MONDAY, MARCH 31 This week of busted cults, celebrity cabbies, and hideously incriminating memos kicks off with an update on last week's Monday item, wherein a Craigslist ad announcing the abandonment of a house in Jacksonville, Oregon, and inviting interested parties to plunder the remains was revealed to be a hoax. The apparent target: Robert Salisbury, who returned home to find a few dozen strangers rummaging around his house and fighting for what they found; by the time cops arrived, several trucks packed with Salisbury's plundered stuff had fled the scene. Today brings details on the hoax's source, courtesy of Jackson County Sheriff's deputies, who identified the authors of the errant ad as 28-year-old Amber Herbert and 29-year-old Brandon Herbert, a married Medford couple who'd allegedly stolen goods from Salisbury and hoped to obfuscate the loss by encouraging the whole town to come steal. As the Associated Press reports, police zeroed in on the Herberts after the couple allegedly sold a pair of saddles over the internet that they'd allegedly swiped from Salisbury's garage. Soon after the sale came the fake ad, which opened Salisbury's home to public plunder and significantly complicated the crime scene. But the mighty Jackson County Sheriff's department would not be foiled, tracking down the Herberts via computer files and arresting them on charges of burglary, theft, and "computer crime." As for Salisbury: Some of his stuff has been returned, but the majority of the plundered goods remain at large.

TUESDAY, APRIL 1 The week continues with April Fools' Day, commemorated by 1,001 kooky news items—flying penguins spotted over Amazon! French president forcibly stretched to increase height!—and one horrifying sucker punch of a Justice Department memo. Details come from the Associated Press, which identifies the just-released document as a March 14, 2003, memo written by John Yoo, then–deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel. The crux of the long-suppressed memo: the legal justification of harsh interrogation tactics against al Qaeda and Taliban detainees overseas. "Customary international law is not federal law," wrote Yoo. "The president is free to override it at his discretion." The 81-page memo also devotes a wealth of ink to debating whether interrogators can be held responsible for torture if "torture is not the intent of questioning," a stupidly crude not-quite-a-trick that outlaws torture for torture's sake (dang!) while permitting torture for any other reason the president can think of. The memo was officially rescinded nine months after it reached the Pentagon, and the ACLU has been lobbying for its release ever since. As the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer said, "The memo was meant to allow torture, and that's exactly what it did."

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2 Today brings some closure to the murder case that has entranced Northwest crime buffs for nearly a decade, thanks to its intoxicating mix of sexy ladies, foiled greed, and specious "Hollywood connections." At the center of the saga: Mechele Linehan, the 35-year-old "stripper turned soccer mom™" convicted last October of first-degree murder in the 1996 shooting death of her fiancé, Kent Leppink. A timeline of Linehan's troubles comes from the Associated Press, beginning in 1996, when Linehan—known then as Mechele Hughes—was working in an Alaskan strip club, where she met 36-year-old fisherman Kent Leppink, to whom she'd soon become engaged.

Around this time, Linehan developed an unhealthy obsession with The Last Seduction, the 1994 neo-noir movie in which a smoldering Linda Fiorentino gets her lover to off her husband; when Leppink's fatally shot body was found in Hope, Alaska, prosecutors focused on Linehan and her boyfriend, John Carlin III. Alaskan prosecutors believed Linehan commissioned Carlin to kill her fiancé, with hopes of claiming Leppink's $1 million life insurance policy. Unfortunately for Linehan, the suspicious Leppink changed the beneficiary to his parents days before he was murdered. Unfortunately for prosecutors, police lacked sufficient evidence to make arrests, and Linehan and Carlin were left to go about their lives. Linehan dumped Carlin, ditched stripping, moved to California, married a doctor, earned a degree in psychology, started a family, and moved to Olympia—which is where Alaska State Troopers found her in 2005, after a new interview with Carlin's son (who in 1996 was underage and forbidden by his father to testify) gave investigators enough damning eyewitness testimony to jump-start the case. Last April, Carlin was convicted of murdering Leppink. Last October, Linehan was convicted of planning the murder, and today she was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

THURSDAY, APRIL 3 Readers will recall the saga of Sukhvir Singh, the Seattle cab driver and observant Sikh who was beaten and subjected to racial slurs last September. Last month, Singh's attacker—21-year-old Luis Vazquez—pleaded guilty to the hate-crime attack, for which he faces sentencing on April 18. For today, we have an e-mail from Hot Tipper Lauren, who writes: "Last evening I caught a cab on Capitol Hill and started chatting with my driver. When I asked if he was just starting, he sighed with relief and said, 'I'm almost done.' I asked if cabbies met more interesting people in the evening or the daytime, and he offered that most people are nice, but in the wee hours you can get some real duds, like the one who beat him a few months ago. That's when I realized my driver was none other than Sukhvir Singh! 'Oh my god, it's YOU! It's HORRIBLE what happened to you! I read all about it, and I'm so sorry....' He was so sweet and humble, saying that if I felt that way I could show up to the King County Superior Court on April 18, 3:30 p.m., and show my support for him. I know I'll be in attendance. I hope you will print the date and time for other sympathizers in Seattle so they can do the same." Lauren's wish is our command.

FRIDAY, APRIL 4 The week continues in Eldorado, Texas, where allegations of child abuse drew police to a secretive 1,700-acre retreat owned by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the reactionary wackos who ditched the regular Church of Latter-day Saints when it ditched the practice of polygamy. Details come from the Associated Press: After receiving a call alleging the physical abuse of a 16-year-old girl at the compound, child-welfare officials obtained a search warrant, with hopes of finding proof of a marriage between the teen and a 50-year-old man identified as Dale Barlow. (As the AP reports, in Texas it is illegal for anyone younger than 16 to get married, even with the approval of her parents; court documents show that the girl had a baby eight months ago.) And while authorities will fail to locate either the allegation-making girl or her alleged old husband during the next three days, by Monday police will have removed 533 women and children from the compound. Stay tuned.

SATURDAY, APRIL 5 Nothing happened today.

SUNDAY, APRIL 6 Ditto. recommended

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