Held to answer

Susan Smith must be sitting in her South Carolina prison cell thinking, “Chloroform and duct tape – damn! Why didn’t I think of that?”

The young mother killed her two sons in 1994, then blamed a man who carjacked her and made off with her vehicle and children. Her case is more often recalled because she described the fictitious attacker as black. (Had she blamed it on a white man, we might be more inclined to remember the two little boys she killed.)

The story that Casey Anthony’s defense spun was that the woman’s 2-year-old daughter accidentally drowned in the family swimming pool, and then she and her dad panicked and concealed the death. Because of decomposition, the cause of death was never determined. The child’s body was found wrapped in plastic with duct tape on her face.

Accidental drownings are not unusual. However, most parents who find their child’s lifeless body in a pool will go to desperate lengths to try and breath life into their son or daughter. They will beg and beseech paramedics and God to work a miracle.

Anthony didn’t even call 9-1-1. She lied about the child being missing for 31 days. She didn’t even give her daughter a proper burial.

All that being said, what was peculiar about the death of Caylee Anthony was that so many people (mostly women) cared, even traveling great distances to fight for a seat in the courtroom. Had this been a boyfriend or father or stranger accused of killing a child, it might have been treated as business as usual. But this was a mother who liked to party. The crowds who gathered outside the courtroom seemed to think this called for a special come-uppance.

TV personality Nancy Grace seized on the case and raged about the verdict.

“As the defense sits by and has their champagne toast after that not-guilty verdict, somewhere out there, the devil is dancing tonight,” she said.

Yes, the devil does like to dance, and not just in Florida.

While Anthony’s attorneys were reveling in their win, a former Washington state police officer was sitting in a Seattle jail waiting to be extradited to Illinois on suspicion of killing 7-year-old Maria Ridulph in 1957. Jack Daniel McCullough, 71, had been a strong suspect in her disappearance when he was 18 and lived a block and a half away from her.

Five months after she was abducted, her body was found in a wooded area. Maria Ridulph might be 61 years old by now, with a lifetime of living behind her if some man hadn’t claimed her for his own use.

McCullough, who went by the name John Tessier back then, told investigators he was on a train to Chicago when the child disappeared. All these years later, investigators say they have found at least two pieces of evidence showing he wasn’t on a train or in Chicago.

McCullough changed his name in 1994 and worked as a police officer in Lacey and Milton. It also turns out that he was fired from the Milton Police Department after he was accused of sexually assaulting a teenage runaway. (He pleaded guilty to unlawful communication with a minor; this is why criminal records don’t tell the whole story and why they should not be expunged.)

If McCullough is guilty of abducting and killing a child 54 years ago, what else has he gotten away with? Why did it take all these years to poke holes in Tessier/McCullough’s alibi? Maria’s parents are now dead, and her 65-year-old brother is glad they are not alive to see that perhaps her killer has had a long life. They had assumed (hoped?) that he had somehow died.

For all the outrage over Anthony’s acquittal in her daughter’s death, at least she was brought to trial.

“You cannot convict someone until they’ve had their day in court,” said her attorney Jose Baez.

Perhaps to upgrade his pre-verdict reputation as a former bikini salesman and deadbeat dad, Baez used his post-verdict press conference to shift attention to a defense attorney’s favorite distraction: the evils of the death penalty.

Baez boasted that he had saved a life.

“We all need to stop and look and think twice about a country that decides to kill its own citizens.”

He probably hopes it will take our minds off of a country where some of its citizens kill other citizens, and live to dance with the devil.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons