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Archives > Volume 7 Issue 72 - December 4, 2009 "Evil" teen strangles 10-year-old brother...Ignoring his younger brother's plea of "Andrew, stop," a 17-year-old who told authorities he identified with a television serial killer strangled the boy, dragged the body to his car and drove to see his girlfriend, an Indiana prosecutor said Thursday. MSNBC News story here 
Andrew Conley of Rising Sun was calm and showed no remorse or emotion as he described strangling 10-year-old Conner Conley as the two wrestled Sunday, a probable cause affidavit said.
Conley told investigators he dumped his brother's body near a park in the Ohio River community about 90 miles southeast of Indianapolis. "Sometimes people are just evil," Dearborn-Ohio County Prosecutor Aaron Negangard said. "This is an evil child." Prosecutors filed preliminary charges of murder against Conley along with a supporting affidavit Thursday. Conley is being charged as an adult and will appear Friday in court, Negangard said. The teen told investigators he had had fantasies about killing someone since he was in eighth grade, including cutting somebody's throat, and felt "just like" the serial killer Dexter on the Showtime television series of the same name. He said killing his brother satisfied a craving like a hamburger satisfied hunger. "Like I had to...like when people have something like they are hungry and there is a hamburger sitting there and they knew they had to have it and I was sitting there and it just happened," Conley told investigators in the affidavit. The slaying comes six weeks after 15-year-old Alyssa Bustamante told Missouri authorities she strangled, stabbed and cut a 9-year-old neighbor's throat because she wanted to know what it was like to kill someone. See vol7_iss61, vol7_iss62, vol7_iss64, vol7_iss69, and vol7_iss70 for more on that story. The affidavit in Conley's case described him killing his brother before visiting his girlfriend and other friends. It said the two brothers were wrestling while their parents were at work. Conley put Conner in a headlock, causing the younger boy to pass out and fall to the floor. Conley dragged Conner to kitchen, put on a pair of gloves and choked the younger boy for about 20 minutes until he noticed blood flowing from Conner's nose and mouth. He told investigators the child's last words were "Andrew, stop." Conley put a plastic bag over his brother's head, secured it with black electrical tape, and dragged the body by its feet down steps to the basement and then from the home to his car. Conley struck Conner's head on the ground several times before putting the body in the trunk of the car. With the body still in the trunk, Conley drove to his girlfriend's house and gave her a sweetheart ring. She told investigators Conley "seemed happy, more happy than she had seen him in a while." Negangard said he will consider seeking the maximum prison term of life without parole. Conley's age makes him ineligible for the death penalty. "Sexting" more common than previously thought... Think your kid is not "sexting"? Think again. Sexting - sharing sexually explicit photos, videos and chat by cell phone or online - is fairly commonplace among young people, despite sometimes grim consequences for those who do it. AP story here More than a quarter of young people have been involved in sexting in some form, an Associated Press-MTV poll found. 
That includes Sammy, a 16-year-old from the San Francisco Bay Area who asked that his last name not be used.
Sammy said he had shared naked pictures of himself with girlfriends. He also shared naked pictures of someone else that a friend had sent him. What he didn't realize at the time was that young people across the country - in Florida, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania - have faced charges, in some cases felony charges, for sending nude pictures. "That's why I probably wouldn't do it again," Sammy said. Yet, "I just don't see it as that big of a problem, personally." That was the view of nearly half of those surveyed who have been involved in sexting. The other half said it's a serious problem - and did it anyway. Knowing there might be consequences hasn't stopped them. "There's definitely the invincibility factor that young people feel," said Kathleen Bogle, a sociology professor at La Salle University in Philadelphia and author of the book "Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus." "That's part of the reason why they have a high rate of car accidents and things like that, is they think, 'Oh, well, that will never happen to me,'" Bogle said. Research shows teenage brains are not quite mature enough to make good decisions consistently. By the mid-teens, the brain's reward centers, the parts involved in emotional arousal, are well-developed, making teens more vulnerable to peer pressure. But it is not until the early 20s that the brain's frontal cortex, where reasoning connects with emotion, enabling people to weigh consequences, has finished forming. Beyond feeling invincible, young people also have a much different view of sexual photos that might be posted online, Bogle said. They don't think about the idea that those photos might wind up in the hands of potential employers or college admissions officers, she said. Meanwhile, NBCs Today Show looks at how "sexting" bullying lead to one 13-year-old girls suicide after a topless photo she sent a boy was forwarded throughout her school. Today Show story here For more information about safety and cell phones, see eGuide/cell phones. Cardinal Edward Egan protected abusive priests at victims' expense... "Claims are claims. Allegations are allegations." Those six words uttered by retired Cardinal Edward M. Egan during two depositions neatly sum up his approach to handling the burgeoning priest sexual abuse scandal that he inherited when he took over the Roman Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut in the late 1980s. Hartford Courant story here 
In 448 pages of depositions that Egan was forced to give as part of 23 lawsuits against seven priests that eventually were settled, the Bishop showed little compassion for the alleged victims and instead argued with attorney's that only a "remarkably small number" of priests have ever been accused of wrongdoing.
"These things (sexual abuse complaints) happen in such small numbers. It's marvelous when you think of the hundreds and hundreds of priests and how very few have ever been accused, and how very few have even come close to having anyone prove anything,'' Egan said. "Claims are one thing. One does not take every claim against a human being as a proved misdeed. I'm interested in proved misdeeds." Egan's depositions taken in 1997 and 1999 were supposed to remain sealed forever when the diocese settled the cases in 2001. The Hartford Courant obtained copies of them in 2002 and published several stories about them. But on Tuesday for the first time some documents were made available to the public after a seven-year court battle by the Bridgeport Diocese to keep them secret. >> Transcript of Oct. 7, 1997 Videotaped Deposition of Bishop Edward Egan >> Transcript of Sept. 23, 1999 Videotaped Deposition of Bishop Edward Egan But in releasing the documents, the diocese withheld nearly 1,500 pages, saying the records were privileged under state and federal law and still subject to a seal order. The withheld documents include 685 pages taken from priests' personnel files, and documents identifying two "John Doe" priests whose names have not been publicly released - documents that originally had been entered in court only for "in camera" review by a judge. Egan left to become the Archbishop of New York shortly after the lawsuits were settled. He went on to be named a Cardinal and retired earlier this year. In other news... 
More than three years after Congress ordered stepped-up monitoring of sex offenders, only one state has adopted the government's strict new requirements, and some others are weighing whether to ignore the law and just pay a penalty. AP News story here So far, Ohio is the lone state to meet the new federal standards. Elsewhere, efforts have been hampered by high costs and legal challenges from the nation's 686,000 registered sex offenders. Advocates worry that the delays are putting public safety at risk. "This means more of the same - that we're losing sex offenders when they cross state lines and disappear," said Erin Runnion, who lobbied for the law after her 5-year-old daughter, Samantha, was kidnapped and killed in 2002. "It's incredibly frustrating. How many children do we have to lose to repeat sex offenders before we start taking these guys seriously?" The initial deadline for states to comply was in July. Then the deadline was extended to July 2010, although several states have signaled they may still be unable to meet it. States that do not adopt the mandates risk losing millions of dollars in federal grants. The law was designed to keep closer tabs on sex offenders, including an estimated 100,000 who are not living where they are supposed to be. It would create a national sex offender registry and toughen penalties for those who fail to register.
The U.S. Coast Guard released video of the Gulf of Mexico rescue of a 3-year-old Florida boy investigators say was kidnapped by his father. MyFoxTampa story here Crewmembers aboard a Coast Guard Air Station Clearwater HC-130 Hercules aircraft spotted Paul Martikainen's 32-foot sailboat Monday at about 5 p.m. after reports he abducted his son Luke Finch during a planned visit over the weekend. An alert was issued for the Cocoa boy after the pair disappeared, and witnesses reported seeing them sailing from Salt Creek Marina in St. Petersburg Saturday afternoon where Martikainen's SUV was found. The sailboat was 140 miles offshore and heading south when it was intercepted, but Coast Guard officials do not know where Martikainen was headed or what his intentions were.
New laws passed in 25 states are making it easier for social networking giants Facebook and MySpace to purge their membership lists of convicted rapists, gropers and child molesters. MSNBC News story here More than 3,500 offenders registered in New York have been kicked off the two popular Web sites in the months since the state implemented a law requiring sex crime convicts to register their e-mail addresses, as well as their dwellings, attorney general Andrew Cuomo announced. Both MySpace and Facebook have long had policies banning sex offenders, and have routinely used state registries in the past to block tens of thousands of convicts from joining. Meanwhile, Facebook is about to begin a major overhaul of its privacy structure, the company said in an announcement posted on the service. MSNBC story here The firm said it will be eliminating the familiar regional networks that often govern which users can and can't see content posted on the site. Instead, the new model will be simpler, allowing users to grant permission to browse personal photos and entries based on three tiers - friends, friends of your friends, or everyone. Facebook, which initially grew out of groups defined by college boundaries, has long outgrown that model, the firm said. See eGuide/MySpace and Facebook for more information on safe social networking.
Roman Polanski began his house arrest on $4.5 million bail Friday, rolling into the luxury resort of Gstaad in a police convoy to a warm welcome from his wife and children at his Alpine chalet. MSNBC News story here Polanski persuaded Swiss authorities to end his two months of incarceration in a Swiss jail pending their decision on whether to extradite him to the U.S. in a 32-year-old sex case. The 76-year-old director wont be allowed to leave the property while Switzerland decides whether to extradite him to the U.S. for having sex in 1977 with a 13-year-old girl. Swiss officials say Polanski transferred the bail and deposited all identification and travel documents with the Zurich cantonal police. His house in Gstaad was fitted with an electronic monitoring system that will trigger an alarm if Polanski leaves the house or removes the tagging bracelet. For more on this story, see vol7_iss54, vol7_iss55, vol7_iss56, and vol7_iss60.
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