Just when we thought we’d heard the last from NYPD “Cannibal Cop” Gilberto Valle comes news of the arrest by FBI agents of two of his Internet pen pals, or, as the august New York Times put it, “part of the same online community of sadists.”
Now, unlike the aforementioned Mr. Valle, these two didn’t want to eat women; they were content just to beat them, which, as I’ve lamented in previous columns, is a more socially acceptable practice in some societies. But not in ours. Well, not just beat them, actually, but you get the idea.
But what struck me most about this report was what these two guys did for a living, and then how they explained it all.
One, 61-year-old Robert C. Asch, is the former librarian of the prestigious Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. The other, 65-year-old Robert Meltz, is a police chief at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Bedford, Mass. Yep – that’s right! A police chief.
The connection to Valle was through an auto mechanic named Michael Vanhise, whom FBI agents discovered had been looking for someone to kidnap, rape and kill his wife and selected other relatives. Asch and Meltz seemed interested. Fortunately, the undercover agents were able to redirect the attention of the two to kidnapping, torturing, killing and disposing of another woman who, unknown to the sadism fans, also happened to be an undercover FBI agent. A meeting was set up near Battery Park, to which Asch brought two bags full of torture equipment, a Taser and cleaning supplies.
According to tapped phone call, Chief Meltz expressed enthusiasm over the prospect strangling the young lady. He also counseled Asch that while “murder is easy, getting away with it is not,” so it had to be planned carefully.
Of course, lawyers for both men denied any actual intention to carry out torture and murder. Chief Meltz’s attorney, one Peter E. Brill, lauded his client for having “spent 40 years of his life devoted to public service.”
But here’s the part I like best: Brill went on to concede, “And he has a little, weird side hobby that his wife is aware of to some extent.”
In addition to true crime, I also write novels, but I couldn’t make this stuff up! Kidnapping, raping, torturing and murdering women is a “little, weird side hobby that his wife is aware of to some extent”? To what extent, I wonder – raping and torturing, but she didn’t know anything about the murder? Or is Mr. Brill trying to tell us that Chief Meltz’s hobby is merely dreaming about raping, torturing and murdering women?
Okay, if that’s what he wants to dream about on his own time, I can’t stop him. But like the Cannibal Cop himself, once he starts talking about it and planning it with his fellow maggots, he’s doing it on my time, and my wife’s time, and my nieces’ and all of my female friends’ time, and everyone else’s.
And then we have to stop him. And all the other maggots under that particular rock with him.
The things we are asked to accept in the name of tolerance has become a long and disturbing list…
Great article!