AMY LYNN BRADLEY: LOST AT SEA?

AMY LYNN BRADLEY: LOST AT SEA?

One of the most fun vacations one can take is a cruise. It is a floating restaurant, hotel, and entertainment center that occasionally drop you off in an interesting destination. But for the Bradley family, Ron, Iva, their son Brad and daughter Amy Lynn, their family cruise turned into a nightmare when their daughter just disappeared.

                On March 24, 1998, Amy Lynn Bradley was last seen asleep on the balcony of the family’s stateroom at about 5:30 a.m. by her father. He decided to let her sleep. When he went out to the balcony a half hour later, she was gone. The only items missing with her were her cigarettes and lighter. All her shoes were left behind. How far could she go barefoot? The family went on a search of the ship to locate their daughter.

                Four days before, the family boarded the Royal Caribbean’s Rhapsody of the Seas. The night before she went missing, Amy was seen at the night club with her brother. She wanted to stay while Brad returned to the stateroom leaving Amy with a band member named Yellow.

                The family asked the captain to not let anyone leave the ship when they docked that morning, but he did not want to upset the guests.  After the guests left, the ship was searched, but only the public rooms, not the individual staterooms.

                The Bradley’s felt that some of the crew had given “special attention” to Amy throughout

the cruise and perhaps she had been smuggled off the ship and sold into sexual slavery. Before the disappearance, three of the waiters made friends with Amy and when they arrived in Aruba, they asked Amy to go to Carlos & Charles, the last place that Natalee Holloway was seen. Amy told her father that these waiters gave her the creeps and she refused to go with them.

The night the waiters had asked Amy to go with them, the next day, all the photos that had been posted of Amy were missing, even though the photo supervisor remembered seeing them there.

The cruise line made very little effort to find Amy. Royal Caribbean said she was probably drunk and had fallen overboard. Eventual the Bradley’s had to go home, but Mr. Bradley and his son returned to Aruba.

                . He called the Bradley’s and described the tattoos and said he was 100% sure it was Amy. Later, the tourists identified the man with Amy as “Yellow” from the cruise ship.

Unsolved Mysteries
There were numerous sightings of Amy during the following years. Five months after the disappearance, two Canadian tourists saw a woman who looked like Amy on the beach in Curacao. She had the same tattoos as Amy, a Tasmanian devil, the sun, a Chinese symbol, and a lizard. They said Amy tried to talk to them, but her companions rushed her away. Amy walked into a nearby café, still looking back at the couple. One of the tourists saw Amy on

                In 1999, a naval ship docked in Barbados and one of the seamen went to a local brothel. He claimed to have seen a woman who told him she was Amy Lynn Bradley and had been kidnapped and needed help to get away from the people keeping her at the brothel. The seaman left and did not tell anyone since he was not supposed to be at that brother. It was not until he retired that he contacted the Bradley’s with his story. By the time they got to the brothel, it had burned down.

                Also, in 1999, a man named Frank Jones contacted the Bradley’s claiming a Columbia gangster was holding Amy in Curacao. Jones said he was a former Special Forces and offered to help find Amy for free. But as we know, there is no such thing as a free lunch!

                Jones said a female cook described Amy’s tattoos and repeated a lullaby Amy taught her. Jones sent two Navy seals to determine her location. At this point, Jones asked for money for the rescue. The Bradley’s requested to see proof that the Seals had found her. Jones supplied a photo, and the Bradley’s eventually gave him a total of $210,000.

               

He had Ron Bradley go to Florida to wait for the call that they had Amy. He sat in that motel room for a week waiting for that call. He finally got a call from one of Jones’s associates and determined that he and his family had been duped. Jones was arrested and plead guilty to mail fraud and got a 5-year sentence and restitution.

                Six years later, a woman, Judy Maurer claimed to see Amy in a bathroom in Barbados. Amy told her name, but two men came into the bathroom and talked loudly at Amy. They threatened Maurer and frightened, she hid in the stall until the men left. When she left the stall, Amy was still there, hunched over the sink. She said she was Amy from Virginia. At that point, the two men returned and crudely took Amy out of the bathroom. Maurer identified Amy to the FBI.

               

In 2005, the family received an email with a photo of a woman lying on a bed in underwear. An organization that locates victims of sex trafficking, thought it looked very much like Amy.

                In 2010, the turmoil from Hurricane Tomas unearthed a human jawbone on the beach in Aruba. It was tested to see if it was Natalee Holloway. It was not her, and  all testing stopped at that point and it was never tested to see if it was Amy or the nine other woman who had disappeared in the Caribbean.

                Amy has never been found but her family has not given up, hoping that she will come home eventually. Anyone who has sighted Amy Lynn Bradly or has information on her location, please inform the FBI.

REFERENCES

Bibliography

Gibbons, P. (n.d.). Shocking facts about Amy Lynn Bradley, the woman who disappeared at sea. Retrieved from Unbreakable Crimes.

Serena, K. (2018, March 7). The mysterious case of Amy Lynn Bradley, who vanished from a cruise ship. Retrieved from All That's Interesting.

MICHAEL SWANGO: KILLER DOCTOR

MICAHEL SWANGO: KILLER DOCTOR

“He could look at himself in a mirror and tell himself that he was one of the most powerful and dangerous men in the world- he could feel he was a god in disguise…” portion of the personal notebook from Michael Swango: medical serial killer.

This quote might give us a glimpse into why Michael Swango killed at least 60 people…all those whose care was left in his hands. , but it is hard to understand the how-how did he get away with killing for so long? Was it due to a “broken system of background checks and the failure of hospital administrators to believe one of their own might be a killer”?

Michael Swango is what is called a medical murderer. His access to patients gave him easy access to victims. And being in the medical establishment assured him that he would not be that closely scrutinized.

            Michael grew up in a military family with a strict and alcoholic father. There was a great deal of tension at home, not only from the father who was a hard taskmaster when he was at home but also the mother who created her share of tension. She saw Michael as exceptional, compared to his other brothers. She felt Michael would be underchallenged in the local high school, so she sent him to Christian Brothers High School. His brothers were sent to the local public high school; this certainly sent a message to the other brothers that somehow they were lesser minds than their brother. This couldn’t help but create tension among the brothers.

            Michael not only excelled academically, but he read music, sang, played the piano and

clarinet and eventually played in the Quincy Notre Dame Band and the Quincy College Wind Ensemble. He graduated as the 1972 class valedictorian and went on to Milkin University, in Decatur, Illinois, on a full music scholarship.

            He made top grades his first two years, but then, when his girlfriend dumped him, he withdrew from his academics, and the summer after his second year, he quit school altogether and joined the Marines. When he returned from the Marines, he had decided to become a doctor, so he returned to Quincy College to take classes in chemistry and biology. In his record, he lied and included a Bronze Star and Purple Heart that he did not have. He also developed a fascination with poisons and did heavy research on the subject.

            One has to wonder what happened to him in the Marines that not only made him want to be a doctor but to develop such an interest in poisons. From then on, his focus was to get into medical school and gain access to patients; in addition, he spent most of his time researching poisons. This is the time period when he developed an interest in violent deaths and began to keep a scrapbook of stories from the newspaper on car accidents and violent deaths.

            As side employment, Michael got a job as an ambulance driver, which gave him access to the real thing, violence in the flesh. He never missed a chance to go out on a run to car accidents, even if it meant missing classes and postponing studying.

            At Southern Illinois University Medical School, there were mixed reviews from his professors. He took unscrupulous shortcuts in projects and tests. It seems he was more interested in becoming a doctor than learning to be a doctor. The other students saw him as lazy, incompetent and strange, calling him Double O Swango, license to kill. What a prophetic nickname.

            He took a job as an EMT, having been previously fired from his job as an ambulance driver. The other EMTs noticed that when Michael made the coffee or brought in donuts for the crew, the staff got violently ill. His fellow EMTs set up a sting where they put a pitcher of iced tea in the break room and left it alone. After they were sure Michael had been in the room, they had it tested and found it laced with arsenic.  He was arrested, and arsenic and other poisons were found in his car. He was convicted of aggravated battery and received a sentence of five years.

When the law school dean reviewed the case, he concluded that the medical school should have more closely investigated Swango, but Michael had never been accused of any crime before, so this seems more like 20/20 hindsight. Attempted murder charges were considered but there was just not enough evidence. One would assume, though, that Michael’s medical career was over—right?

           

Well, when he was released from prison, he got a job at The State Career Development Center in Virginia, but lost it because he couldn’t resist working on his scrapbook of disasters on work time  His next job was as a lab tech at ATICoal where employees suddenly developed  numerous stomach pains. Michael was suspected, but he quit before anything could be done about it.

            In 1991, he changed his name to Daniel J. Adams and began working at Sanford USD Medical Center in Sioux Falls with forged documents, one being a fact sheet from the Illinois Department of Corrections changing his crime from a felony to a misdemeanor fistfight, another being a letter from the governor restoring his right to vote and letters from friends and colleagues saying he was now leading an exemplary life. All this allowed him to practice medicine; he was back in business, giving him the access to drugs and patients he needed.

            Things were going well at Sanford until he made the mistake of trying to join the AMA, whose background check was more detailed and came up with his conviction for poisoning, Sanford fired him.

            That Thanksgiving, the television program Justice Files ran an episode that included Michael. This certainly meant an end to any medical career for Michael, right? No, again he found a way back in.

            The AMA lost track of Michael, and he ended up at the State University of New York at Stony Brook School of Medicine. The first place he was posted was the VA Hospital in Northport where patients began dying at a distressing rate. The first one was on the very first day Michael arrived at the VA.  The mother of a girlfriend who had committed suicide began a campaign again Michael which eventually ended with his being fired from Stony Brook. The Dean of Stony Brook also got fired and alerted all 125 medical schools and 1, 000 teaching hospital about Swango.

            Since the last incident was in a VA hospital, it was considered a federal crime, so the FBI got involved. They found Michael working in Atlanta as a chemist and a warrant was issued for using false credentials to gain entry to a VA hospital. But before they could arrest him, he fled the country and ended up in Zimbabwe.

            There he got another job at a hospital again with forged documents. It seems like Michael could have made a healthy living as a forger since these documents were never questioned. Patients, again, began to die. The nurses were the first to become suspicious. Swango had a private stash of drugs and always had two syringes in his pockets, one hidden (not very well since all the nurses seemed to know about it) and the other in his hand.

            One patient had had his left foot amputated and was healing well. He was just there at the hospital waiting for a prosthesis donated by a charity. “Dr. Mike” came in one night and injected him with something. The patient grew numb but was still able to call the nurses who intervened and were able to save his life, but not his leg. The patient told the nurses who had done this to him, but Swango denied it and whined that he didn’t know why people were always accusing him with things like that.. The patient’s life was never the same and said he didn’t understand why he was not compensated for what “Dr. Mike” had done; after all the hospital had hired him.

The deaths at the hospital were traced to him, and he was terminated. He then hired a human rights lawyer to sue the hospital for wrongful termination. This could only be called the greatest case of hutzpah in the history of the world. A throng of Christian believers who had seen Michael as a gift from God there in Zimbabwe believed this termination was a witch hunt, not knowing the slaughter he had left behind in the states. This publicity was the last thing the Missionary Hospital wanted.

            Three years later, Michael applied to the Royal Hospital in Dhahran in Saudi Arabia, again using forged documents… let's just assume anywhere he goes from now on he uses forged documents.

            Back in the states, VA OIG Criminal Investigator consulted with a forensic psychologist to create a profile of Swango. The DEA combined focuses on the VA focusing on the crime of lying on an application in order to be able to prescribe narcotics.

            After a meticulous investigation and keeping a careful track of the airports, Michael was finally arrested by the Immigration and Naturalization Service at the Chicago-O’Hare airport on his way to Saudi Arabia. The hospitalized people of Saudi Arabia just became the luckiest patients on the planet.

            Because Michael knew they had evidence again him from the VA hospital and not wanting them to look into what he had done in Zimbabwe, he decided to plead guilty to defrauding the government. Sentenced to 3-5 years, the judge said he should not be allowed to prepare food or distribute drugs while in prison.

            During his sentence for misleading the government, the government was busy gathering evidence against him. They exhumed bodies and found poison. He had paralyzed one patient who later died.

Just as Michael thought his time in prison was over, the feds on Long Island charged him with three counts of murder, one count of assault, one of fraud and making false statements, and conspiring to commit wire fraud. Simultaneously he was charged in Zimbabwe with poisoning seven patient, five died.

            He originally pled not guilty but changed it to guilty to avoid the death penalty and extradition to Zimbabwe. He was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences.

            The story of Michael Swango should have been a wake-up call to the authorities around the world to do more meticulous background checks before any doctor get access to drugs and patients.

References

Dr. Joeseph Michael Swango. (n.d.). Retrieved from Murderpedia: https://murderpedia.org/male.S/s/swango-michael.htm

Gelten, L. (2018, SeptemberNew York Post.

8). How a murderous doctor was allowed to keep killing patients.

LeDuff, C. (2000, September 6). Man to admit murdering 3 L.I. patients. Retrieved from Murderpedia- The New York Times: https://murderpedia.org/male.S/s/swango-michael.htm

Leduff, C. (2000, September 7). Prosecutors say doctor killed to feel a thrill. New York Times.

Profile of Joseph Michael Swango: A License to Kill. (n.d.). Retrieved from ThoughtCo: www.thoughtco.com/profile-of-joseph-michael-swango-973127

The angel of mercy who turned out to be an angel of death. (1998, February 6). Retrieved from Murderpedia: https://murderpedia.org/male.S/s/swango-michael.htm

SLENDERMAN

Slenderman, in his black mortician’s suit, is a ghostly figure with extremely thin arms and legs and 4-8 tentacles protruding from his back. His pale face has no discernable features. His arms stretch out to lure children to him where he absorbs them.

Slenderman was first seen online in the summer of 2009 in two vague pictures that were passed around in horror sites and forums. The artist, Victor Surge “created paranormal images” through Photoshop. The artist created the two images that began the whole Slenderman mythology. Once his images hit the internet, others added to the myth, and finally, it arrived in the computers of two little girls who took it as far as attempted murder.

The first photo was dated 1983. In it a hoard of young teenagers burst out of the woods toward the camera. The second photo was of a playground full of 6-7 aged little girls. In a cluster of trees, a tale pale figure is seen with the children gathered around him. It was said that 14 children vanished at the time the picture was taken. Every myth needs a measure of danger to it.

This all would have been chalked up as just a “fun” story until two 12-year-olds in Wisconsin

led their friend into the woods to play a game of hide and seek and then, at the behest of Slenderman, tried to kill her.

The tragedy centers around three little 12-year-old girls: Morgan Geyser, Anissa Weier, and their friend Payton Leutner, a.k.a. Bella.  The three were drawn to each other by their mutual loneliness. They shared the fantasy world that revolved around Slenderman.

The girls got together on that Friday night to celebrate Morgan’s birthday by going skating and then having a sleepover. The three little girls were not popular at their middle school. They were obsessed with video games and making up scary stories. Morgan was a “creative weirdo” whose only real friend seemed to be Anissa, and Morgan seemed to be Anissa’s only friend.

When the girls were done skating, they returned to Morgan’s house and went to sleep. When they got up the next morning, they role played that one was a Star Trek android, Seven of Nine and one a troll princess. It’s doesn’t seem sure how Bella fit into this game. The three then walked to the park near Morgan’s house, with Bella taking the lead. Morgan showed Anissa a steak knife she had taken from the kitchen. The two girls had been planning this attack on their friend for weeks. The three went to the swings when Anissa suggested they play hide and seek in the woods. When they got to the woods, Morgan and Anissa, on Anissa’s cue, stabbed Bella 19 times in the chest. Bella, still alive, was taken further into the woods where the other two ordered the frightened little girl to lie down on the ground.

Morgan and Anissa, later, would say they had planned to go get their friend help, but, instead, left her to bleed to death alone in the woods. Luckily for Bella, she did not die. She crawled out of the woods and was rescued by a passing bicyclist.

Now you must be wondering what all this has to do with Slenderman…well, that connection was revealed five hours later when Anissa and Morgan are arrested. They both claimed that Slenderman told them to kill their friend and they wanted to please him.  When they were arrested, they were heading into the Nicolet National Forest to look for Slenderman.

Once they were placed in juvenile hall, Morgan descended more and more into her mental illness and talked constantly to Slenderman. She claimed to see unicorns and treated the ants in her cell as if they were her pets. She was eventually moved to a mental facility where she was diagnosed with early-onset schizophrenia, which is actually very rare.

In December 2014, Morgan was deemed competent to stand trial. She eventually plea bargained to be committed to a mental hospital indefinitely.

In the same year, Anissa was sentenced to 25 years in a mental institution, when she plead guilty to the attempted murder of her friend Bella. "I want everyone involved to know I deeply regret everything that happened that day," Weir said. "I know nothing I say is going to make this right, nothing I say is going to fix what I broke."

So, what lesson can we learn from this tale? At 12, children can’t handle the kind of things that come to them through the internet. They need to be monitored closely, perhaps having the computer in a family area and not in their rooms.

Myths like Slenderman can be fun for the people who create them and watch how they catch on fire on the internet, but there was nothing fun in the tale of three little 12-year-olds who believed that Slenderman was real and nearly killed one of them to please him.

BELLE GUNNESS

(1859-1930)

BELLE GUNNESS

(1859-1930)

A woman alone in the world has to find a way to take care of herself. In the late 19^th century, a woman named Belle Gunness found a foolproof way to support herself by marrying well and killing often.

Bell Gunness was born Brynhild Paulschatter in 1859 in Norway and immigrated to America in 1881. There are conflicting stories of Belle’s childhood. One source said she was raised in poverty and had to take jobs farming to raise the money for the trip to the US. Another said her father, Peter Paulsen was a traveling conjurer and magician and that Belle danced the high wire. But we do know that suspicious deaths and fires soon followed her arrival. At six feet and 200 pounds, Belle had no trouble attracting a husband.

Within three years, Belle was married to Albert Sorenson. The two ran a candy store in Chicago and had two children; both infants died and now are feared to have been two of Belle’s first little victims. One thing that Belle made sure of was that her husbands had plenty of life insurance…a girl has to protect herself against the fickle fates. Not only did she make sure there was insurance on her husband but her home and store, too. Both of these conveniently burned down, and Belle and Albert collected the insurance and bought a new home. But Belle was not much of a sharer and her husband fell ill and died. The curious thing was that he happened to die on the day two different life insurance policies overlapped…she collected double. Smart girl.  She used the insurance money to buy a farm.

More suspicious deaths followed. She next married Peter Gunness, a widower with an infant daughter. This child died soon after the nuptials; like I said, she doesn’t share well.  After this death, Peter sent his other child, Swanheld, to stay with relatives, thus probably saving her life.

Peter was a butcher, and one day a meat grinder fell off a shelf and killed him. Think about that. The meat grinder falling off a shelf is certainly not that suspicious, but the fact that Peter was under the shelf, to me, is. Taking a nap, perhaps?

The real story is more like what Gunness’s daughter was heard to tell her schoolmates, “My mama killed my Papa. She hit him with a meat cleaver and he died. Don’t tell a soul.” Now that I believe.

Next, let’s meet Mads Sorenson, Belle’s next husband.  With this husband, Belle had four children, Caroline, Axel, Myrtle, and Lucy, along with a foster child, Jennie Olsen.  I guess at this point, Belle didn’t mind sharing the attention with children. But maybe, not. Caroline and Axel died of acute colitis whose symptoms match those of strychnine poison. Mads fell ill and died soon after. The first doctor said it was poison, but the family doctor said heart failure. And that assessment stood.  

Belle’s next idea was to post in lovelorn columns in the newspapers to bring wealthy men to the farm. When they arrived, she would tell them she needed money to pay off the mortgage on the farm. The men would then get this money for her and would never be seen again. As you can see from the photos here, Belle was not an extremely attractive woman, but she must have had some appeal or these men would not have been so easily swayed to pay the mortgage of a woman they barely knew. The following is a list of some of the men who responded to Belle’s ad and who were never seen or heard from again, but it is certainly not a complete list:

·         John Moo

·         Henry Gyrholdt

·         Olaf Sverherus

·         B. Budsbury

·         Olaf Lindblom

·         Andrew Hegelein

In 1908, Andrew Hegelein’s family became suspicious when they heard nothing from Harold. Their inquiries got the authorities to come to the farm to investigate. This began the excavation of the property and the uncovering of the many murders of Belle Gunness.

                At some point, the farmhouse itself burned down and four skeletons were found. When all was said and done, 40 men and children’s remains were found including those of the foster child Jennie and Belle’s children Lucy, 9; Myrtle, 11; and Phillip Gunness, 5. It is believed that Belle killed these men and children, dismembered them and fed them to the pigs.

Belle disappeared. Maybe. There was a headless female found in the fire and a set of metal bridgework that could be identified as Belle’s, making the police believe that Belle had been caught in her own fire. But here’s the problem with that conclusion. This was Belle’s house. Of course, you would expect to find her bridgework there, but not always in her mouth.  Belle seems like a woman who might save her teeth for a special occasion, like the arrival of a new man from the lovelorn ad. So, it is possible that although the bridge was hers; the headless body was not.

               Let’s now take a look at another player at Belle’s ranch, hired hand, RayLampshere. With Belle assumed dead in the fire, on May 22, 1908, Ray was arrested for the arson and the murders. It turns out he is the one who knew all of Belle’s crimes, and now that he was being charged with them, he was willing to talk. He claimed she was not one of the victims of the fire. She had planned it all. She went to Chicago and found a housekeeper and brought her back to the farm. This woman was the headless corpse found in the fire. The interesting thing was that this woman was nowhere near six feet, as Belle was, but she was identified as Belle anyway. Belle, in the meantime, had cleared out all the bank accounts, set fire to the house and farm and moved on.

                In 2007, forensic anthropologist Stephen Hawrocki and some of his grad students started to investigate the alleged death of Belle Gunness. The first step was having the body exhumed from Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois, that had been assumed was Belle’s. What was found was that the alleged Belle’s bones were intermingled with those of the children. It had always been believed that the children were buried separately. So, they next exhumed what was in the graves of Lucy, Myrtle, and Phillip.  All this digging of bones never gave any real results.

                Many sightings of Belle went on for years, but the most promising was a woman named Edith Carlson, who seemed to resemble Belle. But she died in Los Angeles as she awaited trial for murder.

                So, ended the story of Belle Gunness, who spent most of her adult life wreaking havoc in the lives of all who crossed her path.

               

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Marybeth Tinning

In 1971, Marybeth’s eight-day-old baby, Jennifer, died of spinal meningitis which began a journey of death for the following eight babies born to Marybeth. When her first child died, Marybeth was the object of great pity. Who is a sadder sight than a mother who has lost her child?

 After Marybeth lost Jennifer, she collected herself and focused on her two remaining children. But less than a month later, Marybeth returned to the hospital; this time with her son Joseph Jr. Marybeth said he had had a seizure. He was released to the loving arms of his mother, but just a few hours later, she returned to the hospital with a lifeless Joseph Jr., claiming she found him dead in his crib. A few weeks later, it was her daughter Barbara’s turn to be taken to the hospital with convulsions. She died the next day, making Marybeth childless.

Marybeth continued to have more children. A month after he was born, her son Timothy died of seizures, just like his brother Joseph Jr. He was followed by Nathan, Mary Frances, Jonathan, and her adopted child, Michael. Why did no one see a pattern here and stop her?

Her ninth child, Tami Lynn, was born in August 1985. She was no luckier than her prior

siblings. But after her death, the authorities became suspicious. I guess nine deaths was her limit. When she was questioned, Marybeth immediately confessed to suffocating Timothy, Nathan, and Tami Lynn. One must wonder if the lives of innocent children could have been saved if Marybeth had been questioned earlier.

Because of lack of evidence, Marybeth was only tried for Tami Lynn’s death, receiving 20 years to life. All her requests for parole have been denied.

Dee Dee Blancharde

This story is a little different. In this one, the victim survived to her teens, and she found a way to get out of the hell that is Munchausen by Proxy…she killed her mother.

Just like the other mothers we have been exploring, Dee Dee loved the attention she received as the mother of a very sick child. She convinced the world and her daughter Gypsy Rose that she was fatally ill by feeding Gypsy seizure medication, shaving her tiny head, and confining the growing child to a wheelchair for years, so that Gypsy would appear ill.

Rod Blanchard, Daisy’s father says the abuse started as an infant when Dee Dee told him that their daughter needed a breathing machine and was probably not going to live until she was 18. He didn’t really ask for any details and divorced Dee Dee in 1991. In many ways, he just abandoned her to her mother’s whims.

Dee Dee shaved her daughter’s head to convince people that she had cancer and forced a doctor to give her daughter a painful feeding tube. The insertion of a feeding tube seems to also be a staple of the Munchausen mother. My issues are the lack of testing on the part of the medical community. How does a mother “insist” on a feeding tube and just get it.  She even lied to her daughter about how old she was. An aging victim is not what the people what to see and Gypsy was Dee Dee’s cash cow, and it would not do to have her grow up.

For most of her life, Gypsy never went out of the house unless she was in her wheelchair, even though she knew she could walk. She did it in the confines of her home all the time.  Allowing anyone to see her walking would bring down her mother’s carefully crafted con.

In 2011, Gypsy had her first taste of freedom when she escaped to track down an older man she had met at a sci-fi convention. But her mother tracked her down in Arkansas and dragged her home saying, “"If you ever try to do that again, I'm going to smash your fingers with a hammer."

            Gypsy’s access to the outside world was limited to the internet; how could that go wrong? In a Christian dating site, Gypsy met Nicholas Godejohn, and soon he was her “boyfriend.” This relationship and how Gypsy managed it showed that she had learned her lessons in manipulation well from her mother. Nicholas had his own issues with mental health and the police.

Nicholas claimed to have multiple personalities and insisted Gypsy create multiple personalities for herself to match his. There was Kitty the little girl, and Ruby, the evil vixen. She would send him photos of her in various costumes for each persona. This allowed Gypsy to explore her sexuality and start to develop feelings more suited to her actual age, not the little girl she was forced to play.

            Soon, Gypsy wants her adult life to be more than just a fantasy, but she knew that nothing could happen unless her mother was gone. So, the conversation with Nicholas eventually got around to how they could kill her mother.

            The plot took wings and eventually, Nicholas was at Dee Dee’s house and Gypsy was hiding in the bathroom hearing her mother scream, “Help me! Help me!”

            They fled the scene and eventually ended up at Nicholas’ parent's house in Wisconsin. Both are arrested. Nicholas has yet to go to trial, but Dee Dee resides now in what she calls a better place.

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Munchhausen by Proxy : Part 1

Lisa Hayden-Johnson

Lisa’s son was born prematurely, so he needed feeding tubes and constant medical attention. His mother Lisa loved the attention she got as the mother of an ill child. This is one of the aspects of Munchausen by Proxy, a condition where the parent, usually the mother, makes a child sick to gain attention and often monetary gain. The greatest fear of these mothers is that their child will get well.

When Lisa’s son began to get better, she decided to try convincing everyone that her child was still deathly ill. She went on television and told everyone that her son had severe food allergies; therefore, he was unable to eat and had to have a feeding tube inserted. To convince people her son had diabetes, she would put glucose in his urine. She said he also had cerebral palsy and cystic fibrosis which confined him to a wheelchair. She was so convincing that she not only had her son convinced he was sick, but she also had the doctor’s convinced, which lead to 325 operations and invasive medical procedures. She also claimed her son was sensitive to sunlight, so she made him wear sunglasses and a hat to school. The hat was always in bright colors because she wanted him to be able to be readily seen and rescued in case anything happened at school. It wouldn’t do to have the source of all her attention and money to get truly injured in any way and taken to a hospital where she would not be in control of how her son was looked at.

This is where I get confused with any story of Munchausen by Proxy story. How were these women able to convince medical professionals that their child had cerebral palsy and cystic fibrosis? Don’t these conditions require tests to help with such a diagnosis?

The attention Lisa received was wide-spread. From donations, she got a new car, cash, and a free cruise. She was also able to receive disability payments for her son, which was probably not her main motivation, but it allowed her to not have to work and to be able to monitor who her son encountered. It would not do to have someone get too close to him and become suspicious.

After much lobbying by his mother, her son received a Children of Courage award and met both Tony Blair and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. Her son was considered “the sickest child in Britain.” For a sick kid, her son got around. When she was finally caught, the police found a video tape of that free cruise. In it, the boy was seen running around the pool and eating all regular food. It’s amazing what the sea air can do.

Soon her very carefully crafted con came tumbling down when, in 2007, a pediatrician became suspicious of the fact that there did not seem to be a clear diagnosis, so he examined all the boy’s medical files. He demanded further tests on her son. To postpone these tests, on the day they were to be performed, Lisa claimed she had been sexually assaulted. While speaking to the police about the assault, she eventually confessed to the entire scheme.Her plan backfired. 

Prosecutor Andrew Macfarlane said, 'The defendant organized, orchestrated and ensured a regime of medical, physiological and psychological mistreatment, amounting to 24-hour-a-day torture that touched on every aspect of his young vulnerable life.” Lisa received 39 months in prison and her son went to live with his father and is said to be a happy and healthy little boy. This is another aspect of Munchausen; when the children are not with their mothers, they seem to miraculously recover, as if nothing was wrong with them in the first place.

Kathy Bush

           

Jennifer Bush’s life was hell right from the beginning, with 40 medical procedures and 200 hospitalizations before the age of eight. Because of her weak immune system, she had to have her appendix, gallbladder, and small intestine removed.  Like Lisa Hayden-Johnson’s son, Jennifer Bush’s mother made sure anyone who would listen knew how sick her child was and how poor the family was because of it. The perks of all of this were many.

            Jennifer became a poster child for health reform and met Hilary Rodham Clinton at the White House; she even testified before Congress about these reforms. The nurses who tended Jennifer were confused by the letters written to the Clintons since Jennifer never went to school and her writing was on the kindergarten level.

            Kathy told the media that her family was penniless and wrote to the White House that sometimes they had to decide between medicine for Jennifer and food for the family. The family would also have financial problems because their health insurance dropped them when Jennifer began to have medical issues.

            The problem with this image of the destitute family was that at home there was a new Mustang and motorcycle in the driveway and the family was taking vacations at expensive resorts. It seems the cash she solicited was not going to either food or medicine.

            Meanwhile, nurses were beginning to talk. Often Jennifer seemed to be getting better until her mother arrived and drew the curtain to be alone with her daughter. Nurses often heard Jennifer saying “no, no” when alone with her mother. One nurse even saw Kathy squirting liquid into her daughter’s mouth. Jennifer's numerous baffling infections were "consistent with someone smearing fecal matter" into her feeding line and urinary catheter.

            Finally, in 1996, a nurse filed a complaint, and Kathy Bush was charged with fraudulently soliciting money and assault. Jennifer was transferred to another hospital and within a short time, she was eating and had her feeding tube removed. She was put into foster care and her health improved dramatically.

            In 1999, Kathy was convicted of aggravated child abuse. She served three years of a five-year sentence. She was also forbidden from having contact with her daughter.

            When Jennifer was 18, she petitioned the court to lift the ban on her seeing her mother. Jennifer now says she believes that her mother did not harm her at all.

In a written statement to the Sun Sentinel in early 2015, Jennifer wrote:

The 10 years I spent in foster care were traumatic, and I had some devastating things happen to me. [ . . . ] Today, I can proudly say we have flourished despite the devastating separation. The bond I had with my brothers, prior to being removed from my family, is something that never changed. My relationship with them helped carry me through my years in foster care. My parents and I have picked up from where we left off, and have a very close and loving relationship.

Lacy Spears

Garnet Spears spent his first five years on this earth suffering from numerous digestive issues. They were so severe that finally a feeding tube was inserted into his little body. His mother, Lacy Spears, was a former nursing student who used social media to document Garnet’s journey through doctor visits and hospital stays. Often, Munchausen by Proxy mothers have some medical knowledge. Like what often happens, the people in the social media rallied around her and Garnet.

In January 2014, Garnet was again admitted to the hospital; this time his sodium levels were sky high. At this point, the hospital became suspicious and called the police and Child Protective Services. As this little boy was in tremendous pain and slowly dying, his mother was not holding his hand and trying to soothe him; she was on Facebook and her own blog updating people on the boy’s condition and receiving the sympathy of her readers. There were videos that showed that Garnet was screaming in pain before the machines were finally turned off. On the 22^nd of January, Garnet was declared brain dead and his mother had the life support turned off.

The police searched Lacy and Garnet’s home and found sea salt and two feeding bags that

tested positive for sodium. Lucy was arrested and charged with manslaughter and second-degree murder. It is said she called a neighbor and asked her to get rid of the feeding bags, which had 69 packages of salt in it.  

During her 2-week trial, the prosecutor said that her treatment of her son was “nothing short of torture.” The defense blamed the hospital for the sodium poisoning. She was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years. The judge said she suffered from Munchausen’s by proxy and made her son sick just to bask in the attention the mother of a sick child gets.

Blanca Montano

It is February 2011 when Blanca Montano rushed her two children to the hospital. It was determined that they both had E. coli. Luckily her son was able to be treated and released, but her 5-month-old daughter was not so lucky.

She was transferred to intensive care but continued to get one infection after another. The medical staff was confused as to the cause of these rare and unusual infections. They began to suspect that Blanca was tampering with her daughter’s IV, introducing things like fecal matter. As the doctors were trying to treat the infections, Blanca was insisting on a bone marrow biopsy.  

Cameras were mounted in the child’s room and caught Blanca playing with the IV and covering the camera. The hospital felt they had enough evidence and brought in the police. Blanca was arrested and charged with one count of child abuse and forbidden to visit her daughter. The child slowing recovered and was released.Are you seeing a pattern here?

During her trial, the prosecutors said she had done this to gain attention and get back the affection of the children’s father.  Nurses testified that syringes had been found in Blanca’s purse and that she said she was surprised people hadn’t called CPS before. Blanca was found guilty and sentenced to 13 years in prison. She continues to maintain she is innocent.

The Mother-in-Law from Hell: The story of "Ma" Duncan

THE MOTHER-IN-LAW FROM HELL; “MA” DUNCAN

This is the story of Frank Duncan and his mother Elizabeth and how their “incestuous” relationship ended in the murder of Frank’s pregnant wife, Olga.

Elizabeth Duncan, herself, is an interesting woman. Depending on who you believe, she had from 11 to 15 husbands and 2 to 4 children, her favorite being Frank. It seems she would con younger men into marrying her by telling them she needed to be married to collect a sizable inheritance, and she would split it with them. Once they were married, she would fleece them and then leave, going on to the next man.

 Elizabeth tried to kill herself because Frank had decided to strike out on his own and get his own apartment. During Elizabeth’s confinement, Frank met Olga, one of his mother’s nurses. Olga and Frank dated in secret because every time Frank would mention dating his mother would try to kill herself. After she left the hospital, she would call Olga, threatening her and telling her she would never marry Frank.

When Olga got pregnant, Frank was forced to own up and marry her. To say the least, his mother was livid. She went so far as to hire a young man to pose as Frank and illegally had the marriage annulled. The young man certainly could have passed for Frank, but Olga as Franks young wife? The judge must have been blind or had recently come into a sum of money. She was also planning to have her son kidnapped and held hostage until he agreed to divorce his wife. None of this worked to get the pair to divorce.

To appease his mother, Frank moved out of his and his wife’s house and back in with ‘Mother.” This did not make the pregnant bride very happy.

Olga disappeared in November 1958 when she was 30 years old and 7 months pregnant. Two men who had been hired by Elizabeth came to the door and said that Frank was drunk in their back seat. When Olga came to get Frank, the pair hit her over the head and drove her to a remote location. There they tried first to strangle her. They would have shot her but the gun broke when they hit her in the head with it. They continued with their ineptitude when they realized they didn’t have any shovels to dig a grave for Olga; they ended up doing it with their hands. They didn’t bother to check to see if Olga was dead before they buried her. She ended up being buried alive.

Her body was eventually found when two men confessed that Ma Duncan had hired them to kill the girl. Olga was beaten, strangled, and then buried while she was still alive.

Police began to suspect Ma Duncan when then found out about the illegal annulment. At her trial, the nature of Frank and his mother’s relationship was called into question and it was hinted but never proven that it was an incestuous one. It did not take long for Ma Duncan to be found guilty and sentenced to death. Frank, who was a lawyer, worked tirelessly to

have the sentence changed, but Ma Duncan was executed on August 8, 1962.