Testimony: DNA, fingerprints from motor home link Westerfield to Danielle
Posted on 03/12/2002 6:35:18 PM PST by FresnoDA
Testimony: DNA, fingerprints from motor home link Westerfield to Danielle
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 Thousands of computer porn images, videos reported foundBy Jeffrey J. RoseSIGNONSANDIEGO March 12, 2002 SAN DIEGO – DNA from bloodstains on David Westerfield's jacket and inside his motor home matched that taken from underwear belonging to Danielle van Dam, and fingerprints taken from the vehicle matched those of the dead 7-year-old girl, police specialists testified Tuesday. The testimony came at a preliminary hearing for Westerfield, a 50-year-old self-employed engineer who lived two doors away from the van Dams in Sabre Springs. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of murder, kidnapping and possessing child pornography in connection with Danielle's death. Jeffrey B. Graham, a fingerprint analyst for the San Diego Police Department, said fingerprints taken from a cabinet next to the bed in Westerfield's motor home matched Danielle's.
"There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Danielle made those prints," Graham said. Investigators believe Danielle was abducted from her bedroom the night of Feb. 1 and taken over the weekend to the Silver Strand near Coronado by Westerfield in his motor home, who then drove to the desert and back to the beach again. If convicted, Westerfield could face the death penalty. Her naked, severely decomposed body was found off Dehesa Road by a volunteer search team on Feb. 27. Graham said he obtained full handprints from the hands of Danielle's body, which though mummified when found were rehydrated with embalming fluid following an autopsy Feb. 28. Fingerprints taken from the motor home matched those prints, Graham said. Annette Peer, a police DNA analyst, said DNA from a bloodstain taken from the carpet in the motor home and more taken from a bloodstain on a jacket Westerfield left at a dry cleaner Feb. 4 matched that of a yellowish stain on underwear taken from Danielle's bedroom. Peer further testified that the DNA was consistent with DNA from offspring of Brenda and Damon van Dam, who both gave "reference" samples for testing. In other testimony Tuesday:
Detective James M. Watkins, a computer forensic examiner for San Diego police, said some of the sexually explicit images portrayed bestiality, bondage and what appeared to be underage females. Watkins estimated the number of pornographic images involving minors at fewer than 100. Watkins said he also had discovered eight photos of a girlfriend of Westerfield's and her young teen-age daughter, with some of the photos of the daughter in sexually suggestive poses. Under questioning by Westerfield's attorney, Steven Feldman, Watkins said he could not determine whether Westerfield had obtained or viewed the pornographic images or whether it was someone else who had access to the computer, including Westerfield's 18-year-old son.
Hergenroeather said Mills told him that she had known Westerfield for several years as a customer, and that he seemed unusually upset that morning.
Feldman peppered LeAlcala with questions on how the fingerprints were gathered, who had access to the motor home, what steps were taken to avoid contaminating the evidence, and on her experience level and education – all in an apparent quest to call into question the believability of the evidence. LeAlcala said one of the items taken from the cleaners was the jacket. The jacket later was found to have the bloodstain matched in DNA testing by Peer. The hearing, which began Monday, is the first opportunity in court for prosecutors to document their evidence against Westerfield. The hearing is scheduled to resume Thursday. |
You do know how to make people laugh..ya caught me off guard!! My lips are zipped. :)
Did anyone actually testify to blood in or around the van Dams house, or was that just the defense attorney? What about the finger prints in the RV? Danielle was alive in there? How long? Was she alive in there at 9:30 the following morning, when DW left for the beach? While a full scale investigation was going on?
Why just one or two Danielle prints in the RV? Were others wipped off by DW?
Why take a blood stained jacket to the cleaners? He had two days. Why not get rid of it?
Why not clean the porn pictures from your hard drive? DW does not act like a murderer trying to cover up.
Can someone just become a child rapist and killer at age 50? Wouldn't there be something leading up to it, some other crimes? Can anyone piece together what the prosecution theory of this case is? It doesn't seem to make much sense.
Now what caused the blood in the Van Dam's house?
Well, how about this thought.......
Brenda and kids visited DW, and sold Girl Scout cookies. Did the kids "run" around the inside of DW's house? That's the story.
If the RV was there, kid's would have loved a "tour". Like going to an amusement park. The Palm/Hand print was on a cabinet, above the bed. You mean like how kid's jump on beds, like a trampoline? (Thinking inside and outside of the box!)
I'm beginning to think that DW is so smart, he's stupid. Obviously by leaving incriminating materials on his machine he's trying to emit lack of guilt awareness. Fortunately for the prosecution, he's not very good at this.
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How did DW sneak in to the house before 1:30 (assuming that the first reported time by DvD is correct) hide until after 2:30 or 3:00 (depending on version) drag her down the stairs and out of the door. Then some how get her around the house across one yard, across the street and in the house or RV. I say the house based on the neighbor's "it was locked up" and the blinds were closed. Where is the blood in the house? What are we missing here? Why would he drag her? Why aren't his prints in the VD house?
I vote for accessory after the fact.
Women do not, by and large, make terrific criminals. In the United States, women commit only two crimes as frequently as men. The first is shoplifting. The second is the murder of their own children. Andrea Yates, the Houston mother whose trial for the murders of three of her children ends today, and Marilyn Lemak, the Chicago nurse recently convicted of killing her three children, are not at all statistical anomalies. Somehow, women—who commit less than 13 percent of all violent crimes in the United States—commit about 50 percent of all parental murders. Why do so many women direct their most violent impulses toward their own children? While it may once have been true that women were the sole—and often frustrated—caregivers of small children, mothers now work, yet they don't kill their colleagues; they kill their babies. Why? Feminists and legal researchers tend to claim that such women must be extremely ill. Judges and juries mostly agree, with the result being that women who kill their children in this country are disproportionately hospitalized or treated, while men who do so are disproportionately jailed, even executed.
The scholars, the media, and most of the studies do their best to persuade us that these murderous moms really are ill. Perhaps it comforts us to believe that anyone who violates the sacred mother-child bond is simply crazy; it would be unimaginable if these mothers were making rational criminal choices. And since women are not violent in other contexts, most scholars, including Oberman, argue that the majority of maternal murderers suffer from depression, postpartum psychoses, and other mental afflictions. But no one has put forth an analogous medical theory to explain whether fathers who kill their offspring are also depressed, isolated, or psychotic.
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Why does the legal system treat a mother who kills someone else's child as though she were a sociopathic killer while showing mercy toward a mom who drowns her own? For the same reason the law treats individuals who burn down other people's houses as criminals and institutionalizes those who burn down their own. Men are disproportionately jailed for filicide not because they are more evil than women but because we believe they have harmed a woman's property—as opposed to their own.
The Numbers
Children under the age of 5 in the United States are more likely to be killed by their parents than anyone else. Contrary to popular mythology, they are rarely killed by a sex-crazed stranger. FBI crime statistics show that in 1999 parents were responsible for 57 percent of these murders, with family friends and acquaintances accounting for another 30 percent and other family members accounting for 8 percent. Crime statistics further reveal that of the children under 5 killed by their own parents from 1976 to 1999, 30 percent were murdered by their mothers while 31 percent were killed by their fathers. And while the strangers, acquaintances, and other family members who kill children skew heavily toward males (as does the entire class of murderers), children are as likely to be murdered by their fathers as by their mothers.
The Newspapers
Doug Saunders observed recently in the Toronto newspaper the Globe and Mail that the media is complicit in treating maternal killers as newsworthy and paternal killers as ordinary criminals. Newspapers currently following every motion in the Andrea Yates trial completely ignored last month's Los Angeles filicide, in which Adair Garcia killed five of his six children by asphyxiating them with a barbeque he'd lit in the living room. He did it to punish his estranged wife, who had moved out a week earlier. Coverage of Ukranian immigrant Nikolay Soltys, who killed his pregnant wife and 3-year-old son last August, was less focused on his mental state than his dramatic flight and capture. Why is Yates a front-page story while Garcia is disregarded? To paraphrase Michelle Oberman: Murdering mothers are just different.
The Motives
The same studies that have been used to prove that murderous mothers are "sick" can as readily be used to support the theory that both mothers and fathers consider children to be a woman's property. Social science research and FBI crime statistics show that men and women differ in the reasons they kill their children, in the methods they employ, and in the ways they behave following such murders. None of this data proves that fathers are crazier than mothers. Much of it suggests that we all simply believe children "belong" to their moms.
Researchers, building on the work of Phillip Resnick, have shown that women tend to kill their own offspring for one of several reasons: because the child is unwanted; out of mercy; as a result of some mental illness in the mother; in retaliation against a spouse; as a result of abuse. Frequent themes are that they themselves deserved to be punished, that killing the children would be an altruistic or loving act, or that children need to be "erased" in order to save or preserve a relationship. Contrast this with the reasons men kill their children: Most frequently—like Garcia or Soltys—they kill because they feel they have lost control over their finances, or their families, or the relationship, or out of revenge for a perceived slight or infidelity. The consistent idea is that women usually kill their children either because they are angry at themselves or because they want to destroy that which they created, whereas more often than not, men kill their children to get back at a woman—to take away what she most cherishes.
According to a recent article by Elizabeth Fernandez in the San Francisco Chronicle, studies further reveal that fathers are far more likely to commit suicide after killing their children. Mothers attempt post-filicide suicide but rarely succeed. Some scholars suggest this is because mothers tend to view their children as mere extensions of themselves and that these homicides are in fact suicidal.
The Murders
Perhaps more revealing than the differences in why they kill their offspring are the differences between how fathers and mothers do so. For one thing, parental murderers tend to be highly physical. According to a 1988 survey done by the U.S. Justice Department, while 61 percent of all murder defendants used a gun in 1988, only 20 percent of the parents who killed their children used one. Children were drowned and shaken, beaten, poisoned, stabbed, and suffocated. These methods betray a certain "craziness" in both genders—they betray an intense passion and a lack of planning. But a study by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children shows that fathers are far more violent. And mothers frequently dispose of the corpses in what researchers call a "womblike" fashion. Bodies are swaddled, submerged in water, or wrapped in plastic. Moreover, the NCMEC study showed that while the victims of maternal killings are almost always found either in or close to the home, fathers will, on average, dispose of the bodies hundreds of miles away. All these behaviors suggest that women associate these murders with themselves, their homes, and their bodies
None of the arguments here assumes that there is no such thing as postpartum depression or, in rarer cases, postpartum psychosis—a deep break from reality that affects less than one in 500 new mothers. Andrea Yates is actually a good example of someone who was overdetermined to experience some kind of psychotic break that would end tragically. But Yates is only one of hundreds of mothers who kill every year, and while complete psychotic breaks explain why some of this homicidal rage and violence is turned upon one's own children, it doesn't account for either the staggering numbers of maternal homicides or for society's leniency toward women in these cases. The property theory does provide these answers. Women still believe that they have sole dominion over so little property that arson and armed robbery and rape make no intuitive sense to them. But the destruction and control of something deemed to be a woman's sole property sends a powerful message about who's really in charge, and this message hasn't changed since the time of Jason and Medea.
It would, of course, help if we could stop thinking of children as anyone's property. It does nothing to advance the feminist cause to simply assume that all mothers who kill their children must necessarily be crazy. It will do a good deal to advance the cause of children's rights if we begin to consider them as legal entities in and of themselves.
| Additional Quirks: Danielle was last seen wearing blue flowered pajamas with flowers Her favorite colors are pink and purple Danielle belongs to her local Brownie troop Family friends have set up a website at: http://daniellemissing.tripod.com San Diego police are scouring the Sabre Springs area for 7-year-old Danielle van Dam. Police say Danielle's parents, Damon and Brenda van Dam, reported her missing when they discovered Danielle was not in her room at about 9 a.m. Saturday, February 2, 2002. Damon told police he put Danielle and her two brothers to bed at around 10:30 Friday night while Brenda was out celebrating with friends until about 2 a.m. Saturday, a send-off for a woman who was leaving the area, detectives said. When Brenda arrived home with four friends at about 2 am, police say they ate pizza with Damon and talked for about an hour. Shortly after the friends left, police say Damon and Brenda told them they noticed lights blinking on their burglar alarm panel and found a sliding glass door and a side garage door open. Police say the alarm was not set, but the panel is a type that indicates when doors and windows are opened and shut at all times. The couple told police they closed the doors and went to bed, and did not check on the children. Saturday morning, police say the couple told them a friend stopped by at about 9 am to see if Danielle could come out and play. Damon and Brenda told police that they thought Danielle was still sleeping and that Brenda went to wake Danielle. That is when police say the couple discovered Danielle was missing from her room and called 9-1-1. Police began investigating immediately, using helicopters, horses and dogs to search the area canyons for Danielle, a second-grader at Creekside Elementary School in Sabre Springs. Officers also conducted door-to-door searches and provided the Border Patrol and Customs Service with photos of Danielle to keep watch for her at the border. Detectives additionally interviewed family members, neighbors, schoolmates and friends about the disappearance, hoping to develop leads, but had no luck. Danielle was last seen wearing blue pajamas with flowers. She is white, 4 feet tall and weighs about 58 pounds. She has blue eyes and blond hair. Police say at this point the parents are not considered suspects and have been extremely cooperative with investigators. Police are considering one of the van Dam's neighbors to be the prime suspect. Police have searched his home and impounded his vehicles. At the time of this writing, an arrest has not been made. |
1. Kids Put To Bed at 10:30 P.M., by Damon VD.
2. Brenda arrives at VD residence at 2:00 A.M. with FOUR FRIENDS
3. Brenda and her friends "The Four Amigos" eat pizza with Damon, and “talk” for about one hour.
4. 3:00 A.M., "The Four Amigos" depart the VD residence.
5. Damon and Brenda notice the alarm lights blinking.
6. Damon and Brenda notice BOTH the sliding glass door AND the side garage door are open.
7. Damon and Brenda note that alarm was not “SET” but was only in the monitoring mode.
8. Damon and Brenda tell police they closed all doors, and went to bed.
9. Damon and Brenda DID NOT CHECK on the condition of the children.
10. Approximate time, 3:15 A.M.
Tonight:
Damon Van Dam: As soon as I came down I noticed it was the back sliding glass door that was open.
John Walsh: You are getting ready to go through a tough trial.
Brenda Van Dam: They can rip us to shreds if they want to. But all that matters is someone has hurt my daughter.
An exclusive report.
And now from San Diego, John Walsh:
John Walsh: Good Evening. Imagine one morning you go to your daughter’s bedroom, open her door to wake her up and she’s gone. Well that’s exactly what happened in this very house to little 7 year-old Danielle Van Dam. And when she disappeared this family’s worst nightmare began.
(Voice from Video montage of Danielle “In the Arms of the Angels”)
John Walsh: Danielle Van Dam’s face has been all over America, an adorable little girl. The entire nation fell in love with Danielle and prayed for her safe return ever since she disappeared. San Diego police went on high alert to find the 2nd grader. Missing posters covered Southern California. While hundreds of volunteers including the marines joined the massive search. The investigation fanned out all the way to the desert, and even across the border into Mexico.
Last week a surprise arrest in the case. David Westerfield, one of the Van Dam’s neighbors and the main suspect, for Danielle’s kidnapping. He gave no information about what happened to Danielle.
But we all learned the answer on Wednesday when searchers found Danielle’s body in a canyon less than an hour from her home. That answer, however, only raised more searing questions. How could this have happened and why?
With the help of the Van Dam’s and police we piece together the events of the days before and after her disappearance.
John Walsh: It all seems to start the week before Danielle vanished. Danielle’s mother Brenda Van Dam was with some girlfriends at a local hangout. David Westerfield was also at the Club that night. Brenda knew Westerfield lived in the neighborhood, but didn’t know him socially. It seems Westerfield tried to change that.
Brenda: ...He did buy us drinks, but we weren’t talking to him at all. We didn’t really, didn’t really interact with him that much or socialize with him.
John Walsh: 4 days later Brenda and Danielle were selling Girl Scout cookies in the neighborhood. Westerfield’s house was on the route.
Brenda Van Dam: When I went to sell him Girl Scout cookies he said to me “your friend’s look like a lot of fun why didn’t you introduce me to them?” and I said, I don’t even know your first name. And he said, “Well tell your friends you have a rich neighbor that would like to meet them.” And I said well ok we might be going this Friday, I wasn’t sure if I could get a sitter or not and I’ll introduce you.
John Walsh: That Friday Brenda and her girlfriends went back to the club, while her husband stayed home with the kids. Westerfield showed up.
Brenda Van Dam: So we were sitting at the ummm the bar area. He was right behind us and he said ummm “ladies don’t buy their own drinks, let me buy you a drink.” So we thought, well that’s nice. I told him at one point, I had turned my back that I was here to be with my friends, I didn’t, I didn’t mean to be rude. Cause I felt kind of guilty about turning my back to a person that had just bought me a drink. At one point he was just standing and staring at us.
John Walsh: Westerfield finally left the bar and that was the last Brenda saw of him that night. Brenda and her friends came back here to the house and her husband Damon got up and they ate pizza ‘til about 2:30 in the morning and then the friends left. At that time Damon and Brenda went upstairs to bed thinking that they had closed up the house. About an hour later Damon woke up in this bedroom and he noticed a blinking alarm light. Now that meant one thing, a door was open somewhere.
Damon: So I went down to investigate as soon as I came down I noticed it was the back sliding glass door that was open. Cold air was coming in. What I assumed was that someone had a cigarette and had ashed it out there because a couple of the people that were over smoked. Uh, closed the back door and went back up to bed. Thought nothing.
John Walsh: The next morning Brenda went to Danielle’s room to wake her up and she was gone. We don’t know where David Westerfield went after he left the bar. He has said he got in his motorhome the next morning around 9:30 and left his neighborhood of Sabre Springs. He ended up 30 miles south to Silver Strand State Beach a campsite for motorhomes. He self-registered at the campground indicating that he was staying for 2 nights at $12.00 a night. But by mistake Westerfield overpaid by $30.00. Later that afternoon the park ranger showed up at his RV to give him his money back.
Park Ranger: The door opened, I asked him if he was Mr. Westerfield, he said he was, and said goodbye.
John Walsh: But oddly enough even though Westerfield paid for two nights he didn’t end up staying that long. Instead he packed up and drove to Glamis, 125 miles East in the desert. But there Westerfield ran into a problem. His motorhome got stuck in the soft sand well off the beaten path. Two hikers happened to find him the next morning and contacted tow truck driver Dan Conklin.
Dan Conklin: He made a comment that he was familiar with the area, that he knew better to be in here, but he did it anyway, and that to me seems a little strange. He kept asking me if I was sure that I could get him out, and I kept having to reassure him that I could get him out. I eventually did get him out and he didn’t get out of his motorhome. I uh told him I was going to come back and get my wood and get his leveling blocks and I would meet him back on the hard pack road behind us, and when I came over to get the wood and the leveling ramps, I turned around to see him get back onto the hard pack road and head towards the highway and he left.
John Walsh: Dan says Westerfield never waited to get his leveling ramps, he just took off. Monday morning Westerfield returned home police went to his house and with his permission started a routine search.
(Interview of DW in front of his house with reporters)
Question: Are you the homeowner here?
DW: Yes, Um huh
Question: Why would they come into your house)
DW: ummm well you’d have to ask them, I was gone all weekend, so, and I offered to let them look through everything and check it out basically.
John Walsh: Soon police impounded Westerfield’s SUV & Motorhome. Investigators continued to search his house. And left his house with evidence. For 18 days he came and went as a free man.
Ken & John (DJ’s from KFI Radio in Los Angeles yelling at DW through car window): Hey Westerfield did you kill Danielle?
John Walsh: That changed on Friday February 22nd. Police said they finally found the evidence they were looking for. Danielle’s blood on a piece of Westerfield’s clothing and in his motorhome. They took him into custody.
Department 11 of the superior court is now in session.
John Walsh: During Westerfield’s arraignment earlier this week prosecutors added child pornography and murder to the list of charges.
Judge: How do you plead to the list of charges in the complaint, guilty or not guilty?
David Westerfield: Not guilty
Judge: Okay do you deny the allegations?
David Westerfield: Yes sir.
John Walsh: It was agonizing for me to sit in the courtroom and see the Van Dam’s pain. Knowing they still had no idea where their baby was. That evening I sat down with the Van Dams to talk about what lay ahead for them.
John Walsh: There was the arraignment, you know I felt honored to be there cause that was the first time I met you, I had talked to you on the phone so much that I had felt like I had gotten to know you and know about your family and your boys and how much you loved Danielle. Are you prepared for the downside? You’re getting ready to go through a tough trial. This is going to be a high profile trial.
Brenda Van Dam: I think we’re prepared.
John Walsh: You know most people that uh were never victims of crime don’t realize how brutal these things can be. And they can be very brutal and mean spirited, umm are you prepared for that?
Brenda Van Dam: Yes, none of that matters, all that matters is Danielle. Nothing else matters. They can rip us to shreds if they want to, but the focus here is someone has hurt our daughter, taken our daughter, we don’t have her. None of the other matters, none of the other stuff matters to me.
John Walsh: Having been involved for years now with thousands of cases of missing children, I think the toughest thing is for families that have other children and you have two other children. How is the family doing? How are the boys doing?
Brenda Van Dam: Well from day one we have totally straightforward with them. They know their sister did not walk out of the house they know their sister was taken from our home, umm, they know of our search efforts we take them to the search center. Umm we also talk about the possibility that she might be in heaven with grandpa.
John Walsh: I don’t think anybody is prepared for the bad news in the case of a missing child. Are you prepared for that reality if that is the reality?
Damon Van Dam: We’ve cried
Brenda Van Dam: We’ve gone over it, we’ve talked, you can’t lose that little ounce
Damon Van Dam: We’ve gone over it for a long time umm you know you try to prepare as best you can, All I know is you can’t really prepare, and we do keep holding out hope
(They both are talking at the same time here, so it is a little hard to hear them both)
John Walsh: Thousands of searchers shared the same hope. Volunteers from all over kept looking for Danielle day and night. On Wednesday two of those searchers discovered what they prayed they’d never find, the body of Danielle Van Dam. There is still much work to do. Many questions remain. And that’s where you can help. Police would still like to know more about the movements of David Westerfield in the days before and after Danielle’s disappearance. Here’s what they do know. David Westerfield first appears with his motorhome here at Silver Strand State Beach, he then travels 125 to Glamis in the desert. Danielle’s body was discovered here near El Cajon. Anyone who spotted David Westerfield or his motorhome on February 2nd or 3rd might be able to shed more light on what happened that weekend. If you have any information about this case, please call us at 1-800-crime-tv.
1. David Westerfield and Brenda VD have been very well acquainted for many weeks or months.....perhaps he was a visitor early on in a "garage party" and decided why not stay close to home. If (as alleged-click below) these types of activities were occurring, then it is not like any of these folks are people of character, scruples or discretion.
2. Damon may not be as egregious and fun loving as everyone thinks.....from what I have learned from the "swingers" who have posted on FR the past few weeks, it is all about NO EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENT. The SWING SET like the physical variance, but it is highly discouraged and frowned upon to imprint on a specific "alternative partner".
3. One might presume that old Damon was not very happy with the arrangement, and knowing that Brenda VD and DW would coincidentally bump into each other at Dad's Cafe, arranged a surprise for when they returned.
4. I believe that when the "2 guys" and "2 gals" arrived back the morning of Feb. 2, that a "typical" SWING SET occurred in the garage.....DW was part of the team!!! He left the "party" when it was over, like the other "guests". Went home, slept off the night, and was up, packing for his road trip around 9:45 A.M., as reported.
5. Earlier in the evening, DvD placed Danielle in DW's Motorhome.....for the ultimate revenge/payback possible.....
6. Westerfield goes on his road trip, discovers the body, freaks out, dumps near the casino, races home and starts cleaning and covering his trail......knowing he has been setup.....
7. SDPD is "tipped" to DW being a suspect, and move rapidly to track down clues.....(Again, DW was a suspect within 24 hours from previous reports)....and he was the primary focus out of the blocks. This is common with "fingered" suspects.
8. Damon and Brenda VD's actions have been peculiar; note on the live John and Ken interview, Brenda VD is a "Chatty Cathy" during the interview, but Damon is silencing her on numerous occasions. When Douglas Pierce is mentioned, it is Damon who goes ballistic. Brenda VD may not have a clue as to what is really happening.
9. As many have mentioned, what is released Monday will tell the tale, as far as David Westerfield being "fingered" by the VD's, or simply became under suspicion because of SDPD foot work.....
10. Next step??? Will San Diego PD and the DA's office go for the quick "kill", or will they pursue ALL ANGLES to bring any other accomplices or perpetrators to justice?
11. America's Most Wanted, March 2, 2002. VD's provide even more confusion, with Brenda mentioning that she had been around David Westerfield on a previous night while out "partying" and telling him "if I can get a babysitter, maybe Friday"!! So much for just selling Girl Scout Cookies to the guy!!!
12. Recent developments that Damon VD was "entertaining" a friend, while home babysitting the kiddies on the night of Danielle's abduction....
The comments of Rick Roberts source (a high placed law enforcement official) are in bold type. Additional information from other sources (press, etc.) are in italics.
David Westerfield has been quoted in the press as saying that he was a friend of the van Dams.
 Is It Graham??? |
The van Dams have denied this, stating that their only contact with him was when Brenda and Danielle came to his home to sell girl scout cookies, and when they exchanged greeting as they passed by.
The bar has been identified in the press as "Dad’s Café and Steak House."
David Westerfield openly admitted that he was at the bar that night. He claims that he danced with Brenda van Dam. Brenda denies this.
Associates of an Infoseek exec arrested for using chat to solicit a minor may have been shocked and surprised, but not the FBI.
As it turns out, a corner office at a high-profile, high-tech company isn't such an unlikely place to find an online pedophile -- not according to records being yielded from a three-year-old Federal Bureau of Investigation crackdown on Internet pornography.
Of the 413 people arrested as part of the agency's "Innocent Images" investigation since 1995, "only a handful have not been upper-middle-class, educated white men," said Special Agent Pete Gulotta who serves as the investigation's chief spokesman. "They're almost all white males between the ages of 25 and 45.
"We've had military officers with high clearances, pediatricians, lawyers, school principals, and tech executives," Gulotta said of those arrested under Innocent Images.
http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cid/cac/innocent.htm
Here are some you might want to check out later.. A Profile of the Child Molester
preadators
Child abuse investigations
National Conference
Dr. Chaiken reported that of the 95,000 sex offenders in State prisons, 60,000 most likely committed their violent sex crimes against children under age 18. The majority of those serving time for violent sex offenses against children committed their crimes against victims age 12 or under. He endorsed the implementation of the National Incident-Based Reporting System, which collects more detailed crime information, leading to higher quality crime data and, ultimately, stronger laws.
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A police computer specialist testified that some 64,000 pornographic images and 2,200 MPEG-format videos were found on computers and computer disks taken from Westerfield's home. 
