| LIST 66 | 12 Godly People |
1
Jennifer R. Cisowski killed her eight-month-old son by repeatedly throwing him to the ground and then down a staircase. A newspaper reports:
Cisowski told police that killing her son, Gideon Fusscas, was a test of faith because she expected God to resurrect him, a prosecutor said Tuesday evening….
“Apparently the mother of the child was telling her sister, Tabitha, that this was a test of her faith and that Christopher, the father, was possessed by some sort of demon and she needed to pray over him and drive some kind of demon from him,” [chief prosecutor Robert E.] Belanger said….
“[Tabitha] came in and she saw the baby laying dead in the house, and her sister said…that God was testing her faith by having her do harm to her child and she was convinced her child would be brought back from the dead like Lazarus,” Belanger said.
2
John Davis, on trial for torturing his two sons—who were found scarred, malnourished, and underdeveloped—told the court: “Proverbs tells you to discipline your children, or else they will grow up and kill their parents. All I did was discipline them.”
3
Glynn Harding is a serial mail-bomber who wounded a little girl and disfigured a woman. A report in the London Daily Telegraph states: “The court heard how the bomber attributed the start of his campaign to the stillbirth of his baby in March 2000 and its burial inside a jam jar. In the weeks that followed, said Mr Bould, he heard ‘the voice of Jesus’ instructing him to send 100 bombs ‘to ensure that the baby was allowed to go from Hell to Heaven’.”
4
Dan Lafferty, who is serving two consecutive life terms for viciously killing a young woman and her fifteen-month-old daughter, said: “I had a calm peacefulness when I did it. I was being led by the Spirit.”
He also explained: “I'm not going to offend God by saying something inappropriate like, ‘I wish I'd never done it.’ I'll never say that. If you're a child of God, it'll make sense to you someday. I'll never say I'm sorry I did it.”
The Salt Lake Tribune reported: “When one angry sheriff's deputy confronted the convicted murderer about his lack of remorse, Lafferty calmly replied, ‘With all due respect, if God asked me to, I'd kill you right now.’”
5
Greg Martin, an American living in Ireland, was sentenced to three months in jail for killing and butchering his horse with an ax in an act that the judge called “absolute, wanton cruelty.” Martin was upset because the mare had been eating a neighbor's grass. His defense: “The Bible says man has dominion over animals.”
6
As reported by the BBC: “The police in Bangladesh say they have arrested a young Muslim cleric for allegedly killing his own son in a ritual sacrifice during Eid ul-Adha, the biggest Muslim festival. They say the cleric, Golam Mustafa, admitted to having killed the seven-month-old boy, Sulayman, after receiving what he called a revelation.”
7
Lucille Poulin, a 78-year-old former nun and the spiritual leader of a commune on Prince Edward Island, Canada, was sentenced to eight years in jail for frequently beating five children, ages seven to twelve, who were in her care. The Toronto Star reported:
Earlier in the day, a defiant Poulin told [Judge] Jenkins the blood of the children she assaulted is not on her hands. The self-described prophet of the commune near Summerside asked for the court's mercy but never said she was sorry for the pain and suffering she inflicted on the five youngsters. Poulin said God told her it was all right to punish children physically to drive out the devil.
8 9
Two Rastafarians attacked worshippers in a Catholic Church in the Caribbean island St. Lucia. One doused them with gas, while another set them aflame with a blowtorch. They also burned the priest, attacked people with machetes, and killed a nun. According to the Associated Press, the two men responsible “told police they were sent by God to combat corruption in the Roman Catholic Church. ‘The way they're talking is that the world is going to end and that the time had come for what they had to do,’ police Inspector Gregory Montoute, who interrogated the men, said Monday.”
10
Angel Maturino Resendiz, the Mexican drifter who killed nine people in the US before turning himself in to authorities in July 1999, said: “I had to kill them. I could say I'm sorry, but I wouldn't mean it. They were promoting something that it clearly states in the Bible is wrong.” (According to the British newswire Ananova, “Resendiz claimed he was on a mission from God to kill people who he said were ‘evil’ by stopping the spread of sins such as abortion, homosexuality and witchcraft.”)
11
Andrea Yates, who famously drowned all five of her children in Texas, told a court-appointed shrink: “It was the seventh deadly sin. My children weren't righteous. They stumbled because I was evil. The way I was raising them they could never be saved…. Better for someone else to tie a millstone around their neck and cast them in a river than stumble. They were going to perish.”
12
And then there's this APBnews.com report from Florida: “Outraged that her 7-year-old son refused to go to Sunday school, a single mother allegedly tried to burn the boy to death in a bedroom, police said.” A little later that day, she attempted to choke him with a belt. 