Read The Killer Book of Cold Cases Online
Authors: Tom Philbin
The Killer Book of Cold Cases (3 page)
Mason waived extradition, and in March 2003, he was flown to Los Angeles, where he pled guilty to two counts of first-degree murder. He could have been charged with the robbery of the teenagers and the rape of one as well, but the victims didn’t want to endure a trial.
Mason did, however, try to explain his actions, stating that he had been drunk when he committed the crimes. He said, “I’m still trying to just figure out how I got [to where they were]. I do recall being in Vegas. I feel like I have a memory of a liquor bottle in that field somewhere.”
And why did he shoot the cops?
It wasn’t premeditated. He said that one of the cops started to pressure him, and “I was scared. I was really fearful. I feel like I was dreaming. It [the killings] makes no sense. It’s contrary to everything I believe in. At no time in my life have I intentionally harmed anyone. I don’t know why I did this.”
After his guilty plea, Mason was sentenced to two life sentences in prison, escaping the death penalty. The Los Angeles District Attorney did not oppose Mason’s request to serve the sentence in South Carolina so he could be visited by family members.
To the families Mason said, “Please forgive me. Do not be bitter.”
But they
were
bitter and expressed that in open court.
“Your cowardly act shattered our lives,” said Carolyn Phillips, daughter of Richard Phillips, the cop who had fired at Mason. She spoke of how her mother had struggled to raise three kids. “We cannot and will not forgive you.”
Outside the court, the son of the other slain cop, Milton Curtis, said, “Mr. Mason is sorry now, and we heard his apology speech. He wasn’t sorry for forty-five years, and the only reason we’re hearing that apology now is because he got caught.”
The case demonstrated a lot of things, but one for sure: why there is no statute of limitations on murder.
One of the questions that prosecutors must answer when they want to charge someone with a cold-case murder is how long the law allows them to do that. In other words, what is the so-called statute of limitations?
With many crimes, such as rape, the answer is that the statute varies, but for murder it’s forever—there is no statute of limitations. However, there can be exceptions to the rule. One of the most famous is the case of Michael Skakel. He was charged by Connecticut state prosecutors with bludgeoning Martha Moxley, a pretty blonde teenager, to death with a golf club.
Skakel was arrested in 2000 when he was thirty-nine years old, but he had been only fifteen when the murder was committed. The defense argued that Skakel could not legally be prosecuted for murder because at the time of the murder, 1975, Connecticut had a five-year statute of limitations on murder for someone Skakel’s age. At trial, the judge denied the motion to dismiss the case, but defense lawyers made their contention the main item in their appeal of the guilty verdict—which they lost.
Q.
How many Americans support the death penalty?
A.
An overwhelming majority of people—69 percent—favor the death penalty, according to a Gallup poll, while only 27 percent are against it and 4 percent have no opinion. This is despite the unalterable fact that the death penalty is not a deterrent to murder. Statistics have shown that over and over again. “Feeling is everything,” says Dr. Grace Somer. “Feelings of rage that a person is experiencing at the time they become homicidal have nothing to do with cold, deliberate logic. Murder has everything to do with compulsion.”
Murder, as it were, sticks in one’s craw. It certainly has stuck in the craw of the FBI. More than one hundred unsolved murder cases were put under review through the civil rights-era Cold Case Initiative, a partnership started in 2007 between the FBI and civil rights groups, as well as federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies.
The initiative was launched on the heels of several successful prosecutions of civil rights-era cases, most recently the 2007 conviction of James Ford Seale for the kidnapping and subsequent murder of two African-American teenagers in 1964 in Mississippi. Other notable cases include the 2005 conviction of Edgar Ray Killen for his role in the 1964 deaths of three civil-rights workers—the so-called Mississippi Burning case—and the 2001 conviction of Thomas Blanton, Jr., one of four men who bombed a Birmingham, Alabama, church in 1963, killing four African-American girls.
As FBI Director Robert Mueller put it, “the successes in decades-old cases restored our hope and renewed our resolve. We cannot turn back the clock. We cannot right these wrongs. But we can try to bring a measure of justice to those who remain.”
The case of James Ford Seale was resuscitated in 2005 after a documentary filmmaker probed the case, prompting the FBI’s Jackson, Mississippi, office to reexamine old records. The FBI enlisted the aid of special agents who had worked the original 1964 case. Working with the local U.S. Attorney’s Office, they gathered enough evidence to present to a grand jury, which issued an indictment in January 2007.
Retired Special Agent James Ingram was one of the original agents on the case. In a 2007 interview, he said that some witnesses are more willing to come forward with the passage of time. “Some are relieved to talk after forty years and get [what they know] off their chest.”
And in Seale’s case, they did.
—
“Cold Case Initiative” www.fbi.gov
- I have not only fingerprints, but also criminal histories, aliases, mug shots, scars, and tattoo photos, as well as physical characteristics like height, weight, and hair and eye color. I also have civil fingerprints, mostly of people who have served or are serving in the U.S. military or have been or are employed by the federal government.
- I have the largest biometric database in the world, housing the fingerprints and criminal histories of more than 66 million people in the criminal master file, along with more than 25 million civil prints. Included are fingerprints from 73,000 known and suspected terrorists processed by the United States or by international law-enforcement agencies who work with us.
- I work fast. The average response time for an electronic criminal-fingerprint submission is about ten minutes, while electronic civil submissions are processed within an hour and twelve minutes. I process an average of 162,000 ten-print submissions per day.
- I started on July 28, 1999. Before that, the processing of ten-print fingerprint submissions was largely a manual, labor-intensive process, with a single submission taking weeks or months to process.
Answer:
I am the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or IAFIS.
One of the most arresting disappearances, and one that fully captured the public’s attention, was the disappearance on August 6, 1930, of a justice of the New York Supreme Court named Joseph Force Crater. The dapper, 41-year-old judge was missing for decades and became part of popular lore. But at long last, the mystery may (and the emphasis is on
may
) have been solved.
The following is a roundup of murders that are likely to turn into cold cases.
- Unidentified Bodies
. A cop once said that “everything is connected in a homicide,” but the first thing police have to do is identify the victim. Once they do that, they can talk to friends and relatives and other people to start figuring out where he was on the night he was murdered, who was the last to see him alive, and so on. But without an ID, investigators have no place to begin. Of course, police run fingerprints to try to get an identification from the IAFIS database and DNA to try for a hit through CODIS, but if these methods fail, the case most likely will stay cold. - Missing Persons
. - Discovery of Human Bones
. Without flesh, there isn’t a great deal of viable evidence—such as fingerprints, teeth, or identifying marks on flesh—to use to identify someone. - Gang or Drug Related
. Some states have a five-year statute of limitations on the prosecution of a 15-year-old for murder, which can make cases involving youths that age and younger difficult to solve. - Suicides
. - Accidental Deaths
.
The mystery of Judge Crater’s disappearance started in early August 1930, while he and his wife, Stella, were vacationing at their summer home in the bucolic Belgrade Lakes area of Maine. The phone rang and Judge Crater answered, but he didn’t tell his wife what the call was about. After he hung up, he said he had to leave to go to “straighten those fellows out.”
It is questionable whether Judge Crater actually went to straighten anyone out. He had a showgirl mistress named Sally Ritz, and after frolicking with her in Atlantic City, the judge returned to his wife in Maine. But his stay was temporary. He told his wife he had to go back to Manhattan, but before making this final trip, he promised his wife he would return by her birthday, August 9.
For years, to “pull a Crater” meant to disappear, and the phrase was a standard joke for nightclub comedians. In addition, “Judge Crater, call your office,” was often heard on public address systems.
As a promotional gimmick, when Warner Brothers released the film
Bureau of Missing Persons
in 1933, the studio offered to pay Crater $10,000 if he claimed the money in person at the box office. That prize would be worth more than $130,000 today.
When he left for New York City on August 3, Crater was in good spirits and behaving normally, according to his wife. On August 5, Crater spent two hours going through the files in his courthouse chambers. The next day, he had his court attendant, Joseph Mara, cash two checks for him that totaled $5,150 (or around $65,000 by today’s standards) and represented practically all of his money. At noon, they took two locked briefcases, ostensibly containing the money, to his apartment and Crater let Mara take the rest of the day off.
Crater was still around in the evening when he went to buy a ticket from a Broadway agency and purchased a single seat to a comedy named
Dancing Partner
, which was playing that night at the Belasco Theatre. Then he went to Billy Haas’s Chophouse on West 45th Street for dinner with his mistress, and a lawyer friend, perhaps planning to go from there to catch the second act of the show.
