Crime

The jury in Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial asked on Tuesday to review transcripts of testimony from three accusers.

Jurors in Manhattan federal court sent the judge a note around 10.10am, saying: “We would like the transcripts, testimony of Jane, Annie and Carolyn.”

Jane, who testified under a pseudonym, said Epstein started to sexually abuse her when she was 14. She told jurors Maxwell was sometimes present for, and participated in, such abuse.

She also discussed alleged group sexual encounters and recalled meeting Maxwell in summer 1994, at a youth arts camp in Michigan.

Defending a client charged with crimes modern society finds more terrible than murder, who might face the rest of her life in prison, Ghislaine Maxwell’s defence in New York opened with a nice lady who hadn’t seen anything, a travel agent who booked flights years after they mattered and a professor of BugsBunnyology – and none of them cut the mustard.

At the end of the defence’s first day, Maxwell was seen holding her hands up in despair at her fancy attorneys who have cost her, according to her own estimate, some $7m. Juries in US federal trials must be unanimous and there are legal grounds for knocking out some of the charges, but it looks bleak for Maxwell.

Prosecutor Jeffrey Schenk opened his closing arguments in the case against Elizabeth Holmes by talking about a banker. Holmes knew Theranos, the company she founded, was running out of money, and she was on the phone asking her banker to clear a check early.

“Holmes had a choice to make,” Schenk said. She could figure out a way to raise funds to keep the company moving, or risk seeing it wither away. And her choice, he said, was to raise the funds through fraud.

The prosecution’s closing statement on Thursday was a reminder of what this trial is really about: money, and mostly rich people’s money. Those rich people, who gave their money to Theranos after Holmes pitched them on the promise of the company, are who the prosecutor referred to as ‘victims.’ Their money is what, according to the legal system, was manipulated during the years Theranos was the hottest startup in Silicon Valley.

It was the opening day of Ghislaine Maxwell’s defence and her lawyers had called to the stand an expert on “false memories” whose testimony once helped acquit OJ Simpson.

But if anyone had been waiting for a ‘black leather glove’ moment – akin to that defining moment in OJ Simpson’s ultimately successful defence case where a pair of blood-stained gloves ‘didn’t fit’ – they would have been disappointed.

What a sorry parade of witnesses for the defense.

“… Last month, a local investigation by an independent media organization called Coastal Front revealed that a freedom-of-information request it filed a year earlier had obliged the City of Vancouver to disgorge 750 pages of documents showing that between 2012 and January of this year, city officials had accepted nearly 2,000 payments totalling $13.1 million for everything from property tax payments to municipal cemetery plots — all in stacks of cash.”

Toronto police have released a video of a possible suspect wanted in connection with the double homicide investigation of billionaire couple Barry and Honey Sherman from 2017.

Brandon Price, a detective with the Toronto police homicide squad, held a press conference Tuesday morning asking anyone who recognizes the person in the video to come forward.

“Facts are not persuasive; stories are,” the famed American trial lawyer Gerry Spence – who claims never to have not lost a criminal case in his 50 years practising – once said when asked the secret to winning over a jury.

If Mr Spence is right, Ghislaine Maxwell may well be in trouble.

After an extraordinarily short opening statement and a shaky first few days, the prosecution seemed to turn it around with blockbuster testimony from three of the British socialite’s alleged victims this past week. Accuser after accuser detailed a pattern of sexual abuse they say they suffered at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein and his “partner-in-crime” Ms Maxwell.

Four years after the murders of billionaires Barry and Honey Sherman, Toronto homicide detectives are releasing images and other information from their case for the first time in the hope that the public can help them solve the crime.

This information – police will not say what it is – is sealed in search warrant documents the Toronto Star is arguing in court that have been released shortly after the investigation began.

Inspector in charge of murder. Hank Idsinga and principal investigator Det.-Sgt. Sources say Brandon Price will provide information and updates about his investigation on Tuesday morning.

Prosecutors at Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking trial called her Jeffrey Epstein’s “partner in crime” as they wrapped up two weeks of testimony in federal court in New York.

The British socialite, 59, is accused of grooming teenage girls for abuse by the late Epstein. She’s pleaded not guilty to all the charges, which cover a period from 1994 to 2004.

The first fortnight of the trial heard emotional testimony from some of the alleged victims of Epstein and Ms Maxwell. But there were also claims that Ms Maxwell was being targeted because Epstein, whose 2019 death in jail was ruled to be a suicide, could no longer face trial himself.

Some are surprised at the prosecutors quick wrap up, the trial was expected to last up to 6 weeks. Speculation is that the case is weak.

At least 12 major U.S. cities have set annual murder records in 2021 even as there are still several weeks remaining in the year, data shows.

Philadelphia, one of the largest cities in the United States, saw 525 murders in 2021, according to police data. That’s higher than the previously set record of 500 murders in 1990.

A key question arising from the death of a gunsmith near Port Dover involves the “customer” who was in his shop Nov. 3 when the gunsmith died in a hail of police bullets.

Questions about the mysterious customer have circulated now for more than a month.

This smells bad.