The Child Protection eNewsletter

Man Gets 421 Years in Bunker Case…

A South Carolina man who admitted to kidnapping a 14-year-old girl and holding her for more than a week in an underground bunker, raping her daily, was sentenced to 421 years in prison for a crime the judge called "repulsive." Read More Vinson Filyaw pleaded guilty moments before his trial to charges of kidnapping and 10 counts of criminal sexual conduct, one for each day prosecutors said he held the girl captive a year ago in Kershaw County.

The teen was rescued after she got hold of Filyaw's cell phone and sent a text message to her mother. (Read More) "I have a strong belief you have forfeited your right to be a member of this society," Judge G. Thomas Cooper said before handing down the sentence. "I can think of no crimes short of murder more repulsive than these." After the hearing, the girl, now 15, said she was happy with the sentence, the maximum allowed. She explained how she survived in the bunker: "Hope," she said, and constantly thinking about "my family; my friends. "She said she kept trying to send text messages, "hoping they would get out to somebody."

The teenager had planned to testify at the sentencing, but officials said she was too emotional to speak. The teen's mother hugged her daughter as the girl's statement was read by a prosecutor in court. She said the ordeal "was every person's worst nightmare ... a nightmare no one should have to endure or survive."

The mother described the fear and sleepless nights the family endured during the search for her daughter. She asked the judge to give Filyaw a long sentence, one that would never allow him to leave prison. "Our daughter will always be a hero to us," she said. "Her bravery and determination to return to us gave her the ability to outsmart her captor."

But the girl's father had hoped for a more severe sentence. "To me it still ain't enough," he said. "It should be a death penalty. He got what he got, but it's not enough to me. They told me not to but I wanted to fly across (the courtroom) and choke him."

Filyaw detailed the crime in writings done from his jail cell, which prosecutors quoted in asking the judge for a harsh sentence. Filyaw said he posed as a police officer when he kidnapped the girl as she walked home from her bus stop. She was chained to a beam in the tiny bunker and raped daily, authorities said. "Like a predator, I waited on one lonely stray to walk by," prosecutor Barney Giese read from Filyaw's manuscript. "My adrenaline was rushing. My plan was to try to arrest the girl quietly, rather than grabbing her and carrying her."

The manuscript consists of series of letters Filyaw wrote to WTXL-TV. Read More In all, five letters and a detailed manuscript were sent to News19.

The following excerpt is from chapter eight, page two of his manuscript, 48 hours before prosecutors say Filyaw would carry out the crime. "I remembered seeing one of the girls from the high school bus go up a wooded driveway," he wrote. "That's when I started thinking, if I could make my way through the woods to her house, I could abduct her from there."

The manuscript goes on to detail much of the following days. The full WTXL story is available online at http://www.wltx.com/.

Case against McCann’s may be falling apart…

The police case against Kate and Gerry McCann suffered a severe setback when a Portuguese prosecutor said that no new evidence had been gathered to justify reinterviewing the couple. Read More Luis Bilro Verão, the lead public prosecutor, said that the police had failed to produce new evidence against the couple during the 13 days since they were made official suspects in the death of their daughter.

In his first official statement, he said that the McCanns remained arguidos, or official suspects, and that the investigation against them continued. He offered new hope to the McCanns by stating that all lines of inquiry were being investigated.

The McCann’s have offered to take lie detector tests in an effort to prove their innocence. Read More They have also hired one of Portugal’s top lawyers to lead their defense team. Read More

Meanwhile, fresh operations in the hunt for Madeleine McCann have been authorized by a Portuguese judge, with police appearing to accept the original belief that she may have been abducted by a stranger. Read More A convicted Dutch terrorist was questioned by detectives about whether he had helped to dispose of the body of the missing girl, as police began a desperate hunt for new clues. Eef Hoos, who owns an incinerator about 20 miles from where Madeleine disappeared, claimed that detectives from the PolÍcia Judiciária said that they knew he had spoken to the missing girl’s parents.

The 61-year-old Dutchman said: “Two officers asked me if I had anything to do with her, and have you spoken to the parents, they asked me three times. They said they knew I had spoken to the parents -- it’s not true….Everything in my furnace -- I have the names of the people and I see what’s in the bags.”

Mr. Hoos, who operates a business called Creon Starlight to dispose of pets in the town of Monchique, moved to Portugal after serving a seven-year sentence in the Netherlands for a series of bomb attacks in 1988 in which one person was seriously injured. He said yesterday: “The police said to me you have a very bad name. I am the biggest bomb-maker in the world.”

PA foster parents kept 5 adopted kids in basement…

Police accused a Lancaster, Pennsylvania couple of imprisoning their five adopted children and two adults under their care in the squalid basement of their home. Read More The children and adults, five of whom have mental or physical disabilities, were kept in the unsanitary basement with little food for a two-month period last year, according to police.

According to court documents, the children, all of whom are boys, would leave the basement only to attend church and school.

The children and two adult women, for whom the Dickinsons were "primary care providers," dined alone in the basement on "meals" that included peanut butter sandwiches for breakfast and something called "doggie dew stew," according to court documents.

One of the boys, who is 14, was confined for 22 hours at a time in a 4-foot-by-5-foot-by-6-foot hand-crafted cement-block cell that his parents called the "toy room." The "room" had no lights, ventilation, food or water, according to court documents.

According to court documents, the couple received subsidies of $9,000 per month for "the care and well-being" of the children and two mentally challenged adults also under their care.

Representatives of the county's Mental Health/Mental Retardation Department had visited the home at least once a year. Read More Representatives of Friendship Community, the agency chosen by the county to contract with the Dickinsons to care for the women, had visited more often than that.

On each occasion, by all accounts, the women appeared to be well adjusted, and the Dickinsons showed visitors separate bedrooms where the two slept in tidy city homes. Inspectors from the state Department of Welfare also found nothing out of place when they toured the house last September.

The Lancaster County District Attorney calls the case shocking. Read More

In other news… 

News Corp.'s MySpace social networking site is using personal details contained on users' profile pages and blogs to sell highly targeted advertising. Read More The Web site started the first phase of its "interest targeting" experiment in July, culling likes and dislikes from its users' pages to sell ads in 10 broad categories such as finance, autos, fashion and music. MySpace advertisers can now get much more than the basic demographic data contained in site registration forms, Peter Levinsohn, who heads Fox Interactive Media, told an investor conference. The site has more than 3 million users in each category and can place ads based on responses to questions about users' likes and dislikes, favorite movies and music. Data is even extracted from blog entries, where users write at length about their lives. Targeting ads well can be lucrative for MySpace and its corporate parent, but it can also backfire if users believe their personal expressions are being misused.

A federal prosecutor from Florida who authorities say flew to Michigan for a sexual encounter with a 5-year-old girl Read More tried to hang himself in his jail cell but was stopped in time, the sheriff said. http://www.foxnews.com/ John D.R. Atchison, 53, used a sheet in an attempted hanging, said Sanilac County Sheriff Virgil Strickler. Another inmate yelled out to jailers, who kept Atchison from hurting himself, Strickler said.

A third teenage has stepped forward with charges of sexual abuse by a Yakima, Washington freshman football coach. http://www.kndu.com/ Randy Saylor was charged with 2 counts of second degree rape of a child. The case continues to take a new spin as more people step forward. The original allegations were filed last Friday, and over the past three days, two new alleged victims have come forward. Two of the boys are 15 and one is 13. Watch the Video

Police pulled a man over for one crime and the suspect's son told them about another. Read More State police pulled the car over on Interstate 79 in Franklin Township, Pennsylvania. The driver, 28-year-old Joshua McClelland, was arrested for DUI. McClelland had two small kids in the car and said he had just come from his wife's house in Bruceton Mills, West Virginia. That's when the suspect's 5-year-old son in the back seat pointed to a bloody knife on the floor and said, "See that knife. Daddy stabbed mommy in the back."

A couple convicted of forcing some of their 11 adopted children to sleep in cages (See Volume 3 issue 52 , Volume 3 issue 53 and Volume 3 issue 54) have sued Huron County, Ohio social workers and other officials in federal court, accusing them of illegally entering their home. Read More Michael and Sharen Gravelle claim in the lawsuit that Huron County social workers and sheriff's deputies violated their constitutional rights when their special-needs children were removed from the home in 2005. The officials had received a tip about children sleeping in cages. The Gravelles were each sentenced in February to two years in prison for child endangering and child abuse. Volume 5 issue 12 The Gravelles have filed appeals on all charges and are free on bond until they are exhausted, which could take a year or longer.

The Australian Education Department has investigated claims a six-year-old student ran a "sex club" at an eastern suburban primary school, involving up to up to half a dozen first grade students. http://www.theage.com.au/ One mother said her son, also six, was asked to perform a sex act, and that the alleged perpetrator also exposed his genitals to students. Following an investigation, the department has admitted that the student exposed students to sexual conversations and proposed activities, but denied the existence of a "sex club.” The alleged perpetrator received counseling.

Two boys, ages 9 and 11, have been charged with forcing a 7-year-old boy to perform oral sex on them on a school bus. Read More The boys, charged in juvenile court, could be placed on Michigan's sex offender registry for life if they are convicted, The Ann Arbor News reported. The incident reportedly took place in May. The boys -- accused of first- and second-degree criminal sexual conduct and gross indecency between males -- are students at Howell Elementary School, about 45 miles northwest of Detroit.

A startling number of high school and college students -- both female and male -- are being battered, sexually abused or stalked by their dates, according to a Kansas State University professor. http://www.sciencedaily.com/ "Approximately 30 percent of college students have been in relationships that involve physical aggression. Even more have been in relationships that are emotionally abusive," said Sandra Stith, director of the marriage and family therapy program at K-State and a nationally recognized expert in domestic violence. Likewise, approximately 25 percent of high school students who are in relationships are subjected to abuse, according to Stith.

Attorneys for a woman who alleges sexual abuse by a lay teacher at a Roman Catholic high school asked a judge Wednesday to hold the bishop of the Diocese of Orange in contempt of court. Read More The motion, filed in Orange County Superior Court in Santa Ana, alleges that Bishop Tod D. Brown sent a key church official to Canada for unspecified medical treatment one week after a judge ordered him to complete a sworn deposition in the case.

A 5-year-old girl abducted out of Arizona earlier this month has been found in suburban Denver. http://www.thedenverchannel.com/ The child was being held for a ransom of 2 ounces of methamphetamine.

The family of a 15-year-old boy who was sexually abused by a Roman Catholic priest has reached a $1.65 million settlement with the Archdiocese of Chicago. Read More The teen says the Reverend Daniel McCormack abused him several times between 2001 and 2005 at Chicago's St. Agatha Parish, where the boy was a student and McCormack was a teacher and basketball coach.

A three-country search for the parents of a 3-year-old girl abandoned at an Australia train station became a murder investigation when police identified a body found in New Zealand as the toddler's mother. http://www.cbsnews.com/ The girl's father, Xue Naiyin, was the prime suspect, and a warrant for his arrest was sent through Interpol to the United States, where he reportedly fled several days ago. New Zealand police revealed that Anan "Annie" Liu died "during a violent episode", as the first daughter of the suspected killer told how she had fled the family home after being beaten by her father. Read More

A U.S. doctor who authorities said had sex with underage boys while traveling abroad was sentenced to 35 years in prison for downloading child pornography and taking sexually explicit pictures of boys. Read More Gregory Kapordelis, 46, was convicted in May of six counts of downloading child pornography and using boys to produce pornographic pictures between 2001 and 2004.

The diagnosis of bipolar disorder in people under 20 astonishingly increased 40-fold between 1994 and 1995 and 2002 and 2003, according to a study reported in this month's issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, the leading scientific journal in our field. http://abcnews.go.com/ The study found that family history was the single biggest predictor of whether or not a diagnosis of bipolar disorder was justified. Teens who had a parent with bipolar disorder are 18 times more likely to have been diagnosed correctly than those who do not have a parent with bipolar disorder.

Three men were arrested on charges that they held 10 teenagers at gunpoint and forced them to smoke marijuana and perform sex acts on one another. http://www.foxnews.com/ The alleged abductors also fired four shots into the floor of the home where the teens were held, Sampson County Sheriff Jimmy Thornton said. He described the victims as six high school-age girls and four boys and said the home belonged to one of the victims.

A man honored as among the best teachers in Utah pleaded guilty to felony sex charges involving 11 students at his suburban classroom. Read More Frank Laine Hall, 37, who taught first grade in the Salt Lake City suburb of Riverton until his arrest last March, could get up to 30 years to life in prison, prosecutor Rodwicke Ybarra said. Hall pleaded guilty to 10 counts of attempted aggravated sex abuse of a child and one count of sex abuse of a child in a plea agreement that dismissed five other counts of aggravated sex abuse of a child, Ybarra said.

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