Serial killer suspect and Mississippi native Felix Vail, arrested Friday on a murder charge in his first wife’s drowning in Lake Charles, La., wants taxpayers to foot the bill for his lawyer —despite just making $145,001 from a property sale.
For now, the Public Defenders’ Office in Lake Charles, La., is representing Vail, but Louisiana law is clear. Only those who are indigent are eligible for free representation. “We are certainly looking at whether he is entitled to a public defender,” said District Attorney John DeRosier. “We are not certain he is indigent.”
Vail, 73, is charged with murder in the 1962 death of Mary Horton Vail, who reportedly drowned in the Calcasieu River that runs next to downtown Lake Charles, La. and is the last known person to see two other women alive
Dutch cold case team identifies possible prostitutes serial killer
A police cold case team looking into 85 unsolved murders says it may have identified a possible serial killer responsible for murdering five women over the past 30 years.
Four of the women had their throats cut, they had all been subjected to similar sexual practices and all five were covered up in similar ways, a police spokeswoman said. At least 127 prostitutes have been murdered in the Netherlands over the past 30 years, of which just 42 cases have been solved.
The police are also considering using new DNA techniques in the remaining cases in an effort to bring the killers to justice.
Omaha cold case investigators are looking for links between the murders this week of a Creighton University professor and his wife, and the unsolved 2008 slayings of an 11-year-old boy and his family housekeeper.
Professor Dr. Roger Brumback and his wife Mary were found dead in their west-central Omaha home Tuesday. Their bodies were discovered by a piano mover who arrived and found the door of the home slightly ajar. Roger Brumback worked with Drs. William and Claire Hunter at Creighton's medical school. Their son, Thomas Hunter, and their housekeeper, 57-year-old Shirlee Sherman, were stabbed to death at the Hunters' home on March 13, 2008. Police have not said how Roger and Mary Brumback were killed.
No arrests have been reported in either case and police won't say whether they found any links, other than the professional relationships between Roger Brumback and the Hunters. According to CBS Pittsburgh, the Brumbacks were getting ready to retire and planned to relocate from Omaha to West Virginia next month. The station says Roger Brumback was from Monroeville, Pa., a PIttsburgh suburb.
Alleged serial killer Sharman Shivhare, accused in four murders in Indore including a double-murder of a woman doctor and her help, was on Tuesday acquitted by a local court in a murder case for lack of evidence.
Shivhare, was acquitted in a 2009 murder case of Ravikant Vijharia as prosecution failed to produce any cognizable evidence and the witnesses turned hostile during the trial.
Ravikant was found murdered in Harikrishna Vihar Colony in Indore in 2009.
Swedish 'serial killer' has two more murders dropped
A Swedish man originally convicted of eight murders saw two more of the killings wiped from his record when the prosecutor's office announced Tuesday it was dropping charges in a retrial.
The decision leaves Sture Bergwall -- for many years known as Thomas Quick and long considered Scandinavia's worst serial killer -- with just one murder on his record.
The prosecution said Monday it would not prosecute Bergwall, 63, for the deaths of a Dutch couple, Marinus och Janni Stegehuis, who were found stabbed to death at a highway rest stop in Appojaure, in northern Sweden, in 1984.
He was convicted of their murders in January 1996 after confessing to the crime. But he later retracted his testimony, and a retrial was ordered.
Police suspect five dead prostitutes work of serial killer
A police team that investigates 85 unsolved murders of prostitutes in the Netherlands is mainly a possible serial killer on the track. Leader Rene Bergwerff of the cold case team said Tuesday night in the TV program Nieuwsuur that the police found in five cases agreements.
The main similarity is that there was a cut throat. In four of the five women Also similar sexual acts committed with the victim. Furthermore, the victims were covered with materials found at the site.
The team, which operates out of Rotterdam, has found similarities in the affairs of others under Mientje Balkom, Francis Garcia Hofland and three other women.
Vail collected on wife's life insurance, didn't pay for burial
Despite collecting on his drowned wife’s life insurance policies in 1962, Mississippi native and serial killer suspect Felix Vail, who was arrested Friday in Texas on a murder charge, didn’t pay for the Louisiana woman's funeral, burial, plot or marker, according to records and interviews by The Clarion-Ledger.
Prosecutors could seek to introduce that evidence at his trial, said former federal prosecutor Don Cochran, a professor at Belmont University College of Law. “It would all be part of his scheme to make money,” he said.
Cochran — who was involved in prosecuting a cold case himself, the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four girls — said the average spouse or family member “is going to pay for funeral arrangements. A jury should at least be allowed to consider it.”
More than a half century after his wife drowned in a Louisiana lake, Mississippi native Felix Vail is now facing a murder charge in her death — making his case the oldest prosecution of a serial killer suspect in U.S. history. Authorities arrested Vail on Friday in Canyon Lake.
The (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger, after an investigation that began in May 2012, detailed the peculiar circumstances surrounding the drowning of Mary Horton Vail and the fate of other women who crossed Vail’s path. The Nov. 11 report prompted authorities to reopen the investigation.
Undercover Comal County, Texas, deputies waited outside Felix Vail’s home in Canyon Lake for authorities from Louisiana, where Mary Vail drowned on Oct. 28, 1962, to arrive and arrest him. However, Vail left in his truck for town and was arrested at the post office.
Robert Yates Jr. seeks federal appeal of death sentence
Condemned serial killer Robert Lee Yates Jr., awaiting execution for the murders of two women in Pierce County in the late 1990s, is seeking an appeal of his death sentence in U.S. District Court in Seattle.
Yates, 60, a father of five and former Air National Guard helicopter pilot, has already had his death sentence upheld by the Washington State Supreme Court, and the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to reconsider that decision. Yates is now attempting to enter the federal district court system by seeking a petition for habeas corpus.
Even though Yates does not currently have an execution date, U.S. District Judge Ricardo Martinez ordered a stay until September, pending the filing of the formal petition. Martinez said that Yates has raised at least one “nonfrivolous ground for relief.” He also appointed two attorneys to represent him on appeal.
Search for John Wayne Gacy victims solves decades-old missing person case
A DNA test used by investigators to identify victims of serial killer John Wayne Gacy has helped solve a 41-year-old New Jersey missing persons case, officials announced Tuesday.
Sixteen-year-old Steven Soden went missing on April 3, 1972, but his remains were not identified until 2012, when authorities matched them with a DNA sample from his sister.
Soden's relatives contacted the Cook County Sheriff's Office in 2011 after hearing about Sheriff Thomas Dart's efforts to identify several of Gacy's victims. They believed Soden may be one of them, officials said.
"We always had hopes that we'd somehow find him alive," Steven's brother, Ron Soden, 73, told NBC 4 New York Tuesday from his home in Tacoma, Wash. "In this day and age, it's so much easier to find someone over the Internet."
Sun on Sunday pays damages to man wrongly linked to serial killer
The Sun on Sunday ran a front page "world exclusive" last November headlined "I'm Fred West's love child".
The story, about a 33-year-old man, Dean Barry, who had discovered his father was a convicted serial killer, was true enough. The picture, however, was not of him. Inadvertently, the paper had published a picture of his half-brother, who was unrelated to West.
The wronged man, Neil Bachi, sued the paper and his lawyers issued a press release on Monday saying the publication had apologised and paid him substantial damages, thought be a five-figure sum. It also made a contribution towards his legal costs
