March 30 MISSOURI: Death penalty to be sought in trooper's slaying A prosecutor said Wednesday he will seek the death penalty for a southeast Missouri man accused a day earlier of slaying a state trooper with a shotgun and a rifle in an ambush outside the officer's home. Carter County Prosecutor Michael Ligons on Tuesday charged Lance Shockley, 28, of Van Buren, with first-degree murder and armed criminal action. Authorities allege that Shockley ambushed Missouri State Highway Patrol Sgt. Carl Dewayne Graham Jr., 37, March 20 near Van Buren as Graham continued focusing on him as a suspect in a deadly hit-and-run wreck months earlier. "It's not too early to say that I will seek the death penalty. I will," Ligons told The Associated Press. He declined to elaborate. Graham was killed while still in uniform and just after he had completed his shift for the day. The patrol has ruled that the 12-year veteran of the force was the 24th state trooper to die on the job. Shockley was arrested March 23 and charged with leaving the scene of the fatal Nov. 26 accident that Graham investigated in Carter County. Investigators sought a possible link between the investigation and Graham's death. A probable cause affidavit filed with the criminal complaint alleged that on the day of Graham's death, Shockley asked for directions to the officer's home. That afternoon, Shockley allegedly borrowed his grandmother's red Pontiac Grand Am, which several witnesses said they saw parked on a secluded gravel road about 3/10 of a mile from Graham's house. Graham was shot multiple times, according to evidence from the scene and an autopsy. A bullet from Graham's body was .22-caliber, and the trooper received additional wounds from either a 10- or 12-gauge shotgun, according to the complaint. Interviews during the investigation found that Shockley owns multiple firearms, including at least one 12-gauge shotgun. Authorities said they found a .22-caliber bullet at Shockley's home. Ballistic testing of that round with one recovered from Graham's body "conclusively revealed that both were fired from the same firearm," the affidavit said. An investigator said Wednesday that authorities have not ruled out the prospect that another person had a role in Graham's death. "There are other people of interest involved in this case," patrol Sgt. Jason Clark said. "We're not excluding anybody right now." Graham, the patrol's zone supervisor for Carter and Reynolds counties, was the divorced father of a 4-year-old son and was engaged to be married. Graham's father has said he hoped anyone responsible for his son's death would be executed. "I have a gnawing feeling that can't rest - that someone did this to my boy," Carl Dewayne Graham Sr. said last week. Shockley, who remains jailed without bond, has had previous run-ins with authorities, including one confrontation that produced 4 misdemeanors and eventual probation that authorities now seek to revoke. In July 2003, Ligons accused Shockley of trying to assault a park ranger, threatening that worker, making physical contact with a Carter County deputy and resisting arrest. After Shockley pleaded guilty in March of last year, a judge suspended imposition of the sentence for 2 years - effectively putting Shockley on probation - and ordered the man to stay off the Current River from April 15 to September 15 each year of probation. (source: Associated Press) CONNECTICUT: Ross victim speaks out against death penalty A woman who was raped by serial killer Michael Ross over 20 years ago spoke out Wednesday against Connecticut's death penalty. Ross, who has admitted killing eight women in Connecticut and New York is scheduled to die in May. He would become the 1st person executed in New England in 45 years. Vivian Dobson was 21 when she was attacked by Ross in 1983. She escaped after pulling a knife on him. She said Ross dared her to stab him. "I'm not a killer. I couldn't do it," she said through tears. "I'm so sorry to the parents because I lived and their babies died. And I can't change that. But I don't want to be a part of killing somebody else." Dobson told her story hours before the state House of Representatives was set to debate a bill that would abolish the death penalty. The bill was not expected to pass. Dobson testified against Ross during the penalty phase of his trial, but said she regrets being part of a process that put him on death row. Her name and story never became public because court files regarding her participation were sealed. "For 18 years, I've been hiding my feelings and holding in my feelings to help those poor girls that he took away from everybody. And I can't. I can't. I can't do it," she said. "Because not only have I been carrying guilt for these babies, I've been carrying guilt because now his blood's going to be on my hands, too. And I can't do it. That's not me." (source: Associated Press) ********************* Breaking The Hold Of Michael Ross She held the knife to his chest. One push and Michael Ross would be dead. Go ahead, he taunted her, realizing at exactly the same moment she did that she couldn't. She wasn't a killer; he was. For years, Vivian Dobson has been haunted by the thought that she could have killed Ross the night he attacked her in 1983, that she could have saved 4 girls' lives and spared their families years of torment. Now she wants to save him. That's why she has emerged from hiding on the day the House of Representatives is planning to debate the death penalty, why she is chancing the wrath of her family and the families of other victims to talk about her tortured life of the past 22 years - and how it led her to oppose capital punishment. Today's debate is not expected to go much beyond talk, but before legislators defend death row in the name of the victims, or victims' families, Dobson wants them to hear from her. They probably don't know she exists; few people do. It is the women Ross killed who remain vivid in our collective consciousness, not the one woman in the state who escaped with her life. But escaped isn't the right word. Vivian Dobson may have gotten away from Michael Ross that May evening, but she has remained in his clutches since. The night she was walking home from a friend's house and noticed a man sneaking from one telephone pole to another, she knew something was wrong. But she was just yards from her parents' house. She was safe, she thought. "Bad night to be walking in the rain," she remembers Ross saying. She lifted her arm to point to her house just down the road, but then he was on her, choking her and dragging her into the bushes. When they fell to the ground, a knife she carried with her when she walked alone fell from her shirt. She grabbed it and prepared to do what she and her sisters had always said they would if they ever got into trouble. "I put the knife right to his chest and I looked at him and he said, 'Go 'head.' I looked down, I looked at where the knife was and I'm like, 'Oh my God,' and as soon as I thought it, knowing that there's no way possible that I could stab him and kill him, he knew it. He just smiled at me and grabbed me right by the throat again." The guilt settles across her face. "All I had to do was just shove it right into his chest. That's all I had to do. And I didn't do it. I didn't do it and those other girls died." After Ross attacked Dobson, he killed Robin Stavinsky, April Brunais, Leslie Shelley and Wendy Baribeault. Her anguish pours out in a flood of words: "Those were babies. My daughters are their ages, and to picture my daughters going through that and knowing what these girls went through because I knew their fear, I knew what they felt ..." She cries out: "I have to live with that, and in order for me to be forgiven, I have to forgive him for what he did to me." Ross beat and raped her before Dobson, who asked me to use her full name, managed to run to her house and to a life of guilt, exile and silence. She was 21. For 4 years, Dobson didn't leave her parents' home; she barely left her bedroom. Even the night her 2-year-old daughter wandered off, she was paralyzed inside the house, listening to her father call out to the little girl. "The fear was so strong of him getting me that I couldn't even go out to save my own daughter," she says. When they found the toddler hiding behind a tree and brought her back inside, Dobson quickly shuffled the girl into her bedroom with the other children. Do it for our daughters, the parents of the victims told her when she hesitated to testify against Ross in 1987. Do it for them. And she did, because she owed them, she says. And because back then, she thought that if Ross got the death penalty, he'd be dead in a week and her nightmares might end. "Nobody told me any different," she said. But death row became a stage for Ross. As a lifer in the general population, he would have been invisible; as the star of his own long-running death penalty drama, he was a constant presence in her life, a constant reminder of the terrors of that night. The few times she expressed her ambivalence about the death penalty, family and friends hastened to quell her doubts. Without a death penalty, Michael Ross wins, they would say. "But it's all of us who are losing," Dobson says now. "The parents are dwindling away, waiting. People who wanted this so bad are dead. And Ross sits there." She had no idea that while Ross would be showered with attention, she would fade into the background. She couldn't imagine that while squads of lawyers and doctors and psychiatrists would line up to probe the mind of a serial killer, she would be left to cobble together an existence, paying for medications and stints in and out of psychiatric wards with her husband's insurance. They filed bankruptcy when they couldn't afford the $100,000 in medical bills that never stop coming. Two years ago, doctors discovered that the pain in her neck and arms that she figured were panic attacks was really damage to her neck done by Ross when he throttled her. Back in 1983, there wasn't an office to help crime victims. The state offered some services, but she says she wasn't told about them at the time. The Office of the Victim Advocate is now working to get her some help. But for 2 decades she was alone, her family near collapse under the weight of her pain. Her oldest son was 4 when she was attacked, a little boy who didn't know exactly what happened to his mother the night she came into the house screaming, but knew that something bad happened to her in the dark. "Mommy, go to sleep," he'd tell her, holding a 2-by-4 she kept close by. "I'll watch for the bogeyman." A grown man now, he is still afraid of the dark. And her husband has tried desperately for years to give her back the life Ross took in one night. He coaxed her out of the house, driving behind her while she walked to the store. He took her canoeing and didn't get mad when she panicked and said she wanted to go home. He tells her he loves her when nothing else seems to help. Sometimes, his efforts work. But more often, the memories of that night come for her, sending her into panic attacks and back into psychiatric care. "I shouldn't have doubted the fact that he still had a hold on me," she said. And as much as her memories of that night torment her, it is the hold Michael Ross has on her and the other victims' families that drives her now. "This really has nothing to do with death," she says. "It has to do with control, with holding people's lives in his hands. And as long as he stays on death row, he holds our lives in his hands. "And this is the part that they can't see. I see it because I've been living it for 22 years. I'm at the point now where I'm ready to take control of my own life." That is why she has emerged from hiding, why today she plans to do something she thought she'd never do: leave the protective bubble she has created out of necessity and stand before a room full of people to tell her story. She is afraid people will be angry, that they will think she has betrayed them. But she is more afraid of continuing to let others speak for her, of the state choosing death in her name. (source: Helen Ubinas, Hartford Courant) GEORGIA: DA may push for death penalty in Pendergrass officer slaying The Jackson County District Attorney was deciding Wednesday whether to seek the death penalty against the prime suspect in the Dec. 29 shooting death of a Pendergrass police officer. Nolan Leon Chauvin IV, the 2nd suspect arrested in the shooting death of officer Chris Ruse, will testify against 27-year-old Richard Alexander Whitaker, who faces 3 counts of murder in the fatal shooting of officer Chris Ruse, Jackson County District Attorney Tim Madison said Tuesday. Ruse, 45, was killed in a gunfight following a chase of a pickup truck on U.S. 129 in Jackson County in northeast Georgia. Madison, who said he planned to file notices Wednesday in Whitaker's case, would not specifically say whether he would file a death penalty notice. A Jackson County grand jury indicted Whitaker earlier this month on 17 counts, including three murder charges. Chauvin, 18, of Dacula, pleaded guilty Friday to lesser charges of conspiracy to commit a burglary, possession of tools for the commission of a crime and possession of a sawed-off shotgun, according to court records. Chauvin faces 20 years in prison, Madison said. Chauvin's testimony against Whitaker is part of the plea agreement, Madison said. Whitaker and Chauvin were driving to commit a burglary at an unspecified location on the night of Ruse's murder, according to court records. The two allegedly possessed guns and burglary tools. Around 8 p.m. on Dec. 29, Ruse tried to pull over their white 1998 GMC Sierra pickup driving north on U.S. Highway 129 in Pendergrass, according to authorities. When it did not stop, Ruse pursued the truck, and in nearby Talmo, the truck overturned. Ruse was killed as he approached the truck. (source: Access North Georgia)
