How a big mortgage led to murder

This is the lot where their house used to be.

Victor and Olga Barriere owned a 680 square foot house on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in Long Beach, California. They owed $315,000 on the mortgage. The house, built in 1921, needed repairs to get it up to code. They wanted to sell but could find nobody who wanted to buy.

That's when they decided their best option was to burn it down. Commit a little arson. That way they could deceive the insurance company and at least get some money for the place.

They hired their handyman to do the job.

Thomas Trucios had never been hired as an arsonist before. He didn't have any experience in this line of work. He decided to use gasoline to destroy the place. He used a lot of gasoline to get the job done.

The house did not just catch on fire. It exploded.

Residents for several blocks were awakened by the blast, which shattered all of the house's windows and cracked the house's walls and damaged the sidewalks.

Mr. Trucios was too close when the house exploded.

He was badly burned. He received third degree burns over 95% of his body. He got in his car and tried to drive to his home. He called his family on his cell phone and screamed for them to come get him. His daughter, his son and his wife tried to get him into their car to take him to the hospital.

His daughter said that she saw his burnt skin peeling off and sticking to the car seat, while the windows kept fogging up from the heat. She said she knew her dad was still burning inside.

He died in the hospital on the same day.

It took four years to get the criminal case together.

The homeowners who hired Mr. Trucios were first charged with murder. They decided to plea bargain.

Fifty-two-year-old Victor Barriere pleaded no contest to involuntary manslaughter and conspiracy to commit arson and conspiracy to commit insurance fraud. He was sentenced to over 14 years in prison.

His wife, 59-year-old Olga Barriere, pleaded to conspiracy to commit insurance fraud and was sentenced to 6 years.

Three years after the fire, the empty lot where the house stood sold for $30,000.

- Long Beach couple sentenced to state prison for death of handy man in arson scheme, Press-Telegram>>
- 1090 Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. Long Beach, California, Google Maps>>
- 1090 Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. Long Beach, California, Zillow>>

A radar speed camera prank by Rémi Gaillard

There's something wrong

with this piece of technology.

In this video, professional trickster Rémi Gaillard pulls a surreal practical joke on moving vehicles. Mr. Gaillard is a trickster of the old school: he can be annoying, but he's only following his own completely logical set of rules for whatever character or situation he dreams up.

Those who believe in and adhere to the rules, and the authorities who enforce them and must oppose his anarchy, will disagree with his methods.

The Radar Speed Camera Prank by Rémi Gaillard


His most famous prank video is called Kangaroo, where you can test your trickster tolerance by watching him embody the spirit of a jumping marsupial.

Kangaroo by Rémi Gaillard


Previously on Deceptology: Prankster, Frenchman, Imposter, Pain-in-the-Ass...>>


Rémi Gaillard, Nimportequi>>

How lying got their stolen stuff back

When John Davidson’s apartment gets robbed, 

he learns that the easiest way to get his stuff back 

is to have one drug dealer lie to another drug dealer

while he lies to the police.

A story about a burglary solved by lying:

Hanging the machine guns on the wall was a bad idea, but the burglary wouldn’t have happened if we’d just covered up the little decorative window over the front door. If you stood on your toes in the hallway and looked in through the little window, the guns were in plain sight. Almost everything was in plain sight because most of our third-story apartment was a single large room — a shoddy retrofit of a massive early twentieth-century industrial building on Philadelphia’s north side, in Fishtown, where those kind of buildings are common.

The building owner, a tattoo artist we’ll call Daryl, also lived somewhere on the third floor and ran a printing business on the first floor that employed a half-dozen people, most of whom were heavily tattooed tenants. There was plenty of activity around the building during the day and everyone made sure the main doors were always locked, so we had good reason to believe a burglar wouldn’t be able to break into the building in broad daylight, climb the stairs to the third floor, peek into our apartment, force his way in and carry off our machine guns without being caught. That was naïve. We should have covered up the little window...

When I got to the warehouse the cops were already talking to Matt out on the stoop. The metal doorknob on the building’s front door was dented on either side, like it had been pinched, and the cops said certain kinds of doorknobs and locks can be broken just by grabbing them with channel locks and twisting. Apparently we had that kind of doorknob. The same thing had been done to our apartment door...

Read the story: Burgled in Philly, ByGone Bureau>>

Found it here: The Philly unburglary, Kottke>>

What are "hidden mother" photographs?

There was no Photoshopping people 

out of Victorian tintypes, 

so other methods were used.

In early photographs, a subject had to sit still because of long camera exposure times. When that subject was a squirming baby or small child, they were sometimes held in a lap or reassured by an adult hand, either from a photographer's assistant, relative, nanny, or father, but primarily by the child's mother. Whether they're mothers or not, collectors call these photos "hidden mother photographs."

Since customers wanted photographs that showed only the children, photographers had to get creative to block out the other person.

A mother would drape herself in fabric or attempt to hide herself out of the camera's view. That way, after the photo was developed, it would be placed behind a mat or frame which would crop out the mother, thereby deceiving the viewer into thinking the child was posing alone.

There were many techniques used to disguise the mother.

Here, a mom simply holds her child.

When matted, mom is mostly cropped out.

Here, you can see the edges of the mat.

And the image of mom is hidden

(it's a haunting image, by the way.) 

How does mom hide?
Here, she's both a lap 

and the backdrop holder.

The "off to one side" technique

The "off to one side, disguised 
as a drape" technique

"Hopefully, nobody will notice 

my hand holding up the baby's head"

I think this baby noticed.
(The clamp.)

Here, mom disguises herself 
as a chair. Lots of cover is 
provided by baby's copious gown.

Now if the background had been black, 
this might have worked a little better.

 

The inadvertently floating baby - 
a Spiritualist portrait

This photo, taken at home, 

eliminates the mother, but how 

can it be matted?
Was she just camera shy? 
Or was she unclear on the concept?

Again the covering.
This one is creepy.

Notice that the hood has eye-holes.

Scratching out

Sometimes a photographer would scratch out or manipulate a photo to eliminate the face, which might have been done to remove the photographer's assistant from the picture.

Find the hidden mother

How good could a "hidden mom" hide? Test your skill and try to find where she's hiding in these 5 photos.

Balanced

Bewigged

Mirror image

Puffy chair

 Dark

See more hidden mother photographs at this Flickr group: Hidden Mother: Tintypes and Cabinets, Flickr>>
- The Invisible Mother, Retronaut>>

The brain-damaged magician

He works two days a week at P.J.'s Trick Shop

 The magical resurrection of Trent Rivas:

When he was born, he suffered a stroke. A lifesaving medical procedure caused a second stroke, leaving him with damage to about 85 percent of the right hemisphere of his brain.

Doctors said Trent would live, but the future looked bleak: His ability to think abstractly was gone; the part of the brain that processes emotions was damaged; cerebral palsy would inhibit use of the left side of his body.

The only way he could learn was through experiencing things, and repetition. He received physical and occupational therapy and went through the special-education system, his mother fighting every step to give him the best shot at a good life. She exposed him to as much as she could: music, movies and, around age 12, a magic show.

Two years later, they saw another magician, and Cathy Rivas noticed how the show held her son's attention. She bought him an instructional video that sat unwatched for a couple of years. Then one day she found him in the basement room where he spent most of his time, watching the video over and over, working out a trick one step at a time...

Read the article: The power of magic.When Trent Rivas is not performing illusions, he stares blankly and struggles to communicate. But learning magic has opened a door to an undamaged part of his brain — and to a whole new world, Chicago Tribune>>
Video, Chicago Tribune>>

Webcam hacker captured his victim's lives

"Luis Mijangos was an unlikely candidate

for the world's creepiest hacker."

From an article in GQ Magazine:

...at some point, each of them looked up and noticed the same strange thing: the tiny light beside their webcam glowing. At first they figured it was some kind of malfunction, but when it happened repeatedly—the light flicking on, then off—the girls felt a chill. One by one, they gazed fearfully into the lenses, wondering if someone was watching and if, perhaps now, they were looking into the eye of something scary after all. Nila, for one, wasn't taking any chances. She peeled off a sticker and stuck it on the lens.

The more ubiquitous cameras become, the less we're aware they're even there. They stare out at us blankly from our phones and laptops, our Xboxes and iPads, a billion eyes and ears just waiting to be turned on. But what if they were switched on—by someone else—when you least expected it? How would you feel, how would you behave, if the devices that surround your life were suddenly turned against you?

Read the entire article: The Hacker is Watching. Every online scam begins more or less the same—a random e-mail, a sketchy attachment. But every so often, a new type of hacker comes along. Someone who rewrites the rules, not just the code. He secretly burrows his way into your hard drive, then into your life. Is he following your every move? GQ>>

He went to prison for a murder he didn't commit

 Tim Masters was 15 years old when 

Peggy Hettrick's body was found.

The story of a man who was imprisoned for a crime he did not commit:

Tim Masters, who seems closer to 30 years old than his chronological age of 40, is wearing faded jeans, a blue T-shirt, and well-worn, white running shoes. He has a reddish-brown mustache and a carefully groomed beard. His blue eyes convey an intense attention to detail as he talks about the treachery and turning points that have shaped his life since that morning nearly 25 years ago when he stumbled upon a corpse and became a suspect. The stigma hovered over him during high school and through an eight-year stint in the Navy. It peaked with his arrest in 1998 and his conviction for first-degree murder. It took everything he had to keep his spirit from folding into itself during the decade-long legal battle that ultimately won his release from prison. The events surrounding the case tore apart a town and challenged people’s perceptions of right and wrong, truth and justice, and who, really, were the good guys and the bad guys.

Read the entire article:  Presumed Guilty. The wrongful conviction of Tim Masters. 5280, The Denver Magazine>>

Photo: Drawn to Murder, 48 Hours Mystery>>