Lona Manning

January 1, 2007

Interstate 40 and the Arkansas River May 26, 2002

They can look you in the eye, win your trust and melt your heart. They can lie about the past, the present, and the future. They are chameleons, changing names and identities as easily as we change our outfits.

by Lona Manning

They are conmen and women. They are sociopaths.

Some of the names of the victims in this article have been changed or withheld to protect their privacy.

April 3, 2003 Updated  Feb. 6, 2004

John Schneeberger

It's said that the Royal Canadian Mounties always get their man -- but in this case justice was delayed for seven years, and the doctor might never have answered for his crimes if it hadn't been for one very determined young woman who knew that her doctor had drugged her, raped her, and somehow had managed to falsify his DNA to escape prosecution.

by Lona Manning

For an instant, Candice Foley didn't know where she was when she woke up that morning. She wasn't in her own bed. Or on a friend's sofa. She was in a hospital bed. And while she was familiar with how it felt to wake up with a hangover, this was also different – she felt spaced out, a little woozy. Had she been in a car accident or something?

What was the last thing she remembered? She closed her eyes tightly and tried to recall all the events of the previous night. She'd been at her job at the gas station, and was in a bad mood, because it was Halloween night and she was stuck behind a counter. Her boyfriend had come by. Something he said caused her to flare up, one thing led to another, and soon Candice had lost her temper completely. She was so angry that she had grabbed her purse and jacket, jumped into her car and screeched away. At the time she had felt she could have killed her boyfriend, but their fight seemed so distant and unimportant now.

January 15, 2006

Photo credit: New York World-Telegram and Sun archives, Library of Congress.

Long before 9/11 became the date most identified with terrorism, New York's Wall Street District suffered through a massive bombing on September 16, 1920 that shocked the world. Italian anarchists orchestrated the bombing five days after Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were indicted on charges of first-degree murder.

by Lona Manning

Prologue

Out of a clear blue sky, a deadly terrorist attack in New York City brought grief and outrage. Initially, the country rallied in a wave of patriotism and vowed revenge on the perpetrators. But critics said that the government was using the terrorist threat as an excuse to curtail civil liberties. They warned that aggressive action against the terrorists would only provoke more violence and was harming America's reputation in Europe. And some charged that the president was just a puppet and the decisions were really being made by a handful of government officials who lied and twisted intelligence reports to carry out their repressive agenda. Supporters of the government policy countered that these critics were aiding and abetting the enemy while posing as champions of free speech. Strong measures were needed to crush a dangerous enemy, not naïve and craven appeasement.

The year was 1920.

March 4, 2007

More than seven decades after his execution for committing "the crime of the century," Bruno Richard Hauptmann still has his defenders and sympathizers.

by Lona Manning

As Bruno Richard Hauptmann counted down the days to his execution at the State Prison in Trenton, N.J., his wife Anna went on the lecture circuit, asking her fellow German immigrants to donate to the Hauptmann defense fund. Her husband was not guilty of the "Crime of the Century," she pleaded -- he had not kidnapped and murdered the little Lindbergh baby.

Many checks were mailed directly to Hauptmann at the Death House. He realized that the donors who sent only one dollar didn't necessarily believe in his innocence, they wanted him to endorse the check so they could have the autograph of the man condemned for killing the child of the world-famous aviator, Charles Lindbergh.

But he's acquired a host of new supporters in the decades since he died in the electric chair. Conspiracy theories abound about the Lindbergh kidnapping case, and many people unfamiliar with – or dismissive of – the evidence, believe Hauptmann was framed.

March 23, 2004

Who are they? These images are a sampling of unidentified victims profiled on The Doe Network.

There are thousands of unnamed corpses in the United States, so-called John and Jane Does who have turned up over the last few decades in woods, rivers, alleys and dumpsters without any identification. An Internet-based group of volunteers who call themselves The Doe Network is working to name the nameless.

by Lona Manning

Todd Matthews has always known where he belongs. His home is in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, where the soft-spoken 33-year-old lives with his wife and two young sons. Home is where the ties to his past are as close as the quiet graveyard where his ancestors are buried. "I was born, live and work in a three-mile radius," Matthews explains. This may be why, he surmises, he is obsessed with helping people who are lost. Specifically, dead people who are lost.

Matthews's consuming passion is to investigate and identify "John Does," the anonymous corpses that are found in woods, rivers, by riverbanks, in alleys, and dumpsters throughout the country. There are over 5,400 John or Jane Does registered with the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), an FBI clearinghouse in West Virginia. There are thousands more cases -- nobody is sure how many -- reduced to a thin file folder, a box of bones in the evidence room, a nagging memory in the back of a retired detective's mind. Often, but not always, Does are the victims of foul play. Sometimes they took a wrong turn in life, becoming involved in drugs and crime. But, says Matthews, "No matter who they are, even no matter what they've done in life, you've got to think they're all God's children."

Updated January 14, 2007

Kelly Michaels

The Wee Care case that sentenced Kelly Michaels to prison for 47 years was typical of the child-abuse hysteria that gripped the United States in the 1980s. At the peak of the frenzy of the great day-care witch hunt, it was the day-care workers, not the preschoolers, who were at risk. As the preschoolers, urged on by overzealous social workers, child therapists and prosecutors, told their incredible stories of sexual abuse and satanic rituals in courtrooms across the United States, scores of innocent people were sent off to prison. Some are still there.

by Lona Manning

"The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters"

Kelly Michaels never intended to become a preschool teacher -- she had taken fine arts and drama in college -- but she wanted to live near New York City and was looking for something to pay the rent when she applied at Wee Care Day Care in Maplewood, N.J. Although Kelly doubted if she had the qualifications, the director, Arlene Spector, had been encouraging and had persuaded her to give it a try. Once hired, Kelly was quickly promoted from teacher's aide to preschool teacher.

Kelly, then 23 years old, found that the children responded well to her. She was the oldest child in a large family and she'd done a lot of babysitting. Even without special training, Kelly knew what little children liked, what songs and games made them laugh, how to soothe their upsets, and settle their quarrels. But Kelly grew dissatisfied with Wee Care and complained that the teachers were expected to do too much without enough support and supervision. She decided to look for another job.

Although she knew that it was upsetting for little children when their teachers -- with whom they'd formed a bond -- came and went, Kelly accepted a teacher's job at the Community Day Nursery in East Orange, N.J., where she shared an apartment with a roommate. Community Day Nursery was a nicer facility -- larger, lighter, airier -- than Wee Care where the kids were stuck in the basement of a stone church and had to traipse down a long hall and up a flight of stairs to go to the restrooms.

On May 6, 1985, as Kelly was getting ready for work, she must have felt that her life was beginning to take shape and direction. She had fallen into the other day-care job, but this one she had chosen.

Then came the knock on the door of her apartment. It was just after 7 a.m.

A police sergeant and an investigator, both men, stood in the doorway. They were looking for Margaret Kelly Michaels. Could she come down to the prosecutor's office for questioning? Bewildered and concerned, Kelly went to the prosecutor's office where she was told she was suspected of sexually touching three of the little boys at the Wee Care Day Care. Kelly was shocked and horrified and as the questioning continued, she began to cry:

Updated Oct. 16, 2006

Mary and Robert Halsey

The courtroom testimony of twin 8-year-old boys – a concoction of fantasy and fear – led to a life sentence for Robert Halsey in 1993. In 2004 the National Center for Reason and Justice took up his case, but all of its appeals have been denied and the Massachusetts Supreme Court has denied Halsey's Application for Further Appellate Review. Now in his 70s and in failing health, the former bus driver will most likely die in prison, a victim of the child sexual-abuse hysteria that put him there.

by Lona Manning

Robert Halsey is in prison in Massachusetts. He's in his 70s, in poor health and he's been behind bars since 1993. Officially, he was convicted of sexual assault on children, but in another sense, he was convicted of being the bogeyman. His trial transcript makes for chilling reading -- and not for the reason you might expect. It raises the frightening possibility that an innocent person was accused and convicted of a childish concoction of fantasy and fear.

Halsey lived with his wife Mary in a modest house in the town of Lanesboro, in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. He was an uncomplicated man. When he was younger and in better shape he enjoyed hunting and fishing. But as he entered his 60s, he was more likely to settle down in front of the television after a day of driving the school bus. His wife was more likely to be bustling around in the evening as Halsey, like many men of his generation, neither cooked nor cleaned. Mary Halsey relates how one evening, when she was working late in her craft room, her husband brought her a bowl of fruit cocktail. She was amazed that her husband had managed to find the can opener -- and that it had even occurred to him to be so thoughtful. It wasn't that he was a selfish man, but he was a man of limited imagination.

The Halseys had a grown daughter, but no grandchildren. "Children were very precious beings to both of us," says Mrs. Halsey. Her husband talked about the kids on his bus route "all the time," she recalled. "He enjoyed the kids, we always talked about them -- the things they said, if they did something funny."

In the fall of 1990, Beverly Walker arranged for bus service for her twin sons, who were entering a half-day kindergarten program at the local elementary school. The family lived on a winding, steep, dirt road, where no regular school bus could go, so the bus company (after some reluctance), bought a four-wheel-drive passenger van. Robert Halsey was the children's bus driver. Although Halsey picked up other children who lived on the outskirts of town, for a portion of his route, the twins were his only passengers.

He grew particularly fond of them. When the gas station was giving away Matchbox cars with every fill up, Halsey saved them to give to the boys, Jason and Justin Walker (all children's names and other identifying details concerning them have been changed). The Walker twins are teenagers now, but when they were 8 years old, they played a key role in sending Robert Halsey to prison, where he will most probably die.

How did Robert Halsey become the bogeyman of Lanesboro?