5 Twisted Idaho True Crime Stories that Made National TV

 

Evil in Idaho – Someone You Thought You Knew

Someone You Thought You Knew digs into the scary truth that you’re most likely to be murdered by someone you know, were potentially very close to and thought that they’d never hurt you. Some of those people aren’t what they appear to be on the surface. There’s something downright evil about them. Something evil enough to make them kill you. In Season 2, Episode 4, Someone You Thought You Knew focus on the murder of Lisa Stuckey in her Idaho Falls home. She laid there, decomposing for weeks, before friends became concerned enough to call police, telling them that they hadn’t seen or heard from her in quite some time. The episode’s description explains “The investigation leads authorities down a sordid path with many twists and turns. When the truth is finally revealed, the killer has shocking ties to the victim.”

A Nightmare in Idaho Falls – On the Case With Paula Zahn

Really? Two cases from Idaho Falls? It makes us a little nervous to visit Eastern Idaho any time soon. In her series on Investigation Discovery, Emmy winning journalist Paula Zahn takes a deep dive into crime mysteries with interview from those involved in and closest to the case. Season 16, Episode 1 revisits the 1989 double murder of Reeda Roundy and her friend, Betty Gray. The women were found shot to death at Roundy’s home where “Satan loves you” scribbled across the wall in human blood. It would be three years before a manhunt began for the suspect ultimately responsible for their deaths

Ashes to Alibis – Murder in the Heartland

We can’t help but laugh at the series description IMDB lists for Murder in the Heartland. According they describe the true murder series focuses on cases in “Midwest USA.” This, my friends, is why people always confuse Idaho with Iowa, but we digress. The series tells the murder stories through interviews with friends, family, investigators and reenactments. Season 2, Episode 4 visits Kootenai County to profile the murder of Bo Kirk. Kirk was kidnapped, shot and his truck was torched. Who killed Kirk? How did a psychic help bring closure to the case?

Madness on the Lake – Dead Silent

We’ve never watched this series before, but you’ve got our attention now that we’ve seen it described as a “vortex of dark mystery and psychological terror.” The murder mysteries tales they weave take place in the great outdoors. Season 1, Episode 4 takes place in Bayview, Idaho – population 1,123. (That’s less people than went to our high school.) Things proved to be a little two quiet for one resident, ultimately leading to him attacking a family of four. Paula Heath didn’t survive, but three family members did live to tell the story of the strange and horrifying attack

Deadly Double Life - In Pursuit With John Walsh

The series from America’s Most Wanted creator, John Walsh, brings true crime right back to the Treasure Valley in Season 1, Episode 6 of his show. This episode refreshes our memory of a 2017, Caldwell triple homicide. The suspect, Mike Bullinger, still hasn’t been found and hasn’t been seen since August 2018. It’s a story that had us scratching our heads from the beginning because the three bodies found in the Caldwell shed were the bodies of his wife of 10 years, girlfriend of two years and the girlfriend’s daughter. Supposedly, the two women never knew about each other. So how did Bullinger live that double life?

New York Times Co. v. United States Part II

 

United States v. Washington Post Co.

On June 18, 1971, The Washington Post began publishing its own series of articles based upon the Pentagon Papers. That day, Assistant U.S. Attorney General William Rehnquist asked the Post to cease publication. After the paper refused, Rehnquist sought an injunction in the District Court for the District of Columbia, but Judge Gerhard Gesell rejected the government's request, as did the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. This inconsistency between the courts of appeal led the Supreme Court to hear the case.

Opinion

The Supreme Court heard arguments from the Executive Branch, the Times, the Post, and the Justice Department on June 25 and 26, 1971. Along with the issue of how the Times obtained the documents (which was being investigated by a federal grand jury elsewhere) the real issue for the Court was whether there was a sufficient justification for prior restraint, which would be a suspension of the newspapers' First Amendment rights to freedom of the press. The First Amendment states that no federal law can be made abridging the freedom of the press, but a few landmark cases in the 20th century had established precedents creating exceptions to that rule, among them the "clear and present danger" test first articulated by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in Schenck v. United States.

The most recent incarnation of the exception was the grave and probable danger rule, established in Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494 (1951). During this case, the wording was changed to the grave and irreparable danger standard. The idea behind the numerous versions of the rule is that if a certain message will likely cause a "grave and irreparable" danger to the American public when expressed, then the message's prior restraint could be considered an acceptable infringement of civil liberties. The Supreme Court was therefore charged with determining if the Government had sufficiently met the "burden of showing justification for the imposition of such a restraint".

On June 30, with six Justices concurring and three dissenting, the Supreme Court upheld the right of the newspapers to publish the material. The Court issued a very brief per curiam opinion, stating only that the Court concurred with the decisions of the two lower courts to reject the Government's request for an injunction. In its decision, the court first established the legal question with the use of precedents. It first stated that "Any system of prior restraints of expression comes to this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity". The purpose of this statement was to make the presence of the inherent conflict between the Government's efforts and the First Amendment clear. The decision then stated that the government "thus carries a heavy burden of showing justification for the imposition of such a restraint". This reinforced the idea that it was the Nixon Administration's responsibility to show sufficient evidence that the newspapers' actions would cause a "grave and irreparable" danger.

New York Times v. United States is generally considered a victory for an extensive reading of the First Amendment, but as the Supreme Court ruled on whether the government had made a successful case for prior restraint, its decision did not void the Espionage Act or give the press unlimited freedom to publish classified documents.

Concurring opinions

Justice Hugo Black wrote an opinion that elaborated on his view of the absolute superiority of the First Amendment:

[T]he injunction against The New York Times should have been vacated without oral argument when the cases were first presented... . [E]very moment's continuance of the injunctions ... amounts to a flagrant, indefensible, and continuing violation of the First Amendment. ... The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell. ... [W]e are asked to hold that ... the Executive Branch, the Congress, and the Judiciary can make laws ... abridging freedom of the press in the name of 'national security.' ... To find that the President has 'inherent power' to halt the publication of news ... would wipe out the First Amendment and destroy the fundamental liberty and security of the very people the Government hopes to make 'secure.' ... The word 'security' is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security... . The Framers of the First Amendment, fully aware of both the need to defend a new nation and the abuses of the English and Colonial governments, sought to give this new society strength and security by providing that freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly should not be abridged.

Justice William O. Douglas largely concurred with Black, arguing that the need for a free press as a check on government prevents any governmental restraint on the press.

Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., wrote separately to explain that the publication of the documents did not qualify as one of the three exceptions to the freedom of expression established in Near v. Minnesota (1931).

Justices Potter Stewart and Byron R. White agreed that it is the responsibility of the Executive to ensure national security through the protection of its information. However, in areas of national defense and international affairs, the President possesses great constitutional independence that is virtually unchecked by the Legislative and Judicial branch. "In absence of governmental checks and balances", wrote Justice Stewart, "the only effective restraint upon executive policy and power in [these two areas] may lie in an enlightened citizenry – in an informed and critical public opinion which alone can here protect the values of democratic government".

Justice Thurgood Marshall argued that the term "national security" was too broad to legitimize prior restraint, and also argued that it is not the Court's job to create laws where the Congress had not spoken.

Dissenting opinions

Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, dissenting, argued that when "the imperative of a free and unfettered press comes into collision with another imperative, the effective functioning of a complex modern government," there should be a detailed study on the effects of these actions. He argued that in the haste of the proceedings, and given the size of the documents, the Court was unable to gather enough information to make a decision. He also argued that the Times should have discussed the possible societal repercussions with the Government prior to publication of the material. The Chief Justice did not argue that the Government had met the aforementioned standard, but rather that the decision should not have been made so hastily.

Justice John M. Harlan and Justice Harry A. Blackmun joined Burger in arguing the faults in the proceedings, and the lack of attention towards national security and the rights of the Executive.

New York Times Co. v. United States Part I

 

New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court on the First Amendment. The ruling made it possible for The New York Times and The Washington Post newspapers to publish the then-classified Pentagon Papers without risk of government censorship or punishment.

President Richard Nixon had claimed executive authority to force the Times to suspend publication of classified information in its possession. The question before the court was whether the constitutional freedom of the press, guaranteed by the First Amendment, was subordinate to a claimed need of the executive branch of government to maintain the secrecy of information. The Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment did protect the right of The New York Times to print the materials.

Background

The New York Times Washington Bureau Chief Max Frankel stated in a 1971 deposition, while the New York Times was fighting to publish the Pentagon Papers, that secrets can be considered the currency on which Washington runs and that "leaks were an unofficial back channel for testing policy ideas and government initiatives." Frankel recounted for example that the Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson used and revealed secrets purposefully. The Pentagon Papers, however, came to light not by a high-ranking government official. By 1971, the United States had been engaged in an undeclared war with North Vietnam for six years. At this point, about 58,000 American soldiers had died and the government was facing widespread dissent from large portions of the American public. In 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara commissioned a "massive top-secret history of the United States role in Indochina". Daniel Ellsberg, who had helped to produce the report, leaked 43 volumes of the 47-volume, 7,000-page report to reporter Neil Sheehan of The New York Times in March 1971 and the paper began publishing articles outlining the findings.

Restraining order sought

The black article appeared in the Times' Sunday edition, on June 13, 1971. By the following Tuesday, the Times received an order to cease further publication from a District Court judge, at the request of the administration. The government claimed it would cause "irreparable injury to the defense interests of the United States" and wanted to "enjoin The New York Times and The Washington Post from publishing the contents of a classified study entitled History of U.S. Decision-Making Process on the Vietnam Policy."

The government sought a restraining order that prevented the Times from posting any further articles based upon the Pentagon Papers. In addition to The New York Times Company, the Justice Department named the following defendants: Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, president and publisher; Harding Bancroft and Ivan Veit, executive vice presidents; Francis Cox, James Goodale, Sydney Gruson, Walter Mattson, John McCabe, John Mortimer and James Reston, vice presidents; John B. Oakes, editorial page editor; A. M. Rosenthal, managing editor; Daniel Schwarz, Sunday editor; Clifton Daniel and Tom Wicker, associate editors; Gerald Gold and Allan M. Siegal, assistant foreign editors; Neil Sheehan, Hedrick Smith, E. W. Kenworthy and Fox Butterfield, reporters; and Samuel Abt, a foreign desk copy editor.

Section 793 of the Espionage Act

Section 793 of the Espionage Act was cited by Attorney General John N. Mitchell as cause for the United States to bar further publication of stories based upon the Pentagon Papers. The statute was spread over three pages of the United States Code Annotated and the only part that appeared to apply to the Times was 793(e), which made it criminal for:

Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted, or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it [shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both].

Based on this language, Alexander Bickel and Floyd Abrams felt there were three preliminary arguments to raise. First, the wording of the statute was very broad. Was each article about foreign policy one "relating to the national defense"? What was the significance of "reason to believe" that the Pentagon Papers "could be used to the injury of the United States or the advantage of any foreign nation"? If the motivation was to educate the public, was that a defense that served to help, not hinder, the country? Would the public be "a person not entitled to receive" the information? Of equal importance was what the statute did not say: No references to "publication" (as Attorney General Mitchell's cease-and-desist order referenced), no reference to classified information, and no support for Mitchell's reliance on the top secret classification to justify restraint on publication. Additionally, there was no statutory language providing authority for prior restraint on publication at all.

Second, was the relevance of Mitchell's reliance on a criminal statute in a civil proceeding seeking prior restraint. There was Supreme Court precedent that lent support to the idea that bans on the publication of information by the press to be unconstitutional. In 1907 Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the "main purpose" of the First Amendment was "to prevent all such previous restraints upon publications as had been practiced by other governments." In 1931 the Court wrote that only the narrowest circumstances—such as publication of the dates of departure of ships during wartime—were permissibly restrained. In 1969 John Marshall Harlan II wrote that the Supreme Court "rejected all manner of prior restraint on publication." This second line of reasoning made it seem the statute should only be dealt with in passing, making the case a First Amendment one and the relief the government wanted—a bar on publication—unavailable.

The third possible approach was a very broad view of the First Amendment, one not focused on the impact of a government victory on the life of a democratic society if prior restraint were granted; but that the publication of just these sorts of materials—governmental misjudgments and misconducts of high import—is exactly why the First Amendment exists.

Federal judge Murray Gurfein heard arguments in the District Court for the Southern District of New York. Michael Hess, chief of the Civil Division of the United States Attorneys Office, argued "serious injuries are being inflicted on our foreign relations, to the benefit of other nations opposed to our foreign relations, to the benefit of other nations opposed to our form of government." Hess relied on Secretary of State William P. Rogers's statement reported earlier that day that a number of nations were concerned about the Papers publication and an affidavit from the general counsel of the Navy that alleged irreparable injury if publication did not cease. Hess asked for a temporary restraining order.

Bickel argued that the separation of powers barred the court from issuing the restraining order since there was no statute authorizing such relief. He further argued that there was no exception to the general unavailability of prior restraint that applied in this case. Gurfein called all counsel to his chambers and asked Bickel and Abrams to have the Times cease publication of the Papers until he could review them. Bickel responded that Gurfein would be the first judge in American history to enter a prior restraint enjoining publication of news if he granted the government's request. The Times refused to cease publication. Gurfein granted the request and set a hearing for June 18.

The New York Times agreed to abide by the restraining order and on June 19, Judge Gurfein rejected the administration's request for an injunction, writing that "[t]he security of the Nation is not at the ramparts alone. Security also lies in the value of our free institutions. A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know." However, the Court of Appeals, after an en banc hearing, granted an injunction until June 25.

Life of Bob Crane Part II

 

Trial

At the 1994 trial, Crane's son Robert testified that in the weeks before his father's death, Crane had repeatedly expressed a desire to sever his friendship with Carpenter. He said that Carpenter had become "a hanger-on" and "a nuisance to the point of being obnoxious". "My dad expressed that he just didn't need Carpenter kind of hanging around him anymore," he said. Robert testified that Crane had called Carpenter the night before the murder and ended their friendship.

Carpenter's attorneys attacked the prosecution's case as circumstantial and inconclusive. They presented evidence that Carpenter and Crane were still the best of friends, including witnesses from the restaurant where the two men had dined the evening before the murder. They noted that the murder weapon had never been identified nor found; the prosecution's camera tripod theory was sheer speculation, they said, based solely on Carpenter's occupation. They disputed the claim that the newly discovered evidence photo showed brain tissue, and presented many examples of "sloppy work" by police, such as the mishandling and misplacing of evidence—including the crucial tissue sample itself. They pointed out that Crane had been videotaped and photographed in sexual relations with numerous women, implying that any one of them might have been the killer. Other potential suspects proposed by defense attorneys included angry husbands and boyfriends of the women, and an actor who had sworn vengeance after a violent argument with Crane in Texas several months earlier.

Carpenter was acquitted, and he continued to maintain his innocence until his death in 1998. After the trial, Robert Crane speculated publicly that Olson, his father's widow, might have had a role in instigating the crime. "Nobody got a dime out of [the murder]," he said, "except for one person," alluding to Crane's will, which excluded him, his siblings, and his mother, with the entire estate left to Olson. He repeated his suspicions in the 2015 book Crane: Sex, Celebrity, and My Father's Unsolved Murder. Maricopa County District Attorney Rick Romley responded, "We never characterized Patty as a suspect," adding "I am convinced John Carpenter murdered Bob Crane." Officially, Crane's murder remains unsolved.

Later DNA testing

In November 2016, the Maricopa County Attorney's Office permitted Phoenix television reporter John Hook to submit the 1978 blood samples from Carpenter's rental car for retesting, using a more advanced DNA technique than the one used in 1990. Two sequences were identified, one from an unknown male, and the other too degraded to reach a conclusion. This testing consumed all of the remaining DNA from the rental car, making further tests impossible. Authorities tried to get DNA samples from Crane and Carpenter's remains, but their families refuse permission to exhume them.

Auto Focus

Crane's life and murder were the subject of the 2002 film Auto Focus, directed by Paul Schrader and starring Greg Kinnear as Crane. The film, based on a book on Crane's murder written by Zodiac author Robert Graysmith, was described as "brilliant" by critic Roger Ebert. The film portrays Crane as a happily married, church-going family man and popular Los Angeles disc jockey, who succumbs to Hollywood's celebrity lifestyle after becoming a television star. When he meets Carpenter, played by Willem Dafoe, and as a result of their friendship learns about then-new home video technology, he descends into a life of strip clubs, BDSM, and sex addiction.

Crane's son with Olson, Scotty, challenged the film's accuracy in an October 2002 review. "During the last twelve years of his life," he wrote, "[Crane] went to church three times: when I was baptized, when his father died, and when he was buried." His son further stated that Crane was a sex addict long before he became a star, and that he may have begun recording his sexual encounters as early as 1956. There was no evidence, he said, that Crane engaged in BDSM; there were no such scenes in any of his hundreds of home movies, and Schrader admitted that the film's BDSM scene was based on his own experience (while writing Hardcore). Before production on Auto Focus was announced, Scotty and Olson had shopped a rival script alternatively titled F-Stop or Take Off Your Clothes and Smile, but interest ceased after Auto Focus was announced.

In June 2001, Scotty launched the website bobcrane.com. It included a paid section featuring photographs, outtakes from his father's sex films, and Crane's autopsy report that proved, he said, that his father did not have a penile implant as stated in Auto Focus. The site was renamed "Bob Crane: The Official Web Site", but is now abandoned. The "official" Bob Crane website was maintained by CMG Worldwide. The website no longer exists.

Filmography

Film

1961 Return to Peyton Place

1961 Man-Trap

1964 The New Interns

1968 The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz

1972 Patriotism

1973 Superdad

1976 Gus

Television

1953 General Electric Theater: Episode: "Ride the River"

1959 Picture Window

1961 The Twilight Zone: Episode: "Static"

1961 General Electric Theater: Episode: "The $200 Parlay"

1962 The Dick Van Dyke Show: Episode: "Somebody Has to Play Cleopatra"

1963 The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: Segment: "The Thirty-First of February"

1963 Channing: Episode: "A Hall Full of Strangers"

1963–65 The Donna Reed Show

1965–71 Hogan's Heroes

1966 The Lucy Show: Episode: "Lucy and Bob Crane"

1966 Password

1967 The Green Hornet: Episode: "Corpse of the Year, Part 1"

1967 The Red Skelton Show: Episode: "Freddie's Heroes"

1969 Arsenic and Old Lace

1969 Love, American Style: Episode: "Love and the Modern Wife"

1971 Love, American Style: Episode: "Love and the Logical Explanation"

1971 Love, American Style: Episode: "Love and the Waitress"

1971 The Doris Day Show: Episode: "And Here's... Doris"

1971 Night Gallery: Episode: "House – with Ghost"

1972 The Delphi Bureau

1974 Tenafly: Episode: "Man Running"

1974 Tattletales

1974 Police Woman: Episode: "Requiem for Bored Wives'

1975 The Bob Crane Show

1976 Joe Forrester: Episode: "The Invaders"

1976 Ellery Queen: Episode: "The Adventure of the Hardhearted Huckster"

1976 Spencer's Pilots: Episode: "The Search"

1976 Gibbsville: Episode: "Trapped"

1977 Quincy, M.E.: Episode: "Has Anybody Here Seen Quincy?"

1977 The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries: Episode: "A Haunting We Will Go"

1978 The Love Boat: Episode: "Too Hot to Handle/Family Reunion/Cinderella Story", (final appearance)

Awards and nominations

1966 Primetime Emmy Award: Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series--Hogan's Heroes-Nominated

1967 Primetime Emmy Award: Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series--Hogan's Heroes-Nominated

Life of Bob Crane Part I

 

Robert Edward Crane (July 13, 1928 – June 29, 1978) was an American actor, drummer, radio personality, and disc jockey known for starring in the CBS situation comedy Hogan's Heroes.

Crane was a drummer from age 11, and he began his career as a radio personality, first in New York City and then in Connecticut. He then moved to Los Angeles where he hosted the number-one rated morning show. In the early 1960s, he moved into acting, eventually landing the lead role of Colonel Robert Hogan in Hogan's Heroes. The series aired from 1965 to 1971, and Crane received two Emmy Award nominations.

Crane's career declined after Hogan's Heroes. He became frustrated with the few roles that he was being offered and began performing in dinner theater. In 1975, he returned to television in the NBC series The Bob Crane Show, but the series received poor ratings and was canceled after 13 weeks. Afterward, Crane returned to performing in dinner theaters and also appeared in occasional guest spots on television.

Crane was found bludgeoned to death in his Scottsdale, Arizona, apartment while on tour in June 1978 for a dinner theater production of Beginner's Luck. The murder remains officially unsolved. His previously uncontroversial public image suffered due to the suspicious nature of his death, and posthumous revelations about his personal life.

Early life

Crane was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, the youngest of two sons of Alfred Thomas Crane and Rose Mary Ksenich Crane - the original spelling of the family name was Crean. He spent his childhood and teenaged years in Stamford. Crane began playing drums, and by junior high was organizing local drum and bugle parades with his neighborhood friends. He joined his high school's orchestra and its marching and jazz bands. Crane also played for the Connecticut and Norwalk Symphony Orchestras as part of their youth orchestra program. He graduated from Stamford High School in 1946. In 1948, he enlisted for two years in the Connecticut Army National Guard, and was honorably discharged in 1950.

In 1949, Crane married his high-school sweetheart, Anne Terzian. They had three children – Robert David, Deborah Anne, and Karen Leslie.

Career

Early career

In 1950, Crane began his career in radio broadcasting at WLEA in Hornell, New York. He soon moved to Connecticut stations WBIS in Bristol, and then WICC in Bridgeport, a 1,000-watt operation with a signal covering the northeastern portion of the New York metropolitan area. In 1956, Crane was hired by CBS Radio to host the morning show at its West Coast flagship KNX in Los Angeles, California, partly to re-energize that station's ratings and partly to halt his erosion of suburban ratings at WCBS in New York City. In California, Crane filled the broadcast with sly wit, drumming, and such guests as Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Bob Hope. His show quickly topped the morning ratings with adult listeners in the Los Angeles area, and Crane became "king of the Los Angeles airwaves".

Crane's acting ambitions led to guest-hosting for Johnny Carson on the daytime game show Who Do You Trust? and appearances on The Twilight Zone (uncredited), Channing, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and General Electric Theater. After Carl Reiner appeared on his radio show, Crane persuaded Reiner to book him for a guest appearance on The Dick Van Dyke Show.

The Donna Reed Show (1963–1964)

After seeing Crane's performance on The Dick Van Dyke Show, Donna Reed offered him a guest shot on her program. After the success of that episode, his character, Dr. David Kelsey, was incorporated into the show's storyline, and Crane became a regular cast member, beginning with the episode "Friends and Neighbors". Ann McCrea was cast in the series as his wife, Midge Kelsey. Crane continued to work full-time at KNX during his stint on The Donna Reed Show, running back and forth from the KNX studio at Columbia Square to Columbia Studios. He left the show in December 1964.

Hogan's Heroes (1965–1971)

In 1965, Crane was offered the starring role in a television sitcom set in a World War II POW camp. Hogan's Heroes involved the sabotage and espionage missions of Allied soldiers, led by Hogan, from under the noses of the oblivious Germans guarding them. The show was a hit, finishing in the top 10 in its first year. The distinctive military-style snare drum rhythm that introduces the show's theme song was played by Crane himself. The series lasted for six seasons, and Crane was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1966 and 1967. After having an affair with costar Cynthia Lynn, the actress who played Helga, Crane became romantically involved with Lynn's replacement Patricia Olson in 1968, who played Hilda under the stage name Sigrid Valdis. Crane divorced Terzian in 1970, just before their 21st anniversary, and married Olson on the set of the show later that year, with Richard Dawson serving as best man. Their son, Scotty, was born in 1971, and they later adopted a daughter, Ana Marie. The couple separated in 1977, but according to several family members, reconciled shortly before Crane's death.

After Hogan's Heroes

In 1968, Crane and series co-stars Werner Klemperer, Leon Askin, and John Banner appeared with Elke Sommer in a feature film, The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz, set in the divided city of Berlin during the Cold War. In 1969, Crane starred with Abby Dalton in a dinner theater production of Cactus Flower.

Following the cancellation of Hogan's Heroes in 1971, Crane appeared in two Disney films: Superdad (1973), in the title role, and Gus (1976). In 1973, he purchased the rights to a comedy play called Beginner's Luck and began touring it, as its star and director, at the Showboat Dinner Theatre in St. Petersburg, Florida; the La Mirada Civic Theatre in California; the Windmill Dinner Theatre in Scottsdale, Arizona; and other dinner theaters around the country.

Between theater engagements, Crane guest-starred in a number of TV shows, including Police Woman, Gibbsville, Quincy, M.E., and The Love Boat. In 1975, he returned to television with his own series, The Bob Crane Show on NBC, which was canceled after 14 episodes. In early 1978, Crane taped a travel documentary in Hawaii and recorded an appearance on the Canadian cooking show Celebrity Cooks. Neither aired in the U.S. following his death. His appearance on Celebrity Cooks did air in Canada in late 1978, and was recreated in the biopic film Auto Focus.

Private life and murder

Crane frequently videotaped and photographed his own sexual escapades. During the run of Hogan's Heroes, Dawson introduced him to John Henry Carpenter, a regional sales manager for Sony Electronics, who often helped famous clients with their video equipment. The two men struck up a friendship and began going to bars together. Crane attracted many women due to his celebrity status, and he introduced Carpenter to them as his manager. Crane and Carpenter would videotape their joint sexual encounters. Crane's son Robert later insisted that all of the women were aware of the videotaping and consented to it, but some had no idea that they had been recorded until they were informed by Scottsdale police after Crane's murder. Carpenter later became national sales manager at Akai, and he arranged his business trips to coincide with Crane's dinner-theater touring schedule so that the two could continue videotaping their sexual encounters with women.

In June 1978, Crane was living in the Winfield Place Apartments in Scottsdale during a run of Beginner's Luck at the Windmill Dinner Theatre. On the afternoon of June 29, his co-star Victoria Ann Berry entered his apartment after he failed to show up for a lunch meeting, and discovered his body. Crane had been bludgeoned with a weapon that was never identified, though investigators believed it to be a camera tripod. An electrical cord had been tied around his neck.

Crane's funeral was held on July 5, 1978, at St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church in Westwood, Los Angeles. An estimated 200 family members and friends attended, including Patty Duke, John Astin, and Carroll O'Connor. Pallbearers included Hogan's Heroes producer Edward Feldman, co-stars Larry Hovis and Robert Clary, and Crane's son Robert. He was interred in Oakwood Memorial Park in Chatsworth, California. Patricia Olson later had his remains relocated to Westwood Village Memorial Park in Westwood, and she was buried beside him in 2007 under her stage name Sigrid Valdis.

Investigation

The Scottsdale Police Department had no homicide division at the time, so it was ill-equipped to handle such a high-profile murder investigation. The crime scene yielded few clues; no evidence was found of forced entry, and nothing of value was missing. Detectives examined Crane's extensive videotape collection, which led them to Carpenter, who had flown to Phoenix on June 25 to spend a few days with Crane. Carpenter's rental car was impounded and searched. Several blood smears were found that matched Crane's blood type; no one else of that blood type was known to have been in the car, including Carpenter. DNA testing was not yet available, and the Maricopa County Attorney declined to file charges.

In 1990, Scottsdale Police Detective Barry Vassall and Maricopa County Attorney's Office Investigator Jim Raines re-examined the evidence from 1978 and persuaded the county attorney to reopen the case. DNA testing was inconclusive on the blood found in Carpenter's rental car, but Raines did discover an evidence photograph of the car's interior that appeared to show a piece of brain tissue. The actual tissue samples recovered from the car had been lost, but an Arizona judge ruled that the new evidence was admissible. In June 1992, Carpenter was arrested and charged with Crane's murder.

Lawrence v. Texas Part II

 

O'Connor's concurrence

Justice O'Connor, argued the statute was unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause rather than due process and would have kept Bowers intact.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor only concurred in the judgment and wrote a concurring opinion in which she offered a different rationale for invalidating the Texas sodomy statute. She disagreed with the overturning of Bowers—she had been in the Bowers majority—and disputed the court's invocation of due process guarantees of liberty in this context. Rather than including sexuality within protected liberty, she would strike down the law as violating the equal protection clause because it criminalized male–male but not male–female sodomy. O'Connor maintained that a sodomy law that was neutral both in effect and application might be constitutional, but that there was little to fear because "democratic society" would not tolerate it for long. O'Connor noted that a law limiting marriage to heterosexual couples would pass rational scrutiny as long as it was designed to "preserv[e] the traditional institution of marriage" and not simply based on the state's dislike of homosexual persons.

Scalia's dissent

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a dissent, which Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas joined. Scalia objected to the Court's decision to revisit Bowers, pointing out many decisions from lower courts that relied on Bowers that might now need to be reconsidered. He noted that the same rationale used to overturn Bowers could have been used to overturn Roe v. Wade, which some of the Justices in the majority in Lawrence had upheld in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). Scalia also criticized the majority opinion for failing to give the same respect to stare decisis that three of those in the majority had insisted on in Casey. O'Connor's concurrence noted that Scalia's dissent conceded that if cases such as Romer v. Evans "have stare decisis effect, Texas' sodomy law would not pass scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause, regardless of the type of rational basis review" applied.

Scalia wrote that if the court was not prepared to validate laws based on moral choices as it had done in Bowers, state laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity would not prove sustainable.

He wrote that:

Today's opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct. ... [T]he Court has taken sides in the culture war, departing from its role of assuring, as a neutral observer, that the democratic rules of engagement are observed.

He cited the majority opinion's concern that the criminalization of sodomy could be the basis for discrimination against homosexuals as evidence that the majority ignored the views of most Americans:

So imbued is the Court with the law profession's anti-anti-homosexual culture, that it is seemingly unaware that the attitudes of that culture are not obviously "mainstream"; that in most States what the Court calls "discrimination" against those who engage in homosexual acts is perfectly legal.

He continued: "Let me be clear that I have nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means." The majority's "invention of a brand-new 'constitutional right'", he wrote, showed it was "impatient of democratic change".

Thomas's dissent

Justice Thomas wrote in a separate, two-paragraph dissent that the law the Court struck down was "uncommonly silly", a phrase from Justice Potter Stewart's dissent in Griswold v. Connecticut, but he voted to uphold it as he could find "no general right of privacy" or relevant liberty in the Constitution. He added that if he were a member of the Texas legislature he would vote to repeal the law.

Reactions

President George W. Bush's press secretary Ari Fleischer refused to comment on the decision, noting only that the administration had not filed a brief in the case. As governor, Bush had opposed the repeal of the Texas sodomy provision, which he called a "symbolic gesture of traditional values". After quoting Fleischer calling it "a state matter", Linda Greenhouse, writing in The New York Times, commented: "In fact, the decision today ... took what had been a state-by-state matter and pronounced a binding national constitutional principle."

The Lambda Legal's lead attorney in the case, Ruth Harlow, stated in an interview after the ruling that "the court admitted its mistake in 1986, admitted it had been wrong then ... and emphasized today that gay Americans, like all Americans, are entitled to full respect and equal claim to [all] constitutional rights."

Professor Laurence Tribe has written that Lawrence "may well be remembered as the Brown v. Board of Education of gay and lesbian America". Jay Alan Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice has referred to the decision as having "changed the status of homosexual acts and changed a previous ruling of the Supreme Court ... this was a drastic rewrite".

The end result of Lawrence v. Texas was "like the Roe v. Wade of the homosexual issue", according to Peter LaBarbera of Culture and Family Institute and Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, an organization recognized as a homophobic hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Subsequent cases

Sexual privacy

Age of consent laws

Lawrence invalidated age of consent laws that differed based on sexual orientation. The day after the Lawrence decision, the Supreme Court ordered the State of Kansas to review its 1999 "Romeo and Juliet" law that reduces the punishment for a teenager under 18 years of age who has consensual sexual relations with a minor no more than four years their junior but explicitly excludes same-sex conduct from the sentence reduction. In 2004, the Kansas Appeals Court upheld the law as is, but the Kansas Supreme Court unanimously reversed the lower court's ruling on October 21, 2005, in State v. Limon.

Consensual incest

In Muth v. Frank (2005), following Lawrence a man convicted of criminal behavior by having an incestuous relationship in Wisconsin appealed his ruling in an attempt to apply the logic of sexual privacy in Lawrence. The Seventh Circuit declined to extend the right of privacy stated in Lawrence to cases of consensual adult incest. The case was distinguished because parties were not similarly situated since there is in the latter case an enhanced possibility of genetic mutation of a possible offspring as suggested by geneticists who were witnesses at the trial.

Fornication

In Martin v. Ziherl, the Supreme Court of Virginia ruled the state's fornication law unconstitutional relying on Lawrence and the right to privacy.

Teacher-student relationships

The Connecticut Supreme Court rejected an argument based on Lawrence that a high school teacher had a constitutional right to engage in sexual activity with his consent-aged students. The court rejected the teacher's privacy and liberty arguments in the context of an "inherently coercive relationship wherein consent might not easily be refused".

Adult entertainment

Upon rehearing Williams v. Pryor after Lawrence, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Alabama's ban on the sale of sex toys. Facing comparable facts, the Fifth Circuit struck down Texas's sex toy ban holding that "morality is an insufficient justification for a statute" and "interests in 'public morality' cannot constitutionally sustain the statute after Lawrence".

Bestiality

According to Leighann Lassiter, director of animal abuse for the Humane Society of the United States, the Lawrence ruling that struck down all statutes in the United States prohibiting consensual human sexual conduct can also block prosecution of bestiality. Issues stem from several states that include human sexual conduct and bestiality in the same "anti-sodomy" statute. "Cases have been turned over on appeal because of unclear language in the law, and often times no charges are brought at all," said Leighann. As of 2018, 45 states have direct prohibitions on bestiality, while others may prohibit it under broader animal cruelty laws, according to the Animal Legal and Historical Center (Michigan State University College of Law).

Same-sex marriage bans

A few months later, on November 18, 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that same-sex couples have a right to marry. Although deciding the case on the basis of the state constitution, Chief Justice Margaret Marshall quoted Lawrence in its second paragraph: "Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code."

Aside from Massachusetts, other state case law had been quite explicit in limiting the scope of Lawrence and upholding state bans on same-sex marriage regulations. (See Standhardt v. Superior Court ex rel County of Maricopa, 77 P.3d 451 (Ariz. App. 2003); Morrison v. Sadler, 821 N.E.2d 15 (Ind. App. 2005); Hernandez v. Robles (7 NY3d 338 2005).)

In the first successful federal court challenge to a state same-sex marriage ban, Judge Vaughn Walker cited Scalia's dissent in his decision in Perry v. Schwarzenegger that found California's Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage unconstitutional.

United States military

The United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, the last court of appeals for courts-martial before the Supreme Court, ruled that Lawrence applies to Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the article banning sodomy. It also twice upheld prosecutions under Article 125 when applied as necessary to preserve good order and discipline in the armed forces.

The level of scrutiny applied in Lawrence

Justice Scalia and others have noted that the majority did not appear to apply the strict scrutiny standard of review that would be appropriate if the Lawrence majority had recognized a full-fledged "fundamental right". He wrote the majority, instead, applied "an unheard-of form of rational basis review that will have far-reaching implications beyond this case".

Nan D. Hunter has argued that Lawrence used a new method of substantive due process analysis, and that the Court intended to abandon its old method of categorizing due process rights as either "fundamental" or "not fundamental" as too restrictive. Justice Souter, for example, argued in Washington v. Glucksberg that the role of the Court in all cases, including unenumerated rights cases, is to ensure that the government's action has not been arbitrary. Justice Stevens had repeatedly criticized tiered scrutiny and preferred a more active judicial balancing test based on reasonability.

Lower courts have read Lawrence differently on the question of scrutiny. In Lofton v. Secretary of the Department of Children and Family Services the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit upheld a state law barring adoption of children by homosexuals, holding explicitly that Lawrence did not apply strict scrutiny. In Witt v. Department of the Air Force, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that Lawrence applied intermediate scrutiny.

Plaintiffs

John Lawrence died of complications from a heart ailment in 2011, aged 68. Tyron Garner died of meningitis in 2006, aged 39, and Robert Eubanks was beaten to death in 2000, in a case that was never solved.

Lawrence v. Texas Part I

 

Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that sanctions of criminal punishment for those who commit sodomy are unconstitutional. The Court reaffirmed the concept of a "right to privacy" that earlier cases, such as Roe v. Wade, had found the U.S. Constitution provides, even though it is not explicitly enumerated. The Court based its ruling on the notions of personal autonomy to define one's own relationships and of American traditions of non-interference with private sexual decisions between consenting adults.

In 1998, John Geddes Lawrence Jr., an older white man, was arrested along with Tyron Garner, a younger black man, at Lawrence's apartment in Harris County, Texas. Garner's former boyfriend had called the police, claiming that there was a man with a weapon in the apartment. Sheriff's deputies said they found the men engaging in sexual intercourse. Lawrence and Garner were charged with a misdemeanor under Texas' anti-sodomy law; both pleaded no contest and received a fine. Assisted by the American civil rights organization Lambda Legal, Lawrence and Garner appealed their sentences to the Texas Courts of Appeals, which ruled in 2000 that the sodomy law was unconstitutional. Texas appealed to have the court rehear the case en banc, and in 2001 it overturned its prior judgment and upheld the law. Lawrence appealed this decision to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which denied his request for appeal. Lawrence then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear his case.

The Supreme Court struck down the sodomy law in Texas in a 6–3 decision and, by extension, invalidated sodomy laws in 13 other states, making same-sex sexual activity legal in every U.S. state and territory. The Court, with a five-justice majority, overturned its previous ruling on the same issue in the 1986 case Bowers v. Hardwick, where it upheld a challenged Georgia statute and did not find a constitutional protection of sexual privacy. It explicitly overruled Bowers, holding that it had viewed the liberty interest too narrowly. The Court held that intimate consensual sexual conduct was part of the liberty protected by substantive due process under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Lawrence invalidated similar laws throughout the United States that criminalized sodomy between consenting adults acting in private, whatever the sex of the participants.

The case attracted much public attention, and many amici curiae ("friends of the court") briefs were filed. Its outcome was celebrated by gay rights advocates, and set the stage for further reconsideration of standing law, including the landmark case of Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) which recognized same-sex marriage as a fundamental right under the United States Constitution.

Background

Legal punishments for sodomy often included heavy fines, prison sentences, or both, with some states, beginning with Illinois in 1827, denying other rights, such as suffrage, to anyone convicted of the crime of sodomy. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, several states imposed various eugenics laws against anyone deemed to be a "sexual pervert". As late as 1970, Connecticut denied a driver's license to a man for being an "admitted homosexual".

As of 1960, every state had an anti-sodomy law. In 1961, the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code advocated the repeal of sodomy laws as they applied to private, adult, consensual behavior. Two years later the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took its first major case in opposition to these laws.

In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Supreme Court struck down a law barring the use of contraceptives by married couples. In Griswold, the Supreme Court recognized for the first time that couples, at least married couples, had a right to privacy, drawing on the Fourth Amendment's protection of private homes from searches and seizures without a warrant based on probable cause, the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of due process of law in the states, and the Ninth Amendment's assurance that rights not specified in the Constitution are "retained by the people". Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) expanded the scope of sexual privacy rights to unmarried persons. In 1973, the choice whether to have an abortion was found to be protected by the Constitution in Roe v. Wade.

In Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), the Supreme Court heard a constitutional challenge to sodomy laws brought by a man who had been arrested, but was not prosecuted, for engaging in oral sex with another man in his home. The Court rejected this challenge in a 5 to 4 decision. Justice Byron White's majority opinion emphasized that Eisenstadt and Roe had only recognized a right to engage in procreative sexual activity, and that long-standing moral antipathy toward homosexual sodomy was enough to argue against the notion of a right to sodomy. Justice Blackmun, writing in dissent, argued that Eisenstadt held that the Constitution protects people as individuals, not as family units. He then reasoned that because state intrusions are equally burdensome on an individual's personal life regardless of his marital status or sexual orientation, there is no reason to treat the rights of citizens in same-sex couples any differently.

By the time of the Lawrence decision, ten states—Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Michigan, Utah, and Virginia—still banned consensual sodomy without respect to the sex of those involved, and four—Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri—prohibited same-sex couples from engaging in anal and oral sex.

History

Arrest of Lawrence and Garner

On September 17, 1998, John Geddes Lawrence Jr., a gay 55-year-old medical technologist, was hosting two gay acquaintances, Tyron Garner, age 31, and Robert Eubanks, 40, at his apartment in northeast Harris County, Texas, east of the Houston city limits. Lawrence and Eubanks had been friends for more than 20 years. Garner and Eubanks had a tempestuous on-again off-again romantic relationship since 1990. Lacking transportation home, the couple were preparing to spend the night. Eubanks, who had been drinking heavily, left to purchase a soda from a nearby vending machine. Apparently outraged that Lawrence had been flirting with Garner, he called police and reported "a black male going crazy with a gun" at Lawrence's apartment.

Four Harris County sheriff's deputies responded within minutes and Eubanks pointed them to the apartment. They entered the unlocked apartment toward 11 p.m. with their weapons drawn. In accordance with police procedures, the first to arrive, Joseph Quinn, took the lead both in approaching the scene and later in determining what charges to bring. He later reported seeing Lawrence and Garner having anal sex in the bedroom. A second officer reported seeing them engaged in oral sex, and two others did not report seeing the pair having sex. Lawrence repeatedly challenged the police for entering his home. Quinn had discretionary authority to charge them for a variety of offenses and to determine whether to arrest them. When Quinn considered charging them with having sex in violation of state law, he had to get an Assistant District Attorney to check the statutes to be certain they covered sexual activity inside a residence. He was told that Texas' anti-sodomy statute, the "Homosexual Conduct" law, made it a Class C misdemeanor if someone "engages in deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex". The statute, Chapter 21, Sec. 21.06 of the Texas Penal Code, had been adopted in 1973 when the state revised its criminal code to end its proscription on heterosexual anal and oral intercourse.

Quinn decided to arrest Lawrence and Garner and charge them with having "deviate sex". In the separate arrest reports he filed for each, he wrote that he had seen the arrestee "engaged in deviate sexual conduct namely, anal sex, with another man". Lawrence and Garner were held in jail overnight. At a hearing the next day, they pleaded not guilty to a charge of "homosexual conduct". They were released toward midnight. Eubanks pleaded no contest to charges of filing a false police report. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail but was released early.

Prosecution and appeals

The gay rights advocates from Lambda Legal litigating the case convinced Lawrence and Garner not to contest the charges and to plead no contest instead. On November 20, Lawrence and Garner pleaded no contest to the charges and waived their right to a trial. Justice of the Peace Mike Parrott found them guilty and imposed a $100 fine and court costs of $41.25 on each defendant. When the defense attorneys realized that the fine was below the minimum required to permit them to appeal the convictions, they asked the judge to impose a higher penalty. Parrott, well aware that the attorneys intended to use the case to raise a constitutional challenge, increased it to $125 with the agreement of the prosecutor.

To appeal, Lawrence and Garner needed to have their cases tried in Harris County Criminal Court. Their attorneys asked the court to dismiss the charges against them on Fourteenth Amendment equal protection grounds, claiming that the law was unconstitutional since it prohibited sodomy between same-sex couples, but not between heterosexual couples. They also asserted a right to privacy and that the Supreme Court's decision in Bowers v. Hardwick that found no privacy protection for consensual sex between homosexuals was "wrongly decided". On December 22, Judge Sherman Ross denied the defense motions to dismiss. The defendants again pleaded "no contest". Ross fined them $200 each, the amount agreed upon in advance by both sides.

A three-judge panel of the Texas Fourteenth Court of Appeals heard the case on November 3, 1999. Their 2–1 decision issued on June 8, 2000, ruled the Texas law was unconstitutional. Justice John S. Anderson and Chief Justice Paul Murphy found that the law violated the 1972 Equal Rights Amendment to the Texas Constitution, which bars discrimination based on sex, race, color, creed, or national origin. J. Harvey Hudson dissented. The Court of Appeals decided to review the case en banc. On March 15, 2001, without hearing oral arguments, it reversed the three-judge panel's decision and upheld the law's constitutionality 7–2, denying both the substantive due process and equal protection arguments. Attorneys for Lawrence and Garner asked the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the highest appellate court in Texas for criminal matters, to review the case. After a year's delay, on April 17, 2002, that request was denied. Lambda Legal's Harlow called that decision "a major abdication of judicial responsibility". Bill Delmore, the Harris County prosecutor who argued the case, called the judges "big chickens" and said: "They have a history of avoiding the hot potato cases if they can."

Consideration by the Supreme Court

In a petition for certiorari filed in the U.S. Supreme Court on July 16, 2002, Lambda Legal attorneys asked the Court to consider:

Whether the petitioners' criminal convictions under the Texas "Homosexual Conduct" law—which criminalizes sexual intimacy by same-sex couples, but not identical behavior by different-sex couples—violate the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the laws;

Whether the petitioners' criminal convictions for adult consensual sexual intimacy in their home violate their vital interests in liberty and privacy protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment;

Whether Bowers v. Hardwick should be overruled.

On December 2, 2002, the Court agreed to hear the case. Lambda Legal coordinated the submission of sixteen amicus curiae briefs to complement their own brief. Submitting organizations included the American Bar Association, the American Psychological Society, the American Public Health Association, the Cato Institute, the Log Cabin Republicans, a group of history professors, and a group of religious denominations. An op-ed in support by former Sen. Alan Simpson appeared in The Wall Street Journal on the morning scheduled for oral argument. The attorneys for Texas did not control the amicus briefs submitted in support of their position by representatives of religious and social conservatism, including Jay Alan Sekulow and Robert P. George. Several, including that of Liberty Counsel, depicted homosexuals as self-destructive, disease-prone, and promiscuous. The states of Alabama, South Carolina, and Utah advised the Court that unlike heterosexual sodomy, homosexual sodomy had "severe physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual consequences".

At oral argument on March 26, 2003, Paul M. Smith, an experienced litigator who had argued eight cases before the Supreme Court, spoke on behalf of the plaintiffs. Texas Attorney General John Cornyn, then a candidate for the US Senate, refused to have his office argue the case. Charles A. Rosenthal, District Attorney of Harris County, represented the state. His performance was later described as "the worst oral argument in years", but some believe his lack of preparation reflected his lack of enthusiasm for the statute he was defending.

Decision

On June 26, 2003, the Supreme Court issued a 6–3 decision in favor of Lawrence that struck down Texas's statute. Five justices held it violated the Due Process Clause, while a sixth, Sandra Day O'Connor, held it violated the Equal Protection Clause.

Opinion of the Court

Five justices formed the majority and joined an opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy. The Court ruled that Texas's law prohibiting private homosexual activity between consenting adults violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Court did not speak of private sexual activity as a fundamental right that might require the highest "strict scrutiny" standard of judicial review. Instead, it focused on why the Court's decision in Bowers v. Hardwick was wrong.

First, the Court stated that its decision in Bowers went against its statements in cases involving child-rearing (Pierce v. Society of Sisters and Meyer v. Nebraska), contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut and Eisenstadt v. Baird), and abortion (Roe v. Wade) that the Constitution protects a right to privacy and personal autonomy. Next, Kennedy wrote that in Bowers the Court had misread the historical record regarding laws criminalizing homosexual relations. He stated that, after further research, the Court had found that historical American anti-sodomy laws had been directed at "non-procreative sexual activity more generally," rather than specifically at homosexual acts, contrary to the Court's conclusions in Bowers. Combined with the fact that these laws were often unenforced, the Court saw this as constituting a tradition of avoiding interference with private sexual activity between consenting adults.

Lastly, Kennedy noted that Bowers's jurisprudential foundation had been weakened by two subsequent cases involving sexuality (Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Romer v. Evans), and that the reasoning of Bowers had been criticized in the United States and rejected by most other developed Western countries. For this reason, Kennedy stated that there was a jurisprudential basis to think that it should be "an integral part of human freedom" for consenting adults to choose to privately engage in sexual activity.

Kennedy wrote: "The petitioners [Lawrence and Garner] are entitled to respect for their private lives. The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime." Kennedy reviewed the assumption the court made in Bowers, using the words of Chief Justice Burger's concurring opinion in that case, that "Condemnation of [homosexual practices] is firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian moral and ethical standards." He reviewed the history of legislation that criminalized certain sexual practices, but without regard for the gender of those involved. He cited the Model Penal Code's recommendations since 1955, the Wolfenden Report of 1957, and a 1981 decision of the European Court of Human Rights in Case 7525/76 Dudgeon v United Kingdom.

Robison Family Massacre

 

The Robison family murders, also referred to as the Good Hart murders, were the mass murders of Richard Robison, his wife Shirley Robison (née Fulton), and their four children; Ritchie, Gary, Randy, and Susan on June 25, 1968. The upper-middle-class family from the metropolitan Detroit area of Lathrup Village, Michigan, were shot and killed while vacationing in their Lake Michigan cottage just north of Good Hart, Michigan, near the Straits of Mackinac. This case remained unsolved after a 15-month investigation by the Michigan State Police and the Emmet County Sheriff's Office. However, when the investigation was completed in December 1969, evidence pointed to one person: Joseph Raymond Scolaro III, an embezzling employee of Richard Robison.

Crime scene

The murders began with five gunshots aimed at Richard Robison, fired through a rear window from a .22-caliber semi-automatic rifle. The murderer then entered the cottage through an unlocked door and killed the remaining five people with shots to the head from a .25-caliber semi-automatic pistol. Susan and Richard Robison were also bludgeoned with a hammer found at the murder scene.

Shirley Robison's body was intentionally posed so that when the crime scene was discovered it would lead the police to think that the crime was part of a sexual attack. Bloody footprints on the floor led investigators to conclude that one person committed the murders. The bodies were not discovered for 27 days and conditions at the murder scene resulted in advanced decomposition of the bodies.

Investigation

By the second week of the investigation, which had begun on Monday, July 22, 1968, the Michigan State Police and the Emmet County authorities suspected Richard Robison's employee Joseph R. Scolaro III, aged 30. He had not been seen or heard from for more than twelve hours on the day of the murders, and his alibis for that time period all proved invalid. He had also purchased both of the murder weapons determined by police forensic tests to have been used in the Robison family murders, specifically, a .25 caliber Jet-Fire automatic Beretta pistol #47836, and a .22 caliber AR-7 ArmaLite semi-automatic rifle #75878. The four .22 caliber spent shells found at the cabin murder scene were forensically compared by their ballistic markings to several .22 caliber evidence shells known to have been fired by Scolaro at a family firing range in 1967 at which time Scolaro used his missing .22 caliber ArmaLite rifle #75878. The two sets of shells were found to be an exact match. Although Scolaro claimed to have given this weapon away, a neighbor had told police he had seen the .22 caliber AR-7 rifle in Scolaro's house not long before the Robisons were killed.

Scolaro's missing .25 caliber Beretta automatic pistol #47836, which he also claimed to police to have given away prior to the June 25, 1968 murders, was matched forensically in similar class characteristics to a second identical .25 caliber Beretta pistol #47910 that he produced for police on the second day after the bodies were found in Good Hart. Both guns had been purchased by Scolaro on the same day, February 2, 1968. Also found at the murder scene were several Sako .25 caliber spent cartridges, a rare 1968 Finnish brand sold only for the limited time of a few weeks in Michigan (January–February, 1968) prior to the murders. It was documented by investigators that one of the actual few Sako ammunition purchasers in Michigan had been Joseph Scolaro III, on February 2, 1968. Scolaro's statements that he had given away both of the missing murder weapons and the Sako ammunition prior to the June 25, 1968, killings also proved invalid. They were one more part of his elaborate scheme to obstruct the investigation of the crime. During the lengthy murder investigation it was determined by a forensic accountant that more than $60,000 was missing from the two combined businesses of Richard Robison. The two Robison businesses had been left in the care of the suspect Scolaro prior to the murders. The two investigating police agencies involved in the case presented their combined Evidence Case Report CR 4114-08-785-66 to the jurisdictional prosecution on December 17, 1969. The detailed report implicated Joseph Scolaro as the sole perpetrator of the mass murder crime. In mid-January 1970, Emmet County prosecutor Donald C. Noggle decided not to bring charges against Scolaro at that time, citing the two missing murder weapons and the absence of his fingerprints from the crime scene.

Outcome

During the course of the investigation, the suspect Scolaro failed two lie detector tests; a third test was judged inconclusive as to the truth. It was also noted that he tried to deceive the polygraph interviewers in his pre-test interviews. Four years later, a newly elected chief prosecutor in Oakland County, L. Brooks Patterson, believed the Robison crime had originated within his jurisdiction and reopened the prosecution. When the prime suspect Scolaro learned of the impending charges and arrest, he committed suicide on March 8, 1973. Scolaro left behind a typewritten note on which he wrote "I am a lier [sic]—a cheat—a phony" with a list of people he had swindled in multiple business schemes. He then added a handwritten note to his mother on the same sheet of paper saying "I had nothing to do with the Robisons—I'm a liar but not a murderer—I'm sick and scared—God and everyone please forgive me." Since Michigan law does not permit an open murder case to be officially closed, the suicide of the prime suspect Scolaro placed the case in the inactive file. Thus, many questions remained unanswered. Over many years other crime theories have surfaced but to date none has ever been substantiated.

Those who personally knew Mr. Robison were quoted in the two police reports filed on the case as saying they had never known a better family man, friend, or business partner.

Jack Unterweger

 

Johann "Jack" Unterweger (16 August 1950 – 29 June 1994) was an Austrian serial killer who committed murder in several countries – Austria, West Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the United States. Initially convicted in 1974 of a single murder, Unterweger began to write extensively while in prison. His work gained the attention of the Austrian literary elite, who took it as evidence that he had been rehabilitated.

After significant lobbying, Unterweger was released on parole in 1990. After his release, he became a minor celebrity and worked as a playwright and journalist, but within months he resumed killing women. Unterweger hanged himself in prison after being convicted of nine more murders in June 1994.

Early life

Jack Unterweger was born August 16, 1950 in Judenburg, Styria, Austria to Theresia Unterweger, a Viennese barmaid and waitress, and Jack Becker, an American soldier whom she had met in Trieste, Italy. Some sources describe his mother as a sex worker. Unterweger's mother was jailed for fraud while pregnant but was released and traveled to Graz, where he was born. After his mother was arrested again in 1953, Unterweger was sent to Carinthia to live with his grandfather, who was known as a "rough fellow" who regularly used his grandson to help him steal farm animals.

Unterweger was in and out of prison for much of his youth. He worked as a waiter but between 1966 and 1974 he was convicted sixteen times, mostly for theft-related offences, but also for pimping and sexual assault on a sex worker; he spent most of those eight years in jail.

First murder conviction, imprisonment and release

In 1974, Unterweger murdered 18-year-old West German national Margaret Schäfer by strangling her with her own bra, and in 1976 he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. While imprisoned, he wrote short stories, poems, plays, and an autobiography, Purgatory or The Trip to Prison – Report of a Guilty Man, that later served as the basis for a documentary.

In 1985, a campaign to pardon and release Unterweger from prison began. Austrian President Rudolf Kirchschläger (SPÖ/ÖVP) refused the petition when presented to him, citing the court-mandated minimum of fifteen years in prison. Writers, artists, journalists and politicians agitated for a pardon, including the author and 2004 Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek; Günter Grass; and the editor of the magazine Manuskripte, Alfred Kolleritsch.

Unterweger was released on 23 May 1990, after the required minimum fifteen years of his life term. Upon his release, his autobiography was taught in Austrian schools and his stories for children were performed on Austrian radio. Unterweger himself hosted television programmes which discussed criminal rehabilitation and he worked as a reporter for the public broadcaster ORF, where he reported on stories concerning the very murders for which he was later found guilty.

Later murders

Law enforcement later found that Unterweger killed a young woman named Blanka Bočková in Czechoslovakia, and seven more in Austria in 1990—Brunhilde Masser, aged 39; Heidi Hammerer, aged 31; Elfriede Schrempf, aged 35; Silvia Zagler, aged 23; Sabine Moitzl, aged 25; Karin Eroglu-Sladky, aged 25; Regina Prem, aged 32—in the first year after his release, all garroted with their bras.

In 1991, Unterweger was hired by an Austrian magazine to write about crime in Los Angeles and the differences between U.S. and European attitudes to prostitution. He met local police, even going so far as to participate in a ride-along of the city's red light districts. During Unterweger's time in Los Angeles, three sex workers—Shannon Exley, Irene Rodriguez, and Peggy Booth—were beaten, sexually assaulted with tree branches, and strangled with their own bras.

In Austria, Unterweger was suggested as a suspect for the sex worker murders. In the absence of other suspects, police took a serious look at Unterweger and kept him under surveillance until he went to the United States—ostensibly as a reporter—observing nothing to connect him with the killings.

Arrest and death

Police in Graz eventually had enough evidence to arrest Unterweger, but he had fled by the time they entered his home. After law enforcement agencies chased him and his girlfriend, Bianca Mrak, through Switzerland, France, and the U.S., he was finally arrested by U.S. Marshals in Miami, Florida, on 27 February 1992. While a fugitive, he had called the Austrian media to try to convince them of his innocence.

Unterweger was extradited back to Austria on 27 May 1992, and charged with eleven murders, including one in Prague and three in Los Angeles. The jury found him guilty of nine murders by a 6:2 majority (sufficient for a conviction under Austrian law at the time). Based on psychiatric examination, Austrian psychiatrist Dr. Reinhard Haller diagnosed Unterweger with narcissistic personality disorder and presented his findings to the court on 20 June 1994. On 29 June 1994, he was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.

That night, Unterweger committed suicide at Graz-Karlau Prison by hanging himself with a rope made from shoelaces and a cord from the trousers of a track suit, using the same knot that was found on all the strangled sex workers.

Prior to his death, Unterweger had asserted his intention to seek an appeal, and therefore, under Austrian law, his guilty verdict was not considered legally binding after his death, as it has not been reviewed and confirmed by the court.

John and Lorena Bobbitt

 

John Wayne Bobbitt (born 1967) and Lorena Bobbitt (née Gallo; born 1969) were an American couple married on June 18, 1989, whose relationship received international press coverage in 1993 when Lorena cut off John's penis with a knife while he was asleep in bed. The penis was subsequently surgically reattached. Lorena claimed that her husband had raped and abused her for years; John was charged with rape later that year, but was acquitted. The next year, Lorena was acquitted of assault. They divorced in 1995.

Attack

The incident in which Lorena Bobbitt severed her husband John Wayne Bobbitt's penis occurred on June 23, 1993, in Manassas, Virginia. Lorena stated in a court hearing that, after coming home that evening, her husband had raped her. After he then went to sleep, she got out of bed and went to the kitchen for a drink of water. She then grabbed an 8-inch carving knife on the kitchen counter, returned to their bedroom, pulled back the bed sheets and cut off his penis.

After this, Lorena left the apartment with the severed appendage and drove away in her car. After a length of time driving and struggling to steer with one hand, she threw the penis out a window into a roadside field. She eventually stopped and called 9-1-1, telling them what had happened and where the penis could be found. John's penis was found after an exhaustive search, and after being washed with antiseptic and packed in saline ice, it was reattached in the hospital where he was treated. The operation took nine and a half hours. John went on to star in two pornographic films in the 1990s, and stated in 2018 that his penis is "back to normal". John also went on to accumulate a record of serious abuse allegations and some criminal convictions.

Arrest and trial

When Lorena Bobbitt was arrested the night of June 23, she told the police, "He always have orgasm [sic], and he doesn't wait for me ever to have orgasm. He's selfish." This conversation with Detective Peter Weintz was tape-recorded, and the transcript was read later in the trial by Mary Grace O'Brien, the Prince William County Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney prosecuting Lorena.

During the trial, the Bobbitts revealed details of their volatile relationship and the events that led to the assault. Lorena stated that John sexually, physically, and emotionally abused her during their marriage, claiming that he had flaunted his infidelities and forced her to have an abortion. Her defense attorneys, who included the defense lawyer Blair D. Howard, maintained that John's constant abuse eventually caused Lorena to "snap" because she was suffering from clinical depression and a possible bout of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) due to the abuse. John denied the allegations of abuse; however, when he was cross-examined by Howard, his statements often conflicted with known facts, severely weakening the prosecution's case.

Lorena testified that John had raped her and physically battered her on multiple occasions prior to the evening of the incident, that they lacked financial stability, and that he stole her earnings and spent the proceeds. Both the prosecution and the defense conceded that John had demonstrated a history of abuse toward his wife and that this abuse created a context for the assault. Expert witnesses for both sides testified that "he had mentally and physically battered her; that the abuse was escalating; and that, by 1993, she lived in constant fear of him." The defense strategy emphasized Lorena's action as being a mix of self-defense and temporary insanity constituting an "irresistible impulse" due to the history and pattern of abuse and rape. One expert witness testified that, "Lorena believed and was immobilized by John's threat, 'I will find you, whether we're divorced or separated. And wherever I find you, I'll have sex with you whenever I want to.'"

John was later acquitted by a jury of nine women and three men of rape. He gave multiple versions of what had happened that evening in question, relating at various times to police and to the court that "they had not had sex; that Lorena had tried to initiate sex, but he had been too tired; that they had had sex, but he had slept through it; and that the sex had been consensual."

After seven hours of deliberation, the jury found Lorena not guilty due to insanity causing an irresistible impulse to sexually wound John. As a result, she could not be held liable for her actions. Under state law, the judge ordered Lorena to undergo a 45-day evaluation period at Central State Hospital in Petersburg, after which she would be released. In 1995, after six years of marriage, John and Lorena finalized their divorce.

Aftermath

John

After the incident, John attempted to generate money from his renown by forming a band, The Severed Parts, to pay his mounting medical and legal bills, although the band was unsuccessful and failed to generate enough money. In September 1994, he appeared in the adult film John Wayne Bobbitt: Uncut in another attempt to make money. In 1996, he appeared in another adult film, Frankenpenis (also known as John Wayne Bobbitt's Frankenpenis).

In 1994, John was charged with striking Kristina Elliott, a 21-year-old former exotic dancer he met while in Las Vegas, Nevada, on a publicity tour. On August 31, 1994, he was convicted of battery and sentenced to fifteen days in jail (75% of the original 60-day sentence was suspended). "I firmly believe you have an attitude problem," Justice of the Peace William Jansen told John. "Your attitude problem is caused by your drinking."

On August 10, 1998, John appeared on the World Wrestling Federation (now WWE)'s Monday Night Raw is War television program, where he was featured with Val Venis. Not long after, he moved to Las Vegas and worked as a bartender, limo driver, mover, pizza delivery driver, and tow-truck operator. He also had a stint serving at a wedding chapel as a minister of a local Universal Life Church.

In 1999, John received probation for his role in a theft at a store in Nevada. In 2003, he was sentenced to prison for violating his probation for the 1999 theft, after he was arrested on battery charges involving his then-wife, Joanna Ferrell. He was again twice arrested on charges of battery against Ferrell in 2004, and that same year, he filed for divorce under the name John W. Ferrell, which he had been using during his marriage with Joanna. In 2014, John was severely injured when he broke his neck in a vehicular accident in Buffalo, New York.

Lorena

After the trial, Lorena attempted to keep a low profile and reverted to the use of her birth name, Gallo. In October 1996, she made a visit to her native Ecuador, where she met with then-President Abdalá Bucaram for an official dinner. Some time later the two would baptize a child as a godmother and a godfather. Bucaram was criticized for inviting Lorena to the dinner.

In December 1997, Lorena made news when she was charged with assault for punching her mother, Elvia Gallo, as they watched television. She was eventually acquitted of assault, and her mother continued to live with her. In 2007, she was working at a beauty salon in Washington, D.C. and in the same year founded Lorena's Red Wagon organization, which helps prevent domestic violence through family-oriented activities.

In June 2008, Lorena appeared on the CBS News program The Early Show, where she talked about her life since the incident. In the interview, she said that she was in a long-term relationship with a man named Dave Bellinger and that they had a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter.

Joint public appearance

Although Lorena told Oprah Winfrey in April 2009 that she had no interest in talking to John, they appeared together on the show The Insider in May 2009. It was their first meeting since their divorce. On the show, John apologized to her for the way he treated her during their marriage. Lorena claimed that he still loved her because he continued to send her Valentine's Day cards and flowers.

Legacy and depiction in popular culture

The Bobbitt case brought attention to the issue of domestic violence and marital rape. Within days of the incident, some anti-domestic violence advocates and some feminist groups rallied around Lorena, citing the alleged continuous abuse she suffered at the hands of John that caused her to attack him, albeit in an unusual and violent manner.

Media attention surrounding the case resulted in national debate and also sparked a flurry of jokes, limericks, T-shirt slogans, advertising gimmicks, as well as Howard Stern having John as a guest on his 1993 New Year's Eve special and fundraising $250,000 to defray the outstanding costs of his surgery. MCI had also unknowingly been drawn into the fray by running a television commercial a couple of weeks after the incident, advertising how the Bobbitts—a family from Siaconset, Massachusetts, of no relation to John and Lorena Bobbitt—saved by switching to MCI, causing jokes to be made of "when they cut off your service, they mean it". "Weird Al" Yankovic's song "Headline News", a parody of the Crash Test Dummies hit "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm", mentions the incident.

Shortly after the incident, episodes of "Bobbittmania", or copycat crimes, were reported, although the incidents were generally self-inflicted wounds or accidents. The names of John and Lorena Bobbitt eventually became synonymous with penis removal. The terms "Bobbittized punishment" and "Bobbitt Procedure" gained social recognition. The Bobbitt worm, which attacks its prey with scissor-like jaws, is named after the case.

In February 2019, Amazon released Lorena, a four-part docu-series produced by Jordan Peele about the incident, which features interviews with both Lorena and John. On May 25, 2020, Lifetime aired I Was Lorena Bobbitt as part of its "Ripped from the Headlines" feature films. While Lorena serves as the onscreen narrator and executive producer, the film stars Dani Montalvo as Lorena Bobbitt and Luke Humphrey as John Bobbitt.