To be a Putin critic is to play "Russian roulette" with your life

In the film Gorky Park, the police inspector (played by William Hurt) tells the forensic scientist who he wants to “reconstruct” the mutilated faces of murder victims found in the park that too many people in Russia fall into a “chasm.” What “chasm” is he talking about? The one between what is said and what is done. Naturally the KGB is knee-deep in it, as would be its successor, the FSB. It should come as no surprise that the string of murders of opposition figures in Russia in recent years have gone “unsolved,” given that the focal point of that opposition, Vladimir Putin, is a former KGB and FSB operative himself and certainly knows how to cover his bloody tracks. Those tracks are all too obvious to the West, but apparently not so to Russia’s “free” media and the majority of the people, who seem more than willing to believe the Kremlin’s deceptions, out of a sense of Russia’s self-imposed isolation caused by its anti-West and anti-democratic ways. 

The latest murder, that of former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, who was planning a public demonstration against the all-too-obvious Russian meddling in support of separatists in the Ukraine, follows that of  the 2003 killings of  politician Sergey Yushenkov and journalist Yuri Shchekochikhin, the 2004 assassination of magazine editor Paul Klebnikov, the 2006 murders of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and former spy Alexander Litvinenko, and the mysterious death of  Putin critic Boris Berezovsky, who like Litvinenko died while in exile in the UK.

All of these deaths had the fingerprints of Putin and his allies, and naturally none were actually solved. “Officially,” the Kremlin accused the usual Russian scapegoats. In Nemtsov’s case according to the UK The Guardian, 

In the 72 hours since Boris Nemtsov was murdered, the Kremlin has floated numerous explanations for his death. Vladimir Putin has called his killing a “provocation”. It’s a strange word. What Putin means is that whoever murdered Nemtsov did so to discredit the state. Since the state is the primary victim here, the state can’t be responsible, this logic runs…Others have blamed Islamist extremists. Or Ukrainian fascists. Putin’s ally Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s thuggish president, has accused “western spy agencies”, an old favourite. The muck-raking website Lifenews.ru, which has close links to the FSB, Putin’s former spy agency, has pointed the finger at Nemtsov’s colourful love life. At the time of his murder, he was walking past the Kremlin with a Ukrainian model, it noted.

Russia is clearly a country run amok with lies, deception and a population that is too self-involved to know the difference. Putin claims that he will “personally” oversee the investigation into Nemtsov’s death. Who is he kidding? Apparently most of Russia. It is more likely than not that the assassination was the work of either Putin’s own thugs in or out of government, or a nationalist fanatic. But can anyone doubt that the “usual suspects”—anyone out to make Putin and his government look “bad”—will be blamed? Will anyone be arrested and charged after all is said and done? Highly unlikely, especially if it means arresting the true perpetrators. Despite the fact that as an “enemy” of the current regime Nemtsov was under 24-hour surveillance by Russian ‘intelligence,” for some inexplicable reason there was a “breakdown” in the equipment at just the “right” time. Surveillance cameras on the bridge that he was crossing when he was killed was  not “operational” at that particular moment—and even more suspiciously, the killer and his getaway vehicle were perfectly positioned to be obscured from vision by a long-range camera. 

The Guardian dryly noted that some in the “alternative” Russian press believe that true responsibility for the killing lay at the lap of the “Four Bullets”—meaning the four state-run television networks, which typically parrot unquestioningly the Kremlin line with no objectivity or credibility in evidence whatever. I have criticized here before Kremlin propaganda organ RT (Russia Today) News on U.S. cable, and once more its “reporting” on the killing betrays extreme ignorance of the American public, seemingly taking for granted its belief in the “gullibility” of Americans to accept whole hog its “narrative” of what is going on in Russia, and what is “wrong” with the U.S. and the West; what the RT programmers don’t seem to realize is that having a steady stream of fringe fanatics and foreign commentators with extreme anti-American biases on its program only alienates Americans against its “message.”

And while in this country any taint of political violence usually means a media free-far-for-all and political suicide for whoever is accused of it, in Russia it is merely commonplace and usually “justified,” given both the power of state control, the ambivalence of the Russian public (“it is what it is”), and the irresponsibility of the Russian media. This is a “civilized” country?

Hispanics can't trust those "liberals," either

Back when Barack Obama announced his “executive order” to extend a policy that allowed the children of undocumented immigrants to remain in the country “temporarily” to adults who had not committed crimes (and “come out of the shadows”), I derided the order as a publicity stunt to convince the gullible to expose themselves to immediate deportation by registering themselves right into ICE data banks, to be used when the executive order was ultimately challenged in court. I observed that Republican complaints were just the usual red meat of hate to throw at their constituents, and the House of Representatives is just playing to the base by inserting language rescinding the executive order into the Homeland Security funding bill.

As predicted, the so-called “executive order” is on hold in court. I say “so-called,” because essentially that is all it was. Obama never actually signed the executive order; in fact, when he announced the order and gravely signed two sheets of paper in front of the cameras, what we were not told was that what he was signing had nothing to do with immigration. Why did Obama refuse to put his name to his supposed “order”? No doubt to add the “plausible deniability” he would need when the heat became too hot for him.

So Obama lied to the Hispanic community, and exposed millions of otherwise hardworking, law-abiding people to detriment by his false assurances. Unfortunately, this mendacity goes far beyond the political, and into the media. There is no denying the fact that the media—particularly during  the height of the anti-immigrant hysteria during the Bush administration—provided images of these people as little more than nameless, faceless, sometimes diseased and certainly “criminal” semi-human vermin (CNN was particularly notorious for this). No one ever asked these people about their life experiences or their hopes for themselves or their children. All they were here to do, in the words of far-right bigot Patrick Buchanan, was to “destroy America.”

The Seattle Times, as I noted in example after example over the years, contributed to this culture of hate; one or two “neutral on the facts” stories does not change that. Believe me, my observation upon perusing reader comments on the Times website accompanying these stories prove that while perhaps in the generality most people don’t “dwell” on their feelings about other groups, in individuals the hate is both pervasive and repellant, and causes one to wonder what actually lies behind the façade of every stranger’s face you encounter. 

Even for the so-called “liberals” this is true. There are of course those whose opinions are based on sound reasoning and are willing to listen to alternative input and reevaluate their position if someone who exists outside their own experience questions a particular “fact”; this would be particularly true from discussions from people of differing backgrounds and races. On the other hand, there are the phony “liberals” who just like to hear themselves talk; they want you to “love” them just because they are “speaking for you.” But when you point out certain discrepancies in their positions, they cannot accept any questioning of their patronage without taking personal offense and launching into illogical personal attacks. How dare you question them when they are deigning to be your “friend”? 

After the Pasco shooting—in which it turns out that 17 shots were fired by police in killing a Mexican farm worker for allegedly throwing rocks at trucks—national news outlets treated the story as another Ferguson-type incident. However, the Seattle Times certainly didn’t treat it as such. Every day I walk past the newsstand and peruse what the Times considers the “top” story above the front page cutline; if the Pasco story was there, I would have taken an immediate interest in it. That never happened. I passed on a message to the Times concerning my feelings about this along the lines of my previous post. I also contacted “liberal” columnist Danny Westneat, to whom I imparted the following audacious views:

Sometimes I wish the Seattle Times would just die, at least on newsstands where we have to be exposed to its version of what is “important” for people to know. I always thought the P-I was truer to principle, but unfortunately too many people had this impression that just because a newspaper called itself the “Times,” it somehow had more “legitimacy.”  I suppose there are still a few people left willing to fork over a whole dollar for a newspaper that is maybe a dozen broadsheets total in its weekly edition, which of course leaves out quite a bit of legitimate news the Times doesn’t think is worthwhile to know.

One of those stories apparently is the police shooting in Pasco, which some outside the state have called the Washington version of Ferguson, but has been treated as relatively inconsequential by the Times. Why is this? Because the victim was Hispanic, and the Times—if it doesn’t exactly have a culture of prejudice against Hispanics and their concerns, despite the fact they are technically the country’s largest minority group—it certainly doesn’t go out of its way to dissect the reasons for that impression.  Don’t tell me I’m “wrong,” because as Big Daddy would say, you would be guilty of mendacity. Most of the stories that the Times actually publishes in regard to the Hispanic community has the effect of “confirming” the various negative stereotypes people have, and of course the Times isn’t alone in the media (or by politicians) to create an atmosphere of hate among those looking for self-justification.

The Times implicitly “justifies” prejudice against Hispanics generally by allowing the public not to make a distinction between the minority of undocumented immigrants and even native-born citizens of Hispanic “ethnicity.” Furthermore, the media and black activists tend to demote prejudice against Hispanics to an inferior grade by giving it the “ethnicity” label, when in fact the prejudice is almost solely directed at short, dark-skinned people who are fully or mixed indigenous race; after all, isn’t Obama considered “black” despite having a white mother? Are not Native Americans (of the same “indigenous” category of those south of the border) a separate race? So why don’t we call things by their real names?

The Times may possibly employ one or two people with “Spanish” names, but they clearly have no impact on the reporting of Hispanic concerns. You only have to be racist against one group to be a racist; you only have to discriminate against one group to be guilty of discrimination, no matter how hard you try to “justify” it.

Westneat actually responded (how could he not), merely asserting that the Times had supposedly run stories for two days on the Pasco shooting. I responded that I never saw anything on the front page of the Times (maybe they put it on the “front page” of the local section, or the website) concerning the incident, and that the rest of my claims still stood. He responded by stating I was still wrong, and that furthermore, the Times did employ a “Hispanic,” Erik Lacitis, a name the last time made any impact on me was when he essentially defended the belief that Kennewick Man might be “Caucasian.” From his photographs available on the Internet, Lacitis himself appears very much “Caucasian.” In fact, for an alleged “Hispanic,” I found it curious that besides the fact that “Lacitis” is a name most commonly found in the Baltic state of Latvia (bordering Russia), but in America, his first name is typically spelled with a “c” rather than a “k” which is typically northern European. 

Anyways, I responded to Mr. Westneat’s claim by saying that “Whatever you want to say. Erik Lacitis is Hispanic? In what universe? I've seen his picture, and he looks "Caucasian" to me, and he is no doubt he is one of those ‘I'm not one of them’ types. I'm talking about the atmosphere of bigotry being fostered against what George Bush patronizingly called his ‘little brown ones.’ Your newspaper still cultivates bigotry and stereotypes against the stereotypical ‘Mexican.’ No mendacity coming out of your or anyone else' mouth can change that.”

Mr. Westneat again responded, merely by lamely observing that Hispanics can be “white,” which only angered me further.

Why are you continuing to ignore what I am saying?  My whole point is that people are not "prejudiced" against a clearly Caucasian "Hispanic." I'm sure if anyone encountered him on the street, no one would mistake him for "Hispanic," someone who draws up the red flags of their prejudices and stereotypes. This is the whole crux of this "ethnicity" hypocrisy (why don’t we say that blacks and Asians are an “ethnicity” of American?). Have you ever watched Univision? If you did, you would see on its TV shows and soaps that everyone is really "white"--no dark or "ethnic" faces in sight; these are what I call the "Euro-elites." That's the world Erik Lacitis lives in. Racism is just as pervasive in the society those people live in as does in this country. Eric is no "threat" to the Times order; a Hispanic who is actually politically and socially aware would be in a culture where being between white and black mendacity is a hard place indeed.

I remember in college, a professor—clearly “Caucasian”—was asked about his Spanish “sounding” name. I could tell he was annoyed by the question. He gave me a disgusted sideways glance at me before stating that he was “Portuguese.” I knew from this that he was making a “point” of saying that he wasn’t “one of them,” meaning me, since despite my non-Spanish named people “assumed” I was “Mexican”  because of my “ethnic” appearance—which, of course, the professor found an unappealing comparison. I also recall a fellow student taking exception to my preference for pop music of the Sixties and Seventies; it wasn’t “my” music. I observe Latinas attempting to gain false “status” by becoming a white man’s strumpet. Recently, I overheard a “mestizo” with visions of grandeur announce that he was “white.” An Anglo who heard this snorted with incredulity, while I just laughed. I was asked what I thought was so amusing; I said “You, calling yourself ‘white’.” 

It is obvious why this conundrum is something that “liberals” like Westneat seek to avoid answering, because that would expose the “kink” in their “liberalism.” That’s why I don’t trust them.

Hypocrisy in Adrian Peterson case hides the sins of the whole country

Is it really a surprise that U.S. District Judge David Doty overturned the arbitrary decision by the pro-management arbitrator the NFL hired to hear Minnesota Vikings star running back Adrian Peterson’s appeal of Roger Goodell’s trampling on his due process rights? But it was a “victory” only insofar that the judge ruled (as occurred in the Ray Rice appeal) that the NFL illegally imposed its “enhanced” punishment policy retroactively on the players. As ESPN’s Kevin Seifert noted,

“It now seems clear that the league overstepped its labor agreement in its haste to remove both Peterson and former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice from the public eye. If its strategy was to act first and deal with repercussions later, it has largely worked. Neither Rice nor Peterson got back on the field in 2014. Their legal victories can't change that. Now the NFL can move forward and (legally) use its enhanced personal conduct policy for all future incidents.”

This is clearly a violation of due process rights, but who cares if there is some public relations “gain” to made from it. The broader question is why out of all the occupations a person can hold, being a football player requires “enhanced” punishment from society. No one seems to want to answer that question, although there does seem to feed into the image of the sport as a particularly “male” occupation, thus a more tempting target for gender activists who see an opportunity to destroy a person’s life merely on an accusation. 

But there is a much wider question here that makes the hypocrisy on display just that much more obvious. Some of us older people remember that "old school" corporal punishment as a child was "accepted" and never questioned by society. I wouldn’t be surprised if Peterson learned this "skill" from his own parents, and his parents from their own. Furthermore, I think it is just hypocritical for the NFL to legislate "morals" when football itself is legalized violence (hockey is the same way). The civilian courts spoke, and the NFL should not pretend to be something that it isn't: An arbiter of "ethics" and "morality"—even if it is being forced upon it by hypocritical media paladins and advocates with their own agendas that do not bear too close examination. As I have observed, it seems that a certain category of adult is more “precious” than children in the eyes of the law, the media and certain advocacy groups. Andrea Yates—still residing comfortably in a Texas mental institution after being found “innocent for reasons of insanity” of the murder of her five children—is a case in point.

In barbarous, hide-bound Europe, corporal punishment is illegal in the home in Germany and Spain, but is still legal Britain and France. Can the U.S., with its mania with guns, at least claim that it is more “enlightened” than France and the UK? Would you be surprised to learn that physical punishment of children is legal in every state for a parent to employ? The only slight “exception” is Delaware, where such punishment counter-intuitively is not to cause “pain.” Elsewhere, court after court has ruled that laws prohibiting domestic violence do not prohibit parents from inflicting physical punishment on children meant to “restrain or correct” a child’s behavior. These laws are often vague and open to interpretation, using terms like “reasonable force” and not “excessive.” In every Southern state except Virginia, corporal punishment by teachers on children is also legal; it is also legal in Texas, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Arizona and Idaho. 

In fact, truly excessive corporal punishment gravitating into "child abuse" did not evolve until influenced by the Dennis Jurgens case in Minnesota in the mid-1980s, who from the time he was adopted at age one until he died at the age of three-and-half, endured sustained and repeated “corporal punishment” at the hands of his adopted mother, Lois Jurgens, for what she perceived as his “faults.” These “punishments” including physically stuffing food down his throat, and making him eat his own vomit after such episodes. Yet when he was eating “too much,” Jurgens monitored how much he actually ate—to the point that a coroner would later find that Dennis was not only grossly underweight, but that he showed evidence of starvation. 

The “bad boy” as Jurgens explained her behavior deserved his frequent black eyes, but being “bad” as a toddler cannot explain Jurgens’ sadism in “punishing” his private parts. At a new autopsy performed on the remarkably well-preserved body, at the instigation of Dennis’ natural mother, Jerry Sherwood, 20 years after his death in 1965, found that besides evidence of bruising and laceration all over his body, his penis had what appeared to be “bite” marks, and there was scarring on his scrotum. To stop his supposedly frequent wetting of his diapers, an ordinary clothes pin was fastened to his penis to prevent annoying (for her) urine ejection. 

When Dennis died, the cause of death was listed as peritonitis. Because people assumed that “punishment” inflicted by a parent upon a child was “normal,” there was no attempt to delve further. But even though the first coroner was troubled enough to classify the death as “deferred,” no one could accept the thought that something much worse than “normal” had occurred in the Jurgens’ house, residing in a comfortably middle-class neighborhood.

Dennis wasn’t the only victim in that house. During a twenty-year period from the 1950s to the 1970s, Lois Jurgens was a serial abuser of a succession of adopted children, a story chronicled by Barry Siegel in his book A Death In White Bear Lake. Neighbors, family and friends knew or suspected what was happening, but did nothing. Why? Partly out of fear of the clearly psychotic Jurgens—who like many abusers see themselves as the “victim”—and the fact that corporal punishment in the home was considered a “normal” part of childrearing, and such matters were not a concern for those outside the home. In fact, the term “child abuse” as an illegal act is of relatively recent origin. Apparently corporal punishment only becomes a public “issue” if a star football player is caught doing it, and it can be used to advance someone’s political agenda.

Siegel wrote that Lois Jurgens seemed to have had psychological issues that caused incidents of hypochondria and mental unbalance, something rarely seen outside the home by neighbors who might empirically observe a diminutive woman who might seem incapable of hurting a fly. That is unless they insinuated anything untoward going on inside the Jurgens home, which elicited threats of violent retribution from her.  After concerns about her fitness of being an adoptive parent, several doctors who examined claimed to be unable to find anything physically wrong with her; however, one doctor at the Mayo Clinic interviewed her and had the following observation to make:

“A 26-year-old married woman with a long-standing psychoneurosis of the mixed type, starting back to childhood as evidence by enuresis (bed-wetting) until age 13, fears, nightmares, etc…It is fortunate that this woman has not been able to carry through pregnancy at this time as a child will only compound and complicate her emotional disturbance—she would be a poor candidate for adopting a child at this time…They cannot afford psychiatric care, which she desperately needs—she may without it go on to a paranoid schizophrenia.”

Yet the same doctor would later alter his verdict, saying that she had “improved” over time. The slightly-built Jurgens also fooled many social workers by the impeccably clean house she kept, which seemed to be an ideal home for children; ignored by those who ultimately made the decision—including those who allowed four siblings to subsequently live with the Jurgens merely because they agreed to take them all—was that this could be evidence that Jurgens was an excessive “stickler” for order and cleanliness, to the point of manic-obsession.

Even Lois Jurgens’ family and relatives were cautious about what they said in her presence, and her husband, Harold Jurgens, always seemed afraid of her and allowed her to dominate him. For people who find it difficult to believe that a woman can be so abusive that even a man much bigger than her can be cowed into fear and submission to her will, Siegel notes that  “Most of the time he sat in the background, his legs crossed, as if trying to avoid aggravating her. Those who had visited the Jurgens home swore Harold was not allowed to use the front door or the upstairs bathroom. If Harold wanted to go to a ball game after work, it was said he couldn’t go home first, for he’d never be allowed back out.” 

Why would he stay with her? It was the opinion of a psychiatrist named Richard Teeter who examined the Jurgens that Harold “has considerable resilience, warmth and tolerance. As such, the marriage is well-balanced and durable.” In other words, the husband was a complete supplicant to his wife’s desires and “issues.” 

The question of “acceptable” corporal punishment is how much is “necessary” to control a child’s occasionally unpredictable and contrary behavior. Discipline is one thing; a sadistic pleasure in inflicting pain and mental torture is quite another—particularly when there is no fear of physical retaliation from the child. In women, there it is often the “belief” that  they have been “victimized” by society in some fashion—an idea frequently expounded by the media, feminists and gender activists. In cases such as this, children are seen as an agent of oppression, and as such must be made to “pay” for their “crime.” They must “suffer” as she “suffers,” except this time she is the one who will be in control of the oppressing. Nevertheless, to adoption case workers Jurgens’ husband seemed amiable and eager to please, which would “mitigate” Jurgens’ excessive rigidity and inflexibility —not ideal characteristics for being a parent (let alone a spouse), but clearly not based on reality.

Because Lois Jurgens was personally examined by “objective” professionals seeking to gauge her fitness, in her case one can draw reasonably accurate inferences as to her personality in hindsight; unfortunately, such as is still the case today, there seems to be a blindness concerning the “motherly” instinct without the benefit of past experience. In the infamous case of Gertrude Baniszewski, she picked out one her teenage boarders, Sylvia Likens, to act out her “frustrations” on. But because she was technically not an adoptive parent, there was never any effort by professionals to evaluate her fitness. Instead, you have amateur psychologists like crime writer Denise Noe attempting to insinuate that Baniszewski was too “weak” to control to the actions of children who should know “right from wrong.” 

 

But who was the adult teaching them what is right and what is wrong? Baniszewski first poisoned immature minds against the attractive Likens to make her “deserving” of punishment, then engaged in dehumanizing “punishments” which became more and more sadistic, and then encouraged those who might have only saw it all as a “game”—cruel as it was—to actively participate in it in order to please (and avoid abuse themselves from) Baniszewski, who was ultimately responsible.in every way.  But because Baniszewski was never subjected to a psychological examination, opinions on her abusive behavior run the gamut from tiresome gender victimology to the embodiment of pure evil.

How to “explain” Lois Jurgens? Siegel writes that she grew-up poor, was largely uneducated, and there were conflicting stories of whether she suffered excessive “corporal punishment” herself. But during her adult life, she lived a comfortable middle class existence, and apparently wanted many children to make her life “complete.” When she discovered that she could not conceive herself, the Jurgens opted for adoption—with the results duly noted. After Robert had been removed from their home upon the death of Dennis, the Jurgens fought to get him back. But Siegel writes that yet another doctor opposed it, citing Lois Jurgens as a “chronic neurotic” with a schizoid personality, self-centered and “lacking in insight”—which likely would be a life-long issue. She was becoming “more seriously neurotic” and could never “face the stresses and strains of raising a young boy.”

Unfortunately, this view was not universally held by those ultimately making the decisions, given that Jurgens was such a slight person that she seemed incapable of doing the things that others less sanguine had accused her of.  Notwithstanding doubts about the nature of Dennis’ death, Robert was eventually returned to the Jurgens. Four more adopted children from a family in Kentucky eventually followed; from personal experience, I was not amazed to read in Siegel’s book how it reached the point where the children lied to teachers and school counselors about where bruises came from out of fear of retribution, and were even afraid to go home after school. When they did, they “relaxed” when they saw that Lois Jurgens’ car was not there, and cringed when they saw that it was (again, this brings back memories of my own). If Jurgens was not home, they would have to wait outside, even in winter, until she returned. But what was worse was if she was home, for she would likely have spent more time roaming the house looking for things that in her opinion were “amiss”; if she found something, they would soon hear—or “feel”—about it. Jurgens was “Mommy Dearest” on steroids.

Siegel notes that Harold Jurgens would occasionally intervene on the children’s behalf, but he was too weak a personality for these interventions to be effective. The children sensed that he too was afraid of his wife. He would tell her not to get all worked-up, to not lose her cool, but she would just tell him to “shut up,” and he did. Jurgens had the conceit to avoid appearing to be the sole “heavy” in the family, occasionally tasking her husband to administer punishment; when she told him to take one of the boys down to the basement and inflict a whipping on him, he would administer the belt to his own leg while the boy would yell out. But when they came back, Jurgens would complain that the victim wasn’t hurt “bad enough” because there were no tears in his eyes.

But Siegel noted that Harold Jurgens would stop short of telling the children that his wife was completely wrong—they knew what made her angry, and they were wrong if they did it anyways. But otherwise he did little to stop what was happening; it has been suggested that “passive” people like himself derive “secondary gain” by allowing their mate to do the actually “acting” on their own “repressed anger,” although it is hard to make that accusation in this case.

Still, stories about Lois Jurgens’ abusive behavior occasionally leaked to social workers, and when  Jurgens was forced to  “voluntarily” go to a treatment facility for several weeks, home life became tolerable for the children, almost “normal.” When she returned, it was hoped that she had changed. Within hours it became clear she had not, in fact she was already finding fault everywhere. According to Siegel, a counselor at the treatment facility wrote that

“Lois denies and represses a great deal. In counseling and in group therapy Lois never became amenable to treatment, denying her need to change. She consistently blamed her childhood experiences, her mother and father, her husband and in-laws for her angry behavior. When she left treatment she continued to feel she had the ‘right’ to feel the way she does. In general, it was felt that the patient’s response to treatment was unsatisfactory.”

Ten days after her return, Robert ran away and appeared before a family court requesting that he be removed from the custody of the Jurgens. Soon after two more children ran away to hide out with a neighbor, and eventually all the children were removed from the Jurgens’ custody. 

Yet none of this was deemed a matter of the criminal courts, and it was only after the hounding of local media and law enforcement that Dennis’ natural mother forced a confrontation that led to Lois Jurgens’ eventually being forced to answer for his death 20 years earlier. Forensic pathologists who examined the coroner’s original photographs and Dennis’ exhumed remains agreed that he had been suffering in horrible agony for hours before he died, and it was apparent from rigor mortis that he had died at least ten hours before “help” was called for. It was also clear by the positioning of his arms that he had likely died not in his bed on his back as Lois Jurgens claimed, and somewhere else, probably on his stomach where his arms hung down. The injury that caused his peritonitis required him to be on a flat surface and struck by that was described as of “train wreck” intensity. 

We often hear “horror” stories about parents who caused injury by shaking a child, but Dennis’ life was one such episode after another, and no one did anything to stop it. Robert—who was five at the time—remembered that Dennis seemed to be punished much more often than he was; he also testified at Jurgens’ trial about the  incidents immediately preceding Dennis’ death: Not long before Dennis died, he saw Harold Jurgens having to help Dennis relieve himself in the bathroom, apparently due to this ongoing trauma. He also recalled awakening the morning of Dennis’ final day to horrible screams; he did not know if these came from Dennis or Lois Jurgens. He went into Dennis’ bedroom and saw Jurgens “looking over Dennis and hitting him on the back and grabbing and shaking him” for a long time. Jurgens was apparently very “angry” about something, but this was not unusual when it came to Dennis. Jurgens “then picked Dennis up and held him and then started to pound his back several times.” That night, he testified to seeing Dennis being thrown down the basement steps and repeatedly struck by Jurgens, and who then repeatedly submerged Dennis’ head in a laundry tub. This was perpetrated on a boy three-and-a-half years old. 

Robert did not recall seeing Harold Jurgens during this time. Although one should be cognizant of the fact that Robert was only five at the time and there are some minor discrepancies between his testimony and the medical evidence, there is no doubt that the condition that examiners found Dennis’ corpse in was beyond shocking, short of dismemberment, and there certainly were things that Jurgens had done to Dennis that Robert was not privy too.  Although Harold Jurgens defended his wife, he admitted that he was not at home when Dennis died, but in fact in another state when his wife called him to inform about a “problem” she had with Dennis the next day. 

The family doctor—who apparently had not found anything “wrong” with Dennis’ physical condition before—was called to examine him that night, but police were not informed until quite later. Lois Jurgens’ brother Jerome was in fact a police lieutenant and stated flatly that he was going to do whatever was necessary to keep his sister out of jail, and he apparently stole pertinent files and evidence that would have been extremely incriminating. But more in her favor, it simply could not be fathomed that such thing could happen in a “nice” neighborhood.

So there was a time when it simply was not believed that a parent could deliberately abuse a small child and cause their death, especially in a well-to-do environment. It is different than when a teenager like Likens suffers “punishment” that verges on torture and dies from it; it is more believable and takes more obvious effort on the part of the abuser. But with a child as young as Dennis who could never speak for himself, even when there was clear evidence of longstanding abuse, people would find rationalizations  for it—young children bruise more easily, are more likely to injure themselves, etc.), and they were just “bad” kids who would not learn to “behave.” 

As for Lois Jurgens herself, she was unrepentant to the end, rarely altering her impassive countenance during her trial as one witness after another testified to the abuses they “suddenly” remember witnessing against Dennis. She believed she had done nothing wrong, and saw everyone who testified against her as “evil.” Jurors held little regard for her husband, who “allowed” all of this to happen, although they couldn’t know his own psychology—and they didn’t see his wife still ordering him about even while she was being led away to prison—and some jurors actually felt “sorry” for her because of her alleged childhood abuses, and that she was now a “harmless old woman.” Yet they could not ignore the fact that Dennis had died so horrible death at her hands that it was clearly not explainable under any circumstance. In 1987, Jurgens was found guilty of murder in the third degree. But she would only serve eight years of her prison sentence, released for “good behavior.” She was fooling people to the very end.

For a long time there was an unwillingness to recognize deliberately-inflicted traumatic injuries to small children and infants by their parents. It was assumed that such events were “accidental,” caused by a drunken or incompetent parents. Siegel mentioned a case in 1960 at the Colorado General Hospital, where a pediatrician named Kempe repeatedly tried to convince a hospital psychiatrist to examine the parents of children brought into his ward who had severe injuries. In one case, a 3-month-old infant arrived in the emergency room with a broken femur and required immediate brain surgery for subdural hemorrhaging. A “pleasant and attractive” young woman who was his mother seemed impossibly “nice” and “normal” when discussing the case, when she was clearly responsible for the injuries.  As if to explain herself, she engaged in a speech about her own childhood, that her own mother regretting giving birth to her, and acted out her regret with fists and everyday household objects. What surprised listeners was that on the outside she seemed “normal” and not being asked the right questions seemed perfectly “sane” and “predictable” in her answers. 

But underneath the façade was a very disturbed person who acted out on an infant what she remembered experiencing as an older child—and would continue to do so because that was how she was “taught” to discipline. It never occurred to her that despite the fact that she had been (allegedly) traumatized, she felt the need to inflict pain herself without considering how the child was traumatized in turn.