Celebrity Crime

Nov. 7, 2011

Casey Anthony 

Not since O.J. Simpson’s murder trial in 1995 has national media attention focused so intently on one case, and not since Simpson’s acquittal has the public been more shocked by the verdict that exonerated Casey Anthony of any responsibility in the death of her toddler daughter, Caylee Marie Anthony.   

by Denise Noe

The case of Casey Anthony, a young mother accused of murdering her small child, triggered a ravenous media feeding frenzy not seen since the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial in 1995. The parallel was magnified when public outcry at the Casey Anthony verdict echoed the outrage over the Simpson verdict.

A Time magazine article proclaimed the case “the first murder trial of the social-media age.” It noted that hundreds of people began showing up each day as early as 2 a.m. to land one of the 50 courtroom seats reserved for the public at the Orange County Courthouse in Orlando. 

Millions of people followed the trial every day on live-stream video feeds provided by TruTv and HLN. Both CNN and NBC built two-story structures in a lot across from the courthouse to catch every possible detail of the trial and transmit it to eager viewers. Hundreds of media vehicles often surrounded the Orlando courthouse.  Prominent TV personalities such as Geraldo Rivera and Greta Van Susteren covered the trial but no one was more incessant in publicizing this case than Nancy Grace. A former prosecutor and author of three best-selling books, she is known as an outspoken advocate for victims’ rights. Her Headline News’ (HLN) program, called Nancy Grace, garners high ratings. The program focused incessantly on the Casey Anthony trial with its hostess making no secret of her belief that the accused was guilty.

Oct. 28, 2010

Charles Manson

In 2004, Denise Noe wrote "The Manson Myth" for Crime Magazine, an article debunking the charismatic image of Charles Manson propagated by Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi in the best-selling true crime book of all time, Helter Skelter.  Noe wrote that the real life Charles Manson was not some messianic leader gone bad, but a pathetic figure from the beginning.  In 2008 she sent her article to Manson.  When he responded by calling her collect, an unusual relationship began.

by Denise Noe

I first read Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry when I was in high school. I was fascinated by its portrait of Charles Manson: a mesmerizing and charismatic criminal able to thoroughly dominate a band of fanatical followers. According to that book, Manson was able to convince his followers that a worldwide Armageddon between the black and white races was imminent. He believed that this race war had been prophesied in the Bible and in the Beatles’ White Album. Indeed, Manson supposedly thought the very title of the record was a reference to the coming black-white conflict. The helter-skelter theory was that blacks would kill off the white race – all except for Manson and his followers who would take refuge in a “Bottomless Pit” located in the desert.
 
According to the helter-skelter theory of which Manson had supposedly completely convinced his followers, Manson and his people would hide out until the race war was finished and blacks were the only ones above ground. Manson was a racist who believed that blacks would be unable to govern themselves and so would turn the reins of power over to him and the other Caucasians who would emerge from the Bottomless Pit. Thus, Charles Manson would become ruler of the world and his followers a class of aristocrats.

Oct. 6, 2010

Scott Peterson

For murdering his pregnant wife and unborn son, Scott Peterson became one of the most reviled husbands in the annals of crime.

 by Denise Noe

Laci Peterson is missing!

On Christmas Eve, 2002, Scott Peterson called police to report that his 27-year-old wife, Laci Peterson, was missing from their one-story, ranch-style Modesto, California home. Laci was seven and a half months pregnant. Doctors had given her a due date of February 10, 2003. A sonogram had shown the fetus to be a boy; the parents planned to name him Conner.

When the police arrived, Peterson told them he left home alone that morning for a fishing trip to the Berkeley Marina in the San Francisco Bay, 85 miles to the west. He said his wife told him she intended to walk their golden retriever in a nearby park and then shop. “Scott Peterson asserted that he had returned home to find Laci’s Land Rover in the driveway of their Modesto, California, home, and the couple’s golden retriever, McKenzie, in the backyard, alone, with his leash on,” according to forensic psychiatrist Keith Ablow in his book, Inside the Mind of Scott Peterson.

Before calling police, Peterson called his mother-in-law, Sharon Rocha, and said Laci was “missing.” Mrs. Rocha thought her son-in-law sounded strangely calm for a man whose wife’s whereabouts were unknown.

May 14, 2010 Updated Sept. 19, 2011 and Feb.14, 2013

 Pope Benedict XVI

As the scandal over pedophile priests rocks Roman Catholic dioceses around the globe, a lawsuit filed April 10, 2010 in U.S. District Court in Milwaukee names Pope Benedict XVI as a defendant. And with good cause.

By Don Fulsom

Update: Pope Benedict XVI's startling decision to resign at the end of February 2013 may put him at even greater risk of prosecution. Australian human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson notes that, in retirement, Benedict's absolute immunity from legal action as a head of state vanishes. "There are many victims of priests permitted by (then) Cardinal Ratzinger to stay in holy orders after their propensity to molest was known, and they would like to sue the ex-Pope for damages for negligence," Robertson writes in the British newspaper The Independent.

"If he steps outside the Vatican," Robertson adds, "a court may rule that (the victims) have a case." The legal expert contends Benedict's "command responsibility" goes back to 1981 – when, as Cardinal Ratzinger, he took over the Vatican body that punishes errant priests.

Another major critic of Benedict – the first pope to quit the papacy in nearly 600 years – describes the outgoing pontiff's record on sex abuse as "terrible." David Clohessy, executive director of the 12,000-member Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests, tells The Guardian: “He knows more about clergy sex crimes and cover-ups than anyone else in the Church, yet he has done precious little to protect children.”

April 11, 2010

Princess Diana

Was her death really an accident, or was there a hidden hand at work? Many still say that she was assassinated. Not long before her tragic end, she predicted in a letter to her loyal butler that she would be murdered in a car accident. 

By Marilyn Z. Tomlins 

The telephones started ringing in the homes of Paris’s foreign correspondents soon after 1 a.m. on Sunday, August 31, 1997.

It had been a dull Saturday. After a very hot summer when the temperature in Paris had risen to the high 80s Fahrenheit, the sun had that day disappeared behind thick clouds and the city had turned cool so that the Parisians had to wear warm clothing.  There had also been a degree of languor in the city; the summer vacation was over but no one as yet felt like returning to work, school or university.

The journalists shared the Parisians’ languor; what they called the “silly season” was ending and with the rentrée – the return or reopening – would arrive new political shenanigans, disasters and wars to report.

The callers were editors from the world over. All asked the same question of their correspondents: “We hear Di’s been in an accident in a tunnel. Can we have a story in the next half an hour for our first edition this morning?”

Not one of the journalists would be able to sleep on what was left of the hours of darkness, or indeed for the next couple of days. They knew that they were working on the biggest story there had been for a long time and would probably be for some time. Later, some of the most hardened among those who worked as freelancers would admit that they had earned so much money that night that they had been able to set off on a luxury vacation afterwards.

For that August night, Diana, Princess of Wales, died from injuries she had sustained in a car crash in a Paris tunnel.

If before that night, you had asked anyone – man or woman – who was the most beautiful, most elegant, most compassionate woman in the world, the one they would love to have dinner with, they would have replied: Princess Di.

But that night she lay dead in Paris aged just 36.

Frankie and the Boys 1976 - Left to right: Paul Castellano, Gregory DePalma, Sinatra, Tommy Marson, Carlo Gambino, Aladena Fratianno, Salvatore Spatola, Seated: Joseph Gambino, Richard Fusco

The recent release of Sinatra's extensive FBI file exposes his mob connections in voluminous detail, putting to lie Ol' Blue Eyes' most celebrated claim that he did it his way.

by J.D. Chandler

Rumors of mob connections hounded Frank Sinatra throughout his storied, tumultuous life. His denials were as ready on his lips as his trademark song ''My Way'' became in his waning years. J. Edgar Hoover didn't buy it. He thought Ol' Blue Eyes was a murderer and a Mafioso with a golden voice. Despite Hoover's FBI amassing the largest file on Sinatra of any entertainer in U.S. history, none of the damning information there ever made it to a grand jury. Numerous times the government got close to indicting Sinatra, but it never did. Sinatra had friends in the highest places, first President Kennedy and then President Nixon and finally President Reagan. Each, in different ways and to varying degrees, came to his aid when he most needed them, enabling him to front for the mob with impunity.

Recently the FBI released on its web site all 1,275 pages of Sinatra's FBI file. His file may be viewed at http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/sinatra.htm. Beginning more than a year ago, the FBI began posting files of scores of other deceased celebrities it had maintained files on to the bureau's web site. There one can read about Charles A. Lindbergh (1,368 pages), Robert Kennedy (1,263), Joseph Kennedy (1,011), President Kennedy (178), Henry Ford (376), Abbie Hoffman (13,262), Martin Luther King Jr. (16,659), Malcolm X (11,674), Nelson Rockefeller (1,472), Cardinal Francis Spellman (536), Marilyn Monroe (80), Jackie Robinson (131), and, of course, the Mafiosi: Al Capone (2,397), Sam Giancana (2,781), and Carlo Gambino (1,239) to name a few.

Updated Sept 23, 2003

Madalyn Murray O'Hair

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.

by Lona Manning

"There is no God. There's no heaven. There's no hell. There are no angels. When you die, you go in the ground, the worms eat you."

-- Madalyn Murray O'Hair

When David Travis arrived for work on Aug. 28, 1995 at the headquarters of American Atheists in Austin, Tex., he knew something was wrong: The door was locked and a note was posted on it: "The Murray-O'Hair family has been called out of town on an emergency basis. We do not know how long we will be gone at the time of the writing of this memo."

As Travis, a 50-ish former Army sergeant, stood there reading the note, he felt the anger welling up. He couldn't say he was surprised that his employers were gone, and by the looks of things, so was his job as a proofreader. He'd been suspicious that the Murray-O'Hairs were up to something ever since he had opened a letter from New Zealand last spring and discovered a bank statement for an account he had never heard of, for almost a million dollars. And this was when Madalyn Murray O'Hair, his cantankerous boss, was always crying the blues about money and warning him that she might not be able to meet payroll.

O'Hair was always extremely secretive about the financial affairs of American Atheists, which she had founded in 1963 and dominated ever since. All financial records were kept locked up in a little room away from prying eyes. Recently, a seven- foot chain linked fence, topped with cyclone wire, had been built around the property, a fitting emblem of O'Hair's siege mentality. According to her, the world was a hostile place, particularly toward atheists. She and her family had been persecuted for 35 years for their courageous stand for the separation of church and state. But lately, as her health declined, and with it her energy and combative spirit, O'Hair had been known to talk about getting away from it all.