Let's Get Honest! Absolutely Uncommon Analysis of Family & Conciliation Courts' Operations, Practices, & History

Good Grief, when are we going to take ANY violation of ANY criminal law VERY seriously?  

Sorry to drop people in the post mid-stream, but this has been a very disturbing case to handle, given that my own kids were “kidnapped”in the context oif all these key elements, practically, except prior prison term and rape conviction (or as far as I know, rape).  But, most of the rest.  

Including the system’s failure to put a lid on it.  

(Stolen, not kidnapped, technically.  Only the fact that they were not actually removed from the state meant it was not kidnapping and prevented, supposedly, FBI from involvement.  They were missing to me, for sure, at this time.  I have too many and very significant questions (not all evident from this post) as to WHY certain perpetrators are getting out of prison when and in what means they do.  Also as to WHY certain crimes are still not taken seriously enough by:  arresting officers, prosecutors, and sentencing judges alike.

I know as well as anyone and so do many, many women and children, how one could be abused “in broad daylight” and no intervention in sight.  I don’t think grown women get “used” to this, but children are an entirely different situation.

Everyone assumes someone else is handling it.  Not enough people are willing to notice, act on, AND follow through and press police, etc. to follow through on, what they have reported.  When I was assaulted at home, sometimes neighbors called police to the home, who didn’t press charges, report, or for the most part hand out anything regarding domestic violence.  Up to and including several years after the violence against women act had passed, too.  The reporting didn’t stop much, and generally happened after an incident was already over with.  It didn’t deter a follow-up.

I not only kept showing up for work (though often traumatized) I once even showed up in the dentist’s office with my teeth knocked loose.  I don’t remember almost any questions being asked, of any significance, in how this happened.  How often did they get women with front teeth knocked loose in there?  Especially nonathletic looking ones that didn’t look like the lifestyle included rollerblading or contact football, etc..

When my kids were stolen, law enforcement was involved in ENABLING this, as was the family law system, as were “mediators” and of course my relatives were part of the support system making it happen, and reason for it.  It was part of the “cult-like” mentality.  While these people work, I presume, in public, what they do in private is as “off the grid” as any Garrido.

This kidnapping/sex abuse/rescue case is prominent enough, I’ll not summarize it here, any search will produce an article RICH with links, fascination, background, and excuses.  It’s a public purging of the conscience and an attempt to lay blame somewhere, so we can all get on with life and believe that this is NOT business as usual in quality or quantity.

It takes a Village to raise a child?  It takes several villagers to expect law enforcement to handle what they know is going on.

The same method that works for not reporting domestic violence against women, and stalking, kidnapping, jealous obsessions, and inordinate need to DOMINATE — if only one woman, still, that woman — plus failure to maintain one’s own livelihood, participate productively in society (not productively in the black market or “off the grid”).

Garrido – – WHY WAS HE ON PAROLE?

From rag NYDAILYNEWS (I had to put blinders on to read the article, which was pretty raw itself):

August 30, 2009:

Look at this account of his first kidnapping/rape victim that generated the 1977 sentence, of which he only served 11 years.

Conrad was on routine patrol in the early morning hours of Nov. 23, 1976, when he spotted a car with California tags outside a Reno storage facility.

The cop soon noticed a light flickering under the shed’s rollup door, prompting him to bang on it. A disheveled Garrido, shirtless and wearing jeans, opened the door almost immediately.

“I asked him what he was doing in there,” Conrad recalled.

Before Garrido could answer, a female voice cried out from inside the warehouse, and a woman emerged from behind a curtain completely nude. She said she had been kidnapped and raped.

“He didn’t seem nervous or anything,” Conrad said. “He just said they were boyfriend and girlfriend, and they were just having consensual sex.”  

 

(How consensual depends on the point of view….)

Conrad told the woman, later identified as Katherine Callaway, to get dressed. His backup arrived soon after and informed him that the license plate had been traced to a car involved in a kidnapping that afternoon.

Callaway was abducted, handcuffed and assaulted after picking up Garrido as a hitchhiker.

Conrad slapped cuffs on him.

t’s that “ONLY 11 YEARS” part that concerns me, as I wonder about the NJ Toms River, let out murder/suicide situation, plus the similar one, same area, the previous year.  What’s UP with that?

LISTEN:

Even then, Conrad didn’t know that Garrido was high on acid and that the storage unit was equipped with various sex aids, pornography, stage lights and wine.

Garrido later told a detective he needed to dominate women to satisfy his sexual urges.

“I said, ‘What the hell are you resorting to this for?'” retired Reno Detective Dan DeMaranville, 74, recalled to The News. “He said that’s the only way he gets sexual gratification. … The guy should have been castrated while he was in prison.”

COMPARE:

The 56-year-old psycho kept Dugard and the two daughters he fathered with her captive in a secret compound behind his home in Antioch, Calif.

Local cops acknowledged they missed an opportunity to save Dugard in 2006 when a neighbor reported the man known as “Creepy Phil” had sexual addictions and kept little girls in his backyard.

The deputy dispatched to Garrido’s home left without even setting foot in the registered sex offender’s yard.

The mystery of Dugard’s disappearance ended when a University of California, Berkeley, cop became suspicious of Garrido and contacted his parole officer. Garrido later confessed to kidnapping the sweet-faced blond, cops said.

 

CAN WE CONNECT THIS WITH other FORMS OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN, PLEASE??

Jaycee Lee Dugard kidnapper Phillip Garrido’s first wife Christine Murphy says he’s a ‘monster

(NY Daily News, next day)…

The Monster’s first wife says he once “tried to gouge” her eyes out with a safety pin.

Phillip Garrido, who is accused of kidnapping Jaycee Lee Dugard and raping her repeatedly during 18 years of captivity, went into a jealous rage when he saw another man flirting with his wife.

“He took a safety pin and went after my eyes,” Christine Murphy told Inside Edition. “He left a scar on my face.”

(Why not go after the man?)

Murphy, who said she and Garrido were high school sweethearts in northern California, said he “smacked” her around during their brief marriage and that she became his first kidnapping victim when she tried to flee him.

“I was always looking for a way to find out how to get away,” said Murphy, who worked at a Reno casino to pay the bills while Garrido tried to launch a musical career. “He’d always told me he’d find me wherever.“

Murphy said that when she was finally able to escape, Garrido “found me.”

“He pulled up, turned around and forced me back into the car,” she said, in part one of the Inside Edition interview that airs Monday night.

Calling Garrido a “good manipulator” and a “monster,” Murphy said she was relieved when Garrido was sentenced to 50 years in prison in 1976 for kidnapping and raping another woman.

Murphy, who remarried and is now a mother a four, said she had no idea Garrido had been released early and reacted with disgust after he was arrested for turning Dugard into a sex slave and fathering her two daughters.

“It makes me sick to my stomach,” she said. “He’s pretty much capable of anything.”

 

Cops Searched the Home but Didn’t See Compound

Jaxon Van Derbeken, Chronicle Staff Writer

Friday, August 28, 2009

Garrido’s luck held in July of last year, when a multiagency task force in Contra Costa County searched his home as part of a sexual offender compliance check, officials said. He had a string of offenses dating back to 1971 and was a registered sex offender on parole in California.

 I WONDER HOW MANY AGENCIES IT TAKES NOT TO CHECK OUT A MAN REPORTED FOR HAVING LITTLE GIRLS IN THE BACK YARD (??)

Police, however, had been told about the backyard lair before, according to a former neighbor.

Erika Pratt said that two years ago, she called police after seeing what looked like a living compound with tents and sheds.

No warrant

Sheriff’s deputies came to ask questions, Pratt said, but they told her that because they didn’t have a warrant, they couldn’t search the house.

“I always wished someone could do something about it,” Pratt said. “It was like he was charging people to live there.”

Sheriff’s spokesman Jimmy Lee confirmed that his agency had dealt with Garrido before, but he was not able to provide details.

“We need to investigate it further to determine what that contact was,” Lee said.

OTHER SUSPICIOUS BEHAVIOR:

Criminal probe

At the time of the sex offender task force’s check last year, Garrido was the subject of a criminal probe that began in 2008 and had nothing to do with sex crimes.

Aguinaga said Garrido was suspected of bilking an elderly neighbor out of his life savings. A complaint was lodged on the man’s behalf when he moved to Friendship Residential Care in Antioch, Aguinaga said.

The elder care home relayed allegations that from late 2007 to March 2008, Garrido swindled Dilbert “Jack” Medieros, now 79, of nearly $18,000. In the end, prosecutors cited insufficient evidence in declining to file charges in April.

Garrido told police that Medieros had given him money to help start a church. He also told investigators that he had known Medieros for years and took him places such as the zoo.

Which others were complicit in her torment?  

Details of Jaycee’s torment have been beamed around the world. Yet according to his neighbour, the full, awful truth about what really took place here might be worse than imagined – far worse.

For with FBI agents now digging-up Creepy Phil’s backyard and exploring his neighbour’s property, Mr Rogers shudders at the memory of the sounds he heard when it was ‘party time’ next door.

 Mr Rogers says ‘perverts’ in the area were regularly invited over by Garrido for sex, beer and drug parties and that the Garrido home was, in effect, being used as a brothel.

{{Mr. Rogers also, naturally, tells why he didn’t report this and was not involved.}}

As details of this dark and troubling story slowly come to light, the question that America is asking itself above all others is: how on Earth was Garrido able to carry out his despicable crimes in the heart of suburban California, without anyone noticing – and for 18 years? 

{{Despicable crimes happen in respectable neighborhoods all the time.  What TYPE may vary with neighborhood. Or maybe not so much — ask any victim of domestic violence how it went and how SHE got out.  All it takes is enough people to figure out someone else will report it, and enough enablers.  }}

 

             Worse still, could others have known what was taking place there – and even been complicit in Jaycee’s torment?

Certainly, Walnut Avenue is a grubby, primitive and predominantly white area. Many of the homes are little more than wooden shacks with children playing in the dirt outside.

Drug and alcohol addiction are widespread; back yards are littered with cars and fridges. Astonishingly, the area is home to 144 rapists and paedophiles.

 

‘People here live off the grid,’ says one local police source. ‘That means they use drugs, don’t pay taxes and never pay their bills. They live as they want to – and pay no attention to anyone else. And everyone who lives here is very happy with that arrangement.’

 The surrounding streets offer another insight into Garrido’s twisted mindset as he held two generations hostage for his own sexual gratification. As darkness fell on Saturday, people scurried from dusty yard to yard, buying and selling crystal meth.

 Highly addictive and responsible for making users’ teeth fall out in a syndrome known as ‘meth mouth’, crystal meth, also known as crank, is an amphetamine which has swept the U.S. Experts say users experience unstoppable sexual urges.

 Locals say Garrido, who had previously been addicted to LSD, was a ‘tweaker’ – the slang word for crystal meth addicts, whose habit leads to characteristic spasms of twitching – and that he was also reputed to ‘cook’ the raw materials for crystal meth in an old van in his garden. This ‘laboratory’ reportedly exploded last month. Again, neighbours did not call police.

One man:

Smacking girlfriend around, trying to gouge her eye out (possessive jealousy), stalking/kidnapping, kidnapping and raping again, being let out (being let OUT?), kidnapping and raping again, and again.  In the context, drug use, and did I mention financial elder abuse?

Is this enough cause to take violence against women SERIOUSLY?  Or is it really OK to dominate a woman by whatever means necessary. Look at what goes with it.  Look what kind of characters need to do this.

I said I was having a hard time with this post, and I am.  Because while Philip was not biologically related to the girl he kidnapped, THIS one was:

Man who assaulted daughter, fathered her children is sentenced

Lindolfo Thibes, formerly of Los Angeles, gets 109 years to life for physically and sexually abusing his daughter for two decades. The case came to light when he stabbed her in Las Vegas.

By Jack Leonard

April 18, 2009

The emergency call came in as a domestic violence assault: A man had stabbed his girlfriend in the parking lot of a Las Vegas hospital.

But as detectives began to investigate, they unearthed a dark family secret. The suspect was not the victim’s boyfriend but her father, who had been sexually assaulting her for nearly two decades and had fathered her three children.

The assaults, the victim told authorities, started when she was 6 years old and living in Los Angeles. She said her father, a martial arts instructor, threatened to kill her if she told anyone and kept her a prisoner at home, monitoring her movements using surveillance cameras and delivering fierce beatings during paranoid rages.

On Friday, the daughter, now 29, sat silently in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom as a judge sentenced Lindolfo Thibes to prison for 109 years to life in what police describe as the most heinous case of child abuse they had encountered.

As her father was led away in handcuffs, the woman wept quietly and embraced her younger brother, who she said was also a victim of beatings by their father.

> > > > > 

At that rate:  109 years — judging by Garrido’s case, he should be out in 22.

The victim told investigators that the abuse began in the mid-1980s when she and her father were alone in the house. Her mother worked nights and eventually moved out of the home to be a home healthcare provider. (The mother could not be reached for comment.)

Children need their fathers.  ALL children need their fathers.  No matter who the father.  LEt me get this again:  ALL children need their fathers the major crisis of our times is fatherlessness.  Children who don’t live with their father are more likely to grow up and have awful problems and engage in crime.  The federal government should make sure that more fathers get MORE access to their children.  

Keep saying that, so you feel better, maybe you’ll really be able to believe this sooner or later, and incidents like this are ALL fabrications. CHILDREN  need their fathers. Not necessarily their mothers (judging by the courts), but certainly their FATHERS.  MOTHERS are optional, FATHERS are not.  (keep trying, I know you can get it right).  This applies even when their fathers have a need to dominate women by assaulting them, whether for sex, religion, or just because it’s fun.  Children need their fathers

Her father, the woman told authorities, plied her with alcohol and marijuana from the age of 8. {{Concurrent with the incest}}  She said she was pulled out of school in sixth grade and estimated that she was sexually assaulted about 10 times a week, according to law enforcement records.

In an interview with The Times, the woman said her father rigged the family’s West Adams home with surveillance cameras inside and out. Under her bed, she said, were motion detectors that set off an alarm when she got up.

As a teenager, she was forbidden to leave the house alone. Her father often grew paranoid and accused her of trying to escape or of secretly meeting boys. Enraged, he would beat her and her brother on their feet with a baseball bat, she said.

She feared deportation if she reported the abuse, she said, but was also terrified of the consequences if authorities did not believe her. 

He said he “would kill me if he ever got his hands on me if I ever told,” she said. “He used to tell me he was going to cut my head off.” 

At 17, she gave birth to her first child. For years, she said, her oldest daughter was her only friend. The moments they shared playing with the girl’s toys or watching television offered small but important comforts during her life with her father. There were also times, she said, when she and her father played video games or watched movies together.

“I would use little happy thoughts to keep me going,” she said.

Her father, she said, grew fearful that her brother had told police about abuse at the home and fled to Las Vegas in 2003, taking her and her children. They lived in a motel, where, she said, Thibes told others that she was his girlfriend.

In April 2005, he stabbed her twice in the chest with a 10-inch kitchen knife, police records show. In interviews with police, he described her at various times as his wife, girlfriend or daughter.

The woman said she told hospital workers about the abuse once her father had been arrested and she knew her children were safe in custody.

SHE COULDN’T SAFELY REPORT UNTIL SHE KNEW HER FATHER WAS IN JAIL

THESE POLICE ACTUALLY ARRESTING FOR  DOMESTIC VIOLENCE SAVED THIS WOMAN AND HER CHILDREN FROM FURTHER SEXUAL ASSAULTS, BEATINGS, AND A LIFE OF FEAR, A NIGHTMARE.

Again, among these elements listed above were:  Kidnapping, (more than once) rape, domestic violence, need to dominate women for sexual fulfilment, elder abuse (financial), stalking, jealousy, and use of drugs with sex, living off the grid, and possibly pimping out young women to the neighborhood.  When they weren’t also working for him (Jaycee Dugard also helped with his printing business, it came out).  

Oh yes, and in the case of Garrido, being inexplicably let out of jail early (anyone heard why yet?), and inexplicably not caught by multiagency task forces whose responsibility was to monitor.

Musta been because they were in an “unincorporated area” of Antioch.

What about when one parent is in a family court litigation?  OH, well, that’s an ENTIRELY different matter, and the:  Kidnapping, history of violence, obsessive jealousy, living off the grid, stalking, and financial elder abuse no longer apply.  Let us convene some more experts to see which is the better parent, and how they can do 50/50 parenting, and ask a few psychological experts to evaluate how dangerous that one doing the:  kidnapping, stalking, living largely off the grid, and in general refusing to obey the law, really is.  Does that REALLY impact the children growing up?

 

Based on too many cases I know, including (case in point) mine, supposedly not.

 

Now you know why I’m having a hard time with this one.

 

Let’s compare who let Garrido out (what system, which people) with the ones in Toms River, NJ 2009 (and same county, 2008) that resulted in murder/suicide shortly after release, with another one that’s an accident about to happen I read about in Connecticut recently:  Fiance comes at his wife with a ball bat in disguise, they marry, and she finds out later.  When the facts are out, he is still released on $50,000 bail.

Oh yeah, and he was a town alderman — I suppose that was irrelevant.

 

Police: Connecticut town official was masked man who attacked fiancee days before wedding

ANSONIA, Conn. (AP) — A public official wearing a mask attacked his fiancee inside their Connecticut home four days before their wedding, throwing a blanket over her, hitting her with a baseball bat and running out the back door, police said.

Keith Maynard, an Ansonia town alderman who has since resigned, was arraigned Thursday afternoon in Superior Court and released on $50,000 bail. He declined to comment to reporters as he left the hearing.

What the hell kind of bail is that?  

Maynard has been charged with second-degree assault, first-degree unlawful restraint and first-degree reckless endangerment.

Police say the woman, now Maynard’s wife, came home July 1 to find a masked man inside the house. She was treated for minor abrasions after the attack.

“I love my husband more than anything and to know that five days later was my wedding and he could do that and go through with the wedding. I was very surprised,” Ida Maynard told reporters outside the courthouse.

The judge ordered Maynard to stay away from the house so Ida Maynard can live there. He was also ordered to turn over any firearms, though his lawyer, John Kelly, said he did not believe Maynard had any.

 

Was he just getting off on the ball bat attack, or was there some other motive involved?  Was this foreplay?  Preliminary to finding out how much abuse she was going to put with during marriage?  Is any protective order in place?  It’s kind of a half-baked article, there, eh?

He works for Department of Transportation. Well, he’s on “paid administrative leave” at this time.

(Article has considerable more detail & link to arrest warrant, too:  they’d dated 6 years, another woman possibly involved at time of attack, his wife had a son.   )

Blume said nothing in Maynard’s personality indicated he was capable of any kind of violence.

Can we yet face it, most of us are not THAT good judges of personality?  And psychological profile doesn’t of itself determine whether or not there’s been violence.

“Even if we argued, he never raised his voice. Here’s a guy who is just a nice, quiet individual who just did his job,” Blume said. “I don’t know what to say. I’m speechless, and I’m never speechless.”

 

Myth:  quiet people don’t engage in violence.  Work face is similar to at home face.

I’ve known him,” Della Volpe said. “He was a good public servant. But I certainly don’t condone domestic violence. . .Obviously this is a sad day for our community.”

Maynard was a supervisor for the state Department of Transportation. He has been on the Board of Alderman for 10 years, and had been nominated by the Democratic Town Committee to run for another term.

Board of Alderman President Stephen Blume said Maynard was an “excellent Alderman” who took all of his responsibilities seriously.

“I’m shocked by the news. I feel sorry for the woman who had to go through this,” Blume said.

Maynard resigned from the Board of Alderman Wednesday night. The board is expected to accept the resignation at its next meeting.

Police Chief Kevin Hale said he was also saddened by the news, but said it was an example of how the police department doggedly investigates domestic violence matters.

 

Yes they certainly do.  They investigated, and someone else released the obviously disturbed and dangerous fellow, and thanks to being on PAID administrative leave (something many women don’t get ~ ~ in fact, never met anyone that got anything from a “Victims of Crime” fund ever as to DV ~ ~ when I was being battered, or had crimes committed against me that caused work loss-es)  What’s more, the bail has released this man, and his attorney doesn’t think he has weapons (not including baseball bats?).

Why don’t they give Ida Maynard a baseball bat and some mace?

Sorry, folks, I probably shouldn’t write about incidents a little too close to home.  No, I am NOT reassured about my kids at this point, and one is in college presently, too.  I’m a little worried about their current value system, seeing as the court has put them in the custody of an identified batterer (same County/City) despite repeated police involvement repeated infractions of custody order, stalking, failure to respect child support orders (the most obvious), some really odd explanations for why, counter-accusations that I was a flight risk when I had no means to get away and had significant professional involvement right here, and other kind of delusional reports.  

Oh yes — and when they’d just been in essence kidnapped!

WHY do people kidnap?  To protect?  Or to guard against reporting?  Or when the kidnapping is to avoid a child support arrears, when it was set fairly low (if below welfare levels is any indicator), or to “dominate a woman” which is already on the record.  Every single indicator of some severe personality problems is already on the record, and the local enforcment, won’t?

Is it just because they’re too busy investigating more serious cases, like they did with Jaycee Dugard the first (several) times problems were reported, above?  Or is there another reason?

What’s happening to all these kids getting custody switches in the family law venue?

If I get a parking ticket (and I confess I have), I haven’t noticed prosecution lacking in the matter.  What about these serious crimes to society?

Why does family law not take these same behaviors when an actual parent is involved, seriously?  Does shared DNA mean they aren’t crimes?  Did it for Phil Garrido — after all, the 11 year old and 15 year old, WERE biologically his children.  He was their father…

A batterer, stalker, kidnapper, or man obsessed with a former, OVER WITH relationship, or a man not willing to live on the grid, who then again intentionally crossing the criminal line again after being confronted ONCE is a danger signal.  

The reports are already out on abduction risk factors in high-conflict custody, and they are all being stoutly ignored, too.

Now, the landscape is changed.  We are into lawlessness in the relationship, and one parent is supposed to just “deal with it” and pretend that her instincts are “off” and the courts are “on” the mark.  Maybe a few more parenting classes will assuage that gut instinct and make it go away; that’s the typical family law response, when there’s money in the family.  

When there’s not, then the idea is to prolong the litigation, but bring in government-paid professionals instead.  

There’s money in the mix somewhere, for sure and there was, I bet, in Jaycee’s years of torture, too, perpetrator and enablers alike.

It takes that village, and we’ve got one for sure, nationwide, we do.