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Originally Posted by Taltarzac725
They "solved" the Michelle Mitchell murder around 1979 but rushed to judgment because a mentally ill woman made a false confession to get a better room in her mental hospital in Louisiana. They finally got the right person in Rodney Halbower in 2014 following a DNA test on a cigarette that they had bagged back in 1976 at the scene of the crime. What a mess. Getting the wrong person allows the real criminal to keep on doing his or her dirty work. Halbower is a serial killer connected to the San Francisco Bay area and other places. Paula Zahn did a pretty good program on the events. Season 21. Episode 1. On the Case. "Crime and Injustice". And not for Nothing.
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A Reno, Nevada cop or maybe a Washoe County one had come to talk to our Earl Wooster High School class around March or April of 1976. It probably would have been better if he had not come as he started telling us about Thomas Lee Bean who had been at Wooster around 1963 and had received world- wide horror after murdering British Olympic skier Sonja McCaskie. The manner of the murder and how the tabloids handled it forced quite a bit of these publications to change how they dealt with these stories.
The effect of this did make us suspect one another rather than uniting us. The murder of Michelle was on my birthday of 2-24 so people knew where I was that night. I was home opening presents.
I went on the You Grew Up or Lived in Reno, Nevada in the 1960 and 1970s group on Facebook to reconnect with some people and one of these was an ex-cellmate of Thomas Lee Bean. He described Bean as being a gentle, sweet and caring man. He avoided the death penalty in 1972 after some kind of case. Furman vs. Georgia. Looks like a Nevada 1970 case removed the death penalty as an option for juveniles.
Nothing but many of us had a hard time dealing with this.
There does seem to be a lot of help now for people pulled into the legal system. Victimology has come a very long way.