Monthly Archives: April 2021

Passion Blog

Killing Makes You a Celebrity Now?

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This week, to finish off my passion blog for this semester, we are going to talk about a killer who’s reputation I find particularly fascinating. Believe it or not, I had never heard of this man until my twelve year old sister told me about him, but his story is a rather strange one. His name is Issei Sagawa and he is essentially a celebrity for murder and cannibalism.

Issei Sagawa was born in Japan in 1981 to wealthy parents. He recalls having his first cannabalistic thought in the first grade, when admiring a boys thigh. Later in life, he stalked a German woman and followed her home to her apartment. His plan was to break in while she was sleeping and cut off part of her butt to eat (so disgusting), but she woke up and he was arrested for attempted rape, of course he did not reveal his true intentions, and got off with his father’s money. He moved to France when he was 27 to pursue his writing career. It was there that he often took home prostitutes with the intention of killing them but “froze and could never pull the trigger”. However, eventually his urges must have taken over because he killed a woman named Renée Hartevelt when he was 32.

Hartevelt was a classmate, and Sagawa invited her to his apartment for dinner. While her back was turned, Sagawa shot her in the back of the neck, killing her. He passed out from the shot, but quickly woke up, had sex with her corpse, and then proceeded to eat numerous parts of her body after cutting them with a butcher’s knife. He then tried to dispose of her body by carrying it in a suitcase to a river, but was caught and detained by french policemen.

Sagawa’s father paid for a good lawyer, and after two years he was found mentally insane and sent back to Japan. Because the records in France had to be sealed, he only spent about 12 days in a mental hospital in Japan before being released, and he now walks a free man.

As if any of that story wasn’t weird enough, it gets stranger. This man, rather than being feared or hated by people, is a celebrity in Japan society. He returned to the public eye and embraced his newfound fame by signing a documentary deal. He actually profited from his crime, and essentially got off scott-free. Although not all view him as a celebrity and he has struggled to get jobs since the incident, Sagawa not only got away with murder, but seems to actually have benefited from it, which is disgusting and makes me worried about what’s going on in Japan.

RCL Blog

E-Portfolio Ideas

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For my e-portfolio project, I believe I am going to use the Weebly platform to create my website. This is for two reasons; one being that I’m not sure I want my work saved forever on wordpress, and two I have used weebly previously in high school to create websites for my classes, so I am familiar with it.

For the topic of my e-portfolio, I have some ideas. I liked the idea of creating something for my grandparents to update them on my life and first year of college and how the online aspect made it different. Although covid has died down since last march, my grandparents on my mom’s side are very old and at-risk, so I haven’t seen them much in the past year. They live very close to me and I went from seeing them at least once a week to not at all, and I know they are very bored and lonely, so I think they’d appreciate something like this project. My other idea is to create something revolving around my interest in criminology, either for a potential internship or law school. I could include my college essay, which revolves around what I want to do as well as my interests, and my passion blogs about different serial killers I find interesting.

Passion Blog, Uncategorized

This is Why I’m Afraid of the Dark

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This week, we are going to be talking about a very crazy person. A killer, to be precise. Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramírez, or Richard Ramirez, was an American serial killer, serial rapist, kidnapper, pedophile, and burglar. His home invasions and murder crime spree was highly publicized and terrorized the residents of the Greater Los Angeles area. He also later targeted the residents of the San Francisco Bay Area from June 1984 until August 1985.  His weapon of choice ranged from handguns, knives, a machete, a tire iron, and a hammer. He also made use of Satanic imagery. Before he was known and caught , Ramirez was called the “Valley Intruder” (as his attacks were first clustered in the San Gabriel Valley) and the “Night Stalker” by the news media.

You may have heard of him by the name “Night Stalker”, which is what most people are familiar with. With multiple home intrusions all happening when he struck late at night, the media ran with the fear society was going through and publicized him like crazy, calling him the mysterious “Night Stalker”. There were no witnesses to describe him for awhile, because he planned out his kills so that he could sneak into unsuspecting victims’ homes at night and kill them, leaving no one to describe him to police.

He killed fifteen people that we know of, but when he was caught in 1989 he faced multiple charges. These charges included thirteen counts of murder, five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults, and fourteen burglaries. Ramirez was convicted with nineteen death sentences, and his judge stated that his deeds exhibited “cruelty, callousness, and viciousness beyond any human understanding”. Ramirez never expressed any remorse of feelings of regret about his crimes. He ended up dying of complications from B-cell lymphoma while awaiting execution at San Quentin State Prison while on California’s death row.

Therapist Michael H. Stone portrays Ramirez as a ‘made’ psychopath rather than a ‘conceived’ one. He says that Ramirez’s schizoid behavioral condition added to his apathy to the murdering of his victims and his untreatability. Stone additionally expressed that Ramirez was knocked out and nearly passed away multiple times before he was six years old and therefore “later experienced seizures and epilepsy, aggressivity, and hypersexuality.”

The Night Stalker case is actually a very interesting one. There is an entire show on Netflix based off of the events, and I highly recommend watching it if you’re at all slightly interested in the case because it has a lot of eery details and depictions of finding the killer and his identity.

All I know is being afraid of the dark, or what’s hiding in it, is a very real thing. I always double check that all of my doors and windows are locked because psychopaths are a real thing out there and the thought of that is terrifying.

RCL Blog

Advocacy Project Ideas

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For my advocacy project, I don’t think I am going to continue with my drug trafficking and immigration related topics, because I feel I wouldn’t have much pull or ethical advocacy there. I think instead I will talk about rape culture on college campuses and focus on the stigma that based on what young girls wear, they are “asking for it”. I believe my audience will be other young girls in similar situations as well as men in college as well to educate and advocate that the way a woman dresses does not correlate to her sexual intentions.

I think that the Spitting Image project is both a piece of art and a piece of advocacy. It is art because it captures raw footage of young girls in their most natural and vulnerable state, when they feel most like themselves. I believe it is also advocacy because the writer and photographer in charge of the project used to take similar pictures of herself as a young girl, but to see how others viewed her and would change her appearance accordingly. With this project she is advocating to young girls that it matters more who you want to be and see yourself as rather than how others see you.

Passion Blog

Not That Kind of Zodiac

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This week I decided to switch it up and talk about something that really interests me as of late, we are going to talk about astrology! I am a pisces, but I will discuss all the zodiac signs in this post. Just kidding. This week we will be continuing on the topic of serial killers, and our discussion this week will be on none other than the famous Zodiac killer.

We are continuing with a similar trend in last week, regarding being punished for crimes. This case is a rather frustrating one however, because the Zodiac killer continues to go unknown and nameless, and has yet to be punished or caught for his crimes over fifty years later.

The Zodiac was a killer who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. What is unique about this case, is that the killer regularly corresponded with the press, sending them letters including details about the murders not yet released to prove he was the killer. He would leave cryptograms in his letters, hinting at his identity and claiming if the clues were followed he would be discovered. It was likely a fun game to him, taunting the media while getting away with murders, making him a sadist. He also threatened to go on killing sprees and kill dozens of people if his letters were not published in the media. It was in these letters that he started referring to himself as The Zodiac, which is all we have to go on still today, since his real identity was never discovered.

The Zodiac is responsible for seven known murders, or attempts. He ended up killing five known victims, two of his targeted victims survived. He often targeted couples, his first two murders were a young high school couple on a date in a parked car. He shot them both dead, one in the head and one multiple times in the chest and body. Most killers stick to a specific killing pattern, however, what was strange about The Zodiac is he shot some of his victims, while stabbing others. He was confirmedly responsible for five murders, however he claims in his letters to have killed at least thirty seven people.

As stated in last week’s post, I find it very hard to wrap my head around how this killer could be responsible for thirty seven murders, and we only know five of the victims, (seven if you count the two survivors). As mentioned before, you would think these people have families or someone to realize they had gone missing. The only explanation I can really think of is maybe undocumented homeless people or immigrants, but this is not necessarily the case and even if it were it isn’t for me to say whether they still have family or not. This case is frustrating to me, because although being reopened in 2007 for further investigation, The Zodiac has yet to be found and convicted. After about fifty years, I don’t have much hope, which leads me to the unfortunate conclusion of this post which is that he got away with murder.

Uncategorized

VERY ROUGH Rough Draft Issue Brief

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Building a Wall: A Method to Hinder Drug Trafficking, or Human Lives?

During former President Donald Trump’s reign in office, he proposed many new policies in regard to building a wall along the US-Mexico border. This wall was argued to be with the good intention to decrease drug trafficking into the United States, and to hinder drug mules, as well as the cartel from using the border to transport drugs. However, was this the true intention? The wall would likely be unsuccessful in reducing drug flows into the U.S., and would come with substantial financial costs as well as unintended consequences. Many drug flows are already through legal points of entry, a better focus would be to increase security at those ports. This wall however, does make it much more difficult for immigrants and people from other countries to migrate to the U.S. The journey from ones country to ours is dangerous and risky, and many lose their lives making it. A wall along the border will increase the struggles of migrants trying to come make better lives for themselves and their families, and likely increase the deaths as well. A policy implementing a focus on increasing security at legal ports would be better suited to hinder drug trafficking in the United States.

Drug Trafficking and Issues:

Drug trafficking is defined as “the global illicit trade involving the cultivation, manufacture, distribution, and sale of substances which are subject to drug prohibition laws.” Seizures of heroin and meth tripled and quintupled from 2009 to 2014, while cocaine and marijuana remain the two most commonly seized drugs at the United States borders. The Southwestern border is one of the main areas that the illegal substances travel across into the U.S. This is the two thousand mile stretch of land between the United States and Mexico. The drug cartels in Mexico use different methods to distribute the drugs and get them across the border into the United States. Some of these include using drug mules, trains, boats, vehicles, etc. “Mexico is the number one foreign supplier of marijuana to the United States”, as well as methamphetamine. Heroin tends to come from the Middle East and Asia, while cocaine is likely from Columbia, however Mexico often distributes the Columbian cocaine to the United States (The Recovery Village). Now that some of the main facts have been established, why or how is drug trafficking a civic issue?

For starters, there is the money aspect of it. Illegal drug abuse costs American an outrageous amount. According to The Recovery Village, the cost is about one hundred and eighty one billion dollars a year. This includes health care costs, law enforcement, and lost work place productivity, as well as legal costs. Our prison systems are also overcrowded, due to many drug related incarcerations, using, selling, etc. This adds up in tax dollars as well, since society is partly responsible for paying for prisons and institutions. This creates an issue for society because many people are already outraged or disapprove of the taxes they face, and paying for the incarceration of drug supporters is not something many are eager to do. Many argue that the government is at fault for allowing the illegal substances into our country and across the borders in the first place. This creates another civic issue in the question of border patrol. In order to increase our border patrol and therefore decrease the amount of drug trafficking getting over in the United States, more funding would be needed. In order for the government to produce that funding would be to increase taxes on society, or create new taxes. This, in turn would create a similar issue to what was already discussed in the prison funding situation.

Another civic issue that stems from drug trafficking in the United States is drug addiction. Many people in the United States suffer from severe drug addictions, which in turn can cause multiple problems for society. One of these common issues is money again. As a society we help to pay for drug rehabilitation facilities, as well as incarceration of those with severe drug offenses, as discussed previously. However, another issue that can be created by drug trafficking or addiction is an issue with violence. Not only do certain drugs cause hallucinations for some people, but with these hallucinations can come violence. People high on drugs may start acting violently towards others, whether they be provoked or unprovoked.  “Prison populations are full of drug offenders and abusers who committed their crimes while on drugs. In 2004, a national survey found that thirty two percent of all state prisoners and twenty six percent of federal prisoners admitted to being under the influence of drugs when they committed their most current offense. Additionally in 2007, approximately 1.8 million people were arrested for drug abuse offenses.” In turn, this can cause issues of violence with police. Force may be necessary of police officers to contain an offender that is high on drugs if they are unresponsive or not cooperating. However, force also may not be necessary but may be used, which creates an entire other civic issue having to do with unnecessary police brutality.

Another issue that has more recently stemmed from drug trafficking is the production and distribution of synthetic drugs. Synthetic drugs often contain legal and unregulated chemicals, and due to the growing use of technology and internet, they are easily distributed online without a lot of monitoring. These drugs are fake and essentially worse in some cases than normal drugs that are trafficked into the country. The chemicals in these drugs are unsafe and often lethal to people who take them. These chemicals are often distributed from China and come in a multitude of varieties (The Recovery Village). This creates yet another detrimental danger to society and its safety.

Overall, one of the largest problems the United States is facing due to drug trafficking is one of financial significance. Many of the solutions that would prevent or lessen the illicit substances crossing the border, would be more financially straining measures than already exist, like increasing border patrol, for example.

How Different Presidents Plan to Deal with the Issue:

Starting with administration under President Donald Trump, he planned to counteract the drug trafficking issues by building his wall on the border. “The mercurial approach by his administration during the past four years has left anti-drug allies unmoored, provided political capital to presidents who undermined anti-corruption initiatives and squandered efforts to improve regional security by throwing resources at an ineffective border wall” (Business Insider). Trump used drug trafficking incidents of MS13 to build more anti-immigration policies and support his building of the wall on the border of Mexico and the United States. His “zero tolerance” policy at the border, that enforced the separation of families trying to cross, “further pushed people into the illegal market and the hands of criminal groups, helped raise the price for criminal services like human smuggling, increased the risk that deportees would enter the ranks of criminal groups and eroded trust between authorities and migrant communities exploited by criminal groups” (Business Insider). In September of 2020, Trump ordered that the Mexican government crack down and diminish efforts of the Mexican drug cartel, or otherwise face consequences. Consequences such as the Mexican administration under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador would run the risk of being found to have “failed demonstrably to uphold its international drug control commitments”(Business Insider). Many believe this deemed his efforts ineffective and deficient to solving the actual drug trafficking issue.

In January, the new President Joe Biden was inducted into office and administration. He is planning to handle the current drug trafficking issues with a different approach.  According to an article put out by Brookings Edu, the incoming Biden administration should be “especially wary of the likely inevitable growth of fentanyl shipment through maritime areas and the potential for such organizations to use technology to engage in ‘gray zone’-like activities, which could make their trafficking operations even more effective” (Brookings). Fentanyl is one of the newer chemically-engineered drugs as discussed in my last civic blog post. In 2018 alone, 69,425 cases of fentanyl trafficking were reported to the United States sentencing commission (USSC). Fentanyl as well as synthetic opioids being trafficked can cause even more danger to society because it is not uncommon for people to be unaware that what they are buying contains any type of fentanyl or synthetic materials. Producers of the illicit drugs cut them with the synthetic chemicals to make more product for cheaper, and ultimately make more money. However, these synthetic drugs can be more dangerous and result in overdoses, some that can be fatal. According to the CDC, “deaths involving other synthetic opioids other than methadone (primarily fentanyl) continue to rise with more than 36,359 overdose deaths reported in 2019” (CDC).

Wall Motives and Why it Won’t Work:

Under President Donald Trump’s rule in office, he proposed the policy of building a wall as a solution to stop and prevent immigration, and therefore stop drug trafficking. However, were his motives really focused on the drug trafficking issue, or was he more interested in preventing people from other countries from migrating here?

A concrete barrier or a wall along the US-Mexico border would not dramatically reduce drug flows into the US. Although a physical barrier, such as a see-through metal structure, is largely meaningless in terms of impacting drug flows to the United States, it does come with substantial financial costs and unintended consequences. Even if the goal were to combat drug smuggling, the money spent on a border wall might be better spent on other anti-narcotics measures including improving legal ports of entry along the border and supporting the US Coast Guard (Felbab-Brown).

If we were to build a wall, counter-measures of drug traffickers would likely be taken. These counter measures should be considered, and then a decision on whether or not the wall would be sufficient could be made. Some examples of how smugglers could counteract a wall include using tunnels, airborne and sea smuggling, legal ports of entry, and postal and mail services (Felbab Brown).

Smugglers’ obvious answer to a border barrier is tunnels. Drug traffickers are now using tunnels to bring narcotics into the US, a tactic invented by Mexico’s most infamous drug trafficker, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, who was on trial in the US.

Drones and catapults are two other smuggling techniques that are increasingly being used. Drones’ payload, or the amount of cargo they can carry, is currently restricted, so they are not an effective drug smuggling tool for most drugs. However, payload capacities will increase over time, making drug smuggling easier.

Another tried and true approach is smuggling drugs by sea. Drug-carrying vessels have been known to land off the coast of the United States. If the land boundary between the United States and Mexico were to be tightened, the trend of smuggling further north into California’s coast would only expand. Cutting the US Coast Guard’s budget, as the Trump administration suggested at one point to pay for the wall, is counterproductive for this reason—and, more significantly, to deter much more serious terrorist attacks in US ports. The United States Coast Guard is an integral part of border defense in the United States, fighting a range of dangerous threats such as terrorism and illegal fishing.

Hard drugs smuggled into the United States through the US-Mexican border are smuggled in through the 52 legal ports of entry on the border, which must process millions of individuals, vehicles, trucks, and trains each week, according to the US Drug Enforcement Administration. Since 2006, traffickers have concealed their illegal cargo in hidden and increasingly sophisticated special compartments in cars or under legal goods in trailer trucks, with a total of 5,042,062 crossing the US-Mexico border annually, or around 13,800 every day (Felbab-Brown).

Drugs with a high potency to weight ratio, such as synthetic drugs like fentanyl, can also be imported directly from manufacturers to the United States. Indeed, most of the lethal fentanyl and its analogues are imported from China to the United States in this manner. A wall would have little impact on drug traffic because they never reach the land boundary between the United States and Mexico.

Conclusion:

A wall is not going to be sufficient in hindering drug trafficking.  Other ways will be found to get around the wall, as mentioned above in the latter. Increasing security at the ports would be the better, more effective option, as well as a better investment for the U.S. financially.

Resources

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/5-ways-trumps-policies-against-cartels-and-drug-traffickers-backfired-2020-11%3famp

https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-publications/quick-facts/Fentanyl_FY18.pdf

https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates

Passion Blog

Toys Don’t Always Imply Fun

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This week on the blog, I am going to discuss David Parker Ray, also known as The Toy-Box Killer. This is a very morbid discussion as he is one of my least favorite killers that I have learned about or researched. The things he did, or “allegedly did”, (but definitely did do), were very demeaning to women. He definitely saw them as objects, or “toys”, but what he did to them was awful and makes me cringe even thinking about it.

Basically, Ray had a trailer that he soundproofed and called his “toy box”. It was equipped with items used for sexual torture. I will not get into what he did, however I will list some of the tools he used. Whips, chains, pulleys, straps, clamps, leg spreader bars, surgical blades, and saws. So, like I said, I won’t say what he did, but I’m sure you can imagine, and it is so disturbing. He also had a mirror mounted to the ceiling so his victims had to watch everything he was doing to them. Among other things, he was also a rapist.

As if this story wasn’t bad enough already, he barely even suffered the consequences for all that he did, and those women were given no justice. The only reason we know that he did any of this at all, is because three women that were victimized by him survived and escaped. Other than that, there are no known victims, but it is suspected he had over sixty murder victims, but he was convicted for zero. He ended up being sentenced to 224 years in prison, but died about two years in from a heart attack. I hope he suffered.

Overall, justice just was not served in my opinion, not that I can really think of any way for justice to be served for all of those poor women. Over sixty potential victims, and we know none of their names except for three. I mean they were people though, they couldn’t just go missing without anyone noticing. I am sure they have family, and I cannot even imagine what it would be like for a family to go through that. I honestly don’t even know what would be worse, not knowing and wondering what happened to your loved one for the rest of your life, or knowing, but also knowing the amount of pain, torture, and suffering they went through and that they died alone.

Like I said, very morbid and sad topic this week. I’m sorry. Go refresh and watch a funny movie or show. Aimlessly scroll on TikTok. My favorite show of all time is New Girl if you’re looking for suggestions. It’s on Netflix and I have seen the show about nine times through and it can still make me laugh, even on my worst days. Hope everyone has a good week, get this story out of your head. Again, I apologize, but I feel like these unknown women’s stories deserve to be heard somehow.