September 26, 2003
Motivations
Hey, you can't say no to the almighty, so go ahead - be like the woman who starved her 11-month-old son to death because god told you to. Alternatively, you can always emulate this man who used his interpretation of the bible to justify raping teenage girls. Alternatively, if you want to be a supervillian, you can join an Islamic cult whose leader says he can kill people just by looking at them and that he's invulnerable. If you think that's hard to believe, then consider the police officer who "downplayed the idea that the dead cats carry any religious connotation" after dismembered cat limbs, paws, and heads were used to form a pentagram and other symbols on a gravesite.
Stupefaction has the utmost respect for the police and the criminal justice system, but comments like that - and that Georgia officers "believe foul play was involved" when two bound and gagged bodies were found dead in a house that burned down aren't helping their image. Perhaps these are media distortions, but when a man killed his family and himself one day after being arrested on domestic violence charges (he was out on relatively low bail due to his work record as a prison guard), well, then that's pretty clearly a shortcoming in the system.
Two Kentucky kids who beat an elderly man to death and stuffed him in his attic couldn't have left more clues without wearing t-shirts saying "We did it!" Not only did they steal his debit card and use the money they got from it to buy crack, but they also tried to dispose of all of the bloodstained towels and clothes involved in the murder, which the police easily recovered. Only slightly less stupid is another Kentucky pair (this time a husband and wife) who downloaded child pornography on the computers they rented from Rent-A-Center and then returned the computers without deleting the files. There are still a lot of unanswered questions in the apparent bizzare murder-suicide of two teenage girls. What's going on in the Bluegrass state?
Sometimes, you just can't figure out what the hell motivates some people. Cases in point - a man who beat his 3-year-old son to death as punishment for an incorrect answer to a question on a flashcard, a rock band that plans to have someone commit suicide onstage during one of their concerts, and a mother who finally killed her 3-week-old baby on the 5th attempt (and only received a 15-year sentance).
There's no shortage of intentional cruelty; you can always find stories about entire families being executed, or news items like dismembered human remains found behind a gas station in Detroit, or every so often a person's eyes getting gouged out in India.
Still, there's no comparison between any of those incidents and the story of a trio of would-be thugs who tried to rob a man that they had targetted because he'd recently received a cash settlement due to the death of his son in a car accident. As if that weren't horrible enough, during their arbortive home invasion the theives managed to fire a stray shot which hit and killed his girlfriend's 5-year-old son. The description of the child's last moments, from a neighbor, are heartbreaking:
"There was a big hole in the side of his head, but he was conscious. He knew what was happening. His eyes went to me, and then to his mother. He was breathing, but he didn't say anything. I don't think he could talk. He was trying to cry, but he couldn't make the noise. Tears came from his eyes."Posted @ 09:52 AM
September 13, 2003
"You never know who people are."
It's hard to say which stabbing is more bizzare - an attack on a parent in front of a school in plain view of the children, or a stabbing of a woman in a park by a 12-year-old.
On the subject of strange crime, beating a disabled man with his own cane and setting his beard on fire is pretty disgusting, but can't really compete with the evil involved in a cult leader's child murder or the unadulterated insanity of a German man who beheaded his sister-in-law and then ran through the street with her bloody head, insisting that "God ordered [him] to kill".
A man who participated in the killing of two police officers in Florida and then lost his leg in a subsequent shoot-out had been on the run since 1994, but was caught with his wife in Washington state. One of the officers involved in the investigation said,
"To all his neighbors, he'd be the guy next door," Florida Highway Patrol Lt. Paul Henry told The Seattle Times, "but you never know who people are. You never really know."Speaking of officers going down in the line of duty, a woman in Florida who lied to two police detectives was sentenced to 21 years in prison when they were killed by her boyfriend after she concealed the fact that he was a dangerous fugitive from them.
Serial and mass murders have been coming out of the woodwork recently. The conviction of Australia's worst-ever serial killers has gotten a lot of press given the sensational facts of the case, but a serial killer in the United States who may have killed more than 70 people recently confessed to yet another murder of a child. He was sentenced to life in prison, though he's already on death row. A Detroit area man killed 4 people in a convenience store he was trying to rob, led police on a high-speed chase, crashed his car, and then shot himself to death. A man in Colorado claims to be a serial killer, though police can't find the all the evidence. DNA was used to positively identify a suspect in 30-year-old murder case, and police think that he may have been involved in several other murders during that timeframe.
When a man goes to three different hospitals seeking treatment but doesn't get any and dies anyway, you have to wonder what the hell is going on. That's the sort of attention to detail that allows people to let a woman walk out of a maternity ward with a baby in a suitcase or to set free a child abuser "accidentally". Fortunately, a serial child rapist in Denver won't be set free - accidentally or otherwise - for another 60 years and (hopefully) may never be released.
When you think your family relations are bad, consider the following cases: a San Diego teen was out running with his high-school cross country team when he was ambushed and killed by his father. A Kansas man also shot his own son to death. Both men were embroiled in custody disputes and both men committed suicide after being confronted by police. Similarly, a Canadian man killed himself after fatally shooting his common-law wife in the head with an arrow, a Missouri man died of a heart attack after strangling his estranged wife, and an Indian man beat his wife and stepdaughter to death with an iron bar because he thought his wife was using the Internet to cheat on him.
Locking twins in a cage is bad enough, but when a pair of twins were abandoned on a woman's doorstep, one was found dead - perhaps from his twin laying on top of him.
A Korean family who burned themselves to death in their car, apparently due to insurmountable debt, showed a lot more family solidarity than a man who killed his wife on their honeymoon. Still, it's hard to think of a family dynamic more tainted by evil than one that got 5 family members - the victim's mother, father, 2 uncles, and a grandmother - convicted for their part in raping a 5-month-old baby to death.
Posted @ 02:49 PM
September 05, 2003
Legal misgivings
Just because we took a week or so off from this site doesn't mean that we stopped being stupefied.
Fortunately, most other people were also dumbfounded that a man who augmented his already large child pornography collection with the pictures he took of himself raping his 13-month-old baby only received a 5-year sentence. Bad sentencing also made it possible for a serial killer described by police as a "murder machine" to go free after only 20 years in prison. Still, a 20-year sentence seems fair for an 86-year-old man who killed his 89-year-old wife.
The court's wisdom also can be questioned when a man who was awaiting trial on charges of assault and battery with intent to kill his girlfriend - she suffered broken bones in her face - posted only US$4,500 of his US$45,000 bond before being released. He then proceeded to take her hostage for hours and eventually gun her down. With a shotgun. From behind.
Sometimes, there just doesn't seem to be a law severe enough to punish people like the South African serial killer/cannibal, or a Delaware man who killed (and possibly raped) a baby llama in a zoo.
Other times, the court's hands are tied because of the limitations of the law itself - since aggravated animal cruelty is only a misdemeanor in Utah, the bastard who smashed a 3-month-old kitten to a pulp against a wall while a 10-year old cried "don't kill my kitty!" only gets 18 months, despite the fact that he continued to mutilate it after he had already smashed it. The Russian mafia's slaughter of bears trained to live peacefully with humans in Siberia at least had a motive, though I'm not sure that makes it much better. The mob's involvement (and their influence over the legal system) almost certainly means that no one will be punished for this.
It only seems natural that all of these legal SNAFUs might drive someone to take the law into his own hands - but a serial killer that targets sex offenders is still a serial killer. Also, it's important to remember that even though the justice system of western countries sometimes produces stupid results, that doesn't mean that those systems are stupid enough to believe someone who says that her boyfriend stabbed himself to death.
When you consider the brutal murder of 3 employees in an Outback Steakhouse in Texas - one of whom was 6 months pregnant - and a madman's rampage through his former workplace in Chicago, going to work is hardly worth it anymore. It seems that work is not only the place to have crimes committed against you, but also to have crimes committed by you too, as was the case when 5 passenger ship crew members gang-raped and murdered a high-school girl.
There's probably no good explanation as to why a mother would buy beer for her son and his three friends (all of whom were under 16), but to strip for them and give them dollar bills to stick in her panties... well, there's definitely no good explanation for that. Almost as unthinkably dumb is the story of a man who would have gotten away with two murders until he bragged about them in jail - to a police informant. While these are some pretty good examples of extreme stupidity, you can always go one step further and sign a contract that prevents you from seeing family members or seeking any psychiatric care not approved by the cult of Scientology.
Making even Scientology look tame is a Brazilian cult that believes if you were born after 1981, then you must be destroyed. As the linked story notes, they have no problem acting on that impulse while waiting for their spaceship to come rescue them.
Speaking of cults, it's hard to separate fact from what appears to be mostly fiction among the stories of members of SMART - Stop Mind Control and Ritual Torture - who claim to be the victims of a vast Illuminati conspiracy which led to their torture by satanic cults, the CIA, the Freemasons, and just about any other secret society you can think of. I can't help but think that SMART probably does more harm than good, preventing justice for real cult victims with their antics.
Posted @ 11:51 AM