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. 
Send Hot Tips to lastdays@thestranger.com.
