4-29-15 National:
The inmate who fatally beat serial killer and sex offender Jeffrey Dahmer in prison in the early-1990s has revealed his reasons for doing so in a new interview.
Christopher Scarver, who was incarcerated at the same Portage, Wis., prison as Dahmer back in 1994, recently divulged the details of his killing to the New York Post.
“Some people who are in prison are repentant — but he was not one of them,” he told the Post, recounting details of Dahmer’s brutal and unapologetic taunts to other inmates.
Scarver said in the interview Dahmer used to fashion limbs out of the prison food, applying ketchup on places to represent blood.
Though they were taunts, the actions represented a more chilling reality. Dahmer was arrested in 1991 after police found human remains and decomposing bodies in his apartment. Dahmer later confessed to 17 murders, many of which included the rape and dismemberment of the victims.
In 1992, Dahmer was sentenced to 15 life terms in prison after a court rejected his insanity defense.
Despite Dahmer’s abominable past, Scarver told the Post the killer initially left “no impression” on him.
“I never interacted with him,” he told the Post. He would watch from afar, avoiding contact due to Dahmer’s friction with other inmates.
That was until Nov. 28, 1994.
Dahmer, 34 at the time, and another inmate were tasked to clean the bathrooms — unshackled and unattended. Scarver, then 25 and himself a convicted murderer, was with them. He told the Post he’d kept a newspaper clipping that detailed Dahmer’s killings. He found his fellow inmate to have a lust for flesh, and was “disgusted” with the details of his actions.
Scarver told the Post he’d gone to retrieve a mop when he felt someone poke his back. When he turned around, he saw Dahmer and the other inmate “laughing under their breath.”
“I looked right into their eyes, and I couldn’t tell which had done it,” he told the Post.
But after the three men split up, Scarver decided to follow Dahmer to the locker room. He told the Post he confronted Dahmer with the news article, asking the killer if he’d really done the things described in the story. When Dahmer tried to escape, Scarver then took a metal bar and swung it at his head, crushing Dahmer’s skull. Scarver then found the other inmate, Jesse Anderson, and did “[p]retty much the same thing.”
Scarver told the New York Post he believes the prison officials left them all alone on purpose, knowing he hated Dahmer and wanted him dead.
“They had something to do with what took place. Yes,” he told the Post.
After the murders he pleaded insanity, but later changed it to “no contest” in exchange for a transfer to a federal penitentiary.
According to the New York Post, Scarver was then sentenced to two life terms on top of the one he was already serving at the time. Scarver had been sentenced in 1990 for the murder of his former boss during a robbery, the Post notes. He is currently incarcerated at Centennial Correctional Facility in Canon City, Colo.
Scarver now spends some of his time writing poetry for his website. by Tribune Media
April 29, 2015
Inmate who killed Jeffrey Dahmer reveals why he murdered the serial killer
February 16, 2015
Sex offenders often targets as California prisons see high rate of homicides
While California has always been the state with the HIGHEST number of sex offenders killed or murdered (See 2012 and before. See 2013 to current day) , as to prison murders, obviously some are not published.2-16-15 California:
Shortly after 2 a.m. on April 6, 2010, a guard at Salinas Valley State Prison noticed Alan Ager’s cellmate trying to stuff something under a mattress. It was Ager, blood trickling from his mouth and a cloth noose tied around his neck.
The convicted child molester died 10 days later without regaining consciousness, his death earning his cellmate a second life sentence.
California state prison inmates are killed at a rate that is double the national average and sex offenders like Ager account for a disproportionate number of victims, according to an Associated Press analysis of corrections records.
Male sex offenders made up about 15 percent of the prison population, but accounted for nearly 30 percent of homicide victims, the AP found in cataloging all 78 killings corrections officials reported since 2007, when they started releasing slain inmates’ identities and crimes.
The deaths — 23 out of 78 — come despite the state’s creation more than a decade ago of special housing units designed to protect the most vulnerable inmates, including sex offenders, often marked men behind bars because of the nature of their crimes.
In some cases, they’ve been killed among the general prison population and, in others, within the special units by violence-prone cellmates. Officials acknowledge that those units, which also house inmates trying to quit gangs, have spawned their own gangs.
Corrections officials blamed a rise in the prison homicide rate on an overhaul meant to reduce crowding. As part of the effort, the state in 2011 began keeping lower-level offenders in county lockups, leaving prisons with a higher percentage of sex offenders and violent gang members.
Violence and homicides won’t decline unless the state goes well below the prison population level set by the courts — 137.5 percent of the system’s designed capacity, said James Austin, president of the JFA Institute, a Washington, D.C., consulting firm that works on prison issues.
“Until the state gets its prison population below 100 percent of capacity, you’re going to have this,” he said.
Overall, 162 California prison inmates were killed from 2001 to 2012, or 8 per 100,000 prisoners, double the national average over the same time period and far higher than that of other large states, including Texas, New York and Illinois, according to federal statistics.
Officials in Oklahoma mainly blamed gang violence for giving that state the nation’s highest long-term prison homicide rate, 14 per 100,000, although a quarter of its inmate homicide victims in the last decade had convictions for sex crimes.
In California, from 2012 to 2013, the most recent years for which data were available, the rate rose to 15 per 100,000, according to a report by a federal court receiver, though corrections officials said the number of deaths dropped last year.
Department spokeswoman Terry Thornton would not comment on the possible reasons for California’s long-term trend of inmate homicides.
The problem is most acute with sex offenders. Last fall, the corrections department’s inspector general reported that so many homicides occurred in the “increasingly violent” special housing units reserved for vulnerable inmates that the department could no longer assume that inmates there could peacefully coexist.
The report looked at 11 homicide cases that were closed in the first half of 2014, and found that 10 victims were sensitive needs inmates. Using corrections records, the AP found that eight of them were sex offenders.
The inspector general recommended the reinstatement of a policy dropped 15 years ago that required potential sensitive needs cellmates to fill out a compatibility form before they are housed together and that inmates with a history of violence toward cellmates should be housed alone.
Thornton said the report led to an ongoing review of the policy of housing most prisoners, including vulnerable inmates, two to a cell.
Experts said the state could better protect sex offender inmates by separating them into their own facilities. Prison gangs, though made up of inmates often convicted of heinous crimes themselves, have long made it a practice to target sex offenders.
“They’re going to clean up anybody on that yard with ‘hot charges,’ ” said former inmate Todd Siefert, referring to any crime against a woman or child, including a sex offense. The very lowest rung is reserved for child molesters.
Seifert said he was confronted by white supremacist inmates less than a half-hour after he arrived at the California Institution for Men in Chino in 2004 and was severely beaten by a half-dozen fellow inmates even though his sex crime involved an adult woman.
Corrections department spokesmen in Illinois, New York and Texas said the targeting of sex offenders is not considered a problem there. Some states have stricter protocols for keeping sex offenders away from other inmates.
Those participating in Maine’s rehabilitation therapy program are housed separately and none have been injured or killed in the decade it has been in existence, said Dennis McNamara, executive director of The Counseling and Psychotherapy Center Inc., which runs the program.
What about this case of a Maine Prison murder: 3-2014 Convicted sex offender stabbed to death in prisonHowever, only about 11 percent of the state’s inmate sex offender population is in the treatment program, corrections spokesman Scott Fish said in an email. Of four Maine inmates killed behind bars since 2001, two were sex offenders.
I guess there is another not in my files: 2009: ME- Inmate's death ruled a homicideIn Massachusetts, state policy calls for sex offenders to be placed in a “therapeutic community” that offers intensive treatment aimed at changing their behavior, preventing relapses and preparing them for eventual release.
The state had a high-profile inmate homicide in 2003, when John Geoghan, a former Roman Catholic priest whose sexual abuse conviction sparked a widespread abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, was killed by a fellow inmate who claimed he was chosen by God to kill pedophiles.
Adding to the problem in California, the department identified nearly 100 gangs that formed in sensitive needs units, said Matthew Buechner, a special investigator who trained other corrections officials on problems with prison gangs until he retired last fall.
In Ager’s case, the 5-foot-4, 135-pound inmate was kept in special housing when he first entered the prison system at San Quentin but was housed with general population inmates soon after his transfer to Salinas Valley because officials there decided he didn’t need extra protection.
Ager, 63, was housed with Clyde Leroy Beaver, a convicted murderer who has spent the last four decades in prison. Beaver pleaded guilty to murder in Ager’s slaying and got another life sentence that Ager’s son considers essentially meaningless.
A federal judge ruled in March that Ager’s family failed to show that prison officials acted with deliberate indifference.
“The very day they let him into the yard, he was filing complaints, ‘Get me the hell out of here,’ ” said Ager’s son, Daniel. “ ‘This is not safe. I’m going to get killed out here.’ ” ..Source.. by Don Thompson
January 19, 2015
Police seek public’s help in finding man’s killer
1-19-2015 North Carolina:
New Bern police are seeking the public’s help in tracking down the person who killed Terrance Lee Little, 32, on Main Street early Sunday morning.
The incident occurred between Lee Avenue and West Street. Little was shot multiple times.
Police responded to a 911 call regarding shots fired at 2:51 a.m. Responding, they found Lee lying face down on the street in front of the United Missionary Baptist Church. According to one area resident, numerous bullet casings were collected at the scene by police.
Jeremy Gaye, who lives two houses down from the church, said he was watching television with his girlfriend when the shooting occurred.
“We heard the shots and we were kind of ducking,” he said. “We thought that they were shooting at the house because they were so loud.”
Within 10 to 15 minutes, the police arrived on the scene and he and his girlfriend went out on the front porch.
“She was scared, really scared,” Gaye said.
He said he and others in the area were questioned by police. He said the victim was lying face down in the road, not far from the intersection of Main Street and Lee Avenue.
“The police found 27 shell casings,” he said. “I don’t know if (the shooter) shot that many times,” but he said he heard over a dozen shots. “It was definitely not a handgun,” he said, “because of the number of shots.”
Gaye said police were on the scene for several hours and that the body remained in the street for a long time before it was removed, as well.
Although he has only lived in New Bern about three months, Gaye said the neighborhood has been quiet while he’s lived here.
William Manning, another resident in the area, said the shooting was a surprise.
“The area is very quiet, very peaceful,” he said. “There used to be drugs here, but the police cleaned it up really well about a year ago.”
According to the N.C. Department of Justice website, Little was a registered sex offender who was on parole at the time of his death. He had been released from prison in November 2010, having served time for attempted first-degree rape and indecent liberties with a minor, incidents that occurred in 2000 and 2001, records state. ..Source.. by Bill Hand, Sun Journal Staff
December 21, 2014
Mystery of Keene man's death continues one year later
12-21-2014 New Hampshire:
Three gunshots were fired one year ago today, killing a man within seconds inside his home on Pearl Street in Keene.
Who killed 48-year-old David E. Wheelock and why remains a mystery, but investigators say they aren’t giving up hope that one day they’ll have the answers to those looming questions.
The authorities probing Wheelock’s death continue to scour for clues about what happened the night of Dec. 21, 2013. The possible theories procured, in part, from more than 100 witness interviews are immense, Assistant N.H. Attorney General Benjamin J. Agati said last week.
And investigators say it’s too early to discount any one of them just yet.
What police have not determined is whether more than one person carried out the homicide, and whether Wheelock was the intended target or the victim of a random crime, Agati said.
That being said, there is also no evidence to support a wider threat to the people of Keene or Cheshire County, Agati noted. Should police have any suspicion of such a threat, they would notify the community immediately, he said.
Agati’s words are somewhat reassuring to those who live in close proximity to Wheelock’s former home at 170 Pearl St. Nevertheless, neighbors say, the empty house is a daily reminder of the unsolved homicide and the other crimes that probe unearthed.
“This was once a nice, quiet, beautiful neighborhood that people were proud to live in, and then all of the sudden...” said Arlene E. Guyette, who has lived in the same Pearl Street home for 62 years.
Wheelock’s former housemate, Nicholas A. Coll, 26, was convicted this past summer of two felony counts of cruelty to animals, for performing sexual acts on a German shepherd and a yellow Labrador retriever, according to court documents. That abuse occurred in March of 2012 and May of 2012 at 170 Pearl St., where he was living at the time.
According to an affidavit in the case, Coll and Wheelock created online accounts to talk with others about their bestiality, sexual contact with animals.
Agati said Thursday his team is looking into whether someone’s knowledge of bestiality in the home was a motivating factor in Wheelock’s death. The authorities are also probing theories about whether Wheelock’s sexual offender status made him a target, Agati said.
“We don’t have evidence that this was the case, but we’re not ruling anything out.”
Wheelock was convicted of 28 counts of child pornography in October 2005, according to the N.H. Department of Safety’s sex offender registry.
Longtime residents of Pearl Street said last week they had limited interaction with Wheelock and, therefore, knew little about him.
Clarence “Clancy” and Winifred M. “Winnie” Faulkner, who have lived on Pearl Street for 50 years, said on their doorstep Thursday that they would see Wheelock taking his dogs for a walk daily.
Wheelock was confined to a wheelchair due to multiple sclerosis, but that didn’t keep him from getting outside, the couple said. They recalled one time Clancy heard Wheelock hollering for help because he had gotten his wheelchair stuck in the mud.
“Clancy pulled him out. He was OK,” Winnie said.
Guyette didn’t know Wheelock or his housemates, but like the Faulkners she frequently saw Wheelock out and about. Since his death, the home has had few visitors, she said.
“I don’t know who would want to live there now. I say tear it down and build a nice cottage.”
In the weeks following Wheelock’s death, his sister Diane C. Blinn of Plaistow because the administrator of the $128,800 estate, according to records filed in 8th Circuit Court Probate Division. Wheelock died without a will.
The front lawn of 170 Pearl St. now bears a “for sale” sign. The asking price for the three-bedroom home is $45,000, according to a local Realtor’s website.
Neighbors say they haven’t seen much activity from any potential buyers or from police officers, who had become a regular presence in the neighborhood last December.
The yellow crime tape is gone and so too are the unmarked cruisers that once lined the driveway outside the red-painted home. But the memories of that foggy December night are not ones Pearl Street residents will soon — if ever — forget. ..Source.. by Alyssa Dandrea
October 30, 2014
'Vigilante justice' leads to prison time in fatal beating of sex offender
10-30-2014 Maryland:
A 20-year-old Reservoir Hill woman was sentenced Thursday to six years in prison for what prosecutors called an act of vigilante justice when she led a group beating of a sex offender that turned fatal. Her father was also sentenced to jail time for his role.
Circuit Judge Timothy Doory said Latiqwa Mayes' frustration that the man, Donald Robinson, had not received a stricter sentence from the courts after breaking into her room at a boardinghouse months earlier did "not justify a call to the community to impose physical, violent retribution."
Joshua Insley, Mayes' attorney, said his client was told that Robinson's conviction in May 2013 for assaulting her roommate would trigger a violation of his parole for a prior sex offense, and he would be off the streets, Insley said.
That never happened, and on Sept. 2, 2013, Mayes spotted Robinson walking down the street in the 800 block of Lennox St. "She's shocked, and that puts this horrible situation in motion," Insley said.
Mayes started yelling, "He raped me. He's a sex offender," attracting the attention of others in the area, police wrote in charging documents. Her father, Willie Mayes, called for someone to stop Robinson, and a group of teens who were in the area playing basketball ran over and held Robinson. Strangers on the street then joined in and kicked and punched Robinson, police said at the time of the arrest, and Latiqwa Mayes pepper-sprayed him.
The incident was captured on city surveillance cameras, which show that Robinson was able to walk away from the scuffle. But he fell ill a short time later and was pronounced dead at a local hospital within 30 minutes. An autopsy found that the beating had exacerbated an existing health problem, Doory said.
Attorneys for Latiqwa and Willie Mays, who both pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in September, said they never intended for Robinson to die.
"They wanted him to never come back, with good reason," said Insley, who said Latiqwa Mayes needed treatment and counseling, not continued incarceration. She has been in segregation in an 8-by-12-foot jail cell for the past 13 months.
But Assistant State's Attorney Tonya LaPolla said the attack went too far and the suspects hadn't shown enough remorse.
Doory said the attack was "an act of vengeance" and "an act of retribution that went too far," and required punishment. He sentenced Latiqwa Mayes to 10 years with all but six years suspended.
Willie Mayes, a military veteran who proudly noted that he had been sober for five years, was sentenced to 10 years in prison with all but two years suspended, with credit for 10 months time he had already served.
"I don't think anyone thought these punches were designed to kill someone," Doory said. "But because of [Robinson's] vulnerable condition, they did kill him."
Kwan Blackburn, 18, one of the teens who ran over to stop Robinson, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was given a suspended sentence and four years' probation. ..Source.. by Justin Fenton
August 21, 2014
MCSO IDs man found dead in Peoria canal
8-21-2014 Arizona:
Sheriff's investigators identify murder victim as 35-year-old Peoria man
The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office has identified a 35-year-old man found dead Wednesday morning in a Peoria canal.
Passers-by discovered the body of Rolland Lee Tockey pressed up against the intake to a water-treatment plant near 67th Avenue and Thunderbird Road, said Lt. Brandon Jones, a Maricopa County Sheriff's Office spokesman.
Tockey was a registered sex offender who served served almost 16 years in prison for sexually assaulting a 4-year-old girl, according to the Alabama Department of Public Safety.
Tockey lived near the area where his body was found, Jones said Wednesday.
Investigators believe Tockey was murdered, but the official cause of death remains under investigation, he said.
Tockey's body showed evidence of trauma, Jones said Wednesday, but currents in moving water could be the cause. ..Source.. by Matthew Casey
