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Few crimes are as aberrational as the sexual abuse against a minor. A few days ago various international media recalled the case of Marianne Bachmeier, a woman who in 1981 went to court where the rapist and murderer of her 7-year-old daughter Anna was being tried, and ended up shooting the culprit.
LOOK: The mother who did not wait for the verdict and murdered her daughter’s rapist in court
The case generated an extensive debate in Germany at the time between those who justified Bachmeier’s reaction and those who defended that the defendants follow the established judicial processes. The truth is that the woman ended up being sentenced to six years in prison, although she was released before completing half of her sentence.
Bachmeier’s, however, is not the only one in which a father has preferred to take justice into his own hand instead of waiting for a regular court to judge his son’s aggressor.
HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
Three years after the Bachmeier case, a similar case shook American society.
Jody Plauché, an 11-year-old boy, attended karate classes at a gym located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and run by Jeffrey Doucet, 25.
What Gary, Jody’s father, did not know was that during the year that the boy had been training there, he had been sexually abused by Doucet. In late February 1984, the instructor kidnapped Jody and took him to a hotel in Anaheim, California, on the other side of the country.
According to the minor’s later testimony, in that place Doucet abused him on multiple occasions. The boy’s cunning allowed him to convince his attacker to call his mother, which led the police to her location.
Doucet was detained and Jody was able to return to his family on March 1. Gary, for his part, stated during a subsequent interview the helplessness he felt upon hearing the reports of his son’s abuse.
Fifteen days after Jody’s return, authorities transferred Doucet to Louisiana to face justice. A worker from local WBRZ-TV gave Gary details about Doucet’s arrival.
At 9:30 p.m., the defendant landed escorted by a small number of agents. Television cameras recorded his arrival. In the shot, in addition, a subject with a cap and dark glasses was seen standing in the corridor through which the defendant would pass.
When Doucet appeared on the scene, the mysterious man drew a gun and shot him in the head. An agent stopped him after that shouting: “Why, Gary, why?”.
On March 16, 1984, Leon Gary Plauché killed Jeff Doucet at the Baton Rouge, Louisiana airport, but it wouldn’t be a run-of-the-mill murder. Doucet had kidnapped and raped Plauché’s 11-year-old son, the murder was caught on TV cameras.
Strong images ???? pic.twitter.com/R0EFeC1EeV
– CrónicaPolicial (@CronicaPolicial) December 11, 2021
Gary Plauché had decided to take action against his son’s abuser. Doucet passed away the day after the attack. Plauché, for his part, spent a few days in jail before being granted probation and ordered to do community work.
As Jody narrated in an interview with the British newspaper “The Sun” in 2021, his father never regretted having murdered Doucet.
The society made Gary a symbol of popular justice and he even received divine forgiveness. “The local priest washed his feet and gave him God’s absolution and forgiveness, so I think that helped him mentally to deal with the event,” Jody explained in the interview.
DEADLY DINNER IN INDIA
In the poor neighborhood of Chandu Nagar, located northeast of Delhi, India, a family had been renting a room for five years from an old family acquaintance.
It was a 45-year-old man who came from the same village as his landlords. Their trust, however, was broken at the end of 2014.
The father of the family that welcomed the man invited him to dinner one night in October. Immediately afterwards, he asked his wife to go to sleep with her six children, he would stay talking with the tenant.
The man had found out that weeks before the tenant had sexually abused his 13-year-old daughter. The girl had confessed it to him after going to the doctor and discovering that she was pregnant.
Upon being confronted, the tenant mocked the man who proceeded to tie him up and gag him. He heated up a spatula and burned her genitals. She tortured him to death.
Hours later, the same man went to the police to turn himself in and confess to the murder. “He said that he had made a mistake, that he had killed someone,” police sub-inspector Arun Kumar told the BBC.
The man, whose identity was never revealed for judicial protection, came to be considered a local hero in a society plagued by rampant sexual violence against women. Justice, however, accused him of murder, a crime for which he faced up to 25 years in prison.
It is unknown if the man was finally sentenced.
THE HONOR OF HIS DAUGHTER
On October 20, 2019, the five-year-old daughter of Fernando Matías Vila complained of chest pain. When the little girl went into the bathroom with her mother, she confessed that José Dagoberto López Uribe, the 66-year-old man who lived across the street from her house, had “harmed” her.
Descriptions of the girl indicated that the subject had sexually abused her. The situation filled Vila with anger, who grabbed a knife that was on the kitchen table, got on her motorcycle and headed to López’s house.
It all happened on El Resero street, in the city of Bahía Blanca, province of Buenos Aires.
“Honestly, I don’t remember much, I got off the motorcycle and faced him, I killed him. I also didn’t know that I had killed him until I turned myself in,” Vila told the authorities after turning himself in.
Vila ended up being accused by the Prosecutor’s Office on charges of simple homicide, a crime that includes a sentence of between 8 and 25 years. Only at the beginning of this year, however, a popular jury decided that Vila would only receive a sentence of less than 3 years because he acted in defense of his daughter’s honor.
“KILL OR DIE FOR MY CHILDREN”
It was February 2006 when the small neighborhood of Santa Eudóxia, in Sao Paulo, was shaken by a shocking case.
Maria do Carmo Ghislotti was in the kitchen of her house when she heard her husband shout from the patio that connected their house with the neighbor’s.
The man had seen his 3-year-old son leaving the neighbor’s house with his pants down. Behind him, Robson Francelino, 15, was hiding after sexually abusing the minor.
Given the impotence of not being able to react against Francelino, Maria and her husband called the police. The three were taken to the police station where, according to what the woman later recounted, the assailant mocked assuring that she would get away with being a minor.
The woman no longer controlled her anger, took a knife that was on the frame of a window in the police station and buried it in Francelino, killing him on the spot.
Maria do Carmo Ghislotti was jailed but days later a judge granted her probation until the trial against her is held. From jail, the woman assured that in a similar situation she would “kill or die” to defend her children.
In November of that same year, a jury freed the woman from all convictions, assuring that she had acted in defense of her son’s honor.
A RECURRING CRIMINAL
One autumn night in 2014, Sarah Sands left her east London home wearing a T-shirt and armed with a knife. She went to the house of her neighbor, Michael Pleasted, a 77-year-old man.
Pleasted opened the door and received eight stab wounds. Sands had learned that she had raped her three children, ages 11 and 12.
Sands and her family had maintained a good relationship with Pleasted for years, whom the woman considered “a lovely old man,” according to a BBC article.
One afternoon, Sands’ three children confessed to him that they had been sexually abused by Pleasted when they came to help him with repairs inside his apartment. The woman denounced the old man, who faced charges of harassment and sexual abuse of minors.
In the process, however, Pleasted was released on probation and allowed to return to his neighborhood until a sentence is handed down against him.
The decision filled Sands with impotence, who had moved in with his children to his mother’s house, a few blocks away from the Pleasted house.
According to subsequent statements by Sands before the British court, he went to Pleasted’s apartment to tell him to plead guilty and avoid having his children testify in court. The man replied that his children were lying. It was the last provocation Sands endured.
After murdering the old man, Sands turned himself in to the authorities. She was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for the crime, but her sentence was later increased to 7 and a half years, of which she served about four before being released.
When asked if she regretted killing Pleasted, Sands said she was “absolutely” because “I have brought life into the world, it never occurred to me that I would be guilty of taking it from someone else.”
Source: Elcomercio
I am Jack Morton and I work in 24 News Recorder. I mostly cover world news and I have also authored 24 news recorder. I find this work highly interesting and it allows me to keep up with current events happening around the world.
