Isabel Mercedes Celis, who disappeared five years ago next month, has been found deceased in the remote Arizona desert. Somehow I missed this earlier today when I was checking out the latest MP news. Someone just messaged me about it now.
A few articles:
For some reason a lot of people want to know about Russell Randall Thompson all of a sudden. They keep contacting me through various mediums to ask about him because they can’t find him listed anywhere else. I’ve heard about him, like, three or four times in the past week.
Well, he’s on CDOJ, and I don’t know anything more about him than what’s in the casefile. CDOJ, unfortunately, is PACKED with cases that aren’t available anywhere else.
This week’s Flashback Friday case is Frank Lamont Fox, who disappeared after a New Year’s party in Manchester, New York in 1983. He was walking home and never made it. It’s a “few details are available” case, but “drunk guy walking home late at night in the middle of winter” makes me wonder if he wandered off into the woods or fell into a river or something and froze to death or drowned.
(Okay, I don’t know 100% that he was drunk, but it seems likely.)
Kristina Sandoval disappeared from Greeley, Colorado on October 19, 1995. Her husband, John Sandoval, was later convicted of murder, but his conviction got overturned on appeal (something I hadn’t known).
Well, on the eve of his second trial, John took a plea deal and lead the police to her remains. I must say his method of disposal was very clever. Per the article:
The remains of Kristina “Tina” Tournai Sandoval have been exhumed from where he buried her beneath the concrete vault in a grave in Sunset Memorial Park where a World War II veteran was later interred.
I’ve actually said that if I had a choice, that’s how I would dispose of a body.
John is going to have to serve 25 years in prison, and he’s 52 now, so he’ll be an old man when he gets out, if he lives that long. Prison health care being what it is.
I’m just glad Kristina’s family has her back and at least the bastard admitted to what he did, at last. I’ll remove her casefile later.
Last night I read a book called Shamed: The Honour Killing That Shocked Britain – by the Sister Who Fought for Justice, by Sarbjit Athwal, describing the “honor killing” of her sister-in-law, Surjit, and the subsequent missing persons investigation and eventual prosecution of two of the people involved: Surjit and Sarbit’s mother-in-law, Bachan Kaur Athwal, and Surjit’s husband, Sukhdave Singh Athwal.
What it amounted to, basically, is that the Athwal family were very conservative Sikhs living in Britain, and Bachan Kaur had a high reputation in the community as a very devout woman. In fact, within the family she was an absolute tyrant and her sons were terrified of her, to say nothing of her daughters-in-law. When Surjit wanted a divorce from her abusive husband, Bachan Kaur decided she couldn’t have her daughter-in-law shaming the family like that.
So she convinced Surjit to go on a trip to India with her to attend a family wedding. When they were in India, some goons Bachan Kaur had hired drugged Surjit, kidnapped her, strangled her, removed her gold jewelry and dumped her body in the river. It was never found — at least as far as anyone knows. That particular river runs into Pakistan, which doesn’t have the greatest relationship with India, and corpses dumped in from India tend to wash up in Pakistan and never get identified.
Sarbjit Athwal had been at the family meeting where Bachan Kaur announced what she was going to do, and she called the police with an anonymous tip hoping they would stop Surjit leaving for India, or rescue her once she arrived, but the police did…nothing. After Surjit “disappeared”, Sarbjit wrote the police an anonymous letter describing exactly what had happened, in great detail, and the police did…nothing. Then she confided in her sister, who went to the police and gave a statement, and they did…nothing. And so on.
Sarbjit was too afraid to actually go to the police openly, because the Athwals made it clear they would kill her too. Something like a decade passed before the case broke open, and Sarbjit started cooperating with the cops. They went to her house and arrested everyone, including her (in order to trick the Athwals into thinking it wasn’t her who spilled the beans), but instead of taking her to the station they took her to her parents’ house. She was in witness protection for ages before the trial, staying in grimy hostels with her baby whom she was nursing.
I wouldn’t say justice has been entirely achieved in this case. The identities of the people who actually killed Surjit in India are known, but they have never been prosecuted and for legal reasons they weren’t even named in the book. (Media reports I found said one of them was Bachan Kaur’s brother.) Sarbjit’s husband, Hardave, was at that original family meeting and passively let the whole conspiracy unfold, repeatedly lied to the police, and threatened Sarbjit when he found out she was going to testify, but he wasn’t prosecuted either.
Surjit’s daughter, Pawanpreet “Pav” Athwal, had been told her mother abandoned her. She was a teenager when she found out the truth. Pav has been active in Britain speaking out against honor killings and set up a hotline for women who are afraid of being the victim of an honor killing or being forced into marriage.
I would recommend the book if you’re interested in this kind of thing. I’m glad the US isn’t the only country that prosecutes no-body homicides.
And of course it’s always worth saying there is no honor in murder.
The Charley Project Blog 