Is there a serial killer on the prowl in Boston?

Below is my column as submitted to the editor of the Sturbridge Times Magazine for the July 2016 issue.  Please note, the title is different from the one published.

The young lady broken the story has done a lot of work.  If, after reading, by some miracle, someone has some information about what has happened, please leave a comment at the CryptidAntiquarian blog.  She has written a number of posts on the subject:

Post #1  Boston’s Mysterious Vanishing Men  February 20, 2016

Post #2  Boston’s Mysterious Vanishing Men (Follow Up) February 24, 2016

Post #3  Some More Thoughts on Zachary Marr July 31, 2016

Murder Most Foul?

It was more than two and a half decades ago that a horrible murder rocked Boston and everybody got it wrong. A devoted couple were driving home from childbirth classes at a Boston hospital when they were carjacked at a stop light. The husband was shot in the stomach and the pregnant wife's skull was pierced by a bullet.

The husband, Charles Stuart would recover. His wife, Carol DiMaiti Stuart would die at the hospital and the baby would perish 17 days later.

Following Charles' description, Willie Bennet, a local black man was arrested.

It was a heartbreaking story. A prosperous hard working couple suffering tragedy as the perfect life evaporated. No one could help but feel for the surviving husband.

Then it fell apart.

Charles' brother Matthew went to the police and admitted his part as accomplice in his brother's murder of Carol. Before he could be arrested, the murderer jumped off the Tobin Bridge.

There would be no end of recriminations. Innocent Willie Bennet was released and the authorities were pilloried for the rush to judgement.

I was one of the multitude who wrongly bought into the scam. I like to think I am no naif, but there was one big extenuating circumstance that convinced me a crime had been committed.

During wartime, it is not unknown for someone to fear being killed in combat, and shoot themselves such that they are not badly hurt but are unfit for action. Such an injury is known as “the million dollar wound.” Had Mr. Stuart pointed a gun at his leg and pulled the trigger, one likes to think we would have been a bit more skeptical.

Stuart did not do that. Putting a bullet in one's stomach is a dangerous thing to do, even if one had studied anatomy. In the annals of self-inflicted wounds to avoid combat or anything else, it is doubtful anyone has tried it. The man threw the police and the public off the track. What else could they've missed?

Or, be missing...now?

Over the past thirteen years 11 men in Boston have gone missing and ended up found dead in water. The police and regular media have not noticed anything untoward, but someone has.

Blogger Elise Soper is the first person to see a pattern.

Elise is a young woman of wide ranging interests and is curious about much. In fact, she refers to her blog, CryptidAntiquarian, as a cabinet of curiosities. She is inquisitive where the authorities and the Fourth Estate see nothing.

Ms. Soper stumbled on a Reddit post and it led to learning about the work of a David Paulides. He was onto pattern recognition in cases of people who after disappearing are found dead in national parks. Her interest in what he wrote led to her being more aware of such cases.

Like the detective she was becoming, she noticed something in November of 2015,

“After my obsession with unexplained missing persons cases was sparked by David Paulides (as chronicled in my last post) I couldn’t help but begin to notice them more, and then Dennis Njoroge went missing. I saw flyers posted all around Boston, his eyes following me daily, and my heart fell. I had a bad feeling in my gut as I began to connect him to other cases. I remember telling friends gravely that if the precedent was correct, he would be found dead in the Charles River.”

Sure enough, the young man was found in the river. The police suspected nothing un-toward and made little information public. Elise intimated she had made an effort to pry some loose.

She built the list of 11 and posted the pertinent information about the men and the circumstances, as far as is known.

The latest one was this past February. You probably heard about it as it was much in the news. Zachary Marr was celebrating his 22^nd birthday with relatives at the Bell in Hand, the country's oldest tavern in the Government Center area of downtown Boston. It was during our warm winter this year on a Saturday evening. The district is usually lively on a weekend.

Around 1:30 a.m. Zachary went outside for a cigarette. He sent a snapchat to his cousin to tell her they would not let him back in. She agreed to come to him, but he was gone when the cousin came out with the others. The bouncer says Marr did not try to come back in and CCTV does not record an attempt. About a month later, he was noticed in the water by the Museum of Science. To quote Elise, “Why he left the Bell in Hand and walked a mile to the Charles is unknown.”

Elise also has a map with where the victims were last seen alive and where they were found. It is all more than curious and one has to wonder about the blithe attitude of the constabulary. Ms. Soper does.

I have known BPD detectives and one was a relative. Yes, a police officer is a government worker with all that entails good or bad. My acquaintances have not lacked for subtlety. One should hope, forlorn as that may be, their lack of interest is feigned and they are playing close to the vest to protect the investigation.

Despite little help from the authorities, Elise Soper has done an excellent bit of sleuthing. In fact, it is even bigger than Boston. I am going to pay attention to CryptidAntiquarian going forward.

I've never been a Doors fan, but a line from what is probably their most known song, Riders on the Storm popped into my mind as I read about the case, “There's a killer on the road, His brain is squirming like a toad.” Whoever or whatever is out their may not be “on the road”, but this is hauntingly disturbing.

Feeling the bern for Sanders' Education plan - My column in the April 2016 Sturbridge Times Magazine

He shows some promise

“Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”

The words of H.L. Mencken must resonate with anyone paying attention this election season. Whether it's the open ended promise to “Make America Great Again” or the laundry list of Bernie Sanders.

At least Senator Sanders has also provided the electorate with a method of payment for his promises. His litany of programs each has a tax, tax increase or closed loophole that will do the trick. That is if, as the song goes, “the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars.”

Still, one should not get too excited about what is proffered during campaign season. If you've been around a bit, there is the perennial favorite, “middle class tax cut.” If everyone who made that pledge had fulfilled it, we would by now have negative tax rates.

The man from Vermont also wants to give the American worker a $15 an hour minimum wage. On the surface, that sounds like a winner. It does beg the question, why is $15 the magic number? Why not $20 or $50? I'll let the candidate's fans handle that one.

There is one of the Senator's proposals that does almost warm my heart. I say almost as I used to have a dog in the fight, but no longer. Several years ago, the looming tuition that was staring us in the face would have meant an eager embrace of one of the signature features of the man's campaign.

Bernie Sanders has proposed that public colleges and universities be tuition free. His rationale appears reasonable.

This is not a radical idea. Last year, Germany eliminated tuition because they believed that charging students $1,300 per year was discouraging Germans from going to college. Next year, Chile will do the same. Finland, Norway, Sweden and many other countries around the world also offer free college to all of their citizens. If other countries can take this action, so can the United States of America.

Well, if the Europe can do it, why not us? After all, does not public education benefit everyone?

So can it work? To look at the problem, we again turn to our official think tank, the Long Hill Institute of Educational Policy or LHIoEP for short. After their usual dillettantish investigation they were able to forthrightly come to the conclusion, maybe.

The countries that the Senator cites do have free tuition. How do they do it? In the case of Norway, there is a simple answer. Like most Scandinavian nations, there is a belief in equality so everyone can attain a post-secondary degree if they want it. It works maybe because not everyone wants it.

In spite of the near costless education, if your parents didn't attend college, you probably won't either. So why wouldn't people take advantage of it? One reason from an Hechinger Report article of last June notes that blue collar jobs pay well enough that everyone is more or less middle class. Kind of like when this country had no dearth of such work.

So if the whole country does not go, it is affordable. Of course, the Sanders plan claims that his system of paying for it will allow everyone to attend. His plan should appeal to all.

Whether or not the American people were saved by the bailout in 2008 is arguable. There was however one class that was, the bankers. The candidate wants to levy a fraction of a percent tax on “Wall Street speculators who nearly destroyed the economy seven years ago.” Certainly, we all want to see them pay, but if periodically we have to bail them out, we may have to figure something else out.

There is another problem. In theory if you tax something you get less of it and if you subsidize it, you get more. Some young people might have done a cost benefit analysis and decided that the debt made it not worth it. They might not come to that conclusion if it is near free. Some may go through school and come out with a career and a life. Many will major in fields lacking rigor and prospects. It will have been a pleasant four years at winter camp, but for naught.

That this is already happening is evident from the lampooning of grads who can't get jobs in their field as is heard on Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion. His retinue will occasionally do a sketch about The Professional Organization of English Majors or P.O.E. M. The words, “Do you want fries with that” have been uttered.

Another consequence is the non-public colleges that will go out of business because competing with free is too much of a disadvantage. Places like Harvard, which is a hedge fund with courses, need not worry. Some small yet solid institutions may go to the wall.

Norway like the other Scandinavian countries is not huge. Even with its North Sea oil, it has to adjust means to ends realistically. In this country, reality rarely rears its ugly head in primary season.

the Long Hill Institute of Educational Policy has pinpointed one group that is passionately supporting Bernie 's plan. College administrators are audibly salivating.

My review of Harvey Silverglate's Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent

Below is my review of Three Felonies A Day that appeared in the Sturbridge Times April 2016 issue.

Big Brother Is Watching and Ready to Pounce

Book Review by Richard Morchoe

When you get up this morning, you're in trouble. You don’t realize It, but you are a criminal. Yes my fellow average American, it may be true. By the time sleep comes over us, thrice we will have transgressed Federal Law.

That is the contention of Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Attorney Harvey Silverglate. Is it more than hyperbole?

Attorney Silverglate is not without qualifications. With a Harvard Law degree, he has been an advocate for civil liberties for over four decades. More recently, he has been concerned with free speech issues on campus. Along with Professor Alan Kors he authored The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses. Both men are in no sense conservatives so their critique of the tyranny of political correctness, as it holds sway in college, carries some weight.

The two men co-founded the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Attorney Silverglate is Chairman of the Board of Directors.

The book's argument is maybe best illustrated by two cases, that of Theodore Anzalone and that of Bradford Councilman. Though almost two decades apart, they bookend the descent of the American legal system in its willingness to ruin lives for little purpose.

In the early eighties, Theodore Anzalone was a fundraiser for Boston mayor Kevin White. The then U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, William Weld, wanted to take down White and the way to do it would be to get someone to testify against him. Getting something on Anzalone and making a deal for his testimony was the plan.

The Feds got a conviction on Anzalone for splitting up deposits and making them for under $10,000 so that the bank would not have to report them. Legal at the time, the judge decided on his own that it was still a crime and the jury agreed.

The appeals court saw through Weld's gimmicky prosecution and the judge's bad instructions and reversed the verdict. They did the right thing, but would they always?

Almost two decades later, the same court, but with a different makeup, did not. Bradford Councilman was Vice President of a company that provided an online listing service for rare and out of print books. His company also supplied email addresses and served in that capacity as an ISP or internet service provider.

Councilman was accused of backing up client messages in order to get an unfair advantage in pricing and violating the federal wiretap statute. The accused claimed he never read the messages, Was storing them a crime?

The appeals court went back and forth and finally under intense pressure reversed the district court judge's dismissal. We have come from the Anzalone case where the tribunal refused to see a crime where one wasn't to what is now the opposite. The judiciary increasingly is all too willing to cooperate almost as part of the prosecution.

Silverglate notes the result of this is many ruined lives and shattered civil relationships when things that should not be crimes are so interpreted. This is not to say there are not real criminals in the world doing evil, but the prosecutors need not seek to find everything a crime.

Can anything be done?

Alan Dershowitz, in his foreword, suggested that the attorney general should not be the appointee of the president and thus not political. The author does not think that would do much and it is hard to disagree.

Attorney Silverglate seems to suggest everybody behave better and who would not want that? Defenders should see themselves in this climate as civil liberties lawyers and the press should be far more skeptical. Good ideas but hardly enough.

The author notes that there are many vague laws that can be stretched to catch the citizen for crimes he was unaware of. Maybe we need to reduce the number of statutes and their size. As Cicero noted, “A corrupt state has many laws.” One should expect a long wait for that.

Silverglate has laid out a compelling case concerning prosecutorial overreach. Do we, out here in the exurbs, have to worry about three indictments du jour? Probably not for most of us if only because we are too low for the radar. That hardly means it is not a problem. It could happen even if it doesn't.

You might say, at least no one gets killed. Well, not exactly.

Last year Harvey Silverglate would be a featured speaker at a rally in memory of Aaron Swartz. Swartz had been involved in what could be called a case of electronic trespass and theft. The state had seemed to come to the conclusion that it had been much ado about not too much and were ending their involvement. At this point, Carmen Ortiz, US Attorney for Massachusetts grabbed it. According to Silverglate, "Tragedy intervened when Ortiz’s office took over the case to 'send a message'."

The squeeze on Swartz did send a message and Swartz, an internet freedom activist, would commit suicide.

That message was not just for Aaron.