“Man accused of 1974 cold-case killing near Stanford campus pleads not guilty

“Man accused of 1974 cold-case killing near Stanford campus pleads not guilty - Palo Alto Online” plus 2 more

Man accused of 1974 cold-case killing near Stanford campus pleads not guilty - Palo Alto Online
When My Father Stood Up For His Rights - The Wall Street Journal
Assange ordered to face full US extradition hearing next year - The Irish Times

Man accused of 1974 cold-case killing near Stanford campus pleads not guilty - Palo Alto Online

Posted: 14 Jun 2019 05:10 PM PDT

A 74-year-old Hayward man accused of murdering two 21-year-old women whose strangled bodies were found on Stanford University property about a year apart in the 1970s pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in one of the cases on Friday.

John Arthur Getreu appeared in San Mateo County Superior Court in a red jail jumpsuit and black-rimmed glasses entered his plea in the 1974 murder of Janet Ann Taylor. Taylor's body was found on March 25, 1974, off the side of the road at Sand Hill Road and Manzanita Way.

Getreu was also arrested last November by Santa Clara County sheriff's deputies in connection with the death of Stanford graduate Leslie Marie Perlov and has not yet entered a plea in that case. Perlov's body was found on Feb. 13, 1973 under an oak tree on Stanford land in an area now known as The Dish.

Santa Clara County sheriff's investigators initially cracked the Perlov cold case last fall after conducting DNA testing on items taken from Perlov and the crime scene. Familial DNA databases and new technology allowed investigators to match Getreu to evidence found at the crime scene through samples of his DNA they obtained last year from items he had discarded, authorities said. Similarities in the cases led investigators in San Mateo County to test items found at the Taylor homicide against Getreu's DNA profile, which they obtained from Santa Clara County and found a match.

In both cases, investigators determined the women were not raped, but there was a sexual motivation behind each alleged crime based on Getreu's criminal history and other indicators found by law enforcement.

Getreu has been held without bail in the Santa Clara County Main Jail in San Jose since his arrest, but authorities have transported him to the San Mateo County Hall of Justice in Redwood City for hearings in the Taylor case. The San Mateo County District Attorney's Office charged Getreu with Taylor's murder on May 16. Investigators in both counties are collaborating, San Mateo County Assistant Sheriff Gregory Rothaus said during the press conference announcing the charges.

Getreu, who lived in Palo Alto at the time of the murders, has a previous conviction for raping and murdering a 15-year-old American girl in Germany in 1963, for which he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was 18 years old at the time of the crime and lived with his family in Bad Kreuznach, where the fathers of both teens were stationed at a U.S. Army base. He was charged with the rape of a 17-year-old girl in Palo Alto in 1975 and pleaded to a lesser charge of statutory rape, according to court documents.

Getreu will appear in Santa Clara County Superior Court in San Jose on July 15 to enter a plea. He is scheduled for a preliminary hearing in San Mateo County Superior Court on Nov. 4.

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When My Father Stood Up For His Rights - The Wall Street Journal

Posted: 14 Jun 2019 09:01 PM PDT

Charles M. McCurdy pictured in the Lake Shore High School yearbook in 1964. Photo: Courtesy Ron McCurdy

Ron McCurdy with Cari Lynn

June 15, 2019 12:01 a.m. ET

In 1970, when I was 17 years old, my father Charles M. McCurdy—a by-the-book disciplinarian, always in a suit and tie and horn-rimmed glasses—became an activist in a way I'd never imagined.

For some 15 years, he had been the principal of Lake Shore High, a mostly black high school in Belle Glade, Fla. Long after the Civil Rights Act, Belle Glade remained segregated, with separate waiting rooms in doctor's offices (the white side had air conditioning), separate windows to order at Dairy Queen, separate movie theaters (theirs got all the new releases while ours mostly showed old cowboy movies)—and separate schools.

My father had arrived there in 1944, at a time when the professional options for black men in the Deep South were limited to being a preacher, an undertaker or a teacher. My father chose the latter, earning not just a teacher's degree but a master's in educational supervision and administration. An opening for a black principal took him and his young wife, Dorothy, to Belle Glade, a town of sprawling farmland where most black residents, and the white planters who employed them, put farm work above education. Until just a few years earlier, black schools in the town didn't go beyond the fifth grade.

My father saw it as his personal challenge to encourage education in Belle Glade. He held himself to be a role model and required his teachers to do the same: If you wanted to work for Charles M. McCurdy, you had to be all in. That meant knowing all of the parents' names and having a sense of their lives, being present at all school events and being active in the community, including church. My father had a strict dress code for students and teachers alike: skirts that reached below the knee, shirts tucked in, no pants for female teachers, ties for the men.

Of course, not everyone wanted to be as perfect as Charles M. McCurdy—including me. Not only was I under his control at school, but he ran our house like a military regiment. He rose at 5:30 a.m., even on weekends. You could set a clock according to my mother's kitchen, with breakfast and dinner on the table at 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. sharp.

Ron McCurdy in his father's office at Lake Shore High School in 1958. Photo: Courtesy Ron McCurdy

Though I was a budding musician, my father controlled the music in the house. My siblings and I listened to what he listened to, which included Bach, Handel's "Messiah," the 1930s hit "Tumbling Tumbleweeds," and a couple of more recent songs—Ella Fitzgerald's "A-Tisket, A-Tasket" and Ray Charles's "Hit the Road Jack." But as a general rule, my father listened to nothing composed after 1960. He had no use for "hippie" or protest music, let alone Motown or rhythm and blues. "I can't understand a word he's saying," my father complained when I once played James Brown.

In 1970, school desegregation finally came to Belle Glade, 16 years after the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Under court order, my father's school would close, and his students would integrate the town's white school, which would be renamed Glades Central High. My first day of eleventh grade would be my first time crossing the railroad tracks. But not all of the town viewed this as progress. The white high school principal resigned, apparently wanting nothing to do with desegregation.

This left my father as the logical choice to become principal of the merged school. But, according to Palm Beach County, while Charles M. McCurdy had been perfectly acceptable to head a black high school, he was not qualified to oversee white students and white teachers. Instead, a white man with one year of experience as an assistant principal in a neighboring white school was given what rightly should have been my father's job. My father, a high school principal in Belle Glade since 1955, was demoted to the junior high, with his salary slashed.

My father had never bucked a rule in his life. He had been what whites called a "good Negro." He liked Richard Nixon. He not only sat out the sit-ins, he thought that Martin Luther King, Jr. was "grandstanding" and said that he had no use for Malcolm X.

But being removed, replaced and demoted from the job that he loved and in which he took utmost pride—this he couldn't stand for. Though many other black principals he knew faced the same fate at recently desegregated Florida schools, none of them agreed to join him as he sued for the violation of his civil rights.

" Ultimately, Charles M. McCurdy v. School Board of Palm Beach County, Florida, was decided in favor of my father. "

Ultimately, Charles M. McCurdy v. School Board of Palm Beach County, Florida, was decided in favor of my father. It was August 1974 when he was finally reinstated as a principal. But desegregation had exacerbated the racism in Belle Glade, and most of the white student body fled to private and parochial schools and to neighboring white towns.

My father's fierce dedication to education made him almost blind to the challenges in store. He was determined to put academics above athletics, as he'd always done: If student athletes didn't keep up their grades, they didn't play. That stance hadn't made him popular, but he wasn't there to ingratiate himself. Now he was excited to get back into the community, to reset priorities and to engage parents, telling them how much he cared about their children's minds and that they should, too.

But he never got to try. My father died of a heart attack the week before classes began in 1974. Today, Glades Central consistently falls among the lowest-ranked high schools in the nation for academic performance—yet it boasts some of the nation's highest numbers in producing recruits for professional football. The disparity would have deeply saddened my father.

It wasn't until many years later, after I had children of my own, that I realized how much bravery, resilience and vulnerability my father had exhibited in pursuing his lawsuit. He had been raised in a time and place where sticking out your neck could, quite literally, cost you your neck. But he was only one person, up against centuries of institutionalized racism.

My father was known for his many sayings: "My way or the trailway," "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything" and—one of the last things he said to me—"You can't legislate people's hearts."

—Dr. McCurdy is a professor of music in the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California. Ms. Lynn is a journalist and, most recently, the co-author of "Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women."

More Essays

Appeared in the June 15, 2019, print edition as 'When My Father Stood Up For His Rights.'

Assange ordered to face full US extradition hearing next year - The Irish Times

Posted: 14 Jun 2019 05:24 AM PDT

Julian Assange has been ordered to face a full extradition hearing next year, as his legal team branded charges in the US "an outrageous and full-frontal assault" on journalistic rights.

The WikiLeaks founder is fighting against being sent to the States to face 18 charges that include allegations of conspiring to hack into a classified Pentagon computer.

The US extradition case was formally opened at Westminster Magistrates' Court on Friday, a day after an extradition request was signed off by Home Secretary Sajid Javid.

Assange, with a scraggly white beard, told the court that "175 years of my life is effectively at stake" as he sought to defend his organisation.

Mark Summers QC, representing Assange, said there are a "multiplicity of profound issues" with the extradition case.

"We say it represents an outrageous and full-frontal assault on journalistic rights," he said.

Full extradition hearing

Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot ordered for a full extradition hearing expected to last five days to begin on February 25th [2020].

Following the hearing, officials at Southwark Crown Court, where Assange was jailed for a bail breach, confirmed an appeal against the sentence was lodged on May 29th.

Assange, wearing black-rimmed glasses, appeared by video-link from Belmarsh Prison, where he is serving a 50-week prison sentence for the violation.

Addressing the judge as Lady Arbuthnot, he defended his website against hacking claims, saying: "WikiLeaks is nothing but a publisher."

Ben Brandon, representing the US, formally opened the case, saying it relates to "one of the largest compromises of confidential information in the history of the United States".

Evidence will show that Assange "first encouraged" former US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to illegally obtain documents, Mr Brandon alleged.

Then Assange agreed with her to "crack" a password hash on a Pentagon computer, the lawyer continued.

"By taking steps to crack the password hash, it's said that Mr Assange was also attempting to illegally obtain and receive classified information," Mr Brandon said.

The documents relate to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and, the lawyer alleged, information on secret intelligence sources.

"By publishing that unredacted material on the internet, Mr Assange created a grave and imminent risk that human intelligence sources, including journalists, human rights defenders and political activists, would suffer serious physical harm or arbitrary detention," Mr Brandon said.

Sweden

Assange (47) was jailed in April after police dragged him out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had spent seven years holed up after claiming political asylum.

Meanwhile, an investigation has also been reopened into an allegation of rape in Sweden, which Assange has always denied.

He still commands the support of some loyal fans, with a group of about a dozen showing their solidarity outside the court on Friday.

Jennifer Robinson, a lawyer representing Assange, gave a statement outside court to warn the US indictment "will place a chilling impact" on journalism and publishers "all over the world".

The material WikiLeaks published included "evidence of war crimes, human rights abuse and corruption the world over", she stressed.

The case attracts attention from an international audience, with journalists representing outlets from across the globe queuing to get into the hearing. – PA