The Child Protection eNewsletter

Police “suspect Madeleine’s mother”...

Portuguese police believe the mother of missing four-year-old Madeleine McCann is involved in her death, a family spokeswoman has said. http://news.bbc.co.uk/ Justine McGuinness said officers believed that traces of Madeleine's blood were in the McCanns' car, hired 25 days after she vanished. Earlier, Kate McCann arrived for her second police interview in 24 hours.

She was named a suspect, or "arguida", by police. Her husband Gerry described the claims as "ludicrous". The "suspect" status will allow the authorities to put certain questions to her, and also gives her the right to remain silent.

Samples, including suspected traces of blood, have been recovered from the McCanns' holiday apartment. The UK's Forensic Science Service has spent the past month analyzing them. Portuguese police spokesman Chief Inspector Olegario Sousa said partial results from tests had been received, but would give no further details.

Last week, the McCanns launched a libel action against a Portuguese newspaper which reported that "police believed" the couple killed Madeleine, with the paper suggesting she may have died in an accident.

For the latest news on this breaking story, check http://news.sky.com/ and http://www.timesonline.co.uk/.

Baltimore County dad catches predator hiding in son’s room…

A Baltimore County, Maryland man found a sexual predator hiding in son’s room. Read More

Brian Jarrell was heading to his kitchen for a middle-of-the-night glass of water when he noticed a chemical odor seeping from his 9-year-old son's room. The Dundalk father checked on the boy and a younger daughter also sleeping in the room. http://www.baltimoresun.com/ And then he saw a figure hiding behind the door of an armoire.

The man fled, but Jarrell chased him down. Later, Jarrell found a rag doused in a chemical where his son had been sleeping. "I just got sick," the father said yesterday, "because I realized he was after my son."

Richard Lewis Marks, the man charged in this case has an arrest record of burglaries involving sex offenses against boys going back three decades and was accused of a similar crime in the same neighborhood 16 years ago, according to police and court records. http://www.baltimoresun.com/ He was accused in 1991 of entering a Dundalk home through an unlocked door and waking a teenage boy, according to a report released yesterday by Baltimore County police. In that instance, Marks was accused of forcing the boy to undress and performing a sex act on him, according to the police report.

Marks pleaded guilty to burglary in exchange for a sentence of 25 years without parole, and the sex offense charges against him were dropped. He remained in prison until April of this year when he was transferred to home detention and returned to his mother's Dundalk house in the 1900 block of Guy Way. He was released by the state prison system April 30.

Marks, starting in the early 1970s, was arrested "several times for burglaries involving sexual offenses on juvenile male victims," according to charging documents filed Tuesday. In several cases, Marks - who has spent all but about nine months of the past 33 years in prison - broke into homes late at night, woke boys and performed sex acts on them, police wrote in the charging documents.

Court files containing more detailed accounts of the allegations against Marks in his 1974 and 1975 cases have been destroyed. But docket entries that remain at the courthouse reveal that he was, at age 16, convicted of burglary and assault. A Baltimore County jury acquitted him of assault with intent to rape. He was sentenced to eight years in prison.

Federal bankruptcy judge considers throwing San Diego Diocese bankruptcy case out…

When the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego filed for bankruptcy six months ago, it hoped to find shelter from potentially embarrassing and costly lawsuits from people claiming they were sexually abused by priests. Read More Instead, the church opened itself up to an unprecedented public examination of its financial affairs and to withering criticism from a judge.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Louise DeCarl Adler has used her authority to interrogate church staff, order audits and, in the most recent blow, return individual cases to state court control for immediate trials.

Now Adler is considering throwing out the whole case -- a move that would leave the diocese where it was in February, with little choice but to settle or risk going to trial.

Mediation proceedings were to continue Thursday before a federal magistrate judge, and Adler delayed a hearing until Tuesday on the dismissal to allow for more negotiations.

San Diego was the fifth U.S. diocese to seek bankruptcy protection, and with nearly 1 million Catholics, it was by far the largest and wealthiest. The decision automatically suspended civil trials and at least temporarily shielded the church from testimony about what officials knew about the abuse.

At the time, Bishop Robert Brom told parishioners he believed bankruptcy court would be a neutral venue to reach a settlement that would fairly compensate about 150 alleged victims but leave church assets intact.

It has proven to be a noisy forum. Attorneys for people claiming abuse have repeatedly accused the church of lying, forum shopping and abusing the bankruptcy process. In return, church attorneys have claimed they're being victimized by greedy lawyers.

Adler, an experienced bankruptcy judge, has been a stern taskmaster. She has chastised the church for maintaining "Byzantine" records and commented that the diocese had more accounts than billion-dollar corporations that have come before her. (Read More)

Last month, she rebuked the church for undervaluing real-estate holdings and failing to disclose facts to the court. She said federal statutes would allow the case to be dismissed on grounds of "gross mismanagement" and the diocese's "unexcused failure" in financial reporting.

In other news… 

Warnings from federal regulators four years ago that antidepressants were increasing the risk of suicidal behavior among young people led to a precipitous drop in the use of the drugs. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ Now a new study has found that the drop coincides with an unprecedented increase in the number of suicides among children. From 2003 to 2004, the suicide rate among Americans younger than 19 rose 14 percent, the most dramatic one-year change since the government started collecting suicide statistics in 1979, the study found. The rise followed a sharp decrease in the prescribing of antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil after parents and physicians were confronted by a barrage of warnings from the Food and Drug Administration and international agencies. The data suggest that for every 20 percent decline in antidepressant use among patients of all ages in the United States, an additional 3,040 suicides per year would occur, said Robert Gibbons, a professor of biostatistics and psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who did the study. About 32,000 Americans commit suicide each year.

A federal judge struck down part of an Ohio law barring convicted sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of a school, saying offenders can remain in their homes if their crimes were committed before the law went into effect. Read More Judge James S. Gwin in Akron ruled that the law cannot be applied to anyone who committed a crime before July 31, 2003, the effective date of the Ohio Legislature's ban. The legal challenge was filed on behalf of Lane Mikaloff, now 39, who served 16 years in prison for raping a woman in 1986. Mikaloff received an eviction notice in 2005 from the sheriff's office because of his home's proximity to a public school in Akron.

Nevada authorities arrested a Bend, Oregon man after they said his 2-year-old daughter was found alone in a car parked at the Mustang Ranch brothel. http://www.kptv.com/ The brothel’s security guard found the child crying. Storey County deputies said they believe the child was left in the vehicle for two hours in 95-degree heat. Deputies said they found the girl’s father, Lucien Hoffman, inside the brothel attending a private function when they arrived.

A Virginia teenager was charged with killing and raping his sister and beating his niece with a sledgehammer in a crime the sheriff called one of the most brutal he's ever seen. http://www.foxnews.com/ Walter Smith Jr., 16, was charged with the first-degree murder and rape of his 22-year-old sister, Betsy Mary Smith, and aggravated assault against his 2-year-old niece, Andrea Costello. Smith was charged after he recounted the events to Spotsylvania detectives, said Sheriff Howard Smith. Based on Walter Smith's accounts, police said Betsy Smith was beaten with a sledgehammer and stabbed before being raped. When Costello began crying, she was struck in the head with a sledgehammer. Betsy Smith, Costello and a 1-year-old boy were then locked inside the room.

We remember the bad times better than the good because our emotions influence how we process memories, a new review of research shows. Read More Memories are generally prone to distortion over time, but researchers have found some evidence to suggest that emotional memories are more resistant to the decay processes that wear away at all memories with time, says review author Elizabeth Kensinger of Boston College. "It really does matter whether [an event is] positive or negative in that most of the time, if not all of the time, negative events tend to be remembered in a more accurate fashion than positive events," Kensinger said.

A former middle school teacher admitted she had sexual encounters with five teenage boys at her school. http://abcnews.go.com/ Allenna Ward met the boys, 14 and 15 years old, at the Clinton, South Carolina school as well as at a motel, a park and behind a restaurant, according to arrest warrants. Ward pleaded guilty to three counts of second-degree criminal sexual conduct with a minor and three lewd acts on a minor. The remaining five counts will be dropped after sentencing, which will come following an investigation ordered by the court, prosecutor Jerry Peace said. Peace said he will recommend Ward serve 12 years in prison on a suspended 20-year sentence.

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