Crime

Behind the Bars

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 08:30:01 +0000

Behind the Bars Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/01/2017 - 02:30

Lisa Marshall

A CU professor goes inside America's prisons to study gang life.

Seated inside a windowless, soundproof room at the county jail in Fresno, Calif., David Pyrooz was getting nervous.

Across from him sat a gang member awaiting trial for murder, his slick-bald head tattooed with a devil’s horn above each temple. His eyes were darting, a sign that — as Pyrooz’s professors had warned — the interviewee might be growing impatient.

Pyrooz, then a 22-year-old criminology student, glanced at the button on the wall he’d been instructed to press in case of trouble.

The inmate spoke: “You know, you have to hold that button for two seconds before someone will come.”

David Pyrooz, assistant professor of sociology

“I remember thinking ‘A lot can happen in two seconds,’” Pyrooz said. He paused, reestablished eye contact and asked the next question.

Fast forward 12 years and Pyrooz, an assistant professor of sociology at ��񱦵�, has interviewed hundreds of gang members in correctional facilities and on the streets, searching for insight into how some people manage to avoid or escape what he calls “the snare” of gang life, while others succumb to it and suffer lifelong consequences.

His research comes at a time when 33,000 violent gangs with 1.4 million members are active in the United States and gang violence — though down from its 1990s peak — still plagues cities like Denver and Chicago, where 50 percent of homicides are gang-related. The Trump administration has named one gang, MS-13, “one of the gravest threats to American public safety.”

Pyrooz, with several high-profile papers newly published and the largest-ever study of imprisoned gang members in the works, hopes his research can prevent youth from joining gangs and help veteran members escape. His colleagues say the work could also shed light on the power of groupthink and its hold over all of us.

“I have always been fascinated by social groups whose collective power is greater than the sum of their individual parts,” said Pyrooz, a married father of two young children. “We all like to think our accomplishments come from individual merit, but so much of our success is driven by the people in our environment. If it weren’t for the gang, things might have turned out differently for a lot of these guys.”

Dodging the Snare

Pyrooz grew up in California in the 1990s, splitting his time between his dad’s house in the Bay Area, where the Norteno gang ruled, and his mom’s house in the Central Valley, Sureno turf.

By 6th grade, he was noticing groups hanging out by their cars, rap music booming, gang signs flashing. Roadside buildings were emblazoned with graffiti.

By high school, some of his friends were in gangs.

33,000 violent gangs with 1.4 million members are active in the U.S.

Instead, he made salutatorian and landed a scholarship to California State University, where he volunteered to help a criminology professor with research at the local jail. Those first interviews fed his curiosity about what makes “us” and “them” so different — or whether we really are.

“I was struck by how, in many ways, these guys behind bars were not much different than me or my friends,” Pyrooz said. “They just got caught doing something, and once they got into that web that is the criminal justice system, they had a hard time getting out.”

Later, during doctoral studies at Arizona State University, Pyrooz explored a question few others had: How does joining a gang as a teen — as 8 percent of U.S. adolescents do — impact life later on for the gang member?

He found sobering answers: Joiners were 30 percent less likely to earn a high school diploma, 60 percent less likely to earn a college degree, more likely to be unemployed as an adult and lose tens of thousands of dollars in potential earnings — and 100 times more likely to die by homicide.

One subsequent study, subsidized by the Google Ideas think tank, explored how gangs use the Internet. (To brag about their exploits and keep tabs on other members, but generally not for recruitment, it found.) Another looked at similarities between gang members and domestic terrorists (not many, he found).

The closest of the seven prisons near David Pyrooz's old office was a 10-minute walk. He would often watch the newly released inmates file out, ready to start a new life, and wonder how they would do.

“What David has done that few others have is place gang membership in the context of what came before it and after it,” said Scott Decker, foundation professor of criminology at ASU. “That kind of understanding is critical when it comes to thinking about how to address this problem.”

The Art of the Interview

Before arriving at CU in 2015, Pyrooz taught at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, a.k.a. “Prison City U.S.A.,” because of its seven correctional facilities.

The closest was a 10-minute walk from his office. He’d often watch newly released inmates file out, ready to start a new life, and wonder how they would do.

There, he and Decker embarked on a monumental project. They began interviewing 800 inmates, half gang members, half not, 48 hours before they were released, then followed up with them 30 days and nine months later.

The project, still going, has been both gratifying and emotionally taxing, Pyrooz said.

He begins each interview by shaking the inmate’s hand, a gesture that — for someone who has not experienced human touch for months — can go a long way toward establishing trust and rapport. He breaks the ice with a friendly question: What are you most looking forward to eating when you get out?

“The number one thing I want to do is treat them as another human being, not a prisoner,” he said.

Then the stories pour out: A six-figure-salary businessman who landed in prison for a white-collar crime and joined the Mexican mafia for protection. A member of a motorcycle gang who got in trouble for fighting, landed in jail and took up with the Aryan Brotherhood. A young man who, at 18, fell in love with a 16-year-old girl. When the relationship went sour, her mom called the police. He was charged with statutory rape, went to prison, joined a gang, and never left.

Especially hard to hear are the stories of fathers who missed their children’s lives and of inmates in solitary confinement, whom Pyrooz talks with through a mesh wall.

“You just see a lot of lost potential,” he said. “You go home at night wondering what these guys might have been doing if they weren’t behind those bars. You also wonder: Are they really ready to get out?”

The Takeaways

His research has already produced some key conclusions.

First, it’s important to keep kids out of gangs, as 90 percent of juvenile crimes are committed in groups, and membership’s long-term consequences are grave.

Second, the way kids spend their time, and with whom, matters.

“Working to keep kids busy and monitor their activities, particularly the friends with whom they hang out, along with instilling in children good moral values and coping skills, are the ways in which we can keep youth out of gangs,” said Pyrooz, with a nod to his own attentive parents.

You see a lot of lost potential.

Many inmates he’s interviewed ultimately left their gangs, pulled away by the attractions of other groups comprised of wives or girlfriends, children and grandchildren, employers and friends.

“The stereotype is that these guys are violent predators with zero empathy for other people,” Pyrooz said. “Some of that is true, they have done some very bad stuff. But they still love their kids and want to see their families be successful. If you look at them at one point in time, they may look like the worst person out there, but even that person can change.”

Photos by Getty Images/Jan Sochor/CON

A CU professor goes inside America's prisons to study gang life.

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Sleuthing for Jane Doe

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 06:00:00 +0000

Sleuthing for Jane Doe Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/01/2010 - 00:00

Lisa Marshall

Silvia Pettem (A&S’69) is shown at the Columbia Cemetery in Boulder where the original headstone of Jane Doe, is part of a new marker (not shown) provided by Dorothy Gay Howard’s family.

As she pushes open the wrought-iron gate at Boulder’s Columbia Cemetery, Silvia Pettem (A&S’69) looks like she is coming home. She cradles a bundle of yellow daisies in one arm and glances warmly across a sea of weathered tombstones. A cool gust blows back her shoulder-length auburn hair, as if to welcome her.

“I don’t mean to sound too wacko,” she says, speaking bluntly as she often does. “But sometimes I even come and have my lunch here. I feel like I’m among friends.”

In a sense, she is.

In the course of her decades-long career as a local history writer, the colorful 63-year-old has gotten to know many of the inhabitants of this grassy 10-acre burial ground. There’s Mary Rippon, the CU professor who had a secret affair and bore a child with one of her students in the late 1800s; Tom Horn, a hired gunman who was wrongfully hanged for murder in 1903; and Marietta Kingsley, a notorious madam from Boulder’s 19th century red light district.

But while the others fed Pettem’s lifelong curiosity about history, none changed her life like the woman Boulderites knew — until recently — as “Jane Doe.”

“I feel like I know her,” Pettem says, as she kneels to gather a handful of crisp dead rose petals by her tombstone and replaces them with fresh flowers.

A born historian

Fifty-five years after she went missing, Dorothy Gay Howard, left, was identified in 2009 through DNA tests as the woman who was buried in Boulder’s Columbia Cemetery and known as Jane Doe.

From the day in 1996 when Pettem discovered the humble grave marker etched with the words “Jane Doe: April 1954: Age About 20 Years,” she has spent nearly 14 years investigating the crime. She scoured newspaper archives, court and coroner records and genealogy sites in hopes of identifying the mystery woman and bringing her murderer to justice. In the process, she has evolved from a middle-aged mom with zero police training into a lauded cold-case investigator called upon by law enforcement agents nationwide.

In May her work paid off when the victim’s surviving family members joined her at the cemetery to replace the “Jane Doe” headstone with one bearing the woman’s true name — Dorothy Gay Howard.

Now, with the mystery solved and her book Someone’s Daughter: In Search of Justice for Jane Doe (Taylor Trade Publishing) nominated for a Colorado Book Award, the biggest question facing Pettem is: What’s next?

“At the age of 63 I have found my life’s work,” she says.

Pettem was born in 1947 in Lancaster, Pa., the only child of an electrical engineer and a “homemaker who didn’t like housework.” She grew up in the suburbs in an ultramodern home she hated.

“I never felt comfortable there,” she says, tracing her affinity for all things antique back to her early youth.

When she landed in Boulder in 1965 as a CU psychology major, she found herself drawn to the area’s historic buildings, rugged mountain towns and rich pioneer history. Rather than observe them from a distance, she immersed herself, moving into a tiny Fourmile Canyon cabin with no electricity or running water where she cooked on a wood stove, sewed quilts and raised two daughters.

“Living up there in that environment really got me interested in who came before me,” she recalls.

Since then she’s written a dozen local history books, including Separate Lives: The Story of Mary Rippon (Book Lode) and Behind the Badge: 125 Years of the Boulder Police Department (Book Lode), as well as countless history columns for the Boulder Camera.

But on Oct. 5, 1996, her “relatively ordinary” life took an unexpected twist. While playing the part of Mary Rippon during a “Meet the Spirits” event at Columbia Cemetery, Pettem listened intently as an actor playing Jane Doe told Doe’s story:

“Please give me back my name. No one knows who I am or how I came to die — battered, beaten and naked on the rocky edge of Boulder Creek. I was found in April 1954 by two college students out on a hike. My murderer, whoever he was, was brutal and vicious, but the people of Boulder gave me a Christian funeral . . .”

“My first thought was that could be my daughter,” recalls Pettem, whose daughters were 19 and 23 at the time. “I thought to myself, ‘No one should go to the grave without a name.’”

Searching for Jane Doe

In the coming years, Pettem managed to track down the woman’s missing autopsy report and photos and reconstruct much of what happened to her via brittle newspaper clippings, phone interviews and internet research. She enrolled in a 12-week Citizens’ Academy to learn about the inner workings of the criminal justice system and sit in on police officer training classes. And she regularly visited the rocky Boulder Creek shore — just 300 yards downstream from the Boulder Falls parking lot — where Jane Doe’s body was found.

In 2003, with a bulging file in hand, she knocked on the office doors of Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle and then Lieutenant Phil West to ask if they would be willing to exhume Jane Doe’s body and reopen the case.

They obliged, well aware of the daunting task ahead.

“Frankly, for that period of time, our files are non-existent. There is a big blank in documentation through the 1960s,” West says. “It was only through Silvia’s diligence that we were able to reconstruct what became the case file.”

Pettem proceeded to open a donation fund and raised several thousand dollars from interested Boulder citizens and beyond to help pay for the exhumation. She also enlisted the help of Vidocq Society members (forensic specialists who volunteer to help solve cold murder cases) who donated their time and expertise over the years.

On a foggy June morning in 2004, a backhoe scraped away the dirt in Columbia Cemetery to reveal a disintegrated coffin and the exposed remains of Jane Doe. As officers wrapped police tape around the scene, Pettem found herself on the inside of the tape, standing by the open grave looking in. “It was exhilarating,” she admits.

A forensic sculptor used Jane Doe’s remains to craft a 3-D image of what she looked like, and soon it was appearing everywhere from People magazine to America’s Most Wanted. Finally, after several heartbreaking false leads and years of wondering, Pettem got her answer on Oct. 23, 2009.

DNA tests had confirmed that Jane Doe was Dorothy Gay Howard, a strong-willed Phoenix teen who left home in 1953 possibly to visit an aunt who lived in Denver’s Capitol Hill area. She never arrived.

While the case remains open, Pettem and West suspect Howard encountered convicted serial killer Harvey Glatman in Denver. (Ligature marks shown in Doe’s morgue photographs are similar to those left on the three women Glatman was convicted of murdering. He was executed in 1959.)

On May 22, Howard’s surviving sister, Marlene Ashman of Polk County, Ark., traveled to Boulder to bid final farewell to her sister and provide her with a tombstone etched with her name.

“At least people here were kind enough to love her and give her some dignity,” Ashman told reporters.

What’s next?

Standing by that gravestone today, Pettem can’t help but feel a sense of melancholy. Her relationship with Howard’s family has been more distant than she had hoped for.

“From the day I first walked into the sheriff’s office and said ‘I want to return these remains to the family’ I looked forward to the day I would meet them,” she says. “But it hasn’t been a warm relationship. Maybe it’s just too soon.”

And after so many years of dogged pursuit, “it has left a big gap in my life now that it’s solved.”

But that void will likely soon fill.

Already Pettem has been credited with assisting in another Boulder County cold case, helping to locate the killer (now deceased) in the 1970 homicide of an 18-year-old named Harold Nicky Nicholson. She’s also teaching courses to local law enforcement agencies, writing for forensic magazines and juggling invitations from around the country to help in unsolved crimes.

“I may have found my next project,” she says, keeping mum about the details.

And this one, she quips, won’t take 14 years.

As she pushes open the wrought-iron gate at Boulder’s Columbia Cemetery, Silvia Pettem looks like she is coming home.

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