The favorite theory of the legions following the Chris Watts case [and the YouTuber Armchair Detective] firmly believe 1) Chris Watts killed his children one in front of the other after a failed first attempt 2) had an accessory help him commit triple murder and 3) his accessory knew his wife was pregnant all along and didn’t really care.
It’s the favorite theory for a simple reason – it’s shocking. Because it’s shocking, it must be true, right?
Wrong. The Vang Gogh myth is an excellent reality in check in this regard. The favorite theory of the legions of art fans following the life and times of one of the world’s most popular [and expensive] artists [and the Van Gogh Museum] firmly believe 1) Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear 2) was mad and 3) committed suicide.
It’s the favorite theory for a simple reason – it’s shocking, and people like to be shocked. They want to be titillitated. In a world that operates on hyperbole and rewards exaggeration, it’s no surprise that no one really cares about the facts or the evidence. They want the version that suits their own depraved sensibilities best.
But what happens when we challenge the popular mythology? What happens when one goes to some effort to check the facts, verify the information and make sure? Well, history tends to be rewritten, even in a case like Vincent van Gogh where that history is over 100 years old.
Take the trait that Van Gogh is most famous for around the world – the mad artist. The most basic thing everyone believes isn’t even true.
This assessment isn’t just one random publication, or written by a single reporter in some arbitrary journal. It made world headlines at the time. The time being September 2016 when the Van Gogh museum invited around 30 international medical experts, professors and art historians to settle the issue definitively, once and for all. Guess what? They couldn’t. They couldn’t offer a modern diagnosis, and instead offered something more “prosaic” – they sort of deconstructed the original diagnosis, which was this:
…temporal lobe epilepsy precipitated by the use of absinthe in the presence of an early limbic lesion….
And essentially replaced it with this:
…temporal lobe epilepsy precipitated by the use of absinthein the presence of an early limbic lesion….
In other words, they agreed that all of Van Gogh’s symptoms couldn’t really be explained by a disorder or a disease, but it could be explained by a drinking problem. Lousy huh? Instead of a mad artist he was simply an occasionally drunk artist.
Even so, despite this unshocking [and thus unsatisfying assessment] by the medical luminaries, the Van Gogh museum who’d hosted the symposium went ahead with their exhibition eponymously titled On the Verge of Insanity. Everyone loved it.
What lesson do we learn from this? We see that human nature isn’t a reliable conduit for truth. Human nature is prone to projection and transference. Our truth tends to be self-justifying. So where can one turn for a neutral view of the truth, if not to one another, if not to the media, if not to experts, skilled lie detectors in law enforcement, historians and – oftetimes – even medical professionals?
Turn to True Crime Rocket Science – the most credible and authentic voice in true crime.
Almost 130 years ago, Vincent van Gogh checked himself out of the asylum at St. Remy in the south of France, caught a train to Paris [where his brother lived] and moved into a small apartment above a restaurant in Auvers. Auvers is a small satellite town in the countryside set beside the river Oise. It’s about an hour by rail from Paris.
After researching a few lines of inquiry in Portugal, I travelled to Auvers in the south of France where Vincent van Gogh set up his “studio in the south” in the famous Yellow House. It’s also the setting for a violent and bloody act, perhaps even an assault. The ear incident.
From Auvers I journey along the same tracks north as Vincent did, to Paris, past the smouldering ruin of Notre Damme, and then Auvers where Vincent died at the height of summer, at the end of July 1890. I believe he was murdered, and in June this year, the murder weapon [or suicide gun] will be auctioned off.
How much that 7 mm Lefaucheux revolver actually sells for will be an indication of whether the world believes its authentic or not. How much of what we know about the world, and history, and the famous mythology of people like Vincent van Gogh is true? I’m here to find out. Follow #LastJourney on Twitter and Instagram to keep up to speed on where I am.
More echoes of the Watts case. Remember Watts’ “first confession” where he implicated Shan’ann in killing the little girls. We have the same thing here, where Berreth is murdered to “protect” their daughter. Surely there are other ways of protecting children besides murdering their mothers?
Patrick Frazee reported Kelsey Berreth to child services because she was harming their toddler daughter, new documents could show. The alleged killer, 32, is said to have confided in his mistress Krystal Jean Lee Kenney, telling her that his fiancee abused one-year-old Kaylee.
Kenney testified that murder suspect Frazee had told her Kelsey, 29, hurt their daughter, leaving her with a burn on her hand and a bump on her head. Kenney disposed of crucial evidence in the murder case, including a gun, keys and the missing mother’s phone and claims she cleaned up the crime scene at his request.
Kenney then got rid of Berreth’s keys at Makad Gorge State Park, right over the border from Colorado in Idaho, court documents reveal. The nurse also told police that she burned Berreth’s cell phone and threw it in the trash at work, along with the burner phone she used to speak with Frazee. Frazee is said to have told his lover that they needed to ‘get rid of’ Berreth so she couldn’t hurt or even kill Kaylee.
So often the murder of children by their biological parents or other relatives is associated with prolonged periods of abuse or even torture. This is what makes the Watts case idiosyncratic.
A desperate search for missing 8-year-old California boy went from hopeful to tragic on Thursday after officials announced that the child had been murdered, allegedly by his own father. “It is with a heavy heart that the Corona Police Department must let our community know the missing child investigation regarding Noah McIntosh has been escalated to a homicide case,” the police department stated.
Bryce McIntosh, father of missing Noah, has been charged with his murder. Meanwhile, the search for the child’s body continues. “We would like to assure our community members our department has put all our efforts into locating Noah McIntosh while gathering the facts regarding his disappearance,” police stated. “Our search for Noah continues.”
On March 12, Noah’s mother, Jillian Godfrey contacted the police claiming that she had not been able to contact her son for almost two weeks.The next day a search warrant was served at Bryce McIntosh’s apartment.
The painting, Still Life with Fruit and Chestnuts, was donated to the museum by a couple in 1960 and suspected to be by the Dutch master.
But several experts pooh-poohed the claim. However, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam determined that Van Gogh painted the rather dowdy fruit bowl – perhaps on a blue day – in 1886.
The news has been somewhat muted, as the confirmation occurred last year, but wasn’t reported for months. In a further discovery, the experts found there was a portrait of a woman hidden underneath the still life. The often sad artist – whose works are now priceless – often reused his canvases because he was too poor to buy new ones.
…if we had been that little more welcoming in 1876, perhaps the history of art would have taken a different turn. Instead of those astonishing stars over the Rhône at Arles, they might have been shining down on the North Sea at Scarborough.
During the course of several trips in the south of France I visited Arles, where Vincent lived in 1888, and St. Rémy where he was confined in the famous asylum, for the express purpose of identifying the scenes he painted. In fifty years these scenes have changed amazingly littleand today, but for the major fact that the trees have grown taller, they offer virtually the same appearance they did to the painter at the time. A first glance finds them disappointing both in their structure and their unprepossessing color. The views that van Gogh chose often amazed me by their banality, by their total lack of any emotional quality—that quality he makes so urgent in all of his works. But painting the bridge of Trinquetaille, that Mairie of Auvers, the wheatfield under the rain, or the passageway in the asylum, the artist knew how to accentuate the sensations of intensity, of gayety, of desolation or of melancholywhich he discovered in them. By purely pictorial means he has stressed line and color…
Faced with the themes and the canvases of van Gogh, so strangely alike yet so absorbingly different, one realizes that “reality” cannot exist independently, and that the artist paints after all not what is but what he sees. Vincent himself best defined the problem when he asked his brother: “When the thing represented is…absolutely in agreement and one with the manner of representing it, isn’t it just that that gives a work of art its quality?”
Speaking of the history of world art taking a different turn, if even one of the contentions in this true crime interpretation of the life and death of Van Gogh are true, all of art history going back over a century is turned on its head…
March 30th, 2019
1. Interview with OLAYINKA HAMZA, the attorney who met Shan’ann at restaurant
5 and half hours into this Madeleine documentary and a man’s said “we can never question a dog – because they don’t speak our language” £7.99 for this thank you Netflix
watching this Madeleine McCann documentary & 1. Why did they leave the door open?? 2. Why didn’t their friend actually GO into the room to check on the children & 3. Why didn’t their other female friend report she seen a suspicious man carrying a child??? Hmmm…
3. “I think it’s immoral. I think it’s unethical. I think it’s unpatriotic and, yes, I think it’s corrupt – and evidence of collusion.” – Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), during a House Intelligence Committee open hearing, responded to Trump and Congressional Republican’s calls for his resignation, Thursday, March 28,
“They’re innocent,” Douglas said of both Knox and Echols, whom he also referred to as “heroes.” Both have been convicted of murder and both were sitting on stage beside the former profiler. Douglas’ sentiment prompted Knox to choke up and thank him for believing her.
But Echols said he was able to make it through all these hardships because he started practicing magick, which made conditions bearable and kept him sane.
Comedian Dave Hill, who interviewed Echols Thursday, joked a bit about magick, knowing many aren’t super-familiar with the topic.
“Magic is for nerds,” Hill said. “But magick with a ‘k’ sounds like there are goats involved.”
But … what is it?
Magick, as Echols puts it, “is the western path to enlightenment.” It’s similar to things like the Law of Attraction or The Secret, in that it all has to do with manifesting in some way, according to Echols.
“[We’re] wandering aimlessly, that’s what we do through life. We don’t remember where we come from, where we’re going, or why we’re supposed to be going there. Magick causes you to remember some of these things and gives you a sense of purpose,” he explained.
Practicing magick for Echols consists of a variety of… ceremonies and rituals, all for the purpose of spiritual growth. This kept him balanced and helped him manage the physical and emotional stress and pain of imprisonment. Echols was able to learn so much about magick through all his time reading in prison. He got his hands on whatever he could find to read during those endless days, and started from there. Echols is still committed to magick to this day. After all, it wasn’t easy adjusting to life after prison.
“I didn’t realize I had lost things like facial recognition ability, voice recognition ability, destroyed my eyesight. It takes a very heavy toll on you mentally, physically, emotionally,” he explained. He even claimed that he had barely any memories of his first two years out of prison, as he was just so traumatized.
Get the TCRS take on Damien Echols and the West Memphis Three:
When van Gogh moved back in with his parents in 1879 they complained that he did nothing but devour Charles Dickens from morning to night.
Indeed, for van Gogh reading was as compulsive as painting: “I have a more or less irresistible passion for books and the constant need to improve my mind, to study if you like, just as I have a need to eat bread.” He copied down poems by Longfellow, Goethe and Keats; he enjoyed the works of George Eliot as well as Hans Christian Andersen, Thomas a Kempis, Tolstoy, Zola, Dostoevsky, Maupassant, Balzac and Voltaire.
The museum staff decided to send “Vase With Poppies” to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam for further inspection. Experts there analyzed the work’s paint, material and style and concluded that it is indeed a van Gogh, one that falls in line with the paintings he made not long after moving from Antwerp to Paris in 1886.
Louis van Tilborgh, senior Researcher and the Van Gogh Museum, notes that the recent investigation into the origins of “Vase With Flowers” suggests that light can be shed on other “floaters”—works that can have been attributed to van Gogh, but whose authenticity remains uncertain. “[O]ne can say that slowly but surely,” Tilborgh adds, “real progress is being made in Van Gogh studies.”
Dr Perlin said it was “possible” Madeleine’s DNA was present in the McCann hire car, potentially opening up a line of the police inquiry that was seemingly shut down by the 2007 “inconclusive” DNA results.
“What was interesting about the report from the FSS 10 years ago is they’re trying to interpret [the McCann DNA] data,” Dr Perlin said.”What this [FSS] report says is there is a possibility that Madeleine McCann’s DNA is present in this mixture,” said Dr Perlin – who Nine.com.au sent a copy of the FSS DNA report which was handed to Portuguese police in September 2007.
“[If] a lab can produce informative data, even if it is complex and mixed, but they can’t interpret it then you can have tremendous injustice; of guilty people not being convicted, of innocent people staying in prison. What is needed is an objective and accurate interpretation that can scientifically resolve the DNA,” he said. Dr John Lowe, the senior scientist at the FSS responsible for solving the McCann DNA samples, stated in his final report that his team could not resolve the evidence because it was too challenging.
In the Maddie podcast, Dr Perlin explained exactly how modern DNA software can reboot the McCann cold case. Madeleine would be 16 years old in May this year. Portuguese police sent dozens of DNA samples to the FSS in 2007.
Forensics teams lifted floor tiles and took DNA swabs from behind a blue two-seat sofa in the lounge area of the McCann holiday apartment. Sections of the boot compartment in the Renault Scenic hire car were also cut out and expressed to the FSS.
Not everyone is supportive of her, though. There are still plenty of people who think that Knox is guilty, and she admitted she spends a lot of time feeling like she needs to explain herself. As a result, her morning routine isn’t just coffee and breakfast. It includes deleting vicious social media comments.
“I kinda have this daily morning routine where I go on my social media profiles and delete all the nasty comments and block all the people that make mean comments to me,” she said. Knox said that while she acknowledges that these kind of comments are now part of her existence, “It’s not nice. It’s not like it doesn’t hurt me but at the same time I know these people hate someone that’s not me.”
By deleting the comments, Knox explained she’s choosing to limit the amount of negativity that she allows to infiltrate her life. While tabloid journalism tore Knox apart…she’s even joined the media world herself. Within weeks of being exonerated, she began writing for a local newspaper in Washington…
…and it was a different story in 2014: Knox's desire to go back to Italy is a reversal from what she has told reporters in the past. She told "Good Morning America" in 2014 that she would never set foot on Italian soil of her own volition.
But no surveillance cameras captured the incidentand one of the men was actually Smollett’s personal trainer, the actor’s attorneys said.
If prosecutors saw holes in their case, they had to do the “best they could do in the interest of justice. I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt and believe they looked at the evidence and didn’t feel they could prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt,” said Sara Azari, a criminal defense attorney.
The secrecy surrounding the details of the sudden dismissalof Smollett’s charges has left some people calling for greater transparency from the prosecutors office and has led to speculation. A judge agreed to seal Smollett’s court file at the request of his attorneys and without the opposition from prosecutors…legal analysts said the decision to keep the records from public disclosure will stop the community from learning what really happened.
Jussie Smollett has hired high-powered criminal defense lawyer Mark Geragos to represent him against the 16 felony charges he is facing in Chicago following his alleged orchestration of a staged homophobic and racist attack.
1. In the video below AD makes a claim about a red vehicle. He neglects to mention or show the angle of the porch camera, and that it isn’t oriented directly toward the neighbor’s wall, but is turned slightly towards the road. Thus the camera seeing the vehicle pull away makes sense. It is interesting that Watts moves his own vehicle forward, perhaps once he realizes the neighbors are stirring.
In 2007, the now-closed British lab, the FSS, was forced to undertake a massive review of up to 2000 cases of violent crime, including rape and murder. There were concerns that the DNA tests relating to these criminal cases had failed to detect minute traces of DNA that could potentially have identified guilty parties.
The search for Shannon was compared to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Matthews served four years in jail for kidnapping her daughter Shannon, nine, in 2008 to generate cash from the publicity.
The mother, from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, made several emotional pleas for her child to return during the huge police search despite being aware of where she was.
There are reports that Matthews wants to sell the rights to her autobiography so she can pay for cosmetic surgery in the hope it would help her to go unrecognised. It is believed all seven of Matthews’ children are living under new names and no longer have a relationship with their mother. Last year, Matthews told the Daily Mirror: “I’m not Britain’s worst mum. I didn’t kill anybody.”
The parents of missing Madeleine McCann are still being chased for hefty legal fees nearly a decade after the start of their court battle against the ex-police chief who has attacked them again in a new documentary.
Kate and Gerry McCann are about to be told by a court in Lisbon, Portugal, that they still owe thousands of pounds from their libel fight against Gonçalo Amaral. Amaral, 59, is waiting on a soon-to-come judgement from the European Court of Human Rights over the lengthy legal battle with the McCanns, sparked by his 2008 book The Truth of The Lie, before deciding whether to launch a compensation claim.
The eight-part series called ‘The Disappearance Of Madeleine McCann’ was commissioned in 2017 as the true crime genre exploded with TV shows such as Making A Murderer.
The McCanns, who refused to take part in the project and declined to watch a preview, will be infuriated that their tormentor Goncalo Amaral – ‘a thorn in our sides’ – is set to be starring in it. Protection officer Jim Gamble said advances in tech mean she could be found..
The couple, who are still challenging a libel win by the ex Portuguese detective in the highest court in the landthe European Court of Human Rights will be ‘horrified to learn’ that the worldwide streaming service has interviewed the retired officer.
MailOnline first exclusively revealed that Kate and Gerry wanted ‘nothing to do with’ the drama which has cost up to a reported £20 million.
McCanns “didn’t participate or approve of” Netflix documentary.
I used to think for a long time that parents were heavily involved but when Kate was offered a plea for ONLY 2 years in jail for a confession, but never took it, I knew it can’t be it. #MadeleineMccannNetflix
Wasn’t familiar with the story till I saw #MadeleineMccannNetflix. Don’t know the truth, but I know this: 1. You don’t leave a 3-year-old and two 2-year-old alone while having dinner. 2. It’s not a cultural thing whether or not you do point 1. 3. You don’t let the door unlocked.
Sydney Aiello, who survived the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, has died from suicide, people close to the family told CNN. Her mother, Cara, told CNN affiliate WFOR that Aiello suffered from survivor’s guilt after one of the deadliest mass shootings in modern US history and had recently been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Aiello had been on campus the day of the mass attack but was not in the building where the shootings took place, her mother said, according to WFOR. Aiello, a cheerleader in high school, graduated just months after a troubled teen gunned down 14 students and three teachers there. The family of Parkland school shooting victim Meadow Pollack described Aiello as “someone dear to Meadow.”
The news of the double tragedy comes just as students are out of school this week for spring break. Investigators told the Miami Herald that the male student died in “an apparent suicide” on Saturday night. He was a sophomore and attended Stoneman Douglas last year at the time of the Feb. 14 shooting that claimed 17 lives on campus.
The understanding of these statues changed over time as cultural mores shifted. In the early Christian period in Egypt, between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD, the indigenous gods inhabiting the sculptures were feared as pagan demons; to dismantle paganism, its ritual tools — especially statues making offerings — were attacked. After the Muslim invasion in the 7th century, scholars surmise, Egyptians had lost any fear of these ancient ritual objects. During this time, stone statues were regularly trimmed into rectangles and used as building blocks in construction projects.
“Ancient temples were somewhat seen as quarries,” Bleiberg said, noting that “when you walk around medieval Cairo, you can see a much more ancient Egyptian object built into a wall.”
8. From the Archives: John Ramsey interview with Anderson Cooper [2012]
The officers said they would come back in the morning, after 9am. Kate continues: “With that they were gone, leaving us to our own devices. It was incomprehensible. Looking back, it’s inexplicable, of course, that we should ever have been left in what was now a crime scene. We shouldn’t even have been allowed to take things out of the children’s bedroom.”
At the crux of the divide, district attorneys disagree on whether the possibility of the death penalty is necessary to facilitate plea deals on potential capital cases and avoid lengthy, costly murder trials. Without the death penalty, more defendants will be able to plead to second-degree murder, district attorneys who oppose repeal warned, though they clarified that they wouldn’t seek death in a case that didn’t merit it simply to obtain a plea.
“Without this tool that we have at our disposal right now, reserved for the worst of the worst, those pleas simply don’t happen,” said Republican Weld County District Attorney Michael Rourke, citing the recent case of a Frederick man who pleaded guilty to murdering his family to avoid the death penalty. “Chris Watts doesn’t have an incentive at that point.”
The vast majority of all criminal cases are resolved by plea deals, including murder cases, said District Attorney Dave Young, a Democrat who represents Adams and Broomfield counties and opposes the repeal. He is pursuing the death penalty against a man charged with killing Adams County sheriff’s Deputy Heath Gumm. “We would not be able to do that without leverage,” he said. “The whole legal system is based on leverage — not just criminal cases.”
Denver District Attorney Beth McCann disputed that analysis and said convictions shouldn’t rely on the prospect of the death penalty, but instead on the strength of the evidence in the case.McCann has said publicly that she will not seek the death penalty in any case because she morally opposes it, and she has said the decision has not affected her ability to convict.
Chris Watts on sex with mistress Nichol Kessinger and wife, Shan’ann Watts
The incomplete DNA information found its way into the press and, before long, unsubstantiated allegations started to circulate.
Tabloids splashed accusations against the McCanns across their front pages and the media frenzy became relentless. One particular newspaper, featured in the documentary, ran a front-page headline with the words: “We have found her blood in the boot of your hire car… Did you kill her by accident?”
There was no evidence to show that Madeleine was the source of the DNA.
There are so many different genres on Netflix is can be difficult to sort through them all. But one thing Netflix does better than just about anyone else? True crime documentaries.
People are obsessed with seeing true crime stories on television. Maybe it’s because the stories are real. Maybe it’s our morbid fascination with violent crimes. No matter the reason, true crime has been popular long before Netflix was even invented. But now they’ve proven how expert they are at taking those stories and bringing them to life.
Journalist Felícia found it odd that in the weeks after Madeleine vanished, the investigating police seemed to be focusing only on the suspected kidnapping and not the family involved. “We know that in most cases, the culprit is someone who is close to the child,” Felícia explains in the documentary. She goes on to tell the story of a visit she made to the restaurant where the McCann group ate on the night of the incident. She sat at the same table as them and found that despite Gerry McCann’s claim that the table had a “line of sight to the apartment” – which they say was a factor in deciding where to eat that evening – there was limited visibility. This was the first contradiction she found in the parents’ statement to police.
“From the position I was in, it was completely impossible to see the apartment or the room where they had left the children to sleep,” Felícia adds. “As an investigative journalist, I have to ask, why? Why would you lie about such a simple thing?”
Her colleague Margarida says that they had a feeling something was off with the timeline and that the McCanns’ version of events doesn’t match that of the employees who served them in the hotel. Further doubt was driven by inconsistencies in Gerry’s statements about which door he entered the apartment through and whether or not it was locked. There’s also her understanding that the McCann group gathered to work out their timeline and then revise it 24 hours later.
Gonçalo Amaral, former Chief Investigating Coordinator with the Portuguese police, says that statements by Jane Tanner, who claimed to have seen a man carrying a child in pajamas away from the resort, seemed to evolve as time went on.
Our prurient attraction to crime, gore and the misery of others is not new: equivalent publications to Crime Monthly (though tamer) can be traced back at least to Victorian times—an era when Jack the Ripper was turned into a species of folk legend. But today’s fixation, and the sheer barrage of content it brings with it, can make us forget standards and neglect others. We lose in the variety and styles of storytelling we watch. And perhaps, just perhaps, we lose something of ourselves when we slow down to gawp at the car crash as we pass.
Peer-reviewed medical journals are peppered with studies that posthumously diagnose the illnesses of artists, using data that ranges from medical records to, in rare cases, the artist’s physical remains. Most commonly, though, such medical connoisseurs turn to the deceased’s body of work for clues.
This might seem like an amusing sport, but Marmor warned that many doctors use flawed measurements and take their conclusions too far. “Artists have license to paint as they wish, so style is mutable and not necessarily an indication of disease,” he said. “Speculation is always fun, but not when it is presented as ‘evidence’ in scientific journals.”
When Post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin passed away on the Marquesas Islands in 1903, he left behind four teeth in a glass jar and abundant speculation about whether or not he died from syphilis. An opportunity to address some of the unanswered questions surrounding his legacy arose in 2000, when those teeth were extracted from a sealed well near Gauguin’s former hut. Caroline Boyle-Turner, a Gauguin specialist, wanted to first confirm that the cavity-ridden molars did indeed belong to the Frenchman, and then see what could be learned from the remains.
A chance encounter on a cruise liner treading through the South Pacific put Boyle-Turner in contact with William Mueller, a founding member of the Dental Anthropological Association. The two became investigative partners, and their findings were published in Anthropology in 2018. The DNA extracted from the teeth was compared with DNA taken from the interred remains of the artist’s father (recently identified in Chile), as well as a sample from Gauguin’s living grandson. The results were a match. The molars were also tested for traces of cadmium, mercury and arsenic, which were all common treatments for syphilis during Gauguin’s time. None were found, which doesn’t necessarily conclude that Gauguin wasn’t syphilitic, only that he didn’t receive those treatments (or at least not in a high enough dosage to leave a residue).
“Van Gogh was 20 when he arrived, an impressionable age for anyone, so his period in London had a deep influence on him,” he said. “What was important about London was that he worked in an art gallery, and this helped introduce him to painting. Had he never worked in a gallery, I believe it unlikely that he would ever have become an artist.”
Bailey wrote in the Art Newspaper that Van Gogh is thought to have fallen in love with Loyer’s 19-year-old daughter, Eugénie,during his visit.
Alongside the insurance documents, builders also recovered a tattered 1867 edition of “A Penny Pocket Book of Prayers and Hymns.” The offices of the book’s publisher, Frederick Warne, were in Covent Garden, close to the gallery where Van Gogh worked. Bailey wrote that the book was probably owned by Ursula, but may have been read by Van Gogh, who became a devout Christian while in London.
But what if an artist seeks — nay, demands — obscurity? That’s the premise of Dan Gilroy’s contemporary art world satire-cum-horror, in which the dying wish of a hermit painter is ignored and his works fed into the hungry mouth of the market instead of being destroyed.
Stretching five days, “Death Becomes Us” pieces together the rare opportunities to sit before the wrongly accused (Amanda Knox, Damien Echols, etc.) and the cold-case experts who’ve turned such cases into a Hollywood obsession.
A highly anticipated eight-part docuseries on the disappearance of 3-year-old Madeleine McCann is gripping if you don’t know the storyand a disappointment if you do. Somebody knows exactly what happened to Madeleine McCann, the 3-year-old Briton who disappeared without a trace from her bed in a holiday resort on a family vacation with friends in Praia Da Luz, Portugal, on May 3, 2007. But it clearly isn’t the makers of the new Netflix series The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann.
Unfortunately the writer of this piece cops out on his own premise. There are many bogus documentaries out their claiming to represent the premise of true crime, among them Making A Murderer [both seasons], the Paradise Lost trilogy, and virtually all coverage of the McCanns and the Ramseys, especially coverage in which they voluntarily participate.
3. Police detective testifies in Packham murder trial
The culture around The Tortured Genius represents that the more mentally ill the artist, the more brilliant his work. The first person that comes to mind is apparently none other than Vincent Van Gogh. His severed ear is part of popular culture parlance. When the gifted artist wasn’t having psychotic episodes or cutting a part of his ear off, he painted exquisite paintings as he transferred his inner anguish on his canvas. Others like Kurt Cobain, Sylvia Plath, Franz Kafka, etc. had similar fates. Their professional lives flourished as they battled mental illness. But the question remains. Is the idea of the Tortured Genius a myth or a reality?
Made of earthen-color fabric on steel frames up to 32 feet high and 800 feet long, the walls shield industrial machinery from a high school and wetlands greenbelt in Greeley, prairie homes in Windsor, and kids riding bikes and skateboards in Mead.
It is the latest innovation for companies equipped with horizontal drilling technology that are trying to solve a puzzle: how to extract more fossil fuels from under where people are living and minimize impact.
The walls help companies meet Colorado’s noise limits (55-80 decibels during the day and 50-75 at night, and measured 350 feet from the source). Walls also are being considered for wildlife habitat where proposed drilling threatens mating of sage grouse. Previously, oil and gas companies tried to ease impact of industrial operations near people by stacking hay bales and shipping containers around engines. Beyond cutting noiseby 20 to 30 decibels, the fabric walls partially block the glare of floodlights and dust cloudsduring companies’ multimonth period of drilling and hydraulic fracturing.
It was a simple retelling – in what felt almost like real time, so leadenly was it done – of the story of the three-year-old’s disappearance from the holiday resort of Praia da Luz one terrible night in May 2007. It was a blatant cash-in on the vogue for the true-crime series that have become a staple of Netflix’s output since the success of Making a Murderer a few years ago, but without any of the justifications previous works in the genre have provided. It was not the disinterment of a forgotten case, it was not the re-examination of a suspected miscarriage of justice. It offered no new facts, no new insight. It didn’t even have a point of view.
Instead, it was purely a rehashing of everything anyone who was alive at the time, or who has been of an age to understand the periodic appeals on anniversaries, birthdays and other painful dates by the McCanns for more information in the 12 years that have elapsed since, already knew…
3. Michael Jackson’s maid reveals sordid Neverland secrets
It's quite funny that the #McCann have "pretended" to object to the #Netflix film. Look at the copyright tag in the photo. Guess who would have provided permission to use it?> 'never-before-heard testimonies from those at the heart of the story', including the McCanns' friends pic.twitter.com/AvQyQFGPFf
As expected -> Undermining, mocking the Portuguese side of the police investigation. Portuguese cops later identified #McCann as arguidos>>>Maddie cops released sketch of 'egg with side parting' days after disappearance https://t.co/ZIyrRvJe1I#McCannpic.twitter.com/mn10o8Glgy
Aoife Smith described the man she saw carrying the little girl towards the beach on the night of 3rd of May, as wearing beige trousers with buttons, like the ones Gerry McCann is wearing in this photo.#McCannpic.twitter.com/cbJYm9XLMn
1. I’m no hero. 2. I never ‘blasted’ anybody. 3. As I said to the decent Australian journalist from whose podcast this was culled and distorted by someone without his integrity, a reconstruction would have been a great idea if only those involved would have taken part. https://t.co/XaxNB58jKj
I believe the claim the McCanns refused to participate is the opening gambit to get viewers to believe the Netflix documentary is on the up and up. Viewers will come in believing it is going to be objective and get a solid propoganda film exonerating the McCanns. #mccann
Portuguese asked the group to return to the scene to run through their movements on the night of May 3, 2007. But negotiations with the witnesses allegedly stalled because of disagreements over how it would be managed by investigators.
The reconstruction had been planned for May 2008, six months after Kate and Gerry had been declared arguidos, or official suspects. Their friends raised concerns over the arguido status in emails to police.
They were also said to fear a media frenzy if they flew back to the resort, and questioned the purpose of the re-enactment. One member of the group proposed the police use actors instead, but Portuguese detectives refused.
Police were said to be frustrated the reconstruction did not happen. They shelved the investigation in August 2008 and the McCanns’ arguido status was lifted.
“Why do you think he’s telling the truth now?” asked host Phil McGraw.
Rzucek said he believed Watts spoke honestly about the killings because “I think it’s eating him up. I think he was more than glad to talk to somebody for five hours, sitting in a box 24/7,” said Rzucek, who was the children’s godfather. “We loved him like a son and Frankie loved him like a brother,” Sandy Rzucek said. “I just don’t understand.”
Patrick Frazee is pictured checking out baby supplies and formula at a WalMart on Thanksgiving Day in documents from his murder case that were obtained by DailyMail.com. A still from the store’s surveillance system shows Frazee pushing a carriage with a baby seat which is believed to hold his daughter Kaylee just after 1pm.
It was minutes after this that Frazee was seen with a crate in his truck heading back to Berreth’s house, despite telling investigators he went straight home after his fiancee handed over their daughter earlier that afternoon. A neighbor’s surveillance video shows that Frazee was inside the residence for two hours before leaving, during which time authorities now believe he murdered Berreth by bludgeoning her with a bat.
On his way out of the home, Frazee called both his mistress Krystal Jean Kenney and his mother Sheila Frazee, though they were not the only two women the accused killer spoke to over the next few days. Court documents show that Frazee was also in contact with a third woman from Idaho. The relationship between Frazee and that woman is unclear, and she is not a suspect and never been identified as a person of interest in the case.
She was however just a few miles away from where Berreth’s phone pinged in Idaho on November 25, and contacted Frazee at the exact time the missing mother’s cellular was registered by a nearby tower. The woman, 39, has also been employed in the medical field, so there is a chance she may have been a friend of Frazee’s mistress, Kenney.
1. TCRS blows by 2 million page impressions five months after launching in mid-October 2018. Thank you to all the regular visitors, commenters and readers in the TCRS community.
Father Of Murder Victim Shan’ann Watts Reveals What He’d Say To Son-In-Law, Chris, If Given The Chance – Dr. Phil
“Knowing what you now know, what would you say to him?” asks Dr. Phil of the grieving family.
“The same question I’ve had – Why?” responds Frank Sr. adding, “There’s nothing that I can imagine why you would do that to your family. You want another life? Go. Open the door and leave.”
“He could have just gotten a divorce,” says Sandy. Calling her daughter and granddaughters’ deaths “inhumane” she says, “I think the hardest thing for me right now is the way they died.”
“I think the hardest part is knowing our granddaughter watched her sister die and then begged for her life,” says Shan’ann’s mother, Sandy Rzucek, reacting to what the family has been told about her son-in-law’s description of the last words spoken to him by Bella.
“I felt my daughter’s spirit, the moment she died,” says Shan’ann’s mother, Sandy Rzucek, who lives in North Carolina. She describes waking up everyone in her house the morning her daughter and grandchildren were killed to tell family members that she felt something was wrong with Shan’ann.
“We didn’t even know she was missing yet,” says Shan’ann’s brother, Frankie, confirming his mother’s account.
After authorities found her daughter’s body, a few days after her and the girls’ disappearance, Sandy says she felt Shan’ann’s presence in her home. “I felt her, and I heard her say, ‘I love you, Mommy, and I’m sorry.’”
Sandy claims she received another visitation from Shan’ann and her children after Celeste and Bella’s bodies were recovered.
HORRIFIC: Christopher Watts drove the girls along with their dead mother's body on a 45-minute drive to a secluded oil field where he smothered the youngest with her favorite blanket and killed his 4-year-old after she watched her sister die. https://t.co/ul6FgNe8mo
parts of new #ChrisWatts information i think he is still making up. "He said that he killed his wife because they were going to get divorced and she said he'd never see the kids again." I believe premeditated and he cares what people are thinking of him #excuse
“He had no empathy for life,” Curie said about Frazee, in an exclusive interview with NBC’s “Dateline.” Curie said she and Frazee started dating in 2010.
“I was attracted to his sharp wit and he had a very explorative mind. He contemplated everything. And he was excellent at reading people,” Curie told “Dateline” correspondent Andrea Canning. But, four months into their relationship, Curie said Frazee started playing mind games on her.
“He began not calling me for days, and then calling me in the middle of the night telling me he had visions of me in a wedding dress. And we’d talk and argue for hours. And we’d end up winding right back into each other.”
The emotional abuse, as she described it, went on for a year. She said Frazee would put her on a pedestal, then tear her down. But, she said, she continued to be drawn to him. As their relationship continued, Curie said she observed Frazee, a rancher and popular farrier, hit his dogs.
“Dateline” interviewed a man who knew another side of Frazee. Clint Cline said Frazee worked with his donkeys, and describes him as a “nice guy, very conscientious about his work, very concerned about the health and well-being of our animals, very great with his daughter.”
Curie and Frazee’s on-again, off-again relationship ended in 2014, when Curie said she came across the definition of a psychopath online. “He fit the bill to a T. And that’s when I left him.”
In an interview with Dr. Phil that will air on Monday, Sandra and Frank Rzucek were joined by their son to share their grief over the deaths of their daughter, her two children Bella and Cece, and her unborn son.
Chris’ recent chilling “confession” gives us even more insight into his perverted mind. He shared the tale of heartlessly killing Shanann after making love to her, then telling her he didn’t love her and wanted to leave her before finally strangling her to death. He claims she didn’t even struggle and said It was like Shanann was praying, thinking of scripture and forgave him for doing it.
He also described being overtaken by an outside power that got him to compulsively kill his family; he retells the moment as if he was powerless over his impulses to overcome this heinous crime.
Chris Watts may not have been able to find his relevance in the real world, but seems to have found it in prison. In prison, Chris feels like an important man; the man he always thought he should be. He gets fan mail and love letters. His newly revealed confessions, after “finding God” are making him even more of a global star, albeit a notorious one. He is making his mark on history, so he thinks. His egotistical plan and sick need for distinction and recognition are finally being met. Criminality led to his celebrity.
Madeleine McCann’s parents have slammed a new Netflix movie about their daughter’s kidnap fearing it could hinder the painstaking police search for her.
According to The Sun, Kate and Gerry McCann have revealed they had been asked to take part in the documentary but “want nothing to do with it”.
Oscar-winning Netflix boasts the documentary has “riveting” new interviews with key investigators as the 12th anniversary of Maddie’s disappearance approaches.
The streaming giant is set to release more details and the launch date of the movie The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann in the coming weeks.
Throughout their investigation and prosecution of this case, Rourke said they tried to figure out what happened, but he told the Coloradoan that “reality turns out to be much worse than anything any of us surmised from the evidence we had… about the worst you could imagine.”
After Watts was sentenced to three consecutive life terms in prison, Rourke said he doubted Watts would ever give an honest account of the killings. But on Thursday, Rourke said he believes Watts’ recent confession to investigators is a “truthful, credible account” of the killings.
Mostly.
“I’m assuming what he is telling is truthful,” Rourke said, adding that the skilled investigators who interviewed Watts also believe he was honest in his most recent confession. “I don’t think that everything that came out of his mouth during those interviews was the truth because I honestly don’t believe that this monster has the ability to have remorse at all.”
Rourke said some pieces of evidence match Watts’ most recent confession, including footage from a neighbor’s security camera that shows another shadow aside from Watts’ by his truck when he was loading Shanann’s body into the back seat.
In the video released by the Weld County District Attorney’s Office, Watts is seen standing by his work truck when another shadow appears to be moving toward him, and Watts leans down to pick something up, likely one of the girls.
That video “would be consistent with his statements that the girls were alive when they left the house and walked out to the truck,” Rourke said.
NOTE: I will be doing an analysis of the film At Eternity’s Gate, and explain how my research challenges the popular myth of the great artist.
Jo, the widow of Vincent’s brother Theo, made it her mission to introduce the world to Vincent’s art. She sold some of his works, loaned some out for exhibitions and published the letters that Vincent and Theo wrote to each other. #internationalwomensdaypic.twitter.com/jwJHcNZ88c
The Colorado Bureau of Investigation released this morning records pertaining to Chris Watts’ Feb. 18 confession to law enforcement about how and why he killed his pregnant wife, Shanann, and their two daughters, Bella and Celeste.
The records released at 8 a.m. include two audio files documenting Watts’ five-hour long interview with CBI, FBI and Frederick police, two images of Watts, a 37-page CBI report, and a letter from Colorado Department of Public Safety Executive Director Stan Hilkey.
The Tribune has accessed the records and reporters are reviewing them.
Michael Jackson’s estate is engaged in a campaign of adverts, lawsuits and interviews in an attempt to salvage his image after the screening of Channel 4’s documentary Leaving Neverland, which details years of alleged grooming and child abuse.
Jackson’s estate – which has made $2.1bn (£1.6bn) since his death in 2009 and is run by John McClain, a co-executor with Jackson’s former lawyer John Branca – originally tried to block the release of the documentary by contacting Channel 4 and issuing a $100m lawsuit against HBO, which broadcast Dan Reed’s film last weekend in the US.
The estate said the documentary, which premiered at Sundance in January, is “the kind of tabloid character assassination Michael Jackson endured in life, and now in death”, and added that “the film takes uncorroborated allegations that supposedly happened 20 years ago and treats them as fact”.
Eamonn Forde, a music industry expert, said the estate was engaged in an unprecedented containment and damage-limitation exercise to attempt to preserve the most lucrative posthumous fortune in the history of music.
“This is a new era for artist estate management, because this is about containment rather than maximising the profile of a deceased artist,” said Forde. “To an extent, estate management is about building a narrative around an artist; they are the directors of the narrative.”
On Dec. 15, authorities filed a search warrant executed on Frazee’s home, which listed 67 seized items. Police took possession of Frazee’s financial records, five pairs of his wrangler blue jeans, a Verizon tablet, his boots, a tan baseball cap and 50 9 mm bullets and two casings. They also wanted items that could provide DNA samples of the suspect and victim.
They also found “four teeth in a small envelope” and a fifth tooth held separately. One of Berreth’s teeth became a gruesome point of discussion during a recent hearing involving Frazee’s alleged accomplice, Krystal Jean Kenney Lee, an Idaho nurse.
Lee told investigators that Frazee had her clean up “a mess” at Berreth’s townhome after he killed her, the affidavit says. Frazee specifically asked her to look for a tooth that may have fallen down an air vent. Lee found a tooth inside the apartment that included the full root.
Frederick, Colo. – Four-year-old Bella Watts pleaded for her life, just moments after she watched her father kill her younger sister “CeCe,” according to lawyer Steven Lambert. Lambert, of the Grant & Hoffman Law Firm, represents murder victim Shanann Watts‘ parents Frank and Sandy Rzucek, CBS Denver reports. The law firm shared new details about the murder with Dr. Phil in an exclusive interview.
According to lawyer Thomas Grant, Chris Watts confessed new details to investigators after finding faith in prison. Watts spoke for hours with police on Feb. 18 from a prison in Wisconsin.
“He is claiming that he is remorseful, and he has found God,” Grant told Dr. Phil.
Lawyers confirmed Sandy Rzucek was not given access to the audio recording in advance, but was briefed on the discussion by law enforcement. Rzucek wished to share the information with the public, prior to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation releasing the redacted audio recording on Thursday.The Rzuceks hoped sharing the story would help clear their daughter’s name, after some believed Chris Watts’ original story that she killed the children.
Chris Watts had just strangled his wife Shan’ann and was wrapping her in a sheet to dispose of her body when their daughter Bella walked into the room. “What are you doing with mommy?” the 4-year-old asked her father. As Watts began to wrap her body up in a sheet, Bella walked in and asked about her mother, Lambert said.
“She’s four, what we’ve been told she’s quite smart — was quite smart — and knew something likely was up. And what he said was that, ‘Mommy is sick, we need to take her to the hospital to make her better,'” Lambert said.
A spokeswoman from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation [Susan Medina] tells PEOPLE the office plans to release more information on the case Thursday, adding that the office was taken by surprise by the Dr. Phil interview.
Chris Watts murdered his elder daughter after she witnessed him killing her mother according to an interview that will air Tuesday on The Dr Phil Show. Steven Lambert, the lawyer who is representing the family of Shanann Watts in their wrongful death lawsuit, claims that his clients were informed of just how Watts carried out the brutal murders.
It started with Shanann threatening to keep their children from him after she learned of his affair, and ended with the mom and both daughters dead. Bella reportedly spent her final moments begging her father to spare her life.
‘The night in question Shanann came home. She and Chris had got into a fight. They made up. They were getting along really well,’ Lambert tells Dr Phil in a clip obtained by DailyMail.com. ‘Later on, they got into a fight again. In that fight he essentially confessed to having an affair, that he wanted a divorce. That it was pretty much over between them, and she had said something to the effect of, “well you’re not going to see the kids again.”‘
Lambert then adds: ‘As a consequence of that conversation he strangled her to death.’ The clip ends with Lambert revealing: ‘Bella walked in and asked what are you doing to mommy.’ The interview was conducted at the Dodge Correctional Institution in Waupun, Wisconsin, where Watts was transferred back in December. It is unclear however if he is still there, or if he may have leveraged his interview with authorities to be moved to another facility.
Authorities do not believe that Watts ever gave a factual account of what happened the night of the murders. The release last week of doorbell footage that showed Shanann arriving home on the night she was murdered also suggests that the Weld County District Attorney may have come across new video evidence.
[This last sentence is patently incorrect. Law enforcement had the doorbell footage by as early as November 2018, although curiously the exact date when the footage was viewed is not provided].
I’m at the Teller County courthouse where at 8:30 #PatrickFrazee will be back in court for a motions hearing. I’ll be live tweeting from the courtroom. @KKTV11News
3. Michael Jackson – Child Molester or just plain Whacko?
The controversial Michael Jackson documentary Leaving Neverland premiered on @HBO. It chronicled the relationships the singer had with Wade Robson and James Safechuck. Both men claim that Jackson sexually abused them as children. https://t.co/UwIhdFvRdN
Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch in California is back on the market for $31m, a steep cut from the $100m asking price four years ago. The dramatic price cut for the iconic property is partly due to years of droughtin the region that affected the real estate market, Kyle Forsyth, one of the listing agents, told US media.Jackson reportedly paid $19.5m for the property in the 1980s but a real estate investment firm bought it in 2008 for $22.5m after the singer defaulted on a loan.
His ranch was raided in 2003 as part of a child molestation case against him and police at the time seized a large collection of pornography and images of nude children.
Once Trump is impeached, we as a community need to impeach the idiots who defended him daily for over two years. After lying on a daily basis on national and international television, and in spite of his lies and deceits receiving national attention and consistent analysis in the media, Trump’s supporters nevertheless continued to actively defend him. This defense is indefensible.
I would like to see the Trump supporters who are active in true crime put up their hands and admit to enabling a serial liar and deceiver, while simultaneously campaigning against injustice. I’d like to see those supporters do the one thing Trump can’t, and won’t. Admit your mistake and apologize.
Say:
“I made a mistake.”
Will they?
Will you?
I won’t hold my breath.
For the rest, this is the TCRS take of Trump [published in July 2017].
According to these numbers, human beings are about 10 times more poisonous than poisonous snakes. https://t.co/jfFMHAsPeN
An important precursor to the “madness” of Vincent van Gogh, and the murder of Van Gogh, was the infamous ear incident. When I conducted my investigation, I examined the ear incident as a crime scene. Who saw what? What motive was there [if it was self-inflicted or otherwise]. What happened in the aftermath? Who said what, why and how was the wound supposedly inflicted? What when was used? What weapon was likely used to sever an entire ear?
I was pleasantly surprised to find a lot of information on all these subjects, even a sketch of the actual wound. Incredibly, almost 130 years later we have Vincent’s own words to get a sense of his feelings about what happened, as well as not one but two portraits to get a more subtle sense about how he felt about it.
The incident took place just before the Christmas of 1888 during the last days when artists Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin lived together. A few days later Vincent van Gogh wrote to his former housemate – who by this time had skedaddled all the way back to Brittany, that trip paid in full by his patrol, Theo van Gogh [Vincent’s younger brother].
By January 1889 Paul Gauguin wanted his fencing equipment back. In his rush to abandon Vincent and the Yellow House in Arles, he left it behind. But in spite of what happened, he wanted it back. Understandably, Vincent wasn’t too chuffed about giving Gauguin his “weapons of war” back.
The full transcript of the letter – written on January 22nd or 23rd – can be read here.
Gauguin’s explanation of the incident was that Van Gogh did it to himself, and that he was mad, a claim he repeated shortly after Van Gogh’s death. He did not attend his friend’s funeral, but said – quite cruelly – that he wasn’t surprised by the suicide because he’d known all along Van Gogh was mad. And so the myth stuck…
And yet of the two artists, Gauguin was a fine one to talk about screw-loose behavior… This is him at the piano.
A number of expert art historians also believe Gauguin is the real culprit behind the ear-slicing incident, but Van Gogh, in typical self-deprecating fashion – and to preserve the art arrangement with his brother – took the rap for it.
I argue in my book The Murder of Vincent van Gogh that when he was shot – purposefully, with direct intent – a similar scenario played at as the one that did around the ear incident. As a result, a popular mythology has developed around the world’s most famous artist, one that is compelling but untrue, and less compelling than what actually happened.
Next year – 2020 – will be the 130th anniversary of the death of the great artist Vincent Van Gogh. Just in the last five years, huge swaths of the historicity of Van Gogh’s life story have been called into question, analysed and fine-tuned.
A few critical areas where we’ve seen significant shifts from the original story are in the way Van Gogh suffered a gunshot wound and died, as well as the Ear Narrative [how much ear was cut off, and the events surrounding that bloody incident].
Ironically, both these shifts apply directly to what one might call the True Crime Elements of the Van Gogh Mythology. The suicide narrative now feels more like a typical true crime scene, and the ear incident has a similar scenario now too also invoking motive, blood evidence, witnesses etc, in fact all those staples we associate with the true crime genre.
What this shows is that the history around Van Gogh is still changing, still evolving. As wildly famous as Van Gogh is today, one of the most expensive artists in the world, if you had to ask who murdered Van Gogh – and why – good luck getting a straight answers. Even expert historians can’t agree. Even the mainstream media and researchers dedicated to his life story can’t explain what really happened.
So when Willem Dafoe stepped forward for his role in At Eternity’s Gate I was looking forward to seeing the most modern rendition of the Van Gogh story; a retelling with all of the latest research spun together into something more cogent, coherent and authentic. That was the hope, the expectation.
Dafoe’s casting also meant the reach of this film would be greater, and so it was. After publishing The Murder of Vincent van Gogh, my book on the popular Dutch artist, in May 2018, I made Vincent van Gogh one of my Google alerts. It’s fair to say that I get more alerts on Van Gogh on a daily basis than for any of the other high-profile true crime cases on the list.
Around the world Van Gogh is not only popular but often top of mind. When manmade spaceships notice whirls of a certain kind on Jupiter, it reminds them of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Van Gogh is as part and parcel of the modern zeitgeist as Christmas, the Oscars, Facebook and The Big Bang Theory. But how much of the popular mythology is even true?
When psychologists and creatives try to unlock or fathom the keys to creativity, they turn to Van Gogh as both an example and a cautionary tale on how “madness” can inspire art.
If the suicide myth and the ear incident are two legs of the three-legged chair that is Van Gogh Lore, then the third leg is the myth of the man as a mad artist. In my book I investigated all three “legs”. I wanted to see how At Eternity’s Gate fared in handling these subjects.
Before dealing with the Good, Bag and Ugly of the film [ranked 6.9 on IMDb], let’s start with the name. At Eternity’s Gate is a giddy-sounding title for a rather different take by the great artist himself. Van Gogh painted various iterations of the same setup, an old man or woman bent over in despair beside a roaring hearth.
Since I knew the portent of the art, and since I’d seen the trailer, I sensed an immediate mismatch between the context of Van Gogh’s own words and sentiments [in terms of the specific “At Eternity’s Gate” artwork] and how the filmmaker was misinterpreting it.
Intuitively I was interested to watch this film but went in with low expectations. I was pleasantly surprised. The Good
The film opens with a black screen, and Dafoe talking simply, humanly, yet profoundly as Van Gogh. It rings true and elements of his opening gambit, such as “I wish they would only take me as I am”, resonate with words written in Van Gogh’s letter to his brother Theo dated [15-27 April 1882].
So it’s a good start. Using the artist’s own words [and he wrote hundreds of letters in his life] is a smart way to achieve the authentic man through the authentic voice. It’s been done before, of course, in the excellent Painted with Words film starring Benedict Cumberbatch.
The first visual of the film is jarring – appropriately – throwing the viewer into a random farm field, and the artist approaching a maid leading a flock of sheep. He approaches her and asks her if her can sketch her. She’s confused by this and so are we.
The colors are washed-out and desaturated, which suggests Van Gogh hasn’t quite found his eye on his canvas just yet, and needs to start seeing the world – well – differently.
Jump to Paris and a difficult art crowd where Van Gogh still isn’t well-known and can’t sell a damn thing. There we encounter Paul Gauguin, an artist who is better known in 1888 than Van Gogh, and who’s having better luck selling his wares to the same crowd.
Even so, the two strike up an unlikely friendship. Naturally it doesn’t do Gauguin any harm that Vincent’s brother is an art dealer.
The next jump is to a windblown house in Arles, in the south of France. It’s cold, and Van Gogh – forced to stay indoors – is getting stir crazy. He removes his shoes and we’re offered a floor eye-view of his flea bitten socks with toes poking out of holes. This is far and away the most authentic moment in the whole film, because more than painting or writing letters, Van Gogh was a rambler. Every scene he painted he walked to, and he walked a lot. When he lived in London as a youth he rambled from London to Brighton, a distance of 53 miles. On another occasion he walked over 80 miles from London to Ramsgate.
It’s also the depiction of Van Gogh doing his thing that feels real. The glint of the oils on the palette, the sound of the brush lightly scratching on the canvas. The way the white canvas begins to fill up, almost magically, with those boots on the floor.
But this is where the first signs of trouble creep in. The boots are based on reality, and the photography isn’t a bad match for the painting. The problem is the art that is created on camera looks nothing like the painting Van Gogh executed, a detail one would expect more care and consideration in a biopic about a world famous artist and how he sees the world.
Since Willem Dafoe fancies himself as something of an artist, this may be license taken [or given by the director] to give him free reign to “interpret” Van Gogh. Well, fine, to each his own but as misinterpretations go, this one isn’t little. It’s also quite vulgar. It’s doesn’t look for feel anything like a Van Gogh you’ve ever seen, and that’s a problem.
It’s a shame, because the optics and atmosphere of everything else is just about right. It’s just the most important thing, how he looks and represents his boots on the floor that are misrepresented.
As a freelance photojournalist who wrote a series of articles on artists, and went out into the field to find the landscapes they painted [including of my own great grandfather, the Dutch artist Tinus de Jongh], I found this clumsy approach to Van Gogh’s work inaccurate and thus unacceptable.
Of the “three legs” to Van Gogh’s story, At Eternity’s Gate gets the most important part right – the lore. The basic stuff. The look and feel. To be fair, that shouldn’t be hard to do. It requires simply placing the artist where we know he was, and contextualizing the art we know he painted with real places. Incredibly, At Eternity’s Gate begins this process, but leaves out all the seminal works Van Gogh painted – from Starry Night painted at the asylum of St. Remy to Wheatfield with Crows, painted just prior to his death in Auvers.
Why?
The Bad
Of course, part of what the filmmaker was trying to demonstrate through his own photographic palette was the arc of Van Gogh’s psychology, and part of that arc was simply showing how the landscape [and the man] transformed and came to life, vividly and colorfully. It’s a great premise, but sadly the filmmaker executed on it poorly, that is to say, not very “artfully” or “creatively”.
An excellent artistic and creative telling of the story through Van Gogh’s art work is successfully achieved through Loving Vincent [ranked 7.9 on IMDb].
Not only is the animated version viscerally and visually authentic, it’s also narratively and factually a masterpiece. In fact it was Loving Vincent, and the detective-story-plot, that inspired me to investigate Van Gogh’s story as a possible true crime case, and it turned out it was.
Although the portrait of Van Gogh in this film has its moments, it’s not a definitive portrait, not even close. Many others have tried, many have failed, and a few have come closer, a lot closer than this film. Simon Schama’s Power of Art series [IMDb rating 8.6/10] is a credit to the Van Gogh story, even with the miscast Andy Serkins playing the tortured artist.
[vimeo 100156306 w=640 h=352]
As the Good Times reviewer Lisa Jensen put it: But for all of Schnabel’s determined technique, nothing in his movie ever quite achieves the emotional clarity of a single Van Gogh painting.
One rather has the impression the filmmaker so hastily put together his film he forgot to actually study a painting and feel the artist’s own idiosyncratic message. In other words, what we’re seeing isn’t Van Gogh but Director Julian Schnabel’s Van Gogh. The Ugly
If only Schnabel had shown us the real Van Gogh, his movie would likely have one best picture, and possibly best actor. Perhaps someday if my book is turned into a movie that will happen [hey, crazier things have happened].
For me the worst part of the film was the final third, which deals with the seminal moments of Van Gogh’s life. My impression was that Schnabel read a few newspaper articles and excitedly, feverishly sticky taped them into his script.
The ear narrative is nicely woven into the film, especially the sketch of the ear by the doctor, and the “interview” with Van Gogh post mutilation. But this is where Schnabel exposes himself for failing to figure out his own story. As the ear narrative plays out the director finds himself unable to account for it. How did it happen? Why did it happen? Ah well, we’ll leave it the viewer to figure out.
And then we’re left with the biggest mystery of all. How Van Gogh was shot, and by whom? Once again Schnabel has taken a little information [that there’s evidence the wound wasn’t self-inflicted] and then ran with it.
Once again, he finds himself unable to account for the dialogue that must have followed this shooting incident in the little room where Van Gogh suffered for over 30 hours, and then died.
Here Schnabel walks out on his own story, providing a few seconds of screen time as a way to cheat the real questions haunting Van Gogh’s final hours. It’s the ultimate cop out, and the reason this film went out with a whimper amongst critics and audience alike, despite a tsunami of press and PR, and a top notch cast.
The biggest, most glaring omissions for me in the film was the absence of the word “syphilis” in the context of Van Gogh’s mental and physical health, or lack of. His brother, who died just 6 months after Van Gogh [of syphilis] is a picture of health in this story, another indication the director simply didn’t do rudimentary research, or think logically about his story.
A runner-up to the medical aspect is Van Gogh’s reputation as skirt chaser. There is virtually zero attempt to dramatize any of Van Gogh’s infamous dalliances, and as such, it’s no surprise that at the very end Schnabel’s story collapses in on itself.
So who killed Vincent van Gogh, where and why? Great things are done by a series of small things brought together. – Vincent Van Gogh
February 28th, 2019
1. Weld County to release “2nd Chris Watts Confession” on March 7th – Greeley Tribune On Feb. 18, an interview took place between Watts and investigators with CBI, FBI, and the Frederick Police Department. Thursday’s release does not say where the interview took place, nor does it provide specific details about the interview. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation possesses documentation, including a written report and audio file from its interview with Watts. The information will be released to the public March 7. Although he pleaded guilty, Watts never disclosed how or why he carried out the murders. Sources close to the investigation say Watts has finally confessed those details. Chris Watts tells investigators more details about the murders of his wife, two daughters – Denver Channel Chris Watts provides new details on murders: Officials – ABC Chris Watts’ father, Ronnie Watts, said his son did not tell him the details about the conversation, but Ronnie Watts told ABC News Thursday, “In my heart I know he didn’t kill those girls.” Ronnie Watts said his son calls him every night and “knows the Bible inside and out.” “It’s over and done with,” Ronnie Watts said of the case. “I am confused why they [the investigators] went out there in the first place.”
2. What happened when Otto Warmbier was detained in North Korea?
Investigators have also found that a neighbor’s surveillance camera captured someone leaving Paul Caneiro’s home at about 2 a.m. on Nov. 20 and returning about two hours later, according to the affidavit. In that time, neighbors of Keith and Jennifer reported hearing gunshots.
Paul Caneiro had disconnected his own surveillance cameras at about 1:30 a.m. on Nov. 20, according to the affidavit. He told police that he may have disconnected the cameras because he thought they were causing the WiFi to run slowly, but investigators discovered that the cameras were hardwired, and did not run on WiFi.
3. Geologists have finally found exactly where some Stonehenge rocks came from, debunking old research – CNN “It remains one of the most remarkable instances of long-distance movement of megaliths in the ancient world, yet was curiously under-studied,” Pollard said. “I’m sure we’ll be back.”
4. Meet the Woman Living in Boulder’s Notorious JonBenét Ramsey House – Westword “This is all speculative, but based on the feelings we got from being there, we never felt the Ramseys were involved” in JonBenét’s death. “My husband is a marriage-and-family therapist, so we understand a little about dysfunctional families. And if that stuff had been going on behind the scenes, I don’t think we would have felt that way in the home.”
At 27 minutes, the Judge touches on #Rohde's defining identity trait – he's a salesman. That's what he tried to sell [aka bullshit] to the court – he pitched the spiel of a suicide. Sentenced to 20 years in prison, including for obstruction of justice. https://t.co/8qADLyRW36
February 26th, 2019
1. When a body is burned, cadaver dogs can no longer be used. So how does one find charred remains in a landfill? The same way dinosaur hunters and archaeologists look for fossils and buried treasures – by meticulous, systematic searching. How investigators will search a landfill for Kelsey Berreth’s remains – CNN It may sound like an impossible task: searching a quarter-acre of a landfill for charred, decomposed human remains three months after a person was last seen alive. But searchers are hopeful that they will find the remains of Kelsey Berreth and any other evidence that could shed light on her death. Berreth vanished on November 22 from where she lived near Woodland Park, Colorado. Patrick Frazee, her fiancé and the father of their daughter, is accused of murdering her and tampering with her body. A woman cooperating with law enforcement shared information that helped lead investigators to the Midway Landfill in Fountain, Colorado. Searchers will begin sifting through landfill detritus there on Tuesday and continue for at least 35 days until they make it through the area. Beginning Tuesday, Woodland Park detectives and other law enforcement officials will search through an area of 686,805 cubic yards, the department said in a statement. Ten searchers are expected to work eight hours a day for 35 days to make it through the primary target area, which measures 135′ by 32′ and nine inches deep. The entire search area is 250′ by 125′ and 25 feet deep. The estimated time frame could change based on their progress, Woodland Park Police Commander Chris Adams said. An excavator will remove the trash to another location and lay it out in lines so that searchers can sift through the material, Adams said. “It’s a slow, methodical search. We don’t want to miss anything. I think we owe it to Kelsey and her family to — to be as thorough as we can,” Adams said. The process resembles the procedure that forensic anthropologists use to search areas. Authorities begin landfill search for Kelsey Berreth’s remains – kktv.com
2. The video below talks about Chris Watts’ parents offering their son clemency in court. I believe it’s one of the reasons Watts committed the crimes and believed he’d get away with it, because he knew his parents would love him [and forgive, but most important, believe him] no matter what. On the night of August 16th, at around 20:00, Ronnie was telling his son he loved him, rubbing his back and embracing him, while the police were still searching for the the three bodies Watts had gotten rid of. If this doesn’t make a father angry, or doubtful, or hesitant in his love for his son, what would?
In the Oscar Pistorius trial the parents of murdered Reeva Steenkamp also forgave Oscar almost immediately. This is different because it’s the parents of the victim forgiving the killer. They said they didn’t wish to hold a grudge and were doing it out of their devotion to God. The problem with these public declarations is the public and the court is watching as well. If the family of the murder victim is so forgiving, who is the court to disagree [or so the thinking goes]. Oscar initially got off with a very light sentence.
In the Van Breda axe murder trial, many of his family members came forward to say they don’t believe he did this, and if they did they forgive him etc. There is something very distasteful about this. Would the murder victims be so forgiving? Should the court be so forgiving?
One aspect I don’t agree 100% with in the clip below is the selective way of blaming Cindy Watts for what she did or didn’t do [Shan’ann’s behavior towards her is regarded as completely irrelevant].
When Shan’ann went on Facebook and slandered her mother-in-law, a lot of what she was pissed off at wasn’t the nut stuff, it was Cindy saying “she needs to be tough, and to learn a lesson from that [not being given nuts]”. This was what infuriated Shan’ann the most – being undermined and overruled. And yet a lot of that is what was happening behind closed doors between Shan’ann and her husband.
For any marriage to work, it requires two people making an effort and acting right, not just one. True crime isn’t about one aggrieved party, it’s about the dynamics in the marriage that led to the divorce [the crime]. To argue that a breakdown came only from one side isn’t an accurate picture of how the world, or society works.
3. Yesterday one of my books got “Review Bombed” by a toxic fan from this site. This is part of the advent of social media – organized dissent. As a result, I won’t be posting any further content on CrimeRocket today, and I’m currently re-evaluating continuing with the Watts coverage beyond the end of this month [February]. Star Wars 9 Is Already Getting Review Bombed On Rotten Tomatoes – ScreenRant Star Wars 9 doesn’t come out for ten more months, but commenters are already review bombing the movie on Rotten Tomatoes. With Star Wars 9 still months away from hitting theaters, toxic fans are already at it again on the movie’s Rotten Tomatoes page, attempting to torpedo the film’s “want to see” rating by posting negative comments. Of course, none of the commenters in question have seen the movie, and Rotten Tomatoes has not as yet calculated an actual audience score. Many of the comments actually focus on lingering negativity over The Last Jedi, which was itself subjected to an organized campaign of Rotten Tomatoes trolling in an effort to hurt its score. Despite the campaign, The Last Jedi still went on to gross $1.3 billion at the global box office. Captain Marvel ‘review bombed’: Rotten Tomatoes just took MAJOR action against trolls – The Express A group of so-called ‘Marvel fans’, all white male, had taken to the site’s audience reviews section to blast the movie; taking offence to Brie Larson’s observation that almost all journalists she was encountering at film junkets were white males. When she said she wanted to help women and writers of color to get into those junkets, the trolls came out in force – claiming she was “anti white men” and that she “clearly doesn’t want me to see the movie”. It was, of course, all completely over-the-top – and Captain Marvel isn’t the first movie to suffer a “review-bombing” on Rotten Tomatoes. Last year’s Black Panther and 2017’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi – also perceived to be relatively progressive movies – suffered similarly. Captain Marvel’s audience anticipation score had plummeted down to a little over 20% at one point, but Rotten Tomatoes have now taken action.
February 25th, 2019
1. Chris Watts playing with Bella and Ceecee.
Amaral calls David Payne the biggest enigma of #McCann story, then ventures into Gaspar, pedophile theory etc. which I believe is hogwash. pic.twitter.com/ovUuhEh5Iu
February 21st, 2019
1. Video shows Shan’ann Watts shortly before death – CNN Within hours — possibly even minutes — Shan’ann was slain, authorities have said. Watts was sentenced to life in prison in November. Weld County District Attorney Michael Rourke says his office continues to receive daily phone calls, emails and letters containing everything from conspiracy theories to suggestions on follow-up investigations. “This has certainly permeated the conscience of a big section of the public and we continue to get correspondence on a daily basis,” Rourke says. Chris Watts: New footage shows pregnant wife shortly before husband killed her – The Mirror The new footage was obtained by HLN through an open records request to the Weld County District Attorney’s Office. The video had not been previously released by prosecutors.
2. Justice Department preparing for Mueller report as early as next week – CNN
On Nov. 22 around 4:30 p.m., Frazee called Kenney and told her, “You need to get here now. You’ve got a mess to clean up,” Slater said. “We lived such separate lives for so long,” Frazee told police during the recorded call. He never called police to report her missing for the 10 days between Thanksgiving and when he talked with police, Adams said after the recording ended. Tests confirmed that Berreth’s blood was found on the toilet, bathtub, trash can, parts of the floor and wall, vanity area, bathroom door hinges and electrical outlet. Slater said this evidence lead them to conclude she may have been killed in the bathroom. A bath mat was missing from the room. In addition, a cadaver dog at the home alerted authorities to the back of Berreth’s car at her apartment complex. An arraignment was set for April 8 at 8:30 a.m., with the judge giving Frazee’s defense attorneys time to go through what they said were more than 3,300 pages of discovery evidence in the case. The judge also ruled that the arrest affidavit for Frazee would be unsealed following Tuesday’s hearing — likely on Wednesday morning.
When Kenney entered Berreth’s townhome in late November, blood was splattered on the walls, floor and children’s toys, said Agent Greg Slater. Kenney spent three to four hours cleaning, bleaching the walls and floors, removing the curtains and couch pillows and hunting for a tooth in the air duct vent that Berreth’s fiance and alleged killer told her to find, Slater said. Frazee allegedly took matters into his own hands, blindfolding Berreth with a sweater and bludgeoning her with a baseball bat. During the two months before the murder, suspected killer Patrick Frazee allegedly had urged Kenney three times to kill Berreth — once by drugging her macchiato as a way to “get rid of her” and two other times with an aluminum bat and a metal rod, Slater said. Cellphone records from the day of Berreth’s disappearance showed that Frazee called his mother, Sheila, about 4:24 p.m, Slater said. His phone connected to the tower that services Berreth’s house. At 4:37 p.m., Frazee called an Idaho number belonging to Kenney — also in the vicinity of Berreth’s home — and received a return call from that number a few minutes later. Cmdr. Chris Adams told the court that the day after Berreth went missing, her phone and Frazee’s phone were “hitting off” the tower that services Frazee’s Florissant home.Kenney said she believed the couple’s daughter was in danger under Kelsey Berreth’s care and that she “couldn’t live with herself if something happened” to the child.
4. Proposed testosterone limit ’flawed’ and ‘hurtful’, say Caster Semenya’s lawyers – Guardian Caster Semenya’s lawyers have hit back at the IAAF on day two of their hearing at the court of arbitration for sport, claiming the world governing body’s proposed testosterone limit for women is “flawed” and “hurtful”. The two-time Olympic 800 metres champion is challenging the IAAF’s revised eligibility rules for female athletes at the Lausanne-based tribunal in a landmark case for intersex and transgender women in all sports.
February 19th, 2019
1. Trauma/Cadaver dog alerts in basement
NEW: explosive info as DA Dan May states that Patrick Frazee's mom, Sheila, saw the "burning of the black tote' implying #KelseyBerreth 's body was burned after she was murdered and that the body was in tote. Judge will decide whether or not Sheila Frazee will testify after lunch
investigators did luminol tests 12/6 on #KelseyBerreth 's apartment and found kelsey's blood DNA profile all over the bathroom including on the toilet, trash can, floor, wall and door hinges. Pros – is it fair to say Kelsey met with foul play? Slater – yes. #patrickfrazee
CBI: Krystal told investigators she bought the coffee at Starbucks. Went to Berreth's home with it. Said she posed as a neighbor with a fake name and even gave Berreth the coffee. Krystal said she did *not poison it #9news
Frazee suggested Kenney taint a caramel macchiato from Starbucks with ambien or other narcotics to kill Kelsey Berreth. Kenney said she carried some of those drugs as a nurse. @KOAA#KelseyBerreth#PatrickFrazee#KrystalKenney
We are still in the courtroom. DA is pleading for Sheila Frazee’s testimony because he believes it will help the case. Sheila’s Attorney is fighting the plea. @KKTV11News
Kenney went so far as to buy a caramel macchiato at the Starbucks inside the Woodland Park Walmart Sept. 23 and pose as a neighbor thanking Berreth for corralling her dogs that had gotten loose. Berreth told Kenney, who used a bogus name, that she had not helped with the dogs but accepted the unlaced drink anyway. Slater said Frazee was angry when he learned the coffee hadn’t been tainted. Kenney also told Slater that Frazee claimed Berreth was a “terrible mother” who was physically abusive toward their daughter and used drugs and alcohol. Frazee also allegedly told his mother to lie about Berreth in a campaign to paint her as a bad mother,said 4th Judicial District Attorney Dan May. May also said Shiela witnessed the burning of evidence in the killing. The testimony framed Kenney as a key figure in the investigation.She had previously accepted a plea deal in exchange for her testimony against Frazee. Cellphone records from the day of Berreth’s disappearance detailed by Slater showed that Frazee called his mother, Shiela, about 4:24 p.m. His phone connected to the tower that service’s Berreth’s house. At 4:37 p.m., Frazee called an Idaho number belonging to Kenney — also in the vicinity of Berreth’s home — and received a return call from that number a few minutes later. Cmdr. Chris Adams, the prosecution’s first witness, told the court that the day after Berreth went missing, her and Frazee’s phones were “hitting off” the tower that services Frazee’s Florissant home. Kenney was seen on surveillance video Nov. 24 at a Conoco in Florissant. Also captured in the video at the same time was Frazee filling up a 5-gallon jug of gasoline. On Nov. 25, Kenney, 32, and Berreth’s phones simultaneously pinged in Grand Junction. That same day, Berreth’s supervisor got a text from her saying she wouldn’t be at work and was going to visit her grandmother, Slater said. Kelsey’s mother, Cheryl, told Colorado Bureau of Investigations Agent Gregg Slater that Kelsey never mentioned the trip. Cheryl also told Slater, the prosecution’s second witness Tuesday, that she got a text from Berreth’s phone Nov. 24saying she’d call the next day. That call never came, said Slater.Sean Frazee, Patrick’s brother and a Colorado Springs police officer, dropped by Patrick’s house at 2:30 p.m. Nov. 22, Adams said. Patrick was not home at the time, but when Sean arrived “a little later,” Patrick was there with his and Berreth’s 1-year-old daughter. Nothing was out of the ordinary, said Adams.Adams added that Patrick and Sean are estranged. Berreth’s body has not been located. During Tuesday’s cross examination, Adams said on Dec. 4 a cadaver dog hit on a location on the ground next to a car parked in front of Berreth’s house.It is the only location on which a dog has indicated. Family members reported finding blood when they went to Berreth’s house Dec. 6, Adams said.Adams also described a Dec. 2 recorded call between Frazee and an officer to the court. Frazee said to the officer that Berreth told him she wanted to end their relationship. She wanted “space,” he told police. “We’d figure out custody arrangements from there.” In 2017, Frazee took Berreth’s gun, said Slater. The couple was arguing about financeswhen Berreth said, “Maybe I would be better off dead” and pointed the gun at her head. Frazee’s mother was called by prosecutors to the stand Tuesday prior to Adams and Slater’s testimony. A judge ruled in favor of her attorney’s representation that she would invoke the 5th Amendment at the start of the hearing. He will rule again after a lunch break. Before Tuesday, the only possible motive for the presumed killing was found in an amended complaint filed Friday in U.S. District Court in the wrongful-death lawsuit brought by Berreth’s family against Frazee. In it, they claim Frazee, who had the keys to Berreth’s townhome, demanded full custody of their daughter and killed her when she refused. The case, which has attracted a national spotlight, has also led to a custody battle over the couple’s daughter pitting Berreth’s parents against Frazee’s mother. A judge has granted temporary custody to Berreth’s parents.
Agent Slater says Lee told him she had a THIRD chance to “get rid of Kelsey” this time with a bat. Krystal came back a week after Oct 15th. Waited for Kelsey outside her home with a bat. @KKTV11News
Kenney brought gloves, a hair net, two trash bags, bleach, a white body suit (to keep things off her person) and booties (shoe covers). She brought those supplies from home, Slater says, because she had them from painting her home. @KOAA#KelseyBerreth#PatrickFrazee
Krystal told Slater some of Kaylee’s toys were covered with blood and #PatrickFrazee told her to look for a tooth near an air duct. Krystal began to clean up. @KKTV11News
Going room by room. In the living room, Frazee told Kenney to grab a sweater, look for a tooth in a vent & clean up Kaylee’s toys covered in blood. @KOAA#KelseyBerreth#PatrickFrazee#KrystalKenney
Court testimony from CBI agent: Krystal Lee says she went into #KelseyBerreth ‘s condo and “it was horrific.” There was blood everywhere. She said Frazee had instructed her to clean it up.
Courtroom testimony from CBI agent: Krystal Lee says Frazee told her that he blindfolded #kelseyberreth with a sweater for a guessing game, then hit her with a bat. @KDVR
Slater: Krystal says the black tote was used to carry #kelseyberreth's body. #PatrickFrazee had it in the back of his truck. He had Thanksgiving dinner with his family after killing her.
Slater: Frazee put #kelseyberreth's body on a stack of hay in a barn. #PatrickFrazee told Krystal that Kaylee was in another room sitting on a chair during the murder.
Slater: Krystal did not see #KelseyBerreth in the tote but could see a lump. #PatrickFrazee said in the tote was Kelsey's body and the bat used to beat her.
Kenney says Frazee had Thanksgiving dinner with his family and then took black tote with Kelsey's body in it out to Nash Ranch in Fremont County and put it on top of a stack of hay. #PatrickFrazee#KelseyBerreth#KrystalKenney
With #KelseyBerreth’s body in Toyota Tacoma, they drive to #PatrickFrazee’s property. There, he used gasoline and oil to burn tote containing #KelseyBerreth’s body and baseball bat that killed her. @csgazette
BREAKING: Slater: #PatrickFrazee put Kelsey’s body back in his truck went back to his property. Put the tote in and put her in a trough. He got wood and set Kelsey’s remains on fire. @KKTV11News
She threw the keys (presumably to Berreth’s townhome) into a gorge in Gooding, Idaho. Kenney told investigators about her route back to Twin Falls. It matches the phone records. She then burned Kelsey’s phone & a burner phone in her yard. @KOAA#KelseyBerreth#KrystalKenney
Slater says along with the body, #PatrickFrazee and Krystal Lee burned the bat used to kill #KelseyBerreth and the trash bags from the crime scene @KKTV11News
Krystal was instructed to text Frazee from #KelseyBerreth's phone saying, "Do you even love me anymore." She was also instructed to text Doss Aviation. #PatrickFrazee
The murder, according to Kenney (through Frazee), happened in a back office/second bedroom, Slater said. When Kenney went back to Frazee’s home, Slater says Frazee gave Kenney the cell phone. Kenney took Berreth’s purse & took it. @KOAA#KelseyBerreth#PatrickFrazee
#PatrickFrazee wanted to make it look like #KelseyBerreth went off and that's why he asked Krystal to take the gun. Slater says he wanted it to look like she had gone off and killed herself.
The gun is coming up in conversation now. The gun was recovered from Mark Pierson. The gun was proven to belong to #KelseyBerreth. Pierson told investigators the gun came from Krystal. #PatrickFrazee
THREE TIMES: Idaho nurse Krystal Lee Kenney took steps to carry out murder of #KelseyBerreth before changing her mind and refusing to go through with it; now claims #PatrickFrazee killed Berreth himself https://t.co/2H1pADbvJ4
According to Krystal #PatrickFrazee picked up #KelseyBerreth's burnt remains and told Krystal he'd either dump them in the river or the dump. Which could be why we've heard of investigators in contact with Waste Management facilities.
#KelseyBerreth is dead because #KrystalKenney couldn’t be bothered with going to the police after 3 separate solicitation attempts by #PatrickFrazee. Three different occasions she traveled to CO to help. She’s just as much of a piece of shit as he is.
4. A mother’s love: Rohde’s mom pleads for him – TimesLive Be lenient for the children’s sake, Rohde’s mom begs judge – iol Brenda – a shareholder in Lew Geffen Sotheby’s – and two of Jason’s friends gave witness to his character before his sentencing. Rohde, a former Lew Geffen Sotheby’s International chief executive, was found guilty of murdering his wife, Susan Rohde, and obstructing the ends of justice by staging her suicide. Susan’s body was found in a locked bathroom off a room she shared with Rohde at the Spier Wine Estate Hotel, in Stellenbosch, on July 24, 2016. State advocate Louis van Niekerk put it to Brenda that testifying about her son’s character put her “in a terrible position as a mother”. He also suggested that there was an element of bias, to which Brenda replied: “I have just stated the facts. I am here to tell the truth and support my son.”
#Rohde Brenda: My husband and I came to a mutual agreement to separate and then divorce. He settled in JHB and I went to my parents, who helped me with Jason as a toddler. Unfortunately my husband completely disappeared. @TeamNews24
He further told the court that Rohde was very intelligent and a very successful businessman and he (Livingstone) had never observed any signs of violence in Rohde in the years he had known him as a friend. State advocate Louis van Niekerk told the court that the picture that the defense witness was projecting was completely different compared to what the court had found in Rohde’s character. “The court made some very harsh findings on his actions and also pertaining to his character related to the facts before the court. You haven’t read the judgment but I’m not going to take you back there. But it completely differs from the picture that you project here for us today compared to what the court said,” said Van Niekerk.
IAAF president Sebastian Coe, arriving at the court, said: “Today is a very, very important day. “The regulations that we are introducing are there to protect the sanctity of fair and open competition.” The chief advocate for Athletics South Africa, Norman Arendse, said Semenya would give evidence. “The whole week is going to be important. Obviously the evidence will be evaluated and assessed at the end of the process this week. So today this is the start,” he told reporters. The issue is highly emotive.When British newspaper The Times reported last week that the IAAF would argue that Semenya should be classified as a biological male – a claim later denied by the IAAF – she hit back, saying she was “unquestionably a woman”. In response to the report, the IAAF – stressing it was referring in general terms, not to Semenya in particular – denied it intended to classify any DSD athlete as male. But in a statement, it added: “If a DSD athlete has testes and male levels of testosterone, they get the same increases in bone and muscle size and strength and increases in haemoglobin that a male gets when they go through puberty, which is what gives men such a performance advantage over women. “Therefore, to preserve fair competition in the female category, it is necessary to require DSD athletes to reduce their testosterone down to female levels before they compete at international level.” Semenya is not the only athlete potentially affected – the silver and bronze medallists in the Rio Olympics 800m, Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi and Kenya’s Margaret Wambui, have also faced questions about their testosterone levels. But it is Semenya, who also won Olympic gold in 2012 and has three world titles to her name, who has led opposition to the proposed rules. Matthieu Reeb, CAS Secretary General, said the case was highly unusual. “It is unusual and unprecedented because we never had a such a case at CAS,” he said. “What is going to happen I am not able to say, but it is going to be important for sure.” South Africa’s sports minister Tokozile Xasa argues that the rules are “discriminatory”.
February 17th, 2019
1. Armchair Detective is at it again.
This time a post-it is being conflated as metadata “proving” Watts was “secretly” filing for divorce on August 24th in Weld County family court. Does Armchair Detective identify where he found the scrap of paper in the Discovery Documents [it’s on page 169].
This conspiracy theory is specific and thus easy to disprove.
August 24th was the date of their court appearance because they were being sued by the Wyndham Hill Homeowner’s Association. The original civil claim was filed on July 12th against the couple to be heard in the Weld County District Court.
There’s also this from the Coloradoan:
The local court’s own procedures describe a protocol of 30 calendar days allowed to pay fines, and after 45 days of non-payment a delinquency notice is issued.
So an appearance roughly six weeks after the docket was opened fits with the protocols for delinquent payments on fines.
The delinquency aspect with Wyndham Hill makes sense given they were also behind on their previous three mortgage payments. They’d also received a letter from Chase Bank alerting them to their delinquent home loan. The monthly mortgage payment was $2700. At the time of the murders Watts had $2000 in his Chase check account, and $1500 in his USAA checking account. All credit cards were maxed out.
In other words, there is far more documented, timeline and procedural evidence proving the civil claim than a divorce. That’s not to say the couple hadn’t spoken about divorce, just that there is no evidence either of them had instituted any kind of formal process against one another. That this was in the offing over that final weekend, naturally, there can be no doubt.
So the overall premise of the Secret Divorce Conspiracy is catchy – that Watts secretly filed for divorce. But it misses the point. If Shan’ann didn’t know about it until the day of her death then he hadn’t actually filed for divorce. And the murders occurred not because he did file for divorce, but because he didn’t, told Kessinger he had but somehow felt he couldn’t.
Even in his interrogation/confession with the FBI, Watts said he told Shan’ann he wanted to separate, not that he wanted a divorce.
Moreover the backwards slanting print-style handwriting on the post-it [similar to the writing on the other two yellow post-its] appears to be from Frederick PD Officer Patricia Cochran’s notes, not a note or diary entry made by Watts himself.
The format of the Discovery Documents with regard to the Supplemental Reports, is that the cover sheet provides a date, time, location and typed narrative, signed off by the officer assigned to a particular task, along with attachments of all of their written notes and other digital data [bodycam footage, audio recordings] where applicable.
2. Possible motive for missing Colorado mom’s murder surfaces for the 1st time in wrongful death lawsuit – ABC
February 16th, 2019
1. Chris Watts and Steven Avery Interviews Compared
“(#ChrisWatts is likely) making 10 cents an hour stamping license plates," an attorney for Shanann Watts' parents said. "He's spending 23 hours a day in a cell, sitting there. He has the next 30 years to think of what he’s done.”https://t.co/9X0fkmY99H
February 13th, 2019
1. Christopher Watts not fighting wrongful death lawsuit filed by Shanann Watts’s family after murder convictions – Daily Camera Watts has not hired an attorney in the case and has not filed a single document in the suit since it was filed, court records show. The Rzuceks filed a motion for default judgment on Monday, court records show. A default judgment can be awarded if the defendant doesn’t respond to a suit, triggering an automatic win for the plaintiffs. “He has failed to answer the case against him,” according to Steven Lambert, an attorney with Greeley’s Grant & Hoffman Law Firm, who is representing Shanann’s parents. Lambert said he expects the judge to make a decision on the motion in the next week or two. If the judge finds that Watts is in default, the court will next have a hearing in which a jury decides how much money the Rzuceks should be awarded in damages.Watts likely will appear by telephone for that hearing, Lambert said.
2. Nurse Who Hid Evidence for Accused Killer in Colo. Mom’s Murder Was ‘Very, Very Scared’ He’d Kill Her, Too – People A frightened Kenney had confided to her friend Michelle Stein that she had a role in the coverup, Stein told CBS News. “I will just tell you Krystal was very, very scared,” said Stein. “Krystal’s a very level-headed, kind, fun-loving, happy-go-lucky person. She’s a tough cowgirl. But she was absolutely scared and extremely upset.”
Is that a good reason to help someone cover up a murder?
3. Parents still grieving one year after Parkland school shooting – wptv
12 months, since Parkland Feb. 8, 2019 1,149 young lives lost – Miami Herald The 12-month period starting Feb. 14, 2018, saw nearly 1,200 lives snuffed out. That’s a Parkland every five days, enough victims to fill three ultra-wide Boeing 777s. The true number is certainly higher because no government agency keeps a real-time tally and funding for research is restricted by law…
4. Willem Dafoe Talks Offering a “Whole Different Take” on Vincent van Gogh in ‘At Eternity’s Gate’ – Hollywood Reporter Have you gotten any surprising audience reactions to the movie? Just how it deeply affects people. People think they know about van Gogh, but this gives a whole different take on him.Julian somehow was able to get around this kind of cartoon of van Gogh as the tortured loser artist who didn’t sell a painting. He was able to tap into the joyous aspect of making the paintings, without going against the information we have. He was really able to tap into the joy this man must have felt in his prolific — troubled but prolific — years of almost a painting a day toward the end of his life.
Last night I watched #ateternitysgate featuring Willem Dafoe. After researching and writing about the world's most famous artist I was interested to see the modern take on his life & death. I'll be writing a review and critique on the film – watch this space. #VincentvanGogh
February 12th, 2019
1. I don’t agree with the tone and many of the sentiments in this video, but some of the ideas are worth considering. The video also contains yet another instance of ordinary people labeling other ordinary people implicated or associated with a crime as a “psychopath”. Psychopath and narcissist seem to be the go-to terms these days for anyone you don’t understand or agree with. Probably when today’s teenagers argue, picking up a cue from their parents, that’s what they call each other. It’s juvenile and doesn’t belong in true crime.
https://youtu.be/cemEdTERM9s
2. Making A Murderer: Key Pieces Of Evidence The Show Leaves Out – ScreenRant
It’s instructive that this analysis doesn’t come from the mostly braindead mainstream media, but from a news site dedicated to reviewing movies and tv. It shows just how lazy and uncritical much of the MSM is these days.
A few highlights: Dassey’s Confession Brendan Dassey’s supposed “forced” confession is shown in short clips on Making A Murderer, so viewers never really got to hear all the chilling details that came out of his mouth. The reality is, Brendan’s confession lasted for hours, and new portions of the transcripts have surfaced that are very specific and equally disturbing. Details of these transcripts include how many shots were fired into Halbach’s head, and how the entire murder was premeditated because she “looked good and was pretty nice.” Child Molestation While the Netflix documentary makes Steven Avery out to be a pretty harmless guy, it seems like he might be anything but, especially around children. One particular phone conversation between Brendan Dassey and his mother was cut from the documentary completely. So, what were they trying to keep hidden? According to transcripts of the conversation, Dassey told his mother, “I even told them about Steven touching me,” then mentioned his brothers had been touched by Steven Avery as well. Red Flags While he was in prison, Steven Avery planned the torture and killing of a young woman, and fellow prisoners who served time with Avery before Halbach’s death also claimed that Avery talked about and drew diagrams of a torture chamber he planned to build upon his release. The Appleton Post Crescent also included statements from two women who claimed they were raped by Avery, with an affidavit saying that Avery admitted his guilt to his fiancé.
Purchase TCRS’ take on the Avery case at this link.
4. World’s biggest drug lord Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán is found guilty on all counts – CNN After the jury left the room, Guzman waved and smiled at his wife, Emma Coronel, a former beauty queen and courtroom regular who smiled back and touched her hand to her heart. “Good, thank you,” she said when asked how she felt after the verdict. Over two and a half months, the jury heard testimony about unspeakable torture and ghastly murders, epic corruption at nearly every level of Mexico’s government, narco-mistresses and naked subterranean escapes, gold-plated AK-47s and monogrammed, diamond-encrusted pistols. El Chapo jury deliberations will stretch into a second week. Here’s why jurors may be taking their time.The prosecution’s case featured 200 hours of testimony from 56 witnesses. Fourteen of those witnesses — mostly admitted drug traffickers and cartel associates — cooperated with prosecutors in hopes of reducing their own prison sentences. There were also surveillance photos, intercepted phone calls and text messages involving Guzmán, as well as exhibits of blingy firepower and bricks of cocaine that dropped with the force of potato sacks. In contrast, defense attorneys called just one witness and focused on undermining the credibility of cooperating witnesses.
February 11th, 2019
1. Some recent commentary highlighting Watts’ cowardice. Did his weakness as a man play into the heart of why these unspeakable crimes took place?
More conspiracies doing the rounds now in the Chris Watts case. Now it’s that Nichol Kessinger was pregnant with Watts’ child. The idea for this conspiracy seems to have spun up around the Thayers’ recently announcing their second pregnancy on Facebook.
https://youtu.be/K152Ew8IZek
2. Mom allegedly kills son, 2, by bashing him with rock in the veld – News24 The murder shocked residents on social media, with some commenting that conditions were dire in the town…
This illustrates how and why context is important. Happy, harmonious, authentic and cohesive individuals [and communities] are less likely to engage in crime than compromised, fractured, duplicitous and incoherent individuals [and communities]. Wider ranging environmental forces, especially if they are deteriorating, such as financial hardship or illness, can exacerbate the fault lines already present in the human psyche. A pregnancy is a hybrid of internal and external factors that can overwhelm individuals and families if other burdens are already chronic and in play.
February 10th, 2019
1. The horrors of buying a house you can’t afford.
2. In true crime, words – semantics – matter. In criminal trials, words add up ultimately to a sentence which either deprives the defendant of his freedom, or grants it.
In ordinary society, in families and friendships, words also matter. Concentrate today on choosing yours wisely.
“If thoughts corrupt language, language can also corrupt thought.” – George Orwell
February 6th, 2019
1. Did Patrick Frazee “learn” from the Chris Watts case? In other words, is there Criminal Intertextuality at work here?
2. Idaho nurse charged with tampering with physical evidence in Kelsey Berreth murder case
3. Marcia Clark says O.J. Simpson trial made her a ‘depressed person’ as she looks ahead in new show ‘The Fix’ – FoxNews
4. Settlement reached in Rebecca Zahau civil case – CBS A civil case regarding the death of 32-year-old Rebecca Zahau, whose bound and nude body was found hanging from a balcony at a historic Coronado mansion more than seven years ago, was dismissed with prejudice on Wednesday. A jury previously found Adam Shacknai, the brother of Zahau’s boyfriend, liable in her death and awarded her family $5 million, despite a law enforcement ruling that her death was a suicide. The dismissal vacates the jury’s verdict due to a settlement reached between her family and Adam Shacknai’s insurance company, for an undisclosed sum. Following the proceedings, Adam Shacknai spoke outside the courtroom professing his innocence and saying he never touched Rebecca. He also made it clear he did not take part in any settlement talks. He spoke for about 20 minutes to reporters and also talked about the Zahau family’s attorney Keith Greer, the Zahau family, the judge and the jury during his civil trial.
Adam Shacknai’s response when asked “did u kill Rebecca Zahau?” Civil trial is now over. His insurance company and the Zahau family reached a settlement @CBS8 pic.twitter.com/1FwJn1Z8HH
5. Review: ‘At Eternity’s Gate’ has its flaws, but Willem Dafoe is flawless – The National When conversation does occur, it is almost always vital, such as the brief exchanges that manage to show the deep bond between van Gogh and his brother Theo (Rupert Friend), or a heart-wrenching [fictional] dialogue during his incarceration in an asylum where he debates art, God, and eternity with a resident priest (Mads Mikkelsen).
Based on the paperwork filed, police believe Kenney destroyed evidence on Nov. 24. That’s two days after Berreth was last seen publicly. #KelseyBerreth#PatrickFrazee@KOAA
NEW TODAY: More court documents were made public today in state’s case against Krystal Kenney. Here’s the description of the one count of tampering she faces. The dates include Nov. 24 & 25. #KelseyBerreth#PatrickFrazee@KOAApic.twitter.com/ansXg7fbt1
February 3rd, 2019
This is Shan’ann’s final Facebook video, posted on August 8th.
https://youtu.be/uAKEPGA27LY
If Chris Watts was asked why he did what he did, and he gave an honest answer, it might go something like this…
“He kept grabbing my arm and begging, ‘Don’t kill him. You guys shouldn’t kill him. Please don’t kill him,’” Sandler said, adding that Kardashian was pleading with tears in his eyes.
The turning point in the standoff came when Simpson made it clear that the gun in his hands was not directed at law enforcement— “I would never point anything at you guys,” he could be heard saying — and he finally put the weapon down. The situation grew calmer — and just before 9 p.m., Simpson emerged from the Bronco and was finally arrested.
Las Vegas concert shooter Stephen Paddock may have been seeking a “certain degree of infamy” when he carried out the worst mass shooting in recent US history, but no single or clear motive has been found for the 2017 attack, the FBI said Tuesday.
The conclusion was reached in a report released by the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit, which looked into the October 1, 2017 massacre.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said a panel of experts had conducted an analysis of Paddock’s life and behavior leading up to the attack. Paddock acted alone and was not motivated by any ideological or political beliefs, the FBI said.
“There was no single or clear motivating factor behind Paddock’s attack,” the report said. “Throughout his life, Paddock went to great lengths to keep his thoughts private, and that extended to his final thinking about this mass murder,” the FBI said. It said no suicide note or any other communications related to the planning of the attack were found. “However, an important aspect of the attack was Paddock’s desire to die by suicide,” the FBI said.
3 pages? Worst mass shooting in history of USA. FBI releases 3 page report saying nothing. Zero. They have no clue. Sgt Schultz: "I KNOW NOTHING, I SAW NOTHING, I HEARD NOTHING." Biggest pathetic embarrassment in US law enforcement history. https://t.co/Ta2aCDd4lm
NPR colleague @LeilaFadel reports FBI concluded its report on Stephen Paddock & the Vegas shooting & determined he acted alone to plan a mass shooting over the course of a year, but there is still no discernible motive. All investigations now complete. We will never know why.
“Sunflowers” journeyed to 79 exhibitions between the end of World War II and 1973 when the Van Gogh Museum was established. After that, the painting was lent out just six times, traveling as far as Chicago and Tokyo. Its last journey, a trip to London, took place in 2014.
Some of the paints used by van Gogh that have naturally faded or darkened in the last century have also impacted the brightness and coloration of the painting. Over time, the colors will change even more. While there’s little that can be done to reverse the trend, when the painting goes back on display in late February, the museum will reduce the lights shining on the painting down to 50 lux, one-third the amount previously illuminating it…
6. In other news, Chris Watts Conspiracies are now the order of the day…
https://youtu.be/yWNPyLlkkQk
https://youtu.be/_suhdZ79_Tc
January 29th, 2019
1. Drilling Through Discovery is now a #9 Amazon Bestseller.
Hi Nick, I purchased Drilling through descovery last night.. couldn't put it down…I only had 3 hours sleep…I blame you…😁
Madeleine’s twin brother and sister Sean and Amelie, who are both aspiring amateur athletes, will have one special wish as they turn 14 on Friday – for their sister to come home.
A family friend said: “The twins have spent so much of their lives without their big sister but they never forget her and they pray for her. They just want her to be found safe and well after such a long time.”
2. In the mood for some Chris Watts conspiracy theory?
January 24th, 2019
1. When Agent Tammy Lee asks Watts what should happen to the person responsible [if his wife and children were murdered]. Watts’ voice breaks as he answers, “The worst possible thing…”
Elsewhere in the confession he sobs and wails for an extended time. He also fails the polygraph miserably. A psychopath would not show this kind of obvious emotion, and would be far more likely to pass a polygraph. Psychopaths are also skilled at deceiving people in general. They know how to act.
Watts has some social awkwardness issues, and he is something of an oddball, but he’s not even close to a psychopath. Many take comfort that he did what he did because he felt nothing. It’s the opposite. He did what he did because he was overwhelmed with emotions – including for his mistress, and the tangle of their financial mess, among many additional dynamics.
Notice the very long, very demonstrable answer Watts offers when Agent Lee asks him the simplest question: “How did you wake her up?” Also, note the many gestures he makes.
Get the True Crime Rocket Science take on the Amanda Knox case, arguably the most globally talked-out criminal trial in true crime history, at this link.
Ashley Cogburn told CBS News’ Nikki Battiste her friend had a lot going for her: a dream job, a baby and a fiancé. But she said Berreth also often appeared to be upset, and she believes, it had to do with Frazee.
“The moment that I found out that she had been missing, the first words that came out of my mouth were, ‘He did something to her,'” Cogburn said.
Cogburn said she saw red flags in their relationship, including that he was always “mad about something. She couldn’t win … the things that he would say to her were somewhat demeaning … I remember one time in particular she came to me and she was just crying. And Kelsey is this – she’s a tough girl … and I can’t remember specifics, but I just remember gathering, ‘This person is borderline emotionally abusive to you right now.'”
“During the Chris Watts case, it was made public that Chris’ alleged mistress also followed the group, sending screen shots of posts to local, state and federal authorities on the case.”
1. Sent in my one of the members of the Facebook group.
This video is one of many which show just how innocent these little girls were. I also noticed Ceecee’s nappy and underwear. The evidence says she was dressed in a nappy, underwear and nightgown – watching this video shows it must be part of her toilet training, putting on her pull ups nappy but also getting to wear big girl underwear. You also get to observe Ceecee’s care free nature, her bad cough and their strategy to keep her from running out of her room.
Greed, debt and a gambling problem drove a Southern California man to kill his business partner’s family with a sledgehammer and bury their bodies in the desert, prosecutors said Monday.
But the defense said authorities are charging the wrong man and the real culprit is another business partner.
Opening arguments were held in the trial of Charles “Chase” Merritt.
Merritt, 61, has pleaded not guilty. If convicted, he could face the death penalty.
Sean Daugherty, supervising deputy district attorney for San Bernardino County, told jurors that Merritt wrote checks for more than $21,000 on his partner’s online bookkeeping account after the family was last seen alive in February 2010, the Sun newspaper of San Bernardino reported.
“Greed, and greed’s child, fraud” were the motive, Daugherty argued.
When skeletal remains of the McStays were discovered last month near Victorville, detectives started taking a closer look at people associated with the Fallbrook family of four.
One of those individuals is Charles Ray Merritt, also known as Chase Merritt, a metal worker and former business partner of Joseph McStay.
Merritt, 56, is a hard man to find. CBS News 8 affiliates checked four different addresses and came up empty. We also left telephone messages and emails with Merritt and his associates, but received no response.
Merritt worked for Joseph McStay’s fountain design and manufacturing company in February 2010, when Joseph, his wife Summer, and their two young sons mysteriously went missing from their Fallbrook home.
Days after the McStay bodies were discovered on November 11 by an off-road motorcycle rider in the desert near Victorville, Merritt was interviewed by the online tabloid, Daily Mail, which quoted Merritt as saying:
“I was the last person Joseph saw. He came to Rancho Cucamonga on February 4 to talk to me about a huge business deal we had going on in Saudi Arabia.
We met for an hour-and-a-half for lunch. He was so excited. We had the Saudi Arabian project and a few other things going on. The business had never been so good and we were looking forward to the future. He did nothing to suggest there was anything wrong or untoward.
We both left and went home and I spoke to him on the phone about two or three times on his drive back to Fallbrook, all standard business stuff. The last time I spoke to him was around 6 o’clock.”
Opening statements are set for Monday, Jan. 7, in the death penalty trial of Charles “Chase” Merritt, accused in the 2010 slaying of the McStay family, and one more pretrial hearing Friday, Jan. 4, may decide whether to unseal a search warrant declaration used to collect DNA from Merritt’s brother.
A motion filed by defense attorneys said the DNA swab was taken from Bennett Merritt on Dec. 20, after jurors for the trial had been selected.
Defense attorneys want to know why, and suggest in court documents that prosecutors are turning their attention to Bennett Merritt as “somehow complicit in the McStay murders,” and were pushed by independent defense DNA investigations in the case.
“We want to see what the detective wrote to a judge,” defense attorney Rajan Maline said in a brief phone interview. He said any named source in the warrant declaration can be redacted, “but what did they say in the affidavit? We’re dying to see it.”
Join me on Daily Mail TV today as we investigate the cases of killer dad Chris Watts and accused killer dad Patrick Frazee. What's at the heart of both of these cases? Check your local listings! #ChrisWatts#kelseyberreth
Durst — whose past was detailed in an HBO documentary series — is set to go on trial Sept. 3 at the Airport Branch Courthouse in Los Angeles in connection with the killing of Susan Berman, 55, who was found dead in her home in Benedict Canyon on Christmas Eve 2000.
During a hearing Tuesday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mark E. Windham agreed with the prosecution’s contention that jurors should hear evidence about Morris Black’s killing in Galveston, Texas.
Deputy District Attorney John Lewin told the judge that the 75-year- old defendant “beat a murder in Galveston.”
“… He got away with it. … He’s not going to get away a second time,” the prosecutor said, referring to Berman’s shooting death.
What absolute nonsense. Jayme Closs was found after 3 months. Madeleine McCann has been missing more than 11 years. No comparison. >>> parents take hope from rescue of US teenage girl https://t.co/Zik1c6HYWa#McCann
Durst has been long estranged from his real estate-rich family, which is known for ownership of a series of New York City skyscrapers — including an investment in the World Trade Center. He split with the family when his younger brother was placed in charge of the family business, leading to a drawn-out legal battle.
According to various media reports, Durst ultimately reached a settlement under which the family paid him $60 million to $65 million.
“We went and looked at houses together in Fort Collins,” Bolte claimed, noting that he was about to move from his residence and Watts expressed an interest in moving in with him.
“I was planning on getting a two-bedroom apartment,” he said. “But Chris was like, ‘No, I’m going to be divorced. We need to look at three-bedroom houses and the girls can have a room.”
So Watts was going to go apartment hunting with Bolte, then with Kessinger?
The couple said they spoke to KMVT after their employee received threats and harassment on social media. They said Frazee was arrested four days after they called the FBI.
KMVT says that in the next interview segment, airing Friday, the Rockstahls discuss what was said in their conversation with the feds. In an interview slated for Sunday, the couple will share what they were told about Lee’s alleged trip to Colorado that prompted police to swarm Twin Falls, Idaho.
On Facebook, KMVT reporter Kelsey Souto said the Rockstahls believe that Lee was in fear for her life when Frazee allegedly solicited her to kill his fiancée.
After his release, Echols spent years avoiding talking about the spiritual practice that he now admits helped saved his life.
“I was really, really gun-shy. Whenever I’d talk about it, I’d always look over my shoulder to check and see if anyone could hear me,” recalls Echols, who now travels the country teaching “magick” workshops and is busy working on a follow-up book on the subject. “But I eventually realized I had to get over that hurdle—because if you give up the things you love out of fear then you’re not really alive.”
Scotland Yard’s investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance from an apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in 2007, aged three, has so far cost £11.75million.
January 9th, 2019
1. Kelsey Berreth’s human remains still missing.
We've received a number of media calls about the human remains located in Aguilar (near Trinidad). While the coroner has not made official identification, CBI agents do not believe the remains are Kelsey Berreth. https://t.co/Bg2M2hhfq7
After watching the video clip above, do you think Investigation Discovery answer or address the question why [which is the title of the clip]? If so, what answer do they provide?
An online register of actions in the case shows that Judge David A. Groner signed an order of dismissal on Wednesday, and that a settlement conference set for March 20 has been canceled, with the notation “case disposed.”
A clerk in Groner’s office on Friday said the order declares that the claims against those producing the documentary “are dismissed with prejudice and without costs or attorney fees. This is a final order and the case is closed.”
After handling many defamation cases for them over the past 20 years, hopefully this is my last defamation case for this fine family. https://t.co/1DMBuSNxyS
In a ruling dated Dec. 10, Boulder District Judge Thomas Mulvahill granted the Boulder department’s motion seeking to quash that subpoena and granted a protective order.
Mulvahill’s ruling noted that the murder case “remains open and has not been completed,” and also states that Boulder is not a party to the ongoing litigation between Burke Ramsey and producers of the controversial documentary.
But the judge also cited the fact that, with dozens of books and movies and television shows having picked at the bones of the beleaguered investigation for more than two decades, there aren’t a lot of secrets left.
Mulvahill’s ruling stated “…there is a tremendous amount of information available in the public domain such that Defendants can obtain the subpoenaed information from other sources or through discovery.”
In a separate filing, court records show that Burke Ramsey’s lawyers in November moved to withdraw their subpoena to the Boulder Police Department and dismiss their action.In a one-line ruling, Mulvahill granted that motion on Nov. 13.
The subpoena to Hunter had targeted a broad range of material, including every document relating to JonBenet’s death that he might have retained since leaving office.
Court records show that subpoenas in recent months also had been served on numerous other players in the Ramsey drama, including onetime Ramsey private investigator Ellis Armistead, former Boulder County District Attorney Mary Lacy, Boulder’s High Peaks Elementary School — which both Ramsey children attended at the time of JonBenet’s death — as well as Dr. Francesco Beuf, JonBenet’s pediatrician.
Divorced mother-of-two Krystal Lee is being investigated over her role in the mystery of the disappearance of Kelsey Berreth. Lee, 32, is believed to have been having an affair with Patrick Frazee who has been charged with Berreth’s murder even though her body has not been found.
Lee, who lives in Twin Falls, Idaho, has not been formally identified by police as the woman they are investigating, but sources confirm she is the woman involved.
Now DailyMail.com can reveal that that person is Lee, who works as a pre-op nurse at the St. Luke’s Magic Valley Medical Center in Twin Falls. She has now been placed on a leave of absence, the hospital confirms.
A friend of Patrick Frazee whose granddaughter was a frequent playmate of the accused killer’s daughter Kaylee shared shocking new details about his relationship with missing mom Kelsey Berreth.
Tamra Freeman told CNN that Frazee and Berreth had split back on New Year’s Day in 2018, just three months after the couple welcomed daughter Kaylee.
That contradicts comments made by Berreth’s aunt suggesting that her niece had broken up with Frazee on November 22, the day she was last seen in public.
3. Police bodycam footage in Chronological order the day Chris Watts’ family were reported missing
Will Chris Watts survive prison?
4. Animated video shows how Robert Durst could have murdered Morris Black in new court filing
3. Jayne Zmijewski, the dog handler in the Chris Watts case, appears in this trailer:
January 3rd, 2019
1. Rocket Science has been somewhat on the fence about Watts’ possible bisexuality. I’ve been unwilling to say he was definitely bisexual, but also unable to rule it out either. From the beginning there’s been smoke, but is there really fire? Like agent Coder, it was difficult to take Bolte seriously in the beginning, but over time, Bolte’s story seems to have some credibility.
Notice how CNN carefully refers to Bolte as Watts’ “alleged” gay lover even now. So they’re not 100% convinced either, yet interested enough to put Bolte on their platform a second time.
The Twin Falls nurse is suspected of ditching Kelsey Berreth’s cellphone in Idaho, sources told ABC News, which is declining to identify the woman until law enforcement releases her name.
The charges indicate authorities believe Mr Frazee tried to persuade another person or multiple people to kill Ms Berreth on at least three occasions between September 1 2018 and November 1, 2018.
Police allege she was slain on or around November 22 — the last day she was seen alive in public — almost three months after Mr Frazee’s first alleged attempt to arrange her murder.
Stephen Longo, an attorney with McDivitt Law Firm, helped explain the charges.
“It suggests to me that he probably asked the same person three times to either help or commit the crime individually,” Longo said. “It’s always possible, based on the three counts, that he asked three separate people.”
“It’s documented somehow, right? Whether it’s email, text message, recorded phone call, something where we have specifics where we can trace the date,” Longo said.
A person could also have supplied that information, he said.
Meanwhile, prosecutors still are not releasing evidence, including the probable cause affidavit to Frazee, citing the ongoing investigation. They did, however, ask the judge to allow consumptive evidence testing. News 5 asked Mark Pfoff, a former detective in the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office who worked on more than 50 homicide investigations, what that testing means.
“You’re usually looking at some form of body fluids, whether it’s blood or saliva or something like that,” Pfoff said. Pfoff said the amount of evidence is so small, it’s likely not visible to the eye — meaning testing that evidence once would prevent any follow-up testing moving forward.
Judge Linda Billings-Vela will decide on the motion for consumptive testing, as well as another motion on whether to allow Frazee himself to see the probable cause affidavit, in a Friday motions hearing.
Frazee is due back in court Thursday for a custody hearing. Both Berreth and Frazee’s mothers are vying for custody of the couple’s 1-year-old daughter.
January 2nd
Which shirt was hung on the hanger? An orange shirt, or a white shirt?
Looking at a video from the Watts home search w/ K9 cadaver dogs. both female officers clearly heard a child like laughter from S.W closet. Both verbally acknowledge hearing a kids laughter on video but not written on reports!!😫😫😫 #chriswatts#shanannwatts#wattsmurders 👻
It was Berreth however who had been hesitant to move in with her fiance because he still lived with his mother. She instead decided to get her own home after moving to Colorado from Washington to be with Frazee. In May, Berreth paid $184,900 for a two-bedroom home in Woodland Hills, where she lived with her daughter.
A family member claimed soon after Berreth went missing that she had split with Frazee on the day she was last seen, but that has never been confirmed by investigators. There were a number of details that had puzzled the public in the wake of Berreth’s disappearance, including the fact that she had just baked fresh cinnamon buns before she went missing.
Frazee also failed to report her missing, despite [having] their daughter Kaylee that entire time.
…the murder solicitation charge means that someone else was involved in the crime – but so far Frazee has been the only one who has been charged.
District Attorney Dan May said that to be charged with solicitation, the suspect would have to have done more than just ask someone to commit a murder on their behalf,the Post reported…
The narrative for the solicitation charges indicate Frazee had been trying since Sept. 1 to persuade another person to participate in the killing, and the first-degree murder charge involved an accusation of robbery in connection with the killing.
Thus far, the arrest affidavit, which lays out the facts of the case that are the basis from the charges, has been sealed. Even Frazee and his public defenders have been prevented from seeing it.
As to consumptive testing planned by DA, it's hard to say what evidence is. Only that it's so small testing will destroy it. @csgazette#KelseyBerreth#Frazee
Quick explainer on #Frazee's five felonies. Two are first-degree murder under different theories of crime. One theory alleges Frazee killed #KelseyBerreth with intent and deliberation. Other alleges she died during commission of separate felony. @csgazette
The 59-year-old former Saudi insider turned criticwas strangled before he was cut up into pieces by a team of 15 Saudis sent to Istanbul for the killing, according to Turkish officials, with media reports suggesting the parts were dissolved in acid.
A-Haber said the bags and suitcases were put into a minibus which travelled the short distance from the consulate to a garage at the residence. The men are then seen taking them inside.
Question: Were his body parts in the garbage bags, in the suitcases or both?
In POST TRUTH, the 100th True Crime Rocket Science [TCRS] title, the world’s most prolific true crime author Nick van der Leek demonstrates how much we still don’t know in the Watts case. In the final chapter of the SILVER FOX trilogy the author provides a sly twist in a tale that has spanned 12 TCRS books to date. The result may shock or leave you with even more questions.
SILVER FOX III available now in paperback!
“If you are at all curious about what really happened in the Watts case, then buy this book, buy every one he has written and you will get as close as humanly possible to understanding the killer and his victims.”- Kathleen Hewtson. Purchase the very highly rated and reviewed SILVER TRILOGY – POST TRUTH COMING SOON.
TCRS MERCH available now – just in time for Christmas!
Book 5 – ALL NEW! “I have thoroughly enjoyed this audiobook…” – Connie Lukens. Drilling Through Discovery Complete Audiobook
Read the entire 9-Part TWO FACE series, the most definitive book series covering the Chris Watts Case
Visit the TCRS Archive of 100 Books dealing with all the world’s most high-profile true crime cases.
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Book 4 in the TWO FACE series, one of the best reviewed, is available now in paperback!
“Book 4 in the K9 series is a must read for those who enjoy well researched and detailed crime narratives. The author does a remarkable job of bringing to life the cold dark horror that is Chris Watts throughout the narrative but especially on the morning in the aftermath of the murders. Chris’s actions are connected by Nick van der Leek’s eloquent use of a timeline to reveal a motive.”
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