Kids and Crime

by Barb Goffman

When I was in sixth grade, word spread through my elementary school that some fifth graders were going to put Spanish fly in their teacher's coffee. I didn't know what Spanish fly was, but it sounded bad. Dangerous. I waited to see what would happen and ... nothing happened. Did the students chicken out? Did someone threaten to rat them out so they called off the plan? Did someone actually rat them out but this information was kept quiet? Did they call off the plan themselves because they realized it was a bad idea? Or had it been a big rumor with no truth to it at all? I don't know. But it's certainly true that kids who may not have the capacity to fully understand the consequences of their actions can enjoy playing pranks, and they can get angry and want revenge. Teachers often are a prime target.

A review of news reports on Google bears this out. A small sample:

• A thirteen-year-old student was charged with allegedly sneaking a sleeping pill into his teacher's coffee after she chastised him for disrupting class.
• A middle-school student was accused of putting several of his asthma pills into his teacher's coffee.
• An eighth-grade teacher was sickened after two students slipped a prescription sedative into her lemonade, police said.
  

The articles go on, including ones involving elementary school students even younger than the kids involved with the Spanish fly rumor from my elementary school. It was these types of stories that prompted my newest short story, "The Wrong Girl," about a group of elementary school girls who seek revenge on a mean teacher. Addressing this topic was cathartic for me because what happened to the girl in the story happened to me, except I never tried to get revenge.

What causes some kids to try to hurt others? Do they not truly understand the consequences of their actions? Or do they understand but lack sufficient empathy? I don't know, but it's a topic I like to explore in my fiction. I've had several short stories published involving children and teenagers. You can find a few of them in my collection, Don't Get Mad, Get Even (Wildside Press, 2013). My newest story, "The Wrong Girl," is my first attempt at flash fiction. It's in a new anthology called Flash and Bang, which was published on October 8th by Untreed Reads Publishing.

This new anthology is the first one featuring members of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. Every story involves a flash or a bang. The publisher chose nineteen stories, including one from fellow SleuthSayer John Floyd called "Rosie's Choice."

I hope you'll check the book out and let me know what you think of my take on kids and crime. (The anthology is available as a trade paperback and as an e-book, so with a couple of clicks, you could read it right away.) In the meanwhile, as we head toward Halloween this weekend, when children are encouraged to beg for candy or else they'll supposedly play a trick on you, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on children and crime. At what age do children come to truly understand the consequences of their actions? And at what age should they be held accountable?

Not a Cop

I'm not a cop but I write about one named Zoe Barrow who works with the Austin Police Department. Zoe first appeared in my mind while I was out at the Austin Police Academy while playing a cop. Let me explain. 

The Citizen Police Academy was established in January 1978 and over two thousand citizens have graduated in 85 classes. I was in the class in 1991. At that time it was a 12 week program held out at the Police Academy Training facility. It now is a 14 week program and is held at Austin Police Headquarters. The CPA's slogan is "Understanding Through Education." The goal is to provide enough information to the public to dispel misconceptions and to increase rapport between citizens and police officers.

The instruction is comprehensive and each week separate areas of the department is covered. Communication, patrol, canine, fraud, firearms, bomb squad, etc each gives a small view of what is taught and how that department works. It originally, for Austin, was to help people who were interested in becoming neighborhood watch captains in their neighborhoods. Since I was interested in writing mystery and at that time specifically private eye stories. My book characters also dealt with a police officer and I felt this would be very helpful to me. I applied for the program and was thrilled to be accepted.

One of the fun things I was able to be involved with was the CPA Alumni Association. I'm not involved with them anymore and don't even know if they still exists. But one thing we did as alumni was to go out to the academy when invited by the police academy and pretend to be bad guys during the cadets training program. There were specific scenarios set up and the cadets had to react to the situation.

For instance, several of us we asked to play a group of people in a nightclub situation. We weren't really drinking, we were sitting around talking with music playing on a radio. There was to be a gun on the table we sat around, it was a fake gun. Supposedly a call had been made to the police department stating there was a disturbance going on in the club.  The cadets were to come inside the club two at a time,  assess the situation and hope that one of them saw the gun and calls out "GUN" to the other. And one of them would take possession of the gun. All the cadets come into the situation and respond and then afterwards a training officer critiques them.

Another situation is a theft argument. One person says they have been robbed and another person says they didn't do it. The cadet is supposed to search the thief and discover the "jewels." Sometimes a thief has a weapon and it's up to the cadet to discover the weapon. But sometimes the weapon is missed. The training officer can really jump on a cadet if they miss the weapon. One time I had a derringer in my bra and it was missed more than once.

One was a driving scene where the driver is driving erratically, the cadet is to stop the vehicle (in reality we were stopped to keep thing moving along faster) and when the driver gives the officer a driver's license and calls it in, the dispatcher says there is a warrant out for that person. The cadet is to get the driver out of the car and handcuff her/him and put her/him in the squad car. The passenger is just to stay in the car and is okay.

The training officer asked me to really jump on one of the cadets as he wanted to see how she would react. So when she handcuffs me I begin cussing her out. And I complain loudly that the cuffs are too tight. So she loosens them one notch. She didn't react to my calling her names and cursing at her but when she put me in the squad car I was able to slip the cuffs off. After the training officer critiques and tells her to get me out of the squad car, I hand her the cuffs. The training officer jumped all over her. The cadets are not supposed to talk to each other and help each other but of course they do it anyway. All day the other drivers had no idea why their hand cuffs were put on so tight. When I do talks about writing to groups I usually tell this story and tell them that this is only time I was ever able to cuss out a cop and get away with it. It always gets a laugh.

It was during these civilians being bad guys that my character, Zoe Barrow began talking in my mind and became the main character in two novels. In DARK BLUE DEATH, the opening chapter is set at the police academy with Zoe being a training officer and that scene is almost word for word what happened the day I played that scene recorded there.

If you ever have a chance to attend a Citizen's Police Academy training program, I hope you will do so.

The Legends of October

If you are interested in teenagers, you will print this story. I don't know whether it's true or not, but it doesn't matter because it served its purpose on me. 

A fellow and his date pulled into their favorite "lovers' lane" to listen to the radio and do a little necking. The music was interrupted by an announcer who said there was an escaped convict in the area who had served time for rape and robbery. He was described as having a hook instead of a right hand. The couple became frightened and drove away. When the boy took his girl home, he went around to open the car door for her. Then he saw — a hook on the door handle! I don't think I will ever park to make out as long as I live. I hope this does the same for other kids.

                                                            Letter to Dear Abby
                                                            November 8, 1960 

                                                            Quoted in Urban Legends

        There is something about October. It’s in the wind; it’s in the rustling dead leaves; it’s in the flames of the backyard fire.  Shorter days. Longer nights. The growing compulsion to retreat to the indoors, away from the lengthening shadows. It’s a time when the outside world -- our warm summer friend just scant weeks back -- turns a mercurial cold shoulder and casts a narrowed and appraising eye our way, a warning dare of things to come.  Is it any wonder that October is the time of Halloween? 

       And, once we are safely hunkered down inside, October is also a time to spit into the wind, to tempt fate.  We are safe -- so let’s spin some tales about those who are not. It’s a time to tell stories aimed at only one thing -- raising the hackles on the listeners’ necks.  Proving that, despite all of that civilization and infrastructure, despite the safety of our living rooms, we can still be reduced in a few hundred words to primordial horripilating fear. 

       “Ghost stories” are often set in the distant past.  They therefore are safely embedded in another time.  In this way, when we tell them, we insulate ourselves a little from the fear. This was frightening, this was horrible, but this did not happen here.  It didn’t happen now.  It is perhaps as a reponse to this historical distancing that a new genre of modern day horror stories evolved in the 1950s and 1960s. Popularly, these tales are often referred to as “urban legends,” a phrase that, according to The Oxford Dictionary, was coined in or around 1968.  In a sense the term is a misnomer, since many of these frightening, and often cautionary, tales do not share an “urban” setting.  For that reason sociologists and social historians prefer the term “contemporary legend.” 

     These legends, urban or contemporary, typically follow similar, and fairly constrained, narrative approaches.

       First, they are short. They can be told easily at a sitting. They are, in other words, “campfire length.”

       Second, invariably the stories are told as something that happened to someone two times removed from the narrator -- typically to “a friend of a friend,” popularly abbreviated FOAF. This narrative device provides just enough proximity to make the story seem “real” while also providing just enough distance to ensure that the narrator need not (and cannot) personally vouch for the truthfulness of the tale.  We are told to accept the truth of the legend as an article of faith.

      And third, in each legend all of this contributes to a frightening theme:  These are “common-man” stories.  The terror that is their backbone could have happened to anyone.  As we listen we shudder in fear because we know what this means:  this could have happened to us. 

Professor Jan Brunvand

       The term “urban legend” was likely coined by Jan Harold Brunvand, professor of English (now emeritus) at the University of Utah.  Certainly Professor Brunvand is the master historian of the genre.  He spent much of his professional life researching and then cataloging urban myths, collected in a series of fascinating works, including The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and their Meanings, The Choking Doberman and other “New Urban Legends, The Big Book of Urban Legends, The Mexican Pet: More "New" Urban Legends, Curses! Broiled Again!, The Baby Train and other Lusty Urban Legends, Too Good to be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends, and (finally!) The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story. 

       While urban legends evolve by word of mouth (and now via the internet), and change through the re-telling, it is often possible to trace particular legends back to their origins.  As an example, according to Professor Brunvand the many variants of “The Hook” -- that story that found its way into that 1960 Dear Abby letter quoted above --  likely derived from a series of lovers’ lane murders that were committed around Lake Texarkana in 1946.   There is no evidence that those murders had anything to do with a hook.  That came later.  Beginning with a foundation in reality the stories grow, they gain embellishment, much as prose changes when whispered ear to ear in that birthday party game we all played as children.  Part of that growth was the addition of the hook.

       Often the common denominator of a particular urban legend, as Professor Brunvand teaches us, is a locale, invariably one that is frightening by its very nature, or that is linked historically to a crime, to a disaster, or to reported supernatural occurrences.  Such spots are by their nature fertile fields for the cultivation of urban myths.  And, since they can also be visited, they have spawned their own participatory variant on the urban legend -- urban tripping.  Why sit and listen when we can go there -- when we can go there at night? 

The Pope Lick Trestle

       Urban tripping therefore involves a pilgrimage, usually undertaken at night, often in October, to a site that has a notorious and frightening, often supernatural, past.  You won't need to look too far to find one convenient to you.  There are urban tripping sites all over the country. 

     In Louisville, Kentucky you may want to visit the Pope Lick Trestle, the reputed home to the Pope Lick Monster, described as a human-goat hybrid.  The monster (as the legend goes) escaped from a carnival where it (of course) had been cruelly mistreated. It now seeks revenge, and its vengeance is focused on any unsuspecting person who wanders (at night, of course) too near.

The Swift Mansion

       In Cleveland, Ohio why not visit the site of the Swift Mansion? According to locals the mansion was once the Gore Orphanage, where (again, as the legend goes) numerous children were killed by the staff, either murdered or allowed to die of malnutrition and neglect.  Historians dispute whether the mansion ever, in fact, was an orphanage.  But don't let that dissuade you -- it hasn't stopped the stories about those children. And they, too, are out for revenge. 

     

A depiction of the Jersey Devil

       In New Jersey the curious are drawn to the New Jersey Pine Barrens, home of the fabled Jersey Devil. The Devil is described as a flying biped with hooves that emits a blood curdling scream. And, again, this happens at night.  Often in October.

The Bunny Man Bridge

       In Clifton, Virginia, the Bunny Man Bridge (which is actually a tunnel) beckons. The bridge is where you need to be to see the Bunny Man himself (or itself?) -- a man (I kid you not) in a bunny costume who reputedly attacks (with an axe) any who stray too close. 

The Devil's Tramping Ground

     In a Bennett, North Carolina campground thrill seekers are drawn to a barren circle, known as The Devil's Tramping Ground. No trouble finding the circle -- it’s the only place in the forest where no plants ever grow. It is said that objects left in the circle overnight disappear by morning.  Dogs and other animals reportedly refuse to enter the circle at all.  

Old Alton Bridge

       In Denton, Texas, the place to be in the dark hours of October is the Old Alton Bridge, which takes its name from the abandoned Texas village of Alton.  Locally the bridge is known as "Goatman's Bridge," a name inspired by a legendary satyr-like demon that is said to inhabit the forest surrounding the area.
  

      And what trip to Vincennes, Indiana (my wife’s hometown) would be complete without a visit to the legendary Old Purple Head Bridge spanning the Wabash River? The bridge, believe it or not, is still open to vehicular traffic, a fact I know all too well, as previously recounted.  (A longer piece on Old Purple Head, and the legends it has spawned, was the subject of a Halloween piece several years back.) 

Old Purple Head

       Anyone looking to experience a more packaged urban legend this time of year need look no further than the nearest corn maze or haunted forest. There is a profit to be made almost everywhere, and that includes the provision of that October "chill fix" so many of us seem to crave.  But for the connoisseur, those looking for a more elegant blood chilling experience, there are some select urban tripping experiences -- spooky locales, just there for the asking.

       For a price, of course.

       For those on the west coast perhaps nothing can beat the Winchester Mystery House. This 116 room mansion, which has been termed the creepiest house in Silicone Valley, was built by Sarah Winchester, the slightly deranged widow and heir to the Winchester rifle fortune. Reportedly, there was never an overall design for the Winchester Mystery House, or even an architect. The mansion, instead, is a bizarre and immense congeries of rooms built to the whims of Sarah herself.  Rooms were added daily or weekly, inspired by Sarah's own nightmares and warnings from her medium concerning how to best construct the house so as to allude supernatural spirits from following Sarah as she moved from room to room.

        The resulting mansion was continuously under construction for over thirty years, right up to the day of Sarah's death.  It has been described as “a 6-acre labyrinth of false doors and stairs that lead absolutely nowhere – ad-hoc additions reportedly made by Winchester to confuse the evil spirits of people shot and killed by the firearms of her dead husband's namesake.” Tours are available daily, but special flashlight tours -- so-called “Fright Nights” -- are conducted at night every Friday the 13th and regularly throughout the month of (you guessed it) October. 

The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum

      Closer to the other side of the continent is the infamous Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, which sprawls across the landscape of Weston, West Virginia. This massive, now-abandoned, 150 year old hospital is a monument to the horrors to which its inmates were subjected.  It has been the site of scores of reported paranormal encounters over the years and is now a very popular tourist attraction.

      The hospital has a daily schedule of tours, but what you will want (I know you) is the overnight tour. Here is the description offered on the asylum’s website: 

Ever thought about spending the night in a haunted Lunatic Asylum? Our Ghost Hunts last from 9:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. . . . . After everyone is registered and divided into groups, guides will assist you in your exploration of this massive Gothic asylum.  After a brief paranormal tour you may either hunt alone or with our experienced ghost hunting guides. Our guides are here to ensure that you have a positive and safe evening. Make sure to bring your camera, digital recorder, EMF meter . . . . 

I have not taken this tour, but I certainly understand why payment is required in advance.  The most popular time to experience the asylum?  October, of course.  October at night. 

       The legends and sites discussed above -- only a few of those that are out there -- share a thread common to most "ghostly" encounters:  Actual evidence of supernatural happenings is available only in wisps and shreds.  And the psychic experiences associated with each are all potentially explainable – over active imaginations, stimulation brought on by atmospherics, coincidences that align just so. All of this is expected, after all, when we choose to view the surroundings through the shadows of midnight.  Particularly midnights in October.  But, in any event, solid evidence of an actual haunting is generally pretty hard to come by. 

       But not always. 

       There is a stretch of road in Southern England that for centuries has been the site of reported supernatural occurrences. Horseback riders and carriages traveling through the countryside over two hundred years ago avoided this stretch of road not just because of some inexplicale sightings, but also because horses simply refused to travel the road.  They would grow increasingly agitated and then bolt if spurred to continue.  Travelers who did brave the road at night sometimes failed to reach their destination and, indeed, sometimes were never heard from again.

       More recently some drivers have reported that as they steer around a particular “s” turn in what now is a paved road, a flickering figure can, at times, be discerned hovering in front of their car. Eventually, in an attempt to prove that something might, after all, be out there, a team of investigative reporters from the BBC set up a camera on a hillside overlooking the turn. The camera automatically recorded many cars rounding the curve over a stretch of weeks.  Not surprisingly, for days the camera recorded nothing out of the ordinary.

       Nothing that is until the clip below was filmed.

       Even then the investigators were not certain that anything ghostly had been captured on their film.  They began to change their opinion when they were able to carefully view what they had filmed back in the BBC studios.  This is the clip that convinced them that something really might be there. Watch very carefully, or you may miss it.  Pay particular attention to the area right in front of that car as it rounds that final turn. 

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        . . . four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.  Okay.  Deep breath. 

       Some of you will recognize that clip from an article I posted this same October week several years back. Sorry about that!  I couldn't resist trotting it out for one more spin.  It’s always fun to offer up one's own re-telling of an urban legend long about this time of year.  And, as the clip shows, you never know when you might trip on one right there on your own laptop!

       

Murder is More Fun with an Accomplice (The Case for Co-writing)

By Melodie Campbell

To the elderly man in the khaki sweater who lifted his reading glasses to stare open-mouthed…

To the unknown person who gasped and knocked over a chair behind me…

To the woman with the stroller who stared with horror, and then wheeled her toddler frantically away toward the exit…

False Alarm Alert: The two middle-aged women whispering about murder in the Orangeville library were not fiendishly plotting how to do away with a tedious husband.

They were writing a murder mystery!

I’m perhaps best known for writing the mob comedy caper series, The Goddaughter.  But I also write classic whodunits with my close friend Cynthia St-Pierre.  Our first book, A Purse to Die For, was great fun to write.  And happily, it was a Top 100 Mystery on Amazon.com.  Our second, A Killer Necklace, is just out.

Thing is, I live in Oakville and Cindy lives two hours away in Newmarket.

Much of what we do is by email and Skype.  But every few months we like to get together to hash out plot problems in person.  This means meeting somewhere in between, like Orangeville.  And where better, than at the place we feel most comfortable, that hallowed home for books, a library?

But my apologies to the patrons we may have alarmed.  I can imagine the dinner conversation at several houses in Orangeville that night.

Which brings me to the question asked here:  Why write with a partner?

Simply put, it’s FUN!  There is someone sharing your lonely writing job every step of the way.  Cheering when you surprise her with a twist in a new chapter…moaning, when you both start the heavy work of editing.

Writing a novel is a lonely pursuit.  You spend months by yourself before anyone sees the work you have been slaving over.  Having a co-writer takes the loneliness out of being a writer. 

Yes, you give up a little autonomy over your plot and characters.  But you also share the delight of incorporating new ideas and plot twists that you would never have come up with on your own.

Take it from me: planning murder with a partner is much more fun than doing it yourself.  Even our (very much still alive) husbands agree.

Have you ever tried to work with a co-author?  I'll write more about how we actually go about it, in a future post.

Who is the dead woman at the bottom of the stairs? 

 A killer is determined to keep her identity secret, even if it means killing again...

"If Christie wore Armani and Louboutins..." (review of A Purse to Die For)


A KILLER NECKLACE (Imajin Books) is sold in all the usual places.
on Amazon
on Kobo

Making the Minutes Count

By Dixon Hill

There have been some great posts, here on SleuthSayers, about the modus-operandi used by my fellow writers when jotting down notes for stories.

As many of you know, my time of late has been extremely limited when it comes to writing availability. This has caused problems for me, because I tend to need rather long periods of quiet to focus my mind before I manage to "get into the groove" of writing.  And, these periods of quiet usually need to occur after I've decompressed from the rigors of the regular workaday world.

Meanwhile, family life and unimportant things like the need to sleep tend to further compress my available writing hours into short blocks of only ten or fifteen minutes -- or during a twenty-minute break at work.  Trying to get work done in five, ten or fifteen minute blocks of time comes very difficult for me. Initially I found myself writing on napkins or loose leaf notebook paper, only to find that my longhand wasn't fast enough to capture what my mind might fit into those few minutes.

After decompressing from work, I'd sit out on the patio (it was pretty hot by that time of the day), and would begin to form the dream-like procreation that is the catalyst for my writing--only to realize I needed to get it into the computer.  This I bemoaned, because, once I got my computer and all the cooling paraphernalia outside, I had done so much work that the spell had been broken. I often found myself at those times sitting in front of the computer, which was all ready to go, but without the muse speaking to me.


I tried dragging my computer out onto the patio, before I began musing.  This worked well during the late fall, the winter and in early spring.  But, not during the heat of a Phoenix summer afternoon. There have been several excellent suggestions from folks here (particularly from Leigh), on heat-combating hardware that might help my computer keep chugging when it's 110 out.  However, as this summer progressed and the heat not only rose this year, we also encountered much higher humidity than normal.  My computer began to suffer problems.

This is how I wound up writing in longhand, on my patio, in an effort to tap into that forming story in a manner that would allow me to bring it inside and enter it into my computer later.  Unfortunately, this left me struggling with paper that quite honestly was being sweated through, or alternatively seared (to something a bit more crisp than it should have been) by the Sun.  Plus: I still couldn't write fast enough.

 I was stymied until an idea finally struck me, and I began to dictate those passages, which I created in my mind on the hot patio, into the email apparatus of my cell phone.

 I only came up with this concept a few months ago, but have already used it repeatedly. In fact, it's how I composed the first draft of this essay, and posted it on the Sandbox site.  Initially, I tried using the text app on my cell phone, but I quickly realized, while I cannot very easily highlight copy and paste a TEXT from my cell phone into my computer, it is relatively simple to open my computer, bring up my email, then copy and paste the text of that EMAIL into Word, and use it in a story I am constructing.

Anyone who has used cell phone dictation, of course, knows that the email I copy and paste into Word is rather a-fright with errors. but I have found it a far quicker method than jotting on paper or napkins and then trying to type everything I've written longhand into my computer.

Additionally, putting this information into my computer and properly editing it so that it reads the way it should, has actually wound up bringing me more quickly into the writing frame of mind when I do have my computer open.

 Each of us has, at one time or another, stated on this blog that every writer must find his or her own way.  Obviously, I don't know if this way would work well for others. But it seems to have been working for me . Far better than I expected, in fact. So I thought I would share it with the rest of you and any other writers who happen to read this blog.

There are drawbacks with using the voice translation software on a cell phone, of course.  I mean, sometimes the program just fails miserably to capture my words.

When I am drunk -- or half drunk -- not on alcohol, but instead from lack of sleep, not a drop of alcohol in my bloodstream, but my head swimming, my body listing, and my words running together... .

Well, this is when the phone fights me at its worst.   Words appear, sometimes reading similar to" the dog scratched Andy shed tell her," when it should have read: "I dogged the hatch and lashed the tiller."

These are the times that try my soul while I use the phone in this manner. I have found, however, that if I can transfer the text from email to story within 48 hours, there is usually enough there that I can recall what I was trying to say.  This normally allows me to retype it correctly.

Sometimes, when I'm stymied, it helps if I can reconstruct the sound of what I was trying to say by simply reading the mis-typed words aloud and running them all together as I speak. This often tends to reproduce enough of the cadence and tones to clue my ear to the proper words and phrases.

Of course, it doesn't always work out so well.  There is, unfortunately, the time I turned on my computer the morning after I'd dictated into my phone, only discover this paragraph:

The weather report, inside her, that's secret chord warm molten thick liquid fudge that was why she had been drawn toward gloves boys in high school and college. But Ted has been good man and Melissa had learn, through their relationship with him.  Still that has been that's lights by Sue missing from her life . Now, with the doctor, nada mike what's the simple life red mill creek post she know china, your father, or mother home maker. Melissa's on vocation teaching children topless beaches on the Riviera come the best arid outback down south come the hot blooded South American . She had never known these, with the exception of that 3 months student trip through Europe on her Eurorail pass between her freshman and sophomore year of college.


Sadly, I've so far been unable to fathom why this woman evidently had an inner "weather report" composed of warm molten thick liquid fudge, what "gloves boys" do in high school, nor why she evidently chose, as her vocation: teaching children about topless beaches on the Riviera.

And, I question if perhaps her best student was from the Australian outback, or was instead a hot-blooded South American, when it appears she may never have known either.  (Maybe this is what motivates her to teach children about topless beaches on the Riviera.)

I've tried to figure it out for a few days now, but ...

The world may never know.

Still, I think it beats scribbling scrambled words on minute scraps of sweat-soaked paper.  So I think I'll stick to it.  Sure hope my phone learns to understand me better!

See you in two weeks!
--Dixon

A Little Light Corruption

By gum, we folks in South Dakota really know how to keep things quiet.  Until someone dies, and then the whole thing comes boiling out.  Mayberry it isn't.

2013-2014

October 20, 2013 - Richard Benda was found dead from a shotgun wound to the stomach in a field in October.  The SD Attorney General, Marty Jackley, instantly ruled it a suicide.  Came out shortly thereafter that Benda had, apparently, embezzled pots of money from the EB-5 program, an immigration program set up by George H.W. Bush in 1990 that grants Visas to foreign investors for a minimum $500,000.00 investment. Quick money for the state, quick green card, and everything's hunky-dory.

Now Richard Benda was the former commissioner of then Governor Mike Rounds' Office of Economic Development. (Rounds is currently one of our two State Senators, the other being John Thune.)  He was also the one-time financial monitor of the Northern Beef Packers of Aberdeen, a $100 million slaughterhouse, funded largely by Asian EB-5 investors, which later was auctioned off in December, 2013 for $4.8 million in cash and $39.5 million in the cancellation of what's been called a “somewhat murky debt." Benda was soon accused of stealing $500,000 and "amending" grant proposals to give Northern Beef Packers more money. AG Jackley has refused to release the autopsy of Mr. Benda ("out of respect for the family"); and in July of 2014, after 9 months of increasing stink, Jackley waved a document in front of news cameras that he claimed were the indictments for Aggravated Theft and Aggravated Grand Theft by Deception that were about to be served on Benda right before he killed himself/was murdered. (Take your pick; we all have.)

Like any good crime fiction writer, I looked at the documents and recognized the simple fact that, without a signature or notarization, these documents could have been typed up at any time, say the weekend before the Monday July news conference, when the crap was piling too deep to ignore any more.  And, as more and more people demanded answers, the SD legislative committee declared in December of 2014 that Richard Benda was solely responsible for the $500,000 embezzlement and probably the loss of millions of dollars (last report, $140 million, but who's counting), but no one knows where that money went, and they were not going to investigate further.  They were especially not going to investigate a man named Joop Bollen, a Dutch foreign national who ran the EB-5 program for Governor Rounds and later set up his own private corporation, SDRC, which took over administration of the EB-5 program.  Mr. Bollen was asked some questions by the SD legislative committee, but was allowed to answer them in writing, and never had to appear.  He has never been charged with anything.  Anything at all...

But wait, there's more!  I've been on vacation, and while I was gone, the Feds, yes, the Feds! have decided that South Dakota is too corrupt to use EB-5 funds, and we are barred, yes, BARRED, from every getting EB-5 money again.  Plus, they're suing South Dakota:
http://dakotafreepress.com/2015/10/18/feds-say-south-dakota-too-corrupt-to-use-eb-5/
http://www.mitchellrepublic.com/news/state/3863619-feds-aim-kick-sd-out-eb-5-program-state-sues-bollens-records
And, at last, the State of South Dakota is going to sue Mr. Bollen.  Like there's any money left...

Meanwhile, there's a whole new bit of nasty coming out from under the rocks:

2015

Late at night on September 17, 2015, a fire destroyed the home of Scott and Nicole Westerhuis and their four children in Platte, South Dakota.  It wasn't until a few days later that it turned out that all six had been shot to death.  SD Attorney General Marty Jackley declared it a murder/suicide/arson, perpetrated by Scott Westerhuis.  The only question was why.  Now, I'm writing this in early October, and this is only going to get messier.

Scott Westerhuis was the business manager of MCEC, the Mid Central Educational Cooperative, which is, among other things, a hub for distributing federal grand monies to other non-profit organizations.  One of these was South Dakota Gear Up, whose website was taken down after all the employees were fired...  Well, here's the deal, Gear Up received a $4.3 million dollar contract to help get Native American kids into college. On September 16, 2015, Department of Education terminated the contract after an audit declared bad reporting, bad accounting, and general bad books. On September 17, the Westerhuis family tragedy occurred.  On September 25, State Education Secretary Melody Schopp fired every surviving employee of Gear Up, and shut down the Gear Up website.

36705 279th Street, Platte, SD.
screen cap from Google Maps,
2015.09.22.

But wait, there's more! The Westerhuis family lived on a $1.3 million rural Platte property that included a 7,600 square foot house, a $900,000 gym complete with basketball court, weight-lifting area, and computers, and a loft with a meeting room, rooms for guests, and a kitchen.  This was on an official combined MCEC salary of $130,549.82.

But wait, there's more! Scott Westerhuis set up as many as 7 non-profit corporations related to Indian education:




Some are inactive, but Rock Ranch Consulting, which has no easily identifiable online presence, may refer to the Westerhuises’ rock-decorated rural home, torched on September 17. Rock Ranch Consulting was the source of incorporation funds for “American Indian Institute For Innovation and Excellance,” [sic], whose 2014 Form 990 shows $2.7 million in revenue and $3.0 million in expenses, including $1.58 million in salaries and wages, $311K in pension and benefits, and $270K in travel, conferences, and meetings. Apparently very little education of Native Americans actually happened. And there's Oceti Sakowin Education Consortium (OSEC), formed in 2011 and still in good standing, whose 2013 Form 990, completed by Nicole Westerhuis on November 6, 2014, shows $965K in revenue and $935K in expenses. Scott Westerhuis was incorporator of all of these, and his wife Nicole was business manager of at least some of them.
(Thanks to Corey Allen Heidelberger for his incomparable fact-finding on Dakota Free Press: http://dakotafreepress.com/tag/mid-central-educational-cooperative/ )

But wait, there's more! We are just now cracking (again, thanks, Corey!) the list of high-level education professionals who received significant monthly and annual payments ($150,000+ in some cases) for consulting and administration from Gear Up and/or MCEC, and are scrambling to cover their assets, er, what they did and when and why.  My two favorites:

1. Dr. Joseph Graves, Mitchell, SD School Superintendent, received his money from the MCEC for the Teaching American History federal grant; what makes this especially sweet is that the South Dakota Board of Education has made teaching early American history optional in South Dakota.  
2. Dr. Rick Melmer, the Dean of Education of the University of South Dakota, who simply couldn't remember nine $1,000 in payments live on South Dakota television:  http://www.keloland.com/newsdetail.cfm/melmer-answers-questions-about-gear-up-work/?id=185508   You really can't make this stuff up.  (I don't know about you but I've never forgotten a single thousand dollar check I've ever gotten in my life, much less nine of them...)

Governor Dugaard

Now I could go on into a tirade about South Dakota mismanagement of federal grant monies, i.e., the political cronies slurping on the federal gravy train.  (Meanwhile our distinguished Governor Dugaard refuses to expand Medicaid coverage because the feds might not have the money:  note to Gov - if so, it's because your pals have siphoned it all off to build large gyms.) Or I could discuss the shameful use of Native Americans to get grant monies.  I have, I will, and I will again.

I will go off, for a moment, again, on the fact that South Dakota has been ranked #2 for government corruption.  (New Jersey, eat your heart out!)  How can this be? Simple:  South Dakota is a one-party state:  the Governor is Republican, the GOP has a super-majority in the legislature, the districts are gerrymandered so that Republicans consistently keep their super-majority (this is especially farcical when you see the little corridor linking the entire Rosebud Reservation, votes 90% Democratic, to staunch Republican Pennington County, a/k/a Rapid City).  It helps that Pierre, our capital, is one of the few US state capitals which is not on a major interstate - it's literally out in the middle of nowhere - and there is no major news media located there.  This helps ensure that whatever happens in Pierre, stays in Pierre.

Until someone dies.  And the death toll is starting to rise.

Meanwhile, why does hell always break loose in autumn?  

I'll keep you posted.  

Bouchercon: Good golly, I miss Raleigh

So, I spent a week in beautiful Raleigh, North Carolina.  We tacked on a few days before Bouchercon to attend the launch party for Diane Chamberlain's new book.  As I have mentioned here before my sister is a terrific novelist who happens to live near Raleigh.  This was her first Bcon, and I am happy to say she enjoyed it.

It was at least my sixth (New York, Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, Long Beach...I think that's it) but I enjoyed it too.  Among the highlights were meeting two SleuthSayers for the first time: John Floyd and B.K. Stevens, and saying hello again to three more: Art Taylor (see proof on the right) , R.T. Lawton, and Barb Goffman.

Last year I reported that one of the highlights was the Author Speed Dating Breakfast, which I attended as a reader.  This year I was back as an author.  I was paired with Craig Faustus Buck, a fine short story artist whose first novel has just come out. (He's the guy brandishing the book in the foreground.) At every table we each had three minutes to explain to the breakfasters why they would absolutely love our books.  Then a bell would ring and we would jump up and charge off to the next table.


What struck me as most interesting about this was the way Craig and I each changed our patter as we went.  Both of us saw what got a good reaction and what got blank stares and by the end of the two hours we had our pitches down perfectly.  At one of the last tables I suggested that for variety we should each do the other's speech, since we had heard them so often.  Cooler heads prevailed.

Every author attending the Speed Dating Breakfast was required to bring "swag," defined here as something for the attendees to take away.  This ranged from candy to magnets to band-aids printed with the book covers to pouches of lavender to book marks.  Congratulations go to Cate Holahan for the cleverest booty of all: a folder to carry the rest home in!

Kenneth Wishnia, Washisname, and Jason Starr, as photographed by Peter Rozovsky

Another highlight was the panel celebrating the anthology Jewish Noir.  Editor Ken Wishnia led us in a discussion of such subjects as the connection between angry prophets of the Hebrew Bible with  hardboiled private eyes (they all rail against corrupt society, for one thing), and the link between Jewish outsiderness and the noir sensibility.  Ken also discussed the importance of not including every Jewish food you know in every meal in your story.  Not get for your cholesterol or credibility.

I was proud to be one of the contributors to Murder Under The Oaks, the second Bouchercon anthology.  The eighteen or so authors who were present formed an assembly line, signing copies for hundreds of people who apparently failed to get the publishing industry's email explaining no one reads short stories anymore.

I even attended some panels I was not on.  (You may think that's a joke.  The biggest problem at Bouchercon is Buyer's Regret.  Whatever you choose to do, and no matter how much fun it is, you will wonder if you should have been doing something else... so I skipped a panel on short stories to have tea with SJ Rozan, one of my oldest writing buddies, for instance.  Can't clone myself yet.)

There was a panel on pairing your protagonist with the right antagonist.  Most of the participants denied that their books had typical antagonists at all.  Someone asked whether the writers had ever met anyone they considered truly evil.  The two who immediately replied that they had were Mark Pryor (a prosecuting attorney) and Diane Chamberlain (a former psychotherapist).  I guess they would know, huh?

There was a wonderful panel in which masters were asked which classics of the genre influenced them.   They all digressed into the non-classics they loved as well.  Bill Crider said: "I love the old sleazy paperbacks where the titles all ended in exclamation points."  Lawrence Block replied that he had always wanted to sell that company a novel titled One Dull Night!

Other highlights included meeting some of my favorite mystery writers for the first time: Margaret Maron, Chris Muessig (look to the right), Sarah  Shaber, Reed Farrell Coleman, Richard Helms, Bill Crider, and Jack Bludis, to name too few. 

I had another favorite moment but I can't tell you about it, because, heh heh, I will put it into a short story in the near future.  So you will have to wait until I get it written, edited and published.  Three, five years max.

Okay, this is getting too long.  Next time I will give you my inevitable collection of quotations from the festival, and I will offer one complaint about my favorite book convention.

Post-Partum Bouchercon Blues

Whenever a convention ends there’s a feeling of emptiness. The excitement, the constant motion, everything just sort of winds down, leaving one with a sort of empty feeling: Post-Partum Bouchercon Blues.
Mystery conventions are chaos—exercises in controlled chaos to be sure. But chaos. You spend your time running from panel to panel, sometimes even ones you’re on. You meet with editors and agents and other authors and fans. This time I even got to record my Anthony and Macavity-nominated story, “Howling at the Moon” for Ellery Queen’s podcast. I believe an Academy Award Nomination for “Best-Worst Reading of a Short Story in the Mystery Category, Black Mask Sub Category of a Story Under 10,000 Words, But More than 3,000 Words” is forthcoming and I hope the award will be handed to me by Jennifer Lawrence.

You spend some time eating and a lot of time in the bar at night schmoozing and maybe, just maybe, having a drink or two. Nah. Whoever heard of hard-drinking mystery writers?

But there’s other aspects of conventions besides the obvious ones. One of my favorite things is to see cities that I might not normally choose to go to or get to see. Raleigh is a perfect example of that. Albany was another a couple of years ago.

Next year, Bouchercon is in New Orleans and Left Coast Crime is in Honolulu in 2017, both places I’ve been multiple times and places I probably would have gone to again on my own. But I don’t think I ever would have thought about going to Albany or Raleigh on my own, though I’m not sorry for having had the opportunity to visit either city.

To be honest, Albany is one of the last places on earth I ever would have thought of going to. My major “experience” with it, prior to Bouchercon 2013, was via Law & Order when someone, usually the DAs, would have to go there for some legal proceeding and it always seemed as if they were being sent to Siberia. So when I was nominated for the 2013 Shamus Award I turned to my wife and said, “Albany! Why Albany? Why couldn’t it be Chicago or Boston?” someplace I really wanted to see or see again in these cases.

But that’s part of the problem—many of us don’t really see the city where the convention is held. You see the inside of the hotel or the convention center or a restaurant or two. And they all pretty much look the same. So when my wife, Amy, and I go to conventions we always go a day early and stay a day or two extra so we can see the city. And guess what, we both really liked Albany. It had a certain small town New England charm that maybe those who live there don’t see. But coming from L.A. and being outsiders we saw the city with different eyes than those who’ve been jaded by familiarity.

And going to Raleigh for Bouchercon 2015 was the same. We got there a day early to meet up with Amy’s parents and one of her sisters—who drove up from Georgia—for dinner the night before the convention. And we stayed a couple extra days after it was over. During the convention we didn’t have a rental car, but for those extra days at the end we did. And we explored a bit of the city. One of the things we enjoy doing is just driving around the neighborhoods seeing how they’re different—or the same—as where we live (Los Angeles area).

We particularly enjoy the older Victorian and Colonial homes, with their wraparound porches and Southern charm. And we enjoy sampling the local food. Blood-red Cheerwine (which is not alcoholic) is the unofficial state drink of North Carolina. Even so, it took some doing but we finally found some. It tastes better than Dr. Pepper and I can take it or leave it. But I had spareribs marinated and glazed in Cheerwine and they were out of this world. Just a different taste that I really sparked to. We also ate at the famous Pit restaurant. And cruised the city, seeing the North Carolina Museum of History and the Fiction Kitchen and Gringo A Go Go. And how lucky we were to be in Raleigh on the major celebration of Food Truck Day.

We saw Mordecai Park, home of the Mordecai Plantation Manor, once part of a 5,000 acre plantation. The park also now holds the home of Andrew Johnson, one of only two presidents to be impeached. The home was originally a few blocks away but was moved to the park.

We also visited the Oakwood Cemetery, with graves going back a couple hundred years, maybe more. It contains the grave of Berrian Kinnard Upshaw, the first husband of Margaret Mitchell and, some say, the possible inspiration for the character of Rhett Butler. And in that cemetery was a section filled with Confederate Civil War soldiers...and one Union soldier mistakenly put there and originally misidentified as a Confederate. Some of the graves are still tended to with flowers and Confederate flags. And despite the current brouhaha over that flag, it was a very sobering site and solemn place to be.

Standing in that cemetery, seeing all the graves of dead Civil War soldiers truly made me stop and think about how short life is and how much we take for granted.

So, while we enjoyed the convention, we also enjoyed the side trips and learning about Raleigh and its history. To see more about my actual convention experience and about my panel, with Shamus nominee Sam Wiebe and Macavity Winner Craig Faustus Buck, you can check out my 7 Criminal Minds blog post from last Friday. Click here http://7criminalminds.blogspot.com/2015/10/new-faces-new-crimes-new-challenges.html

It was good to go and good to come home. And come March it’ll be good to go to the next Left Coast Crime in Phoenix. Another place I’ve been but a place I’ll enjoy rediscovering.

*****

And Big Time Congratulations to our own fellow Sleuthsayer Art Taylor for his Anthony Win for Best Short Story for “The Odds are Against Us” from Ellery Queen.

*****

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Good Books and Old Movies, Part II

by Susan Rogers Cooper

I mentioned last post that I was teaching classes on the mystery from novel to film, and listed the books and movies I'd be teaching.  Rob Lopresti had done a little research on my first author, John Buchan, creator of "The Thirty-Nine Steps," and sent me his blog on him, which was quite interesting.

Buchan was a Scot, which might have had something to do with his grand descriptions of the Scottish countryside in "The 39 Steps," and began his adult life with a brief legal career, which he gave up for his real passion -- writing.  On October 19, 1915, John Buchan's first novel, "The Thirty-nine Steps" was published and was an immediate hit, selling 25,000 copies by the end of the year.  It tells the story of Richard Hannay, a South African visiting London who gets caught up in an espionage ring.   Jason Worden argued that Buchan actually invented a new sub-genre: the story in which a civilian gets chased both by the bad guys, and by the police who think he is the bad guy.  That paranoia made it perfect for Alfred Hitchcock, who not only filmed "The Thirty-nine Steps," but used a similar plot in two other movies.  Buchan wrote many more novels, including four about the plucky Richard  Hannay.  During World War I, his penchant for writing came in handy as he wrote propaganda for the British government.  He also served as Governor General of Canada until his death in 1940.  As Rob said, not bad for a thriller writer.

Learning all this about John Buchan made me want to learn more about the other writers I was featuring in my class.  Although John Buchan was the least known (to me anyway) of the four, I decided to delve a little deeper into the others.  I knew before hand -- from general knowledge and reading Lillian Hellman's wonderful book "Pentimento" -- that Dashiel Hammett had worked as a detective for the Pinkerton agency, was an alcoholic, and had issues with rejection -- at least according to Ms. Hellman. Delving a little deeper, I learned that Samuel Dashiel Hammett worked for the Pinkertons from 1915 to 1922, quitting due to the Pinkertons penchant for strike breaking. Almost all of his books and short stories were written in the 1920s and '30s, due in part to his bad health and his interest in political activism. He joined The Civil Rights Congress (the CRC), a leftist organization, and soon became their president. The CRC came under scrutiny in the late 1940s, and Hammett was subpoenaed to appear before a judge to name a list of contributors to a defense fund set up by the CRC for people accused of communist sympathies. He refused, citing the fifth amendment, and was sent to federal prison. Only a few years later, in the early 1950s, he was blacklisted by the HUAC and was unable to work as a writer from that point until his death in 1961. Raymond Chandler wrote in The Simple Art of Murder, “Hammett was the ace performer... He is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought the most of, The Glass Key, is the record of a man's devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.”

And speaking of Raymond Chandler, one of my all time favorite writers, I was interested to learn that he didn't start writing until 1932 at the age of forty-four. A former oil company executive, he lost his job during the Great Depression and decided to take up writing. In a letter to his London publisher, Hamish Hamiton, Chandler explained why he began reading and eventually writing for pulp magazines: “Wandering up and down the Pacific Coast in an automobile I began to read pulp magazines, because they were cheap enough to throw away and because I never had at any time any taste for the kind of thing which is known as women's magazines. This was in the great days of the Black Mask (if I may call them great days) and it struck me that some of the writing was pretty forceful and honest, even though it had its crude aspect. I decided that this might be a good way to try to learn to write fiction and get paid a small amount of money at the same time. I spent five months over an 18,000 word novelette and sold it for $180. After that I never looked back, although I had a good many uneasy periods looking forward.”

In the introduction to Trouble Is My Business (1950), a collection of four of his short stories, Chandler wrote, “The emotional basis of the standard detective story was and had always been that murder will out and justice will be done. Its technical basis was the relative insignificance of everything except the final denouement. What led up to that was more or less passage work. The denouement would justify everything. The technical basis of the Black Mask type of story on the other hand was that the scene outranked the plot, in the sense that a good plot was one which made good scenes. The ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing. We who tried to write it had the same point of view as the film makers. When I first went to Hollywood a very intelligent producer told me that you couldn't make a successful motion picture from a mystery story, because the whole point was a disclosure that took a few seconds of screen time while the audience was reaching for its hat. He was wrong, but only because he was thinking of the wrong kind of mystery.”

Chandler also described the struggle that the writers of pulp fiction had in following the formula demanded by the editors of the pulp magazines: “As I look back on my stories it would be absurd if I did not wish they had been better. But if they had been much better they would not have been published. If the formula had been a little less rigid, more of the writing of that time might have survived. Some of us tried pretty hard to break out of the formula, but we usually got caught and sent back. To exceed the limits of a formula without destroying it is the dream of every magazine writer who is not a hopeless hack.” And in a radio discussion with Chandler, Ian Fleming said that Chandler offered "some of the finest dialogue written in any prose today".

After Chandler's wife died, he began drinking heavily and slid into a severe depression. He attempted suicide but called the police before the attempt to tell them he was going to do it. He died in 1959.

My final author of course needs no introduction to anyone – mystery buff or not. Agatha Christie is almost as well known as Santa Claus. She published sixty-six novels and fourteen short story collections. She was initially unsuccessful in getting published, but in 1920 “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” was published, introducing the world to Hercule Poirot. The Guinness Book of World Records lists Dame Agatha as the best selling author of all time.

Much has been made of her ten day disappearance after her husband asked for a divorce. A much maligned movie, “Agatha,” was made – with a large disclaimer at the beginning – with a fanciful explanation as to what occurred. It has never been made public what happened in that ten day period.

In 1930 Dame Agatha married archeologist Sir Max Mallowan, whom she met during an archaeological dig. Their marriage lasted until Christie's death in 1976.

Witch Trials

Carving kit © Pumpkin Teeth

by Leigh Lundin

The Halloween season means trick or treats, chomping chocolate, honoring saints, and tormenting witches.

Wait… witches? Real ones?

It’s been more than 300 years since the Salem witch trials and the hangings and tortured deaths that followed, but an US Air Force clinic has fired dental technician Deborah Schoenfeld for practicing witchcraft.

Witchcraft: You know, satanic rituals like meditation, yoga exercise, listening to sitar music… witchy things like that after converting to Hinduism. Really.

Deemed a witch, she wasn’t allowed to know who her accusers were, but at least she wasn’t hanged, crushed to death, or burned at the stake. Her accusers satisfied themselves with calling her a devil and career termination.

Despite the hostile work environment, Ms Schoenfeld liked her dental technician job. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has taken up her case and written a letter of demand to the Dentac commander in Fort Meade, Maryland and the Clinical Dentistry Flight Commander in Washington.

No clue yet how the spirits might move them.