by Ray Black
As the trials progressed, Willie seemed to bore of the whole proceedings and told his shocked lawyer to enter a plea of guilty. He was told that he would have to admit guilt to all three counts, which Willie subsequently did.
Willie’s sentence was passed and he was given a maximum sentence of five years with the Division of Youth, which meant by the time he was twenty-one he would be free. It appeared that even with all the evidence mounted against him, there was little the authorities could do to a juvenile even though there was every indication that Willie might very possibly kill again.
There was such public outrage at the leniency of Willie’s sentence that it prompted the state legislature to pass the first law in the nation which allowed juveniles to be tried as adults for certain horrific crimes. This was called the ‘Willie Bosket Law’.
WILLIE’S FATE
Willie spent the first part of his confinement at the Goshen Center for Boys and spent the majority of time in conflict with the wardens. He broke out of the Center with a few other boys only to be recaptured two hours later. What he hadn’t realized when he broke out was the fact that while he was in Goshen he had actually had a birthday and was now sixteen years old, technically an adult. Escaping from any penal institute was a felony for an adult and he was consequently sentenced to four years in a state prison.
While he was in prison Willie befriended a group of black Muslims who only exacerbated his rage against the ‘whites’. After serving a rather stormy four years in prison, Willie was returned to the Division of Youth and placed in another reform centre for boys until he became twenty-one years of age.
After his release, Willie was determined to stay out of trouble after meeting a girl called Sharon Hayward. Sharon already had a child and the pair decided to get married. For once Willie behaved like a normal well-adjusted adult. He enrolled in the local community college and even started to look for a job. Unfortunately, for Willie, this new-found freedom was not to last for long. One day while he was visiting his sister, he had an unfortunate encounter with a man from her building which ended up with the man complaining that Willie had tried to rob him. Willie protested and explained that the whole thing was a misunderstanding, but to him the whole thing smelt of politics. The Governor was apparently taking the brunt for Willie’s quick release, and it appeared that one way or another he was going to be put back inside.
It appeared that the system that had for so long had worked in Willie’s favour was now starting to turn on him. He was a victim of his own criminal record, and anything else that happened, however small, now seemed to add more fuel to the fire. Even though his juvenile record had been wiped clean, while he was in the institution he had developed such a bad reputation that the authorities were now clamping down on him. They set Willie’s bail so high that his family were unable to raise the money, and so he had to remain in jail until the time of his trial. Willie was becoming more and more incensed at the way he was being treated, and this resentment built up inside him.
When the case went to court one of the officers put a hand on Willie to get him to move. However, when he resisted he was pushed by a further three officers, to which Willie responded with obscenities. Things went from bad to worse and Willie was pushed so violently against a table that it cracked under his weight, causing the legs to splinter off. One of the police officers hit him with one of the table legs and even though Willie’s lawyer tried to intervene, Willie was charged with assault, resisting arrest and criminal contempt of court.
Willie was now a very angry young man and this was to be another turning point for him. Having decided that going straight had got him nowhere, he decided to take on the system feeling that he had nothing to lose.
When Willie eventually went to the hearing for his sentencing, he dismissed his lawyer and decided to represent himself. He put up a good act and claimed that he was not Willie Bosket but in fact Bobby Reed. The judge allowed him to put his case forward but at the end of the day decided that he was a dangerous man and gave him the maximum sentence. He still had to stand trial for his assault on the police officers, and again he demanded to be his own lawyer. This time he put on such a good show that the jury found him not guilty.
While all this was going on Willie’s father Butch had been released from prison and was starting a new life. But the old Butch soon emerged and he molested a young child that was in his care. Once again he was arrested, but desperate to stay free, he tried to escape and was killed in a shoot-out with the police, taking his own life and that of his girlfriend before he could be apprehended.
Willie, on hearing this news, was elated because it restored his faith that his father was in fact a ‘bad man’ who had gone out in a blaze of glory.
Once back inside prison, Willie was convinced that he would never again be a free man. He started a one-man war against the system, with the prison guards being his main targets. One of his many fights with the guards resulted in him being charged with yet another felony charge. This meant that he had accumulated a total of three felony charges which, no matter how small, resulted in a twenty-five year to life imprisonment sentence under the 1965 persistent felony offender law. Willie’s three felony charges were all fairly small – escape, attempted assault and assault/arson – and he could not understand how these could add up to the same sentence as someone who had committed murder.
With this in his head and his extreme hatred of the system, Willie carried everything to the extreme. He was now at war with the system.
On April 16, 1988, at around 12.42 p.m. in the visiting room of the Shawangunk State Prison in New York, prison guard Earl Porter was stabbed by an 11-inch stiletto blade, which penetrated his chest only narrowly missing his heart. Even to this day, Willie Bosket’s only regret is that he didn’t manage to kill the guard.
This time Willie went to trial for attempted murder. Once again refusing counsel, Willie mounted his own defence. His legs were bound by heavy shackles, while his arms were handcuffed in front of him with the handcuffs chained to his waist, a further chain connected these chains to the shackles. He was once again given another life sentence – this time Willie was in jail for good.
WHERE DID IT ALL GO WRONG?
By the time Willie Bosket was eleven years old, he was an angry, hostile, homicidal boy who no one could seem to reach. He had a history of suicidal attempts and showed constant violence towards fellow human beings. In his head Willie had thought that violence had won him respect. His mother had distanced herself from Willie in the fear that he would turn out like his father. As he grew up he learned how to throw temper tantrums, he often hit his teachers, he stole and for the most part was left to his own devices. Added to this his grandfather had sexually abused him when he was only nine years old. Time and time again he told people that he didn’t care whether he lived or died, as the future didn’t seem to hold any happiness for him.
Crime and violence became a normal part of his existence, in fact he considered it to be a sport that he was very good at. He never really had to face up to any of his criminal acts against others, because as a juvenile he was considered not to be responsible for his actions. Somehow he easily worked his way through the cracks in the system and always ended up back at home.
When he was given a psychiatric evaluation it was reported that Willie was suffering from antisocial behaviour, which was not far removed from Antisocial Personality Disorder, the diagnosis given to his father. Willie was not considered to be psychotic, but he was certainly dangerous.
Two questions still remain unanswered. Why was he so bitter? Why was he so angry towards the system? Why – most probably because Willie had been incarcerated since he was nine years old and was raised by his surrogate mother, the criminal justice system. If this is the case then Willie Bosket is purely a monster that was created by the very system that he now haunts. Willie has gone from the child that nobody wanted to the man who no jail can control. Willie is now considered the most dangerous prisoner in the stat
e of New York. He is confined to a life of solitary confinement, in a concrete box without even the added advantage of electricity. He is denied all access to reading or recreational material and even his guards are not allowed to speak with him.
Willie’s words still echo around the penitentiary: ‘I’ll haunt this damn system,’ and indeed he does.
Tony Craven
Tony Craven was constantly ridiculed for being a virgin, but the problem was he didn’t really fancy people his own age he was only comfortable around little children.
Tony Craven was considered an outcast in society, and consequently suffered much persecution. He worked at a food processing factory in Huddersfield, a northern English industrial town where he lived with his family. Tony was constantly being ridiculed by his workmates because he was still a virgin. He looked far younger than his seventeen years, looking more like a thirteen or fourteen-year-old, which only seemed to make his co-workers pick on him more. The men he worked with even resorted to bringing pornographic magazines into the factory, in an effort to get him interested in women. They would open the magazine at a particularly provocative page and taunt him with, ‘What d’ya think of that one? Wouldn’t ya like to have some of that?’
Tony tried his hardest to ignore his workmates, answering their teasing with, ‘No, actually, I wouldn’t. I don’t like those women.’ In fact Tony was not attracted by mature women, or even girls of his own age. The people he was most comfortable with were the local neighbourhood children who were only half his age. This was probably due to the fact that Tony felt so out of place in normal situations, that he found it easy to identify himself with the other children. One of these children was his seven-year-old neighbour, Angie Flaherty, for whom he often babysat.
‘LITTLE ANGEL’ GOES MISSING
On Saturday, August 10, 1991, Angela’s parents called the Huddersfield police to report that their daughter had not returned home from her afternoon bicycle ride. Angie was nicknamed the ‘Little Angel’ because of her loving and trusting nature and her parents were worried that she may have wandered off with a stranger. It was just after sunset when the police started a thorough search of the neighbourhood.
Two helicopters searched the area from above, while 100 police officers – some on horseback – went over the land piece by piece. On the morning of August 11, just before midday, a constable on horseback noticed Angie’s bright-pink bicycle deep in the forest near to her home. Only minutes later, Little Angel’s body was discovered in a makeshift play area used by the local children. They had built a kind of fort using some cardboard boxes and a soiled, tattered old mattress.
Angie’s body was naked. Her clothes had been folded into a neat pile and were lying beside her spiritless body. There was a considerable amount of blood on the inside of her thighs which indicated that the poor child had probably been sexually assaulted. They also noticed that apart from the strangulation marks around her neck, her killer had crushed her skull with repeated blows. Whoever the evil person was that had killed this innocent child had wanted to make certain that his victim was dead and unable to identify him.
The detective who was assigned to this particularly appalling case was Detective-Superintendent Peter Bottomley. Right from the start Bottomley felt sure that Angie’s attacker had to be someone that she knew. The tyre tracks through the forest proved that Angie had been riding her bike right up to where the attack took place, proving that she went quite willingly to the hidden play area with her murderer. From this Bottomley concluded that it was more than likely that the girl was lured by someone she trusted rather than by a stranger.
During the aftermath of the murder, Tony Craven played the part of an innocent extremely well. He offered statements to reporters who were hovering around outside the Flaherty’s house. He told them that there were no words to express how he felt, and that he could not imagine what poor Angie’s parents were going through. No one suspected in the least that he was connected to the grisly attack on poor Angie Flaherty, except, that is Detective Bottomley.
Bottomley was watching Craven talking eagerly to the reporters while straddling his bicycle. He remarked to one of his partners that he thought Craven was a ‘strange kid’. Tony didn’t appear to be showing any signs of distress even though Angie was a close friend of his. If anything, he seemed to be revelling in the attention he was receiving from the press.
Two days after they discovered Angie’s body, Bottomley decided that he would bring Craven in for questioning. Immediately, Tony revealed to his interviewer that he had some information regarding the case that might be of some use to them. He claimed that on the afternoon Angie disappeared, Tony had seen her with a balding, middle-aged man walking towards the makeshift fort. Craven said that although he had never seen the man before he felt sure that he was the one that had attacked poor Angie.
Bottomley was not convinced by Craven’s story but went along with the false lead in the hope of outwitting him.
The next day Craven was called back to the police station for a second interview. Bottomley told him that he was going to arrange for blood tests to be taken from all the 9,000 males in the area in an attempt to find a DNA match for Angie’s killer. Tony confidently agreed to have his own blood taken and tested, and showed no signs of concern whatsoever.
The DNA tests on Tony’s blood were conclusive as they matched semen found in Angela. At last Bottomley had solid proof that Tony Craven was the cold-blooded killer. He was immediately arrested and quite openly admitted to what had happened.
TONY’S EVIDENCE
He told the police that he had grown tired of the constant harassment he received from his fellow workers about his lack of sexual experience, so he decided he would go out and get some. Tony persuaded Angie to go to the fort and play with him as they had done many times before. He dared her to take all her clothes off and then forced her down on the dirty old mattress. She sobbed and shrieked as Tony raped her, and continued to cry out in pain even after he had finished.
‘She just wouldn’t be quiet,’ Craven confessed. ‘She just kept on screaming and screaming. Louder and louder. She said that she was going to tell what I had done to her. I asked her not to. But she went on saying she was going to.’
Realizing that he was going to have to kill her to keep her quiet, Tony tried at first to strangle Angie. However, the child struggled so much that he was unable to get a tight enough hold on her throat. In a last desperate effort to keep her quiet Tony grabbed her jaw with his left hand and with his right, picked up a rock and proceeded to hit her around the head until she bled to death.
Tony Craven willingly gave every detail of the attack to the police, but one thing that still bothered Bottomley was why he was so eager to let his blood be tested. Was it that he actually wanted to get caught? No, that was not the reason. Tony explained that he thought it would be safe to have his blood examined, as he never actually bled.a life behind bars.
He was taken to Leeds’ Armley Road Jail, where, after only a few days, Tony Craven tried to hang himself using his bed sheets. However, he was discovered in time and sent to the infirmary. A few days later, when back in his cell, he tried once again to take his own life, but it was another failed attempt. A third attempt occurred while he was awaiting trial, but this time Tony slashed his wrists. It was obvious that he now found it impossible to live with what he had done to the poor ‘Little Angel’.
In early May, 1992, Tony’s case went to trial and he was sentenced to life in prison by Justice Connell at the Leeds Crown Court in England. His case will come up for parole in 2008, to see whether he is considered a reformed character who will be safe to release on the public once again.
Cheryl Pierson And Sean Pica
Patricide is a familiar theme both in real life and in fiction. It was fear and revenge for alleged sexual abuse that apparently drove Cheryl Pierson to kill her father with the help of a school friend.
Cheryl Pierson was a very popular, pretty pupil at Newfie
ld High School in Selden, New York. She was a cheerleader and socially she was very successful, although her grades were never better than average. She was 5 ft 2 in tall, with clear skin and a typical permed 1980s hairstyle. She went out with an older Italian boy who loved to spend money and was also co-captain of her beloved cheerleading squad.
Cheryl hardly had the profile of a typical teenage killer, and she certainly wasn’t a misfit in society. Nonetheless, Cheryl did have a couple of skeletons in her cupboard – namely, incest and her mother’s death.
Her mother died of kidney failure in 1985, leaving her husband, James, to bring up their son and two daughters. Mr Pierson, an electrician, did his best to play the part of a good and caring father by taking his children to amusement parks and coaching his son’s junior baseball team. To make up for the loss of a mother figure, James showered his two daughters with love and possessions. However, according to his eldest daughter, Cheryl, he showed too much affection. According to Cheryl, her father sexually abused her from the time she was eleven up until the age of sixteen.
During the early years of sexual abuse, Cheryl’s mother was in and out of hospital and was in a state of very frail health. She died when Cheryl was fifteen, and only two days after the funeral her father forced Cheryl to have sex in her dead mother’s bed. She was forced to endure sex with her father twice every day, and if she put up any sort of a fight she was beaten into submission.
AN END TO HER SUFFERING
