resignation 6.res.01 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Four days after his resignation, Davis was commissioned a Major General of Mississippi troops.^[2] On February 9, 1861, a Constitutional convention at Montgomery, Alabama named him provisional President of the Confederate States of America and he was inaugurated on February 18, 1861. In meetings of his own Mississippi legislature, Davis had argued against secession, but when a majority of the delegates opposed him, he gave in.

In conformity with a resolution of the Confederate Congress, Davis immediately appointed a Peace Commission to resolve the Confederacy’s differences with the Union. In March 1861, before the bombardment of Fort Sumter, the Commission was to travel to Washington, D.C., to offer to pay for any Federal property on Southern soil, as well as the Southern portion of the national debt, but it was Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  not authorized to discuss terms for reunion. He appointed General P.G.T. Beauregard to command Confederate troops in the vicinity of Charleston, South Carolina. He approved the Cabinet decision to bombard Fort Sumter, which started the Civil War. When Virginia switched from neutrality and joined the Confederacy, he moved his government to Richmond, Virginia, in May 1861. Davis and his family took up his residence there at the White House of the Confederacy in late May.

Davis was elected to a six-year term as President of the Confederacy on November 6, 1861. He had never served a full term in any elective office, and that would turn out to be the case on this occasion as well. He was inaugurated on February 18, 1861. In June 1862 he assigned General Robert E. Lee to replace the wounded Joseph E. Johnston in command of the Army of Northern Virginia, the main Confederate army in the Eastern Theater. That December, he made a tour of Confederate armies in the west of the country. Davis largely made the main strategic decisions on his own, or approved those suggested by Lee. He had a very small circle of military advisers. Jefferson Davis openly pushed for the acquisition of Cuba upon completion of the Civil War.

In August 1863, Davis declined General Lee’s offer of resignation after his defeat at the Battle of Gettysburg. As Confederate military fortunes turned for the worse in 1864, he visited Georgia with the intent of raising morale.

On April 3, 1865, with Union troops under Ulysses S. Grant poised to capture Richmond, Davis escaped for Danville, Virginia, together with the Confederate Cabinet, leaving on the Richmond and Danville Railroad. He issued his last official proclamation as President of the Confederacy, and then went south to Greensboro, North Carolina. Circa April 12, he received Robert E. Lee’s letter announcing surrender.

President Jefferson Davis met with his Confederate Cabinet for the last time on May 5, 1865 in Washington, Georgia, and the Confederate Government was officially dissolved. The meeting took place at the Heard house, the Georgia Branch Bank Building, with fourteen officials present. He was captured on May 10, 1865 at Irwinville in Irwin County, Georgia.^[12] In the confusion of the capture, Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  Davis accidentally wore his wife’s overcoat leading to persistent rumors and caricatures of him being captured in women’s clothing.^[13] After being captured, he was held as a prisoner for two years in Fort Monroe, Virginia.

purpose 8.pur.00100 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

A week later, Helgelein was gone, too. Belle wept to her neighbors, “When am I ever going to learn? What do I do wrong that these men take such advantage of me?” Stuck again without masculine help, Lamphere refused to come back, damn the crop.

To help with the spring harvest, Belle hired a local man of good reputation, a man who was known for his truthfulness and get-it-done attitude, Joe Maxson. There never was an insinuation of any relationship between him and Widow Gunness. Away from work, which he kept up long after sunset, Maxson remained to himself in the cozy room Belle had given him over the kitchen, reading the newspaper and playing soft refrains on his fiddle. Often, the Gunness children were lulled off to sleep by the soft murmur of his stringed lullabies.

The only time he stuck his nose into others’ business was to warn his employer, as directed, when former farmhand and jealous lover Lamphere was trespassing again. Constant threats to the woman’s being, even after Andrew Helgelein disappeared, had forced Belle to have him arrested time and again, but Lamphere would continue to harass by distance. Maxson would often see Lamphere peering from behind the elms that lined the perimeter of her yard, Knowing he was spotted, the latter darted off like a frightened salamander.

On April 27, 1908, Belle visited an attorney, M.E. Leliere, for the sole purpose of writing her last will and testament. She seemed distracted and told the lawyer that she feared what Lamphere might do to her. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  “That man,” she told him, “is out to get me, and I fear one of these nights he will burn my house to the ground.”

In the will, she left her property to her children or, in the event of their deaths, to the Norwegian Orphan’s Home. When Leliere suggested that that wasn’t the official name of the orphanage — that he needed a day or two to get its real name before he could authorize the will — Belle flustered. She insisted that such business could be completed after the fact and that they should both sign the will now. “There’s no time to wait!” she maintained. With a sigh, Leliere consented, placing his name at the bottom of the document beside hers.

That night the Gunness farm burned.

hero 1.her.7100 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Sweeney Todd received a huge boost to his popularity with the creation of Stephen Sondheim’s musical thriller, Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” which combines some of Pit’s version of String of Pearls with a touch of black humor.

In Sondheim’s play, Sweeney Todd is the alias of a man wrongfully accused of a crime and transported to Australia. The barber returns to Fleet Street, only to find that his wife and daughter have disappeared. His wife, the target of the lust of a judge, was driven to insanity, while his daughter was adopted by the judge out of a sense of remorse.

Todd meets up with Mrs. Lovett, who makesLouis J. Sheehan, Esquire   “the worst pies in London” and together they plot his revenge against the judge and a Beadle who assisted the judge in his nefarious plans. Made mad by his anger, Sweeney Todd begins killing as many of his customers as possible, which Mrs. Lovett uses for her pies.

Anthony, the hero of the play, falls in love with the ward of the judge, and is determined to reveal the heinous crimes of Sweeney Todd. In classic tragic formula, Sweeney Todd’s desire for revenge proves to be his undoing.

The play premiered on Broadway with Angela Lansbury taking the role of Mrs. Lovett and Len Cariou as the Demon Barber. Sweeney Todd was directed by Harold Prince. It won a slew of Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Book, Best Music, and Best Actor and Actress awards. The musical also won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical. Across the ocean, the musical premiered a year later and won Best Musical Award from the London Standard Drama Awards, and the Society of West End Theatre Awards for best musical and best actor in a musical.

But it is in the streets and playgrounds were Sweeney Todd is best remembered. Anywhere children gather to tell spooky stories and scare each other, the legend of Sweeney Todd is sure to delight. As Anna Pavord of the London Observer wrote in 1979, “Sweeney Todd will never die. We all need bogeymen and he was bogier than most.”

stroke 2.str.00 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Rose’s rejection was devastating to Fred. On December 13, 1994, he was charged with twelve murders. Again, Rose brushed him off. He had written to her, “We will always be in love…You will always be Mrs. West, all over the world. That is important to me and to you.”

Just before noon on New Year’s Day at Winson Green Prison in Birmingham, when the guards were having lunch, Fred hanged himself with strips of bedsheet. He had clearly planned his suicide well in advance so that he would not be discovered. Rose leaves court following testimony (AP) Despite the paucity of direct evidence linking her to the murders, Rose went to trial on October 3, 1995. A number of witnesses — including Caroline Owens, Miss A, and Anna Marie — testified to Rose’s sadistic sexual assaults on young women.

The goal of the prosecution, led by Brian Leveson QC, was to construct a tight web of circumstantial evidence of Rose’s guilt. The defense, led by Richard Ferguson QC, tried to show that evidence of sexual assault was not the same as evidence of murder. That Rose did not know what Fred was doing when he murdered the girls and buried them in various places. Ferguson made the mistake of putting Rose on the stand. Her defiance came through very clearly to the jury. Furthermore, the prosecution learned to extract damaging testimony from her by making her angry. She left the jury with entrenched beliefs that Rose had treated the children badly and that she was completely dishonest. Finally the defense played the recordings of Fred West describing how he had murdered the victims when Rose was out of the house. Unfortunately for Rose, Fred was shown to be lying on key issues, which threw his entire statement into doubt. The most dramatic evidence was given by Janet Leach, who was called as the “appropriate adult” (witness) to Fred West’s police interviews. Privately, Fred had told her that Rose was involved in the murders — and that Rose had murdered Charmaine and Shirley Robinson without him — but that he made a deal with his wife to take all the blame on himself. Janet was so stressed by this confidential confession that she suffered a stroke. It was only after Fred’s death that she felt that she could tell the police what he had said to her. After her testimony, she collapsed and had to be taken to the hospital. Rosemary West   Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire (AP) In his summary, Leveson called Rose the “strategist” and the dominant partner. “The evidence that Rosemary West knew nothing is not worthy of belief.” Ferguson, in his summary, stressed that the evidence only pointed to Fred. The jury took very little time to find Rose guilty of the murders of Charmaine, Heather, Shirley Robinson and the other girls buried at the house. The judge sentenced her to life imprisonment on each of ten counts of murder.

necessary 00.nec.0002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

On the six-month anniversary of Bates’ death, the Riverside Press, the police, and the victim’s father (whose name and address had appeared in the local newspaper the day after the murder) were each sent nearly identical copies of another letter, this one written in pencil on lined notepaper.  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Instead of a signature, two of the letters bore a symbol that resembled a letter Z joined with a numeral 3.  In what would become a hallmark of the Zodiac’s epistolary style, the envelopes were franked with excessive postage: in this case, they each carried two of the necessary four-cent stamps.  The letters sent to the police and Press read as follows:

BATES HAD
TO DIE
THERE WILL
BE MORE

The copy without the hieroglyph signature, sent to Joseph Bates, substituted “Bates” with “She.”  One latent fingerprint was developed on the letter sent to the Riverside Police Department, but its origins are not known, and it has never been matched to a suspect.

In mid-April 1967, a janitor at the RCC Library discovered a poem written on the underside of a folding school desk.  The desk had been in storage for an unknown period of time, but the contemporary receipt of the “Bates had to die” letters led many investigators to believe that the poem described Bates’ murder and was written by her killer.

Some amateurs, however, have noted that the style and tone of the letter indicate otherwise: one compelling theory is that that an unrelated student penned it following an unsuccessful suicide attempt.  The handwriting is of debatable resemblance to the three “Bates” notes or any other Zodiac printing and the date of its origin is unclear, so the entire issue remains open to interpretation.  The poem read:

Sick of living/unwilling to die
cut.
clean.
if red /
clean.
blood spurting,
dripping,
spilling;
all over her new
dress
oh well
it was red
anyway.
life draining into an
uncertain death.
she won’t
die.
this time
someone ll find her.
just wait till
next time.
rh

The cryptic signature, “rh,” may have been a reference to RCC’s President at Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire the time, R. H. Bradshaw.

detective 2.det.00200 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

If you can’t convince them, confuse them.
Harry S. Truman.

The trial known as “People of the State of California, Plaintiff, versus Orenthal James Simpson, Defendant, Case Number #BAO97211, Los Angeles County Superior Court,” began on Monday, January 23rd, 1995. It was exactly ten years to the day since O.J. Simpson had become the first Heisman Trophy winner to be elected to the pro footballers Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.

In their opening statements on January 24th, Marcia Clark and Chris Darden put their case before the jury.

Simpson had been unable to reconcile himself to a life without Nicole. She, however, had moved on with her life, forming relationships with other men. Unable to control her any longer and after being rejected by her and her family late that afternoon at Sydney’s musical recital, Simpson had decided to kill her. Ronald Goldman had simply been  in the wrong place at the wrong time, but had to be eliminated. According to the coroner’s report, the murderer had killed both of his victims from behind, thus minimizing the amount of their blood that would have splattered onto himself. The murder of Nicole Brown was the final act in an abusive 17-year relationship, triggered by her leaving Simpson in February 1992 and filing for divorce.

He had no alibi from the time he returned from his trip to the McDonald’s in Santa Monica with Kato Kaelin at about 9:40 p.m. until he appeared at the front door of the house on Rockingham Avenue at about 10:55 p.m. to be picked up by Allan Park, the limousine driver. The prosecution claimed the murders were carried out about 10:15 p.m., when Nicole’s neighbors first heard the white Akita barking.

Marcia Clark

Deputy District Attorney Marcia Clark then described the evidence against Simpson, saying there was a path of “blood where there should be no blood,” leading from Nicole Brown’s condominium to Simpson’s home. “That trail of blood from Bundy through his own Ford Bronco and into his house in Rockingham is devastating proof of his guilt,” she  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire   told the jury. There was the hair found on the knit cap that matched Simpson’s hair, the socks in his bedroom that contained traces of the victims’ blood, the cut on Simpson’s hand. The “mountain of evidence” grew and grew as the case proceeded.

The next day, O.J. Simpson’s lawyer Johnnie Cochran told the jurors that the former football legend was an innocent man, wrongfully accused by a prosecution that wanted to win the case at any cost. He began his address by quoting from Martin Luther King Jr., “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” He then went on to remind the largely black jury that they were the conscience of their community and that when the trial was over they had to return there.

The central theme of Johnnie Cochran’s opening remarks was the prosecution’s rush to judgment. “This case is about a rush to judgment, an obsession to win at any costs,” he told the jury. Cochran said that Simpson had accepted the end of his marriage. He was friendly and sociable the evening of the musical recital for his daughter. He was no where near South Bundy the time the murders occurred and had shown no signs of stress or panic on his flight to Chicago, even signing autographs.

Cochran said police ignored at least two witnesses who offered information that could clear Simpson. The witnesses included a woman called Mary Anne Gerchas, a jewelery store owner, who said as she walking near the murder scene the night of June 12th, where she saw four men, wearing knit caps run from the crime scene and speed off in an unmarked vehicle. Another woman called Rosa Lopez, who worked as a housekeeper for one of Simpson’s neighbors, claimed she saw Simpson’s car at home that night at the time of the murders. Subsequently both these witnesses turned out to be totally unreliable and were never called by the defense.

At the end of his presentation, Simpson stood up and slowly hobbled over to the jury box to show off his scarred and battered knees, presumably to indicate that the former football star was in no condition to kill anyone.

Under the rules of California’s reciprocal discovery law, both prosecution and defense were bound to disclose all information relating to witnesses they intended to call. The defense had blatantly ignored this ruling, introducing 26 separate discovery violations in an attempt to unsettle the prosecution. William Hodgman pleaded with the judge to stop what he called this “trial by ambush.” But in an example of his limp-wristed management of the case, Ito allowed Cochran to roll over the bench and continue his preamble to the jury.

However by January 30th, Judge Lance Ito had rethought his approach to this problem and reprimanded the defense for mentioning previously undisclosed potential witnesses during its opening statements. The judge said the defense had intentionally withheld from the prosecution the names of 14 new witnesses it mentioned in its statement. He said he would instruct the jury to ignore comments made about six of the witnesses. He denied a prosecution request for a 30-day delay in the trial but ruled the state could re-open its opening statement.

Following the ruling, Johnnie Cochran resumed his opening statement. Cochran told jurors that the evidence collected in the case was “contaminated, compromised and ultimately corrupted.” He also told jurors that Simpson, that evening, was practicing his golf swing in his front yard, specifically, “chipping” — in his front yard at 10:10 p.m., five minutes before the prosecution has argued the victims were killed, packing and showering ready for his trip to Chicago.

He also countered the trail of blood that prosecutors said implicated Simpson. He argued that police carried a vial of Simpson’s blood around with them for several hours rather than immediately bringing it to a police lab. As a result, he said, some of the blood sample was missing. He strongly suggested it had been used to contaminate a pair of socks found at the foot of Simpson’s bed.

The “Dream Team” was laying down the foundation that would support the cornerstone of its strategy. Their client was not only innocent, he had been framed for this murder.

On January 31st, the prosecution called its first witnesses after taking advantage of a rare opportunity to re-open its opening statement, following the Judge Ito’s finding on the defense team’s negligence regarding disclosure.

The first witness in the case was Sharyn Gilbert, an emergency 911 dispatcher for the Los Angeles Police Department. Gilbert testified that she was on duty the night of Jan. 1st, 1989, when Nicole Brown Simpson called police pleading for protection from Simpson. Under cross-examination by defense attorney Cochran, Gilbert acknowledged that she never spoke to anyone at the Brentwood estate but drew her conclusions from listening in for three to four minutes on an open line after receiving the call.

The second witness was police detective John Edwards, who responded to the 911 call. He testified that a severely beaten Nicole Brown Simpson ran from the bushes grabbing hold of the police officer and screaming, “He’s going to kill me, he’s going to kill me,” referring to O.J. Simpson. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire  Her face was badly beaten with a cut lip, swollen and blackened left eye and cheek; the policeman could see a hand imprint on her neck. According to a statement made by Nicole, this was the eighth time the police had been called out to attend a spousal abuse complaint at Rockingham Avenue.

Late in the afternoon of Wednesday, January 25th, William Hodgman had collapsed in an office in the Criminal Courts Building and was rushed to hospital. The stress from the trial and the eighteen-hour days he was working finally caught up on him. He would effectively be out of the trial and Christopher Darden would assume his responsibility, backing up Marcia Clark. He had a heavy burden to bear. A black man brought in to help prosecute another black man, in front of a largely black jury. Many saw it as very symbolic.

To more than a few observers, it seemed that Darden would be the only attorney on the prosecution team who would be able to fight off any secret race messages that the defense team would signal to the jury. But according to his own account of the trial, despite his heroic efforts, he was unable to rescue justice from the insidious assault of Cochran and his team.

vimana 4.vim.0002000 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Much Indian aeronautical matter popularly attributed to the Mahabharata is actually taken from these sources:

1. The Vaimanika Shastra: it is an alleged ancient text on aeronautics, “channeled” in 1918-1923, and published in 1973, Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
   which started the enthusiasm for “Vedic UFOs”.
2. Speculations based on Mahabharata and other old Indian writings: see http://www.uforq.asn.au/articles/indianepics.html, which refutes several such misinterpretations.

Theories and opinions arising from the Vaimanika Shastra follow.

An illustration of the Shakuna Vimana with hinged wings and tail, drawn in 1923 under instruction of S. Shastry, author of the Vaimanika Shastra^[16]

An example is the statement that “Gurkha flying in his swift and powerful Vimana hurled against the three cities of the Vrishnis and Andhakas a single projectile charged with all the power of the Universe. An incandescent column of smoke and fire, as brilliant as ten thousands suns, rose in all its splendour. It was the unknown weapon, the Iron Thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death which reduced to ashes the entire race of the Vrishnis and Andhakas.”

Some modern UFO enthusiasts (like Desmond Leslie, co-author with George Adamski, in 1953, of one of the first books on UFOs entitled Flying Saucers Have Landed) have pointed to the Vimana as evidence for advanced technological civilizations in the distant past, or as support for ancient astronaut theories.

A symposium on “Science and Technology in ancient India” was organised in December 1990 at B.M. Birla Science Center at Hyderabad, A.P., India. Many topics of ancient Indian aeronautics were discussed. The Vaimanika Prakaranam in Vimana Vignana deals with instruments like Guha Garbha Darsha Yantra which can locate objects hidden underground from an aircraft. A semiconductor ferrite named Chumbaka radiates microwave signals and detects hidden objects.

Italian ufologist, Roberto Pinotti presented a paper on ‘Aeronautics in ancient India’ in the World Space Conference conducted at Bangalore. He told the conference delegates that those aircraft were similar to modern jet-propelled aeroplanes. He agreed that they represent the most complex and sophisticated designs. Others such as Dileep Kumar Kanjilal in Vimana in Ancient India : Aeroplanes Or Flying Machines in Ancient India (1985) prefer ion thruster propulsion.

David Hatcher Childress has written about ‘Ancient Indian Aircraft Technology’ and ‘Vimana Aircraft of Ancient India and Atlantis’, and Stephen Knapp endorses the concept in ‘The Secret Teachings of the Vedas’.

According to Ufology literature, Alexander the Great purportedly gave a description of “two silver disk-like objects” entering and leaving the Jaxartes River. Alexander, so the story goes, then became obsessed with the craft and spent many hours in a primitive diving bell searching for them.^[17] The earliest source of this tale seems to be Frank Edwards, Stranger than Science (1959):

He [Alexander] tells of two strange craft that dived repeatedly at his army until the war elephants, the men, and the horses all panicked and refused to cross the river where the incident occurred. What did the things look like? His historian describes them as great shining silvery shields, spitting fire around the rims […] things that came from the skies and returned to the skies.

Edwards gives no source for his account, and no ancient account of Alexander’s campaign has a comparable description.  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

A similar story, occurring in Tyre rather than Transoxania, is alleged in an Italian article of 1966, also without giving a source.^[18] This story would derive from the account in the Alexandriad of “bright lights emanating from the diving machine”^[19][20] used by Alexandros at the siege of Tyros in 332 B.Chr.E.

victims 44.vic.9993 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

A Most Vicious Vampire

//

Fritz Haarmann

One of the worst cases of clinical vampirism is that of Fritz Haarmann, also known as Germany’s “Hanover Vampire.”  Haarmann was actually institutionalized at one point during the late 1800s, but he managed to escape.  Eventually he became a homeless vagrant.  Then he learned to butcher meat, which allowed him to have a home and start a business. Having his own place protected his attack on boys.

Graf, sketch

He would seek wandering waifs in the train station and take them home.  Soon he teamed up with a good-looking male prostitute named Graf who had much better luck.  They’d take the boys to Haarman’s home, feed them, and then Haarman would force them to have sex.  Often those victims would simply vanish.  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Once the police caught Haarman in the act and arrested him for molestation.  They had no idea that he’d murdered another boy and had his head sitting there under some newspapers.

Together Graf and Haarman trapped and killed an estimated 50 young men over a five-year period. They were finally stopped when someone found a sack of skulls and bones in the Leine Canal and turned them into the police.  Since Haarmann lived near the canal and had been arrested before, investigators searched his home, They found clothing from missing boys and saw bloodstains on the walls. Again, they arrested Haarmann and he confessed.

As he talked, he called his victims “game.”  He described how he would grab the boys, sleepy from a large meal, and while sodomizing them would chew through their throat until the head was practically severed from the body.  As he tasted their blood, he achieved orgasm.  He would then cut the flesh from their bodies, consume some of it, and sell the rest on the open market as butchered meat. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
The rest of the parts he dumped into the canal.

Armed with grisly evidence for 27 of the murders, investigators ensured Haarmann’s conviction and he was sentenced to die by execution. Moments before the blade fell, Haarmann announced that this was his wedding.