Crime Magazine - Lona Manning

The Murder of Madalyn Murray O'Hair: America's Most Hated Woman

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Updated Sept 23, 2003

Madalyn Murray O'Hair

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

by Lona Manning

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

-- Madalyn Murray O'Hair

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

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

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

As August turned into September, there was still no sign of the Murray O'Hairs: the grandmother and matriarch of the clan, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, her son Jon Garth Murray, 40, and her granddaughter Robin, 30. (Robin was the daughter of another son, Bill Murray, who hadn't spoken with his mother, brother or his daughter in years.) The American Atheist organization was headed by a five-person board of directors, but the day-to-day operations had been entirely in the hands of the O'Hair trio of mother, son and granddaughter, who were lifetime members of the board and who alternated the roles of president, secretary and treasurer. When board members Spike Tyson, a Vietnam veteran, and Ellen Johnson, a Vermont housewife and O'Hair loyalist, visited the offices and the O'Hairs' home, the mystery deepened.

At the house the Murray-O'Hairs all shared, there were no signs of violence, no burglary, no forced entry -- yet it was clear that they had left abruptly. Breakfast dishes were sitting on the table. Madalyn O'Hair's diabetes medication was on the kitchen counter. And most telling of all, their three little ankle-biting dogs, to which they were devoted, had been left behind with no one to care for them.

The Murray-O'Hairs' lives revolved around the atheist movement and each other. They lived together, ate together, vacationed together, and worked together. Now they had disappeared together.

America's Most Hated Woman

Of all the media descriptions of Madalyn O'Hair written when news of her disappearance came to light, she would have been most angered by the suggestion that she had slid into "obscurity" since her heyday in the early '60s. The reports noted that O'Hair was brash, profane and vulgar, that she had a reputation for being abrasive and turning friends and allies into enemies, that she was notoriously tight-fisted and always looking for ways to enrich her empire -- all of those things she might have agreed with. But the idea that she had been passed over, forgotten, returned to anonymity after her brush with fame and destiny -- that would have rankled. She was "America's most hated woman," as she liked to remind herself and others, and she preferred being hated to being a forgotten has-been.

She became America's most hated woman in 1963, when her lawsuit protesting school prayer reached the U. S. Supreme Court. Photographs show Madalyn standing on the steps of the high court with her two sons, Jon Garth, then 9, and Bill, 16. She is smiling, hovering lovingly over her boys, and respectably attired with a demure hat and gloves. But the conventional-looking matron was -- unthinkably for the early '60s -- a divorcee and an avowed Communist with two illegitimate sons, sired by two different fathers.

The Supreme Court decision banning prayer in school enabled Madalyn to throw off the bondage of poverty and anonymity and gave her life a direction and a purpose. First though, she had to settle that bit of legal trouble with the Baltimore police -- she was accused of assaulting five officers when they came to her home to retrieve a runway teenager. (The teen was a girlfriend of Madalyn's oldest son, Bill). Madalyn and her family escaped to Hawaii, then Mexico. After successfully resisting an extradition order to Maryland, she settled in Texas, where she preached the gospel of the separation of church and state.

Along the way, she created her own persona -- the atheist crusader who suffered persecution at the hands of Christians and the government. She blamed her father's fatal heart attack on the constant vandalism, the threatening phone calls, and the abusive mail the family received. But her fame brought her a platform and an unexpected source of income. Her admirers and supporters started sending her checks and she became a provocative talk-show guest, her radical utterances causing Johnny Carson's jaw to drop.

Atheists, she explained, believed in the rational powers of mankind, not in some superstitious mumbo-jumbo that taught people to be content with the status quo. An atheist, O'Hair said, "accepts that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist accepts that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said." She knew the Bible better than many Christians and enjoyed pointing out the cruelty and caprices of the Old Testament Jehovah, as well as the sideshow carnival nature of Jesus' supposed miracles. Why did the Christian God, she asked, merit anyone's respect or reverence?

But Madalyn, always combative, didn't stop there. She delighted in insulting Christians and Christianity and preaching free love and open sexuality for all. She described nuns, for example, as "poor old dried-up women lying there on their solitary pallets yearning for Christ to come to them in a vision some night and take their maidenheads. By the time they realize he's not coming, it's no longer a maidenhead; it's a poor, sorry tent that nobody would be able to pierce -- even Jesus with his wooden staff. It's such a waste." Her unabashed vulgarity was too much for some of her fellow atheists, who preferred a more diplomatic approach. But not Madalyn. "I love a good fight," she said. "I guess fighting God and God's spokesmen is sort of the ultimate, isn't it?"

But in 1980, on Mother's Day, there came a horrible blow -- her oldest boy Bill "came out" as a Christian. And not a nominal, go-to-church-at-Easter Christian, either, but a foursquare, evangelical, come-to-Jesus, pass-the-plate, full-gospel Baptist. As a child, he wanted what all children want, his mother's love and approval. As an adult, battling an alcohol and drug problem, he realized that Madalyn was unfortunately one of those people who couldn't even conceive of her children as separate human beings in their own right. Her children were merely extensions of her ego, and her regard for him, or for anyone, depended on how completely they obeyed her every command.

For years, Madalyn had referred to Bill as the reason she picked up the cudgels to banish prayer from the schoolroom. She wrote heart-rending articles about how the other kids beat Bill up at school and ostracized him because of his beliefs. But looking back, Bill Murray felt that when he stood there on the Supreme Court steps, he was just being used as a prop in his mother's battles against everything she hated in bourgeois America. It took all of his pent-up anger to wrench himself free of her orbit and having done so, all communication between them ceased. His prediction that his mother would sever all ties with him was abundantly fulfilled -- O'Hair cast him into the void with this cutting remark: "One could call this a postnatal abortion on the part of a mother, I guess; I repudiate him entirely and completely for now and all times...He is beyond human forgiveness." This denouncement demonstrated how she almost viewed herself as the god of her own universe; it was her prerogative to grant her children absolution, or even life itself.

To the evangelical movement, Bill Murray's conversion must have seemed -- literally -- heaven-sent. Many Christians and conservatives believe that the banning of school prayer marked the beginning of America's decline into immorality and crime and Murray, from his vantage point at the center of the drama, agreed with them. "In the three decades since this landmark case, the nation has lost its moral center," he wrote. "Violent crime has increased from 16.1 to 75.8 incidents per 10,000 population. Juvenile violent crime arrest rates have increased from 13.7 to 40 per 10,000 population. Teen pregnancy has almost tripled from 15.3 to 43.5 per 1,000 teenage girls. Almost half of these pregnancies end in abortion. For a startling 28 percent of all live births in America today, the mothers are unwed. The teenage suicide rate has increased 400 percent since 1963."

"I was part of the family that kicked God out of America," Murray tells his audiences today at his evangelical fundraising events. "I know the truth better than any man in America. That is why God picked me to tell it."

In an atheist universe, there are no gods to roll around on the floor of Olympus or Valhalla, laughing at irony. Madalyn Murray O'Hair carried on without her son Bill and relied on her younger son Jon Garth Murray and her granddaughter Robin to carry the atheist torch. Unfortunately, Jon Garth Murray was not well liked by the American Atheist headquarters staff or others he came into contact with. Some diplomatically recalled that he lacked social skills. The undiplomatic said he was a neurotic, immature, mama's boy with a penchant for screaming abuse at people, and that he was generally despised.

"I almost quit my first week there when I heard Jon screaming at his mother with a bunch of profanity," employee Travis recalled. "I just wasn't brought up to talk to my mother that way, but I later came to realize he talked that way because that's the way she taught him to talk."

Robin, too, lived in her powerful grandmother's shadow. She had been given up by Bill Murray (her mother was never mentioned) when he was a drug addict, and O'Hair had legally adopted her. Observers say that although Robin was more pleasant in general than her Uncle Jon, she was seldom happy and that she, too, tended to belittle the staff, just like O'Hair. This is one reason, her estranged son Bill Murray suggested, that Madalyn O'Hair sometimes hired ex-cons to do the office work; they were anxious to find work anywhere and therefore were more liable to put up with the sarcasm, the verbal abuse, and the low pay.

A Fateful Hire

Or maybe O'Hair, a rebel herself, was drawn to those who lived outside the law. Whatever the reason, she hired ex-con David Waters in 1993, and at first it looked like a good choice for both of them.

Waters, in his 40s, was a slick-looking man with the piercing eyes of a fox. O'Hair knew he had a criminal record but she later claimed she didn't know just how bad it was. At first the O'Hairs only knew that their new office manager was obviously intelligent and well spoken and capable of more than working as a $7 dollar-an-hour typesetter. By the spring of 1995 he served as their office manager. During his tenure, an expensive computer went missing. Later, some valuable bonds were stolen from the office safe. The O'Hairs suspected that the thefts were an inside job, but still, they entrusted Waters with the bank accounts and the keys while they went to California for a long-running legal dispute with another atheist organization.

When they returned, they discovered their office manager had laid off all the staff, closed the office, and emptied their bank accounts -- over $50,000 dollars. Furious, the O'Hairs pressed charges, and waited impatiently for the case to come to trial. Meanwhile, as O'Hair explained in her newsletter:

On May 2, Mr. Waters executed an affidavit which was delivered to law enforcement officials. The Murray-O'Hairs were not advised about this affidavit for months — until August 23, 1994. Meanwhile, it had been accepted at face value by all concerned. This was, actually, an incredible document. It stated that Jon Murray had called Mr. Waters from San Diego, advised that the trial was very adverse to American Atheists, and instructed Mr. Waters to steal up to $100,000 by cashing the organizations' checks, retain $15,000 for his "services," and put $40,000 in cash in the office safe for Mr. Murray. The absurdity of the affidavit should have been immediately apparent to all; after all, the San Diego hearing had been decided favorably for American Atheists and the Murray-O'Hairs. It did, however, bring out the true nature of the police and judicial system of the city of Austin, the county of Travis, and the state of Texas. An accusation had been made against a nationally known Atheist (Jon Garth Murray) and, simply because he was an Atheist, the accusation was seen to be plausible immediately, by everyone. The defense plan…was obvious: use the hatreds inherent in a Christian political system to smear the Atheist victim of a crime — and go free...If Mr. Waters had stolen this amount of money from any church, or had invaded the home of any minister, he would have been arrested within hours, tried and convicted within days, and would even now be serving a term in the Texas state penitentiary.

And, considering Waters's extensive and serious criminal record, there seemed to be no urgency on the part of the prosecutors to bring him to trial. As Madalyn O'Hair recounted:

On July 21 (1994), the case was set for hearing in the 147th District Court of Travis County:

called, then postponed to August 22,

called, then reset for September 9,

called, then reset to September 15,

called, then reset to October 3,

called, then reset to October 17,

called, then reset to November 7,

called, then reset to December 5,

called, then reset to January 23, 1995,

called, then reset to February 6,

called, then reset to March 13,

called, then reset to April 10,

called, then reset to April 24,

called, then reset to May 18,

called, then reset to May 22.

On two of these occasions, Mr. Waters's attorney did not even bother to come in to court, but the trial was set over each time anyway.

Unhappy with the lenient sentence Waters ultimately received -- probation and an order to pay back the money -- Madalyn O'Hair decided to expose him by writing a lengthy article in her atheist newsletter (quoted in part above). She indulged her anger with a lengthy diatribe, laying out Waters's criminal record and revealing him to be a cold-blooded animal. She reported that while he was still a teenager that he had killed another boy by beating him with a post and leaving him in a ditch. Once out of jail, he turned on his own mother, beating her, screaming abuse at her, and finally urinating in her face. More convictions for theft, assault and fraud followed. O'Hair concluded that Waters was a dangerous person and that the courts were indifferent to prosecuting him as he deserved to be -- because he had stolen from atheists.

The Phone Contact Stops Abruptly

When American Atheists board members Spike Tyson and Ellen Johnson finally made contact with Jon Garth Murray in San Antonio via his cell phone in early September a few days after their disappearance, he repeated that the family had been called away on urgent business, but refused to provide details. Robin then got on the phone; she was worried about the family dogs but reassured Johnson that all was well. Johnson could tell that on the contrary, something was horribly wrong. During the next few weeks, more phone calls passed between the O'Hairs and various members of the organization. Finally, during her last phone call, Robin was so distraught she could barely speak to Johnson. Her last words were, "I know you will do the right thing."

Then, on Sept. 28, they stopped answering the phone.

No one phoned the police and in fact, the American Atheists sought to dispel the rumors, already in circulation, that O'Hair was dead.

"I can tell you categorically that Madalyn is alive," an American Atheist spokesman was quoted as saying the same day the cell phone went unanswered. I can't tell you exactly what is happening. She's safe, and that's all I can tell you."

The months went by. Ellen Johnson and the remaining American Atheists picked up the pieces of the organization. They started to fill the backlogged book orders, revive the members' newsletter, expand the cable-access television show, plan for a national convention, and continued to deny that anything was wrong. Johnson, who had assumed the president's position at AA, told reporters that no organization funds were missing. "We just don't suspect foul play," she added. "And I cannot tell you all the reasons why. We just -- we just don't."

Theories of the Disappearance

Several theories were in circulation. One was that the Murray-O'Hairs had taken the money and run. This was what David Travis, the disgruntled former employee, believed. He knew about the New Zealand money and suspected there might be other offshore accounts. But there was more. He and another employee had seen letters and notes from Jon, going back several years, in which Jon wrote about emigrating to New Zealand. The main reason the Murray-O'Hairs wanted to get away is because of a lawsuit that had gone sour and eaten up a lot of money and what remained of their reputations, as well. Madalyn had attempted a strong-arm takeover of another atheist organization called The Truthseekers. (Her son Bill Murray accused her of printing up phony stock certificates as part of the takeover ploy.) Truthseekers fought back vigorously, and the Murray-O'Hairs feared that they could lose their entire organization in court. (Eventually, after a costly legal struggle, Truthseekers maintained its autonomy).

Another possibility that was seriously discussed was that Madalyn had disappeared to die in peace. She had frequently expressed the fear that when she died, Christians, or "Christers," as she called them, would try to pray over her and she wanted no part of a deathbed repentance scene.

As for Jon Garth and Robin, they might have grown tired of their utter dependence on the imperious grande dame of the family and the suffocating lives they led together. Jon had complained that he was sick of the "family business" and wanted to chuck it all and start over somewhere else. Robin, sensitive, shy and heading into spinsterhood, doubtless wanted a lot of things that she would never achieve as long as she lived in the shadow of her formidable grandmother. (When Gannon and Shannon, the cocker spaniels belonging to Jon Garth and Robin, disappeared in December 1995 from the fenced compound behind the Atheist building, it added fuel to the speculation that Jon and Robin were alive and well and in hiding -- with or without their mother.)

Another theory was that they had met with foul play. It had to be admitted that O'Hair had made a lot of enemies in her career. Reporters covering the case found many ex-supporters, ex-allies, and ex-employees. "She went through people like popcorn," said one. Her son Bill accused her of preying on the lonely, the confused, and the misfits -- as long as they had money -- with the same kind of remorseless hypocrisy that some evangelical Christians are accused of. She was the atheist flip side of the religious con artist: "She was just evil. She stole huge amounts of money. She misused the trust of people. She cheated children out of their parents' inheritance. She cheated on her taxes and even stole from her own organizations." But what to make of the month of September, during which the Murray-O'Hairs made and received numerous phone calls? If they were kidnapped, why wasn't there a ransom demand or something?

Finally, there were whispers that perhaps the Christian and government persecutions that O'Hair had complained of for years had turned out to be more sinister than anyone imagined. "If you think we are being paranoid," opined a Canadian atheist newsletter, "the religious and government harassment suffered personally by this founding family of American atheism is well recorded, along with FBI and CIA infiltration of their organizations." "Off the wall, I think the Vatican did it," said a supporter. "The Vatican or the CIA. Someone with enough clout to cover it up."

O'Hair herself told Life magazine back in 1963 that it would only take one crazy person to end her life: "These death threats are no picnic...I think sooner or later some night some nut is going to get a message from Jesus Christ and I'm going to have had it. But as long as I'm still round I'm going to keep on being a squeaking wheel."

When the Murray-O'Hairs disappeared, they left several projects hanging. They had planned to picket the Pope when he visited New York City. They had just ordered a new printing press. Was this proof that they had been abducted, or was it all part of an elaborate scheme to distract their board and employees while they disappeared? Were they just pretending to carry on with business as usual while spiriting money out of the country and quietly packing away their chief asset, a large library of atheist literature? As a bewildered Ellen Johnson put it: "the Murray-O'Hairs left behind the entire contents of the office building, one car, all their personal belongings, their pets, their own bank accounts (which they have not touched) and the remainder of the office bank accounts and trust fund moneys. This is hard to reconcile with the idea that they were robbing the till so they could escape to Shangri-La."

In addition to the rumors, there were also sightings: O'Hair or her children were said to have been seen in Texas, in Mexico, in New Zealand, and elsewhere. Their presence could be felt haunting the empty halls of American Atheists headquarters, and in cyberspace as well. One of the most persistent urban legends is the story that Madalyn Murray O'Hair is petitioning the FCC to ban all religious programming. This warning is passed along by e-mail and through church bulletins and no matter how many times the American Atheists and the FCC deny the truth of the rumor, it won't die. The FCC reportedly has received millions of letters of protest and continues to receive them. (www.truthorfiction.com)

Indifference to the Disappearance as the Months Pass

Not every atheist was horror-stricken at the O'Hairs' disappearance. Frankly, some -- those who disapproved of Madalyn O'Hair's combative and vulgar style -- were relieved that she was no longer atheism's most visible and vocal spokesperson. A Texan atheist wrote:

The disappearance of the O'Hairs in September 1995 gave hope that more positive atheist initiatives might develop...That's why atheists should worry about the revival of Madalyn's American Atheists, Inc. under the leadership of Ellen Johnson, who assumed the office of President in a questionable Board of Directors meeting. Ellen Johnson is also a die-hard Madalyn fan who continues to present Madalyn as an atheist heroine. What atheism doesn't need is a continuation of Madalyn's negativity.

By the time Bill Murray learned that his mother, estranged daughter and half-brother had vanished, board member Tyson was living in the O'Hairs' home. Instead of sharing their concerns and assisting each other in the search, Madalyn's son and the American Atheists traded insults in the media. Each accused the other of caring nothing for the O'Hairs, and seeking only to make hay out of the disappearance for the publicity it would bring. "One of my mother's employees moved into her house…and began to sleep in her bed. Her close "confidant," Ellen Johnson, immediately flew to Texas from New Jersey and set up a new board of directors to take over the property and bank accounts of the family's atheist organizations. Not a single "friend" reported any of the three missing to the police," said Murray.

Bill Murray predicted, correctly, that when he filed a missing-persons report on his own family, that he would be accused of "fortune-hunting or ghoulish opportunism." That's just what happened when, a full year after the disappearance and because of the mounting public clamor, Murray filed a report with the Austin police. "He has said over and over and over again that he wants nothing to do with them. Why is he doing it now? Publicity. He needs money for his organization," Tyson said of Murray. "He hated his mother with a passion." And the filing accomplished little, anyway. The Austin police said there was no evidence of foul play, and "it is not against the law in Texas to be missing."

As the Atheists delved into the secrets of Madalyn's empire, it was not to their advantage to publicize what they learned. O'Hair had always claimed that her American Atheists organization had over 50,000 members or more. There were in fact fewer than 2,400 addresses on the mailing list. The Murray-O'Hairs were in trouble with the IRS for non-payment of income taxes, and there were also questions about whether the Murray-O'Hairs had treated the organization's money as their own. Questions about financial credibility were bad news for the organization, and the remaining directors tried to put the best face on things. Johnson, an attractive blonde, was a considerable contrast to the lumpen-looking Murray-O'Hairs. Spike Tyson continued to deny that anything was wrong: It was "absurd," he said, to suppose that the Murray-O'Hairs had stolen money. "We know where every bank account is. Every penny is accounted for."

A Mystery Corpse

"In 1986, O'Hair wrote an essay for the American Atheist about her hopes that nothing special would happen to her body. She didn't want any "dirty Christers" to get their hands on her corpse. Instead, she advised that if the atheists lived nearer the coast, it would be better if Jon and Robin "could fling the carcass into the water," where the fish could feed on it. A dead body, O'Hair wrote, was nothing more than "a fallen leaf from a tree, a dog killed on the highway, a fish caught in a net."

-- journalist Robert Bryce

The male body found on a riverbank east of Dallas in early October of 1995, lying on its back, stripped naked and abandoned among the weeds and the garbage, was like that -- like a leaf, a dog, a fish on the riverbank. Detective Robert Bjorklund wanted to find the "cocky bastards" who killed him, mutilated him and tossed him away. "The way they laid him out was like, 'Come and find us.'" Bjorklund checked over 200 missing-persons cases, but couldn't find the corpse's identity. The corpse did not offer much in the way of clues.

There were no clothes. No tattoos. Very little blood. No distinctive scars. No hands.

No head.

So the body was photographed, sampled, and given a pauper's burial. But Bjorklund didn't forget about the mystery corpse.

A Reporter and a Private Eye Search for the Missing Murray-O'Hairs

Fall turned into winter, winter to spring, and summer returned again to the Texas plains, with no word of the Murray-O'Hairs.

In the summer of 1996, a San Antonio reporter by the name of John MacCormack was assigned the Murray-O'Hair story for the one-year anniversary of the disappearance. MacCormack had more than 20 years of journalism experience and the face of a friendly bulldog. If a story interested him, he would lock on to it and not let go. He interviewed the American Atheist board members but found them to be tight-lipped, even denying that anything was amiss.

A few months later, a tip led McCormack to one of the few indisputable facts he could work with: The American Atheists finally admitted, in its 1995 tax returns, that a large sum of money was missing, and all the evidence pointed to Jon Garth Murray as the thief. He had arranged for the transfer and withdrawal of a large amount of money -- over $600,000, last September, shortly before his disappearance. In addition, he had sold his Mercedes through a classified ad.

This is the kind of information that captures the interest of the IRS, who revoked the American Atheists' tax exempt status pending an investigation, and finally the wheels started to turn on the O'Hair case. But it was not death that interested the federal agency; it was that other inevitability, taxes. The Murray-O'Hairs owed a considerable tax bill. In February 1997, the IRS seized the Murray-O'Hairs' house and property, evicting Spike Tyson. The American Atheists had a vested interest in whatever the Murray-O'Hairs had left behind, as President Ellen Johnson told the members, so the organization also was "active...in legal proceedings to recover missing funds taken by Jon Murray."

Significantly, when the revelations about the missing money came to light, no one who knew the O'Hairs came forward to say, "They couldn't possibly have done this. I know them. They couldn't have stolen this money." Instead, Arnold Via, who described himself as a friend of the O'Hairs said, "If they misled us, abandoned us and stole money, they are crooks."

Reporter MacCormack hitched up with a private investigator named Tim Young, who had decided that the search for one of America's most famous women and her family looked intriguing. Young obtained Jon Garth's cell phone records for that last, mysterious month in San Antonio. Together, MacCormack and Young started checking every phone number on the phone logs. Before September 1995, Jon Garth didn't use his cell phone much, but during that last month, over 200 phone calls were made to financial institutions, jewelers, overseas long-distance services, travel agencies -- all tending to confirm the idea that the O'Hairs had been planning to flee the country.

McCormack explained, "We went door-to-door to all the places that (Jon Garth) called. We knocked on one door, and found where the $600,000 went."

During that mysterious month of September 1995, Jon Garth had contacted a jewelry store in San Antonio and asked to purchase $600,000 worth of gold coins. The jeweler instructed him to wire money to the jeweler's account and the order was placed on his behalf. The only time the jeweler met his customer was when Jon Garth came in on Friday, September 29, to pick up his 1,500 coins. The jeweler, Cory Ticknor, remembered that Jon Garth was inexperienced at handling gold coins and seemed like he badly needed a shower, but did not appear nervous or distraught. He was escorted to his car by a police officer moonlighting as a security guard. Then he was gone. Ticknor was the last person known to have seen Jon Garth Murray alive.

MacCormack's discovery only deepened the mystery and the speculation, but the evidence continued to point to some dishonesty on the part of Jon Garth, if not all of the Murray-O'Hairs.

Vanity Fair Duped

Ex-con David Waters, the former office manager, was as willing as anyone to speculate on their disappearance. In fact, he had been a principal source for an investigative article in Vanity Fair magazine, published in the spring of 1997, in which reporter Mimi Swartz concluded that the Murray-O'Hairs had absconded to New Zealand.

Swartz found abundant evidence to show that the Murray-O'Hairs might have been planning to liquidate American Atheist assets and flee the scene. Some of the documents and letters she relied on were given to her by Waters, who had purloined them from the American Atheists office during his tenure there. They proved the O'Hairs had been discussing a move to New Zealand for years. For example, a 1985 letter written by Jon Garth stated: "Should it become necessary for us to flee this country, we would like to have some funds on deposit outside the United States so that we would not be leaving in an entirely destitute condition." Waters also claimed that Madalyn and Jon Garth had framed him for the theft of the money from American Atheists because he was on to their money-laundering scheme and their preparations for their flight out of the country. Waters even suggested that the Murray-O'Hairs were behind the mysterious, unsolved thefts of the computer and the bearer bonds. He was working on a book about the whole thing.

Although more than one reporter was tantalized by Waters's documents and his theory -- he enjoyed talking to reporters -- Bill Murray grew increasingly skeptical as the months turned to years, that his mother, half-brother and daughter were still alive. For one thing, his mother would be unable to resist the publicity her disappearance had generated. The most dangerous place to be was in between Madalyn O'Hair and a camera, he pointed out.

Murray also stated flatly that the world, big as it was, was not big enough to hide the O'Hairs. "You have these three obese people. Robin requires two airline seats wherever she goes. My mother uses the f-word in virtually every sentence that comes out of her mouth. Just singularly, they would be remembered. Together, it's like waving a red flag in front of a bull." By the second anniversary of their disappearance, Bill Murray was convinced that his family had been murdered, and murdered for money. While he did not pretend to be grief-stricken at his loss, Murray did conscientiously attempt to interest various law enforcement agencies in investigating the disappearance, to little avail, and always against the unvarying hostility of the American Atheists.

The Tip That Breaks the Case

John MacCormack continued his interest in the case and came to be recognized as a leading authority on the O'Hair disappearance. In June 1998, after he'd been interviewed for a major television newsmagazine piece on the mystery, he was at his desk at the San Antonio newspaper where he worked, when he got an anonymous phone call. The caller told MacCormack that the disappearance of a small-time con artist, Danny Fry, might be linked to the disappearance of the Murray-O'Hairs. The caller was close to Fry and knew that he had traveled from Florida to Texas in the summer of 1995 to stay with none other than David Waters, then had disappeared at the end of September -- the same time as the Murray-O'Hairs.

MacCormack was intrigued. He knew that Waters, who still lived in a ramshackle apartment in Austin, had been promoting the theory that the Murray-O'Hairs had absconded with American Atheists funds.

But the anonymous voice on the other end of the phone line was telling MacCormack that Waters knew precisely what had happened to the Murray-O'Hairs -- because Waters had kidnapped and murdered them. And the caller was afraid the same fate had befallen Fry.

Fry's fiancée confirmed that her man was susceptible to get-rich-quick schemes. "Danny was not the type of person to make $300 or $500 a week. He wanted to make a lot of money, and he kept telling me there was a big, big backer, a big construction thing, (in Texas)."

Initially, Fry called his fiancée and his daughter back in Florida every day, but toward the end of September, he grew terse and evasive. His fiancée recalled, "I started wondering and asking him questions and he got real angry with me. He said, 'Don't ask.'"

"The last day he called, I said, 'Danny, please come home,' and he said, 'I've got one more thing to do. Then I'll come home,' " she said.

But he never did. Danny Fry had joined the Murray-O'Hairs to become one of the approximately 100,000 missing persons in the United States. Fear of David Waters had kept Fry's family from going public, but MacCormack's investigation had given them hope that the truth might come out.

MacCormack pondered the possibilities. Madalyn O'Hair fires an ex-con for stealing money from the American Atheists. Danny Fry, as it turned out, served prison time with Waters. Fry leaves his family and travels to Texas. He disappears the same weekend the O'Hairs do -- right after the purchase of half a million dollars of gold coins.

Things had taken a decidedly sinister twist, but there was no hard evidence. And David Waters could look a reporter straight in the eyes and say, "I am in no way connected with their disappearance, demise, relocation to a sunny clime or anything else that has to do with (the Murray-O'Hairs)." He complained that MacCormack was his "nemesis."

Meanwhile, the Austin police were still saying that there was no indication that a crime had been committed. "I'm of the opinion that they are not dead and that there was no foul play involved. I still have that feeling," said the lead investigator on the case. "If somebody wants to show me a body or a crime scene, I'll be glad to have my opinion changed."

By then, the O'Hairs had been missing for three years.

When MacCormack obtained Fry's long-distance bills he saw that Waters had been lying when he claimed that he and Fry had been casual acquaintances who had seen each other briefly in Texas. When Fry was still in Florida in the summer of 1995, Waters had phoned him and they had held lengthy conversations. Fry traveled to Austin and lived in Waters's apartment, but in September, at the same time the Murray-O'Hairs disappeared, Fry started phoning his family from San Antonio. Some calls were placed from a pay phone that overlooked the swimming pool at the Warren Inn in Northwest San Antonio. Finally, in the last few days before his disappearance, Fry was back in Austin.

MacCormack also published the fact that David Waters was in San Antonio in September of 1995, buying a white Cadillac with $13,000 cash. This was at the same time that Jon Garth and Robin's credit card records showed that they were maxing out their cards with cash advances.

The Headless Corpse Gets a Name

All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean; and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not; as is the good, so is the sinner, and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an oath.

This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto all: yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead.

Ecclesiastes, 9:2-3

A few months after the phone call about Danny Fry, in the fall of 1998, MacCormack was reading the morning wire stories on his computer when a short item out of Dallas caught his attention. It was the third-year anniversary of the appearance on the banks of the Trinity River of a male corpse, minus head and hands. Dallas police were stumped.

MacCormack contacted the Dallas police department and explained there might be a connection between their headless corpse and three missing atheists and a pile of gold coins. The police thought the killing had all the earmarks of a drug murder, but luckily, they were willing to test MacCormack's theory. Fry's family cooperated by providing DNA samples.

A few months later, they had their answer.

"It is confirmed, "said Detective Robert Bjorklund, "that our homicide victim is Danny Fry. The probability is.... 99.99 percent."

MacCormack courageously continued to write articles about the damning circumstantial evidence against Waters, even as it became apparent to him that Waters was a cold-blooded killer and an extremely dangerous man. A third ex-con entered the picture, as well: Gary Karr was another alumni of the prison system and had also served time with David Waters. Karr, in his early 50s, was a tough-looking brute who had convictions for rape and kidnapping, and had only been out of prison a few months. He was also in Texas, staying at David Waters's apartment, at the time of the Murray-O'Hairs' disappearance. Waters continued to meet with reporters, coolly denying any involvement in the disappearance of the Murray-O'Hairs and Fry.

But, at long last, law enforcement authorities were taking notice. Three months after MacCormack published his scoop about Danny Fry's murder, federal agents served search warrants on Karr's home in Michigan and David Waters's apartment in Texas. Much of their information came from Karr's ex-wife and Waters's ex-girlfriend, both of whom had known about mysterious happenings back in 1995, but had kept their mouths shut for three and a half years. MacCormack's revelations, however, and questioning by law enforcement, had done wonders in awakening their consciences.

In short order, both Karr and Waters found themselves back in jail on unrelated charges. Rounds of ammunition were found in Waters's apartment, a violation of his parole. Karr was locked up on firearms charges as well. Using the evidence seized, including financial records and a bow saw, the FBI was able to piece together the story of the O'Hairs' last month on earth. "Initially, I was looking at Jon Murray for money laundering and I ended up with four dead people," said Ed Martin, lead agent for the IRS.

What Happened to the Murray-O'Hairs

The Murray-O'Hairs had been held for a month. There is no evidence that any of them tried to escape or summon help during that time, which mystifies some observers. Madalyn O'Hair had been the most closely confined, at the Warren Inn Apartments in Northeast San Antonio, and Robin was probably her companion. Their principal guard was Fry, who had no serious criminal record and was regarded as a good-natured charmer with a gift of gab. He must have been recruited by Waters for these qualities -- to keep the Murray-O'Hairs quiet and cooperative while Waters tried to extract all the wealth he could from them. Jon Garth had the most "freedom." In addition to various banking errands around San Antonio, he even traveled to New Jersey with Gary Karr to facilitate the money transfer to buy the gold coins. Bill Murray speculates that Jon Garth's acquiescence was purchased with threats to the safety of his mother and niece. Perhaps Jon Garth held out hope to the very end that the Murray-O'Hairs would be allowed to live.

Water's ex-girlfriend later testified that Waters was so angry when Madalyn O'Hair wrote her article denouncing him in her newsletter, that he fantasized about torturing her and pulling off her toes with pliers. For a cold-blooded psychopath like Waters, merely robbing from the O'Hairs was not revenge enough for losing his job and being exposed by the article. He probably relished telling Madalyn O'Hair, face to face, precisely how the O'Hairs contributed to their own disaster -- how he had letters, written by them, detailing their planned move to New Zealand. As the days of captivity went by, he might have mocked them. Who was looking for them? Nobody. Who cared enough about them to look for them? Nobody. Nobody at all in this world. Just as he brutalized his own mother, he probably brutalized Madalyn O'Hair. Taunting her with the fact that her own secrecy about her financial affairs, her own imperious conduct, meant that no one would question her disappearance. "I know you'll do the right thing," Robin cryptically told the American Atheists board members before she disappeared. But to the American Atheists, doing the right thing had always meant doing as Madalyn told them to do.

Madalyn O'Hair, however, must have faced Waters with her customary courage, because Waters apparently never learned about the other New Zealand bank accounts in Jon Garth's name, because they were untouched, nor about a bank account in San Antonio that contained $23,000. Waters got only the Mercedes, the cash advances from the credit cards, and half a million dollars in gold coins. In fact, there was another, second delivery of $100,000 in gold coins that was not picked up from the jeweler's.

The end of September must have been a significant deadline for Waters -- perhaps the difficulty of holding, or secretly transporting, three people in the middle of a small city was proving to be too difficult and dangerous. At any rate, the O'Hairs met their end on or shortly after September 29, 1995. They were either murdered, probably by strangulation at Waters's hands, in the motel, or were transported, either dead or alive, to a storage locker rented by another associate of Waters, "Chico" Osborne. Inside the locker, Waters and possibly Karr and Fry carried out the grisly task of sawing the bodies into pieces. Later, they were dumped into barrels, and transported 120 miles to a remote ranch. The O'Hairs were dumped into a shallow grave, where they remained undiscovered for over five years.

Fry survived the O'Hairs by one or two days at most -- then he, too, was gone, probably shot in the head, and dismembered.

After Waters cleaned out the storage locker with a spray of water and bleach, he and his girlfriend checked into a hotel for several days of serious partying. Waters and Karr bought the best suits money could buy, ordered champagne, and flashed around their newly acquired Rolex watches. Most of the money was stashed in a storage locker rented by Waters's girlfriend, but they made a serious dent in the $80,000 they had on hand.

In an atheist universe, there is no revengeful god, or even a Nemesis to exact retribution. But a few days after killing the O'Hairs and Fry, Waters returned to the locker to discover that the lock was open and the money was gone. All of it. For his months of planning and effort, all he had left was revenge and the knowledge that he had committed probably the perfect crime. Or had he? Who knew about those gold coins?

Postscripts

For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope; for a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward, for the memory of them is forgotten.

Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun.

Ecclesiastes, :4-6

As the final pieces of the puzzle were put together, an Austin reporter, Robert Bryce, noted that the Austin police had completely missed out on the most heinous crime of the decade: "Despite pleas from O'Hair's son, William J. Murray, several briefings from federal agents, and solid leads developed by members of the press, the Austin Police Department (APD) sat on the sidelines of the O'Hair investigation...Meanwhile, investigators from the Internal Revenue Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, and the Dallas County Sheriff's Office are working together on the case....a federal agent was asked to discuss APD's actions in the O'Hair case. His only response was to roll his eyes in amazement."

Karr was brought to trial in May 2000, where the jury heard the story of a cold-blooded murder. Without any bodies, though, the jury did not convict Karr for murder, but his convictions for extortion and money laundering were enough to send the career criminal back to jail for life.

David Waters never faced trial for the kidnapping and murder of the Murray-O 'Hairs. In March of 2001, he was sentenced to 20 years (in addition to earlier sentences of 60 and 25 years). As a result of a plea bargain he revealed the location of the Murray-O'Hairs' bodies. Waters died of lung cancer in January of 2003 in a federal prison hospital in North Carolina.

In addition to solving the murders of the O'Hairs and Danny Fry, agents were finally able to track down the missing gold coins. It turned out that a group of thieves from San Antonio, who had a master key to the type of lock Waters used, came across his storage locker. To their utter amazement, they had found a suitcase full of gold coins, which they promptly fell to spending. Only one coin was recovered by police. The theft of the coins seems so bizarre, so improbable, that merely calling it "coincidence" or "chance" seems too feeble, but federal agents and the thieves themselves swear that this is precisely what happened.

The missing cocker spaniels Gannon and Shannon have not been seen since they disappeared from a locked compound at the American Atheist headquarters.

In January 2001, a full five and a half years after they were last seen, the Murray-O'Hairs were finally found on a sprawling ranch near the little town of Camp Wood, Tex. (The owner of the ranch was not implicated in their deaths.) Federal agents, led to the scene by David Waters, found skulls, scorched cloth, severed bones, and a metal hip belonging to Madalyn O'Hair. As Bill Murray told his supporters in his website: http://www.wjmurray.com/

One federal agent at the scene told me of how gruesome the situation was. The bodies had been dismembered and then burned...That same agent also told me that he had offered a prayer over the bodies when they were first discovered. He told me, "No one deserves this, no one."

The feud between American Atheists and Bill Murray continued. Johnson, the organization's president, denied that Bill Murray could possibly have any claim or interest in the remains of people he evidently despised, even if they were his kin, his own mother, half-brother and daughter. Murray countered that Johnson only wanted to use the remains as a relic for fund-raising purposes.

After the identification of the remains was confirmed, they were given to Bill Murray for burial, and he announced that, in accordance with his own beliefs and his late mother's wishes, he would not pray at the burial site.

As an evangelical, I do not pray for the dead. Baptists believe that upon death the fate of the soul is sealed. The deceased person is in Glory with God, or in Hell. In either event, prayer is fruitless at that point.... The group (at the burial site) removed themselves... (and) said a prayer for the remaining family members and for the law enforcement officers who had worked on the case and suffered emotionally as a result.

One of the law enforcement officials was close to tears on several occasions. The details of the last days and hours of my mother, brother and daughter were so brutal that even men accustomed to violence were emotionally shaken.

Of the many ironies involved in the O'Hair story, one is that Madalyn O'Hair battled the government all her life and conscientiously avoided paying taxes. She was especially suspicious of the FBI, believing Hoover's organization to be the malevolent agent of the evil theocracy that was the United States. But it was the FBI and the IRS who finally avenged her murder. And some of those agents involved in the case, those who searched for her, found her, and attended her burial, expressed the deepest sorrow over the horrors that she and her family had endured at the hands of David Waters, Gary Karr and Danny Fry.

''I hope I live my life in such a manner that when I die, someone cares - even if it is only my dogs. I think I want some human being somewhere to weep for me.''

-- Madalyn Murray O'Hair

Links to Austin papers and photos:
http://www.auschron.com/issues/vol18/issue12/pols.ohair.side6.html
http://www.auschron.com/issues/vol18/issue40/pols.athiests.html

Links to American Atheists:
http://www.atheists.org/visitors.center/index.html

O'Hairs newsletter article (the one that exposes Waters):
http://www.atheists.org/visitors.center/OHairFamily/ns-jul95.html

Archive of reporter John MacCormack's stories on the O'Hair case:
http://www.mysa.com/mysanantonio/extras/ohair/

Also good – another MacCormack article
http://www.dallasobserver.com/issues/2001-02-01/news.html

David Waters tries to persuade reporters that the O'Hairs stole the money -- including photos of Waters and the Murray-O'Hairs
http://www.auschron.com/issues/vol18/issue12/pols.ohair.html

Topics:

Celebrity Crime

Murder

Authors:

Lona Manning

Cons, Frauds, and Schemers

admin — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 08:23:23 +0000

January 1, 2007

Interstate 40 and the Arkansas River May 26, 2002

They can look you in the eye, win your trust and melt your heart. They can lie about the past, the present, and the future. They are chameleons, changing names and identities as easily as we change our outfits.

by Lona Manning

They are conmen and women. They are sociopaths.

Some of the names of the victims in this article have been changed or withheld to protect their privacy.

James Rubin Rowe

It didn't matter to Marina Howard that her wedding rehearsal dinner was being held on Friday the 13th. She was still the luckiest girl in the world. Only eight weeks ago, she had applied for work as a hostess at a steakhouse restaurant and been swept off her feet by the owner, Mike Grogan. Mike was husky, tall and broad shouldered with dark hair, with piercing eyes and an easy laugh.

Mike had led a fascinating life. An ex-Navy Seal, he'd played pro football (and had a Super Bowl ring to prove it). He was fun-loving and free-spending. Years ago, he'd invested in a little company known as Microsoft and that was why, at age 39, he was a millionaire. He was incredibly smart about business and investing. He offered to buy cars in her name so she'd be able to build up her credit rating. Other friends of Mike's – people he'd met since moving to San Diego six months before – were investing all their money in a computer software company he was starting up.

And so, Marina knew her future was bright. As the time approached for their friends to start arriving at the restaurant, Marina sat writing thank-you notes to her bridesmaids. Mike was in the kitchen, talking to the chef about the dinner, when two U.S. Marshals burst through the kitchen door and placed him under arrest. Marina's groom-to-be was marched out in handcuffs.

Marina had to come to grips with the fact that her fiancé Mike Grogan wasn't Mike Grogan. "I was in love with a guy who does not exist," she told a reporter for the San Diego Union Tribune a few days later. Grogan's real name was James Rubin Rowe. He had never been a Navy Seal. He had never played pro football. He had been married at least two times before and in fact he was still married to a woman in Seattle. And he was not a millionaire, although over the years he had conned people out of millions of dollars.

Rowe's wife in Seattle also didn't know her husband's real name was James Rowe. She thought she was married to Steve Heitman, owner of a chain of successful ski equipment shops. James Rowe had started up his business by winning the trust of two Microsoft executives. They bankrolled the stores, but Rowe drained all the company's cash to fund his lavish lifestyle. He scooted out of Seattle just before his financial house of cards came crashing down on him, leaving his investors with the debts. The real Steve Heitman had gone to high school with Rowe but had tragically died when he was 20. Rowe had stolen his identity.

And before he was Steve Heitman, Rowe used other aliases. With his commanding presence, people skills, and self-confidence, he could get hired for jobs that he knew nothing about, like precision engineering or drilling wells. He'd hang around long enough to embezzle from his boss and skip town. In most of his incarnations, he claimed to have a military background and often showed up in uniform, shoulders back, with a chest full of ribbons. He was a genius at getting people to trust him. "If you and I sat down in a restaurant," Rowe told Keith Morrison of Dateline after his arrest, "I would be able to ascertain what you wanted, and who you were and what I needed to do to get inside your head, probably within 45 minutes. Within two weeks, we would be best friends, and you would be investing money."

Rowe had been caught before and had done time in federal prisons but resumed his conman career as soon as he was released. This time around, he said he was filled with remorse for the pain he had caused Marina. Denny Behrend of the U.S. Marshal's Seattle office doubts Rowe's sincerity. Rowe, Behrend figures, uses women for "their good name and their good credit. Being married also lends an air of respectability to him."

How did the Marshals swoop down on Rowe just before his bigamous marriage to Marina? Only because Rowe had bilked so many people over the years that he accidentally bumped into an old victim. Rowe was looking at automobiles at a luxury car lot when another customer recognized him and confronted him. Rowe denied everything, of course, but the angry victim alerted the San Diego Violent Crimes Task Force, who coordinated the arrest with the U.S. Marshals.

When he was arrested in San Diego on Oct. 13, 2000, Rowe claimed innocence, but pled guilty to 12 counts of fraud in Seattle. Rowe is currently in federal prison in Pennsylvania and is due for release in 2015.

Interstate 40 and the Arkansas River May 26, 2002

Billy Clark

James Rowe says he can't resist conning people because he can't resist stealing money. Another conman, Billy Clark, couldn't resist the opportunity to play the hero.

Early on Sunday morning, May 26, 2002, a barge smashed into the Interstate 40 bridge at the Arkansas River near the small town of Webbers Falls, Okla. The impact caused a 500-foot section of the bridge to collapse into the murky water, taking almost a dozen cars and trucks with it. Fourteen people died in the catastrophe. As news of the accident spread, scores of volunteers, law enforcement officials and rescue personnel rushed to the scene. Among those was a burly, sandy-haired officer dressed in army fatigues. He said he was Captain William Clark, just back from Afghanistan, and he was in charge of the recovery operations.

Clark, 29, commandeered a new Ford truck and reserved eight hotel rooms for himself and his team who would be arriving shortly. In addition to issuing orders and giving interviews, Clark hinted that one of the victims had sensitive information in his laptop, which would have to be recovered from the river. The bridge disaster was not only an economic catastrophe and a personal tragedy, it was also a national security issue of some kind.

Locals had their hands full responding to the disaster and didn't have time to think about, let alone check, Clark's bona fides for several days. "He walked the walk and talked the talk," the mayor explained. But Clark's insistence that he was in charge of operations finally irritated the mayor, who pointed out that unless the governor declared a state of emergency, the local authorities were still in charge. "One of our men from the medical examiner's office called the military to check him out. There is no record of him ever being in the army," the mayor later told the National Post.

Clark abruptly fled town and the FBI was notified. Clark next surfaced in Canada, in Tobermory, a small town north of Toronto. Once again, he presented himself as a Special Forces officer from Afghanistan. His bragging about his exploits and his aggressive overtures to young women made him conspicuous in the little town. The local harbormaster saw a newspaper article about the Oklahoma bridge conman and realized who their visitor was. Provincial police arrested Clark.

Back in Tallapousa, Mo, Clark's hometown, the sheriff explained that Clark routinely impersonated police officers or firemen and passed bad checks. "It's just the way he makes his living: I don't think he's worked in a day in his life."

Yet, even after his arrest, Clark continued to insist that he was an army officer, serving in a top-secret "black ops" unit. He was sent for an extensive psychiatric examination and was initially ruled unfit to stand trial, having convinced authorities, for a time at least, that he was not deliberately conning people, but was delusional. His own cousin isn't even sure if Clark knows what the truth is: "He tells so many lies he believes it. I've argued with him lots of times about him being in the military. He says he is."

Clark is currently serving time in a federal prison in California and is scheduled for release in 2007.

Dr. Barian Baluchi

Any judge who wants a psychiatric evaluation of a conman should consider the cautionary tale of Dr. Barian Baluchi, the conman asked to give a psychiatric evaluation for a conman.

Professor Barian Samuel Baluchi MB, ChB, MSc, PhD, was a respected Harley Street psychiatrist in England. Baluchi's success in his field was evident in his shiny Mercedes Benz and his $1.3 million home. He had trained in England and Spain, as well as Harvard. He was an expert on stress and mental trauma. The British government consulted him frequently on the mental-health problems experienced by immigrants. He authored a book on the subject and ran a resource center for immigrants, for which he received $2.5 two million in grant monies. He developed his own therapeutic methods, which he called "holistic interactive trauma therapy."

In addition to his regular counseling practice, Baluchi made a handsome income as an expert witness in court cases. His specialty was testifying on behalf of asylum-seekers fighting deportation. (He had himself successfully sought asylum in Britain as an immigrant from Iran in 1978. He married an Englishwoman, but divorced her once he obtained permanent residency status.) Over 1,500 asylum seekers won the right to stay in Britain, partly on the strength of Baluchi's professional opinion that they would suffer too much trauma if deported.

In a bizarre twist, the fake psychiatrist testified on behalf of a fake doctor. A Kurdish refugee named Iskender Dilek was convicted of raping immigrant women while posing as a gynecologist. Baluchi gave his expert opinion that Dilek was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. In this instance, however, Baluchi didn't sway the judge, who sentenced Dilek to 10 and a half years.

In fact, Baluchi produced so many reports on behalf of immigrants that he aroused the suspicions of an immigration official. A government investigation revealed that although the walls of Baluchi's office were covered with certificates, attesting to his certification in psychiatry and plastic surgery, the astounding truth was that Baluchi had no medical qualifications whatsoever. He had gotten himself registered as a doctor in Britain with stolen credentials from a Spanish physician.

Baluchi was actually a former taxicab driver.

"He took in people from all walks of life," prosecutor Louise Kamill charged, "from the newly arrived asylum seeker to senior officials at the Department of Health, local authorities and established charities, from people practiced in detecting dishonesty such as the judges sitting at the Old Bailey, the immigration appeals tribunal, criminal solicitors, to his own personal acquaintances, including his English first wife. Each one believed him to be a qualified doctor and trusted him."

Baluchi was sentenced to 10 years in prison in January 2005.

Vicky Allan

Baluchi was able to convince even his colleagues that he was a Harvard-educated psychiatrist. But for sheer audacity, few can match Vicky Allan of British Columbia, Canada. When the single mother met Gary Mayhew, a flooring installer, she spun a tale he couldn't resist. Allan posed as a widow who could only inherit her late husband's millions if she got remarried. Her father-in-law had recently died, she explained, and left her the family fortune, but only on the condition that she remarries so that her daughter, his grandchild, could have a father. The 40-year-old single mother promised Mayhew she would split the fortune with him if would he would marry her. Mayhew readily agreed, but as soon as Vicky became his wife in December of 2000, her promises of riches turned into demands for all his savings. She spun a web of deceit and paranoia, telling him that other relatives of her late husband were out to kill them so they wouldn't inherit the money. She said they had kidnapped her brother and she needed ransom money. By the time Mayhew realized he'd been conned and left his wife after five months of marriage, she had drained his life's savings of $170,000.

Mayhew got a restraining order from Vicky, but he was to learn the truth of the adage that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

In early March of 2002, Mayhew's divorce from Vicky was finalized. That same month, he got a call to meet a potential flooring customer at a local motel. When Mayhew showed up at the appointed room, three muscular men jumped on him and roughed him up. As he struggled and tried to scream for help, they yelled that he was getting what he deserved. "How do you think Tracey felt?" one asked. They blindfolded him and strapped him to a chair with duct tape. His heart pounding, Mayhew heard his ex-wife saying, "Well, let's go for a coffee. Part of the movie scene is for him to be left there for awhile." His three assailants left the room with his wife.

Mayhew dreaded what would happen when Vicky returned. He managed to free himself and ran from the room, calling for help. But Vicky heard him and sent her three goons to catch him. He was dragged across the parking lot into the motel room again. He continued to struggle against the three men, who were all stronger than he was. He began to fear for his life. Fortunately, his three assailants, surprised at the struggle he put up, decided to abandon the fight and run away. Mayhew escaped a second time and ran for help.

When the police arrived, they found Mayhew taking refuge in the motel lobby and three very confused bodybuilders.

The police untangled an incredible tale: Vicky Allan had approached three young men at a local bodybuilder's gym and told them she was a casting agent for an upcoming Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. She was holding auditions at a local motel and if they could convincingly act the part of three men giving vigilante justice to an abusive husband, she'd hire them for the movie. She would provide the actor they were to terrorize.

At first, the young men believed Allan's story, but, as the judge who heard the case put it, "They were surprised at the vehemence with which Mr. Mayhew resisted them, thinking that it was probably even excessive for the scenario. Eventually they were persuaded that there was something wrong with the situation they found themselves in and they fled."

At first, Vicky told police her husband had set her up, but she couldn't lie her way out of this one – the evidence of the bodybuilders and the motel clerks was overwhelming. When her first story didn't work, she pled guilty but tried to spin a tearful tale of spousal abuse, charging that Mayhew had beaten and terrorized her when they were married. She simply wanted to give him a taste of his own medicine.

Mayhew vehemently denied her accusations, telling reporter Marshall Jones, "I believed her lies and she forged numerous checks. Twenty-two years of my life savings, she wiped out. I used to have a perfect credit rating and now I can't get a credit card."

At her sentencing hearing, Judge B.J. Grannary noted that Vicky accused her ex-husband of beating her in the motel room before the police arrived, giving her a concussion, when in fact Mayhew had escaped to the lobby after the bodybuilders fled. Making false accusations was as natural as breathing, to her.

Over the previous 20 years, Allan had been convicted of theft and fraud in six different cities. When Mayhew met her, she hadn't just become a grieving widow, she was just out of prison. As part of their investigation, police learned that Vicky Allan had paid for the motel room with – what else? – a stolen credit card.

At the sentencing hearing, Judge Grannary called Vicky vindictive and malicious, adding, "She ambushed [Mayhew]. She trapped him. She set him up. She planned it. She deliberated over it. She calculated over it. She arranged for these three men to come and beat him up and tie him up. She had the tape. She had the blindfold. She had the location. She had other people call her husband to ensnare him in the trap…." Grannary charged that Allan "intoxicated" the three bodybuilders "with expectations of riches and fame."

Allan, Grannary concluded, "feeds on a diet of the gullible and she has no difficulty in finding gullibility in her life."

On Aug.15, 2002, Vicky Allan was sentenced to two years less a day for terrorizing her ex-husband. As Judge Grannary pronounced sentence, she tried to interrupt, but he cut her off. "Tell it to somebody who is going to listen to you," he said.

If she is out of prison again, someone, somewhere, probably is.

Protect yourself – learn how to spot a conman

"Sooner or later, you will have a run-in with a sociopath," warns Donna Anderson of Lovefraud.com. Anderson was the victim of a con artist who lied his way into marriage and left her in debt. Anderson's website gives tips on how to spot a con artist.

Conmen often claim to have served in the military, usually in Special Forces on secret missions. This website http://www.pownetwork.org/phonies/phonies.htm exposes military frauds.

The story of the whiz-kid con man, Barry Minkow, who got caught, got religion and now educates others about fraud. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Minkow

Bibliography

James Rubin Rowe:

"The perfect stranger: His web of deceit snared love, friendship and wealth -- until he tried one con too many," by Jennifer Hanrahan, San Diego Union-Tribune, October 29,2000

"Profile: Jim Rowe changes identity and cons many," Dateline NBC transcript, July 5,2002

"Conman tells of misdeeds, denies lacking a conscience," by Jennifer Hanrahan, San Diego Union-Tribune, October 21, 2000

William Clark

"Fainting spell led to barge crash, bridge collapse, NTSB concludes," By Steve Tetreault, Arkansas News Bureau, Sep 1, 2004

"Disasters are a gift to imposters," by Jessica Leeder, National Post (Canada), July 13, 2002.

"Oklahoma barge crash - U.S. fugitive was hitting on local women," by Jessica Leeder and Odile Nelson, National Post (Canada) June 11, 2002

"Impostor at bridge collapse has history of false identities, authorities say," Associated Press, June 12, 2002

Barian Baluchi

"Bogus Doctor `Frittered Away' £1m," by Melvyn Howe, Press Association Newswire, October 12, 2006

"Jail For Fake Doctor Who Helped Convict Sex Pest," by John Carvel, Birmingham Post, January 27, 2005

"How doctors and lawyers all fell for King Con," By Lech Mintowt-Czyz; Ben Leapman; Bo Wilson, The Evening Standard (London), January 21, 2005,

"Bogus Doctor Conned Charities, Patients And Government," by Melvin Howe, Press Association Newswire, January 17, 2005

"Refugee Rapist Picked On Fellow Turks," by Shenai Raif, Press Association Newswire, January 9, 2004

Vicky Maureen Allan

Regina v. M****, Oral Reasons on Sentence by the Honorable Judge B.J. Grannary, Provincial Court of British Columbia, 2002 BCPC 0671, File No: 30910-2H

"Ex-husband speaks out after woman's guilty plea, by Marshall Jones, Kelowna Capital News, July 5, 2002

"Female con artist given two years," Kelowna Daily Courier, August 16, 2002

Topics:

Corruption

Authors:

Lona Manning

Rapist, M.D.

admin — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 07:07:39 +0000

April 3, 2003 Updated Feb. 6, 2004

John Schneeberger

It's said that the Royal Canadian Mounties always get their man -- but in this case justice was delayed for seven years, and the doctor might never have answered for his crimes if it hadn't been for one very determined young woman who knew that her doctor had drugged her, raped her, and somehow had managed to falsify his DNA to escape prosecution.

by Lona Manning

For an instant, Candice Foley didn't know where she was when she woke up that morning. She wasn't in her own bed. Or on a friend's sofa. She was in a hospital bed. And while she was familiar with how it felt to wake up with a hangover, this was also different – she felt spaced out, a little woozy. Had she been in a car accident or something?

What was the last thing she remembered? She closed her eyes tightly and tried to recall all the events of the previous night. She'd been at her job at the gas station, and was in a bad mood, because it was Halloween night and she was stuck behind a counter. Her boyfriend had come by. Something he said caused her to flare up, one thing led to another, and soon Candice had lost her temper completely. She was so angry that she had grabbed her purse and jacket, jumped into her car and screeched away. At the time she had felt she could have killed her boyfriend, but their fight seemed so distant and unimportant now.

Then, not really knowing what she was doing, she drove to the medical center where she knew her girlfriend was working. A nurse there saw the hysterical young woman and paged her family doctor. Candice agreed to wait and see him. She liked Dr. Schneeberger. She really liked him, in fact – he had delivered her baby daughter, and he was so intelligent. He was in his 30s and not bad-looking. And he was originally from South Africa, which in a small town like Kipling made him quite exotic. The nurse led Candice to Dr. Schneeberger's combination office and examining room.

By the time Dr. Schneeberger arrived, Candice was sobbing and still very agitated, face flushed, chest heaving. They talked for a few minutes, then Schneeberger proposed, "Well, maybe I'll give you something to calm you down." He left the room and a moment later, returned with a syringe, closing the door behind him.

Candice eyed the syringe dubiously. "Oh, it's a needle?" Schneeberger murmured a few words of reassurance, then swiftly pushed up her sleeve, swabbed alcohol on her arm, and injected her.

Almost instantly, Candice felt the medication -- whatever it was -- take effect. She felt herself start to go limp, start to go numb. She felt herself start to slump sideways in the chair, but her doctor grabbed hold of her firmly, pulled her up and half led, half carried her to the examining table.

She couldn't speak. She couldn't move. "My eyes were wide open," she later told the Canadians newsmagazine program W5. "They were like, stuck wide open. I couldn't even shut them. It was like I was paralyzed." Like in a dream, her limbs felt rubbery and heavy as lead. She tried to move, but couldn't. She tried to cry out, but couldn't speak. Helpless to resist, through her numbness she felt Dr. Schneeberger unsnap the button on her jeans and pull them down. She felt him pull her panties to one side and enter her.

Her doctor had raped her.

A few minutes later, he pulled her jeans back up and left the room.

As the events of the night before came back to her, Dr. Schneeberger suddenly was at her bedside, looking down at her through his black framed glasses, reaching for her arm to take her pulse.

"What – what was that drug you gave me last night?" Candice demanded.

"Why?" he asked, and smiled gently. "Did it give you wild dreams?"

Oh, God, she had to get out of there. Now. It hadn't been a nightmare, it was true. Her own doctor had drugged her, raped her, and was now lying to her face.

She was still too woozy to confront him then and there, so Candice got herself home. Thinking back to all the crime shows she'd seen, she put the panties she'd worn to the hospital into a plastic bag.

But wait. What would happen when she went to the police to file a charge against the doctor? Kipling was a very small town and Dr. Schneeberger was one of its leading citizens. She expected to have a tough time convincing the police as it was; hell, she could hardly believe it herself. Candice decided to drive to the nearest city, Regina, and report the crime there.

Realizing that her body might also contain evidence of the rape, she decided to have herself examined. She couldn't possibly go back to the medical center where she'd been raped, so she went to a Regina hospital. Candice knew enough about courtroom science to know that if any of the doctor's sperm was on her panties or left in her body, then she had all the proof she needed that he had raped her.

Candice knew that just like fingerprints, every person's DNA is unique to that person (with the exception of identical twins). In fact, 99.9 of human DNA is identical from human to human, and individual variation accounts for only 0.01 percent. But that 0.01 percent has become vitally important in crime detection. If the ejaculate on Candice's panties could be compared to a DNA sample from Schneeberger, then, Candice figured, it would be case closed. No matter what he said, he couldn't explain away his DNA on her clothes. His own body fluids would testify against him.

Almost every day brings a sensational new headline announcing that a criminal has been exonerated after a lengthy prison term, or that DNA has helped to bring a felon to justice. Deoxyribonucleic acid is a complex molecule that contains the genetic code for every living creature. Our DNA is our genetic inheritance from our parents, which combines to form our own unique blueprint. DNA is found in the nucleus of every living cell.

DNA evidence was first used in the United States in 1987 to obtain a conviction in a rape case in Orange County, Fla. It has revolutionized the justice system in a few short years. To date, over 100 people have had their convictions overturned as a result of DNA evidence that wasn't available to them at the time of their trials, with hundreds more prisoners petitioning for DNA tests. DNA captured the public imagination in the O.J. Simpson trial, which also demonstrated that the jury's confidence in the DNA profile was only as good as their confidence in the law enforcement officials who handled the evidence.

The doctors at the Regina hospital examined Candice and contacted the Regina police on her behalf. Soon the news of her accusation traveled back to Kipling and to Dr. Schneeberger.

Lisa Schneeberger was a lucky woman, and she knew it. She was happily married to one of the most respected men in town. It seemed almost every time she went downtown, someone told her how kind her husband was, what an excellent doctor he was.

They'd built their own spacious dream home with his-and-her home offices, and lots of room for Lisa's daughter from her first marriage and the children they were planning to have together. Her husband also turned his energies toward fundraising for community projects, like the new swimming pool. At home, he definitely wore the pants in the family, but that was what had drawn her to him when they first met. He was so self-confident.

Her reaction, therefore, when her husband came home and told her that one of his patients had accused him of rape, was understandable. Who was this girl, to say such things about her husband? Was she crazy, was she obsessed with him, or was she trying to make a quick buck by dragging her husband's name through the mud? Lisa's faith in her husband never wavered; her contempt for Candice was palpable.

Unlike Dr. Schneeberger, Candice Foley could not be called one of Kipling's leading citizens. At 23, she looked even younger and was given to emotional outbursts. She was an unwed mother. The petite brunette had a reputation as a party girl. In the court of public opinion, as conducted in the coffee shops and sidewalks and backyard fences of Kipling, there was no contest: popular Dr. Schneeberger had the support of his patients and the community as he went through the indignity of giving a blood sample to defend himself against this ridiculous charge.

Candice lived with a noticeable chill towards her, waiting impatiently for the DNA results to come through. She knew that she would be vindicated. But she wasn't happy that the Regina Royal Canadian Mounted Police had turned the investigation of the case back over to the local detachment in Kipling. She was worried that the local police weren't necessarily objective when it came to building a case against Dr. Schneeberger. In a town of 1,000 people, everybody knew everybody, but whom could she trust?

After several months of waiting, Candice got a call from Constable Russ Bevans, who told her that the doctor's DNA had been compared to the sample she provided, and there was no match. Candice had obviously had intercourse with someone on Halloween night, but it couldn't have been Dr. Schneeberger. The tests cleared him completely.

Candice was stunned. And furious. She suspected that there was some kind of a conspiracy, and the police were protecting the doctor. She knew the truth – she knew that Dr. Schneeberger, who'd been walking around free for months, going about his life, had raped her and gotten away with it. She knew that friends and supporters would come up and slap him on the back, and urge him to "hang in there," then maybe they'd lean in a little closer and whisper something only the doctor could hear, something about her, and then they'd laugh and roll their eyes. The rage boiled inside her. She knew she was right. She knew she was telling the truth. At least her parents stood by her, even if some of her so-called friends had turned away. They didn't want to hear about it anymore. But Candice was not going to give up. And so, she demanded that Schneeberger provide another sample and that another test be done.

Lisa Schneeberger and her husband were amazed to hear that Candice Foley and her accusations were not going away. There was nothing Lisa would have liked so much as to tell this girl, to her face, what she thought of her. But it was best to maintain a dignified silence, and for her husband to submit another blood sample.

The second test came back negative as well – no match. Candice argued and pleaded with the Kipling police not to close their investigation of the case, but after Dr. Schneeberger passed two DNA tests, there was nothing else they could do. They closed the file in 1994, and as far as the Schneebergers were concerned, that was the end of it. Candice moved away from Kipling, to the city of Red Deer, in the neighboring province of Alberta, away from the whispers, the frowns and the gossip. But she didn't forget and she didn't give up.

Larry O'Brien, a 25-year veteran of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, hadn't spent much of his career wearing the famous red serge jacket and wide brimmed hat. He'd done a lot of undercover and intelligence work in southern Ontario, going after the Mafia. But as he neared retirement, he accepted an offer from a lawyer to go into private investigation work. Eight years later, the law firm representing Candice in her efforts to get justice contacted him and asked him to meet its client. O'Brien agreed to the meeting, bringing one of his assistants along. "She was at a dead end," O'Brien recalled on television's W5 newsmagazine program. "She told us that we were probably her last resort. If we couldn't accomplish things for her, she didn't know which way to turn."

O'Brien liked Candice's straightforward manner, and her careful recall of details. "Without a doubt, I was convinced that she had been sexually assaulted, and most likely by Dr. Schneeberger." The only problem was how to prove it.

"Knowing the circumstances, how could it be that he had fooled the police?" O'Brien wondered. Was Dr. Schneeberger tampering with the DNA tests, and if so how? "I thought he was actually switching blood in test tubes. There was talk about a refrigerator with test tubes and it was taking place in the hospital. I think that was the only logical conclusion at that time. [But] the only way we were going to get to the bottom of this was with DNA evidence." This meant O'Brien had to get close enough to Schneeberger to somehow get a sample of his blood, hair, or saliva. He soon brainstormed a way to do just that. His assistant talked his way into Dr. Schneeberger's office with a story about a radio station contest and got his target to fill out an entry form and lick the envelope.

Unfortunately, O'Brien explains, "somehow or other the envelope became contaminated. It was an envelope randomly selected out of a brand new box. It should not have been contaminated." But as he had learned about DNA testing, "a flake as miniscule as possible from your skin could fall onto it and contaminate the item [being tested]." (Recently, for example, an audit of the police lab in Houston, Tex., revealed that leaks in the roof could allow rain to come in and contaminate the samples. Because of this and other problems with the testing procedures at the lab, the DNA tests will be re-done. The re-testing will affect as many as 525 convictions in Houston, including seven death-row cases.)

In O'Brien's next effort to obtain a sample of Schneeberger's genetic material, he broke into the doctor's car and plucked a hair from the headrest on the driver's seat. This effort failed as well, when the laboratory told them the hair sample was unusable because the hair lacked the living root bulb at the base of the strand.

The hair that we style, curl, color and fuss over with shampoo and conditioners isn't alive. The hair shaft is a dead protein strand that lacks the living nucleus that contains nuclear DNA. More recently, hair strands have been used to extract mitochondrial DNA. If the nucleus of a cell can be compared to the yolk of an egg, then the white of the egg is the body. Floating in the body of every human cell are tiny particles called mitochondria, which provide a power source for the cell and which contain a different type of DNA – the mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, is not unique to each person, rather it traces his or her female line of inheritance. That is, a person's mtDNA is inherited from his or her mother, who inherited it from her mother, and so forth.

DNA identification has been made using mtDNA, most famously to identify the bones of the murdered Romanov czar, Nicholas, and his family, but wasn't used in a trial setting until 1996. Mitochondrial DNA testing came too late to help Candice.

As Candice absorbed this latest setback, the Kipling gossip mill kept churning. O'Brien checked out rumors that Dr. Schneeberger had rented a house to one of the local policemen – could this prove a conspiracy between the doctor and the police, born out of friendship? But the rumor turned out to be false.

Meanwhile, the friendly neighborhood spies were working on behalf of the Schneebergers as well. Lisa Schneeberger's cleaning lady knew Candice's parents and learned that the family had hired O'Brien. She relayed this information to Lisa. The feud escalated as Candice's parents received a letter telling them that they were not longer welcome as patients at the Kipling Medical Center. This meant that the entire medical community of the little town had turned its back on Candice and her family, along with a good many of the other residents.

Refusing to give up, O'Brien broke into Dr. Schneeberger's car again and spotted a tube of Chapstick in the car's ashtray. "I opened [it] there and I could see that it had been used lately. The edge on it was no longer sharp. We had some window-type envelopes with us, and I smeared Chapstick on the inside of the windowpane envelope. We sent it off for analysis." The laboratory in Regina analyzed the minute trace of saliva or skin cells left on the surface of the Chapstick. The sample was enough to compare with the semen left on Candice's panties. "About two weeks later, I heard from the law office that it had analyzed positive."

And Candice's reaction? "She was at a dead end," O'Brien recalled on television's W5 newsmagazine program. "She told us that we were probably her last resort. If we couldn't accomplish things for her, she didn't know which way to turn." At last, after four years, she had succeeded against the odds. Or had she?

Now it was the Schneebergers' turn to dispute the results of the DNA tests. Dr. Schneeberger agreed to provide a third blood sample, right in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police forensic lab in Regina, while being videotaped, with witnesses watching. That ought to settle the question once and for all.

At first, the technician sought to obtain a small blood sample, which is all she would need, by pricking the doctor's finger. He refused, claiming that he had a rare disease that would cause his skin tissue to spasm and die if he were pricked in the finger. He rolled his sleeve up and offered his arm, instead.

The video, made on Nov. 20, 1996, shows the technician swabbing his arm while he held it steady with his other arm. She went to push the needle into the vein, but the needle wouldn't go in. Perplexed, she tried another needle and after some difficulty, drew a small sample of blood, which she noticed looked odd. It was thick and brownish and looked like old blood.

The Mountie watching the proceedings grew a little suspicious and asked her, "Yeah, that was a little strange, that one, eh?" Stranger still, the blood was submitted for analysis and the lab was unable to extract the DNA. "Poor quality sample," they explained.

Now Candice was certain that something was going on at the lab. "Oh, I was angry," she later explained to the news program W5. "I was writing letters to prosecutors, phoning them, yelling and screaming, swearing: 'What the hell is going on? Are you guys stupid? This was your last chance probably to get a sample from him. How can you not get enough blood? How can you not pull enough blood out of somebody's arm?'

"I mean, we have lots of blood rushing through our system. How can you not get enough blood out of somebody's body? Give me a break."

On an April afternoon in 1997, Lisa Schneeberger's 15-year-old daughter Lydia asked her if she could go and see her father, her mother's first husband, for the weekend. Lisa was surprised because the family had already made its plans for the weekend, and she knew her daughter had a babysitting job. Her daughter looked pale and upset, and as Lisa gently questioned her, the girl dissolved into tears.

"Mom, I have something I have to tell you," she said hesitatingly.

"Well, what is it? What do you want to say?"

"Come with me. I want to show you something." Lydia led her mother back to her bedroom, flipped back the covers on her bed, and pointed to a condom wrapper.

"Mom, he's done this before."

Lydia scanned her mother's face anxiously. She knew that her mother was deeply in love with her stepfather. But her mother didn't hesitate. In that moment, Lisa knew with horror and conviction, that "he" meant her husband, Lydia's stepfather. "It was," Lisa said later, ''the day my life changed forever.''

Lisa comforted Lydia as best she could, helped her pack an overnight bag, and sent her to her boyfriend's home. She knew that her husband was driving home from an out-of-town medical conference. She had the presence of mind to tell him to pull off to the side of the highway when she reached him on his cell phone.

"Lydia's told me what you've been doing to her. I know. You've done it to Candice too, didn't you?"

"I'll be home soon," her husband responded. "Of course this isn't true. I'll explain everything."

The adrenalin coursed through Lisa's veins as she gathered up her two youngest daughters, the children she'd had with Schneeberger, trying to smother her emotions as she herded them into the family mini-van. She pulled out of the driveway and parked up the street, staking out her own house as she waited for her husband to come home.

The girls were asleep by the time her husband's car pulled up. Lisa and the girls returned to the house. Few words were exchanged; Schneeberger was slurring his words and appeared – to Lisa – to have taken drugs of some sort. He went to sleep on the sofa and she spent a sleepless night, still coming to terms with the fact that her marriage, her life, her daughter's innocence, had turned to ashes. "What part of it was real?" she later wondered, "Was any of it real?"

As the sun lifted over the prairie horizon, Lisa woke her husband up, and told him to get out.

The next day, she searched through his home office, which was right next to Lydia's bedroom. High on a shelf, she found a box containing gloves, syringes, vials of medicine, and condoms. Lisa looked at the syringes and she felt sick. Her husband used to treat the children for ordinary ailments with injections instead of with a pill or a liquid. She had questioned whether this was necessary, but had acquiesced with he told her that injections were an accurate and quick way of delivering medicine. He was the doctor, after all, and the man of the house.

But there was the time that her daughter had awakened one morning, crying and acting groggy, and complaining that her stepfather had given her an injection in the middle of the night. When her husband came home that day, Lisa remembered asking him: did you give Lydia a needle last night? Yes, he explained. She was coughing. Didn't you hear her coughing? She hadn't, but dismissed the incident.

Now, she realized with horror, her husband had been drugging and raping her daughter a few feet away from her. Candice, a woman Lisa Schneeberger had despised, had been right all along. And if she had only listened to Candice and believed her when she first made her accusation, maybe her daughter would never have been assaulted.

She phoned the RCMP and reported her husband for rape.

The news went through Candice like an electric shock. She had been waiting so long for Dr. Schneeberger to be caught, but not like this. "I'll never forget the day I found out it happened to [Lydia]," Candice told the Calgary Herald. "I bawled and I screamed and I freaked out. It happened to someone else and I was fighting all along

John Schneeberger had to provide another blood sample, and this time the police weren't listening to his claim that he could only provide blood from his arm. They pricked his finger. They swabbed the inside of his cheek for skin cells. They took a hair sample. His DNA – his own DNA – matched the Chapstick sample that O'Brien had taken from his car and the semen stain from Candice's panties.

The DNA-doctor had finally been caught.

In September 1999, Schneeberger faced his accusers in a court of law. He was charged with aggravated sexual assault on his stepdaughter and one count of sexual assault on Candice, two charges of administering a noxious substance to commit an indictable offence, and one count of obstruction of justice.

The "noxious substance" was the anesthetic Versed. When Schneeberger told Candice on Halloween night seven years ago that he was giving her something to calm her down, he was in fact injecting her with a powerful anesthetic that created amnesia. Medically, Versed is used for patients who are undergoing painful and unpleasant procedures like colonoscopy. Most patients will have no memory of the period of time while the drug is in their system. Lydia may have been semi-conscious and aware of what was happening to her when her stepfather made his nocturnal visits to her room, but lost all memory in the morning. She had a memory of being given the injection, but once the powerful drug entered her bloodstream, she was completely helpless. This amnesiac effect does not work as powerfully for everyone, which is perhaps why Candice recalled the rape, which her doctor tried to pass off as a dream. The manufacturers of Versed warn that a rare side effect of the medication brings about respiratory arrest, and persons being administered Versed should have their breathing monitored. This was not a service that the doctor provided to his victims.

When Schneeberger took the stand, Lisa saw the full extent of the twisted deceit her husband was capable of. In the months before the trial he had begged for her to stand by him. He had wept copious tears and even tried to bribe her with presents. He could not admit to her, or perhaps even to himself, what he had done. In court, he continued to proclaim his complete innocence. Even with the DNA evidence against him, Schneeberger continued to deny that he had raped Candice or his stepdaughter. He believed that he could explain away the condom wrapper in his stepdaughter's bedclothes, the sperm on Candice's panties. But how could he explain the DNA tests?

He told the court that he had been framed: someone, either Candice or an accomplice, had stolen some of his ejaculate, probably by breaking into his house, and used it to accuse him of rape. Because DNA evidence is so powerfully convincing to a jury, Schneeberger explained, he knew that he was effectively trapped. "The only way I could distance myself from the complaint. . .was to provide a false blood sample," he testified.

He had done this, he admitted, by stealing blood samples from one of his male patients. Then he operated on himself, inserting a slender, six-inch long plastic tube filled with the pilfered blood in his arm at the crook of his elbow. Lisa Schneeberger recalled a day when he'd come into the house from the garage with his arm wrapped in a towel. "It was his left arm. And he had said that he had been lifting up some glass to move and the glass had slipped and cut his arm. And I believed his story."

When Schneeberger gave his blood samples for the investigation, he always offered his left arm, only rolling up his sleeve just enough to expose the inside of his elbow.

But, as he explained to the judge, he faked the DNA tests not to cover up his crime but because he had no choice: An unscrupulous woman was framing him.

Lisa Schneeberger, as she listened to her husband's testimony, wondered if it was possible that her husband could talk his way out of trouble, as he had before. Would the judge fall for his lies the way that she once had?

The prosecuting attorney described Schneeberger as a cold-blooded predator who took what he wanted without regard. When Candice had come to the hospital looking for medical care on that Halloween night, "…he injected her with a potentially dangerous drug, raped her, and left her alone in a darkened room." As for Candice, so far she had gained nothing and lost a lot because of her pursuit of justice from the doctor, so "[w]hat did it get her? She was socially ostracized. She was forced to leave her community, the community she was born in. She was the subject of malicious rumors."

Judge Ellen Gunn found Schneeberger guilty, explaining that the DNA doctor was an "inventive, fanciful and imaginative" witness. "However, an adjective that does not apply is credible."

As Schneeberger was led away in handcuffs to await a sentencing date, Candice told reporters, "I just want to say this is a glorious day that I've waited for seven years. And that's all." Supporters of Lisa, Lydia and Candice laughed, clapped and called, "Bye, John" as Schneeberger was driven away.

Following his conviction, the Saskatchewan College of Physicians and Surgeons stripped Schneeberger of his medical license.

The sentence when it came was lenient, even by Canadian standards. Judge Gunn found Schneeberger guilty of assaulting Candice, but because Lydia couldn't remember the assaults due to the anesthetic, Gunn dismissed that charge. She found Schneeberger guilty of injecting Lydia with the anesthetic, but his total sentence amounted to just six years, meaning he could possibly be out on parole in two.

And so began the next phase of Schneeberger's story – his demands for visitation rights with his two daughters from his marriage to Lisa. Lisa was aghast at the idea that she could be forced to take the two little girls, aged 5 and 6, to a medium- security prison so that a convicted rapist could visit with them. She figured the courts would see it the same way. But they didn't. Even before his final sentence, Lisa had been handed a court order to take the girls to see their father in jail and she had paid a $2,000 fine for refusing to do so. She had appealed the decision to a higher court, and lost again in 2001. The judge told her that she must take the children to the prison or face the consequences.

By that time Lisa's plight had drawn a lot of sympathy and attention, including from an opposition party politician who vowed to draft a new federal law guaranteeing that no child would be forced to visit a parent convicted of a serious crime. "What [it will do] is provide clear direction to judges that Canadians do not accept forcing children to visit pedophiles, to visit sex-offending parents in prison against their will," Bob Mills explained to reporters. But in the meantime, Lisa's battle to protect her children from trauma came down to a showdown at the prison gates. On the appointed day, a crowd of around 100 protestors showed up to support Lisa. As they approached the interview room where their father waited, the little girls began to cry hysterically, clutching at their mother's legs. The court-appointed social worker relented and let Lisa take her daughters back home. Lisa had used up all her savings and couldn't afford to fight the matter anymore, when Schneeberger finally broke the stalemate by agreeing not to insist on future visits.

In June of 2001, Schneeberger's case came up for parole. Perhaps sensing that he would be denied parole, Schneeberger chose not to appear before the parole board, and let his case be decided on the basis of his court and prison files. Candice was disappointed because she had geared herself up to go before the parole board and tell her story again. "That's just so unfair," she told the Calgary Herald. "This is so typical. He just gets his way all the frickin' time." Parole, however, was denied.

Meanwhile Lisa decided to fight back on other fronts. First, she divorced him. Then she went to work to get him deported. She knew her husband, an immigrant from South Africa, had received his Canadian citizenship after the rape on Candice. If he hadn't deceived everyone with the stolen blood sample, he would have been exposed as a criminal and denied citizenship. On that basis, she argued to the Immigration authorities, his citizenship should be revoked and he be forced to leave Canada.

Bob Mills, the politician who championed her cause, has drafted "Lisa's law," a law that would ensure that children are protected from being forced to have a relationship with a parent convicted of a serious crime. Mills is currently working with the Justice Committee of the Canadian parliament, and lobbying all five political parties in the legislature, to endorse his bill.

In 2002, Schneeberger was in the news again when he was transferred to a minimum-security prison in British Columbia, a province on the west coast of Canada, hundreds of miles away from the scene of his crimes. Ferndale Prison, dubbed "Club Fed," because it houses federal prisoners, features a nine-hole golf course for inmates. Mills pointed out that when he had proposed that Schneeberger be taken out of the frightening atmosphere of Bowden prison for the visits with his daughters, prison officials told him that the doctor was too much of a security risk. "I was told by the attorney general that the reason the kids had to go to the prison... was because this man was too dangerous to be brought out to [a] hotel... [s]o how can he now live in Club Fed and golf and fish and not have any fences?"

"I can't even read the paper or watch the news anymore without getting angry," Candice told reporter Deborah Tetley. "Every time I see his face it just reminds me of the fact that so many people never believed me." She still feels unwelcome in Kipling, where many people still support Schneeberger and believe that Candice framed him somehow. She says that a Hollywood producer has taken an interest in her story and is looking for funding.

Lisa, no longer named Schneeberger, has made a new life for herself and her children but dreads the day when her ex-husband is let out of prison: She told the Canadian newsmagazine program W5 that her ex-husband "has no remorse for what he's done. He was a doctor when he was at the office, and he was husband and father when he came home -- and then he was a monster when he wanted to be."

Updates

John Schneeberger was denied parole on April 17th, 2003. His ex-wife testified at the lengthy parole hearing. Schneeberger admitted to "crimes and deceits," calling the scar on his arm from where he inserted the tube of someone else's blood "a badge of dishonor," and apologized for his "denial." The parole board expressed concern about letting Schneeberger into the community. One member of the board judged that the DNA doc was "shallow and self-serving."

Schneeberger will return for his next parole hearing in November, by which time he will have met the statutory requirement that he serve two-thirds of his six-year prison term.

In August of 2003, a Canadian federal court agreed that John Schneeberger had lied to obtain his Canadian citizenship. Schneeberger became a Canadian citizen during the time he concealed his crimes by substituting another person's blood for his own. Schneeberger could face deportation as a result.

Immigration officials filed a claim in March alleging Schneeberger lied to a Canadian citizenship judge in 1993 when he denied having been the subject of a criminal investigation. In a written ruling, Judge Eleanor Dawson concluded Schneeberger obtained his Canadian citizenship by concealing information or making false representations.

Bob Mills, a member of Parliament from the opposition Alliance party, continues to lobby for "Lisa's law." Canadian Immigration authorities began legal proceedings to revoke Schneeberger's citizenship last October but have declined to discuss the progress of the case with Mills or the media. Schneeberger's lawyer also declined comment. Production of I Accuse, a feature film based on Candice Foley's ordeal in bringing Schneeberger to justice, is currently underway.

Updated 09/14/03

Schneeberger was reportedly stripped of his Canadian citizenship in December of 2003 and could be deported. Candice Foley's ordeal became a made-for-television movie, "I Accuse," which first aired in November, 2003.

Updated 02/06/04

More about DNA:
http://hope-dna.com/docs/fbi_kids_dnapage.htm

Author Notes:

Candice's last name has been changed.
The name of Lisa Schneeberger's daughter has been changed.
Some of the quotes used in this article originally appeared in Canadian television and newspaper accounts of this case, notably the CTV newsmagazine program W5 and articles written by Deborah Tetley for the Calgary Herald.

Topics:

Forensics

Sex Crimes

Authors:

Lona Manning

9/16: Terrorists Bomb Wall Street

admin — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 06:49:36 +0000

January 15, 2006

Photo credit: New York World-Telegram and Sun archives, Library of Congress.

Long before 9/11 became the date most identified with terrorism, New York's Wall Street District suffered through a massive bombing on September 16, 1920 that shocked the world. Italian anarchists orchestrated the bombing five days after Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were indicted on charges of first-degree murder.

by Lona Manning

Prologue

Out of a clear blue sky, a deadly terrorist attack in New York City brought grief and outrage. Initially, the country rallied in a wave of patriotism and vowed revenge on the perpetrators. But critics said that the government was using the terrorist threat as an excuse to curtail civil liberties. They warned that aggressive action against the terrorists would only provoke more violence and was harming America's reputation in Europe. And some charged that the president was just a puppet and the decisions were really being made by a handful of government officials who lied and twisted intelligence reports to carry out their repressive agenda. Supporters of the government policy countered that these critics were aiding and abetting the enemy while posing as champions of free speech. Strong measures were needed to crush a dangerous enemy, not naïve and craven appeasement.

The year was 1920.

Thursday, September 16, 1920

The church bells at Trinity Church overlooking Wall Street were striking noon. 24-year-old William Joyce, head clerk at the J.P. Morgan bank, glanced out the window at the scene outside. The busy intersection was filling with office workers heading out for their lunch break. Twin sisters Minnie and Esther Huger met up in front of the Assay office. Another pair of young sisters, Margaret and Charity Bishop, also met for lunch. Just 18, they had recently joined the work force to help support their widowed mother. Catherine Dickson stood on the sidewalk, waiting for her girlfriend, who wanted to apply for a job on Wall Street. Catherine had agreed to take an early lunch hour to help her. Lawrence Roberts, a salesman for a printing company, made a bank deposit and decided to walk to his next appointment with a client. Bernard Kennedy and Thomas Osprey walked down Wall Street, headed for the Stock Exchange building, carrying pouches of valuable securities. Like William Joyce, both young men were veterans of the First World War.

The solid granite facades of the Stock Exchange, the Sub-Treasury building, the Assay office and J.P. Morgan's bank spoke of a permanence and stability that belied the insecurity faced by many American workers in the fall of 1920. The American economy was wracked by both high unemployment and sharp inflation.

Lawrence Servin made a living as a peddler and today he was selling chocolates to the noon-time crowd while keeping one eye out for the cops. In 1920, it was still not uncommon to see horses and carts on the streets of New York, though few were as dilapidated and ancient as the old wooden wagon pulled by a tired old horse, that Servin saw pull up in front of the Assay office. The driver quietly slipped down and briskly walked away.

The driver of the horse and wagon knew he didn't have much time to get away. And if these were his last moments on earth – well, better comrades than he had gone in the same way. The rest of his comrades were in prison, in hiding or in exile. What he was about to do was for all of them. Tutti i nodi vengono al pettine – the chickens come home to roost.

At 12:01, as the last notes of the church bell died away, there came a tremendous ear-shattering explosion. A newspaper reporter walking down Wall Street from Broadway felt the concussion of the explosion before he heard it. The sound of the blast, which seemed to shake the mighty buildings all around him to their foundations, was followed by flames and smoke 100 feet high. The explosion was contained within the narrow canyon of tall buildings and whoever was unlucky enough to be in the area was trapped in the carnage. Building awnings burnt to ash in seconds. Hundreds of people were knocked off their feet. Automobiles were lifted into the air and overturned. Minnie and Esther's hair and clothes exploded into flame. Blood spattered on the walls and sidewalk. Windows shattered from ground level to nine stories in the air. Flying glass injured Ulysses S. Grant, grandson of the civil war general and president, who worked in the Treasury building. A secretary who had just stood up from her chair to answer the telephone turned and saw glass shards all over her desk and chair.

The shattering glass, which one witness said covered the inside of the J.P. Morgan office ''like snow,'' was not as deadly as the chunks of hot metal which sprayed in all directions. Projectiles slammed into the side of the J. P. Morgan building, biting holes into the smooth façade. Other chunks crashed through plate glass windows, even those that were covered with security screens. One of the hot slugs killed William Joyce at his desk. Joyce was supposed to have been on his honeymoon but had postponed his wedding until October to cover for a colleague who was on vacation.

James Saul, an office boy, was knocked flat by the blast. He stood up, his ears ringing, smeared and spattered with blood, some of it his own. He commandeered an empty automobile and loaded it full of injured people and made four trips to Broad Street hospital. Lawrence Roberts, the salesman, was comparatively lucky, escaping with a broken leg. Many of the injured lay unconscious on the pavement and others twitched in their death throes. Hundreds of panicked office workers ran away from the devastation pursued by billowing clouds of dust. Hundreds more people were drawn to the scene by the noise of the explosion, which was heard all over Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Policemen, firemen and ambulances raced to the scene over streets covered with broken glass and debris of all kinds, including maimed bodies. Soon the rescue workers lined up a row of corpses covered with car blankets from automobiles, torn awning and whatever else they could find.

In addition to the frantic efforts to help the wounded, officials worried that the explosion was but a precursor to an attack on the sub-Treasury building, which stood vulnerable, its windows gone, its door smashed in. The first policeman at the scene called for all Army veterans to step forward and help push back the crowds and guard the buildings. ''Within five minutes,'' The New York Times reported, ''upwards of 500 young men had forced their way through the crowd and assembled on the sidewalk for orders.'' Later, soldiers were called in from nearby Governors Island to set up a security cordon around the financial district.

By nightfall, the death toll stood at 31, with hundreds more injured. Dorothy Hutchinson learned that her husband William, an insurance broker, would not be coming home. Samuel Soloway identified the body of his 16-year-old son Benjamin at the morgue. Minnie and Esther Huger and Margaret and Charity Bishop were treated for severe burns. Minnie hung on in terrible pain until Saturday, then died. Charity survived, although scarred for life, her sister Margaret died.

The driver of the wagon believed that there were but two classes of people, the oppressors and the oppressed. But the majority of his victims were chauffeurs, couriers, secretaries and bank tellers – ordinary working-class people. Some were American-born; others were from England, Ireland, Poland and Sweden.

At first, officials theorized that an automobile had collided with a wagon carrying dynamite and that the explosion, the largest ever in Manhattan, was an accident. But descriptions from survivors and an inspection of the site by mine explosion experts soon convinced them otherwise. The dynamite, at least 100 pounds of it, was indeed the kind used in demolition work, but it had been wired to a timer and packed around with hundreds of small chunks of iron. And where the horse and buggy had stood there was a tangle of twisted metal and a large depression in the roadway. Police collected the jawbone and legs of the horse, still wearing its horseshoes.

Lawrence Servin, the chocolate peddler, regained consciousness in the hospital. He told police that he had seen the driver of the wagon and described him as a ''dark-complexioned, unshaven, wiry man, probably 35 or 40 years old, and dressed in working clothes and a dark cap. He seemed to be about five feet six inches tall. He had dark hair.''

His description was echoed by secretary Rebecca Eppstein, who had seen the wagon pull up, and the driver walk away towards Broadway just before the explosion knocked her ''senseless.''

The following day the Stock Exchange opened as usual at 10 a.m. The carnage had been swept and washed away and canvas was tacked up over the shattered windows. In fact so quickly had the debris been removed from the site that the police had to chase down garbage scows in search of remaining bomb and wagon fragments or other possible clues. The financial leaders at Wall Street were determined to put on a display of strength in the face of the attack and to show that life would go on as usual. Coincidentally, arrangements had already been made to hold a small parade and ceremony to mark the anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution. ''A stone's throw from the spot which 24 hours before had witnessed scenes of wildest confusion and terror, patriotic speeches were delivered from a rostrum on the site where George Washington took the oath as first president of the United States'' and a fife and drum band played. It was happily noted that the bronze statue of Washington that presides over Wall Street ''suffered not the slightest blemish.''

William J. Flynn, head of the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation, arrived from Washington with scores of federal detectives. At police headquarters, Arthur Carey, chief of the homicide squad, asked for harness makers, livery stable owners and wagon builders to help him reconstruct the shattered wagon and identify the maker of the horse's shoes. Although hundreds of City detectives and federal agents worked on the case, they turned up no firm leads.

Wealthy New Yorkers hired security men to guard their homes. J.P. Morgan, who was in Europe at the time of the blast, hired his own private detectives to try to find the killer. Across the nation, policemen were called out to guard banks and government buildings.

Detectives had to sort through hundreds of leads, rumors and hoaxes. When it was reported that the Customs House would be blown up at 2 p.m. on Friday, thousands of New Yorkers gathered to watch the spectacle. Nothing happened. Postcards and letters warned of further bomb attacks in cities across America. Several letters appeared to have warned of the explosion before it happened, but they were swiftly traced to a man living in Canada who was known to be harmless and suffering from paranoia. It was only a bizarre coincidence that he predicted an explosion on Wall Street.

But the day after the blast postal inspectors found a message that appeared to come from the actual terrorists:

Remember
We Will Not Tolerate Any Longer
Free the political prisoners
Or it will be death
For all of you
American Anarchists Fighters!

The warning, stamped on ordinary paper with a rubber printing kit, was found in a mailbox a block away from the explosion. The mailbox was emptied around 11:30 each day, so detectives reasoned that the terrorists had dropped their message into the mailbox on their way to detonating their bomb.

Before the last of the victims were buried, the newspapers declared that the investigators had run out of leads in their search for the perpetrator. In fact, Flynn and the NYPD had a very good idea of who was behind the explosion – what they lacked was the proof.

The story behind the Wall Street bombings encompasses the period known as the ''Red Scare'' and led to one of the most famous trials in American history.

The Red Scare

President Woodrow Wilson faced trying times. The nation had come through the slaughter of World War I, followed by the even more deadly Spanish Flu pandemic. Returning soldiers clashed with immigrants for jobs, the newspapers were full of stories of labor unrest and general strikes, wages didn't keep up with inflation, deadly race riots broke out in Chicago and St. Louis, wartime shortages for essentials like sugar persisted and crime was rapidly on the increase. As if that wasn't enough, small but vocal groups of socialists, communists and anarchists fervently preached the downfall of the corrupt capitalist system and the coming revolution of the proletariat. Wilson, kept a clamp on vocal opposition to the war by passing the Espionage Act, which prescribed prison terms and fines for anyone who spoke out against conscription, criticized the armed forces, or otherwise gave aid and comfort to the enemy Hun. The 1917 Espionage Act was followed by the Sedition Act of 1918 which forbid ''disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language,'' against the U.S. government. These laws were still in force in the summer of 1919 when Wilson appointed fellow Democrat A. Mitchell Palmer as his attorney general. Several months later, Wilson was felled by a stroke and was incapacitated for the remainder of his presidency. Many of the nation's problems fell to Palmer, including the problem of what to do about the radicals, many of whom were immigrants to the country.

Palmer's Justice Department included the Bureau of Investigation, now known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI. Director William J. Flynn, a former New York City detective, was put in charge of surveilling and catching radicals.

One of Flynn's assistants, a fast-rising young civil servant named John Hoover, was in charge of assembling all information possible about radical groups throughout the United States. Hoover filed his information on thousands of cross-referenced index cards. ''Every anarchist or red in the country is ticketed and labeled like so much dry goods. He can be reached at any time,'' Palmer boasted.

The public seldom distinguished between anarchists, socialists and communists, dubbing them all ''reds'' or ''Bolshies,'' although fierce debate about how best to achieve the worker's paradise raged between the radical groups. Anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were the first to denounce Lenin's Bolshevik revolution because they opposed his totalitarian methods. Anarchists eschewed formal organizational structures, and were divided between those who believed in ''propaganda of the word'' and ''propaganda of the deed,'' or direct action. The Haymarket bombing in which eight policemen died was the work of anarchists. An anarchist assassinated President William McKinley in 1901.

A few of the Italian immigrants who migrated to communities up and down the East Coast were devoted anarchists. The foremost Italian anarchist in America at that time was Luigi Galleani, a charismatic orator who believed that violence was necessary to overthrow the capitalists who oppressed the workingman. Galleani emigrated from Italy in 1901 and lived in New Jersey, Canada and Vermont, occasionally running into trouble with the authorities but always defiant and uncompromising in his beliefs. Flynn called him the cleverest of the anarchists. The members of Galleani's inner circle who figure most prominently in this account are Carlo Valdinoci, a tall, handsome bachelor; Mario Buda, a short, wiry man whose eyes glowed with the intensity of a true believer; Nicola Sacco, a hard-working skilled tradesman, and Bartolemeo Vanzetti, an intelligent man who preferred the freedom of casual labor, because it gave him time and energy to spend on his true passion: anarchism.

The work of Galleani and his disciples had a public side and a hidden side. They spread the gospel of anarchy through newsletters, speeches, social events and plays. But an inner cadre occasionally used bombs to get the message across. Four Galleanists died while planting a bomb in a Massachusetts textile mill. A female member of the group was arrested on a Chicago-bound train with a satchel full of dynamite. Galleani himself was arrested several times for inciting labor unrest and advocating anarchy, but was always acquitted. This may have been in part because any judge trying anarchists in his courtroom could count on a retaliatory strike in the form of a bomb in his courthouse or his home. Over the years, there were scattered incidents of bombing in New York City, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Boston, and Milwaukee.

Criminal investigations and trials were hampered by the need to collect sufficient evidence. Conspiracies are by their nature difficult to prosecute – it is difficult to establish who did what. Justice officials were certain that Galleani was behind many bombing incidents. Lacking direct evidence, they could not prosecute him, but they could deport him because he was a resident alien who preached criminal anarchy and had authored a ''how-to'' bomb-making manual, cheekily titled La Salute é in Voi (The Health is Within You).

In October 1918, Congress passed a new law aimed at resident aliens, the Anarchist Act. Historian and anarchist expert Paul Avrich notes the new law meant ''for the first time mere membership in an anarchist organization or possession of anarchist literature for the purpose of propaganda became grounds for eviction from the country,'' no matter how long an immigrant had lived in America. If he was not a citizen, he could be deported.

In response, Galleani and his followers declared war on the U.S. government and announced their intentions through a published flyer: ''Deportation will not stop the storm from reaching these shores. The storm is within and very soon will leap and crash and annihilate you in blood and fire…We will dynamite you!''

In late April, three dozen small bombs destined for a cross-section of prominent politicians, justice officials, and financiers such as John D. Rockefeller were sent through the mail. Only a few of the packages were delivered. Although the design of the bombs was ingenious and the ''infernal machines,'' (as the newspapers called them) were carefully packaged to look like store samples, the plotters had neglected to add sufficient postage. Once the authorities realized that the packages marked ''Gimbel Brother's – Novelty Samples'' contained bombs, postal officials managed to intercept them. No one was killed by the few that were delivered, but when Sen. Hardwick's maid opened the package sent to his home in Georgia, her hands were blown off. Hardwick was on the anarchist's hit list because he co-sponsored the deportation bill. Like virtually all prominent men, Hardwick did not open his own mail and the punishment fell on a black servant.

The anarchists intended their bombs to be delivered on May Day, the international day of revolutionary solidarity. A month later, the anarchists managed to blow up eight large bombs, nearly simultaneously, outside the homes of judges, politicians and a factory owner who had drawn their ire. Judge Albert F. Hayden of Boston, Judge W.H.S. Thompson and Judge Charles Nott of New York sent anarchists to jail for protest and conspiracy. W.W. Sibray of the Bureau of Immigration presided over deportation hearings. In Paterson, N.J., a bomb exploded at the home of Harry Klotz, a powerful mill owner. The politicians on their hit list had endorsed anti-sedition laws and deportation – Mayor Harry L. Davis of Cleveland, Massachusetts State Reps. Leland Powers and A. Mitchell Palmer. This was their second attempt on Attorney General Palmer's life. But once again, none of the anarchists' intended targets, or their wives and children, perished in the attacks and the only fatalities were a night watchman, a female passer-by, and one of the anarchists.

That anarchist was Carlo Valdinoci, Galleani's dashing young lieutenant. He was blown to bits in front of Palmer's house. He either tripped over his bomb as he was about to place it on Palmer's porch or the bomb went off prematurely. The police collected Valdinoci's remains over a two block area. His luxuriant dark curly hair, which the anarchist women used to sigh over, landed with his scalp on the roof across the street. But to the great frustration of the police, the only pieces of Valdinoci that they really needed, his finger-tips, were atomized in the blast. For some time they did not know the identity of the dead bomber, but strongly suspected he was an anarchist. All of the bombs were delivered with a flyer that promised, ''war, class war, and you were the first to wage it under the cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws…There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.''

The Washington Post averred, ''the series of bomb outrages occurring simultaneously in eight American cities may now serve as a warning as to what wavering, indecision and weakness inevitably lead to in dealing with the new brand of Bolshevik-anarchy which is fastening itself like a foul growth on the life of the country.'' Prominent labor leaders countered that while they did not condone the violence, it showed that people were being driven to desperate measures by unjust working conditions and heartless capitalists.

No arrests followed. Periodically Palmer or Flynn would announce that federal agents, working undercover, had discovered the existence of vast conspiracies aimed at overthrowing the United States government. Headlines would scream: ''Huge Red Plot of Destruction is Uncovered'' or ''Reds Planned Overthrow.'' Palmer enjoyed nation-wide support in his hunt for the radicals, as the headlines attested: ''No Mercy for Reds Behind Gigantic Bomb Plot to Main and Kill,'' ''Congress to Fight Reds Who Seek U.S. Downfall.''

While historians of the ''Red Scare'' describe American reaction to radical movements as ''hysterical'' and ''draconian,'' it might be added in fairness that those who most fervently believed that radicals could overthrow the government were the radicals themselves. Galleani's eloquent, almost mystical rhetoric urged them on:

Thou hast seen

the Passion, the Sorrow, and the horrid slaughter

of undefended right.

Thou hast curst, thou hast wept

Harvesting prison, misery, and affliction.

Cursing is sterile; weeping cowardly,

Listen!

History directs you; Science arms you.

From unavenged tombs,

killed by disease and gunshot

your fathers entrust you with their vengeance

Be Bold! Redemption springs from audacious revolt!

Nothing else could explain the suicidal course they embarked on with their 1919 bombing campaign.

Under the law, Palmer's Justice Department did not have the authority to deport resident aliens, only the Immigration Department could. The Commissioner of Immigration, Anthony Caminetti, was also in favor of deporting anarchists and argued that deportation was not a punitive act – the anarchist ''is merely removed from one field of activity to another where he may continue his work.'' Caminetti added that the anarchists were hypocrites to delay their deportations with legal appeals: ''those who most noisily denounce every form of government in existence are the most persistent in claiming every technical and other right under the laws of the country they are in.''

Palmer, with one eye on the pending Democratic presidential nominations, warned, ''Like a prairie-fire, the blaze of revolution was sweeping over every American institution of law and order…eating its way into the homes of the American workmen, its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat were licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society.''

So with the public and the press clamoring for action, Palmer, Flynn, Hoover and Caminetti turned their attention to rounding up and deporting as many radicals as they could – a wave of arrests and deportations known as the Palmer Raids.

Luigi Galleani and eight of his adherents were deported in June of 1919, three weeks after the June 2nd wave of bombings. The newspapers reported that ''the government has reason to believe they were concerned in a conspiracy to assassinate the President of the United States, but the evidence to that effect was not sufficient to hold up in court. For that reason there were no indictments on that charge…'' Several dozen members of Galleani's inner circle successfully eluded the federal dragnet, including Buda, Sacco, and Vanzetti, who moved around and used alibis.

As many as 10,000 immigrants were swept up in the raids in late 1919 and early 1920 though fewer than 500 people were eventually deported. Justice officials also claimed to find counterfeiting equipment (many of the radical groups had their own small printing presses) and materials for making bombs. Once, they mistook a set of bocce balls for a new type of bomb. Mostly, they confiscated ''tons'' of radical literature from social clubs and private homes. A typical raid took place on Aug. 14, 1919 at the premises of the Union of Russian Workers in Manhattan, ''an old private house in process of rather rapid decay.''

Policemen from the New York City bomb squad swarmed the building and arrested everyone inside with much swinging of their night-sticks. Most of the men herded into holding pens turned out to be poor Russian immigrants who were taking English classes. The authorities believed that the free classes were ''but a blind, the real purpose being to gain recruits to the cause of revolution and anarchy… Large quantities of anarchist literature were found secreted in various portions of the premises….''

Most of the bruised and bewildered Russians were released but the directors of the Union of Russian Workers found themselves on a ship bound for Russia. ''To deny them the privilege of remaining in a country which they have openly deplored as an unenlightened community, unfit for those who prefer the privileges of Bolshevism, should be no hardship,'' Palmer remarked.

Two thousand more aliens were being held and awaiting deportation when 70-year-old Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Freedland Post intervened.

Post was appalled by the Palmer Raids, which marked immigrants for deportation without legal counsel or in some cases evidence of any wrong-doing. He reviewed the pending deportation orders and cancelled most of them. In his memoir of the Red Scare, Deportations Delirium, he wrote that Palmer's justice officials trampled on the Constitution:

So detectives of the Department of Justice ruthlessly invaded peaceable homes, in the small hours of the morning, without warrants but upon a pretense of imminent danger to the community, and arresting inmates in their beds, searched their rooms, seized lawful private property, and hurried their prisoners to police stations where, before the sun had risen, they subjected them to ''third degree'' examinations in efforts to discover evidence of a guilt that apparently did not exist. So, also, those detectives made sweeping arrests of whole audiences at public meetings, rounding up citizens and aliens without discrimination, and standing them against meeting-room walls, searched them threateningly after the manner of highwaymen robbing groups of travelers. After the search they usually turned citizens loose, but the aliens they marched off to prison, and at least once conspicuously in manacles and chains. They jailed crowds of these prisoners in quarters so close, and held them there so long, that Nature protested with sickening odors. They kept prisoners incommunicado, old Spanish fashion, for days at a stretch, lawlessly intercepting their letters in the mail, depriving them of the help of friends and the services of lawyers, placing them beyond the reach of writs of habeas corpus, and hiding them so that their families were in distress from ignorance and fear….And the victims, those ''moral rats'', what were their offenses? Were they criminals? In almost every instance, No.''

Palmer countered that Post was defying the law because of ''his own personal view that the deportation law is wrong.'' The assistant secretary was a ''moonstruck parlor radical'' who had even invited Emma Goldman into his home. Palmer lacerated Post for ''his self-willed and autocratic substitution of his own personal viewpoint for the law… [h]is habitually tender solicitude for social revolutionists and perverted sympathy for the criminal anarchists of the country…his release of even self-confessed anarchists of the worst type.''

But Post wasn't the only voice to speak up against the Palmer Raids. A committee of 12 prominent lawyers, including Felix Frankfurter, issued a ''Report upon the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice,'' charging that Palmer's ''ruthless suppression'' had inflamed ''revolutionary sentiment'' and created more radicals than he caught.

Palmer had enjoyed widespread support for his crusade against the ''reds,'' but would suffer a dramatic reversal of his fortunes in the spring of 1920. Only the year before, Palmer and his federal agents were the heroes who thwarted the May Day mail bombings and he was touted as a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. But now he was seen as a political opportunist. Too many public alarms were false alarms, which undermined his credibility. Palmer had predicted more mayhem for May Day 1920, (''Discover May Day Plot of Reds: Many Federal and State Officials Marked for Death'') but the day passed peacefully. Jackson Ralston, a Washington lawyer, complained that the Justice Department ''advertised uprisings on specific dates, which failed time after time to materialize, until the whole matter became a national joke.'' Further, Ralston charged that some of the detainees had been arrested on bogus charges with faked evidence and added ''some of the bombs alleged to have been sent [to] prominent persons have never been produced.''

Although the Palmer Raids ceased, undercover surveillance and deportation of radicals continued. Eugenio Ravarino, an undercover agent working for Flynn's Bureau of Investigation, managed to penetrate what was left of the Italian anarchist movement. Acting on Ravarino's information, federal agents began to roll up the remaining Galleanist radicals, making arrests in Paterson, N.J., and Brooklyn. Two of those arrested, Roberto Elia and Andrea Salsedo, were of particular interest because they were printers who may have been responsible for publishing the anarchists' manifestos that accompanied their bombs. The two were held incommunicado, illegally, at Justice Department headquarters in New York and the evidence is that they were beaten. After several days of intensive interrogation, Salsedo confessed to their connections with the Galleanists and named other members of the group.

Word reached Buda, Sacco, and Vanzetti that their comrades were being held and interrogated. The remaining Galleanists concluded that their days were numbered and most, including Sacco, made preparations to leave the country. Some have argued that one of his preparations was to acquire some cash for himself and his fellow anarchists by robbing the payroll of a shoe factory in South Braintree, Mass., where he once briefly worked.

Meanwhile, Salsedo flung himself out of a 14th story window at the Justice Department. Although some, including Asst. Labor Secretary Post, believed Salsedo was murdered, this seems unlikely since he shared a room with Elias who would have been a witness to any struggle. Further, Flynn lamented that Salsedo's death hampered the investigation of the bombing campaign. It is more likely that Salsedo killed himself because he knew that he was a marked man, having betrayed his comrades.

The next day, Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested and eventually charged with armed robbery and murder, resulting in the most hotly debated trial of the 20th century.

Bartolomeo Vanzetti (l) and Nicola Sacco (r)

Sacco and Vanzetti

Sacco and Vanzetti were indicted on Sept. 11, and five days later Wall Street exploded. The Washington Post editorialized that the ''wholesale murder'' was ''the fruit of so-called radicalism. With the enactment of every law designed to protect the American government from radicalism, and at every suggestion for the suppression of propaganda inimical to constitutional government, there are thousands of well-meaning people in the United States who throw up their hands in holy horror lest the guarantee of free speech may be infringed.''

Sacco and Vanzetti were not on trial for radicalism, but for killing a payroll guard and a clerk and making off with $16,000 in payroll cash. Nevertheless, it is an interesting historical question: Were they part of the bombing conspiracies of the Galleanists?

Historian Paul Avrich concludes ''[t]hough the evidence is far from satisfactory, the answer almost certainly is yes…Both were ultra-militants, believers in armed retaliation. They carried guns…they were associated with known participants in the plot. [Mario] Buda reckoned them the ''best friends'' he had in America and they were equally close to Valdinoci [the man who died while planting a bomb]…After [Valdinoci's] death his sister Assunta went to live with the Saccos and remained with them for many years.''

The night Sacco and Vanzetti were detained, they were questioned about their radical activities and associates – not the South Braintree payroll robbery. They understandably assumed that they had been caught in the dragnet for anarchists, and understandably, they lied. (They also told their lawyer that they were hiding a cache of dynamite that night and were lying to cover their tracks.)

So even though they were not on trial for their anarchist beliefs or any terrorist activities, the defense strategy was hopelessly compromised. From the point of view of saving Sacco and Vanzetti's lives, the defense attorneys should have focused on the crimes themselves and shown that the prosecution's evidence did not rise to the standard of proof beyond reasonable doubt. But Sacco and Vanzetti had to explain why they had lied to the authorities. They were not covering up the participation in the robbery, they explained, they were hiding the fact that they were anarchists. But this explanation brought their anarchist beliefs into the courtroom, and Prosecutor Frederick G. Katzman took full advantage of their quandary, painting them as ingrates to the Red, White and Blue, or worse.

Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted on July 14, 1921. They were executed seven years later, after numerous failed appeals. The executions sparked anti-American demonstrations around the world. Rioters in Paris swarmed the streets, smashing American cars. They entered movie theaters and pulled American films out of the projectors. In Geneva, a mob swarmed American consulate, shouting ''Murderers! Murderers!''

It is often asserted that Sacco and Vanzetti were deliberately framed. They were initially arrested because of suspicious circumstances that pointed to their participation in the South Braintree hold-up. One of their associates, Feruccio Coacci, had missed his April 15th deportation sailing but voluntarily left the country immediately thereafter. Coacci lived near South Braintree and Chief Michael Stewart, who was investigating the April 15th murder/robbery, wondered if there was a connection. The stolen car used in the robbery was found abandoned near Coacci's home. The police went to Coacci's home to investigate and found Mario Buda living there. Buda gave them a false name and disappeared after being questioned. The police learned that Buda had left his own car in a local garage and they asked the garage owner to let them know when he came to pick up his car.

On May 5, Buda and three other men showed up at the garage. The garage owner told them they couldn't drive the car because it didn't have current license plates. While his wife slipped to a neighbor's house to phone the police, the men reluctantly left. The police sent an officer to check the Bridgewater streetcar and detain any ''foreigners.'' Although Sacco and Vanzetti had lived in the United States for 12 years, their appearance and demeanor made them instantly visible as the ''foreigners'' on the streetcar. When arrested, they were both carrying guns. Vanzetti's gun was said to match the gun stolen from the slain payroll guard. Three different brands of bullets were used in the robbery. The same three brands were found in Sacco's pocket.

Although the police had probable cause to make an arrest, the trial that followed was anything but fair. Judge Webster Thayer made no secret of his contempt for the defendants, telling a friend: ''Did you see what I did to those anarchist bastards the other day? That ought to hold them for awhile,'' and a friend of Harry Ripley, the foreman of the jury, told the court Ripley said that even if Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent of the robbery/murder ''They ought to hang them anyway!'' The evidence against them was shaky, particularly the eyewitness evidence. New evidence that turned up after their conviction, including a confession from a career criminal that his gang had robbed the payroll, did not win them a new trial. Most legal analysts agree that the prosecution did not prove the case against them, particularly Vanzetti, and it was prejudice against foreigners and resentment of anarchists that sent them to their doom.

But miscarriages of justice occur every day. Not every injustice brings millions of protestors out into the street. The difference was that Sacco and Vanzetti's case was seized upon as a cause célèbre, the judicial murder of ''a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler,'' attracting, in the words of writer Francis Russell, ''literary left, radicals, liberals, [c]ommunists, woolly well-meaning progressives…plus a large scattering of people who could not be labeled politically but whose sense of justice had been outraged. Some of these latter were starched conservatives. The crystallized view of the opposition was that Sacco and Vanzetti were the victims of a malignant conspiracy…The trial was a put-up job to get rid of two troublesome agitators.''

According to historian William Koch, the Comintern, or Communist International – an organization controlled by Moscow whose purpose was to encourage the spread of communism world-wide – saw the useful propaganda value of the Sacco and Vanzetti case. The Comintern set up a front organization called the International Labor Defense, and collected vast sums for Sacco and Vanzetti's defense – although they kept most of the money and gave only a pittance to the two condemned men. Essentially, communists masquerading as progressives lionized militant anarchists posing as pacifists to further denigrate the United States and fatten the Comintern's pockets.

The charade was sometimes difficult for the condemned men to bear. They told their friends they would have proudly died for anarchism, but to be executed for a sordid murder and a grubby robbery was a different matter. When Sacco and Vanzetti's letters from prison were published, the editors cut out references to their atheism to make the duo more palatable to a U.S. audience. According to historian Robert D'Attilio, Vanzetti wrote an article for their Defense Committee bulletin, ''signed by both, [which] ends with the words, 'Remember La Salute é in Voi [The Health is Within You].' It is without question a call for help to their comrades, a call for direct action now that their legal means apparently had been exhausted, a cry of defiance hurled at the authorities, who would have understood its meaning.''

If Sacco and Vanzetti were framed because they were anarchists, we are no closer to understanding why they were framed because they were anarchists. The authorities deported the most dangerous anarchist of all, Luigi Galleani, and many of his comrades. There is no apparent reason why Sacco and Vanzetti, who had no prior criminal records, should have been singled out for judicial murder as opposed to deportation. Any satisfaction to be gained by killing these two particular anarchists would be more than outweighed by the expense of the trial, the many appeals, and the condemnation directed against the State of Massachusetts and the United States by those who protested the executions.

And if the authorities were in the business of framing anarchists for crimes they didn't commit, they never got around to framing anyone for the Wall Street bombing, even though federal agents picked up several likely candidates, all radicals, who would have made excellent patsies. Tito Ligi and Giuseppe de Fillipis matched the survivors' description of the driver, while Florian Zelenko was arrested with dynamite in his possession. They were all released ''for lack of adequate evidence.'' Flynn and the NYPD conducted a diligent and thorough investigation, including placing an informer next to Sacco's cell, which suggests at least a good faith effort to find the true perpetrator of the massacre.

On the first anniversary of the Wall Street bombing, Flynn publicly discussed the Justice Department's theory that the bombing was the work of ''the so-called Galliani band that was centered in Paterson, N.J., but whose members became widely scattered.'' He suspected that Galleani himself, by then deported to Italy, ordered the strike. Decades later, an old associate of the Galleanists told historian Paul Avrich that Mario Buda was the driver of the wagon that blew up Wall Street. This fits what is known about Buda's movements at the time. But Buda was beyond the reach of Bureau of Investigation – he left the country after the bombing and returned to Italy. In 1927, the Mussolini government arrested him as a ''dangerous anarchist'' and sentenced him to five years in prison.

The Italian anarchist movement in America was shattered by the Palmer Raids. There were a few final salvos from the anarchists – in the years following Sacco and Vanzetti's trial, bombs went off at the homes of a witness, a juror, and Judge Thayer. No one was killed. But there were no further fatal domestic terror attacks on U.S. soil until the 1970's and the emergence of a Puerto Rican independence group and the radical Weathermen.

The legacy of the ''Red Scare'' era includes the American Civil Liberties Union which was founded to assist conscientious objectors in World War I and to protest anti-sedition laws that curbed free speech; and immigration quotas that favored immigrants from North European countries.

A. Mitchell Palmer failed in his effort to win the 1920 Democratic presidential nomination. He resigned as U.S. attorney general in April 1921. William J. Flynn resigned as head of the Bureau of Investigation in September 1921. His assistant John Hoover, better known to history as J. Edgar Hoover, became chief of the FBI in 1924 and remained in that post until his death in 1972.

Palmer, Flynn and Hoover may have won the war against radicals but they lost the verdict of history. The ''infamous'' Palmer Raids are generally condemned as an ''hysterical'' overreaction that trampled on basic legal freedoms ''illegally, brutally and viciously.'' Palmer is dismissed as a political opportunist who used the ''Red Scare'' to advance his bid for the presidency. While Flynn is largely forgotten, Hoover remains a highly controversial figure.

In 1961, the Massachusetts State Police ran modern ballistics tests on Sacco's pistol and concluded that his gun was indeed used in the South Braintree robbery. However, it has been suggested that the prosecution tampered with the gun.

The marks of the 1920 Wall Street bomb explosion are still visible on the façade of the J.P. Morgan building.

Two Historical Footnotes

In 1942 a right-wing extremist named William Dudley Pelley was sentenced to 15 years in prison for saying that President Franklin Roosevelt lied about the extent of the damage at Pearl Harbor. Unlike Sacco and Vanzetti, his case was not taken up by the Comintern and he did not become a free-speech martyr. During Roosevelt's presidency prosecutions suppressing free speech were brought against both Communists and Fascists.

In 1916, Labor leader Tom Mooney was convicted for throwing a bomb during a parade in San Francisco, in which 10 people were killed. It is generally accepted today that he was wrongfully convicted. He was pardoned in 1939.

Further Reading

The author is indebted to the scholarship of historian Paul Avrich. His book, Sacco & Vanzetti: the Anarchist Background, is an invaluable window into the world of the Galleanists.

There is an enormous amount of literature about Sacco and Vanzetti. Historian Francis Russell argues for Sacco's guilt in Sacco and Vanzetti in Sacco & Vanzetti: The Case Resolved. Upton Sinclair re-created their story in his novel Boston. In The Untried Case, Herbert B. Ehrmann argues that the Morelli Gang, professional criminals, actually committed the South Braintree robbery. Protest: Sacco-Vanzetti and the Intellectuals by David Felix tells how Sacco & Vanzetti became martyrs.

Aliens and Dissenters: Federal Suppression of Radicals, 1903-1933, by Preston William Jr., covers the Red Scare.

A new book about the Wall Street bombing, The Day Wall Street Exploded, by Beverly Gage, is forthcoming.

Topics:

Historical Crimes

Authors:

Lona Manning

The Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping

admin — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 06:32:17 +0000

March 4, 2007

More than seven decades after his execution for committing "the crime of the century," Bruno Richard Hauptmann still has his defenders and sympathizers.

by Lona Manning

As Bruno Richard Hauptmann counted down the days to his execution at the State Prison in Trenton, N.J., his wife Anna went on the lecture circuit, asking her fellow German immigrants to donate to the Hauptmann defense fund. Her husband was not guilty of the "Crime of the Century," she pleaded -- he had not kidnapped and murdered the little Lindbergh baby.

Many checks were mailed directly to Hauptmann at the Death House. He realized that the donors who sent only one dollar didn't necessarily believe in his innocence, they wanted him to endorse the check so they could have the autograph of the man condemned for killing the child of the world-famous aviator, Charles Lindbergh.

But he's acquired a host of new supporters in the decades since he died in the electric chair. Conspiracy theories abound about the Lindbergh kidnapping case, and many people unfamiliar with – or dismissive of – the evidence, believe Hauptmann was framed.

The Lone Eagle

"Do you have the baby, Mrs. Lindbergh?" the nursemaid, Betty Gow, asked her employer.

"No." Anne Morrow Lindbergh looked at Betty in bewilderment.

"Perhaps Colonel Lindbergh has him, then." Betty ran downstairs to the study. "Colonel Lindbergh, have you got the baby, please don't fool me."

"The baby? Isn't he in his crib?"

The wind rattled the shutters against the window glass. The night outside was pitch black. A ransom note lay on the nursery windowsill. The crib was empty.

So began the most celebrated kidnapping case of the last century, a case that is still hotly debated today. Who stole little Charles Lindbergh, Jr., on March 1, 1932? And was Bruno Hauptmann wrongfully convicted?

Charles Lindbergh became an overnight world-wide celebrity in May of 1927 when he flew his single-engine aircraft, the Spirit of St. Louis, across the Atlantic, becoming the first person to fly solo non-stop from New York to Paris. The publicity and adulation for Lindbergh was intense. He was young, (just 25 years old), six foot three inches tall, handsome in a clean-cut All-American way, nonchalant about his bravery, and good to his mother. He was called "Lucky Lindy" and the "Lone Eagle." More than two hundred songs were written in his honor. There were ticker-tape parades, torchlight parades, poetry contests. News photographers dogged his every move.

In the five years following his transatlantic flight, The New York Times alone mentioned him over 2,700 times. In 1929, Lindbergh married Anne Morrow, the pretty, gentle daughter of a wealthy diplomat; their first son was born a year later. But the family's fame made their baby a vulnerable target. The Lindberghs chose a secluded spot to build their spacious home, on 360 acres near the small town of Hopewell, N.J., about 60 miles from New York City. On the night of March 1, the Lindberghs, their servants and their pet dog were downstairs when the kidnapper climbed a ladder to the second-story nursery and escaped before the baby's disappearance was discovered by the nursemaid, who had gone to check on him.

The ransom note was marked with a distinctive device of two overlapping circles and three punched holes. The note demanded $50,000 (roughly equivalent to several million dollars today) and warned, in badly-spelled English, not to make "anyding public or for the polise."

Not make anything public? Impossible. This was the Lindbergh baby. This was the "crime of the century." His birth "was one of the biggest news stories of 1930," said a contemporary newspaper report, "and his first photograph was one of the most prized pictures in the history of journalistic photography." "For the second time in five years," Lindbergh's biographer A. Scott Berg noted, "the world revolved around Charles Lindbergh." The kidnapping of the "Little Eaglet" awakened a wave of sympathetic grief, horror and outrage across the nation and the world. Church-goers prayed for the baby's safe return. Boy Scout troops turned out to search ditches, fields and forests. Even Al Capone, the notorious gangster, vowed he would do everything possible to help find the baby – if the authorities would just let him out of prison.

"The crime has brought on the biggest newspaper scoop in the history of journalism, not excepting the [first] World War," said the Hopewell Herald, the local paper. "Over 900 writers, photographers, telegraph operators, radio announcers and engineers, aviators, police, [and] detectives… are stationed in this area…. Every form of communication known to science connects Hopewell at the present time with the world. The town is shrouded in a veritable web of telephone wires… and at least 18 or 20 telegraph outlets including also the radio broadcasting setups."

The New Jersey State police took over the case from the small local police force. Their commander was Norman Schwarzkopf, whose son would later distinguish himself during the First Gulf War. The police checked into the backgrounds of everyone who worked on building the house. Border guards searched cars passing from the Northeastern United States into Canada. Everyone carrying a blue-eyed child with blonde curls came under scrutiny. Lindbergh insisted that the priority be getting the baby back, not catching the kidnappers. "Lindbergh leading hunt for his baby," the newspapers proclaimed, adding "Lindbergh is ready to pay [ransom] if he can get the baby safely back to its mother's arms." The State of New Jersey posted a $25,000 reward for information and people across the country sent in contributions for the ransom.

A week later, the kidnappers mailed more letters, which complained "We have warned you note to make anything public…. It is [is it] realy necessary to make a world affair out of this… We will form you latter were to deliver the money. But we will note do so until the Police is out of the cace and the pappers are qute [papers are quiet]."

"Jafsie" Enters The Case

Dr. John Condon was a retired teacher who lived in New York. Eccentric, self-important, intelligent and outgoing, he loved to air his opinions in letters to the editor. After the story of the Lindbergh kidnapping broke, Condon wrote to his favorite newspaper, the Bronx Home News, to publicly offer his services to help recover the lost child.

This impulsive act on Condon's part might have come to nothing – except that the kidnappers saw the letter and wrote him, accepting his services as a go-between. The letter to Condon used the same symbol as the other ransom notes – two overlapping circles with three holes punched inside them.

The ransom note "singnature", photo courtesy Kelvin Keraga.

Condon plunged into a secret world of intrigue, with Lindbergh's blessing. He communicated with the kidnappers by placing cryptic messages in the newspaper, signing himself as "Jafsie," a name based on his initials J.F.C. The kidnappers communicated through notes which were delivered to the house. Those notes in turn contained instructions for where to find other notes which would direct Condon to a meeting place. (For example, "Take a car and drive to the last supway station from jerome Ave here. 100 feet from this last station on the left seide is a empty frankfurther stand with a big open Porch around, you will find a notise in senter of the porch underneath a stove.") At one point, Condon asked for a "code" to communicate with the kidnappers. "It is note necessary to furnish any code," the kidnappers replied. "You and Mr. Lindbergh know ouer Program very well."

Following his instructions, Condon was led to a cemetery on the night of March 11 and was met by a man with a German accent who called himself "John." John wore his hat pulled low over his forehead and his coat collar turned up, but Condon later provided a description for a composite sketch.

John didn't have the baby with him and Condon had no ransom money at that first meeting, but they agreed to meet again.

A month had gone by since the kidnapping, when Condon and Lindbergh followed a second trail of notes that guided them to a night rendezvous at another cemetery. Lindbergh stayed behind while Condon entered the cemetery, but was close enough to hear a man call, "Hey, Doc." Condon handed over the money in exchange for a note which read "The boy is on the Boad Nelly. It is a small boad 28 feet long. Two persons are on the boad. The are innosent. you will find the Boad between Horseneck Beach and gay Head near Elizabeth Island."

Lindbergh and the Coast Guard searched the Martha's Vineyard area for the boat Nelly. The boat was never found.

Although, at Lindbergh's request, the ransom money was not marked – the kidnappers had warned him not to – investigators kept note of all the serial numbers. A portion of the ransom was paid in gold certificates, which were worth their face value in gold.

Investigators knew that next year, all citizens were required to exchange gold certificates for regular greenbacks because people were hoarding gold during the Depression, which drained the country's gold reserves. That meant the kidnapper would have to deposit or spend his gold certificates, increasing the chance that someone would spot a matching serial number.

There were other false leads, and an extortionist who pretended to be negotiating with the kidnappers was caught and arrested, but there was no break in the case. The local police, the state police, border and customs officials, and the FBI were all involved in the investigation. But the massive publicity was more of a hindrance than a help. As a recent FBI article noted, investigators were buried in "a mass of misinformation received from well-meaning but uninformed, highly imaginative individuals, and a deluge of letters written by demented persons, publicity seekers, and frauds."

Tips came in from all over the world – sightings of the Lindbergh baby were reported from England, France, South America and India. But the tragic truth was that he had never gone far from home.

A Heart-Breaking Discovery

Two and-a-half months passed, while Anne Lindbergh agonized over her missing baby and her husband stoically worked with the investigators. The ransom notes had repeatedly emphasized that the "child is in gut care," "There is no worry about the boy. He is very well." But on May 12, a truck driver pulled over to the side of the road a few miles away from the Lindbergh property and walked into the woods to relieve himself. There he spotted the partially buried body of a small child. Only the back of the head and upper body of the tiny corpse were visible. The exposed flesh was dark like tanned leather.

The body was badly decomposed, and mauled by animals. But it had golden curls, it was wearing a little flannel undershirt the nursemaid had sewn hours before he disappeared, and its toes overlapped, a Lindbergh family trait. The Lone Eagle was called to the Trenton morgue to identify his son. The attending physician declared that the child had died of a blow to the head, and had probably died on the night of the kidnapping. Lindbergh instructed that the body be cremated.

The perfunctory autopsy and hasty cremation were the subject of much criticism later. Lindbergh was trying to protect his son in death from the thousands of people who obsessed about the case and might even want to rob the corpse from the grave.

Now the search shifted to finding a murderer. The New York Police Department was already involved and the FBI, under its long-time commander, J. Edgar Hoover, joined the investigation. Early on, it was surmised that the kidnappers must have had some inside information on the Lindbergh household. Who knew that the Lindberghs had decided to stay at Hopewell that night, instead of going to Anne's mother in Englewood, as they had originally planned? How had the kidnappers known which room was the nursery, or that the shutters on one particular window were warped and couldn't be locked? The servants were interrogated, and Violet Sharpe, a maid who worked for Anne Morrow Lindbergh's mother, came under suspicion because she resisted questioning and couldn't remember the name of the movie she'd supposedly been to that night, nor the friends she'd been with. After several interviews with police, Sharpe committed suicide by drinking a poisonous cleaning product. In time, police established that she'd been with some men at a local speakeasy, a place where alcohol could be illegally purchased during the alcohol-free Prohibition years.

Sharpe may have wanted to hide her personal life from her employers, but understandably, suspicion about her possible role in the kidnapping has persisted. No proof has ever been established.

The only tangible leads were the ransom notes and a home-made wooden ladder found on the ground outside the house. The language and handwriting of the ransom notes suggested a foreign-born writer, possibly German. The ladder was built in three sections, designed to fit into a car, and had been left behind as the kidnapper fled. It was built of random pieces of lumber, and the side rails of the middle section had split lengthwise along the grain. Investigators surmised the kidnapper, descending with the additional weight of the baby, had broken the ladder and fallen. This may have been when the baby sustained his fatal head injury. The kidnapper might have injured himself as well.

Any other forensic evidence, such as foot prints or tire tracks, was destroyed when the Lindbergh property was overrun with police, reporters, and sympathetic citizens in the hours after the baby's disappearance. However, modern-day critics who condemn the investigation as "botched" seldom acknowledge the enormous resources thrown into the case, the sustained effort put forward to catch the kidnappers, and the problems the authorities had to contend with.

The investigation was thorough and recognizably modern in its approach. FBI agents searched through boat registrations, looking for the boat Nelly. The employees of the cemeteries where Dr. Condon and "John" had met were screened. New York police checked the names and signatures of anyone who rented a safe-deposit box that spring. They checked every person who had once been a pupil under Dr. Condon to see who had criminal records, and every person released from a mental hospital before the kidnapping. Previous kidnapping cases were re-examined, in hopes of turning up a similar modus operandi.

But it was the painstaking forensic work of an employee of the U.S. Forest Service Laboratory, Arthur Koehler, which most resembles a modern CSI sleuth. He analyzed the marks from the saw used to mill the lumber and contacted 1,600 lumber mills. He eventually determined that most of the wood for the ladder had been milled in South Carolina and sold at a lumberyard in the Bronx.

One of the uprights on the top-most section of the ladder did not come from the lumberyard; it appeared to be recycled wood because it had some extra nail holes in it. Because the wood was unweathered, Koehler figured that wherever it came from, it must have been indoors in a dry place. This piece came to be known as Rail 16.

The authorities delivered 250,000 copies of a pamphlet with serial numbers of the ransom money, concentrating on the New York area where the mysterious man who called himself "John" apparently lived. They visited and re-visited banks and business institutions to urge that the case not be forgotten. It's probable that much of the money was spent and was never checked. In early May, 1933, over $2,000 worth of gold certificates was deposited at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. But the depositor had used a false name and address. By early 1934, the trail went dry. Nine long months went by and no ransom money surfaced.

In September, individual ransom bills began popping up all over New York. Some merchants were able to provide descriptions of the customer because they remembered the man who made small purchases, as little as 10 cents, but paid with a ten dollar gold certificate, which meant handing over a lot of change. The customer spoke with a pronounced German accent, was of average height and build, with high, broad cheekbones and piercing blue eyes. The case, J. Edgar Hoover proclaimed, went "red hot."

On Sept. 15, a gas-station manager suspiciously eyed a $10 gold certificate from a man paying for 98 cents' worth of gas. The manager knew that gold certificates were supposed to be out of circulation. "You don't see these much anymore," he ventured. Suspicious, the manager jotted down the license plate number of the customer's car on the bill, as per company policy.

Three days later, a teller going over a deposit from the gas station realized the certificate matched one of the ransom serial numbers. The license plate number written on the note provided investigators with a name and address.

Soon, investigators were staring at Bruno Richard Hauptmann's application for a driver's license. His handwriting formation was distinctively European. He spelled New York with a hyphen, just like the kidnapper. He placed the dollar sign after the number, "5$" instead of "$5," just like the kidnapper. The kidnapper spelled "night" as "nihgt." Hauptmann spelled "light" as "lihgt."

Hauptmann's distinctive "x", which looks like two "e"'s.
A comparison of the ransom note with his driver's registration from the 1937 book, The Hand of Hauptmann.

After two and a half years, investigators were certain they had found "John."

Hauptmann was picked up on the evening of Sept. 19, 1934. An angry mob gathered outside the Greenwich Police Station, where he was taken.

Bruno Richard Hauptmann

Hauptmann was born in Germany in 1899. He and two of his brothers fought in World War I but only Hauptmann survived. Post-war Germany was in desperate economic straits, and the unemployed Hauptmann became a burglar and also committed armed robbery. He escaped from prison and stowed away on a ship to the United States. Caught and returned to Germany, he made one more failed attempt before successfully entering the U.S..

Hauptmann was a good-looking, athletic man who resembled the composite picture of "John." Once in America, Richard Hauptmann found work as a carpenter and married another German immigrant, Anna Schoeffler, who worked in a bakery. Later, Time magazine would unkindly describe Anna as the "loyal, horse-faced wife."

Although eyewitness testimony was used, to dubious effect, in the trial, it was circumstantial evidence that damned Hauptmann to the electric chair.

When Hauptmann was arrested, he had $20 of the ransom money in his pocket. Police found $14,000 more stashed in the garage he rented.

Hauptmann had quit his job as a carpenter, where he made $100 a month, on the very weekend that Dr. John Condon paid the ransom money to "John." Since then, he had only worked occasionally. His wife also quit her job at the bakery.

That same month, he opened an account with a brokerage firm to buy stocks. He told friends that he was living on his stock earnings, a remarkable accomplishment during the Depression.

He had another bank account his wife didn't know about, and in April, he started depositing change and small bills, like someone who had broken larger denominations by making small purchases.

As the prosecutor exclaimed: "He had more money than this jury and myself, all of us put together…Here is a poor carpenter, that had slaved for $100 a month, frugal, thrifty, and he spends $400 for a radio. When? During a time when the country was in the midst of the worst depression in its history, 1932. $125 for field glasses. Field glasses! Talk about luxury! Trips to Florida….. He buys a canoe. He sends his wife to Germany…She bought a chest of silverware there."

Hauptmann's explanation, which came to be derisively known as "the Fisch Story," was that his friend and occasional business partner, Isidor Fisch, gave him a shoebox before Fisch left for Germany.

Fisch, a failed businessman with a knack for conning friends out of money, died of tuberculosis and never returned to the U.S. Hauptmann claimed that he stored the shoebox in a closet but it had gotten soaked by a leaky pipe. He claimed the shoebox disintegrated, revealing thousands of dollars. Hauptmann explained that since Fisch owed him money, he decided to pay himself back. He said that he had no idea it was the Lindbergh ransom money. He took the money out of the shoebox, dried it, and hid bundles of money here and there in his garage.

Authorities had strong evidence to tie Hauptmann to the ransom demands. But did he have anything to do with the kidnapping and death of little Charles? What if he was just an extortionist? If he was the kidnapper, had he acted alone, or did he have an accomplice? Hauptmann was questioned aggressively day and night and also beaten. He insisted he knew nothing about the Lindbergh kidnapping.

Rail 16 – The Ladder

While searching the attic of Hauptmann's rented home for more ransom money or other clues, police Det. Lewis Bornmann noticed that an eight-foot section of the attic wood flooring was missing and there was a little pile of sawdust where it had been sawn away. In the single most damning piece of evidence against Hauptmann, wood expert Arthur Koehler matched Rail 16 of the kidnap ladder with the flooring from the attic. The four irregularly spaced extra nail holes in Rail 16 matched up perfectly with the holes in the attic floor joists.

Hauptmann had worked part-time at the Bronx lumberyard which sold some of the wood for the ladder.

The kidnap ladder was made with 8-penny nails from the Pittsburgh Steel Company. Hauptmann had a keg of these nails in his garage.

Koehler matched the nicks and groove marks made by Hauptmann's hand planer, to nicks and grooves on the wood used in the kidnap ladder, much as a ballistics expert would match bullet scratches to the barrel of a particular gun. Hauptmann had worked very little since the time of the kidnapping, and apparently had not resharpened his plane, which still retained the distinct series of nicks in the blade

The Defense

Modern celebrity trials, like O.J. or Michael Jackson, have been compared to circuses. But no modern trial could compare to the Hauptmann trial, held in Flemington, N.J. Thousands thronged the courthouse, lining up at 3 in the morning to get a seat inside. Movie stars and politicians got some of the coveted seats. Ordinary folk who couldn't get inside waited outside all day in the rain and sleet for a glimpse of the Lindberghs. Vendors sold little model kidnap ladders. The noise from the crowds out front sometimes grew so loud that the attorneys could not hear the witnesses.

The jurors were ordinary working class men and women for whom the $3 a day stipend was real money after five years of the Depression, while being sequestered at the local hotel with free meals was the equivalent of a holiday. In addition, there was the glamour of seeing the Lindberghs up close and all of America's top journalists such as Walter Winchell and Damon Runyon, in town to cover the proceedings.

A New York tabloid paid the bills for Hauptmann's lawyer in exchange for access to Hauptmann and his wife. The lawyer they selected, Edward J. Reilly, was the bombastic, emotional type who could be relied on provide colorful copy for the papers. History hasn't been kind to Reilly, but he was a well-respected defense lawyer in his day. Court observers were surprised when Reilly conceded that the corpse found in the woods was the Lindbergh baby instead of trying to cast doubt on the identification. When it came to the ladder, however, Reilly recognized how dangerous that evidence was for his client and unsuccessfully tried to keep the ladder out of court. Arthur Koehler's testimony proved to be devastating. Time magazine noted Reilly's "nimblest cross-examination failed to shake this implacably precise witness."

The defense promised seven experts who would testify that Hauptmann had not written the ransom notes, but in the end could only produce one, who argued that the letter-formation and spelling peculiarities in the ransom notes were common among Europeans, not just Hauptmann. The prosecution provided eight handwriting experts who testified that only Hauptmann could have written the notes. Prosecutor Wilentz broke up their dry testimony by bringing on a statuesque beauty, Hildegarde Alexander, described as "a blonde pajama model," who testified that she saw Hauptmann staring at Dr. Condon in a telegraph office. Alexander was one of many eyewitnesses for both sides whose testimony seems contrived.

Even Lindbergh's claim that he recognized Hauptmann's voice as being the same voice that said "Hey, Doc," at the cemetery two-and-a-half years earlier seems far-fetched. But he was the Lone Eagle. As the prosecutor told the jury, "And Lindy remembered that voice. And who is to say he didn't? Are you going to substitute your judgment for his?"

Major trials seem to attract a certain type of odd duck – people who appear at the last minute, people who claim to have been holding on to devastating evidence, but who never thought to mention it to anybody until the cameras and crowds gather for the trial. (This strange phenomenon continues today – a man showed up at the trial of the Long Island Shooter, claiming that someone controlled the murderer with a microchip implanted in his brain.)

At the Lindbergh trial, a man almost caused a mistrial when he stood up in the courtroom and yelled that he knew the identity of the killer and that Hauptmann was innocent. (Between 200 and 250 people confessed to the Lindbergh kidnapping over the years, authorities say).

What is inexplicable, even inexcusable, is that lawyers for both sides put some of these bizarre people on the stand. One 87-year-old Hopewell man, testifying for the prosecution, claimed that Hauptmann drove by his house the morning of the kidnapping. That is, he remembered the face of a stranger in a car, before he had any reason to take notice of him, and could pick him out in the courtroom three years later. Only after the trial, the defense learned that this witness was legally blind. Another local yokel with an amazing memory for faces was well-known around Hopewell as a thief and liar.

An equally dubious line-up testified on behalf of Hauptmann. Even with his imperfect English, Hauptmann could see that it didn't do his case any good when a defense witness swore they saw somebody else with the baby, or saw Hauptmann at his wife's bakery, and then the prosecution got up and brought out that the witness was an ex-mental patient or a criminal. "Where are they getting these witnesses from?" Hauptmann complained. "They're really hurting me." His wife Anna, a meticulous housekeeper, testified that she cleaned her closet "almost every week," but never cleaned the top shelf and so never noticed if there was a shoebox full of money up there. Hauptmann himself made a poor showing on the stand, alternately arrogant and surly.

The defense suggested that Violet Sharpe, the dead maid, and Isidor Fisch, the dead business partner, were the real kidnappers, but they couldn't take apart the forensic evidence of the kidnap notes, the ransom money, and the ladder. "I don't care about handwriting! I don't care anything about wood!" Reilly blustered, but in vain.

Hauptmann was found guilty on Feb. 13, 1935. A messenger boy inside the courthouse ran to a window and shouted the news to the thousands of people waiting outside. The courthouse bell began to toll. A great roar of satisfaction swept over the crowd as they learned the jury had decided on the death penalty.

Although Hauptmann was executed only 19 months after his arrest, his case was reviewed formally and informally and he was allowed several stays of execution. New Jersey Gov. Harold Hoffman, who was no fan of Schwarzkopf of the State Police, publicly aired his doubts about Hauptmann's guilt.

Sam Leibowitz, one of the nation's best attorneys, spent hours with Hauptmann, reviewing the evidence against him. Leibowitz told him frankly there were weaknesses in his story that he had to explain.

Hauptmann steadfastly insisted he was innocent. He turned down a newspaper's offer of $75,000 – more money than the ransom amount – to confess and name any accomplices. Hauptmann went to the electric chair in the Death House in Trenton State Prison on April 3, 1936.

Hauptmann Rehabilitated

Hauptmann continues to attract defenders and sympathizers 70 years after his death. Anna Hauptmann stayed loyal to her husband for the 60 years of her widowhood. "I know my Richard could never do such a thing," she repeatedly declared. Over the years, dozens of men, (and one African-American woman!) have come forward, claiming to be the Lindbergh baby. The New Jersey State Police conducted a review of the case in 1981. As part of their research, the police used an electron microscope to analyze the clothes found on the baby's corpse. They confirmed that the clothes on the body came from the Lindbergh home.

Ten years later, Hauptmann's widow, aged 92, pleaded one last time for the case to be reopened. Robert R. Bryan her lawyer, told The New York Times that the "evidence was faked and that witnesses were both pressured and bribed to support the state's case." Bryan, an anti-death penalty activist, had also done legal work for one of the Lindbergh baby claimants. Bryan declared the "Trial of the Century was the greatest fraud in U.S. legal history."

Bryan went through the reams of Lindbergh files, which included the thousands of letters with false leads, crazy theories, and dubious eyewitness sightings. He decided the prosecution had buried vital exculpatory evidence, that is, evidence that could have raised a reasonable doubt or even exonerated Hauptmann. He gave the example of Frieda von Valta, who claimed she saw Hauptmann on the subway the night of the kidnapping. Jim Fisher, a Lindbergh historian, has countered that this claim was not suppressed – according to police reports at the Lindbergh case archives, she came forward at the trial and Reilly refused to put her on the stand. She was a crackpot who constantly phoned the police with accusations against her neighbors. Anna Hauptmann's suit garnered much publicity but went nowhere.

Nevertheless, Hauptmann's trial was undeniably unfair, for a number of reasons:

The trial was unfair because of the overwhelming media attention and public clamor. However, this publicity was not created by the prosecution or the Lindberghs and was often as much of a burden on them as it was on the defense. For example, the newspapers broke the news that ransom money was being tracked by serial numbers – certainly something that could have made the kidnapper stop passing bills. But if Hauptmann was guilty of killing the world's most famous baby, it is an act of unmitigated gall to complain that the publicity engendered by his actions was unfair to him. (As one of the kidnap notes said, "[is it] realy necessary to make a world affair out of this"? And the author of that note knew that the baby was dead.)

The trial was unfair in the sense that all trials of that period were unfair by modern standards. The prosecution brought forward "surprise" eyewitnesses without giving the defense time to prepare. Handing over all evidence which may be exculpatory was not explicitly required of prosecutors until the 1963 Brady case.

The Hauptmann trial took place before Brady and before the Miranda you-have-the-right-to-remain-silent ruling of 1965. Hauptmann was not singled out for unfair treatment in this respect, he received treatment that other defendants of the time received, treatment that today we regard as unfair.

The trial was unfair because of the prejudice against Hauptmann as a foreigner and a German. Wilentz, the prosecutor, made inflammatory remarks such as: "[The kidnapper] wouldn't be an American. No American gangster and no American racketeer ever sank to the level of killing babies. Ah, no! Oh, no, it had to be a fellow that had ice water in his veins, not blood."

Prosecutors today could probably not get away with charging Hauptmann with felony-murder. Manslaughter committed in the course of a burglary was a capital offence. Hauptmann was charged with stealing the clothes the baby was wearing, and thus the prosecutors could ask for the death penalty.

But modern-day champions of Hauptmann are not upset because a baby killer didn't get a fair trial. They are conspiracy theorists who argue Hauptmann was innocent, deliberately framed with manufactured evidence.

The Microscope Effect

In his analysis of the O.J. Simpson trial, Patrick Frey, a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles County, wrote: "I have a theory. Put anything in life under an intense microscope – anything – and you can find questions. Especially if you want to find them, and you proceed off of incomplete information and jump to conclusions…. people ignore simple theories based on basic evidence in favor of huge, unwieldy conspiracies that could never be kept together in real life. Or they focus on one piece of evidence at a time without looking at the big picture…. I call it the Microscope Effect."

The Microscope Effect could equally well apply to the Lindbergh case. The ransom notes, the lumber from the attic, the ransom money in Hauptmann's possession, all tie Hauptmann to the crime. Nevertheless, some researchers pore minutely over the case archives and have built ramshackle theories which obscure the basic facts.

Not that the conspiracy theorists agree with one another. Det. Ellis Parker thought the corpse in the woods wasn't the Lindbergh baby; investigative journalist Ludovic Kennedy calls the suggestion "ludicrous." Kennedy believes Hauptmann's "Fisch" story about the money in the shoebox, others acknowledge that Hauptmann was an extortionist, but argue he wasn't the kidnapper. Virtually everyone connected with the case has been accused, at some time or another, of being complicit in the murder, including Dr. John Condon, the mysterious Isidor Fisch, the nursemaid, the other servants, Lindbergh's sister-in-law, and Lindbergh himself. Other suspects have no known connection to the case – a disbarred lawyer, the Purple Gang of Detroit, Lufthansa Airlines. The investigators, the prosecutor and Arthur Koehler the wood expert have been accused in no uncertain terms of fabricating evidence, committing perjury, and sending an innocent man to the chair.

In fact, there was friction, rivalry, and resentment between the State Police, the NYPD, and the Treasury Department, and vociferous arguments about how to conduct the investigation and who should get credit for what. It is difficult to imagine them pulling together an air-tight conspiracy under such circumstances.

There are unresolved issues, evidence of police bungling or overzealousness, and unexplained discrepancies in the thousands of pages of the case file. There are questions about whether the time sheets and payroll records at Hauptmann's last job were tampered with. Dr. Condon was such an eccentric character that particulars of his testimony are suspect. He initially hedged when asked to identify Hauptmann in a live line-up, but at trial he had no doubts. Hauptmann's wife and friends gave him reasonable alibis for the kidnapping night and the night the ransom money was exchanged. Experts can quibble forever over the ransom notes, although a majority of forensic experts who compared Hauptmann's writing with the notes have concluded Hauptmann probably wrote them. But sweep every dubious witness – for both sides – every crackpot confession, every anonymous tip, off the table; the circumstantial and forensic evidence speaks loud and clear.

Hauptmann told reporters, "If I made that ladder, I would be a second-rate carpenter." (The kidnap ladder was cleverly but crudely made.) And why would a carpenter, with ready access to lumber, go up to his attic of his rented home and start ripping up floorboards? And yet, even if there is no obvious explanation, physical evidence trumps psychological theorizing. Ludovic Kennedy believed Rail 16 did not come from Hauptmann's attic, but if it had: "It would of course have been conclusive proof – as good as a set of fingerprints – that Hauptmann had been actively involved in the kidnapping…"

In 2005, 70 years after Hauptmann's conviction, Court TV presented a re-investigation of the physical evidence.

"I was surprised by the strength and the overwhelming amount of forensic evidence linking Hauptmann to this crime," Paul Dowling, the show's producer, told the Associated Press. The program presented the findings of Kelvin Keraga, an independent researcher, who coordinated an extensive study of Rail 16. He compared it to the remaining piece of wood found by Bornmann and to the rest of the planking in the attic. Using meticulous comparison of wood grain, wood rings, mill planing marks, and nail holes, Keraga concluded that there was "irrefutable evidence that Rail 16 was indeed part of Bruno Richard Hauptmann's attic floor prior to the kidnapping." It therefore follows, Keraga added, that the serious accusations against the police and Arthur Koehler regarding Rail 16 are baseless.

A diagram by Kelvin Keraga showing the alleged position of Rail 16 in the attic. (click to enlarge)

Since the physical evidence and the case files in the Lindbergh saga have been preserved, (much of it at the New Jersey State Police Museum), future technological advances may bring more revelations about the case. William J. Fitzpatrick, a district attorney in New York, suggested in the New York Law Journal that the envelope flaps on the ransom notes could be tested for DNA. He predicted "HBO will do a sequel to the Crime of the Century called Gee, Hauptmann Really Did It."

Questions remain, of course. Was the baby killed deliberately or accidentally? Did Hauptmann act alone? Did Violet Sharpe, the maid, commit suicide because she was racked with guilt for some involvement in the kidnapping? Was it chance that Hauptmann successfully picked the right room, the right window, the right night for his crime? Why didn't he confess in a plea-bargain? Hauptmann took these mysteries to the chair with him.

Epilogue

Charles and Anne Lindbergh went on to have five more children. In the years following the trial, Americans grew disillusioned with Lindbergh when he made a friendly visit to Nazi Germany and urged America to stay out of the coming European conflict. For his part, Lindbergh was disillusioned with America and Americans. Lindbergh, more than anyone, was hounded by America's least desirable characters – wackos, extortionists, bogus psychics and the reporters who treated him and his family like exhibits in a zoo. On two occasions after the kidnapping, obsessive stalkers climbed up to the Lindbergh's second-story windows with ladders. He finally took his yong family abroad to England, a move that sparked a brief flurry of self-recrimination in the nation's tabloids, which faded as q.uickly a.s it did after the car accident in which Diana, Princess of Wales, died. In his later years, Lindbergh became an ardent conservationist. Lindbergh died in August, 1974 and his wife in February , 2001.

Further Reading

There is much more fascinating detail available about the Lindbergh case.

This writer recommends Loss of Eden: a biography of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, by Joyce Milton and Kidnap: the Shocking Story of the Lindbergh case, by George Waller.

Lindbergh, by A. Scott Berg, is a Pulitzer-prize-winning biography. Berg interviewed Anna Hauptmann and nursemaid, Betty Gow, 60 years after the kidnapping. Berg told Terry Gross of NPR's Fresh Air, "it was a fervent hope of mine that I would find enough evidence to clear Bruno Richard Hauptmann…Unfortunately, the deeper I got into the case and the more I studied the evidence, the more I read the transcripts…. the guiltier he came up."

Attorney Robert R. Bryan remains convinced that Hauptmann was framed: "My goal remains to historically right this terrible wrong." A number of books, such as Scapegoat, by Anthony Scaduto, The Airman and the Carpenter, by Ludovic Kennedy, and Crime of the Century: The Lindbergh Kidnapping Hoax, by Gregory Ahlgren and Stephen Monier, promote the view that Hauptmann was framed, although they present different theories of the crime.

The Lindbergh Case and The Ghosts of Hopewell: Setting the Record Straight on the Lindbergh Case, both by Jim Fisher, put the case for Hauptmann's guilt and answers many of the conspiracy theories.

Crimes of the Century, by Gilbert Geis and Leigh B. Bienen, has a chapter on the Lindbergh case, with a useful discussion of the legal issues.

Charles Lindbergh and Ann Morrow Lindbergh published numerous books about their life and work. Lindbergh wrote The Spirit of St. Louis about his epochal flight. Anne's most famous work is Gift from the Sea, a meditation on being a woman. Her published journal, Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead, covers the period of the kidnapping. Their daughter Reeve Lindbergh has written Under a Wing, about growing up a Lindbergh.

Internet resources

Kelvin Keraga's forensic study of Rail 16 of the kidnap ladder (.pdf report) is part of Court TV's Forensic Files web site on The Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping: Investigation Reopened.

Prof. Douglas O. Linder developed the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) School Of Law's Famous Trials web site that includes photos, a discussion of the case, and excerpts from the trial transcripts: Famous American Trials: Richard Hauptmann (Lindbergh Kidnapping) Trial 1935.

A website with Frequently Asked Questions: members.aol.com/LindyTruth/.

Featured Subject: Charles A. Lindbergh is a selection of New York Times articles about Lindbergh (free registration required).

The New Jersey based Hunterdon County Democrat newspaper has a special online section on the Lindbergh Trial.

Famous Cases: The Lindbergh Kidnapping is an FBI article discussing how Hauptmann was tracked down with the ransom money.

A Charles Lindbergh tribute site: charleslindbergh.com.

The Hauptmann kidnapping trial is periodically reenacted in the courthouse where the real trial took place by Famous Trials Theater.

Bruno Richard Hauptmann Denies Lindbergh Baby Killing, April, 1935 (:37): A sound clip of Richard Bruno Hauptmann proclaiming his innocence, and more pictures at The Authentic History web site.

Topics:

Celebrity Crime

Kidnapping

Authors:

Lona Manning

Todd Matthews and The Doe Network: Naming the Nameless Dead

admin — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 06:28:33 +0000

Who are they? These images are a sampling of unidentified victims profiled on The Doe Network.

There are thousands of unnamed corpses in the United States, so-called John and Jane Does who have turned up over the last few decades in woods, rivers, alleys and dumpsters without any identification. An Internet-based group of volunteers who call themselves The Doe Network is working to name the nameless.

by Lona Manning

Todd Matthews has always known where he belongs. His home is in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, where the soft-spoken 33-year-old lives with his wife and two young sons. Home is where the ties to his past are as close as the quiet graveyard where his ancestors are buried. "I was born, live and work in a three-mile radius," Matthews explains. This may be why, he surmises, he is obsessed with helping people who are lost. Specifically, dead people who are lost.

Matthews's consuming passion is to investigate and identify "John Does," the anonymous corpses that are found in woods, rivers, by riverbanks, in alleys, and dumpsters throughout the country. There are over 5,400 John or Jane Does registered with the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), an FBI clearinghouse in West Virginia. There are thousands more cases -- nobody is sure how many -- reduced to a thin file folder, a box of bones in the evidence room, a nagging memory in the back of a retired detective's mind. Often, but not always, Does are the victims of foul play. Sometimes they took a wrong turn in life, becoming involved in drugs and crime. But, says Matthews, "No matter who they are, even no matter what they've done in life, you've got to think they're all God's children."

Matthews's obsession with naming the nameless dead started with a Jane Doe known as the "Tent Girl." The story of the Tent Girl began two years before Matthews was born, when a man named Wilbur Riddle found a young woman's body in Scott County, Ky., in 1968. The partially decomposed corpse was found in a heavy burlap sack, like the kind used to store tents, and dumped near a highway. Despite extensive efforts by Kentucky police and the FBI, her identity was never discovered. Twenty years later, Matthews began dating Riddle's daughter Lori and learned about the day his girlfriend's father found a Jane Doe. Her anonymous death haunted Matthews. He knew that somewhere she had relatives and friends who missed her and didn't know how to find her. He took it as his personal mission to find the Tent Girl's true identity and locate her family.

For the next 10 years, Matthews devoted his spare time to researching the case and looking for reports of missing women. Even without any law enforcement training or experience, Matthews saw that the greatest obstacle to solving this mystery was lack of communication between police departments. A detective in one part of the country, looking for a missing person, may not necessarily know about the unidentified body found thousands of miles away. When the Internet came along, Matthews was quick to understand the potential of e-mail, chat groups and websites, for his Tent Girl quest.

Matthews used email directories to search for people who lived in the area where Tent Girl was found. He also searched public forums and discussion groups for any references to missing women. One night, while surfing the Internet, he came across a posting from an Arkansas woman named Rosemary Westbrook. She was looking for her older sister Barbara Ann, who had disappeared in 1968. For 30 years no one in the family knew what happened to Barbara Ann, who had grown estranged from her family because of her marriage, and it seemed to Westbrook that no one cared. When she posted messages about Barbara Ann on the Internet, she got no response: "No one ever wrote," she remembers, "no one ever answered, no one ever replied," until she heard from Matthews about the Tent Girl. Their chance encounter in cyberspace turned out to be the breakthrough both were looking for. With Matthews acting as a liaison, Westbrook sent photographs of her sister, a petite, brown-haired woman with a small gap in her front teeth, to Dr. Emily Craig, the forensic medical examiner for the State of Kentucky.

"I could see enough similarity in tooth structure and bone form," Craig recalls, to authorize DNA testing. The Tent Girl's remains were exhumed in 1998 and samples were taken from her teeth and bone. Her DNA was compared with Westbrook's DNA, a process that took six weeks. During that time, Westbrook recalls, she wore out her carpet pacing the floor while she wondered if she had done the right thing in disturbing the final resting place of the Tent Girl. Her husband reassured her that even if the unidentified woman was not her sister, the DNA information obtained from the Tent Girl's teeth and bones might help some other family searching for its missing loved one.

On April 22, 1998, Matthews and Westbrook learned that the Tent Girl was indeed Barbara Ann. The authorities hadn't made the connection between the Tent Girl and the missing woman in 1968 because Barbara Ann's husband had never filed a missing persons report on her. He died in 1987, before her body was identified, and is the chief suspect in her murder. But thanks to the Internet and his own tenacity, Matthews had solved the 30-year-old mystery of Barbara Ann's disappearance.

The Tent Girl experience taught Matthews how to improve the odds for identifying John Does. How can a missing person in part of the country be matched to a body discovered elsewhere? How can accurate and complete descriptions of John Does be preserved and publicized? What about forgotten old cases that have never been entered into a computer database? "I looked around," Matthews recalls, "and there were so many other bodies just scattered around." That's when Matthews joined forces with The Doe Network.

The Doe Network began as a cyber-bulletin board, a site where a handful of volunteers collected reports of unidentified remains from newspaper articles and police websites. It has since grown into a true network of over 200 members, organized into geographical districts coordinated by area directors.

The Doe Network's website publishes computer-enhanced photographs, forensic sketches and sometimes clay reconstructions to put a face on each anonymous Doe. Behind the scenes, the Doe Network volunteers discuss case profiles via e-mail and look for potential matches. As of December 2003, the Doe Network has posted over one thousand Doe case files and assisted with 17 positive identifications; sometimes matching a Doe found at one end of the country with a missing person's report filed thousands of miles away. A Kentucky man, missing for 18 years, was located as a John Doe in Vermont. A Jane Doe in Texas was matched to a missing Michigan woman. (This is not to say that all missing persons end up as corpses. On the contrary, the vast majority of missing persons disappears briefly and turns up alive and well.)

Some volunteers find their way to the Doe Network because they are looking for a missing friend or loved one. Matthews explains that the Internet and the Doe Network "allows a person to get involved in the case and not wait on a phone call. Everybody can't jump in a squad car and start interrogating people. If you've got your own life mystery, missing person, the Internet gives you a form of communication that allows you to take some action."

Other volunteers join because of the empathy they feel for the John and Jane Does. Diana Gettys, the Doe Network Area Director for Georgia, believes that her turbulent adolescence gives her a "kinship" with them. "Outwardly, some of these Jane and John Does may be labeled 'transient,' 'known prostitute,' 'known drug-user,' or 'runaway,' but to me they are simply people who lost their way in their own lives. I am haunted by that last moment: that last instant from which they never had a chance to turn back. And I feel anger that they never had the time they needed. That is why I do what I do: if ever anyone needed a friend, it is our nation of unnamed dead."

The impetus to fully use the capabilities of computers and the Internet has come from the relatives of missing people, not from law enforcement. There was no requirement that all law enforcement agencies register John Does with the FBI until 1999, with the passage of "Jennifer's Law." The law, which Matthews helped lobby for, was named in honor of 21-year-old Jennifer Wilmer, who disappeared in 1993. Kristen Modafferi, an 18-year-old student who disappeared in San Francisco in 1997, is the inspiration for "Kristen's Law," which provides federal funding for a national registry of adults who have disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The Center for Missing Adults database went online in June of 2002.

When Matthews began searching for the Tent Girl's identity, he often got the brush-off from law enforcement personnel. Now, he notes, law enforcement agencies are coming to The Doe Network to learn about how to enlist the public's help in solving Doe cases. Dr. Emily Craig, the medical examiner who identified the Tent Girl, says that "Todd's success and his groundbreaking work with the [Internet] is what encouraged the Kentucky Medical Examiner's office to develop its own website." [http://www.unidentifiedremains.net/]

Although the FBI and law enforcement agencies around the country are working on ways to improve the accuracy of match-ups between unidentified Does and missing persons, the NCIC database is only as good as the data entered into it. Errors or misleading information, Matthews believes, are often the reason why potential matches are missed. "You have to have something who can think," Matthews explains, "and the computer cannot think. Our [Doe Network] people can think." The Tent Girl case provides an illustration of this point: -- the doctors who had autopsied the Tent Girl thought she was a teenager, but in fact she was a petite 24-year-old. A computer search based on the incorrect age might have missed the connection entirely. More recently, the Doe Network matched a missing man named Christophe Fainard with a John Doe in New York City. Although the corpse had a number of distinctive tattoos and the missing person's report and unidentified person's report were filed in the same city, it took the Doe Network to make the connection, three years after Fainard's body was found.

Although families of the missing sometimes contact the Doe Network directly, the Doe Network's policy is to not contact families about potential matches. Instead, they contact the law enforcement agencies involved. "The potential match database is closed to the public," Matthews explains. "Nobody [who is not a member] can view it, and there's a reason. If you had a missing daughter would you want to see her mixed up in four or five different Doe cases? That would be painful for you." Connie Marstiller, a spokesman for the FBI's NCIC, calls the Doe volunteers "guardian angels" for John and Jane Does. Their civilian status makes them more approachable, she believes. "Sometimes families are more comfortable talking to them than they are to law enforcement, for whatever reason."

There is a story behind every case, and sometimes finding the name of an unidentified person only awakens a new and deeper mystery. Take, for example the tragic case of Sean Cutler. In 1995, in Vermont, a black Labrador carried a human skull to his horrified owner, who promptly called the police. More remains were found in nearby woods. The bones went unidentified for eight years until a woman named Carol Cielecki, using the Doe Network to search for her missing ex-husband, read about the find. She matched the description of the remains to an Internet posting about a handicapped man who went missing in New Jersey in 1994. Sean Cutler was blind and confined to a wheelchair as a result of a 1975 carbon monoxide accident that had killed his mother and left him brain-injured. He had been awarded a $1 million settlement for the accident and was in the care of his father. Sean's father, Lewis Cutler, told his in-laws that Sean was in a group home in Canada. In 1997, Lewis Cutler and a companion died in a mysterious house fire, leaving no answer to the question of what happened to the million dollars, or to Sean.

For five years, his relatives had nowhere to turn until the Vermont remains were identified as being Sean Cutler's in the fall of 2003. Thanks to the Doe Network, Sean's family was at last able to claim him and lay him to rest, even though the manner of his death probably will never be known. Bringing killers to justice is beyond the Doe Network's mandate, Matthews explains, adding firmly, "We are not private detectives."

A Doe case solved is always a bittersweet experience for the relatives of the missing person. Finding their remains ends any hope, however feeble, that a loved one is alive. Making a match is exciting, says Tracie Fleischhut, one of two New York area directors, "but you're also thrown back a little because you know someone is getting bad news."

Rosemary Westbrook says she feels tremendous gratitude to Matthews for finding her long-lost sister Barbara Ann. Westbrook was 10 when she last saw Barbara Ann, whom the family knew as "Bobbie." Now Westbrook uses the investigative techniques she learned during the search for her sister, to help others look for long-lost relatives. "There's a whole lot of [missing person] cases -- more than you even imagine. Todd touched our lives, so I try to touch other peoples lives, to let them know there are people out there who care."

The Doe Network is not for those with a morbid fascination with death and murder, Matthews says. "The one real fear in life is not death -- the greatest monster of all is the unknown. Particularly when the location of a loved one is the unknown. I see folks with missing loved ones literally writhing in pain."

Matthews has a build-it-and-they-will-come philosophy about the Doe Network, and his faith in the network's ability to attract people seems to be justified. In the fall of 2003 he began reorganizing the network's database, and out of nowhere, two new volunteers with computer and website skills offered to help. In 2001, Matthews proposed that the Doe Network provide free forensic artist services to law enforcement agencies that couldn't afford it. Project EDAN, or "Everyone Deserves A Name," was born after four forensic artists responded to the Matthews' call and volunteered their services.

Wesley Neville is one of the most active EDAN forensic artists. Neville sketches faces of the unidentified based on remains and autopsy reports, and has also created clay sculptures using skeletal remains. Of his work for Project EDAN, he says, "If a family member of mine, or someone I was close to suddenly went missing, the pain and suffering would be unbearable. I would feel lost, helpless. God gave me a talent, which I consistently attempt to hone and improve on. Assisting families of missing persons with my art is a way for me to do my part -- to add closure to their situation." In August of 2003, Neville found the Doe Network's 16th case file match.

There are still thousands of John and Jane Does, going back decades, who haven't been entered into the national registries. Depending on how far back you go, Matthews says, the estimates are that only 50 percent to as little as 10 percent of the unknown dead are registered in the national FBI database. These unreported Does can't be checked against missing persons' reports because nobody knows about them. The special mission of The Doe Network, Matthews says, is to find and work on the "the oldest and the forgotten-est" cases. They eschew the high-profile missing-person cases "that every mind in the country is working on" in favor of the forlorn Does.

Television programs may show crime scene investigators using unlimited manpower and resources to investigate crimes, but in reality, Matthews points out, "they're not going to spend a million dollars of technology to identify a bum in a dumpster."

"There's no way to know how many cases are forgotten unless people get involved," he adds, "and we don't assume someone else will take care of things. We need people to look for old stories, and make sure they aren't forgotten. Police should file NCIC reports on [these] cases." And if the police don't file an NCIC report on any Doe case that comes to Matthews' attention, he politely nags them until they do, and encourages families with missing loved ones to ensure that their cases are registered as well.

Matthews also sees The Doe Network as the guardian of information for future law enforcement efforts. Even though thousands of Does remain to be identified, Matthews says "I like to think we help all of them by preserving the data… preserving the data is one of our most important functions. We might not have all the weapons we need to fight the battles today, as yesterday did not have DNA. Tomorrow will bring more tools -- they might discover the secrets to the mysteries that elude us. Until then we leave cases in time capsules in the indexes and archives, for the next generation."

Matthews's commitment to the unnamed John and Jane Does has grown over the years since he first encountered the Tent Girl case. At times, his obsession has interfered with his family life: "I have spent a lot of time over the years...not doing what I should be doing. There's a bathroom remodel project that has taken a year now," he adds ruefully. But he is comfortable in the belief that, somehow, he has been called upon to do this work and he has found an on-line community of kindred spirits in the Doe Network. He calls his fellow volunteers "some of the most interesting and amazing people I have ever encountered... I can't find anyone who cares more than they do."

"We can't bring the Does back to life," Matthews concludes, "but we can bring them back home."

Topics:

Cold Cases

Justice Issues

Authors:

Lona Manning

Nightmare at the Day Care: The Wee Care Case

admin — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 05:38:52 +0000

Updated January 14, 2007

Kelly Michaels

The Wee Care case that sentenced Kelly Michaels to prison for 47 years was typical of the child-abuse hysteria that gripped the United States in the 1980s. At the peak of the frenzy of the great day-care witch hunt, it was the day-care workers, not the preschoolers, who were at risk. As the preschoolers, urged on by overzealous social workers, child therapists and prosecutors, told their incredible stories of sexual abuse and satanic rituals in courtrooms across the United States, scores of innocent people were sent off to prison. Some are still there.

by Lona Manning

"The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters"

Kelly Michaels never intended to become a preschool teacher -- she had taken fine arts and drama in college -- but she wanted to live near New York City and was looking for something to pay the rent when she applied at Wee Care Day Care in Maplewood, N.J. Although Kelly doubted if she had the qualifications, the director, Arlene Spector, had been encouraging and had persuaded her to give it a try. Once hired, Kelly was quickly promoted from teacher's aide to preschool teacher.

Kelly, then 23 years old, found that the children responded well to her. She was the oldest child in a large family and she'd done a lot of babysitting. Even without special training, Kelly knew what little children liked, what songs and games made them laugh, how to soothe their upsets, and settle their quarrels. But Kelly grew dissatisfied with Wee Care and complained that the teachers were expected to do too much without enough support and supervision. She decided to look for another job.

Although she knew that it was upsetting for little children when their teachers -- with whom they'd formed a bond -- came and went, Kelly accepted a teacher's job at the Community Day Nursery in East Orange, N.J., where she shared an apartment with a roommate. Community Day Nursery was a nicer facility -- larger, lighter, airier -- than Wee Care where the kids were stuck in the basement of a stone church and had to traipse down a long hall and up a flight of stairs to go to the restrooms.

On May 6, 1985, as Kelly was getting ready for work, she must have felt that her life was beginning to take shape and direction. She had fallen into the other day-care job, but this one she had chosen.

Then came the knock on the door of her apartment. It was just after 7 a.m.

A police sergeant and an investigator, both men, stood in the doorway. They were looking for Margaret Kelly Michaels. Could she come down to the prosecutor's office for questioning? Bewildered and concerned, Kelly went to the prosecutor's office where she was told she was suspected of sexually touching three of the little boys at the Wee Care Day Care. Kelly was shocked and horrified and as the questioning continued, she began to cry:

"Did you sexually assault Jonathan Moore during naptime or any other time while you were at Wee Care?"

"No."

"Did you ever touch or attempt to touch Sean sexually?"

"No."

"Did you ever lock any of the pupils in a closet?"

"No --"

"Did you ever touch Paul on his penis with a spoon?"

"No."

"Are you sexually attracted to any of these pupils that we just talked about?"

"No!"

The questioning went on for nine hours, and included a lie detector test, which Kelly passed. She was also repeatedly asked, "Why would the children say that you did these things?" It was up to Kelly to prove to her interrogators that she wasn't a monster.

Kelly racked her brain trying to think how this could have happened to her. ''I was a very trusting, naive person," she described herself later. "I loved life… I wanted to be an actress, I wanted to be a writer. I had never been in trouble with the law, not even a parking ticket, Catholic high school, Catholic college, drama club, president of my student council in high school.''

The whole thing had started, she learned, when one of the little boys that she used to supervise at naptime, Jonathan Moore, was at his doctor's office. He was being examined for a rash, but his mother was also worried about his hyperactive behavior, which was another added stress in her life, on top of her troubled marriage. The nurse was taking his temperature with a rectal thermometer and Jonathan had said that his teacher at day care took his temperature. He wasn't upset or angry or frightened when he mentioned it, and upon further questioning, explained that the teacher was named "Kelly." Jonathan added that Kelly also had taken the temperature of two other boys, Sean and Evan (the names of all the children and parents are not their real names and are the pseudonyms used in Nap Time, a book about the Wee Care case).

Jonathan's grandfather was a prominent local judge. Soon Jonathan was repeating his allegations to Sara McArdle, an assistant D.A. at the Essex County Prosecutor's Office. McArdle, an intense woman in her 30s, would become the lead prosecutor in the case. McArdle also interviewed the other two boys Jonathan had mentioned at the doctor's office. Evan Connors denied that Kelly had inserted anything in his bottom or abused him sexually in any way. But Sean, described as "agitated, hostile, rushing around the room, almost trapped," during questioning, came up with a new charge -- he alleged that Kelly Michaels had touched his penis. The wheels started to turn on what would become one of New Jersey's longest and most expensive crime trials.

Although the Wee Care parents were initially told only that "serious allegations" had been made against a "former employee," it wasn't long before all the parents knew that Kelly Michaels was the employee in question and the "allegations" became, at least in their minds, an established fact. Peg Foster of the Child Abuse Diagnostic and Treatment Center at Children's Hospital of New Jersey, in Newark, met with the parents the week after Kelly was first questioned. She provided the parents with a list of symptoms that children might be displaying if, in fact, they had been sexually abused. The list included tummy aches, fear of being separated from parents, and bedwetting. In addition Foster included a warning to be on the lookout for any sexual behavior or remarks, such as inappropriate sex play or touching.

None of the Wee Care parents had raised any complaints or alarms about Kelly during the seven months that she had cared for their children. None had mentioned suspected sexual abuse at the day care to the director, or to their doctors, or to the police. But after the meeting with Foster, the rumors and after-the-fact detection work began to spread like a virus in the Wee Care community. In retrospect, the parents remembered that many of the children had been refusing to take naps. Some had mysterious rashes on their bottoms. Another child had been stuttering. What about that time a little girl asked a teacher, "Do you want to see my vagina?" Parents, especially mothers, spent hours on the phone comparing symptoms and worries-- what if, what if? They were alternately reassured and horrified to learn that Lou Fonolleras, an investigator with the Department of Youth and Family Services, would be spending some time at the day care to interview the children.

ENTER THE SOCIAL WORKERS

Sometime in between Jonathan Moore's first remark that Kelly took his temperature and Kelly's arrest two months later on charges of multiple child abuse, the prosecution shifted from investigating to see if a crime had been committed, to building a case against Kelly Michaels, the sex pervert.

Nap Time, a book about the case that was based on interviews with the prosecution team, doesn't discuss any hard evidence or forensic findings that solidified doubt into certainty for the prosecution team; it only relates emotions and intuitive flashes. Peg Foster "was overwhelmed by a kinetic feeling of sudden conviction" when listening to the children's parents talk about how their kids weren't sleeping well and were refusing certain foods. Lou Fonolleras and Sara McArdle got that tingling feeling just by walking down the paneled hallways of the church in which the day care was located.

Thus the case against Michaels was driven by emotion, and conducted not with reference to logic or traditional crime detection techniques but in accordance with certain beliefs to which Foster, Fonolleras and McArdle subscribed and which they, in turn, preached to the parents.

One was that young children seldom, if ever, lie about sexual abuse. Even if some of the details were far-fetched, the basic charge of sexual abuse was true because children as young as 3 or 4 could not even conceive of such a thing on their own, therefore they had to be speaking from experience. Their rallying cry was, "Believe the Children."

Another was that if a child denied that anything had happened with his teacher, it wasn't because nothing had happened, it was because the child was afraid to tell. In fact, as Foster told her fellow investigators, "the more silent the child, the worse the abuse the child must have suffered."

Therefore, it was necessary to question and re-question and question again until the child did tell. This second point, that if a child said 'no,' he had to be lying, was in direct contradiction to point one, "Believe the Children."

Point three explained the discrepancy: The children were withholding the truth because they were afraid of Kelly. In addition to tormenting her young charges sexually, Kelly must also have terrorized them with threats for their own and their families' safety. Therefore the children had to be reassured that Kelly was a bad person who was now in jail.

When, after repeated urging, a child unlocked the dark secret that had been corroding his soul, it was known as "disclosure."

Imbedded in this belief system, however, was the classic Catch-22: Because "disclosure" meant the child had been abused, and refusal to disclose also meant the child had been abused and threatened to boot, there was no way for a child to demonstrate that he or she had not been abused.

Little Evan Connors is a case in point. When assistant D.A. McArdle first interviewed him he denied that anything bad had happened with Kelly. A few weeks later, Lou Fonolleras of the Department of Youth and Family Services came to Wee Care. Fonolleras interviewed Evan and again Evan denied that anything bad had happened. Fonolleras, however, had confidence in his ability to intuit when children were hiding the truth. "You can't go by what they say," he explained. Fonolleras suggested that Evan's mother read No More Secrets for Me, a child's book about sexual abuse, to him at bedtime. Fonolleras felt that if tales of body parts, touching, and secrets were Evan's nightly bedtime fare, he might be encouraged to "disclose." Soon, Mrs. Connors reported that Evan was misbehaving and acting out in the daytime, and haunted by nightmares at night. After two weeks of urgings from the grownups in his life, and scary bedtime stories, Evan was ready to "disclose." According to his mother, Evan said that his teacher Kelly had sucked his penis and scraped his nipples with a fork. He named other children as participants. He was interviewed once again by Fonolleras and this time he added new allegations -- the children had been made to undress and pile on top of one another. Kelly had inserted forks, knives and spoons in his private parts. (This interview and the other initial interviews – when the allegations were first made, were not recorded).

All the other friends I talked to told me everything that happened. Randy told me. Connie told me...And now it's your turn to tell. You don't want to be left out, do you?

(The following quotes in italics are taken from excerpts of the transcripts of the interviews held with the Wee Care children. For more excerpts, click here.)

The children Evan named were questioned in turn and they added yet more names to Fonolleras's list until practically every child who attended Wee Care was declared to have been a victim and the charges against Kelly Michaels became a mind-boggling catalog of sexual perversity.

Some of the allegations that the young children made -- such as claiming that Kelly forced them to play "duck, duck, goose" in the nude -- were improbable, but at least were physically possible. Other charges, such as the allegation that she had put cars on top of them and turned one child into a mouse, were not.

The investigators, suspecting that the young children lacked the vocabulary to explain the evils they had been subjected to, taught them the names of body parts with anatomically correct dolls.

Investigator: What are these things [pointing to a doll]? What we all have here? Breasts or boobies? What do you want to call them?

Child: You're teaching me.

Investigator: I'm not teaching you. I'm asking you. Come on. Don't go throwing stuff around like that.

Child: Stop teaching me this stuff.

Investigator: You got to learn somehow. . . .

The social workers believed that disclosure would bring psychic relief to the children.

That's why I need your help, especially you older kids...because you can talk better than the younger kids...and you will be helping to keep her in jail longer so that she doesn't hurt anybody. Not to mention that you'll also feel a lot better once you start.

But after talking to the investigators, the children didn't feel a lot better. They felt a lot worse and most went into therapy. They were upset, fearful, and started saying and doing sexually inappropriate things. "Pee on me!" one child exclaimed to her mother. Nightmares and stomachaches were common.

Investigator: And did you have to pee on her at all?…

Investigator: Well, what about licking the peanut butter?…

Investigator: Did you ever see Kelly locking any of the kids in the bathroom or closet?…

The children's suffering was carefully related in Nap Time, written by Lisa Manshel, a friend of Peg Foster. Again and again in Nap Time, Manshel records that after "disclosure," the children's behavior got worse, not better. One child started to masturbate openly, and invited her mother to "smell my vagina." In every instance, the social workers, the prosecutors (and Manshel, the author), believed that the children were acting up because they had been sexually assaulted and were wounded on a psychic level.

The prosecution was blind to the alternate explanation that the children were traumatized because they had been through a psychologically terrorizing interview process with grownups who wouldn't take "no" for an answer.

I'm here to help you, and I know you want to tell me something, and I'll stay here all day -- till you tell me.

Or the children were acting up because their world no longer made sense. All of the adults in their lives -- their parents, their remaining teachers, their doctor, and the man with the funny dolls -- were telling them that Kelly had done horrible things to them. They had liked Kelly and they were mad at her when she went away. The policeman said she was in jail. So she must have done something bad. Some of the children began speaking of a "good" Kelly and a "bad" Kelly, perhaps as a way of separating their memories of their pretty, smiling teacher from the mean person Mr. Fonolleras kept talking about. "Tears still come out of my eyes sometimes," Joey Gardner told his mother, "because I feel so bad because Kelly was my best friend."

Tell me what Kelly did to your hiney and then you can go. If you tell me what she did to your hiney, we'll let you go.

Although many of the children expressed affection for Kelly, and distaste for the questioning and the questioners, (Little Joey referred to McArdle as "Vomit," and spit at Fonolleras) the investigators were certain the terrorized tots were really in mortal fear of Kelly. For example, Jonathan "became inhibited around (McArdle)," but this was not because of his feelings toward the abrasive prosecutor, it was because of his feelings about his teacher: "(Jonathan) seemed to react negatively to women as a corollary to his feelings toward Kelly." Later analysis of the Fonolleras interviews showed that "16 of the 34 children never said they were afraid of (Kelly Michaels) and the remaining children never volunteered that information."

Furthermore, the prosecutors were never able to extract from the children's disjointed and contradictory answers a plausible scenario whereby the young preschool teacher could have kept so many children silent for so long. Three-and-4-year-olds, after all, are at a developmental stage where they are beginning to understand the concept of rules of behavior, and "I'm telling!" is their constant refrain, particularly among female children. But as Manshel records in Nap Time: "the team was certain, even without specifics, that somehow the children had been made to keep silent."

Investigator: You Wee Care kids seem so scared of her.

Child: I wasn't. I'm not even.

Investigator: But while you were there, were you real scared?

Child: I don't know

Investigator: What was so frightening about her, what was so scary about her?

Child: I don't know. Why don't you ask her?

In the following exchange, the investigators make little bribes and even plead for the child to cooperate At no time does the child say he is afraid, but the investigator supplies the reassurance that Kelly cannot harm him: The investigators are blindly pursuing their belief – ignoring, even contradicting what the child does say about his feelings, and interpreting his reluctance as fear.

Child: I hate you.

Investigator: No you don't...You just don't like talking about this, but you don't hate me.

Child: Yes, I do hate you.

Investigator: We can finish this real fast if you just show me real fast what you showed me last time.

Child: No.

Investigator: I will let you play my tape recorder....Come on, do you want to help us out? Do you want to help us keep her in jail, huh? ...Tell me what happened to (three other children). Tell me what happened to them. Come on...I need your help again, buddy. Come on.

Child: No.

Investigator: You told us everything once before. Do you want to undress my dolly?

Investigator (2): Let's get done with this real quick so we could go to Kings to get popsicles...Did Kelly ever tell you she could get out of jail?

The investigators believed the children needed more reassurance, which meant more discussions about the bad things Kelly had done to them, and how she was in jail now and couldn't hurt them any more. However, when the counselors told the children that Kelly had used her power over them but that she couldn't any more, the preschoolers, operating at the level of concrete thought, could only understand this as a reference to the only kind of powers they knew about – the superpowers of cartoon characters. Soon, the investigators were reporting that, according to the children, Kelly Michaels claimed she could walk through walls and turn herself into a monster. This must have been, the prosecution figured, one of the ways in which she terrorized them! They didn't realize they were hearing their own jargon, distorted by childish misunderstanding, turned back on them. They were hearing the echo of their own fears and reporting it as child abuse.

During the weeks Fonolleras was questioning the children, the Wee Care parents were actively involved, exchanging allegations and warning each other if one child mentioned another child's name in connection with the investigation. Some of the children continued to attend the day care (it closed permanently a few months after the allegations surfaced) and the remaining Wee Care teachers heard the children discussing the interviews with each other, and the strange dolls that had private parts on them.

THE SMOKING (PEANUT-BUTTER) GUN

Kelly Michaels, stuck in a county jail for six months because her family had trouble raising the $25,000 bail, felt as though she had fallen down Alice's rabbit hole. She thought that the impossibility of the charges -- their sheer number, variety and inconsistency, would make it obvious to any rational-minded person that the whole thing was a horrible mistake, a fantastic concoction of childish fears and fantasies, abetted by some sick-minded individuals on the prosecution side.

Sneaking off with her entire class to the choir room and playing "Jingle Bells" in the nude? Peeing on them? Engaging in group orgies with 3-and-4 year-olds? What child molester would take chances like that when footsteps in the hall meant being caught red-handed, with no time to clean up and dress the children. Feeding children a cake made of excrement? Most of them didn't want to eat their vegetables! A child forced to drink urine and eat excrement would probably throw up. How was that even sexual?

"If you don't help me, I'm going to tell your friends that you not only don't want to help me, but you won't help them."

Kelly's lawyers suspected that the "counseling" the children received was really just a way to reinforce the false stories of abuse that the investigators had planted. They asked the court for the right to have their own expert therapist interview the children. But the defense team was denied any access to the children before the trial.

Some parents, it is true, were at first reluctant or skeptical. Peg Foster and the other therapists in the case worked at persuading them that it was all too true. This was referred to as overcoming their "denial."

Nap Time also describes how Foster, searching for some physical evidence to back up the wild accusations, finds peanut butter in the day-care kitchen:

"She thought, 'Oh God, it's really here, I found it!" Peg was surprised at herself for not having expected success, stunned, even after all she had heard, to be reminded (by the jar of peanut butter) that the sexual activity had actually happened...."

If a jar of peanut butter, found where one might expect to find peanut butter, could be proof, to a trained professional, of sexual perversion -- then Kelly Michaels was facing a tough time when she came to trial, a year and a half after her arrest. Just as the investigators left no way for the children to demonstrate that they had not been abused, the prosecution left no way for Kelly Michaels to show that she was innocent.

THE TRIAL

By the time the trial began, Kelly was already well established as a monster in the media. Her lawyers had advised her to not give interviews. Unfortunately this strategy meant that anyone could project an image of a molester on the young woman they knew only as a stoic but forlorn figure wearing handcuffs and escorted to the courtroom by a full security detail. The security was to protect Kelly from the death threats she'd received, but it also created the impression that she was so dangerous that she might somehow, like an evil genie, escape from her captors and resume her rampage.

Kelly's family and friends mostly lived in Pennsylvania, while the relatives and friends of the children were close at hand. In Nap Time, Manshel only mentions Kelly's immediate family and an uninvited assortment of kooks and convicted sex perverts as sitting on Kelly's side of the courtroom.

Judge William Harth agreed to let the child witnesses, 19 of them, testify one after another from the judge's chambers on closed circuit TV, so that they didn't have to face their alleged abuser in court. He ruled that the defense could not discuss the children who were not testifying, thus cutting off another avenue of defense. Kelly and her lawyers could not show that, taken as a whole, the investigation was seriously flawed, and that if some of the allegations were obviously impossible, then all of the allegations were suspect. Even so, some fantastic tales were aired in the courtroom, such as the charge that Kelly had made a child stick a sword in her bottom, and some of the children appeared confused, answering the same essential question "yes" to the prosecution, "no" to the defense, and "yes" again to the prosecution on re-direct.

Some of the parents, alternating between simmering hatred for Michaels and grief for their children, testified that their little ones were frightened about going to day care, crying and begging not to go, and the parents didn't understand why until after the investigation began. But although this says a lot about the callous indifference of some Wee Care parents, it doesn't establish that their children were sexually abused at the day care.

One of the child witnesses was Joey, whose interviews with Fonolleras yielded some of the most shocking accusations ("We chopped our penises off") and the most vehement retractions ("It's all lies!") According to Nap Time, Joey loved the day care, "(Joey) insisted on going… Joey...attended Wee Care nine-to-five, four days a week, and he was fiercely attached. It was his life."

"Fiercely attached" to a place where he was allegedly being sexually tortured?

THE EXPERTS SPEAK

Whether the Wee Care children loved or hated day care, were outgoing or withdrawn, clowning it up or nervous, acting out sexually or wearing three layers of clothing, sucking their thumbs or sassing their parents, they were said to be exhibiting traits of sexual abuse. It could all be explained, said the prosecution's expert witness, Eileen Treacy, by the Child Abuse Syndrome, (the description given to the cluster of behaviors and emotions often displayed by young victims of sex abuse or incest, by a Dr. Suzanne Sgroi.) Treacy was an attractive and authoritative young woman who was eight years away from obtaining her Ph.D. in psychology but could quote the psychological literature chapter and verse. She was neither licensed as a therapist in New York, where she worked at a clinic for sexually abused children, nor in New Jersey. What she lacked in credentials, she covered over with bravado, substituting dogmatic certainty for scientific validity.

Despite Treacy's lack of academic or research credentials, she evaluated all the Wee Care families, calibrated the amounts of stress in each one, such as the stress brought on by a new baby or a pending divorce, and determined whether there were other "confounding variables" to explain the bedwetting and the stuttering. She concluded that all but one of the little child witnesses had no tensions in their lives, apart from Kelly Michaels, that could explain the degree of maladjustment they were showing. She spoke of the behaviors of the children, as reported by their anxious parents, as having a "high degree of correlation," (with sexual abuse) "over point six [.6] in numerical terms of probability," which gave her testimony a pseudoscientific gloss.

Treacy was on the stand for eight days, presenting the listed behaviors of the syndrome as though they were as reliable an indicator of sex abuse as rash and fever are indicators of measles. Using the syndrome label, Treacy was able to link a variety of child behaviors to the purported sex abuse, including the fact that one child had an aversion to eating tuna fish.

Treacy also reassured the jury that children didn't lie about sex abuse, and that they could not be pressured, coerced or coached -- as the defense claimed -- into making false accusations. "It is possible to suggest particular answers to children," Treacy confidently informed Kelly's attorney during cross-examination. "Whether they'll accept is another matter."

In Nap Time, Lisa Manshel quotes Treacy's assertion that the children could not be intimidated into speaking falsely, then two pages later she writes that "Children are taught, in no uncertain terms, to do what they are told... children should not be expected to have the strength of will to say no to an adult," by way of explaining how Kelly intimidated them into silence.

Many of the 19 children who testified on closed circuit television from the judge's chambers, where they yawned, fidgeted, ate potato chips, and spun in their chairs, behaved as though they could not be easily cowed by mere grown-ups. Little Lewis sassed the judge and the defense attorneys. "Objection overruled, buster!" the 6-year-old yelled at Kelly's lawyer.

Although the prosecution used an expert witness to testify that the Wee Care children acted like sex-abuse victims, the defense was not allowed to bring in an expert witness to testify that Kelly Michaels did not act like a pervert. She had no criminal past, no history of child molesting, no unusual episodes in her childhood. But sex perverts, as everyone knew, didn't have to be dirty old men in raincoats. They could be anyone, anywhere.

Day after day, for nine grueling months, Kelly heard herself described as a "grotesque liar," and a monster. "It was a long trial because they had to make something unbelievable – believable," she later explained. "And they piled on so much to wear the jury down. Really there was no credible evidence or plausibility. You keep beating the jury day after day after day and you get pseudo-experts – and you can get an expert to say anything, particularly in the psychological field."

When the jury looked at Kelly and saw a bright, attractive young person, it only demonstrated, as the prosecution said, how devious, how cunning she was! Was she kind and patient with the children? She was only trying to seduce them. Did she offer to help another teacher? She was just trying to get more time alone with her victims. Manshel enthusiastically took up this theme in her book. Kelly, for example, was a pretty woman with thick, curly dark hair and nice features, but she wasn't cute, she "seemed" cute. While Fonolleras and the other investigators were conducting their interviews with the children, Manshel sympathetically explained that they sometimes resorted to black humor to get through the horror of it all: "They joked about 'peanut butter and Kelly.'" But when Kelly, during her long trial for appalling sex crimes, sometimes laughed and joked with her family, Manshel records that the jury and the media were shocked by their demeanor.

As for physical evidence, the prosecution could offer nothing substantial. Some children claimed that Kelly had made them urinate in the piano bench in the church's music room. The bench was sent to the FBI laboratory to be tested for traces of urine, but the tests came back negative. Many of the children were examined, and although some had rashes, and one little girl had "notches" in her hymen, no child had lacerations consistent with being raped with a knife, or a perforated intestine from being repeatedly poked with a fork. And although Kelly was rumored to have taken pictures of the children, no pictures were found. But the lack of evidence didn't dampen McArdle's prosecutorial zeal. It only proved what a sly and cunning creature Kelly Michaels was. She was an unnatural monster, a succubus who preyed on little children. Kelly's seeming ordinariness was a compliment to the zeal and brilliance of the investigating team – they had hunted and trapped a rare creature and brought her in, in chains, to receive her punishment.

Kelly and her family kept hoping and expecting someone -- a juror who'd had lots of kids and who knew darn well that you couldn't dress and undress a dozen squirming children in the blink of an eye, or a journalist who wasn't overawed by the prosecution's expert witnesses -- that someone would stand with them and proclaim that the prosecution's case was ludicrous. But in the superheated atmosphere of the trial, to question the charges was to question that children could be or were, sexually abused. Dissension was denial. To add to Kelly's nightmare, one of the accusing parents was an editor at the local paper.

During his closing arguments, one of the prosecutors sang the Joni Mitchell song, "Both Sides Now," the lyrics of which were found scribbled in Kelly's Wee Care attendance book, as further evidence that Kelly was hiding her sadistic character under her normal exterior:

I've looked at life from both sides now
From up and down
And still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall...

Kelly could only watch from the prisoner's dock. How do you defend yourself against the charge that you like Joni Mitchell? Surely that's only a misdemeanor in New Jersey, not a felony? What did it all prove?

GUILTY

After an extraordinary, unprecedented nine months of testimony, the case was sent to the jury. The jury deliberated for 13 days, during which time the jurors were allowed to replay some of the videos of the children's testimony. They found Kelly guilty. As she later said, "You're finished. Your life is over. You're dead. For all intents and purposes, you're dead. And I remember just looking at the jury and saying, "Why?"

"You have to understand," says psychiatrist Dr. Lee Coleman, "that these trials are not rational. You cannot try to explain what happens on the basis of the evidence, or the basis of reason, or anything like that."

Dr. Coleman has testified at dozens of sexual abuse trials as an expert witness on the reliability of child testimony and the use and misuse of psychiatry in the courtroom. He believes that jurors, asked to choose between sending an accused molester to jail on scanty evidence or possibly releasing a depraved monster into the community, are swayed by "fear of criticism, the fear if they don't bring in some kind of conviction," that they will be perceived as soft on child abuse. "They will acquit people on dozens and dozens of charges and bring back a few convictions when there's no possible way you could separate the evidence leading to some versus the evidence leading to the other."

"The prosecutors thought that 'we'll just keep throwing so much against the wall day after day after day,'" Kelly reflected years afterwards, so that the jury concluded "'even though we can't pinpoint one thing that's really concrete about any of it, there's so much of it that something has to be true.'" Kelly was indicted on 235 counts but eventually convicted of 115 counts of child abuse. Ironically, she was acquitted on the charge that she sexually abused Jonathan Moore by sticking a thermometer into his rear – the allegation that started the whole thing.

Kelly was sentenced to 47 years in prison and denied bail pending appeal. She spent the first 18 months in solitary confinement. She would have been treated better if she'd murdered somebody.

SCARS THAT NEVER FELT A WOUND

While Kelly and other day care workers like her in other towns and cities were marched off to prison, cognitive psychologists were investigating the question of young children as witnesses and if young children could be made to agree to, and eventually believe in, things that didn't happen.

This was understandably a difficult area to investigate without harming children. Obviously it would be unethical to try to persuade preschoolers that somebody had molested them. But some ingenious experiments, most notably by Stephen Ceci of Cornell University and Maggie Bruck of McGill University in Canada, showed that children could be influenced by adult questioning. In one experiment, children came to believe that someone had licked their knees and stuck marbles in their ears during a touching game -- intimate contact without the sexual overtones -- even though it hadn't happened. Children could even be persuaded that they had had the painful experience of catching their fingers in a mousetrap.

Children could also be brought to agree that someone else had done bad things, especially if the person they were questioned about was presented to them in a bad light. In the "Sam Stone" experiment, a man impersonating "Sam Stone," an acquaintance of the teacher, briefly visited with two groups of preschoolers. The second group was prepared for his visit by being told that he was clumsy and always breaking things. In interviews after Sam Stone's visit, many of the children in the second group agreed that Sam Stone had ripped a book and damaged a teddy bear, even though this had never happened.

In addition to clearly showing how easily young children can be swayed, the researchers investigated the investigators. They provided erroneous information to adults who were to interview children, and proved that the children's responses were influenced by the adults' expectations. According to Nap Time, during the Wee Care investigation, Peg Foster told the other investigators that if Kelly Michaels used peanut butter in sexual abuse, then she might have used excrement and urine as well. Immediately afterwards, the first allegations of that sort were recorded.

Lou Fonolleras, Peg Foster, Eileen Treacy and the other Wee Care investigators were confident of their ability to see into the children's souls and interpret the truth, no matter what the child was actually saying. Eileen Treacy, for example, told the children, "God gave me a special blessing. He did. You know how some big people can't talk to kids too good? You know, they don't seem to listen?… Well, you know what? God gave me the blessing that I am able to listen and I help kids with this stuff." But the cognitive psychologists showed that intuitive judgments, divinely inspired or not, were completely unreliable. In the "Sam Stone" experiment, videotaped interviews were made of the children from both groups of preschoolers -- those who accurately said that Sam hadn't torn up a book, and those who said he had. These interviews were shown to "approximately 1,000 researchers and clinicians who work on children's testimonial issues... They were asked to decide which of the events reported by the children actually transpired and then to rate the overall credibility of each child."

"The majority of the professionals were highly inaccurate," the researchers discovered. In other words, when watching a child who said that Sam Stone had ripped up a book, something that never happened, the child experts were as likely to say the child was telling the truth as not. The intuition and empathy of the experts turned out to be a fantasy of their own egos. Driving the point home, Ceci and Bruck wrote, "Experts who conduct research on the credibility of children's reports, who provide therapy to children suspected of having been abused, and who carry out law enforcement interviews with children, generally failed to detect which of the children's claims were accurate and which were not, despite being confident in their judgments." Ceci added that one could do as well or better by simply tossing a coin.

The use of "anatomically correct dolls" also came under fire. In the '80s, the only children who came near the special dolls, made with large, prominent genitals, were children who were suspected of having been abused.

In the Wee Care case, as Dorothy Rabinowitz reported in Harper's,

As a rule, children were given knives and forks and then asked to show -- on an anatomically correct doll -- where Kelly had hurt them. On the tapes that I heard, the child's first response more often than not was to poke the doll in the eye or the neck or a knee. Invariably, the listener then hears the voice of Fonolleras, urging, "Where else? Uh-huh, where else?" After a succession of "where else?" responses, the child winds up poking at a penis, or a vagina, or an anus. Here, the "where else's" stop. Later, Fonolleras's official report typically would note how a child "described" the penetration of her vagina or his anus.

The cognitive researchers gave the dolls to children who had never been suspected of being abused, and saw that many children, when given a doll with breasts, vaginal and anal openings, or a penis and testicles, will touch, poke, pull and insert things. Again, video tapes of the children at play were shown to experts and again, the experts could not tell, based on the way the children handled the dolls, which children had never been abused and which ones had.

Just as normal children had never been tested with the special dolls, so the shape and variation of normal little girls' hymens had never been established through large-scale examinations. This finally occurred after Kelly Michaels and hundreds of others were in prison and it was discovered that there was a great deal of variation in hymeneal openings among little girls and that bumps, notches and ridges were commonplace. Likewise, at the time of the day-care trials, it was widely believed that if a boy's anus dilated, or "winked," during examination, it indicated that he'd been abused, and suspected molesters were sent to prison for life because of testimony about anal "winking." But when examinations were conducted on a dozens of young males, it was discovered that anal "winking" was a typical response to the light touch of the examiner's gloved hand.

These discoveries played an important part in the vindication of some of those convicted of ritual child abuse.

TWO JOURNALISTS FIGHT FOR REASON AND JUSTICE

When public opinion against Kelly Michaels was at its height in 1988, when she was "the most hated woman in all of New Jersey," an investigative reporter named Debbie Nathan who worked for a newspaper in El Paso, Tex. came to her aid. Nathan had investigated a similar case in Texas and Kelly's parents asked for her help. Nathan spent two intensive weeks in New Jersey examining the case. She says she was not surprised at the cold shoulder she got from the prosecution team, but she was surprised that even the local media people were reluctant to talk to her and were even hostile because of her skeptical attitude.

Kelly's nightmare, meanwhile, continued in prison. When she had to walk past her fellow prisoners, they cursed at her and threw garbage. She was sent to a treatment center for sex offenders for evaluation. "I had to leave in shackles – chains around my ankles and my hands cuffed down at my stomach," she told Nathan. "I walked by all (the other convicts) and there was total silence. They just totally stopped what they were doing. All these guys; sex offenders who probably have fantasies of women looking just like I did then. I came back to jail and cried all night."

Her family continued to travel to New Jersey to visit her almost weekly and brought her audio tapes of family conversations that she could listen to while she was alone and pretend that she was with them once again. She read, she wrote, she exercised, she prayed. But "there were times when I did want to bang my head against the wall and just become unconscious and stay that way forever."

Debbie Nathan wrote a series of critical articles for the Village Voice, slamming the whole day-care, witch-hunt crusade and challenging the pseudoscientific pretensions of those who were sending people to prison for life in the name of protecting children. Her interest in the subject led her to write other articles and to co-author the book, Satan's Silence.

Another journalist, Dorothy Rabinowitz, who worked at a New Jersey television station at the time of the trial, wanted to present an on-air editorial criticizing the prosecution and the media coverage of the case, but her station manager demurred. Angry at being censored, Rabinowitz reviewed the case and interviewed Kelly, her parents, the prosecutors and defense team, and some of the parents. She came away convinced that Kelly was innocent and wrote a stinging article that exposed the way the child interviews had been conducted. It's a measure of the atmosphere in which Nathan and Rabinowitz worked that Rabinowitz's article, which was originally for Vanity Fair, was not published there and was finally published by Harper's Magazine in 1990.

After Rabinowitz's article came out, Kelly decided to leave the solitude of protective custody and try her luck among the general prison population, although she knew that many of her fellow inmates were victims of child abuse themselves and could well decide to dish out some rough justice. She began to serve as tutor in the prison's literacy program and gradually convinced some of the inmates and guards of her innocence.

Essex County still wasn't through with her, however. "I had been (in prison) a couple of years," she recalled recently, "and a bill arrived, literally a bill, from the Public Defender's Office for over $800,000.00. (I was) just walking down to my cell, and I'm saying, 'I'm innocent, I didn't do any of these things, yet I have to pay for the pleasure of having been prosecuted wrongfully and serving a 47-year-sentence for it.'"

THE APPEAL

Thanks to journalists Nathan and Rabinowitz's second look at the Wee Care case, an eminent attorney, Morton J. Stavis, was persuaded to come to Kelly's aid in early 1990. He was in his 70s and had had a long and illustrious career as a civil-rights crusader. He met with Kelly and reviewed her case. She recalls his indignation when he returned to prison to tell her that he would defend her: "He came back… and he was slamming his fist on the table and he was saying, 'there was no way these things happened, we're going to defend you,' and I said, 'but you know what, my parents are all out of money, we have no money to give you.' And he said, 'We'll get the money somehow.'"

Stavis devoted two years to preparing her case for appeal. In the 33,000 pages of the trial transcript, he found plenty to dispute -- the defense's hands had been tied from the start, while the prosecution had free rein with the child witnesses. The use of Eileen Treacy had been grossly inappropriate. She had helped to choose which children would testify, but she also served as the independent expert vouching for their credibility.

Then there were the damning tapes of the interviews with the Wee Care children. Robert Rosenthal, a young lawyer who joined the defense team, contacted the researchers Ceci and Bruck and asked them to file an amicus (friend of the court) brief ((http://www.falseallegations.com/amicus.htm)) which was endorsed and signed by no fewer than 45 other researchers. This lengthy report outlined the many ways the investigators had misled, coerced, frightened, bullied, and bribed the Wee Care children and how as a result, the children's testimony was hopelessly tainted. The researchers pulled no punches in their estimate of the work of Lou Fonolleras and Co.: "The interviews with the children in the Michaels case are some of the worst I have ever heard..." Ceci told a reporter. "The children were undoubtedly abused, but probably not until they met the investigators."

Finally, a court date was set for the spring of 1993 to argue the appeal. In December of 1992, Stavis and his wife were vacationing in California but he made time to pick up and sign the final papers in the case, checking them over one last time before sending them back East. Then he prepared to take his wife Esther out to dinner.

Back in her prison cell, Kelly learned that while Stavis was walking outside, he stumbled and fell down an embankment and hit his head. He was dead.

"When my father came to prison to visit me and told me – I still said, 'Dad, we're going to win.' Even though it was personally devastating…. I still felt it was going to be all right. It turned out that the work (Stavis) had done was completed, it was just the oral arguments hadn't been heard… I really believed – and maybe this is youth and naivete -- that the truth would win, it was stronger than the hysteria and the lies and the craziness."

Out of respect for his longtime friend Stavis, flamboyant, civil-rights lawyer William Kunstler agreed to take over the oral arguments for the Michaels case.

Finally, came the day that Kelly and the Michaels family had hoped for, dreamed of -- the state appellate panel overturned the conviction. The appeal judges singled out Eileen Treacy's testimony as being inappropriate, because she was, in effect, used by McArdle to tell the jury to believe the children, when it was the jury's job to decide which witnesses to believe. The judges were especially critical about the child interviews, describing them as coercive, highly suggestive, and inept.

Kelly's lawyers moved quickly to get her released on bail. Understandably, the Michaels family saw the verdict as a vindication of their daughter's innocence, although technically all that had happened was that the appellate court had ruled that Kelly's trial was unfair. The Star Ledger reported:

Tears were streaming down Michaels's mother's face as she rushed out of the courtroom surrounded by family and close friends after the hearing concluded. One woman gave the white-haired Marilyn Michaels a bouquet of flowers in congratulations.

As Mrs. Michaels pushed through the crowded courtroom, filled with an entourage of reporters and onlookers, she said the family was ecstatic about the judge's decision.

''My daughter is innocent. She has always been,'' Mrs. Michaels said, overcome with emotion. ''The whole world knows it now. This means the truth has come out.''

Parents of the children were stunned at the reversal. Essex County vowed to retry the case, with the same prosecution team. As the months passed, the Essex County Prosecutor's Office continued to defend its prosecution of Kelly, but not as vehemently. By 1997, the office was conceding that the interviews of the children were "horrible," but that no one knew, way back in 1985, how to interview small children. "It was a completely gray area back in that time," claimed the lawyer for McArdle, as though common sense didn't exist 15 years ago.

Investigator: Just tell me -- show me what happened with the wooden spoon. Let's go.

Child: I forgot.

Investigator: No, you didn't. I'll tell you what, let's just go to the doll, we won't waste any time.

Investigator (2): Now listen, you have to behave.

Investigator: Do you want me to tell him to behave?

Investigator (2): Are you going to be a good boy? Huh? You have to be good. Yes or no?

Child: Yes.

AFTERMATH

The appellate court had ruled that the children's testimony was so corrupted by the leading questions asked by the investigators that a "taint hearing" had to be held to determine if any of the children's testimony could be considered valid, or if it was too tainted. This would be akin to unscrambling an egg, and Essex County appealed the decision to the New Jersey Supreme Court. In June 1994, the Supreme Court upheld the appellate court's ruling – no new trial without a taint hearing.

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Embassy/9062/witchhunt/Wee_Care/supreme.txt

The problem of bringing back the child witnesses, after so much doubt had been cast on their testimony, proved to be insurmountable for the prosecution team. After spending over $3 million to prosecute her, Essex County dropped the indictment against Kelly Michaels in December 1994. The $800,000 bill for her defense was not officially withdrawn, but she has not been pursued for the money.

Kelly, by then 32, was free. But, "being technically not guilty is not the same as being completely innocent," she reflected. "You cling to that difference when you walk into a courtroom and people spit at you, or when you're sitting in a cell and all around you people are screaming filthy names at you. That difference, it's everything."

After her release from prison, Kelly Michaels was staying with Morton Stavis's widow in New York, when she agreed to give an interview to a freelance journalist who was also a lawyer. Partway through the interview, he was so moved by her story and so convinced of her sincerity, that he turned off his tape recorder. Soon afterwards, he asked her for a date.

They are now married and have four children. She says that she doesn't spend a lot of time dwelling on the past, but "the prayer I have is that someone will come to me…maybe a parent or a child all grown up, and say 'we got sucked into this horrible madness, and looking back we see that it just didn't happen, and I was led by these experts to believe… and I'm really sorry.'"

In May 1999, the District Court dismissed Michaels' lawsuit to hold Essex County, McArdle, Lou Fonolleras, Eileen Treacy, Peg Foster, and others responsible for the harm and the horror they visited on her and the financial ruin they brought to her parents. She adds that she and her family are not the only victims of the Wee Care case, there are the deluded parents and children as well, and the millions wasted on prosecuting her case, "taxpayer's money…(that) could have been used to help children."

http://vls.law.vill.edu/locator/3d/Jun2000/995486.txt

Sara McArdle is now deputy assistant prosecutor at Essex County. In Nap Time, she is reported as wondering, "Why are people afraid to show children normal affection? It makes me so sad that people think hugging a child is going to make him accuse them of sexual abuse." She was apparently oblivious to the answer -- the reason people are afraid to hug children is because of people like McArdle. Although she discussed the investigation with Lisa Manshel while Nap Time was being written, she declines interviews about Wee Care today.

Eileen Treacy is now a professor at Lehmann College in New York City. She has continued her second career as a trial expert who trains others in "how to recognize, treat and prevent occurrences of sexual abuse."

Peg Foster is still with Children's Hospital in Newark working in the field of child abuse diagnosis and prevention. She still believes that Kelly Michaels tortured dozens of children with cutlery and peanut butter, but feels the court battle has led to improved child-interviewing techniques. She is in what she used to like to call "denial."

Lou Fonolleras, whose interviews of the Wee Care children completely corrupted the case, is still an employee of the Department of Youth and Family Services. He declined to be interviewed. A spokesman for DYFS says that Fonolleras has been working at an office job, not with children, for the past nine years.

Lisa Manshel, the author of Nap Time, became a lawyer. She declined to be interviewed.

The Wee Care children are now young adults. Many have been in therapy for years. To date, no Wee Care parents have publicly retracted their accusations against their child's former teacher. Some of the families have received financial settlements from the day care's insurance company. The last of these suits was settled in June 2001. The amounts paid to the families is undisclosed.

THE ROAD TO HELL

Kelly Michaels's case, in its broad outlines, followed the same pattern as other infamous day-care cases of the '80s – McMartin, Fells Acres, Country Walk.

During the 1980s many people came to believe that as soon as the parents' taillights disappeared over the hill at the neighborhood day care, the staff -- people with ordinary names like Peggy and Brenda, Bernie and Chip -- dropped their friendly poses and preyed on their young charges with every type of perversion known to man and some no one could have imagined. Children spoke of having their heads dunked in buckets of blood, of being tied naked to trees, being forced to mutilate animals and kill babies, of being transported through underground tunnels, or spirited away by airplane, of being brutally assaulted sexually and used in child pornography. And to ensure the children's silence, they said they were threatened that Mommy and Daddy would be killed, their house would be burned down, that they must never, ever tell.

According to some true believers – social workers, police detectives and prosecutors -- these macabre scenes were playing out in dozens of day cares – and had been for years. Some leaders of the crusade against child abuse believed that there was, in fact, a coordinated conspiracy going on – that sex rings had infiltrated the day cares and were using children to produce child pornography or even recruiting the kids in Satanism. Their campaign was, quite literally, a witch hunt.

According to investigative journalist Debbie Nathan, "research shows that between 1984 and 1995, at least 185 adults nationwide, about half of them women, were charged with ritualized sexual abuse. Of those, 113 were convicted, mainly on the word of young children." (Not all of the accused were day-care workers, some were bus drivers, some were parents and grandparents, some, like Patrick Figured of North Carolina, currently serving a life sentence, simply knew someone who owned a day care.)

The ritual abuse day-care cases usually start with one suspicious parent. Thefirst ritual abuse case was the infamous McMartin School case in California. There, the initial accusations were made by a mother, later diagnosed as a schizophrenic, who was convinced that someone was abusing her 2-year-old son because his bottom was red. Her son started attending McMartin after she had dropped him off unannounced in front of the school, and drove away. The staff looked after him and later allowed the mother to enroll him, out of pity for the child. Later, her paranoid accusations against the Buckey family who owned and operated the day care led to the longest and most expensive trial in U.S. history, in which the Buckeys were eventually acquitted, but not before spending years in prison.

Once parental suspicion is aroused, for whatever reason, the anxious parents –naturally enough -- contact the authorities. In ritual-abuse cases, a familiar scenario begins. The authorities warn all the parents to be on the look out for signs of sexual abuse. Panic ensues. The children are questioned and re-questioned by parents and counselors. Denials are ignored. The children, pressured to "disclose," start to make allegations that range from the bizarre to the impossible.

Whether charges were laid or not doesn't seem to depend on the credibility of the allegations but upon the credulity of the investigators: Parents in both Roseburg, Ore., and Cape Cod, Mass., for example, believed their children had participated in satanic rituals that included murdering people. In Roseburg, three people were convicted and sent to prison; but in Cape Cod, the prosecutor's office refused to press charges and concluded that the children's stories were a "hoax," a fantasy. (No dead people were found in either case.)

But although children were questioned about masks, candles, chanting, and upside down crosses, these elements were not always introduced into the courtroom and juries were asked to pass judgment on comparatively straightfoward cases of molestation and rape. The prosecutor in the Gallup Christian Day Care case openly admitted that Mr. and Mrs. Gallup and their son Chip were prosecuted not as Satanists but as child molesters, although he believed that Mrs. Gallup, a white haired minister's wife, had been torturing children in satanic rituals for 20 years. He believed that "the Gallups and some of the workers were sexually interacting amongst themselves and with the small children…they watched reruns of these videos and they were fed popcorn and (there were) incidents of animal torture and so we had to decide how we were doing to deal with that aspect of the case and so we focused our first two cases in particular on simple cases because we knew that the jury was going to have a terrible time of believing that kind of a situation."

The children in the Wee Care case were also questioned about robes and crucifixes. It appears that juries were not always given the opportunity to judge the investigation in its entirety and understand the context in which the allegations were gathered.

Not only were juries kept in the dark about fantastical allegations and impossible and conflicting testimony, so were the defendants. Jenny Wilcox and Robert Aldridge of Ohio spent 11 years in prison before their conviction was overturned. According to the Ohio Observer, Wilcox's lawyer "said evidence suggested that (in the original trial) prosecutors had received a 29- page report from police on the case but only provided defense attorneys with a sanitized eight-page report that left out details of…wildly varying statements by other children and denials by others." Like Kelly Michaels, Wilcox and Aldridge have not been allowed to sue for wrongful prosecution and false imprisonment. In neither case has the state admitted it made a mistake in prosecuting them, and even if mistakes were made in collecting evidence, the prosecution has immunity from being sued for errors.

THE VERDICT OF HISTORY

While the verdict of the court, labeling the unfortunate accused as sick child molesters, still stands in many cases, the verdict of history is slowly changing. More and more people now believe that the Great Day-Care Witch Hunt was a collective fantasy of prosecutors, social workers and frightened parents.

Historians of the day-care witch hunt have pointed to several factors that led to the panic: the mass exodus of mothers from the home to the workplace in the '70s and '80s, which gave rise to a lot of stress and free-floating guilt and, in some quarters, condemnation; then there were the pioneering child- protection crusaders, flush with new federal dollars to ferret out abuse; and the vulnerability of minimum-wage child care providers who found themselves cast in the role of the bogeyman in the closet. At the same time the country was enjoying frightening itself with titillating stories of human sacrifice and child torture in books such as Michelle Remembers, which spelled out in graphic detail how Satanists would go to any extreme to get children and do horrible things to them.

Michelle Remembers and several other supposed memoirs of life in the coven have been exposed as hoaxes. No child pornography involving children from any of the suspect day cares has ever been found. And there's no physical evidence that any of the day-care centers were turned into torture chambers at all. No corpses of slaughtered animals and babies. No cages. No tunnels.

When the controversy was at its height, Dr. Roland Summit, an advocate for the belief that satanic sex rings were operating all over the country, said that although the claims made by the child witnesses were fantastic, it was impossible to suppose that the little ones could make the stories up out of whole cloth:

There's been a great effort to understand… how it couldn't be true. And the best answer people seem to come up with is the notion that therapists or police investigators are brainwashing the children into telling crazy stories. Why these people would want children to tell unbelievable stories that make them look stupid, make the investigators look stupid, has never been explained in that theory. But, there is a great willingness to believe that children will say anything in order to please adults… I think if we look at the coalition of data as it comes together, there's no way children have made these things up.

No one has searched more diligently for evidence of satanic ritual abuse than Ken Lanning of the FBI. He looked into over 12,000 allegations of ritual abuse and concluded there was no hidden satanic network. ((http://www.religioustolerance.org/ra_rep03.htm)). As he put it, in his 1992 report:

The large number of people telling the same story is, in fact, the biggest reason to doubt these stories. It is simply too difficult for that many people to commit so many horrendous crimes as part of an organized conspiracy. Two or three people murder a couple of children in a few communities as part of a ritual, and nobody finds out? Possible. Thousands of people do the same thing to tens of thousands of victims over many years? Not likely. Hundreds of communities all over America are run by mayors, police departments, and community leaders who are practicing Satanists and who regularly murder and eat people? Not likely.

But Lanning did find a group of people who were assiduously trading how-to information about satanic rituals coast-to-coast. It was the investigators and social workers themselves. The Los Angeles Ritual Abuse Task Force, for example, distributed thousands of copies of a pamphlet with the warning signs of satanic abuse including "fear of death," or "aversion to attending church." The author, therapist Catherine Gould, and her fellow committee members later became convinced that the evil Satanists were trying to poison them.

Lanning concluded, "until hard evidence is obtained and corroborated, the public should not be frightened into believing that babies are being bred and eaten, that 50,000 missing children are being murdered in human sacrifices, or that Satanists are taking over America's day-care centers or institutions. No one can prove with absolute certainty that such activity has not occurred. The burden of proof, however, as it would be in a criminal prosecution, is on those who claim that it has occurred."

STILL IN PRISON

If the diligent hunt for satanic ritual abusers has come up empty, why are there, by one estimate, over a dozen convicted ritual abusers still in prison? http://members.shaw.ca/imaginarycrimes/othercases.htm

Gerald Amirault is in prison in Massachusetts where his legal battle to overturn his conviction has ground to a halt. His conviction was based on children's testimony collected by the same kinds of interviewing techniques used in the Michaels case. He has asked the governor of Massachusetts for a pardon and a commutation of his sentence to time served, 15 years so far. His mother and sister were also convicted of abuse and released from prison after serving eight years, maintaining their innocence throughout. Violet Amirault, Gerald's mother, died in 1997, hoping to the last that her son would be freed.

Update: Since this article was written, Gerald Amirault has been paroled from prison after serving 18 years. He lives with his wife and children.

Bernard Baran was arrested in 1984 and convicted for allegedly molesting three preschoolers at the day care where he worked. He was only 19 years old. The initial accusation against him came from the parent of a little boy who accused Baran of touching her son. She was a drug addict who periodically lost custody of her child. The other accusations against Baran arose after the other parents learned about the first accusation. The medical evidence against Baran was similar to that brought against Kelly Michaels – that is, it was non-existent. Baran's mother had no money to mount a proper legal defense for him. Baran is still in prison, also in Massachusetts, a victim of prejudice and hysteria. http://www.freebaran.org/.

Update: Since this article was written, Bernard Baran's conviction was overturned in June, 2006 (http://ncrj.org/BaranPR.html) on the grounds that the portions of the interviews with the children were not shown to the jury. The remaining videotapes of the interviews showed that the children denied "Bernie" hurt them until repeatedly prompted. Baran spent 22 years in prison.

Patrick Figured was sentenced to prison for life for allegedly abusing three toddlers at his girlfriend's mother's day care. The allegations against him and his girlfriend, Sonja Hill, were preposterous and included burning bibles and forcing the children to drink blood. Jurors ignored testimony that Figured, an electronics company executive, was never alone with the children and had very little to do with them. The anal "winking" test helped sentence Figured to three life terms. He is currently incarcerated in North Carolina's Nash Correctional Institution. http://www.religioustolerance.org/ra_smith.htm

Frances and Dan Keller: If you were accused of burying children alive with animals, painting pictures with bones dipped in blood, digging up and dismembering bodies, torturing animals, running a child brothel and sacrificing infants to Satan, what would you do? Frances and Dan Keller of Austin, Texas, decided to flee to Las Vegas, which didn't help them when they came to trial.

Fran Keller ran a daycare out of their home, complete with a pony in the backyard. She and her husband were accused of sexually assaulting all of the babies and toddlers in their care. The accusations started with one little girl who had been seeing a therapist for behavior problems before she attended the daycare. The Travis County Sheriff's Office investigated. Soon the children were accusing deputy sheriffs of being abusers as well. (Two were charged but the charges were eventually dropped.) Some of the children went to a therapist who believed that Satanic Ritual Abuse was a secret network devised by the CIA and Nazi scientists. Dan Keller's lawyer suggested that the children got their horror stories from the movie Pet Sematary.

In 1992, The Kellers were sentenced to 48 years in prison each and are still in prison today. http://users.rcn.com/kyp/KELLER.HTML

MORE LINKS

Debbie Nathan and lawyer Michael Snedeker's book: Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt, is available through http://www.iuniverse.com/

The Witch-hunt information page, is a collection of information and links on the day-care-abuse trials; http://www.geocities.com/jgharris7/witchhunt.html

The Religious Tolerance web site tracks the ritual abuse cases, the fates of those accused, andincludes a good discussion of how children might be led by anxious parents and zealous social workers, to believe in horrible things that never happened:http://www.religioustolerance.org/ra_case.htm

The parallels between the day-care witch hunt and the Salem Witch Trials (http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/SALEM.HTM) are striking.

Topics:

Innocence Cases

Investigative Reporting

Authors:

Lona Manning

The Forgotten Innocent Man

admin — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 09:20:02 +0000

Updated Oct. 16, 2006

Mary and Robert Halsey

The courtroom testimony of twin 8-year-old boys – a concoction of fantasy and fear – led to a life sentence for Robert Halsey in 1993. In 2004 the National Center for Reason and Justice took up his case, but all of its appeals have been denied and the Massachusetts Supreme Court has denied Halsey's Application for Further Appellate Review. Now in his 70s and in failing health, the former bus driver will most likely die in prison, a victim of the child sexual-abuse hysteria that put him there.

by Lona Manning

Robert Halsey is in prison in Massachusetts. He's in his 70s, in poor health and he's been behind bars since 1993. Officially, he was convicted of sexual assault on children, but in another sense, he was convicted of being the bogeyman. His trial transcript makes for chilling reading -- and not for the reason you might expect. It raises the frightening possibility that an innocent person was accused and convicted of a childish concoction of fantasy and fear.

Halsey lived with his wife Mary in a modest house in the town of Lanesboro, in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. He was an uncomplicated man. When he was younger and in better shape he enjoyed hunting and fishing. But as he entered his 60s, he was more likely to settle down in front of the television after a day of driving the school bus. His wife was more likely to be bustling around in the evening as Halsey, like many men of his generation, neither cooked nor cleaned. Mary Halsey relates how one evening, when she was working late in her craft room, her husband brought her a bowl of fruit cocktail. She was amazed that her husband had managed to find the can opener -- and that it had even occurred to him to be so thoughtful. It wasn't that he was a selfish man, but he was a man of limited imagination.

The Halseys had a grown daughter, but no grandchildren. "Children were very precious beings to both of us," says Mrs. Halsey. Her husband talked about the kids on his bus route "all the time," she recalled. "He enjoyed the kids, we always talked about them -- the things they said, if they did something funny."

In the fall of 1990, Beverly Walker arranged for bus service for her twin sons, who were entering a half-day kindergarten program at the local elementary school. The family lived on a winding, steep, dirt road, where no regular school bus could go, so the bus company (after some reluctance), bought a four-wheel-drive passenger van. Robert Halsey was the children's bus driver. Although Halsey picked up other children who lived on the outskirts of town, for a portion of his route, the twins were his only passengers.

He grew particularly fond of them. When the gas station was giving away Matchbox cars with every fill up, Halsey saved them to give to the boys, Jason and Justin Walker (all children's names and other identifying details concerning them have been changed). The Walker twins are teenagers now, but when they were 8 years old, they played a key role in sending Robert Halsey to prison, where he will most probably die.

How did Robert Halsey become the bogeyman of Lanesboro?

The Arrest

Robert Halsey's ordeal started in February of 1992 when the parents of 5-year-old Monica Kelly complained that he had tickled their daughter. Halsey, who had grown up in an era when it was all right to tickle children, pinch their cheeks and give them candy, got a crash course in the sensibilities of modern child rearing. He was quietly taken off that bus route and only allowed to drive for the high school students. Halsey was worried and embarrassed and he missed the Walker twins. In the summer of 1992, he went to their house and brought them a present of some baseball bats. He asked Mrs. Walker to please not believe the rumors she had heard. (Later, Mr. Walker testified that he and his wife suspected Halsey might be a molester because he was taken off the bus route.)

In early 1993, when the twins were in first grade, their mother gave birth to her third child. Her husband brought Jason and Justin down to the hospital on Saturday afternoon and he also brought along some cigars.

It was the cigars that prompted something in little Justin's memory. Something about Mr. Halsey. All we know is that on Monday, the children's school counselor, Jane Satullo, interviewed the twins in the presence of the town's police chief.

Later, Police Chief Stan Misiuk took each child separately to Cheshire Lake, which was spanned by a causeway called Nobody's Road. The locals went fishing lake for bass, gill and pumpkinseed. Mr. Walker sometimes took the twins there.

It was here, the twins later testified, that Mr. Halsey frequently detoured on his way to school. He shot and stabbed fish, crayfish and turtles while they watched in fear. He made a house of cards, put crayfish in it and set fire to it. These strange goings-on continued all through the fall of 1990 while they were going to pre-kindergarten, although they didn't mention any of it to their parents. Then in the spring of 1991, Halsey began to molest them. He would drive uphill from the pond into some secluded fields and tie them up with rope and duct tape and take them, one after the other, off the bus and sodomize them. Then he ripped the duct tape off and dropped them off at school. These alleged tortures continued through the rest of the school year and resumed the following school year.

Until the day little Monica came home and complained to her parents that Mr. Halsey had tickled her. James Zarvis, the owner of the bus company, stepped in to drive the Walker boys. According to Zarvis' later testimony, Jason and Justin told Zarvis that they missed Mr. Halsey and wondered where he was. The criminal allegations against him would not come until almost a year later -- when they were at the hospital meeting the new baby.

The initial interview with the school counselor and the police chief was not recorded. In other cases of this sort, it's the interview transcripts or videotapes that have helped to set the defendant free. They have clearly shown adults coaching and coaxing young children into accusing their parents, their teachers, other people in the community, of sexually abusing them. In the infamous McMartin Daycare case in California, chief interrogator Kee MacFarlane dressed in a clown suit and interviewed children with puppets. A social worker in the Wee Care preschool case cajoled: "All the other friends I talked to told me everything that happened. Randy told me. Connie told me...And now it's your turn to tell. You don't want to be left out, do you?"

At trial, the counselor, Jane Satullo, would tell the jury that she didn't ask the twins any leading questions. But she is a therapist, and not a detective, as is made evident by her remark: "I try most of all to open the child's -- open the child -- really, in some ways, opening their heart, feeling safe, it's okay, they can talk, they can tell their story in their own words."

After the children were interviewed, the police chief sent several officers to search Halsey's house and arrest him. The police seized knives from the kitchen and tool shed, they seized rope, tackle boxes and fishing poles, they took his late father's .38, his pellet gun and a starter pistol. They took his penknife off his key chain. "They took my duct tape out of my craft room," said Mrs. Halsey. "It was my tape." In the bedroom, they found Mr. Halsey's stash of adult pornography, some magazines and videos. Police noticed that the house was filled with clutter, including cardboard boxes.

Halsey, unable to meet the $500,000 bail, waited in jail. The day after his arrest, all 350 children at Lanesboro Elementary were sent home early so the teachers and school officials could meet to discuss the shocking allegations. In the days that followed, parents jammed into the school for information meetings. Jane Satullo and the school principal, Thomas Gillooly, were both quoted extensively and both spoke as though the charges against Halsey did not merit any doubt, and both dispatched the presumption of innocence. "We all feel violated," the principal said. "This has rocked the entire community." He added that everyone had discovered "how unsafe our world can be." Satullo called the boys "heroes." A parent complained that the school "has been victimized by a predator."

Halsey had been driving the bus and tickling children, for over 20 years, but no grown victims came forward, even though the case was well publicized. On the other hand, nobody publicly came to his defense. One of his fellow bus drivers said the charges against Halsey, "Baffle me... He was a simple, uncomplicated guy. I can't even imagine this happening."

In the months before trial, the children were in therapy and they developed even more accusations. Halsey made them hold up targets while he shot at them. He sprayed them with a "sleepy spray." He made them eat urine, feces and vomit. He threw them in the lake, then took them to his house and stuffed them in cardboard boxes and made them watch adult pornographic videos.

Halsey's public defender, Richard LeBlanc, was skeptical about whether Halsey had time to do any of these things. In the second year, particularly, Halsey had 45 minutes to pick up all the morning kindergarten children and deliver them home, then pick up children attending the afternoon session, and deliver them to school. Halsey's only bus-driving peccadillo, which had gotten him into trouble in the past, was his income-supplementing practice of stopping to pick up bottles and cans he saw at the side of the road. Nobody had a record of the exact time Halsey's bus pulled into the school yard every day (although he had never been in trouble for being late), still, it was difficult to understand how Halsey would have time to detour down Nobody's Road, tie and tape the kids up, whip out the fishing pole, catch fish, kill the fish, drive up the hill to the cornfield, sexually assault the children, then rip the duct tape off their mouths, untie them, and still finish his route on time.

The Trial

Judge Daniel Ford, who had been the prosecuting attorney in the Bernard Baran (http://www.freebaran.org) case, would hear the case. Baran, a daycare worker in nearby Pittsfield, Mass., was the first person to be convicted of bizarre crimes of this type against children. Halsey's prosecutor, Timothy Shugrue, was a specialist in sexual-abuse cases who would go on to co-found the Kid's Place, an agency for screening and counseling abused children.

At trial, "the courtroom's high ceiling and adult-sized witness stand dwarfed the two boys," reported the Berkshire Eagle. Jason, the elder twin by five minutes, testified first. He claimed after Halsey had been driving them for about a week when he detoured one day to Nobody's Road, drove over some concrete barriers and took them into some secluded fields, and pulled out his .38. He made the children hold up targets, which he shot at.

But when Justin took the stand, Shugrue had trouble pulling the same story out of him. He introduced the target shooting testimony with, "Could you tell me, at some point in time did things become not okay with Bob?"

"Yes," answers Justin. "He started hitting us and pulling down our pants."

When Shugrue tries to clarify that he's asking for the first strange incident, which according to the other twin, was the target shooting incident, "the first time he did something that made you feel kind of uncomfortable," Justin responds: "He pulled down our pants and stuck his penis into our butt." Shugrue attempts to clarify by asking Justin:

Q. I want to ask you about the times you said he started to hit you and stuff... When did that start?"

A. The second day of school. He was hitting us and putting our heads in the pond.

Q. What happened at first?

A. First I hit him because he said something to me, and then he started hitting me, then dunked my head in the pond.

Shugrue then shifts gears and leads Justin through a discussion of how Halsey had tickled him and how Justin pushed his hand away. Justin is shown a map, and is asked to point out where the van went. After six pages of laborious coaching and looking at maps, Shugrue has placed Justin and Halsey past the lake and in the field, all ready to talk about the target- shooting incident.

Q. What happened once you pulled into that field?

A. He started hitting us and pulling our pants down.

Shugrue repeats, "I want to talk about the very first time that something happened." He suggests to Justin that he is a little uncomfortable and nervous and wants to say everything at once. Justin agrees. Okay. Shugrue asks again, what did he do?

A. Pulled down our pants.

Q. I'm talking about the first time you went in there." [Shugrue repeats, and adds a hint] "I'm talking about the first time you went in there. Did he ever use guns?

A. Yeah.

Q. What did he do with the guns?

A. He was putting guns to our heads and he was putting knives to our head.

After eight pages of effort, Shugrue throws in the towel, and asks directly, "Do you remember ever seeing any targets?"

The light finally dawns for Justin: "He used to make us hold them up and shoot at them."

Here, Justin is supposed to testify that Halsey unzipped his own pants, placed candy in his crotch, and invited the children to fish for it, but Shugrue is momentarily sidetracked by a new allegation;

Q. Where did he put the candy?

A. Up his butt.

Q. Did he tell you he put the candy up his butt?

A. Yeah.

Q. Did you actually see him do that?

A. Yeah.

Q. Tell us, when you were on the bus, did you see him do something with the candy?

A. He licked it.

Q. You started to tell me, and I interrupted you before, that he unzipped his pants?

Often, when the children said something particularly bizarre or impossible, Shugrue asked them if they were frightened. Mary Halsey says the children didn't appear frightened to her: "The one boy (Jason) was very much in control but the other twin (Justin) was sort of fidgety like, but he didn't appear to be frightened. They looked like they had been well rehearsed, which I imagine they were."

But even if the correct answer was not forthcoming, prosecutor Shugrue supplied it. Shugrue was convinced that Halsey kept his arsenal of guns, knives, baseball bats, ropes, tape, etc., hidden behind the last bench in the back of the van. But his star witnesses almost never said that. They testified that Halsey wore a knife on his hat and one attached to his boot. They said he wore a gun on his holster, even when he was picking them up or dropping them off. He also kept a gun in his pocket, baseball bats under the front seat, and filled the glove compartment with knives. Almost every time the twins were shown a gun or a knife in the courtroom, they said they had seen it "under the seat," "in his pocket" or "in the glove department." Almost every time, Shugrue would prompt them: Ever see them in the back as well?... Did you see a bunch of knives also in the back?... Do you remember ever seeing any guns in the back?... Did you see them in the back as well? Yes, the children would agree, yes, they also saw weapons in the back.

The concrete blocks on Nobody's Road.

The question of the concrete blocks demonstrated how quickly the Walker twins could accommodate their testimony to fit what the questioner was asking. Nobody's Road was blocked off by large dividers in the winter to prevent cars from using the unpaved portion past the causeway which spanned the lake. (The prosecution argued that there was enough room for Halsey to maneuver the Suburban around the blocks.)

Halsey's lawyer asked Jason: "(You said in direct examination) that the van just drove right over (the blocks), is that right?"

A. Yes.

Q. You went over the blocks, is that right?

A. Yeah.

The blocks in question are three feet tall and three feet wide. On redirect, Shugrue moved to repair the damage:

Q. Did you actually go over the blocks? Did you go around the blocks? Explain that to us.

A. We went around the blocks.

On re-cross, Jason adapted his story when Halsey's attorney persisted by asking him:

Q. Well now, did you go over them or did you go around them?

A. Around them. One wheel just hit on the blocks and went over them.

Shugrue also corrected 7-year-old Monica Kelly, who testified that "the first day" she saw the guns and knives on Halsey's bus, she told her parents at that time and they even had a conversation about it. She also claimed thatwhen her grandmother picked her up at the bus stop, she pointed the guns out to her grandmother. Shugrue repaired her credibility by telling her that what she really meant was that she told her parents "more recently," and that she was "still afraid" of Halsey. She agreed with him.

The remaining witnesses were sisters who had moved to Florida. According to the original allegations described to a grand jury by Mr. Walker, Justin said Halsey lined up the children on the school bus and sexually assaulted them one after the other. Justin and Jason named the other supposed victims, and these children were in turn questioned. Monica and the Carter sisters would eventually testify to seeing knives and guns on the bus, or to having their mouths taped, but none of them corroborated the sexual assaults. At trial, no child testified to seeing another child sexually assaulted.

Another child who had been named by twins as having been a victim denied, in spite of repeated questioning, that anything unusual had happened on Halsey's bus, and did not testify.

Halsey's lawyer was able to establish that like the other children, Carter sisters' testimony had changed and become more damaging to Halsey since their initial interviews with the police, but he was unable to do more than suggest contamination of their testimony, since the interviews were not recorded. The investigating officer's testimony clearly showed that she asked leading questions such as, "Did you see knives and guns on the bus?"

The children seemed to move from milder to wilder accusations when asked, what else? what else? Monica was the girl who initially said that Halsey had tickled her. By the time of the trial, she said that he had also waved a knife at her and choked her. In this excerpt, Jason recalls being forced to eat sushi, and after a "what else," comes up with more.

Q. What kinds of things would he have you do with the fish?

A. He said he made me eat it, he's going to make me eat it...

Q. Did he do anything else with the fish.

A. Shot them in the water, and he --

Q. Go ahead.

A. Made us eat them.

Q. Anything else?

A. He stuck them up our butts.

The prosecution called as its expert witness psychologist Jeffrey Fishman, who testified that children who have been molested, often, out of sense of shame, delay revealing all the details of what happened to them. Fishman also explained to the jury how sexually abused children behave -- the tummy aches, the trouble swallowing, the sudden modesty about being seen naked.

The twins' mother took the stand to describe how her children behaved from the time Mr. Halsey began driving them -- the tummy aches, the trouble swallowing, the sudden modesty about being seen naked. What the jury never heard was that Dr. Fishman was also the children's therapist and that he'd worked closely with the family, a collaboration that routinely involves discussing symptoms to look out for. And the defense never called an expert to counter Fishman's testimony and explain that cognitive psychologists had clearly shown how easy it was to influence children to say things that weren't true and that of course many children get tummy aches.

The defense did call the twin's teachers who testified that the children behaved normally at school, and were happy, alert and well dressed. The prosecution had an explanation for that, too: Traumatized children can appear to be happy, Dr. Fishman explained, because they are "dissociating" -- blocking out the terrible things that had just happened, to protect themselves psychologically.

And indeed, the children had trouble remembering some things that one might suppose were impossible to forget, such as in this exchange between Shugrue and Jason:

A. He stuck his finger into my butt.

Q. What did it feel like?

A. I don't remember.

Q. Hurt?

A. Yes.

A few minutes later, Shugrue takes no chances, and phrases the question differently:

Q. What did it feel like when he had it (his penis) inside you? Did it hurt?

A. Yes.

Words didn't fail Shugrue when he came to his closing argument. Speaking as though he were the abused boys, Shugrue told the jury what he thought the boys really meant to say: "And with that came (the words), 'he would insert his finger into my rectum as he made me get down on all four of my hands and knees, how he would 'wiggle his finger around in and out of my rectum because my pants were removed', and the words, 'I had to get on my hands and knees, and I felt him put something in my rectum, my bum and he moved it in and out until he peed on my back..." (In fact the children always described sodomy, whether penile or with an object, as a twirling, not a thrusting, sort of activity. The children always say, "he moved it around," and one even demonstrated a circular motion with his finger. Only Shugrue uses the term, "in and out.")

Perhaps the greatest blow to Halsey's case was the medical evidence. Pediatrician Matthew Sadof testified that both boys had scarring on their anuses. One boy in particular, had a "lack of rugae" (no puckering) on almost half of his anus. But if this anomaly was indeed a scar, how big was the wound? A wound that size -- half the anus ripped or scraped away, would leave a child screaming in pain and bleeding profusely. Their mother testified that she sat with her children while they had their bowel movements because they complained of constipation. She looked at their stools before flushing them, she wiped their bottoms. She mentioned the children were in the habit of bending over, spreading their cheeks, and saying, "look at my butthole," as part of their bath time play. (This exhibitionism was blamed on Halsey's influence, as was the excessive modesty their mother also complained of.) And obviously she laundered their clothes and underpants. Would wounds of any size escape this mother's detection?

This brief review of the medical evidence is not intended to be the final word on the subject, simply to suggest that Sadof's testimony is not beyond dispute and in fact it was disputed in the civil proceedings that followed the criminal trial. The expert for the insurance company questioned whether what the doctor saw were scars at all, but the normal lumps, bumps and ridges which are variations in human anatomy.

The defense argued that Halsey's bus schedule didn't allow for extensive molesting in the fields. But Shugrue's aggressive cross-examination of the bus company owner Zarvis, raised the specter of doubt. "You don't really know when and where people were picked up!" he accused Zarvis. "It was three years ago," Zarvis countered, complaining that because the prosecution had subpoenaed his company's records, he couldn't remember how many children Halsey picked up on each part of his route. "You don't have any firsthand knowledge of what Mr. Halsey did and where he went." Shugrue accused. "No," said Zarvis.

A key witness in the case also made a significant change to her testimony about the amount of time Halsey was alone with the children. Police Chief Misiuk's initial report says that Mrs. Walker told him the twins were "ready" to be picked up at 11:30 a.m. for the afternoon session. At trial, however, she changed her story: "And it was about 11 o'clock that they would have their lunch, and it was -- the latest he would ever pick them up would be quarter after or 20 after, the latest," she said.

This time change added at least 15 minutes to the time Halsey supposedly had alone with the children.

But even if he did have time to spare on his mid-morning run, he apparently squandered most of his opportunities. He wasted precious time catching fish, stabbing frogs and turtles, playing mumblety peg and setting fire to crayfish. Perhaps every perversion is explained with the all-purpose answer that he's a twisted child molester. Or perhaps this entire tragedy could have been avoided if just one of the adults involved in the investigation had said, "Wait a minute, wait a minute -- he did what with the crayfish?!"

Another major setback for Halsey was that his defense attorney did not put Halsey on the stand in his own defense. What else could he say, his lawyer felt, but "I didn't do it." Halsey could have spoken volumes. In giving his side of the story he could have put his simple, straightforward nature and his loving regard for the twins on public display. His attorney could have taken him through every accusation step by step and allowed him to refute them, each of them, in great detail. They never heard, for example, that Mrs. Halsey was saving the infamous cardboard boxes to cut up to make starter fuel for the wood stove. All the accusations about guns and knives in his bus could have been debunked. His 20 years of reliable, caring service could have been put on the record. With a life sentence in the balance, Halsey's jury needed to hear -- and no doubt expected to hear -- Halsey say he was not only totally innocent but totally incapable of committing such terrible crimes. Instead the jury only got to hear that Halsey would not take the stand in his own defense.

The jury deliberated for only three hours. What started with tickling ended with three life sentences, with the third life sentence to run concurrently with the second. Robert Halsey, who drove a generation of Lanesboro children to school, became the bogeyman.

After the trial, when it was too late, his lawyer told the court that there were people who knew a different Robert Halsey: "(Before trial) my office has gotten a number of anonymous telephone calls from different people... who said, 'You know, I just can't believe that this could be true of Mr. Halsey because he was the bus driver for my kid...' and it was story after story of, 'I can't believe this. He was so good to my kids. I never had any problems with him. He would do this, he would go out of his way to do that.'"

Mrs. Halsey said, "accusing him of hurting children was like accusing Santa Claus. He would never do anything like that."

After Halsey's trial, the Walker family sued the bus company and settled out of court.

Halsey's one publicly funded appeal, which centered mostly on the question of whether the prosecution should have used his adult pornography stash against him at trial, was turned down in 1996. Halsey's appeal lawyer did not raise the issues of suggestibility of children's testimony, nor did she question the medical evidence, nor the credentials of the "expert" therapist, who had held 11 different positions at 11 different facilities in the 10 years previous to his testifying, and had never done formal research or been published. Halsey is incarcerated at Bay State Correctional Center in Norfolk, Mass.

Epilogue

Shortly after the Halsey trial, Timothy Shugrue left the district attorney's office and went into private practice. (Shugrue did not respond to requests for an interview for this article, nor did the Walker parents.) One of Shugrue's first clients was a woman divorcing her husband, a project manager for a civil engineering firm named Bruce Clairmont. Clairmont was eventually accused of molesting the couple's youngest children. Clairmont maintains his complete innocence and refuses to enter a treatment program in prison.

Carol Clairmont Weissbrod, Bruce Clairmont's sister, has fought for her brother steadfastly ever since. "I thought the system worked," she explained. "I was raised to believe that if you didn't break the law, then everything would be fine and you wouldn't go to prison." She says that with her brother's case "I found out the hard way that that's not true."

When she learned about Robert Halsey, in particular the fact that Shugrue, Dr. Fishman and others who had been involved in her brother's case, had also worked on the Halsey, she contacted Mrs. Halsey to commiserate. Weissbrod discovered that after Mary Halsey's husband became the monster of Lanesboro, she stayed on in the same town, in the same house, too poor to move away. She is also too poor to phone or visit her husband more than once a month. In early 2002, Mary Halsey had a stroke and is now legally blind.

Because of Carol Weissbrod's efforts, Robert Halsey's case has been take up by the The National Center for Reason and Justice, an advocacy group for the wrongfully convicted. Tax-deductible donations may be sent to:

NCRJ
POB 230414
Boston MA 02123-0414

Update: October 2006

Thanks to the efforts of Robert Halsey's supporters at the National Center for Reason and Justice, http://www.ncrj.org/, Robert Halsey was assigned a public defender, attorney Charles K. Stephenson, in the early spring of 2004. When Stephenson investigated the case, he discovered startling revelations that are here disclosed publicly for the first time.

As bizarre and sensational as the accusations against Halsey at trial had been, it turned out that two of his young accusers, twin boys Jason and Justin Walker, told even wilder stories while continuing in therapy with Dr. Jeffrey Fishman after the trial. (It was Fishman who served as Berkshire County's "expert" on child abuse for Halsey's trial.)

According to Fishman's clinical notes, which Stephenson obtained, the therapist was convinced that the children had not told all there was to tell about their encounters with Halsey. Fishman encouraged the twins to confide in him by comparing secrets to fish swimming in an aquarium, waiting to jump out. "Rather than offer slight variations on similar stories," Fishman wrote, "the boys were directed to think about new varieties of sex things that hadn't been let out at all." Thus encouraged to come up with "new varieties of sex things," the twins poured out ever more grotesque accusations against Halsey in bi-weekly therapy sessions. At times, the sessions took on a flavor of a contest, as the twins "took turns…telling new stories of their abuse."

The Walker children (the confidentiality of the family is preserved throughout this article by the use of pseudonyms) catalogued a long list of perversions, mostly centering on feces, urine, fire, and small animals. Many of the alleged tortures had no sexual component, and many of the sexual accusations betrayed a typical child's ignorance of human anatomy. Attorney Stephenson wrote in his appeal brief that Fishman "extracted scores of preposterous claims of abuse…[and showed] himself to be distressingly gullible, praising the children for their courage in disclosing what was plainly impossible."

In addition to encouraging the boys to talk about perverted and grotesque activities, Fishman would occasionally remind the boys that their own parents had failed to protect them from Halsey. His notes – ironically called "progress notes" – blandly catalogue the inevitable results.

Justin and Jason became increasingly neurotic and unhappy, suffered from nightmares, had furious temper-tantrums, and even threatened suicide. They would not go to bed without "elaborate safety rituals and reassurances." One of the twins used disclosures as a bartering chip – in exchange for sleeping in his parents' bed, he would tell a "big secret." The parents, meanwhile, were drifting apart, each locked in his or her own private despair, wracked with guilt over what had happened, but also sick of having the trauma dominate their lives. (By September 1994, the parents were beginning to express doubts about the therapist's strategy of pressing the children for more revelations. Dr. Fishman acknowledged that his "treatment may in fact be exacerbating traumatic memories.")

While reviewing the therapy notes, Stephenson uncovered a bombshell revelation. Two months after the trial, the twins told Fishman that Halsey was not the only one who molested them on Nobody's Road. At first, they alleged another man, whom they called "Mister," rode on the bus and joined Halsey in abusing them. The following month, the accusations grew to include another man and a woman. "The parents," Fishman wrote, "were somewhat incredulous and unsure what was really true. They were clearly distraught over continued allegations that seemed unending."

No allegation of multiple offenders had been made during the trial, and according to the available records, none of the other children who were questioned mentioned an old man with a dark beard, or an old fat lady. The children's parents reported the accusations to the police, but there is no indication that the district attorney ever looked for these phantom attackers – or ever questioned the reliability of the original accusation against Halsey. If the district attorney believed that the accusations against Halsey were true, why were these later accusations ignored? And since the later accusations were obviously false, (for example, one boy claimed the female offender "stuck her vagina in my butt") then why do they continue to defend the case against Halsey?

Armed with this strong evidence that the children's accusations were the product of misguided therapy, Stephenson filed a motion for a new trial in March of 2004. He also argued that Halsey's trial lawyer had failed to mount a proper defense. (For example, Halsey's trial attorney, Richard LeBlanc, called no expert witness to challenge the testimony of the prosecution's "expert" witness Dr. Fishman and failed to challenge the medical evidence.) The appeal was heard in October by the original trial judge, Judge Daniel A. Ford, who once prosecuted a young daycare worker named Bernard Baran in similar circumstances (http://www.freebaran.org/#Short).

Judge Ford rejected Halsey's appeal. His February 2005 ruling argued that though the accusations made in therapy "may seem difficult to believe," they were similar to the "implausible claims" made at trial – and the jurors had "still believed the twins testimony." Even if the jury had heard these new revelations, he ruled, it would not have changed the outcome of the trial.

In September of 2005, Stephenson presented a powerfully written, carefully reasoned 54-page brief to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Appeals Court. The brief was supported by a 268-page appendix which laid out in detail the injustices and absurdities of the case:

[T]he claimed multi-victim orgies and torture could never have occurred within the time constraints of a school bus run… had Robert Halsey drugged several of the children, inserted drill bits into the complainants' penises, broken bones and … beaten them repeatedly… there would have been physical manifestations apparent to even the most myopic caregiver.

Stephenson was armed with an affidavit from one of the nation's most eminent experts on child memory and suggestibility, Dr. Melvin J. Guyer, who reported that the children's accusations "are characteristic of the bizarre and scatological stories told by impressionable children when they are interviewed by adults who have an obsession with abuse which blinds them to the ease with which children can fabricate…" Guyer noted that the children's stories centered around "poop" and "pee" "In most instances," when children start talking about poop and butts and killing animals, "responsible adults tell children to stop acting silly." But in the Halsey case, zealous and gullible counselors like Jane Sattullo and Dr. Fishman encouraged the children to elaborate on their bizarre stories. As a result, a man was sent to die in prison.

Stephenson and Mr. and Mrs. Halsey, as well as all his supporters, were hopeful that the appeals court would see the case against Halsey for the preposterous nonsense it is. But on May 31, 2006 the appeals court dismissed Halsey's appeal. The appeals court judges did not provide a written opinion, destroying in two short sentences Halsey's hopes for release.

Stephenson filed an Application for Further Appellate Review with the Massachusetts Supreme Court, which was denied in July of 2006. Stephenson was shocked and disappointed: "I thought this was the best case, the best argument, the most compelling appeal in my entire (25 year) career." Stephenson is convinced Halsey did not have a fair trial and hopes that further publicity about this case will bring more public support for Halsey.

Dr. Fishman continues to practice as a therapist in Massachusetts. In a telephone call from this reporter, Dr. Fishman declined to answer any questions about his role or his findings in this case. There is no indication that Mr. and Mrs. Walker have had second thoughts (they sued the bus company and were paid a handsome settlement), even though they doubted some of the wilder accusations their sons were making. The National Center for Reason and Justice http://www.ncrj.org/ continues to support Robert Halsey's claim of innocence and to accept donations on his behalf to finance further legal appeals on his behalf.

More information on the Halsey case

In 2002, Professor Ross Cheit of Brown University published a lengthy article about the Halsey case in which he argued that Halsey was guilty and the children's accusations were "credible." That article is rebutted at length here.

http://members.shaw.ca/imaginarycrimes/halseycheit1.htm

Update: September 2002

In response to this article and another scholarly paper written by Lona Manning, Ross Cheit has posted a website, www.ManningDebunked.org, in which he attempts to dispute Manning's research on the case and her critique of his article.

Manning has responded in turn with a page: http://members.shaw.ca/imaginarycrimes/Halseydebunked.htm.

Topics:

Innocence Cases

Investigative Reporting

Authors:

Lona Manning

The Hurricane Hoax

admin — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 09:11:07 +0000

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter

The movie The Hurricane portrays Rubin "Hurricane" Carter as a black man wronged by a racist justice system. But Carter is a fraud and so was the movie, from beginning to end.

by Lona Manning

Most people who know about the Hurricane Carter case only know the Hollywood version presented in the movie starring Denzel Washington. The Hurricane, released in 1999, features crooked, lying, racist cops and frightened witnesses who won't come forward. Carter himself is brash but noble, persecuted his whole life by one obsessed detective who keeps sending him to jail.

The real Rubin Carter and the real Lafayette Grill murder case are nothing like the movie. This movie bills itself as being about hope and redemption. The movie, in terms of Carter and the actual murders at the Lafayette Grill, is a fraud from beginning to end, full of errors, distortions and fictions, large and small. Some events were invented to add dramatic excitement, but most of the distortions and misrepresentations appear to be attempts to place a halo over Carter's head and paint horns and a tail on the police. If this was director Norman Jewison's attempt to right one of the legions of wrongs of a justice system riddled with racism, he picked the wrong case. Once Jewison had made that mistake in judgment, his need to fabricate the truth took over.

The following incidents from the movie, for example, are not true – and this is just a partial list:

The biggest and most crucial distortion the movie serves up is that one evil, racist Paterson lieutenant had it in for Carter. The movie depicts this cop doing his best to destroy Carter at every crucial turn in Carter's life, from age 11 on. This distortion allows movie audiences to make the leap of faith that Carter and co-defendant John Artis were framed and therefore innocent. There was a lead detective in the Lafayette Grill case by the name of Vincent DeSimone. He had nothing to do with Carter's earlier convictions.

The Canadians (a group of nine people who lived and worked together in a commune-type setting; all were involved in Carter's case, but the three principally involved were Sam Chaiton, Terry Swinton, and Lisa Peters) did not find evidence that proves Carter is innocent or that Carter was framed, and neither has anybody else. His release had nothing to do with proving the case was built on "forgeries and lies," as the lawyers for Carter claim in the final courtroom scene.

Evil detectives did not threaten the Canadians on the street and did not tamper with their car. It bears repeating: the Canadians were not the victims of an attempted murder by New Jersey law enforcement.

Carter was not 11 when he and a group of his friends encountered a middle-aged white man, depicted as a maniacal pedophile in the movie, at the Great Falls. He was 14 when he was convicted for clubbing the man over the head with a bottle and robbing him of his watch, which was valued at $55. It was Carter's fourth juvenile offence. Carter was an experienced and savage street fighter, the leader of a gang called the Apaches. Anyone would have thought twice before tangling with him.

Carter did not leave the Army wearing a uniform covered with good conduct and service ribbons. The record shows he was discharged, with the designation "unfit," after four courts-martial for: "disobeying a lawful order (three times), failure to make reveille, disrespectful in language to a non-commissioned officer and treating his superior officer with contempt."

Carter was returned to prison after he left the Army to finish his juvenile term, but the movie completely omits another four-year stint in prison, for mugging three people. Carter was twice denied parole because of his hostility and aggression. The detective who arrested Carter for the mugging couldn't have been motivated by racism – the detective was black.

Carter's world championship bout in 1964 with Joey Giardello was not a slam-dunk case of racist "fixing." Giardello sued the producers of the movie for their portrayal of the fight and recently settled out of court.

When the police stopped Carter and Artis on the night of the shooting, Carter was not sitting up front beside Artis, he was lying down in the back seat. Plus there was another man in the car, sitting opposite Artis in the front seat.

It's true that the police questioned Al Bello, the petty thief who was a witness at the murder scene, with a tape recorder rolling. In this crucial scene, we watch as the evil detective half bribes, half threatens Bello into framing Carter for the murder. The Hollywood writers ignored what was really said (see later in this article), and substituted a scene of menace and innuendo.

Prison guards did not try to "toss" Carter's cell and take away his "manuscript" for his autobiography, The 16th Round, in 1973. The opening scene in the movie is a distortion of a 1974 incident when prison guards took Carter to the Vroom Psychiatric Unit as punishment for holding an unauthorized inmates' meeting. Prison officials were also worried about Carter's mental state, as he had recently referred to himself as "God." His manuscript, at that time, was safely in the hands of his publishers.

There was an Avery Cockersham. His wife Louisa is the character in the movie who invites three of the Canadians, including Lisa Peters, into her house and gives them cookies and explains that the bartender at the Lafayette wasn't a bigot. The real Avery Cockersham didn't "move away and couldn't be found;" he didn't die before the trial. If the Cockershams had useful information for the defense, they didn't step forward and give it.

The prosecution didn't claim that Rubin Carter killed the Lafayette Grill victims just because the bartender wouldn't serve blacks. The movie is completely misleading on this point. (The "racial revenge" motive is discussed further in this article under the coverage of the trials.)

The jury for the second trial in 1976, which is scarcely mentioned in the movie, was not all white. It included two blacks.

The Canadians did not find the diary of a dead investigator.

In the movie, the Canadians find a telephone time card. They try to interview Jean Wall, the operator, about the time of the murder call, but she says that if she were asked to testify, she would say that she couldn't remember. Then she runs into her house, frightened and angry. The real Jean Wall testified at the first trial that she received a call reporting the murders at around 2:30.

In the movie, the evil detective has altered the time of the call on the card. But, a big deal is made in the movie about how the evidence could never be used in court. And it never was. If it had, it would have been laughed out the door. There's no mystery about the time of the murders and the forged time card is a product of the Canadians' overheated imaginations.

As New Jersey columnist Paul Mulshine points out, "The movie seems to lie compulsively." For example, when the police pull Carter and Artis over on the fateful night, the writers chose to have Denzel Washington say to Garland Whitt, the actor playing Artis, "John -- you been drinking?" to which Whitt replies, "No."

Artis testified at trial that he'd been drinking heavily that night and that he had thrown up earlier. Why doesn't his character say, "Uh, oh -- got a breath mint?"

Evil detective Della Pesca, the movie's version of Lt. DeSimone, is an ugly, leering guy. The real-life detective was a little sensitive about his looks. He'd taken a bullet in the face during World War II. The movie of course, doesn't mention that the reason the detective wasn't a beauty contest winner was because he was a war hero. (DeSimone, who rose to become chief of detectives in Paterson, died in 1979.)

There are lots of other things the movie doesn't mention, like:

Carter's troubles with his alibi witnesses, and his alibi;

the supporter who says Carter beat her into unconsciousness while Carter was out on bail awaiting the second trial;

the accusation that some of his supporters bribed prosecution witnesses to
change their testimony;

the fact that Carter no longer speaks to the Canadians who devoted so much time and effort to freeing him.

The fact is that Carter was not exonerated for the Lafayette Grill murders, as Carter claims. Two juries, one convened in 1967 after the murders and the other at a retrial nine years later, found him guilty as charged. A federal judge overturned both of his trial convictions on the grounds that Carter did not get fair trials. New Jersey prosecutors, for reasons not related to Carter's guilt or innocence, declined to re-try him a third time and dismissed the indictment against him. They did unsuccessfully pursue their appeal of the federal judge's ruling all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. (Click Here to view the appeal brief.)

Nevertheless, Carter is always referred to as the man who was wrongfully convicted for a crime he didn't commit. He was framed, says the Bob Dylan ballad. "This man is love," declared Denzel Washington, who invited Carter up on stage with him when Washington accepted his Golden Globe award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Carter in The Hurricane.

IS CARTER INNOCENT?

But is Carter innocent? Questioning Carter's innocence, after he has been portrayed on-screen by Denzel Washington, after he has stood, beaming and triumphant, with his honorary World Boxing Council belt raised over his head, may seem like questioning whether black people are victims of racism and injustice. But this is a case about one man, not an entire race of people. Everything the public knows about the fateful night and the trials that followed comes from Rubin Carter or his supporters. And Carter is not, as a moment's reflection will make anyone realize, an impartial observer of events. There is a prosecution side to the story, one that has been ignored or hidden for a long time. As well, there are revelations about Rubin Carter himself, his violent past and his credibility, that were nowhere to be seen in the movie.

It's time now to discard what the movie contends and take a fresh look at the real Hurricane Carter and the three people murdered execution-style at the Lafayette Grill in the early mornings hours of June 17, 1966.

For a case that's consumed two trials, twenty appeals, and millions of dollars in legal costs, the basic facts of the Lafayette Grill murders are sparse and flimsy.

Here's the prosecution case in a nutshell: Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, then 29, a middleweight boxer, and John Artis, a 19-year-old facing the military draft, entered a bar and shot four white people in retaliation for the murder earlier that evening of a black bartender by a white shooter. Eyewitness testimony placed Carter and Artis at the scene and also identified Carter's leased car, a white Dodge. The murder weapons were never recovered, although bullets that were not the same brand but were the same caliber as the bullets used in the killings were found in Carter's car hours after the murders.

As for the defense, some observers of the case have criticized the police for a lax investigation. Police did not conduct paraffin tests to detect traces of burned gunpowder on the hands or clothes of Carter and Artis. They neglected to take fingerprints at the crime scene or to test the spent shotgun shell found on the bar's floor for fingerprints. They didn't inspect for traces of blood in Carter's Dodge, and didn't even bother to take photos of the skid marks left on the street out in front of the Lafayette Grill when the killers made their screeching getaway. Subsequently, controversial lie detector tests also caused headaches for the prosecution. But Carter and his supporters charge the police with something more serious than sloppy police work. Carter contends that he and Artis were deliberately and maliciously framed for the murders and that the State of New Jersey did everything in its power to send him to the electric chair.

As he tells his audiences in his inspirational stump speeches:

The odds of my being alive today were not exactly in my favor. There were three murder victims. All of them were white. The jury was all white. The police, the judge, the state witnesses and the prosecutors were all white. I, at that time, was black.

THE LAFAYETTE GRILL MURDERS

It's almost closing time at the Lafayette Grill at the corner of Lafayette and 18th Streets in Paterson, N.J. It's early in the morning on June 17, 1966. Only three patrons remain while bartender Jim Oliver, 51, opens the cash register to start counting the day's receipts. It's really a gathering of friends, it's just that one of them happens to be the bartender and the rest are on the other side of the counter. There's Fred Nauyoks, 60, perched on a barstool, lighting up another cigarette and laying out some money for one last drink as he laughs and jokes with Oliver. His wife is out of town and he and Oliver are planning to go to a late night diner for some bacon and eggs.

Outside, a late model white car cruises slowly past the silent houses. Apart from the car, the streets are nearly deserted. Two blocks away, a short, plump, 23-year-old man steps out of the shadows and starts walking up the sidewalk. He glances over his shoulder the way he came, hesitates, then heads to the Lafayette.

Inside the bar, Willie Marins sits nearby, nursing his own drink. Oliver keeps a glass just for Marins, to be sure that his tuberculosis doesn't spread to the other customers. Only 42, Marins is too sick to work, but not too sick to play some pool and pass the night with his buddies at the Lafayette.

The white car passes the short, plump man. The streetlights reflect off the car's shiny paint as it slows further and stops outside of the Lafayette.

The third customer is Hazel Tanis, 51. She's tired, she's been on her feet all evening, serving at a graduation banquet at the country club where she works. She thought her friend, bar owner Betty Panagia, would be behind the counter tonight, and she's dropped by to hand in a deposit for a union convention in Atlantic City. She's earned the trip out of town, and after all, she'll be back home before her daughter's baby is due. Oliver explains that he's covering for his girlfriend Betty because she's been working so hard lately. Hazel sits down at the end of the counter, a little away from the men.

The front door of the bar flies open...Bartender Oliver sees the two men with guns and hurls an empty beer bottle at them that smashes against the wall by the front door. Oliver turns to run and is hit in stride in his lower back by a blast from a .12-guage shotgun. The round opens a two-inch by one-inch hole and severs his spinal cord, killing him instantly. Simultaneously, the man with the pistol shoots Nauyoks, one of two men sitting at the bar, just behind the right ear, hitting his brain stem, killing him instantly as well. The killer with the pistol then moves two stools down and shoots Marins in the left temple. The .32 caliber slug passes through his forehead near his right eye. He stumbles to the floor and plays dead. In the commotion, Hazel Tanis leaves her barstool and crouches in the corner. The man with the shotgun pulls the door back. She screams "No!" just before he empties the other barrel of the shotgun into her upper right arm and shoulder. Now on the floor, she pleads for her life. "I'm a mother. I'm a grandmother. Please don't shoot me." The man with the shotgun tells the man with the pistol to "Finish her off." He discharges the five remaining bullets. Four hit her: one in the right breast, one in the lower abdomen, two in the genital area.

Just a few minutes later, Det. Jim Lawless is home and looking forward to going to bed after a long night gathering evidence and doing paperwork for the murder of a black bartender that occurred six hours earlier at another bar. Lawless's phone rings. It's headquarters. There's been a report of another shooting. The Lafayette. Lawless grabs two guns and heads back out the door. He's the first police officer on the scene.

There's Oliver lying behind his bar, his back blown open. Blood is splattered on the floor, the walls, the bottles, some of the money scattered around his legs. Fred Nauyoks looks like he's resting or he's had one too many, he's just sitting on his barstool, his cigarette burning between his fingers, his head resting on the counter.

Willie Marins is -- Marins is standing up, and walking around, though obviously in shock. Blood trickling out of his eye and down his face. He makes no effort to wipe it off. "I've been shot, I've been shot," he says. He staggers, clutches a pillar for support. The sound of ambulances grows louder and their lights start to flicker through the front window.

Hazel Tanis is lying on the floor, her stomach and intestines visible, blood pulsing out. She looks up at Detective Lawless.

"Please kill me," she says.

Lawless knows each of the victims. Some of them are his neighbors. And there is little he can do for Tanis but direct the ambulance workers to her. What can the ambulance attendant do for her, for that matter -- he's a 17-year-old kid, working for his father, white with shock at what he sees. He almost slips and falls on the blood as he enters the bar. A thin, frightened young woman, Patty Graham Valentine, who lives in the apartment directly above, hovers over Tanis, choking back hysterical sobs. With one hand she holds her raincoat closed over her pajamas. "I called Bob," she tells Tanis. "Everything's going to be O.K."

Officer Unger and his partner Alex Greenough join Lawless. They have a short, plump man in tow. The man is breathless and excited and talking volubly, repeating what he already told the policemen out on the sidewalk. He says his name is Al Bello, B-E-L-L-O, officer, and he was just out to get a pack of cigarettes when he heard a noise. He saw two Negroes come around the corner, laughing and swinging their guns.

Guns?

One had a pistol and another had a shotgun, Bello says.

And you say these were Negroes?

They've already put out a call for two colored men in a white car.

Did anybody get the plate numbers?

Questioned separately, Bello and Valentine agree that the car had dark license plates, probably New York plates, but they couldn't tell the police the plate numbers.

Get out an all-points bulletin for two colored men in a late model white car with out-of-state plates.

Sgt. Theodore Capter and his partner, Angelo DeChellis, arrive at the scene. A few minutes ago they heard the earlier bulletin and almost immediately spot a white car speeding down 12th Avenue. They overshoot 12th Avenue and drive down a parallel street, hoping to cut the car off, figuring it's heading out of town. But when they get to where 10th Avenue dumps out on the broad boulevard of Route 4, they don't see a white car. They don't see any cars at all on the highway. They turn around and head back into town. Then they see a white car ahead of them with two black men in it and signal it to pull over. No, make that three black men. A third man had been lying down in the back seat. When he sits up, Capter recognizes him. It's Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, the middleweight boxer. They let the car go. It's 2:40 a.m.

At Lafayette and 18th, Capter and DeChellis pick their way through the growing crowd, the other squad cars, the ambulances waiting to carry away the bodies of Nauyoks and Oliver, to where Bello is describing what happened.

They acted so confident that at first he thought they were cops. They saw Bello. In a flash, Bello realized they weren't cops, and that he had just walked into something deadly. Bello turned. He ran and hid in that alley down there. He heard their tires screech. He saw the car pass, saw the out-of-state plates and the butterfly wing shaped taillights set in a geometric design across the back of the car.

Capter looks at DeChellis. DeChellis looks at Capter. They jump back in their patrol car and set out to find Hurricane Carter.

CHAMPION OF THE WORLD

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter was a flamboyant and well-known figure in Paterson. His comings and goings, his boxing matches, his barroom brawls and his court appearances, all made the Morning Call and the Evening News. His scowl and his shining baldhead and his goatee were familiar to most people in Paterson, and definitely to anyone who followed boxing.

Some people who knew Carter's parents, Lloyd and Bertha, marveled at how such a sober, hard-working Baptist couple could have produced a bird of paradise like Carter. Carter liked to wear flashy colored vests and berets and tailored suits and to tool around town in his custom Cadillac. For reasons nobody could understand, Rubin, of all the seven Carter children, was a rebel. "He was the bully," his father admitted to a sportswriter. "He wanted the name." A man who served time with him in reform school remembered that Carter was the kind of boy who would hit another boy over the head with a brick just for laughs. "I just kept getting into trouble," Carter admitted, "and they kept adding time. So I escaped."

After his early discharge from the Army, Carter had to serve out the rest of his juvenile sentence. Upon release, he lasted less than a month in civilian life before his arrest for mugging three people. Prison psychiatrists described him as a sociopath, "almost completely lacking in controls… projecting responsibility for his failures on society and the law."

Once released, Carter embarked on a professional boxing career and after a few hungry months, started to rise rapidly through the ranks.

And he learned that words can be even more powerful than fists. He discovered he enjoyed reading and surprising people with his newfound vocabulary. He relished turning ordinary conversation into colorful poetry: "I believe there's a God. I won't be dogmatic and say there is. I believe, though. Man couldn't do it, that's for sure. Man's so greedy if he put the sun up there he'd be charging $25 a day." A sportswriter reminisced, "He charmed me to the point in 1964 where I took a World Series watch off my wrist and gave it to him."

But Carter was his own worst enemy. His temper, his drinking, his lack of discipline, affected his boxing career. Almost every recap of the Hurricane Carter case mentions that he was "about" to challenge for the middleweight title. The truth was that at the time of the murders, Carter's career was in decline. He had depended on intimidating his opponents and putting them away early with his powerful left hook. He didn't have a lot of boxing technique or staying power in the ring. In his last 14 fights, he lost six and tied one.

A fact that is central to Carter's character – but a fact that has been carefully papered over by his supporters -- is that he's a chronic, inventive, almost compulsive embellisher. He elaborates, changes and exaggerates the events in his life, from his childhood on, and fashions them into dramatic stories. His "autobiography" bears only an accidental resemblance to the truth. This includes crucial details of the murder case. The Dylan song, based on Bob Dylan's interview with Carter, is a catalogue of all the misleading things Carter has said about the Lafayette Grill murders. Carter claims he was basically pulled over because he was black. He says that Marins, who survived the shooting, said he wasn't the shooter. He accuses the police of framing him by bribing Al Bello and Arthur Bradley to testify against him, because he was a "revolutionary bum," that is, a black activist. None of these accusations hold up under scrutiny.

Another aspect of Carter's personality was that he saw himself as a protector and avenger. He claims that when he got into trouble as a youth, he was just looking out for one of his brothers and sisters, or a fellow gang member. He talks openly in his autobiography, The 16th Round, of his hatred for authority and his desire to wreak bloody vengeance:

I wanted to see this insidious juvenile labor system demolished from stem to stern and I wanted to see it happen out of pure hatred and vengeance at atonement for the crimes committed against me, and other just like me… I wanted to be the Administrator of Justice, the Revealer of Truth, the Inflicter of All Retribution. I gloried in these thoughts.

He could inspire fierce loyalty and devotion. Fred Hogan, an investigator in the New Jersey public defender's office, became his first and staunchest advocate when Carter went to prison. Another friend, Thom Kidrin, wrote songs about him and brought him food and visited him for years when everyone else had deserted him. Carter attracted lawyers who gave him years of free legal work. Then there was young Lesra Martin, a black teen from the rough streets of Brooklyn who was taken in by a group of idealistic Canadians and transplanted to their commune in Toronto. Martin found Carter's autobiography at a used book sale and wrote him a letter, thus setting off a chain of events that led the Canadians to take on Carter's case and eventually help him win his release. The movie does not exaggerate the dedication of Martin and the Canadians, who devoted years of their lives to freeing Carter.

THE ARREST

Sgts. Capter and DeChellis found Carter's white car a few minutes after hearing Bello's description at the crime scene. This time, Carter's passenger "Bucks" Royster, (an inoffensive neighborhood barfly), was gone, and he and Artis were alone. They were escorted back to the Lafayette, where both Patty Valentine and Al Bello were asked to look at the car. Valentine, then 23, burst into tears when she saw it. Bello said, "That's the car."

Bello, at that point, did not identify either man as the killers he had just seen leaving the bar. But it was clear that they were suspects and Bello got a good look at them when they were brought back by the police. This raises the question of doubt: When Bello, two months later, identified Carter as the shooter to one of the detectives working on the case, was the identification based on what he had actually seen at the time of the shootings, or was he just telling the police what he figured they wanted to hear? Perhaps one clue is offered by testimony from the first trial that, when Bello got home early that morning, he exclaimed to a friend, "Rubin Carter just shot up the whole bar!"

Carter and Artis were questioned at the police station all that morning, then released. There was already plenty of incriminating evidence against them, but motive was missing, along with an eyewitness identification.

The mayor promised a $10,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the killers. Police continued with their investigation, following up other leads, including some red herrings. Big murder cases always seem to attract cranks, confessors, psychics and assorted hangers-on. Due to the inconsistent accusations of a woman named Annie Ruth Haggins, Paterson police dragged all the rivers, because she said that a man gave her a gun to throw in the river right after the shooting. A man named Roosevelt Davis was held in jail for weeks because of her stories, which she finally admitted were baseless.

Rumors were running rampant in Paterson, a mid-sized city that had seen better days and now had troubles with the Mafia, illegal gambling, and prostitution. One theory was that Jim Oliver, the bartender, had been a bookie and the Mob had killed him as a warning to others, not to withhold numbers money. Oliver's family hotly denies that he was involved with the Mob. Also, Elizabeth Panagia, the owner of the Lafayette Grill, not Oliver, had been expected to be at work that night. Oliver was just recovering from surgery.

Carter allegedly told his family that the shootings were an attempt by the Mob to frame him, because he had refused to throw a fight. Considering the circumstances of the murders, however, it seems impossible that the Mob could have arranged to shoot people and arranged for witnesses to see a car that looked like Carter's zoom off, at the same time Carter was driving around five blocks away.

From the beginning, the death of Jim Oliver and his patrons was linked in people's minds with the slaying of Roy Holloway, a black bartender. Six hours before the shootings at the Lafayette Grill, a white man named Frank Conforti had stormed into the Waltz Inn to confront Holloway, who had recently purchased the bar from Conforti, about lax payments. Conforti argued with Holloway, 48, then went to his car, returning a few minutes later. Without saying a word, Conforti shot Holloway in the head with a .12-guage shotgun, killing him instantly. So Oliver's death hours later seemed like more than a coincidence, even though Holloway's death was the result of a business dispute rather than a pure black-versus-white issue.

News of Holloway's gruesome murder raced through the neighborhood, rekindling the racial strife that Paterson had experienced two summers earlier when several riots raged in the black community. Dozens of blacks flocked to the Waltz Inn before police had time to arrest Conforti, who was still inside the bar. Police had to escort the handcuffed Conforti through a gauntlet of angry onlookers to a police car. "Give him to us," some of them shouted.

More pertinent is what Eddie Rawls, Holloway's stepson, did after hearing about the murder. Rawls went to police headquarters where an officer told him not to worry. Rawls, according to grand jury and trial testimony, shouted out a warning that if the police didn't handle the case properly, he would take matters into his own hands. Later that evening, Rawls went to the Nite Spot where he worked as a bartender. The Nite Spot was such a favorite hangout for Carter that the bar had a special "champ's corner" section for the boxer. Artis also frequented the bar and was there that evening. According to trial testimony, Carter was at the Nite Spot when Rawls arrived with the news of his stepfather's slaying. Prosecutors insist that Carter then began talking about wanting to locate guns that had been stolen from him a year earlier. Carter denies this, but in his grand jury testimony he admitted that there was talk in the bar about a possible riot, some sort of "a shaking" in retaliation for Holloway's murder.

But the prosecution never found a witness who could testify that Carter himself was angry about the killing.

After several months of investigation, police didn't know much more than they knew on the night of the crime. Ballistics tests confirmed what Bello had told them on the night of the murder: The shooters used a shotgun and a pistol. They compared Patty Valentine's statements about Bello's comings and goings with his description of how he had run away after snatching money out of the cash register, then returned out of fear that he might be blamed for the murders, and it all matched up. Bello was not a suspect, but he must have been near the bar when the shootings occurred, because he was inside right afterwards.

But Bello wasn't talking anymore. That night, he'd been acting as a lookout man for a burglary, and he left his post to get more cigarettes while his partner, Bradley, struggled futilely to break into a sheet metal company. Lt. Vincent DeSimone, who came into the case (and into Carter's life) the morning of the murders, suspected that Bello had rifled the cash drawer in the bar and he didn't believe Bello was just out for a 2:30 a.m. stroll. Bello refused to speak to DeSimone for four months.

A month after the crime, a grand jury heard from Carter and Artis, who explained what they had each been doing and where they went that night. DeSimone told the grand jury that the eyewitness descriptions of the killers (from Marins, Tanis, Bello and Bradley) were "not even close" to Carter and Artis. This statement of course, later caused a lot of trouble for DeSimone. And the eyewitness testimony from the two surviving shooting victims was virtually useless, anyway. Hazel Tanis, for example, on the night of the shooting, had rambled on and said that one killer was tall and one short, then both were tall, one was light-skinned and one was dark-skinned. (Tanis died four weeks after the shooting and her testimony was excluded from trial, by a motion from Carter's lawyer.)

DeSimone also said that the lie-detector tests the police administered to Carter, Artis, and Eddie Rawls indicated that they had not participated in the crime, but that the three had suspicions of who might have done it. The grand jury did not indict anyone for the crimes. Today, Carter claims that the grand juries held in July and August "exonerated" him and that he and Artis passed the lie detector tests.

The case got a boost four months after the murders when Bello dropped some hints to Sgt. Mohl that he knew more about the murders than he was telling. Bello had gone to Mohl to complain that some of Carter's friends were threatening him. And there was the reward money now in play. Bello finally told Mohl that he'd recognized Carter at the murder scene. Det. LaConte and Mohl took him to meet with DeSimone, who either coached or coaxed him to officially identify Carter as one of the men who had left the bar, laughing and swinging a gun. With this necessary piece of information captured on audiotape, Carter and Artis were arrested.

In real life, DeSimone cautioned Bello to tell the truth. In the movie, the evil Della Pesca says he "just wants the facts," but the acting skills of Dan Hedaya transform the entire scene into a police frame-up of Carter as the detective makes it clear that the truth is the last thing he's interested in. Here's what DeSimone actually said to Bello:

D: Now let me say this at the outset. I'm interested in one thing, Al, an' that's the truth. Now if I get the truth from you, an' not the truth to make me happy, what really is the truth, you follow me?

B: Yeah

D: I guarantee you, in return, I will do everything possible to protect you. This is, should be an indication to you that this is the first step. You understand what I mean?

By "protection," DeSimone means, of course, protection from retaliation by Carter or his friends, which Bello and Bradley were both quite worried about. A moment later, Bello asks for more than "protection," – another exchange that wasn't used in the movie:

B: Yeah sure oh, well uh, what I was wonderin' uh, if there isn't any way that I could maybe get my parole dropped or somethin'.

And DeSimone has to step gingerly:

D: Well, that I can't promise, In other words, I'm takin' this a step at a time.

The undeniable fact is that Bello had already named Carter as the shooter to LaConte and Mohl, before he ever sat down with DeSimone and his tape recorder; and the scene in the movie is completely misleading. Furthermore, Bradley was not present at the taping. He was in Bordentown Reformatory for a series of motel robberies. He gave his statement to police separately.

In exchange for his testimony, DeSimone agreed to forget about Bello's role in the attempted break in and the theft of the money from the bar. As he put it to Bello, the murders were far more serious

D. For example, if you were in the area for the possibility of pulling a burglary, there's no evidence that we have of any burglary, even if it were an attempted burglary. You understand what I mean?

B: Yeah. I understand.

D: There would be nothing done on that. This I can assure you. Even if it went so far that I had to go before the grand jury an' tell 'em the true facts. You understand what I mean? An' then dismiss without no-you understand what I mean?

B: Yeah.

D: Let's assume it did exist. Have no fears about this because, look it isn't a case of dealing but it's just common sense. When you're dealing with a murder, particularly with a murder that involves three people sitting there minding their own business, any normal human being will say, "Hey, forget that,(attempted burglary) that's unimportant." We're not no persecutors lookin' to pick on every little thing. You understand what I mean? Now, uh, I want the complete, total truth.

(Click Here to read the entire transcript.)

This exchange sounded quite sinister in the movie, but what was DeSimone's alternative? Should he have prosecuted Bello for attempted burglary or stealing the money from the bar, and thrown away any chance of getting his testimony about what he saw at the Lafayette Grill that night?

THE FIRST TRIAL

The first trial got underway in Paterson in May 1967. Carter's lawyer's flamboyant and aggressive style contrasted with the dry methodical approach of the prosecuting attorney, Vincent Hull.

It took three tedious weeks to get through jury selection. An incredible 377 jurors were interviewed and many were disqualified because they had already made up their minds about the case, which had been heavily reported by the local papers. The defense used up all 20 of its peremptory challenges to eliminate potential jurors, while the prosecution used only eight. Nonetheless, the 12-person jury that finally sat was all white. (One of the two alternate jurors was West Indian.) The contrast in the courtroom was striking: two black defendants, with black supporters and a black lawyer, being prosecuted and judged by whites. And Carter's lawyer, Raymond Brown, made the white on black tableau a central part of the defense, accusing the police of picking Carter and Artis virtually at random off the streets.

The movie doesn't show any aspect of the actual trial, and for good reason. The police laid out a compelling case for Carter's guilt, starting with the swift identification of his car within a half-hour of the murders.

Carter has claimed that he was basically pulled over for a DWB -- Driving While Black -- on that fateful night. As the Dylan song goes, "in Paterson that's just the way things go / if you're black you might as well not even show up on the street / 'less you want to draw the heat." When Sgt. Capter stopped him and Artis for a second time, Carter says the patrolman was surprised to see him and said, "Awww shit, Hurricane, I didn't know it was you!" Capter's testimony, on the other hand, was that he and his partner were specifically looking for Carter because of the description of the car given at the scene of the crime. And Carter's lawyer repeated Capter's evidence, indicating that the defense heard what Capter was saying, even though they chose to ignore or dispute it later:

Brown: The second time you stopped the car at Broadway and East 18th, what was the posture of the car? Did you have to stop them? Were they being run down?

Capter: They were stopped waiting for the traffic light.

Brown: Nothing unusual?

Capter: No. The only thing, it fit the description that I received at the scene of the crime.

Brown: The description you had was that it was a car and when the brakes were applied it caused the rear lights to light up in a butterfly fashion?

The prosecution relied on the surviving victim of the shooting (Willie Marins) and the testimony of Valentine and Bello for their conclusion that the shooters were blacks. (Valentine only claimed to see the "backs of their necks" as they got into their car.) Other inconsistencies in various descriptions of the killers were downplayed. Marins had described the gunmen as "light-skinned, thin, black men, wearing dark clothing, and one had a pencil-thin mustache." Carter is 5'7", solidly built and wore a goatee. Artis is 6'1" with an athletic build and clean-shaven. Both men are dark skinned and when stopped by police were wearing light-colored clothing, although they had enough time between the first and second time the police stopped them to change their clothing, get rid of the guns, and drop off the third man who had been with them in the car the first time police stopped Carter and Artis.

Marins testified, and in Carter's words (from his autobiography): "didn't say that John Artis and I were the guilty parties, but he wouldn't say in court that we weren't, either. Throughout his examination, Marins kept stressing that he was in a complete state of shock on the morning following the shooting and couldn't possibly have known what he was saying when he was being questioned at the hospital by the police."

For actual identification of Carter and Artis, therefore, the prosecution had to rely on Bello and Bradley. The prosecution openly admitted that both were no-good punks, with lengthy criminal records for petty crimes. On the stand, Bello admitted that he entered the Lafayette right after the shootings, walked past the bodies of the dead and dying, and scooped up about $60 from the cash register. "Basically, I am a thief, I admit that," he said.

Bradley played a minor role. He didn't claim to see as much as Bello. He saw Carter drive by, he said, but he recanted his evidence before the second trial, and did not testify again at the second trial. Neither the prosecution nor the defense had much use for him, as he refused to take a lie detector test and had alcohol and drug problems.

Then it was the defense's turn.

When DeSimone first spoke to Carter about the murders, Carter gave his original version of his activities that night. He said he had been to a late-night business meeting with his "advisor" at Club La Petite, then club-hopped after that.

But later, investigators learned that Carter had run into an old sparring partner that night at the Nite Spot and Carter had accused him of stealing guns from his training camp. Witnesses also placed Carter at the apartment building of a woman who had information about the missing guns, at the same time he was supposedly having a midnight business meeting at Club La Petite.

When Capter and DeChellis pulled Artis and Carter over the first time, Carter claimed they were heading to his house to get more money, but the road they were on was not a through street to Carter's house. (Click Here for a map of the movements of the cars, based on police testimony.) Several blocks behind them (that is, from the direction they had been traveling) was the apartment of Eddie Rawls. Prosecutors speculated that Carter and Artis left the Lafayette, turned down 12th Avenue (where two sets of patrolmen saw a white car speed by), scooped up "Bucks" Royster, the third man in the car, and dropped off clothes and/or weapons at Rawls's house. (Rawls was suspected of being involved in the murders, but police could never tie him to the crime.)

Carter's biographer, James Hirsch, asks, why did Carter and Artis keep driving around that night, to be picked up a second time? Why didn't they hightail it out of town or at least go home?

Psychology, as Russian novelist Dostoevsky pointed out in a murder trial scene in The Brothers Karamazov, is a two-edged sword. Why would Carter and Artis, if guilty, leave their hometown? The sensible thing to do, if you have just committed a murder in your own backyard, is carry on with your normal habits as though nothing is wrong. Carter's normal habit was to cruise the bars until the sun came up. Also, Carter, if guilty and knowing that Bello had seen him leave the Lafayette, may have been running around trying to put his alibi into place. Before Sgt. Capter detained him a second time and brought him in, his car was spotted outside of the Club La Petite, which is where he claimed to be earlier in the evening; on business, not pleasure.

The third man in Carter's car that night, "Bucks" Royster, arrived at court so besotted that the judge asked him how much he had had to drink that morning. Royster replied, "I don't know." In the Dylan ballad, Royster's inebriation somehow became the judge's fault: "The judge made Rubin's witnesses / drunkards from the slums."

By the time Carter took the stand, he had already dug himself into a hole by his attempts to fashion an alibi. From their first interview with DeSimone, Carter and Artis' alibis did not match. Artis claimed he had spent most of the evening with Carter. Carter said he only linked up with Artis after midnight. Their sequence of visits to various nightspots didn't match, either. (Click Here to view an alibi chart.)

Carter told the jury that at the time of the murders, he was giving a woman and her mother a ride home. The two, Catherine McGuire and Anna Mapes Brown, took the stand to corroborate his testimony. She was sure about the time, McGuire said, because her mother had to get up next morning to go to work, so she kept checking her watch. The prosecution called a supervisor from the hospital where Brown worked, who testified that Brown was on vacation at the time of the crime.

Never mentioned in the movie were the shotgun shell and the bullet found in Carter's Dodge when the car was searched at the police station. Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that Carter had ammunition in his car. He collected guns all his life. He enjoyed hunting and kept guns at his training camp. He sometimes carried a pistol under his tailor-made jackets. The Dodge he leased was his "working" car, filled with his boxing equipment and things for camp and perhaps some of his bullets had spilled out, who knows when. But the defense vigorously disputed the bullet evidence, arguing at the first trial that the search of the Dodge had been illegal. They also argued that the ammunition found in the car was of a different brand than that used in the murders, but for that matter, two different types of shotgun shell had been used inside the bar.

Reviews and discussions of the case have tended to feature the arguments made by the defense, while ignoring the rebuttals that were made by the prosecution. For example, Carter's supporters have heaped scorn on Bello's claim that he ran away from Carter and Artis. "How could an overweight, high-heeled Bello elude a world-class professional athlete and a former high school track star?" This point is made in the Hurricane biography and the Canadians' book, Lazarus and the Hurricane. It seems like a good point.

The prosecution does have an explanation, it's just that the readers of the books mentioned above aren't provided with it: When the killers left the bar, their guns were empty, so they couldn't shoot Bello. If they chased Bello down the street, then the white car would have been left behind to incriminate them. Instead, says the prosecution, they decided to brazen it out, leap in the car and drive away. When they were stopped by the police 10 minutes later, Carter, the more recognizable of the two, was lying down in the back seat of the Dodge.

In a largely circumstantial case such as this, issues of credibility become extremely important. The evidence was presented to the jury by a parade of witnesses, not in rhyming verse in a Dylan folk ballad. The jury watched Patricia Valentine, so nervous and frightened that she could barely speak above a whisper, testify that the getaway car was identical to the car Rubin Carter was driving that night. (Click Here for complete trial transcript of Valentine's testimony.)

They watched as the prosecutor carefully led Carter and Artis over the inconsistencies of their alibis -- which contradicted each other and their own testimony in front of the grand jury. (Click Here to view the conflicting alibis found in Sixteenth Round and Hurricane: The Miraculous Journey.)

On May 25, 1967, after deliberating over an eight-hour period, the jury found Carter and Artis guilty. Carter received three life sentences, two consecutive and one concurrent, Artis got three concurrent life sentences.

In his autobiography, Carter describes how, for the first month at Trenton State Prison, he stayed in his cell. He does not speak of solitary confinement, rather that he shunned contact with prison officials and other inmates. Only years later, in 1992, does the story of being thrown in the Hole for three months for refusing to don prison uniform, make its appearance in a Sports Illustrated article. His prison records show that he avoided work details and received citations for disobeying orders, but also make it clear that he was in the general lock up and not kept, as he claims today, in solitary confinement.

By 1972, Carter was working on his autobiography and developing the dramatic stories that would enthrall sympathetic readers and eventually, Lesra Martin and the Canadians. How he was attacked by a pedophile when he was a youth. How he was sent to juvenile detention for 10 years, just for defending himself and his friends. But he hadn't learned his lesson, because, once at Jamesburg State Home for Boys, he tried to defend another little boy from a sadistic guard. He beat the guard savagely, and was punished by being kept in a cell slightly larger than a coffin, for six months. Then the vengeful guard came back to frame him and ruined his chance for parole. So he escaped from juvenile detention in a hail of bullets. Then he joined the Army and defeated the All-Army heavyweight champ, the first time he put on boxing gloves. And there's more, much more, in the same vein.

A practiced raconteur, Carter knew that if he told the story colorfully and with passion, people would believe him. Like the time he defeated Attilio Tonda, whom he describes as the Canadian heavyweight champ, in a little sparring match in Paterson. It was a great story, and nobody ever interrupted him to say that the Canadian heavyweight champ at the time wasn't somebody named Tonda, it was Robert Cleroux.

A BREAK FOR CARTER

By a fortuitous coincidence, Carter's book hit the stands in 1974 a few weeks after a big break in his case: Bello had recanted his testimony and said he'd lied at the first trial. He said the New Jersey police called Carter and Artis "niggers" and "Muslims." Bello claimed they appealed to him, as a white man, to do his bit to get them locked up. "They told me help your own people, and I went for it." (It should be noted here, that Bello was not aware that his conversation with DeSimone had been taped. Unlike the movie, where the tape machine is in plain sight, in real life, the machine was hidden under the table. The detectives do not use the n-word or call anyone a Muslim, on the tape.)

"There's no doubt Carter was framed," Bradley told Selwyn Raab of The New York Times. "I lied to save myself (from a long prison term for robbery)." Carter's lawyers filed a new appeal.

Supporters flocked to the cause. There were marches and demonstrations, led by Muhammad Ali and other celebrities.

Passaic County had a new prosecutor by then, Burrell Humphreys. Humphreys was a member of the NAACP, a man who referred to Martin Luther King Jr. as his hero. When he reviewed the Carter/Artis file, however, he felt that Carter and Artis were guilty and he was willing to re-try them. Humphreys also believed DeSimone's angry protests that he had not coerced Bello and Bradley to lie on the stand and that he and his fellow detectives had not framed Carter and Artis.

In the years following the first trial, Bello had kept getting into trouble and turning to DeSimone for help. DeSimone tried to find him jobs, urged him to quit drinking, nothing worked. Finally, fed up, DeSimone told Bello that he was on his own. At that time, who should pop into Bello's life but Fred Hogan, an investigator in the New Jersey Public Defender's Office who had befriended Carter and taken up the cause of proving hisinnocence. Seven years had passed since the first trial and with it the deadline for perjury charges. Bello was angry at DeSimone and really upset that he still hadn't received any of the reward money offered for the information leading to the conviction of the killers. Over a period of several months, Hogan met with Bello.

Eventually, both Bello and Bradley agreed to file affidavits recanting their story. But when they were grilled in court as part of Carter and Artis' appeal for a new trial, Judge Larner (the same judge who had conducted the first trial) ruled that the Bello recantation "lacked the ring of truth."

Cal Deal, a reporter for the Herald-News, explained that Larner questioned Bello and Bradley carefully.

In his opinion (that is, his written explanation for his decision) Larner notes that Bello singled out DeSimone "as the one law enforcement officer who pressured him into lying at (the) trial." However, Bello identified Carter and Artis many months before the trial "and at a time before there could have been pressures from Lt. DeSimone," Larner said.

(W)hen pressed on cross-examination on significant matters which might cast doubt on the credibility of his recantation, his memory became poor and he constantly resorted to the ploy, "I don't recall!" he said...

While Bello says he lied when he identified Carter and Artis, he says the rest of his testimony is true. That includes his descriptions of Bradley's actions. Bradley now says he never did the things Bello says he did.

For the first time, according to the record, their testimony does not mesh..."The ring of truth is totally absent in the recantations of both witnesses," Larner concludes.

(Cal Deal kept up his interest in the Carter case over the years and developed a web site, http://www.graphicwitness.com/carter, featuring original trial documents, photographs, and exclusive interviews.)

But Carter and Artis got their second trial, anyway. The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the prosecutors were wrong in allowing Bello and Bradley to testify that no promises had been made to them (except for protection).

It was the Bello tape recording that brought the prosecution to grief. The New JerseySupreme Court ruled that the existence of the tape was unfairly hidden from the defense. DeSimone had given no guarantees to either man, other than the guarantee that he would try his best to help them, but the defense had been deprived of the chance to argue to the first jury that Bello and Bradley were only testifying for these favors, and therefore had a motive to lie on the stand.

So things were looking up for Carter and Artis in 1975. The defense won its motion for a change of venue. The jurors were selected from Hudson County, which the judge said was demographically similar. The judge's decision to grant a change of venue came after studying newspaper articles about the case. He concluded that the local papers were biased against Carter and Artis. In the end, the Hudson County jurors were bussed into Passaic County and the trial was held there. Carter's book was in the bookstores, Muhammad Ali was leading the campaign to free them, Dylan was touring the country with the Rolling Thunder Revue and singing the song co-authored with Jacques Levy: "Here comes the story of the Hurricane / the man the authorities came to blame."

The lone surviving witness, Willie Marins, had died (of causes unrelated to the shooting). Carter began claiming that Marins said he wasn't the killer, although when he wrote his autobiography, Marins was still alive, and Carter accurately wrote that Marins refused or was unable to say either way if Carter was the shooter.

Pending their second trial, Carter and Artis were released on bail. Carter immediately launched a speaking tour, enjoying his freedom and his celebrity. New Jersey's Gov. Brendan Byrne, under public pressure to just pardon and release Carter and Artis, called for a new investigation into the murders. But the good times didn't last long.

Carter was invited to watch a Muhammad Ali fight and he came with his own retinue of bodyguards and supporters. New Jersey columnist Paul Mulshine describes what happened at the hotel when one of his fundraisers, Carolyn Kelley, went to his room to ask Carter about a problem with the hotel bill:

"I didn't see it coming," (Kelley) says of the punch that floored her. "I felt everything getting dark. I remember praying to Allah, 'Please help me,' and apparently Allah rolled me over, and he kicked me in the back instead of kicking my guts out. Allah saved my life."

Shortly thereafter, her son Michael was called to the room by a couple of other members of the entourage who told him 'something happened to my mother in Carter's room.'

''My mother was laying on the floor, near the door; she was in a fetal position with her back to that door," he said....

''I was ready to get a weapon that I had at my disposal. I was going to go to jail that night," he recalls.

Instead, Michael Kelley fought back his anger. He took his mother to a room and iced down the large lump on her cheek and the black eyes. The next day he put her on a plane back to Newark...

''Rubin used to tell me time and time again, 'You've met Rubin and you know Carter, but you've never met the Hurricane. The Hurricane's bad. The Hurricane's mean.'"

At first, horrified and confused, Kelley kept the beating a secret. But Philadelphia Daily News columnist Chuck Stone, formerly sympathetic to Carter, got wind of it and broke the story. The criminal investigation into the beating was inconclusive and Carter was never charged, but the damage was done.

Carter's explanation for the accusation was that he'd thought Kelley was blackmailing him for money. In other words, Carter was framed again! If Kelley was trying to get money, (which she denies), she cooked the goose that laid the golden egg. The publicity machine dried up after the news of her beating became public, and with it the donations. The Carter defense fund ended up in debt.

Carter's celebrity support melted like snow on a griddle. He faced the second trial without Ali, Dylan, Dyan Cannon, or any of the other celebrities who had been proclaiming his innocence.

Carter also turned down a chance to walk out of jail a free man. Before the second trial, Prosecutor Humphreys offered Carter and Artis a no-lose proposition: Take a lie detector test. Pass it, and you go free. Fail it, and it won't be used against you in court.

The defense team refused the offer. They said they didn't trust anybody from Passaic County. Humphreys, on the other hand, felt he had successfully called their bluff. "So much for the claims of innocence," he told Gov. Byrne.

Humphreys also wanted both Bello and Bradley to take lie detector tests before he would use them as witnesses in the second trial. Meanwhile, Bello had come up with yet another version of what happened that night and was trying to develop his story into a book or movie deal. This time, he tried to float the story that he was inside the bar when the shooting broke out, hiding behind Hazel Tanis.

The polygraph expert who gave Bello the test concluded that Bello was telling the truth when he said he was inside the bar! This was patently impossible, no one could have hidden behind Tanis as she crouched, then lay on the ground as two men stood over her, filling her body with buckshot and bullets. Bello was tested again, and this time, the "original" version of the story prevailed with the lie detector. The prosecution hid the significance of the "in the bar" test result from the defense. When its existence was revealed, it became another ground for Carter's eventual release.

Carter's story had attracted all the celebrity attention – the rallies and the concerts and the interviews -- when Bello had recanted and claimed that he had been bribed and coerced by law enforcement. But by now, the story was much too confusing to be summed up on a protest sign or a bumper sticker. The case resembled a hall of mirrors. Originally, the defense accused the police of bribery. Then the prosecution turned the tables on the defense with their own charges of bribery: At the second trial, the prosecutors contended, Bello had recanted his original testimony because the defense had bribed him.

Alfred Bello explained how he was visited in jail (where he was serving time for a drunk and disorderly charge) by (Fred) Hogan, and later by (New York Times journalist Selwyn) Raab and (television reporter Harold) Levinson, who were soliciting his recantation. Bello said that Hogan offered him money if he would recant. Hogan told him he had a 'piece' of Rubin Carter's autobiography and that Bello could get a 'piece' if he recanted….

On the witness stand Fred Hogan became trapped by his own efforts to withhold evidence and conceal the truth. At the 1976 trial, Fred Hogan was called as a defense witness...Mr. Hogan is exposed. His original notes state that Alfred Bello would testify for the highest bidder and that $20,000 was mentioned.

The participation of Raab and Levinson also became suspect. Were they crusading investigative journalists or were they trying to manufacture a sensational story? Did they know that Bello had either asked for money or been offered money to change his story? Both of them took the stand at the second trial to deny trying to bribe Bello, but Levinson admitted that he knew that Bello was talking about getting money to testify. Hogan, Raab and Levinson were never charged with tampering with a witness, but the damage was done. Carter's defense, which relied so heavily on Bello and Bradley's recantation, blew up in his face.

At the second trial, Prosecutor Humphreys described the evidence against Carter and Artis as six strands, which, woven together, made a "rope strong enough to bring two killers to justice." The six strands were:

eyewitness testimony about the car,

eyewitness identification of Carter and Artis,

Carter's movements on the night of the crime,

the collapse of Carter's alibi;.

the ammunition found in Carter's car, and

the motive -- revenge.

Patty Valentine returned to testify about the car. Bello was led carefully through his testimony, and he had to explain to the court how often he'd lied and why. It took five days to sort through the tangled mess, and who knew what the jury would make of it all.

The ammunition found in the car was the subject of another fierce debate. This time the defense contended that the police had planted it. Muddying the waters was the fact, uncovered by journalist Raab, that the police did not log the bullets in as evidence until five days after they said they found it.

The prosecution countered this argument by producing two witnesses (Valentine and a local reporter) who testified they saw the policeman find the ammunition in the car the morning after the murders. Although of a different brand, the bullet and the shotgun shell matched the caliber of the murder weapons.

Then, more disaster for Carter. When the second trial was first announced, Carter told the media that he would rather have a trial to set the record straight, instead of just being pardoned and released by the governor, as his supporters had been asking: "I'd rather have a fair trial that's free from perjured testimony, that's free from manufactured evidence which put us here originally."

But leading up to the second trial, Carter's defense team learned that his alibi witnesses from the first trial were going to testify for the prosecution this time around. It was another hall of mirrors situation. Catherine McGuire and her mother Anna Mapes Brown testified that Carter had asked them to lie for him at the first trial. The prosecution found a letter Carter wrote to them from jail before the first trial, laying out the alibi story and asking them to "remember" it. (Click Here to view an image of Carter's letter to his alibi witness, April 5, 1967.)

Carter was damaged as much or more by the credibility problems he created for himself, as he was by Bello's shaky testimony. His alibi meltdown was especially foolhardy, since the exact time of the murders was not a big issue. Carter was at a nightclub just four blocks from the Lafayette around the time of the shootings, and everyone agreed that the job didn't take long, probably no more than a minute.

Finally, at the second trial, Prosecutor Humphreys introduced motive, which had not been discussed the first time around. Humphreys believed in and argued for the racial revenge motive, the idea that Carter was avenging the murder of his friend's stepfather. Humphreys felt if he could get the jury to understand that Carter was impulsive, vengeful and reckless, they might believe he was the kind of man who would do such a thing. And the evidence that painted such a picture lay conveniently at hand.

Humphreys wanted to confront Carter with all of the hated that spilled over in the pages of his autobiography The 16th Round. He wanted to demonstrate to the jury that Carter loathed and despised white people and routinely talked about killing and shooting:

"America, the dirty white racist bitch!" Carter wrote, describing his travels as a young Army recruit through the Deep South:

I looked out of the window at a bunch of drunken farmers who were crowding around a radio and disharmoniously yelling their fool-ass heads off to a hillbilly song. Their loud rebel shrieks grated on my nerves...I noticed something else, too: all these honkies were wearing guns, every last one of them. I decided I would have to get me one, too.

The second trial judge, Bruno Leopizzi, ruled against Humphreys on the book, but allowed him to argue the racial revenge motive. [Years later, this was the decision that set Carter free. A federal judge, Lee Sarokin, (played by Rod Steiger in the movie), ruled that there was no evidence that Carter hated white folks, or that he was angry about Holloway's shooting, Sarokin felt the prosecution was saying that Carter, a black man, wanted revenge just because he was black, as though all blacks went out and shot people when one of their own was killed. The racial revenge motive, therefore, was racist and prejudicial and Sarokin ruled that Carter didn't get a fair trial.]

By the time the two sides gave their closing arguments, Carter knew he was headed back to jail. He himself had decided not to take the stand, so he wouldn't be cross-examined about the Carolyn Kelley beating. Then there was that book that he wrote, maybe all the exaggerations he'd put in there weren't such a good idea. If he got on the stand, the prosecutor could have creamed his credibility with that.

When thousands of people were marching for Carter and Artis in the streets, it was the prosecution that stood accused of using lying witnesses, of bribery, of manufacturing the evidence. By the time the second trial was over, testimony suggested that it was Carter who had tried to bribe a witness (Bello) and it was he, not the prosecution, who had relied on perjured testimony (from his alibi witnesses in the first trial). The jury believed the prosecution version of events.

In addition, the aggressive tactics of the defense team only served to alienate the jury. After the second trial, Humphreys gave his opinion of the Carter/Artis defense team.

They could have stressed a reasonable doubt about the identification and not attacked the police. They could have said the 10 various officers in the case might have been mistaken, rather than conspiring to frame (Carter and Artis). Trying to convince the public of a massive police frame-up is difficult and can backfire if you don't have absolute proof...A good attorney would not have openly antagonized the court, would not have cross-examined all witnesses at great length — since this loses effectiveness — and would concentrate on proving a reasonable doubt rather than the conspiracy theory.

This was a disastrous turn of events for John Artis. All along, he had protested his innocence. He was, he said, just a young man who went along for a ride with Carter on that fateful night. The prosecution contended that he was a star-struck boy who'd had too much to drink and went along for the ride on a murder spree, swayed by Carter's charisma and charm. A year before the second trial, prosecutors offered Artis full clemency if he would testify against Carter. He refused. For the second trial, Artis had the option of being tried separately, but he and his lawyer went along with Carter's defense strategy. The catastrophe that was the second trial was due entirely to the blunders made by Carter and his supporters. It was Carter who created the damning evidence of the letter coaching his alibi witnesses in their story. Artis had nothing to do with attempts to bribe Bello and Bradley into recanting their testimony. It was Carter who was accused of beating a female supporter, and it was Carter who wrote a book that was chock full of demonstrable falsehoods and overt racist diatribes.

If Artis is innocent, as he claims, he must particularly regret turning down the offer from Prosecutor Humphreys before the second trial -- if you pass a lie detector test, you can go free. Fail the test, and it won't be used against you in court.

And Carter and Artis went back to jail. Where the Canadians found them, in 1980.

LESRA MARTIN AND THE CANADIANS

Lesra Martin and the Canadians first met Carter through the pages of his autobiography, The 16th Round. In their subsequent book about their adventures, Lazarus and the Hurricane, they recount how they were horrified by Carter's description of his frame-up and imprisonment, at the age of 11, for defending himself against a pedophile:

The judge sat high above us, his black robe rippling in the breeze of a huge fan 'These hoodlum cut-thoats in this city are a menace to our society," he said.... "I sentence you, Rubin Carter, to Jamesburg State Home for Boys, as of this day until you are 21 years of age. So be it."

My mother grasped my hand tightly and cried, (wrote Carter). I was numb with shock. "Until I am 21 years old?" I thought. "Goddamn! That was 10 years away. Ten long years."

But long before the publication of their book in 1991, the Canadians became acquainted with Carter's actual criminal record, and knew that Carter was not 11, but 14 years old, when he was sentenced to three years for attacking a man with a bottle and stealing a watch and $55 dollars. He did have a brush with the law at age 11 -- his own father turned him in to the police because of his acts of theft and vandalism. The Canadians knew the truth, but they repeated Carter's version anyway, which is the version shown in the movie.

Carter claims to have been a political activist who attracted the ire of J. Edgar Hoover himself (hence the frame-up for murder). He claims he marched in Washington in 1963 to hear Martin Luther King Jr. and was invited to join the March in Selma for Southern voting rights. Did the Canadians notice that there isn't one scrap of evidence to back up these claims? Although Carter has been the subject of four sympathetic books, not a single article, photo, or quote has surfaced to indicate that he ever spoke out on civil rights, except for a frequently misquoted remark in the Saturday Evening Post about going up to Harlem and shooting some cops. Even the movie writers couldn't come up with any rallies or speeches for their hero. They show Denzel Washington making the reckless "shoot some cops" remark, then the next thing you know, someone is breaking out the windows at Carter's house. If such a frightening incident occurred in real life, Carter has never mentioned it.

The Canadians' book pounces on inconsistencies or perceived inconsistencies in the evidence against Carter, but ignores Carter's credibility problem entirely. It is hard to guess what blinded the Canadians to the many discrepancies between Carter's version and the actual record. The Canadians routinely took Carter's word over the sworn court testimony of the police, even if it meant accepting Byzantine and convoluted conspiracy theories. And since Carter's alibi witnesses, who were also black, turned on Carter in the second trial and withdrew their alibis for him, the Canadians had an explanation for that too; the racist police had pressured them into removing their alibis.

At roughly the same time the Canadians came into Carter's life, the defense discovered the existence of an investigator who had worked on the Carter/Artis investigation before the second trial. His name was Richard Caruso and he had saved his notes critiquing the case. The defense felt they had stumbled on to a gold mine.

Paul Wice, in his book Rubin Hurricane Carter and the American Justice System, says "Caruso's notes were based on a combination of personal observations, overheard conversations, and office gossip during his brief three months within the task force."

Caruso, for one thing, was very critical of the initial police investigation, which was deplorably lax. But he also thought he detected corruption, as well. Caruso was suspicious of the fact that after the first trial, Patty Valentine was able to buy a house in Florida. This incriminating tidbit has been repeated, but the rebuttal has never been published, except for here: Patty Valentine's husband had fought in Vietnam and they were able to fund the purchase through his veteran's benefits. Caruso also wrote about a secret code word that people needed to know before approaching some of DeSimone's witnesses. The code word is suggestive, not of a cover-up, but of security. Patty Valentine was always concerned for her safety and DeSimone may have devised the code word to reassure her that no stranger could show up on her doorstep pretending to be from the prosecution team.

What little is revealed about the Caruso notes, as discussed in Lazarus and the Hurricane, indicates that Caruso was also interested in the witnesses and allegations that were part of the initial investigation, then were dropped by the wayside as the detectives focussed on Carter and Artis. Names like Annie Ruth Haggins and the Cockershams reappear. These were people who had little credibility, who told conflicting and shifting stories, and were never used as witnesses by either side. But to the Canadians, anyone was more credible than a white policeman.

A forged time card, altering the time of the murders -- and thus affecting Carter's alibi -- is crucial to the plot of the movie. This evidence was also put forward by the Canadians and is discussed at length in their book. In real life, the time of the murders was given as 2:30 in the very first police report, before police could possibly have traced Carter's movements that night. How could they have known, a few hours after the crime, that they needed to falsify and place the time of the murder at 2:30? According to Carter, the "frame up" against him didn't start to happen for several months.

In the movie, the time of the murders was altered by fifteen minutes, from 2:30 to 2:45. In real life, the murders were always pegged at 2:30. Both Valentine and Bello called the police and Det. Lawless was on his way from his house minutes after the shootings. Ambulances were dispatched, victims were scooped up and admitted to hospital, reporters descended on the scene. It would have been impossible to change the official murder time, months after the crime.

While it's good drama for the movie, the theory that the time of the murders was hidden with forged evidence has no credibility and has precisely nothing to do with why Carter was eventually freed. Moviegoers have been completely conned on that one.

Another possibility the Canadians researched was that the car in question was not a Dodge Polara, but a Dodge Monaco. The Canadians felt the Monaco's lights, which extended across the back of the car, were more butterfly-like than the Polara's. In the movie, Valentine's testimony is falsely given as "(the) taillights lit up all across the back." In real life, Valentine testified that the taillights did not light up all across the back. But little facts like that didn't stop the producers of the movie from insisting that the car was really a Monaco.

CARTER IS RELEASED

One of the angriest criticisms leveled at The Hurricane movie is that the amateur Scooby-doo efforts of the Canadians are given such prominence, instead of the painstaking legal arguments of Carter's lawyers. One of the people making this criticism is, not surprisingly, one of the lawyers on the Carter/Artis defense team.

Carter was able to finally walk out of the New Jersey prison system in 1985 because of a carefully crafted legal brief, (which the Canadians assisted in researching and writing). (Artis was paroled four years earlier.)

The movie shows that the defense team appealed to a Federal Appeals Court for a writ of habeas corpus on the grounds that Carter did not receive a fair trial. For one thing, the defense had learned about that Bello lie detector test, the one where Bello claimed to be in the bar while the bullets were flying. This could have been used in court to further attack Bello's credibility. For another, the racial revenge motive linking Carter to the shooting was a tenuous connection. Although there was evidence that Carter knew the stepson of the murdered black bartender and even evidence that Carter was discussing or looking for guns on the murder night, there is no evidence that Carter discussed plans for revenge.

Judge Sarokin agreed with the defense and ruled that the racial revenge motive was unconstitutional. He wrote that the extensive record [of the case] "clearly demonstrates that petitioner's convictions were predicated upon an appeal to racism rather than reason and concealment rather than disclosure." In writing his decision, Sarokin made more than a dozen factual mistakes, including inserting the name of a victim from another shooting. As the Bergen Record wrote on March 26, 20000, "While [these mistakes] considered inconsequential by some, such mistakes nonetheless continue to fuel the debate that Carter and Artis were wrongly freed by a judge who did not closely study an otherwise complex case. Even Carter's biographer says the mistakes are 'not insignificant.'"

The prosecution team, now led by John Goceljak and Ron Marmo, fought Judge Sarokin's ruling all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and went down swinging. (To read that brief click here.) Finally, the authorities decided that because so many years had passed since the crimes occurred, because some witnesses had died, because Artis had already been paroled and Carter had served virtually a life term anyway, that they would dismiss the charges, rather than hold a third trial.

If they could have foreseen that they would be portrayed with impunity in a Hollywood movie as corrupt, foul-mouthed racists with the integrity of cockroaches, perhaps they might have gone for that third trial.

AFTERWARD

Carter lived with the Canadians in the United States while the State of New Jersey appealed Sarokin's ruling, then moved to Canada as soon as he was free to do so. Perhaps the implications of freeing a man who was a reckless and spontaneous storyteller and a paranoid weaver of conspiracy tales didn't occur to the Canadians before Carter's release in 1985. If so, the reality must have struck them soon after Carter moved in with them. Carter claims in his biography Hurricane, published in 2000, that the Canadians watched him like a hawk when he was in public and even listened in on his telephone conversations.

His tendency to invent grandiose claims for himself -- "I made the Olympics in 1956!" -- could be the reason why such close surveillance occurred. Carter sometimes got carried away with his anecdotes ("I smuggled guns to South Africa!") And the Canadians had book and movie deals to consider. Carter was damaging his own credibility and hence his marketability.

But with rare exceptions journalists over the years have accepted Carter's version(s) of his life and his case without scruple. He has the ability, it seems, to project absolute sincerity. Thus Boston Globe reporter Michael Blowen interviewed Carter in 1992 at the commune and soberly reported: "for many of his years in prison, Carter was in solitary confinement. He learned to subsist on five slices of bread and two glasses of water and on food brought in from the outside -- there was a 25-pound-a-month limit." Blowen evidently did not check into federal regulations limiting solitary confinement, or Carter's own autobiography that contradicts the interview.

More recently, Carter told a capacity audience at the University of South Florida that the State of New Jersey kept him in conditions that make Devil's Island sound like a holiday at Club Med: "For 10 of the 22 years," states The Oracle, the student paper, "Carter said he sat thinking in its darkness, also called 'the hole.' "Six feet underground, in total darkness, without sanitation, with five slices of stale bread and one glass of water," Carter said."

For The New York Times he pulled out all the stops and claimed that he spent 20 years in solitary confinement. (He didn't mention whether he got a thimbleful of water and one or two dry crusts of bread.)

This stuff wows reporters and also his audiences. Then Carter caps it all off by explaining that he's not bitter about all that has been done to him. People who are not bitter, of course, do not sue for wrongful prosecution. And Carter points out he never has.

For a man who is not bitter, Carter has left a trail of bitterness behind him. Most of the people involved in his big publicity push in the 1970's were cut out of his life by the time the jury in his second trial found him guilty. His son, Raheem, hasn't seen him in years. When the movie came out, Raheem was in jail, awaiting trial for assaulting his girlfriend, and, he claimed to reporters, waiting for his father to post his bail. As for the Canadians, his relationship with them was over years before last year's movie came out.

In 1994, after Carter had moved in and out of the Canadians' commune several times, he left for good and hasn't looked back. One of the Canadians –Lisa Peters -- had become his wife but he now claims that he only married her to improve his chances of immigrating to Canada. They are now separated and Carter has moved on to another relationship.

Too bad the Canadians, who are avid astrologers and casters of horoscopes, didn't see the heartbreak that lay ahead of them. They had ignored or excused Carter's tendency to revise his past or to blame others whenever anything went wrong. But in Carter's 2000 biography, it was the Canadians who came under attack. Carter told biographer James Hirsch the Canadians were incapable of treating Carter like an equal. He felt like a "trophy horse to fill their coffers," and he felt like they were his new jailers.

Suddenly, the Canadians were willing to acknowledge that Carter was capable of a less than scrupulous adherence to the truth: ``There are so many untruths in the book,'' one of the Canadians sighed in an interview for the Toronto Star. ``This is not a pleasant thing to talk about. It's distasteful.''

Paterson police and prosecutors probably found the Canadians' description of them in Lazarus and the Hurricane, distasteful as well: After wittily asserting that one of the prosecutors was keen to send Carter back to jail because jailing an innocent man was "a real accomplishment," the prosecutor is described as "teeter(ing) in his elevator shoes, his auburn pompadour slipping suspiciously out of place."

It's not just that Carter and the Canadians no longer live together, they no longer speak. This awkward fact was a problem for the promoters of the movie, who don't portray the less-than-perfect postscript to Carter's life after the judge sets him free. On screen, the Canadians and young Lesra leap up in exultation as Rod Steiger frees Denzel Washington. At the film's premiere, the Canadians and Carter sat in separate rows and never spoke to one another. The producers of The Hurricane have not announced plans for a sequel.

Both Carter and the Canadians, however, say that they are pleased with the movie, even though the movie falsifies and distorts almost every aspect of the case. The "year's most honestly inspirational story," as one enthusiastic reviewer put it, actually promotes distrust and hatred, and every scene that shows Carter being framed or threatened is distorted or invented out of whole cloth.

Carter, now 64, promotes himself as an advocate for the wrongfully convicted, and lives in Toronto. He continues to tell his audiences at his motivational speeches that Willie Marins said he wasn't the killer, that he was persecuted because of his black activism, that he was the victim of a racist frame-up, that he was exonerated by the courts. Corporations and universities pay thousands of dollars to be told fictions by Carter. Lesra Martin and John Artis, recognizing a good thing when they see it, have also joined the lecture circuit.

If the Canadians, or Carter, or Lesra Martin -- now an attorney himself -- believe that any of their accusations about Carter's frame-up are true, if they have a shred of evidence that such despicable acts occurred, they should be hounding the U.S. Department of Justice to indict the wrongdoers. The fact is that no person involved in prosecuting Carter and Artis has been officially accused of forgery, perjury, witness tampering, attempted murder, or any of the heinous things the movie, the Canadians, and Carter accuse the New Jersey authorities of doing.

The movie ends with the words, "the real killers were never caught, nor were they pursued."

New Jersey authorities maintain to this day that when they prosecuted Carter and Artis, they prosecuted the men who went to the Lafayette Grill and shot four innocent people, then walked out, laughing.

Topics:

Celebrity Crime

Crime Books and Films

Murder

Authors:

Lona Manning

The Shame of Lorain, Ohio

admin — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 07:29:31 +0000

December 6, 2002 Updated: June 7, 2013

Nancy Smith, center, with her four teenage children.

The ritual abuse hysteria that swept across the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s resulted in hundreds of innocent people being wrongfully convicted of committing a bizarre concoction of sexual acts on preschoolers. Most of those convicted were eventually freed from prison on appeal, but some innocent people remain behind bars. One of the most blatant cases of wrongful conviction occurred in Lorain, Ohio. There a politically ambitious prosecutor's office coaxed and manipulated a few Head Start preschoolers into testifying that they had been sexually abused repeatedly over a six-month period by their bus driver and some stranger -- two people who never even knew each other, but were sentenced to life for crimes that never occurred in the first place.

by Lona Manning

Bulletin: For Nancy Smith, her long legal odyssey ended June 4, 2013 in an Elyria courtroom where a judge released her for time already served. Instead of the vindication she had steadfastly fought for since her 1994 conviction on child molestation charges, she surrendered her rights to any further appeals to clear her name of the wrongful conviction she was subjected to at the hands of misguided and overzealous Lorain, Ohio prosecutors.

To avoid the possibility of being sent back to prison, she accepted a deal worked out between her attorneys and Lorain prosecutors that sentenced her to 12 years in prison but gave her credit for the 15 years already served since she and co-defendant Joseph Allen were convicted in the Head Start molestation case.

Judge Virgil Sinclair, a retired Stark Count judge appointed by the Ohio Supreme Court to handle Smith’s resentencing, also reduced the rape charges against her to the lesser offense of “gross imposition.”

The resentencing of Allen will take place at a later date. Like Smith, Allen has been free since mid-2009 when Lorain County Common Pleas Judge James Burge acquitted both Smith and Allen when they appeared before him to correct a minor entencing error.

In February, 2009, Common Pleas Court Judge Burge vacated their sentences on a technicality and agreed to set both free on bail. Smith, a single mother of four and a bus driver for Head Start, was serving a sentence of 30 to 90 years. Allen, an unemployed, 40-year-old unskilled laborer, was serving five life sentences. Smith was convicted of taking several 4-and 5-year-old children on her bus to the Lorain apartment of Allen where the prosecution alleged they sexually abused them.

In vacating their sentences in February, the judge ordered a new sentencing hearing to be conducted later in the year. During his preparation for the sentencing hearing, Judge Burge said he became convinced their convictions were unfounded. In what Smith and Allen expected to be nothing more than a routine status hearing on June 25, 2009, the judge surprised all concerned with his ruling overturning their convictions.

In a quiet, low-key manner, Judge Burge announced that after reviewing the trial transcript and court records that he had “absolutely no confidence” in the original guilty verdicts. Click here for a You Tube video for Judge Burge’s announcement:

While stressing that he thought the detectives, social workers and parents in the case were trying to do their best, the judge explained that the pre-trial interviews of the children were so suggestive that the children’s testimony should have been ruled inadmissible. He also said that he found that “exculpatory” evidence – evidence favorable to the defendants that would have supported their innocence – was kept from their defense attorneys, or was handed over them too late for them to use effectively. This violated the defendants’ constitutional rights to a fair trial.

Judge Burge also noted that he reviewed the preschool attendance records, which were not used in court by the defense. These attendance records, if accurate, made it clear that neither Smith nor Allen could have snatched children away from school to assault them because the children in question were marked as “present.”

When Burge vacated Smith and Allen’s lengthy sentences earlier in 2009, the Lorain County prosecutor’s office vowed to return both to prison. Judge Burge vacated Smith’s sentence after Smith's lawyer, Jack Bradley, brought the successful appeal of her sentence due to an error in the wording of her original sentence order. Their sentencing orders were supposed to include the phrase "found guilty by a jury," but did not. Bradley had realized that an Ohio Supreme Court ruling from 2008, laying out what is necessary for a proper sentencing entry, made it possible for him to file this new legal appeal. When the judge provided the relief sought, Smith's lawyer praised Judge Burge for "not act[ing] as a rubber stamp" and automatically re-sentencing Smith to her original sentence. "He's a legal scholar; he looks at issues very, very carefully."

[Click here to watch the scene in the courtroom at YouTube].

Joseph Allen’s attorney, Roland Bailey promptly filed the same claim on Allen’s behalf, and Judge Burge responded by vacating his sentence as well.

When Judge Burge announced the acquittals on June 25, gasps and applause broke out in the courtroom. Smith, then 51, covered her face with her hands and cried. She and her co-defendant were sitting within three feet of each other, but even at this incredible turn of events, they did not look at each other. As they had claimed all along, they never knew one another and still do not know each other do this day.

Afterwards, Smith struggled to explain to the Morning Journal what over 14 years in prison for a crime she never committed had done to her and her family: “It was horrible because I never finished raising my kids. They started having children and I wasn’t there for them. My daughter lost children and I wasn’t there for them. My dad died and it was just horrible.” Nancy is going to look for work and continue to rebuild her life with her family.

Although he has no money and serious health problems, the then 55-year-old Allen was brimming with hopeful plans – he wanted to travel to meet all the people (many of whom learned about this case through crimemagazine.com) who wrote to him and supported him through this years in prison. He said he wanted to do charity work to help African orphans, and he intended to help others who’ve been wrongfully convicted “as long as God put breath in me.”

Greg White, the district attorney at the time of the original trial, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer he was “at a total loss” to understand why Burge had freed the pair. (White is now a federal magistrate judge for U.S. District Court for Northern Ohio.) In a strange twist of fate, Jonathon Rosenbaum, the assistant district attorney at their original trial, was shot in the back by his son and is now reportedly paralyzed.

Lorain County Prosecutor Dennis Will stated that he had to appeal Judge Burge’s action to a higher court because the precedent set by Judge Burge would have allowed thousands of others to appeal their sentences as well. Smith’s lawyer found a clerical error in her sentencing order, which led to Judge Burge’s decision to set aside their sentences. Lorain County argued that Judge Burge had no authority to free them and should have merely corrected the error.In January of 2011, the Ohio Supreme Court agreed, overturning JudgeBurge's ruling setting Smith and Allen free, ordering them back to prison to resume their lengthly prison sentnences.

Judge Burge told the Chronicle Telegram that because of the Supreme Court ruling he has no alternative but to send two innocent people back to prison. “I never thought I would witness anything quite so tragic in the criminal justice system, much less be any part of it,” the judge said.

Attorneys for Smith and Allen appealed the reversal and their clients were allowed to remain free on bail until the appeal was resolved. For Smith, the appeal became moot when she agreed to the deal announced in court on June 4, 2013. It is expected that Allen will follow the same course.

As the case took twists and turns in court, interest in it brought new information to light that points to the innocence of both Smith and Allen. Rachel Dissell of the Cleveland Plain Dealer has reported that:

Lorain Police Chief Cel Rivera, who was involved in investigating the case, admitted to Nancy Smith’s daughter that he now doubts Smith’s guilt; the long-suppressed video of the police line-up of Joseph Allen demonstrates that children were coached to finger Allen; (click here for (part 2) and (part 3) of the video); one of Allen’s child accusers now says he has doubts that he was molested.

Some social analysts attribute the daycare child-abuse panic of the 1980's and 1990's to evangelical Christians who were convinced that Satanists lurked everywhere. Others said it was a backlash against working mothers who put their children in daycares. Some pointed to the passage of the 1974 Mondale Act, which provided federal funds to investigate child-abuse cases. Still others thought that politically ambitious prosecutors decided to go crusading after child molesters, real or imagined, to further their careers. Then there were the child-protection "experts" who told the police that if children said, "no, nothing happened," it really meant that the children were too frightened to speak.

Perhaps it was all of these reasons working together that created the potent witches' brew of fear, superstition, guilt and hysteria that characterized the child-abuse frenzy. "During a prosecutorial fury that swept the country from 1980 to 1992, there were at least 311 alleged child sex rings investigated in 46 states.... Children told stories that were appalling.... sex rings were run by Satanic cults, dozens of children raped by scores of adults, dozens of babies were killed and eaten, horses slaughtered in playrooms, children raped by men in black cloaks while the women waited in line for their turn," Andrew Schneider and Mike Barber wrote in 1998 in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

On the basis of these types of accusations, hundreds of people were arrested and thrown in jail, and scores were convicted, and sent to prison. One day they were respected members of their communities; the next, they became despised outcasts. It could happen to anyone, anywhere -- to a preschool teacher in Texas, a grandmother in Massachusetts, a father in North Carolina -- all found themselves in court, charged with abusing children in perverted ceremonies.

Scott and Brenda Kniffen were arrested without warning one morning in April, 1982, at their home in Bakersfield, Calif. Scott Kniffen had offered to act as a character witness for a friend who had been accused of molesting children by a mentally ill relative. For standing up for their friend, the Kniffens also fell under suspicion. While awaiting trial, Brenda was attacked in jail by the other prisoners, who beat her up and threw feces at her. Their two sons, 6-year-old Brian and 8-year-old Brandon, were questioned by a zealous prosecutor who promised them that they would see their parents if only they would answer the questions. So after hundreds of denials, the Kniffen boys finally agreed that they had been hung from hooks, made to pose for child pornography, and raped. (No photographs, let alone hooks, were ever found.) But the Kniffen boys were not reunited with their parents. Once the state had "saved" them, they were tossed into the foster-care system and forgotten. Brian lived in 16 different homes before he and his brother were old enough to seek legal help and recant their testimony. Their parents served 14 years of a 240-year sentence before an appeals court judge set them free in 1996. (http://www.edwardhumes.com/books/mean/index.shtml#witchhunt)

Bobby Fijnje was a 14-year-old who babysat at his family's church in Florida. He spent two years in adult prison before being acquitted in 1991 of charges that he'd molested the children in his care. His parents were urged to accept a plea deal for their son, and told that he would likely contract AIDS in prison. When they proclaimed their son's innocence, false stories were leaked to the media that accused them of being child pornographers and drug dealers. The jury was so disturbed by the conduct of the case that they wrote to Florida Attorney General Janet Reno:

There was a high degree of improbability of certain allegations raised against the defendant. For instance, alleging that he [Bobby Fijnje] drove a child to the American Foreign Legion Hall, when no representative of that facility saw the defendant on the premises. And the fact that no adult ever saw the defendant drive a car, a task that he claims he has yet to attempt.

Other allegations have the defendant taking children where there were witches and in which he dressed as a clown. Again, no one ever saw anyone dressed as a witch nor the defendant as a clown. Further allegations of a baby being killed and a cat's neck being broken were unfounded.

In the Fells Acres Preschool case in Boston, a pediatric nurse interviewed dozens of little children. Wall Street Journal columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz reviewed the interview transcripts and wrote:

Over and over, the interviews show, the children say nothing happened, nobody took their clothes off, they know nothing about a magic room or a bad clown. But the interviewer persists. In the world of these examiners, children are to be believed only when they say abuse took place. Otherwise, they are described as "not ready to disclose."

Violet Amirault, her daughter Cheryl, and her son Gerald were imprisoned for molesting the children in their daycare in 1987. At one point, a judge agreed to parole Violet and Cheryl, pending a review of their sentence. The women reached the gates of the prison when they were told that the prosecutor had gotten the release overturned, and they were led back to their cells. (Mrs. Amirault and her daughter were eventually paroled in 1995, but Gerald is still in prison.)

"The Marquis de Sade could hardly have improved on this [ritual abuse] horror show," wrote Mark Sauer, a journalist for the San Diego Tribune and an early skeptic of child sexual-abuse cases. Another skeptic was FBI Special Agent Kenneth Lanning, who studied hundreds of such cases and concluded that there was no evidence to back up the wild charges the children were making. Cognitive psychologists such as Dr. Stephen Ceci of Cornell University demonstrated that young children could easily be influenced to say things that weren't true.

The ritual-abuse panic seemed to have run its course by 1993 with the acquittal of Dale Akiki, a volunteer at a church-run daycare. Mark Sauer wrote: "When (Akiki) was acquitted after 2 1/2 years in jail awaiting trial, jurors said the only crime committed in the case was the misguided prosecution itself."

Most of those convicted in the ritual abuse trials were eventually freed from prison on appeal. Those released after serving lengthy prison terms, having lost their reputations, their homes, their careers and their families, were the lucky ones. The ritual abuse hysteria that swept across the country has left some forgotten victims behind. The same month that Dale Akiki was acquitted, police in Lorain, Ohio, a fading industrial town on the shores of Lake Erie, arrested an unemployed laborer named Joseph Allen. Allen, along with Head Start school bus driver Nancy Smith, was declared to be a perverted child molester. Their nightmare experience with the justice system is the subject of a terrible injustice.

Anatomy of a Panic

An agitated young mother brought her 4-year-old daughter to the hospital on May 7, 1993. Margie Grover said her daughter Nicole attended the Lorain Head Start school, and that day her daughter had come home and said, "We didn't go to school today." Upon further questioning, Grover said that Nicole told her that her bus driver had taken the children to see a man named "Joseph," who tied her up, taped her eyes, and molested her with a stick.

Grover (the names of the children and their parents have been changed), said she found a piece of the branch in the girl's clothing. Officers attending at the hospital noted in their report that most of the information was provided by the mother and the attending nurse, not by the little girl herself, who was physically unharmed.

The case was assigned to Det. Tom Cantu of Lorain's Youth and Gang unit. Cantu had served over 20 years on the force, following a four-year stint in the Marines, and had been named Ohio "Policemen of the Year" in 1992 by the Veterans of Foreign Wars. When he started the investigation, he had an accused person, Nancy Smith the bus driver, her unknown accomplice by the name of "Joseph," an unknown location, and a definite date.

It quickly became clear to Cantu that the incident couldn't have happened as Nicole -- or was it her mother? -- had described. Smith's bus log and the odometer readings confirmed that she had driven her usual route on May 7, and Nicole's teacher marked Nicole as "present." Sherry Hagerman, the aide on Smith's bus that week, said that nothing had happened. The abuse was supposed to have happened in the afternoon. But that's when Smith went to her second job, driving for the YMCA Meals-on-Wheels program. Her supervisor at the "Y" confirmed that Smith was a most reliable driver and that she had shown up for work as usual that day.

Cantu spoke to Smith's co-workers, neighbors, and friends. They scoffed at the idea that Smith, a single mother with four teenage children, was a child molester. She held down three part-time jobs, often working 12 hours at a stretch. Her social life revolved around her long-time boyfriend coming over to make dinner and the occasional night out at the Bingo Hall with her mom or a girlfriend. A more unlikely candidate for a child molester would be difficult to imagine. In fact, in the initial story told by Margie Grover, Nicole described Smith as the protector in the situation. Nicole said that Smith was angry with "Joseph" for molesting her, and that Smith was "going to get a knife and kill "Joseph."

Cantu interviewed little Nicole on May 13, but most of the information came from Margie Grover, who insisted that her daughter was telling her lots of details at home. In front of Cantu, however, Nicole hesitated, saying, "I forgot," "I don't remember that," and "Can we go home now?" Repeatedly questioned by both Cantu and her mother, she finally agreed that she had seen "'Joseph's' pee pee."

Cantu went to the Head Start school on May 25 and questioned 11 children who were on Smith's bus route. They were all gathered together around a table -- 3, 4 and 5 year olds -- along with the broad-shouldered, 6'1" Cantu. His police report for that day notes, "The children were questioned if Nancy had ever touched them in a bad way, or in any way which would hurt, or upset them, and each one stated that she has never touched them. The children were questioned if they know anyone named "Joseph," and they all indicated that they did not. All of the children stated that they liked Nancy, their bus driver, and that she was nice."

"Kids at that age are basically honest," Cantu believed. But that interview wasn't the end of the matter. Nicole's mother had been spreading the alarm to other Head Start parents, who in turn questioned their children. Had they heard of "Joseph"? Had they been taken to "Joseph's" house? "It started with one child," recalled Cantu, "then came up with another child, it really mushroomed." The veteran officer believed that the parents were influencing the children: "After (the children) went home (from school), the whole thing started changing.... (Margie Grover) started the whole thing. She got together with other parents and they kind of had a meeting and they kind of got stories together."

Emily Oliphant, who worked part time as a bus aide for Head Start, brought her son William to the police station. She told Cantu she had caught him in his bedroom a few weeks earlier, naked, straddling a big teddy bear. When she asked what he was doing, he said that "Joseph" had taught him about "humping." But when Cantu questioned little William, the boy couldn't repeat his mother's story about "humping," and "he didn't know anyone, black or white, named 'Joseph.'"

Cantu said that from the jumbled descriptions of "Joseph," he couldn't tell "if the guy was white, black, or a white guy with black spots, or a white guy with black spots -- you're talking to little kids." "Joseph" was a white man who painted his head and hands black, said one child. "Joseph" had blue eyes, said several others. But as noted, Cantu suspected that their parents heavily influenced the children's testimony. "One day they tell you one story, then they go home, and all of a sudden they have the same story." For example, at least two other children claimed that they'd been molested with a stick, just as Grover said her daughter had been molested.

Cantu recalled, "I took the kids to different houses where they said this thing happened and none of it panned out. The kids gave descriptions of the interior of the house and different pictures that might have been in the house, (but) any house we went into, nothing matched anything the children stated." He also canvassed the neighborhood where the suspects lived and asked if anyone had seen a bright yellow school bus parked there all afternoon. No one had.

The investigation wasn't two weeks old when Cantu was summoned to the mayor's office. When he arrived, there was Margie Grover, who turned up the heat by complaining to the mayor that no arrest had been made. Cantu found himself getting "into a tiff" with her, but he held his ground about proper police procedure. "I even told the mayor, 'just because somebody accuses, they say Nancy Smith did it, I have to prove she did it, I can't arrest her on your say-so.'" Cantu ended up phoning the police chief to come down to placate her.

A caseworker in the Child Protection Program met with Grover and urged her to leave the investigation to police and to stop sharing specific information with other parents, which might "contaminate" the case. Grover's live-in boyfriend, Dan Palermo, wanted a copy of Nicole's medical report, but since he wasn't Nicole's father, the staff refused to give it to him. "By the end of the meeting (the) mother seemed to understand that she could be doing more harm than good if she continued on her present course," the caseworker wrote, "however I am not certain this will change anything in the family's approach."

"There is no proof that a male suspect named "Joseph" exists at the present."

The Head Start semester ended on May 27 with a picnic in the park. The day after, Margie Grover, her identity concealed, appeared on a local TV station's newscast with the dramatic news that a molester was stalking the Head Start kids -- and nobody was doing anything about it. She said she had to take this step, "for someone to do something about this case and get the ball rolling." Palermo accused the police of engaging in a cover-up.

Grover even identified a suspect, a man her daughter had pointed out when he was cutting the grass outside his house. He was the owner of a gay bar -- and a white man. He was eventually cleared.

After the accusations became public, Cantu took Smith for a lie detector test "and they said that she didn't do that crime any more than me or the guy that gave the test."

Cantu concluded that there was no case against Smith. He reported: "There is no proof that a male suspect named "Joseph" exists at the present.... all of the victims in the case have been interviewed with much inconsistency and lack of good evidence."

But the case didn't end there.

White and Rosenbaum

Greg White, a handsome former Marine, had become Lorain County Prosecutor on his 31st birthday in 1981. A year later, attorney Jonathan Rosenbaum joined his staff. He rose to become chief deputy prosecutor in 1988. Their partnership would continue for 20 years before ending in bitter acrimony. They both developed reputations as aggressive prosecutors. As the Morning Journal noted:

Before White and Rosenbaum.....(g)raft and corruption were common. A lot of people who were lazy and greedy were splitting the pie. Time after time in the 20 years they have worked together, White and Rosenbaum have butchered the sacred cows. Wealth? Community standing? Political party? Personal friendship? Forget it.

The team of White and Rosenbaum also had a lot of support among Lorain police officers. Said one, "Being prosecutor comes naturally to (Rosenbaum). If you're going to commit a crime, don't do it in Lorain County, because he might be on the case."

White was a star of the local Republican Party, a political up-and-comer in an area that was heavily Democrat. Margie Grover's public accusation that nothing was being done to catch a child molester came at a bad time for White, who was planning to run for Congress. (He narrowly lost the race.)

Shortly after Cantu made his recommendation that the investigation against Smith be concluded, he was promoted to sergeant, and transferred out of the Youth/Gang unit. Cantu had been working on the case alone, in addition to the rest of his caseload. After Grover went to the media, five officers were assigned to the Head Start investigation. The questioning of the children, ages 3-to-5, began anew with the special task force.

"Amy was asked, did Joseph make you touch him? Amy stated, "No." -- from the police reports

When Child Protective Services first interviewed Nicole Grover in May, she denied that anyone had touched her. After several months and more interviews, she agreed with Det. Eladio Andujar that Nancy and Joseph had, in fact, molested her. In this excerpt of one of her conversations with Andujar, Nicole is shown a drawing of a naked body and Andujar presses her for information.

Q. Which parts did Joseph and Nancy touch? Point to it with a pen. Which did they touch, Huh?

A. My back.

Q. Did they touch this?

A. Uh-huh.

Q. What is that?

A. A butt.

Q. What else? Oh, this part?

A. A belly button and a pee pee.

Q. He touched those areas?

A. Yeah.

Q. Who touched that, Nancy or Joseph or both?

A. Nancy and Joseph.

Preschooler Johnny Givens got involved in the case at the end of May. His mother had seen the news reports and she remembered that her son had complained of a sore bottom the previous winter. The police report states, "(Johnny) was questioned if Nancy ever did anything to him, or if she had ever touched him, or ever touched his penis... (Johnny) stated that she had never done anything to him, and had never touched him in any way..." He agreed that Nancy had a boyfriend "who rode the bus sometimes" and that he was white. He also said this boyfriend had never touched him. His parents claimed that their son had said "Nancy's boyfriend had put a stick up his butt one time on the bus," but Johnny told the police that "this didn't happen, and that no one put anything up his butt."

By the end of July, when Johnny was re-questioned by the new task force, he was driven around and asked to point out which house he'd been taken to. He still spoke of Nancy's "boyfriend" as being a white man.

Antonio Pena's father also drove his young son around town, looking for Joseph's house, and was aggressive in urging his son to cooperate with the investigation: "Do you remember what I told you about your little sister? Do you want him to get her? And do those things he did to you? Daddy doesn't want that either. You have to help your sister and all the other little kids." Det. Andujar also appealed to Antonio to cooperate: "You help me find this guy and I will put this guy away."

Two weeks after Margie Grover's revelations about child molesters appeared in the media, 4-year-old Jason Andrews's mother reported that her son had told her he'd been molested right on the bus by someone named Alan. The police report notes:

He also stated that Alan looked like Al, a neighbor... who is a Hispanic male. This officer attempted to speak with Jason who was very shy and had to be coaxed to reply to questions. Jason related that Alan rides the bus sometimes and helps out the driver.

But police couldn't find a Head Start employee or volunteer who matched this description. They did question Elizabeth "Angel" Powell, a bus aide, because little Amy Williams named her, not Nancy, as being the one who took the children to "Joseph's" house. Powell, 25, wasn't very popular with the other bus drivers. Her flirting turned some of the men off, the women thought she dressed like a floozy. They also thought she was overly affectionate to the children -- bus drivers weren't supposed to hug and kiss the students. However, no charges were brought against Powell on the basis of the little girl's accusation. Powell would reappear at a crucial point in the trial.

Joseph Allen

Joseph Allen Walks into the Case

In October of 1993, six months after the investigation began, a black man named Joseph Allen walked into the Lorain police station to report a stolen vehicle.

Allen had pled guilty in 1985 to sexual battery on a young girl and served a three-year sentence. He claims that the girl's mother, who was angry with him for breaking off their relationship, framed him. Rosenbaum was the prosecutor in that case, and in pre-trial documents he filed in conjunction with it, he claimed that Allen had a prior robbery conviction. In fact, Rosenbaum had confused Joseph Allen with another man by the same name. There was no medical or physical evidence against Allen in the earlier battery case -- the girl had refused to submit to a medical exam. Allen says he pled "guilty" on his lawyer's advice: "I only know my attorney had me to sign some papers because he told me cases like them was hard to win." Guilty or innocent, Allen had the conviction on his record and Rosenbaum considered him to be a "sick, demented pervert."

Allen, an unskilled laborer originally from Alabama, was nearing 40. He lived in public housing and spent a lot of his time at the nearby Catholic Charities. "I didn't have any problem with the law until my car was stolen by these teenage runaways. From that moment on everything started going down hill. The police started following me everywhere I went."

Det. Joel Miller remembered the little boy who'd said someone named Alan had molested him. What if he was talking about Joseph Allen? Miller discarded the other details in the police report -- that Alan looked Hispanic and rode on the busses -- and focused on the name.

Allen was arrested on Nov. 3. "They told me that I was being charged (about) the teenager that had stolen my car." The teenager, a 15-year-old runaway, had claimed that Allen had offered her money for sex. "This is all a lie," Allen claims today. Since he was extremely poor, he says, he had no money to offer anyone.

Allen agreed to let the police search his home. He lived in a small cottage with no second floor and no basement, so his house didn't match the children's descriptions, because they spoke of going upstairs in "Joseph's" house or down to the basement. The police found items that they thought no bachelor should have: sheets decorated with cartoon characters, and toy cars and trucks. (Allen later explained that "I got those things from Catholic Community Services" for the children of his friends.)

The Lorain task force prepared a photo lineup that included Allen and pictures of five other black men. Their first stop was Margie Grover's house, where Nicole failed to spot Allen as "Joseph." On their next two stops, the children also failed to pick out Allen. In fact, of the 10 children shown the photos, nine children either picked no one or picked someone else. When a child identified someone other than Allen, the police questioned the choice: "Are you sure? Look carefully." For the children who failed, the police report adds an interpretative note: One child "was noted to stare at the pictures as if he was scared of something." Another child "appeared to be scared."

A few days later (the date isn't given in the police report), Margie Grover phoned Det. Andujar and told him that Nicole had, after all, recognized "Joseph" in the photo lineup. Nicole and her mother had initially described "Joseph" as being white, and previously had even pointed out a white man as a suspect. Joseph Allen has a dark complexion and could never be mistaken for a white man, but Grover brought Nicole into the station to positively identify Joseph Allen as being "Joseph." Smith's lawyer would later claim that Nicole's identification of Allen only happened after his picture had been published in the newspaper.

Lineup

Seven children were asked to come to the police station for a live lineup consisting of Allen and four other black men. Just as with the photo lineup, the police report notes that the children who did not pick Allen exhibited signs of fear or avoidance.

Little curly-haired William Oliphant paid three separate visits to the lineup room. His efforts were like a gullible passerby taken in by a street conjurer's feats with cups and balls, and raise the suspicion that he was being clumsily coached. On his first trip, Allen was in the No. 2 spot. William picked No.1 and No. 3, and after several "are you sures?" the session was ended. The investigators decided to give him another chance. But the men in the lineup had been shuffled around and Allen was now in the No. 4 position. William came into the room, and immediately picked No. 2, the position Allen had just vacated. This session also ended without William successfully picking out Allen.

A little while later, after Allen had been shuffled into the No. 3 spot, William was brought back in for another try. This time, William picked No. 4, the position Allen was in on the previous visit. He failed to spot Allen after a total of 12 tries.

During the lineups, Allen and the rest of the men in the room were required to remove their shirts. Some of the children had said that "Joseph" was a white man who painted himself black, or was a black man with white spots. Allen explained, "I have burns scarred on my stomach, when I was burned when I was a child." The police later claimed that these scars were the white spots the children were talking about.

Now that the police had found their "Joseph," they turned their attention back to Nancy Smith. On Nov. 5, she was arrested at her home and taken away in handcuffs in front of her children and her parents. At the arraignment a few days later, Head Start parents and Smith's supporters packed the courtroom, as a weeping Smith entered a plea of "not guilty."

"Child rapist!" came the cry from the parents' side of the courtroom.

"You'll rot in hell!" one of Smith's relatives shot back.

Margie Grover was on hand to tell the journalists some new allegations: Nancy Smith had picked her child up early and dropped her off late. Her daughter had come home with needle marks on her leg. "My daughter will have to go to counseling for the rest of her life!" she complained, and accused the school of marking her daughter "present" when she was really absent. At Joseph Allen's arraignment, Grover yelled and cursed at Allen until the judge ordered her out of the courtroom. "Everybody's going to pay for what they did," Grover warned. Smith's relatives suspected -- correctly as it turned out -- that Grover was paving the way to file a major civil suit against the school.

The Head Start parents came from working class and poor backgrounds. No one suggested that their economic status prevented them from being loving and caring parents. Wrong side of the tracks or not, they were entitled to have their children fully protected from molesters. On the other hand, Smith's family felt it was significant that most of the parents who accused Smith had been to the courthouse before -- convicted of drug dealing or drug possession or driving under the influence.Some of them had chaotic personal lives and money troubles that had also landed them in court.

The chief accuser, Margie Grover, had been convicted of distributing cocaine out of her home and had avoided prison by agreeing to testify against others. As a result, one of the men she testified against came to her house and attacked her. This information was kept from the jury in Smith and Allen's trial, who saw only a concerned mother, described as "a young, fashionable woman in a long print dress," not a mother who would expose her young child to the dangers of living in a house with drug dealers.

In the months leading up to the trial, two more children were brought to the police station by their mothers to report that Nancy and "Joseph" had victimized them. The children's' stories matched what the other children had been saying, and what the newspapers and television stations had been reporting: they'd been taken to "Joseph's" house by Nancy. One child added that he'd been threatened not to tell anyone or he would be killed.

Both of these claims were shown to be bogus. The police determined that one child did not attend Head Start when Nancy worked there, and the other had a different bus driver. Children's Services reported that one of the children was a neglected child whose father was a crack addict, and he'd been in foster care in the past.

The police had been given a first-hand demonstration of how children could say and believe things that were not true, and how parents could encourage their children to come forward as "Joseph's" victims -- but apparently this didn't give them second thoughts about their case against Smith and Allen.

The Trial

The trial was scheduled for May of 1994, but was postponed to July. The previous December, Smith's father suffered a stroke, and in June, her mother died from an aneurysm. Her relatives and friends banded together to raise money for her defense and hired Jack W. Bradley -- the same lawyer who, years before, had counseled Joseph Allen to plead "guilty" to sexual abuse. Allen got a court appointed lawyer, Joseph R. Grunda. Judge Lynett McGough refused Bradley's motion to try Allen, with his prior conviction, separately from Smith, who had no criminal record, saying that it would be wrong to put the children through the ordeal of testifying twice.

The coverage of the upcoming trial stressed the trauma to the children and parents. The children, explained the Morning Journal, "may have to face the terror of testifying against (Allen) in court, despite his alleged threats to kill them if they told about the abuse."

Smith and Allen went on trial on July 25, 1994, at the Lorain courthouse before Judge McGough and a jury. Bradley was incensed that the prosecution hadn't turned over its witness lists or other records until the last minute. The Morning Journal reported "high emotions" between Bradley and Rosenbaum as they "argued, interrupted each other and raised their voices during testimony."

Seven years after the trial, the incredulity and anger remained in Bradley's voice as he described the prosecution scenario. "(Nancy) supposedly would keep about five kids on the bus, not let them go to the school, and take them to this Joseph Allen's house during the afternoon, she and Joseph Allen would sexually abuse these kids, all afternoon -- tie a kid up in the front yard to a tree, poke them with needles, urinate on him, and get them all dressed and cleaned up and take them home -- drop them off at their parents." All this, by the way, while Smith was working her other job, driving a bus afternoons for the Meals on Wheels program.

In the end, four children testified in court that "Joseph" and Nancy had molested them. A fifth child, Amy Williams, was part of the investigation and participated in the lineup, but she had claimed that Angel Powell took her to "Joseph's" house, not Nancy. Amy did not testify, nor, inexplicably, did Smith's lawyer call any of the other children who rode the bus, or any of the parents who supported Smith.

Antonio Pena testified that he went to Allen's house three times, with three other children, where he was anally raped. (No medical evidence was presented at trial to support any of the sexual abuse the children claimed.) He said that when he refused to drink a cup of urine, Allen tied him to a tree and hit him with a rope.

When first questioned by Det. Cantu, Johnny Givens had described Nancy's boyfriend as white. He had initially denied that anyone had touched him or stuck a stick up his bottom, but at trial, he testified that he'd been sexually assaulted. He added that when Smith and Allen were finished with the children, he was taken back to school, where he told his teacher he'd been playing with toys, and Nancy would select other children to take to "Joseph."

"When I cross examined the children," Allen's attorney Jack Grunda later recalled, "I was able to get every child who took the stand to change their stories." Smith's attorney also found it easy to get the children to agree to whatever he suggested. Nicole said she was driven to Allen's house in a car, then when questioned by Bradley, said she went in a bus. She also shook her head "no" when Bradley asked her if either Smith or Allen had ever touched her. Johnny agreed that it was actually a different Head Start employee, not Smith, who took him to "Joseph's" house.

Under the laws of evidence in the State of Ohio, Bradley and Grunda weren't allowed to hear the tapes of the children's interviews until the cross-examination began. They both stayed up most of the night, listening to the tapes, and realized that the children had all changed their stories significantly over the course of the investigation. They asked Judge McGough for permission to play the tapes in court for the jury. The judge refused.

Several years after the trial, two experts in the field of child suggestibility reviewed transcripts of the interviews. Both experts agreed that the police had manipulated the children into making allegations against Smith and Allen. In the words of Melvin Guyer, a University of Michigan professor and one of the experts, "All of the interviews are outrageous, horrible, terrible.... There is a high incidence of suggestibility and inappropriate questioning. It's outrageous."

But the jury never heard the tapes. As Allen's lawyer Jack Grunda explained, they only heard what the children said on the stand -- and never realized that the children's stories had changed considerably since the investigation started.

Most of the children had failed to pick out Joseph Allen at the live lineup at the police station after he was arrested. At trial, Prosecutor Rosenbaum inverted this exculpatory evidence by deploying the Catch-22 logic of telling the jury that the children's failure to identify Allen was in fact proof that Allen was "Joseph." The reason they hadn't picked him out was because they were terrified. Had they all identified him, this of course would have been considered powerful evidence against Allen, as well.

To emphasize the message that the children were afraid of "Joseph," the jurors heard from William's mother, Emily Oliphant, who testified that when William saw Joseph Allen in the live lineup at the police station, he started crying and ran from the room. She also testified that he picked every other man in the lineup but Allen, thus implying that he recognized Allen but was too frightened to say so, "He went all around him. I mean every single time. He was brought into the room I believe three or four times. And... every single time, everybody but him." This is false, but the jury never knew that.

A videotape of the line up sessions shows William playing with the intercom and mimicking the police officers. He didn't run crying from the room, as his mother testified.

When little William Oliphant was involved in the lineup, he was still being regarded -- with the vigorous promotion of his parents -- as being one of "Joseph's" victims. According to Smith, however, William Oliphant was not on her bus route, and this may serve to explain why William did not testify at trial as a victim -- the prosecution would be hard pressed to explain how Smith had managed to sneak him away to "Joseph's" house when he did not even ride on her bus.

However, William was still one of the most important witnesses for the prosecution because he became a "linkage" witness. Smith and Allen both denied that they had ever met, let alone conspired together to hurt children. There was no physical evidence of the crimes and absolutely no evidence to show that the two co-accused had met before. At trial, young William testified that he'd seen Allen at the bus stop, thus providing crucial "linkage" testimony that placed Allen near Smith and her school bus. William's transformation from a victim to a "linkage" witness can be traced through his mother's statements in the police reports that were kept from the defense and the jury.

At the police station in November of 1993, looking at Joseph Allen in the photo lineup, Emily Oliphant said that she'd seen him the previous winter, lurking around the school busses:

Emily said (Allen) was standing by Nancy Smith's bus door, the day that she helped at Head Start. Emily said that she was holding William's hand walking to the bus and she had a very tight grip on William's hand. Emily stated that (Allen) was standing along side of the open door of Nancy's bus and when she approached the bus with William, William pulled his hand away from Emily and he ran and got on (another) bus, the bus in front of Nancy's. Emily said that William was in death fear of the suspect standing by the door of Nancy Smith's bus. Emily said that William said "I'm not going back to Nancy's bus until that stranger leaves."

The next variation on Emily Oliphant's story came when she identified Allen at the live lineup, Oliphant elaborated on her story -- she had actually spoken to Joseph Allen:

.....Emily stated that her son William had broken free of her grasp and ran to (another) bus on seeing Allen. Stated that at that time she told participant No. 2, Mr. Allen, to stay away from her son.

At trial, Emily Oliphant told another variation of her encounter with Joseph Allen. Gone was the part about walking hand-in-hand with her son. She testified that she'd been on another bus, working as an aide and had sent William out on the sidewalk to go to his bus. But William had come back, crying and complaining that "Joseph" had grabbed his arm. She then went out and confronted Allen and warned him to stay away.

A crucial difference between this version and the earlier versions -- where the mere sight of Allen frightened William -- is that in the trial version, Allen hurt William by grabbing his arm. In the earlier versions, William was reacting in fear to the mere sight of Allen, presumably because he'd been secretly taken to "Joseph's" house. But since William was not presented at trial as being one Smith and Allen's victims, there was no reason why the mere sight of him, should terrify William. But having his arm grabbed could explain it.

At trial, Oliphant testified that her son told her at the time, "Joseph grabbed me." In other words, her son identified "Joseph" to her in the winter of 1992 by name, then she went out and spoke to him. Four months later, when Margie Grover was phoning Head Start parents and warning them that a molester named "Joseph" was on the loose, Emily Oliphant went to the police and spoke to Det. Cantu about her fears that "Joseph" had molested her son. At that time, (May 1993), she said that her son told her "Joseph" was a white man. Although everyone in town was looking for "Joseph," for six months, Emily Oliphant didn't mention the day she allegedly talked to him, until he was in custody.

Other Linkage Witnesses

"Just say yes, this is the guy you saw in the picture, and if I ask you to point him out, can you do that?" Prosecutor Rosenbaum hissed at the startled witness outside the courtroom. Kathy Cole, a Head Start employee, had just told him that she was not really certain if Joseph Allen, the man on trial, was the same black man she had seen at the Head Start schoolyard. According to affidavits later filed by Cole and another woman who witnessed Rosenbaum's intimidation tactics, Rosenbaum added: "God damn it, you will answer the way I want you to answer. Is that understood?" Cole's testimony, nonetheless, was equivocal -- she couldn't be certain that the strange man she'd seen at the schoolyard was Joseph Allen.

But fortunately for Rosenbaum's case, another Head Start employee provided the final, damning link in the chain -- Elizabeth "Angel" Powell.

Powell testified that one day she'd been working on Smith's bus and Smith had briefly parked the vehicle to run into a store to get some soda pop. Suddenly, she claimed, Joseph Allen, muttering, "Nancy, Nancy," under his breath, tried to climb on board. She chased him off with a tire iron. She then saw Allen go into the store and emerge arm-in-arm with Smith. As Powell delivered this testimony, the newspaper reported, Smith's jaw dropped in horror and disbelief.

The next day, a Head Start parent contacted the defense team and was speedily put on the stand as a rebuttal witness to Powell. He testified that he recognized the incident Powell had described in court and it was he, not Allen, whom Powell had chased off the bus. He had jumped on board the bus to talk to his son, but apparently had startled Powell, who shooed him away. He had then sought out Smith to explain and apologize for alarming Powell.

To further undermine Powell's testimony, Smith's lawyer elicited in his cross-examination that she too had failed to pick Allen out of a police lineup. Powell stuck to her identification of Allen, however, saying "Today, when I saw him, I was sure of it. I would stake my life on it."

The jury also heard from Det. Joel Miller, who testified that the children had identified items seized from Allen's house -- a magazine with a picture of a man blowing another man's head off, a pink dress, a belt, a Halloween mask, and some toy cars and children's sheets.

Rosenbaum questioned Miller whether the children had described the items before they were shown them. Here, Miller testifies that Antonio described a picture in a book:

Q. Did he say anything else about the book before looking at it?

A. He said it had a gun in the book.

Q. Did he say anything other than -- describe it more than just having a gun, or was that it?

A. He said the picture showed of shooting his eye out.

Q. And that was before Antonio Pena was permitted to look at that book?

A. Yes.

But the police report, kept from the jury and the defense, tells a different story:

Antonio said that Joseph was holding a gun in the book. Antonio said that Joseph's gun looked like a cowboy gun. Antonio was asked what else was on the page with the gun and Antonio said a man. Antonio was then showed a picture that was in the book. Antonio said that Joseph showed him this picture and he said that he's shooting his eye out. This picture is a man lying dead on the floor, with his brains blown out, with a shotgun.

This is how William Oliphant was shown the picture, from the police report:

William was asked if there were any pictures of guns in the book and he said yes. William said that the picture of the man, the gun was shooting. William was shown the picture of the man shot in the magazine and William said that was the picture.

This is how Nicole was asked about the picture, from the police report:

Nicole was asked if "Joseph" ever showed her any magazines. Nicole was shown the mentioned picture of the gun and the dead man.

This is Miller's testimony:

Q. Did any other kids describe a violent picture of some sort?

A. Yes.

Q. Who?

A. Nicole Grover, William Oliphant and (a girl who did not testify).

Q. Did any of them do that prior to seeing the magazine?

A. They identified the picture before seeing the magazine.

The Defense's Turn

Nancy Smith took the stand in her own defense. The pent-up anguish of the past months poured out of her as she sobbed, "I have never touched any of those children in a sexual manner at all.... I'm sorry, but this has ruined my life... and to be accused of this is terrible, because I am a mother."

Her lawyer argued that a molester driving a school bus where it shouldn't be would be pretty easy to spot: "She's going to take a bunch of kids in a plainly marked bus -- and nobody ever said, 'Oh yeah, we would see the school bus parked by Joseph Allen's' house. Not one person came in and ever said they'd ever seen any kids getting out of any bus, going over to Joseph Allen's house."

In fact, the prosecution argued that Smith and Allen's secret molesting hideout must have been somewhere else and not in Allen's home. Children were driven around the neighborhood of the Head Start school and they pointed out various homes during the investigation, but in the end, police were not able to find a home that matched the various conflicting descriptions. "I don't have no place else," Allen insists. "I could barely keep what I got."

Smith's lawyer also called Head Start officials to testify as to their safety procedures. And according to their testimony, Head Start officials ran a safety-conscious school. Bus arrival and departures and odometer readings were logged each day. The bus drivers logged themselves in and out with punch cards. Most of the time, there was an aide on the bus. Attendance was taken daily and families were phoned if a child was absent. Furthermore, a would-be molester could never count on being alone with a child -- parents were encouraged to ride the bus at any time, and to drop in on the classes unannounced. The children were always escorted on and off the bus, and to their classrooms.

One of Smith's bus aides later filed an affidavit stating that she was with Smith on her bus route every day from January to March and only missed one day of work, that nothing unusual had happened, and that she never saw Joseph Allen. She wasn't called to testify. Other character witnesses who wanted to testify on Smith's behalf, such as her boyfriend, were never called. The defense didn't call an expert to testify about how children's testimony could be contaminated by suggestive questioning.

Smith and Allen had the uphill task of proving that they had never met one another. It was true, but how can you prove you've never met someone? They were supposed to have molested children in a secret hiding place no one had ever found. They were not given specific dates when the abuse supposedly occurred, so they could not establish alibis. It was enough to suggest, as Rosenbaum did to the Head Start bus supervisor, that he didn't know where his busses were all the time. It was enough to suggest, as Rosenbaum did to Nancy Smith, that it would be possible to sneak a child away with no-one noticing. It was enough to suggest, as Rosenbaum did to Head Start officials, that they had a good motive for covering up the crime and maybe even altering their records, because they stood to be sued for millions by the angry parents.

Joseph Allen didn't take the witness stand. His prior record as a convicted child molester spoke heavily against him, but the only reason he was dragged into the case was because of the allegations against Smith that had started with Margie Grover. If the allegations against the bus driver were not true, then none of the story was true. Smith's presumption of innocence, on the other hand, was tarnished by Allen's record.

Rosenbaum described Allen as a "jackal" who preyed on innocent children. In his closing arguments, Rosenbaum asked the jury to discount any inconsistencies or contradictions in the children's testimony: "What you saw was humiliated and scarred children, who sometimes told the truth and sometimes lied, but you can tell the difference."

The Verdict

On Aug. 4, 1994, after six-and-a-half hours of deliberation, the jury declared Smith and Allen guilty. "I don't think (the children) could have gone into detail like that if they were lying," explained one juror. Bradley reflected, "I felt that we had shot down every single allegation and the kids did not come off very well on the witness stand and yet, the jury came back guilty."

"I have never met this man," Smith wailed as the jury was polled to confirm that their verdict against her was unanimous. "I have never seen this man. I never touched those children. Ever! I didn't touch those children and (the prosecutor) knows I didn't touch those children. Oh, my God."

Asked to comment on Smith's reaction, Rosenbaum snapped, "I didn't see one tear," despite the fact that Smith had sobbed on the witness stand.

Smith was sentenced to 30 to 90 years in prison and was ordered to pay the costs of prosecution. Allen received five consecutive life sentences. (In comparison, convicted Atlanta child murderer Wayne Williams received two life sentences.) Allen reacted stoically to the news. Smith was shattered.

Smith's sisters cared for Smith's four teenage children. Each of her children swore affidavits for her appeal. Her oldest daughter wrote, "Like my siblings, I believe the only children abused by the events leading to my mother's conviction were her own four children. We love her, miss her and need her in our lives."

After the Trial

The trial and the harsh sentences caught the attention of retired Lorain resident Raymond Kandt, who wrote a number of letters to the editor after the trial, poking holes in Prosecutor Rosenbaum's case. He wrote that Rosenbaum used innuendo, not facts, to cast doubt on the reliability of Head Start records:

During and after that trial, Chief Assistant County Prosecutor Jonathan Rosenbaum implied that the personnel of Head Start not only lied in their testimony but that they also altered the attendance records of the children involved as well as the records of bus driver Nancy Smith's itinerary...these would be serious charges, if any charges had been made...

But, as Kandt pointed out, no Head Start official was charged with falsifying records, "because if Rosenbaum had charged the people at Head Start with these crimes he would have had to prove these charges."

On the other hand, Kandt added, if the attendance records and the bus mileage records were reliable, then the case against Nancy Smith evaporated. For example, "the school records showed that the children were not absent from school on the same day, even though they testified to going to "Joseph's" house together on several occasions."

Kandt is also scornful of the idea that a molester would have revealed his identity to the children. "Picture this. Nancy stops her bus in front of the mysterious residence of Joseph Allen and hustles three or four children inside. Joseph greets them -- 'Hello, kiddies. My name is Joseph Allen and I will be your abuser for today.' Ridiculous!"

A Reporter Challenges Rosenbaum -- and Gets Sued

Two years after Smith and Joseph Allen went to prison, Paul Facinelli, a columnist for the Chronicle Telegram, decided to take another look at the case. There was something about the whole thing that bothered him. "To believe that this happened," he recalls, "you have to believe that Nancy picked up 25 kids, dropped off 21 of them at the Head Start and somehow got these other four kids in a 30-foot-long yellow school bus to a site undetermined, where she and Joseph Allen did unspeakable things to them without anybody seeing them over the six-month period. Despite all this horrendous abuse that was alleged, no parents, to my knowledge saw anything -- there was no bruising, no blood in the panties or anything. The kids told the police about how "Joseph" peed on them and they had to eat urine laced cookies, but there were no reports of any nausea, no foul odors, nothing."

When Facinelli asked Rosenbaum about Det. Tom Cantu's conclusions that there was no case against Nancy Smith and that "Joseph" appeared to be imaginary, Rosenbaum disparaged Cantu's work, saying that he wasn't "the brightest guy around." Facinelli then obtained Cantu's evaluations for 1992 and 1993, and reported that Cantu had received "exceptional" job performance ratings "from three different evaluators."

Facinelli also obtained a videotape and the written police reports of the police lineup with Joseph Allen and the children. He realized that what was going on in the videotape didn't match the police reports, such as the fact that contrary to his mother's trial testimony, William Oliphant did not appear terrified. According to the police reports, Nicole was also "frightened" while looking at the lineup, but after reassurance, she identified Joseph Allen as "Joseph:"

…the participants were asked to step forward and then backward in numerical order.... Nicole had initially identified Joseph as participant No. 3, Mr. Ward. Nicole then identified Joseph as participant No. 2, Mr. Allen. Appeared frightened during the proceedings and had to be reaffirmed that none of the participants could harm her.

What the police report does not say, but the videotape reveals, wrote Facinelli, is that Nicole was "given numerous chances" to choose Allen. "Detectives coaxed and prodded her." Nicole chose Allen in the No. 2 position after the detective asked if there was anyone she wanted to get a closer look at, and her mother, who was holding Nicole in her arms at the time, said "No. 2."

Facinelli also records that Grover "herself pointed to Allen, corrected her daughter in order to draw the child's attention toward Allen, and took her daughter's wrist and directed the child's extended index finger."

None of this is mentioned in the police report.

Facinelli also discovered that in the months leading up to the trial, the Lorain Drug Task Force was investigating a dentist for writing illegal prescriptions for painkillers. The woman he was writing them for was the state's star witness, Emily Oliphant. After Smith and Allen's trial was concluded, the dentist was arrested. Oliphant herself was never charged with anything and moved to Idaho with her family. She claimed that she only met with Rosenbaum to discuss the illegal drugs after the Smith trial, not before. But her law breaking made her susceptible to the prosecutor's manipulation as a witness for the state. In addition, her drug use may have impaired her judgment.

Lorain County Prosecutor Greg White complained that the Facinelli's investigative bombshells unfairly targeted him in the middle of his re-election campaign. (Despite the controversial Chronicle Telegram investigation, White was returned for his fifth term as prosecutor.) Rosenbaum responded to Facinelli's hard-hitting revelations by bringing a libel suit. Judge Richard M. Markus, who ruled that Rosenbaum had not even specified what, if anything, was incorrect about Facinelli's work, dismissed his lawsuit in 2001. "Despite the court's repeated requests," Markus wrote, "(Rosenbaum) persistently declined to quote the exact language in each publication that he claimed is defamatory." Evidently Rosenbaum believes that the courts can be in error sometimes, because he has appealed Markus' verdict to a higher court. He has expressed no doubt about the guilt of Smith and Allen, and declined to be interviewed for this article.

The Appeals

The defense lawyers used the way the children had been repeatedly and suggestively questioned as a main plank in their appeal in November of 1995. They pointed to the Kelly Michaels case in New Jersey, where Michaels, a young daycare worker, had just had her conviction for child molestation overturned because of the way the children had been badgered, coaxed, and cajoled to say that she'd done bad things to them. (http://crimemagazine.com/nightmare-day-care-wee-care-case)

The Ohio Supreme Court ruled, in effect, that New Jersey could do as it pleased -- but New Jersey had nothing to do with the course of justice in the Buckeye State. The appeal was denied.

The Civil Suit

The parents of Nicole Grover, Amy Williams, Johnny Givens, and Antonio Pena sued the Head Start school for $20 million in damages after Smith and Allen were convicted. The civil suit has yet to be settled, but lawyers for the Head Start Agency have turned up more exculpatory evidence that chipped away at the credibility of another "linkage" witness.

The attorneys obtained a police tape recording of an interview with Angel Powell, the Head Start aide whose testimony at trial provided the devastating link between Allen and Smith. The lawyers attempted to question Powell about it, saying that the tape proved that she was aware that the man who boarded the bus identified himself as a Head Start parent -- but Powell refused to answer the questions. At one point, she stuck her fingers in her ears, chanting "la, la, la, la" and ran out of the interview room.

Rosenbaum Resigns

In the following years, Rosenbaum was embroiled in further controversy, in cases having to do with sex. He and White prosecuted a woman for taking photos of her young daughter in the bathtub. The case was settled out of court after drawing national notoriety. In another case, a doctor accused of sexual misconduct won a dismissal of the charges against him, when it was discovered that the patients who accused him had "recovered" their memories of being molested "in dreams." The doctor's attorney filed a formal complaint against Rosenbaum, for withholding this crucial exculpatory evidence from the defense. (Rosenbaum was cleared of wrongdoing.)

Shortly afterwards, in February 2000, Rosenbaum resigned from the prosecutor's office, but later returned to work part time. Two years later, White suddenly demanded Rosenbaum's resignation. "I have not agreed with the direction the office has and is taking on certain issues for quite some time," Rosenbaum responded. The exact reason for the rift remains mysterious. "I hope Mr. Rosenbaum finds his peace," was all White would say.

Legal Limbo

For Smith, the devastating heartache continued when her appeal lawyer, James D. Owen, missed a crucial filing deadline for appealing her case to the federal courts. Smith says that she repeatedly called him to confirm he was filing the appeal and that he had assured her everything was taken care of. But she said he never responded to her requests for a copy of the legal papers. Her friend Marty Yant, a journalist and private investigator, finally checked with the court registry and discovered that no appeal had been filed. When Smith confronted Owen, he denied that he had ever agreed to represent her in federal court and produced a copy of a letter saying as much, which he claimed to have sent to her months ago.

Smith and Allen's case represents one of the most blatant miscarriages of justice that the sexual-abuse hysteria wave produced. Their case is stalled now -- without money, without resources, and with few remaining legal avenues available. Two people who never even knew each other have been incarcerated for the remainder of their natural lives for crimes that never occurred in the first place. The prosecutor behind the wrongful convictions, Greg White, is currently being considered by the Bush administration for an appointment to be U.S. District Attorney for Northern Ohio.

Parole Denied

After almost thirteen years in prison, Nancy Smith became eligible to apply for parole.

Her bid for parole was rejected on February 20, 2007.

Nancy reportedly received 87 letters in support of her application and one opposed. But that one letter of opposition was from the current Lorain County prosecutor, Dennis Will, who says he believes Nancy should serve her full 90 year sentence.

Nancy's situation is complicated by the fact that she does not admit guilt for the crimes, so she cannot express remorse. She has refused to participate in sex offender treatment programs. A parole board member who interviewed her reportedly said that Nancy was "in denial."

The Ohio Innocence Project, a university-based program using law students, is preparing a pardon/clemency application to Ohio's governor.

Her next parole date is March 2009.

Donations to Nancy Smith and her co-accused Joseph Allen's legal fund can be made through the National Center for Reason and Justice (www.ncrj.org).

For more information on the ritual abuse panic:

The author, Lona Manning's site, "Imaginary Crimes": http://members.shaw.ca/imaginarycrimes/
Dorothy Rabinowitz's series on the Amirault/Fells Acres Case, "A Darkness in Massachusetts": http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=95000779
The Bobby Fijnje story: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/terror/cases/fijnje.html
The Kern County nightmare -- children coerced into accusing their parents and other adults: http://www.edwardhumes.com/books/mean/index.shtml#witchhunt
Seattle Post Intelligencer Series on the Discredited Sex Ring Investigation in Wenatchee, Washington: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/powertoharm/context.html

Topics:

Innocence Cases

Investigative Reporting

Authors:

Lona Manning