Word: murdered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...song with less esoteric and more social overtones is "Dance On," a scathing look at gang violence, and murder in Detroit and how it was influenced by war on television. At the end the question "What color is your money today?" is especially potent...
Before he was charged with second-degree murder in the 1986 death of Kathleen Holland, 17, Joseph Porto calmly confessed on videotape that he had strangled his girlfriend till "my hands got tired," then used his high school graduation tassel to finish the job. Porto, now 19, gave a similar account to a prosecution psychiatrist, explaining that he had exploded in jealous anger when Holland told him she wanted to date other boys...
...when Porto took the witness stand at his trial on Long Island last month, he made a stunning recantation. He had invented the murder story, he tearfully claimed, because he was ashamed to tell the truth: Holland had begged him to wrap a rope around her neck to produce a state of near suffocation, called sexual asphyxia, that is said to heighten erotic pleasure. In his excitement, he said, he pulled too hard. Nassau County Prosecutor Kenneth Littman derided the new story as the "oops defense." But the jury found Porto guilty on only the lesser charge of criminally negligent...
...public a 6,000- signature petition demanding that Porto get the maximum penalty. "Rough sex?" scoffs her father Denis, a retired policeman. "That phrase wasn't even part of my daughter's vocabulary." It had, however, become part of the public's vocabulary earlier this year during the "preppie murder" trial of Robert Chambers, who claimed to have killed Jennifer Levin accidentally during an unbridled sexual episode in Manhattan's Central Park. Last week Levin's father Steven held a press conference to protest such defense tactics. "It's become open season on women," he said. Porto Prosecutor Littman agrees...
...asked-for-it defense doesn't work anymore," says Harvard University Law Professor Alan Dershowitz. "So now we're hearing she demanded it." The first use of that argument may have been in the trial last year in St. Louis County, Mo., of Dennis Bulloch, who faced murder charges in the death of his wife. Julia Bulloch's body, bound to a chair with adhesive tape, had been found in the burned remains of the couple's garage, which Bulloch admitted torching. He claimed that his wife had choked to death accidentally during an episode of sexual bondage. Though...