Tag: Ryan Skipper

TruTV’s live coverage of the Ryan Skipper murder trial yesterday in Bartow, Fla., was interrupted yesterday by coverage of another case, which is unfortunate because a potentially significant new allegation was revealed in testimony given while the cameras were dark.

According to witness John Kirchoff — who was part of a cadre of meth addicts who were associates of defendants Joe Bearden and William Brown — within hours after Skipper’s murder, he had a conversation with Brown, who told him, “I killed him, man. I killed him.”

And then, according to Kirchoff, Brown claimed that his father had raped him, apparently more than once.

Here’s a rough transcript of the report by TruTV’s Jean Casarez:

What I think what is interesting here is that Bill Brown, the co-defendant, is really coming into this case even stronger in regard to the murder count, because we just had a witness before lunch — it would be John Kirchoff — who said that Bill Brown, the next morning, was knocking on the window — and I’m talking about March 14. Came in. He [Kirchoff] was alone with [Brown, who] started to cry.

And he said, “I killed him, man. I killed him.” Now here’s what I haven’t been able to tell you that I think is important from [Brown]. According to John Kirchoff, this excited untterance of “I killed him, man. I killed him” — he never talks about the defendant Bearden, but what he does talk about is his own father. How he hates his own father because his father has held a knife and a gun to him before, forcing him to engage in homosexual sex.

So, yes, the father engaged his own son in sex. That’s the co-defendant, Bill Brown. So maybe we’re seeing a clue here why the prosecution has not proceeded with the hate crime — that the motivation, especially with [Bill Brown], could be something else.

The Lakeland Ledger also described Kirchoff’s testimony:

Kirchoff … testified that Brown came back in the morning and was very upset.

He recalled Brown was sobbing and talking about how his father molested him at knife- and gunpoint.

Brown then stopped crying, stared at Kirchoff and said, “I killed him,” according to Kirchoff.

Kirchoff said he assumed Brown was confessing to killing his father because he had previously been talking about the past sexual abuse.

“It scared the hell out of me,” Kirchoff said.

He tried to describe Brown’s facial expression.

“He looked evil,” Kirchoff said.

If you are just tuning into the trial, note that Brown and Bearden are being tried separately, and the proceedings currently underway are in the case against Bearden. Bearden admits he was involved in events on the night of the murder but denies he was in Ryan Skipper’s car when Skipper was stabbed 20 times and then left to die on a gravel road in a rural area.

Bill Brown will be tried later this year.

TruTV legal analysts covering the trial in Bartow, Fla., of one of the men accused of killing Ryan Skipper spent considerable air time yesterday speculating about the prosecution’s decision to remove the hate-crime charge against the defendant, Joseph Bearden.

It is true that Bearden and his co-defendant, William Brown, who will be tried later, knew that Skipper was gay. And the level of brutality in the murder — they stabbed Ryan 20 times and then dumped him, still clinging to life, on the side of rural road — suggests the two young meth addicts had motives beyond just fencing Ryan’s car for drug money.

Bearden has been in prison since he was charged with the murder two years ago. He has covered himself in tattoos, including a dagger or spike on his face that appears to pierce his skull above and blow his left eye, a large cobra in strike pose on his chest and neck and a small teardrop under his right eye. In gang and prison culture, teardrop tattoos are usually a sign that the bearer is a murderer.

The TruTV analysts speculated that hate-crime charge was dropped because prosecutors feared it would make the jury less sympathetic to the gay victim and more inclined to be lenient with the defendant — the young man sitting before them with a tacit admission of guilt tattooed on his face.

The prosecutors in Polk County expressed similar concerns to Ryan’s Skipper’s family:

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In an appearance on “The View” last week, Mike Huckabee congratulated American voters for electing their first black president, noting how far the country has come since the days of segregation. And then — at 0:55 on the video above — co-host Joy Behar asked him about gay civil rights:

BEHAR: You’re very passionate about [progress on African-American civil rights], I see. But do you feel that way about gay rights, too?

HUCKABEE: It’s a different set of rights. People who are homosexual should have every right in terms of their civil rights to be employed, to do anything they want, but that’s not really the issue … But when we’re talking about a redefinition of an institution, that’s different from individual civil rights. And — you know — we’re never going to convince each other of that…

BEHAR: But segregation was an institution, too, in a way. It was right there in the books.

HUCKABEE: But there’s a difference. Bull Connor was hosing people down in the streets of Alabama. You had John Lewis getting his skull cracked on the bridges of Selma. Look, that’s wrong…

BEHAR: Gay bashing goes on, too.

HUCKABEE: There’s Christian bashing — look what happened to the lady out in California the other day. She’s out there — she’s 69 years old, holding a cross. People come up — violence is wrong. It doesn’t matter who’s behind it.

Huckabee’s scattershot outbursts reveal the flimsiness of the Christian moralists’ rationale against gay civil rights. First he asserts that there is a magic threshold, a tipping point, of violence that gay people must endure before the majority will grant them equal rights. Then he counters the argument that current levels of hate-crime violence against gays, which includes murder and life-threatening assaults, ought to be sufficient, by citing an incident of “Christian bashing” in which an elderly anti-gay protester in Palm Springs was shoved and the cross she had carried to a gay marriage rally was knocked from her hands.

Footage of the Christian bashing incident, which you can see in the video below, backs up the story that Phylliss Burgess, 69, was shuffled around by the crowd and, indeed, someone knocked her cross down.

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