Phantoms and Monsters

The Pied Piper of Staten Island
Fortean / Oddball News - 8/8/2010
Rare Giant Squid Washes Up On Wellington, NZ Beach

Posted: 08 Aug 2010 05:42 PM PDT

The film 'Cropsey', a feature documentary that examines the mystery behind the disappearance of Jennifer Schweiger and four other children, is to be released soon. The film also investigates Andre Rand, the real-life boogeyman linked to the missing children. I have posted information related to Rand's case.

Born Andre Rashan, in 1943, Rashan employed various pseudonyms to cover his movements and criminal activities through the years. Between 1966 and '68, using the last name "Bruchette," he worked as a physical therapy aide at New York's Willowbrook State School - later renamed the Staten Island Development Center. On May 5, 1969, he was arrested in the South Bronx for kidnapping and attempting to rape a nine-year-old girl. Pleading guilty to a lesser charge of sexual abuse, he served sixteen months in prison, winning parole in January 1972. Back on the street, Rashan legally changed his name to "Rand," logging three more arrests by the end of the decade for "minor" offenses, including burglary.

Along the way, his name was linked with disappearances of several children. Rand was working as a painter at a South Beach, Staten Island, apartment house when five-year-old Alice Pereira vanished from one of the flats in 1972, but officers were short on solid evidence required for an indictment. Nine years later, in July 1981, Rand was hauled in for questioning in the disappearance of seven-year-old Holly Hughes, from Port Richmond, and once more he was released for lack of evidence.

On January 9, 1983, Rand collected eleven children from West Brighton, loaded them into a van, and set off on a five-hour jaunt into Newark, neglecting to ask parental permission. They spent the day eating hamburgers and watching planes land at Newark airport, and while none of the children were harmed, Rand was arrested on charges of unlawful imprisonment, convicted in March and sentenced to ten months in jail. He was back on the street by August, listed as a suspect when ten-year-old Tiahese Jackson vanished on Staten Island.

No trace of the three missing girls had been found by July 9, 1987, when 12-year-old Jennifer Schweizer disappeared from her home at Westerleigh. A victim of Downe's syndrome, Jennifer was traced to the grounds of the deserted Staten Island Development Center, where Rand had been living for several years in a makeshift shelter of his own design. Witnesses reported seeing Rand with Jennifer the day she disappeared, and after some preliminary questions, he was charged with her kidnapping on August 4, held without bail pending a psychiatric evaluation. Eight days later, Schweizer's body was unearthed from a shallow grave, within sight of Rand's lean-to, and a charge of murder in the first degree was added to his file.
Serial Killer Central

The New Youk Daily News has a very fine link source page dedicated to this case at Andre Rand

**********
Originally published 9/8/2002

'HANNIBAL LECTER OF STATEN ISLAND' Sex Fiend Trial Revisits '80s Case

nydailynews - "You know me and [Ted] Bundy are alike in many ways. We both used Volkswagens. Bundy's thing was women. My thing is kids. . . . Do you think the police could figure that out?"

- Andre Rand, convicted child kidnapper and suspected serial killer in conversation with inmates.

As America agonizes over a wave of horrific child abductions and murders this summer, prosecutors are targeting a Staten Island deviant suspected of killing at least four young girls and two women.

Andre Rand, a 58-year-old drifter and sex offender, is serving 25 years to life for kidnapping 12-year-old Jennifer Schweiger, whose nude body was found in 1987 in a shallow grave near Rand's campsite on the abandoned grounds of the Willowbrook state mental facility.

Although Rand has been in prison for 12 years, he still casts a large and disturbing shadow over the borough.

"I call him the Hannibal Lecter of Staten Island," said Donna Cutugno, president of Friends of Jennifer for Missing Children, a volunteer group that began the community search for Schweiger and still searches Willowbrook's 385 acres twice a year looking for the other girls.

"He terrified a whole community. He still haunts us."

New trial

Tomorrow, pretrial hearings are scheduled to begin in a Staten Island courtroom, where Rand will stand trial for the kidnapping of Holly Ann Hughes, who disappeared 20 years ago when she was just 7.

Prosecutors and detectives have reinterviewed witnesses from two decades ago - some under hypnosis - and say they have pieced together key evidence that eluded them in 1981 when Holly was last seen at a local deli buying a bar of soap on the night of July 15. Police said witnesses saw Rand's green Volkswagen circling the area on that night. Although he was questioned by police and his car was searched at the time, he was not arrested or charged.

"There has always been a nagging thought about the other allegations about him and the other missing children," said Staten Island District Attorney William Murphy last week. "I thought it was important enough to take a deeper look at these cases and do another prosecution."

Law enforcement authorities have long suspected Rand in the kidnappings of two additional girls: Tiahease Jackson, 10, who disappeared Aug. 13, 1983, in Mariner's Harbor after buying chicken wings at a store 2 miles north of Willowbrook; and Alice Pereira, 5, who disappeared on July 10, 1972, near her apartment in the New Dorp section, several miles southeast of Willowbrook. He also has been linked to the disappearance of Ethel Atwell and the rape and murder of Shin Lee, both Willowbrook aides.

But Murphy said only the Hughes case got stronger in recent years, and prosecutors won an indictment from a grand jury last year.

At least 10 people are expected to testify at his trial about seeing him with or near the outgoing and smiling girl who lived with her mother at the time. Moreover, officers and inmates from Auburn Correctional Facility are expected to testify they heard Rand tell fellow inmates: "Kids entice me"; compare himself to Ted Bundy, the notorious serial female killer who was executed in 1989, and ask another inmate who was looking at a pornographic book, "How could I get a book like that with kids?"

Just 'boasting'

In court papers, Rand's lawyer, Duane Felton, dismissed his client's comments as "vague utterances more in the nature of pretentious prison boasting."

"Why would anyone boast about such things, let alone while incarcerated?" said Staten Island Assistant District Attorney Mario Mattei, the lead prosecutor in the Holly Ann Hughes case. "He's a pedophile who abducts young girls to have sex with them."

Mattei, whose hurdle at trial will be the 20-year time lapse, said he couldn't let the case rest.

"When you look at Rand's past, and there is a fresh case to be made against him, I couldn't imagine letting him get away with what we believe he did to this innocent little girl, Holly Ann Hughes. We think he should be accountable."

Holly Ann's father, Peter Hughes, a retired dockworker, still carries a photo in his wallet of the precocious little girl who loved singing Billy Joel's song "My Life" and going out for pizza.

"There is not a day that goes by . . . " he said, choking back tears. "She was just a beautiful little child."

Hughes said he was surprised when detectives came to his home in 1998 saying they had new leads in his daughter's disappearance.

"It's upsetting to go through again, but it was a good thing to happen. Andre Rand is an evil, evil person. I don't think he will ever say where her remains are so we will never be able to put my daughter to rest. But hopefully he will be convicted and put in jail for the rest of his life. The best we can hope for is that he will die in there."

He has one demand of Rand: "Let me know what you did with her!"

If Rand is not convicted in the Hughes case, he is eligible for parole in just under 10 years, on July 30, 2012, for the Schweiger kidnapping.

Rand was also charged with Schweiger's murder but in the absence of physical evidence jurors deadlocked on that charge.

Authorities at the time described Rand as a meticulous and fastidious person, who took great pains to leave no clues behind.

How he started

Rand was born Frank Rushan in Manhattan on March 11, 1944. He grew up in Ithaca, N.Y., served in the Army during the early 1960s and worked as an attendant at Willowbrook from 1966 to 1968, after which he changed his name to Andre Rand.

He had odd jobs, including his own sign-painting business on Staten Island, and lived in roominghouses, shelters and makeshift campsites on the Willowbrook grounds. People in the neighborhood described him as friendly, articulate and well read, not the retarded, drooler he feigns to be when questioned by police.

His first brush with the law was on May 25, 1969, when he enticed a 9-year-old Bronx girl into his car and drove her to a vacant lot. He removed his clothes and hers, but a passing police car interrupted the crime. Charged with attempted rape, Rand pleaded guilty to sexual abuse and was sentenced to four years. He served 16 months.

In 1979, he was accused of raping a young woman and a 15-year-old girl, but neither pressed charges.

In 1981, Rand offered a 9-year-old girl a lollipop and tried to entice her to ride in his Volkswagen. When she refused his offer, Rand followed her to her home and searched for her while she hid under a rug. No charges were filed.

And in January 1983, Rand drove to a Staten Island YMCA, enticed 11 children into his van and drove to Elizabeth, N.J., where he treated them to White Castle hamburgers. He then took them to Newark Airport, where they watched planes arrive and depart. On return to the YMCA five hours later, Rand was charged with unlawful imprisonment and served 10 months in jail.

Experts say Rand's criminal history is an anomaly because his victims are generally random strangers. Fewer than 100 cases of child abductions by nonfamily members were reported in 2001 among a population of 59 million children, according to the FBI.

With renewed national focus on these crimes, Rand offers a window into the dark psyche of criminals like himself, their methods and their madness.

"These people are typically loners and losers," said Kenneth Lanning, a retired 30-year veteran FBI agent and national expert on missing and sexually exploited children. "They prefer children to adults but lack the interpersonal skills to become a Little League coach, a teacher or a clergyman - people who easily befriend children. So they abduct young children because they are vulnerable and easy prey for them."

Lanning said at least 95% are unmarried men who have few friends, and that even in this small population of child molesters who abduct children, only a tiny fraction of those will kill their victims.

"These are the most vile and cruel of this sick population," he said.

Felton, Rand's court assigned lawyer, did not return several phone calls from the Daily News. But in court papers, he argues that his client is innocent.

His side

In an April 7 motion trying to prevent prosecutors from obtaining blood from Rand for a DNA sample, he argued that his client was "thoroughly investigated at the time. . . . His photograph was shown to persons who had seen Holly Ann Hughes shortly before her disappearance and none of them have identified [him] as having been near or with the child on July 15, 1981."

And in an affidavit filed with the court protesting press coverage of his arrest last year, Rand wrote on his own behalf - in meticulous and flowery handwriting - that he has been the victim of "a slanderous/scapegoat article resurrecting [so-called] 'notoriety,' thus encouraging hostility against plaintiff. Focusing and arousing public attention toward plaintiff from so-called 'missing persons' old cases - such persons plaintiff has never met!"

In a jailhouse interview with The News in 1987, Rand repeatedly lied to a reporter, saying he had never met Jennifer Schweiger.

He changed his story at trial only after his defense lawyer learned there were several witnesses who saw Rand with his bicycle leading the trusting little girl with Down syndrome by the hand away from her house toward the woods at Willowbrook.

**********

'CROPSEY' - The Film

Cropsey Legend - Growing up on Staten Island, filmmakers Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio had often heard the legend of 'Cropsey.' For the kids in their neighborhood, Cropsey was the escaped mental patient who lived in the old abandoned Willowbrook Mental Institution, who would come out late at night and snatch children off the streets. Sometimes Cropsey had a hook for a hand, other times he wielded a bloody axe, but it didn't matter, Cropsey was always out there, lurking in the shadows, waiting to get them.

Later as teenagers, the filmmakers assumed Cropsey was just an urban legend: a cautionary tale used to keep them out of those abandoned buildings and stop them from doing all those things that teenagers like to do. That all changed in the summer of 1987 when a 12-year-old girl with Down syndrome, named Jennifer Schweiger, disappeared from their community. That was the summer all the kids from Staten Island discovered that their urban legend was real.

Now as adults Joshua and Barbara have returned to Staten Island to create Cropsey, a feature documentary that delves into the mystery behind Jennifer and four additional missing children. The film also investigates Andre Rand, the real-life boogeyman linked to their disappearances.

Embarking on a mysterious journey into the underbelly of their forgotten borough, these filmmakers uncover a reality that is more terrifying than any urban legend. Read more at Cropsey Legend

Click for video

**********

Hi to all! Please take a few minutes and check the new blog
'The 'C' Influence'
...great alternative discussion by several of the internet's most recognized esoteric bloggers. Again, thanks for reading 'Phantoms and Monsters'...Lon

**********

Fortean / Oddball News - 8/8/2010

Posted: 08 Aug 2010 10:01 AM PDT

First 9/11 Truth Billboard Unveiled...More Planned

disinfo - In what may be the first of it's kind in the nation, a group of 9/11 Truth activists organized, designed and paid for a commercial billboard in which 1,200 Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth invite the public to "Examine the Evidence."

The 24'(w) x 12'(h) billboard was installed sometime Thurs. afternoon, Aug. 5, 2010 on South Higuera, just south of Elks Lane in San Luis Obispo (near the Sutcliffe Cemetery). [MAP: http://tinyurl.com/24jcasv] where it will remain for 8 next weeks.

The activists who brought this matter to the people of San Luis Obispo County realize that the evidence they are attempting to share is difficult to digest but want to encourage the public to rise above their fear, take the Red Pill and learn the truth.

For if we do not, then we are telling our government that it is ok to murder 3000 of us so they can take us to war in the Middle East and kill hundreds of thousands more.

In order to understand the facts regarding the unprecedented total collapse of 3 modern, steel high rise buildings one has to be able to free themselves from preconceived notions in the face of evidence backed by fact and the laws of physics

The volumes of evidence include a peer reviewed paper published by an international team of scientists in which they describe discovering red chips of unignited thermite in all 4 samples of the World Trade Center dust that they tested. There has been no coverage of this paper in any of the mainstream press, including the so-called "Left" media. NIST (The National Institute of Standards and Technology) was tasked with explaining these 3 high rise failures and produced the reports that make the government's case. But they have not responded to this paper either and have remained silent on many issues that the 9/11 Truth community has raised.

For more details about this highly charged issue please visit: http://www.ae911truth.org

Click for video

NOTE: I've looked at the evidence and concede that there are many discrepancies...especially where it relates to the Pentagon crash. Having said that, these billboards may or may not start to get the dialogue rolling again...but it will no doubt cause some controversy. If there was a conspiracy enabled by an entity within this or any other government then it needs to be brought out in the open...Lon

**********

Ahmadinejad Bans Assassination Reports

timeslive - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Saturday denounced international media for their coverage of an alleged assassination attempt against him, state television reported.

"Somebody fired one of those firecrackers which have a colourful smoke as a sign of joy and you witnessed what the foreign media made out of this simple event," he said in a ceremony marking national reporters' day.

During a trip to the western city of Hamedan in western Iran, a minor explosion led to reports by some Arab media that there had been an assassination attempt against the president. Some Western news agencies also followed the same news line.

Official news agency IRNA dismissed the reports and said a young resident of Hamedan wanted to show his support for the president and "out of excitement" fired a firecracker "like in football stadiums."

IRNA said first the Arab and then Western media "misused" the harmless incident for their own political purposes.

"The Western media then started a news wave claiming that a hand grenade was exploded, dozens were injured, the president survived the assassination attempt and was taken away from the venue with no news about his whereabouts," Ahmadinejad said.

"Nothing had happened, it was just a firecracker, nobody even moved from his place and the people continued to show their enthusiasm (towards the president)," he added.

NOTE: What happens when the shit storm finally hits the Iranian government? I have had conversations with several Iranians in and out of Iran and the mood for social unrest is increasing everyday. My fear is that Ahmadinejad and the mullahs lay blame for the internal turmoil on the US and it's allies...making an attempt to justify use of WMDs...Lon

**********

Building Kim Jong-Il's Cyber Army

venturebeat - It wouldn't be that hard for North Korea to build a cyber army to take on the U.S. in a war fought only in cyberspace. North Korea has an estimated cyber war budget of $56 million, and the cheap way it could attack the U.S. is by herding a bunch of compromised computers to do its bidding.

That's the assessment by Charlie Miller, a veteran computer security tester whose accomplishments include hacking Apple's operating system and the iPhone. He spoke at the Defcon security conference in Las Vegas last week.

Miller gave his talk the humorous name: "Kim Jong-Il and Me: How to build a cyber army to defeat the U.S." It drew a big crowd of hackers and security researchers. He imagined what would happen if he were kidnapped by Kim Jong-Il's secret agents and forced to make war on the U.S. While he made a lot of jokes, the topic is a serious one. Miller gave a serious talk on the subject before a group of NATO officials a few months ago, and he has done computer penetration work for the National Security Agency in the past.

The substance of his talk was corroborated in part by Gen. Michael Hayden, the former director of national security, who said in a talk on Thursday at the Black Hat security conference that, "You built cyberspace like the north German plain, and then you bitch when you get invaded." He meant that the advantage in cyberspace goes to the attacker.

During a war, the internet would be degraded. It would therefore be important to control lots of computers to carry out attacks. That's why botnets, or millions of compromised computers that can be remotely controlled by an attacker, are a big force multiplayer in a cyber army. Perhaps 100 million compromised computers would be needed.

"I think I could marshal a lot of botnets to do the job pretty easily, and make sure they are all over the world," Miller said. "That way, you can't snip off the communications that control them. Make it 100 times better than anything we have seen before."

"It's good to be North Korea because they can get around laws that prevent you from taking other computers," he said. On top of that, North Korea doesn't have that much to attack.

The big problem in a cyber war is attribution: who started it? You couldn't tell if it were Russia or China. If you have millions of computers throughout the world, you can choose where the attack appears to emanate from. That would help a country like North Korea hide.

The cyber army would include botnet collectors, penetration testers who comb the networks for vulnerabilities, spies, developers of malware, technical consultants who sell their knowledge to the highest bidder, and others. The total estimated budget to do the job with about 600 people would be more like $45 million, well within North Korea's current budget. It might take two years to assemble such a force.

With all that, you get all the tools you need to wage war. Of course, many of these people are in the U.S. and would be hard to commandeer by North Korea.

The logical way to get the botnets to be useful is to exploit a Zero Day bug (or one for which there is no known solution). On average, each Zero Day bug remains unpatched for 348 days. These serious bugs, which can be used to take over computers, are plentiful and stick around for a while.

Other means: logic bombs to take down the internet, pay criminals to hijack computers for you, use insiders to create back doors into security systems. Miller doesn't think those ideas would work very well, since you probably couldn't rely on them. A distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack would flood certain sites with too much traffic.

To protect against these attacks, Miller says, you would have to have redundancy of critical networks. During a war, the U.S. could briefly try to segregate its networks from the rest of the world, by putting filters on the web so that nothing bad gets through. Of course, that effectively accomplishes the isolation that would be the object of an attacker. It would be hard to filter out all of the botnets that would be using different attack methods.

There are hardened targets like the National Security Agency that ordinary botnets would have trouble penetrating. To breach them, Miller would do penetration testing, get in somewhere, and then take control. That would take considerable time.

Miller would target places such as electric power grids, the air traffic control system, and military networks. The latter could be penetrated if someone plugged a compromised universal serial bus (USB) device into a computer on the network.

"In these cases, you have to get people inside these networks," he said. "You pay them off, get them into the network and then allow me to remotely attack it. With enough money, patience and time, it's really hard to stop a skilled attacker."

The lesson, Miller said, is that you have to detect the buildup of botnets and other tools of cyber war early and deal with them before they are used. If you wait too long, there will be nothing you can do about it.

**********

Peabody, Massachusetts UFO Sighting

Posted on August 7, 2010 at 9:39 PM

Case Number: 24990

Log Number: US-08072010-0011

Submitted Date: 2010-08-07 11:12 GMT

Event Date: 2010-08-06 14:40 GMT

Status: Submitted

City: Peabody

Region: Massachusetts

Country: US

Longitude: -70.9286609

Latitude: 42.5278731

Shape: Disc

Distance: 100 feet or less

Entity Type: None

Vallee Index: CE1

I was on a lounge chair in my backyard on the north side of the swimming pool. I was facing east and was in the shade cast by the tall bamboo behind me. Although there was no change in the light, I had a random thought that dark thunderclouds might be coming in from the west and looked up at the sky. A few seconds later I saw a silver disk travelling from west to east, in a straight line over my pool. At first glance I thought it was some kid's silver balloon that got loose but quickly realized it was no floppy, tinfoil balloon, but some kind of firm-surfaced metal. I focused in on it so I could remember as much detail as possible. It was shaped like a disk but also had a squashed egg type shape.

The top and bottom were rounded and the sides were slightly rounded, like the shape of a Mento candy. There were no hard edges or seams, no puckers or variations of color or texture in the surface. It was totally smooth and reflective, the bottom of it turning darker as it passed over the green trees at the eastern end of the yard. I'm estimating that it was about 30 feet above the fully mature maple trees, so maybe 60 feet above ground. I got the impression that it might be 3 to 4 feet in diameter. Although it was breezy at the treetops, the disk moved in a straight line, with no side to side wavering or drifting from the wind, and no change in altitude. There was absolutely no sound emitting from it. After the disk had been in my sight for about 5 seconds I had the presence of mind to call out, "Look up!" to my husband, who was doing some yardwork about 20 feet behind me and to the right.

Since he was to the right of the edge of the bamboo stand he had a clear view of the disk and looked up in time to see it just as it was going over the trees. His description of the disk corroborated mine. From the time I saw the disk to the time it travelled out of sight was about 8 to 10 seconds and I estimate that the distance it travelled in that time was about 50 to 60 feet. Using these estimates, the disk was travelling at about 3 to 5 miles per hour. Unfortunately there was no time to take a picture, even with my cell phone. Immediately following this sighting I felt glad to have finally seen something concrete and real because it left no doubt that these objects do exist. Then I started wondering whether the fact that they do exist was a good thing or not. Knowing that there is technology far advanced than that held by us here on Earth is a bit unsettling.

From our own history we know what usually happens when a technologically advanced civilization meets a less advanced society. I can only hope that whoever is controlling these objects has a less aggressive nature than us humans. We told friends about the sighting but, of course, most of them just laughed it off and asked how much we had been drinking at the time (which, by the way, was not at all). We humans do laugh when we are nervous about something, and we don't want to hear about something that makes us uncomfortable. And the quickest way to shut someone up is to ridicule them. So our friends reactions are normal, but we know what we saw. I don't think our government could keep such technology a secret. Even if they could, if we had it, we wouldn't be fighting wars to get oil because we would have a better propulsion system already. So what we saw was an Object, that was Flying and is Unidentified...a UFO.

Peabody, Massachusetts UFO Sighting

Fortean / Oddball News - 8/8/2010

Rare Giant Squid Washes Up On Wellington, NZ Beach

Posted: 08 Aug 2010 08:11 AM PDT

stuff - A rare squid washed up dead on a Wellington beach this morning with experts saying they believe it had been attacked in the sea.

The massive squid was found by residents at Houghton Bay on Wellington's south coast and experts from Te Papa have estimated it could be up to 4m long. The remains have now been washed out to sea.

Te Papa communications manager Jane Kieg said the creature was in bad shape as it had been attacked and had suffered further damage from being washed up on the beach.

Department of Conservation Wellington area manager Rob Stone initially identified the squid as a colossal squid - the largest type.

But Ms Kieg said it was a giant squid. She said colossal squid have short tentacles with swivel hooks and massive fins. But the Wellington beast has long tentacles with teethed suckers and small fins.

Giant squid can grow up to 13 metres in length.

Department of Conservation staff had removed the creature's beak and experts at Te Papa would measure it in order to determine the age of the creature.

Ms Kieg said it was however a "fantastic" opportunity to see a giant squid. Te Papa had one of its educators at the beach, explaining the giant squid to people.

Because the area is a marine reserve, the remains were left on the beach but were washed backed out to sea about 3pm.

Victoria Univesrity marine biology student and Island Bay resident Jeannine Fischer said she was in a laboratory this morning when she heard about the squid having washed up on the beach, so went down for a look.

''As far as I know it is very rare. I've never heard of such a big squid washing up so close to Wellington.''

Ms Fischer said the squid, which was white, with pink and white tentacles, was sitting in a stormwater channel.

Thanks to Tony Lucas for the heads up!

Rare Giant Squid Washes Up On Wellington, NZ Beach

Have you had a close encounter or witnessed something unusual?
Send us an email

'Phantoms and Monsters' - Now Available on Kindle

New Items - Strickler's Celebrity Autographs

Anomalist Books - works on maverick science, unexplained mysteries, unorthodox theories, strange talents, and unexpected discoveries. Please check out their excellent and diverse catalog
Become a fan of 'Phantoms and Monsters' at Facebook