"Sex trafficking shelter filled with survivor tales" by Juliet Linderman, Associated Press December 30, 2014
BALTIMORE — For seven years, 27-year-old Button had been sold up and down the West Coast by a host of violent pimps, one of whom once drove her into the desert, dragged her out of the car, and broke her nose and both of her eye sockets. The reason: She asked to leave a strip club because she was feeling sick.
Button grew up in a wealthy household on Long Island, with parents she says were loving. Still, after dropping out of college and becoming addicted to what she describes as ‘‘risky behavior,’’ Button’s parents sent her to a rehabilitation facility in California, where she met a man who would become her first trafficker.
Local and federal law enforcement agencies are trying to do more to combat sex trafficking. But the governmental, nonprofit, and faith-based organizations that provide care are scrambling to keep up.
The faith-based Samaritan Women, a residential program that is among the relatively few in the nation dedicated to long-term help for the surging numbers of victims of human trafficking, relies on grants and donations and does not accept government funding....
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"Horrors Blackstone police allegedly found detailed in court; Mother enters plea; judge denies bail" by Eric Moskowitz, Globe Staff December 29, 2014
WORCESTER — The Blackstone mother accused of concealing the births of several of her children — two of whom were imprisoned in squalid bedrooms, where closets hid the skeletal remains of three other babies — quietly pleaded not guilty to murder and other charges on Monday, before a prosecutor offered a vivid account of the horrors police said they found in her home.
After police waded through knee-high filth and discovered two horribly neglected children in Erika L. Murray’s home in September, they secured a warrant, hoping to search the house for paperwork that might provide clues about the identity of those children, the prosecutor said.
Instead, they discovered the remains of one dead baby — and, soon after, the remains of two more, all three skeletons clothed and stashed in closets in two filthy bedrooms, Assistant District Attorney John E. Bradley Jr. said during Murray’s arraignment in Worcester Superior Court.
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Defense lawyer Keith S. Halpern argued that Murray posed no risk of flight or further danger, and he called the murder charges premature, with the medical examiner yet to rule on the cause of death of any of the deceased babies. Judge James Lemire disagreed, ordering Murray to remain held, now without bail, at the Western Massachusetts Regional Women’s Correctional Center in Chicopee.
To the outside world, the 31-year-old Murray and longtime boyfriend Raymond Rivera appeared to live a quiet life in a three-bedroom home on St. Paul Street with just two children, their 13-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son. That changed Aug. 28, Bradley said, when a neighborhood friend playing with the boy called to ask his own mother if she knew how to get a baby to stop crying.
That woman visited the house, where she found....
I can't post it, sorry.
See: Murray’s Madness
The prosecutor said Murray admitted that Rivera did not want more children after the first two — the 10- and 13-year-old — but she continued to have unprotected sex with him, giving birth five more times in a seven-year period. Bradley said Murray admitted she delivered each of those babies on her own in the home’s sole bathroom, on the first floor, before moving them upstairs “in an effort to hide the babies from her boyfriend.”
The boyfriend tearfully told reporters last month that he had been banished to the basement by Murray and had no idea of the deteriorating condition of the upper floors, or even the existence of any of the babies, but prosecutors said earlier this month that Rivera slept with Murray in the third upstairs bedroom and must have known. He was indicted Dec. 16 on charges that include assault and battery and reckless endangerment of children.
Halpern, the defense lawyer, said Murray’s admissions to police were inconsistent, the mutterings of a woman “who simply agreed with whatever they asked because it was her belief that if she went along with them she’d go home.”
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"Two bodies found in Brockton in wooded area; Remains of woman were dismembered, DA says" by Nestor Ramos, Globe Staff December 30, 2014
BROCKTON — The bodies of two people, one dismembered and another badly decomposed, were discovered in the woods along a dead-end road here in recent days, Plymouth District Attorney Timothy J. Cruz said Monday.
The first body found belonged to a woman around 20 years old, with medium-length brownish hair, Cruz said. The woman’s body was dismembered, and resting beneath it were the skeletal remains of another body, so severely decomposed that its age and gender were not immediately clear.
“One of the bodies was obviously there longer than the other and therefore was in a different stage of decomposition than the body that was on top,” Cruz said. It is also possible but not clear, he said, that the older body had also been dismembered.
As detectives begin to seek answers about the bodies — who they were and who left them in the woods, which are near the VFW hall off North Quincy Street — Cruz said both had been taken to the medical examiner’s office to begin to establish a timeline....
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That's literally the end of the road.
LAST DAY UPDATE:
Identities sought of 2 bodies found in Brockton
I guess we'll never know.
UPDATE: Judge rejects request to dismiss murder charges against Blackstone mother
