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Investigating your Stalker

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mtnsky

Morgan had a stranger stalker, Keenan was a person not known to her, rather his identity was deduced over months.  He was also very likely a serial stalker as well.  This I added after discovering many stalking and peeping tom incidents within a few mile radius dating back for years.

As I research solutions to these types of terrorizing some of it is very straightforward, such as the findings that stalkers are often socially maladjusted, emotionally immature, insecure and jealous by nature.  Like perpetrators of domestic violence, who often stalk their partners, they seek to exert power and control over the victim.  According to James Harris, his daughter Brooke complained of Keenan being possessive, and she ended their relationship because of it.  An objective look at mannerisms is a good tool to ID your stalker.

At the beginning we had few if any tools to deduce who the stalker was and were limited for a while into seeing which cars were home, and which weren’t, of which lights were on in which houses as ours…only tools.  If we could have included a read of mannerisms of the suspects, no matter how crude it might have been.  That would have been an improvement in identifying him earlier.

Other advice i read is downright frightening to me.  Such as the majority of stalkers are not mentally ill; however a minority, usually stranger stalkers, suffer from mental health disorders (such as paranoid schizophrenia or manic depression) and exhibit delusional thought patterns or behaviors.  I would think if this little bit of observation were in the material the Deputies and Detectives had about stalkers they would have been better able to deal effectively with Keenan than they did.  Actually they had no material on stalkers of stalking so, anything would have been an improvement really.

There is advice suggesting you should approach the stranger stalker (just once), and tell them firmly to stop, then attempt to involve family members to assist.  I question both of these thoughts, as I have been told that his father Wade was quick to bring him to the Sheriff’s office to answer questions, but also quick to opine that he had not done anything wrong.  I wonder how he could be so sure and I doubt he would have been receptive to talking his son out of his stalking obsession.

His mother, Jennifer Johnson, to this day will not even admit he was pretty much the schoolyard bully back in grade school, when that fact is well known up and down the valley.  So I really don’t see how an attempt to involve the parents would have really been very productive.  Most likely the opposite.

His parents and friends are pretty intent on protecting him by whatever means they can, and don’t seem ready to admit Keenan could ever do anything wrong.  This I am sad to say is something that has played out many times in cases of stalkers – many, many times they have family members, friends, even people that don’t really know them that well make up excuses, alibis and lies for them.  Sometimes I would assume because they want to keep them out of trouble, other times possibly because they themselves don’t want to believe something like this could really happen, and then there are always friends that have been warned not to be “snitches”, or else,  as in this case.

Which brings up the third piece of advice which I have found to be a very informative, and a useful tool – that is to get the criminal records of the stalker, especially a stranger stalker.  As the claims that he has never been in trouble in his life grow ever louder from all of his family, the list of charges, for a twenty-one year old seem very, very, long.  And most all of the charges he has been found guilty of portend to a serious problem if connected with a stranger stalker, as they are in Morgan’s case.

In fact after having had a chance to look over criminal records for all the immediate family and friends, I can see why this is suggested in a stranger stalking situation.  I don’t know if the Sheriffs are at liberty to run these records and share them with victims, but I believe it would be a big help.

I think it would be safe to say that successful criminals research their victims first, just as hunters research, and stalk their prey before a successful kill.  So in the victims interest – why would you not want to arm yourself with research and facts on those that are threatening to do you harm, as stalkers obviously do.

In all of the people claiming to be friends of the families that have contacted me, I found one to be very telling.  He claimed to be a good friend of James Harris, and wished to vouch for his integrity.  And then in the next sentence he admitted that Brooke was probably not one to be trusted.  Very telling indeed when even Jim’s friends know a thing or two about Brooke and her checkered past.

Selective Evidence? – Part 1 on Morgan’s stalking and death scene investigation

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pillbottle

The morning of 12/2/2011 was ruled by emotion.  Steve and I look back on that morning, and know there was nothing that was right.  No place to sit, nothing to say, no advice to hear that made any sense.  We were guided, and led by others far more than making any cognizant decision.

For law enforcement, the Sheriff’s department, and whoever else was there I would have to say chaos was the defining word.  There was surprise, shock, emotions to the state of tears, but the overwhelming feeling I remember is that they were acting as if they just really did not know what to do.

Questions to me of any consequence were very few.  Both Steve and I fully expected there would be an investigation in the coming weeks and months, which would include detailed questioning about all the important things surrounding Morgan’s death…but it never came, never happened.

The two Detectives who were assigned to her stalking case, Megan Alstatt, and Rob Glassmire kept up with the stalking case, they gave us time to adjust, and heal.  But as for an investigation into her death, it became a grey area.  No real person in charge, no one sure who we should talk to, how we should react to a Postmortem Examination Report that had more mistakes than truth.  An answer later on to us was, “Why would there be an investigation into her death, the Pathologist called it natural causes?”  It would be easy to call it surreal, but it was our daughter, and we wanted the truth about her death, and it seemed that was not much of a priority in this system.

Even in the smallest detail, like medications Morgan may have been taking, caused chaos.  It sounds so simple, parents know the prescriptions of their daughter, at least Steve and I certainly do.  If not us, there is her doctor, Steve had this theory that no matter how many different doctors you see over time, if there were any prescriptions they should always come from one doctor, it really is a safety measure, and something he’s always insisted on.  Morgan did the same, so any current medications would be at a single source, not hard at all to find out.

Then if we as her parents, and the doctor chosen to monitor all of her medications as part of his responsibilities, didn’t qualify for that kind of information, there was always the pharmacy, same one we had used for many years (of importance yet to be determined – it was the same pharmacy located in the City Market that Keenan worked in).  But none of these seemingly obvious means to determine if Morgan was taking medications was used.  Instead a rather arbitrary, actually almost unbelievable method was used.  It seems that Garco Sheriffs department personnel searched Morgan’s room, and if a prescription bottle was found, no matter what the date on that bottle was it then became a medication that Morgan was using in their opinion.  Not only were they wrong, but these medications did not show up in Morgan’s tox results, only one…go figure, probably because she wasn’t taking them and hadn’t for a really long time.

Little details such as if it had been filled for the last time over two years ago, the bottle was empty, the prescription was expired, and never renewed, did not seem to matter in this search for Morgan’s correct, if any medications.  All of the bottles I found in her room after her death, and after the chaos were empty.  Some officers report they were full (the actual count not given, just full), while other officers report they were empty.

Here is a really important clue that may have helped them.  In the midst of this chaos, an officer walked up to me with Morgan’s pill holder from the car, and wanted to know if I knew what was in it.  I explained to him the pills that were in it, the reason they were there, even the doctor who could verify it all, if needed.  I was assured that was not necessary and right along with everything else they were compiling on their own, the information I gave that officer was twisted, misconstrued, and incorrectly reported.  How hard can it be?  I would have written it all down for him if that is what it took to get it correct.

Fighting to have the mistakes of that morning corrected has taken exponentially more time then it took them all to make the mistakes, and it really is a fight that continues to this day, maybe they are not really interested in the truth, at some point I have to really wonder.

The very amazing fact is that I told that officer that inquired about the pill holder from the car that Morgan was not really taking any medications, not on a regular basis, the few pills in that pill minder were put in the car just in case of emergency.  Think of it like a bottle of Tylenol you keep in your glove compartment in case you are away from your house and you get a horrible headache…that is the same nature of keeping that pill holder in the car. She wasn’t using it, but I wanted it there just in case.

He did not question me about the fact she was not taking any medications.  He did not ask to speak with her doctor, who would have also known.  He did not ask to see a copy of pharmacy records.  Yet I read now in the reports from that morning, the morning of her death, all sorts of medications they say she was taking, for reasons that I have to assume they just made up, because there is no truth to any of them.  Morgan had a tox screen and none of these medications they list as ones she was talking were found in her system.  Except one.

Also mixed in were five other drugs in the date rape cocktail found in her stomach was amitriptyline.  In her blood was found none of the prescription medications the GarCo Sheriff’s department reported she was taking, I’ll mention again the medications they assumed she was taking that were not in her blood were supposedly taken by Morgan for reasons absolutely unknown to me, because they are all wrong, and would have known that if they had asked us instead of playing doctor.  Could you possibly screw it up any more than this?  The contracted forensic pathologist looked it all over, and had a simple solution.  List the amitriptyline, and ignore everything else, and he’ll call it insignificant.

None of this seemed to bother anyone.  Is it any wonder that a year later the DA said the Sheriff’s department had so thoroughly botched Morgan’s death scene investigation.  And all this was just on Morgan’s medications!  On the list I had printed out by the pharmacy, none had been filled since May of 2009, which would be 2 and a 1/2 years before her death.  Meaning any medication they found was over 2 1/2 years old – at least 2 1/2 years old, bottle empty, and from that they construct a list of medications, and erroneous reasons for Morgan to take those medications.

I will share something with you that I have been told many times since Morgan’s death by doctors reviewing her records.  It’s been unanimous that all these doctors felt this case would only get better from here, always saying, “don’t worry”, “they can’t change to that” or “they can’t say this”, while adding that the proof is all here in black and white.  And I don’t blame their optimism that sanity would prevail one bit, because it was obvious to us too, but unfortunately my “gut” was warning me again that there just was something wrong here.

Well they did just that, the actual thing I was concerned about, they came to all the wrong conclusions, GarCo’s finest, it is deflating, hurtful, and disgusting to see so little effort be put forth in any suspicious death.  If it is you daughter, you have to make sure the correct doctor is on hand to correct ridiculous mistakes, because it only gets worse.

If I had to explain any part of this to Morgan, I truly do not know what I would say.  I taught her to trust, and try to see the best in all.  To be calm, and let justice takes its path, let the truth shine – and now she has lost her life, because in this case it wasn’t the best advice.

For the investigation into something so pathetically simple as Morgan’s medications to end up so completely upside down, and backwards is without excuse.  To refuse any attempt to correct egregious errors that have risen to a point that you’d think they had been chiseled into stone.  Of course, this is without adding the fact that Morgan’s blood level, perhaps 12 hours after death, of amitriptyline was 7,909 ng/ml.  I asked, and I asked, and I  asked again, and that was one of the highest levels ever seen at the large national crime laboratory that tested her samples.  The contracted pathologist had a simple solution for that too, he just called it insignificant.  The highest level they had ever seen was listed and represented as insignificant.  Am I the only one who sees a problem with that?

The answers are all right here for Morgan’s case.  That the crime scene was so thoroughly botched by the Sheriff’s department can be overcome by other evidence that has presented itself.  Isn’t solving the crime still important at some point?

Justice for Morgan has to still be in play, she really hasn’t been treated with fairness, respect, and dignity – has she?  Nobody charged with the responsibility is really standing up for her right to due process – are they?

The FBI reminds me that there is no law against incompetence, but I still believe a failure to protect, under color of law was present here, along with the requirement for officers to act in compliance with the law.

Does it seem that Morgan’s civil rights, were vaporized by a stalker and sexual pervert, aided by the Sheriffs department, the Coroner and of course his contracted forensic pathologist?  What are we all willing to do for the next victim suffering a similar fate?  At this point I can’t see how it will go any better for the next victim unless GarCo changes how they do things.  We have to remember after all, this stalker/murderer still runs free…