The Raleigh News & Observer has an ongoing series of articles with the stories of those imprisoned here. When a news organization unravels and exposes corruption it performs as the fourth branch of government many consider the media to be. It is encouraging to know there are news organizations that will suffer the present times to create a more respectable and credible future, particularly in the court system.
AMY FRINK & GERARD J. SNIFFEN, III - similarities
The case of Amy Frink, in 1992, was one that probably won't be reexamined. Her disappearance was similar to my son's. In 1998, about eight months after I tipped off the Brunwick County, NC authorities giving them new information to help them solve her murder, my own son disappeared, and like Amy, died in an adjacent state.
The cases were similar in that both were last known calling from a phone booth in their home states. Both were initially reported to have died in adjacent states, Amy in South Carolina and my son in Alabama. Both suffered disfiguring, bloody deaths. In neither instance did the mother identify the child's body.
With my son's case, Baldwin County, Alabama officers stonewalled my access to police records for several years. When I was able to obtain them, police records along with forensics reports proved the body identification was in error. Two shotgun shells at the scene denote murder and not suicide.
With Amy's case, initially she was reported to have been killed in South Carolina. Later it was determined she had been killed in North Carolina and her body had been moved across state lines and disposed of in South Carolina justifying a South Caroline autopsy and South Carolina investigations. But the killing having occurred in N.C. justified the N.C. trial in which two of five suspects were sent to prison and have since been released. The same investigator, Detective Bill Knowles, who investigated the famous Crystal Todd murder, was involved with the Amy Frink case.
I spoke with the state crime lab just this summer and asked what they might have evidence of with the Frink murder because it had straddled lines like my son's death, and the only thing I figured would have been her car. According to my son she'd been driving a Subaru Brat, and it was reddish in color. Amy had driven him back to the house rental at Ocean Isle Beach a few weeks before we received the newspaper regarding her death. We vacationed there often and Amy had known my son for more than a year, even having written him letters back in Matthews, NC where we'd lived.
According to newspaper reports, the car had been used to drive over her body after she had been killed. It was a horrible story and when my son gave me information he'd withheld believing he knew who had murdered her, I was compelled as a mother with deepest sympathy for Amy's family to notify police. It was my duty as a good citizen and as a mother to try and help solve the murder.
I had no idea tipping off police would lead to the loss of my own son, and that i would be stalked, suffer harassment by police in two states, and live in terror for so many years after.
When Baldwin County discovered my blog I was approached by Jillian Kramer, a journalist at the Mobile Press Register for an interview. The interview was short via telephone, but the article was published between Christmas and New Years, months later, filled with errors and omissions. It was obvious Ms. Kramer did no homework, as is proven in my post to address her errors. She had said she would "hit the ground and research," but was obviously writing the article for Sheriff Hoss Mack, who was in 1998, with John Garner, deputy that investigated the crime scene.
Just now there is the case in Baldwin County of a Mobile Commissioner, Steve Nodine accused of murdering Angel Downs. The first trial was ruled a mistrial. The investigation was inferior. The defense is attempting to prove Ms. Downs committed suicide. Baldwin County sheriff department was involved with the investigation.
I have been contacted through my blog by many folks, several in Baldwin County, Alabama who are upset and afraid for their experiences with the law enforcement community, and reports of inappropriate behavior among higher authorities in the county. I've been given stories of bribery, gifts, and even possible drug trafficking involvement by members of the department. In one instance a person has been intimidated to keep quiet for what he knows. There are people there afraid for their lives in exposing certain information regarding police corruption.
Just this past summer my Atlanta attorney, Kenneth H. Schatten advised me to stop writing my story on the internet. He said I was making people angry. And he said there was so much money against me I'd never get the truth. He also said, "Think of it this way. Maybe they have your son somewhere and they've told him if he tries to contact you or his brother or sister, they'll kill you all.
If good people have criminal organizations, media and police against them, who will advocate for them, and what chance does the country or any community have of coming clean?
I tipped off Brunswick authorities about Amy Frink's murder, and within a couple years I had more than 40 brushes with the law, police, courts, false arrests, ineffective lawyers and a nasty divorce to add to the stress. Before attempting to help solve the Frink murder, I had one speeding ticket in my life- ticketed for driving 10 miles over the speed limit.
Is it safeer for good American citizens to suffer in silence and avoid helping solve crimes? Had I kept quiet about the Frink murder, my own son might still be near and the course of my life would have been drastically different than the ongoing tribulations of false arrest, harassment and false accusations I've endured.
4 comments:
I have been reading your blog for awhile and I have an observation. Your ex-husband, Gerard Sniffen obviously had read it also, after all, it concerns his son. There is enough evidence in what you have uncovered to initiate an investigation. Has Mr. Sniffen done that? Has he hired a private investigator? Gone to the police??He has methodicly discredited you, so he knows it has to be him that gets the ball rolling. If he has done nothing, then it is because he knows what happened.
It's really hard to fault anonymous's logic here.
Thank you for your comments. I am most certain my ex-husband has visited portions of this blog and is well-aware that I and other members of the family have concerns regarding my son's identity, mysterious disappearance and death. However, to my knowledge he has apparently chosen to leave the obvious, well documented questions regarding the boy's disappearance and identity - unanswered.
In fact, he has fought my attempts to unravel the mystery in blocking my access to certain records.
The night my son disappeared, my husband, already having had at least one of his nightly martinis, received a phone call from our son who was stranded at a phone booth and in distress.
My husband, Assistant Vice President of Communications for Norfolk Southern Railroad, did not call police, nor did he attempt to contact the telephone company to get the exact location of the incoming call.
Instead, he ordered our 17-year-old daughter to get in the car and drive. And drive she did, down I-75 through Georgia and nearly to Florida, "to look for her brother."
According to the story I was given, all her father could speak of was being sure he was at work on time at the railroad the next morning. During the ride, he seemed obsessed with making sure he wasn't late or absent from work, because it's all he could talk about.
The problem was, the phone booth my son was phoning from, was on Interstate 85 near Newnan, Georgia in Coweta County.
My daughter had been instructed to drive South on Interstate 75, so the trip was a waste of time. And not long after, my son turned up missing and then was reported dead in Alabama.
The problem is with the Alabama autopsy report, which indicates the person who died in Baldwin County, Alabama, 12/9/1998 was not the body of my son.
The last time I saw my son was outside the divorce court room in the hall at Cobb County. My husband, having had me ordered out of my home based on lies to police, had all three of my grown children dressed and in court that day, I thought, to testify against me.
My younger son approached me in the hall, as though he was afraid someone was listening and said quietly almost in a whisper. "Mom, I don't want to do this." He was looking over his shoulder carefully to be sure nobody would hear his words.
Thinking the court required testimony of my children, I told my son, "You have nothing to worry about, just go in there, answer the questions, and tell the truth."
We never went into the court room.
But now I know my son was trying to tell me something else. I wish there would have been time to have listened to him, without being watched in the Cobb County court building.
The truth of the matter at that point I was extremely frightened, not knowing what they would do to me next having already been falsely accused. I sensed more horrors would be coming, and I knew it the day my husband said he'd be home for my birthday, and instead the police showed up and ordered me out of the house.
This is a horror story I hope will never happen to another child, mother or father in this country. There's not a child who could walk away from this scene without lasting scars. And my remaining children, even though they were grown, have scars that will never heal from it.
Again, thank you for your comments.
I FINALLY found it. Took me hours. It was an odd name that does not show up in search with the peoples' names as it should. I should contact her and tell her so. I felt at first the reading was almost unbelievable but as you continue and realize she is a genuine person (like you putting her real name out there and her location) and her grandson's photo (LE) I also found the rhythm of what she is imparting. I think you will see the similarities I referred to. I know I am not putting this on the same blog post but it took me so long to find this I am ... impatient. LOL. So I have to just get it here so you can size it up yourself.
http://starlightinnerprizes.com/Suspects-2.htm
We have to advise her to enable it to be found by googling. Maybe it's just me?
Post a Comment