Comment and Opinion

Free Alan Yurko – Part 2

Part 1 | Part 2 | Mail about Alan Yurko

Yurko update (16/3/2002)
The despicable people who want to get murderer Alan Yurko out of prison held a conference and fund-raiser recently. All the usual suspects were there, spouting their vile drivel about how a ten-week-old baby gets blood in his eyes, brain and spinal cord from a vaccine administered 11 days before the assault. One of the objectives of the event was to raise some money for an appeal against the murderer's conviction and incarceration. A press release before the show said that they needed $200,000, but the best they could do with a roomful of true believers was $4,000. Even if they had managed to get the full $200,000, Yurko would still stay in prison. Evidence is evidence, no matter how many expert witnesses you pay to lie about it in court. Speaking of press releases, they all take the form of letters from either Alan or Francine Yurko (Ms Yurko married the murderer after he was convicted of beating her son to death), but they refer to the Yurkos in the third person, just the way the professional PR person writes them.

Yurko's kidneys (13/4/2002)
Murderer Alan Yurko, darling of the anti-vaccination liars and hero to chiropractors, needs money for a legal appeal. A recent fund-raiser only collected $4,000 instead of the $200,000 needed, so Yurko has offered to sell a kidney. His organs should be in good shape as he has spent all except seven months of the last 12 years in prison for violent crimes. I believe it would be of more benefit to all concerned if Yurko sold both of his kidneys at once. Unfortunately eBay doesn't allow the auction of human parts, so The Millenium Project has stepped into the breach and will run an auction. I will start the bidding at $1 and you can place your bid here.

Speaking of missing sites … (3/8/2002)
A couple of sites of interest to me have gone missing in the last few days. They both relate to murderer Alan Yurko, Hero of Chiropractic and killer of small children. One site is the Woodlands Healing Research Center, which contained Harold Buttram's vile and unprincipled defence of the murderer, and the other is the Free Yurko site which was the killer's own personal site. These aren't just cases of sites which are temporarily unreachable because the Woodlands site is still there but devoid of any content and the Free Yurko site links to a statement by the host (Bizland) saying that the site has been suspended. What is going on? Has principle broken out? Are the free speech rights of child killers being infringed? I suppose I will just have to ask some of my friends on the anti-vaccination liar mailing lists.

The word of the week (14/9/2002)
The word of the week is "coagulopathy". This is the new buzzword being used by the anti-vaccination liars to increase the fear of vaccines. So far I have been told that it is caused by the polio vaccine and also that it was the real reason that the child murdered by Alan Yurko was hospitalised, except in that case it was caused by the DTaP vaccine. It seems that coagulopathy is the real killer in all those Shaken Baby Syndrome tragedies. It's just that all those medical examiners doing the autopsies don't know what to look for. Or perhaps the MEs are told what to find ... (dons tinfoil hat and looks for black helicopters). You would think that it was enough to oppose vaccines, therefore sentencing children to death and disability, without actively supporting people who actually kill children outright, but some people are never satisfied.

Will you be praying? People with consciences won't. (23/11/2002)
A plea has been issued for people to pray for murderer Alan Yurko. The date chosen is 29 November, and the reason given is that this is the day between Thanksgiving and the start of Hanukkah. It is also, coincidentally, the fifth anniversary of the day when Yurko committed an aggravated assault on a police officer in an attempt to escape from custody. It is significant that nobody is suggesting that anyone pray for the soul of the baby that this animal beat to death. The anniversary of the boy's killing is 27 November, a date which passes without notice for Yurko supporters.

Yurko Update (11/1/2003)
Murderer Alan Yurko has now got someone claiming that the child he killed was really killed by the doctors who treated the child after he was admitted to hospital. The person doing the claiming is infamous for also believing that HIV has nothing to do with AIDS, so any claim to scientific credibility can be completely discounted. The interesting thing, though, is that Yurko is still the darling of the anti-vaccination liars despite now seemingly saying that it wasn't the vaccine that killed the child but heparin administered after Yurko pulped the baby's brain. The story is being promoted across the Internet using the title "Rat Poison Killed Yurko 'Shaken Baby'", with the suggestion that the boy's name was "Alan Yurko". Heparin is not rat poison, the baby's name was not Alan Yurko (his mother did not marry the killer until after his conviction for murdering her son), and what killed the child was a violent assault so the scare quotes around the words "shaken baby" are just another form of lying.

It is fascinating to watch the cognitive dissonance of the Yurko supporters as they try to rationalise the realisation that he and his accomplice wife have been stringing them on all along. One example of this is that I have been challenged to say how I like my "crow served – stewed, fried or baked" (someone else added that I will probably eat it with bullshit) now that Yurko has been vindicated. The person writing this didn't seem to notice that Yurko is now saying that the vaccine didn't do it. (The murderer's wife has been talking about medical negligence rather than vaccines for some time now, preparing the way for a lawsuit. For her, this is really only about money and getting the killer out of prison.)

Somebody didn't like what I said (18/1/2003)
Maintaining the tradition of stupid headlines for articles, the SickofDoctors site which originated the "Rat Poison Killed Yurko 'Shaken Baby'" nonsense responded to what I wrote last week with a story headed "'Ratbag' Scoffs at Yurko Case Breakthrough". If there had been a "breakthrough" I might have had something to scoff at, but this is just the latest in a long list of reasons given for the death of Alan Ream which has included DTaP vaccination, scurvy, meningitis, coagulopathy, diabetes, chest infections and medical negligence. Everything, in fact, except the truth, which is that a man with a violent past acted in his usual manner, resulting in the traumatic death of a child. I notice that when quoting me on the SickofDoctors site, the paragraph above about how Yurko was now saying that the vaccine didn't do it was omitted. Why can't any anti-vaccination liar answer the question – what are you going to do now that Yurko has abandoned you? I must admit, however, that Fintan Dunne who runs SickofDoctors is probably driven by a hatred of medicine generally rather than any specific anti-vaccination agenda, so he would support any claim which suggested that doctors were wrong. When that claim comes from another AIDS denier like Al-Bayati it probably carries more weight in that particular ward of the madhouse.

In another example of poor quoting, Mr Dunne looked at the Green Light site and accused me of making "fawning" statements about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The words he has me fawning are not mine but come from the Gates Foundation web site. Mr Dunne obviously has some issues with the Gates Foundation and goes on to make a real fool of himself by talking about the Foundation's investments. He picks out investments in Merck, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson and tries to make out that the Gates Foundation supports vaccination because it makes these companies profitable and therefore somehow makes Bill Gates and the Foundation wealthier. The total world market for vaccines is about 5% of the total revenues for these companies combined so it can hardly be seen as a big money-earner for them, and when you see that the investments of the Gates Foundation come to 0.6% of Merck shares, 0.2% of Pfizer and 0.18% of J&J, it is obvious that even if vaccines were immensely profitable the returns to the Gates Foundation would be minimal. If Bill Gates really wanted to make money he would buy into a company called Microsoft, which has a market capitalisation greater than any of the three pharmaceutical companies mentioned, and is, in fact, worth just a little less than Merck and J&J combined. It took me about ten minutes to find out these financial details, so there is no excuse for Mr Dunne not to know them.

The selective quoting, misattribution of words and the use of isolated facts with the assumption that readers will not be able to find out the real context are typical hallmarks of the anti-medicine campaigners. They have no science or facts on their side so they have to resort to lies, innuendo, half-truths and character attacks. With this denial and rejection of the concepts and rules of honest discourse, it is not surprising to find that they can believe that a murderer is a hero.

Yurko desperation update (22/3/2003)
A continuing ploy in the campaign to free murderer Alan Yurko is an attack on the medical examiner who conducted the autopsy on the dead baby. For a while, the killer's supporters have been claiming that the autopsy was carried out on the wrong dead child. Now they have found something new, and, to quote, "Compelling new developments surrounding the Yurko Project are coming to light. The Medical Examiner in the Yurko case who contaminated the autopsy of Baby Alan with data and tissue from another has done so, according to an internal investigation, hundreds of times before". When you actually read what happened, you find that in 1994 and 1995 the Medical Examiner's Office was extremely careless, and evidence related to several court cases was either contaminated or the chain of evidence was broken. You will notice that the quote above talks about "hundreds of times before", but when you actually read what happened you find that only 26 cases were affected. (It is possible that convictions in those cases could be overturned on appeal now that the evidence problems have been revealed.) So 26 becomes "hundreds"? And where did I read that it was only 26? Why, on the Free Yurko web site, of course! They must think that the people who look at the site can't read. And another thing – Yurko did his killing in 1997, long after the evidence storage problems were fixed. In 1994 and 1995 he was in prison in Ohio, serving a sentence for four counts of aggravated burglary.

Yurko update (21/6/2003)
The latest story from the supporters of murderer Alan Yurko is that it wasn't the vaccines, or the coagulopathy, or the coroner, or the several other excuses which have been successively offered in the campaign to get the killer out of prison. The most recent one was medical negligence, but this has now been escalated to a claim that the doctors who attended to the baby after he was bashed and taken to hospital deliberately killed him so that they could harvest his organs for transplant.

Perhaps Yurko is conducting some sort of bizarre experiment to test the capacity of his followers to tolerate or perform unconscionable acts. You may be familiar with the work during the 1960s of psychologist Stanley Milgram, who showed evidence that people could be encouraged to act against their consciences in certain circumstances. It could be that Yurko is extending this work to see if there is a revulsion threshold for the anti-vaccination campaigners beyond which even they will say "Enough". There is no sign of this happening at the moment and no evidence of the moral and emotional dissonance observed by Milgram (admittedly, he was working with subjects for whom possession of consciences could be assumed), so the next claim is awaited with interest. Maybe it will be to replace the word "transplant" with "breakfast".

Yurko – more nonsense (31/1/2004)
Murderer Alan Yurko has found a new excuse. The latest story is that the baby he beat to death actually died of scurvy. Just in case you didn't catch it the first time, a baby with blood in his eyes, brain cavity and spinal cord and with four healing broken ribs from prior assaults died of scurvy. This is about the seventh different reason provided to explain the death of a ten-week-old baby and to shift the blame away from the person who did it (and who has been officially declared a "hero" by the International Chiropractors Association). The picture at the right is supposed to be of Alan Yurko and his victim in the ICU and comes from a site begging money for more appeals for the killer. I seem to remember, however, being told that the baby was in a coma from the time he was admitted to hospital until his death two days later, and I don't think it is usual practice for comatose patients in intensive care to be handled by lay people. Perhaps Yurko just has a winning way with authority figures and rule enforcers, because the story is that he was the baby's father even though he was in a maximum security prison serving four concurrent sentences for violent crimes when the baby was conceived.

Cats and pigeons, rocks in ponds (10/7/2004)
The online version of the British Medical Journal recently published a guest editorial which suggested that there is really no evidence for shaken baby syndrome. Predictably, the anti-vaccination liars have leapt on this, drooling with glee at the thought that they will be able to quote (and misquote) the paper for years to come. A real doctor dropped a mention of The Millenium Project into the conversation and the dribble changed to mouth foam as the liars went feral. I must admit that it gives me great pleasure to be described in terms such as "emotive lunatic" by these people, because a day even momentarily spent annoying them is not a wasted day. I did notice their continued reluctance to actually mention my name and I can only put this down to the name's powerful juju, as surely their expertise in research would mean that they would have no problem finding out what it really is.

One of the responses to the original editorial came from 106 doctors, pointing out the more nonsensical claims, the selective research, and the abysmal quality of the "peer reviewed" journals that seem to be the only places where the editorial writers can get their research papers published. This letter generated its own thread of responses, and one of them came from an Alan Yurko. It seemed far too literate a work for someone who has spent almost all of his adult life in prison for violent crimes, but it did say that it had been transcribed by someone else. Among the lies in it was the claim that Yurko had personally contacted 88 of the 106 doctors to ask for help in his appeals against his murder conviction, but he complained that they all wanted to be paid for their time. Certain details were left out of Yurko's letter, so I sent the following kind and gentle letter to the BMJ. It takes some time for letters to be reviewed and published on the BMJ site, so I will be paying attention over the next day or two to see if it got through.

Alan Yurko did not elaborate on his address, which happens to be a prison cell in Florida. Yurko is serving life plus some extra for the deliberate and premeditated murder of a ten-week-old baby (his supporters always say "his son" but the child was conceived while Yurko was in prison in Ohio serving four concurrent sentences for burglary with violence).

The child had all the usual signs of having been in a car crash, such as retinal bleeding, subdural haematoma, blood in the spinal cord, external bruising to the head, and broken ribs. One strange thing was that nobody mentioned the car crash at Yurko's trial. Another strange thing was that in the time it took for Yurko to get the baby to hospital after he slapped it (yes, he admitted to that) four of those broken ribs had time to start healing. That's right – four healing broken ribs, broken in prior assaults on the child.

I have long ceased being surprised at anything that the anti-vaccination liars say in support of their demented agenda. Denying the reality of shaken baby syndrome and blaming all the signs on vaccine reactions is just another means, like the lies about MMR and autism, which they can justify by their objective of stopping children from receiving protection from dangerous and fatal diseases.

Peter Bowditch www.ratbags.com

Competing interests: Love of children, dislike of child killers

Update

Yurko was released from prison in August 2004. More details will be here very soon.

A baby slaughterer gets away with it (28/8/2004)
O. J. Simpson has a new golfing partner. Murderer Alan Yurko is to serve only 2317 days in prison for beating his girlfriend's baby to death, after Circuit Court Judge C. Alan Lawson ruled that problems with the baby's autopsy report justified a new trial. The autopsy report seems to be an extremely sloppy document, prepared by a medical examiner with a history of carelessness, and the judge correctly ruled that the jury in Yurko's original trial might have come to a different conclusion if the autopsy evidence had been presented differently. (In an interesting example of doublethink, Yurko's lawyers claimed at one point in the hearing that the examiner had mixed up the parts of two bodies which were being autopsied at the same time, and at another point stated that there were no other autopsies carried out for a week either side of the one for Yurko's victim. That must have been one very messy and untidy morgue.) Despite what Yurko's supporters are claiming, the judge did not declare him "innocent", and the quashing of the conviction did not support the insane idea that vaccination had anything to do with the baby's death. In fact, the judge quite explicitly rejected the testimony from the usual collection of demented anti-vaccination doctors who appeared before him to tell him why Yurko could not possibly have hurt the child. The anti-vaccination liars don't care about this, though, and they are celebrating the decision with the same fervour that they would apply to, say, news of a measles epidemic in New York kindergartens or the failure of a clinical trial of an AIDS vaccine.

As Yurko's defence strategy has only two components – defence witnesses lying about the terrors of vaccines, and derogation and defamation of prosecution witnesses – and Judge Lawson had pointedly rejected both of them, there was no way that Yurko could risk another trial where the prosecution would be prepared for his tricks. As soon as the order for a new trial was made Yurko's lawyers started plea bargaining, and Yurko pleaded nolo contendere to a charge of manslaughter. Judge Lawson accepted the plea and sentenced Yurko to time served on the original murder conviction, which meant that he could be immediately released from prison. A "nolo" plea means that the defendant does not contest the charge and is prepared to accept whatever the court decides. The difference between nolo contendere and a "guilty" plea is that the "nolo" does not require the allocution which is sometimes ordered when someone pleads guilty to a lesser charge. Allocution is a statement to the court admitting guilt to the charge and expressing contrition, and Yurko's lawyers were never going to let him make any such statement. (Yurko is now saying that he really was responsible for the baby's death because he allowed the child to be vaccinated!) The practical effects of the plea are the same as for a "guilty" plea, in that Yurko's criminal record will show that he has served a custodial sentence as the result of a conviction for manslaughter.

Alan Yurko now has seven convictions for violent crimes recorded against his name – four for aggravated burglary in Ohio, one for battery of a police office in Florida, one for aggravated child abuse, and a manslaughter conviction gained by plea bargaining down from a murder charge. He was also convicted for escaping from custody at the time he bashed the police officer. He is a violent man, who only seems to be able to control his violence while in prison surrounded by other, possibly more violent, criminals. As soon as he was paroled from prison in Ohio he broke his parole and fled to Florida to set up house with Francine Ream, so there is an encouraging possibility that he will soon be back in an Ohio prison to finish the time he owes there. It says much about the anti-vaccination liars that they can use a man like this to advance their agenda, but, as I have said before, if your raison d'être is causing harm to children then it makes a kind of perverse sense to respect someone who commits the ultimate form of harm.

You can read a report about the court decision in the Orlando Sentinel. Please remember that this newspaper has been sympathetic towards Yurko for some time. Also remember when you see the baby being called "Alan Ream-Yurko" and referred to as Yurko's son, that Yurko was in prison when the baby was conceived and that Francine Ream did not marry her husband until after he was convicted of murdering her son. (At one point she said that she could not remember the baby's birthday.) I was criticised once for suggesting that part of Yurko's motivation for killing the child was that he did not want to be continually reminded of the fact that "while he had been inside a prison, someone else had been inside his girlfriend". Apparently this rather tasteless remark was a worse crime than adding the effects of violent shaking to the broken ribs which had been inflicted in prior assaults on the child during his short but tormented life.

Keep on running, Alan (2/9/2004)
After I wrote the piece last week about slaughterer Alan Yurko getting out of prison, I thought I would help him to tidy up some unfinished business. This is what I wrote to the Ohio Dept of Corrections:

I don't know if the Ohio DRC has been informed by the authorities in Florida, but Alan R Yurko, a technical parole violator in Ohio, was released from prison in Florida on Friday, August 27.

Yurko was prisoner number A 216942 in the Ohio system, and fled to Florida as soon as he was paroled. I believe that the Ohio authorities located him in Florida, but he could not be extradited as he was in prison for the aggravated assault of a police officer and also awaiting trial on a charge of murder. He was convicted of the murder, but a judge ordered a new trial last Friday. To avoid a new trial, Yurko pleaded nolo contendere to a charge of manslaughter and was sentenced to time served, putting him back on the streets.

As he has legally completed his sentence in Florida, there would seem to be no impediment to getting him back to Ohio to face parole violation charges and to complete his sentences for his four convictions there.

Go get him. I do not want to pick up a newspaper to read how this violent man has claimed another victim.

Thank you.

And here is what Ohio DRC said to me:

Thank you for the information you provided on our offender, Alan Yurko.

Yurko was released from the Florida Dept of Corrections on 8-30-04 due to his vacated Florida sentence.

On 9-1-04, Ohio issued a warrant for the offender for the offense of parole violation. Orange County Sheriff's office is cooperating with us and is helping locate the offender.

If I can be of further assistance, let me know.

Arlette Brown
Ohio Adult Parole Authority

That should make me even more popular with the anti-vaccination liars.

I didn't think that they would like it (4/9/2004)
As I suspected, the anti-vaccination liars were not very happy when they found out that I had written to the Ohio corrections people to let them know that Alan Yurko was available to come back to serve whatever time he owed to that state's prison system. One suggested that I should spend a long time in hell, and another seemed to think that only a person who was pro-vaccination would consider parole breaking to be a crime. A friend of mine was summarily dumped from an anti-vaccination liar mailing list for simply mentioning that Yurko had been in prison in Ohio. This was not really surprising, as the current mythology about Yurko is that he was employed as a construction worker before moving to Florida (a previous mythology had him being a pre-med student) and the fact that he was imprisoned between December 19, 1989, and April 8, 1997, was inconvenient for the mythologisers. The best response, however, said:

As anyone with any brains knows, Alan is as far from violent as one human being can be. These people ought to spend life in prison plus ten without parole for not only supporting but insisting on the mass poisoning of children and adults. Of course, they could get out for time served if they agree to receiving the same vaccines in the same dosages and the same order as children get.

"As far from violent as one human being can be"!! This is a man with seven convictions for violent crimes plus one for escaping from custody, and who breaks his parole within days of being released. (By the way, I must apologise for getting Yurko's record wrong in something I wrote previously. I had forgotten about his convictions for aggravated child abuse and escaping.) I have always thought that the anti-vaccination liars lived in a different universe, and now I know they have a different dictionary as well. And as for me taking a course of childhood vaccinations, just let me know the time and place and I will be there.

To check up on the latest situation surrounding the slaughterer, I sent the following email to the Orange County Sheriff's office. I expect to be even more unpopular shortly.

I realise that with Hurricane Frances tearing up trees and houses this is probably a matter of low priority for you right now, but has any action been taken to find Alan Yurko who was released from prison in Florida last week? He was Prisoner Number X13917. The Ohio authorities have informed me that they issued a warrant on September 1 in an attempt to get him back to that state to face parole violation charges, and they said that the Orange County Sheriff's Office was helping.

Any information about this man would be appreciated.

Thank you, and I hope that the threat from the hurricane is soon past.

He's back inside (18/9/2004)
Baby slaughterer Alan Yurko is back inside. He was arrested on September 9 and is being held in custody awaiting a hearing to have him sent back to Ohio to do some more of the time he owes there. Meanwhile the mythology mills have been running three shifts a day plus weekends to produce fairy tales about this "hero". Some of the stories are listed below, with my comments.

• It's cruel to lock him up again after all he has been through – He should have though of that before he skipped parole
• He didn't skip parole, it was a mix up with the dates – The Ohio DRC web site says that he was paroled on April 8, 1997, and defines "date paroled" as the date the prisoner was released from incarceration.
• No, that was the date his parole ended, he was released sometime in 1996 – Right! Four counts of aggravated burglary, each carrying a sentence of 10 to 25 years, and he gets out in 6-and-a-half years with a parole period of eight months.
• But we have a letter from the Ohio DRC to the Orange County Jail which says that he was released on July 12, 1996 – Good. I'll write to the Ohio DRC to ask for clarification. If they wanted to be kept up to date on his situation in December, 1997, it seems that maybe his parole didn't end in April, 1997.
• The Ohio DRC withdrew the warrants against him in 1999 – There is little point in keeping warrants open, with the associated paperwork, when the offender is in prison for life.
• He only went to Florida to see his baby being born – The baby was born in September. If his parole ended in April, what was the problem?
• He only went for a few days – As I said above, if the parole period had passed, what was the problem?
• He only went to Florida because his girlfriend was sick when she was pregnant – But I thought you said …
• The judge found him innocent – No, the judge found that some of the evidence used to convict him was suspect and ordered a new trial.
• Going back to prison will prevent him from pursuing his new career as a paid public speaker – It will also foul up his run as a write-in candidate for the Presidency on November 2, but them's the breaks.

Some things go away again (4/12/2004)
I just checked the Offender Information Database at the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, and what did I find? I guess that this means that baby slaughterer Alan Yurko won't be starting his professional speaking career as soon as he had hoped.

Sad New Year (8/1/2005)
I turned on the email this morning to hear that baby slaughterer Alan Yurko may soon be released on parole again. The anti-vaccination liars are wetting their pants about this of course, although I can't understand how anyone can be "immediately released" on January 5 (quotes in original email) but not get out until March. I do understand, however, that people involved with the Yurko case have some trouble with the precision of dates. Francine Yurko (she married the slaughterer after he was convicted of the murder of her son) once said that she couldn't remember the baby's birthday. She had a bit of trouble with the date of conception as well, as Alan Yurko was inside a prison cell when the mythology has him inside her. I suppose, though, that if she can't remember her dead son's birthday it would be a bit much to expect her to remember details of the conception such as the date, the man involved, and whether the act took place in a bedroom, a car or was just a quick knee-trembler up against the back wall of the local K-Mart.

It looks like Yurko may have again benefited from a bureaucratic bungle which had nothing to do with him. The basis of the appeal which overturned his murder conviction was that the coroner had been careless with some cases a few years before, so the judge ordered a new trial without the autopsy evidence. (Evidence from the hospital staff would probably have been enough for a new conviction for murder, but Yurko would not take that risk and plead nolo contendere to manslaughter.) In his latest stroke of luck, it was discovered last year that there were several thousand prisoners incarcerated in Ohio who should have been eligible for parole. The officials are now justifiably careful and are probably acting much more favourably towards any parole applications.

I have written to the Ohio Department of Corrections for clarification of the "immediate" release, and I will post any reply here as soon as I get it. Also, next week I will have Yurko's full Ohio criminal record here. It is available from the relevant Clerk of Courts, but I will put it into a more concise, readable format.

Yurko update (12/3/2005)
The Ohio corrections department was recently quite embarrassed by the news that thousands of prisoners who should have been released on parole were still locked up. Not only was this depriving these people of their freedom, but it was costing the state many tens of millions of dollars to feed and guard them. Yurko was a beneficiary of the backlash.

According to his web site, baby slaughterer Alan Yurko was supposed to be released from prison on March 7 but the parole officer forgot to turn up and his release date has been postponed until March 15. The Ohio Department of Corrections web site still shows him as incarcerated. I wrote to the department during the week:

I wrote to you last year about a prisoner, Alan Yurko, who was at that time a parole violator. I would like to inquire about his current status.

The DRC web site currently shows him as Offender Number A216942. A few days ago the site showed that he had a parole hearing scheduled for March 1, but there is no parole hearing date there now and his status is shown as "incarcerated".

His supporters were claiming in January that he was to be released in March and would be treated as if he had completed his various sentences. As they have lied comprehensively and often about this man in the past and as they have called me some very nasty names for taking an interest in his lethal activities in Florida, I like to keep up-to-date with where and if he is locked up.

Is he inside or outside at the moment, and if he is inside, what are his prospects for the near future?

Thank you.

I have now received two replies from different people inside the department, both telling me that I have to ring up to find out what I want to know. I live on the other side of the world and many time zones away from Ohio and when I read the last email from the department it was already after 5pm on Friday in Ohio, so I decided that an international call to some bureaucrat's voice mail was probably going to be a waste of time and money. I will ring when a warm body is likely to be in the office, and we should all know the good or bad news next week. I wonder how he will earn a living if he gets out. If you believe the mythology, he could become a paid public speaker or could return to his old trades of landscape gardener or medical student. If you believe his criminal record, he could go back to burglary.

Speaking of the Yurko mythology, there has always been the sob story about how much he missed his daughter while he was in prison. On the Free Yurko web site, his wife says that she met him for the first time after he was paroled in Ohio. That would make someone else the father of the girl. As the record shows that he was paroled in April and the baby he killed was born in September, you can make your own guess about who was the father of "his" son.

More sad news (19/3/2005)
It's true! Baby slaughterer Alan Yurko is out of prison. When I hadn't heard anything two days after he was supposed to be released I wrote to Mrs Yurko to find out what was going on. She was quite polite to me and didn't even suggest that I should kill myself (as she did the last time she wrote to me). Strangely, nothing has appeared on the anti-vaccination liar mailing lists yet. Maybe they don't think the news is good, as it is very hard to rally around a martyr when the martyring is over. The Ohio Department of Corrections web site is still showing him as incarcerated at the time of writing (late Saturday night, March 19), but that could just represent slackness of public servants. Maybe I should take down my Yurko Kidney Auction page and replace it with a page running a book on how long he will stay out.

Speaking of Alan Yurko … (10/12/2005)
When Alan Yurko was released from prison in Ohio, there was not a mention on any of the anti-vaccination liar mailing lists that had been so full of praise for him over the years of his incarceration. Not only was his release not mentioned, but his name has not been mentioned since on any of the lists that I have access to. He has become a non-person. The reason for this is that he is no longer any use as a martyr. When he was inside there were grandiose promises of him being offered a career in public speaking or journalism, but as soon as he was out he was abandoned. Someone who lives near him has written to me to say that Yurko is unemployed and appears to be having marital problems. It is very difficult to feel any sympathy for him, but it must be more than a little discouraging to have hundreds of people claiming to be your friends and offering you support only to find that they were just using you for publicity and would discard you as soon as your usefulness was over.

Al(l)an's back! (7/1/2006)
Back inside, that is. Well, actually he seems to be out on bail now, but baby slaughterer Alan Yurko was recently detained on charges of burglary, drug possession and aggravated theft. The report from the Cuyahoga Common Pleas Court web site has his first name as "Allan" but the birthday is the same, he lives in Ohio and you can only stretch coincidence so far. Here is an extract from the court records. The picture on the right showing the vascular structures in the brain is there to remind us how much damage can be done to a ten-week-old child's brain from a beating administered by an adult.

CASE INFORMATION
Number: CR-05-473467-G
Caption: THE STATE OF OHIO VS ALLAN YURKO
Status: CASE OPEN
Judge Name: LILLIAN J GREENE
PO Name: N/A
Next Event: PRE TRIAL CONFERENCE SET FOR 01/11/2006 AT 09:00 AM IN ROOM 16C JUSTICE CENTER
Arrested: CLEVELAND PD

DEFENDANT INFORMATION
Number: 96328
Name: ALLAN R YURKO
Status: DEFN JAIL
Date of Birth: 12/11/1969
Race: WHITE
Sex: MALE

BOND INFORMATION
Bond Number 482731
Amount 2500
Type CASH/SURETY/PROP.
Date Set 12/16/2005

ACTIONS
Event Date Event
09/21/2005 ARRESTED
11/17/2005 INDICTED ORIGINAL
12/01/2005 CAPIAS
12/14/2005 JAIL
12/16/2005 ARRAIGNED

CHARGES
Statute Description
2925.11 DRUG POSSESSION

OTHER DEFENDANTS
Defendant Nbr Defendant Name
175333 SCOTT A MEYER
111602 DAVID A PIETRASZ
70155 TINA R SKEENS
141656 TRACY J HOLPUCH
10749231 MARK WARNER
10749238 DAVID CASTELL

OTHER CASES
Other Cases
CR-05-473142-A
CR-97-354103-ZA
CR-97-353205-A
CR-89-244427-ZA
CR-89-244368-ZA
CR-89-244699-A
CR-89-244247-ZA
CR-89-236864-ZA
CR-89-237238-ZA

Proceeding Date Filing Date Side Type Description Image
12/19/2005 12/22/2005 N/A JE FIRST PRETRIAL SET FOR 01/11/2006 AT 09:00 AM.

He has a friend? (28/1/2006)
When I mentioned that child-killer and anti-vaccination hero Alan Yurko was again having trouble with the law the following came in:

From: "Caroline Stuard"
Subject: alan yurko
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2006 08:51:18 -0700

Mr. Bowditch: I am an old friend of Alan Yurko . you stated that Alan was detained for drug possession, and burglary. Do you have any proof to show me? I need to know. If it is not true you will be sued for slander. You caused that family enough pain. If you have the proof or numbers I can call, let me know�

Caroline Stuard

I see that you read about this on the Millenium Project Blog, which is often an abbreviated copy of what appears on the main site. Had you read the main site you would have seen that the Case Number in the Cuyahoga Common Pleas Court for the drug possession charge is CR-05-473467-G. The arrest took place on September 21, 2005.

By the way, it is usually considered unwise to threaten legal action in the first communication, especially if the wrong offence is mentioned (slander is spoken, the written form is libel), but as you did it the threat has been added to the collection of vacuous legal threats which I have received over the years.

Alan Yurko update (4/3/2006)
In January I reported that baby slaughterer Alan Yurko was back inside, this time for drug and burglary offences. A very good friend of his threatened to drag me into court for saying this, and when I referred her to the appropriate court case number she said:

Hey there Mr. Ratbags: I read what you said about Alan Yurko. didn't you ever hear of "innocent until proven guilty?". Speaking of breaking the law, there is a law that states that you cannot use a persons last name on a website without getting the persons permission. Gee, I do not remember giving it to you. Should I sue you? Hmmmm Let me think about it. I have a personal question to ask you, hope you do not mind. When you were a baby did you accidently fall on your head ? Or were you vaccinated? That could explain why you are such a vile human being. I am sure your mom is SO PROUD of you. I bet you offering to sell someones kidneys was a wake up call for her. What happened to you, Mr. Bowditch? Did something tramatic happen in your life to see the world in such a dismal way? Do you even believe in God? Or do you have a problem w/ him too? You let me know. Until then I will say a prayer for you. Hopefully whatever the problem you have going on inside of you, that made you this way, will one day go away. You could do a lot of good if you wanted to . But instead you prefer to spread your vile words on to everyone else before knowing all the facts. Peace, Caroline Stuard

Now, speaking of "innocent until proven guilty", the Orlando Sentinel, a paper which always seemed favourable to Yurko while he was languishing in a Florida prison, is telling us that his trial on drugs and burglary charges has been delayed. You may remember how, while he was in prison and therefore useful as a martyr, the anti-vaccination liars were collecting money for him and talking big about how they were going to get him work when he got out. Well, they all disappeared as soon as he was no longer useful, and now he can't raise $250 for bail. Good friends, these people.

The amount of bail seems very light for someone facing two 26-year prison sentences, but what is really bizarre is that if he gets convicted on the cocaine possession charge he faces a sentence more than three times that which he served for the death of Alan Ream. Something seems wrong with a society which treats a crime which really only harms the perpetrator much more seriously than a crime resulting in the death of a child.

The Yurko Story, the final chapter (4/11/2006)
On October 31, baby slaughterer Alan Yurko pleaded guilty to three charges of burglary and one of aggravated theft. He will be sentenced on November 21. A charge of drug possession had been dismissed a few days earlier. (It looks like he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time when the police raided a house looking for cocaine and scooped up everybody who was on the premises at the time. Someone without the resources to find a $250 bail deposit is not likely to be a useful customer for a coke dealer.) The absurdity of the cocaine possession charge was compounded by the fact that he was facing a sentence three times as long as he served for the death of baby Alan. Because he couldn't raise bail, he was imprisoned for more than a year before the charge was dismissed, although this might be moot as he was also being held on the burglary charges.

I have commented before that it is difficult to have any sympathy for someone who beats a child to death, but there is a real possibility that Yurko might not have needed to return to a career in crime if promises made to him when he was being used as a poster boy by the anti-vaccination liars had been kept. After all, he doesn't appear to be a very competent burglar because he keeps getting caught. I recently raised the matter of the way he had been abandoned by his erstwhile friends as soon as his usefulness to them was over with one of his strongest supporters and she was quite open about it. Her position was that he had gone back to his old haunts and companions so anything that happened to him was his fault. She had no time for my argument that he wouldn't have needed to go back to crime if the job offers and pretences of friendship had been real. She simply didn't care what happened to him now, and it was time to move on to new ways of campaigning against vaccination. Still, why should I expect even a hint of human decency from people whose pleasure in life is endangering the lives of children?

An old friend goes back to his old job (13/9/2008)
Long-time visitors will remember Alan Yurko. This is the man who was a hero of the anti-vaccination movement because he beat a baby to death. (Literally a hero – the International Chiropractors Association set up a "Chiropractors Hero Fund" to raise money for his court costs.) Yurko served several years in prison for murder. The judgment was overturned on appeal and a new trial ordered, but Yurko pleaded nolo contendere to manslaughter (which basically means that he admitted to the killing but wasn't prepared to allocute to it in court) and was sentenced to time served on the murder conviction. As soon as he was out of prison he was abandoned by his "friends" who had been promising him writing and speaking careers. He was no longer any use as a martyr and when I asked one of his strongest supporters why nobody was helping him any more I was brushed off with some trite drivel about how whatever happened to him was his fault. To my knowledge, Yurko's name has not been mentioned on any anti-vaccination liar mailing list since he was released. He is a non-person now that he can't be pointed at with the message "See what happens when you vaccinate your children. You end up in prison".

Here is something I wrote about this a few years ago.

Some of the stories being told about Yurko by his "friends" before they threw him away like so much garbage were that he was a talented writer with a great future and that he had been a medical student at the time of his original arrest for the murder of his son. The facts were that he had spent a large proportion of his life in prison and at the time the baby was conceived he was serving four concurrent sentences for burglary with violence.

So where is Alan Yurko now? Here's a hint:

You can see more of the grisly details here. While it is very difficult to have any sympathy for someone who killed a child, I have to think that if the promises made to Yurko by the people who were prepared to use him in their advertising had been kept then he might not have needed to return to burglary as a profession.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Mail about Alan Yurko