True Crime Stories

  I found this case interesting because it appears that while by a legal standard Arthur Paul Baird Jr. did not qualify as “insane” it seemed to be understood that he actually may have been. The idea, or the “rule” of someone being “insane” to meet a legal definition has been up for debate for a very long time. The long and short of things is that if someone seemingly knows their actions are wrong, then they are not insane. To prove “temporarily insane” is even harder to prove because actions both before and after are considered and looked at. While I will agree that claiming insanity can be as common as appealing a case based on ineffective counsel and often is nothing more than a tactic used to lessen culpability, that is not always the case. Many believe that these rules should be changed but little has really been done about it. Arthur Paul Baird Jr. lived in Darlington Indiana with his wife Nadine. Even though I have lived in Indiana all of my life I had never heard of ...

I know there is no way for me to know about every crime, no matter how horrible, that happens in my state but I am still very surprised when I hear of one particularly horrible for the first time after many years. When this crime occurred I was actually still in high school about two hours away and lets be fair, I was not as interested in true crimes at that time. In the evening of October 10, 1986 seventeen year old Alicia Elmore went to a store a few block from her Terre Haute Indiana home to run an errand. On her way home a man, who was later determined to be Bill Benefiel, who was wearing a mask and carrying a gun confronted her. Alicia was pushed into a garage and forced to take all of her clothing off. Her head was covered and she was bound with her own clothing and electrical wire. Alicia was then put in Benefiel's van and he took her to a house that he owned. There he chained and handcuffed her to a bed. Over the next few months he continually raped Alicia and to...

  As I stated at the beginning of my last entry, this case too involves an execution. It is only by coincidence really that they both took place in California. I will warn you that this case is a bit confusing and while the case in which sent Donald Beardslee to his execution involved several people. As usual I tried to find information on each of the participants of the crime and I found a little but when an execution is involved it is difficult to find anything beyond that a lot of the time. The strange thing here however is that I did not come across an appeal by Beardslee but I did find one from one of the other participant and those help in giving more information about the crime itself and was very informational. Donald Beardslee was born in 1944 and when he was of age he joined the Air Force and became an aircraft mechanic. In 1965 he and another airman were caught trying to steal a car. He was sentenced (although I do not know for how long) to a work farm in Minnes...

  This case and the one I plan to do after this one, are both cases in which the perpetrators were executed in the state of California. I do not think there is a question in either case whether the perpetrator was guilty of the crime that sent them to their deaths but I do question the mentality of them both. But, here I am, as usual getting ahead of myself. Few people will argue that Robert Alton Harris did not have a horrible childhood. It was repeatedly said that he was born in 1953 early (some say two months, some say three) due to the fact that his father, Kenneth, had kicked his mother, Evelyn, in the stomach. Both of his parents were alcoholics. Court reports would say that at birth Robert suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome. While I cannot necessarily dispute this officially and knowing the history I am unsure that it is not technically true, I do question that was a diagnosis in 1953. At the time of his birth the Harris family was living at Fort Bragg in North ...

This case is interesting in the fact that I am unsure completely what the motive was in the murders. Prosecutors do not always know what a motive is but they know that juries want to know “the why” and are more likely to convict if they can understand why the murder occurred. Defense attorneys more often than not, have a completely different motive or reason, that is if they admit that their client was responsible. If they do not admit their client is responsible for the crime they will often place the blame elsewhere. The defense will also tend to “jump around” which is not necessarily a bad strategy since their goal is simply create “reasonable doubt” while the prosecution has to “prove” their case. In this case the prosecutors claimed that Cheyanne Jessie murdered her father, Mark Weekly and her six year old daughter, Meredith Jessie, to preserve her relationship with her boyfriend, Matthew Munroe. The defense would claim that Munroe was the actual murderer and that Cheyann...

  Cases that involve police officers are some of the more interesting cases to me. I do not mean police shootings, although I have done several of those and those are interesting too, but I mean more of the cases in which police officers commit murder or other crimes that they have sworn to help prevent. If you watch a lot of true crime shows, which I would gander that you do, you will often hear how suspects or perpetrators seem to act or feel as if they are smarter than investigators. What I think is interesting about these statements is that when it comes to a police officer being a suspect they are even more confident that they can outsmart investigators. Not only do they think they know everything that investigators are going to do and look into but most believe they can explain things away. Many of them even show up at the scene when it is discovered. On June 5, 2004 the body of twenty-three year old Jesse Valencia was found laying on the ground in between two building...

This case is one of those in which I fear I will have difficultly putting together because of my conflicting feelings. You have heard me say many times that I am not necessarily for, or against the death penalty and that I do find it appropriate when there is no question that the person convicted committed the crime. You have also heard me often say that for me guilt or innocence for me is less important in a trial than following the law. I am not saying that all of these things apply in this case but I do admit that I am conflicted on some things. The crime that Scott Hain and his accomplice, Robert Lambert, were convicted of is especially gruesome. It involved the murders of two people, twenty-seven year old Michael Houghton and his twenty-two year old co-worker, Laura Lee Sanders. I am going to tell the story of what happened as relayed through court records and then I will go into a deeper discussion. According to the courts on the night of October 6, 1987 Houghton and San...

Ok, I will give you guys a little bit of a break on the neighbor murders. However, almost all of my cases come from television shows and this one comes from the series Evil Lives Here. The episode was titled My Son should Die in Prison. It was told from the perspective of Jon Eason. Jon's son from a previous marriage, Dylan, along with his friend Isaiah Churchwell were accused, and later convicted, of murdering Jon's wife, Cynthia. Much, well pretty much all, that you will hear here involving Dylan's childhood came from the television show as I found little in my research. And, because of the “sensational” point of view that Cindy was murdered by her own step-son there is not as much about Dylan's accomplice. To add to that Isaiah Churchwell was the foster son of a prominent Burlington Colorado couple but in 2011 another foster son of the couple, Joshua, had gone missing and his body was later found in a suitcase. That case is unsolved but with the two cases ...

  Once again I am talking about a case that I learned about on Fear thy Neighbor. If you are a regular reader then you know that I get into these spurts where I will focus on a type of crime. Even still I think these types of crimes are the most interesting to me. I know that the television show dramatizes things and not everything is fully based on fact. Because of that I generally try to dig a bit deeper for these cases. Even still finding clear answers is not always easy. Neighbor crimes are interesting to me because they are not stranger killings. But then again, they aren't intimate killings either. They are also crimes in which there is generally a trail of legal documentation of some kind, whether authorities were helpful or not. Most of these crimes turn into he said/she said, or a variation of that as neighbors accuse each other of doing things, most of the time without any proof. Then things continue and continue and neither side feel that authorities are of any h...