Posted on 03/08/2006 6:54:36 AM PST by commish
NO story yet, just a blurb on website and TV.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
"Washington" is a southern name, mostly. Very few white southerners ever moved North, so in places like the Northeast, anyone with a southern name is likely to be black. But since this took place in the south...
Aw, hell, anyone can score at a wedding. Scoring at a church potluck... now THAT takes game. (Unless they're Episcopalian)
A SOUTHERNER surnamed Lee? I never heard of something so odd!
(/sarcasm)
Ha, I ran into some research on someone, an older man, whose mother's last name was Washington and it did strike me that I didn't know many white people named that *anymore* (since George and Martha died, lol).
Then I saw that she was British. We're talking someone born like late 1880s or so. My own thinking was so funny that I laughed out loud at myself. British? Couldn't think of any Washingtons I knew in England, either. Ha.
Like no one ever lived before there was a United States. Geo Washington just sprang fullblown from the soil of Mount Vernon, lol. Just odd the things we get "used to." Of course, then I started wondering if this murder suspect I was sleuthing is related to old George!
That was a scene in the play he and that girl starred in, called "Extremities." He was a perp who broke into her home and she turned the tables on him, tied him up and put him in the fireplace.
YW - and here are some more various tidbits gleaned from the latest AP story and sundry other sources - just the parts I hadn't seen posted yet:
~~~~
" ....
Moseley later told agents that burning additional churches became "too spontaneous" after they saw fire trucks rushing by.
.....
An attorney for Cloyd, Tommy Spina, said he had spent little time with his client and declined comment on the charges, but added: "This is not a hate crime. This is not a religious crime."
.....
A lawyer for DeBusk did not immediately return a message seeking comment, and court files did not list an attorney for Moseley, whose father ran unopposed for a constable's position in Jefferson County in 2004.
.....
Two current Birmingham-Southern students, speaking on condition of anonymity because they didn't want their names associated with the suspects, said Moseley, DeBusk and Cloyd had a reputation for pranks and vandalism, although nothing serious.
.....
Investigators had said earlier that they were looking for two men seen in a dark sport-utility vehicle near a couple of the church fires, and documents show Cloyd drove a green Toyota SUV. Tire tracks found at the scene of six church fires allegedly matched the type of tires on Cloyd's Toyota: a BF Goodrich All Terrain model.
.....
Jim Collins at Cahaba Tires in Pelham said agents arrived Tuesday looking for records of those who had bought the tire in recent months. Checking his records, he said he had sold it four times — and one of the customers was Cloyd's mother.
Also, the day before the arrests, agents spoke with Cloyd's parents, Kimberly and Michael Cloyd. The father, a physician, said his son admitted that "he knew who did it and he was there," according to the affidavit. Then after the arrests, Moseley described how the church arsons unfolded, the affidavit said.
A judge ordered the three held until a hearing Friday. ..."
Acquaintances said DeBusk and Moseley were both amateur actors who were known as pranksters and dreamed of becoming stars. They performed in campus plays and appeared in a documentary film.
Moseley confessed to the arsons after his arrest, investigators said in court papers.
The papers said Moseley told agents that he, Cloyd and Debusk went to Bibb County in Cloyd's sport utility vehicle on Feb. 2 and set fire to five churches. A witness quoted Cloyd as saying Moseley did it "as a joke and it got out of hand."
Moseley also told agents the four fires in west Alabama were set "as a diversion to throw investigators off," an attempt that "obviously did not work," the court papers said.
My suspicions were correct, Mr. Ben Moseley is one to get people to do crazy things. He may have had ambitions to become a director. Methinks his ambitions got misdirected.
Aaaccck! Please post a warning before putting up a picture of Leroy Lincoln Wood, Esquire!
(Jewell's atty - the horse's butt on the right.)
Cloyd's the one who seemed to be more interested in being on the "wrong" side of the camera lens - buttering up the film studio owner his Scout troop visited.
The picture suggests something you would get when kids do crazy things on film. Now I'm seeing a pattern of kids doing crazy things on stage. Could it be the immature result of not being able to separate fantasy from reality that touched off this arson madness?
Perhaps. What is sooo spooky about that "rope-around-the-neck" picture is that a very similar type of photo surfaced in the Natalee Holloway case!
The person of interest, who was the last to see her in Aruba - a then-17-year-old kid - had some photos posted on his tickle or myspace site from a trip to Venezuela he went on during the school year. He had put a belt around his shirtless (male) schoolmate's neck, fastened to look like it was choking him, and they were play-acting a torture scene from Abu Ghraib (or so it appeared). The kid was looking horrified and clawing at the belt at his throat.
It was just startling to see another "ligature" photo for another POI. Maybe teens everywhere have one and I'm very sheltered, but it just seems kinda out of the norm to me.
Of course this Moseley one wasn't a spur of the moment thing - it was for a school production - but surely there were other scenes that might have made a good photo to use for the publicity - and for this to be the only one available of him, also coincidental.
Like I said before in post #518:
Hunting buddies who have swallowed the anti-religion drool that spews from their demon professors who have risen out of the cesspool of the sixties to the Dawn of the Dead.
Get this! The college is going to give some money to the churches! I can't believe that. It's a nice gesture, but it's like taking responsibility for what these jerk kids did!
~~~~~
http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060309/NEWS/603090352/1001
March 9, 2006
Classmates: Arson suspects goofy, not evil
By Mike Linn
Montgomery Advertiser
BIRMINGHAM -- Classmates saw Russ DeBusk and Ben Moseley as just a couple of guys who liked to goof around, act in student plays and keep their classmates laughing.
But nobody at Birmingham-Southern College would have linked them to a string of rural church fires in Alabama.
"I was absolutely shocked," said Elisabeth Tutwiler, a classmate and friend. "It's Ben and Russ. Goofy boys. Typical guys. Talented actors. I enjoyed being around them."
DeBusk and Moseley, 19-year-old sophomores at Birmingham-Southern, were arrested Tuesday night in connection with a string of fires at nine Baptist churches. A third suspect, Matthew Cloyd, a student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, also has been charged in the arsons.
DeBusk and Cloyd, 20, a former student at Birmingham-Southern, are from upper middle-class suburbs of Birmingham.
DeBusk, a theater arts major from Hoover, and Moseley, who had not decided on a major, were suspended and immediately banned from campus, school officials said.
Campus police summoned the two Tuesday night from their separate dorm rooms at Hanson Residence Hall on campus. They took the two to campus police headquarters about 8:30 p.m., where federal authorities were waiting.
"These cruel and senseless acts of destruction have profoundly touched our college community," said David Pollick, president of Birmingham-Southern. "We are also deeply concerned for the families of these young men, knowing the pain they are experiencing."
Pollick said the school would offer financial assistance to the churches.
Moseley, who is good friends with DeBusk, was in a rock band that played cover songs at fraternity parties. He pledged Sigma Nu fraternity in the fall of 2004.
The two, who were featured in the school newspaper Wednesday for their acting skills, "are a little wild and a little crazy, but very friendly and very personable," said Martin Landry, a theater arts and music major at Birmingham-Southern.
Classmates and friends said they fit in very well. They didn't mention church fires; they weren't acting strange, they said.
"When all this media happens, the first thing you think is, 'These terrible people,' " said former Birmingham-Southern student Jana Wright, 19. She said neither Moseley nor DeBusk expressed political or religious views to make anyone think they could be involved in burning churches.
"I just want people to know they weren't terrible people. They're not bad people; they're just people who made wrong decisions," she said.
~~~~~
Funny you should mention "demons" - the truth is starting to come out. "Satanists" are just people looking for "knowledge," dontcha know?
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http://www.al.com/news/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/news/114189967337050.xml&coll=2
A busy actor, DeBusk known as peacemaker
Thursday, March 09, 2006
GIGI DOUBAN and TOM GORDON
News staff writers
Russell DeBusk was funny and animated, and few people took him too seriously.
"He's a real goofy personality," said Jeremy Burgess, DeBusk's roommate at Birmingham-Southern College. "He's almost like a cartoon character."
No one was laughing Wednesday after DeBusk, Ben Moseley and Matthew Cloyd were arrested in the recent spate of church fires.
At BSC, DeBusk was a theater major, following an interest he had established at Hoover High School. A member of Hoover's class of 2004, he was voted "Most Dramatic" out of more than 430 graduates.
He was active in Hoover's drama department and earned a drama scholarship to BSC, said Sandra Taylor, a retired drama teacher from Hoover High who taught DeBusk at least three years.
"He was a wonderful drama student, very enthusiastic," Taylor said. "Russ fell in love with drama and the theater and had some talent."
When he wasn't acting, DeBusk was working behind the scenes in the technical aspects of theater, Taylor said. She said she had seen DeBusk in at least one production at BSC. "He could do it all."
At Hoover, DeBusk was a good student and well-behaved, Taylor said. The only thing she ever had to speak to him about was smoking, she said. "He was a smoker, but he was not a behavior problem."
At BSC, friends say, DeBusk was a good student and was often the first to settle an argument between friends.
"He's the peacemaker," said Burgess, who added he had not seen a lot of DeBusk lately but assumed he was busy with theater activities.
DeBusk was busy, having just taken the lead role in an independent film called "Work," which was expected to debut at the Sidewalk Film Festival in September, according to Wednesday's edition of the campus newspaper, The Hilltop News.
Said he was Satanist:
DeBusk, whose home address was listed as the Russet Woods subdivision in Hoover, had other interests as well. Friends said he and Ben Moseley were Satanists, which DeBusk told friends was "not about worshipping the devil, but about the pursuit of knowledge," according to Burgess.
DeBusk invited Burgess and others to go demon hunting last summer. Burgess said it didn't amount to much.
"All it ended up being was us playing guitar in the woods while a few of them got drunk," Burgess said. "I didn't think anything of it."
Burgess said he and DeBusk discussed religion loosely, debating whether pets go to heaven and what heaven looks like. "He told me I was one of the more intelligent Christians he's talked to," Burgess said. "Coming from a Satanist, I didn't know quite how to interpret that."
Ian Cunningham, a sophomore who lived in the same dorm as DeBusk, recalled returning from the campus chapel recently to snide remarks about being saved from DeBusk and Moseley. "He would constantly mock me," Cunningham said of DeBusk.
But because Moseley and DeBusk had a reputation for lighthearted humor, Cunningham took their jibes with a grain of salt.
Taylor said she was shocked to learn of DeBusk's arrest and could not imagine what might have led him to set church fires.
"I am absolutely floored," Taylor said. "Russ was kind and gentle to everybody ... . I can't fathom what in the world happened."
Kids go in a lot of different directions, said Taylor, the retired drama teacher. "I'm praying for him. Lord, he needs it."
~~~~~~
Oh man, he's going to be "The Belle of the Ball" at Club Fed.
That play is "Extremities" by Mastersome.
Dang those Methodists, always burning Baptists churches and telling lame jokes about us on Sunday!
The scene in the play is that she has turned the tables on him during a rape. She proceeds to beat him without mercy if I remember right.
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