Category: Crime

She Befriended the Man Who Killed Her Mother. Guess How That Turned Out?

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If you answered “not too good,” you’re a winner:

Big-hearted, gregarious and always up for an adventure, Martha McKay surrounded herself with friends.
“There was something about her that people really loved,” her sister Katie Hutton tells PEOPLE. “She left an impression on people. She had that gift.”
McKay’s family and friends were devastated when she was killed on March 25, 2020, at Snowden House, the historic antebellum-style home on Horseshoe Lake, Arkansas, she bought from her family in 2004, restored and reopened as a luxury bed-and-breakfast.
McKay, 63, was found stabbed and bludgeoned to death at the top of the stairs, near a bag filled with her belongings, as well as a utility knife.
Authorities were shocked when they pulled the body of her killer out of the lake (he’d jumped in and drowned during a police chase): it was Travis Lewis, who’d been convicted at 17 for the horrific 1996 murders of her mother, Sally Snowden McKay, 75, and her cousin, Joseph “Lee” Baker, 52, a prominent Memphis blues guitarist. . . .
Knowing how forgiving McKay was, family and friends were still shocked when she befriended him after he went to prison (Lewis was sentenced to 28 ½ years after pleading guilty). . . .
A longtime Buddhist, McKay wrote Lewis letters in prison and supported his early, paroled release.
“We were contacted every time he came up for parole,” says Hutton. “None of us would OK it except for her.” . . .
When Lewis was finally released on parole in 2018, McKay quietly gave him a job doing work on the property, Hutton says.
But before her death, she fired him. Police had heard about a theft at McKay’s house before her murder, says Crittenden County Chief Investigator Todd Grooms. After she died, Hutton read in her diary that she’d sold a chandelier for $10,000 cash, which she stashed in the house.
Travis happened to be there that day, says Hutton. “Then the money vanished. She fired him after the money disappeared,” she says.
The family is still reeling from the fact that the same man killed her sister, mother, and cousin — 23 years apart.
“We are all just in disbelief,” says Hutton.

(Hat-tip: Kirby McCain on Twitter.)




 

Transgender Person Stabbed to Death

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The major media are ignoring this crime for some reason:

HRC is deeply saddened to learn of the death of Helle Jae O’Regan, a 20-year-old transgender woman killed in San Antonio, Texas, on May 6. Her death is believed to be the at least 11th violent death of a transgender or gender non-conforming person this year in the U.S., and the sixth known violent death in just over five weeks — all transgender women.
”For the past several weeks, we have learned of the violent deaths of transgender Americans at a rate that should be a shock and horror to every single person. We must all ask ourselves today: ‘What am I doing to ensure a world where a person’s gender identity is not a potential death sentence?’” said Tori Cooper, HRC Director of Community Engagement for the Transgender Justice Initiative.

Let’s get the local news story:

A 42-year old man accused of violently attacking three people inside a barbershop choked one of the victims until they passed out, then stabbed the worker to death, according to court documents.
He’s also accused of stabbing another woman several times before she ran to get help. Investigators say she was taken to the hospital but is expected to be okay.
A third employee was also inside the shop but was not hurt.
Friends came in twos and threes to the Diesel Barbershop off Bandera Road to pay their respects and celebrate a life.
Court documents identify the victim as 20-year old Evan O’Regan, known as Helle Jae O’Regan to friends.
“We’ve known her since high school and she was so sweet,” said Jazzlyn Rodriguez, a friend of O’Regan’s. “She was the kindest person.

Gosh, who could have stabbed this “sweet” young person to death?

San Antonio police arrested 42-year-old Damion Terrell Blue Campbell on Wednesday night in connection to an incident that left one person dead and another wounded at a Northwest Side barbershop earlier in the day. Campbell was charged with murder.
At around 12:15 p.m. on Wednesday, officers were called to the Diesel Barbershop in the Bandera Oaks shopping plaza for a cutting in progress. When police arrived, they found 20-year-old Evan Sorrell Ford Oregan, also known as Helle, an employee of the barbershop, laying near the back door of the business suffering from multiple stab wounds. Oregan died at the scene. . . .
The employees were taking appointments preparing for Friday when the incident occurred. After speaking outside, witnesses said Oregan and Campbell walked into the shop together to schedule an apparent appointment, according to the arrest affidavit.
Campbell told the employees he forgot his payment and left the shop to retrieve it, but returned armed with a knife and a gun and ordered the employees to the back of the business, the affidavit said.
Campbell then choked Oregan until she passed out, according to the affidavit. One of the employees was able to escape, but surveillance footage showed Campbell stabbing Harrell and Oregan multiple times before fleeing from the business, the affidavit continued.

 

Probably not a right-wing Trump voter:

One of Campbell’s neighbors, Robert Abraham, said given the numerous bizarre posts and confrontations between him and Campbell, the allegations were not shocking.
“It doesn’t surprise a lot of people that were familiar with him in the neighborhood,” Abraham said.
Abraham said Campbell had repeatedly confronted him and others on the neighborhood’s Facebook group. He said at one point, the communications were so concerning, his wife urged him to call the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office.
“I can’t even mentally understand it. It was quite bizarre,” Abraham said of Campbell’s antagonizing comments and posts, pointing to one in which Campbell had licked park benches, making light of the pandemic.
Other residents reached out to KENS 5, not wanting to go on camera, but echoing Abraham, stating Campbell had posted bizarre videos and comments. One video shared by a member of the neighborhood Facebook group depicts what they said is Campbell in a beak-like plague mask, driving with a siren playing in the background.
“When I kind of step back and look at it, I was like — it was quite frightening, to be honest with you,” Abraham said. “You know, in light of what happened.” . . .
Shayne Brown, the owner of Diesel Barbershop, where Campbell is alleged to have carried out the attack, described the deadly ordeal in a Facebook post.
“Attempts were made to give the man whatever he wanted…cash, equipment, or whatever it took to get him out of the shop,” Brown wrote in a Facebook post. “The man made it clear that he wasn’t there for money. He then began asking the employees: ‘What have you done wrong? What have you done wrong? God sent me here to kill you because you have done something wrong! What have you done wrong?’ over and over again while forcing them to the back of the shop.”

And the moral of the story? Crazy People Are Dangerous.




 

Ahmaud Arbery: Focus on Media Bias, Because ‘The Issue Is Never the Issue’

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Andrew Branca, an attorney specializing in self-defense cases, has referred to the “propaganda circus” surrounding the death of Ahmaud Arbery. One of the problems I’ve encountered is that, while my attention to the case has focused on the issue of media bias, which is what this “circus” is actually about, many people seem to think it is necessary to engage in arguments about the incident itself. But this is exactly what the “propaganda circus” seeks — to take a case that ought to be a matter for a judge and jury to decide and transfer jurisdiction to the “court of public opinion,” for a trial-by-media, with people reacting to what cable TV talking heads say about the case. You see this in the comments on my American Spectator column Monday, as well as my blog post Monday.

A 1960s radical once said: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” Whenever the Left seizes on some incident like the Arbery shooting, they do so to advance their agenda, and the role of supposedly “objective” journalists in assisting this project is what we need to focus on: What propaganda methods are involved?

First, consider the factor of selectivity. We must keep in mind that the United States has approximately 14,000 homicides in an average year — about 1,200 homicides per month, 40 homicides per day. Very few of those crimes ever get national media attention. It must be noted that about half of U.S. homicide victims are black, as are about half of known perpetrators of homicide, despite the fact that black people constitute only 14% of the U.S population. Black-on-black violence is a disproportionate amount of crime in America, whereas situations like the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery are quite rare.

So the media have chosen a rare type of incident to make a national story. Why? The agenda is unmistakably political:

Satilla Shores is a predominantly white neighborhood, one the Daily Beast’s Justin Glawe describes as featuring “several homes … decorated with Trump flags, one bearing the president’s smiling face with the phrase, Make liberals cry again.” . . .
>Advocates for Arbery argue his killing is a very clear case of racial profiling; in his caption for the video, Merritt wrote, “Ahmaud Arbery was pursued by three white men that targeted him solely because of his race and murdered him without justification.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by others, including presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who tweeted Tuesday, “The video is clear: Ahmaud Arbery was killed in cold blood.”
Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial election and who has said she hopes to become Biden’s running mate, demanded a “full investigation, appropriate charges, and an unbiased prosecution.”

That’s how the left-wing site Vox spun the story last week. They scarcely bother to conceal their message: “Trump voters are racist. White Republicans are the reason Ahmaud Arbery is dead.”

Yet it must be kept in mind that white-on-black homicide is a statistical rarity, a tiny fraction of the 14,000 homicides committed annually in the U.S., crimes that the national media typically ignore. The selectivity involved is driven by a partisan political motive, a desire to inflame public opinion in a way that is disadvantageous to Republicans. Another propaganda factor involved in the media’s coverage is omission.

 

Most Americans have never seen that 2013 mug shot of Ahmad Arbery, because the media do not wish to acknowledge his criminal record:

 

This is highly relevant to the circumstances of Arbery’s death, because Gregory McMichael, now charged with murder, was an investigator on that 2013 case in which Arbery was charged with bringing a pistol to a basketball game between Brunswick High (his alma mater) and their arch-rival Glynn Academy. Arbery was sentenced to five years’ probation in that case, and was subsequently convicted for violating his probation:

In an email [Ware County prosecutor George] Barnhill wrote to the state attorney general’s office on April 7, he asked to be taken off the case, stating that his son, an assistant district attorney in the Brunswick prosecutor’s office, had handled a felony probation revocation case involving Mr. Arbery. He also said Gregory McMichael had helped with “a previous prosecution of Arbery.”
Court records show that Mr. Arbery was convicted of shoplifting and of violating probation in 2018; according to local news reports, he was indicted five years earlier for taking a handgun to a basketball game.

How many CNN viewers know about this? And in the endless discussion of the case, how often is the significance of this information pointed out? Because, you see, first of all, that if McMichael recognized Arbery as he ran down Satilla Drive (“hauling ass,” McMichael said in his statement to police), he would have been aware that Arbery was a convicted felon with a history that involved firearms. Was it reasonable for McMichael to believe Arbery had a weapon? Could this explain why the former police officer decided to get his gun and pursue Arbery? Furthermore, because George Barnhill’s son was also involved in prosecuting Arbery, this helps explain why the case didn’t result in an immediate arrest, because Barnhill (who was chosen to handle the prosecution after the Glynn County D.A. recused herself) had to recuse himself after Arbery’s family objected to his possible conflict of interest. My purpose in drawing attention to this is not to argue about the shooting, but rather to show how the omission of these facts distorts perceptions of the case.

So, two methods of propaganda — selectivity and omission — are part of how the media have shaped the narrative of Ahmaud Arbery’s death, and they have done this to advance a political agenda: “Blame Trump!”

When the 36-second video clip of the shooting went viral last week, it was presented without context — or worse, was presented with the inflammatory false context of a “black jogger” being “hunted down” when, as we now know, Greg McMichael and his son believed themselves to be in pursuit of a burglary suspect. Again, this is not to argue about the case, as such, but rather to address the propaganda methods used by the media to advance their political agenda. If all you knew about the case is what you saw in that 36-second video clip, you’d certainly be angry about it, and if you were told that Ahmaud Arbery was just out for jog, you’d be even angrier. Even after it was explained that Arbery was a convicted felon whom the McMichaels suspected of committing burglaries in the area, you might still be angry, but there is a wide distance between (a) what actually happened, and (b) perceptions created by how the case has been portrayed in the media. “The issue is never the issue.”

It would be impossible for me to list everything that is being omitted, or at least not being properly emphasized, in coverage of this case. If you’re going to do hourly updates on cable news about a story, wouldn’t it behoove you to explore the story in-depth, rather than just showing the same video clip over and over and soliciting commentary from politicians and pundits? CNN can’t be bothered, however, and instead all the really useful reporting is done by other organizations, for example the Daily Mail, which interviewed the guy who called police to report Arbery’s trespassing at 220 Satilla Drive:

The witness’s timeline tallies with a recording of a 1:08pm non-emergency call released by the Brunswick Police Department and published last week by DailyMail.com. ‘There’s a guy in the house right now, a house under construction,’ the male caller says in the clip.
The audio is redacted to protect his identity but DailyMail.com can confirm it’s the same voice as the man we spoke to.
He claimed there had been a rash of thefts in Satilla Shores recently that included pistols and rifles stolen from people’s vehicles. Police have said they recorded one burglary in the area since January; there are no records matching claims of firearms thefts from vehicles.
However, he said he had never personally seen Arbery before and had no evidence he was linked to the theft or any other crimes.
‘I saw him running down the street and I know someone matching his description had been entering vehicles and been on people’s docks,’ the witness added.
‘So I went down there to call the police and get a closer look.’

Notice the phrase “people’s docks.” In case you haven’t looked at a map of this neighborhood, it’s waterfront property, on the north bank of the Little Satilla River, and there are boat docks behind the homes on the even-numbered addresses on Satilla Drive. While it’s not Palm Beach or Malibu or some other luxurious resort location, having a riverfront property with your own private boat dock is rather a sizable investment.

 

If you believed that your property was at risk of being stolen or damaged by intruders, it would not be unreasonable to call the police when you saw suspicious activity in the neighborhood. Does that explain why Gregory McMichael and his son thought it would be a good idea to grab their guns and set off in pursuit of Arbery? No, except that there apparently was concern about crime in the neighborhood and — just speculating here — maybe the senior McMichael, an ex-cop, was feeling ornery that Sunday afternoon. It’s one of those situations where you ask, “What the hell were they thinking?” However, you could ask the same question about Ahmaud Arbery’s behavior that day.

Watch this report from Savannah’s WSAV-TV:

 

You’ll see that there’s not only the video we’ve all seen — Arbery evidently checking out the unfinished construction site at 220 Satilla Drive — but also other videos, from the same site, taken at night and showing someone who may or may not be Arbery inside the site. According to the report, these other videos date back as far as October 2019. So it was not a matter of paranoid imagination when a 911 caller told the dispatcher the day Arbery shot that this was an “ongoing situation.” There is yet another video I’ve seen which shows Arbery exiting the site at high speed (“hauling ass,” as Gregory McMichael told police), perhaps because he realized that the neighbor had called police.

Recall that, just two years ago, Arbery got busted for shoplifting and violating probation. Even if you think he was just out for a jog and decided to check out this construction site, what would Arbery think when he saw the neighbor standing in his driveway talking on the phone?

“Oh, no. They called the police. Better get out of here.”

This is speculation, but it is a fair guess that if Arbery thought police were on their way to investigate his trespassing on this property, he wouldn’t stick around to explain himself to the cops. You can read the police report yourself and see what allegedly happened thereafter, and you can also read George Barnhill’s letter asserting that the McMichaels’ actions did not violate Georgia law. Many people — including Dana Loesch — have criticized Barnhill’s argument. That’s immaterial to what I’m saying about media bias. If all you know about this case is what you’re getting from CNN or MSNBC, you know a lot less than half the story.

The media are deliberately distorting the case, using it as propaganda to incite racial anger to advance their political agenda.

Stop arguing about the case, and instead “turn the camera around,” as Andrew Breitbart used to say: Force the media to defend their bias. Hold them accountable for their selectivity and omissions. Why are they reporting on this homicide, rather than covering any other of the approximately 40 homicides that happen every day in America? What makes this Georgia case more important than any other case?




 

Georgia on My Mind

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“It seemed like a good idea at the time” is not a strong defense in a murder trial, and the question everybody seems to be asking in regard to the death of Ahmaud Arbery is why Gregory McMichael and his son thought it was a good idea to grab their guns, jump in their truck and go out in pursuit of a man they assumed to be a fleeing burglary suspect.

It is not my habit to play Monday-morning quarterback in controversial murder cases. I’m not a lawyer, and my opinion in such matters is no more valuable than anyone else’s. However, I’ve spent more than 30 years in the news business, and I know a thing or two about media bias. In 2009, when I saw a bunch of pundits pontificating about the alleged “lynching” of a census worker in Kentucky, I got the wild idea to hit the road and investigate the reality of the story on the ground. As it turned out, the census worker had committed suicide and staged it to look like a lynching, in an insurance fraud scheme, but by the time the truth came out, the pundits who had smeared this Kentucky community as a haven of “anti-government extremism” seemed to have lost interest.

Could it be that the media’s coverage of the Ahmaud Arbery case is similarly biased? I’m trying to resist the itch for a road trip, but meanwhile I’m sick and tired of the way the story is being spun:

Brunswick is a seaport town on the Georgia coast with which I have a personal connection. During World War II, my maternal grandfather moved to Brunswick to work in the shipyard and my grandmother joined him there, working in the canteen that served meals to the more than 16,000 workers who built 99 “Liberty ships” in the Brunswick yards in a span of about three years. Founded in the 1770s, Brunswick remains today a major harbor, and its picturesque Old Town district attracts many tourists who visit nearby Jekyll Island and St. Simons Island.
Brunswick seldom makes national news, but that changed last month when the New York Times devoted a 1,700-word article to the February shooting death of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery. Why would this homicide be worthy of national attention? Because Arbery was black and the man who shot him is white and, until the case became the subject of round-the-clock coverage on CNN, no charges had been filed in the case. Now that 34-year-old Travis McMichael and his father, Gregory McMichael, have been charged with murder and aggravated assault, one might hope that journalists would be content to leave the matter to the justice system, but that’s not how the media operate in such cases. Instead, Americans are still being bombarded with updates and commentary on the alleged “lynching” of Arbery, who is described as a “black jogger” who was the victim of racism. . . .

You can read the rest of my latest column at The American Spectator.




 

Blame Trump? Store Guard Murdered After Confronting Customer Without Mask

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Friday, a security guard at a Family Dollar store in Flint, Michigian, was shot to death after he confronted a customer who was not wearing a mask. Liberals on Twitter rushed to blame President Trump, claiming the shooting was inspired by Trump’s criticism of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

“This is another Trump inspired murder,” one Twitter user declared. “This is what the rabid hosts on Fox and Trump have done,” said another. “A direct result of Trump’s cry to ‘liberate’ Michigan,” said yet another as the torrent of Trump-hating messages spewed forth.

Then details of the killing, and mug shots of the suspects, emerged:

Three people are charged with the murder of a Family Dollar security guard in Flint, who was enforcing the store’s policy requiring face masks.
Two men remain at large while a woman has been arrested and is awaiting arraignment in the Genesee County Jail.
The male suspects are 44-year-old Larry Edward Teague and 23-year-old Ramonyea Bishop. Teague’s wife and Bishop’s mother, 45-year-old Sharmel Teague, has been arrested.
All three suspects are facing a charge of first-degree premeditated murder, which carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole if they are convicted.
Larry Teague and Bishop also are facing several weapons charges while Teague faces an additional charge of violating Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s order to wear face coverings in enclosed public spaces.
Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton said Sharmel Teague and her daughter went in the Family Dollar at 877 E. Fifth St. in Flint around 1:40 p.m. Friday. Teague was wearing a mask, but her daughter was not.
While inside, security guard Calvin Munerlyn confronted the daughter about not wearing a face mask.
Whitmer issued an order in April requiring everyone entering an enclosed space to wear a face mask or covering over their nose and mouth to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Family Dollar has adopted that as a store policy for customers.
Sharmel Teague and Munerlyn got into an argument about the policy. Leyton said Sharmel Teague spit at Munerlyn, who then ordered her to leave the store and told the cashier to refuse service to her.
Surveillance video showed Teague and her daughter leaving the store in a red GMC Envoy and enter the nearby River Village Apartments complex. Minutes later, cell phone records show Sharmel Teague made a phone call to Larry Teague, Leyton said.
About 20 minutes after Sharmel and her daughter left the store, Leyton said Larry Teague and Bishop drove the same GMC Envoy back to the store.
Leyton said surveillance video shows Larry Teague and Bishop enter the store and start an argument with Munerlyn. Witnesses reported hearing the suspects ask Munerlyn who had disrespected his wife.
During the altercation, Leyton said Bishop pulled out a handgun and shot 43-year-old Munerlyn in the head. He was rushed to Hurley Medical Center, where he died later Friday.

 

Look, I don’t want to jump to conclusions here, but Hillary Clinton carried Flint, Michigan, by a wide margin in 2016, and if you were looking to find violent Trump supporters in Flint, you probably wouldn’t pick Larry, Ramonyea and Sharmel as the most likely suspects.




 

The Case of the COVID-19 ‘Black Widow’: Police Are Investigating Wanda Lenius

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Last month, I told you about how Wanda poisoned her husband Gary in Arizona — allegedly, I hasten to add, because certainly I myself have no direct knowledge of the matter and wouldn’t want to deal with the hassle of a libel suit. I’m just repeating what Ace said, a defense that would probably stand up in court, because if a genuine blogging legend says it was murder, you can take that to the bank, buddy.

Police in Arizona seem to agree:

The Mesa City Police Department’s homicide division is investigating the death of Gary Lenius, the Arizona man whose wife served him soda mixed with fish tank cleaner in what she claimed was a bid to fend off the coronavirus. A detective handling the case confirmed the investigation to the Washington Free Beacon on Tuesday after requesting a recording of the Free Beacon’s interviews with Lenius’s wife, Wanda.
Gary Lenius, 68, died on March 22. Wanda, 61, told several news outlets last month that both she and her husband had ingested a substance used to clean aquariums after hearing President Donald Trump tout one of its ingredients, chloroquine phosphate, from the White House briefing room.
Detective Teresa Van Galder, the homicide detective handling the case for the Mesa City Police Department, confirmed that the investigation is ongoing but declined to provide additional details.
“As this is an active investigation, I cannot go into any details at this time regarding the case,” Van Galder said. The Free Beacon provided a recording of its interview last month with Wanda Lenius.
News of the police probe comes after a series of Free Beacon stories raised questions about the portrayal of the couple in the initial NBC News report that vaulted the story onto the national stage.
Though that report and others suggested the couple mindlessly followed the president’s medical advice to disastrous results, friends of Gary Lenius told the Free Beacon they were skeptical he would knowingly ingest fish tank treatment.

A police spokesman said this is just “normal protocol.”

Routine investigation. Nothing suspicious at all. Nudge, nudge.




 

‘Nice Guys Finish Last’: Red Pill Truth About a Tennessee Murder Case

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Abusive people tend to have keen sense of who will tolerate their abuse, and will not associate with anyone who stands up to them. Having extensive experience of dealing with sociopaths, my observations on this subject ought to carry some weight, and my advice to anyone would be: Avoid them, if possible, but never back down from them.

Never show weakness. Never be deceived. Don’t be played for a chump.

Sociopaths are selfish, dishonest and cruel. They take sadistic pleasure in inflicting harm on others, and congratulate themselves in getting away with it. Success in manipulating others — gaming the system to their advantage — is a source of self-esteem to the sociopath. They escape consequences by exploiting the desire of decent people to avoid unnecessary conflict. Sociopaths are very clever when it comes to enlisting others to be unwitting accomplices in their malevolent schemes.

If you are insufficiently “street smart,” you may not notice the telltale evidence that you’re dealing with a sociopath, and you won’t realize that the only safe move, in regard to such people, is avoidance.

Did I mention that sociopaths are often charming, attractive people?

 

Chandra Beth Williams was a “single mom” when she met Bryan Lawson, and that should have been a red flag warning to avoid her. Am I being too harsh here? Perhaps, but there has to be a reason — a backstory — to explain why a pretty blue-eyed blonde finds herself in that situation.

Good-looking young people are seldom single. The more attractive a person is, the more likely they are to be in a relationship. Young men have to learn this common-sense principle and act accordingly. If you meet a pretty blue-eyed blonde, just assume she already has a boyfriend or husband, because otherwise you’re likely to get in trouble. However, should you discover such a woman is single, be suspicious.

What’s the backstory? “A pretty face can hide an evil mind,” to quote an old Johnny Rivers hit, and what can you deduce from the fact that an unusually attractive woman is single? Is there something wrong with her personality? Is she on the wrong side of The Hot/Crazy Matrix?

Look, I understand that bad things sometimes happen to good people, through no real fault of their own. There are innocent victims in the world, and perhaps the good-looking single mom is one of them. But a naïve young man, dazzled by her beauty, is unlikely to be sufficiently skeptical to investigate such a woman’s character, to look before he leaps. That’s the short story of what happened to Bryan Lawson.

 

Bryan married Chandra and became a good stepfather to her son. Both he and Chandra developed substance-abuse problems, becoming addicted to opioids, but when Chandra gave birth to their son, Bryan quit the drugs. Chandra’s behavior became increasingly more abusive. After a burglary, the couple had installed a video surveillance system in their apartment, and the camera caught the last confrontation between Chandra and Bryan. She threatened him with a baseball bat, and he shot her to death.

A few hours after Bryan was arrested, a man called the sheriff’s office to report a relevant fact: Chandra’s son was not Bryan’s son.

She had cheated on Bryan. He had been cuckolded. It was not until after Chandra was dead that this truth was discovered by a DNA test.

Bryan Lawson had been the victim of a sociopath and, given the video evidence of Chandra’s abusive violence, his lawyers believed that Bryan might be acquitted by a jury, having shot her in self-defense.

As revealed in A&E’s documentary series Accused, however, Bryan Lawson ultimately decided to accept a plea bargain, being sentenced to 15 years in prison, although he’ll likely be paroled after three years.

Perhaps nothing could have saved Bryan Lawson from his fate. Some guys are just natural-born chumps, and the sociopath in search of a victim will always find such people, as if guided by radar. We could examine the Bryan Lawson case to see what factors made him uniquely vulnerable to a monster like Chandra, but that misses the point.

Anyone might be deceived by a sociopath, if we were not warned to recognize and avoid them. The danger posed by the sociopath’s warped character — dishonest, selfish and cruel — is seldom apparent when first meeting such people who, as I say, are often attractive and charming. When we look at someone like NXIVM cult leader Keith Raniere, for example, it’s easy to dismiss his victims as gullible fools, but that overlooks Raniere’s charismatic qualities, and the sociopathic cunning by which he attracted naïve spiritual “seekers” to himself.

One of the basic methods by which sociopaths engage their victims is called “mirroring,” reflecting back at us an image calculated to gain our trust and sympathy. Victims of this tactic will often speak of having felt an instant emotional “connection” the first time they met the sociopath.

Sociopaths have no conscience, they are incapable of empathy, and yet they are very good at faking these qualities, because they know that this charade — creating an image of themselves as sensitive and caring — will cause their victims to consider them trustworthy. And while it is possible that anyone might be deceived by the sociopath, becoming the victim of a sociopath is not entirely random.

“Nice guys finish last,” Leo Durocher once famously said, which doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t be nice. Rather, the problem is that if you prioritize being “nice” as a core principle of your life, you are apt to become a victim of those who are willing to cheat to get their way.

Bryan Lawson was a textbook case of Nice Guy Syndrome, willing to play “white knight” for the single mother Chandra Williams, and patiently enduring her abusive behavior until, at last, he was forced to kill her in a desperate act of self-defense. The fact that Chandra cuckolded Bryan, deceiving him into believing he was the father of the child she conceived in adultery, is scarcely surprising under these circumstances.

You should read The Rational Male, and follow Rollo on Twitter. People don’t want to see the cold, hard truth about situations like what happened to Bryan Lawson. The Red Pill is not a pleasant taste, but the medicine is necessary if you want to avoid becoming a chump.

UPDATE: I shared this post with Rollo, who responded by referring me to his 2012 post, “Single + Hot = Crazy.” The common-sense point is this: An unusually attractive woman can have her choice of partners, so if you meet such a woman who is single, the obvious question is: Why?

Whatever the answer is, the wise man must evaluate this explanation in terms of how it reflects on the woman’s personality and habits. If a guy is just looking for a fling, he might be less scrupulous in this regard, but if he’s looking for Wife Material, it behooves him to be cautious.

If it seems too good to be true, it is probably neither good nor true.




 

Crazy People Are Dangerous: If You’re Watching ‘Tiger King,’ You Know It

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What remarkable luck — five years ago, Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin began working on a documentary about Americans who own private menageries of exotic animals and, almost accidentally, found their protagonist in an eccentric Oklahoma zoo owner, Joe Schreibvogel, a/k/a “Joe Exotic.” In 2019, he was sentenced to federal prison, giving their documentary its dramatic conclusion, and their film was released on Netflix just about the time the coronavirus lockdown created a captive audience. During its first 10 days of release, more than 30 million people watched Tiger King, which instantly attained the status of cult classic.

The other day, my son Jefferson and I binge-watched the first three or four episodes (I lost count), and it’s easy to see what has made this the most successful documentary in history. Prior to the release of Tiger King, little attention was paid to the strange subculture of exotic animal collectors. Bizarre fact: The number of tigers privately owned in America exceeds the number of tigers that live in the wild. We might take patriotic pride in this fact — an endangered species is flourishing here, thanks to American capitalism — but the filmmakers are not sympathetic to the private ownership of exotic cats. (Producer Eric V. Goode is a wealthy conservationist.) And the type of people who pursue the hobby (or business) of breeding tigers and other exotic species in captivity . . .

Well, “eccentric” is perhaps the most polite adjective that comes to mind.

These people are not just crazy, they’re trashy. You have never in your life seen so much trash outside of a landfill. The filmmakers do an excellent job of conveying this with subtlety. For example, after our introduction to Joe Exotic and his downscale zoo in Oklahoma, we then meet Kevin Antle, a/k/a “Doc Antle,” a/k/a “Mahamayavi Bhagavan Antle,” owner of T.I.G.E.R.S. (The Institute for Greatly Endangered and Rare Species) near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Doc Antle with Jay Leno on ‘The Tonight Show’ in 2003.

In contrast to Joe Exotic’s redneck persona, Antle seems far more reputable. Antle is a multimillionaire who has worked as an animal trainer for such big-time Hollywood productions as Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and the 1998 remake of Dr. Doolittle. Antle’s attraction in Myrtle Beach is very professional-looking and charges more than $600 for admission, giving visitors a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get up close and personal with these animals. However . . .

Antle appears to be running a sex cult, with multiple “wives” chosen from among his female employees. We meet a former employee who joined Antle’s operation as an 18-year-old and left after more than a decade, describing her experience at T.I.G.E.R.S. as something akin to slavery.

Another exotic animal owner we meet — who “seems chill,” in my son’s words — is a former Miami cocaine kingpin who served time in federal prison for the murder of an FBI undercover agent. And so it goes with everyone we encounter in Tiger King. There are no heroes here, no one you would think of as members of the respectable bourgeoisie. In general, they could be categorized as “grifters,” who in one way or another have cashed in on the public fascination with rare exotic animals. The producers are holding up a mirror to American society, inspiring us to ask why so many people are willing to pay money to have their picture taken with a tiger. How did the “tiger selfie” become a status symbol?

One is reminded of the old saying about legislation and sausage, and how you don’t want to know what goes into making it. The business of breeding wild animals in captivity, which makes it possible for people to pay for that “tiger selfie,” attracts a certain type of person, because the work required behind the scenes is not something that the respectable bourgeois would be interested in doing, or even knowing about. For example, an adult tiger requires a diet of a certain number of pounds of meat daily. This is quite expensive, and early in the series we are told that Joe Exotic has more than 200 tigers in his Oklahoma zoo.

That number boggled my son’s mind: “Two hundred? What the . . .?”

My son had thought that somebody would own maybe 10 tigers, which would still be a lot of tigers, but 200? “That’s an insane number of tigers.” How did Joe Exotic go from zero tigers to more than 200 in less than decades? Ah, but how is not the question, rather why.

It’s about the cubs, you see. Federal safety regulations do not allow for the general public to interact with exotic big cats as adults because an adult tiger (spoiler alert) might bite your arm off. What these private zookeepers can do, however, is let someone handle a tiger cub, up to a few months in age. Thus, exhibitors like Joe Exotic must have their cats continually breeding, producing new litters of cubs on a regular basis, to give them the product that pays their bills.

Perhaps you see the problem with this. If the big money is to be made with baby tigers, what happens when they grow up? Well, animal-rights activists, whom I despise quite generally, have nonetheless made a reasonable point in voicing their suspicions that some of these private menagerie owners are killing their “excess” adult animals. After all, what is the bottom-line incentive of continuing to feed hundreds of pounds of meat every month to adult tigers and lions, if these animals make no meaningful contribution to the profit of your operation?

And then, of course, there is Joe Exotic’s nemesis, Carole Baskin.

What an evil witch she is, masquerading as philanthropic animal-rights activist when she is not really any better than the for-profit zookeepers whom she attacks in the name of “animal rights.” Joe Exotic made many mistakes in his life, but none was more foolish than ramping up his personal feud with Baskin’s “Big Cat Rescue” into an obsession.

This reminded me, actually, of Bill Schmalfeldt, who in 2012 decided to make himself part of the Brett Kimberlin saga, and didn’t stop until . . .

Well, you can read the files about Bill at Hogewash.

Joe Exotic had a habit of making boastful threats. He was going to “destroy” Carole Baskin, et cetera, and as my son observed, you feel sorry for Joe because he has so obviously gotten in over his head, antagonizing Baskin in ways that are certain to boomerang back against him.

Did I mention that Carole Baskin murdered her second husband?

“Allegedly,” I hasten to add.

Missing millionaire Don Lewis (left) and his widow, Carole Baskin (right).

Don Lewis was a successful businessman, a 42-year-old married father of four in 1981 when he first met 20-year-old Carole Jones Murdock. Lewis was a rather notorious womanizer, and commenced an affair with Carole, a high-school dropout who was also married at the time. Carole divorced her first husband and, in 1991, became Mrs. Don Lewis. Six years later, however, Don was ready to divorce Carole, whom he claimed had threatened to kill him. Then one day, Don mysteriously disappeared.

Five years later, Carole had Don declared legally dead, and thus inherited his substantial fortune, rumored to be several million dollars, and including the Florida property which she subsequently turned into Big Cat Rescue. You see, among his other enterprises, Don had been a collector of exotic wild animals, including dozens of big cats, and Carole’s enemies — chief among them, Joe Exotic — suspect that after killing her husband, Carole feed Don’s remains to the tigers. Such is the suspicion expressed by several people in Tiger King, but as a professional journalist certainly I would never make such an accusation myself, because that might be construed as libel. You can Google it yourself, however.

 

As I say, there are no heroes in Tiger King, and whether or not Don Lewis was murdered, he was no innocent saint. Adultery is a sin, after all, and perhaps the “Red Pill” guys like Rollo Tomassi would find some lesson in whatever happened to Don Lewis, who was definitely an Alpha male.

As every student of Aristotle knows, hubris is essential to tragedy. In his arrogance, the protagonist fails to recognize the destructive fate which approaches, and there is a lot of hubris evident in the fate that befalls Joe Exotic. He staffs his Oklahoma zoo with the lowest sort of human trash, perhaps not merely as a way of saving money — his people work for substandard wages — but also because ex-convicts and drug addicts can be bossed around more easily. One cannot help but notice that Joe Exotic is not alone among big-cat aficionados in having a domineering, control-oriented personality. All of them, Carole Baskin included, take pleasure in the superiority of their status within their private fiefdoms, a status that requires a number of inferior minions to do their bidding. There is a sadistic quality to this type of personality; such people cannot see others as equals, and so they will always seek out or create situations in which they are the unquestioned Boss, surrounded by lackeys and sycophants.

The spirit of voluntary cooperation — teamwork in pursuit of a common goal — is alien to the domineering personality. There is nothing wrong with ambition, and every team must have its leaders, but anyone who aspires to such a role generally will encounter an institutional structure that requires them to “pay their dues” and work their way up the ranks before obtaining a position of independent leadership. Nick Saban didn’t just decide one day to start a football team and appoint himself as head coach. No, he first worked as a graduate assistant at his alma mater, Kent State, in 1973, and spent the next 16 years as an assistant coach (at Syracuse, West Virginia, Ohio State, etc.) before finally getting his first head coaching job in 1989 at Toledo State, when he was almost 40. It was more than a decade later that Saban became head coach at LSU, where he led the Tigers to the National Championship before being hired at the University of Alabama in 2007, when he was age 56.

Nick Saban did not suffer from a lack of ambition, and he is a demanding taskmaster, but you see that he had to pay his dues, working within the system, to make it to the top of his field. This is a very different thing than the way someone like Joe Schreibvogel makes himself the boss of a private zoo, and collects a bunch of underlings to do his bidding. Even the more respectable operators, like Doc Antle, are part of a fringe subculture that lacks the kind of institutional framework that limits the authority of the boss. You may see Nick Saban shouting on the sidelines and think he’s some kind of tyrant, but he is accountable to the university, and governed by the authority of the NCAA, so that he must work within the limits of this framework. While there have been documented abuses within the world of college athletics, the process by which someone becomes a head football coach is such that the wheat are separated from the chaff. You can’t buy your way into an NCAA head coaching job, the way that a Miami drug kingpin bought himself a menagerie of exotic pets.

Viewers of Tiger King are sympathetic to Joe Exotic because they see him as an underdog who fought (and lost) a war against a powerful enemy. The animal-rights movement, as personified by Carole Baskin, has enough money and prestige to make life miserable for private zoo owners.

The regulatory power of the federal government is part of this equation. In addition to allegedly trying to hire a hitman to kill Carole Baskin — oops, spoiler alert! — Joe Exotic was sent to prison for violating two federal laws, the Lacey Act and the Endangered Species Act. It is quite probable that these laws that Joe Exotic was convicted of violating have also been violated by many other proprietors of private menageries, but Joe more or less drew a target on his own back. He just pushed things too far, and made himself conspicuous. It’s like the difference between a local drug dealer who avoids arrest by keeping his enterprise small, selling only to a trusted circle of clients, and the big-time smuggler who drives flashy sports cars and, predictably, finds himself forced to defend his empire by murdering rivals or suspected snitches.

“A man’s got to know his limitations,” to quote Inspector Harry Callahan, and it’s obvious that Joe Exotic didn’t recognize any limits.

Joe Exotic was crazy, and Crazy People Are Dangerous.