Posted on 10/07/2009 7:48:34 AM PDT by Colofornian
MONT VERNON, N.H. - A devout Mormon on the verge of becoming a church missionary helped lead a group of machete-toting teens accused of butchering a nurse in her bed and slashing her 11-year-old daughter’s throat in what officials say was a sadistic pact to attack at random.
Police said Christopher Gribble, 19 - a handyman and member of the Church of Latter-day Saints - allegedly slashed to death 42-year-old Kimberly Lynn Cates in a brutal bloodbath that left sixth-grader Jaime Cates bleeding in her family’s front yard Sunday morning after attempting to run for help.
Authorities allege a cold-blooded quartet of Granite State teens - Gribble, Steven Spader, 17, William Marks, 18, and Quinn Glover, 17 - were hell-bent on killing and robbing whoever was home at an address they randomly picked early Sunday.
“They took a woman who was full of life,” said neighbor Yuki Chorney, who believes young Jaime was running to her house. “And they took away the innocence of Jaime.”
Spader, who dropped out of Hollis-Brookline High School last year, slit the young girl’s throat with a machete and along with Gribble fatally hacked her mother in the head, torso, left arm and left leg, authorities said.
Gribble’s friends found it difficult to understand how such a pious Mormon, who dutifully attended missionary prep class in Lowell, could morph into an alleged crazed killer.
“It doesn’t mesh with my knowledge of him,” said Ben Gentile of Boxboro, reached by phone yesterday at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.
Andrew Johnson, 18, met Gribble in the Boy Scouts when they were both 6 years old. Gribble’s father, an EMT, taught the cubs CPR for their life-saving merit badge.
“He was always wicked nice,” Johnson said of Gribble. “He’d give you the shirt off his back . . . it’s incomprehensible.”
On his Facebook page, Gribble lists himself as a fan of former Bay State Gov. Mitt Romney and Abe Lincoln. Gribble was home-schooled and a member of the ROTC, friends said.
Spader, the other accused killer, showed signs of being a misfit - having once drawn a swastika on his head and proclaiming himself a member of the predominantly black Crips gang.
“He just progressively got worse and worse,” said one friend. “He . . . would do stupid little things for trouble . . . The ‘Crips gang’ was him and two other kids.”
Marks and Glover, meanwhile, were seen as falling in with the wrong crowd, friends said.
“Something tells me Quinn (Glover) didn’t know that was going to happen,” said Chris Capps, 20, of Amherst, N.H.
Adam Hayward, a junior at the University of Oregon, described Quinn as “a feel-good, down-to-earth, passive guy.”
The victim’s husband, David Cates, 44, a defense contractor with BAE Systems, was away on business and was believed to be at the bedside of Jaime last night, who remained in stable condition at Children’s Hospital Boston.
“I know her injuries were very serious and I suspect her recovery will be very long,” said William Delker, New Hampshire senior assistant attorney general.
Spader and Gribble, both charged with first-degree murder, attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder, are being held without bail. Spader is alleged to have been the driver. Glover and Marks pleaded not guilty to burglary charges and were held on $500,000 bail. All four are scheduled to return to court Oct. 20.
“(The Cateses) were the most loving neighbors,” Chorney said. “Kim would tend to the garden, the flowers. She loved the outdoors.”
Kimberly and Jaime “were best friends,” she said. “Their relationship was one I’d want to have with my daughter. They did things together all the time. She loved her mom.”
Perhaps they misspelled Muslin as Mormon somewhere along the way...
IDing a criminal’s Christianity is pointless and only used to denigrate the devout. One notes that a Muslim criminal’s religion is NEVER, EVER IDed in such a report.
We’re getting more and more like Britain.
Wonder how it would have turned out
had mom had a big gun.
These animals need to be sent to the ultimate authority ASAP.
Good point!
Wicked Nice?
Ho boy I am getting old, I suppose that means really awesome cool dude.
Also I guess there goes the Amish dude did it jokes.
Non-believers always seem to be surprised by the amount of evil in the world.
I would love some alone time with this subhuman filth.
Oh! It's YOU, Colofornian!
I should have expected as much.
Nancy Grace has her next story.
LOL.
4 3 2 1.....rants from Moms who are devout home schoolers.
/sarc
Not Christian. This young man obviously learned to deceive while going through the missionary interviews conducted by his Mormon Bishop to find out if he was “worthy.”
Whenever a human being determines his own “worthiness” by his own actions and not the atonement of Christ, he either learns pride or deception. There is no in-between.
Both pride and deception are horrible sins in the eyes of God.
For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast… Ephesians 2:8-9
Mormons ARE NOT Christians...just saying
ok what was the religion of the thugs who beat the 16 year old to death in Chicago...i dont recall any mention of it
After Jonestown, I don't think people readily Id'd Jim Jones as "Christian" -- although he had a Christian background earlier in his life. The point is that devout Jim Jones had well moved beyond his Christian background as is the case with the group involved here.
I guarantee if he listed being a fan of Obama or Clinton and a member of ACORN it NEVER would have been put in here.
i thought they were christians
“Wicked nice ...”
I think that’s a New England regionalism.
We might say “Real nice” or “mighty nice.”
But still, horrible crime. I know it’s a cliche, but we live in a fallen world and sometimes evil is so blatant.
(Oh, sure, I told 4 Boston journalists to stress that.../sarcasm off)
A moral less Mormon.
I bet his Mom drank Mountain Dew and smoked secretly when she was pregnant...she birthed a pyschotic according to the latest dumb ass polls.
or Maybe he tried LSD for the first time.
They worshiped at the church of Section 8 at the WIC alter.
I am sure in the footnotes we will learn the extensive research base this Boston paper uses for their determination of “devout” for any religion.
Mr. Cates is going to regret not getting a burglar alarm and a firearm the rest of his life.
The fact that the perps picked a house “at random” in the Granite State is somewhat odd since about half of all homes there have firearms and the perps did not. Something tells me they smelled out Massholes, immigrants from south of the Merrimac. The same way those Jamokes in Lebanon, NH singled out Dartmouth professors.
It is also odd that they attacked when the husband was out of town. (No, I do not suspect he was involved, but they may have been tipped off.)
The most distasteful job in the world must be serving as their defense lawyers.
Remember the DC sniper? The enemedia was quick to identify him as a military veteran. The fact that he had changed his name to Muhammed and become a ROPer more recently just didn't seem to matter to them.
As Global2010 pointed out, Gribbled was also home-schooled. (The next thing you'll accuse me of is telling 4 Boston journalists to stress that the murderer was home-schooled 'cause I "must have it in for all home-schoolers")
A Roman-style scourging followed by a salt water bath for each of them
“Wicked” is New England (originally Southie - South Boston) slang for “very”. The lobstah in “Finding Nemo” says “It’s wicked dahk down thar” if you’ve seen the movie. Meant to show that the legend of Marvin spread throughout the Oceans and even reached New England.
Agree.
The big 10 are now related to a Late Night show not the now fabled Commandments.
“Spader, the other accused killer, showed signs of being a misfit - having once drawn a swastika on his head and proclaiming himself a member of the predominantly black Crips gang.”
When he enters the Big House, he will find out pronto how wrong his romanticizion of the Crips was.
will discuss this with my Mormon friends.
You're partially missing the point, V. The "sidebar" angle of the article isn't that a murderer has a religious affiliation...all kinds of murderers have religious affiliations. What's new about that?
It's more comparable to having some Roman Catholic whose about to become a priest -- and he hacks to death one and slits the throat of another. I mean, do you think that would then be irrelevant to the story? (The murderer in this case was about to become an Lds door-to-door missionary...you want somebody like that ringing you and your neighbor's doorbells?)
They were the religion of Ho-mies.
“He was always wicked nice,”
________________________________________
Make that nicely wicked...
“One notes that a Muslim criminal’s religion is NEVER, EVER IDed in such a report.”
Perhaps it’s because it’s “not news” when a muslim acts like a muslim...
While the USA has always been a great country, we have always had our nutcases, just like any other country. Does the name Charles Manson ring a bell? That happened many, many years ago and this sounds like something right out of his playbook, so, yes, it does sound like America and any other country in the world also.
Cant blame religion.
At all.
Human nature takes a bad turn and evil happens.
Just ask Cain.
Demon possessed ...
Yes. If the reporter had asked Johnson to elaborate on his Boy Scout years he might’ve described them as “wicked pissah.” Then again, he might not have.
IDing a criminal’s Christianity is pointless
_______________________________________
DUH the murderer isnt a Christian...
He is a mormon...
He went through a intense vetting system to be accepted into the mormon missionary program...
Only temple worthy guys get to go...
They claim to be, but most mainline Christian denominations have examined Mormon teachings and rejected them as being Christian.
There are two main doctrinal beliefs that mainline Christianity has decided on constitutes the core of Christianity: the nature of God and the nature of salvation. You can err on a lot of doctrine, but if you get these two right, most Christians will accept you as being Christian, no matter how screwed up you are on the rest of your beliefs.
Mormonism has significantly changed both of these.
“IDing a criminal’s Christianity is pointless and only used to denigrate the devout.”
The MSM takes every opportunity to disparage Mormons, no doubt because of their conservative stance. I fear they’ll get a lot of leverage out of this. Watch how they tie Glenn Beck in. Wait for it -
Idiotic analogy. Contractors, Jehovah's Witnesses, Fuller Brush sales people and the Schwan's Driver, among others, all ring neighbor's doorbells. I'm reasonably certain that, given the sheer numbers of people who ring doorbells, every one of them potentially could and likely has had such bad apples.
The clear implication that you and the Boston journalists are trying to draw is that the theology was responsible for producing such monsters. And that is clearly bullsh*t.
A more likely explanation is that such monsters sometimes seek to disguise themselves in religion (or a host of other wholesome activities) as a cover to stalk their victims. Ted Bundy was an expert at doing just that.
A good share of those same mainline Christian denominations have embraced homosexuality as a normal lifestyle worthy of church leadership positions and the social gospel of lieberals to redistribute wealth through the iron fist of government. They also embrace trendy theories such as global warming.
I don't think I would be looking to them for a definition of Christianity.
Wow. Just wow. An on-the-verge of becoming a Mormon missionary auditions as a mass murderer, becoming "only" a solo murderer in the process, and it's the media's fault for "bad PR" for Mormons or home schoolers everywhere?
[Some folks have an overabundance of a religious persecution complex...the MSM is bad enough w/out overblowing it out of proportion]
Muslin is a woven cotton fabric.
But I know, typos happen. But sometimes they're kinda funny.
There, fixed it. Stupid-ass writer.
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