NOTE: I’m on deadline for my next book on Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker that’s due in early October. As a result I will be posting on Crime Scene USA less frequently. Will return to form in mid-October. Thanks for your patience and remember, it’s all me NO AI!

Vermilion sits about 35 miles west of Cleveland on the southern shores of Lake Erie. It’s a quaint, unpretentious town that could have been ripped from the 1950s, complete with Eddie Haskell just down the street..

There are around 10,000 souls living in this quiet corner of Ohio that features a slew of beaches and remains tres popular with Cleveland cottagers. It’s remains about 93% white while the rest of America is going in another direction.

Most importantly, the highlight of the town’s social calendar is the annual Woolybear Festival.

Master and slave sex scandals rare

Vermilion ain’t the kind of burg where one expects to find sex scandals of the master and slave variety. It’s the kind of town where people’s private affairs are theirs alone.

Julene and Jeremy Simko were high school sweethearts and both had challenging childhoods and teen years. He became the man of the family as a teenager when his father died. Pals described him as edgy. Julene’s childhood was more harrowing: she was sexually abused by her father.

But on Nov. 18, 2009, Vermilion hit America’s finely-tuned tabloid radar. Julene called emergency services around 6 a.m. that morning reporting that someone had blown her husband’s head off while he slept. Who would do such a thing?

‘It was just role playing’

She told cops she was sleeping on a different floor and was awakened by the gunshots. There were some problems out of the gate: There were no signs of forced entry, the alarms did not go off and the couple’s dogs did not bark.

There was also a particularly eye-popping discovery: A 14-page contract outlining the Simko’s master-slave relationship.

“I don’t know what other relationships people carry on,” Julene told homicide detectives in 2013, four years after her landscaper husband was murdered.

It would take years for cops and prosecutors to bring the case to trial but detectives believed the sex slave contract was Julene’s motivation for icing hubby. And, as a sweetener, revenge for what happened to her as a child. Cops said the night before the murder someone had looked up her father’s obituary on the home computer.

“Given the unfortunate acts that happened to Ms. Simko as a child, coupled with the father-daughter/master-slave agreement and then her father’s obituary being accessed by someone that night, coupled with the murder of her husband gave me pause for thought and concern,” Lorain County Prosecutor’s Office investigator Rick Thomas testified.

Perhaps. All arrows pointed toward the blond sex slave. Prosecutors had a treasure trove of courtroom-pleasing bon mots.

Julene told homicide detectives in 2013 that the couple had a regular sex life. Indeed, vibrators, dildos and other sex toys were in plain view throughout the couple’s home. She told shocked cops the toys were used often.

As for the master-slave contract, Julene said it was more a part of the couple’s role-playing sexual antics than a cornerstone of their “daily relationship.” However, police investigation found some interesting nuggets in the “contract” and in the home.

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Submit to bestiality

— Jeremy was allowed to attend his wife’s obgyn appointments.

— Julene was ordered to stop shaving her legs, underarms and nether regions.

— Cops retrieved photos showing Julene “chained to something in the basement and she was nude with a golf ball as a ball gag in her mouth, a collar around her neck, and you could see she’s let the hair under her armpits grow.”

— In some photos Julene appeared to be in distress. She told cops she was a “willing participant” in the action and videos that one investigator described as “elaborate” affairs.

— The kinko contract also required that Julene submit to certain sex acts and that her body parts “would be stretched and measured.”

There were other problems for Julene. Detectives noticed a slew of inconsistencies, including the lack of blood on the 9mm handgun she used to shoot at the, uh, intruder. Blood was also absent from the .357 Smith and Wesson revolver whose bullets sent Jeremy to the morgue.

‘One is dead, and one is not’

Cops believed both weapons had been wiped clean — by Julene. Oddly, the backdoor handle did not have any of the dead man’s DNA. But didn’t Julene’s statements — and CCTV — show Jeremy taking the dogs to their houses before the pair retired for the evening?

Indeed. The defence gambit that it was a cold-blooded home invasion that turned violent with Julene starring as the plucky heroine did not move the needle. The jig was up and she pleaded guilty.

Payday was 28 years to life in an Ohio prison.

“Of the three potential killers here — a stranger/robber, assassin or Mrs. Simko, the one who would have the easiest to get close access to the defendant would have been Mrs. Simko and the individual who would have been the least concerned about getting extremely close to the defendant would be Mrs. Simko,” the judge said.

NOTE: I’m on deadline for my next book on Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker that’s due in early October. As a result I will be posting on Crime Scene USA less frequently. Will return to form in mid-October. Thanks for your patience and remember, it’s all me NO AI!

The summer of 1968 was not a pretty time for the United States.

There was the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War that saw American boys dying by the thousands for no apparent good reason, racial tensions were at a boiling point after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

Most tumultuous year of a wild decade

And, on June 6, presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Hopes and dreams were shattered and a wounded nation staggered further into the abyss.

In Detroit, the city was still reeling from the race riots of July 1967 that left 43 dead and a metropolis forever wounded. Still, the auto plants were booming, Motown owned the airwaves and the hometown Tigers were en route to a World Series victory that October.

Like thousands of others, when the mercury turned scorching Dick Robison packed up his family and headed to the cottage in Good Hart, a speck on the map in the northern end of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula.

Family fled violent Detroit for the summer

Robison was a 43-year-old Detroit publishing executive who visited his Lake Michigan cottage with his wife and four children every summer since he bought it in 1957. Far away from increasingly violent Motown, it offered the family a chance to decompress in the fresh air.

But then Dick and Shirley Robison were not heard from since late June.

Their neighbours first noticed an unpleasant smell in the area, then a putrefying stench.

On July 22, 1968, a caretaker stopped by the lovely log-and-stone cottage the family called Summerset. The door was locked but he managed to pried it open. His greeting was pure, unadulterated horror.

Lying on the ground dead was Shirley Robinson, 40, a plaid blanket covering her body. She had been shot in the head with a .25 calibre handgun. Her husband was dead in the hallway, he too had also been shot in the head. Dick had also been shot with a .22 rifle in the chest.

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Their oldest son, Richard, 19, was shot multiple times in the head while a younger brother, Gary, 16, was shot twice in the head and once in the back. Randall, 12, was found lying on top of his father. He died the same horrific way.

Killer murdered patriarch first

The Robison’s only daughter, Susan, 7, was also lying dead by her father. She had been shot in the head and suffered a fractured skull from a claw hammer.

Cops believed that the killer had first shot Dick Robison through the window and then hunted down and murdered the others with the icy cold blood of a reptile. Before leaving, the monster locked the door and turned up the heat to speed decomposition of the bodies.

Detectives spoke to neighbors, friends, family, relatives and scores of locals. And then, the case seemingly went ice cold and was marked: Unsolved. With few answers, rumours, speculation and myth found fertile soil around the horrifying bloodbath.

But the investigation was never as cold as the public was led to believe. The murders were not random. The Robison family had been targeted for death and detectives zeroed in on one suspect in Dick Robison’s inner circle.

His name was Joseph Scolaro III. He had worked for Robison’s publishing company since 1965. He was having a tough time keeping his stories straight as detectives turned up the heat.

There was the matter of his alibi and whereabouts, and the location of his weapons on the dates in question. There was also the troubling realization that his handgun’s bullets matched those taken from several of the victims. The slimy person of interest told cops he last spoke to his boss in a June 25 phone call.

“The guy was as smooth as glass,” researcher Richard Wiles told Michigan Live on the 50th anniversary of the massacre. “It was like trying to nail down Jell-O.”

Homicides detectives were certain Scolaro was their man but it would take nearly five years, until 1973, for cops to have the villain in the scope. And they believed that the motive for the massacre was the world’s second oldest reason for murder: Money.

Scolaro had given himself a large raise and a bump to his expense account without Robison’s knowledge. He was robbing his boss blind. Cash-o-la also would play a role in why Scolaro was not prosecuted. Up in Emmet County where the murders occurred, a tight-fisted prosecutor didn’t want to spend the money for a trial.

In addition, ground-breaking lab work connected the suspect’s guns to the investigation: A .25-caliber Beretta automatic pistol and an uncommon .22-caliber Armalite AR-7 rifle. Scolaro had two of each but said he gave both rifles away and one of the Berettas to Robison. This did not jibe with the discovery of bullets from the murder weapons at a shooting range owned by the suspect’s father.

‘Joseph was the killer’

Things stayed cold until Oakland County Prosecutor L. Brooks Patterson asked for the file. The embezzlement had occurred in suburban Detroit, his turf.

Six first-degree murder charges. But then the case took another twist.

Just before law enforcement was about to charge Scolaro with the sickening slaughter, he killed himself in March 1973. Rumours persisted that Scolaro had been tipped off he was about to be charged and took the easy way out.

At the bottom of his typewritten suicide note, he added: “P.S. I had nothing to do with the Robisons. I’m a cheat but not a murderer.”

The case remains listed in Michigan State Police as “inactive.”

NOTE: I’m on deadline for my next book on Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker that’s due in early October. As a result I will be posting on Crime Scene USA less frequently. Will return to form in mid-October. Thanks for your patience and remember, it’s all me NO AI!

With every passing minute, the temperatures in Chicagoland tilted ever closer to scorching.

On July 2, 1966, Chicago experienced the kind of summer day that could be described as “oppressive.” You can also toss in sweltering. Temperatures would hit a scorching 94F. By 10 a.m., it was already 88F and soaring past 92 F at lunchtime.

Some of the old tenaments became veritable ovens and scores of senior citizens.

Vietnam War was a buzzkill

There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, only figuratively. Hovering over the good vibes that Fourth of July weekend was the distant war in Vietnam that was delivering the children of the working class home in body bags, and, closer to home, racial tensions simmered.

But with a boffo soundtrack and sunshine, that weekend seemed like a good time to go to the beach, cool off in Lake Michigan and catch some rays at Indiana Dunes National Park along the southern shore. Less than an hour east, it was an ideal escape from the sweltering city.

And that was exactly what Ann Miller, 21, and her girlfriends, Patricia Blough, 19, and Renee Bruhl, 19, decided to do. The trio arrived at the beach around 10 a.m. that Saturday and planted themselves about 100 yards from the water’s edge.

On July 2, 1966, Patricia never made it home. Nor did her friends.

The investigation was a head scratcher out of the starting gate. What could have happened to the women?

Indiana State Police said that the trio were spotted “sunning themselves, swimming, and talking.”

ISP Capt. Ron Galaviz noted that they “were last seen boarding a TriMaran-type boat” described as white with a turquoise interior. It was between 16 and 18 feet long.

Captaining the vessel was a welltanned, lone white male, about 20 or 22, with wavy dark hair and wearing a beach jacket. Miller, Blough and Bruhl boarded the vessel and sailed westward. They were never seen again.

Who was mystery man driving boat?

At sunset, they noticed that the beachgoers’ blankets and belongings remained in the sand.

Cops suspected the women were murdered but, at first glance, none of them seemed the type to become victims of kidnapping, let alone homicide. But there was one red flag that drew the cops’ attention.

All three were enthusiastic horsewomen who rode their steeds at George Jayne’s Tri-Color Stables. And among the items recovered from the beach were phone numbers for George and Silas Jayne.

Silas was a gangster suspected in a slew of deaths over several decades, including the suspected 1977 murder of Brach’s Candy heiress Helen Vorhees Brach. Her body has also never been found. Jayne was tight with the Chicago Outfit.

Sheriff was mysteriously killed

The brother’s feuded and George’s assistant, Cheryl Rude, was blown to smithereens when a bomb went off under her car. Cops suspect the young women may have seen who planted the bomb. But luckily for Silas Jayne, the sheriff who planned to investigate was mysteriously killed in a farming accident.

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Notably, one of Jayne’s henchmen had a boat similar to the one seen at Indiana Dunes. Oddly, investigators were told the boat was destroyed by fire.

Deep down she knew her sister was dead, noting that a day before she disappeared Patricia “looked scared.”

“She started crying. She never cried,” Janice said. “She said: ‘I’m in terrible trouble.’ “ At the time, her sister was dating a married man. A query if she was pregnant elicited a vague response.

Twenty years after the women vanished, the Chicago Tribune ran a bombshell story on the case, stating that one of the trio was pregnant. That led to whispers of an offshore abortion mill, the sort of thing controlled by the Mafia in the pre-Roe v. Wade era.

However, cops said that angle was investigated but there was nothing solid. In addition, Bruhl was having marital problems, suggesting the missing women had run away.

The Tribune reported that police found an unmailed “Dear John” letter in Renee’s purse addressed to her husband, suggesting she wanted to leave him. Again, cops got nowhere on the runaway angle.

Did Renee write her hubby a Dear John letter?

But all roads led back to murder, possibly involving the race horse Patricia owned. Again, cops hit a dead end on that avenue of inquiry. However, Galaviz said there was some equine funny business.

“There was one race in question that the jockey of Patricia’s horse may have pulled the horse back so that it did not win the specific race,” he said, adding that the jockey was questioned and fired.

Now, 60 summers have come and gone since the mysterious events at Indiana Dunes. Answers remain blowing like grains of sand in the warm summer breeze.

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When it came to the small army of Elvis Presley impersonators in Las Vegas, Dana MacKay was the King of the hill. No doubt about it.

Handsome, talented and successful, MacKay had it all, including a beauty pageant queen named Mary Huffman for a wife and a Las Vegas mansion he called “Mini-Graceland.”

But on Oct. 2, 1993, their lives hit a sour note. When cops arrived at the house for a welfare check, they found the couple dead on the floor.

Murder theories changed

They had been dead for a day, maybe longer.

MacKay’s daughter still remembers her grandmother’s howls of anguish.

At first, cops believed the couple had walked in on a burglary and died for it. More than three decades later, the theory has changed.

“I don’t believe it,” Det.George Sherwood told local media. “Somebody was lying in wait for them.”

MacKay looked like Elvis, sang like Elvis.

He even had a backup band, and he didn’t lip-sync.

He was the first to play Elvis in Legends in Concert and he also played a 35-year-old King in the movie This Is Elvis.

“Dana just loved the king Personified the king he did it just came so naturally for him that it felt very real and it felt very genuine,” friend Danny Koker told News3lv earlier this year.

He added: “Mary was a wonderful was a wonderful gal She really was and those two Dana and Mary together were Really really wonderful. They were really cool.”

MacKay made a tidy living, but his true passion was landscaping. And he loved the slew of palm trees he had planted at “mini-Graceland.”

Palm trees to riches?

MacKay believed he could make a bundle planting the palm trees on the Las Vegas strip. The city and Clark County were offering a big contract to plant the trees.

Pals said MacKay had the trees but not the financing, so he brought in a buddy named Tim Stone for help in the cash department. The duo formed Paradise Palms and bought $100,000 worth of landscaping equipment to get the job done.

But five months later, the partnership unravelled and the two men were slugging it out in court.

He was confident he would win the case because of information he had.

Dead before he could go to cops

But before he could go to court with whatever that information was, MacKay was dead.

The tabloids described it as a “gangland-style execution.” Stone got the equipment and assets.

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Sherwood never made the murders for a robbery. After all, there was plenty of cash and jewelry lying around the crime scene. So either the killer was a lousy robber or not a robber at all.

The couple had been shot at close range, just inside the front door. Drugs were not a part of the mix.

One single manila folder was all that was taken. MacKay, pals said, took it everywhere. It was filled with notes on the palm tree business.

“Dana always kept a file with him that outlined all his business, whether it was his musical endeavours, the palm tree business, his home and personal information, his life finances. And that was the only notable thing that was missing,” Sherwood said. “Somebody wanted that folder, and somebody wanted Dana.”

Vargas says she has a good idea who killed her dad.

“Because I know exactly who did it, and I know the cops know exactly who did it, but he’s allowed to get away with it because of his connections,” she said.

Cops suspect that MacKay and Huffman were taken out in a murder-for-hire plot.

It is the “why” part of the equation that is so elusive.

“My dad was telling people before he died, if something happens to me, this is the person responsible,” Vargas said. "He wasn't like other dads. You look at him and he wasn't like a normal dad. He doesn't look like the average guy."

His friend Koker was circumspect on the murder.

He said: “I feel as though years ago when this happened I was I was pretty vocal about my feelings on the subject now 30 years has gone by I have I have responsibilities and people that I love in my life that I want to look after and take care of.”

ADDENDUM

Dana MacKay wasn’t the only Elvis impersonator to meet with foul play. Jimmy Ellis performed as Elvis for years using the persona of “Orion.” Ellis also earned fame as the masked Elvis mimic who spouted consiracy theories that the King of Rock ‘n Roll had faked his death.

Some said Ellis’s voice was so close to Presley’s that some whispered it was in fact, the King.

Killer was sentenced to death

None of that mattered on December 12, 1998, when a monster named Jeffrey James Lee walked into Ellis’ Orrville, Alabama pawn shop and shot him to death. Lee also executed another employee, Elain Thompson.

He was convicted and sentenced to death. Jeffrey James Lee had been slated to get the big adios on June 11, 2026 but his ticket to Nowheresville was punched invalid because of the use of nitrogen hypoxia. But the Supreme Court delayed the execution his sentence was not overturned.

His passage on the night train is only delayed.

The Lehigh Valley was once the throbbing muscle of American heavy industry. Hometown proud, the Bethlehem Steel mills were the second largest in the world, employing tens of thousands of workers and bringing immense prosperity to the area.

But by the late 20th century, Bethlehem Steel — battered by cheap Asian product — was kaput. Its demise threw workers out of work en masse and was often cited as an example of American industrial decline.

These days, the Lehigh Valley metro area, which includes Allentown, Easton and Bethlehem, remains the third biggest metro area in Pennsylvania. The surrounding area offers stunning hilly vistas and roiling rivers and streams.

Found murdered in car

It was away from the city where the body of Devon Guzman, 19, was found on June 15, 2002, after being reported missing in the parking lot. She was dead in the backseat of her compact car. Cops noticed a 4-inch gash through her neck.

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At first, detectives put the horror down to suicide. But upon further investigation, that notion was torpedoed and cops were calling her death a murder. Someone had made it look like a suicide and that someone was almost certainly her killer.

Homicide investigations typically zero in on a victim’s personal life, family, friends, lovers, husbands and wives. Guzman’s love life was, well, complicated.

The “vibrant” young woman had come out to her parents as bisexual and they were cool with it.

Her mom, Melody, said several years before the killers were tried: “I don’t miss her any less today than the day I lost her. I have to stay strong for her and my son ... I believe in an eye for an eye ... and I believe they will get what’s coming to them through the justice system.”

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Homicide investigators began peeling back the layers of the onion and were stunned when they untangled her complicated web of love and sex. Guzman lived in a lesbian relationship with her longtime girlfriend, Keary Renner, in nearby Forks Township, Pa. The pair lived in an apartment over a bar and the watering hole’s habitues claimed they frequently heard loud arguments coming from upstairs. Several times, they went up to check and see if everything was all right.

Clandestine affair with married woman

There was more. Guzman was also engaged in a clandestine affair with a married woman named Michelle Hetzel, 20. Her hubby, Brandon Bloss, didn’t know about the clandestine trysts. He seemed oblivious when Michelle and Devon went on a romantic beach vacation to the U.S. Virgin Islands.

According to reports, the two women had discussed marriage. But even though Hetzel remained married to Bloss, she was upset that Guzman continued her torrid affair with Renner.

Matters came to a head on June 14, 2002, when Guzman and Hetzel bitterly clashed over Keary Renner. Then, when Guzman returned her to the apartment she shared with Renner, the two lovers got into a physical fight over Hetzel. The victim fled and drove to Hetzel’s house.

She didn’t return. What Guzman didn’t know was that sinister machinations were afoot.

Couple decided Guzman had to go

Hetzel, her lover on the side, decided that the young woman had to go and went so far as to contact a man who later told cops he had been offered cash to kill Guzman.

And what about her husband? How cool was Brandon Bloss, 26, about his wife having a sexual affair with another woman?

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One witness told detectives that on the night of June 14, the last time Guzman was known to be alive, he saw her at the home of her girlfriend on the side, Hetzel, and her husband, in Easton. Investigators concluded that Guzman wasn’t murdered in her car because of the lack of blood.

But inside Hetzel’s car, police found bloodstained clothing, which authorities said fit Bloss, along with four latex gloves. The bloodstains on the shirt were determined to be Guzman’s, and bloodstains and hair samples found on her shirt matched Bloss’ hair and blood samples, cops told reporters.

The motivations were a mess. Prosecutors eventually settled on jealousy and desperate desire by the couple to get Guzman “out of the way.” Bloss didn’t much like being a cuckold, while Hetzel was white with rage after Guzman returned after their tropical tryst to Keary.

Hubby didn’t like being a cuckold

“Brandon didn’t like that,” Keary later said.

The couple were both charged with first-degree murder — a death penalty bounce in the Keystone State. Their lawyers had hoped to move the trial because of the ramped-up media circus. They were turned down.

The killer couple had separate legal representation. On one hand, both honed in on the blood of a third, unidentified person being discovered in Guzman’s car and Hetzel’s home. And why would the couple kill together when they had planned to divorce?

None of their arguments held up in court.

In 2001, Hetzel and Bloss were sentenced to life in prison, where they remain. A 2020 appeal from Hetzel was torpedoed.

Sammy “The Bull” Gravano tells an interesting anecdote about murderous mobster Roy Demeo.

The famed Gambino crime family underboss recalled a meeting with Demeo at a Staten Island diner with two underlings to discuss shipping stolen cars — the latter’s specialty — to the Middle East.

Gravano later told me that Demeo was looking at a room of seniors in an adjoining room. The Bull asked him if he wasn’t interested in talking cars. No, Demeo replied, he was thinking how easy it would be to murder the roomful of elderly diners.

‘Something wrong with this guy’

Gravano, who knocked off 19 mobsters himself, was shocked. Business was one thing — this was quite another.

Mobster Roy Demeo was behind the wheel, and in control of the notorious Murder Machine.

The Gambino crime family soldier oversaw a bloodthirsty crew of killers that was eyed in a staggering 200 gangland murders from the 1970s to the early ‘80s. Demeo was a one-time butcher’s apprentice who found his true calling in the ranks of New York City’s underworld. The mobster would eventually become too violent to live.

He was born in Brooklyn in 1940 to hard-working Italian immigrant parents. His older brother was killed in the Korean War. The above two incidents are not usually a harbinger of a kid who turns into a psychopath but there we are.

In 1966, he was recruited by Gambino talent spotter Anthony “Nino” Gaggi, and the young butcher signed on to La Cosa Nostra. He joined Gaggi in a loan-sharking racket and began building his own crew of car thieves.

Skilled at homicide

The first street hood to sign on was 16-year-old Chris Rosenberg, a neighborhood dope dealer. Years later, a heartbroken Demeo would have to park a bullet in Rosenberg’s skull at the behest of Mob bosses.

Besides bringing in bags of money for the Gambinos, the Demeo Crew also proved themselves adept at homicide — and not getting caught. They called it the “Gemini Method” of getting rid of bodies.

Demeo made his bones in 1973 when he whacked New York porno kingpin Paul Rothenberg, who paid extortion money to the surly gangster and his mentor, Gaggi. Rothenberg’s crime was having bank checks made out to Demeo. Cops were getting too close. He had to go.

Two bullets from a silencer-equipped .38-calibre handgun settled that. The murder seemed to trigger a dormant or hidden blood lust in the gangster. His excesses would have few if any equals in the annals of the underworld.

Using his butchering skills, he literally made unlucky mobsters do the Houdini, and simply vanish. It was a term popularized by the mob’s favorite freelance killers, the Irish Westies who were also adept at dismemberment. No corpse? No beef!

The death house was an apartment over a joint called the Gemini Lounge in the Canarsie area of Brooklyn.

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When the doomed arrived at the upstairs apartment — called the Horror Hotel — they were greeted by smiling crew member Joseph “Dracula” Guglielmo. Demeo kept his tools of death in the flat. The Gemini Method was simple. A bullet in the head, then dismemberment followed by disposal in the weeds or Sheepshead Bay.

“Roy said, ‘We have to cut them up,’” Vito Arena later testified. “Roy instructed me and Henry (Borelli), believe it or not, to go and buy some pizza.”

Pissing on the mob’s sidewalk

No body, no crime. But the clock was ticking on Roy Demeo and his crew. Too much attention, too wild. Ultimately, you can forget the honor stuff, and all the other gothic trappings of the Mafia. It is about money. Nothing more. If you own a candy store and some bum is pissing on the sidewalk, it’s bad for business.

Demeo was pissing on the mob’s sidewalk.

The beginning of the end came when an 18-year-old college student working as a vacuum-cleaner salesman was mistaken for a Cuban hit man by the increasingly paranoid Demeo, who proceeded to shoot the kid.

In the underworld, whacking a snitch, a degenerate gambler or a wise guy who broke the rules is one thing. A college student? That’s something else altogether. That draws heat from the cops and is bad for business. You are pissing on your sidewalk.

FBI Vito Arena flipped and started singing like a canary. Demeo was subpoenaed in late 1982 and by that time Gambino chieftain Paul “Big Paulie” Castellano had seen enough. Demeo knew the hands of the hourglass were running out, and the proof was a sawed-off shotgun his constant companion.

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The 42-year-old Demeo was lured to a garage in Brooklyn that his gang had used. There, he met with his mentor, Nino Gaggi, now a Gambino capo. Roy Demeo barely had his coat off when Gaggi and other crew members parked scores of bullets into his body, seven of them into his noggin.

But his minions didn’t make Demeo — one of the most psychopathic killers in Mob history — disappear. Au contraire. They left the intact corpse in the trunk of his 1983 Cadillac and parked it at a marina.

After members of the posh yacht club complained enough, cops finally came and found Demeo.

Castellano would soon join Demeo

Mob boss Castellano wouldn’t last much longer. He was taken off the board in December 1985 in front of Sparks Steak House in Midtown Manhattan, paving the way for the Teflon Don, John Gotti.

Friends recalled he was a devoted family man.

His son Albert recalled in 2002, that the man described in mob writers’ Jerry Capeci and Gene Mustain’s book on Demeo, Murder Machine, was a stranger.

"I grew up in a very normal household. Now I read this about my Dad, and it really upsets me. This was cathartic,” Albert said after writing his own book.

“I went into this book with noble intentions, but I realize now that I can't fix my father's image. He did kill, I know those things. I can't fool myself. But I can show that there was another side to him: a father who took care of his family.”

Chinatown was on the big screen that July of 1974, and life was accompanied by a blistering soundtrack featuring Paul McCartney and Wings, Eric Clapton and Steely Dan.

The American role in Vietnam was over, the oil embargo was in the rearview mirror and the president was about to resign in disgrace.

In the Race Point Dunes in Massachusetts on July 26, 1974, a 13-year-old girl walking her dog found a woman’s body. The location wasn’t far from where the blockbuster Jaws had been filmed, on Martha’s Vineyard.

Victim was nearly decapitated

The victim had nearly been decapitated, her hands cut off and several of her teeth were pulled out. No fingerprints, no ID, nothing to testify to her presence on this planet.

Newspapers called her “The Lady of the Dunes“ and for nearly 50 years, she was a nameless soul. In 2023, FBI agents identified the woman as Tennessee native Ruth Marie Terry, who was around 37 years old at the time of her death.

Her tragedy and that of her family’s is but a slice of the broader tale of suspected serial killer Guy Muldavin and cops believe he killed her. Terry had at one point been married to Muldavin when her life ended on Cape Cod.

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The murder was particularly grisly. The killer clearly didn’t want the woman identified so her hands were chopped off post-mortem. Officials believe she had been battered to death and that the fatal blow was to the left side of her head.

Terry had also been sexually assaulted with some kind of wooden object post-mortem. There were no signs of a struggle, leading detectives to believe she knew her killer.

Why she was on Cape Cod is anyone’s guess. Author Joe Hill — son of Stephen King — noted in 2018 that there was an extra in the 1975 blockbuster Jaws who is a dead-ringer for Terry. Most murder mavens agreed that Hill had a pretty good point.

Still, aspiring thespians don’t typically travel from Tennessee to New England for extra work, although Terry reportedly had some ties to Massachusetts.

Mob boss Whitey Bulger was eyed

Now, the question is: Who killed her and why? The case took on legendary status in New England and there is no shortage of possible suspects or motives. Boston mob chief Whitey Bulger was considered a reasonable bet. In 1981, detectives discovered that the gangster had been keeping time with a woman who looked a lot like Terry when she was murdered.

He also had a penchant for removing his victims’ teeth. Bulger was taken off the board in a West Virginia prison in 2018 following years on the lam.

Another possibility was suspected serial killer Hadden Clark, who confessed to the murder.

In 2004, he sent a letter to a pal claiming he murdered a woman on Cape Cod. Accompanying the letter were two drawings: One was of a handless, naked woman sprawled on her stomach, the second a map pointing to where the body was found.

The murder may have also been random. A tryst gone awry or some other pedestrian excuse for homicide.

All of this is a long way from the summer of 1974 when the sun shone just a bit brighter, the movies were better and the music, well, a whole lot better. It was back when murder could still shock us.

Jaws was a box office blockbuster that summer of 1975 that sent movie-goers into a tizzy. And the gory scenes were a gumbo of nightmares that would last for decades.

It’s believed the Lady of the Dunes appeared in the short “July 4th-Crowd Arrives” sequence as an extra. The Jane Doe’s body was discovered shortly thereafter.

Cops said at the time she was between 25 and 30, about 5-foot-8 and 145 pounds. And she remained a Jane Doe for nearly 50 years.

Which brings us to Guy Rockwell Muldavin. Born in 1923, he attended New York’s Academy of Dramatic Arts after being disqualified for service in the Second World War because of a mastoid infection.

Was Muldavin a monster?

Muldavin moved and married a lot. He was a college professor in 1946 when he married Joellen Mae Loop in Bellevue, Pennsylvania. The newsome twosome continued to move around. New York, California and then to the Pacific Northwest where he worked as a Seattle disc jockey. They called it quits in 1956.

But Muldavin had extra-curricular activities even in the squeaky-clean, picket-fence 1950s.

Cops say he is the primary suspect in the disappearance and presumed murder of waitress Barbara Joe Kelley, aged17, and the murder of her boyfriend, bread truck driver Henry Lawrence “Red” Baird, on June 17, 1950 in Humboldt County, in Northern California.

Baird’s body was discovered face down on Table Bluff Beach. He had been shot in the back of the head execution style. He was naked except for his shoes and socks. Barbara’s clothing was neatly folded. No trace of her has ever been found.

Second wife, daughter vanish

Bad things tended to happen to people in Muldavin’s proximity. He married again in September 1958 to Manzanita Aileen ‘Manzy’ Ryan in Idaho. She brought an 18-year-old daughter, Dolores, to the union. On April 1, 1960, mother and daughter disappeared. Restless Muldavin flew the coop so he wouldn’t have answers the questions of the FBI.

And here, Muldavin appears to become emboldened. At this point he may have gotten away with four murders.

So, not long after Manzy and Dolores disappeared, he married Evelyn Marie Emerson in Seattle. They divorced. Then remarried on August 10, 1963, this time in Los Angeles. Things came off the rails when it emerged that Muldavin scammed Emerson and her family lout of $10,000. He was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in the slammer.

Shockingly, a precurser of today’s activist judge suspended the sentence in 1962. All he had to do was repay the money. Har! Har!

Human remains in septic tank

But cops knew the score on Muldavin, they simply could not connect the dots tight enough to get a greenlight from the prosecutors in King County as there were no corpses. Never mind the human remains discovered in his septic tank.

And sometime in early 1974, he married Ruth Marie Terry in that capital of romance, Las Vegas. By that summer, she was dead.

Muldavin moved back to California in 1976. After stint at a posh jeweler on Beverly Hills fabled Rodeo Drive, he moved to a small community on the Central Coast near Salinas where he was a volunteer DJ. He pegged out in Salinas on March 14, 2002 and was survived by his wife.

Twenty-one years later, cops 3,200 miles away in Massachusetts closed the books on the murder of Ruth Marie Terry.

On August 28, 2023, Guy Muldavin was officially named as the man who murdered the Lady of the Dunes. No doubt there are more victims.

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In rural Georgia, alternative sexual practices and lifestyles don’t always fly with the hoi polloi. While a late-night threesome may be cool in Atlanta, overall, it’s best to keep one’s hormone-charged hijinks under wraps.

Such was the case of blond Georgia peach Cheryl Howell Coe. Cheryl and her hubby, Luther Coe engaged in activities that definitely veered away from Friday Night Lights, PTA and the Antioch Baptist Church crowd south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Now, we’re not being judgey here. Just stating facts.

Cheryl and Luke were active swingers and into partner swapping. No biggie but sometimes this arrangement can go sideways when one half of a couple digs the lifestyle and action a lot more than the other.

The way it emerged, old Luke was heavily into the BDSM and Master/Slave part of the deal whereas it seems that Cheryl just wanted to get laid often and by as many different men as possible.

‘Women are in charge’

By 2021, Cheryl and Luke were arguing bitterly over their now divergent sex lives. She wanted more and with a multitude of partners, and he wanted less. Not for the first time did a man drive the swinging bus only to be left at the side of the road.

Exactly who was the dominant partner also became murkier. She had discussed the swinging lifestyle in Facebook conversations with fellow travellers, noting that “in the lifestyle, the women are in charge.”

Around 7:30 p.m. on June 23, 2021, the Cowetta County Sheriff's Office responded to a phone call from a hysterical woman in Newnan. It was Cheryl Coe, who admitted knocking back too many ciders, crashing and then spilling her guts to a 911 operator there had been a horrible accident.

It seemed that Cheryl had just taken hubby off the board. She said she crashed after her cider fest, then awoke to hear what she believed was an intruder. BANG! BANG!

Luther was bound for the morgue

No more intruder. No more Luther.

Cops have a suspicious nature and Cheryl gave them plenty of ammunition.

As detectives began digging, a sordid picture began emerging. A week before the killing, Cheryl asked to add another playmate on to her growing roster. Her husband asked if she intended to see an additional man for sex on the same day.

The Times-Herald reported that Cheryl answered in the affirmative that she was gunned for a double header. She signed off: “LOL".”

For Luther, this was all a bridge too far and he responded that her clandestine activities “turned his stomach.” Cheryl then suggested that maybe the couple should torpedo their open marriage arrangement. No, no, no, Luther said, they just needed more rules.

Swinging started in 2020

The pair had been in a relationship since 2015 and had opened it up in 2020.

Now, under the interrogation room spotlight, Cheryl, 51 at the time of the shooting, was not doing herself any favours. Her story kept changing like the sands in the hour glass. First, she believed Luther was an intruder so she shot him. Then, that became Luther becoming overly aggressive during a BDSM session.

Cheryl claimed she was only defending herself.

And she let detectives in on a secret: She had become disturbed at their uber-violent BDSM sexual practices. Her hubby choked her out and slapped her breasts leaving bruises.

Coweta County Sheriff’s Office investigator Jason Brooks said text messages uncovered by cops unearthed other disputes.

And physical evidence revealed that Luther had been shot at point-blank range. Why, Cheryl had no idea it was Luther until with his dying breath, he told her “Cheryl, you shot me.”

Couple appeared happy

When Cheryl went on trial, testimony provided a veritable Penthouse Forum worth of action. Most of the sexual action was with friends, courthouse habitues learned. The couple appeared happy, his son from a previous marriage testified.

Entered into evidence was Coweta County Sheriff’s Officer Jason Brooks’s body camera video showing Cheryl speaking with her mother on the phone after cops arrived.

Cheryl told detectives that her hubby told her to “get her ass out of bed” before yanking a pillow out from between her legs. And she added one more twist: Cheryl was only doing what Luke had taught her to do in the event of an intruder.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” Cheryl claimed. “I just grabbed the gun like he’s (Luther) always told me to.”

But the black widow eventually copped to investigators that the couple had been fighting over their sexual arrangements. Until she passed out drunk, she told cops, they had planned to discuss the lay of the land.

She added: “He was more enraged than he’s ever been at me.”

But prosecutor Laura Lukert called vixen Cheryl “the most unreliable of narrators” in her closing arguments. “The only consistency we have is that that woman shot Luther Coe.”

Cheryl Howell Coe was found guilty of malice murder, felony murder and aggravated assault on Aug. 18, 2025. She was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

What had promised to be a tantalizing experiment in lust and adventure crashed and burned. Hubby in the morgue, his playmate in prison.

Dennis “Scooter” Abrahamsen liked dope, tattoos, porn stars and kinky sex. Not in any particular order but these were his passion projects.

And on May 14, 2010, Abrahamsen was once again ready to indulge his predilections. Those same lurid inclinations would punch the tattoo artist’s ticket: a one-way to the morgue.

Eighteen hours later, his mangled corpse was discovered by worried relatives lying bloody and battered on a massage table at his New Port Richey, Florida home. The 41-year-old had been stabbed and bludgeoned to death.

Home looked like a slaughterhouse

The crime scene itself looked like a poorly kept-slaughterhouse. Blood covered the walls and even sprayed far enough to hit the ceiling fan.

Amanda Logue was a small-town mother and wife from Leesburg, Georgia. But she had a secret, an alter-ego powered by sexual desire and a desperate need for dough.

In the twilight hours, she was porn star Sunny Dae, who specialized in BDSM videos. She starred in such wholesome fare as Natural Porn Killers, Sunny Side Up (I and II), and Casting Couch Cuties 31, among scores of others.

Just a smalltown girl

Peltz added: “She’s from a small town in Georgia, living with a husband and young daughter. They go to church on Sunday. And you know, by all appearances, she’s a loving wife and mother, but then she gets on a plane to go model and shoot pornography, and it’s a complete life of sex and lies at that point.”

Late in 2009, she met a buff Chicago DJ named Jason Andrews, a 28-year-old who feigned a British accent and was gay for pay in the realm of LGBTQ porn. Pro tip, kids: Nothing is real in porn.

They met on the set of a porn video shoot and it was love at first sight. But there would be no sunset, ranch house or barking dogs for the bargain basement dwellers of America’s seedy twilight zone.

In addition, to her cinematic oeuvre, Logue also worked as a prostitute whose particular specialty was sex parties and gang bangs. Friends of the newsome twosome noted that both had changed and the pair seemed to bring out the worst in each other.

And fellow porn star Kristen Cameron said Logue seemed like a “decent” person.

“She was professional, prompt and seemed all-around normal, well, so I thought,” Cameron told the AP. “She was nice to me and was a great model! I felt a connection to her since we both have southern backgrounds.”

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However, Cameron noticed a dramatic change in Logue when she started seeing Andrews. And she wasn’t particularly keen on her friend’s new paramour.

“She wouldn’t talk, all she did was text with Jason.”

It’s never been clear who came up with the screwball idea but it was fairly stupid and while not necessarily outrageous enough for the hall of fame, it was pretty dumb. No one but no one should take credit.

In early May 2010, Logue was hired for a sex party at Scooter Abrahamsen’s home. She would be his date and they would have sex with another couple and the action would be recorded on video. Good wholesome fun.

In hundreds of typo-riddled and sex-laced text messages between Logue and Andrews, they concocted their twisted scheme.

In what was described as Logue’s “nearly incomprehensible” reply, she said she wanted to have hot sex when the dastardly deed was done. But what was the upshot? What the Mensa members have in mind?

Logue and Andrews had spent April and May in Florida filming porn, going to the beach and gushing on social media of their undying love for one another. Narcissist A Meets Narcissist B.

Early on May 14, 2010, he posted a raunchy photo of his smoking hot new paramour.

The next night she attended the balls to the wall orgy at Scooter Abrahamsen’s place. Cops later unearthed a flurry of texts between Logue and Andrews during the sleaze-o grope-a-thon.

Their plan was very stupid indeed

The other couple split around 5 a.m. but Logue stayed behind in the orgy’s afterglow. The pair of porn stars had come up with a plan that was both heartless and dense all at once.

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They were going to murder and rob “Scooter” Abrahamsen. And then what? Who knew. Logue and Andrews lived purely in the present. No past, no future, just the present.

Andrews wrote: “Just get him on his face either bash or tell me to get in and where to go.”

He responded: “Wicked. Ill just be waiting. Really. Take. Your. Time.”

And then they murdered Abrahamsen, making off with $6,000 in cash, credit cards and a video camera. Hardly the score of a lifetime or even enough to as, Ving Rhames character Marcellus Wallace said in Pulp Fiction, “kickin’ it in the Caribbean.”

He tweeted: “therealsunnydae and I wanna go watch a movie tonight, any suggestion?”

Their date nights would soon be fleeting with neither qualifying as a criminal mastermind.

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Three days later the couple was arrested when they tried to use Scooter’s credit card at a Home Depot in Orlando. Detectives didn’t have quite enough to hold them for the murder but they were zeroing in.

Andrews moaned on his Twitter account: “Amanda please let me know when you are ok, really. My heart can’t take the weight of the fear that I would never see you again.”

Less than two weeks later she was arrested in Georgia while Andrews was pinched by the U.S. Marshals in Tennessee. The dominoes fell in rapid succession.

Andrews would plead guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Almost exactly two years after the slaying, Logue pleaded to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 40 years in a Florida prison.

‘Hope he comes and haunts you’

Both had narrowly escaped a date in Florida’s death house. And, in reality, were handed another sort of death sentence.

“Scooter” Abrahamsen’s cousin, Donna Rella, didn’t think Logue’s punishment was near enough for the bloody murder.

“I hope every time you close your eyes, he comes and haunts you for the rest of your pathetic life,” Donna Rella said.

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This post has been previously published. Of course, I could have used AI like some of the other Substack kids but … I’m an old pro. Back with new shit on July 24!

On what would be the final night of Mikiko Kasahara’s life, she was ecstatic. And she had a truckload of reasons to be pleased with herself.

The Texas Lutheran University student had racked up spectacular grades on the big board and made the Dean’s List; the fall term was at a close, and it was time to celebrate her accomplishments and bright future.

On December 13, 2002, the 21-year-old hosted a party for pals at her Seguin, Texas (about 45 minutes east of San Antonio) apartment to cut loose and have some fun.

Nothing but a Skeleton

The festivities carried on until the wee hours of the morning. And then, Mikiko Kasahara was gone. Besides her killer, the party’s stragglers were the last time anyone saw the serious young student alive.

But something was not right.

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It was a neighbor who first reported the fire the morning after the bash. It had been a horrific inferno that raged through the unit. Once firefighters battled their way through the blaze and squelched the fire, they removed Kasahara’s body from the apartment. What was left of the pretty co-ed was utterly unrecognizable. Nothing but a skeleton.

Homicide detectives determined that sometime between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m., Mikiko had been tortured, strangled to death, and then, in a final sickening gesture, her killer set Mikiko ablaze.

Larynx Crushed

If the fire had been employed to cover up the murder, it didn’t work.

An autopsy revealed Kasahara’s larynx had been crushed, and in a macabre addendum, the Travis County medical examiner noted there was a “profound injury with much hemorrhage within the pelvis.”

There was no booze or drugs in the clean-living exchange student’s system. But the case went cold with investigators releasing a series of tidbits — bits and pieces — over the decades that helped draw a more complete picture of the murder.

From the start, police have insisted the killer was a man but “stopped short of referring to the murder as a crime of passion.”

Among the items retrieved from the crime scene was an incinerated laptop.

What cops found enabled them to weave together the tapestry of a possible motive. On the computer, detectives discovered a trove of Asian-driven pornography that had been accessed around the time Kasahara was murdered. Cops reportedly have a nagging belief that the murderer may have been obsessed with Asian women.

Private life was whistling clean

And that made Mishiko a target.

But because of the fire, no physical evidence could be retrieved. Det. Jaime Diaz told KPRC 2 that scores of cops have worked on the case. They have recreated the crime scene, processed the laptop, and extensively probed the victim’s private life, but to no avail.

What makes the case more mystifying is that Kasahara was an excellent student, didn’t drink, do drugs or run with a rough crowd. She was, Diaz said, “truly an innocent victim.”

Another former investigator on the case feels Diaz’s frustrations.

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“To me, this is as vivid today as it was the day I was called there,” retired Capt. Maureen Watson told the Seguin Gazette. “This is far from a cold case, and I won’t let it become a cold case ... I will not stop, and this department will not stop, even if I go away, until this is solved or we have absolutely exhausted all our resources.

“This young girl deserves that.”

Texas Crime Stoppers is offering a cash reward of up to $3,000 to any person who provides information that leads to the arrest of the person/persons responsible for this crime. All tips are anonymous and the tipster will receive a Texas Crime Stoppers Tip Number. To be eligible for the cash rewards, tipsters MUST contact Crime Stoppers by using one of the following two methods:

• Texas Crime Stoppers Hotline: 1-800-252-TIPS (8477)

  Crime Scene USA is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This post has been previously published. Of course, I could have used AI like some of the other Substack kids but … I’m an old pro. Back with new shit on July 24!

It was a poignant vignette, a slice of life from a quickly vanishing America.

On July 4, 1988, Sally Ann McNelly, 18, and her boyfriend Shane Paul Stewart, 17, planned to watch the big fireworks display at Lake Nasworthy in San Angelo, Texas. The couple had been off and on but had recently gotten back together.

For Sally, there was much to look forward to. For starters, there was the seniors’ high school prom. Sadly, that seminal event in a young woman’s life was not to be for Sally Ann McNelly.

Promised to hit 11 p.m. curfew

Instead, her parents would “very carefully” place her prom dress in the 18-year-old’s coffin because “there wasn’t anything to put it on.” Just bones.

After giving his dad a hug on the night of the Fourth, Shane told him he would be home by 11 p.m. It was an unkept promise but it wasn’t the teenager’s fault.

When Sally Ann and Shane were reported missing the following day, a search soon found his prized copper-colored Chevrolet Camaro abandoned in the parking lot with the windows down and the keys still in the ignition. There were no signs of foul play.

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Witnesses last saw the pair in the Camaro around midnight, but nothing seemed particularly amiss. Inside the car were food wrappers and a note from Sally to her parents, allegedly claiming she was unhappy at home.

Shot in the head

And despite large-scale searches for Sally and Shane, nothing turned up until November when hunters discovered her skeletal remains in a pasture near the Twin Buttes Reservoir in the San Angelo area. His bones were discovered nearby. The location was around 20 miles from where they had last been seen.

Both teenagers had been shot in the head with a shotgun.

Why would someone want to murder two kids in cold blood? Rumors were rampant, including that the pair were dabbling in the occult and were members of a Satanic cult.

SATANIC PANIC

Sally’s friends claimed they had witnessed her attending parties where occult practices and black magic were being performed. It was the height of the Satanic panic and garnered a tidal wave of media attention, including a spot on Unsolved Mysteries.

The Standard-Times reported that Sally had been a member for a while and that Shane was trying to help her break free.

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And according to news reports, in March 1988, Sally and Shane turned a gun over to local cops. They said a cult member had given it to them, claiming it was used in a murder. Police discovered that the gun was stolen.

Detectives have long pooh-poohed the idea that the murders were connected to the occult.

What they didn’t dismiss was that the case quickly went cold, and as the years passed, the families of Sally and Shane became sick with worry that they would never see justice.

‘No answers came’

In 2013, Shane’s dad, Marshall Stewart, sadly lamented on the 25th anniversary: “No answers came.”

Until June 2017. A San Angelo man named John Cyrus Gilbreath, 47, was picked up in a routine traffic stop after his girlfriend told officers he was in the marijuana trade. A warrant was obtained to search his home.

Gilbreath had been on the detectives’ radar for a long time.

Inside the home, Texas Rangers and the Tom Green County Sheriff’s Office discovered personal writings “specific to the offence of murder” that included Shane and Sally’s names, along with three audio tapes with “SS” written on them, a search warrant affidavit obtained by the San Angelo Standard-Times stated.

‘Person of interest’

Cops also obtained a lock of hair, a fingernail and biological material believed to be blood, KIDY-TV reported. Gilbreath remains in a federal prison on other charges, but he is considered a “person of interest” in the double homicide.

Investigators have long suspected there was more than one person involved in the slayings.

Shane’s dad, Marshall, kept the Camaro for years until it “became too much”. As for the killers?

“I just wish that they would get right with themselves and get right with God,” Marshall Stewart said in a YouTube video.

If you have any information, contact the Texas Rangers at 1-800-346-3243.

They say there’s no rest for the wicked but my internal clock says that it’s time for a break. I will be posting some greatest hits over the couple of weeks with a full glorious return on July 23.

In addition to the greatest hits, be sure and check my Notes regularly. Part of my break will be spent writing my next book, Inside the Mind of Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker for Gemini Publishing. It is slated to be published later this year.

Stay tuned!

Gavin Rivers Weisenburg and Tanner Christopher Thomas apparently discovered grandpa’s stash of 1950s men’s magazines, such as True, Argosy, and Man’s Action, in a battered box in the garage.

The two Texans have now been indicted by a grand jury on federal charges. The reasons are audacious enough: Weisenburg, 21, and Thomas, 20, allegedly were plotting to seize a small Haitian island. More?

‘Rape fantasies’

Apparently, the feds claim that the swashbucklers “conspired to recruit and lead an unlawful expeditionary force to the Island of Gonave, which is part of the Republic of Haiti, for the purpose of carrying out their rape fantasies.”

Weisenburg and Thomas were arrested after a federal probe uncovered their alleged Flintstones-like plot to seize the island. Charges include: Conspiracy to murder, maim, or kidnap in a foreign country and production of child pornography. The DOJ said the perverted pair have also been charged with child pornography in Texas after they allegedly coerced a teen girl to engage in sex acts on camera in August 2024.

According to reports, the pair began plotting their invasion in July 2024 and spent more than a year learning French, conducting weapons research and had fire training and sailing in their sights. Thomas joined the USAF last January for more military training. Their legal eagles said both will plead not guilty. If convicted, they face life in prison.

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The dopey duo face life in prison.

Thomas's lawyer, John Helms, said his client "never actually tried to do any of this." David Finn, Weisenburg’s legal eagle, said he encourages everyone to "tap the brakes" before the trial. Attorneys for both men said they will enter not guilty pleas.

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Even at 70, Thelma and Louise star Geena Davis remains a smouldering smoke show. But it will take an army of Hollywood’s top make-up artists to turn the star into sinister serial killer, Dorothea Puente.

Davis is slated to star in and executive produce the HBO true crime drama series Dorothea, based on the Sacramento succubus. Who was Puente? For starters, she followed in a long line of California vixens, sinister mother-in-laws and crime bosses who had a feminine touch (kinda.) More?

Now, to our tale…

Dorothea Puente looked like the grandma down the street who was always armed with cookies and a glass of milk. Kindly Dorothea, everyone thought.

But hiding behind her sweet smile was the blackest of hearts. Puente was a serial killer who preyed upon some of society’s most helpless and vulnerable people. People who could fall off the edge of the planet and no one would care.

Residents began to vanish

Puente operated a rooming house in a large Victorian home in Sacramento, California. Her residents were alcoholics, former mental patients, the elderly and others on the fringes of society. All were on Social Security. And if they vanished? No one would ask about them.

Starting in 1982, residents did indeed begin to vanish - along with $100,000 of their Social Security cash. That money? It went straight into the pocket of Dorothea Puente.

The evil crone splashed on herself for a facelift and a litany of other goodies, cops later said. She was finally arrested in 1988 at a Los Angeles dive bar boozing with — get this — another elderly man. The bust came after shocked cops found the bodies of seven people buried in her backyard along with two more planted elsewhere.

“It was just a big shock of how she could fit seven bodies in such a small yard without ever having a witness to what she was doing.”

The victims had all been tenants of Dorothea, ranging in age from 52 to 80, and all of them died sometime between 1982 and 1986.

Preying on the elderly was a thing for Puente. At the time of the slayings, she was on parole for a drug scam also involving old people in Los Angeles. If Puente‘s heart was a block of ice, it was no wonder.

Born in Redlands, California in 1929 to alcoholic parents, her father often threatened to blow his brains out in front of the kids. He later died of tuberculosis while her prostitute mother was killed in a motorcycle crash. It wasn’t a great start.

Repeatedly sexually abused

Dorothea and her siblings found themselves placed in orphanages where she was repeatedly sexually abused. Her criminal career and personal life were a garish kaleidescope shaded in black. She kicked things off at 16 by selling her body in Olympia, Washington.

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Forging cheques, running a brothel, stealing her sailor husband’s money to use for gambling — and other men, these are but a few of the entries on her CV. She used reptilian cunning and the native guile of a low-renter to survive.

In the late ‘40s she was busted for kiting checks in Riverside. Dorothea’s hubby dumped her.

Next stop: San Francsico. In the city by the bay, she married a merchant seaman named Axel Bren Johansson. During the marriage Dorothea displayed a Zelig-like knack for reinvention. In her cons of the 1950s, she became a Muslim woman who was of mixed Egyptian and Israeli parentage. Call her Teya Singoalla Neyaarda. So she said.

And while hubby was away, Dorothea would play inviting men into the couple’s home for sex and ploughing through Johansson’s dough to feed her gambling addiction. As in the past, cops were never too far away.

Firm a front for prostitution

She was arrested in 1960 for using a bookkeeping firm as a front for her activities as a high-flying madam running a house of ill-repute in Sacramento. She got 90 days in the county jail.

A year later, her hubby had her committed to the DeWitt State Hospital. The commitment came as a result of a combo booze and crime binge. And there were also suicide attempts.

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Headshrinkers pegged Dorothea as a pathological liar whose personality was, to say the least, unstable. Puente and Johansson called it quitsville in 1966. Two more hubbies would follow but 20 years after her sinister crimes, she told Sactown Mag that Johansson was her favorite husband.

She would fib years later that her husband was the brother of famed fighter Ingmar Johansson. Pssst… he wasn’t.

Puente’s next role was as a devout Christian dedicated to helping wayward young women (and in the late 1960s there were lot of them in California) find the Lord.

The next betrothed was Roberto Jose Puente in 1968. Six months later it was over, she said, telling people she was a victim of domestic abuse. He ran— fast — back to Mexico.

As she had done her whole life, she lied

And now here she was, sitting across from Carbrera in a police interrogation room, Puente knew she was up to her eyeballs in shit. And then, it came to her. She used the tools that had allowed her survive and thrive in a cruel unforgiving world.

She lied.

Puente denied killing her tenants and the boyfriend she had lured from Oregon through a pen pal site. Why she loved and cared for them! This was all just a terrible misunderstanding, she seemed to to tell cops.

As previously mentioned, Puente was a teller of tall tales. She had been discovered at 19 by a talent scout for the Radio City Rockettes and she joined them although there is no record of her ever being a member.

She was a nurse on the infamous Bataan Death March. Mind, that was 1942 and she would have been 13-years-old. Puente claimed to know both Jack Kennedy and Ronald Reagan (she wasn’t fond of Nancy.)

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Following her elderly dope scam in the 1980s, one prison headshrinker issued a dire warning in 1985. Not only was she a pathological liar, he diagnosed her as schizophrenic.

And then it was all over, too late for her victims.

She had killed the departed by giving them drug overdoses, then had a mentally challenged handyman bury the corpses.

“I remembered giving (Dorothea) her Miranda rights,” Cabrera said. “She then looked up at me and said, ‘Mr. Cabrera, I’m sorry.’ I remember looking into her eyes. And for that brief moment, I genuinely believed she was sorry.”

Twenty years after Puente was arrested, tried and convicted, Cabrera remained amazed at his quarry.

“I started working her,” Cabrera said of his interrogation, “but all along, she was working me. She was tough. She never blinked, never broke a sweat.”

In the end, the Landlady From Hell was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder in 1993 and sentenced to life without parole.

Prosecutors had wanted Puente to get the death penalty at the Green Room in notorious San Quentin Penitentiary.

“These people were human beings, they had a right to live - they did not have a lot of possessions - no houses, no cars, only their social security cheques and their lives,” prosecutor John O’Mara said at her sentencing. “She took it all ... Death is the only appropriate penalty.”

Puente died in jail of cancer in 2011. She was 82.

ADDENDUM

The elderly killer kept her own counsel for years behind bars, then she started blabbing to Sactown magazine in 2009, two years before she pegged out. Puente claimed she was an innocent woman.

She added: “But God always puts obstacles in people’s way. Look at Job, John, Paul, Moses. Things happen for a reason.”

Puente also agreed that maybe it would have best if she had been executed.

‘I don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks’

“Maybe I would have been better off. It’s the same thing. I’m here until I die,” she said.

As for her rep as a stone-cold killer?

“I don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks,” she said.

What was left of Willie Bioff was scattered all over the tranquil Phoenix neighbourhood where he was hiding.

Once one of the most powerful men in Hollywood who could bring studios to their knees, Bioff’s sordid past had finally caught up with him, courtesy of a bomb placed under his pickup truck on Nov. 4, 1955.

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To his neighbors, Bioff and his wife were known on Bethany Home Rd. as Bill and Laurie Nelson. They were quiet, and their ranch-style home was well maintained.

Hollywood ripe for the pickings

Inside, the decor boasted “Louis XIV-style furniture, a collection of miniature ivory elephants, a lantana-and-plumbago hedge planted by Bill Nelson himself,” Time magazine reported.

Willie Bioff died a long way from the west side of Chicago where he was born in 1900, the child of Russian immigrants who kicked him to the curb when he was only 8 years old. He started out by peddling newspapers, then became a pimp until he was busted in 1922.

By the late 1920s, Bioff had fallen in with Al Capone and the precursor of the Windy City mob, The Outfit. Stock markets were booming and a dry America was still soaking wet thanks to gangsters who smuggled in the booze from Canada and the Caribbean.

For fun, Americans went to the movies by the millions. The public had fallen in love with the emerging constellation of movie stars as Gods and Goddesses. The industry’s big players were mostly Jewish and had fled from New York City one step ahead of inventor Thomas Edison’s patent police.

In sleepy California, year-round sunshine lifted the limits on how and when the producers could make movies. It was far away from Edison and together, they created the Dream Factory.

Organized crime has always been brilliant at spotting money-spinning opportunities and industries to exploit.

Seeing a potential goldmine in the movie houses, back in Chicago Willie Bioff joined forces with corrupt International Alliance of Theatrical State Employees (IATSE) boss George E. Browne and they started shaking down theatres. It was very, very lucrative.

No payoff, no projectionist. But there were bigger fish to fry.

Again it was that opportunity thing. The Outfit sent the Jewish labour racketeer Willie Bioff to Tinseltown.

In Hollywood, time was money, so Bioff played both sides of the coin. On one hand, he controlled the unions and on the other, he was shaking down the studio moguls to keep the wheels spinning.

Hollywood being extorted

Everyone from Warner Bros. and MGM to poverty row producers churning out low-rent westerns were kicking up to the gangsters. And it wasn’t just the dough. Bioff was loving his new Hollywood life, a far cry from the bleak west side of the Windy City.

Bioff hoodwinked the usually savvy studio bosses into believing he was a businessman, not a gangster. New York World-Telegram columnist Westbrook Pegler blew up Bioff’s facade when he revealed the pimping charge from 1922. And more bad news was on the way.

In the days prior to RICO, the most terrifying weapon in the feds’ arsenal in battling organized crime was the taxman. In 1941, Bioff and Browne went on trial for tax evasion and racketeering.

“Obedience was never one of Bioff’s strong points,” Alan K. Rode wrote in Noir City Magazine. “On the stand, he accused studio bosses of bribing him to maintain labor peace — while remaining mute about the Outfit’s orchestration of the scheme.”

Found guilty, Browne got eight years, Bioff and the third conspirator, Nick Circella, each got 10 in the slammer.

Now, The Outfit had a problem. Bioff could be a loose cannon, a loudmouth. There were rules and they were unrelentingly enforced. Would Bioff flip to save himself? Bioff and his family were indeed threatened. And those fears became very real on Feb. 2, 1943.

Bound, Beaten and Burned

The victim was model and dice girl Estelle Carey, 34, gal pal of Circella. Carey was discovered bound, beaten and burned in her Chicago apartment.

Was it a message or a home invasion? After all, Carey did double duty as her boyfriend’s banker. Bioff didn’t wait to find out. He had read the writing on the wall and it said R.I.P. Willie Bioff.

So Bioff flipped and began singing like a canary triggering seismic ramifications in the underworld, particularly in Chicago over the Hollywood shakedown racket.

Boss Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti, Paul “The Waiter” Ricca, Louis “Little New York” Campagna, Charles Gioe and Phil D’Andrea were fingered by weasily Willie. For Nitti, a claustrophobe, the idea of prison was unbearable. So on March 19, 1943, he drunkenly walked to the Illinois Central Railroad yard and blew his brains out.

The others served varying stretches in prison and Bioff was forever marked: RAT.

Not only that, he broke the mob’s Hollywood cash register. His partner, Browne, “drank himself to death” in the early 1950s.

Bioff was a marked man when he left prison and moved to Arizona. He and his wife blended in, running in high society Republican circles. He even donated $5,000 to state senator and future presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. But hovering in the background was a gangland thirst for revenge.

But old habits die hard. Bioff hooked up with Outfit associate Gus “Greenie” Greenbaum who introduced him to the riches that could be had in the Nevada gambling industry. He hired Bioff to be entertainment director of the Riviera Hotel.

It didn’t matter. The Outfit caught up to the hyper-cautious Bioff on Nov. 4, 1955. His betrayal had never been forgotten. He stuck the key into the ignition of his truck, triggering the dynamite under his seat and KABOOM! Bioff never felt a thing.

She was puzzled, she told the reporter, because Willie “didn’t have an enemy in the world.”

Cops didn’t buy it. Chicago Outfit boss Tony “Big Tuna” Accardo and several other mobsters had been in the Phoenix area recently. No, this was an undoubted settling of underworld accounts. And one that remains unsolved.

ADDENDUM

Three years later, Bioff benefactor, Gus Greenbaum also had his ticket punched. Another Chicago Outfit guy, Greenie had been hailed as a hero for turning around the fortunes of Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas.

On December 3, 1958, Greenbaum and his wife, Bess, were found brutally murdered in their Phoenix home. He had tried to pack it in but the mob wanted him back running the Riviera. Greenie had problems: Bad health coupled with gambling and drug addictions.

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When he refused the Riviera gig, his sister-in-law was iced as a warning. Even with a 27% stake in the resort, his monstrous cocaine use and mountain of gambling losses, he needed more and started skimming.

On December 3, 1958, Greenbaum and his wife, Bess, were found brutally murdered in their Phoenix home. He had nearly been decapitated. The Greenbaum murders remain unsolved.

ADDENDUM 2.0

Greenbaum served as the inspiration for Moe Greene in the critical and box office smash, The Godfather in 1972.

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Cops found Sydney Loofe’s remains on Dec. 4, 2017.

Her dismembered body parts were discovered stuffed in garbage bags on a gravel road southwest of Omaha, Nebraska. Besides the 24-year-old’s remains, investigators from the FBI and local law enforcement found sex toys, clothing and lingerie.

Months later, Loofe’s slit bra and shirt were found.

Looking for love on Tinder

Store clerk Loofe had been looking for love of the feminine variety and turned to the most likely place where she could find action: Tinder. And when she saw Bailey Boswell’s face on the app, she immediately swiped right, liking the looks of the raven-haired temptress.

The two young women hooked up for a first date on Nov. 14, 2017. It went so spectacularly, they set up another for the next day.

According to friends, Loofe had struggled with depression, anxiety, and at least in one report, cocaine. But she was popular, a skilled basketball player and outdoorswoman. Now she was looking for something special to make her life complete.

And she thought she’d found it Bailey Boswell. But Boswell, 26, came with a tractor-trailer load of baggage in the form of her sugar daddy, Aubrey Trail, 54. To say the May-December duet were weirdos was an understatement.

Father was murdered

For starters, they were the self-proclaimed “king” and “queen” of a Nebraska witches coven. Their days were filled with trolling dating apps looking for potential followers —and wouldbe victims.

Both grew up in miserable circumstances, and Boswell’s father had been murdered when she was a young girl. But in the first quarter of the 21st century, good narratives sell and there’s was loopy but tantalizing.

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The gruesome twosome somehow convinced women they had met on the dating app Tinder that they had developed amazing powers and that these awesome powers came from murdering people.

Ashley Hills was 20 when she met the pair via Tinder. Trail bluntly informed her he was a vampire and had a 12-witch harem.

Trail asked Hills if she would like him to be her “sugar daddy”? Hills said yes. She’d get $200 a week, expenses paid, and would spend time at the couple’s apartment where presumably she’d have sex with the pair. It all seemed like a pretty good deal.

A day after the proposition was delivered, Hills said she went for lunch with Boswell, got their nails done and went on a spending spree at Victoria’s Secret.

They modelled the lingerie for Trail — then engaged in a torrid three-way sex session. After the three-way, Hills decided she was in.

Full nudity was the rule

One rule at the apartment was that Hills had to be naked. If she didn’t follow the rules, Trail would whip her and choke her with a belt. Still, she considered Trail a fine, upstanding man.

And she later admitted, she swallowed every single one of his innumerable lies.

Within a week, she learned “Jenna”, the beauty she first swiped right for, was really Bailey Boswell and that Boswell was also in a “sugar daddy” relationship with Trail.

She said on their first meeting, Trail drove her to his apartment, they shared small talk and the wannabe Svengali showed her pictures of scantily clad women on his phone. She left a few hours later with $200 Trail had given her.

But there were rules in this hedonistic heaven: She had to be honest, spend at least one day a week at the apartment, ask Trail for permission, check in with him every three hours, not talk to any other men and to call him “Daddy.”

Whipped and choked with a belt

In addition, the two women were to be fully nude inside the home. Punishment would follow bad behavior, and on at least one occassion she was whipped and choked with a belt.

Hills later said that Boswell was no shrinking violet when it came to the trio’s raunchy sex games. She particularly liked torture.

Trail and Boswell soon started talking about murder with Hills. And the woman they chose to kill was another girl in the sugar daddy arrangement named Anastasia Golyakova. The problem for Trail was that she wasn’t following the rules. Boswell called the woman “annoying.”

The trio began formulating a plan: They would murder Golyakova on an antiquing trip to Pennsylvania and her body would be dumped along the way. At first, Hills told her three-way friends she was “ready for it.”

But days before heading north with Golyakova in September 2017, Hills had a panic attack, fled a TJ Maxx fitting room and informed Boswell she “was done.”

Ashley Hills had no idea how close she was flying to the sun

As for Sydney Loofe, she would never be seen alive again. After her third date with Bailey Boswell, she vanished.

But Loofe had told her friend Brooklyn McCrystal about the “hot date”. Now, the friend wanted to find out the identity of that date. Eventually, she stumbled across Boswell’s profile and swiped right.

The femme fatale sent her phone number and McCrystal passed it on to cops.

Four days after Loofe disappeared, Trail’s dream of a vampire sex cult would lie in tatters. Cops arrived at the couple’s apartment where the stench of bleach was overwhelming, causing one neighbor to vomit.

A sex party off the rails?

And then they found what remained of Sydney Loofe on the side of a lonesome road.

Trail pleaded not guilty and went on trial first. He claimed he had accidentally strangled Loofe during a sex party that went off the rails.

The evidence was harrowing but the defence was steadfast that Loofe’s death resulted from “rough, consensual sex” and that she had agreed to participate with Trail in a “sexual asphyxiation” fantasy that would be filmed.

The dead woman agreed to be paid for the video, his lawyer added. An autopsy revealed Loofe had been strangled to death with an extension cord.

Hills, who split months before the murder, testified that Trail and Boswell had an elaborate plan for when they murdered someone.

“It was my understanding when we went out there everything would be set up like a tarp to do everything over.”

The women would kill while their “sugar daddy” watched.

Boswell and Trail were both convicted of first-degree murder. She got life, he’s got an appointment in the death chamber.

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The Mansfield family of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Spring Hill Florida, California and Parts Unknown, Nevada, have a history of depravity reaching back at least 80 years.

Things do tend to go off the rails when dad is a serial child molester. It started back in Michigan in 1946 when William Mansfield Sr. was arrested for raping a small girl he’d lured into a Grand Rapids matinee.

Dear old dad ended up pulling time — 10 years — for sex offences against children in Michigan, Nevada and eventually, Florida. During the decades of Billy Sr’s. evil sexual predilections, his wife Virginia turned a blind eye, insisting the victims were liars. No amount of evidence could convince her otherwise.

The Mansfield clan was an obscenity in and of themselves. Billy Sr. was arrested and convicted for the rape of five children between the ages of 5 and 10 in a long CV of depravity. And Mansfield pater was also known to encourage his sons to fight each other to toughen them up. Virginia gave a pass on the fisticuffs as well.

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His namesake, William Mansfield, Jr. known the world as Billy, was born back in Grand Rapids on Nov. 23, 1955. Now, the way Billy Jr. tells the tale, it is readily apparent that his Leave it to Beaver rendering of his childhood is a tapestry of half-truths and outright lies.

Childhood? It was fan-tastic

The sexually twisted scion has said he had a good upbringing, great relations with parents and siblings, blah, blah, blah. But when the lad was 14, he dropped out of high school and changed his birth certificate. Next stop: The U.S. Army.

At the time, the U.S. armed forces were bogged down in a harrowing quagmire in Vietnam. Did Billy Jr. sign up to go kill commies in Indochina?

Mansfield Jr. did not take any VC bullets but he later confessed he had developed an addiction to booze and drugs while in the service. And he desperately wanted to kill women.

Last week, Billy Mansfield Jr., now 70, told cold case detectives he is suffering debilitating health problems and fears the end is nigh. He claimed he wants to clear his conscience.

Mansfield Jr. is serving multiple life sentences for the murders of at least six women and girls between 1975 and 1980. The child molester and sex offender buried four of his victims in the backyard of his family’s raunchy Spring Hill, Fla. property.

Mansfield mansion? A ‘House of Horrors’

The location was referred to by cops and the media as the “House of Horrors.”

Now, the case has taken a new twist that was triggered by Mansfield himself.

“He may be lying to us. He may be delusional. He may be who knows what.”

The latest search stems from information tied to Billy Mansfield Jr. and his brother, Gary, who were arrested in Nevada in 1980 after a slew of horrific crimes. Junior was also charged with the rape and murder of a 29-year-old mother of three near Santa Cruz, Calif. He is currently caged at a medical facility in the Golden State where what’s left of his life is washing out to sea.

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In 1982, Billy pleaded guilty to the Florida murders, as well as an attempted sexual battery charge involving a fifth female victim. He copped to avoid VIP seating in the electric chair.

‘Specific behavioural tips’

Cops have been excavating locations near the family’s Florida property, Dry Creek Ranch and Sunshine Grove, scouring local woods and ranches. Detectives say they received “specific behavioral tips and historical leads.”

At the time of the grisly slayings, Mansfield’s mother and father obstructed cops and maintained their boy’s innocence.

The wide-ranging operation was launched in mid-June and investigators were using specialized archeological cadaver dogs, which have flagged the area with light hits.

Homicide detectives have never been exactly certain how many additional victims Mansfield may have murdered. Police have said that there may be several more victims — or none at all. Billy Jr. has reveled in muddying the waters.

Two of the confirmed victims were teenagers, Elaine Ziegler and Sandra Jean Graham, whose bodies were discovered on the Mansfield property in the early 1980s. Also recovered was Theresa Fillingim, identified in 2021, and a Jane Doe who remains known only to God.

Mansfield clan was twisted

Like Henry Lee Lucas, Mansfield was known to be a big talker. He claimed he had buried bodies in two other nearby Florida counties, Pasco and Pinellas.

It was that vile chatter that cops took seriously. Detectives always feared that there were more victims and in 2023, reopened the file in pursuit of missing women possibly murdered by Mansfield. Sadly, that effort came up empty.

Hernando County Sheriff Al Nienhuis explained that the likelihood of any new criminal prosecution resulting from a discovery is probably zero because Mansfield is already jailed for life.

“But, if there are bodies out here, we certainly want to give them a proper burial and give their families answers to what happened to their loved one.”

He said of Mansfield: “He is a very difficult individual to communicate with. He is certainly not a friend of law enforcement. He has indicated that he’s feeling some remorse because he’s getting closer to death.”

ADDENDUM

So far, police have indicated the searches have amounted to nothing burgers. Mansfield Jr. is on Year 45 of his dreary life behind bars, big brother and co-conspirator Gary Mansfield, 71, died in 2023. The rotten old man is also dead but details are sketchy as to the where, when and how. Good riddance.

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.Las Vegas has long been a town known for rolling the dice, literally and figuratively. A burg for new beginnings and shedding the putrid skin of failure, bad women, bad men and bad luck.

It’s also a predator’s town. Suckers and vulnerable young women are plentiful. Naive pigeons ripe for the plucking. And like the Hotel California, people check in but sometimes they can never leave.

One of those that never made it past the city limits was a homicide victim cops dubbed Sahara Sue Doe. Detectives were limited in a thousand ways at the time to the point it’s a wonder anything but the most obvious slam dunks were solved.

Las Vegas was broiling

Summer in Vegas hits the boiling point el pronto and August 1979 fit the mold. Las Vegas was exceptionally hot that year, featuring record-setting temperatures. The city recorded highs of 116F on August 1 and August 3, marking two of the hottest days in its history. The mercury hitting 100 F or higher was the norm that month.

For the rest of the country, including the Midwest and Northeast, it was a cool, rainy summer.

And here it was, the last summer of the 1970s, and the country was gasping through its dying days. Disco ruled the radio but seismic changes were underway through all facets of American life.

The victim had been stabbed to death

And in Sin City, a killer snuffed the life out of a teenage girl. That month, a man was walking through an open field where the El Rancho Vegas Hotel and Casino (formerly the Thunderbird with its Navajo motif) previously stood when he saw the body of a woman lying in the dirt. The teen was dead at the scene.

Clark County Coroner’s Office ruled her death to be a homicide following an autopsy.

She got the moniker Sahara Sue Doe because her corpse was discovered at the intersection of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara Avenue on Aug. 14, 1979. There was no identification, no papers, trinkets or anything else that might help detectives identify the girl.

The victim had been stabbed several times in the abdomen.

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She was white, had brown eyes and wavy light-brown hair, stood 5’6”and weighed about 100-105 lbs. Doe was between 15 and 30, wore dentures and her manicured nails were painted red.

Some of her clothing was gone and homicide detectives believed the killer may have taken them as souvenirs.

Victim seen in Vegas liquor store

An unidentified homicide victim makes busting the murderer significantly harder. There were, however, some leads.

During a canvass, cops found witnesses that had seen the attractive young woman with an unidentified man. The pair visited a long-closed liquor store near the intersection. Maybe an hour before the victim’s body was discovered.

A clerk at the liquor store said the man was maybe around 6’, thin and oddly, possessed a moustache that was a different color than the color of his hair. Within days of the discovery, detectives released a composite sketch of the man.

And then, nothing for decades. The case went cold fast as murders in places with big transient populations often do. Vegas fit the bill in that respect.

Out of the starting gate, police were tilting at windmills. There were no matches for fingerprints taken from the victim. Seven other missing women were ruled out and a comprehensive media campaign failed to generate any heat.

No connection to another missing woman

One of the possibilities that didn’t pan out were Sahara Sue Doe’s remarkable similarities to another missing woman, Deborah Rae Meyer. Meyer also disappeared in that broiling August of 1974, and had dentures. DNA would later torpedo the possibility that Doe was Meyer.

Forensic results on her clothes, released in 2016, revealed that she had spent time in California’s Napa Valley and the Central Valley before she was slain. One member of the public told cops their victim had ties to a trailer park. Another said she may have gone by the names “Shawna” or “Shauna”.

Cops also chased down leads that Sahara Sue Doe was possibly employed at a Holiday Inn or some other no-name motel on Las Vegas Boulevard.

The above strands came to nothing. It would take 44 years to identify the victim.

In September 2022, Vegas cold case detectives requested a forensic genetic genealogy investigation, and from there cops were able to identify and contact potential family members who gave DNA samples. That November, the unit was notified that Sahara Sue Doe had finally been identified through DNA.

Finally identified in 2022

Cold case Det. Terri Miller told 8 News Now that Texas-based Othram Labs, made the match through familial DNA.

The victim’s name was Gwenn Marie Story.

She was just 19-years-old, and her particular story was chillingly familiar.

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Through family members, investigators learned that the teenager had left Cincinnati in the early summer of 1979 with two male friends. Her quest was find her biological father who she believed lived in California. Vegas was a pitstop on the way home.

While three went west, just two returned. Story’s male companions returned to the Queen City later that August. Gwenn Marie Story did not. They told her family that she had decided to stay in Vegas. Story’s family never heard from her again.

Immediately, suspicion fell on her two male friends. Cops said they were starting at square one. Police weren’t sure if the man that was with Story at the liquor store during the last hour of her life was one of the men she was travelling with.

“Finally after 44 years of not knowing what happened to our sister Gwenn Story, we have news that she had been identified,” Story’s family said in a statement.

“We are looking for some closure on this case. Our family just wants some answers, we would really appreciate the help. Our family would also like to thank all the many detectives who have worked this case over the years at the Las Vegas Metropolitian Police Department. If it wasn’t for you, we would still be wondering where Gwenn is.”

Who murdered Gwenn Story?

Theories of what happened to Story abound.

Top of the list are Story’s two male travelling companions. Cops suspect that either the men were directly involved in her murder or know what happened to the teen. Publicly, their names have never been released. They remain “major” persons of interest.

Then there is the stranger danger theory with the finger pointed at the man in his late 20s who was seen in the liquor store with Story and hour before she was killed. Cops believe he may have lured her to the field where she was attacked.

Lastly, there’s the theory that Story may have been ensnared by a human trafficking ring.

Each theory is viable. But while cops have identified poor Gwenn Story, they still have a killer to catch.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s Homicide Cold Case Section is asking anyone with information about Gwenn Marie Story, or the two males she traveled to Las Vegas with to contact the Homicide Section by phone at 702-828-3521, or by email at homicide@lvmpd.com.

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Henry Lee Lucas was a known bullshitter. The one-eyed drifter was also a serial killer, although the fabulist wasn’t quite on the same page as Samuel Little.

At one point, Lucas claimed he had murdered more than 600 people. Many of his claims were outright disproven with others leaving cops highly skeptical.

Lucas’s motivation for spewing fibs about his homicidal activities was a combo of better food, smokes, milkshakes and the odd field day to crime scenes.

Serial murder confessor

The Texas Rangers caught up to Lucas, then 47, in 1983 for the murder of an elderly woman. He started talking and never shut up with some across the U.S. so desperate to clear their unsolveds Lucas’ lies were swallowed hook, line and sinker.

His kills littered the country, Lucas told riveted detectives. In fact, one of his earliest murders, he maintained, occurred in Duluth, Minnesota in the late 1950s.

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When Lucas’ tales began making headlines, detectives in Duluth thought of the Jan. 30, 1958, stabbing murder of Marie Bertha Heidman, a 49-year-old Northwestern Bell operator. She was discovered in the living room of her home at 717 N. Third Ave. E. in Duluth, she was clad in her PJs and housecoat.

Heidman had been stabbed twice in the heart with a sharp metal object. Investigators surmised the murder weapon was a knife. It has never been found.

Cops found the probe hard going from the beginning. There were no back alley abortions, late night threesomes or boozing. Heidman was a quiet, cheerful woman who lived alone and was devoted to the Sacred Heart Catholic Church.

‘Personal life beyond reproach’

The victim was also very careful.

And the crime scene offered few clues. There were no signs of a struggle or other tell-tale red flags in her tidy home. Nothing was missing and she had not been sexually assaulted.

Theories and whispers reverbated around Duluth and Superior. Cops thought maybe the killer simply exploded in a rage. A neighbor told detectives he thought someone had been sitting in their car watching Heidman, adding there had been fiddling with her lock in the days before the murder.

Case went cold very quickly

Cops unleashed lie detector tests, they appealed to the public, they brought in top police and scientific talent. They got nowhere fast and the case grew colder until it was as frozen as Lake Superior.

And then, 25 years after Heidman was murdered, a low-renter named Henry Lee Lucas was pinched for the murders of a number of people in Texas. Lucas admitted to the murder of 80-year-old Kate Rich. There was no doubt on that one: Rich’s bones were discovered in a wood-burning stove in Lucas’ shack.

Next came the Jane Doe off I-35. Detectives suspected the victim was Lucas’ common-law wife, Frieda Powell, just 15. She had been reported missing.

And then he substantially upped the ante by blurting out in court he had murdered 600 people.

Mom was a prostitute who made Henry watch

Henry Lee Lucas’s formative years would set the table for his brutally violent life.

Born in Blacksburg, Virginia in 1936, his family lived in a rundown cabin. His father had lost both legs in a railroad accident and acted as a pimp for Henry Lee’s prostitute mother, who often forced her son to watch as she sexually entertained men.

"I just couldn't stand there and watch. I had to turn my back and walk out of the house, and after I did that, she beat me, 'cause I didn't watch it."

He had been brutally beaten by his mother, brother and a teacher and as a result, lost an eye. His outcomes were written in stone: Reform school with graduation day being prison.

Now, in 1983, he was facing the electric chair in Texas.

“He has made a statement indicating he committed a homicide in the Duluth area in the late 1950s,” said Montague County District Attorney Jack McGaughey.

Had Lucas lived in the Duluth-Superior area?

A deeper dive revealed — as they often would — that Lucas’ claims about the Heidman murder weren’t adding up and were on the murky side.

“There’s absolutely no doubt that he admitted to and tried to admit to many crimes that he didn’t do,” former Texas Ranger Bob Prince told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1999.

Lucas said he didn’t enjoy killing

Lucas’ partner-in-crime, fellow serial killer Ottis Toole had once been eyed in another Duluth cold case. That was the 1979 murder of Ella Johnson, 84. While there were similarities with Heidman in the Johnson slaying again, the hard facts didn’t tally.

As a side note, law enforcement in Florida determined that Toole was the killer of six-year-old Adam Walsh in 1981. He was the son of America’s Most Wanted host and victim’s advocate, John Walsh.

Lucas said Toole enjoyed killing but claimed murder wasn’t his cup of tea. He killed his victims out of hate and the urge to perform necrophilia on the dead bodies.

“I don’t hate women, but I hate what they do,” Lucas said. “I hate the way they talk to people, the way they act to people, the way they do things they are not supposed to do. They put themselves in predicaments they shouldn’t put themselves in.”

Sentenced to death

Lucas would eventually be convicted of a more modest 11 murders. He was sentenced to death for the 1979 murder of Debra Louise Jackson, 23, in Georgetown. She would not be identified until 2019 but was instead famously known as “Orange Socks”.

But by 1985, Lucas was backtracking after the Dallas Times Herald exposed his tapestry of lies. He did, however, admit to killing his mother.

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Former U.S. President George W. Bush, then Texas governor, gave Lucas a reprieve in 1998. His sentence was commuted to life in prison days before he had been slated to die by lethal injection. Bush cited the doubts over some of Lucas’s outlandish claims as his reasoning.

Lucas was the only condemned killer to have his sentence commuted by Bush.

Lucas died of congestive heart failure at the notorious Huntsville prison on March 14, 2001. He was 64.

The brutal murder of Marie Heidman remains unsolved.

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No one really noticed at first, after all, America had always been a country on the move, but by the late 1950s that trend had become a runaway train.

Singles and families alike were packing up and ditching cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Buffalo and New York. Instead, they were eyeing opportunities in the Sun Belt. Weather, opportunity and a fresh start were the convincers.

One of the cities they were fleeing to was Tucson, Arizona. The city was transforming itself from a quiet desert community to a booming metro area. Everywhere you turned a new development was springing up from the desert.

Between 1950 and 1960, Tucson quadrupled in size, growing from about 55,000 residents in 1950 to more than 200,000 by the time the calendar hit 1960.

Tucson native Charles Howard Schmid Jr., 23, hung out at local drive-ins and juke joints that dotted the city’s East Speedway Boulevard. To the teens hanging out, Schmid was something of a Libertine.

Schmid told tall tales

Muscular and a one-time Arizona high-school gymnastics champ, Schmid always had wheels. He was quick when it came to spewing out tall tales and seemed to have money to burn. There were also the girls. Lots of girls and Smitty had their phone numbers.

Sounds good for Smitty, right? Well, there was a fly in the ointment.

Schmid stood just 5’3” and it ate his guts out. But if there is a will, there always is a way and Smitty added three inches to his height, using some of the same schemes as height-challenged thrill killer Charles Starkweather. To give himself a boost he stuffed rags and smashed tin cans into his boots.

But there was more, and Starkweather would not have approved.

The young man began dying his hair jet black, piling on the pancake makeup and topping off the package with pale cream lipstick, a bogus mole on his face and mascara. As a final touch, Schmid used a clothespin to stretch his lower lip to give himself an Elvis Presley pout.

Killer was a blabbermouth

To afford his best life, his adoptive mom fronted her boy dough every week.

Lying Charlie told his pals he got his cash stealing cars and smuggling them into Mexico. Or did the cash originate with the gaggle of girls whom he had instructed on “100 ways to make love”?

He would later learn that discretion is the better part of valor. In fact, no corpus delicti, no investigation. But he simply could not keep his mouth shit.

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In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 masterpiece, Rope, starring James Stewart, a dark scenario played out. Stewart had posited to two of his students about killing someone an getting away with it. It was an intellectual exercise intended in jest. His two students took it to heart.

As did Charles Schmid.

Alleen Rowe seemed like a good prospect for homicide. The 15-year-old high school student lived with her divorced mom who worked nights. Rowe made herself a target because she put the kibosh on casual sex with Schmid and some of his pals.

Schmid ordered his girlfriend, Mary French, to lure Rowe to accompany the group to the desert. She agreed but not long after arriving, Schmid held the now terrified girl’s arms behind her back before tying her up.

Schmid coldly replied: “It’s Mary French’s idea. She hates you.”

Rowe’s bathing suit was then ripped off and Schmid told the other man with them to get lost. When the man returned, Rowe was trying to get her clothes on after being raped by Schmid, who ordered the second man to rape Rowe as well. He could not sustain an erection.

Next, Schmid wanted the girl dead and for the man to bludgeon her with a rock but he refused. Instead, he murdered Alleen Rowe. When he returned to the car, he kissed French, telling her: “Remember, I love you.” The trio then buried Rowe.

Alleen’s mother Norma was worried sick and gave cops the names of Schmid, Saunders and French. They may have information, Norma told detectives and the trio were questioned but investigators believed Alleen was a runaway.

Sick show and tell

Charlie Schmid might have gotten away with his sinister crimes but he would not, and could not keep his mouth shut.

In June 1964, about a month after Alleen Rowe vanished, Schmid showed friend Richard Bruns, 19, where the girl had been buried in the desert. An agonizing secret to keep but Schmid was like a mentally-challenged peacock strutting his crimes around.

That August, Schmid met pretty blond 16-year-old Gretchen Fritz at a neighborhood pool. Gretchen was a rich girl, the daughter of a prominent heart surgeon. But like Schmid, the girl was no stranger to trouble. In fact, she had been booted from her private school. Gossip suggested she was involved in an armed heist.

The reality was that she had been classified as a pathological liar in dire need of psychiatric therapy.

Gretchen was possessive, jealous

Still, Gretchen was stunning and the pair began dating. But she was not what Schmid had bargained for. She was posessive, blindingly jealous. Fritz would become hysterical if she saw Schmid with other girls or learned she’d been left on the sidelines. He would later say she was calling him “five or six times a day.”

This was all too much for the young killer. He wanted out. So he spilled the beans about murdering Alleen Rowe. Schmid took Fritz to the burial site to show the troubled blond “what kind of guy I am.”

Fritz was already aware “what kind of guy” Schmid was. She had boosted his diary which provided more details on the Rowe murder and an admission her beau had shot and killed a 16-year-old boy.

Now, Fritz somehow had the idea she was holding the cards. She threatened to “ruin” him if HE tried to break up with her. Schmid called Fritz’s bluff on August 16, 1965 and strangled his 17-year-old girlfriend to death, along with her 13-year-old sister Wendy.

Cops suspected sisters were runaways

Cops also put the Fritz sisters down as runaways when they disappeared. Some of their friends opined they had run off to Mexico.

Once again, Schmid confessed to pal Richard Bruns. He had murdered the sisters and then revealed their bodies, buried in the sand. With the latest revelation Bruns became convinced that Schmid was either going to murder him or his girlfriend. He fled to his grandparents home in Ohio and confessed to them.

Bruns flew home to Tucson and told cops everything. Soon, Schmid was behind bars and charged with the murder of the Fritz sisters and Rowe. Cops also got to Mary French and the third member of the Rowe murder trio, John Saunders, 19. The pair spilled their guts.

Still in a chilling precursor to the present, it emerged that at least 30 teens who were friends of Schmid, by now known as the Pied Piper of Tucson, kept it buttoned.

ADDENDUM

Charles Howard Schmid was convicted of murder in 1966 and pencilled in for a date with the gas chamber. But the death penalty was put on ice in 1972 and his sentence was commuted to 50 years in prison.

There was an escape in 1972 when Schmid and triple killer Raymond Hudgens made good on getting out of the Arizona State Prison. The dastardly duo took hostages and were later recaptured.

While the Pied Piper of Tucson slithered out of being executed in the gas chamber, that only delayed the inevitable. On March 20, 1975, Schmid was stabbed 47 times by two convicts. He died of his injuries 10 days later.

Schmid’s corpse was then stolen from the morgue. Cops got it back.

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“I’m a scientist. I have a PhD in anthropology from the University of Texas. But when I went over there, I put a cross around my neck.” - Antonio Zavaleta, an expert on the occult at Texas Southmost College. Texas Monthly, 1989

Three international bridges link Brownsville, Texas, to notorious Matamoros, Mexico, where the good times are cheap.

Generations of South Texans have crossed the border for boozing, brawling and whoring. All three are easy to find south of the Rio Grande.

Mark Kilroy was hanging with pals

Forty minutes from Brownsville on the Gulf of Mexico is South Padre Island, a wet T-shirt wonderland that attracts tens of thousands of college kids from around the U.S. for the annual spring break booze-a-rama.

And apparently, the birdwatching is pretty good in South Padre, too. University of Texas at Austin student Mark James Kilroy was seeking birds of a different feather in the spring of 1989.

On March 14, 1989, Kilroy was in South Padre Island with pals when they became separated. The 21-year-old student was never seen alive again.

Some reports suggest he was snatched off the island. Others said it happened over the border in Matamoros where danger can be behind every corner. During that era, strange things were happening on both sides of the border.

Sara Aldrete was an exceptionally tall woman standing 6’1”, with striking looks and flowing brown hair framing her lovely face. While she lived in Matamoros, she attended Texas Southmost College where she played soccer and was a cheerleader.

According to Texas Monthly, she was courteous, friendly and always eager to please.

“She sat in my anthropology class all semester, an A student, always present, always friendly. I never saw her wear an emblem, an amulet, a talisman, any sign of black magic - and I’m trained to watch for such things; never heard her ask a weird question, even when we talked about weird religions,” Antonio Zavaleta said.

Blood-splattered altar

But at night, she would return to her parents’middle-class Matamoros home, lock her bedroom door and pray to Satan on a blood-splattered altar summoning the dark lord to do her bidding on this mortal coil.

Aldrete was leading a secret double life: Student by day, witch and devil worshipper by night.

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In the 1980s, Aldrete met the charismatic Adolfo Constanzo, a fortune teller and grifter turned cult leader. Constanzo marinated the young woman in the devil’s ways, black magic and witchcraft in a satanic gumbo of Santeria, Aztec warrior rituals and Palo Mayombe.

Constanzo initiated Aldrete into the cult and dubbed her La Madrina - the Godmother.

Cops would later say the cheerleader became as bloodthirsty as the cult leader, and there were plenty of blood sacrifices. They had sex once but he made it clear: He preferred men.

The cult mainly targeted drug dealers, stealing their dope and pushing it over the border. Constanzo told his followers that human sacrifice granted them immunity from law enforcement for their drug-smuggling operations. Win-win.

Warehouse was a killing floor

And at an old warehouse in Matamoros, they tortured and murdered scores of victims, their dismembered body parts cooked in a large pot.

Aldrete played an active role in the slaughter, investigators believed, and that included human sacrifice.

In one instance, Aldrete personally selected the victim to be butchered. He had the temerity to insult La Madrina and such effrontery needed to be punished. The leggy cheerleader lured the victim herself.

Then she supervised his agonizing death, cutting off his nipples before boiling him alive. Mexican media called her cult Los Narcosatanicos - the Narcosatanists.

Murder has never been in short supply in Matamoros. People disappeared all the time, part of the transient nature of border towns and the desperate scramble to enter the U.S. for a better life. That makes people vulnerable.

Cops closing in

But by 1989, homicide detectives in Mexico were beginning to take notice of the body parts in their midst. The homicidal rampage was more ghastly, more violent, more deadly. And When Mark Kilroy disappeared, that changed everything.

Aldrete had ordered cult members to bring her a white American male as a sacrifice. The details that later emerged were stomach-churning.

Kilroy was taken to a remote ranch where he was tortured and sodomized for hours by cult members before being ritualistically murdered with a machete blow. Cultists then removed his brain and boiled it in a pot. He was buried on the property with 14 of the group’s previous victims.

It didn’t take cops long to find the ranch but by then Aldrete, Constanzo and other fanatics were on the run. At the death ranch, investigators made the macabre discovery of human hair, brains, teeth and skulls.

On May 6, 1989, acting on a tip, detectives raided their Mexico City hideout in a blaze of bullets and Constanzo begged another cult member to shoot him. Ever dutiful, he blew the boss’s brains out.

‘You could smell the stench’

Former Chief Deputy of Cameron County, Carlos Tapia was horrified by the probe, particularly the farm where they found scores of bodies.

“I thought in my 22 years of law enforcement I had seen everything. I hadn’t. As we drew near, you could smell the stench...blood and decomposing organs,” Tapia said.

Authorities also discovered “voodoo paraphernalia,” a blood-splattered altar of sacrifice, cheap rum, human body parts, animal bones, chicken and goat heads, as well as the witch’s cauldron filled with the nauseating mixture of blood and flesh.

Years later, Tapia offered insight on the murders — cops estimate there were between 16 and 26 victims — that continue to haunt South Texas.

“In their wicked, distorted minds there was no seriousness. They thought they had performed some kind of heroic deed for the Devil. They believed that by sacrificing innocent human beings, their loads of marijuana would have an invisible shield of protection from law enforcement officers,” Tapia said.

Aldrete, now 61, was captured not long after and sentenced to 45 years in prison.

If she is ever released, American officials have said they’ll be waiting with extradition papers — and a needle.

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