Ramplate's Bottom Feeders

Well, court abruptly ends yesterday again. There is no court today or Friday.

More of Jodi and Travis' relationship was told - very slowly (I think the jury almost groaned when the defense lawyer wanted to back up a bit - it's been so slow)

She has a lot of details and dates in her head that's for sure. It seems that Travis treated her differently from the start and she just went along with it. He would only get cozy with her in front of close friends and roommates, or when they took a trip to different states as they visited LDS historical sites around the mid-US
Other than that - in larger groups, or in front of other church members, and his PrePaid associates, he was distant.
According to her - he was distant after sex too - most guys are to some degree. But we only have her word to go by - as he is dead. She said though that she felt like a hooker, or a used piece of toilet paper - yet she kept on seeing him.
She seems like a chameleon trying to fit into his world suddenly jumping in with both feet. Still, very little emotion on the stand.
At the end of the day she was talking about Travis' first valentine's gift - she said she got some chocolates that were melted and a shirt and underwear that said "Travis Alexander's" on them. under that was a set of boys Spider-man underwear which has not been explained yet because the started discussing a letter supposedly written by Travis that was the last thing in the box. The defense wanted to enter the letter ito evidence and the prosecutor objected - and that's when court ended for the day.

So far there is nothing in her testimony that leads to self defense - from here the stabbing seems to be an accumulation of experiences all blowing up at once.
We shall see next week how this turns up - she will be on the stand a long time - once the defense is done with her, the prosecution has a lot of stuff to go through - and he's been taking lots of notes

Colorado v James Holmes

The apartment

There were dozens of black football shaped canisters filled with black powder all over the apartment. Black powder (3 megajoules per kilogram), is slightly less powerful than TNT (4.7 megajoules per kilogram) and you need quite a bit of it - but in several dozen shaped canisters, the large shrapnel produced would bring devastation to anyone caught in the blast.
One megajoule is approximately the kinetic energy of a one-ton vehicle moving at 100 mph.

He made use of liquid wires (electrical wires that can be stretched without breaking) for his various trip wires and to connect his devices, along with various trigger black boxes with blinking lights set up all over the apartment. I believe he also had a jar or two half full of bullets (more explosive flying debris), over 30 homemade grenades, and 10 gallons of gasoline.
There was some sort of jar filled with a liquid, and several green soda bottles also filled with an unknown substance (the police are still not telling what they contained - some kind of chemicals I would imagine.) There was also a main triggering device in the kitchen.

He had left his stereo on a timer set to go off slightly before the time as the theater attack, so that when the loud music started to play, someone would come and investigate. Someone did knock on his door, but thankfully did not open it. The devices could have blasted through several apartment walls, and certainly could have weakened the building, if not collapsed part of it.

Holmes now faces 152 charges.

Arizona v Jodi Arias

Well now, they got to the meat of the relationship today - still slow testimony, but lots of salacious scandalous details - keeping in mind this is from the accused who is on trial for her life. In any event, the censor had their work cut out for them today. This was Smear the dead guy day.

The boy's Spider-man underwear in the valentine box - this was supposedly for her to wear while Travis Alexander had his way with her from behind. They also talked about his supposed humiliation sex fantasy. He allegedly also wanted sex on the freeway with her.
She talked about visiting him one day and finding his cell phone in the cushions of the couch, so she took it and locked herself into the bathroom to read his text messages - and found out that she and he were not exclusive - so she went home and broke it off with him over the phone. That was the end of the bf/gf/ thing, but not the end of the sexual relationship.
In her taped interrogation she had claimed that after they broke up she moved to his town Mesa Arizona because things were already in motion and she was set to go.
BS - today under oath she had a place to live, but no job prospects lined up at all.
She moved to a place that was 10 minutes from his house, and finally found some service job at a restaurant or two. Travis also hired her to be his maid - and allegedly wanted her to dress like a French maid while doing it. I don't think she actually ever did, but while she was working there, he apparently took the opportunity to have his way with her. Sometimes they would clandestinely spend the night and leave early in the morning.
Apparently he was good at insulting her and then apologizing for it - so she enabled him to have another chance because she still loved him.
She even took a weekend trip to NY with him to see some of the sights he found in a book called 1,000 Places to see Before You Die - she "sobbed" when she was shown some of the "couples pictures" they took at places like Niagara Falls.

One time she was sleeping in his bed and said she found him on top of her having regular sex (a definite sin) with her.
And get this, she was helping him clean the attic and he brought out a porcelain angel and gave it to her - when she left she forgot to take it so she called his phones and didn't get an answer, and since it had only been about 10 minutes since she had left, she went back into the house and up to his room to get the angel - and allegely found Travis kneeling on the bed pleasuring himself to pictures of 5 year old boys in their underwear. Making Travis Alexander the first human in history since the computer age to have printouts of child porn despite the authorities finding nothing on his computer, or phone, and nothing in his apartment to do with child porn.

She left in a hurry she says, and he left messages on her phone trying to have her call to apologize and explain that he was trying to fight his inner demons - and she bought it.

This is nothing more than her word with no evidence to back it up - this all doesn't draw the conclusion that she was in fear for her life on the day she killed him, but I think this will be explained away by the psychologists and other experts - as she knew his dark secret so he wanted to do away with her.
Anyway you slice it, the prosecution has a lot of ammo once it's his turn for sure.

========================
EDIT - One thing I keep forgetting to mention. Jodi Arias gave her mother some photocopies of a long letter supposedly written by Travis Alexander, where "he confesses a lot of his inner demons" those urges he's supposedly a slave to. She instructed her mother to take a few of those handwritten pages to - The National Enquirer (Dun dun duuuunnn).
Her mother isn't to blame for passing off these papers as Travis', she's only trying to help her daughter by being the messenger.
I have heard an excerpt from the publisher (who by the way hasn't published them due to not knowing their veracity or true origin - I know, the Enquirer has shown some ethics?) and these written pages do not sound like a guy wrote them.
In any case,, they are not allowed to be admitted into court as evidence because she has been unable to produce the originals, for forensic and handwriting analysis purposes.

Otherwise, "the spaghetti defense" (throw everything against the wall and see what sticks) rambles on and on

Arizona v Jodi Arias

Day 4 on the stand for Arias? Hard to keep track.
Court was delayed yesterday apparently because Arias was a complete mess and had lost it - the sex tape was going to be played and the time she has to recount the day she killed Alexander is coming up soon.

The defense has been telling the court what a sexual deviant and controlling monster Alexander was - but the tape showed nothing of the sort.
It sounded consensual and Arias was an enthusiastic participant - I really don't know what the defense was thinking when they decided to play the tape (that she made by the way), and I think they have pretty much shot themselves in the foot with it if that is all the corroborating evidence they can come up with to try to back up her story. Alexander actually seemed like he was going to fall asleep at times in the recording - he was at least very relaxed.

Anyway, she recounted a slap, a broken finger, a grabbed wrist, and being pushed to the floor in her story leading up to her going back to Yreka, California. She also showed several checks that she wrote to Alexander presumably because he was behind in his bills - hard to believe because he ws on one of the upper tiers of Prepaid Legal, and she was pretty well short of money as well. She had to ask her mom for money to move back to California.

Someone pointed out an interesting question yesterday - she recounted an event where she ruined his car engine (I didn't catch how), but as the story goes, she had to kill him in self defense because she dropped his camera?
Wouldn't you think he'd pound her over the engine rather than a camera? It doesn't make sense if he was such a monster.

In any event, today sounds like the day she will have to explain the 29 stab wounds, the slit throat, and the shot to the face she gave him.
That sounds more like rage than self defense - in self defense one has to present evidence that the force she used equaled the danger she thought herself to be in. There were three fatal wounds she caused - why didn't she just do enough to stop him, and escape? Like I said - this was a rage killing.

No court today, the judge called in sick.

Where the dedicated meets the insane

Definition of dedicated
adjective
• 1devoted to a task or purpose: a team of dedicated doctors
• 2exclusively allocated to or intended for a particular purpose: a dedicated high-speed rail link from the Channel Tunnel

Definition of insanity
noun
[mass noun]
• the state of being seriously mentally ill; madness: he suffered from bouts of insanity
• extreme foolishness or irrationality: it might be pure insanity to take this loan [count noun]: the insanities of our time

Two definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary - how are they connected, other than appearing in the same .....

Definition of lexicon
noun
• the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge: the size of the English lexicon
• a dictionary, especially of Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, or Arabic: a Greek-Latin lexicon

Read on...

The Oxford English Dictionary - far from being the first or largest collection of vocabulary, there were earlier and larger works in German, Italian, and other languages, as well as several primarily incomplete and unorganized collections here and there which also included words no longer in common use, and those words only used in certain circles of society.
It is with that thought that work began on the project in 1857 under a different longer name A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society and was published in parts beginning in 1884.
The title it now has began being published in 12 volumes in 1895.
The work had many, many people at the helm through the years and versions, as well as many contributors after a public notice for help was printed - James Murray being the third editor.
Many thought that Murray would not have what it took to compile all the miscellaneous slips of paper with quotes defining many words collected from all over by book enthusiasts.
He was however, a determined driven man very interested in words his work on the project began in 1879, and with the help of many assistants, and contributors continuing to mail in definitions he worked tirelessly on it in a shed separate from the other buildings on the grounds of the Mill Hill School. The post office erected a box just to carry the volume of entries he was receiving from all over.
The group under Murray managed to categorize and deal with nearly 1,000 of those entries a day. Nine years later the first volume ending with the letter B was printed in 1888.
In 1897 a banquet was held by the Oxford University Delegates to honor 18 years of diligent work - several of the major contributors were present with one notable exception - a Doctor William Chester Minor who had been an integral part of the compilation - Murray had asked him time and time again to find definitions for words that he himself had had trouble with, and without fail the doctor had come through on top of being one of the most prolific contributors Murray had had all those long years.
He thought it curious the good doctor would miss the occasion so he decided to pay him a visit. Looking at the return address - Murray had known that the doctor had an association with Broadmoor asylum, and so he went for a visit.

There he found that the doctor was not on the staff of the asylum as he had thought - but was an inmate, and that is why he was unable to attend the banquet.

Dr. William Chester Minor had been born in Ceylon, in 1834 to missionaries from the United States. He had shown some problems early in life starting with an excessive interest in the opposite sex - this greatly disturbed his parents when he showed such interest in Indian girls so they sent hm to live with his brother in the states at about age 13.
Eventually he entered Yale and graduated as a surgeon. He enlisted in the Union Army in1863 and spent quite a lot of time tending to the wounded, however combat in the field became too much for him, and to top that off the experience of being ordered to brand a deserter on the face as punishment, helped to massively unstable his mind.
He was allowed to be discharged from the Army and keep his pension, and moved to England to convalesce near family.
He tried to put it all behind him with art and flute playing, but his troubles continued until one evening, he ran after a man whom he had either thought had broken into his apartment to steal things, or someone who was an Irishman bent on revenge for the branding incident..
The man started to run and Minor shot three times - missing his first shot, but wounding the man twice in the neck with the last two,. Hearing the shots the police ran to the site where Minor gave himself up realizing he was mistaken and shot the wrong person - this man was a brewery stoker named George Merrett, and he left behind a widow and two children.
Minor was found innocent by reason of insanity and placed in the asylum "Until her majesty's pleasure be known"
While in the asylum he had the use of two cells, a couple of menservants and a rather impressive library of books at his disposal - he even had frequent visitations from the widow of the man he shot to death - and she would bring him even more books and things. Spying the notice for the Oxford Dictionary project he began to mail hundreds of slips of definitions and even thousands by 1880.

Murray's visit went surprisingly well, and the two struck up a friendship, but Minor's mental health deteriorated and in 1902, in a fit of delusional guilt he sliced off his own penis in an effort to curb his sexual interests in women. Murray eventually arranged passage for Minor to go back to the states to be closer to his brother in Connecticut. where he steadily declined in health and died in 1920 from a respiratory infection.

Murray's health also was in decline but he worked on the dictionary until he could no longer do so, and died in 1915 of pleurisy.

Neither one saw the completion of the dictionary, but together I think they finished 6 volumes - which turned out to be about half of the final product.

Inventors, Scientists, and Dreamers

Where would we be without our inventors scientists and dreamers? I don't know, maybe still living in caves banging rocks together to try and start a fire? Some experiments bring brilliant advances, while others are complete failures of folly. It doesn't matter which really, there are some things that look good on paper, but just don't go as planned.

People killed by their own discoveries and inventions

I told you about Thomas Midgley - who was strangled by a complex pulley system used to help his aides move him around in bed. The invention worked, and no one is exactly sure if he committed suicide with it, or was merely a victim of his own reckless genius.
But to be sure, he was killed by his own invention.

I also bet that Madame Marie Curie comes to mind - famed Polish chemist and physicist, she was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the only woman to win in two fields, and the only person to win in two different fields. Unfortunately she did not patent any of her work and did not financially gain from her long hours of study and dedication. She died in 1934 of aplastic anemia ( where bone marrow stops replenishing itself) due to the many hours of exposure to the radioactive materials, which in her time was not protected against, because of the unknown danger that later spawned protective gear for those who work with such substances.

And it's possible that some history buffs will be familiar with the name Horace Lawson Hunley - Inventor of some of the first true man powered submarines, after two failures his third vessel was produced and named the H.L. Hunley - that has been in the news because it was only found several years ago since it went down after a successful mission to sink the USS Housitanic in the Civil War.
Hunley didn't go on that trip though, on a test run he decided to command the vessel, in spite of not having been assigned to do so, and the vessel sank killing all on board - the Hunley was recovered and all were given burial with military honors in 1863 - then they refit the submarine and went on the actual mission, where it was lost again - not to be found until the late 1970's - since then it has been recovered, the second crew has been laid to rest and the vessel is now at The Warren Lasch Conservation Center in North Charleston, South Carolina.

That also brings to mind Thomas Andrews the brilliant designer of the HMS Titanic - yes, he's the one who designed the hull that got ripped a new one when the ship hit the iceberg. He was right on board with the rest of them. Of course, laxed safety requirements also did their part in limiting the number of lifeboats available to the people on board as well. Cost cutting at its finest.

Oh, by the way, James Heselden doesn't count - he did not invent the Segway - that two wheeled personal people mover - he merely bought the company then drove one off a cliff. There was however a General Electric inventor who invented a new way to motorize bicycles in 1903 and then fell off his prototype and died.

There have been a slew of inventors in aviation who were killed by their own devices
Abu Nasr Isma'il ibn Hammad al-Jawhari died around 1008 after strapping two wooden wings and a rope to himself and jumping off a mosque.
Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier crashed a type of hot air balloon that could fly long trips - he crashed near the Pas-de-Calais attempting an English Channel crossing in 1785.
Otto Lilienthal crashed a hang glider of his own design in 1896
And Franz Reichelt in 1912 had members of the press gathered and was filming sort of a newsreel type of footage on the day he was going to test a coat-parachute invention he was working on - he told the press he was going to test using a dummy, but suddenly jumped off the first deck of the Eiffel Tower to the pavement below - this short clip you can actually find online, but the film stops before he hits. The parachute did not even slow his decent.


Alexander Bogdanov - tried some transfusion experiments, apparently to recapture his youth, and died when he transfused blood from a student suffering from malaria and tuberculosis - but it may have been just the wrong blood type - something not fully understood in 1928.

Some scientists died from acute radiation poisoning within days of experimenting with what was later called "The Demon Core"
I don't pretend to know all the details but there was a core of about 14 pounds in a sub critical state - part of the experiment was to make an encasement for the core that needed precision to handle, and to make the core create the first steps of a fission reaction without causing it to go critical and set off lethal bursts. These were called neutron reflection experiments the idea was to reduce the mass while keeping the strength of the core.
Working alone Harry Daghlian, first tried to encase the core with tungsten carbide bricks by hand while listening to his instrumentation. One more brick was to be placed when he realized that that would make the core go too far - he accidentally dropped the brick, causing it to near super-critical - he found that he had to manually disassemble the brick pile to stop the reaction, and with the resulting does of radiation he died 25 days later.

Nine months later working on the same core, while using beryllium spheres for the casing, Louis Slotin used a screwdriver to keep the separation where it needed to be while he used his other hand to lower the upper sphere. He had performed this a dozen times sort of like a magician to the display of observers - this time he had 7 observes as the screwdriver slipped and he dropped the sphere onto the core, causing a super-critical reaction yet again with the Demon Core. He quickly knocked the top sphere to the floor, but the damage was done. Some of the observers were shielded by his body, but within 20 years some of them had died partially from the event. Slotin died 9 days after the event - and hands on experimentation was suspended in favor of remote manipulations. The Demon Core was used the first post WW2 test of a bomb.
There's a famous rumor that Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was executed by the device that now bears his name. He did not invent it, it was his suggestion as a form of punishment, but it was invented by Antoine Louis. Nor did he die by the invention - he died of natural causes.

Li Si has a different tale to tell - Prime minister of the Qin dynasty of China up until 208BC invented the punishment called The Five Pains. This capital punishment called for the condemned to have their nose cut off, followed by a hand, and then a foot. Next was castration, and finally the condemned was sliced in half. Yes, this was how he died in 208BC.

I want to include the story of inventor Perillos of Athens 550BC because his invention was used on him first, but he was actually thrown off a hill afterward.
He was requested to build a Brazen Bull that Phalaris of Sicily, an exceptionally cruel ruler fond of torture, had asked him to make.
This was a hollow statue of a bull that had tubes inside to carry sounds to the outside that sounded melodious and bull-like. Unfortunately for the victim inside, the reason for all the noise was their screaming because the bull was set over a fire and the person inside roasted. I think the ruler had intended this for party entertainment, but he ordered it tested by the inventor, he was certainly roasted and sound did come out of the mouth of the bull, and the smell was of incense to mask the burning flesh. They took him out before he died and tossed him off that hill. In any case, wonderfully entertaining. If you're into that sort of thing.

Speaking of entertainment, Karel Soucek designed a barrel to go over Niagara Falls and in 1984 he was successful but bloody after doing so.
He then convinced backers to let him try another stunt a 180 foot fall into a tank of water - from the top of the Huston Astrodome. The barrel started spinning shortly after release and hit the rim of the water tank, splintering into several pieces. He was still alive when the pulled him out of the wreck and the stunt show continued, and he had been warned by no less than Evil Kinevel not to do the stunt - he died the next day January 20, 1985.

So hats off to the inventors and dreamers, the discoverers of tomorrow.

As I had suspected, no court on President's Day. So as promised....

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.

Macbeth, by William Shakespeare circa 1608

The Malleus Maleficarum (Witches Hammer) 1486 by Heinrich Kramer,
(a witch hunter's guide - more on that in a later post)

The belief in witches has been around for a long, long time, magic has always been intriguing to mankind probably since the beginning. The words , witch and witchcraft, have their origins seeded probably sometime before the year 900.
Why the belief in witches? If you did not believe in such things as the Devil and witches and spirits - then conversely, you did not believe in God. And devoutly religious people would have none of that - you would be branded a Heretic.

When I say witches, most of you probably think of Salem, Massachusetts first, and it is that set of circumstances that I will be writing about now.
Salem is not the first outbreak of accusations in America, but it is the most famous as countless plays and movies have dramatized the basics of the story. However, the truth is somewhat different from most of those accounts.
The trials actually took place in various townships and not just Salem Village (now Danvers), but also included Ipswich, Andover, and Salem Town as well. But even those places were not the very beginning - the first instance which probably influenced events in Salem was the accusations leveled against Ann Glover (also known as Goody Glover). She was the last person hanged in Boston due to witchcraft accusations by the Goodwin children in 1688.
By the next year, Cotton Mather a Puritan minister and prolific publisher, had written a book entitled Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possession
In the times there was quite a bit of religious disagreement between Protestants, Calvinists, and Puritans. They did not like the trappings of other religions =,and resisted vestments, crosses, and any of the other trappings that smacked of "popery".
Children's toys and dolls were not allowed because they were a waste of time, singing was not allowed unless you were signing unaccompanied approved hymns. Popular songs which glorified love and nature were against god, children were only taught religious lessons, and the adults were expected to attend 3 hour sermons every Wednesday and Sunday - all life revolved around the church meetinghouse.
The town had gone through two or three ministers amid all the bickering and disagreement of property lines, grazing rights, and other dealings between the town and village of Salem.
Enter Reverend Samuel Parris from Boston, their first ordained minister. Being from Boston, he no doubt had a copy of Mather's Memorable Provinces with him. The town council gave him a sweetheart deal in order to keep him.
Parris was hired for ₤66 annually - one third in money, and two thirds in provisions. Provisions not only included food but also a steady firewood supply - imperative for surviving the cold winters, and the use of the parsonage.
Later, on October 10, 1689, they voted to give him the deed to the parsonage and an two acres of land to sweeten the deal. Unfortunately, this caused many to argue even more because they said that the parsonage could not be deeded to a person or persons, because it was unlawful to deed property of the Ministry by vote or any other means. And the offer was rescinded.
Parris was not a negotiator and pretty much caused more aggravation by using inquisitor-like activity to make parishioners in good standing to pay penance for the smallest of infractions. He would stick around and make himself useful to the God fearing population.
In the winter of 1692 Betty Parris (age 9), and her cousin Abigail Williams (age 11) - the daughter and niece of Samuel Parris and living under his roof, began to exhibit fits "beyond epileptic fits, or natural disease" said a minister from nearby Beverly.
The girls screamed, threw things about the room, uttered strange sounds, crawled under furniture, and contorted themselves into peculiar positions.

How curious that this would mirror events from Boston in Cotton Mather's book, of which Reverend Parris owned a copy, and even more curious that those afflicted also lived in the reverend's care.... Hmmmm.

They also claimed to being pricked with many pins, but a doctor could find nothing physically wrong with the two children. Shortly thereafter, more girls from the village exhibited fits in the middle of sermons by former reverend of the town Deodat Lawson in the meeting house. I am assuming that Lawson was preaching due to the conflict with Parris, who was not being paid at the time. The townspeople were trying to get the Parris family to leave, but they resisted.

The first three arrested were Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and Tituba..
Sarah Good was not so good it seems, she was called filthy, was mostly a loner in town, and had curiously been around near the time some livestock was found dead.
Sarah Osborne was somewhat of a meddler she tried to control her son's inheritance from a previous marriage, in her new marriage she was with an indentured servant which also seemed distasteful to others, she rarely attended church as well - in fact she had been sick and hadn't attended in three years. Add this to the fact that one of the new accusers was 12 year old Anna Putnam - there had been a long standing feud between the Putnams and Porter families. Osbourne's first husband had been related to the Porters by marriage.
Tituba was a slave belonging to Reverend Parris - her origins are hard to establish but she certainly did not come from where everyone else did - and it was easy to accuse her of dabbling in black magic. It was thought that she had used information in the Malleous Maleficarum (which was apparently a book specially ordered by Parris) to scare the girls.

Wild tales of nightly meetings with strange creatures conjured in the night were gotten out of Tituba, as well as more accusations of other townspeople. It's quite possible she was directed to say these things by her master Reverend Parris.
Sarah Good denied the charges against her (including a claim someone saw her fly across the sky). She was declared guilty and hanged.
Sarah Osbourne who also plead innocent, died in confinement and judgment had not yet been passed.
Tituba , who had confessed was imprisoned for a time and later released - no record of her after that exists, but she was not executed.

Martha Corey, Dorothy Good and Rebecca Nurse in Salem Village, and Rachel Clinton in nearby Ipswich. were accused next.
Martha Cory being accused surprised many because she was thought to be very pious. But she disbelieved the veracity first accusations and voiced her opinion - and thus, became a target for the girls. Cory was found guilty and also hanged.
Dorothy Good was only 4 and a half when she underwent interrogation and gave up her mother under pressure - Dorothy was imprisoned for a while but released, and temporarily had a mental breakdown from which she did eventually recover.
Rebecca Nurse (age 77) was involved in land disputes with the Putnam family. When she went to trial she proclaimed herself to be "as innocent as the child unborn" she was found guilty and hanged.
Rachel Clinton had been convicted of an extra marital affair, and deemed to be "unclean and suspicious of other evil acts". After release she was forced to beg for money to support herself and what followed were the accusations (one of which was the ability to shape shift into such creatures as a dog and a turtle) - she died destitute in 1695.

In all about 24 people were executed or died in prison. One, Giles Corey, was pressed to death because he refused to enter a plea of guilty or innocent. That meant that he was taken to a field, laid down with a board placed upon him, and heavy rocks were piled on one by one to try to gain a plea - the only plea Corey made was "More weight!"

The last trial was held in 1693, but public debate about what had happened and how proceedings had been carried out continued until 1695 when compensation and restitution were talked about. Petitions were filed by 1700 to 1709. and at first only those named in the petitions were addressed. By 1711 money was authorized to be divided between 22 petitioners families, 578 pounds 12 shillings. Eight others were not compensated because they were not named on the petition. It wasn't until 1718 that all legal entanglements had been taken care of.

There is another theory that has been around for years - it involved rye bread that had developed mold called claviceps purpurea from which LSD is derived, but I don't think it could cause that much hysteria for so long.

Today features more brain farts!
She drops his camera, he apparently runs after her, she runs through his closet, gets the gun he 'supposedly' stored there - and shoots, he keeps coming, tackles her, she gets away and the next thing she remembers is dropping the knife next to his dead body.

:rolleyes: pull the other one now

Exactly.

Doctor Drew said PTSD can happen like that but I don't think it's probable in this case.
I did hear of a case where someone had a bad sleepwalking problem, and actually got in the car and drove to his in-law's house and murdered both of them - but I don't believe Arias.

All day she didn't seem to complain or mind doing what they were doing - in those pictures she didn't look unhappy either.
Travis used to go to the shooting range with friends and always borrowed guns from them. There is a film of them and Alexander is shooting one of those assault rifles. He had a friend who was an NRA instructor - why would he by a little .25 for protection?
It's pretty much a deterrent type of weapon - hold it aimed at someone and they usually won't want to get shot - even by a .25.
It is from what I read, more appropriate for shooting little varmints.

Anyway, instead of running down the hall and out the door (she says Travis caught her trying to run out of there a year earlier) she turns left into the closet and makes a B-line for the gun?
Oh, and "the gun went off, I didn't even think I had my finger on the trigger, and I thought the bullet hit the wall, I didn't mean to shoot him"
Yeah.

So after she shot him in the face the bullet went in above the eye and lodged in the opposite cheek - he yells "****ing ***** I'll kill you" Unlikely.

She "doesn't remember" the knife attacks - stabbing him 9 times in the back and 20 times in the chest - or slitting his throat so deeply his head was half way off.
She remembers dropping the knife next to his dead body in the bathroom and letting out a scream. She "doesn't remember dragging his body into the shower, or putting two loads of laundry in the wash - including the camera. She doesn't remember trynig to clean up the crime scene. She remembers putting the knife in the dishwasher.

Next thing she remembers is driving down the road, getting rid of the gun in the desert, and stopping to clean up - ok if she didn't clean up until after leaving, why is there not a blood trail in other parts of the house?
Oh yeah, her shoes were missing too I guess.

Next thing she does is try to act like it didn't happen, she didn't want anyone to know what she did. She said she felt she couldn't tell anyone because she was trying to "Save Travis' reputation" - during her testimony though she had a pity party about her own life being over.
Doesn't sound like she thought it was a justified killing then huh?

She waited until she was contacted with the news, and then called the police to "offer her help" and lied over and over to them from the start. She was also fishing for information to see what they had found.
She went to his memorial to make an appearance to make everything seem normal, and threw in that she felt Travis' presence, and that "he was in a better place and forgave her" - how insulting to his family huh?

She kept on saying she wanted to die, and had made plans for suicide before she was arrested, and tried to slit her wrists in jail - yeah, didn't try hard enough.
Her testimony ended strangely with all the lies she told after being arrested - weak ending.

So today I guess it will be the prosecution's turn to cross examine and poke holes in her story.

The unbelievable case of Marybeth Tinning

Marybeth Roe was born in the small town of Duanesburg, NY.
here she attended school there along with her brother. Something was wrong with Marybeth, but in the 1940's in a small town things were handled differently than they should be today. Marybeth though, had tried to kill herself several times.

After high school she worked in several low wage jobs, but in 1963 she became a nurse's aide. She met Joe Tinning on a blind date and two years later they were married.
In their first five years of marriage, they had two kids - Barbara, and Joseph Jr,
Marybeth's father died if a sudden heart attack in 1971. And Marybeth had a third child, Jennifer in December of 1971 - Jennifer died in January of 1972 at Schenectady Hospital . This death was not investigated because the baby had been sick and didn't go home from the hospital. They diagnosed her with meningitis
The rapid succession of the death of her father and her baby, seemed to set Marybeth off - many people described her as strange, but she withdrew more after this happened.

Seventeen days later, Marybeth rushed Joseph Jr. to the hospital, telling them that he had had some type of seizure. They found nothing wrong with the child and sent him home. A few hours later Marybeth was back, and she said she put Joseph down for a nap and found him tangled in the sheets all blue - Joseph was dead.

Just about 3 weeks later, Marybeth was back in the emergency room with her daughter Barbara (age 4 by now) saying she had gone into convulsions - the doctors wanted her to stay overnight for observation, but Marybeth insisted on taking her back home. As with Joseph she rushed Barbara back to the hospital unconscious. The child died later in the hospital of unknown causes. A rare not really understood malady called Reyes Syndrome was suspected, but never proven.

On Thanksgiving Day 1973 Marybeth gave birth to Timothy. Three weeks later Marybeth would bring him to the hospital telling doctors she found him dead in his crib. The death would be chalked up to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) - something that is not really fully understood even today.

In 1975 on Easter, Nathan was born. Six months later Marybeth would be back in the emergency room carrying Nathan - she said she was in the car driving and glanced at the baby only to find him dead - this was also diagnosed as SIDS.
In 1978 the Tinnings were making arrangements to adopt a child, About this same time Marybeth became pregnant again.
They went ahead with the adoption and baby Michael joined the family, a couple months later Mary Frances was born.

January 1978 Marybeth showed up at the ER directly across the street from their current home, with an unconscious Mary Frances (another seizure). The doctors were successful in reviving the baby, In February Marybeth was back with a brain dead Mary Frances - no saving her this time - another SIDS death.
After Mary Frances was laid to rest, Marybeth was again pregnant and gave birth to her seventh child, Jonathan in November of 1980.

In March of that year, Jonathan was brought to the ER by Marybeth unconscious, but like Mary Frances, he was revived. They sent him to Boston to be thoroughly examined and could find nothing wrong, and he was sent home - a few days later he was back in the ER. Brain Dead.
Less than a year later 2 and a half adopted Michael was brought in dead, same excuse. Well that event eliminated some kind of genetic theory.

In August of 1985, Marybeth gave birth to Tami Lynne - her 8th biological child.
Marybeth went shopping in mid December with a next door neighbor (who was a nurse)
Later that day, Marybeth made a frantic call to the neighbor, who rushed over to find an unresponsive baby on the changing table. Tami Lynne was pronounced dead at the ER.

Under police interrogation, Marybeth confessed to smothering three of her children, but recanted her confession of one of the three later .
She was sentenced to twenty years to life for Tami Lynne's death, she has been denied parole three times and is up for a review this year.

Münchausen syndrome by proxy - Marybeth was doing this to each of her children for the attention and sympathy it brought her.

Well, I'm back after a hospital stay. I really haven't watched too much TV over the last two weeks, and I can't believe where the Arias Trial has gone.
I didn't hear the Park Ranger story (probably a good thing), and the questioning day after day is getting monotonous.
I keep thinking "ok let's get past this and listen to the 'expert' testimony from specialists who probably didn't even examine her anyway"

Arias' story is beyond ridiculous - and she conveniently doesn't have any real details for anything she's not sure how the evidence fits.

The self defense plea did not fit to begin with - 1) you have a duty to retreat
This did not happen - she decided to go for the gun (in her story) and not flee down the hall because she "got caught running down the hall the year before"
2) Force used to defend oneself must equal the force one perceives is being used against them.
She suffered possibly (again according to her) bruises due to being slammed onto the floor, and an injured finger.
Meanwhile - he's got 2 dozen stab wounds, a slit throat, and a bullet to the face.

I don't think the jury buys it anymore anyway from the tone of the 200+ questions they had for her. (Arizona is one of three states that allows the jury to ask their own questions as long as they are previewed by the judge and found relevant.