People Named Cortez

First, see

http://vocct.blogspot.com/2010/04/people-named-george.html

Now see

I know nothing about the causes of these deaths, but clearly many people named Cortez  are dying very young in our area for some reason!

Unsuitable For Building

The property immediately to the west of mine sits along the side of a rather large gully and has a major and unsightly power line almost directly overhead, making it rather unsuitable for building on. Despite this, shortly after the zoning on both this property and my own land were illegally changed from residential to commercial in 2007 as detailed elsewhere in this blog (see, for example, http://vocct.blogspot.com/2009/06/my-story.html), a medical office building and complex were proposed for this property and were approved by the city.

In the last few weeks, construction has suddenly begun on this property. Due to the slope of the land, this has necessitated the bringing in of enormous quantities of fill material and heavy equipment to move it around, obviously at very great expense.

Why would someone do all this, when there is a great deal of other undeveloped land nearby that is clearly much more suitable for building on? The answer is that the other land is not located right next to my homestead. There is a medical building owned by the local hospital immediately to the east of my house that was built shortly after the zoning change and as part of a number of proposed buildings close by that were approved by the city around the same time as the complex being started along my western fence line. (Make that right up against my western fence line!--the fill material being brought in is being dumped right next to my fence.) Construction must now take place on the opposite side of my house so that my property is surrounded on both sides by commercial property. This is necessary so that the county appraisal district can raise their appraisals on my land to commercial levels, which they know I can't pay.

The obvious solutions to my dilemma are to either sell my property and move elsewhere or develop my property myself. However, these are not viable options for me, and the people and entities involved in the construction and planning going on around me know this. My former father-in-law is a very powerful lawyer, banker, and real estate developer who controls the local hospital board and the entire real estate market in our area and has close business and personal ties to three former U.S. presidents (Johnson, Bush, and Bush), Texas billionaires, and more; he also has high-level state and federal agents at his beck and call (see http://vocct.blogspot.com/2012/10/bringing-dirty-tricks-back-home.html). When he puts out the word that my property is not to be sold, purchased, or developed by me or anyone else, no one dares to defy him. This means that even if I could persuade a real estate agent to list the property for sale, no one would dare to buy it, and even if I could get someone to help me develop my land, the city would never approve another development plan.

My former father-in-law and his associates have made lifelong careers out of obtaining property for development on the cheap by getting people into financial trouble in various ways and then buying their homes and land at property tax auctions on various county courthouse steps in our region or as emergency buy-outs. Classic examples of this are the Boot Ranch development, Tapatio Springs resort near Boerne, and shopping centers at The Rim in San Antonio. In my case, I'm sure locals think the idea of the city and county receiving money for the purchase of my property instead of me (however piddling the sum) is a wonderful way of keeping their own taxes down.  They don't seem to be able to realize (at least not until it's too late!) that for the greedy, there is never enough and that their turn to have their property grabbed, or that of loved ones, will eventually come.  [This may be quite soon for some, given the current push for a bypass around my city.  Land located along any proposed routes will suddenly become very valuable commercial property that is ripe for development and therefore highly desirable!]

In the process of these land grabs, people standing in the way often suddenly turn up dead. My neighborhood is no exception to this; at least four people owning property close to mine have died suddenly and violently. Two were found shot to death, one was brought to the hospital dead of unknown causes, and one was found dead underneath a tractor. One of the gunshot victims was my next-door neighbor who, with her husband, owned the property to the west of mine that is now being developed. All of these deaths took place shortly after my husband suddenly left me in 1999,

At the time of the zoning change to commercial and the approval of the medical complex, the property in the gully that is now being built on was listed as being owned by a local physician and her husband, a civil engineer who works for a major local construction company. (The husband also currently sits on the local school board.) Recently, however, an attorney and former city judge who now heads the local hospital foundation went to great pains to seek me out at my workplace so she could tell me herself that she and her father from Colorado had purchased the property to the west of mine and would be building on it. This former judge and her father are also listed as having purchased a large, multi-story medical office building next to the local hospital and supposedly built by them, which is just to the southeast of my property.

I believe that the local physician, her engineer husband, the former judge, and the judge's father are all fronting for my ex-husband and his father. As a fellow physician who was Chief of Staff at the time, my ex- had to have known about the hospital and medical expansion that was being planned for our neighborhood. His sudden departure in 1999 coincides with the murder outside the U.S. of a person who appears to have found out what was going on here and planned to reveal it very publicly. This victim, like the gunshot victims here, was also shot in the head. And I know for a fact that my ex-husband went to great lengths to try and conceal his whereabouts at the time the foreign victim was killed.

Because of the way law enforcement at all levels in the U.S. (including the Department of Justice) has repeatedly refused to help me over the years (undoubtedly due to my former father-in-law's high-level connections), I have little hope of getting any of the assistance or relief I'm entitled to under the law here or of getting the homicides of my neighbors investigated and prosecuted properly. The victim from outside the U.S. is another matter, however, since other countries tend to become upset when foreigners come over and assassinate their prominent citizens. I have every confidence that the foreign victim's death is currently being investigated thoroughly and that charges, if warranted, will be brought. I'm also very glad there are no statutes of limitations on murder cases.

Meanwhile, the illegal stalking and harassment directed at me and my adult children continues unabated. Much of the construction noise from next door is deliberately amplified at times when we are at home. One day last week, I awoke to find that the top portion of our trash had been removed from the bin and scattered all over our front lawn so I'd have to be outside for longer than usual while a large number of heavy construction vehicles that had been waiting just around the corner could slowly parade by. (Most of these vehicles belonged to the same construction company that the afore-mentioned civil engineer works for.) And my ex-husband was careful to leave his latest calling card (a bright pink Christmas bow; he know it's my favorite color) in the center of all the mess. Just this morning, on the way to work, I was headlight-harassed (see http://vocct.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-to-spot-gangstalking-primer.html) by a young female physician with a short blonde bob driving a gray car. In fact, the community-wide stalking and harassment are currently so severe that I sense a documentary film coming on.

By the way, property immediately across the street from the gully currently being built in was the scene of another bizarre and violent death; see http://vocct.blogspot.com/2012/02/developers-greed.html.

Finally, I am far from the only one currently having problems with our local hospital, which recently was awarded one of only two very prestigious national awards (the other recipient being Duke Medical Center).  Coincidentally (??), the major hospital in a neighboring county that is our hospital's main rival was informed around the same time that they'd just been listed as not being up to Medicare standards in the field that my ex-husband specializes in here.  Both of these smack highly of a combination of my former father-in-law's national connections and the expensive public relations firms he employs.  (The rival hospital and its doctors are furious, of course.)

As my friend Medawar likes to say, there's no crime a property developer won't commit!

[*Be sure to read the comments below.]  

Dead On The Roadside 2013

Death Of A Doctor

As noted in the first article shown here (which is taken from www.mysanantonio.com), Lubbock pathologist Dr. Joseph Sonnier III was recently found shot to death in his home. Apparently, the death was a homicide and there are no suspects at this time.

The second article here, which is from www.kxan.com, tells about the shooting deaths of Becky and Fermin Gallegos and their dog. These deaths occured two years ago (almost to the day!) in Fredericksburg, Texas (which is located here in Central Texas). A copy of Mrs. Gallego's obituary from the Fredericksburg Standard is also included.

The important connection between these two fatal shooting incidents is that Becky Gallegos is the ex-wife of Dr. Sonnier.

I never believed the deaths of the Gallegos to be murder-suicide as ruled. I now believe all of the killings are in fact related homicides. I find it interesting that the Lubbock account makes no mention of the Fredericksburg deaths. I also find it interesting that a current Fredericksburg pathologist with close ties to my ex-husband also has strong ties to Lubbock.

Pathologists are one of the first lines of defense against potential cover-ups of suspicious deaths. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that a pathologist and his former wife might have knowledge of such cover-ups and might possibly be silenced as a result.

Update: An alleged hit man and the plastic surgeon alleged to have hired him have been arrested for the murder of the pathologist. This is the same case above where the first reports said there were no suspects.

These sudden arrests are very convenient as far as distracting attention away from the Fredericksburg connection and, as far as I know, do nothing to explain it.

Another Cluster Of Deaths

In numerous previous posts on this blog, I have discussed suspicious deaths occurring in our area that have been clustered around some particular person, family or entity (the latter often a real estate development of some sort) in ways too coincidental to be statistically random. (See, for example, “Boot Ranch”). In recent months, a new set of these kinds of deaths has become apparent.

This latest group of deceased persons clusters very tightly around my ex-husband, in that all of them were very close lifelong friends of my ex-‘s. Two of the deceased, Kathy and Michael Stein, were brother and sister. Another, Allen Land, was Kathy Stein’s ex-husband. The fourth, Leonard Strackbein, was a lifelong close friend of all the other victims, as well as being a close buddy of my ex’s.

The Stein siblings’ father, a lifelong close friend of my former father-in-law’s, happens to be the doctor who delivered my ex-husband and his late sister. Kathy Stein was particularly close to my ex-husband all her life—like a sister to him, in fact. Notice from her obituary that at the time of her death, Kathy was the girlfriend of Paul Oestreich, who happens to be the current Fredericksburg Police Chief; Paul is also a close, lifelong friend of my ex-‘s and like a brother to him.

The local police, my ex-husband, and my ex-‘s family have all quietly put out the word that Kathy’s death was a suicide. Remember how the policeman who came out to document the cutting of my fence as discussed in my recent “Ugliness” post mentioned a “suicide” that had just occurred? This was on December 4, 2011, so the officer was no doubt referring to Kathy, although he never mentioned her name, or the fact that she was the girlfriend of his boss. Furthermore, I never saw anything in any of the local newspapers or on any of the local news broadcasts about Kathy’s death. Normally, the suicide of a police chief’s girlfriend is considered newsworthy, so this omission itself is odd, to say the least, particularly when it comes so soon after the sudden deaths of both her brother and her ex-husband as well.

I’m also concerned that there may be additional sudden deaths related to these that I don’t even know about. Several of my recent local newspapers have been stolen before I could see them, and I’ve been prevented in various ways from replacing them, leading me to wonder if they contained other obituaries for other persons whose names I might have recognized as having been closely connected with my ex-husband.

There have been a great many suspicious deaths of persons close to my ex-husband over the years, beginning (at least as far as I know) with the violent death of his own sister at age 16, and including the deaths of his close friends Robert Carter and Jimmy Brown, whom I’ve blogged about here before. (See “Jimmy Browns” and “My Story” at the beginning of this blog.)

For the record, I myself have no inside or personal knowledge about any of these deaths; all I know about them is what information has been given out by the obituaries shown here, my ex-husband, his family and friends, and local law enforcement. (Note: All obituaries shown here are taken from the Fredericksburg Standard-Radio Post.) Frankly, given the number of people close to my ex- who’ve suddenly turned up dead over the years, I’m very glad not to have any additional information about them. I freely admit that some of them may be from natural causes. However, I do have enough of an understanding of basic statistics to know there are simply too many of these deaths for all of them to be considered random occurrences.

Important Updates

I have recently added important updates to a number of my previous posts here. A summary of these follows and includes the links to these posts. (Note: The links are not live, in order to prevent possible tampering. You will need to copy and paste them into your browser.)

First and foremost, there has been a death associated with the situation explained and illustrated in my post "Developer's Greed". I've updated the post by adding the brief newspaper account of this death plus the victim's obituary. I felt it was important to include the obit., both to put a face on the death, and also to document that the body was quickly cremated. The link to this post is:

http://vocct.blogspot.com/2012/02/developers-greed.html


One of the attorneys who defrauded and misrepresented me is now running for public office in Bexar County. I have added information on this to two of my posts about her, "She Said" and "More Trust Issues". Here are the links to these:

http://vocct.blogspot.com/2009/09/she-said.html

and

http://vocct.blogspot.com/2009/06/more-trust-issues.html


I've added the fact that there is now major development of or very near the property that was involved in "The Case Of The Dropped Driver's License":

http://vocct.blogspot.com/2010/09/case-of-dropped-drivers-license.html


Finally, I've added a few more examples to "License Plates"; see:

http://vocct.blogspot.com/2012/03/license-plates.html

Death In Comfort

Note: This post benefited greatly from discussions I had with Medawar on the subject. He should be considered a co-author of the material that follows.

I've posted information on suspicious deaths in the area around Comfort, Texas before: see "I-10 At Comfort" (9/3/09) and "The Case Of The Dropped Driver's License" (9/11/10).

Now it's time for a different kind of discussion about deaths and Comfort, Texas. These articles, which were published recently in the San Antonio Express-News, describe an apparent "industry of death" being established near Comfort that is disturbing on several different levels.

At the very least, it sounds suspiciously like a scam designed to get people to sign over all their assets to trusts controlled by others. Maybe my viewpoint is colored more than a tad by my own victimization involving a fraudulent trust (for more on this, see the very beginning of this blog), but I can't see why it takes everything you have in the world to insure your after-life care, especially since you won't actually be around to oversee its distribution. I would certainly like to have more information on who would actually be controlling these trusts after their signers are safely installed within this facility!

Then there's the issue of the disposal of the remainder of the bodies when only the heads are retained. The fact that liquid nitrogen is already present in the facility in large amounts allows one to conjure up the image of the remainder of these bodies being flash-frozen until solid/brittle and then being dropped from a height onto a hard surface or being pounded by a machine into a million tiny pieces that could be sold as animal feed or fertilizer. Yes, I'm aware that Myth Busters supposedly busted the myth about bodies being disposed of in this way, but remember that this company has to be disposing of large numbers of bodies somehow.

Whatever is or is not actually going on at the facility, I find the idea of disposing of bodies on an industrial scale deeply disturbing and rife with the potential for serious misuse. Think how easy it would be for organized crime to dispose of sex trafficking victims, drug cartel informants, inconvenient spouses, and the like in a way that not only instantly obliterates the deceased, but also co- mingles their DNA so it can no longer be identified.

Then there's the even more disturbing possibility that people might still be alive when flash-frozen. If that were the case, what you would have here would be an industrial-scale death camp exponentially more efficient than those of the Nazis.

Hopefully, all my concerns about this facility are strictly hypothetical, but my confidence in this is not exactly boosted when I see published statements about how much time and effort was put into searching for the right location for this operation, since I'm well aware of the amount and extent of organized crime and high-level connections of various kinds already well-established in this area. Even more chilling [pun intended!] is the name of the owning company, Stasis, which happens to be the plural of Stasi; for more on the importance of this, please refer back to "Empire Builders", posted here on 10/30/10. And various people I correspond with tell me there are more of these facilities elsewhere in the U.S. (California, for example).



Update, 2/10/12:

Fire And Water

Fire and water happen to be the best ways to destroy DNA evidence at crime scenes. They also happen to make great excuses for labeling homicides as accidents, which is how the FBI gets away with saying our violent crime rates are down.

It's shaping up to be a long, hot summer here in Central Texas.

More Local Deaths

These are all very recent. Even one of them is too many!

At least two of these deaths had connections to Fair Oaks Ranch, which happens to be where P.I. #2 [see previous post] lives.

I'm told the skull in the bag may possibly be some sort of sick medical prank.

Finally, Mr. Scripps was a member of the well-known media family.

Death Of A Priest (Or Two)

Clusters

Deaths and events related to them have a major tendency to occur in clusters in our area, as illustrated here. I'm not saying there's necessarily anything wrong in this particular case (I don't have enough information on it to be able to say either way); I'm just using it as a good example of the kinds of things that happen too often here and need to be investigated seriously by someone from the outside.

The Ex-Wives Club

As I’ve stated repeatedly, there are MANY other domestic violence and abuse victims here besides my children and me, and NONE of us has been able to obtain even a small fraction of the help we need. I’ve already posted information on some of these before: “Willa” (10/26/09), for example, whose abusive husband actually volunteered at the local women’s shelter. Now I’d like to introduce you to the stories of a few selected others.

First and foremost is the story of my friend Joanie. In “Old Emails From A Friend” (9/17/10), I talked about a play group my children and I belonged to years ago when they were very young. We also belonged to a second, much larger, play group made up of moms and tots from prominent local families. This group consisted of the wives and children of doctors, architects, dentists, professional artists, bankers, and more. It was through this group that I met Joanie and got to know her.

Joanie was a stay-at-home mom with the same number of children as me. Her husband was a pilot who worked for a large real estate company in Houston, so he was gone a lot of the time for work reasons as my husband was. Joanie seemed rather reserved at first, but as I slowly got to know her, I discovered she was intelligent, creative, and sensitive. She was also very attractive—the kind of person who “lit up the room” wherever she went. She had lots of casual friends but few close ones; she always seemed very guarded.

Joanie and her husband were also clearly very wealthy. They owned and lived in what is arguably the most beautiful historic rock home in our area, located in an extremely desirable spot in the center of town. My husband claimed Joanie was from a wealthy family, but I never knew her maiden name or anything about her background. She and her children were always impeccably dressed, and when the rest of us brought taco salads and chicken casseroles to share for lunch, Joanie brought liver pate.

Frankly, Joanie would probably have become one of my best friends here if it hadn’t been for her husband—I couldn’t stand him. He was loud, rude, and coarse, the exact opposite of Joanie. In fact, he frankly gave me the creeps, particularly in light of persistent rumors around town that he was flying loads of drugs in from South America. I was at a total loss as to why someone like Joanie had married him or why she stayed married to him. I was even more confused about why my own husband was a friend of his. When I attempted any discussion with my husband about the frankly abusive way I’d seen Joanie’s husband treat her on several occasions and why he wanted a friend who behaved that way, my husband just laughed and said I needed to get to know him better. I told him I didn’t care to.

When our older children entered school, I lost touch with Joanie. Thinking back now, I realize she must not have been getting out much, because I don’t remember seeing her at the store or around town. At one point, her husband made a failed attempt at running for public office. I was not pleased when my husband campaigned for him, but we discussed this and ended up “agreeing to disagree” on the matter.

Then in the early 1990s, I became pregnant with my youngest child and was pleasantly surprised to hear that Joanie was also expecting another baby. I finally did run into her at the store, and we had fun commiserating about pregnancy and catching up on each others’ news. She seemed happy, healthy, and excited about the new baby, and her older children were doing extremely well in school. All seemed well.

The last time I went to Joanie’s house was when my youngest and I were invited to Joanie’s baby’s first birthday party. Joanie was absolutely radiant that day, holding all the little ones (and us grown-ups too!) in thrall with a puppet show she wrote and performed for the occasion. However, I was sad to note that her husband wasn’t there. Sure enough, when he suddenly came in at the end of the party, Joanie suddenly became tense and silent. It was clear from the way he belittled her that they had serious problems.

At some point after that, I remember my mother-in-law telling me the word going around town was that Joanie was having serious problems with post-partum depression. I told her that didn’t make sense to me because Joanie’s youngest child was older than that. My mother-in-law insisted Joanie had been suffering from this for a long time. Not long after this, I heard Joanie’s marriage had ended. Her husband moved to a ranch outside town, married a woman with ties to both South America and local real estate, and opened a chocolate importing business. Joanie kept the historic home in town she’d always loved so much.

The next news I had of Joanie was very strange and frightening. Her ex-husband had taken their two youngest children hiking on a fairly high rocky peak at a local park. Somehow the older of the two children took a terrible fall off the peak and sustained a very serious head injury. News reports said the father left the younger child, who was quite young at the time, alone at the summit while he went down to the injured child. The victim was rushed to a trauma center in San Antonio and barely survived. This child eventually made a full recovery, but they had no memory of what had happened.

I heard Joanie was furious with her ex- over the accident, which was what I would have expected from her, so I was surprised when my mother-in-law started telling me again how depressed Joanie was. Not long after this, I ran into Joanie briefly, and she seemed more frightened than depressed: eyes constantly darting back and forth, talking in a very guarded manner, and clearly nervous and jumpy. Joanie was definitely not herself, and I frankly didn’t know what to make of it.

The next thing I heard about Joanie was when I opened up the newspaper one morning and read about her death. I could barely contain my shock and horror as I read that her ex-husband and a female friend (the wife of a doctor) found her hanging from the hook that held the light fixture over her dining room table.

Joanie’s death was ruled a suicide. My husband and my old play group friends all told me her ex- was furious because she’d started seeing a new doctor in San Antonio who felt she was being over-medicated and took her off all her antidepressants. He blamed this doctor for causing her death and was threatening to sue him.

I was heartbroken over the death of my friend, but it wasn’t long after this that my own husband suddenly left and our lives were turned upside down as well. Later, I heard Joanie’s oldest child was accusing their father of murdering their mother, which I’d wondered about as well.

At some point, Joanie’s ex-husband must have regained ownership of the historic rock house, because he opened a restaurant in it. I also heard his second marriage ended in divorce. Both of our youngest children graduated from high school together, and I remembered her fondly that night.

I’ve never forgotten Joanie, and recently she’s been much on my mind again. In the last few months as I’ve learned more and more about gang stalking and begun realizing how much of it applies to our situation, I’ve also realized it makes a lot of sense as far as what I remember of Joanie’s. In fact, my former mother-in-law began saying exactly the same kind of stuff about me (or even worse!—see some of my ex-husband’s similar comments that are scattered throughout this blog) to anyone who would listen after my husband left. There’s a definite pattern here: target a victim for organized stalking while at the same time spreading false rumors all over town that the victim is crazy in order to attempt to explain some serious future crime against that person (like murder, driving them to suicide, involuntary commitment long enough to steal assets, etc.).

I’ve also begun seeing this same pattern in terrible things experienced by other acquaintances of mine. For example, the wife of a local doctor was repeatedly described to me by both her husband and mine (both good friends) as “crazy”, even though I never saw any evidence of this. Her husband left her to marry a co-worker around the same time my husband left. She moved to Boerne and eventually remarried, but recently she suddenly turned up dead and I haven’t been able to find out what happened to her.

Another acquaintance of mine has a similar story, but I believe hers has a happier ending. This woman, who is incredibly intelligent and talented, was the creative force behind a well-known local business that her husband and his family managed. I was very upset when my husband came home one night and said this woman had been brought into the local emergency room close to death that morning from a suicide attempt. This woman did survive, but she and her husband eventually divorced, she moved away, and recently I heard she had remarried. Her ex-husband is now extensively developing the property they once owned jointly. Even more significantly, this property is not far from mine.

Military Deaths

Posted here is information on a number of deaths from recent years involving military or former military personnel. Again, some of these may possibly be genuine accidents or have other causes, but I believe most of them need further investigation. Also, as before, I need to make it clear that there are a lot more of these than what is shown.

As you can probably tell, there's some overlap between the various catagories. Finally, the well-known homicide cases of victims Col. Phillip Shue and Heidi Seaman could be included here, but I've decided not do so because there is already a great deal of information about their deaths elsewhere on the web that is easy to locate.

Deaths Related To First Responders

Here are my sample picks for deaths related to first responders I believe should be looked into further for various reasons. Note that while all of my catagories overlap somewhat, this one has the most duplications, for example, the previously-posted Vallado case from 2007 in which Fredericksburg police officers were the last people to see Ms. Vallado alive.