Murders

JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. - U.S. Army Sgt. John Russell pleaded guilty Monday to second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of five fellow service members and the attempted murder of another in Iraq in 2009 after the government agreed not to seek the death penalty. Russell, 48, was dispassionate and matter-of-fact as he gave his first public account of his methodical march with an M-16 rifle through the Camp Liberty combat stress center - the only mass killing of Americans by a U.S. serviceman during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Suspected killer Christopher Dorner spent his final hours barricaded inside a mountain cabin splattered with blood, presumably his own, and no chance for escape before a single gunshot echoed from inside the vacation home near Big Bear. The blood-splattered walls inside the cabin were revealed during the Feb. 12 standoff when a robotic police tractor started tearing down the cabin walls to give officers a clean view inside and were seen more than half an hour before the cabin caught fire after police fired seven "pyrotechnic" tear gas canisters into the cabin.

The murder charges weren't for the white supremacists, even though they'd threatened to kill the Texas prosecutors threatening to put them away; nor were they for the cartels, even though they'd long ravaged law enforcement down in Mexico. Instead, officials in Texas believe a trio of slayings near Dallas boiled down to simple revenge: A disgraced former justice of the peace and his wife stand accused of murdering the Texas prosecutors who ended his career. Eric Lyle Williams, 46, was charged with capital murder Thursday, one day after his wife, Kim Lene Williams, 46, was similarly charged in two attacks that shocked Kaufman County and led to fears of an unprecedented assault on the rule of law in Texas.

An alleged Mission Viejo drug dealer is scheduled to be arraigned Friday on a charge of murder in the death of a 21-year-old woman by providing her with a lethal dose of drugs and then refusing to take her to the hospital after she lost consciousness. Prosecutors accuse Louis Richard Wood, 35, of being a heroin user and dealer for about a decade at the time of the Emma Wihlborg's death in November 2011. Wood had been in a relationship with Wihlborg, 21, for weeks, according to a statement from the Orange County district attorney's office.

"The Island President" (PBS, Monday, 10 p.m.). Comprising 2,000 pancake-flat islands in the Indian Ocean, with a mean elevation of about five feet above sea level, the Maldives will be the first nation to go, literally, when the oceans rise. Jon Shenk's documentary follows then-president Mohamed Nasheed on a mission to save his country, his people and maybe the world. A frequently jailed activist who once spent 18 months in solitary confinement in a corrugated iron shed, Nasheed hits the road to make his quixotic case for environmental responsibility.

The wife of a former justice of the peace was charged Wednesday with capital murder in connection with the slayings of a North Texas district attorney, his wife and an assistant district attorney, a law enforcement official said. The overnight arrest of Kim Lene Williams is the latest twist in an investigation that had narrowed on her husband. Online jail records do not list charges against Kim Williams, 46, and officials in Kaufman County, about 30 miles east of Dallas, wouldn't immediately comment on the reason for her arrest.

WASHINGTON - U.S. courts will not be the world forum for lawsuits brought by victims of human rights abuses abroad who seek damages from multinational corporations or deposed tyrants, the Supreme Court declared Wednesday. In a decision welcomed by corporate leaders and decried by human rights activists, the justices said U.S. courts are limited mostly to deciding disputes over conduct that took place on American territory, not on foreign soil. By a 9-0 vote, the high court tossed out a closely watched lawsuit brought by Nigerians against Royal Dutch Petroleum for allegedly conspiring with the Nigerian regime in a campaign of rape, torture and murder in the oil-rich delta in the early 1990s.

A former IRS agent who opened a tax preparation business was sentenced Friday to nearly 24 years in prison for defrauding clients out of more than $11 million and then attempting to hire a hit man to kill four of them. Steven Martinez, 51, of Ramona was sentenced in San Diego federal court to 286 months in prison and five years of supervised release.  He was also ordered by District Court Judge William Hayes to forfeit all the property, including a home in Mexico, and other possessions that he purchased with clients' money.

After more than three weeks of trial proceedings, it took a day for the downtown Los Angeles jury to convict Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter of first-degree murder Wednesday, capping a nearly three-decade-old whodunit and ending the strange odyssey of a man who went from teenage German immigrant to member of the New England social elite to now-convicted killer. Join us at 9 a.m. as we discuss with Times reporter Jack Leonard the trial of Gerhartsreiter, who for years posed as a member of the Rockefeller family . Gerhartsreiter, 52, was accused of bludgeoning John Sohus, his landlady's 27-year-old son, with a blunt object.