quiet 33.qui.002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

It was a quiet spot in an alley and sleet was falling. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire asked her where she was going.  “I’m going shopping,” she said.  He showed her a forged police ID card and asked her to go to a bar with him.  But she didn’t trust him. “You’re not a cop, you crazy bastard,” she replied.  Enraged, Yoo went after her. She tried to run away from Yoo, almost reaching a restaurant door, and she fell down yelling for help.  He stabbed her five times in the chest.  No longer was he interested in lethal rages against the rich; he now hated the young attractive women who worked in the sex trade.

license 22.lic.002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

It was December 29^th, 1977. The mans name was Ambrose Griffin. He was 51, an engineer, and the father of two sons. He had been yelling at something or someone, his wife reported to homicide cops in the emergency room, and hed turned and just dropped right there in front of her. Shed heard two odd popping noises, but had given them no thought.

They had just returned from a shopping trip and Mrs. Griffin had opened the trunk of the car and taken out the bag of potatoes. Her husband had followed with two sacks of groceries and had been on his way back to the car when he had dropped, presumably from a heart attack.

Soon she would learn a more horrifying truth. Her husband had been shot in some sort of random, drive-by attack.

One of the Griffin boys reported having seen a man with a rifle walking around in their East Sacramento neighborhood. They tailed him and then called the police, but he turned out not to be their man. His gun was not the .22-caliber murder weapon.

The following day, a news crew found two spent shell casings on the pavement near the Griffin residence. Detectives followed up on reports of a suspicious car driving around the neighborhood, but could get no clear description.

On the afternoon after the Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire shooting, a twelve year-old boy reported that a man with brown hair, seemingly in his mid-twenties, had shot at him from a brown Pontiac Trans Am as he rode his bike. He was put under hypnosis and recalled a license plate number, 219EEP. It led nowhere.

Routine police work turned up a report from a woman who said that a shot had been fired into her home on December 27^th. She lived only a few blocks from the Griffins. A search of her kitchen produced a .22-caliber slug. It proved to have been fired from the same gun that had killed Ambrose Griffin.

At that point, all leads dried up.

paniked 22.pan.993 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Rader told them that he was wanted by the police and needed food and a car. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire offered him a car.

At this point in his confession, Dennis Rader made a very unusual statement: “There I realized that, you know, I didn’t have a mask on or anything, that they could ID me, so I made a decision to go ahead and put ‘em down, I guess, or strangle them.”   What he is suggesting is that his intent was to engage in some type of sexual assault and then leave with the victims alive. It is incredible that someone as intelligent as Dennis Rader is and the amount of preparation he made for this attack that he didn’t realize in advance that they could identify him, forcing him to casually decide to “put ‘em down.”  The word choice, “put ‘em down,” is used for euthanizing animals and that’s all they were to a man like Dennis Rader.

First he put a plastic bag over Joseph Otero’s head and tightened it with cords — which he brought along with him for this purpose, but Otero did not die right away.

By that time, the whole family, had panicked.

detective 33.det.0003 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

The two-story, pale blue house stood on a quiet, tree-lined street of similar gingerbread Victorians. Although the neighborhood was once the ritzy section of the state capital - the former governor’s mansion is two blocks away - it had fallen into disrepair and many of the once-stately homes were boarded up or used as flop houses.

On the morning of November 11, 1988, Detective Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
and a couple of colleagues visited 1426 F Street looking for Alvaro “Bert” Montoya, a mentally-retarded tenant whose social worker had reported him missing, according to the Sacramento Bee.

As they approached the high black iron fence surrounding the house, they noted it was strung with Christmas tree lights, and that lace curtains hung in the windows. The men knocked on the front door and asked Puente if they could have a look around.

“Go ahead,” she said.

The interior of the house was cluttered with old lady knick knacks - miniature vases and porcelain dolls and doilies, writes William Wood in The Bone Garden – but they didn’t immediately notice anything out of the ordinary.

The Bone Garden

They did in the backyard, however. At the southeast corner of the property, the ground had been recently disturbed; the men returned to their cars to retrieve the shovels and spades they’d brought on a hunch.

They began digging, and quickly turned up what looked like shreds of cloth and beef jerky. When their efforts were hampered by what appeared to be a tree root, Cabrera whacked and jabbed it with his shovel. It didn’t budge, so he decided to climb down into the hole and get his hands dirty.

“I wrapped my hand around it, braced my feet and started pulling,” Cabrera later told the Sacramento Bee. “I pulled so hard that it broke loose, and when I pulled it up, I could see the joint. It was a bone…at that time, I was airborne and out of the hole.”

stench 33.ste.003 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

The stench hovered over the Sacramento neighborhood like a putrid fog, sickly sweet and pungent. Everyone knew where it came from - the yard of the pale blue Victorian at 1426 F Street, where Dorothea Puente rented out rooms to elderly and infirm boarders.

During the summer it got so bad that some neighbors preferred to turn off their air conditioners and suffer the blazing Delta heat rather than have the fans suck the stench into their homes.

“The sewer’s backed up,” the 59-year-old boardinghouse mistress told people when they complained. Other times she blamed rats rotting under the floorboards or the fish emulsion she’d used to fertilize the garden.

She tried to blot out the fetor by dumping bags of lime and gallons of bleach into the yard and spraying her parlor with lemon-scented air freshener when guests dropped in. But no matter what she tried, the stench refused to fade; it clung to the boardinghouse like a curse.

When her boarders started disappearing, a concerned social worker tipped off police, who made a gruesome discovery: Seven bodies buried in the garden.

Not long afterward, Puente appeared in court, accused of murdering her tenants so she could steal their government benefit checks and buy herself luxuries ranging from fancy clothes to a face lift.

This is a story of keeping up appearances. Dorothea Puente tried hard to project a polished exterior with cosmetic surgery and tailored clothes. She also projected herself as a upstanding member of Sacramento society, a small-time socialite who gave to charity and rubbed elbows with second-tier politicians.  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

No one suspected that the sweet-faced, grandmotherly Puente was systematically drugging and killing her frail boarders and burying their remains in the yard she so lovingly tended. With her careful exterior, she got away with murder for years.

shark sha.99 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Andrew Maggio, a barber in the city of New Orleans, had just received his draft notice.  It was May 22, 1918 and World War I was on everyone’s mind.  Andrew wasn’t keen to go to war, so he went out drinking that night.  When he returned just before two o’clock in the morning to the place he shared with his brother Jake, he noticed nothing unusual.  But then, he wasn’t in much of a condition to notice anything at all, and that would soon come back to haunt him.  Compared to what he was about to experience, a draft notice would seem like a mosquito’s bite to shark attack.

Jake and Andrew’s rooms adjoined the home of their married bother, Joseph Maggio, and his wife Catherine.  As Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire, a novelist and acknowledged authority on the Axeman indicates, on the morning of May 23, Jake woke up around four o’clock a.m.  He realized he’d been startled awake by noises that sounded like groaning that were coming through the wall from the room where Joseph and his wife slept.  Jake got up and knocked on the wall to get their attention, but failed to get a response, so he knocked louder. Again, nothing.

Now worried, Jake tried to arouse Andrew, but had difficulty, since Andrew was inebriated.  Finally Jake got him up.  Together they ventured into Joseph’s home, and to their alarm, they found evidence of a break-in.  A wooden panel had been chiseled out and removed from the kitchen door.  It lay on the ground, the discarded chisel on top of it.

documenting 6.doc.003 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Ruth Barrick was a neurosurgery patient.  She’d hit her head and nearly died, but was doing well there at the Ohio State University Medical Center.  Dr. Michael Swango, an intern, told a nurse that he was going to check on her.  The nurse thought this was strange, and when she later checked on Barrick herself, she found the woman barely breathing.  Calling a code, she and the medical team managed to stabilize Barrick’s vital signs and she recovered.

Then a few days later, Swango went into Barrick’s room again.  Another nurse checked on him several times and spotted several syringes.  After nearly half an hour with the patient, Swango left, and when the nurse went in to see Barrick, she found the woman once again in a very bad state. While she administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, she heard Dr. Swango come in and say, “That is so disgusting.”

Yet her efforts were useless.  Ruth Barrick was dead and the nurse suspected that Swango had done something to cause it.

In fact, before he disappeared from the place, five patients died and several grew terribly ill.  He’d also given a “spicy” chicken dinner to several coworkers, all of whom had become ill afterward.  Swango was clearly a menace.

Even so, throughout his medical career, people had covered for Swango, and the same thing would happen again and again: He was allowed to get away with murder.  His fellow students knew that he was unfit for a medical career—was in fact downright weird.  They called him “Double-O Swango” because where medical care was concerned, he seemed to have a black thumb.  What they didn’t realize was that he truly had a license to kill.  It seemed he’d entered the medical profession precisely as a cover for what he wanted to do to people.  He had no compassion and he certainly had some bizarre ideas on what it meant to be a doctor.  Yet this athletic, blue-eyed blonde always managed to charm his superiors into believing in him.  Despite a lackluster performance, he always managed to pass through the system.

It wasn’t just the medical establishment, either.  Even his mother seemed to look the other way when he expressed an intense interest in violent deaths.  She’d clip newspaper articles for him, assuring herself and everyone who commented on the oddity of this interest that the “information” would further Michael’s medical career.  He was learning things.

No doubt that’s true, but what he was learning to do was bring about the deaths of other people.  He found it exciting to walk out of the ER to inform worried parents of the death of their child, or to rush to an accident scene were bodies were twisted and torn apart.  He lived for this kind of high.

In retrospect, it’s difficult to understand how he managed to even become a doctor, let alone practice for almost two decades.

In 1983, Swango graduated from Southern Illinois School of Medicine in Springfield, Illinois, although he was a year behind his classmates for failure to complete his assignments.  He served his internship at Ohio State University, but when his post was finished, it was not extended—partly because of suspicions that no one seemed to want to address.  After he left, the authorities began to investigate him for murder, but found insufficient evidence to charge him with anything.  It’s not easy to pin a murder on someone giving injections to patients when that’s what doctors do.

Swango then started work with a team of paramedics, who seemed to get along with him.  Feeling comfortable, he told them his ultimate fantasy: “It’s like this,” he said. “Picture a school bus crammed with kids smashing head-on with a trailer truck loaded down with gasoline. We’re summoned. We get there in a jiffy just as another gasoline truck rams the bus.  Up in flames it goes!  Kids are hurled through the air, everywhere, on telephone poles, on the street, especially along an old barbed wire fence along the road. All burning.”

The others were put off.  This guy was sick.  They kept their distance.

Then one day Swango brought in a box of doughnuts, and four of his fellow workers who partook of it got severely ill.  Another time, he offered soft drinks to two others, who also got sick.  They quickly caught on to what he was doing and laid a trap.  It soon became clear that Swango was poisoning them.  He shrugged off their concerns, yet there was sufficient evidence from the amount of poison found in his locker and home to convict him of six counts of aggravated battery, for which he did less than three years in prison.

Despite that, he was accepted into several more positions in Virginia, South Dakota, New York, and Zimbabwe.  All he had to do was lie, fake his credentials, adopt aliases, and misrepresent his past employment history.  No one checked, and wherever he went, colleagues became ill and patients died.  Each time authorities closed in, he was gone.

When Swango was finally stopped by the FBI, he’d been on a roll for almost two decades in seven different hospitals.  In many cases, someone had seen him with a syringe, and several patients who recovered indicated that it was the blond doctor who had injected them before they lost the ability to feel and move.

In 1998, he was charged with killing five patients in a hospital in Zimbabwe, where he had worked from 1994-1996.  However, complications with extraditing him to Africa meant that he would not be prosecuted. Then the FBI looked into his history, and agents estimated that he may have been responsible for directly causing well over thirty deaths.  Apparently he just liked to see what would happen when he did this or that to a human being, whether patient or colleague.

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire, who wrote Blind Eye after spending two years documenting Swango’s swath of death, called him a psychopath who would never stop.  “If he is free,” Stewart said, “he will find a means and a place to do it again.”

Arraigned on July 17, 2000, he finally confessed in September.  He pleaded guilty to fatally poisoning three patients in 1993 at a New York hospital, and was convicted of another murder in Ohio.  In a plea deal, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.  The extent of his evil likely surpasses his admissions and may never be known.

Swango is not alone in this type of infamy.  Throughout history there have been doctors who killed, and the list of motives is long and complex.  Let’s have a look at the most common ones.

status 000.sta.0002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

When investigators revealed the facts about what was found on Eddie Gein’s farm, the news quickly spread. Reporters from all over the world flocked to the small town of Plainfield, Wisconsin. The town became known worldwide and Eddy Gein reached celebrity-like status. People were repulsed, yet at the same time drawn to the atrocities that took place on Eddie Gein’s farm.  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Psychologists from all over the world attempted to find out what made Eddie tick. During the 1950s, he gained notoriety as being one of the most famous of documented cases involving a combination of necrophilia, transvestism and fetishism. Even children who knew of the exploits of Eddie began to sing songs about him and make jokes in an effort to, as Harold Schechter suggests in his book Deviant, “exorcise the nightmare with laughter.” These distasteful jokes became known as “Geiners” and were quick to become popular around the world.

Back in Plainfield, residents endured the onslaught of reporters who disrupted their daily life by bombarding them with questions about Eddie. However, many of them eventually became involved in the mania surrounding Eddie and contributed what information they had. Plainfield was now known to the world as the home of infamous Eddie Gein.

Most residents who knew Eddie had only good things to say about him, other than that he was a little peculiar, had a quirky grin and a strange sense of humor. They never suspected him of being capable of committing such ghastly crimes. But the truth was hard to escape. The little shy, quiet man the town thought they knew, was in fact, a murderer who also violated the graves of friends and relatives.

Eddie in Court

After Gein spent a period of thirty days in a mental institution and was evaluated as mentally incompetent, he could no longer be tried for first degree murder. The people of Plainfield immediately voiced their anger that Eddie would not be tried for the death of Bernice Worden. Yet, there was little the community could do to influence the court’s decision. Eddie was committed to the Central State Hospital in Waupun, Wisconsin. Soon after Eddie was sentenced to the mental institution, his farm went up for auction along with some of his other belongings.

Thousands of curiosity seekers diverged on the small town to see what possessions of Eddie’s would be auctioned. Some of the things to be auctioned off were his car, furniture and musical instruments. The company that handled the business of selling Eddie’s goods planned to charge a fee of fifty cents to look at Eddie’s property. The citizens of Plainfield were outraged. They believed Eddie’s home was quickly becoming a “museum for the morbid” and the town demanded something be done to put it to an end. Although the company was later forbidden to charge an entrance fee to the auction, residents were still not satisfied.

Eddie Gein’s Farmhouse

In the early morning of March 20, 1958 the Plainfield volunteer fire department was called to Eddie’s farm. Gein’s house was on fire. The house quickly burned to the ground, as onlookers watched in silent relief. Police believed that an arsonist was responsible for the blaze because there was no electrical wiring problems with the house. Although police carried out a thorough investigation, no suspect was ever found.

When Eddie learned of the destruction to his house he simply said, “Just as well.”  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Although the fire destroyed most of Eddie’s belongings, there were still many things that were salvaged. What was left of Eddie’s possessions would still be auctioned off, including farm equipment and his car. Eddie’s 1949 Ford sedan, which was used to haul dead bodies, caused a bidding war and was eventually sold for seven hundred and sixty dollars. The man who purchased the car later put it on display at a county fair, where thousands paid a quarter to get a peek at the Gein “ghoul car.” It seemed to the people of Plainfield that the publics fascination with Eddie would never end.

dots 66.dot.002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Two days later, August 8, Chamberlain and Intervallo called Detective Salvesen to tell him about the Craig Glassman event and the letters that Glassman had received. One of the letters was amazingly confessional: “True, Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  I am the killer, but Craig, the killings are at your command.” Salvesen promised to inform the task force immediately, but the information didn’t get to the task force for days.

In the meantime, several traffic tickets that had been written the night of the Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  shooting, outside witness Davis’ apartment, were at last found. All but one were investigated and yielded nothing. One final ticket was yet to be investigated — one belonging to a Yonkers man named David Berkowitz.

Detective Jimmy Justus called the Yonkers Police Department and talked to Wheat Carr, the daughter of Sam Carr, who had lost her dog. She gave him a real earful about David Berkowitz and everything her father had tried to impress upon the police days earlier. Officer Chamberlain called Justus shortly afterwards and told him everything he knew. They compared notes.

Then after the Carr family and officers Chamberlain and Intervallo had connected all the dots repeatedly for the New York City Police, the latter were more than anxious to go in for the collar and the glory that went with it. On August 10, Shea, Strano, William Gardella and John Falotico put 35 Pine Street under surveillance. The number of cops grew as everyone wanted to be in on the arrest.

Just after 7:30 P.M., a heavy-set Caucasian male walked out of the apartment building and seemed to head towards Berkowitz’s Ford Galaxy. The police started to close in on him. Falotico pulled his gun and stopped the man. “David, stay where you are,” he warned him.

“Are you the police?” the man wanted to know.

“Yes. Don’t move your hands.”

It was not David Berkowitz, but Craig Glassman, the part-time deputy sheriff who realized that these men surrounding him were not the Yonkers police but New York City’s “finest.” Glassman figured it out fast that Berkowitz was a suspect in the Son of Sam murders.

Several hours later another figure emerged from the apartment building, carrying a paper bag. The man was heavy with dark hair and he walked slowly toward the Ford Galaxy. This time, the police waited for the man to get into the car and put the paper bag on the passenger seat. “Let’s go!” Falotico yelled and the officers advanced. The man inside did not see the approaching figures. Gardella came from the rear of the car and put the barrel of his gun against the man’s head. “Freeze!” he yelled. “Police!”

The man inside the car turned around and smiled idiotically at them. Falotico gave him very explicit instructions to slowly get out of the car and put his hands up on the roof. The man obeyed, still smiling.

“Now that I’ve got you,” Falotico said, “who have I got?”

“You know,” the man said politely.

“No, I don’t. You tell me.”

Still smiling his moronic smile, he answered, “I’m Sam. David Berkowitz.”

David Berkowitz arrested

simpson 2.sim.0003 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Davis was the youngest of the ten children of Samuel Emory Davis (Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, 1756 – July 4, 1824) and wife (married 1783) Jane Cook (Christian County, (later Todd County), Kentucky, 1759 – October 3, 1845), daughter of William Cook and wife Sarah Simpson, daughter of Samuel Simpson (1706 – 1791) and wife Hannah (b. 1710). The younger Davis’s grandfather, Evan Davis (Cardiff, County Glamorgan, 1729 – 1758), emigrated from Wales and had once lived in Virginia and Maryland, marrying Lydia Emory. His father, along with his uncles, had served in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War; he fought with the Georgia cavalry and fought in the Siege of Savannah as an infantry officer. Also, three of his older brothers served during the War of 1812. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  Two of them served under Andrew Jackson and received commendation for bravery in the Battle of New Orleans.

During Davis’s youth, the family moved twice; in 1811 to St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, and in 1812 to Wilkinson County, Mississippi near the town of Woodville. In 1813, Davis began his education together with his sister Mary, attending a log cabin school a mile from their home in the small town of Woodville, known as the Wilkinson Academy. Two years later, Davis entered the Catholic school of Saint Thomas at St. Rose Priory, a school operated by the Dominican Order in Washington County, Kentucky. At the time, he was the only Protestant student.