SOUTH BEND, INDIANA--Saint Joseph County Homicide Police have announced they have identified and arrested the murderers of four homeless men today, though the arrests and interrogations began on Friday. The primary confessor's name is Daniel Sharp, 56. I found it interesting that it wasn't the South Bend Police Department that nabbed them, but the county boys (though exact details are sketchy). Good show. But they must have had an incriminating piece-of-evidence that made Sharp crack in his first-day of interrogation (if there were any others):
Sharp and Randy Lee Reeder, 50, were in police custody on Sunday, two days after they were arrested in the December beating deaths of Michael "Shan" Nolen Jr., 40; Michael Lawson, 56; Jason Coates, 29; and Brian G. Talboom, 51. Sharp and Reeder had been charged with four counts of murder each. (AP, 02.04.2007)
Both men were also homeless, and it appears they did it over the notion that they thought these men had stolen their own cache of scrap metal they had collected in a specific location nearby. This was an early theory--that the killers (I initially thought there was more than one killer, unless it was Dracula, too hard for one man) did it for the coveted scrap in the area of the murders, but often the most obvious possibility is the correct one.
Reeder and Sharp (like Burke and Hare?) committed premeditated murder. After the murders, they carried their victims from the kill site, hid the bodies in a warehouse for a couple weeks, then deposited them in a concrete vault on a railroad underpass and a maintenance tunnel underneath the old Studebaker factory. They weren't found for about a month. It just has that Weimar feel to it, a society in-decline, staring into the abyss--more blows to our vapid-notions of victimology and identity.
Like most soulless criminals, they did it for the money, these so-called homeless perps. They thought these men had stolen their coveted-stash of scrap metal, but does it matter? The Police only protect certain property, so perhaps we should enact municipal codes that legally protect the "belongings" of the homeless? A hard-call. Icons are falling. More shocks to come. Reeder fled to Michigan--quite mobile for a "homeless" man--and is awaiting extradition from Berrien county.
AP: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070204/ap_on_re_us/manhole_bodies
No comments:
Post a Comment