Runners-Up for Top Story Aug ’05: Joseph Edward Duncan III, Jose Raul Pena and others
Runners-up for top story of the month: Retired actor Robert Sorrells, 75, who appeared in Westerns and on TV in the 50s and 60s, sentenced to 32 years in prison after confessing to killing Arthur DeLong last year. After drinking at the Regency Lounge in Simi Valley, Ca., he was escorted out by DeLong for “unruly behavior”and, after “reflecting on his perceived mistreatment,”went home, retrieved his gun, returned to the bar and shot DeLong at point blank range. Sorrells admitted his judgment was impaired because of his “biochemical state.”Jimmy Lee Smith, 74, one of two men convicted in the 1963 “Onion Field”murder in which LAPD officer Ian Campbell was shot to death, sent back to prison for three years after admitting to heroin possession. With high blood pressure and other medical problems, he’s apparently looking forward to prison medical care; he put up no defense. Beyonce’s dad Mathew Knowles, fired as her manager and sent to rehab after harassing one of her back-up dancers and behaving inappropriately with other women. His behavior “finally made sense”to Beyonce and her family. (No doubt, we would have suspected a problem long before.)
Joseph Edward Duncan III, 43, released from prison and writing on his blog that his “demons”were stronger than he previously thought, charged with abducting Shasta Groene, 8, and suspected of murdering four others: Shasta’s mother Brenda Groene, 40, her brothers Slade, 13, and Dylan, 9, and Brenda Groene’s boyfriend, Mark McKenzie, 37. Duncan had a history of inflicting violence and sexual torture. He reportedly refused to comply with therapists and law enforcers trying to correct his behavior and was diagnosed in 1980 as antisocial and a sexual deviant. The only confirmation that alcoholism may have been at the root of his behaviors was a report that he stopped at a store in the western Montana logging community of St. Regis in late May for gas and a 12-pack of Bud Light. However, the adult victims were very likely addicts: Shasta Groene’s father Steve Groene, 48, revealed that Brenda, his ex-wife, and boyfriend, McKenzie, used marijuana and methamphetamine; the toxicology report showed unspecified illicit drugs in their systems. Court records also show that Brenda, after serving time in prison, was ordered to take “drug and alcohol counseling.”
Jose Raul Lemos, a.k.a. Jose Raul Pena, using his 19-month-old daughter Suzie Marie Pena as a shield against police trying to arrest him after being reported for making domestic threats against Suzie’s mother, Lorena Lopez and, in a separate report, for physical threats against Lopez’s 16-year-old daughter. Pena’s family in El Salvador described his relationship with Lopez as “troubled”and punctuated with fights. Pena, an illegal migrant, had been deported in 1995 after a conviction for cocaine possession, but later illegally returned. He pleaded guilty to burglary and other crimes in 1994, pled guilty of DUI in 1996, was arrested in 1997 and charged with gun possession by a felon in 2004. He had 18 aliases, nine birth dates, three fake drivers’ licenses and three fake Social Security cards. Police, who described Pena as despondent and crazed as he randomly shot at police officers, used psychologists in an attempt to get him to talk and gave Pena numerous opportunities to surrender. His family, who blamed police for the death of the little girl, initially denied charges that Pena was under the influence of alcohol or other drugs. At least one local said, “In Bel-Air [police] would have tried to talk to the person more.”Toxicology reports later showed that Pena was under the influence of alcohol and unspecified other drugs. The problem isn’t that police failed in whatever attempt they made at reasoning with chemistry. Rather, it’s that there is little doubt that although relatives and other locals attempted to pin the blame for Suzie’s death on law enforcers, there were hundreds of incidents for which close persons could have intervened, but didn’t. There were also dozens of encounters for which law enforcers could have stepped in with a very heavy hand. Little Suzie died because some were unwilling, while others were unable, to coerce abstinence in her addicted father.
Gregory Haidl, claiming that Orange County, California’s most senior criminal judge, Francisco Briseno, presided over an unfair trial, in which Haidl and his two friends were convicted of raping a drugged-up 16-year-old high school girl. Haidl has challenged the outcome of the trial despite the fact that, according to journalist R. Scott Moxley, his father, former Orange County Assistant Sheriff Don Haidl, spent “at least $6 million on 10 lawyers, three teams of private detectives, O.J. Simpson’s jury consultant, focus groups, public-relations consultants….”Assistant District Attorney Chuck Middleton, on the other hand, walked into court generally armed with a few notes on a pad and, as Moxley puts it, “the fact that, in California, it’s illegal to have sex with an unconscious person.â€