A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

prison, he had made sure that was what he would get. In addition to the charges in Pennsylvania, federal charges were filed in Ogden, Utah, for the kidnapping and interstate transportation of Tom Young and Ida Burley. And then there were the murder charges in Umatilla County, Oregon, for the shooting death of Stephen Schmerer, and Malhuer County, Oregon, for the execution-style murder of seventy-five-year-old Mary Lindsay.
    On Friday, May 6, 1977, Michael Olds was returned to Pendleton, Oregon, under heavy guard. He appeared before Circuit Court Judge Jack Olsen in preliminary hearings. His attorney asked that he be committed to a mental hospital for psychiatric evaluation. Judge Olsen denied the request on the grounds that there would be a profound security risk in removing Olds from the Umatilla County Jail.
    Clearly, Michael Andrew Olds should never have been released from prison after his first conviction for murder.
    His own defense attorney in the trial for Blossom Braham’s murder agreed. “I feel terrible,” he said. “I hoped that man would have been rehabilitated. Personally, I didn’t believe he would ever be this way after he was released. He was a nice-appearing young fellow. The jury probably thought he had made a mistake and if he served a life term in prison, he’d be rehabilitated. But obviously it didn’t happen.”
    But Olds had fooled any number of experts on criminal behavior. All the prison psychiatrists, counselors, guards, work supervisors, and chaplains had praised him highly in their progress reports. Apparently only the prisoner himself knew that he needed the walls and the controlled atmosphere to keep a lid on the hatred that bubbled and boiled within him.
    Michael Andrew Olds was the poster boy who illustrated the end result of child abuse. Whether the seed of violence lay dormant within him is a question that can never be answered, but
he
was the first victim, a small boy whose personality was permanently damaged by too little love, too much deprivation and punishment.
    The child, who was conceived during a crime of violence, ended, for all practical purposes, his own life with a series of violent crimes.
    Michael Olds was convicted of two counts of murder in Oregon and sentenced to life in prison. He is serving his time at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. Today, he is fifty-six years old.

As Close as a Brother
    Probably nobody is more consumed by dreams than a teenage girl. At eighteen, everything seems possible: college, a new love, marriage, a baby, an exciting career in a big city. But along with the dreams, there is danger. A lot of teenagers are naive—at least to some degree. They tend to believe that the men they encounter are telling the truth. If a man is good-looking and fun, friendly and helpful, they assume that he is safe. And most of the time strangers are no real threat, even though handsome and friendly men have been known to break hearts.
    Anyone who has ever tried to warn a headstrong young woman of the perils of taking strangers at face value knows it is akin to shouting into the wind. It is even more difficult to warn them about someone they already know and trust. They won’t listen; they are so easily offended by anyone who tries to give them advice. Most girls eventually grow up like the rest of us in the school of hard knocks and disappointments, realizing ruefully that sometimes you have to be hurt to learn. But some, albeit a tiny percentage, put their trust in men who do more than hurt emotionally.
    This case is a heart-breaker, not only for the girls who
learned too late about a deceptively friendly man, but for the people who loved them. Even though their tragedies happened three decades ago, and the victims would now be old enough to be grandmothers, I cannot forget them and the lives they never got to live.
    At one time or another, every one of us has known a psychopath. Think of someone who lies when there is no need to lie, who has had just too many bizarre adventures for one person. As they grow older, these people will steal your money, step on your face to get your job, break your heart—but they won’t kill you. They are garden variety psychopaths. Terms come in and out of vogue in psychiatric parlance, but the personalities involved don’t change. Today, a psychopath is called a sociopath, or is said to have an antisocial personality. A sociopath remains forever in the early childhood phase of emotional development, never