CA CA - Valerie MacDonald, 26, San Francisco, 9 Nov 1980

scriptgirl

Well-Known Member
Joined
Oct 28, 2009
Messages
1,565
Reaction score
494
This is one of the craziest and saddest cases ever. A beautiful aspiring actress, lives in a shady apartment building managed by 2 ex cons. She is offered a phony film role, imprisoned and repeatedly raped in a warehouse, killed, dumped in water. The police refuse to act, her parents reform the law in Oregon, become victim advocates. One killer is killed, the other two escape. One of them buys a ton of property in New Zealand is very rich. And years earlier, one of the guys, raped and killed another woman and probably many more. Did I mention the case was also stymied cause one of the killers allegedly worked for the CIA?

http://www.investigatemagazine.co.nz/Investigate/2583/lawyers-goons-money/


FEATURE ARTICLES, NEW ZEALAND - Written by iwishart on Wednesday, March 21, 2012 23:56 - 0 Comments

Lawyers, Goons & Money
LAWYERS, GOONS & MONEY
A TALE OF THE CIA, COP-KILLERS, A BEAUTIFUL (DEAD) WANNABE ACTRESS, & WANGANUI’S MILLIONAIRE MURDERER

You wouldn’t read about it, except perhaps in the book or movie that someone will inevitably pen about this story. IAN WISHART has the world exclusive on how a gun-runner, bank robber and murder suspect with links to a CIA black op has ended up building a new life for himself in sleepy, provincial New Zealand, while a worldwide manhunt spanning three decades had failed to find him

In Hollywood, they say, every waitress is a movie star in the wings. Oregon-born Valerie McDonald was one of those waitresses, albeit she’d only made it as far south as a seedy, $3-a-night North Beach apartment building overlooking San Francisco Bay. It was a neighbourhood yet to be revitalised, but it danced to a student and arts beat, a bohemian rhapsody of sorts. Valerie, studying at the San Francisco Art Institute, initially enjoyed her time at the Tower Apartments. That was, until she crossed paths with the new building managers and her rhapsody hit some discordant notes.


Valerie McDonald

Phillip Thompson, Michael Hennessey and John Gordon Abbott were ex-cons. Abbott, in fact, was on work release from a five years to life sentence at San Quentin prison, and he’d met his mates on the inside. Thompson, at 35 the oldest of the men, had been born at the tail end of World War II, and cut his teeth shipping drugs and intrigue for CIA black operations during the Vietnam War era. He’s listed as a driver on the Nixon presidential re-election team for 1972.

Thompson, however, had demons. Plenty of them. On June 18, 1971, then aged in his 20s, Thompson took a 21 year old mother named Betty Cloer into a field east of Sacramento, beat her, raped her then shot her three times before “bludgeoning her face beyond recognition”. Cloer’s nude corpse was found by two young girls horseriding the next day. She left behind a five year old son who was so traumatised that for the next five years he lived in denial that his mum was dead, telling his grandparents that his mum was only “hiding from bad men” and that she’d come back to look after him.

It wasn’t to be.

Nobody had connected Phillip Thompson to this unspeakable crime, and so he continued doing spook work for the CIA and sometimes the FBI, interspersed with prison time for armed robberies and violence. Just in passing, he was finally caught for this 1971 murder in 2003 after a DNA check on cold-cases located his DNA on Betty Cloer’s underwear. He was tried and convicted of murder in 2008 in a history-making California court case, 37 years after the killing.

Detective Rick Fitzgerald told jurors in the trial that Thompson had indeed been a CIA covert operative in the 70s and 80s:
“There is in fact some information that suggests he was an operative who was given a lot of leeway,” the police officer testified. Newspaper reports also confirmed Thompson was associated with terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, who’d blown up a Cuban passenger jet in 1976 killing 73 people on board.

But if young mother Betty Cloer was Thompson’s first known victim, she wasn’t the last. “There are at least eight to ten others that we know of,” Det. Rick Fitzgerald said outside the court.


Phillip Arthur Thompson

Which brings us back to that bohemian North Beach apartment building in San Francisco, November 1980. When Thompson, Hennessey and Abbott took over management, they began evicting some of the tenants and re-arranging rooms. Valerie McDonald feared for her safety. She told her friends she’d seen the men organise parties where “bowls of cocaine” were available, and that “Satanistic” activities had taken place.

“Val called me and told me she was frightened,” her mum Dee Dee Kouns told reporters later. But Valerie didn’t make it out. As Valerie and a couple of girlfriends were shifting furniture on 9 November 1980, they ran into Michael Hennessey.
Hennessey, the youngest of the three criminals at only 23, came from a good family by all accounts, but his world collapsed when he rushed his ill father to hospital one day, only to be told it was nothing serious and to go home. A short time later his beloved dad dropped dead from a heart attack in front of him, and Hennessey blamed himself, going to pieces. A drift into crime followed, and incarceration at San Quentin prison. Those who’ve met his family describe Hennessey as a basically good kid who fell in with a bad crowd, and who became Thompson and Abbott’s “flunky”.

Half Japanese and half Irish, Hennessey was big and muscular, and when on his own he had relatively good social skills. Valerie liked him, but she didn’t like his mates. Still, she was prepared to give him a couple of minutes.

The con eyed the strawberry-blonde up and down, and explained he was helping shoot a Dustin Hoffman movie that night. He told the girls he was supplying cocaine to the movie’s director, Dino de Laurentis, and that they wanted a blonde woman to play the part of a serial-killer’s victim in a couple of scenes.

The girls thought it sounded dodgy, but Hennessey offered Valerie $200, and the struggling young waitress and film student – based on her earlier friendship with the man – made what turned out to be a fatal choice. She was never seen alive again.

At some point, somehow, Valerie McDonald had made some kind of contact with a 23 year old German woman named Inez Sailer who’d also fallen into the orbit of Abbott, Thompson and Hennessey. We know this because police found a scrap of paper with Valerie’s name and phone number on it, in Sailer’s wallet. We don’t know why it was there because when police found it on New Year’s Day 1981, six weeks after Valerie had gone missing, the wallet was in Inez Sailer’s cold, dead hands. Whatever had happened, she was in no condition to tell.

Two women, one vanished, one shot five times, both connected. Police now believe Sailer had been drawn into a criminal operation being run by Thompson, Abbott and Hennessey out of their apartment block.

When dawn of November 10 broke and Valerie hadn’t returned home, her friends became worried but police brushed them off. By the time the San Francisco Police Department stopped chewing on doughnuts and turned to the task at hand, about six days after her disappearance, the trail had gone cold. Valerie was missing , and so were Phillip Thompson, John Gordon Abbott and Michael Hennessey.


John Gordon Abbott

Which brings us to John Gordon Abbott.

Born in England in the mid 1950s, his mother Ursula was an American university professor in Davis, California and his father a British diplomat working for the United Nations. The parents separated when Abbott was a teenager, and the boys, John and Michael, started to slip off the rails. His first major offence was robbery with violence at the age of 15, in Canada, while living with his grandparents.

He was sent back to live with his mother in the early 1970s, and studied Oriental Languages at UC Davis. Police files record he was a “straight-A student” with an “IQ of 180” – genius level – who by 1974 could fluently speak and write Japanese, and in 1975 he “travelled extensively throughout Japan”, the files note.

That file, a police intelligence briefing from June 1978, obtained by Investigate HIS/HERS from US authorities, pre-dates the 1980 disappearance of Valerie McDonald, but it eerily foreshadows how events were to pan out. It was sent to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police by police in Davis, California, just after Abbott escaped from prison.

“I feel you should be aware of Mr Abbott” wrote Det. Sergeant John Persons. “It is my belief that Mr Abbott very likely will flee to British Columbia, Canada, and possibly attempt either to stay there or make arrangements to go to Japan.

“Secondly, it is my belief that Mr Abbott should be considered as very dangerous, and would kill without hesitation.”

John Gordon Abbott and his brother Michael, he said, had attempted to burgle a Davis City jewellery store in May 1976, but they triggered a silent alarm in the process. “Patrol units responded,” says the police file. “The first unit approaching to the front was immediately fired upon with a .22 rifle, the bullets going through the windshield narrowly missing the officers.

“A second unit responding to the rear of the business was fired upon with a .357 magnum. During the exchange of gunfire, Michael Abbott was killed, and John Abbott escaped. During the ensuing search for John Abbott, the police department [itself] was fired upon and a dispatcher and police officer were narrowly missed (slugs recovered were .38 calibre). A police helicopter was also fired upon. WOULD YOU LIKE TO READ MORE OF THIS STORY?

You have clicked on subscriber-only content. You’d be surprised at just how much of this site you cannot currently see. If you’d like a peek, get a one day access pass for US$4.99, or choose one of our other subscription plans. Membership begins at just US$5.99 a month or $39.99 for the year

If you are an existing print subscriber you qualify for free access. Login to the site with your username and password using the Log In link in the upper right column. If you still cannot see protected content and you have a current print subscription, contact us via email for instructions.

This link has great stuff on the case as well.

http://www.truecrimediary.com/index.cfm?page=cases&id=210
 
http://blog.oregonlive.com/oregonianextra/2008/04/a_long_wait_for_justice.html

A long wait for justice
By The Oregonian
on April 19, 2008 at 8:00 AM, updated May 10, 2010 at 4:18 PM Print



Email

From The Oregonian of Sunday, Feb. 27, 2005

A long wait for Justice: After decades of heartbreak, two Oregon families hope an upcoming murder trial will bring answers to two brutal killings that police say no longer appear unrelated

By Ashbel S. Green

Betty Cloer took her 5-year-old son to Sacramento in 1971 to start a new life.
Two young women, two murders, separated by 110 miles, nine years and five months.
Horseback riders found the body of Betty Cloer, 21, in a field about 30 miles east of Sacramento on June 19, 1971. Valerie McDonald, 26, an aspiring filmmaker living in San Francisco, vanished Nov. 9, 1980. Although police couldn't find her body, they concluded she was murdered.

As the years passed, both killings remained unsolved and left families in Oregon to cope with loss and mystery.

Rob Cloer took a 5-year-old boy's approach to his mother's unsolved murder: He pretended it didn't happen. His grandparents adopted him, but Rob told himself his mother had faked her death and was coming home someday. Growing up in Junction City, he kept his mother's murder a secret. He didn't tell his best friend in high school.

Valerie McDonald modeled and took small acting parts after graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute with a degree in filmmaking.
Valerie McDonald's parents, Bob and Dee Dee Kouns, went on a public crusade to change the criminal justice system, which they held responsible for the death of their daughter and the failure to arrest her killers. They launched the victims' rights movement in Oregon and became a powerful political force, tirelessly pushing for tougher criminal sanctions.
Two murders, unconnected.

Until a recent forensic test made a surprising match.

In early 1971, Betty Cloer was a 21-year-old unwed mother who was ready to leave her hometown of Eugene.

"I think she wanted a fresh start somewhere for her and me," Rob Cloer said.

She moved to Sacramento, found a job and an apartment.

On June 18 -- a Friday -- Betty left Rob with a roommate and went dancing. She met a guy. It is unknown what happened, but police believe she impulsively agreed to go to Lake Tahoe with the man. At 2 a.m., she stopped by the apartment as Rob slept and picked up a coat. The next afternoon, two young girls on horseback found her body near Placerville, Calif.

She had been beaten, raped and shot three times.

Although a friend gave a detailed description of the man, police never identified a suspect.

After his mother was killed, Rob went to live with his grandparents in Oregon. He told them he wanted to call them "Mom" and "Dad" to put an end to questions about his mother's absence.

"I was 6 years old, and I desperately wanted to feel normal," he said. "I wanted a mom and a dad, not a grandma and grandpa."

Outwardly, Rob tried to create the illusion that nothing was wrong. Inside, he concocted a story that his mother had faked her death to hide from dangerous people who wanted to kill her.

The childish fantasy ended when Rob was 10 and witnessed the killing of a deer. From then on, he thought about catching the man who murdered his mother and killing him as painfully as possible.

After high school, Rob Cloer joined the Army. One day, in the rec room, a squad member walked up with a book in his hand and a puzzled look. He opened the book and pointed to a name on a page: Betty Cloer. Did Rob know her? The book was about the Zodiac Killer, and it listed Betty Cloer as one of his possible victims.

Shocked, but determined not to appear weak, Rob Cloer tried to respond as casually as possible: "That was my mother. But it wasn't by him."

Later, in a bathroom, when no one could hear him, Cloer wept.

After the military, Cloer got married. They moved to Eugene, where he got a job in a mill.

Cloer told his wife about his mother but otherwise kept his secret.

Bob and Dee Dee Kouns settled in Portland in 1969, when their daughter, Valerie, was 15. After getting her high school diploma, Valerie attended the San Francisco Art Institute. She earned a degree in filmmaking but modeled and took small acting roles to make money.

In June 1980, Valerie McDonald moved into an apartment in North Beach. Less than six months later, she decided to move out because she was afraid of two ex-cons -- Philip A. Thompson, and John G. Abbott -- who had taken over the management of the building.

Thompson and Abbott had violent pasts.

Thompson's extensive record included two rape charges in the early 1970s. He went to prison in 1975 for assault with a deadly weapon, forgery and receiving stolen property. While in prison, he was convicted of soliciting crime, being an accessory to a felony, being a felon in possession of a firearm, receiving stolen property and escape.

In a prison intake center, he met Abbott, a former Asian studies major at the University of California at Davis, who spoke Japanese and had an IQ of 160. Abbott had been convicted of assaulting a police officer. He went to prison after he was involved in a shootout that left his younger brother dead.

On Nov. 9, Valerie McDonald was moving her possessions out of her apartment when Michael Hennessey -- an ex-con who met Thompson and Abbott in prison -- said he could get her a small part in a movie starring Dustin Hoffman as a detective in pursuit of a serial killer.

The killer went after beautiful blondes. Hennessey told McDonald that she would be perfect for the blonde who got away. McDonald was suspicious, but Hennessey allayed her fears by pretending to make several calls to the movie set.

The next day, when McDonald had not returned home, a friend called the police. An officer said she couldn't file a missing persons report for 72 hours.

The friend spent a week looking for McDonald and talking to the police before she figured out how to get in touch with the Kounses, who flew to San Francisco. Dee Dee Kouns said the police initially brushed off her and Bob, saying their daughter probably went to Las Vegas.

Eventually, the police assigned an officer from the missing persons division to the case, but as soon as he started poking around, Thompson, Abbott and Hennessey disappeared.

That was Nov. 19, Dee Dee Kouns said, 10 days after her daughter had gone missing.

Hennessey and Abbott turned up more than 800 miles away in Trail, B.C., where Abbott had graduated from high school. On Nov. 26, they got into a shootout with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Hennessey was killed. Abbott was arrested and charged with attempted murder.

A search of their belongings uncovered McDonald's ID cards and the leather jacket she was wearing the day she vanished.

Police also learned that Thompson had been in Trail but had returned to California before the shootout.

Eventually, police theorized that McDonald was killed because she found out about the ex-cons' violent crime ring, which included a possible plan to trade guns to Central American rebels for cocaine.

Although the evidence suggested a link between Abbott and Thompson and McDonald's disappearance, neither ex-con admitted any involvement. Without a body, a weapon or a murder scene, San Francisco police decided they could not make an arrest.

Abbott went to prison in Canada for his role in the shootout and was deported to his native England in the late 1980s.

Thompson returned to prison in California in 1983 on kidnapping and robbery charges unrelated to the McDonald case.

The Kounses remained deeply frustrated with just about every aspect of the criminal justice system. They were unhappy that Thompson and Abbott got out of prison early to be in a position to harm their daughter. And they resented what they said was a slow response and callous treatment by police.

In Oregon, they founded Crime Victims United, an advocacy group. They pushed for change through the Legislature and the ballot, often using their daughter's story to further their cause.

They co-sponsored a 1986 initiative that opened criminal trials and parole hearings to crime victims and their families.

The Kounses and Crime Victims United also threw their support behind Measure 11, a 1994 initiative that set some of the longest mandatory criminal sentences in the nation. As of January 2004, 38 percent of Oregon's 12,751 prison inmates were serving Measure 11 sentences, according to Sue Porter, prison population forecast analyst with the state Office of Economic Analysis.

In January 2001, the Kounses had been retired from political advocacy for several years when they received a visit from the sheriff and undersheriff of Ferry County, Wash., which shares a border with British Columbia. The sheriff told the Kounses that a partial skeleton found by hunters in a river a decade earlier had recently been identified through dental records as McDonald's.

The Kounses were relieved -- they thought their daughter's body would never be found -- and grateful to the sheriff's office for not giving up trying to identify the remains.

But they also were frustrated the identification took so long, wasting time that might have helped solve the case.

The sheriff promised to open an investigation, but Dee Dee Kouns says the small police department probably does not have the resources to pick up such a cold trail.

Two years later, Rob Cloer got a surprise.

An El Dorado County, Calif., sheriff's sergeant had attended a seminar on using genetic testing in cold cases. Afterward, he decided to see whether such testing could reveal who had killed Betty Cloer in 1971 and left her body in a field.

In late 2003, a DNA test matched the sperm left on the young woman's clothes 32 years before to a California prison inmate: Philip A. Thompson.

The name meant nothing to Cloer, but the news knocked the wind out of him. He said he couldn't go to work for three days. He sank into a kind of numb shock, sleeping whenever he wasn't working. It was several months before he emerged.

When the Kounses learned of Thompson's arrest, they cheered. Although Thompson had been behind bars since the early 1980s, he had become eligible for parole. They were both angry and fearful that he might go free.

Cloer was wary, hesitant to look at a man he'd spent so much of his life thinking about killing. But in a court appearance last year, he saw Thompson, who has pleaded not guilty to murder. Cloer now plans to attend an upcoming preliminary hearing.

In 2004, Bob Kouns died from cancer. Rob Cloer's grandparents, whom he called "Mom" and "Dad," also died.

After playing phone tag, Dee Dee Kouns and Rob Cloer talked late last year for the first time.

"It was extremely difficult, but at the same time I got the impression we were both looking forward to hearing from one another," Cloer said. "There are not many people in the world you have in common with things like this. Even though it was a horrible, horrible situation, it kind of connected us."

For nearly 34 years, Cloer tried to keep his mother's murder a secret.

"But every six months, once a year, something happens: a song on the radio, a smell in the air brings back the memories, and I'm locked in a bathroom crying like an idiot," he said. "If you're going to try and bury it all the time, that's what's going to happen."

If Thompson is convicted, Cloer hopes it will "allow memories of my mother to come into my life without being so painful."

Dee Dee Kouns said she would be "ecstatic" to see Thompson put away for the rest of his life.

"He is up for parole. If he gets convicted of Betty's murder, I think he'll never see the light of day. And that's what I want. And I want it because it's justice for Betty and justice for Rob, but it's also the appropriate thing for society. But it doesn't solve Val's murder," Kouns said.

"I'd like to see Abbott held responsible for Val's murder, and I'd like to see Thompson held responsible for Val's murder. That would be justice."

More links:

http://www.maebrussell.com/SF-Wash. State crime/Without A Trace.html

http://www.maebrussell.com/SF-Wash. State crime/Mystery of Disappearing Actress.html
 
http://www.investigatemagazine.co.n...murderer-found-after-30-years-in-new-zealand/

In the meantime, John Gordon Abbott had been released from his Canadian prison and deported to England, his country of birth where the trail for investigators went cold.

Last year Investigate magazine discovered Abbott living in a tiny provincial New Zealand village where he had purchased millions of dollars of property since 1990, all of it for cash. He had originally slipped into New Zealand without declaring his criminal past.

He had flown to Australia on business when the magazine story broke within New Zealand, and police put borders on alert for his arrest if he tried to re-enter. Australian police also placed their border security on alert.

Dubbed the “millionaire murderer” by a neighbour who’d become suspicious after Googling his name, Abbott had been dividing his time between teaching at a Japanese University for part of each year, and then returning to his New Zealand bolt hole for the other half of the year. He was trying to get to his family home in Japan when the tsunami struck, devastating his city.
-----
Abbott was prevented from re-entering Australia or New Zealand and police have informed Investigate he returned to England, where he still has citizenship by birth.

In the meantime the family of slain actress Valerie McDonald are asking US authorities to seek his extradition from the UK back to the US to face murder charges.

Well if he's in the UK - there doesn't seem to be much news on him.
My guess is he ended up in Japan, or South Africa or South America.
I wondered if the NZ Government confiscated his property.

'
 
I want to know why he hasn't been extradited back to the US. I think the property is still in his name in NZ.
 
I am not aware that JGA (John Gordon Abbott) has any warrants outstanding in the US. He served his armed robbery sentence for the Davis Jewelery shop job back in the 70's and he completed his firearm sentence in BC Canada in the late 80's. He has been linked to the Valerie MacDonald case but no charges have been brought.

What is not clear is why he fled NZ. I am not aware that there are any charges pending against him anywhere in the world. It is possible that he failed to disclose his prior felony convictions when he emigrated to NZ. This would probably cause him to lose his immigration status but I'm not so sure it would result in asset forfeiture.

The real question is "what has he been up to all these years?" We know he has been some sort of a professor in Japan but that doesn't seem to explain how he has become so wealthy. It is a good guess he has been up to some illegal activity but we don't know what it is.

This whole case seems like something out of Crime Fiction. A bit over-the-top perhaps but all of the elements are there. A genius-criminal (not exactly a "criminal-genius" considering his early failures at big time crime) and a Common Criminal recruited by the CIA for "black operations". Still, there are a lot of blank spots that need to be filled in before we know what really happened to Valarie.
 
an informant in jail gave info about what happened to Val. I would love to know how that informant got the info out of either John or Phillip. Those two don't seem trusting.
 
There are no charges in the U.S against Abbott. Valerie's body was not identified until after Abbott served his sentence in Canada and was deported back to England. Local authorities in the jurisdiction where she was found have stated that they would like to interview Abbott about the case, but that is never going to happen.

This case has multiple layers of intrique.

Abbott's father was a high-up in the IMF, World Bank and the Reagan Treasury Department with a lot of clout. Abbott should have been deported to the U.S. to face bank robbery charges - the same charges that Thompson was eventually convicted for and was given a long sentence. However, like Thompson's criminal career, Abbott has lived a charmed life, never receiving treatment that one would expect based on his actions.

Thompson may one of the most interesting people I have ever come across. He was a combination Mafia hitman, a CIA asset and a serial rapist/thrill-killer. I have seen a lot of criminals that are one or the others, but PAT seemed to do it all.

During the Nixon Administration, PAT worked for a White House group called the Intelligence Evaluation Committee (IEC) that was headed by representatives of several different Federal agencies (FBI, CIA, etc.). It's purpose was to "deal with" radical anti-war protesters and other domestic agitators. G. Gordon Liddy, who was active in IEC, stated that one of the plans discussed and partially implemented was to have operatives kidnap protest leaders and hold them in Mexico until after the 1972 Republican Convention to prevent Nixon from having a repeat of the Chicago Democratic Convention riots four years earlier. This is likely why Thompson was on the IEC staff - he was just the sort of goon to do this sort of dirty work.

The next milestone in Thompson's career was he was arrested and convicted in 1976 for several charges involving machine-gunning to death one Ronald E. Winter in Sacramento. Winter was scheduled to testify the following day in a case concerning stolen weapons from Mather Air Force Base. From what I have learned from speaking to local law-enforcement, PAT was involved in the theft ring, but had not been arrested with his accompliaces. Thompson then killed Winter who had knowledge of the ring and who was involved.

For this crime, PAT was convicted of "accessory to murder" though I have not found any evidence that anyone else was at the scene except Thompson and the victim.

It was during this prison time that Thompson met Abbott. Shortly afterwards, they both escaped the prison and went on a robbery and kidnapping spree. They were eventually captured and returned to prison. Here is where this gets very wierd: neither one of these two were ever charged with escape or any other crimes committed while out. Instead, they were returned to serve out their sentences with no additional penalties.

Both were paroled in 1980 - Thompson first, then Abbott. Hennessey was also paroled at around the same time. Thompson somehow landed a job as apartment manager at the Tower Hotel where Valerie lived. PAT then hired Abbott and Hennessey as assistant managers. (I always thought that parolees were not allowed to associate together , but , as always, Thompson and Abbott seemed to live charmed lives.)

The three then started robbing armored cars and banks in an elaborate scheme: They would take the loot from the robberies, buy weapons and then travel to Central America and trade the weapons for drugs that would then be imported back to the US and sold on the street. Each transaction would increase the value of the loot.

This money-for-guns-for-drugs scheme mirrors what many believe the CIA was doing to help finance right-wing insurgents in Central America such as the Contras in Nicaragua. However, Thompson and Abbott predated the alleged CIA scheme by a couple of years - were these crimes a prototype that was later perfected by others?

More to come...
 
For those of you who are interested in researching Phillip Arthur Thompson on your own:

There are many weird characters involved with Thompson and this case. The following is a short list and my humble opinions about their reliability. I have grouped them into the various "camps" concerning this material.

1. newsmakingnews.com
Virginia McCullough
Kate Dixon

Be very wary of info provided by this website which is ran by Dixon with McCullough a frequent contributor. VM worked for the defense of Thompson when he was convicted of murder one for Betty Cloer. Her published materials reads like a public relations release for some of the spookiest spooks out there including Thompson. KD and VM were close to being barred from the courtroom during Thompson's trial for their antics. I have not figured out their agenda, but it is clear that they have one and making Thompson look like a good guy is definitely part of it.

2. Michael Riconosciuto
Anita Langley

MR is a convicted meth-cooker / spook who ran in the same circles as PAT and seems to be his mortal enemy. He runs a website through Anita (MR's cousin by marriage) which republishes various news articles about Thompson. The articles are from legit sources, but be wary of stuff sourced to Michael himself - he may be legit, but his rep among interested authorities is that he is often unreliable.

3. Rachel Begley (aka Desertfae)
Cheri Seymour (aka Carol Marshall)
Book: The Last Circle

Rachel is an acquaintance who's father was murdered with two others near Palm springs in 1980 which PAT was likely involved in. Seymour is the author of "The Last Circle" which details the crooked dealings surrounding theh Cabazon Indian Reservation (for which Thompson provided his skills as a goon) and Rachel's quest for justice for her father. I generally trust any info published by these two.

The general principle to use is trust no source completely - there are too many agendas bouncing around to be lazy and just trust one source including myself. In this sense, it is not unlike the Gosch case. However, it definitely has solid info out there if you look hard enough.
 
IIRC, Anita Langley claims that Valerie MacDonald was Michael Riconosciuto's "girlfriend" and that PAT killed her to get revenge on MR. This seems unlikely since Valerie was stunningly beautiful and MR...er... isn't.

Virginia McCullough claims that MR killed MacDonald and framed PAT for the crime. This also seems unlikely since Valerie's jacket and some other belongings were found among the items confiscated from John Abbott by the RCMP.

What is strange is that I have not been able to identify exactly when Thompson and Riconosciuto first crossed paths. They both worked for the Cabazon Indian Reservation starting in 1981, but these contradicting accusations predate that time. I suspect that it was much earlier, but have not been able to discover a timeframe to place this in context.
 
In the period starting with the rape/murder of Betty Cloer and ending with the apparent rape/murder of Valerie MacDonald, Phillip Thompson also was charged with two separate rape charges. Both were dismissed for lack of evidence, but Thompson's accomplaice during one of the crimes later testified at the Cloer trial that Thompson and himself had, in fact, been guilty of the crime. (One of the victims eventually committed suicide - authorities have stated that they believe it was brought on by the trauma she had faced during the rape, but this will never be known for sure.)
 
Are there court docs for these two rape cases? what happened to the accomplice?
 
IIRC, Anita Langley claims that Valerie MacDonald was Michael Riconosciuto's "girlfriend" and that PAT killed her to get revenge on MR. This seems unlikely since Valerie was stunningly beautiful and MR...er... isn't.

Virginia McCullough claims that MR killed MacDonald and framed PAT for the crime. This also seems unlikely since Valerie's jacket and some other belongings were found among the items confiscated from John Abbott by the RCMP.

What is strange is that I have not been able to identify exactly when Thompson and Riconosciuto first crossed paths. They both worked for the Cabazon Indian Reservation starting in 1981, but these contradicting accusations predate that time. I suspect that it was much earlier, but have not been able to discover a timeframe to place this in context.

I've been following a little the machinations of Anita Langley and Virginia McCullough- and while I can see Langley is probably just being directed by Riconosciuto's, I have a hard time reading into the motives of McCullough. There's something really bizarre about this whole case.
 
I still want to know about those other two rape cases-what time period did they occur in?
 
Scriptgirl,

I will have to reconstruct my notes concerning these cases (I cannot seem to find them), but iirc, the info came from articles durring Thompson's trial and were published in the "Mountain Democrat" newspaper. I believe the two rapes occurred just prior to the Cloer murder. I will post greater details soon.
 
I dont think Thompson was talking about the Cloer murder. Cloer was found so soon after her murder, but Valerie's body was stashed. And wasnt found for so long afterwards. And it was in the direction of Trail, where Abbott fled after the murder. I dont have a question in my mind that it wasnt Thompson. I just cant understand why he was used as a snitch, or why Sutherland presumably came in after the LE did, and claimed that her body had been tossed out to sea.

Interestingly during the preliminary hearing in People v. Wisely, Richard Kish, another informant in the case, testified that Wisely told him that “another man named Thompson at that time he told me that Thompson had killed a girl up near San Francisco that he had -- that he knew where the body was stashed.” (Reporter’s Transcript (Preliminary Hearing), People v. Wisely, Super. Ct. Orange County, No. C-48114, Sep. 30, 1981, p. 358, attached herein as Exhibit L.) Whether Thompson was describing the murder for which he was convicted or another murder is unknown. Nonetheless, Thompson certainly would have had additional reason to fabricate Wisely’s participation in a crime, if he had confided in him his participation in an unsolved murder and already believed based upon his experience with Wisely in the Los Angeles case that Wisely was someone who might share damaging information with authorities.
 
Here is a rather long sit down interview with Abbott.

 
Here is a very detailed write-up about the murder of Betty Cloer (19 June 1971) by Thompson. It also mentions the murder of Carol Hilburn (13 November 1970).

Also mentioned are Donna Lass and Judith Hakari.

LINK:

THE MURDER OF BETTY CLOER
 
The murder of Judith Hakari has been associated with the Zodiac murders, The East Area Rapist investigation and the Philip Arthur Thompson series of crimes. There were a disturbing number of sexually related murders of young women in the Sacramento area in the late 60’s-early 70’s. Some were victims of high profile serial killers. There may have been one or more as yet unidentified serial killers and some random one-offs. 5o years has passed and except for those cases with retained biological material, there is little chance of solving them. Most of the perpetrators are now in their 70’s or more likely dead.
 

Members online

Online statistics

Members online
162
Guests online
945
Total visitors
1,107

Forum statistics

Threads
589,935
Messages
17,927,866
Members
228,005
Latest member
vigilandy
Back
Top