Crime Magazine is about true crime: organized crime, celebrity crime, serial killers, corruption, sex crimes, capital punishment, prisons, assassinations, justice issues, crime books, crime films and crime studies.
Pat O'Connor
J. Patrick O'Connor is the editor and publisher of Crime Magazine. He graduated from the University of Missouri in Columbia in 1967. He was a reporter and bureau manager for United Press International, editor of Cincinnati Magazine and an associate editor for TV Guide. He was editor and publisher of the Kansas City New Times, an alternative newspaper. Click here to read an interview with him on bookhitch.com. He is the author of The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal, which was published by Lawrence Hill Books in May of 2008. His next book, Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and the Framing of Kevin Cooper, will be published by Strategic Media Books in January of 2012. Click here to contact him by e-mail.
The Murder of JonBenét Ramsey
May 7, 1999 Updated 8/30/06 and 07/20/08
by J. J. Maloney & J. Patrick O'Connor
Related Story: Solving the JonBenet Case by Ryan Ross. (04/14/03)
Editor's Note:
On July 9, 2008, Boulder County District Attorney Mary Lacy stated that DNA tests conducted by Bode Technology Group revealed that skin cells left behind on JonBenet Ramsey's long underwear point to a killer other than the girl's parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, or her brother, Burke. Mrs. Ramsey died of ovarian cancer in 2006 at age 49.
"To the extent that we may have contributed in any way to the public perception that you might have been involved in this crime, I am deeply sorry," Lacy wrote in an exoneration letter to John Ramsey, who now has remarried and lives in Michigan. "No innocent person should have to endure such an extensive trial in the court of public opinion."
Early in the investigation into the 6-year-old pageant star's brutal murder on Christmas night in 1996, Lacy said that Boulder police discovered male DNA in a drop of blood on JonBenet's underwear that did not match any members of JonBenet's immediate family. The tests conducted by Bode Technology Group, Lacy said, revealed the same DNA that was found previously in the drop of blood was present in three places on JonBenet's long underwear.
Lacy stated that Boulder investigators now hope they'll eventually find a DNA match in the ever-expanding national DNA databank, a sentiment echoed by John Ramsey. "I think the people that are in charge of the investigation are focused on that, and that gives me a lot of comfort," Mr. Ramsey said in an interview with a Denver TV station. "Certainly we are grateful that they acknowledged that we, based on that, certainly could not have been involved."
Even if a DNA match is eventually made, it does not mean that the DNA from this contaminated crime scene will reveal it to be that of JonBenet's killer, although it possibly could. For now, all that is known, is that it is not the DNA of John, Burke, or the late Patsy Ramsey. In the meantime, the JonBenet case will continue unsolved and will remain one of the most botched crime investigations in the annals of U.S. law enforcement.
The brutal murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey on Christmas night in 1996 shocked America to its core. Just as the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and murder seven decades earlier had seared the nation's consciousness, this murder – of a beautiful and talented child in a wealthy Boulder, Colo., home – renewed every parent's worst nightmare: No child was truly safe, not even tucked in at home on Christmas night.
JonBenet's murder – particularly as the days went by and no arrests were forthcoming – quickly became a national obsession, featured day after day on network news, television tabloid programs, talk radio, newspapers and magazines. Her image flitted across television screens innumerable times, often showing her in a fancy red cowgirl outfit, singing "I want to be a cowboy sweetheart," or dancing across the stage in a glittering Las Vegas showgirl outfit, complete with heavy makeup. Her unusual first name became so well known that like Cher and Madonna she no longer had need of a last name.
The public's shock at the murder soon began to share equal time with its growing dismay at the Boulder police's investigation, a dismay fed by a steady stream of leaks from the Boulder County District Attorney's office about the inept police investigation being conducted. For one thing it became known that the police had badly botched the initial investigation by failing to seal off the crime scene. For another it appeared the police were treating the primary suspects – JonBenet's parents – with kid gloves by not only acquiescing to their refusal to be interviewed at police headquarters, but also to being interviewed separately. Fueled with such information, the media, especially the tabloid television and talk radio shows, were showing no such restraint toward the glamorous child's parents, John and Patsy Ramsey. Some in the media began to point the finger directly at her father. Others implied it was her mother who had garroted the girl. Some speculated the crime had to have been committed by both parents. The tabloids even raised the possibility that her brother Burke, who was just shy of 10-years-old at the time, murdered JonBenet.
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Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and the Framing of Kevin Cooper
Jan. 30, 2012 Special to Crime Magazine
An excerpt from the recently released book Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and the Framing of Kevin Cooper by J. Patrick O’Connor, editor of Crime Magazine. Published in January of 2012 by Strategic Media Books, Scapegoat is available at www.strategicmediabooks.com, Amazon.com, barnesandoble.com and other book sellers throughout the United States.
Foreword
During the fall of 2008, I was in the San Francisco Bay area on a book tour for The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal. The tour was arranged by Jeff Mackler, the executive director of the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, and it involved about fifteen speaking engagements at different venues. Jeff told me that supporters of death-row inmate Kevin Cooper – whom I had not heard of -- would be attending a number of these presentations, and that they would be asking me to write a book about Kevin’s case. Indeed, two of Cooper’s most dedicated supporters, Carole Seligman and Rebecca Doran, did just that.
Cooper had been convicted in 1985 of the brutal murders of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their ten-year-old daughter, Jessica, and eleven-year-old houseguest Christopher Hughes, and the attempted murder of the Ryens’ eight-year-old son Joshua.
Jeff had gotten to know Cooper over the years, and had visited him about twenty times. Kevin’s case was quite different from Mumia’s, he said, in the sense that Mumia is essentially a political prisoner and Kevin was anything but.
When I decided to begin researching the Kevin Cooper case in early 2009, I had no pre-conceived notions about his guilt or innocence. Each case is different, radically so. My first step was to read and notate the trial transcripts, documents of over eight-thousand pages. I then read all the police reports, witness interviews and various newspaper accounts. Finally, I read all of the appeals and the judicial rulings. By this time I was ready to begin interviewing various people involved in Cooper’s trial and his subsequent appeals.
One problem in researching a crime nearly twenty-five years after it occurred is that a number of key people involved in the investigation and trial have passed away or have retired or have simply forgotten important factual details. Another obstacle is that, because Cooper technically still has appeals open to him, the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office refused to discuss the case.
During the summer of 2009, I made arrangements to interview Kevin Cooper in a visitor’s cell on death row at San Quentin. On several issues, particularly those regarding his criminal record previous to the Chino Hills trial, I found him protective and less than forthcoming. That was all behind him, he seemed to suggest.
On the other hand, I was taken by his equanimity and his resolve to prove he was wrongfully convicted of the gruesome Chino Hills murders. I could see that the many years he had spent on death row, instead of diminishing him, had turned him into a person worthy of the high regard that his supporters – and his attorneys at the Orrick law firm – felt for him. On death row, Kevin Cooper had finally grown up.
Contrary to popular belief, most of the nation’s more than three-thousand-five-hundred death row inmates do not profess innocence. In fact, unlike Kevin Cooper, very few do. For those who do, the road to exoneration is a long, slow trek that usually fails. But it does succeed occasionally. Since 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed states to resume executions, one-hundred-thirty-six death-row inmates have been exonerated. In the majority of those cases, the proof of the inmate’s innocence was so convincing that the prosecutor dropped the charges rather than retry the case. In forty-five cases where there was a retrial, the inmate was acquitted.
There are two things that do link the Mumia Abu-Jamal and Kevin Cooper cases: Each was prosecuted by a district attorney’s office hell bent on winning a death-penalty conviction; and neither defendant received a proper defense. What separates the two cases is that, while Mumia’s trial was a mockery of the justice system’s standards for a fair trial, Cooper’s trial had the trappings of fairness – but was lost long before the trial opened. Two pre-trial developments caused this outcome: The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department destroyed evidence that could have exonerated Cooper; and his public defender insisted on going it alone. Not many Davids actually slay Goliaths.
This then is a book about a gruesome murder case, painfully recounted; all quotes are from either documents or interviews I conducted doing my research. It is also a book about how justice can go astray. It is the true story of the Chino Hills murders, and the prosecution of Kevin Cooper, a prisoner who escaped once too often and found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Since 1985, he has been on death row at San Quentin asserting his innocence in failed-after-failed appeal while awaiting his execution.
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Review of Murdered By Mumia: A Life Sentence of Loss, Pain, and Injustice by Maureen Faulkner and Michael A. Smerconish
(The Lyons Press)
Vendetta
There's a great deal to admire about Maureen Faulkner, the widow of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner who was shot to death on December 9, 1981. Less than six months later she bravely sat through the entire trial that concluded with Mumia Abu-Jamal's conviction for first-degree murder and a sentence of death. Over the next 25 years, while Abu-Jamal was becoming the Alpha symbol of the anti-death penalty crusade, Maureen Faulkner became its Omega.
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Mumia Abu-Jamal's Last Chance for Justice
April 4, 2009
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Since his conviction in 1982 for the murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, through his numerous books, essays and radio commentaries, has become the face of the anti-death penalty movement in the United States and an international cause célèbre. Paris, for example, made him an honorary citizen in 2003, bestowing the honor for the first time since Pablo Picasso received it in 1971.
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The Brother Who Fleeced His Flock
For years, the Catholic brother in charge of a Kansas City home for developmentally disabled men had embezzled his way to a fortune. When the board of directors found out, its cover-up – with the help of The Kansas City Star – was as bold as the theft.
This is a story of how a Catholic brother embezzled up to $500,000 or more from the Community of the Good Shepherd, was eventually caught red-handed and then allowed to go scot free; a story the silk-stocking Board of Directors of the Community of the Good Shepherd covered up for more than two years through stonewalling, arrogance and threats of reprisal; a story The Kansas City Star had dropped in its lap, assigned a reporter to and then would not publish. It is a story of a crime that would have gone unpunished if not for the dogged determination of one person whom the Good Shepherd Board could not shut up: Richard Bowman.
Good Shepherd is a private, charitable organization located on James A. Reed Road in Kansas City that provides comprehensive care and housing for 30 developmentally disabled men ranging in age from their early 20s to their late 60s. It is licensed by the State of Missouri's Department of Mental Health which has placed 22 of the current residents there; the other eight are private placements. Richard Bowman's younger brother, Mike, who is 37, is one of the residents and has been since he was l6. Mike has Downs Syndrome and is severely autistic. He has no speech and no fine motor skills – his disability is total.
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“The Mumia Exception”
May 1, 2009
Mumia Abu-Jamal
Not even the U.S. Supreme Court is immune from “the Mumia Exception.” On April 6, 2009 the high court denied Abu-Jamal’s request for a Writ of Certiorari, scuttling his last chance for justice.
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Speaking Truth to Power
April 5, 2009
Mumia Abu-Jamal's 27 years on Death Row for a murder he did not commit would have turned almost anyone else into an embittered, defeated man. Instead, he has remained what he always was, "the voice of the voiceless," as he demonstrates yet again in his most recent book, Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A. (City Lights Books, 2009.)
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