DO NO HARM

by Erin Moriarity

"Do no harm."

If physicians are required to take some version of the Hippocratic oath, why aren't prosecutors and police officers required to make a similar promise? Officers of the state, by their actions or inactions, often make life or death decisions. Why aren't they held to the same standards as doctors?

From my perspective of covering murder trials, it seems, all too often, prosecutors or district attorneys are motivated more by winning convictions than solving cases or finding truth. In fact, they are rewarded by re-election for their winning stats, often with little or no attention paid to the actual facts of the cases.

As a reporter who covers murder trials for a living, I can come up with a myriad of examples, none more troubling than the case of Ryan Ferguson (pictured).

Now 24-years-old, Ryan Ferguson was convicted of murder and robbery in December 2005, based in large part on a "dream."

Here are the facts: In the early morning hours of November, 1, 2001, newspaper sportwriter Kent Heitholt was beaten to death in the parking lot outside the newspaper's offices. Although he was killed in downtown Columbia, Missouri, on a night filled with Halloween revelers, no one admitted seeing the murder, although two witnesses remembered two young men hanging around near the scene.

The murder was brutal and bloody -- Kent was beaten and then strangled with his own belt.

The case went unsolved until March 2004, when police heard that a young man was telling people about a dream he had -- a dream where he and a friend by the name of Ryan Ferguson had committed the murder.

The "dreamy" young man is Chuck Erickson.

His story was unbelievable...or should have been. He claimed to have no memory of the murder until more than two years later when he says he first dreamed about it.

When he was initially interrogated by police, he seemed to have little knowledge of the case. The investigator asked, "How was Mr. Heitholt strangled?" Chuck responded that he thought a bungee cord was used. When the officer tells him that the weapon was the victim's belt, Erickson expresses shock and seems surprised. (You can see and hear Erickson's reactions on videotapes of his interviews.) Where did the murder occur? As police took Erickson on a tour, ostensibly to have him describe the crime, he looks like a deer caught in the headlights and seems to rely on the police to give him the facts.

Obviously, when a person confesses to an unsolved crime, the police and the prosecutor in the case need to take the confession seriously and investigate. In this case, the District Attorney was Kevin Crane, a man who, by all accounts, is a man of great skills and integrity. Still, you have to wonder why he wasn't more concerned by what was missing in this case? Here's why:

There is no physical evidence, none, to back up Chuck Erickson's story.

While there were unidentified fingerprints and blood evidence at the scene and hair found in Heitholt's hands, none of it matches either Erickson nor Ferguson. No physical evidence to connect either man to the crime. There were bloody footprints found at the scene that don't belong to either young man. The killers would have had been covered in blood, but later testing of Ferguson's car came up with nothing.

Erickson told police that he and Ferguson escaped from the killing on foot going one way; the blood leading from the crime goes the opposite way. Erickson said the two teenagers returned to a bar afterwards; the bar--according to testimony--was closed at the time. The murder occurred somewhere between 2:15 am and 2:25 am. Ryan had been on his cell phone shortly before calmly talking to a female friend and then he goes and brutally kills a stranger?

Erickson says the murder was a robbery; Heitholt's wallet was in his car. Erickson claims that the two killers were seen by a friend by the name of Dallas Mallory. Mallory denies it.

Despite the serious discrepancies, the police charged Ryan Ferguson with second degree murder and District Attorney Kevin Crane put Ferguson on trial. The main witness: Chuck Erickson, who agreed to an 11-year sentence in return for his testimony against Ryan Ferguson.

The Chuck Erickson who testified at trial was a very different man than the one who was interrogated by the police -- this Erickson was poised and very confident of his facts. Ryan Ferguson was convicted of murder and robbery and is now serving a 40-year sentence.

Kevin Crane, now a judge, believes, despite the lack of evidence, that Ryan Ferguson and Chuck Erickson both killed Kent Heitholt. His strongest argument is that a young man like Chuck Erickson wouldn't involve himself in a crime that would send him to prison unless he was truly guilty. Why did Erickson "forget" the details of the murder? Crane says Erickson simply didn't want to remember them. Who would? he asks.

Crane denies that Erickson, at trial, testified to facts that he had been "fed" by police. But Ferguson's family says that is exactly what happened. At subsequent hearings, they have brought in witnesses who now say that they were badgered by police into giving facts that bolstered the state's case.

Ryan's father, Bill Ferguson, is determined to get his son a new trial. Surprisingly, he not only believes Ryan is innocent, but believes that Chuck is as well. He thinks that, for some unknown psychological reason, Erickson confessed to a crime he didn't commit.

Police and prosecutors have an obligation to investigate crimes and take killers off the street, but were they, in this case, too quick to accept Chuck Erickson's story? Did the police fill in the holes in Chuck's story to make a case? And in their zeal to solve the murder of Kent Heitholt, did the police and prosecutor send the wrong men to prison?

Do no harm.

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The Case of Rachel Mullenix

By Erin Moriarty

When strangers hear that I talk to murderers for a living, they often gasp. People are frightened, fascinated or repulsed by the idea that, as a necessary part of covering trials as a reporter, I go to jails and prisons to spend time with killers and those accused of killing. The truth is, interviewing those accused of murder, even in close quarters, is rarely frightening nor captivating. (And I include in that assessment my three interviews in Witchita, Kansas with Dennis Rader, the now infamous B.T.K. killer. Rader, who killed 10 women, is in person surprisingly nondescript. He escaped detection years, not because he was particularly smart, but simply because he had no connection to his victims.) While murder may be the most heinous human act, the most surprising feature about those who commit murder is just how ordinary they are.

Most killers are not smarter, more calculating or unfeeling than the rest of us. They are simply human beings —albeit, with means and opportunity—who give in to the same emotions that the rest of us feel: jealousy, hate, fear or some combination of those sensations.

It is because most accused killers are not special that I am particularly fascinated by 19- year-old Rachel Mullenix. She is an exception to the rule.

It is not Rachel's gender nor age that makes her so interesting, although we all know that male killers, particularly young males, vastly outnumber females. It is also not her appearance that makes her stand out, although Rachel Mullenix does act and look more like a college coed than a jail inmate. What makes Mullenix’s case so compelling is the fact that the victim is Rachel’s mother, 56-year-old Barbara Mullenix, a woman whom Rachel loved and, by most accounts, shared a close relationship. While their relationship was as complicated as that of many other mothers and daughters, the motive for such an act, and such a brutal act, still seems elusive.

Barbara Mullenix was stabbed to death sometime in the early morning hours of September 13th, 2006. One detail is particularly disturbing: Barbara was stabbed in the eye with a butter knife. This is one autopsy photo I wish I had never seen:the photo of Barbara’s lifeless, mutilated body with the hilt of the butter knife jutting out of her skull feels burned into my consciousness. What could this mother have done to bring out such rage and cruelty in another human being, her daughter no less?

To be fair, Rachel denies she had anything to do with the actual killing. She blames her 21-year-old boyfriend at the time, Ian Allen, who has reportedly confessed to police that he acted alone. But Rachel--then 17 years old-- was in the home and watched when Allen allegedly came into their condo and stabbed her mother. Rachel didn't call for help, didn't call 911 to get her mother medical assistance and she didn't try to escape. Instead, she helped Allen clean up the apartment and even dispose of her mother's body. Rachel says she tried to stop her boyfriend, but there is no evidence of that. Rather, there is disturbing evidence of something entirely different: that when Allen left her alone to get rid of evidence, Rachel sent him a text message saying "I love you". She then left with him and ran away to Louisiana where the two were apprehended by police.

This is the young woman who sat across me this summer during two lengthy interviews: a polite, seemingly sweet daughter who spoke convincingly about the mother she loved. Rachel admits that the two had a volatile relationship over the years. Barbara, who didn't work outside the home, was emotionally tied to her daughter and was fearful of losing her as Rachel grew up. What complicated matters more is that Barbara was an alcoholic and, when drinking, would be cruelly critical of her daughter. In the weeks leading to Barbara's death, she had grounded Rachel and kept her from seeing Ian Allen. Still, Rachel said the two women had always managed to get past their disagreements and says she didn't harbor a deep resentment towards her mother. And, in fact, she says, the day before the murder, Barbara had ended the grounding by allowing Rachel to go to the movies with Allen.

So how do you explain a loving daughter watching her mother die and then running away with and having sex with her mother's killer? Rachel, who has been examined by a forensic psychiatrist, explains her behavior by claiming that she was abused by her boyfriend and says that she, like other abused women, was too cowed by her abuser to question his actions. There is, however, no evidence of abuse: no injuries and no reports. Ian Allen has no criminal history nor any known history of abuse.

Rachel's psychiatrist offers a more complicated explanation: that Rachel suffers from a borderline personality and has become accustomed to abuse at the hands of her mother. When her mother was murdered, Rachel simply followed the next person in command: her boyfriend.

Neither explanation really helps you to understand the young woman who, one moment is in tears remembering her mother, the next, coolly giving details about the murder.

Who and what is Rachel Mullenix? I don't know what to make of her. I know l like her and, as a mother, I feel for her. On the surface, she seems so much like other women her age. At the same time, I believe that most of us could not stand by and watch a loved one die, that we would step in front of a killer's knife to save a parent or, at the very least, call for help.

But if Rachel Mullenix isn't like the rest of us, does that mean she is a coldblooded killer?

Rachel went on trial in July. Her boyfriend, Ian Allen, goes on trial at the end of this month. This is a case I will follow throughout the fall: the unusual case, both fascinating and frightening.

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Family Affairs

By Erin Moriarty

Fifty- nine- year old Susan Atkins, serving a life sentence in a California prison, has asked for an early release based on “compassionate grounds;" she has terminal brain cancer. If the name isn’t familiar, that’s not really surprising. You have to be almost fifty years old to remember her crime and even older to understand the enormity of it.

Atkins was a member of the Manson “family” and by no means, a shy one. In August of 1969, Atkins was the one who stabbed eight and a half month pregnant Sharon Tate to death after the actress begged her to save the child. “ She asked me to let the baby live. I told her I didn’t have mercy for her….You’re going to die” , she told the actress and later repeated to a parole board. She was the one who took the blood of the young mother and wife of director Roman Polanski and used it to write "Pig" on a door. Now, almost forty years later, Atkins is the one asking for mercy....and she just may get it. The request has already been approved by the California Institute for Women in Corona, California. Now it’s up to state parole board. Atkins is, in all likelihood, banking on the short term memory of most Americans and hoping there will be little opposition.

Seventy-six-year old Emmett Harder remembers. Fueled by a combination of guilt and curiosity, he has spent nearly four decades trying to resolve once and for all the actual number of victims murdered by Atkins and the gang of hippies led by Charles Manson and his side-kick, Charles “Tex” Watson. Curiosity, because Harder is a writer and historian; guilt, because Harder used to hang out with the Manson gang in the months before they went on their now infamous killing spree.

Harder, then a gold prospector who wrote a book "The Canyons Are Full of Ghosts", came across what he thought was just a group of hippies camping out at the Barker Ranch in the southwest corner of Death Valley National Park. He enjoyed the company of the man he knew as “Charlie” and the others. “They were a happy group, young people just trying to find their way”, he remembers thinking back then. He didn’t notice anything unusual. "They didn't always wear clothes, but it was hot," he recalls.

When he first heard about the murders at the Tate house, he never connected it to the young people he knew until weeks later when they were arrested on other charges. Harder was asked to testify, but declined; he still had trouble connecting the people he knew with the heinous murders. However, when he went to the jail to speak with one member of the "family," he won't say whom, he was told that, rather than eight murders, the gang was actually responsible for five more, thirteen altogether. Harder was told that as many as five people, hitchhikers and runaways, had been killed in the desert. He's been trying to confirm that story ever since. Over the years, others became intrigued by the story as well, including Detective Sergeant Paul Dotsie with the Mammoth Police Department.

In May, Harder thought he was close to solving the case. After Detective Sergeant Dotsie's cadaver dog "Buster" indicated that there were unmarked graves at the Barker Ranch, investigators from Inyo County descended on the ranch and began to dig. But after 24 hours and finding nothing, the dig was stopped. Investigators became concerned that Native American burial grounds would be disturbed.

Harder isn't giving up. He's convinced the bodies of missing young people are out there somewhere and that they need to be found. He believes that, even forty years later, there are parents anxious to know what happened to their children who went into the desert and never came out. Harder wants to put those ghosts in the canyon to rest.

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The Preacher's Wife

By Erin Moriarty

In Waco, Texas, a mother grieves the death of her only daughter and wonders if she was murdered. Her daughter's husband, a Baptist preacher, lives under a cloud of suspicion, unable to find work in a ministry. It's a case that may never be resolved to anyone's satisfaction, all because investigators mishandled the scene in the initial hours after the young woman's death.

31-year-old Kari Baker died late on April 7th, 2006 in her home in Hewitt, Texas, just outside Waco. Her husband, Matt Baker, had called 911 at 12:01 am on April 8th. He told police that he had gone out to put gas in the car and rent movies and came home to find his wife dead on their bed. On the nightside table, there was a nearly empty bottle of Unisom, the over- the- counter sleeping medication, two empty wine cooler bottles and an apparent suicide note. Baker said his wife was nude when he found her, so he dressed her as he called 911 and then placed her body on the floor and administered CPR.

When police heard that Kari had been despondent, they decided without further investigation that Kari had committed suicide. They called a justice of peace, described the scene, and over the phone, he determined the death to be a suicide. No autopsy was ordered. Police took only a few pictures at the scene and collected only a few pieces of evidence: the Unisom bottle, the remaining pills and the suicide note. Two days later, Kari was buried.

If the police had only questioned the husband further and conducted an investigation, they would have quickly realized that there was much more to the story. Just days before she died, Kari told a counselor that she feared her husband was having an affair and was trying to kill her. Kari told the counselor that she had found a small container of what appeared to be crushed pills in her husband's briefcase. When Kari asked her husband about the pills, she reported to her counselor that her husband blamed young patients at the youth center where he worked. After Kari's death, the counselor related the story and Kari's fears to her family.

Soon, there were more and more questions about the circumstances surrounding Kari's death. There is the matter of the suicide note: it was typed! Even Kari's signature was typed, although there were pens nearby.

Matt Baker told police that his wife was despondent over the death of their second child seven years earlier, but if they had questioned those who saw Kari the day of her death, they would have heard a very different description. Kari appeared upbeat and excited about a new job that she had applied for.

Another odd fact surfaced: one month before Kari's death, her husband had gone online researching "overdose by sleeping pills" and the drug Ambien, although Kari did not current have a prescription for that medication. Baker now says that he did the research after becoming alarmed by the amount of sleeping medication his wife was taking, but he never voiced that concern to anyone, including Kari's mother or her doctor. How much research he did is not completely clear. When private investigators hired by Kari's mother tried to examine Matt Baker's work computer, they discovered that someone had swapped Baker's computer with his secretary's and Baker's had disappeared. It has not been recovered to this day. Additionally, his home computer, Baker himself admits, can't be examined because the hard drive broke down. But the most damaging information to surface was evidence that Baker had been "involved" to some extent with a young woman in his parish before Kari's death. Matt even gave this young woman his dead wife's cell phone ten days after his death so that he could carry on extensive conversations with her: 1700 minutes over a period of a week and a half.

The few photographs taken at the scene raise questions of their own: Obvious lividity is seen on Kari's arms and parts of her body that, her family says, is inconsistent with the timeline Baker gives. She also appears to have a cut on her nose and bruising on her mouth.

Kari's family had Kari's body exhumed and autopsied three months later. While the drug Ambien was found in Kari Baker's muscle tissue, it was too late to determine exactly how she died or whether she was murdered. It was enough for the Justice of Peace to change the cause of death from "suicide" to "undetermined".

Here's how the case stands today:

Last fall, Matt Baker was charged with his wife's murder, but after the local district attorney failed to obtain an indictment from a grand jury, a requirement under Texas law, charges against Baker were dropped. Kari Baker's parents filed a wrongful death case against Baker. It is likely that sometime within the next year, Baker will be "tried" in civil court. If new evidence surfaces, new criminal charges could be filed.

In the meantime, the family is in turmoil as Kari's parents are pitten against their son-in-law, with two young grandchildren caught in the middle.

It is a tragic situation that could have been avoided if a couple of police officers and a Justice of the Peace had just asked a few more questions instead of jumping to a conclusion on that April night two years ago.

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Reporter Beware!

[Please join In Cold Blog in welcoming award winning journalist, Erin Moriarty, as our newest contributing writer.

Erin is a correspondent for CBS 48-Hours and the co-author of Death of a Dream, a book about the brief life and tragic death of Catherine Woods. She has covered some of the nations highest profile stories and her top notch reporting has earned her nine national Emmy Awards, an Overseas Press Club Award, two Association of Women in Radio and Television Gracie Allen Awards, Top 100 Award from Irish America magazine, and the Outstanding Consumer Media Service Award. We at ICB are truly honored to have her with us.]

By Erin Moriarty

If someone had asked me three years ago to look into the Brandon Mayfield case in Portland, Oregon, it is likely I would have turned them down. He's the American lawyer who was arrested in connection with the terrorist bombing in Madrid , Spain after his fingerprint was found on a bag of bomb detonators. The evidence against him was daunting: Not only had his fingerprint been matched by three top FBI fingerprint examiners, but by an independent examiner appointed by the court. The problem is all four examiners were wrong!

A case like this frightens a reporter like me who often relies on the word and experience of law enforcement. The truth is, because fingerprint evidence carries so much weight in court, few people, let alone reporters, would have questioned it. Brandon Mayfield might still be in a federal prison today if Spanish investigators had not found the man to whom the fingerprint really belonged, an Algerian terrorist by the name of Ouhnane Daoud.

The problem in the Mayfield case is a common one. The latent print found on the bag of detonators was only a partial and distorted one. When the FBI put it through their automated system, 20 names popped out, including Mayfield's. While no two people allegedly have identical prints, apparently parts of their prints can be similar. Mayfield and Daoud share similarities.

It seems that both human error and bias may also have played a part in this case. While the FBI was sure that this was a match, Spanish investigators had their doubts and even warned their American counterparts of a possible error. The fact that Mayfield was arrested anyway may have had something to do with the fact that he had converted to Islam when he married his Egyptian-born wife.

Mayfield is not in jail today. He received a public apology and a 2 million dollar settlement from the FBI. And this reporter has gained a lot more skepticism about the evidence used so commonly in courts.

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