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Well I finished the Haunted House and it worked out fantasticly! We had over 50 people come and visit us! I think it went very very well and despite the length I was active for I feel great! It was a big success, and I had fun. Next year we can do it bigger, better, more AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh and here's the news
Dating Scam Ends in Murder
Brazilian Fiancee Charged in Robbery, Slaying of California Man
By KIM CURTIS and STAN LEHMAN, AP
SAN BRUNO, Calif. (Oct. 31) - The lonely, divorced carpenter thought he was going to Brazil to make wedding plans.
Instead, he was drugged and held captive for six days at his fiancee's home while she and another man emptied his bank accounts, according to Brazilian authorities. Then they drove the 56-year-old victim to a vacant lot, where they strangled him with copper wire, doused his body with fuel, and set it on fire, investigators say.
Authorities found Raymond Merrill's charred body in April.
Now, the woman he believed was his betrothed is under arrest, along with a man suspected of helping to kill him.
"He would talk to me about ideal relationships and pure love," said Merrill's best friend, Bill Rauch. "With age doesn't necessarily come wisdom. He was used to doing things his way and, in the end, it did him in."
For months, his family knew nothing of his horrifying end. It was only after a bungled robbery in Brazil that investigators even learned of Merrill's fate.
Merrill met Regina Filomena Rachid last year through an online dating service. At the time, he was lonely and depressed, having been dumped by a Las Vegas woman for whom he had bought expensive gifts, according to Merrill's best friend.
Merrill and Rachid exchanged dozens of calls, e-mails and photographs, often enlisting Rachid's 18-year-old daughter as a translator. Rachid was 41, from an upper-middle-class family that was in the real estate business.
"I thought, `This is going a little fast,' but I didn't want to sound critical," said Merrill's sister, Marcia Sanchez Loebick.
The warning signs were obvious to Merrill's friend of nearly 30 years. Merrill gave Rachid $10,000 to start a skin care clinic and bought her a $20,000 sport utility vehicle. She complained it wasn't a fancier, more expensive model, Rauch said.
"This from a man who was tightfisted," Rauch said. "Ray and I would go out and I'd have to buy all the beers. All of a sudden, he's lavishing all these gifts and money on a relationship he's not even close to consummating.
"I said, `Ray, these are so many red flags. I can't believe you're pursuing this,"' Rauch said. "He would just slough it off. He'd say, `She's just a passionate and emotional Latina.' What do you say to a guy like that?"
Merrill visited Rachid twice in Sao Jose dos Campos, an industrial city about 60 miles from Sao Paulo. Both times he stayed a week longer than planned. Both times he notified Rauch, who then drove to Merrill's home in San Bruno to water the plants and collect the mail. On the third trip, Merrill again overstayed his return, but this time he didn't call Rauch to let him know.
Loebick, who lives in Cleveland, said she sent her brother repeated e-mails warning him that their 86-year-old father was dying, but got no response. She and Rauch's best friend called police in California to report him missing.
What happened to Merrill was more awful than either could have imagined.
Sometime after he arrived on March 21, Rachid and her real boyfriend, Nelson Siqueira Neves, drugged Merrill, kept him in a room in Rachid's house, and drained his bank accounts, stealing about $200,000 in all, according to Merrill's sister and Brazilian authorities.
Then, on April 1 - the day he was scheduled to return to California - they hired Evandro Celso Augusto Ribeiro for $5,600 to help kill him and set fire to the corpse, according to investigators. Authorities found the scorched remains but could not identify the victim, and buried the body in a pauper's grave.
But then Rachid - to raise money to pay off the hit man - took part in the holdup of a black-market money changer, and accidentally left her purse behind, investigators say.
The money changer went to police and turned over the purse, which contained Merrill's credit card. Hours later, Rachid showed up at the same police station to report her purse stolen. Police arrested her on the spot. The alleged hit man soon told authorities what happened to Merrill, investigators said.
Rachid and Ribeiro are in custody, charged with armed robbery followed by death.
Rachid's boyfriend was questioned by police in early October but was released under a Brazilian law that says no one can be arrested in the days immediately before and after an election, investigators said. Now he cannot be found.
"I feel a really terrible sense of loss," said Merrill's best friend. "You expect to lose your parents. But you don't expect one of your best friends to die."
Kim Curtis reported from San Bruno, Calif., and Stan Lehman reported from Sao Paulo, Brazil
Alligator Caught Up in Alleged Drug Dispute
AP
FREDERIC, Mich. (Oct. 31) - Your money or your ... alligator? Police say an armed man went to the home of a drug dealer to collect on a debt. When the dealer couldn't pay, the collector made off with the dealer's 18-inch-long pet alligator.
"I think he was going to hold (the gator) for ransom, or something," Crawford County Sheriff Kirk Wakefield told the Traverse City Record-Eagle for a story Tuesday. "It's really weird."
The alleged gator-napping arose from a Sept. 25 drug bust at a house west of Frederic, a rural village 200 miles north of Detroit, Wakefield said.
Police confiscated a cache of drugs, including marijuana, methamphetamine, cocaine, crack cocaine and Ecstasy pills, plus $900 in cash and two handguns.
"Apparently the guys we took this from owed somebody for what we took," Wakefield said. "That somebody hired this guy to go get that money."
The drug dealers from southern Michigan hired Gary Lee Gugin, 39, to round up a couple thousand dollars from the house near Frederic, the sheriff said.
Just after midnight Sunday, "he walked inside with a sawed-off shotgun and said he was there to collect that money," Wakefield said.
Finding none, he took the gator instead, the sheriff said.
Deputies were dispatched to Gugin's home north of Frederic and found him unloading the alligator from his vehicle, Wakefield said.
Gugin was arraigned Tuesday in district court on charges of armed robbery, first-degree home invasion, firearms possession by a felon and two other weapons charges.
He was held in the county jail without bond.
A criminal complaint signed by Prosecutor John Huss said Gugin had a prior conviction of manufacturing and delivering marijuana.
The alligator was returned to its owner.
Mystery Decorator Adorns Town With Pumpkins
AP
BOONE, Colo. (Nov. 1) - Nobody knows who, but someone with a lot of Halloween spirit decorated this small southern Colorado town with hundreds and hundreds of pumpkins.
Residents woke up Tuesday to find virtually every surface covered with the orange holiday icons. There were pumpkins left on front porches and at front gates, on the front and back steps of a church and all along the boundary of the city park.
Larry Taylor said there weren't any pumpkins when he walked his dogs at about 10 p.m. on Monday in the town of about 330 residents, 110 miles southeast of Denver.
But by the time Postmaster Nancy Pennington drove to work at 7:30 a.m. Tuesday, they were everywhere.
At Boone Grocery and Hardware, pumpkins were placed on top of the concrete parking stops out front.
"It's kinda cool," said employee Bill Coyle. "It's kinda unique. Throughout the town there's probably a couple of hundred of them. They're everywhere."
Pennington's job keeps her updated on the goings-on in town but she's not talking about who might have dreamed up the idea.
"I have an idea, but I'm not sure. I won't tell," she said.
 Azalin · Wed Nov 01, 2006 @ 10:45pm · 0 Comments |
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