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Post by Joanna on Jan 10, 2019 19:15:37 GMT -5
Boulder Police Dismiss Oliva's Latest Claims
BOULDER, Colo. – The Boulder Police Department says there are no new updates in the investigation into JonBenét Ramsey’s death following a reported confession shared widely online.
On Thursday, DailyMailTV published a story that a convicted pedophile had confessed to accidentally killing the 6-year-old Boulder girl in 1996. In letters written from prison, 54-year-old Gary Oliva reportedly told a friend, “I never loved anyone like I did JonBenét and yet I let her slip and her head bashed in half and I watched her die. It was an accident. Please believe me. She was not like the other kids.”
On Thursday, police told FOX31 and Channel 2 the department is aware of Oliva, has investigated his potential involvement in the case and that the man has confessed to JonBenet’s murder several times in the past. “The department routinely receives information on this investigation. Information provided to the police department is reviewed along with the many tips and theories we receive,” the department said in an email.
Police said there are no new updates in the investigation. Moreover, former Boulder District Attorney Stan Garnett said DailyMailTV has not reported anything that wasn’t already known to authorities.
Source: Eric Ruble, KDVR, January 10, 2019.
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Post by Joanna on Jan 7, 2019 15:12:19 GMT -5
Babysitter Returns Dead Infant to MotherWAUSAU, Wis. – The Wausau babysitter charged with killing a 2-month-old boy in her care attempted to hide the infant’s death from his mother and then went swimming at a Wausau hotel with her boyfriend and son. Marissa Tietsort (above), 28, dressed the baby in winter clothing and strapped him into a car seat, pretending he was alive during a trip to McDonald’s and continuing the ruse when she returned the boy to his mom, court documents indicated.
Tietsort has been charged with first-degree intentional homicide in the baby’s death. Family and friends of the 2-month-old child filled the benches of a Marathon County courtroom wearing “Justice for Benson” T-shirts featuring a photo of the infant. Judge Jill Falstad set a $500,000 cash bond and ordered that Tietsort was not to have any contact with children under 18 or with the victim’s immediate family. Tietsort has been in jail since October on a $250,000 cash bond in a separate child abuse case. If she is ever able to post bond, Tietsort is not allowed to leave Marathon County, the judge ruled.
According to a criminal complaint, Tietsort knew the child had died while in her care, but did not tell the baby’s mother when she came to pick up her son. An autopsy shows the baby died of blunt force trauma to the head.
The boy’s mother dropped off the baby and his older brother at Tietsort’s home on North 6th Street in Wausau on the afternoon of Oct. 18, 2017. The infant was awake and Tietsort was the only adult in the house when the victim’s mother left her children there, according to the complaint. About two hours later, the baby’s mother received a text from Tietsort advising her there was a story on a local news outlet’s website indicating she [Tietsort] had been charged with child abuse. Tietsort told the mother she was not allowed to have any contact with children and not to tell anyone she was watching her two sons. The mother picked up her sons about three hours later. When the mother arrived, the infant was in his car seat wearing a snow suit with a hat pulled down over his eyes. The mother told police she believed her son was sleeping because it was past 9 p.m.
The victim’s mother then took her children to Northway Coin Laundry on West 3rd Street, where she discovered her child wasn’t breathing, had stiff limbs and was cold to the touch. The mother immediately began CPR while her sister called 911. When police arrived around 9:45 p.m., officers observed the infant “had an ashen skin tone, his jaw was clenched and his lips were blue.”
Police found Tietsort at the Plaza Hotel in Wausau at 4:15 the following morning. She admitted she had been watching the infant and his brother the day before and the infant had died in her care. She told police she did not kill the infant, but did not make any efforts to resuscitate him or call for help. She said she knew the baby was dead because he was cold to the touch, but she did not check for a pulse. After realizing the baby had died, she dressed him in his snowsuit and hat, covered him with blankets and placed him in his car seat. When her boyfriend came home around 6:30, she did not tell him the infant had died. Tietsort, the boyfriend, their son and the victim’s brother then went to eat at McDonald’s. Tietsort took the dead baby with them.
According to the complaint, autopsy determined the 2-month-old boy died of “blunt force head injuries with multiple impacts to the head.” The infant had at least three separate injuries to his head, which all occurred around the time of his death, forensic pathologist Robert Corliss opined. The boy also had significant injuries to his tailbone, which Corliss said was “fractured, broken off and displaced, indicating a significant amount of force was used.”
Following the child’s death, Tietsort was arrested on a child abuse charge from an incident that occurred in August. According to court documents, the father of an 11-month-old girl told police he believed Tietsort injured his daughter while babysitting her. Tietsort told the girl’s parents their child had fallen off the couch while sleeping, which resulted in injuries to her face. However, doctors told the parents the injuries, though superficial, were not consistent with a fall from that height.
In 2017, an infant was taken to the hospital with a bruised face and skull fracture. Tietsort told investigators the infant’s older sister had tried to take a bottle away from Tietsort while she was feeding the child. She said the bottle struck the infant, causing the injury. She wasn’t charged in that incident.
In 2010, Tietsort’s boyfriend filed for temporary restraining orders after telling investigators his girlfriend was abusing their two sons. Records indicate social services employees have removed four of Tietsort’s children from her care and were unaware she had given birth to a fifth child. Tietsort, who is pregnant with her sixth child, is being held in the Marathon County Jail. Her next court appearance is scheduled for January 18. Source: Natalie Brophy, The Wausau Daily Herald, January 4, 2019.
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Post by Joanna on Jan 7, 2019 14:36:55 GMT -5
January 7, 1948: Pilot Crashes in UFO ChaseOn a cold afternoon in early January 1948, control tower operators at Godman Army Airfield in Fort Knox, Kentucky, became aware of the presence of a mysterious object floating in the skies above the base. Reports from nearby highway patrol officers, who also saw the unidentified flying object, were enough to convince the controllers they weren’t seeing things that weren’t there.
A number of senior officers, including the commanding officer, were called to the tower in an attempt to make sense of what was out there, but no one was able to actually clarify what they were seeing through their binoculars. Military personnel at bases in southern Ohio also reported the UFO, which hovered in a spot before descending to Earth and then rapidly rising out of sight.
Around the time of the UFO sighting, four F-51 Mustangs led by Capt. Thomas Mantell (above) of the Kentucky Air National Guard were on their way to Godman. Mantell, a decorated former Army Air Corps transport pilot with combat time logged on D-Day in 1944, was informed there was a UFO in the area and instructed to fly over and identify the peculiar floating object. Three of the four Mustangs banked toward the UFO, while one returned to base because of low fuel. Pushing their throttles forward, the three pilots, with Mantell in the lead, raced toward the object. Within a matter of minutes, the situation worsened. One pilot had to break off the pursuit because of low oxygen levels and a second was unable to continue the chase, ending his run at 22,500 feet before returning to base. Mantell doggedly carried on alone. Controllers attempted to communicate with the 25-year-old fighter pilot, but there was no response. Mantell’s Mustang was last seen in a death spiral, dropping like a rock from the clouds and shattering into pieces when it impacted Earth. The young captain was killed instantly, his wristwatch stopped at the time of his demise.
The Air Force commenced an immediate investigation. The UFO had disappeared, a fighter pilot had been killed and the public was already concerned about the possibility of an attack by malicious extraterrestrials. Initially, investigators theorized Mantell was killed “trying to reach the planet Venus.” As crazy as this sounds, a few weeks earlier, F-51 pilots had been fooled into thinking Venus – unusually bright in the night sky at that time of year – was a UFO and given chase. Though this was the official explanation for Mantell’s crash, years later, astronomers at Ohio State University disproved the hypothesis, finding the sky was still too bright and hazy for the clear observation of Venus.
There was a second, more plausible theory: Mantell was pursuing a Navy Skyhook weather balloon. At the time, the Skyhook was part of a highly-classified observation program about which neither Mantell nor the Godman airfield controllers was aware. The shape, size and general appearance of a Skyhook with sunlight glinting off its surfaces would have been similar to what the controllers and pilots reported that fateful day in 1948. Though Mantell’s inexperience with the Mustang was partially blamed for the accident, he had accumulated more than 2,000 flight hours during his service as a military pilot. His unwillingness to abort his pursuit of the UFO, even when faced with the potential for oxygen deprivation and starvation in the unpressurized cockpit could have caused him to black out after experiencing hypoxia. Only one F-51 in his flight was equipped with an oxygen system and Mantell’s lacked such gear.
Though the official explanation of Mantell’s demise was plausible, members of the general public weren’t convinced. Details of the F-51’s crash didn’t add up and the fact the UFO was visible from other military bases and surrounding locales led many to suspect a government cover-up. The official explanation for the Mantell incident has remained unchanged through the years, however, there are those who still question it today and consider the military’s mad dash to come up with answers a sign of the government is suppressing the existence of alien life forms. Source: Ian D'Costa, We are The Mighty, September 7, 2017.
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Post by Joanna on Jan 1, 2019 0:20:49 GMT -5
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Post by Joanna on Dec 29, 2018 17:02:13 GMT -5
Julie Rea and Joel Blood Spatter Analysis Little More than Junk Science “I tucked Joel in, but I feel so guilty I didn’t hold him longer,” Julie Rea recalled, her voice welling with emotion. This is all she can muster about the worst night of her life. As she attempts to continue, she breaks down.
In the early morning hours of Monday, Oct. 13, 1997, Rea was jolted awake by a scream in her Lawrenceville, Illinois, home. She discovered an intruder, but found no sign of her 10-year-old son. She told police she struggled with the man, who fled, then ran for help. But it was too late. Her child, Joel Kirkpatrick, had been stabbed to death.
At the time of the murder, Rea was a divorced mother working toward a doctorate in educational psychology. She had divorced Joel’s father three years earlier and was leading a quiet, uneventful life in the wake of a turbulent marriage. The mild-mannered daughter of missionaries, Rea had devoted herself to her bright, inquisitive son. But in 2000, after a protracted and deeply flawed investigation, Rea was charged with killing Joel. “Surviving your child’s murder, only to find out that you’re being accused of murdering your child, is a kind of trauma that I wouldn’t wish on any living being,” Rea, now 50, said. “I wouldn’t wish it on a snake.”
Prosecutors used a forensic discipline called bloodstain-pattern (often referred to as “blood spatter”) analysis to argue that an intruder never entered the home on the night of the crime and that Rea herself was responsible for her son’s death. She was convicted of first-degree murder in 2002 largely on the strength of the testimony of two bloodstain-pattern analysts.
Four years later, Rea was acquitted at a second trial after a legal team assembled by the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law in Chicago mounted a vigorous defense that challenged the state’s forensic testimony. They also presented new evidence that Tommy Lynn Sells – a serial killer of children and lifelong drifter who had been sentenced to death in Texas for an almost identical crime – had confessed to killing Joel. Rea was formally exonerated in 2010.
Today she belongs to a growing community of victims: Americans who were wrongly convicted with the help of forensic disciplines allowed into courtrooms despite little to no proof of their reliability. Of the 362 people who have been exonerated based on DNA tests in the United States, faulty forensics contributed to almost half the underlying convictions. Like Rea, these exonerees have had years of their lives stolen and many have struggled to find their place in the world after surviving the crucible of incarceration.
A year before Rea’s exoneration, the National Academy of Sciences had released a report that called into doubt the reliability of bloodstain-pattern analysis. The conclusions of those who profess to interpret blood spatter were often “more subjective than scientific” and open to “context bias,” the 2009 report said. “Some experts extrapolate far beyond what can be supported,” it said, and cautioned, “The uncertainties associated with bloodstain-pattern analysis are enormous.”
The report criticized a wide range of forensic disciplines, including the analysis of hairs, fibers, bite marks and shoe and tire impressions. Its authors found that many of these disciplines were not grounded in hard data and extensive, peer-reviewed research, but instead relied upon practitioners’ personal interpretations. “The law’s greatest dilemma in its heavy reliance on forensic evidence,” the report continued, “concerns the question of whether – and to what extent – there is science in any given forensic science discipline.”
The report called for sweeping reform. Yet almost a decade later, little has changed. In the field of bloodstain-pattern analysis, rigorous research that might determine the accuracy of analysts’ findings is scant. Bite-mark analysis – which, in 2016, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology declared had no scientific validity – is still admitted in criminal prosecutions. So, too, is microscopic hair comparison, an outmoded and dangerously flawed technique that has, to date, led to the convictions of 75 people who were later exonerated by DNA testing. “Forensic science should be treated like any other consumer product,” said M. Chris Fabricant, director of strategic litigation at the Innocence Project in New York City. “Before it’s allowed to be used on human beings, it should be scientifically tested and clinically demonstrated to be reliable, just like toothpaste.” But as long as courts continue to admit forensic evidence proffered by prosecutors, and prosecutors continue to win convictions using it, “There is no incentive to change,” he added.
Bad science also affects defendants whose cases never go to trial. About 95 percent of criminal cases are resolved with plea bargains and in such cases, forensic work often goes unchallenged. “The mere threat of scientific evidence being used in court is often sufficient to induce a plea,” Fabricant continued.
Defendants convicted on the strength of dubious forensic testimony languish in prison, while those who have won their freedom, like Rea, try to put their lives back together. The $87,057 in compensation she received from the state of Illinois has proven to be cold comfort. Struggling with PTSD and reeling from the abuse she endured behind bars, she continues to suffer. Being branded a child killer “separated me from society,” Rea charged. “I’ll always have a scarlet letter. Nothing will ever make that go away.”
_________ On that fateful morning 20 years ago, Lesa Bridgett, awakened around 4:30 to the sounds of Rea pounding on her front door. Her neighbor was barefoot, clad only in a T-shirt and underwear. She looked frantic and she was speaking so rapidly she was difficult to understand. Hoping to calm her, Bridgett pulled the 28-year-old into a bear hug. “Joel’s gone,” Rea shrieked.
Court records indicate she told police she’d run into Joel’s room after hearing a scream and saw only his empty bed. A man in a ski mask lunged at her and Rea – who had a black belt in taekwondo – struggled with him, chasing him through the house and into the backyard. He slammed her head to the ground before making his escape. Hysterical, she told Bridgett she thought Joel had been kidnapped. But when Lawrence County Deputy Sheriff Dennis York arrived and searched the home, he found Joel. The 5th-grader lay on his bedroom floor between his empty bed and the nearby wall. His pajamas were drenched in blood and he had been stabbed 12 times, twice in the aorta.
When Rea was told that her son was dead, she erupted into screams. She was taken to the hospital with a black eye, rug burns on her knees, a wound on her right arm that required stitches, and scratches and abrasions on her head, both shoulders and the tops of her feet. In her fragile state of mind, she did not grasp that investigators were already eyeing her as a suspect. They had not been able to find any obvious signs of forced entry into the home and Rea could not remember locking the back door, but told police it was safe to assume she had.
Rea hardly fit the profile of a woman who would drive a knife into her child’s heart. She had no history of mental illness or criminal record, nor did her behavior in the hours leading up to the child’s murder suggest anything was amiss. She and Joel had spent an unremarkable evening at home with her best friend, Trena Woodward, and Woodward’s children. The two women had spent the evening scrapbooking.
A plodding investigation followed, with few leads. The murder weapon – a steak knife pulled from a butcher block in Rea’s kitchen – did not yield any fingerprints. Investigators had little to go on, having failed to perform basic police work that might have pinpointed the identity of an intruder. They never dusted Joel’s bedroom for fingerprints nor the butcher block from which the knife was pulled, and failed to preserve critical trace evidence on Joel’s bed covers. Instead, they focused on Rea. Looking for any remnants of blood that she might have attempted to wash away, investigators dug up her septic tank, inspected her sink and shower drains and examined the laundry items in her washing machine. They sprayed luminol, a chemical that detects the presence of blood, around her house – and found nothing.
But they couldn’t come up with a motive either. Rea, who shared custody of Joel with her ex-husband, Leonard Kirkpatrick, had fought for more time with their son. Kirkpatrick had been awarded physical custody of the boy after he remarried – a decision Rea had fiercely protested, filing her latest appeal two weeks before her Joel’s death.
In the wake of the murder, Rea could not bear to be alone. Terrified of the dark, she rarely slept. She stayed in an apartment 85 miles away in Bloomington, Indiana, where she had been commuting to Indiana University. A rotation of friends stayed with her around the clock. “To fall asleep, I had to have someone on either side of me and the lights on,” she remembered. She got a German shepherd that she took with her almost everywhere. Though she managed to teach at the university, she was plagued by panic attacks and debilitating anxiety. Several times, investigators appeared at her apartment and workplace unannounced.
The investigation sputtered along until 2000, when the Illinois State’s Attorneys Appellate Prosecutor’s Office, which routinely handles complex prosecutions for rural counties, took the case to a grand jury. On the eve of the third anniversary of Joel’s murder, Rea was indicted. Prosecutors had no eyewitnesses, little forensic evidence and couldn’t come up with a motive. They would rely on a forensic discipline that had helped win circumstantial cases before: bloodstain-pattern analysis.
_________ Bloodstain-pattern analysis is rooted in the belief that drops, spatters and trails of blood at a crime scene are rich repositories of information that can be used to reverse engineer and even reconstruct crimes. Many practitioners are law enforcement officers who have no background in science. Nevertheless, their expert testimony often lends a sense of scientific certainty to circumstantial cases and can be a powerful tool in the hands of prosecutors. “An expert who says, ‘This is what the physical evidence shows,’ is extremely persuasive, especially in a circumstantial case,” said Judy Royal, a staff attorney with the Center on Wrongful Convictions who began working on Rea’s case in 2003. “Jurors don’t understand when an expert is overstating findings or going beyond what can be tested and replicated.”
This fact has been laid bare in cases around the country in which bloodstain-pattern analysis has figured prominently – most recently that of Joe Bryan, a former high school principal who was convicted of the 1985 murder of his wife in Clifton, Texas. Bryan was the subject of a two-part investigation by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine this spring that questioned the accuracy of the bloodstain-pattern analysis used to convict him. The Texas Forensic Science Commission, a national leader in criminal justice reform, found in July the conclusions of the prosecution’s bloodstain-pattern expert, Robert Thorman, were “not accurate or scientifically supported.” In September, Thorman conceded in an affidavit that some of his conclusions were wrong. Bryan, whose attorneys have asked that his conviction be overturned and whose case is before Texas’ highest criminal court, has spent 31 years in prison. A judge recently recommended Bryan’s conviction stand, finding that “Thorman’s testimony was not important to the case.”
Bryan’s and Rea’s cases are not the only ones in which a bloodstain-pattern analyst has delivered testimony that was later called into question. From Oregon to Texas, from North Carolina to New York, convictions that hinged on the testimony of a bloodstain-pattern analyst have been overturned and the defendants acquitted, or the charges dropped. As recently as last February, a judge vacated the conviction of a Missouri man named Brad Jennings for the 2006 murder of his wife, Lisa, after evidence emerged that supported his claim that his wife committed suicide. Jennings was released from prison after eight years behind bars.
Bloodstain-pattern analysis was most clearly discredited in the case of an Indiana state trooper, David Camm, who found his wife and two children shot to death in their home in 2000 and was quickly charged with their murders. Over the course of three trials, prosecutors presented a succession of bloodstain-pattern analysts who testified that eight specks of blood found on the T-shirt Camm wore on the night of the crime were “high-velocity impact spatter” from the shooting. The defense produced its own bloodstain experts, who argued the specks in question were actually “transfer stains” – blood that blotted Camm’s T-shirt as he attempted to render aid. Camm was acquitted in 2013 after spending 13 years in prison. Another man, a burglar with a long rap sheet whose DNA was found at the crime scene, was convicted of the murders and imprisoned.
The retired biochemist and forensic scientist Robert Shaler, one of the authors of the 2009 National Academy of Sciences report and the founding director of Pennsylvania State University’s Forensic Science Program, testified for the defense in the Camm case that experts on both sides were incorrect. Specks of blood, he argued, were too little information from which to draw any meaningful conclusion. “The experts couldn’t even agree on the type of pattern they were looking at,” he said in an interview.
Camm’s lead attorney at his third trial, Richard Kammen, was even more blunt. “People see what they want to see,” he said of bloodstain-pattern analysis. “It’s as accurate as a Ouija board.”
When Rea stood trial for her son’s murder in February 2002, bloodstain-pattern analysis took center stage. Like Camm’s case, Rea’s hinged on a minuscule amount of blood that stained her T-shirt on the night of the slaying. Almost all of it was her blood, which had seeped from the wound on her arm. But a tiny smear on her shirt’s right shoulder was found to be that of her son. DNA testing of two other small bloodstains on her shirt established a possible – though not definitive – link to Joel. The defense would argue that Joel’s blood had likely been transferred onto Rea’s shirt when she scuffled with the bloodied intruder.
The prosecution called two bloodstain-pattern analysts who asserted there had been no intruder. The first was Rod Englert, a retired police detective and past president of the International Association of Bloodstain Pattern Analysts. He began by performing a lengthy demonstration using theatrical blood to show the jury how different kinds of blood spatter are created. Holding forth without interruption, he introduced the forensic discipline’s basic principles and lexicon. Bloodstain-pattern analysis, he explained, allowed investigators “to put the pieces of the puzzle together.” It was with this imprimatur of legitimacy that Englert delivered his findings. He concluded the crime scene had been “staged and manipulated” and was “not consistent with her story of a struggle.” His expert opinion was based on both his examination of the evidence, he insisted, and his “experience of having gone to many, many scenes, many like this, hundreds of scenes.” He saw “no indication that there was a third party in this residence.”
The task of interpreting the bloodstains on Rea’s T-shirt was left up to Dexter Bartlett, a crime scene investigator with the Illinois State Police. Bartlett told the jury that Joel’s blood could not have transferred onto her shirt and was more consistent with her wielding a weapon. Bartlett offered no proof of this – no experiments he had conducted, no data and no explanation of the methodology he used to arrive at his conclusions.
The defense called its own bloodstain-pattern analyst, Paul Kish, a forensic consultant who testified his microscopic examination of the T-shirt led him to believe Joel’s blood had been transferred onto it. The blood rested on top of the fibers, he told jurors; it had not penetrated the weave of the fabric, as blood cast off a weapon would be expected to do.
Who was right and who was wrong was left to jurors to sort out. Rea’s public defender, Brad Vaughn, implored them to remember that none of the claims made by the state’s bloodstain-pattern analysts could be verified and they had not conducted any experiments to test their conclusions. “That’s not scientific,” Vaughn told the jury. “Science is about establishing: ‘This is scientific and true because I can recreate it. I can duplicate it. I know within a range that this can be done this way.’ There was no attempt to do that.”
The other prosecution strategy was to cast Rea – whom friends and family described as a caring, attentive parent – as a bad mother. Her ex-husband testified she had considered having an abortion when she discovered, at the age of 17, she was pregnant with Joel. Neighbors claimed she behaved erratically, even coldly, in the immediate aftermath of the crime. One neighbor told the jury Rea, though initially hysterical, never cried. These claims went largely unchallenged because Rea’s attorney didn’t call her to the stand. In the end, the jury found Rea guilty and she was sentenced to 65 years in prison.
Then in 2004, there was a sensational development in the case: Serial killer Tommy Lynn Sells told Illinois investigators he had broken into a house in 1997, stabbed a boy to death using a knife he pulled from a butcher block in the kitchen and sparred with a woman both inside and outside the house. Sells was facing execution in Texas for fatally stabbing a 13-year-old girl after breaking into her family’s home and he had been linked to several other murders of children around the country. The same year, an Illinois appellate court overturned Rea’s conviction because of a legal error and ordered a new trial.
At her 2006 retrial, prosecutors doubled down on bloodstain-pattern analysis when they once again called Englert to the stand. But this time, Englert – who had delivered some of the state’s most damning testimony in the Camm case – focused on a theory he had did not mention at Rea’s first trial. In examining her T-shirt, he said he had seen evidence that “a bloody hand pushed up” against it. The source of the blood, he added, could only have been “Joel’s bloodied hands.” His testimony suggested a horrifying scenario: Joel had tried to push his mother away as she plunged a knife into him. Under cross-examination, Englert admitted he never obtained measurements of Joel’s hands for comparison. Englert, who stands by his testimony, recently claimed any differences in his testimony in the two trials was likely the result of variations in the prosecutor’s questions.
Testifying for the defense, forensic consultant Kenneth Moses challenged whether Englert had used the scientific method to arrive at his conclusion. “I have seen nothing to indicate that this area was studied for that purpose and data collected, comparisons made and some sort of a conclusion or hypothesis drawn,” Moses said, referring to the T-shirt. “There is no scientific basis for making such a claim.”
The defense went on to argue that Rea’s injuries on the night of the murder could not have been self-inflicted and investigators had missed clues that pointed to an intruder. They also played the audio of Sells’ confession for the jury. The lifelong drifter had confessed to numerous other crimes and some of his accounts strained credulity. But the defense bolstered its case by introducing evidence suggesting Sells had been near Lawrenceville, Illinois, around the time of Joel’s murder. Most importantly, Rea took the stand to tell her story, insisting she had “absolutely not” killed her son.
When the jury returned a not guilty verdict on July 26, 2006, Rea let out a primal cry. Her knees buckled beneath her as she fell to the floor. “I thought everything would be better,” she said. “I thought I might go to law school or finish my doctoral degree. I thought I’d be strong and able to help other people and give back to my family and friends who had given so much to me. I just had no idea what it would be like.”
Instead, at the time of her acquittal, Rea was still reeling – not only from her son’s violent death and two criminal prosecutions, but from the trauma of incarceration. She is reluctant to discuss the physical and emotional abuse she endured during the almost four years she spent behind bars except to say she was reviled by both inmates and guards. “What I had supposedly done was considered to be the one unforgivable sin,” she said.
Additionally, despite her acquittal, she soon discovered she had to continue living under the weight of suspicion. Prosecutors in the case still spoke of her as though she killed her son. Edwin Parkinson, the lead prosecutor in her case, told reporters, “The jury found her not guilty; they did not find her innocent.” Parkinson did not respond to a request for comment.
Despite intensive therapy and faith, Rea struggled. Marriage to a man she wed shortly before her first trial, who believed so fervently in her innocence that he went to law school to aid in her defense, unraveled in the years following her acquittal. She also had difficulty finding a job. Knowing her previous conviction would surface one way or another, she was up front with prospective employers. “After the person interviewing me picked their jaw up off the floor,” she said, “the job would be offered to someone else.” The difficulties continued even after she was formally exonerated by an Illinois circuit court in 2010.
In 2011, Rea moved to Tennessee, where her parents live, hoping for a fresh start. She tried a number of ventures, including opening a bed-and-breakfast, but none came to fruition. She is currently unemployed and apprehensive about the future. “I have no income right now,” she admitted. “I don’t know what to do.”
She is painfully aware that what happened to her – and to Camm, Jennings and others wrongly convicted on the strength of bloodstain-pattern analysis – changed nothing. Prosecutors continue to use bloodstain-pattern analysis in even the most circumstantial of cases and judges keep allowing it into the courtroom, largely unexamined.
_________ A working group of forensic scientists and bloodstain-pattern practitioners, which is overseen by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has recently called for more stringent standards and drafted new guidelines for bloodstain-pattern analysts.
But the most significant reform efforts that are currently underway have been brought about by the Texas Forensic Science Commission, whose decisions often prompt other states to follow suit. The commission has determined that bloodstain-pattern analysis that is used to reconstruct a crime must be performed by an organization or individual who is accredited – not a self-styled expert – if it is to be allowed in a Texas court. The group also has plans to educate the state’s criminal court judges by creating a resource they can consult that will describe each forensic discipline’s standards and limitations, as well as potential red flags. “When judges let everything in because they don’t have the tools to do better, we are in a situation where the only thing stopping overstated testimony is the analyst’s own ability to exercise self-restraint,” said Lynn Garcia, the commission’s general counsel. “When life, liberty and justice for the victim is at stake, that is nothing short of terrifying.”
For Rea, the reforms will come too late. “Joel still needs justice,” she said. “He’s never seen a day of it. My acquittal just got us back to level ground.” She deplores the fact Sells, whom she believes killed Joel, will never be charged with his murder – he was executed in 2014.
Over and over again, Rea has wished she had awakened sooner on the night Joel was murdered. Then she could have saved her son, she believes, or died trying.Sources: Pammela Colloff, ProPublica, December 20, 2018, and New York Times Magazine.Note: Darlie Routier was convicted on blood spatter analysis performed by blood spatter “expert” Tom Bevel, whose credibility is questionable and who has been described as nothing more than a “hired gun.”
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Post by Joanna on Dec 24, 2018 20:28:48 GMT -5
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Post by Joanna on Dec 22, 2018 0:03:30 GMT -5
Dr. MacDonald Denied New Trial
RICHMOND, Va. – The U.S. Court of Appeals has denied the petition of former army surgeon Jeffrey MacDonald, who was convicted of killing his pregnant wife and two young daughters at Fort Bragg almost half-a-century ago. The former Green Beret doctor, now 75, has adamantly maintained his innocence in the 1970 murders and insists his family was killed by a group of drugged hippies which included a woman who chanted “Acid is groovy; kill the pigs.”
Prosecutors claim MacDonald killed his wife, 26-year-old Colette MacDonald, and their daughters Kimberley, 5, and Kristen, 2, with a knife and ice pick, then stabbed himself with a scalpel to make it appear he was attacked while attempting to protect his family. After the murders, they say he used his wife’s blood to write the word “PIG” over their bed, an idea he got from the Tate-LaBianca murders six months earlier.
After decades of failed appeals, MacDonald again sought to clear his name by appealing to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a federal judge’s 2014 ruling rejecting a new trial. On Friday, the appeals court upheld the ruling. The latest appeal was based on three hairs found at the crime scene that did not match the family’s DNA and a statement by a deputy U.S. marshal who accused the prosecution of intimidating a witness. A three-judge panel of the appeals court agreed with the lower court judge that the new evidence did not warrant a new trial. “Simply put, we cannot say that the new evidence ... considered with all the other evidence, would be sufficient to establish by clear and convincing evidence that no reasonable fact-finder would have found him guilty of the murders of his wife and daughters,” Judge Robert King wrote for the panel in the unanimous ruling.
The North Carolina murders became known as the “Fatal Vision” case, the title of a 1983 true-crime book by author Joe McGinniss. Though McGinnis apparently pretended to be convinced of MacDonald’s innocence to gain access to the defendant, his book, Fatal Vision, pronounced MacDonald guilty. McGinniss alleged he became convinced of the doctor’s guilt during his research.
MacDonald is serving three consecutive life sentences. His lawyer, Hart Miles, called the ruling “devastating news,” but said MacDonald “will continue to fight for his freedom. He continues to maintain his innocence and wants to express his sincere thanks to all the supporters who have stood by him,” Miles said in a statement.
The 4th Circuit overturned MacDonald’s convictions in 1980, ruling the nine-year delay to bring him to trial violated his right to a speedy trial. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed that decision in 1982 and MacDonald was returned to prison.
Source: The Associated Press, December 21, 2018.
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Post by Joanna on Dec 20, 2018 19:32:26 GMT -5
Blessed Midwinter!
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Post by Joanna on Dec 20, 2018 2:57:00 GMT -5
Do you know where I can find the obituary of Eleanor Rose? I'm sure both the Seattle Times and Post-Intelligencer published the obituary. Check their websites.
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Post by Joanna on Dec 20, 2018 2:54:11 GMT -5
Congratulations, Julia. That case has been in the news lately because the mother is filing a wrongful death case against the father, but if he's a deadbeat, she won't get anything. The mother is also a deadbeat. In addition to being addicted to heroin, she has two other children, younger than Ayla, she can't support and she wasn't married to their fathers either. Neither family is qualified to raise a dog, let alone a child. The mother should be suing DHHS because the employee who removed the child and placed her with the father acted on her own without court authority. According to reports, the little girl was terrified of her father and cried and screamed when Karen Small snatched her from the home of her mother's sister and handed her over to him.
Congratulations, Julia.
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Post by Joanna on Dec 16, 2018 8:33:25 GMT -5
Ted Bundy Documentary Premiers on Netflix Jan. 24, 2019 Netflix is adding another true-crime series to its roster: Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, will premier January 24, 2019, the 30th anniversary of Bundy’s death in the electric chair.
The streaming service, which produced Making a Murderer, The Keepers and The Staircase, the new docu-series from Emmy winner Joe Berlinger will feature previously unheard audio tapes of interviews Bundy gave while on Florida’s death row. The four-episode program will also detail the murders Bundy was either convicted of or confessed to committing, as well as the media frenzy surrounding his trials and his bizarre marriage to Carole Ann Boone in an Orlando court room following his conviction for killing 12-year-old Kimberly Diane Leach of Lake City.
The series is inspired by the book of the same title by Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, who recorded in excess of 100 hours of tape in which Bundy provided his perspective of the killer and analyzed his life and motives without admitting to the killings himself.
Berlinger directed the badly-titled Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, a narrative feature about Bundy starring Zac Efron, that will premiere at the upcoming Sundance Film Festival.
Conversations With a Killer is from RadicalMedia in association with Third Eye Motion Picture Company. Berlinger, Justin Wilkes, Jon Doran and Jon Kamen serve as executive producers and Sara Enright as producer. Source: Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter, December 11, 2018.
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Post by Joanna on Dec 14, 2018 22:57:31 GMT -5
Yeah, Reddit sucks and most of those who post are retarded. It's also a waste of time. I was banned from that lousy subreddit called /UnresolvedMysteries, because I used the word "queer" meaning "strange or odd." The subhuman moderator accused me of using a homophobic term! She was so stupid that she didn't know that queer meant something other than homosexual. I almost joined Reddit once, but after reading a few posts and comments, I came to my senses. r/UnresolvedMysteries is one of the subs I considered until I noticed Wikipedia was cited repeatedly as a source of information. Any of you who have read our rules know we do not allow quotes from Wikipedia because anyone who is a member of Wikipedia is free to create, add to, delete, or change, content, thereby rendering the information notoriously unreliable.
As for Ted Bundy's daughter, I agree with Pat. If she wants to blame someone for her notoriety, she doesn't have to look any farther than her stupid, prison-groupie mother.
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Post by Joanna on Dec 11, 2018 2:56:22 GMT -5
Jay (deceased) and Meredith Lawrence Opioid Crackdown Leads to Despair, Suicide, Other ProblemsBy 2006, Jay Lawrence, a Navy veteran and native of Tennessee was experiencing numbness in his arms and legs and the pain was so excruciating it reduced him to tears. Multiple surgeries, chiropractic adjustments and physical therapy didn’t work. He finally found solace in prescription painkillers – 120 milligrams a day of morphine. A high dose, but it dulled the pain enough for him to take walks with his wife, shop for groceries, even take in a few movies.
But last February, the doctor at the pain clinic delivered some jarring news: He was cutting Lawrence’s daily dosage, first to 90 milligrams then, in short stages, down to 30 milligrams. The doctor said the reduced dosage was in response to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) prescribing guidelines released in 2016 as part of a national anti-opioid push, according to Lawrence’s wife, Meredith. “The doctor said: ‘You know these guidelines are going to become a law eventually. So we’ve decided as a group that we’re going to take all of our patients down,’” Mrs. Lawrence told Fox News in an interview.
Following the reduction in pain relievers, Lawrence’s pain returned with a vengeance. He could barely move or sleep. He soiled his pants, unable to make it to the bathroom in time, his spouse recalled. “It feels like every nerve in my body is on fire,” he told his wife.
Meredith said she and her husband went to their primary care physician and asked for a referral to another pain clinic and were advised it would take a minimum of six weeks. This was too much for Lawrence. In March, on the day of his next medical appointment, when his painkiller dosage was to be reduced again, he instead went to a nearby park with his wife. And on the very spot where they renewed their wedding vows just two years earlier, they held hands and he raised a gun to his chest and killed himself.
Lawrence, who was 58, became one of an undetermined number among the nation’s 20 million chronic pain sufferers who chose suicide after being cut back or denied prescriptions for opioids. The suicides have motivated many of those who continue to suffer pain – and family members and advocates of those who took their lives – to call for a re-evaluation of the rush to reduce opioid dosages for those who most need them. “We have a terrible problem. We have people committing suicide for no other reason than being forced to stop opioids, pain medication, for chronic pain,” said Thomas Kline, a North Carolina family doctor and former Harvard Medical School program administrator. “It’s mass hysteria, a witch hunt. It’s one of the worst health care crises in our history,” added Kline, who has 26,000 Twitter followers and a website where he publishes the names of those who he said committed suicide after having their opioids prescriptions cut back or eliminated. “There are five to seven million people being tortured on purpose.”
The CDC doesn’t have numbers on those who commit suicide after having their pain medications cut. But most of the doctors who spoke to Fox News said they knew of between one and six patients who had committed suicide after losing access to opioid treatment and being turned away by other doctors who now see prescription painkillers as a hassle.
Several prominent doctors and pain patient advocacy organizations said they have heard from hundreds who say they have been left in debilitating pain and are considering suicide. The issue earlier this year came to the attention of Human Rights Watch, which launched an investigation. “Clearly, there are patients now who feel like life is not worth living if they return to living in pain,” said Diederik Lohman, director of Health and Human Rights for Human Rights Watch. “Many of the patients we spoke to are very law-abiding and would turn to suicide before going to the street to get illicit drugs. The government has a duty to respond to the overdose crisis, but to do so in a way that is harming people who have a legitimate medical issue is a human rights issue.”
Many pain patients say they understand the urgent need of political leaders and government agencies to fight the drug overdose epidemic. But targeting the millions who legitimately suffer chronic pain is grasping for a solution that doesn’t address the preponderance of illegal drugs, they argue – or the rate of overdoses caused by them.
The CDC released a report Nov. 30 showing that despite a drop in painkiller prescriptions over the years, the drug overdose rate continues to soar, with the growth driven by the illicit opioid fentanyl and its cousins. It is a trend that has held for several years.
“People with pain shouldn’t have to suffer because people without pain are abusing opioids,” said Cynthia Toussaint, a former ballerina from California, who has Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS), which left her bedridden for 10 years, and unable to speak for five. “Pain patients don’t want to take opioids any more than cancer patients want to use chemotherapy. However, many people with pain need opioids to function physically and pursue the joyful aspects of life.”
At a recent American Medical Association (AMA) meeting, the group’s president, Dr. Barbara McAneny, spoke of how an advanced prostate cancer patient of hers attempted suicide after he was denied opioids by an insurer. “The pendulum swung too far when pain was designated a vital sign and now we are in danger of it swinging back so far that patients are being harmed,” she said, according to published reports.
Issues with CDC Guidelines. Federal officials have said the CDC guidelines weren’t intended to disrupt the proper prescribing and use of opioids. “We’re not telling any doctor that they can’t make a legitimate prescription,” then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions told Fox News, in an interview before he left office. “Maybe some doctors are getting too cautious. We don’t know.” Sessions acknowledged “opioid prescribing can be essential for people,” and added, “it’s very clear that people with serious pain problems are in need of real significant pain relief and sometimes [opioids] are the only thing that will provide relief, and it is absolutely legitimate to prescribe it.”
We have heard about the suicides ... It’s tragic that anyone takes their life for any reason, including that they had their opioids unilaterally stopped, Dr. Debbie Dowell, lead author of the 2016 CDC Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain, said. CDC officials added they are also aware chronic pain sufferers have committed suicide in their struggle to get by with fewer or no opioids. Dowell continued, saying the scope of suicides caused by under-treatment of chronic pain “isn’t something that’s easy to measure. We’ve looked at how we might measure this. Sometimes patients or their families don’t report it.”
The CDC guidelines focused on primary care physicians and recommended extreme caution in prescribing opioids. It also suggested a maximum daily dosage of 90 morphine milligram equivalents for first-time painkiller patients. But the guidelines also warned against forcibly tapering or abruptly cutting off severe pain sufferers who have responsibly taken opioids, noting a drastic change could lead to withdrawal and serious illness.
Untreated pain, many health experts say, can also lead to hypertension, more serious pain conditions and other problems. Health practitioners say this is a plight that could affect anyone – all it takes is a slip, a fall, or a botched surgery that could bring on intense and perhaps long-term pain.
Dowell indicated patients should be prescribed on a case-by-case basis. “We believe everyone deserves effective pain management,” she claimed. “The CDC guidelines are not a regulation or a law – it’s guidance for providers. It never made a recommendation to take people off medication involuntarily, or to taper down involuntary,” she continued. “It was meant to provide updated guidance about the benefits and risks of opioids for chronic pain so that the provider and the patient – together – could make decisions.”
Guidelines Become Enforcement Tools. The CDC disclaimer was apparently lost among the headlines concerning the staggering number of deaths due to opioids. Political leaders and government officials often failed to note the bulk – at least 60 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services – of the overdose epidemic was caused by illicit drugs, not prescription painkillers. And when officials did address the portion of deaths due to prescriptions, advocates of safe opioid use argue, they often lumped together pain patients and people with addiction who illegally obtained someone else’s prescribed opioids. That made for a perfect storm, which formed the basis for a slew of hardline state and federal policies, including a Trump administration vow to slash prescriptions by 30 percent over the next three years.
Either in response to the CDC guidelines or as a proactive measure to deal with the opioid crisis on their own, at least 33 states have enacted some type legislation related to prescription limits, according to the National Conference of State Legislators. Health care providers and pain patients who have Medicare prescription plans are bracing for January, when the federal insurance program will give its insurers and pharmacists the authority to reject prescriptions that deviate from CDC recommended dosage.
“The CDC guidelines were geared to primary care doctors, but they have been hijacked and weaponized as an excuse for draconian legislation,” said Michael Schatman, a clinical psychologist and director of research and development at Boston Pain Care, a multi-disciplinary pain clinic, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Pain Research. “Illicit opioids, not prescription opioids, are driving overdose deaths.”
The disproportionate focus on prescription painkillers by officials responding to the overdose epidemic, pain specialists and public health researchers say, is in great part why the drug-related death rate continues to climb while legal opioids becomes less available to pain patients.
“We’re targeting the most vulnerable and sickest people who have been on opioids a long time,” insisted Dr. Stefan Kertesz, an addiction specialist and professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine. “Insurers are issuing rules that say we won’t cover long-term opioids for anyone over 90 milligrams. Well, five percent of people who receive opioids account for 60 percent of the milligrams prescribed. With so many milligrams going to a tiny group of very sick people, if you can knock a few people off these opioids, you can show a big numeric reduction. What we’re really doing is dragging down the dose on the most disabled people,” said Kertesz, who sits on several state opioid safety committees. “Prescription control seems an easy answer to the epidemic, but that’s not stopping addiction.”
Cries for Help and Giving Up. On social media, comments sections on news sites and in emails to Fox News, numerous pain sufferers say they have made suicide plans because their health care provider has forcibly reduced their dose to a deficient level, or cut them off entirely. They speak of being treated like drug abusers, submitting to frequent urine tests and pill counts. “I have been on pain management since 2006,” said a man from Tampa in a Facebook message. “Have a crippling disease that there is no cure for, and can no longer get the medications I need. A few months ago I was researching death with dignity and other options for assisted suicide if I wasn’t able to get the help needed down the road.”
Some posted comments about a loved one who died by suicide after losing access to a long-term treatment for pain and found the suffering unbearable. Others said their spouse’s suffering, together with the frustration and anguish of being turned away or under-treated by doctors, was the reason they came around to accepting their loved one’s suicide plan.
In her new home in Georgia, its walls covered with pictures of her late husband, Meredith Lawrence recalled the helplessness she felt watching him suffer, as the pain worsened, and the drugs were tapered down. “He said ‘I have three choices,’” Meredith Lawrence recalled. “He said ‘I could do illegal drugs, I could suffer the rest of my life in pain, or I can end my life. I’m not going to do the first two.’” Lawrence’s doctor did not respond to email and phone requests to comment for this story.
Meanwhile, hashtags on Twitter like #SuicideDue2Pain, #DontPunishPain, #PatientsNotAddicts have become common. “I think about suicide every day,” said Dawn Anderson, a former trauma nurse from Indiana, whose doctor cut her opioid dosage after his office was raided by the DEA. “I recently wrote a suicide note to my family,” said the woman, a diabetic whose legs were both amputated below the knee. “They have seen all I have gone through. I want to live. But not like this.” Anderson, 53, now finds it too painful to stand on prosthetics because of what she says is undertreated pain, and is confined to a wheelchair. “The pain feels like an electrical shock that happens every 30 seconds in some parts of my body,” she explained, “and in the back it’s a stabbing pain, like a hot poker that is stuck and never coming out. The pain I endure on a daily basis is taking my will to live.” Anderson’s doctor did not respond to requests for comment.
Anne Fuqua, a former nurse in Alabama who herself suffers from chronic pain, has logged records of 167 suicides since 2014 that she maintained were directly a result of patients who had their opioids reduced or cut and suffered uncontrolled pain. Fuqua said she is in the midst of verifying more suicides that have been reported to her.
Caylee Cresta, a 26-year-old Massachusetts woman, has Stiff Person’s Syndrome, a rare disease, that causes muscle spasms and rapid convulsions that fracture her bones and often leave her stuck in an unnatural position for days. She has had the condition since age 19. “You’re in fear that your doctor will say that your next prescription is your last,” she said, adding that when she has “a bad day,” it means “I stop being a mother, a wife, a daughter.” Ending the pain by ending it all has seemed, at times, like the way out, she admitted.
Though pain management experts indicated they share the concern and alarm over the terribly high percentage of drug overdoses, they are more concerned about their patients. “I share the nation’s concern that more than 100 people a day die of an overdose. But my patient nearly died of an under-dose,” said McAneny, president of the AMA. “My patient suffered, in part, because of the crackdown on opioids … When I visited my patient in the hospital as he was recovering from his suicide attempt, I apologized for not knowing his medication was denied,” McAneny continued. “I felt I had failed him.” Sources: Elizabeth Llorente, Fox News, December 10, 2018, and Centers for Disease Control.
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Post by Joanna on Dec 10, 2018 16:28:48 GMT -5
Killer Pleads Guilty in Exchange for 80 Years
The man accused of the 1988 abduction and murder of 8-year-old April Tinsley in Fort Wayne pled guilty to murder and child molestation Friday, December 7, in Allen Superior Court. John Miller, 59, was facing the death penalty. He will be sentenced to 80 years in prison under terms of the plea agreement. Sentencing is scheduled for December 31.
Miller was arrested in July, thanks in part to a recent breakthrough that combines genealogy and DNA technology.
April Tinsley was abducted from her Fort Wayne neighborhood April 1, 1988, which, that year, was both April Fool’s Day and Good Friday. Her body was discovered three days later in a ditch along a country road.
Though the killer left DNA on the little girl’s underwear, taunted police and terrorized the community with threatening notes and graffiti, he eluded authorities for decades. It wasn’t until May of this year that Parabon NanoLabs used genealogy data to narrow the DNA to two sources: Miller and his brother.
Detectives began staking out Miller’s mobile home in Grabill, Ind., and found DNA in the trash that matched that of April’s killer. On July 15, police visited Miller, who confessed shortly after officers asked if he knew why they were there.
Source: Vic Ryckaert, The Indianapolis Star, December 7, 2018.
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Post by Joanna on Dec 6, 2018 9:59:37 GMT -5
Ewing's 1985 Mug Shot Judge Orders Ewing's Extradition to Colorado
On Tuesday, a Nevada judge ordered Alexander Christopher Ewing, 58, be extradited to Colorado where he bludgeoned four people (including a child) to death in 1984. The suspect has been fighting extradition and may appeal the order.
Ewing was linked to the crimes in July when the Colorado Bureau of Investigation matched his DNA to samples taken from two crime scenes. On January 10, 1984, Patricia Louise Smith, 50, was found dead in her Lakewood apartment. She had been sexually-assaulted and died of skull-crushing blows to the skull. Six nights later, on January 16, Bruce and Debra Bennett and their 7-year-old daughter, Melissa, were bludgeoned to death in their home in a new housing development in Aurora. The Bennett’s other daughter, 3-year-old Vanessa, suffered severe facial injuries, but survived. The arrest warrant lists 18 crimes, including murder, attempted murder and sexual assault.
Arizona criminal records indicate Ewing left Colorado within days after the hammer attack on the Bennetts. Less than two weeks later he was in Kingman, Arizona, where he picked up a 25-pound granite slab and entered an unlocked door. He went into a bedroom and immediately began pummeling a man on the head. The victim survived even though he required 100 stitches to close his wounds. Police found Ewing hiding under a bush near the house. He was charged with attempted murder, but because of jail overcrowding in Kingman, the suspect was sent to Washington County jail in Utah to await trial.
On Aug. 9, 1984, while being transported – along with several other inmates – to Arizona for a court hearing, Ewing escaped during a restroom break on the outskirts of Henderson, Nevada. That night, wielding an axe handle, he entered the unlocked home of Christopher and Nancy Barry at 739 Racetrack St. and chased Nancy, who was screaming, into the bedroom she shared with her husband. Ewing began pummeling Christopher Barry with the axe handle. Both survived with broken bones. Christopher Barry ended up in a coma with skull fractures.
Detectives who have pursued the suspect in the serial attacks have described the killer as a predator with a “thirst for violence.”
Source: Kirk Mitchell and Kieran Nicholson, The Denver Post, December 4, 2018.
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