Trials: Part 2

My younger brother recently opted out of jury duty, to his disappointment, due to the financial hardship that it would certainly cause. The trial as it turns out was for one George Luna. It was actually a retrial, he'd already been convicted and had been serving time, but convinced enough authorities that the jury in the original trial had not given the case a fair shake. The trial was moved from its original venue in Marshall County Ky. to my home county, Trigg.
They called up over a hundred potential jurors to make sure they had plenty of choices. They narrowed the field down to thirty two, then started asking about financial hardships, which is where my brother had to do something he did not want to do, but had no choice.
The trial ran all week, going to the jury on that Friday. They deliberated only for a short while, and before the evening was out, returned an unsurprising guilty verdict. The prosecutor, not facing any new evidence or witnesses basically only had to repeat the original trial strategy and script. The defense as well had nothing new to work with, so it defended pretty much the same way it did years before.
According to the prosecutors case, Luna bludgeoned Debra Hendrickson to death then set fire to her mobile home with her body still inside. Luna then took Hendrickson's truck, drove off, and later returned to the conflagration and called 911. The tape of that call was one of the pieces of evidence in the case against Luna.
From WPSD : "The coroner said the body was so badly burned it was only able to be identified through a ring and the button of her favorite blue jeans found near the body."
Luna and Hendrickson had a domestic relationship for at least a month before the killing. According to Hendrickson's sister, it had been an abusive one.
Luna will spend the rest of his miserable life behind bars. I'm just fine with that.
What is it that motivates such a savage, brutal domestic murder? I have no stinkin' idea.
I know about violent and abusive relationships, not first-hand, but I've been around several women who were abused and a few of the men that caused it. (I know this sort of thing happens the other way, women abusing men, but not in any instance that I am personally familiar with.)
And yes, I personally know someone that took it to the fatal end.
I'll  refer to him as Greg.
I met him at Misawa Air Base, Japan in the early eighties. We were both there with our young families serving three year tours. I maintained communications equipment, he was one of the guys that operated it. I didn't know him really well, we only spoke of non-work related things a couple of times. Our kids knew his kids, he had two small boys, I had two boys and a girl about the same ages.
His wife and my wife belonged to a club of some kind, Greg was suspicious of that group and pulled me aside to talk about it one day. Various clubs were quite common among the wives that tagged along for the overseas duty. The base was very much like a small town, you ran into the same people many times and places, and gossip was also common.
I don't recall much of the conversation other than that it occurred and he was suspicious. It's the last time I ever talked to him and it would have probably slipped into forgotten-completely-land had it not bubbled up to the top several years later.
I don't recall what I was looking for at the time, but I was exploring new interwebs technologies and magical powers of internet searches. This would have been in the early 2000's. I came across his name in an article about a trial, a murder trial.
Greg had divorced, remarried, divorced again and remarried again, etc. in that time. His sons were, like my own kids by that time, entering young adulthood. Greg had a baby with his fourth wife in eastern Missouri. One of his sons, Kevin, lived in Brevard County, Florida, the other in Camden County, Mo, near Lake of the Ozarks.
This is coincidental, almost parallel to my own life. I'd divorced the mother of my kids, remarried, moved to Brevard county in Florida for a couple of years, left there and moved to Missouri, divorced and remarried, etc. and had a baby with my third wife. This was all eerily similar to Greg's life.
There's more coincidence to follow, I'll get to it later.
For whatever reason, unlike my third marriage, Greg's fourth wasn't going well for him. He somehow, in conversations I wouldn't even know how to start, convinced his sons to come to the lake and help him get rid of his wife.
And they did.
They met at a beach at the Lake of The Ozarks, played with the baby, went for a swim. Four adults went into the water, three came out. The men took the baby and went out for pizza before returning to the scene and calling 911 to report Greg's wife missing. She was found soon enough and Greg and his sons grieved.
They had held her under the water till she drowned. The party at the beach was in celebration of their third wedding anniversary.
An investigating officer, perhaps because of his training, perhaps because he had seen a few episodes of Law and Order, was suspicious of Greg from the get-go. However, initially there was no direct, conclusive evidence of foul play.
Kevin returned to Florida. A day or so later  he told his girlfriend about it. She recorded him and took the tape to the local Sheriff. Once arrested he confessed to his role in the sordid affair. Arrest warrants were issued in Jefferson County, Mo for Greg and in Camden County Mo. for Kevin's brother Kenneth.
More details of the case can be found here.
Greg was sentenced to life without parole, Kevin to life with possibility of parole, and Kenneth, who had shown at least some compassion during the drowning by taking the baby away from the scene of the crime, was sentenced to ten years.
Greg and Kevin at least, are still in prison, about an hour's drive from my home, in Potosi, Mo.
Is it just coincidence that I moved to the same county in Missouri where Greg lived with his fourth wife and baby?
Yeah, pretty much. It's still kind of creepy though.

So what led these men to do what they did? Like I said, I have no stinkin' idea.
I don't know about Luna, but I do know that with Greg it had nothing to do with lack of intelligence. I knew Greg to be a smart, articulate and capable equipment operator. He even held fairly high security clearances. In the time I knew him and even in the direct conversations we had I never got 'the willies' or anything like that. He didn't have dead, soulless eyes or a scary demeanor and he was not physically imposing at all.. He was just another one of the guys I worked with.
Yet he held his wife, the mother of his baby, under the water with the help of his sons until they were sure she was dead, on his anniversary.
No, there's no way my head will wrap around that. I know it happens, all too often, but I'm simply not wired that way. I hope you aren't either.
There's real moral to this story, no sage advice for getting the world to get along better and not kill each other.
Whether we think we do or not, average people tend to rate and measure heinous crimes.
In the city it is quite common for murders to occur in certain parts of town. Probably drug-trafficking or gang related. We tell ourselves that these are somehow un-alarming, almost expected among 'those people.'
The there's the occasional innocent kid killed in a drive-by. This alarms us more than two gang-bangers shooting it out. For the poor kid, vigils are held and TV cameras show up. Kid-murders are much, much more noteworthy than two tattooed and armed teenage boys in a violent, ultimately petty, territory battle.
Serial murders fascinate us. We remember, and even make movies about serial killers. We leave the theater knowing the murderers name, not so much the victims. Fortunately these sorts of things are quite rare in real life.
Assassinations are memorable as well. The difference between an assassination and a murder  is the prominence of the victim. Presidents, dictators and ambassadors are assassinated.
The drunken brawl. Two guys, usually liquored up, air grievances, make threats, one of them pulls a gun, a knife, a broken bottle. We don't seem to have a lot of sympathy for these either. Maybe because the victim might have at least had a fighting chance.
Mass murders, theater and school shootings, etc. drive us absolutely furious. These killers are nuts, dangerous nuts and not many people weep at the often sudden and violent demise of the killer. He had it coming.
And those people overseas in Whatever-stan or one of the many anarchy-ridden Republics in Africa who kill each other in droves? Well, it's just too hard and unfamiliar for us to wrap our heads around. In many cases we may hear about the numbers and the technique, but rarely, if ever anything much about the victims.
Then there' s the other kind of murder.
According to the FBI, in 2011 of all the women murdered that year, thirty six percent were killed by husbands or boyfriends.
Further FBI data:
"Of the murders for which the circumstance surrounding the murder was known, 42.9 percent of victims were murdered during arguments (including romantic triangles) in 2011.  Felony circumstances (rape, robbery, burglary, etc.) accounted for 23.1 percent of murders. . . . 24.8 percent of victims were slain by family members"

Yeah, domestic  murder is a HUGE problem. For all the headline-grabbing, gang-banging, serial killing, mass shootings and assassinations, most murders happen between people that are socially or family related.
Mostly because it is generally only the people we know, love, or have reason to hate personally and passionately that that will lead to an otherwise non-violent person angering up to want to harm them.
Strangers killing strangers is somewhat rare. Strangers we can generally dismiss or ignore, it just isn't necessary to waste passion on strangers.
Not often do you hear about some guy just walking up to a random woman and punching her. I'm sure it happens, but compared to husband/boyfriend against woman violence the numbers are miniscule.
In my mind it is this sort of thing that is about as sad as a really bad situation can get. In most cases the woman loves/loved the man, put up with his lazy, crazy crap, maybe even bore and takes care of his children. In most cases the man is bigger and stronger than the woman. There's rarely a fair fight, rarely an escape route, in many cases the woman puts up with a lot, and somehow still trusts the man to not kill her.
These men, according to their convictions, not only decided to kill the women, after they were done they plotted elaborate escape/subterfuge strategies.
Luna looked at the bloody, bludgeoned body on the  floor, and decided that simply wouldn't do. Either a ploy to mask the deed or further vengeance, I'm not sure which, but what he decided to do was to pour accelerant  on and around her, then set it ablaze. Then he stepped out to her truck and drove away for a while.
Greg talked his adult sons into helping him. Then, after the deed was done, which is not a quick process mind you, coolly and calmly went out for pizza, then returned to the scene and called the authorities.
That kind of scheming, planning, on top of the grotesque physical act they'd performed, mark these men as people I certainly do not want walking around freely among us. They both have proven the ability and willingness to commit the vilest of acts and then try to cover it up to save their own hides from prosecution.
Normal people just don't do this. Sane societies do not, can not tolerate this. Regardless of how many years these men lived without murdering someone, no matter what otherwise good works and deeds they may have performed before or afterwords, the ability to murder, in cold blood, those that loved them and trusted them, has rightfully earned them their permanent spots locked away from civil society.
I guess the only advice I can offer is to people that think there's no other alternative to offing their spouse/partner; Forget it. You're not as clever as you think you are, you will not evade justice.