senate 5.sen.0002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

On May 19, 1865, Davis was imprisoned in a casemate at Fortress Monroe, on the coast of Virginia. He was placed in irons for three days. Davis was indicted for treason a year later. While in prison, Davis arranged to sell his Mississippi estate to one of his former slaves, Ben Montgomery. Montgomery was a talented business manager, mechanic, and inventor who had become wealthy in part from running his own general store. However, floods ruined Montgomery’s early years at the reins, and he was unable to turn an early profit. The Davis family was unwilling to forgive Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  the debt of their former slave, and he lost the land. Montgomery never recovered, and died soon after.^{[citation needed]}

Jefferson Davis at his home c.1885

After two years of imprisonment, he was released on bail which was posted by prominent citizens of both northern and southern states, including Horace Greeley, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Gerrit Smith (Smith, a former member of the Secret Six, had supported John Brown). Davis visited Canada, Cuba and Europe. In December 1868, the court rejected a motion to nullify the indictment, but the prosecution dropped the case in February 1869.

In 1869 Davis became president of the Carolina Life Insurance Company in Memphis, Tennessee, where he resided at the Peabody Hotel.^[14] Upon Robert E. Lee‘s death in 1870, Davis presided over the memorial meeting in Richmond, Virginia. Elected to the U.S. Senate again, he was refused the office in 1875, having been barred from Federal office by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. He turned down the opportunity to become the first president of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (now Texas A&M University).

In 1876, he promoted a society for the stimulation of U.S. trade with South America. Davis visited England the next year, returning in 1878 to Beauvoir (Biloxi, Mississippi). Over the next three years there, Davis wrote The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. Having completed that book, he visited Europe again, and traveled to Alabama and Georgia the following year.

He completed A Short History of the Confederate States of America in October 1889. Two months later on December 6, Davis died in New Orleans of unestablished cause at the age of eighty-one. His funeral was one of the largest ever staged in the South, and included a continuous cortège, day and night, from New Orleans to Richmond, Virginia. He is buried at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond.^[15]

neighbor 6.nei.11002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Over the next several years, the farm prospered, better than Belle’s luck with men. Farmhand after farmhand that she hoped would turn into a husband left her dry, often in the middle of harvest, when muscle was especially needed. Time after time, it appeared that perhaps one of them, such Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  as hefty Peter Carlson, was turning into a suitor; some even talked marriage openly — then disappeared in the dead of night.

Nineteen-year-old Emil Greening, son of a neighbor, often came forward to offer his services between Belle’s would-be suitors, but of course he had no attraction to the older woman. His interest lay in Jennie, who had developed into a lean, rosy-cheeked blonde of dimples and giggles. But, his interest in the Gunness place waned after Jennie suddenly decided to go to college in San Francisco and left without nary a farewell. Emil was heartbroken.

Then came Ray Lamphere.

Belle had first seen the curly-headed 30-year-old odd-job carpenter about town in the spring of 1907 and, knowing he was looking for work, asked him to hire on as her farmhand. He was glad to have the work, if for nothing else than to support his drinking habit, and took up residence in Belle’s spare room on the second floor. According to de la Torre, Lamphere was “not too bright,” but was talented with hammer and nail and not afraid of work. It wasn’t long after that they were seen together arm in arm about town, he as lean as she was overweight. In the gin mills, which he frequented, Lamphere would boast to his pals that she had seduced him because she thought he was “quite a man,” then display the watch she gave him, or the vest, or the beaver hat, or the high-top leather boots.

But, something wayward happened to the affair and as the Christmas season of 1907 rolled about, Belle was suddenly traipsing about La Porte with a new man who, like most of her others, seemed to materialize out of the ether. More stunned than anyone was Lamphere when he learned the couple had paused at Obbereich’s Department Store to purchase a wedding ring.

No sooner had the fires of jealousy begun to send Lamphere to the saloons to rant and rave to his comrades about the treacheries of femaledom than this latest of suitors vanished. But, the farmhand’s relief was short lived, for shortly thereafter yet another gentleman appeared to have captured Belle’s devotions.

 

Andrew Helgelein

This time, neighbors said, it looked like true love. Described as “a big Swede,” Andrew Helgelein beamed when he strolled the country lanes and town byways with his woman. He was a slap-happy, good-natured man who seemed in his usual high spirits when he stopped at the town bank to withdraw all his funds from another bank in his native South Dakota. He announced to the teller that he and Belle were getting married.

 

That evening, Belle asked Ray Lamphere to vacate his quarters at her residence and find other lodging. She was turning the room over to Helgelein until the wedding day, which wasn’t far off. Lamphere, vehement, took it a step further by quitting his position and wishing his employer bad luck. Again he was seen and heard at the bars spouting hellfire to Belle Gunness and “that big Swede”.

 

gallows 88.gal.0002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

The Legend of Sweeney Todd

// “He kept a shop in London Town
Of fancy clients and good renown
And what if none of their souls were saved?  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
They went to their maker impeccably shaved
By Sweeney
By Sweeney Todd
The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”

“The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” by Stephen Sondheim.

 

Sweeney Todd and the penny dreadfuls

 

Not long after Sweeney Todd was filleted by the barber-surgeons, the nascent pulp fiction market took hold of his story and, as fiction writers do, began to embellish it somewhat. The first stories that appeared in the one-cent “penny dreadfuls” — the popular true-crime reports of the day — were filled with ghastly accounts of a sub-human monster who used a barber chair and trapdoor to lure unsuspecting clients to their doom.

So-called “Newgate novels,” stories with a moralistic turn, which demonstrated the folly of a life of crime, had been popular with the British public since the first true crime report appeared in 1776. That work, The Annals of Newgate, or the Malefactors Register, was prepared at the request of His Majesty’s government by the Newgate chaplain and was immensely popular with the masses. Later came The Newgate Calendar, or the Malefactors Bloody Register, which highlighted the crimes of such notables as “Moll Cutpurse, master thief,” “Daniel Davis, dishonest postman,” Mary Carlton, a.k.a., “The German Princess, adventuress” and “Charles Fox, an offending dustman.” Almost everyone in the Newgate Calendar ended up on the gallows.

The stories were often serialized to ensure repeat customers, and were enhanced to provide melodramatic aspects missing in the true account of the case. One of the most popular stories of Sweeney Todd created a love interest for the hapless apprentice. The String of Pearls,” by Thomas Peckett Prest, became immensely popular and was quickly adapted for the stage by George Dibdin-Pitt for performance at the Britannia Theatre.

Actors recreate Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett for the stage

For centuries after his demise, Sweeney Todd was reincarnated on British stages around the country, much to the delight of the masses. Most plays were based on Prest’s String of Pearls in some form or another, but the villains remained either Sweeney Todd, or in some cases, Margery Lovett.  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

With the invention of motion pictures, it was only natural that the Demon Barber would move to the screen. His first appearance in film was in a 1920s silent film version of String of Pearls. Haining reports that although no prints of the film remain, the movie, entitled simply Sweeney Todd, was a romantic comedy. Two years later, a serious horror film of Sweeney Todd was produced and in 1936, the Demon Barber had his first speaking role.

One of the main characters of String of Pearls was Tobias, Todd’s apprentice, who was apparently modeled after the poor child whom Todd had committed to the asylum. In Pit’s play, Tobias escapes thanks to the gin-drunk guards and returns to Fleet Street to avenge himself, expose the villain, capture the string of pearls and win the girl.

 

placed 99.pla.9929929 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

On November 29, 1966, carbon copies of an anonymous letter were mailed to the Riverside Police and the Riverside Enterprise. [see Illustration] Typed using a portable Royal typewriter with either Pica or Elite typeface, it was entitled “The Confession,” and carried a “byline” that consisted of the word “BY” followed by twelve underscores.

Both copies were on low-quality white paper eight inches wide and torn at the top and bottom so as to be roughly squarish, and had been sent unstamped and with no return address from a secluded rural mailbox.  Presumably, the author planned on the Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
letters being sent by Postage Due mail.

At least one of the details referred to in this letter had not been made public, and at the time, investigators agreed that it was most likely genuine, though this opinion has changed over the years.

This confession has been double-spaced to make reading easier.

THE CONFESSION

BY _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

SHE WAS YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL BUT NOW SHE IS BATTERED AND DEAD. SHE IS NOT THE

FIRST AND SHE WILL NOT BE THE LAST I LAY AWAKE NIGHTS THINKING ABOUT MY NEXT

VICTIM. MAYBE SHE WILL BE THE BEAUTIFUL BLOND THAT BABYSITS NEAR THE LITTLE

STORE AND WALKS DOWN THE DARK ALLEY EACH EVENING ABOUT SEVEN. OR MAYBE SHE

WILL BE THE SHAPELY BRUNETT THAT SAID XXX NO WHEN I ASKED HER FOR A DATE IN HIGH

SCHOOL. BUT MAYBE IT WILL NOT BE EITHER. BUT I SHALL CUT OFF HER FEMALE PARTS AND

DEPOSIT THEM FOR THE WHOLE CITY TO SEE. SO DON’T MAKE IT TO EASY FOR ME. KEEP

YOUR SISTERS, DAUGHTERS, AND WIVES OFF THE STREETS AND ALLEYS. MISS BATES WAS

STUPID. SHE WENT TO THE SLAUGHTER LIKE A LAMB. SHE DID NOT PUT UP A STRUGGLE. BUT

I DID. IT WAS A BALL. I FIRST CUT THE MIDDLE WIRE FROM THE DISTRIBUTOR. THEN I

WAITED FOR HER IN THE LIBRARY AND FOLLOWED HER OUT AFTER ABOUT TWO MINUTES.

THE BATTERY MUST HAVE BEEN ABOUT DEAD BY THEN. I Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
THEN OFFERED TO HELP. SHE WAS

THEN VERY WILLING TO TALK TO ME. I TOLD HER THAT MY CAR WAS DOWN THE STREET

AND THAT I WOULD GIVE HER A LIFT HOME. WHEN WE WERE AWAY FROM THE LIBRARY

WALKING, I SAID IT WAS ABOUT TIME. SHE ASKED ME, “ABOUT TIME FOR WHAT?” I SAID IT

WAS ABOUT TIME FOR HER TO DIE. I GRABBED HER AROUND THE NECK WITH MY HAND OVER

HER MOUTH AND MY OTHER HAND WITH A SMALL KNIFE AT HER THROAT. SHE WENT VERY

WILLINGLY. HER BREAST FELT WARM AND VERY FIRM UNDER MY HANDS, BUT ONLY ONE

THING WAS ON MY MIND. MAKING HER PAY FOR ALL THE BRUSH OFFS THAT SHE HAD GIVEN

ME DURING THE YEARS PRIOR. SHE DIED HARD. SHE SQUIRMED AND SHOOK AS I CHOCKED

HER, AND HER LIPS TWICHED. SHE LET OUT A SCREAM ONCE AND I KICKED HER IN THE HEAD

TO SHUT HER UP. I PLUNGED THE KNIFE INTO HER AND IT BROKE. I THEN FINISHED THE JOB

BY CUTTING HER THROAT. I AM NOT SICK. I AM INSANE. BUT THAT WILL NOT STOP THE

GAME. THIS LETTER SHOULD BE PUBLISHED FOR ALL TO READ IT. IT JUST MIGHT SAVE THAT

GIRL IN THE ALLEY. BUT THAT’S UP TO YOU. IT WILL BE ON YOUR CONSCIENCE. NOT MINE.

YES, I DID MAKE THAT CALL TO YOU ALSO. IT WAS JUST A WARNING. BEWARE…I AM

STALKING YOUR GIRLS NOW.

CC. CHIEF OF POLICE
ENTERPRISE

Neither envelope bore a complete address; they were handwritten with a felt-tip pen in the following manner.

Daily Enterprise
Riverside Calif
Attn: Crime

Homicide Detail
Riverside

One fingerprint was found on the envelope sent to the RPD Homicide Detail, but it has never been matched to a suspect, and whether it was left by the author, a postman, or a police officer is unknown.

Riverside Police patch

The killer’s claim that “she did not put up a struggle” was contradicted by the numerous defense wounds on her hands and arms, as well as by the flesh and hair found beneath Bates’ fingernails.

While a contemporaneous newspaper report reflects uncertainty as to whether the knife actually broke in her body,  no evidence of this event is reported in the autopsy report, and more recent pronouncements from RPD detectives are unanimous that the knife did not break.

Bates’ car had indeed been sabotaged in the manner described, which had not been fully revealed by  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
the news media.  The phone call that is referred to near the end of the letter has never been elaborated on by authorities, though researcher Tom Voigt suggests that it was placed to the Riverside Press, rather than the police, and so went misunderstood and ignored.

The letters were delivered on the same day they were posted.  The next day, November 30th, both the Enterprise and the local police submitted their copies to the Riverside County Postal Inspector, who in turn notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  Murder is not a federal crime, but extortion through the mail is, and the FBI briefly considered joining the investigation under this pretense.  However, since no specific victim of extortion was named or alluded to, there would be no federal aid in the investigation.

In an unexplained turn of events, what appears to be a photocopy of the “Confession” was attached to an FBI report declassified in the 1990s, but the typescript and number of words per line are different from those in the well-known copy that appears in a photograph of the letter lying either on a detective’s or a reporter’s desk.

break 3.bre.002002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Laws are like spiders’ webs: if some light or powerless thing falls into them, it is caught, but a bigger one can break through and get away.
Solon, quoted by Diogenes Laertius in Lives of the Philosophers

On a bright, sunny Sunday morning, February 12th, Judge Ito led his court off on a sight-seeing tour of the homes of the rich and famous, the not so rich and famous and the place where the rich and famous sometimes ate.

In a cavalcade of vans, busses and cars, the judge, jury and both legal teams headed off to Brentwood, Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
up the same 405 freeway that Simpson and Al Cowling had hijacked that night in June. Guarded by LAPD and Californian Highway Patrol cars, fussed over by a SWAT team and the LAPD air patrol in helicopters, and followed by the media in an assortment of ground and air vehicles, the convoy made its way north from the downtown area.  Parts of the highway and overhead ramps were sealed off from the public and the whole thing had a carnival-like atmosphere about it.

The procession stopped first at the apartment rented by Ronald Goldman, then moved on a couple of blocks down San Vicente Boulevard to the Mezzaluna restaurant, and then to South Bundy. From there, it moved to Rockingham Avenue. Although the legal ruling was that both crime scenes had to remain as close to their conditions on the night of the murder as possible, the defense had worked hard to create the right atmosphere for their client.

At Simpson’s home, all the pictures of scantily-clad white females, including the naked photo of Paula Barbierri, Simpson’s girlfriend at the time of the killings, and those of his white golfing buddies had been replaced by decorous images — photographs of his mother and Martin Luther King and a print of a famous school integration painting by Norman Rockwell. There was even a Holy Bible gracing the bedside table in Simpson’s bedroom.

What benefit the trip had is hard to quantify. The only book so far published by members of the sitting jury makes no mention of it. Chris Darden believed they simply used it as a day off, a break from the boring reality of their sequestration. They must have found it hard to believe what they were seeing – – a 6,200-square-ft home with seven bedrooms and seven bathrooms, a tennis court and an Olympic-sized pool, surrounded by waterfalls. Simpson had bought it in 1977 for $650,000 and spent another $2 million over the years upgrading the property. It was a far cry from the homes of the jurists, who were basically unskilled or semi-skilled working class people, living in the less salubrious suburbs of Los Angeles.

The lead detectives had never seen anything like the trip, and wondered why the judge hadn’t scheduled the visits for after dark, when there would have been less traffic around, especially since the murders occurred at night. But the judge was a law unto himself, and both the prosecution and defense would find that out as the months ahead unfolded.

On February 17th, Detective Tom Lange was called to the stand to begin the first of eight days of testimony. He had been chosen by the prosecution to act as a guide to the court, leading them through the crime-scene evidence.

On cross-examination by Johnnie Cochran, the detective’s competence and integrity were questioned over and over again. Cochran made much of Lange’s humanitarian gesture in covering Nicole’s body with a blanket to shield it from the media vultures lurking across South Bundy with their cameras and telescopic lenses trained on the crime scene. However, LAPD/SID analysis of her body and clothing disclosed no foreign hairs or fibers. There was no contamination as a result of covering the corpse.

Among other issues, Cochran zeroed in on why bloodstains found on the back gate of Nicole’s condominium were not collected until July 3rd, twenty days after the murder. Lange had left instructions with Dennis Fung, the criminalist, to collect and record all the evidence he had pointed out to him, then to close down the crime-scene, as Lange himself went off downtown to meet his partner Phil Vannatter and interview Simpson. No one could explain why this one blood spot had remained uncollected until Bill Hodgman noticed it again as he was walked through the area on July 3rd.  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

It would certainly confuse the jury when they came to consider it.

Cochran also grilled Lange as to why the LAPD had not investigated the possibility that the murders were drug related, connecting Nicole and a friend of hers called Faye Resnick, who was involved with drugs, and potential killers linked in with drug dealers.

Faye Resnick

Resnick, a 27-year-old Beverly Hills socialite, was born in Chicago. She had been married to a vacuum cleaner salesman and to a drug dealer before marrying her already five-time married husband, Beverly Hills businessman, Paul Resnick. She had become a close personal friend of Nicole and had observed O.J. Simpson as a “violent, controlling, obsessed character whose happy public face could transform itself into a terrifying, sweat-drenched mask of naked hate.”

Cochran’s premise was that Nicole and Goldman may have been killed by drug dealers bent on scaring Resnick into paying off her drug debts.

The LAPD had received 518 different leads to follow up in the case, including 50, which involved suspects other than Simpson. All were checked out and under the state’s discovery law; all details were handed over to the defense team, who employed former LAPD officer Bill Pavelic to investigate them. The defense could never make any connection between the deaths and drug dealers and neither could the police. It was, like so many of the defense’s tactics, a red herring, but one whose flavor was ultimately acceptable to a jury that would need to be convinced beyond more than a reasonable doubt.

As February moved into March, the evidence continued to be presented by the prosecution, building blocks into the wall of guilt that they were trying to erect around Simpson. The defense began an all out assault, telescoping into the two areas they would target to prove their client’s innocence. One would be based around the racist attitude of a policeman; the other around their contention that the blood and DNA samples were corrupted by the criminalist team authorized to collect them, or worse, deliberately mishandled and in some cases illegally manipulated to form a pattern of guilt leading to their client.

conceded 3.con.0002002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Jasmine’s attorney, Tim Foster, accepted the idea that Jasmine might have engaged in discussions about killing her parents, but said she did not mean that she would literally do it. The scenario he painted was that Steinke had gotten high on cocaine, watched the violent movie, and undertook to rescue Jasmine, as “Mickey” had done for “Mallory. ” The idea was his alone, as was the act. Thus, Jasmine, too, was a victim.

She took the stand in her own defense and affirmed that her boyfriend was the killer. She cried when asked about choking and stabbing her brother and said that Steinke had made her do it, as her brother begged for his life. She had a knife in her hand, she said, for self-defense, but Steinke had taken it and slit her brother’s throat.

While the prosecutor conceded that Jasmine did not engage in the act of murder, she had persuaded and encouraged Steinke to do it, telling him which window would be unlocked for entering the home on Saturday night. She also willingly fled with him. Thus, she was eligible for a murder conviction. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
He urged the jury to remember her part.

On July 9, 2007, after the jury deliberated just over four hours, Jasmine was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
She began to weep, according to the Edmonton Sun. Under Canadian law, she cannot receive an adult sentence, so she faced a maximum of six years in prison and four of probation. Steinke faces trial for murder next year; he has not yet entered a plea.

Jasmine Richardson is the youngest person to be convicted of multiple murder in Canadian history. For that matter, she’s the youngest in North American history.

 

coworkers 3.cow.00020 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Forensic odontologists can match the bite mark impressions on a body against the teeth of a suspect to decide if there’s a match.  Ted Bundy was convicted of murder with such evidence, and so was Wayne Boden.

A young schoolteacher, Norma Vaillancourt, was found murdered in 1968 in her apartment in Montreal, Canada.  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  She’d been strangled, raped, and bitten all over her breasts.  The crime was sadistic, but among her many boyfriends, there were no good suspects.

Only a day later, another victim was found in the same city in the same condition, and the bite marks were matched. Both women appeared not to have struggled, so it was assumed that they not only knew their attacker but may also have been engaged in something they wanted to do.  It was similar to the way a vampire might seduce someone with a hypnotic trance before taking his meal.

In 1969, Marielle Archambault told coworkers that she felt entranced by a man she’d recently met.  She, too, turned up dead, and similarly bitten.  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  However, she had put up a struggle.

There were two more victims, one of them in Calgary, before the vampire was stopped in 1971.  The police arrested Boden and an odontologist took an impression of his teeth to match to the wounds on each of the victims.  The forensic expert had a fairly easy time of it, since there were so many different impressions to use.

Obviously caught, Boden finally admitted that he had killed these women while having rough sex.  He would strangle them and then become frenzied with the need to feast on their breasts.  Apparently, he figured, he just did it too hard.

perp 5.per.00030 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Aug. 30, 2007: Brian Spangler of De Soto, Mo., tried to use his naked body to create a diversion  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire in a convenience store beer heist he was attempting with a friend. It nearly worked, but another customer wrote down the license plate number of the pantsless perp’s getaway vehicle.