Verdict PLUS

REAL LIFE

BY WALTON GOLIGHTLY VERDICT SOME truly crazy crimes –and occurrences –from around the world. O N October 1, 2019, Tommy Jenkins, 32, of Whitestown, Indiana, struck up an online relationship with 14-yearold Kylee of Neenah, Wisconsin. As their correspondence progressed, Tommy requested sexually explicit photos of Kylee. When she refused to come to Indiana, Jenkins set out for Neenah –on foot. Waiting for him at the end of his 600km trek were Winnebago County Sheriff’s deputies (one of whom was ‘Kylee’) and FBI agents, who arrested Jenkins for using a computer to attempt to persuade, induce or entice a minor to engage in unlawful sexual activity. Some More Crazy Behaviour:  ONE day in 2018, in Tokyo, someone stole 61-year-old Akio Hatori’s bicycle saddle. He was so angered by the theft, he told police, he decided to become a serial thief himself –until he was caught on surveillance video on August 29, 2019, and later arrested. Police found 159 bicycle seats at his home. “I started stealing out of revenge,” Hatori told police. “I wanted others to know the feeling.”  ANOTHER one after revenge was Alex Bonilla, 49, of Gilchrist County, Florida. On July 14, 2019, he broke into the home of the man having an affair with his wife. Bonilla forced the man into a bedroom, where he tied him up and, using scissors, cut off the man’s penis. He then ran away with it. When last heard of, the man was doing well medically, according to his family.  Bozhena Synychka, 20, and Volodymyr Zaitsev, 25, got ‘tired of looking after’ their toddlers, Andrey, three and Maksim, two. So in mid-August, they dropped the boys off at a homeless encampment in Zaporizhia, Ukraine –and didn’t come back. The naked toddlers were watched over by men at the camp for a week as they drank CRAZY CRIMES from a river and foraged through trash for food, until passer-by Olena Tashevska recognised the children and called the police. Police are pursuing criminal charges against the parents, and the boys are living in an orphanage.  A MEDICAL examiner in the US state of Georgia has resigned after wildly misinterpreting the cause of death for 61-year-old Ray Neal, who died on July 21, 2019. Despite reports by police and witnesses of large amounts of blood on the floor and walls at the scene, the medical examiner initially ruled Neal had died of natural causes. But when his body arrived at the funeral home, employees discovered a hole in his neck, and Neal was returned to the morgue for an autopsy, which revealed he’d been stabbed several times. Police are now investigating the death as a murder.  Jeremiah Ehindero, 41, pastor of Jesus Miracle Church in Sango-Ota, Nigeria, blamed the devil for his trouble with the law after stealing an SUV from a local Toyota dealership. Ehindero negotiated a price for the Highlander, which he said would be used for ‘evangelism’, then asked for a test drive –and never returned. Ehindero later sold the vehicle to a spare parts dealer. According to police, he confessed he stole the car to repay a loan from a bank in Lagos after tithes and offerings from his congregation were insufficient. “When the pressure from the bank became unbearable for me, the Devil told me to steal a vehicle from the car dealer to sell and use the proceeds to repay the loan,” said Ehindero.  YUSUKE TANIGUCHI, 34, a shopping mall clerk in Koto City, Japan, was arrested in 2019 for using his photographic memory for nefarious ends. According to police, Taniguchi was able to memorize more than 1 300 numbers from credit cards as people used them at his shop register. He admitted to investigators that he would remember the name, card number, expiration date and security code, and write the information down as the customer walked away. Then, later, he’d use the accounts to make online purchases of items which he’d sell.  POLICE in Harris County, Texas, are looking for Paul Nixon, 51, on felony charges after taking a novel approach to divorce. Nixon filed for divorce in February, 2019, but forged his wife’s signature and the name of a notary on the legal papers. A judge declared the divorce final in April, but Nixon’s wife didn’t find out until May. “She started finding things showing that he was spending money on jewellery, so she confronted him and he told her that they were actually divorced,” a detective told reporters. “They are still married. The fraudulent divorce papers have been retracted.” Nixon could face 10 years in prison. Tommy Jenkins IF you think you’ve seen any of these people, or would like to report a missing person, contact the Bureau For Missing People on (012) 393- 2005, or fax (012) 393-2012. Missing people can contact the bureau to let them know they’re alive and well –even if they don’t want to get in touch with family. PONTSHO ONILA MPHUTHI Disappeared: October 14, 2019 Aged: 21 PONTSHO left her home in Harrismith without telling anyone where she was going and never returned. SEEN THEM? HELPLINES BONGINKOSI PHAKAMANI MZILZ Disappeared: October 8, 2019 Aged: 30 BONGINKOSI left his home in Moroka to go to work and never returned. He was wearing a black jersey, grey trousers and grey sports shoes. EDWARDO AMANDIO CHISSICO Disappeared: September 10, 2019 Aged: 41 EDWARDO left his home in JHB Central without telling anyone where he was going and never returned. BIANCA PRETORIUS Disappeared : July 11, 2019 Aged: 28 BIANCA left her home in Middelburg without telling anyone where she was going and never returned. Alex Bonilla

Yusuke Taniguchi

REAL LIFE

HE got away with it 31 years before; he thought he could get away with it again. W HEN William New called police to tell them that his wife was dead, he thought he had a solid story. It was 04h02 on the morning of October 15, 2004. “Oh my God,” he told the 911-operator on the other end of the phone. “I was just gone for a little while. I drove to Rite Aid [a pharmacy] to get her some migraine medicine. I was gone maybe 30 minutes.” He sounded distraught. New claimed he had an idea about what had happened. “Somebody broke into my house,” he said. “My wife’s really hurt. She’s bleeding.” Less than two years later he was standing in a San Diego courtroom receiving a life sentence for double homicide. A jury found him guilty not only of murdering his wife Phyllis but also his first wife, Somsri New, in 1973. The similarity between both deaths was astounding – both women were shot in the head, while they were sleeping. Detective Pat Gardner investigated the death of Phyllis ‒ the third Mrs New, who came NEW WIFE, after the second Mrs New was divorced. “The husband had supposedly left his house to get his wife some medication,” the detective says. “And when he returned to his home he found that somebody had broken into his home and murdered his wife during the 30 minutes while he was gone.” Gardner spoke to the paramedics that attended to Phyllis. “They arrived on the scene, declared Phyllis New deceased at the home and noticed that she already showed signs of rigor mortis,” he recalls. This was a significant clue because it called into question the timeline and scenario that New had given police. Deputy medical examiner Dr Steven Campman examined one of the paramedic’s report. “In his opinion she had been dead for at least a couple of hours,” he explained. “He felt rigor mortis in her face and maybe in an arm and he saw some colour changes of her body that let him know that, in his experience, she had been dead for some time.” Rigor mortis is the stiffening of the body; livor mortis is the settling of blood in the body – coroners use both signs to determine the approximate time of death. Pointing at a crime scene photo showing red patches on one of the victim’s arms, Campman says, “It generally takes a couple of hours for this to SAME METHOD...

REAL LIFE

be very visible. So for that to be seen at four in the morning suggested that she’d been dead a couple of hours.” Immediately it seemed that New’s story was untrue. If an intruder had broken into the house, it wasn’t during the 30 minutes while he was at the chemist... And there were other inconsistencies between the crime scene and New’s story. “Present in the home was a very large, free-standing jewellery box,” Gardner says. “It had eight drawers total and two vertical drawers on the side. Basically only three of those drawers had been disturbed – the very top ones.” The rest of them were completely full of jewellery. That was very unusual for a robbery. “My gut told me that there were some serious problems and it didn’t appear to be a residential murder or burglary,” says Gardner, who added something else: “The shot seemed to be an execution style shot. That’s something you don’t normally see in a home invasion.” By now Gardner refused to believe New and his version of events. His colleague Detective Richey Hann took the man downtown for further questioning. He too had his doubts about the recently widowed man. “We knew at that point he was the only person that was in the house with her at the time – or around the time that she died,” Hann says. “So he’s the one we needed to start with.” New ran through his day with the detectives, telling them that he had been to Office Team – a temp agency. But Carol Espinoza – one of Phyllis’ friends – had another story to tell police. In fact, three hours after she heard about the murder she called detectives to tell them what she knew. “My first thought was Bill has something to do with this,” Carol says. The night before her death Phyllis had confided in her friend. “She had called the temp agency where he was working and they had never heard of him. So she said to [Bill] ‘Well then I’ll be following you to work tomorrow and you better produce a payslip, a cheque or a pay time card or I’ve had it’. I felt she had pushed him into a corner and gave him an ultimatum: ‘This is it, I’m not carrying you anymore’.” After Carol gave them this information detectives called New in for another interview – the second one in the space of seven hours. New now told police that he had gone to the temp agency but confessed that he did not work for them. Phyllis, he said, was not mad at him, though. “I told her that I wasn’t working,” he informed Detective Hann. “And she got upset and she cried. She doesn’t get loud or anything like that... Nothing happened. We talked and we talked and we talked... She said that she was gonna see that I got some help.” New denied hurting his wife and when detectives suggested there was no intruder he called an end to the interview after just two hours. Suspicion around his involvement in his wife’s death continued, however, especially when another one of her friends told police about the demise of the first Mrs New. Nancy Friend had known Phyllis for 16 years. She called detectives to tell them about a conversation she had had with the victim. “I said: ‘I’ve known Phyllis a number of years. You do know that he killed his first wife’. There was dead silence on the other end of the phone. And the first thing the officer said was: ‘How do you know this?’ I said, ‘Well, Phyllis told me’." Nancy recalls that conversation too. “She said his first wife died when she was eight months pregnant. And that kind of threw me and I said: ‘What happened?’ She said: ‘Well, Bill was cleaning the gun. It fell and discharged and hit her across the room’. And the hair on my arms stood up. I got goosebumps all over my body thinking, ‘This doesn’t sound right’.” The story didn’t sound right to Detective Gardner either, who reviewed the interview tape between New and his colleagues. Asked about his marital history, he told the police, “My first wife passed away, and my second wife, we got divorced. My first wife was Somsri Thasiri. She was from Thailand. I met her when I was overseas.” Asked how she died, New said, “It was an automobile accident.” Gardner decided to confront the suspect with this conflicting information. “Actually I figured the best way for me to do it was to call him on the telephone and that’s what I did,” the detective says. Gardner grilled New about his first wife. “Her name was Somsri, and she passed away in an accident,” he told Gardner. He didn’t want to go into any more detail. But the detective pressed him, saying, “I was told that the accident was an auto accident and then I was also told that the accident was an accidental shooting. Can you just at least let me know that?” Reluctantly New said, “It was an accidental shooting but we, my mom and dad, decided that they were going to just tell everybody that it was an auto accident. I was cleaning a rifle and I dropped it. I grabbed it when it fell and it went off and she was struck.” New, however, couldn’t – or wouldn’t – tell Gardner exactly where his wife was hit. THE shot seemed to be an execution style shot. That’s something you don’t normally see in a home invasion.

William with his third wife, Phyllis The actual trajectory of the bullet that killed his first wife

REAL LIFE

“He finally admitted that he had shot her in a gun-cleaning accident,” the detective says. “Well, it’s pretty unusual that if you shoot your wife you wouldn’t know the facts of the shooting, especially if it’s your wife that you supposedly shot.” Unwilling to let the issue go, Gardner located Somsri’s 1973 death certificate. He then called the San Bernardino police department and spoke to a Detective Dave Dillon, who worked in the county where the victim had lived. Dillon found 26 old film negatives taken of the Somsri New crime scene –the only surviving piece of evidence left in the case. “So what I asked them to do after that is blow them up into 8x10s, which told me another story about what happened at the scene,” Dillon says. “I looked at this and I saw that the blood splatter did not match with the trajectory of the bullet. Blood splatter had travelled to the back of the wall, which was not consistent with the bullet path. Based on my experience in homicide and having spent so much time there I thought and felt that this was in fact a murder. I just didn’t feel comfortable saying this was a death investigation.” Armed with this information Gardner took the investigation one step further. “I went over to the crime lab and I gave them the photographs and the reports. I asked them to do a crime scene reconstruction to determine scientifically what the Somsri New shooting was.” Gardner flew to Bexar County in San Antonio, Texas with a diagram of New’s 1973 apartment to speak to the medical examiner there. Forensic pathologist Dr Vincent Di Maio –a ballistics and gunshot wounds expert – reviewed the evidence along with New’s statement. “According to the husband he was sitting on the couch and he started to get up or he was doing something at that time and the gun fell from his hand and he grabbed it in mid air and it accidentally discharged,” Di Maio says. Holding a shotgun in his hand, he points out: “It would be awful hard to drop this gun and get your finger in the trigger part and put pressure on it. Because you need, not only for it to get in, but it’s got to also fire. On top of that, if he’s sitting down and the weapon slips from him the bullet would have to have travelled in an upward direction to her head. “However, the bullet, after entering the head and exiting the face, then went into the back of the couch and into the wall behind in a downward trajectory. So actually the overall trajectory of the bullet was into the head, through the face, through the back of the couch, into the wall, which is not consistent with his account where the bullet would have had to have been going upward.” The gunshot wound in Somsri’s head also contradicted New’s story. “This was a huge wound on the head,” the pathologist says. “There was also a large gaping wound on the left side of the face and this suggests that at the time the deceased was shot the muzzle of the gun was in contact with the head.” San Diego assistant district attorney Kurt Mechals used this information to charge New with two murders: that of his first wife Somsri in 1973 and of his third wife Phyllis in 2004. Looking at Di Maio’s report he says: “Basically they were executed. The muzzle of the gun was right up to the head when the shot was fired. The most obvious similarities is both Somsri and Phyllis were the defendant’s wives. Both of them were shot in the home. Both were shot at nighttime in the home and both were shot in the back of the head. Not just in the back of the head but the trajectories were almost identical.” Mechals argued that New had the same motive to kill both wives: “He stood to gain and ultimately his stepson did get a substantial amount in life insurance from the 2004 murder of Phyllis,” he says. “It was the same back in 1973.” New was charged with both murders in April 2005. His trial started less than a year later in February 2006. A month after that he was found guilty of murdering both wives, 31 years apart. Four weeks after the verdict New was sentenced to serve two consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. THERE was also a large gaping wound on the left side of the face and this suggests that at the time the deceased was shot the muzzle of the gun was in contact with the head.

Outside the courthouse a group of women stood, dressed in purple and wearing Snoopy buttons saying, “We love you, Phyllis.” Phyllis used to go line dancing with them at The Wagon Wheel Salon, one of her favourite local haunts. Adrienne Hart and her friends were pleased with the verdict. She told waiting reporters: “We’re here to support her. We’re here to support the verdict. We’re happy with the verdict. It’s just a sad situation that something like that should have to happen. But I believe and I think we all believe that he was guilty and he is getting his just desserts now.” She went on to say, “Everybody was a friend to her. The first time she met you, you just felt like you were welcome. I think of her out there on the floor and she always would shine and you would see her out there smiling and happy and that’s how I’d like to remember her.” New appealed his sentencing in both 2008 and 2011 and both times had his appeal denied. In Sepetember 2019 he was killed by a fellow inmate, Mark Hudson, in a brawl, during which he sustained serious head injuries.