IT WAS a picture of suburban harmony on a sunny afternoon: two neighbours, a man and a woman, both mowing their front lawns in a leafy part of Revesby. But in a horrific few minutes, order turned to chaos, leaving two members of a family dead, one seriously injured and another under arrest. As he mowed on Thursday, a man heard trouble next door. Soon his neighbour staggered into his yard with stab wounds to her stomach and back, crying for ...

A woman walked to her neighbour's house in a quiet area of Revesby yesterday afternoon covered in blood and believed to have been stabbed in the chest. The woman had fled a crime scene and was asking her neighbours to call police. Officers arrived at an address on Hydrae Street soon after, about 4pm, and found an unspeakable scene. The woman's husband and teenage daughter had been stabbed to death. Another of the woman's daughters was wandering nearby streets, covered in ...

On Saturday, "48 Hours" ran a story about the 2003 murder of Elli Perkins, a murder that her 28-year-old son Jeremy confessed to committing. Jeremy had been hallucinating and behaving erratically before his mother's death, but his parents, devout Scientologists, resisted giving him psychiatric treatment. As "48 Hours" notes, "[s]ome pro-Scientology materials declare that psychiatrists are not only useless, but evil – their medications nothing but poisons." The Perkins' opted to medicate their son primarily with vitamins. The Scientology community was ...

(CBS) There was never a question who committed the murder of Elli Perkins on March 13, 2003. As correspondent Peter Van Sant reports, within hours, police had a confession. His jeans drenched in blood, 28-year-old Jeremy Perkins had just stabbed his mother 77 times. Weeks later, in a recorded interview, Jeremy told a psychiatrist what was going through his mind. "My mom, I thought she was out to get me," he said. "Like sometimes she’d be totally normal and then she’d ...

Perhaps it's less of a stretch for Scientologists to believe that aliens arrived here in a spaceship, exploded, and stuck bits of their souls on us, than it is for other religions to believe there was a talking, burning bush or a savior who walked on water. All religions believe they are the, er, gospel truth. Most religions, however, have withstood the test of some time and were not created by a science fiction writer. Scientology, which now claims to have ...

... I froze. I wasn't moving much to begin with, but I froze solid. I didn't want to breathe. I forgot all about our immediate problems. My CO had just said he was going to murder Julie Titchbourne. He was absolutely serious. I was in shock. Sure, she deserved to die — all SPs did. But you can't actually do that that sort of thing. My thoughts raced. Please, I thought, please, somebody say something that will make this stop. I ...

TAFFY Hotene was ordered to live in an Auckland city drugs and alcohol rehabilitation house for two years as part of his parole conditions. He ran away within two weeks, apparently with the knowledge of the Corrections Department. Five weeks later he murdered Kylie Jones. The Sunday Star-Times has obtained documents on Hotene including his parole conditions. The Corrections Department refuses to comment on its role in the saga, citing Hotene's privacy and his pending sentencing. However, his parole papers show ...

[Picture / Caption: RESOLUTION — "I think the judge just wanted to bring an end to this case," says Graham E. Berry, right, with Gordon J. Calhoun.] For years, the Church of Scientology has been synonymous with bitter litigation battles. But the 40-year-old religious organization, long known for its aggressive legal tactics, threw in the towel recently on a federal lawsuit in Los Angeles that it had been waging against two critics. Besides serving as a legal setback, the action in ...

The tangled murder-suicide case of a British stripper and her husband has prompted the slain man's children to file a civil suit against a psychiatrist whose handgun was used in the Sherman Oaks couple's deaths. The suit filed Friday in Van Nuys Superior Court also seeks unspecified damages against Eli Lilly & Co., the maker of the controversial antidepressant Prozac, claiming that Victoria Howden's use of the drug contributed to her June 10 murder of the children's father, Charles House, and ...

They loved 79-year-old Suzine Van Sickle and brought her back home to live out her days, they said. But Van Sickle's caretakers — her daughter and granddaughter — yesterday were convicted of poisoning, then smothering her. A King County jury found Jimmie Jean Shumway, 59, the daughter, and Alexis Shumway, 29, guilty of premeditated first-degree murder in the bizarre killing last November that they kept secret for three months. The two showed no emotion as the verdict was read yesterday. Deputy ...

THE AUTHOR of a new book on the Church of Scientology cult has become the victim of a bizarre plot to link him to the murder of a communist pop singer. Russell Miller, whose book, Bare Faced Messiah: The True Story of L Ron Hubbard, is to be serialised shortly in The Sunday Times, is being investigated by private detectives trying to link him to the death last year of Dean Reed, an American singer who defected to the Soviet bloc. ...

U.S. Customs Service officials did not violate constitutional guarantees against prior restraint of speech when they detained and reviewed thousands of documents sent to Los Angeles by the Church of Scientology in England two years ago, a three-judge federal panel has ruled. The unanimous opinion written by U.S. Dist. Judge William P. Gray held that a federal statute prohibiting importation into the United States of written material advocating treason, forcible resistance to any federal law or threats to harm or kill ...

CLEARWATER — Pinellas Pasco State Atty. James T. Russell disclosed Tuesday that last month his office investigated an alleged plot to murder Clearwater Mayor Gabriel Cazares. Russell said his office received a report on June 10 of an alleged death threat against Cazares. Rut Russell refused to reveal details because he said the case has not been closed. "YOU'RE NOW talking about an investigation that my office is or was doing," Russell said. "It's an open file in our office . ...