Tag: crime

Secret OJ Simpson files are released by FBI and reveal chilling new details about murder investigation that shocked the nation

The FBI has released almost 500 never before seen files on OJ Simpson which reveal more details about the infamous case.

The tranche was published Friday and largely covers the investigation into the 1994 murders of Simpson’s ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman.

Simpson was cleared of criminal charges in 1995, following a high profile trail which captured the nation’s attention.

He was later found civilly liable and ordered to pay the victims’ families $33.5 million. He maintained his innocence until his death in April aged 76.

The secret documents show the lengths that the FBI went to to keep their findings under wraps.

‘Due to the intense media interest in captioned matter, and the potential prejudicial impact that public dissemination could have on pending criminal proceedings the following information should be handled on a strict need to know basis, and should not be disseminated outside the FBI,’ one internal memo published states.

The files also reveal the huge effort investigators put in to identify the shoes worn by the killer.

LA homicide detectives determined the footwear to be a pair of rare Bruno Magli shoes, with agents flying to the manufacturer in Italy in a bid to glean more information.

Agents dispatched to the factory were briefed, ‘under no circumstance should the interviewing agents mention that this investigation concerns OJ Simpson or the homicide investigation in Los Angeles, California’.

Other details include lists of materials found at the scene which were sent for DNA testing.

Two rambling letters dated June 1994 are also among the documents, written by an individual claiming to have visions about the killings.

‘I can’t sleep at night. The dreams that I have, where pieces of the puzzle fall into place. And the ultimate dream that the killer is still out there and is after me,’ one reads. 

The FBI publishes records it keeps on individuals following their death. 

Keep reading

The Myth That Biden Had Nothing to Do with the Prosecutions of Trump

The five criminal and civil prosecutions of Donald Trump all prompt heated denials from Democrats that President Biden and Democrat operatives had a role in any of them.

But Joe Biden has long let it be known that he was frustrated with his own Department of Justice’s federal prosecutors for their tardiness in indicting Donald Trump.

Biden was upset because any delay might mean that his rival Trump would not be in federal court during the 2024 election cycle. And that would mean he could not be tagged as a “convicted felon” by the November election while being kept off the campaign trail.

Politico has long prided itself on its supposed insider knowledge of the workings of the Biden administration. Note that it was reported earlier this February that a frustrated Joe Biden “has grumbled to aides and advisers that had Garland moved sooner in his investigation into former President Donald Trump’s election interference, a trial may already be underway or even have concluded…”

If there was any doubt about the Biden administration’s effort to force Trump into court before November, Politico further dispelled it—even as it blamed Trump for Biden’s anger at Garland: “That trial still could take place before the election and much of the delay is owed not to Garland but to deliberate resistance put up by the former president and his team.”

Note in passing how a presidential candidate’s legal right to oppose a politicized indictment months before an election by his opponent’s federal attorneys is smeared by Politico as “deliberate resistance.”

Given Politico was publicly reporting six months ago about Biden’s anger at the pace of his DOJ’s prosecution of Trump, does anyone believe his special counsel, Jack Smith, was not aware of such presidential displeasure and pressure?

Note Smith had petitioned and was denied an unusual request to the court to speed up the course of his Trump indictment.

And why would Biden’s own Attorney General, Merrick Garland, select such an obvious partisan as Smith? Remember, in his last tenure as special counsel, Smith had previously gone after popular Republican and conservative Virginia governor Bob MacDonald.

Keep reading

Gilgo Beach serial killer suspect studied ‘Mindhunter’ book like ‘homework’, typed planning notes on Microsoft Word, and murdered woman as far back as 1993: Docs

Prosecutors in the Suffolk County, New York, confirmed Thursday that the suspected Gilgo Beach serial killer has been formally accused of two more murders, but the bail application to make extra certain that Rex Heuermann remains behind bars also provided details that are chilling in their implications.

Heuermann, now 60, was infamously arrested last summer on the strength of discarded pizza crust and DNA evidence that allegedly linked him to male hairs found on the victims, of whom there are now six.

The Manhattan architect, already accused of murdering Melissa Barthelemy, 24, Megan Waterman, 22, Amber Costello, 27, and Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, in the late 2000s and 2010 on Long Island, has since been indicted in the 2003 slaying of Jessica Taylor, 20, and the 1993 murder of Sandra Costilla, 28.

Simply put, the link between Heuermann and a murder from the early 1990s, when he would have been around 30 years old, raises the distinct possibility that, if he really is who prosecutors say he is, there’s no telling how far back the serial killings largely targeting sex workers may go or how many victims there might be.

Keep reading

When a North Carolina Colonel Shot This Utility Worker, Journalists Suggested His Victim Was a Spy

At first glance, the killing of Ramzan Daraev was a senseless tragedy. Daraev was taking photographs of a telephone pole in Carthage, North Carolina, on May 3 for his utility company job. A U.S. Army special operations colonel who lives on that street accused Daraev of trespassing; the confrontation ended with the colonel shooting Daraev dead.

Journalists smelled a more sensational story. Daraev, it turns out, was an immigrant from Chechnya, a Muslim-majority region of Russia that has a history of conflict with the Russian government. Fox News reporters and a conservative social media personality falsely called Daraev an illegal alien, both implying that Daraev was a Russian spy.

Although the investigation is ongoing and it’s unclear whether the colonel or Daraev was to blame for escalating the fight, there’s no evidence that Daraev was connected to any foreign scheme.

The story is a perfect storm of anti-immigrant panic and national security paranoia. Because the incident involved a U.S. soldier and a foreigner—one who fled from a rival government, to boot—journalists were quick to assume that the foreigner had it coming. And they projected an action-movie fantasy to explain why.

The confrontation began while Daraev and a coworker were “performing pole surveys as part of an ongoing engineering design project for deploying fiber infrastructure,” his employer, Utilities One, later confirmed. An unnamed colonel, who is stationed at nearby Fort Liberty, was alarmed by two men with cameras outside of his house.

“They are talking to each other on the property line right now, and they are obviously having a difficult time communicating,” his wife told police, laughing a little, according to audio of her 911 call released by The Fayetteville Observer. “My husband’s just yelling to me to ‘call the police, call the police.'”

Then something went wrong. The colonel’s wife called the police again a few minutes later, screaming that she needed a rifle. “This person is from Chechnya. He came up on our property line. My kids are in the backyard. He’s taking pictures of our property. My husband, he’s military,” she said. “He’s trained and he knows what he’s doing, but I really need some police presence here.”

Soon after, Daraev was dead. He was shot in the face, the hand, and the back, according to a petition by the Daraev family. The sheriff’s department found Daraev’s partner, Adsalam Dzhankutov, nearby.

It would appear to be a common misunderstanding, turned violent. Thieves have pretended to be utility workers in the past and jumpy homeowners have shot real utility workers mistaken for intruders. But three weeks later, Fox News picked up the story, turning a local incident into a “mysterious shooting” that “raises questions” about national security.

“U.S. Special Operations soldiers around the country have experienced strange interactions in recent years that they say involve suspicious surveillance of them and their families,” national security reporter Jennifer Griffin and producer Liz Friden wrote. “Many believe that U.S. military bases have become an increasing target of foreign probes.”

Griffin and Friden conceded that the shooting “could have been a case of mistaken identity,” then quickly emphasized that Daraev and Dzhankutov had “cell phones with Russian language contacts.” (In other words, they still talked to their friends and family back home.) “Sources tell Fox News that ‘power company employment is often a cover for status/action’ that U.S. intelligence agents use for surveillance of foreign targets overseas,” they added.

Keep reading

New York and New Jersey Want To Let Felons Serve on Juries. Here’s Why.

The vast majority of states—44, to be exact—suspend people from serving on juries when they are convicted of a felony, and in many states the suspension is permanent. That means millions of people—especially groups of people convicted at relatively high rates, such as black and Hispanic men—are disqualified from jury service, quietly resulting in what some have called the “whitewashing” of American juries.

At least two states, New York and New Jersey, would like to change that.

The New York proposal, which is currently under review by the state’s Senate Judiciary Committee, would repeal the clause in the state’s judiciary law that blocks individuals convicted of felonies from serving on juries. New Jersey’s bill, which was introduced in January and endorsed by Gov. Phil Murphy on May 1, would amend the equivalent clause in its code to permit most felons to serve on juries, barring only people convicted of murder and aggravated sexual assault.

“Jury exclusion laws bar more than 20 million people nationwide from serving,” said Wanda Bertram, a spokesperson for the Prison Policy Initiative. “With this bill, New Jersey has the chance to reverse one of the harshest jury exclusion laws in the country, and to set an example that other states can follow to make their criminal legal systems fairer and more effective.”

Keep reading

DoJ accuses far-right Epoch Times of being money-laundering operation

The far-right Epoch Times media company was at the center of a fraudulent money-laundering and cryptocurrency scam involving tens of millions of dollars, the justice department said on Monday as it announced the indictment of its chief financial officer Bill Guan.

The 61-year-old executive “conspired with others to participate in a sprawling, transnational scheme to launder at least approximately $67m of illegally obtained funds”, according to a statement from the US attorney’s office of the southern district of New York.

Proceeds went to the company, it said, and for the personal enrichment of individuals including Guan, who faces up to 70 years in prison on one count of conspiring to commit money laundering and two counts of bank fraud.

Keep reading

10,000 human remains found on serial killer’s farm — and authorities are still identifying victims

For years, a peaceful million-dollar farm in Indiana hid a dark secret — it was a serial killer’s playground.

When cops finally raided Herb Baumeister’s 18-acre property in Westfield, north of Indianapolis, they uncovered some 10,000 pieces of human remains — mostly crushed and burned skeletal fragments of the teenage boys and young men whom he had abducted and murdered in the 1980s and 90s.

Nearly 30 years after Baumeister killed himself while on the run from police, authorities are still sifting through the remains and identifying victims.

The Hamilton County Coroner announced last month that human remains recovered from Herb Baumeister’s Fox Hollow Farm in 1996 were positively identified as belonging to Jeffrey A. Jones, who went missing in 1993.

Jones is the third victim to be identified in recent months.

There are an additional four DNA profiles found at Baumeister’s property that have not been identified, bringing the total number of his victims to 12, Hamilton County Coroner Jeff Jellison said.

“Because many of the remains were found burnt and crushed, this investigation is extremely challenging; however, the team of law enforcement and forensic specialists working the case remain committed,” Jellison said.

Baumeister, a businessman and married father of three, hunted gay teens and men in central Indiana beginning in at least 1980. He’s believed to have killed at least 25 people, Fox News Digital reported.

He reportedly used the fake name “Brian Smart” and targeted young gay men he met at bars.

Keep reading

Trump’s Conviction Requires Him To Surrender His Guns. Civil Libertarians Should Be Troubled.

Last September, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung caused a kerfuffle by mistakenly reporting that the former president had bought a Glock 19 pistol decorated with his portrait during a visit to a gun dealer in Summerville, South Carolina. At the time, Trump faced four criminal indictments, which would have made him guilty of several federal felonies—the purchase itself, plus two more felonies related to falsely presenting himself as an eligible buyer—if he had actually completed the transaction that Cheung described. Now that a New York jury has convicted Trump of 34 felonies involving falsification of business records, he is barred from possessing firearms as well as buying them.

Trump, who had a concealed carry permit, owned at least two handguns prior to his conviction: a Heckler & Koch HK45 pistol and a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. As the New York Post notes, Trump will now have to surrender those guns and any others he has acquired or transfer them to someone (such as one of his sons) who is legally allowed to own firearms. The fact that Trump, a self-described “very strong person on the Second Amendment,” has lost the right to keep and bear arms may add to the delight of opponents who welcomed his conviction. But however you feel about Trump, this detail is a reminder that federal law arbitrarily strips people of their Second Amendment rights for reasons that have nothing to do with public safety.

Leaving aside the shaky legal reasoning that allowed New York prosecutors to convert a hush payment into 34 felonies, falsification of business records, even to aid or conceal “another crime,” is not the sort of offense that marks someone as apt to injure or kill people with a gun. 18 USC 922(g)(1), which prohibits receipt or possession of a firearm by anyone who has been convicted of a crime punishable by more than a year of incarceration, is “wildly overinclusive,” UCLA law professor Adam Winkler notes, because it encompasses many people with no history of violence.

Keep reading

34 REASONS the Bragg-Biden Show Trial Should Have Been TOSSED OUT — Each One Alone Providing Grounds for a Mistrial

1. Unconstitutional Gag Order that prevented President Trump from criticizing the trial, exposing the many conflicts that should have forced the judge to recuse himself, and the railroading of his fundamental due process rights.

2. Judge Merchan’s many, many conflicts of interests – all of which were disqualifying. His daughter, Loren Merchan, is President of Authentic Campaigns, a political consulting firm that hires the likes of the Biden-Harris Campaign, Adam Schiff, Ilhan Omar, and many other far left Democratic lawmakers. Loren’s firm has made tens of millions off these clients – Juan Merchan, through his daughter, had a direct financial stake in the outcome of this trial, a flagrant breach of the canons of legal ethics, both under the ABA and NY State, that under any other judge would have been grounds for a recusal.

3. Judge Merchan’s wife was previously employed by Letitia James, the Attorney General of New York State who campaigned on “getting” Donald Trump.

4. Bragg’s Lead Prosecutor was Matthew Colangelo, the former #3 official at the DOJ. We are told Colangelo graciously decided to step down from his prestigious office to work for a lowly state DA’s office – of course, a reasonable inference would be that he was directed to do so by the Biden Regime to persecute his leading political opponent in Donald John Trump.

5. Statute of Limitations (2 years, NY State) had long expired for the business records falsification scheme that served as the primary charge brought against Trump. For this reason, the case was passed over by the DOJ and even Alvin Bragg over seven years because it was so weak. Only once Bragg felt political pressure, externally via Clinton attorney Mark Pomerantz, who previously worked in Bragg’s office, and internally via Colangelo, a Biden lackey, did Bragg buckle under the political weight and press charges.

6. Venue in bright-blue Manhattan, a borough that voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump at almost a 9 to 1 clip, prevented the President from ever getting a fair trial, because the pool of jurors was naturally biased against the 45th President, and could not possibly rule fairly and impartially (8 of the 12 cited the NY Times as their main source of news). Any pro-Trump jurors who were considered chose to self-select out themselves because they claimed they “could not rule fairly.” Case in point: no way in hell is the burden of proof met on any of these charges, and yet the jury pool consisted of two lawyers, who evidently believed just that. No reasonable juror, and especially no reasonable lawyer-juror, would have found that the elements of every single crime brought against Trump met the burden of proof of beyond a reasonable doubt.

7. Election Interference: This was not a new case: it had been circulating in various court systems, federal and state, for years. These charges were only brought this year to interfere with the 2024 presidential race, period. President Trump is now the leading presidential candidate, by every reputable poll, and the frontrunner by significant margins, a gap that has only expanded over time. There is no reason why this case should be brought now, six months before Election Day, unless there was a conspiracy to prevent President Trump from being on the campaign trail in key swing states, like PA, MI, AZ, and GA, which is exactly what occurred.

Keep reading

Disgraced Professor Sentenced for Action That Could Have Trapped Firefighters in Deadly Blaze

A former college lecturer on “criminal justice issues” is going to get some first-hand experience in the subject after he was sentenced to spend five years and three months in prison on Thursday.

Gary Stephen Maynard had pleaded guilty in January to starting a number of fires in California that could have had much more disastrous results than they did.

Maynard, 49, had formerly lectured at Santa Clara University and Sonoma State University, KCRA reported.

The former lecturer admitted to starting at least four fires in July and August of 2021, according to a Justice Department news release, and pleaded guilty to three counts of arson.

One count of arson was dismissed as part of a plea agreement, according to court records cited by The New York Times.

Maynard was charged with starting fires behind firefighters who were working to contain the Dixie Fire, which eventually destroyed more than 1,000 homes and spread over 1,500 square miles, according to KCRA.

“He intentionally made a dangerous situation more perilous by setting some of his fires behind the men and women fighting the Dixie fire, potentially cutting off any chance of escape,” Phillip A. Talbert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California, said in a statement (available in full below).

It eventually grew to become the second-largest fire in California history, according to the outlet.

“Maynard faced the possibility of up to 20 years in prison and a $750,000 fine,” KCRA reported. “Besides the prison sentence of more than five years, he was ordered to pay $13,081 in restitution.”

His attorney argued that Maynard was “suffering from untreated and significant mental health issues when he set the fires and has sought treatment since then,” according to Fox News.

“A Santa Clara University colleague of Mr. Maynard, who was not identified, told the police in October 2020 that Mr. Maynard was struggling with anxiety, depression, split personality, and wanted to kill himself, the complaint said,” according to The Times.

Keep reading