Crime Log

Amanda Knox Acquitted by Italian Jury

2011-10-04T08:20:00.000-07:00

This crazy story has come to an end for Amanda Knox, who was acquitted of murder (her convicted for slander in accusing her former boss of the murder stood, but she had already served the three-year sentence).

The British family of the murdered student, Meredith Kercher, have had what they thought was justice for her death taken from them. "We respect the decision of the judges but we do not understand how the decision of the first trial could be so radically overturned," the Kerchers said last night. "We still trust the Italian justice system and hope that the truth will eventually emerge." Some Kercher family responses are here.

If you are wondering why Knox was tried and convicted, part of the answer was physical evidence that was later discredited, but more of the answer was her alleged attitude that the prosecution used for its own ends. Here's one example of the argument that there was something wrong with her character that justified prosecution. The prosecution's case involved the claim that Knox killed Kercher as part of a satanic ritual. (See the Rolling Stone overview of the original investigation and prosecution, and Amanda Crouch's discussion of her conversion to doubt about the conviction in Slate, and the Friends of Amanda website.) The claim of a Seattle neighbor that Knox "is someone who blindly trusts other human beings" could be, well, circumstantial evidence that she lacked the character to resist Satan and was actually a witch (see also the Daily Telegraph overview) . . . Other than some reversals in Knox's story, the prosecution never had anything on her really: my earlier post on the initial conviction has some links with background on that.

It gets worse. The co-author of a book on an unresolved serial murder case in the area, Douglas Preston. reports that the prosecutor in the Kercher murder was a known incompetent with a fixation on satanic conspiracies who had been convicted of "abuse of office" for prosecutoral malpractice in 2006. Yet he was allowed to work on this case using the same discredited framework.

This is a ludicrous, tragic situation that produced a lose-lose-lose outcome for the parties involved, now particularly for the long-suffering Kerchers, it's back to square one on what happened to their daughter that night in 2007.

Update on Amanda Knox Appeal in Italy

2011-10-03T09:47:00.000-07:00

The story that has never gone away is updated here as a new jury deliberates on the conviction of Amanda Knox and Rafaele Sollecito for the murder of Knox's roommate Meredith Kercher in 2007.

Alabama Professor Kills Colleagues in Faculty Meetings

2010-02-15T02:25:00.000-08:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education has coverage of the biology professor at the University of Alabama at Huntsville who shot and killed three of her colleagues in a faculty meeting. The professor is a woman, which is unusual in this kind of massacre of work colleagues. She had been died tenure - a full year earlier - and had both filed an appeal and was well on her way to getting another job in the area. Her husband dropped her off at 3 pm for the meeting, as usual, and she called an hour later asking him to pick her up. By the time he arrived, she was in police custody. As seems always to be the case, "There had been no threats or hints of violence, he said, nor was he aware that his wife even had a gun."

The kicker comes near the end of this piece, talking about Anderson, the husband, and Bishop, the wife and alleged shooter:

The two met when they were undergraduates at Northeastern University, and Mr. Anderson was dating Ms. Bishop when she shot her brother to death more than two decades ago. He called that shooting "an absolute accident." The Boston Globe reported that there is a controversy over whether, in fact, the shooting was accidental.

The Globe report reads in part:

The argument was not between the brother and sister, it was between the sister and her father, the report said. The young woman told them that after the argument, she had decided to practice how to load a shotgun the family had bought for self-defense after a previous break-in.

She said she loaded it but had trouble unloading it and it accidentally went off in her bedroom. Still hoping to unload it, she said, she went downstairs to ask her brother to help her, accidentally shooting him. Her mother said she had witnessed the incident and generally corroborated her account.

In Huntsville 24 years later, one of the three dead colleagues was the department chair, Gopi K. Podila, who had supported Bishop's tenure bid.

The other two victims, Maria Ragland Davis and Ariel D. Johnson, were Black faculty who did additional work on science in developing countries and in U.S. minority communties, respectively.

Another faculty member, Luis Rogelio Cruz-Vera was injured but released. Joseph G. Leahy (also faculty) and Stephanie Monticciolo (staff) remain in serious condition.

The Department of Biological Sciences at UA Huntsville lists 14 faculty members on its website. Five of them were faculty of color. Bishop apparently killed three of the five, and tried to kill a fourth. Joseph D. Ng, an Asian American, is one of two surviving faculty of color in the department, and the only one who was unharmed.

Much of the coverage is skeptical about the explanation of revenge for a tenure denial, and this skepticism is fueled by Bishop's apparent murder of her lead supporter, the department chair. Although two surviving victimes, Leahy and Monticciolo, are white, it is worth asking whether this might have been a racial hate crime.

R.I.P.

UPDATE 2/16: In an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, the faculty member who apparently interfered with Amy Bishop's shooting spree, Debra M. Moriarity, offers an account that leads to this description:

Apparently, Ms. Bishop was simply going down the line, starting with the people closest to her, killing Mr. Podila, Adriel D. Johnson Sr., and Maria Ragland Davis, all professors, and severely wounding Stephanie Monticciolo, a department administrator, and Joseph G. Leahy, a professor. All were shot in the head.

The implication is that execution-style head shots were administered by the biology professor to her department colleagues in the arbitrary order in which people happened to sit at that particular meeting. The only untouched faculty of color in the department, Professor Ng, was indeed present.

Prof. Moriarity apparently got to Prof Bishop as she continued to fire by crawling towards her under the conference table. A few seconds later, she arrived at Bishop's legs.

Ms. Bishop, who continued shooting the entire time, then turned her attention to Ms. Moriarity, placing two hands on the gun and pointing it at her. Ms. Bishop's expression was angry—"intense eyes, a set jaw," Ms. Moriarity recalled.

With Ms. Moriarity looking up at her, Ms. Bishop pulled the trigger twice. The gun clicked, apparently out of bullets.

This suggests that Moriarity didn't stop Bishop at all. Bishop would apparently have killed Moriarity - "her closest colleague" in the department - and perhaps everyone else in the room if she hadn't run out of bullets.

I am skeptical of this scenario of the shooting gallery. We shall see.

UPDATE 2/22 - the New York Times has more on Bishop's history of rages and tantrums.

The Fine Art of Killing

2010-01-25T02:50:00.001-08:00

Here's a good LA Weekly profile of Rodney Alcala, "Dating Game" winner and serial killer.

Anti-Mafia Uprising in Italy

2010-01-25T01:09:00.000-08:00

Roberto Saviano wrote a great book called Gomorrah, which discusses the globalized business structure of organized crime, its interconnection with legit firms in sectors like fashion, and its pervasive local effects. Now he has a piece in the NY Times:

This month, rioting by African immigrants broke out in Rosarno, in southern Italy, after at least one immigrant was shot with an air rifle. The riots were widely portrayed as clashes between immigrants and native Italians, but they were really a revolt against the ’Ndrangheta, the powerful Calabrian mafia. Anyone who seeks to negate or to minimize this motive is not familiar with these places where everything — jobs, wages, housing — is controlled by criminal organizations.

After describing the riots, Saviano says, "It’s a mistake to view the Rosarno rioters as criminals. The Rosarno riots were not about attacking the law, but about gaining access to the law." But he goes on to explain the logic of gangster organizing that could change the immigrants' stance:

if the Africans in Rosarno had been organized at a criminal level, they would have had a way to negotiate with the Calabrian Mafia. They would have been able to obtain better working and living conditions. They wouldn’t have had to riot.

The title is "Italy's African Heroes." It looks like the state agrees with the mob on the need to strip them of hero status -- which will only augment the mob.

Saviano says that Americans have also already seen this movie:

Italy is a country that’s forgotten how its emigrants were treated in the United States, how the discrimination they suffered was precisely what allowed the Mafia to take root there. It was extremely difficult for many Italian immigrants, who did not feel protected or represented by anyone else, to avoid the clutches of the mob. It’s enough to remember Joe Petrosino, the Italian-born New York City police officer who was murdered in 1909 for taking on the Mafia, to recognize the price honest Italians paid.

The nice thing about this piece is that it sees that another way is possible - though interestingly not for the Italians by themselves.

To those African immigrants I say: don’t go — don’t leave us alone with the mafias.

Financial Disclosure Rules Deter Gang Unit Cops?

2009-12-28T01:02:00.000-08:00

So says this LAT report - many cops assigned to units that deal with LA's flourishing street gangs would rather switch than sign. The reasons listed in this story is that the LAPD may use personal financial information against them in disciplinary proceedings, and that they don't trust the bureaucracy with the information.

I can see why they wouldn't trust the LAPD bureaucracy. On the other hand, financial info is supposed to be used in disciplinary proceedings - against cops on the take. There's a real possibility here that gang cops have something financial to hide, and intend to continue to do exactly that.

War Doesn't Fight Terror

2009-12-13T02:36:00.000-08:00

See this reference to a Rand study showing terrorism was addressed successfully by military force only 7% of the time, and much more successfully via "political bargaining (43 per cent) and effective law enforcement (40 per cent)" This blog has some good comments on the limits of Obama's approach to Afghanistan, though the definitive big picture challenge to the Nobel speech comes from Glenn Greenwald. I've also noted its doomsday aspects here.

Verdict in Study Abroad Murders in Perugia

2009-12-05T03:22:00.000-08:00

A British woman studying abroad in Perugia is found in her bathroom with her throat cut. Suspicions swirl around a number of people who naturally appear in the acquaintanceship circle of students abroad, including a young non-student Afro-Italian on whom suspicion settled first. But the police extracted a confession - under duress and possible physical abuse - from a University of Washington woman who was the victim's flatmate. Yesterday this woman, Amanda Knox, was convicted of the murder. See the best overview of the case, the verdict, the Daily Beast tabloid version. The Knox family plans to appeal.

I find the murder scenario -- in which Knox's boyfriend holds one knife while Knox cuts her roommate's throat with the other -- to be unconvincing. The plausibility of it for some seems to come entirely from a MySpace story Knox wrote, Halloween costume shots, some stupid comments, and other standard stuff. The scenario in which a thief is surprised in the act by the victim and kills her in a panic is somewhat more plausible, but the cops hit only on the local black guy - the classic "usual suspsect" - and to repeat throat slashing is not the most obvious way to shut somebody up long enough for you to get away. I'm not feeling anything right about this case.

PTSD Strikes Again?

2009-11-07T00:14:00.001-08:00

The news that the massacre at Ft Hood was conducted by a psychiatrist prompted the New York Times to ask whether those who treat victims of post-traumatic stress disorder can develop it themselves. The answer seems to be yes, in the form of "secondary post-traumatic stress disorder."

I also wonder about collective PTSD. Can an entire community acquire a higher background level of PTSD, like a kind of low-grade radiation? Can a whole country get a kind of "tertiary" PTSD?

See also former Senator Max Cleland's description of how for soldiers memories of war never go away.

PTSD Strikes Again

2008-11-04T03:06:00.000-08:00

CALIFORNIA BRIEFING, Los Angeles Times
November 4, 2008

SANTA BARBARA
Gunman arrested after standoff on 101 Freeway

A masked gunman who was waving an American flag on a 101 Freeway overpass in Santa Barbara was taken into police custody Monday after an hours-long standoff that shut down the freeway in both directions and caused a rush-hour traffic snarl, officials said.

Edward Van Tassel, a 28-year-old Army veteran who served in Iraq, first surrendered his handgun to police, officials said. As part of the negotiation, Van Tassel asked authorities for a Barack Obama sign, which he posted on a chain-link fence on the overpass along with the flag he was holding, said Sgt. Lorenzo Duarte of the Santa Barbara Police Department.

No shots were fired. The revolver Van Tassel was holding was not loaded, Duarte said. He was arrested by SWAT officers about 11 a.m. without incident.

Van Tassel was booked into Santa Barbara County Jail on charges including resisting or delaying arrest and wearing a mask while committing a crime.

Aaron Jacob Levy, 33, also was arrested for driving Van Tassel to the overpass and participating in the incident. Van Tassel is also believed to have been involved in an incident Friday in which a masked man with a weapon was found at a radio station.

Van Tassel served in the Army from 2003 to 2005, said Sgt. Jim Pfleging of the Santa Barbara Police Department. Officials said Van Tassel appeared to be shouting statements against the war and making comments about veterans' benefits during the standoff.

The freeway -- which had been closed from State Street on the southbound side and from Las Positas Road on the northbound side, causing gridlock throughout the area -- was reopened shortly after the incident ended.

-- Victoria Kim

Gangs on Drew Street III

2008-06-28T14:15:00.000-07:00

The Drew Street neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles was back in the news with a huge multi-agency sweep that netted 28 suspected gangbangers and nacro-traffickers. By huge I mean it took 500 agents to roust those 28 people. Maria Leon and her bad luck 13 children made their trademark appearance in the piece. The rousted were sometimes ungrateful, as in the scene shown here. Check out Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah for why poor people in gangster-run neighborhoods don't like the cops. No, it's not because they are gangsters themselves or love their oppressors, but because the cops come and make a big show, break down the door and terrify the kids, and then they leave. Nothing changes. The journalists say it's because Drew Street is a clan transported almost intact from a "lawless region" of Sinaloa - yes where the big killings of top police happened last week - and that they have a quasi-innate hatred of cops. Naw. It's because the cops don't actually make things better.

Couple of other problems with the journalist view:

If the Avenues gang has been in the neighborhood for 60 years, it's interwoven into the society. The neighbors are right that cops and sweeps won't make a difference.
If convicted, the 54 Avenues now in custody will go to prison - from which la eMe runs the Avenues. The biggest "gang haven" in California is California's prisons.

What to do instead? Spend some redevelopment dough. Try much better schools and straight jobs. Do lots of good street work - without cops. The real revolution: decriminalize the big-money narcotics.

A final word on the end of gang week in the LA Times - their story on "Big Mike," a former Grape Street Crip turned gang interventionist. Big Mike fits the neighborhood in topping out at $17,000 a year. And he has left the neighborhood to raise his daughter in "the high desert."

Road Rage Strike Again

2008-06-24T12:11:00.000-07:00

Here's a truly screwed-up road rage story from San Francisco, plus a handy homicide map for the city this year. Random death from random idiots. As my friend Lisa likes to say, "Love humanity. Hate people."

6611

2008-06-16T08:36:00.000-07:00

“Sponsored parties? And those are…allowed?” Even after an hour of Alex’s thorough explanation of the newest IV phenomenon, Barry had trouble wrapping his head around the idea.

“Are you kidding? They pay you to get absolutely obliterated. They’re not just allowed, my man. They’re encouraged!” Alex, frustrated that he had to spell out everything to Eva’s “brilliant” new boyfriend, tried to put things into simpler terms. “You provide the house and they throw in the alcohol, mixers, music and chicks. As long as you let them advertise and do some sort of promotion for them, you basically get hooked up with a free party.”

“They bring the girls, too?”

“Yes, Barry. Stupid drunk guys make their friends take pictures of them with girls way out of their league and, BAM! The girls are all over the internet. But more importantly, so is the logo,” Eva elaborated.

“So, this girl, the dead one. She was just a walking advertisement?”

“That’s my best guess. These girls get paid pretty well to walk around, pretending to be interested in these half-wit college boys and making sure everyone is nice and toasted. Tina at the restaurant used to work for a similar company before she started waitressing. I’ll ask her about it when I go in tonight,” Eva with her bright eyes and biting wit made a killing waiting tables downtown. Between her nosey coworkers and gossipy regulars, Eva was bound to know someone who knows something about the beaten girl.

Barry decided he wanted to learn a little more about this new breed of parties. “What did you say the address to that place, Alex?” he asked.

“6611 Trigo.”

He made a mental note to poke around after he dropped Eva safely off at work.

***

“Are you sure you don’t want me to walk you inside?’ Barry asked for the third time as Eva unfastened her seatbelt and started to open the passenger door of his aging silver Camry.

“I think I’ll be alright for about, what, twenty-five feet,” she giggled and grabbed her purse from the backseat.

“Well, call if you need anything. I’ll be back at 2 to pick you up, unless you get off early?”

“Not a chance Dan’s letting me go before last call again. Besides, I need all the cash I can get my hands on. Saving up for that rape whistle, remember?”

“That’s not funny, Eva,” Barry muttered after she slammed the door and waltzed into work. “Not even a little bit.”

“You’re late, kid,” Eva’s manager greeted her with his usual criticism as he tossed her an apron and a bar rag. “Get to it. Tina’s got the whole floor by herself and she’s about to start panicking!”

“Sir, yes sir,” she quickly clocked in, said hello to Jordy, the regular Sunday night bartender, and started picking up tables.

Tina, brisk and blonde as ever, whizzed by her and nearly sent an entire tray of pint glasses flying. 10 p.m. and the evening rush was in full swing. Eva put on her game face and prepared herself for another hectic night at the pub.

***

Barry stopped by his house before beginning his midnight excursion to the street of Isla Vista to grab some dinner and collect his thoughts. His roommate Logan had beat him to the kitchen and had just about finished preparing a microwavable lasagna.

“Hey, man. You want to get in on this?” Barry eyed the bubblying heap of cheese and preservatives, and though he knew his lactose intolerance would later bite him in the ass, he was too distracted to cook anything substantial for himself.

“Sure. Yeah. Thanks, I mean.”

“You ok?”

“Yeah. Long fucking day,” the two physicists sat down on their cluttered kitchen table and Barry proceeded to fill Logan in on the cause of his angst. As they devoured the mediocre Italian food, he told him his plans for the evening, but Logan stopped him in his tracks.

“You’re insane. I mean, why not just call the cops and let them poke around these punks’ house?” Logan got up from the table and cracked open a beer for Barry and one for himself. “For such a smart guy, you’re absolutely nuts. I don’t see why you’re so interested in some unexceptional rape case.”

Though they had lived together for the last six months and worked in the same research group, Barry couldn’t find the words to answer his roommate’s inquiry. They were close, but their friendship revolved primarily around baseball, beer, and the occasional drunken, emotional rant. He could never tell Logan about Laura, his disdain for law enforcement, or the real reason he moved to California. He couldn’t tell him about the broken engagement, about the nightmares, about the crumbling of his entire existence. Not without losing it all over again.

“I’m curious, I guess,” he rinsed off his plate in the sink and took a generous swig from the IPA Logan always kept in the house, hoping he wouldn’t have to answer any more questions. “Thanks for dinner, man. I’ll be back later.”

“Don’t do anything stupid!” Logan called after Barry as he ran out the door just as abruptly as he arrived. He sighed and finished his own beer, too tired to deal with Barry’s irrationality.

***

“Why must all of the damn streets in IV look exactly the same?” Barry thought to himself as he trudged along what he thought was Trigo. “Fuck!” Too dark to see the street sign until it was too late, Barry realized he was on the 6700 block of Sueno. He turned around and headed towards his destination.

The night he lost Laura must have been a night very much like this, the air disturbingly still and crisp. May 14^th, a month before graduation and three weeks into their engagement. Barry was working late in lab trying to squeeze in some last minute alterations to his senior project when Laura popped in to drop off some dinner and moral support. He briskly thanked her for the leftovers and told her he had a lot of work left to do but he’d call her in the morning. He brushed her off as if it was nothing, and she left sulking and resentful. He was so absorbed in his work that he didn’t even hear her scream.

***

When he finally got to her, it was too late. She lay whimpering in the bushes mere feet from her car, beaten within an inch of her life. Nearly naked, shivering like a dying animal, and dried blood crusted on her thighs, she let out a strangled cry when Barry reached for her.

“It’s me, sweetheart. It’s me. You’re safe, now, Laura,” but she wouldn’t be coddled, she wouldn’t be comforted, and she wouldn’t even look him in the eye. It took two female EMT’s and several police officers to calm her and hoist her into a stretcher. Barry’s guilt consumed him, but regret quickly took a backseat to anger upon listening to the law enforcement discuss Laura’s assault.

“When will these girls learn not to walk around at night by themselves?” an officer scoffed, as if it were her fault for being an easy target, as if she tempted her aggressor to take advantage of her.

They never caught the bastard that plundered his beloved. They didn’t even try, said it could have been anyone. It was too late to catch him. And what was the big deal? She was still alive, wasn’t she?

Laura recovered, physically at least. Barry did his best to support her. He stayed with her at her apartment night after night, sleeping on the couch and protecting her from the evils of the outside world. But still, she refused his touch. One night he made the fateful mistake of cuddling up next to her after she had fallen asleep. She cringed violently and, half-conscious, became hysterical.

“Don’t you fucking touch me! Don’t you ever touch me!” she leaped out of bed and locked herself in the bathroom for the rest of the night, sobbing uncontrollably. Nothing Barry could say or do would bring Laura back to him. Devastated, he broke off the engagement, declined admission to MIT, and drove cross-country to California. He left Boston, Laura, his shame, his failure, and his love forever.

Barry had worked himself into a fit of rage and his hunger for retribution dominated his thoughts. He knew intuitively this house was the source of the atrocity he witnessed earlier in the afternoon. This was the place, these were the men responsible, and they would pay for the cruelty and negligence. The mildew infested stairs creaked under his weight, but Barry finally made it to the front door of 6611 Trigo. He knocked furiously but no one answered. What was he thinking busting in on these kids like this? Kicking their asses wouldn’t bring Laura back to him nor would it revive the girl he found on the beach. But it might quiet his anger and provide him with an outlet for his unadulterated hatred.

He jiggled the doorknob and the faulty lock readily malfunctioned, practically inviting him into the dimly lit living room. He poked his head into near darkness and scanned the house quickly. “Hello? Anybody home?” No answer. He stepped into the house and noticed a business card sitting carelessly on an end table right next to the doorway.

Gordon Kane

Executive Promotions Coordinator

Amnezia Corp.

Barry pocketed the card, confirming the link between the girl, the company, and the residents of this house. He continued down the hallway where he noticed a beam of light emanating from a bedroom door left ajar. He peaked in and immediately noticed the stench of stale urine and human sweat. Inside the room sat a young man crumpled pitifully in the corner. Scratches covered his arms and his skin looked nearly peeled off to the bone. His eyes, hollow and crazed, were barely human. This must be the bastard that did those terrible things to her, Barry thought. A fucking tweaker, completely out of his mind, had beaten and violated that poor girl in a fit of meth-induced insanity. Barry was about to make his presence known when a firm hand on his shoulder startled him.

“Who the hell are you?” A deep voice growled from the shadows. Barry turned around and found himself nose to nose with a stout wall of a man.

“Uh, I, uh,” he fumbled. “I think I left my keys here the other night at the, uh, the party this weekend.” You idiot, he though to himself. What kind of imbecile would buy his pitiful attempt at covering his ass? Apparently, this thug didn’t need further convincing.

He loosened his grip on Barry’s shoulder. “Let me look around for you,” he flicked on the hallway light and led Barry back to the living room. In the light, he saw remnants from quite the rager. Beer cans, panties, pizza boxes, and empty bottles of Amnezia, of course.

“I’m Cameron, by the way,” the pug-nosed young man introduced himself. “You want a beer while I look around, or what?” Barry shook his head no. The last thing he was interested in was cheap beer.

“What’s…uh, what’s up with him?” Barry asked, trying not to sound invasive and overly interested.

“No clue. He’s been like that the last few days, jittery as hell and pretty much unresponsive.”

“Drugs?”

“I doubt it,” Cameron cracked a Natty Light for himself, clearly finished looking for Barry’s allegedly missing keys. “Keith had a healthy appetite for blow last quarter, but kicked it after his psychiatrist put him on Zoloft. I don’t know that he’s been using again, but I’d be pissed if he was and wasn’t sharing!”

“And you haven’t thought of taking him to the hospital?”
“He won’t go. The fucker tried to bite me the other day when I offered to take him to Student Health. I figure if he doesn’t want to go that badly, there’s no sense in forcing him. Besides, I’m sure he’ll get over it once he comes down…if he is doing coke again.” Right. You just outgrow psychosis like an old pair of jeans. Barry new something else was up, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. The pieces just didn’t fit together. If it wasn’t drugs, what could make a person look and smell like that? Guilt? Murder? Barry knew the kid did it, that much was clear. It was written all over his scabby face. But what could he do? Coerce his roommate into turning him in? This oaf would rather sit in a drunken coma than talk to the cops.

Barry’s pocket vibrated and he fumbled for his cell phone. Eva, the screen flashed. “Shit, I have to get out of here,” thanking Cameron for his time, Barry scuttled off to go pick up his girlfriend.

***

“I can give you a lift home if you want,” Tina offered as Eva hung up her phone, frustrated that Barry didn’t pick up.

“No, it’s ok. I’m sure he’ll be here soon enough. It’s not even 1:30 yet,” the Sunday night regulars had already cleared out and the two girls were wiping off the last few dirty tables.

“Well, I’ll wait with you until he gets here. Wouldn’t want you getting killed or something like Anna.”

“Anna?”

“Yeah. Anna MacKenzie. The girl they found at the beach today,” Tina explained. “I used to work with her when I promoted for Red Bull. We both quit around the same time and she started working for Amnezia when I got the job here at Joe’s. She hated it, or it seemed that way from what she told me.”

“Really? You mean, you knew her?”

“Oh yeah. We weren’t close or anything, but we partied together a lot. She was always bitching about how awful that job was, but she couldn’t quit because the money was too good. If you ask me, I think she was doing more that just promoting,” Tina scoffed as she reached in her apron to count out tonight’s tips.

“What are you talking about?” Eva untied her own apron and sat down on a barstool across from where Tina was organizing her money.

“Some companies have an unwritten policy about what is expected of these promotion girls. We used to get bonuses if the people throwing the party agreed to throw another one. And…well, there are certain motivational techniques that can be effective in ensuring this sort of bonus.”

“So, you girls are encouraged to what? Sleep with these guys until they agree to host another party? That’s disgusting.”

“No, it’s not quite like that. I mean, when I was working at Red Bull, we were told to “socialize” with the hosts and pay a little more attention to them and their close friends. But we were never forced to fuck any of those clowns.” Eva could see why Tina quit and moved to surprisingly less exploitive line of work as a cocktail waitress.

“God, whatever happened to Women’s Lib? What did our mother even fight for?”
“The right to saggy breasts and shitty tips,” Tina sneered as she finished counting out for the night. “Can you believe that? Only sixty measly bucks! What bullshit.”

Barry arrived at Joe’s Café just before closing time and reunited with Eva. They both briefed one another in the car ride back to Barry’s place.

“There’s something else going on, Eva. I mean, Anna could have just been going above and beyond the duties of her job and jostled the libido of a drunk, aggressive, careless SOB. But there’s something missing, something more. You should have seen him, this Keith character,” Barry cringed just thinking about that smell. “He hadn’t slept or eaten for days, but I’m sure he pissed himself a few times. He looked like an animal.”

“He is an animal! What kind of human being does that to another person?” The lowest, foulest, kind of human being, Barry thought. The kind of person that hurt Laura, the kind of selfish and desperate beast that killed Anna. The kind of person that could hurt his precious Eva.

“Stay with me tonight,” he pleaded. He needed her badly. He’s lost so much already and he couldn’t part with her, even for the night.

“Of course, B.”

***

They collided gracefully, flesh upon flesh, and collapsed in a heaving heap of glistening skin and rumpled sheets. She made love like a goddess and Barry held his delicate nymph close to his chest, watching over her through the night. Her vulnerability pained him, to think a man with less noble intentions than his own could take soil such overwhelming beauty. He pushed aside all thoughts of death and destruction, and for the first time all evening thought only of her and the way her gentle breath warmed his neck.

***

In the morning, Barry woke quietly so as not to disturb Eva, gloriously naked and still sleeping. Logan sat in the living room, mindlessly dunking a strawberry Poptart into a cup of coffee.

“Hey. How’d last night go, Sherlock?” he taunted Barry as he plopped down next to him.

“Not what I expected.”

“Did you hear? They caught the guy.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I guess they got a confession out of him and everything. Apparently his roommate turned him in late last night after he attacked him with a kitchen knife,” Logan slurped up the rest of his coffee and set the empty mug down. “They think it was drug related or something.”

“No kidding,” Barry then spilled everything, even his darkest suspicions, to Logan. He showed him the business card.

“Amnezia, huh? You know, Carl, Chemistry Carl? He used to work for these guys doing product development and shit. You know, seeing how much taurine and ginseng and caffeine you can squeeze into a drink before you kill a man,” Logan joked, but a light bulb went off in Barry’s head. Of course, it was the drink. The fucking sports drink. Once again, he bolted on Logan and headed to campus to visit his chemistry guru.

He poked around the Chemistry building and paced outside Carl’s office for what seemed like hours. It was still early, but Carl was usually on campus before the crack of dawn on Monday’s to get a head start on his research before teaching snot-nosed undergrads basic OChem. He showed up soon enough and greeted Barry with a hearty hug. Carl was a hugger, and Barry ignored his latent homophobia and accepted the embrace.

“How’ve you been, bud?”

“Oh, you know. The usual,” Barry was too anxious for small talk. “Do you have a few minutes?”

“I’ve got a lecture in half an hour but I’m all yours until then,” Carl winked and invited Barry into his office. Carl was a rather successful assistant professor with a taste for expensive shoes and slightly effeminate ties. His sexuality was somewhat of an enigma, though Barry had his suspicions. “What can I do you for?”

“Do you know Gordon Kane?” Barry pulled out the disintegrating business card.

“I’ve heard of him, but I didn’t work at Amnezia long enough to get properly acquainted,” Carl took a seat at his desk and began rifling though some loose papers. “I quit after a few months.”

“Why?”

“Didn’t like what I was seeing. Didn’t like creating a product that could hurt people.”

Barry pressed on, sensing he was getting somewhere. “Hurt them how?”

“I saw some shit, Barry. Amnezia is marketed as a supplement so it isn’t regulated by the FDA. We could put whatever we wanted to into the beverage without any real consequences. The toxic cocktail of “supplements” mixed with alcohol, anti-depressant, or even the right neurochemistry is enough to drive somebody completely off the wall. One test group we did permanently ruined this poor guy who was taking Prozac for mild depression. He went absolutely bonkers. Violent. Impulsive. Inhuman, almost. It was scary as hell. So, I quit.”

“Just like that?”

“No, it wasn’t quite that easy. See, I was on the inside and letting me go would be too risky.”

“So, what’d they do? Swear you to secrecy?”

“In a way. I get a nice stipend from them every few months. Their way of keeping me quiet, I guess,” Carl grinned and Barry suddenly realized where he was getting the funding for his couture accessories. “Well, I’ve got a lecture to prepare for, but I hope I helped you out a little.”

“In more ways that you know,” Barry got up to leave. “Thanks, Carl.”

***

Keith was poisoned, clearly. Seduced by corporately encouraged flirting and poisoned by unregulated substances, he went off the handle and killed Anna. And though he could not be entirely blameless, certainly Amnezia ought to bear some of the burden for exploiting the desires and addictions of young men while objectifying women to the point of no return.

Barry went to the cops, but they proved as unhelpful as they were in Boston. Assholes. Total, incompetent, half-witted assholes. He had one person left to turn to. The elusive Gordon Kane, Executive Promotions Coordinator. That rat bastard.

His trembling fingers dialed. 893-742-6187. Three rings and a female voice answered. Gordon Kane’s personal secretary. “I’d like to speak to Mr. Kane, please.”

“If this is related to the incident regarding Anna MacKenzie, Mr. Kane and the Amnezia Corporation are under strict order not to discuss matters related to the case,” apparently, Barry wasn’t the only one who suspected the company’s involvement in the “incident”.

“No, I received his number from a friend. I’m interested in hosting a party in Isla Vista…” Barry was getting better and better and lying through his teeth, and dangerously comfortable with it.

“Please hold,” the drone of Muzak assaulted Barry’s ears, but he didn’t have to wait long.

“Mr. Kane would like to inform you that until further notice, Amnezia will no longer be sponsoring parties in your area. Thank you for calling. Goodbye.”

Barry froze in his tracks, the deafening dial tone resonating in his head and he knew. He knew no matter how hard he fought, how deeply he dug, nothing could take back what had happened to Laura. She was lost to him forever and nothing could resurrect what ought to have been buried long ago. But he could prevent it from happening again, from happening to Eva and girls like Anna. Humans do remarkably despicable things to one other without incitement. To exploit man’s tendency to violate and kill others is as unforgivable an act as the killing itself.

Barry knew he was a nobody, that he could never stop the Gordon Kanes of the world. But he knew he had to keep fighting. He had to keep trying. And more importantly, he knew he had to keep loving.

Karyn--murder on greek row

2008-06-13T10:39:00.000-07:00

As I looked around at the boxes filling my new home I could hardly believe that I now lived here. The memories of my former life flooded my brain, and then I quickly remembered why I had chosen to move across the country. Kimber. No last name just Kimber. She hired me as a body guard early in her career when a stalker tried to cut off a lock of her hair for a “keep-sake.” I quit when she went big in Hollywood, preferring not to deal with the paparazzi. A chance meeting ten years later sparked an intense sexual relationship that had been enjoyable, but lacked any real substance in my opinion, she felt differently. After trying to burn all of my possessions, including the clothes I was wearing, in an attempt to teach me a lesson, I decided to move. I caught the first plane to the only other place I knew and paid a friend to fed-ex my belongings.

Shaking off these thoughts I continued unpacking the remainder of my meager belongings into my one bath, one bedroom apartment that was located a mere four blocks from the Louisiana State University football stadium. Life was shaping up for me. The apartment had not been by choice but by proximity. Upon returning to my un-glamorous hometown I called the only person I bothered to keep in touch with, Benny Taylor. Since we graduated from high school he had stayed local, married his high school sweetheart, and became a detective while I had hauled ass away from the south. It was he who also got me the job as a private security guard for the school. I started tomorrow. Even if the initials were the same Louisiana was nothing like Los Angeles, I reminded myself that this was the change I wanted as I went to bed using my sleeping bag for a blanket.

As I pulled up to the address that Benny had given to me I thought that there had been some mistake. The house had three large Greek letters on it reading Delta Pi Alpha. Benny didn’t answer his phone, and looking into my empty wallet convinced me to ring the doorbell. When an elderly woman answered the door of the sorority asking if my name was Cooper Thompson I became more confused but confirmed and was quickly ushered in. I walked inside and saw the double descending staircase and expansive living room with three chandeliers but was taken instead into a small side room labeled guest. She spoke in a whispering tone explaining that she was the house mom, known to the girls as Iris, and was in charge of the girl’s well-being. When I asked why she was whispering she gave me a confused look, lowered her voice another octave and said “because of the murder Mr. Thompson.”

I was taken aback for a moment as my mind wrapped around the idea that I was unaware of something so significant. I timidly told Iris that I was unaware of the current happenings in Baton Rouge as I had just moved here two days ago. I ventured to ask her what had happened but the look on her face halted my sentence. She quickly became professional and instructed me to take a seat on the bed while she sat at the small desk to the right.

“Well, Mr. Thompson, the reason you are here is because due to recent events I have deemed it necessary for extra protection around the house. I didn’t want to make this fact public which is why our mutual friend Benny has set you up here. He says that you have had high profile cases before and your discretion is quite necessary in this situation. I take it from your earlier question Benny didn’t bother to fill you in on what would be required, so I will. You will be in charge of verifying the identity of everyone who comes into this house and monitoring the cameras that are placed around the perimeter. Due to your limited knowledge I will allow you three days to contact me and let me know if you are willing to take the job, now Mr. Thompson if you could leave out the back door I would appreciate it, the girls are already jumpy enough. I’ll show you the way out.”

I had barely even heard what she had said; my imagination had been going wild with the possibilities of who had been killed and in what manner. Was the star quarter back strangled by his angry girlfriend for impregnating another girl? Did a Ted Bundy wanna-be sneak into a sorority house? Was it a fencing fight gone wrong? Obviously the killer hadn’t been caught or there wouldn’t be a need for security. Maybe the straight A sci-fi buff was tired of being turned down by girls. I sped home to install my wireless and find out.

I love reporters, anything to sell newspapers; all the gory details of the death were in the article. A white female named Cassandra Dukes age twenty-one had been found in the Sigma Tau fraternity house, room twelve. The occupant of this room, Tim Crawford, had come back from a weekend at home to find the body in his bed. Believing it to be “some drunk girl trying to sleep it off” he ripped off the blanket to find a naked body and blood on his sheets. He then ran for the bathroom and subsequently called 911. His upchuck reflex had been triggered by the fact that his own hunting knife was lodged between two ribs of a girl he immediately recognized. Tim had been questioned by the police but after confirming with his parents that he had been home in Nashville the whole weekend he was released. Cassandra also happened to be a member of the LSU chapter of Delta Pi Alpha. The picture in the article showed a statuesque blonde deeply tanned from the scorching Louisiana summers. I wondered to my self who could be capable of killing this kind of beauty.

Wanting to know more about who was suspected I called Benny again. This time he answered with a chuckle and a “So did you take the job?”

“I’m considering, first tell me what you have on this case so I know what I’m getting myself into.”

According to friends Cassandra had left the sorority house around ten thirty pm with Debbie Hudspeth on Saturday night. Debbie stated they first went to a party at the Delta Chi house before heading next door to Sigma Tau. They arrived around midnight and that’s where Debbie’s memory of the night ends. She wasn’t concerned when she woke up and Cassandra’s bed was un-slept in. It wasn’t be the first time she shacked it. The coroner determined that the time of death was approximately three am, Sunday morning. Tim had called 911 around noon. CSI had found white powder in lines and two empty syringes, tests were being run to verify the substances. Debbie had also told the police about two girls in an opposing sorority who openly hated Cassandra for hooking up with their boyfriends. Debbie claimed there were a lot of people who disliked Cassandra, “she was beautiful and guys noticed, she tended to steal the spotlight, even from their girlfriends.” However, she couldn’t think of anyone who would kill over this. Cassandra’s room had been searched and her laptop was taken for evidence. Currently an officer was sifting through her emails and documents for any clues. Investigators were interviewing other attendee’s at the party, but the level of intoxication at the party was hindering the process. “Here is what we do know” Benny said. “One male noted that she had been dancing on tables around one am and appeared quite drunk. A few people saw her head upstairs soon after that, stumbling on several steps. Other than that we won’t have too much until the reports on the drugs and computer come in.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll take the job, but finding this psycho is your job, not mine. I’m on door duty only.”

“Just because you caught a few stalkers in your prime doesn’t mean I need your help,” Benny responded. “I’ll keep you up to date though,” he said as he abruptly hung up.

My next call was to Iris. She thanked me for my quickness and told me to arrive at the house tomorrow at eight am promptly for a tour of the house and an introduction to the girls. She also informed me that I would be on duty in eight to ten hour shifts, rotating with another guard. I was less than thrilled to work ten hours at a time, but something about this situation intrigued me and I wanted learn more.

After the tour and introductions I was lead to my new post beside the door. I was confidant that sitting in a chair for ten hours straight would do wonders for my now softening physique. While I didn’t grown any new muscles I was amazed at the entertainment I had before me. Not only were there cameras showing the girls tanning on the grass in front of the house, but my location was at some strange vertex of sound. I could hear almost any conversation being had downstairs. I would imagine my job as an episode of True Life: I live in a sorority house anytime I became too bored.

Apparently life was not so great all the time. In the first week in the house I overheard several arguments break out, mostly over petty things like who took who’s favorite dress, but one seemed particularly juicy. “Look this was not my fault, Cassandra was my best friend. Just because you were Suzy High School doesn’t mean that your daughter had to be. She might not have been the pinnacle of perfection but at least she knew how to enjoy life and have fun, something you wouldn’t be able to do even if you pulled that stick out of your ass!”

Holding back my initial urge to laugh I turned my head to see who these harsh remarks had come from. I saw a girl I recognized as Debbie sitting on a nearby couch crying, her hair cascading down to cover most of her now pink flushed face. I decided to follow my urge and asked her if she was okay.

“I will be as soon as that bitch leaves town,” she said. “I mean Cassandra had always told me what a bitch her mom was but I didn’t think she would do this. She called my parents and told them that it was my fault that Cassandra was doing drugs and partying with a different guy every night of the week. She told them that they better send me to rehab before I get what’s coming to me.”

I didn’t know what to say so I stood up and sat next to her on the couch, trying to put a comforting look on my face. Debbie took this as encouragement to continue talking. “Thank god my parents and I are close or she just might have convinced them. Cassandra used to tell me stories about how her mom would put her nose where it didn’t belong just to make sure that the people she didn’t like would always remain below her. She told me that once her mom rigged cheerleading tryouts to prevent the daughter of a rival co-worker from making the team. We would laugh about how crazy it was to do those types of things but it doesn’t seem so funny anymore.” She tilted her head to rest it on my shoulder and said “It’s nice to know I will have some protection from Mrs. Dukes while you’re around.”

When I got home that night I thought about what Debbie had said and reminded myself of what had happened in the past when I became involved with girls in need of protection. As I feel asleep that night I tried to push the smell of Debbie’s hair out of my mind, that lush fresh tropical smell. I dreamed of the beaches in Tahiti that night.

I had the next morning off so I gave Benny a call and we went to Waffle House for breakfast. As we sat down and ordered I remembered how much I used to love simple food like cheese grits. I could definitely learn to live without the L.A. trend food like wheatgrass shots. My thoughts were interrupted by Benny’s voice. “So we got the lab results and toxicology report back early this morning. You won’t believe what they said.”

“I’d rather not play the guessing game Benny, it’s early just tell me.”

“Well, the drugs on the table next to the body, they weren’t drugs. The lines of what looked like coke was baking powder and the syringe had nothing in it, it was brand new. Except here is where it gets real strange though, the toxicology report did detect cocaine and GHB in her system.”

“Wait, if there were real drugs at the party, why would there be fake drugs on the nightstand, and does this mean that the girl was raped, are you looking for male suspects?

“I’m still trying to figure it all out, but there wasn’t any sign of any kind of sexual activity, and the cause of death was the GHB, the victim was allergic. I talked to the lab specialist myself just to make sure I wasn’t reading the damn report wrong.”

“Jesus, then who the hell would stabbed the poor girl?”

“God only knows, but we do have a few leads now. We finished interviewing the students at the party and a few of them remember Cassandra’s roommate holding her up and helping her into a room upstairs. The same roommate who claimed she didn’t remember anything. Also there were some emails between Cassandra and a freshman named Nicole Barrett. It’s probably nothing but Miss. Barrett sent a pretty nasty email claiming that Cassandra told everyone not to let her in during rush and had been urging a face to face meeting, which Cassandra never responded to. Anyways I’ll be interviewing them both today so I’ll be on campus. Give me a call if you take a break from the strenuous job of watching sorority girls.”

It was about three hours into my shift when Benny rang the doorbell. I bypassed the normal ID check and asked him who he wanted to speak to. “I told you this morning Cooper I need to speak to the roommate, Debbie Hudspeth.”

“Wait, Debbie is the roommate? I thought she didn’t remember anything.” I said trying to hide the shock in my voice. I couldn’t believe I didn’t make the connection that Debbie was Cassandra’s roommate. And now Debbie was a suspect. This would happen to me I thought as I walked Benny to Iris’s room. “You already know Iris, just knock she’ll get Debbie for you.”

Back at my station I wondered if Debbie had been putting on an act the whole time, if the blackout was a convenient excuse, if she had been the one to shove the knife in Cassandra, ending her life. When Benny came back out to the foyer I asked him what had happened. Give me a call when you get off work, now is not time. I’m on my way to meet with Nicole Barrett at the coffee hut on campus.

I didn’t see Debbie the rest of my shift. I immediately called Benny when I got off, hoping to hear news that the killer had been caught and Debbie was exonerated. Instead I found out that Debbie had confessed to remembering a little more than she let on. She had told Benny that she had been with Cassandra when she did coke and that later when Cassandra had gotten too drunk she put her to bed in Tim Crawford’s room knowing that he was out of town. She claimed that after putting her in bed, fully clothed, she went back to the party. She also said that there was nothing on the nightstand when she put her to bed. This was around one thirty am. Benny told me that she had been crying trying to explain to him that she wanted to help catch the killer she just didn’t want people to know that Cassandra used cocaine. She was trying to protect her friend’s reputation. While they didn’t have enough to arrest her, Debbie was the main suspect.

“What!” I exclaimed. “What happened to your interview with Nicole Barrett?”

“She said that she and Cassandra had met up about a month ago and Cassandra explained that she had nothing to do with her getting dropped. They had known each other in high school through their parents so Nicole believed her and apologized for the email. There’s nothing there Coop.”

“Maybe you just weren’t asking the right questions, I know Debbie didn’t do this!” I said before I could stop myself, and immediately regretting it.

“Listen I know we’re friends and you’ve had a rough time meeting women since you moved here, but I’m only going to say this once. A twenty-one year old college sorority girl who is the main suspect of a murder is not someone you want to get involved with. And if you for one moment get in the way of my investigation, I will have to arrest you,” he said in a tight voice before slamming down the receiver.

I knew he was right but there was something about Debbie that made me believe she didn’t do it. Something beyond just the way I felt about her. When I arrived at the house the next morning I immediately went and knocked on Debbie’s door, ignoring the no men allowed upstairs rule. When she answered her eyes were red and puffy and showed a mix of shock and relief. She threw herself around me in a hug and started crying. “I didn’t do it I swear, Cassandra was an amazing person,” she whimpered when she calmed down.

“I know I believe you, the thing is the police don’t. I shouldn’t be telling you this but they’re trying to build enough evidence against you for an arrest. You are pretty much their only lead at the moment.”

“What do you mean pretty much? Is there someone else?”

“Just this Nicole Barrett girl who sent an email but she said everything was resolved.”

“Wait, Barrett, is she a freshman?”

“Yea, she accused Cassandra of keeping her from getting in a house during rush. Why?”

“This fall during parent’s weekend I remember Cassandra’s mom getting into an argument at Yamato’s with a woman named Mrs. Barrett, it was brutal. Everyone was watching; Cassandra was so embarrassed. She told me that the Barrett woman was involved in her parents divorce. Hold on I’ll go get our rush binder, if she tried to rush there will be a picture with her application.”

Before I could even comprehend what she had said Debbie was back, with an overstuffed four inch binder. “Here she is,” Debbie exclaimed, ripping the photo from the book. “Go to your station before you get into trouble; I’ll ask the girls if anyone saw her at the party.”

Wondering who was really in charge I went back downstairs and about an hour later Debbie came up to me with a grin on her face. “I was right, both Margaret-Bailey and Katie-Lynne saw this girl following Cassandra around at the party. Grab your coat it’s up to us to find Cassandra’s murderer if the police refuse to.”

I wondered at what point in time it had become ‘us’ and at what point in time this girl was going to get me arrested. “Look Debbie, I believe you, the thing is I can’t just leave here, this is my job.”

“This is my life. I know this girl is hiding something, but I need your help. Please.”

The earnestness in her eyes led my hands to my coat before my mind had time to think. As we drove to campus my mind began to catch up. I was about to storm the freshmen dorms on the hunch of a sorority girl. Christ I hadn’t even fucked her and she already controlled me.

I was relieved to find that Nicole was not home when we got there, I wasn’t ready for an epic battle. As we poked around the room it seemed like the normal room of a freshman girl and I began to question how much I was risking in being here. But then I heard a gasp from behind me, expecting to see an irate Nicole I turned slowly but was instead met with an excited Debbie. “I knew it, she drugged Cassandra, look in her top drawer, there’s a picture of Cassandra in Tim’s bed naked with drugs on the table, but no knife. She was there, she planted the drugs.”

I knew enough about police procedure that none of this could be used in court if the police didn’t use a search warrant. “Listen Debbie we need to go, I’ll tell the police about this stuff, I have a friend on the force. They will catch her I promise.”

Debbie looked worried but agreed and I took her hand leading her away from the desk. I was about to grab the door knob when the whole thing swung inward, almost knocking me out. In front of us stood the life size picture from the rush book and she didn’t look pleased. “Who are you and what the fuck are you doing in my room” Nicole shouted.

Before I had a chance to come up with a lie Debbie was racing at her. In an instant everything was out of hand. Debbie had her hands around Nicole’s neck and was screaming “Why did you kill her! What did she ever do to you?” A few doors in the hall way began to open at the commotion. I heard someone yell “call the police in the distance.” I knew Benny would be pissed. I knew I should be the one to call him but as Nicole’s face began to turn blue I knew I had no time. I pried Debbie off and held her back as Nicole fell to the ground gasping. “It was an accident,” Nicole got out between heaving breaths. “I never wanted to kill her.”

By this point a crowd had gathered to watch the scene. “Tell me, tell me why you did it!” Debbie screamed, frantically scratching to get out of my arms. I heard sirens and thought of Benny. I knew I was fucked but at the moment I was too busy preventing a second murder to think about going to jail. Looking around Nicole noticed that everyone had heard her say it was an accident, it slowly dawned on her that she was caught.

By this time there were police were in the building, but Debbie wasn’t ready to leave it to them. She bit down hard on my arm and I reflexively released her. She ran straight for Nicole, who still lay on the ground. She pinned her to the ground screaming “tell me, tell everyone, why did you kill Cassandra!”

When Nicole hesitated Debbie grabbed for a knife she had in her pocket. God I really do choose the craziest ones I thought as backed away slightly, informing the recently arrived police of what was going on. Upon seeing both the blade in Debbie’s hand and the rage in her eyes, Nicole began to talk.

“Okay, oaky, I’m sorry, it was an accident. This fall when I rushed I was dropped from every house on the first day. I didn’t understand what had happened, so I asked a close friend of mine and she told me that a woman named Dukes had sent bad character references to all of the houses, claiming that I had severe mental issues and had recently been hospitalized. I was shocked at first, but then I became angry. I emailed Cassandra, the only ‘Dukes’ I knew, but she refused to respond, so I made a plan to embarrass her and get even, maybe even get here kicked of out DPA. That night at the party I tried to talk to her to give her a chance to explain, but she kept walking away from me. It made me mad, she wouldn’t even acknowledge what she had done to me, I knew I had to get her back so I slipped a GHB pill into her drink and waited. After I saw you put her to bed that night, I snuck upstairs. I set up what looked like drugs and undressed her in some guy in the frat’s bed. I took a picture, planning to post it on Facebook so that everyone would think that she was a drug whore, but then something went wrong. Cassandra wasn’t breathing anymore, I thought that the alcohol mixed with the GHB must have done something to her and I freaked, I didn’t know what to do. I saw a knife on the dresser and shoved it into her dead body to try to make it look like some serial killer or something, I panicked,” she finished shaking with tears. “I swear, I didn’t want her dead I just wanted her to fell as embarrassed as I was.”

As she finished her sentence Debbie face had turned entirely white in disbelief. One of the officers grabbed the knife from Debbie and both girls were placed in handcuffs, too emotional to even realize they were being arrested. But then, right when Benny walked up, Debbie had a flash of anger, “it wasn’t Cassandra, it was her mom,” Debbie muttered. As they dragged her and Nicole away in different directions she yelled louder, “it was Cassandra’s mom who wrote the letters, it was her fucking bitch of a mom.”

I was overwhelmed with information. I couldn’t believe what had just happened. I couldn’t believe that Debbie had pulled a knife, I couldn’t believe that rush was that important to someone, I couldn’t believe that Baton Rouge was just as crazy and fucked up as Los Angeles.

As the area cleared out and officers got everyone’s statements Benny came up to me and offered me a ride home. “You know,” Benny said as we headed for his car, I really should have you arrested for impeding a police investigation. You’re lucky Nicole confessed or this would have been your ass.” Benny walked ahead, turning around as we reached the car and saying “and you know you might want to find a new job, a new profession for that matter, or else one of these days, one of these crazy bitches you always fall for is send you to the morgue.”

Claire's entire skeleton story--whole new scenario

2008-06-11T11:58:00.000-07:00

Even at 9 in the morning I was sitting with my face in the fan, wishing Cairo was a little closer to Santa Barbara but grateful for the distance from bill collectors, when she walked into my office. I greeted her and waited. Waiting is always useful for observing. In the dim light of my shuttered windows, I was surprised to see that she was white, since she was wearing a chador. Not something you usually see on a white girl. She hadn't wanted to be seen. Why not? And since I'm a fairly recent arrival and don't really advertise my skills to the American community, I knew she must have spent some effort to find me.
Without sitting down, she spoke abruptly. "I want you to help me. You're a woman, and nobody around here pays any attention to what a woman says or does, so I think you'll be better than a man."
In agreement at least as to her opinion of me, I waited. "I asked around at the University of Cairo where I have friends, and Caroline Marquez gave you a good recommendation." Indeed, I had helped Caroline resolve a slight matter involving a stolen doctoral dissertation.
"My professor has disappeared, and no one believes me. They think the Professor has gone back to the States for more publicity, and that WAS supposed to happen. But there were..." she paused as if to pick her words carefully, "certain items left ...of a personal nature...that would never have been left behind." She did not elaborate. "I know there's been a kidnapping, and perhaps murder. And I know who did it." She sat down, now, heavily. She got very quiet, and I could again hear the vendors in the street below waylaying the tourists with cheap imitations of the Sphinx.
"What do you need me for?" I asked. "If you have evidence, the local police must investigate, even if you are a woman."
She got up and went to the window, looking through the lowered slats. "They won't listen to me because of who did it. It would be a huge scandal and bad for the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities." Noticing my expression, she sighed. "I hoped you would know about them, having dealt with Caroline, but I guess I need to start at the beginning."
I agreed that the beginning is always a helpful place to start. I got out my notepad, and she began to talk.
"Last year, Professor Sanders stumbled, literally, across an undiscovered archaeological site, Gebel Hagg. It's been forever since a brand new site was found, and as you can imagine, there was huge buzz. Everyone wants to work a site like that, but for the discoverer it can be particularly lucrative: for their career, as they do publicity appearances, newspaper articles, and of course peer review journals. The increase in scholarly credibility is huge. It can be the difference between tenure at an Ivy League school and teaching on a semester basis at the community college. Of course Professor Sanders immediately applied for permission to survey and excavate. No one expected any obstacles because the concession already belongs to the University that Professor Sanders works from. But Belac couldn't stand it. He had--"
"Who's Belac?"
"Belac is a professor who works for the Sorbonne, in France, although he himself isn't French. Early on in their careers, Belac made some assertions which Professor Sanders disproved. Ever since then, Belac has hated the Professor, and never misses an opportunity to harass, criticize, slander, anything he can. Because he's prominent in the field, sometimes he can even get people to listen. He's been a thorn in the side more times than I can count. Anyway, Belac applied to the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities (the group who oversees all archaeological digs in Egypt) for control of the site. He dragged up some old lies about a former dig and stated that the Professor was unprofessional and incompetent. He said that the Professor is a modern-day Belzoni." She paused, looking at me taking notes. "Belzoni was an explorer in the 1800's who was not, shall we say, overly picky in documenting everything he found, or of who paid for his work and where he shipped the things he found. Very much frowned upon by the Egyptian government, so you can see it's a serious accusation. I worked with the Professor writing a letter to the Council refuting the claim. We were able to keep the site, but only because the Professor has maintained really good relations with the local officials and has had tea with the Council Head once or twice. A good reputation can really make a difference sometimes."
I had tons of questions, but first: "What makes you think that Belac would resort to something so desperate?"
She leaned forward, her eyes lighting up. "The site at Gebel Hagg was extraordinary. Nothing like it had been discovered. It's a graveyard, and not only does it cover almost 500 years of a period about which we know very little in Lower Nubia, all the other contemporary sites have been buried under Lake Nasser for 20 years. It covers the period from the start of Egyptian Colonization of Lower Nubia all the way through the Late New Kingdom. It's the find of a lifetime, and the maker of a star if an excavator wishes to put himself in the spotlight. And Belac does!"

She stood up and, leaning forward towards me, placed her hands flat on my desk. "From the beginning Belac's been arguing with the Professor's conclusions about the site. I think that somehow he has gotten hold of the results of our dig this fall proving that the Professor's conclusions are accurate. Belac won't let it be credited to Professor Sanders if he can help it. Not only is this going to make Professor Sanders as well known as Howard Carter to the public, Belac will have lost face and credibility with the entire archaeological community. It's not impossible that the Sorbonne could even stop his funding. Belac still has friends on the Council who think he should have gotten control of the dig, and who've been watching very closely via the Council official who accompanies all digs. As far as he knows, there's only one copy of the report--it just got finished and archaeologists are required to file their findings with the Council before making the information available to anyone else. If Professor Sanders disappears or otherwise "withdraws" and the report is "lost," Belac will gain control of the dig and can "publish" the findings as his own, claiming to have made the analysis of the artifacts that the Professor was "unable" to do. What no one knows is that I have a copy of the report. I'll do anything I have to to keep him from getting it. He doesn't deserve Gebel Hagg!"
By now she was growling, and I almost expected her to bare her teeth. She stood up straight, turned around and began to pace. "Do you know---that jerk actually took a swing at me when we appeared on the Jerry Springer show to talk about new trends in Egyptology and the Gebel Hagg site came up."
Having watched Jerry Springer a time or two, I wondered what the show had REALLY been about, but said nothing.
Still panting, but a little calmer, she looked at me and gave a small, slightly discomfiting smile. "Good thing I know Aikido. He went right off the stage into the camera." The smile disappeared. " Can you believe he actually came to my room later to try and apologize for his unprofessional"--she used her index fingers to frame the word in quotations--"behavior!"
"Sounds like a gem," I said. "Ok, some questions. Where is Belac now? Is he still in the States? Does he have an obvious alibi? I don't want to investigate someone without cause. After all," I paused, "I have my credibility to protect as well."
"No," she said, "he's back here in Egypt. I just ran into him on the street the other day. He wanted to buy me coffee, again apologizing. I tried to beg off, but he was insistent. I think he likes me. I told him I'm involved with someone, but I don't think it helped. Anyway, he was full of questions about the site and what we've found, etc. I didn't tell him too much, but I could tell the wheels were turning. The last thing he said was, 'Well, best of luck. After all, "there's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip." When I asked him what he meant, he just smiled and said it was an old English phrase. Then he left, and I went on to the dig."
"When did you last see the Professor?" I asked.
"We had dinner two nights ago. We were celebrating the end of the season, and the great stuff we'd got so far. We both know that we'll be working together for a long time, and that's good news for both of us. We've been friends for some years, since I first took a class as an undergraduate. After dinner, we both went to our rooms to finish packing. We were supposed to eat breakfast together and go to the airport, but I ate alone. When I didn't hear anything and it came time to leave, I went upstairs. No one was in the room, but everything was still there, unpacked. I've checked everywhere. No one has seen or talked to, or had any contact from the Professor. I can't think of anyone else to ask," she sighed, and leaned against the wall.
I had been thinking while she talked, and I already had a few people I'd like to ask questions. "Write down the names, titles, addresses and telephones of everyone you can think of related to the dig or who knows the Professor, anyone who might have heard from him. Include family or friends in the States if you know any." After a few minutes, she handed me a surprisingly long list. Seeing my look, she said quickly, "When you work a dig together, everybody gets really close. And as I said, we've been friends for some time."
"Sure, I know how it goes. Leave me a copy of the report and the other paperwork. I have a safe I'll keep them in, so you can put your mind at ease about that. I will make some calls and snoop around and find out what I can. I'll try to give you a call later."
She handed over the papers, and headed to the door. She turned in the doorway, and with tears in her eyes, said, "Please hurry. I don't know if there's a chance it's still just a kidnapping, but I know if too much time goes by, it will be a murder for sure. I don't mean to be melodramatic, but without official help, Professor Hawkins' life is hanging upon you."
"Don't worry," I said. "I will follow up immediately, and as soon as I get anything, we'll go to the police. Go on, now, and let me get to work." She left, and I picked up the final report. What could be so important it would be worth killing for, I wondered? Then I remembered other work I'd done, and knew it could be almost anything, depending on the person. I put it in the safe, and turned to the telephone. I made an emergency appointment with the Council Head (whom I had neglected to state I knew myself). I asked my questions. I got some very enlightening answers, including the name of Belac's hotel. I went and talked to the concierge. For a substantial investment into his son's Student Exchange with the U.S. Fund, I found out that Belac had had a meeting 3 nights earlier with a woman and been overheard. Gebel Hagg had been mentioned numerous times, as had Professor Sanders and how undeserved it was that Belac didn't have the dig.
Next, to the hotel Professor Sanders stayed in, to look at the room. Whatever those things "of a personal nature" were, I didn't see anything fitting the bill. Among other interesting conversation with the desk clerk, I confirmed that the Professor had been seen going upstairs two nights ago, and not since then.

"Oh, shit." I said to myself. Walking out, I hailed a taxi. Holding the report, I directed the taxi to the airport. By the time my chartered plane (boy, was her bill going to be high) landed near Gebel Hagg (near being relative), it was close to sunset. A sense of urgency had grabbed me, and wouldn't let go. If I was right, time was almost up. In the desert, thirst is ever present and one of the ugliest ways to go. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Well, ok, maybe on my ex-husband....After asking around, I found a driver to take me to the site.
When I arrived, they were dismantling the last of the camp. Asking to speak with whoever was in charge, I was taken to a short chubby man with bright blue eyes and a cheerful if tired smile, who introduced himself, while wiping his face, as Ass't Professor Adams. Even though twilight was here and dark not far away, it was still hot enough to sweat. The dark brings little relief.
"What can I do for you?" he asked. "I understand it's a matter of some urgency?"
"Yes," I said. "I understand that one of the pyramids you excavated last season is set to be demolished when the road is rebuilt. Is that true?"
He grimaced. "Unfortunately, it is. You would think they would be willing to wait, but oh, no. One season and one season only for that pyramid. We excavated everything, took pictures and video, and sealed it back up. It has a personal interview with a bulldozer tomorrow." He sighed, looking down. "It breaks my heart."
"Could you please take me there? It's extremely important that I see it."
He looked dubious. "It's dark, almost, and the entry is down a passageway. Even with a light, you won't see much. All of our spotlights are packed away."
"I only need to check a few things. It won't take long." I added, "Please, it's important. It could make a huge difference to Professor Sanders."
"Of course, of course. Let me get a flashlight." When we picked our way across the site to the pyramid, I stopped for a moment and just looked at it.
"Not as big as Khufu's, but probably just as impressive to the guy who built it," he said, smiling.
"Yes, they really had a style all of their own, didn't they?" I answered as I hurried down the passageway. At the end, I looked for the marks I was hoping to see. There weren't any. I looked again. I knew they had to be here. There! They had been sanded lightly, not enough to show on the rock, but enough that anyone not REALLY looking would never notice it. "We have to open this tomb. I think the Professor is inside!" I said. "Look at these marks--the seal has been broken and then patched. Please, go get some more help." When the three guys the Professor yelled for came running up, I got out of the way so they could open the door. Inside, on the floor, gagged and bound, was Professor Sanders. "Bring water!" I yelled. Untied and the tape removed, the Professor staggered forward and drank. "Oh, Thank God!" Then she started crying.
The next day, back in Cairo, I called my client. I told her I'd found what we were looking for, and could she come to my office immediately.
"You work fast! I'll be right there." She arrived within 30 minutes. I met her at the door. "Good news," I said as I gestured her toward a chair.
"You found proof Belac did it, didn't you? I knew it! I knew it! Oh, poor Professor Sanders." She made a little moan. "It was too late, wasn't it?"
"Actually, the only person I was too late for is you." She stared at me. "You neglected to tell me a few things. Like the fact that Professor Sanders is a woman. And that you are not only good friends, but have lived together for years. As lovers. You didn't tell me that Professor Sanders had ended the relationship, and that's why you got your own room as of a week ago. " I looked at her, and smiled. "Nothing gets past the desk clerks in Cairo. They don't like lesbians here. Against the religion, you know." I waited, but she said nothing. "You also didn't tell me that you were second in command on the site, and that you would get the concession if something happened to Professor Sanders. Your only competition would be Belac, You couldn't allow the chance that the Council might give control of the site to Belac. After all, you were the only one with a copy of the report. If you could pin Professor Sanders' death on him, you'd be scot free. There was certainly enough hostility that it would be believable. And when the hooplah died down, you could print the findings as if they were your own analysis. YOU invited Belac to your room after the Jerry Springer show--don't you just love concierges--YOU invited Belac to coffee when you 'happened' to run into him, and YOU invited yourself back to his room, talking about Gebel Hagg all the way. He must have thought it was his lucky month! Little did he know you were setting him up as a patsy." I, having had the presence of mind NOT to sit down, leaned back against the wall. "It was actually pretty close to working. Everyone on the site was supposed to be gone already, but there were problems with a truck breaking down. Even so, nobody thought it strange when you were there in the morning, saying you got in after everyone was asleep. Actually, you'd spent the night opening the door and putting the Professor into the pyramid, then resealing the door. Pretty clever. Once the road was regraded, there'd have been no chance of her ever being discovered.
"That's a very nice little story you've concocted," she said. "If there was any proof, I'd be concerned." She leaned down to pick up her purse.
"But there is proof," Helen said, stepping out from behind the closet door.
"Oh, God, you're alive!" What should have been a cry of joy was one of dread instead.
"Yes, I'm here, and whatever you put in my tea didn't kick in 100% until we were in the taxi headed to the site. The driver won't be hard to find. Belac's agreed to give his statement to the police." She paused, and said, "You should have just let me go, Melissa, instead of trying to take me out. I can't help you anymore."
As if finally putting it together, Melissa jumped up and headed to the door. One of Cairo's finest was standing outside the door, blocking her way. As he walked with her downstairs after cuffing her, I could hear him explain to her that she had the right to call the embassy, since she was an American citizen.
Turning back to the Professor, I said, "You'll probably have to testify, you know."
"I know," she said quietly. "Hardest thing I'll ever do, except for those two days in that tomb." Slowly, she crossed the room. At the door, she paused, without turning, "I should thank you. You saved my life. 12 more hours and I'd have been crushed under the rubble, if not dead of thirst already. But I think you'll understand when I say that the life I got back isn't the one I left. It's like I lost my life anyway."
"I do, indeed, understand." I said. And I do. That's why I live in Cairo.

Natalie's Story, part II

2008-06-09T15:18:00.000-07:00

Fumbling for her flashlight, Louisa scrambled to her feet and started running away from the field and back to her campsite. Though she tried to forget the horror she had just seen, her mind could not stop thinking about the man lying dead and deserted in the field. Louisa remembered the ranger’s station at the entrance to the camp ground, and turning around in its direction, decided to see if there was anyone who could help. The bobbing light from the ranger’s station grew bigger and brighter as Louisa ran down the road in desperation. As she closed in on the little shack, she noticed the back door was still open. Bolting inside, and locking the door behind her, Louisa was dismayed to see that no one was there, horrified by the fact that the man she had found dead was the ranger on duty for the night. Spotting a phone on the desk, Louisa reached for the receiver, shaking as she dialed 911.
The dispatcher had told Louisa to hang tight and relax as she waited for the officer to come make the report. “Yeah, no problem, I can totally relax when a killer is on the loose,” she thought. She was currently sitting with her legs crossed tight on the ranger’s desk chair, staring the window out into the pitch blackness, just waiting for the killer to emerge out of the dark, pointing the big tranquilizer gun straight at her. She cursed the day she ever decided camping would be a fun idea. She was scared to death, cold, hungry, tired, alone, and above all, she still had to flippin’ pee. Louisa couldn’t believe the whole camp was sleeping soundly as she was locked up in a ranger’s station, fearing for her life. Trying to take her mind off of what might be outside, Louisa turned her attention to the magazines and newspapers strewn about on the desk. As she picked up the Examiner, Louisa noticed the gleam of a small mirror on the desk’s surface, covered with little specks of white powder. “I guess it makes sense”, Louisa muttered to herself. “This job isn’t exactly the most exciting”.
The lights of the patrol car beamed in through the window of the office and Louisa tried to get a good look at the person inside. The car’s engine hummed to a stop, and a big handsome policeman stepped out, adjusted his hat, and walked up to the door. Finding it locked, he knocked politely while Louisa slid off her chair and opened it for him. “Good evening, miss” the man said, “I’m officer William Gitson, and I’ll be working this case. Are you alright?” “Yeah I guess. I’m fine”, Louisa answered. She was relieved this would all soon be over. “That’s good,” William said with a smile. “So can you take me to the body?” he asked. Louisa was still scared over the possibility of a killer being on loose. “Do you have a gun?”
Satisfied with William’s answer, Louisa opened the door of the station and walked with William over to the field, passing first the bathrooms whose convenient, field-side location had gotten her into the whole mess in the first place. “Uh, do you think that first I can go to the bathroom?” William smiled with empathy and even agreed to check every stall in the women’s restroom before Louisa went inside for her long-awaited pee. Things felt much better after that, and Louisa led William over to where she thought the body lay. The two were surprised to see that someone else was already there, kneeling next to the corpse on the ground. Louisa shrieked.
“Stop, police!” William shouted with authority. “Step away from the body. What are you doing out here, sir?” The man looked up from the corpse, blinded by the flashlight. “Oh, thank God you’re here! I just found him as I was walking around the campgrounds” the man exclaimed. “Alright, well I’m out here to make the report. If you could, sir, please just show me your hands so I know you aren’t armed”. “Oh, yes of course,” the man replied and lifted his arms in the air. Louisa was relieved to see there was nothing there. William stepped forward, and came to one knee on the side of the body. “Its ranger Randy Cowler”, Bill said. “Tranquilizer dart, park ranger standard. Well that helps with the suspects. It’s gotta be someone who has access to their guns.”
It was almost morning by the time William had finished taking Louisa and the man, Walter’s, eye-witness reports. Louisa didn’t know what to think about Walter. He was a retired physics professor from UCSB who liked hunting. Hunting! Louisa was sure he would know his way around a big gun. She was also just creeped out by his presence at the scene of the crime just as she arrived with officer Bill. For all she knew, Walter could have been coming back to dispose of the evidence!
Just as officer William was about to leave, Louisa remembered something. “Hey officer, did you notice the cocaine on Randy’s desk?” she said, proud of her own detective work. “Well, no actually,” he said. “Can you show me where it is?” Louisa went up to the desk as William slid out from the desk in his chair. She picked up the newspaper where she has seen the mirror, but nothing was there. In disbelief, Louisa moved around all the other newspapers and things on the desk, but there was no trace of the cocaine. “Oh, its not here anymore” she said, dumbfounded. “Are you sure it was there to being with, Louisa? You sure have had a long night. You probably just imagined it”. And getting up swiftly from the chair, Bill assured Walter and Louisa he would find the killer, and wished them a nice Saturday.
“Hey, Louisa”, Walter said. “I think you were right about the cocaine. I noticed some white powder on Randy’s face when I found him back in the field.”
“Really? Well its good to hear I’m not crazy,” Louisa responded. “But why would officer William want to cover up something like that?”
“I don’t know,” Walter said. “But it makes me want to find out.”
Louisa would have said the same thing if Walter had asked. She didn’t know why, but for some reason, she really wanted to solve this case. There was something in the victim’s expression that conveyed such complete and total loss of hope, and somehow, Louisa felt that if she could figure out the reason for Randy’s death, she could restore the hope to the world that Randy never had.

The Daily Grind, Part III

2008-06-06T20:20:00.000-07:00

“What’s going on Jake?” Melanie leaned over my shoulder to get a better look. As soon as I got a handle on whatever the hell had fallen into the beans and yanked it out, Melanie screamed. Fuck, I thought, as I tossed it down to the ground. Laying there on the floor was a blood-stained, mutilated hand—severed apart at the wrist, and partially ground. I was just about to say, “Dude, you probably don’t want to see this…” when Ted nudged past Melanie to see what had happened. In a kind of silent horror, Ted dropped to his knees and examined it at a short distance. I watched as his hand slowly rose up to his chest and grasped at something. He seemed unable to react as he contemplated the situation. As I glanced between Ted and Melanie, who by this point had gone completely white, I realized that I would have to be the one to do something. I picked up the phone and dialed my boss’s number.

“Hey Boss, you’re never going to believe this one.” After I told her what happened, she sternly instructed, “Just don’t call the cops quite yet, alright? I don’t want to end up like fucking Wendy’s. Just give me ten minutes.” I set the phone down on the receiver and turned my attention back to the mutilated hand. Much to my dismay, I noticed that blood was beginning to drip out of the espresso head. Ted shook his head and said, “I’m outta here, I don’t need this shit.” Fucking Ted. At least I wouldn’t have to look back on this day and remember Techno as the background music to the investigation.

As the back door slammed shut, Melanie seemed to regain consciousness of the situation. We both looked at each other expectantly, each of us waiting for the other to make a move. Finally, I bent down to get a better look. From what I could tell, this hand was nothing particularly special—although from the amount of knuckle hair I suspected it must have belonged to a man. I couldn’t tell if the wrinkles were due to age, or the fact that all the blood had been drained out of the mutilated piece of flesh, causing the skin to dry out and form tiny ridges. Nevertheless, I suspected the guy must have been at least thirty. Finally, my focus shifted to three tiny black markings along the inside edge of the thumb. Tattooed in one of those gothic fonts were the letters: BRC. B-R-C? I was briefly reminded of an old employee, Irving, who had his name tattooed onto the back of his hand, along with “Est. 1985,” the year he was born. Dumbass. I thought maybe this man had been stupid enough to do the same, tattooing his initials onto his hand so he wouldn’t forget or some shit. I began to look at the hand in a new light. No longer was this just a mere piece of mutilated flesh, but now this hand had a soul—albeit an idiotic one—but a soul nonetheless. It did, at one point, belong to a human being, and I was determined to find out whom.

Just then, the front door swung open, and there stood my boss—looking as though she had just been brutally awakened from her slumber by a bear. Her expression was one of curiosity, anger, and deep dissatisfaction. I felt as though when she did find whoever had done this, she would inexplicably shame him or her to death. How dare they commit a crime in her coffeehouse. Her anger, however, seemed to subside as she took control of the situation.

“Alright,” she said with a kind of breathy, ‘lets get this over with’ kind of voice. “We need to figure this out before we can notify the police. If the media gets a hold of this before the crime is solved… well, you all know what happened to Wendy's. You two are the only ones that can know… Where’s Ted?”

“He bailed.”

“I’ll call him,” Melanie offered eagerly. I couldn’t believe this bitch was still sucking up to the boss when there were body parts floating around.

“No, I’ll take care of it later. For now, why don’t we all have a look around the coffeehouse in case this motherfucker decided to leave any other body parts lying around.”

By the Book, Part III

2008-06-05T15:05:00.000-07:00

Looking back, I'm not really sure what moronic reason I had to start investigating the murders. A bit of abstract guilt, I suppose, coupled with a sense of morbid fascination. Having long been a fan of classic detectives like Holmes, Poirot, and Wolfe, I had always wondered if I would be able to, as Poirot would say, “use my little gray cells” to solve a crime should I have the opportunity. Now it seemed I had one. Any great detective's first step is to gather as much information as possible, so I set about learning what I could about the murders.

The first victim's name was Tommy Green, and he had lived in downtown Santa Barbara on De la Vina. His roommate Steven (never Steve) looked at me a bit oddly when he opened the door and wasn't inclined to let me in at first, but after a few minutes of convincing (and some not-so-subtle implications that I was working with the police) he relented. The screen door squeaked loudly as I entered. He told me that he had been watching TV with Tommy, and had gone into the bedroom to take a phone call from work. When Steven came out about 10 minutes later, Tommy was gone. A day later his body was found in a dumpster behind a Mexican restaurant a few blocks away.

“Have you cleaned the apartment since then?”

“No,” he replied, “With everything that happened, I just...I've been kinda out of it.” That made sense, but piqued my curiosity. The apartment was quite neat, with nothing broken or noticeably scuffed or dented. No signs of a struggle. No blood on the carpet, which considering how messy a slash to the femoral artery is, almost certainly meant he had not been killed here. But then, Steven hadn't heard anything unusual while he was on the phone, either. The couch faced both the door and the only window at an angle, so it was unlikely that anyone could have come in without Tommy seeing them. Filing this information away in my head, I looked around the living room carefully, in a Holmesian attempt to observe every detail. One chair sat at a right angle to the couch, making a squared off area in front of the TV. A coffee table sat in the middle of the room, with a couple newspapers and a coaster on it. In the corner next to the TV sat a guitar stand with three guitars, and next to that stood a bookshelf. I glanced briefly at the books in it, noting that the top two shelves were primarily science fiction, while the bottom three were a mix of historical novels and crime fiction. One book on the lowest shelf, oddly enough, was reversed so that the pages were showing rather than the spine. I reached to correct it, but was interrupted by Steven, who had been watching me with a certain fascination.

“So are you some kind of private detective, or what?” He looked positively fascinated by the idea.

“I guess you could say that. How soundproof is the door to the bedroom?” I was still trying to work out how the killer had managed to get Tommy out of the apartment without causing some kind of commotion.

Steven grimaced. “Not very. Tommy's sort of a player, and when I crash out here I can hear everything pretty clearly. The shit that guy would say in the sack, man, you would not believe...” He seemed to suddenly remember that the man he was talking about was now dead. “I mean...shit, man, I know that probably sounded pretty callous but-”

“Don't worry about it. It still hasn't quite sunk in. I understand.”

He looked grateful. “Do you want to look at the bedroom? The police did, even though I told them Tommy wasn't in there.”

“I don't think so. Could I have your phone number in case I think of anything I need to ask you later?”

“Sure man, whatever you need.” He told me his number and I put it in my cell phone. Then I walked back out to the street, pausing for a moment to consider what I'd seen. No matter how hard I thought about it, I could not come up with a way to enter the apartment without being noticed by someone on the couch. Even if Tommy had gotten up to go into the fridge and grab something to drink, the sound of the screen door opening should have alerted him immediately that someone was there. For that matter, if the door was as thin as I'd been told, Steven should have heard the screen door too. But he'd been on the phone, so it was possible that he'd simply not noticed it.

Murder on Sorority Row (update)--karyn

2008-05-29T19:14:00.000-07:00

As I looked around at the boxes filling my new home I could hardly believe that I would have to live here. The memories of my former life flooded my brain, and then I quickly remembered why I had chosen to move across the country. Kimber. No last name just Kimber. She hired me as a body guard early in her career when a stalker tried to cut off a lock of her hair for a “keep-sake.” I quit when she went big in Hollywood, preferring not to deal with the paparazzi. A chance meeting ten years later sparked an intense sexual relationship that had been enjoyable, but lacked any real substance in my opinion, she felt differently. After trying to burn all of my possessions, including the clothes I was wearing, in an attempt to teach me a lesson, I decided to move. I caught the first plane to the only other place I knew and paid a friend to fed-ex my belongings.

Shaking off these thoughts I continued unpacking the remainder of my meager belongings into my one bath, one bedroom apartment that was located a mere four blocks from the Louisiana State University football stadium. Life was shaping up for me. The apartment had not been by choice but by proximity. Upon returning to my un-glamorous hometown I called the only person still willing to talk to me, Benny Bengasi. Since we graduated from high school he had stayed local, married his high school sweetheart, and became a detective while I hauled ass away from the south. It was he who also got me the job as a private security guard for the school. I started tomorrow. Even if the initials were the same Louisiana was nothing like Los Angeles, I reminded myself that this was the change I wanted as I went to bed using my sleeping bag for a blanket.

As I pulled up to the address that Benny had given to me I thought that there had been some mistake. The house had three large Greek letters on it reading Delta Pi Alpha. Benny didn’t answer his phone, and looking into my empty wallet convinced me to ring the doorbell. When an elderly woman answered the door of the sorority asking if my name was Kraig Thompson I became more confused but confirmed and was quickly ushered in. I walked inside and saw the double descending staircase and expansive living room with three chandeliers but was taken instead into a small side room labeled guest. She spoke in a whispering tone explaining that she was the house mom, known to the girls as Iris, and was in charge of the girl’s well-being. When I asked why she was whispering she gave me a confused look, lowered her voice another octave and said “because of the murder Mr. Thompson.”

I love reporters, anything to sell newspapers; all the gory details of the death were in the article. A white female named Cassandra Stokes age twenty-one had been found in the Sigma Tau fraternity house, room twelve. The occupant of this room, Tim Crawford, had come back from a weekend at home to find the body in his bed. Believing it to be “some drunk girl trying to sleep it off” he ripped off the blanket to find a naked body and bloodied sheets. He then ran for the bathroom and subsequently called 911. His upchuck reflex had been triggered by several stab wounds to the chest with the knife still lodged between two ribs of a girl he immediately recognized. Tim had been questioned by the police but after confirming with his parents that he had been home in Nashville the whole weekend he was released. Cassandra also happened to be a member of the LSU chapter of Delta Pi Alpha. The picture in the article showed a statuesque blonde deeply tanned from the scorching Louisiana summers. I wondered to my self who could be capable of killing this kind of beauty.

Wanting to know more about who was suspected I called Benny again. This time he answered with a chuckle and a “So did you take the job?”

“I’m considering, first tell me what you have on this case so I know what I’m getting myself into.”

According to friends Cassandra and her roommate Debbie had left the sorority house around ten thirty pm Saturday night. Debbie stated they first went to a party at the Delta Chi house before heading next door to Sigma Tau. They arrived around midnight and that’s where Debbie’s memory of the night ends. She wasn’t concerned when she woke up and Cassandra’s bed was un-slept in. It wasn’t be the first time she shacked it. The coroner determined that the time of death was approximately three am, Sunday morning. Tim had called 911 around noon. CSI had found white powder in lines and two empty syringes, tests were being run to verify the substances. They had suspicions about a two girls in an opposing sorority who openly hated her for “fucking their boyfriends” but no serious leads at the moment. Her room had been searched and laptop taken for evidence. Currently an officer was sifting through her emails and documents for any clues. Investigators were interviewing other attendee’s at the party, but the level of intoxication at the party was hindering the process. “Here is what we do know” Benny said. “One male noted that she had been dancing on tables around one am and appeared quite drunk. A few people saw her head upstairs alone soon after that, stumbling on several steps. Other than that we won’t have too much until the reports on the drugs and computer come in.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll take the job, but finding this psycho is your job, not mine. I’m on door duty only.”

“Just because you caught a few stalkers in your prime doesn’t mean I need your help,” Benny responded. “I’ll keep you up to date though,” and then abruptly hung up.

My next call was to Iris. She thanked me for my quickness and told me to arrive to the house tomorrow at eight am promptly for a tour of the house and an introduction to the girls. She also informed me that I would be on duty in ten hour shifts with another, rotating with another guard. I was less than thrilled to work ten hours at a time, but something about this situation intrigued me and I wanted learn more.

After the tour and introductions I was lead to my new post beside the door. I was confidant that sitting in a chair for ten hours straight would do wonders for my now softening physique. While I might not be growing any muscles I was amazed at the entertainment I had before me. Not only were there cameras showing the girls tanning on the grass in front of the house, but my location was at some strange vertex of sound. I could hear almost any conversation being had downstairs. I imagined my job as an episode of True Life: I live in a sorority house anytime I became too bored.

Apparently life was not so great all the time. In the first week in the house I overheard several arguments break out, mostly over who took who’s favorite dress, but one seemed particularly juicy. “Look this was not my fault and Cassandra did not have this coming to her. Just because you were Suzy High School doesn’t mean that your daughter had to be. She might not have been the pinnacle of perfection but at least she knew how to enjoy life and have fun, something you wouldn’t be able to do even if you pulled that stick out of your ass!”

Holding back my initial urge to laugh I turned my head to see who these harsh remarks had come from. I saw Debbie sitting on a nearby couch crying, her hair cascading down to cover most of her now pink flushed face. I decided to follow my urge and asked her if she was okay.

I had the next morning off so I gave Benny a call and we went to Waffle House for breakfast. As we sat down and ordered I remembered how much I used to love simple food like cheese grits. I could live without the L.A. trend food like wheatgrass shots. My thoughts were interrupted by Benny’s voice. “So we got the lab results and toxicology report back early this morning. You won’t believe what they said.”

“I’d rather not play the guessing game Benny, just tell me.”

“Well, the drugs on the table next to the body, they weren’t drugs. The lines of what looked like coke was baking powder and the syringe had nothing in it, it was brand new. Now I know sorority girls don’t have the brightest reputation, but if I had to guess I would say that the supposed drugs were planted to make it look like the girl was using. Here is where it gets real strange though, the toxicology report did detect benzoylmethyl ecgonine in her system.”

“So the victim did cocaine at some point in the night, was stabbed in Crawford’s room and then someone planted fake drugs to make her look like a druggie. Am I getting this right Benny?”

Part 1 Rewrite and Part 2

2008-05-29T16:52:00.000-07:00

Barry finally roused himself out of bed, crippled by a throbbing headache. Last night’s overindulgence proved to be more excessive than his body could handle and getting up to face the day proved to be a daunting, if not impossible task. But the promise of her in a tempting sundress, her greased olive skin glistening in the Santa Barbara sunshine, was motivation enough to get his hung over ass out of bed. He splashed water on his face, threw on a pair of ragged jeans, and trudged the half mile to beach where Eva awaited him.

It had been nearly a year since his big escape to California, and he still wasn’t accustomed to the lack of seasons and accents. Boston at this time of year was rainy and the winter snow was surely just starting to thaw. Spending hour upon hour in his lab proved nearly impossible with his current surroundings, especially with Eva keeping him perfectly distracted. Long nights of tweaking temperature controls and adjusting lasers had turned into endless evenings in bed, fucking until sunrise. For the first time in months, he felt an inkling of affection for another human being. Love? No, not quite. Not this easily.

“Hey, B!” Eva spotted him lumbering towards her on the sand. His head hung low and his drooping sunglasses reminded her of a weary hound dog, tuckered out form the endless hunt. “You look like absolute shit, lover.”

“Funny. I feel accordingly,” kissing her on the cheek, Barry inhaled deeply and let the heavenly mixture of herbal shampoo and fresh pot taunt his nostrils.

“I got started without you, but it looks like you need this more than I do.”

“Well, I appreciate your charity,” she passed him the smoldering remnants of an immaculately rolled J. Barry eyed her craftsmanship admiringly and drew in a deep breath. The smoke went straight to his head and the contents of his skull finally settled upon the exhale. This was new. The drugs, yes, but mostly the freedom. Laura never let him smoke, even to east the pain of his faulty shoulder. The motorcycle accident his junior year of college permanently weakened the major joints of the left side of his body, but this mattered little to her. He gave up more than recreational drugs for her sake, more than she would ever know. But that was ages ago, before graduate school, before California, before that fateful night in the Physical Science parking lot, and long before Eva. The vivacious undergrad did crazy things to his body and even crazier things to his mind. Eva made him forget, made him feel. Hardly twenty years old, she was far too young and beautiful for the affections of a jaded physicist and Barry’s idiot friends urged him to proceed with caution…after asking if she had any available and attractive girlfriends, of course. She had become his peace of mind over the last few months, but all that changed upon the discovery of the body.

It peeked out of the drainage pipe where the lagoon met the Pacific and flowed outward. Like Ophelia, adorned with garlands of moss and muck rather than daisies and violets, the serene bluish female corpse bobbed just below the surface of the water with death and sorrow written all over her decaying face. Barry’s weak stomach betrayed him and he felt hot vomit churning deep within his abdomen.

“Jeezus, Barry!” Eva yelped as he unloaded the contents of his boiling belly mere inches away from her bare feet. Embarrassed, disgusted, and unable to explain himself, Barry collapsed on the sand and pointed to the woman that had undone his digestive tract. Eva approached the stagnant pool of salt water to get a better look. Indeed, a young woman barely Eva’s age lay beaten and nearly unrecognizable. Clothed only in the remains of a black halter-top emblazoned with an obnoxiously neon sports drink logo, she showed signs of sexual assault. Bruised thighs. Bashed face. Broken and helpless.

Soon enough, Eva and Barry were no longer the only sickly fascinated spectators. A crowd, paralyzed by curiosity, had quickly gathered to gawk at the freshly deceased woman. Someone must have called the police because within minutes, the SBPD arrived and demanded statements from the civilian onlookers. Eva hastily pocketed her paraphernalia and told the pigs everything they wanted to know about the body.

“Have they ID’d that poor girl yet?” Eva asked, sliding next to her distraught boyfriend on the couch as he started blankly at the evening news. “God, that could have been me, could have been any one of us.”

Her roommate Alex looked up from his laptop and scoffed. “Don’t sensationalize this, Eva. People die everyday. Women are raped, tortured, and murdered by the minute, but as soon as it happens in sleepy little Santa Barbara, pepper spray and rape whistle sales skyrocket.”
“Your callousness is astounding. Are you even capable of feeling, or is there just a black, tarry mess where your heart ought to be?” Eva turned to Barry for support, for empathy, for something. “You don’t think I’m being paranoid, do you? You saw here, that gaping mouth twisted in a terrified plea for help, her legs black and blue with bruises…”

Barry’s stomach did a triple aerial back flip just upon the mere mention of the Lady of the Lake. “Can we not talk about it. Her. The body? Whatever.”

“Hey, did you see the pictures I put up from Thursday night? There’s actually a pretty adorable shot of you two before you disappeared,” Alex, an obsessive Facebook user and a classic ADHD case, turned his Mac towards Eva and Barry.

“I can’t see that from here. Tilt your screen down a little,” Eva abandoned her position on the couch and snatched up Alex’s computer. “Aww, how disgustingly adorable.” Barry saw a look grow in her eye, the kind of dangerous feminine twinkle that hints at babies, homemaking, and eternal monogamy. Too soon for such a look, but he quickly forgot his commitment issues upon closer inspection of the tagged photograph.

“Hey, see that in the upper left, just above your head?” Barry pointed to a blurry advertisement, obscured by the low resolution of the digital photography. Further explanation proved unnecessary.

Eva gasped and put two and two together. “That logo…Jaxxx Energy Burst…that’s the logo…”
“On the girls shirt, right?” Indeed the chartreuse script surrounded by an electric magenta ellipse matched the icon on the tattered clothing they stumbled upon earlier in the afternoon. “Alex, do you have any other pictures from that night?”

“Let me look,” the stalkerish advantages of Facebook proved to be more valuable than Barry ever anticipated. Quite the amateur photographer, Alex documented and posted everything onto his virtual account. Clicking on an album cleverly dubbed “Getting Shitty, Spring 08”, he opened up a photo of Eva and her housemates posing, drinking, laughing, and dancing like careless undergrads.

“There,” Barry stopped Alex just past the original photo he had showed Eva of the two of them outside an apartment on Trigo. “Did you guys end up going upstairs to that party?”

“Yup.”

“And do you have the pictures to prove it?”

“You know it, bro,” Alex clicked to the next photo of two of Eva’s other housemates shot-gunning cheap beer with the same logo in the background. It appeared to be hanging over a balcony, draped like an advertisement for all those roaming the streets of IV to see. The next few photos were more of the same; idiotic binge drinking, scantily clad coeds, glazed eyes, and crazed smiles.

“Wait, go back one,” he backtracked and an image slowly loaded back onto the screen of three men Barry had never seen before posing with two identically dressed, busty, blonde young women. Clad only in black miniskirts and that increasingly recognizable halter-top, Barry knew they were onto something.

By the Book, Part II

2008-05-29T03:00:00.000-07:00

A jab in the side that ranked somewhere between hard and painful brought me out of my head and back into the courtroom. My lawyer was giving me a less-than-friendly glare. “Don't drift off. You'll alienate the jury.”

I considered asking Johnnie Cochran here if he thought a detailed description of how I had supposedly slaughtered seven teenagers and mutilated their corpses wouldn't alienate the jury. Nate had assured me that this guy was the best defense attorney in the county. I grudgingly turned my attention back to the trial.

The DA was questioning his first witness, the SBPD detective who had investigated the first four murders. I had been a bit upset when I'd learned that he was testifying against me. He seemed like a decent guy, and we'd gotten along pretty well when he was working the case. If he thought I'd committed the murders, it didn't bode well for me with the jury. But then, we hadn't met under the best of circumstances. After Nate had told me the killer's MO, I had become somewhat obsessed with learning as much as I could about the murders. I visited every crime scene, talked to every witness, friend, and policeman who would give me the time of day, and generally made a nuisance of myself. The more I'd learned, the more things lined up with my book. Besides the greek letters carved into the palms, every victim had been killed and disposed of in a manner and location that almost perfectly matched the scenes I'd written. Single diagonal cut across the femoral artery, leading to death by exsanguination. Bodies wrapped in a shower curtain and dropped in four different dumpsters in four different parts of town.

All four victims (another murder occurred a week or so after I started looking into them) were in their late teens, recent graduates of the local high schools. One was a student at the local university, while the other three were working entry-level jobs at local companies. All four were male, but that was where the physical similarities ended. One was Hispanic, the rest white. Two blonde, two with black hair. Three were average height, the other tall but not remarkably so. No two victims lived in the same neighborhood. With no hard evidence to go on, the police were working day-in and day-out to find a common thread linking the four young men, and they weren't having much luck.

The Daily Grind - Part II

2008-05-28T22:31:00.000-07:00

Four years ago I would’ve laughed at someone like me—a twenty-six year old working some pansy-ass job at a coffee-house, complaining about the early hours and how much cream cheese I have to make. At one point I had wanted to move up in the world, make something of myself. But change has never come easily for me, not in my life, not even in the form of that wonderfully brassy clink! at the bottom of the tip jar after an especially meaningful transaction. Yes, I had graduated from a University. But these days a degree has to be accompanied by internships, a fancy resume, and giving a shit. And all the shit I had to give was already gone.

I was just about to put the key in the door to the coffeehouse when the early morning silence was brutally interrupted by my co-worker.

“Morning Jake!”

“Morning, Melanie.”

Melanie was one of those girls who got up every morning with a smile on her face and, I’m assuming, a teddy bear. But she was alright, I guess. There’s no law that says not having boobs is a criminal offense, and I have to admit that I was somewhat amazed by this fact. I mean, those babies were practically concave. I found myself staring and eventually shifted my focus back to turning the key. After briefly holding the door open for her, we headed inside. Three steps into the shop, however, Melanie looked quizzically back at me.

“What happened to the alarm?” She asked with pity in her voice.

“Some idiot must’ve forgot to set it last night… Liz is going to have a field day.” I, too, felt sorry for the poor sap. There are only two actions that can lead to getting fired from this place—forgetting to set the alarm, and not properly maintaining the pastry case. Whoever it was had broken the second most important rule. Melanie shrugged and continued to skip towards the light switches. I, on the other hand, headed straight for the espresso machine.

I turned the handle of the espresso device and pressed GRIND. Instead of the usual brrrr brrrr brrr of the espresso beans being ground, however, the machine sounded like it had developed one of those old people coughs. Angrily, I smacked the hopper a few times with the palm of my hand. Still, haaa-ck-k-k-euu-bleh. God damned machine. Begrudgingly I lifted the lid off the hopper and shoved my hand down into the beans. My hand had barely brushed past the surface when I felt something… hairy? Suddenly, the sound of Ted’s techno blasted through the coffeehouse. Fucking Ted.

“TURN THAT GODDAMN MUSIC OFF!” I shouted as I began slowly removing beans from the hopper.

“What the…”

“What’s going on Jake?” Melanie leaned over my shoulder to get a better look. As soon as I got a handle on whatever the hell was in that hopper and yanked it out, Melanie screamed. Fuck, I thought. Immediately I dropped it. Staring at me from the floor was the face of Ed, one of our regular customers, sawed at the neck apart from his body, and partially ground.

Crime scene

2008-05-28T19:48:00.000-07:00

Kevin could tell this morning was not the time to tease her for her excessive drinking so he got right to the point. "We need your help on a case. A young model, Carmen Donovan killed her husband two days ago. We know she did it. She had a motive and the opportunity. It's perfect, except we don't have any proof. However she killed him, she did a good clean job. Well... evidence-wise."
"What do you mean 'however she killed him'? Don't you have the body?" Monica asked.
"Yes, we have the body, but the thing is disgusting. No autopsy yet, but a wound to the head where he was bludgeoned was found and a potential stab wound in the stomach, not to mention that he was pushed off the twelfth story of The Mark Hopkins. Now we're assuming one or more of these things are what killed him. Although the corpse is a rather messy ordeal, the murder was clean—no evidence, no weapons, no fingerprints, no videos, nothing."
"Does Carmen have an alibi?" asked Monica.
"She was out shopping with her friends at the time the body fell from the building," Kevin responded. "We've interrogated all her friends. The alibi seems airtight. They all have the same story but it's not too exact like a rehearsed story. I just can't figure it out."
"Well, you always did have a problem with difficult cases. I guess that's why I've always been a better detective than you," Monica pointed out spitefully. Unfortunately for Kevin, it was true. He was a decent detective, but Monica was brilliant. He chose to ignore the comment.
"So, are you in or out?" he asked her.
"I don't know," she hesitated. She hated working with the police; they were arrogant and incompetent, a terrible combination. However, her conscience and current boredom got the better of her. "Fine, I'll help you," she sighed, "but I won't like it."
Kevin chuckled. "You don't have to. I'll see you at headquarters in thirty minutes."

"So now the idiots need my help," Monica concluded in telling an overview of her knowledge of the case so far to Charles. "Wait! Stop here."
"But, madam, we are not at the there yet," Charles objected, but he slowed the car down. They were next to the Mark. The police had cleaned up the body remnants nicely; there was no trace of Harold Donovan's fall. Charles pulled over and helped Monica out of the car. She glanced around, apparently looking for something, and then started wheeling her wheelchair over to an alley. Charles followed her.
"Good to see you, Al," she said. Charles rounded the corner to find her talking to a homeless man. He was dressed in a strange assortment of dirty discarded clothing. There were dark circles under his eyes, his unhealthy, yellowish skin was broken by numerous sores, and his smile revealed a disgusting row of rotting teeth. A drug addict, no doubt, thought Charles.
"Monica! What are you doing here?" asked the man.
"I'm on a case, the one about the man who fell from the Mark a couple
days ago. What do you know about it?"
"Who, me?" he asked, feigning innocence.
"Don't sass me," she snapped. "I know you know something. You monitor that hotel as if you owned it."
"Fine, I might have something for ya," he confessed. Then he glared at her. "But why should I tell you anything?"
"Oh, that's not nice. I've always provided generous compensation for information. You'll be able to afford a week's worth of hits with the money I give you," she bargained. "How about two hundred bucks for all the information you can give me." Al looked pleased at that. He reached under his blanket and pulled out a stack of scrap paper with writing on it.
"Here are my notes on people going in and out of the hotel. It's yours," he handed Monica the papers. "Look at three days ago," he winked at her.
"Ah, perfect. Thanks Al," She handed him two Ben Franklins and wheeled around. Charles stared at her in amazement as he followed her back to the car.
"He used to be a doorman for the Mark, until his drug problem caught up with him," Monica explained to Charles. "Now he sits there on the corner, stoned, and watches the activity around the hotel. He knows everything and everybody. Very useful."
"I see, madam," Charles said crisply.
"It's 'miss', Charlie," Monica impatiently reminded him. She studied the papers
from the homeless man, Al; the list of people that had entered and exited the hotel was in
chronological order and there were detailed descriptions of every person.
They arrived at the police headquarters and greeted Kevin. He took them to his office where the beautiful Carmen was standing there, looking like the ultimate of cool all decked out in Gucci, pouting and glaring, obviously disgruntled at being held there. Kevin handed Monica the police report of the crime.
"This is for you. All the information on the case is in that file. Call me if you have any breakthroughs," he told her.
"Look, obviously, the reason you can't solve the case is because you overlooked something, probably many things. You called me. You want my help, you have to do things my way. Now, I refuse to get my information from a written description. We are going to make a trip to the hotel room. I may be crippled, but I'm not bedridden, damn it!" she said angrily. "Let's go."
Kevin shot her an exasperated look and beckoned Carmen to follow him out the door. A little while later the four of them entered the expensive hotel lobby filled with modern art and crossed to the elevators. They went up to the twelfth floor and walked to suite 1214. The suite was in a classy beige and blue color scheme with lush carpeting, and plush furniture. The fridge and bar were fully stocked, and, of course, there was a great view of San Francisco from the infamous window that Mr. Donovan fell, or was pushed, from.
Monica wheeled herself over to the window and inspected it. It had been closed for security reasons, but judging by its prime condition, she assumed it had been open when Donovan had met his end. It was a luxurious window, stretching from about a foot off the floor to the same distance from the ceiling and, for safety, the bottom foot of the window was unopenable. Just outside the window, there was a decorative mock balcony that stuck out half a foot and to go with it, a decorative railing of wrought iron, with
grisly spires guarding the window ominously. She carefully inspected this little deck and the bottom of the one above it as well.
"Where's the screen?" she asked Kevin.
"It's on the bed," he answered. She immediately led the group to the bedroom. This room, like the other, was well furnished but had that cold hotel feeling. The screen was lying completely intact on the bed.
"So the killer bothered to take off the screen before she or he push Donovan out the window, huh?" Monica commented ironically. Without waiting for a response, she wheeled herself into the adjacent bathroom. This was where the luxury of the hotel really made itself evident. There was a whirlpool tub next to the shower, a huge vanity, and a telephone next to the toilet, which Monica smirked at. She meandered around the bathroom, looked in all the cabinets, in the shower, the hot tub and the toilet.
"There's something in the toilet," she called. Kevin came over.
"Where?" he asked.
"Right there," she pointed inside the toilet bowl where a smidgeon of something white was just barely visible. Kevin reached in and pulled out a medicine bottle. He stared at Monica incredulously. How had she seen that? They had had a whole swarm of police detectives in the room the day before and none of them had caught that. She grinned at him, looking smug.
"May I see the bottle," she held out her hand. He handed it to her. "Unisom, sleeping pills. Hmm." She turned around to face Carmen, who had quietly been talking to Charles, batting her eyelashes in Kevin's direction occasionally.
"Mrs. Donovan did you or your husband have troubles sleeping often?" she inquired, waving the empty bottle at Carmen. The model frowned.
"Yes, Harry had troubles occasionally, but those aren't his pills. I hold his pills for
him in my purse." She dug around in her large Gucci purse and withdrew a similar white
medicine bottle. "I don't know what those are," she insisted.
Kevin slipped the bottle into an evidence bag and put it in his coat pocket. Monica gave the entire suite one more visual sweep and decided that she was ready to leave. The group went back to headquarters and Monica thanked Kevin for allowing her to inspect the crime scene for herself. Then she and Charles left Kevin to deal with Carmen and the other menial concerns that being a policeman entails.

2008-05-27T09:44:00.000-07:00

That same, nagging feeling woke her up again. “Geez, must I be cursed with such a ridiculously small bladder?”, Louisa thought as she turned over and tried not to think about rushing waterfalls and trickling pools of water. Not that she had been getting the most restful sleep anyway. She and some friends from school were on their annual camping trip at Lake Cachuma in the Santa Ynez Mountains just half an hour from Santa Barbara. Louisa never found it easy to sleep while on camping trips, she always stayed up hour after hour preparing for a bear to rip its way through the tent and devour her whole, or a bolt of lightning to strike down on her campsite. It also didn’t help that she was practically spooning with her friend’s dirty feet due to the fact that she and all her seven friends had decided to share the same four-person tent. Being thankful she was the person nearest to the zippered flap to freedom, Louisa wiggled her way out of her sleeping bag, quietly opened the zipper, and slithered out into the night.

Since she had already been times before, and was armed with her trusty maglight, Louisa had no problem finding the path that lead to the bathrooms. Crossing the wide open field in front of her, Louisa shivered as a cool breeze blew across her jacket, darting down the uncovered parts of her skin, making her grasp helplessly for more material that wasn’t there. Louisa concentrated on the beam of her flashlight that bobbed across the ground in front of her, and tried in vain not to think about what could possibly lay ahead in the pitch-blackness that surrounded her. In that very instant, Louisa’s beam caught a glimpse of something that was not green grass, but rather an upside-down park ranger’s hat. Following her flashlight beam a little farther from the hat, Louisa discovered a man sprawled out facedown in the grass, a tranquilizer dart sticking out from his back. His arms were flung out and his head turned to the side as if he had been running from something when he fell. Gasping with horror and fear, Louisa fell on her knees beside the man, frantically feeling for a pulse on his arm. The man’s skin was cold to the touch, and though Louisa concentrated her very hardest to find his heartbeat, no movement came from the man’s limp wrist.

2008-05-27T09:36:00.001-07:00

2008-05-22T15:03:00.001-07:00

There's one thing that no amount of late night Law and Order or Boston Legal will teach you about a trial: they're damned boring. After all, you can only listen to people go on about how you're a dangerous psychopath for so long before it gets old. I had been sitting at the defense table in department four of the Santa Barbara Superior Court for over an hour now, and was currently struggling to stay awake through the opening statements.

The DA had gone first, laying out all the reasons that the jury should find me guilty beyond a reasonable doubt (“the evidence will show that Kenneth Short did willfully, and with malice aforethought, take the life of seven innocent people”). My over-priced defense attorney had just finished making what I thought was a pretty weak case to the contrary, which basically summed up to “someone else did it, but we don't know who or why.” It took every ounce of my willpower to suppress a sudden urge to jump up and earnestly inform the jurors that I really wasn't a bad guy. Bake them a cake, maybe belt out some Andrew Lloyd Webber or Gilbert and Sullivan ("A British tar is a soaaaaaa-ring soul, as free as a mountaaaaaaaain biii-ird"). In short, show them that I was an all-around friendly fellow who just wasn't the serial killer type. Somehow I got the feeling that the judge wouldn't have approved of such a display, though, so I choked it down and went back to admiring the ceiling tiles and thinking about how I had gotten into this mess in the first place.

Ever since high school, my goal in life had been to be a famous writer. I spent all of my free time either reading, writing, or coming up with ideas for new stories. I had started my first and only book in my junior year of college, and taken a year off after graduating to finish it. It had everything I thought a good book needed. A compelling main character (in this case, a deranged, yet oddly sympathetic killer who ritualistically mutilated his victims' corpses), comic relief (in the form of a ludicrously inept detective), and just the right amount of social commentary. And of course, a snazzy book jacket. Long story short, it sold about as well as a rock swims and I went back to school, eventually getting a job teaching Literature classes at Santa Barbara City College. I all but forgot about my book until one day, six years later, my best friend and publisher Nate Goodwin called me up with some highly disturbing news.

“Kenny, my man. You been watching the news lately?” Nate's voice sounded a bit shaky, but I figured he was just high. It was the weekend, after all.

“Nah, I check out the primary results every once in a while, but I don't really care which movie star is in rehab this week. Why, what's up?”

“A few homeless guys have turned up dead the past couple weeks. The police suspect that they were all killed by the same person.”

As cliché as it sounds, a chill actually ran down my spine at that. “A serial killer in Santa Barbara? I bet the Mesa folks are raising Hell.” Santa Barbara did attract somewhat unusual people, even for Southern California, but in one way they were much like every suburban community in America: they hated it when their little bubble of sanity and safety was disturbed. A serial killer did a number on that bubble.

“Actually, that's not what I called to tell you. At least, not all of it. There have been three victims so far and all of them have had weird designs carved into their palms.”

If my spine had been a bit chilly before, it was now downright frosty. I didn't bother to ask what kind of symbols, because I knew perfectly well what the answer would be. Greek letters carved into each palm, inverted so that the top of the letter lay toward the fingers. Now I knew why Nate had called me. I walked over to his desk, opened the top drawer, and pulled out a seemingly brand-new hardcover novel with a still-snazzy book jacket. The bottom of the jacket read “Omega Calling”. The top read “Kenneth Short”.

Twin Towers

2008-05-22T14:52:00.001-07:00

Matthew Yasavolian

English 193A, 5/20/2008

The drive had finally ended. We made the four hour trip in our Lexus SUV that is the car we designated for long trips. The ride had been quite uncomfortable with the car fitting eight people maximum and, of course, we filled every seat available. It was the whole clan which included my brother, sister, grandfather, aunt, uncle, mother and father. The second we parked, I opened the door and sluggishly fell out as I couldn’t feel my legs anymore because the car was so packed with people plus laptop and book bags jam packed the leg room.

It was a bright, gorgeous day in Santa Barbara. The sun was out and heated the sky as the cool breeze drifted in from the ocean. It was like nothing I had ever imagined. Coming from the bay area in northern part of California, the only days that we ever witnessed like this were the best days produced in the summer and even those days didn’t last long. Often, they would be accompanied by gusts of wind or clouds that drifted and covered the ever-so-promising sunny forecast that the weather man had promised us the day before. I hadn’t before visited Santa Barbara and my decision to go to the university was based on rejecting my other college options. It was UCSB or either UCSD, which had a bad reputation for a non-existent social life or UC Davis, which was in the middle of farm land and their hottest seasons there made it possible to fry an egg on the gravel. Plus, I wanted to live near the beach knowing it might be the only opportunity I get.

After I took a moment to soak up what seemed to me as heaven and to regain feeling in my legs, my brother called over to me, yelling numerous times when I finally heard him the third time. He motioned me over to where my parents were grabbing rolling bins that were available for students to put there belongings in to take up to their dorm rooms. I looked up to take a glance at my future home for the next year and was amazed at what I saw.

I wiped my eyes to make sure I wasn’t dreaming but sure enough, it was real. It looked like a small resort with a pool surrounded by palm trees and a huge grass lawn right next to it. The dorm looked like a hotel. It was over nine stories up and consisted of two towers with elevators in each one. The dorm was called Francisco Torres and it was the only one of the dorms that didn’t reside on campus, being about a mile off campus. We were finally able to gather all my things and make it to the ninth floor where my room was and started to unload.

I noticed my future roommate had beaten us to the room and unpacked all his things. However, it seems as if he packed for just the weekend. His side of the room was a mess; his dresser drawers were open as some clothes were neatly folded and others hung from the ends of the drawers. His bed sheets were carelessly put on the bed and looked like someone had already slept in it. On his desk were his fifty-year old computer and monitor and an old printer that looked to have some cobwebs on it. I hadn’t met my roommate before but I was already beginning to get a sense of who he was. We had just talked a couple times on the phone to coordinate what each of us was to bring to contribute to the room. I agreed to bring a television and he agreed to bring a small fridge. The day before move in day, he called and told me he couldn’t find a fridge that would fit in the room and asked me if I could bring one. I seemed to have over packed in comparison, bringing my laptop, printer, sound system, mini-fridge, and the television with its stand. I felt I should bring everything with me in one trip so that I wouldn’t have to drag my parents through this again and make multiple trips. As we were finishing up unpacking, my roommate showed up with his mother and younger siblings and hands full of snacks. He seemed like a very mellow character, very simple plain white t-shirt and jeans and slippers. Our parents and families eventually left and we had time to talk and get a feeling for how the year would span out. My roommate decided to take a nap, but I decided to go out and meet everyone else on the floor. The two guys next door seemed like guys I associated with in High School. They both played on the football team in high school and one of them also did wrestling. I played a lot of sports myself, being the captain of the soccer team and track team and playing 3 years of high school football. I wasn’t the typical jock, the one that picked on nerds or made fun of geeks that stayed after school and had chess club meetings. I was a student that came home after games, did homework and helped my mother with chores around the house.

There were also some weird characters on our floor. I didn’t have the chance to meet her, but I walked past this one door and took a quick glance inside. This girl’s back was facing the doorway and I saw something I knew I would never forget. She had wires that ran through small hooks in her back with tattoos beneath. The scariest thought I would ever see. After meeting everyone else on the floor, I headed back to my room and relaxed and turned on the television. The next day, the first day of classes began and things ran smoothly for the first week. In the dining commons everyday, I would eat with my roommate and our sweet mates and some of our new friends. Each time, I would also notice something; there would be this one kid that seemed rather geeky and didn’t seem to fit in. He wore glasses, tight jean pants, turtlenecks and sneakers. He sat alone at every meal, breakfast, lunch and dinner. He looked like a typical high school nerd directly out of those old 1990s television shows. He ate his meals and left, and did the same thing every day.

The Friday night after the first week of school was crazy and everyone seemed to be eager to go out and party. The amount of alcohol being passed that night was more than I had seen my entire life. I decided to stay in that night and relax so I wouldn’t be incapacitated the next morning. I went outside to the pool and relax on a lawn chair and talk with some friends and all of a sudden I heard a loud scream.

We got up and went around the corner into the parking lot and saw there was a large crowd of people huddled around a car in the parking lot. The same girl was still screaming. We pushed our way through the crowd and there laid a body smashed into the hood of the car. The face was hard to recognize at the time because it had taken a serious beating by the hood of the car. The body seemed like it had fallen a long distance and sure enough, I looked up and there was a smashed glass window on the ninth floor of my tower. In fact, the window was from the room right next door to mine.

First Page - Erika

2008-05-21T22:01:00.000-07:00

My head throbbed, intensified by the uncharacteristically sweltering Santa Barbara weather and the toxicity of last night’s overindulgence. In the midst of a torturous hangover, the beach is usually not the greatest route to rehydration and recuperation, but the promise of her adorned in a tempting sundress, her greased olive skin glistening in the spring sunshine was motivation enough to drag me out of bed and into the sunshine. Lately rhyme and reason had released its hold on my formerly scientific, ordered thought process. A normally solitary creature absorbed and obsessed with my research, I’d been yanked from the comfortable world of condensed matter and electron spin by a vivacious literature undergrad. Long nights in lab tweaking temperature settings and painstakingly charting, graphing, and analyzing everything were quickly replaced with endless evenings in bed talking, laughing, and quite possibly loving? No. Not just yet.

“Hey, B!” She spotted me trudging towards her, my head hung low and sunglasses drooping like a weary hound-dog tuckered out from the endless hunt. “You look like shit, lover.”

“I feel accordingly,” kissing her the cheek, I inhaled deeply and let the heavenly mixture of herbal shampoo and marijuana smoke invade my olfactory receptors.

“I got started without you. But I figured you might need this,” she passed me the smoldering remains of an immaculately rolled J. I eyed the craftsmanship admiringly, tenderly, and drew in a sharp breath, taking the smoke in straight to my dome. My skull pounded, reverberated, and settled upon the exhale quieting the echo of my ailing head. We walked along the sand conversing and making eyes at one another, enjoying the fleeting serenity of the ocean. Eva made me forget, made me feel rather than think. She had become my peace of mind over the last few months, but all of that changed upon the discovery of the body.

It peeked out of the drainage pipe where the lagoon met the Pacific and flowed outward. Like Ophelia, adorned with garlands of moss and muck rather than daisies and violets, the serene bluish female corpse bobbed just below the surface of the water with death and sorrow written all over her decaying face. My weak stomach betrayed me and I felt hot vomit churning deep within my abdomen.

“Jeezus, Barry!” Eva yelped as I emptied the contents of my boiling belly mere inches away from her bare feet. Embarrassed, disgusted, and unable to explain myself, I collapsed on the sand and pointed to the woman that had undone my digestive tract. Eva approached the stagnant pool of salt water to get a better look. Indeed, a young woman barely Eva’s age lay beaten and nearly unrecognizable. Clothed only in the remains of a black halter-top emblazoned with an obnoxiously neon sports drink logo, she showed signs of sexual assault. Bruised thighs. Bashed face. Broken and helpless.

"The Daily Grind" - 1st Page for Sara

2008-05-21T21:16:00.000-07:00

4:45 AM

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard… Ugh. And they’re like, “It’s better than yours…” Must… find…I could teach you, but I’d have to… snooze button. Clearly, setting my alarm clock to the radio was a mistake. In all fairness, though, this has to be at least ten times better than the techno I’m going to have to listen to in half an hour. Fucking Ted and his techno. He got upset yesterday because some “artist” had decided to put words to the music. As if the words were ruining the music, if you can even call that music.

God it’s dark. The first time I work up this early, I remember thinking how much easier it was to open my eyes, because, hell, you don’t have to adjust to the light when the sun hasn’t come up yet. Talk about a bright side… or whatever. Despite the overwhelming joy I feel at not having to strain my eyes, there seems to be a certain nauseous feeling that has escaped my stomach and is currently circulating in my arms and legs. I stumble out of bed. Three bruises and a head bump later I’m in my car, on my way to work.

Four years ago I would’ve laughed at someone like me—a thirty-six year old working some pansy-ass job at a coffee-house, complaining about the early hours and how much cream cheese I have to make. But I needed a change. Not quite the change that my friend had made in college—the high school valedictorian dropping out of UCLA to join the circus. But I needed out. Working fifteen years as a California Highway Patrol Officer, and eventually as a member of the Anti-Narcotics squadron, left me desiring a better patron-client relationship. It didn’t take long for me to realize that people don’t enjoy small talk when they’re being handed a $377 fine for speeding. And you sure as hell can guess how a meth dealer responds to a question about changes in the weather when at that exact moment the sky is crashing down on a business he worked ten years to build.

And there was the whole "ex-wife" thing.

First Page, Shannon

2008-05-21T10:30:00.000-07:00

You know Charlie, I could have won the Olympics, the O-fucking-lympics," Monica swore. "God damn these useless legs." She took another gulp of her scotch. Charles shook his head at her. He was her chauffeur, assistant, and best friend. She was on her fifth scotch now and Charles deemed it to be enough.
"Midnight, madam, time for bed," he said in his crisp English accent. He began to steer her wheelchair into her bedroom.
"It's miss thank you. I'm only 32. I'm not a madam yet, Charlie," she snapped, slurring slightly.
"Yes, miss, and call me Charles," he responded. He helped her into bed and then left her small, one-person apartment, pausing a moment to look out the window at the rather picturesque view of yellow, pink, and blue apartments across her street that were so characteristic of San Francisco.
Monica was rudely awakened at eight in the morning by the telephone. As she floundered around in her sheets and blankets trying to disentangle herself, she could feel the hangover destroying her physical, mental, and emotional well-being. She finally got to the phone.
"What!" she snapped.
"Hangover?" a wry voice asked on the other side.
"Oh, what the hell do you want, Kevin?" She knew what the SFPD detective
wanted. He needed help on a case. That was the only time he ever called her, when the
incapable police force could not do its job and needed her expertise.

1st page for Claire

2008-05-20T10:12:00.000-07:00

"Esconced in the broken-down bean bag as she was, with the smoke from the bong she held embraced in her lap like a baby enclosing her in its own warm embrace of indifference, the pixielated images on the television seemed to move of their own volition, and she roused her eyelids with difficulty--"
Mentally groaning, she put the book down. Five pages in, she thought, and I'm still hearing about the drinking and weed addictions. Two sentences would have sufficed, maybe even one: "Hi, my name is idiot and I'm an alcoholic AND a dope fiend." Why did publishers think people read detective novels? To read endless pages about being drunk or high and unable to get up out of the beanbag chair? Noooo, for a crime. The only thing criminal so far was the writing. Like a stoner even thinks in words like "pixillated" (hell, even the editor couldn't spell it right) or "volition" or "roused." The author was probably a goddamn English major, using all her fancy words just to show her extensive vocabulary. She rolled her eyes at her thoughts and picked the book back up. "You're cranky," she told herself. She'd give it five more pages: ten pages were enough to know whether a book was about criminal activity or if it would drive you to it.
Thumbing to the right spot again, she heard the coffee percolator in the Kirby's apartment start. No one nowadays knows what a percolator is, but she remembered her grandfather using one. She'd wake up on the couch during summer vacations, smelling the coffee and hearing the bubbly-sounding "perk....perk..." but actually, it sounded more like "pur.......pur.......pur.....pur...puuurrrrrcc..." as the water was forced up around and through the grounds to seep back down again. Evaporated milk and honey in coffee still caused olfactory flashbacks for her. The Kirby's had probably bought theirs new.
Well, if the Kirby's were up, so was she. One of the disadvantages to old apartments was thin walls. And odd as it was, she was even more of a morning lark than the Kirby's. Being a rather clumsy lark, she tried to stay considerately in bed reading for the hour until they woke up at 5 a.m. With something very much like relief, she closed the book and put it aside. Maybe she wouldn't give it five more pages after all.
She wondered as she showered how bad the day was going to be today. Understaffed, underfunded, and overworked, every employee in the department was suffering from bad morale and the resultant bad
attitudes, herself included. Watching her new boss try to cope with it all, she was less resentful every day that management had decided that despite their "desire for honest feedback and constructive suggestions," she was
not what they were looking for as a "team leader." Besides, "team leader" sounded like head migrant of the McDonald's day team...not a loss to her resume.
She gave herself a mental shake: knock it off or you'll create your very own bad day. She didn't know it, but it was going to be a very bad day regardless of her attitude. She should have known it when the hot water ran out much quicker than normal and left her scrambling to turn off the water and shivering in her towel.

Mexico Drug Wars Coverage

2008-05-18T10:38:00.000-07:00

The LA Times offers a little background on the military operations the Mexican government and the Sinaloa drug cartel are conducting against each other. The recent action follows the assassination of Mexico's No. 3 law enforcement official, Edgar Millan Gomez in Mexico City by a petty thief who was waiting for him in one of his supposed safe houses. The Mexican government is portraying the violence as the act of a cartel desperate over its weakening by an effective government crackdown.

The newspaper columnist Jorge Fernandez Menendez has a better explanation, one involving money. He compares the current Sinaloa problem to the decline of Medellin godfather Pablo Escobar in the late 1980s: "The weaker Escobar became, the more enemies he made . . . and the less money he had, the more he resorted to violence to take revenge on his enemies and strike fear in them."

It's not clear why the Sinaloa cartel would be running out of money, given their apparent ongoing control of the Pacific coast cocaine transhipment routes. But at least this story about the international drug trade provides a better context for the shoot-outs in Glassell Park than the dumb recent LA Times story about the mother from Guerrero with thirteen gang children.

One of the best pieces on the overall context suggests that the cartels are turning Mexico into a "failed state." This may seem far-fetched. But when Mexico's defense secretary said "Organized crime is not, and can never be, stronger than Mexico," he raised exactly that possibility.

Hollywood Fall Guy

2008-05-18T10:20:00.000-07:00

Late last week the Hollywood wiretap case involving Anthony Pellicano came to an end with guilty verdicts for wiretapping, racketeering, and other charges. The good New York Times piece points out that all the potential big fish got away. Maybe this is a script with "third-act problems," but more likely it's a good version of an even more familiar noir script. Possible top targets were never indicted, including Michael S. Ovtiz, the entertainment lawyer Bert Fields, Brad Grey, current studio chief at Paramount, as well as Pellicano customers Chris Rock, Courtney Love, Alec Gores (billionaire acquisitions specialist, Freddy De Mann, Madonna's former manager, Adam D. Sender, a hedge fund manager. In the noir script, folks like this have enough clout to pressure top law enforcement folks to show quick, definitive evidence against them or lay off. In the noir framework, it's not a huge shock that the government failed "to deal any crushing blows to people in power." One legal academic is quoted as saying “If the government has no plans to go higher than Pellicano, this is a depressingly pedestrian effort that shows a lack of ambition." But with all that money getting deposed and put in the witness box, all the ambition in the world doesn't amount to much.

The Problem With Prison

2008-05-08T08:23:00.000-07:00

Growing doubts about the value of prison as the country's main mode of crime reduction have hit the Wall Street Journal. A good piece by Gary Fields on Tuesday, May 6th, points out that violent crime is growing again, but that a surprising explanation has cropped up. April 2008 was about 20 percent deadlier than April 2007, and that "the usual reasons - the economy, poverty, gangs and crews, and the availability of firearms" have something to do with it, but can't by themselves explain this sharp a rise.

The explanation that has been "little explore" is "the migration of the prison culture back to the streets. As nearly 700,000 convicts a year return home, some of them may be bringing prison culture with them. 'This is part of the price we're paying for 20 years of mass incarceration,' said David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at New York City's John Jay College of Criminal Justice" (A 16).

What Kennedy means by "prison culture" is the centrality of "respect." "Disrespect can lead to lethal responses at the slightest provocation. . . . There are now many people on the streets who live by a prison code, as the prison population has ballooned to 2.2 million from 330,000 in 1980."

This too is not a total explanation, but mass incarceration has its own noir "blowback" that is finally getting some public attention.

Drug Sting Nabs 75 Students at San Diego State U.

2008-05-07T09:29:00.000-07:00

The LA Times coverage of this bust suggested an EME connection, and it's interesting to think of possible connections between specific college frats and the hardcore drug syndicates in Mexico, who some observers believe control the country's federal government, not to mention large swathes of territory, e.g. much of Tijuana. See also Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah, which explains how the Napoli-area "System" and its leading clans have allowed semi-autonomous dealers to access nice middle-class clients like college students without visible mob strings attached.

***

Story by SARA LIPKA, Chronicle of Higher Education
Wednesday, May 7, 2008

A yearlong undercover drug investigation has resulted in the arrests of 75 students at San Diego State University and 21 other people accused of being involved in illegal drug sales there, university and law-enforcement officials announced on Tuesday.

Eighteen students were arrested on Tuesday, and 15 others were arrested in recent weeks, the student newspaper, The Daily Aztec, reported. The other arrests were made over the past 12 months.

During the investigation, officers have seized $100,000 worth of marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy pills, hallucinogenic mushrooms, methamphetamine, and illicit prescription drugs, according to the district attorney's office for San Diego County. The officers also seized four guns, brass knuckles, and $60,000 in cash.

The university's police department started the investigation after a student died of a cocaine overdose in May 2007, the district attorney's office said in a written statement. Federal drug agents joined the investigation about five months ago. During the investigation, another student, from San Diego Mesa College, died of a drug overdose in a San Diego State fraternity house near the campus.

The officers in the investigation infiltrated seven San Diego State fraternities and made more than 130 undercover drug buys, both on and off the campus, officials quoted in news accounts and in the district attorney's statement said.

The officials said that students had coordinated the deals mainly by text messages. In one case, a member of the Theta Chi fraternity sent a mass text message to his "faithful customers," informing them of a "sale" on cocaine after a brief waiting period while he and his "associates" traveled to Las Vegas.

The university's president, Stephen L. Weber, told The San Diego Union-Tribune that faculty and staff members were not informed that the undercover investigation was being conducted on and near the campus.

"This was not a difficult decision," he said. "We needed to do something about it. We're talking about drug trafficking. That's the thing we were not prepared to turn our backs on. We had to deal with this."

San Diego State has suspended all the students who were arrested, pending due-process reviews, Mr. Weber said in a written statement on the university's Web site.

The university is also looking into whether any fraternities were involved organizationally, beyond the actions of individual members. If it finds that they were, Mr. Weber told reporters, those fraternities will be kicked out as campus organizations.

In a statement issued later in the day, the university announced that six fraternities had been placed on "interim suspension," pending hearings.

Among the students arrested were an undergraduate majoring in criminal justice and a master's candidate who was a month away from a degree in homeland security and who worked as a community-service officer under the supervision of the campus police.

In his own statement regarding the arrests, Mr. Weber called the investigation "a big step forward towards a safer environment for our students, faculty, staff, and neighbors."

"Illegal substances are inconsistent with our values and with the pursuit of our mission," he said. "Certainly today's arrests underscore the scope of the challenges universities face as we fight this major societal problem."

Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/05/2757n.htm

Hollywood High School

2008-04-10T07:58:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has good coverage of the endless Pellicano wiretap-and-intimidation trial, with former Hollywood and Disney president Michael superagentOvitz testifying yesterday morning, and the threatened reporter Anita Busch testifying in the afternoon. Timeless dialog includes this:

You believe (Ovitz) was the client who hired Mr. Pellicano to put the fish on your car?” asked attorney Chad Hummel, who represents one of the defendants, former Los Angeles police Sgt. Mark Arneson.

“Yes,” Busch said.

Ovitz, on the other hand, insisted "“Absolutely no, I never instructed him (Pellicano) to do anything illegally."

Of course it's not exactly illegal to leave a fish on somebody's car. What law does that break?

Ovitz calls Hollywood "the campus" and not in the sense of a college campus, because that is too adult. Hollywood, he says, is in fact like high school.

His testimony seems to prove it. Back in 2002, he flipped over rumors that were making him look bad and became dependent on Pellicano's mysterious powers to make it stop. Pellicano the private eye supposedly gave "very good advice," Ovitz said. "Frankly, when a lot of people abandoned the ship, he didn't. He was always an open ear."

Pellicano seems to have become the sad and frightened Ovitz's priest, therapist, friend, and confessor. It's probably not a coincidence that Ovitz paid him $25,000 per case, and an additional $75,000 over the course of that year.

Crime Spree Drew Street: The Sequel

2008-03-30T17:09:00.000-07:00

There's another stock gang story in the LA Times today. It covers Drew Street in the Glassell Park area of Los Angeles, and is a retread of the story they did after a daytime shootout last month.

Check it out and then ask yourself these questions:

- the "Satellite House" seems to have been a major drug distribution point. Does the article find out who owned it, or operated it?
- who owned or operated the overbuilt and undermaintained housing that was constructed after the early 1980s?
- Drew Street appears to have been a base of operations for organized crime. Why does this article replace the Avenues gang and the "Eme" cross-border crime syndicate with a focus on one woman, Maria Leon, and her thirteen children?
- what is the function of references to the village of Tlalchapa - Leon's origin - in the Mexican state of Guerrero, called "one of Mexico's most violent regions"?
- are these statements meant to explain Drew Street's trafficking and violence in a causal way?

"Tlalchapans moved into many of the new apartments, said former Drew Street residents. As they did, neighbors said, fights, parties and heavy drinking became more common."

As more Tlalchapans arrived on Drew Street, "it was the law of the revolver," Flocelo Aguirre said.

Police task forces, gang sweeps, arrests -- even a 2002 gang injunction -- have done little to break the bonds of family and culture that breed criminal activity on Drew Street, officials said.

If so, is the author saying that Drew Street crime comes from Tlalchapan's culture of crime?

The piece is fun pulp fiction, but if you tried to do urban policy, sociology, or crime detection with its type of information (stereotypes, general trends, a "usual suspect," and no specifics about individual associations, building ownership, etc material), you would fail. There's no syndicate, police force, crooked urban officials, payoffs and deals, all the usual stuff that make something like the Drew Street system operate.

Hollywood Pellicano Case Overview

2008-03-29T11:12:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to a good backgrounder on the Pellicano wiretapping case that has been roiling Hollywood for several years. It focuses on the reporter, Anita Busch, who first turned up the story during an investigation of organized crime activity in Hollywood. She seems to have gotten a little too close to that invisible point where moguls and mobsters converge: she was wiretapped and threatened and, when she told her sources they may have been overheard on her phone, he career was effectively ended. Part of the case finally went to trial last year, and it continues.

Spitzer Saga Continues

2008-03-29T10:45:00.000-07:00

You won't have forgotten Eliot Spitzer, the governor of New York who stepped down earlier this month in the wake of revelations that he'd used money parked in a shell company to hire the services of a prostitute employed by a company called "Emperor's Club VIP," which advertised its service on line and touted its 1-5 Diamond ranking system for the women it made available.

Two core questions have never been addressed by our not-so-brilliant media, which suffers from collective attention deficit disorder.

did Spitzer just start hiring hookers recently - maybe via a little extra job stress while being governor? Or was he hiring hookers for a long time, including during the period when he was busting their employers? In other works, was New York's most self-righteous D.A. in recent history screwing and arresting the same people at the same time, in time-honored crooked-cop tradition?
did Spitzer have contact with any of the people that work behind the scenes in organized prostitution? Most prostitution rings, as far as I know, are controlled by organized crime.

Today's New York Times has an article that turns over the second of these overlooked pieces of the puzzle. The call girl Spitzer saw in Washington D.C., aspiring R&B singer Ashley Alexandra Dupre (pictured here), knows a guy called Anthony Scibelli, who has been named in a large-scale federal indictment of the Gambino crime family. Scibelli's lawyer describes him as not a mobster but a "hard-working contractor," one who also apparently "has contacts in the music business." Scibelli supposedly just wanted to help Spitzer's famous "Kristen" (Dupre) with her singing career. The lawyer denied this help involved having sex with her.

Is it just a coincidence that Dupre knows both the former governor of New York and an alleged member of the Gambino syndicate? Maybe. But we are definitely only part-way down this particular rabbit hole.

2008-03-23T12:05:00.000-07:00

Here's a decent review of a bunch of new crime series books by the NY Times's Janet Maslin, complete with descriptions of the more tiresome formulae of the current genre.

Soldier Mental Health

2008-03-08T11:42:00.000-08:00

As newspapers continue to describe some urban neighborhoods as war-zones, here's some news from the Iraq war-zone. A new report, as described by Peter Spiegel in the Los Angeles Times, has found that soldiers are more likely to suffer from mental health problems in their third and fourth tours of duty. "27.2% of noncommissioned officers - the sergeants responsible for leading troops in combat - reported mental health problems during their third or fourth tours. That was up from 18.5% of those on their second tour and 11.9% of those on their first tour." These are self-reported numbers.

Soliders also have increasing trouble concentrating on their work. "Most strikingly, soldiers reporting they intended to separate from or divorce their spouses shot up over the courses of the 15-month tours, with 30% of all junior enlistees saying they planned to break off personal relationships at the end of their deployment. Only 10% reported similar feelings at the start of their tours."

LA Gang Coverage

2008-02-23T01:19:00.000-08:00

Frontier Days hit NorthEast LA on Thursday, at least in the LA Times coverage. A local man walking with his 2-year-old granddaugher was shot by people in a passing car and later died. People who knew him shot at the car. About a half hour later, the cops stopped what seemed to be the same white Nissan. 3 guys emerged, the police say, firing automatic weapons. The cops shot back and killed Daniel Leon, above.

Today's Times backgrounder describes the Avenues as a fusion of the Mexican Mafia and a criminal clan that has been on Drew Street for generations. "Like hundreds of residents in the neighborhood, the Leons originally hailed from the village of Tlalchapa, in Guerrero, Mexico, neighbors said." Leon is one of 13 children who grew up in a house the cops called the gang's "mother ship."

What if we think of 3304 Drew St as a branch office in a multinational drug retail business?

Beyond its standard coverage, the piece cites local support for the Avenues. "I've been here 25 years and they've never disrespected me," said Modesta Hernandez. "On the contrary, they protect us. They help us."

The article has no explanation for the original shooting.

See also a much more in-depth piece from the LA Weekly on the legendary Black gang the Grape Street Crips. This one features the themes of permanent violence, occupied territory, outlaw rule, internal terrorism, and hints at civil war.

We need solutions as serious as these descriptions of the problem.

How to Catch No One

2008-02-02T05:52:00.001-08:00

The easiest way not to catch a thief or a bomber is to send in the Marines. This is what New York City is doing on their transport system. These guys can be spotted a mile away. They're slow. They are as likely to shoot perps or witnesses as interrogate them. They make everyone clam up within 20 blocks of the guns. They have weapons training, not detective training. They are the extreme opposite of undercover. They are a pure show of force - a symbolic display of power and nothing more.

The important thing about the New York Times article on the subject is that it doesn't even try to connect this military force in the subway to a real strategy. Why is it there? No answer.

Except "terrorism," of course, which apparently can cover for the most empty-headed but gun-toting activity. It used to be that you'd see armies patrolling the streets during periods of martial law under dictatorships, or in Mafia-controlled parts of Italy, or during the Red Brigade kidnapping days, or during urban rebellions. But even then the rule was the same: men with guns never uncover anything.

We bombed Afghanistan and did no detective work. Over five years later Osama is still at large. Afghanistan is once again the origin of 93 percent of the world's opium prodution, just like the good old pre-Taliban warlord days.

The M-4s will do just as much good in the NY subway. If a bomb goes off, these guys will be miles away. They will have no clue whodunit. They will know less that their bomb-sniffing dogs.

And so will we.

The Usual Tijuana Tale

2008-01-20T03:06:00.000-08:00

I've just finished a Mexican crime novel called The Uncomfortable Dead, authored in alternating chapters by two people, the great pro crime writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II, and the great Zapatista insurgency theorist-leader (and not-so-great crime novelist) Subcomandante Marcos. The contrast between the two sets of chapters is interesting for anyone who likes crime fiction or wants to write some themselves: the folksy voice of Marcos's detective is not too convincing, the politics, though generally admirable, are too obvious for the genre, and the detection structure is, well, not so good. To be fair to Marcos, he's trying to keep up with a master of the genre, which is impossible for someone with his kind of full-time job. There's some interesting stuff about the Zapatista judicial system, among other things, but my main point here, given the Tijuana story I'm linking to, is that together Marcos and Taibo write an entire crime novel set in Mexico without a single, hour-long shoot-out between SUV-driving narco-gangs armed with military weapons.

It's a good potboiler, and might even be true. But it would be nice to see the LA Times cover Tijuana - or East LA County for that matter - without the B-movie theatrics, which cover up what's really going on.

Vacation Crime Against LA Schools

2008-01-10T00:05:00.000-08:00

L.A. crime is rising where it hurts
Sandy Banks

LA Times January 5, 2008

On the same day that a smiling mayor and police chief stood side by side at a news conference hailing a citywide drop in crime, grim-faced teachers at a South Los Angeles elementary school painted over obscenities on classroom walls, swept up broken Christmas ornaments and tried to salvage students' art projects.

Crime may be dropping on the streets outside, but inside Los Angeles Unified campuses, holiday breaks are criminals' party time.

According to an article this week by my colleague, Times reporter Paloma Esquivel, 60 campuses were hit by thieves and vandals during the Christmas break that's about to end.

At McKinley Avenue Elementary the burglars didn't steal much -- a few laptops, cameras, VCRs and boom-boxes. But they went on a rampage on the vacant campus, urinating on floors, dumping ketchup on computers and drawing pornographic images on classroom walls.

The 80-year-old building has motion sensors that should have tripped a silent alarm but didn't. Once the vandals made it over a spiked iron fence and snipped the wire blocking windows, they were free to roam the campus.

Now, school police are trying to find the culprits. In most school break-in cases, they turn out to be neighborhood teens. Police have put up posters, asking students to alert authorities to vandalism. And they're using grant money to distribute refrigerator magnets imprinted with that same plea.

Too few police

During vacations, deserted schools are sitting ducks. Los Angeles Unified campuses are burglarized about 400 times each year, and almost half of those break-ins occur during the summer vacation, holiday breaks and long weekends all across the sprawling district.

Part of the problem is the district's puny police force. It hasn't been expanded in 20 years, even though the district has grown by more than 100,000 students and 70 campuses during that period.

L.A. Unified Police Chief Larry Manion has 362 officers and responsibility for more than 800 schools scattered over 710 square miles. His priority is keeping kids safe as they travel to and from school and while they're on campus, he said. "The vast majority of our officers work during the school day. That's what the community demands."

On nights and weekends, he's too short-handed to give campuses much patrol attention. "We don't have the troops," he said. Taking a page from Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton -- who credits the city's crime drop to more officers on the streets -- Manion wants to double the size of his force within five years. But even then, he wouldn't have enough officers to watch district schools 24/7.

Holiday break-ins have become a criminal tradition, he said. "And 95% of the time, when a burglary is committed, it's accompanied by vandalism or some distasteful comments written on the wall."

School social worker Petra Galindo is often called on to counsel children -- and teachers -- who return from vacation to find their classrooms defaced. "You try to protect the kids from seeing it. It's so disruptive to the psyche of a school," she said.

I told her I was stunned by the viciousness of the damage at McKinley Elementary. Smearing ketchup on children's writing projects? Urinating on classroom floors? But Galindo said she has seen worse: "Feces smeared on walls. Incredibly racist and obscene scrawls."

The vandals are typically teens "with an ax to grind," she said. "If they don't feel respected, in terms of how they're interacted with at school; if they're not doing well, truant a lot, disconnected at home . . . any little thing can set them off.

"Holidays bring on a lot of depression and sadness for people who don't have that sense of connectedness," Galindo said. "The schools are empty, no one's protecting them. The kids go in there as a group, it escalates, things get out of hand. . . . It's violent anti-social behavior. Schools are an easy target."

Some arrests

School police sometimes collar the culprits. Officers nabbed four burglars inside Budlong Elementary in South Los Angeles on New Year's Day and recovered $26,000 in stolen property. On Christmas Day, a silent alarm at Pio Pico Elementary drew officers "who caught the suspects in the commission of the crime," Manion said.

They could prevent more burglaries if all schools had security cameras and alarm systems that actually worked. "We'd like a monitor in every school, up and operable," he said.

District officials told me that most of the district's 700-plus schools do have "intrusion detection systems," though they couldn't tell me how many actually function. They're maintained by the district's information technology division, the same group that saddled school employees with a perpetually malfunctioning payroll system.

I guess it's too much to expect a district with a computer system that can't accurately pay teachers to provide campus security systems that are able to protect millions of dollars of equipment and students' priceless psyches.

If this kind of destruction were happening at churches or synagogues instead of schools, it would be considered a hate crime. City officials, civic leaders and law officers would be up in arms. But when vicious burglars rip through children's classrooms, we quietly hand teachers mops and ammonia and shrug it off as teenage vandalism.

I'm relieved that citywide crime is going down. But I wish politicians would stop patting themselves on the back long enough to figure out if there's a way to spread the good fortune to beleaguered schools and neglected students.

Last month, when he was stumping for endorsements for his reform plan, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa bragged that he "raised 50 million bucks like that" to spend at schools that sign on. Two years ago, alarmed by housing project crime, the mayor persuaded Motorola to donate $1.2 million worth of surveillance equipment to monitor Jordan Downs.

Spring break is not that far down the line. We know the thieves have wire cutters. Let's give more than refrigerator magnets to school police to fight crime this time.

s andy.banks@latimes.com

Copyright 2008 Los Angeles Times | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-banks5jan05,1,7903368.column?coll=la-util-news-local

Another L.A. Classic

2008-01-03T04:04:00.000-08:00

LAPTOP SNATCHED DIRECTLY FROM A CRIPPLED MAN’S LAP
How low can thugs go in Echo Park?

BY MICHAEL KRIKORIAN
LA Weekly, Wednesday, December 12, 2007 - 4:00 pm

LITTLE UNSHKINS CAN FLY. Not a transatlantic flight, but short trips of 10 feet or so. Last week, Unshkins made one of those flights and helped save his owner. Unshkins is a cat.

Peter Choyce, wheelchair-bound by a bad spine, was enjoying a sunny afternoon in the driveway of his neighbor’s house on Benton Way near the Silver Lake–Echo Park border in Los Angeles. He was typing on his laptop, working on his memoir, his cat by his side.

Two men in a white car drove by, apparently saw what they thought would be an easy mark and stopped. One of them, described by Choyce as a light-skinned Hispanic in his 20s, got out and approached his wheelchair. The suspect may not have noticed the cat.

In the space of a second or two, the assailant punched Choyce in the face, grabbed the laptop directly out of his lap — and was attacked by little Unshkins. Unshkins, a black cat with white paws, flew up in the face of the attacker, clawing frantically and bloodying the criminal’s face, Choyce says. And Choyce managed to get off a solid punch to the mugger’s throat.

“I know to go for the larynx,” says Choyce, 48. “I didn’t know it, but I have the killer’s instinct. Go for the throat. But Unshkins just flew at him, though. And that was the main blow.”

Choyce says that, as he looked up from writing his memoir, the attacker “came out of nowhere.” His cat is not the friendliest beast, with a cranky and aggressive personality. “I don’t think she did it to protect me,” he says. “I think she did it purely for selfish reasons, thinking she was the one being attacked. It happened so fast... This guy was one of those skinny, flabby guys, if you know what I mean.”

Choyce, who can barely walk without a cane, says an adrenaline rush so inspired him that, after Unshkins’ facial attack and his own punch, he actually got up and “ran like hell” after the attacker, who had taken off running with the cherished laptop toward an awaiting getaway car.

During the foot chase, the laptop, a Dell Inspiron E1505, was smashed against a concrete wall of the neighbor’s driveway and ruined.

“That laptop was my connection to my world and my family,” says Choyce. “It was the only way I can write my book. Now it’s ruined because of this punk.”

Because Choyce suffers from kyphotic degeneration of his vertebrae, he must be in a wheelchair. He cannot drive, although he sometimes can get around with a cane. A friend of Choyce’s in San Francisco is now worried that he won’t be able to communicate via e-mail with his friends and family — or finish his memoir — without his laptop.

“He’s in such a depressed state of mind, feeling completely alone. His laptop was a connection for him, and he is very unhappy without it,” says Sandra Derian, who has known Choyce for 19 years.

“He is hoping he can get money from someone to buy a new or used laptop until he can pay them back in a month or two,” she says. “His mom is 88 years old, living in Ohio. He has a sister living in Asia. There is no one he can rely on in L.A.”

Alvin Baligad, manager of the 16-unit building on the corner of Benton Way and Reservoir Street where Choyce lives, came upon the scene shortly after the attack on December 5. “I saw that Peter was bleeding from around the bridge of his nose and the paramedics were working on him, but I didn’t see that attack,” says Baligad.

WITH A HINT OF PRIDE, Choyce says that some of the blood on his face was from the attacker’s bleeding and scratched-up face.

Apparently, no one saw the assault — at least no witnesses have come forward. The attacker fled into a waiting vehicle, described by Choyce as just a white car. That’s not much for police to use in their investigation, and Los Angeles Police Department Detective Jeana Franco adds that she has no leads.

“I have very little to go on,” says Franco, who works the robbery table at LAPD’s Northeast Division. “The description is a male Hispanic in his 20s and a white car. Basically, that’s the whole report. I think it is pretty horrible to attack a guy in a wheelchair. That’s about as low as it gets. But unless he [the attacker] does something else and we can link this to him, it is not looking like we’ll catch him.”

The LAPD’s Northeast Division covers a mix of rough, gang-ridden and gentrified hilly areas, including Eagle Rock, East Hollywood, Echo Park, Silver Lake, Highland Park, Cypress Park, Los Feliz, Franklin Hills, Solano Canyon and Atwater Village. As of December 1, the division had recorded 480 robberies in 2007, in addition to 17 homicides and 665 aggravated assaults.

By Los Angeles standards, that puts the area in the mid-range of crime. In comparison, the toughest area of the city, 77th Street Division, which covers South-Central and parts of South Los Angeles, has seen 1,334 robberies, 47 homicides and 1,280 aggravated assaults in 2007.

Despite LAPD ChiefWilliam Bratton’s claims that the city is safer than it has been in decades, many residents don’t feel the city is even close to being safe, especially with crass street crimes committed in broad daylight by lowlifes who would nab a laptop from a crippled man’s lap.

“Peter and others I know feel that the neighborhood still feels unsafe, with many drug crimes taking place, despite claims it is an up-and-coming neighborhood slowly gentrifying,” Derian says of Echo Park and Silver Lake. “Him being assaulted in the middle of the day is just an example of how misleading it is to see reports of the neighborhood being a livable place for people to move to, when he isn’t safe on his front lawn from the thieves trying to make a buck to buy their next fix.”

After the attack, Choyce was upset with the treatment he received at an area emergency room, saying he was dealt with extremely coldly: “All they did was be rude to me and call me ‘sir,’ ” he says. “I was bleeding, my computer was ruined, and I was getting ‘sirred’ to death.”

It wasn’t the first time Choyce, who has been openly gay since he was a boy, has been attacked. As a youth, he says, he was often beat up and called “faggot.” Choyce, who was raised in New Hampshire, was a nude model for many years in his 20s, before his body was ravaged by disease. His apartment is full of photos of him and other males, sans clothing, along with shots of tigers, elephants and religious images.

He was also a disc jockey in Boston for a time, and at his Benton Way apartment enjoys playing an eclectic collection of CDs. One recent day, Bruce Springsteen was singing about Spanish Johnny in “Incident on 57th Street,” followed by a song from Leonard Cohen that Choyce says is the only one ever written about his illness, kyphosis.

He’s not shy about his deformed body. He takes off his shirt and shows off his twisted back. It has a severe, hunchback look. Perhaps not surprisingly, in a city like Los Angeles where every other person is trying to get into “the industry,” Hollywood has tapped the unique-looking man. He has worked as an actor on Monk and Dexter, and openly touts himself as the “Hollywood Hunchback.”

“Central Casting has been very good to me,” says Choyce, but in recent years he has worked far less, not been well, and has struggled with pain medications — and addiction.

Despite his pain, he still swims and tries to stay fit, working out in a friend’s pool for up to four hours a day to stay strong. There’s not much more he can do, with five of the six lower discs in his spine virtually wiped out. But he still has a lot of hope, and takes a minute to plug a book by physician John Sarno, Mind Over Back Pain, saying, “I love this book.”

Facing the holidays, and thinking about the mean streets around him, Choyce says, “I think they saw a guy in a wheelchair and figured I would be an easy mark. But in the end, me and Unshkins kicked his ass... I just wish I had a laptop.”

Was the Sheriff MIA?

2007-10-10T01:20:00.000-07:00

It took nearly a month for deputies to break into the home. The two women were long dead
By GIDEON RUBIN

Wednesday, September 26, 2007 - 5:00 p

Worst fears: Maurice Dawkins solved his daughter's disappearance alone. (Photo by Orly Olivier)

MAURICE DAWKINS CLUTCHES A PHOTO of his daughter Crystal that reminds him of a promise. During a family gathering last year, the powerfully built former Jamaican police detective made a vow intended to provide a measure of assurance to his four daughters. But in the end it foreshadowed unimaginable tragedy.

“I remember telling [my daughters] if anybody does anything to them, if it takes the breath out of my body, I will be there for them,” Dawkins says in his heavy Jamaican accent.

He was forced to keep that promise after Crystal Danielle Dawkins, his 18-year-old daughter, left the home they shared in Columbia, South Carolina, just before Thanksgiving last year to visit her estranged mother, Christine Bacon, at her Lancaster home near Los Angeles.

It was a trip the elder Dawkins opposed, having learned of it only a day before Crystal left on November 17. Dawkins and Crystal’s stepmother in South Carolina had just separated, and for this young woman who was “gentle and loving,” the emotional yearning to visit her mother in Lancaster had grown strong.

But things began to go awry three days into her trip to Southern California, when Crystal called her stepmother to report that her mom’s ex-boyfriend had been hanging around and had been so verbally abusive to her mother that the two women went to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s station to report him.

Maurice Dawkins believed all was well until November 25, when he got a gut-wrenching call from Crystal’s boss at a Popeye’s, saying his daughter hadn’t returned to her job on the day expected. He was horrified to belatedly learn from Crystal’s stepmother of the incident involving the mother’s boyfriend. And when he tried to reach his daughter by cell phone, he got an uncharacteristic silence — from a girl who was always reachable.

Only much later would he learn that Crystal and her mother were dead — their bodies left to decompose for weeks inside a house that deputies refused to enter. Today, Dawkins is pursuing a lawsuit against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, saying their actions call into question the manner in which the department handles missing-persons reports, deals with perceived foreigners in trouble and follows up on such complaints.

When Dawkins called the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s station in Lancaster late last November to file a missing-persons report, he tells the L.A. Weekly, his request was denied. Distraught, he called Sheriff’s stations throughout Los Angeles County seeking help before taking matters into his own hands and flying to L.A. on November 27.

Dawkins says nobody answered the door at his ex-wife’s quiet house on Price Lane in Lancaster, and Sheriff’s deputies would not go inside. So he spent days surveilling the house in hopes that Crystal or her mother would show up — so much time, in fact, that neighbors began to befriend him.

“He seemed to really care for his family,” says Sasha Garcia, a neighbor of Bacon’s. “He was distraught. He was frantic, really.”

When Dawkins begged the deputies to break into the Price Lane house to search for clues, he says he was smugly told, “That’s not how we do it here... Who do you think you are?”

Little did the high-desert deputies know that Dawkins was not some helpless immigrant with a thick accent, but had been a celebrated tough-guy New York City whistleblower, who, in 1990, acted as the key courtroom witness against Darryl “God” Whiting, head of a vicious Jamaican crime ring. Dawkins’ own history gave him little patience with cops who didn’t stick out their necks. And as he saw it, the Lancaster Sheriff’s deputies played that role to the hilt.

So Dawkins launched his own probe, ultimately logging 17,330 miles in a desperate search for his daughter, scouring mountains, valleys and gullies throughout the Southland. “It was tormenting, it was frightening in the sense of not knowing what happened,” he says. “My experience in Los Angeles, I wouldn’t wish on anybody — even the guy that killed my daughter.”

His investigation led him to Las Vegas on a second trip last December, where Dawkins showed a picture of his beautiful young daughter to hotel clerks, gas station attendants and even prostitutes — and he began to have his worst fears confirmed. He learned that his ex-wife and her boyfriend, Christopher Anthony Brown, owned two rental properties in Las Vegas, yet one tenant said she hadn’t heard from her landlords in weeks.

When the tenant called Christopher Brown’s number, a male who answered the phone said Brown had changed his number. But, recalls Dawkins, how would a stranger recognize Brown’s name, or know that he changed his number? Says Dawkins, “That’s when I knew he killed my daughter.”

Dawkins immediately called the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s homicide bureau, imploring deputies to go to the home on Price Lane. “Somebody better get there before I get there,” he declared as he drove toward Lancaster.

THREE HOURS LATER, Dawkins was near Barstow when Detective Bill Marsh called him. Dawkins says the veteran detective was crying, and told him both women’s bodies were found in the house. “I was trembling, but I was trained in the police [academy], so that made it a little more easy to take it,” Dawkins says.

Marsh says Dawkins’ demand for action and his citizen’s investigation ultimately led to Brown’s January 18 arrest in Arizona by Pima County police. Dawkins would not give up “in his determination to raise awareness that wasn’t being addressed,” Marsh tells the Weekly. “Most of us as human beings, and particularly as parents — there’s a premonition, there’s a feeling. And he obviously felt it, he addressed it and he worked it hard. Sadly, there was something very wrong.”

Today, Brown faces two counts of first-degree murder in a special-circumstances case that could bring him the death penalty. Brown is known as a bad actor — Arizona’s Pima County Prosecutor Mark Diebolt says he is tied to Jamaican organized crime. He was convicted in Arizona in July for drug trafficking and will be extradited to Los Angeles in a few weeks.

Dawkins’ pursuit of justice has given purpose to a life devastated by grief. He says he sold his landscaping business to pay expenses he incurred searching for his daughter, sleeps two hours a day, has lost 40 pounds and is on the brink of clinical depression.

He has also launched legal action, filing a Notice of Claim — a precursor to a lawsuit — against the Lancaster Sheriff’s Station, alleging racial discrimination and negligence in handling his daughter’s disappearance. (Dawkins, his daughter, Bacon and Brown are all Jamaican-born blacks.) Officials say an internal-affairs investigation is also under way.

One of his attorneys, Abbas Kazerounian, says Dawkins’ legal team has enlisted a high-powered public relations firm, and is trying to involve activist Al Sharpton. Dawkins wants prosecutors to seek the death penalty for the two murders, but says pursuing legal action against the Sheriff’s Department is just as much a part of honoring his daughter’s memory.

Lancaster station commander Captain Carl Deeley defends the actions by deputies, saying that deputies interviewed Bacon and Crystal Dawkins at length before their deaths, after Crystal took her fears about Christopher Brown to them. Deeley says the mother, Bacon, “flat-out said there had been no violence in their relationship.” Moreover, deputies had no choice but to refuse Dawkins’ request that they enter the home on Price Lane, since they lacked any evidence that anyone was in danger, he says.

“I really feel horrible for him,” says Deeley. But “he’s looking for someone to blame, and the person to blame is the person who’s in custody now.”

Dawkins describes the experience as a “living hell” in a life that has seen significant low points. In 1989, he served jail time on drug possession charges and ended up homeless. While living in New York’s subways, he was approached by law enforcement officials seeking a street informant, and Dawkins ultimately infiltrated a Jamaican organized crime ring. Later, he was the star witness in a trial that led to Darryl Whiting’s conviction and life sentence.

Now, Dawkins says, he has to pursue a promise to his daughters that he made in happier times: “I have to live unto my responsibility... I will always be there for my children.”

Maddie McCann Disappearance

2007-10-06T09:10:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I amaze myself. I haven't said anything about the biggest child abduction story in years. 4-year old Maddie McCann disappeared one evening from her parents' rented condo in a Portuguese beach town while they were out to dinner with friends. At first it was treated as a kidnapping, but months later, based on odd DNA evidence in a car rented later among other things, the Portuguese judicial police have now decided that the parents are suspects - that they may have murdered their child, accidentally, and then covered it up. The campaign has produced global coverage, a huge media campaign by the bereaved parents, huge blogging and commentary pro and con, and an audience with the pope, among other things. I've been following the story in the British and French papers.

I've just read the best article so far, by Anne Enright in the London Review of Books. All the big themes are there: love mixed with hate, anger as death wish, parenting and rage, guilt and denial, the eternal presence of Lady Macbeth, our will to kill, our will to be very very normal.
Plus, for English majors, there are great close readings that really get to the social and psychological heart of things.

Phil Noir

2007-09-21T01:22:00.000-07:00

A report on the deadlock in the Phil Spector murder trial:

Hanging a jury, listening to Phil Spector’s basement tapes
By STEVEN MIKULAN, LA Weekly

“THE JURY BELIEVES THEY ARE HUNG.”

The air suddenly went out of Department 106 when Judge Larry Paul Fidler told the courtroom Tuesday afternoon that the Phil Spector trial jury was deadlocked. Apprehension had been building with each passing day that the nine men and three women were at an impasse. Then, about 11 a.m. this morning, court media and spectators were jolted by two buzzes from the jury room — indicating the jurors had a question for the judge. (Three buzzes would have meant they had reached a verdict.)

The mood in court quickly changed over the next few hours from one of drowsy tedium to nervous dread as the case’s prosecutors, defense lawyers and, finally, Spector himself arrived at the Criminal Courts Building for the afternoon “proceeding” that had been called by Judge Fidler. Deputy D.A.s Alan Jackson and Pat Dixon looked ashen and showed none of the ambling self-confidence that had marked their many presentations and cross-examinations. Members of Team Spector also looked as though they expected disaster.

The judge then summoned the jurors and asked their foreman, Juror 10, if he thought some rereading of testimony or instructions would help the jury move toward a unanimous decision.

“We discussed that at some length,” the foreman, who is a county civil engineer, said flatly. “At this time, I don’t believe anything else will change.”

Fidler polled all the jurors, finding several who disagreed — three indicated that it might help if the judge would clarify the difference between “doubt” and “reasonable doubt.”

Another bombshell dropped when the foreman revealed a 7-5 schism among the jurors — the deadlock, in other words, was not the result of some 11-1 holdout, but an almost even split. While many assume the 7-5 divide was in favor of conviction, there is no evidence of that. Although the jurors avoided eye contact with media and spectators as they filed into court, this was not a case of jury indecision. Its 12 members were very decisive — so much so that none would change their minds after four ballots.
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After sending the jurors and alternates home for the day, Fidler asked lawyers for both sides to submit arguments to him Wednesday regarding what kind of instructions he will give the jury. He can, as the defense called upon him to do, declare a mistrial. But this is unlikely, given the five months that have gone into the trial. He can read back certain instructions and further explain the intricacies of doubt and reasonable doubt, although, as he said after the jury had been dismissed, this “seldom produces positive effects.” Or he can reverse his own earlier ruling and permit the jury to consider Spector liable for the lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter.

Some might say that Judge Fidler has himself to blame for the deadlock. By insisting on an all-or-nothing decision on second-degree murder, he made it harder for jurors to send an old man to prison for the rest of his life — something they were reluctant to do after his lawyers had planted enough doubt about Spector’s guilt in their minds. The odds are on Fidler now allowing Spector to face this lesser charge, which means the lawyers for both sides would have to present new closing arguments, tailored around involuntary manslaughter, on Thursday morning.

Phil Spector didn’t blink when Fidler announced the impasse, and the defense retinue retained its stony-faced façade all the way to the elevators after court was dismissed. Still, they must have been secretly rejoicing.

“We’re not allowed to speak to the media,” said one member of the entourage. “But if one of us did, it would be to say that the absence of bad news is good news.”

BEFORE TUESDAY’S DEADLOCK, the days had been long ones for Department 106 court watchers. Friday morning arrived with grave disappointment when some panel members filed in wearing jeans and T-shirts — indicating they were more likely to spend the weekend at Lake Havasu than announce a verdict and face the media. In the courtroom, a few journalists read newspapers or whispered comments to each other while trying not to draw reprimands from bailiffs or court media handlers. Occasionally, we’d drift upstairs to the 18th-floor press office next to the D.A.’s office, where there’s a TV and DVD player. Vanity Fair’s Dominick Dunne obtained and donated for viewing a 1967 I Dream of Jeannie episode co-starring Phil Spector as himself. The L.A. Times’ Peter Hong delivered Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Lana Clarkson’s first film) and the Godfather trilogy (intra-oral gunshot homicide in the second film); City News Service’s Ciarán McEvoy brought in Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which also features a gun-in-mouth murder. More important, the Meyer movie’s freakish, homicidal character, Ronnie “Z-Man” Barzell, was supposedly modeled on Spector.

Dunne caused a stir Friday when a group of TV and radio reporters heard him discuss, outside the courtroom, videotapes made by Spector and his then-assistant, Michelle Blaine, in which Spector walked through possible alibi scenarios. Dunne, in his October Vanity Fair article, wrote about how these tapes were rumored to have been shot at the Beverly Hills Hotel over the course of eight days immediately following Clarkson’s death — but declared the rumor to be untrue. (The tapes were actually made a year later and not at the hotel.) Nevertheless, local media, in the dry white season of waiting, jumped on the news as though it were true.

Friday was also the day O.J. Simpson arose from the ashes of oblivion, when he was accused in Las Vegas of coercing the return of sports memorabilia that he claimed belonged to him but was in the unlawful possession of a collector. The L.A. media went into meltdown mode over this story, which, in an ironic twist, veteran Associated Press reporter Linda Deutsch, who covers Spector’s trial every day, recounted a conversation she’d had with Simpson, in which the Juice told his side of the Las Vegas debacle. Suddenly, Deutsch’s voice was heard every 15 minutes on radio — not about Spector, but Simpson, a specter who still haunts this town.

The instant eclipse of Spector by Simpson demonstrated just how little the music producer’s trial means to the public, and reminds me of the time nearly every reporter covering Robert Blake’s murder trial two years ago fled Blake’s courtroom to watch the arrival of superstar Mel Gibson at another room in the Van Nuys courthouse. There was an attempt by NBC’s Dateline program (www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032600/) to glam up the Spector case last week with a hilariously cheesy “special.” Tongue-in-cheekily narrated by Keith Morrison, the documentary substituted ironic captions for analysis and video manipulation for intellectual focus.

“She grew up in Northern California,” Morrison’s voice intoned, “tall and pretty and hungry for fame.”

And, if this hoary narrative weren’t enough:

“But Hollywood, as every child should be taught early on, is often a cruel town.”

The big gag, of course, is that Juror No. 2 is himself a Dateline producer and will no doubt be a font of insider knowledge once the program does a post-verdict special.

JUST BEFORE THE JURY began its deliberations, Judge Larry Paul Fidler handed down a gag order against Spector and his wife, Rachelle. The latter had earned the judge’s wrath for going before Court TV cameras almost immediately after an earlier Fidler admonition against speaking to the media about the case. When Fidler brought down the hammer on Rachelle, she spoke up in court.

“And that’s all right for Louis and all the other bad people to go out and say stuff?” Rachelle called out from her seat, referring to one of Spector’s adopted sons.

Fidler, like the suddenly exposed Wizard of Oz, was shocked and angered that anyone in the gallery would even consider speaking to the robe, let alone in this tone. He immediately warned her against repeating such insolence — only to hear Rachelle reply again.

“You’re talking to me,” Rachelle sputtered. “I’m not allowed to respond?”

After giving her a final warning, the judge turned his attention to Phil Spector, ordering him and any “surrogates” from speaking to the press. The source of Fidler’s ire was a long interview with Spector that had appeared the day before in London’s Sunday Mail, in which the Wall of Sound creator accused the judge of not liking him and questioning that his case could be fairly heard “by 12 people who voted for Bush.”

Spector’s lawyers responded that he did not say these things, and, in fact, the interviewer, Vikram Jayanit, who is making a Spector documentary for BBC and often sits in court with Rachelle, claims that what the Mail ran was an unauthorized edit of a pretrial interview with Spector. The damage had been done, however, and Fidler threatened the Spectors with contempt penalties if they opened their mouths again, on the grounds that he would view future interviews as attempts to influence the jury.

However, Fidler’s authority to gag the spouse of a defendant in a criminal trial — a spouse who is not involved with the defense team — seems iffy, at best. One former federal prosecutor I spoke to says she cannot recall any instance in which a judge has barred a spouse from speaking to the press. Both the ACLU attorney Peter Eliasberg and the First Amendment Project’s executive director, David Greene, told me that Fidler’s move raised freedom-of-speech questions and seemed to go beyond what was necessary to protect the jury’s objectivity, especially since it has not been sequestered. Erwin Chemerinsky, Duke University professor and in-out-now-back-in-again dean of UC Irvine’s law school in waiting, went further.

“I think the judge has no jurisdiction to gag Phil Spector’s wife,” Chemerinsky said. “She isn’t a party in his courtroom, and I think it’s unconstitutional to gag her. But the honest answer is that there’s no Supreme Court case and the law is very unsettled about this.”

THERE WILL BE OTHER DIVERSIONS besides old DVDs to turn to as the jury tries to overcome its impasse. Some of these can be found in the transcripts of tapes made at an Alhambra Police Department interrogation room after Spector’s arrest. The give and take between the outraged and confused suspect and Alhambra P.D. Detective Esther Pineda reads like the peripatetic dialogue of a David Mamet play — or the Three Stooges. Most of the pages of conversation consist of Spector claiming he hasn’t made his three allotted phone calls, when the cops say he has. There are also Spector’s requests to see his personal assistant, Michelle Blaine, as well as friends Romy Davis and bodyguard Jay Romaine — seemingly unmindful that as a prisoner he cannot summon and meet with them as though they were guests at his castle. And, of course, there’s Spector’s belligerent denial of wrongdoing in the death of Lana Clarkson, for whom he shows zero pity. Detective Pineda sounds woefully deferential — almost cowed.

J’Accuse!

SPECTOR: This is nonsense. You people have had me here for six fucking hours, maybe nine hours. And you have me locked up like some goddamn fucking turd in some fucking piece of shit. And you treat me — and then while this person eats and shits and farts — and you have me jerking around. And when somebody comes over to my fucking house who pretends to be security at the House of Blues and comes over to my house — remember, I own the House of Blues. Where this lady pretended to work, okay? And then just blows her fucking head open in my fucking house and then comes and — and then — and then you people come around and — and arrest me and bang the shit out of my fucking ass and beat the shit out of me and then you pretend and arrest me and then pretend like you’re fucking Alhambra.

And the — the Mayor of Alhambra wants me to have Bono come and sing at the anniversary of — bullshit. This is nonsense. This is absolute fucking nonsense.

I don’t know what the fucking lady — what her problem is, but she wasn’t a security at the House of Blues and she’s a piece of shit. And I don’t know what her fucking problem was, but she certainly had no right to come to my fucking castle, blow her fucking head open, and [unintelligible] a murder. What the fuck is wrong with you people?

Return to Gender

PINEDA: Hold on. Okay. All right. Just a minute. Let’s slow things down. He wants to speak to the people that are here. Now, Michelle Blaine is unavailable, but the Romaine guy — or Romy?

UV2 [Unidentified Voice 2]: Uh-huh.

PINEDA: He is at the front counter.

UV2: Female.

PINEDA: Romy?

UV2: Uh-huh.

PINEDA: Okay . . . because Jay Romy, or Romaine, is at the front counter.

UV2: That’s a male.

PINEDA: That’s a male?

UV2: Uh-huh.

PINEDA: Now, this Romy person is a female?

UV2: Uh-huh.

PINEDA: Okay. Let me . . .

UV2: Sounds like a girl.

PINEDA: Okay. Let me — well, the guy that I spoke to doesn’t really sound like a guy.

UV2: [Laughs.]

You’re Kiddin’ Me, Right?

SPECTOR: I’m being charged with murder?

PINEDA: Yes. That’s one of the things that [unintelligible] . . .

SPECTOR: Of whom?

PINEDA: Okay. Well, I — I don’t have her name yet, but, um, have you contacted your attorney?

SPECTOR: No. I haven’t been allowed to do a damn thing. That’s why I wanted to talk to . . .

PINEDA: Okay.

SPECTOR: . . . uh, Jay and Michelle.

PINEDA: Okay.

SPECTOR: Can’t I talk to Jay and Michelle . . .

PINEDA: I . . .

SPECTOR: . . . first?

PINEDA: Umm, Michelle — you can’t talk to ’cause she’s talking to somebody else right now. And Jay — I’ll — I’ll see what I can arrange with the jail because the law says . . .

SPECTOR: Can I just talk to Jay and Michelle, um, in — in . . .

PINEDA: You can’t.

SPECTOR: . . . in a room?

PINEDA: We can’t bring them inside the jail. But . . .

SPECTOR: Oh, I can go out.

The Art of Compromise

PINEDA: Tell you what I’m going to do. I . . .

SPECTOR: What?

PINEDA: I said, “Tell you what I’m going to do.” I . . .

SPECTOR: Yeah. I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna be fucking — somebody’s gonna pay for the fucking — I have been locked up for the fucking last twelve fucking hours. And you fucking people come in my house and rummage through my fucking house, and you ties me down like a fucking pig and, you know, while somebody’s dying there. And, you know, and — and — and — and — and it scared the shit out of everybody — while somebody commits suicide.

PINEDA: Mr. Spector, go ahead and have a seat. I am going to call Ms. Davis back. You can talk to her on this phone when the phone rings.

SPECTOR: I just wanna get the fuck outta here.

What Is to Be Done?

SPECTOR: Charge me with murder. Fuck this.

PINEDA: Hand me the phone. Hi, Ms. Davis. This is Detective Pineda with the Alhambra Police Department. Um, Mr. Spector is a little bit agitated with, uh, us being here. And he didn’t answer my question as to whether...

SPECTOR: [unintelligible]

PINEDA: . . . he would accept the call from you. So I thought out of courtesy, since you were gonna be able to get a hold of Mr. Shapiro, that I’m gonna put the call through. I told him he needs to pick up the phone if — when it rings. So if it just keeps ringing and ringing, it’s because he’s not picking it up, and you can disconnect the phone and then call us back. Now, hold — let me put you on hold to figure out exactly what needs to be done.

Talk to Her

PINEDA: Mr. Spector, come on over. Mr. Spector, do you wanna talk to a detective? I’m a detective. I understand you wanna speak to a detective.

SPECTOR: I would like to have my phone call first.

PINEDA: Oh, you don’t wanna speak to a detective?

SPECTOR: No. I want . . .

PINEDA: Okay. Then I’m gonna go . . . It’s almost 12:00. It’s a quarter to 12:00. Okay. I thought you wanted to speak to a detective.

SPECTOR: Oh, I was — no. I thought they wanted to talk to me, but I would like to make a . . .

PINEDA: Oh, I do want to talk to you.

If James Bond Had Been a Double Agent

2007-08-28T23:46:00.000-07:00

I've posted a entertaining review of what sounds like a good page-turner about the life and antics of Eddie Chapman, World War II double agent, career criminal, famous seducer, film extra, adventurer, celebrity, and the subject of more than one movie in his time. He came from the Depression-era coalfields of the English midlands, was trained by both British and German intelligence, spoke many languages, had a photographic memory, and was rich and poor by turns. Quite a mid-century life of the man who described himself as always an "honest villain."

Iain Banks's "Complicity"

2007-08-28T00:49:00.001-07:00

This is a novel I picked up when I was in Edinburgh in July. I've always liked Banks, who's part of a wave of Scottish and UK writers who are verbally more headlong, inventive, and crazy than their more decorous American counterparts (e.g. the eloquent but oddly confined Jonathan Franzen). Complicity came out in 1993, and tells the story of a group of college friends who came of age under Margaret Thatcher: by the time the book's action begins, they are in their mid-30s. The main character, Cameron, is a slightly crank-addicted whisky swilling investigative journalist who's trying to quit smoking and not O.D. on Intel 486-era video games. He works for a newspaper much like The Scotsman, headquartered in Edinburgh. He's having a hot and twisted, long-term affair with a college friend's wife. His closest childhood friend, Andy, joined the military, served in the Falklands War against Argentina (HMS Antelope sinks in the picture), became a start-up millionaire back in London, but has sold everything and is living as a recluse in a deteriorating former hotel in the Western Highlands.

The book is a thriller: Cameron the journalist is getting calls from a military "Deep Throat" source who claims that a series of suicides in the intelligence community were actually murders. He is getting burnt out by various wild-goose chases and goes to visit Andy in his gloomy, cavernous ruin somewhere near the Isle of Skye. The chapters describing his various sex, drugs, and reporter escapes are interspersed with scenes in which an unknown assailant kills one wealthy creep after another, though in a couple of cases stopping with mere humiliation. The killer's chapters are told in the second person: the book's first sentence is, "You hear the car after an hour and a half."

This continues through the first half of the novel. Around that time, the cops come to question Cameron in their investigation of the murders. The reason: a while earlier, Cameron had written a guest column in a magazine in which he named several right-wing powerbrokers who deserved worse than they got. The column was called "Radical Equaliser." And every name Cameron mentioned had been either beaten or killed.

Cameron is superpissed at Thatcherite parasites - speculators, arms dealers, the billionaire pillagers of the villagers. His column read like this (the cop quoting it to back to him in the police station):

Perhaps somebody should make one of these programmes for those of us who're fed up seeing the usual suspects get theirs (corrupt landlords, substance-abusing youths and of course the inevitable drug dealers; reprehensible villains all, no doubt, but too predictable, too safe) and introduce a Real Avenger, a Radical Equaliser who'll take on some alternative hate-figures. Somebody who'll give people like James Anderton, Judge Jamieson and Sir Toby Bissett a taste of their own medicine, somebody who'll attack the asset strippers and the arms smugglers (ministers of HMG included - listening, Mr Persimmon?); somebody who'll stand up against the tycoons who put their profits before others' safety, like Sir Rufus Carter; somebody who'll punish the captains of industry who parrot that time-honoured phrase about their shareholders' interests coming first as they close down profitable factories and throw thousands out of work, just so that their already comfortable investors in the Home Countries and Marbella can make that little bit extra that always comes in so handy darling when you're thinking about trading up to a 7-series Beamer or moving the gin-palace to a more expensive mooring.

Did Cameron actually kill them? Unlikely, of course: he does enough speed to do it, but he lives too much in his head. Someone who knows him well did do these crimes. If it's not actually Cameron himself, then who? As his relations with the cops take a sudden bad turn, Cameron has to solve their cases for them, which he does in a long series of flashbacks that take him back to his childhood, other parts of Scotland, other conversations about the undercurrents of Thatcherite England.

It would be interesting to know whether Banks saw the unknown Canadian masterpiece Clearcut (1991), which came out two years before his novel. In that film, a progressive city lawyer is offered a chance to move from complaint to direct action, and the film is brilliantly ruthless in showing just how unwilling he is to turn words to deeds. A pairing is set up between a main figure who thinks, writes, and rages, and an alterego who acts on the thought, and who may or may not be the main figure himself.

Both film and book are great at showing what the deeds actually look like. They look like what we now call terrorism. They create terror. And, unlike newspaper columns, terrorism makes an immediate difference.

Here's the voice of the (affluent, well-educated, Scottish) terrorist:

You know the evidence: the world already produces . . . we already produce enough food to feed every starving child on earth, but still a third of them go to bed hungry. And it is our fault; that starvation's caused by debtor countries having to abandon their indigenous foods to grow cash crops to keep the World Bank or the IMF or Barclays happy, or to service debts run up by murdering thugs who slaughtered their way into power and slaughtered their way through it, usually with the connivance and help of one part of the developed world or another.

We could have something perfectly decent right now - not Utopia, but a fairly equitable world state where there was no malnutrition and no terminal diarrhoea and nobody died of silly wee diseases like measles - if we all really wanted it, if we weren't so greedy, so racist, so bigoted, so basically self-centered. Fucking hell, even that self-centeredness is farcically stupid; we know smoking kills people but we still let the drug barons of BAT and Philip Morris and Imperial Tobacco kill their millions and make their billions; smart, educated people like us know smoking kills but we still smoke ourselves!

. . . The point is, there's no feasible excuse for what we are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others.

Complicity asks the classic Noir questions:

Are you OK with the law of the Strong ruling and destroying the Weak?
If not, what are you going to do?
Will anything you do work against the Strong - anything except violence?

Or in Clearcut's formulation: you dreamed anger, and your anger is real.

The Tragic Intersection of Two Families

2007-08-28T00:45:00.000-07:00

I've posted a piece from the LA Times about a "gang killing" in Pico Rivera - a piece with unusual depth and decent sympathy for both of the two main families involved, including the one from which the most recent shooters came. The victim, Maria Elena Hicks, is shown at left. R.I.P. for a woman who worked endlessly and looked out for her town all of her life.

Mafia Erupts Again

2007-08-24T04:02:00.001-07:00

On August 15, 2007, a machine gun assault killed six Italian mobsters in an Italian restaurant in the western German city of Duisburg. Germany was alarmed, to put it mildly. The story got coverage all over the world, and included this summary from Japan Today:

German and Italian authorities say the gangland killing was a vendetta against a 25-year-old man identified as Marco Marmo who was suspected of shooting the wife of a crime family boss on Christmas Day 2006.

Her death heated up a bloody quarrel between the rival Nirta-Strangio and Vottari-Pelle clans based in the southern region of Calabria, who have been feuding since a 1991 Valentine's Day brawl.

However, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported that the massacre was actually linked to a battle for control of the market for Colombian narcotics.

The deputy prosecutor in Reggio di Calabria, Nicola Gratteri, warned that more bloodshed was likely still to come.

All the classic elements are here: the eternal cycle of kill and be killed and kill again, the permanence of the vedentas, the tangle of money and sociopathic rage. The deeper money story is probably arms trafficking, a competitive but lucrative business in a world awash in arms of every kind and endlessly at war.

The LA Times ran a backgrounder today, with a familiar but well-done storyline of towns both complicit and held hostage by interlocking tribes of warring men. Note the crucial subtheme: mafias and poverty go hand in hand. The law of the gun blocks social development, period - always and forever.

Reminds me of my favorite obscure book title: "Men are Not Cost Effective."

the backgrounder follows below. Noir: the kernel of the Real.

***

Killings cast light on an Italian mob
The residents of San Luca bury five young men killed in a feud as the 'Ndrangheta drug cartel gets unwanted scrutiny.

By Tracy Wilkinson and Maria De Cristofaro
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

August 24, 2007

SAN LUCA, ITALY — Three coffins were delivered to a waiting town just before dusk. Old men and women, their tough-looking sons and their grieving neighbors filled the main square and stood in near silence as church bells tolled and a police helicopter hovered above.

Then the people of San Luca, home to a raging mob feud, broke into steady and loud applause as each coffin was carried into the Santa Maria della Pieta church and laid on an altar awash in white roses and lilies.

Funerals were held Thursday here and in a nearby town for five of the six Italian men killed last week in a machine-gun ambush in Germany, part of what authorities said was a battle involving factions of one of Italy's least known but most powerful criminal gangs, the 'Ndrangheta. The group, which has grown stronger and wealthier in recent years as it shifted from kidnappings to drug and weapons trafficking, is said to take in tens of billions of dollars in illicit revenue annually.

Fearing reprisal killings, police inspected cars arriving at the funerals Thursday and banned the traditional procession from the church to the cemetery. But some relatives vowed not to avenge but to forgive -- wearing white instead of black.

The slayings outside a pizzeria in Duisburg, Germany, cast a spotlight on the highly secretive drug cartel that is based here in the Calabria region of southern Italy. They also stunned Italians because of the level of brutality (one of the dead was just 16) and the way in which the violence had spilled onto foreign soil.

"We have hit bottom," Father Giuseppe Strangio said as he prepared to eulogize Francesco Giorgi, the 16-year-old, and two others. "Something has got to change."

Choosing unusually blunt language, the priest, who shares a last name with one of the feuding clans, implored his congregation to choose justice and "not the weapons of hatred and vendetta."

"My request -- my appeal -- is that we condemn energetically any type of Mafia," he said. "We must condemn and rebel against this evil that perverts the good in each one of us. . . . We are all responsible."

Some in the congregation cast their eyes downward as the priest spoke. Most of the mourners filling the pews were women, with a few rows of men in the back. Several hundred grim-faced men, and more women, stood outside through the hour-long service.

In the 'Ndrangheta's tight-knit and insular culture, it is often said that the women determine the spilling of blood and the waging of vendettas. At the funeral here, both Francesco's mother, Teresa, and the mother of another of the dead men, Marco Marmo, said they were prepared to forgive the killers.

If that proves sincere, another bloodbath that many officials fear might be averted. But some authorities remained convinced that the rancor would continue to fester and eventually explode again.

Police believe Marmo was the intended target of the Aug. 15 hit, with the other five victims becoming collateral damage when the group left the pizzeria together after a birthday party. Marmo had fled to Germany a few days before the ambush purportedly to escape threatened retaliation.

The San Luca feud, as it is known, began 16 years ago when families fought over something involving carnival celebrations. Roughly one person a year was killed until 2000, when something of a truce took effect.

But last Christmas, the feud erupted anew when a gunman (possibly Marmo, according to police) attempted to kill the leader of one clan over disputes in the drug business. The gunman failed, but killed the man's wife, unleashing another spasm of violence.

This kind of internecine killing is, in a way, a mere sideshow to the gigantic business that the 'Ndrangheta manages.

Authorities say the 'Ndrangheta (pronounced en-DRAHN-geh-tah) controls an illicit empire that hauls in an estimated $50 billion annually from drug and weapons trafficking, extortion and counterfeiting. By dealing directly with Colombian cartels and nudging out other competitors, the 'Ndrangheta now has a near monopoly on the cocaine trade in Europe, according to Nicola Gratteri, lead anti-mob prosecutor in Calabria.

Though the Sicily-based Cosa Nostra has dominated the headlines and popular culture for a generation, it has in reality been eclipsed by its Calabrian counterpart in terms of power and wealth, Gratteri said.

Like other crime syndicates, the 'Ndrangheta emerged two centuries ago and evolved after World War II, in part as a protection racket in sorely neglected southern Italy. Its name derives from a Greek word meaning heroism or virtue. It also made big scores by kidnapping the children of Italian industrialists and other wealthy families.

(One of the most notorious cases was the 1973 abduction in Rome of the grandson of J. Paul Getty. His kidnappers cut off his ears and mailed them to a newspaper before a ransom eventually won his release.)

Eventually the 'Ndrangheta halted the kidnappings, which brought undesired police scrutiny, and shifted to drugs and smuggling. A key to its success has been its ability to maintain a low profile and to co-opt local politicians, even as it spread its criminal branches beyond southern Italy to the rest of Europe and to Australia and Latin America.

Another key is its structure, which is almost completely based on family. Couples are generally encouraged to have five or more children to give the syndicate an ample pool of trusted foot soldiers. Families often intermarry, as well, to maintain the networks. This makes the 'Ndrangheta far more impenetrable than other crime syndicates, authorities say. Several years ago when the government offered reduced sentences to those who would turn state's evidence, more than 1,000 Cosa Nostra members accepted. But fewer than 50 turncoats have presented themselves from the 'Ndrangheta, Gratteri said.

"To say anything, a turncoat from the 'Ndrangheta would have to talk about 300 relatives," Gratteri, a prosecutor for 18 years, said during an interview in his armored BMW as he drove to an appointment. His bodyguards followed in two police cars.

"They are harder than granite. They are the most compact and the less visible, but by far the most dangerous."

Whatever great fortunes the Calabrian mob is amassing, they are not visible here in its homeland, where Calabria's spectacular if shoddily developed coast gives way just a few miles inland to jagged mountains covered with olive trees and cactus.

San Luca, a town that could not be called pretty, sits haphazardly along these ridges at the edge of the Aspromonte range. Its roads are rutted, its trash uncollected. Some houses that started to fall down were left that way; others were halted in mid-construction. There are scores of cars with German license plates, and no outward signs of wealth or even prosperity.

Authorities say the riches are invested elsewhere, in affluent northern Italy and other parts of Europe. It leaves this area as desolate as ever, fertile ground for criminal organizations and despair.

"Young people especially are forced to leave. There is no work and no education," said a 20-year-old bartender named Giuseppe.

The day before the funerals, the people of San Luca eyed visitors with angry suspicion. They were fed up with prying journalists, resentful of being portrayed as a nest of gangsters and, presumably, were on the lookout for any stranger who might try to carry out the revenge that most people were predicting.

San Luca, like a few rural Italian communities, clings to traditions. Knots of men sat outside cafes, played cards, drank beer and swapped stories in the town's unkempt plazas. Nary a woman was in sight.

"We are honest people," a shopkeeper in her 40s said as she scolded a journalist to "write the truth."

Like everyone spoken to, she would not give her name and mentioned being terrified no fewer than three times in a 20-minute conversation. "Just because there are four or five jerks," she said, "the whole town is criminalized."

But when asked about the upcoming funeral, she said she would be there. Out of "solidarity," she confided.

wilkinson@latimes.com

King of Noir

2007-08-06T01:17:00.000-07:00

That would be this man, John Le Carre, who defined the Cold War thriller with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and who has never let up. His last books have focused on Africa - in this case, the eastern Congo where it borders on Rwanda. The forces at work there are the same as those he found underlying the Cold War, the ones we've been calling "noir."

My friend Elizabeth Robinson gave me Le Carre's new book, The Mission Song, for my birthday last September, but I didn't have time to read it until last week when I was in Vienna, where Hapsburg imperial history has been lovingly preserved and traces of the Cold War completely erased. This is a appropriate enough, since for Le Carre postcolonial African history is an extension of both the colonial period and the Cold War overlay.

The novel is told in the first person by a professional interpreter who is called in to work at a secret summit among rival leaders of an area in the eastern Congo that has been plundered by Rwandans to the east and the Congolese capital "fatcats" in Kinshasa 2000 kilometers to the west. The point of the summit is for the rival parties to come together under a new leader and create the conditions for peaceful trade and prosperous development. The sponsor is, importantly, not the British government acting openly, but a nameless business consortium run by apparently realistic idealists who, aware of the facts on the ground, will do well by doing good - well by minerals, good by a new elder statesman come to unite.

I had trouble getting through the first 50 pages because the narrator is such a prat (the Britishism means ass, but, at least in my mind, an ass who binds with elites and looks down on regular people). He is of mixed race, cultures, and nationalities, and in part because he grew up in an interesting crossroads in Central Africa speaks maybe a dozen languages with a perfect ear. But then, as in all Le Carre novels, and in life, the trap door opens and the ride begins.

I won't say more about the plot, which has Le Carre's trademark of multiple reversals. The book is quite good at laying out the standard rules of noir, which came originally as much from Le Carre as from Hammett or Chandler or anyone else:
Rule 1: the official story is a cover story.
Rule 2: to understand anything, you have to stop hearing only what you want to hear.
Rule 3: rulers seek only money and power
Rule 4: rulers admire coercive force, believe in it, and will always use it.
Rule 5: your opposition to any of this, when it becomes effective, will put you in mortal danger.

One of the leaders being forced to the table by the syndicate spells all this out in a compact way. He is being coerced into saying who his contacts in Kinshasa are, and he replies like this:

You want to know who they are, these wise guys in Kinshasa I spoke to? Your fucking friends! . . . the fatcats [your guy] won't have anything to do with till he's built Jerusalem in Kivu! [eastern Congo] You know what they call themselves, this band of altruistic public servants when they're swilling beer and screwing whores and deciding which kind of Mercedes to buy? - the Thirty Per Cent Club. What's thirty per cent? Thirty per cent is the People's Portion that they propose to award themselves in exchange for favours they are granting to the Middle Path. It's the piece of this crappy operation that persuades arseholes like my father that they can build schools and roads and hospitals while they line their fucking pockets. What do these fatcats have to do to earn themselves the People's Portion? What they like to do best: nothing. Look the other way. Tell their troops to stay in their barracks and stop raping people for a few days.

[Now pretending to speak to the new hero-leader backed by the corporation: "No problem. . . You want to stage a couple of riots in Bukavu and Goma, take the place over ahead of the elections, kick out the Rwandans and start a little war? No problem! You want to grab Kavumu airport, play the minerals game, steal the stockpiles, take them to Europe and depress the world market with a short-sell? Do it! One small detail. We distribute the People's Portion, not you. And how we distribute it is our fucking business. You want your [guy] to be Governor of South Kivu? He has our total, selfless support. Because every fucking building contract he awards, every road he thinks he's going to build and every fucking flower he plants along the Avenue Patrice Lumumba, we take one-third. And if you shit on us, we'll throw the constitutional book at you, we'll run you out of the country in your fucking underwear. Thank you for your time.

Le Carre has always excelled at setting up the binary oppositions by which we order our world: capitalist vs. communist, freedom vs. tyranny, civilized vs. savage. But with him it's always a set up. He gets us to ask the question, are we really the opposite of our enemy? Or do we resemble each other in some ways. We aren't the same as our enemy, or our appointed "other." But aren't we closer than we think? So here the question is, isn't London (or Washington DC) more like Kinshasa than we think?

Noir Rule 6: fighting the corruption of your enemy means first fighting it in yourself.

The Cloud of Unknowing

2007-07-12T03:40:00.000-07:00

I had a great time reading Elmore Leonard's Killshot from 1989, which I had somehow missed. It's fabulous formula work, with great dialogue and inner thinking seen in predators and heroes alike. The story is primal American frontier: wandering lunatic killers, whom Leonard makes vivid and coherent, are defeated by ordinary blue-collar folks, whom Leonard makes vivid and funny.

"America" is left entirely to one side, partly becasue it's mostly set in Canada and also because society is never really the issue for Leonard. Not so for lots of other crime writers, and Donna Leon is one of them. I just finished Uniform Justice (2003), which is both gripping and sad. "Italy" is absolutely at the center, and particularly the Italy of profoundly and apparently hopelessly bought-off government.

We find passages like this:

Brunetti thought of Parliament in the way most Italians thought of their mothers-in-law. Not due the loyalties created by ties of blood, a mother-in-law still demanded obedience and reverence while never behaving in a manner that would merit either. This alien presence, imposed upon a person's life by sheerest chance, made ever-increasing demands in return for the vain promise of domestic harmony. Resistance was futile, for opposition inevitably led to repercussions too devious to be foreseen.

The government is not there to help, develop, and support, but to skim and control. This fact about Italian government becomes a fact about the psychology of all the actors in the story. The mystery is about a particular act of corruption, but corruption itself, at the heart of Italian public life, chews away at everyone's soul.

In the end we do know "what happened" but we also see that no one can or will do anything about it. This is a more or less unacceptable attitude in the U.S. But what if we are just repressing it here? What if Americans actually feel the same way deep down - that the country has become essentially corrupt, and there is nothing to be done? Public figures, even the more pissed off among them, aren't there yet, but they are always behind. For anyone who is already there, better to read Leon than Leonard.

Better than Hiaasen

2007-06-02T23:04:00.000-07:00

A Defendant for the Defense, Following His Own Rules

By MICHAEL BRICK
June 2, 2007

An unwritten playbook seems to guide jailhouse lawyers: bring a dramatic flair, rant and rave, put the whole system on trial. Point your fingers. Wave your arms around. Grow a catawampus mane of wild-man hair if at all possible. Call out the police for laziness, the prosecutors for zealousness and the whole establishment for racism, sexism, ageism, xenophobia, catatonia and misanthropy. If all else fails, refuse to appear in the courtroom.

Gregory Zalevsky is not following the playbook. He plays for sympathy, not outrage, as both defendant and defense lawyer at his murder trial, which continues next week in state Supreme Court in Brooklyn.

“This case is very emotional, very personal, very sad,” Mr. Zalevsky told potential jurors on Wednesday, drawing one of many objections from the prosecutor. “The only other time I’ve felt similar pain is when my mother died in 1993.”

With an arsenal of bad posture and loud sighs, soft paunch and hushed, almost groveling tones, Mr. Zalevsky, 57, has turned his trial into something of a humility contest.

The case centers on the death of Irina Ilyina, 34, who prosecutors say was smothered and strangled inside Mr. Zalevsky’s apartment in Brighton Beach on July 4, 2004. Ms. Ilyina, a mother of two young girls, was dating Mr. Zalevsky while pursuing a divorce against Igor Orak, 36, the father of her two young daughters.

Mr. Orak, a real estate lawyer from New Jersey, had left his wife 12 days after their second child was born to take up with a woman he described in his testimony as “a stripper at a go-go bar in New Jersey.” Suggesting that Mr. Orak was the real killer, Mr. Zalevsky has portrayed himself as a wrongly accused lover, his grief compounded by the prosecution.

In court, his main adversary is Jonathan S. Kaye, an assistant district attorney with a jarhead haircut and the blocky features of a man who plainly knows how it feels to be punched in the face. Mr. Kaye has matched the defendant’s demeanor with a choice of soothing, schoolmasterly tones over harsh rhetoric.

“Does everybody think they’re able to focus on the issues of this case and not get distracted by extraneous things, such as the defendant representing himself?” he asked potential jurors. Later, he put his concern more bluntly: “I may come across as — not a bully, but — if he doesn’t follow the rules of evidence, it’s my obligation to object.”

At the defense table, Mr. Zalevsky sits beside Terence J. Sweeney, the third defense lawyer assigned to the case. In a series of open letters before the trial, Mr. Zalevsky accused Mr. Sweeney of anti-Semitism and insanity, asked to be addressed as “detainee” rather than inmate and called for the recusal of the judge, Justice Matthew J. D’Emic.

“The defendant further expresses a great disappointment with All Three of the former Attorneys appointed by the court,” Mr. Zalevsky wrote.

To Mr. Sweeney, who has maintained a sort of amused patience through it all, he signed off: “I wish you the best in the rest of your Fruitful career.”

But their engagement was not through. Justice D’Emic declined to recuse himself and assigned Mr. Sweeney to serve as a legal adviser, an arrangement the defendant seems to have accepted with a wary sort of resignation.

For jury selection, Mr. Zalevsky arrived from jail in striped slacks, tan socks, stitched shoes, tortoiseshell glasses and an aging sweater, all variants of blue or brown but none quite matching. He rubbed his lip idly, scanned the panel, scribbled notes and seemed to try to ignore Mr. Sweeney out of existence.

In quick succession, Justice D’Emic eliminated from the panel two victims of domestic violence, a man whose friend was murdered, a woman who proclaimed herself unable to accept the concept of reasonable doubt and another who claimed to be scared of Russian men. Mr. Zalevsky questioned the candidates, mostly about their marriages.

“Good job,” Mr. Sweeney told him, in a tone of proud surprise.

The chosen panel included 11 women and one man, at their fore a young nanny who said she skipped crime articles in newspapers to “try to limit my intake of, I guess, more tragic stories.”

As the trial began on Thursday, Mr. Zalevsky seemed edgy. He objected to the testing of a video screen, then interrupted the prosecutor’s opening statement eight times, once by objecting to being called the victim’s “boyfriend.”

After the sixth objection, Justice D’Emic told him, “I can’t really have you making speeches here in front of the jury.”

In his own opening statement, Mr. Zalevsky warned jurors that the trial would be emotional, offered condolences to the victim’s family and suggested that her husband “should be the one on trial here, instead of the defendant.”

As Mr. Kaye called his witnesses, Mr. Zalevsky conducted cross-examination from his seat. After the victim’s father, Arkady Ilyin, recounted searching for his daughter, Mr. Zalevsky opened his inquiry with, “I’d like to ask if he permits me to ask questions.”

Then the victim’s husband, Mr. Orak, took the stand. Mr. Zalevsky displayed similar deference, even while accusing him of abusing his wife, endangering his unborn child and standing to profit financially from the killing.

“Good morning,” Mr. Zalevsky began, eliciting little more than a glare. His questions explored love and death, the terms of divorce, the significance of Independence Day, the Russian cultural symbolism of certain colors in floral arrangements sent to Ms. Ilyina and a bizarre meeting on an airplane, where Mr. Zalevsky and Ms. Ilyina were seated across from Mr. Orak and his new companion, the stripper.

At the end of the day’s testimony, he stood, submitted to a pair of handcuffs and returned to jail, where he signs his legal correspondence, “Respectfully, Gregory Zalevsky, defendant.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

A Paradise for Opium

2007-05-29T11:25:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times had a good piece on the return of Afghanistan to its globally dominant position in opium production. The article is about the somewhat pathetic attempt on the part of the US to train local counternarcotic police - pathetic because opium production stems from the economic and political structure of the post-Taliban state of the country and not from the absence of an Afghani DEA. "Structure" is a euphemism for "chaos," a gangland warlord country created by the U.S. invasion and not fixed by it. Under the Taliban, Afghanistan's poppy cultivation was about 20% of the world total. Last year, the country's share was 92%.

It's more and redundant evidence of the pointlessness of replacing law enforcement with military invasion. Law only works with a strong civil society and governing structure, plus the full and even enthusiastic cooperation of the population on the ground. War destroys all this. You don't get to law through war.

And Then There's the Ones Dead in No War

2007-05-28T15:29:00.000-07:00

Grisly crimes alarming Japan
A series of killings in which the bodies were dismembered has unleashed a frenzy of self-examination.

By Bruce Wallace

TOKYO — It's not so much the news of a 17-year-old boy stabbing his mother to death that has shocked Japan, dominating chatter on tabloid TV for the last two weeks and sending shudders through a nation that prides itself on a low homicide rate.

The greater horror lies with what he did afterward. Having killed his mother as she slept, police say, the boy cut off her arm and head with a saw. Spray-painted her arm white and stuck it in a potted plant. Put her head in a sports bag and carried it with him to an Internet cafe, where he spent two hours watching rap music videos in a private booth.

He then took a taxi to a police station in his town in northern Japan, where he surrendered the head and told the officers, "It didn't matter who I killed."

Step by gruesome step, it's hard to imagine a more grisly crime.

Yet what unsettles many Japanese is that dismembering the body of a slaying victim, known here as barabara jiken or "scattered pieces incidents," no longer seems like such an aberration. Over the last several months, there has been a series of killings in which the bodies have been cut up or disposed of in sickening ways.

The disturbing crimes have unleashed a national frenzy of self-examination, with criminologists, politicians and anyone else with an opinion asking whether some macabre virus has infected contemporary Japanese society. It has given rise to suggestions that the killers were mimicking dismemberment scenes in best-selling novels and that the cause is the increasing divide between rich and poor in a society that once prided itself on egalitarianism.

These theories, based on little more than speculation but amplified by entranced media, have contributed to a sense that a country once bound by tight family and community ties is splintering into something alien.

"These recent murders are about self-validation: people murdering someone in order to fulfill an 'empty self,' " said Jinsuke Kageyama, a criminal psychologist. "The murderers recover their lost power by killing."

The recent savagery began in December, when a Tokyo woman confessed to killing her allegedly adulterous husband with a blow from a wine bottle and then cutting his body into pieces. The parts were found scattered across two city wards; his head was buried in a suburban park.

Less than a month later, a 21-year-old Tokyo man was accused of killing his younger sister. He claimed he lashed out violently after she belittled him for his failure to win acceptance to dental school. Police said he hacked her body into pieces and stuffed the parts into four garbage bags.

In March, the strangled body of a young, female English-language teacher from Britain was discovered buried in a sand-filled bathtub in a university student's Tokyo apartment. The suspect eluded a police raid and is still on the run.

The incident occurred around the time a verdict was reached in the trial of another Japanese man in the slaying of Lucie Blackman. The British woman, who was working as a Tokyo bar hostess, disappeared in July 2000. Authorities found her remains in 2001. The body had been dismembered and the head encased in concrete. Judges acquitted real estate developer Joji Obara in her death and dismemberment, saying there was no physical evidence linking him to Blackman's body.

And these aren't the only stories dominating media coverage. They have been accompanied by what seems to some a deluge of shocking crimes, from the random stabbing of a 2-year-old child by a woman in a Yokohama shopping mall, to a couple accused of dumping their toddler son's body on a mountainside after he suffocated in the helmet compartment of their motorcycle.

The recent mayhem in a country with a low homicide rate, which has been falling, has commentators scrambling for explanations. Some criminologists argue that socially dysfunctional students go unnoticed in a school system in which docility and acute shyness are regarded as normal.

Others see a copycat syndrome, pointing to novels such as the 1998 bestseller "Out," in which a wife kills her abusive husband and then conscripts three female co-workers to help dismember the body for easier disposal.

Corporate restructuring that ended the jobs-for-life era also has been cited as a possible cause. So too the tunnel vision produced by playing violent video games. Some ruling party politicians said the burst of gore underscored the legitimacy of their campaign to restore what they say are lost Japanese values: love of family and love of country.

"We are witnessing the deterioration of Japanese society," lawmaker Tsuneo Suzuki told parliament. "We must stem this appalling destruction of family and community morals."

Yet the record shows that dismembering bodies is neither unique to Japan nor a newly arrived phenomenon. Dismemberment took place in the Edo period (1603-1868), said Mark Schreiber, an American who is a longtime resident of Japan and the author of two books on the history of sensational crime in the country. He said random slashings of innocent passersby occurred regularly during the Showa era (1926-89) and that the Taisho period (1912-26) had its record of sadistic, gory crimes.

Even the national tabloid-induced panic is nothing new. Ten years ago, a 14-year-old killer deposited the severed head of an 11-year-old child at the gates of an elementary school in Kobe, and taunted police and citizens with threats to kill again before he was finally caught.

Nor is dismemberment unknown outside Japan. The savage 1947 slaying of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles, the Black Dahlia case, remains one of America's most infamous, and both Canada and Britain were scandalized by multiple dismemberment killings in the 1990s.

The conflict in the Middle East also has produced a numbing abundance of political and religiously inspired beheadings, many recorded and available for viewing on the Internet.

"There's a lot of mindless mayhem out there all over the world, and I don't know what you can really read into it," Schreiber said. "People are just freaking out. And they are using whatever they can get their hands on that's lethal."

Individual motives in the recent Japanese killings vary widely. The British teacher appears to have been stalked and her killer was trying to hide the evidence of his crime. The 17-year-old who killed his mother allegedly claimed any victim would do, and made no attempt to evade capture. The Tokyo wife told police that her husband was abusing her; she cut up his body, the media reported, because she simply couldn't physically dispose of him all at once.

Even if culture was the cause, the fault may not rest solely with Japan. Violence and sadism are not unique to this nation: American pop culture, from Bret Easton Ellis to "The Sopranos," also includes scenes of dismemberment.

"Sure you have Japanese kids who pour themselves into the fantasies of their computers," said Jimmy Sakoda, 71, a former Los Angeles Police Department homicide investigator who had close ties to Japanese police during his career. "But because of the Internet, these kids are just as likely to be influenced by American movies or rap lyrics as by homegrown stuff."

That's why many observers are reluctant to lay blame for such extreme cases on Japan's social ills.

"When someone dismembers a body, that's total hatred," Sakoda said. "That's when killing's not enough. It's hate beyond reason."

bruce.wallace@latimes.com

*

Hisako Ueno of The Times' Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-crimes27may27,1,755679.story

The Princess of Burundi

2007-05-26T18:14:00.000-07:00

This is a crime novel by Kjell Eriksson that appeared in Sweden in 2006. There are lots of good things to say about it, starting with its great psychology of everyday life. At one point the cops are sitting around trying to figure out of two murder cases are actually connected, and one of them, named Berglund, says this about an older working-class guy, Oskar Pettersson, he's just been talking with:

"There is a kind of culturedness that exists apart from the kind transmitted by schools and universities, and Oskar Pettersson represents this educated culture. Once upon a time I think this kind of culture flourished in the neighborhood where Little John grew up, and it helped to stem the flow of today's lawlessness. Of course, there were scum in the fifties and sixties, but there was also a social resistance that is lacking today."
"What kind of resistance?" Sammy asked.
"Something upheld by normal people, but also by the authorities."
"Sweden isn't how it was," Riis agreed. "There's a lot of new folk now, that's bound to lead to trouble."
Berglund turned his head and looked at Riis.
"I know you don't like immigrants, but both Little John and Vincent Hahn are products of Swedish social democratic policy, our so-called People's Home. I think it is the isolation of individuals in our country that breaks them. The gap between people's dreams and the potential to get off track is too large. What was it we once dreamed of, what did Oskar Petterson dream of?"

Good questions.

Dead Boyfriend from Hell

2007-05-22T15:41:00.001-07:00

From today's Los Angeles Times:

A man tried to kill his girlfriend Monday by parking their car in front of a speeding Metrolink commuter train, but instead died when debris from the crash struck him after he had been ejected from the car, police said.

His girlfriend, who was in the car when the train slammed into the vehicle's passenger side, was seriously injured but is expected to survive.

Homicide detectives said they were trying to determine the motive of the man, who was identified late Monday as Brandon Julius Funches, 21, of South Los Angeles. They said they believe he was trying to kill the 23-year-old woman, whose name was not released, and they were unsure whether he also intended to commit suicide.

Los Angeles Police Department officers and Metrolink officials said they were amazed that no one else was hurt in the crash, which occurred at a crossing in Pacoima.

The incident began just after noon as the gate arm dropped at the rail crossing at San Fernando Road and Branford Street, Los Angeles Police Sgt. Lee Sands said.

Witnesses told police that they saw the couple shouting at each other inside a 2005 Dodge Magnum that was waiting at the crossing for the oncoming Lancaster-bound train, which was filled with about 125 passengers, to pass. Suddenly, Sands said, the man pulled his car into the opposing lane of traffic, sped past two other waiting cars and the crossing gate, and parked on the tracks.

Some witnesses told police that Funches appeared to have jumped out of the Dodge just as the train hit the vehicle. But police believe that he was ejected from the car when the train hit it — perhaps while trying to leave the vehicle. The impact sent metal debris flying, with some of the pieces fatally wounding Funches as he was running away, Sands said.

Detectives believe that Funches placed the car on the tracks with the passenger side facing the train in hopes of killing his girlfriend.

The train did not derail, and no one on board was injured, authorities said.

But the Dodge was so mangled, they said, that they could not immediately determine the make or model.

Officials said the force of the crash sent pieces of metal flying as far as a block away. Pieces penetrated cars and disabled a truck by tearing through the engine, LAPD officials said.

Denise Tyrell, a Metrolink spokeswoman, said its trains in that area go through crossings at up to 79 mph. She said the agency was treating the case as a "deliberate act" and was checking the train's black box recording device for data.

"It is very rare for you to survive being hit by a train in your car," she said. "A train is massive — 450 tons. Your car is to a train what a soda can is to your car."

The crash occurred about 15 miles from where a man deliberately parked in front of an oncoming Metrolink train two years earlier near Glendale. Eleven people died and nearly 200 others were injured Jan. 26, 2005, when the train smashed into the man's SUV, setting off a violent chain reaction that caused a commuter train coming from the opposite direction to crash and derail. One train also smashed into a freight train parked on adjacent tracks.

After that crash, Metrolink and other agencies looked at ways to better protect passengers. Among the measures was the removal of some tables on the trains that studies showed could cause injuries.

Little is known about the couple involved in Monday's incident.

Firefighters used special rescue equipment to extract the woman from the car. She was taken to Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, where she was listed in serious condition.

"We wish the woman the best and hope for her recovery," Tyrrell said.

richard.winton@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/search/la-me-metrolink22may22,1,7878135.story

Gangsters and Reformed Gangbangers

2007-05-21T09:58:00.000-07:00

A couple of interesting crime bits today:

the best overview of Hollywood's "Mr. Fix-It" in trouble with the law, complete with an excellent chart of the relationships
a good story about gang members joining construction unions, reminding you of the great social function well-paid blue-collar work used to play and perhaps still could

Pretty Goddam Sad

2007-05-14T23:52:00.000-07:00

Lots of bad stories in the heartless city. Here's one of the worst. It's from the LA Times Homicide blog, which tries to tell the story of every single murder victim in LA. Check out who they actually are.

The Right will focus on the victim's pregnant girlfriend, Latreyna Jones, having a 5 dollar car wash to pay for the burial. The Right should go to more of their own funerals.

I'd like to live in an America where the paper didn't feature weeping and bereft black folks every damn day of the week.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-homicide13may13,1,6804322.story
JILL LEOVY CHRONICLES LOS ANGELES COUNTY VICTIMS

Siblings torn apart by gunfire

Lavonne and Eric Mandeville, raised in foster care, couldn't have tried any harder to beat the odds and start a new life. And still Eric is dead.
By Jill Leovy
Times Staff Writer

May 13, 2007

This dispatch is adapted from The Homicide Report, an online project by Times staff writer Jill Leovy to report on every homicide victim in Los Angeles County, including the many whose deaths go unmarked in any other public forum or medium.

--

"Soft-spoken and quiet-like," is how a friend described Eric Omar Mandeville, 20, killed April 22 in Long Beach. At his funeral last week, a scattered family reunited to mourn the young man, who was shot to death late one night on his way to the local grocery mart.

The slaying is one of more than 335 in Los Angeles County since Jan. 1, a rate of a little less than three a day.

By an overwhelming margin, the victims, like Eric, were black or Latino young men.

Eric had tried hard to beat these statistics.

He earned $6.80 an hour working part time at a McDonald's in Long Beach. He and his sister Lavonne lived off his paychecks and the wages she earned as a nursing assistant.

The siblings had been raised in foster care. They didn't know where their father was, said Lavonne, Eric's elder by five years. Their mother had drug problems, and they grew up without her; for years, Lavonne thought she was dead.

As soon as Lavonne was emancipated from foster care, at age 18, she took her brother out of the system. The two survived however they could, sometimes relying on motel vouchers from homeless shelters to stay off the streets.

They went to school. They worked. Eventually, they were able to afford a small apartment off an alley in North Long Beach. In front, men drank out of cans in paper bags and music boomed from car stereos. But it was an improvement on where they'd been.

Eric would start getting ready for work two hours before he had to leave. He shaved so closely that his neck was peppered with little nicks. He toiled over his shirts, which always looked crisply ironed. He put on his McDonald's apron and his hat. His sister marveled that he wasn't embarrassed to wear them on the bus.

"Am I down?" he would ask her, worried that some part of him still did not look groomed. Then he set off, always forgetting to turn off the iron.

His co-workers and bosses knew nothing of his history. He was a well-liked employee — quiet, earnest, clean-cut. He greeted an older Latina at the restaurant every day in Spanish — he had learned a few phrases just for her.

He would often ask his bosses how he was doing, how he could get better, said McDonald's supervisor Don Cunnane. "I still can't believe it. Such a good kid," he said.

He and Lavonne had plans. They were going to move out of the county and open a group home for foster children like themselves.

He was shot at 1872 Locust Ave. about 2 a.m. Later that morning, bosses at McDonald's noticed Eric hadn't shown up for work. Cunnane was so concerned that he came out to the crime scene when he heard. The killing is still under investigation.

In the days after, Lavonne cried on the floor and had visions of Eric. She thought he was trying to tell her who had killed him.

It took her three days to track down their mother out of state. Lavonne, over the years, had managed to reassemble somewhat the family she and Eric had lost in childhood. By the time the funeral was held, she was surrounded by relatives and friends, including a brother who had been raised separately. But Eric remained the core.

"It was just me and him," she said. "He was all I had left."

jill.leovy@latimes.com

Iraq as PTSD Factory

2007-05-10T08:02:00.000-07:00

For everyone, particularly the entire population of Iraq itself. But the Pentagon has done a study of the effects of extended and repeated tours in Iraq. As reported in the LA Times for May 5th, their report "found that 28% of those involved in high levels of combat experienced acute stress, compared with 6% involved in low levels of combat." In addition, "the new report showed that 27% of soldiers who had been on multiple tours experienced mental health problems, compared with 17% who were serving in Iraq for the first time. I would say those numbers are low, but at least the effects of combat are being studied. This is in fact the fourth Pentagon survey of mental health since the Iraq war began four years ago.

PTSD might take forms other than stress - hostility towards others, for example. "Fewer than half of the service members questioned agreed with the statement 'All noncombatants should be treated with dignity and respect.' Forty-four percent of Marines and 41% of soldiers said torture should be allowed if it would save the life of a fellow service member."

To cheer yourself up, check out the daily coverage of the Phil Specter murder trial, or coverage of Paris Hilton being denied the glamour slammer and going to jail for 45 days for drunk driving.

California Prison Deal

2007-04-26T10:35:00.000-07:00

The Schwarzenegger Administration has struck a deal for resolving the prison "crisis" that includes a great deal of borrowing for prison construction, forced shipment of 8,000 prisoners out of state, and nothing to reduce the highest recidivism rate in the United States. Read all about another step down the long road from golden to gulag California.

Death Comes to Class

2007-04-25T06:21:00.000-07:00

Going on ten days later we still don't have much insight into the Virgina Tech gunman's actual motives. There's the familiar mix of isolation, misery, rejection, and rage, but the actual triggering event, and the ability to punish random strangers - and so many of them - is still not understood. The Los Angeles Times did have a sad story today about his path through a morning French class and the death he left in his wake.

Day 6: "That Haunted Face"

2007-04-22T09:10:00.000-07:00

The backgrounders on Virginia Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho are starting to appear. The Los Angeles Times and the New York Times have long front page reportage based on family interviews. We do need to figure this out, but we're not getting anywhere so far. Cho's sister summed it up in her apology on Friday: “This is someone that I grew up with and loved,” she said. “Now I feel like I didn’t know this person.”

The stories are still doing a lot of recycling. Non-malignant shunning remains a theme: "His junior-year roommates mostly ignored him because he was so withdrawn. If he said something, it was weird."

One story has some info about what the cops were doing between 7:15, when the first two killings occurred at the dorm, and 9:15, when the bloodbath in the engineering building began:

The campus police received a 911 call at 7:15, when the rest of the campus was still opening its eyes, the thousands of students who commuted to school not yet on the grounds.

Classes had not begun, and the campus was not alerted to the dormitory killings. The university police quickly picked up some information, and the nature of it led them to make a decision and follow a trail. Ms. Hilscher’s roommate, Heather Haughn, had shown up at 7:30 to meet her and accompany her to class. Instead, she encountered the campus police.

One of the things she told them was that Ms. Hilscher [Cho's first victim] had a boyfriend, Karl D. Thornhill, a senior at nearby Radford University; Ms. Hilscher had spent the weekend with him at his off-campus townhouse, and he had dropped her off at her dorm that morning. Ms. Haughn also told them that Mr. Thornhill had guns and had been shooting them at a range two weeks earlier.

Based on what she said, the police concluded that they had the most clichéd script of all — the lovers’ quarrel. They went looking for Mr. Thornhill, and found him on the highway, driving home from a class. They pulled him over and started interrogating him.

But he was the wrong man, and the police were at the wrong place.

That gave Mr. Cho time, and he had uses for it.

"I Will No Longer Run"

2007-04-19T08:08:00.000-07:00

See some good overviews (NYT and LAT) today. We have a little progress on Cho Seung-Hui's state of mind :

- he's not a traumatized war vet but he turns himself into one: the manifesto. A decent commentary

- warning signs appeared in the Fall 2005: In October 2005, his creative writing professor kicked him out of class because his writing was 'intimidating" and frightening other students. The department chair found Cho's response "arrogant" with an "underlying tone of anger." In November 2005, a female student complained of "annoying" contact with Cho but did not press charges. In December 2005, a second female student complained to campus police about Cho's instant messages. Police told Cho to stop contacting her. Acquaintances of Cho said he may be suicidal and he was referred to a mental health facility. A counsellor recommended involuntary commitment to a mental health facility; a judge signed an order saying that Cho "presents an imminent threat to self or others." There, a doctor determined that he was mentally ill but not a threat - which was apparently true at the time. In Fall 2006, in another creative writing class, Cho's fellow students refused to analyze his work, one of his English professors contacts a dean of students about his behavior. She gets no usable information, and deals with Cho in her own way - "Cho was allowed to remain in the seminar but was placed off to the side, where . . . he did not speak."

- Cho was "shunned" more than he was treated, even in class. He was one of those informal social pariah at whose cafeteria table dormmates won't sit - the classic "loser" whose misery and isolation produces even more pathetic attempts to make contact and even more aversion. Cho's roommate remarked that in the video Cho is a "totally different person. He was staring straight at the camera, and he never stared into our eyes or even looked at us." Cho's parents put him in the dorm in order to help him make these contacts. But Cho's life became defined by repeated failures to do exactly this.

- The pain of this kind of repeated, general rejection is excruciating. It can lead to the disintegration of the ego that is one of the standard sources of psychosis.

- "Psychosis" - what do we mean by this word? At first, Freud thought it could be traced to a "defensive conflict against sexuality," and Cho did lash out against alleged debaucheries at Virginia Tech. Then it seemed that psychosis takes over from mere neurosis when the ego loses contact with reality and lives entirely in a world of fantasies. These fantasies may compensate for the ego's crushed state, and we could cite the fabricated omnipotence of the gun-wielding campus commando that Cho became in his movie.

- Psychosis II: we could instead see psychosis not as the break with reality but as a final solution to a break that has already been established. The solution is a forced reestablishing of contact with those whom the subject feels have rejected contact. Strangers are included since the prior pattern of rejection is so complete and generalizable to anybody. The renewed contact is psychotic because it is willing to establish contact even at the price of destroying the contacted object.

- Murder is the final contact. And suicide is completely consistent with it.

Rampage Aftermath Day 2

2007-04-18T09:37:00.000-07:00

A victim's list with information. Unbelievably sad.
Hey, if you'd brought your piece to class, you'd be alive right now
Belaboring the obvious ("Gunman Showed Signs of Anger"!)
In the rampage classroom
Our classic theme: suicide by homicide
In general, the chasm between being shunned and killing everyone is stumping the country.

VT Killer Not a Vet, Just an English Major

2007-04-18T00:52:00.000-07:00

The media is being brilliant as usual: "Cho Seung-Hui Penned Violent Plays: 'Richard McBeef' & 'Mr. Brownstone.'" Thanks. That explains it. He was angry and troubled. He was a loner. I would rather have Dick Cheney give me a nose job than have the media explain my psyche. I'd learn more from listening to Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" and P.O.D's "Youth of the Nation," which in fact I just did.

None of this - or the stupid references to "resident alien" - gets even close to the simple fact about this guy's kill kill kill. Most people could point a gun at a tree 33 times. They couldn't fire at 33 ducks, or kill 33 gophers. They couldn't throw 33 rocks into a pond. How exactly do you kill, one, then another person, and another and another, and get to 33??

Who's cracking next? Where are his guns?

Hunting Students at Virginia Tech

2007-04-16T18:27:00.000-07:00

No news on the motive of the shooter who killed at least 33 people at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia this morning. He is apparently dead of a self-inflicted wound. He seems to have killed two students in a dorm around 7:15 am, then killed 31 more students two hours later in an engineering building in a different part of campus. Among many other questions about another insane bloodbath: where was he for two hours between the killings? What was he doing? What were the cops doing?

And of course my first question is always: was this guy a vet?

So so sorry everyone.

"Aurelio Zen" Crimes Series Author Dies

2007-04-14T10:48:00.000-07:00

We didn't get to read a Michael Dibdin novel in the course, but I may change that next time around. Dibdin died in Seattle this week of undisclosed causes. Raised in England, Dibdin wound up living in Italy for a long time, where he taught English at the University of Perugia in the 1980s. After getting fired by a new program director, Dibdin published his first novel, "Ratking," in his early 40, and then wrote 10 more, each set in a different Italian city. Dibdin's Italy is as noir as it gets. He once said that Italian society "is collusion. They're all guilty. There' s always a deal being made. 'I know you're corrupt and you know I'm corrupt, and I know you know,' etc." In the midst of a crooked, mobbed up, violent society that is equally saturated with beauty and pleasure, the detective, Aurelio Zen, watches rather than strikes back. "It was a face that gave nothing away yet seemed always to tremble on the brink of some expression that never quite appeared. Zen's subjects found themselves shut up with a man who barely seemed to exist, yet who mirrored back to them the innermost secrets of their hearts."

R.I.P. Mr. Dibdin. Luckily Aurelio Zen lives on. The 11th novel, End Games, is due out this later year. See also a list of the Zen novels. The Guardian has a nice obituary.

thanks to Jocelyn Y. Stewart at the Los Angeles Times for citations and other material.

Wife Murders Her Minister Husband

2007-04-14T10:29:00.000-07:00

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-wife13apr13,1,5696215.story

Murder trial begins for minister's wife
Mary Winkler's husband, a Church of Christ preacher, was found with a fatal shotgun wound last spring in Tennessee.

By Jenny Jarvie
Times Staff Writer

April 13, 2007

SELMER, TENN. — Why did the preacher's wife allegedly kill her husband in their church parsonage?

That question has perplexed residents of this small western Tennessee town ever since Mary Winkler was charged last year with fatally shooting her husband, Matthew, with a 12-gauge shotgun. On Thursday, as her first-degree murder trial got underway, attorneys presented two starkly different answers.

Prosecutors said Mary Winkler calmly planned her husband's murder, fearing he would soon find out she had deposited counterfeit checks from a "Nigerian scam" into their joint bank accounts.

Defense attorneys portrayed Winkler, 33, as a long-suffering victim of emotional and physical abuse who had tried to cover bruises with make-up and visited her doctor with a "severely swollen jaw."

The killing was an accident, the defense said. Winkler fired the gun while intending to provoke her husband to talk about an incident involving their 1-year-old daughter, Breanna.

"The morning he did what he did to Breanna, she was going to get his attention with the very thing he had always threatened her with: a shotgun," defense attorney Steven Farese said during opening statements in McNairy County Justice Center. He did not elaborate on the incident.

Prosecutors, meanwhile, said the shooting was a deliberate and premeditated act, motivated by Winkler's fear that her husband would find out the extent of their financial troubles.

"The house of cards was falling down," said Walt Freeland, assistant district attorney, explaining that the day before the shooting, Mary Winkler had received several phone calls from representatives of her local bank urging her to come in with her husband to discuss account "irregularities."

The defense countered that Matthew Winkler made all decisions regarding household administration, instructing his wife to write checks so his own credit rating would not be not tarnished.

Matthew Winkler, 31, a pulpit minister at Selmer's Fourth Street Church of Christ, was found fatally wounded from a single shotgun blast. Fired at close range while he lay in bed on the morning of March 22, 2006, the round drove 77 steel pellets into his back, fracturing his spine and perforating his ribs, left lung, diaphragm, stomach and spleen.

His wife was arrested one day later in Orange Beach, Ala., with their three daughters.

For more than a year, this Bible Belt community of 4,500 has speculated about Mary Winkler's motives. By all accounts, she was the model minister's wife: quiet and meek, happily married, a devoted mother.

"Matthew and Mary Winkler had what appeared to everyone who observed them, those on the outside, to have had a marriage made in heaven," Farese said. "But behind closed doors it was a living hell."

Matthew Winkler's grandmother and brothers shook their heads as Farese described him as a domineering leader of the household, destroying objects that his wife loved, isolating her from her family, telling her she could not eat lunch because she was too fat.

"She had to be perfect to be the preacher's wife," Farese said.

Mary Winkler, dressed demurely in a navy suit with a small cross around her neck, raised a crumpled tissue to her nose as Farese outlined the difficulties of her marriage.

After opening statements, Matthew Winkler's father, Dan Winkler, also a Church of Christ minister, testified that he talked to his daughter-in-law after her arrest. "I said, 'I am so sorry for all of this,' and I told her I wished I could take the handcuffs off and I could give her a big bear hug," he said.

But Mary, he said, never apologized to him. "She should have," he added.

Farese suggested that Dan Winkler, who now has custody of his three grandchildren and recently filed a $2-million wrongful-death lawsuit against Mary Winkler, had manipulated the three girls against their mother. Prosecutors expect to call the eldest daughter, who is 9, to testify about what she saw on the morning of the homicide.

Dan Winkler has refused to let his daughter-in-law see her children, Farese said.

"What's your personal feeling: Do you think Mary should see her children today?" Farese asked.

Dan Winkler stared into the distance for a few seconds, apparently struggling to formulate an answer, before Farese abruptly withdrew the question.

The trial is expected to take about two weeks. If convicted of first-degree murder, Mary Winkler could receive a life sentence. But the jury will also have the option of finding her guilty of a lesser charge.

jenny.jarvie@latimes.com

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ARTICLE 2

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-wife14apr14,1,6154969.story

Interview with minister's wife played at trial

Mary Winkler sobbed and talked of reaching into a closet for a shotgun. She is charged in her husband's death.

By Jenny Jarvie
Times Staff Writer

April 14, 2007

SELMER, TENN. — Jurors in the trial of a minister's wife charged with first-degree murder heard a tape of her speaking in sobs during an interview with investigators the day after her husband's body was discovered in the parsonage.

"I didn't just get up and say, 'Hey, let's see how this thing works,' " said Mary Winkler, 33, apparently alluding to the shotgun used in the killing. "I was battling; I've been battling it not to do that forever. And I don't know why."

Winkler had recently been arrested at an Alabama resort about 340 miles from Selmer, the couple's western Tennessee hometown. She had been with their three young daughters.

An agent with the Alabama Bureau of Investigation was questioning her.

Winkler sobbed frequently in the recording. She said she reached up to get the shotgun from a closet and suggested she was in the bedroom, balancing on pillows on the floor, around the time of the shooting.

"It was not as loud as I thought it would be," she said.

But, as defense attorneys repeatedly pointed out, Winkler stopped short of saying she shot her husband, Matthew.

Many of her statements consisted of "um," "I don't know" and "uh-huh."

It was a "total blur," she said, when pressed to describe what happened immediately after the shooting.

Defense attorney Steven Farese suggested that Alabama agent Stan Stabler misled Winkler that her recorded statement would not be made public. He accused Stabler of pressing Winkler with increasingly loaded questions.

Farese also drew out the fact that Winkler did not verbally answer Stabler's repeated question of whether she shot her husband. "On the seminal issue in this case — whether Mary Winkler shot her husband — you say there was no verbal response?" Farese asked.

"With nodding, she affirmed to me," Stabler replied.

"Nodding?" said Farese theatrically. "Nodding?"

The defense, which is arguing that the shooting was accidental, suggested Winkler was tired and disoriented when she was interviewed. She paused for long periods of time, sobbed and asked for questions to be repeated.

"I just can't right now," she said when Stabler asked her to tell him what was troubling her. She said she was just not up to that.

Winkler suggested on the tape that the couple's domestic relationship had deteriorated after years of conflict, but she did not provide specifics.

She said repeatedly that she feared her husband's reputation would be smeared in newspapers and in court. Winkler, 31, was a minister at Selmer's 4th Street Church of Christ.

"There's no reason for him to have anything ugly because I have obviously done something very bad, so let me just, you know, be the, get the bad," she said.

Winkler took pains to speak well of her husband.

"He was a mighty fine person, and that's the thing," she said. "You just say, 'The lady was a moron.' " She added: "That's fine with me."

But she did reveal a few things about her husband.

"I love him dearly, but gosh, he just nailed me in the ground," she said. "Just chewing, whatever."

Winkler also said her husband had threatened her physically, referring to an incident six years ago when they lived in Pegram, Tenn.

"He said something that really scared me," she said. "I don't know, something life-threatening." She didn't elaborate.

In another interview, with a special agent of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation named Chris Carpenter, Winkler talked of her husband's criticism of her, according to the interview summary Carpenter wrote. The interview wasn't taped.

Winkler said her husband criticized "the way I walked, what I ate, everything," according to the summary. She also mentioned financial pressures, which she described to Carpenter as "mostly my fault, bad bookkeeping."

"I was just tired of it," she was quoted as saying. "I guess I just got to a point and I snapped."

During cross-examination of Carpenter, defense attorney Leslin Ballin continued the argument that the state had insufficient evidence that Winkler deliberately shot her husband.

"You didn't write down that Mary pointed the shotgun at Matthew, did you?" Ballin asked. "You didn't write down that Mary intentionally pulled the trigger, did you?"

"She did not tell me she intentionally pulled the trigger," Carpenter replied.

jenny.jarvie@latimes.com

Santa Barbara Gang Killing

2007-03-17T09:51:00.001-07:00

So they say. School got out early last Wednesday. Kids from westside and eastside clashed on State Street by Saks Fifth Avenue. You can read the LA Times article below.

This isn't some big turning point for Santa Barbara. A few years ago on the main street on my side of town - Milpas - several guys ran back and forth through traffic shooting at each other like they'd just stepped out of a spaghetti Western. This shit happens, then it doesn't happen.

On the other hand, I don't know why people are so surprised. Santa Barbara schools are as crappy and thus as much like warehouses for kids with no future as the schools of any other town in California. People live two or three or more families to a house because, you'll be surprised to learn, you can't buy a Santa Barbara barrio house ($900,000 if you're lucky) on a barrio job ($15,000- 25,000 a year). I know, since I live in a barrio house only because I have a decent white-collar salary. People work three or four jobs to maintain even half or a third of a house, a detail from the story below that suggests that the structure of the California economy militates against basic parental supervision. No parents at home, no college future, no chance of moving out, no imagination of an interesting job, stuck on the vocational track, school as frustrating and humiliating, then a chance to stand up on State Street in mid-afternoon. The Sun Also Rises, anyone?

The article starts here:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-gangkill16mar16,1,6411112.story
Deadly gang brawl stuns Santa Barbara
The city is reeling after violence erupts on the streets, leaving one teen killed and another charged with murder.

By Steve Chawkins
Times Staff Writer

March 16, 2007

SANTA BARBARA — Residents and tourists here were stunned Thursday in the wake of a daylight gang brawl that left a 15-year-old boy stabbed to death, a 14-year-old charged with his murder and downtown's main commercial strip shut down for more than eight hours.

"Everyone's saying, 'This isn't supposed to happen in Santa Barbara,' " said Police Chief Cam Sanchez. "Well, it isn't supposed to happen anywhere."

Police wouldn't reveal how the early Wednesday afternoon fight had started, saying it was still under investigation. But they were emphatic that the deadly skirmish, which involved throngs of participants and was witnessed by many bystanders, was a confrontation between two rival gangs.

Killed was 15-year-old Luis Angel Linares, a student at El Puente Community School who was known to his friends as Nacho. Bleeding after being stabbed, he staggered into the parking lot behind Saks Fifth Avenue on State Street before being rushed to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

His alleged killer, whose name was not released because of his age, attended Santa Barbara Junior High School. He is being held at Santa Barbara County's juvenile hall, officials said.

Four others — allegedly members of the same gang — were also arrested on a variety of charges. They range in age from 13 to 16.

Santa Barbara students had been let out of school early Wednesday for a "minimum day" to give teachers and administrators time to attend training sessions, said J. Brian Sarvis, superintendent of the city's schools.

"We try to do the releases all at once so schools can coordinate with families that have child-care needs," he said. "Of course, we're rethinking that policy."

With the fight surging across State Street, dozens of police officers and sheriff's deputies converged on the scene from their departments' headquarters just blocks away. As it turned out, the Police Department was in the middle of a training session, so more officers were immediately available than would have been otherwise, officials said.

Behind Saks on Thursday afternoon, friends and classmates of the dead teen came by to pay their respects. Officers had removed the many candles and bouquets that had been left there, saying the boy's family did not want the site to become a flash point for further violence, police said.

With friends, 16-year-old Stephanie Montaldo was collecting donations for the Linares family in a hand-decorated cardboard box.

"I've known him since he was little," she said. "He was always very funny."

Blocks away, on the steps of the Police Department, Chief Sanchez said this was only the second gang-related death he could recall in his six years as head of the agency.

Although gangs have long been part of Santa Barbara's streetscape, Sanchez said he had been disturbed by their increasingly younger membership.

"The gang kids are getting younger and more blatant — more in-your-face with their teachers and even with officers," he said.

Meanwhile, parents, many of whom work multiple jobs to make ends meet, have been clamoring for solutions, he said.

"We have a gang unit, we have the Police Athletic League, we have a lot of things going on," Sanchez said, "but we can't force them into positive activities."

The fact that Wednesday's melee erupted so violently and in broad daylight was upsetting to many residents.

"I think some of these kids are numb to the fact of death," said Vincent Romero, a manager at the Unity Shoppe, a secondhand store on State Street that also provides clothing and groceries to the poor.

"It's video games, it's war, it's movies — it's just the whole package," he said.

Strolling into Saks on Thursday afternoon, Barbara Anderson, a recently retired program manager at UC Santa Barbara, said that, even a day later, the killing seemed incongruous.

"This is a safe town," she said. "When I read about this, my heart just broke."

*

steve.chawkins@latimes.com

Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service

The Gang and the Globe

2007-03-04T09:14:00.000-08:00

Sunday readers of The Los Angeles Times were treated today to twin headlines: "Smugglers Bring Havoc to Central America," and "How a Community Imploded." The piece on Central America describes governments' struggles against traffickers (those are Nicaraguan soldiers training their guns on captured smugglers) when parts of those governments are probably smuggling themselves. The other article is the best overview yet on the L.A. neighborhood "Harbor Gateway" and its major murder problem. This piece is good because it looks at causes besides the gangbangers themselves: unregulated apartment construction in the 1980s that, coupled with a total lack of public services (even streetlights, to say nothing of schools, parks, rec centers, and other gathering places), destroyed the community fabric. Most of the residents were low or limited income, the area became an immigrant community in which newcomers had to fend for themselves, sustaining barriers of language among others, and then the tripling of the black population in ten years created a backlash among some Latino kids. The article features some good material on the good life of a gang member - when it's better to be in than out - and also a very unusual phenomenon - a remorseful developer.

The story is sad - the 204th Street gang (Latino) has made most Black folks afraid to leave their houses during the day, and some of their kids have been gunned down in broad daylihgt. The story is infuriating - decent government, transitional services, and a public infrastructure can keep most of this from happening, but now it almost never does. In most parts of the US today, including California, government only reacts to crises and arrives on the scene when the bodies have been carted away to make a pious speech. L.A. abandoned Harbor Gateway long ago, and the result was avoidable fear and death.

Role of Loss Confirmed

2007-02-22T09:00:00.000-08:00

Some results of the Yale Bereavement Study confirm one of the Detective Fiction course's themes- the importance of loss in shaping behavior. An article in today's Los Angeles Times reports that the study "found that, contrary to common belief, yearning or missing a loved one is a more dominant emotion than depression - meaning mental health experts who treat the grief-stricken may need to refocus on feelings of loss."

It's Really Working, Isn't It?

2007-01-19T11:29:00.000-08:00

The Governor's holiday gift to Californians was a proposal for an $11 billion expansion program of one sorry part of the state's overburdened infrastructure. Only problem was, it was for prisons. The prisons are in terrible shape - operating at double capacity, meaning the conditions for the prisons have been judged by federal courts to be illegal and they have warned the state they will be taken over if the state doesn't fix them. California also has the highest recidivism rate in the United States - and it's not a strong standard to start with. Schwarzenegger's proposal was for 73,000 new beds, or in other words to add 50% more prison beds to the number built between 1984 and 2004, which was the greatest prison building boom in world history. That didn't work, so let's do it again!

Crime is plastered all over the newspapers every day now, particularly in L.A., which is going through one of its regular gang crime booms (up 14% over 2005 citywide, up 25% in South L.A., and up 42% in the San Fernando Valley). Here's a sample of headlines just from the last 2 days. Enjoy the incoherence:

"Governor blames public indifference for prison ills" (Jan 18)
"DEA raids marijuana outlets" (Jan 18)
"L.A. urged to alter gang tactics" (Jan 18)
"Hate-crime case witnesses called heroes" (Jan 18)
"FBI joins L.A.policing effort in war on street gang crime"
"Anti-gang battle needs more than just cops"
"Democrats offer plan to overhaul sentencing"

These articles lay out the following picture. We spend a fortune on prisons and justice but we're supposed to spend more. Because we don't spend more, violent offenders get out on early release. But that doesn't really matter, because keeping them in makes them worse. It'll save money to shorten sentences so we'll do that. That contradicts our faith in prisons we'll spend billions more on them. As the gang problem gets press, politicians call for more cops. But more cops won''t solve the gang problem, which starts with a lack of jobs. But we can't create more jobs, because we have to build more prisons.

This machine doesn't help neighborhoods or young men. It's excellent, however, for juicing politicians.

The "more than cops" piece was written by the LA Times columnist Steve Lopez. Near the end of it, he says the true thing that the official crime talk of California politicians always avoids.

Although some gang members are sociopaths who need to be locked away for good, many are products of economic, educational, cultural and social forces that have destroyed families and communities. They grow up with absent dads and addicted moms in places where the manufacturing jobs of yesteryear gave way to a service economy that doesn't buy you a house and barely pays the rent.
"If you don't have a job for them, it's over," [Connie] Rice said about what happens if you're lucky enough to talk a kid out of a gang. "[Father] Greg Boyle is right. The only factor that has ever substantially reduced crime by gangs is jobs."

So jobs are the one thing politicians won't talk about. The "New Economy" and poverty go together, and together they produce gang crime. Sure it's "not that simple" - but it's 80% that simple. Problem is, admitting this would make folks like Schwarzenegger have to rethink their economic ideologies, in which zero government steering of the economy makes us all rich and free.

It's easier and cheaper for Arnold to get up there on autopilot and say we don't care about prisons enough to spend another $11 billion. That's not true. We the people just don't have the money Even if we did, we wouldn't waste it on more prisons that won't fix the economy but will destroy more lives.

Birdman Reflux

2006-12-31T17:13:00.000-08:00

Benjamin Swardlick, one of our course members, wrote me from the UK on December 18th:
"5 dead prostitutes in Ipswitch, England. All the bodies found close together. The man in custody calls himself their driver... Says he helped them to hook up with drugs. I mean have ANY of these investigators read Birdman, this case is solved by Eng 193. Can't even believe the similarites. I'm staying tuned to figure out who plays Jack Caffery."

It's hard to tell who Caffery will turn out to be or if these women are going to get someone like that to help them. But here we are again, trying to honor the dead.

The Names:
Gemma Adams
Tania Nicol
Anneli Alderton
Paula Clennell
Annette Nicholls

And here we are again wondering why.

There's a compendium of information here. Some of the commentary is good, including Diane Taylor's piece on the vulnerability of sex workers and society's calloused stupidity about them. The case has stood Britain (or at least its press) on its head.

May they rest in peace. And have some justice in 2007.

Noir Goodbye

2006-12-16T10:14:00.000-08:00

We've talked a lot about war coming home as one of noir culture's causes. I thought about this reading Donald Rumsfeld's remarks yesterday as he stepped down from his position of Secretary of Defense. The Los Angeles Times article today has him saying this:

A conclusion by our enemies that the United States lacks the will or the resolve to carry out missions that demand sacrifice and demand patience is every bit as dangerous as an imbalance of conventional military power. It may well be comforting to some to consider graceful exits from the agonies and, indeed, the ugliness of combat, but the enemy thinks differently.

Even if you're one of the O'Reilly Factor fans who thinks that the Iraq war went bad only because of media nay-sayers, the logic here should interest you. Rumsfeld acknowledges the war has become an agony. But any exit would comfort "the enemy," which is unnamed and unchanging - remember Mike Hammer's "nameless ones who kill people for the Great Whatzit." This is true even of "graceful" exits. What does graceful mean for Rumsfeld? Exiting after negotiation? Some form of agreement after which "enemies" smile and shake hands?

Noir goodbyes are always a kind of curse. They say, "I am the war god, and the rule of force. You embraced me, and then you fired me, because you are too weak to stick with the Way of Force. And now, without me, the enemy Force will destroy you."

Oh well. Goodbye anyway, Mr. Rumsfeld.