Archive for the ' Victim's Families ' Category
Daun Richert-Slagle suing Lifetime
I hope that she wins.
A woman who was the sole survivor of a serial killer who claimed the lives of at least eight victims is suing Lifetime and parent company A&E Television after the network portrayed her as a prostitute in a recent made for TV movie.
Daun Richert-Slagle, from Chico, California, was a 21-year-old mother of three back in 1990 when she was assaulted for several hours by Keith Hunter Jesperson, the man who would eventually become known as the Happy Face Killer.
According to Slagle, it was only because she had her young son with her at the time that he eventually agreed to let her go.
Now, in the new Lifetime film Happy Face Killer, Slagle is being portrayed not just as a prostitute, but as a woman who willingly had sex with the serial killer in front of her own child.
Slagle has responded by filing a lawsuit against Lifetime and A&E Television.
'Some of these things could literally destroy my career,' the registered nurse said in an interview with KTLA.
'In this particular case, Lifetime took somebody who had an innocent involvement with a serial killer and turned her, for whatever creative license or entertainment value, into a prostitute, into somebody trying to extort money, into being an unfit mother, which is completely deplorable,' added her attorney Tre Lovell.
Videos, pictures and much more detail:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2776407/Sole-survivor-vicious-serial-killer-sues-Lifetime-falsely-claim-young-mother-prostitute-new-TV-movie.html#ixzz3F2UMsfu4
How dare they victimise her again,.
True Crime Movies
True Crime TV
Victim's Families
A&E Television
Daun Richert-Slagle
Happy Face Killer
48 Hours update on the Long Island unidentified serial killer
I am glad that there is new information and that the case has not been just let lie. I was worried that since Hurricane Sandy it was just going to lay unsolved.
Sadly there does not seem to be any new leads or information on the 4 girls found murdered in New Jersey. So close to this case.
True Crime Videos
Long Island New York
Long Island Serial Killer
Shannan Gilbert
Unidentified Serial Killer
Now She Has a Name; Heidi Balch
Now She Has a Name: When a Serial Killer Visited My Small Town
By Deji Olukotun
Until the day the golfer spotted a dismembered head in the cool waters of Stony Brook, the scariest beast in Hopewell was the New Jersey Devil. As elementary school students, we were shown videos of the Devil rampaging flocks of sheep and terrorizing farmers in the Pine Barrens. This was frightening, to be sure, but the Pine Barrens were several hours by car southeast of Hopewell (pop. 2200) and the videos never showed the Devil's face owing to budgeting constraints, as the filmmakers could not afford any special effects. Plus we had a professional hockey team named after him — the Devils — and they were an inspiration to young children, not a menace.
I remember receiving the news about the head late one night in a house in the Sourland Mountains in 1989. My friend George and I were locked in a fierce battle of Nintendo Ice Hockey, the chief variables of the game being to decide whether to choose a slow, plump player, who could shoot the puck hard and check anything in his path; a skinny player who was extremely lithe but who had a weak shot and could be easily bumped off his skates; or a medium-sized player who was a compromise between the other two body types. It was an addictive formula, and one that Nintendo continues to exploit in its games today. Anyway, we were engrossed in this battle when George's parents mounted the stairs and solemnly told us that a severed head had been found in a creek by the Hopewell Valley Golf Club, and added that they had locked the doors and we'd been up late enough playing-your-games-and-you-should-get-some-sleep.
We did not sleep that night, of course. The thought of a head without its body was something that had never occurred to us, and we were old enough, about 10, to know that someone had killed this body before lopping off its head. We consoled ourselves, as our world views splintered and cracked, by watching The Ultimate Warrior thrash his opponents on the World Wrestling Federation until the sun pried open our dreary eyelids.
The local news followed the story of the severed head closely, and blood tests eventually revealed that it contained the AIDS virus. In 1989, AIDS was associated with two things, gays and blacks, and we believed you could contract it by cutting your head on metal and that the symptom was a long white hair on your tongue and throat. This only compounded our sense of terror: a dismembered head with a misunderstood virus.
The place where the head had been found was more bizarre, the seventh hole of an idyllic golf club. My family didn't belong to the club, but I had been there with friends to swim in the pool, which had a deep-end colored a malevolent blue, so bottomless were its waters, and lifeguards that sneered as they twirled their whistles around their fingers. In my memories, the swimming pool is always sun-dappled and solar flared — enough to please J.J. Abrams — because we only went swimming on sunny days. Hopewell was a small town, and safe and complacent with its five churches, its family-owned deli, sport hunting shop, and pharmacy. It had once been a hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan, and before that a scene of fierce resistance during the Revolutionary War. Charles Lindbergh's baby had been kidnapped from a second story window, and then discarded in the woods just outside town, but by the late 1980s Hopewell had become a desirable backwater with its ample green spaces, acres of woods, pristine creeks, Harvest Festival, and Memorial Day parade, where kids of all colors could roam freely without fear. We would ride our Huffies and Schwinns by the golf course, right over the spot where Stony Brook, the stream in which the head had been found, dipped beneath the road.
As time went on, and the head was never claimed, rumors began to circulate, and always seemed to end in one of two possibilities: the Mafia or a serial killer had done it. Serial killers were, of course, far scarier to a 10 year old than the Mafia. Unlike the Mafia, which (television had us believe) followed a moral code, serial killers were imbued with their own unique compass. As a kid, my main concern was to find out how many other killers were out there, because that would promote my survival. My parents reassured me that we were safe — what else could you say to a child about such a thing? — and I would believe them until the sun went down and our home filled with shadows. But there were deeper questions, too: Why hadn't anyone noticed that a head was missing? Wasn't the family looking for the head? The thought that no family member cared enough about this person's head to claim it back was even more terrifying. If your family can't search for your missing head, then what good are they, in the end?
Most of my questions about the head were fed by what my parents called "an active imagination," but in hindsight the threats were never were too far away. While vacationing at my grandparents' cabin in Wisconsin, my mom hid an ax under the bed because the bodies of slaughtered children had been turning up in the woods, before Jeffrey Dahmer had been caught; my best friend in Hopewell had once lived in Arkansas down the street from the mother of John Wayne Gacy, a serial killer who had apparently visited her regularly as my friend rode his bigwheel tricycle down the street.
Much later, working with asylum seekers in South Africa, I regularly met men and women from the Democratic Republic of Congo who fled war-torn areas where roving militias dismembered the bodies of civilian victims. The difference was that the practice was fed by a heady mix of psychotropic drugs, psychological warfare, and perverted interpretations of animist traditions. The scale of such murders was terrifying, but there were reasons in place. It was war and the militias feared the spirits of their victims. There was a certain logic.
As a Nigerian-American, I've also become accustomed to a few stereotypes, most of which revolve around Nigerian email scams, but also the selling of body parts. Not just internal organs, but arms, legs, feet, little fingers. (Just watch the South African film District 9, and you'll see Nigerians who get off on dismembering people and also having sex with aliens from outerspace.) But again, there is a sort of reasoning to that illicit traffic. The bodies for these occult rituals are sliced apart for spiritual purposes, not as ends unto themselves.
Last week, after a 24-year search for more information about the head, the New Jersey State Police finally discovered the identity of the victim. She was a prostitute who had changed her name no less than 15 times, and she was identified by DNA tests that matched her with her aunt, who had filed a missing persons report with the police in 2001. Her name was Heidi Balch. She is believed to have been the first victim killed by Joel Rifkin, who confessed to murdering someone with the name of one of her aliases in 1993, and who had been sentenced to 200 years in prison after killing 17 prostitutes on a rampage. Rifkin claimed to have begun murdering prostitutes because he had contracted AIDS from one.
The HIV virus was the main character of South African author Kgebetli Moele's 2009 novel The Book of the Dead, and the protagonist moved from victim to victim boasting of its conquests. It was not Moele's best book — that would be Room 207, a must read — but it was chilling to read how the virus thrived on intimacy and broken relationships. Revenge was never the point of the virus in that story: it lived only for the sake of living. Rifkin, by contrast, claimed to be butchering for revenge and not for pleasure. In this, the fictional virus holds the moral upperhand, for it doesn't pretend to be serving some larger purpose.
Like science fiction, serial killers twist our values on their head and allow us to reflect back on ourselves — What would happen if our planet had two suns instead of one? Or if we communicated through telepathy? — and, in the case of serial killers — what if you didn't care if you killed someone? Or took pleasure in the killing? Serial killers are big business. Their psychological profiles and crafty, nefarious plotting can be patiently examined in a television series like Dexter or Bates Motel and people will watch them.
Only after I read the news about the discovery did I realize how long I had suppressed even thinking about the murder. For two decades, I now realized, I had been holding my breath as we drove along the road past the golf course; and all that time the head loomed spectral and ghoulish in the crenellations of my mind.
The New Jersey State Police managed to trace Heidi Balch's identity by searching records of prostitution offenses at the time. If my consciousness was first shattered in 1989 when they found the head, it was this fact that shattered it again. Heidi Balch was killed because she had been pushed, by will or by circumstance, to the margins of our society to the extent that her very livelihood was a criminal act. Rifkin, Dahmer, and Gacy preyed on the weak and marginalized. It's hard to imagine a sober conversation about legalizing prostitution in America today or empowering sex workers with rights, especially when abortion laws are becoming still more restrictive. Heidi Balch was unclaimed and nameless for 24 years. Now we know her name, but if she were alive today what would prevent us from forgetting her again?
Again we see how far the ripples of a killer reach into society. How it touches kids and parents and how and what they do.
Heidi Balch
Hopewell New Jersey
Joel Rifkin
John Wayne Gacy
the Mafia
Serial killer Anthony Sowell's aftermath continues
Serial killer Anthony Sowell's aftermath continues to stoke fears on Cleveland's East Side: Phillip Morris
By Phillip Morris, The Plain Dealer
Convicted serial murderer Anthony Sowell's Imperial Avenue home in Cleveland,OH, is demolished, Tuesday, December 6, 2011. But fear in the wake of his slaughter remains strong in certain Cleveland communities.
I first met Renee when they started pulling bodies out of Anthony Sowell's backyard in 2009.
She called and said she wanted to talk to a reporter. She warned me that she was in the middle of a nervous breakdown and needed to scream.
When I arrived at her East Side home, Renee met me at the door with a picture of Kimberly Yvette Smith in her hand. She gave me the photo and began to shake and sob uncontrollably.
Awkward and haunting doesn't begin to describe that introduction, but it's the moment the serial killing became real for me.
Kim, an attractive young lady, was the ninth woman to be found buried in the home of Anthony Sowell, the convict Cleveland serial killer. She was also a close friend of Renee's, as were four of the other women whose remains were found at the Imperial Avenue property.
But Renee wasn't worried about Sowell. His career was over. She was worried about someone else; a man who she believed posed a continuing threat to her.
"I'm scared, Mr. Morris. There is someone else out here raping us. I was raped in July at gunpoint. The same guy, with the same M.O. has raped at least three more of my girlfriends. How can we get this guy off the street before he kills someone?"
I've thought of Renee often in recent days as the level of tension and fear begins to rise again in certain neighborhoods on Cleveland's East Side — neighborhoods near the house where Anthony Sowell killed and stashed the bodies of eleven women.
Police took the extraordinary step this week of issuing a warning to women to remain vigilant against stranger abductions as they seek whoever killed 20-year-old Jazmine Trotter and 45-year-old Christine (Crissy) Johnson-Malone.
The bodies of these two Cleveland women were found about a mile from each other last week in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood. Both died of head trauma and strangulation. Police say they have no evidence the incidents are connected, but a highly stressed community is already rushing to its own judgements.
The fear that another serial predator might have emerged continues to evolve, especially with the news Monday of an attempted abduction in the general vicinity of the two killings.
Perhaps it's a community's overreaction. But that is what can be expected in the wake of a successful serial killer, who operated under a city's radar for years. Even after Sowell's 2011 capital conviction, the paranoia and fears he stoked live on.
The current attacks have caused some to wonder whether another violent sociopath has picked up the killer's mantel and resumed his work.
Cleveland, to its benefit, has changed in some important ways since Sowell made women disappear. The city's police department doesn't take missing person's reports as cavalierly as it once did. Officers appear quicker to handle the complaints and more eager to ascertain a missing person's whereabouts.
And the community is much quicker to report those who go missing. Families are doing a better job of keeping an eye on their own lost sheep and vulnerable loved ones.
Such proactive behavior helps improve the overall level of public safety, as sloppy predators – like Sowell – no longer have the luxury of operating in a climate marked by rank indifference.
Still, the warning and plea of Renee continue to haunt me. I don't know if she's living or dead. I have been unable to locate her.
If you're out there Miss RYO, give me a call.
Her concerns remain just as valid now as they were when we spoke.
The first line of defense against a predator remains vigilance. Members of a community who assume direct responsibility for each other thwart a serial killer from operating under our radar.
Anthony Sowell
Christine (Crissy) Johnson-Malone
Imperial Avenue home in Cleveland OH
Jazmine Trotter
Kimberly Yvette Smith
Charles Manson in the news again
Charlie just can not seem to behave and stay out of trouble even in prison. I mean, I am sure he had no idea that his follower (yes, Charlie still has plenty of them) was trying to sneak him a cell phone. Just like Charlie had no clue that his other followers were murdering people.
CORCORAN, Calif. — A follower of Charles Manson has been arrested for allegedly trying to smuggle a cell phone inside a California prison where the mass murderer is housed, authorities said Tuesday.
Craig Carlisle Hammond, 63, was arrested Sunday for investigation of conspiracy, possession of an illegal communication device and attempting to bring a cell phone into a prison, said Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections.
He was taken to jail and was released after posting bail. He is scheduled to be in court next month.
Hammond had a wrist watch cell phone that was found by a correctional officer at Corcoran State Prison in an area where the device is prohibited, authorities said. The phone never got into Manson's hands.
However, the notorious cult leader who is serving a life sentence for orchestrating a series of gruesome murders more than 40 years ago has been caught with a smuggled cell phone twice in the past four years.
In 2009, Manson was found with a phone and he had been calling and texting people in California, Florida, New Jersey and British Columbia. Two years ago, he also was found with a phone.
Recent legislation in California makes it a misdemeanor to smuggle a cell phone into a prison, punishable by a fine of up to $5,000.
Hammond goes by the name Gray Wolf that was given to him by Manson and regularly visits the 78-year-old, according to the Los Angeles Times (http://lat.ms/10fOUVL).
From Huffington Post
More info from L.A. Times
Manson has been caught with a cellphone in his cell twice. Manson called people in California, New Jersey and Florida with an LG flip phone found under his prison bunk in March 2009. For the offense, 30 days were added to his sentence. The cult leader was again found with a cellphone in his cell Jan. 6, 2011.
That fall, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a Senate bill that makes it a misdemeanor to possess an unauthorized cellphone in prison or to try to take one into a prison. Violators face up to six months in jail and a fine of up to $5,000.
The proliferation of cellphones in prisons is a significant public safety concern, officials say. Inmates have run street gangs from behind bars, intimidated witnesses and orchestrated assaults on guards, they said. In 2011, 15,000 cellphones were found inside prisons.
Manson sees few visitors, but Hammond is among his regulars. Hammond controls a copyright on Manson's music and is a self-described follower of the the inmate.
A Manson website maintained by followers and believers of Manson's ATWA group –an acronym for Air, Trees, Water, Animals — reported that Gray Wolf was detained at Level 4 visitation entrance. According to the website, Manson was meeting with another friend when Gray Wolf was detained by guards. Manson and the two visitors were subsequently searched and the two visitors also consented to their vehicles being searched. Gray Wolf was then taken into custody and asked for a lawyer, according to the website.
I am not linking to ATWA, if you are curious it is easy to find.
I actually giggled when I read this article. Do not get me wrong, it is sad, disturbing and a concern that Manson still has people willing to go to jail for him but the fact that the dummy was busted and Charlie did not get his way makes me happy.
I kind of felt like this
His crimes are in no way a joke but really, his legacy has become one to most people.
People have not forgotten, it is just that many see him as something to make fun of rather than to follow and that's not such a bad thing.
It would have been better to rid the world of him, but I can stomach him being an object of ridicule (by most) much better than as an object to follow.
ATWA
Charlies Manson
Craig Carlisle Hammond
Peanut butter jelly time
Families of killers, forgotten victims.
"Moore is a part of an exclusive group, those who share blood relations with someone perceived by the public as a monster: a mass murderer. With that unenviable tie can come isolation, guilt, grief, fear, disbelief, even post-traumatic stress disorder, in addition to a very public stigma.
In the aftermath of a massacre, questions and criticism are frequently directed at the parents, spouses and children of the accused. The public sometimes sympathizes, often criticizes and even goes so far as to blame family members for the actions of their kin."
Families of killers and what they go through.
So often forgotten victims.
Susan Klebold said in an essay:
"For the rest of my life, I will be haunted by the horror and anguish Dylan caused. I cannot look at a child in a grocery store or on the street without thinking about how my son's schoolmates spent the last moments of their lives. Dylan changed everything I believed about my self, about God, about family, and about love. I think I believed that if I loved someone as deeply as I loved him, I would know if he were in trouble. My maternal instincts would keep him safe. But I didn't know. And my instincts weren't enough. And the fact that I never saw tragedy coming is still almost inconceivable to me. I only hope my story can help those who can still be helped. I hope that, by reading of my experience, someone will see what I missed."
I can not even begin to imagine that, how she feels. It has to horrible.
Melissa worried that she might also be a killer, a bad person or have some kind of evil inside of her due to her father being a serial killer.
""When I was growing up, my dad had put so much pride in my last name, and he gave me lessons on how to be a good citizen," Moore said. "My name was now known for these horrific murders, and it started to make me wonder if I was like my dad."
Brown says it's normal for the family members of killers to doubt their own moral integrity. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, right?"
Imagine for 1 second growing up with that fear inside of you. I can't. It speaks of her courage, that she went on.
There is also often a survivor's guilt for the families of the killers.
"Mildred Muhammad's ex-husband and father of her three children, John Allen Muhammad, terrorized the Washington, D.C., area with random sniper attacks in 2002.
Soon, there were reports of shootings throughout the Washington metropolitan area. Once John Muhammad was captured, there were whispers that he had done it to get his ex-wife's attention.
At first, Mildred Muhammad thought that if she'd only stayed with him, he would have killed her instead of killing 10 innocent strangers and wounding three. The guilt and disbelief were overwhelming.
It's difficult to grasp the reality that a family member could cause nationwide sorrow, said forensic psychiatrist Helen Morrison, who has profiled dozens of killers. Also hard is the realization that it's not the family's fault.
Morrison said it's imperative to get the individual to talk about their experience — their feelings, their doubt, their anger, their distress — and try to put that in a perspective that finally leads them to say, "It's not my fault."
This poor woman blamed herself for not being killed.
I can hope that there will not be anymore murders, but I don't think that is a hope I can really expect to come to being.
So, I hope that in the face of a tragic event people can remember that the killer is alone in their blame.
The families are victims as well, even if that is hard to process.
Shattered Silence from Melissa Moore here.
Susan Klebold's essay here.
Far From the Tree here.
Another excellent book on this subject, We Need to Talk About Kevin. This is a fictional account but it still has a lot of insight into this subject.
By Sarah LeTrent
(CNN) — "Missy, you need to change your last name," the shackled man in the orange prison jumpsuit said into the receiver, staring blankly at his 15-year-old daughter's tear-stained face.
"That's when I knew that these things were true," recalls Melissa Moore, now 33.
Until that day, the man behind the glass partition, Keith Hunter Jesperson, was simply her father; the one who used to tuck her into bed at night "like a burrito."
Now, in her eyes, he was also the convicted serial killer plucked straight from the newspaper headlines who was serving multiple life sentences; the one who had bloodied her family name forever.
Jesperson, the so-called "Happy Face Killer," murdered eight women when he was a long-haul truck driver in the early 1990s. Jesperson earned his nickname by sending confessions to journalists and police departments around the country to gain notoriety, signing the admissions…
Andrew Solomon
Dylan Klebold
Far From the Tree
Helen Morrison
John Allen Muhammad
Keith Jesperson
Mildred Muhammad
Sandra L. Brown
Serial Killer Books
Shattered Silence
Susan Klebold
The Dead Man Talking Project
Hunting for Long-Gone Serial Killers: Inside the Dead Man Talking Project
Two California prosecutors are teaming to up to gather the DNA of deceased murderers and use it to close unsolved murders. But tracking down the saliva of a dead man isn't always easy. Christine Pelisek reports.
By day, she runs the sex-crimes division of the Los Angeles County district attorney's office. In her spare time, she tracks down the DNA of dead rapists, murderers, and serial killers.
Carol Burke is on a mission to cross off as many cold cases as she can by matching swabs of known felons with evidence from unsolved-crime scenes. With Anne Marie Schubert, who is in charge of child-abuse cases upstate in the Sacramento D.A.'s office, Burke helps to run a project called Dead Man Talking, which has brought the pair closer than ever to bringing justice to the cases of some of the most sadistic serial killers in California history—even if the culprits themselves are long gone.
"It's really rewarding," Burke says of the project. "There is a lot of value to it, even though we can't prosecute the offenders because they are dead. Families can at least have some closure. They finally know what happened to their loved ones."
California has a DNA data bank that stores close to 2 million felon profiles. It also contains some 25,000 pieces of crime-scene evidence from murders, rapes, robberies, and burglaries—semen from a bed sheet, or a cigarette butt—that have never been linked to an offender.
Burke and Schubert believe that adding to the list of felon profiles could close countless unsolved cases. But a surprising number of known offenders are missing from the database. Schubert says that since 1984, close to 25,000 inmates have died in a California prison or on parole. Of those, nearly 19,000 were not swabbed for DNA before they died. Over 40 of them were death-row inmates.
Finding traces of these men can be extremely difficult, especially for two women with full-time jobs and no staff. Burke and Schubert are focusing first on death-row inmates and then widening their net to offenders who were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Each has their own white whale. Burke is devoted to tracking down the DNA of notorious "Freeway Killer" William Bonin, so called because many of his victims were left by the side of freeways in Southern California. "He's my No. 1 target," Burke says. "He was a really bad guy. He was so prolific."
Bonin was convicted of kidnapping, robbing, sexually assaulting, and killing 13 boys and young men in Los Angeles and Orange counties between 1979 and 1980. After he was arrested, Bonin, who had worked alongside various accomplices, including a factory worker named Vernon Butts, confessed to killing 21 young boys and young men, some of them he had picked up hitchhiking. Police believe his body count is closer to 30.
However, when Bonin was executed in San Quentin State Prison in 1996 before submitting a DNA sample, any hope of linking him to more killings died with him.
"I originally assumed they autopsied people in San Quentin," says Burke. "That's not the case. They were only autopsying people who committed suicide or were killed in prison. So someone who died of natural causes or was executed like Bonin was not autopsied."
Burke says Bonin's court files and trial exhibits have been destroyed. Nor has she had any luck finding his blood, semen, or saliva with the Los Angeles or Orange County police departments or with the coroner's office. An attempt to track down the DNA of Butts, who Bonin said was an active participant in many of the murders, almost came to fruition when she discovered that he had committed suicide in a Los Angeles County jail and was autopsied. But, she said, law-enforcement personnel destroyed the forensic evidence in 2010.
The dead ends can be frustrating. "Bonin is the most notorious and the one who most likely left unsolved murders in his wake," Burke says. "It sure would be great to get his sample so we could solve some of the unsolveds out there."
Recently she found better luck in the case of Roland Comtois, who abducted two teenaged girls in 1987, killed one, and sexually assaulted the other. The 65-year-old inmate died in a prison hospital from an infection in 1994, but was never autopsied. But Burke's sleuthing uncovered a bloody shirt that had belonged to the killer—left when police shot him trying to escape arrest and stored as evidence. So far, his DNA has not been linked to any new murders.
Schubert, who created Dead Man Talking in 2008, started the project in part to solve some of Sacramento County's most notorious serial-killer cold cases that date back to the '70s.
"It was a killing field, and not just here," she says. "The number of body dumps across the state was enormous."
One of the killers high on her list is the "Original Night Stalker," who is believed to be responsible for over 50 rapes that began in Northern California and ended with multiple murders in 1986 in Santa Barbara, Orange, and Ventura counties.
"It terrified Sacramento and the region," says Schuster, who was a child when the attacks began. "We still haven't solved it. It's highly likely that he has died in prison."
Schubert spent over a year searching for the DNA of serial killer Gerald Gallego, who along with his wife was responsible for the sex-slave murders of 10 young women in California and Nevada in the late '70s. Gallego, who was sentenced to death in both states, died in 2002 of rectal cancer in Nevada and was never swabbed.
Eventually, Schubert says, she found a saliva sample buried inside 14 boxes at a clerk's office.
"I can say he was suspected in multiple murders and not just the ones he was convicted of," she says.
Last year the pair had their first major success when they linked L.A. serial killer Juan Chavez to the unsolved murder of 60-year-old Lynn Penn. Penn was found strangled in his apartment in July 1990.
Chavez committed suicide three months after he was convicted of killing five gay men. Schubert discovered that Chavez had been autopsied, and a sample of his blood was still in evidence. His DNA was uploaded into the DNA data bank and last February it was linked to saliva found on a cigarette butt discovered inside Penn's apartment.
"I think I screamed," said Schubert when she learned of the DNA hit. "I remember where I was. It's like how everyone remembers where they were when Elvis died."
Schubert is hoping to expand the project statewide and hire a full-time investigator. However, cold-case grants are hard to come by. Last year they were turned down for funding for the project.
"There are probably some people out there that are like, these guys are dead; it doesn't matter. I don't think that at all," she says. "It does matter. It's about seeking justice for those who were harmed by these people."
I think it matters and I think it is very important to give the families closure. I applaud these two ladies and hope that the criminal justice system gets behind them.
Anne Marie Schubert
Carol Burke
Dead Man Talking
Gerald Gallego
Juan Chavez
Lynn Penn
Roland Comtois
the Original Night Stalker
Vernon Butts
WIlliam Bonin