Canada geese may want to travel in gaggles, after another seven of their feathered friends were discovered savagely cut up and left for dead on a Naperville roadside Tuesday.

The murdered fowl, discovered at North Aurora and Enterprise Roads, bring to 11 the number of victims taken by a serial goose hunter still at large. The killing spree began late Monday, when a resident called police to report four geese carcasses left in the parkway in the 1200 block of Langley Circle.

“It appears somebody is hunting the birds for the meat,” said Sgt. Gregg Bell of Naperville Police, after viewing gruesome photographs of the crime scene.

Canada geese, which neared extinction in the late 1950s, are
protected by federal and state laws. An aggressive nationwide
restoration effort has brought back the population considerably, but
hunting the birds is still prohibited, authorities said.

“It’s never hunting season for those geese,” Bell said.

Naperville animal-control
officers arrived at the Langley Circle Tuesday morning to remove the
dead birds discovered the night before, but the carcasses were missing.

Soon after, an employee at a business reported the second
cluster of goose carcasses about five miles away. Authorities were able
to photograph and clean up that site, Bell said.

Because the
incisions to the geese’s chest cavities were clean and similar, police
do not believe a wild animal is behind the killings. Naperville police
has turned the investigation over to the Department of Natural
Resources, which would be the agency to press charges if a suspect is
caught.

But there were no suspects as of Tuesday afternoon, police said.

“If you’re a goose, you might have to watch your back,” Bell said.

– Vikki Ortiz Healy

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For three weeks in 2002 Washington, D.C., was paralyzed in fear as a sniper randomly took the lives of 10 people and wounded three others. When it was all over, Gulf War veteran John Muhammad and his 17-year-old accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo were arrested for the killing spree. And no one was more shocked than Muhammad’s ex-wife, Mildred.

n Mildred’s new book “Scared Silent,” (read an excerpt here) she chronicles her mentally and emotionally abusive relationship with John, the man who would become the D.C. Sniper, and says that she was the intended target of his bloody rampage.

When I met John, he was very charming and thoughtful. He would give you the shirt off your back. He was that kind of person, before he went to the Gulf War. When he returned in 1991 he was a different man.

The Changes Begin
Whatever happened to him there shook the foundation of his life. When he came back he was not the same person. He didn’t laugh anymore. He made sure that everything that he did he had control over.

He was not debriefed or counseled when he returned. His change in behavior was gradual, but he got more and more obsessive and abusive. It got to a point where he said, “It’s a question of mind over matter — I don’t mind because you don’t matter.” When I went to my community they didn’t believe me. They asked me what I did to provoke him.

I spent a long time believing what he said. When someone you hold dearest to you tells you that you’re nothing, you tend to believe them. He was able to blame me and caused me to be ashamed. He would isolate and control me.

“You Have Become My Enemy, and As My Enemy I Will Kill You”
After 12 years of marriage I was finally able to break free, but it was not easy. He was angry that I divorced him. He felt that I was abandoning him. He said, “You have become my enemy, and as my enemy I will kill you.” I was forced to move into a transitional home, and was granted a restraining order for life against him.

Out of revenge, he fled the country and took the kids with him. I had no idea where they were. He settled with them in Antigua, which is where he met [sniper accomplice] Lee Boyd Malvo. Lee took on a sort of “big brother” role with the kids. (Source)

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JARRATT, Virginia (AP) – John Allen Muhammad, the mastermind behind the sniper attacks that left 10 dead, was executed Tuesday night as relatives of the victims watched, reliving the killing spree that terrorized the Washington metro area for three weeks in October 2002.

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MSNBC’s Chris Matthews has said some things that would make your scratch your head – like getting a thrill up his leg from a speech given by Barack Obama. However, this one will really make you wonder what he was thinking.

On his Nov. 9 broadcast of "Hardball," in an interview with Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, Matthews compared the incident of Maj. Nidal M. Hasan at Ft. Hood to Sirhan Sirhan’s 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

"You know, I have a hard time with this because people like Sirhan Sirhan, who is still serving time for killing Bobby Kennedy, didn’t like what Bobby Kennedy had said on television," Matthews said. "Bobby Kennedy had made political statements saying we’re going to sell arms, fighter planes directly to Israel, not under the table. We’re going to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Those are the things that triggered his killing spree. He killed one person – Bobby Kennedy, horrifically. But did he become a different religious person because he committed the crime? And when did this happen?"

But the struggle Matthews was having – that given Reuters had reported Hasan had tried to contact al Qaeda, was that reason enough to intervene on the activities of Hasan (emphasis added).

"See – we have a problem," Matthews said. "How do we know when someone like Hasan is going to make his move and do we know he’s an Islamist until he’s made his move? He makes a phone call or whatever, according to Reuters right now. Apparently he tried to contact al Qaeda. Is that the point at which you say, ‘This guy is dangerous?’ That’s not a crime to call up al Qaeda, is it? Is it? I mean, where do you stop the guy?"

And this was obviously a philosophical struggle for the "Hardball" host, as he reiterated he confusion.

"Well, this guy, according to all the testament, admittedly it has not been admitted into court. We cannot call him the shooter until we have a trial. That’s the way we work here, you know, that’s how it works in America, certainly not in the news business. You can’t call somebody a murderer until you get a conviction in court. And the question here is when can you identify a problem? That’s what we have to deal with. And you say it’s an ideological point – you can find the problem. But then we get into the business of checking out on people’s thinking. And that’s the problem.

Incredibly, this wasn’t just a one-time lapse for Matthews. He reiterated his question, if contacting al Qaeda, an institution classified as a terrorist organization by several international governments and organizations, was crime (emphasis added).

"When does a person become a danger, when they have a certain thought system? Or when they go out and buying semi-automatic pistols, or when they start phoning up al Qaeda, saying how can I join the gang? I mean, where do you stop a person? This is criminology, maybe not ideology, but or even religion. But how do we weed out a guy – it seems to me, all of the warning signs, I mean, we have seen them all now. It’s like looking at pictures of Muhammad Ata hanging around convenience stores and going to ATM machines. We got all kinds of information on this guy after it’s too late."

Amazingly, Matthews even compared himself to Hasan – suggesting his actions were just criticism of the United States invasion of Iraq, with just one subtle difference.

But this guy was running around shooting his mouth off saying how he hated this country’s wars with – look, you can listen to me on television and hear me saying I didn’t like the war with Iraq. You know, I don’t agree with the war on Iraq and a lot of Americans didn’t like the war with Iraq. They didn’t start shooting people about it."

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