Coroner estimates Petito died three to four weeks before her body was found, on 19 September
Gabby Petito’s cause of death was strangulation, and the manner of death was homicide, Wyoming authorities have announced.
The Teton county coroner, Brent Blue, announced the findings of Petito’s autopsy at an afternoon news conference on Tuesday. He also estimated that Petito had died three to four weeks before her body was found, on 19 September.
Continue reading...The real estate heir avoided justice for 40 years but now the charges could begin to pile up
For years, the wheels of justice moved so slowly against Robert Durst, the New York real estate heir with a trail of dead bodies dotting his improbably charmed life, that his victims’ family and friends feared he’d never pay the consequences.
Now, though, it’s open season. After Durst’s first murder conviction last month – the culmination of a sensational trial in Los Angeles featuring close to 40 years of devastating evidence – prosecutors and civil litigators are working at lightning speed to haul him back to court any way they can.
Continue reading...Jonathan Toebbe and wife arrested in West Virginia after nuclear engineer makes ‘dead drop’ to undercover FBI agent
A US navy nuclear engineer with access to military secrets has been charged with trying to pass information about the design of American nuclear-powered submarines to someone he thought was a representative of a foreign government – but who turned out to be an undercover FBI agent.
In a criminal complaint detailing espionage-related charges, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) said Jonathan Toebbe sold information for nearly a year to a contact he believed represented a foreign power. That country was not named in the court documents.
Continue reading...Police say investigation remains open as former law enforcement members claim to have identified killer
The case of the Zodiac killer took another twist this week after a team of investigators claimed they had unmasked the man who has fixated the public and amateur sleuths for decades.
But the apparent breakthrough was not so clearcut.
Continue reading...Coverage of Gabby Petito’s death highlights deep-seated beliefs about gender, race, patriarchy and who deserves protection
Gabby Petito was eulogized last week, her father celebrating the adventurous spirit who took her final road trip. To the many people who followed her story in the news, she was Gabby. Like a daughter, a sister, a niece. Someone who should be cared for.
Petito was also white, young, blond, pretty and valued by society for everything that that implies, say advocates for missing women of color who watched conflicted as her story spread from social media to major newscasts. While the 22-year-old’s death is helping spotlight other missing person cases, they say being white is a social currency that women of color don’t have, which is painfully clear when they disappear.
Continue reading...Inspired by hit podcasts and documentaries, ordinary people are trying to track down fugitives and reopen cold cases. But should they be?
Although the story you are about to read involves a fugitive, law enforcement and a six-month chase across Mexico, for Billy Jensen it was just another day on the job. In 2017, Jensen was on the hunt for a pale, ginger, tattooed California killer hiding out in Mexico. Jensen uploaded a photo of the fugitive to Facebook. “¿Has visto a este hombre?” he asked, using Facebook’s targeted ad tools to ensure the post was seen by people living near American bars. Tips came flooding in. One tipster snapped a photo. In just 24 hours, Jensen had his guy.
Unfortunately, the killer was on the move. It took half a year of similar posts for the 49-year-old Jensen to finally get the suspect apprehended by the Mexican police – for Jensen isn’t a police officer himself, or a detective, or an FBI agent. He is a podcaster, author, journalist, and self-described “citizen sleuth”.
Continue reading...Judge denies white supremacist, 22, opportunity to address court as survivors of 2019 attack give moving statements
A 22-year-old white supremacist was denied a chance to address a courtroom before a judge sentenced him Thursday to life in prison without the possibility of parole for bursting into a southern California synagogue on the last day of Passover in 2019 with a semiautomatic rifle, killing one worshipper and wounding three others.
An agreement with prosecutors that spared John T Earnest the death penalty left little suspense about the outcome, but the hearing provided 13 victims and families a chance to address the killer and gave a sense of finality to a case illustrating how online hate speech can lead to extremist violence. Many gave heart-wrenching accounts of how their lives were upended and how determined they were to persevere despite such devastating loss.
Continue reading...Guardian analysis reveals region-wide increase in violent deaths, but Black and Latino residents make up majority of victims
On the night of 3 September 2020, Sonya Mitchell got a call as she was leaving work. Her 23-year-old son, Daimon “Dada” Ferguson, had been shot in a drive-by outside his older sister’s home.
In the months before, Mitchell, 56, had been watching reports of shootings in her hometown of Vallejo, in the San Francisco Bay Area, with increasing concern. There was the shooting at a birthday party on 9 June that killed two women and injured a 10-year-old. Three separate shootings had rocked the city on 20 August, including a double homicide that left a 25-year-old man and his 24-year-old girlfriend dead in a car with their infant son.
Continue reading...Mourners attended a Long Island funeral home on Sunday for a viewing for Gabby Petito, the 22-year-old woman whose death on a cross-country trip sparked a manhunt for her fiance.
Continue reading...An arrest warrant shows unauthorized charges worth more than $1,000 were made during the time his girlfriend was missing
The boyfriend of Gabby Petito has been charged on Thursday with unauthorized use of a debit card as the search for him continued in a Florida swampland.
An arrest warrant has been issued for Brian Laundrie, who was indicted by a federal grand jury on Wednesday for allegedly using a Capital One Bank card and someone’s personal identification number to make unauthorized withdrawals or charges worth more than $1,000 during the period in which Petito went missing. The indictment does not say who the card belonged to and the nature of the charges have not been disclosed.
Continue reading...Investigators found what appeared to be more 8.5 million images and videos on dark web servers created by Eric Eoin Marques
A man described by US authorities as the world’s most prolific purveyor of child sexual abuse images at the time of his arrest in Ireland has been sentenced to 27 years in federal prison.
Eric Eoin Marques, 36, created and operated computer servers on the dark web that enabled users to anonymously access millions of illegal images and videos, many depicting the rape and torture of infants and toddlers. Law enforcement had never seen many of those images before finding them on Marques’ servers, according to prosecutors.
Continue reading...Billed as the most secure phone on the planet, An0m became a viral sensation in the underworld. There was just one problem for anyone using it for criminal means: it was run by the police
The rain pattered lightly on the harbour of the Belgian port city of Ghent when, on 21 June 2021, a team of professional divers slipped below the surface into the emerald murk. The Brazilian tanker, heavy with fruit juice bound for Australia, had already crossed the Atlantic Ocean, but its journey wasn’t halfway done as the divers felt their way along the barnacled serration of its hull. They were looking for the sea chest, a metallic inlet below the water line, through which the ship draws seawater to cool its engines. Tucked inside, they found what they were looking for: three long sacks, each wrapped in a thick black plastic bag and trussed with black and white striped nautical rope.
The sacks were heavy. Each one weighed as much as a sheep and, shaped like a body bag, could feasibly have contained one. As the Belgian police opened the first bag, a stack of crimson bricks slid out. Had this cargo reached Australia, where high demand and meagre supply has pushed the price of a kilo of cocaine to eight times its equivalent cost in North America, the haul would have been worth more than A$64m (£34m).
Continue reading...The former nurse pleaded guilty in 2019 to charges related to her role in the cult-like group that turned some women into sex slaves
A former nurse who co-founded and once ran the cult-like Nxivm group, where prosecutors say women were brainwashed, branded like animals and coerced into sex, was sentenced to 42 months in prison.
Nancy Salzman, the former president and co-founder of Nxivm, must also pay a $150,000 fine, US district judge Nicholas Garaufis said on Wednesday. She has agreed to forfeit more than $500,000 in cash, several properties and a Steinway grand piano.
Continue reading...Governor Ralph Northam said the men, tried by all-white juries, were not given due process at a time when only Black men received death sentences for rape in Virginia
The governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, has granted posthumous pardons to seven Black men who were executed in 1951 for the rape of a white woman.
The case attracted pleas for mercy from around the world and in recent years has been denounced as an example of racial disparity in the use of the death penalty.
Continue reading...Two children of assassinated Senator Robert F Kennedy support California decision which may be reversed
Six children of Robert F Kennedy have condemned the decision to grant parole to Sirhan Sirhan, the man who shot and killed the New York senator as he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968.
Related: 'Something died in America': John Lewis on Robert Kennedy's legacy
Continue reading...The man who killed Robert F Kennedy was granted parole on Friday after two of the former attorney general, senator and presidential hopeful’s sons spoke in favor of release and prosecutors declined to argue he should be kept behind bars.
Related: 'Something died in America': John Lewis on Robert Kennedy's legacy
Continue reading...A former tour manager for R Kelly testified on Friday that he paid a $500 bribe to a government worker to get the singer Aaliyah a fake identification card so Kelly could secretly marry her when she was 15 years old.
Related: Aaliyah: ‘Her sound is the R&B blueprint’
Continue reading...Jerhonda Pace, first witness at the R Kelly sex-trafficking trial, says the singer ‘slapped me and he choked me until I passed out’
A key accuser at the R Kelly sex-trafficking trial returned to the witness stand on Thursday, saying he often videotaped their sexual encounters and demanded she dress like a Girl Scout during a relationship that began when she was a minor.
Jerhonda Pace resumed her testimony in Brooklyn federal court a day after telling jurors she was a 16-year-old virgin and a member of Kelly’s fan club when he invited her to his mansion in 2009.
Continue reading...Secretive gangs are hacking the computers of governments, firms, even hospitals, and demanding huge sums. But if we pay these ransoms, are we creating a ticking time bomb?
They have the sort of names that only teenage boys or aspiring Bond villains would dream up (REvil, Grief, Wizard Spider, Ragnar), they base themselves in countries that do not cooperate with international law enforcement and they don’t care whether they attack a hospital or a multinational corporation. Ransomware gangs are suddenly everywhere, seemingly unstoppable – and very successful.
In June, meat producer JBS, which supplies over a fifth of all the beef in the US, paid a £7.8m ransom to regain access to its computer systems. The same month, the US’s largest national fuel pipeline, Colonial Pipeline, paid £3.1m to ransomware hackers after they locked the company’s systems, causing days of fuel shortages and paralysing the east coast. “It was the hardest decision I’ve made in my 39 years in the energy industry,” said a deflated-looking Colonial CEO Joseph Blount in an evidence session before Congress. In July, hackers attacked software firm Kaseya, demanding £50m. As a result, hundreds of supermarkets had to close in Sweden, because their cash registers didn’t work.
Continue reading...Federal prosecutors in R Kelly’s sex trafficking case say the R&B star had sexual contact with an underage boy as well as girls, and jurors should hear those claims.
Related: Surviving R Kelly producers: 'We wanted to explain why you shouldn’t blame survivors'
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