Tears



Charlie	Keever	13	SAN DIEGO 2003-- Jurors will deliberate for a second day in the trial of a convicted rapist accused of the torturing and killing two young South Bay boys more than 10 years ago. Scott Erskine is accused of molesting and killing Charlie Keever, 13, and Jonathan Sellers, 9. He is charged with two counts of murder, with allegations that he used a rope to strangle the two boys. Tuesday, Deputy District Attorney Valerie Summers told jurors in her closing argument that it could have taken up to five minutes to kill each victim. She said the evidence was "uncontested" that Erskine bound, gagged, molested and strangled the boys on March 27, 1993. Erskine also is charged with special circumstance allegations that the murders happened during the commission of a lewd and lascivious act on a child under 14, that both boys were tortured, and an allegation of multiple murders. If the jury convicts him, the same panel would decide whether to recommend his execution or life in prison without parole. According to testimony, the two boys were riding their bicycles in South San Diego near the Otay River, when Erskine attacked them and took them into an igloo-style fort covered with brush. That is where they were molested and killed, according to Summers. It was "a horrible way to die," the prosecutor said. Police collected DNA samples from the victims, but it wasn't until 2001 that advanced DNA technology revealed that Erskine's DNA was left in Keever's mouth, Summers said. His DNA was also found on two cigarette butts found outside the fort, the prosecutor said. The defendant was serving a 70-year sentence for raping a woman in October 1993 when he was charged with killing the two boys. Investigators in Palm Beach, Fla., are looking at Erskine as a suspect in the 1989 rape and murder of a 26-year-old woman, Summers said.
Jonathan	Sellers	9


Amanda UPDATE	Cope	12	ROCK HILL--Rock Hill police have charged a second man with rape and murder in the 2001 death of a 12-year-old girl, raising questions for similar charges against the girl's father. Amanda Cope was found strangled and raped in her bed Nov. 29, 2001. Her father, Billy Wayne Cope, was jailed the next day on murder and criminal sexual conduct charges. Now police say DNA evidence links James Edward Sanders, 44, to the case. Sanders, in jail since January 2002, was charged with murder, two counts of sexual conduct and criminal conspiracy to commit criminal sexual conduct, Capt. Charles Cabaniss said. Police say DNA also links Sanders to the rape of a 60-year-old woman and that he was involved in four home break-ins around the time Amanda Cope was killed. Police now have added a conspiracy to commit criminal sexual conduct charge against Billy Cope. But there is no connection between Sanders and Billy Cope, Cope's lawyer, Phil Baity of Fort Mill, said. Cope's DNA does not match the DNA taken from Amanda Cope, but Sanders' does, Baity said. Police would not discuss whether Cope's DNA was found on his daughter's body. "The only scientific evidence in this case implicates Mr. Sanders," Baity said. Sanders lived less than two blocks from the Copes when Amanda died. Two months after Amanda Cope's death, her mother, Mary Sue Cope, died of an infection while recovering from major surgery. Two other children in the family have been living with relatives in Mitchell County, N.C.


Leslie Michelle	English	2	December 2 , 2003-GA- Death row inmate Eddie Albert Crawford, convicted of the 1983 rape and murder of his 2-year-old niece, is scheduled to die by lethal injection Dec. 10. The execution is scheduled for 7 p.m. at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson. Crawford, 56, was convicted of the Sept. 25, 1983, killing of Leslie Michelle English. The toddlers body was found the next day in a wooded area, strangled, bruised and raped. If executed, Crawford will be the 12th Georgia inmate put to death by lethal injection.


Naja	Smallwood	5	PA- 1980-A LITTLE GIRL wearing a brown jacket and a pink hair ribbon went out clutching a quarter for candy 23 years ago and never returned. The city was horrified back in 1980 when police found 5-year-old Naja Smallwood's naked body in a trash-filled closet in an abandoned housing project. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled. Naja's mother, Dolores Smallwood, 59, still wells up in tears when she thinks about her baby girl. She has struggled with depression for years, her other kids have suffered and one of her sons is in prison. The worst thing, she says, is that she thinks she knows who did it. And he has never paid. Police and Smallwood think a neighborhood teen who used to baby-sit Naja lured her to the building and killed her. He was convicted of raping a 9-year-old months after Naja disappeared. "We have considered him a suspect since a year after the girl was killed," said Detective Charles Brown, of the Police Homicide Division, who has followed the case for years. But cops have never been able to pin the suspect to crime. Brown hopes that now, with new DNA technology, police will finally be able to get him. "You just need that one little thing to get you over the hump," Brown said. Naja was reported missing on Nov. 14, 1980. After a five-day search, police found her in the Earlham Building in the Schuylkill Falls public housing project, Merrick Road and Earlham Street in East Falls, a vacant structure. "She was found up on the 11th floor in a small closet," Brown said.


Mollie	Pittman	13	Nov. 18,2003-Fla- Politics in the Orange-Osceola Public Defender's Office may allow a man, found guilty in a 17 year old murder case, to walk free. We've just learned that the public defender called an emergency hearing Tuesday in the Franklin Reed murder case. Reed, found guilty of murdering and raping 13-year-old Mollie Pittman, was supposed to be sentenced late this week but, as of late Tuesday afternoon, his lawyers have been taken off the case. On November 10, 2003, Assistant Public Defender Gregory Hill was set to give closing arguments in the Franklin Reed murder case. That was, until Hill's co-council and supervisor Jennifer Davis, decided to make the arguments herself. She said Reed wasn't prepared for closing arguments. He said that wasn't fair and resigned. Franklin Reed's family says his lawyer's actions could now be grounds for an appeal. Davis' boss told us that too much attention is being focused on these closing arguments in the first place and that it would have been difficult for anyone in the public defender's office to argue over the substantial amount of DNA evidence, against Reed, found on murder victim Molly Pittman (photo left). Reed's family maintains his innocence and doesn't like the fact that office politics are prevalent in the halls of justice. Public defender Robert Wesley told us that it's not unusual for tension to be high between lawyers working on a high profile case like this and that family members of someone found guilty almost always try and blame it on an unfair trial.



Jenny	Lin	14	The Jenny Lin Foundation was incorporated in 1994 after the tragic and brutal murder of Jenny Lin, a talented and well-loved fourteen-year-old girl. The foundation's mission is to aid law enforcement officials in apprehending the perpetrator as well as increase community awareness of child safety. In addition, the foundation sponsors many events which celebrate Jenny's memory.



Brandy	Duval	14	In 1997, with eight other members of the Bloods gang, Martinez kidnapped, gang-raped, sodomized, tortured, and murdered Brandy Duvall (14). The gang members took turns sexually assaulting the child. The viciousness of the multiple sexual assaults left Ms. Duvall bleeding from her vagina and anus. That did not deter her attackers, though, and they would climb off of her laughing, covered with her blood. They once showered her off to get her into a fit condition for additional rounds of sexual assault. Martinez slit Ms. Duvall’s anus open with a knife so that she could be sodomized, or possibly re-sodomized due to the swelling her various rectal injuries caused. In addition to his penis, Martinez brutally sodomized Ms. Duvall with a beer bottle and wooden broom and toilet plunger handles. During the course of the rapes, Martinez repeatedly kicked and beat the child, including during periods when she begged for her life. One time, Martinez kicked her football punt-style in the chest after an episode of sodomistic assault caused her to defecate uncontrollably and soil one of her rapist’s shoes. Martinez killed Ms. Duvall by stabbing her, choking her with his bare hands, stabbing her some more (for a total of 28 knife wounds), and then throwing her, with the help of another gang member, down a boulder-covered slope, where she bled to death in the night. In separate incidents, Martinez--who was a drug dealer and armed robber--shot four other people, one of whom died. Martinez bragged that he liked shooting people because he enjoyed watching his victims’ bodies twitch. Another time, Martinez beat a girlfriend unconscious in front of the girlfriend’s young child.


Raylynn	Chelton	15	Charlotte, NC -- June 5, 1993 -- Tasha, 17, and Raylynn, 15, were last seen alive being forced into a car outside Raylynn's apartment complex of Emerald Bay Apartments in Charlotte, North Carolina on June 3, 1993. Resident at the complex heard gunshots and shouting sometime after midnight. On June 8, the girls were found hidden in a weeded lot at Chemway Industrial Park on Exchange Street in Charlotte. Both had been raped and shot to death. The murders went unsolved until October 2003, when Myron Terrell Burris and Robert Chevelle Friday were both arrested and charged with killing Raylynn and Tasha. In March 2004 a third man, Antwon Maurice Sanders, was also arrested and charged. Burris and Friday were convicted felons with long records who became suspects shortly after the murders, but police did not have enough evidence to charge them for over a decade. After they were in custody investigators received information that Sanders was also involved. As of April 2004, the three men are awaiting their trials. Tasha was born in Seattle and had attended Olympic High School with Raylynn, but had dropped out before her death and was working at K-Mart. Raylynn would have had her sixteenth birthday a month after she died. She liked talking on the phone, listening to rap music and shopping, and wanted to be a lawyer. Tasha and Raylynn had been friends for about two months prior to their murders.
Tasha Michelle	Lopes	15

LaShonna	Bates	11	Indianapolis, IN -- Nov. 1, 2000 -- More than six years after the killing of 11-year-old LaShonna Bates shocked the city and unified it across racial and economic lines, Indianapolis police arrested a convicted child molester and accused him of her murder. The accused is 29-year-old Charles R. Daugherty, the man who found the fourth-grader's badly decomposed body in a wooded area near Euclid and Massachusetts avenues in April 1994. At the time, Daugherty told police the gruesome discovery upset him so much that he couldn't even call 911 for more than two hours. LaShonna, a student at IPS School 46, disappeared Feb. 15, 1994, from near her school bus stop at Meridian and Arizona streets on the Near Southside. She lived in the neighborhood nearby; so did Daugherty. White and black volunteers formed search parties and stapled posters to phone poles in rich and poor neighborhoods throughout the city. A reward was raised. And after LaShonna's body was found, IPS named a swimming pool in her honor. But the outpouring of support didn't result in an arrest. That bothers Carson. "Why did it take so long?'' she said. "I'm just horrified." According to detectives, there were plenty of reasons to suspect Daugherty but not enough evidence to lock him up. First, there was Daugherty's criminal history and the fact that he lived in the same neighborhood as LaShonna, yet was also the one to find her body -- clear on the other side of town. Or how, at first, Daugherty told investigators he found LaShonna's body while chasing a runaway dog. Later, West said, Daugherty admitted the story was a lie -- another red flag. But for years investigators couldn't generate enough evidence to make an arrest. Rayl was able to confirm Daugherty's 1991 conviction for child molesting. He pleaded guilty, the spokesman said, and received a four-year suspended sentence and four years' probation. The deal would have kept him out of prison if he had not broken the law while on probation. Daugherty still was on probation at the time LaShonna disappeared, Rayl said. He already had violated that probation in 1992, the spokesman added, and served two years in prison once that violation was resolved in 1995. For six years, only the harshest of the details were known: LaShonna Bates. Pigtailed 11-year-old. Abducted in 1994 outside a Near-Southside bus stop, found dead seven weeks later on the Eastside. Blunt-force trauma to the head. Now a sworn statement has fleshed out some of those details, though plenty of mystery remains. The convicted child molester who police say now admits killing LaShonna told detectives he kidnapped her about 8 a.m. and repeatedly raped her until it started to get dark. Finally he bashed her skull in with a rock when she resisted his last rape attempt. "My reaction, and all his co-workers, we were all shocked," said Dan Rhoades, general manager of the restaurant where Daugherty has worked for three years. "He was an extremely steady employee. He never missed work or was late."


Juan	Delgado	12	Juan was reported missing 4 days before his body was found dismembered and encased in concrete. Charged and convicted in his murder was a 27 year old, one-armed drifter, John Samuel Ghobrial. Ghobrial sexually assaulted and smothered Juan before dismembering his body. Ghobrial was eligible for the death penalty, but his eventual sentence is unknown at this time.




Magali	Forabosco	7	"On a population of 350.000 residents, in this region live about 400 people with penal records for sexual abuses. We already questioned about the same amount, but each day new people come out. It's amazing, we searched in about 300 houses, but the list is not yet finished." Even the "La mouette" association, born 13 years ago to cooperate with the investigation on the seven years old Magali Forabosco, is cooperating. Even Magali disappeares in Agen on January 1984 while coming back from school with her elder brother. He starts running to reach their father that always waits for them half way: the boy is anxious to tell him about a good school grade. Magali stays behind by her self. A man that just finished twenty years of jail for sexual abuses reaches her: he stunnes her and hides her under a blanket in his car, and drives for about thirty kilometers to the ruins of an old castle. Here in the silence of the country he rapes her for four hours before choking her to death. Eleven days after, a young girl that went hunting with her father finds the remains of her body. A year passes, and that man, Robert Guiné, is arrested for having tried to abuse on a fifteen years old girl: during the interrogations he confesses the murder of Magali. The hunter's daughter was so shocked that now she lives in a nursing home for mental insanity. In the region of Bordeaux the cases of sexual abuses on minors unfortunately are not too rare. Just two months ago, was arrested a man that had abused on ten girls in a place 200 kilometers away from Agen. The maniac would fake to be the school doctor, and would ask them to show him their school. But once in the car the girls were brought somewhere else and were tortured. The girls all had long blond hair and blue eyes.


Tiffany	Hambleton	14	Salt Lake City homicide detectives are trying to collect forensic evidence that inexplicably was not gathered after the 1986 murder of 14-year-old Tiffany Hambleton. Cold-case detectives quietly exhumed Hambleton's body last week. Investigators told the victim's mother, Vicki English, only that they were seeking more forensic evidence that could help solve the nearly 18-year-old case. But an April 1, 1986, autopsy report reveals that Salt Lake City homicide detectives, in conjunction with the State Medical Examiner's Office, did not perform a rape analysis or a stomach-contents analysis on the teen, whose partially nude body was found in an irrigation ditch west of Salt Lake City International Airport. The report indicates fingernail clippings and hair samples were preserved. After the exhumation, police would not offer details about what amounts to a second autopsy, including whether a rape analysis was conducted. "We asked the M.E. to look at the original autopsy and review that and gather all the evidence from the body they could to gather DNA," Detective Dwayne Baird said this week. Former Salt Lake City homicide detectives Ken Farnsworth and John Foster, both of whom witnessed the original autopsy, said in recent interviews they could not remember whether a rape analysis was done. James F.G. Bell, a former detective who headed up the Hambleton murder investigation and also witnessed the autopsy, said through a spokesman that he had no comment. The oversight is surprising to Professor James Gaskill, a former state medical examiner who ran the State Crime Lab from 1972 to 1994. He now teaches criminalistics at Weber State University. "It's pretty obvious that sex offenses and murders go hand in hand," he said this week. "Any time you find a person without clothes, you have to suspect there was a sexual assault." Further, Gaskill said that analyzing stomach contents as part of an autopsy is standard procedure. "The first reason would be to check for toxic medications or drugs. The second reason is that it's helpful in determining the time of death." The murder investigation was reopened earlier this year after Mayor Rocky Anderson appointed an independent commission to examine several cold cases. Hambleton disappeared Feb. 17, 1986, after telling her mother she was going to a Kiss rock concert with friends. Her family and some former police officers long have believed that Hambleton's murder is linked to the deaths of Lisa Strong, 25; Christine Gallegos, 18, and Karla Maxwell, 20 -- all within a one-year period. Ballistics tests revealed that Strong, Maxwell and Gallegos were killed with the same .38-caliber handgun. However, Gallegos also was stabbed repeatedly in a manner similar to Hambleton, who was not shot but died from knife wounds. Former Salt Lake City Police Officer Frank Hatton-Ward, as well as Greg Chase and John Ilk, former members of the city's now-defunct crime analysis unit, publicly theorized that the women -- including Hambleton -- were killed by a gang known as the Chosen Few, who may have passed around the gun. But a special homicide task force established in 1986 suspected an Idaho drifter in the murders. Sgt. Don Bell, then with the Salt Lake City homicide unit, branded Hatton-Ward, Chase and Ilk in news accounts as "junior-varsity detectives." All three subsequently left the department. But Hatton-Ward continues to believe his investigation was on the right track. "They referred to the three of us as junior-varsity detectives, but I can't imagine finding the body of a 14-year-old without clothing and not doing a rape analysis," he said this week. Although city police never solved any of the murders, a state grand jury indicted Forrest Whittle, an associate of gang members James Sherrard and Frank Chris Martinez, in Strong's death. He was convicted in 1995 and is serving 5 years to life. In courtroom testimony, Whittle's roommate, Mike Staples, said Sherrard and Martinez were at the same party Whittle was attending near 800 East and Kensington Avenue about the time of Strong's murder. A Sept. 26, 1989, Salt Lake City police report quotes Martinez as saying he was with Hambleton before she disappeared. But Salt Lake City police said this week that no evidence links Strong's murder to Hambleton's. "Nothing we've been able to find at this point has established that relationship," Baird said.



Victoria	Monette	2	BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- Murder warrants were issued today (Dec. 19, 2003) in the death of Victoria Monette. Monette was just a few days short of her third birthday when she was taken to the hospital suffering from head trauma and severe burns over 80 percent of her body. She died a few days later. At the time of her injuries, Monette was under the care of 29-year-old Michael Kevin Meyers, a convicted sex offender and boyfriend of Victoria's mother, Barbara Kristin Reid. Reid, age 23, was charged today in the murder and is currently being held in the Jefferon County Jail under a $50,000 bond. Meyers was already in jail on a charge of "sex offender residing with child." He is being held under no bond. He has now been charged with Monette's murder under a $50,000 bond on the new charge.