Parents Behaving Badly

Nancy Grace Camera Shy?:

How’s this for irony? Nancy Grace is being sued by the family of Melinda Duckett for causing Duckett’s suicide. If you don’t know the story Melinda Duckett was believed to have had some involvement in the disappearance of her son Trenton Duckett who to this day has not been found.

Duckett was a guest on Grace’s show in 2006 and Grace grilled her on the show as to where Trenton was. The next day Melinda Duckett committed suicide probably sealing the fate of Trenton who, like I said, has still yet to be found.

Now Grace is suing to keep her videotaped depositin from being leaked for fear that someone would…

“cut and splice” and “manipulate” her words into sound bites that would appear “wholly out of context.”

I think the HQ of the Irony Police just exploded.

Secondly I have a question for the legal experts out there. Why was she never charged with hindering an ongoing investigation by putting Duckett on the air and interrogating her on nationwide TV if Duckett was their main suspect?

Lastly I do have something personal against Ms. Grace. She’s a cherry picker. She picks stories that have already captured the ‘imaginiation’ of America by focusing on stories like Casey Anthony and Haleigh Cummings. However when I spoke to her my self on a live podcast, not mine of course, and told her about the case of Giovanni Gonzalez she seemed interested and took all the information I had to give her yet no mention of Giovanni has ever came from her lips on any of her broadcasts. The whole time I was talking to her I fet like I was making a deal with the devil but I didn’t care because I thought any help to find Giovanni would be appreciated.

She doesn’t really care about children in my opinion. She only cares about ratings.

(Cross posted at Trench Reynolds’ Crime News)

Trenton Duckett case update: Police are following a slim lead that suggests Melinda Duckett, Trenton’s mom, might have arranged for her son to be taken to South Korea. Melinda, who was adopted from South Korea as a baby, reportedly talked with friends about sending Trenton there. Not sure how plausible that is, but any lead is better than radio silence.

Your votes are in, and it’s official: Melinda Duckett has been voted by Parents Behaving Badly readers as the Worst Parent of 2006. When I announced the awards originally, I had this to say about the deceased mama:

Holy shit…where to begin? The Florida mom offed herself after appearing on Nancy Grace and being grilled over her son Trenton’s disappearance. Evidence strongly indicates that she handed off her son to someone else to keep him away from his dad. Then the stories of her extra-sexular activity surfaced, including a photo purportedly of Melinda that showed her feeding Trenton a bottle while giving head. I know you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but in this case, the temptation’s almost overwhelming.

Apparently, PBB fans agreed, and gave Duckett 27% of all votes cast. This edges her just slightly ahead of David and Liz Carroll (25%), the murdering foster parents whose names deserve to be synonymous with “pond scum” from now until the end of Time. Coming in third was China Arnold (18%), the alleged “microwave mother”. The sensationalism behind the accusation against her was obviously mitigated by lingering questions over her guilt or innocence; her case is by no means open and shut. Fourth place went to Khalid Adem (7%), the dad found guilty of genitally mutilating his daughter.

Of course, according to one of my readers, I deserve the Worst Parent of 2006 award for even nominating Melinda Duckett in the first place. I can’t tell you how happy I am that the rest of my visitors disagreed. It’d be embarrassing having to accept my own award!

(As an interesting side note: If you search Google Images for Melinda Duckett’s name, all you get are pictures of Nancy Grace, Trenton Duckett, and Joshua Duckett. Even turning off SafeSearch doesn’t improve the results. I’m not sure what’s going on here. Did Google cede to some sort of legal filing from Melinda Duckett’s parents?)

The suit by Melinda Duckett’s parents against Nancy Grace, accusing the CNN host of berating poor Melinda into suicide, has been moved to federal court. The move came at the behest of CNN and Grace. Meanwhile, followers of the case over on CourtTV’s message boards are lamenting the lack of a “Christmas miracle”. You’re not the only ones, folks.

It’s that time of the year: time to look back at the stream of bad parents who have graced the pages of PBB and do the impossible by picking out the worst parent of 2006. Since I can’t possibly do that on my own, I’m asking YOU, my readers, for help.

Below is my selection of the worst parents of the year from the PBB archives. I based most of these selections on reader reactions and the length of the accompanying comment threads, which gives us a nice balance between the criminally stupid and the truly gruesome.

Because of the gap in my coverage, there’s an obvious imbalance toward the latter end of the year. Hey, you go to war with the blog you have! It balances out, though, as not all of these stories happened in late 2006; one or two actually happened in 2005, but I’m throwing them into the pot because they still managed to echo into the headlines of 2006. To correct any additional imbalance, I’m allowing you guys to add write-in candidates. Just go to the poll in this blog’s left sidebar and select or type in your choice. (NOTE: If the write-in future is abused, I’ll remove it. Please use sparingly.)

Voting will close on Friday, January 5th.

The Finalists

Khalid Adem. Friends and supporters insists he was railroaded, but a jury of his peers found him guilty of forcibly circumcising his daughter.

China Arnold. She maintains she’s innocent; the state says she microwaved her baby to death.

David and Liz Carroll. The foster parents left their son, Marcus Fiesel, bound in a closet while they skipped town for a family reunion. They came back to find him dead.

Savarin DeJesus (not pictured). The 18-year-old New York City mom got drunk, got sick, and then slept…while her child drowned in mommy’s vomit bucket.

Melinda Duckett. Holy shit…where to begin? The Florida mom offed herself after appearing on Nancy Grace and being grilled over her son Trenton’s disappearance. Evidence strongly indicates that she handed off her son to someone else to keep him away from his dad. Then the stories of her extra-sexular activity surfaced, including a photo purportedly of Melinda that showed her feeding Trenton a bottle while giving head. I know you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but in this case, the temptation’s almost overwhelming.

Jonathon Edington. The loving father thought his neighbor had molested his daughter, so he killed the guy. Edington was wrong. The dad now faces a very long prison sentence for losing his shit and killing an innocent man.

Michael and Sharen Gravelle. The “caged kids” parents from Ohio were convicted this year after offering pitiable explanations for locking their 11 foster kids up like rabbits.

Heather Heck. This supposedly Christian mom sparked a firestorm of controversy by first hiding her pregnancy, then leaving the kid in a car all weekend while she went out and had fun.

Festus Oguhebe. The professor from Nigeria who saw fit to motivate his lazy kids by torturing them with ants.

The Parents of Castro Valley High School. To their credit, they didn’t murder or mutilate anyone. But the parents of Castro Valley High continue to inflict an undue sense of entitlement on their kids by waging war against a local basketball coach (Nancy Nibarger, pictured) who doesn’t deserve their constant bullshit.

Oh, Melinda Duckett defenders are gonna have a CONNIPTION over this one. Too fucking bad. It’s been the leading theory for weeks, and the best hope of finding her son Trenton Duckett alive. Police in Leesburg, Florida now say that a second pivotal lead gives them an idea about where Duckett may have handed her son off. They say they’re fairly confident now that some sort of deal went down that involved Melinda giving Trenton away, thus relieving her of the burden of motherhood.

The new evidence comes in the form of 25-year-old Chai Chen, a close friend who Melinda called shortly after being spotted twice by employees at a Belleview Wendy’s – once with the boy, and once without him. Chen worked at a Rent-A-Center across the highway from that restaurant. The new witness (who should have stepped forward MONTHS ago, asshole) said Ms. Duckett called him at 12:08pm to invite him over to her pad to watch videos. Presumably, she didn’t mean these videos – but hey, you never know.

News flash to whoever has Trenton: this is End Game. You can’t keep him for much longer. For God sakes, take him to someplace safe so he can be reunited with his surviving family, then pack up your bags and get the fuck outta Dodge. You’ll serve no jail time. No one will ever know you were involved. If you’re found with Trenton before then, it’s going to be a long time before you see sunshine unfiltered by iron bars and barbed wire.

Well, if this doesn’t beat all. Just when you think the Trenton Duckett case can’t get any more bizarre, reality steps up and proves you wrong. Hot tipper Amraan filled me in today on Beth and William Eubank of Lockport, New York, who are suing both CNN and Joshua Duckett over Melinda’s death. They’re also demanding a complete accounting of funds collected by Joshua from his Web site. As you might have guessed, Joshua was none too thrilled about this, given that the grandparents have not been involved in Melinda’s life for the past three years, and that they have done little to nothing to help find their missing grandson, Trenton.

I have one question: what the hell is wrong with these people? Their grandson is still missing and presumed alive, and all they can think to do to “help” is to hound Joshua with a frivolous lawsuit? I guess now that they no longer have their own daughter to treat like shit, they’re passing the neglect onto Trenton. They can’t even wait for him to be found to let fly with the lawsuits. I’m feeling more sympathetic toward Melinda Duckett now. Is it any wonder that she turned out the way she did, with these money-grubbers as parents?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I don’t give a damn about Melinda’s reputation. The parents’ lawyer, Jay Paul Deratany, has accused Grace and Joshua of “attributing all sorts of negative things to Melinda Duckett — everything from pornography to being a terrible mother.” Only one problem, Mr. Deratany: it’s not libel or slander if it’s ture. There are tapes and photos, for God sakes!

It’s a shame that the Eubanks don’t care as much about Trenton as they do about Melinda’s precious memory.

Holy shit on toast – here’s an interesting twist on the Trenton Duckett saga that I didn’t discover until tonight. Joshua Duckett, of course, is the father of Joshua Duckett and the grandfather of Trenton Duckett, currently the most well-known missing child in the United States. James, however, is not hard at work helping his son find poor Trenton. Instead, the elder Duckett is sitting on Florida’s Death Row for the rape and murder of 11-year-old Teresa McAbee in 1987. Duckett was the last person to see McAbee alive before her dressed body was found at Knight Lake, near the town of Mascotte, Florida.

For his part, Duckett maintains he’s an innocent man. He’s been railroaded – RAILROADED, I say! The Canadian Coalition against The Death Penalty has a personal letter written by Duckett attesting to his innocence, as well as pointers to other information describing how the case against him was flawed

For a while, retired homicide captain Marshall Frank bought much of this evidence. In 2003, he published a two-part article documenting numerous problems with the case, such as rotten evidence handling and prosecutorial sloppiness. But after pressing deeper into the case, Frank did a 180-degree turnaround. He concluded that, not only was Duckett guilty of murdering McAbee, but that he was a “serial killer” who was also responsible for the murder of 14-year-old Jennifer Weldon. Frank’s turnabout occurred after he examined the case file the Lake County police had on Duckett regarding the McAbee murder…and after the Polk County police shared information on a string of other similar murders, including Weldon’s.

I’ve been unable to discover whether the Weldon murder was ever solved. It appears that James Duckett has refused to cooperate with prosecutors on any other cases, which means that progress on these 20-year-old crimes has probably ground to a halt. Weldon, having died before the advent of the Internet, lives on only in the memories of the family and friends who loved her…and in the desks of detectives who no doubt would love to close her cold file.

Back in August, over at the Court TV forums, users discussed James Duckett and what probable impact he might have had on his son, Joshua. Mind you, this was immediately after Trenton went missing, when Josh and Melinda were both prime suspects. At the very least, this family history explains why Josh wasn’t the perfect father up until the time Trenton disappeared. I wonder what similar behavioral insights lie in Melinda’s past…?

More on this later, as I’m getting kids out the door for school. For now, just a quick blitz about the big news that Police in Leesburg, Florida are opening a new investigation on the premise that Trenton Duckett is alive.

I hope they’re right. They seem confident that they are.

So what the hell’s happening in the Trenton Duckett case? The last we left this mystery, mother Melinda Duckett had committed suicide following a confrontational appearance on “The Nancy Grace Show”. At the time, I lambasted Grace for her Pearl Harbor attack.

As time has worn on, though, my outrage has dimmed. I admire the way dad Joshua Duckett has stuck with the case, gathering tips and keeping Trenton’s name in the media spotlight. If Melinda loved her son as much as she claimed, why isn’t she around to help? Why couldn’t she set her personal misery aside at least long enough to find out what happened to her son? The only rational explanation is that she knows what happened to Trenton.

On the other hand, Ms. Duckett doesn’t strike me as the brightest bulb under the lampshade. If she did kill Trenton, why haven’t authorities found him? I have a hard time believing that this emotional wreck of a woman was that clever.

What’s really been pissing me off is that some of the people who knew Melinda before she died have been on my other site dissing Joshua for being an absentee father, and praising Melinda’s love for Trenton. What goes through some people’s heads? I can’t fathom how you can shit all over the man who’s actively looking for his kid, and lavish praise on the woman who took herself out, abandoning her child to his fate. Whatever Josh’s faults may have been before this incident, the fact is that his life now centers around the child. And that’s more than we can say for Melinda.

One interesting charge from that thread is that Melinda Duckett’s friends are doing nothing to help find Trenton. One commenter remarks:

No one was there at the Leesburg Festival but Josh’s family handing out candy with Trenton’s picture and info on it. Melinda’s dead so let’s forget about Trenton?? No one was at her side as she begged for her sons return on the t.v…..because she did not do that either. Josh did not abandon them Josh was not around because of the fake email Melinda sent. I commend him for dealing with her as long as he did. It takes 2 to make a marriage fail and only one person cared enough about Trenton to make sure he is not forgotten and hopefully he is found. That is Josh. Even in death Melinda was selfish….

And no, the blood is on the people who were her “friends” but were not there. Did not come forward with information that might help find Trenton, that never appeared beside her, the ones who still do nothing but blame others for the actions of Melinda and ignore that there is still a child who they claim to care about out there. I hope you can sleep at night with the guilt over the loss of Trenton.

Meanwhile, on the national television circuit, Nancy Grace plans to air her CNN show from the Leesburg crime lab on November 16th and 17th in an effort to keep a spotlight on the case. Some are accusing Grace of being an opportunity whore…which may well be true. But Grace’s Web site does a great job in highlighting unsolved cases that the rest of the media is ignoring. I’d rather fault the rest of the media for not paying attention to Trenton than to faulting Grace for putting her resources behind a good cause. Besides, if the end result is that authorities find Trenton, who cares what the motivation is?

Judging by reader comments on my other blog, it seems that most people think it’s a foregone conclusion that Melinda Duckett killed her son Trenton. And certainly, as I discussed in an earlier post, things look grim for the dead mom. Duckett, who killed herself after being grilled on national TV by ratings sponge Nancy Grace, was found to have disposed of many of Trenton’s possessions a few days after his reported disappearance. Then there’s the social services record trail left behind by both parents, which contains numerous incidents of dad Joshua Duckett claiming that Melinda threatened to harm the child as a way to spite him.

I have to admit, though: while I find it highly probable that Melinda is the perpetrator, I can’t be as strident as some others are in condemning Duckett in the absence of a body.

Why? First of all, there are Melinda’s multiple suicide notes, in which she expresses that she’d be a crappy mother after Trenton was found. Now, these notes may be posthumous posturing on Duckett’s part – an irrational attempt to control public perception of her, fostered by the belief that Trenton will never be found and the truth will never come out. But they may also be seen as painting a portrait of an unstable woman who was pushed over the edge by her son’s disappearance. This would explain her unwillingness to cooperate with police, her tossing Trenton’s things, and her post-CNN suicide: she had given up on being Trenton’s mommy. (Incidentally, this theory lets Nancy Grace off the hook as well: if it’s true, then Duckett had decided to check out long before she appeared on the show.)

Second of all, Joshua Duckett has changed his story about Melinda’s behavior so many times that he can hardly be believed. He claimed numerous times that, during heated arguments, Melinda tried to manipulate him by threatening to harm Trenton. But then he signed a statement recanting all of these accusations, claiming that his mommy put him up to it. Now that Melinda’s dead, he’s recanted again, saying that Melinda and her attorney “pressured” him into signing that statement. Which version of reality is the truth, Mr. Duckett?

And third of all, where’s Trenton? Call me naive but if Melinda Duckett did this, I would’ve thought that they’d have found his body long before now. Both Ducketts come across in social services reports as irrational, impulsive people; they are far from being criminal masterminds. If Melinda Duckett did this, I can’t see her being very original about hiding Trenton’s body. (On the other hand, a baby is easier to hide than a full human being, and easier to kill without spilling blood, so there’s less of a chance of leaving behind clues. Yes, I know it’s gruesome to think like this, but I’m sure the cops are using even more grim calculations in their attempts to retrace Duckett’s steps.)

Am I saying it’s likely that someone else kidnapped Trenton? That he was baby-napped by some lunatic woman who’s parading him around town and pretending to be his mommy? No. I think the obvious conclusion – that Melinda Duckett killed her baby – is still the most probable. But until all the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed, I’m not going to unleash my fury on the dead woman. There are too many holes in this narrative for it to be an open and shut case. Make no mistake, however: When the truth does come out, whoever is responsible will not be spared the wrath of PBB.

Now if only that wrath could bring dead children back to life…