82 Tourists Murdered in India

Teams of gunmen stormed luxury hotels, a popular restaurant, hospitals and a crowded train station in coordinated attacks across India's financial capital Wednesday night, killing at least 82 people and taking Westerners hostage, police said. A group of suspected Muslim militants claimed responsibility.

Fighting For Her Life: University of Georgia Murder Victim

Meredith Emerson used her wits and martial arts training when she was attacked in the north Georgia mountains by a drifter who eventually killed and decapitated her, the convicted killer told investigators.

Gary Michael Hilton described his four days with Emerson, and how she fought him from the moment he tried to overpower her as she hiked with her dog, Ella, according to the interviews that The Atlanta Journal-Constitution obtained from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

"She was doing everything she could to stay alive," GBI Director Vernon Keenan told the newspaper. "It's not something you can train for. Instinct kicks in ... She nearly got the best of him. She's very much a hero."

Serial Execution-Style Killings at Boca Raton Shopping Mall

BRIAN SKOLOFF writes:

[In December, 2007,] The 911 call lasted a split second. Not even a breath was heard.

It was Nancy Bochicchio's last desperate plea for help.

The single mom and her 7-year-old daughter, Joey, would soon be dead, each bound and shot in the head in the back seat of their black Chrysler Aspen.

March 23, 2007

Randi Gorenberg, 52, heads to the mall to do some shopping. It's a typical day for the bubbly, outgoing doctor's wife and mother of two.

Surveillance video shows her leaving the mall at about 1:16 p.m. She walks into the parking lot to her black Mercedes SUV.

Just over a half-hour later, at 1:54 p.m., witnesses spot her car driving through a park in nearby Delray Beach.

Then a gunshot.

Gorenberg's body falls limply from the passenger door, shot in the head.

Her Mercedes is found a few minutes later abandoned behind a Home Depot. Her purse and cell phone are missing. So are her black and white Puma shoes.

No one sees the killer. To this day, he's a ghost.

"It's been a very hard and sad year for me," said Gorenberg's mother, Idey Elias. "And whoever he is, he's still out there doing these evil things."

___

August 7, 2007

A 30-year-old woman and her 2-year-old son leave the Town Center mall on a balmy afternoon and head for their black Lincoln Navigator in Nordstrom's parking garage.

The woman puts her son in his car seat and loads her purchases in the back.

She gets behind the wheel and is startled to see a man sitting beside her child with a gun to his head. The gunman is dark-skinned, about 5'11", 180 pounds, wearing sunglasses and a full-brimmed floppy hat, possibly with a ponytail.

"Take whatever you want, just don't hurt us," she tells him.

The man orders the woman to drive to an ATM where she withdraws $600.

He then orders her into the back seat, where he binds her feet with plastic ties, secures her hands with cheap novelty handcuffs and fixes her neck to the headrest with another tie.

He's calm but threatens to kill her. She doesn't resist. They drive back to the mall where he puts a pair of blacked-out swim goggles over her eyes.

He asks if she's OK, even gets her a drink of water and her inhaler for asthma. Then he disappears.

The woman eventually frees herself.

"He took my license and told me if his picture was on the news that he would come after me ... and my son," she would later say. "I'm terrified."

She has concealed her identity from the public out of fear for her own and child's safety, appearing before reporters on the condition that her name and face not be shown.

Three days after she was attacked, the same man is believed to have robbed a woman at gunpoint in a parking garage at another nearby shopping area.

___

Dec. 13, 2007

It's just after midnight at the mall. A security guard making his rounds notices a black SUV idling in the parking lot and calls police.

The Bochicchios are dead inside.

Just 10 hours earlier, Nancy Bochicchio picked up Joey from her second grade class for a doctor's appointment. The inseparable pair then hit the mall.

They enter between Neiman Marcus and Sears and come out the same way less than an hour later, spotted on surveillance video, their long shadows trailing them in the afternoon light.

Video from a nearby bank then shows their car at a drive-through ATM.

Bochicchio withdraws $500. No one knows what happens next but the killer.

Both are bound in the exact manner as the August victim. Their eyes, too, are covered with blacked-out goggles.

Murder-Suicide in California

Five people were found dead, three of them children, in what appeared to be a murder-suicide in a home across the street from the Richard Nixon Library, police said Sunday.

A 14-year-old boy called 911 about 11 p.m. Saturday to report that his father had shot him and his brother at their condominium, said Sgt. Peter Rodriguez of the police department in Brea, which was investigating the shooting in neighboring Yorba Linda.

Police found the body of a woman on the doorstep. Inside, they found the bodies of a 5-year-old boy and two girls, ages 8 and 9. Officers also found the body of a man with a shotgun beneath him.

Police did not immediately know the motive for the shootings or the relationship of the victims.

No Protection: Monica Thomas-Harris Murdered By Her Estranged Husband

POMONA, Calif. - Monica Thomas-Harris got the chilling news just before Christmas: Her estranged husband, jailed for abducting and threatening her, had been released.

A frantic Thomas-Harris rushed to the district attorney's office, begging for an emergency protection order that would allow police to arrest him if he came near her. But it was the Friday evening before Christmas, and no judge was available. The next business day was Monday, but that was Christmas Eve, and her husband's lawyer was on a long vacation and couldn't be reached for a hearing.

Less than two weeks later, Thomas-Harris, 37, was dead, shot in a motel room by her husband in a murder-suicide.

Taxi To The Dark Side

Young Murderers

MICHAEL ANDERSON, 24
ROBERT HAWKINS, 19

OMAHA, Neb. - The young man (Robert Hawkins) who killed eight people and committed suicide in a shooting rampage at a department store spent four years in a series of treatment centers, group homes and foster care after threatening to kill his stepmother in 2002.

Michael Anderson killed a young woman who answered an online advertisement for a babysitter. She was shot in the back by Anderson and a friend of his when she came for the interview.

Murder Via Internet Advertising

24 year old woman answers online advertisement for baby-sitting job and is allegedly shot in the back by teenager, Michael Anderson. He says that he was present, but that a friend of his killed the woman because he thought it would be "funny."