Man claims he witnessed Dana Bradley murder, Disturbing Study Finds Women Actually Think Sexual Violence is Normal, Describing Abusive Behavior as "Young Love"

- Man claims he witnessed Dana Bradley murder
RCMP investigate, inform him no new evidence found
- ‘The guy is the real thing’
Doctor says man’s story of Dana Bradley murder shouldn’t be written off as false memory syndrome
- ‘There’s nothing left I can do,’ says man convinced he witnessed murder
- Disturbing Study Finds Women Actually Think Sexual Violence is Normal
- Normalizing Sexual Violence - Young Women Account for
Harassment and Abuse
- Describing Abusive Behavior as "Young Love"

Man claims he witnessed Dana Bradley murder
Tara Bradbury and Glen Whiffen
Published on March 15, 2014

RCMP investigate, inform him no new evidence found

Dana Bradley’s body was arranged in burial fashion by her killer in an area of alder bushes and trees off an old dirt road, away from the eyes of the city on a cold and quiet December evening many years ago.

One of the killer’s last acts at the scene was to tuck her school books carefully under her arm, as in some bizarre act of kindness when, sometime earlier, the monster in him had raged and he had brutally beat her about the head and robbed her of her life....

He said he saw the savageness in the killer that evening, claims he witnessed the horrific murder and the events following it that night.

As a child, he had known the man well. Suffering from his own type of hell with him, Robert says his memories from that day and night were long repressed, along with many other terrible memories from those years.

More than two-and-a-half years ago, after he decided to part ways with booze and take his chances without it, he says his mind healed and the memories surfaced — first of being sexually abused at the hands of the man, then of the murder....

Robert says the RCMP first met with him on Dec. 14, 2011 — the 30th anniversary of Dana’s murder.

According to an RCMP document, the investigation into Robert’s tip continued for 16 months.

The RCMP subsequently informed Robert that none of the avenues related to his tip provided any new evidence to support criminal charges.

In March 2013, the RCMP asked Robert to meet with Dr. Peter Collins, an expert in the field of forensic psychiatry.

“Subsequent to that meeting, you were advised by Dr. Collins that you were not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and recovered memories, but rather that you were experiencing false memory syndrome,” the document notes.

Robert complained to the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP about the way investigators handled his information. He alleged the RCMP relied on false memory syndrome to make the decision to dismiss his complaint. He also pointed out that false memory syndrome is not recognized in the medical community....

At the same time, the RCMP informed Robert the investigation into his complaint about being sexually abused by the man in the early 1980s had concluded without corroborating evidence to support charges....

Looking back, Robert said the man probably wanted him to go along as a cover, in case he was seen, so that he could say he was taking him to his mother and father.

This time, Robert noted, the man didn’t attempt to drive up the dirt road but stopped on the side of Maddox Cove Road and walked up to where the body was.

“He was looking for his jacket — he didn’t have his jacket on — and he had gotten the booster cables,” Robert said. “So while I was left in the car, there was a car that drove by. He told me that if anyone stops, (to say) he left his new chainsaw up in the woods.”

As outlined in previous media reports, a Shea Heights couple driving north on Maddox Cove Road that night — between midnight and 1 a.m. — noticed a car matching the suspect vehicle parked on the side of the road. They said a passenger side door of the car was open and the dome light was illuminated. They also saw a man standing near the woods. They reported he had no jacket, despite the cold....

They then drove back to the man’s house, where Robert held a work light while the man washed the trunk of the car using cleaning supplies.

“He cleaned out the trunk and then he got me in the backseat of the car and had another go (sexual assault) at me,” Robert said. “And then he brought me home.”....

The man Robert describes had been a close friend of his parents in the early 1980s. In the 1990s, he was convicted of sexually abusing children and served time in prison. The time period of those offences is the same time frame Robert alleges he was abused by the man and Dana’s murder occurred.... http://www.thetelegram.com/News/Local/2014-03-15/article-3650234/Man-claims-he-witnessed-Dana-Bradley-murder/1 http://www.thetelegram.com/News/Local/2014-03-15/article-3650234/Man-claims-he-witnessed-Dana-Bradley-murder/2
 
‘The guy is the real thing’
Tara Bradbury and Glen Whiffen
Published on March 17, 2014

Doctor says man’s story of Dana Bradley murder shouldn’t be written off as false memory syndrome

Part 2 in a three-part series

Good memories from childhood are often recalled fondly. Bad memories, not so much. But what if the memories are so terrible, so horrible, it’s unbearable to live with them?....

He says he saw her murderer sexually assault and kill her by hitting her in the head with a tire iron and that he was there, crying, when the killer laid her out in burial fashion among the trees off an old dirt road just outside the city.

Robert’s relates these memories in spine-tingling detail — how he screamed and begged the man, a close friend of his family, not to leave the body in the winter cold overnight, and of being forced to hold a lamp in the dark as the killer later cleaned out the car trunk.

His throat closes and his chest hurts at times when he recalls his own abuse at the hands of the same man — a man who was convicted in the 1990s of sexually abusing other children, and served time in prison.

Robert would have gone to the police long ago if he had remembered any of what he had seen and experienced.

Now a successful businessman, husband and father, Robert describes always looking back on his childhood fondly, though he admits he had always had a hole, a big blank spot, in his memory.

He drank from the time he was 13 until he was 35, when, he says, the booze caught up with him.

After quitting drinking, he was driving home one day in 2011 when he suddenly began drowning in a wave of memories, which rushed in, bubbling and swirling, to fill the hole.

“I was all alone, and the first memory of the sexual abuse came back, and it came back like a punch in the stomach,” Robert said....

The RCMP investigated Robert’s information for 16 months, then informed him none of the avenues related to his tip had turned up any new evidence. As part of their investigation, police had asked Robert to meet with Dr. Peter Collins, an expert in forensic psychiatry.

According to a police document, Collins advised Robert he was not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but was experiencing false memory syndrome.

Not a recognized psychiatric disorder, false memory syndrome is used to describe a condition in which a person is affected by memories which aren’t true, but which they strongly believe. The term was developed in the United States by Peter and Pamela Freyd, who also founded the False Memory Syndrome Foundation in 1992....

Dr. Hugh Mirolo is the province’s only neuropsychiatrist and has been declared an expert witness in the courts in the area of neuropsychiatry. The Telegram asked him to meet with Robert, and the doctor believes he is telling the truth, especially since Robert experienced a panic attack and flashback while telling him his story.

“It would be pretty damn difficult for a guy to make that up, and for me to buy it,” said Mirolo, who had Robert’s permission to share his opinions with The Telegram.

“If he is an actor, he is a very, very good actor. He deserves an Oscar.”

Robert’s reaction was consistent with experiences Mirolo has witnessed in the past as a doctor in the United States, working with war veterans. Post-traumatic stress disorder can cause flashbacks that bring them right back to the time and place of a memory so they are reliving it instead of simply recalling it, Mirolo said....

There is a tendency for the brain to repress things that are traumatic, the doctor explained, and it’s as basic as the pleasure principle: we go towards things that are pleasurable and avoid things that aren’t.

“When you have PTSD or (have witnessed) gory events, things like that, those things can be blocked,” Mirolo explained.

“The blockage is not foolproof; things can trigger it. The same goes for regular childhood memories. When I go to my office in the summer and they’re mowing the lawn outside, I remember the house in the country where my dad used to mow the lawn. That smell brings me back in time. This is the same sort of thing.”....

Mirolo doesn’t mince words when asked if he feels Robert was dismissed unfairly by the police, when it comes to false memory syndrome.

“Yes. Unfairly and too fast,” he said. “This guy is the real thing. He has been a victim more than once.... http://www.northernpen.ca/News/Local/2014-03-17/article-3651754/%26lsquo%3BThe-guy-is-the-real-thing%26rsquo%3B/1 


‘There’s nothing left I can do,’ says man convinced he witnessed murder
Tara Bradbury and Glen Whiffen
Published on March 18, 2014

....Commission interim chair Ian McPhail wrote in the final report that the forensic psychiatrist’s diagnosis of false memory syndrome didn’t play a role in the attention given to the investigation, and wasn’t the basis for the investigators’ dismissal of the tip.

“I emphasize that, given its place in the investigation, the psychiatric assessment was not conducted to determine whether (Robert) was lying about his memories, which would have impacted the investigation, but rather to determine what the appropriate degree of reliance on those memories would and could be. There is no suggestion in the available material that (Robert) was deceitful.”

Robert told The Telegram Monday he is surprised by what he said is a “sudden and unexpected de-emphasizing” by the police of forensic psychiatrist Peter Collins’ diagnosis.

“Dr. Collins applied for a temporary licence to practice in Newfoundland so he could deliver his false memory syndrome message, and the RCMP could close my tip that very same day,” Robert said. “He appeared to be very important to investigators at the time.

“Things could be much further along if only they had given me the benefit of the doubt.”

When asked how he feels about the lack of evidence turned up by the police in their investigation into his memories, Robert is quick to respond.

“I don’t think they looked hard enough,” he said. “I think there were a lot of investigational techniques not used. I think they focused on trying to discredit me, rather than try to find evidence. It was a shallow investigation.”....

According to a police document Collins, an expert in forensic psychiatry, advised Robert he was not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but was experiencing false memory syndrome, a term used to describe a condition in which a person is affected by memories that aren’t true, but which they strongly believe.

The Telegram asked local neuropsychiatrist Dr. Hugh Mirolo, an accredited expert in the courts in the area of neuropsychiatry, to meet with Robert and share his opinions. Mirolo believes Robert is genuine, and told The Telegram he believes the RCMP dismissed him too quickly and unfairly.... http://www.northernpen.ca/News/Regional/2014-03-18/article-3653169/%26lsquoThere%26rsquos-nothing-left-I-can-do%2C%26rsquo-says-man-convinced-he-witnessed-murder/1 


Disturbing Study Finds Women Actually Think Sexual Violence is Normal
By Viola Knowles ,  RYOT News April 15, 2014

Apparently women thinking sexual abuse is normal is the new normal.

A study to be published in Gender & Society finds that young women assume being harassed, assaulted and abused is simply something everyone experiences.

Sadly, statistics show us that they’re not exactly wrong.

Love Is Respect reports that one in three teens in the U.S. will experience some form of abuse from a dating partner, and one quarter of high school girls will be victims of sexual abuse.

One in four college girls will be the victims of rape or attempted rape.

This doesn’t include the one in three grown women who will be raped or beaten in her lifetime.

The fact that these are no longer just stats, but a way of thinking for women, shows that the time to take action is now.

Women in leadership are working hard to bring attention to these atrocities, like Angelina Jolie speaking out about sexual violence against women and children in conflict. http://www.ryot.org/women-think-sexual-violence-normal/642849

Normalizing Sexual Violence
Young Women Account for Harassment and Abuse
Heather R. Hlavka
Marquette University, USA

Despite high rates of gendered violence among youth, very few young women report these incidents to authority figures. This study moves the discussion from the question of why young women do not report them toward how violence is produced, maintained, and normalized among youth.... http://gas.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/02/28/0891243214526468.full

Describing Abusive Behavior as "Young Love"                                             
Proponents of the witch-hunt narrative have a particular kind of blindness to real abuse. That is, they don't see sexual abuse in places where it is obvious to others. The book (The Witch-Hunt Narrative) is full of examples where real abuse is described as a false accusation or false conviction by proponents of the narrative. https://blogs.brown.edu/rcheit/2014/04/09/describing-abusive-behavior-as-young-love/#more

Ariel Castro's son carries the burden of a name and suffers the sins of his father

Ariel Castro's son carries the burden of a name and suffers the sins of his father
By Phillip Morris, The Plain Dealer September 20, 2013
COLUMBUS....

That’s when the son’s heart sank. That’s when Ariel Castro, the son, said he understood that his father, his namesake, had been unmasked as something far worse than he could have ever imagined.

That’s when he began to have flashbacks. He remembered as a boy also running out of the house to get help for his mother who was being beaten, yet again.

He suddenly remembered making a similar emergency call to Cleveland police 20 years earlier, when Castro inflicted a savage Christmas Day beating on Grimilda "Nilda" Figueroa, two months after she had come home from brain surgery.

"When I heard Amanda Berry’s voice … when I heard her say his name, I knew that he was guilty. I mean who would make that up? Who would come up with a name like Ariel Castro or invent that kind of story?"

Since that fateful day in May, Castro’s life has been a continuing series of painfully-refreshed childhood memories and haunting questions. He continues to recall incidents and behaviors that long foreshadowed his father’s crimes.

"My father was always very secretive. Growing up on Seymour Avenue there were parts of the house we weren’t allowed in. He kept a lock on the attic and on the basement door, on the garage. He nailed the windows shut. It didn’t seem so weird at the time."

But now that the three captive women are free, now that the elder Castro is dead, having hung himself one month into his life sentence, sordid truths about his possessive and savage nature are being revealed.

Up until Nilda Figueroa found the strength to finally leave Seymour Avenue with young Ariel and the couple’s three daughters in tow, Castro, whom she never married, would often lock her in the house when he was away.

Because of his own jealousies, he would literally incarcerate her, making wild, ungrounded accusations alleging infidelity to justify her home detention. She was his first prisoner.

The son says he now understands that his mother, who died in 2012 in Indiana, stayed with Castro as long as she could out of fear for her life. But she also stayed out of loyalty and compassion for her children.

Memories of the fear he often felt as a boy, whenever his father’s car pulled into the Seymour Avenue driveway at night have returned – a daily homecoming fear that he says he suspects Gina, Amanda, and Michelle undoubtedly confronted for the better part of a decade.

He remembers now how fiercely he determined as a young boy not to become anything like his father....

Perhaps there is sociopathic irony in the fact that Castro took three girls captive. Before Nilda left with their three daughters in the late 90’s, Castro reportedly doted on his girls – while heaping regular physical abuse on the son and the mother....

"When my father used to beat me, he would sometimes tell me how fortunate I was to have a father. He always said he didn’t have one. But the whole time, I would be thinking, ‘I wish I didn’t have one either.’ "....  
http://www.cleveland.com/morris/index.ssf/2013/09/ariel_castros_son_carries_the.html


Ariel Castro's son struggles to remember the father he never really knew: Ariel Anthony Castro
By Special to The Plain Dealer on September 21, 2013

The last time I saw my father was about five months ago. I was in Cleveland for the weekend, and he asked me to stop by his house before I hit the road back to Columbus.

When I pulled up, he poked his head out from the back of the house and waved me to the backyard. I remember commenting to him that another of the neighboring houses looked freshly boarded up, and we recalled memories of my childhood friends who lived there decades ago. Today, the houses themselves are just memories, and so is my father, Ariel Castro.

I'm still shell-shocked from the way these past several months unfolded. Instantly, my father became one of the most hated men alive. In no time, reporters from around the world demanded to know who this man was and what kind of background he came from. Just like that, my father went from captured to convicted to imprisoned to dead....
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2013/09/ariel_castos_son_struggles_to.html


Ariel Castro's son: 'I am not my father and I can't explain his actions'  9/23/13
By Chris Francescani, Reuters

The son of Cleveland kidnapper Ariel Castro has described in detail the overwhelming horror he felt when his father's crimes were revealed to the world.

"I'm still shell-shocked from the way these past several months unfolded," Ariel Anthony Castro wrote in an essay published late on Saturday in the Cleveland Plain Dealer....

"I was horrified and disgusted and angered when I got the news of the unthinkable crimes my father committed," he said.

"I still am. He deserved to pay for his actions, everyday of those 1,000 years he could possibly serve. My anger with him kept me from visiting him in prison, even when he was moved to a facility just 20 minutes away from my doorstep."

Still, Castro said he does not hate his father.
"I learned long ago that it's not worth the effort to actively hate someone who will always be in your life."
Castro's mother died a year ago. "Both of my parents are gone now, and my father's punishment is between he and his Maker. Hate isn't going to do anyone any good."  
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/23/20653775-ariel-castros-son-i-am-not-my-father-and-i-cant-explain-his-actions

Martha Marcy May Marlene - A Devastating Portrait of Cult Brainwashing

Un Certain Regard - Martha Marcy May Marlene By Peter Debruge Jan. 22, 2011
A young woman looking for somewhere to belong finds it difficult to readjust to society after escaping life with a cult in "Martha Marcy May Marlene," a sensitive treatment of a sensational subject that heralds the arrival of talented tyro Sean Durkin behind the camera and promising new star Elizabeth Olsen. Picking up as its heroine breaks free and then using uneasy flashbacks to suggest the character's lingering paranoia, Durkin's effective yet frustratingly obtuse feature debut -- a sister project to his short "Mary Last Seen" -- invites contemplation while withholding the narrative drive needed to break out beyond, yes, cult status. http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117944343/


‘Martha Marcy May Marlene’ – A Devastating Portrait of Cult Brainwashing [Sundance Review]
....Martha Marcy May Marlene tells the story of Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), a woman who escapes from a cult in rural New York and tries to reintegrate into a normal life with her sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson). Lucy brings Martha to her Connecticut vacation home, where she and her husband Adam (Hugh Dancy) are trying to enjoy a few days away from their regular lives in the city. Martha constantly experiences chilling flashbacks and begins to lose her grip on reality. As the days pass and Martha’s behavior becomes more and more erratic, it becomes clear that her time away from home may have had far more effects on her than initially believed. http://www.slashfilm.com/martha-marcy-may-marlene-review/


movie trailer
IMDb Video Martha Marcy May Marlene
(shows violent scenes)
Haunted by painful memories and increasing paranoia, a damaged woman struggles to re-assimilate with her family after fleeing an abusive cult. http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi1493409049/