The Killer Book of Cold Cases Read Free Page B

bitter.”
    But they
were
bitter and expressed that in open court.
    “Your cowardly act shattered our lives,” said Carolyn Phillips, daughter of Richard Phillips, the cop who had fired at Mason. She spoke of how her mother had struggled to raise three kids. “We cannot and will not forgive you.”
    Outside the court, the son of the other slain cop, Milton Curtis, said, “Mr. Mason is sorry now, and we heard his apology speech. He wasn’t sorry for forty-five years, and the only reason we’re hearing that apology now is because he got caught.”
    The case demonstrated a lot of things, but one for sure: why there is no statute of limitations on murder.
    Statute of Limitations
    One of the questions that prosecutors must answer when they want to charge someone with a cold-case murder is how long the law allows them to do that. In other words, what is the so-called statute of limitations?
    With many crimes, such as rape, the answer is that the statute varies, but for murder it’s forever—there is no statute of limitations. However, there can be exceptions to the rule. One of the most famous is the case of Michael Skakel. He was charged by Connecticut state prosecutors with bludgeoning Martha Moxley, a pretty blonde teenager, to death with a golf club.
    Skakel was arrested in 2000 when he was thirty-nine years old, but he had been only fifteen when the murder was committed. The defense argued that Skakel could not legally be prosecuted for murder because at the time of the murder, 1975, Connecticut had a five-year statute of limitations on murder for someone Skakel’s age. At trial, the judge denied the motion to dismiss the case, but defense lawyers made their contention the main item in their appeal of the guilty verdict—which they lost.
    Q & A
    Q. How many Americans support the death penalty?
    A. An overwhelming majority of people—69 percent—favor the death penalty, according to a Gallup poll, while only 27 percent are against it and 4 percent have no opinion. This is despite the unalterable fact that the death penalty is not a deterrent to murder. Statistics have shown that over and over again. “Feeling is everything,” says Dr. Grace Somer. “Feelings of rage that a person is experiencing at the time they become homicidal have nothing to do with cold, deliberate logic. Murder has everything to do with compulsion.”
    Never Say Die
    Murder, as it were, sticks in one’s craw. It certainly has stuck in the craw of the FBI. More than one hundred unsolved murder cases were put under review through the civil rights-era Cold Case Initiative, a partnership started in 2007 between the FBI and civil rights groups, as well as federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies.
    The initiative was launched on the heels of several successful prosecutions of civil rights-era cases, most recently the 2007 conviction of James Ford Seale for the kidnapping and subsequent murder of two African-American teenagers in 1964 in Mississippi. Other notable cases include the 2005 conviction of Edgar Ray Killen for his role in the 1964 deaths of three civil-rights workers—the so-called Mississippi Burning case—and the 2001 conviction of Thomas Blanton, Jr., one of four men who bombed a Birmingham, Alabama, church in 1963, killing four African-American girls.
    As FBI Director Robert Mueller put it, “the successes in decades-old cases restored our hope and renewed our resolve. We cannot turn back the clock. We cannot right these wrongs. But we can try to bring a measure of justice to those who remain.”
    The case of James Ford Seale was resuscitated in 2005 after a documentary filmmaker probed the case, prompting the FBI’s Jackson, Mississippi, office to reexamine old records. The FBI enlisted the aid of special agents who had worked the original 1964 case. Working with the local U.S. Attorney’s Office, they gathered enough evidence to present to a grand jury, which issued an indictment in January 2007.
    Retired Special