Mary Stachowicz: not the right kind of victim to the media

We favored the death penalty for alleged homosexual Nick Gutierrez for murdering Mary Stachowicz — and then effectively blaming her for “attacking” him (see story below) — just as we called for the death penalty for Matthew Shepard’s killers. But isn’t it interesting how the media have devoted so much coverage over the years to the heinous crime against Matthew, and so little to that against Mary? (Associated Press failed to even cover Gutierrez’s trial.)

How can reporters, producers and editors justifty their double-standard? These days it can be presumed that the Fourth Estate will lavish coverage on “gay” victims, while pious victims like Mary often get ignored. And it seems the media have even less interest in the latter when the murderer is a homosexual — imagine AP ignoring a story about a ‘christian’ who killed a lesbian and stuffing her in his crawl space? I cannot.

In a way, the media’s blatant pro-homosexual bias in covering terrible crimes shows the perils of the “hate crimes” concept in general – both affirm a politically correct hierarchy of victims that is unjust and un-American, no matter how well-intended. Surely, press bias also helps to perpetuate the lopsided prosecution of “hate crimes” against approved classes of victims (like Shepard) by mobilizing government resources through the pressure-generating power of the media spotlight. 

The homosexual lobby named its “thought crimes” bill the “Matthew Shepard Act” — even though he wasn’t killed “just because he was gay,” as the liberal myth goes. But there will never be a “Mary Stachowicz Act” because in the eyes of the same liberals, she was not the right kind of victim.

Call your Senators at 202-224-3121 or e-mail them at http://www.congress.urg/ and ask them to reject the “Hate Crimes” amendment that Sen. Ted Kennedy tacked on to the Naional Defense Authorization Act.  – Peter LaBarbera

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Nicholas Gutierrez, murderer of Mary Stachowicz, deserves death penalty but gets life in prison 

By Allyson Smith, Americans For Truth

CHICAGO — Nicholas Gutierrez, who in November 2002 gruesomely murdered Mary Stachowicz, a devout Chicago Catholic mother of four, was sentenced July 3 to life in prison, even though his crime made him eligible for the death penalty. The sentence was handed down by Cook County Circuit Judge William Lacy following sentencing arguments made by defense and prosecution attorneys the previous week.

“I think the judge was fair, but as the daughter of the victim, knowing what he [Gutierrez] did to my mother, he absolutely, 100 percent deserved the death penalty,” Angie Ruffolo, Mrs. Stachowicz’s daughter, told the Chicago Tribune.

Last November, Gutierrez, who had worked with Mary Stachowicz at the F. J. Sikorski Funeral Home on Chicago’s Northwest side, was convicted of sexually assaulting and murdering her. Days after her murder, authorities found Stachowicz’s raped, battered, stabbed and strangled body in a crawl space beneath the floorboards of Gutierrez’s apartment above the mortuary.

In addition to being vaginally raped, sodomized, and sustaining 10 fractured ribs, Mary suffered 11 stab wounds in the head, face, and neck due to Gutierrez attacking her with such ferocity that the tip of the steel hunting knife used to commit the crime was bent. Afterward, he stole money from her purse, attempted to hide the killing, and “even ate meals at the table he placed over the floorboards covering Stachowicz’s body,” according to a June 27 Chicago Tribune report.

During Gutierrez’s sentencing hearing the week of June 25, prosecutors argued strongly for the death penalty, describing Gutierrez as a man who had sexually abused a female relative and another young girl when he still was a child.

Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney Vicki Kennedy said the case “screams out for a sentence of death.” Gutierrez “went on with his life, while her family members are going in and out of that funeral home,” she said. “All the while, Mary’s family was hanging pictures in the neighborhood that she was missing.”

Gutierrez’s attorneys argued that he did not deserve the death penalty because he had been physically, emotionally and sexually abused as a child. Before being placed in the state’s custody at about age 10, he was raised by a mother who was an alcohol and cocaine addict, they said. One witness, Carol Garza, testified that she had done drugs with Gutierrez’s mother in his home three or four times a week for a decade. At those times, Nicholas Gutierrez was locked in another room of the apartment, Garza said.

According to the Chicago Tribune, defense attorney Crystal Marchigiani argued that Gutierrez “acted under the influence of an extreme emotional disturbance” the day he killed Stachowicz. But during opening trial arguments last year, Marchigiani employed what Americans For Truth called an “anti-Christian panic defense,” telling jurors that Gutierrez killed Stachowicz after she confronted him for having homosexual sex, and that Stachowicz had instigated the attack by following Gutierrez upstairs and bullying herself into his apartment.

Prosecutors characterized the supposed facts underlying that defense as fabricated.

Defense attorneys also argued that Gutierrez was not eligible for the death penalty because he may have sexually assaulted Mrs. Stachowicz after she died, saying that if the assault occurred after death, it should not be considered rape and that he should not be sentenced to death if he did not commit a felony in addition to the murder, according to the Tribune.

During sentencing arguments, Angie Ruffolo held a photo of her mother, Mary Stachowicz, and told the newspaper, “Everyone is talking about how graphic it [Mary’s murder] is,” adding that the defense called the crime scene a “bloody mess.” “I need to think about her, how beautiful she was.”

Mrs. Stachowicz’s children described their mother as a supportive woman who cooked holiday meals and took them to church every Sunday. Ruffolo told the Chicago Tribune that her mother would have given Gutierrez the money he stole from her, if he had only asked. Ruffolo added that Mary never got to see her three sons get married or meet her five grandchildren, one of whom was born the day Gutierrez was convicted of her murder.

In her victim impact statement, Ruffolo told Gutierrez, “You took all of that away. Why couldn’t you take your own mother and leave mine alone?”

Mary’s youngest son, Danny Stachowicz, 26, told the court that his mother was his best friend and confidant and that he could always count on her. He said he once dreaded the prospect of getting up and going to church, but “Now what I would do to wake up and see my mom dressed for church.” He said he cannot even look at the church he grew up attending, St. Hyacinth, which is directly across the street from Gutierrez’s former apartment, without thinking about how his mother was stabbed, raped and tortured.

Danny Stachowicz told Gutierrez, “People say time heals all wounds. I am here as proof to show nothing heals wounds like this. I can only hope your life is lived in agony.”

At the sentencing, Bernard Sarley, another of Gutierrez’s attorneys, said that Stachowicz’s children were “fortunate enough to have as loving, as kind a mother as a child could possibly have,” and cited statements they had read to the court as proof.

But some of Mary’s relatives said that after enduring hours of graphic testimony detailing how she was killed, the defense’s tactic of using the family’s own words to defend Gutierrez was what hurt them most at the sentencing.

“It was wrong for them to turn our victim-impact statements against us,” said Mary’s son, Chris Stachowicz. “It’s disrespectful to my mother and to our family.”

“It is difficult to determine how ‘justice’ was rendered in this case,” said Susan Jordan, who organized a candlelight vigil in memory of Mary Stachowicz on her death anniversary in 2005. “I attended the opening and closing sessions of the Gutierrez case – along with Peter LaBarbera. I was absolutely sickened by the details of the gruesome murder of Mary Stachowicz. I find it especially troubling that the defense attorney used words from the Stachowicz family to portray Gutierrez as a ‘victim’ because of his difficult childhood.”

Authorities in the eastern city of Leipzig released chilling photographs of the last sighting of Mitja Hofmann. Captured by CCTV as he sat on a tram, the boy was smiling broadly as he made what was supposed to be his first ever journey home from school unaccompanied by his mother.

But the man sitting next to him was named by police as Uwe Kolbig, 43, a man known to police after serving two years in prison for sexually abusing children in 1998.

In an unusual step by police, they stated that they are certain that later that day, last Thursday, Kolbig sexually abused and murdered Mitja.

The boy’s body was found on Saturday evening in Kolbig’s allotment.

Police said that he had died after being strangled. Kolbig himself could not be found.

Continue reading in Telegraph… 

Now that the left has ascended to power in Washington, San Fran Nan and her munchkins have declared that adding “sexual orientation” to existing federal “hate crimes” law will rise to the top of the congressional priority list.

But wait. Why not first pass a “nice crimes” law, at the federal level and also in some states?

After all, selecting some crimes for special designation as markers of “hate” is helpful, but only if we first recognize other “non-hate” crimes as the nice ones.

For instance, I would nominate all nice murders, where the offender expresses tender sentiments toward the victim before bludgeoning him/her to death. There’s also the nice, reasonable spouse abuse crimes, where a husband was set off because he had a bad day, or because his woman looked twice at another man. His self-esteem was low and he had a good reason. Outside the orange jumpsuits, these are really great guys.

Of course, the ACLU will help us here, because they are the perpetual defenders of “nice” people who perform nice crimes, like sodomy (back when it was a crime) or pedophilia. Remember the 1997 case in Massachusetts of 10-year-old Jeffrey Curley, who was the victim of a grotesque sexual molestation and murder by two men. The ACLU defended the pedophile group NAMBLA in a subsequent suit. Sex, after all, is a nice thing, and people have their needs. Perhaps it shouldn’t go as far as murder, especially of 10-year-olds, but I’m sure the ACLU can help us understand how to think about this.

The ACLU also defends the nice crime of obscenity distribution, which benefits us all by providing images of group sex involving 13- and 14-year-olds, animals and so on. The freedom to view such material develops the highest and noblest of character traits in our citizenry.

A judge in Asheville, N.C., recently sentenced child porn producer Andrew Douglas Reed to a mere 10-month sentence, in recognition of the “nice” nature of his crime. Some of the pornography involved kids as young as 6 engaging in sex acts with adults or other children. Let’s hear it for all the local folks who spoke up on Reed’s behalf, especially the fellow members of his “welcoming” Unitarian Universalist congregation. We should especially thank the lenient judge, a Democrat, who recognized right off that this was really a nice man performing a nice crime who didn’t deserve 80-some years in jail. The kids involved will surely recover, someday.

I don’t know that rape would fit into the nice crime category, except in those cases where the rapist keeps a memento from his victim – a lock of hair or an article of clothing. This signifies respect and affection, don’t you think? Then that could be “nice.” Interviews with rape victims might shed some light.

Another nice crime is when a Muslim or well-informed college student marches in a parade or a demonstration in the U.S., and because of our free speech laws is able to call for the extermination of the nation of Israel, or of Jews, or of all infidels in general, or even “death to America.” Oh, wait, that’s not a crime, unless we still – (yawn) – punish people for sedition or treason.

But if it were, it would be a nice one, because America, Israel, Christians and all other nations and faiths are responsible for everything bad that has ever happened to Muslims. This would make a great teaching example for FBI and law enforcement “hate crimes” training funded by the Department of Justice. It would illustrate how an officer can identify what are appropriate thoughts (those that have good reasons behind them, like anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and anti-American opinions) vs. those that are bad and evil, like believing that homosexuality or Islamofascism are wrong. Those opinions are “hateful,” according to the important people who decide these things.

Local police officers, based on the federal 1990 Hate Crime Statistics Act, are required to conduct interviews when a crime is committed against a homosexual to find out “why” the offender committed the crime. Victims who are window-washers, stamp collectors, vegans or blues musicians wouldn’t get this courtesy even if the actual crime is the same, say, an act of theft. But a homosexual does. If the offender has a negative (“homophobic”) opinion, or if he/she added a homosexual insult to the injury, that crime becomes a statistic, counted as part of a miniscule-but-predicted-to-grow “epidemic” of “hate” crimes against homosexuals.

Most of these are non-violent crimes like intimidation or vandalism, but they surely signal a Threat From The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. Take the 1998 murder of homosexual Matthew Shepard in Wyoming. Even though it seemed to be a drug deal gone bad, Katie Couric quickly blamed the “hate” of Christians, particularly Focus on the Family. With such special insight, one wonders why she didn’t point to Martin Luther, the Apostle Paul and maybe even the Gaither Brothers as well.

Such crimes need to be carefully tracked, the offenders and all their allies or potential allies interrogated, with extra penalties for even daring to commit a crime while holding, or seeming to hold, the wrong beliefs. To stop at simply punishing the crime would be, well, insensitive to “hate.” How much better for everyone, even the victim, if one is robbed or murdered while nice views are held by the felon.

The categories of “hate” in that 1990 statistics law enabled the Safe and Drug Free Schools Program of the No Child Left Behind Act to set aside millions of dollars for “anti-bias” and “safe schools” lessons for school children about what were now called hate crimes. Pleas from pro-family leaders were ignored, and it’s a good thing. Many of these programs, unbeknownst to parents, tell children that having the wrong opinion about homosexuality is just as bad as hating people because of skin color. Negative opinions about homosexuality apparently lead to violence, or at least this is the theory that will be proven just as soon as that “epidemic” of hate crimes unfolds.

In the meantime, such opinions in the young must be quickly corrected. Federal and state education departments fund such lessons now, even though there’s not yet a federal hate crimes law involving sexual orientation with penalties in place.

Incorrect opinions about religion – especially those favorable to Christianity or Judaism – are also dangerous. It’s amazing how this view seems to go hand in hand with acceptance of “gay” lifestyles. But it’s good that those in charge of nice opinions monitor all these things together.

Thanks to that 1990 statistics law, we know the correct definition of a “hate” crime, as opposed to all those “nice” crimes out there. And I’m sure the new Democrat majority, backed up by their trial lawyer friends, will help us with further categories, labels and stereotypes, so we know what “nice” beliefs to hold.

Or else.

Crosstalk Radio with Jim Schneider

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Americans For Truth blacked out the front page of its website today, with the following message:

“The Americans For Truth website is blacked out today, the anniversary of the brutal murder of Mary Stachowicz by homosexual Nicholas Gutierrez. Four years ago on this date (Nov. 13, 2002), Gutierrez raped and sodomized Mary, and stabbed, beat and strangled her to death before hiding her bloodied, mangled body in his crawl space. Gutierrez later claimed that Mary, a Catholic mother of four devoted to her family and her church, had inspired the assault by “taunting” him about his homosexuality—a blatant and bigoted appeal to liberal stereotypes of Christians as crazed ‘homophobes.’

“This screen is also symbolic of the media blackout of the Stachowicz case and the trial of Gutierrez. The same media that hyped the murder of homosexual Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard as a “hate crime” showed little if any interest in Mary’s case—demonstrating that in the eyes of the media, some victims are more important than others.”

“The media drive the ‘gay’ agenda in this country by choosing what to cover and what to ignore,” said Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans For Truth. “The brutal murder of Mary Stachowicz was no less ‘hateful’ than the murder of homosexual Matthew Shepard—yet only one case, Shepard’s, is celebrated as a ‘hate crime’ and even used as a teaching tool for American schoolchildren. That’s just plain wrong, especially since Shepard’s murder was not the clear-cut ‘hate crime’ it was portrayed to be.” (ABC reported that his killers were motivated by drugs and money, not anti-gay hate.)

On Nov. 3, a Chicago jury found Gutierrez guilty of first-degree murder and rape. He could be sentenced to the death penalty next month.

Focusing on Associated Press’ failure to cover the Stachowicz case (AP ignored the Gutierrez murder trial), AFT has asked people to “tell AP that ‘gay’ victims are no more important than Christian victims. Hate is hate–and that there is no logical reason why Shepard’s case deserves any more coverage than Stachowicz’s.”

The ugly truth is too much for most in the media to admit:

they would have cared a lot more about Mary Stachowicz

if she were “gay,”

and if her murderer, Nick Gutierrez, were not.

TAKE ACTION – Call the Associated Press and ask why they ignored the Mary Stachowicz case while continuing to devote extensive coverage to the Shepard case. Politely tell them that “gay” victims are not more important than Christian victims–hate is hate–and that there is no logical reason why Shepard’s case deserves any more coverage than Stachowicz’s.

by Peter LaBarbera

All murder victims are equal, but some are more equal than others, to paraphrase George Orwell.

On Nov. 3, a jury took just three hours to find Nicholas Gutierrez guilty of the first-degree murder and rape of Mary Stachowicz (pronounced Stack-OH-vich), a 51-year-old Chicago mother of four and former co-worker who attended church nearly every day. Gutierrez, a homosexual, is now eligible for the death penalty, and his horrifying crime is the sort that cries out for that form of justice.

On this date four years ago (November 13, 2002), Gutierrez, then 19, raped and sodomized Mary, and stabbed, beat and strangled her to death before hiding her bloodied and mangled body in the floor crawl space of his apartment—above the Chicago funeral home where she worked and where he had been laid off. For three days, family members and friends searched frantically for Mary until Gutierrez guided police to her body and gave a warped “confession” filled with self-serving lies.

The trial revealed evidence of the brutality of Gutierrez’s murderous assault on Mary: the tip on his hunting knife was bent from the force of his 11 stab thrusts against her body, and he broke 10 of her ribs.

As if his savagery were not evil enough, Gutierrez, a stocky man about six feet tall, and his public defender lawyers effectively blamed Mary for her own murder—arguing that the five-foot-five-and-half-inch tall Stachowicz had attacked him because she was obsessed about his homosexual lifestyle. By attempting this preposterous “anti-Christian panic defense,” Gutierrez’s lawyers played to bigoted and crude stereotypes of religious people as crazed “homophobes”—in a desperate ploy to reduce his sentence to second-degree murder.

To demonstrate the folly of Gutierrez’s defense, prosecutor James McKay showed the jury a crime scene photo of her bloodied and disfigured face—which he mockingly contrasted with the superficial cut sustained by “Mr. Band-aid,” Nick Gutierrez, on the day of the assault.

Thankfully, the jury didn’t buy Gutierrez’s story and took just three hours to convict him.

If you are the typical American—even if you live in Chicago—you probably have never heard of Mary Stachowicz because she simply was not the right kind of victim. Matthew Shepard, a “gay” college student from Wyoming murdered by two drug-induced thugs in 1998—now there’s a victim who deserves worldwide sympathy and fame. Shepard’s is now one of the most famous homicide cases in all of history, thanks to media hype and homosexual activists’ “spin” that:

1) falsely linked his tragic death to the rhetoric of Christian pro-family groups; and

2) erroneously reported that he was targeted for murder “just because he was gay.” His tragic killing is now exploited as a teaching tool to promote acceptance of homosexuality on high school and college campuses across the country. (Six years after the murder, ABC finally did some serious journalism challenging this myth, revealing that Shepard’s killers were motivated by money and drugs, not anti-gay hate.)

A whole industry has arisen to exploit Shepard’s tragic killing, which has been used as a teaching tool to promote the acceptance of homosexuality to millions of impressionable high school and college students across the country.

Enter Mary Stachowicz, who may have been killed, at least in part, “just because she was a faithful Catholic”—not that the media cares. (A recent Nexis media database search on Mary’s name found a grand total of only 13 articles; a similar search on “Matthew Shepard” found 997 articles in the last month alone.)

Associated Press completely ignored the Gutierrez trial, ensuring that it would receive little national attention—despite the heart-rending details of the Stachowicz case. (On the day that Mary’s killer was convicted of murder, her daughter Angela gave birth to another grandchild whom she will never get to see. Mary’s widowed husband Jerry was forced to endure the humiliation of testifying as to when they had last made love, to prove that the semen found on her murdered body was not his.)

Adding insult to injury, as Gutierrez’s trial was going on, AP ran a feature story about Judy Shepard, Matthew’s mother, who was speaking to college students in Chicago about “hate.”

I called AP’s Chicago office to ask why they weren’t covering the Gutierrez trial—right there in the Windy City—after all the attention they heaped (and continue to heap) on the Matthew Shepard case. I was told that the Shepard case is different because that was a “hate crime.”

Such is the folly of the “hate crimes” concept. It is hard to conceive of a greater demonstration of hatred than Nick Gutierrez cutting Mary’s life short in such a ghastly way and then cravenly exploiting his victim’s strong Catholic beliefs as a way to reduce his sentence. Did the “monster” who sodomized and killed Mary do so because she caught him stealing from her purse, as prosecutors argued, or did he fly into a rage after she “taunted” him about his homosexuality (as a headline in the Chicago Sun Times gratuitously stated)? Or was that just a convenient yarn he concocted to save his hide, knowing that the media and some gullible defense lawyers might play along? (The Tribune reported that Gutierrez’s homosexual partner, Ray Scacchitti, testified that “Stachowicz knew he and Gutierrez were gay and never questioned them about their lifestyle.”)

All this could have made for some fascinating coverage of a trial that might have yielded larger questions, such as: Was Matthew Shepard more a victim of hate than Mary Stachowicz? Are some homosexuals so obsessed with others’ approval that they pose a threat to religious people? Are Christians a growing target for “hate crimes” in America? No surprise that the local media failed to pursue these angles, seeing that most big Chicago media corporations march every year in the “Gay Pride” parade.

There is no logical reason why Matthew Shepard should be a household name while Mary Stachowicz, by all accounts a good person who devoted her life to her church, dies unknown—a victim of bigotry and slander even in her death. The ugly truth is too much for most in the media to admit: they would have cared a lot more about Mary Stachowicz if she were “gay,” and if her murderer, Nick Gutierrez, were not.

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