7 Disturbing Unsolved Crimes

No. 7...
The Anthrax Mailings:

With conspiracy theories abound, ranging from Iraq and Hussein being involved to our own C.I.A. being responsible, this postal terror swept across America and had every news channel on its toes and politicians scrambling from their office desks. In all 22 people were affected and five died.

Most notably the Anthrax Mailings have been linked to World Trade Center bomber Abdul Rahman Yasin. The word "spores" was suddenly synonymous with "terror". How ironic.

No. 6...
The D.B. Cooper Hijacking:

In 1971 Dan Cooper (This was obviously way before they required an I.D. to board a commercial flight in the United States) boarded an airplane and hijacked it by handing a polite note to a flight attendant.

"I have a bomb in my briefcase. I will use it if necessary. I want you to sit next to me. You are being hijacked."

The note also contained instructions to have him provided two parachutes and for a ransom to be collected and held at Seattle/Tacoma Airport. D.B. Cooper further directed the pilot to not land until the ransom was ready to exchange hands.

After releasing only the passengers, the hijacker had the pilot take them back into the air with specific instructions not to ascend higher than 10,000 feet and have the wing flaps tilted at a 15% angle, where he jumped to fame somewhere over the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest. (Presumably Woodland, Washington) D.B. Cooper remains the perpetrator of the only unsolved American hijacking though most believe he died in his escape attempt. Over 11,000 serious suspects have been investigated by the FBI.

No. 5...
The Chandra Levy Murder:

An intern at the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Chandra Levy was murdered around the first of May in 2001. She was found in a park in Washington D.C. and little evidence has surfaced in the case. While the case was being investigated an affair surfaced between Chandra and U.S. Representative Gary Condit. The revelation of the affair did little to help the case but as a bi-product the Senator lost any credit he had with the voters by not exposing the affair himself after having heard of her disappearance.


No. 4...
Teamster Leader Jimmy Hoffa:

Leading of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters through the 1950' and into the 60's, Jimmy Hoffa was a powerful man in the political landscape of America. He served the better part of a decade for attempted bribery of a grand juror. (His sentence was commuted by Nixon several years early under the condition he not involve himself with the Teamsters. An order he ignored and that many think may have cost him his life.)

Mr.Hoffa was last seen leaving a restaurant on July 30th of 1975 in the company of a carload of men and hasn't be seen since. Many stories have surfaced surrounding his disappearance and the location of his body. One of the most radical is that he lies beneath the N.Y. Giant's stadium.

No. 3...
The Black Dahlia:

Elizabeth Short, nicknamed the Black Dahlia and inspiration for 2006 movie The Black Dahlia, was an aspiring actress who tragically only reached fame through her own gruesome murder.

She could have been labeled "transient" and moved frequently back and forth from California to Florida.

She was found separated in two with the image of a joker-like smile surgically cut into her face. Many believe only a doctor could have performed the mutilation and no blood was found at the scene leading to the assumption she was murdered elsewhere and then dumped. Her murder remains unsolved.

No. 2...
Jon Benet Ramsey:

I was a resident of the Boulder County Jail while this case was in the heights of its media circus. Allegations of a crime scene foul up by Boulder homicide were abundant and the nation cried in hope for the child beauty queen's murderer to be found.

She was found in the basement of her parent's Boulder, Co home strangled and covered in a white blanket only 8 hours after her disappearance had been reported. (She was discovered missing when her mother found a ransom note demanding $118,000 for the return of Jon Benet on the kitchen staircase.

Her parents have been implicated in the crime as well as well as many others. Her mother was accused of striking the child after the child had wet the bed the prior night.

In 2006 a man by the name of John Mark Karr was arrested in Thailand by American authorities on a five year old child-pornography case out of the state of California. In an interview he implicated himself in the crime but his DNA was later found not to match that found at the scene. Her death remains unsolved.

No. 1...
Natalie Holloway:

Born in Mississippi but a graduate from Mountain Brook High School in Birmingham, Al, Natalie disappeared on her senior trip to the island of Aruba.

The island is slightly larger than Washington D.C. and has been searched extensively and repeatedly since her disappearance.

Natalie's father has teamed with some specialists to have the ocean floor mapped surrounding the small island in hope that they may yet find her body.

Three suspects have been at the center of the investigation and have been arrested, released, and rearrested several times over with no beneficial information having been collected.

This story is both tragic and a constant reminder to parents of graduating seniors who have plans on celebrating their achievement on foreign shores. (Click here to subscribe to my feed!)

(This case had a huge break a few days ago where Joran Van Der Sloot confesses to having someone take care of the body.)

Ethan Brown Book Review By www.stopthedrugwar.org

When a Baltimore hustler clothing line manufacturer and barber named Rodney Bethea released a straight-to-DVD documentary about life on the mean streets of West Baltimore back in 2004 in a bid to further the hip-hop careers of some of his street-savvy friends, he had no idea "Stop Fucking Snitching, Vol. I" (better known simply as "Stop Snitching") would soon become a touchstone in a festering conflict over drugs and crime on the streets of America and what to do about it.

In a steadily rising crescendo of concern that reached a peak earlier this year when CBS' 60 Minutes ran a segment on the stop snitching phenomenon, police, politicians and prosecutors from across the country, but especially the big cities of the East Coast, lamented the rise of the stop snitching movement. Describing it as nothing more than witness intimidation by thugs out to break the law and get away with it, they charged that "stop snitching" was perverting the American justice system.

Not surprisingly, the view was a little different from the streets. Thanks largely to the war on drugs and the repressive legal apparatus ginned up to prosecute it, the traditional mistrust of police and the criminal justice system by poor, often minority, citizens has sharpened into a combination of disdain, despair, and defiance that identifies snitching -- or "informing" or "cooperating," if one wishes to be more diplomatic -- as a means of perpetuating an unjust system on the backs of one's friends and neighbors.

At least that's the argument Ethan Brown makes rather convincingly in "Snitch." According to Brown, the roots of the stop snitching movement can be traced directly to the draconian drug war legislation of the mid-1980s, when the introduction of mandatory minimums and harsh federal sentencing guidelines -- five grams of crack can get you five years in federal prison -- led to a massive increase in the federal prison population and a desperate scramble among low-level offenders to do anything to avoid years, if not decades, behind bars.

The result, Brown writes, has been a "cottage industry of cooperators" who will say whatever they think prosecutors want to hear and repeat their lies on the witness stand in order to win a "5K" motion from prosecutors, meaning they have offered "substantial assistance" to the government and are eligible for a downward departure from their guidelines sentence. Such practices are perverse when properly operated -- they encourage people to roll over on anyone they can to avoid prison time -- but approach the downright criminal when abused.

And, as Brown shows in chapter after chapter of detailed examples, abuse of the system appears almost the norm. In one case Brown details, a violent cooperator ended up murdering a well-loved Richmond, Virginia, family. In another, the still unsolved death of Baltimore federal prosecutor Richard Luna, the FBI seems determined to obscure the relationship between Luna and another violent cooperator. In still another unsolved murder, that of rapper Tupac Shakur, Brown details the apparent use of snitches to frame a man authorities suspect knows more about the killing than he is saying. In perhaps the saddest chapter, he tells the story of Euka Washington, a poor Chicago man now doing life in prison as a major Iowa crack dealer. He was convicted solely on the basis of uncorroborated and almost certainly false testimony from cooperators.

The system is rotten and engenders antipathy toward the law, Brown writes. The ultimate solution, he says, is to change the federal drug and sentencing laws, but he notes how difficult that can be, especially when Democrats are perpetually fearful of being Willy Hortoned every time they propose a reform. The current glacial progress of bills that would address one of the most egregious drug war injustices, the crack-powder cocaine sentencing disparity, is a sad case in point.

Brown addresses the quickness with which police and politicians blamed the stop snitching movement for increases in crime, but calls that a "distraction from law enforcement failures." It's much easier for cops and politicians to blame the streets than to take the heat for failing to prosecute cases and protect witnesses, and it's more convenient to blame the street than to notice rising income equality and a declining economy.

While Brown doesn't appear to want to throw the drug war baby out with the snitching bathwater, he does make a few useful suggestions for beginning to change the way the drug war is prosecuted. Instead of blindly going after dealers by weight, he argues, following UCLA professor Mark Kleiman, target those who engage in truly harmful behavior. That will not only make communities safer by ridding them of violent offenders, it will reduce the pressure to cooperate by low-level offenders as police attention and resources shift away from them.

Cooperating witnesses also need greater scrutiny, limits need to be put on 5K motions, cooperator testimony must be corroborated, and perjuring cooperators should be prosecuted, Brown adds. Too bad he doesn't have much to say about what to do with police and prosecutors who knowingly rely on dishonest snitches.

"It was never meant to intimidate people from calling the cops," Rodney Bethea said of his DVD, "and it was never directed at civilians. If your grandmother calls the cops on people who are dealing drugs on her block, she's supposed to do that because she's not living that lifestyle. When people say 'stop snitching' on the DVD, they're referring to criminals who lead a criminal life who make a profit from criminal activities... What we're saying is you have to take responsibility for your actions. When it comes time for you to pay, don't not want to pay because that is part of what you knew you were getting into in the first place. Stop Snitching is about taking it back to old-school street values, old-school street rules."

Playing by the old-school rules would be a good thing for street hustlers. It would also be a good thing for the federal law enforcement apparatus. It's an open question which group is going to get honorable first. (Click here to subscribe to my feed!)

Drug War Chronicle Book Review: "Snitch: Informants, Cooperators, and the Corruption of Justice," by Ethan Brown

My Dad always said I was a Fool

David and I were quickly handcuffed and tossed unceremoniously into the back of the squad car. We had both been arrested before and were more worried about what our parents would say than anything. I already knew what my father was going to say and had thus determined that I wasn't going to call either of my parents for help. Always the optimist, I was positive I could escape this situation unscathed.

Our destination was the Harris County Jail; home to crack-heads, car-jackers, rapists, cho-mos, and murderers alike. We were mere golf club thieves--a detail about our crime that we had already decided to keep from our fellow inhabitants. There's nothing "hood" about that.

Being booked into a jail of such magnitude is an experience in and of itself. It takes well over 7 hours on an average day. We were going in on a Friday. We could expect full-body cavity searches, fingerprinting, blood testing, psychiatric evaluation, and chest x-rays. All were a segment of the process. Picture musical chairs. Except, the chairs are cells--holding cells that contain about 40-60 individuals. Inmates are shuffled in groups through these barren gray slabs of concrete as they complete the various evaluations required for booking. The only interruption to this virtual criminal assembly-line is the occasional sack-lunch scuffle.

I'm not talking about people fighting over bologna and peanut-butter & jelly sandwiches, although that's sure to happen as well. These people actually get in fights and arguments about abandoned and empty sack-lunches. Once an individual has managed to collect enough of these empty sacks, they are then wadded up, providing an excellent pillow to use while sleeping through the intake process. Sleeping was the last thing on my mind.

After experiencing many hours of other peoples' body odor, snoring, and halitosis, I was thankful David and I finally made it to one of the housing units. There was much more air space in our new environment to dilute the myriad smells I had been picking up on earlier. Also, the nurses who looked like they took some of these guys home with them when the need arose, were far far away, several floors beneath us. I firmly believe my belonephobia can be attributed to them.

One of the few benefits in being in such a large county jail is that you get to court quickly. We had court the very next day, on a Saturday, and I was able to get out of jail immediately afterwards. My parents would only think I had stayed out overnight at a friend's house and everything would be cool. I would just tell them about my 5 years probation, 240 hours community service, and 3 months of boot camp at a later time. I had a June deadline for turning myself in for the boot camp portion of my sentence, which was allotted by the court so that I could graduate high school. I was a damn fool.

You are probably wondering what brand of golf clubs we had heisted, because that crime would usually fit under the misdemeanor category of "theft under $500." You don't receive five years probation, community service, and boot camp for a misdemeanor. They had charged me with a class 2 felony; 2nd degree burglary. You have to enter someone's home for a crime to be considered a burglary. I never even left the car and David heisted the golf clubs from the front porch.

David smartly passed up his first and second offers from the district attorney before being released about four weeks later with credit for time served. No paper trail, no community service, and, most importantly, no felony.

I'll always regret not making that phone call to my family and either asking for an attorney or sitting it out and missing school in the county jail until I was offered a fair deal. The felony and probation would turn out to be some of greatest hindrances of my life. I was only seventeen, but I was branded for life. Worst of all was that I had no one to blame but myself. (Click here to subscribe to my feed!)