markgribben.com

Not Dead

Mark Gribben — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:52:50 +0000

Updates to this website will resume very shortly.

I appreciate everyone’s patience — forces outside my control have slowed down my ability to research and write.

Mark

Minute by Minute, Part 1

Mark Gribben — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:41:36 +0000

Let’s think about time for a moment. The exercise is worth it because in 1968 a man’s freedom depended on just how accurately we tell time.
As I write this there are four clocks in my immediate vicinity. The analog clock on the wall says it is about 2:14 p.m. My computer clock says it’s 2:16. Both my cell phone clock and the digital clock on the cable box say it’s 2:13 p.m.
When you ask someone the time and they say “2:15″ or “a quarter after,” do you wonder if their watch precisely indicates 2:15 or is it showing somewhere between 2:13 and 2:17? Does anybody really know what time it is?
For Dr. John M. Branion, Jr., convicted murderer, the answers to those questions made all the difference in the world.
Dr. Branion was not the kind of man anyone would expect to kill his wife. Educated at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, he was a successful and respected African-American physician at time when discrimination against blacks was openly practiced and accepted in America. His father was one of the most prominent criminal defense attorneys in Chicago, serving as the deputy public defender for Cook County — the first black man to do so, and Branion’s brother-in-law was an equally successful attorney.
Branion’s wife, Donna, came from one of the wealthiest black families in Chicago. Dr. Branion was active in the civil rights movement and had walked beside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during his visits to Chicago.
According to his defense attorney Branion once shielded King from a thrown brick with his own body. Unlike King, however, Branion’s involvement in the movement was not limited to peaceful protests; he was known to police as a doctor who tended to injured Black Panthers and other more radical activists, putting him on a U.S. Justice Department list of “undesireables.”
Although Branion had an on-going affair with a woman who shared his passion for civil rights activism, by all accounts the 30-year Branion marriage was normal and happy. The Branions had two children, a daughter and a son who was 4 years old in 1967.
The crime that put Dr. Branion in prison occurred in the morning of December 22, 1967 when Donna Branion was shot to death in her home. The evidence that pointed to Dr. Branion as the murderer was all circumstantial and at his trial Dr. Branion unsuccessfully used a defense of impossibility — it was impossible for him to have killed his wife because at the time she died he was someplace else.
That’s why time was so important in the Branion murder case.
Donna Branion was known to have been alive at about 10:15 a.m. when she spoke with her sister about some mundane topics. Donna’s sister, Joyce Tyler, testified that her sister did not sound agitated or upset about anything.
The first event occurred at 11:05 a.m. when a neighbor of the Branions returned home from shopping. Theresa Kentra later told police that about 20 minutes later she heard a “loud sound followed by two or three similar sounds” and then a commotion of some sort.
(The court opinions in this case refer to them as “sounds” or a “commotion” while Mrs. Kentra, on the stand, used the word “shots” — quite a difference in connotation)
Let’s agree that what Mrs. Kentra heard happened at 11:25 a.m because Dr. Branion’s defense and appellate counsel asserted it was so and the prosecution did not object.
Some 15 or 20 minutes after she heard those sounds, Mrs. Kentra saw Dr. Branion come out of his apartment and call for “Helen,” another doctor who lived nearby. For what it’s worth (and it might be worth a lot) Mrs. Kentra said Dr. Branion did not appear to be “agitated.”
Chicago police logged a call reporting Donna Branion’s death at 11:57 a.m. One minute later, the first patrol car was at the scene. Officer William Catizone testified at Dr. Branion’s trial that he found Donna’s body lying in the utility room of the Branion home. He said he went directly to the body and could not find a pulse.
Donna had been shot in the head, neck, and shoulder. Three bullets passed through her body and were found at the scene beneath her body while a fourth was found in her body during the autopsy.
There was no sign of forced entry and Donna had not been sexually assaulted. Robbery also did not appear to be the motive.
Almost immediately suspicion fell on Dr. Branion, despite the fact that he had no motive for killing his wife. They were a loving couple despite his unusually close relationship with Shirley Hudson, who he met in the civil rights movement and eventually married.
Money wasn’t an issue. Certainly Donna Branion came from a wealthy family, but Dr. Branion would not inherit anything as a widower; in fact, if all he cared about was his wife’s money, he had a strong motivation to keep her alive.
Police centered their attention on Dr. Branion because of the way he acted after discovering his wife’s body.
Entering the home, he turned on the light in the utility room, saw his wife lying in a pool of blood and simply turned off the light, left the room and called for help. He told police that he did not approach her because he could tell by her appearance that she was dead.
As the investigation into Donna Branion’s murder went on, other circumstantial evidence emerged. Ballistics experts determined that Donna was shot by a Walther PPK, a type of gun owned by Dr. Branion. However, when police asked him whether he had any guns capable of firing the .380 slug of the type that killed his wife, Dr. Branion did not tell them that he owned a PPK — which can fire .380 cartridges despite being a 9mm weapon.
Later, armed with a search warrant, police recovered two boxes of ammunition in the Branion home. One box was full, containing 25 cartridges. The other box was missing four shells.
That was good enough for the police. Dr. Branion was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife.
Next: “The evidence is circumstantial, but what circumstances!”

Turn on and Tune in

Mark Gribben — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:06:34 +0000

Back in January I was interviewed on camera for a Biography Channel show on “Murder, Inc.” It’s airing on Saturday, June 21, 2008 on the Biography Channel at 9 p.m. ET (US) and again on Sunday, June 22 at 1 a.m.

It should be a good show even though I’m in it …

The Ragged Stranger, or “Truth is Relative”

Mark Gribben — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 21:31:37 +0000

In 1989, Bostonian Charles Stuart called 911 and reported that he and his pregnant wife had been shot by an unidentified black gunman. Carol Stuart died from her gunshot wound; the child she was carrying lived 17 days before he was disconnected from life support by order of his father.
Shortly after, Charles’s allegations that the family was attacked by an African American gunman began to fall apart and he committed suicide by jumping into the Mystic River.
Eventually, the true story came out: Stuart killed his wife and shot himself as either part of an insurance fraud or get her out of the way so he could be free to pursue another woman. It doesn’t really matter why he did it, just that he did.
As shocking as Stuart’s crime is, it proves the rule that in crime there is no such thing as an original idea. Pardon the pun, but every manner of killing has been done to death.
So it is with the robber-killed-the-wife story.
Stuart should have known that he couldn’t get away with it, because in 1920, an even more audacious murderer tried the same scam and ended up on the gallows in Joliet prison.
Carl Wanderer was bolder than Charles Stuart; he convinced a Chicago bum to help him out with a fake robbery under the ruse that Wanderer wanted to appear to be a hero in front of his pregnant wife, Ruth.
The bum, who agreed to the plan in return for $1.25, wasn’t privy to the whole plan and it cost him his life.
The man, collateral damage in Wanderer’s plot, has never been positively identified. Various names have been assigned to him, but the facts of the Wanderer murder have been so distorted over time that it is best to refer to him by the name he was given by the Chicago press: “The Ragged Stranger.”
The Wanderer case is a part of Chicago lore; the site of the crime is a frequent stop on those “bloody Chicago” tours and Ben Hecht, the noted Second City journalist, claimed that it was his skeptical detective work that eventually cracked the case.
That’s not true, but Hecht should get credit at least for not being sucked in by Wanderer’s scheme. The newsman visited Wanderer the day after the murder and was aghast to find him whistling while he pressed his trousers. His was the first article to portray the tragic hero/widower in a negative light.
In fact the police were fairly quick to poke holes in Wanderer’s story.
Why, wondered the Chicago dicks, was this bum penniless but in possession of a pistol? Wouldn’t he have pawned that? The going rate for a Colt automatic like that in the 1920s was $50.
On the subject of guns, why was Wanderer carrying one? And was it just coincidence that a robber would have the same kind of weapon as Wanderer?
With a little bit more checking the story quickly fell apart. First off, Wanderer did serve in the Great War as a lieutenant, but he wasn’t the decorated hero he claimed to be, according to his commanding officer.
Next, it turns out that Wanderer was infatuated with a 16-year-old girl who frequented his father’s meat shop, and was not quite the dedicated husband who was ready to settle down to life as a Chicago butcher. There was never any indication that his lust was anything more than just idle fantasy.
Under-reported, but hinted at in one account of the crime, was the allegation that Wanderer’s paramour was another man. Wanderer only mentions the allegation in one reply to a reporter’s question about his relationship with the girl.
“There was never another woman,” he replied. “Or another man. I hated married life. I wanted to get back to the army. I grew to love the army life and serving in France. It’s free and easy; it’s the life for me.”
The idea that Wanderer was a closeted homosexual who killed because he did not want to tied to a woman and a baby was played up in Hecht’s autobiography, but because the rest of Hecht’s role in cracking the case was overstated, there is no reason to believe that allegation — especially because it does not appear anywhere else. Of course it’s interesting to note that no two newspaper reports of the Wanderer murder have identical facts except that Ruth Wanderer and another man were murdered by her husband. So feel free to pick the story that best appeals to you.
Perhaps that’s the most interesting thing about the Wanderer tale. Every newspaper chose to create the crime it thought best and no one let the facts stand in the way.
Wanderer himself was not much help. When the detectives confronted him with the fact that the gun held by the ragged stranger could be traced from the factory to Wanderer’s brother and to him, he admitted setting the whole thing up but never gave the same reason why twice. It was for another woman, he said. It was to get his hands on Ruth’s $1,500 savings. He didn’t want to be a father, he told them once. He wanted to get back into the army, another time.
Who cares.
There are a few things that we can all agree on, however:

Wanderer killed two people with the same gun;
He stood trial first for killing his wife;
When the jurors convicted him but chose not to sentence him to death the newspapers were incensed and published their names, addresses, and telephone numbers. One even published their pictures and called them “12 soft-boiled eggs.”
The Ragged Stranger was never positively identified but was buried in Glen Oak Cemetery through the largess of a Chicago saloonkeeper named Barney Clamage.

Because no one was satisfied with the verdict in the Ruth Wanderer trial, Carl Wanderer was tried for the killing of the ragged stranger. This time the jury knew what the people wanted and he received the death penalty.
On September 30, 1921 Wanderer was hanged. As the hangman was going about his business, Wanderer began to sing “Old gal, old pal, you left me all alone/Old gal, old pal, I’m just a rolling stone/Old pal, why don’t you answer me?”
At that point the trap was sprung and Carl Wanderer was dropped into eternity.
It’s probably apocryphal, but someone reportedly said Wanderer should have been hanged for his singing alone. Since facts aren’t important to the story of the Ragged Stranger, let’s all agree that it really happened.

Egregious Conduct

Mark Gribben — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 21:35:45 +0000

Three men walk up a cold muddy trail lined by tall pines. It’s an icy northern California morning in January, but the chill in the air isn’t the reason that one of the three is shaking so badly he can barely walk.
The young man, an Oregon-bound college student, spent the last night of his life in these remote woods fastened to a tree by a chain around his neck as his girlfriend was raped inside a shack by the two other men and their friend.
Words fail when trying to describe how piteous the man is — and who can blame him as his death approaches and the girl he cared for is brutalized back at the cabin. He knows there will be no reprieve for him; there is no reason to even hope that these barbarous savages who have so far shown no trace of humanity would consider being merciful.
Regrettably, this isn’t a Rob Zombie film script or some variation on one of those popular torture-porn movies. This is what happened to Kevin Thorpe and Laura Craig in 1981.
Even more regrettably, it gets worse. A lot worse.
But all is not lost. At least society has treated the killers with decency and humanity. One only had to serve 11 years for his part in the crime (chopping up Kevin’s body with an ax to make it easier to dispose of), while another was moved off death row and may even get out of prison one day because the prosecutor in his case didn’t play fair. After all, the killer only shot Kevin somewhere between 30 and 60 times (It’s hard not to empty the clip of an Ingram M-11 .38-caliber fully automatic pistol with a single pull of the trigger. It’s a machine gun: the magazine clip holds 32 rounds and the gun can discharge all 32 rounds in 1.6 seconds. No one can seem to recall whether the killer reloaded it).
Thankfully, the American justice system was able to overcome the prosecutor’s egregious conduct and repair the damage done. Justice perseveres.
What was that conduct that was so awful that it could make the crimes of Benjamin Silva pale in comparison and prompt his removal from death row, you ask?
Why the prosecutor and the defense counsel for Norm Thomas — the one who chopped up Kevin’s body with the ax — had a secret deal to wait until after Thomas testified before the defense scheduled a psych exam in preparation for Thomas’s trial.
You see Thomas had been in a motorcycle accident and had his head knocked around a bit and he tended to get a little mixed up about things. There was a possibility that if Silva’s defense counsel knew that the prosecutor was concerned about his chief witness’s ability to testify, the defense might exploit that fact during cross-examination.
Never mind that Thomas still could have faced murder charges if the prosecution wasn’t satisfied with his performance on the stand — a fact the defense could and did bring up on cross. That secret deal undermined the entire trial and cast a cloud over the jury’s verdict, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals would find 20 years after murders of Kevin and Laura.
As a result the prosecution’s nefarious conduct, the judges tossed not only Silva’s death sentence but his murder conviction too.

In our justice system, the prosecuting attorney occupies a special position of public trust. Courts, citizens, and even criminal defendants must rely on these public servants to be honorable advocates both for the community on whose behalf they litigate and for the justice system of which they are an integral part. When prosecutors betray their solemn obligations and abuse the immense power they hold, the fairness of our entire system of justice is called into doubt and public confidence in it is undermined.

That’s how the judges finished their scolding of the prosecution for its terrible act.
Never mind that the question was never whether or not Silva was responsible for murdering Kevin and Laura. There was no doubt about that. He was present at both killings and was the one who started the whole squalid event in the first place.
He tacitly admitted those facts.
No the bigger issue was that the government had failed to treat him fairly and had denied him due process under the law. The state violated Silva’s rights far beyond the point that Silva had violated Kevin and Laura’s right to live.
And for that there must be redress. The state shall retry him or resentence him on the remaining kidnapping, assault, and robbery charges, the judges ordered.

I have to stop here and admit that the prosecution’s decision to hide Thomas’s mental state from the defense really was important to the defense’s case and a serious mistake. The prosecution should at least have told Silva’s defense team that Thomas had issues. Silva was a guilty piece of slime of the type that I usually scrape off the sole of my shoe, but I acknowledge that Thomas was a pretty shaky foundation on which to build a case.

It all began January 11, 1981, when Kevin and Laura left Ridgecrest, California, for college in Oregon. They were driving Kevin’s Ford north on Highway 395 and hauling a trailer through Madeline, California, when their trailer suffered a flat tire. They pulled into a gas station in town and Kevin set to work repairing the tire. Around 9 p.m. the operator of the gas station offered Kevin and Laura a place to stay for the night but they declined because they wanted to make it to Oregon that night and the repair work was nearly finished.
Meanwhile, Ben Silva, Joe Shelton and Norm Thomas also planned a trip to Oregon. The three men lived on Shelton’s property outside Madeline. They had been talking about finding some women that evening and when Thomas said he knew some women in Oregon, they decided to drive up and see them. They left in Silva’s truck around 8 p.m., and stopped at the gas station in Madeline to fill up the tank.
Silva saw Kevin working on the trailer’s flat tire. He also saw Laura and told Thomas and Shelton that they didn’t have to drive all the way to Oregon to get a girl.
Silva decided that they would wait for the Kevin and Laura’s car to drive by and then stop it by signaling with a red light. Silva stopped the truck and backed it into a side road adjoining the highway and waited about an hour before Kevin’s car drove by.
After following for a short distance Silva took a spotlight covered with a red lens and held it out the window, pointing it at Kevin’s car. Kevin pulled over and Silva pulled up behind him. Silva then walked to the driver’s side while Thomas approached the other side. Silva pointed a shotgun at Kevin’s face and commanded him to move over; Silva sat behind the wheel and Thomas, armed with a pistol, entered the back seat. Dropping the shotgun, Silva pulled out a handgun. He cocked it, pointed it at Kevin’s chin, and warned him not to try anything because the gun had a hair trigger. Silva then drove the vehicle to Shelton’s cabin and Shelton followed in the truck.
After arriving at the cabin, Silva picked up his shotgun and ordered Kevin and Laura out of the car. He told Thomas to drive their vehicle further up the road and to leave it there. Before Silva left the vehicle, however, he shot and killed a dog in the back seat of Kevin’s and Laura’s car.
According to Thomas’s statements and testimony (which in fairness to Silva’s defense are disjointed and filled with inconsistencies) when he returned to the cabin about half an hour later he found Kevin and Laura on the couch. Silva and Shelton left Thomas with the captives and went to loot the car and trailer.
Thomas, who was the only one who provided details of the events, said they decided to chain Kevin up for the night. Chains were placed around his body, secured by locks, and he was taken outside where he was chained to a tree by his neck.
Thomas then admitted that he and Silva disposed of Kevin’s car.
They did not return to Shelton’s cabin until early the following morning.
When they returned they found Shelton asleep with Laura; Shelton bragged that he had raped her several times while she was at the cabin.
Thomas went to sleep and then awoke refreshed enough after the events of the night before to rape Laura. Silva and Shelton were gone. Thomas said he went outside and caught up to the two men. Silva told Thomas to follow him and he led Thomas up the side of the hill where Thomas found Kevin’s body lying on the ground with a carpet thrown over it. There was blood everywhere. Silva told Thomas that he had some trash bags and that he wanted Thomas to cut Kevin’s body into pieces small enough to fit inside those bags. Thomas took two or three hours to accomplish the task as Silva watched, stopping just twice to throw up.
When Thomas was finished cutting up the body, Silva told him to clean the area and to burn the evidence. Kevin’s clothes, the ax, and some brush were thrown into a burn barrel. While the three men were standing around the fire, Shelton told Thomas about the murder: Silva and Shelton unlocked the chain linked to Kevin’s neck from the tree; the other end of the chain was still locked to the chains around Kevin’s neck. Silva left Shelton to watch him and went to a trailer on Shelton’s property to obtain a weapon.
According to Thomas’s testimony of what Shelton told him, Silva returned with an Ingram M-11. Silva walked up behind Kevin and shot him up and down his body at close range. Thomas’s disordered testimony makes it unclear whether 1 or 2 clips were discharged. But it is clear that Kevin was shot everywhere — “he had holes in his face, and all up his arms and legs,” he told the court.
Thomas said Silva did not interrupt or comment while Shelton described the murder; he simply looked at Shelton and smiled. Silva and Thomas later buried Kevin’s body in two shallow holes.
Laura was kept at the cabin for several days.
On January 16, Thomas saw Silva and Shelton drive off with Laura between them. Shelton later told Thomas that somewhere near Mount Shasta Silva shot Laura. According to Shelton, Silva pulled Laura out of the car by her hair and shot her in the head. The gun was thrown into a river and Laura’s body was kicked down the hillside. Silva and Shelton returned to the cabin a few days later.
Shelton related to Thomas the facts of Laura’s murder, and again Silva, who had been listening, merely smiled. The next day, Silva and Shelton again left the cabin, telling Thomas to hide all of the weapons in case the police came around. An hour or two after they left, a deputy sheriff arrived looking for Shelton. As he drove up, the cop saw Thomas place something in the truck. The deputy spoke with him for awhile and then asked if he could search the truck. Thomas declined and the deputy started to leave.
Before the deputy reached his car, Thomas stopped him and admitted that he had put a gun in the truck. When the deputy asked why Thomas had not simply admitted that earlier, Thomas said that he was on probation and that he was not permitted to possess a gun.
The cop left and ran a check on Thomas and, upon receiving confirmation that Thomas had violated the terms of his probation, returned to Shelton’s property with about 10 other officers and arrested Thomas.
Once in custody, Thomas told the police that he had been involved in some terrible crimes and he inquired whether he would receive police protection if he talked. Thomas was promised protection and the district attorney was called in to speak with him. Thomas detailed the fate of Kevin and Laura, including his own participation in the mutilation and burial of Kevin’s body.
Shelton was arrested on January 30. The boots Kevin had been wearing when he left Ridgecrest were found in Shelton’s possession. The next day, Shelton led officers to the location of Laura’s body. Silva was arrested in Fresno on January 23. He was informed of his rights but waived them, choosing to speak with police. When asked what he thought would be the outcome of his trial, Silva said he would either be sent to jail for a long time or be put to death. He also wrote on the walls of his cell that “Joe Shelton is a rat. Norman Thomas is a rat.”
Thomas pleaded guilty to “participation in the kidnapping, accessory after the fact to murder, burglary, and use of a firearm.” He was ultimately sentenced to 11 years and 4 months in prison, but had not been sentenced prior to Silva’s trial. Thomas also faced possible murder charges if he failed to cooperate with the district attorney’s office. Defense counsel placed these facts in evidence.
Shelton was tried and received a life term.
The jury deliberated for two days before finding Silva guilty of first degree murder of Kevin Thorpe, and also finding true the five special circumstance allegations relevant to that murder allowing for imposition of the death penalty. The jury also found the arming and use allegations true, and convicted Silva of kidnapping for robbery of Kevin and Laura, robbery of Kevin and Laura, possession of a machine gun, and possession of a silencer for a firearm. The jury additionally found each of the arming and use allegations in counts 3 through 6 to be true, and the intentional infliction of great bodily injury allegations in counts 3 and 5 (kidnapping for robbery and robbery of Kevin) to be true.
The jury acquitted Silva of the murder of Laura, and found that he did not inflict bodily injury upon her. Accordingly, the jury likewise rejected the multiple-murder special-circumstance allegation.
The penalty phase of Silva’s trial was held February 16, 1982, and the jury returned its verdict of death the same day. Silva’s motion for a new trial or modification of sentence was heard and denied March 15, 1982, and the court sentenced Silva to death the same day.
It was not until many years later that the fact of the special deal between prosecutors and Thomas’s attorneys came to light and Silva’s conviction for Kevin’s murder was tossed.
Eventually, in late 2005 Silva pleaded no contest to Kevin’s murder rather than face another trial. The prosecution wanted the murder conviction on the record so that the chance that Silva could get paroled would be reduced. It is a rare thing these days for a murderer to get parole in California.
Normally, I would say that a blanket denial of mercy even for killers is a poor reflection on society; in this case, though, it’s a good thing.
But not nearly good enough.

R.I.P. Richard Widmark

Mark Gribben — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 13:33:03 +0000

Richard Widmark, who created a villain in his first movie role who was so repellent and frightening that the actor became a star overnight, died Monday at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 93.
As Tommy Udo, a giggling, psychopathic killer in the 1947 gangster film “Kiss of Death,” Mr. Widmark tied up an old woman in a wheelchair (played by Mildred Dunnock) with a cord ripped from a lamp and shoved her down a flight of stairs to her death.
“The sadism of that character, the fearful laugh, the skull showing through drawn skin, and the surely conscious evocation of a concentration-camp degenerate established Widmark as the most frightening person on the screen,” the critic David Thomson wrote in The Biographical Dictionary of Film.
~NY Times

I note this not only because Widmark was a great actor who played gangsters, killers, and heroes with style, but because I made a reference to the young Richard Widmark in this article about my friend (more like a brother), Frank Bari. Read this and find out why Frank’s life is too wild to be believed.

Zeke Goldblum’s Case

Mark Gribben — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 18:25:17 +0000

It’s not unusual that after more than 30 years in prison Charles “Zeke” Goldblum would still be asserting that he is innocent of killing George Wilhelm.
One would expect Zeke, a former attorney and up-and-coming young activist in Pittsburgh politics, to spend every waking moment trying to get out of the prison where he has spent half his life. It’s also not unexpected that Zeke’s parents, Rabbi Moshe Goldblum and his wife, Evelyn, now in their 70s, work tirelessly to free their son.
Nor is it odd that Wilhelm’s family doubts his claim, as does the current Allegheny County (Pa.) district attorney, the police investigator who helped put Zeke behind bars, and perhaps most importantly, the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons, which has rejected his requests for pardon or clemency five times since Zeke was convicted in 1977.
What is unusual about his case is that there are almost as many people who played a role in convicting Zeke who now believe that he is innocent of Wilhelm’s murder.
“I could sit here for the rest of my life and do nothing,” federal Judge Donald E. Ziegler told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1995. “On the other hand, this is the one case in 21 years (as a judge) which seriously troubles my counscience about the result.”
In 1977, Ziegler was the Allegheny County judge who sat on Zeke’s murder and conspiracy trial.
Another expert who has doubts about Zeke’s guilt is noted forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, who was the coroner at the time of the killing.
“Following my evaluation and analysis of all of the materials, it is my professional opinion…that Mr. Goldblum was not the individual who inflicted the fatal stab wounds on Mr. George Wilhelm,” Wecht wrote to the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons before one of Zeke’s unsucessful clemency requests.
The man who prosecuted Zeke now has doubts, too. In 1998, former prosecutor F. Peter Dixon wrote that Zeke was nothing more than “a frightened witness to that murder, and an accessory after the fact. Despite my best efforts in trying these cases, a miscarriage of justice has occurred.”
Most importantly, even George Wilhelm did not blame Zeke for his murder.
Left for dead after being stabbed numerous times in the face with the 13-inch blade of a grass shear and tossed over the side of a parking garage, Wilhelm’s dying declaration named someone else as his murderer.
Zeke is one of the first to admit that he bears some of the blame for Wilhelm’s killing.
“I’m guilty of accessory after the fact,” Goldblum admits. “I’m guilty of hindering apprehension. I’m not guilty of murder.”
“I’m not an angel,” he said at another time. “I’m also not a killer.”
It was a bunch of circumstantial evidence — prior bad acts, really — and the word of an accomplice that ended up convicting Zeke Goldblum of George Wilhelm’s 1976 murder.
Zeke himself didn’t help his case much, his appellate attorney said.
“He was a terrible witness,” said Lee Markovitz.
The story of Zeke Goldblum’s downfall begins in 1975 when he was a rising star in Allegheny County legal circles. He had just graduated from law school and was working for one of Pittsburgh’s top accounting firms. Zeke was active politically, and was teaching part-time at the University of Pittsburgh.
According to him, he made the mistake of overextending himself and dragging his parents with him.
“In early 1975 I arranged for the purchase of the Fifth Avenue Inn Restaurant,” he wrote in a statement on a website dedicated to freeing him. “The money for the investment was provided by my parents. They invested nearly $70,000 in the business and assumed a $100,000 mortgage on the business.”
They say the easiest way to make small fortune in the restaurant business is to start with a large one, and that’s what happened to the Fifth Avenue Inn. In a short time Zeke found himself overextended financially and physically. That’s when he made a bad decision.
“I felt so frazzeled that I needed to find an immediate solution,” he wrote. “I foolishly arranged to have the restaurant burned in late November, 1975. I planned the arson, made the preparations, and hired Clarence Miller to actually set the fire.”
Zeke knew Clarence Miller from their political activities and he knew that Miller wouldn’t balk at a chance to help an old friend even if it meant breaking the law.
Miller, however, tells a different story.
The torching of the restaurant in was done in part to pay off Wilhelm whom Miller, Zeke, and a couple of others had attempted to swindle.
Wilhelm was an amateur geologist who wanted to buy a parcel of land in North Carolina that he thought was a good site to mine for semi-precious stones. The only problem was that the land was owned by the federal government.
That’s where Miller came in. He claimed to have the ear of an aide to one of Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senators and arranged to have Wilhelm speak to the man by phone. The “aide” promised to get the senator to help. For setting up the meeting, Wilhelm paid Miller $20,000 and eventually received a fake deed to the property.
The fraud unraveled when Wilhelm met the real aide in person — who had no idea what Wilhelm was talking about. Wilhelm went to the FBI, which began investigating Miller, and through him, Zeke Goldblum.
According to Miller’s testimony, he and Zeke managed to convince Wilhelm to have the feds drop the investigation in return for $40,000.
That’s why Zeke had Miller torch the restaurant, Miller said. But Miller admitted that neither he nor Zeke ever planned to pay Wilhelm the money and that’s why George Wilhelm was stabbed in the face with the garden shears at the top of that Pittsburgh parking garage.
Miller admits taking part in the murder, but blames Zeke for most of the cuts and says that Zeke, who was sitting behind Wilhelm in the car at the time, hit the victim in the back of the head with a wrench.
The problem with that story is that the blood spatter pattern in the car doesn’t seem to indicate that Wilhelm’s main assailant was behind him. That, plus the fact that there was no wound in the back of Wilhelm’s head that even remotely resembled a blow from a wrench.
Zeke claims that he had nothing to do with the swindle and was only involved in the murder to the extent that he had advised Miller to pay back the money to Wilhelm. He admits being present when Wilhelm was killed, but says that Miller was the only one who attacked Wilhelm.
After Zeke and Miller fled the scene, police came upon Wilhelm, who was still living and able to speak.
“Clarence…Clarence Miller did this,” Wilhelm told police before losing consciousness.
Miller was promptly brought in for questioning, and he named Zeke as his alibi. Zeke admits to making the bad decision to lie for Miller. However, the alibi didn’t hold and both Miller and Zeke Goldblum were arrested. The men were arraigned on first degree murder charges and Zeke managed to post bail.
His bad judgment, which led him to commit arson and to at least be at the scene of a murder (if not to be a participant), didn’t fail him when he got out on bail. Zeke went about trying to find someone to kill Clarence Miller before they went to trial. The man he got to agree to do the job was an undercover cop.
Miller admits he has no excuse for the murder for hire request.
“There is no good explanation for the solicitation,” Goldblum told the Post-Gazette in 1995. “I’m more ashamed of that than anything, except not helping Wilhelm.”
At trial, all of those bad acts came back to haunt Goldblum when Miller, who was cooperating with authorities, testified as the government’s star witness.
Miller’s believability was enhanced by the fact that he was not getting anything in return for his testimony.
He, too, was sentenced to life in prison.
Zeke’s case has been reviewed numerous times by state and federal appellate courts, and has been championed by such illustrious criminalists as Dr. Henry Lee, but as of March 2008, he remains behind bars.
It’s likely that he’ll stay there, too. Pennsylvania has clamped down on clemency and pardons ever since lifer Reginald McFadden was pardoned and promptly went on to rape and murder two women.
“I think the political climate is such that people who are serving life in Pennsylvania prisons have little hope of getting out,” said one of Zeke’s lawyers to the press years ago.

Murder Written in the Stars

Mark Gribben — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 16:56:40 +0000

The supernatural figures into more than a few crimes that are chronicled in The Malefactor’s Register, although most, if not all, can be laid at the feet of killers who are very much of this world.

For more articles where otherworldly powers factor in otherwise “normal” murder, see:

Daddy’s Little Girl

Slay for Pay

It Was in the Cards

In Bad Company

Religion Assisted Suicide

Valentine’s Day Murder

Few murderers, however, are like Arthur Covell, who in 1923 used a horoscope to plan the murder of his sister-in-law Ebba Covell. What makes Covell’s crime even more unusual was that he had a hypnotic effect over his nephew Alton, whom he used as his murder weapon. Without Alton, Arthur never could have committed the crime for he was a bedridden paralytic (or as the press at the time referred to him, “a hopeless cripple”) who could not walk and who was barely able to sit up in bed.
Ebba was the second wife of Dr. Fred Covell, a chiropractor who lived in Bandon, Oregon, a beautiful small town along the Pacific Coast. Along with Ebba and Fred, the Covell household included two of Fred’s children by a previous marriage, Lucille, 14, and Alton, 16, as well as three children from Fred and Ebba’s marriage.
Apparently Lucille and Alton were developmentally disabled, Alton to the point that he had been institutionalized. When Fred remarried after the death of Alton and Lucille’s mother, Alton was returned to the home.
The situation in the Covell household — two mentally retarded teens, a profoundly disabled adult, and the normal chaos that accompanies young children — was tense and according to contemporary accounts, there was particular hostility between Arthur and Ebba.
“Mother never went upstairs to see him and always fussed about how much he ate,” Lucille told authorities.
Arthur had been injured when a truck he was repairing fell on him and crushed his spine. As he recovered he began studying the pseudo-science of astrology and casting horoscopes for friends and family. Within a short period of time he gained a reputation as an accomplished seer and was running a lucrative mail-order horoscope business. His clientele included several Hollywood big-wigs including movie director William Desmond Taylor, who would one day be murdered himself in one of Hollywood’s great unsolved crimes.
Arthur’s work in astrology was more than vaugely simple solar horoscopes of the type we see in many newspapers. Instead he said he used the stars and planets to provide advice on when to make decisions and to predict what the future held.
Sometime in the spring or summer of 1923 the heavens revealed to Arthur a complex plot of mass murder and theft. Evidence uncovered after the murder of Ebba showed that Arthur had planned to use Alton to commit at least 27 murders in and around Bandon. Some of the victims were to be slain after being swindled while others would be killed after their wills were revised to make Arthur a beneficiary. Strangely, one of the families Arthur slated for death was to be sacrificed for the improvements they had made to their home.
“The plans of Arthur Covell were so minutely detailed that they even called for the removal of windows and doors before the home of the victim was burned,” said Detective Luke S. May after Arthur’s arrest. “The stolen articles were to be used in a home the Covells planned to build.”
Although Covell told Alton and Lucille that Ebba’s murder was fated by the stars, her arguments with Arthur and her apparent discovery of his plot also helped, police said.
On September 3, 1923 the time had come to get Ebba out of the way, Arthur told Alton. They had already talked over the plan in great detail, and even included Lucille in some of the discussions. Lucille later said that she was afraid to go to her father or stepmother for fear of what they would do to Uncle Arthur.
The stars told Arthur that the crime must occur at 11 a.m. on September 3, after Fred Covell went to work.
As Arthur lay in his bed on the second floor, Alton took the murder weapon — a rag soaked with ammonia — and snuck up behind his stepmother. He clamped the rag over her mouth and nose, and after a painful struggle a few minutes long Ebba died. The only sign of injury was an red rash on her cheek caused by the chemical.
Alton carried Ebba’s lifeless body to her bedroom and gently placed her on the bed and told his uncle that it was done. Arthur called Fred at his office and told him to return home as “something terrible has happened.”
It didn’t take long for authorities to toss out the idea that Ebba, a healthy, middle-aged woman, would just keel over and die a natural death. However, they were stumped when an external examination did not reveal any evidence (except that strange red blotch on her cheek) of foul play. She had not been strangled and her neck was not broken.
Once the coroner ruled her death to be homicide, police began pressuring the most obvious suspect, Fred Covell. After all, there was no way that Arthur could have carried out such a crime, and the only other people in the house were Alton and Lucille, neither of whom had any reason to want Ebba dead.
Within 48 hours, however, Fred was out from under suspicion while Alton and Arthur were in jail awaiting arraignment on murder charges. The case broke open after police questioned Lucille who told them everything she knew about Arthur’s plans. Confronted with her information, Alton confessed to killing Ebba at Arthur’s direction.
I put the ammonia on the rag,” he said, “and Ebba was standing by the stove. I walked up to her from behind and on the right side. I put the rag over her nose with my right hand and held her arms with my left. I held it on her nose, pressing hard, for about three minutes before I let her down on the floor.”
In Arthur’s bedroom police found a journal filled with encoded entries and astrological symbols. It didn’t take them long to decipher the code which amounted to a written confession of the entire plan by Arthur. The notebook contained messages such as “Today is the day. I wonder if Alton will go through with it.”
Interestingly, it also contained a note from Arthur to himself detailing how he had miscalculated the appropriate time for Ebba’s death: “Sept. 3. 11 A. M. Made mistake about con. Should have been 11:14:14.”
To police, however, Arthur admitted nothing except knowing that “September would be a bad month for Ebba.”
The trial of Arthur and Alton was pretty much a perfunctory affair. Both were convicted of murder; Alton received a life sentence while Arthur, who observed his trial from a cot in the courtroom, was sentenced to hang.
Arthur was carried to the gallows by a group of prison guards on May 28, 1925 and hanged. Alton was paroled after serving about eight years.

The Deacon’s Tale

Mark Gribben — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 18:14:29 +0000

Samuel L. Smithers was probably on his way to becoming a serial slayer when he was tripped up by a landlord who happened to stumble across his killing fields. At the very least, Smithers was a killer who tossed away his victims like so much dirty tissue when he was finished with them.
A former church deacon in Plant City, Florida, Smithers is currently on death row in Starke’s Florida State Prison for the murders of Christy Cowan and Denise Roach, a pair of Tampa prostitutes who had the misfortune of crossing Smithers’s path in 1996.
At that time, Smithers attended church with a woman who owned a vacant house on 27 fenced acres with three ponds in Plant City. In 1995 she hired Smithers to perform general caretaking work at the property because she was trying to sell it and needed to keep it well maintained.
Smithers was given a key to gate and garage, but because he had no need, was not given access to the house.
The arrangement continued through 1996 and on May 26 of that year Smithers was paid by the woman for mowing work he did a week earlier. Two days after paying Smithers, the property owner decided to pay an early evening visit to the house and was somewhat surprised to find Smithers’s car in the driveway and the caretaker cleaning an axe in the garage amid a large puddle of blood.
He told the woman told her that someone must have come by and killed a small animal. He assured her that he would clean up the mess.
She subsequently left the house but bothered by the blood and Smithers’s odd story, the woman called the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Department. A deputy met her at the house later that evening and they found that the site had been cleaned up. However, the deputy noticed what appeared to be drag marks in the grass leading towards one of the ponds. He followed the drag marks down to the pond and discovered a woman’s dead body floating in the water. She was identified as Cristy Cowan.
Cowan, 31, had once dreamed of becoming a nurse but had fallen on hard times after becoming addicted to drugs. She had been feeding her habit most recently by working as a prostitute.
Cowan’s mother in Connecticut told the Tampa Tribune that her child moved to Florida with her boyfriend and their two children because she loved the beach and the warm weather. But after failing an entrance exam for nursing school she became depressed and turned drugs for consolation. The drugs inevitably led to estrangement from her family and to prostitution.
“She wanted to straighten out, but she just couldn’t,” another friend told the Tribune reporter. “If they had put her in jail and kept her there for a few years, she would have had time to think about what she was doing.”
At the time Cowan’s body was discovered, she had not been dead for more than a couple of hours, the medical examiner said. There was a foam cone around her mouth which suggested that she might have drowned. Cowan had an injury to her eye, a laceration under her lip, a blunt impact injury to her jaw, a chop wound on the top of her head which penetrated her brain, and a chop wound behind her ear. She also had injuries consistent with manual strangulation. The ME stated that death was caused by strangulation combined with the chop wounds.
While police were examining the crime scene a dive team subsequently discovered a second dead female body in another part of the pond. She was later identified as Denise Roach.
The 24-year-old died of a skull fracture after she was beaten and stabbed in the head. They identified her body by matching fingerprints from records in the Hillsborough County Jail, where she served 10 days for prostitution in 1995.
The medical examiner would later testify that Roach’s body had been in the pond seven to ten days and was therefore very decomposed. There were two slits in Roach’s clothing which were caused by a sharp instrument. Her face and skull were fractured. There were also sixteen puncture wounds to her skull, several of which penetrated the skull. Finally, she had injuries consistent with manual strangulation (the hyoid bone was fractured). The medical examiner stated that death was caused by the combined effects of strangulation, stab wounds, and blunt impact to the head.
A search of the house revealed a condom wrapper in one of the bedrooms and a semen stain on the carpet. Test results established that Cowan could not have contributed to this stain, but Roach and Smithers could not be excluded. A fingerprint taken from the kitchen was identified as having been made by Smithers. Roach’s DNA was consistent with a blood stain found in the carport. Shoe prints by the pond matched shoes found in Smithers’ home.
Also, Smithers and Cowan were seen on a convenience store videotape about an hour before the owner surprised Smithers. The videotape depicted Smithers and Cowan entering and leaving the store together.
Two detectives went to Smithers’s home and Smithers agreed to accompany them to the Sheriff’s Office for an interview. Smithers requested that his wife join them during an interview that lasted nearly three hours, and later he agreed to return the next morning to take a polygraph test.
Upon returning the following morning, Smithers took the lie detector test and failed. He subsequently admitted that he killed Cristy Cowan and Denise Roach.
Smithers told police a fanciful tale that tended to lessen his own culpability for the women’s deaths.
As for Cowan’s death, Smithers claimed he was coming home from work when he spotted a car on the side of the road. He stopped to assist the driver (Cowan) and drove her to a convenience store. Once back in his truck, Cowan demanded money and threatened to accuse him of rape if he did not give her money. Smithers drove Cowan to the property that he maintained and gave her all the money that he had.
Smithers went on to say that Cowan still was not satisfied and she threw a drink at him.
Losing his temper, he picked up an axe and struck Cowan in the head. She fell down unconscious and he dragged her to the pond. He returned to the carport to rinse off the axe when the property owner arrived.
Although the woman would later testify that she heard nothing, Smithers said that during the time his employer was present, he could hear Cowan making noises from the pond. When the owner left, Smithers went back to the pond and hit Cowan in the head “to shut her up.” He also threw some tree limbs at her.
Smithers told an equally unlikely story about how Roach was murdered.
On May 7, Smithers was at the property mowing the lawn when he saw Roach. Confronting the woman, Smithers was told that she had permission to be on the property. When Smithers returned on May 13, Roach was still there. Smithers asked her to leave and she refused. Roach then hit Smithers on the arm and Smithers punched Roach in the face. Smithers said that Roach picked up a planter in the carport and threw it at Smithers’s truck, causing a dent. Smithers shoved Roach against the wall, causing a piece of wood to fall down from a shelf and hit her on the head. Roach fell to the ground unconscious. Smithers left the property, but he returned the next day and dragged her body to the pond. He cleaned up the blood with mop and a bucket of water.
Police gave Smithers’s tales the consideration they deserved and subsequently arrested him on two counts of first degree murder.
At trial, prosecutors presented the testimony of several witnesses who stated that both Cowan and Roach were prostitutes and worked in the same location. One hooker testified that she had previously “dated” Smithers, who offered her extra money to go with him to the property, but she refused. Another prostitute testified that on the day Cowan disappeared, she gave her a condom. This condom was similar to the condom wrapper found at the crime scene.
Other circumstantial evidence weighed against Smithers, including a videotape of him and Cowan at a nearby convenience store a while before Smithers was confronted at the property.
The deacon wasn’t finished with his stories and testified in his own defense. This time his explanation was even more far-fetched. He testified that he lied to detectives because he was scared his family would be hurt if he told the truth.
It turns out that the incident actually began months earlier when he was a deacon at his church. A girl named Mimi was on probation and was fulfilling her community service requirement at the church. Smithers was Mimi’s supervisor. Mimi, however, could not complete her hours and she therefore offered to have sex with Smithers if he would alter her records. He agreed.
Weeks later, Smithers was approached by a man he knew only as Mr. X who was aware that Smithers was taking care of the property. Mr. X, who had a photograph of Smithers and Mimi having sex, asked Smithers if he could use the property for a drug transaction. Mr. X said he would go public with the picture if Smithers did not cooperate. Smithers agreed to let Mr. X use the property. On two separate occasions, Mr. X contacted Smithers and asked Smithers to meet him at the property to unlock the gate.
Several people were present during the first visit to the property, including Denise Roach. Roach got into an argument with Mr. X and Mr. X hit Roach in the head with a hatchet. Smithers claimed that he just stood and watched. Mr. X then approached Smithers and hit him with a tire tool. He ordered Smithers to drag Roach’s body to the pond. Mr. X told Smithers that he would kill his family if he did not keep quiet.
Ten days later, Mr. X again asked Smithers to meet him at the property. This time Cristy Cowan was present. Several people went inside the house to conduct business. Afterwards, Mr. X ordered Smithers to go inside the house and clean up. When Smithers returned outside, Cowan’s dead body was lying in the carport. Mr. X and his cohorts left and Smithers dragged the body to the pond and returned to clean up the carport.
It was at this time that the property owner arrived at the property and the crimes were revealed.
Just as the detectives had done months before, jurors gave Smithers’s stories the consideration they deserved and convicted him on both counts. He was subsequently sentenced to death.
On appeal (so far) the only major controversy has been whether the cases should have been severed and tried seperately.
What really makes the Smithers decision interesting to true crime aficionados is that few court opinions cite so many different front-page murders as precedent. In upholding Smithers’s conviction and death sentence the Florida Supreme Court cited the cases of two high-profile serial killers (Ted Bundy and Danny Rolling), and the appeal of Kosta Fotopolous, whose story was was so eloquently recounted in an earlier post on the Malefactor’s Register (ahem).
The relevant Florida Rule of Criminal Procedure states “Joinder of Offenses. Two or more offenses that are triable in the same court may be charged in the same indictment or information in a separate count for each offense, when the offenses . . . are based on the same act or transaction or on 2 or more connected acts or transactions.”
The court explained that “the acts joined for trial must be considered in an episodic sense.” For joinder to be appropriate the crimes in question must be linked in some significant way.

“In the past this has meant that the crimes must have occurred during a ’spree’ interrupted by no significant period of respite (Bundy) or the crimes must have been causally related to each other, even though there may have been a significant lapse of time (Fotopoulos). But the mere fact of a general temporal and geographic proximity has not been sufficient in itself to justify joinder except to the extent that it helps prove a proper and significant link between the crimes.
There is clearly a “meaningful relationship” between the two crimes and they are without question “linked in some significant way.” Under these circumstances, we find that the trial court did not err in denying Smithers’ motion to sever.

Smithers remains on Florida’s death row while his case is considered by the federal courts.

R.I.P. Christian Brando

Mark Gribben — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 23:04:23 +0000

A few years ago I wrote an article for The Crime Library about Christian Brando, the oldest child of actor Marlon Brando. Christian’s trial for the murder of his sister’s lover was the warm-up for the OJ Simpson case that followed not too much later.
Christian ended up serving 5 years for manslaughter in the death of Dag Drollett, who was the father of Cheyenne Brando’s baby. Cheyenne was Christian’s younger half-sister.
Trouble seemed to follow Christian, who probably lived a little too fast for his own good. That wasn’t all his fault, though. His parents, Anna Kashfi and Marlon Brando were not exactly the best role models and Christian was left to raise himself most of his life.
Most recently Christian was in the news because he was linked to Bonnie Lee Blakely, the woman whom Robert Blake was accused of killing. Blake, of course, was acquitted. For a time there was a question as to whether or not Christian was the father of Bonnie’s baby.
But this is a true crime website, not a Hollywood gossip site. Why am I writing about Christian Brando, you ask?
Because he died over the weekend and tonight I was eating dinner tonight when the phone rang and a woman sniffled into the phone asking if I was the guy who wrote the Crime Library story on Christian Brando. That’s not really unusual for me. I get phone calls all the time from people who have questions about stuff I write.
When I told her I was the guy, she asked if I was going to update the story with his death (I’m not), because she wanted me to know that Christian, his mother, and her boyfriend saved her life one day a long time ago.
It turns out that during one of those times that Christian was being shuffled back-and-forth between Anna Kashfi, a washed-up Hollywood never-really-was, and Marlon Brando, a…well, a Marlon Brando, he was sitting up in the bedroom of the rundown apartment Anna was sharing with her boyfriend looking out the window when my caller, who was obviously much younger, was accosted by a couple of knife-wielding thugs.
No one else was around and it looked like something awful was going to happen to her, when from his window Christian yelled and scared off the goons. His mother called 911 and because the girl’s mother was working two jobs at the time, Christian and Anna cared for her all that night.
She said no one was ever interested in hearing her story because it didn’t fit with the tabloid version of Christian Brando, and I believe her. All of the research I did for that Crime Library story indicates that Christian was a good, tormented soul who didn’t deserve a lot of the stuff that happened to him. He didn’t go looking for trouble, but it seemed to find him without much difficulty.
I’m just putting this up because there will be stories written about Christian Brando in the next few days and I think it’s important that people know that he was so much more than just the son of Marlon Brando who killed his half-sister’s boyfriend.