Around two weeks before Amy Frink died, our family was vacationing at Ocean Isle Beach. My eldest son was with her and she drove him back to the rental house where we were staying. We lived in Matthews, and returned to Matthews, NC the next morning. We nearly always rented from Cooke's.
I remember standing in my NC kitchen, startled while reading the details of her tragic death. We received the weekly Brunswick Beacon newspaper through the mail. My eldest son walked into the kitchen from outside, and I gave him the news. He went upstairs quietly to his room. Not so long after another of his close school friends would be killed in a head-on collision on the road to Ocean Isle Beach. Amy died my son's junior year at Charlotte Latin School. He graduated in 1993.
1993, our family was transferred from North Carolina to Cobb County Georgia where my husband would begin an executive position with Norfolk Southern Railroad, with communications and signals. In Charlotte, North Carolina he had been in charge of the railroad's construction machinery.
There are two questions that remain. If Amy's death is reported as 1994, how could I have read about it in North Carolina, while standing in my kitchen? I lived in Georgia in 1994. That North Carolina memory is so well-planted in my mind because I knew how painful it would be to tell my son, and how horrible it must be for her poor parents.
I also recalled reading that Amy had phoned her sister from a pay-phone at a South Carolina store to notify her she would be arriving for a visit in Myrtle Beach. I had recalled from the story that Amy had died in South Carolina. Now accounts indicate she was killed in North Carolina and her body was then moved across the state line, which would explain why the trial occurred in North Carolina.
I had initially given the information to three entities offices in 1998, D.A. Rex Gore, Brunswick County Sheriff, and The Brunswick Beacon newspaper. I'd spoken with Sheriff Ron Hewett's office on more than one occasion. In the latter conversation around 2001, I had asked the sheriff if the crime had been committed in South Carolina, and then how could the trial be held in North Carolina? His response at that time, was generally that it was the way they do things there.
I had notified Brunswick authorities in 1998 of new information describing the killer, and after that Amy's murder was solved. But by that time my younger son was dead with similar circumstances, those being 1/ the phone booth, 2/crossing state lines, 3/bloody, crime scene, 4/ Birdie Frink had told me in a phone conversation, she was disallowed to see her daughter's body, and I was unable to identify my son's body.
Yet getting information from Alabama and Georgia entities with my son's "suicide" was as difficult as understanding the lukewarm, even evasive, almost rude reception I'd received from Brunswick authorities and entities in attempting to help them solve a six-year-old heinous crime. As it turned out, neither of those arrested in Brunswick matched the description of the man I'd given them 1998, who my son believed had killed Amy. This man lived in a trailer south of Ocean Isle on I-17, had blonde scraggly, long hair and a bad temper. He lived with his mother, and it' s where they'd been the last night my son had seen Amy alive. My son was 17 years old the summer of 1992, and Amy had written to him in Matthews after their summer friendship had developed the year before.
I'd taken the following notes regarding my own son's death, and body shipment. I'd suspicions from all else I'd suffered, there was foul play involved, particularly since initially his father made plans to cremate his body. Through Marietta, Georgia attorney George C. Childs I had demanded burial instead knowing exhumation might be the only way I could eventually get the truth. I'd been to Mobile to examine his body, and via cell phone was told the morgue had closed at 5:00 p.m. I made a purchase there with my VISA card as proof, and believe the date was December 23, 1998.
Suspecting organized crime and being dangerously alone, then I opted not to stay in Mobile, and drove back to Georgia, the drive totaling somewhere around 18 hours. A couple days began the jailings and harassment, which along with a protective order and my husband's apparent intention to have me incarcerated permanently, discouraged attendance of my son's burial.
Note: The "BODY SHIPMENT" information as relayed via telephone, by Baldwin County Coroner, Huey Mack, Sr.
The body was released by Alabama's Judge Stuart on December 29, five days AFTER his Cobb County, Georgia funeral, and the same day I was arrested and placed in Houston, and Cobb County's jails.
(Those false charges were later dismissed. According to my attorney, Kenneth Schatten, there were no harassments, to justify the "harassing phone call" charges and he had listened to a tape recording which proved it.)
But for several days, and the duration of my court ordered "state hospital incarceration," the body was apparently stored in Georgia a full week before being flown to Pittsburg, PA, and then moved to Roanoke, Virginia, 1/7/99.
So the body was moved to Virginia and stored for a week before the 1/14/99 burial.
It was moved from Georgia storage one day after I was released from the "mental hospital" trap, and the possibilities for a permanent incarceration and a "guardianship" over me was lost by my husband and his attorney, Michael Broadbear.
(I'd refused all medications, even though intimidated and threatened with injection, and was finally released, ruled "not a danger to herself or others." It's good for the public to know that in Georgia this a method of forcefully intimidating and permanently discrediting, silencing potential witnesses, as well as settling divorces. It's a horror to imagine and, God only knows how many others have not escaped these devilish traps.)
So where was the body stored in Georgia? And why won't they release any records?
The Cobb County funeral home handled all arrangements, and as I understood it they handled payment to other entities in Virginia and Alabama. They would not release records after asking the boy's father.
Why wouldn't any of them release the records?
Even John Garner of Alabama had said to get copies of police reports I would need to hire a lawyer and get a subpoena. Why? These were public records. The one person who seemed to be missing was Jimmy Johnson, the actual Baldwin County sheriff. Huey Mack and John Garner were doing all of the talking, and Jimmy Johnson's name was never mentioned until I found it out almost by accident, in 2004.
Sheriff Johnson provided records promptly, one even with a tattoo picture on a foot that I recalled looked like my son's tattoo. Being a graphics artist, I would tend to believe a coroner's report faster than a graphic image. The coroner had written that on the body, there were two well-healed scars, one above each knee. My son had no knee scars at all, no leg wounds, and no knee surgery. While the tattoo is similar in my recollection, I'm sure my son isn't the only person who had that particular tattoo. A tattoo image can be transposed directly on to a photograph with graphics software, or manually to a human body.
Instructions:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lceb-BbVoFo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TynVZHRmpUU
2 comments:
Moving the date of the murder by two years, accomplishes the following things:
It makes Amy an adult, not a minor. This might reduce the legal responsibilities which some people had for her!
It moved the case into the period when Mr Hewet was Sheriff, which may be important.
The two people convicted as accessories, deny all involvement, and moving the date of the crime by two years could be an important part of the process of securing a conviction against two innocent men. Presumably, if their lawyers knew the date of the crime was off by two years, they'd be able to win an appeal, and perhaps launch a case for malicious prosecution, perjury, etc.
It gets all independent investigators starting in the wrong year, which must prejudice their chances of getting anywhere near the truth!
It would be beyond belief if this happened in the UK: Medawar knows of a murder case that collapsed because the Crown had the time of the death wrong by four days, never mind the cause of death. But there have been a lot of wrongful convictions because defence counsel hasn't presumed to challenge the prosecution on the most basic facts of their case, looking instead for tiny loopholes.
Tip: if arraigned for murder, with huge and towering stack of evidence against you, you are entitled to ask the prosecution to prove that they are at least right about the day the murder happened!
David Waddington QC managed to bully his client, Stefan Kisko, into pleading guilty to the murder of Leslie Moleseed, even though she was raped and Mr Kisko's private parts had never developed, due to a handicap. The prosecution counsel, it turned out, had gone to court with the firm intention of offering "no evidence" the moment the plea was entered, because he'd reviewed the police notes and thought the case was hopeless. Then a highly-trained legal mind gets up and says his client is pleading guilty...
Mr Waddington subsequently became Home Secretary. Once the horrible bodge he'd made of Kisko's defence was revealed, he resigned from the cabinet -and was made governor-general of Bermuda. That appointment was possibly the most shameful thing which John Major ever did as Prime Minister. (Tony Blair subsequently moved the bar a long way as far as prime ministerial misconduct was concerned.)
Sometimes, the very, very basic facts can be wrong, and if you don't challenge them, you can be convicted of the most absurd things.
When the right murderer was finally convicted in the Moleseed case, it turned out to be a local comic-book dealer and paedophile who had been the first choice of rank and file police officers anyway. Senior officers had other ideas, as in a long list of other wrongful convictions.
Which brings us to the real reason for wrongful convictions in the first place:
These hardly ever occur because the police do not know who did it: those cases can remain open.
Cases need to be closed when the police know exactly who did it, and this is someone who must be kept out of jail, or at least out of court and certainly out of public sight. Then there is a compelling need to convict someone else.
In Amy's case, someone has been clever, because the men convicted were not convicted of the murder itself, but as accessories after the fact, which means that almost no accurate information about the actual murder needed to be presented in order to convict them! They were also at a considerable handicap in defending themselves, because they were trying to account for their actions in a different year to the actual murder, and after a long period of time, in which innocent or unwitting connections with items of evidence might have been established.
Especially if the real killers saw the need to establish such links as an insurance policy.
If Medawar's worst thought possible about Amy's murder was true, then the body and spilt blood would have shown traces of muscle relaxant. Does anyone know of any evidence of this, or if this was tested for?
Medawar would prefer not to spell out the implications of this unless there is a glimmer of evidence, because they are very distressing. But would account for the need to massively mutilate the body, to cover up what was actually done.
This is something that would make the motive for murder specific to her, and limit the suspects to those who were able to obtain a blood, tissue or hair sample, some time in advance of the murder.
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