I'm not doing this cuz I think anyone is remotely interested in my plans but...I need to be concrete.
Today I must get dressed (yep, I'm still in my jammies), fix my hair, go to Kroger, buy rice wraps, milk and shrimps- I am making Vietnamese springrolls-mmmmmm. I also need chicken? turkey-I haven't decided.
Then during the week I have turned over a new leaf!
I plan to start taking apple cider vinegar and drinking metabo tea in the mornings as well as actually eating breakfast. No more lunches out, I will either bring my lunch or come home and make a healthy one. Also my bf and I will exercise.
Grand plans?
Crazy?
Overly ambitious? Who knows.
This weekend we go to Cedar Point. Top thrill dragster, here we come!!
Sunday, September 28, 2003
You're goin' down! FOR DOING DRUGS!
What Would You Go to Jail For? (Many outcomes)
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My inner child is sixteen years old!
Life's not fair! It's never been fair, but while
adults might just accept that, I know
something's gotta change. And it's gonna
change, just as soon as I become an adult and
get some power of my own.
How Old is Your Inner Child?
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Saturday, September 27, 2003
When the cases grow cold
07:00pm 27/09/2003
State Police unit digs into the past
Sunday May 25, 2003
By Susan Williams
STAFF WRITER
LEWISBURG — Many police officers can tell the same tale. They get a call to come to a bar. Inside, they find a man holding a gun, standing over a dead man.
The man will say, “ ‘I shot the bastard,’” an officer said. And a half-dozen others in the bar will chime in that they saw the whole thing.
But then there are the unusual cases. Bodies, long dead, with no identification, found over hillsides.
Sgt. Michael Spradlin has worked both — what he calls the clear-cut homicides and the ones that make him scratch his head.
Spradlin is one of only three cold-case investigators working for the West Virginia State Police. When the Cold Case Unit was established in 1998, each troop — a multi-county division of the state — had an officer assigned.
In his office at the Lewisburg detachment, Spradlin’s walls hold posters and pictures relating to the cases he is tracking.
The names Margie Dodd, Angela Stephens, Cathy Carroll, Dorothy Stieger, Susan Roop, Tammy Daniel and Evelyn Shrewsbury are written out on the posters around his desk. Pictures of Theresa Woods also are there. They show Woods as a pre-teen and a teenager, before she disappeared from her Oak Hill home.
At his nearby home, Spradlin has cardboard and plastic boxes full of lives held in suspension, waiting for the final puzzle piece. “Each box represents a life,” he said.
“To be a cold-case investigator,” Spradlin said, “you must be patient, persistent and have a long memory.
“You can have people come forward and say, ‘I’ve lived with this for 20 years. Now I’m living for the Lord, and I want to tell what I know.’”
Spradlin can work through those layers of history. “If you know a case, sometimes an offhand remark will fit in.”
‘It caused me terrible grief’
Maj. Rick Hall started his State Police career in the Oak Hill detachment. Like many other troopers just coming aboard, he looked through a large file that has been lodged in the Oak Hill detachment for more than 40 years.
The case is referred to as “The Mad Butcher.” In 1962, a young man looking for bottles and hubcaps to sell came across a human hand and arm on the hillside of Gauley Mountain. As the investigation unfolded, State Police collected 13 body parts flung over the hillside. A young man missing from Oak Hill, Mike Rogers, had been found.
Investigators believe the butcher notched off at least seven victims in his spree of terror, a case that was a first for its time in many ways. The killer had a distinct style. Rogers’ body was cut in ways that a surgeon or an animal butcher would sever body parts.
Modern readers are familiar with the term “serial killer.” But for quiet Fayette County and, later, the nation, as news of the case spread, it was shocking. Others who have investigated the case think there might be even more victims.
New troopers were asked to review the file in case they might see something other officers missed. Hall had a special interest in the case because his father, who also was a trooper, found the skull of one of the victims.
The butcher cases have never been solved, but they remain in Spradlin’s files.
Hall also is familiar with another case Spradlin is working on: the Theresa Woods case. “That was the hardest case I ever worked on,” said Hall, who now works at State Police headquarters in South Charleston. “It caused me terrible grief, and I lost a lot of sleep over it.”
Hall was pleased when a cold-case unit was put together.
“Most of them [cold-case investigators] are working murder cases,” Hall said. “But there are also some sexual assaults. A trooper in McDowell County was able to successfully close a case where some children were sexually assaulted by a school principal.”
They also are investigating a large embezzlement case.
Spradlin was successful in a Greenbrier County case that ended with the conviction of a mother who was accused of killing one of her children in 1982 and attempting to poison another.
“These cases cry out to be solved,” Hall said.
But the ranks of troopers are depleted. And they’re even smaller since the U.S.-led military invasion of Iraq. Thirty troopers were called up to fight in the war. Hall hopes that, when the troopers return from military duty and when troopers graduate in July, the numbers increase.
In addition to Spradlin in Greenbrier County, Sgt. D.B. Swiger and Senior Trooper Dean Olack are assigned to the cold-case unit. But because of the manpower shortage, Olack temporarily has been stationed in Martinsburg.
‘You wait and you wait’
Spradlin sees one part of his job as giving comfort to families who are waiting and wondering.
Marshall Abshire considers Spradlin and the other troopers who worked on his brother’s case “like family.” Abshire said he waited nearly 25 years to see his brother’s case concluded.
“You wait and you wait and you wait,” Abshire said. But in 1998, police called him to say they had reopened his brother’s case.
In 1976 in Greenbrier County, Billy Ray Abshire started his vehicle to go to work, but an explosion blew him about 20 feet into the air. Four people were later arrested for their part in the murder-for-hire case. Three of them were sentenced in December 1999.
“There are not too many days that pass without me thinking of what those guys did,” Abshire said. “We are proud of Mike Spradlin and the West Virginia State Police. He [Spradlin] got it going.”
Donald Woods has not been so lucky. He knew something was wrong when his daughter did not come home from school Feb. 20, 1986. He went looking for her immediately, then turned to police. He had posters made and offered a reward.
He waited almost four months before he got the bad news: His 14-year-old girl had been found dead. At the cemetery where she is buried, Woods had the words “Little Angel” engraved near Theresa’s name.
He still waits to find out who killed her.
The case has gone on so long that even some of the officers who worked on the case have died.
“Nobody knows anything,” Woods said recently.
Another parent who has had a long wait is Dalma McMillion Barber. Her daughter, Sue Roop, disappeared in 1979.
A Raleigh County deputy thinks he has found Sue’s body, but the parts of her that were found were so badly decomposed that they require special testing.
McMillion Barber has doubts that the remains are her daughter’s.
“If it doesn’t reach my heart, I wonder if I will ever believe it,” McMillion Barber said.
The parents of Cathy Carroll, interviewed in 1988, said they hoped to live long enough to find out what happened to their daughter.
Their wish was not fulfilled. But Carroll has a daughter and a former husband who remain interested in seeing the case come to a conclusion. They keep in touch with Spradlin.
Carroll, who was noted for her beauty, worked for the city of Montgomery. She was killed in her home the evening before she was to appear in court for a divorce hearing. The killer managed to get by Carroll’s dog, which was notoriously vicious and had bitten several people. Visitors and meter readers had to call ahead if they needed to get in the yard.
People who remember Carroll’s case still comment on the chilling way her body was found, with a cord around her neck and some kind of powder poured down her throat.
An extensive
criminology background
John Zirkle is retired now but, in his last few years with the State Police, he worked in the cold-case unit. “Those were the best years,” he said.
Zirkle created a cold-case computer database for the nine counties Spradlin still covers. He said that before he established the database, there was no pool of information.
“These are minimum figures,” he said. Some parts of the state are not covered in the database.
Beginning in 1998, police identified 79 cases. Zirkle said more have been identified since he did his work. Those range from 1962 to the present. Some of the oldest cases might never be solved.
In the first 13 months after he charted those cases, Zirkle reported that the cold-case unit developed new information on 41 of them.
“If you see a mother or a father come in with tears in their eyes and ask you to find the killer, you could understand how important this work is,” Zirkle said. “There should be more money appropriated for it. There’s more work to do.”
In the nine counties covered by the statistics, Fayette has the most unsolved killings, followed by Raleigh.
Spradlin is quick to point out that he is not working alone, and that the department also is working with other police agencies.
For Troop 1, Sgt. D.B. Swiger covers the nine counties that take in the northern part of the state. He is working out of Kingwood, Preston County.
Swiger brings an extensive background in science and criminology to his job. He has been to the FBI’s national academy and the homicide-investigations class sponsored by the Southern Police Institute.
He is happy to be able to point to a murder indictment in Taylor County that recently was the fruit of his labor. But he still grapples with about 20 unsolved killings in his nine-county area.
One that still intrigues him is the 1977 rape and strangulation death of a nun in Ohio County. She died near the convent where she lived. A DNA profile of the suspect has been developed.
Swiger inherited a large case file, and the trooper who had the case before him, Kenny Sheets, wanted to make sure someone would follow up.
Swiger tracked one suspect across the country and found that he had died in Missouri. The man had had gall-bladder surgery, and the hospital still had some of his DNA. Swiger was able to clear him posthumously as a suspect in the case.
Swiger is still working on the case, though. Looking through the Bible that belonged to the nun, he came across a handwritten note. It said, “As long as I can walk, I will keep moving. As long as I can see, I will keep looking. As long as I can stand, I will keep fighting.”
“It gave me chills,” he said. And it certainly inspired him to keep going with the case.
Swiger finds the cases hard to forget, even when he is not officially on duty. “It’s hard to let go,” he said. “I think about them when I am running. I think over questions I would ask and what the counter answers might be.”
Spradlin said, “There are other officers who are just as capable of doing what I do, if they had the time. [But] You start to work on a case, and the phone rings off the hook and you have to go to a car wreck.
“When we are working cold cases, at the end of the month, it might be hard to measure what we do. There is a lot of legwork. If somebody is looking for someone to drive up to the police station to confess, you will wait a long time. You have to be proactive and track these cases down in a systematic way. I could not do what I do without the help of Colonel [Howard] Hill.
“You also need prosecutors who will work with you on these cases.
“I want to be the rock in somebody’s shoe,” Spradlin said. “I want them to be looking over their shoulder"
http://sundaygazettemail.com/news/News/2003052429/
07:00pm 27/09/2003
State Police unit digs into the past
Sunday May 25, 2003
By Susan Williams
STAFF WRITER
LEWISBURG — Many police officers can tell the same tale. They get a call to come to a bar. Inside, they find a man holding a gun, standing over a dead man.
The man will say, “ ‘I shot the bastard,’” an officer said. And a half-dozen others in the bar will chime in that they saw the whole thing.
But then there are the unusual cases. Bodies, long dead, with no identification, found over hillsides.
Sgt. Michael Spradlin has worked both — what he calls the clear-cut homicides and the ones that make him scratch his head.
Spradlin is one of only three cold-case investigators working for the West Virginia State Police. When the Cold Case Unit was established in 1998, each troop — a multi-county division of the state — had an officer assigned.
In his office at the Lewisburg detachment, Spradlin’s walls hold posters and pictures relating to the cases he is tracking.
The names Margie Dodd, Angela Stephens, Cathy Carroll, Dorothy Stieger, Susan Roop, Tammy Daniel and Evelyn Shrewsbury are written out on the posters around his desk. Pictures of Theresa Woods also are there. They show Woods as a pre-teen and a teenager, before she disappeared from her Oak Hill home.
At his nearby home, Spradlin has cardboard and plastic boxes full of lives held in suspension, waiting for the final puzzle piece. “Each box represents a life,” he said.
“To be a cold-case investigator,” Spradlin said, “you must be patient, persistent and have a long memory.
“You can have people come forward and say, ‘I’ve lived with this for 20 years. Now I’m living for the Lord, and I want to tell what I know.’”
Spradlin can work through those layers of history. “If you know a case, sometimes an offhand remark will fit in.”
‘It caused me terrible grief’
Maj. Rick Hall started his State Police career in the Oak Hill detachment. Like many other troopers just coming aboard, he looked through a large file that has been lodged in the Oak Hill detachment for more than 40 years.
The case is referred to as “The Mad Butcher.” In 1962, a young man looking for bottles and hubcaps to sell came across a human hand and arm on the hillside of Gauley Mountain. As the investigation unfolded, State Police collected 13 body parts flung over the hillside. A young man missing from Oak Hill, Mike Rogers, had been found.
Investigators believe the butcher notched off at least seven victims in his spree of terror, a case that was a first for its time in many ways. The killer had a distinct style. Rogers’ body was cut in ways that a surgeon or an animal butcher would sever body parts.
Modern readers are familiar with the term “serial killer.” But for quiet Fayette County and, later, the nation, as news of the case spread, it was shocking. Others who have investigated the case think there might be even more victims.
New troopers were asked to review the file in case they might see something other officers missed. Hall had a special interest in the case because his father, who also was a trooper, found the skull of one of the victims.
The butcher cases have never been solved, but they remain in Spradlin’s files.
Hall also is familiar with another case Spradlin is working on: the Theresa Woods case. “That was the hardest case I ever worked on,” said Hall, who now works at State Police headquarters in South Charleston. “It caused me terrible grief, and I lost a lot of sleep over it.”
Hall was pleased when a cold-case unit was put together.
“Most of them [cold-case investigators] are working murder cases,” Hall said. “But there are also some sexual assaults. A trooper in McDowell County was able to successfully close a case where some children were sexually assaulted by a school principal.”
They also are investigating a large embezzlement case.
Spradlin was successful in a Greenbrier County case that ended with the conviction of a mother who was accused of killing one of her children in 1982 and attempting to poison another.
“These cases cry out to be solved,” Hall said.
But the ranks of troopers are depleted. And they’re even smaller since the U.S.-led military invasion of Iraq. Thirty troopers were called up to fight in the war. Hall hopes that, when the troopers return from military duty and when troopers graduate in July, the numbers increase.
In addition to Spradlin in Greenbrier County, Sgt. D.B. Swiger and Senior Trooper Dean Olack are assigned to the cold-case unit. But because of the manpower shortage, Olack temporarily has been stationed in Martinsburg.
‘You wait and you wait’
Spradlin sees one part of his job as giving comfort to families who are waiting and wondering.
Marshall Abshire considers Spradlin and the other troopers who worked on his brother’s case “like family.” Abshire said he waited nearly 25 years to see his brother’s case concluded.
“You wait and you wait and you wait,” Abshire said. But in 1998, police called him to say they had reopened his brother’s case.
In 1976 in Greenbrier County, Billy Ray Abshire started his vehicle to go to work, but an explosion blew him about 20 feet into the air. Four people were later arrested for their part in the murder-for-hire case. Three of them were sentenced in December 1999.
“There are not too many days that pass without me thinking of what those guys did,” Abshire said. “We are proud of Mike Spradlin and the West Virginia State Police. He [Spradlin] got it going.”
Donald Woods has not been so lucky. He knew something was wrong when his daughter did not come home from school Feb. 20, 1986. He went looking for her immediately, then turned to police. He had posters made and offered a reward.
He waited almost four months before he got the bad news: His 14-year-old girl had been found dead. At the cemetery where she is buried, Woods had the words “Little Angel” engraved near Theresa’s name.
He still waits to find out who killed her.
The case has gone on so long that even some of the officers who worked on the case have died.
“Nobody knows anything,” Woods said recently.
Another parent who has had a long wait is Dalma McMillion Barber. Her daughter, Sue Roop, disappeared in 1979.
A Raleigh County deputy thinks he has found Sue’s body, but the parts of her that were found were so badly decomposed that they require special testing.
McMillion Barber has doubts that the remains are her daughter’s.
“If it doesn’t reach my heart, I wonder if I will ever believe it,” McMillion Barber said.
The parents of Cathy Carroll, interviewed in 1988, said they hoped to live long enough to find out what happened to their daughter.
Their wish was not fulfilled. But Carroll has a daughter and a former husband who remain interested in seeing the case come to a conclusion. They keep in touch with Spradlin.
Carroll, who was noted for her beauty, worked for the city of Montgomery. She was killed in her home the evening before she was to appear in court for a divorce hearing. The killer managed to get by Carroll’s dog, which was notoriously vicious and had bitten several people. Visitors and meter readers had to call ahead if they needed to get in the yard.
People who remember Carroll’s case still comment on the chilling way her body was found, with a cord around her neck and some kind of powder poured down her throat.
An extensive
criminology background
John Zirkle is retired now but, in his last few years with the State Police, he worked in the cold-case unit. “Those were the best years,” he said.
Zirkle created a cold-case computer database for the nine counties Spradlin still covers. He said that before he established the database, there was no pool of information.
“These are minimum figures,” he said. Some parts of the state are not covered in the database.
Beginning in 1998, police identified 79 cases. Zirkle said more have been identified since he did his work. Those range from 1962 to the present. Some of the oldest cases might never be solved.
In the first 13 months after he charted those cases, Zirkle reported that the cold-case unit developed new information on 41 of them.
“If you see a mother or a father come in with tears in their eyes and ask you to find the killer, you could understand how important this work is,” Zirkle said. “There should be more money appropriated for it. There’s more work to do.”
In the nine counties covered by the statistics, Fayette has the most unsolved killings, followed by Raleigh.
Spradlin is quick to point out that he is not working alone, and that the department also is working with other police agencies.
For Troop 1, Sgt. D.B. Swiger covers the nine counties that take in the northern part of the state. He is working out of Kingwood, Preston County.
Swiger brings an extensive background in science and criminology to his job. He has been to the FBI’s national academy and the homicide-investigations class sponsored by the Southern Police Institute.
He is happy to be able to point to a murder indictment in Taylor County that recently was the fruit of his labor. But he still grapples with about 20 unsolved killings in his nine-county area.
One that still intrigues him is the 1977 rape and strangulation death of a nun in Ohio County. She died near the convent where she lived. A DNA profile of the suspect has been developed.
Swiger inherited a large case file, and the trooper who had the case before him, Kenny Sheets, wanted to make sure someone would follow up.
Swiger tracked one suspect across the country and found that he had died in Missouri. The man had had gall-bladder surgery, and the hospital still had some of his DNA. Swiger was able to clear him posthumously as a suspect in the case.
Swiger is still working on the case, though. Looking through the Bible that belonged to the nun, he came across a handwritten note. It said, “As long as I can walk, I will keep moving. As long as I can see, I will keep looking. As long as I can stand, I will keep fighting.”
“It gave me chills,” he said. And it certainly inspired him to keep going with the case.
Swiger finds the cases hard to forget, even when he is not officially on duty. “It’s hard to let go,” he said. “I think about them when I am running. I think over questions I would ask and what the counter answers might be.”
Spradlin said, “There are other officers who are just as capable of doing what I do, if they had the time. [But] You start to work on a case, and the phone rings off the hook and you have to go to a car wreck.
“When we are working cold cases, at the end of the month, it might be hard to measure what we do. There is a lot of legwork. If somebody is looking for someone to drive up to the police station to confess, you will wait a long time. You have to be proactive and track these cases down in a systematic way. I could not do what I do without the help of Colonel [Howard] Hill.
“You also need prosecutors who will work with you on these cases.
“I want to be the rock in somebody’s shoe,” Spradlin said. “I want them to be looking over their shoulder"
http://sundaygazettemail.com/news/News/2003052429/
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