Murder

The car bomb that killed Philip J. Lucier – the president of the Continental Telephone Co. and the father of 11 children – was meant for an attorney whose clients had swindled a minor New Orleans Mafioso. The FBI misread and mishandled the case from the beginning. Subsequent federal investigations never produced a single indictment. Now, 30 yeas later, it seems certain no one will ever be charged in Lucier's tragic death.

 by Ronald J. Lawrence

"It never occurred to me to look closer. There was nothing suspicious."

- A witness

12:13 p. m. July 24, 1970 – Philip J. Lucier, president of Continental Telephone Corp., drove his black Cadillac into the parking lot of the Pierre Laclede Building, 7701 Forsyth Blvd., in the Clayton business district of suburban St. Louis. He and two telephone company vice-presidents, James Robb and James Napier, had decided on the spur of the moment to have lunch at the St. Louis Club. No one knew they were going there.

There were no empty spaces, but Lucier saw Theodore F. Schwartz, a respected attorney, back his black Lincoln Continental out of a parking stall. The two men knew each other and Schwartz waved to him. The lawyer, whose office was in the building, rarely left in his car for lunch, although this day he did.

The casual observer might not have noticed it, but, despite the difference in models, there was a similarity between Lucier's Cadillac and Schwartz' Lincoln. Not only were both black, each had a mobile telephone antenna and a four-digit license plate.

12:40 p. m. July 24, 1970 – A businessman drove slowly, looking for an empty space in the parking lot of the Pierre Laclede Building. Up ahead, he saw a man sitting behind the wheel of Lucier's black Cadillac. The door was open slightly and the man's foot dangled outside. It appeared as if he was working underneath the dashboard.

He recalled, "After a few minutes, I guessed the man was waiting for someone. Then, he looked back for a glance, pulled his foot inside, shut the door and sat there." The businessman found a space nearby. "I drove right behind the car, and then walked past it again to the building. It never occurred to me to look closer, there was nothing suspicious."

William Bonin

An examination of not only the notorious murders committed by William Bonin, but the role the media played in the case.  Written by J.J. Maloney who, as a reporter for the Orange County Register, first coined the term "Freeway Killer".

by J.J. Maloney

He didn't have a name so we called him the Freeway Killer.

He was a murky presence, cruising up and down the freeways of Orange County and neighboring counties, stalking the dimmed tinsel byways of Hollywood, picking up those sad youngsters who came there in search of a dream and found a nightmare instead.

The police would later find the nude bodies sprawled behind filling stations, or in dumpsters -- cast off the way a child discards a doll that has served its purpose.

Updated Dec. 19, 2007

Belton Missouri

The story of Jeffrey Gardner, a young man sentenced to prison for shooting an abusive husband who was threatening his wife with a knife. After the printing of this story, the Missouri Court of Appeals, Western District, on March 2, 1999, overturned the conviction of Gardner -- who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the shooting.  Gardner was a boarder in the couple's home at the time of the shooting. On Dec. 7, 1999, the Missouri Supreme Court did overturn the appellate court opinion. Gardner is serving his sentence at the state penitentiary in Jefferson City, Mo. Click here to read the Missouri Supreme Court decision.

by J.J. Maloney

Carol Drummond could feel feel the noose tightening around her throat.

For more than five years the 38-year-old Belton resident had been stalked, threatened and vilified by the friends of Phillip Hancock, her late husband.

In August, 1991, Drummond called police after Hancock threatened her with a bayonet. In December, 1991, the 6-foot-2-inch Hancock hurled Drummond to the ground, breaking her collarbone because her dog had urinated on the floor. A judge ordered Hancock to stay away from Drummond.

Hancock then lived with a friend, Mark Lassince, until he made up with Drummond and moved back in with her, in January, 1992. Also living in the house were Jeffrey Wayne Gardner, an attractive, soft-spoken, 28-year-old boarder, and Jackie, the 8 year old daughter of Hancock and Drummond (she kept her own name after the marriage).

In the early afternoon of March 7, 1992, Hancock called the Belton police and talked with the dispatcher. Hancock wanted police to eject Gardner from his house. The dispatcher explained that, since Drummond was half-owner of the house, if she wanted Gardner to stay, there was nothing the police could do. Gardner asked if the police would come over and take Gardner's gun away from him. Hancock said he feared Gardner and Drummond would plant the gun on him, to get his probation revoked. The dispatcher said there was nothing the police could do about Gardner's gun, either. Hancock expressed bitterness, saying he was, "screwed, I don't have any rights."

Jan 25, 2003

Antoinette Frank

The psychiatrist who interviewed Antoinette Frank for the New Orleans Police Department said she was too emotionally unstable to become a police officer. He was right, but she was hired anyway. She proved to be a lousy cop and then she turned killer.

 by Charles Hustmyre

When Chau Vu saw the battered red and white Ford Torino pull into the parking lot of her family's restaurant for the third time that night – this time just before 2 a.m. – she knew something bad was going to happen. "I just had a feeling," Chau said later. "...inside, something told me it was not right."

The driver of the Torino was 24-year-old Antoinette Frank, an off-duty New Orleans police officer, who sometimes worked a uniformed, extra-duty security detail at the restaurant.

Friday night's business had been slow, and in the early hours of this cool and drizzly Saturday morning, March 4, 1995, Chau's mother had already left, leaving Chau, her older sister, and two teenage brothers to clean up the Kim Anh Vietnamese restaurant on the eastern edge of New Orleans, just a couple of miles from Lake Pontchartrain.

Dressed in a leather jacket, green blouse, and black jeans, Frank tugged on the glass door. She wanted to get in, but the door was locked. Frank had already been to the restaurant twice since her patrol shift ended at 11 p.m. On her second trip she'd brought someone she introduced as her nephew, 18-year-old Rogers LaCaze. Although LaCaze stood just 5-foot-2 and weighed 135 pounds, his mouthful of gold teeth and his attitude frightened Chau. She didn't like him.

Edgar Smith

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.

by Lona Manning

Sixty-nine year-old Edgar Smith lives an anonymous existence as one of almost 160,000 inmates in the California penal system. At one time, however, he was the most famous prisoner in the United States. His story begins on the other side of the country and almost half a century ago, in the peaceful town of Mahwah, N.J. In 1957, Smith was sentenced to die in the electric chair for the murder of Vickie Zielinski, a pretty young cheerleader whose savagely bludgeoned body was found in a sandpit. The crime and the trial drew national attention. Smith claimed he was innocent and named another man as the killer, but he was found guilty and sent to the Death House in Trenton State Prison. From his prison cell, Smith managed to stave off execution with a series of appeals, and even wrote a book giving his version of the case. He began to correspond with columnist William F. Buckley Jr., who helped him overturn his conviction and negotiate a plea bargain instead of a second trial. At the time of his release in December 1971, he was the longest-serving prisoner on death row in the United States. 

Smith's successful transition to the world outside the 20-foot walls of Trenton State Prison lasted only as long as his fame. By 1976 he was in California, broke and drinking too much. That's when a woman named Lefteriya Ozbun discovered the real Edgar Smith, and miraculously lived to tell about it.

September 19, 2007 updated June 22, 2009

Veronique Courjault

Nine recent cases of infanticide in France are causing the French to ask what is it in their psyche that makes the nation's mothers kill their newborns.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

Infanticide is a crime no one living in France can commit; it is a crime that does not exist. Page through the French Penal Code and you won't even find the word. Yet, mothers killing their newborn babies is a French phenomenon. It is just that in France infanticide is called by another name.

Under Art. 221-4-1 of the French Penal Code, infanticide is qualified as the "assassination of a minor under the age of 15." It is "assassination" and not "homicide," because French law makes a distinction between slaying someone in a burst of sudden anger, like a crime passionnel when a spouse kills an unfaithful partner, and a premeditated taking of life. When there has been no medical supervision during pregnancy, no preparation for the confinement, and the pregnancy was concealed from everyone, even from the father of the child, then, French law declares the slaying as "premeditated." Thus, the crime becomes an "assassination," or, as it would be called in the United States, "first-degree murder." Until France abolished the death sentence in 1977, as a rule, punishment for first-degree murder was death on the guillotine; that of second-degree murder was life imprisonment, perpéte in French underworld slang, though it, too, could have fetched a sentence of capital punishment.