Murders

The intruder climbed a stairway tucked amid the rocks, walked through an open patio door into the beach house and, with repeated knife slashes, thrust a family into a nightmare. Authorities said Thursday they had no suspect or motive in the slayings at the upscale Faria Beach Colony, a gated community about six miles up the coast from Ventura. The killer stabbed to death a pregnant woman and her husband about 10:30 p.m. Wednesday as their horrified 9-year-old son looked on.

Officials at a clinic that treated Dae'von Bailey six weeks before he was found beaten to death said Friday that their staff had warned social workers he might be an abuse victim, contradicting an account by the Los Angeles County child welfare department about how it dealt with the abuse allegations.

Accusations by a dead man have delivered Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom his most serious crisis since taking power a year and a half ago. Protesters and political foes have urged Colom to step aside while investigators look into murder allegations lodged on video by a lawyer days before he was slain by gunmen Sunday.

A surveillance camera caught the bubbly, 8-year-old girl skipping down a street in Tracy, Calif., after a play date on the afternoon of March 27. She never made it home. After a 10-day search that saw law enforcement officers pour into the small Central Valley city, investigators Monday pulled a suitcase that held Sandra Cantu's body from an irrigation pond.

Joseph Berg, a 43-year-old entrepreneur, sat brooding and alone on a bloodstained sidewalk Sunday, a few feet from the policeman blocking the stairwell to the basement crime scene. Fifteen years ago, Berg first took refuge in that basement, then a newly established community center of the Tel Aviv Gay and Lesbian Assn. "I came here, found people to share myself with, to be who I was with others," he recalled.

The bodies of a longtime Mexican army general and two associates were discovered early Tuesday on a highway to Cancun, the latest execution-style victims of the violence sweeping Mexico. Brig. Gen. Mauro Enrique Tello, who left the army last month and was working as a security consultant for the mayor of Cancun, is one of the highest-ranking officials killed in lawlessness fueled by drug trafficking and other gangland crime.

It was nearly two years ago that 19-year-old Donna Jou left home with a man she met on the Internet and then disappeared. For almost two years, her parents believed that John Steven Burgess knew what had happened to their daughter but refused to tell them. On Thursday, Jou's parents finally got answers to questions that have haunted them. Burgess, a convicted sex offender, had pleaded guilty earlier this week to involuntary manslaughter and to concealing Jou's body.

Bombings. Butyric acid attacks. Sniper shootings. Letters filled with fake anthrax. These are some of the tactics used over the years by antiabortion extremists. The slaying of Dr. George Tiller in his Kansas church Sunday was part of a decades-long history of domestic terrorism aimed at abortion providers, carried out by a small minority of the much broader and generally peaceful movement that opposes abortion.

A lawyer for a Swedish hip-hop artist accused of murdering a pedestrian in a sensational act of road rage invoked the movie "Crash" on Friday in asking for a reduction in the performer's $1-million bail. In court papers, David Jassy's attorney wrote that the fatal encounter in a Hollywood crosswalk was a prime example of the Academy Award-winning film's "thesis . . . that random interactions of diverse people in a city as frenetic as Los Angeles can lead to disastrous consequences."

At the Canoga Park Bowl, everyone knew James Shamp. His job was to clean, but he did so much more. Bowlers described him as a comedian and their loyal cheerleader. He greeted regulars with a big handshake followed by a succession of jokes that would continue through their games. "He was the black Chevy Chase," said Robert Battle, a member of the Equally Offensive bowling team. .