CA CA - Stephanie Crowe, 12, Escondido, 21 January 1998

This is the just what I was discussing once before. The total lunacy and complete lack of common sense (on the part of the police) in their metamorphosis of a "theory".

The original logic given for focusing on a 14-year-old gifted student who had never been in trouble prior to this, was that the father was an obvious "no", there was no disturbance, and no sign of an intruder in the Crowe home (that phrase is so overused... like a drone... by police everywhere that it actually makes me cringe. It is almost as if you can picture them at the academy, as if in boot camp, being forced to repeat over and over again "No sign of an intruder. No evidence of forced entry."... *shudder*)

So they focus on an easy target... a child. They lie to him about evidence that does not even remotely exist. Of course they can legally do this with adults... but a child will accept what a policeman says without question. That is why it is the LAW that a PARENT be informed of the questioning and be allowed to be present. An adult guardian also can choose to hire an attorney for the child, something the child CANNOT do by law. No one under the age of 18 in most states, 17 in some states, can enter into a legal contract. That is why you do not question a child without a parent's informed consent. It is not only the law... it is a matter of law enforcement ethics.

By the time they got finished manipulating Michael Crowe, they had a total of at least THREE awkward teenage boys fumbling around in this house while the rest of the family slept right through it. They had Joshua Treadway sitting patiently at the dining room table, (in full view of any family member who might wake up to use the bathroom) waiting for Aaron Hauser to "finish off" Stephanie, after her violent struggle with her own brother, so he could then walk another five miles back home. :rolleyes:

But there was "no sign of anyone being in that house other than the Crowe family." :bang:

One small... skinny... uninhibited by drug use... seen at every other house on the block that night... prior convicted criminal... absolutely could NOT have managed to breach the Crowe home and stab Stephanie.

BUT... three inexperienced... clumsy by design... two of them exhausted from walking five miles in record time... teenage boys... could have EASILY converged upon the Crowe home and "group murdered" a twelve-year-old girl?? And then waltzed right back out disturbing no one?? A girl, nearly as large as they were... who would have recognized all three of them... and would have almost certainly yelled out their names in an effort to make them stop. Whereas the same 12-year-old child, confronted by a near thirty-year-old man she had never seen in her life, would most likely have been paralyzed by fear, and never got the chance to make a sound.
 
Babcat said:
BUT... three inexperienced... clumsy by design... two of them exhausted from walking five miles in record time... teenage boys... could have EASILY converged upon the Crowe home and "group murdered" a twelve-year-old girl?? And then waltzed right back out disturbing no one?? A girl, nearly as large as they were... who would have recognized all three of them... and would have almost certainly yelled out their names in an effort to make them stop. Whereas the same 12-year-old child, confronted by a near thirty-year-old man she had never seen in her life, would most likely have been paralyzed by fear, and never got the chance to make a sound.
Ah, but could ONE of the boys have done it? As a bizarre theory, could Joshua Treadway, the one who accused Michael, have actually have done it? He would know the habits of the family ( doors locked or not, what times they went to bed, etc). He could describe it so completely because he did it? Not that I believe that, BTW, just thinking of other possibilities.

I don't believe that a person, sound asleep in bed, being stabbed awake would necessarily scream, either, but I always find it hard to believe people can walk around in a house and no one wakes up. My kids move and I wake up (I keep hoping I'll outgrow that-I haven't had a decent night's sleep in four years) Must be the house layout.
 
The exaggerations, half-truths and outright lies Michael Crowe told Escondido detectives during his interrogation following the killing of his sister were part of a desperate attempt to avoid jail, he testified yesterday.

On the stand for the third day in the trial of Richard Tuite, Crowe said in response to questions from defense attorney Brad Patton that he made up things in an effort to give detectives what he thought they wanted to hear.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/crowe/20040420-9999-1m20tuite.html

This is part of what makes me go hmmmm... why would he start lying.
 
Doyle said:
This is part of what makes me go hmmmm... why would he start lying.
I understand what you are saying. For myself, that does not make me go Hmmm only because I saw what the police did to my murdered friend's boyfriend. They told him they could prove he did it, but it was a lot of hooey. Until he finally produced his witness (he was out of town), they didn't leave him alone. IMO, a fourteen year old would have said anything to make them stop badgering him after a few hours of being told that they can prove he did it. What he says in the article makes sense to me.
"The meaning to him, Crowe testified, was that "if I could answer their questions and explain everything to them I would be able to go to the mental health place instead of to jail." " If I was up against authority who thought I was guilty, and they told me I was either going to jail or to a mental institution, I might have tried for the mental institution, too. (maybe not)

Your body and brain are pretty messed up when you are 14, again IMO. Remember that glorious time when your hormones are jerking you all over, you're too old to be a kid and too young to be an adult?
 
Doyle,

Have you seen the tapes of the interrogation the police did of Michael Crowe? They are truly painful to watch. My oldest daughter will be fourteen in two weeks. Kids of this age are nearly as big as adults. It is deceptive to those who don't have kids that age yet, or have first hand experience with kids that age, because it is easy to treat them as you would an adult. It is hard for most people to remember being that age. They might remember events, friends, etc., but they don't remember how they reasoned then compared to now. They don't remember how they reacted emotionally to things compared to how they react as an adult. It is very difficult to remove yourself from yourself, essentially, and remember back to a time when you didn't know what you know now.

Kids at 14 are soooo gullible. They are like peacocks, spreading out their feathers and puffing out their chests trying very hard to be "grown-up", and not allow others to see that their brain still functions as a child. If you don't have a kid that age, but you can find a neighbor kid or relative you know well who is comfortable with you, try an experiment. It really doesn't matter if the kid is a boy or a girl, but keep in mind that boys are even LESS mature at age 14. Boys will puff out that chest and spread those feathers wider than girls will, yet they are even MORE gullible as a general rule. (This is why there is such a problem with girls of thirteen and fourteen attempting to sneak "dating" boys of 16, 17, even older, because boys their own age are so far behind them.)

Anyway... the experiment. Try very seriously and straight faced telling a kid of 14 an Urban Legend that you know would make your friends your own age roll their eyes. If it isn't widely told, (and therefore already known to the kid as an Urban Legend) watch how fast they buy it. Or try this... tell the kid that you were watching Animal Planet while they were at school and it was so interesting. Explain how the Aborigines in Australia had found a way to breed kangaroos with mountain goats and make phenomenal pack animals. (I'm making this up as I go along just as an example.) Tell him/her you can't wait to go to the website about it... then watch the kid's reaction. An adult would wait curiously and play along, but would be expecting a punchline at the end if you brought up a website. They would be expecting a stupid cartoon or doctored photo as the finale of this joke. But the 14-year-old would be buying this hook, line, and sinker. If the website actually existed, and the cartoon appeared, it would literally take them by surprise.

This has NOTHING to do with intelligence. My nine-year-old is a gifted student. She is a year ahead in school, attends a special program one day a week, reads on a high school level, solves complex puzzles and algebra problems. She also starts crying if she drops the ball during a softball play. She always has mysterious ailments come upon her when she's told to clean her room. She needs to be sent back upstairs several mornings a week and "reminded" to brush her teeth. She may have the reading comprehension of age 15, but she has the maturity of age nine.

Michael Crowe was plenty intelligent enough to understand what the police were saying and implying, more so than most 14-year-old boys. But he had the maturity level of a 14-year-old boy. The combination of these two factors made his interrogation even MORE painful to watch. It was like watching my own daughter Shannon (the nine-year-old) be interrogated. Because of the superior intelligence they have an insight ability that others their age do not have. And most of them also have a strong desire to please their teachers, parents, or anyone they see as an instructor. They can see the end of the puzzle as the interrogator starts laying out the pieces. They WANT to solve it, because it is their nature. But they do not have enough life experience to recognize a trap. It nevers enters their mind that the adult may be lying, or just wrong. And to make matters worse, they are gullible, because all emotionally immature people are. And all children are emotionally immature. But those who feel an obligation to solve the puzzle try to assimilate what they know with what they are being told. When the two scenarios cannot be justified, the child becomes anxious because they cannot solve the puzzle. This is when they begin to doubt their own knowledge of an event rather than doubt what the adult is telling them.

It is similar to having a dream and trying to tell the dream to someone else the next day. Dreams never entirely make sense, so almost all people will fill in the details that are missing in order to piece together a coherent story. They aren't intentionally lying. They are piecing together a puzzle to make a picture appear. Michael Crowe was trying to draw on what he knew to be the truth, and yet make the "facts" the police were telling him somehow fit together. There was no plausible way to do that without changing the truth. The police were not accepting the truth. In his immature mind he had no choice but to create a bridge between his own knowledge and what he believed was their knowledge.
 
where are the interviews available to look at... I have not seen them.

I am partially from Missouri and would like to see them.
 
Hmmm... I'll have to see if I can find some on the net to view. I have seen them repeatedly on different shows. Court TV had a documentary about it. Not the movie... the actual tapes. American Justice on A&E had an hour long program that showed a good deal of the tapes. Of course they are excerpts since the entire interrogation was hours long. But the part of the interrogation where Michael makes his "confession" has been shown repeatedly... I know I have seen it dozens of times. I don't tend to get emotionally involved easily in true crime stories since I watch and read so much of it that I would be depressed all the time. But this tape makes me cry. And it makes me terribly angry.

I cannot imagine what kind of fury it would produce in me if I were Michael's mother watching these grown men deceive and bully this child and tear him apart emotionally just hours after my daughter was butchered by someone they photographed then showed him the door. THREE grown men so totally clueless about children it boggles the mind. Maybe that particular police department could benefit from hiring more homicide detectives so these men could be home more often and actually get to know their own children. Then maybe they would get a clue. At least one child psychologist saw the tapes and called it the worst case of child abuse he ever saw in his life.
 
Prosecutors in the Richard Tuite trial called classmates, Crowe family members and friends to the stand yesterday in an attempt to counter the defense's portrayal of Michael Crowe as a brooding, anger-filled loner from a dysfunctional family who wanted his sister, Stephanie, dead.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/crowe/20040421-9999-1mi21tuite.html

When detectives wouldn't accept the truth for an answer and said he could be charged with Stephanie Crowe's murder, Joshua Treadway said he resorted to making up a conspiracy tale to please his interrogators and stay out of jail.

Treadway, whose initial interrogation came on his 15th birthday in January 1998, testified yesterday in the trial of Richard Tuite that detectives convinced him they could prove the knife found under his bed was the one used to kill the 12-year-old Escondido girl.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/crowe/20040422-9999-1mc22tuite.html
 
One of three teens originally charged with murdering his friend's sister testified today he had no reason to kill the girl and never heard the brother talk about it either.

Aaron Houser, 21, was called to the stand in the trial of transient Richard Tuite.

Houser told jurors he was mad at Michael Crowe and wasn't speaking to him in the months before 12-year-old Stephanie Crowe was stabbed to death Jan. 21, 1998.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/crowe/20040427-1651-tuite.html
 
At the insistence of detectives who were listening in, Joshua Treadway placed a phone call and read questions from a script in an effort to incriminate Aaron Houser in the murder of Stephanie Crowe.

That "controlled call" on Jan. 28, 1998, one week after the Escondido 12-year-old's body was found in a pool of blood on her bedroom floor, was the subject of intense testimony in the murder trial of Richard Tuite yesterday.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/crowe/20040428-9999-1mi28tuite.html

Aaron Houser, a member of the teenage trio once accused of the murder of Stephanie Crowe, calmly testified Tuesday that he was not involved in the 1998 slaying of the 12-year-old Escondido girl.

Houser also tried to explain statements he'd made and the emotions he felt during a phone call between him and friend Joshua Treadway, a taped conversation that Treadway had made at the behest of the Escondido Police Department.
http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2004/04/28/news/inland/20_20_494_27_04.txt
 
I'm of the opinion that what LE did to those 3 teenagers is reprehensible. I've seen nothing so far in this trial that does anything but strengthen that opinion.
 
A forensic expert testified yesterday that it was "virtually impossible" for Stephanie Crowe's blood to be transferred from a camera tripod onto Richard Tuite's shirt when it was examined at a police crime lab.

The testimony by John Thornton, a retired forensic-science professor at the University of California Berkeley, called into question the defense's explanation regarding a key piece of evidence against the mentally ill former transient.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/crowe/20040430-9999-1mi30tuite.html
 
Theories of police interrogations and contamination of evidence took a front seat in court last week as prosecutors tried to rebut accusations that Stephanie Crowe's murder came at the hands of her brother and two of his buddies.

The theories were the topic of expert testimony as prosecutors continued to argue that the Escondido Police Department took a wrong turn early on in the investigation of the 1998 slaying of the popular 12-year-old girl.
http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2004/05/02/news/top_stories/19_22_095_1_04.txt
 
After 14 weeks, 169 witnesses, 30 hours of interrogation videotape and countless crime-scene photos and exhibits, testimony ended yesterday in the trial of Richard Tuite in the 1998 slaying of 12-year-old Stephanie Crowe of Escondido
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/crowe/20040505-9999-1mi5tuite.html

On the hit TV show "CSI," the crime lab is a place of perfection, the technicians godlike in their ability to find and interpret blood drops, fingerprints and knife wounds.

By the time Gil Grissom and his crew have finished running evidence through their high-tech gizmos in Las Vegas, in fact, there's never any question about what happened – or about the identity of the bad guy.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/crowe/20040504-9999-lz1c4csi.html

A forensic expert testified yesterday that the knife Richard Tuite's attorneys say was used by three teenagers to kill Stephanie Crowe does not match cuts in the girl's comforter.

Barton Epstein, a Minnesota criminalist, said the tests he did on Stephanie's comforter using a Best Defense knife caused certain tearing not found in the roughly 1-foot-square swatch through which the Escondido 12-year-old was stabbed.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/crowe/20040504-9999-1m4tuite.html
 
Doyle said:
One of three teens originally charged with murdering his friend's sister testified today he had no reason to kill the girl and never heard the brother talk about it either.

Aaron Houser, 21, was called to the stand in the trial of transient Richard Tuite.

Houser told jurors he was mad at Michael Crowe and wasn't speaking to him in the months before 12-year-old Stephanie Crowe was stabbed to death Jan. 21, 1998.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/crowe/20040427-1651-tuite.html

This is one of the things I pointed out a page back. If they hadn't been talking, then how does the defense propose that they even planned this out? I mean, surely the cops would have been able to trace phone activity between these three. From what I remember, there was only one phone call between Michael and Johsua Treadway when Joshua called to find out why he wasn't in school that day. Other than that there was no indication that there had been some great big plan going on between the three of them. And then Aaron Houser suddenly being mad at Michael for months, on the outs with him..just all of a sudden decides to help him carry out some plan to kill his sister. I can't believe it. Interesting article about the knife too and how it doesn't match the knife marks and cuts made on the bed.
 

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