LOVE GONE WRONG-Caitlin Rother

put a loaded gun to her head. A woman with a history of violent drug addicted boyfriends kills her latest lover after only a few weeks together, alleging that he forced a gun into her mouth in a drug induced rage. A fifteen year old girl falls in love and wants to have a baby with a boyfriend who is four years older. Her mother, who wants to end the relationship, ends up dead after being stabbed, choked, and injected with

a syringe loaded with bleach. A sixteen year old girl and her twenty year old boyfriend conspired a fatally bludgeon her disapproving father with a baseball bat. In Georgia, a socialite wife of a multi millionaire is fatally shot by a flower delivery man on the day of a key divorce. Hearing a crooked businessman trying to go straight a shot in his driveway by a hitman wearing a ski mask and camouflage gear. A contract for higher murder advertised in

Soldier of Fortune magazine. A Gulf wer veteran and father of three is kidnapped, beaten, and stabbed by the lover of his on and off again wife who wants to collect life insurance metafits at pay off her house. In South Carolina, a woman goes to the electric chair after a vengeful over a dead calf turns fatal. The state's most prolific serial killer manages to kill a fellow prisoner while on death row, and a young white man tries to incite a race war by fatally shooting nine African

Americans during Bible study in a historic church. The book that we're featuring this evening is Love Gone Wrong from the Notorious USA Series with my special guest journalist and author Caitlyn Rother. Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Caitlyn Rother.

my blood. That's why I quit new papers. I wanted to work on a shorter number of stories and kind of go a little bit more in depth. So they're each kind of you know what we call shorts anywhere from mind range from I don't know, eighteen thousand to twenty three thousand words each state by state. And you know, I started out with South Carolina, the one about the dead calf. The Complicated Woman is the title of that one.

And I started looking for historic cases because I've never done that before, and I thought, well, that would be cool, that would be fun. I've always been kind of forced into the criteria of the publishers these days. They want these brand new cases that are on TV. I wanted to do something different, so my criteria. No one set this for me. I basically just looked what was to

what was interesting for me and something different. And because I've been having to write stories that everybody's kind of heard about already at least, you know, on the news or whatever, I wanted to pick some that were a little bit more obscure. So I ended up picking some notorious cases in South Carolina. There were three. It actually one of them was in the news and it's still in storm roof, the one about the guy who killed the people in the church. But I picked two older cases.

One Sue Lowe, who was the first woman in South Carolina to be electrocuted in the and so to get the death penalty. And then a guy, uh pee Wee Gaskins, who was also got the death penalty, but he was one of these guys who claimed to have killed you know, eighty to one hundred people, but you know, most people who knew him thought he was exaggerating. And there were fourteen murders, so I was kind of looking for, you know,

the worst but also unique. So and then in some of the other some of the other ones, which well, I'm sure we'll get to later, but kind of, you know, I wanted to do a mix, so state by state. In Florida, I found two pairs of where we had similar circumstances but different outcomes, very different outcomes, and so

there were two pairs of those. And then in Georgia, there was an FBI source that I had who I was working with a little bit on some documents and some interesting backstory and ended up putting together some stuff in Georgia. So it really there wasn't any one specific thing, but when I had to title it, I had to

look for something. And the theme that I saw not every single case I picked, but most of them had to do with what I thought was love gone wrong, and that is mothers kids killing their parents, which is a pretty twisted version of that boyfriends girlfriends killing their boyfriends, and you know, and in many cases, you know, I find that it's more interesting for many of our readers of the true crime genre, who are women, to read about women killing people. So I always look for an

interesting female character. So anyway, those are some of my criteria.

don't got a lot of money. They're split up, but they're still living together. And this is August twenty eleven, So tell us a little bit about their circumstances and who is Melissa Webb?

she's a drug user. You know, they don't. They don't seem like very sympathetic characters. The the the boyfriend quote unquote boyfriend. They'd hardly known each other for very long.

So the reason I say that is it turns out she is Native American, and there are some statistics from the Department of Justice that show that Native American women are two and a half times more likely to be raped than women of other ethnicities, and I just thought, wow, that's pretty interesting. And in her background, as it turns out, I interviewed her mother, and her mother said, you know, I don't agree with the choices she's made in her life. You know, she is she does is addicted to drugs.

She's you know, I don't allow her to live with me when she's doing drugs. But she's she's not a killer. And so the more I learned about her, she had been raped a number of times by these boyfriends that she'd had, you know or not. Some of them were boyfriends, some of them were strangers, and you know, she just sounded like she just had a rough time of it

from the get go. And you know, it just the whole story as it played out, it's like she's already in the system, she's already a fellon, and so she basically, the way the laws are written, she didn't really have a chance, I thought, So she was defending herself. This is her story. Her story is that this guy who also was a drug addict and his family was kind of tied in with the law enforcement in town, even

though he was a drug addict. His stepfather was worked for the sheriff's department, and as a small town and so anyway, it was just sort of the way that

it went. There was evidence that didn't really get to be presented to the jury about what happened in the room, and there were guns and when she got back from being out and he was drugged, but she claims that he was paranoid and mixed all these different kinds of drugs cocaine and steroids in addition to the oxy cotone, and was in a rage and they'd been fighting, and that he threatened her and said he was going to kill her and came after her, fired at a shot

into the ceiling and then put the gun in her mouth, and so she claims, you know, she was just trying to defend herself, and she saw there was another gun downstairs, which is a shotgun. So even when she got the gun away from him, he was going downstairs, she thought to get the shotgun and which is no match for the small gun. And anyway, and what ended up happening is there was evidence in the apartment to prove some of this, but the sheriff's department didn't collect it. The

defense hired an expert. The expert was not allowed to present any of this information anyway. I ended up making it about three times longer than what I was going to because I just really felt like I just felt like some of this evidence should be seen by somebody because it was you know, there was no media coverage of this case at all, So I just felt strongly that this case just at least needed to have somebody look at it in a more objective way.

And you say, the police service in this book say they didn't find any bullet hole whatsoever to back up her assertion, and that's what she did in this cell.

It was there was a water stain, so it clearly was leaking, so there clearly was a hole there, but the prosecution really never was never really investigated that, and the judge wouldn't let it in. So the defense hires this expert to basically look at all this take the ceiling apart, wrote a big report through some pages and was not allowed to show it to the jury, was not allowed to testify. And so to me, that just didn't seem right. That didn't seem right.

that is still not even clear to me. Honestly, she told she told Rick something about how she buried the body. Now that doesn't mean she buried the body. That meant to me, because you know, people are not as precise with their language as you and I might be as writers. I often find that where people may say something but they aren't being specific. They're saying, you know, like, she didn't say we buried the body because it's you know anyway. My point in that is, I think there's some way

room in there. She told different people different things. The guy who she said buried the body had been arrested some ridiculous number of times, and I read his deposition and it was really incoherent, and so he never was even in court, so they couldn't even question him. And if he's the guy who buried the body for her, which is what she claimed, there was never that never got into court either, So I just I guess. All

I'm saying is I can't prove what happened. I don't know whether she buried the body or whether he buried the body. But the body was found across state lines or county lines, whatever it was county lines, and that didn't look good. So the jury basically said, well, who takes a body, you know, no matter how it got there, Who takes a body to across state lines and buries it like that doesn't tell anyone the gun's missing. It

just looks really bad. And she told people different stories, and she's a drug addict, and you know, we don't like drug addicts. That's pretty much our society. So you know, I'm not defending her. I'm just saying I just felt like her her case didn't get a fair look, that's all. I don't know what happened. I wasn't there, So.

this man was abusive. So whether whether that was proven or not, I wasn't at the court right well, and she also.

And the other thing that I learned by I thought South Carolina was going to be the hardest state to do research on, it ended up being the easiest because what I found was this really interesting sociological angle. Basically so much racial strife in that state. I mean, all a lot of this stuff that I was writing about is about the white people not you know, not liking the black people and Dylan, you know, and that's such

an issue. We have such a racial divide in our country right now that you know, the presidential campaign has really brought that out into the open that I didn't even realize was as bad as it is, you know, and all the people who are claiming that the police officers are shooting the unarmed black people. I mean, it's just been a whole trend in the last year. And I was writing this even before it came out as much as it has, you know, in the last few months.

So that to me, I always wanted to believe that, you know, we were past that and Kumbaya and you know, we can all because I don't have a problem with you know, I'm not a racist, so I don't. I guess I didn't know it was there as much as it really was, So it was it was very alarming

to me to see. But it's a history, you know, and it's the whole history thing with the Confederate flag and what it stands for and how people have such different perspectives on that in South Carolina that that was just fascinating to me because it's just so different from from where I live here in California.

And you say two tenths of one percent of all executions nationally are for whites killing.

Mike Kaplan. So tell us about Richard Braun and where he's at cocaine anonymous at this time, and a person named Michael Jackson and grenades and this comedy of errors and unorganized crime. Tell us a little bit about hitman for hire.

there were just these really seedy guys. You know, one in particular, and he just got this idea. He's you know, been in the military briefly, had been in a prison guard and just had this idea. You know. He goes and he gets this strip club and he reads the soldier of Fortune magazine and sees that people are advertising in the back I mean pretty blatantly advertising their services basically, you know, as people can go kill someone for you.

And he realized that, you know, he'd get these calls at the payphone at the bar, and these people, mostly men, wanted someone to go kill their wives so they didn't have to pay you know, divorce and alimony and stuff. And it was pretty bizarre. These guys that he used were young. They they had this idea that they thought it would be cool, you know, to be hit man, and it was just absurd because they were constantly trying to set bombs that didn't go off properly, and they

were you know, just total low life. But they did end up killing two people, and Richard Brown with only one of them. And it was sad because you know, he was he was a drug addict and he had been doing some stuff with this guy in this business and he knew it wasn't really ethical and wasn't really right. So he was trying to get out, he was trying to get straight, he was trying to get off drugs.

Met this woman and AA or NAA wasn't really clear, and next thing you know, he gets, you know, there's a bomb in his car and he managed to not be killed at the first attempt, but they eventually come back and shoot him. And this one of these low life shows up with the you know, ski mask on and camouflage and this and that, and it's just like there were so many different moving parts to this story because it was all over the country and there were

episodes of it. And so it turns out that alcohol fire I forget atf alcohol tobacco on firearms is the one that ended up coordinating this case because it had to do with explosives and guns and guns being sent across straight lines and this guy was operating out of one place, and you know, they were traveling and killing

people in different states. And because it was all in the back of the Soldier Fortune, which is a national magazine, And to me, I just could not believe that it was so easy to hire a hitman, just why out of a magazine. And there was another case which I didn't go into very much. I just mentioned it in there, which took place in Florida, so about a woman who was a you know, and these were innocent people. These

people had done nothing wrong. They just had you know, scummy husbands or boyfriends or whatever, you know, or somebody who wanted their money, and it was all about greed mostly. That's what was so sad about is these innocent people were getting killed. The woman in Florida was perfectly nice, you know, government worker, you know, well liked and everything, and her husband hired this hitman and killed her in beds. And he's the same guy who killed Richard Brawn in Georgia.

So they all they got tried in a whole bunch of different states. And I was reading all these different news articles trying to piece it together because nobody, it seems like no single reporter was able to pull it all together. So that's something I was trying to do on my own all these years later. It was pretty fascinating, but pretty difficult. And it was one thing that was really interesting. You know, the author Michael Connolly, right, he

writes crime fiction. He was one of the reporters who actually wrote one of some of these stories when he was still a reporter down in Florida. And so he wrote a piece of you know, a couple of pieces on this and and kind of hinted at the you know, the national angle of it all. But I was like, hey, wait, there's Michael Conway. He even got in on this, So

that shows you how long ago this was. Before he was a before he was an author, before he even went to the La Times, he was a reporter in Florida.

homemade aluminium foil silencer with a coke bottle. So tell us about this little scene that you describe that again, you say that the innocent people that are involved, well, this is his son witnessing this hit man coming for his father.

so he didn't really get shot. But the guy with the gun basically, you know, they're meeting eyed I and the Michael. The son goes, please, don't shoot me, and so the guy lowered the gun, put his finger to his lips and goes quiet. You know, So he he

didn't at least he didn't kill the kid. You know, So this guy apparently, all these years later, the guy with the gun has apparently found religion and you know, turned over a whole new leaf in prison, supposedly, and you know, feels bad about what he did, but he did kill two people.

is even more difficult to solve. But basically, you know, they started putting it together. It was really difficult to actually piece that together and make sure that it was right.

But you know, all over the country there were these series of incidents, and then these atf people started meeting and talking to each other and comparing notes about the bombs, and they started tracing where the bombs went, and it traced back to the guy who was hiring everybody, the guy who was placing the ad and Soldier of fortune. And it was really ridiculous too, because they the guy who ended up killing those two people. He got caught.

They took his gun, but they didn't realize that the gun was linked to the murder that had just happened, even though you know, they had it in their evidence locker. The information hadn't been entered into the computer yet. You know. The thing was Dylan roof where he was, he bought a gun and he shot all these people, and he should never have been able to do that, But the FBI screwed up and didn't enter, some clerk didn't enter the right information or whatever, same kind of thing. You know,

this stuff happens. And even when we have you know, the laws in place, and even though we have these checks and balances, these guys can just you know, kill somebody, get caught for something else, be held at a police station, and because the information's not in the computer, they can walk free and go kill somebody else. And that's pretty

much what happened here. So but eventually they caught up to him, and they traced back the guns, they linked the ballistics and ended up having trials in all these different states. These guys had to be tried over and over again. And there was another guy who was killed anyway. So it was like the whole ring of people. And because they were so bad at it, you know, the police were able to solve because they kept screwing up.

so we don't even know. But he's one of these people who he's really short. He was sent to reform school really young. He was a twisted kid. You know, he found erotic pleasure and you know, pain and raping other people and from a very early age, so the kid was he was just a twisted He was twisted from the start. And so he kills these people. He kills again you know, doesn't like black people, doesn't think

they should mix and mate. And therefore one of the victims was a multi race child, you know, and the mom he killed them both, you know, And so the guy, he's just a bad seat across the board. But anyway, so he's he's in prison, and he's he's on death row. This was a little confusing. I think he was on

death row. But then they didn't execute anybody, sort of like we have in California where we have all these you know, eight hundred people on death row and then nobody gets executed for it's been ten years since they've executed anybody, and they're still sending people to death row. Well that's kind of how it was in South Carolina.

So he's on death row and there's a guy in the cell next to him who's in there for killing the parents of this guy who's on the outside, and they get they the son of the victims is getting more and more frustrated because, you know, this murderer is not getting executed, so he's getting very frustrated. There's a number of trials too, retrials, and they keep reconvicting this guy, but still he's not getting executed. So this guy is so upset he decides he wants to somehow get this

guy killed in prison. So there's somebody on the outside who hooks him up with this guy Peewee, who's got a reputation and he's also been a hit man, you know, hired as a killer previously. So basically what they decide to do is the guy in the outside, you know, starts sending different kinds of poison through the I don't know how they in this somebody's shoe and this and that, and so Peewee feeds tries to feed this guy in

the you know, sell next to him. He's got people who work for him and deliver things, and they've got this whole system in prison where you have to do people favors or they, I don't know, beat you or rape you. I I don't mean to laugh, it's just

it's so bizarre to me. But they He basically gets this guy working for him who delivers meals, and so he tries to poison the guy next to him, and the guy just get gets sick, and he tries a couple different times, finally gives up and says this isn't working. Some kind of explosive. You know, you need to send me some explosive. So somehow they smuggle in like stick of dynamite and something else, and I don't know exactly how it worked, but he came up with this idea

and this contraption. He and the guy next door used to talk to each other through the air vent and it just wasn't you know, it was they couldn't hear each other that well. So he was like, I'm gonna rig up this you know, kind of phone system. That's what he told the guy. So what he did is he stuck the explosive step.

with smuggled and explosives. I thought that was pretty amazing at how completely ridiculous the prisons are being run in South Carolina. Of course that was what twenty years ago, thirty years ago, but still you would think that they'd be able to stop stuff like that. I've never heard of anything like that happening in California. I don't know, but I thought that was.

I picked that one. And I also picked another one where there was a teenage girl who killed her father, and so we have a mattress side and a patricide. I also picked those two together because they had such different outcomes. So Robinson ended up getting out of prison and the other girl ended up staying, you know, in prison for life, and so I thought that was interesting too.

And even from state to state, you know, when I put these together, there are women who kill boyfriends or you know, kill someone and they don't pull the trigger, and yet they get the death penalty when the guy who actually pulled the trigger ends up getting life and gets paroled. And in other cases, even in the same state, you know, it's just so completely disproportionate, and you know, the laws are not applied equitably, do you know what I mean. So that's kind of what goes into my

story choice, is I'm looking with these different cases. I mentioned that I paired the two teen killings, and then I paired the two the one about Melissa that we talked about at the beginning, kill the guys she didn't know for very much for very long. Paired that one with another case in Florida, with the woman who had dated her boyfriend for eighteen years. So you know, here we have two knowing somebody for three weeks getting life

in prison. Yet the woman who uses the hammer and the gun and the poison and all the other things she ended up getting. I forget what the sentence was, but it definitely wasn't death and it wasn't life. She got a chance at Pearl, I think after twenty five years.

So I just thought, you know, it's really interesting to me, even in the same state, that you get such disparate punishment, you know, and different sentences and different charges and just depending on the I don't know if it's depending on the prosecutor, depending on the county, depending on I don't know, whether it's sunny outside. It just to me was just very strange. So back to Valsa, I also thought, you know, she and of whom you know, had boyfriend who they

got to kill. Their parents. They were just I just don't understand. I don't understand that it happens sometimes, but it just what is going through a kid's head? Are

they born like that? I mean, I know there's a lot of kids that don't get along with their parents, but I mean, honestly, to have them, you know, to have them down on the floor and to stick a syringe in their neck full of bleach, you know, with an air bubble in it, premeditated, and then that's not enough, so they need to stab her because she won't die.

I just, I don't. I just it's unfathomable to me that you can do this to your own mother, who, you know, as far as we know, never abused her, never did anything except tried to discipline her, you know, so well.

And she had this bad boy boyfriend, as you described it had been in jail, not that it was in between Petty and Sirius. I guess he was on his way to be a developing criminal. But again, yes, you know, injecting her with bleach that was in a horrific scene in this book and then that's not working fast enough or it didn't do what they wanted to do so they could stab her. Then they go on this three

day drug fueled party. I think this is where the jury just hates these people, you know, and whether it's a young woman or not, they just hear about the ten carrot gold ring at Walmart, twenty bags of concrete and the trash bags and the party.

my head. I get. I think the other woman, the other woman who was with the guy for eighteen years and used the hammer and the gun and the you know, I actually did quite a bit of research on that one. And he was from San Diego, you know where I live, And he was the guy who owned the dealership where I bought my car, as it turns out, and so I, oh, wow, that's pretty that's a coincidence, right, So I investigated his

murder and I really understand. I understood her motivation more than I understood these kids, you know, even though she went so over the top, And that became the title for one of the for the singles about Florida was kill him some more. I mean, how many things do you need to kill somebody? A hammer and a gun and poison in the gin, and I forget what the last thing was a knife? So I was just like, God, how many different ways do you need to try to

kill somebody? They're probably already dead? And that's how angry clearly she was at him, But at least I understood that a little more because eighteen years he's a rich guy. He wouldn't marry her, and you know, according to her, he threatened to shoot her. And so while he was, you know, passed out, she killed him and killed him some more. So that to me, you know, I wouldn't do it, but at least I at least understand the

motivation a little bit more. And she claimed that when he got drun Key was very abusive and this had been a long history of this, and so that to me at least made a little more sense. But these kids and killing their parents, they just were like taking the joy ride and doing all this drugs and let's kill let's kill my mom. You know, I'm just like wow.

understand that. And if he really was as abusive as she says he was, although I interviewed somebody who knew him some years earlier and said, you know, I saw him drink, but I never saw he was like a really funny, really friendly, fun guy. Never saw him even remotely upset. But then again, his own lawyer told me that he saw him, you know, kind of some entitlement issues, you know, with having the money and not trusting people who are trying to supposedly get his money, and so

that's all. It's all in the book, right, Interesting though, that he was owned the car dealership where the car that I have sitting in my driveway right now came from his dealership. I thought that was really interesting. It felt like I was supposed to write that one.

in this situation. There wasn't anything except she was greedy. She and she wasn't in love with them anymore, and she fell in love with this other guy, and she got the other guy to kill her husband. And that to me, you know, and there was nothing in it except she she wanted. She thought there was life insurance money.

Turned out there wasn't. She didn't want to keep getting back together with the guy, and so her lover, who she was in love with, didn't also also didn't want her going back with her husband because she kept going back for some reason. I don't know why. And so that's supposedly why he killed. Why he agreed to kill the husband, and not in a you know, in a pretty nasty way, took him out to the forest and made him, you know, kneel down, hit him in the back of the head. All this stuff. I mean, it

was just mean. It was just a mean, rotten thing. But the reason I picked this case is I saw I really feel like she changed in prison. I really feel like she did. Actually finally turn into a better person. And the interesting thing about her case was it got national attention and it got international attention. The Pope even got involved in trying to get her get the death

penalty commuted because she found religion. And you know a lot of people do find religion in prison in order to try to get out, you know, and make it look like they have changed. But it seems like she really did. She was commended by other inmates for helping them, for talking them through difficult situations when they felt like killing themselves, and they formed groups and they wrote letters for her. There were all kinds of people, petitions and everything.

Like I said, the Pope even got involved. Now, the Pope has an agenda in that, you know, they don't believe in the death penalty, and he came here into twenty fifteen and even spoke about, you know, I really think you should not have the death penalty in this country. And so the US ambassador for the Pope actually wrote a letter to it was the DA's officer, the prisoner or whoever, but basically it tried to intervene in this case because she she you know, studied, she got this degree.

She was writing letters with this theologian in I don't remember what country, but and he was impressed by her, came to visit her, and so she was helping people. She really did seem to be helping other people in prison. And you know they often use that at trial sentence saying, oh, you know, you should spare this person's life because they're smart or they're this, or they're that, and they can help other inmates. And you know, it's usually just something

that they say, and I don't believe it. This case, it was actually happening. So that's the reason I picked this case, because she just it seemed like she was such a crummy person to start with, and like she really it really did seem like she changed. So when her husband was again another one of these innocent victims hadn't done anything wrong at all to deserve that.

She didn't do it. She helped plan it, she helped mastermind it, but she wasn't the one who pulled the trigger. And she wasn't even there. So that's really unusual. And it's also really unusual just to have a woman on death row in Georgia. It's pretty unusual to have women on death row period. That's part of the reason why I picked some of these. And she was only the second woman in Georgia's history to be executed, and there

are none on death row. There is none, not a single other one, at least at the time that I wrote this in Georgia on death row right now since she's been executed.

And even though they're most each one of these is a magazine length story generally, except for the very first time we talked about which was really much longer because, like I said, it just the more I got into it, the more unfair it seemed. But they're they're magazinelength story. But I still have to you a lot of the research that I would do for a book, I just

didn't write as much about it, you know. So I did those and then I got back to writing book projects, and you know, I'm also a writing coach and teacher, and so that's it for me for at least for now. So I have I have an essay that I've been working on that I'm going I was going to publish in October for Domestic Violence Months about my marriage my

late husband and at my relationship. And it's taken me about seventeen years to finish that essay and I still couldn't quite get it published this month, but I'm gonna It's called Secrets, Lies, Smearing Off, and Shoelaces, which gives you an idea. But yeah, So I'm back to book projects and I'm working on something on Manson which I'm not allowed to talk about, but I can at least say that it's fascinating.

that story. Don't give us the whole thing, but don't give us a little bit that came absolutely okay.

like he's already pretty much admitted it. But basically, you know, he's he walks into this church, which he purposely chose, according to his friends, that he purposely chose this because it was a historic African American church. He had been reading up on all of this racist you know, propaganda online and basically decided that you know, black on white crime was spiraling out of control and somebody needed to

do something about it. And so he's one of these drifters, aimless, you know, has no life, has no real job, using drugs. His parents are I couldn't really tell if they didn't care about him or if he was just a pain in the ass. But he, you know, he was like staying with some other group of friends who sat around, you know, did drugs and played video games and drank.

You know. It just it's like the young white man, uneducated, feeling disenfranchised, feeling disillusioned, feeling generally pissed off, goes and kills a bunch of people because I don't know, he thinks it's gonna he wanted to start a race war, I mean, which actually supposedly was the motivation, at least

cited in court in the Manson trial. You know, it's just like I don't know if he did a lot of reading or something, but there's just the ideas, you know, he wrote some manifesto about, you know, no one else is doing it, I'm gonna go do it, and I'm going to take care of this, you know, and it was like he it seems like he already knew, he already knows his life was gonna be over the minute he did that, but he felt like it was important.

So he goes into this church and shoots all these people who are you know, in the Middle Bible study, and they welcome him him in and he obviously doesn't belong there. He's the only white person, and they welcomed him in and then he ended up shooting him nine of them. So I thought that was pretty horrific. And again, you know, they were all completely innocent people. They had not done a thing to him. He didn't know any

of them. You know. He's just one of these people who wants to be famous, I think, and had nothing else in his life that was going the way he wanted it. So this is how he decides to take matters into his own hands. And it's just it's so abominable to me that that people do this stuff, you know, and and time and time again, even you know, we see these young, young white guys, and I don't get the feeling he's mentally ill. I don't know. I don't

think we know that yet there. I don't know if they're still in jury selection or where they are with this case. But I'm waiting to hear, you know, what is it? What is there anything? Is there any mitigating circumstance at all that would that would cause this kid to do this, because in some of these other cases where they go in and they shoot a bunch of people, oftentimes they're mentally ill. In this case, I don't, I don't know yet, but I didn't get that feeling.

But he's an expert. You know, he's a death penalty expert in South Carolina. So he's got a great lawyer. So we'll see what We'll see what his lawyer does for him. I'm just really curious to know, you know, is there anything that would you know, explain a little bit more other than he just hated these hated black people. You know, that's that's an overwhelming that just makes no sense to me. But what can I tell you case? This makes sense to me. They're all just crazy.

Jackie Hawks. Tell us a little bit about what is the new development and the reason for the new edition.

He came to court one time wearing a woman's jail jumpsuit. He started wearing mascara, he started, you know, looking more, putting some stuff in his hair. He just looked more and more feminine, you know, and the prosecution and the law enforcement basically just laughed and said, you know, he's just trying to get attention. He's just trying to act

crazy to get sympathy. They you know, it's very It put me in a kind of a weird situation because as a reporter working for a newspaper for most of my career up until I became an author, you know, you have to be really sensitive to the LGBT community. You have to be sensitive to any kind of community that has its own people and its own issues, and when you get to covering a murderer who is an

LGBT person. It puts me in a difficult situation because I want to be respectful and sensitive to the people who are not killers who are LGBT and or transgender, and I feel like sometimes people just want to attack people who are killers regardless. And so this took me into a different kind of an area, and I've had to tread very carefully to not upset the victim's family members and not upset my sources, who you know, to this day still want to believe that, you know, people

who are in prison don't have any rights. Well, the update is all about Skuylar de Leone transitioning essentially on death row into a woman, at least so far, just with hormones. But California, in the federal court, there is a judge who granted two different inmates in two different lawsuits, granted gender reassignment surgery that the state was going to

have to pay for. And so I'm trying to make this short, but basically, the because of these two decisions, and in the first case, the inmate they was up for parole and for the seventh time they'd rejected transgender born man turned you know, transition to a woman in prison, just like Skuyler. She on the seventh try, after the judge had granted the surgery, the parole board said, oh, we're going to let you out. So that meant the state didn't have to do the surgery. No precedent was set.

They released her, so she'd have to go pay for the surgery on her own. That's fine, you know, That's how government works, I guess. And it was a tricky situation. Came up again, there was another lawsuit and the same thing in a different different prisoner, same judge again granted the surgery. Now, I always take this as a constitutional issue. It's not a personal thing. I am not sympathizing with killers.

I just want to make that clear because I've lost friends on Facebook over this where people feel like I'm, you know, put wishing for Skuyler to get this surgery. I'm not. I'm just stating what the law says, what the courts have ruled, and that is, we have a constitution. We we have a constitution that demands that we treat prisoners with They still do have certain rights. Even though people who are victims and their victims' families feel like

they shouldn't have any rights. They do still have rights under the Eighth Amendment. They have a right to quote unquote adequate medical care. So basically, the Department of Justice has actually weighed in on this and said that transgender medical care really does need to be applied fairly to inmates, just the same as it is in the community. So

that's why this judge did this. These people are trying to cut off their genitals, they're trying to commit suicide in prison, they're getting raped, et cetera, et cetera, and under you know, there's another amendment to the Constitution about you know, cruel and unusual punishment, you're not allowed to That's why we have reporters witnessing executions, you know, to make sure that they are treated humanly when the state

executes them. So in this case, even though Skylar's on death row, Skylar and Skyler killed in order to get money to pay for this surgery. So that's that's the part about this case that makes people even more angry is that there is now a policy in California prisons because of this judge making these rulings. The state prison system decided, you know, we don't want this decided in

the courts over and over again. We're just gonna We're going to create a policy whereby these inmates can apply to have this surgery, and if they meet the criteria, they can get the surgery. But we're not going to grant it to everyone. And there's gonna be criteria, and in those criteria, and this may be. You know. The reason I did the update was because I did a magazine story and I went and visited Skyler up at San Quentin and talked with her for two and a

half flowers. I was not allowed to use anything from the interview because her lawyer immediately sent me a letter and said, she's not competent to grant an interview. She's not mentally competent. I'm like, okay, seemed competent to me, but anyway, I wasn't allowed to use that. So I was allowed to observe. I could see she had been she had cut her arms repeatedly. There were these big, giant purple welts that I could see where she'd cut herself,

tried to kill herself with various objects. So I saw the scars. I saw. I saw that she seemed happier, and she's and more at peace, and she's more you know, she's medicated and you know, so here she is on death row, living as a woman. And so that's what the update's about. It's basically what's going on with her, what's going on with the policy, and that the fact is now she wants to take advantage of this policy.

But the crux of it is, Okay, if she is mentally incompetent, she may not be able to get the surgery, because you have to be able to be competent in order to say I want to have life changing surgery. So that's one reason why she might not get it. And another reason is under the criteria, they look at the circumstances of the crime visa the surgery, and in this case, since she killed the Hawks in order to get money to pay for surgery that Skyler had already scheduled,

that may be another disqualifying factor. And so those are the constitutional issues, and those are the criteria, and those are the reasons why Skylar might not qualify. So I'm just trying to be as objective as possible, still trying to be sensitive to other transgender people who might want to get the surgery who are not in prison.

because California hasn't executed anyone in ten years, they just feel like it's even it's like adding, you know, insult to injury, even beyond the point of you know, of comprehension, and it just doesn't seem fair. And you know, nobody I talked to except for one person who was going to visit Skylar. Nobody dollars should be used to pay for this kind of thing, but this is not You don't get a choice on how your taxes are spent. You know, there are courts and there are judges and policies.

And I was you know, I was asked, well, is there someone I can write a letter to and object? And you know, I basically quoted the monitor who's in charge of you know, California's mental health system and medical systems were really screwed up. They had a lawsuit some years ago that I covered when I was still a reporter. But they have to have a federal agency come in and oversee some of this stuff. And I can't remember if it's mental health only or medical only, but anyway,

they just said, you know, this is a policy. And you know, even though we sympathize with the victims' families, you know, not everybody's going to get granted this surgery. But you know, we have to go buy these criteria which are applied in the general community just as they are here because that's the law.