Suder Law

Netflix is Now Helping Cops Solve Cold Cases

News Cold Case, Legal News, Netflix, Suder Law

Television has, once again, come to the aid of law enforcement.

“The Keepers,” a Netflix documentary series, premiered on May 19. And in the weeks since, prosecutors and detectives investigating the unsolved 1969 murder of Sister Cathy Cesnik have received a trove of new information that could help lead to its long-awaited conclusion.

The seven-episode series centers around the killing of Cesnik, a 26-year-old nun and school teacher in Baltimore, and suggests the crime may be connected to the abuse of teen girls by priests in the city. Sister Cathy, some say, planned to expose the crimes of the Rev. A. Joseph Maskell and the Rev. Neil Magnus.

Nearly 48 years later, the show has encouraged previously silent victims and informants to talk.

“Every day there are new people [coming forward] with information,” said Joanne Suder, a lawyer who represents many of the participants in the documentary. Suder added that her office has already received “dozens” of calls.

“What’s interesting is it’s not just victims of Maskell – it’s victims of Magnus, it’s victims of many of the priests, it’s victims of the police, it’s victims of teachers,” she said.

They started coming forward about five days after the show became available on Netflix. For those who haven’t seen it yet, it is worth the watch. However, keep in mind that in the case of watching it online, a high-speed Internet connection would likely be required. To get that, services of a reputed Internet provider can be availed by looking for internet providers los angeles or similar locations on the Web. Know that without an Internet connection with good speed, one may not be able to watch the series peacefully. Also, remember that the series could be blocked in different countries. If that is the case, then you may want to check out the best vpn for netflix in your area so you are able to change your location and get set to watch a truly intriguing and saddening show.

“I have to say [‘The Keepers’] has been a very good thing.””Many thought secretly that they were the only victims,” she said. “They thought something was wrong with them. They [thought they] must have been some sort of terrible sinner to deserve that kind of punishment and treatment.

It’s not the first time true-crime TV has been a boon to investigations. The day of the final episode of HBO’s 2015 documentary series “The Jinx,” wherein alleged serial killer Robert Durst gave a possible confession to three murders, the show’s subject was arrested on a murder warrant for the death of his confidante, Susan Berman.

In August 2016, months after Netflix debuted “Making a Murderer” – a show about possible systemic wrongdoing in the case of convicted killer Steven Avery – his nephew Brendan Dassey, who was convicted as an accessory in the murder of Teresa Halbach, had his conviction overturned. Two petitions that urged President Barack Obama to pardon the pair garnered more than 500,000 signatures.

One of Avery’s original lawyers, Dean Strang, told the Wall Street Journal in January 2016 that responses to the documentary blew up his inbox and answering machine with “emails, tips [and] suggestions” related to the case.

Similarly, Ryan White, the filmmaker responsible for “The Keepers,” said his team has seen a deluge of messages in “every . . . social-media and email inbox that I have, coming in at every direction.”

A Facebook group called “The Keepers Official Group – Justice for Catherine Cesnik and Joyce Malecki” already has added more than 70,000 members since the show debuted. (Malecki was also murdered around the same time, and there is speculation the crimes could be connected.) Prior to the documentary’s release, the group numbered just under 1,000.

Among the most promising reverberations have been the police’s renewed resources toward the Cesnik case, White said.

“What I’ve especially seen since the release of ‘The Keepers’ is an incredible amount of movement on the murder investigation side.”

“[The police] are really re-engaging with this case again. It was quite cold for many decades. They’ll say they were working on it [all along], but I think the lack of progress is kind of indicative that this wasn’t a case that even they thought they could still solve.”

White thinks his work has given new hope that the truth will come out.

“Now that the documentary has unearthed so much information, and so many more people feel comfortable speaking up right now, I do believe the murder can be solved.”

Grand Jury Action Needed in Unsolved Murders, Sexual Abuse of Keough Students and its Cover-up

News Legal News, Sex Abuse, Suder Law

By: Bill Hughes

To the dead we owe only the Truth.” — Voltaire

Notice to the Archdiocese of Baltimore (AOB): Three high ranking Penn State College officials were sentenced to jail, on June 2, 2017, for not reporting the child abuse allegations against scumbag Jerry Sandusky. This is a final warning to those who enable child predators to perpetrate their crimes. No more cover-ups! Now, to that end, let’s re-open a window to the past:

Joyce Malecki, age 20, was working in an office of a liquor distributor. On November 11, 1969. She went shopping in the Glen Burnie area and was abducted. Her body was found two days later in a creek located on the U.S. Army’s Fort Meade military base.

That salient fact makes her murder a Federal case! It gives jurisdiction to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Baltimore. The FBI is the investigatory arm of that office.

Unfortunately, little has been done by the Feds in this matter. In the case of Malecki, her hands were tied behind her back, her throat was slashed and she was strangled. Her murder remains unsolved.

Malecki was a resident of Landsdowne, in Baltimore County. She attended St. Clement Roman Catholic Church, the same church where the degenerate Father Joseph Maskell, now deceased, was an assistant pastor (1966-68.) The record shows that Malecki attended a religious retreat during that period with Maskell in charge of the (gasp) “spiritual” program.

The AOB knew Maskell had sexually abused an altar boy at St. Clement. In the late 60s, the boy’s mother had reported it directly to them. Its shameful reaction: Move the predator to Archbishop Keough High School, where he would continue his unholy reign of terror over the innocents.

Enter Sister Cathy Cesnik, age 26. She was an English teacher at Keough during a time period when Maskell was the so-called “guidance counselor” and chaplain at the school.

The Netflix docu-series, “The Keepers,” revealed that she was prepared “to blow the whistle” on Maskell and his crime accomplice, Fr. Neil Magnus (also deceased). Close to thirty students came forward since then declaring that both Maskell and Magnus, and parties unknown, repeatedly raped, sodomized and sexually abused them at the school and at other sites.

How large was this evil ring of sick pedophiles and sexual predators? Some believe that besides members of the Roman Catholic clergy, cops, politicians, and a shadowy character, “Brother Bob,” were also involved.

On WBAL-TV, on the night of June 2, 2017, popular attorney and civil litigator, Joanne Suder, was interviewed. She said, in talking about “The Keepers” series, that there may have been “over 100 victims” of this sexual predator clique at Keough during the period of time in question.

A list of crimes associated with the “sexual exploitation of children” is catalogued in the federal code. Sister Cathy was a potential witness against Fathers Maskell and Magnus. If the wrongdoers in her murder used a phone, or U.S. mail, for example, to plot her killing, the Feds may have justification to take over her case, too.

In an article dated June, 2015, investigative reporter Tom Nugent, “Inside Baltimore,” suggested a possible “link” between the Keough rapists, particularly Fr. Maskell, and the notorious John Merzbacker. He’s doing hard time in a state slammer for convictions on four rape charges at a Catholic Middle School in Locust Point.

If Merzbacker does know more than he’s been saying, that could be helpful in solving some of these cases, maybe the authorities can figure out a way to get him — legally of course — to talk. Just a suggestion.

What about that principal at Merzbacker’s Catholic Middle School — Sister Eileen Weisman? She was an intimate of his. Was she also acquainted with Maskell or Magnus? Was she part of the cover-up? Sister Weisman has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. Like Keough, the School Sisters of Notre Dame operated a school in Locust Point.

There are also unsolved murders, cold cases, of other young victims in the same time period and vicinity as Sister Cathy and Melecki. Are these cases related? In that category are Pamela Lynn Conyers, age 16, in 1970, in Anne Arundel County; and Elizabeth “Gay” Montanye, age 16, whose body was found in South Baltimore, in 1972.

During the inquiry into Maskell’s wrongdoing, back in the early 90s, some of the State’s evidence was destroyed by a suspicious “basement flooding” at the Court House. These were the boxes of files and documents that Maskell had ordered buried in the Holy Cross Cemetery, which were later recovered, via a search warrant, by city detectives.

Supposedly, nude photos of children were found in this cache. Had Maskell sent or received them through the mail? If so, a federal crime may have also been committed by him. The “flooding” ended that line of inquiry.

When I was working in the Court House, in the 60s and 70s, evidence for a trial was kept either in police custody and/or in the office of the assistant D.A. If it had to be stored, it was placed in a file cabinet in the assistant’s office under lock and key!

Question: If the critical evidence was “flooded,” why weren’t any serious efforts made to restore it?

Bottom line: The victims, their families, and the public want answers to their questions, and they want all the above cases solved. The FBI should take the lead and coordinate with the City and Baltimore County police. It should be a team investigative effort for the sake of the public good.

Federal, Baltimore City and Baltimore County Grand Juries need to be empaneled — now — and begin calling witnesses!

Justice can’t wait any longer.

Replace the Veterans Health Administration with Veterans Insurance

News Joanne Suder, Legal News, Suder Law, VA, Veterans

By Joanne Suder

About a year ago, the scandal surrounding the deaths of veterans waiting for care from the Veterans Health Administration finally publicly exposed the VA‘s ineptitude. Since then, Congress conducted inquiries, the FBI commenced investigations, the secretary for Veterans Affairs resigned, and some regional directors were fired. Nearly anyone with any modicum of power in Washington, D.C., vowed to fix the VA, yet, as The Baltimore Sun reported Friday, thousands of former service members still face treatment delays.

The problem is this: The VA is simply too large and too bureaucratic for reforms to have any real effect. It’s time to abolish the VA.

When Congress established veterans hospitals in 1917, the scheme made sense. After World War I, a massive influx of soldiers returned to the United States, and many had suffered injuries necessitating continuing medical care. Furthermore, as health insurance was in its infancy, most people paid for care out of pocket. To compound matters, many people had difficulty accessing medical care, especially in rural areas, and specialized care for individuals with disabilities was virtually nonexistent. Thus, government-operated medical facilities and disability programs made perfect sense – in 1917.

This system kept expanding. World War II brought in another massive influx of new patients into the VA. Congress also gave the VA new responsibilities, including research and military cemetery administration. Each subsequent conflict added yet more veterans eligible for services. Moreover, although the VA was originally intended to treat veterans with service-related disabilities, the system began providing primary care to veterans with no service disability and family members. In short order, the VA became the country’s largest medical services provider. As medical services have advanced over the years, so has the technology used to manage them, with things like ems billing services to help with managing payments and supporting this sector.

Some government publications claim that the VA provides some of the most cost-effective, efficient care of any U.S. provider. Some of that cost effectiveness derives from statutory price controls on prescription drugs, damages caps on lawsuits against the federal government and Congress-dictated funding.

But that cost effectiveness has its own cost. Support staff for the VA earn from $20,000 to $165,000 a year less than their private-sector counterparts. A cardiac surgeon who earns $99,000 to $385,000 a year at the VA could earn $421,000 to $556,000 in the private sector. With such wage disparity, it’s not surprising the VA acknowledges its staffing deficits – it needs 10,000 more support staff and 1,500 more physicians. Moreover, the VA suffers from a shortage of facilities. In recognition of this, a 2014 overhaul of the VA called for opening 27 new clinics.

The most recent VA debacle underscores the system’s complicated, unmanageable structure – one that hinders efficient operation, as well as supervision and accountability. Thus, it’s not surprising that veterans have died due to the VA’s poor care quality.

Numerous attempts have been made to resolve the VA’s quality problems. The VA’s budget is probably not an issue, given that it’s grown threefold, from $49 billion in 2001 to $154 billion in 2014. In the late 1980s, the VA was restructured and elevated to a cabinet-level department to ensure visibility. Indeed, some reform is proposed every few years, but systemic problems persist.

Given decades of failure, it is time to abolish the VA and create a better solution. Fortunately, other solutions have existed and worked reasonably well. Medicare and Medicaid function as insurers, as opposed to direct providers, thus giving beneficiaries access to the same providers who serve many Americans. With the help of such insurers, veterans would be able to have access to a lot of medical services that they might require due to old age or any other reason. Although Medicaid policies might differ from state to state, for instance, Medicaid California (Medi-Cal) would be different from the policies created for, say, Texas. Hence, it would be required for veterans to understand what are the plans they fall under and apply for the policy accordingly.

The government should give eligible veterans insurance-like benefits, enabling veterans to choose their providers and have the government pay. Veterans would not face long appointment wait times or be relegated to substandard care. Further, veterans could seek convenient services rather than driving long distances. In many respects, this system would be familiar to many veterans – the GI Bill’s education benefits allow veterans to choose the school, and the government pays tuition.

Moreover, an insurance scheme recently was created to address the VA’s lack of facilities and distances veterans must travel. In 2014, the Choice Card program was launched, permitting veterans who live more than 40 miles from a VA clinic to use private medical care. It’s time for such a program to be the standard, not an exception.

Implementing such a model would be radical and enormously challenging. However, history has shown that VA reforms are ineffective. Replacing the VA with a single-payer model, proven effective with Medicare and Medicaid, is in our veterans’ best interest.

Joanne Suder is chief attorney at the Suder Law Firm, PA, which concentrates in medical malpractice, personal injury and plaintiff’s sexual abuse cases; her email is joanne@suderlaw.com.

Lawsuits increase pressure on polygamist sect

News Legal News, Polygamy, Suder Law

PATTY HENETZ – The Associated Press

Dr. Dan Fischer, a former polygamist who turned a dental practice into a multimillion dollar company that develops and sells advanced dental equipment and materials worldwide, and Joanne Suder, a crusading attorney from Baltimore, are working together on lawsuits against Jeffs and the church alleging child sexual abuse, abandonment and financial fraud.

Suder, well known for taking on decades-old, multimillion-dollar sexual abuse lawsuits as well as medical malpractice and financial fraud cases, has hinted more legal action is to come that would focus on the financial trust that controls the FLDS church’s estimated $100 million in assets.

Fischer, president of Ultradent of South Jordan, Utah, employs more than 600 people and has spent millions on charitable dental work through his nonprofit organization Smiles for Diversity and a pledge to the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry. Besides continuing his company’s quest for the cure for tooth decay, he now has turned his philanthropy toward hundreds of boys and young men aged 13 to 21 who’ve been forced out of the twin border cities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz.

Fischer has housed some of these young men in apartments built in remodeled Ultradent buildings and helped many of them financially. He introduced Suder to some of the FLDS members she now represents, as well as others helping her gather evidence for her cases.

Suder in turn came up with the idea of a mentoring program for the boys and young men, which they dubbed Get-a-Dad. Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff has pledged to be a mentor, as has best-selling author Jon Krakauer, whose 2003 book “Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith” dealt with the FLDS community.

Fischer believes exposure as a former polygamist could affect Ultradent’s $75 million in annual sales. But his history with the FLDS and animosity toward Jeffs has trumped his financial fears.

“I’ve kept low-key because of my business,” Fischer told The Associated Press in an interview. “I finally felt that to be responsible, I had to come out more.”

But when he tells associates of his history, “they think I’m from outer space, or maybe I’m crazy,” he said. “And some are terribly shocked.”

No wonder.

He grew up in a Salt Lake County FLDS family, the oldest of 36 siblings.

FLDS members consider themselves fundamentalist practitioners because they continue to practice polygamy as they believe Joseph Smith, founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commanded.

The mainline LDS church disavowed polygamy in 1890 and excommunicates members who practice or preach it.

An estimated 30,000 polygamists live in Utah and parts of the southwest, Mexico and Canada. Hildale-Colorado City’s estimated 10,000 members make it the largest polygamist group in the West.

The community has largely run itself without outside intervention since a raid in 1953 that created a public relations disaster for the Arizona governor who ordered it. But during the past three years, investigations have revealed disturbing allegations of lawlessness that include church leadership and the twin towns’ police force, whose members often take orders from Jeffs and may be improperly using their authority.

“The more victims come out, the more victims I hear (say) it’s a theocracy, and there is no protection (under) the law,” Shurtleff said.

Living in the FLDS

FLDS teachings require members from early childhood to clothe themselves from wrists to ankles, even during summer’s hottest days. FLDS girls wear long pioneer-style dresses, and style their long hair into elaborate braids. Fischer attended Murray High, where none of the FLDS kids — called “pligs” — took gym class or went to school dances.

Despite being an oddball, Fischer was an academic standout in industrial arts. He graduated in 1967, and majored in premedical studies for dentistry at the University of Utah. In 1968, at age 19, he was a dental student at Loma Linda University in Loma Linda, Calif., when he reluctantly married his first wife. By then, his parents had moved to Colorado City. He married his second wife — his first wife’s sister — in 1973, again against his will.

At the time, Leroy Johnson was the FLDS prophet. Fischer, who considered Johnson a benevolent leader, said it was the prophet himself who ordered the second marriage.

All through his remaining time at dental school, Fischer feared someone would discover his plural marriage and he wouldn’t graduate.

In 1981, Fischer married again. In 1998, after repeated run-ins with Jeffs over what he described as Jeffs’ cruelty and manipulative leadership, Fischer left the church.

He disavowed polygamy, but remains married to his second wife.

That year, Jeffs, whose father and church prophet, Rulon Jeffs, was slowly dying, ordered the Salt Lake County FLDS to move south to Hildale-Colorado City and to end all association with “apostates” — anyone not a member of FLDS in good standing. Rulon Jeffs died in 2002, and Warren Jeffs took over.

Since then, the number of boys and men told to leave has steadily increased.

Legal action against the sect and its leaders

Meanwhile, Suder got involved. She won’t say exactly how, only that she was contacted at least three times by FLDS members, one of them a girl who said she was sexually abused, before she decided to take a case. Fischer’s brother-in-law, Deloy Bateman, an excommunicated member and school teacher who still lives in Colorado City, introduced Suder to Fischer. Bateman also was one of Krakauer’s principal sources for “Under the Banner of Heaven.”

On July 29, former FLDS member Brent Jeffs, 21, sued Jeffs and his brothers Blaine Jeffs and Leslie Jeffs, claiming the three men sodomized him when he was a child while telling him that was how he would become a man.

Two days later, Fischer and his newly named nonprofit organization, Diversity, organized a news conference on the steps of the Utah Capitol to introduce the FLDS “lost boys” to the world. In the past four and a half years, he said, more than 400 teenage boys have been banished or excommunicated — with the full complicity of police, who allegedly have arrested or cited the boys for such infractions as wearing their sleeves rolled up or talking to girls.

“Too many children have been exploited, victimized and discarded,” he said at the time.

On Aug. 27, six banished “lost boys” sued Jeffs and Sam Barlow, a former Colorado City police chief and close associate of Jeffs, using portions of federal racketeering laws to claim conspiracy and a pattern of unlawful activity aimed at ridding the sect of surplus boys and men.

Plaintiffs in the cases allege the banishments have cost them lost wages, lost educational opportunities and lost benefits from the United Effort Plan Trust, a communal organization that holds real and personal property for the Utah and Colorado FLDS members.

Officials now have their eye on the latest UEP purchase: a 1,300-acre compound known as the YFZ ranch, 100 miles north of the Mexican border near the small town of Eldorado, Texas, which FLDS leaders at first tried to pass off as a corporate hunting retreat. YFZ stands for “Yearn For Zion,” from a song Jeffs wrote.

Schleicher County Sheriff David Doran, who has maintained a cautious peace with the new community, two weeks ago tried to get the church people to allow him to meet with Fred Jessop, a former FLDS leader now the subject of a missing-person report. An “elderly-sounding” man called Doran claiming to be Jessop, but Doran says he’s not satisfied with the call.

But neither can he do much to force the issue, or to find out what the church plans for the compound. “We know there are problems that are potential from this community,” he said. “But they legally bought the land and they have constitutional protections.”

It has long been rumored Jeffs plans to take some of his most faithful followers and move to a private compound in Mexico. Hildale-Colorado City residents have told investigators that Jeffs has promised to take the most worthy members of the twin towns to live on the YFZ property.

Understanding the issues

Suder is lead attorney on both cases against Jeffs and the FLDS church. A petite 54-year-old who chain-chews Nicorette gum and drives her private investigators as hard as she pushes herself, Suder talks about her role in the cases only obliquely. “I file my lawsuits on Fridays at four o’clock so the media won’t know,” she said.

But somehow, they always know.

Rodney Parker, a Salt Lake City attorney who has represented the FLDS in legal matters and regularly serves as spokesman for the church and its leaders, has denied all the allegations in the lawsuits, which he says lack merit because the church, not the courts, has the right to make its own membership decisions.

The plaintiffs in the civil cases — and their attorneys, who along with Suder include lawyers in Texas and Salt Lake City — stand to reap huge financial rewards from the lawsuits. But taxpayers also could benefit because Suder and her associates are sharing their information with public law enforcement agencies, including the attorneys general of Utah and Arizona, county prosecutors and sheriffs in the two states plus Texas and Canada.

Members of the FLDS community have received millions of dollars in welfare, state and local taxes and federal Homeland Security funds. It’s called “bleeding the beast,” Shurtleff said.

Authorities are investigating possible fraud as well as the church’s trust, the United Effort Plan.

“We’re slowly getting people to understand what the issues are,” Shurtleff said. “Part of our target is UEP. That’s what is making Warren all his money.”

Next week, the state’s Peace Officer Standards and Training Council will discuss findings of its own investigation of the Hildale police force following review of the findings of an 8-month investigation by Shurtleff’s office.

POST director Maj. Sid Groll said that while the POST investigation isn’t entirely complete, “I would expect the council to make some decisions.”

Possible actions include decertification of officers and recommendations to the Washington County Attorney for further action, Groll said.

Shurtleff said he wants to make people understand the investigations aren’t just about polygamy. “We’re talking about all different kinds of crime here,” he said, including child abuse, abandonment, tax fraud, welfare fraud — all so-called predicate offenses that can lead to prosecution under organized crime statutes, focusing on FLDS leaders.

“It’s frustrating,” Shurtleff said. “I want to get more done, but it’s hard. It has to be done right.”

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page B7.

Krakauer Still Vexed by FLDS

News FLDS, Legal News, Suder Law, Utah

By Patty Henetz

A year ago Jon Krakauer told the more than 800 people crammed into a Utah movie theater for a reading of his book, “Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith,” that he wasn’t pursuing social reform when he wrote about religious extremism.

Since then, he has so deeply immersed himself in the distressed lives of members and former members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that he no longer will write about the polygamous sect that inhabits twin towns on the Utah-Arizona border.

“I’ve been asked to help a lot of people who feel they’ve been victimized by this culture,” Krakauer told the Associated Press on Friday in a rare interview. “I just keep getting drawn deeper and deeper into this.”

By “this,” Krakauer means the religious politics of FLDS and its leader-prophet, Warren Jeffs, who reportedly has banished hundreds of men and boys from Hildale and Colorado City, Ariz., in a struggle for control over the sect, whose estimated 6,000 to 12,000 members make it the largest polygamous group in the West.

Krakauer’s best-selling book on religious extremism focused on the 1984 cold-blooded murders of Brenda Lafferty and her 15-month-old daughter, Erica, in American Fork. He will be in Salt Lake City on Saturday to lend weight to an organization calling itself Diversity, founded by former polygamist Dr. Dan Fischer.

Fischer, the Midvale dentist who invented the tooth-bleaching product Ultradent, and his group have pledged to help some 400 boys ages 13 to 21 who have been banished or excommunicated from the FLDS.

Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, who will appear with Krakauer and Fischer at a Capitol news conference with some of the youngsters they call the “lost boys,” said he met Fischer about a year ago. Shurtleff said Fischer has been providing housing and financial support for the boys, whom Shurtleff called victims.

That’s how Krakauer sees them, too.

“Boys are fined and harassed by the police, who are sworn to uphold the law but serve as minions of Warren Jeffs,” Krakauer said. “Hundreds of these boys over the past four years have been cast out. Most of them end up on the streets of (Las) Vegas or St. George,” where they turn to drugs or prostitution.

While most have been kicked out of the community ostensibly for misbehavior, Krakauer said the real problem is plain: The creed says a man must be a polygamist to achieve godly approval. But when 50 percent of the population is male, the surplus must be jettisoned.

The boys are virtually helpless in the normal world because they know nothing of it except the evil that will befall them should they venture away from Short Creek, the old name for the twin towns, Krakauer said. ” ‘You will be ground into native element’ is one of their phrases. It is drummed into their heads they don’t stand a chance out there,” he said. “These kids are programmed to fail.”

Sect members consider themselves fundamentalists because they continue to practice polygamy as Joseph Smith, founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commanded. The mainline church disavowed polygamy in 1890 and excommunicates members who practice or preach it. But an estimated 30,000 polygamists whose beliefs are rooted in Mormonism live in Utah and other parts of the southwest, Mexico and Canada. Smith’s teachings on polygamy remain in Mormon scripture.

During his years researching the book, Krakauer traveled to polygamist communities in Mexico and Canada. One of his main sources for the book was Deloy Bates, who has been excommunicated from the FLDS but still lives in Short Creek. One of Bates’ sisters is married to Fischer, who left the FLDS about a dozen years ago, Krakauer said.

Since then, Fischer has housed the castoff children and given them jobs in his company, Krakauer said.

Fischer wasn’t available Friday for comment, said Diversity director Lynette Phillips.

Krakauer said his research and willingness to check out rumors passed on by FLDS sources has made him privy to chilling information about Jeffs.

“He’s feared and despised and rules by fear. Warren is by far the scariest of the prophets to come along,” Krakauer said. “Warren Jeffs has really got my goat.”

As he’s gotten more involved in the lives of the polygamists, “I guess maybe I’ve gotten sucked into their zealotry a bit, but mostly I try to cool their jets,” he said. “I would love to find an exit strategy, believe me. I really would like to pass this on to someone else. Maybe when Warren is out of the picture.”

Discord within the church has grown since early January after Jeffs excommunicated about 20 men, many considered to be his rivals, in an apparent effort to further consolidate power.

Jeffs, 48, assumed leadership of the church after the September 2002 death of his father, former prophet Rulon Jeffs. Many at the time thought one of two church elders, Louis Barlow or Fred Jessop, would have been named president. Both have now been excommunicated.

Utah and Arizona prosecutors have been investigating allegations of welfare and tax fraud, incest, child abuses and forced marriages of young girls to adult men. Anti-polygamy activists claim FLDS Church leaders often traffic young girls between Colorado City-Hildale to the church’s enclave at Creston Valley in British Columbia.

On Thursday, former sect member Brent Jeffs, 21, filed a lawsuit that alleges Warren Jeffs and his brothers Blaine Jeffs and Leslie Jeffs sexually abused him when he was a child. Brent Jeffs claims the three told him the actions were a way to make him a man.

Ron Parker, an attorney for the church, said the church and Jeffs denied the allegations. Warren Jeffs’ whereabouts are unknown to most outside his closed community, whose members are told not to speak to reporters.

Brent Jeffs’ attorney Joanne Suder was with the Baltimore law firm that sued the Baltimore Catholic diocese over child sexual abuse.

“I just keep getting drawn deeper and deeper into this.”

Suder is the legal warrior in 2 lurid sex-abuse cases

News Legal News, Sex Abuse, Suder Law

January 12, 1994|By Jonathan Bor and Mike Klingaman

She represents plaintiffs in two of the most lurid sex-abuse cases to hit Baltimore in years — those of a famous doctor accused of luring patients into bed and a former teacher charged with terrorizing boys and girls into sex.

The cases against Dr. Neil Solomon and John Joseph Merzbacher have given attorney Joanne Suder an unmistakable image: that of a crusader for the rights of ordinary people who feel exploited by people they thought they could trust.

Many in the legal community see Ms. Suder as someone on a legal roll.

“She is a very caring person who identifies very strongly with her clients, almost to the point where she doesn’t see the other side of an issue,” said a lawyer who has opposed her many times in court.

“Once you get these cases, the floodgates open. It feeds on itself,” said the lawyer, who asked not to be identified.

Although her work had generated headlines before, nothing in her career had generated the attention drawn by the Solomon case. Three women, all represented by Ms. Suder, filed lawsuits last summer charging that Dr. Solomon lured them into sexual relationships that have poisoned their lives ever since.

The women’s suits, seeking damages of $140 million, have whipped up a storm. Solomon was a former state health secretary, a friend to four governors, a nationally syndicated health columnist, the author of several diet books.

In October, a state licensing board took his license and forced him to promise never to seek reinstatement.

That month, emboldened by those who had stepped forward in the Solomon case, a woman approached Ms. Suder with her accusation that Mr. Merzbacher had sexually assaulted her at gunpoint while he was her teacher at Catholic Community Middle School in Locust Point. Ms. Suder contacted the state’s attorney’s office — and, last Thursday, Mr. Merzbacher, 52, was jailed on an 86-count indictment charging him with sex crimes against 10 students at the school two decades ago.

Ms. Suder has filed $350 million in lawsuits on behalf of five former students against the Archdiocese of Baltimore. She estimates that 40 former students have approached her with similar allegations against Mr. Merzbacher. While acknowledging the publicity over the Solomon and Merzbacher cases, Ms. Suder says she hasn’t done anything recently that she hasn’t done before. In 16 years of practice, she has represented brain-damaged babies, neglected nursing home patients, breast cancer patients and parents who have lost their children to medical mistakes.

“I think I have always been involved in serious cases,” said Ms. Suder. “It just happens that some of the cases I’ve been into are things that interest the media, such as sex abuse.” Ms. Suder, who reluctantly agreed to an interview yesterday, doesn’t downplay the gravity of the Solomon and Merzbacher cases but insists that other cases interest her equally. Currently, she and her husband, Robert, are representing several women who may die of breast cancer because their doctors allegedly misread their mammograms. She was reared in Treasure Island, Fla., and educated in Catholic schools. Of six siblings, all but one are lawyers.

While in high school, she volunteered as a candy-striper in a nursing home. There, a former journalist lay paralyzed, unable to speak or move anything but a hand. “No one came to see him and everyone talked about him like he wasn’t there,” she said. “I sensed that, although he was paralyzed, he was very much aware of everything going on around him. I remember spending a lot of time one day with him and trying to communicate with him.”

Searching for clues about the man who had been so coldly dismissed, she read through his records. She discovered he had had a fascinating career with the Wall Street Journal. She fed him, talked to him, and developed a way of communicating in which he could register responses by squeezing her hand. When she returned to school that fall, she knew she might never see him again.

“I left this big note on his bed about everything he liked and needed. He died around Christmas.”

The Suders were married right after she graduated from high school. The two attended the University of Baltimore law school, “Bob” graduating a few years ahead of his wife. While in law school, she was already pregnant with their first child and went into labor during a constitutional law exam. She finished the exam, then had the baby in the hospital. Brian is now 17. The Suders’ second child, Jennalee, is 9.

After spending a few years with the public defender’s office, Ms. Suder joined her husband in full-time private practice. She says they also represent accident victims, lawyers accused of malpractice and people who believe they have been defamed.

In a pending case, she has charged disc jockeys Don Geronimo and Mike O’Meara of WJFK-AM/FM — the radio team, “Don and Mike” — of invading a woman’s privacy by “outing” her on the air as a lesbian.

The plaintiff, a promotions director with a competing radio station, said she did not feel comfortable bringing the matter to a public forum until, on another lawyer’s recommendation, she met with Ms. Suder.

“My decision to go through with the lawsuit had a lot to do with her,” Dawn Tritaik said. Said Baltimore Circuit Judge John Themelis, who knew Ms. Suder in law school: “She is a very intelligent and pleasant person who happens to be an extraordinarily brilliant trial lawyer.”

In the malpractice arena, lawyers describe her as a tough but careful litigator. “She is very easily in the top 10 [malpractice attorneys] in the city,” said Walter Tabler, the former director of the state Office of Health Claims Arbitration, which hears all malpractice cases in Maryland.