attica 9.att.1128 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

In 1979, Robert Ressler, the FBI veteran, interviewed Berkowitz in Attica Prison three times. Berkowitz had been allowed to keep a scrapbook he had compiled of all the newspaper stories about the murders. He used these scrapbooks to keep his fantasies alive.

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  Ressler made it clear that he didn’t buy the demon dog theory one bit and eventually he was able to get the truth out of Berkowitz. The demon story was to protect him when and if he was caught so that he could try to convince the authorities he was insane. He admitted to Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire    Ressler “that his real reason for shooting women was out of resentment toward his own mother, and because of his inability to establish good relationships with women.” He would become sexually aroused in the stalking and shooting of women and would masturbate after it was over.

He also admitted to Ressler that stalking women had become a nightly adventure for him. If he didn’t find a victim, he would go back to the scenes of his earlier murders and try to recall them. “It was an erotic experience for him to see the remains of bloodstains on the ground, a police chalkmark or two: seated in his car, he would often contemplate these grisly mementos and masturbate.” So murderers do return to the scene of the crime, not out of guilt, but because they want to revive the memories of their crimes for sexual pleasure.

He wanted to go to the funerals of his victims but was afraid that the police would become suspicious. However, he did hang around diners near the police stations hoping to overhear policemen talking about his crimes. He also tried unsuccessfully to find the graves of his victims.

Like many serial killers, he nourished his sick ego from the newspaper attention he received for his crimes. He got the idea of sending the letter to Jimmy Breslin from a book on Jack the Ripper. Ressler found out that “after the press started calling him Son of Sam he adopted the moniker as his own, and even fashioning a logo for it.”

This story is repeated time after time in every city experiencing the attacks of a serial killer. The demands of the citizens to know what is happening is balanced against the reality that feeding these demands for information virtually ensures that the killer will keep on killing. Legitimate police work is seriously hampered by a deluge of bogus tips from well-meaning citizens. The only party that benefits from this common problem is the media.

typical 99.typ.001 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Of these three assaults which had occurred in two different areas, the Bronx and Queens, only one bullet had been recovered intact. Consequently, police were not yet able to link these attacks to a single individual.

Things quieted for two months. Then in the early hours of January 30, 1977, the killer went hunting for his next victim.

Christine Freund, victim

Twenty-six-year-old Christine Freund and her fiance John Diel left The Wine Gallery in Queens around 12:10 A.M. and strolled towards his car. They were too absorbed in each other to observe that man who had been watching them.

As they sat in the car, two shots broke the night, shattering the windshield. Christine grabbed her head; both shots had struck her. John rested her head on the driver’s seat and ran for help, trying to flag down passing cars, but to no avail. People in nearby homes had heard the shots and had called the police.

A few hours later Christine died in the hospital.

Forty-three-year-old Detective Sergeant Joe Coffey was a big, handsome Irishman known for his toughness and dedication. He and Captain Joe Borrelli started to work on this latest homicide. They had two theories: that the killer was either a psycho or someone who had something personal against Christine Freund.

Coffey could see that the bullets used to kill her were not typical. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  They had come from a powerful, large caliber gun. Investigating further, he discovered that her murder matched those other assaults on Donna Lauria, Donna DeMasi and Joanne Lomino.

Coffey had a hunch that they were dealing with one psycho packing a .44, stalking women in various parts of the city. As his investigation began to bear fruit, a homicide task force was formed under Captain Borrelli. Ballistics reported that the weapon employed was a .44 Charter Arms Bulldog — an unusual weapon.

After probing into the backgrounds of the murders and their victims, police were unable to find any suspect on record; nor could they find any common thread that linked the victims to one another or a third party. It was beginning to look as though a psycho had randomly targeted attractive young women for assassination.

3.not.1 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

On Friday November 17, 2006, Jennifer Deleon was found guilty on two counts of first degree murder, after only four hours of jury deliberation. In October 2007, Jennifer Deleon, now calling herself Jennifer Henderson since her divorce from Skylar Deleon, was sentenced to two life terms without the possibility of parole.

“She didn’t have so much as a traffic ticket back then. If Jennifer had never met Skylar, none of this would’ve come into her life,” said her attorney, Michael Molfetta, who blames Skylar for the couple’s woes. “She had no idea what he was up to, no idea that he was into killing the Hawkses.”

 

Jennifer DeLeon with her attorney

 

But if you ask the trial prosecutor, he’ll say that Jennifer ran the show and was the driving force behind everything. “She was the dominant one in the relationship, she wore the pants,” Murphy said.

Jennifer has since divorced Skylar and a friend of hers from jail said she wants nothing more to do with him. This is in marked contrast to her earlier frequent visits to him in jail, pledging her love, before she herself was charged. Then the visits stopped.

Deleons case went to trial in the Fall of 2008: Deleon admitted his guilt at the beginning of trial, but prosecutors persisted in an effort to convince jurors to recommend the death penalty for sentencing. A California jury found Skylar Deleon guilty of all three murders on October 20. The penalty phase began October 22; On November 7, the jury returned its recommendation: the death penalty for Deleon.

For Ryan Hawks and the rest of the victims’ family, resolution for both cases will mean they can move on with their lives. Hawks and his brother Matt set up www.tomandjackiehawks.com, a web site initially set up to help find their parents. Matt posted this note on Father’s Day:

 

Tom and Jackie Hawks

 

Happy fathers day DAD. They don’t make words that can explain how great of dad you truly are. I am so thankful to have been raised by someone who taught me so much. I thank you for all the wonderful years we had, and the time spent with us. I promise dad that I will be the father to your grandson Jace that you were to me. I know that Jace will never get to meet you or mom again, but know that he will know all about you and the legacy you leave behind. I love you both so very much. Happy fathers day. Matt Hawksnote

finger 2.fin.0004 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Once the yacht was well out to sea, it didn’t take long for the idyllic cruise to turn ugly. While Jackie was on deck with Machain, Thomas was lured below to the master stateroom by Skylar and Kennedy. With the element of surprise on their side, Skylar and Kennedy began punching Thomas and using a stun gun on him. Incapacitating Thomas was no easy feat — Thomas may have been 57 years old, but he was a former competitive  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire   bodybuilder and wrestler who prided himself on staying in great shape.

Jackie, 47, was overpowered by Machain and brought below deck to join her husband. She cried, “We trusted you! How could you do this? You brought your wife and baby on board!” She pleaded, “I don’t want to die! I have a new grandchild in Arizona. I want to see him.”

Sympathy was not forthcoming. The couple was handcuffed with their arms behind their backs, and duct tape was placed over their eyes and mouths. Thomas said nothing, Jackie sobbed through her tape.

Thomas was a former military police officer, firefighter and probation officer. He had no illusions that the gang would let them live: if they were let off the ship they could identify their captors. “He knew they were going to die and he did the best he could to comfort her,” said Newport Beach police Sgt. Dave Byington. “He would reach over with a finger and stroke her hand.”

It was an excruciating two hours that they sat there, as the vessel neared Catalina Island 30 miles offshore. Then they were brought on deck, and the tape was peeled back so each of them could see out of one eye. Thomas and Jackie were ordered to sign a bill of sale for the yacht, a power of attorney document, and to provide the passwords to their bank accounts. For cooperating they would be dropped off on a passing boat or a dock somewhere in Mexico, the thieves told them.

Thomas and Jackie complied, having no other option.

arrived 4.ari.991 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Packing up her three foster children — and the cash tight in her purse strings — Belle moved to Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire La Porte, Indiana. LaPorte was an area heavy with fellow Norsemen that her late husband had known about and where he had been planning to eventually retire. She plopped the insurance money down on a farm up for sale by the county, a former house of ill repute that had fallen into disrepair since its madame, Mattie Altie, passed away at a crisp old age. It was a square house of red brick, two stories high, and set on the edge of an orchard on one side and a shallow swamp and forest on the other. McClung Road, which paralleled it, rolled over mild hill and dale south to La Porte whose church steeples peeked from over the patch of woodland a mile south.

Belle swept out the ghosts of its painted women and aired out their cheap sour perfume that dallied in the narrow hallways and recesses. To the Christian relief of her neighbors who had always hated such a “business” operating so near where their children were playing, Belle Sorenson turned the abode into a comfortable home for her and her happy brood.

Explains de la Torre, “Mattie Altie’s showy marquetry parlor floor and its dark walnut furnishings were polished until they shone. Simple ruffled curtains of white were put up to brighten the tall, narrow, tree-darkened windows…(A) handsome front fence was put up by a young hardware clerk, Charles F. Pahrman, (who was puzzled however) by the square of Kokomo link fence that penned hogs in the back on the rise that sloped to the swamp.” His customer had ordered that the fence be six feet high and topped by barbed wire, unusual for a hog pen…for what hog could ever jump even half that high?

The house had six bedrooms, a spacious dining room, a long kitchen, and a high-beam cellar. Kerosene lamps throughout kept the place well illumined. Carpenters, like Pahrman, were retained to free the clogged-up drain spouts, straighten the sagging shutters and reinforcing the small barn that stood across a patch of a yard.

Not long after she arrived in La Porte, Belle produced out of nowhere a new husband. He was tall, good-looking, blonde and bearded Peter Gunness, a farmer by trade. He brought with him a baby boy from a previous marriage who, not long after moving with his father, contacted a virus and died. The Gunness family’s grief soon mellowed out under the many hours of hard work required to keep the cornfields thriving. Irrigating, planting, sowing, everyone had his or her responsibility. Her children helped where they could, feeding the hogs, cleaning the corncrib, raking. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  Peter Gunness and Belle became regulars in town on trade day, selling their cattle for meat and trading manure for tools.

Then, one winter eve just before the close of 1900, daughter Jennie, hearing clatter below, rushed from her upstairs room to find her stepfather Peter writhing in pain on the kitchen floor. Standing over him, weeping, was Belle who screamed that the large iron meat grinder had fallen off the shelf onto his head. He died before sunrise.

 

leave 5.lea.0010 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

London was abuzz as the trial of Sweeney Todd approached in December 1801. “Scarcely ever in London has such an amount of public excitement been produced by any criminal proceedings as by the trial of Sweeney Todd,” wrote the Daily Courant. “So great is the excitement that sober-minded men, who do not see any peculiar interest in the sayings and doings of a great criminal, are disgusted that the popular taste should run that way.

“Be that as it may, the case of Rex v. Sweeney Todd will certainly be one of the trials of the age.”

That prescient prediction by the newspaper was held to be true as the trial opened. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  Sweeney Todd had not been told of the death of Margery Lovett prior to his trial, and when he was informed, he apparently turned pale, “like some great, gaunt ghost.”

Todd was actually on trial for just one murder, that a seaman, Francis Thornhill. Despite the large number of bodies and the mountain of evidence found at his home, police could scarcely identify any other victims. Sir Richard had rightly surmised that although the barber was a mass murderer, one slaying would be sufficient to send him to the gallows.

Dressed in a red gown, chain, and white peruke, the attorney general, representing King George III, opened his case. A reporter for the Newgate Calender — the long-serving recorder of criminal behavior in England — dutifully took down the statements.

“Mr. Thornhill had been commissioned to take a certain string of Oriental pearls, valued at 16,000 pounds, to a young lady in London,” the prosecutor began.  “He was anxious to fill this request, and as soon as the ship docked, went into the City with the pearls. It appears that upon his route to deliver them, he went into the shop of the prisoner at the bar to be shaved, and no one ever saw him again.”

The captain of the ship and a friend of the dead man retraced his route to the city when he failed to show up, and questioned Todd. Sweeney admitted shaving the sailor but said he completed the job and Thornhill went on his way. Col. Jeffrey, the friend of Thornhill remained in London after the ship sailed to Bristol, sure that the string of pearls would soon show up.

“Gentlemen, it did,” the prosecutor continued. “It appeared at the Hammersmith residence of Mr. John Mundel who lent money upon securities and it will be deposed that one evening the prisoner at the bar went to this Mr. Mundel and pawned a string of pearls for one thousand pounds.”

Describing in graphic details the scene beneath St. Dunstan’s Church, the attorney general revealed some of the more horrifying facts of the case of the Demon Barber. “Almost every vault was full of the fresh remains of the dead. (Sir Richard) found that into old coffins, the tenants of which had mouldered to dust, there had been thrust fresh bodies, with scarcely any flesh remaining on them — yet sufficient to produce the stench in the church”.

The prosecutor then went on to describe the connecting tunnel between Fleet Street and Bell Yard, and then tied it all together with the evidence found in Sweeney Todd’s shop.

“Sweeney Todd’s house was found crammed with property and clothing sufficient for 160 people,” he said to the stunned courtroom. “Yes, gentlemen of the jury, I said 160 people, and among all that clothing was found a piece of jacket which will be sworn to have belonged to Francis Thornhill.”

There was still more evidence, the prosecutor said.

“Is a piece of sleeve enough to convict a man? Wisely, the law says no and looks for the body of a murdered man,” he said confidently. “We will produce that proof. For among the skeletons found contiguous to Todd’s premises was one which will be sworn to as being that of the deceased Mr. Thornhill.”

Colonel William Jeffrey took the stand for the prosecution and told how he had gone in search of Thornhill, and how he later sought the help of the Bow Street Runners. He descended into the catacomb with Sir Richard and a doctor, who removed a bone from a skeleton they found there. Jeffery made his mark upon the bone for identification.

Next up for the prosecution was its star witness, the hero of the hour, Sir Richard Blunt. He told of how the rumors of Sweeney Todd had been brought to his attention and how he had linked Todd with the stench of St. Dunstan’s. “After careful inquiry, I found that out of 13 disappearances, no less than ten had declared their intention to get shaved, or their hair dressed, or to go through some process which required them to visit a barber.

“My attention was directed to the peculiar odour in the church and from that moment, I, in my own mind, connected it with Sweeney Todd and the disappearances of the persons who had so unaccountably been lost in the immediate neighborhood of Fleet Street. And in the midst of this, I had formal application made to me concerning the disappearance of Mr. Francis Thornhill, who had been clearly traced to the shop of the prisoner at the bar and never seen by anyone to leave it.”

The final witness for the prosecution was Dr. Sylvester Steers, who identified the leg bone found beneath Todd’s shop as one belonging to Thornhill. How did he come to this conclusion, the prosecutor asked.

“Mr. Thornhill met with a very unusual and painful accident,” the doctor replied. “The external condyle or projection on the outer end of the thighbone, which makes part of the knee joint, was broken off, and there was a diagonal fracture about three inches higher upon the bone. I had the sole care of the case, and although a cure was effected, it was not without considerable distortion of the bone.”  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

“From my frequent examination I was perfectly well acquainted with the case, and I can swear that the bone in the hands of the jury was the one so broken to which I attended.”

Forensic evidence such as this had never before been produced in a court trial, and the question of whether the jury, educated men though they might be, would accept it. The evidence of Todd’s guilt was certainly apparent if circumstantial evidence was to be believed. The job of the prosecutor would have been made so much easier if Mrs. Lovett had only been alive to testify.

andersonville 2.and.0003 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Death Knell

//

 

General William Tecumseh
Sherman

In May 1864 Union troops under the leadership of General William Tecumseh Sherman began a campaign on the city of Atlanta. Sherman’s formidable presence in Georgia caused great concern at Andersonville. General Winder believed that Sherman might launch an attack on the prison to liberate the captured Yankees. The South had fewer men in uniform than the North, and the Confederate leadership did not want to see the Union army replenished with 33,000 freed prisoners. They apparently did not take into account that the harsh conditions at Andersonville hardly made these men battle ready.

 

To prepare for a possible attack, Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
General Winder ordered the construction of two outer stockades and an earthworks barricade around the existing stockade. The work commenced immediately. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
With Sherman’s army so close, there was no time to waste. A middle stockade 12 feet high and the earthworks barricade were hastily erected, but the outer stockade was never completed. Sherman did not attack Andersonville, and his troops took control of Atlanta in the fall.

It has been suggested by some historians that the Union did not attempt to liberate Andersonville or other Confederate war prisons as part of an attrition strategy. Feeding thousands of prisoners was more burdensome for the Confederacy than it was for the Union. Food given to prisoners was food taken away from Confederate soldiers.

At the beginning of the war, an exchange cartel had been established to arrange for the swapping of prisoners between the North and the South, but when the Union insisted that their black soldiers be traded on a one-for-one basis just like the white soldiers, the Confederacy refused. Freedom and equality for black slaves was the issue that had ignited the war. It was a point the Confederacy would not concede although it desperately needed its soldiers imprisoned in the North. The Union would not negotiate this, even though it meant keeping Union soldiers incarcerated in hellholes like Andersonville. To win the war by attrition—if that was indeed the Union’s plan—the Confederacy’s resources would have to be sapped in every possible way. According to William Marvel in Andersonville: The Last Depot, “In the summer of 1864, Ulysses Grant let it slip that there was at least a grain of truth to that argument: as hard as it was on those in Southern prisons, he contended, it would be kinder to those still in the ranks if each side kept what prisoners it had, since it would end the war sooner.”

This was a cruel strategy if the Union leadership was fully aware of the horrible conditions at Andersonville. Prisoners died of exposure, malnutrition and a variety of diseases, including smallpox, typhoid, dysentery, diarrhea, scurvy and gangrene. Lonnie R. Speer writes in Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War, “Diarrhea and dysentery, by themselves, were responsible for 4,529 deaths between March 1 and August 31, 1864.” When a man was found dead inside the stockade, his body was simply left in the lane that ran in front of his shelter. A prison detail would eventually remove it.

 

Prison burial detail
(Library of Congress)

Sometimes men would fake their own deaths, hoping to be carried out and left on the pile of corpses rotting outside the prison gates, so that they could run off after dark. Many men risked crossing the dead line to scale the stockade walls, but even those few who made it over the top didn’t get far. Escapees were usually captured within a day. Out of the nearly 33,000 prisoners who spent time at Andersonville only 329 escaped successfully.

 

Andersonville served as a war prison for only 15 months. The ever-present threat of attack from Sherman’s troops forced Winder to relocate prisoners to other facilities. This evacuation was long and torturous because most of the prisoners were in wretched shape, and the trains arrived irregularly. Security grew lax during this period as many guards were pulled off duty and sent to the front lines, but with no provisions and little strength, few prisoners attempted to escape. The evacuation proceeded slowly, but by November only 1,500 inmates occupied the camp. New arrivals brought the population up to 5,000 by December, and the camp remained at that number until the end of the war in April 1865.

All told, Andersonville Prison, which was originally built to hold 10,000 prisoners, held 32,899 at its most crowded. In all, 12,919 of them perished there. According to John W. Lynn in {800 Paces to Hell}, the death toll at Andersonville was roughly equivalent to the total number of Union soldiers killed in the six bloodiest battles of the war—Gettysburg, Spotsylvania, the Wilderness, Shiloh, Stone’s River and Chickamauga.

There is no record of what became of Captain and Mrs. Hunt and their baby boy.

After the war, Captain Wirz was tried for the atrocities of Andersonville by a military tribunal that convened at the U.S. Capitol in Washington. Oddly Wirz stood trial on these charges by himself; his superiors were noindicted. Former prisoners gave vivid testimony regarding beatings and shooting allegedly administered by Wirz while Wirz’s attorneys argued that a man with “a withered left shoulder and useless right arm,” as William Marvel writes, could not possibly have delivered such punishment by his own hand. It was obvious that the North needed a scapegoat to satisfy its outrage over the horrors of Andersonville, and Wirz fit the bill. His conviction was inevitable.

 

Captain Wirz on the gallows
(Library of Congress)

On October 24, 1865, he was found guilty on one count of conspiracy to commit murder for conditions at Andersonville and 11 counts of murder, including the death of one-legged Chickamauga. Wirz was sentenced to death by hanging. His execution took place 17 days later within view of the Capitol in the yard of the Old Capitol Prison before a restless crowd of spectators, some of whom climbed trees to get a good look at the devil of Andersonville as he met his end. Wearing the customary black robe and hood of the condemned, his hands and legs bound with straps, Wirz was hanged at 10:30 in the morning. He was pronounced dead 14 minutes later. As his body was removed, knife-wielding spectators rushed to the scaffold to take slivers of wood and pieces of the rope as souvenirs.

 

 

Andersonville Cemetery
(Library of Congress)

 

 

articles 4.art.000200 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

On September 14, 2007, former football star O.J. Simpson, 60, made the news yet again when he was implicated in an armed robbery inside Las Vegas’ Palace Station Hotel and Casino. Initially named a suspect in the robbery, O.J. told detectives that he and some men he met at a friend’s wedding party retrieved allegedly stolen memorabilia that belonged to him out of a hotel guest’s room, Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  after being alerted by auction house owner Tom Riccio that collectors were planning on selling the items, the Associated Press reported. The stolen objects included O.J.’s Hall of Fame certificate, a picture of him with J. Edgar Hoover and some personal childhood and family photos, as well as negatives taken by his ex-wife Nicole Brown. O.J. said that he failed to alert the police because he often found them unresponsive since the 1994 murder of Brown and her friend Ron Goldman.

 

O.J. Simpson

 

O.J. claimed that he didn’t use a weapon when he retrieved the articles. However, police did seize two firearms reportedly belonging to Walter Alexander, 46, of Arizona and other evidence from two other homes that were allegedly connected to the crime. Alexander was arrested on September 15^th while on route to McCarran International Airport on two counts of robbery, two counts of assault Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  with a deadly weapon, conspiracy to commit robbery and burglary with a deadly weapon.

During the investigation, detectives interviewed one of the victims, Bruce Fromong, a sports memorabilia collector who testified for Simpson in the 1997 wrongful death trial concerning Ron Goldman’s death. Fromong said that Simpson entered the room with as many as six men, one of whom posed as a potential buyer. Two of the men then wielded guns at him while Simpson screamed, “That’s mine, that’s mine, that’s mine” and made threats, CNN reported. Another man in the hotel room, Alfred Beardsley was alarmed and immediately called the police. Simpson later told detectives that he might have exchanged harsh words and threats but that he only wanted his property back, which he believed was stolen. The Associated Press quoted Beardsley as saying that he would “give him [O.J.] those pictures back” because he felt “bad about it” and concerned because things had “gotten way out of control.”

On September 16^th, one day after Alexander was taken into custody O.J. was also arrested. Among the charges O.J. faced were “robbery with the use of a deadly weapon, conspiracy to commit robbery, burglary with a deadly weapon and two counts of assault with a deadly weapon and coercion,” Clark County District Attorney David Roger said that “He is facing a lot of time” if he is found guilty. O.J. could face as much as life in prison. More arrests are expected to be made in connection with the case that has catapulted O.J. back into the media spotlight.

eyes 3.eye.992 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?
Groucho Marks in the movie Duck Soup.

Having worked hard at destroying the credibility of the police officers involved in the investigation, the defense team then turned their considerable abrasive talents in the direction of the witnesses for the prosecution who were called to give evidence regarding the blood samples found at the crime scenes. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
This would prove to be the most complicated and technical part of the trial, leading many people to believe that a jury of laypeople was simply unable to grasp the complex and, at times, stupefyingly dense evidence.

Jurist #98 Carrie Bess, a postal officer worker, said of the technical evidence, “We heard how people watching the DNA testimony on television found it difficult to keep track of details. Our sentiments exactly.”

Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School and perhaps the most experienced attorney in the court, especially on the theory and mechanics of the law, was himself overwhelmed by parts of the trial. He said, “Much of the expert testimony was incomprehensible to me — and I have been teaching law and science for a quarter of a century.”

Dennis Fung, the lead criminalist called out to the crime scenes on June 12, started giving evidence on April 3. He would spend most of the next three weeks in the witness box being cross-examined by Simpson’s lawyers. On the face of it, he was an experienced professional, eleven years on the job, over 500 crime scenes under his belt.

He explained to the jury about the painstaking process of collecting bloodstains and smears and other evidence and how it was catalogued and stored. The prosecution maintained that DNA evidence tied Simpson into both of the murders and it came from blood on the glove found behind the guest bungalow, in the Ford Bronco, on the pair of socks found in his bedroom at Rockingham Avenue and on the footpath at South Bundy.

Barry Scheck

The defense’s main attack on the prosecution’s blood/DNA evidence came from lawyers Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld. Barry Scheck stepped into the limelight as a star on O.J. Simpson’s “Dream Team” of lawyers, but for many years he had been on the cutting edge of criminal law.

A pioneer in genetic fingerprinting, Scheck had earned honors as a forensics expert who used scientific evidence to defend indigent suspects facing serious crimes. During 1987, the short, fiery New Yorker masterminded impressive arguments that led to Hedda Nussbaum being declared innocent in the death of her adopted child. Scheck adeptly pleaded that the woman suffered from abuse by her companion, Joel Steinberg, and he convinced jurors that Nussbaum had become a psychological victim of spousal abuse.

But unlike many prominent attorneys who built up their financial assets by taking on highly publicized murder trials, Scheck donated his professional services in 90 percent of the cases he has taken on.

Peter Neufeld

Scheck and his partner Peter Neufeld teamed up and launched the pro-bono Innocence Project at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in 1992, an organization that helps to free people wrongfully convicted of murder through DNA testing. Two of the more prominent civil rights attorneys in America, they both practiced law in New York.

Neufeld, a 44-year-old graduate of the New York University of Law, was working in a Legal Aid office in the South Bronx when he met Scheck. They had joined forces and became accomplished defense lawyers as well as colleagues, developing a particular interest in what they saw as an intersection between science and the law. Neufeld had done pioneering work in forensic psychology and was one of the very first lawyers to successfully use the “battered woman’s syndrome” as a defense against murder.

The two lawyers were drawn to DNA “fingerprinting” as a powerful tool to help exonerate those who had been wrongly convicted and imprisoned. They saw it as a major leap beyond conventional serology typing.  To Neufeld, DNA was the “gold standard of truth.” To Scheck, it was “the magical black box that suddenly produces the truth.”

Scheck started out on Fung wanting to know why the Ford Bronco had not been sealed off as a vital evidentiary object in the Rockingham crime scene, why he was the only criminalist employed on both sites, and what impact on evidence corruption the blanket that covered Nicole’s body may have had. Scheck also zeroed in on why  junior criminalist Andrea Mazzola was allowed to collect most of the blood evidence.

Over the period of Scheck’s cross-examination, he brought up the fact that a crime scene photograph showed an ungloved hand holding the blood-spattered envelope containing Mrs. Brown’s eyeglasses. Fung also agreed that he had only collected “representative” smears of the blood in the Ford Bronco, which was why stains were still found in the vehicle six weeks after it was impounded. He also admitted to placing blood samples into plastic bags, which he claimed was purely a temporary measure, although doing this could foster bacteria growth, which in turn could distort test results.

Scheck accused Fung of destroying evidence in an effort to conceal when he received the vial of O.J. Simpson’s blood. The criminalist remembered that in fact he had given the vial of blood to his assistant, Mazzola, and she had carried it out to their evidence truck in a black plastic bag. There was also a heated debate over a missing page from the crime scene checklist, which Scheck claimed was replaced as it showed that Fung could not have received the vial at the time he stated he had. The missing page however, subsequently turned up in a crime laboratory notebook, and Judge Ito ruled that its misplacement was inadvertent.

On April 18th, Dennis Fung finished testifying. He denied covering up mistakes, using selective memory and “saying what the prosecution had told him to say,” rather than what was the truth. He then amazed everyone in the courtroom, by crossing over to the defense table and shaking hands with O.J. Simpson and his lawyers. It seemed to some observers, that Dennis Fung was just so delighted to be finished with his testimony.

Apart from his grueling days on the witness stand, he had been the butt of more than one joke. Shapiro had been presented with a box of fortune cookies by a local Chinese restaurant and had gone around presenting them with compliments from the “Hang Fung Restaurant.”  When word got out, it became a big story in the media. Also Johnnie Cochran, who told reporters that Dennis Fung was the worst witness he had ever seen in thirty-three years, was seen one day, during court break, dancing up and down the hall singing, “We’re having Fung. Oh we’re having Fung” For a man basing his case on a racist platform, he seemed to be showing very poor judgment.  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Andrea Mazzola was called to give evidence on April 20th and spent four days being grilled by Peter Neufeld, who subjected her to as severe a battering as his partner had to Dennis Fung.

She agreed that she had collected most of the blood samples without any supervision from Fung, although in the preliminary hearing, Fung had claimed the opposite. Neufeld also tried hard to show that Mazzola did a sloppy job, using videotape as evidence of her resting a hand on a dirty footpath, wiping tweezers with a dirty hand, and dropping several blood swabs. She admitted that there were times when she had made mistakes in the collection of evidence, but denied emphatically that anyone, including herself would have deliberately altered evidence.

She was unable to confirm that she had carried out to the evidence truck the vial of Simpson’s blood returned to the scene by Detective Vannatter, thus reinforcing the defenses notion that the blood was never handed over to Fung that day, and this delay gave the police ample time to plant blood evidence.

Mazzola finished her testimony on April 27th. Both Scheck and Neufeld had done a brilliant job in creating a smokescreen to confuse the jury over the propriety of the criminalists’ activity that day in June. If there was confusion over who did what in the collection of crime scene evidence, it was minor compared to what was to come next.

pointed 9.poi.991991 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Friends of Jasmine’s twenty-three-year-old boyfriend, Jeremy Allen Steinke, pointed authorities to a town in Saskatchewan, and they found Jasmine alive and with Steinke. He was an unemployed high school dropout, considered the unofficial leader of a group Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  of Goth-punks. The two were arrested without incident and returned to Medicine Hat. After a hearing, Jasmine was sent to the Calgary Young Offenders Centre to await a trial. Within days, she had penned an apology letter to her family, admitting she had taken part in their slaughter. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  She wrote that she wished she could “take it all back” because now she “had no one.” She said her brother was killed because he was too sensitive to survive without her parents. She herself had choked him to make him unconscious.

Supposedly, this all occurred because the seventh-grade girl had reacted badly to being grounded for dating Steinke behind her parents’ backs. They told her she could no longer see him. Yet Jasmine had already agreed to marry Steinke and she was determined to be with him. She urged him to help her get rid of them.

Logo: VampireFreaks.com

A romantic bond was not all this couple shared: they had a fixation on Goth culture and Steinke even claimed to be a 300-year-old werewolf. Both had posts on a Web site known as VampireFreaks.com, and Steinke reportedly wore a vial of blood around his neck. Jasmine referred to herself on another site as “runawaydevil”. They shared an appreciation for razor blades, serial killers, vampires, and blood. They would soon learn that murder was not fantasy.