Murderers paroled who murder again

The possibility of a murderer being released from prison on parole and then committing another murder is shocking to say the least. It is more common than you think.                  

I remember reading in a newspaper many years ago of a Canadian man who was sentenced to hang for the rape and murder of two small boys. His sentence was commuted and alternatively, he was to serve a life sentence. Unfortunately he was released from prison and again, he murdered two more boys after raping them. While in prison, he was executed by some of his fellow inmates.

                   

John McRae was a pedophile. In 1951, a Florida judge sentenced him to life in prison for the murder of an eight-year-old boy. He was paroled in 1971. He later murdered three boys and a nineteen-year-old. He was sentenced to life in prison in 1998 and died in prison in 2005.                                            

John Miller while living in California killed an infant in 1957. He was paroled in 1975. That same year, he killed his parents.  He was sentenced to life for those two murders. 

Charles Crawford of Missouri was given a life term in 1965 for murder. He was paroled in 1990. He was later convicted of murder again in 1994.          

Timothy Buss of Florida murdered a five-year-old girl in 1981. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Twelve years later, he was paroled in 1993. Three years later, he murdered a 10-year-old boy. Three years later, he was sentenced to death.              

Jack Ferrell of Florida committed a murder in 1981. He was sentenced to 15 years to life the following year. He was paroled in 1987. He murdered again in 1992. This time he was condemned to death in 1993.

Henry Brisbon of Illinois murdered two victims in a robbery. This case merits a lengthier explanation. The two victims credited to Henry Brisbon were James Schmidt, a Chicago businessman, and his fiancee, Dorothy Cerny, both 25. While traveling on Highway 57, in Cook County, on the night of June 3, 1973, Schmidt and Cerny were stopped by a gang of four men, dragged from their vehicle and forced to lie down on the grassy shoulder of the road. Brisbon was identified as the triggerman who killed them both with close-range shotgun blasts as they lay helpless on the ground. Conviction on a charge of double murder earned Brisbon a sentence of 1,000 to 3,000 years, but the prison term was less impressive than it sounded. Actually, Brisbon could have been paroled in just eleven years, but he was not content to wait. On October 19, 1978, he used a sharpened soup ladle to stab inmate Ronald Morgan at the Statesville penitentiary, striking the inmate without any apparent motive. While awaiting trial for that murder, Brisbon took part in a 1979 riot and was transferred to the maximum security lockup at Menard. He was sentenced to death but the sentence was commuted by Governor Ryan who is against the death penalty. I doubt Brisbon will ever be released on parole but if he is, I strongly suspect that he will kill again. After the trial for the murder of the inmate, he yelled, “You'll never get me. I'll kill again. Then you'll have another long trial. And then I'll do it again.”

Darrell P. Pandeli of Arizona had been convicted of the murder of Teresa Humphreys in 1996 and sent to prison. After being released from prison on parole, he murdered a prostitute, cut off her nipples and flushed them down the toilet. He is currently on death row in Arizona for that second murder.

Scott Lehr of Arizona was convicted of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison.  Later he was released on parole. After release, between February 1991 and February 1992 he lured ten different female victims, between the ages of 10 and 48-years-old, into his car. After raping and beating them unconscious he then he stripped and abandoned them in the desert. Three of his victims died in those acts. Lehr was subsequently sentenced in 1997 to 17 consecutive life sentences on 32 counts of attempted murder, sexual assault and kidnapping. That means that he will never ever be released from prison while he is still alive.

Canadian federal authorities are beginning to think the same way. When serial killer Clifford Olsen was convicted of murdering eleven young boys and girls; ages nine to eighteen. At his sentencing on January 14, 1982, the trial judge remarked, “My considered opinion is that you should never be granted parole for the remainder of your days. It would be foolhardy to let you at large.” He was sentenced to life in prison and could only apply for parole after he served only fifteen years. Fortunately, every time he applied for parole, his application was refused by the national Parole Board.  He died in prison from cancer in 2011 at age 71.

Canada has passed a law that states that if you commit more than one murder, you will be sentenced to 25 years in prison for each of the murders and the sentences are to be served consecutively. Justin Bourque was sentenced on October 31, 2014 to serve 75 years in prison before he can apply for parole for the June 4, 2014 shooting rampage that killed three RCMP police officers in Moncton, New Brunswick.  He is 24 years of age. This means that he can apply for parole when he is 99 years of age. That will be in the year 2090 if he lives that long. Matthew de Grood, the man currently on trial for fatally stabbing five people in their 20s at a northwest Calgary house party, He has been charged with five counts of first-degree murder. If he is found guilty of all five murders, he will be sentenced to five consecutive sentences for the five murders. That is 125 years in prison. He is currently 22 years of age. This means that he would be eligible for parole when he is 144 years of age in the year of 2140 if he lives that long.  

Arthur J. Bomar, Jr. of Nevada was released from prison in Nevada on parole in 1990. Bomar had served 11 years of a murder sentence for killing a man over an argument about a parking space. Six years later in Pennsylvania, Bomar brutally kidnapped, raped and murdered a university star athlete, Aimee Willard. This time, he was sentenced to death.

Because of the aforementioned problem in which allowed Bomar to be free to commit these crime The Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, better known as Aimee's Law, was passed by the US Congress in 2000 and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on October 28, 2000. It encourages states to keep murderers, rapists, and child molesters behind bars longer, and holds them (the state) financially accountable if they fail to do so. It allows interstate parole violators to be jailed in their state of residence at the expense of the state where the original offense was committed. It even allows for offenders to be jailed in another state if circumstances allow.

The Canadian government has decided that some crimes are so horrible—the offenders should never ever be released. Here is an example of such a monster who committed his crimes in California.

On September 29, 1978, Lawrence Singleton who had a deeply ingrained hatred and dislike of women. was a merchant seaman He picked up 15-year-old Vincent in Berkeley and drove her to an isolated area a few miles west of Patterson and not far from Interstate 5.  After he raped her, he then used a hatchet to chop off her arms just below the elbows. he then dragged her into a culvert, where he left her, apparently thinking she would die from the trauma he had just inflicted on her body. And, besides, as investigators later deduced from Singleton's crude modus operandi, if she had no hands, it would be difficult to identify her from fingerprints

But she didn't die. She managed to get out of the culvert and started walking toward the distant noise of I-5 traffic, her bloody stumps hanging down from her shoulders. People in the first car that saw her were so horrified they turned around and fled. People in the second car stopped and got her to a hospital.

In March 1979, a San Diego jury convicted Singleton of kidnaping, mayhem, (cutting off her forearms) attempted murder, forcible rape, sodomy and forced oral copulation. Singleton was so notorious in California for his singular act that when he was paroled to Contra Costa County in 1987, after serving a bit more than half of his 14-year prison sentence, town after town refused to allow him to settle there and he finally served out his parole in a trailer on the grounds of San Quentin prison. Singleton then moved to Florida shortly after that.

On February 19, 1997  Roxanne Hayes, a 31-year-old prostitute and mother of three, was stabbed to death in Singleton's Tampa, Florida home, nine days after Singleton was released from a psychiatric hospital after attempting suicide. A sheriff's deputy, knocking on Singleton's door, found him in his blood-spattered shirt and Hayes' bloody corpse lying on the floor nearby. He was convicted of her murder and sentenced to death. While waiting for his execution, on December 28, 2001, Singleton, at age 74, died of cancer in a Florida prison hospital.

Two Canadian men many years ago, tied their male victim to a tree and cut off his genitals and fed them to a dog. They got 20 years each for that crime. Two other Canadian men tied their victim’s feet to their motorcycles and sped away in two separate directions. The victim’s legs were pulled away from his torso and he died very shortly after that. Those two men got life in prison and during a riot in the prison; they participated in the brutality brought upon some of the other inmates.

If the Canadian Parliament passes this “Natural life in prison” Bill into law, Canadians will feel much safer knowing that future inhuman monsters will no longer be paroled and instead they will spend the rest of their natural lives in prison—preferably in a very, very secure prisons. 

Now admittedly, that will cost the Canadian taxpayers a great deal of money. Each prisoner in Canada’s 54 federal penitentiaries costs taxpayers $117,788. Canada’s worst criminals are more expensive to house than other inmates, costing taxpayers up to $151,000 a year in high security prisons. As many as 2,823 murderers are incarcerated in Canada each year.  Even at $117,000, per inmate each year, that will cost Canadian taxpayers $33 million each year. Multiply that by 25 years minimum and the amount is $8.2. billion dollars which is staggering.

There are 2,823 murderers in prison and approximately 3 million taxpayers in Canada. Divide 2, 823 into 3,000,000 and you get 10.6 cents per inmate each year. After 25 years, each taxpayer will have paid $2.65 towards the upkeep of a murderer for twenty-five years. Back in 1975, I sent a report to the solicitor general of Canada stating that it would only cost each Canadian taxpayer as little as five cents a year to keep each prisoner in prison. That had some impact on the debates in Parliament with respect to the death penalty being abolished.

I am against the death penalty because of the risk of executing an innocent person. My paper on the death penalty that was read by all the members of the Canadian Parliament and the Canadian Senate and from what I heard from a former prime minister and from the many letters I received from the members of Parliament and the Senate, it had an impact of their way of thinking and they subsequently abolished the death penalty in Canada. 

I would like to see these monsters who torture. butcher and then kill their victims hang for their crimes but I am mindful that if it turns out that even just only one person hanged was actually innocent, then I will settle for those monsters spending the rest of their lives in high-security prisons.