As the Discovery Channel crew from Australia wrapped up their interview with me this week (Stella Nickell will be the focus of a segment on their latest installment of Deadly Women), my thoughts tuned to my buddy Matt’s latest TV stint. He’ll be featured on Oxygen Network’s “Captured” series at 10:00 p.m. Sunday. He’ll be talking about his next true-crime book, I’LL BE WATCHING YOU, due out this summer.

I’ve read the advance copy…and wow! It is one of the most sensational, incredible stories of redemption and survival you will ever read.

Here’s a snip of the synop:

Mary Ellen Renard was determined to make a fresh start. Recently divorced, she’d just moved into an apartment in Elmwood Park, New Jersey. On a warm August night in 1987, she made plans to meet a friend at a singles dance, but her friend had to cancel at the last minute. Mary Ellen decided to go on her own and, toward the end of the night, started up a conversation with a handsome young man almost twenty years her junior. He introduced himself as Ned Snelgrove and told her he was a recent graduate of Rutgers and was now an executive at Hewlett-Packard. As flattered as she was by his advances, Mary Ellen decided to call it a night.

But when her car wouldn’t start, the young man reappeared in the parking lot, got it started, and offered to follow her home to make sure she made it safely. When they arrived, he asked if he could use her bathroom before he left for home. Mary Ellen was apprehensive, but agreed. It was a decision she’d soon come to regret.

Once he made it into her apartment, he sexually assaulted her and attacked her with a knife, stabbing her several times. But Mary Ellen fought back ferociously, and somehow managed to escape into the apartment below hers. Miraculously, she survived the attack and was able to help police identify and apprehend Snelgrove. It wasn’t long before the cops got word from a detective in Middlesex County that Snelgrove had been the primary suspect in another murder five years earlier: that of a Rutgers student who’d been attacked in much the same way.

But unlike Mary Ellen, this other woman had not survived. Snelgrove eventually pled guilty to both crimes in exchange for 20 years in prison. But the story was far from over. More than a decade later, Mary Ellen received a visit from two detectives. Snelgrove had been released almost ten years early for good behavior, and had been arrested for another murder.

Sometimes, if we just allow justice to run its course, things work out the way they should—or, rather, the way in which the natural circle of life has a way of coming back around and taking care of itself.

Take convicted sex offender David Brown, aka, Nathaniel Bar-Jonah, who authorities accused of killing and cannibalizing a young boy and was serving a 130-year sentence for kidnapping, sexually assaulting and choking a teenage neighbor. Brown was found dead in his cell early Sunday at the Montana State Prison he called home.

Hold your applause, please . . .

In 2000, authorities charged Brown with murder in the 1996 disappearance of 10-year-old Zach Ramsay. Authorities said they had evidence suggesting Bar-Jonah had butchered the boy and disposed of his body in meals served to neighbors. They were later forced to dismiss the murder charge after Ramsay’s mother said she would testify she believed her son was still alive.

Yes, still alive.

Two days ago, on Sunday morning, April 13, shortly after a shift change at 6:00 A.M.., Brown was found unresponsive in his cell, Montana State Prison spokeswoman Linda Moodry said. “Emergency medical response was initiated and he was transported to Powell County Memorial Hospital where he was pronounced dead at 7:06 a.m.,” Moodry wrote in a prepared statement.

According to the Boston Globe:

Though Bar-Jonah’s worst crimes occurred in Montana, he drew national attention to Massachusetts because he had been allowed to move out of state in 1991, even though he had been accused of several crimes against children.

In 1977, Bar-Jonah, dressed as a police officer, kidnapped two boys as they left a movie theater in Shrewsbury. He tried to assault them, but one escaped and found help. The former Dudley man served 12 years in the Massachusetts Treatment Center for the Sexually Dangerous in Bridgewater. Born David P. Brown, he changed his name while incarcerated. He told acquaintances he wanted people to think he was Jewish so he could feel persecution.

Forty-three days after his 1991 release, he was charged with assaulting another Massachusetts boy. A judge released him on the condition that he move in with his mother in Montana. Once there, he continued to prey on children.

There is no known cure for pedophilia. How many times does the public have to pay the price for a court making erroneous decisions that pout us all at risk? This terrifies me every time I think that this savage was allowed to walk out of prison and move to another state.

He’s dead, yes, but this problem of our court system allowing repeat offenders chance after chance after chance did not die with him.

There is a reason why we—the American press—rarely cover European crime stories: Generally (and frankly) speaking, we just don’t give a rat’s arse about crime 3,000 miles away. Which is probably one of the reasons why we’re hated so much by the global community, but that’s another story for another time.

That said, this following story just could not be overlooked.

A divorced, unemployed dental assistant was found guilty of eight counts of manslaughter in 2006 for “routinely killing her offspring.” Sabine Hilschenz told investigators that she did not harm the children but left them to die after giving birth. She was drunk. She couldn’t help herself.

Eight kids. Dead. Starved to death. But she “did not harm the children.”

Last time I knew, leaving a newborn to fend for him/herself was akin to neglect and abuse.

She may have not “harmed” the kids, but after they died, she tossed their corpses out like common trash. The remains of the babies were found in buckets and flowerpots at the home she shared with her husband, and in an old fish tank at the home of her parents in former communist East Germany.

Hilschenz gave birth to nine babies—two boys and seven girls—between 1988 and 1998. She was also accused of killing the first of the nine babies, born in 1988, but the lower court ruled that the time in which she could be charged in connection with that death had lapsed.

These cases are always hard to prosecute. There are so many different claims a mother can make—and, for the most part, evidence is hard to use against the suspect because the bodies are so decomposed. It’s nearly impossible, in other words, for a medical examiner to determine cause of death.

Hilschenz divorced her husband, who was believed to have worked for the “feared East German secret police,” in 2005, after what she claimed was years of marital strife and years of alcoholism on her part, which she claims led to the deaths of the children.

Get this: The couple have three surviving children that the husband told the court he “does not want anymore.”

The husband declined to testify against her at trial, but a separate investigation has been launched into his role in the affair.

Now, before you spit out your coffee, here is what Hilschenz received for a sentence: A German appeals court on Monday confirmed a 15-year prison term handed down to Hilschenz. The court in Frankfurt an der Oder in eastern Germany found that the fact 42-year-old Hilschenz was an alcoholic did not reduce her accountability for the crime.
Yeah, right.

“The verdict took into consideration that eight people were killed without having a chance to even begin their lives,” said presiding Judge Barbara Sattler.

This makes no sense. Not even two years per count. The woman murdered eight children and will walk out of prison in 15 years.

Some crime stories are just too caustic and horrific to think about. We try to stay away from that here on Crime Rant and comment on and take a look at those stories we think our readers will appreciate for various reasons, or maybe learn something from.

Sure, we joke around from time to time.  Yet, some stories just have an impact on you that is hard to describe.

Looking at this story from a researcher’s viewpoint, it’s rare that you have a murderer admit guilt; even more uncommon is when you have a serial killer admit guilt and then describe his or her crimes.

Gary Michael Hilton, who recently pleaded guilty to the murder of hitchhiker Meredith Emerson, described in graphic detail what the young Georgia hiker went through before her death.

It’s important to us to note that Meredith fought this animal as hard as she could. She didn’t just lie down and submit. Meredith left this world a fighter for her life.

What’s equally substantial about this confession is that Hilton speaks with no emotion. His voice is flat and devoid of any feeling or sympathy or sorrow. The 61-year-old confessed killer talks about how he kidnapped Meredith. He said he targeted her because she was a woman and he wanted her money. He figured he could make her give him her ATM card. But Meredith kept giving him the wrong ATM password number.

What’s chilling is Hilton’s comment that once he kidnapped her he “never had any intention of letting her go.” This is why law enforcement and abduction experts say it’s vital that you fight off your attacker with all you have.
 
What is inspiring to us and something that needs to be noted is Meredith’s desire to live. 

“She … grabbed the knife,” Hilton said. “I lost control of the knife and then I produced the baton. She fought that and I lost control of the baton—and I’m good too.  . . . I had to hand fight her and I still couldn’t get control of her. She would uh, feign or pretend that I was in control and then start fighting again. So I had to, I had to hit her a number of times.”

Hilton chained Meredith to his van and kept her there for days.

“As to what extent she was injured, uh, her two eyes were somewhat blackened,” he said. “She may or may not have a fractured nose. I checked with her a number of times. She was not in any pain other than—afterwards, she was not in any pain other than a headache. I offered her and gave her aspirin.”

Hilton said he beat the young woman to death and then decapitated her. He told investigators he did that “forensically” because her hair was full of fibers.

“It doesn’t seem real, looking back on it. It was like an out of body experience.”

He is serving a life sentence in Georgia in exchange for a guilty plea and information that helped investigators locate Emerson’s body.

Hilton is also charged in the death of a woman in Florida and he is the sole suspect in the deaths of John and Irene Bryant, an elderly couple who disappeared while hiking in North Carolina.