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Former Waldron, Arkansas Mayor, Troy Anderson, has been missing since June 21st

Gabriel Falcon
AC360° Writer

There is the bleach on the carpet, the unanswered phone calls, and the young married couple taken into custody. Together, they offer haunting clues that something sinister may have happened to a former small town mayor in Arkansas.
 
“He’s a very good man, a good friend, and a good person,” Annette Rotta said of Troy Anderson. “I just hope they find him.”
 
Anderson vanished on June 21st. A missing persons report was filed with the police six days later. Friends, family, and the authorities fear for the 75-year-old’s safety.

“We feel that he is endangered,” Sgt. Levi Risley of the Fort Smith Police told CNN. “There are suspicious circumstances.”

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Barbara Starr
CNN Pentagon Correspondent

While the military has instituted dozens of programs to help troubled soldiers with post traumatic stress, brain injuries, and other problems, a number of troops at Fort Hood have privately told the nation’s top military officer they feel they are treated poorly because they are wounded, ill or injured.

In an April 19 confidential memo to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, outlined a number of problems he observed during a trip to several military locations in Texas days before. CNN obtained the memo from a military source, and both the Army and Mullen staffers confirmed its authenticity.

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Amy DuPont and Zach Brown were once on-air colleagues at WXOW in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

Gabriel Falcon
AC360° Writer

They were friendly co-hosts on camera. But behind the scenes, something was wrong. “I was scared,” said Amy DuPont, the anchor for WXOW/ABC 19 in La Crosse, Wisconsin. “You think you know someone and obviously I didn’t.”

DuPont is referring to Zach Brown, her former on-air partner and colleague at WXOW. Brown, who was also a meteorologist, bantered with DuPont for several years on the station’s morning newscast.

“I thought we had a good working relationship,” DuPont told CNN. But in November, 2007, DuPont began receiving strange emails from someone who used the screen name “Mario.”

Captain Kurt Papenfuss of the La Crosse County’s Sheriff’s Department described the messages were “catty” and contained “weird stuff.” In an interview, he also said some of the comments were about the on-air relationship between DuPont and Brown. “The gist of it was,” Captain Papenfuss said, “you need to be nicer to Zach, you’re mean on air, quit talking about your baby.”

The first email was sent in late 2007. And they didn’t stop until this June. In all, the authorities said 21 inappropriate emails were sent to DuPont. And she began to suspect they may be coming from her co-host. “In the back of my mind I wondered,” she said.

DuPont asked the police to investigate. It didn’t take long to get some answers. Armed with a subpoena, authorities were able to trace back the emails to a computer in Brown’s home.

But was he the one sending the emails? “We brought him into the station,” Captain Papenfuss said, “and he wouldn’t really respond to anything.

The police did say Brown told his employer he was aware the emails were coming from his residence, but insisted his roommate was sending them, not him.

Brown could not be reached for comment. In a brief phone call, Sean Dwyer, the News Director for WXOW told CNN, “all I can say is, he is no longer an employee at News 19.”

This week DuPont was granted a temporary restraining order against Brown. She’s also hoping to put this story behind her. “I’m ready for something else in the news to take the attention of me,” she said.

Ismael Estrada
AC360° Producer

I was sitting at home in Chicago when I saw the video for the first time. An off-duty officer was caught on surveillance tape beating a female bartender in February of 2007. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing! The guy was huge. Anthony Abbate was behind the bar slamming the woman around, throwing her to the ground and punching her over and over in the head. I called a couple friends who are cops here in Chicago to ask if they knew this guy. One friend told me, “He deserves every day he gets behind bars! This gives us such a bad name.”

I knew the attorney, Terry Ekl, who had the tape. I gave him a call and he met me at our Chicago bureau in the morning with his client, the bartender who was beaten, Karolina Obyrcka. I remember thinking that Obyrcka was small, but I was also impressed with the fact that she was able to walk away from the beating she took.

Obyrcka told us her story which you were able to see on AC360° that night and gave us a copy of the surveillance tape. During the interview she says she refused to serve Abbate any more drinks when he became enraged. She says he went behind the bar and started to beat her. Abbate admitted during the trial that he was drunk during the incident, but also says the 5’ 3” bartender was the aggressor in the violent scuffle.

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Gabriel Falcon
AC360° Writer

Before Adam Walsh, Etan Patz and Madeleine McCann. Before the first Amber Alert. Before a young face stared back from the side of a milk carton, there was Danny.

Danny Barter vanished in 1959. He was on a family camping trip to Alabama’s Perdido Bay. He was playing with his dad one minute, gone the next. “Just like that,” recalled his brother, Mike Barter. Danny was 4 years-old.

Over this past weekend, his loved ones returned to the campsite and to the scene of the presumed stranger abduction. They came to remember Danny, and to rededicate a half-century mission to find him.

Even with the passage of time, their faith has not wavered. “We’ve never doubted that he’s not out there, “said Mike Barter. “Until they prove otherwise, we hope one day we will be reunited.”

Their hope has been bolstered by investigators with the FBI and the Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office, which re-opened the case last year after hearing of a conversation pertaining to the case. “A lead was sparked when someone was sitting in a public area talking about what happened,” FBI Spokeswoman Joyce Riggs wrote in an email message to the members of the media.

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Plain Error
Innocence Project of Florida

There has been a flurry of activity recently surrounding the case of William Dillon.

Dillon was exonerated by DNA testing in November of 2008 and released from prison the next month. As we have mentioned a handful of times earlier, his case involved the testimony of a one John Preston who, with his dog Harass II, made the rounds providing fraudulent testimony to convict whomever the police wanted him to. Preston has been exposed as a charlatan and a fraud, and it was believed he was “regularly retained to confirm the state’s preconceived notions about cases.”

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Tyler Weinman, 18, is under house arrest, accused of killing 19 pet cats in Miami, Florida.

Alyssa Caplan
AC360° Staffer

Who or what is behind a spree that has left 18 pet cats gruesomely mutilated and seemingly showcased for their devastated owners? Miami-Dade police have been trying to answer this question and unravel the mystery that has gripped, and at times seemed to terrorize, the Miami towns of Cutler & Palmetto Bay over the last month where police and pet owners began discovering disfigured cats May 13th. Was a serial killer on the loose? Was this some sort of sick prank? The work of a wild animal? Gang initiation or a cult? Who or what might be the next victim?

On Sunday, police announced they had made an arrest. Palmetto High school senior Tyler Hayes Weinman was taken in to custody and charged with 19 counts of Animal cruelty, 4 counts of Burglary, and 19 counts of Improper Disposal of a Dead Animal. Weinman could face a maximum of 158 years in state prison if convicted on all counts, said Terry Shavez, spokeswoman for the state attorney’s office. Find more background on the arrest and Weinman, here.

A judge ordered Weinman released today during a brief hearing after deemed ”competent” following psychological testing. Weinman will return home fitted with an electronic monitoring device until he is summoned to appear for his next hearing July 6.

Weinman’s family and some friends have rallied to his support that they absolutely have the wrong guy. His attorney, David Macey, alleges his client is innocent. “It’s trial by ambush,” Macey said. “It’s anything goes so that they can have a body, a warm body, to solve these cat killings. My heart and my sympathy goes out to the owners of these pets, but unfortunately, it won’t provide them any relief that Tyler’s in custody. Tyler is innocent.”

Left puzzled over this bizarre crime, we reached out to Fmr. FBI profiler Candice DeLong to help make sense of what type of person might be motivated to go on a cat killing spree, and why?

Q & A with Candice DeLong
Host of the Discovery Channel Series Deadly Woman, former FBI Profiler and Psychiatric Nurse

Caplan: Candice, when you first heard about these pet cats showing up on their owners lawns mutilated, what went through your mind? Keep reading

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Authorities say Thomas Parkin (L) has impersonated his mother since her death in September 2003.

The Kings County District Attorney says Thomas Parkin, 49, now faces charges of larceny, conspiracy, forgery and more.

Mhilton Rimolo, a friend of Parkin's, is charged in connection with the deception and fraud.

Gabriel Falcon
AC360° Writer

The elderly woman in oversized sunglasses hunches over a desk at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Brooklyn, New York. Dressed in red and holding a pen, she fills out the required information to renew her license. A surveillance camera takes a snapshot of the seemingly routine matter.

It all appears normal.

Except for one glaring fact: the woman is a man.

And, according to investigators, that man is posing as his own dead mother in what Kings County District Attorney Charles J. Hynes called “a multi-year campaign of fraud that was unparalleled in its scope and brazenness.”

Brazen and bizarre.

Authorities say Thomas Parkin impersonated his mother since her death in September, 2003. They believe a friend of Parkin’s, Mhilton Rimolo, was his partner in crime in a long-running scam of deception and fraud.

Parkin, 49, and 47-year-old Rimolo are charged with multiple counts of Grand Larceny, Conspiracy, Forgery, Perjury and Criminal Impersonation.

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The Pima County Sheriff's Department in Arizona says Shawna Forde, MAD's executive director, killed a father and his daughter.

MAD's Operations Director, Jason Eugene Bush, is also facing charges.

Albert Robert Gaxiola was also allegedly involved in the killings.

Gabriel Falcon
AC360° Writer

Shawna Forde considers herself a true patriot, a frontline freedom fighter who claims to protect the country by guarding against illegal immigrants.

Forde is the Executive Director of the Minuteman American Defense. According to the Washington State organization’s mission statement, the Minuteman American Defense (MAD) helps secure America’s borders “against unlawful and unauthorized entry by all individuals.

Serving as MAD’s Operations Director is Jason Eugene Bush. Bush, who goes by the name “Gunny,” paints a stark picture of the stakes at play. On the group’s web site, he writes in capital letters “THIS IS MY COUNTRY. THIS IS YOUR COUNTRY. DEFEND IT OR LOSE IT. PERIOD.”

To their followers, Forde and Bush are leaders and crusaders. But to the police, they are killers, extremely violent predators who took the lives of a father and his young child.

The Pima County Sheriff’s Department in Arizona says Forde, Bush and an associate of Forde’s, Albert Robert Gaxiola, killed 29-year-old Raul Flores and his 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia Flores on May 30th.

Authorities believe the three suspects used deception to enter the Flores home in the town of Arivaca. Deputy Dawn M. Barkman, the Public Information Officer for the Pima County Sheriff’s Department says they “apparently forced their way into the house posing as law enforcement.”

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Gary Tuchman | BIO
AC360 Correspondent

Over the last few weeks, I’ve interviewed a number of people who were not so happy to see me. I’ve also TRIED to interview some people who weren’t so happy to see me. These are folks the public relies on — police officers and district attorneys — but they’ve been accused of ethical and maybe criminal violations.

We’ve been reporting on the misuse of laws that allow police to take money and valuables from drivers in certain circumstances when they are suspected of committing serious crimes.

The “asset forfeiture” law is sound. The idea is to take “ill gotten gains” away from crooks, and to give the money to police departments and DA’s offices for the public good.

But we’ve gotten emails and calls from viewers all over the country telling us stories of overzealous police who’ve shaken down innocent drivers.

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