Death By Headlines: Journalism and Culpability

By Burl Barer If you cover up a killing, interfere with an homicide investigation, or tamper with a jury, you face hard time in the big house. When newspapers, radio and television outlets promulgate false and deceptive information leading to the deaths of innocent people, they face a good time in the White House – or at least access, and some one-on-one interviews with important politicians. What we read in the newspaper, see on...

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Medical Child Abuse: A Prosecutorial First

By Mike Trent On February 28, 2006, two women who hardly knew each other, Darcy Wall and Susan Owen, walked into a Harris County Constable, Precinct Four substation together. Darcy was a mother of two children and the wife of a pastor at a local Bible church. Susan was a nurse in a pediatrician’s office. They had both been close friends and supporters of a woman named Laurie Williamson, the mother of three terminally...

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Florence Small Lost Her Head

The defense made a valiant effort on Frederick Small’s behalf. Proclaiming that he was in Boston at the time, and had witnesses to the fact. There was undeniable proof that he wasn’t near the cottage,  when it burned into the ground. And he had absolutely nothing to do with the body that they found.   He could not, would not, did not murder his wife. Yet in jail he sat, on trial for his life. ************ The normal nighttime...

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Chloe Davis Murder Case: Part 4

Chloe’s neighbors and classmates had gathered on the lawn of the Davis residence to await her arrival. Faces of onlookers fell pale as the police motorcade pulled to the front of the little house and Chloe smiled and gave a casual wave from the car window. Today, under the company of the famed police psychiatrist, Dr. J. Paul De River, Chloe would lead her law enforcement entourage through rooms that had once held the sounds of laughing...

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