the glass-fronted apartment buildings which most of us will only ever see when watching the Monaco Grand Prix on television.

So indeed did the day promise to be for Hélène Pastor, the principality’s wealthiest citizen after Prince Albert and his two sisters, the princesses Caroline and Stephanie, as she set out on her way to visit her 47-year-old son, Gildo Pallanca-Pastor, who was recovering from a stroke in Archet Hospital in the neighboring French town of Nice.

Mid-afternoon, her visit over, Pastor was seated in her dark-colored Lancia beside her chauffeur and major domo of 25 years, Mohamed Darwich, 64. As the car was just pulling away from the hospital’s parking area, a gunman walked up to the automobile and opened fire through the windscreen with a sawn-off hunting rifle. The car continued for a few yards and then crashed into a parked automobile.

When the medics arrived they found both the 77-year-old Pastor and the chauffeur slumped over and covered in blood, grievously wounded, but alive.

The shooter was nowhere in sight, but eyewitnesses told the police that he had rushed from the scene on foot. They said they had seen another man with him. Neither of the two had taken the precaution of covering his face.

Four days later on Saturday, May 10, Darwich died at the Saint Roch Hospital of Nice, the blast of bullets having hit his heart and stomach. Pastor, hit in the jaw, neck and chest, was recovering from her injuries in the same hospital, and her doctors did not fear for her life.

Eleven days later on Wednesday, May 21, her death was however announced: Her condition had suddenly deteriorated and her life could not be saved.

Prince Albert was reported to be devastated. He and his pregnant wife, the former South African swimmer, Charlene Whitstock, now Her Serene Highness, Princess Charlene of Monaco, attended the very private funeral. The media was banned and helicopters circling overhead made sure that no photographs could be taken.

Before she died, she had told the police that she had not received any threats to her life. She did not even have any enemies, she said.

Hélène Pastor

Although she was one of the wealthiest women in the world, Pastor had lived discreetly in Monaco, almost never attending any society event.

Apart from Gildo, she also had a daughter, Sylvia. The latter -- Sylvia Ratkowski-Pastor -- was born in 1961 in Pastor’s first marriage. Gildo Pallanca-Pastor was born in 1967 in her second marriage.

Sylvia, the companion for the past 28 years of the Polish-born Wojciech Janowski, 65, a man with an M.A. degree in Economics from Cambridge University, and Poland’s honorary consul to the principality since 2007, used to complain to her friends that her mother loved her brother more than she loved her.

Notwithstanding that both she and Gildo received a monthly allowance from their mother of €500,000 ($680,000), she also said that her mother was more generous towards Gildo.

How did Pastor become so wealthy?

Her story is one of which dreams are made.

In the 1880s a poor Italian stonemason, Jean-Baptiste Pastor, arrived penniless in the principality from the Liguria region of Italy. In 1936, some of the public buildings he had worked on having caught the eye of the then ruling prince, Louis II (Prince Albert’s grandfather), Jean-Baptiste was commissioned by the prince to build a football stadium. From then on there was no looking back for the Pastors. After Jean-Baptiste’s death his son Gildo had begun to buy up waterfront land on which he constructed luxury apartment buildings. He had also continued to build for the ruling princes. What is more, the two families --the ruling Grimaldi family and the Pastors -- had become friends.

When Gildo died he left his real estate empire to his two sons and his daughter Hélène. On the premature deaths of her two brothers Hélène had become the sole owner and operator of the Pastors’ real estate empire. No journalist has even tried to estimate her wealth, but a wild guess is that she is the owner of more than 3,000 apartments which come to 15 per cent of the principality’s real estate.

Dead, her heirs were her two children: Gildo and Sylvia.

The investigation

The investigation into Pastor’s assassination was to be carried out by the police of Nice and Marseille and with the cooperation of the Monaco police.

The glamour of Monaco always assures high-profile international media coverage when events worthy of news occur in the principality, but the shooting of its wealthiest citizen made front-page headlines around the world and only intensified as the facts of Pastor’s assassination came to light.

As television’s news anchors also led with the news, not many hours passed before taxi drivers went to the police in Nice and spoke of two individuals they had had as passengers on the day of the shooting.

A taxi driver said that in the morning he had picked up two young men at the Nice railroad station after the train from the nearby town of Marseille had pulled in. He had driven the two to a hotel in town.

Another two taxi drivers said that in the middle of the afternoon each had driven a young man to the Archet Hospital.

A fourth taxi driver said that at the end of the day he had picked up two young men at the railroad station who wanted to be driven to the town of Marseille because they had missed their train. They had argued with him over his fare for the 96-mile ride but had finally agreed to pay him €500 ($680).

From CCTV footage at the crime scene as well as at the railroad station, and having lifted fingerprints and taken DNA samples in the hotel room the two young men had stayed in that day, the police put names to them.

They were Samine Said Ahmed, 24, a French national of Comorian origin, and living in Marseille, and the 31-year-old Alhair Hamadi, also a Comorian and living in the northern French town of Rennes. (The Indian Ocean Island of Comoros used to be a French colony.) Both had done time in French prisons for robbery with violence and for drug dealing.

Not announcing that they had identified the two young men, the police tapped their cell phones. Records the phone companies had supplied had already revealed that they had been in Nice and in the vicinity of the hospital on the day of the shooting.

The two were soon arrested.

On Monday, June 23, the French police arrested another 21 people -- 12 in Marseille, five in Nice and four in Rennes -- suspected of having been involved with the shooting of Pastor and her chauffeur. This brought the total to 23.

One of those arrested was another Comorian. He was an auxiliary in the gendarmerie (militarized police).

And then the shoes began to drop. Sylvia, the murdered woman’s daughter, was arrested and so was her companion, the Honorary Consul Janowski.

At a press conference on Tuesday, June 24, the chief prosecutor of Marseille, Brice Robin, said that the investigators had not yet established the connection of Sylvia in the killing.

The investigators had though established through studying the cell phone records of Ahmed and Hamadi that her companion, Janowski, had been in touch with the two. His cell phone records had confirmed this.

Said Prosecutor Robin: “Right now, suspect financial movements have been identified on Mr. Janowski’s bank accounts which need to be explained.”

Wojciech Janowski

He added that the investigators had also established a link between Janowski and another two of the arrested men. The two had put him in touch with Ahmed and Hamadi. They were not named.

Asked by a journalist whether the murder was therefore a contract killing, Prosecutor Robin replied: “We can think that, but it’s too early to talk of motives.”

Some of the investigators though revealed “off the record” that they were leaning towards a dispute over money as motive for the killing, and that there was no doubt that Janowski was the instigator of the killing.

Meanwhile, Sylvia’s friends told the media that they were certain that she could not have known that the assassination of her mother was being planned. They described her as a dignified and reserved woman.

It was as incomprehensible to those who knew the couple that Janowski had played a part in Pastor’s assassination. Known for his charitable work for which he was awarded the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest award, they described him as a man of great elegance, culture and generosity. They spoke of how he had cared for Sylvia, whom he called “Sisi,” when she underwent an operation for breast cancer last year.

The principality’s other honorary consuls were as sure that Janowski was innocent.  They described him as always prepared to step in to assist where there was a problem.

There was a problem.

As someone who wished to remain anonymous told me: “It is common knowledge here in Monaco that there are arguments in the family about money. This is a family which always wants to be richer and richer.”

A day after the press conference, on Wednesday, June 25, 10 of the 23 who had been arrested were released: four of them from the 14 who had been arrested in Marseille; two of the five arrested in Nice, and all four who had been arrested in Rennes.

Ahmed and Mamadi were not among the released.

Neither were Sylvia and Janowski.

Focusing on Sylvia

Sylvia Pastor

Rumors began to circulate that the police had begun to focus on Sylvia.

The investigators wanted to know why her mother’s condition had so suddenly deteriorated when her doctors had reassured her daughter and her unofficial “son-in-law” that she was to make a complete recovery.

They learned that on Tuesday, May 20, in the evening, Pastor had received a visit from her daughter.

At midnight, when the nurses had noticed that things were not so well with the patient, they summoned the doctors.  Despite all effort to save the woman’s life, she passed away at dawn of the following day, May 21.

Was Pastor’s death a double-murder?

Had someone entered her private room and administered some substance which had killed her, seeing that the shooting had not?

But her private room was guarded 24 hours a day by armed guards and no one outside of the hospital staff could have entered her room.

Her daughter was in fact her last visitor -- and the last person from outside the hospital to have seen her alive.

Did the police have a case of matricide on their hands?

Twenty-four hours later Sylvia was released.

She had only been “helping the police with their investigation of Wojciech Janowski” the prosecutor’s office stated.

Another six of those the police were holding were released at the same time.

This meant that the police were still holding seven.

One of the seven, it was revealed, was Janowski’s personal trainer named Pascal Dauriac. The latter had been the personal trainer of both Janowski and Sylvia for the past 10 years.

Another of the seven was Janowski.

Who is Wojciech Janowski?

Wojciech Janowski’s life is riddled with affiliations with men whose businesses had a nasty habit of folding shortly after having been listed on lightly regulated stock exchanges.

These “associates” all claimed to hold MSc, PhD, DSc and MA degrees, or put ‘Dr.’ in front of their names.

Their degrees they had obtained from Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, Saint Andrew’s University in Scotland, Warsaw University, Toronto University, the University of South Africa (UNISA) and Cambridge University. UNISA is a strictly correspondence university.  As for Janowski’s M.A. in Economics from Cambridge University, still perhaps the most prestigious economics degree in the world, it is bogus: he is “unknown” to the university’s alumni database.

One of the “associates” of Janowski claims that he has been a visiting professor at Stanford, Berkeley, St Andrew’s and at the University Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris.

Another of the “associates” can be viewed on LinkedIn in a casual black t-shirt sitting in front of a timber-frame cabin. He acted as Janowski’s PR man. Public relations -- his website has suddenly gone down -- are however just one of his expertises. Another is offering counsel on a wellness site.  He is the “associate” who claims to have a degree from the University of South Africa: the degree is an M.A. in Religious Studies.  He is also a director of several businesses in Canada and Poland, all in the energy, oil and chemical fields.

Another “associate” is a Polish-born former Canadian and Monaco resident, now back living in Poland. This “associate” specialized in “pump and dump” investment fraud. His dubious financial history commenced with the collapse of a Canadian company in 2001 and culminated in 2005 with a spectacular implosion of a UK-listed company which ended in London’s High Court. England’s Guardian newspaper termed the case “the greatest stock market heist of all time.” At the five-week trial there were revelations of faked bios, faked university degrees and paying bribes -- and of death threats.

Talking

Janowski, being held in Nice, turned down the offer of legal representation.  He had nothing to say because he had had nothing to do with the killing of Pastor, he said. Then, on Thursday evening, facing a fourth night trying to sleep on a hard bunk in a cell, he opened up.

He admitted to having known that a shooting was going to be carried out, but that was all.

As the night progressed, still refusing legal representation, he admitted that, yes, he had discussed the possibility of doing away with Pastor with Dauriac, the personal trainer, but that when he had not done anything about it, Dauriac had presented him with a plan of how it could be done. Dauriac wanted to be paid for overseeing the murder, and had asked him for €200,000 ($270,000). He had given him the money.

Pastor had humiliated him, he said, because she had not accepted him as part of her family, and she had also humiliated her daughter and because he loved her daughter dearly, he wanted to put an end to her suffering at the hands of her mother. Therefore, his having agreed to Dauriac’s plan to murder Pastor was an act of love.

Dauriac had by then already answered each question the investigators had addressed to him and his story differed from that of Janowski. He said that it was Janowski who had planned the murder and that he had done so already some two years ago, and it was in January this year (2014) that he had put the plan into motion. He also said that Janowski had paid him not €200,000 but only €140,000 ($190,000) which he had to share with the others in the killing team.

The killing of Darwich, Pastor’s chauffeur, was not a mistake, he said. Janowski had insisted on the killing of the chauffeur in order to make the police believe that he was the primary target in what was an underworld killing. In other words that Pastor’s killing was collateral.

Ahmed and Hamadi were also confessing. Each said that the other was the shooter. The CCTV footings had shown that Ahmed was the shooter.

What now?

The seven, having been officially charged with the murder of Pastor and Darwich, will await the trial in Marseille’s Les Baumettes prison. The prison has the reputation of being France’s toughest.

 Janowski, Dauriac, Ahmed and Hamadi risk life imprisonment for first degree homicide. The others face jail terms of 10 years or more for complicity to murder.

Janowski has been stripped of his title of honorary consul.

Tomasz Orlowski, Polish Ambassador to France, said in Paris that an irreproachable reputation was needed for that role.

“In the present circumstances there can be no question of trust,” Poland’s foreign ministry added from Warsaw.

As an honorary consul does not enjoy diplomatic immunity there is no possibility of Janowski not paying in full for his crime.

Sylvia has been “totally exonerated” as Prosecutor Robin said at a press conference on Friday, June 27. He described her as “in a state of shock” and “feeling let down as she had total trust in her companion.”

The prosecutor also said that she had denied to the investigators that there had been a conflict between her and her mother, and that there had been arguments about money. She gave as proof of this the fact that over the past year her mother had given her money for her to hand over to Janowski. The amount was €8.5 million ($10.8 million).

As the credit balance of Janowski’s Monaco bank account was only€900,000 ($1.2 million) at the time of his arrest, the prosecutor said that they were still trying to find out where those millions had gone. Some of it had not gone to pay the killing team because Janowski also had an offshore account in Dubai from which he had withdrawn €250,000 ($340,000) in nine transactions between Tuesday, April 22 and Sunday, May 4, two days before the killing.  Why he had needed that amount was being investigated. He was not saying.

Disbelief

Despite what is now known about the killing of Pastor and her chauffeur, Janowski still has supporters among Monaco’s wealthy.

He has, these supporters are saying, enough money not to have to kill for more.

(Photo CBC.ca) The Oscar Pistorius trial has everything: a narrative about a system, a psychology, an issue spanning something far beyond the act of killing Reeva Steenkamp.

By Binoy Kampmark

The Oscar Pistorius case in the High Court of Pretoria ceased being a matter about the subject once the athlete was charged and examined in the dock.  Killings happen every day, the stuff of triviality, the prosaic in action, or the fulfilment of a basic need.  Lives are there to be taken, and for societies where struggle hounds and haunt development, it is expected.  But the recipe is, sadly, spiced by celebrity – the taking of lives becomes more fascinating when it is done by the feted hand, executed by the ennobled figure.  There is no equality in life, crime or beauty – status matters in the killing stakes. 

The alleged murder of Reeva Steenkamp by Paralympian extraordinaire Oscar Pistorius, a series of disjunctions were visible – a man triumphant over his disability but failing in emotion (the mythologized are denied their chance to be humble); a sportsman deemed supreme and yet robotic, an automaton, a machine.  The challenges proved ubiquitous. Oscar Pistorius was that man, a pained construction, a phenomenon, but also one imperilled by his own prowess.  The defense would finally have to resort to something Pistorius had always denied: that disability, in the commission of acts of brutality, may well be important. 

This case had everything, a narrative about a system, a psychology, an issue spanning something far beyond the act of killing Steenkamp.  It was sociology as well, demographics, and disability.  There were studies on the tweets on the trial in an attempt to map public opinion with frame analysis and data mining techniques.[1]  There were campaigns alleging undue racial vilification of whites. There was that every nasty motif of the unknown black intruder who dirties white suburbia.

It meant that those backing and defending the vulnerable were faced by a seemingly contradictory position: A man who killed because he did not have his leg blades (the defense line), a person who killed because he did not have his support mechanism. The shrewd analyst might spot a problem here, suggesting that a person who can’t walk might be considered in a better light because he did not have his wheelchair when the incident happened. But Pistorius was never going to escape exceptionalist storytelling.

Previous trials have called for the marshalling of psychological views, the painting of mental portraits of insecurity, cruel instability, frightful reactions.  If the man be broken, can the man be truly understood yet committed to a cell?  The case of Pierre Revière was history and psychology, and it was subsequently attacked by feminists who claimed it was a straightforward case of woman-hating.  Ultimately, all ideologies demand a way of not seeing, a form of collective myopia. 

Killings of passion and confusion are rarely clear matters.  They involve a rush of blood, a moment of terrible incoherence.  There is only one object in that case, be it death or preservation.  Unfortunately, that understanding may prove at odds to the case. Perception is everything.

Reactions and highlights

The saturation coverage of the Pistorius trial has been unprecedented. While South Africa has not been stranger to spectacular killings, or gruesome murders, the celebrity status of the event has proved peerless.  Audiences have been able to watch live coverage, something of a new phenomenon for South Africans.  “Pop-up” TV channel 199, otherwise called the Oscar Pistorius Trial Channel, did what its title suggested, focusing exclusively on the man in the dock.  The BBC created an interactive graphic about how Steenkamp died.  “Explore the scene of her death interactively.”[2]  Justice, or at least its exploration, became a televised moment, one of dramatic import.

The televised aspect lent a dramatic quality a closed courtroom would have otherwise treated as prosaic.  CNN’s correspondents felt they were seeing “CSI” episodes “replete with gory autopsy details and photographs of the crime scene.”  More than 150 photos of the defendant’s house were taken by the police following the shooting, showing a sanguinary scene of devastation, with the used gun on the floor, trails of blood, spent cartridges.  South African violence had become a live spectacle, a matter of updates and instant commentary.  Each sample of evidence was painstakingly scrutinised and analysed.  The autopsy, according to pathologist Gert Saayman, showed that Steenkamp had eaten two hours before she died, contradicting the defendant’s account that they had been asleep hours before the killing. 

The bathroom door through which Steenkamp was shot was reassembled in court.  The defense had argued that, as a piece of valuable evidence, it had been contaminated. Former police Col. G.S. van Rensburg had resigned over his handling of the piece, and was also subjected to a sustained and seemingly successful attack by Pistorius’s counsel, Barry Roux.  His recounting of the evidence was patchy at best, his powers of observations treated as suspect.  A police expert, forensic analyst J.G. Vermeulen, even swung a cricket bat at the door in an attempt to determine if prosthetic legs were on when the incident took place.  Defense counsel disputed Vermeulen’s theory that Pistorius was still on his stumps at the time.

The prosecution did prove wonky at points, with the police investigation itself subjected to withering criticism.  The handling of Pistorius’s gun by a police ballistics expert proved rather inexpert, given that he wasn’t gloved. A highly prized watch by Pistorius went missing during the investigation into the crime scene, resulting in a “body search” of officers.

Reactions to the trial, seen through the prism of celebrity coverage, became its own object of interest, with celebrity feeding celebrity.  “When is OP taking the stand?” inquired one Molly Seima on Twitter (March 28). “I need to be glued to channel 199 when he does.”  Toshpolela suggested that the channel should be kept functioning as a court channel even after the dust on Pistorius’s trial had settled.  “There are enough cases to feed our curiosity” (March 11).

Those viewing the trial saw various eyewitnesses come to life as actors in a vast, choking drama.  The defendant’s neighbor, Michelle Burger, spoke of “terrible” screams, a cry for help, the firing of “four gunshots.”  The identification of screams was one of several points of inquiry in the trial.  But as acoustics expert and engineer Ivan Lin would explain in court, those screams could not be interpreted reliably as being those of a man or woman.  The reliability of the state’s witnesses was thereby called into doubt.

The biggest of microscopes was, however, reserved for Pistorius the accused.  His psychology, his justifications, his overall view of life, were all dominant highlights.  The defense team did its level best bringing that portrait to the fore.  Daily press accounts were filed recording Pistorius’s vomiting at reliving those moments of the shooting.  In April, Pistorius testified about how the gun, the protective weapon, meant everything to him.  Memories of his mother’s fears lingered.  “She often got scared at night.  We didn’t live in the best of areas. There was a lot of crime.  She would call the police, call us to her room and we would wait for the police to arrive.”  Her response was always the same: tucking a firearm in a bag under her pillow.

The courtroom also heard how Pistorius’s 2009 boating accident, one that subjected his face to horrendous injuries, made doctors place him in an induced coma.  “I was a lot more vigilant of losing my life after that. I became quite fearful, I became quite withdrawn.”

Little wonder, then, that this has been the trial of doctors, physicians and psychologists.  On Day 34 of the trial, orthopaedic surgeon Gerald Versfeld was called. The portrait of Pistorius, less a super figure than one who was markedly fragile, was encouraged.  It was he who bolstered suggestions of vulnerability, reading a statement from Pistorius that spoke of the dog knocking him over “many times.”

Disability in context

The issue of disability has also loomed large.  It had to for the defense, which decided to see it as vital to the Blade Runner image.  Those favoring the prosecuting side have tended to marginalize, if not exclude it as a grounds for consideration.  Advocates have demurred – such matters are vital to the overall setting of the incident.  But any Blade Runner argument can cut both ways – it suggests a machine in action, a beast out of control, or it suggests a being susceptible to weaknesses precisely because of that physical state.

Pistorius had argued against the very idea that he was disabled.  But that was in 2007, when he told the New York Times why he refused to park in disabled bays.  “There’s nothing I can’t do that able-bodied athletes can do.” For Pistorius, a disability did not preclude other abilities. What of those “millions and millions of abilities they have?  So what if you have a leg or two missing?”  Michael Sokolove, in interviewing Pistorius for the paper, found “an athlete’s disposition, that of a person who believes himself to be a royalty of a certain kind – a prince of the physical world.”

The approach of the defense has come full circle on the matter.  The princeling had well and truly fallen from the elite set.  Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Meryl Vorster diagnosed Pistorius as a sufferer of Generalised Anxiety Disorder.  Defense witness Wayne Derman, a professor of sports medicine at University of Cape Town, was brought to testify that Pistorius feared more than those without disability.  “Disability never sleeps.”  Works such as Nick van der Leek’s Recidivist Acts (2014) investigate the nature of Pistorius’s disability and also reiterate the theme.

Such anxiety acted as an incentive, an adrenalin push making him more susceptible to action.  He nursed a “profound fear of crime,” had developed an “exaggerated fight response” (BBC News, July 3).  This was Pistorius bifurcated, two forms of him in operation, the darker side having killed Steenkamp.

Gender violence and hidden truths

One particularly dark side of Pistorius’s conduct was, according to  Lisa Vetten of the University of Witwatersrand, “that not all violence against white women in South Africa is carried out by black men” (The Conversation, May 14). Accordingly, the rate of non-intimate homicide may have fallen in South Africa, but by 2009, the leading cause of female homicide was intimate femicide.[3] This tends to derail arguments of terrified estrangement between the races, focusing on violence committed within racial groups than between racial groups.

In the aftermath of the shooting of Steenkamp in February 2013, South Africa’s minister of women, children and people with disabilities pointed the finger at austere, possessive Calvinism and its attitude to women.  For Minister Lulu Xingwana, “Young Afrikaner men are brought up in the Calvinist religion believing that they own a woman, they own a child, they own everything and therefore they take that life because they own it” (News 24, Feb. 27, 2013). 

Jan Bosman, secretary of the Afrikanerbond, would retort that, “This minister has proven beyond any doubt that she is not fit to hold office in a constitutional democracy” (News 24, Feb. 27, 2013).  For Bosman, Pistorius had become a convenient “smokescreen” for departmental incompetence, notably that of Xingwana.  Afrikaner lobby group AfriForum even entertained the prospects of bringing a complaint before the Equality Court against Xingwana, citing possible contravention of the Promotion of Equality and the Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act.

Through that particular glass darkly, individuals such as Afrikaans singer Sunette Bridges would insist, along with Steve Hofmeyr, that during the 14 months she and Hofmeyr had been gathering news clippings on violence against women between 2012 and 2013, Pistorius was the only white man to have slain a white woman, the grim exception that proved a grimmer rule. 

Black men otherwise asserted a near overwhelming monopoly, dark murderous essences haunting South African society. Importantly, they were adduced to break the notion of intimate femicide, which had no truck for the amateur sleuths. The killers would be both black and unknown, though Vetten’s statistically valid point remains that such figures constitute a mere 2 percent of the female homicide cases nationally.  Other issues involve sampling methods – how they got the information to be interrogated, how the victims’ identities were supplied, what range of papers and print they were examining, and how frequently it was done.

In scouring the press, Bridges also found an astonishing ignorance about reportage of Pistorius.  This was the other side of “otherness” – particularly that Dutch South Africans were being made to fit a particular model of guilt and presumption.  Alex Perry of Time magazine had been short of a fact checker – Pistorius was not, Bridges insisted, an Afrikaner “but an English speaking South African by his own admission!” (Mar 1, 2013).  Perry had become part of the unconscious army against the Afrikaners. 

Racial assumptions

Bridges dismissed assertions that Afrikaner lagers were everywhere, congregations formed against the “Swart Gevaar” (Black Threat).  The point was made to take the shine off the Pistorius lifestyle. Do not assume that such a life such as his might extend more broadly to others of similar skin color.  Many did not live in an Edenic environment, but crippling squalor.  “Almost 700,000 of this minority currently find themselves living in utter squalor in squatter camps.”  Bridges ventured various numbers – 77 White squatter camps in Pretoria alone, with more than 430 in the country in total.  She never cites where she obtains these figures, proving rather reluctant on the reference and footnote.  They are, however, vital in that continuum of Afrikaner identity – one shaped, sharpened and padded by a narrative of persecution and threat.

For Bridges, South Africa was land and country, but one ravaged by a marauding sense of exclusion and assertion against its White populace.  That symbol was typified by such fanatical platforms as those of Julius Malema, insisting on the “Killing of the Boer.”  In a blog post on April 8, 2012, she claimed that she had “been a victim of rampant crime in South Africa six times in 11 months. My house was burgled three times in six weeks and my car window smashed three times in less than a year.”  For her, it was important to mention that, “The victims of crime in this country might not have color, but the perpetrators DO!” (emphasis in original)  It was a country beset by seven million illegal immigrants, an unreliable police force as guilty for the very crimes they were charged to protect the public from.

As Pierre de Vos, Claude Leon Foundation Chair in Constitutional Governance at University of Cape Town, would explain (The Conversation, April 15), “at the heart of the defense is an assumption that the high crime rate in South Africa, coupled with Pistorius’s vulnerable state as a disabled person, rendered his actions reasonable.”  This is where the psychology proved sketchy with the environment. The defense strongly emphasised a society run wild, jungle mad with crime. But the gated community, by its definition, allowed Pistorius to, as De Vos explains, “Sleep with the windows of his bedroom open.” Other South Africans without the luxuries of the security community had to rely on “elaborate rituals” of security, activating alarms, locks, private security companies.

Pistorius, wealthy; the Pistorius whose witnesses were overwhelmingly white, all having come from a particular South Africa.  His South Africa that remains overwhelmingly one of celebrity, not squalor; well paid security rather than grotesque insecurity.  There is no ruthless Hobbesian nature here of nasty, brutish and short lives.  If press reports of a brawl in a Johannesburg night club with a taunting customer are to be believed, Pistorius has no fear reminding individuals that he comes from a family that “owns” the South African president.[4] 

Summing arguments

Pistorius, when the judgment is handed down, may well have been the exception that proved several rules – be it on disability, gender violence and his country. His defense team will be drawing upon his psychological profile, reminding the court of a man vulnerable and traumatised even before he raised his weapon in fear. His strength was merely a product of that vulnerability, brute physicality exercised without emotional calm.  The prosecuting team will do what it has done from the start: suggest, that Pistorius’s intent was always to kill, whoever it was who was in the bathroom at the time.  If you fire four shots through a door at someone locked in a lavatory, the intention, as lead prosecutor Gerrie Nel explained in the initial bail hearing, is one of inflicting death.  But for all of that, Nel has already conceded that the case against Pistorius remains circumstantial.  The rest of South Africa has already decided – it remains for the court to hand down its final ruling.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

Her face – and body – were known to millions of men who crawled the Internet for web-sex. Her stage name was Red-Hot Carla and her fans agreed that the name was well chosen. However, the way she looked when the police forced entry into the house she shared with her lover and pimp, would have made them recoil with horror. 

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

The first call to the police reporting that a woman was missing came in the afternoon. The caller, a woman, describing herself as a neighbor, was saying that she has not seen the woman from the house next door for a day. The cop who took the call was wondering what a cop’s work would be like if they were to investigate each call about someone who has not been seen for 24 hours.

Deep into that night the woman again telephoned the police. She still has not seen her neighbor and she was really worried, she said.

The following afternoon the police received a call from a woman reporting that she has heard a gunshot coming from the house of a neighbor. She said that the previous day the man from that house had rung her doorbell and wanted to borrow a bottle of wine. She did not have any wine in the house and he left.  Did the man live alone in the house the cop who took the call wanted to know? The caller said that, no, his wife lived in the house with him.

A missing woman and a gunshot being heard decided the police to go and find out what was going on.

This was the Belgian town of Liège only a few miles from the borders of France, Germany and the Netherlands.

 Therefore, Liège is a frontier town, but there is nothing wild west about it. The French-speaking locals, the Liègeoises, are sturdy and staid, their pleasures mostly culinary.  They love mussels which they eat with fries, and they feast on pancakes and chocolates. They also devour meatballs - boulets à la Liègoise– which are made with pork and beef and very sweet apple syrup.

The address the police went to was a lane in the suburb of Vottem, three miles from central Liège. Two-story, red-brick, terraced houses lined the lane on both sides. There were no front gardens, but lace or chiffon curtains hanging behind small windows kept prying eyes from seeing into front rooms. Such discreet elegance made it obvious that it was a lane where the bourgeoisie lived: perhaps they were not wealthy people, but they were of a good social class.

The police knocked on the door of the house to which they had been directed. There was no answer. They banged on the door. Still no answer. Not being able to see into the front rooms they forced the lock.

A man lay across the settee in the living room. He was covered in blood and his face was a raw wound. A gun hung loosely from his right hand. The cops thought that he was dead, but no, he had a pulse. They summoned an ambulance who raced him under police guard to the local hospital. Someone might have tried to kill him, disguising the attempt on his life as suicide, and that person might still have been around.

In the bed of a bedroom upstairs lay a woman. She was undoubtedly dead: her head had almost been shot off.

Neighbors quickly filled in the police about the couple’s identity.

Stephane Fontaine

The man was named Stéphane Fontaine, 43 years old, and unemployed.

The woman was - well, there was some confusion about what her name was. Her real name.

 Known to the neighbors as Carla Sainclair, she was born Anne Derouck and she was 29 years old.

She was a porn star, and a prostitute, and apart from the name of Carla Sainclair she also called herself Red-Hot Carla - Carla La Chaude. She was a star of porn movies, and as for her real-life role as prostitute, she was selling her charms not only in sex clubs all over Western Europe, but also on x-rated web sites, and indeed in a specially equipped room in the house in which she lay dead.

Stéphane Fontaine was her pimp and her lover.

Had he shot her and then himself?

From the early stages of decomposition of the woman’s body and from the smell in the room they could tell that she had been dead for a few days, whereas the shot which had injured the man had, according to the neighbor, been fired only that afternoon.

Fontaine was unable to enlighten the cops. He could not speak: he was in a coma.

It was Wednesday, October 14, 2009.

He would remain in the coma for three months.

Good Girl

Schoolgirl Anne Derouck excelled in languages and mathematics.  She spoke of wanting to be a journalist and on leaving school she enrolled at a journalism school. However, in the year 2000 it was in a local department store that the dark-haired, curvaceous and friendly 20-year-old went to work as a salesgirl.

Her salary not high, so she hit on a plan to earn more money.

She took a night job at a private men’s club. Dressed as either a policewoman or a nurse, but then stripping down to the skin, she walked among the men who would be taking photos of her.

Next, she began to put in hours at a brothel. In Belgium prostitution is not illegal but for a third-party to live off its proceeds is against the law.  Brothels are all the same tolerated.

The Derouck family was unaware of what Anne was up to.

As she freely admitted to other girls in the profession, she loved the physical pleasure the job gave her.

Soon, her appetite for sexual delights having increased, she began to attend partner-swapping evenings. At such an evening, held in private homes or private sex clubs, or even in 5-star hotels, the understanding is that all inhibitions must be left at home because having sexual relations with as many of those present, male and female, is the rule.

In the year 2000, at one such partner-swapping evening, Anne met Stèphane Fontaine. He was 34 years old and living alone but he was the father of two children.  She was of course just 20 years old. Both would say that theirs was "love at first sight."

Unlike Anne’s happy childhood, Fontaine’s had been unhappy. Born out-of-wedlock, the surname Fontaine was that of the man who would marry his mother and legally adopt him.

Leaving school without diplomas, his first job was that of automobile mechanic. Next, he worked at a golf club doing menial tasks. Both jobs were of short duration and in 1985, 19 years old, he set out on a career of crime, successfully committing several hold-ups. In 1986 his luck ran out when in an armed bank robbery he took the manager and the latter’s young son hostage. Apprehended, he received a seven-year jail sentence.  Released in 1991 after having served five years, he went to work in a biscuit factory.  He was still working there when he met Anne.

Fontaine was a fan of a famous French prostitute, Laure Sainclair, and Anne, in order to please her lover, adopted the surname Sainclair for her prostitution, and as Carla Sainclair, she began to get known as a star of porn not only in Belgium but also in France, the Netherlands and as far away as Spain.  (Laure Sainclair is now retired. She had become an icon in France’s libertine world when she appeared on a TV chat show speaking about her life as a prostitute.)

With web-sex taking a hold in the mid-2000s Carla (I will call her Carla from now on) created a website for herself, and as Red-Hot Carla, she began to promote her sexual talents online. She and Fontaine had moved into the Vottem house and in 2007 when he was dismissed from the biscuit factory because he was drinking too much - his employers said he was an alcoholic - he became Carla’s web-master. He set up a webcam in one of the bedrooms and, having created a second website, viewers could at €500 ($650) a time watch Carla strip and perform sexual acts.

In 2008 Carla contacted a producer of porn movies: she wanted to be in movies. She was auditioned and given a contract and within months Red-Hot Carla starred in not just one, but two porn movies.  The producer was also posting porn videos on the web and Carla starred in them too. By the time of her death she had starred in seven such movies.

Her neighbors having seen the posters for the porn movies - there are sex shops all over Belgian towns where such posters are displayed - was enlightened to the identity of the charming young woman living among them. They appeared not to mind -- not even when men began calling at the house and they realized that she was also working as a prostitute. The couple had transformed the bedroom where Fontaine had already set up the webcam into a room where Carla could receive her clients.

The Derouck family also learned what Carla, who they still knew as Anne, was up to. After her murder some of them said that Fontaine had steered her into prostitution. They said they had never liked him. He would say, as she had herself revealed, she was doing what she was doing because she enjoyed sex. “She fantasized about making love to two men at the same time,” he explained her fondness to the police for partner-swapping evenings.

In 2009 Carla began to complain to some of the other prostitutes she had befriended and also to her mother that Fontaine was drinking too much and that he had become violent towards her. She spoke of an incident when he, drunk behind the wheel, had crashed their car, and when she had become angry with him, he had hit her in the face.

She also bemoaned the fact that he would not look for a job. She told her mother that he was refusing to do so because he said that he was against paying income tax. Carla, on the contrary, had to pay tax on her earnings. Whether she declared every euro she earned only she and Fontaine knew.

Having starred in seven porn movies, Carla, with more admirers than ever, began to travel to neighboring countries and to Spain to participate in private sex parties. Fontaine, at home and not only drinking heavily but consuming a large number of sleeping pills because he was suffering from insomnia, spent the time creating websites for other prostitutes and acting as their webmaster too.

On Friday, October 9 of that year of 2009, Carla was on the phone to her mother saying that she and Fontaine were having another argument. She was to be the main attraction at a sex fair in the town of Tournai, some 100 miles away, and she wanted Fontaine to accompany her but he refused.  At the fair she told the other girls that she wanted to leave him; that she was going to leave him.

Her performance at the fair over, she returned home where Fontaine was waiting.

Some time that night or perhaps during the next day, or it could have been days or weeks earlier, Carla had taken up pen and paper and written down that Fontaine was going to kill her.

She wrote: ‘I, Anne Derouck, testifies that Stéphane has threatened to kill me. He threatens me openly.  If I am to die, I want an autopsy to be carried out on my body.  I declare that I do not want to die.  I am sorry to say it but if I am to die, the guilty one will be Stéphane Fontaine.’

The police found the note in the Vottem house.

The injuries

Carla’s injuries were horrendous.

She had been shot four times into the left side of her face, each shot having been fired at close range while she was asleep.

The first shot was to her temple and had gone through her brain and had killed her instantly. The next two shots had been into her forehead, and the fourth, the last one, was into her left eye.

According to the pathologists, the shooting had taken place at least three days earlier: during the night of Saturday, October 10, to the morning of Sunday, October 11.

Her blood alcohol content (BAC) was 1.51 g/L which meant that she had in the immediate few hours before her death consumed a bottle of wine, or two or three glasses of strong liquor like gin, vodka or whiskey.

There were no bruises, and no scars of recent or old injuries, on her body.

According to the ballistic experts at the murder scene, Fontaine was the one who shot Carla and who, three days later, had turned the same gun on himself.

 Fontaine’s injury was such that the medical experts said it was a wonder that he had survived.

He had shot himself into the left side of his mouth, pressing the gun to his palate. The bullet had entered the left lobe of his brain and destroyed the optic nerve of his left eye.

He had no alcohol in his blood, but he had consumed a large number of sleeping pills in the 72 hours or so hours in which he had gone to ask a neighbor to borrow a bottle of wine and which other neighbors, passing the house, had seen him standing at the windows, his lover dead in an upstairs bedroom.

I needed a gun for our protection

For the three months of Fontaine’s coma the police and psychiatrists waited to speak to him. They knew that he would be suffering from memory loss not only because of the coma but also because of the injury to his brain so they did not expect to get much information from him.

On Wednesday, January 10, 2010, Fontaine was released from hospital into police custody. In a pitiful state, he was incarcerated in the hospital wing of Lantin Prison, four miles outside Liège.  Lantin, Belgium’s largest prison, open since 1979, can accommodate 342 inmates, 40 of them female. The prison also has a secure psychiatric wing.

Because of the destruction of the optic nerve of Fontaine’s left eye he was blind in that eye, and because of the damage to his brain he was classified as intellectually challenged. Both conditions were to be permanent, and so too would be his memory loss. He suffered total amnesia of the days before, during and after he had fired four bullets into his lover’s head.

He would need round-the-clock care and psychiatric counseling too.

Replying to police questions, he spoke of an argument he and Carla had had because she wanted him to accompany her to a sex fair in Tournai and he did not want to go. He could not remember why he did not want to go with her, and he also could not say when exactly they had had the argument. Already back in hospital, told that she was dead and that he had killed her, he had tearfully expressed his regret. She was, he said, the human being he loved more than any other, and he could not envisage a life without her.

Questioned about the gun he had used and for which he did not have a license, he said that he had bought it through a friend who had bought it from a friend who had bought it from a friend. The police tracing this long line of friends of friends identified the original owner of the gun as a man in the criminal underworld.

He needed the gun, said Fontaine, because strangers were coming to the house all the time and he had to be in a position to defend Carla - and himself.

He was adamant that he had never laid a hand on her, and he had not forced her into prostitution: she had masterminded her career herself. And there had never been any talk of her leaving him.

He explained away his armed hold-ups and the bank robbery when he had taken hostages by describing them as follies of his youth. He bitterly regretted having taken that path, he emphasized.

The court-appointed psychiatrists, who by law had to evaluate Fontaine’s mental state, reported that he manifested no signs of anxiety or depression but that he did manifest anti-social and narcissistic behavior, and he showed no empathy towards others. He did love Carla but he did not respect her. His insomnia was severe and he was dependent not only on sleep medication but also on alcohol.

They also reported that Fontaine did not manifest any signs of mental illness and despite that he had become intellectually challenged and his lost memory would never return, he was fit to stand trial.

 Public Prosecutor Marianne Lejeune formally charged Fontaine with first-degree murder. Belgian law classifies first-degree murder as assassination. He was also to be judged for the illegal possession of a firearm.

They were quiet neighbors

On Monday, March 5, 2012, Fontaine, flanked by two uniformed police, walked into the courtroom in Liège.

The hearing was expected to last four days.

Carla’s mother described her murdered daughter as discrete, serious, spontaneous, always in a good mood, and always ready to do someone a favor. Fontaine was violent towards her daughter and he did slap her face when the two had argued about Tournai: Carla had told her about it when the two of them had spoken on the phone in the hours before her daughter had set off for the fair. Carla was not however planning to leave Fontaine, she added. Indeed, Carla loved Fontaine, the only man she has ever had a serious love relationship with.

Carla’s sister spoke of how much her sister had loved life and what a wonderful person she had been. Fontaine’s entire existence focused on sex and he settled his problems with violence, she said.

The couple’s neighbors testified that the couple had caused no problem. The two were quiet and respectful and they were loving towards one another. They certainly had never witnessed any arguments or violence between the two. They did see many men visiting the house, but this did not surprise them because Carla had never hidden that she was a prostitute and starred in porn movies.

A childhood friend of Carla’s said that she had no idea what Carla had been up to and learned about it only after her murder. She said that she remembered Carla as a studious girl and that Carla would have gone into prostitution only because she had been pushed into it.

Women who had been performers at Tournai with Carla testified that she had told them that she was going to leave Fontaine. She had also spoken to them of how he beat her.

Fontaine’s former colleagues from the biscuit factory described him as pleasant. They had kept up with him after he had left the factory and that, they said, was proof that they had not found him disagreeable.

Fontaine, cross-examination by the lawyer representing Carla’s mother, repeated what he had told the police: he loved Carlo with all his heart and he had never hit her. To most of the lawyer’s questions, though, he replied that he could not reply because of his memory loss.

As Fontaine had not denied having shot Carla, Prosecutor Lejeune, in her closing argument, strove to convince the jury of 12 to unanimously find him guilty of first-degree murder. Carla was leaving him and he had therefore decided to kill her.

 Lejeune also asked the jury to find Fontaine guilty on the second charge of the illegal possession of a firearm.

The Belgian Constitution provides that all serious crimes, like murder, be judged by juries. A tied vote is considered a not guilty one whereas, in the event of a hung jury, three professional judges are appointed to decide the accused’s guilt or innocence.

Lejeune asked the judge for a 30-year incarceration sentence.

In their final plea for Fontaine’s liberty his two lawyers, Pascal Rodeyns and Steve Van Laeden, both prominent in Belgium, stated that the autopsy practised on the victim proved that, as there were no scars of violence on Carla’s body, their client had not been violent towards her. Also, no one had ever witnessed any act of violence on his part towards her.

 Rodeyns asked that the case should be analyzed within the framework of the type of relationship the couple had.

 Their client’s amnesia was genuine, he said, and his memory would never return. Accordingly, what had preceded the fatal shooting and the scenario of the victim’s shooting and the following suicide attempt would never be known.

He also said that at the time of the shooting Fontaine was not himself but was suffering from temporary insanity. He had also taken a large number of sleeping pills. He loved Carla and this was why he had turned the gun on himself. “He did not reckon on waking up,” he stated.

On Thursday, March 8, at 3 p.m., after four hours of deliberation, the jury returned.

They found Fontaine guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced him to 25 years.

On hearing the sentence, Fontaine showed no emotion.  Journalists wrote about his empty eyes and the frozen expression on his face just as he had had during the four days of his trial.

Incarceration

Fontaine was returned to Liège’s Lantin Prison and to its hospital wing for the daily medical and psychiatric care he would need.

Should he be released before he has served his time, it would be into a care home.

As for Red-Hot Carla’s millions of fans. Undoubtedly, they still crawl the Internet for web-sex where also undoubtedly other women are now supplying it.

 The porn movies Carla starred in are showing in theatres in red-light districts not only in Belgium but over all of Europe. Her websites are no longer live on the Internet but her attributes are still to be viewed on sex sites. On those sites she can also still be viewed performing various sex acts as if Fontaine had never blasted four bullets into her face.

The house the couple lived in, they had rented, their furnishings were ordinary, their car was not a luxury one and they had not ever taken a vacation.

Whatever the reason was why Fontaine had slain Carla, it was not financial.

Kate Webster at the Old Bailey before she was sentenced to be hanged for murder - July 1879

Victorian Britain was horrified by a 30-year-old Irish woman who murdered her employer, dismembered the body, threw bits of it into the river Thames, boiled the head (and other body parts) and sold the fat as "dripping" in local pubs. She blamed two innocent men for the crime and when that didn't work, she pretended to be pregnant so that the judge wouldn't give her the death penalty.

 Such was her notoriety that Madame Tussaud's rushed to create a wax statue of her which remained on display in London for 80 years.

by Siobhán Pat Mulcahy

 Catherine “Kate” Lawler was born in a small village called Killanne, in County Wexford, Ireland in 1849. As a small child, she was caught stealing and became known as a pickpocket. She was imprisoned for larceny in Wexford in December 1864, aged only 15.

 In 1867, she stole enough money to take the boat to Liverpool and continued her criminal career once she got there. In 1868, aged 18, she was sentenced to four years “penal servitude” for a series of thefts.

 She claimed to have married a sea captain called “Webster” by whom she had four children and also claimed that all the children died, as did her husband, within a short space of time.

 In London, she took a job as a charlady and made extra money as a prostitute. In 1873, she moved to Notting Hill to work as a cook/housekeeper and met a man there called “Mr. Strong.”  He became both her lover and accomplice in further robberies but once she became pregnant, he abandoned her.

In April, 1874 she gave birth to a son named John W. Webster, in Kingston-upon-Thames.

Becoming a mother failed to reform her and she took to robbing boarding houses. She would rent a room and sell everything she could get her hands on before absconding. She would later claim to have been “forced into crime” as she had been “forsaken by him [Strong], and committed crimes for the purpose of supporting myself and my child.”

The next few years saw her being arrested on numerous occasions and receiving short prison sentences. In 1875, she spent 18 months in Wandsworth prison.

Back on the outside, she found domestic work with the Mitchell family in Teddington but left them because she said “they didn’t have anything worth stealing.”

She was constantly on the move to avoid the police and used aliases, including:  Webb, Webster, Gibbs, Gibbons and her birth name, Lawler.

Her young son was cared for during her frequent absences by Sarah Crease, a friend who worked as a charlady for a Miss Loder in Richmond. It was Miss Loder who recommended Webster as a domestic worker to Julia Martha Thomas in January 1879.   

Victim, Julia Martha Thomas, who had an "excitable temperment."

Mrs. Thomas was a 54-year-old widow, who lived at 2 Mayfield Cottages in Richmond, had a reputation for being a harsh employer with an “excitable temperament.”Yet, when she was introduced to Webster, she engaged her on the spot, without asking for references.

Webster would later say: “At first I thought her a nice old lady... but I found her very trying, and she used to do many things to annoy me during my work. When I had finished my work in my rooms, she used to go over it again after me, and point out places where she said I did not clean, showing evidence of a nasty spirit towards me.”

The daily arguments between the two women became so serious that Thomas tried to persuade friends to stay with her as “she was afraid to be alone with the Irish woman who was very fond of drink.”

Mrs. Thomas told Webster her employment would end on February 28 and she recorded the decision in what was to be her final diary entry: “Gave Katherine warning to leave.”

Webster begged her to keep her on for a further three days, until Sunday, March 2 and for some reason Mrs. Thomas agreed.

On March 2, the two women quarrelled and several members of the local church said that Mrs. Thomas had appeared “very agitated” during the service.  They said she was so upset that she left church early to confront Webster.

Murder

But Webster was lying in wait for her at Mayfield Cottages.

When Mrs. Thomas went upstairs, Webster jumped out from the shadows, took hold of her and threw her down the stairs. Then, to stop her screaming, she put her hands around her neck and choked her until she was dead.

She cut off the dead woman's head with a razor and a meat saw and then hacked off her limbs. She par-boiled the limbs and torso in a copper pot and burned the organs and intestines in the fireplace.

Webster said later that “even she was revolted by the enormous amount of blood everywhere.”

She burnt or boiled as much of the body as she could, then packed the remains into a wooden box, except for the head and one foot for which she could not find enough space.

Webster disposed of the spare foot on a manure heap in Twickenham but was left with the problem of the head which she placed in a black bag. She continued to clean up the cottage on the Monday and Tuesday, then, wearing one of Mrs. Thomas's silk dresses, she visited her former neighbors, the Porter family, taking the black bag with her. They visited several pubs together and in the evening, Webster excused herself and went off, ostensibly to visit a friend, returning later without the black bag, which was never found.

She asked the Porter's young son Robert, to help her carry the box with the torso, taking the lad back home with her to fetch it. She told him she was meeting someone at Richmond bridge who was taking the box and asked Robert to go on without her once they got there. Later, Robert told police he heard a splash of something heavy hitting the water a few moments before Webster caught up with him again.

The box was discovered the next morning by a coal man who reported it to Barnes police station near Richmond.

The local doctor who examined the various body parts could only say that they were “from a human female.”

Meanwhile, Webster continued to live at Mayfield Cottages posing as Mrs. Thomas, wearing her late employer's clothes and jewelry and dealing with tradesmen under her new identity. She made arrangements to sell the house and pawned Mrs. Thomas's gold fillings at a local pawnbrokers.

On March 9, she reached an agreement with John Church, a local publican, to sell Thomas's furniture. He agreed to pay her £68 with an interim payment of £18 in advance.

When a suspicious neighbor, Miss Ives, asked the deliverymen who exactly had ordered the goods removed, they replied “Mrs. Thomas” and pointed to Webster.

Police were called in to search 2 Mayfield Cottages. There, they discovered blood stains, burned finger-bones in the hearth and fatty deposits behind a large copper pot, as well as a letter left by Webster giving her home address in Ireland. They immediately distributed a “wanted” notice giving a description of Webster and her 5-year-old son.

Escape to Ireland

Realizing she had been exposed, Webster flew the coop with her son, catching a train to Liverpool and then traveling aboard a coal steamer to her uncle's farm in Enniscorthy, Ireland.

There, the chief of police realized that the 30-year-old woman being sought by Scotland Yard was the same person he had arrested 15 years earlier for larceny.

Webster was traced to her uncle's farm and arrested there (still wearing Mrs. Thomas's clothes and jewelry) on March 29.

As Webster travelled under arrest from Enniscorthy to Kingstown (near Dublin), crowds gathered at every station to jeer and gawk at her. Her uncle had refused to give her son shelter when he heard about the murder and the authorities sent him to the local workhouse until an industrial school could be found for him.

She was brought back to England via Holyhead and taken to Richmond police station where she made a statement saying John Church (who had bought Mrs. Thomas's furniture) had committed the crime. Fortunately for him, he had a rock solid alibi and was released almost immediately after his arrest.  She then made a statement implicating Henry Porter (her former neighbor) in Richmond but he too had an alibi. She was formally charged with Mrs. Thomas's murder on March 30, 1879.

Trial at the Old Bailey

The London Times reported that Webster's first appearance in court was greeted by “an immense crowd around the building... and very great excitement prevailed.”  In a sign of the public interest in the case, the prosecution was led by the Solicitor General, Sir Hardinge Giffard, while Webster was defended by prominent London barrister, Warner Sleigh. The case was presided over by Mr. Justice Denman.

The trial which began at the Old Bailey on July 2, 1879 was packed to the rafters. Webster pleaded not guilty to both the murder charge and the various charges of theft. Her defense sought to emphasize the “circumstantial nature of the evidence” while highlighting Webster's “devotion to her son.”

The prosecution had difficulty proving that the human remains found by police were actually those of Mrs. Thomas; without the head there was no means of positively identifying them.

At the official inquest, the doctor who examined the body parts attributed them to “a young person with very dark hair” and an “open verdict” had been given for the cause of death

The most damning piece of evidence against Webster came from a hat-maker called Maria Durden who told the court that Webster had visited her a week before the murder and said “she was going to Birmingham to sell some property, jewelry and a house that her aunt had left her.” The jury took this as a sign that the murder had been planned in advance.

In her own testimony, Webster attempted to gain the jury's sympathy by blaming Strong, the father of her child. She said: “I formed an intimate acquaintance with one who should have protected me and was led away by evil associates and bad companions.”

After a six-day trial, the jury retired to consider the facts, returning just over an hour later to pronounce a guilty verdict.

Judge Denmam asked Webster if there was “any reason why sentence of death should not be passed” and Webster replied “Yes, there is. I am quick with child” [pregnant]. The Law Times reported that “a scene of uncertainty and confusion ensued.”

The court's clerk suggested using a “jury of matrons,” selected from the women in the courtroom gallery, to rule on the question of whether Webster was “quick with child.” Twelve women were sworn in along with a surgeon named Bond, and they accompanied Webster to a private room at the side of the court where she could be examined. They returned a few minutes later with a verdict that Webster was not “quick with child,” though this “did not necessarily mean she was not pregnant.”

The judge commented that “after 32 years in the profession, he was never at an inquiry of this sort.”

He sentenced Webster to death by hanging at Wandsworth prison.

Webster's confession

The night before her execution, Webster finally confessed to the murder of Julia Martha Thomas. Her confession was recorded in the presence of a prison warder and a Catholic priest, Father McEnrey, at her own request. It reads as follows:

            Mrs. Thomas came in and went upstairs. I went up after her, and we had an argument, which ripened into a quarrel, and in the height of my anger and rage I threw her from the top of the stairs to the ground floor. She had a heavy fall, and I became agitated at what had occurred, lost all control of myself, and, to prevent her screaming and getting me into trouble, I caught her by the throat, and inthe struggle she was choked, and I threw her on the floor.

            I determined to do away with the body as best I could. I chopped the head from the body with the    assistance of a razor which I used to cut through the flesh afterwards. I also used the meat saw andthe carving knife to cut the body up with. I prepared the copper with water to boil the body toprevent identity; and as soon as I had succeeded in cutting it up I placed it in the copper and boiledit. I opened the stomach with the carving knife, and burned up as much of the parts as I could.

In her confession, she gave no mention of Mrs. Thomas's missing head.

Execution

Her execution took place three Sundays after sentencing on the morning of Tuesday, July 29, 1879.

Two newspaper reporters were in attendance to record the event. Inside her cell, Webster was being ministered to by FatherMcEnrey.

The governor entered and said “it is time” and she was led out between two male warders across the yard to the purpose-built execution chamber nicknamed the “Cold Meat Shed.”

Executioner William Marwood brought her to the double trap doors and tied leather straps around her waist, wrists and ankles.

As he placed the white hood over her head, Webster's last words were “Lord, have mercy upon me.”

A total of 134 men and only one woman, Kate Webster, were executed at Wandsworth Prison until the last hanging took place there in 1961. The Irish woman is listed in the hand written prison records as “Catherine Webster, interred 29/07/1879 in unmarked grave number 3.”

Notorious

The trial and execution caused a sensation on both sides of the Irish Sea.

Her sexual history, which included a string of male companions, suggested “promiscuity” which was abhorrent to respectable Victorian Britain but also served to heighten public interest in the case.

British newspapers variously described her as “gaunt, repellent, and trampish-looking” with “a criminal nature.” The Daily Telegraph said she was “a tall, strongly made woman of about 5 feet, 5 inches in height with sallow and much freckled complexion and large, prominent teeth.”  The Telegraph also claimed Webster had tried to sell two pots of lard or “best dripping” – made from Mrs. Thomas's boiled fat – to the landlady of a Richmond pub.

Dublin's  Freeman's Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser called the case “one of the most sensational and awful chapters in the annals of human wickedness.”

Newspapers also noted that the accused had only cried once during the trial – when her son was mentioned – which clearly meant that she had “absolutely no remorse for her crimes.”

Her attempts to implicate two innocent men in the murder caused outrage, while her “impersonation” of Mrs. Thomas provoked widespread public revulsion.

Within a few weeks of her arrest, Madame Tussaud's created a wax statue of Webster called “The Richmond Murderess” which remained on public display well into the 20^th century – alongside other notorious killers such as the evil Dr. Crippen.

Discovery of the missing head

When the Hole in the Wall pub near Mayfield Cottages closed in 2007, it was bought for redevelopment.

In October, 2010, workmen carrying out excavation uncovered a “dark circular object” which, on examination, proved to be a woman's skull. It had been buried beneath the foundations where the pub's stables had been.

Carbon dating carried out at Edinburgh University showed the skull was dated between 1650 and 1880. It had “low collagen levels, consistent with being boiled.” It also had fracture marks consistent with Webster's account of throwing Thomas down the stairs and choking her.

In July 2011, the West London coroner concluded that the skull was indeed that of Julia Martha Thomas.

A verdict of “unlawful killing” was recorded with the cause of death due to “asphyxiation and head injury.”

 The FBI’s raid on the Waco, Texas compound of Branch Davidian leader David Koresh on April 19, 1993 ended in total disaster with all 76 cult members dying in an inferno.

by Robert Walsh

 “Behold, the Lord will come with fire and the chariots will be with flaming torches. The rebukes of flames of fire.” (David Koresh misquoting Bible passage Isaiah 66:15 during the Waco siege.)

On February 28, 1993 Federal agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) arrived at the Mount Carmel compound in Waco, home of the Branch Davidian cult, to search for illegal weapons and arrest several leading members on suspicion of illegally converting semi-automatic AR-15 rifles into full-auto assault weapons. The raid involved 76 ATF agents and was one of the largest in ATF history. The raid should have been a surprise, but security was breached. Seeking a publicity coup the ATF had tipped off the media. A local reporter following the tip had asked a postal worker for directions to the compound and the postal worker happened to be the brother-in-law of cult leader David Koresh. Instead of mounting a raid, searching the compound and making arrests, ATF agents walked into a vicious firefight leaving four ATF agents and six Branch Davidians dead. The bungled raid started the longest stand-off in U.S. criminal history and ended disastrously on April 19, 1993. It also inspired Timothy McVeigh to commit the Oklahoma City bombing exactly two years later.

A Brief History of the Branch Davidians

The Branch Davidians formed in 1955 as a breakaway group from the Davidian Seventh Day Adventists, the Adventists themselves having split from the Seventh Day Adventist Church in 1930. Most of those joining the Davidian Seventh Day Adventists were “disfellowshipped” from the original Seventh Day Adventists for what were called “aberrant teachings,” “disfellowship” being similar to Catholic excommunication. This breakaway group was led by Victor Houteff, a Bulgarian immigrant who believed firmly in the second coming of Christ and that God’s final judgment was quickly approaching.

The splinter group found its home in Waco, Texas in 1935 with Houteff in control. During the 1930s membership grew steadily and the group established its own compound, farm and printing press to distribute Houteff’s self-published tracts for public consumption. When Houteff died in 1955 his wife

Florence took over. In 1957 the group moved to a larger compound they named “New Mount Carmel” after their original home. In 1959 the group encouraged members from all over the United States to sell their homes and businesses, summoning to the compound in time for Passover and a promised second coming in April. Around 900 people arrived, stayed for several days and, when the second coming didn’t happen, the gathering dispersed and the group splintered again. Several different factions, one led by George Roden, fought bitter legal battles for control of the compound, assets and funds. Roden’s group took control after a bitter factional feud.

Roden’s control lasted until his death in 1978 when his wife Lois took charge. During the 1970s a young Bible teacher named Vernon Howell joined the group. In 1985 Lois’s son George Roden Jr. took control. He soon found himself facing a rival faction led by Howell, now calling himself David Koresh. Roden expelled the Branch Davidians at gunpoint and they set up home in Palestine, Texas. In 1987 Koresh’s faction attempted to force its way into New Mount Carmel. After a tense stand-off resulting in an exchange of gunfire, both sides found themselves in court. Roden was jailed for contempt of court and later for the murder of group member Wayman Adair. He was committed to a psychiatric institution as a result. With Roden permanently out of commission, Koresh took legal control of New Mount Carmel by paying back taxes accumulated during Roden’s leadership. With his legal ownership and personal control fully secured, Koresh was in absolute command.

The original Adventists under Houteff had been pacifists.  George Roden Jr.’s leadership had been dictatorial, sometimes backed up by violence. The Branch Davidians under Koresh were committed, possibly fanatical devotees of Koresh’s unique brand of Christianity. Koresh firmly believed Armageddon was coming, ordering his followers to stockpile essential supplies for the coming Apocalypse. Needless to say, these supplies included considerable stockpiles of guns and ammunition. Members were expected to practice regularly with pistols, revolvers, shotguns, semi-automatic AK-47’s and AR-15 semi-automatic rifles. In line with their leader’s edicts many Davidians did so assiduously. Their stockpiling of weapons caught the eye of local police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

AR-15 Rifle

Possession of fully-automatic assault rifles was outlawed in 1986 by the Hughes Amendment to the Firearms Owners Protection Act, but owning semi-automatic rifles was still perfectly legal. The problem was that the semi-automatic AR-15 and AK-47 rifles owned by the Branch Davidians were easily converted into full-automatic weapons. The Branch Davidians had among their members Henry McMahon (who ran the Davidians’ “Mag Bag” gun dealership to raise funds for the group) and Paul Fatta (a legitimate firearms dealer registered with the federal government). The Davidians also legally traded guns all over Texas to raise funds. With their own thriving gun business they could easily obtain the parts needed to convert their AR-15’s and AK-47’s. The ATF suspected they were doing exactly that.

Owning parts needed to convert AR-15’s to full-automatic rifles wasn’t illegal, but actually converting them was. The ATF also received reports of noisy, regular bursts of full-auto gunfire heard coming from New Mount Carmel. The ATF was also contacted by a UPS driver who had tried to deliver a package to the compound. The package had accidentally broken open, revealing inert grenade casing, firearms, gun parts and gunpowder. Following that tip, the ATF put the compound under 24-hour surveillance, discreetly checking paperwork related to the group’s firearms trading. The ATF also infiltrated undercover agent Robert Rodriguez to gather evidence within the compound.

The ATF investigation, which began in July of 1992, uncovered enough evidence for a search warrant to be granted for New Mount Carmel and arrest warrants for leading Davidians David Koresh, Paul Fatta, Steve Schneider and Woodrow Kendrick.

A Disastrous Raid

ATF raid on compound

For two separate reasons, the ATF’s February 28, 1993 raid was doomed to failure even before it started. In the first instance, the ATF used bogus information in an attempt to secure military assistance under the provisions of the “War on Drugs” legislation for the raid.  The ATF falsely claimed – based on erroneous information provided by disgruntled ex-members – that the cult was operating a methamphetamine lab on the premises. There had been a meth lab at the compound prior to Koresh taking over, but Koresh had it dismantled and gave the equipment to the local sheriff for destruction. These facts caused the Special Forces commander attached to the raid to question the grounds for military co-operation. As a result the ATF was quickly restricted to using nearby Fort Hood as a training base and offered communications and medical support only.

The second gaffe was self-inflicted. In the hope of generating major positive publicity for the beleaguered ATF, agents tipped off local journalists that the raid was coming and when it would be made. A local TV reporter for KWTX-TV, sensing a scoop, asked a local postal worker for directions to the compound. The postal worker turned out to be Koresh’s brother-in-law who lost no time in telling Koresh everything he’d just heard. Surprise was essential to the ATF’s plan and surprise was now completely lost.

The ATF’s pre-raid problems didn’t end there. Undercover agent Robert Rodriguez had been a cult member for months, seemingly under a secure cover. Koresh now summoned Rodriguez and told him his cover had been blown for months. Rodriguez was allowed to leave, quickly informing his superiors that Koresh was expecting them. To many experts the raid would have already been hopelessly compromised and probably should have been dropped. The ATF pressed on and the agency’s luck went from bad to worse.

ATF agents raided New Mount Carmel on February 28 and a fierce battle commenced almost instantly. What should have been a fairly straightforward search-and-arrest operation became a major firefight leaving four ATF agents and six Davidians dead. It’s never been confirmed which side fired first, but there were already 10 bodies and many more followed. Even the three National Guard helicopters detailed to fly low and slow, distracting Davidians during the raid, arrived late and withdrew quickly after taking heavy ground fire. With no air support, armoured vehicles or heavy weapons available and after exchanging fire for nearly two hours, ATF agents withdrew, low on ammunition. The longest siege in American criminal history had begun. It would last another 51 days.

The FBI Takes Over

With Federal agents shot dead the case was immediately handed over to the FBI.  Anybody hoping the FBI would do better than the ATF’s was to be disappointed. The FBI site commander at Waco was Richard Rogers who had already taken enormous criticism for his handling of the Ruby Ridge stand-off in northern Idaho in 1992. That the FBI intended to take a tough stance became clear when Davidian David Schroder attempted to enter the compound, having been away at the time of the raid. Schroeder attempted entry with Woodrow Kendrick (one of the Davidians named on an arrest warrant) and Norman Allison. According to FBI snipers Schroeder brandished a pistol so they shot him dead, making him the seventh Davidian to die. Kendrick and Allison were arrested. (Later they would be acquitted in federal court of having aided and abetted the deaths of federal agents.)

The Standoff

The FBI’s handling of Waco, hampered from the start by bitter internal wrangling, also received heavy criticism. In 2006 British TV broadcaster Channel 4, in a co-production with American cable channel HBO, aired “Inside Waco” revealing the depth and bitterness of divisions between the negotiators and hardliners within the FBI. For the hardliners former Special Agent Jeff Jamar stated: “To say that they were staying in there because they were intimidated by Army vehicles circling the place, to me that’s nonsense. If they were intimidated, that’s fine.”

Former FBI negotiator Byron Sage, also present at Waco, still held the opposite view. Regarding the FBI’s increasingly aggressive tactics he stated: “Did it adversely impact on the negotiations? Yes, it did.” Sage was scathing in his criticism of the hard-line element, bluntly stating that their attitude and actions repeatedly caused unnecessary difficulties and undermined the negotiators in their efforts to resolve the situation peacefully.

So far the ATF raid had bungled their raid and the FBI operatives couldn’t agree among themselves about how best to handle the resulting standoff. Hardliners and negotiators clashed constantly. Negotiators accused hardliners of compromising very delicate negotiations by being too heavy-handed. Hardliners felt negotiation was increasingly futile and sought to force the Davidians to surrender by making their lives increasingly difficult.

 As the standoff progressed and negotiations became increasingly fractious, the hardliners progressively gained the upper hand. As a result the Davidians found their media access cut off and psychological warfare employed by the FBI became increasingly aggressive. Endless recordings of jets flying overhead, of rabbits being slaughtered, pop music and repetitive chanting were played at deafening volume to deprive the Davidians of sleep and gradually wear them down. The FBI also deployed armoured support in the form of nine Bradley armoured fighting vehicles equipped with CS gas launchers and five M728 Combat Engineer Vehicles to force entry to the compound and the buildings inside it. Two M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks were also despatched along with an M88 tank retriever to recover broken-down or damaged armoured vehicles.

At one point negotiators promised the Davidians that the armoured vehicles wouldn’t enter the compound. Shortly afterward the Davidians saw the armoured vehicles entering the compound They repeatedly drove over the grave of Peter Gent, a cult member buried at the compound, destroyed the perimeter fence, crushed the cult’s vehicles, destroyed two of the compound’s water towers and demolished a number of outbuildings.

It became clear to the Davidians that the hardliners were in control and the negotiators couldn’t actually keep their promises. Both the Davidians and the FBI’s own negotiators bitterly criticized the aggressive approach and provocative actions of the hardliners. The hardliners themselves, hoping to force a resolution rather than continue trying to negotiate one, were unmoved.

In spite of the heavy-handed approach of their colleagues negotiators did have some successes. During the first few days they managed to get a video camera into the compound along with food supplies in return for 19 children leaving the compound. The video was later broadcast nationally on the Christian Broadcasting Network. Concealed within milk cartons were miniature listening devices giving the FBI covert access to Koresh and his senior followers discussing tactics and strategy. Having been seriously wounded in the initial firefight, Koresh left most of the negotiating to his deputy Steve Schneider, but Koresh always retained the last word on decisions made.

The crisis dragged on. The negotiators tried to negotiate, the Davidians continued to hold out and FBI hardliners assumed increasing power. Relations between negotiators and Davidians became increasingly cynical while the FBI operatives fought increasingly bitterly among themselves. Koresh threw another spanner in the works when he agreed with negotiators to surrender in return for direct access to national media coverage. Koresh and his followers would broadcast across the nation on the Christian Broadcasting Network, provided they surrendered afterward. The broadcast was arranged and the Davidians got their publicity. Then Koresh broke the agreement. Reneging on the deal was disastrous for the negotiators and did nothing to help the Davidians themselves. It did plenty to bolster the influence of FBI hardliners who wanted to go in hard and heavy.

FBI commanders consulted then-Attorney General Janet Reno who in turn consulted President Clinton. The ultimate decision to break the siege by force lay with Clinton and, after discussions with Reno and senior FBI officials, the President agreed to have the standoff broken. The armoured vehicles would breach walls and pump CS gas into the main building, smoking out the Davidians. Loudspeakers would tell them that no armed assault was incoming and warn them not to open fire. The amount of gas pumped in would steadily increase for every two hours the Davidians refused to surrender.

The Siege of Waco

On April 19, 1993 the FBI made its move. Having already destroyed much of the compound, the FBI now cut off water and power supplies. The armoured vehicles moved in, breached the walls and started delivering large amounts of CS gas into the main building using M79 40mm grenade launchers firing M651 rounds into the breaches. It wasn’t long before the FBI ran low on gas rounds and requested the Texas Rangers to provide more. The rounds provided proved unusable as they were old-style pyrotechnic rounds producing sparks and flame as well as gas. They were an obvious fire hazard and totally unfit for the job.

Six hours after the assault began the Davidians were sheltering in a cinderblock room within the main building. The rest of the compound was either in ruins or occupied by law enforcement. More holes were punched in the walls by the Combat Engineer Vehicles and, according to the FBI, were intended as exits for any Davidians wanting to surrender. Nine came out and the remainder stayed within the building.

Around noon the fires started. Three fires erupted within the main building, simultaneously and in separate places. The surviving Davidians claimed they were started by the FBI either accidentally during the gas assault or deliberately to burn them out of the building. According to the FBI the Davidians deliberately started the fires themselves. It has never been confirmed how the fires started or whether they were accidental or deliberate. Either way, it made no difference. There were 76 Davidians left inside the building and they all died. Almost all of them died from suffocation and smoke inhalation, a few died when the building began collapsing around them. Two who died during the assault did so violently. They were David Koresh and his loyal deputy Steve Schneider.

Schneider had been Koresh’s loyal second-in-command throughout the standoff but, according to the FBI, they both died of gunshot wounds. Koresh had been shot in the head. Schneider’s autopsy showed he died with a pistol placed in his mouth. Schneider’s wound usually indicates a suicide while Koresh’s head wound was external. According to the FBI this indicates that Schneider, either against Koresh’s will or at his request, shot Koresh and then shot himself.

The Aftermath – Public Outrage

In the aftermath of the disastrous raid, FBI agents uncovered a staggering stockpile of weapons and munitions within the ruins of the burnt-out compound. According to a report from the U.S. Treasury Department, FBI agents found 305 firearms, including 46 fully automatic AK-47’s and modified AR-15’s, pistols, rifles, shotguns, two .50 caliber rifles with armour-piercing rounds, 1.9 million rounds of ammunition that had “cooked off” during the fire, hundreds of gun parts for converting semi-auto AK-47’s and AR-15’s to full-auto, over 200 inert rifle grenades that could have been converted to live grenades, hundreds of assorted pins, casings and safety arms for making hand grenades, Kevlar helmets, bulletproof vests and, most chilling of all, approximately 15 home-made silencers. Former Davidian Donald Bunds later admitted that he had made the silencers under the orders of David Koresh.

Janet Reno

After the siege, conflict arose between Reno and the FBI over the reasons for the assault. According to Reno, the FBI told her that there was evidence of children being physically and sexually abused within the compound before and during the siege. According to the FBI they offered no such evidence. President Clinton had apparently been told by Reno that the FBI wanted to end the standoff as soon as possible, that the standoff was costing $1 million a week to police, that negotiations had irretrievably broken down and that Koresh’s control over his followers made it far more likely that the Davidians would opt for a last stand or mass suicide if their leader ordered them to do so. The Jonestown massacre of 1978 still haunted the Federal Government. Reno changed her version of events after the FBI denied advising her of child abuse during the standoff. Reno would later claim that Linda Thompson’s “Unorganised Militia of the United States” had started preparing to arrive at Waco in large numbers, either to join the Davidians or attack them.

According to Clinton, he initially favored simple standoff tactics without a deadline. Just starving them out would have been his preferred solution. Clinton favored this strategy because it successfully ended a previous standoff in his native Arkansas in 1985. Extremist militia group “The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord” had peacefully surrendered in 1985 after being besieged, but not assaulted, and Clinton wanted to avoid a potential disaster. What seemingly swung his opinion were the disputed reports of rampant child abuse given to him by Reno. Clinton now approved the gas assault, albeit reluctantly.

Oklahoma City

Timothy McVeigh

There was also another chilling postscript.

Michelle Rauch was a student journalist at Southern Methodist University during the standoff and spent her spring break covering the story. Looking for a new angle, she chanced upon a young man who had come to view the compound and watch events unfold. During their interview he expressed anti-government and anti-gun control views, bitterly criticized the authorities and their handling of the standoff and stated that, without decisive action, the United States would sleepwalk into a socialist dictatorship. Rauch finished her interview and snapped a couple of photographs as he surveyed the scene from a nearby hillside.

His name was Timothy McVeigh. While on Death Row at Terre Haute Federal Correctional Facility after the Oklahoma City bombing, McVeigh wrote to a local newspaper in his home town of Buffalo, New York. Part of his letter to the Buffalo News included the words:

“Everything that Waco implies was right on the forefront of my thoughts. That sort of guided my path for the next couple of years.”

Exactly two years after the Waco stand-off ended McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and leaving over 680 injured.

The death of former White House Press Secretary James Brady on August 4, 2014, -- grievously wounded during John Hinckley's attempted assassination of President Reagan in 1981 -- was ruled a murder by the Virginia Medical Examiner.

by Robert Walsh

“Honey, I forgot to duck…”– President Reagan after his attempted assassination by John Hinckley, Jr. on March 30, 1981.

“Guns are neat little things, aren’t they? They can kill extraordinary people with very little effort…” – John Hinckley Jr., President Reagan’s would-be assassin.

On August 4, 2014, former White House Press Secretary and gun-control advocate James Brady died as a result of injuries sustained when John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981. Brady’s death has since been ruled a homicide by the Virginia Medical Examiner’s office, raising questions about whether Hinckley could be tried for murder if he is ever officially considered fit to stand trial. Brady, 73, died at his home. He had been partially paralyzed and in a wheelchair since the assassination attempt, and his speech was slurred.

Hinckley had attempted to assassinate the President to impress actress Jodie Foster, with whom he’d become obsessed after seeing the Robert de Niro film Taxi Driver. Hinckley had also been inspired by the case of Arthur Bremer, who attempted to assassinate Alabama Governor George Wallace in 1972.

The two cases have much in common. Both Hinckley and Bremer were unbalanced, obsessive individuals. Both men were insignificant nobodies, the very antithesis of their targets. Both were able to stalk their intended victims for some time without being stopped and to attack before being rendered harmless by the bodyguards. Both were able to easily obtain the firearms to commit their crimes and both were regarded as insignificant and posing no threat until they proved otherwise.

Hinckley's Background

John Hinckley Jr.

Born on May 29, 1955 in Ardmore, Oklahoma, Hinckley came from a wealthy Oklahoma oil family. His obsessive tendencies began at an early age and continued as he grew. In early adulthood he developed an obsession with John Lennon (himself murdered by obsessive fan Mark Chapman, recently refused parole once again.)

Like many stalkers Hinckley’s home life was troubled. He came from money but, due to his increasingly bitter relationship with his father, seldom saw much from the family coffers. John Hinckley Sr. was increasingly frustrated by his son’s tendency to not settle on anything or to apply himself. His son had seemingly failed at or dropped out of several careers and managed to show similarly disappointing results at college. His existence seemed to consist of trying and failing at one grand scheme after another while occasionally scrounging money from his parents when they were prepared to give him any.

He also obsessively collected books on true crime, especially books covering serial killers, spree killers, hijackers and assassins. He was a perennial underachiever, intelligent, but simply disinclined to become his own person and take full responsibility for his own life.

Life Imitating Art

Robert De Nero in Taxi Driver

Art imitated life, as the character Travis Bickle so ably portrayed by Robert de Niro was in part based on Arthur Bremer. John Hinckley was about to make life imitate art. To Foster he made unsolicited phone calls and mailed her letters and poems. Hinckley went so far as to make unwanted visits to her dorm at Yale University, even signing up for a course there himself to be near her.

His attempts to gain Jodie Foster’s attention had come to nothing. Foster wanted nothing to do with him but, Hinckley’s deluded mind thought that, by becoming nationally known himself, he would somehow become her equal and therefore she would change her mind. The fact that the campus police at Yale had been warned to keep a close eye out for him, that the dean of Yale had been forwarded some of the letters Hinckley had sent to Foster and that she simply wanted him to stay away from her didn’t enter his thinking.

Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver

Hinckley first chose President Carter as his target but switched to Reagan when the former actor defeated Carter in November of 1980. He chose a president as his target simply because he wanted the maximum possible public profile.

In a diary he kept until several months before his attempt he noted that Arthur Bremer had shot George Wallace after giving up on his attempts to assassinate President Richard Nixon. He told authorities he wrote that he had no desire to "do a Bremer" and settle for less than the most high-profile target possible, especially as Bremer had disappeared into obscurity while Hinckley wanted to be remembered. Ironically, for someone who seems to have looked down on Arthur Bremer for settling for a lesser target, it was Bremer’s keeping a diary that inspired Hinckley to keep his own.

In late-1980 he began to actively stalk President Carter with the full intention of assassinating him.

It didn’t run smoothly. On October 2, 1980 Hinckley stood within pistol range of President Carter, but decided not to shoot

One week later he was arrested at Nashville International Airport in possession of three handguns and spare ammunition in his carryon bag. The guns were confiscated and Hinckley, inexplicably, was released. One of the first things he did was to destroy his diary and commit its contents to memory, knowing fully that if any police officer had flicked through it he would have been instantly held and probably spent years in prison. Not only was Hinckley released, but he was able to replace his lost guns with a .22-caliber Rohm RG-14 revolver and ammunition, bought over the counter within hours of his release. The ammunition included a number of "Devastator" bullets made by Bingham, Ltd of Atlanta, Georgia.

Devastator Bullets

Devastators are effectively explosive bullets, consisting of a standard .22-caliber long cartridge containing small aluminium and lead azide explosive charges designed to explode on contact. When fired the lead azide slams back into the canister and comes forward as the bullet hits and slows down. This basic law of physics causes the bullet to shatter, massively increasing the kinetic energy transferred from the bullet to its target. Even a round as small as a .22 can do enormous damage when made in such a way.

The revolver was of the type commonly known as a "Saturday Night Special." It was small, easily concealed, with a short barrel and a small calibre but, using expanding bullets, the small .22-caliber bullets could inflict damage out of all proportion to their size. If the weapon had a longer barrel (Hinckley’s gun had a barrel of less than two inches) then the velocity of the bullet would have been faster and its effect almost certainly fatal.

The Washington Hilton

Washington Hilton

Hinckley arrived by Greyhound bus in Washington on March 28, 1981 and checked into Room 312 of the Park Central Hotel, only two blocks from the White House and across the street from the Secret Service headquarters. In his pocket was the RG-14 loaded with the six Devastator expanding bullets. The following morning he read in the newspaper that Reagan was scheduled to give a luncheon address to the AFL-CIO at the Washington Hilton the next day.

On March 30, Hinckley positioned himself at the rear entrance of the Washington Hilton in the roped off area for spectators 15 feet from the presidential limo and waited for his chance. He got it at 2:25 p.m. when the President emerged and waived to the crowd with a broad smile on his face. Raising his gun as the President approached the limo, Hinckley fired all six rounds in less than two seconds.

The result was instant chaos. His first bullet hit Press Secretary James Brady in the head, leaving Brady face-down on the sidewalk. As he turned to protect the President, the second bullet hit Washington, D.C. Police Officer Thomas Delahanty in the back of his neck . With his last clear shot at Reagan, Hinckley fired the third bullet over his head while Special Secret Service Agent in charge Jerry Parr pushed Reagan into the backseat of the limosine. The fourth bullet struck Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy in the abdomen as he spread himself over Reagan to shield him. The fifth bullet was repelled by the limosine's  bulletproof glass. The final bullet ricocheted off the limosine and pierced Reagan's underarm, grazing a rib and lodging in his lung, an inch from his heart. The wound was potentially fatal. Had Hinckley’s bullet travelled a fraction of an inch to one side then President Reagan would have joined Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy on the list of U.S. presidents assassinated while in office.

Amid the chaos Hinckley was swiftly pinned down and disarmed before being thrown into a police car and driven away at high speed.

George Washington University Hospital

Ronald Reagan recovers at GW Hospital

Reagan did not know he had been shot. His ribs hurt but he thought it was from being shoved face down in the back of the limosine. The initial plan to take him back to the White House was aborted when Secret Service agent Jerry Parr, inside the limousine, was first to realize that the President had been shot. The 70-year-old was complaining of chest pains, breathing difficulties, and coughing up blood. President Reagan was rushed to George Washington University Hospital, two miles from the scene of the crime.

The President spent nearly four hours in surgery and several weeks recovering before being anywhere near healthy again. The bullet in his lung had failed to explode. The only bullet that did was the one that hit James Brady. (Surgeons wearing bulletproof vests removed the bullet from Officer Delahanty's neck on April 2.) Delahanty and Agent McCarthy also made full recoveries.

Insanity Defense

The consequences of Hinckley’s actions were far-reaching and long-lasting. On June 21, 1982 he successfully pled insanity under the laws of the time, enraging the American public in the process. This collective outrage led to the Insanity Defense Reform Act, passed into law in 1984. The act reversed the burden of proof in insanity defense, making it the responsibility of defenders to prove their clients were legally insane where it had always been the responsibility of the prosecution to prove that they were not.

 Expert witnesses were now barred from directly testifying as to the sanity (or otherwise) of a defendant. The act was challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court, but was ruled constitutional in the case of United States vs Freeman. Three states, Utah, Montana and Idaho, abolished the insanity defense.

Hinckley Confined to St. Elizabeth's

And what of John Hinckley Jr.? He was sent to the St. Elizabeth psychiatric hospital for compulsory treatment and remains there today. He’s been granted a number of short stays at the family home and his lawyers regularly petition for greater freedoms and eventual release. The most recent ruling allowing him greater liberty came in December, 2013 despite ongoing doubts in some quarters. It seems as though the doubters do have some strong reasons for wanting to keep him where he is.

Hinckley at one point told psychiatrists, when asked if he was still a danger to Jodie Foster, that:

“Not now. If released I would go the other way but in one or two years if things go on the same, no response from her, then I’ll kill her.”

In 1983, Hinckley made an unsuccessful suicide attempt. In 1988 the Washington Post ran a story that Hinckley had written to serial killer Ted Bundy, then awaiting execution. In his letters Hinckley was reported to have expressed sympathy for Bundy’s plight. He had also written to Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, herself jailed for attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford and had also asked for Charles Manson’s prison mailing address. A search of his room at St. Elizabeth’s also uncovered more than 20 photographs of Jodie Foster.

In 2011, further doubts emerged as a result of one of Hinckley’s furloughs. His mother had driven him to see a movie and left him outside the theater before driving home. Instead, Hinckley went straight to a nearby bookstore where he spent a couple of hours flicking through books on true crime, especially books on assassins and particularly looking for references to his own crime. He didn’t know that he was under the covert surveillance of the Secret Service, the agency charged with protecting current and former presidents from assassination. What particularly disturbed them when Hinckley was questioned about this unauthorized absence was his having thoroughly studied the movies so he could try and convince anyone questioning him that he’d actually seen the films in question. Had investigators not had solid evidence that he hadn’t been to the movies as he claimed, Hinckley might well have fooled them.

Hinckley’s attempts to prove himself sane enough to be fully released might prove counter-productive. Given that James Brady’s death has recently been ruled a homicide, there exists a question of whether a sane Hinckley might face murder charges. There are also the cases of Delahanty, McCarthy and President Reagan to consider as all were seriously injured in the attack. If Hinckley is sane enough to release, is he by default sane enough to prosecute? If so, three charges of attempted murder and one of murder might await him. That particular legal controversy looks set to run for some time before a definitive answer is reached in the courts.

The Brady Act

James Brady with Bill Clinton as he signs the Brady Act into law.

James Brady became an advocate of gun control, successfully lobbying for what became known as the Brady Act. The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (to give it its full name) passed into law on November 11, 1993 during the tenure of President Clinton. It came into effect on February 28, 1994.

From then on, gun buyers had to pass stricter background checks when buying from federally licensed dealers, makers or importers. The act was, however, subject to certain exceptions. Firearms defined as curios or relics by a municipal, state or federal museum curator are exempt, meaning that you could buy a handgun used by John Dillinger without such checks, but not an exactly similar weapon of the same brand and calibre. If a curator certifies a firearm as being of historic interest or that a large part of their monetary value comes from its association with an historical event, period or individual then it is exempt. At the bill’s signing, Brady expressed his attitude in honest and pungent terms:

“Twelve years ago my life was changed forever by a disturbed young man with a gun. Until that time I hadn’t thought much about gun control or the need for gun control. Maybe if I had I wouldn’t have been stuck with these damn wheels.”

James Brady was strongly supported by his wife, Sarah, in his gun control campaigning. He was also heavily opposed by pro-gun organizations such as the National Rifle Association (NRA). In a landmark court case, Printz v. United States, the NRA argued that the entire Brady Act was unconstitutional and demanded it be voided. The NRA lost, but not without one significant gain. The act itself was upheld, but the clause making it mandatory for state and local law enforcement to carry out the background checks was ruled unconstitutional. It became non-mandatory, so background checks would now be carried out at the discretion of the agencies concerned. 

Doreen Heskett 

When the badly decomposed remains of 5-year-old Doreen Heskett were discovered in a cow pasture eight months after she was abducted from a busy street, the citizens of Napa discovered that living amongst them was a sexual predator responsible for child abduction and murder.  While parents whispered rumors of police cover-ups, children became fearful of a faceless boogieman authorities were never able to unmask.

by Tobi Shields

 The year was 1963 and Napa County had yet to become a tourist trap of wine salons and congested city streets.  The population, an estimated 22,000, was predominantly white, working class families.  Parents allowed their children to walk to school and play outside unsupervised, and children lived without fear of kidnapping, as the potential dangers posed by the predatory sex offender had yet to enter public awareness.

In March 1963, the Heskett family lived at 2309 Main Street.  Marvin Heskett, at home recovering from his second heart attack, worked as a salesperson while wife Dorothy stayed at home and cared for their nine children ranging in age from 17 years to five months.

Doreen Disappears

Monday, March 25, 1963, was a routine day of school and play for 5-year-old Doreen Heskett.  Dressed in a turquoise blue jumper with red decorative stitching on the shoulder straps, a white blouse, stockings and blue tennis shoes, she walked with her siblings approximately one half mile to Lincoln Elementary School for her morning kindergarten class.  When class recessed at 11:30 a.m., the little blue-eyed blonde returned home to eat lunch with her mother and younger siblings.  Fellow classmate Linda Ford arrived at the Heskett residence shortly before 2 p.m., to play with her new friend.

With her husband out of town, Dorothy left her eldest son and daughter in charge of the younger children while she visited the grocery store.  When Dorothy returned, Doreen immediately approached her mother with the request to walk to Linda’s house.  Assuming Linda Ford lived nearby, Dorothy granted Doreen permission.  Unbeknownst to Dorothy, the Fords had recently moved to a new home on Sherman Avenue, approximately one mile to the north of the Heskett residence.

The girls set off for the Ford residence at 4 p.m.  Linda rode her bicycle with the smaller Doreen seated behind her.  The most likely route taken by the girls would have been north down Main Street; left at the corner of Main and Pueblo Avenue; right at Pueblo and Jefferson Street; north down Jefferson to the first street on the left, Sheridan Drive; and left onto Sherman Avenue.  It probably took the girls 15 minutes to reach Sherman.

Mrs. Ford cut the play date short and asked her daughter to escort Doreen home at 4:40 p.m.  Instead of walking Doreen home as her mother had requested, Linda parted company with her friend at the intersection of Jefferson and Pueblo.  At the time, Jefferson Street was a major thoroughfare of the city.  Then only a two-way street, it stretched approximately five miles in a straight line north from Trower Avenue to just beyond the intersection of West Imola to the south where it ended at Earl Stewart’s pasture.

When Doreen continued walking south on Jefferson, instead of east down Pueblo to Main, Linda called out to her friend that she was walking in the wrong direction.  Doreen replied that she wanted to go that way and proceeded to walk south, past the Union Oil bulk gasoline plant toward Napa Union High School. 

As dinnertime approached, Dorothy Heskett realized that Doreen had yet to return home.  At 5 p.m., she began searching her Main Street neighborhood, expecting to see Doreen in front of a house playing with Linda.  Two hours later, unable to find Doreen, she returned home to report her daughter missing to police.  The Napa Police Department logged her call at 7:15 p.m. After a search of the Heskett residence, responding officers ordered a door-to-door canvas of the neighborhood.

Without a clue to the child’s whereabouts, Chief of Police Sherwood Munk contacted the Marin County Sheriff’s Department to request bloodhound assistance.  In recent years, Deputy Michael McLean and his personally trained scent hounds had garnered media attention due to their high success rate of locating murdered and missing persons in the North Bay. 

An hour and a half after receiving Munk’s call, Deputy McLean and his bloodhound Brandy were in Napa.  The bloodhound picked up Doreen’s scent outside the Ford residence and followed it south down Jefferson to the crossing signal located in front of Napa Union High School.  There the trail came to an abrupt end. 

Chief Munk informed the local sheriff’s office and California Highway Patrol unit that he had a possible abduction.  An all-points bulletin broadcast from the Napa Police Department and Napa County Sheriff’s Office catapulted the case to a statewide effort by law enforcement.  Police departments in neighboring states and major cities received a poster bearing a photograph and description of the missing child.  Chief Munk kept Doreen in the public eye by asking newspapers to publish her photo and description with instructions for readers to clip the article for future reference.  Television and radio also featured news coverage of the search, informing neighboring counties of the urgency of the situation.

Thousands of citizens of Napa and surrounding counties contributed to the search.  Local service stations donated gasoline and oil to over 80 radio-equipped cars patrolling the streets.  Homemakers provided hot meals to the volunteers at search headquarters and offered babysitting services to the mothers volunteering in the search.

For five days, county and state agencies aided police in widening the search, eventually covering 100 square miles.  While off-duty law enforcement officers and firefighters from other jurisdictions volunteered their time to the foot search, city crews accessed wells, septic tanks and sewer mains.  Military personnel from Hamilton and Travis Air Force Bases scoured fields while their helicopters conducted aerial searches.

Theories as to what became of Doreen differed among local law enforcement agencies.  After two days without a ransom demand, Chief Munk ruled out the possibility that monetary gain was the motive behind the kidnapping and ordered his officers to question the nearly 100 sex offenders residing within the county.  Officers with the sheriff’s department were of the opinion that Doreen was still in the area, injured from a fall into a hole or a well.  While Chief Munk alerted surrounding agencies to be on the lookout for his kidnap victim, Sheriff Claussen used the local media to direct citizens to search their properties for the missing child.

As for Marvin and Dorothy Heskett, they too preferred to believe that their daughter was alive.  Perhaps not wanting to acknowledge the latest theory that a sex offender was responsible for her daughter’s disappearance, Dorothy had conceived a scenario in which a childless woman had abducted Doreen to raise as her own.  Marvin, on the other hand, trusted the intuition of Chief Munk and thought his daughter’s willingness to talk to people might have contributed to her abduction.  While both parents had cautioned Doreen not to talk to strangers, and if one should offer her a ride, to go to the nearest house and ask for help, the little girl had remained trustful and friendly.

Napans were fearful.  Prior to the disappearance of Doreen, the community was virtually unaware of the prevalence of child molestation by strangers.  The local newspaper would occasionally print an article announcing the arrest or conviction of a man accused of child molestation, but most often than not, such persons escaped the glare of the media.  That all changed when Doreen disappeared.  Front-page articles in the Napa Register alerted residents to the perverts in their midst by including the name, occupation, and address of every arrestee accused of child molestation.

Spurred by a reward fund created by local radio station KVON, daily reports of potential sightings of Doreen flooded the switchboards at the Napa County Police Department and Napa County Sheriff’s Office.  While the majority proved false, three reports from local citizens claiming to have seen Doreen on Jefferson Street that fateful afternoon proved useful to police. The distribution manager of the Union Oil bulk gasoline plant reported seeing a little blond girl walking south on Jefferson.  He recalled hearing another little girl yell to her friend that she was walking in the wrong direction.  During the second day of the search, a woman reported seeing a girl fitting the description of Doreen standing near the traffic signal in front of the Napa Union High School campus late Monday afternoon.  She saw the girl run away from the street, toward the school, as if scared by the traffic.          

A third sighting placed Doreen three miles south of the high school.  Several young men employed at the service stations located at the intersection of Jefferson and Imola Avenue reported seeing a young girl run across busy Imola at 5:45 p.m.  The young men all described the child as blond-haired and wearing a blue dress with matching suspenders.  They lost sight of the girl after she ran toward the River Park Estates construction barricade located at the end of South Jefferson.  In case Doreen had wandered into one of the fields between South Jefferson and the Napa River, Chief Munk ordered another foot search of the area.  To rule out the possibility that Doreen reached the water and drowned, local scuba divers checked the river and sloughs.  Days later, Undersheriff Gardner joined Hamilton AFB aviators for a low survey of the housing development and surrounding fields.

Described by the Oakland Tribune as one of the most massive hunts ever staged in California, the five-day search concluded on Saturday, March 30, 1963.  An estimated 3,000 people volunteered that day making it the most dramatic attempt to find a child in Napa history according to the evening edition of the Napa Register.  At nightfall volunteers assembled in the grandstands behind the National Guard Armory where Undersheriff Gardner thanked them for their tireless search efforts and donations to the KVON reward fund that had exceeded $5,000.

Investigating a Case without Leads

Desperate to find that one critical clue that would break the case, Chief Munk reached out to the State Department’s Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation (CII) in Sacramento to request the assistance of an investigator skilled in kidnap and missing person cases.  In early April, Special Agent Sidney Jones came to Napa and interviewed every person questioned by police in the initial hours of the investigation.  Back at his Sacramento office, he ran background checks on every name in the voluminous case file.  Jones also ran criminal background checks on 290 registered sex deviates in Napa, Solano and Sonoma counties.

Chief Munk assigned three officers to the Heskett case full time.  Assistant Chief Blair, Detective Sherman Schulte and Juvenile Officer Earl Randol investigated potential sightings and possible leads from around the North Bay.  Several jurisdictions, including San Jose and Petaluma, extended the courtesy of allowing Napa detectives to question suspects arrested for attempted abductions and molestations of young girls.

Some residents of Napa theorized that police had been unable to locate Doreen because her parents were involved in her disappearance and withholding information from investigators.  However, this was not the case.  Police had interviewed Marvin and Dorothy Heskett early in the investigation and neither parent had exhibited behavior indicative of deception.  In fact, both parents had openly discussed their personal lives and allowed police to search their residence on more than one occasion.  In order to quash the rumors, both parents agreed to undergo polygraph examinations.  Chief Munk announced in the April 18, 1963, issue of the Napa Register that the test results showed both parents were truthful and not involved in the disappearance of their daughter.

At the suggestion of Marvin and Dorothy Heskett, Chief Munk asked Los Angeles-based medium Lotte Von Strahl to examine the case.  Chief Munk and Detective Randol personally showed Von Strahl the route Doreen walked before she disappeared.  The self-professed psychic viewed mug shots of convicted sex offenders but failed to sense a connection to missing Doreen.  Before she left Napa, Von Strahl visited the Heskett home where she received a photo and lock of Doreen’s hair to aid her psychic investigation.

Desperate to know what became of their daughter, the Hesketts made a public plea to her abductor in the September 16, 1963, issue of the Napa Register.  Written by Marvin Heskett, the statement addressed the pain that his family had endured in the past six months as they imagined Doreen murdered and abandoned in some remote location.  The family did not wish any vengeance upon the person responsible; their only wish was to recover the remains of their family member for a proper burial.  While their public plea did not result in its intended outcome, the Hesketts did receive several letters of encouragement from concerned citizens.

Remains Recovered

On the morning of Thursday, November 21, 1963, Earl Stewart stumbled across the skeletal remains of a child in his South Napa cow pasture.  Police were baffled by the location as they had paid particular attention to the field due to its proximity to the South Jefferson/Imola intersection, the last location of a possible sighting of Doreen.  Undersheriff Gardner had participated in an aerial search of the field while law enforcement officers and volunteers had combed the field on three separate occasions.

During their initial observation of the remains, investigators noticed some important details.  There was a gaping hole in the skull; the missing portion lay about a foot from the body.  The body was face down; the right arm under the body, the left arm outstretched with the hand clasped together.  Despite the advanced decomposition of the body, the clothing was intact and only slightly faded.  Investigators theorized Doreen was the victim of a sex crime as the child’s panties were pulled down to her knees.  Missing were Doreen’s stockings and tennis shoes.

Various specialists examined the remains throughout the next eight months.  First, Napa pathologist Houghton Gifford and coroner Charles E. Burchell studied the bones at the pathology lab at Queen of the Valley Hospital.  Gifford found the condition of the remains consistent with a body exposed to the elements for eight months, the length of time Doreen was missing.  At the request of Napa County District Attorney James D. Boitano, renowned criminologist Dr. Paul L. Kirk assisted police in the investigation.  As head of the criminology department at the University of California at Berkeley, Kirk had extensive experience in forensic science and microscopy. 

Prime Suspect           

Confident that Doreen was murdered, Chief Munk focused on the likeliest of suspects: adult male sex offenders with a predilection for female children.  Since their initial questioning of local registered sex offenders in April, police investigators had regarded six as possible suspects.

One particular suspect, Claude Ray Jr., eventually became the prime suspect.  Ray had a history of molesting prepubescent female children.  In 1957, he served a one-year sentence in county jail for committing a lewd and lascivious act upon a 7-year-old girl. 

During the course of the investigation, police discovered information that placed the convicted pedophile in close proximity to Doreen Heskett.  At the time of Doreen’s disappearance, Ray worked as a laborer on the Ghisletta Ranch, property that adjoined that of Earl Stewart.  The Ray family resided in a small house on Lincoln Avenue, within sight of Napa Union High School and three blocks from the Heskett family.  Due to their residential location, the Ray children attended Lincoln Elementary School, the youngest daughter a classmate of Doreen.

Questioned within 48 hours of the abduction, Ray provided an alibi that Assistant Chief of Police Jack Blair was unable to disprove. Eight months later, when police recovered the remains of Doreen Heskett, Ray was again brought into the police department for questioning. Repeating his earlier alibi, Ray failed to convince Detective Earl Randol of his innocence. Unable to make an arrest without an eyewitness account or physical evidence that tied Ray to the abduction or murder of Doreen, Detective Randol was forced to cut his suspect loose.

Ruled a Homicide

The year 1964 brought disappointing news for investigators.  In late March, a year after Doreen’s disappearance, D.A. Boitano officially announced that the examinations, as conducted by criminologist Dr. Paul L. Kirk and pathologist Dr. Houghton Gifford, were inconclusive.  The badly decomposed condition of the body made it impossible to determine if the fractures present in many of the bones had resulted prior to death or as a result of trampling by the cattle that grazed in the field.  Kirk theorized that the discovery of the body three miles from the location where Doreen was last seen, coupled with the position of her underwear, were indicative of foul play.  In his final assessment of the case, Kirk determined the cause of death as homicide.

The final ruling in the matter of how Doreen Heskett met her death came in August.  Before a panel of nine jurors, investigators outlined the circumstances of Doreen’s disappearance and the eventual recovery of her remains eight months later.  Information gleaned from the autopsy revealed a perimortem (at or near the time of death) injury to the jaw.  Jurors officially ruled the death of 5-year-old Doreen Heskett a homicide.

A Suspect Kills

On the morning of Monday, October 4, 1965, Claude Ray Jr., drove to the Mendocino coast with his two youngest daughters, 9-year-old Jeanette and 7-year-old Renay.  Estranged from his wife, Ray had offered to drive the girls to school in order to spend some time with them.  Despite her husband’s recent threats to kill the children if she followed through with divorce proceedings, Mrs. Ray allowed her two youngest daughters to leave with their father that morning. 

When the school called to inform her of the absences, Mrs. Ray chose not to call police until she spoke with her husband.  When Ray arrived at his wife’s apartment later that afternoon, he claimed that he had dropped both girls off at school that morning, and then proceeded to drive to Mendocino to inquire about a job.  Mrs. Ray then phoned police to report her two daughters missing.   

When Detective Sergeant Earl Randol responded to the call, he immediately recognized Claude Ray Jr. as the prime suspect in the Heskett case.  With time of the essence, Randol grilled Ray on the route he drove to Mendocino.  Ray admitted that he had not inquired about a job, but rather drove along the coast pondering his marital problems.  Ray cast further suspicion upon himself when he voiced his concern that a sex fiend had kidnapped his daughters and they had met the same fate as the little girl found in the hayfield.

That afternoon, two dozen deputy sheriffs and volunteers aided police in a search of the area surrounding Westwood Elementary School.  Napa Police Department broadcasted an all-points bulletin to police agencies throughout California.  Randol informed law enforcement in Mendocino County that two Napa girls were missing and possibly met with foul play in their jurisdiction.  Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office immediately launched its own search of the area Claude Ray claimed to have driven on October 4. 

On October 10, six days after the girls disappeared, a man out scouting seashells with his family discovered the body of Renay Ray at Schooner Gulch, two miles south of Point Arena in Mendocino County.  The body was clothed in a pink sweater and gray wool jumper.  A white ankle sock and black Mary Jane shoe were missing from the left foot.  Also missing were the child’s white cotton underpants.  The Mendocino county coroner noted a large welt over the right eye and another that stretched from the bridge of the nose to the upper lip.  An autopsy revealed that the child was sexually assaulted prior to death or shortly thereafter.  Observing bruises around the neck, the coroner determined cause of death as manual strangulation.  The lungs, absent of water, supported the theory that Renay had been thrown into the ocean after death.

Mendocino County Sheriff Reno H. Bartolomie directed Sergeant Randol to arrest Claude Ray Jr., on the suspicion of murder and deliver him to the county jail in Ukiah for booking.  As Randol transported his prisoner, members of the Air Force and Coast Guard searched the stretch of beach between Gualala and Point Arena for the body of Jeanette Ray. After two weeks of combing the beaches and county roads failed to produce a clue to the whereabouts of the missing child, Sheriff Bartolomie, resigned to the fact that Jeanette had been swept out to sea, called off the search.

In Napa, D.A. Boitano and Assistant Police Chief Blair informed the press that detectives planned to question Claude Ray Jr., in relation to the Heskett case, as there were similarities between the cases that warranted further investigation.  However, detectives were unable to uncover any new information that might link Ray to the unsolved murder.

Ray Sentenced to Life in Prison

Mendocino County Superior Court found Claude Ray Jr., guilty of the first-degree murder of his daughter, Renay, on January 27, 1966.  Authorities were unable to charge him with the murder of his daughter Jeanette as their search had failed to recover a body.  Two days after his murder conviction, Ray received a sentence of life imprisonment. On July 11, 1983, he committed suicide by hanging himself in his cell.

Renay Ray is interred at Tulocay Cemetery in Napa.  The inscription on the headstone reads, “My precious daughters, Renay M. Ray, July 10, 1958-October 4, 1965; In Loving Memory of Jeanette L. Ray.”  Three rows to the north lay the headstone of another little girl who lost her life to a depraved murderer.  Her headstone simply reads “Doreen Heskett, 1957-1963.”

A Fifty-Year-Old Cold Case

For 47 years, the Doreen Heskett case remained unsolved and virtually forgotten as Napa investigators focused their attentions on new, solvable cases. The case resurfaced in late 2010 when Napa County received a $500,000 federal grant for the funding of a cold case unit. 

Comprised of Napa Police Detective Todd Shulman and Napa County Sheriff’s Office Detective Pat McMahon, the two-man cold case unit reviewed 39 unsolved homicide and sexual assault cases, the oldest case being that of Doreen Heskett.  In the hopes of locating foreign DNA, detectives submitted the tattered remnants of the clothing worn by Doreen on March 25, 1963, to the Department of Justice criminal lab in Sacramento.  In June 2012, the federal grant expired and detectives disbanded the cold case unit.  As of this writing, there has yet to be a public announcement of the DNA results.

During the 18 months that the cold case unit was in operation, the Napa Register published several articles related to the Heskett case. Comments posted to the online edition of the newspaper reveal suspicions passed down through generations.  Napans who were children during the time of Doreen’s disappearance revealed an old rumor that the “good ol’ boys” of Napa had concealed the crime. Other comments addressed the long-standing question of whether searchers could have failed to locate the body in the hay-covered field, or whether someone familiar with the property had placed the remains there much later.  These suspicions are still evident today 50 years after Doreen Heskett tragically lost her life to a vicious child murderer who then dumped her in a cow pasture.

In early September world media splashed the headline that Jack the Ripper had finally been identified by amateur sleuth, Englishman Russell Edwards. The latter, in his book, Naming Jack the Ripper, identified Jack the Ripper as a Polish Jew named Aaron Kosminski. However, our intrepid reporter, Marilyn Z. Tomlins, says Kosminski could not have been Jack the Ripper. 

By Marilyn Z. Tomlins

In London during the fall of 1888, it was cold and wet with thick fog descending over the narrow dimly-lit streets, alleys and squares. The weather, however, did not make life for the hundreds of thousands, most of them immigrants, living in London’s Whitechapel district, harder than it already was. For the majority of them unemployed or working at menial jobs for up to 18 hours a day for a weekly wage of five pennies, and living sometimes up to 12 in an unheated room without running water, or living in insalubrious lodging houses, the weather was their least concern.

Survival was what was on the minds of the immigrants, and this was so especially for the women, because at that time the men of Whitechapel considered a woman no different than their other "chattels" -- furniture, carts and horses for example --  and domestic violence was a common occurrence. Furthermore, as for many women prostitution was the only means of survival, they faced an added danger: being beaten up or being slashed with a knife by the men who paid them tuppence (two pennies) for satisfying their sexual demands.

That fall another danger also confronted the women of Whitechapel: Jack the Ripper.

One hundred and twenty-six years later and despite the investigations of thousands of Ripper enthusiasts -- “ripperologists” as they have become known -- many of them writing books claiming to know the identity of this killer, and indeed naming him, the debate over who was Jack the Ripper continues.

Russell Edwards’s book, Naming Jack the Ripper, over 300 pages in length,is a good read, and I was prepared to believe that he had indeed identified Jack the Ripper. Yet, despite headlines like "Jack the Ripper Named,""Jack the Ripper Unmasked,""Jack the Ripper Murder Mystery Solved," it was not long before not only “ripperologists” but also a number of renown scientists cast doubt over Edwards’s declaration that Jack the Ripper was “definitely, categorically and absolutely” Aaron Kosminski.

I then began to doubt it too.

Edwards’s investigation

In his book, Russell Edwards describes himself as from a “regular family” and growing up in a council apartment in a tower block in a tough area of Northern England. Having a wish to be his “own boss” he started off, aged 19, selling furry toys from market stalls. When this did not bring in money he moved down to the south where he went from job to job, once penniless and homeless and sleeping on a park bench. He did all the same enrol at the North London Polytechnic and then the Central London Polytechnic, studying management; after graduation he set up a software company. He left that company and set up another and got married and then he went to see the 2001 Johnny Depp movie, From Hell, and his interest in Jack the Ripper began.

In 2007 a friend told Edwards that an item of Ripper memorabilia was going to be sold at auction. The item was a shawl which, according to the auctioneer, and the media, had belonged to one of Jack the Ripper’s victims.

The shawl was described as having a Michaelmas daisy pattern.

Researching the flower on the internet, Edwards learned that Michaelmas is the Christian feast of Archangel Michael and that the feast day is celebrated in the Christian Orthodox churches: in the Orthodox churches in the West on September 29 and in those of Eastern Europe on November 8.

Edwards, knowing that three of the murders attributed to Jack the Ripper had been committed on those two dates,  had to have the shawl.

It must be pointed out that despite Jack the Ripper’s notoriety as a most vicious and depraved killer it is accepted that he had killed only five women, the “canonical five.”

Mary Ann Nichols -- body found on Friday, August 31;

Annie Chapman -- body found on Saturday, September 8;

Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes -- bodies found on Sunday, September 30;

 Mary Jane Kelly -- body found on Friday, November 9.

Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were therefore murdered on the day the Western Orthodox churches celebrate the Feast of Archangel Michael, and Mary Jane Kelly on the day the Eastern Orthodox churches celebrate it.

The shawl’s asking price (Edwards does not reveal how much it was) was not met, and the item was withdrawn from sale, and a disappointed Edwards went home, but just to return to the auction house and to buy the shawl directly from its owner, a man named David Melville-Hayes. The latter, in his 70s, is the great-great-nephew of a policeman, Acting Sergeant Amos Simpson, who in 1888 was 41 years of age, had been on duty in Whitechapel on the night of the murder of Catherine Eddowes and had taken possession of the shawl which had been taken off her body. The story is that Simpson, liking the shawl, had asked the police officer in charge at the murder scene whether he could have it because he wanted to give it to his wife.  Mrs. Simpson apparently would not wear it, but the shawl had remained in the family and finally having become the property of Melville-Hayes he had given it to Scotland Yard’s museum -- the Black Museum -- to be put on display. First though, he had cut two pieces from the shawl and those he had given to a friend who had the two pieces framed. As for what was left of the shawl, Melville-Hayes, later of the opinion that the Black Museum was not displaying it properly, had taken it back.

The shawl was stained and in 2006 the television production company Atlantic Productions doing a documentary about Jack the Ripper carried out a DNA testing on the stains, but the result as Melville-Hayes had been told by the production company had been “inconclusive.”

Edwards, the shawls new owner, would have new DNA testing done on the stains.

The five murders

Each morning at around 3 o'clock those of Whitechapel’s inhabitants who had jobs would begin to set off for their workplaces.

It was just after 3:40 a.m. when one such inhabitant walking fast along a street named Buck’s Row in the northeast of Whitechapel saw what he thought was a piece of canvas lying on the sidewalk. In the half-dark, he stopped to have a look and saw that what he had taken for canvas was a woman. She was lying on her back, her dress pulled up to her waist and her eyes were wide open. Having called over another man who was also on his way to work, the two felt the woman’s hands and found them warm, but even without medical knowledge they could tell that she was dead: she had a large gash in her neck and a lot of blood on and around her. Domestic violence being rife in the area, and it not being unusual for a prostitute to have her throat slashed, the two pulled the dead woman’s dress down over her legs for the sake of decency and then went on their way to find a patrolling policeman.

It was the morning of Friday, August 31.

It was not difficult to identify the murdered woman because she was known in Whitechapel. She was Mary Ann Nichols, who, at 42, abandoned by the man with whom she had had five children, was a penniless alcoholic who had turned to prostitution.

How Nichols had spent the last 48 hours of her life was established. She had been drinking in the local pubs, and drunk and unable to pay the four pennies for a bed in the dormitory of a lodging house -- these were called dosshouses -- she was told to leave. Earlier that morning, as the clock on the local Christ Church struck the half hour after two she had been seen walking east towards where her body would be found. She was very unsteady on her feet.

The walk from where she had last been seen alive and where she was found dead would have taken her about half an hour. She was therefore killed between 3 and 3:40 a.m.

Under the bright lights of a mortuary room it was established that she had two slashes to her throat, several to her vagina and a cut which ran from her neck down to her groin. She had been stabbed in her face as well.

Eight days later, on Saturday, September 8, another prostitute was found dead with similar injuries and all -- the police, the media, the locals and the British -- said that the women had been killed by the same man.

 This second victim was Annie Chapman, 47. Her story was similar to that of Nichols. Separated from the man with whom she had had three children, an alcoholic and consumptive, she had turned to prostitution.

At 6 a.m. on that Saturday an elderly male resident of a narrow four-story brick building at No. 29 Hanbury Street, west of Buck’s Row, had come across Chapman’s body. The building, like the others on the street, consisted of rooms which were let out on a weekly or monthly basis. The street door of each of the buildings opened into an alleyway, and as tenants were coming and going at all times of the day and night, those street doors were never locked. As prostitutes knew that the doors would not be locked, they took their clients into the alleyways.

Also like Nichols, Chapman, having been told to leave a lodging house because she was unable to pay the few pennies for a bed for the night, had been seen walking the streets in the hours before her death. At 5 o'clock that morning, it being cold and rainy, she was seen in a pub drinking when a man said to have worn a “small skull cap” had called her out and she had left with him. The pub was near to where her body was found.

At 5:30 a.m. a woman had seen a man and a woman whom she recognised as Chapman, standing talking outside No. 29 Hanbury Street. She heard the man whom she described as looking about 40, 5’5” in height, dark, “foreign” looking and wearing a dark overcoat and a brown deerstalker hat, ask the woman, “Will you?” and the woman replying, “Yes.”

A few minutes later a resident of the building beside that of No. 29 had heard something fall against a fence which divided the two buildings and he heard a woman saying, “No.”

The first woman was certain of the time because she had seen the it on the clock of Christ Church.

At 7 a.m. according to the female owner of a pub close to Hanbury Street, a man with dry blood on the back of his right hand and below one of his ears and on his collar, had walked in and ordered half a pint of beer. He was, as she said, wearing a dark coat and a “brown stiff hat.”

As Chapman’s body was found at 6 a.m., her killing had taken place in the 30 minutes after 5:30 a.m.  The body lay at the dividing fence. As with Nichols, Chapman’s skirt was pulled up to her waist revealing that her abdomen had been cut open from her neck to her groin, and her throat had been cut.  A pile of intestines was draped over one of her shoulders, and some flesh lay over the other. Her head had almost been severed from her body.

Twenty-two days later, on Sunday, September 30, the bodies of another two women, also prostitutes, were found.

The first body that of Swedish-born Elizabeth Stride, 45, was found at 1 a.m. in a narrow alleyway south of where Nichols’s body was found, and the second, that of Catherine Eddowes, at 1:44 a.m. in an alleyway west of where Stride’s body was found.

By then the killer had become known as Jack the Ripper because four days previously, on Thursday, September 27, a letter written in red ink representing blood had arrived at the office of the Central News Agency in London signed “Jack the Ripper.” The salutation was “Dear Boss” and the sender wrote of how he kept on hearing that he had been caught. He continued, “I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled.”  The police thought the letter, grammatically correct, was a fraud: It is now accepted that it indeed was and that it was written either by a journalist with the agency --Thomas Bulling -- or the agency’s manager -- John Moore -- in order to win publicity and thus readers.

Elizabeth Stride, born Elizabeth Gustafsdottir in Sweden, had arrived in London in 1866 where she had married an Englishman, John Stride. The marriage had broken up because of her drinking when, rowdy on the street, the police would lock her up until she had sobered up.

On Saturday, September 29, at 6:30 p.m. she had left one pub to go and drink in another. She had left that second pub in the company of a man who was described as 5’5” in height and who had a black moustache and “sandy eyelashes.” He wore a “morning suit” and a bowler hat.

 At 11:45 p.m. a Whitechapel resident had seen a woman whom he would later identify in the mortuary as Stride walk in the direction of the alleyway, Dutfield’s Yard, where her body would be found. The man and woman were kissing and at the end of the kiss, the man had said to the woman, “You would say anything but your prayers.” The man was described as middle aged, about 5’6”, rather stout, clean-shaven, decently dressed in a black coat and dark trousers and wearing a round cap with a small peak. The witness had watched the two walk off, both appearing sober.

At 12:35 a.m. a patrolling policeman, a William Smith, had seen a man and a woman stand talking in front of Dutfield’s Yard. He described the man as about 5’7” in height, about 28, wearing a black coat and a hard felt hat, and he wore a shirt with a white collar and also a tie. The man, said the policeman, had a small dark moustache and had a dark complexion. He carried something which was wrapped in newsprint.

At about the same time a third witness, a non-English-speaking Hungarian Jew named Israel Schwartz, had also seen the couple in front of Dutfield’s yard. Later, speaking through an interpreter, Schwartz described what he had seen. He had seen the man whom he described as about 30, 5’5” in height, fair-skinned, dark hair with a full face and a small brown moustache and dressed in dark clothes and wearing a black cap with a peak, pull the woman off her feet so that she fell down. She screamed three times. At that moment, as he would recount, he had seen another man watching the scene. This onlooker stood across the street, and the man with the woman, looking in that man’s direction, had shouted out the name “Lipski.” Schwartz, then getting scared, had begun to run, and so had the second man, which had encouraged Schwartz to run faster in order to get the hell out of the place.  The second man would fail to come forward to give evidence; he was in fact never identified.

 “Lipski” was a derogatory term for a Jew because in 1887, in other words the previous year, an Israel Lipski, a Polish Jew, had been hanged for the poisoning with nitric acid of a woman in Whitechapel.

Stride’s body, found at 1 a.m. which was about 30 minutes after Schwartz had seen a man hurling her to the ground, was unlike those of Nichols and Chapman because it was not mutilated, but like theirs, her throat had been cut.

Forty-four minutes later, at 1:44 a.m., another body was found.

The body of Catherine “Kate” Eddowes, 46 years old and most horribly mutilated, lay on a small, totally enclosed square, Mitre Square, half a mile to the west of Dutfield’s Yard.

The square fell within the beat of a policeman who, when he had passed that way at 1:30 p.m. had not seen anyone, dead or alive, on the square.

Eddowes lay on her back, her dress pulled up to her neck which had been cut so savagely that her head was almost severed from her body. Her eyelids had been slashed and the tip of her nose had been cut off and placed beside the raw wound. Her lower abdomen had been cut open and both her uterus and left kidney were missing.

A homeless drunk, Eddowes used to carry her earthly belongings which were mostly clothes and some small kitchen appliances with her, and that night she had done so again. The police making a list of what they were finding at the murder scene and indeed what clothes the murdered woman was wearing, noted that she was wearing an “extremely dirty” white cotton apron over her skirt and that a large piece had been cut from it.

That piece of white cotton, bloodstained, was found at 2:55 a.m. lying in a doorway a quarter mile away to the east, and on a wall above the doorway, written in white chalk, was the sentence: “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.”

Fearing that there will be anti-Jewish riots should the Londoners, who were already saying that Jack the Ripper was a Jew, read about or saw photographs of the writing, a police officer at the scene ordered it to be washed off. It duly was.

The shawl was not on the police’s list and according to Edwards they had not listed it because when the list was drawn up Acting Sergeant Amos Simpson had already taken it.

That night of Eddowes’ murder only one man had been seen with her. At 1:35 a.m. three men, all Jewish, had seen a man and a woman near to Dutfield’s Yard. Only one of the men could describe the man: he said he was around 5’9” in height, of medium build, had a fair skin, a small fair moustache and wore a greyish jacket and a grey cloth cap. He also said that the man had a reddish scarf or neckerchief knotted around his neck.

Forty days were to pass before there was another murder of a woman in Whitechapel, but during those days many letters were sent to the police and newspapers, the senders claiming to be Jack the Ripper.  A kidney was even sent to a man who had set up a vigilance committee and who was appealing to Queen Victoria to do something to have the killer apprehended and brought to justice.  The letter which accompanied the kidney was full of spelling and grammatical errors and blood-smeared. It could not be established whether the kidney was human, but some newspapers reported that it was part of the left kidney of a human being.

The murder had been committed in the early hours of Friday, November 9 and the woman Mary Jane Kelly, was again a prostitute.

Kelly, 25, Irish-born and described by those who knew her as pretty and having a big bust, had moved from Limerick to London in 1884 when she had begun to ply her trade first in a brothel and then on the street.  The widow of a mine worker, the man she had been living with in Whitechapel had left her nine days previously on October 30, but the two had remained on friendly terms and at 8 p.m. on the last day of her life -- Thursday, November 8 -- he had visited her in her room in a lodging house, Miller’s Court, on Dorset Street in northwest Whitechapel. Dorset Street was known as the worst street for crime in London. After the visit, Kelly had gone out drinking, and obviously looking for clients.

At 11:45 p.m. that night another prostitute and tenant of Miller’s Court, who was on her way out, had seen Kelly going into her ground floor room, No. 13. A man was with Kelly. The prostitute had greeted Kelly, asking her how she was but Kelly was so drunk that she could only manage to mutter, “Goodnight.” The man was described as about 36, 5’5” in height, had a blotchy face and side whiskers and a reddish moustache. He wore a dark overcoat which was described as shabby and a black felt hat.  He was carrying some quarts of beer.  She had watched Kelly and the man go into Room No. 13 and once the door was closed Kelly had started to sing drunkenly. On this woman’s return to Miller’s Court at 3 a.m. on what was then Friday, November 9, all was quiet in Kelly’s room.

Half an hour before that another tenant returning to her room had seen a man stand across the street from Miller’s Court. The man named Hutchinson and describing himself to the police later as a friend of Kelly said that at 2 a.m. of the morning of November 9 he had come across Kelly on the street and she had asked him whether he could lend her a sixpence (six pennies) which he could not do because he was penniless himself. He had then seen a man walk up to Kelly and the conversation of the two had gone as follows:

Kelly:  “Alright.”

 The man: “You will be alright for what I had told you.”

The couple had then walked to Kelly’s room, Hutchinson following, and he heard Kelly say to the man: “Alright my dear, come along, you will be comfortable.” Having seen the couple go into Kelly’s room, Hutchinson had walked off. His description to the police of the man he had seen was that he was about 35, 5’6” in height, pale face, dark eyes and eyelashes, and a moustache which curled up at the edges. He wore a long coat trimmed with astrakhan, a light waistcoat under a dark jacket, dark trousers, and a dark felt hat. On his feet were boots with white buttons. Hutchinson also said that the man wore a gold chain and a gold clip pinned to his tie, and he looked “Jewish,” and he was carrying a parcel.

At 10:35 a.m. Kelly’s naked and dead body was discovered on the bed in her room by an elderly man sent to get six weeks of overdue rent from her. He had knocked and when there was no answer he had looked through the window.

The body lay on the blood-soaked bed. The skin of the abdomen and the thighs had been cut away and the breasts had been cut off. The abdomen had been emptied and the uterus and kidneys placed under Kelly’s head and so too one of her breasts. The other breast and her liver lay between her feet, and so did her intestines. The skin of the abdomen and thighs were laid out on a table. Kelly’s face had been mutilated as the nose, lips, cheeks and eyelids had been partially cut away, and her neck had been slashed right to the bone.

As another Miller’s Court tenant had heard a woman’s voice shout, “Murder!” between 3:30 a.m. and 4 a.m. it was estimated that Kelly had been murdered in those 30 minutes.

By then the “Whitechapel Case” was no longer a local story, but an international one. The women were being called the “Unfortunates” and the name “Jack the Ripper” was on lips across the globe.

Edwards’s DNA profiling

The shawl Edwards had bought from David Melville-Hayes, the great-great-nephew of Acting Sergeant Amos Simpson, was in two pieces.  The biggest piece was just over six feet long and just over two feet wide, while the smaller piece was two feet long and one and a half feet wide. The shawl’s right side was dark brown and the reverse side was golden brown, and at each end of the shawl was a two-foot long strip which had a reddish golden Michaelmas daisy design.

There were small stains, some of them dark, others resembling white dots, on both pieces of the shawl and Edwards began looking for a scientist who would not only check the shawl for DNA but would also execute DNA matching should he, Edwards, be able to find descendants of Catherine Eddowes and indeed of the Jack the Ripper suspect Aaron Kosminski. By then he had started to focus solely on Aaron Kosminski as Jack the Ripper because the curator of the Black Museum, Retired Police Officer Alan McCormack, had told him that Kosminski was without doubt Jack the Ripper. McCormack had said to him: “I’ll tell you: The murderer was and always has been Aaron Kosminski.”

In 2011, still not having found the needed descendants and not having succeeded in having the stains on the shawls analyzed, Edwards made the acquaintance of Finnish scientist Dr. Jari Louhelainen. The latter, living since 2000 in England and Senior Lecturer in Molecular Biology at Liverpool John Moore University as well as Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Helsinki, agreed to assist Edwards in his task, by then almost an obsession, to identify Jack the Ripper.

Dr. Louhelainen’s first analysis of the shawl was with infrared photographic instruments and next he used UV photography. The first identified the dark stains on the shawl as arterial blood and the second revealed that one of the stains possessed the characteristics of human semen. The stains were however too old to extract DNA from them so instead Louhelainen used what he called “vacuuming” in interviews. This is to use a special slender tube (pipette) filled with a special liquid to draw DNA from the shawl. However, the substance that could be drawn because of the age of the shawl and the stains was not the genomic DNA used today in criminal investigations but a mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). The problem was that mtDNA is inherited only from the mother, so it was imperative that the DNA extracted from the stains on the shawl was to be compared solely to that of a female descendant of Aaron Kosminski and a female descendant of Catherine Eddowes. 

Edwards’s research without financial assistance from anyone led him to a female descendant of Eddowes and a female descendant of Aaron Kosminski.

The mtDNA of the alleged female descendant of Eddowes, Englishwoman Karen Miller, matched the mtDNA found on the shawl.

Furthermore, the mtDNA of the alleged female descendant of Aaron Kosminski, who did not want to be named, matched that of the mtDNA of the semen stains on the shawl.  (She apparently lives in Australia.)

Edwards therefore had his Jack the Ripper, and as far as he was concerned, Jack the Ripper was, as Retired Police Officer Alan McCormack, Curator of the Black Museum, had told him, the Polish Jewish man, Aaron Kosminski.

Aaron Kosminski

Aaron Mordke Kosminski was born on September 11, 1865 in the village of Klodawa in Poland’s Kalish Province. The Polish people were at that time in revolt against Imperial Russia, Poland’s ruler and what was known as the “Great Emigration” of Poles was in full swing. Because of Imperial Russia’s anti-Semitism, and indeed that of Poland, the situation of the Jewish Kosminskis was extremely fragile, and in 1881, Aaron, 16 years old, the family immigrated to England. Aaron’s mother Golda, born Lubnowska, was by then a widow so she accompanied her children -- three daughters named Hinde, Blima and Malke, and two sons named Icek and Aaron -- the family settling in Whitechapel. Aaron first lived with the married Icek, then with his sister Blima and her husband Woolf Abrahams and then he and his mother moved in with the married Malke. In Whitechapel, Icek having anglicized his name to Isaac had started a successful tailoring business so that the family’s social status was described as “bourgeois.”

The Kosminski family’s reaction to the 1888 series of killings and to the anti-Semitism they were experiencing in their new country and which was increasing daily because of rumours in Whitechapel that Jack the Ripper was a local Jew, is not recorded, but after Icek had become Isaac, Aaron’s other siblings had also anglicized their first names. Isaac had even begun to use the surname Abrahams which was that of his brother-in-law Woolf, husband of Blima who had anglicized her name to Betsy.

In 1888 Aaron Kosminski was 23 years old and unmarried and as documents dating from the 1890s specified he was a hairdresser.

The first public mention of him was in December 1889 in two news reports, one in the Lloyds Weekly News and the other in the City Press. Aaron Kosminski, then 24, and unknown to the people of Whitechapel and indeed to the police, was arrested for walking an unmuzzled dog in the central London street of Cheapside, then a popular open-air market area. Rabies was rife in England and dogs had to be muzzled.  Appearing in court he defended himself by saying that the dog was not his and that he was therefore not the one who was responsible for muzzling the animal. He was fined but he refused to pay the fine because as it was Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, he, as a Jew, as he said, was not allowed to handle money on that day. He returned to the courthouse on the Monday and paid the 10 shilling fine and the incident was over and Aaron Kosminski had yet again become just another resident of London’s infamous East End.

The next mention of Aaron Kosminski was in an official medical document. On Saturday, July 12, 1890 his brother-in-law Abrahams arrived with him at a workhouse, the Mile End Old Town Workhouse. A workhouse was a prison-like place. The inmates, as they were called, were people -- men and women, the latter often accompanied by their children -- who were unable to support themselves or who were layabouts not wanting to work, or indeed were mentally unstable and needed medical supervision. They had to adhere to a harsh timetable, rising at dawn and working all day at menial jobs, to be back in bed by 8 p.m. Wages were minimal and so was the food.

Three days later Abrahams was back at the workhouse to take Aaron back to his and Betsy’s home.

Seven months later on Wednesday, February 4, 1891, Abrahams re-admitted Aaron to the workhouse. The address given for Aaron was then that of his sister Matilda (formerly Malka) and her husband and, in the report of the workhouse’s doctor, Aaron was described as insane: he had attacked one of his sisters, presumably Matilda, with a knife, he heard voices which told him what to do and he only ate food he had picked up in the street believing that should he accept food from anyone he will be poisoned. Furthermore he “practised self-abuse” -- he masturbated which was at the time believed to drive the masturbator insane.

Three days later the workhouse transferred Aaron to the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in the North London Borough of Barnet. No reason for the transfer had been recorded but on arrival Aaron’s hands were tied behind his back.

Aaron remained a patient at Colney Hatch, his condition regularly assessed and recorded, so that we know that he was going from being a quiet and well-behaved patient to being demented and incoherent.

On Friday, April 13, 1894 Aaron was transferred to another mental asylum, the Leavesden Asylum For Imbeciles on a street named Asylum Road in Abbots Langley in Hertfordshire County. His mother was named his next-of-kin and the address given for her was again that of Matilda.

Twenty-five years later, on Monday, March 24, 1919 Aaron Kosminski passed away at Leavesden. He was 53 years old and the cause of death was given as “gangrene.” He weighed 96 lbs. On Thursday, March 27, he was buried in the East Ham Jewish Cemetery in Marlow Road in the district of East Ham, east of London.

Those of his family who were still alive and had not left London had the words May his dear soul rest in peace engraved on his tombstone.

Golda and Betsy had died in 1912 and Isaac would die in 1920 and Woolf in 1944. They were buried not in the East Ham Jewish Cemetery, but in another cemetery, the East Ham Plashet Jewish Cemetery.

Collapse of the DNA profiling

No sooner had world media splashed the breaking news that Russell Edwards had identified Jack the Ripper with DNA profiling as Aaron Kosminski, than an Australian “ripperologist” commenting on the website, casebook.com, under a pseudonym, pointed out that Louhelainen’s DNA profiling was scientifically erroneous.

Immediately, four DNA experts agreed with the Australian. They are: English Professor Sir Alec John Jeffreys of the University of Leicester who is the inventor of the techniques to establish DNA fingerprinting and profiling; Austrian molecular biologist Professor Walther Parson, head of the Institute of Legal Medicine of the Medical University in Innsbruck; Dutch Professor Mannis van Oven, of the forensic molecular biology department of Rotterdam’s Erasmus University, and the Austrian Professor Hansi Weissensteiner of the Genetic Epidemiology Division of the Medical University in Innsbruck.

Another “ripperologist,” Englishman Richard Cobb who organizes Jack the Ripper conventions and conducts Ripper Tours, added his own voice. He told The Times of London that Karen Miller attended a three-day Ripper convention in Wolverhampton in the West Midlands in 2007 when the shawl was on open and unprotected display and that her family’s mtDNA could then have got onto it.

Edwards in the last two chapters (28 pages) of his book describes how Louhelainen had gone about isolating mtDNA on six stains on the shawl and then amplifying seven small segments from it to facilitate the analysis.

About these seven small segments Edwards would write in his book (Pg 205) and which the Australian “ripperologist” had quoted on casebook.com: “One of these amplified mtDNA segments had a sequence variation which have a match between one of the shawl samples and Karen Miller’s DNA only; i.e., the DNA sequence retrieved from the shawl did not match with control reference sequences. This DNA alteration is known as global private mutation (314.1C) and it is not very common in worldwide population, as it has a frequency estimate of 0.000003506, i.e., approximately 1 / 290,000.”

As Edwards continues in his book, Louhelainen made the above calculation using the database of the Institute of Legal Medicine in Innsbruck.

However, as the Australian “ripperologist” and the scientists pointed out the DNA mutation should have been 315.1C and not 314.1C, and that 315.1C was not rare but shared by 99% of ethnic Europeans. It meant that the mtDNA of the shawl would match that of 99% of people of European descent.

The scientists described Louhelainen’s error as one of “nomenclature.”

As for the analysis of the stain on the shawl said to have been human semen, its haplogroup, or collection of particular DNA sequences one inherits from a parent, was identified as T1a1 and so was the haplogroup of the unnamed Australian descendant of Aaron Kosminski.

Louhelainen in an interview with London’s The Independent at the time of publication of Edwards’s book and therefore before his analysis was rejected, had said:  “Because of the genome amplification technique, I was also able to ascertain the ethnic and geographical background of the DNA extracted. It was of a type known as the haplogroup T1a1, common in people of Russian ethnicity. I was even able to establish that he had dark hair.” As Edwards writes in his book, Louhelainen had told him that by saying “Russian” he was including Poland then under Russian administration.

Immediately after Loulehainen’s interview the scientists and historians were back pointing out that the haplogroup T1a1 is not found in Ashkenazim Jews -- Jews from Central and Eastern Europe -- and Aaron Kosminski having been from Poland would have been an Ashkenazim Jew. It is a haplogroup found predominantly in Caucasians people. The meaning of Caucasian in this context being geographical and not the former American racial clarification of a white-skinned person as “Caucasian.”

Also, as the experts pointed out, hair color has nothing to do with mtDNA and like all physical traits and medical disorders are determined by genes in the nucleus.

Accordingly, as the haplogroup on the shawl was T1a1 and Aaron Kosminski was an Askhenazim Jew, he could not be connected to the shawl.

More reasons why Aaron Kosminski could not have been Jack the Ripper

1.      The Shawl

We have only the word of Acting Sergeant Amos Simpson’s descendants that the shawl Mellville-Hayes had put up for auction had been taken off the body of Eddowes.

But was it, and was Simpson even at the murder scene?

The murders of Nichols, Chapman, Stride and Kelly were investigated by the Metropolitan Police (the Met) commonly known as Scotland Yard because the murders had occurred within the Met’s jurisdiction. That of Eddowes by the City Police because it had occurred within the square mile heart of London under the jurisdiction of the City Police.

Simpson was with the Met but as its police had joined those of the City Police at the scene of that night’s murder, it is probable that he had been sent to Mitre Square that night.

The story according to his descendants was that he was on “special duties” that night and that he had discovered Eddowes body. In fact, he had not discovered the body and writers who had studied police records of the time failed to find his name listed with those police who had been at the murder scene that night.

Is it so impossible that Simpson, as an act of self-aggrandizement, had made up the story of the shawl?  He was already 41 years of age, an age which at that time meant that someone was “aged,” yet he was still only an acting sergeant. He would retire around 1893, in other words about five years later and this means that he was indeed at the end of his career.

Furthermore, is it so impossible that Simpson had bought the shawl cheaply -- it was second hand and soiled -- at a market stall on his way home at the end of his shift?

What is certain is that we have no proof that the shawl had been taken off the body of Eddowes.

2.      The Michaelmas daisy design

To a Jew, and Kosminski was a Jewish man, Archangel Michael and the celebration of his name-day would have had no significance. Therefore, there can be no connection between the daisy design on the shawl and the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes.

3.      The shawl’s age and its country of manufacture

Edwards had been unable to establish the shawl’s age and where it had been manufactured.  Without knowing the date, even an approximate one of its manufacture, and in what country this had been, there is no proof that either Eddowes or her murderer had the shawl on their person that night of the murder of Eddowes.

4.      The dates of the murders

·         The murder of each of the five women took place during the hours of the Jewish Sabbath and what is more Chapman was killed during Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.

An observant Jew which Aaron Kosminski was as he refused to handle money on the Sabbath would not have left his home where his family, which included his aged and widowed mother, would either have been preparing for the traditional Sabbath meal or were already at table. Also, on those nights he would have gone to the synagogue with his brothers and brothers-in-law.

·         As for Rosh Hashanah, it revolves around the synagogue more than any other Jewish holiday.

On the Jewish calendar, on Thursday, September 6, 1888, the year 5649 had begun: it was the first day of the three-day celebration.

Chapman was killed in the early hours of Saturday, September 8, the Shabbat Shuvah, which is the Shabbat which occurs between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur and which is a day of reflection before the Day of Atonement of Yom Kippur.  It is a day Jews spend in the synagogue and concentrate on the Torah, to pray and attain forgiveness for sins of the old year and to start the new one with a clean slate.

It is therefore inconceivable that a practising Jewish man would have gone out killing on such holy days for a Jew.

·         Aaron Kosminski had severe mental problems as we know from the reports of the asylums of Colney Hatch and Leavesden, but apart from having threatened one of his sisters with a knife, there had been no episodes of physical acts of violence reported by the two asylums.

Yet, if he were Jack the Ripper, he would not have been able to refrain from killing in the 20 months between the murder of Kelly on Friday, November 9, 1888 and his admittance to the Mile End Old Town Workhouse on Saturday, July 12, 1890? He was indeed a free man in those 20 months.

5. The addresses

From Aaron Kosminki’s admission to the Mile End Old Town Workhouse and to the asylums of Colney Hatch and Leavesden we know the Whitechapel addresses of his siblings and of his mother, and we also know that he had moved from sibling to sibling, at times his mother moving with him.

The addresses were all within a few minutes walk to where the five women had been murdered.

Would Aaron -- indeed any Whitechapel resident -- have run the risk of killing on his doorstep so to speak and of being recognized in the company of the woman he was about to murder?

6. The Kosminskis’name change

Edwards gives importance to Isaac Kosminski having changed his surname to Abrahams and Golda having done so too. Such a name change can not be interpreted as Aaron’s brother and his mother wishing to separate themselves from him because he was Jack the Ripper.

It was not extraordinary for Jews settling in a new country to have anglicized their first names and their family names. They did so in order to make it easier for officialdom in their new countries to spell their names, yet some also did so in order to hide their Jewish parentage and ancestry. For example the family name Sladowski had become Slade, and when a surname had begun with an O an apostrophe was inserted between it and the next letter, the holder then being able to claim Irish descent.  Like the surname Olinski had become the Irish O’Linn.

Aaron himself had explained to the police at the time of his arrest because of the unmuzzled dog that he sometimes used the surname Abrahams because Kosminski was hard to spell. Indeed, the surname was often spelled Kozminski.

7. Aaron lying in a different cemetery than his family

Edwards also gives significance to the graves of Aaron Kosminski’s family not being in East Ham Jewish Cemetery with that of Aaron. Then, as indeed today, a deceased is buried in a cemetery closest to the place of residence of his or her family.

At the time of Aaron’s burial his address was given as that of Matilda's which was in the district of Bow, east of London.

East Ham Jewish Cemetery was also east of London and it was five miles from the district of Bow.

8.No physical description of Aaron Kominski

“Witnesses” had seen four of the five victims in the company of a man within minutes of the murder of that victim.

Rarely did the description given by one “witness” match that given by another. 

Thus, the men were described as follows:

• Age: middle-aged; about 40; about 35; about 34 or 35; about 30; between 25 and 30; about 28.
• Height: 5’; 5’5”; 5’6”; 5’7”, about 5’; no taller than 5’; 5’9”.
• Build: stout; broad shouldered.
• Complexion: fair; pale; dark; had a blotchy skin.
• Face: clean-shaven; had a moustache described as black; brown; dark; fair; reddish; “carroty”; turned up at the edges.
• Hair: fair; black.
• Eyes and lashes: dark; fair.
• Clothes: long dark overcoat buttoned up; long dark overcoat hanging open; shabby overcoat; overcoat trimmed with astrakhan; morning suit; greyish jacket; dark trousers; light waistcoat; shirt with blue cotton collar; tie with golden horseshoe pin; long golden chain hanging over chest; reddish scarf or kerchief knotted around the neck.
• Hat: brown deerstalker (the fictional private investigator Sherlock Holmes wore one); black billycock (bowler hat); hard felt hat; soft felt hat; dark felt hat; dark felt hat turned up in the middle; cap with a small sailor-like peak; grey cloth cap; small skull cap.
• General appearance: looked Jewish; looked foreign (this meant Jewish); shabby; genteel; affluent.

The above descriptions were not only contradictory but would have fitted more than half of the men then in Britain and almost all the men of Whitechapel.

Furthermore, as Aaron Kosminski had an eating problem, he would not have been stout.

Therefore, we have no idea what Aaron Kosminski looked like.

For that matter, we have no reliable description of what Jack the Ripper looked like.

Without reasonable doubt

Seeing we have no physical description of Aaron Kosminsky, and the only misdemeanor he had committed was that he had not muzzled a dog he had taken for a walk, he cannot be identified as Jack the Ripper.

Therefore, in 1888, like indeed too today, with exactly what we have on Aaron Kosminski, in other words no DNA, no court would be able to establish without reasonable doubt that he was Jack the Ripper.

 Accordingly, despite my admiration for the dedicated work Edwards had put into trying to identify Jack the Ripper, I say that we still do not know the identify of the man who had slaughtered the five “Unfortunates.”

So it will remain unless someone somewhere finds in a box in an attic a document yellow and brittle with age written by an ancestor confessing to having been Jack the Ripper.