Word: murderings
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Which makes the sheriff more inclined to believe that Gonzalez - who is charged with shooting Byrd "Bud" Billings and his wife Melanie in their spacious home as he and six others allegedly robbed it the night of July 9 - was hired to commit the murder by resentful local business rivals. In police documents released this week, Gonzalez says one used-car dealer, Henry "Cab" Tice, told him that he and other dealers wanted the 66-year-old Billings "whacked" and asked him to do the job. (Gonzalez claims he refused - although he boasted to police, without offering details, that...
...other males - including Gonzalez's father, an Air Force sergeant and a 16-year-old - have also been charged with capital murder as well as home invasion and, like Gonzalez, have pleaded not guilty. (The teen has been charged as an adult but will not face the death penalty.) An eighth defendant, a woman charged as an accessory to the murder for allegedly providing a van used in the crime, has also pleaded not guilty. But investigators say Gonzalez's accomplices have fingered him as the sole gunman - and add that while they'd been lured by his promise...
...doesn't buy into the idea "that Bud Billings brought this on himself." He points to the fact that Bud and Melanie "opened their home and fortunes" to their adopted brood as proof of their charitable side. But even that admirable domestic picture has come under scrutiny in the murder's wake: Billings, who was arrested in 1989 for adoption fraud, tried earlier this decade to copyright his adopted children's names in a bizarre scheme to extract money from Florida's Department of Children & Family Services. He had also recently thrown two of his teen-aged children...
...conspiracy, we'll drop it immediately. But as long as there are believable threads there, I have to pursue them. You can't have that kind of collective element operating in your community if it's true." Many Pensacola residents - including journalist Rick Outzen, who first broke the murder-for-hire story on his blog last month - now agree with him. Meanwhile, another friend whom Gonzalez tried unsuccessfully to recruit for the July 9 robbery told police the alleged killer "always acts like he's a thug, you know, a mafia wannabe." But unfortunately, there may be a tragic element...
...Megrahi was freed after serving only eight years of a life sentence for 270 counts of murder. U.S. officials had pleaded with Britain and Scottish officials in recent weeks to block his release, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Thursday that she was bitterly disappointed that he had been freed. There was also strong criticism from family members of some of the victims; 259 passengers were killed when a bomb exploded mid-air aboard the doomed aircraft over Lockerbie, Scotland, and 11 others who were on the ground died from falling debris. (Read: "Re-Opening the Lockerbie Tragedy...