Laci's things in tug of war

The Modesto Bee ^ | May 31, 2003 | Garth Stapely and John Cote'

[IrishRainy]

Scott had plenty of time (four months) to "sit...and grieve the loss of his wife and child," and evidently he did that best on the golf course and in strip bars, among other places.

[daylate-dollarshort]

I agree that Rense in of itself is not a reliable source and needs "double checking". To that end I checked the sources, Modesto Bee, Indianapolis Star, USA Today, The Washington Post, Reuters, etc. On all those checked, the stories were as reported. To challenge Furman's and others statement that there are no recorded satanic ritual killings all that needs to be demonstrated is one.

By the way Wecht, does not say there are no ritual or Satanic killings, just that in his opinion he sees no evidence of this in the Laci Peterson Case. The imminent crimonologist, Henry Lee, has described the evidence he typically looks for in ritual murders and has claimed that, while rare, they do exist.

[daylate-dollarshort]

Not much work finding them- they were listed on one questionable website. Finding the articles to verify the site's claim was a chore. Almost all the articles are archived. Some sites allowed searching of the archives, other's charge a fee ranging from $1.95 to $3.95 to access the archive and retrieve the articles.

Sometimes you get lucky and find a casched copy of the original article.

I haven't found all of the articles cited. However, all that is necessary it to find one to debunk Furman's claim that there has never been any. So far, of all that I've been able to find the original article, they all confirm that they were described as satanic or ritual killings.

[daylate-dollarshort]

see my other post to you-----

[EllaMinnow]

Main thread for Saturday.

[daylate-dollarshort]

The original article was easy to check. The prosecutors statement that the defendants hoped a virgin sacrifice would earn them "a ticket to hell" is contained in the original article reporting of the case.

The defendants pleaded guilty to the charge of killing a 15 year old girl,Elyse Pahler, and were sentenced as juevenilles. Under California law, at least at the time of sentencing, they had to be released upon their 21st birthdays.

[daylate-dollarshort]

This post took very little time to find, but the site that it came from was questionable. Rather than condmn the reports out of hand, I checked their cites. I was able to find many of the articles cited and am trying to locate more. To verify the content of these assertions took a few hours and a little Visa help. I still have not verified all. However I was only trying to find "some" to counter the claim that there has neve been a Satanic Cult murder. In That I believe that I succeeded.

I have a number of stories like these from Europe, Australia, and Russia, these may prove more difficult to verify. Le Pais, Tass, a couple of South American news agencies, to name a few.

Two of articles I'm still trying to verify were reported locally and I remember the cases well, but nonetheless I haven't been able to find the articles. I remember the photographs of the "leader" of the cult who had shoulder length hair. When they gave him a jail buzz, (haircut) he had a "666" tatoo on the side of his head. I'd really like to find that photograph. By the way, he is now on Florida's death row.

I also have some additional articles from ABC News, Reuters, The Washington Post, and others that I have not posted to this thread.

[daylate-dollarshort]

Thank you very much Tapu!! I do remember the West Memphis 3!! Good job in reminding me.

Below is the ABC News article about them. The photographs aren't still available from their website, but the article is still able to be uncovered.!

The article itself wants to attack the "Satanic Panic" but if a reasonable person reads the article, the article shows the effort by law enforcement to arrtrbute the killing to anythiing other than Satanism. The "scholars" would rather explain the Satanism aspect away rather than accept the statements given by the perpetrators.

I think the article provides enough information that the reader can make up his own mind---at least on this case.

Law Enforcement Struggles With Cult Crimes
Little Proof for 'Satanic Panic'

RELATED STORIES

Pearl Teens Face Trial
A Satanic Past
Son of Sam Interviews

U.S. NEWS added

E-mail ABCNEWS.com

“I don’t know what these kids in Pearl are yet, dabblers or semi-
organized, but it’s the same bottom line: people were killed.”
—Police officer Marcus Quinones

By Jackie Cooperman
ABCNEWS.com
Oct. 24

—A 16-year-old admirer of Adolf Hitler stabs his mother to death with a kitchen knife, shoots and kills two fellow students in a Mississippi high school, and belongs to a group that “hates the accursed god of Christianity.”
    Three teenage fans of Heavy Metal music and “white magic” are convicted of murdering and mutilating three eight-year-olds in Arkansas. Two New York teens are accused of murdering another student, gouging out his eyes and forcing him, in his final breaths, to swear allegiance to Satan. A Mexican drug-smuggling group offers 13 human sacrifices, hoping the murders will improve marijuana sales.
     Grisly crimes, to be sure, many of which have sent communities into what some have called a “satanic panic”—fear that an underground devil cult was operating in their midst, ready to steal their children. But experts caution that even when pentagrams, satanic texts or animal carcasses are found at crime scenes, psychosis, not satanism, is often to blame.
     “It’s so easy to blame the belief,” said Dr. J. Douglas Crowder, a forensic psychiatrist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. “We want some abstract villain to attribute problems to, but if you have a psychopathic kid, the core problem is in the personality…rather than cultic systems or beliefs.”

Satanism in the Eye of the Beholder

Conflicting definitions of satanic and cult practices complicate the issue.
     “There are three kinds of satanism. There’s religious satanism. It’s a bonafide religion and they usually don’t present a problem,” said Dr. Herbert Nieburg, a psychologist specializing in adolescent satanism at the Four Winds Hospital in Katonah, New York.
     “The second group are the bad guys. They are criminal cultists. They can’t experience remorse and they commit crimes using Satanism as an excuse. Everyone else, about 90 percent, are adolescent satanic dabblers. They are disturbed, dysfunctional, disenfranchised people, mostly male, who do ritual borrowing.”
     The rituals, experts say, often include animal sacrifices, chants and praises of the occult, but rarely do they lead to violence.
     Investigators are faced with the challenge of distinguishing when belief in non-traditional and satanic religions is relevant to crimes.
     “It is easy to get caught up in these cases and begin to see ‘satanism’ everywhere,” special supervisory FBI agent Kenneth Lanning wrote in Satanic, Occult, Ritualistic Crime: A Law Enforcement Perspective. “Oversensitization to this perceived threat may cause an investigator to ‘see’ satanism in a crime when it is really not there.”
     Still, satanic beliefs can hold the key to some criminal cases.
     “It’s all about group dynamics,” said New York City police officer Marcus Quinones, an expert on cult and gang crimes. “You must define the characteristics of a destructive cult and a those of non-threatening cult. When psychological and physical coercion is used, then you may have a problem.”

Experts Call Students ‘Dabblers’

In Pearl, Miss., 16-year-old Luke Woodham is charged with stabbing his mother to death, then fatally shooting two girls at Pearl High School on Oct. 1. Six of Woodham’s friends, said to have joined Woodham in a cult called “the Kroth,” are charged with conspiracy in the deaths.
     Many experts said they suspected the students were “dabblers” in satanism before becoming more extreme.
     “Dabblers, or ‘the buffet,’ I call them, they take a little bit of this and a little bit of that. The dabbler is dangerous because he doesn’t have control,” Quinones said. “I don’t know what these kids in Pearl are yet, whether they’re dabblers or semi-organized, but it’s still the same bottom line: People were killed.”

‘Satanic Panic’ Skews Issue

Cult watchers cautioned against public panic, discounting theories that the violent adolescents were members of a larger group.
     “Some people have the theory that there’s a big nationwide organized cult, but police evidence does not support that theory,” said Carol Giambalvo, a director of the American Family Foundation, a cult education organization.
     “Young people can go manufacture an ad-hoc, do-it-yourself ideology but it doesn’t mean they have a hierarchy or deep, philosophical, well-developed beliefs, and calling them a cult adds nothing to our understanding,” said Jeffrey Victor, author of Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend and a sociologist at the State University of New York, Jamestown.
     Prosecutors sometimes play upon community panic to gain quick convictions, say Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, who produced Paradise Lost, a documentary about the murders of three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis, Ark. Police charged three teens with the crime and accused them of belonging to a satanic cult, but the filmmakers say the teenagers were wrongly convicted, blamed because they wore black and listened to Metallica music.
     “Clearly some kids are doing evil things and taking their inspiration from evil sources and we’re not downplaying that,” Berlinger said. “But what we are saying is you have to be very careful to jump to the cult conclusion.”

Substance Abuse Also a Factor
Often, adolescents drawn to satanic ideas also abuse drugs and alcohol, experts say.
     In 1984, two teens were charged with torturing another adolescent to death in what investigators initially called a “satanic killing” in Northport, Long Island. Later, the trial focused on the teens’ addiction to the drug LSD, with the defense calling hallucinogens “the devil in this case.” One of the accused hung himself while awaiting trial, and the other was acquitted.
     In Matamoros, Mexico, drug smugglers said they killed 13 people because they thought the human sacrifices would grant them divine protection for their marijuana ring. Religious experts said the group was observing a corrupted form of santeria, a blend of Roman Catholic and Yoruba beliefs which sanctions animal but not human sacrifices.
     Some experts predicted the satan-inspired incidents may eventually wane, but even if that’s true, many said, the seemingly endless horror stories point to a larger problem.
     “We’re horrified about kids killing kids,” said Berlinger, who has four children. “The bigger issue is why has our society gone this way? What is it about the current generation of kids that makes them so insensitive to violence?”

Did The Devil Make Them Do It?
	Oct. 1997, Pearl, Miss. Luke Woodham, 16, walked into Pearl High School and shot and killed two students while wounding seven others. Prior to the shooting incident, Woodham had stabbed his mother to death. Woodham has been indicted on murder charges, while six others in a group that called themselves "the Kroth" have been charged with murder conspiracy.
	May 1994, Matamoros, Mexico The "godfather" and four fellow members of a cult were sentenced to more than 60 years in prison for the ritual murders of 13 people in 1989. The victims, according to authorities, were killed becauses the cult sought magical protection from the law and rival drug smugglers.
	March 1994, West Memphis, Ark. Damien Echols, 19, and Charles Jason Baldwin, 16, were convicted on three counts of capital murder in the brutal slaying of three 8-year-olds, whose bodies were found nude and hog-tied in a drainage ditch. Jessie Lloyd Misskelley Jr., 18, also involved in the incident, was found guilty in a separate trial on one count of first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree murder.
	June 1988, Sedalia, Mo. Three teens, Theron Roland II, Ronald Clements and James Hardy, were sentenced to life in prison for the gruesome death of Steven Newberry, 19, whose body was found in an abandoned well with several squirrel and cat carcasses. The attack was attributed to drug use, a fascination with violent rock music and satanism.
	June 1984, Northport, N.Y. Ricky Kasso and James Troiano were accused of killing Gary Lauwers, 17, by gouging his eyes out and stabbing him 17 times during a three-hour torture session. At the end of the ordeal, Kasso and Troiano forced Lauwers to say, "I love you Satan." Police claimed Kasso and Troiano killed Lauwers in a dispute over stolen drugs. Kasso confessed to the murder and later hanged himself, while Troiano was acquitted of second-degree murder.

[RGSpincich]

The "ticket to hell" was the price they would have to pay after death for the Devil making them into a successful band. They were not worshipping the Devil they were trying to use him.

Lyrics from the bands they emulated convinced them that this was possible. The sickos were trying to create a short cut to success in the music world. Had they been true satan worshippers they would have known that human sacrifice is not part of the program.

The fast buck, instant gratification, shortcuts to success...Greedists, if you will, who attempted to use the devil.

[texasbluebell]

Darn to bad you are not female. I know a guy 38 fairly good looking and conservative who just cannot find a wife . He really wants to be married.

I'm convinced FR needs a dating service or a constantly active thread on this for members...

[texasbluebell]

Just curious because of all the high-powered attys out there, why Geragos? Pro-bono, maybe?

Someone on Fox a week or so ago remarked that Geragos is definitely not taking $$ for this. But I haven't heard another word about it.

[texasbluebell]

Your situation that you described in #639 sounds so much like my brother-in-law's situation that I was wondering if that's who posted it, till I saw that you are female!

Amazing.

[runningbear]

(" finally had to let the armadillo go. I hated to see it go, but there were protesters outside my pants yelling all the time... so, I finally freed it...")

LOL.. now that is a vision I don't think I would want to see... ;o)

[runningbear]

I think it was from the Peterson's who called Geragos.. Can't verify it wholly from source.. Have to find it.> Was about a month ago stated.. Last I heard in Jan, McAllister quit because of scaughty's yapping off his mouth to the media, and couldn't afford McAllister's fees. But boy was I surprised to hear, he joined in the new 'dream team'....lol..

[runningbear]

Thanks, interesting to follow up on, and that as RG has pointed out and others, the dungeon and dragons era, maryiln manson et el songs driving these people to do what they did... A book, in a chapter(s), "the gift of fear, Gavin De Becker states some of this...

[runningbear]

LOL....

[daylate-dollarshort]

There have been posts made regarding attorney Mark Geragos "reneging" on an agreement between the parties to allow Sharon Rocha to enter the Peterson home and retrieve some of Laci's property. It has been presented that this was some kind of "last straw" and Sharon Rocha, in desperation, entered the home without the defense's permission. This is not exactly true.

On Wednesday night Sharon Rocha appeared on Greta's show on FNN. She complained that she was not being allowed to enter the Peterson home by Scott Peterson's mother. She offered a very sad story designed to ellicit sympathy, not only from Greta, but from the audience as well. She accomplished that goal.

What she did not reveal to Greta or the public was that there was already an agreement in place for her to enter the home and retrieve items she had listed as belong to Laci that she would like to have. The date, and presumeably the time, was set for Tuesday, June 3. Instead, she stated that Scott's mother was refusing to allow entry. Scott's mother called in and denied that she was blocking the entry.

The agreement was between the parties was designed to eliminate a media farce. Geragos did not want or need any more negative press and controversy. The negotiations and the agreement itself was kept confidential and was not announced to the press or public prior to the appearance of Rocha on Greta's show.

The following morning, Thursday, Geragos responded to Rocha's attack on Mrs. Peterson by calling Rocha's attorney and in complaining made the "if you want war" statement. He was outraged, I believe righfully so, and responding to the deception and dishonesty of Rocha in light of the agreement. He then apparently, withdrew the agreement.

Sharon, taking advantage of her breech, then entered the home on Friday morning complete with attendant press who were obviusly told there would be an entry prior to the event itself. The press witnessed the arrival of the vehicles and the police as their video reveals.

I think a fair and objective review of the agreement, the statements made by Sharon Rocha and the reports by the press will reveal that this was a pre-planned event orchestrated by Sharon Rocha to accomplish her own ends. In the process she slandered Jackie Peterson to her own advantage.

IMO............

[MaggieMay]

Your posts put me in a mind of reading text generated, by HAL 9000,"2001 Space Odyssey". (especially when HAL is trying to reason with Dave)I agree with runningbear you are a good debater.

[MaggieMay]

I went back over my notes after reading your post. I am going by what was published on KTVU.com. I am quoting from that source:
Al Clark(One of two of the Rocha's attorneys): "We thought we had it worked out with Geragos that Sharon could come in Laci's home next Tuesday". "He (Geragos)called...on Thursday and said he's not going to allow anyone in the house....I called Sharon..she said,"I've got to do something".

I do not know what source you are using in your post, but everything I have read support's the account, I have included in the above paragraph.

[Velveeta]

What I've garnered from the various press reports was that the "defense" set that Tuesday date for Sharon to enter the home under strict guidelines set by the *defense*. Press reports indicated that the *defense* team would accompany Sharon and videotape her visit to the home and record everything she did and every item she touched or wanted removed from the home.

IMO, I this were me....this would have been an unacceptable scenario! How on earth could she have walked into her dead daughter's home with *defense* cameras recording her heartbreak? I believe this is what Sharon meant when she stated that victim's families don't have any rights. What an awful intrusion of someone's private grief and misery.

I'm quite sure that cameras were not present when the Peterson's entered. Why should the Rocha's be subjected to such a humiliating injustice?

The defense team is now stating that there was a "deal"...perhaps the defense said: this is the deal take it or leave it...and the Rocha's chose to leave it.

I think I would have done the same thing, frankly. There was nothing for the Rochas to lose.....they've lost enough already. For the Petersons and their attorneys to not have any compassion with regard to Laci's family was shameful and disgusting.