Joseph Duncan Extradited to California for Murder of 10-year-old Boy

January 29, 2009

When I wrote Stolen in the Night for St. Martin's Press couple of years ago, I found myself wishing and hoping since that time that the subject of my book, serial killer scumbag Joseph Edward Duncan III, who is clearly among the worst sexual deviants to ever walk the face of the earth, would eventually be extradited to California to stand trial for the 1997 Riverside County murder of 10-year-old Anthony Martinez after his case in Idaho had been adjudicated.

Readers will recall that Duncan was singlehandedly responsible for the 2005 slaughter of Shasta and Dylan Groene's family - their mother, her boyfriend, and their older brother - before vanishing into the night with Shasta, then 8-years-old, and her brother, Dylan, then 9-years-old - in a case that culminated with the ghastly sexual abuse of Shasta and Dylan for several weeks and Dylan's eventual torture and murder while Shasta was forced to watch.  If not for Shasta's early-morning rescue inside a Denny's restaurant in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, a similar fate almost assuredly awaited the terrified young girl. 

Finally, this past week I got my wish, as did many other people, when Duncan was brought from his death row cell at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana to California on Friday, January 23, 2009 to face the Anthony Martinez murder charges.

Duncan had been previously convicted of raping and torturing a 14-year-old boy in Tacoma, Washington, and allegedly committed the Martinez murder after the system turned him loose and allowed him to move on to commit the atrocities in Idaho.  To recap the Martinez case, investigators looking to match Duncan's profile to criminal activity in other areas of the country placed him in Southern California at the time of Martinez' disappearance in April 1997.  Martinez, according to detectives in Riverside County, had been kidnapped by a "mustached man" in Beaumont, California on April 4, 1997 while playing with his younger brother and several friends in an alley behind their home.  A man fitting Duncan's general description had approached the children and offered them money to help him look for his supposedly missing cat, an obvious ruse to try and gain the trust of the children.
 
"He first went after Anthony's brother, but that boy got away," said Beaumont Police Lieutenant Mitch White.  "He got Anthony."

Decapitation at Virginia Tech

January 26, 2009

Virginia Tech, still suffering from the carnage committed by gunman Seung-Hui Cho in April 2007 when Cho went on a shooting rampage and murdered 32 people before killing himself, is back in the news as this beleaguered institution of higher learning deals with yet another horrific incident of violence.  Homicide detectives are investigating the very gruesome murder of a young Chinese female graduate student, Xin Yang, 22, that occurred shortly after 7 PM Wednesday night, January 21, 2009.  Yang was a graduate student studying accounting.

Yang was having coffee with fellow Virginia Tech international graduate student Haiyang Zhu, 25, at the Au Bon Pain café inside the Graduate Life Center at Donaldson-Brown - which also houses a graduate student lounge, computer lab, study room, and reading room - when she was attacked.  Police were not saying what had led up to the ultra-violent attack on Yang, or even if they had any such information, without first running it past the Commonwealth's Attorney.  Yang had resided in the Graduate Life Center, but was looking for another place to live.  Zhu had been assisting her in that search.

The call that a female student was being attacked inside the café came in at 7:06 PM, and the first officer on the scene arrived approximately 1 minute later.

"She (the officer) found the suspect in the café along with the victim," said Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum.  "It was a perfect crime scene and the victim had been decapitated... there are some details of an investigation that we're not going to be able to talk about at this point after consultation with Commonwealth's Attorney.  But obviously there is going to be a court case in the future on this."

The officer first on the scene could see that the suspect had blood on his clothes, and that the victim had been decapitated.  The suspect was holding the victim's severed head in his hands.  There was much blood, and the officer described the scene as "gruesome." The suspect's backpack lay nearby and, according to a police affidavit, contained other sharp instruments.  According to what Chief Flinchum told reporters, there were approximately 7 witnesses to the attack.  No one, as best as he had been able to ascertain, attempted to intervene during the attack on Yang, and according to published reports the witnesses never reported an argument between the two prior to the onset of the violent confrontation.

"The incident points to an isolated, very personal tragedy," said university Pres. Charles Steger.

Police believe that Zhu used a large kitchen knife to decapitate Yang.  According to the police, the suspect has no known prior criminal record.

"All of his friends are very, very shocked," Kim Beisecker, director of Virginia Tech's Cranwell International Center, said to reporters.  "They all indicated that they would never have expected this of him and are searching for understanding, for an explanation, as we all are.  And we just don't have one…(Yang had) just the sweetest, bubbly personality.  She really did make an impression with her warmth in just those two weeks.  (Zhu) was polite and helpful."

Hell Hath No Fury Like a Woman Who Has Been Cheated On!

January 12, 2009

The original quotation that the title of this article was taken from, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned or, sometimes, hell hath no fury like a woman spurned, is actually from a 1697 play called The Mourning Bride, by William Congreve. Given the nature of this article, it seemed appropriate to use a variation of that line from the play here. Rajini Narayan, 44, of Adelaide, South Australia, seems to fit in there somewhere because on Monday, December 7, 2008, she allegedly set fire to her husband's genitalia while he was sleeping after she purportedly saw him hugging another woman and presumed that he was having an affair. Her husband, Satish Narayan, 47, an engineer by profession, lived for 20 days after the fire attack, but succumbed to his injuries on Saturday, December 27, 2008.

It was about 5:30 a.m. when Rajini Narayan poured alcohol on her husband's genitals and lit the flammable liquid. Shocked into waking by the fire and the intense pain, Mr. Narayan bolted upright and leapt out of bed, knocking over the bottle of alcohol that his wife had left nearby. The additional alcohol, of course, only served to fuel the fire, and it quickly spread over Mr. Narayan's body as well as throughout the couple's townhouse. Mrs. Narayan, along with the couple's three children, escaped unharmed from the blaze. By the time Satish had been rescued, he had endured severe burns to 85 percent of his body. He was rushed to Royal Adelaide Hospital where he remained until his death.

It was later determined that the blaze had caused approximately 1 million Australian dollars in damage to the Narayan's townhouse and an adjacent structure. Mrs. Narayan was, of course, arrested; she was initially charged with arson, three counts of endangering her children's lives and causing serious injuries to her husband. Following Mr. Narayan's death, the charges against Mrs. Narayan were upgraded to include murder.

According to Lucy Boord, one of the prosecutors, Rajini Narayan allegedly confessed to neighbors that she had set her husband's genitals on fire after learning of the affair she believed he was engaged in. Boord urged the court not to release Rajini on bail without first having the murder suspect undergo a psychological evaluation.

"She poses a substantial risk to others given her flagrant offending," Boord said to the court. "Witnesses also heard the accused make references to using a police officer's gun on herself, and references to whether she should be alive at all."