Tag Archives: Texas

DNA Identifies Remains of Murdered Jane Doe

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension announced yesterday that a woman who was murdered 35 years ago in Blue Earth has finally been identified.

Michelle Yvette Busha of Bay City, Texas, was 18 years old when she was murdered in Minnesota and had been missing ever since.

On May 30, 1980, Busha’s nude and decomposing body was discovered badly beaten in a ravine off Interstate 90, east of Blue Earth, MN, in Faribault County. A cord was wrapped around her neck, indicating that she died of strangulation. Busha was reported missing in Texas on May 9.

Nine years later Robert Leroy Nelson, a former Minnesota State Patrol trooper, confessed to her murder. Authorities say Busha was hitchhiking when Nelson picked her up. Nelson was given a life sentence in Texas for Busha’s murder and for other charges stemming from child molestation.

On Aug. 12, 2014, as part of the BCA’s effort to ID unidentified human remains, “Jane Doe’s” body was exhumed. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children created a new sketch based on a new scull scan and x-rays from the original autopsy. BCA forensic scientists obtained a complete mitochondrial DNA profile and a partial nuclear DNA profile, which led to Busha’s identity.

Credit must also be given to her parents who submitted a DNA sample to the FBI’s National Missing Person DNA database years ago. The program was initiated in 2000 to assist in the identification of missing persons and unidentified remains. Without that sample, a match could not have been made.

The message is clear. Parents who have missing children should submit a DNA sample to the FBI’s national database.

Trail of a Serial Killer

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FBI agents finally arrested Robert Durst last Saturday at a New Orleans hotel for the murder of Susan Berman, which occurred 15 years ago.

Better late than never.

Thanks to the HBO documentary about Durst’s links to three killings, the victims’ families will finally achieve some justice from a system that has utterly failed to do its job.

In 1982, Robert Durst claimed that his wife, Kathleen, had suddenly disappeared from their cottage in South Salem, New York. No one was ever charged and her body has never been found.

In 2000, Susan Berman, Durst’s spokeswoman, was killed at her home near Beverly Hills with a bullet to the back of her head just before New York investigators prepared to question her in the disappearance of Durst’s wife.

After Berman’s death, Durst moved to Texas, where he lived as a mute woman in a boarding house until his arrest in 2001 after dismembered parts of the body of his elderly neighbor, Morris Black, were found floating in Galveston Bay. Durst claimed he shot Black in self-defense. Despite admitting that he dismembered Black’s body before dumping the remains, Durst was, unbelievably, acquitted of murder.

But the injustice that allowed a sociopath like Robert Durst to remain free for all these years while he continued to murder is not solely the fault of the justice system.

Durst is the oldest son of the late real estate mogul Seymour Durst whose Durst Corporation manages the World Trade Center and is reportedly worth $4 billion. Robert became estranged from his family when his brother Douglas was chosen instead of him to run the family business.

Despite Douglas’ fears that Robert would kill him, and the restraining orders family members took out against Robert, the Durst family spent thousands on high-priced lawyers that allowed Robert to beat the murder charge against him and to remain free.

People can argue all they want about the right to an adequate defense, but while the family’s money and power protected them, their defense of this sociopath ultimately led to the unnecessary deaths of others. For that they should be ashamed.

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Last Wednesday a federal appeals court stayed the execution of Scott Panetti, 56, a Texas man whose attorneys and supporters have argued is too mentally ill to legally be put to death. Panetti’s attorneys had also appealed to the state district court and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, requesting that they stay or delay his execution so his competency could be assessed, however, both appeals were denied. Their appeal for clemency to the state Board of Pardons and Paroles was also denied.

Prior to the stay, Panetti’s execution was scheduled for this Wednesday.

Diagnosed with schizophrenia 36 years ago, Panetti’s was convicted of murdering his wife’s parents at their Texas home in 1992, shooting them with a deer-hunting rifle in front of his wife and their 3-year-old daughter.

His attorneys claim that he still hears voices and suffers from the delusions that prevent him from understanding why he is being executed, which would violate the 8th Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Prosecutors argue that medical records fail to support the claim that Panetti’s mental health had deteriorated. Prosecutors maintain that his bizarre behavior is deliberate. Court-appointed state medical experts have repeatedly questioned the validity of his symptoms.

In 2002, the US Supreme Court banned the execution of the mentally disabled. In 2007, the court reviewed Panetti’s case and found that inmates must be required to not only know that they are being punished, but to have a “rational understanding” of why.

Despite the Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling on the mentally disabled, Texas executed Marvin Wilson in 2012. Wilson’s IQ had been measured at 61. He was the 484th person executed in Texas since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977. Texas Governor Rick Perry has presided over more executions than any other governor in American history.

Whether you’re a death penalty supporter or not, the Supreme Court clearly drew a line in the sand regarding the execution of mentally handicapped individuals. So the key question here is not just whether Scott Panetti has been faking his schizophrenia for nearly four decades––but whether Governor Perry and the state of Texas are subject to rulings established by the Supreme Court.

DNA Frees Another Innocent Man

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Cornelius Dupree with his wife Selman Perkins. Photo courtesy of the AP and The Innocence Project

Texas leads the nation in the number of wrongly convicted inmates, having freed 41 wrongly convicted inmates through DNA testing since 2001—more than any other state.

Cornelius Dupree Jr., sentenced to 75 years in prison in 1980 for the rape and robbery of a 26-year-old Dallas woman a year earlier, was the latest to be declared innocent Tuesday after spending 30 years in prison. Dupree, who always maintained his innocence, holds the dubious distinction of having served more time in prison for a crime he didn’t commit than any other Texas inmate exonerated by DNA evidence.

He is the 21st inmate exonerated by DNA evidence in Dallas County, which maintains biological evidence decades after a conviction. Craig Watkins, the Dallas County DA, and the first black district attorney in Texas history, has cooperated with innocence groups in reviewing hundreds of requests by inmates for DNA testing. Watkins has reversed what he calls “a convict-at-all-costs mentality” that he says permeated his office before he arrived in 2007.

Dupree spent over half his life behind bars because of mistaken identification, which is not unusual considering 75% of wrongful convictions of people later cleared by DNA evidence resulted from misidentifications, according to the Innocence Project. They recommend that all law enforcement agencies be required to have written policies for identification procedures based on scientific research on eyewitness memory to increase accuracy and reliability.

A Department of Justice study found that even the most experienced officer could inadvertently give subconscious hints to the witness to identify the suspect, resulting in false identification. Thus, an officer who doesn’t know the identity of the suspect should conduct the line-up. Also, under traditional simultaneous lineups, some witnesses will inadvertently begin to compare photos to one another, or persons in live lineups, instead of comparing one photo or one person to their memory. Consequently, the identifications are not as reliable as those conducted sequentially. Photos or persons should be viewed one at a time and presented in random order.

Fortunately for Cornelius Dupree, Texas also has the most generous compensation laws for the wrongly imprisoned in the country. He is eligible for $80,000 for each year he was behind bars, plus a lifetime annuity. He could receive $2.4 million in a lump sum that is not subject to federal income tax. The Texas Legislature passed the compensation law in 2009, after dozens of wrongly convicted men were released from prison. But I’ll bet if you asked him, no amount of money could ever compensate for the thirty lost years of his life.

The Hammer Gets Nailed

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According to the law of karma, every human action––in thought, word, or deed––inevitably leads to results or consequences, positive or negative, depending upon the quality of the action. Karma is considered the means by which everyone becomes the architect of their own destiny.

When a Texas jury convicted former House Majority Leader Tom Delay Wednesday of money laundering, it was the first nail in the coffin of a political career marked by bullying and unethical behavior––bad karma.

Prosecutors accused DeLay of conspiring with two associates, John Colyandro and Jim Ellis, to use his Texas-based PAC to send $190,000 in corporate money to an arm of the Washington-based Republican National Committee. The RNC then sent the same amount to seven Texas House candidates.

Under Texas law, corporate money can’t go directly to political campaigns. Prosecutors claim the money helped Republicans take control of the Texas House. That enabled the GOP majority to push through a Delay-engineered congressional redistricting plan that sent more Texas Republicans to Congress in 2004––and strengthened DeLay’s political power.

The man once known as “Hot Tub Tom” because of his drinking and partying–– before his “born-again Christian conversion”––helped Newt Gingrich lead the 1994 Republican Revolution, which swept Democrats from power in both houses of Congress, and put Republicans in control of the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years.

Once in control, DeLay, Gingrich, and conservative activist Grover Norquist founded the infamous K Street Project in an effort to pressure Washington lobbying firms to hire only Republicans in top positions, and to reward loyal GOP lobbyists with access to influential officials. Delay earned his nickname, “The Hammer,” for his enforcement of party discipline and retribution against those who didn’t support the legislative agenda of President George W. Bush. All sounds pretty Christian to me.

DeLay faces up to life in prison on the money laundering conviction, and two to twenty years for the charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering. He resigned from Congress in 2006 due to the indictment and a separate federal investigation into his ties to former disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a probe that ended without any charges.

Of course, Tom Delay’s conviction just marks the beginning of an appeals process that will seek to clear his name. One can only hope that the process takes years and whatever is left of his money and reputation.

Sociopaths

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I first heard about the Whitaker family killing on Tru TV and then saw the father, Kent, on television again yesterday. For those who may not be familiar with the story, Kent and Tricia Whitaker, and their two sons Bart and Kevin, lived in Sugar Land, Texas. By all outward appearances, they seemed to be an ideal family. Kent and Tricia had been married for 28 years and their oldest son Bart was about to graduate from college. On December 10, 2003, the family was celebrating Bart’s upcoming graduation and headed home at 8:30 where a gunman shot all four of the family members as they entered the house. Tricia and Kevin died while Bart and Kent survived.

Investigators soon learned that Bart wasn’t actually going to graduate college, but was on academic probation at his university and was still considered a freshman. Detectives found that two years earlier authorities had visited the Whitakers to tell them Bart had been overheard planning to kill his family. When Kent and Tricia confronted their son, he stated it was a joke made while he was drunk, so they dismissed the threat. But detectives eventually discovered that Bart had convinced two of his friends to murder his family. Bart fled Texas and hid out in Mexico for a year under an alias until he was captured, convicted of his role in the murders, and sent to death row where he resides today awaiting execution. Bart’s father, Kent, forgave his son and wrote a book entitled, “Murder by Family”. Bart, while professing remorse, is incapable of actually feeling anything because he’s what medical professionals have defined as a sociopath.

Whether it’s Ted Bundy or Hannibal Lecter, fact or fiction, we’ve come to think of sociopaths as serial killers. And while they garner most of the media attention, most sociopaths do not become serial killers. The number of sociopaths in the U.S. is estimated to be around 4% of the population, the highest percentage in the world, leading some researchers to label sociopathy as a Western disease. Researchers speculate that the demise of the extended and the immediate family as well as the high divorce rate, an over-emphasis on individualism, praising maverick behavior, and the lack of a sense of community, are all factors that may contribute to the high rate of sociopaths in the U.S.

It’s believed that the majority of convicted criminals have some form of Anti-Personality Disorder, which is really an adult version of juvenile conduct disorder. Sociopaths generally have complete disregard for the rights of others and the rules of society. They lack remorse, shame or guilt. They’re narcissistic, charming, manipulative, superficial and often impulsive. Their friends are really just victims or unwitting accomplices, the same with their lovers.

Diagnosing it before the age of fifteen is difficult, although bedwetting, animal abuse and pyromania are markers of the disorder. There should also be evidence of a conduct disorder. Researchers don’t know the number of children who exhibit these signs and grow up to develop APD, but these are often the traits of diagnosed adults.

Some research suggests a connection between APD and maternal deprivation in the first five years of life. Mothers of children who develop the disorder usually didn’t discipline their children and often showed little affection towards them.

There is no effective treatment for sociopaths other than locking them up in a secure facility, or, as in Bart Whitaker’s case, putting them to death.