The Central Park jogger case (events also referenced as the Central Park Five case) was a criminal case in the United States over the aggravated assault and rape of a woman in Manhattan's Central Park on April 19, 1989, occurring at the same time as an unrelated string of other attacks in the park the same night. Five black and Latino youths were convicted of …
Mar 15, 2022 · Prom night murders: True crime podcast reignites 1989 'prom night murders' as Jeff Pelley seeks new trial. “It’s a little smudged,” Whitfield replied. “It did occur to me.”. Watson then called a former Pennsylvania State Police officer and private investigator, Patrick Zirpoli, who walked through his assessment of the crime scene.
Tawana Vicenia Brawley is an African-American woman who accused four white men of kidnapping and raping her over a 4-day period in November 1987 when she was 15 years old. On November 28, 1987, Brawley was found in a trash bag after having been missing for four days from her home in Wappingers Falls, New York. She had racial slurs written on her body and was …
The McMartin preschool trial was a day care sexual abuse case in the 1980s, prosecuted by the Los Angeles District Attorney Ira Reiner. Members of the McMartin family, who operated a preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, were charged with hundreds of acts of sexual abuse of children in their care. Accusations were made in 1983, arrests and the pretrial investigation …
Thirteen years after an investment banker jogging in Central Park was savagely beaten, raped and left for dead, a Manhattan judge threw out the convictions yesterday of the five young men who had confessed to attacking the woman on a night of violence that stunned the city and the nation.
The case was prosecuted by ADAs Elizabeth Lederer and Arthur Clements, with trials held in 1990.
In 2019, shortly after the release of the Netflix series When They See Us about the Central Park Five case, Glamour Magazine said that the 1993 Woman of the Year Award to Fairstein was a mistake and that it was given to her before the full facts of the case were known.
After she left the DA's office in 2002, Fairstein began to publish mystery novels featuring Manhattan prosecutor Alexandra Cooper. Several have been bestsellers. In June 2019, after the release of the Netflix series When They See Us about the Central Park Five, Fairstein's publisher, Dutton, dropped her.
Fairstein assisted District Attorney Vance in his decision not to prosecute Dominique Strauss-Kahn for sexual assault in 2012. Fairstein 's writing skills came into play in writing up the decision not to charge.
The $10 million lawsuit against Fairstein and two co-defendants, former Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Gail Heatherly, who now teaches at the Columbia Law School, and New York City Police Detective Milton Bonilla, was dismissed on summary judgment in September 2010.
Jovanovic, which was subsequently overturned on appeal. It was dismissed with prejudice by a new trial judge. The dismissal was requested "in the interest of justice" by the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau. There was no physical evidence linking Jovanovic to the crime.
He was featured in a 2015 episode of Nightmare Next Door . In 2013, TV documentary series The Real Story aired an episode profiling the movie Scream.
On April 20, 1994, Rolling was sentenced to death. Rolling was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder and paraphilia.
Rolling was brought to trial nearly four years after the murders. He claimed his motive was to become a "superstar" similar to Ted Bundy. In 1994, before his trial could get underway, Rolling unexpectedly pled guilty to all charges. Subsequently, State Attorney Rod Smith presented the penalty phase of the prosecution.
As an adult, he had trouble trying to assimilate into society and hold down a steady job. At one point, Rolling worked as a waiter at Pancho's restaurant in Shreveport. In May 1990, he attempted to kill his father during a family argument in which his father lost an eye and an ear.
In one example of the senior Rolling's sense of discipline, he pinned Danny to the ground, handcuffed him, then had police take his son away because he was embarrassed by him. As a teenager and young adult, Rolling was arrested several times for robberies in Georgia and was caught spying on a woman getting dressed.
A day later, on Saturday, August 25, Rolling broke into the apartment of 18-year-old Christa Hoyt, prying open a sliding glass door with a Ka-Bar knife and a screwdriver. Finding she was not home, he waited in the living room for her to return.
Rolling was being held in the Marion County Jail, that was 40 miles south of Gainesville. As part of investigation, investigators determined that Rolling had type B blood like the suspect in both the Gainesville and Shreveport murders.
Much of the grand jury evidence pointed to a possible motive for Brawley's falsifying the incident: trying to avoid violent punishment from her mother and particularly her stepfather, Ralph King. Witnesses testified that Glenda Brawley had previously beaten her daughter for running away, and for spending nights with boys. King had a history of violence that included stabbing his first wife 14 times, which later escalated into him shooting and killing her. There was considerable evidence that King could and would violently attack Brawley: when Brawley had been arrested on a shoplifting charge the previous May, King attempted to beat her for the offense while at the police station. Witnesses also described King as having talked about his stepdaughter in a sexualizing manner. On the day of her alleged disappearance, Brawley had skipped school to visit her boyfriend, Todd Buxton, who was serving a six-month jail sentence. When Buxton's mother (with whom she had visited Buxton in jail) urged her to get home before she got in trouble, Brawley told her, "I'm already in trouble." She described how angry King was over a previous incident of her staying out late.
Steven Pagones, the New York prosecutor whom Brawley had accused as being one of her assailants, later successfully sued Brawley, and her three advisers, for defamation. Brawley had initially received considerable support from the African-American community. Some suggested that Brawley was victimized by biased reporting ...
Some suggested that Brawley was victimized by biased reporting that had credited racial stereotypes. The mainstream media 's coverage drew heated criticism from the African-American press, and from many black leaders who professed to believe the teenager and her narrative.
State law provides that if a child appears to have been sexually molested, then the Child Protective Services Agency is supposed to take jurisdiction and custody of that child. Now, Tawana Brawley was 15 at the time of the incident.
In popular culture. Spike Lee 's 1989 film Do the Right Thing features a shot of graffiti which says "Tawana told the truth.". Brawley appeared alongside Sharpton in the music video for Public Enemy 's " Fight the Power ", which was directed and produced by Lee.
On November 28, 1987, Tawana Brawley, who had been missing for four days from her home in Wappingers Falls, New York, was found seemingly unconscious and unresponsive, lying in a garbage bag several feet from an apartment where she had once lived. Her clothing was torn and burned, her body smeared with feces.
Bill Cosby offered a $25,000 reward for information on the case, while Don King pledged $100,000 toward Brawley's education. In December 1987, more than one thousand people, including Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, marched through the streets of Newburgh, New York, in support of Brawley.
McMartin preschool trial. The McMartin preschool trial was a day care sexual abuse case in the 1980s, prosecuted by the Los Angeles District Attorney Ira Reiner. Members of the McMartin family, who operated a preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, were charged with numerous acts of sexual abuse of children in their care.
Only 41 of the original 360 children ultimately testified in the grand jury and pretrial hearings, and fewer than a dozen testified at the actual trials. Michael P. Maloney, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychiatry, reviewed videotapes of the children's interviews.
The McMartin preschool trial was a day care sexual abuse case in the 1980s , prosecuted by the Los Angeles District Attorney Ira Reiner. Members of the McMartin family, who operated a preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, were charged with numerous acts of sexual abuse of children in their care. Accusations were made in 1983, arrests and the pretrial investigation took place from 1984 to 1987, and trials ran from 1987 to 1990. The case lasted seven years but resulted in no convictions, and all charges were dropped in 1990. By the case's end, it had become the longest and most expensive in American history. The case was part of day-care sex-abuse hysteria, a moral panic over alleged Satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Ray Buckey was questioned, but was not prosecuted due to lack of evidence. The police then sent a form letter to about 200 parents of students at the McMartin school, stating that their children might have been abused, and asking the parents to question their children. The text of the letter read: September 8, 1983.
Shortly after investigation into the McMartin charges began, the funds to research child sexual abuse greatly increased, notably through the budget allocated for the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (NCCAN). The agency's budget increased from $1.8 million to $7.2 million between 1983 and 1984, increasing to $15 million in 1985, making it the greatest source of funding for child abuse and neglect prevention in the United States. The majority of this budget went toward studies on sexual abuse with only $5 million going towards physical abuse and neglect.
The prosecution then gave up trying to obtain a conviction, and the case was closed with all charges against Ray Buckey dismissed. He had been jailed for five years without ever being convicted of committing any crime.
Our investigation indicates that possible criminal acts include: oral sex, fondling of genitals, buttock or chest area, and sodomy, possibly committed under the pretense of "taking the child's temperature.". Also photos may have been taken of children without their clothing.
Two young white women also got off the train and accused the African-American teenagers of rape. The case was first heard in Scottsboro, Alabama, in three rushed trials, in which the defendants received poor legal representation.
The Scottsboro Boys were nine African-American teenagers, ages 12 to 19, accused in Alabama of raping two white women in 1931. The landmark set of legal cases from this incident dealt with racism and the right to a fair trial.
Jean-Paul Sartre 's 1946 play The Respectful Prostitute ( La Putain respectueuse ), in which a Black man is wrongfully blamed for an incident on a train involving a white prostitute, is believed to have been based on the Scottsboro case. The Scottsboro Boys is a staged musical portrayal of the Scottsboro case.
In the song, he warns "colored" people to watch out if they go to Alabama, saying that "the man gonna get ya", and that the "Scottsboro boys [will] tell ya what it's all about.".
There is a parallel between the court scene in Native Son in which Max calls the "hate and impatience" of "the mob congregated upon the streets beyond the window" (Wright 386) and the "mob who surrounded the Scottsboro jail with rope and kerosene" after the Scottsboro boys' initial conviction.
An NBC TV movie, Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys (1976), asserted that the defense had proven that Price and Bates were prostitutes; both sued NBC over their portrayals. Bates died in 1976 in Washington state, where she lived with her carpenter husband, and her case was not heard.
In early May 2013, the Alabama legislature cleared the path for posthumous pardons. On November 21, 2013, the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles granted posthumous pardons to Weems, Wright and Patterson, the only Scottsboro Boys who had neither had their convictions overturned nor received a pardon.
Vicki Hutcheson, a new resident of West Memphis, would play an important role in the investigation, though she would later recant her testimony, claiming her statements were fabricated due in part to coercion from police.
Chris Morgan and Brian Holland. Early in the investigation, the WMPD briefly regarded two West Memphis teenagers as suspects. Chris Morgan and Brian Holland, both with drug offense histories, had abruptly departed for Oceanside, California, four days after the bodies were discovered.
On June 2, 1993, Hutcheson told police that about two weeks after the murders were committed, she, Echols, and Misskelley attended a Wiccan meeting in Turrell, Arkansas. Hutcheson claimed that, at the Wiccan meeting, a drunken Echols openly bragged about killing the three boys.
On November 4, 2010, the Arkansas Supreme Court ordered a lower judge to consider whether newly analyzed DNA evidence might exonerate the three. The justices also instructed the lower court to examine claims of misconduct by the jurors who sentenced Damien Echols to death and Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin to life in prison.
According to local West Memphis police officers, on the evening of May 5, 1993, at 8:42 pm, workers in the Bojangles' restaurant located about a mile from the crime scene in Robin Hood Hills reported seeing a black male who seemed "mentally disoriented" inside the restaurant's ladies' room.
Michael Moore was the son of Todd and Dana Moore. He was eight years old, 4 ft. 2 tall, weighed 55 lbs, and had brown hair. He was last seen wearing blue pants, a blue Boy Scouts of America shirt, and an orange and blue Boy Scout hat, and riding a light green bicycle. Moore enjoyed wearing his scout uniform even when he was not at meetings. He was considered the leader of the three. He lived with his parents and his nine-year-old sister, Dawn. James Michael Moore is buried in Crittenden Memorial Park Cemetery in Marion, Arkansas .
Around 1:45 pm, juvenile Parole Officer Steve Jones spotted a boy's black shoe floating in a muddy creek that led to a major drainage canal in Robin Hood Hills. A subsequent search of the ditch revealed the bodies of three boys.
Robert Kelly. Each defendant was tried separately, with Robert Kelly the first to be tried. Testimony lasted nine months with 12 children providing descriptions of sexual and physical abuse: babies ritualistically killed, victims taken out on boats and thrown overboard, and inappropriate trips in hot air balloons.
In January 1989, allegations were made by a woman that Bob Kelly had sexually abused her child. After investigation by a police officer and social worker, the conclusion was the allegations were valid and parents were urged by the authorities to have their children evaluated for abuse. A total of 90 children, after many therapy sessions (in some ...
A total of 90 children, after many therapy sessions (in some cases as much as ten months' worth), also made allegations resulting in accusations against dozens of people besides Kelly and charges against seven adults (Bob and Betsy Kelly, three workers at the day care, a worker at a local Head Start facility, and the son of a judge).
The trial was relocated 60 miles away from Edenton due to difficulties in finding an unbiased jury. Defense attorneys claimed they were hampered in preparation of their case due to lack of access to files and the child witnesses, as well as the extensive preparation of the children by the prosecuting attorneys.
Trial. The trial was relocated from Edenton to Farmville due to local publicity. "The attention became national...May (1991) with the broadcasting of a documentary, 'Innocence Lost,' as part of the PBS series Frontline, which suggested that abuse of the extent alleged by the state was impossible.". In March 1992, "Mr. Kelly, 43 years old, (was) ...
Kelly was convicted and sentenced to 12 consecutive life terms in prison. The trial "included 83 prosecution witnesses and 60 defense witnesses". The children had testified that Kelly had forced them to have different types of sex. The parents testified that the children exhibited abnormal behavior.
The eight-month trial against Bob Kelly was the most expensive in North Carolina history, ending in conviction on 99 of 100 charges and twelve consecutive life sentences. On May 2, 1995 all convictions were reversed by the Court of Appeals. The remaining six defendants were charged with a mixture of charges ending in a variety ...
The Robersons and Sims settled with the state of Washington for $850,000 in a case that was split off from a suit against the police due to a clerical error. The city of Wenatchee paid the Robersons a settlement of $700,000. The city was fined almost as much during the civil trial for withholding evidence.
In 1995, after Pastor Robert Roberson criticized the investigation, he was arrested and charged with eleven counts of the sexual abuse of a child. Roberson and his wife were acquitted of all charges. Perez's foster daughter later recanted and apologized to Roberson, claiming that Perez had pressured her.
The city was fined almost as much during the civil trial for withholding evidence. While on trial for child abuse, Douglas County also prosecuted the Robersons for welfare fraud, a case the Robersons described as "harassment". After their acquittal, they plea-bargained this case to community service for Robert.
Accusations. The investigation began in January 1995 when Detective Robert Perez was told by his 13-year-old foster daughter, Donna Perez, that she had been sexually molested. On March 13, 1995, Perez put Donna in his police car with two social services caseworkers and they drove through Wenatchee and East Wenatchee.
In 1999, the Washington state legislature passed the "Perez Bill" which required child abuse investigators to keep accurate records of their interviews and forbade them from investigating cases involving their own children.
Sixteen adults entered Alford pleas; most of these were poor or "functionally retarded". On March 23, 1995, Robert Roberson, pastor of some of the accused, criticized the authorities at a public meeting. Five days later, the Roberstons were arrested.
The town of Wenatchee, Washington, made world headlines in 1994 and 1995 when police and state social workers undertook what was then called the nation's most extensive child sex-abuse investigation. ^ a b c Murphy, Kim (14 June 1998). "Wenatchee: Sex Probe Tests Truth and Trust". L.A. Times.