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Archives > Volume 7 Issue 21 - March 24, 2009 Austrian police investigate Fritzl for four other murders...Josef Fritzl is likely to spend the rest of his life locked up in a psychiatric unit - but the full extent of his crimes may be yet to surface. news.com.au story here 
The depraved father, convicted after imprisoning his daughter, Elisabeth, for 24 years, (for more on this story, see vol6_iss78, vol7_iss18, vol7_iss19, and vol7_iss20) is being investigated over at least four unsolved murders and disappearances.
Even as he was led away to serve at least 15 years in prison, police were re-examining missing person and unsolved murder cases over the past four decades. One is the 1986 murder of Martina Posch, 17, who was raped, strangled and dumped in a lake a short distance from where Fritzl and wife Rosemarie ran a guesthouse. "What really stands out is that Martina looks similar to Fritzl's daughter. The likeness is incredible," police chief Alois Lissl said. Other cases include the shotgun murder of Anna Neumayer, 17, near Fritzl's workplace in 1966 and the disappearance of Julia Kuehrer, 16, near his home in 2006. The investigation also includes sex worker Gabriele Superkova, 20, was murdered and dumped in a lake near where Fritzl was holidaying in 2007. Jessica Logan's parents seek "sexting" laws... Jessica Logan's nude cell-phone photo - meant for her boyfriend's eyes only - was sent to hundreds of teenagers last year in at least seven Greater Cincinnati high schools. Cincinnati Enquirer news story here 
The 18-year-old Sycamore High School senior was then bombarded with taunts: slut, porn queen, whore.
On July 3, [2008] Jessie hanged herself in her bedroom. See vol7_iss16. Now, Jessie's parents are attempting to launch a national campaign seeking laws to address "sexting" - the practice of forwarding and posting sexually explicit cell-phone photos online. The Logans also want to warn teens of the harassment, humiliation and bullying that can occur when that photo gets forwarded. Cynthia Logan and Parry Aftab, an attorney and one of the leading authorities on Internet security and cyberbullying, plan to attach Jessie's name to a national campaign to educate teens about the dangers of sexting. "Schools need to understand our kids are targeting each other and how technology is being used as a weapon," Aftab said. "None of them (the schools) know what to do. Many of them ... think it's not their problem. They want to close their eyes and put fingers in their ears, saying it's a home issue." A national study by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy revealed that 1 in 5 teen girls or 22 percent say they have electronically sent or posted nude or semi-nude images online of themselves. Some area school resource officers and principals estimate that at least half of the students have an inappropriate photo on their cell phone. See more at eGuide/archives/cell phones. In other news... 
Over the past decade, agents and computer experts have gone after hundreds of people like Paul2u who solicit sex from kids or trade child pornography online. MSNBC News story here Police efforts around the country were all the rage with the media in the early 2000s, reaching a crescendo with Dateline NBC's "To Catch A Predator" series. Despite the publicity then and now, the bad guys haven't gone away. They've quietly multiplied. Trading child porn online and grooming underage targets in chat rooms has exploded nationwide. With arrests more than quadrupling in 10 years, Wisconsin's agents and analysts feel overwhelmed. "I don't think we've made significant progress at all," Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen said. "Our community leaders don't even know how bad the problem is. The general population has no idea." The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's cyber tip line took 85,301 reports of child porn and 8,787 reports of online enticement last year. Investigations of Internet crimes against children resulted in 3,000 arrests nationwide in 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Most disturbing is the correlation between child porn and enticement, said Wisconsin forensic computer analyst Dave Matthews. Viewing leads to doing, he said. "They're grooming themselves," Matthews said. See more on how to protect kids online at eGuide/archives/online safety.
It was an alleged murderous plot ripped from the movies: Police say two teenage Utah boys hatched a plan to kidnap, torture and kill two students and a school police officer. ABC News story here But they were apparently foiled by one boy's mother, who, according to court documents, told police she had overheard her son and his friend discussing how to lure their intended victims to locations they had already selected. John, 15, and Noor, 14, were charged in suburban Salt Lake City, Utah, as juveniles with three counts of conspiracy to commit aggravated kidnapping after telling police they planned to model the killings on the torture scenes in the horror blockbuster "Saw," according to court documents. The court documents, which by Utah state law can be released with the boys' full names despite their juvenile status, say that John's mother called police March 7 after listening in on her son's conversation. His mother told police that "they wanted to make sure to have cameras and camcorders so they could take pictures of what they were doing, because they wanted people to know who did it, so they could become famous," the documents say.
A California woman who reported her 18-month-old daughter missing now says the child died accidentally and that she dumped the body near a freeway, authorities said Friday. AP story here Stacey Barker, 24, told detectives that when her daughter Emma Leigh died, she panicked and believed she would be blamed, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Sergeant Diane Hecht said. A body found Thursday in Sylmar, a few blocks from Interstate 5, was identified by coroner's officials as Emma. The cause of death was not immediately determined. Barker initially told investigators that she was knocked unconscious by someone while putting Emma into her car in Lancaster on Wednesday. She said Emma was gone when she awoke partially clad hours later in another city. Sheriff's Lieutenant Pat Nelson said Barker was suffering from a head injury when she first spoke to investigators. The details or cause of her injury were not immediately known. Hecht said Barker told investigators where she dumped Emma's body.
People who have a high family risk of developing depression had less brain matter on the right side of their brains on par with losses seen in Alzheimer's disease, U.S. researchers said on Monday. Reuters News story here Brain scans showed a 28-percent thinning in the right cortex - the outer layer of the brain - in people who had a family history of depression compared with people who did not. "The difference was so great that at first we almost didn't believe it. But we checked and re-checked all of our data, and we looked for all possible alternative explanations, and still the difference was there," said Dr. Bradley Peterson of Columbia University Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. His study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings are based on imaging studies of 131 people aged 6 to 54 with and without a family history of depression. The team was looking specifically for abnormalities in the brain that could signal a predisposition to depression, rather than changes that may be caused by the disease. The thinning on the right side was only linked with a family predisposition to depression. People who actually were depressed also had thinning on the left side of cortex. See more on depression at eGuide/archives/depression.
A former San Diego area high school principal and administrator is looking at 12 years in state prison after pleading guilty today to sexual abuse of a child. examiner.com news story here Robert Melvin Goode Jr., 60, was charged with 11 felony counts, including continuous sexual abuse of a minor and forcible oral copulation, in an abuse that reportedly last six years. Married and the father of three, Goode had resigned from his administrative post at three affiliated private schools - Classical Academy in Escondido, Classical Academy High School in Escondido and Coastal Academy in Oceanside. He had previously served as a high school principal at Tri-City Christian School.
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