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From Los Angeles Times

DNA testing sheds new light on Original Night Stalker case

Investigators confirm through DNA that the man who killed a Goleta couple in 1981 is the same one they believe responsible for a string of crimes that started with dozens of rapes in Northern California and ended with multiple slayings in Santa Barbara, Ventura and Orange counties.

By Steve Chawkins and Nicole Santa Cruz, Los Angeles Times

May 6, 2011

Whether the serial killer known as the Original Night Stalker is still alive, nobody knows.

But 30 years after a couple died while housesitting in Goleta, investigators have confirmed through DNA testing what they long suspected: The man who killed them is the same one they believe responsible for a decades-long crime spree that started with dozens of rapes in Northern California and ended with as many as 10 slayings in Santa Barbara, Ventura and Orange counties.

The last known crime associated with the Original Night Stalker took place in 1986, but his notoriety lives on. In 2004, California voters passed an initiative, bankrolled by the brother of one of his victims, that mandates collection of DNA samples from people convicted — or even arrested — in felony cases.

Authorities are no closer to pinpointing an identity for the killer, who was usually masked and sometimes accompanied by his German shepherd. Still, officials in Santa Barbara said Tuesday they've answered a crucial question in the 1981 slayings of Cheri Domingo, 35, and Gregory Sanchez, 27.

"We now have concrete evidence that links their deaths to the horrific individual that terrorized both Northern and Southern California," said Drew Sugars, a spokesman for the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department.

About six months ago, the state crime lab in Santa Barbara offered sheriff's investigators a chance to scrutinize old evidence with cutting-edge DNA technology.

Using a recently developed technique, scientists could wring usable DNA out of samples that had been seen as too old and degraded to be of much value, said Colleen Spurgeon, the lab's assistant director.

In the Goleta case, Sanchez was shot and bludgeoned. Domingo died of massive head injuries. Some of the grisly details matched those at other crime scenes associated with the Original Night Stalker: Sanchez and Domingo lived in an upscale neighborhood and were killed in bed. Domingo's hands had been tied — as had the hands of victims at other scenes.

Eighteen months before, another couple had been killed at home in Goleta. Dr. Robert Offerman, an osteopathic surgeon, and Alexandria Manning, a clinical psychologist, also had their hands bound with twine. Authorities believe their assailant was the Original Night Stalker.

The sheriff's office dug about 50 pieces of evidence out of storage. Detectives studied blankets, bedspreads, hair, and semen stains. Scientists at Spurgeon's Santa Barbara crime lab sent samples to another federal lab in Richmond, Calif., for further testing.

In the last month, a search of DNA databases found matches between the Goleta case and three Northern California rapes. Before he became known as the Original Night Stalker — so named to distinguish him from Richard Ramirez, the serial killer known as the Night Stalker who terrorized the Los Angeles area in the mid-1980s — the killer was called the East Area Rapist and was tied to no fewer than 52 sexual assaults in Sacramento County and the Bay Area.

Then there were the 1980 murders.

In Ventura, Lyman Smith, an attorney days away from being appointed a judge, and his wife, Charlene, a court clerk, were bludgeoned to death with a fireplace log in their home.

Later that year, Keith Harrington, a medical student at UC Irvine, and his wife, Patrice, a pediatric nurse, were beaten to death with a blunt instrument in their Laguna Niguel home.

Finally, in 1986, 18-year-old Jannelle Cruz was fatally bludgeoned in her family's Irvine home.

In the last couple of weeks, authorities in Santa Barbara have matched the DNA found in Goleta to those crime scenes.

That wasn't a surprise to many investigators. But for Larry Pool, a detective with the Orange County Sheriff's Department, it was a break that might "breathe some life" back into the aging cases.

Finding the Original Night Stalker has become his life's mission.

In his work space, he has two composite drawings prominently displayed. He keeps a recording of the killer's voice — from a phone message to one of his victims — in the top drawer of his desk.

"He is cunning," Pool said. "He has a degree of tactical soundness to the way he operates. He is able to adjust tactically to improve his effectiveness as a killer."

Pool once thought the suspect could be in prison. But that theory came to seem less plausible as the state's DNA database grew.

As he hunted for the Original Night Stalker in the early 2000s, Pool had a buried man exhumed. The DNA didn't match.

Investigators said the killer would be in his 50s or 60s today. He usually hid his face under a dark ski mask or kerchief and was under 6 feet tall. His shoe size was about 9.

Relatives of the Original Night Stalker's victims were quietly heartened by the news from Goleta.

Bruce Harrington, a Newport Beach developer, spent nearly $2 million to pass Proposition 69 after the killing of his brother Keith.

The DNA match this week was further validation of its need, he said.

Like Harrington, Jennifer Smith, who was 18 when her father and stepmother were so brutally slain, doubts the Original Night Stalker is still alive.

"I personally have resolved that he's not," she said. "That's how I live with it."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-original-night-stalker-20110506,0,6713627,print.story

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Doyle McManus: Al Qaeda's very bad year

More than the death of Osama bin Laden, the spread of democracy in the Arab world is depriving the terrorist movement of its reason for being.

by Doyle McManus

May 5, 2011

Al Qaeda is having a very bad year. And from the terrorists' standpoint, the death of Osama bin Laden isn't even the worst of it. The biggest potential blow is the spread of democratic politics in the Arab world. If it succeeds, Al Qaeda will be deprived of its reason for being.

Bin Laden's death at the hands of American commandos produced strikingly little outrage in the Muslim world. In 2001, when he held the United States and Europe in a state of terror, Bin Laden was a hero to a sizable fringe of Muslims frustrated by their countries' stagnant politics. But by the time he died this week, the Saudi-born terrorist had become little more than an object of curiosity. Polls conducted by the Pew Research Center found that the number of people in Muslim countries who expressed confidence in Bin Laden plummeted during the last 10 years. Even in Pakistan, where he lived his final years, the terrorist's "job approval" dropped from 52% in 2005 to 18% in 2010.

Al Qaeda, the movement Bin Laden co-founded, is looking marginal as well. Bin Laden and his lieutenants knew that they could die at any moment, and they tried to design Al Qaeda to survive them. When the United States attacked "Al Qaeda Central" in Pakistan and Afghanistan, they decentralized, sponsoring franchises in Yemen, North Africa and Somalia. And they focused more energy on inspiring and supporting individual would-be terrorists in the West.

That strategy isn't working very well. The last known successful attack against a Western country coordinated by Al Qaeda Central was the London transit system plot of 2005, almost six years ago. The last apparent "self-starter" attack was the 2009 Ft. Hood massacre for which Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan has been indicted, but that was an isolated tragedy.

Even more important, Al Qaeda's theory of history looks increasingly irrelevant. Bin Laden didn't stage terrorist attacks because (as then-President George W. Bush contended) he hated our freedom. Bin Laden and his Egyptian lieutenant, Ayman Zawahiri, plotted attacks against the United States, "the far enemy," because they believed that that was the quickest way to bring down repressive regimes in their own homelands, "the near enemy."

They turned out to be wrong. Al Qaeda's attacks didn't prompt an American withdrawal from the Muslim world; quite the contrary. The United States increased its presence in the region, invading Iraq and Afghanistan — without touching off the regionwide insurrection Bin Laden hoped for.

Over time, most Muslims decided that they didn't want to live under Bin Laden's version of Islam, especially after local branches of Al Qaeda killed thousands of civilians in Iraq and other countries.

And in the final failure of Bin Laden's career, many of the local affiliates of Al Qaeda — the organizations that were intended to keep his message alive after he was gone — took their eye off the ball. In Iraq, Yemen, Algeria and Somalia, Al Qaeda's successors found themselves sucked into local politics, not the grand transnational terrorism that was supposed to be their trademark.

As my colleagues Brian Bennett and Ken Dilanian reported Wednesday, U.S. intelligence officials say Bin Laden recently sent messages to the affiliates — by courier, apparently, from his Abbottabad hideout — admonishing them to remember that their target was the United States, not local regimes.

But in most of the Muslim world, all politics are local now. Autocratic regimes in Tunisia and Egypt have fallen; autocratic regimes in Yemen, Syria and Libya are tottering. And not only is the United States, Bin Laden's "far enemy," not propping the dictators up, but its president is standing ostentatiously on the sidelines, encouraging young Arabs to take their future into their own hands.

Bin Laden appealed to Muslims with a message that said, essentially: The way to assert your dignity and regain your rights is to attack the United States, as violently as possible.

The lesson of the Arab Spring has been the opposite: Young Tunisians and Egyptians found their dignity and won their rights by going into the streets with as little violence as possible.

In Tunisia and Egypt, Muslim militants have plunged into local politics, but the center of Islamist energy is the locally focused Muslim Brotherhood, not Al Qaeda. "Al Qaeda hates the Muslim Brotherhood," notes terrorism expert Audrey Kurth Cronin. "The Brotherhood is willing to work within the political system, and their success has increased the marginalization of Al Qaeda."

It may take years for Al Qaeda to wither away, warns Cronin, who studied the life-cycles of terrorist groups for her book "How Terrorism Ends." But if most of Al Qaeda's remaining members focus on local politics instead of attacks on the United States, an intriguing question arises: Do we need to care about them anymore?

We'll still worry about terrorism in countries that are important to us: Saudi Arabia, with its oil, or Pakistan, with its nuclear weapons. And in the United States, individual militants may still turn up, inspired by Bin Laden's successors. But those problems are a far cry from the threat we saw in the implacable, well-organized Al Qaeda that attacked New York and Washington in 2001.

As President Obama and his aides have been quick to warn, the war against Al Qaeda isn't over. But we may be seeing the beginning of the end. And among the most important weapons for the United States in the next phase of the struggle are the old-fashioned tools of diplomacy and foreign aid, wielded to help democracy succeed and deprive Al Qaeda of its reason for being.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mcmanus-column-bin-laden-20110505,0,1187561,print.column

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From the New York Times

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Tornado Leaves Couple With Nothing, but Not for Long

HENAGAR, Ala. — There's the kindness of strangers, and then there's what is happening to Regina and Jerry Wayne Walker.

They used to rent a mobile home for $150 a month on a dirt road in this slice of rural northeastern Alabama.

Then, last Wednesday, winds from a tornado so strong it killed 33 people in the county pushed their mobile home across the road like it was a toy.

They woke up under a pile of rubble. Their cars were smashed.

Her blouse had been blown off, landing in a nearby tree, cellphone still in its pocket.

They were broke, bruised and stuck in a part of the country so remote that the Red Cross did not show up for three days.

They thought about going to a shelter or perhaps a relative's house, but they were scared to leave for fear that what little they had left might be taken by thieves.

But what to do? They had nowhere to live.

Someone, no one knows who exactly, brought a tent. People showed up with water and food.

The next day, the city set up a portable toilet. A local teacher stopped by and asked Mrs. Walker, 49, what she needed. Clean underwear, she said. A few hours later, she had some.

A pastor drove in from Birmingham and handed them his personal Bible. Although neither of the Walkers can read or write, it gives them comfort.

The strangers just kept coming. There was peroxide to clean her wounds. Homemade dressing to go with the green beans. Ladies from the church asked about their clothing sizes and promised to return with a new wardrobe.

A woman in a black S.U.V. gave them $80. A car was lent, the gas tank full.

In the morning, someone they know only as the Chicken Man, because he owns some nearby poultry houses, brings them scrambled eggs and biscuits. At night, two neighbors drop by with sweet tea.

The biggest surprise of all came from a neighbor's boss. He had a recreational vehicle. It does not have a transmission, but it has a roof and a door and a soft place to sleep.

“I had never laid eyes on this man until the other day,” said Mr. Walker, 49.

The gifts are so generous, the outpouring so great, it makes them happy. At least, as happy as they can be given the circumstances.

“People take care of their own here,” said Mrs. Walker's son, Nathan Burke, 26, who was staying in the trailer with them but was not home when the storm hit.

When a particularly generous delivery of food arrived from yet another good Samaritan, he brought it over to his mother.

“See, Mama,” he told her, a grin on his face, “the South has risen again.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/us/06voices.html?pagewanted=print

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Editorial

The Quiet at Ground Zero

President Obama made no speech as he placed a wreath of red, white and blue flowers at ground zero on Thursday. His silence was the best way to honor the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. No words were needed to remind Americans of our continuing pain.

The closest Mr. Obama came to mentioning this week's killing of Osama bin Laden was at a lunch cooked by the firefighters of Engine Company 54, Ladder Company 4 and Battalion 9, the station that lost 15 members on 9/11. “When we say we will never forget, we mean what we say.”

The sky above was deep blue when Mr. Obama stepped forth later at ground zero and bowed his head. Before privately visiting families of the victims, Mr. Obama paid his open-air respects to the nearly 3,000 who perished. He stood near what is now called the Survivor Tree — a gnarled, scalded callery pear tree found in the wreckage. It was nursed back to flourish at the heart of what will be the National September 11 Memorial and Museum .

Crowds were kept well away on surrounding sidewalks, offering their own silence beyond sight of the president. A dozen construction cranes were stilled above acres of work in progress as ground zero slowly comes back from the ashen wound it was on Sept. 11.

One World Trade Center, stood barely halfway up to its 1,776 feet, but its mirror-finish skin reflected promisingly across the scene. “It's not joyful, but we persevere,” one man in the crowd declared of the occasion. He echoed the tone of President Obama before police responders from 9/11: “We did what we said we were going to do.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/opinion/06fri4.html?pagewanted=print

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From the White House

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The President in NYC: "When We Say We Will Never Forget, We Mean What We Say"

In New York City this afternoon, there was a profound mix of old grief and perhaps some new closure just a few days after the death of somebody responsible for such immense suffering in that city. The President didn't speak as he laid a wreath at the National September 11th Memorial. And he kept it private when he met with 9/11 family members afterwards. But speaking separately to police officers from the city and firefighters at the "Pride of Midtown" Firehouse, Engine 54, Ladder 4, Battalion 9 -- which lost 15 firefighters at the World Trade Center on 9/11 -- the President had messages for all of America.

To the firefighters :

This is a symbolic site of the extraordinary sacrifice that was made on that terrible day almost 10 years ago. Obviously we can't bring back your friends that were lost, and I know that each and every one of you not only grieve for them, but have also over the last 10 years dealt with their family, their children, trying to give them comfort, trying to give them support.

What happened on Sunday, because of the courage of our military and the outstanding work of our intelligence, sent a message around the world, but also sent a message here back home that when we say we will never forget, we mean what we say; that our commitment to making sure that justice is done is something that transcended politics, transcended party; it didn't matter which administration was in, it didn't matter who was in charge, we were going to make sure that the perpetrators of that horrible act -- that they received justice.

So it's some comfort, I hope, to all of you to know that when those guys took those extraordinary risks going into Pakistan, that they were doing it in part because of the sacrifices that were made in the States. They were doing it in the name of your brothers that were lost.

To the police :

And so since that time I know a lot of you have probably comforted loved ones of those who were lost. A lot of you have probably looked after kids who grew up without a parent. And a lot of you continue to do extraordinary -- extraordinarily courageous acts without a lot of fanfare. What we did on Sunday was directly connected to what you do every single day. And I know I speak for the military teams, the intelligence teams that helped get bin Laden in saying that we know the sacrifices and courage that you show as well, and that you are part of the team that helped us achieve our goal, but also help us keep our citizens safe each and every day.

So I couldn't be prouder of all of you. I couldn't be more grateful to you. And I hope that you know that the country will continue to stand behind you going forward, because there are still going to be threats out there and you're still going to be called on to take courageous actions and to remain vigilant, and you're going to have an entire country behind you when you do it.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/05/05/president-nyc-when-we-say-we-will-never-forget-we-mean-what-we-say

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From the Department of Homeland Security

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Statement from Press Secretary Matt Chandler

"DHS issued an intelligence message May 5 to its federal, state, local and tribal partners about potential Al-Qa'ida contemplation in February 2010 of plots against the U.S. rail sector. For the same reason, the Transportation Security Administration will issue a bulletin to rail sector stakeholders. We have no information of any imminent terrorist threat to the U.S. rail sector, but wanted to make our partners aware of the alleged plotting; it is unclear if any further planning has been conducted since February of last year.

We want to stress that this alleged Al Qa'ida plotting is based on initial reporting, which is often misleading or inaccurate and subject to change. We remain at a heightened state of vigilance, but do not intend to issue an NTAS alert at this time. We will issue alerts only when we have specific or credible information to convey to the American public. Our security posture, which always includes a number of measures both seen and unseen, will continue to respond appropriately to protect the American people from an evolving threat picture both in the coming days and beyond.

Since Sunday, DHS and its partners have taken a number of actions, including but not limited to: reviewing protective measures for all potential terrorist targets, including critical infrastructure and transportation systems across the country; deploying additional officers to non-secured areas at our nation's airports; and identifying any new targeting rules that should be instituted to strengthen the ways we assess the risk of both passengers and cargo coming to the United States.

As always, we urge our state, local, tribal and private sector partners, as well as the general public, to remain vigilant and report any suspicious activity to federal, state or local law enforcement."

http://www.dhs.gov/ynews/releases/pr_1304632982913.shtm

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