Posts Tagged ‘Sherry Black’

Tangential Crime Blotter: Sherry Black, Warren Jeffs, Robert Ben Rhoades

Saturday, March 19th, 2011

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.

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Posted in crime | 3 Comments »

Sherry Black Murder Tidbits Trickle Out

Sunday, January 2nd, 2011

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…

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Posted in Books, crime | No Comments »

More from the Salt Lake City Crime Blotter

Thursday, December 23rd, 2010

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.

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Posted in Books, crime | 2 Comments »

Sherry Black, Pickers, and the Salt Lake City Meth Underworld

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010

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…

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Posted in Books, crime | 3 Comments »

Sherry Black Murder Follow-Up #2

Friday, December 10th, 2010

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:

  1. Suspect Lorin Nielsen pleaded guilty in April 2009 to theft, a third-degree felony, and theft by deception, a second-degree felony.
  2. He was sentenced to 90 days in jail, which means he would have been out on of jail at the time of Black’s murder.
  3. “Nielsen was booked into Salt Lake County Jail on Monday for a violation of his probation in the theft case. Detectives, however, would not say whether he is being investigated in connection with the homicide.”
  4. He was a member of “the Kearns Town ICP gang.”

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…

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Posted in Books, crime | 2 Comments »

Follow-Up on the Murder of Bookstore Owner Sherry Black: Books and Mormons and Juggalos, Oh My

Thursday, December 9th, 2010

You may remember the post on the murder of bookseller Sherry Black I did last week. You may also remember the piece I did on Insane Clown Posse and their Juggalo followers a month or so ago. I never imagined the stories would intertwine, but police speculate that her murder may have something to do with the fact that Black unwittingly bought stolen books from 20-year-old Lorin Nielsen. Guess what band Nielsen was a fan of?

The relevant section:

In February of 2009, 20-year-old Lorin Nielsen was arrested and charged with stealing books from his father, a polygamous church president.

He sold them to Sherry Black for $20,000.

The books included a first-edition French Book of Mormon signed by John Taylor with a message to Parley P. Pratt.

For those without any particular knowledge of the history of Mormonism, both of those were big wheels in the early LDS. Pratt was a member of the first “Quorum of the Twelve Apostles” and Taylor was with founder Joseph Smith the night he was killed by a mob in a jail in Carthage, Illinois on June 27, 1844.

In total, the books were worth an estimated $45,000.

When the father confronted Nielsen about the theft, the report states Nielsen warned him that “if he got police involved he will set off a chain of events he’s not going to like because he is a member of a gang.”

Police reports state Nielsen was affiliated with an Insane Clown Posse, or Juggalos gang and had access to guns.

I’m inferring from the above that Lorin Nielson’s father is Wendell Nielsen, president of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). Nielsen took over from convicted felon Warren Jeffs. (Recently Jeffs’ rape conviction was overturned, but he’s now facing sexual assault charges in Texas. It was big news in when Jeffs’ bigamist compound in Texas was raided by police. I must admit that my tolerance for polygamy as an “alternate life style” pretty much evaporates when you start marrying 12-year-olds. )

Never mind the fact that Juggalos are a “gang” in about the same sense that Deadheads or Parrotheads are a gang. Or that my (admittedly facile) understanding of Utah law is that it is not much more difficult to obtain “access to guns” if you’re not a felon than Texas. However, if this is the same Lorin Nielson, he probably is a felon (it says he was found guilty of theft and theft by deception, the date is about right, and the amount involved would certainly be enough to earn a felony conviction (assuming it wasn’t pleaded down), but because Utah is a closed records state, you can’t be sure that’s the case).

I mentioned before that bookstores are rarely robbed, because there are usually much richer targets available. Plus books are next to impossible to fence, because collectors are too small a community, word of stolen goods gets out really fast, and it’s almost impossible to find a place to sell anything worth stealing. But some of that early Mormon stuff goes for insane amounts of money. This case reminded me that fake documents were at the heart of the “White Salamander Murders” case. (Short version: A guy named Mark Hoffman was selling fake Joseph Smith documents that undermined official Mormon dogma to church leaders desperate to keep them off the market, then he went all mad bomber in an attempt to cover his tracks.)

So police believe, what? An insane Juggalo killed Black because they were pissed off because she cooperated with the police? Honestly I think there’s more wackiness in the FLDS side of story than the Juggalo side…

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Posted in Books, crime, Music | 8 Comments »

Bookstore Owner Stabbed to Death

Wednesday, December 1st, 2010

Sherry Black of B&W Books and Billards of Salt Lake City. She was also the mother-in-law of Utah Jazz owner Greg Miller.

As far as I know, I never bought any books from (or sold any to) her, but I’ve bought so many books over the years that you never know. Robberies of book stores are pretty rare, since would-be robbers tend to concentrate on businesses that actually have money. (Q: How can you make a small fortune in the bookselling business? A: Start with a large fortune.)

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Posted in Books, crime | 1 Comment »