Spree Killers: What kind of killers are they?

On March 28, 2011, I received an email message from a criminology student at the University of Ghent in Belgium. The student asked me eight questions. They are as follows:

1. How would you describe a spree killer?
2 What are the main reasons why these killers murder people?
3. If you draw a general profile of a spree killer, what would it look like?
4. Is our society protected against such murderers?
5. Can we do anything about it so that there are less of them in society?
6. Is deterrence enough for those offenders?
7. What are the punishments for those killers convicted of spree killing?
8. If we can protect ourselves against them, what measures should we take?

I emailed the student back and told the student that I would write an article in my next blog and answer those questions. What follows, are my answers to those questions.

Description of a spree killer

The word ‘killer’ needs no explanation but the word ‘spree’ certainly does. According to Funk and Wagnalls Canadian College Dictionary, the word ‘spree’ means (amongs other definitions) “excessive and unrestrained indulgence in an activity” such as a buying spree or killing spree. It has been said that a spree killer is someone who embarks on a murderous assault on two or more victims in a short time in multiple locations. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics defines a spree killing as "killings at two or more locations with almost no time break between murders. I disagree that spree killings having to be in two or more locations. For example, a person going on a buying spree could be indulging in that activity in one store alone. It follows that spree killers could be killing people in one location alone. Another term, rampage killer, has sometimes been used to describe spree killers, but it does not differentiate between mass murderers and spree killers. Spree killers include mass murderers and serial killers.

When I speak of mass murderers, I am not referring to the kind who target their families all at one time, such as in one house when the victims are all together at the same time because that kind of murder is impulsive. The same applies when a mass killer targets fellow employees or students in a school all within a short period of time. In those kinds of killings, the actions of the murders are also impulsive. By saying impulsive, I mean that there is a specific motive such as vengeance that motivates them to kill their families, fellow employees and fellow students. That motive is generally revenge although in fazes where families are killed, the motive is the killer’s silly belief that the victims are better off dead.

Admittedly, actions of these kinds of killers are unquestionably excessive and unrestrained but they are not an indulgence such as a buying spree which can be cumulative over a long period of time. But some of these killers who commit their mass murders on a one-time basis and generally in one specific area and over a short period of time could be classified as spree killers.

What are the main reasons why these killers murder people?

A mass murder could come under the heading of spree killings such as what took place in the Texas Tower case in which Charles Joseph Whitman, 25, climbed 39 floors to the top of the University of Texas tower in Austin, Texas on August 1, 1966 by shooting innocent people in the tower and also people wandering about in the grounds below him. Prior to shooting to death these people, he also murdered his wife and mother at their homes, then he killed three people in the tower and ten more outside the tower when he fired his deer rifle from the top of the tower.

Whitman's frustrations with his dysfunctional family were complicated by his abuse of amphetamines and his health issues including headaches that he reported in one of his final notes as ‘tremendous.’ A glioblastoma, which is a highly aggressive brain tumor, was discovered during his autopsy that experts on the ‘Connally Commission’ concluded may have played a role in his actions. He was also affected by a court martial as a United States Marine, failings as a student at the University of Texas, ambitious unfulfilled personal expectations and psychotic features he expressed in his typewritten note left at 906 Jewell Street, Austin, Texas, dated on July 31, 1966.

I think it is quite obvious that this young man was not what one could say was a normal thinking man. Although many people have suffered from life experiences such as what Whitman was undergoing, they don’t kill innocent people because of it. But coupled with his brain tumor, I think it is safe to say that he didn’t have full control of his faculties.

He was an extremely intelligent man. At the age of six, it was determined that he had an IQ of 136 which placed him in the category of having a superior mind. But even if he had been a genius, this alone would not have prevented him from being a very sick individual susceptible to having the impulse to murder innocent people.

A brain tumor is an abnormal growth of cancerous cells or non cancerous cells inside a brain. Its threat level depends on the combination of factors like the type of tumor, its location, its size and its state of development. Brain tumors are commonly located in the posterior cranial fossa in children and in the anterior two-thirds of the cerebral hemispheres in adults, although they can affect any part of the brain.

Constant headaches are one of the symptoms of a brain tumor. Charles Whitman complained of headaches. University psychiatrist Dr. Heatly recognised the latent hostility in Whitman, but was not overly concerned when, during the course of their session, he mentioned a fantasy that involved “going up on the Tower with a deer rifle and shooting people,” as Heatly had seen no signs that he might seriously take action. Heatly was unaware that Whitman had repeated this fantasy to many people over the years, who had dismissed it as nonsense. Heatly suggested that Whitman return the following week for further counselling, but he failed to do so.

Throughout the summer of 1966, Whitman attended classes and kept up work commitments with the assistance of the amphetamine Dexedrine, which affected his sleeping patterns and made it difficult for him to deliver both study and work commitments. This exacerbated his feeling of low self-esteem, and his father’s attempts to embroil him in his parents’ ongoing marital trauma only served to concentrate his mind even more on his continuous fantasies of mass murder.

The question that comes to the fore is; “Did the tumor exacerbate his desire to murder people?” It is conceivable that it did. The next question that is equally important is; “Would he have committed the murders if he didn’t have a tumor in his brain?” It is possible that he may have but one cannot definitively say for sure that his brain tumor was the main cause of him murdering so many people. Many mass murderers have killed innocent people and they didn’t suffer from brain tumors. Many people who have suffered from brain tumors didn’t kill innocent people.

Was Charles Whitman a spree killer? Since his actions were excessive and an unrestrained indulgence in his activity of murdering innocent people, I would classify him as a spree killer.

In December 6th, 1941, Richard Speck was born in Kirkwood, Illinois. Speck’s father, a religious man who abhorred alcohol, died when Richard was six years old. His mother had married a Texan, Carl Lindberg, who was a violent drunk with an arrest record. The family moved to Dallas, and Lindberg beat Speck repeatedly throughout his boyhood. Speck failed in school and turned to a life on the streets. Speck spent over two and a half years in prison for crimes varying from theft to assault from 1963-1965. Married in the early Sixties, Speck would often rape his wife at knife point. During her divorce proceedings, she described Speck as violent and needing sex four or five times a day. The divorce was final in January of 1966 and Speck, facing more burglary and stabbing charges, slipped out of Texas and moved back to Illinois, staying with friends of his family in Monmouth.

Speck had no intention of giving up his life of crime and promptly was arrested again for burglary and assault. He took off for Chicago to avoid his trial and was fired from a couple of jobs for being drunk, including one on an iron ore ship. Investigators looking into Speck past discovered he was wanted in Monmouth for questioning in the murder of a bar maid and rape of a female senior citizen. In addition, they linked him to the July 2nd disappearance of three girls in Indiana and the murders of four other females in Michigan. Authorities located the hotel room where Speck was staying, but he was not there.

On Sunday July 15th, 1966, patrolman Daniel Kelly was flagged down by a citizen who had noticed Corazon Amuaro, a young student nurse, screaming and sobbing in an apartment window uncontrollably. Kelly, only eighteen months on the job, entered the apartment and exited some time later, vomiting in the street. Inside he had found the bodies of eight young women, all student nurses, strewn about the premises. When Corazon was able to tell her story, she related how an armed man (Richard Speck) had come to the door, forced his way into the apartment and found seven students there. He made them empty their purses at gunpoint and bound their arms and legs with strips of material he made from their sheets. What Speck was about to do would shock even the most hardened detectives and horrify the entire country.

Two other young nurses came home at this point and attempted to flee when they saw what was happening. Speck caught them and stabbed and strangled them to death. He then began a grim routine of going into the room where the other seven were tied up and bringing them one by one to other rooms where he raped, then murdered them with his knife or by strangling them. Corazon, realizing that the only way she could save herself was by hiding, wedged her body under a bunk bed and hoped against hope that Speck would not see her. After he had raped and strangled his last victim, he took whatever money he had stolen and left, having lost count of how many girls were in the room. Hours later, Corazon crept out in a state of shock and screamed for help.

Her description of the man, especially of a tattoo on one of his arms, helped lead police to the Maritime Union Hall, where an employee recognized the sketch artist’s work of the suspect as Richard Speck. With nowhere to hide as an entire city closed in on him, Speck tried to kill himself, but changed his mind and wound up in Cook County Hospital. The doctor treating his injuries, Leroy Smith, saw the telltale tattoo and alerted a policeman. Speck was arrested without incident.

Speck’s trial lasted just twelve days. Found guilty on all counts, he was sentenced to death, but was saved from that fate by the Supreme Court’s temporary abolishment of the death penalty in 1972. To assure that Speck would never see the light of day again, he was re-sentenced to over 400 years in prison. He died behind bars on December 5th, 1991, a day before his fiftieth birthday, of a massive heart attack. He was never charged in the other murders that he was thought to have committed in Indiana and Michigan. He showed no remorse for what he did, often bragging in prison about the killings.

Was he a spree killer? Unquestionably he was. His prime motivation was sex. I think he killed the women so that there would be no witnesses around to testify against him. His actions were obviously excessive and unrestrained. He simply didn’t give a tinker’s dam about the lives he snuffed. The fact that he bragged about his killings while in prison is proof positive that he was an unrepentant killer of women.

On December 7, 1993, as the train pulled into the Merillon Avenue Station, a Jamaican, Colin Ferguson, then 35 years old, pulled out his gun and started firing at passengers. He killed six and wounded nineteen before being stopped by three of the passengers, Ferguson's trial was notable for a number of unusual developments, including his firing of his defense counsel and insisting on representing himself and questioning his own victims on the stand.

Ferguson was convicted on February 17, 1995, of murder for the deaths of the six passengers who died of their injuries. He was also convicted of attempted murder for wounding nineteen passengers. He is serving his sentence of 315-years-and-8-months to life at the Attica Correctional Facility in western New York. His current earliest possible parole date is August 6, 2309. Needless to say, none of us will be around then and neither will Ferguson.

His landlord Patrick Denis said Ferguson once told him, "I'm such a great person. There must be only one thing holding me back. It must be white people.” In February 1992, Ferguson was arrested and charged with harassing a white woman on a subway. The woman tried to sit in a vacant seat alongside Ferguson and asked him to move over, prompting Ferguson to scream at her and press his leg and elbow against her until police officers pinned him to the ground. Ferguson tried to escape the police and shouted to other nearby African Americans, "Brothers, come help me.”

Denis, his Flatbush landlord, said Ferguson appeared even more unstable upon his return, speaking in the third person about "some apocryphal-type doom scenario" that included black people rising up and striking down "their pompous rulers and oppressors". (Obviously white people) Ferguson started taking five showers a day and could be heard by neighbors repeatedly chanting at night, "all the black people killing all the white people".Denis became increasingly concerned about Ferguson's obsession with racism and apparent growing mental instability, and asked Ferguson to move out by the end of the month.

As the train approached the Merillon Avenue Station, Ferguson drew his handgun, dropped several cartridges on the ground, stood up and started opening fire on the passengers at random. During three minutes of gunfire, Ferguson killed six people and injured another 19. Initially, some passengers mistook the gunshots for caps or fireworks, until a woman shouted, "He's got a gun! He's shooting people!" Ferguson walked east on the train, pulling the trigger steadily about every half second. Several passengers tried to hide beneath their seats, while others fled to the eastern end of the train and tried to go into the next car. Ferguson walked down the aisle of the train and shot people to his right and left as he passed each seat, briefly facing each victim before firing. The New York Times later wrote the motions were "as methodical as if he were taking tickets".Ferguson repeated over and over, "I'm going to get you." as he walked down the aisle shooting at them.

Was his hatred for whites his motive for killing so many white passengers on that train? Many mass killers have hatred as their main motive to kill so many people. Unquestionably, his actions were excessive and unrestrained. His desire to get even with the whites who he felt did him wrong, made him willing and eager to kill any whites, even those on the train in which none of them had done him wrong. He was definitely a spree killer.

Kunstler and Kuby (his lawyers) proposed an innovative defense that Ferguson had been driven to temporary insanity by a psychiatric condition they termed "black rage". Kunstler and Kuby argued Ferguson had been driven insane by racial prejudice, and could not be held criminally liable for his actions even though he had committed the killings. The attorneys compared it to the utilization of the battered woman defense, post-traumatic stress disorder and the child abuse syndrome in other cases to negate criminal accountability. Kuby said the notes carried by Ferguson on the day of his arrest demonstrated that Ferguson was motivated by rage during the shootings. These arguments gave Ferguson’s jury about as much sympathy for him that a dog would get if it wandered into a flea convention.

There is no doubt in my mind that Ferguson’s hatred of white people is what prompted him to finally shoot them on a train. Why the train? Because there was very little they could do to escape his wrath in the car of a train.

Over the course of a year, in the United States, school board treasurer Andrew Kehoe secretly planted 1 ton of pyrotol inside the Bath Consolidated School. On May 18, 1927, after murdering his wife, he detonated the explosives. As residents were attempting to rescue the dying children and teachers, Kehoe arrived on the scene and detonated his dynamite laden pickup truck. Forty-four of his victims died including himself when he detonated the explosives in his truck.

What was his motive?

While serving on the school board, Kehoe fought endlessly for lower taxes. He blamed the previous property tax levy for his family's poor financial condition and he repeatedly accused superintendent Emory Huyck of financial mismanagement. While on the school board, Kehoe was appointed the Bath Township Clerk in 1925, but was unsuccessful at retaining this position in the election later that year. During this time, Nellie Kehoe was chronically ill with tuberculosis, and her frequent hospital stays may have played a role in putting the family into debt. At the time of the Bath School disaster, Kehoe had ceased making mortgage and homeowner's insurance payments, and the mortgage lender had begun foreclosure proceedings against the farm.

It would appear that he wanted to get even for those who he felt had brought about his financial problems but instead of going after the leaders in his community, he chose to murder their children enmasse. Revenge was his motive. Like the others I described earlier, his actions were both excessive and unrestrained, He was a spree killer.

As I mentioned earlier in this article, spree killers also include serial killers. A serial killer is typically defined as an individual who has murdered two or more people over a period of more than a month, with down time (a "cooling off period") between the murders, and whose motivation for killing is largely based on psychological gratification, such as sex, thrill, profit, power/control and revenge.
Sex is the primary motive of lust killers, whether or not the victims are dead, and fantasy plays a large role in their killings. Their sexual gratification depends on the amount of torture and mutilation they perform on their victims. They usually use weapons that require close contact with the victims, such as knives or hands. As lust killers continue with their murders, the time between killings decreases or the required level of stimulation increases, sometimes both.

Kenneth Bianchi, one of the "Hillside Stranglers", murdered women and girls of different ages, races and appearance because his sexual urges required different types of stimulation and increasing intensity.

Jeffrey Dahmer searched for his perfect fantasy lover — beautiful, submissive and eternal. As his desire increased, he experimented with drugs, alcohol and exotic sex. His increasing need for stimulation was demonstrated by the dismemberment of victims, whose heads and genitals he preserved. He experimented with cannibalism to "ensure his victims would always be a part of him".

The primary motive of a thrill killer is to induce pain or create terror in their victims, which provides stimulation and excitement for the killer. They seek the adrenaline rush provided by hunting and killing victims. Thrill killers murder only for the kill; usually the attack is not prolonged, and there is no sexual aspect. Usually the victims are strangers, although the killer may have followed them for a period of time. Thrill killers can abstain from killing for long periods of time and become more successful at killing as they refine their murder methods. Many attempt to commit the perfect crime and believe they will not be caught.

Robert Hansen took his victims to a secluded area, where he would let them loose and then hunt and kill them. In one of his letters to San Francisco Bay Area newspapers, the Zodiac Killer wrote "killing gives me the most thrilling experience it is even better than getting your rocks off with a girl". Coral Watts was described by a surviving victim as "excited and hyper and clappin’ and just making noises like he was excited, that this was gonna be fun" during the 1982 attack. Slashing, stabbing, hanging, drowning, asphyxiating, and strangling were among the ways Watts killed his victims.

Material gain (profit) and a comfortable lifestyle are the primary motives of comfort killers. Usually, the victims are family members and close acquaintances. After a murder, a comfort killer will usually wait for a period of time before killing again to allow any suspicions by family or authorities to subside. They often use poison, most notably arsenic, to kill their victims. Female serial killers are often comfort killers, although not all comfort killers are female.

Dorothea Puente killed her tenants for their Social Security checks and buried them in the backyard of her home. H. H. Holmes killed for insurance and business profits. (more on him later) Professional killers ("hitmen") may also be considered serial killers. Richard Kuklinski charged tens of thousands of dollars for a "hit", earning enough money to support his family in a middle-class lifestyle.

Another objective for certain kinds of serial killer is to gain and exert power over their victims. Such killers are sometimes abused as children, leaving them with feelings of powerlessness and inadequacy as adults. Many power-or control-motivated killers sexually abuse their victims, but they differ from hedonistic killers in that rape is not motivated by lust but as simply another form of dominating the victim. Ted Bundy traveled around the United States seeking women he could have control over, especially control over their very existence.

It is impossible to determine what motivated Jack the Ripper because he was never caught. Was it power and control, the thrill of committing such ghastly murders or were they done to get even with prostitutes if a prostitute did him harm such as giving him a venereal disease?

The main issue I wish to present to my readers in this article is the issue of how a a spree killer is defined. The key word is ‘spree’ and it is that word that is the bone of contention between me and the FBI when it comes to identifying what a spree killer is.

You may recall that I described the word ‘spree’ to mean, “excessive and unrestrained indulgence in an activity” and that definition was taken from the Funk and Wagnalls Canadian College Dictionary. But that isn’t the only dictionary that defines that word in that manner. The Penguin English Dictionary defines it as; “a bout of unrestrained indulgence in an activity.” The Collins Concise Dictionary defines ‘spree’ to mean; “a session of over indulgence.”

Just as a shopper can go on a spending spree and as such, is undergoing an unrestrained indulgence in spending money, so can a mass or serial killer undergo an unrestrained indulgence in committing murder. Hence, the phrase, spree killer is apt when defining such murderers.

However, the matter doesn’t just rest there. As I said in the beginning of this article, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics defines spree killings as "killings at two or more locations with almost no time break between murders. I disagree that spree killings having to be in two or more locations. It can be in one location.

In Canada, more specifically in the province of Ontario, there was a serial rapist called Paul Bernardo. He was committing his rapes in the City of Toronto. Then he moved to Port Dalhousie, Ontario. Early in the morning on June 15, 1991, Bernardo took a detour through Burlington, halfway between Toronto and Port Dalhousie to steal licence plates. That is where he found Leslie Mahaffy. The 14-year-old had missed her curfew after attending a funeral and was locked out of her house and had been unable to find anyone with whom she could stay overnight. Bernardo abducted the girl and took her to his home that he shared with his wife, Karla Homolka. Bernardo and Homolka subsequently videotaped themselves torturing and sexually abusing Mahaffy. They even subjected her to sodomy. The following day, Bernardo strangled her. The pair put her body into their basement. Bernardo and Homolka decided the best way to dispose of the evidence would be to dismember Leslie Mahaffy and encase each piece in cement. Bernardo bought a dozen bags of cement at a hardware store the following day. Bernardo used his grandfather's circular saw to cut the body. Bernardo and Homolka then made numerous trips to dump the cement blocks in Lake Gibson, 18 kilometres south of Port Dalhousie.

Now if Leslie Mahaffy was the only person he murdered, then he couldn't be referred to as a serial killer or a spree killer.

On the afternoon of April 16, 1992, Bernardo and Homolka were driving through St. Catharines to look for potential victims. It was after school hours on the day before Good Friday. Students were still going home but by and large the streets were empty. As they passed Holy Cross Secondary School, a main Catholic high school in the city's north end, they spotted Kristen French, a 15-year-old student, walking briskly to her nearby home. The couple pulled into the parking lot of nearby Grace Lutheran Church and Homolka got out of the car, map in hand, pretending to need assistance. As French looked at the map, Bernardo attacked from behind, brandishing a knife and forcing her into the front seat of their car. From her back seat, Homolka controlled the girl by pulling down her hair.

Over the three days of Easter weekend, Bernardo and Homolka videotaped themselves as they tortured, raped and sodomized Kristen French, forcing her to drink large amounts of alcohol and to behave submissively to Bernardo. At Bernardo's trial, Crown prosecutor Ray Houlahan said that Bernardo always intended to kill her because she was never blindfolded and was capable of identifying her captors.

The couple murdered French before going to the Homolkas' home for Easter dinner. Homolka testified at her trial that Bernardo had strangled French for exactly seven minutes while she watched.

Now both victims were abducted from different areas but they were murdered in one location. Does the fact that they were murdered in one location change the status of Bernardo from being an ordinary murder to being a serial killer and thusly, a spree murder? I don’t think so. His actions were unrestrained indulgence in two murders which in my respectful opinion, defines a spree killer.

As an aside, Bernardo was sentenced to life in prison and it is highly unlikely that he will ever be released from prison. His wife unfortunately was sentenced to only twelve years in prison for manslaughter because at the time of her conviction and sentence, the video that showed their participation in the sexually torture of their two victims wasn’t discovered until after her trial was over. Further, they accidentally killed her sister when they gave her an overdose of a drug so that Bernardo could have sex with the young woman.

To think of Bernardo in any manner but as a spree killer is akin to thinking of this Pit Bull as a Chihuahua.

Herman Webster Mudgett (May 16, 1861– May 7, 1896, was better known under the alias of Dr. Henry Howard Holmes. He was one of the first documented American serial killers in the modern sense of the term. In Chicago at the time of the 1893 World's Fair, Holmes opened a hotel which he had designed and built for himself specifically with murder in mind, and which was the location of many of his murders. While he confessed to 27 murders, of which nine were confirmed, his actual body count could be as high as 250. He took an unknown number of his victims from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, which was less than 10 miles away from his "World's Fair" hotel and brought them to his hotel.

He built his three-story, block-long "Castle"—as it was dubbed by those in the neighborhood. It was opened as a hotel for the World's Colombian Exposition in 1893, with part of the structure used as commercial space. The ground floor of the Castle contained Holmes's own relocated drugstore and various shops, while the upper two floors contained his personal office and a maze of over one hundred windowless rooms with doorways opening to brick walls, oddly angled hallways, stairways to nowhere, doors openable only from the outside, and a host of other strange and labyrinthine constructions. Holmes repeatedly changed builders during the construction of the Castle, so only he fully understood the design of the house, thus decreasing the chance of being reported to the police.

After the completion of the hotel, Holmes selected mostly female victims from among his employees (many of whom were required as a condition of employment to take out life insurance policies for which Holmes would pay the premiums but also be the beneficiary), as well as his lovers and hotel guests. He tortured and killed them. Some were locked in soundproof bedrooms fitted with gas lines that let him asphyxiate them at any time. Some victims were locked in a huge soundproof bank vault near his office where they were left to suffocate. The victims' bodies were dropped by secret chute to the basement, where some were meticulously dissected, stripped of flesh, crafted into skeleton models, and then sold to medical schools. Holmes also cremated some of the bodies or placed them in lime pits for destruction. Holmes had two giant furnaces as well as pits of acid, bottles of various poisons, and even a stretching rack. Through the connections he had gained in medical school, he sold skeletons and organs with little difficulty.

He moved about in the United States and once stayed in Toronto. He continued to murder people but not on the grand scale he had done when he was in Chicago. He was finally caught, tried and sentenced to death by hanging. Apparently the executioner shortened the drop so it took 15 minutes for the condemned man to die while slowly strangling at the end of his rope.

Was this serial killer a spree killer? Of course he was. After all, wasn’t his actions the result of excessive and unrestrained indulgence in an activity? His motive to kill his victims however was for profit and of course, to get rid of their bodies.

What are the main reasons why these killers murder people?

The thrill of seeing people die at the hands of their killers, sexual satisfaction, having power and control over their victims, revenge against people in general and getting rid of victims who if they live, may testify against them.

If you draw a general profile of a spree killer, how would he or she look like?

It is difficult to draw a general profile of a spree killer. Most serial killers and mass murderers do not look like killers, until they are caught, then the evil in their faces is all you see, Some are handsome, such as Ted Bundy who murdered young women around the United States. Some look real scary, such as Robert Charles Browne, a convicted killer serving a life sentence for the murder of a 13-year-old Colorado girl. He also admitted to a series of 48 other murders from 1970 until his arrest in 1995. He was heavily bearded. Some look really ugly, such as Robert Pickton who murdered 49 prostitutes at his pig farm near Vancouver, B.C. Some looked just average such as Hadden Clark. When six-year-old neighbor, Michelle Dorr, came by looking for his niece, no one was home, but Clark told the young girl his niece was in her bedroom and followed her into the house where he butchered her with a knife and cannibalized her, then buried her body in a shallow grave in a near-by park. He bragged he killed other women.

Is our society protected against such murderers?

The only way that society can be protected against serial killers is through education and that education begins at home when our children are very small. We must warn them not to speak to strangers and not to walk alone into areas that they are not familiar with. When they are in their teens, they will be more aware of the dangers that lurk but the danger is always there. The prostitutes murdered by Pickton were street-wise and yet he conned them into going with him to his farm where he then strung them up, gutted them and fed their bodies to his pigs. There is no real protection against being a victim of a mass murderer because these murders are committed suddenly without any warning. Certainly how a murderer looks is no real hint of who or what he or she has in mind for people. You can be killed by people who look truly handsome and pretty and at the same time, an ugly person can be as nice as anyone can be. Looks are deceiving. However, mannerisms is something else. If you are aware that someone you know talks strangely and says that some day he wants to kill a bunch of people, take him seriously. Whatever you do, don’t insult him. It could cost you your life.

Can we do anything about it so that there are less of them in society?

Obviously, mass and serial killers are mentally disturbed. They need treatment. The problem is, many of them don’t seek it. I strongly feel that if a serial killer or mass killer is caught, they should never be released back into society under any circumstances. Many years ago, a child killer in Quebec murdered two young boys after he sexually ravaged them. He was sentenced to hang. His sentence was commuted and years later, he was released from prison. He later murdered two more boys after sexually ravaging them. This time he was sentenced to life in prison. Later, he was murdered by an inmate in prison.

Is deterrence enough for those offenders? .

Deterrence is the use of punishment as a threat to deter people from committing a crime. Deterrence is often contrasted with retribution, which holds that punishment is a necessary consequence of a crime and should be calculated based on the gravity of the wrong done.

Deterrence can be divided into three separate categories.

Specific deterrence focuses on the individual in question. The aim of these punishments is to discourage the criminal from future criminal acts by instilling an understanding of the consequences.

General or indirect deterrence focuses on general prevention of crime by making examples of specific deviants. The individual actor is not the focus of the attempt at behavioral change, but rather receives punishment in public view in order to deter other individuals from deviance in the future. The argument that deterrence, rather than retribution, is the main justification for punishment is a hallmark of the rational choice theory.

Incapacitation is considered by some to be a subset of specific deterrence. Incapacitation aims to prevent future crimes not by rehabilitating the individual but rather from taking away his ability to commit such acts. Under this theory, criminals are put in jail not so that they will learn the consequence of their actions but rather so that while there they will be unable to engage in crime. It is ofter simply referred to as warehousing the criminal.

I spent a number of years counseling men and women who were in prison and one thing I learned from them is that if a person has a family that loves them and a good job and friends that respect them, the thought of losing it all by committing a crime is a real deterrence. It is the person who is a loser and has nothing to lose, who is unlikely to be deterred. After all, to many of them, living in prison where they get three meals a day and a warm bed to sleep in is better than living on the street as a homeless man. I remember asking a man who had just been released the previous month as to why he was back in jail. He said that there was nothing outside of jail that would keep him out of jail.

Mass murders are so hell-bent on committing mass murder, no amount of consequences will deter them. Many of them kill themselves rather than be taken alive. Serial killers are never deterred. If they were, they wouldn’t kill people.

What are the punishments for those killers convicted of spree killing?

Ted Bundy was electrocuted in the electric chair in Starke, Florida. I can imagine how frightening that must have appeared to him when he was sitting in it. I know because in 1981, I was invited to visit the state penitentiary in Florida and during my visit, I was asked if I would like to see the electric chair? When I was seated in it, the deputy warden was explaining to me the procedures that are undertaken during an execution. Even though I knew that it wasn’t wired up at that time, I still felt uneasy.

Charles Albright (born August 10, 1933) in Dallas, Texas, was sentenced to three life sentences without possibility of parole for the murders of Shirley Williams, in 1991, Mary Pratt in 1990 and Susan Peterson in 1991. The victim's eyes were surgically removed by this killer.

Richard J. Angelo, a nurse at Good Samaritan Hospital on Long Island, was convicted of murdering four patients through poisoning by injection or IV. Psychologists testified he had dissociative identity disorder. After he injected patients, another personality took over rendering him unaware of his actions. Angelo passed a polygraph test. The prosecution agreed that the ''monster in nurse's whites'' had a personality disorder but knew right from wrong. He was sentenced to fifty years to life in prison on January, 25, 1990.

Jeffrey Dahmer had an obsession with death and cannibalism that started in his childhood years. After undergoing several young men and eating part of their bodies, he was captured and sentenced to prison for life without parole. Later he was murdered by a fellow inmate.

John Gacy who lived and worked in Chicago and while he was there, he murdered a large number of teenage boys and was later executed by lethal injection.

Charles Milles Manson (born November 12, 1934) is an American criminal who led what became known as the Manson Family, a quasi-commune that arose in California in the late 1960s. He was found guilty of conspiracy to commit the Tate/LaBianca murders carried out by members of the group at his instruction. He was convicted of the murders through the joint-responsibility rule, which makes each member of a conspiracy guilty of crimes his fellow conspirators commit in furtherance of the conspiracy's object. He was sentenced to death but the Supreme Court temporarily placed a hold on capital punishment in the U.S. so his sentence was commuted to life in prison. When I was invited to visit all the prisons in California in 1972, I passed by Manson’s cell on death row. I was told I could talk to any inmate on death row but not Manson. This killer called out to me, “Hey Man. Come talk to me.” I just continued walking past his cell. At the time of this writing, he is 76 years of age and is serving his time in the Corcoran State Prison. He has applied for parole and has been turned down 11 times.

Tex Watson was the leader of the killers from the Manson family and was present at the Sharon Tate and LaBianca murders. He too was sentenced to death but his sentence was also commuted to life in prison. Years ago, he expressed a desire to some day be released from prison. I wrote him a letter and told him that no parole board would risk the wrath of society by releasing him. A month later, I received a letter from his wife telling me that Watson had decided not to apply for parole any longer.

I am against capital punishment for one reason only. I don’t want innocent people executed. I draw the line however with respect to terrorists and people who torture their victims to death. I believe that mass murderers and serial murderers should spend the rest of their lives in prison. Further, they should not be permitted to mingle with other prisoners. They should be totally isolated from other prisoners. Richard Speck was permitted to mingle and live with other prisoners and he bragged to them how he murdered all those nurses. I saw a video of him sharing a birthday cake with his fellow inmates. That is not a suitable way to treat such an evil man. Recently, a Canadian serial killer was permitted to mingle with other inmates and one inmate was told to share the cell with this killer. The next day, this killer’s cellmate was found strangled to death. Bernardo is serving his sentence in a cell in which he spends 23 hours a day in it. Others like him also spend their lives in their cells. This is the proper way to deal with these kinds of killers.

If we can protect ourselves against them, what would be the measures we might take?

First of all, make sure that your doors and windows in your home are properly secured. Many serial killers have gotten into unsecured homes and either killed their victims when they were in their beds or alternatively, abducted them while they were asleep.

Teach your children how to take great care when answering the knock on the door. There should be a means in which they can see who is at the door before they open it. One day when I was serving a civil document on a person in a home, a teenage girl opened the door. In her hand was a cell phone. She had called her mother before she opened the door and then when I told the girl why I was there, she conveyed that message to her mother. That was a good way to protect her daughter. If I was a rapist, it is unlikely that I would have tried to abduct the girl since she had given a description of me to her mother.

Children should be warned how to avoid being kidnapped while walking on the street. When someone in a car asks your child if they would like to help that person look for his dog, the child should run away as fast as he or she can. If a child is seized, the child should remain limp. It is extremely difficult to lift someone up whose body is totally limp. The person would have to drag the child to his car. While the child is screaming, neighbours would be very suspicious of anyone dragging a child to his car.

Some parents walk their children to school when their children are very young. Our children were with a babysitter before school and after school and my wife or I picked them up from the babysitter. The baby sitter walked them to school and brought them back to her home after school. That isn’t always possible for some parents so their children should be taught to go to school with a friend and return home or close as possible to home with the same friend.

Summary

It is an unfortunate fact of life that really scary and horrible people are free to walk our streets, people who are mass murderers and serial killers. The term serial killer was coined in the 1970s due to cases such as Ted Bundy and David Berkowitz, the man who shot couples to death in New York City. According to an FBI Behavioral Unit study 85% of the world's serial killers are in America. At any given time 20 - 50 unidentified active serial killers are at work continually changing their targets and methods. Prostitutes, runaways, and others who lead transient and anonymous lives are usually not reported missing promptly and receive little police or media attention, making them excellent targets. The police in Vancouver learned too late that they hadn’t paid more attention to the fact that prostitutes in that city were disappearing. They ended up in Robert Pickton’s pig pen---truly a spree killer if there ever was one such killer.

According to Mike Rustigan, professor of criminology at San Francisco State University:

"With all of them, their motives tend to be total, deep and personal. They feel no guilt, no remorse and have an attitude of total disdain towards their victims.

"There's a self-importance that runs in all of them. With the Unabomber, for example, he demanded that The Washington Post and The New York Times publish his manifesto. You get the feeling that if he had just laid low, he may have remained on the loose to this day. His own brother saw the manifesto in his home and he then contacted authorities. I feel he felt upstaged by the Oklahoma City bombing, which made everything he had done up to that point seem like nothing." unquote

As to mass killers, you should watch for tell-tale signs such as mumbling in an angry manner, making threats. Make sure that you don’t piss anyone off at work. Mass killers have returned to places of employment and killed those persons whom they felt disrespected them. Unfortunately, innocent people have been killed by mass killers simply because they were in the immediate areas where the killers began their rampage.

More efforts should be undertaken to determine what makes these killers tick. Elliott Leyton in his book Hunting Humans said in part;

“We must study them well, for there will be many more such killers in what remains of this century and it should be clearly understood that their intent is to steal our daughters and sons and to snuff out their lives.” unquote

The murder of strangers by serial killers and even mass killers will probably always be with us. We are inclined to dismiss them as freaks and an aberration in human nature but nevertheless, they are still with us. It is even conceivable that sometime in our lives, we have been next to one of these killers or later in our lives, we will be next to one of them but by the grace of God, we have been or will be spared from their insidious acts of violence. It is a scary world out there. Be careful.

Should terrorists and wannabe terrorists be executed or imprisoned for a very long time?

In 1985, I was invited to give an address at the Seventh United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders which was being held in Milan, Italy in September of that year. My speech was on the subject of terrorism and what should be done to terrorists when they are caught.

I was nervous, not because I was addressing 125 governments, 58 non governmental organizations like Amnesty International, the International Red Cross, the Vatican, etc., and 1,395 individual experts (since I had addressed two previous Congresses in the past—1975 and 1980) but because I was going to be making recommendations with respect to sentences that far exceeded what the previous speakers were advocating be given to terrorists.

I was sick and tired of reading about terrorists who indiscriminately planted bombs on buses and in schools and murdered innocent men, women, children and even babies just so that these terrorists could die as martyrs and be greeted in heaven by 72 virgins.

The day before I was to give my address, I handed out copies of my speech to the news media that were in the conference centre but they didn’t seem that interested in reading it. After all, I was not a delegate speaking for a particular country. I was only one of the few experts that the UN invited to express our own opinions on the various topics under discussion during that conference.

They didn’t realize that although invited experts cannot vote in these conferences, they can influence the voting of the delegates, such as when I proposed a bill of rights for young offenders in the 1980 UN Congress held in Caracas in which the delegates in the 1985 UN Congress were now voting on my proposal and which was later accepted by them in September and passed by the UN General Assembly two months later.

What did surprise me however was that I was to give my speech from the podium rather than from my desk on the main floor. I have addressed the UN Congresses around the world twenty-five times since 1975 and only twice have I been invited to give my address from the podium since only ministers in the governments are the ones that give their speeches from the podiums.

I later learned that it was the Italian army that asked the chairman of the session to invite me to speak from the podium and the reason for this was that a television camera was placed on the floor facing the podium and it was the wish of the Italian government to have my speech televised in its 10-minute entirety so that it could be broadcasted on television all over Italy that night. It was broadcasted that night however the voice over mine was in Italian.

In my speech, I recommended the sentence of death be given to any terrorist who built, planted or caused an explosive device to be set to explode or used a firearm and actually caused death to a human being or seriously maimed a human being.

Further, I recommended a sentence of life in prison without parole for any terrorist who built, planted or set an explosive device to explode or used a firearm in which neither caused the death of a human being or seriously maimed a human being.

I also recommended that any terrorist who advocates building or planting an explosive device in a place where innocent persons can be killed or maimed but such a device is not actually built, planted or set to explode, or any terrorist advocated murdering innocent people with firearms be sentenced to prison for a minimum of 25 years.

With respect to those terrorists who murder their victims, I made the following recommendations:

1. All the witnesses be gathered up and placed in the finest hotels under guard and questioned immediately.
2. Their statements be compiled by the investigators and and turned over to the prosecutors within 14 days.
3. The trials of the terrorists commence on the third week.
4. All the terrorists who are convicted should automatically be sentenced to death.
5. The Supreme Court of the country in which the terrorists are tried should drop everything and concentrate on the transcripts of the trials of the terrorists.
6. If they are convinced that the trials were conducted fairly and they are satisfied with the testimony of the witnesses, they should confirm the death sentences.
7. The death sentences should be carried out withing 24 hours of the confirmation of the Supreme Court.
8. The bodies of the terrorists should be immediately incinerated and placed in small lead containers and dumped into the nearest ocean at least 200 miles from shore so that no one can pray over their remains.

I further suggested that while the terrorists were waiting for their trials and after their convictions, the only persons that they should be in contact with are their lawyers. This meant that no family members or holy men would be permitted to see them.

My concern was that we were treating these terrorists as human beings when in fact, we should have been treating them as the animals they are. That night, my speech was shown on TV all over Italy and newspapers world-wide quoted excerpts from my speech.

Admittedly, I was a strong advocate (and I still am) for the severest punishment that humans can give other humans in a civilized world but when you consider what these animals do to human beings without any concern as to how the families of the victims will feel when they learned that their loved ones have been blown to bits or shot to death by the terrorists, I was really expressing what a great many people around the world actually feel towards terrorists.

Consider what happened to the Jews when terrorists went wild.

Sep 22, 1968 - Palestinian terrorists booby trapped a car. The car exploded in the shopping market Mahen Yehuda in Jerusalem, killing 12 people and wounding 70.

May 22, 1970- Palestinian terrorists attacked a school bus at the Mosha Avivim in the Upper Galilee. 9 children, the driver and 2 other adults are killed, and 19 children are wounded.

Sept 5, 1972, Munich Massacre: Palestinian terrorists killed 11 Israeli athletes and one German policeman in the Munich Olympic Games.

Apr 11, 1974 - PLO terrorists attacked Kiryat Shmona, killing 8 children, 8 adults, and 2 soldiers.

May 15, 1974 - Maalot Massacre: 22 children and several adults were killed (66 children were wounded) by Palestinian terrorists of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine

Mar 11, 1978 - PLO terrorists seized a bus on the coastal road, killing 35 men, women, and children.

That was just in a ten-year period. There were other bombings and firearms deaths also caused by terrorists during the time frame in Israel.

There were many acts of terrorism in the United States but two come to mind that were really horrendous. They were;

1995 April 19: Oklahoma City bombing: A truck bomb shattered the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, killing 168 people-including children playing in the building's day care center. Right-wing terrorists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were convicted in the bombing. McVeigh was executed by lethal injection and Terry Nichols was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

2001 September 11: September 11, 2001 attacks carried out by Al-Qaeda. The attacks killed nearly 3,000 civilians, and were carried out by Islamic fundamentalists using hijacked commercial airplanes to damage the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, ultimately destroying both 110-story skyscrapers. The Pentagon near Washington, D.C., was also severely damaged. Building 7 of the World Trade Center was also destroyed, but was not hit with a plane, thus raising suspicions as to the official story. A fourth plane crashed when terrorists took control of the plane while flying over Pennsylvania. So far, no one has been sentenced as the terrorists in the planes were killed when their planes crashed although their ringleader is currently on trial.

Can any reasonable thinking individual really believe that these terrorists who committed these horrendous crimes should be shown any form of mercy? All they are entitled to is a fair trial and a quick death.

Ahmed Ressam was arrested by US Customs officials in 1999 while carrying timing devices and 130 pounds of explosives from Victoria, BC to Port Angeles, Washington. Charged with offences including transporting explosives and possessing unregistered firearms, Ressam confessed to membership in a Montreal group plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. In July 2005, Ressam was sentenced in the United States to 22 years in prison. He should have been sentenced to life in prison without parole.

US border officials arrested three American members of the militant Muslim group Jamaat ul-Fuqra in 1991. They were carrying an attack plan, a list of bomb components, and surveillance notes about a theatre and a Hindu temple in the Toronto area. Sentenced to 12 years in prison, they were released in April 2006 and deported. They should have been sent to prison for the rest of their lives.

A suitcase bomb was loaded on a plane in Vancouver, then transferred to Air India Flight 182 in Toronto. The plane crashed while en route to India, killing 329 passengers, including 279 Canadians. A second bomb, loaded on a Canadian Pacific flight from Vancouver to Bombay, killed two and injured four at Tokyo’s Narita Airport. Inderjit Singh Reyat was sentenced to 15 years in prison for his role in the bombings. He should have been executed.

In 1982, Members of Direct Action detonated a van packed with dynamite outside Litton Industries' Toronto plant, which manufactured parts for the guidance systems of US Cruise missiles. Ten people were injured; damage was estimated at $3.87 million. Direct Action issued communiques emphasizing their anti-nuclear position. Three members of the group were convicted. They were also convicted of destroying other government property by the use of bombs elsewhere in Canada. The five received sentences ranging from six years to life. All of them should have been given life in prison. As an aside, there was almost an eleventh victim. I had driven past the building and van just five minutes earlier on my way home from work.

In the summer of 2006, police carried out a massive anti-terrorism sweep in southern Ontario. Seventeen people — 13 adults and four youths — were arrested in a series of June raids. An 18th individual was detained two months later. Normally referred to as one case, the so-called Toronto 18 in fact encompassed two plots. One was a plan to bomb the Toronto Stock Exchange and other prominent buildings. The other, Gillespie says, was "the attempt to create a large al-Qaeda type cell in Toronto — to arm themselves with weapons, and then to create some sort of mayhem that would scare the Canadian public into withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. They also intended to invade parliament and sever the head of the prime minister from his body. That was unlikely to happen. Some of the accused had their charges stayed or dismissed. Those that were convicted were given sentences that ranged from two and a half years to life in prison. Those sentenced to life can apply for parole after 10 years is served with the exception of one who was given credit for some of the ten years parole eligibility while waiting for his trial while in jail. They all should have been given a minimum of twenty-five years in prison.

The 2002 Bali bombings occurred on 12 October 2002 in the tourist district of Kuta on the Indonesian island of Bali. The attack was the deadliest act of terrorism in the history of Indonesia, killing 202 people. A further 240 people were injured. The three men responsible for the bombings were later executed by firing squad.

So long as we treat terrorists or wannabe terrorists with kid gloves, they or other terrorists and wannabe terrorists will continue to plague society with their evil deeds.

At the end of my address at the UN Congress in Milan, I said the following:

“When a terrorist kills an innocent victim, that innocent person is the primary victim who suffers from the pain of death and the loss of his or her chance to enjoy life to its fullest. The secondary victims are the family and friends of the primary victims. But there are also periphery victims. We are those people who are neither the primary or secondary victims. We are victims also because when an innocent victim dies at the hands of a terrorist, a little of us within each of us, dies also.”

Good cop nabs bad cop

This is an interesting story because it deals with the issue of bad cops who are thugs on the street and their police force’s attempt to hide their identities from other authorities and the public in general. It also tells of an unnamed police sergeant who discovered who one of the thugs was who it is alleged, beat up a protester and how he recognized the thug and reported him to the proper authorities.

To appreciate the significance of this story, let me take you back to last June when the City of Toronto hosted the G20 summit. As one can appreciate, it was necessary to use the services of twenty thousand police officers to ensure that there were no problems in the area of the summit.

Unfortunately there were two kinds of thugs in the area of the summit. They were civilian hooligans and police hooligans.

The civilian hooligans burned a police vehicle in the immediate area of the International Conference Centre in downtown Toronto and there were also civilian hooligans who smashed store and bank windows on some of the main streets. Unfortunately, these kinds of scum creep out of the mud whenever large groups of crowds congregate. Where were the police when this was happening? Some of them were watching what those scum were doing, but they did nothing to stop the scum from doing the damage. Why didn’t they intervene? The reason is that there weren’t enough of them in that area. The majority of the police officers were in other areas of the city, many of them abusing the citizens.

During the three days of protests that accompanied the G20, protesters were bludgeoned, kicked, tear gassed, trampled by police horses and shot at with rubber and plastic bullets. Homes were raided for ‘preventative arrests’ without presentation of a warrant. Journalists covering these unprecedented events were arrested and assaulted. Peaceful protesters and neighbourhood passers-by were kept in an intersection by police for hours without letting them leave during a driving thunderstorm.

For example, they were hassling a group of protesters that were in the area of the Ontario Legislative Buildings which is some distance from the conference centre. They arrested some of them and charged them with phony charges which were later thrown out of court.

At the detention center, dubbed ‘the kennel’ by police guards, demonstrators were hauled into primitive wire cages, strip searched and denied legal counsel. There, detainees suffering from concussion and deep lacerations were denied medical attention. A diabetic entering into shock was denied treatment for four hours. If they wanted to use the temporary toilets in the cages, they were seen by anyone passing by since the doors had been removed.

Of the 1,150 people arrested, more than 800 were released from custody without charge when the summit was over, proof that their arrests had been arbitrary. At the magistrate’s court in August, Crown prosecutors entirely back-footed by the grievous lack of evidence accompanying many of the remaining charges, agreed to withdraw 31 warrants outright and struck deals with another 22 individuals, staying all charges in exchange for agreements by the accused to donate $25 or $50 to charity. An additional 9 charges were dismissed because people were ‘listed in error.’ Five people signed a peace bond in exchange for full exoneration. Another 227 cases were adjourned until the autumn with the Crown failing in the majority of those cases to produce any evidence to defense lawyers. Only six individuals appearing before the magistrates pleaded guilty—mostly on charges of petty larceny.

The Toronto Police Services Board, which is supposed to exercise civilian oversight over the force, issued a press release thanking the police for “the manner in which they conducted themselves.” Fortunately, members of that board are going to be replaced now that a new mayor has been elected.

Over the course of Ombudsman Marin’s investigation, the Toronto Police Force refused to co-operate with the ombudsman’s repeated requests for information and the Force denied Marin permission to interview any police officers. Just prior to the release of Marin’s report, the obstructionist tactics of Chief Blair were once again on display.

When a by-stander at the so-called free speech zone several miles from the perimeter fence came forward with yet another video depicting police officers brutally beating a defenseless demonstrator, Blair baldly (and erroneously) stated that the video had been doctored and denounced the province’s Special Investigations Unit for overstepping their bounds for re-opening the police brutality case. Despite the video depicting the face of one of the offending officers—who, like at least 200 others had removed his name tag and badge number, the chief did nothing to have the offending officer identified. The thug’s face is clearly shown in the video when he for a brief moment lifted the plastic shield that covered his face.

I will do another article on this G20 debacle after I read the final report of the investigations that is being undertaken. Meanwhile, I wish to deal with one particular incident that occurred during that police farce in June. It is the one I briefly referred to in the previous paragraph.

The protester is named Adam Nobody. A friend of mine who is a former police investigator with the Professional Standards Branch of the Toronto police force told me that Mr. Nobody wasn’t born with that name. He changed his last name for the pun value.

Video of the arrest of Mr. Nobody showed him being apprehended by riot police during a demonstration at Queen’s Park. The Special Investigations Unit (SIU)which investigates wrongdoings of Ontario’s police forces, deemed ‘excessive force’ was used, but could not identify the officers involved. Stills from a video shot by an unnamed University of Toronto student and published in the Toronto Star, show the face of an officer who appears to strike Mr. Nobody repeatedly with a steel baton.

Mr. Nobody, who works building stages, told the Globe and Mail he was making a joke protest sign when he looked up and saw a group of police officers rushing him. They tackled him and dragged him behind a police van. Nobody, 27, said one officer had a boot on his head when another asked him for his name. “Adam Nobody,” he replied. The officer wasn’t amused. Nobody said the officer suddenly kicked him twice in the face, shouting, “Stop being a smartass.” The officer then pulled Nobody’s ID out of his pocket. “Shit,” the officer reportedly said. “This guy really is a Nobody.” Imagine what the officer would have done if after asking him for his last name and his real name was Guess. Unfortunately because the officer was in plainclothes, Mr. Nobody had no way of identifying him.

The alleged beating occurred away from prying eyes moments before he was filmed by a bystander. The video, provided to the Toronto Star by the unnamed University of Toronto student who attended the G20 protests at Queen’s Park on June 26th, shows police tackling Mr. Nobody to the ground, punching and striking him with batons. The footage is similar to a now-infamous YouTube video of the same incident shot by bystander John Bridge that drew allegations of ‘tampering’ from Toronto police Chief Bill Blair (for which he later apologized), but differs in that it shows the face of an officer who appears to strike Mr. Nobody repeatedly with a baton. The officer’s garb seems to conform with the uniform worn by Toronto police, with black pants featuring a red stripe down the side and what appears to be the force’s crest on the right shoulder.

The video led the Special Investigations Unit (SIU)to conclude that police probably used excessive force. The unit's director, Ian Scott, said an officer appears to make a “striking motion” with a closed fist, which may have caused a fracture below Nobody’s right eye.

Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair (who is definitely not the brightest light on the police force) went on local radio to lash out at the SIU's conclusion. He insisted the video had been tampered with and suggested Mr. Nobody had been armed. A day later, he publicly apologized. Where did he get the idea that Mr. Nobody was armed? Since he claimed that he had no idea who assaulted Mr. Nobody, it had to be mere speculation on his part. That was the ravings of a fool; a bumbler who has no control of his police force and in order to save face, praised them for their work at the G20 Summit and claimed that he can’t believe that his officers would do such heinous things to the citizens of Toronto. Is he naive or is he lying through his teeth?

At least he was smart enough to recognize that he made a rather stupid statement to the press and subsequently said, “This statement created a false impression that I wish to clarify. I have no evidence that he was armed or violent and all charges against the injured man have been withdrawn. I regret the false impression that my comments may have created and apologize to Mr. Nobody.”

The next step of course is for the police force to pay Mr. Nobody for his injuries. I think $10,000 would be reasonable. I guess he and the rest of us will have to wait to see if that ever becomes a reality.

Nobody saw his assault charge dropped after prosecutors conceded they had no evidence. They couldn’t even find the officer who arrested Mr. Nobody. The police badge number listed on the arrest sheet doesn’t correspond to anyone on the Toronto force. The Special Investigations Unit didn’t lay charges against the arresting officers. The agency’s investigators were unable to learn the identity of those who might have used excessive force in arresting Mr. Nobody. Officers who might have shed light on the incident refused to testify. That doesn’t surprise me. It is called, ‘The Blue Wall’. No police officer is willing to report to his superiors that he knows a police officer who has committed a crime.

That generally is what innocent victims of police brutality have to face when they accuse police officers of beating them up---other police officers standing about clamming up claiming they saw nothing even though they are only a few feet from the scene.

Well, guess what? A Toronto police officer did report what he saw. He wasn’t at the scene however when Nobody was being be beaten by the police. As it happens, according to sources, the sergeant, a front desk officer at that station was looking at video footage of police clashes with demonstrators from that awful weekend in Toronto. He recognized the face of the police officer. It was the face of Constable Babak Andalib-Goortani. This officer works as a traffic cop out of 31 Division. He pointed this out to one of the sergeants passing by him. It’s unclear if this was the footage shot by videographer John Bridge and posted on YouTube, which was first made public by the SIU about a month ago, or if it was a second corroborating piece of footage obtained by the Toronto Star and publicized a week later. But this event occurred within the past fortnight.

When an officer was looking at the image of the assault on Mr. Nobody on the computer screen, he said to his sergeant who was at that moment passing by,“Hey, take a look at this.” The officer turned the monitor so the sergeant could take a better gander. The sergeant recognized the face on the screen and said, “Oh, that’s Babak.”

That brief exchange somehow made its way to the SIU offices. The sergeant was summoned for an interview, the Toronto Star learned, and confirmed the identity of the cop with the goatee when his face shield was lifted to expose his face.

Now why is it then that no one at 31 Division recognized this officer? Remember what I said about the Blue Wall? Unless this thug had raped their wives or daughters, they weren’t going to turn him in simply because he beat a protester senseless. Does that tell you something of the caliber of these particular officers? They get anywhere from sixty to a hundred thousand dollars a year as police officers and they don’t give a shit about their fellow cop beating up an innocent citizen. They are supposed to detect and apprehend criminals and yet they appear to have ignored the criminal in their own ranks.

Babak Andalib-Goortani arrived at the SIU’s Mississauga headquarters on December 22nd in the company of his lawyer to hear the charge against him, a session that lasted just 20 minutes. As first a subject officer and now a criminally charged officer, he has the constitutional right to decline an interview with SIU investigators and his own police chief. This ‘perp’ is facing a charge of assault with a weapon, the weapon being the police baton which is made of steel.

As is the custom with citizens who’ve been charged, they are cuffed and taken into custody. Andalib-Goortani was not arrested in the fashion that is routine for civilians. He wasn’t taken into custody and cuffed; he wasn’t immediately remanded in court (his first appearance date wasn't until January 24th); and he wasn’t subjected to the ‘perp walk’ where an accused is often allowed to be photographed by the media — although the Toronto Star did catch Andalib-Goortani arriving and leaving the SIU offices, an appointment that hadn’t been previously revealed to inquiring journalists by the police.

Cops are nearly always treated differently, more respectfully, more gingerly, which is in itself cause for dismay in a society of purported equals. More distressing, though, is the fact that only one officer from among the scores of police officers who mistreated civilians during the G20 weekend has been charged thus far.

As the World Socialist Web Site wrote at the time, “The events in Toronto are a serious warning. The level of official violence is being ratcheted up. In the face of the upheavals to come, the state in every country is working up plans for mass repression. What dominates the politics and social relations of every country is the global economic crisis, which has reached an advanced stage. All the emphasis must now be placed on the development of a consciously socialist and internationalist movement of the working class, the only progressive response to the police state provocations and violence of the ruling elites”. unquote

What we need is better leadership in some of our police forces and a system that will make it an offence for police officers who witness crimes committed by fellow officers who refuse to report the crimes to their superiors.

If any police officer in the Toronto Police Force hassles the officer and sergeant who recognized the thug that beat up the protester, they should be dismissed from the Force. Such persons are no different than the thug that beat up the protester. Society doesn’t need that kind of filth in their police forces.

If this perp is convicted of assault with a weapon, there is only one sentence that would be appropriate and that is a term of imprisonment. Further, upon conviction, he should be dismissed from the police force.

Some people may say that dismissal from the police force is harsh but let me ask this rhetorical question. If an adult working in a day care centre beats up a child in his care, should he not be dismissed from the day care centre? Does it not follow then that if a police officer who is supposed to protect members of society beats up a citizen who has committed no crime, should he not be dismissed from the police force?

If his union says that he should remain in the police force even if he is convicted, then this tells you something about the character of its members.

I will keep my readers posted as this drama unfolds.

Sandy Hutchens: a fraudster that keeps growing like pond scum

I met this pond scum Sandy Hutchens years ago when I was the president of the Paralegal Society of Canada. He was attending one of our board meetings (which was open to any member). He and his ‘big mouth’ wife Tanya Hutchins (who simply wouldn’t shut up) tried to take over the meeting and I finally ordered them to leave. That was the last I ever saw of them. However later I was given information that he was involved in some shady dealings while acting as a paralegal and I asked the board to back up my proposal that the memberships of this man and his wife be cancelled. They agreed. As the years moved on, I was reading various news accounts of this man and his scams.

Laurie Monsebraaten of the Toronto Star wrote on March 21, 1988;

‘City Shelter’ is filling the rooming houses with welfare recipients, single mothers, pregnant teens and victims of family violence. But the group is operating the rooming houses without proper licences. They are buying up the relatively inexpensive homes in the west end, renovating without building permits, and getting welfare and other social agencies to refer people to them as if they were legal.

From our information, this group is set up to buy as many houses as they can get their hands on, and it's important that we put a stop to it now," she said. "They are community busters with no consideration for neighborhoods.

But City Shelter president Sandy Hutchens said in an interview that his group is doing everything to meet existing regulations and that he is offering clean, affordable housing for people in great need.

"We wanted to get the housing up as quickly as possible," he said. "Maybe we didn't do it in the right way, but we're working to correct that. I think it's a shame that we're being so violently opposed. Governments are saying that the private sector must do its share to help ease the housing crisis. Well, we're not just talking, we're actually doing something about it.

But Disero (Toronto West city counselor)  said Hutchens and his group "know exactly what they are doing" and "deliberately" broke the rules.

Disero became aware of City Shelter after residents on Gillespie Ave. complained about an illegal rooming house on their street two months ago.

"We believe this is a very shrewd group with a lot of money behind it," she said. "If the way they have acted on Gillespie Ave. is any indication of the way they do business, no Toronto community will be safe."

The city has always had trouble stopping illegal rooming houses - it took three years to shut down the last one in Disero's ward. But council has resisted bringing in tougher legislation controlling rooming houses because they are generally viewed as a good form of housing and the number of illegal operations has been minimal.

But Disero and other west Toronto councilors are worried that if private groups start turning rooming houses into big business with no respect for the law, the city could be overrun.

"Right now, the city is virtually powerless to stop them," said Councilor Richard Gilbert, Disero's wardmate and a member of the NDP caucus, which traditionally has been against stricter controls on rooming houses.

Along with the freeze, Disero wants the city's planning department to investigate the "growing phenomenon" of private interest in rooming houses, and report to council in two months on ways the city can stop abuses.

The city may want to limit the number of roomers in a non-owner-occupied rooming house to five or six, she speculated.

The Gillespie Ave. rooming house owned by City Shelter has 12 roomers, and provides the group an income of about $3,700 a month from rents.

What follows is excerpts from an article written by Joseph Hall of the Toronto Star on December 31, 1989;

"I guess I'll just freeze to death," Curran said yesterday. He is one of 21 residents facing eviction on Tuesday from their Parkdale rooming house. How are you supposed to find a new place at this time of year? How am I going to pay for a truck to move when I have to give first and last month's rent?"

Curran, a former bar singer whose ulcers have put him on permanent disability, said he and his neighbors were given notice two days before Christmas that the sheriff's department would be taking over their apartments at 233 Sorauren Ave. in the Dundas St.-Lansdowne Ave. area.

The tenants, many of whom are on welfare, were told that the building's new owner (Sandy Hutchens) had defaulted on mortgage payments, and that they had 10 days to get out.

Sandy Hutchens, who said he sold the building in September and has since managed it, has offered all the tenants rooms in his other properties around Parkdale. "I've told them that I will find them other places, but it's up to them whether they take them or not," said Hutchens, who manages about eight other buildings in the area.

Hutchens said he sold the building to "a woman" who is "out of town this weekend" and that she defaulted to the Laurentian Bank of Canada.

He said he plans to buy the building back from the bank next week and may reoffer the current tenants their rooms. It wasn’t going to happen..

Korwin-Kuczynski, councilor for Ward 2, said three of Hutchens' Parkdale buildings have been denied rooming house licences in the past few months and that there was a question of ownership in all three cases. "I will also be asking the city's housing inspectors to immediately begin inspections of all buildings that have been registered to Mr. Hutchens either now or in the past," Korwin-Kuczynski said.

"I don't have time to try and wade through the ownership question. We have to find out what's going on in his buildings as soon as possible."

He said he wants to ensure the rooming house owner was not moving people back into buildings recently denied operating licences.

Alfred Holden and Bob Mitchell of the Toronto Star wrote on January 3, 1990;

A judge agreed with their lawyer that the matter needs more unraveling, and granted a 10-day stay on the serving writs of possession for mortgage holders, who want to sell the building empty of tenants.

"I'm just ecstatic. It's just the beginning of our fight, but it gives us some time," said Shirley Claxton, one of 21 residents who were shocked to learn Christmas Eve that they'd been paying rent but their landlord (Sandy Hutchens) wasn't making payments on his mortgage.

The tenants' lawyer, Jean Hyndman, said she hopes to be able to negotiate with the mortgage holders so tenants can stay when the building is sold. She also plans to investigate some other legal avenues, she said.

Sandy Hutchens, who is listed as the owner of the property registered as 844645 Ontario Limited on the eviction notice, hasn't made any mortgage payments since June. When contacted by The Star earlier, Hutchens said he didn't own the building any longer.

The property's mortgage is held by three investors who used private pension monies to fund the mortgage. Henry Erlich, lawyer for the pension fund investors, said Hutchens owes about $16,000, maybe $20,000, with fees.

"The poor tenants are obviously innocent except for the fact that they've been very foolish. We gave them notice back in September that the owner wasn't making his payments and that they were going to be evicted," Erlich said.

Sandy Hutchins and his wife Tanya realized that poor immigrants were an easy target so they went into the immigration business for the purpose of ripping off those victims also.

Lila Sarick of The Globe and Mail wrote an article about this infestation on February 22, 1996. It is as follows in part;

A husband and wife who operated immigration consulting businesses in three countries have been charged with leading clients to believe they would receive jobs and visas in Canada.

Sandy Hutchens, 36, and his wife, Tanya, 29, of Aurora, Ontario were charged yesterday with fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud, conspiracy to aid and abet persons to enter Canada, and employment of an illegal alien. Their company, Gold Star Legal Services, had offices in Toronto, the Philippines and Romania, RCMP Constable John Simpson said.

In the Philippines, 107 individuals say they paid $1,500 each and were told that job offers and Canadian work visas would be arranged, police said.

A number of those who applied were registered nurses, who paid the equivalent of half a year's salary and quit their jobs believing they would soon be traveling to jobs in Canada, Constable Simpson said. Some wrote letters to the companies and persons they believed would be their new employers, introducing themselves and thanking them for the job offer.

Other individuals say they were told they would receive visas to study at a non-existent Christian academy in Gravenhurst, Ontario or to work as sewing machine operators or nannies, police said. About 25 Romanians reported paying a total of $50,000 for promises of jobs and visas.

However, the job offers were fictitious and the Canadian embassies were not prepared to issue the visas. None of the individuals were successful in entering Canada, Constable Simpson said.

Police estimate the alleged fraud at $240,000.

All three Gold Star offices have been closed and the manager of the Philippines office is facing local criminal charges, Constable Simpson said. He added that the Romanian office manager is in Canada, having travelled here to urge the Hutchens to resolve the problems.

The investigation began a year ago when Filipinos living in Canada and trying to become permanent residents made complaints to the Philippine consulate in Toronto.

The company began as a service to resolve landlord-tenant disputes and branched into immigration work a few years ago, Constable Simpson said.

In October 2008, Mark Bonokoski, a columnist with the Toronto Sun, wrote an article about this fraudster. In it he wrote;

Earlier this summer, (2008) a house-warming message appeared on the online bulletin board of the Chabad@Flamingo synagogue in Thornhill, Ontario inviting the congregation to attend a Chanukat HaBayit at the new home of Moishe and Tanya Hutchens.

When he was finally arrested for fraud by Toronto cops back in 2002, he was a Baptist-raised, drug-pushing, scam-running paralegal named Sandy Hutchens, with a criminal record spanning 20 years.

By the time he was sentenced three years later to two years house arrest for bilking, among others, a wheelchair-bound cancer survivor out of $40,000, he had converted to Orthodox Judaism with Rabbi Mendel Kaplan, chaplain of the York Regional Police, and founder of Chabad@Flamingo, appearing as a character witness.

Superior Court Justice Harry LaForme called Rabbi Kaplan an "impressive witness," which more than half explains why Hutchens didn't receive the five years in jail that the Crown was seeking, and which many of his victims believed he richly deserved.

Since then, Sandy Hutchens has morphed into Moishe Hutchens and, when in business mode, he operates under the name Moishe Alexander. There is no mixup. Sandy (Moishe) Hutchens and Moishe Alexander are one and the same.

Last Sunday, after receiving a flurry of e-mail about his alleged activities, I popped over to Moishe Hutchens' new home on Theodore Place in Thornhill where, according to neighbours he has being living since April with his three children and his wife, Tanya, a paralegal allegedly working under the registered name of Tatiana Brik.

Incidentally, neither of these two scumbags are currently licenced in Ontario as paralegals nor is it likely that they ever will be.

No one answered the door bell. Newspapers were piled on the porch, and every blind was shut. A business card was left in the door next to the mezuzah, with the message to "please call."

Hutchens called the next day, but referred all comments to his lawyers, one being Lou Strezos and the other being Alvin Meisels, a Toronto real-estate lawyer who also represents Hutchens, including being counsel in the case of Canadian Funding Corp. v Brooke Properties Inc., in which Sandy Hutchens appears as "Craig Hutchens."

Lou Strezos called that night, and an agreed-upon time was scheduled to discuss Sandy Hutchens and why, in particular, he was operating as Moishe Alexander. Strezos cautioned, numerous times, that he was making notes of the conversation which I, in fact, was also taping.

"There's a very simple answer to it," said Strezos. "He formally converted to Orthodox Judaism and, a result of a committee of three ... a rabbinical court, in the colloquial sense, his Orthodox Jewish name is now Moishe Alexander. "It is not uncommon. There is nothing wrong with that. He's got nothing to hide."

Then Strezos was asked this: Are Moishe Alexander's current business dealings on the up-and-up?

"Yes," Strezos replied. "If there are any accusations to be made, and I am not going to speak about what spurious allegations may be made on the Internet, if an allegation is rendered by anybody, he will answer it in due course. I am not going to engage in a dialogue through the media on speculation on what you or other people may think. So that's properly answered. If anyone has to bring a suit, or anything arises, we will answer it in due course.”

Three years ago, a week after he was sentenced, I (Mark Bonokoski) popped into Hutchens' then- and equally-upmarket Thornhill home -- again out of the blue, just like last Sunday.

He was home, of course, as per court order with conditions of his sentencing (that included) two years of follow-up probation, random drug and alcohol tests, strict curfews, limited comings and goings, 50 hours of community work talking to groups about the scourge of drugs, and restitution of the entire $65,803 he had scammed from his victims.

I am standing in the living room, waiting for Sandy Hutchens to come downstairs.

"You Jewish?" Tanya Hutchens suddenly asks. "No," I reply.

It goes downhill from there, with Tanya Hutchens taking control of her husband's answers like how, for example, they planned to pay restitution.

"From our savings," she interjects.

And what Sandy Hutchens planned to do to make a living now that his scam artistry had been make public.

"He's self-employed," she replies.

And then I am asked to leave.

The Internet today is rife with allegations, none proven (in court), that the now 49-year-old Sandy Hutchens -- a.k.a Moishe Hutchens, a.k.a Craig Hutchens, and a.k.a Moishe Alexander -- is up to old tricks in suspect multi-jurisdictional mortgage schemes here, and including as far away as Florida.

It is difficult to keep track of Moishe Hutchens especially when it comes to tracking down his aliases.

Alvin Meisels -- lawyer No. 2 -- called the allegations on the Internet "a smear campaign that is causing (Hutchens/Alexander) a lot of grief."

"He's gone a long way to rehabilitate himself and, contrary to suspicions (anyone) might have, I am satisfied myself that the fellow is genuine," said Meisels. "He's closed a multitude of financial deals (since being convicted of fraud)-- certainly more than 15, certainly more than a score (20) -- and I am satisfied they are all legitimate.

"And those (financial deals) that did not close, did not close for legitimate reasons."

As for the Florida allegations, this was addressed by lawyer No. 3, noted Toronto civil litigation and libel attorney Julian Porter, who wrote a letter to Sun Media lawyer Tycho Manson in anticipation of a story being published.

"Mr. Alexander now has a good reputation as a private lender," Porter wrote. "In that position, he became involved with a transaction wherein financing was required relating to British purchasers of condominium units in Florida.

"The financing met with trouble through no fault whatsoever of Mr. Alexander. The proponents of the building transaction have, as Florida people are sometimes wont to do, decided they cannot meet their obligations. But, in the meantime, they can easily trash Mr. Alexander on the Internet and exploit his conviction four years ago."


While the RCMP will not confirm or deny, it is known that an investigation has been launched regarding complaints being leveled against Hutchens/Alexander in Ontario through RECOL, the privacy-protected online tip conduit on economic crime backed by the Mounties and the OPP.

It is also known that at least one Toronto lawyer -- Ian Stuart Hennessey -- has been disbarred this year by the Law Society of Upper Canada for his past involvement in assisting Sandy Hutchens, through "knowingly (being) involved in fraudulent mortgage transaction."

"The fact that others have been deceived by Hutchens is not a defence," the adjudication panel ruled.

If Sandy Hutchens, as Moishe Alexander, is not above board, he is obviously not afraid to wave the flag regarding his supposed coups while still on probation for fraud, although that particular detail goes unmentioned.

On one of Moishe Alexander's websites, complete with photos of him posing with supposedly pleased clients -- although their faces are pixilated out and no surnames are provided -- he brags of closing some pretty sweet deals through his aforementioned firm, Canadian Funding Corp.

Some of the headlines read as follows:

- "Canadian Funding Corp. and Moishe Alexander funds builder for multi-home construction with total financing of $1.2 million."
- "Canadian Funding Corp. and Moishe Alexander close 120 deals in three years."
- "Canadian Funding Corp. and Moishe Alexander provide all funding for $14 million development in Northern Ontario."
-
"Canadian Funding Corp. and Moishe Alexander provide full funding for $15.5 million condo development in Southern Ontario."

One testimonial, from a "Luc B. of Ontario" -- his face electronically blurred -- reads: "As a builder and developer, this ($1.2 million) funding provided by Canadian Funding Corp. and Moishe Alexander allows me to expand and continue my home building operation when nobody else would listen. Thanks Moishe."

Sandy Hutchens -- a.k.a Moishe Alexander -- was first introduced here in October 2002, when Toronto police in 32 Division's fraud squad had him pegged as a fly-by-nighter who professed to be a fighter for the underdog.

They had him running a bogus storefront paralegal operation in the city's north end, papering apartment buildings with flyers promising to fight rent hikes and landlord-tenant disputes, and boasting of his ability to arrange loans as well as broker the sale of commercial properties.

Det.Const. Ed Malachowski, who retired from the force in February, worked the thick and complicated file that finally got Sandy Hutchens convicted of four counts of fraud and another count of drug trafficking in prescription painkillers.

"He was nothing but a cancer," said Malachowski. "And he was a cancer who had to be stopped. He couldn't have cared less about his victims. Once he had won their trust, they were done.”

The following article was published on April 2, 2005 by www.canoe.ca /NewsStand/TorontoSun/News.

A CON MAN and drug peddler who bilked a cancer survivor out of her business begged for a conditional sentence yesterday after saying he had converted to Judaism. Character witnesses, including Rabbi Mendel Kaplan and other congregation members and friends, praised Sandy Hutchens, 45, as a devout orthodox Jewish family man with three kids.

Hutchens pleaded guilty to four counts of fraud and another count of drug trafficking in prescription painkillers last spring in front of Justice Harry LaForme.

Hutchens' lawyer, Joseph DiLuca, said his client has rehabilitated himself and provided $55,000 in restitution and agreed to pay an additional $10,000.

But Hutchens' conversion and glowing character testimonials weren't believed by cancer survivor and widow J.M. Shaw or any of his other victims.

"He is a consummate actor and I believe will use this talent to convince the court that he is a reformed man," said the 59-year-old widow, whose business Hutchens offered to sell in December 2000.

Instead he scammed her out of $40,000.

Shaw said her husband, who succumbed to cancer in October 2003, spent his final months worrying about his family's financial well-being.

"Two doctors and a nurse told me the only explanation for my illness (cancer) was stress," she said in a heartfelt victim impact statement.

Shaw is now working 52 hours a week, having lost her "nest egg" -- the business she and her husband built. Meanwhile, Hutchens and his family enjoyed a Caribbean cruise this winter and his children attend private school.

Crown attorneys Ann-Marie Calsavara and Moiz Rahman are seeking 5 1/2 years for Hutchens, who has a criminal record spanning 20 years.

Hutchens, who also operated a paralegal firm called Tenants Right Co. and The Legal Network, also admitted that he defrauded three clients with landlord-tenant problems for more than $25,000.

The judge will sentence Hutchens on April 8, 2005.

He wasn’t sent to prison. He was ordered to serve his sentence at home.

On March 19th 2011, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in their W5 program did a TV show on this fraudster. What follows, is a summary of that show.

Many Canadians found themselves financially devastated after turning to private lender CFC, whose website boasts “Just because your bank has said ‘no’ doesn’t mean we will.” W5 finds victims like PEI resident Tanyia Kingyens, who turned to Canadian Funding Corporation to secure a loan to purchase a million dollar seniors residence. Kingyens borrowed $32,000 from family members to cover CFC’s upfront fees.

Then, CFC started changing the rules and adding conditions, which Kingyens met, ultimately leaving her in the hole another $70,000. When the loan didn’t show up on its due date, Kingyens got nervous and searched the name of the CFC president, Craig Hutchens. She was shocked to discover Hutchens had a history of defrauding people.
Hutchens’s lengthy criminal history includes a 2005 conviction for drug trafficking and four counts of fraud, which included bilking a cancer survivor out of $40,000. The 51-year-old now lives in an affluent suburb just north of Toronto. He has converted to Orthodox Judaism and assumed the name “Moishe Alexander,” just one of at least a dozen aliases that W5 discovered in this investigation.

I should add that the program also stated that an investor in Florida needed $300 million dollars and Sandy Hutchins offered to lend him the money but asked for $2 million up front. It turned out that not only did this crook not have $300 million to lend, he couldn’t even get it. He even created a phony document alleging that the Toronto Dominion bank in Canada would give him the money if he needed it. The investor in Florida lost $2 million dollars to this pond scum and has sued for it back.

The Herald Tribune published an article about this crook on November 29, 2010 in which it wrote;

Washington Loop LLC, a Punta Gorda company managed by Charles A. Robinson and Lovina Lehr, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection just three months after suing a Canadian mortgage company for failing to fund a $17.4 million loan commitment.

The lawsuit against First Central Mortgage Funding of Toronto claims that company’s principals, Sandy Hutchens and Jennifer (is she Tanya?) Hutchens, assumed multiple identities in order to trick Washington Loop’s managers into thinking they had secured enough money to pay off their outstanding loans and proceed with their residential development on 250 acres off Washington Loop road in Punta Gorda. But Washington Loop never got a penny from First Central Mortgage.

According to the lawsuit, Washington Loop actually paid $223,000 to First Central Mortgage in fees and expenses, and is now accusing the Canadian mortgage company of fraud, conspiracy and breach of contract.

“First Central Mortgage along with Sandy Hutchens and Jennifer Hutchens obtained the signature and properly executed document as well as $223,000 pursuant to the fraudulent loan commitment by and through the color and aid of fraudulent and false representations,” the lawsuit filed on behalf of Washington Loop states. “Those false and fraudulent representations were statements of the ability to fund the mortgage, statements verbally, through agents, and on website of previous deals that had closed, and communications through e-mails reassuring Washington Loop that the refinancing was forthcoming.”

First Central Mortgage has responded to the lawsuit by filing a motion to dismiss, which claims Washington Loop’s allegations of fraud and conspiracy are “not clearly identified or sufficiently described.”

“The entire complaint is improper because it is an impermissible shotgun pleading,” the motion filed on behalf of the Canadian mortgage company states.

The fact that Washington Loop filed for bankruptcy protection just three months after filing suit against First Central Mortgage, attests to the financial predicament Washington Loop was placed in after failing to get fresh funds from the Canadian company.

Charlotte County court records show that Washington Loop owes $6.76 million to Busey Bank, which was used to begin developing the 250 acres at 37894 Washington Loop Road in Punta Gorda in 2007.

Busey Bank filed to foreclose on that loan in September 2009, but the debt is not yet included in Washington Loop’s bankruptcy filing.

Washington Loop has not filed a complete list of its assets and liabilities, but it has filed a preliminary statement claiming assets of less than $50,000 and debts of more than $1.9 million.

But in its fight to retain its land and the rights to develop it, the lawsuit against First Central Mortgage takes center stage.

The lawsuit states that Washington Loop hired a broker from Bernard Financial Group in August 2009 “to find a suitable lender with the intent to obtain refinancing.”
Bernard Financial referred Washington Loop to First Central Mortgage and Washington Loop received a commitment letter for a $17.4 million loan on Sept. 13, 2009.

To secure that commitment, Washington Loop paid First Central Mortgage $174,000 and paid an additional $6,000 to the Canadian company for travel related expenses.

“Upon wiring of funds and sending all requested documents to First Central Mortgage, Washington Loop started to experience difficulties in communicating with First Central Mortgage,” the Washington Loop lawsuit states. “Additionally, First Central Mortgage missed a planned closing date on Oct. 30, 2009.”

Over the next few weeks, Washington Loop claims First Central Mortgage began deploying delaying techniques – claiming documents were missing from Washington Loop’s loan file and demanding additional appraisals, which cost Washington Loop even more money.

By January of this year, Washington Loop began to ask for confirmation that the funds it was set to receive were held in escrow and discovered that “First Central Mortgage never had the intent or means to fund the signed commitment and that the money was not held in trust or escrow.”

Washington Loop also says in its suit that First Central Mortgage did not employ all the people its said it employed. In fact, Sandy Hutchens used a number of aliases including Moshe Ben Abraham, Fred Hayes, Moishe Alexander and Craig Hutchens, while her daughter, Jennifer Hutchens, used the name Jennifer Araujo.

“Sandy Hutchens and Jennifer Hutchens used no fewer than seven aliases and posed as multiple persons with multiple titles for the purpose of inducing Washington Loop into applying for and paying monies for a loan commitment,?” court documents filed by Washington Loop state. “False and fraudulent representations were made by the two individual defendants who indicated that they had the ability to fund the mortgage, provided information of previous deals that closed that in fact has not and assured Washington Loop that the financing was forthcoming when in fact it was not.”

Now here is some real irony for you. Sandy Hutchens has created a web site in which he warns people to watch for scammers. In it he says in part;

Sandy Hutchens and his team of scam prevention experts have put together some useful information for individuals and businesses to stay aware of the many scams and fraud schemes that are appearing in today’s society. They have also put together some good information for those that have already fell victim to a scam or fraud including contact information for private and government agencies dedicated to fighting against the scammers.

Our mission is to give consumers the information they need to avoid becoming victims of advanced fee fraud, affinity fraud, astrology and psychic scams, banking scams, betting scams, cheque overpayments, false charities, investment scams, identity theft, internet scams, pro-forma invoicing, prize and lottery scams, pyramid schemes, telephone share scams, work-from-home scams and any other type of fraud or scam and to help them get their complaints to law enforcement agencies quickly and easily.

I suppose it could be said that no one better than a scammer can tell you how to protect yourself against scammers. What I find rather interesting however is that he hasn’t mentioned who his so-called experts are. Do they really exist? If not, then that is just another scam of his.

Guess what funds his organization. He claims it is funded by Canadian Funding Corp. According to the CBC program W5, that corporation has no money. This is just another scam of this pond scum.

At the end of his web site, he says;

We at ‘Sandy Hutchens Scam Prevention’ are dedicated to making this world a better place by riding it of scammers and career criminals. You to can do your part by keeping people informed.

The world would be rid of these kinds of scammers if the judges sent them all to prison. I am doing my part to keep people informed about the likes of Sandy Hutchins and other pond scum that seem to sweep over society not unlike the recent Japanese tsunami which left wreckage and misery behind it.

By the way, now that I have your attention, I have a bridge I would like to sell you. One end of it is in Manhattan and the other end is in Brooklyn.

UPDATE: I received an email message from a lawyer in Denver, Colorado on March 28th that said in part; "I am about to file a class action on behalf of everyone he has defrauded in the US." unquote Will Hutchens attend when the matter comes to court? Not likely since he may not be permitted to enter the United States.