Good news for William Thomas Zeigler because Judge Whitehead has granted a hearing to discuss the question of whether the Zeigler defense will be permitted to do the DNA testing that they have requested. To recap: in December 1975, a quadruple murder took place in the Zeigler Furniture Store in Wintergarden, Florida. The victims were […]
Archives for October 2015
Remembering Michelle Martinko
Remembering Michelle Martinko who was found murdered around 4am on December 20, 1979 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The police discovered her body in the parking lot of the Westdale Mall. The Kennedy High School senior had been stabbed to death in the family Buick. Michelle Martinko was repeatedly stabbed most notably in her face and […]
Dirty Old London by Lee Jackson
Dirty Old London by Lee Jackson brings to live the filthy Victorian age of raw sewage, cesspools, and rotting corpses. Jackson describes the battle between refuse collection for a profit and as a general matter of health. Each has its consequences for the economy (healthy workforce) so politics play a huge role in allocating money, […]
Guilty verdict in 2009 Noah case
Guilty verdict in 2009 Noah case six years after he disappeared. From the San Antonio Express News: “Shelby C. Moore apologized for concealing his death from worried relatives for months, not telling them he’d helped dump the body in Gillespie County.” Note that Moore (Noah’s cousin) was sentenced to nine years only for tampering with the body […]
Child abuse at Lake Alice
Child abuse at Lake Alice in New Zealand is one of the topics the Age reported about in 2008. “Disgraced former psychiatrist Selwyn Leeks” had lost his appeal against a former patient. Leeks had to pay $55’000 in damages for sexual assault. Leeks had been under investigation for using electric shock aversion therapy in the 70s […]
Wrongfully convicted Lapointe cannot be retried
Wrongfully convicted Lapointe cannot be retried and was set free on International Wrongful Conviction Day! From the Hartford Courant: “A judge on Friday dismissed the notorious, quarter-century-old capital murder case against Richard Lapointe, a mentally impaired dishwasher who was released from prison when the state Supreme Court said he was wrongly convicted in the brutal death […]
International Wrongful Conviction Day
International Wrongful Conviction Day on October 2 is an initiative from the Canadian Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted. They launched the initiative in 2014. The AIDWYC is “a non-profit organization dedicated to identifying, advocating for, and exonerating individuals convicted of a crime that they did not commit and to preventing such injustices in the future […]
Case of the Month: Mark Carlson
Case of the Month: Mark Carlson 1957-1974. “We know that on October 20, 1974, Mark Carlson heads into Boise County to do some hunting and doesn’t return home that night,” according to Idaho State Police Captain Bill Gardiner. And that ‘s the gist of the case. Mark Carlson left to go hunting. A store clerk saw […]