maureenmilliken

Episode 6: JonBenet Ramsey documentary wars

Posted on January 1, 2017January 1, 2017 by maureenmilliken

The Ramsey house after JonBenet’s disappearance. (Kari Gehring/Liaison)

It’s been 20 years since the body of JonBenet Ramsey was found in the basement of her parents’ Boulder, Colorado home. She’d been bludgeoned to death and strangled. The case has, to quote one documentary “haunted America” ever since and, America being what it is, spawned a variety of documentaries over the past months, some good but most not so much.

We discuss some of the docs, as well as the “evidence” and evidence of the crime, including the implausible intruder story and the role of her parents, John and the late Patsy Ramsey in keeping the investigation from ever reaching a realistic result. The story has everything: sexploitation of a cute kid, rich white folks, dueling investigators, lies and videotape.

We make hay of it all.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:30:23 — 41.4MB)

Episode 5: Not-so-merry Christmases

Posted on December 24, 2016 by maureenmilliken

Michael “Mucko” McDermott is led by police from Edgewater Technologies in Wakefield, Mass., December 26, 2000, after he shot seven coworkers to death. [Boston Herald photo]

On Christmas 27 years ago in California, a woman on her way home from looking at the Christmas lights was abducted, brutally raped and nearly killed, saved by her own bravery and smarts. It took nearly three decades and the imagination of a young prosecutor to bring her attackers to justice.

The day after Christmas in 2000, a disgruntled IT professional at a Massachusetts company shot to death seven coworkers. His defense that he believed he was killing Nazis to get his soul back didn’t wash, and Michael “Mucko” McDermott is serving seven life sentences for the massacre.

No, we don’t talk about JonBenet Ramsey (next week!), the Grinch, or the dipshit in the Santa suit who held up the 7-Eleven, but these two “Christmas crimes” had a lasting impact, and are the focus of a very special Christmas episode of Crime & Stuff.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:02:09 — 28.5MB)

Episode 4: Sarah Cheiker’s long strange trip

Posted on December 18, 2016 by maureenmilliken

Sarah Cheiker and former LA neighbor Jim Caccavo in 2012. [Caccavo/LA Times photo]

Sarah Cheiker happily lived most of her 80-plus years in her Los Angeles bungalow. That changed when three drifters befriended her. In 2008 she disappeared, turning up 3,000 miles away in Maine four years later, abandoned in a ramshackle cabin that the police officer who found her said he wouldn’t keep his dog in.

What happened to Cheiker from the time she met Nicholas and Barbara Davis in the mid-2000s to when she was found in Maine in 2011 will make your hair freeze.

We discuss her long strange trip on this week’s Crime & Stuff, and then have attorney Matt Nichols clarify some of the nuances of multi-state crime in Ask a Lawyer.

We also trash Santa Claus, moon over Dennis Lehane and discuss Tig Nataro’s “One Mississippi.”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:13:31 — 33.7MB)

Episode 3: Ayla Reynolds, still missing after five years

Posted on December 11, 2016August 27, 2021 by maureenmilliken

On the morning of December 17, 2011, Justin DiPietro called the Waterville, Maine, police to report his 20-month-old daughter, Ayla Reynolds, missing. That was the spark to what eventually became the biggest criminal investigation in Maine’s history. Five years later, Ayla is still gone and no one has been charged in her disappearance, which police quickly termed a criminal investigation and made clear that they believed she’d been killed. Ben McCanna, a former reporter with the Morning Sentinel in Waterville, whose beat was all Ayla all the time in the months after she vanished, talks about his experience, which includes access to the toddler’s parents that no other reporter at the time had.

Matt Nichols, of Nichols & Churchill, explains, in our Ask the Lawyer segment, why charges are sometimes not brought even when “everyone knows” someone is guilty of a crime.

Want more? We also eviscerate the new Gilmore Girls.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:37:35 — 44.7MB)

Episode 2: NOT a good boy, the story of SC serial killer Todd Kohlhepp

Posted on December 2, 2016August 27, 2021 by maureenmilliken

Todd Kohlhepp

Todd Kohlhepp, charged with killing seven people in South Carolina, is not a good boy. No matter what his mother says.

Kohlhepp, a popular and successful realtor, was arrested in early November after Kala Brown, missing for three months, was found in a storage container on his 100-acre farm. Kohlhepp admitted to killing Charles Carver, Brown’s boyfriend, and also told police he’d killed Meagan and Johnny Coxie, who disappeared in December 2015. To top it off, police said he also confessed to shooting to death four people in a South Carolina motorcycle shop in 2003.

Kohlhepp’s mother insists he’s not the monster everyone seems to think he is. She’s been doing that since he was convicted at age 15 of raping a teenage neighbor at knife point, telling the court that “he’s not a bad boy.”

But he is. And always has been. Crime&Stuff Episode 2 takes a look at the life of accused South Carolina serial killer Todd Kohlhepp.

Coming up this weekend.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 52:45 — 48.3MB)

Episode 1: Twisted Sisters, a tale of yoga and death

Posted on November 24, 2016August 27, 2021 by maureenmilliken

yogatwins — Ali and Ann Dadow (Thomas Cordy/West Palm Post)

Ann and Alison Dadow were as close as two sisters could be. Or closer. They did everything together. They changed their names together, to Anastasia and Alexandria Duval. They taught yoga together, moved across the country, drank, fought and even filed for bankruptcy together. Everything, that is, until their car went over a cliff in Hawaii during a hair-pulling brawl and one died and the other was charged with murder.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:50 — 49.3MB)