Confession

Just before 3:30 on any Saturday afternoon, you'll likely find the Rev. Stephen McHenry kneeling in prayer in the rear of his darkened church in Ambler. He's preparing himself to hear confessions. Some of what he'll hear in this Catholic rite is mundane: the tales of an impatient mother, of an angry husband, of second graders who "fighted" with their sisters. Sometimes, what he hears is truly sad or horrible: a story of addiction or abuse or abortion, of infidelity, even homicide.

Renewing Yourself Through the Practice of Honesty By Paul Wilkes Workman. 144 pp. $18.95 Reviewed by Elizabeth Eisenstadt Evans Someone on the Internet confessional www.confessions.net hurt his hamster while cutting its hair. Someone else is cheating on his girlfriend. Another poster is having a tough time breaking an addiction to the World of Warcraft , according to recent posts. Check out the websites that allow anonymous virtual admissions.

The jury in the upcoming Harrison "Marty" Graham murder trial can hear the multiple-slaying suspect confessing to the strangling of seven women whose rotting corpses were found in his North Philadelphia den of death, a Common Pleas judge ruled today. Judge Robert A. Latrone said all of the prosecution's evidence, including Graham's confession, will be allowed at the trial. It was a defeat for the defense, which had sought to bar all of the police evidence. "For what condolence it might have for the defense, the question of the admissibility of the (Graham confession)

The confession of an accomplice who cannot be cross-examined generally cannot be used to help convict a co-defendant, the Supreme Court declared yesterday in a 5-4 decision. The ruling reaffirmed - and possibly strengthened - a criminal defendant's constitutional right of confrontation. That right forces witnesses against the accused to submit to cross-examination, which the high court has called "the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth. " In the case decided yesterday, Millie R. Lee and her boyfriend, Edwin Thomas, were tried jointly before a judge for the 1982 double murder of her aunt and her aunt's friend in East St. Louis, Ill. Neither of them testified.

Death threats from two friends made him confess to a crime he did not commit, 15-year-old Donald Lee Torres said yesterday during his murder trial for a 1989 arson that killed a family of four in their Middletown, Del., home. The slight, dark-haired Torres told jurors in Delaware Superior Court that he confessed to police that he set the fire last February because two brothers he knew, John and Chris Scioli, threatened to kill him if he did not. Torres also said that other witnesses who had testified that they heard him admit guilt were either mistaken or lying.

Just because a jury rejects the validity of a confession, that's no reason to toss it into the trash. Yesterday, the same confession to the murder of jogger Kimberly Ernest that jurors rejected by acquitting Richard Wise, and his co-defendant, last Friday was used against Wise in court in an unrelated case. The prosecutor's tactic infuriated Wise's lawyer, Jack McMahon. "I never saw anything so lame," he said. Wise and co-defendant Herbert Haak were acquitted of the Ernest slaying in about three hours by a jury that apparently considered the confessions insufficient evidence.

Catherine Wells knew what she was doing when she confessed in August that she helped kill a man in his Worcester Township home eight years ago, a Montgomery County judge ruled yesterday. Montgomery County Court Judge Anita B. Brody yesterday denied a motion to suppress Wells' taped confession that she and a friend stabbed and suffocated Andre Lars Paschedag in 1982. Defense attorney Michael Cassidy had argued that Wells was under unusual stress when she confessed the killing to police on Aug. 1. Cassidy said Wells had had only two hours of sleep the night before the confession, had not eaten all day and had smoked marijuana and taken caffeine pills before she talked to police.

So-called jailhouse witness Clark Greene testified yesterday that Wilfredo Santiago never confessed the murder of police officer Thomas Trench to him, contrary to the prosecution's claims in the arrest warrant. Under questioning by detectives last July 17, according to the prosecution, Greene claimed that while in the Detention Center Santiago had admitted killing Trench, who was found dead of two bullet wounds in his patrol car on 17th Street above Spring Garden at 3 a.m. on May 28, 1985.

The jury listened intently as a homicide detective read a detailed confession he took from Richard Wise admitting the brutal beating and sexual assault of jogger Kimberly Ernest. The detective then maintained a stoic calm as Wise's fiery lawyer, Jack McMahon, sought to prove that the investigator had made up key parts of the confession. The confession came on Nov. 29, 1995, three weeks after Ernest's death, and just hours after co-defendant Herbert Haak, 26, signed a statement admitting a role in the murder but pointing to Wise as the actual killer.

It seemed like the cops did everything right. Six-and-a-half hours after his arrest in a murder case, Ernest Goldsmith, 47, confessed to stabbing to death Michael Jones, 31, in the hallway of their Frankford apartment building on April 20, 1991. He had given a statement denying the crime, but finally agreed to confess. Before taking the second statement, cautious homicide cops asked Goldsmith if he would agree to waive his right to an arraignment within six hours of his arrest.

OSLO, Norway - An Iraqi man whose brother was killed in Norway's worst peacetime massacre hurled a shoe at the confessed killer and urged him to "go to hell" in a rare outburst Friday that briefly interrupted the terror trial of Anders Behring Breivik. The incident was the first display of anger inside the normally subdued courtroom where the far-right fanatic is being tried for the bomb-and-shooting attacks that left 77 people dead on July 22. Hayder Mustafa Qasim, 20, traveled to Norway from Baghdad to attend the proceedings against Breivik in Oslo's district court, his attorney, Kari Nessa Nordtun, told the Associated Press.

The confession that an 18-year-old Donte Johnson made to police in June 2010, in which he described the rape and killing of Sabina Rose O'Donnell, can be used as evidence in Johnson's trial this week, a judge ruled Monday. Johnson's attorneys fought to keep the statement out of the trial, arguing that Johnson, now 20, functions at the cognitive level of an 11- or 12-year-old and could not have understood his rights when he confessed. "The detective speaks to Mr. Johnson and he thinks he's talking to an adult, when in reality he's speaking to a child," said attorney Gary Server.

OSLO, Norway - In a scene unimaginable in many countries, Norway's worst mass killer since World War II got to explain his fanatical views to the court and the world for days while dressed up in a business suit. Two days into Anders Behring Breivik's terror trial, the studied formality with which Norway's legal system deals with a confessed killer who rejects its authority is baffling to outsiders, even to some Norwegians. On Monday, the day the trial started, Norwegian prosecutors and even lawyers representing the families of his 77 victims shook Breivik's hand as proceedings began.

ON THE CARRETERA CENTRAL, Cuba - "Subanse," climb aboard, I said repeatedly, pulling the right wheels of my eight-seat van off the dangerous two-lane highway that snakes hundreds of miles across an island most Americans consider off limits. Ostensibly, I was in Cuba to cover Pope Benedict XVI's visit. But over the week and across the Ohio-size country, I gave more than five dozen Cubans a botella - in Cuban slang, a ride. My riders gave an unvarnished view of the country.

NEW YORK - The pregnant woman's body was found on a rooftop more than two decades ago after a horrific attack: Her head was missing. Veronica Bowen's boyfriend was charged yesterday, with murdering her out of jealousy in 1989, five years before he would kill another of his girlfriends in the city's suburbs. Already imprisoned for the second slaying, Philip Ward pleaded not guilty to murdering Bowen, though prosecutors say he recently confessed to a crime in which he'd long been under suspicion.

Renewing Yourself Through the Practice of Honesty By Paul Wilkes Workman. 144 pp. $18.95 Reviewed by Elizabeth Eisenstadt Evans Someone on the Internet confessional www.confessions.net hurt his hamster while cutting its hair. Someone else is cheating on his girlfriend. Another poster is having a tough time breaking an addiction to the World of Warcraft , according to recent posts. Check out the websites that allow anonymous virtual admissions.

RUST HAS SEEPED through the weathered, salmon-colored paint on the bars covering my basement window. My chocolate-brown, wafer-thin storm door clatters every time I open it, and the railing on my deteriorating stoop is pocked with holes. But I'm not going to fix those blemishes on the facade of my South Philly rowhouse. Not yet anyway, in part because I want to be a tax-dodger. Now that dozens of property assessors are traversing the city to determine the "actual value" of every property, I plan to delay any visible improvements.

Police say he's on a security video, firing four times into one of two people slain in 2009 at the Piazza at Schmidts in Northern Liberties. He signed a statement admitting he shot several times during a botched drug robbery that left party planner Rian Thal and friend Timothy Gilmore dead in the hall outside her posh seventh-floor apartment. But on Tuesday, Antonio Wright had a different take on the evidence. The video? Mistaken identity. Not him. The confession? "Manipulated paperwork" by detectives out to frame him. For almost 40 minutes, Wright, 30, combative and cursing, tried to convince a Philadelphia judge to throw out the statement prosecutors want to use to try to convict him of murder.

Police say he's on a security video, firing four times into one of two people slain in 2009 at the Piazza at Schmidts in Northern Liberties. He signed a statement admitting he shot several times during a botched drug robbery that left party planner Rian Thal and friend Timothy Gilmore dead in the hall outside her posh seventh-floor apartment. But on Tuesday, Antonio Wright had a different take on the evidence. The video? Mistaken identity. Not him. The confession?

A Montgomery County Court judge shot down arguments Thursday from the suspect in a 19-year-old murder case who claimed that her ex-husband had accused her of the killing to gain leverage in a custody dispute. Statements that Melissa Haskell, 38, made to county detectives this year - in which she allegedly confessed to smothering an infant in her care nearly two decades ago - were enough to suggest that the state's case against her could prevail at trial no matter what role her former spouse might have played in building the case against her, Judge William R. Carpenter said at a bail hearing Thursday.