The mystery of Ali Lowitzer

By Kathryn Casey

It was disturbing, to say the least, finding out that a teenager was missing, 16-year-old Alexandria “Ali” Lowitzer. What hit me particularly hard was that Ali lives in my part of Houston, and she’d been missing for weeks before the case caught my attention.

The truth is that I tend to focus in on this type of news. I’ve spent the last twenty-five years as a crime writer, first for magazines, now books. So I’m sensitive to the issues, and the prospect of any missing person draws my attention. One who lives just miles from my home, well, that’s sure to convince me to research the case and weed through the clues. How could I have missed the news coverage? When I Googled Ali’s name, I realized so little had been reported that I probably wasn’t the only one who hadn’t heard.

In many ways, the case has all the elements of a big news story, the kind that monopolizes headlines across the nation. On Monday April 26, Ali finished classes for the day. At some point, she called her mom and said she planned to take the school bus home and then walk a mile to her cook’s job at the Burger Barn restaurant. Later surveillance video would show the auburn-haired teen, her hazel eyes ringed in smoky eye-liner, departing the bus at three that afternoon, about 30 feet from her front door. It was then that Ali Lowitzer simply vanished.

Ali never made it to work that day, or to the Alice-in-Wonderland birthday party she’d helped organize for a friend that weekend. And she didn’t play catcher for her softball team at the tournament the following week. Yet the first article on her disappearance didn’t appear in the Houston Chronicle until nine days later.

Why hadn’t the case made headlines? The activities the teen was involved in “throw up some red flags,” said Dawn Davis, a case manager for the Laura Recovery Center, a group that organizes searches for missing persons. Perhaps based on that information, law enforcement, at least for the first month, wrote the teen off as a runaway.

It appears that the Harris County Sheriff's office only recently decided that perhaps they were wrong. They've brought in homicide and missing persons to investigate the case. But from all appearances, valuable time was lost. If Ali was abducted, as her parents contend, one can only imagine how much harm this delay has done. In abductions as in homicides, the first forty-eight hours are absolutely crucial.

While Ali may dress Goth, her parents, John and Jo Ann Lowitzer, paint a very different picture of their daughter. They talk of a girl who sings in the school choir, plays the flute, loves to draw, and was so connected to family and friends that she habitually sent 4,000 text messages a month. It frightens them that Ali hasn’t sent a single text since she stepped off that school bus. She hasn’t updated her Facebook or MySpace social-networking pages either. And her friends say they haven’t heard from her. Perhaps most disturbing, Ali’s father says a few months ago, another neighborhood teenager was nearly abducted. In that case, a car pulled up next to a girl and a man lunged at her, grabbing her around the neck. “She bit him," John Lowitzer said, "so the man backed off and tried to get her around the waist, and she was able to get away."

As the weeks and the agony drag on, both of the Lowitzers continue to send their daughter nightly text messages, hoping somehow Ali will be able to access them, although her cell phone charger, along with nearly all her belongings, including her purse and money, were left in her bedroom. 

Although police didn't initially push the case, family, friends, and the Laura Center did the best they could. They started a Facebook campaign, and led volunteers on searches of the miles of forest surrounding the Lowitzer’s neighborhood, undoubtedly hoping yet fearing they’d find traces of the 5-foot-2 teenager with pink banding on her braces. When she disappeared, Ali wore black-and-white checkered pants, a dark hoodie and a checkered backpack. “Ali is a wonderful person,” her father, John Lowitzer, told the press, begging whoever has his daughter to “let her go!”

While I fear Ali’s parents are right, that there’s a good chance the teenager didn’t leave on her own but was abducted, I sincerely hope they’re wrong. If Ali ran away, maybe she’ll hear their tearful pleas, take pity and return to those who love her.

So the question is: What do you think happened to Ali Lowitzer?

The Airport Evidence are Heads

by Andrea Campbell

I always hate it when Arkansas has some strange news story ongoing. The state has a not so great redneck stigma to overcome, as many states in the South often do. But this is just, well, darn weird y’all (and I say that with love because I’m not even from here originally). One news story was titled: “Coroner holds on to heads in boxes.” Another was: “Human heads go nowhere for now.” Puleese, there is no grammatically sufficient way to convey this headline (ouch).

Bad Labeling, Strange Cargo

Just recently, a Southwest Airlines employee questioned the freight shipment documents for containers that were being sent from Adams Field in Little Rock and posted for Fort Worth, Texas. Yes, there were human heads in boxes at Little Rock Airport, lots of them. The Associated Press reported: “Officials say a Southwest Airlines worker stumbled across a few boxes of human heads at the Little Rock, Ark., airport.” How on earth do you stumble upon this, you ask?

Apparently the heads were being shipped by JLS Consulting of Conway, Arkansas, and the containers were brought in by General Delivery of Little Rock. But when they reached the Southwest Airlines cargo office, the deliveryman said he didn’t know what they contained. Okay, what do airlines ask you when you check baggage? You know, the “are you traveling with …” questions, and, "... did anyone give you an unknown package” speech. 

So you know this questionable freight answer is not going to fly, literally. And the airline's employees know the drill: in 2009, Southwest Airlines moved 182 million pounds of cargo. So the airline agent did what they're supposed to do and opened the containers. The agent found red bio-hazard bags and heads wrapped in absorbent pads. According to the airline's company spokesperson, Chris Mainz, the company wisely refused to ship them airfreight because they were packaged and labeled incorrectly. And he called the police. Enter one of our state’s coroners, Pulaski County’s Garland Camper.

Over to the Morgue

Camper took possession of the heads and had them transported to the county morgue, where they’ve been since June 9. There are between 40 to 60 whole and partial heads.

The shipment was bound for a Fort Worth medical laboratory that uses them for a continuing education program for doctors, said JLS founder Janice Hepler.

And Camper replied, “I’m not just going to release a bucket of heads to go across the country without verifying that these were indeed lawfully obtained.” The specimens were in three rubber containers.

The hang-up continues because Coroner Camper says he hasn’t been able to verify the information—the company can’t accurately describe the heads and there are inconsistencies. Hepler is cooperating and understands; she says nothing is wrong, that they see the coroner’s point of view, and they'll eventually present proper documentation.

Caution for Good Reason

Camper told reporters that in his 24 years with the coroner’s office, this was the first time he knew of a shipment of bodies being stopped. "We've come to the conclusion that there is a black market out there for human body parts for research or for whatever reason," Camper told NBC. "We just want to make sure these specimens here aren't a part of that black market and underground trade."

While the heads were donated to science by an undisclosed organization—the Medtronic project—their spokesman, Brian Henry, said the company uses the specimens for physician education and training and in the development of new surgical tools. He also talked about a similar holdup a few years ago involving incorrect labeling. He probably shouldn’t have shared that.

Practice Called into Question

Okay, if you’re in the business of shipping body parts, why aren’t you getting it right? The coroner had every reason to be suspicious and was just performing his due diligence. Henry remarked, “We certainly expect our suppliers to adhere to the required processes to safely ship or transport specimens,” adding that the company would “work with our suppliers to make sure that all future orders are properly labeled.”

Ethical Lapses and Administrative Mistakes

It just makes someone reconsider donating their body to science, now doesn’t it? (That and the horrible movie “Pathology,” but let’s not go there.) Still, federal law prohibits buying or selling body parts. Companies can charge for transporting body parts, but people, you must get it right. I mean, there is a certain amount of decorum here. While I'm sure anatomical materials are shipped frequently, I don’t think the public wants to hear about snafus in this regard.

There have always been horror stories and jokes told about human remains, but no one wants their loved one to be the subject of the story, now do they? Mary Roach, author of the book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, thinks that good science outweighs any taboos we may feel. She writes: “… being carved into bits and chunks and shipped to a dozen different universities and institutions seems no more distasteful than decomposing in the dark underground or being burned to a char in a crematory retort. I'm all for post-mortem adventure and travel. (I'm told that if you donate your brain to the Harvard Brain Bank, for instance, it rides up front in the cockpit on the plane to Boston.)”

The Pro Camp and Cautions 

A website called Donating Your Body to Science has an article called “The Ultimate Donation: How to Give Your Body to Science and Keep It Safe,” by the New York Times' Tara Parker-Pope, and she says that bodies donated to science have helped create crash-test dummies and safer cars, protective gear for soldiers, and a better understanding of numerous diseases.

But she also cautions that: “… potential donors should also ask what happens to a body if a university doesn't need it, and whether auditing systems are in place to track how the body is used. … potential donors and family members should ask what happens to a body when the research is complete? Many medical schools cremate the bodies. Some hold memorial services, and family members may be allowed to attend. A few universities, such as Wayne State, promise to return remains to family members.”

Mr. Henry has since told reporters he believes the heads, which he described as “four cranial samples and 40 temporal lobes,” were mislabeled by the vendor, causing the mix-up.

Notes: Southwest flies to 69 cities in 35 states.

Sources: http://www.southwest.com/about_swa/press/factsheet.html#funFacts

Donating your body to science: http://www.flatrock.org.nz/topics/older_and_under/death_wish.htm
TSA travel info: http://www.tsa.gov/311/index.shtm

Video and update on the Southwest story: http://www.wxii12.com/video/23957372/index.html

A Big Day: A New Trial and a New Book

by Kathryn Casey

First the trial: Today begins a new milestone in the bizarre saga of Laura Hall.

In August 2007, Hall, a University of Texas student, was convicted of helping her then-lover, Colton Pitonyak, flee to Mexico to escape prosecution in the 2005 murder of a young woman named Jennifer Cave. But there was something more, something hideous. Hall, who'd hoped law school was in her future, was also found guilty of tampering with evidence, specifically helping to dismember Cave's corpse.

The Pitonyak case, some of you may remember, was the subject of my fifth true crime bookA Descent Into Hell.

Hall appealed her convictions. She failed in the biggest sense: the guilty verdict was upheld. But Hall won on another front: the court ruled that she was entitled to a new sentencing. Why? Early on the one witness put on the stand to testify during the sentencing phase, a cab driver, didn't identify Hall from a police photo lineup. That fact wasn't disclosed to Hall's defense attorney. Looking at the case, I can't disagree with the court. Hall's attorney deserved to know that information while the witness was on the stand.

Still, I'm wondering if this new sentencing trial will turn out to be a win for Laura Hall, or if she'll one day rue her decision to proceed with it.

Why? This is a horrendous murder, a bloody, awful crime scene, sure to raise emotions. On the first go-around, Hall was eligible for up to a ten-year sentence, but the jury only gave her five. She's already served 22 months and is eligible for parole. Why should she be worried? The bottom line is that Hall is unable to keep her mouth shut.

While now behind bars, for months while the case worked its way toward retrial Hall was out of jail, living with her parents in Tarpley, Texas. During that time, she talked openly about her role in the case, even boasting to one man that she "capped the bitch," which could be interpreted as admitting she fired a post-mortem bullet found lodged inside Jennifer Cave's severed head.

So when the trial begins today in Austin, prosecutors have witnesses who can illustrate in gory detail that Laura Hall feels no remorse, and that she, in fact, bragged about defiling another young woman's body.

You never know what will happen in a courtroom, but my prediction is that Laura Hall won't get a sentence reduction this week. In fact, she runs the very real risk of walking away with more time. Perhaps Hall should have been careful what she wished for. Now that she's got it, she may find that this new trial isn't to her liking.

Now let's talk about the second big event of the day, the debut of my new true crime book: Shattered. On Houston's David Temple case, the book brings to life a fascinating real-life tale of love gone wrong, of college sweethearts who end up in a deadly dance of dominance and control that spawns a horrible tragedy.

The 911 call came in from a red brick Colonial in a quiet Houston suburb at 5:36 on January 11, 1999. "Somebody's broken into my house and my wife has been shot," David Temple said, his voice breaking. "Oh, my God.... Oh, Jesus.... She's eight months pregnant."

At the time, three years before Laci Peterson disappeared and her husband Scott became a prime suspect, it seemed impossible that any husband would brutally murder a pregnant wife. In the Temple case, prosecutors wanted more evidence than detectives could provide, more proof. The result: a stalled investigation that left Belinda's family and friends aching for justice.

Shattered dissects an eight-year investigation into the murder of Belinda, a beloved high school teacher. In addition to missing evidence, there were other complications, including that David was a former football hero and a high school coach. In Texas, we admire few more than those who battle for us on the gridiron. Could this small-town hero be a cold-blooded killer?

Along with a detective who never quit, Shattered features one of the most hard-fought trials I've ever covered. Two Texas legal titans battled it out, one intent on avenging the death of a young mother and her unborn daughter, the other convinced his client wasn't a killer but another victim.

Did David Temple murder his beautiful, pregnant wife, or was he an innocent man, persecuted by an out-of-control prosecutor? Who would the jury believe? Beginning today, Shattered is available in bookstores, at retailers including Walmart, and on the Internet through many sites, including Amazon.com.

Friday, July 2, 2010: As I predicted above, Laura Hall's appeal didn't go as she'd hoped. The jury just gave her the max, 10 years, twice the original sentence. Laura, you should have been careful what you wished for!

Point, Click, Stalk?

By Robin Sax and Guest Contributor Melissa Alonzo Kriz

Ever pass by a building or landmark, wonder what it is, and wish you could find out right on the spot? Now you can -- with the click of your phone's camera and the launch of "Goggles," a new image-recognition technology that instantly provides pictures and information based on a single photo. The beta (still in testing) application was developed by Google to run on the Android operating system, also developed by Google for mobile devices.

This remarkable visual search technology soon will be expanded to allow a user to take a mobile-phone picture of an item (work of art, book, plant, etc.), then instantly search for similar images and information about the object on the Internet. As our technological capabilities increase exponentially, we might all say this was inevitable. We might be comfortable with how we'll use the new programs for fun and for good. 

But a pause is necessary.

Imagine you are at the gym or the grocery store, and a creep sidles up and manages to take a picture of you with his cell phone. Within seconds, using this image-recognition technology, he would have access to your photos on Facebook and find your name, where you work and live, and any other information about you that exists in cyberspace. That's a scary prospect. 

Take it one step further: What happens when predator aims his camera at a child on the playground? The predator would have access to similar images of the child on the web; they could lead to the child's name, school and possibly home address.

Goggles is currently limited to letting users find and learn about inanimate objects. However, technologies (including a yet-unreleased component of Goggles itself) already exist that use similar methods to crawl the web looking for images containing facial characteristics of people. The photos could be culled from your employer's public website, online community newsletters, schools' and universities' sites, Facebook and other social-networking sites, and any other public area on the web where your photo may reside (even without your knowledge).

Google has taken some heat for privacy concerns on some of its services, so for now it is holding off from releasing the facial-recognition aspect of Goggles. However, other software developers are already delivering mobile and web applications containing facial-recognition technology. Just look at your iPhoto if you are a Mac user.

The Swedish company The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) is currently testing a product called Recognizr. The TAT product allows a user to snap a photo of anyone in public, select the "recognize" button, and then receive photos and information about that person from social networking sites. TAT does have privacy policies; they offer an opt-in provision (or permission) from the subject of the photo in order for Recognizr to work. 

But TAT doesn't plan to offer its service directly to consumers. Instead, it will make the technology available to mobile-phone makers and phone-service provides so they can develop their own applications.These companies may or may not choose to follow TAT's privacy standards.

Face.com, an Israeli company, also has developed several products that include facial-recognition technology. Developers will be able to use and expand upon its services. One Face.com product, CelebrityFinder, uses facial recognition technology to pull all photos (and lookalikes) of a celebrity from Twitter feeds. Face.com is in the process of enhancing the face detection function to include profile poses. Face.com privacy policies say the use of its product may not violate user privacy, and that users must inform their subjects that they've been tagged and provide them the ability to remove those tags. I feel safe already.

The bottom line is that the facial recognition technology is already here. We live in a "point, click, and stalk" world. So how can we protect ourselves, and our families, from stalkers who'll use this technology to their criminal advantage? It is unlikely we can pass an enforceable law making it a crime to take a non-celebrity's photo in public, even if the photo taken is of a child.

Perhaps federal legislation could be aimed at the technology companies and mobile phone carriers? We could demand strong, mandatory privacy policies for the facial-recognition software from Face.com, TAT, and other developers as a pre-condition of sale or use. While this type of legislation wouldn't guarantee protection from illicit use of this potentially creepy technology, it would assist in increasing consumer awareness. Most of all, we must hold those who develop, host, and use the technology accountable so we can prevent the next wave of cyber-stalking before it begins.

Mystery Man Tracks Murder in the Himalayas

by Jonathan Green

I’m not sure whether my epiphany dawned on a remote, snowy mountainside - in the shadow of Mount Everest on the Tibet border at 14 feet above sea level - one of the most hostile environments on the face of the earth. Or if it was simply sitting in my basement office making calls over several months to reluctant interviewees that were never returned.

Either way, a few months after starting my investigation into the murder of 17-year-old Tibetan Buddhist nun, Kelsang Namtso, by Chinese paramilitary soldiers – a killing witnessed by at least 100 Western mountain climbers, many of whom refused to bear witness to what they had seen – I began to think I had set myself an impossible task.

Conventional wisdom is that writing a book is like climbing a mountain. I had to do both, but even that wasn’t the hard part.

As an investigative journalist it’s easy to take for granted that, although the job is not without it’s challenges in the US, at least freedom of speech is enshrined in the constitution and is upheld in daily life. You don’t get 15 years for speaking to a journalist in, say, Wisconsin.

But I was investigating a state-sanctioned murder in modern-day Tibet, one of the repressed places on the face of the earth. Tibetans face 15 years in prison just for talking to a Westerner, over e-mail or the phone, about the political situation in their country. Let alone talking to a Western reporter about a murder by the Chinese police.

And therein were the first of many problems of reporting a narrative set in three countries separated by the highest mountain range in the world in regions were free speech is criminalized.

At the heart of my story are two girls from remotest Tibet, best friends, who nursed a dream to escape Tibet, cross the high Himalaya, all in the hope of a few seconds with the Dalai Lama. They joined 75 other refugees before tragedy struck. Kelsang was murdered in front of Western climbers. Many didn’t want to talk about what they had seen lest they upset the Chinese authorities and were refused entry back to climb in Tibet again.

But, I persevered, and therein I found a redemption of sorts.

Because, in stark contrast to these obstacles, a few extraordinarily brave people stood up against the might of modern-day China to help me bring the injustice of the murder of an amazing young woman to light.

The first was her best friend, Dolma Palkyi (right), whom I spent weeks interviewing and who gave selflessly in talking about the killing of her friend, which she witnessed first hand. She did so because of her conviction that, simply, people needed to know the circumstances of Kelsang’s murder.

And secondly, a very brave Romanian climber Sergiu Matei, who risked his life to film the murder, saved a Tibetan refugee and then smuggled footage of the murder out to the world. Today, the loop of the shooting plays all over the globe on Youtube and other outlets as a permanent memorial to the bravery of a young woman who was murdered while trying to escape to a better life of religious freedom and for a brief meeting with the Dalai Lama.

After many years of struggle, my book slowly evolved and so did a truth and realization in my work, and perhaps a valuable life lesson too. It was that, no matter how hard things appear, there will always be the brave, the few, who will help us whether we are journalists, police officers, attorneys or anyone else who works in the field of justice. And that despite an army of uncaring, or unhelpful or plain obstructive, if just one person stands up to speak out against injustice it can, and does, make all the difference in the world.

Murder in the High Himalaya by Jonathan Green is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and in all good bookstores. Jonathan Green is an award-winning journalist and author. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Men's Journal, the Financial Times Magazine, British GQ and Esquire and the Mail on Sunday's Live magazine among many other publications.

The Unexpected Knight

by Pat Brown

I know Father's Day has passed, but I want to tell you a story about a knight in shining armor. Well, okay, tarnished armor, and he came riding a Metrobus, had trouble staying gainfully employed, and had a few minor scrapes with the law. When I first met him, I thought he was an opportunist, a petty criminal who was taking advantage of a beautiful, naive woman. I will call him "Charles" and the lady, "Diana."

I interpreted for Diana for quite a few years at the hospital. She was a sweet, African-American deaf woman who had a difficult childhood growing up in foster homes. It wasn't that she was a problem child; she was simply abandoned to the system. When she became an adult, she lacked education and job skills, and she struggled to survive, living in less than great circumstances. And then, as happens far too often to women, especially those who are targeted because they can't hear you coming, she was raped.

But Diana kept her head up. She believed in God and in good, and she didn't let what had happened to her destroy her soul. Then she met Charles. A hearing man who knew no sign language, he still managed to woo her and within a short period of time, he married her.

By the time Diana introduced me to Charles, she was working a steady job and he was getting into trouble here and there, landing himself in jail on occasion. I wondered whether he saw this Deaf woman as a good mark, someone to take advantage of. He moved into her apartment, and I thought he might be mooching off of her, using her income which included disability checks. I wondered how well he treated Diana, if he abused her or cheated on her. Finally, one day, I found out just what kind of man Charles really was.

Diana was pregnant with their first child. Together they came in for her appointment and to get results from the various tests run on pregnant women. The two were waiting in the room with me when the doctor walked in. He sat down and started reading the results from the paper in front of him; he didn't raise his head to make eye contact. As soon as I saw his demeanor, I knew what was coming.

I interpreted. "I am sorry to tell you that your HIV test came back positive."

I will never forget what happened next. Shock registered on both their faces, and Charles's hands flew up to the side of his head, framing his horrified expression. Then he stood up and abruptly walked out of the room, leaving his wife alone with me.

Tears started sliding down Diana's cheeks and she asked, "Why? Why me? Why now?" I had no answer for her. I moved over next to her and put my arm around her, and she cried quietly onto my shoulder. Minutes passed and I wondered what this poor woman was going to do.

Then the door opened and Charles came back in and sat back down in his chair, grim-faced.

I moved away from Diana and sat down in my seat again.

Diana turned to look at Charles and started signing. I interpreted because, while Charles had learned a little sign language, he would not be able to understand what Diana was saying at a time like this.

"Charles," she signed, "if you want to leave me, I understand." She looked resigned already, simply waiting for confirmation.

Charles looked at her and shook his head and as he spoke, Diana turned to watch my hands to see his answer.

"Diana," he said quietly and strongly. "You are my wife. I love you. I will never leave you."

The look on Diana's face, the astonishment, the happiness, overcame the cruel sentence of the test results. Her knight in shining armor had shown up, even though he had been there all along.

Ten years have passed since that day and just a couple of months ago, a car drove up to my house and Charles and Diana got out, along with their daughter and son. We spent a wonderful evening together. The children were lovely, well-behaved kids, and their parents clearly adored them. Diana looked healthy and happy. Both Charles and Diana are gainfully employed and while they aren't rich by any means, they have a home full of love.

When they left, Charles helped Diana and the children into the car and then ran back to me.

"Those kids don't know how lucky they are," he said to me. "And you know what I mean," And then he winked at me, ran back to his waiting family, jumped in the car and drove off.

Victims of crimes often suffer financial, physical and emotional loss. But the worst of these three is the pain of destroyed relationships, of spouses and significant others bailing out because they don't want to deal with their mates' issues or their own issues. Diana suffered loss after her rape, but she was blessed with the kind of man every woman hopes will be there when the chips are down and the road ahead is going to be tough.

I wish every other woman in this world who ends up a victim of a sexual assault would get her own knight in shining armor; one special loving man, just like Charles.

Death of a Wonder Horse

-

by Deborah Blum

The name Phar Lap comes from an Asian word for lightning; a sky flash. A passing dazzle of light, a spark in the night.

And so he was, the big copper racehorse from Australia, his dazzling speed making him one of those unexpected beacons of hope during the Great Depression who, according to a report published in an international chemistry journal in April, was killed by a massive dose of arsenic.

Of course, no one who follows race horse history could be entirely surprised by that finding. For one thing, it built on preliminary results from 2006. But from the day Phar Lap died in California on April 5, 1932, rumors have circulated and suspicion simmered that he was killed by someone from the gambling syndicates who had invested in other horses.

After all, gamblers in Australia had earlier tried to shoot the big horse.

The Wonder Horse -- one of his many nicknames, along with the Red Terror -- was born in October 1926 in New Zealand and thought to have so little promise that he was purchased as a two-year-old by American businessman David J. Davis for about $130 (US). As the story goes, when the gangly youngster shambled into sight, the new owner was so horrified, he refused to pay to train him. The Australian trainer, Harry Telford, offered to train the colt for free in exchange for eventual part ownership of the horse.

Phar Lap won his first race a year later and, as they say, didn't look back. He'd matured into a beautiful, powerful chestnut with a cheerful disposition and a drive to win. Too much of a winner, some thought. On November 1, 1930, the day of the prestigous Melbourne Stakes, a car started following him on the way back from morning practice and shots -- apparently ordered by a rival owner -- were fired at the big horse. They missed, and no one was ever caught although a furious Davis offered a $100 reward, huge for the time. Phar Lap, though, remained unfazed. And won the race.

In fact, it was one of 14 straight victories that year, followed by 14 straight victories in 1931. In his four-year racing career, Phar Lap ran hard and often and fast. He won 37 of 51 races, and that would include his last.

Davis, by now enamoured of his bargain colt, decided to enter him in an international big prize race, the Agua Caliente Handicap, at a track near Tijuana, Mexico. The purse for the winner of that race would be more than $11,000 (comparable to about $100,000 today). Although Telford was reluctant, Phar Lap was shipped by boat to Mexico. In a hard-fought race, he once again triumphed in a flying finish, still watchable, in fact, in a YouTube video.

Three days later he was dying.

Davis had moved him to a private ranch near Menlo Park, California, while he negotiated for entrance into other lucrative private races. On that morning of April 5, 1932, one of the stablehands found the big horse convulsing in agony. Phar Lap died several hours later. Speculation of deliberate poisoning has followed his story ever since, although alternative theories have been offered -- from severe gastroenteritis to accidental poisoning from the use of pesticides on the ranch.

Phar Lap was such a sweet-natured horse that those who knew him mourned not only the loss of a champion athlete but the loss of a friend. Telford said, "A human being couldn't have had more sense. He was almost human, could do anything but talk ... I loved that horse."

The racehorse was such a hero -- and a martyr -- to fans in Australia and New Zealand that museums from both countries telegraphed to ask for the chance to display the horse. Davis, after consulting with Telford, decided to send Phar Lap's "great" heart to Australia's National Institute of Anatomy in Canberra. The skeleton went to the Dominion Museum in New Zealand. And the hide was sent to the National Museum of Victoria, in Melbourne, where taxidermists labored for four months to create a life-like replica of the Wonder Horse, from his shining red coat to his tousled mane.

In the years since his death, songs have been written to the horse, movies been made about his life story. But it's that mane that eventually solved the mystery of what -- if not who -- killed Phar Lap. Australian researchers removed six hairs and then used a highly specialized x-ray microsope to bombard them with intense radiation, illuminating the chemical makeup of the hair. The analysis (done at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois) is so precise that it allows scientists to tell whether material was absorbed from the blood or introduced after death, such as through embalming processes.

In the case of Phar Lap, researchers were able to determine that arsenic had been metabolized: the horse had been given a massive dose of arsenic one to two days before he died. Those preliminary results were released a couple years ago. The final report, the official conclusion, was published in April under the title Determination of Arsenic Poisoning and Metabolism in Hair by Synchrotron Radiation: The Case of Phar Lap.

A tidy, scientific way of describing a shameful episode and an example of epically bad sportsmanship. I'm glad that researchers in Australia were so determined to find some answers about the death of Phar Lap, even if it serves only to remind us of the realities of the American horse racing business of the 1930s, with its underpinnings of crooked money and sweaty desperation.

It's not justice, of course. Because Phar Lap deserved so much better. The big copper horse deserved to be more than a fleeting star, a flash in the sky. He deserved a chance to finish his glorious career with a much-petted old age in one of those fabled green pastures ... I hope that whoever came bearing arsenic to the stable in those soft April days of 1932 didn't finish out his own days happy and healthy. The man -- whoever he was -- deserves so much worse.

Crimes and Misdemeanors -- and Murder

by Cathy Scott

Journalists by nature are nosy -- and we're chameleons, fading into the background as we observe the happenings around us. I've been to more homicide scenes than I care to count. But once there, I'm all about the details. So, as I've put together a book this past year about the Barbara Kogan case (scheduled for publication in spring 2011), I've been all about the details.


On a rainy October morning in 1990, Kogan's husband George was gunned down by an unknown assailant. From the start, Barbara was a suspect. For nearly two decades, she adamantly denied any involvement. Now 67 years old, she has admitted to playing a part in hiring a hit man to shoot three slugs into George Kogan's back. She said, through her attorney, that she didn't want to put her two sons through the stress of a lengthy trial. She is about to be moved from the Riker's Island jail to a New York prison upstate to serve out a 12-to-36-year sentence.

But the first criminal case I was involved in -- and the reason I became a crime reporter -- wasn't a murder. It was a misdemeanor crime against two friends, my sister and me. As a teenager, I regularly followed crime stories in the local newspaper, and I always was interested in TV news reports, although during that era growing up in San Diego County, there wasn't much crime to speak of.

I lived in La Mesa, a suburb east of San Diego known as the "Jewel of the Hills" with its near-perfect weather and safe neighborhoods, which still have walkable, tree-lined streets. It was a quiet, middle-class, crime-free 'burb -- and a nice place to raise children.

And so it was shocking on one spring night in that same neighborhood when I became a victim along with my sister and two of our friends. And while we were the ones victimized, it was so absurd to us at the time that we laughed -- mostly out of embarrassment.

It happened as we jogged in preparation for a 30-mile benefit walk for hunger -- plus my sister and I were getting swimsuit-ready for Spring Break in Palm Springs. So we took a week-night run as we had dozens of times before. We never felt at risk -- until that night.

We started our run from a cul-de-sac at the end of our block. About two blocks later, a man sitting in a dark-colored Volkswagen Bug stepped out of his car just as we jogged by. The four of us were chatting it up as usual, but it creeped us out enough that we stepped up our pace.

Our route took us a few blocks before turning right, running a few more long blocks, and turning right again to make for a run of a few miles. The last stretch was past a church, then up a hill toward home.

But halfway up the hill, the same man we'd seen blocks earlier stepped out of the darkness and under the light of a street lamp. He was naked from the waist down, with his trousers around his ankles.

It was startling. but we moved so quickly that the man was as shocked as we were. He started running too, away from us, stumbling because his pants were still wrapped around his ankles. He hobbled away while we crossed the street and ran to the home of a neighbor, Mrs. Harris, to call the police. One of my friends, in the meantime, screamed at the top of her lungs, so much so that my sister afterward described it as "screaming and waving her arms hysterically, a la Blanche in Bonnie and Clyde."

It was no exaggeration. And perhaps that was what we all wanted to do that night -- scream -- but didn't. Instead, we giggled. Before that, as a group, we had felt pretty fearless.

When police arrived, two officers asked us direct questions about what we saw, where the man was standing when he dropped his pants, and a good description of the suspect and his car. Then we all went to our respective homes. Within 30 minutes, an officer called and said they had located a suspect and his car. As it turned out, the man lived around the corner from us -- which creeped us out even more -- and his VW was parked in his driveway.

Police needed the four of us to meet them on the street in front of the man's house. So we drove there. Sure enough, standing with the officers was the same man who had earlier exposed himself to us. The man was arrested, and later we were summoned to court for a trial. Outside the courtroom with our mothers, we met the deputy district attorney prosecuting the case. He informed us that the suspect had just pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of lewd conduct.

Thus ended my first involvement with a criminal case. I've been fascinated with criminal law ever since, not as a victim but as a journalist and author. I wouldn't write about that night until many years later; it was hardly a crime worthy of a news story. But for four young women, it was a pivotal moment in time. It stripped away our sense of safety and security in the neighborhood where we'd grown up.

When I eventually became a crime reporter, my habit was to write about the underdog. And for many of their families, what we as reporters put on paper is the last time their loved ones will be written about, so I've always felt it's important to do right by them.

That has been my goal with the George Kogan murder, to tell it like it is and get to the bottom of the story. In a murder-for-hire homicide like his, which has been anything but open-and-shut, sometimes it's tough getting to those crucial details. But in the end, dogged determination usually gets us the facts, documents and interviews we need. 

George Kogan's family, as well as his estranged wife Barbara, the accused and now convicted, should expect nothing less -- the good, the bad and the ugly. Joseph Pulitzer once wrote that journalism is "a noble profession" he'd spent his life doing. While not all would agree with him 100 percent, it's our responsibility, as writers and journalists, to get the story right. George Kogan, shot in the back in broad daylight in October 1990, deserves as much.

Photo of Barbara Kogan courtesy of the New York Post.