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#11
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06-26-2019, 08:42 PM
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Re: Decomposed Woman Found in Montana
You can contribute rather than criticize. But you choose to not do anything but the latter. How many posts have you started? Exactly.
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#12
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06-27-2019, 04:38 AM
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Re: Decomposed Woman Found in Montana
What a creepy looking fucker. It's just incredible that there's this many evil people out there. I could never, ever, do something like that to another human being. Yet there are apparently a massive amount of people who could, would, and do, do this to others. Chilling, it really is, and I'm sick of having to share this world with scum like them. |
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#14
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06-27-2019, 04:58 PM
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Re: Decomposed Woman Found in Montana
Killer is Ronald Porter. Subject of Season 1 Episode 10 of Forensic files. Medical Detectives (Forensic Files) - Season 1, Ep 10 : Insect Clues https://www.yousubtitles.com/Medical...ues-id-1377760 Here is the transcript of the show: [music playing] NARRATOR: Between 1985 and 1988, 18 transients, hitchhikers, and prostitutes we're choked, sexually molested, and left for dead in the desert mountains of California. The only witnesses, the insects of the desert. And they also turned out to be extremely important pieces of evidence. [music playing] NARRATOR: The women who had been choked unconscious and sexually molested were all dumped and left for dead in the high desert mountains near San Diego, California. Not all of the victims died. And those who survived, all described the same scenario. JEFF DUSEK: Several of them had their pants undone and pulled down, bras were moved up exposing their breasts. One lady had a nipple ring removed. So we thought there had been some sort of sexual activity. But because they were unconscious, we had no proof of it. NARRATOR: Betty Bass was one of the victims. BETTY BASS: Nice seeing you too, love. Bye bye. NARRATOR: She's had a history of mental problems and is currently homeless. But she can vividly recall the night, eight years ago, when she accepted a ride from a stranger. After leaving this motel on El Cajon Boulevard, she looked for a ride going towards Ramona, California. A man in a silver car pulled up and offered to take her part way. -I can take you as far as El Centro. -Good enough. He had a clean car, so I thought, you know he was a pretty good guy, a pretty nice guy. I just thought he was OK. NARRATOR: As they drove over the mountains, the driver said he needed to pull off the highway to take a bathroom break. When the driver walked around the car, he asked Betty to grab something from the back seat. As she did, he wrapped his arm around her neck and choked her. The last thing she remembers was losing consciousness. When she woke up, she walked up this hill looking for help. BETTY BASS: So I walked and I walked and I walked. Well, I finally crawled over this fence. I crawled to the other side of the street. Some family came by and put me in their motor home and aid me up a little bit. And then they took me to the hospital. -The scene of the attack is right here in the dirt, right by this little knoll. The car tire tracks stopped back here a few feet. And then you could see footprints up into this area. Her clothing-- some of her clothing was found here. [photo click] NARRATOR: Police photographed the shoe and tire prints and also recovered two Marlboro cigarette butts. On Betty Bass' shirt, detectives noticed a tiny red carpet fiber. This attack sounded identical to another in the same vicinity just one month earlier. Two young girls were hitchhiking together at a restaurant near the interstate highway. A silver, compact automobile pulled up. And a middle-aged man offered them a ride. -Where you girls going? -We're heading to Tucson. [horns honking] -I'll take you as far as El Centro. -Great. -Sounds good to me. -Hop in. NARRATOR: It was a ride they'll never forget. [scream] [music playing] 911 DISPATCHER (ON PHONE): This -It was my friend. He strangled her. -Do you have any idea who he is? -Uh-uh. A guy who picked us up hitchhiking. NARRATOR: This girl was fortunate. She survived her attack. And her friend, whom she feared was dead, was later found in the desert, frightened but alive. The victims all provided a similar description of their attacker. JEFF DUSEK: He was about early 40's, short hair, blondish-grayish color, glasses. That's how they all described him. Obviously these were people who are going to take a rides from anyone. But many of them told us that they felt comfortable getting in the car with him. NARRATOR: And there were other similarities with all of these attacks. ROGER BOHREN: The things he said to these women, it was almost like he had a script. It was almost the same type of scenario. I can only take you 40 miles. I'm only going to El Centro. JEFF DUSEK: The type of people he was victimizing were the vulnerable people in society. Some people who were having mental problems, drug addicts, street people, hitchhikers. NARRATOR: Police had a description of the suspect, some tire tracks, and shoe print evidence but little else. A sexual predator was loose in the mountains of California. San Diego's El Cajon Boulevard, where prostitutes, runaways, and transients have congregated for years. The reason, location. It's close to a highway entrance ramp convenient for hitchhikers looking for a ride. And it was here where many of the victims were picked up. JEFF DUSEK: We had a series of live victims. And we also had dead victims out there who we thought were part of the pattern. We had what we thought was a pretty consistent pattern, common footprints, common tire tracks, the same type of victims being victimized, and certainly the same area where there were being picked up and dumped. NARRATOR: When detectives were called to Sheep's Head Mountain on July 21, 1988, they feared another in the series of choke and dump cases. This time, the victim was dead and nude from the waist down. ROGER BOHREN: She was found laying on the road here. This was more dug out at the time. The graders come in here every so often. And she was more in the ditch type of thing. NARRATOR: The victim had been dead for quite some time. Her skin was brown and blistered from the sun. Her legs and feet were covered with blood. It appeared the victim was alive before falling into the ditch because impressions of her arms flailing were found in the dirt. Detectives noticed a blood trail and her bare footprints leading almost a mile up the mountain. At the top of the mountain, detectives found a pair of shoes, some clothing, two sets of footprints, and signs of a struggle. The footprints led detectives to a parking area where they noticed a tire track. It looked as if a car had turned around before leaving the scene. The victim's bare footprints led from the clearing into the brush. ROGER BOHREN: Somehow she gets herself out of this area and then comes back up, and then finds her way down the main road. NARRATOR: On the body, investigators discovered some tiny clues. Hundreds of live, worm-like creatures. They were carefully collected and preserved, then taken to the forensics lab for analysis. Was it possible these tiny insects could tell forensic scientists something about the victim's last moments alive or even when she was killed? The autopsy revealed that the victim had probably been choked, but strangulation wasn't the cause of death. JOHN EISELE, MD: The cause of death was actually a laceration of the vagina. The mechanism would have been blood loss from that laceration. NARRATOR: The victim was identified as Sandra Swick, a 43-year-old transient from Florida. Swick's body was found in the same general vicinity as many of the other choked and dumped victims. All were found the same distance from the interstate highway, usually near a V in the road where the attacker could park without being seen by others. Detectives still didn't have a suspect. But three months after Swick's murder, detectives got an unexpected break. While patrolling in the mountains, Sheriff's Deputy, Larry Daley noticed a car driving out of a deserted side. --As I cam around the bend here, I could see the car coming out. NARRATOR: Daley turned onto the side road and saw a woman lying in the dirt unconscious but still alive. LARRY DALEY: I saw the victim lying on the ground, pants down passed her knees, her shirt pulled up to her neck as if someone had choked her. NARRATOR: Daley immediately called for an ambulance and put out a description of the car he saw driving from the scene. After three years of frustration, could this be the break investigators were hoping for? After finding the body of an unconscious woman in the desert, Sheriff's Deputy, Larry Daley rushed to his vehicle and called for help. LARRY DALEY: I also called out the description of the vehicle that I saw coming down the road towards me. NARRATOR: A short time later, this silver Honda was stopped by an officer who heard the call. FRANK KLIMKO: What I wanted to see was I wanted to see a monster. I wanted to see this monstrous man, maybe someone with three arms, who came out and was abducting women and strangling them. NARRATOR: The driver was 41-year-old Ronald Porter, an automotive mechanic with a history of sexual offenses. The woman found unconscious in the desert survived her attack and was able to identify Porter as her attacker. Porter confessed to the attack but would not admit to any of the other attacks over the past three years. Investigators believe Porter was responsible. And they also suspected that Porter had murdered Sandra Swick three months earlier. To find out if all these crimes were the work of one individual, San Diego authorities sought help from the FBI and their unit which specializes in studying serial murders. LARRY ANKROM: Another offender would choose to abduct the same type of victim, bring her to the same type of location, do the same types of acts with them in the same locations, in the almost exact locations, it became pretty evident to us that the probabilities favored it being one person NARRATOR: Larry Ankrom identified the remote desert dump sites as the signature element of all of the crimes. The attacker invested lots of time and effort into finding these remote locations. Another signature element was the type of women he chose. LARRY ANKROM: He's making an assessment before he decides he's going to go ahead and ask her if she needs a ride. And when he's made that initial impression, then once he's decided, yeah, I can control this victim, then she gets in the car. And then it becomes somewhat of a game with him to get her where he wants to go. NARRATOR: The FBI was convinced that all of these crimes were, indeed, the work of the same individual. The next step was for San Diego authorities to prove that Ronald Porter committed these crimes. The carpet fibers in Porter's car were microscopically similar to the red carpet fiber found on the blouse of Betty Bass. Tire tracks found at some of the crime scenes were similar to the print on the spare Michelin tire found in the trunk of Porter's car. And when searching Porter's apartment, police found shoes and boots with tread marks consistent with those found at some of the choke and dump crime scenes. A walkie-talkie discovered in Porter's storage shed belonged to a woman who was choked and dumped in the desert mountains a few years earlier. And the blouse, worn by that same victim, contained a semen stain. A DNA analysis of Ronald Porter's blood matched the semen stain from the blouse. But despite all of this evidence, prosecutors faced a major legal problem. By the time police arrested Ronald Porter, the statute of limitations on most of these assault cases had run out. If prosecutors were going to send Porter to jail for any length of time, it would have to be for the murder of Sandra Swick. But the Swick murder was their weakest case. Investigators found no semen, no blood, no hair or clothing fibers, which could link Ronald Porter to the Swick crime scene. A tire track found at the Sandra Swick attack site was to faint for analysis. However, some of the tennis shoe prints found at the Swick crime scene were similar to a pair of tennis shoes found in Ronald Porter's apartment. But Porter's attorney says, a similar tennis shoe print is inconclusive. JERRY KOLKEY: But 5,000,000 other people with similar shoes, with similar treads, could also have made the print. NARRATOR: And the prosecution faced another problem. They weren't exactly sure when Sandra Swick was murdered. JOHN EISELE, MD: Time of death determination by a pathologist is a very inexact science, if it's a science at all. There are certain changes the body undergoes. And we can predict general time frames for those. But there's a lot of different variables that affect it. NARRATOR: If prosecutors wanted to convict Ronald Porter of murder, they needed more. Could the tiny insects found on Swick's body tell forensic scientists when Sandra Swick died? And tie Ronald Porter to her murder? When detectives found Sandra Swick's body on Sheep's Head Mountain, it was badly decomposed. The hot desert air and sun had taken it's toll. And hundreds of tiny worm-like creatures were feeding on her decomposing flesh. Investigators wondered if these tiny creatures might offer some clues about when Sandra Swick died. Detectives collected about 100 of these creatures and sent them to the laboratory of David Faulkner. He's a forensic entomologist, an expert on insect activity on dead bodies. DAVID FAULKNER, MS: They can tell you lots about where they've been, where the victim's been, how old the victim is, conditions of the body following death. And those are the things that are interesting. NARRATOR: Faulkner's first task was to determine the age of these creatures, or maggots as they're called. So he preserved some in alcohol at the exact stage of development as when they were found. Eventually, the maggots would shrink and develop a hard shell. And a week later, emerge as a winged adult. Once Faulkner had an adult, he could compare it to the hundreds of different flies, which inhabit the California Desert where Swick's body was found. After hours of study and analysis, Faulkner identified them. The flies were Sarcophaga, also known as flesh flies. DAVID FAULKNER, MS: All the things this particular group of flies will do is, they'll fly in very bad weather. So if it's foggy, or rainy, or overcast they'll be active. And they'll be searching out a potential host. Whereas, other flies will probably settle and wait until the sun comes out or until it gets warmer. NARRATOR: Once Faulkner knew they were Sarcophaga, he could study the exact time frame of their life cycle. The preserved specimens were in their third, or final, stage of larval development. DAVID FAULKNER, MS: Once you have them identified, you know what stage of development the most developed ones are. Then you go backwards and say, OK, this was the temperature regime at that time. This is how long this particular insect takes to develop to this stage. Therefore, that body was available, to these insects, for this amount of time. Usually, that indicates how long a person's been dead. NARRATOR: In normal weather conditions, it takes a week for the baby maggots to develop to their third stage But the weather conditions in the desert are far from normal. During the week Sandra Swick's body was discovered, the daytime temperatures averaged 92 degrees. In 92-degree weather, it would take only 3 and 1/2 days for the freshly laid maggots to develop to their third and final stage. And Faulkner was able to tell investigators something else. The Sarcophaga never deposit their maggots in the dark. They only do so in daylight. -I'm going to Florida. NARRATOR: This meant that Sandra Swick was still alive when the sun set on Sunday evening, July 17th. But she was dead by daybreak on Monday morning, July 18th. At the first sign of light, these flesh flies were attracted to the chemical scent of Swick's decomposing flesh and immediately laid they're maggots. DAVID FAULKNER, MS: The maggots would not have done as developed if she had been alive longer. If she had been alive Monday afternoon, Monday evening, there's no way that these flies, under those temperature conditions, could have developed to that stage. NARRATOR: Faulkner's conclusions provided police with a scientific time frame for Swick's murder. Now, detectives could investigate Ronald Porter's whereabouts during the time of Swick's death. Porter worked as a mechanic at this automotive chain store. When his time sheets were subpoenaed, they revealed he was not at work on Sunday, July 17th. In addition, Porter provided no alibi regarding his whereabouts on that day. JEFF DUSEK: And it matched up. We had a time period were Ron Porter was available to drive from the north part of the county down to pick up Sandra Swick and transport her to East County. NARRATOR: Based on the insect clues and the similarities between the Swick murder and the other cases, Ronald Porter was charged in the murder of Sandra Swick. Prosecutors believe Ronald Porter picked up Swick as she hitchhiked somewhere near an entrance ramp to Interstate 8. -I'm going to Florida. -Jump in. I can take you about 40 miles to El Centro. -That'd be great. -How you doing? -Good. NARRATOR: As the car traveled East into the mountains, Porter pulled off the main highway onto a dark, deserted road. He may have used some excuse, as he did in other cases, possibly the need to take a bathroom break. As he walked around the back of the car, he surprised Swick from behind. Grabbing her around the neck, in a military-type choke hold, he pulled her from the car and choked her until she was unconscious. [choking sounds] NARRATOR: He threw her to the ground, removed her clothes, and sexually assaulted her with his hand. He then returned to his car and fled. [car starting] Sometime later, Swick regained consciousness. Dizzy, disoriented, and bleeding heavily from the attack, Swick walked barefoot down the dark, deserted road, walking almost a mile before collapsing. The blood trail was almost one mile long. And she bled to death from lacerations suffered during the assault. JEFF DUSEK: Her death had to be a tough one. A very difficult, long dying process that she went through. NARRATOR: And the insect clues were able to provide detectives with the time of death. Something they were unable to determine by any other means. JURY FOREMAN: We find the defendant, Ronald Elliott Porter, guilty of the crime of murder. NARRATOR: Ronald Porter was convicted of second-degree murder in the death of Sandra Swick and was sentenced to 28 years to life in prison. Ronald Porter continues to maintain his innocence. The insect clues were an important element in their case against Ronald Porter. And they told David Faulkner all he needed to know about Sandra Swick's brutal attack and murder. DAVID FAULKNER, MS: You get a lot of information from them. Whether a body's been moved, how long the person's been dead. Or how long the body has been available to insects. Whether the body has been buried, whether the person took drugs, whether they had been poisoned. All these different sorts of things could be in the insects that are collected or removed from the body. |