Woman Condemned

TerriLynn McClintic is the young woman, who with her male accomplice, lured a small 8 year old blonde haired beauty of a child and drove away with her where she was tortured raped and killed. TerriLynn knew the family and it didn't take long to follow the surveillance cameras straight to her front door. She admitted to her crimes readily, taking responsibility for the abduction and nothing else. Slowly, as time in jail took a toll on her, her mind made the inevitable conclusion that "this was all real". It was really happening. Despite being raised as almost feral, spending her entire life fighting tooth and nail for survival, she slowly began to realize that life didn't have to be that way. It's hella confusing that she first witnessed happiness in life only after receiving a life sentence. Where was Canada Child Services when young TerriLynn was learning her survival skills? The life skills she had to learn for survival are vastly different than the rest of ...

We talked about Janet before but I have had two or three emails and tweets asking for an update. It looks like her pretrial is still pending but I reached out to a writer colleague in Ohio to see if she has any important deets. Ill let you know what she says. Hannah Tyburski charged with 4 felony counts in connection with her sister’s death  I did find one little enticing tidbit to this case. Janet strangled her adult daughter Rachael to death. First reports didnt report this but its recently been discovered that Janet's other daughter, Hannah 27, helped in the murder and disposal of the body in a nearby field. She says she only helped her mother dispose of the body. Although there has been no official release as to the motives of this filicidal family but police reports show a long history of turmoil between Rachel and her mother. Janet Tyburski, 46, faces one count of aggravated murder, two counts of murder, two counts of felonious assault, one count of tampering ...

Thirteen years ago, speaking at the University of the District of Columbia, US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg criticized the effectiveness of court-appointed lawyers for low-income people facing capital punishment. "People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty," she said. "I have yet to see a death case among the dozens coming to the Supreme Court on eve-of-execution stay applications in which the defendant was well represented at trial." She wasn't the first to draw this connection. In 1994, the legendary lawyer and death penalty opponent Stephen Bright, president of the Southern Center for Human Rights, wrote a seminal essay for the  Yale Law Journal  titled " Counsel for the Poor: The Death Sentence Not for the Worst Crime But for the Worst Lawyer ." Very little has changed in the intervening 20 years. In 1997, for instance, a Georgia jury imposed a death sentence on Robert Wayne Holsey. (See  " This Man...

OMG, I had almost forgotten about these two guys, really. I mean, this shit happened in the 90's! They were sentenced only a few days after OJ was found not guilty. Ancient history, baby. However, I was reminded of them when I woke up this morning. As a writer, my work schedule is my own and with this being Thanksgiving break, all 7 kids are in the house for a week. I spend my mornings watching DVR'ed TV and meting out punishments for the sporadic, inevitable arguments and fights that break out. By the afternoon everyone is up and dressed and out and about, doing their own thing around the house and property. Then I write or research, spend a little time on my work, as much as I can with everyone home and a holiday looming. So this morning I stoked the fire, poured myself some coffee and crawled back into my predawn, dark bedroom to check out the things I recorded last night and wait for the ruffians to awake. I was super excited to see one of the new Barbra Walters spe...

“ W e in this country make horror spectacles out of murder cases, especially when the condemned killer is a woman. We drag the thing out. We sob and wring our hands. … We play cat and mouse with the {condemned}, until we have reduced her to the last extremity of woe; then we kill her.” I found this quote extremely interesting. It came from The NY Daily News after the execution of a woman in 1934. People often have this reaction to American serializing of murder and mayhem in our midst. We are societal monsters ourselves, always searching out more info on the sickest of our countries crimes and then bemoaning our outrage as we deny the irony in ourselves. Other countries snicker at our third world justice system and gangland tactics but we soldier on, oblivious to our own ridiculousness. What is really interesting about the Daily News quote above is it was printed in 1934 after the execution of Anna Antonio. All these years later and still we flounder in our sickness. Anna was an ...

Wrap your mind around this one, boys and girls. Stephanie Shae Graham was a real live party girl in 2007, Alabama. The 21 year old girl was the real deal with a police record to prove it. A stripper and prostitute with an alcohol dependency and several different drug addictions, she was hardly the apple of mommy's eye. Her mother, Lisa Leanne Graham was constantly helping her out and always complaining to family members that she was troublesome. She was heard more than once saying she wished she would die or disappear. She had no tolerance for her daughters wicked ways which always, somehow ended up landing in her lap. Stephanie was mixed up in some legal issues surrounding a drive-by and it was around that time Lisa began to suspect her daughter was sleeping with her husband. She was also hearing things that made her think Stephanie was planning on leaving town and leaving her with bond of thousands of dollars to pay the bail bondsman. Lisa devised a plan and garnered the ...

 Last Thanksgiving (2014) we talked about Rebecca Trevino from Michigan. Instead of Turkey she served up hot steel when she killed her boyfriend who was also a reserve cop. Its one year later and I was wondering what happened to her. She plead to a manslaughter charge and will spend about four years in prison. Im stunned.  She plead no contest to voluntary manslaughter, a felony that carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison, in July. The family of the victim, James Gascoyne, says the nearly four-year sentence Rebecca I. Trevino will receive is not long enough but since she took the plea deal offered her, she was allowed to get the sentence. Just four years for killing a man. His family made a scene in the court room, saying they werent consulted about the deal. It had to have helped that he was known to beat her profusely and had even beat her the night before.

Many years ago I had some trouble with the women on Pennsylvania death row. The way they twisted and turned my words to and about each other after years of friendship and the quickness with which they turned on each other was a rude awakening for me but it also helped me narrow my focus.  My stark opposition to the death penalty wasn't my focus. What I really wanted to do was give an alternative lifestyle to those living there forever. Basically so mean bitches like that have a little more trouble turning prison into the Criminal University we all know it is. Believe it or not, a lot of these "evil bitches" dont want to live in a violent environment anymore. They dont want the fighting and deaths, the bullying and scare tactics and the constant drama. There are a percentage of women on death row and serving LWOP that realize this is their lifelong home and simply want to exist in peace. Some are guilty of their murderous crimes, others caught up in governmental flubs an...

I was doing my thing early yesterday morning. My spouse gets up at the unbelievably absurd 3:30 a.m. At times, which are few and far between, I get up with him and drink coffee and fix him a little brekkie for the hour or two drive to work. Yesterday happened to be one of those mornings. So we sat, he and I, hours before sunrise and watched our favorite morning Newscasters on News 2 in Nashville. They are a funny lot with jokes and snide remarks plenty enough to start any crime writers day off right. I'm snickering away when I heard it. A 14 year old girl, Treyonta Burleson  in Nashville had been shot. Shot twice, actually, in the chest. By who, you might ask? Who in the hell would shoot a 14 year old, little slip of a girl? One who had been involved in a neighborhood movement to improve the conditions in the projects on Charles E. Davis Boulevard. Neighbors reported hearing a large group of girls screaming and fighting and a loud noise like a car crashing.One witness...