unlucky 1.unl.9342 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Belle Gunness had been born under an unlucky star, so said the kindly, the sympathetic neighbors of La Porte, Indiana. Since she had come to their town and settled in the old Altie house a mile north of town square, she had suffered one disappointment and heartbreak after another — and they admired her quiet suffering, her ability to go on with head held high. Unfailing.

By 1908, Belle’s once-hourglass figure had fattened, but her silken blonde hair, accompanied by a full Nordic smile of white teeth and pair of flashing blue eyes, still turned heads. Weighing in at 280 pounds, she nevertheless was able to tighten her corset to emphasize a 48-inch bust and a pair of curving 54-inch hips in an era when curves, no matter how expansive the girth, epitomized glamour and sex appeal.

 

The Truth About Belle Gunness by Lillian de la Torre

“Belle lived at the time of the corn-fed politician and the billowy beauty,” says Lillian de la Torre, author of The Truth About Belle Gunness. “In those days, men aspired to the bulk of William Howard Taft, who was about to become President of the United States…Ladies whose facades were not naturally as full and flowing as Belle’s stuffed their corset covers with ruffles and wore droop-fronted shirtwaists. Belle Gunness was right in style (with) a waist that would pull into 37 inches. When she donned her ruffled silks and put her diamonds in her ears, men thought her well worth a second glance.”  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

 

She had been a familiar presence in the hard-working hamlet of La Porte, a weekly frequenter to its wholesale shops, its bank, its grocers, its milliners. Her greetings of good morning had been pleasant to all she passed and her kind stare would be remembered by many. Her Norwegian accent was like a song amid the monotonous plains drawl of the Hoosier frontier. La Porte, with its shingled hoses and its front-porch-sitdown attitude and its slowly growing population of 100,000, was not about to claim, nor want, big city ways. Sixty miles from Chicago, its only connection to the big city was the New York Central Railroad line that traversed it.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

compass 7.com.001 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

“The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” by Stephen Sondheim.

St. Dunstan’s was old and musty, but the smell, which permeated the church and sacristy, was putrid beyond comprehension. They had been burying people in the catacombs there for hundreds of years, and never before had the smell of decay and death been so prevalent. It got so bad that ladies attending the services would require a handkerchief scented with vinegar or perfume in order to sit through the services, and the parson himself was reported to “sneeze in the midst of discourse and to hold to his pious mouth a handkerchief, in which was some strong and pungent essence, for the purpose of trying to overcome the effluvia.”

The matter went on for some months before anyone thought to contact the authorities to investigate. At first the church leaders were afraid that some sort of disease was rampant in the facility, and they contacted the London health department (such as it was in the 18th century), but a study of the parishioners and others nearby found no more deaths or sicknesses than normal. At their wits’ end, the church fathers sought the help of the Bow Street Runners to begin an investigation. The Beadle of St. Dunstan’s, known to history only as “Mr. Otton”, was also a constable for the Runners and he took the matter to his chief, Sir Richard Blunt, who had taken charge of the police force after the death of Henry Fielding.

The smell, Otton told Blunt, reminded him of the smell of rotting corpses, but no one had been buried in St. Dunstan’s in many years, and the catacombs below the church had been adequately sealed. Blunt and Otton launched an investigation, descending into the bowels of the church and inspecting the vaults they found there. None had been disturbed, although the stench was much stronger in the crypt. The sewers, which ran near the church, were also scrutinized, and they were found to be in working order and not leaking offal into the church. Blunt left the church with a firmer understanding of the problem, but with no idea what the cause might be.

Another Runner was to provide the link between Sweeney Todd and the mysterious stench of St. Dunstan’s Church. It seemed that the rumors of the mysterious disappearances of several sailors who vanished after seeking a polishing off at Sweeney’s barbershop had started the gossips’ tongues wagging, and the constable dutifully reported the chit-chat to Blunt. Sir Richard didn’t immediately put Todd together with the smell, but employing the now-common police technique of records investigation, Blunt found that Sweeney Todd had once been accused of theft of a pair of silver shoe buckles. The case had not stood up because the buckles were of a fairly common sort, but the woman who charged the barber with the theft was adamant that her husband, who had mysteriously disappeared one day, had worn the exact same buckles on his shoes.

Sir Richard was savvy enough to assume that where there is smoke, there is fire, and he put Todd’s shop under a close watch. In typical bureaucratic fashion, Sir Richard reported his suspicions to his superiors and was given the green light to “use whatever means might be necessary” to solve the mystery. Over the next several months, three Runners watching Sweeney’s barbershop reported that men had entered the store for a shave or haircut and had not been seen to leave.  Sir Richard became more convinced that Todd was murdering clients, and that somehow, St. Dunstan’s Church was involved. He decided to revisit the vaults, this time with a crew of Bow Street’s finest, to get to the bottom of the issue.

Armed with just a compass, walking stick, and oil lanterns, the men descended once again into the fetid stench of the church’s crypt. After a few moments of searching they stumbled across the crypt of the Weston family, which had been one of the Demon Barber’s favorite dumping grounds. What they found there was reported in the newspapers in Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  gruesome detail: “Piled one upon each other and reaching halfway up to the ceiling, lay a decomposing mass of human remains. Heaped one upon another heedlessly tossed into the disgusting heap any way, lay pieces of gaunt skeletons with pieces of flesh here and there only adhering to the bones. Heads in a similar state of decay were tumbled about, the whole enough to strike such horror into the heart of any man,” wrote the Courier in its account of Sweeney Todd’s trial.

Coming to the horrible realization that they had finally located the source of the stench, the Bow Street Runners pressed on, following bloodstained footprints until they disappeared at the back of a shop, apparently on Bell Yard. Sir Richard, who was known as an acute thinker, realized that Sweeney Todd was murdering his clients, and what was worse, he was disposing of the evidence by serving the meat in a pie.

 

bastholm 5.bas.6661666 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

In 1962, Fred’s parents relented and let him come back to live with them at Much Marcle. That summer, his girlfriend Rena Costello came back from Scotland and took up with Fred immediately. They seemed well matched. Rena was not your average girl, but rather an experienced delinquent that as a teenager had a record for prostitution and burglary. That Rena was pregnant by an Asian bus driver introduced a complication into their relationship and to his parents’ acceptance of her as his mate.

Secretly, they married in November of that year and moved immediately to Scotland. His parents believed that the baby she was carrying was Fred’s. In March of 1963, when Charmaine was born, Fred had Rena write to his mother saying that their baby had died in childbirth and that she had adopted a mixed-race child. Even though Rena had been a prostitute at various times, she was not happy to be a prisoner to the voracious sexual appetite of Fred West. Colin Wilson in The Corpse Garden tells how Fred’s interest in “normal sex” was minimal. “He wanted oral sex, bondage andsodomyat all hours of the day and night. Fred drove an ice cream truck which afforded him unlimited access to many young women. For someone as highly sexed as Fred, it seemed like paradise. His politeness, apparent trustworthiness and sincerity, and his ability to spin interesting tales made him attractive to the teenagers who flocked around his ice cream truck. His continual seductions turned Rena and Charmaine into afterthoughts. Despite Fred’s almost daily infidelities, he was very possessive of Rena and Charmaine. In 1964, Rena bore Fred’s child, a daughter they named Anna Marie. “On again, off again” characterized their roller coaster marriage for several years. During that time, Rena and Fred met Anna McFall, whose boyfriend had been killed in an accident. At that time, Fred was involved in an accident with the ice cream truck that killed a young boy. While Fred wasn’t at fault, he was concerned that he would lose his job. So, he and Rena and their two children, plus Anna McFall moved back to Gloucester. Fred had a job in a slaughterhouse. Colin Wilson sees this job in the slaughterhouse as having a profound affect on Fred. “One thing is clear: that at some stage, West developed a morbid obsession with corpses and blood and dismemberment. There is no evidence that he had shown any such interest so far. It seems, then, that Fred West’s sexual perversion became slowly more obsessive in the period following his marriage, and the evidence suggests that necrophilia and desire to mutilate corpses began during his period as a butcher.” Rena and Fred’s marriage became increasingly unstable. Rena wanted to take the two children back with her to Glasgow, but Fred refused, so she went back to Scotland alone. But she was miserable without her daughters and, in July of 1966, returned to Gloucester to find Fred and Anna McFall living together in a trailer. Rena told Constable Hazel Savage that her husband was a sex pervert and unfit to raise their children. Coincidentally, there were eight sexual assaults committed in the Gloucester area committed by a man of Fred’s description.  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire Anna McFall, victim In early 1967, Anna McFall became pregnant with Fred’s child. She was trying unsuccessfully to get Fred to divorce Rena and marry her. Fred responded to the stress of her demands by killing her and burying her near the trailer park sometime in July. Not only did he kill his mistress and their unborn child, he slowly and methodically dismembered her corpse and buried her along with the fetus. Oddly enough, he cut off her fingers and toes, which were missing from the gravesite. It would be his ritualistic signature in future crimes.

Fred acted very nervous after McFall’s disappearance. Then Rena moved back into the trailer and Fred became his old self again. Fred happily sent Rena out to earn some pocket money as a prostitute and began to openly fondle the young Charmaine. Mary Bastholm (South West News Services) In January of 1968, pretty 15-year-old Mary Bastholm was abducted from a bus stop in Gloucester. Howard Sounes believes that Fred was responsible because in later years, he abducted other women in a similar fashion from bus stops.

There were a number of links between Fred and Mary Bastholm: he was a customer at the Pop-In [where Mary worked] and Mary often served him tea; Fred had been employed to do some building work behind the café; Mary had been seen with a girl fitting the description of Fred’s former lover, Anna McFall; and one witness claims to have seen Mary in Fred’s car. (Sounes)  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire In February, Fred’s mother died of complications of a gallbladder operation. He launched into a series of petty thefts, which caused him to change jobs frequently. On November 29, 1968, while he was working as a bakery delivery driver, he met the girl who would become his next wife and longtime soul mate, Rose Letts.

remove 2.rem.0002020 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

A prison surgeon, Dr. W. J. W. Kerr, also heard the cries of the infant. Dr. Kerr who was originally from Corsicana, Texas, had just arrived at Andersonville that day. He inquired among the guards and learned of the plight of the Hunt family. Concerned for the welfare of the mother and child, the doctor convinced his superiors to remove the Hunts from the compound, and when he learned how they had come to reside at Andersonville, he started a petition to have them paroled. The doctor was moved when he discovered that the Hunts had been newlyweds when they were captured.  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

According to an article Kerr wrote for Confederate Veteran magazine, Jane Scadden Hunt of Chicago and Captain Harry Hunt of Buffalo, New York, were married in the summer of 1863 in New York City. Captain Hunt ran a sailing vessel out of that port, and to celebrate his marriage, he invited several members of the wedding party to accompany him and his new bride on a pleasure trip into the Atlantic. They had been at sea only a few hours when they were intercepted by a Union revenue cutter and ordered to sail to North Carolina to pick up a load of corn for the war effort. They reached North Carolina without incident, but while loading the vessel, they were captured by Confederate troops. Recognizing that the crew was made up of noncombatants, the Southerners released all but Captain Hunt. “His wife, thinking he would be released in a few days, refused to leave him; but instead he was finally sent to Andersonville Prison and both were held as prisoners of war,” the article read.

The Hunts had been at Andersonville for 13 months when their baby was born. During part of that time Mrs. Hunt apparently disguised herself as a man. She had a trunk that contained some clothing and “$5,000 in greenbacks,” which was stolen by prison marauders. When her baby son arrived, she had only a few strips of cloth in which to wrap him. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Dr. Kerr addressed his petition to General Winder, who was in charge of the post, but the commandant of the stockade would also have a say in the Hunts’ fate, and that job belonged to Captain Henry Wirz, the man responsible for ordering the dead line. The Swiss-born Wirz was reputed to be iron-willed and cold-hearted. The doctor wondered how the commandant would respond to the Hunts’ predicament.

 

 

finished 3.fin.9992 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

The Government Wins When Justice is Done.
Motto of the U.S. Justice Department.

The criminal trial was over, but the law was not finished with Orenthal James Simpson. A year later on October 23rd, 1996, another trial began and once again, he was the defendant.

Louis and Juditha Brown, Nicole’s parents

This time, the venue was the courthouse in Santa Monica. Before a jury of one black, one Hispanic, one Asian, and nine whites, a civil trial began to lay judgment again on him for the murders of Ronald Lyle Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.

In this civil suit filed by the Goldman and Brown families, Simpson could not invoke the Fifth Amendment and, unlike the criminal case, was forced to testify. Also, the standard of proof was a lot easier than in the criminal case. There, guilt must be proven “beyond a reasonable doubt.” In a civil case, guilt had only to be proven according to the “preponderance of the evidence”, rather than “beyond a reasonable doubt.” In other words its purpose is to decide whether it is more likely than not that the defendant committed the crime.

On February 4th, 1997, the jury awarded $8.5 million in compensatory damages to Fred Goldman and his ex-wife Sharon Rufo for the loss of Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  their son’s love, companionship and moral support. A few days later, they brought in punitive damages of $25 million to be shared between Nicole’s children and Fred Goldman.

The jury had considered for six days, Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  after the four-month trial. It seemed a lot more deliberate than the five hours it took the criminal court jury to decide after over nine months of testimony.

Fred Goldman, a pathfinder in the legal attack against Simpson, told reporters that Tuesday evening, “We finally have justice for Ron and Nicole. Our family is grateful for a verdict of responsibility.”

It seemed at long last that judgment had finally been observed. The money of course, was never paid out. Simpson’s lawyer, Robert Baker, told the jury that Simpson was broke, with a negative net worth of $856,157, down from a net positive worth of $10 million. He owed lawyer fees, back taxes of $685,248.00 to the IRS, and mortgage repayments, and in effect was without assets. It appears unlikely that anyone will ever get anything of any consequence.

Simpson would go about living out his life on the income from a $4 million pension fund established when he was playing football. This would bring him in more than $20,000 dollars every month, and could not be touched by the courts. Not a bad life-style for most people, but way below the heady days of his wine and roses period.

The Simpson children

Simpson moved to a $1.5 million house in Kendall, Florida with his son and daughter. After the civil trial, Nicole’s parents launched a bitter custody battle, which they lost in 2000. His move was a shrewd one. Under the laws of California, any money he acquired can be seized to pay the damages awarded against him in the civil trial. In Florida the law is different. Simpson recently told a journalist, Caroline Graham, “They can’t touch my earnings here. And it will be a cold day in hell before I pay a penny.”

In due course, the mortgagee, Hawthorne Estates, repossessed his Rockingham estate, which was auctioned off on November 29th, 1997, for a little under $3.9 million and subsequently demolished by the buyer to make way for an even grander Brentwood palace. Simpson had borrowed heavily against his house to help fund his huge legal bills, and hadn’t met his very large mortgage payments.

Interest in Simpson faded, and the murder and trials were relegated to the writers and commentators to analyze, dissect and ruminate over. There was plenty of comment that surfaced from members of the jury after the trial was over.

Marsha Rubin-Jackson said, ” If a lot of evidence had been brought out, for instance the diaries that contained examples of abuse and the evidence in the Bronco after the chase, I would have given that a lot more thought.”

Armanda Cooley, the lady selected as the foreperson, had also been concerned about the presentation of evidence, saying, “I felt Mr. Simpson was guilty when the prosecutors were putting on their case… I changed my thinking when I heard evidence about the glove… another episode that changed my mind was… the picking up of evidence weeks later… the results were so much different… the DNA content being so much different.”

She also commented, “Based on the evidence that was presented… a lot pointed to Mr. Simpson’s guilt… because we had no direct evidence… I had no alternative but to think he was not guilty. There were many questions that were not answered.”

Perhaps the most pertinent commentary came from juror Carrie Bess:

“As far as I’m concerned, Mr. Simpson would have been behind bars if the police work had been done properly.”

Her views were shared by Peter Bozanitch, an Assistant District Attorney, who summed up the LAPD’s handling of the investigation with some irony,” I’ve been working with the LAPD for 25 years — this is by far the best work they’ve ever done! This is the best they’ve ever done; this is their crowning achievement.”

By the time it was all over, it had long ceased to be about law and order and justice served, and instead had become about voyeurs feasting on and being titillated by the complex life-styles and tragedies of people whose lives, loves and, ultimately, deaths simply served up a special brand of entertainment to help a bored audience get through the day.

fate 2.fat.002002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

The Fearful Vampire Killers

// The fate of one “vampire killer” was determined in Arkansas recently, while three people in Guyana still await their chance to prove in court that they acted rationally…if they can.

 

Nathan Chipps

On August 15, 2006, Nathaniel Chipps shot Teresa Tracy McCartney in the head outside Rockport, Arkansas.  They were together in the travel trailer of a friend, also present but in another room, and they started to argue.  Chipps then shot McCartney, fled the trailer, stole a car, and high-tailed it to hide out in the home of a relative.

 

 

Rockport, Arkansas map

 

The friend who owned the trailer called the police, who transported the victim, but she had died from her wound.  She’d been shot with a .38-calibre weapon, the type of gun that the police located in the vicinity where they arrested Chipps after a two-hour manhunt.  He went with them without further incident and was locked up in the county jail.  The gun was sent for a ballistics examination, as Chipps had no weapon on him.

Chipps, 21, claimed that McCartney, 35, had told him she was a Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
vampire and wanted to suck his blood.  He’d shot her in self-defense.  However, it was found that he’d taken drugs that night and was hallucinating at the time of the incident.

Chipps was charged with aggravated assault and murder, according to a Caller-Times report.  The case went to trial and, with a murder conviction, Chipps could have gotten 99 years, but instead, on June 15, a jury found him guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter.  They sentenced him to 20 years in prison and a fine of $10,000.

Next: The situation was more confused on the East Demerara Coast of Guyana.

interview 4.int.002002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

James Riva claimed to hear the voice of a vampire in April, 1980, before he shot his grandmother four times with bullets that he had painted gold.  He then tried to drink her blood from the wound in order to get eternal life.  Finally, he set her corpse on fire.  Carol Page documents his tale and includes her interview with Riva in Bloodlust: Conversations with Real Vampires.

To some degree, he claimed, it was self defense, because he was convinced she was drinking his blood while he was asleep.  He believed that everyone was a vampire and that he needed to become like them. The secret, he was told by imaginary voices, was to kill someone and drink the blood.  Afterward, Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
the vampires would throw a party for him.

Fascinated with vampires since the age of 13, he drew pictures of violent acts and began to eat things with a blood-like consistency.  He killed animals, including a horse (he says), to drink their blood.  He also punched a friend in the nose and tried to spear another in order to get blood from them, and claimed that he had attacked strangers to get it, but didn’t want to kill anyone.  He kept an ax by his bedroom door and once told a psychiatrist he was going to kill his father.

Riva told a psychiatrist about the voices warning him to watch out for vampires.  They said that he had to drink blood.  He decided that his grandmother was using an ice pick at night to get his blood—although she was in a wheelchair.  He also believed that she was poisoning his food.  On the day that he killed her, he felt he was going to die.

A jury returned a verdict of second degree murder, with a life term. He stopped drinking blood in prison, he said, because he couldn’t get enough and he thought his body, used to human tissue consumption, was metabolizing his.

At a parole hearing on August 4, 2009, Riva told the parole board and the weeping members of his family that he was sorry. “The name penitentiary came from the word penitent — and you learn how to be penitent in prison.” For the last 29 years, he said, he has been in therapy and on medication and no he longer believes he is a vampire, nor does he have the compulsion to torture animals. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
He even converted to Islam.

The parole board and his family were not as convinced of his remorse, but rather were concerned that his ability to premeditatedly and horribly murder someone who cared for him made him capable of doing that to anyone. In addition, he has become fixated on his claim that his mother abused him as a child and has sent letters to her from prison demanding that she confess to having tortured and threatened him with drowning as a child. Prison officials do not trust him to take his medication, since he went off it once and attacked a guard he thought was sneaking into his cell at night and draining his spinal fluid.

officer 5.off.001001 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Aug. 6, 2008: A Fort Wayne, Ind., police officer, on her routine patrol, observed a naked man through a front window, standing fully exposed to the street. The officer called for backup and entered the home where she found the man, identified as Ronald Miller, sodomizing himself with a claw hammer and motor oil. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
According to neighbors, Miller, who had been convicted of public nudity in the past, exposed himself to the neighborhood on a regular basis.