Which is to say that so far they’ve found none. Which hasn’t kept other people from jumping the gun. You might want to wait on reporting that until you find, you know, actual bodies. Especially since the tip was reported to come from a “psychic.” This would keep distant outlets like The Sydney Morning Herald from reporting it as fact.
Is “police investigating report of mass grave” just not sexy enough for the news cycle these days?
Bad: Smoking meth.
Much Worse: A teacher and a principle.
Get a Rope: In the principle’s office.
As far as I can tell, there’s been no real news in the Sherry Black murder case since it was featured on the America’s Most Wanted website in January. But in poking around, there is some news on some tangents of the story, and tangents of the tangents.
I recently received a couple of comments on a previous post on the Sherry Black murder, including one claiming to be from Warren Jeffs, accused felon and President of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I know this may come as a shock to some, but people aren’t always who they claim to be on the Internet. (I will now wait a moment for the incredulous outrage to die down.) As far as I can tell, Mr. Jeffs is currently held in lieu of bail at the Reagan County Jail in Big Lake, Texas awaiting trial. The possibility that he might be allowed Internet privileges while under heavy manners, and that he would use such privileges to post random, badly capitalized blog comments, seems…remote. Plus, the ip address of the poster (72.250.219.218) points to Ogden, Utah, not Big Lake, Texas.
Incidentally, Jeffs still seems reveared by the FLDS faithful, with thousands of letters and many visitors (up to the max of ten a day).
Strangely enough, Jeffs isn’t the only famous (or infamous) prisoner currently awaiting trail at Big Lake. Accused serial killer Robert Ben Rhoades, who has been convicted of torturing, killing and raping women, and who has been accused of as many as 50 serial killings, is also held there. For comparison’s sake, 50 victims would put him up in Henry Lee Lucas territory, and more than John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy.
Here’s some background on Rhodes, evidently written by someone who bought a pallet of true crime adjectives at Sam’s and wanted to use them up before the expiration date. There’s even a Utah angle here as well, since charges against Rhoades for the murder of Candace Walsh were dropped in 2006, mainly so Rhoades could be tried in Texas, where he would be subject to the death penalty.
As shown in the Deseret News, he even looks like a serial killer.
It’s always dangerous to assume that any fictional work accurately reflects reality, be it movie, TV show, or novel. But some works come a lot closer than others.
HBO’s The Wire rings truer to me than most, not primarily because of the gritty, noir depiction of urban crime and a dysfunctional, overworked police department, but because they accord very closely with creator David Simon’s excellent non-fiction work from which they draw, Homicide: A Year in the Killing Streets (also the basis of the NBC TV show) and (with Edward Burns) The Corner.
Well, here’s Simon delivering a righteous smackdown to Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III over his assertion that the show was a “smear that will take decades to overcome”:
Others might reasonably argue, however, that it is not 60 hours of “The Wire” that will require decades for our city to overcome, as the commissioner claims. A more lingering problem might be two decades of bad performance by a police agency more obsessed with statistics than substance, with appeasing political leadership rather than seriously addressing the roots of city violence, with shifting blame rather than taking responsibility. That is the police department we depicted in “The Wire,” give or take our depiction of some conscientious officers and supervisors. And that is an accurate depiction of the Baltimore department for much of the last 20 years, from the late 1980s, when cocaine hit and the drug corners blossomed, until recently, when Mr. O’Malley became governor and the pressure to clear those corners without regard to legality and to make crime disappear on paper finally gave way to some normalcy and, perhaps, some police work.
And here’s a former Baltimore police officer backing him up on it: “As a former Baltimore police officer for 11 years, I can attest to the fact that much of what appears in the HBO series “The Wire” is a very accurate depiction of reality both on the street and within the Baltimore Police Department.”
As for the greater issue of why Baltimore crime remains stubbornly high, why the drug problem remains so intractable (I’m in the “legalize it, regulate it, and tax it” camp), and why the “broken window” policing Mayor Rudy Guiliani used to bring down New York’s historically high crime rates has not (could not? can’t?) be used in Baltimore is a topic far beyond the scope of this blog (and my own expertise, formidable as it may (or may not) be).
There’s been a tiny bit of news in the case of murdered bookstore owner Sherry Black: police have released pictures of a belt that may belong to her murderer. So if you live in Salt Lake City and know someone with criminal tendencies who has worn a belt with the initials “AX” on the buckle (which evidently stands for “Armani Exchange”; fashion is not my beat), police would like a word with you.
A commenter here has suggested that transient Paul David Vara, who has been arrested on aggravated murder and multiple rape charges in the same area, may be involved. There’s certainly no question that (assuming police statements are true) Vara is (to use a legal term) a violent scumbag:
When police found Gabel’s body, they noted that her breasts had been mutilated, according to court documents. An autopsy by the Utah State Medical Examiner’s Office found most of Gabel’s internal organs had been torn out.
The 6-foot-1 and 260-pound Vara told police that he “pulled her internal organs out of her body,” court documents state.
The cause of death was determined to be “multiple factors, including strangulation and extensive loss of blood,” according to court documents.
Vara told police that he “used green string to strangle the female because she was struggling with him.”
Vara hails from San Antonio, and seems to have quite a record of violent offenses:
His adult charges in Texas date from 2007 back to 1998, when he would have been 18. His charges in Texas include aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in 2004, assault in 2001, two separate incidents of assault causing bodily injury in 2000 and another one in 1999. He had several charges of burglary and vehicle burglary in 1998.
And pace our commentator, his record of gang activity (such as it is) seems to be non-Insane Clown Posse related:
Medina said Vara told him that he had come to Utah to escape the Latin Kings gang in San Antonio. Medina, 40, said he left MS-13, a gang he had joined at age 11 and the two men bonded over their mutual hope to leave gangs behind.
(A little background on the Latin Kings can be found here. )
While Vara certainly seems violent and scummy enough to have killed Black, I’m just not seeing any real link to her (or, that matter, ICP). And sadly, the world suffers from no shortage of violent scumbags…
You may remember this post I did on the tasteless opulence of Latin American drug lords.
Well, gold-plated automatics are one thing, but a giant painted mural of Justin Bieber is quite another. Brazilian drug lord Pezao, step up and claim your prize as Most Tasteless Drug Lord for 2010.
(Hat tip: Dwight.)
And on that note, Merry Christmas to one and all!
A commenter on the Sherry Black murder followup suggested a possible connection between her murder and the arrest of transient Paul David Vara (not Vera) on multiple rape charges. I am unable to find any mention of a connection with the Sherry Black murder, or Lorin Nielsen, or Insane Clown Posse, in the searches on his name, much less the semi-incriminating updates our commenter attributes to him. If our commenter has such links, perhaps he could share them with us. Or, better yet, the Salt Lake City police department, who I am sure are in a much better position to act on such information than I am.
As far as I can tell, there are no new leads in the murder of bookseller Sherry Black. Or at least none that the police are sharing with the media.
However, that blog update did link to this fascinating piece from 2008 talking about a ring of meth addicts stealing Mormon collectables and selling them to antique dealers, and the (mostly unsuccessful) quest of Randy Holladay to get back his possessions. I am very far indeed from the Salk Lake City antique business, but the story paints them (and the “pickers” that sell to them) in a most unflattering light:
Holladay made one fatal mistake, he says, in his homespun investigation. He gave out his list of stolen property to antique dealers in the first week of March. That’s something the Utah Antique Dealers Association advocates, according to its vice president, Nate Bischoff. One day to the next, though, Holladay says, the trail went cold. He suspects the list was circulated to dealers across the Salt Lake Valley, who then hid from view whatever they had bought of his possessions.
The story it paints of the Salt Lake City police is also less-than-flattering, noting that “In 2007, nine burglary detectives handled 1,300 cases each.” The story also notes:
A month ago, Holladay learned that 10 pages of e-mails he had sent to law enforcement at the beginning of the investigation were being circulated among neighbors and what he calls “various shady people” throughout the city. In those e-mails, Holladay poured out his anger, his fear, his suspicions—accurate or not—of neighbors and others. The district attorney’s office shared the e-mails with defense attorneys in the discovery process. Lloyd says his house was broken into several weeks ago. The only thing taken was the discovery file containing Holladay’s e-mails relating to this case.
Then again, hosility to police is pretty much a given for an “alternative weekly,” so their reporting in that arena may need to be taken with a grain of salt…
This story by Paul Koepp of the Deseret News, unlike the one I linked to yesterday, seems competently written, and sheds light on a few items that were previously unclear, namely:
Amazing how competent writing makes things so much clearer, isn’t it?
I’m not going to pretend to be an Internet Columbo, able to ascertain Nielsen’s guilt or innocence from a handful of news articles. But if he did kill Sherry Black, he’s too stupid (not to mention too evil) to live. Gee, you don’t think police might be able to connect the murder of a central figure (albeit an inadvertent one) in your last crime? Not only did it not take Sherlock Holmes to crack that case, it didn’t even take his dim half-brother Hiram, who works the fryolater at the Hildale Dairy Queen…