Providentia

The Assassination of Hendrik Verwoerd

It was a crime that shocked all of South Africa.

On September 6, 1966, South African Prime Minister Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd entered the House of Assembly and prepared to take his seat. A parliamentary page named Dimitri Tsafendas quickly crossed the floor and approached him. As the Prime Minister looked up for the expected message, Tsafendas drew out a large sheathed knife, took off the sheath and stabbed the politician four times in the chest. A mob of nearby Members of Parliament quickly restrained Tsafendas while four others (who happened to be medical doctors) tried to help the Prime Minister. Despite their best efforts, Hendrik Verwoerd was declared dead on arrival at a nearby hospital.

As one of the chief architects of apartheid and Prime Minister during one of the most racially charged eras in South Africa’s history, Hendrik Verwoerd continues to be a controversial figure. A trained psychologist, Verwoerd was a professor at the University of Stellenbosch until entering politics. An outspoken advocate of Afrikaner nationalism, he helped draft and implement the various “Apartheid Acts” after becoming Prime Minister in 1958 and also led the country to independence in 1961. Verwoerd strengthened his hold on the black majority of the country by enacting various “pass laws" limiting educational and employment opportunities for non-whites, outlawing political organizations such as the African National Congress, jailing Nelson Mandela and other anti-apartheid activists, and banning interracial relationships to prevent “miscegenation”.

It was the anti-miscegenation statutes that likely sparked Dmitri Tsafendas’ murder plan. Born of a Greek father and Mozambican mother, Dimitri Tsafendas was legally classed as white despite his mixed race heritage. Shunned by most South Africans due to the dark complexion which made him either “too white” for some and “not white enough” for others, he spent most of his life abroad. Tsafendas drifted from country to country and spent considerable time in psychiatric hospitals in Germany, the UK and the United States.

After returning to South Africa in 1964, he fell in love with a “coloured” woman but the anti-miscegenation laws drafted by Verwoerd's party made this relationship impossible. Tsafendas even tried to have himself reclassified as “coloured” only to be refused by the bureaucracy (it was unheard of for a white to have himself declared non-white).

Not only was Tsafendras unable to marry his girlfriend but being seen in public with her would have earned him a prison sentence. She eventually married someone else and he was never the same afterward. As his mental health continued to deteriorate, he formed a plan to kill Verwoerd. He gained a job as a parliamentary messenger (a job that was only open to whites at the time) and spent two years planning the assassination.

Tsafendras cooperated fully with police and prosecutors after his arrest. His rationale for killing Verwoerd was certainly unique enough.  He claimed that he was acting on orders from a giant tapeworm living in his stomach. Whether this was a genuine delusion or an attempt to save himself from execution, the government was faced with a problem. Putting a white man on trial for killing the Prime Minister might have had unintended political consequences. Verwoerd was already being portrayed as a martyr by his party and there were fears that public sympathy for Tsafendras might undermine the government apartheid policies.

Dmitri Tsafendras was declared not guilty by reason of insanity without ever going on trial. He was ordered detained "at the pleasure of the State President" and sent to Pretoria Central Prison. Instead, he was placed in a segregation cell on death row, right next to the gallows. For the next twenty-eight years of his life,  Tsafendras saw every prisoner facing execution being led past his cell. Since he was not serving a formal sentence, only an order from the Prime Minister could ever release him. According to reports, he was severely mistreated for years while in prison with frequent beatings, use of restraints, and verbal abuse.

And there he stayed until 1993 when Verwoerd's National Party handed over power to the the country's first multiracial government. Dmitri Tsafendras was then transferred to Sterkfontein Mental Hospital where he spent the rest of his life. While he was technically free to leave at any time (the detention order had been lifted by the new government), Tsafendras resisted any attempt at releasing him. His decades of incarceration had left him so institutionalized that he was unable to function in the community.

He had few visitors during his final years in the hospital and, following his death from pneumonia in 1999, Tsafendras was buried in an unmarked grave in Krugersdorp. It's debatable whether he was even considered a mental patient given that he wasn't on psychiatric medication at the time of his death. While he still mentioned his tapeworm at times (and requested a postmortem to verify that it was there), it's an open question whether his fragile mental state was due to his preexisting problems or his years of abuse.

Although Dmitri Tsafendas is considered a martyr in some circles, his impact on South Africa's history is debatable. Verwoerd  may have been a major force in apartheid but his death did little to change South Africa's racial policies. None of Verwoerd's political foes had any kind words for the "mad Greek" who killed the politician and Tsafendas was largely forgotten even before his death.

Hendrik Verwoerd's legacy still haunts the country (one of Nelson Mandela's first official acts as Prime Minister was to make a formal visit to Verwoerd's widow) but the assassin who killed him remains an enigma.

Detecting Fake News

Although the Internet provides a variety of news, it also can give confusion caused by personal subjective thoughts such as personal TV, blogs, and unproven news. The unproven news is written in a subjective direction with added personal opinions rather than objective content, so readers may acquire knowledge with the wrong outlook. In addition, fake news is being produced and the problem of social polarization is becoming serious. In the end, it is necessary to detect the fake news, but it is not easy to distinguish the truth of published news because of the lack of fake news distinction time compared to the speed of information sharing on the Internet and the diversity and strong subjectivity of news. Therefore, in a paper recently published in the journal Cognitive Systems Research, the possibility of fake news is defined by using the reverse-tracking method of the articles which are posted on the Cognitive System. Finally, as the result, the detection rate is average 85%. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)

For the abstract

Guilty Plea Entered in Hammer Attack on Colorado Therapist

Months after a vicious hammer attack on an Aurora, Colorado mental health worker, the former patient accused of the attack pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity in Arapahoe County District Court, according to prosecutors.   The victim, 59-year-old Svetlana Martinez, was attacked  in her southeast Aurora home around 6:30 p.m. on Nov. 18, 2018.  

The defendant, 45-year-old  Filip Kazakov,  is facing  numerous felony charges over the assault, including attempted first-degree murder, first-degree assault, and second-degree burglary, according to Colorado Bureau of Investigation records.  Giving the severity of the offenses, prosecutors have called for the maximum penalty.   He already has a history of prior offenses, including a misdemeanor domestic violence charge in Adams County in 2010. 

According to court documents, Kazakov entered Martinez' home and violently beat her with a hammer in different parts of her home.  She sustained multiple skull fractures and a broken arm but managed to save her life by barricading herself in a storage closet until he left the house.  Despite losing a substantial amount of blood and losing consciousness for an hour, she was able to reach a neighbour's house for assistance.    Police responding to an emergency call found Martinez on her neighbour's porch "covered in blood."   Kazakov was identified as a suspect after police interviewed several of Martinez' friends and they were able to locate and arrest him at his home several hours later.

Though his reasons for attacking Martinez are unclear, Kazakov had previously seen the victim for counseling in 2017 over some "mental health issues."    When questioned by Aurora police, he insisted  that“ Martinez was a "KGB agent that specialized in spiritual exorcism" and that she had implanted "a part of herself in him" to steal his energy.    He insisted that he only intended to scare the victim to "get his energy back" though Martinez testified that Kazakov said that he wanted to kill her prior to the attack.   

Kazakov is currently being held in the Arapahoe County Detention Center on a $300,000 cash or surety bond and is  scheduled to appear in court for a status hearing on July 19.

For more information

James Frye and the Lie Detector

The Murder of Dr. Robert Wade Brown

On November 27, 1920, Washington physician  Robert Wade Brown was shot to death  while he was working in his D.C. office (which also happened to be part of his residence on West Eleventh Street).   Just before the shooting, Dr. Brown's junior colleague saw a man enter Dr. Brown's office whom he later described as being an African-American male around twenty-five years of age.  After hearing shots being fired, the young doctor investigated and found Dr. Brown's body lying outside his office.   He had been shot twice in the chest and once in the head.

A prominent member of Washington’s African-American community,  Robert W. Brown's death devastated family, friends, and admirers alike.  He was also considered to be one of the wealthiest African-Americans in the United States which is apparently what led to his being sent several threatening letters just months before his death.   Whoever wrote the letters had been apparently trying to extort money from him.   While police investigated at the time and failed to find whoever was responsible, they suspected that the gunman had killed him out of revenge or possibly in an attempt to steal drugs.  Though there were no immediate suspects, a $1000 reward was posted by the dead man’s daughters as well as the National Benefit Life Insurance Company (of which Dr. Brown had been president).   A coroner’s inquest concluded that he had been killed by an unknown assailant and the killing went unsolved for months.

A break in the case finally came in August 1921 when twenty-four year-old James Alphonso Frye was arrested by D.C. police following an arrest over an unrelated offense.   Shortly after Frye was taken into custody, a Washington dentist, John R. Francis, told police that Frye was involved in the Brown murder.    Frye had worked for Francis and had reportedly confessed to him that he had killed the doctor.   Acting on this tip, police interrogators subjected Frye to intense grilling and managed to get a confession. 

According to this confession , Frye had gone to Dr. Brown’s office to get a prescription to treat his gonorrhea.  The bill was for two dollars and, when he told Dr. Brown that he only had half of that in his pocket, was told to get the rest.   He left the doctor's office and tried to borrow money to cover the rest of the bill but had no success.   Frye then went home to get his revolver which he offered to the doctor as collateral for the debt.  According to Frye's story, it was at this point that the physician became hostile and, when he failed to leave his office promptly,  attacked him.   Frye insisted in his confession that he had taken out his gun and shot Brown in self-defense  (his exact words were:   "I tried to run to the door and he grabbed me again and knocked me down and I told him to put his hands up and he kept on hitting me, hitting me on the head, and in the struggle I think that my gun was fired.”).  Frye would change his story repeatedly over the course of the next few months but the original confession seemed proof enough to charge him with first-degree murder.

Enter William Moulton Marston

After months of legal wrangling during which he repudiated his original confession and insisted that his confession had been forced out of him by police, Frye eventually changed lawyers.  With few other options, he placed his life in the hands of two young attorneys, Lester Wood and James Mattingly, who also happened to be graduate students at American University.  This is likely what inspired them to recruit American University professor William Moulton Marston to use his newly-developed "lie detector" to determine whether the accused was telling the truth or not.   What this basically involved was using a sphygmomanometer to measure changes in blood pressure as the person being questioned answered a series of questions linked to the offense.   While Marston and other researchers such as John Augustus Larson had already generated headlines over the ambitious claims being made, this new technology had never actually been allowed as evidence in a criminal trial before.   

As it happened though, William Marston was an irrepressible showman who relished the chance to make legal history.  Born in 1893, he studied law and psychology at Harvard University  as well as working as a research assistant for the legendary Hugo Munsterberg. While Munsterberg first proposed the use of experimental psychology methods in forensic cases, it was Marston (with the help of his wife Elizabeth) who developed the systolic blood pressure test of deception.    His undergraduate thesis, Systolic Blood Pressure Symptoms of Deception, would later be published in the The Journal of Experimental Psychology.   The rationale behind Marston's test was simple enough: when people lied, their elevated autonomic arousal could be measured through systolic blood pressure (later expanded to include galvanic skin response).   

Though he intended to become a lawyer rather than a psychologist, Marston was convinced that his blood pressure technique would revolutionize criminal law.   As he later told a Boston reporter, "This study of psycho-physics of deception is going to prove a great help to me when I begin to practice law.  I have tried 100 experiments and every one has come out right. You can see what a valuable thing it will be to me when I cross-examine a witness."

With the outbreak of World War I, Marston offered his services to interrogate criminals and suspected spies using his new device.   Working for the Psychology Committee in Washington D.C.,  his attempts at proving the effectiveness of his lie detector tended to yield mixed results that antagonized his supervisor, American Psychological Association president Robert Yerkes.   Undaunted, Marston completed his law school education and eventually qualified to practice law, along with his wife Elizabeth.  

After later receiving his doctorate at Harvard University, Marston launched a series of businesses as well opening his own law practice.   To promote his research and establish himself as an authority on deception, Marston arranged a series of newspaper interviews describing the potential value of his lie detector.  In one photograph  run in a 1921 issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Marston is shown administering his test with a caption reading "“MACHINE DETECTS LIARS, TRAPS CROOKS."   The article itself basically repeats what Marston already provided  in his press release including such bold pronouncements as :  "Successful lying will soon be a lost art, for science has perfected an instrument which is credited with being able to register instantly a falsehood."    Heady stuff considering he was still a graduate student at the time.

James Frye and the Lie Detector

Once Marston graduated from Harvard, he took a new position at American University in Washington, D.C.    It was there that both of James Frye's lawyers had taken Marston's new course on legal psychology, including his enthusiastic lectures describing his lie detector and its virtual infallibility.   Using Marston and his new technique in James Frye's defense was largely an act of desperation on their part but they had few real alternatives.  As for Marston, the Frye case (which was already one of the most-publicized murder trials in Washington) would provide him with the perfect opportunity to prove the value of his invention.  

After meeting Frye and getting his consent, Marston carried out his test on June 10 at the D.C. jail where Frye was being held.   As Frye himself would later describe what happened, "“He asked me several questions, none pertaining to the case, then suddenly he launched upon several questions going into every detail of the case. Several days later, I read in the Washington News where he had said I had told the truth."    Based on his results, Marston expressed his satisfaction that Frye was telling the truth when he said that he had been coerced into confessing to the murder.

On July 19, 1922, James Frye testified on his own behalf and quickly denounced the confession he had made as being completely bogus.  Not only was he innocent of Dr. Brown's murder but he insisted that it was the dentist, John R. Francis Jr., (the one  who had originally implicated him in the murder) who was actually guilty.  Frye claimed that Francis had admitted to the murder while they were both high on gin and cocaine.   As Frye related in his testimony, Francis had been the one behind the extortion plot against the doctor and had killed him in retribution for going to the police.    

Though Frye's credibility was already suspect, the news that William Moulton Marston had personally tested James Frye with his newly-developed "lie detector" generated renewed interest in what seemed like an open-and-shut case up to that point.   

The Lie Detector in the Courtroom

The prospect of seeing this new device being demonstrated in the courtroom quickly became a major news story which led to a rush for any available seats in the courtroom where the trial was being held.  Many people waiting for hours to be seated with the courtroom being quickly filled to capacity and beyond.  Though Frye's defense team submitted all of Marston's publications (including his dissertation) to the judge to bolster his credentials, Chief Justice Walter McCoy flatly refused to allow the psychologist to testify and directed the jury to render a verdict solely on the evidence presented to date.   Based on his reading of Marston's assorted research papers, Judge McCoy concluded that "so far the science has not sufficiently developed detection of deception by blood pressure to make it a usable instrument in a court of law. It would be entirely foreign to our practice to have such tests made out of court and not applied certainly to every witness who goes on the witness stand."  He also added that, "once such instruments became as well known as the radio, the telephone, and the telegraph, then it might have some consideration in the court."  He also rejected any attempt to have Marston qualified as an expert witness or to allow him to make any opinion about whether Frye was telling the truth or not. 

With this last-ditch defense being rejected, James Frye's fate was sealed.  The prosecutor for the case, Joseph Bilbrey summed up his argument by declaring  Frye to be "the most colossal liar that ever appeared in court" and the jury took only an hour to find him guilty of second-degree murder.  Though this saved him from the death penalty, the judge still sentenced him to life in prison and he was promptly sent to Fort Leavenworth to begin his sentence.

To nobody's surprise, Frye's attorneys, Mattingly and Wood, promptly launched an appeal arguing that William Marston's  technique would prove that Frye wasn't guilty of murder and that police had actually forced the confession out of him.   As for Marston, he basked in the notoriety the case had given him and promptly established what he proudly called the "only psycho-legal research laboratory in the United States" at American University.   He also worked with Frye's two attorneys to launch what would eventually become a Supreme Court case over the admissibility of Marston's device in a criminal trial.  It probably didn't help that Marston was charged with various counts of mail fraud just days after the appeal was filed.  Though the charges were eventually dismissed, the stigma would haunt Marston for years and the publicity helped undermine James Frye's appeal.    Since Marston was tied up in court on his own behalf, this also meant that he had less time to help with the Frye appeal

The Birth of the Frye Standard

Due to various deferrals, the James Frye's case would drag on for well over a year as his defense team prepared their final legal brief titled, "Memorandum of Scientific History and Authority of Systolic Blood Pressure Test for Deception Memorandum of Scientific History and Authority of Systolic Blood Pressure Test for Deception."   Along with listing the various errors of law which they felt had been made in the Frye trial, they also outlined their case for allowing Marston's device to be allowed in the courtroom.   The brief was also notable for downplaying Marston's own contributions (likely due to the mail fraud charge still hanging over him).  The brief finished by arguing that allowing evidence using Marston's sphygmomanometer was just as valid as allowing forensic psychiatrists to express an opinion about mental illness. 

To counter Mattingly and Wood's brief, the U.S. Attorney's Office responded with their own brief prepared by Peyton Gordon and Joseph Bilbrey.   This new brief basically focused on William Moulton Marston and questioned the credibility of the evidence he was trying to provide.   Gordon and Bilbrey also cited a law review article written by Harvard Law School professor Zechariah Chafee which was openly critical of Marston's research.  Not only was Chaffee a noted legal authority, but he actually knew Marston, having had him as one of his students.  Despite this, Chaffee pointed out that Marston's research was simply too untested to be accepted in a criminal trial.   Which was what Gordon and Bilbrey had been saying all along.

And the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeal agreed with them.  On December 3, 1923, the court handed down a 669-word decision upholding the original verdict and provided what would be commonly known as the "Frye test" for whether scientific evidence should be allowed as evidence in a criminal trial.  The decision stated, in part: 

Just when a scientific principle or discovery crosses the line between the experimental and demonstrable stages is difficult to define. Somewhere in this twilight zone the evidential force of the principle must be recognized, and while the courts will go a long way in admitting expert testimony deduced from a well recognized scientific principle or discovery, the thing from which the deduction is made must be sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance in the particular field in which it belongs.

The Frye decision would set the standard for scientific testimony in every U.S. state for decades to come and would also influence legal decisions in many other countries around the world.  Not until the case of Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals in 1993 would any other legal decision regarding scientific evidence come close to being as influential.   

Ironically, though the decision provided James Frye with legal immortality (whether he wanted it or not), it carefully removed any reference to William Moulton Marston or the device that was at the centre of the controversy.   Marston, for his part, despite expressing disappointment over the ruling, eventually moved on with his life including having children with two women (at the same time, but that's another story), as well as creating the comic book character, Wonder Woman, a legacy that remains with us long after Marston's death in 1947. 

 James Frye would eventually be paroled in 1939 after serving eighteen years in prison.  Long after his release and up until his death in 1956, he would work tirelessly trying to clear his name and insisted that he had been convicted due to racial bias (a distinct possibility given the political climate of that era).   His repeated attempts for a pardon in his case were continually denied.   

Are Creative People More Passionate?

Passion is one great force that releases creativity,  because if you're passionate about something, you're more willing to take risks.  Yo-Yo Ma

Is there a link between creativity and romantic passion?   A new research article published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that there is.

Written by Kathleen L. Carswell and Eli J. Finkel of Northwestern University and Madoka Kumashiro Goldsmiths of the University of London, the article presents the results of three research studies examining whether being creative helps bolster long-term romantic relationships.   

As the authors point out, what we call romantic passion can go by many names, including romantic yearning, attraction, desire, or eros.  Not surprisingly, numerous research studies have demonstrated the role that romantic passion plays in long-term relationships and personal well-being.  Certainly, the importance we place on romantic passion helps explain the popularity of romance novels,  love songs, poetry, movies, television programs, etc.,  But,  for all that we value this kind of passion, it's important to note just how fragile it can be.  Though marriage is typically viewed as being a lifelong commitment, just about every major theory explaining romantic passion acknowledges that it typically peaks early in most relationships and slowly decreases with time.  

But not always.   One recent study reported that, among couples in relationships of at least 10 years in duration, 40 percent reported still being “very intensely in love."  In that same study, researchers complemented these self-reports with functional MRI showing that long-term couples reporting a high degree of passion showed heightened activation in the same brain regions as people in the early stages of a passionate relationship.  In exploring those factors that can keep a romantic relationship alive, researchers have identified different possible candidates.  These include relationship factors such as maintaining regular intimacy, being focused on positive relationship experiences, being mutually responsive to partnership needs, and the belief that sexual satisfaction can be attained through hard work and effort. 

To read more, check out my new Psychology Today blog post.

Death of a Clown

Dan Leno was the prince of clowns.

Born George Wild Galvin in 1860, he was the youngest of six children in an old London show business family. His father was a comedian and his mother was a singer and George soon showed that he had inherited both talents. He made his debut as "Little George,the Infant Wonder" when he was only four years old and quickly became a regular part of the family act. After their father died, George and his brother, Henry later began touring as The Brothers Leno-Champion Dancers (Leno was their step-father's name) and toured across the United Kingdom before George went solo in his late teens.

He was never a tall man (he barely reached five feet in height) but made up for it with his dancing skills, his comic wit, and his sparkling delivery. He quickly became known as the "Funniest Man on Earth" with an astonishing range of talents. He performed comic skits, danced, sang funny songs and generally had the audience in stitches with his antics. Despite his grueling schedule and daily performances, he still somehow managed to find time to marry and have six children over the years. By the 1880s, he was Great Britain's top-billing music hall star and regularly performed to sold-out audiences at London's Drury Lane. At the height of his popularity, Dan Leno was entertaining Queen Victoria and, later, King Edward VII (which earned him the nickname of the "King's Jester").

And then...

In 1902, Dan Leno suffered what was later termed a "nervous breakdown". His behaviour became increasingly erratic and he also became hard of hearing. Leno's family was alarmed by his odd behaviour and strange delusions (he began proclaiming that he was descended from a Scottish marquis). He also became more grandiose and announced that he was giving up comedy for a career as a serious actor.

On one occasion, Constance Collier, a prominent Shakespearean actress, came home at 1:00 AM to find Leno waiting for her outside her home. He told her that he wanted to play Hamlet and urged her to use her influence to get him the part. Like most of London, Collier was one of Leno's fans but she could see that he was acting strangely. She was able to get him to leave by promising to talk to a director friend of hers but Leno was back the next night with an expensive gift of jewelry. She finally refused his request firmly and Leno left brokenhearted (he gave the jewelry to a barmaid on his way home).

In 1903, he was sent to a nursing home in Camberwell where he still showed signs of the awesome comic talent that had made him famous. Despite an attempt at resuming his performances, Dan Leno died on October 31, 1904 at the age of 43. News of his death made international headlines and thousands of fans attended his funeral. He is buried in Lambeth Cemetery near the gardens that still bear his name.

The actual cause of Leno's death continues to be a matter of controversy. His death certificate lists "General Paresis of the Insane" (a common term for neurosyphilis) although there is no actual evidence that he ever had the disease. Another possibility that more recent historians have raised is that Leno died of a brain tumour. Unfortunately, the loss of hearing and behavioural symptoms that he showed during his decline do not provide enough information to make a clear diagnosis.

For all his popularity, most of the comic routines that he performed during his long career have been lost. While there are a few scratchy sound recordings that survive, what little is known of Leno's performances are taken from popular writers of the time such as Max Beerbohm. One of his sons, Sidney Leno, later toured as Dan Leno Junior but he never matched his father's success.

Despite being largely forgotten today, Dan Leno's influence on later comedians was profound. The great Stan Laurel viewed Leno as one of his heroes and based many of his own comedy routines on skits that Leno had first performed. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and many of the other comic greats of the silent era were also influenced by Leno. That people are still laughing at antics inspired by Dan Leno more than a century after his passing may well be the best possible monument to a funny man who died far too soon.

How Was Aphasia Diagnosed in Ancient China?

The concept of aphasia was first described as Yin Pai (most probably apoplexy aphasia) in the Yellow Emperor’s Internal Classic, which is the first medical classic and the origin of traditional Chinese medicine theory.  A new article published in the journal Aphasiology examines briefly the pathogenesis of Yin Pai in different eras of traditional Chinese medicine and its application to aphasia. Yin Pai was explained by four theories: kidney-essence deficiency, wind-phlegm blocking, static-blood blocking collaterals, and liver-Qi stagnation. Apoplexy aphasia is the earliest and most frequently reported subtype of aphasia. The Chinese medical prescriptions were produced based on pathophysiology and therapeutic targets. The authors conclude that  Yin Pai was the earliest and dominant theory of traditional Chinese medicine, which attempted to explain aphasia and provide targets for therapy. However, evidences of efficacy and safety for treatment methods was not provided. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)

For the abstract

"Sorceror" Sentenced in Bizarre "Witchcraft Extortion Scheme"

A California court has sentenced an Argentinian man to two years in prison for a "witchcraft extortion scheme" involving hundreds of victims around the world.

In what was referred to as "a despicable scheme that preyed upon people who put their trust in a phony," US Attorney Robert Brewer added that "this defendant used the vulnerability of the lovelorn to humiliate and extort them, and for that he will pay a price."    According to testimony provided at the trial, Argentinian man Ariel Boiteux launched his Paraguayan-based business, Amarres Immediatos, in 2015.  Potential clients were recruited through ads  on Facebook, Instagram, and MercadoLibre (which is comparable to Craigslist) offering services such as "casting spells designed to foster romantic relationships."  Boiteux and his business partners reportedly began their online business  after realizing the profit potential  in "amarres de amor," or "moorings of love."

After carefully choosing potential victims, Amarres Immediatos then instructed clients to engage in "magic" rituals to find love.  This basically involved providing committed clients with alcohol, candles, vegetables, and photographs and having them recite sexually explicit "incantations" and performing sexual deeds on camera.   The recordings would then be sent to Boiteux and Amarres Inmediatos for "magical" purposes.   Instead, Boiteux would use these recordings to blackmail clients into sending him money to avoid having the recordings released publicly.  

Since most of the victims were afraid of public exposure, Boiteux was able to carry on his schemes for years and victimize numerous clients in the United States, Peru, Mexico, and Switzerland.   One of the victims was a public figure who was not named in the trial but who was targeted for as much as $250,000 by Boiteux.  

The scheme continued until 2017 when an undercover Homeland Security agent called the phone number on Amarres Inmediatos's website and asked to purchase another victim's recording that had already been seen online.   When Boiteux went to pick the money that had purportedly been wired to him by a customer, he was arrested by Paraguayan police and later extradited to the United States for trial.   Three other people involved with the scheme were also arrested.

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The Last POW

It was in the summer of 1998 when a Russian doctor was asked to examine an elderly patient at a hospital in Kazan (450 miles east of Moscow).   Aside from the name under which he had been admitted, Andras Tamas, and the fact that he had been a long-time psychiatric patient in a nearby psychiatric hospital, very little was known about the case.   The psychiatric hospital had arranged for Tamas to be sent to Kazan because he had already lost his left leg to circulatory problems and was suffering from high blood pressure.  

According to the file, Tamas was schizophrenic and the staff at the psychiatric hospital had never been able to understand his "mumbling".  Still, the doctor who had been called in to interview Tamas had one advantage that they didn't - he had grown up near the Hungarian border and c0uld recognize that Tamas was speaking Hungarian.  In fact, Tamas knew almost no Russian and had been unable to communicate with staff in the five decades he had been in the hospital.   Incredible as it seemed, Tamas had somehow been hospitalized in Russia with no one being aware that he was actually a Hungarian citizen.    

During the fifty-five years that he was in hospital, Tamas was incapable of communicating with staff or patients and, on the rare occasions that he tried to write something, would have his writings confiscated by suspicious attendants.  He was also incapable of reading any of the newspapers or books available to him and couldn't make any sense of television or radio broadcasts (all of which were in Russian.  And, naturally enough, the "severity" of his mental illness and lack of any real progress in treatment meant that he could never leave.

In a subsequent search of archival records, authorities finally managed to piece Tamas' story together.   He had been a private in the Hungarian army during World War II when he was captured along with other troops by the Red Army in 1945.  Despite the war coming to an end, he still spent two years in a prisoner-of-war camp near Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) until the camp was officially closed.   He and his fellow Hungarians were then placed on a train bound for a camp in Siberia.   What this basically involved was a 21-day odyssey in which he was stuffed along with his fellow prisoners in a cramped boxcar.   Not only did many of the prisoners end up suffocating, but Tamas  began to show signs of what records indicated was "severe psychosis" (likely brought on  by having to sleep on the dead bodies of his  comrades). 

As a result, he was taken off the train and committed to the Kopernich hospital.  Since he had no documentation with him (aside from one note stating that he was suffering from "psycho-neurosis", doctors simply admitted him and dismissed his speaking in an unknown language as a symptom of mental illness.   And there he would remain.

While investigators alerted Hungarian authorities in an attempt to send Tamas home, they were immediately stymied by a rather basic problem -  they didn't know his true name.   Not only was there no record of an "Andras Tamas" in the Hungarian military records but Tamas himself, after decades in the hospital, could no longer recall what his name had been originally.   In fact, after decades of almost total isolation, getting him to say anything comprehensible proved to be a challenge.  

Finally, after two years of legal wrangling, Tamas was issued a Hungarian passport and flown back to Hungary on August 11, 2000.   Given his poor condition, he was immediately placed in the Psychiatric and Neurological Institute in Budapest where he could receive proper medical care.   Not only did he finally receive a prosthetic leg (the first thing he asked for), but he was also given a new set of dentures and a hearing aid.   Meanwhile, doctors and investigators from the Ministry of Defense were frantically trying to discover his true identity.   Naturally enough, given the publicity surrounding his return to Hungary, hundreds of families eagerly sought information in the hope that he might be one of their missing relatives.  

Though it took him a while to relearn how to speak normally, Tamas was finally able to provide details about his early life, including the town where he had been born and that he had been a blacksmith's apprentice before being drafted into the army.    He still couldn't identify his regiment though he had enough basic knowledge of armaments that investigators concluded that he had been in an artillery unit.   Finally, based on the cues that Tamas provided, investigators managed to identify his home town, located 145 miles north of Budapest, and, eventually, his true name. 

Though he had lived most of his life as Andras Tamas, he was actually Andras Toma and, amazingly enough, still had a half-sister and a half-brother who remembered him.   In fact, his half sister, Anna Gabulya would later tell reporters that she had seen the media coverage when Andras had been repatriated to Hungary and had been struck by his resemblance to her late father.   She had been reluctant to notify authorities given all the other families doing the same.   In the end, DNA testing would be needed to  prove that he was Andras Toma and that he could finally return home.

But taking in the frail and disoriented ex-POW proved to be an ordeal for his half-sister and her husband.   Not only was Andras still confined to a wheelchair, but he was utterly terrified of any form of physical contact.  "The first evening, we bathed him and put him to bed,"  Gabulya said in one interview.  "Then my husband and I looked at each other, each thinking, "How are we going to survive this?"  In the days that followed, Andras mainly sat on his bed wearing nothing but pajamas and his old army cap.   He also ate his meals in total silence and largely refused to be drawn into conversations.   Only after he became settled into a regular routine, including wood carving, helping with some household chores, and  scattering bread crumbs for sparrows, did he finally become more relaxed with his relatives.

But there was still the question of what to do about his military service.    As a prisoner of war, he had never been formally discharged from the military.  This meant that he had been serving his country non-stop since he joined the army in 1944.   Not only was the Hungarian government obliged to pay him for all the years he had been away from home, but, in a formal public ceremony, he was promoted to the rank of sergeant-major before being officially discharged.  

Once the publicity died down, Toma was allowed to return to the hospital in Budapest given that his schizophrenia still needed to be managed.  Since his symptoms weren't severe enough to require institutionalization, his doctors agreed to release him into the care of his half-sister.   For the rest of his life,  he managed well enough living with Anna and her family until his death in 2004 at the age of 78.    As Hungary's last POW, he received a grand military funeral with over 2000 mourners in attendance and was buried in a military cemetery not far from his home.

Though he never really recovered from his decades of isolation,  the ones who knew Andras Toma best say that he found a certain sense of peace at the end, and even regained his sense of humour.   While Russian authorities searched to see if anyone else had fallen between the cracks the way that Toma had, his case proved to be unique.   While other Hungarian families held out hope that other missing relatives might eventually be discovered, Andras Toma remains the last POW from World War Two to be successfully repatriated.  

Can Movies Inspire Copycat Violence?

In 1995, a 14-year  boy, Sandy Charles, lured a 7-year old acquaintance into some bushes near their homes in the town of La Ronge in northern Saskatchewan under the pretext of playing a baseball game with him.    With the help of an unnamed 7-year old accomplice, Charles then stabbed and bludgeoned Jonathan Thimpsen.   After the murder,  Sandy  Charles then mutilated the body by removing strips of skin which he took home to place in a tin can covered in foil.   An intense search of the area by friends and family led to Jonathan's body being found three days later.   After an investigation, Sandy Charles was arrested.

As Charles would later admit to investigators, he boiled the skin on the family stove to reduced the fat to liquid but had refrained from actually drinking it stating that, "I just wanted to stay the way I am."   According to testimony later presented in court, Jonathan had been selected at random so that his fat could be harvested based on a scene from the 1989 movie, Warlock.    The movie, featuring a 17th century warlock who travels to the future, includes an off-camera murder of a young boy so that his fat could be extracted to make a potion enabling the warlock to fly.   According to Sandy Charles' mother, her son had become obsessed with the movie and saw it more than ten times.    While he admitted committing the crime to her, he also insisted that he could not stop himself.  "H esaid it was like a dream. He said he didn't want to do it, but it was like it wasn't him doing it", she reported.   He also later said that "There's a strong spirit in my room that gave me these thoughts.   I was going to commit suicide until this thing popped into myh ead. I started thinking about killing someone else. Something wanted meto." 

The killing of Jonathan Thimpsen and the subsequent publicity of Charles' trial generated international publicity given the age of the victim and the perpetrator as well as the bizarre circumstances involved.    The RCMP officers investigating the murder concealed many of the details for fear of possible "mass hysteria."     In a public statement before the trial began, RCMP Corporal Dave Hoefl refused to provide full details about the murder due to the possible impact on jury selection.  "When you take a look at a 14-year-old doing this to a seven- year-old, there has to be a reason.  There is a reason. We just have to decide whether it's in the public interest to know that reason right now," he said.   "I'm not sure whether the community is ready for this or not - and in reality, I don't even think the province is ready for it."   Based on the circumstances of the crime,  Sandy Charles was tried for  murder in an adult court.

During the trial, his defense attorney, Barry Singer, insisted that Charles was not guilty due to mental illness and that the movie had a powerful effect on his mind.  "In the movie, the idea was that if you cut the fat off a virgin, unbaptised child, then boiled it down and drank it. That would give you the power to fly," said Singer. "Sandy was suffering from the delusion that if he did these things, it would give him the power to fly. The movie just gave him the know-how to do it."    Following the lurid testimony given during the trial, Sandy Charles was later found not guilty by reason of insanity on August 2, 1996.  He was transferred to the Regional Psychiatric Centre in Saskatoon where he was held until 2013 when he applied to be transferred to a secure psychiatric unit closer to his home.  

As many expected, the trial generated considerable debate concerning the link between movie violence and real-life crimes.    In their coverage of the murder, the Toronto Globe and Mail cited experts who warned against drawing general conclusions from the murder but also warned that violent movies could be a "precipitating event" for an already troubled child.    Based on concerns relating to movie violence as well as a petition in the early 1990s calling for an end to violence on television, the Canadian government passed legislation forcing cable companies to enable parents to block violent programs  deemed unsuitable for  children.  Similar legislation was passed in the United States months later.

The debate concerning the potential impact of media violence on impressionable children is a longstanding one.   During the 1950s, Fredric Wertham's crusade against violence in comic books led to the implementation of the Comics Code Authority while similar crusades against violence in video games, music lyrics, and the Internet have had limited success.    Concerns over the potential impact of inappropriate content in movies and television programs has generated considerable controversy over the years due to concerns about children modeling their behaviour on graphic violence seen on screen. 

Moral panics over violent movie and television content remain a familiar phenomenon, especially as new, shocking media depictions of graphic violence help inspire  to calls for greater censorship.   Certainly the number of films that have faced censorship over the years  in the United States alone, often for minor scenes that would likely have gone unnoticed by the audiences supposedly being protected, is mind-boggling.   In other countries, battles over movies such as A Clockwork Orange led to either outright censorship or awkward compromises with movies being either dramatically reedited or removed from distribution altogether.   Though changing social standards and legal challenges led to a reevaluation of many of the production codes that controlled movie content for decades, the battle over what can be shown on the screen is far from over.  

But does media violence really lead to youth violence?  Though Albert Bandura's classic Bobo Doll experiments suggest that children tend to imitate aggressive behaviours that they see being modeled,  the impact of observational learning as it applies to movie and television violence seems more muted.   No clear causal link between media violence and real-life crimes has ever been found despite decades of media violence research.   Certainly the rise in movie and television violence of the past two decades has not led to a similar increase in real-life violence.  If anything, there has been a sharp decrease in violence during that same period, especially among adolescents.   Though school shootings and other examples of extreme violence appear to inspire copycat offenses, most young people appear perfectly capable of distinguishing between fictional violence and the real thing.  

A more controversial theory about media violence deals with the idea of catharsis, or using violent media content to purge viewers of their violent thoughts or fantasies.   The term "catharsis" was first coined by Aristotle who suggested in his Poetics that watching violent Greek tragedies helped audiences "through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions".   In other words, watching violent movies or television shows made people less inclined to commit violent acts.    This was in direct opposition to Plato's view that plays, music, and literature had a potentially harmful affect on morals (thus making him the first moral crusader).     Along with being a common theme in literature, catharsis has also been adopted by psychoanalysts such as Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud

While most moral panics surrounding media violence tend to peter out fairly quickly, new panics often arise to take their place.   Even as cases such as Sandy Charles continue to be invoked as a justification for greater control over media content, actual evidence to support such control is often lacking.    More graphic cases of copycat violence can definitely be expected in future but the knee-jerk reaction, and the calls for stricter controls, will likely follow the same old pattern.