Guest blog by Laura James

Last year we heard the sickening story of the death of Marsha Spicer in Missouri. Her murderers – the team of Dena Riley and Richard Davis – videotaped the two-hour ordeal of rape and torture that they put poor Marsha through before they finally choked her to death and buried her in a shallow grave.

This is, sorry to say, a known phenomenon in the history of crime. The cases of male/female team sex killers go as far back as… our technology allows.

By that I mean – it wasn’t until the advent of audiotape and videotape that prosecutors and the public were capable of believing that a woman could willingly participate in a sex-murder. Up until it was possible for such murderous couples to record their acts, women were routinely given the benefit of the doubt. “Why, she must have been horribly abused,” many said of the female half of such duos. “A masochistic, surely. Forced to participate because she feared for her own life.”

That’s what prosecutors in Canada assumed when confronted with the horrors of Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo. Then the videos surfaced. But it was too late – Homolka pled out with a slap on the wrist and is a free woman today.

Sadly, the lesson could have been learned much earlier. In the mid-60s, the team killers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady — the infamous Moors Murderers – audiotaped and photographed their violations and killings of children. Myra couldn’t employ “the devil made me do it” defense because it was all on tape. From prison she would admit, “Without me, those crimes could probably not have been committed.”

Even so, the sentencing judge gratuitously remarked, “Though I believe Brady is wicked beyond belief without hope of redemption, I cannot feel that the same is necessarily true of Hindley once she is removed from his influence.”

Nonsense and hogwash. But there it is. The lady is given undue deference – a perennial theme in the annals of crime – even where she herself admitted being an indispensable perpetrator in the atrocities. Even our most respected criminologists make the strange assertion that such women “fall somewhere in the middle: both victim and perpetrator” (John Douglas, The Anatomy of Motive).

And there is another example from the mid-’80s. The couple, Debra Brown and Alton Coleman, went on a months-long rape and murder rampage throughout the Midwest. Their crimes weren’t recorded, but they left so many bloody fingerprints all over the place that there was no denying their deeds. After they were caught, Debra Brown would admit committing murders and that she didn’t “give a damn. I had fun out of it.” Both were eventually sentenced to death in more than one state. Coleman has already been executed. But Miss Brown is still alive, and one of her death sentences was commuted by the governor of Ohio. That deference again. 

And let’s not forget that Charles Starkweather was executed — Caril Fugate paroled.

Gerald Gallego was sentenced to death — Charlene Gallego paroled.

Douglas Clark got the death penalty — Carol Bundy got 25 to life.

We could learn some lessons from such cases. Women do participate in sex-murders, and are no less culpable than the man.

Hopefully nobody will have to watch that sickening homemade snuff film made by Riley and Davis to get it this time.

Guest blog by Laura James
 
This week the Virginia governor’s special Virginia Tech Review Panel issued its report on the campus shooting. Mediocrity is all too often the product of committees with consultants, but this is ugly mediocrity.
 
The committee suggests the policemen investigating a double murder in a college dorm should have prepared the campus for a possible mass shooting.
 
That is like telling a crew of firefighters battling a forest blaze to prepare for a possible earthquake.
 
The police of both city and campus responded to the initial murders in Blacksburg. These are the police, mind you, who would later learn of a mad gunman and would race after him, knowingly facing the risk of death to stop this extraordinary man-made disaster. Which way would YOU run? The report begrudgingly acknowledges the manner in which the emergency was handled by police with five niggardly words: “Their responses were well coordinated.”
 
They are not otherwise critical of law enforcement except in ONE respect: they weren’t psychic. The report says the police should have considered within the first hours of their homicide investigation that a double murderer would follow up his crime with a murder spree.  The report suggests instead of saying the murderer was “probably” not on campus any more, they should have told university officials that a crazy gunman could be on the loose!
 
From the report: The police “conveyed the wrong impression to the university …about the lead they had and the likelihood that the suspect was no longer on campus.” They should have considered “the low-probability side as well as the most likely situation.”
 
“Low probability”? How about 0.0000000000000001% probability?
 
The report states there has been exactly one college campus mass shooting in the US in the past 40 years – Charles Whitman, 1966. (High schools are another thing altogether.) When it comes to mass shootings at college, these events are as rare as some comets. Every 40 years. Or one in every ten Olympic Games. And this in a country as gigantic as the United States, a country with three hundred million current inhabitants. The committee report includes a list of all major school shootings in the U.S. in the last four decades.

The report acknowledges: “Based on past history, the probability of more shootings following a dormitory slaying was very low.” “Very low”? There have been a few mass shootings but never a dormitory slaying followed by a mass shooting. And yet the police were supposed to not only think of a mass murder scenario but relay this to the university?
 
The committee must have searched long and hard to come up with this one. As shallow as it is, it’s the only criticism of the police in the report.
 
Maybe they were throwing a bone to the plaintiff’s attorneys who have filed civil suits against the police and university. For that is to whom this report matters most. This is the opinion that will make or break a case, maybe earn a hefty fee. This report will be parsed per syllable by all those involved in seeking civil damages. They forget who is truly to blame.

Guest blog by Laura James

The most famous newspaper headline ever written in the U.S. of A. was DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. But that’s rather cheap, isn’t it, since the joke was on the man who wrote it. The better headlines have imparted intended humor or double meanings, but the art of writing a newspaper headline seems to have gone the way of quillwork and macrame. Current journalism school advice sucks all the sass out of modern headlines. These days, any overly creative headlines are likely to earn their authors a bonk on the head. And thus we might never again see such gems as:

CAPERS CRAPS OUT (announcing the murder of one Tom Capers during a dice
game)

HEADLESS BODY FOUND IN TOPLESS BAR

JUVENILE COURT TO TRY SHOOTING DEFENDANT

MAN STRUCK BY LIGHTNING FACES BATTERY CHARGE

STEALS CLOCK, FACES TIME

WORLD’S IN AN AWFUL MESS (the all-encompassing work product of a
journalist who was having a particularly bad news day)

Okay, OKAY, it’s not so easy to walk that fine line and come up with a decent headline for a crime story. I once had the privilege of working a brief stint as a copy editor for the Lapeer County Press in my home state of Michigan, and headlines are not easy to write, let me tell you.

Only one of my headlines garnered any notice; as soon as I wrote it and sent it back to the composing room, I heard laughter. The next day, readers called in to thank us for the chuckle. I never did figure out what was so ticklish about MAN IN PINK NIGHTIE FLASHES ATTICA WOMAN.

Anyway, my regular readers — the four of you — if I count all of my sisters — are probably wondering where I’m going with this. So the other day I was casually perusing an 1894 edition of the Olean Democrat from New York state when I happened upon:

REMARKABLE FEMININE FREAK.

Well, that’ll stop your eyes, won’t it? The subhead read,

Alleged Murderess Who Smokes, Shaves and Wears Men’s Attire.

The city of Toronto furnished this tale of a black woman named Clara Ford, dubbed a “remarkable specimen of femininity” — because she disguised herself as a man, carried a revolver, played the coronet and kettle-drum, read works relating to love and murder, drove a hack for two years, was a choir boy in an Episcopal church, and joined a Socialist group solely for the purpose of haranguing men who held socialist views. Her sex was discovered accidentally when she was tied to the murder of one Frank Westwood, a young, white, well-to-do man from a prominent family who was shot dead at his front door. Per the press coverage, she confessed to shooting him out of jealousy.

The Ford-Westwood case is the subject of a new book by Ontario attorney Patrick Brode, who wrote Death in the Queen City: Clara Ford on Trial, 1895 which is available exclusively from the publisher, Natural Heritage Books. That outfit promises to deliver “a bizarre story of romance and racism” and a “wildly unconventional” defendant. It sounds like a remarkable book, so I won’t spoil it for you by revealing the outcome of Ford’s trial.

Unless you have to know right now. **Spoiler alert** The accused proved an alibi during the trial — or at least that’s what the jury hung its hat on when it announced his/her acquittal. I’ll leave it to you to come up with an appropriate headline for that outcome. All I can come up with is HE/SHE SET FREE.

[CR Note: Laura James is the historic true crime blogger extraordinaire. She offers up old crimes on her wonderful site, Clews. Laura James Fortnightly appears in Crime Rant on or about the first and fifteenth of the month.]

Guest blog by Laura James

I always get a kick when the more venerated members of the Fourth Estate make excuses for covering crime stories.

Last year, it was the outgoing ombudsman for National Public Radio that agonized out loud about how to cover true crime — while proclaiming the network shouldn’t have aired the grotesque courthouse confessions of Dennis “Bind, Torture, Kill” Rader.

The ombudsman, Jeffrey Dvorkin, in a column about NPR’s coverage of the killer’s confession, said many listeners were shocked and appalled, calling the story “tabloid” and “exploitive to the point of being pornographic.”

Dvorkin goes on:

“Crime is not often covered by NPR. This is because crime, the staple of tabloids and local television news everywhere, does not carry much journalistic weight. This is a good thing, in my opinion, since there are often consequences — and not good ones — whenever the media engages in too much crime reporting….”

If he meant that statement, I have to wonder, then why does NPR cover crime news at all?

He explains:

“At NPR, crime reporting occurs only when a specific crime reaches such a level of noteworthiness that it is part of the national conversation in offices and coffee shops. As such it is worthy of reporting.”

Oh, okay, I get it. Even if it doesn’t carry much journalistic weight, if it’s big news that everyone’s talking about, then it’s worthy of NPR. Crime stories do attract an audience.

But then he goes on to say that crime news is only relevant when it “says something about our society.”

Now I’m confused. I thought that NPR doesn’t cover true crime, and when it does deign to do so, it’s only when everyone is talking about a particular story. But it only carries “journalistic weight” if it’s a crime that says something about our society.

Funny, I can’t think of a crime that doesn’t say something about our society.

[CR Note: Laura James is the historic true crime blogger extraordinaire. She offers up old crimes on her site, Clews. Laura James Fortnightly appears in Crime Rant on or about the first and fifteenth of the month.]