Featuring:

D.B. Cooper – Myth or Man? by David Keller

A Beautiful Monster: The Fascination with Oscar Pistorius by Binoy Kampmark

Bradley Manning: Patriot or Traitor? by Don Fulsom and Avi McClelland-Cohen

Dirty Laundry: Cold Case 84-137640 by James R. Melton

The Legend of Tex McCord (aka Roger Caryl) by Kim Walker

The Great Pretender by Michael Volpe

April 18, 2013

How bite marks can lead to convictions.

by Liz Porter

Criminals are regularly nabbed because they make stupid and careless mistakes. The burglar who robbed a safe at the up-market Haigh’s chocolate factory in the South Australian capital city of Adelaide is a perfect example. He was caught by his own bad manners. On his way to burgle the establishment’s safe, he toured the factory’s display area, helping himself to samples and biting into several chocolate bars. He then threw the uneaten leftovers on the floor – from where police collected them. If he had taken his uneaten chocolate home – or neatly disposed of it in a rubbish bin – he might never have been caught.

The robbery took place on a weeknight in early February 1996. Office staff arriving for work at the inner suburban factory the next morning discovered that an intruder had broken in through a skylight. He had used an axe and jemmy to bash the alarm system off the wall and had then overturned the office safe, making a hole in its back and removing the $1,800 inside. The workers also spotted the partially eaten chocolate bars the thief had dropped on the floor, and noticed that he had also stolen chocolate from a display area nearby.

Police recovered the uneaten chocolate, noting that clear tooth marks were visible in a 40 by 55-millimetre piece of chocolate frog, a 27 by 29-millimetre portion of chocolate honey nougat, and a 40 by 77-milllimetre bar of plain chocolate.

The chocolate evidence was stored carefully, while police closed in on a man they believed to have been responsible for a recent series of similar night-time break-ins. A gourmet deli had been robbed on January 14, and bus tickets, blank checks, phone cards and $400 worth of cakes were stolen. On January 22, a travel agency had been robbed of foreign currency. Then, a week later, and only three days before the Haigh’s heist, a robber had climbed through a window of another travel agency and stolen $4,850 in cash. Possibly emboldened by his success in previous break-ins, he left a handwritten note for police or, as he called them, the “boys” in the “Beuro”(bureau) telling them they had “better be considering a new line of work,” and signing it “Traffick.”

The police suspected that the person responsible for all these burglaries was a 24-year-old man from the Adelaide suburb of Northfield. When they raided his home, they seized property allegedly taken in the previous cake shop and travel agency robberies. They also took a Valentine’s Day card with the man’s handwriting on it. But their suspect continued to deny involvement in any of the robberies.

Police were able to use their powers under Section 81 of South Australia’s Summary Offences Act to compel the man to have impressions of his teeth taken with special dental gel. These impressions, along with the chocolate samples, were sent to Adelaide University’s Forensic Odontology Unit, where Dr. Kenneth Brown made casts from the impressions of the suspect’s teeth and used the same gel to make casts of the tooth marks in the chocolate surfaces. The casts were then examined and compared and photographed microscopically.

DNA analysis wasn’t considered as an investigative tool in this case. Although DNA profiling was already being used at Adelaide crime scenes by 1996, the technology available at that time wasn’t up to detecting traces on chocolate, and in separating saliva from chocolate. By 1998, new technology was introduced that revolutionized the sensitivity and reliability and speed of DNA analysis. Even if this case were to happen now, the bite-mark examination would still include forensic odontology, which would be used, with DNA, to add weight to the evidence presented in court.

The suspect’s teeth, Brown noted, had certain distinctive features. He had a 1.5-millimetre gap between his upper left central incisor and his lateral incisor. (The central incisors are the two front teeth, top and bottom, while the lateral incisors are the teeth either side of them.) The upper left lateral incisor was rotated at an angle of about 20 degrees off center. There was a recognizable notch on the biting edge of the upper right lateral incisor and noticeable facets of wear on both the upper right central incisor and the lower right lateral incisor.

Types of Bite Marks

Brown’s next task was to examine the kind of bite marks that had been left in the chocolate samples. Broadly speaking, bite marks in foodstuffs vary according to the kind of food being bitten, and have been classified as Types 1, 2 and 3. Type 1, typically seen in chocolate, fractures the foodstuff, but allows only limited tooth penetration, so that the bite marks will only record the most prominent edges of the incisors and some of the characteristics of the outer edges of the upper and lower front teeth. Type 2, typically seen in apples, requires extensive pressure by the teeth, and sufficient penetration to create a fracture of the surface. Type 3, usually seen in cheese, fractures the food surface, but allows complete or near complete penetration by the teeth.

Fortunately for the investigators, the honey nougat bar, with its layer of softer nougat below the chocolate surface, displayed a Type 3 bite mark, retaining marks made by the scraping of the teeth and recording a more detailed impression of the suspect’s upper and lower front teeth. In particular, the notch on the upper right lateral incisor was recorded in the cast made of the bite marks, along with the distinctive facets of wear on the outside biting edge of the suspect’s lower right lateral incisor. In fact, the entire outline and dimensions of the suspect’s tooth was reproduced exactly in the cast taken from the nougat.

The bite marks on the chocolate frog and the chocolate bar provided extra details, but the nougat evidence was the most useful source of corresponding details between the bite marks and the suspect’s teeth.

After seeing Brown’s results, police had enough evidence to charge their 24-year-old suspect. But, in May 1997, when the man faced the Adelaide Magistrate’s Court on six charges of breaking and entering between November 1995 and February 1996, he continued to deny any involvement in the burglaries, pleading not guilty to all charges.

He may well have been cheered by the news that the chocolate samples, having been returned to police custody after Brown had cast the bite marks in them, had significantly deteriorated during Adelaide’s February 1997 heat wave. But while the original chocolates themselves couldn’t be produced, police tendered the casts made of them as evidence, along with the casts of the suspect’s teeth.

Brown told the hearing that the likelihood of two individuals having an identical dental imprint was “so remote that it is difficult for us to comprehend.” The bite marks recorded in all three chocolate samples bore “remarkable similarity” to the accused man’s teeth, the expert said. The accused, he concluded, had bitten into the chocolates.

The police weren’t the only ones impressed by the forensic odontologist’s evidence. After hearing it, the accused changed his plea to guilty. He also pleaded guilty to the robbery of the travel agency where he had left a note, after he realized that a handwriting expert had matched the writing on a Valentine’s Day card he had sent to his girlfriend to the note he had left for police.

The magistrate, displeased that the accused had pleaded guilty only when “the writing was on the wall, so to speak,” sentenced him to two years in prison.

Not All Bite Marks Are Equal

Evidence of bite marks in foodstuffs have been able offer police more certainty than evidence of bite marks on skin, which has resulted in many  unsafe and unjust convictions – all based on the false belief that a bite mark was “as identifiable as a fingerprint.”

Chewing gum, for example, has been proven to be a useful medium for the recording of tooth marks. In the world’s first reported case, involving a  1976 murder in the United States city of San Diego,  a wad of red cinnamon-flavored chewing gum enabled local homicide detectives to place a suspect at the murder scene and clinch a conviction.

The male victim had been shot and stabbed in his bedroom and there were two suspects, only one of whose fingerprints were found in the room. Impressions of the victim’s and the two suspects’ teeth were taken to compare with a silicon reproduction of the chewing gum found at the scene. Under magnification, it could be seen that the chewing gum had been wedged against the inside surface of the upper and lower incisor (front) teeth of an unknown person.

Comparisons ruled out the victim and the suspect whose fingerprints had been found. The other suspect had an opening drilled in the inside surface of her upper incisor (as access for root canal therapy). There was also a defect – either a missing filling or some decay – on its mesial surface (the side towards the centre of the mouth). These defects were also apparent on the wad of gum. A blood typing test showed that this suspect and the chewing gum user had the same blood group.

The world’s second chewing gum/tooth marks case was reported in South Australia, in May 1990. A local policeman, Detective Constable Geoff Carson, was investigating a burglary at a physiotherapy clinic in the South Australian town of Murray Bridge when he found a wad of pink strawberry-scented chewing gum on the floor. It was in an area of the clinic that was a private dwelling, not a place where a patient could possibly have dropped it. Noticing that it bore distinct tooth mark-like indentations, Carson asked the crime scene examiner to collect the gum. He arranged for it to be stored in the fridge so that it wouldn’t soften before he got it to a forensic expert.

The break-in had been the latest in a spate of burglaries from local houses and businesses, all involving entry via a smashed window and the theft of food. The size of the windows and the kind of food taken suggested that the offender was both young and of a slight stature. Meanwhile, fingerprints found at some of the scenes had been identified as those of a local 15-year-old. The youth was arrested and questioned, but he denied any involvement in any of the robberies, including the physiotherapy clinic break-in. But if the chewing gum were proved to be his, it would show that he had been in an area of the clinic which he could have no legitimate reason for visiting.

Using Section 81 of the South Australian Summary Offences Act, police ordered that impressions of the youth’s teeth be taken by a local dentist, who pressed a special gel around his upper and lower teeth, creating a shape which then set as a mould. In the meantime Carson contacted Dr. Kenneth Brown of Adelaide University’s Forensic Odontology Unit, and sent him the chewing gum and the dentist’s impressions of the suspect’s teeth.

Brown prepared casts of the suspect’s teeth by pouring a dental stone plaster mixture into the impression moulds. When they had set hard, and the impression moulds were removed, these casts represented the shape of the suspect’s upper and lower teeth. Brown then examined the oval-shaped wad of chewing gum, which measured about 29 by 12-millimetres. After photographing both sides of it, he made replicas of the tooth impressions, using a special polyvinyl siloxane mixture. Comparing the teeth on the casts with the impressions on the chewing gum replica, he noted that seven specific features of upper teeth numbers 23, 24, 25, 26 had been reproduced on one side of the chewing gum. The other side of the gum had produced impressions of teeth that corresponded to the lower teeth numbered 34, 35 and 36. There was insufficient detail of teeth 34 and 36 on the chewing gum, but the impression of tooth 35 on its own mirrored six different features of tooth 35 on the cast.

When the youth was confronted with this forensic evidence, he confessed to both the physiotherapy clinic break-in and the other burglaries where he had left his fingerprints.

This case was so remarkable that Malaysian forensic odontologist Dr. Phrabhkaran Nambiar eventually wrote it up for publication in the June 2001 edition of the Journal of Forensic Odonto-Stomatology. Nambiar, who had assisted Professor Brown with the lab work on this case when he was a postgraduate student at Adelaide University, noted that, while some foods were better than others for bite-mark registration, chewing gum was in a class of its own. Chewing gum, for example, is the only “food” which will show the biting surfaces of teeth towards the back of the mouth, providing information not produced when people bite into other kinds of foods.

Bite marks left on surfaces such as food raise a different set of scientific issues. Food has different properties from skin (such as not moving when it is being bitten) and some foods can record better teeth impressions than skin. In the preface to his paper on the Murray Bridge case, Nambiar documented a variety of food bite-mark cases. In one, a lamington (a small sponge cake covered in chocolate) had been bitten into during a night arson attack on a coffee shop in the South Australian town of Mt. Gambier. The offender was convicted on the basis of evidence provided by a computer-generated image of his dental arch. When this image was superimposed over the bite mark in the lamington, it was found to match.

Forensic science academic literature abounds with examples of criminals convicted after leaving bite marks in foods. In one of his many papers on the subject, British expert David Whittaker reported that one of the earliest bite-mark convictions dated back to 1906, when a burglar was convicted after leaving tooth marks in a piece of cheese.

In 1955 the tooth marks left by an alleged rapist in a cucumber helped to secure his conviction, while in 1971 the tooth marks left by a murder suspect in the pastry of a meat pie were also vital in obtaining his conviction.

British forensic dentist Dr. Colin Bamford has also given evidence about bite marks in a series of different inanimate materials, including cheese and apples. He once testified in a murder case involving a bite mark on a Mars Bar, and in a murder and armed robbery case where the defendant had been chewing the plastic butt on a car key and had left tooth marks.

Junk Forensics

The history of cases involving bite marks on skin is not as impressive.  In general, there are too many variables involved in the examination of a bite mark on the skin, where the compression factors vary according to the location on the body of the bitten skin. There may also be problems related to the way the bite mark has been recorded. If a bite mark is very fresh, there will be indentations in the skin. If an impression is taken with synthetic silicone rubber material, these impressions may be reproduced. Otherwise, if the expert is relying on photos, he or she is examining two-dimensional images of a three-dimensional construction.

In fact, the history of forensic evidence in U.S. courts is stained with examples of death sentences unjustly imposed as a result of bite-mark evidence given by dentists. Air force veteran and postal worker Ray Krone, for example, spent four years on Arizona’s death row and another seven in prison on a life sentence after being convicted, in two trials, of the 1991 murder of Phoenix cocktail waitress Kim Ancona. Testimony that his teeth matched bite marks on Ancona’s breast and throat was crucial to his first conviction in 1992 – after which he was labeled “The Snaggletooth Killer.” In 1996, his conviction was reversed on appeal, on the basis of the prosecution’s concealment of evidence from Krone’s lawyers. He was re-convicted in 1996, again on bite-mark testimony, despite DNA tests which indicated that blood found on the victim was not his – or hers.

Krone continued to proclaim his innocence. Finally, in April 2002, DNA tests of blood and saliva on his supposed victim implicated a man by then in prison for sexually assaulting and choking a 7-year-old girl. Four days later, Krone was set free.

In 1992, when a 3-year-old girl was found raped and strangled near Brooksville, Mississippi, police arrested Kennedy Brewer, 21. As the victim’s mother’s boyfriend, he was automatically a person of interest. He was also home alone with the victim and his own two children on the night the little girl vanished. The traces of semen found in the child’s body were too small for 1992 DNA techniques to use. But a confident forensic dentist testified that the 19 mysterious marks on the child’s body were bite marks, five of which matched Brewer’s teeth “with reasonable medical certainty.” (A defense expert said they were insect bites, sustained during the two days the child’s body lay undiscovered in the open.)

Brewer was convicted and sent to death row. In May 2002, new DNA tests indicated that two unknown men raped the tiny victim, and a new trial was ordered. Brewer’s conviction was “vacated” and he was moved from death row to pre-trial detention, where he remained until 2007, when he was released, pending a new trial. In the meantime, investigations by the Innocence Project led to the identification of Justin Albert Johnson, one of the original suspects in the crime, as the perpetrator. Johnson subsequently confessed. Finally, in February 2008, charges against Kennedy Brewer were dropped and he was exonerated.

Yet, some skin bite-mark opinions can be delivered with a degree of confidence. Forensic odontologists can certainly give opinions on whether or not a bite mark is self-inflicted. Their opinion in such cases is based on anatomical as well as dental issues. A person cannot, as Melbourne forensic odontologist Dr. Tony Hill points out, bite themselves on the back, or on the genitals. Hill has testified in several rape cases where he has been able to testify that a bite mark is human, not animal, and made by an adult, rather than a child. He has also been able to state that someone else, not the victim, inflicted the bite. But was that person the accused? He has not been able to say.

Forensic odontologists can also use bite marks to exclude certain suspects – as in a case where an alleged biter has a missing front tooth or unusually crowded teeth and the bite mark doesn’t show the same peculiarity. A biter with unusual teeth might also be able to be identified in a “closed” incident where the culprit has to be one of several suspects (and no one else has had access to the victim). In one South Australian case involving allegations of abuse of a baby girl of approximately 20 months of age, experts from Adelaide University’s Forensic Odontology Unit examined the teeth of five suspects and were able to eliminate the chief suspect and three of the others. The fifth one was the culprit, who was convicted.

April 22, 2013

 Hans van Meegeren

Hans van Meegeren duped a string of wealthy collectors into paying vast sums for fake artwork of the Old Masters. One victim was Reichsmarschall Herman Goering.

by Robert Walsh

When many people are asked to name a selection of truly master criminals they’ll probably come up with the usual suspects: Jack the Ripper, Charles Ponzi, notorious English highwayman Dick Turpin or maybe legendary Australian bushranger Ned Kelly. One name that’s highly unlikely to appear is possibly the greatest (and certainly the boldest) art forger in criminal history, Hans van Meegeren.

Van Meegeren was born in October, 1889 in the Dutch town of Delft, the same town as the equally legendary artist Johannes Vermeer, a 17^th century master.  Van Meegeren, like any aspiring local artist, was a fan of Vermeer and was keen to become Delft’s other big name in the art world. He succeeded, but in a way that even the most inventive crime fiction writers couldn’t possibly have dreamt up.

It’s fair to say that the art world in general (and the Dutch art scene in particular) wasn’t exactly overwhelmed while Van Meegeren was painting under his own name. The general consensus among Dutch art critics was that he wasn’t nearly as talented as he aspired to be, was technically crude and, creatively speaking, fairly unoriginal. In short, he was generally regarded as a journeyman painter rather than another Vermeer. Like many people possessing a creative temperament and an artist’s ego, Van Meegeren was constantly stung by the criticism (and sometimes outright dismissal) heaped upon him by critics and contemporaries. Eventually he devised an elaborate (and, some would say, slightly crazy) plan to humble his critics, elevating himself to the standing he craved while doing so at their expense.

Initially, his career as an artist had gone well enough. He earned a decent living painting portraits for wealthy European and American socialites, exhibited his work in his native Holland and further afield and early in his career was invited into the HaagseKunstkring (a select Dutch artistic society composed of young, gifted painters and writers). If he had a problem with the Dutch art establishment it was that his talent as a creative, original artist had peakedby the early 1930s and by the mid-1930s his personal and artistic relationships with his peers had almost totally dissolved. This was due to his own increasing bitterness at the Dutch art community not tolerating his increasingly confrontational attitude and not giving him the recognition he felt himself entitled to.

A Grand Plan

His plan to reverse his fortunes was both technically challenging and perversely brilliant. Rather than simply forging copies of classic paintings by famous artists, Van Meegeren opted to create supposedly undiscovered pieces by a variety of Old Masters. Having (so he hoped) comprehensively duped the critics and collectors previously so dismissive of his own works, Van Meegeren then intended to openly admit he was a forger, create havoc in the art world, humiliate his critics and reap the rewards of the resulting publicity. By the strangest route and largely beyond his control he managed exactly that and, ironically for a forger, any painting proved to be a Van Meegeren is nowadays worth a lot more than it would be otherwise.

His first obstacle was purely technical. Even in the 1930s it was possible for any collector to run scientific tests on a suspect painting. If the canvas wasn’t old enough to match the lifespan of the supposed artist, if the chemical composition of the paint was incorrect or if the brushstrokes were obviously made using a different type of brush (Vermeer was well known to use brushes made from badger hair, for example) then a fake could easily be detected. Granted, with advances in forensic and scientific testing since the 1930s (when Van Meegeren was producing his best work and plenty of it) his fakes would never pass inspection today, but in this era he managed to come up with raw materials sufficiently similarto those of the Old Masters he admired so much. Certainly close enough that they easily fooled the critics and collectors he so despised.

Van Meegeren devised an aging process that, by 1930’s standards, made his fakes almost indistinguishable from the real thing. His paint was custom-made by grinding pigments in oil of lilac and then adding just the right amount of phenol formaldehyde resin dissolved in either benzene or turpentine. The resulting paint had all the right characteristics of a genuine 17^th century artist’s paint.

Finding canvas that would pass inspection was rather easier. Van Meegeren simply obtained cheap, almost worthless paintings from the same era, removed the original paint and then recycled the blank canvas into forgeries close enough to fool many art critics and collectors. During the 1930s he produced fakes by a variety of distinguished artists, selling them as newly discovered works. His particular masterpiece came in 1936 when he created a fake Vermeer named “The Supper at Emmaus” which Van Meegeren personally regarded as his finest work. It was instantly accepted by many top-level Dutch experts as being the genuine article.

Hans van Meegeren’s most famous dupe, Reichsmarschall Kerman Goering.

Scamming Kerman Goering

One of his better works was “Christ and The Adulteress” which his artistic agent sold to a German art collector in 1942 for the equivalent of $7 million in today’s money. The collector was none other than Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, commander of the Luftwaffe and one of Adolf Hitler’s most senior colleagues. Goering (himself an avid art collector) had no idea he’d paid so much for a fake and gave it pride of place in his personal gallery at his official residence, Karinhall. Aside from the obvious risks attached to making a fool of one of Nazi Germany’s most senior figures (while also pocketing a huge amount of his money) the decision by Van Meegeren’s agent would have serious consequences for his employer, although eventually his post-war legal problems would provide him with notoriety, celebrity and the public profile that he so desperately craved.

Money was never an issue for van Meegeren. His fakes went unexposed and for increasingly high prices. A rough estimate is that, in total, he pocketed somewhere around $60 million in today’s money from his many forgeries. He owned houses and hotels, moved around Europe freely before the war and relatively freely during it. He was said to have accumulated so much cash that he began hiding jars and boxes around his many homes and that future residents were still finding caches of pre-war Dutch banknotes even well into the 1960s. His desire for recognition far outweighed his admittedly lavish tastes, a desire that probably extended from his childhood and would only grow stronger as time went on. He could easily have exposed himself as a forger and humiliated many of his detractors long before the end of World War II but instead continued turning out fakes, reaping the profits while laughing privately at those experts he had taken for the fools he thought they were. It was with the end of the war (and the liberation of his native Holland) that a certaindeal with a certain German collector reared its ugly head and he was finally forced out into the limelight.

Van Meegeren in the Crosshairs

In May of 1945 van Meegeren was visited at his studio by two military officers representing the Allied Art Commission. The AAC was busily investigating the vast trade in stolen artwork during the Nazi era. The Nazis (when they bothered buying things instead of simply confiscating them) kept meticulous records of their dealings with art vendors. What they’d bought, where they bought it, how much they paid and (bad news for Van Meegeren) who they paid it to were all easily checked, providing an investigator had access to the right paperwork. The AAC investigators certainly did.

The name of Hans van Meegeren appeared on some of those papers in connection with the supposed Vermeer masterpiece “Christ and The Adulteress” as bought in 1942 by one Hermann Goering. For the first time in his long career as a master forger, Hans van Meegeren was now in extremely serious trouble. What made things especially grim was that he was arrested and held for trial as a suspected Nazi collaborator instead of as a forger. In early post-war Holland forgery didn’t carry the death sentence. Collaborating with the Nazis (especially top-level Nazis) very definitely did.

Van Meegeren was now in a highly dangerous and equally surreal situation. In order to prove he wasn’t a collaborator he would have to admit that he’d been selling forgeries for over a decade. If he confessed to being a professional forger he’d certainly draw a jail sentence for what the Dutch then called “falsification.” If he failed to prove that he was a common criminal and that he’d actually had the nerve to take a top-level Nazi for a fool then he’d quite likely be shot as a collaborator. In the years immediately after the war the Dutch were in no mood to show leniency to collaborators which left him with only one option: Cop a plea for being a top-level international forger and take whatever jail sentence the court chose to hand down.

After six weeks in custody, van Meegeren’s sense of self-preservation and desire for public attention finally won through. During yet another interview with Dutch investigators he finally cracked and bluntly told them that he was a forger. He freely admitted selling forgeries for over a decade and that the painting he sold Goering wasn’t a genuine classic from one of Holland’s greatest artists but was really a fake he’d painted himself. The cat was finally out of the bagand Hans van Meegeren was about to become an Old Master of the criminal variety. He’d serve some time, certainly, but he’d avoid the firing squad and still be able to reap the benefits of becoming a celebrity crook after his release. So far, so good, all except for one small problem.

The investigators didn’t believe him.

Van Meegeren’s artistic talent and instinct for fakery had landed him in a cell, possibly with a firing squad waiting for him. He’d come clean about his extensive criminal career and, when he’d finally shown his true colors, the authorities refused to accept his plea that he was only a common criminal, not a traitor to his country. Just to stay alive he’d now have to completely incriminate himself of lesser charges and simply accept whatever mercy the Dutch chose to offer.

Proving He Was a Forger, Not a Collaborator

Van Meegeren made the authorities a startling offer. He would prove his criminal talents by producing yet another faked painting using his standard mimicry, showing beyond doubt that he really was the master forger he claimed to be. His original plan to make himself a star and shame his detractors had come to fruition, granted. But it had come by a route so convoluted and downright bizarre that truth really had become stranger than fiction.

In front of the court he assembled his raw materials and set to work. While the judges, jury, international media, and the Dutch art community witnessed his every brushstroke(no doubt cringing at the mention of the journeyman they’d sent packing before the war). Van Meegeren showed every little trick and detail he’d used to fool so many people into parting with so much of their cash and credibility. Van Meegeren delivered a tour de force performance, proving beyond reasonable doubt that he wasn’t a collaborator, but certainly was one of the all-time great master forgers.

The charges of collaboration were dropped, the Dutch art community was left in a state of huge collective embarrassment and the most the judges were prepared to give van Meegeren was a token one-year sentence for “falsification.” Van Meegeren himself became an international star touted by no less a writer than Irving Wallace as “The man who swindled Goering.”American art lovers especially regarded him as though he was more of a prodigal son than a career criminal.

Postscript

Sadly for van Meegeren, his fame has long outlived him. While waiting to start his token jail sentence his health (which had been slipping for years through heavy smoking, heavier drinking and an addiction to morphine-based sleeping pills) finally gave out. He succumbed to a severe attack of angina the day before he was due for transfer to a Dutch jail. He lingered for a few weeks, but the damage was done and he died without serving so much as a day of his sentence.

Hans van Meegeren’s fame has survived through his surviving paintings and his legacy as one of the masters of forgery. Ironically, for a master forger, his known fakes and pieces painted under his own name are now worth considerable sums – some have netted six-figure prices, such is the art world’s appetite for his work. Not because they are artistically brilliant, but simply because there are many collectors prepared to pay decent prices to have either a fake Old Master or a genuine van Meegeren in their collections, something which would certainly have been immensely gratifying to him. He set out to achieve fame and fortune and he did so, albeit by so bizarre a route that even he must probably have shaken his head at the sheer strangeness of it all.

April, 25, 2013

 Steve Wright

The murders of five prostitutes by the Suffolk Strangler in 2006 set off one of the largest manhunts in British history. DNA evidence led to the arrest and conviction of a man who admitted he had sex with four of the five dead women, but was he the actual serial killer? 

by Siobhan Patricia Mulcahy

During November and December of 2006, five prostitutes were murdered one at a time in Ipswich, England. Although each was asphyxiated and not strangled, the British media dubbed the serial killer “the Suffolk Strangler.” 

Forensic evidence suggested that all five victims were attacked from behind and that the assailant put his arm across the victims’ throats to render them unconscious. The first two bodies were found fully or partially clothed in a nearby river in Ipswich. The last three victims were left naked in woodlands near the same area; no attempt had been made to hide or bury the bodies. Each victim was arranged in the form of a crucifix with her hair extended outwards in the form of a halo. Jewelry and other trinkets were taken from the victims but have never been recovered.

The victims were 19-year-old Tania Nicol, 25-year-old Gemma Adams, 24-year-old Anneli Alderton, 29-year-old Annette Nichols, and 24-year-old Paula Clennell. Clennell, the fifth and final victim, had predicted her own murder during a television interview about the serial killer. She had been friends with the other victims as they worked the same streets touting for passing trade.

At the time of the murders, Suffolk police asked the Forensic Science Service to assist in one of the largest murder manhunts in British history. From the time Tania Nicol was reported missing on November 1, 2006, the police investigation involved 600 officers from nearly every law enforcement force in Great Britain. The inquiry team received more than 12,000 calls from members of the public and almost 11,000 hours of closed-circuit TV footage were scrutinized.

More than 100 scientists spent more than 6,000 hours analyzing “swabs” for body fluids and DNA, along with thousands of fibers from the victims themselves, including the locations where each murdered woman was found. Initially, the surface of each of the victim’s bodies was swabbed to recover foreign DNA. Over 100 swabs were taken and processed using the SGM Plus profiling method.

A DNA Match

Tania Nicol

A DNA match led police to a man named Steve Wright, who at the time of the murders was working as barman in Ipswich's red light district and as a forklift truck driver in the Ipswich Docklands. His DNA profile was held on a police computer database after a previous conviction for theft; in 2002 he was convicted of stealing £80 from a former employer. Investigators said Wright’s DNA was recovered from Anneli Alderton, Paula Clennell and Annette Nichols.

Wright was arrested at his home at 5 a.m. on December 19, 2006 and taken in for questioning. At the time, the police told the assembled media: “This is a significant arrest and the team is feeling quite buoyant.” The police said that they were no longer appealing for information in relation to the murders and that the arrest was a major breakthrough in the case. They were very certain they had the culprit – to the exclusion of all other possible suspects.

When questioned by police, Wright admitted frequently using prostitutes in Ipswich's red light district and also admitted having sex with four of the five victims but he maintained “this did not make him a murderer.”

The police also told the media that the basis of the arrest was closed-circuit TV footage which they thought showed Wright's car picking up the first victim, Tania Nicol. Wright picked her up on October 30, 2006 and her body was not found until December 8. Wright said it was “quite possible” he was the driver of the car seen in CCTV images that showed Nicol getting into a vehicle on the night of her killing but he also said that after he picked her up he changed his mind about having sex and dropped her back in Ipswich's red light district.

Steve Wright’s Background

Gemma Adams

Steve Wright had a troubled childhood and adolescence. His mother walked out on the family when he was 8 years old and he did not see her again for 25 years. He and his siblings lived with their father, who remarried and had a son and daughter with his second wife. At age 16, Wright left school with poor academic results and joined the Merchant Navy where he became a chef. While in the navy, he began to frequent prostitutes and continued to do so throughout his adult life. When he left the navy, he worked as a lorry driver, a steward on the QE2 and as a bar manager in various locations and at one point, he lived in Thailand for a few months.

He was married and divorced twice and fathered two children. His second marriage lasted only a year and he may have had a third wife in Thailand though he has always denied this.

DNA Matches Lead to Conviction

Anneli Alderton

After his arrest, initial examination of over 500 items recovered from Wright’s home and car confirmed the presence of body fluids. Scientists extracted the DNA from these fluids – using SGM Plus methods and obtained profiles matching Paula Clennell, Anneli Alderton and Annette Nichols.

Scientists also recovered fibers from the bodies of Anneli Alderton, Paula Clennell and Annette Nichols using adhesive tape. These were then compared against items recovered from Steve Wright’s home and car. There were other incriminating items uncovered such as fibers matching the carpet of Steve Wright’s car found in Tania Nicol's hair and fibers from a pair of navy blue track suit bottoms recovered from Wright’s home which were found to be “indistinguishable” from those recovered from four of the victims.

During a six week trial at Ipswich crown court, the prosecution used CCTV footage and all the forensic evidence linking Wright to the murders – links so strong that prosecution experts said the odds of being mistaken were one in a billion.  In the end, jurors took only eight hours to convict Wright unanimously on all counts. In summing up, the trial judge, Mr. Justice Gross, said it was an “extremely disturbing case.”

Prosecutor Peter Wright called on the judge to impose a “whole life term.” He said the criteria for passing such a sentence were met because there was “a substantial degree of premeditation or planning.”

Wright was sentenced to life imprisonment with little chance of parole. Justice Gros called him the “epitome of evil.”

Is Steve Wright Innocent?

Annette Nichols

Wright, who adamantly professed his innocence from the time of his arrest, was shocked at his conviction. After his conviction, he said the verdict was like a “knife in the heart” as he had not expected to be found guilty. In a letter dated August of 2008 from Long Martin Prison, Worcestershire to the East Anglia Daily Times, he wrote that he was not the “real killer.” He also said that he was “numb with shock” after being found guilty of the murders and that there “was not one shred of evidence” against him.

“People should believe I am innocent because I have gone through my whole life trying to be as fair and considerate to other people as I possibly could. I don't have a violent bone in my body and to take a life I would have thought would be the ultimate form of aggression…All their evidence proved was that I had contact with the girls but not one shred of evidence showed that I killed them,” he wrote.

Wright is not alone in maintaining his innocence. To crime investigator and writer David Dixon, the forensic evidence linking Wright to the murders does not prove that Steve Wright was the killer. “The forensic experts testified that most fiber deposits would be lost in the wind and rain after a few hours of exposure to the elements, yet a full profile of Wright's DNA was found on three murder victims despite the bodies being exposed to wind and rain for several days, and even though Wright used condoms during sex with the women.”

To Dixson, all the scientific evidence only proves Wright had contact with the victims and that he had sex with four of the five murdered prostitutes – which Wright readily admitted from the outset.

Dixon says: “This CCTV footage, presented at the trial, alleged to show Tania Nicol being picked up by Wright's Ford Mondeo, but the footage was taken at night, and the car might not have been a Ford Mondeo, and if it was, it might not have been the killer's car, or Steven Wright's, and the girl getting into it may not have been Tania Nicol either.”

“Another very important point is that Paula Clennell (the final victim) reported to the police that she had seen Tania Nicol some two hours after this time, talking to a man in a silver car in the red-light district.”

Paula Clennell

Clennell therefore died as a potential material witness for Wright's defense, Dixon says. And another witness also saw Nicol talking to two men in a “posh” car after the CCTV sighting undermines this CCTV evidence completely.

Dixon believes a more obvious candidate for a suspect car is a blue BMW with polished alloy wheel hubs that was seen by several witnesses. Anneli Alderton was last seen alive getting into a dark blue BMW. Gemma Adams was last seen outside a BMW garage, according to Dixon. But this evidence never received an airing in court.

“Annette Nicholls was seen getting into a blue BMW with polished alloy wheel hubs a week before she is thought to have vanished. Tania Nicol was last seen at the driver's window talking and giggling with two men sitting in a “posh” blue car,” Dixon says.

“Another witness, a doorman at an Ipswich massage parlor, saw a driver in a blue BMW with polished alloy wheel hubs behaving very strangely in the car park in early December. The driver repeatedly reversed his car back and forth outside the door, then moved further up into the car park and did the same again, revving up his engine and stopping it repeatedly. He then drove off very fast.”

If we add up all the elements, Dixon says, what we get is “last seen alive,” “seen getting into,” “last seen outside a BMW garage,” “acting suspiciously outside a sex-related venue,” “last seen talking to two men in a posh car” – all of which must guarantee suspicion of a blue BMW.

Dixon believes Wright's defense did not make enough of this during the trial.

Wright also admitted having sex with Adams in his car at around the time she disappeared, and said that at later times he took the other women – Alderton, Clennell and Nicholls - back to his home for sex while his partner was at work. He would take them to his bedroom but would not use the bed in case his partner was able to smell sex on the bedclothes.

Instead, he had sex with them on two jackets on the floor. The court heard bloodstains from Clennell and Nicholls were found on one of the jackets.

Crown Prosecution advocate Michael Crimp said Wright was the “common denominator” linking all five murdered women. He concluded that Wright was the last person to see them alive and the scientific evidence proved he was responsible for their deaths. He said Wright had failed to give a satisfactory explanation as to why blood from two of the victims was on his jacket. This was one of the main factors in Wright's conviction.

Indeed there was no attempt by Wright's defense to investigate the origin of the blood stains. Could they have been menstrual blood? All the murdered prostitutes were drug addicts. Could this blood have been the result of lack of personal hygiene after injecting heroin? Or could the blood have resulted from rough sex with other customers earlier in the night? None of these possibilities were explored by Wright's defense in court.

According to Dixon, the prosecution also failed to explain why no jewelry and clothing from the victims had ever been found – surely if “trophies” had been kept by the murderer, they would have been uncovered in Wright's home or car.

Dixon says: “Wright made admissions that he need not have made, such as his awareness of some of the areas that the bodies were disposed in, where a dishonest denier would always deny if he could. He has had a long history of involvement with prostitutes dating back a quarter of a century with no sign of a psychopathic disposition in his history.”

Dixon also has a problem with the modus operandi of the actual murderer.

“The first two victims disappeared at fortnightly intervals and were found weeks later in a nearby river, in circumstances designed to eliminate the risk of forensic and DNA evidence. The last three were all killed in a single week, and the bodies were laid out on dry land for a quick discovery, plastered in DNA and forensic evidence that implicated the hapless defendant Steven Wright.”

Dixon says the murders can be described as “serial cascade murders” because of the change in timing between the first two murders and the last three. He believes there is also a corresponding switch between the two sets of murders, with the bodies of the first two being found in the east of Ipswich, and the bodies of the last three being found to the west of Ipswich.

Dixon concludes with the question: “Why would a serial killer accelerate the pace of his series so dramatically when the police surveillance of the small district from which he took his victims was at its height?” He may have a valid point.

Dixon is not alone in claiming the wrong man may have been convicted of the Ipswich murders.

Noel O'Gara, owner/editor of Court Publications in the Republic of Ireland has conducted his own investigation into the Ipswich murders, and last year, published an eBook about the case called The Real Suffolk Strangler. He believes the actual murderer is still on the loose.

O'Gara agrees with Dixon on a number of issues. He says: “The evidence that Steve Wright's DNA was found on the victims did not prove that he was a killer. What it did prove was that he had sexual relations with them as he admitted.”

He also agrees with Dixon that the blue car is a major “loose end” in the case, and like Dixon, he believes the existence of this car was not properly investigated by the .Ipswich police.

In his book, O'Gara suggests that a former police officer who worked as a pimp for all the murdered prostitutes was the real killer. He also claims that “the real killer” was the driver of the mysterious blue car seen in the CCTV footage shown in court.

O'Gara's chief suspect, Tom Stephens, was indeed arrested by Ipswich police before Steve Wright and was also named in one of the UK's Sunday newspapers as the potential culprit but O'Gara claims the police “lost all interest” in the ex-cop turned pimp once they arrested Steve Wright. He says Wright was a much “better fit” for the police who then stopped following leads on other suspects.

Though O'Gara spent several years gathering his own evidence in this case, he was unable to interview his chief suspect who (locals say) disappeared from the Ipswich area shortly after Wright's conviction. O'Gara says: “I went to the central police station in Ipswich to discuss my evidence but received a very hostile reception there and a request to meet the chief police officer was dismissed out of hand.”

Appeals

In March, 2008, Wright revealed he would be lodging an appeal against his conviction, as well as the trial judge's recommendation that his life sentence should mean “a whole life.” He has also claimed that the trial should never have been held in Ipswich, and that the evidence against him was not sufficient proof of his guilt. In a letter to the court of appeal, he stated: “All five women were stripped naked of clothing/jewelry/phones/bags and no evidence was found in my house or car.”

In July 2008, Wright renewed his application to appeal which was to be considered by three judges but in February 2009, he dropped this bid without explanation. British media have speculated that this decision was made because of lack of money. Wright’s family has said they hope to convince the Criminal Cases Review Commission to take on the case but they have had no success with this plan to date.

O'Gara cannot explain why Steve Wright has dropped the appeal against his conviction.

“He probably feels the cards are stacked against him. Ipswich police have repeatedly said they will not be reopening the investigation as they are satisfied they have caught the real killer.

If Steve Wright is indeed innocent, then the real killer is still on the loose.

In solving a youth’s odd disappearance and the mystery at Tupper Lake, is dead serial killer Israel Keyes the key, or something even more nefarious?

  by Eponymous Rox

The sprawling Adirondack mountain region of upstate New York is a dense world of water and woods. Sometimes serene, sometimes sinister, it remains a sparsely populated and unspoiled wildlife habitat, peppered with small, historic hamlets and connected by a network of mostly nameless footpaths, dirt roads, winding county routes, and, here and there, slicing through the countryside like a machete, a superhighway that seems to go on and on and on…to nowhere.

Major, minor, or backwoods, in spring, summer, autumn or winter, none of these passageways ever sees any significant amount of traffic. Not one, regardless of length or width, maintenance or neglect, is ever congested.

That peace and quiet is part of the appeal of this northern U.S. territory, for both year-round residents and the thousands of visitors who annually hike or vacation in these pristine hills during the hot, humid, and much too brief summertime.

Summer is when this tranquil place fully comes to life, when it is at its most peopled and inviting. In wintertime, though, the same idyllic landscape becomes a great deal more stark and forbidding. Deadly even, if one disrespects it.

Blizzards, howling arctic winds, and subfreezing temperatures which can grip the area for six months or more each year bring tourism to a virtual standstill then, restricting access to roads, seasonal camps and the out-of-the-way locations tourists usually like to probe, and lighting up a vacancy sign in nearly every hotel, motel and inn.

Winter and its isolation comes here early and stays late, driving away all those merely dabbling at nature, and generously returning stewardship of the mountains and lakes and beasts of the forest to the hardier full-timers.

Year after year, these rugged individuals fearlessly embrace the snow and cold, firm with the knowledge that, if they’re extra careful, they’ll surely live to feel the warmth of spring again. And that, if they aren’t, they won’t.

Vanishing into thin air

At any given time of year there are probably more dead people here than living. And, whether one believes in such things or not, countless numbers of ghosts, ancient and recent, also call the Adirondacks their home.

It’s just that kind of terrain: Haunting.

By now, although hearts are still filled with hope, there is little doubt that dwelling restlessly amongst those mountain spirits is the soul of a young man born and raised in the township of Tupper Lake named Colin Gillis. He was only 18 when he mysteriously disappeared without a trace on March 11, 2012, and no one has seen or heard from him since.

When Gillis had returned from college on Spring Break that March, the days had already begun to grow longer and warmer, although the nights, dipping down into the teens and well below, were still characteristically unforgiving.

The pre-med student was excited to once again be in that familiar neck of the woods he “knew like the back of his hand” and was particularly looking forward to a party being held on the evening of March 10th.

There, he was planning to meet up with some of his former high school classmates, some of whom he hadn’t seen since graduation.

Gillis was dressed for a 40-degree day when he grabbed a backpack and set out for the gathering shortly after having dinner with his parents. But it was already down into the twenties and the mercury still falling when he later left that party on foot at around two in the morning, presumably intoxicated and reportedly annoyed.

The youth was last observed by a passing motorist “flailing his arms” at the side of Route 3, a desolate section of roadway between Tupper Lake proper and the village of Piercefield, where the Gillis family lives.

As it turned out, the driver of the car that passed Colin Gillis at the early morning hours of March 11th was the editor of the local paper The Lake Placid News. This trusted eyewitness happened to be ferrying his elderly mother back to her home in the village of Tupper Lake and, concerned by Gillis’ frantic conduct and for the safety of a vulnerable passenger, decided not to stop. He went instead to the nearest police station to relay the incident.

Officers from that police department have since repeatedly stated that they responded immediately to this man’s urgent-sounding report and quickly drove out to the area in question but, upon arrival, saw no one there at all. Days later, however, when a massive rescue mission was fully launched searchers came across Gillis’ driver ID card together with one of his sneakers in that exact same spot.

It’s not known therefore who it really was that last saw Colin Gillis alive. Or what.

Unsavory elements

For many thousands of years Native Americans freely traversed the domed mountain range that serves in present times as the border between Canada and the United States. Then, like now, it was a formidable and at times extremely inhospitable environment—suitable for hunting, trapping or fishing, but little else—so no one ever thought to make it a permanent residence.

The name "Adirondack" is in fact a bastardized version of the Mohawk word Ratirontaks which roughly translated means "they eat trees." The full force of that translation is somewhat lost on us today though, because it was a deeply derogatory term which the Mohawk used to describe the Algonquian-speaking tribes whom, they claimed, dined on tree buds and bark whenever better food became scarce.

Fate has been unkind to all Native American peoples, so it is therefore impossible now to verify either the superiority of the Mohawk way of life or the Algonquians lowliness. But the historical grudges and insults of one tribe lobbed against the other are probably best dismissed as amounting to nothing more than ordinary cultural bias, such as has plagued every civilization since the beginning of time.

Still, the Adirondack Mountains are not, by virtue of their majestic stature, somehow exempt from having an actual lowlife element crouching in their shadows, and the record shows that some of these individuals have been far more onerous than the tree-eating variety.

A lake and a lair

In the northernmost tip of the Adirondack mountain region there sits a rundown cabin on a fairly modest-sized piece of property consisting mainly of old growth forest, towering pines, and swampland.

A ramshackle abode nestled within the darkest recesses of upstate New York, it was of little or no interest to anyone for all the years that its mostly-absent owner had quietly paid the taxes on it. But recently this rustic hideaway has become the subject of much speculation and mad searches.

Here, from 1997 to 2012, the now-dead serial killer Israel Keyes had set up his home-away-from-home for whenever he was on the east coast and prowling. Here, the FBI continues to diligently hunt for clues as to the identities and locations of his many unknown victims. Here, police dig intermittently for bodies and bones.

Although Keyes killed himself in an Alaskan jail cell before officials could fully extract all the details of his heinous crimes, based on those he did confess to, he is believed to have been one of the most mobile and possibly most prolific serial slayers known to date.

Moreover, he had been operating throughout the entire country for approximately a decade without his neighbors, family, friends, wife, or daughter ever suspecting he had such a lethal hobby.

Burying “kill kits” all over America. Plotting murders months and even years in advance. Traveling hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles to snatch a victim. Robbing banks along the way. Burning buildings. Raping. Torturing. Dismembering. Keyes was certainly one of the most methodical, heartless, and criminally insane of all serial murdering sociopaths.

An exceptionally depraved man who enjoyed every aspect of doing wrong, except getting caught for it.

By 2009, when Keyes decided to rob a bank in the small but quaint Adirondack village of Tupper Lake New York, he was already descending into uncontrollable madness: breaking his own rules in targeting a town so close to his own turf, and taking more and more unwarranted risks to accomplish his numerous other misdeeds.

That was an inevitable decline, experts say. Even the most “organized” breed of killer, like Keyes was, will someday fall prey to their own psychosis and start compulsively offending until they finally get nabbed. And although Keyes was never pursued or fingered for the Tupper Lake heist, it wasn’t very long after committing this rash act that he was apprehended.

March 13th, 2012, to be exact.

Road kill

Stalker, thief, kidnapper, rapist, torturer, arsonist…Israel Keyes was a deadly and sadistic predator. A former U.S. soldier, he skillfully and opportunistically hunted in public parks, boatyards, campgrounds, cemeteries, or highways, abducting and slaying the young or the old, males or females—whomever struck his fancy—sometimes pairs of them.

It is understandable why evil men like that are often rumored to have supernatural powers aiding them, but it’s unlikely that even this demonically possessed killer could have been in two places at one time. Not at the height of his crime spree, nor in March of 2012 when it was abruptly brought to an end.

Yet this is what some spooked citizens of Tupper Lake, on learning it was Keyes who pulled off the 2009 bank job there, now believe.

They suspect he was not really in Texas in March of 2012, as authorities claimed, but, rather, driving along Route 3 to his secret shack at the very moment that Colin Gillis was stumbling homeward.

They think that Keyes then stopped to offer the cold, befuddled and unsuspecting youngster a ride, and at some point he killed the boy, chopped him into bits and pieces as he’d done to all his other victims, and then scattered the remains where they’ll never be found again.

And to defeat those cruel ends the Gillis family has posted a $25,000 reward.

End of the road for wanderlust killings

Agents from the FBI are dead certain that Israel Keyes’ last and final victim was 18-year-old Samantha Koenig, who, on February 1, 2012, he’d abducted at gunpoint from an Alaskan drive-through coffee stand, transported in bondage to a shed at his residence, raped, tortured, and strangled.

After that, a giddy Keyes took a mini-vacation in New Orleans to celebrate the heartless crime, using his victim’s ATM card to finance the excursion with, until, eventually, her limited funds ran out and he was forced to go back home again.

When he returned, he dumped Koenig’s dismembered body in a semi-frozen lake close by, but, before mutilating it, snapped a lifelike-looking photo in order to deceive the girl’s distraught family into replenishing her drained debit card with a $30,000 ransom.

The fact that the teen’s banking account remained active throughout her inexplicable absence, also gave her loved ones false hope they would see her alive again.

At roughly 1:30 a.m. on March 11th, when 18-year-old Colin Gillis also uncharacteristically went missing, killer Keyes was once more in travel mode, but this time journeying the Texas highways, the FBI insists, although still using Koenig’s debit card to illicitly finance his trip. A trail of ATM withdrawals he left like breadcrumbs across the Lone Star state would also seem to confirm the killer’s whereabouts on that morning.

Two days later, however, on March 13th, wayward Keyes’ whirlwind would end abruptly in his arrest by a trooper who pulled him over for a traffic violation and recognized he was the “person of interest” being sought in the abduction of a pretty “Alaskan barista” from Anchorage.

There were shreds of withdrawal receipts from her account strewn on the passenger seat of his car, a stack of ransom cash at his fingertips, a murderer’s arsenal stored in his trunk, and a dark confession on the tip of his tongue.

At this point in time though, nobody knew yet that the young lady was in fact slain. Nobody knew yet of this man’s taste for blood. Nobody knew yet that Colin Gillis would never be seen again…

Gillis is described as a Caucasian male, approximately six-foot tall and 180 pounds, with light hair and blue eyes. He was a second-year pre-med student at the State University of New York at Brockport when he vanished.

Did a group of partygoers he’s alleged to have quarreled with before leaving on foot that day seek him out for revenge? Did the police successfully intercept him instead and, in the process, cause his death by applying excessive force while attempting to make an arrest? Did a pack of hungry wolves stalk the youth as he was obliviously walking the remote road in darkness and then drag his body into the woods to devour it?

Or did an infamous roaming serial killer, sensing capture was imminent, elude the Texan posse so to visit his New York hideout for one last time, and on the way seized upon a convenient kill?

This has become the number one mystery at Tupper Lake now, which the Gillis family desperately hopes to solve someday.

True crime writer Eponymous Rox is the author of THE CASE OF THE DROWNING MEN and HUNTING SMILEY. You can learn more about Colin Gillis and follow developments in his missing person case—as well as others like it—at the Killing Killers website. Visit the 'Find Colin Gillis' Facebook page here.

April 29, 2013

Screenshot from the motion picture Black Hawk Down

Specialist 4 John “Stebby” Stebbins won the Silver Star for his heroics at the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993. Since 2000 he’s been serving a 30-year sentence for raping his 6-year-old daughter.

by David Robb

You may have seen the movie Black Hawk Down. It was one of the biggest box office hits of 2001, and earned its director an Oscar nomination. The film, based on Mark Bowden’s nonfiction book of the same name, told the story of the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu. One of the real life Army heroes of the battle was Specialist 4 John ‘Stebby’ Stebbins, who was shot three different times – and thought dead each time – but recovered from his wounds and received the Silver Star, the third-highest military honor.

A former baker from upstate New York, Stebbins served as the company clerk for an elite unit of Army Rangers. His fellow soldiers referred to him as “chief coffee maker” and “paper pusher.” But when thrown into battle, his heroics surprised everyone.

“He was a changed man, a wild animal, dancing around, shooting like a madman,” Bowden wrote in his book.

In the movie, all the combatants are depicted under their real names – everyone, that is, but Stebbins. The Army insisted that his name be changed in the movie because the year before its release, he was convicted in a military court martial of raping his own 6-year-old daughter.

The transcript of the court-martial reveals that around October 1, 1998, when Stebbins and his family lived at Fort Benning, Georgia, “he began sexually abusing his 6-year-old daughter” – who is identified in the court record as “MS.” 

 “(He) approached MS and asked her whether she had seen him in bed with his wife. After she replied that she had, (he) made MS remove her clothes, lie face down on the bed and spread her legs.  He then raped her. (He) admits that he raped MS at least two more times before September 30, 1999.  Before raping MS for a third time, (he) also forcibly sodomized her. 

“(His) offenses were discovered on March 17, 1999, after (he) and his wife separated and were living apart. In response to an argument, (he) and his wife had over the telephone, MS, who was then 7, told her mother that she was “mad at him” and that she “hated him…because he did sex to me.” When questioned by her mother, MS indicated that (her father) had penetrated her genitals and anus and had placed his penis in her mouth.”

This was not the kind of hero the Army wanted portrayed in Black Hawk Down. So in exchange for receiving Pentagon permission to use actual Army Black Hawks in the movie, the producers agreed to change the name of his character. The real life John Stebbins became the fictional “John Grimes,” the only fictional character in the movie. And so Stebbins was written out of the script – literally.

The real John Stebbins is currently serving a 30-year sentence at the Fort Leavenworth military prison in Kansas.

 May 2, 2013

 “Surrender had played out for good with me…” Jesse James.

When the Ford brothers assassinated Jesse James on April 3, 1882, the longest-running outlaw saga in American history was over.

 by Robert Walsh

Confederate bushwhacker, desperate outlaw, bank robber, political terrorist, gang leader, multiple murderer, folk hero. Jesse James was all of them. One thing he wasn’t (as much as his latter-day apologists like John Newman Edwards would like you to think) was some sort of Robin Hood who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. While he made great play of continuing to fight for the Confederate cause (when he wasn’t claiming to represent poor, dispossessed Missourians against rich Northern carpetbaggers) he was out for himself.

There was certainly an element of political thought behind his actions (Northern banks and businesses often being prime targets) but most of what he stole stayed in his pocket and, while violence was always going to be a part of his life and career, he also killed even when there was no need for bloodshed.

To understand Jesse James one needs to understand the context into which he was born. Jesse was born in Clay County, Missouri in 1847. Clay County was by far the most pro-Southern county in Missouri, its people and its ways having earned it the nickname “Little Dixie.”

The Kansas-Missouri Border Wars erupted around the issue of slavery and emancipation during the 1850s. Missourians could keep slaves (the James family themselves owned a few) while Kansas outlawed slavery. Even in the 1850s, years before the Civil War began in 1861, pro-and-anti-slavery groups organized themselves into armed bands, raiding and fighting long before the Confederacy even existed. Jesse grew up amid a climate of political violence where the bullet often outweighed the ballot box. Guerilla groups such as the pro-Southern “Bushwhackers” and pro-Northern “Jayhawkers” and the largely-criminal “Redlegs” (named for the red gaiters they wore) routinely fought running battles during the period now known as “Bleeding Kansas.”

When the Civil War began, Jesse wasn’t old enough at first to join the Bushwhackers he so admired. His older brother Frank began riding with infamous Confederate William Quantrill (leader of “Quantrill’s Raiders”) but Quantrill turned Jesse down, stating that 16 years old was simply too young. A few months later rival Confederate William “Bloody Bill” Anderson wasn’t so fussy. Jesse had found himself a particularly unpleasant mentor.

Bloody Bill was well named. He hated Yankees with such passion that he collected the scalps of his victims during raids and skirmishes. He was brutal, fanatical, and utterly indifferent to killing anyone who opposed him and, while the perfect mentor for a wannabe guerilla, he couldn’t have been any worse for an impressionable teenager already noted by Anderson and others as a more-than-capable fighter. Jesse having been born into violence and death, Anderson’s influence could only have been deeply negative.

Atrocities were common on both sides. Bushwhackers, Jayhawkers and Redlegs routinely conducted reprisals against each other and, seeing as there were increasingly few official Confederate troops in Missouri, reprisals by Jayhawkers were often against civilians they believed had ties to known or suspected Bushwhackers. The infamous Redlegs were nominally pro-Union, but in practice they tended towards preying on innocent civilians as much as Confederate sympathizers.

The James family was not exempt from reprisals. Jesse was still living on the family farm near Kearney – not far from St. Joseph, Missouri – when Jayhawkers arrived. They beat Jesse and tortured his stepfather Joseph, suspecting rightly that they were well aware of Frank’s activities with Quantrill. Despite Jesse being severely beaten and his stepfather partially hanged, neither gave anything away. Perhaps not surprisingly, Jesse too now held a lasting grudge against pro-Northern forces and it was then that he sought out Anderson and joined his band of Bushwhackers.

Guerilla Wars: Raiding as a Way of Life

The guerilla war conducted in Missouri was especially personal. In Missouri almost everybody knew everybody else’s affiliations and so former friends and even family members often found themselves on opposite sides, making the fighting especially personal and especially vicious. Frank took an active role in the notorious”Lawrence Massacre” in 1863, where Union troops and pro-Union civilians were killed en masse while Jesse was involved in the equally notorious “Centralia Massacre” in 1864, where captured Union troops and civilians aboard a hijacked train were beaten, shot and, in some cases, scalped.

By late 1864official Confederate forces had withdrawn from Missouri. Frank was still riding with Quantrill and Jesse was firmly established with Anderson, at least until Anderson’s death after being ambushed by Union cavalry. Anderson’s death made Jesse’s grudge even deeper. He swore vengeance.

Towards the end of the Civil War, Jesse also suffered the second of two life-threatening war wounds when he was shot through the lung by a Union cavalryman. The fact that he was actually trying to surrender doubtless did little to cool his grudge.

Life as a Bushwhacker was perfect training for aspiring outlaws. By the end of the war, Jesse was well-used to life spent perpetually on the run, always outnumbered, outgunned, headed straight from one fight into another and he became fully accustomed to raiding as a lifestyle, killing as a regular event and the possibility of dying being an occupational hazard. His being several years younger than Frank probably accounts for his more aggressive, hot-headed nature, making him more likely to start shooting when Frank might have acted differently in the same situations. Anderson’s malign influence at such a young age, coupled with Jesse having been born into a violent time and place, suggests that his becoming a full-time outlaw was predictable.

Reconstruction in Missouri

With the defeat of the Confederates in 1865, the James boys were forced into an oppressive way of life. Being former Bushwhackers they couldn’t vote, own property, run their own businesses or even preach in their own local churches and, perhaps most galling of all, were forced to swear an oath of allegiance to the Union. Part of Reconstruction in Missouri involved repressing former Confederate fighters and their sympathizers and the increasing dominance of Northern “carpetbaggers” who began sweepingaway old ideas and reshaping Missouri in the Northern image. The carpetbaggers began steadily pushing out long-held traditions, dominating commerce and business in the enforced absence of locals who ran things before the war and were often barred from doing so afterward for their Confederate sympathies. The pre-war way of life was being squeezed out of existence at the expense of many native Missourians and their former Northern enemies were squeezing by any means available.

Jesse chafed at such restrictions. Being made to feel like a second-class citizen in his own land was bad enough, but watching his old way of life destroyed to benefit outsiders (especially Northerners) was endlessly provocative to him. Between the Confederate surrender in April, 1865 and the start of Jesse’s outlaw career in 1866, the restrictions on former rebels and increasing dominance by Northern interests fuelled his resentment, stoking (so he always claimed) his desire to keep fighting for a cause already lost.

The James-Younger Gang

With these factors in mind, Jesse began recruiting former Bushwhackers into a fully fledged outlaw gang. First on his list was older brother Frank. After Frank, the James brothers recruited two of Frank’s fellow Quantrill Raiders, Bob and Cole Younger. Bob and Cole enlisted their brother Jim and once the gang heard of former “Bloody Bill”Anderson associate Arch Clements (an acquaintance of Jesse’s already running his own gang, fighting Union troops and conducting a series of armed robberies) they opted to ride with Clements. Other members came and went (Bill Chadwell, Clell Miller, Charlie Pitts, Bob and Charlie Ford among others), but the James and Younger brothers were always the nucleus around what became known as the “James-Younger Gang.”

After the death of Clements while fighting Union cavalry, the gang was led by Jesse, with the experienced, cooler heads of Frank James and Cole Younger an essential part of planning raids and ensuring the gang’s survival. Jesse also had a novel new target for armed robberies: banks. Outlaws of the day usually robbed trains and stagecoaches for payrolls and whatever they could take from passengers as banks were deemed too well protected, despite their undoubted assets. Indeed, the very first American bank robbery occurred during the Civil War when a man named Green earned himself $5,000 (and a hangman’s noose) after robbing a Massachusetts bank, murdering a cashier in the process. Before Jesse, banks were considered off-limits, after Jesse (and even today) they’re considered fair game.

It’s said that Jesse took a particular interest in banks because many banks were owned by rich Northern carpetbaggers or at least funded the carpetbaggers as they “reconstructed” the old South according to Northern ways and ideas. They seemed an especially attractive way to strike directly against Jesse’s old enemy even after the Civil War had ended. Setting aside the political statement of robbing banks, Jesse liked the large amounts of ready cash robbing banks provided.

The First Peacetime Daylight Bank Robbery in U.S. History

The first bank robbed by members of the James Gang was in Liberty, Missouri in early 1866. The target was the Clay County Savings Association (familiar turf for the James and Younger boys). It was the first peacetime, daylight bank robbery in American history and the bank had been funded by anti-slavery Republicans which possiblymade it especially appealing. There’s no firm evidence to confirm that either Jesse or Frank took part (eyewitness reports are conflicting and no physical evidence exists either) but what is widely believed is that the James brothers were at least involved in the planning, if not necessarily the robbery itself. A bystander, a student at William Jewell College (which, ironically, Jesse’s father helped found) was shot dead as the robbers escaped with nearly $4,000 in banknotes and gold.

The James-Younger Gang was firmly on its way and there was no turning back. The gang made the leap from Confederate guerillas to full-time outlaws who could expect long sentences at best and at worst either a professional hangman or a lynch mob. Fortunately for them, Clay County folk retained much sympathy for the defeated South and, being rural folk, were used to keeping local secrets from outsiders, especially Northerners. Even though many local people must have had at least some idea who the robbers were, nobody said anything and nobody was likely to either.

Oddly, for a supposedly pro-Confederate gang still clinging to the Southern cause, many of their robberies were of small local banks containing local money rather than that of the hated carpetbaggers. This being a time before bank robberies were insured by the Federal Government, robbing local banks was only likely to hurt local people and businesses which contradicts the myth of Jesse’s band being entirely politically motivated. Despite the Robin Hood myth so ably peddled by the gang’s apologists and supporters, especially journalist (and unofficial public relations wizard for the gang) John Newman Edwards, very little stolen money found its way from the banks of the rich into the pockets of the poor. Jesse might have believed that he was acting to represent the downtrodden Missourians and the defeated Confederacy (so might Edwards for that matter) but I’ve no doubt that Jesse fully understood the value of providing some kind of justification for his many crimes and that Edwards probably recognized the value of a widely read, long-running syndicated saga when he saw one.

Edwards and Jesse began to correspond viaa simple means, mainly the ordinary U.S. Postal Service. Jesse (an educated, well-read man) would supply intimate accounts of robberies, raids and killings (sprinkled liberally with pro-Confederate speechifying and self-justification) and Edwards (formerly a Confederate cavalryman) would polish the text, reaping the considerable professional rewards of almost-exclusive communication with Jesse James. With Edwards as his personal scribe, Jesse was becoming a star as his gang robbed trains, banks and stagecoaches, shooting its way out of trouble whenever the need arose. Jesse provided action and good copy and Edwards was always keen to return the favor by trying to generate good press, even though later examination suggests strongly that the gang didn’t deserve its reputation as avenging angels for the poor and dispossessed.

Murder at Gallatin – No Turning Back

The bank job that really made the gang’s name was at Gallatin, Missouri in December, 1869. The Daviess County Savings Association was run by former Union militia officer, Captain John Sheets. At least it was until Jesse’s gang robbed it and Jesse mistook Sheets for Union cavalry Captain Samuel Cox (killer of “Bloody Bill” Anderson) and promptly shot him dead.

The James gang then took a moderately large amount of cash before riding out, shooting its way through a posse and making a successful escape. The Gallatin job and the needless revenge murder of an innocent man put Jesse firmly on the front page of many a newspaper and now there really was no turning back. The James boys were wanted men, criminal pioneers (banks were still seen by most outlaws as off-limits) and now full-fledged outlaws with prices on their heads. The prices came courtesy of Missouri State Governor (and former Union Colonel) Thomas Crittenden, offering what was then the largest reward in Missouri history for their capture. The initial reward was $10,000 for Frank and Jesse, dead or alive. As their notoriety grew other gang members such as Cole Younger would also have bounties put on them.

Six months after the Gallatin robbery, John Newman Edwards wrote his first article in support of the gang, with Jesse as its public face. Over the next four years, the gang carried out a long series of robberies and a string of murders as it rode from town to town wreaking havoc as it went. In Iowa, Texas, Kansas and West Virginia the gang ripped through banks, stagecoaches and a Kansas City fairground. But in 1873 the gang made a fateful decision to attempt its first train robbery and it proved a huge mistake in the long term.

They blocked the Rock Island Line near Adair, Iowa, robbing the derailed train of around $3,000 in cash and gold. They disguised themselves wearing a potent symbol of Confederate defiance and white supremacy, the masks habitually worn by members of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan, founded by legendary Confederate cavalryman Nathan Bedford Forrest (who later quit when the Klan’s racism and violence became too virulent even for him), was formed shortly after the end of the Civil War in 1865 and had undergone repression when President Ulysses Grant used the Force Acts to suppress it. Certainly a potent political statement at a time when former Confederates were still as resentful as ever of Southern defeat and the Northerners then “reconstructing” the Old South in their own image.

Enter the Pinkerton Detective Agency

The robbery also caused the Adams Express Company (which had lost heavily as a result) to bring the Pinkerton Detective Agency into the hunt with the firm intention of ending the James Gang’s career one way or another. The involvement of the “Pinkerton men” (feared by outlaws nationwide) would prove fateful for the James brothers and especially for their family.

The gang started its private war with Allan Pinkerton by murdering one of his detectives, Joseph Whicher, in 1874. Whicher had tried to infiltrate the gang by posing as a field hand on a farm run by neighbors of Jesse’s parents. It wasn’t long before he was found dead with three bullets in his head and chest. Pinned over the chest wounds was a note bearing the words “Thus always to detectives.” Not long after the Whicher murder (which incensed Allan Pinkerton who took it as a personal challenge) two more agents were found dead. Captain Louis Lull and Detective John Boyle went looking for the Younger brothers and found them. Lull killed John Younger (who was only 15 years old) before Lull, Boyle and local Deputy Sheriff Daniels all died in the ensuing gunfight.

If Whicher’s death left Pinkerton furious, the deaths of Lull, Boyle and Daniels left him completely enraged. He swore to get the James brothers by any means necessary, legitimate or otherwise. His men raided the James family farm, tossing an incendiary device through a window in the dead of night. Jesse’s mother Zerelda lost an arm and his younger brother Archie died in the explosion and fire that destroyed the farm. Jesse’s father was also injured, but both his parents survived.

The raid was a costly public relations disaster for Pinkerton and the legality of his actions was at best highly debatable even for the 1870s. It also inflamed local opinion against carpet- bagging Yankees in general and Allan Pinkerton in particular. The “Robin Hood” myth of persecuted rebels that John Newman Edwards had started now became integral to Jesse’s life story, a pervasive myth even today. Pinkerton afterwards denied that the intention of the raid was arson, but biographer Ted Yeatman later unearthed one of Pinkerton’s letters in which Pinkerton clearly stated his intention was to “Burn the house down.” Pinkerton had taken what should have been a purely professional manhunt and made it a personal vendetta, much to the detriment of his own legacy and the hunt for the outlaws themselves.

Shortly after the raid the Missouri State Legislature narrowly voted down a bill openly praising the James brothers and offering them amnesty.

Now that former Confederates were once again allowed to hold political office and had regained their voting rights a bill limiting the size of rewards that the governor could offer was swiftly passed instead. It was intended to inhibit more tempting rewards being offered and thus provide some limited protection for the gang but, while the governor had his hands tied, there was no limit on rewards offered by private companies or individuals such as railroad barons or other carpetbaggers with an axe to grind.

The End of the James-Younger Gang

The next major raid by the James-Younger Gang was at Northfield in Minnesota. It was a disastrous failure and effectively spelt the end of the gang as it then stood. Minnesota was far from the gang’s usual hunting grounds, was in unfamiliar territory and the decision to raid the First National Bank caused much dissent between senior gang members. Jesse was happy to go on the raid; Frank James was skeptical, Cole Younger was openly unhappy and only went because his younger brother Bob refused to back out. The whole plan was only even considered at the suggestion of gang member Bill Chadwell, a Minnesota native who finally convinced the others to go along. Chadwell claimed Northfield was a soft target whose residents were never likely to put up much resistance. For the more politically-minded outlaws, the bank also had a carpetbagger as a major stockholder (former governor of Mississippi during Reconstruction, Adelbert Ames) and was said to be owned by former Union General Benjamin Butler.

Butler was a particularly hated Union figure known to residents of Baton Rouge as “Beast” Butler due to his harsh measures against the city’s residents during its occupation. He was also known as “Spoons” for his alleged habit of pilfering silverware from mansions captured during the Civil War. Butler wasn’t actually involved with the Northfield bank at all, but the gang didn’t know that. This lack of clarity was typical of the bad planning, poor information and glaring underestimation of Northfield’s population toput up far more of a fight than the gang expected.

To raise funds needed for the Northfield robbery, the gang robbed a train at Otterville, Missouri on its way north. They needed funds for horses, guns and food to sustain them on the way as the ride was so long and they’d be operating hundreds of miles from friendly territory with only Chadwell to guide them so they had to be totally self-sufficient.  Not only was the Northfield raid ill-conceived, poorly planned, lacking in local support, and based on inaccurate information, Chadwell, although from Minnesota, had never actually been to Northfield. He had only heard that the bank was rich enough to be worth the time, effort and risk required to rob it and in general was unworthy of a gang of seasoned outlaws. Plus, some gang members spent the morning before the robbery drinking rather than casing the bank properly. In short, everything was in place for a spectacular disaster and that’s exactly what the Northfield robbery was.

The gang assembled was a large one: Jesse and Frank James, Cole, Jim and Bob Younger, Charlie Pitts, Bill Chadwell and Clell Miller.Frank, Jesse and Bob Younger were to actually rob the bank, Cole Younger and Clell Miller would guard the bank from interference while the rearguard of Jim Younger, Bill Chadwell and Charlie Pitts would provide additional intimidation and firepower if required. An odd decision was that no local citizen was to be killed. All the gang members agreed to only shoot to wound opposition. The people of Northfield weren’t quite so discriminating.

All was ready for what would be the James-Younger Gang’s swansong as an active unit. At exactly 2p.m. Frank, Jesse and Bob Younger walked into the bank and from there everything went haywire. As Cole and Clell reached the bank they spotted none other than Adelbert Ames himself walking towards the bank, which proved more than a slight distraction all things considered.

Frank, Jesse and Cole headed inside the bank and found cashier Joseph Heywood, teller Alonzo Bunker and the bookkeeper Frank Wilcox. They quickly ordered the employees to line up against a wall. After identifying the cashier, Jesse demanded that Heywood open the safe. Heywood, playing for time, claimed the safe was on a time lock so it couldn’t be opened. The safe did have a time lock, but the lock hadn’t been set and so the safe could easily have been opened had the gang realized this. They didn’t, especially as Heywood made a great show of being unable to open the safe and bought enough time for Bunker to make his escape and alert the townsfolk, albeit taking a bullet in the shoulder from Clell Miller for his efforts.

Now the downfall of the James-Younger Gang began in earnest. Two Northfield citizens owned gun shops and began handing out guns and ammunition to anyone who wanted them and hadn’t already grabbed his own weapon, many locals having already picked up their own weapons and plenty of ammunition. Citizens began appearing in every vantage point they could find, on rooftops, in doorways, windows, from behind walls and began randomly opening fire on the bank and the gang. A chaotic firefight started with lead zipping in every direction. With Heywood still playing for time and an armed and very dangerous citizenry blasting bullets and buckshot from every available piece of cover they could find, it was no longer a matter of a simple bank job. Now it was a fight just to escape and survive.

For some of the gang it would be a forlorn hope. Bill Chadwell (the gang’s guide into Minnesota) was shot dead shortly after Clell Miller was injured by a shotgun blast and mortally wounded by a well-aimed rifle bullet. Bob Younger’s elbow was shattered by a rifle bullet, crippling him permanently. Cole Younger received 12 wounds from bullets and buckshot. Frank (having already sustained injury when the bank vault door was slammed shut on his arm) was wounded in the leg and other arm. Jesse stopped some buckshot and Jim Younger took a couple of bullets as well.

The James-Younger Gang (what was left of it) rode full-pelt out of Northfield with locals firing guns, hurling rocks and waving pitchforks at them. They left behind two dead outlaws, two dead citizens (including Cashier Heywood who had been killed by Frank after resisting too firmly), one seriously wounded citizen, sacks full of spent cartridge cases, bullet holes and shattered windows in many buildings and a crime scene resembling a battlefield rather than a robbery. The gang had lost its guide, most of its members were seriously wounded, they were hundreds of miles out of their comfort zone, a posse was immediately on their tail and things couldn’t really have gone much worse.

Their take for this disastrous firefight? $26.70.

The James boys and the Younger brothers promptly split after their escape from Northfield. Frank and Jesse managed to escape back into Missouri. Charlie Pitts and the Younger brothers were soon found by militia units. Pitts was shot dead while the Youngers were captured and held for trial. The James-Younger Gang was finished as a criminal group.

The Younger boys drew long sentences at Stillwater Penitentiary. Cole drew 25 years, Bob and Jim drew lesser sentences. Bob died in prison of tuberculosis while Jim was unable to cope with his very restrictive parole restrictions, committing suicide less than a year after his eventual release. Cole served his full stretch.

Jesse’s New Gang

After Northfield little is known about Frank and Jesse until they re-surfaced in Nashville, Tennessee later in 1876. Frank seemingly gave up the outlaw life and settled down to live quietly under a false identity: B.J. Woodson. Jesse, whose alias was Thomas Howard, wasn’t as sensible. Even the disastrous Northfield raid didn’t cause him to cease raiding, robbing and killing and he assembled a new gang in 1879. On October 8, 1879 the new gang held up a train at Glendale, Missouri and went on a spree including robbing a Federal Paymaster at a canal project in Killen, Alabama and at least two more train robberies. The new gang, ominously for Jesse, included Charlie Ford, who quickly convinced Jesse to accept Charlie’s brother Bob as a member. But Jesse was growing increasingly paranoid. His paranoia scared away at least one fellow outlaw and it’s been said that Jesse personally killed another who he came to distrust. Jesse was starting to come unglued. Soon he would come unstuck in every sense.

With local law enforcement (such as it was at that time) becoming increasingly suspicious of Thomas Howard and B.J Woodson, the brothers both moved back into friendlier territory in Missouri. Jesse stayed in Missouri under his alias, taking up roots in the town of St. Joseph. Frank, always the more prudent of the two, moved on again and eventually settled in West Virginia. Frank settled down and lived the quiet life while Jesse continued his criminal career with his new gang. Ironically (and disastrously for him) for all his increasing paranoia Jesse now only trusted his two new personal bodyguards, Bob and Charlie Ford.

The Dirty Little Coward Who Shot Mr. Howard

What Jesse never knew was the secret deal struck between the Ford brothers and Missouri Governor Thomas Crittenden, a deal which was about as shady as it could be. Crittenden had made great political capital out of his self-declared war on the James brothers in speeches.  For years, the State Legislature had placed a $10,000 bounty on bringing Jesse in “dead or alive.” The Ford brothers agreed secretly with Governor Crittenden to bring Jesse in dead. Crittenden (cleverly getting around the legal limit on rewards offered by a governor) also approached railroad operators and banks to offer an additional $10,000 in reward money. The Ford brothers fully intended to collect what now made up around $20,000 in reward money and, as there was no extra reward for bringing Jesse in alive, dead was safer and just as good. Being a shrewd, clever operator, Crittenden must have known full well that he was, in effect, taking out a contract with two known felons to kill another felon in return for a large cash payment. That was exactly what the Ford brothers did.

On April 3, 1882 Jesse and the Fords were preparing for yet another robbery, popping in and out of Jesse’s house all morning. It was unusually hot for April in Missouri so Jesse removed his guns to stand on a chair cleaning a picture on the wall. Bob and Charlie Ford promptly unlimbered their guns and pumped bullets into Jesse’s back and head. The longest-running outlaw saga in American history was over.

The Fords were somewhat dismayed to find themselves charged with murder instead of being given their huge cash reward. They were convicted and (within hours of their convictions and death sentences) were both pardoned by Governor Crittenden who presumably wanted the less pleasant details of their transaction kept out of the public eye. Being known publicly as the men who killed an American legend didn’t do them any favors either. The reward, for example, was never paid  to them, instead most of it ended up in the pockets of Sheriff Timberlake and Marshal Craig who had legal jurisdiction for St. Joseph  where Jesse died. The Ford brothers found themselves vilified as cowards, traitors and no more than cheap assassins. They both had to flee Missouri, but even that didn’t save them.

Charley Ford developed a morphine addiction and also tuberculosis. He committed suicide on April 6, 1884 in Richmond, Missouri. Bob Ford fled to Creede, Colorado where he opened a tent saloon. On June 8, 1892 a cowhand named Edward O’Kelley walked into the salon and blasted him with a double-barreled shotgun, shouting as he fired:

“That’s for Jesse James!”

O’Kelley drew a life sentence for the murder, a sentence commuted due to a 7,000 signature petition. Colorado’s governor pardoned O’Kelley on October 3, 1902.

Postscript

Five months after Jesse’s death, Frank James finally turned himself in. He turned up in the state capital at Jefferson City where he had an appointment with his brother’s nemesis. He simply handed over his guns to Governor Crittenden personally, stating:

“I have been hunted for 21 years, have literally lived in the saddle, have never known a day of perfect peace. It was one long, anxious, inexorable, eternal vigil. Governor, I haven’t let another man touch my gun since 1861…”

Frank was tried at Gallatin for a train robbery committed at Winston, Missouri in July, 1881. He was acquitted on all charges. He was next tried in Huntsville, Alabama for robbing a U.S. Army payroll at Muscle Shoals in March, 1881. Again, he was acquitted on all charges. Missouri took legal jurisdiction to press other charges but Frank was never tried again. He also avoided extradition to Minnesota to stand trial for his role in the Northfield robbery, which included his murder of bank cashier Joseph Heywood.  In spite of his undoubtedly being a bank robber, thief, outlaw and multiple killer, Frank never gained a criminal conviction or served any prison sentences.

Now a free man, Frank briefly joined Cole Younger in Buffalo Bill Cody’s touring “Wild West Show, a travelling rodeo where Frank and Cole recounted their personal memories of their outlaw careers and especially their long acquaintance with Jesse. Frank later worked as a shoe salesman and as a ticket collector in a burlesque show. He finally retired to Clay County, returning to the family farm outside Kearney where he gave guided tours of the James farm for 25c a head. He died there on February 18, 1915 aged 72.

May 6, 2013

 From the cold case files: the 1965 murder of Jean Welch in Cumberland, Maryland

by James Rada, Jr.

Jean Welch carried her basket of wet laundry outside to dry on the clothesline behind her apartment. May 17, 1965 was a sunny, spring day in Cumberland, Maryland, and besides warm to hang clothes on the line, Jean had trader her winter clothes for shorts a short-sleeved blouse.

Cumberland had once been the second-largest city in Maryland. Located in the Appalachian Mountains in western Maryland, the city had boomed with the coal and railroad industries. As those industries struggled and declined, the city's population had peaked in 1940 and had been falling since then to around 31,000 in 1965. Because it was such a small city, it contained neighborhoods that looked more as if they belonged in the suburbs rather than a city. Jean Welch and her family lived in one of these neighborhood on Cumberland's south side.

Jean was an attractive brunette and looking at her, one might find it hard to believe she was 33 years old, let alone the mother of three children. And someone was looking at her as she hung the clothes. A witness would later tell police she had seen Jean hanging the laundry around 1:30 p.m.

Someone else most likely saw her, too. This person wouldn’t give a statement to police. The police would never know his name. They would only know what he did.

Jean lived in her apartment on Oldtown Road with her husband, Dale, and their three daughters. Two families lived in apartments on the second floor of the building. No one was home that afternoon in one of apartments, but in the other, a woman was inside going about her day. She noticed nothing amiss.

“One woman from the other second-floor apartment was at home and investigation revealed she had heard a knock on the Welch's side door,” reported the Cumberland Evening Times. The side door was located on New Hampshire Avenue and it was used more often by family and friends than the front door on Oldtown Road.

Neighbors across the street were sitting on their front porch watching the people walk by and traffic zip up and down Oldtown Road. No one would later recall anyone approaching the front door to the Welch apartment. However, they did recall that the drapes in the large picture window of Welch’s apartment had been open when Jean was hanging clothes, but by 3 p.m. someone had closed them. Given that the day was so lovely, it was odd enough for the couple to recall them being closed, though they didn't notice anyone pulling them shut.

Around 4 p.m., Judy Woodson, Jean’s 13-year-old daughter from a prior marriage, returned home from school and entered the apartment. She found it a mess, which was unusual. Her mother was a good housekeeper. Then Judy found her 1-year-old sister Dee Dee strapped to her training potty in the back bedroom. Judy’s other sister, 2-year-old Loy Lee was also in the apartment and crying.

Loy Lee explained what happened next decades later.

“Mom!” Judy called.

No answer.

She looked in her mother’s bedroom but it was empty. The door to the bathroom was closed. If her mother was in there, why hadn’t she answered Judy’s call. Judy knocked on the door.

“Mom?”

When there was no answer, Judy opened the door.

Her mother was inside. The sight would haunt Judy for many years to come. Jean was laying face down in a partially filled tub of water and not moving. Judy screamed.

Dale Welch had spent the afternoon playing golf. He had been at the Cumberland Country Club since noon. He finished his round of golf around 4:15 p.m. and got in his car to head back to Air-Flow Roofing and Siding Company where he was vice president.

“While en route from the golf course to the office, Mr. Welch was advised on his two-way car radio that there was 'an emergency' at his home,” the Cumberland Evening Times reported.

Welch rushed home and was met by police at the apartment who showed him his wife’s body. They then led him to where his daughters were and began questioning him.

The deputy county medical examiner determined that the killer had struck Jean several times with a blunt instrument. Unfortunately, no one could find the murder weapon. Besides striking her, the killer had strangled Jean with a drapery cord and pushed her face down into the tub to drown her. Her time of death was estimated to be around 2 p.m., shortly after she was last seen hanging laundry.

Though Cumberland was a city, it was not plagued by a high murder rate as seen in many cities. The number of murders each year could be counted on one hand, usually one finger.

The case fell under the jurisdiction of the Cumberland Police Department but because of the violent nature of the crime, a multi-agency investigation team was formed. It included Deputy Maryland States Attorney J. Frederick Sharer, Cumberland Detective Lieutenant Thomas See, Cumberland Detective Harry Iser, County Investigator William F. Baker and the deputy Allegany County Medical Examiner.

At least 10 police officers were assigned to the case full time. They began going door to door, questioning neighbors. They also visited with friends and relatives of the Welch's. Within a week, more than 300 people had been interviewed and their statements recorded.

Cumberland Police Detective Captain James Van and other officers stopped cars along Oldtown Road during the time period the murder might have occurred and questioned the drivers if they had seen anything on the day of the murder.

“The residents of Oldtown Road area have been cooperative and many have cut their lawns, trimmed their hedges seeking the murder weapon in an effort to assist police,” reported the Cumberland Evening Times.

Besides the murderer, the murder weapon continued to elude the invesigators. Police searched trash cans, a nearby lake and construction sites. The Cumberland Sewer Department personnel cleaned out catch basins and sewers around the Welch's apartment hoping to find the weapon. City workers also cut grass on nearby open lots, hoping the weapon might simply have been tossed away.

It was never found or identified.

No clear motive was ever established, either, though sexual assault was alluded to in some reports.

Cumberland Police Chief B. Frank Gaffney told the newspaper, “As of now there has been no basic motive established and we are operating on all theories. The murderer could be a friend or stranger, local or transient.”

Jean was buried March 20, but the investigation and rumors were just beginning. The rumor mill was naming the killer even though the police had no evidence to support the accusations, though each one needed to be investigated. The rumors resulted "in some leads, on the other hand, they have necessitated many endless hours of checking for county, city and state officers," reported the Cumberland Sunday Times.

The volume and nature of the rumors became so bad that State's Attorney Donald Mason warned the public, “Persons who start or repeat these false rumors are subject to legal action for civil slander by persons whose names are mentioned. These false rumors also hinder the work of the investigating officers who are working tirelessly on this case.”

The target of many of those rumors was Dale Welch. This is not surprising since the spouse is usually the prime suspect in such a case, but Welch had an air-tight alibi. He had been playing golf miles away from the apartment with a number of other men who testified to that fact.

When the Cumberland Police brought in a lie detector with a trained Maryland State Police examiner to use with some key witnesses, Welch volunteered to be tested, hoping to clear his name. He passed two separate tests, showing he had no knowledge relating to the death of his wife. It was enough for the police, though rumors would always surround him about what he knew about his wife's death.

 A Botched Crime Scene

Despite the diligence of the police during the investigation, they had mishandled the crime scene during the first day. Blood samples and fingerprints had been lost due to mishandling. Though a large number of investigators were needed to handle the searches and interviews, it may have led to a case of having too many fingers in the pie.

“It wasn't that someone committed the perfect murder and got away with it. Things got messed up,” said Loy Capshaw, the adult Loy Lee Welch.

At the investigation's peak, 10 officers were assigned full-time to the case with many other people from different agencies looking at it on a part-time basis. Sylvester J. Smith, president of the Air-Flow Roofing and Siding Company where Welch worked, offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the capture of Jean's killer. This only added to the volume of tips and leads that police needed to investigate.

No one was ever arrested and the killer remained at large.

Capshaw noted the fact that the case was never closed haunted her father until his death. He had always hoped that the killer would be found so that he could have closure.

For a short time, it seemed like that might finally happen. Sources familiar with the case were saying that an under-the-radar investigation by the state's attorney office in the early 2000’s had found forensic evidence that indicated a living family member might be the murder. If true, this would not have been Dale Welch because he had already passed away. However, no one was ever indicted and the case was not reopened. It remains unsolved and part of the Maryland State Police's cold case file.

Featuring:

Solitary Confinement in Jails and Prisonsby Shawn R. Griffith

Jesse James: The Baddest Outlaw of Them All by Robert Walsh

Is the Suffolk Strangler Still at Large?  by Siobhan Patricia Mulcahy

Hans Van Meegeren – Master Forger by Robert Walsh

Forensics: The Chocolate Factory Case by Liz Porter

The Murder of the BBC’s Winton Cooper  by Ben Johnson

The Ethnic Cleansing of Native Americans by David Robb

Mystery at Tupper Lake by Eponymous Rox

The Murder of Yaseen Ege – The Little Boy Who Was Slow to Memorize the Koran by Marie Kusters-McCarthy

May 9, 2012

 Michael Cassius McDonald

Long before Al Capone stormed into Chicago, a violent little Irish-American ruled the mean streets of Chicago.

by Kelly Pucci

Though long-forgotten by many, latecomers like Capone, Torrio and Colosimo owe a debt of gratitude to Michael Cassius McDonald, the man who brought togethercriminals and elected officials, setting the stage for organized crime in Chicago. During a 50-year career in the underworld, journalists, gangster, mayors and even one president of the United States took orders from Chicago original crime boss.

Michael Cassius McDonald arrived in Chicago just before the Civil War. A teen-aged runaway from Upstate New York, McDonald knew no one in Chicago. His childhood friend and fellow freight train jumper, Henry Marvin, died en route and was buried by McDonald without fanfare.

In the 1850s Chicago became the nation’s railroad hub opening the city to a flood of eager young men with big ideas. Young men like Marshall Field, who opened a retail emporium in downtown Chicago, and George Pullman, creator of the eponymous sleeping and dining cars that made travel by train comfortable and later carried President Abraham Lincoln’s body on a final journey from the White House to Springfield, Illinois.

But when Mike McDonald rode the rails in the 1850s, passengers sat on hard wooden benches as they stared at an unchanging landscape through sooty windows. With little to occupy bored passengers after consuming lunches brought from home, passengers eagerly welcomed the sight of boys called “candy butchers” who trudged through the aisles. In exchange for a few pennies and free transportation to Chicago, runaways and orphans clad in ragged clothing peddled goods for the railroad. Sympathetic passengers, mistakenly believing that the boys received their fair share of profits, bought poor quality goods from the candy butchers. And Michael Cassius McDonald was the most successful candy butcher of his time.

An Enterprising Lad

Slight in stature, he peddled books and fruit to kind-hearted ladies. Male passengers, duped by his innocent appearance, took candy home only to discover when opened by a loved one the boxes were half empty. Eager to increase his profits, McDonald expanded his business to include phony raffle tickets. Chicago crime writer Richard C. Lindberg credits McDonald with inventing the “prize package swindle.”As Lindberg explains it, McDonald guaranteed a cash prize of up to $5 in every box of candy purchased. Most prizes amounted to a few cents, but once hooked by the possibility of a big prize, greedy passengers tried and tried again leading McDonald to proclaim “There is a sucker born every minute” long before film star W.C. Field uttered the famous phrase.

Most boys tired of the grind, working long days for pennies and sleeping in dirty railroad yards at night. But McDonald, now in his late teens, wasn’t like most boys. He expanded his business. From wealthy passengers not afraid to gamble tidy sums of money, he learned to play cards. A keen observer of human behavior, McDonald watched their body language as they bluffed and wagered their way through intense poker games. Soon he exchanged his ragged clothes for the attire of a card shark: a crisp suit, polished shoes and an ever present cigar. He continued to work days, but at night he joined floating card games in The Sands, Chicago’s vice district, going up against some of the best card sharks in the country.

Until the election of Mayor John Wentworth in 1857, Chicago officials unofficially tolerated The Sands, but within a few weeks of his first term, Mayor Wentworth declared war on The Sands. Literally overnight the mayor and his police force destroyed The Sands, burning to the ground or tearing down every shack, brothel and gambling parlor after issuing a 30-minute warning to occupants get out.

But Mike McDonald was not discouraged. He correctly predicted that gambling, no longer contained in one Chicago neighborhood, would spread throughout the city making the job of finding gamblers more difficult for police. In fact, the police force was so inept that Mayor Wentworth fired the entire department, until public pressure forced him to reverse his decision.

Discrimination against the Irish and Irish-Americans prohibited McDonald from applying for many honest jobs; elected officials enacted legislation to prohibit immigrants from holding city jobs.  But McDonald’s illegal business was flush with a customer base that included politicians, judges and city officials.

Gaming the System

McDonald operated Chicago’s most successful floating faro game, a European card game popularized in America by Wyatt Earp and Mississippi Riverboat gamblers. Played with a unique deck of cards laid out on an elaborately decorated card table with hidden compartments to allow dealers to skim money, players had little chance of winning. Occasionally McDonald instructed his dealers to adjust the game in favor of influential business leaders, but quipped “Never give a sucker an even break” – another phrase later popularized by W. C. Fields. Games often ended in violence but by this time local cops could be called upon to remove the angry patron in exchange for a bonus from McDonald’s men.

When President Abraham Lincoln called upon Illinois citizens to sign up for duty in the Union Army, McDonald did his best to aid the call to action. Though able-bodied, 22-year old Mike McDonald did not enlist in The Irish Brigade. Instead he organized groups of bounty jumpers. These men collected a $300 signing bonus called a bounty, and then deserted the army as soon as possible with money in hand and returned to Chicago to enlist under an assumed name. McDonald pocketed 50 percent in exchange for a promise of immunity from a crime punishable by hanging. Government officials desperate to fill quotas looked the other way as McDonald signed up Chicago’s drunken, derelict and destitute men. During the first two years of the Civil War, Illinois supplied more than 130,000 men to the Union army and McDonald accumulated enough money to purchase a saloon and adjoining gambling parlor in a luxury Chicago hotel.

Perhaps it was ready access to an unlimited supply of alcohol that fueled McDonald’s violent temper. On one occasion he punched and kicked a 60-year old woman who owned a roadhouse he frequented; he knocked down a man who tried to steal his handkerchief; he pummeled a man in a saloon and when the poor fellow tried to defend himself against McDonald the police hauled the man off to jail.

As the nation suffered through the Civil War, Chicago and Mike McDonald prospered. Businessmen in town to negotiate lucrative Union contracts, White southerners displaced by war and Confederate soldiers, escapees from a prison camp on Chicago’s south side, provided a steady stream of gamblers at McDonald’splace. Through his wealthy customers McDonald learned of skyrocketing land values caused by the demand for new factories and housing for workers and he invested heavily in real estate. By the end of the war, McDonald owned several buildings, four gambling clubs and a liquor distributorship.

His notoriety attracted women of a certain type: young and flashy. Isabella or Belle Jewel met Michael McDonald when she danced in the chorus line at a popular theater where John Wilkes Booth performed Shakespeare. Smitten by Belle’s beauty, McDonald quickly welcomed her into his circle of friends, introducing her as Mrs. McDonald though they never married. They dined in the finest restaurants and lived in an exclusive neighborhood. Whether it was physical abuse at McDonald’s hand, or his habitual drunkenness that drove Belle to leave him after seven years, she did so with a flair for the unexpected. The former chorus girl, no longer the belle of the ball, joined a St. Louis convent where she remained until her death in 1889.

The Great Chicago Fire

A few weeks after Belle’s sudden departure from Chicago, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed most of Chicago and every personal possession, business and building McDonald owned. Chicago and Michael Cassius McDonald were ruined, but not for long.

Chicago began rebuilding almost immediately after the outgoing mayor honored hundreds of dead citizens by closing saloons for a period of one week.

By the end of the year McDonald married Mary Ann Noonan Goudy, a stunning 24-year-old divorcee and mother of two. She and her toddlers moved into the house McDonald had shared with Belle Jewel.

Thousands of laborers rushed to Chicago to build new houses for 300,000 citizens made homeless by the fire. For months, skilled tradesmen arrived at a busy railway station located in the heart of a red-light district where McDonald set up a shabby, but conveniently located gambling parlor. To outsmart competing gambling parlors in the area, McDonald hired well-dressed men to greet passengers as soon as they arrived. Yes, McDonald’s men knew where to get a hot meal and, incidentally an “honest” card game to pass the time while looking for employment.

McDonald’s business drew the attention of Chicago’s new mayor, Joseph Medill, co-owner of the Chicago Tribune; Mayor Medill tried to shut him down. Medill successfully lobbied the state legislature to increase penalties for owners of gambling parlors. He forced saloon owners to close on Sunday, the one day a week that laborers were free to enjoy a drink or two at their neighborhood tavern. He ordered his police superintendent to raid gambling parlors, when he was lax in carrying out his duties, the newspaper Medill owned published a list of known gambling parlors and their locations.

With the support of the liquor distributors association and the publisher of a competing newspaper, McDonald publicly opposed the mayor’s edict to close saloons on Sunday. For a while saloons remained opened, but owners dimmed the lights, locked the front door and admitted patrons through a side or back door.

Well aware that the police superintendent knew his men took bribes from gambling parlors including his, McDonald threatened to expose him. As a compromise, McDonald and others under his protection received advance notice of impending raids. For the benefit of the public, police officers removed gambling equipment they stored for pickup by the owners the following day. On occasion the police smashed furniture, but only well-worn or broken items chosen by the owner. If an employee or gambler was inexplicably arrested in the raids, McDonald posted bail.

Mayor Medill continued to put pressure on McDonald, but the king of gambling emerged victorious. The police superintendent and his successor were fired. Mayor Medill fled to Europe under the guise of seeking treatment for unnamed health issues. McDonald successfully offered his own candidate to replace Mayor Medill. With a new mayor in office, McDonald flourished. Upon McDonald’s request, Mayor Harvey Colvin repealed the law that banned the sale of alcohol on Sunday. Recognizing McDonald’s ability to get things done, Chicago’s gambling community clambered for McDonald’s support – the result, Chicago’s original crime syndicate. Flush with payoffs from politicians who paid McDonald hush money in connection with their own shady businesses and money contributed by small and big-time gamblers, McDonald opened the most notorious gambling house in America.

“The Store”

In September 1873 the beautifully crafted wooden doors of McDonald’s 24/7 department store of gambling, popularly known as “The Store” swung open to reveal the luxurious interior of a multi-story brick building: fine carpets, thick velvet drapes and gleaming mirrors. A cigar store that sold the finest imported cigars and a saloon stocked with the best wines available occupied the ground level. On the second floor, a staff of impeccably dressed men stood behind oak gambling tables, ready to greet well-heeled players. The Palace European Hotel, little more than a fancy rooming house, welcomed out-of-town gamblers on the third floor. No longer happy to occupy the home of her husband’s former lover, Mary and the kids lived together on the upper floor with McDonald as an occasional overnight guest.

McDonald extended credit to politicians who walked over from City Hall and to U.S. Senator James G. Fair. A frequent visitor from Nevada, Fair made millions from co-ownership of the Comstock Lode, the richest silver mine in the United States, and from a partnership in a California railroad, Fair couldn’t resist paying a visit to The Store when he changed trains in Chicago on his way to work in Washington, D.C. Sir Charles Russell, a member of the British Parliament, played poker at The Store. McDonald treated with generosity wives who complained their husbands gambled away the family rent money, refunding their losses and vowing to ban them from The Store. He contributed to charities. When someone asked McDonald for a contribution of $2 to help defray the cost of burying a fallen police officer, he quipped, “Here’s $10, bury five of them.”

Despite McDonald’s dislike of policemen, he kept some on his payroll. He brandished a pistol at a large political gathering, but officers on duty kept their distance. Police escorted drunken voters to a polling place set up at McDonald’s business where he offered naturalization papers and voter registration forms on the spot. During a drunken rage he broke the nose of a stranger who commented on a newspaper article unfavorable to McDonald and his supporters. The man filed criminal charges, but the case never made it to court. McDonald assaulted a newspaperman and threatened to cut off his ear. When arrested for attempted murder of a rival gambler, a police officer escorted him to jail in a special carriage and recommended to the judge McDonald be released on bail immediately. Of course, he was acquitted of all charges and that evening he held a banquet for judges, city officials and police officers.

For a time, members of the Chicago police force disregarded department orders to raid The Store. But occasionally policemen showed up unannounced. One evening a group of officers bounded into The Store and up the stairs to the family living quarters with a warrant to arrest McDonald. Mr. McDonald was not at home at the time but Mrs. McDonald was. She responded by firing two shots at the policemen. Charged with attempted murder, she was led to penitentiary where she stayed just until her husband hired an expensive lawyer named Alfred Trude and bribed a judge who released Mary before reprimanding the policemen for their unlawful raid of the McDonald family home.

Like her husband, Mary enjoyed keeping company with minor celebrities who performed in Chicago’s many theaters. She quickly fell in love with Billy Arlington, an African-American banjo player who lived with his wife Julia on Chicago’s South Side. Mary showered Arlington with gifts and even brazenly introduced him to her husband at a dinner party. When Billy had to leave Chicago for a performance in San Francisco, Mrs. McDonald followed. By the time they reached Denver, Mary declared her undying love for Billy Arlington in a letter she mailed home to her husband. Undeterred McDonald followed the couple to San Francisco where he threatened Billy and Mrs. McDonald with a loaded pistol.

McDonald forgave his wife for her indiscretion. He promised his wife a new home away from The Store and sealed the deal when he moved his family to a limestone mansion on a wide boulevard lined with homes of prominent Chicagoans including the mayor.

Mary promised to be faithful and for a while she was. Through her husband’s generous contributions to a local Catholic Church, she met Father Joseph Moysant. While church workers completed preparation of his living quarters at the church, Mary offered the priest a spare room, and often her own room, in the McDonald’s spacious mansion. On one occasion they took a secret trip out of town. They continued a clandestine affair undetected for two years until they decided to leave Chicago forever.

Like Belle Jewel, Mary left Chicago wearing a nun’s habit, but she had no intention of joining a convent. The lovers took a train to New York were they boarded a ship bound for Paris. This time it took McDonald two months to track her down. Under advice of his lawyer, Alfred Trude, the man who defended Mrs. McDonald against the attempted murder of a policeman, McDonald filed for a divorce. Shaken by his wife’s latest infidelity he lamented to a friend, “When you cannot trust your wife and your priest, whom can you trust?”

Though busy operating his gambling parlor, collecting protection money and distributing police bribes, McDonald ran some honest and some not quite honest enterprises. He bought the Chicago Globe newspaper, a rival to former Mayor Medill’s newspaper the Chicago Tribune. He commanded hustlers and pickpockets to stay clear of the area around the Columbian Exposition so as not to damage Chicago’s reputation while it hosted millions of fairgoers. At a private meeting in the White House he persuaded President Chester Arthur to pardon a colleague convicted in a Ponzi scheme. He financed construction of Chicago’s first elevated rail line. He operated a racetrack. He invested in a quarry that sold limestone to city contractors at inflated prices. He hired a crew to paint city hall with a special liquid guaranteed to render the crumbling building waterproof and fireproof, billing the City of Chicago $180,000 for a job estimated at $30,000. The special liquid turned out to be a worthless mixture of lime, lead and linseed oil.

McDonald was a busy man, but still a man, a man who loved women. At age 56 he married a 21- year old Jewish actress named Dora Feldman who he remembered from the times she and his son played together as schoolmates. Like McDonald, Dora was divorced and like his former wife the new Mrs. McDonald was attracted to artistic types. For a few years the couple was happy to host lavish dinner parties in the home McDonald purchased for Dora and to dine late at night in fine restaurants after the theater or opera. But McDonald was getting older and slowing down. While he spent his afternoons napping, Dora sneaked away to meet her teenaged lover, Webster Guerin. Guerin couldn’t support himself by selling his paintings so Dora set him up in a picture-framing business downtown. Whether or not McDonald suspected his wife of carrying on a long-term affair, he continued to love his wife, even to the point of converting to Judaism and not questioning how she spent his money.

When Dora suspected that Webster Guerin was seeing another woman, who in fact was his brother’s girlfriend, she became enraged. She threatened to kill the woman. She threatened to kill Guerin. On a cold February morning Dora burst into her lover’s office and shot him dead in full view of witnesses. Though she admitted to the police she killed her lover, she told her husband that she killed the man because she was blackmailing her. McDonald paid for her defense, a team of prominent lawyers led by Alfred Trude, the man who defended his first wife against a charge of attempted murder.

The scandal took a toll on McDonald and he did not live to see his wife acquitted of murder. Michael Cassius McDonald died with his former wife, Mary, at his side and $2 million in assets.

May 13, 2013 Special to Crime Magazine

An excerpt from George Hassett’s just released Gangsters of Boston, which is published by Strategic Media Books (www.strategicmediabooks.com). Gangsters of Boston is available at Amazon, bookstores, as an e-book and at special discount price at the Strategic Media Books web site       

by George Hassett

In 1960, when Attorney General Bobby Kennedy launched his historic crackdown on organized crime he had to overcome resistance from the FBI and its director J. Edgar Hoover. For decades, Hoover had vehemently denied the existence of a national network of gangsters.

Privately, he knew that organized crime investigations made for bad statistics – lots of man hours resulting in a relatively small number of arrests. He also knew that mixing wealthy gangsters with underpaid agents – the FBI starting annual salary in the mid-1950s was a pitiful $5,500 – could undermine his FBI’s cherished reputation of incorruptibility.

But the Kennedy brothers would not let up. They had pressured Hoover to fight the Italian mob since John F. Kennedy was senator. Now that he was president and named Bobby his attorney general the campaign intensified.

J. Edgar Hoover

The Kennedy’s hated one Mafia don with a particular zeal; Raymond Patriarca had taunted the brothers during congressional hearings, saying, “You two don’t have the brains of your retarded sister.” Soon after, Bobby Kennedy told a friend that he and Jack were “going after that pig on the hill,” referring to the mob boss’ Federal Hill stronghold. The brothers increased the pressure on Hoover – even bursting into his office with information requests during his sacred afternoon naps.

Hoover finally acted. He adapted the dirty tricks he used against suspected Communists in the 1950s – illegal wiretapping, bugging, break-ins, and searches - against organized crime. When that proved troublesome Hoover fired off a memo to all regional offices in September 1963, demanding the recruitment of high-level informants from within organized crime. It was called the Top Echelon Informant Program.

The organized criminal enterprise that dominated Boston for decades - and later included James “Whitey” Bulger - was conceived in this Hoover memo. Decades later, as victim’s remains were being dug up from shallow graves, the full toll of the FBI’s misconduct in Boston’s underworld finally came to light. Almost 50 murders would be attributed to the FBI’s star informants and four innocent men framed by a killer FBI agent for a murder they did not commit.

In the Boston underworld FBI Agent H. Paul Rico was the bureau’s main representative. Born in the Boston suburb of Belmont in the 1920s, he was the son of an Irish mother and Spanish father who worked for New England Telephone. The Mediterranean looks he inherited sometimes led people to believe he was Italian, an assumption he used to his advantage when trying to gain favor with wiseguys. He graduated from Boston College with a history degree in 1950, then joined the FBI. He was first posted in Chicago but was transferred to the Boston office after his father fell terminally ill.

That was when the young agent worked on the Brink’s robbery, his first big case and learned the value of “flipping” or “turning” an informant. Rico worked with agent Jack Kehoe – the agent who got Specs O’Keefe to cooperate with authorities and testify against his former co-conspirators. He also worked with future partner Dennis Condon. In time these two agents would manipulate Boston’s underworld as if they were the kingpins.

The Flemmi Brothers: “A Couple of Bad Kids”

Vincent “Jimmy the Bear” Flemmi

Vincent “Jimmy the Bear” Flemmi and his brother Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi were introduced to the Boston underworld by notorious kingpin Edward “Wimpy” Bennett. Bennett, who earned his nickname by endlessly munching on White Castle hamburgers, was a treacherous Irish thug who controlled Roxbury and the South End with a cunning attention to underworld politics. Stevie Flemmi, in particular, was said to have learned his devious ways from Wimpy.

“Behind his back everyone called [Wimpy] the fox,” said infamous Boston hit man John Martorano. “He always talked with his hand to his mouth, even when he was inside, so that nobody could read his lips. He said he learned it in prison. Then he would hire lip readers to hang around other wiseguys he was lining up, so he’d know what they were talking about. He was continually looking for an edge.”

Bennett made sure to maintain good relations with the most powerful gangster in New England. For reasons unknown to anyone else, Bennett always called Patriarca “George.” The underworld believed Bennett was “George’s” spy in Boston – one reason he was hated by North End gangsters such as Jerry Angiulo.

In the 1950s the Flemmi brothers were valuable killers in Bennett’s gang. That didn’t mean they were well liked; a Revere wiseguy was quoted in an FBI report describing the Flemmis as “a couple of bad kids.”

Born in 1934, Stevie drifted into the underworld after two tours of duty in the Korean War. On his first eight-man combat patrol he earned the nickname the Rifleman when he killed five enemy soldiers. His brother Jimmy the Bear was just as lethal. By the early 1960s, within months after his release, he murdered two men. He killed a third man while high on Seconal one night. The man’s offense: he bumped into the Bear at a downtown cafeteria.

Accounts of Jimmy the Bear’s brutal murders reached Patriarca in Providence. Since the Bear was from Boston, Patriarca told Jerry Angiulo he would have to try to get him under control. Angiulo personally delivered the message to Jimmy that he had to get every murder approved by Patriarca. “The Man says that you don’t have common sense when it comes to killing people,”

Angiulo said quietly. “Jimmy, you don’t kill somebody just because you have an argument with him.”

Meanwhile, FBI Agent H. Paul Rico was plumbing Boston’s underworld for informants but the Bear was interfering. In December 1964 Rico recruited George Ash, a 41 year old ex-con from Somerville. Ash had a long criminal record and knew every wiseguy in the city. Rico thought he had his star informant.

But on the night he was approved by Washington and given his own informant’s identification number, Ash ran into the Bear. They ended up in the South End in a Corvair owned by Ash’s sister. Suddenly the Bear decided to stab and shoot his old friend Ash. After finishing Ash off, the Bear climbed unsteadily out of the car and wandered away without seeing the two Boston police officers watching him from across the street.

The two Boston cops immediately drove to Stevie Flemmi’s store, told him what had happened, and demanded $1,000 not to report the murder. Stevie paid them off and then chewed out his careless big brother saying he was lucky the two officers were friends.

Ash’s murder was a setback for Rico but within a few months he set his sights on recruiting the Bear himself as an informant. Even as Rico was courting him, he was aware that Jimmy the Bear was plotting another murder. Teddy Deegan, a small time burglar, was in the Bear’s crosshairs. At the Ebb Tide Lounge in Revere, the Bear was heard ranting that Deegan was a “treacherous sneak.”

On March 10, 1965, Agent Rico even sent a report to his FBI superiors in Washington stating clearly that Jimmy the Bear Flemmi was about to kill Deegan – “a dry run has already been made and a close associate of Deegan’s has agreed to set him up.” No one in law enforcement thought to warn Deegan he was about to be murdered.

To lure Deegan to the Ebb Tide, he was told that a finance company in downtown Chelsea was a soft touch for a break in. Deegan immediately declared his interest. On March 12, 1965, Vincent “Jimmy the Bear” Flemmi was officially approved as an FBI informant.

That night the Bear and his friend Joe “the Animal” Barboza met Deegan at the Ebb Tide and drove to Chelsea for the supposed burglary. They got Deegan into an alley and opened fire, killing him. Within an hour, the Bear and Barboza were back at the Ebb Tide celebrating and drinking cheap scotch. The next day, Agent Rico sent a memo to J. Edgar Hoover identifying the killers of Deegan as Flemmi and Barboza. Agent Rico didn’t bother to tell the police investigating the murder.

Joe "The Animal" Barboza

Jimmy the Bear’s old friend, Joe “The Animal” Barboza would one day become the Boston Mafia’s Joe Valachi, the inside guy who told all. But the Mafia liked what they saw when it first recruited the young tough guy in the mid-1950s in state prison.

A second generation Portuguese American, Barboza found trouble early in life. At age 13, he and his older brother were arrested after a vandalism spree. By 1949, the 17-year-old led a gang that broke into homes and small businesses, stealing money, watches, liquor and guns. Sentenced to the Concord Reformatory for five years in 1950, Barboza led a wild break-out in the summer of 1953 that was the largest in the prison’s 75-year history. Barboza and six other inmates guzzled whiskey and popped uppers, overpowered four guards and raced away in two cars. They beat people up, cruised the bars in Boston’s center of vice at the time, Scollay Square, wandered to Lynn and Revere and were nabbed at a subway station less than 24 hours after the escape.

The trip earned Barboza a stay at Walpole, the state’s maximum security prison. It was there that the Mafia took an interest in the young convict and it was for the Mafia that Barboza mostly worked after his parole in 1958. Released from prison, he boxed, worked as a dockhand, a clerk in a fruit store but his only real skill was murder. And during the escalation of Boston’s gang wars he had plenty of opportunity to prove himself. Within eight years of his parole, he earned a reputation as one of the state’s real killers – allegedly killing at least two dozen men.

By January 1966, Barboza was a big shot in the Boston underworld; in court he was represented by the famous criminal lawyer F. Lee Bailey. He was on shaky ground though, the mob’s leadership was growing tired of his reckless behavior. He was on the same probation his pal the Bear was on from Providence: no hits without prior approval.

In October 1966, Boston Police arrested Barboza for illegal gun possession in the city’s Combat Zone. When two Barboza pals raised $82,000 for his bail, Mafia thug Larry Zannino had them set up and murdered. In the Charles Street jail, Barboza went wild and vowed revenge.

FBI agents Dennis Condon and H. Paul Rico were monitoring all of this. They had been combing the Boston underworld for the informants Hoover demanded. Barboza, with his troubles, seemed the perfect candidate. They began to visit the Animal in jail, working to recruit him as an informant.

In June 1967, Barboza began naming names. He implicated Patriarca and Angiulo in separate murder conspiracies. In a third case, he covered for his friend and Agent Rico’s snitch Jimmy the Bear by implicating four innocent men in the Deegan murder. By the time he was through Barboza would become the New England’s Mob Joe Valachi.

May 16, 2013

With good reason, conspiracy theories abound about the shooting deaths of oil scion Ned Doheny and his companion/secretary Hugh Plunkett at the fortress-like mansion Greystone in Los Angeles.

by Benjamin Welton

On the night of February 17, 1929, two would-be writers converged together in order to make history in Los Angeles, America’s fabled land of never-ending sunshine and raw economic opportunity. These two men—Leslie White and Raymond Chandler—did not knew each other that night, nor were they writers yet. They would learn and apply that craft in the 1930s in the various pulp magazines of the day, with White taking the lead while Chandler was busy drinking himself out of a job at the Dabney Oil Syndicate. The hardboiled and cynical worldview that these men shared captured the zeitgeist of the Depression, but the seeds of this bitter harvest were planted in the late 1920s, right before America’s decade-long party came crashing down. In the era before James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, the seedy world of Southern California was rife with corruption and an almost expressionist tapestry of nihilist violence and amorality.

In the same way that the double murder that occurred on February 17, 1929 foreshadowed darker things to come (at least in the literary world), the events of that night were partially based on an even greater scandal of that age. President Warren Harding, America’s 29^th commander-in-chief, is often placed near the cellar of the historical rankings of U.S. Presidents, and much (if not all) of that is due to the Teapot Dome Scandal that consumed his entire administration, even after his sudden death in San Francisco in 1923 (which is another crime for another day). Between the years of 1920 and 1923, President Harding’s Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall took and pocketed bribes in order to lease U.S. Navy petroleum reserves (which were then primarily located at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, as well as California) to private oil companies.

Teapot Dome Scandal

Albert Fall had come to politics the hard way. Although born in Kentucky, Fall was a Western man through and through. Besides representing New Mexico as a Republican in the U.S. Senate, Fall had made a killing in Kingston, Arizona, along with the killing of many men, which he boasted about to any available ear. As a lawyer in Santa Fe, Fall, along with other prosperous men in Santa Fe, helped to order the assassination of Pat Garrett, the legendary lawman who had made his name known through his killing of Billy the Kid. Fall was a Horatio Alger-like up-from-the-bottom type, yet instead of feisty pluck, he was full of hard, brutal power lust. Unfortunately for him, he was not as successful once he was in power. Fall lived large and spent freely, causing him to sink into a mire of debt by the early 1920s. When he took office in 1921, Fall hatched a plan to relieve himself of his debt burden.

Fall called upon his Kingston friend and former business partner Edward L. Doheny, one of the country’s wealthiest men and a Southern California oilman who could honestly brag that he owned whole swaths of Mexico. Indeed, in 1910, when the Mexican Revolution began, Doheny financed a private army to protect his wells in Mexico: Cassiano 6 & 7 and Cerro Azul 4. Along with this, Doheny used his substantial influence in Washington to try and place the policies of the U.S. government in step with his own. Some at the time even believed that Doheny was behind the many assassinations of the war, with Mexico President Venustiano Carranaza included. Doheny served as an easy model of vampiric capitalism in such novels as Upton Sinclair’s Oil! and B. Traven’s The Treasure of Sierra Madre.

Fall arranged for Doheny to take charge of the Elk Hills lease (worth somewhere near $100 million) in exchange for building oil storage facilities at the U.S. Navy’s Pearl Harbor base in Hawaii. Doheny agreed, and on November 30, 1921, he sent his son, 28-year-old Edward (Ned) L. Doheny Jr. on a train to Washington with $100,000 in a black satchel. In a room at the Waldman Park Hotel, Ned Doheny, who was accompanied by his personal secretary Hugh Plunkett, presented the $100,000 in five $20,000 bundles to Albert Fall.

Unbeknownst to the Doheny family, Fall had recently made the same deal with Harry Sinclair, another oilman who had also acquired for himself a government lease, this one at Teapot Dome. Fall, who was now $140,000 wealthier, paid off his taxes and made improvements to his New Mexico property. This sudden windfall caught the attention of Iowa lawyer and journalist Carl Magee, who eventually uncovered the whole plot for the American public, leading to the convictions of  Fall and Sinclair on the respective charges of bribery and contempt of court. It was the fiasco surrounding Fall, Sinclair, and Doheny that caused the doomed Harding to comment: “I can take care of my enemies; it’s my friends who are causing me trouble.”

Murder at Greystone Mansion

Thus, by the time that the bodies of Ned Doheny and Hugh Plunkett were discovered at the opulent Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, scandal was treated just like another appendage of the Doheny body politic.

Leslie White, who was then an investigator with the Los Angeles D.A.’s office, received a call at 2 a.m. from Lucien Wheeler, the former Secret Service agent in charge of the D.A.’s investigative unit. Wheeler informed White that young Doheny had been murdered and that he was needed at Gresytone right away.

Greystone, which occupied over 46,000 square feet of Los Angeles real estate, looked very much to White like a European fortress, a wall keeping outsiders on the periphery. When it was fully completed in 1928, it had cost somewhere between $3 and $5 million. The elder Doheny had spared no expense, even going so far as to keep full-time security guards in guardhouses scattered throughout the property. The then oilman Raymond Chandler was fascinated by the Dohneys and their unimaginable wealth, and it’s not hard to discern Greystone hiding behind fictional façades such as the Sternwood mansion in The Big Sleep (itself built upon the Sternwood family’s oil money) and the Grayle residence in Farewell, My Lovely. But, on that rainy night in February 1929, the real inspiration for White and Chandler was inside of the Doheny castle.

White, Wheeler, and the rest of the investigative staff found two corpses in young Doheny’s plush bedroom. Doheny had died in his underwear and silk bathrobe with a hole in his skull. He was found dead on his back, with blood crisscrossed in an abstract pattern on his face. Plunkett was found spread-eagle on his stomach. A large pool of blood was trapped under his face, caused by a yet another hole in the head. Plunkett’s brains had splattered on the wall, and his falling corpse had disheveled the rug underneath him. Interestingly, the fingers of his left hand had been burned by an unfinished cigarette still trapped within his fingers.

White soon located the bullet that had caused Ned Doheny’s demise. After prying it from a wall, White marked its height, which was six feet. He then placed the killer bullet in an envelope. Then, after taking the mandatory fingerprints off of both men, he found a gun—a Bisley .45 Colt Revolver—under Plunkett’s body. White’s crime scene photographs not only show the dead Doheny wearing what appears to be a mask of blood, but that the two victims had been drinking – an opened bottle of Johnny Walker was on the table. This last clue would prove surprisingly important in the ensuing cover-up.

As a forensic investigator, White set to work organizing the physical evidence at the crime scene. He not only collected evidence, but he also interviewed witnesses at the scene. These witnesses told White that Plunkett had arrived at Greystone at 9:30 p.m., letting himself in with his own key. Doheny and Plunkett fell to talking, which grew more and more heated as the night progressed. Plunkett was believed to be both unstable and unwell, and was open about his refusal to check himself into the Camarillo sanitarium, a move suggested and supported by the Doheny family and associates. According to one account, Ned Doheny once again tried to convince his friend Plunkett to reconsider the sanitarium, causing the hysterical Plunkett to produce the single-action revolver and strike down his employer. Then, in a fit of remorse, Plunkett turned the gun on himself. Witnesses described the gunshots as sounding like “furniture banging,” and they came to investigate. The murder and suicide, by their estimate, happened at around 10:55 p.m.

Suspiciously, the authorities weren’t informed of this occurrence until approximately three hours later. The main witness, Dr. Ernest Clyde Fishbaugh, had been called away from a Hollywood theater performance at 10:30 p.m. Dr. Fishbaugh arrived a little before 11 p.m., just around the time of Plunkett’s suicide (which, according to Fishbaugh’s own testimony, occurred after Plunkett had told everyone in the house to not come any closer to the bedroom). Fishbaugh told two differing accounts of Plunkett’s warning, with one early description stating that Plunkett shut the door softly, while his later accounts stated that Plunkett slammed the door, as if in a rage. This was not the only irregularity that night. The testimonies of the maid, the nanny, the liveried butler, the night watchman, and the guards all sounded too neat, almost as if they had been rehearsed in advance. Considering the time gap between the murder and suicide and the first call to the police, White and Wheeler believed this to be possible.

White tested the murder/suicide theory at the Beverly Hills mortuary that morning, and found it lacking. In particular, White found powder burns around the hole in Doheny’s head, which meant that the gun had been less than three inches away from his head when it was fired. Since this type of evidence usually points towards suicide, the theory that Plunkett had murdered Doheny and then killed himself started to unravel before it had even fully coalesced. White found no evidence of powder burns on Plunkett, thus furthering his doubt.

Along with this, White discovered that both men had been drinking, which ran contrary to the accounts of Fishbaugh and the household staff. Furthermore, the unfinished cigarette found on Plunkett didn’t gel with the theory that that he was a frenzied killer worried about saving himself from being committed. It didn’t seem likely that a man who had just shot his best friend would then turn the gun on himself, all the while still holding a lit cigarette.

Cover-Up

By this time, White was convinced that the theory that Plunkett had killed Ned Doheny was false. Before taking his findings to Buron Fitts, the D.A. of Los Angeles County, White got a foreshadowing of how his case would ultimately end. While he was investigating the corpses of Doheny and Plunkett, a uniformed L.A. County sheriff lazily sauntered into the morgue and warned White that “Old Man Doheny’s too big to monkey with.”

White brought his incendiary findings to Fitts on Sunday morning. Fitts, a former Marine officer in World War I during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, was known as fiery reformer and an outspoken advocate for Los Angeles’s veteran community. Fitts was also a politician with deep ties to Harry Chandler, the conservative owner of the Los Angeles Times. At the time it was widely-known that Fitts eyed the governorship in Sacramento, so Fitts was in a dangerous position: He had to both keep up his image as a reformer (which meant supporting White and initiating a thorough investigation into the affair at Greystone) while still avoiding the ire of Doheny, a man of incredible clout in both California and Washington.

When he met with White on that Sunday morning, Fitts agreed to a “sweeping investigation.” To White, Fitts seemed enthusiastic about the prospect. White ended his part of the investigation happy in the knowledge that experienced bloodhounds like Wheeler and Fitts would soon see the case through to completion.

This illusion was shattered within hours, as Fitts called a press conference together in order to inform the news media that his office had signed the death certificates for both men. The affair at Greystone was officially labeled as a murder and a suicide. Hugh Plunkett was named as the guilty party, who, while insane, had killed Ned Doheny before killing himself. No inquest was held, and there was no autopsy on the body of young Doheny. The case went from a widely covered sensation to completely out-of-print in less than 24 hours.

White blamed the funeral-like silence on the elder Doheny, a man who had experience in handling the media. This was White’s first taste of municipal fraud, but it was not to be his last. When he left the D.A.’s office in the 1930s, White blamed his departure on the rampant corruption of Los Angeles. This would prove beneficial for White, for his 1936 memoir, Me, Detective, was a success in its own time.

Theories

Despite the rapid disposal of the case, the affair at Greystone just would not go away. In the underground press of Los Angeles, rumors spread that Ned Doheny and Plunkett were gay lovers, and that their deaths had come at the hands of Lucy Doheny, Ned’s wife. According to this theory, Lucy had caught the men in a provocative situation, and had reacted with scorn by killing them both. Another popular idea was that it had been the work of an intruder. This idea seems unlikely, considering the Fort Knox-like security of Greystone. Still yet another theory was proffered concerning the death of Ned Doheny and Hugh Plunkett. Plunkett, who was set to testify in court about his role in the payoff to Albert Fall, was killed in order to keep him quiet. Unable to live with what he’d done, Ned Doheny then killed himself.

We may never know what actually happened that night at Greystone, but it seems that the official story is not the correct one. The idea that Plunkett killed young Doheny and then himself just doesn’t hold when the physical evidence is presented. The rapid speed which this tragedy was taken from headlines is also highly suspicious, and only further adds to the many conspiracy theories that surround this case. What is for sure though is that the deaths of Ned Doheny and Hugh Plunkett are part of the collective conscious of Los Angeles, and, therefore, America. This tale of murder, suicide, and backroom intrigue in the City of Angels meshes perfectly with the roman noir tradition that begins in America during this time. It is therefore fitting that Chandler should have the last word, and in his 1942 novel The High Window, Chandler’s private investigator Philip Marlowe gives his take on the Cassidy case (a fictional stand-in for the Doheny case) to the Los Angeles detective Breeze:

            “I’m going to make a point, and it’s an important point. Just look at the Cassidy case. Cassidy was a very rich man, a multimillionaire. He had a grown-up son. One night the cops were called to his home and young Cassidy was on his back on the floor with blood all over his face and a bullet hole in the side of his head. His secretary was lying on his back in an adjoining bathroom, with his head against the second bathroom door, leading to a hall, and a   cigarette burned out between his fingers on his left hand, just a short burned-out stub that had scorched the skin between his fingers. A gun was lying by his right hand. He was shot in the head, not a contact wound. A lot of drinking had been done. Four hours had elapsed since the deaths and the family doctor had been there for three of them.  Now, what did you do with the Cassidy case?”

            Breeze sighed. “Murder and suicide during a drinking spree. The secretary went haywire and  shot young Cassidy. I read it in the papers or something. Is that what you want me to say?"

            “You read it in the papers,” I said, “but it wasn’t so. What’s more you knew it wasn’t so and the  D.A. knew it wasn’t so and the D.A.’s investigators were pulled off the case within a matter of   hours. There was no inquest. But every crime reporter in town and every cop on every homicide detail knew it was Cassidy that did the shooting, that it was Cassidy that was crazy drunk, that it  was the secretary who tried to handle him and couldn’t and at last tried to get away from him, but wasn’t quick enough.”

May 20, 2013

DNA and the transgender Gypsy super-criminal.

by Paul Buchanan

On the afternoon of April 25, 2007, Michele Kiesewetter, a 22-year-old police officer in the German city of Heilbronn, drove with her partner to the parking lot of the local Theresienwiese, a sort of fairground along the east bank of the Neckar River, used for Oktoberfest. The two parked there for a lunch break. Witnesses in the area reported hearing gunfire at around 2 p.m.

Police units arriving on the scene found Kiesewetter lying dead outside her BMW 5-Series patrol car from a single gunshot wound to the head. Her partner, Martin A., had also been shot in the head. He would emerge from a coma weeks later, with no memory of what had happened.

Both the officers’ service handguns were missing, as were their handcuffs. The crime scene and the victims’ patrol car were scoured for forensic evidence. Minute traces of DNA were recovered from the car’s center console and from its back seat. The DNA samples were found to belong to an unidentified woman, a person of interest who would come to be called Die Frau ohne Gesicht, or The Woman without a Face.

That same unique DNA signature had already been linked to a couple of murders. In 2001 that DNA was tied to an unsolved 1993 murder in Idar-Oberstein, Germany, a town about two-and-a-half hours northwest of the Heilbronn murder. There, 62-year-old Lieselotte Schlenger, a churchwarden and pensioner, was found dead in her home. She’d been garroted with a wire taken from a bundle of flowers that were strewn on the woman’s table. No fingerprints or footprints were recovered, but a swab later taken from the rim of a Meissen china teacup yielded enough genetic material to be typed. That DNA, from a crime scene 14 years earlier, perfectly matched the DNA found in Kiesewetter’s patrol car.

The DNA also matched a sample found on a door handle in Joseph Walzenbach’s home in Freiburg. Walzenbach was found murdered in March 2001. A 61-year-old antiques dealer, he too had also been strangled, this time with garden twine. Both the Schlenger and Walzenbach murders were thought to have occurred during the commission of a burglary. Neither scene provided any further forensic evidence, and the DNA recovered matched no individual known to the German penal system. All that could be determined was that the genetic material came from a woman of Eastern European ancestry.

A few months after Walzenbach’s murder, yet another DNA match suggested a possible motive for both the earlier murders. In October 2001, 7-year-old Juergen Bueller stepped on a discarded syringe on a pathway near his home in Gerolstein, about 300 kilometers northwest of Heilbronn. He brought the shattered syringe home, and his parents immediately took him and the needle to a local hospital, fearing that he might have been exposed to the HIV virus.

Tests showed that the syringe had been used recently to shoot heroin. Traces of blood found on the needle showed no signs of HIV but did come back with a perfect match to the same phantom killer’s DNA. The killer, police concluded, was a junkie. She may have killed her earlier victims during botched robberies fueled by her habit. Celebrated criminal profiler, Kurt Kletzer, concluded that the Woman without a Face was “someone from a damaged home life” who had been abused by her drug-addicted caretakers. She was, “compelled to murder to feed her habit, thus reducing the victim to the status of a worthless object.”

Yet in many ways the phantom woman’s crimes didn’t seem those of a desperate addict. She was brazen, that was clear—but she wasn’t reckless. She left no fingerprints, no witnesses, no clues of any sort—except her DNA. As the crimes linked to her multiplied—break-ins and burglaries and cash-register thefts—the scenes sometimes yielded a second strand of DNA, but it was never the same strand twice. This suggested that the Woman without a Face sometimes worked with an accomplice but never with the same one twice. This inference hinted at powers of manipulation or intimidation that would keep a series of associates quiet. In many ways her methods seemed more the work of a cold and cunning psychopath than a junkie feeding her addiction.

In the years between Schlenger’s strangulation in 1993 and Kiesewetter’s execution in the Heilbronn parking lot in 2007, the same woman’s DNA was detected on a half-eaten cookie in a trailer-home burglary in Germany; on a toy gun at the scene of a gemstone robbery in France; at an optometrist shop robbery in Austria. A car stolen in Heilbronn was found to have her DNA on the gas cap. A bar robbery crime scene in Karlsruhe yielded her DNA on some beer bottles and on the rim of an empty wine glass. In all, the “Woman without a Face” was linked to nearly 40 major and minor crimes scattered across central Europe.

Some of the cases were eerily perplexing. In Worms, in 2005, a local gypsy shot his brother with a 7.65 caliber pistol. After his arrest for attempted murder, traces of the mysterious woman’s DNA were found on one of the bullets. This, The Observer noted in 2008, suggested “that she may have ties with one of the loosely linked groups and communities who move back and forth across Europe's increasingly porous frontiers.”

After Michele Kiesewetter’s murder, the reward for information that would lead to the phantom’s identity reached €300,000. The Heilbronn police department, alone, racked up 16,000 hours of paid overtime in its pursuit of the phantom. More than 800 women with criminal records were tracked down across Europe and tested for a DNA match. In all, the search for the Woman without a Face cost an estimated $14 million.

Police wondered if the woman might be a transsexual or might, at least, be able to convincingly impersonate a man. Eyewitnesses had seen a young man on the site of a 2006 Saarbruecken burglary attempt, but it was the phantom’s DNA that turned up on a stone found at the crime scene. A composite picture of an androgynous young man sporting a soul patch was released to media outlets hungry for information. “We can't rule out that our suspect is a man now, or that she looks like a man,” a police spokesman told the BBC. “We just don’t know.”

Then, in February 2008, the bodies of three Georgian car dealers were dragged from the Rhine, near Mannheim. The men had come to Germany on a mission to buy used German cars to transport home for resale. Evidence showed that the three had been executed near Ludwigshafen and their bodies transported about 15 kilometers to be dumped in the river.

Two men, a 40-year-old Iraqi and a 26-year-old Somali, were quickly arrested. The Iraqi had been working as a police informant, and the white Ford Escort station wagon he drove (on loan to him from local police authorities) showed blood traces belonging to one of the victims. His car had been used to transport the bodies. When forensic officers subjected the Ford’s carpeting and upholstery to analysis, they found yet more DNA traces of the Woman without a Face. Had she been the executioner?

The arrests seemed like a huge break—the police finally had two of the phantom’s accomplices in custody—but both men accused the other of being the triggerman, and neither would admit that a woman had been involved in any way. The police had bought the Ford Escort second-hand several months earlier, so all previous owners were tracked down and investigated, but no new leads emerged. “We are as baffled as everyone else about how her DNA came to be there,” Chief Superintendent Horst Haug told Australian journalist Alan Hall. “But it is one more piece in the mosaic. All criminals, no matter how deadly or how clever, all slip up eventually. We just hope we catch her before she kills again.”

There was indeed a “slip up,” but its discovery proved even more astonishing than the capture and prosecution of a transsexual Gypsy super-criminal.

In March 2009, French authorities tried using DNA to identify a burned corpse. Their investigation indicated that the body was probably that of a particular male asylum seeker who had gone missing. The man’s application for asylum, which he had filled out years earlier, had required a fingerprint. Authorities hoped that by matching the corpse’s DNA to any trace genetic material found on the fingerprint they could clearly establish the dead man’s identity.

Instead, the results that came back were literally incredible: the DNA obtained from the fingerprint belonged to The Woman without a Face.

This made no sense. “Obviously that was impossible,” a prosecutor’s office spokesperson, told Spiegel, “as the asylum seeker was a man, and the phantom’s DNA belonged to a woman.” A second test on the fingerprints found none of the phantom’s DNA. There seemed only one explanation: the sample taken from the fingerprint had to have been contaminated.

Some old-fashioned, low-tech detective work was called for. It seemed impossible that the DNA sample from the asylum-seeker’s fingerprint could have been contaminated between when it left the document and when it was processed in the lab. So there was only one other possibility: somehow the DNA had been introduced to the process before the fingerprint was tested.

Investigators quickly found a pattern: the French lab and the lab in Heilbronn used the same brand of cotton swab manufactured by the same German company. Other regional crime labs that used a different brand of swab had never found a match to the phantom.

After nearly a decade of inspiring dread, the Woman was finally given a Face. She was an employee of the Greiner Bio-One factory, an innocent, though perhaps careless, woman who worked packaging sterile cotton swabs.

 “The things were double-packaged,” one investigator told Bild newspaper. “We thought they were the Mercedes of cotton swabs.” The swabs were marketed as being sterile, and they were. They had been processed to remove all germs, fungi and viruses—but the process did not destroy DNA. They simply weren’t designed for collecting genetic material. Hence, forensic technicians across three nations had for years found the same DNA at scores of crime scenes because they had brought it there on the sterile swabs they carried.

If a lesson is to be learned from the Phantom of Heilbronn—and with so much effort and money wasted, one would hope a lesson might be at hand—it is perhaps that we should temper our current infatuation with forensic science with a little common sense. It seems instructive that so many trained professionals would sooner posit the presence of a transsexual-Gypsy-addict-serial-killer than wonder if someone, somewhere had made a simple mistake.

May 23, 2013 

Originally published on Advocate.com May 07 2012 

by Diane Anderson-Minshall

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

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

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

HOUSTON’S STONEWALL

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

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

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

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

THE HAMPTON ROADS KILLER

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

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

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

A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE HANDCUFF MAN

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

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

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

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

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

LARAMIE’S GREAT LOSS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A TWO-SPIRIT TRAGEDY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HOOP DREAMS DASHED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Last name withheld.

THE HANDSOMEST SERIAL KILLER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THEIR OREGON TRAIL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL ATTACKS

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

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

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

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

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

THE JENNY JONES MURDER

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

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

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

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

THE BYSTANDER EFFECT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 27, 2013

 Martin Luther

Martin Luther, the seminal figure of the Protestant Reformation, was a Nazi before there were Nazis. Before the rise of Adolph Hitler, Martin Luther was the worst anti-Semite to ever live.

by David Robb

Martin Luther is best known as the founder of Protestantism, to which today there are more than 800 million adherents.  He launched The Reformation on Oct. 31, 1517, when he nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Schlosskirche (Castle Church) in Wittenberg, Germany. It was his protest of church indulgences – payments that assured donors a place in Heaven – from which the Protestant faith derives its name. There is even a Christian denomination named after him – Lutheranism. There are now more than 65 million Lutherans worldwide.       

Martin Luther King Jr., the great American civil rights leader and man of peace, was named after him, but Martin Luther was no man of peace; he was one of history’s worst anti-Semites. He was a Nazi before there were Nazis.

Before Hitler, he was the worst anti-Semite to ever live. His hatred of Jews was well-known – and widely followed – in Germany at the time, and helped sow the seeds of the Holocaust that would come four centuries after his death.

In his treatise Von den Jüden und iren Lügen (On Jews and Their Lies), published in Wittenberg in 1543, Luther had this to say about Jews:

• “First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them.”
• “Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed.”
• “Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them.”
• Jews, he wrote, are “poisonous envenomed worms.”
• Jewish rabbis, he wrote, should be “forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb.”
• Jews, he wrote, should be “tossed out” of Germany “by the seat of their pants…ejected forever from this country.”
• Calling for the murder of all Jews, he wrote: “We are at fault in not slaying them.”
• “Let the government deal with them in this respect, as I have suggested.”

Martin Luther’s Von den Jüden und iren Lügen (On Jews and Their Lies).

All of this could have just as easily come from Adolf Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf, in which he referred to Martin Luther as a “truly great statesman.”

And when Hitler came to power, he took all of Luther’s advice.

“Luther, if he could be with us, would give us his blessing,” Hitler once said, telling a roaring crowd in 1934 that if Luther were there with them today, “he would rejoice” at the new German state.

Luther was widely cited by other top Nazis to as the forefather of their Nazi faith.

Bernhard Rust, Nazi Germany’s minister of education, wrote: “Since Martin Luther closed his eyes, no such son of our people has appeared again. It has been decided that we shall be the first to witness his reappearance.... I think the time is past when one may not say the names of Hitler and Luther in the same breath. They belong together; they are Schrot und Korn (being of the same school.)”

A leading Nazi churchman, Bishop Martin Sasse, justified the burning of Jewish shops and synagogues during the 1938 rampage known as Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), writing: “On November 10, 1938, on Luther's birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany,” and urged the German people to heed the words “of the greatest anti-Semite of his time – the warner of his people against the Jews.’”

Reich Culture Governor Hans Hinkel said this of Luther: “Through his acts and his spiritual attitude he began the fight which we still wage today; with Luther, the revolution of German blood and feeling against alien elements of the Volk was begun.”

Walter Buch, the Nazi Party’s supreme judge, father-in-law of Hitler’s henchman Martin Bormann and convicted SS-Obergruppenführer war criminal, made this observation: “Many people confess their amazement that Hitler preaches ideas which they have always held. From the Middle Ages we can look to the same example in Martin Luther. What stirred in the soul and spirit of the German people of that time, finally found expression in his person, in his words and deeds.”

Erich Koch, the Reich commissioner for Ukraine and the head of the Nazi Party in East Prussia, said, “Only we can enter into Luther’s spirit.”

Bavarian Minister of Education and Culture Hans Schemm said that Luther’s “engagement against the decomposing Jewish spirit is clearly evident not only from his writing against the Jews; his life too was idealistically, philosophically anti-Semitic. Now we Germans of today have the duty to recognize and acknowledge this.

Luther’s anti-Semetic writings were even used as a defense at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials following the end of World War II.

Julius Streicher, the Nazi propagandist and publisher of the anti-Semitic Der Stürmer, told the Nuremberg tribunal that “Anti-Semitic publications have existed in Germany for centuries…Martin Luther would very probably sit in my place in the defendants’ dock today, if this book had been taken into consideration by the prosecution. In the book The Jews and Their Lies, Martin Luther writes that the Jews are a serpent’s brood and one should burn down their synagogues and destroy them.”

Streicher, who before the war was one of the top Nazi officials in Nuremberg, had done just what Luther instructed when, in 1938, he ordered the destruction of the Great Synagogue of Nuremberg.

After finding Streicher guilty of crimes against humanity, the Nuremberg judges wrote: “For his 25 years of speaking, writing, and preaching hatred of the Jews, Streicher was widely known as ‘Jew-Baiter Number One.’ In his speeches and articles, week after week, month after month, he infected the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism, and incited the German people to active persecution.”

The same could have been said of Martin Luther.

Streicher was hanged for his war crimes in 1946, but he was right about one thing: If Martin Luther had been alive at the time of the Nuremberg Trials, he would have been put on trial, too.

May 30, 2013

Adolf Hitler

Known as one of the greatest madmen in history, Adolf Hitler was one of life's pathetic losers - a school dunce, a failed artist, a sexual impotent, a sociopathic racist and a drug addict suffering from both manic depression and Parkinsson's disease. But was he also a pedophile? Hitler had “sexual contact” with only a handful of women throughout his life. Five of the women attempted suicide and four of them succeeded.

by Siobhan Patricia Mulcahy

During the WW II, American psychiatrists labeled him a “schizophrenic” and “psychopath”. Winston Churchill wanted to borrow an electric chair so he could be “executed like a common criminal” in Britain.

But what is the truth about the man behind the dictator's mask?

Adolf Hitler the School Dunce

If we go by Hitler's school results then there is no doubt he had a below average IQ. Hitler was only interested in two subjects – Art (because there were no end of year exams) and History (because he enjoyed learning about Germany's glorious past).

By the time he started secondary school, he was already displaying “sociopathic” tendencies. The boys in his own year rejected him – calling him an “oddball” and “loser” - so Hitler befriended the boys in the lower classes. He would organize, manipulate and bully them into re-enacting historic German battles.

Hitler's father Alois, a respectable civil servant, was very disappointed in his son and pressured him to do better but he died when the budding dictator was only 13.

Two years later, the school principal wrote to Hitler's mother, Klara to tell her that Adolf would have to repeat the academic year because he had failed most of his exams.

According to Donald Hook's The Madmen of History, when Hitler's mother handed him the letter, young Adolf went to the toilet, defecated, used the letter to wipe his bottom, put the letter back in the envelope and re-addressed it back to the school.

Adolf Hitler the Work Shy Bum and Failed Artist

Hitler left school the same year (1905) just before his 16^th birthday without any qualifications. He spent the next two years at home painting pictures, working at menial jobs and generally being molly-coddled by his mother. On his 18^th birthday, he inherited his father's civil service pension which made him temporarily wealthy.

Hitler was happy to live off his father's pension until the money ran out. For two years, he lived the high life in Vienna, writing letters home to his mother about how “he was making his way in the world as a successful college student and a burgeoning artist”. The truth was that Vienna’s Academy of Art had rejected Hitler's college applications – twice.

Hitler bummed around the city, changing addresses frequently, trying to befriend other artists. When his father's money ran out, he accepted the kindness of strangers and occasional charity handouts. For several years, Hitler worked at one dead end job after another. He was a complete failure.

The outbreak of WW I saved him. It gave him something to do; it offered him a meager salary and it provided him with an opportunity to prove that he could succeed at something.

Hitler was indeed decorated during WW I. His superiors appreciated his bravery but lower ranked soldiers said they were “suspicious of him” and called him “the oddball” which meant he never rose above the rank of corporal.

Hitler and Henry Ford

After WW I, Hitler was imprisoned for treason against the German state in 1924 for plotting to overthrow the Weimar Republic. In jail, he read as many books as he could – mainly German history and political philosophy and later described this time as “free education at the state's expense.” The school dunce had come of age.

One writer who influenced him was American car manufacturer Henry Ford. Hitler read Ford's autobiography, My Life and Work and another of his books The International Jew which claimed a Jewish conspiracy would attempt to take over the world. He also approved of Ford's hostile views towards communism and trade unions.

Much of Hitler's dreary book Mein Kampf (My Struggle), written while in prison, is based on Ford’s ideas. Hitler copies much of Ford's outlook on industry and work. He also takes up his antagonism towards the Jewish people. In effect, Hitler's vision for a “new Germany” is merely a rehash of Henry Ford’s narrow (and some might say twisted) world view.

Hitler the Sexual Impotent

Hitler suffered “serious lower abdominal injuries” during WW I and the injuries obliged him to seek medical attention for stomach cramps and diarrhea for the rest of his life. Experts agree they may have rendered him sexually impotent and could account for his strange relationships with women.

Hitler always said he never married because he was “married to Germany” and never had children because “German citizens were the only children he required.” But was he hiding the terrible truth – that a portion of his sexual organs were blown to smithereens during WW I?

In the film of his final days, Downfall (2004) it is implied that Hitler's girlfriend Eva Braun was allowed to have sex with other men so long as she was discreet. The film script was based on the war diaries (and book) by Traudl Junge, one of Hitler's secretaries in the Berlin bunker.

Also, according to Nazi architect, Albert Speer's memoirs Inside The Third Reich, Braun never slept in the same bedroom as Hitler. “Eva Braun will prove a great disappointment to historians,” he said. Hitler's valet, Heinz Linge, agreed. “Hitler and Braun had two bedrooms and two bathrooms. Public displays of affection or physical contact were non-existent.”

Hitler – the Pedophile and his Suicidal Women

At least four women committed suicide after having “sexual contact” with Hitler. Another attempted suicide but failed. Hitler was attracted to vulnerable teenage women, even when he had reached his 40s. In fact, by the time he met his first girlfriend, he was already in his late 30s.

According to psychologist Andrea Antczak (who has written extensively on Hitler’s psychological makeup) because he had an abusive childhood – his father Alois beat him daily – and a troubled adolescence, this “greatly affected his moral psychological development.” She further writes that “The negative environment in his adolescence instilled in him: hatred, anger and self-loathing. It is clear he was unable to complete any of the stages of life successfully to allow for a solid foundation for the next phase of life.” Antczak implies that as a “sexual being” Hitler was trapped in adolescence even as a middle-aged man therefore he was naturally attracted to adolescent girls.

Hitler began a relationship with Angela “Geli” Raubal (1908-1931) his half-niece when she was 16-years-old and he was 36. Apparently, Hitler was so possessive of her that he had her followed whenever she was not with him. In 1931, Geli Raubal died from a gunshot wound to the lung in their Munich apartment. She had shot herself with Hitler's pistol after he refused to allow her to go to Vienna to see her friends.

The second suicidal teenager romantically linked with him was schoolgirl Maria Reiter (1911 – 1992) who told her story to Stern magazine in 1959. According to Reiter's account, the 37-year old Hitler became friendly with her in 1927. At the end of their first date, he made a “coarse sexual advance” towards her which she rejected. Hitler declared his love for her but then ignored her for several months, plunging her into a deep depression. In despair, the 16-year-old attempted to hang herself, but her brother-in-law found her and cut her down before she died.

Next on the suicide list was Renate Muller (1906-1937), a German singer and actress. In 1935, Muller had a three-hour “meeting” alone in a Berlin hotel bedroom with Adolf Hitler. Unlike the teenage girls he manipulated, Muller was 29, financially independent and did not believe in Fascism. Apparently, she refused to give up her Jewish lover at Hitler's request and rejected the notion of acting in Nazi propaganda films. Shortly afterward, her career began to fail and she became addicted to morphine. Muller jumped from a Berlin mental hospital window to her death in 1937. German newspapers reported she had died as a result of an epileptic fit.

Hitler's next suicidal woman was Unity Valkyrie Mitford (1914 – 1948), an English aristocrat and Fascist devotee. Mitford first saw him when she attended the infamous Nuremberg Rally in 1933. The following year, aged 19, she left England for Munich “to be near him.” Five years later, when Britain declared war on Germany (September 3, 1939), Mitford went to Munich's English Garden, took a pearl-handled pistol Hitler had given her as a gift and shot herself in the head. Mitford survived the suicide attempt but never recovered from her injuries (as the bullet remained lodged in her skull). She died from meningitis in Scotland in 1948.

Eva Braun (1912 -1945) was Hitler's longtime companion and for two days, his wife. In 1929, Braun (aged 17) first met Hitler (aged 40) in Munich where she worked as a Nazi Party photographer. Braun first attempted suicide in August 1932 by shooting herself in the chest with her father's pistol. Her second attempt occurred in May 1935 when she took an overdose of sleeping pills. A decade later, she committed suicide with Hitler in his Berlin bunker on the day the war in Europe ended.

Hitler the Drug Addict

In 1935, Hitler was suffering from long-term, severe, lower abdominal cramps. His physician Dr Theodor Morell said the cramps were caused by a “complete exhaustion of the intestinal system” and recommended the treatment of vitamins, hormones, phosphorus, and dextrose. These were the drugs administered for male “erectile dysfunction” at that time.

According to his own records, Morell tested dozens of relatively unknown drugs on the dictator including “biologicals” from the intestines of male animals and high doses of amphetamines.

Hitler was constantly ill with stomach pains, headaches, nausea, shivering fits and diarrhea. He was also completely dependent on Morell's constant supply of drugs. Morell’s records show that the Fuhrer was taking up to 82 medications per day – including a primitive form of “Viagra” which was semen extracted from the testicles of bulls. These drugs had to administered intravenously as Hitler had a morbid fear of taking pills.

After WW II, Nazi architect, Albert Speer claimed Hitler's “addiction to amphetamines” was the cause of his “increasingly inflexible decision making” – for example, never allowing German military retreats.

Hitler's Parkinson's Disease

In September 1944, Hitler suffered a heart attack and was forced to spend several days in bed. By this time, he was showing the severest symptoms of Parkinson's disease. As early as 1935, he had developed a tremor in his left arm and leg which could not easily be treated. In an attempt to disguise the problem, he would wring his hands while speaking or clasp them tightly together (either in front or behind his back}.

Early newsreel footage clearly shows the tremors in his hand and his shuffling walk. Several German doctors, including Morell and Ernst-Gunther Schenck, gave a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease. By late 1944, Hitler replaced Morell with a new physician, Dr Karl Brandt, who was constantly on hand to administer pain killers and an endless supply of amphetamines.

Hitler the Manic Depressive

According to Brandt, “the Fuehrer was always tired” and displayed symptoms of what medics now call manic depression. “Hitler rarely got out of bed before 11 am. At noon, he was informed of the latest military developments. After quickly considering the news, he issued his orders to the relevant military personnel. His lunch was then followed by a two-hour afternoon nap.”

When Hitler was asleep, no one was allowed to disturb him even when important events were taking place, such as the Allied landing in Normandy. When he did get out of bed, his secretaries were ordered “not to mention the war” in his presence.

By 1945, his hair had gone white, his body was stooped, and he had difficulty walking. A lack of personal hygiene – one of the many symptoms of manic depression – meant that Hitler's sweat “smelled like rotten meat.” People who had not seen him for months were shocked by his appearance. One Berlin witness said: “Often saliva dribbled from the comers of his mouth, presenting a hideous and pitiful spectacle.”

On April 30, 1945 Hitler committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule. As he bit down on the tablet, he also shot himself in the temple with a hand gun. He wanted to be certain he did not survive. His final epitaph has never been written but it might read as follows: “Adolf Hitler – a sexually impotent, drug-addled pedophile – destroyed Europe and was responsible for the deaths of more than 70 million people.”

June 3, 2013

The author uses the Steubenville rape case as a primer for confronting the rape culture that grips the United States.

by Avi McClelland-Cohen

"Young men need to be socialized in such a way that rape is as unthinkable to them as cannibalism" - Mary Pipher

Much of America is already aware of the Steubenville rape case, or at least one of the countless similar cases involving teenagers, alcohol, and sexual assault. Such stories have become almost commonplace of late, with many ending in the suicide of the victim, making the tale all the more heartbreaking.

What is lacking is a discussion of why rape is so prevalent or, more importantly, what can be done to reverse the trend. Regardless of political party or personal ideology, a society without rape is one almost everyone can agree we should work towards. So where is the anger? Where is the outrage and betrayal that seems only appropriate when our children are attacking each other in the most brutal of ways?

As a society, if our first question following a rape is, “Could the victim have avoided this attack?” we have already failed. Regardless of how she was dressed, where she was, what (if anything) or how much she had been drinking, or even if she was acting flirtatious, a woman does not ask for rape.

 Rape is unwanted sex, and it is never the victim’s fault. If our instincts are to disbelieve a victim that she was violated, we are setting the example that victims must stay silent – and perpetrators safe. If we allow rape culture to continue permeating our society unchecked, all we are doing is enabling a new generation of sexual predators.

Steubenville, Ohio

Late one summer night in August, 2012, a 16-year-old West Virginia girl in Steubenville, Ohio – thankfully anonymous and known to the masses only as Jane Doe – was raped by two of her schoolmates. Ma’lik Richmond and Trenton Mays, both star players on the town’s beloved high school football team, carried the unconscious girl from party to party, violating her repeatedly. (No more detail on the assault will be provided here. The details are not relevant, but more importantly, promulgating them only contributes to the problem of rape as a spectator sport, of re-victimization by the media post-assault, and of focusing so much on the problem that a solution is never found.)

There were witnesses to this rape. Dozens of them – possibly more. Not a single witness lifted a hand to stop the assault. Many watched passively. Some participated – and, as a result, images of the rape went viral, transforming one girl’s private horror into a nationwide headline extravaganza.

The public still only knows, and probably only ever will know, a fraction of what occurred on that August night. We do know that Trent Mays acknowledged the rape to multiple contacts via text message in the days following, even urging his friends to help him cover up the incident by telling police that he was just “helping” her. He acknowledged sexual contact, but displayed a startling lack of understanding of his actions: "I shoulda raped [sic] now that everybody thinks I did," he said, adding that she "wasn't awake enough." This begs the question of whether Mays (or even other teenage offenders) understood that sexual contact with an unconscious person is not only morally wrong, but legally rape.

Mays also noted in his texts that he had communicated with his football coach, Reno Saccoccia, who joked about the incident, leading Mays to believe that the accusations would be “taken care of.”

The accusations were not “taken care of,” but progressed into criminal charges and court proceedings. In perhaps the only fleeting moment of justice in this case, Judge Thomas Lipps of the Hamilton County Juvenile Court found the two young men “delinquent,” the juvenile equivalent of a guilty verdict. Both will serve at least one year, and possibly remain in custody until they turn 21. Mays received an additional year for distribution of child pornography (having disseminated photographs of his own crime).

When it came time for the media to weigh in, mass media outlets not only failed in their duty to promote justice and the proliferation of quality, reliable information, but instead they demonstrated just how deeply American rape culture flows. Poppy Harlow of CNN was one of the more high-profile commentators whose reporting, in her exchange with Candy Crowley, failed to reflect the reality of the situation. Harlow, who was in Steubenville for the trial, found it difficult to watch the proceedings not because of the torment of the young woman who was publicly violated, but rather “It was incredibly emotional – incredibly difficult even for an outsider like me to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believe their life fell apart.”

Harlow has expressed regret for the appearance of rape apology and it is difficult to believe she was speaking maliciously, but nevertheless this reporter’s words reflect one of the core issues at stake here: a complete dismissal of the rape victim’s plight and an unwillingness to accept the severity of the crime. As a public figurehead, Harlow has a responsibility to her viewers – many of them impressionable young people – to present a measured account. The fact is, Richmond and Mays are facing a relatively brief incarceration as a result of deliberate actions they knowingly and willfully committed; the victim, who never had a choice in the matter, faces a life sentence of dealing with what these young men did to her; and unless we do something, there will be countless more Jane Does at countless more high schools around the country.

The newsmakers at CNN are not the only ones to blame, nor were Harlow’s words the most frustrating. Twitter became an outlet for rape apologists worldwide. Such inane commentary does not deserve re-publication (it is vile beyond belief), but it should be noted that at least two Twitter users made serious enough threats against the victim’s life to result in their arrests. Interestingly, both of the individuals arrested for death threats were women, one of them a cousin of one of the assailants.

Nowhere in the mass media was there any substantial discussion of rape as an epidemic or what can be done on a large scale to prevent such crimes. Caught up in the sensationalism of Jane Doe’s horror, the millions of other rape victims nationwide were ignored, and future victims disregarded. A case as high-profile as Steubenville, and especially one with such energetic social media involvement, could have been an educational opportunity; that opportunity, thanks to the shortsightedness of the networks, was utterly lost.

So 16-year-old Jane Doe was victimized not only by Richmond and Mays, but by her fellow partygoers; the media; Coach Saccoccia, who helped cover up the rape; the Internet world; and us. Yes, us. Unless we are actively working to not only stop but reverse the trend of rape and rape apology, we ourselves – men and women alike – are no more than enablers.

By not actively working to reform the way we think about and react to rape, we are failing our children, and we are failing society. Consider these statistics from the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network (RAINN):

• 44 percent of rape victims are under age 18.
• Almost 2/3rds of victims are raped by a friend or acquaintance. This number is higher (93 percent) among juvenile victims.
• 54 percent of sexual assaults are not reported to the police.
• 97 percent of rapists will not serve a day of time for their crime. That means 97 percent of rape victims will never receive justice, or offenders proper rehabilitation.
• Victims of sexual assault are three times more likely to be depressed, 26 times more likely to abuse drugs, and four times more likely to contemplate suicide. Anecdotally, the latter statistic is becoming even more alarming with the recent spurt of high-profile suicides by high school-aged rape victims.

The survivors of sexual violence are not the only victims. Rapists were not predetermined from birth to be such, but rather they were not socialized to understand consent, or healthy sexual relationships—some were simply never taught such things; many lacked quality role models, and as a result were socialized to violence. They, too, are victims, as is the society that created them.

We must work for a culture without rape, and to do so means more than simply reiterate the problem. What can we do? It starts with the basics. Speak back – even, as trivial as it sounds, Tweet back: create an environment so hostile to rape apologists that they cower in silence, keeping their antiquated ideas about sexual consent to themselves until they evolve enough to throw off the sexist bounds. This, after all, is the beauty of free speech: every single person has the right to speak back, and in doing so the power to educate.

Go further—write to the networks. A quarter of a million people have already petitioned CNN to apologize for its heinous disregard. Though the offending commentary cannot be rescinded, a strong enough backlash can prevent such carelessness in the future.

More than reacting to the crimes already committed, we must move forward. There are too few issues over which our society has the absolute power to take control and remedy the problem. When it comes to rape, there are no foreign nations threatening attack, no all-powerful banks fueled by government or corporate interests, no external power wielding control; there is only us, and our will to do better by our children and ourselves. We must teach the next generation to be better than our generation and generations before. We must stamp out any acceptability of sexual violence and non-consent so that, as psychologist Mary Pipher proposed, rape will be no more acceptable to young men (or women) than the horrific and very rare crime of cannibalism. That is when rape culture – and cases like Steubenville – will truly be in the past.

Resources

"Guilty Verdict in Steubenville Rape Trial; Matt Lauer Faults NBC; Iraq War Anniversary."CNN Transcripts. CNN, 17 Mar. 2013. Web.

RAINN | Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. http://www.rainn.org/

Rollins, Henry. "Henry Rollins: The Steubenville Rape Case Is a Failure." LA Weekly, 22 Mar. 2013. http://blogs.laweekly.com/westcoastsound/2013/03/henry_rollins_the_steubenville.php

OpEd byEPONYMOUS ROX

In the tawdry trial of Jodi Arias for the murder of Travis Alexander there was nothing sacred or secret, but this: The true identity of the killer.

No, I'm not suggesting Arias has been wrongly convicted -- she definitely hatched a plot to kill and her plan was horrifically successful.

It's simply to point out that, whatever dislike she's justifiably earned through her years of pathological lying and posing, all that collective contempt is clouding everybody's commonsense and good judgment.

Women rarely kill

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 90 percent of all murders committed annually are perpetrated by males.

However, as can be seen throughout history, it's the remaining minority who traditionally get the most press, public scorn, and the book thrown at them.

Moreover, when females do slay, knives and guns aren't their favorite weaponry.

"Women are different in whom, how and why they kill," crime analyst James Alan Fox of Northeastern University elaborated in a 2012 ABC interview. "Extreme violence is far more alien to females than to males."

Ladies prefer poison

Whether it's a faithless lover, a wife-beating husband, or a pensioner whose death she stands to benefit from, when a woman decides to kill she's apt to do it with arsenic, antifreeze or a pillow rather than a blade, blunt object or firearm.

"Women tend as a rule to do softer killings. Poisoning, suffocation, those sorts of things," ex-FBI profiler Gregg McCrary told ABC. "Rarely are they the slasher types or inflicting a lot of bodily damage."

Consider as well that women are usually smaller than men, and socialized from birth to be nurturing and nonaggressive.

"Destruction and the ability [to] use power to knock someone down is so tied into a masculine identity." Dr. Michael Welner, forensic psychiatrist and chairman of The Forensic Panel, explained on ABC's Good Morning America. "That's not part of what makes women feminine."

Sometimes females use weapons in self defense

Occasionally, during out of control domestic altercations, the last thing some abusive males witness is a total shocker for them.

They never expect to see their battered women brandishing weapons.

That too, according to criminologists like James Alan Fox, is the case in most intimate-partner homicides where the accused was a woman and her victim a man:

"For women, killing is often seen as a last resort -- a defensive move."

"I think I was inconsistent in my lies. Yes."

When prime suspect Jodi Arias was first apprehended for the 2008 murder of Travis Alexander, she claimed to know nothing about it.

Later, jailed, she made a sudden about-face, stating she'd witnessed the doomed man's assault by a murderous pair of masked intruders, and that her own life had been weirdly spared during the bloody confrontation.

Finally, years after the fact and awaiting trial, Arias confessed to the crime, although pleading self defense and "amnesia."

But while weeks of sordid testimony and thousands of salacious e-mails may have disclosed the depth of her and Alexander's sexual deviance and a deeply unhealthy bond, in the end not a shred of this scandalous material supported her contentions.

On the other hand, if one weaves together defendant Arias' contradictory tales with probabilities, statistics and a body of evidence, it reveals the most likely reason she couldn't remember an exceptionally vicious, prolonged knife attack which left the petite woman with barely even a scratch.

Love or money?

There's no question that this truly troubled female wanted an insensitive, fickle, and philandering lover dead.

She was seeking revenge for being sucked into an emotionally abusive relationship that, despite her various compromises, wasn't going to end in marriage after all. It was just simply going to end.

Yet experts agree that stabbing Alexander 27 times and nearly decapitating him not only required intense malice, but great physical force as well. During which the victim strenuously battled to survive.

Clearly a woman would have been no match against such a frenzied show of strength, even one with "six-pack abs" as Arias allegedly had, even one pitted against a wounded male, even one oozing with venom and evil.

So who is the madman Arias coaxed to do her killing?

Eponymous Rox writes about cops, curs and killers for Crime Magazine, the GatherNews agency, Associated Content, and the Killing Killers website. Visit Killing Killers today and cast your anonymous vote in the Arias opinion poll: Do you think Defendant Arias should be sentenced for life or put to death for murdering her ex-boyfriend?

June 6, 2013

Ariel Castro

The field of abduction provides a fascinating if complex area of study.  The individual who seeks to kidnap and then enslave the subject in question is treated as a creature lacking human traits.  It is not merely anti-human but non-human, a figure of fantasy, who conceals his quarry.  With frequency, the term “monster” is used.  It took a matter of hours for the term “monster” to be employed in the context of Ariel Castro.

by Binoy Kampmark

Absentees occupy a distinct part of human consciousness.  They are suspended, either alive or dead, often both.  They might appear at any given moment, or they might never do so.  There is contingency about their existence, qualified, uncertain, and tortured.  

For three missing women in Cleveland – Amanda Berry, 27; Georgina ‘Gina’ DeJesus, 23; and Michelle Knight, 32 – not to mention a 6-year-old daughter born to Berry – hope had been suspended.  They were never struck off the “missing list” – faith prevailed that they were still alive.

The fact that they went missing has its troubling psychic effects on communities.  Reporting a person as missing triggers emotions of guilt – were people being too complacent about their disappearance?  Did the individual in question who went into the darkness do so because of some predilection?  The emotional currency associated with such reportage is of a different order. In some, more gruesome way, the report of a corpse is far more reassuring than the report of a person who is both living and dead.  Such people occupy an eternal purgatory in human consciousness.

For that reason, the range of reactions to Cleveland’s abductees may not be that surprising.  It is not merely that people go missing. Environment is everything.  The wide spaces of Australia offer a seemingly eternal space that takes, consumes and colludes in vanishings.  A person goes missing there every 15 minutes.  In the United States, the number is remarkable – 2,300 people go missing every day.  What is troubling about the figures is that many of these disappearances take place in heavily populated centers. 

Arial Castro's house

The concentrated, densely populated environment of Cleveland is surely never going to facilitate disappearances.  For that reason, complicity in the vanishing of the three women as a suggestion is increased. Guilt follows.  In the Cleveland case, “they were the girls next door.”  Neighbors would have noticed.  People would surely observe irregularities.  They would also note variations in behaviour.  Three abductees would be obvious, even concealed from the world. 

It transpired that suspect Ariel Castro had allegedly abducted and held the three women in captivity in a Cleveland house, beginning in 2002.  As the accounts were released by the prosecutors, it became clear that Castro was going to come in for a considerable, pre-adjudicatory pasting.  This case is fast becoming part of the cult of criminal celebrity, with a narrative of institutional vengeance (we can’t let this sort of thing happen) to the commercialization of rescue. The requirements for this drama: a cold-blooded villain, flawless victims, and saintly rescuers. 

Psychological Portraits

It did not take long for the media machine to spin a narrative of psychological disturbance.  “What kind of monster does this?”[1]  The first part of the drama rapidly developed a momentum of its own.  Police authorities soon released information that they had found “chains and ropes in the home,” with one victim chained to the wall “like some kind of trophy”.[2]  Ariel Castro has already assumed his role in the abduction imaginary, one who initiated, in the words of Jezebel’s Laura Beck, a series of horrors on his victims (May 8).  He allegedly (a word infrequently used in various reports on the subject) “impregnated Michelle Knight five times during her 11 years in captivity. He starved her.  He punched her in the stomach till she miscarried (The Week, May 9).

Prosecutor Timothy McGinty of Cuyahoga County, Ohio was clear about the sheer gravity of what he was pressing on Castro, seeking charges “for each and every act of sexual violence, each day of kidnapping, all his attempted murders and each act of aggravated murder”. 

The tagged offenses of murder and aggravated murder demonstrate the murkiness at stake here – making an individual in control to account over the bodies of others. It was not merely the abduction and the sexual assault.  It was the sheer totality of power wielded over the victims.  McGinty, perhaps unwittingly, was admitting to the sheer tyranny supposedly present in what has now been termed “the haunted house,” a sense of Gothic nightmare in suburbia.  And he is keen that Castro be erased, as authorities are evaluating “whether we will seek charges eligible for the death penalty.”[3]

By way of contrast, the rescued women were nudged ever so closely towards a trope of female virtue wronged by boundless evil.  Excessive brutality was highlighted against highly pronounced innocence.  Such virtue becomes a platform for public celebration.  According to Frank Ochberg, clinical professor of psychiatry at Michigan State University, “We, the public, have to have a sense of leaving them alone, but also rooting for them” (Christian Science Monitor, May 20). But such virtue also becomes a mirror. For Kurt Schillinger writing in the Christian Science Monitor (May 20), “How we actually define people emerging from traumatic experiences can both support their healing and the public’s, too.” That the public should be “healed” is an interesting turn of phrase, posing it as a moral entity prone to illness, horror and, even collusion.

Collectivised Guilt

Spectators and viewers tend to individualize their relationship with those involved in a crime, actual or alleged.  Various points of identification are found and made.  The vulnerability of the victims, the power of the victimiser, and the role played by the rescuer are fundamental in this web of meaning. Those who know the suspect are also entangled, an implied sense of guilt that they should have done something to prevent the crime from taking place. 

The Cleveland case has shown a few interpretative strategies in action.  Responsibility, on the one hand, has been isolated. Ascribing responsibility after all, as one of Julian Barnes’ characters remarks in The Sense of an Ending, is something of a “cop out,” and “exoneration.”  This has, predictably, come from relatives of the suspect keen to diminish suggestions of solidarity.  The almost aggressive insistence on that exoneration, however, has been notably shrill.

Castro’s daughter Arlene rapidly moved into a defensive mode, aware that slip-ups were being noted by journalists who swarmed into Cleveland like hornets in the immediate aftermath of the discovery.  Her emotional barricades were aggressively extensive – she has claimed that, “We don’t have a monster in our blood.”[4]  She has sought forgiveness for her father’s conduct. The brothers followed suit, pouncing on the newly minted term of “monster” with enthusiasm, and wishing their sibling “rot” in jail.   

Similarly, Monica Stephens, at one point married to Castro’s son, Anthony, told CNN’s Piers Morgan (May 15) of how she always felt “the heebie-jeebies” about Castro.  When she visited the home on Seymour Avenue, she noted the suspect’s obsession in keeping things locked up.  “Both my ex-husband and his mother had shared with me stories of how he had beaten them, locked them in the house, just treated them like hostages, so I never had a desire to get to know him.  He didn’t have like, you know, father-in-law appeal.”

Even the prosecutors seem to agree about the exceptional nature of their suspect, avoiding laying charges against brothers Pedro and Onil, citing “no evidence” of complicity.  The alleged efforts on the part of Ariel were said to be that of a “sick” loner, without conspiracy, without plan. 

The net of accountability in such cases can be a wide one, spread with an almost compulsive sense.

The spotlight is also on the police forces that apparently deny ever receiving calls from neighbours about what was transpiring in the Castro household.  The situation seems remarkable – three abductees held for a decade in a populated area.  Police quickly denied claims that neighbours had called them about “suspicious” activity occurring in connection with Castro’s residence.  Nina Samoylicz claimed that, in July 2010, she saw a naked woman in the backyard of Castro’s home.  Cleveland’s suburbs can be dull, and such nudity prompted discussion and a call to the police.  A different account was offered by Samoylicz’s sister Faliceonna Lopez, which goes to show how unreliable gossip and speculation can be.  Only their mother, it seems, was contacted by the excited witnesses (CNN, May 8).[5]

The police report makes the claim that the women were allowed to go into the backyard on occasions provided they wore wigs, sunglasses and kept their heads down (Jezebel, May 8).  The women also informed the police that they left the house twice during their period of incarceration.

The narrative that has emerged here is that the “monster” must be capable, credible and competent.  The suspect supposedly kept the abductees under lock and key, a supreme effort of concealment.  The alleged criminal has to be made formidable enough – one doesn’t like being made to look the fool but even more importantly, one doesn’t like being made to look responsible in the face of cruelty.  Martin Flask, director of public safety for Cleveland, informed reporters that “there is no evidence to indicate that any of them (the women) were ever outside in the yard in chains, without clothing or any other manner.”[6]

“Monsters” and Comparisons

The field of abduction provides a fascinating if complex area of study.  The individual who seeks to kidnap and then enslave the subject in question is treated as a creature lacking human traits.  It is not merely anti-human but non-human, a figure of fantasy, who conceals his quarry.  With frequency, the term “monster” is used.  It took a matter of hours for the term “monster” to be employed in the context of Ariel Castro.

Castro’s lawyer, Craig Weintraub, took issue with the designation, telling WKYC-TV (May 14) that, “The initial portrayal by the media has been one of a ‘monster’ and that’s not the impression I got when I talked to him for three hours.”  The same view was expressed, according to Weintraub, of “family members who have been interviewed by the media.”

A useful parallel here is the response to the Austrian abductor Josef Fritzl, who was accused of raping and enslaving his daughter for 24 years in a “basement of horrors.”  Here was an almost mythological monster who operated in sinister, Wagnerian shadows, a ruler of cruelty who conducted what Allan William Hall called a “24 year reign of terror.”. Fritzl oversaw a 650 square foot dungeon, a sprawling complex in which he kept his daughter with whom he had six children.  In a report by Patricia Treble, writing for Macleans (Apr 6, 2009), he would require permanent psychiatric evaluation, without which he would commit more crimes.  For psychiatrist Adelheid Kastner, Fritzl expressed a powerful urge “to dominate and control other people.” 

Josef Fritzl's Basement

Even monsters, however, can bask in the brief light of normality.  Fritzl’s behavior, while shocking, can be seen as the antics of a “cellar rapist.”  Even the W.H. Smith book chain found itself in hot water when it advertised – unknowingly, claimed central office – that the book The Crimes of Josef Fritzl would actually be marked as a Father’s Day present. Is the monster in us all, a creature merely dormant awaiting the spark?

For Fritzl himself, the actions might have been “crazy,” and he was on the downward slide.  Yet the picture he lived was ordinary, or one of “depraved domesticity” (New York Times, May 9, 2008).  He brought his prisoners gifts – his daughter received flowers, the children stuffed animals and books.  Meals would be cooked by Elisabeth.  The family would dine together.  Behind the domestic screen lay a crime, and Fritzl channelled a Nazi sentiment, speaking of an Austria where order and discipline were the staples, where shackles were the rules.  His mother was ever a fantasised figure.  His daughter became the substitute figure, a figure both maternal and sexual.  “My drive to have sex with Elisabeth grew stronger and stronger.”  This took place, despite Fritzl knowing he was “hurting her.”

Domesticity and crime are the twin images of the scene – the monster and the domestic.  At any moment, the image can disintegrate – Fritzl threatened at stages to gas the occupants of the house if ill should befall him. The image of domesticity can also be found in the police report on the Cleveland abductions. Castro, it is alleged, made the women celebrate “abduction day” every year, an almost primeval rite of rebirth.  According to one of DeJesus’ cousins, “He would celebrate their abduction day as their new birthday” (The Week, May 9).

Such captors are also deceptive.  They are able to practice their concealments in full view, holding a broken mirror for society to gaze at.  The paradox here is a simulation of total normality.  No one questions because there is nothing to question.  Violence is internalized and ritualized.  The discovery of the deception is treated by way of an orgy of collective guilt and vengeful anger. 

In Fritzl’s case, the deception was elaborate – his daughter was made to write a note claiming to have “joined a cult group.”  Even the wife, Rosemarie, was convinced.  The alleged deceptions of Castro find similar form – the other family members did not know that the abduction and rape was being perpetrated under their noses.

The environment where Fritzl also operated in is treated as rebarbative.  In the words of the lead investigator Franz Polzer, “The work in the cellar is overwhelming and oppressive for the investigators.  Every object reminds them of what went on.”

The domesticity of the abduction scene, with its family settings, its otherwise dull routine, sets the wheels of trauma into motion.  Brutality is measured and patterned.  Sexual assault is rationalized, normalized, ritualized.  Revelations that a man might father children by his own daughter are taken to be exceptional violations of the incest taboo.  After the Fritzl case, other countries also recorded their own versions of the case.  In Victoria, Australia, a man was accused of fathering four children by his daughter.  The then premier of Victoria, John Brumby, emphasised the acts as exceptional.  “Obviously any crime of this type is one that is shocking and personally repulsive… to me and to other Victorians.” (Northern Territory News, Sep 18, 2009)

Deification of Rescue

Excessive guilt can produce gestures and rituals of overcompensation. One is a developed hagiography of the victims – extensive coverage of their mental state.  “How are they coping?”  The most absurd example of this is the contrition shown by Arlene Castro to that her friend, one of the victims DeJesus.  Given that they went to school together, and that her father was allegedly keeping her under lock and key, was a point of consternation that required some correction.  To that end, she insisted that DeJesus “meet my children.”

While the Castro family fears demonization and the taint of history, the converse is true for Charles Ramsey, the man who, along with Angel Cordero, helped release Berry after he heard her screaming.  The Internet junkies are mulling over the aura that has been generated around Ramsey, which is probably suggestive of the sheer collective guilt for how such a case could have happened. Sites such as Know Your Meme are running up videos with him.  His exploits feature on the loop, gathering a following over what was, essentially, a banal undertaking with remarkable consequence.  “Thank you Charles for going to the aid of Amanda in the selfless way you did,” goes the response of a donor to a site set up to raise money for his efforts.[7]

Everything Ramsey does from hereon in is being revered.  This is despite his own assertion that, “We bleed the same blood, put our pants on in the same way.”  The ordinary act has been treated as singular, while Castro’s alleged behavior was said to be exceptionally brutal concealed by the rituals of ordinary domesticity.  Ramsey’s specific patois supposedly mattered to some journalists – he “calls everybody bro,” as if that might be significant; he is a “straight talking” sort, lacing his words with occasional profane relish. Out of unremarkable simplicity, an almost hysterical interest has been generated.  A saint has been born.

Some of the reverence is of the financial sort, which goes to show that rescuing an alleged abductee might just find yourself a spot of cash, a form of communal dispensation for previous moral indifference.  Robby Russell of Portland, Oregon, at the time of this writing, raised $14,000 on his site “Thank You Charles Ramsey.”[8]  “Thank you for doing what you did… thank you for the fantastic interviews,” claims the ecstatic Russell who is posting tips on where to put your “expendable income.”

Some of this deification may be the outcome of a social and legal state where rescue comes with its hazards.  Rescue, by all means, but do so at your own peril.  Effectively, one is discouraged to undertake a mission of rescue in jurisdictions where the common law prevails against the Good Samaritan.  At times, an effort to assist a person in distress can result in a legal action if the rescue fails.  The very existence of Good Samaritan laws is a testament to that fact. This is in stark contrast to such civil code jurisdictions as France, where the task of rescue is obligatory for citizens. 

The way such guilt manifests itself – the sort that questions why a person did not aid another earlier when needed – is diverse.  Law officials can be shocked into action.  Prominent members of the public denounce moral apathy in the face of a person’s misfortunate.  Officials in Shenzhen, China began, in 2011, to draft rules to protect rescuers from legal action after a case where an injured 2-year-old was ignored by 18 passers-by.  The child was also run over twice in the southern city of Foshan, dying as a result of her injuries.  The laws protect those undertaking the act of rescue “as long as there was no negligence or deliberate sabotage” (ABC News, Nov 2, 2011). While U.S. jurisdictions sport such legislation, the reluctance in a litigious culture to convert an act of rescue into an act of negligent breach is tempting and stifling.  We can only wonder then when a normal act of rescue takes place, a near orgiastic spectacle of reverence follows. Spiced with social media, accounts become extreme, daring, by definition heroic.

The way the celebratory phenomenon occurred in the Cleveland abduction case was, however, variable.  While Ramsey became a cyber phenomenon, a meme in frenetic action, fellow rescuer Angel Cordero, the other rescuer, barely received a mention.  “Among the hard truths revealed by the Cleveland kidnapping horror,” noted Joseph Brean of The National Post (May 13), “was the awkwardly accidental nature of heroism.”

The status of the hero, as noted by historian Paul Johnson in his work Heroes, is transient and transitional, adjusting to times and moments. The clue here is the society in need of heroes, a condition pitied by such playwrights as Berthold Brecht, who’s condemned Galileo makes the point: “Unhappy is the land in need of heroes.” 

Reflections

The entire drama surrounding the discovery of the Cleveland abductees has become a true spectacle of commercialised morality, virtuous wronged women, and supremely demonic suspects.  Ethical constipation and guilt have played a vital part in this.  Ramsey’s presence proved a godsend, a vent for the broader suspicions of complicity.  The Good Samaritan, it was suggested, was alive.  The sheer savagery of the prosecution language also suggests the anger at how authorities, and the public, were deceived by the domestic spectacle that was inverted under their very noses.  Castro’s behavior was the mirror to a society that was simply deceiving itself.  And it is precisely those which tend to be desperately in need of heroes.

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

by Eponymous Rox

As far as killers go, the Kalamazoo River in Michigan, which deviously hid missing person Jeffrey Woodruff within its murky depths for three days and nights during the spring of 2013, is one of the deadliest.

Its swift currents, chilly waters, and toxic bed of oily sludge are notorious, making it the least likely place a young man would venture to take a swim, be he intoxicated or stone cold sober.

And cold as a stone Woodruff was when his waterlogged corpse was finally fished out of the Kalamazoo on April 30th, not far from the sleepy shores of Saugatuck and the local tavern from where he’d mysteriously vanished...

Don’t go in the water

It was the scene of one of the most heinous crimes ever committed against nature, and one of the costliest as well.

The Enbridge pipeline rupture at Marshall, Michigan on July 26, 2010 unleashed about a million gallons of heavy crude directly into the Talmadge Creek tributary system. Thereafter, a combination of worker incompetence and days of torrential rainfall served to carry the massive spill miles downstream and into the Kalamazoo River.

Propelled then by raging floodwaters, that highly contaminated effluence was estimated to have been just 80 miles short of reaching Great Lake Michigan itself when finally contained. But containment didn’t solve the crisis, for even today an enormous quantity of this unrefined oil sits on the river’s bottom, waiting to be reclaimed by the culprit corporation that negligently deposited it there.

To achieve those ends, U.S. regulators from the Environmental Protection Agency recently ordered Canadian-based Enbridge Energy to, once and for all, dredge the Kalamazoo river basin. A cumbersome project which the derelict company has so far stubbornly balked at doing, citing an already expensive cleanup attempt and some of the heftiest fines ever lobbed against an industry offender.

As a result, locals don’t even trust drinking from their wells these days, let alone swimming or fishing in the river.

Jeffrey Woodruff goes missing

Michigan native Jeffrey Woodruff was a recent transplant to Kalamazoo’s otherwise picturesque waterfront community of Saugatuck.

There, the athletic 25-year-old had quickly secured gainful employment at Amsterdam Antiques, the proprietor of which happens to be longtime pals with the owner and operator of Wally’s Bar and Grill.

On April 27, 2013, Woodruff had closed up shop for his then-vacationing boss, and, as the evening was still young and temperatures mild, he headed on foot to Wally’s popular watering hole to have a couple of beers and take in some tunes.

For a twenty-something American male on a Saturday night, it couldn’t have been a more ordinary activity for him to embark upon, and by all accounts Woodruff did enjoy himself at the crowded pub, even though he’d arrived alone.

Yet, by 11 PM, this notably outgoing and friendly newcomer, who apparently had no problems peaceably mingling with total strangers, would somehow vanish from Wally’s without a trace, never to be seen alive again.

Slain in Saugatuck

From the very moment the Woodruff Posse descended on Saugatuck, arriving there en masse within 24 hours of deducing their young man was uncharacteristically AWOL, they sensed something foul was afoot.

An abandoned cellphone, an edgy barman, a barking boss, and prior 911 calls from passersby about an unconscious male lying prone in a lot near Wally’s Bar and Grill, placed only an hour or so after Woodruff disappeared, made them fear the worse.

Incredibly though, police informed Team Woodruff that this unidentified comatose individual “was gone” when officers investigated around 12:30 AM, adding they had no particular interest in assisting their search party.

“Gone” as well was the film from Wally’s surveillance cameras, the skeptical rescuers soon discovered. All of it “mistakenly” erased, claimed the bar owner, when he inexpertly undertook to examine the video feed for clues.

Two days later, on April 30th, the fully-clothed but lifeless body of Jeffrey Woodruff was discovered soaking in the corrupt waters of the nearby Kalamazoo. Like hundreds of other young men who’d met similar fates these past 16 years, he too was deemed the “accidental” victim of what has now evidently become the world’s most lethal mix: alcohol and a river.

The dead man had a telltale gash across his knuckles, and an injured ear.

This case is developing; visit the Killing Killers website to follow it, and view the special feature section Voices For The Dead to read an exclusive interview by Eponymous Rox with the family of Jeffrey Woodruff.