Remember how I told you that I didn’t have the luxury of prosecuting only the Marcos Duendes re-trial by itself, that I had an entire caseload of other felonies and as it turned out four other felony cases just as serious and complicated in their own ways as the Duendes case?

I already told you about Jesus Delgado who had molested his ten year old step daughter for years and threatened her with murder by immolation if she ever breathed a word. This was the case that the crime lab found his and his victim’s DNA together on the crotch of the panties that the brave teenager had saved in a brown paper bag under her bed for about six months until the day when she could turn them over to the police when the son of bitch finally got arrested and charged only because the victim risked everything to tell her mother what Delgado was doing when she saw her rapist molester step father beginning to groom her younger sister who had just turned ten.

The other case that I already told you about was the capital case re-trial of a former coke addict who murdered his girlfriend and her three children, including their infant son with a tire iron by methodically bashing out their brains in the living room, kitchen, and bedrooms of their small apartment because the mother of three wouldn’t give her junkie husband her hard earned paycheck to spend on drugs. This death penalty case was having to be re-tried because the idiot trial judge had granted the murderer, Alfred Cornelius Copeland, his petition for post conviction relief of a new trial on a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel because the public defender was drunk everyday of the trial, which he was, but the experienced alcoholic lawyer still did a completely competent job of the defense considering that Copeland hadn’t provided his attorney anything that could have been done different considering that the Copeland had confessed not only to the police but to three family members at three separate times to the murders and so the best and most sober defense attorney in the universe couldn’t have done any better with the case.

Into this mix came two other cases that I had to prosecute at the same time as I was prosecuting my “normal” felony caseload plus the Copeland, Delgado, and Duendes cases.

The first of the additional hard cases was a former teenaged rapist of a young pregnant stay-at-home mom in her own home that he was burglarizing who’d spent 16 years in adult prison, got out, moved in with his aging parents when he was now in his mid thirties and then tried to do the same thing again to a vice president of a local bank who he had forced into the bank at gun point when she was opening up the bank from the rear entrance and he came “out of nowhere” and put the barrel of his gun in her ear. Therein, he hog-tied her with zip ties, gagged her with a strip of duct tape, made her lie in the middle of the bank foyer after demanding that she give him the combination of the bank safe which she said that she didn’t have. He was wearing a hoodie sweatshirt all the while so that the lady banker never got a good look at him, but she later described him to police as a white man, maybe mid thirties, about five foot something, with real high widow peaks on his forehead’s hairline. He had pulled her pantyhose down from under her dress and was trying to sodomize her which she kept squirming away in resistance to try and prevent when the bank president who had waited an agonizing thirty minutes because he hadn’t seen the “all clear” sign in the bank window but couldn’t wait any longer began opening the locked rear door. The robber rapist grabbed the president’s arm to pull him inside the bank, but the frightened man pulled free and ran for his life through the parking lot. The robber shot three times at the fleeing bank president but didn’t hit the man. Then the robber fled himself. Police found the hoodie that he had been wearing in a nearby abandoned building, and the lady banker identified the robber when she saw his face on a Neighborhood Sex Offender flyer and then kind of, sort of identified her would be robber rapist at a preliminary hearing that also included the introduction of evidence seized by police from the man’s bedroom in his parents’ house, including a collection of hardcore bondage pornography magazines, zip ties, and duct tape.

And finally a farmer’s wife took her rich farmer husband out to dinner at his favorite restaurant for his birthday, and in the parking lot there after dinner, a man came up to the driver’s side of the new pickup truck the farmer was driving with his wife already sitting in the passenger’s seat. The man shot the farmer in the neck through the driver’s side window and fled into the night. While the farmer bled to death, the farmer’s wife ran back into the restaurant and hysterically cried for “Help!” Later, police found that the farmer’s wife who the farmer was in the process of divorcing according to the couples’ prenuptial agreement had been having an affair with a transient ex con who had wooed his target at her work where he was the subject of much water cooler gossip. I was tasked with advising the police as they painstakingly investigated and developed a case against the transient whose whereabouts were unknown and the supposedly grieving very rich farmer’s widow.

“When it rains it pours,” they say.

” ‘They’ can go straight to hell!” is what I like to say.

[DISCLAIMER: IT’S ALL MADE UP, FOLKS. IT’S WHAT I TOLD YOU ALREADY . . . IT’S ALL MADE UP. NO REAL PEOPLE HERE TO SEE. KEEP MOVING ALONG, PLEASE.]