Gruesome Las Vegas Torture Slaying Nets Guilty Verdict

March 27, 2009

During the summer of 2006, police in Florida found the diary of 23-year-old Cassandra Thomas of Las Vegas inside a stolen car.  After investigators in the Sunshine State read it, the written words of this young woman led to a homicide investigation in Sin City nearly 2,000 miles away.  The victim was 42-year-old Michael McClain of Las Vegas, cousin of a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department sergeant.  McClain went missing in early June 2006, but his body would not be found until two months later.
 
The events that led police to believe that a murder had been committed in Las Vegas began on June 26, 2006 when police in Jacksonville Beach, located due east of Jacksonville off of Highway 228 and right on the beach just as its name implies, found Thomas and one of her cohorts in crime, Corey Pearce, 29, inside a stolen car next to a beachfront condominium.  Because their presence there seemed somewhat suspicious, officers ran the car's license plate and found that it had been stolen in Marietta, Georgia.  According to Jacksonville Beach police Detective Tony Dziedzicki, officers found marijuana inside the car, as well as chemicals that they believed could be used to make methamphetamine.  During a more thorough search of the vehicle, the cops came across Thomas's diary.

"By the luck of the draw, we opened it up," Dziedzicki said.  "It talked about how she was feeling guilty.  There was a lot of emotion."

Dziedzicki said that Thomas wrote about how she could not believe that the victim had been tortured in the manner that he had been, and he said that it was obvious that the crime had been bothering her.

"It had been on her mind since the incident," Dziedzicki said.

After police had taken Thomas into an interrogation room, she was evasive about the murder at first.  However, when one of the cops asked her if the person she had written about in her diary needed help, she admitted what had occurred in Las Vegas.

"She said, 'There is no need to help them.  They are gone,'" Detective Cpl. Lee Amonette said.

Without much additional prodding by the detectives, according to police reports, Thomas told the investigators what had happened.  She explained that Pearce and another man, Joey Salas, 30, a friend of both Thomas's and Pearce's, had struck McClain with a table leg as well as a baseball bat, but that had not killed him.  The two men dragged McClain to a bedroom in the upstairs of a house, located in the 2600 block of Jacyra Avenue in the vicinity of Sahara Avenue and Boulder Highway on Las Vegas's east side, where they finished him off.  Pearce allegedly hammered a black-handled screwdriver into McClain's temple, according to Thomas, and then drove a pencil into the back of his neck.  According to the police report, the torturous actions had caused McClain "to convulse violently."

The motive for the violent murder was because Thomas, Pearce, and Salas believed that McClain had beaten a female friend of theirs.  After he was killed, they left McClain's body inside one of the bedrooms for about three days, until they could no longer stand the stench of his decomposing body.  They then wrapped his corpse in a shower curtain and dumped him in the desert outside of town.

Update on Maryland's Bizarre Case of the Bodies in the Freezer

March 18, 2009

Renee D. Bowman, 43, the Lusby, Maryland woman suspected of killing two of her adopted daughters and storing their corpses inside a freezer, had originally been indicted on charges of first-degree child abuse with regard to the third adopted daughter who survived and whose actions resulted in the authorities being notified of the atrocities that had occurred inside the family's home.  Many readers will be interested in knowing that Bowman was also indicted by a grand jury on attempted first-degree murder, as well as a number of other charges, with regard to the now 8-year-old girl who managed to escape from the filthy flea-infested house of horror.

"The nature of the case took it to that level," Detective Sgt. Michael Moore said.  The Calvert County Sheriff's Department detective also indicated that the charges were upgraded to include attempted first-degree murder due to the severity of the surviving girl's injuries.

The girl's injuries, readers will recall, included open infected sores and lacerations, as well as ligature marks on her body and considerable scarring on her neck.  Bowman has not yet been charged with the deaths of the two girls found inside the freezer, presumably because the coroner has not yet ruled on the girls' cause of death.
 
According to an article that appeared in The Washington Post in October 2008, Bowman allegedly went shopping for a new fall wardrobe on eBay a few months before the case came to a head, while the dead girls lay in the basement freezer.  The computer she used was located in a small room above the basement.  She ended up purchasing a couple of inexpensive jackets, and purchased a gold ring adorned with fake diamonds in the shape of a heart from the online auction site.  About a month prior to her arrest, Bowman purchased a small statuette that depicted a mother in a sitting position cradling a child in her arms.  It was called "A Mother's Grace" on eBay.

Bowman apparently liked going on the Internet a great deal.  She had three e-mail addresses, and was known to visit a high-school reunion type Web site where she reunited with an old friend from high school.  She had written on Internet sites that she liked to read and write, and that Janet Evanovich was her favorite author.  Her favorite television program, she had said, was Dexter.  There were also details of her childhood, in which Bowman characterized herself as being like that of an "abused dog," and said that she had experienced a violent and chaotic childhood.  She recounted how her mother had left her family behind and became homeless, and how she had seen her mother bathing in a church's school fountain while students watched.

"My mother would come and bathe in the fountain," Bowman once wrote to her high school friend.  "I would stand there and dream of being beautiful and having a beautiful life..."

She also told of how she had seen her mother, as well as other homeless people, who would come into the bathroom of the school's library and bathe in the sink.  She said that on those occasions when she had seen her mother, her mother had not recognized her.

The Continuing Saga of Phil Spector

March 16, 2009

By now most readers who follow crime stories and court cases know that the first trial of legendary record producer Phil Spector, 69, accused of murdering struggling B-movie actress Lana Clarkson, who was 40-years-old at the time of her death, ended in a hung jury on September 26, 2007.  Clarkson, of course, who was perhaps best known for her part as Amethea in the cult Roger Corman movie Barbarian Queen, was found dead in the entrance hall of Spector's mansion in Alhambra, California on February 3, 2003, with a gunshot wound to her mouth. 

Although Spector claims that Clarkson killed herself, prosecutors contend that Spector shot her.  They attempted to bolster their contention by citing that he has a history of gunplay that included using a gun to threaten and/or intimidate others.  They have also said that he has a history of drunkenness which, of course, is one explanation or excuse for the gunplay.  Nonetheless the eccentric Spector, who has worked with such rock and roll artists as John Lennon, Tina Turner, the Beach Boys, the Crystals, and the Ronettes, to name but a few, has been free on $1 million bail since shortly after being charged with second-degree murder in the case.
 
According to details that were presented in the first trial, Spector met Clarkson the night before she was killed at the House of Blues in Los Angeles where she was working as a hostess.  They went to Spector's home, which had become known as the "Pyrenees Castle" because it looked like a castle, constructed in 1926 as a replica of a chateau in Southern France.  The home has 10 bedrooms, eight bathrooms, crystal chandeliers, red carpeting and red velvet draperies.  There are also two suits of armor in the foyer, and a coat of arms that hangs over a large fireplace. The next morning Clarkson was dead, slumped in a bloodstained chair in the foyer of Spector's mansion, with the suits of armor standing at attention nearby.

Spector's first trial lasted five months, and was presided over by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Larry Fidler.  Like the author Truman Capote, who in his later years-and possibly because of his affinity for the drink-cheerfully displayed his contempt for the ways of the establishment by sometimes showing up in court on DUI charges in Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirts-Spector would appear in court with outrageous hairstyles, his hair sometimes in a perm (or a wig) and frizzed to many times the normal size of his head.  What it was that he was trying to say, if anything, is known only to Spector, but it made for great news photographs.

During the first trial, Spector's legal team accused the judge of being biased against their client, and argued that many of Fidler's decisions or rulings were contrived or made to make certain that prosecutors obtained a conviction.  The judge, of course, denied the allegations and refused to remove himself from the proceedings, including the retrial.  When the first trial ended in a hung jury, Spector proclaimed the decision a success.  Prosecutors, however, felt differently and promptly announced that Spector would be retried.  Spector ended up replacing the first defense team with a new one, and the matter involving Fidler was reviewed by the California Supreme Court.  Fidler, however, was allowed to continue as the judge in the case.
 
At one point during the first trial, prosecutors contended that Spector's chauffeur had purportedly overheard Spector say, "I think I killed somebody."  The statement apparently was made while an outdoor courtyard fountain was running, which the defense team used to argue that the chauffeur was mistaken about what he had heard Spector say because of the "ambient" sound of the fountain.  The fountain would continue to be an issue in the second trial while a new jury tried to decide whether Spector had shot and killed Clarkson or whether she had taken her own life after perhaps becoming despondent over her failed movie career.  At a hearing to set a new trial date, Spector showed up wearing a large button that read, "Obama Rocks."