All Blog Posts from Crimesider

WASHINGTON - A judge found a District of Columbia woman guilty Wednesday of killing her four daughters.

Thirty-four-year-old Banita Jacks was convicted of four counts of felony murder, three counts of premeditated first-degree murder and four counts of first degree child cruelty. She was acquitted of one count of premeditated first-degree murder.

D.C. Superior Court Judge Frederick H. Weisberg decided the case himself after Jacks waived her right to a jury trial.

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WASHINGTON - A Washington woman accused of killing her four daughters created a "prison of torture" in her own home, and long planned how she would carry out the murders and get away with it, prosecutors said Monday.

The decomposing bodies of Banita Jacks’ four girls were found by U.S. Marshals serving an eviction in her southeast D.C. home in January 2008. The girls are believed to have been ages 5 to 16 when they died.

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Columbia, Mo. March 10, 2004 - On Halloween night in 2001, Kent Heitholt, a popular sports editor for the Columbia Daily Tribune was beaten and strangled with his own belt in theTribune parking lot. Not long afterward, Chuck Erickson said he began having dreamlike memories of the killing. When police questioned Erickson, he named an accomplice: his high school buddy Ryan Ferguson.

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COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) - Patrick Burris, the South Carolina serial killer who terrorized a small community had been arrested over thirty times, had convictions in four states and had beaten the rap on violent crimes in which he later intimidated the victims into silence.

That sorry history has left many, including law enforcement, to scratch their heads and ask why on Earth was this man recently given parole after an eight year stretch in a North Carolina prison.

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NEW YORK - Ryan Ferguson is not getting out of prison anytime soon. His latest appeal was turned down by Boone County, Missouri Circuit Judge Jodi Asel, in a decision that was released this week.

If you watch 48 Hours Mystery regularly, it is hard to forget Ryan Ferguson or his 2005 trial in Columbia, Missouri. Ferguson was convicted, along with a high school friend, of the 2001 murder of Kent Heitholt, the Columbia Daily Tribune sports editor. What makes this young man’s case so memorable is that there was so little evidence against him other than a dream of his co-defendant, Chuck Erickson. Really. A dream that Erickson had two and a half years after the murder which led him to confess to the Columbia police.

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