Imagine scaling straight up a 100-foot rock wall bloody and naked, after you’ve been stabbed 6 times, struck on the head with a pipe wrench, and thrown down a 100 foot ravine. If you’ve read my blogs, you know I enjoy stories about heroic victims. I found this case intriguing. On September 12, 1977, a family driving a winding road on vacation in the middle of the night in Colorado Springs came across a young bloody woman walking naked down the road. She had been beaten and stabbed. She fell to the ground unconscious. Investigators need to figure out exactly what happened and identify her. She is eventually identified as a 20-year-old prostitute named Kaitlyn Bennett. A visit to the scene indicated the young woman was beaten, stabbed and raped, and then thrown without her clothing down a 100-foot ravine, where at best one day someone would discover her bones. Kaitlyn Bennett comes to consciousness and decides her only hope of surviving is to scale the 100-foot wall…, and she does. This is far more difficult than it appears on the surface. If you’ve worked a trauma scene, you know blood is slippery. Her trail up the side of the ravine is marked by bloodied rocks. At the hospital Kaitlyn discovers her attacker has cut off a lock of her hair to keep as a trophy for his kill. At the hospital, Katilyn indicates that she left home because she wasn’t getting along with her mother and ended up on the streets working as a sex worker. It’s easy to be judgmental, but from having done psychological assessments on sex workers, understand they typically come from abusive families, and they lack helpful resources. They are often recruited after they’ve run away from foster placement. A red-headed man in a white pick-up with a camper picked her up and drove her to the campground. He told her he couldn’t take her home because his wife was home. Once in the wilderness, he asks her to get into the topper in the back, so they’ll have more room. When she starts crawling in back, he strikes her in the head with a large pipe wrench. As the son of a man who fixed everything in our home, this piece of evidence immediately had me thinking, her assailant is a plumber. The investigator in this case is Joe Kenda. “My, my, my.” Joe checked out plumber after plumber until he found a red-headed plumber, Charles Warren, driving a white truck with a topper. A search of Warren’s home found a strand of Kaitlyn’s hair behind the second drawer in his bedroom dresser. During Kenda’s interrogation of Charles Warren, Charles admitted his sexual fantasy was to have sex with a woman in her own blood while she was dying. Warren also admitted that he would wake up in the middle of the night and go to his dresser to touch the lock of the victim’s hair. When he found out that Bennett survived the attack, he said next time he’ll make sure she’s dead. A panel of psychiatrists found Warren to be insane. He was sent to a Colorado state mental hospital. It is interesting to note that Warren was married, with a child, working for the family plumbing business. His family was shocked by the charge. Warren had no prior criminal charges. If you think we are dealing with hard issues now, please read an old tongue and cheek article I discovered. VITAMIN DEFICIENCY: BETTY RUBBLE MISSING By Betty Cuniberti Kansas City Star Orlando Sentinel May 05, 1995 Sometimes you come across an injustice so colossal, that hits home so hard, you drop everything. Risk societal expulsion. Put your life on the line. Even if push comes to shove, burn articles of underwear that lift and separate - a function more vital today than during the college protest days. I'm doing all these things. I can barely type through the smoke. Betty Rubble is left out of Flintstones chewable vitamins. Fred, Barney, Wilma and the kids are vitamins. Even Dino and the Flintmobile are chewed and swallowed daily by small children. But not Betty. Betty, Barney, Fred and Wilma enjoying nothing and 1 cup of coffee. Only the women apparently use forks. The chase scenes in the Flintstones were classic. As Fred chases their pet, Dino, through the house, you see couch-chair-lamp-couch-chair-lamp-couch-chair-lamp, repeatedly in the background. BETTY'S A VITAMIN Injustice rectified: October 20, 1995. Bayer Corp., Parsippany, N.J., makers of Flintstones vitamins, said Betty Rubble will finally make her debut as a Flintstone vitamin. This follows a special "Vote for Betty" 800 number promoted by Bayer, plus prehistoric voting booth sites in select cities. She was the lone character from the Hanna-Barbera cartoon show left out when the brand made its debut 25 years ago; the story is that Betty's ultra-thin waist kept breaking during production. Modern technology has overcome that problem, the company says. The Bayer corporation actually ran an ad, “Betty now included,” as a promotion to sell their vitamins. Having an additional cartoon character on a pill seems like an odd motivation to start taking it. The I-94 Murders currently can’t be found anywhere. Hopefully, it will be back on the shelves in a week. Thank you everyone for your support for my work! The success of Burning Bridges led to increased sales of all of my books. I ran out of Murder Book this past summer and we sent it in for another print. I also sent The I-94 Murders in to reprint, realizing I would be running out of those also. The printer told me I’d have them at the end of November. Each week the print date has been postponed. I’m now looking at January 5. I went to the stores that sell my books and pulled The I-94 Murders off the shelf so I could fill my online orders. I am thankful for the stores and for people being so understanding. I’m also thankful to all of you for the great sales of both the books and audiobooks.
Thanks for listening, Frank
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AuthorFrank F. Weber is a forensic psychologist specializing in homicide and sexual and physical assault cases. He uses his unique understanding of how predator’s think, knowledge of victim trauma, actual court cases, and passion for writing true crime thrillers. His Award Winning books include "Murder Book" (2017) "The I-94 Murders" (2018) "Last Call" (2019) and "Lying Close" (September 2020). Archives
April 2024
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