This is from 1997 but it's a story that should be remembered:

http://www.serendipity.li/wod/heartb.html

Jean Duffey

Jean DuffeyThe "Jean" she is referring to is Jean Duffey. Today Jean Duffey is a high school algebra teacher in a suburb of Houston Texas, a handsome woman with short-cropped brown hair, a woman who looks just like the soccer moms we heard so much about before the recent election. But six years ago she was the prosecuting attorney of a federally funded Drug Task Force in Saline County Arkansas, whose undercover agents began to come to her with revelations about the murders of the two boys.

And no soccer mom encounters I'd ever had prepared me for what she told us right at the beginning of our interview.

"The FBI has eyewitnesses to the slayings," she tells us in that matter-of-fact tone affected by those who, for professional reasons, are forced to cultivate as much detachment as they can. "One witness at the scene even passed a polygraph. But still, to this date, nothing has been done. It's been this way from day one, with seven separate investigations, each one stopped."

The initial hue and cry by local citizens and the media, Duffey explains, was directed at the unbelievable verdict of the State Medical Examiner, who ruled the boys' deaths accidental. This forced the second examination we'd heard about from Linda Ives. Remember? The one showing that one boy had been stabbed in the back, while the other's face had been smashed in, bearing the imprint of a rifle butt?

Hearing this stomach-wrenching information related to us on camera for a second time in two days, I had a curious reaction. I felt slightly giddy. There was a disconnect between the events being related, and my reaction. I was tempted to ask: "What could Dr. Malak have been thinking about, that day those boys' lifeless bodies crossed his examining room table? Lunch?"

Later I was to feel that my feelings were not as inappropriate as they appeared at first blush. How can one react in the face of what feels like sheer malignant evil? As I listened further, the threads of — dare I say it? — conspiracy — began to weave tighter, and I began thinking of Dr. Malak not as of someone merely incompetent, but as of someone both incompetent and sinister, sort of a backwoods Joseph Mengele.

"Fahmy Malak was bulletproof in Arkansas; he was completely protected," states Duffey. "And that was true, even in the face of incredible adverse publicity from the media after the second examination showed how clearly ridiculous his ruling of accidental death was. We are way beyond the bounds of incompetence here; we are into criminal intent."

So, I asked, was Dr. Malek an accessory to murder? Ever the prosecutor, Duffy considered her words carefully. "Accessory to murder," she said slowly, "is different from conspiracy to cover up, which is what I believe Dr. Malak was involved in."