Kansas: Butler County judge sets $250,000 bond in Carol Mould homicide

JUDGE FEARS SUSPECT COULD POSE THREAT TO SELF, FAMILY
Butler County judge sets $250,000 bond in Carol Mould homicide
BY TIM POTTER
The Wichita Eagle
Saturday, May 23, 2009

EL DORADO - William "Bill" Wherry Moore -- a former Cub Scout and Boy Scout leader and Benton-area youth-sports coach -- looked distressed as he sat in shackles Friday and a judge read the charge against him: Premeditated murder in the first degree in the September 2004 killing of Carol Mould, a 43-year-old wife and mother of three.

The prosecutor, Butler County Attorney Jan Satterfield, told District Judge John Sanders that she was requesting that Moore remain in jail under a $250,000 bond because of the nature of the charge and concern that he could pose a threat to himself and others, including his wife.
Satterfield said Moore -- a 55-year-old aircraft worker (Cessna), according to a jail booking sheet -- has no criminal history.

Sanders set Moore's bond at $250,000 and appointed a public defender for him. Sanders said he was aware that Moore's "mental state" has been a concern but didn't elaborate.

On Sept. 22, 2004, authorities responding to a report of a fire found Mould's badly burned body in her Benton-area home off K-254. Authorities have not said how she died but have said her body was set on fire after she was killed. The fire didn't destroy the house.

The Mould house sits a couple miles from Moore's rural Benton home. Butler County Sheriff Craig Murphy announced that early that morning his investigators arrested Moore in Mould's killing.

Moore's wife, Tammy, said, "You can print that my husband is having a nervous breakdown, and he does not know what he is saying. My husband is not a murderer."

Neither Murphy nor Satterfield said what prompted the arrest.

After Moore's court appearance Friday, Mould's husband, Doug, said he wanted to thank investigators for "working extraordinarily hard in trying to solve Carol's case."
He also thanked Circle school district staff for supporting his children...

Shooting deaths of Oklahoma girls remain a mystery one year later

By Emanuella Grinberg

CNN
June 8, 2009

(CNN) -- William Whitaker is certain that somebody in the central Oklahoman community where he lives knows who killed his daughter.

The dirt road where the bodies of 11-year-old Skyla Jade Whitaker and Taylor Paschal-Placker, 13, were found is too remote for the killings to be the work of a stranger passing through, he says.

"There's absolutely no way that somebody from out of the area could've just stumbled upon the place," Whitaker said. "I know whoever did it told somebody, whether they were drinking or bragging or whatever, and whoever knows just needs to bring the information forward."

It has been a year since the two friends were shot multiple times in the stomach and chest less than a half a mile from Taylor's home in the rural community of Weleetka, with a population just over 1,000.

"Taylor was shot five times. My daughter was shot eight times. Thirteen shots between two little girls who never did anything to anyone," Whitaker said. "I don't know how a person can go to work, eat or sleep knowing what they did. I couldn't live with that on my conscience, but they've been doing it for a year now."

In the beginning, hundreds of tips poured in. Authorities pursued leads and analyzed evidence, but a year later, they have no suspects or witnesses leading them to any viable conclusions.
Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation spokesperson Jessica Brown said during a press conference Monday that authorities have "good evidence" in the case but lack the final piece to make an arrest...

"What we are frustrated about is the lack of cooperation we're getting from members of the public," Brown said. She stressed Monday that a $36,000 reward is being offered for information that leads to a conviction.

The girls were shot with two different guns, leading to the possibility that two people were involved, Brown said. The OSBI released a sketch of a person wanted for questioning last year, but they have not received information leading to him, she said.

But the killings remain fresh in the minds of Oklahomans. A billboard with the girls' faces and a tip hotline has loomed over Interstate 40 for several months. A memorial service was planned for Monday, June 4, in Weleetka to mark the anniversary...

Weleetka Police Officer Stacey Rice will never forget the image of the dead girls. He was the second officer on the scene after a relative called 911 around 5:30 p.m. that day.

"I really hope I never see anything like that again. It's just emotionally and visually traumatic. You see two small children lying on the ground like that and it's kind of hard to explain. Makes you want to go find your children," said Rice, a father of two teenage boys.

"It took me several minutes to realize what happened, but after a while, it kind of sank in, and that's when emotions started running ... anger, lots of anger, sadness, disbelief. Nobody wanted to believe what had happened."...

Whitaker finds solace in visiting the memorial site set up at the crime scene, where people leave bouquets of flowers, stuffed animals, cards and other mementos. The most recent addition to the site is an 8-foot cross donated by members of the community. stuff people

"I just get a feeling whenever I'm there. It's real quiet out there, and I see the brought and it's kind of comforting, it really is. I know she's in a better place right now, she don't feel sickness, don't feel pain. She's in a better place, and it's my way of remembering."

The Fritzl fiasco

Writen by Stephanie Marsh

The Times

BBC.news.

June 9, 2009

Elisabeth Fritzl and her children could have been freed years earlier if Austrian authorities had not missed dozens of clues, writes Stephanie Marsh, author of a new book on the man who held his daughter in a dungeon for a quarter of a century...

Josef Fritzl is ruthless, and an accomplished liar, but he is also a clumsy operator, a man who, by the time he had reached his mid-40s, had been arrested twice for arson, twice more for sex offences, and jailed once for the rape of a woman at knifepoint.

And though the Austrian authorities have always insisted that they bear no responsibility for Josef Fritzl's 24-year incarceration of his daughter, Elisabeth, evidence...suggests that this often flagrant criminal left a staggering number of clues in his wake - clues that were repeatedly ignored by social workers, the police and the judiciary.

In August 1984, four months after her 18th birthday, Elisabeth disappeared. She vanished at some point around lunch-time. She was living at home in the family house in Amstetten at the time and, except for her father, the house was empty. Her mother and one of her sisters were out shopping, another sister had been sent out by Fritzl for a walk.

By the time they returned, Elisabeth was gone. It was Josef Fritzl who, the next day, would report Elisabeth's disappearance to the police, hinting, without a shred of evidence to back up his claim, that she had joined "a cult".

Notwithstanding the fact that were no cults to speak of in Austria either now or at the time, there were other factors that might have alerted the police's suspicions.

Although Fritzl's conviction for rape had by this stage been wiped from his criminal record (by Austrian law sex offences were then automatically deleted from police files after a period of 10 to 15 years), it was commonly known in the tight-knit community that he was a convicted rapist. His arrests for arson were still on record but he nevertheless legally owned two guns: a Bernadelli pistol and a rifle.

It was also known to social workers that Elisabeth had run away from home two years previously. On her return to Amstetten, however, they had chosen to discuss the matter only with her father, though Elisabeth was in the room at the time.

Additionally, some of her friends suspected Elisabeth of self-harming - another obvious outward sign of abuse - but social workers simply accepted Josef Fritzl's account.

We now know that what in fact happened on that August afternoon in 1984. Josef Fritzl had locked his daughter into a specially prepared dungeon in his cellar. About a month into her incarceration, he forced her to write a letter which he then posted to himself and showed the police.

Again the authorities accepted everything Fritzl told them at face value. The letter was never examined by a relevant expert, despite the fact that Austria's expert on fringe religions actually lived in Amstetten (he would eventually be shown all Elisabeth's letters only in 2008, declaring them obvious fakes).

In 1993, nine years after Elisabeth disappeared, the first of three babies appeared on the Fritzl's doorstep. The precise details of these "discoveries" are particularly disturbing. The child was abandoned in a cardboard box along with a letter from Elisabeth. However, in a nonsensical piece of bureaucratic logic it was decided that there would be no official search for Elisabeth because she was an adult and could "go where she liked."

Just over a year later there was a second child, this time found abandoned on the doorstep in a pram. It was Rosemarie Fritzl who discovered this second child and it was she who then described what had happened to a social worker.

She said shortly before midnight she had heard the sound of a baby crying outside the house. She discovered the child on the doorstep and returned inside with it in her arms. Suddenly the telephone began to ring. On the other end of the line a woman, claiming to be Elisabeth, was apologising for having abandoned her child. It was obviously a taped message: Rosemarie Fritzl hung up, but the phone immediately began to ring again: when she picked up the same message was played down the receiver.

What was particularly mysterious to Mrs Fritzl, she told the social worker, was the fact that she and her husband had recently changed their home telephone number and this number was not yet known to anyone else.

Although the case of the two abandoned foundlings was unusual enough to attract the attention of the national press, nothing about this chain of events seems to have caused much concern among the authorities.

At Josef Fritzl's suggestion, one of the letters was examined by a graphologist who, of course, declared himself to be satisfied that it had indeed been written by Elisabeth Fritzl.

The fact that her letters never made any mention of a cult, and that, in later years, at least one letter would bear a post-mark from a town very close to Amstetten, in which Josef Fritzl was known to own a house, still did nothing to alert social workers or the police.

A third child would appear on the Fritzl's doorstep in 1997. He, too, would be taken in and raised by his "grandparents".

Time passed. Josef Fritzl spent more and more time in the cellar but nobody questioned his increasingly unusual behaviour. He was living apart from his wife, in a separate flat within the house in Amstetten, and he would often spend the night in the cellar, claiming he was away on a business trips.

Lodgers saw him bring bags of groceries into the cellar, as well as building material, appliances, and furniture: bed frames, mattresses, a shower unit, a washing machine. Things were constantly disappearing into the cellar and never coming out.

In late March 2008, Elisabeth Fritzl's oldest child, Kerstin, became desperately ill in the cellar and her father decided to evacuate her. Had it not been for the suspicions of one of the doctors treating Kerstin in hospital, it is more than likely the case would never have come to light.

The Austrians have prided themselves on their discreet handling of the case, but there has been no inquiry, no admission of failure on behalf of the police, social workers, or the government.
The Austrian media, for their part, have been side-tracked into a largely peripheral debate about press intrusion.

And, although it is true that the British paparazzi, in particular resorted to desperate and underhand tactics to get the first pictures of Elisabeth Fritzl and her children, many sections of the Austrian press showed no compunction in either publishing Josef Fritzl's confidential psychiatric report before his case came to trial, or printing many of the intimate details of Elisabeth Fritzl's ordeal when they were first leaked to an Austrian magazine. So much for privacy.

Meanwhile, serious questions regarding the competence, gullibility and accountability of the Austrian authorities have gone unanswered.

New York bouncer Darryl Littlejohn found guilty in 2006 slaying of student Imette St. Guillen

From Chris Kokenes

CNN
Thursday, June 4, 2009

NEW YORK (CNN) -- A Manhattan nightclub bouncer was found guilty of murder Wednesday in the slaying of a 24-year-old graduate student from Boston, Massachusetts, the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office said.

Darryl Littlejohn, 44, could be sentenced to a maximum of life in prison for the death of grad student Imette St. Guillen in 2006.

Darryl Littlejohn, 44, could be sentenced to a maximum of life in prison without the possibility of parole for the death of Imette St. Guillen, a criminology student at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Sentencing is scheduled for July 8.

"We're going to appeal," Littlejohn's lawyer, Joyce David, told CNN after the conviction. "We're disappointed. I'm hoping this gives the family of the victim some closure. But I think that the wrong man was convicted."

.

The verdict came several hours into the first day of deliberations by the jury. Before the verdict, David stressed to CNN that she believed in the innocence of her client, saying that Littlejohn was framed and that another person was a likely suspect.

"He was a convenient scapegoat who has a long criminal record," David said.

FindLaw: Read the indictment

During the trial, witnesses said they saw Littlejohn and St. Guillen leaving The Falls bar in lower Manhattan together early on February 25, 2006. Hours later, St. Guillen's nude body was found in an isolated lot in Brooklyn.

Her face was covered with strips of packing tape, and a sock was stuffed in her throat. She died of asphyxiation. Investigators determined she had been raped.
Littlejohn was charged with murder after investigators linked his DNA to blood found on plastic ties used to bind St. Guillen's hands behind her back.

Littlejohn is already serving a term of 25 years to life for the October 2005 kidnapping of a 19-year-old college student in Queens. (She saved herself by hurling herself out of his van with plastic cuff ties around her wrists that also matched those on Imette, and ones found at Littlejohns home.)

.

This guy doesn't deserve to draw air. What's the worst prison in New York State? That's where he needs to exist.

40 years after Manson murders, Susan Atkins makes a bid for parole

Carey Bodenheimer

CNN.com
June 5, 2009

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- The woman who stabbed pregnant actress Sharon Tate to death will be considered for parole from prison a month after the 40th anniversary of the killings that cast a shadow of fear over southern California.

Susan Atkins, 61, has been denied parole in 17 previous hearings, but the former "Manson Family" member now is terminally ill with brain cancer and is paralyzed.

Charles Manson used his hypnotic powers to direct Atkins and other "family" members to kill seven people, including the pregnant Tate, in a two-night rampage that terrorized the city of Los Angeles, California, in August 1969.

Atkins -- who was initially sentenced to death along with Manson and three others -- will have her 18th parole hearing on September 2, according to a spokesman with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

In July of last year, Atkins -- California's longest-serving female inmate -- was denied a compassionate release in a unanimous decision by the California Board of Parole Hearings.
She has repeatedly been described as a model prisoner who has accepted responsibility for her role in the slayings, and she now shuns Manson.

By her own admission, Atkins held Tate down as she pleaded for mercy and stabbed the pregnant woman 16 times. In a 1993 parole board hearing, Atkins said Tate "asked me to let her baby live. ... I told her I didn't have any mercy on her."

After stabbing Tate to death, according to historical accounts of the murders, Atkins scrawled the word "pig" in blood on the door of the home Tate shared with her husband, director Roman Polanski. Polanski was not home at the time, but three of Tate's house guests were also slain by the killers, as was a teenager who was visiting the home's caretaker in his nearby cottage.

A Web site maintained by her husband and attorney, James Whitehouse, says Atkins is now paralyzed over 85 percent of her body and cannot sit up in bed or even be moved into a wheelchair.

However, despite her declining condition and her impressive prison record, the site says, "there is still a very real chance the Parole Board will nonetheless insist her release would be a danger to society."

Atkins' compassionate release was opposed by Tate's sister, Debra, Los Angeles County prosecutors and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, among others. However, the former prosecutor who won her conviction, Vincent Bugliosi, said he supports Atkins' request for release.

"She has paid substantially, though not completely, for her horrendous crimes," Bugliosi told the Los Angeles Times last year. "Paying completely would mean imposing the death penalty."
Bugliosi is the author of several books on the Manson case, including "Helter Skelter."

Debra Tate told CNN in an e-mail in March that she does not believe any Manson family member convicted of murder should ever be set free, saying the slayings were "so vicious, so inhumane, so depraved, that there is no turning back."

"The 'Manson Family' murderers are sociopaths, and from that, they can never be rehabilitated," Debra Tate said. "They should all stay right where they are -- in prison -- until they die. There will never be true justice for my sister Sharon and the other victims of the 'Manson Family.' Keeping the murderers in prison is the least we, as a society who values justice, can do."

In a manuscript posted on her Web site, Atkins, who was known within the Manson family as Sadie Mae Glutz, wrote that "this is the past I have to live with, and I have to live with it every day."

"Unlike the reader, or the people who seem to think Charles Manson was cool, I can't think about it for an hour or so and then go on with my life. Just like the families and friends of the victims, this is with me every day. I have to wake up every day with this and no matter what I do for the rest of my life and no matter how much I give back to the community I will never be able to replace what my crime took away. And that's not 'neat,' and that's not 'cool.'"

Atkins was housed in the California Institution for Women at Frontera until May 2008, when her declining health caused her to be moved to Central California Women's Facility at Chowchilla.
Manson and those convicted along with him in the murders -- Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten and Charles "Tex" Watson -- have been in California prisons for more than three decades.

All were initially sentenced to death, only to have their sentences commuted to life in prison when the Supreme Court struck down death penalty laws in 1972, establishing a four-year moratorium on executions. Van Houten was released for six months after her conviction was overturned, but was reconvicted.