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Posted on 04/12/2002 11:17:08 PM PDT by FresnoDA
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Westerfield's attorneys argued in a motion filed with Superior Court Judge William Mudd last week that they should be able to review the personnel files of 13 officers involved in the case to see if there was any history of past misconduct.
But prosecutors said Mudd need only review the personnel records of detectives Mike Ott and Mark Keyser for the names and telephone numbers of any witnesses with information relevant to complaints received during the last five years about their credibility, or complaints about the detectives giving suspects their Miranda rights.
Ott and Keyser interviewed Westerfield on Feb. 4, two days after the girl disappeared. They also drove with the defendant on the exact 600-mile route he said he traveled the weekend Danielle van Dam turned up missing. A hearing on the "Pitchess" motion is set for April 18.
Mudd ruled Tuesday that future motions in the Westerfield case will be filed under seal until hearings scheduled for May 6. The judge also ruled there would be no TV coverage of the pretrial hearings in the case. Trial is set to begin May 17.
Other possible pretrial motions might include a defense request to move Westerfield's trial away from San Diego County, and a prosecution motion to limit inquiries into the supposed "swinging" lifestyle of the victim's parents.
Westerfield, 50, lived two doors down from the victim. He is charged with kidnapping, murder, possession of child pornography in connection with the girl's death.
He also faces a special circumstance allegation of murder during a kidnapping, which could lead to the death penalty if he is convicted. Prosecutors will announce later whether they intend to seek life in prison without parole or capital punishment should Westerfield be found guilty.
Brenda and Damon van Dam discovered their daughter missing from her upstairs bed the morning of Feb. 2. Searchers found her partially decomposed body just off an East County road on Feb. 27. In the interim, the case drew nationwide attention.
Big Ditto that bump
No kidding...you are a VDA.....LOL
Just who makes up the swing sets?
Mostly cops and teachers, Booth said of the members.
''These are not the people you see on Jerry Springer. They are middle to upper class,'' said Booth, who notes that they prefer the term ''play couples'' over `swingers.'
Swing sets? I thought those were things for the kids that you set up in the back yard. I much prefer the term "polyamorous"
FDA
For the next four days, a swingers convention will take over the Radisson Deauville hotel in Miami Beach. The entire 17-story resort has been reserved by thousands of curious couples, vibrator vendors and veteran swing experts who will swap stories (and spouses), attend sexuality seminars, hawk fetish toys and gab about the latest gadgets.
It's open to the public. Want to attend? It costs about $395, depending on the package.
Hosting the convention for the unconventional is the California-based Lifestyles Organization, which has put together 28 conventions since 1969 and is now for the first time bringing the gathering to Florida -- home to the nation's second-largest swingers community after California. For the clueless: Swingers are couples who swap romantic partners.
''We generally rent the whole hotel. The reason being that we don't want to make anyone feel uncomfortable,'' Lifestyles spokesman Gary Booth said.
Perhaps a good call, considering the topless poolside parties, ''Evening of Caressive Intimacy'' and intercourse-enhancing harnesses on sale in the Richelieu Room.
But how do the hotel employees handle their, er, affectionate guests?
Training. A week's worth.
Last week, an in-house hotel training team began coaching staffers from every department, including housekeeping, valet attendants and bellmen, said Donald Dougherty, the Deauville's general manager.
The golden rule: Beware of 'Do Not Disturb' signs.
''We told them it's an extremely adult-orientated event,'' Dougherty said, ``and even gave them the option of taking time off if they were not comfortable with it.''
And?
''There were no takers,'' Dougherty said.
On Wednesday, the hotel's lobby was already decked out in Lifestyles Convention banners, and booths were set up with informational literature as busloads of early arrivals got in.
THE LIGHT DAWNS
''Oh, now I get it. I thought they were swing dancers,'' blushing hotel guest Ann-E Imperatore said as she read through a pamphlet in the hotel lobby.
''Better than fighting, I guess,'' the Providence, R.I., visitor added.
The event officially gets started at noon today with the opening of the Erotic Marketplace.
Those who didn't buy one of the package deals can buy a $10 ticket to check out the various vendors.
Expect everything from penile enlargers and edible underwear to -- well, you get the picture.
The North American Swing Club Association, a convention sponsor, estimates that there are more than 500 clubs nationwide.
Organizers expect thousands of couples from 49 states -- not North Dakota -- and eight countries at the resort, 6701 Collins Ave., through Sunday.
''These are not the people you see on Jerry Springer. They are middle to upper class,'' said Booth, who notes that they prefer the term ''play couples'' over `swingers.'
FAMED LOCAL CLUB
While the convention is a first, the lifestyle isn't. Miami, Booth said, is home to one of the country's most famed swingers clubs: Miami Velvet.
Owner Grant O'Donell said the private hot spot has more than 6,000 members, many of whom will be at the convention.
Among the 24 seminars being offered: The Monogamy Myth; Deeper Into the Heart of Sex and Tantra (note that tantric experience is required); Current Research on AIDS and STDs; Sadist, Masochist, Dominant, Submissive: Are You One of Us? -- A Panel Discussion; Systematic Sexuality: An Introduction to Swinging.
The event will end Saturday night with ``A Romantic Rendezvous in the Le Jardin.''
Said Booth: ``It's not a wild sex orgy party. It's about people coming together and sharing
The event will end Saturday night with ``A Romantic Rendezvous in the Le Jardin.''
Said Booth: ``It's not a wild sex orgy party. It's about people coming together and sharing.
I don't know about that last bit. I personally, have never aspired to be one of VERY VERY MANY, the multitudes. Hard to believe this is an industry. Kicks just keep gettin' hard to find....
Let's do lynch?
Amazing, the things you can find on the internet...
By John Wilkens
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
April 14, 2002
Molly from Ocean Beach is on the line and she's not happy. "You are making money off the murder of Danielle van Dam," she said to Rick Roberts. "That's all you care about."
The comments don't seem to faze Roberts. He's heard worse in the two months since he began using his local talk-radio show to raise sharp questions about the activities of the slain girl's parents.
What had been whispers and water-cooler gossip exploded into the open with his show. Some people started focusing as much on Brenda and Damon van Dam as they did on David Westerfield, the neighbor charged with kidnapping and killing the 7-year-old Sabre Springs girl.
By arguing that the partying parents had indirectly put Danielle in harm's way, Roberts was accused of compounding the family's grief. Critics likened him to someone who blames a rape victim for wearing a short skirt.
He said he got death threats and his bosses at KFMB received calls for his firing. About 90 percent of the response early on ran against him, he said.
But with that came the kind of buzz that's golden to talk-show hosts. His disclosures got mentioned in media outlets from The Globe to Newsweek. He went on "20/20 Downtown" and Court TV.
His own show, "The Court of Public Opinion," had so many callers some were on hold for more than two hours. People started phoning in 20 minutes before each four-hour broadcast just to get in line. His ratings went up 35 percent, according to the station's program director.
In recent weeks, the focus has shifted at times to other issues, but it always snaps back to the van Dams, and no doubt will lock on them again during upcoming court proceedings.
These days, Roberts said, the feedback on the case favors him, especially since some of the lifestyle issues he raised were verified during Westerfield's preliminary hearing. People are calling to thank him for "having the courage to tell the real story."
"If ours was a civilized world," one man gushed on the air recently, "you would be king." Roberts said about 90 percent of the callers now support him.
Molly from Ocean Beach isn't one of them.
She told Roberts he lacks compassion and that his primary motivation is ratings. "Profit, that's all you're about, Rick, and that's clear to anyone who's listening."
Roberts didn't flinch. "Sweetheart," he rumbled in a gravelly voice so distinctive it gets him recognized three or four times a day out in public, "I do everything for ratings. There's nothing wrong with ratings. When I get ratings, it means I am doing my job."
Many talk-show entertainers have a gimmick, a trademark routine that separates them from their competitors. For the 48-year-old Roberts, it's reading the names and neighborhoods of convicted sex offenders on the air every week.
He started doing it in Kansas City in 1994, then in Dallas and now in San Diego, where, even with his recent boost, he trails Roger Hedgecock in the afternoon drive-time ratings.
"If somebody has a rabid dog, there's a notice posted to warn the neighbors," he said. "I think our children deserve at least the same kind of protection." He gets the names from public records.
Roberts' interest in sex criminals stemmed from his radio work on missing children. He said he dealt with several cases early in his career and grew angry when he realized many of the abductions were committed by repeat offenders.
His experience with these other cases came to play in the van Dam disappearance, he said. He didn't believe the details and time line as they were reported in the initial media accounts.
"The whole thing didn't make sense," he said.
Several days after Danielle vanished, Roberts said he got information from a law-enforcement source about the parents' activities. He said he agonized about whether he should go public with the details. Then "the van Dams made the decision for me."
They did that, he said, by holding press conferences in which they claimed, "This could happen to you the way it happened to us. We're just like anybody else."
The result, according to Roberts, was a community "frozen in fear," worried that a "clairvoyant child molester" would somehow find other kids and steal them away in the night, too.
"You can't go in front of the public like Ward and June Cleaver and say, 'Gee, we put Wally and the Beaver to bed at night and when we woke up the Beaver was missing,' not when you know it isn't true," Roberts said.
So, on Feb. 8, he put what he had learned on the air. He talked about wife-swapping and pot-smoking and parties in the garage.
At the time, Danielle was still missing and Westerfield had not yet been arrested. Roberts said his main concern was the safety of the other two children in the van Dam house.
Soon people from all over the county were going on his show to talk about the parents in all sorts of ways. They passed judgment on Brenda's makeup and Damon's body language. Any whiff of innuendo and suspicion got passed along relentlessly as the Roberts show became, in effect, "All Danielle, All the Time."
Talk radio, of course, is designed to be wide open. It's not journalism, as even Roberts will admit. Folks routinely come on and say just about anything they want.
Roberts said he trusts his listeners to separate the wheat from the chaff, that his main obligation is to keep the show balanced between callers who agree with him and those who don't.
"You have to remember it's the court of public opinion," he said, "not the court of law." If that means the occasional wacko gets through, he added, "well, they're entitled to their opinion, too."
His calls are screened by a producer who sits on the other side of a large plate-glass window. They're not screened very much – all the caller has to do is give a first name, city, and whether he or she agrees with the host – because Roberts wants whatever is going to happen to happen on the air.
But even some who are familiar with the brawling nature of the medium recoil when they hear the harsh scrutiny that's usually reserved for presidents and other public figures directed instead at the parents of a murdered child.
"For the sake of Danielle's memory and dignity, please stop all the rumors and gossip and settle down to decent conversation in this matter," a listener wrote in one of the milder notes posted on Roberts' KFMB Web site.
Others wade right in, however. The phone lines have been jammed. The Web site has had thousands of postings. Maybe that's because it's human nature when a child is slain for other people to search for answers – to grasp at reasons why the victim's family is so different the same tragedy couldn't possibly happen to you.
The Rick Roberts show offered people reasons in spades.
He said he has no regrets about his handling of the case.
"I feel bad for the parents," he said. "You have to. No one should have to suffer the pain and anguish that comes from losing a child. But there is an indirect responsibility that the parents ought to fess up to."
The van Dams declined to comment on Roberts. Susan Wintersteen, who has helped coordinate volunteer efforts for the family, said the talk show "is doing a great disservice" to the community.
"Everybody in San Diego came together to search for Danielle," she said, "and now he's just tearing them apart."
She's not the only one with hard feelings. Roberts has had a falling out with Marc Klaas, whose 12-year-old daughter, Polly, was abducted from her Petaluma home in 1993 and murdered.
Klaas, who runs a foundation to curb crimes against children, has been a guest on Roberts' show over the years. He admits amusement at the host's weekly routine of reading the names and neighborhoods of sex offenders on the air.
But he doesn't like the way Roberts has "gone after the van Dams."
The two tangled recently on Court TV. What had been set up as a debate about the relevance of the parents' lifestyle degenerated into a shouting match.
Later that day, on his own show, Roberts was upset about the exchange. What bothered him most was being accused by Klaas of lacking empathy for the van Dams.
"Of course I feel sorry for the parents," said Roberts, himself a divorced single father raising two teens. "But don't ask me to suspend my intellect in the process."
He told his listeners that Klaas was "going to have to hit his head against a tree and get some common sense."
Klaas, in a phone interview the next day, said, "Law enforcement has said that none of the van Dams' choices had anything to do with the murder, but Rick Roberts just keeps going on and on about it.
"These people are in the depths of grief, down on the ground barely able to survive, and he's stomping on their heads and kicking them in the ribs. He should be absolutely ashamed of what he is doing."
He isn't.
"Let's face it," Rick Roberts said. "My main job is to keep people listening."
"I do everything for ratings. There's nothing wrong with ratings. When I get ratings, it means I am doing my job." rick roberts
Around the dial with Rick Roberts
Rick Roberts, 48, grew up in Texas and Oklahoma. His mother was disabled and his father wasn't around so he was raised by his grandparents, he said. He spent a couple of years in a boys home.
For a while he thought he would be a doctor, but chemistry overwhelmed him. He became a lawyer instead, specializing in oil and gas leases. He sometimes led educational seminars for other attorneys and at one of those somebody suggested he go into talk radio.
At the time, about 10 years ago, political talk shows were popular, thanks to Rush Limbaugh. But Roberts wanted to do a show that fed more off other news, a show that "asked the questions the guy in the car would ask if he could."
He started at KOA in Denver, an unusually big-league launching pad for a rookie. Then, in 1994, it was on to KCMO in Kansas City. He sparked controversy there for a two-hour interview with a white ex-cop who blamed his murder conviction on racist black jurors.
He resigned in late 1995, reportedly after his show was yanked off the air because he was making fun of a longtime, folksy commentator at his own station.
Roberts landed in Dallas at KRLD, where a station executive was quoted as saying he had "searched the nation for an outstanding contemporary performer and Rick fit the bill with flying colors."
About a year later, in April 1997, the colors had faded. By then, he'd drawn criticism in the press for calling a gay man 'a nance boy' on the air. One newspaper reported the station and Roberts were unable to agree on a contract extension; another said Roberts was fired for poor ratings.
Within months, he was in San Diego. He brought his "Court of Public Opinion" show to KOGO. "Rick is going to stir things up," the station's general manager promised.
There were problems at KOGO. In September 1998, he walked out on his show when he felt station executives were trying to curtail his comments on the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. He came back a few days later, but his air time got bounced around and he switched to KFMB in 2000.
Roberts is a divorced single father raising a 16-year-old girl and a 13-year-old boy. He said he doesn't talk much about his family on the air because he doesn't want them to be targets for the people who sometimes call his show with death threats.
He has a pilot's license and goes flying in a rented Cessna several days each week. Flying, he said, is his stress-buster. He used to smoke three packs of cigarettes a day but quit last year. Sometimes he still takes a puff or two out in the parking lot during news breaks and commercials. And as any frequent listener can tell you, he has an ongoing battle with his waistline.
Talk radio, he said, "brings out the best and the worst in people." The best was when his listeners in Dallas helped raise money to rebuild a black church burned down by arsonists. Or when his listeners in San Diego helped pay the electricity bills of cash-strapped senior citizens during the energy crisis.
He likes to talk about serious subjects on his show – "I want people to think" – but he said he tries not to take himself or what he does too seriously.
"We're not replacing heart valves here," he said. "It's talk radio."
– JOHN WILKENS
LOL. I love this line..
I KNEW IT!I wanted to know this weeks ago.. It's like AH HA!
Only one more month until trial time. Can RR and FDA keep flogging the parents for this length of time. If the prosecutor reveals additional and damning evidence at trial, making Westerfield's conviction a slam dunk, or if DW plea bargains at the last moment, will the Court of Public Opinion turn and bite the hand that fed it?
Seriously, if prosecution can place David Westerfield in Danielle's room or at Dehesa, or even DNA under her nails, I will admit I was wrong. If they can show beyond REASONABLE DOUBT that he acted alone in this crime, I will learn shrieking html to say I missed the boat. However, with what we know thus far, I still don't see it. I wouldn't be surprised to see neighbors testify that BvD and DW were a great deal more familiar with one another that we have been led to believe. That said, the parents life-style created an unsafe environment for the children, no matter how you slice it or dice it.
Still, the saddest thing beyond the crime itself, is the number of other lives that will be ruined, particularly those who had no active participation.
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