Tag: crime

Dead deputy probable suspect in 1983 murder of 11-year-old girl

St. Lucie County Chief Deputy Brian Hester announced Thursday that they have closed the 1983 cold case murder of 11-year-old Lora Ann Huizar.

Based on information obtained during the investigation, detectives have named former deputy James Howard Harrison as the only probable suspect in this case. The sheriff’s office is unable to pursue charges against Harrison because he died in 2008.

“We have established probable cause to determine that Harrison abducted, sexually assaulted, and murdered the juvenile victim and later altered the crime scene by placing the victim in a drainage ditch in an attempt to destroy physical evidence,” said Chief Deputy Brian Hester.

On Nov. 6, 1983, a uniformed patrol deputy, later confirmed to be Harrison, observed Huizar walking toward her home from a local gas station around the time of her disappearance.

On Nov. 9, 1983, deputies recovered Huizar’s body nearby.

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Connecticut socialite mom admits to secretly filming minors in her mansion

A voyeuristic Connecticut socialite pleaded guilty to secretly recording three people, including a child, in a sexual situation in her multimillion-dollar Greenwich mansion.

Hadley Palmer, a mother of four, pleaded guilty to three counts of voyeurism and risk of injury to a minor — all committed in 2017 — on Jan. 19 in state Superior Court. As part of the plea bargain, the two most serious charges levied against her were dropped — employing a minor in an obscene performance, which is a Class A felony, and possession of child pornography.

The charges allege she filmed someone either naked or in their underwear with the “intent to arouse or satisfy the sexual desire of such person (defendant) or any other person.”

Palmer, 53, could face between 90 days and 60 months in prison. She will also be required to register as a sex offender. 

However, in an unusual move, her criminal case has been sealed from the public. Judge John Blawie issued the order in Stamford on Thursday, limiting most of the details and criminal proceedings surrounding her crimes.

The judge said the case was sealed in order to protect several victims’ identities, despite objections from the Associated Press.

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‘Darkness Enveloped My Soul’: The Final Confessions of the Torso Killer

Jennifer Weiss says her life came full-circle in a massive, dreary building in Trenton, New Jersey. In May of 1978, her mother, Deedeh Goodarzi, put her up for adoption at an agency in the shadow of the New Jersey State Prison and its barbed-wire crowned fences. Decades later, she found herself at that same prison, confronting the man who had left her mother dismembered in a flaming hotel room in Times Square: Richard Cottingham, a.k.a. the Torso Killer, a man whose brutality towards his victims shocked even the most seasoned of cops.

“I wanted to find her. I didn’t want to ever have to try to find her skull,” Weiss says of her mother, whose identity she says she uncovered in 2003, when she was in her early twenties. “I was expecting to get the other half of the locket like Annie… and it was not the case.”

Weiss first met Cottingham through a sheet of glass for a window visit and was shocked to discover that she wasn’t scared of the man before her, who resembled Santa gone to seed. “I was trying to figure out pieces of my mother’s life and where her remains were,” she says. And he had the answers.

Cottingham, now 75, has spent the last four decades in relative obscurity, watching hours of police procedurals and detective shows behind bars as he slid into his seventies and his health hit a steady decline. Over the last decade or so, however, the killer — who has been convicted of eight murders  — has been slowly confessing to a series of cold cases. How these confessions came about is highly contested, though: Former Chief of Detectives for the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office Robert Anzilotti would say he’s responsible for wearing Cottingham down over the years, while Weiss and her friend, serial killer expert Dr. Peter Vronsky, claim it’s her unlikely, uncomfortable relationship with Cottingham that has helped grease the gears. Cottingham, who wrote to Rolling Stone from South Woods State Prison for his first published interview in more than 10 years, credits both, seeming to play his confidantes against each other even behind bars.

Credit aside, it’s not been an easy path when it comes to getting confessions out of Cottingham. Whether it’s his failing memory, the police’s interdepartmental politics, or Cottingham’s lust for manipulation, it’s become a proverbial race against time to get his alleged crimes put to paper — according to Cottingham himself, he has roughly 70 to 90 murders to go.

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Dem Political Consultant Pleads Guilty to Murder-for-Hire Scheme

A Democratic political consultant has pleaded guilty to hiring two men to murder a longtime associate.

Sean Caddle, who worked on campaigns in 2013 and 2017 for New Jersey state senator Ray Lesniak (D.), on Tuesday admitted to one count of conspiracy to commit murder. In 2014, the New Jersey native paid out-of-state conspirators thousands of dollars to travel to the Jersey City home of former associate Michael Galdieri, stab Galdieri, and set his apartment on fire. It is unclear what the motive was.

Lesniak said hearing the news of the murder-for-hire scheme was “the most bizarre thing I’ve ever experienced in my entire life.”

“He led a double life,” Lesniak told the Associated Press. “While he was running campaigns for me—a lot of them very successful—he was arranging a murder.”

Caddle also worked on campaigns for former state assemblyman and failed Jersey City mayoral candidate Louis Manzo and successful Jersey City mayoral candidate Bret Schundler.

Manzo was indicted in 2009 as part of a federal corruption probe in New Jersey that led to dozens of arrests of elected officials. The assemblyman accepted $27,500 for his 2009 mayoral campaign in exchange for development approvals after he was elected, according to the FBI.

U.S. Attorney Philip R. Sellinger said Caddle’s murder for hire was “a callous and violent crime” and that Caddle was “as responsible as the two men who wielded the knife.”

“There is no more serious crime than the taking of another person’s life,” Sellinger said. “The defendant has admitted arranging and paying for a murder by two other people. His admission of guilt means he will now pay for his crime.”

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Parents guilty of murder and raised by radicals, Chesa Boudin is San Francisco’s next district attorney

In 1981, when Chesa Boudin was 14 months old, his parents — members of the radical and violent Weather Underground — left him with a babysitter so they could take part in an armored car robbery. It became one of New York’s most notorious botched heists, a crime that left two police officers and a Brink’s truck guard dead in a New York suburb.

Thirty-eight years later, Boudin is set to become San Francisco’s top prosecutor. In a matter of weeks, he will be sworn in as the city’s district attorney, the latest in a line of prosecutors seen as criminal justice reformers who are taking the reins across the country.

Like his peers on the left, Boudin ran on a platform of ending “mass incarceration,” eliminating cash bail, creating a unit to review wrongful convictions and refusing to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, as well as prosecuting ICE agents who violate so-called sanctuary city laws. He also wants to move the district attorney’s office away from prosecuting prostitution and minor quality-of-life crimes to focus, instead, on taking on corporations and prioritizing the most serious offenses.

Boudin, 39, spent decades visiting his parents in prison and, as a result, learned the ins and outs of the criminal justice system from a unique vantage point. Boudin’s parents were getaway drivers in the attempted Brink’s robbery in 1981 in Nanuet, New York, about 35 miles north of New York City. His mother, Kathy Boudin, pleaded guilty to murder and robbery and was imprisoned for more than two decades. His father, David Gilbert, is still behind bars after he was convicted of murder and robbery.

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California child molester sentenced to two years in juvenile facility

A 26-year old transgender woman who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl will be moved to a youth treatment center, despite prosecutor’s efforts to keep her in a Los Angeles County Jail.

LA County prosecutors said Hannah Tubbs, who identifies as female, also would not have to register as a sex offender once she finishes her two-year sentence.

Tubbs, who was busted for molesting a 10-year-old when she was a 17-year-old juvenile, will be sent to the kids lock up after LA County District Attorney George Gascón declined to file a motion to move the case out of juvenile court, where it was filed because of Tubbs’ age at the time of offense.

A judge in Antelope Valley, Calif. ruled Thursday that Tubbs would be moved to the youth treatment center immediately, where she will be kept with juvenile female prisoners.

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Ex-Northwestern professor sentenced to 53 years for sex-fetish murder

A former Northwestern University professor has been sentenced to more than five decades behind bars for the “cold-blooded” and “calculated” sex-fetish stabbing death of his boyfriend.

Renowned microbiologist Wyndham Lathem, 47, was sentenced Tuesday to 53 years for killing 26-year-old Trenton James Cornell-Duranleau, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Lathem was convicted in October of first-degree murder and faced a prison sentence of 20 to 60 years.

Cook County Judge Charles Burns said he believed a sentence on the “extreme” end was merited, according to the paper.

“To butcher an individual, Trenton Cornell, the way that he died, in order to fulfill a bizarre, antisocial, perverted fantasy, based on whatever sense of reality, is totally beyond my understanding,” said Burns, who called the murder a “calculated execution.”

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