Lona Manning
Lona Manning is a freelance writer and researcher.
Her work has appeared in the online magazine The American Thinker, the South African magazine
You, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation newsletter, and the history magazine
Old News.
She has worked in politics as a research assistant. Manning maintains a website about Hurricane Carter, at
http://members.shaw.ca/cartermyths/
and a website about the ritual abuse trials at
http://members.shaw.ca/imaginarycrimes/index.htm.
She lives in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, Canada.
Updated: The
Shame of Lorain, Ohio.
(Bulletin 02/16/09: Nancy Smith, one of two people wrongfully convicted in
this case 15 years ago, was released on bail February 4, 2009 pending a
resentencing hearing.)
The ritual abuse hysteria that swept across the United States in the 1980s and
early 1990s resulted in hundreds of innocent people being wrongfully convicted
of committing a bizarre concoction of sexual acts on preschoolers. Most of those
convicted were eventually freed from prison on appeal, but some innocent people
remain behind bars. One of the most blatant cases of wrongful conviction
occurred in Lorain, Ohio. There a politically ambitious prosecutor's office
coaxed and manipulated a few Head Start preschoolers into testifying that they
had been sexually abused repeatedly over a six-month period by their bus driver
and some stranger -- two people who never even knew each other, but who are now
serving life prison terms for crimes that never occurred in the first place.
New:
The
Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping. (3/04/07)
More than seven decades after his execution for committing "the crime of the
century," Bruno Richard Hauptmann still has his defenders and sympathizers.
Updated:
Nightmare
at the Day Care: The Wee Care Case.
(updated 01/14/07)
The Wee Care case
that sentenced Kelly Michaels to prison for 47 years was typical of the
child-abuse hysteria that gripped the United States in the 1980s. At the peak of
the frenzy of the great day-care witch hunt, it was the day-care workers, not
the preschoolers, who were at risk. As the preschoolers, urged on by overzealous
social workers, child therapists and prosecutors, told their incredible stories
of sexual abuse and satanic rituals in courtrooms across the United States,
scores of innocent people were sent off to prison. Some are still there.
New:
Cons, Frauds
and Schemers. (01/01/07)
They
can look you in the eye, win your trust and melt your heart. They can lie about
the past, the present, and the future. They are chameleons, changing names and
identities as easily as we change our outfits.
Updated:
The
Forgotten Innocent Man. The courtroom testimony of twin 8-year-old boys –
a concoction of fantasy and fear – led to a life sentence for Robert Halsey in 1993.
In 2004 the National Center for Reason and Justice took up his case, but all of its
appeals have been denied and the Massachusetts Supreme Court has denied Halsey's
Application for Further Appellate Review. Now in his 70s and in failing health,
the former bus driver will most likely die in prison, a victim of the
child sexual-abuse hysteria that put him there. (Updated
10/16/06)
9/16: Terrorists Bomb Wall Street. (01/15/06)
Long before 9/11 became the date most identified with terrorism, New York's
Wall Street District suffered through a massive bombing on September 16,
1920 that shocked the world. Italian anarchists orchestrated the bombing
five days after Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were indicted on
charges of first-degree murder.
The Doe Network: Naming the Nameless Dead. (03/23/04)
There are thousands of unnamed corpses in the United States, so-called
John and Jane Does who have turned up over the last few decades in woods,
rivers, alleys and dumpsters without any identification. An Internet-based group
of volunteers who call themselves The Doe Network is working to name the
nameless.
The Great Prevaricator.
(Updated 03/29/04)
Edgar Smith,
with William F. Buckley Jr. blithely playing his stooge, wrote his way to
freedom from the Death House in Trenton State Prison in 1971, becoming the most
famous death-row prisoner of his time. Fourteen and-a-half years earlier, Smith
-- at age 23 -- had bludgeoned to death 15-year-old Vickie Zielinski in Mahwah,
N.J. Less than five years after his release from prison, Smith kidnapped a
petite but scrappy young mother who miraculously managed to escape from Smith's
car with a knife stuck in her side.
Rapist, M.D..
(Updated 02/06/04)
It's said that the Royal Canadian Mounties always get their
man -- but in this case justice was delayed for seven years, and the doctor
might never have answered for his crimes if it hadn't been for one very
determined young woman who knew that her doctor had drugged her, raped her, and
somehow had managed to falsify his DNA to escape prosecution.
The Murder of Madalyn
Murray O'Hair: America's Most Hated Woman. (Updated 09/29/03)
When atheist Madalyn Murray
O'Hair, her son, and granddaughter mysteriously disappeared from their Austin,
Tex., home in 1995, the police didn't lift a finger to find the family that had
taken God out of America. Five years went by before a determined reporter would
unravel the mystery of her disappearance.
The Hurricane Hoax. The movie
The
Hurricane portrays Rubin "Hurricane" Carter as a black man
wronged by a racist justice system. But Carter is a fraud and so was the movie,
from beginning to end.
This page has been viewed
times since 04/04/01.
