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Real estate developer and politician plots to kill husband to avoid divorce
Ruthann Aron gets three years in murder plot
Conspiracy to kill husband in Bethesda over child custody
Baseball player's domestic violence arrest in Baltimore demonstrates how men are presumed guilty in domestic disputes by Glenn Sacks
Credit card debt alleged as motive in brutal Annapolis slaying
Preston woman accused of stabbing her husband in face with crab
Woman arrested in Frederick stabbing
Arundel woman held in killing of her husband
Woman, boy not kidnapped — Amber Alert turns out to be hoax after man arrested in Wheaton
Woman stabs boyfriend and then burns his body in Millersville, another husband died in 2002 fire
Towson woman enlists five others to help kill husband
Abstracted from an article in the New York Times
June 11, 1997 — Maryland has had its fair share of politicians running afoul of the law over the years. But little compares with the troubles now facing Ruthann Aron, a once rising star in the state Republican Party.
Ruthann Aron was an overachiever and the wife of a respected urologist in the upscale D.C. suburb of Potomac, Maryland. She was also a successful real estate developer and aspiring politician. After serving on the local planning commission, in 1994 she made a run to be the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate. She lost, partly due to a local attorney who dogged the campaign with allegations of shady business deals. Ruthann, however, was undeterred. In 1997 she was gearing up to run for a Montgomery County commission seat.
In the summer of 1997, the operator of a local landfill went to the police claiming Ruthann had approached him about finding a hit man. After an elaborate sting operation she was arrested for soliciting the murders of, not just her old political nemesis, but her husband as well. Police claimed Ruthann feared her marriage was heading for a divorce, which might hurt her political career.
Mrs. Aron was arrested June 9, 1997, and charged with conspiracy to kill her husband, Barry, a urologist, and a Baltimore lawyer who once represented her business partners in a lawsuit against her.
She was picked up after leaving a hotel in Gaithersburg, Maryland, where the authorities said she left an envelope containing $500 in cash as a down payment for the person she believed she had hired to kill the two men for $10,000. The man with whom she had discussed the financial arrangements was, as it turned out, an undercover police officer.
She was charged with two counts of solicitation to commit first-degree murder. Each charges carries a maximum penalty of life in prison.
In addition to the testimony of the landfill operator and the undercover cops, the prosecution had Ruthann's own voice on surveillance tapes literally spelling out the names of her intended victims. Faced with overwhelming evidence, Ruthann's attorneys argued that she was mentally ill. The trial resulted in a hung jury (the hold out juror worked with the mentally ill).
Abstracted from an article in the Washington Post, Page A01
November 23, 1998 — Montgomery County politician Ruthann Aron was ordered yesterday to serve three years in the county jail for trying to hire a hit man to kill her husband and a lawyer under a sentence that a judge said will punish her but also allow her to get psychiatric help.
The sentence was substantially more than the one year in a private New York psychiatric hospital at her own expense that Aron's attorneys had sought. But it also was a marked departure from the eight to 18 years in a state prison that sentencing guidelines recommend. With standard good behavior credit, she could be released after serving about two years.
Aron, 56, dabbed at her eyes as Circuit Court Judge Vincent E. Ferretti Jr. pronounced sentence at the end of an emotional, day long hearing during which she gave her first public explanation of how, as a wealthy Potomac developer in the midst of planning a campaign for the Montgomery County Council, she ended up calmly ordering hits on two men.
“My mind did blow. I did crack up,” Aron told the judge, speaking in a husky, barely audible voice. But it was not “an excuse,” she said, “for the most unconscionable and most unmentionable thing a human being can do.”
For soliciting the murder of Arthur Kahn, a lawyer who had testified against Mrs. Aron in a lawsuit stemming from her failed U.S. Senate campaign in 1994, Ferretti sentenced Aron to 10 years in prison with all but 35 months suspended. With credit for 17 months served, including the almost nine months she spent on home detention throughout her two trials, Aron will spend 18 months in jail for that count.
Ferretti also sentenced Aron to five years in prison for soliciting the murder of her husband of more than 30 years, Potomac urologist Barry Aron, but suspended all but 18 months. For that sentence, he gave her no credit for time served and tacked the time onto the first sentence.
Although the county jail usually does not take inmates for longer than 18 months, Ferretti said it has made exceptions in the past and must follow his sentence. Ferretti ordered her to continue taking her medication while in jail and also to continue seeing her private psychiatrist while there.
All told, Aron will serve three years in the county jail. Afterward, she must serve five years of probation, during which she must continue to get psychiatric treatment.
Ferretti said the suspended prison sentence was longer for the charge relating to Kahn because he was a relative stranger, unlike Barry Aron, with whom Ruthann Aron was “in the throes of a relationship,” Ferretti said. [EJF note: Apparently it is less serious to attempt to have your husband killed.]
“Clearly Ms. Aron needs treatment,” Ferretti told about 50 onlookers, including three jurors from Aron's two trials. “No one wants her to commit this or any other crime again, but she also deserves punishment because this crime deserves punishment.”
Non-binding state guidelines show that in Maryland, judges' sentences for two counts of solicitation to commit murder generally range from eight to 18 years. However, defense lawyer Judy Catterton told Ferretti that, from 1987 through 1996, 17 of the 30 people sentenced in Maryland for that crime received sentences below the guidelines.
In the two cases in Montgomery County, Catterton said, two women convicted of soliciting hit men to kill their husbands received sentences of 18 months in jail.
Aron's attorneys had argued throughout her two trials — the first one ended in a hung jury and the second in Aron pleading no contest to the charges — that the politician suffered a lifetime of mental illness. She solicited a hit man, they said, only after she had a breakdown caused by an emotionally abusive husband who threatened to leave her and also by a borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder, which caused wide mood swings between mania and severe depression.
Prosecutors countered that Aron, whose voice was captured on 15 police audiotapes, had carefully and coolly contracted for the killing of two people who threatened her political ambitions only after she considered making a silencer and killing them herself. Her husband's plan to divorce her would have embarrassed her on the eve of her County Council campaign, prosecutors said, and she blamed Kahn for speaking out about her past legal troubles in business deals and ruining her Senate bid.
The Arons' divorce is pending, as is his $7.5 million lawsuit against her alleging emotional distress and her $24 million counterclaim alleging that he caused her breakdown by prescribing drugs that aggravated her mental illnesses.
Abstracted from stories in the January 9, 10, 11, 12, and 18, 2002, Washington Post
Arlen J. Slobodow is lucky to be alive. He was attacked while asleep in his Bethesda Maryland home with his 5-year-old son. The attack appears to have been motivated by a bitter 2-year divorce and custody battle with his estranged wife, Elsa D. Newman, 49, a lawyer also living in Bethesda. Newman is charged with conspiracy to commit murder and is being held without bond.
Margery Lemb Landry, 48, a veteran Foreign Service office with the State Department, is charged with attempted first-degree murder in the attack. Prosecutors say Landry shot Slobodow in the right leg after she broke in through a basement window. Slobodow managed to pull off a mask Landry was wearing, and to call police. Landry fled, leaving behind a fanny pack full of ammunition and child pornography, which she allegedly had planned to plant in Slobodow's home. The child pornography was to be used to show that Slobodow was an unfit parent.
Newman was said to have told her attorney in an early custody battle that she would kill her two sons and hire someone to murder her husband if she couldn't have custody. The Judge in this case awarded full custody of the children to Slobodow on September 4. Deputy State's Attorney, Katherine Winfree, said Ms. Landry was easily manipulated by Newman. Newman was in New Jersey at the time of the shooting, but apparently tried to call Landry on a cell phone the next morning to see whether “the deed was done.”
Copyright © 2001 - 2002. Glenn Sacks
This column first appeared August 8, 2002, in the Los Angeles Daily Journal and the San Francisco Daily Journal (August 8, 2002)
Reproduced with permission of the author
Baltimore Orioles pitcher Scott Erickson was arrested after an altercation with his girlfriend last week — the latest example of how police often arrest men who have been attacked by their female partners.
According to the Associated Press, the Baltimore police concluded that Erickson's girlfriend Lisa Ortiz: initiated the fight by hurling objects; decided to come back twice after Erickson carried her out of the apartment; repeatedly kicked the apartment door; caused Erickson two minor injuries, one of them to his pitching arm; and herself suffered no injuries.
Nonetheless the police, who were operating under Maryland's mandatory arrest law, interpreted Erickson's actions as excessive and are charging him with second-degree assault. Ortiz states that Erickson, who did not pursue her either time after carrying her out, “has never been physically abusive toward me, and in no way do I feel threatened or felt fear from Scott.” Ortiz was not arrested.
Domestic violence activist Greg Schmidt, a police lieutenant who created the Seattle police department's domestic violence investigation unit in 1994, says that cases like Erickson's demonstrate the way men are often presumed guilty in domestic disputes. He notes that mandatory arrest laws, such as California's, frustrate police officers because they are “expected to make arrests in petty incidents, often where the woman is the aggressor, the abuse is mutual, or it is unclear who the aggressor was.”
“The domestic violence industry — the trainers, the shelter directors, etc. — can spin things however they want,” he says, “but most street cops know that women are just as likely to start domestic disputes as men are. But arresting women puts you under lot of scrutiny. It's bad for your career.”
Schmidt also criticizes the dominant aggressor doctrine which discourages dual arrests (which are often an appropriate measure) and instructs police to downplay who struck the first blow. Instead, police are asked to focus on who is (supposedly) in control of the situation and who is more fearful — often code words for “arrest the man.”
Part of the problem is the training that police officers receive from the domestic violence industry, which insists that 95% of domestic violence is committed by men. Southern California domestic violence consultant Anne O'Dell, who has conducted over 500 domestic violence trainings of police officers and commanders, judges, district attorneys, and victim advocates, tells her trainees that “if a police officer is arresting more than 8% women, you've got a real problem. When an officer arrests 12% or 15% women, I'm outraged.” O'Dell says that dual arrests should occur in no more than 3% of incidents.
There is virtually no current data which supports the “95%” myth. According to the US Department of Justice's 1998 Report on the National Violence Against Women Survey, men comprise nearly 40% of all domestic violence victims. California State Long Beach University professor Martin Fiebert has compiled an on-line bibliography which examines 130 scholarly investigations (104 empirical studies and 26 reviews and/or analyses) which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners. The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies exceeds 77,000.
Domestic violence researchers Susan Steinmetz, Richard Gelles, and Murray Straus, early advocates for battered women and authors of the influential and ground breaking Behind Closed Doors: Violence in American Families, conducted two major studies for the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, both of which found similar rates of abuse between husbands and wives.
As Gelles explained in The Missing Persons of Domestic Violence: Male Victims, “Contrary to the claim that women only hit in self-defense, we found that women were as likely to initiate the violence as were men.”
In addition, studies by researchers R.L. McNeeley and Coramae Richey Mann show that women compensate for their lesser physical strength by their greater use of weapons and the element of surprise. According to Phil Cook, author of Abused Men the Hidden Side of Domestic Violence, while abused women tend to be seriously injured more than abused men, often it is men who receive the most serious injuries, because of the weapons factor.
Once a man is arrested for domestic violence it can be difficult (and expensive) for him to extricate himself. Family law attorney Lisa Scott, founder of the domestic violence activist group Taking Action Against Bias in the System , says that district attorneys are rarely willing to drop domestic violence cases against men, even when the evidence is scant and the female “victims” themselves ask that charges be dropped.
Many women's advocates correctly note that these drop requests can at times be motivated by economic dependency or because women are unfairly made to feel guilty for nonviolently “provoking” violent men. However, Scott explains that it is much more common that women request drops because they know that they initiated the violence, or that they participated equally in it, and they do not want their male partners to be prosecuted unfairly.
Men in Erickson's position often face an agonizing choice. If they do nothing, they allow the abuse to continue and possibly escalate. If they attempt to defend themselves, they take the chance that someone will call the police and they will be arrested. If they call the police, they are in danger of being arrested and prosecuted for what is really their female partners' violence.
According to Gay Kennedy, formerly the domestic violence adviser on the LAPD Harbor Division advisory board, “the system has become very unfair to men.”
“Studies show that there are many male victims of domestic violence but that they don't report it,” she notes. “It's not hard to see why. Anyone who is attacked by their partner should call the police, but male victims don't want to risk being sucked into a system which is hopelessly stacked against them. And the domestic violence industry, which is rife with anti-male prejudice, is part of the problem.”
Glenn Sacks writes about gender issues from the male perspective. He can be reached at Glenn@GlennSacks.com. His Web site is www.GlennSacks.com.
© 2003 by Brian M. Schleter, The Capital
January 29, 2003 — A Shady Side woman fatally shot her husband after he threatened to divorce her over a $48,000 credit card debt she ran up, county prosecutors told a judge yesterday.
Terry Harriett Pierce Eslin, 58, confessed that she shot Richard Paul Eslin, 66, in the head with a rifle as he slept in the bedroom of their home at 1664 Snug Harbor Road, said Deputy State's Attorney Gerald Anders.
She shot him after what investigators believe was an attempt to poison him with prescription-strength sleeping pills failed, Mr. Anders said.
After hearing details of Mrs. Eslin's statements to police, Circuit Court Judge Paul A. Hackner refused to reverse a District Court judge's Jan. 21 ruling to hold her without bond. She's charged with first-degree murder.
“I have to assume the facts as alleged in the complaint are true until we can sort it out,” he said at the end of the hearing in Annapolis.
Mrs. Eslin's attorney, retired Circuit Judge James C. Cawood Jr., argued unsuccessfully that his client's statements should not be used to determine her bail status. “She should not be judged as guilty at this point. She is no danger to society and is not a flight risk,” he said.
Bond is necessary so psychiatrists can evaluate Mrs. Eslin's mental health needs. She claims her husband abused her for 15 years, he said.
Mrs. Eslin covered her face with her hands and sobbed at times as Mr. Anders summarized her account of the shooting.
According to her statements to police, the couple fought after he discovered her credit card debt three days earlier. He threatened divorce and refused to take out a second mortgage on the house to pay it off, Mr. Anders said.
Mrs. Eslin claimed her husband ingested an entire bottle of sleeping pills on the day of the shooting, telling her it was
“to teach her a lesson.”
He fell asleep, but woke up and got sick.
After he fell asleep again, Mrs. Eslin said she put towels over his head and shot him. She then beat his head with the rifle until the gun broke into three pieces.
Afterward, she put his body in a tarp and called police.
“Anyone who could do this type of thing is not one who is a good candidate for the risk of bail,” Mr. Anders said. Mrs. Eslin told police there had been only one incident of abuse in the last five years. None of the 11 people interviewed by police, including neighbors and co-workers, could collaborate her allegation, Mr. Anders said.
Neighbors told The Capital that Mr. Eslin served in the Navy and retired from the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. He frequently sparred with the neighborhood kids for walking on his lawn.
J.D. Brown, a neighbor and close friend, said he never heard the couple fight. “There was never a bad word said,” he said. “It always sounded like a very loving relationship. I looked up to them...the way they talked to each other.”
© 2003 The Star Democrat
Reproduced under the Fair Use exception of 17 USC § 107 for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use.
Wednesday 30 July, 2003 — A Preston woman was arrested after an alleged fight with her husband.
According to police, Sherry Lynn Harrison, 28, and her husband, Alvin J. Harrison Jr., 33 allegedly argued at their home at 5980 Newton Road in Preston. Police said Mrs. Harrison allegedly took a hard-shell crab and stabbed Mr. Harrison in the face with the pointed end of the shell. Mrs. Harrison allegedly bit Mr. Harrison on his right forearm when he attempted to restrain her, said police. Police said Mr. Harrison refused medical treatment for his injuries.
Mrs. Harrison was arrested and charged with second-degree assault. She is being held at the Caroline County Detention Center on $1,000 bond.
Wednesday, April 7, 2004, Frederick (AP) — Frederick police say they've made an arrest in last week's stabbing of a 19-year-old man in South Frederick.
Detectives say additional interviews with the victim led them to 35-year-old Dawn Brashear of Birmingham Court. She was arrested at her home this morning and is charged with attempted first- and second-degree murder and first- and second-degree assault. The victim is out of the hospital.
Police now say the stabbing occurred at the suspect's home, and not — as first believed — on South Jefferson Street.
© 2004 The Baltimore Sun
Reproduced under the Fair Use exception of 17 USC § 107 for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use.
April 27, 2004 — Anne Arundel County police have charged a Laurel woman with first-degree murder in the shooting death of her husband over the weekend.
Laura Ann Rogers, 35, was charged Monday with first-degree murder after detectives looked further into the circumstances surrounding the death of her husband, Walter Gray Rogers, 43. The death initially was reported to police as a suicide.
Rogers was denied bail Tuesday, a spokeswoman for the Anne Arundel County state's attorney said.
Police responded to a 911 call placed from the Rogers' home in the 8200 block of Main Street in Laurel at 7 AM Saturday. They found the victim suffering from a gunshot wound to the upper body. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
His wife was home at the time of the 911 call, but it was not clear who called, police said. Family members in the home at the time told police that they believed Walter Rogers had shot himself with the shotgun.
But the officers were skeptical, said Anne Arundel police Lt. Joseph Jordan. “Some things didn't add up for them,” Jordan said. “The original officers thought some thing was amiss, so they contacted our homicide unit.”
The homicide unit took over the investigation and conducted more interviews with the victim's wife. After Laura Ann Rogers gave police a statement, Jordan said, the detectives decided to file the homicide charges against her.
Laura Ann Rogers told police she had recently learned her husband had been sexually abusing a juvenile female, police said. Jordan said that information appeared to be connected to the shooting.
Detectives said they also determined that Laura Ann Rogers had purchased the firearm used in the shooting April 23 — the day before her husband was shot.
“We never classified it as a suicide,” Jordan said. “We were suspicious from the time we arrived.”
November 28, 2005 — Police have found a woman and her 5-year-old son who were the subject of an abduction alert issued Sunday night. But they also found out that the abduction story turned out to be a hoax.
Montgomery County police officers found Sara Hernandez-Torres, 22, and her son, Isaac, unharmed after a Dodge Ram pickup truck was found at about 10:30 AM near Twinbrook Parkway and Castleford Road. WRC-TV in Washington, D.C., reported that a municipal employee in Rockville spotted the vehicle, which was a subject of the Amber Alert issued Sunday night, outside a home.
Officers took into custody Carlos Delcid, 41, who they said was driving the truck. At first, police reported that they believed Delcid took the woman and her child shortly after 6 PM from the Wheaton metro station.
Police spokesman Derek Baliles said the Amber Alert was issued based on information from family members, but did not have specifics. Montgomery County police said Ms. Hernandez-Torres made up the story in which she claimed her supposed former boyfriend abducted her and her son. Police said she wanted to hide her ongoing romance with the man from her family.
Police said that Ms. Hernandez-Torres admitted to making up the story about the abduction after being questioned. Charges likely will be filed against her for making a false report. Derek Delcid likely will not face charges.
April 16, 2008
— Anthony Fertitta was stabbed to death and set on fire in 2006. His girlfriend pled guilty Wednesday to second-degree murder.
Cynthia McKay took the plea bargain, ending the risk of a first-degree murder trial.
The body of Anthony Fertitta, 50, was found burning the night of February 22, 2006 just steps away from his girlfriend's Millersville home.
McKay, 52, told police she knew nothing about his killing.
“She was seen on video buying gasoline at 2:50 AM. The body was found on fire at 3:05,” said Kathleen Rogers, Anne Arundel County's Assistant State's Attorney.
Fire has figured in McKay's life before. In 2002, her husband Clarence Downs died in their home in what was ruled an accidental fire.
McKay already had a long criminal record for theft.
She was sent to prison shortly after Downs' death for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from St. Mary's Seminary.
When investigators found Fertitta had been stabbed to death, and found blood in McKay's home, she and her teenage son were charged.
But prosecutors were not confident enough to pursue a first-degree murder charge, which opened the door for McKay to enter an Alford guilty plea to second-degree murder in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court.
Under an Alford plea, a defendant does not admit guilt, but acknowledges the prosecution has enough evidence to obtain a conviction.
McKay's son, 21-year-old Christopher Haarhoff of Baltimore Highlands, has already been sentenced to five years for helping burn the body.
Cynthia McKay also entered an Alford guilty plea to theft from her last employer. That and the second-degree murder plea resulted in her being sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Abstracted from article on WBALTV11.com
March 6, 2010
— A Baltimore County woman is accused of orchestrating the slaying of her husband, the owner of a Towson gas station.
Baltimore County police have arrested six people in connection with the slaying of William Porter, 49. He was shot at his Hess gas station in the 1600 block of Joppa Road on March 1 st . He died the next day at Shock Trauma.
Karla Louise Porter, 47, was taken into custody Saturday evening before her husband's funeral. She was denied bail on Monday.
Investigators said Karla Porter's brother, 53-year-old Calvin Lee Mowers, her sister 51-year-old Susan Datta, both from Essex, and three other men have been charged with first-degree murder.
Karla Porter initially told officials that a black man shot her husband, but police said cell phone records and other technology helped unravel the scheme.
Court records show Karla Porter told her nephew, Seamus Coyle, that she was having problems with her husband. Coyle told her that he had someone to take care of her problem — a man named Walter Bishop.
Charging documents show that as early as December, Karla Porter had been trying to get the 37-year-old Bishop to kill her husband. She paid him $9,000 to do so, officials said.
The documents said Karla Porter used her cell phone the day of the slaying to lure her husband to the gas station at 3 AM on March 1, 2010. She then called Bishop, who drove to the gas station with several others. The charging documents say that Bishop shot Porter and that Mrs. Porter's sister provided the weapon used in the slaying.
A witness told police that Karla Porter said her husband was abusive and that he wanted to move to Florida, but there are no police or court records indicating prior abuse.
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