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The Duley Murders

I have an admission to make. The horrific tragedy that took place on the Edisto River this week is only 4,000 meters from home on a road that I have made many trips (church, softball games, golf course, even a bike ride or two, and a few runs). Shillings Bridge Road links US 178 to US 301/601 and is a rural road that runs through many farms, a church, and links to schools in the area. From the time I make the left turn off Lake Edisto Road to Shillings Bridge the boat ramp in question is easily seen, next to a few houses as the road crosses the Edisto River.

I remember the Susan Smith incident in the Upstate in Union County in November 1994 (new style; there was no October 1994 because of a declaration on September 14, 1994 that cancelled the month) and wondered if that media case was more serious than usual because of a lack of newsworthy events caused by incidents the previous month. Instead of talking about Game 3 of the Fall Classic (which, btw, was lucky for the kyojin), the media was adrift in the Susan Smith incident. In that incident, we had a Medea who plead for the safe return of the children she had killed herself by driving the vehicle into the lake in question. With the lack of newsworthy stories because of the labour situations that resulted in the Long November, the media was relegated to pressing this story every day. She later admitted she killed the children.

I saw a parallel with this heinous act. Miss Duley killed her two children at a motel on US 301 Monday night (did not say which one, but there are some shady motels in the area before you access Shillings Bridge), strapped their corpses into child seats, and drove the car into the boat ramp to simulate a drowning. A dispute between Miss Duley and her mother had taken place, and on the first day of school for most children, two were dead.

This year was the first time since 2001 that a Sanctity of Human Life Sunday was not declared by the White House (instead we had celebrations of the promotion of baby murder, and sexual deviants), and it reminds me that we have lost Official Sanction of the Sanctity of Human Life (having participated in our state March for Life the past 13 years, two National Right to Life Conventions, and a few dinners) has me wondering. We go from abortion to euthanasia, and “dilation and extraction” (partial-birth) abortion (illegal under federal law) (where the baby arrives feet-first and the doctor kills the baby before the head exits the uterus), to where full children are allowed to be murdered by their mothers in grief. The disgust of this incident is beyond belief. We also are no longer allowed to punish teenage murderers with appropriate penalties, but coddle them under foreign law. Surely the wrath of removing the sanctity of human life has come to us. ◙

Dominick Dunne, R.I.P.

By Mitchell Hadley

Dominick Dunne, it seems, knew everyone and did everything.

He was a veteran of the literary circuit, a Hollywood producer, a constant fixture wherever the stars were on both coasts. He succeeded, he failed, became an addict, sobered up, and succeeded again. He could drop names with the very best of them, and the names he dropped were always heavy ones.

He was the brother of John Gregory Dunne, which made him the brother-in-law of Joan Didion. He was a survivor - the murder of his daughter and the lenient sentence her killer received propelled him into the area of true crime, which he made his own personal domain, and it propelled him back to the front pages.

He was a successful author, lighting up the pages of Vanity Fair with his accounts of the trials of the rich and famous. He was a familiar face on television, both on his own show on CourtTV and as a guest of Larry King’s. It was said that he was the people’s representative at the trials he covered, and each night he would tell you what he’d seen as if you were an old and trusted friend.

He wrote best sellers. The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. People Like Us. An Inconvenient Woman. A Season in Purgatory. He was a most outspoken critic of the O.J. Simpson fiasco, believing beyond doubt that Simpson was guilty of murder, a story he told in his memorable novel, Another City, Not My Own.

Dominick Dunne died of cancer today, at age 83. There is some irony in the fact that he died the day after Edward Kennedy, insofar as he chronicled the story of Michael Skakel, the nephew of Ethel Kennedy (widow of Robert), in A Season in Purgatory. I imagine he might have appreciated that irony, or at least acknowledged it.

I enjoyed watching him on television. I enjoyed reading his books. I’ll miss him, but the wonderful thing about words is that they have the power to live long after their authors have departed, and for that we can always be grateful.

This Just In

By Steve

Petters, Castroneves Announce Racing, Criminal Defense Partnership

(ELK RIVER, MN – October 11) Millionaire businessman Tom Petters today announced his sponsorship of an Indy Racing League team for the 2009 season, and that he had signed two-time Indianapolis 500 champ Helio Castroneves as his principal driver.

Speaking from the Sherburne County jail in Elk River, MN, where he is currently being held on charges of mail and wire fraud, money laundering and obstruction of justice, Petters announced the partnership with Castroneves, who was the big winner in 2007’s “Dancing with the Stars” and is presently under federal indictment for conspiracy and tax evasion.

“It was a no-brainer,” Petters said of the Castroneves signing. “Helio and I have a great many interests in common. Our common background and shared passion made this a natural relationship. We’re also pretty creative in figuring out ways to stay one step ahead of the . . . competition.”

Smiling through a glass partition at reporters who had gathered in the visitors' center at the jail, Petters added, "Helio's a winner. They don't call him the 'Spider Man' for nothing. His tradition of climbing the fence after race victories could come in quite handy for 'Team Petters' in the future."

Petters spoke optimistically about his new venture, which would mark his initial foray into motor sports. Castroneves, who won 12 Indycar victories racing for Roger Penske, will drive the number 02158758 car for Team Petters, sporting a distinctive black-and-white striped color scheme. Petters said the car would run a limited IRL schedule in 2009, competing only in races in Algeria , China , Saudi Arabia , Zimbabwe , and other countries which currently lack an extradition treaty with the United States . He said that in future years, races held in Caribbean island countries might be added to the schedule.

“People might be wondering how we’ll be able to pull this off,” said Petters, speaking rapidly as his phone call minutes dwindled away. “But we’re not going to let little things - external distractions like multiple felony indictments, possible life imprisonment - get in our way. We're focused! We’re winners! But I’ve go to go now, we’re having chipped beef on toast for dinner.”

A spokesman for Team Petters said that the Petters-Castroneves partnership would extend to shared services for their upcoming criminal trials, and did not rule out the possibility of asking federal authorities for a joint trial, even though the two men have been charged with separate crimes. "A good legal defense is like a good pit crew," he said. "You need teamwork and cooperation all around."

He added that sponsorships and other financing details for Team Petters were still under discussion at press time.

The World That Was and Never Will Be

By Mitchell

There's a striking passage in The Power Broker, Robert Caro's epic biography of New York City's master planner Robert Moses. Actually, there are a lot of striking passages, as you might expect from a 1,200 page book that won the Pulitzer Prize. But this excerpt struck me in a particular, a "here's another fine mess you've gotten us into" kind of way.

You might think this book is nothing more than the remarkable story of Moses, but it's also tantamount to a biography of the modern New York City, for you can't really tell the story of one without also telling the story of the other, and you can't really tell the story of the United States in the post-war era without understanding both of those stories. The excerpts are lengthy, but if you'll bear with me I think you'll find it's worth it.

Therefore, unlike a public work on Long Island, a public work in the city had to be planned not only in terms of itself but in terms of its environment, the neighborhood in which it was located. It had to be judged not only in physical terms – highway as highway, park as park – but also in social terms: in terms of its effect on the human beings who had to live around it. If in creating public works on Long Island, one could paint on a clean and empty canvas, in creating public works in New York City one had to paint over an already existing mural, a mural whose brush strokes were tiny and intricate and often, when one looked closely, quite wonderful, lending to the vast urban panorama subtle shadings and delicate tints and an endless variety, so that if it was crowded and confused and ugly it was also full of life and very human, so much so, in fact, that while the painting as a whole might lack beauty, order, balance, perspective, a unifying principle and an over-all effect commensurate with its size, it nonetheless possessed many charming little touches and an over-all vitality, a brio, that made it unique and should not be lost. If Moses attempted to employ on the canvas of New York City the same broad brush strokes that he had used on the canvas of Long Island, he would be obliterating the city’s intricacies indiscriminately instead of working around those that were worth keeping and preserving them – and while this method might result in the creation of something beautiful and good, adding to the mural new values, it would also almost certainly destroy many existing values. A public work in the city might in terms of itself – Moses’ terms – be an excellent public work while in broader terms being a poor public work: a highway, for example, that, however magnificently designed, was damaging either to the adjacent neighborhood – shattering its essential unity, cutting its homes off from its playground or from its churches and shopping areas, filling its quiet residential areas with noise and gasoline fumes that made them no longer nice places to live and to bring up children – or to the city as a whole: a highway, for example, through a hitherto sparsely inhabited area that initiated a sudden influx of subdivisions and apartment houses, loading it with people, before the city had provided the sewers and subways and schools those people needed, and that by boosting land costs made it immensely difficult for a financially hard-pressed city to provide such services – services which could, if installed before the highway was built, have been installed at a price within the city’s means. (Emphasis added.)

And the only way of knowing and understanding it was to study and learn about it, to find out how many children lived in it and how old they were, what games they liked to play, what games their parents liked to play with them on weekends, what games their parents liked to play among themselves, to find out whether the parents liked to play games at all or simply to sit quietly and talk, whether the neighborhood’s teen-age boys wanted a place to walk after dinner and watch the neighborhood’s teen-age girls walk or whether they wanted to spend their time after dinner playing basketball, to find out which streets the neighborhood’s mothers considered safe enough so that their children could cross them alone and thus use a playground on the far side whenever they wanted and which streets the mothers considered too dangerous, to find out exactly how far the children were willing to walk to get to a playground in the first place. And there was only one way to learn about a neighborhood: listen to its people, discuss their problems with them. Unless Moses did that – not Moses himself necessarily; his lieutenants or the architect designing the specific playground in question – he simply wouldn’t, couldn’t, know enough about the neighborhood to satisfy its needs.

This might speak to you about the abuse of power, of the bureaucrat run amok, the arrogance of the ruling class, the growing loss of power by the ordinary citizen. All this is true, but what struck me in this excerpt is the story of the neighborhood. What is truly radical to modern sensibilities is the concept of a neighborhood as being self-sustaining, with its own playgrounds, its own churches, its own shopping areas. There's so much to this one concept, it's almost too much to go into in this small space. It's true that in many major cities you can still find vital neighborhoods where people think of themselves as residents more of the neighborhood than the larger city. But as the size of cities as increased, the distance between them has decreased, thanks to the evolution of the car as a virtual appendage, for example - we think nothing of driving miles and miles to jobs, to church, to shopping. The very idea of neighborhood schools is one that disappeared long ago.

Perhaps more striking, but hardly unrelated, is the concept of a neighborhood as a living, breathing entity. A place where people knew their neighbors and socialized with them, where children were known to all and watched by all. No doubt the idea of "all for one and one for all" can be romanticized to absurd extremes, but it remains true that in our mobile and rootless society, in a culture where we barely speak the same language let alone share the same values, we have suffered greatly from this tear in the social fabric.

For it's harder and harder to say that we belong to anything, other than to ourselves. This too is hardly a new concept, as Robert Putnam pointed out in Bowling Alone. We go wherever we have to in order to get what we want, because we can. We live wherever we want, because we can. Builders construct new neighborhoods out of undeveloped land, miles and miles away from any central business district, and people move there and put up with the commute because it's the only way they can afford the lifestyle they want. We live in our own little sanctuaries within our ever-increasing homes; we use Tivo to create our own television schedule; we walk down the street plugged in to our iPods, blissfully unaware of our surroundings.

I was most struck personally by the idea of the neighborhood church. Nowadays, we're so used to going to extremes to find a church that satisfies our needs that we think nothing of a 30 minute commute to church, often driving by two or three others on the way. We have to watch movies like Going My Way to recall a time when the parish was truly seen as a guardian of the neighborhood. And this is far from unrelated to the topic, for the divisons that wrack so many denominations today can trace their roots back to social upheaval - perhaps not the upheaval that resulted from Moses' unique brand of social engineering, but it came from that same bolt of cloth - the challenging of accepted norms and ideas, the tearing out of the very roots that had keep us in place for so long, leaving everyone just a little uncertain about everything, past, present and future.

Caro concludes this section with the tragic story of Sunset Park, a Brooklyn neighborhood that was devistated by Moses' construction of the Gowanus Parkway. Had Moses been willing to listen, to work with local residents, to put value into the opinions of anyone but himself, he might have built the Parkway one block over, where it would have run through a part of Sunset Park that was truly in need of renovation. Instead, incorporating it as part of Third Avenue, the neighborhood's main street, he created a monster, a street too wide and too busy for families to cross. Half of the retail disappeared due to the widening of Third Avenue; the rest suffered from lack of business as more and more shoppers turned to stores that were more easily accessible. As Third Avenue started to fail, the blight that the neighborhood had sought for so long to hold off made deeper and deeper incursions, and the residents who had for so many years provided stability to the neighborhood began to move out.

Drugs, homelessness, crime, people searching for identity and looking in the wrong places. You can create a grocery list of the problems plaguing society today, problems that increasingly aren't limited to the inner cities. You can make all the lists you want, including lists of possible solutions, solutions that too often fail for lack of funding, lack of dedication, lack of thinking. This isn't the place to debate those solutions, not really. (Although it seems folly to suggest that values wouldn't play a part in it, or a sense of belonging, or a recreation of our neighborhoods and urban areas through sensible planning - and perhaps a reining in of our more materialistic, more individualistic tendencies.)

But what is clear is that without understanding the past, without appreciating the many elements that conspired to change the world that was (this barely scratches the surface, I'm afraid), we can hardly lay claim to understanding the world that is, let alone the world that is to come. It's true that we can't turn back the clock, not completely. When the genie is out of the bottle, it's no use trying to get the cork back in. But if we don't at least try to understand what it was about the past that seems so appealing today, what it was that we had and lost, then how much hope can there be for tomorrow?

Trial of the Century

By Mitchell

Fifty-three years ago tomorrow, sometime in the early morning of July 4, 1954, in the Cleveland suburb of Bay Village, Marilyn Sheppard was murdered. Her husband, Dr. Samuel H. Sheppard, was charged with the crime, and convicted by a jury. Those are the plain facts, what we know for certain.

This we also know for certain: the Sam Sheppard murder trial was made for today’s media. It was perhaps the most sensational murder trial of the century to that point, with reporters from all over the country (radio, television, newspapers) converging on Cleveland for their frenzied coverage of the trial. (Greta and Nancy must curse that they weren't in the business back then.)

And what a trial it was, a spectacular affair lasting eight weeks and including all the elements today’s news networks would crave – sex, money, prestige. And then there was the added bonus, as the columnist Dorothy Kilgallen put it, that “it [was] equally possible for the rational mind to find him innocent or guilty.”

It happened so long ago, and yet the details seem strangely familiar. If one were to judge by the headlines screaming from the tabloids and being shouted from the cable news networks, we’re currently undergoing an epidemic of such killings. Every month or so we’re flashed the picture of a woman who’s either dead or missing. Invariably, the prime suspect – the only suspect – turns out to be the husband, boyfriend, or lover. As we had known from the start. And invariably, we’re left to wonder why this one thought he could get away with it, when the others couldn’t.

The Sheppard case fits the description to a T. Attractive wife, socially prominent husband, infidelity on his part, a bloody murder. The hubby pleads innocent, telling a intriguing, if implausible, story of a bushy-haired intruder, but we all know he's the one who did it. He’s hauled into court, put on trial, convicted (after five days of deliberation by the jury), sentenced to life in prison. Appeals follow, but they’re all doomed to failure. There’s even the involvement of a famed real-life detective novelist whose investigation claims to exonerate the prisoner (Erle Stanley Gardner, creater of Perry Mason, whose Court of Last Resort worked on Sheppard's behalf). The only thing missing, back in the 50s, was the Lifetime movie.

Perhaps the movie would have left out the final twist, though – the appearance of a soon-to-be world-famous defense attorney, the shocking revelation uncovered by a world-famous journalist (Kilgallen, who years later disclosed that the original trial judge told her, before the start of the trial, of his opinion that Sheppard was "guilty as hell"), a stunning success in appellate court when so many appeals through the years had been denied, a landmark Supreme Court decision followed by a new trial in 1966, and with it a new verdict – not guilty.

It was all there, and there’s no reason to think the Sheppard trial wouldn’t be just as big a sensation today as it was 53 years ago, even as it continues to fascinate us now.

It's always been assumed that the Sheppard case was the inspiration for The Fugitive (substituting Kimball's one-armed man for Sheppard's bushy-haired intruder), but Roy Huggins, the series’ creator, has always insisted the real basis was Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, with its story of the obsessed detective Javert and his endless pursuit of the fugitive Valjean.

The case has been the subject of numerous books and articles throughout the years, including one authored by that lawyer who was made famous by the trial: F. Lee Bailey. Sheppard himself wrote (or had ghostwritten) a book maintaining his innocence, but other books have insisted on his guilt. (It’s even been the focus of an episode of Nova, which certainly proves its importance, because we all know PBS doesn’t waste time on anything that isn’t important.)

And to this day, despite all the effort, we’re still not really sure what happened. The famed Supreme Court decision overturning Sheppard’s conviction made no judgment as to his guilt or innocence – simply ruling that the pretrial publicity, along with the bias of the trial judge, had made it impossible for Sheppard to receive a fair trial. (The case, Sheppard v. Maxwell, which defined the limits to which a free press could go in covering trials, is standard reading today in any Constitutional law class.)

In 1975 it was made into a three-hour TV movie on NBC, Guilty or Innocent: the Sam Sheppard Murder Case, starring George Peppard in a fine performance as Sheppard, coming complete with a story in TV Guide backgrounding the case. This was where I first became familiar with the story of Sam Sheppard. Rewatching the movie today, it still holds up: the semi-documentary feel, with black-and-white stills reenacting various aspects of the case, and with actors in the story directly addressing the camera, as if they were telling the viewer their character’s story.

The movie gets the period elements right: the dark paneling of the courtroom in 1954, the large globe lights hanging down from the ceiling, the heavy blinds in the windows, keeping out the musty sunlight. The grey suits, the big cars, the men’s hats, the flowered wallpaper, the blood red lipstick. Think Perry Mason, but darker, without Mason’s light of justice to pierce the darkness of death and uncertainty.

In the twelve years between Sheppard’s trials we see time change; the dark 50s paneling of the courtroom (the same one he was originally tried in according to the movie, although in reality it was across the hall from the original) now replaced by light-colored walls and modern lighting. Sheppard himself becomes grayer, thicker around the waste, even as the cars become longer and more sleek, and the clothes louder and more garish. Put more plainly, Sheppard enters prison two years after Korea; he emerges in the middle of Vietnam. Regardless of the merits of a script and cast, a movie set in a particular time and place is nothing if it doesn’t live within its period.

Sheppard emerges in this story as a sympathetic character, due in large part to the portrayal by George Peppard. (The movie is largely based on Jack Harrison Pollack's book Dr. Sam: An American Tragedy, in which Pollack leaves no doubt that he believes in Sheppard's innocence.) Peppard offers a subtle performance; you're meant to identify with him, but there's something about Peppard-as-Sheppard that leaves you slightly disconcerted, the inscrutible look in his eyes that leaves you asking yourself, "well, maybe. . ." It's painful watching Peppard, an actor I've always liked, show us Sheppard's slow descent into the dissolute lifestyle that ultimately claims his life in 1970.

William Windom co-stars as "Walt Addison," a journalist who serves as a kind of Greek chorus and is probably a composite of Pollack and Chicago Tribune writer Paul Holmes, whose Sheppard Murder Case was one of the first books to declare Sheppard's innocence. Most of the other names have been changed from the real-life characters, with the exception of Walter McGinn's assured performance as the cocky, assured young Lee Bailey. And while the movie is, as I say, sympathetic to Sheppard, leading one in the direction of his innocence, it ultimately allows the viewer to form his own opinion.

So if Sheppard didn't do it, who did? Bailey thought the killer was the jealous wife of a neighbor. (He felt only a woman could have inflicted the brutal injuries to Marilyn Sheppard in that particular manner; a man of Sam Sheppard's strength would have utterly obliterated her skull.) Others pointed to a handyman who had known access to the Sheppard household and was subsequently conviced of similar murders. In the 90s, Sheppard's son brought a civil suit against the state of Ohio for wrongful imprisionment, but lost. Jury deliberations revealed that many still thought Sheppard had done it.

And so we come to today. The jury is, so to speak, still out and probably always will be. Despite theories on both sides, it's likely that - barring some miracle - the court of public opinion will product a hung jury. (We've only touched a bare sliver of all the information about the case - this site provides a wealth of information and links.)

But there are some things we know. People will continue to die, murders will continue to be committed. Spouses and loved ones will always be prime suspects, and the guilty ones will continue to amaze us as to why they thought they could get away with it when nobody else could. And there's one more thing we know.

The media, like the poor, we will always have with us. And as long as this is the case, the circus will always be in town.

Not the First Time

By Drew

As a postscript to this week's Virginia Tech shootings, you hear a lot about how this was the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. It was not, however, the first to occur on a college campus. Charles Whitman was the sniper who, on August 1, 1966, killed 15 people from his perch atop the 27-story tower at the University of Texas.

Read here for more information about this equally bleak moment in American history. And if you get a moment, check out You Tube for KRLN-TV's disturbing live coverage of the shooting as it happened. (We'll try to provide a link for this later in the week.)