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You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking Killers in True crime History and the authors that have written about him. Gasey Bundy Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Good evening from a teen vampire cult that killed one member's parents. The naked people who tell cops nothing to see here. Frank Stanfield has seen it all in thirty years as a newspaper editor and reporter, mostly in Florida. Vampire's, gaiters and wackos. A newspapers Man's Life recalls rustlers hiding ranchers, bodies in a bottomless pit, and a Jane Doe so maol people believe it was a bear attack, and exposes cops who bungle murder cases and praises those who are heroes.
There are tales of bears, sharks, snakes, alligators, and pot bellied pigs. There is the teacher who is too pretty to go to jail despite having sex with a middle school male student. Hurricanes lash out, tornadoes spin a blender of death and sinkhole swallow homes, roads and people. All of this takes place while newspapers with their own zany
characters are fighting for their survival. The book that were featuring this evening is Vampires, Gators and Wackos, A newspaper Man's Life with my special guest, journalist and author Frank Stanfield. Welcome back to the program, and thank you so much for this interview. Frank Stanfield, Thank you, Dan appreciate it. Thank you very much, and congratulations on this book. It's pretty well a good slice of your life as a journalist and the incredible stories that you covered as a
reporter and journalist. Let's talk about your background first and how you got started in journalism and your first assignments, before we talk about one of the more spectacular cases that you turned into a book, Cold Blooded, that we discussed May twenty twenty one, Cold Blooded. But before that, tell us about your background and how you became a journalist.
Well, I grew up in the Midwest before we came to Florida, and so I came from a family of storytellers, you know, oral storytellers, and I always wanted to write. So when I have a chance to go to college, and I took political science and journalism classes and I got my first job was at the Augusta Chronicle in Georgia, and it was like a real eye opener. I said, this is what I've got to do. This absolutely has my aim on it. So that's the way it started. And they let me cover the cops quite a bit,
so that was my favorite. My favorite thing.
Well, you talk about your early experience at a KKK rally. Tell us about that.
Oh, brother, Yeah, this is when this goes way back to when Jimmy Carter was president and some idiot drove his car through a KKK rally over in Plains, Georgia, where the Jimmy Carter is from. So they had another one of these rallies. This is ugly, ugly stuff, these people, and they had a rally in Augusta. So my editor says, Okay, we're going to go, but we're not going to write about it. We're not going to give any ink to these people. But you I want you there just in
case something happened. So I went and I introduced myself and that the guard runs off to get the grand poobah or an interview, thinking I want to interview him or something, and I kind of wander around and I get this. I get a sick feeling looking at these people and listening to their rants and burning the cross, and it was a real sickening thing. But nothing happened. So I went back to my office and the next day the folks call and says, well, hey, what about
this reporter. He didn't write anything, And I said, the editor had the wheremouthal at least to say, well, she didn't give me her give them my phone number, address, what time I left work, and all that sort of thing, So at least she didn't do that, so that was good.
Now you talk about this case and I just mentioned it, the one that you turned into a book in twenty twenty one, Cold Blooded, the case of Rod Ferrell, sixteen year old vampire. We could go into this case and take the entire hour to talk about that, but this case you became part of it largely. You mentioned that after some very fine reporting on behalf of the fellow journalist you became. This became largely your case. Just tell us about the most incredible part of this most incredible tale.
Well, Rod Perrat was only sixteen years old, but he had the charisma and the drive to form a cult, a vampire cult. And these guys were drinking each other's blood and doing all these odd things. And so they come down to Florida to pick up one of their cult members. He had gone to school here at one point, came back, picked her up and killed her parents, and she left with them, and they were all caught three days later, but she was not indicted. The rest of
them are indicted. So the sheriff was like, this ain't right, you know, And what role did she have in all this? I mean, that was kind of the mystery of the whole thing. And it was an outrageous case. Of course, it made international headlines. It was just so outrageous.
You talk about another case, and it's the Missing Millionaire, the title of that I believe in the chapter. But this Robert W. Ford, and you had it that a person got away with murder. Tell us a little bit about this incredible story that you've included.
This was wild. This is back in the early eighties. This fellow by the name of Neil Haber who was a builder developer here and lived in Leesburg, Florida, and he had come back from Mexico and went home, and then about a day or two later he was reported missing and in his car, he had some fancy car,
and so where was he? You know? And the step son, this Robert Ford, told this really messed up story, like he heard something, but he didn't really see the people, and he saw there was blood in the garage, so he just kind of wiped it down and he found blood on a tarp, so he threw that in a dumpster. And the cops messed this up every way you can mess it up, and they basically just this Robbie Ford,
who was a stepson, just got away with murder. And the cops, in their effort to try to solve this thing, got real cozy and friendly with the widow and with her suddenly brand new business partner who had just been a gopher before. So the whole thing made headlines every every day, and the family took out a full page out of the newspaper a reward for return of the car,
not for him, they wanted the car. Then they next day said, oh no, we want him to of course, Well they found him in the in the car in an orange grove after he'd been in there for several days, and in Florida, that's not a good thing. So nobody wanted the car after that. Yeah, But basically the man had possible mafia tize business dealings. He had some very odd accounting system, a lot of liquid cash. So there was like several different possible motive suspects. So it was very interesting.
You have a chapter called Cases that Keep Cops Awake at Night and that's an understatement. And one Trenton Ducket in August two thousand and six, and a woman named Melinda calls nine one one, tell us a little bit about this Trenton Ducket.
Trenton was about two years old, and she calls the cops and she reports and missing. She says, oh, I went to check on him, and then I went to had some friends over watching TV, and I went back to check on him again and the window screen was cut open. This was an apartment complex. He was gone. So the next day Nancy Grace calls and asks her, well, what was he wearing? What were you doing? And she the mom says, you know, she was very vague. She said,
we were just running around whatever. And when she called the nine one one operator, the nine one operator said, well, what was he wearing? And she says, I don't, you know, basically, I don't know whatever, I don't remember or something like that, And the whole thing was fishy from the beginning. Well then, so after Nancy Grace interviews her and gets no answers, she before the interview airs, she goes over to her grandparent's house and kills herself. So now nobody knows where
he is if he was killed, where's the body? If she handed him off, which some police officers thought, where is he? And another twist of this whole thing is this kid's grandfather is on death row for killing a kid gave as a cop too, So that's another whole twist. Yeah, incredible.
Yeah, And keeping in that theme, you have another chapter called Killer Cop and you have Teresa May mccabee, which is eleven year old. This is May nineteen eighty seven. She's out for an errand to buy a pencil, and she bumps into the last person that last witness anyway, Caesar with a sixteen year old Mexican boy. But that person that witnesses it is a police officer. Tell us a little bit more about this tale.
Right, and that's the grandfather of this Trenton, who was born years years later. Of course, he's a rookie cop a little town, a little bittytown in South Lake County, which is outside of Orange County where Disney World is and all that. But yeah, he doesn't make a lot of sense either. He's not. The police chief tells him, is you get out there, you hunt this kid, you know, no matter what else is going on. But the next morning he's out there doing traffic stops and whatnot. He's
not doing what he's supposed to do. He didn't put flyers out like he was supposed to do, and he had They found tire tracks by this lake where they found the little girl's body, and the tire tracks matched the patrol car. So he gets arrested. He swears he didn't do it and all this, and there's been a whole years of controversy about DNA. They found hair on her, well that is it his or not? And for a long time they couldn't. The technology didn't allow him to
test it. Now they can test it, but he doesn't want it tested because he says that it will destroy the only stample. Well, okay, whatever, so he's on death roat. Still.
You have a chapter called Mother Nature runs a much and you also include stories of hurricanes and talk about I believe it's Tampa is the lightning capital of the world.
I believe. Yeah.
Tell us about some of these incredible stories and why you included in a story in a book that's about murder and death and some killing.
Well, mother Nature can be a pretty wicked killer too. I talk in this book about what happened on Groundhog Day. There was a tornado that came through a little town outside the village's retirement community called Lady Lake and Lake Mac and it killed twenty one people. But I mean it was devastating the whole landscape. It picked up these old double wide trailers of the older folks lived in some of them, and just rolled them across the landscape.
Has killed them and snapped trees off. It suck people out of their house. One of the things that I saw the first thing was a man sitting where his brick house was. He's just sitting there in a chair. The house is completely gone. He was asleep on the mattress. He heard his wife's scream in the other room. He said, the next thing I know, I'm floating in the air and I'm looking up at the stars because there's no root in the house. That kind of thing. And then
the hurricanes. There was two thousand and four, there was like five hurricanes back to back to back to back to back. And you know, when you cover those things, there's two ways to do it. You can sit in the emergency shelter and just wait for the thing to be over with, or you can pick your moments and get out and try to cover it like you should be covering it. And that's what my photographer and I did.
And those things are so dangerous. We tried to get back every night before it got dark because you can't see tree limbs and road signs flying around the dark. But at the last day of the last storm, she went back to the car to get something out of the car and a tree limb snapped, big tree limb and just missed her. So they're very deadly, and we saw a lot of a lot of destruction, a lot of a lot of property damage. A lot of people is scared to death by those things. With good reason absolutely.
You include a story Jane Doe, Bottomless Pit nineteen ninety one in Rock Springs Run Reserve and a body's found, and we mentioned this in the introduction that it was brutalized so badly that people the rumor was that you'd been mauled by a bear. Tell us a little bit about this bottomless pit and Jane Doe.
Yeah, there's actually two stories there. The Bottomless Pit is one story and the Jane does the other. Kind of put them together one chapter with Jane Doe. After the crime scene, people get to looking at the body, which was buried under some limbs and things. That's what people, I think, initially thought she had been killed by a bear.
They realized the body had been posed, that she had been someone had I don't know how to say this, had placed a bottle, a broken bottle where something like that should not be, and had posed her hand pointing to it, and she had been bitten and torn up,
just torn up. And so years later, a few years later, and again this is all when DNA stuff was pretty new, a analyst, crime scene analyst is feeding the mail DNA found on her body through a computer, a crime computer, and all of a sudden there was a hit and it was on a convicted rapist. So wow, that was like a big right there, because the police hadn't gone
everywhere done everything they could. They even went to all these topless bars in Orlando thing think that she was maybe a dancer or something to see, you know, to try to identify her. They never did identify her, but they identified the killer. They had a trial. They brought in this bitemark expert who helped put ted Bundy away. He testified, so that was a big deal. The bottomless pit thing. Lake County, where I do my work, is outside of Orlando, and it used to be especially very rural.
So Florida at one time still does have not had more cattle than Texas. So there's a lot of ranches and stuff. And so these two ranch owner and a foreman were out there because they were looking for missing cows. They were missing some cows. So it turns out that a couple of these ranch hands shot them and threw them in this so called bottomless pit. They have these
sinkholes in Florida that are full of water. Nobody knows how deep they are, but they weighted their bodies down with concrete blocks and threw them in there, and then they figured out, you know who these guys were, and of course one of them had a conscious because he says the cop says, well, you know what happens to a body in the water, meaning alligators, And so the guy broke down and confessed and that got the bodies.
When they pulled the bodies out, they also found an old duson Berg that had been used in a bank robbery in the nineteen twenties in this place. So this is a kind of a place that criminals used to dump all their their stuff. So that was a very interesting case too.
You also include a case of a six year old girl named Kayla missing. Kayla McKean, tell us what's important about this story and whine you included it.
Well, Kayla, I think she was five or six, I can't remember. I think she was five and her dad reports are missing on Thanksgiving and hundreds of people show up to look for her and all this sort of thing. Well, this goes on for like three days, people looking, and the cops suspect that he did it all along. This is a kid that he didn't even know he had. This girl until is a strange girlfriend tried to get
child support. Yeah, well he'd killed her. But here's the thing, this case was messed up every way you can mess up as far as the child welfare system goes. You had DCF people going out there and saying that they investigated this or that and they didn't. You had every kind of breakdown of the system you could think of.
The only people that were doing it right was the school where the little girl went to school, and they were reporting things like, Okay, she comes to school and makeup on to hide a black eye and that kind of thing. So the school was the only one that did it. And so basically because of this case, they had to redo the entire child welfare laws, the way things were done, how investigations are done, and so on. So that was a major, major thing.
Just like in the introduction, this chapter is called Gators and Other Monsters. Tell us about some of the stories that are included in this Gators and Other Monsters chapter.
One of the things I talk about I interview the Spella. He's a shark expert at the University of Florida, and they talk about, well, there's a lot of shark attacks. Most of them are not fatal, but some of them are. And also some of them are so hideous tiger sharks on the west coast that people are like damaged for life because of it. But he talks about he had an injergy spent on this. He says, well, people are catching these sharks now, cutting their fins off and you know,
throwing the rest of the shark back. So he says, well, who is who's hunting who here? And so you've got people worried about the shark population now all things. But what we had several instances in Florida over the years of people being killed by alligators. These things are monsters. They're huge, twelve thirteen feet long. They can get to be several hundred pounds. So there was one little boy over in Belusia County who was standing on the edge of a lake with his parents and all of a sudden,
just the water ripples, the snap and he's gone. So we did a story. We had a cable show the Orlando where I worked at the time, and we went out with a game and fish guy on this airboat and we were talking about alligators and this is a big habitat and so on, and a three footer swims up to the boat, and so the game and fish guy says, do you want me to catch him? And we said sure, you know. So he's holding it and the gator little gators making these noises like Mama helped me,
you know that kind of thing. So the wind is blowing us out to the middle of the lake, and so we're done, and he said, well, I can't let him out here because you know, he'll just be food for other alligators, bigger alligators. So he says, here, you hold him. How I get back to the shore. I'm going like, say what now? Because he's wiggling around and carrying on, and my photographer was laughing so hard I thought she was gonna fall over. So they're out there.
They're very common, but people don't have any sense. If you ever feed an alligator, get in the habit of an alligator's in the habit of being around people, they lose their fear of people. They're very, very dangerous.
And you talk about as well, people should know and before they go out swimming at night is not a good idea. That's when they come out.
No, that's when they come out. There's certain feeding times. And I just talk about a teenage boy that was killed by an alligator too, and an elderly woman because they were just swimming in a place that they're full of alligators. And somebody in a couple of cases anyway, have been feeding these alligators, which just encourages them to come around. They're just they're big, and they've got a brain the size of a walnut. I think they're not
real smart. They're just they're just made for killing, that's what they are.
Yeah, you have a chapter called Cops and Sarah Heckerman is a Lake County Sheriff dispatcher on February two thousand and five, and it's in balls of Jason Wheeler who's twenty nine years old, and friend had hog tied her and raped her and threatened to kill her. And she called if she called nine one one, tell us a little bit more about this incredible story involving cops.
Yeah, Henckerman, she wasn't a dispatcher, but she called the cops. She was living in the woods, in the forest, I should say, with the sky Wheeler. They have some children together between them, So she calls the cops says, well, now he tog tied me. If you come with lights and Simons and all, he'll kill you. So she says, I'm leaving the house. I'm going to go down to a friend's house, walk down the road or whatever. So the cops get there and they send three deputies and
so they pick her up. They go to the house and they're looking for him. He basically they're living in a camper while they're fixing up their house, which was damaged in a hurricane. He ambushes the whole lot of them and kills one deputy and injures two others. There's a big gun battle. He somehow escapes on a motorcycle
and then goes out and hides in the woods. And that now there's a massive man hunt for the sky and he stands up on this little island in a lake and a deputy shoots him and he ends up being paralyzed for life. Well, so he goes to trial, and now he's repented. He says, I was sinful, I was doing all these terrible things and I'm sorry and all that, but the judge and the jury recommended death. Film. Well,
here's the interesting thing about these cases Florida. Now, I guess everywhere the jury toold member jury has to be unanimous in their recommendation for death sentence. So he's coming back for sentencing, just like some of these So many of these other people are coming back, so he gets another shot. Is he going to get off death row or not? But people will have a pretty dim view of people that ambush and kill police officers around here.
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Zip recruiter the smartest way to hire. Now, Frank, we have another chapter and you describe it as ruthless or you name it, title it as ruthless featuring certainly a ruthless killer Fred Anderson Junior. And in this particular story especially, you talk about that you got the call. Tell us a little bit about this call that you got and this assignment and the Fred Anderson Junior and ruthless.
Right, it was on Saturday morning. I wasn't feeling that great, you know, nothing serious, but just sort of like, I don't know, I'm not feeling great. So my editor, of course calls, and she says, I think there's like a couple of people murdered in a store. I think in another town. So she's let me call you right back. So then she says, well, there's been a shooting at a bank over Mount Dora, which is a beautiful little town, and so maybe one of them is dead, maybe one
of them still alive. I'm not sure. So I jump in the car and go. That's the last time I thought about not feeling great, because you get focused, you know. So I get over there and the helicopter's taking off with air rescue, and there's one fella is holding his head and screaming and says she just was trying to make a living and people are freaking out and the cops are everywhere. So it turns out and I asked the leading police officer over there. I says, Okay, tell
me what's going on. He said, well, one of them is dead. The bank teller is dead. And we arrested the suspect inside the bank, and one of them. Then he says, now the other one's dead. So I go back to the office and start writing the story which is nearby. Start writing the story, and then I send the story in and then somebody from Orlando calls says, well, she's not dead. The second person's not dead. What this guy had done he pretended to be a college student
doing research on the banking business. He goes in there, hangs around on Friday afternoon, the scope the place out comes back on Saturday, and basically Rob's of this bank tells the tellers to go back and open the vault and everything, which they do. They do everything that he's supposed to that they he had asked them to do. Then he shoots him, shoots him anyway. He says, which one of you guys want to die first? And then
to start shooting well. Then he tries to get the security camera video out of the out of the machine, and when the cops come in, he's standing next to a garbage candle. Cash, I mean a lot of cash. I forget how much it was, seventy thousand dollars or something like that, maybe more. And then but his mistake was that one of the ladies lived. She was paralyzed for life. But when she testified in the trial, she comes down middle aisle there in the courthouse, in the
courtroom in a motorized wheelchair, you could hear a pin drop. Sure, and she says, and she tells the story which one of you guys want to want to die first. So now his defense, he was, this is so messed up. His defense. He had gone to he's sang in church choir. So his defense is he sings a song on the witness stand about mercy. And the prosecutor says, this man doesn't deserve any mercy because he didn't give these ladies any mercy. And the jury agreed and that was it
for him. That was a terrible crime.
Well, you talk about a case where a dug dealer who was twenty two years old, Elloy Bennettez or Benavetez, and this huge person named Ron Ridgeway, five hundred and fifteen pound bodyguard for this gang leader named Diaz. Right, tell us why this story and what's so fascinating about this case?
And this was a good chance to take a look at a big international drug game. They were and they were living in the forest and living large too. They were taking their own product and smoking it and snorting it too. And but what happened here was this drug dealer of benavite. This goes out to this drug stash house because they owe money. They owe about half a million dollars I believe it was, I can't remember, and
he's there to collect. And so what they do instead is they have a guy on the roof of the rifle and they shoot him and then they bury him, and then they make a concrete pad over him and make a dog pin out of it. These guys are just ruthless. I mean they're they're leaving bodies everywhere. They're shooting each other and in the forest and everything else. So Ron Ridgeway is one of the enforcers, bodyguard whatever. He's five hundred and five pounds and his lawyer says, well, Ron,
are you losing any weight in the jail. He says, no, I'm gaining weight. And his baby brother was four hundred and eighty five pounds. So, but these guys are just absolutely ruthless. And they's they're making They're they're shipping money rather drugs. They're bringing it in. They're they're bribing inspection people at the airport in Texas, and then they're shipping it all over the country. And then they're bringing in cocaine from Puerto Rico, so this whole thing, you know
how this goes. Once they started making arrest, people start flipping on each other. And one guy, this Puerto Rican hitman, he gets scared and in a pre trial hearing and he's gray. He's going to get the death sentence. So he just without any negotiation or anything else, please guilty straight up to first degree murder. And it happens so fast. Everybody in the courtroom wasn't sure that the court reporder
got it. So they had they were going to They did subpoena my notes, and I said, well, good luck reading them first of all, but I had a you know, I had him down as doing it. So but these guys were just they would just kill each other at the drop of a hat. It was just incredible.
You include a chapter called Jessica and February twenty fourth, two thousand and five. My father Mark Lunsford comes home and his nine year old daughter, Jessica is missing from her room. He lives with his He's staying with his parents, right or his parents, her grandparents, and there's no sign of forced entry. Tell us about this remarkable case and how it winds up in the end regarding a law.
This is a horrible case too. She was actually six. Yeah, the dad had gone spent the night with his girlfriend. He leaves Jessica with her his parents, which are nice, nice people. And this is a small area. This is home Asasses Springs over Citrus County. Nice area. But so what happened was they didn't know. They searched and search and searched for a long time, and finally they have an idea that this convicted, already convicted sex defender was staying in a mobile home where he was supposed to
be staying, staying with a sister nearby. It turns out this guy had broken in at night the house apparently was not locked, brought her over to the trailer, his storias, he got scared, and basically buried her alive. Just horrible. And so this is one of those And again the cops kind of messed it up because they forget to mirandize him, or they questioning him without telling the lawyer they're going to do, and all this sort of thing.
So there's a big controversy about it, and then because they would have a hard time finding a jury that wasn't familiar with this case in this small area, they moved the trial to Miami. That's another whole thing. But this guy, James Cooey, who he is his last name, just I wanna you look at him and you go just how disgusting and how awful. And so they come up with new legislation making all this kind of least kinds of child abduction and by convicted sex offenders, harder
sentencing and all that sort of thing. So again it changes the law. But it was just a heartbreaking case because she was just a beautiful girl that was just being compliant that he says, come with me, so she being an obedient little girl, she follows him. And it's just awful. This is heartbreaking.
And and the confession, as you say, it's disgusting, but it is one of the most disgusting yet detailed, unfortunately confessions. It's heart wrenching even read it. It's it's so disgusting and so brutal and senseless. And you also write that Bill O'Reilly, the conservative pundit was outraged over this case, wasn't he he was.
Yeah. What Bill was talking about was they didn't charge the sister. They said, surely she knew that something was going on or whatever. And her roommates, I mean, they had to. Why didn't they prosecute shoot them? You know, they worked as accessories or something. Well, the prosecutor, Bill brad King rather at the time, he says, look, I can't there's no evidence to show that they were aware of it. Couy such a messed up character. He says, oh, I had her locked up in the closet for days
and all that, and the prosecutors said that's impossible. So basically, they didn't charge the roommate the sister. So that's what upset Bill O'Reilly. But the prosecutor says, look, she gave permission to search the house, and because the confession was thrown out, if she hadn't agreed to verbally allow them to search the house, they wouldn't have had a case anyway. So it turns out it ended up being okay. But yeah, Bill, Bill O'Riley was, he was hot. So it was just
another one of those terrible cases. So much of that stuff goes on in Florida, I think because people come to Florida. There they don't have a family structure here. They their family somewhere else, and they're just at loose ends. And there's a lot of drugs going on, and it's just I don't know. People just kind of lose their minds down here sometimes crazy. Wow.
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Now you talk about people losing their mind in Florida, and appropriately you have a chapter called crazy, and you feature a woman named Diane Evers in January first, nineteen eighty bathing her two twin daughters and her two year old.
What happens. She her family's in the living room, she's bathing these ends, and so the girl girl and they got to check on her, and then, to their horror, realize that she's drowned the children in the bathroom. She says she's the virgin Mary, and that she has all these delusions about doctors saying this or that, to her nurses saying this or that. And she pleads not guilty by reason of insanity. It's one of those rare cases. That's a rare defense anyway, because Harry's don't like it,
they don't buy it. But in this case it worked. She was institutionalized until just a few years ago, and now she's graduated to a halfway house or you know,
kind of step down facility. But the judge, the monitoring this whole thing for years, that what what happened is under the law, you get a right to you know, if if the mental housettle says, oh she's better now, you get a hearing, and then the judge decides, well, every time they were about to have a hearing, she would what they call decompensate, and one time she tried to sell her arm off with a saw and that kind of thing, so they needless to say that they
canceled that hearing. But it's like, that's that is true craziness. But there's other cases in this book where people act crazy, stay crazy things, do crazy things, but it's not the judge or whatever decides no, that's that's not crazy. That's just it's not that crazy. There's crazy, then there's crazy. You know that kind of thing. So, so sorry about your luck here, you go on to jail. So and then I've covered other cases where that's actually been the defense.
But like I say, it's rare. It rarely works. The jury just doesn't go.
You say, one of the strangest cases you help cover was in two thousand and two, a nationally publicized case of a woman diagnosed with twelve different personalities disassociated identity disorder. Tell us a little bit about why you think this is one of the strangest cases other than the obvious.
Well, it's so rare that some psychologists don't even believe it's real. Rod Ferrell, the vampire, he claimed the habit, of course he didn't. But this woman, her deal was she said that she was sexually abused by her psychiatrist, that she would. She had these different personalities. One of them was a promiscuous young woman who she would be having sex with his doctor, and then she would and she was a come to and then realized that she was being abused. Yes, and you know, you know that
kind of thing. And during the testimony of this case, she slipped from one identity to another in the courtroom. And so because the fence attorney was asking questions and she goes, how are you, how are you doing? You know that kind of thing, and he says, who am I talking to now? And then she snapped out of it and went back to her main persona or whatever. So the end result was that it was very odd
to see. But the end result was that the psychiatrists was acquitted, but the state yanked his license anyway, so that was interesting. But to see something like that happened right in front of your eyes. It's like weirds like Sybil and three faces of Eve and those kinds of things. Very odd. Yes.
Indeed, you have a chapter called baby Faced Killers, and you have a middle school troubled kid with a nine milli meter semi automatic hand about to confront his tormentor or at least that's what he says. Tell us about this controversial case.
Yeah, Keith Johnson. He says this, he's being bullied or you know, tormented or whatever by this other kid. And so he's fifteen. Maybe he's fourteen at the time of the crime. I can't remember, but yeah, I think he's fifteen.
Man.
He goes to trial, So he shows up, he's staying, he's got all kinds of problems. Here's the thing, all these cases, you can look at their home and say, well, okay, I get it. I actually taught middle school for one year, and I would see these kids going off the walk and what's going on here? And then I get the parents in there. I say, okay, I get it now. Yeah. So this kid, he got kicked out of his house because he stole was his mother's car and drove to
New York with his girlfriend. So he's having to stay with some family friend. Well, the family friend had a gun, and he got hold of the gun, took it to school and shot this kid. Joey Summerland shot him several times. And the controversy was he says, I was in fear of my life. I thought he was gonna kill me. Blah, blah blah. Other people said, well, no, he was just a run in his mouth and that kind of thing. So, but the thing of it is the only sentence that
and the jury found him guilty. The only sentence you can have for something like that was mandatory life. He was fifteen years old. Well, now the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court keeps moving the ball, okay, And so now the Supreme Court says, no, you if you're a juvenile when you commit murder, you don't automatically be sentenced to life. Do you have you know, you're entitled to a new sentence and all that jazz. So so he is coming back for another sentencing hearing. I don't know when exactly.
It keeps. They keep putting it off because the COVID has pushed everything back so much. Right, we're just now having trials on cases from twenty seventeen, that kind of thing. But so was he justified in doing what I did in his mind? You know, that's that's a question. But it you know, even though it's horrible and you're thinking fifteen years old and you'll spend the rest of your life in prison, that's that's a big one to chew
a off, you know absolutely. So there's other cases too where it was an accidental shooting and the kid gets
sentenced under juvenile law, which of course is a lot different. Okay, you can be sentenced to confinement, but by the time you're twenty one or whatever, you're out of Another case where a kid shot his sister, and the legal system found a way to kind of hit some kind of happy medium with a lot of counseling and so on that one, because basically the parents we're going to lose both of their children, you know, So it's I think you're going to see a lot of more handwringing and
people trying to figure out some way of dealing with these kids because they're out there and they're killing and the what are you doing? You know?
Absolutely. You have another chapter called Love Hurts and this is a twenty one year old Joline Fisher and her ex Tony Fisher, and that she's at her grandparents house. She's afraid of Tony. Tell us what happens in this chapter Love Hurts and this Joline Fisher and Tony X.
She comes home, I guess from a date, comes home with a friend. Anyway, I'll call her a date. Yeah, So he's walking her to the door. She gets in the door and the door slams behind her, and it's her husband in there, and he's got a knife and some guns and she's trying he's trying to cut her throat, so she's putting her hands up to try it between the blade and her throat to keep getting her throat cut. And they're wrestling around and the friend runs next door
to get some help. He comes and smashes the door in and gets in there, and then the cops come. Well, she has such severe cuts all in her hand that it takes a special surgeon hours and hours and hours to try to reattach the nervedings, to try to attach all the tendons all that were cut. It was just terrific. But the interesting thing was in the trial she looks at him square in the eye and says, you know, she says, I know that I'm supposed to be a victim,
but I'm not going to be a victim. I'm not going to do it, you know, And you're going to go away to jail and I'm going to get all my life basically, So kudos to her. She had a lot of guts and she was bound or determined to keep healing and to go on to their line. So that was a that was quite a story.
You have other shocking examples of similar cases. And you have a Corey Brown claiming was an accident, but her head was bashed against with a brick or against a brick wall. You have other cases as well. You have another chapter called dead Men Talking. Tell us what story might be involved or is included in dead Men Talking.
That's one I'm really proud of because I got a tip. There was the city of Mount Door, which I say is a beautiful little town. It's kind of a tourist place. It looks like an MGM set for the Whole Musical or something beautiful place. Well, there had been a series of stabbings and robberies and assaults and one murder of an old man, so I got a call. There was another a man found dead in his house. So the cops are calling it a natural death. So I got
a tip though from somebody. He says, this is not natural, it's homicide. So I get to looking into it. I talked to the man's girlfriend. There were obvious signs that the house had been broken into, the circumstances. The crime scene looked really fishy. He was on his knees, and there was a pillow nearby, and then there was a knife nearby, and then the cops come and they moved the knife to take crime scene pictures, and I'm going,
what's going on here? So I kept doing these stories, investigative stories, and got a lot of pressure on the prosecutor's office, and they got to the point where they got a court order exhumed the body and found out that yes, he had been murdered, and the guy confessed to the murder. He got convicted or second degree murder. There's a gang of teenagers out there and they just wanted to rob and one of them is, we just want to do old people, and so just ruthless, terrible people. Yes.
Absolutely, you have a chapter called Senseless, and certainly it chronicles a senseless murder that.
The name is an understatement.
But you also have a couple chapters, the last two chapters Deathnell for Newspapers and Dreams. So tell us about a little bit about death Nell for Newspapers, question Mark and your dreams.
Regarding that, Well, I've been in this business actually now forty years and I go. I mean from the days when it was like the newspaper was extremely powerful and influential to now the massive layoffs, the newsaper business was not fast and getting up to speed with the Internet and all that lost so much. So they're they're sort of hanging on. They're doing the best they can. But I mean, there's only a few people here in Lake County. I'm one of them, and I'm not full time, but
I'm working on covered trials and so on. But my dream, I have this recurring dream where I'm at trying to I'm on the copy desk and I'm trying to put out the paper, but I don't have a list of the stories. I don't know what pages are supposed to go on. It's all confused, and there's but there's people in there from different papers, you know, like from the Sentinel and from the Oca Star Banner and that kind
of thing. I'm going like, well, what does this mean? Well, it just means that I've left a lot of friends behind over the years, and a lot of people have moved on, And so that's kind of what I'm thinking that it's your subconscious tries to put all these things together. The thing of it is, and you put your heart and soul in something like I have a journalism, then it's really hard and disturbing to see, you know, these things fall apart. So that's what that's what it's about.
Absolutely, And you do talk about and I agree, you know, the face of journalism has changed and uh and maybe they were late getting you know, a digital version of what they were doing, but it's essential that they do. And regardless of whether that change has is dramatic and not to be ever the same in terms of newspapers and their their readers readership, but that it's necessary and the same the same honored art of journalism is necessary today and will be in the future. So you'll just
have to reinvent itself somewhat, won't it. Yes, well, I want to thank you very much Frank for coming on and talking about uh, Vampires, gators and wackos. A new newspapers Man's Life, Frank Staffy. For those they might want to take a look at this book and other work, can you tell us about a web page or Amazon page that they might take a look at.
Frankie Stanfield at Frankie Stanfield dot com. And I'm on Facebook and Twitter on my name. Thank you very much, Frank.
Vampires, gators and wackos A newspaper man's life. Thank you very much. Frank Stanfield, you have a great evening.
Good night, thank you,