Sex Crimes

May 21. 2012

Farah Jama (L)

Farah Jama, a 21-year-old Somali immigrant in Australia was convicted – based on contaminated DNA evidence – of raping a woman he had never met at a bar in Melbourne he had never been to. His exoneration, after 16 months in prison, led to important reforms in how DNA material is collected from rape victims. 

by Liz Porter

All over the world, young men sometimes still go to prison for crimes they didn't commit. But in 2008, in Melbourne, Australia, a 21-year old Somali-born student went to jail for a crime that didn't even happen. This unlucky young man was not the victim of police corruption or manufactured evidence. Instead, he was convicted by a piece of forensic evidence produced in a one-in-a-million “CSI moment:” the kind of improbable, but theoretically possible scientific episode that only a scriptwriter for the famous CBS series might dream up.

Sadly for Farah Jama, his “CSI moment” was real. It happened at Melbourne’s Austin Hospital, one of several in the city with suites of rooms where rape victims are taken for forensic examination.

It was here, in the early hours of Saturday, July 15, 2006, that an agitated young woman was waiting for the on-call forensic doctor to arrive and examine her. There was a sticky-looking substance in her hair: male ejaculate from a sexual encounter she’d been involved in a few hours earlier. The episode, involving oral sex, had not been romantic. But the girl hadn’t been  raped. A girlfriend had urged her to pursue a rape allegation, but she later withdrew it.

As the young woman paced up and down, her hair was shedding tiny, invisible fragments of male DNA. These unseen flecks floated in the air, some near a trolley holding swabs, slides and other equipment. One tiny fragment landed in an open box of slides. It sat there, a microscopic forensic time bomb, waiting to go off.

Just over 24 hours later, the same forensic doctor returned, having been called in to examine another patient. As the woman lay down on the bed next to the trolley, the doctor opened the box of slides, unaware that at least one of them was already contaminated with male DNA. With a gloved hand she took a sample from the woman and dabbed it on to the slide. She then sealed the slide in an evidence bag, and handed it to the waiting police.

Four months later, that tiny forensic bomb exploded.

April 16, 2012 Special to Crime Magazine

One Voice Raised, A Triumph Over Rape , an excerpt from the non-fiction story about Jennifer Wheatley-Wolf’s empowering experience of testifying against the man who raped her 20 years after the crime was committed.  In addition to Jennifer's story of hope is a detailed account of how the cold-case was solved by Chief Investigator David H. Cordle  Sr.

Chapter 4

Intuition

1. Direct perception of truth, fact, etc., independent of any reasoning process; immediate apprehension.

2. A fact, truth, etc., perceived in this way.

3. A keen and quick insight.

4.The quality or ability of having such direct perception or quick insight.

I have always been intuitive. I suppose we are all intuitive to some degree. But maybe my feeling of “something isn’t right here” was a bit keener than even I believed. I have been asked, if I’d felt something was wrong, “Why didn’t you do something?”

Indeed, why didn’t I? Hindsight is always twenty-twenty. However, even if I had followed my instincts, to what outcome? Who knows? In truth, the answer to “why not?” isn’t, “I was tired and overreacting,” or even “I had spooked myself by reading Stephen King at 3 a.m.” It is much simpler: I’m home, getting ready for bed; I’m in my pajamas.

I am home. Isn’t this the place where we feel the most invincible, the safest? Don’t we all feel like the weight of the day begins to fall off once we come into our homes and kick off our shoes? We turn on the TV or stereo, grab a beer or glass of wine, get ourselves something to eat, and begin to relax. We naturally put our guard down. Getting ready for bed, dressed in my pajamas, and unwinding after a busy night at work is so far opposite from running out of the house screaming for help like a maniac. I didn’t believe I was in danger because I was home. I didn’t listen to my intuition. All the warnings were there and I got them all loud and clear.

I did not react to any of the intuitive signals I was picking up on because I wanted to continue to believe my home was a safe haven.

I am home. I’m safe.

March 12, 2012

Joan, Michelle and Christe Rogers

On June 4, 1989, the bodies of Joan, Michelle and Christe Rogers were found floating in the serene waters of Tampa Bay. They were stripped below the waist, bound, and tied to concrete blocks. How could such a tragedy strike in paradise?

by Fred Shrum, III

They were going on vacation! It was a trip that may seem normal to some.  But to the Rogers family, it was the trip of a lifetime.  They were going to Florida to make some memories.  But Florida would literally become a tourist trap for Jo, Michelle and Christe.  They would not make it home alive.

The Rogers women were going to experience Florida in the classic fashion. They would color their days with beaches, attractions, and maybe even a visit to Mickey Mouse. This would be a welcome respite from their daily grind spent on a 300-acre dairy farm in Ohio. They were determined to enjoy every moment.

Why was Florida such a welcome change? Have you ever worked on a farm? Imagine an existence where no matter how tired or sick you are, or how cold or hot it is outside, there is work that has to be done. No exceptions. You awake in darkness to greet 80 cows that need to be milked.  By the time you are finished, it’s only first light.  You step out of the milking parlor and gaze at the fields that seem to go on forever.  There are crops that need constant attention.  Around late afternoon all 80 cows are calling out to be milked again.  You may have worked enough by nightfall.  Once you get in there is laundry, cooking, and other housework. Then you wake the next morning and start all over again.  You do this every single day.  How does Florida sound now?

Oct. 31, 2011 

Special to Crime Magazine:  An excerpt from David A. Gibb’s book, Camouflaged Killer: The Shocking Double Life of Canadian Air Force Colonel Russell Williams.  By day Williams commanded the largest military base in Canada; by night he stalked single women in their bedrooms.  What began as a fetish to steal women’s undergarments grew into a compulsion to rape and murder. 

Chapter Ten

Enemy under Fire

With true military precision, Colonel Russell Williams arrived at the Ottawa police headquarters at 3 p.m. and reported for his scheduled interview.

He was introduced to Detective-Sergeant Jim Smyth, a forty-something, slightly bookish, unassuming officer in a dark suit and tie. Mild-mannered in his approach and soft-spoken by nature, Smyth was not the type of fellow one would suspect of being a police officer. In fact, much like TV’s Columbo, he probably owed much of his success to people’s innate tendencies to underestimate his talents and resolve. At six feet two, Williams’s tall and lean build dominated the smaller-framed officer.

Smyth, who had started his policing career in 1988, was one of only a half-dozen certified criminal profilers in Canada. His success as a profiler and polygraph operator for the OPP’s Behavioral Sciences and Analysis Services unit had been well documented.[1] As far as cops went, he seemed to have the proverbial Midas touch, the kind of cop most case investigators would want holding their ladder.

Sept. 12, 2011

A Predatory Priest by David Margolick is available as a Kindle Single on Amazon.com

by David Margolick

Hard by the Santa Fe Railroad tracks on the outskirts of Belen, New Mexico, on a rutted gravel driveway flanked by scrubby brush and lonely cottonwoods, Tommy Deary’s three youngest brothers walked side by side. They’d traveled a long way from Putnam, Connecticut, the small New England mill town where they’d grown up, the last three sons in a succession of 13 children, but no farther than the man they’d come to see, the man they believed to be in the house barely visible in the distance. That man had grown up only a few miles from them, but had spent the last 30 years in a strange ecclesiastical exile. Thirty years earlier, in fact, at St. Mary’s Church in Putnam, to which the Dearys, like so many Catholic families in town had flocked every Sunday, he’d briefly been one of the priests. Very briefly, it turned out, though for longer than long enough.