Strike out for justice for a murdered woman. Write, telephone, email the national news media to get them to cover the Tammy Haas case - and, of course, write the Attorney General of Nebraska. !.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.! ! ! ! Catt's Claws ... A Feminist Newsletter #66 ... September 19, 1995 ! ! ! !.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.!.! Information submitted by msmithbe, Misty, the Spazgirl: UPDATE ON TAMMY HAAS MURDER "As broadcast on Channel 11, KELO-News at 10... Tammy Haas' boyfriend, Eric Stuble, has been arrested and charged with manslaughter. Tammy Haas' body was found 09/24/92 - THREE YEARS AGO ! He has confessed to killing her accidentally during a sudden fight. The crime occurred in Hartington, Nebraska, just over the state line from South Dakota where Ms. Haas lived and is being handled by the Attorney General there. He is free on $50,000 bond and it is said he will plead not guilty. See Catt's Claws #60, Aug. 28, 199,5 for full details, but here are the highlights: She was reported missing after starting to walk home from a party on Friday and her body was not discovered for FIVE DAYS. (Think of the hell the family went through!) Trauma-type injuries were found on the head and extremities of the partially clothed body of Tammy Haas said Capt. Dave Winkler of the Nebraska State Patrol. "We've got some information that tells us it's a homicide," said Jeff Hanson of the Nebraska State Patrol. A second autopsy was performed on Ms. Haas without the presence of the medical examiner who performed the first autopsy. The autopsies showed she died of a broken neck. After her death her body was hidden in the trunk of a car (which rumor says belonged to the Stuble family) and driven to an isolated ravine near a golf course and dumped. Finally in August 1995, the family and friends formed the Tammy Haas' task force "PULSE" - Public Understanding Let the Silence End. Another source on the case says there was a statement made by her brother in the press in Yankton, SD, surmissing Ms. Haas' death may have been an accident. (If so, why didn't he step forward three years ago?) The boyfriend heard the police were going to arrest him and so he surrendered to the authorities. He had been living in Minneapolis. Stuble had evidentally dated Haas when she was a senior in high school and he was a sophomore. He is 20 now. She was 19 when she died in 1992 and will never be 20. We must not let this Stuble person get off scott free. He hid from the situation for almost THREE years. Years ago the police impounded a car which evidentally belonged to him and lost vital information when they returned it, some say "accidentally" failing to get a search warant. The family is reported to be politically influential. What kind of morality does the Stuble family have? His family had to know what occurred and yet they did nothing, hoping to allow Eric Stuble to get away with murder, even if it was accidental murder. Stuble dumped this poor girl's body in a ravine hoping to keep it from being discovered. She lay exposed, partially clothed to the elements while her killer partied and continued his life. We can understand panicking - but for THREE years? And the well- heeled and well-connected family hiding a MURDER ??? Tammy Haas' murder must not go unavenged. Write the national media asking why they aren't covering this sad tale of political whitewashing; write the Attorney General of Nebraska to ask what he's going to do about it (How about a grand jury to find out why the police didn't do their jobs?) and write the police chief and the country prosecutor in Hartington, Nebraska. Sorry we don't have the zip, etc., but a letter to the city should get there. ....................... * ........................ Canadian single-parent families - 87% women - will suffer even more as the government transfer payments (as welfare payments are called in Canada) are slashed (as the Republicans are doing in the U.S.)> Total income for the one-parent families dropped 7% according to Statistics Canada mainly because of lower employment earnings. And many Canadian social observers are predicting very hard times ahead as the attacks on transfer payments increase - in other words, the ultra-conservatives are taking hold in Canada also and want to balance their budget on the backs of poor women and children. CC wonders if there is any effort to force the fathers of those single- parent children to take responsibility for their fatherhood and support their children? ....................... * ........................ A reminder: four members of the Board of Directors of the New York _Times_ share their time (and interests) as directors of major insurance companies; two members of the Board of Directors of the New York _Times_ share their time (and interests) as directors of major pharmaceutical companies. Is it any wonder that the New York _Times_, once one of the great newspapers but now slipping badly in veracity, is opposing just about everything Bill Clinton stands for - and doing it in such a way that it appears the Clinton administration stands for nothing - so that affordable health insurance and investigations at the horrendous prices of drugs is never broached again. Terrible. Want a blow-by-blow vision of prejudicial coverage? Watch the stories about Clinton trying to stop teenage smoking ... take any article and circle the adjectives - you know those little descriptive words. Those little descriptive words that anyone in Journalism 101 knows don't belong in a news story. I remember writing a news article about a county commission meeting and my editor driving home a point so that I wouldn't EVER forget it. I had written the "....commissioner smiled in amusement at the speaker's words." Across the news room, my editor yelled, "How do you know he wasn't passing gas?" The New York _Times_, which adopted Ms. some years back, is now using Miss and Mrs. again in preference ... a woman's marital state and/or sexual availability appears to be more important than anything else a woman might do or say. ....................... * ........................ Since Doris Allen became Speaker of the California Assembly, her Republican colleagues have shunned and insulted her, publicly calling her a pawn, traitor, puppet, and even "Willie Brown in drag." One Republican lawmaker said, "She's a deviant and needs to be punished." Her deviancy is that she made a deal with longtime Democratic power Willie Brown to replace him as Assembly speaker instead of some ultra-right wing Republican energumen. Sooo, the Reps have gotten some 25,000 signatures to try to force an election in November to recall her from office. Unforgiving, these Republicans who obviously have the money to hire just about anything done. When presented with the fact of the petitions, Allen said, "Do I let a group of power-mongering men with short penises tell me what to do?" and vowed to fight the ouster. A Republican Assemblywoman-WORMT Paula Boland was irate, saying if a man said a comparable thing about a woman there would be rallies and protests. Boland, of course, hasn't been listening to what the guys HAVE been saying. You know, Ms. Boland, words like "bitch," "pawn," "Willie Brown in drag," ain't exactly compliments outside of Republican wonderland. It's amazing to me how prim and proper the Reps try to portray themselves and they would, in actuality, shock the crap out of those who live in the worst projects. ....................... * ........................ Will wonders ever cease??? The President of Peru, Albert Fujimori, has connected birth control and the tragically burgeoning birth rate of his country. Some men are slow, but at least Fujimori has gotten there and gotten there even as the Roman Catholic church is unleashing all its big guns against him. He recently signed a law making vasectomies and tubal ligations legal and he has pledged to support family planning for the poor as well as the rich. He said he changed his opinions about birth control after seeing suffering women who "are condemned to a life of hardship because they have too many children." Fujimori, re-elected to a five-year term this spring, was the only male head of state to address the U.N. Women's Conference in Beijing. Mother Theresa also addressed the Beijing Conference and her message was just the opposite, favoring unlimited births, which prompted Mary Gaughan to comment: " Yes, the joys of motherhood, watching your children starve to death on the filthy streets of Calcutta..." What is it, something like 1,500 children a year die on the streets of Rio de Janero? .......... ............ * ........................ After initially and publicly criticizing Hillary Rodham Clinton strongly for going to Beijing for the U.N. Women's Conference, Henry Wu, an American who had been held captive by the Chinese and then released, said in a National Press Club speech: "I want to applaud Mrs. Clinton, and I think she deserves my praise. Americans should be proud their first lady stood up and reaffirmed the principles of the United States." Wu, who was also quoted by the news media upon his release as being very critical of President Clinton, went on to say, "But today as an American citizen I want to publicly thank the President, the Secretary of State, the National Security Adviser to the President, and the many men and women in the State Department who worked constantly to free me." Catt's Claws is still offering copies of HRC's speeches at the U.N. conference that our great, impartial media failed to cover in any detail. Write irenestuber@delphi.com and ask for them. Several hundred readers have already gotten copies. ....................... * ........................ An article in the Jose Mercury News 09-17-95 by Richard Roeper stirred up a storm as it quoted VERBATIM the well _read_ but never printed letter by O.J. Simpson that preceded his flight from justice until spotted on the L.A. freeways. "Remember when Simpson's friend Robert Kardashian appeared before the assembled media to read O.J.'s `To Whom It May Concern' letter? Remember how Kardashian, an educated and articulate man, stumbled over many words and struggled to find the right inflection? "Turns out it's because the handwritten letter was riddled with errors of spelling and grammar -- errors you wouldn't expect a 10-year-old to make. "`I loved her,' Simpson wrote of Nicole. `Allways have . . . if we had a promblem its because I loved her so much. Recitly we came to the understanding that for now we wern't right for each other at least for now. `Dispite our love we were diffearnt and thats why we murturally agreesd to go our spaerate ways. It was tough spitting for a second time . . .'" (Please, these are not Catt's Claws mistakes, but the exact wording of O.J.'s letter.) Roeper goes on to say, " Now I understand that Simpson was under tremendous duress when he sat down to scribble, but still . . . `I took the heat New Years Eve 1989 because that what I suppose to do I did not plea no contest for any other reason but to protect our privicy and was advise it would end the press hype.'" Roeper brings home a vital point: "What's equally troubling is that more than a year after the fact, this may be the first time you've seen the excerpts quoted verbatim, because virtually every news organization in the country cleaned up Simpson's language. "Newsweek's editors not only corrected his spelling mistakes, they also restructured some sentences for clarity's sake." Roeper points out OJ barely mentioned his ex-wife and two children but found the time and space to thank 22 of his jock friends and golfing partners. And Roeper sums up with a biting statement: "Forget the raging debate about whether he's guilty or innocent. Just think for a moment about a 47-year-old man -- a University of Southern California alumnus, a TV commentator and film actor who made his post-sports living as a communicator, who tasted all the riches the world has to offer -- but apparently never learned to write beyond the third-grade level. It's sad that anyone would consider such a man to be a hero or role model, even if he had never been charged with anything more serious than jaywalking." CC-->> Catt's Claws has been accused many times of building mountains out of media slights, but this O.J. letter shows that some of the media's bias - especially the macho media - is so thorough and so ingrained that no one in the once proud and wonderful profession protested. One wonders what other actions they are covering for? If the media can change at will the words of a 47-year-old college graduate, what are they doing to the words of a 49-year-old President of the United States? Or any women they don't agree with? CC is shocked as the abdication of the truth by the news media. Our thanks to "masaponara" for bringing this article to our attention - and thanks to Alan Roeper for being part of the vanishing breed of responsible journalists. <-- cc ....................... * ........................ Catt's Claws salutes volunteers Jennifer Gagliardi for posting Catt's Claws through her listserv and Paula Levine for her proofreading. ....................... * ........................ Women's rights are young and tender and we must protect them from the plagues of holy hypocrisy and newts. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- >>> Send your ideas, comments, and news to irenestuber@delphi.com for inclusion in the Catt's Claws feminist newsletter which will be emailed three times a week: Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. This is NOT an interactive discussion net but an exchange of information and is NOT sponsored by any organization. We are accepting *limited* donations (only what can be spared) to help offset the online costs of posting Catt's Claws. Irene Stuber. PO Box 6185, Hot Springs, AR 71902.<<<<