Category Archives: psychopath

Sierra LaMar: Anatomy of a Search Day 47

I’m so God damned angry that I can barely see straight. We have been searching for Sierra LaMar for 64-days now. That’s more than two months. I’ve watched this community rise to the occasion on multiple levels. I’ve seen support come in from all over the Bay Area. I’ve thought, more than once, that today is the day that we will find Sierra. Yet here we are, still: looking; hoping; and engaged in internal dialogues, trying to negotiate with a God who forces families to reach into the depths to endure open ended misery. I understand that life isn’t fair, but this is ridiculous. Where is the mercy?

 

Somewhere out there a goon who does or doesn’t drive a red Jetta with a black hood has created an intolerable situation that only he can end. Was he born without conscience or is he a product of of a dysfunctional environment? Does hate and destruction come naturally or did he hone his demonic skill set over time?

 

He turns his back in indifference, eating pizza, drinking beer and generating a vibe so negative that it has a community up in arms and a family caught up in emotional free fall. I wonder if he thinks about Sierra on a daily basis or only when the flyers and news reports remind him that many are still looking? In the final analysis it doesn’t really matter. And all we can do in response is send out search parties, keep open minds in the face of near statistical certainty and encourage the family to stay strong for their girl. The only thing that is important is bringing Sierra home.

 

Listen turd. You have the power to end this right now. You don’t have to turn yourself in. Just clean up your business and cover your tracks. Let Sierra’s family have her back, whatever that means. Then you can go about your business, target your next victim and reign terror on somebody else’s community. Just understand that you can’t get away with this forever.

 

Ultimate Survivor Midsi Sanchez

At some point you are going to mess up. You’ll leave your DNA, or there will be a witness, or your victim will escape like Midsi Sanchez did back in 2000. Then and only then it will be your turn to pay. The wages of your sin will be steep. Hopefully yours will be a long and painful death. Then you will rot in hell forevermore.

 

I know something about guys like you. My family was bedeviled at one time. He haunted and tormented us as he looked away in indifference. It lasted for 65-days. Finally, he is in a place where he has no influence, no future, and most importantly no hope.

 

When we began looking for Sierra there was a vacant lot across the street from the search center. Now there’s a housing development. Sometimes I wonder if we’ll still be here when the children of the young families that move into these houses graduate from high school.

It Came From Hell!

He’s only twenty-years-old, slight of frame, with a receding hairline and a bad complexion. His name is Ryan Brunn and he possesses qualities that are both unique and rare to mankind. He lacks conscience and receives great joy from inflicting pain and suffering upon others. Such great joy, in fact, that his most recent bloodlust was only satisfied after he had kidnapped, bludgeoned, raped, stabbed and murdered seven-year-old Jorelys Rivera. Then he disposed of her remains by tossing her into a dumpster, compacting her tortured little body and hoping that his crime would not be discovered. But it was.

Brunn was not regurgitated from Hell last Thursday so that he could attack little Jorelys on Friday. He had been preparing for his moment for two decades. As the authorities retrace the steps of his sordid life they will no doubt uncover other victims who were able to escape the full wrath of his budding sadism. The human victims may be able to assist in peeling back the layers of his grotesque life. Unfortunately, as they do so they will be forced to relive their own pain, suffering and extreme victimization. The animal victims will not. Perhaps it was while torturing and killing animals that he first became sexually aroused. If so, he would not be the first as this is a common trait among sexual sadists.  

Jorelys is not dead simply because Brunn wanted to eliminate witnesses to his rape. If it were that simple he would have strangled her to death. Instead he leveled incalculable violence upon her little body in the form of blunt force trauma and stab wounds. It was only in the throes of this massive perversion that he was able to achieve the sexual release that was the goal of his attack. Had he not been captured he would have repeated this scenario again…and again…and again ad nauseam.   

So, it is the memory of little Jorelys that will sustain him for the next several decades. He will sit in his cell and relive his greatest triumph through dreams, masturbation, and other facets of his twisted imagination. It is only the death of her victimizer that will finally free Jorelys from her ongoing victimization. When his eyes become as unblinking and unseeing as her, that Jorelys torment will finally end once and for all.

How do I know these things to be true? Fifteen years ago I spent six months sitting in a courtroom as prosecutors built the case against my daughter Polly’s killer. I listened to psychiatrist after psychologist detail the mind of a sexually sadistic psychopath. Their arguments were so convincing that he was sentenced to death. He still sits on death row and, as he told Psychiatrist Lewelen Jones, “Masturbates twice daily and thinks of tying up female victims of past crimes.” I can think of no better justification for the death penalty.

48 Hours Mystery…or Travesty?

Many were looking forward to the 48 Hours Mystery episode that featured the family of Amber Dubois.  We knew and trusted the producer, having worked closely with her over the course of nearly two-years.  Good things had resulted from the brutal kidnap and murder of 14-year old Amber at the hands of the sexually sadistic psychopath John Gardner. Friendships had been forged, legislation written and passed, and new understandings about the nature of evil and the shortcomings of California’s criminal justice system had been exposed. Why then, did 48 Hours focus on false accusations, bogus aspects of the investigation, and providing a bully pulpit to a self proclaimed monster?

Amber Dubois disappeared without a trace on her way to Escondido High School on the morning of February 13, 2009. Within 2 weeks the KlaasKids Foundation and Laura Recovery Center sent representatives to the San Diego suburb to organize a volunteer search and rescue effort. We worked for and with Amber’s family for more than a year, until her remains were recovered. KlaasKids S&R Director Brad Dennis facilitated Amber’s funeral and I hosted her memorial service.

48 Hours Mystery focused much attention on Amber’s step-father Dave Cave as a possible suspect. As Dave said during the program they did it because, “That is where the statistics lead.” He withstood multiple interrogations and polygraphs, yet he was always there for Amber. When Amber’s mother Carrie moved out of his house he held his head high and covered her back. When friends and family suspected that he was involved he “manned-up” and worked to bring her home.  48 Hours took a tabloid approach to Dave’s travails and chose to portray him in a less than flattering light, but unlike 48-Hours, who grovels on the floor looking for kernels of tragedy that they can exploit for personal gain, Dave Cave stands tall in my eyes.

KlaasKids and the Laura Recovery Center search and rescue teams have worked together numerous times to successfully recover missing children.  Neither organization charges for that service, nor do we fundraise once we have arrived at ground zero. Our complete focus is upon working with law enforcement and in this case helping Amber’s family to recover their missing child. Therefore, I was shocked that 48 Hours chose to ignore our contribution and instead focus upon a live-scent mercenary K-9 team that supposedly followed Amber’s 8-month old scent 50-miles along a Southern California freeway. Anybody with any S&R experience knows full well that even under optimal conditions scent eventually dies. Therefore it is ludicrous to think that a paid K-9 team followed Amber’s scent along a road used by hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day after week after month. The television show notes that the dogs hit upon a spot a mile away from Amber’s still undiscovered remains. They forgot to mention that in terms of search and rescue a mile might as well be 10,000 miles and that the route the dogs followed was entirely different that the one Amber and her killer traveled on the day that he raped and murdered her.

Finally, 48 Hours provided a national, primetime television audience to the monster who killed Amber Dubois and Chelsea King. Both families thought that they were done with him, that he would be forgotten and die in prison. Instead they watched him opine about his potential victimization behind bars. They saw his face and heard his voice. The producer said that the interview did a “Great job illustrating that these predators live among us and they don’t look like Charles Manson.  They look like average Joe’s.” Really, that’s the best you can come up with? The Dubois and King families were re-victimized by a tabloid television program devoid of human decency.

Watching Gardner on primetime television reminded me of my own similar experience. In the days prior to the sentencing of the goon who killed and murdered my Polly, I received a phone call from Geraldo Rivera. He told me that he had been offered an opportunity to interview the killer on primetime TV. He said that he would take the killer down and expose him for the piece of shit that he really was. Then he said that he would only do so with my permission. I asked him not to do the interview as the thought of that monster ever again appearing in public made me physically recoil. Geraldo honored my wish, but two days later another reporter aired the interview on Hard Copy! I correctly accused her of using Polly’s tragedy to further her own career. I told her that any person convicted of raping and murdering children deserved to be locked away and forgotten, not provided with a national television audience. I told her that she, just like 48 Hours Mystery, was nothing more than a tabloid whore!!!

I am mystified and embarrassed by third rate journalism that purports to do anything more than entertain at the expense of truth, clarity and useful information. 48 Hours cherry pick facts in order to portray real life tragedies as nothing more than twisted, grotesque fantasies that re-victimize people who have already been victimized enough.