Proof that Crime Pays well

One of the most interesting cases I worked on involved a 17-year-old girl that one day disappeared without a trace. The police traced her last day to an acquaintance who observed her get into a car driven by her ex-boyfriend who was known to sell drugs. She then disappeared. The ex-boyfriend claimed he dropped her off at her new boyfriend's house not far from where she was last seen.  An extensive search lasting over two weeks turned up no sign of her body. The woods were searched using bloodhounds, as was the nearby lake and the homes where she could have visited. After several months with no leads, the case turned cold. It was then a largely forgotten file stored at the police station.  Her parents did what they could to reopen the case, but failed to generate interest.

Then, about a year later after she disappeared, a former acquaintance of the victim dropped by the police station with an incredible story. He claimed his friend had murdered her in his parents’ home, dismembered her body, and burned the remainder in a barbecue pit in the back of his parents’ home. Lastly, he threw the ashes out of the window as they drove to buy beer. They then drove back to the house, and carefully cleansed the home where the murder took place so that his parents would not suspect what had occurred in their home.

Without a body, they believed, they could not be charged with murder. They were right about this claim. The police must have a body to prove murder. They were the last persons she was seen alive with, so consequently would be suspects. Therefore they had to destroy all evidence that would lead them to the crime. The police concluded the man’s story was incredulous, but were obligated to investigate. After a careful examination of the location where the informant claimed the murder occurred, all they found after two days of careful inspection using luminal and other modern techniques, was one blond hair, what appeared to be a drop of blood in a floor register, and possible small bone fragments in the barbecue pit in the back of the parents’ home. DNA confirmed the hair, the blood and the bone fragments were those of the missing girl. These finds were, to the surprise of the accused, legally a body. The accused, an illegal immigrant, had by then fled to his home country, Mexico. Due to the cooperation of the Mexican police, he was apprehended and brought to the U.S., tried, found guilty, and given a life sentence.

The judge vented his anger after the trial by firmly stating, “I am tired trying the parade of worthless  %$#@&* offenders I see in my court convicted of sick crimes. This is the 17^th life sentence I have handed down in my 13 years on the bench." He then added that the 80,000 dollars a year for the 65-years life expectancy in prison of the illegal immigrant will cost taxpayers 5.2 million dollars. The costs for searching for the body was an additional 30,000 dollars. The state must also pay for both sides of the trial, costing the taxpayers another 18 thousand dollars.

In prison, the offender will have the best medical care offered in America, the same care Congress receives. He will have excellent, free psychology support, and many activities paid for by the state to keep him busy, including baseball, football, golf, and a very well-equipped exercise room including treadmills and weight lifting machinery. He will also have the use of the extensive prison law library to appeal his conviction, which is now doing.

And, if he would rather be in the women's prison, which is much safer and far-less stressful, all he has to do is to claim to be a woman and begin transitioning. This will cost the taxpayer another 1.2 million dollars if he elects all of the available transitioning options. If the prison warden, or the state,  balks, the ACLU will gladly take the case to court. The total cost to taxpayers will come close to six million dollars. In short, although most Americans would not trade places with the convicted offender, he will be, in some ways at least, better off than many Americans.

Bergman’s Comments

Corrections (which includes prisons, jails, probation, and parole) cost U.S. taxpayers around $74 billion annually. The United States has about 4.2 percent of the world's population, but houses around 20 percent of the world's prisoners. About 1.9 million people are currently incarcerated in the United States, the second highest documented incarceration rate in the world. Seventy percent of all violent crime in the United States is committed by young Black males reared in a fatherless home by a mother on welfare. Young Black males consist of less than three percent of Americans.

The proportion of drug offenders compared to total prisoners is only 21 percent. The number of persons in prison for murder, though, is close to 20,000. The five countries that execute the most people are, in descending order, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United States. The main deterrent to crime is a stable, father-supportive family with active church family involvement, which should be the main goal of our government, society, and especially the Church.

The Struggle to Publish My Eisenhower Book

Dwight Eisenhower was a distant relative of mine by marriage. His brother, Roy, married Edna Shade who was related to the Eckhoff family. My mother’s mother was an Eckhoff. I have been collecting material about ‘Ike’ for about 40 years and finally published an article in a peer-reviewed journal, Kansas History, on his religious upbringing. My article was given the Edgar Langsdorf Award for superior writing, as determined by a panel of judges appointed by the Kansas Historical Foundation. The award included a healthy cash stipend and a large walnut plaque in the shape of the state of Kansas.

When my book on Eisenhower was finally ready to be considered by publishers, I sent it to several, all of which rejected my conclusions, and thus my book. In the meantime, I was able to publish a summary of it titled Religion and the Presidency of Dwight Eisenhower.

My goal was to publish my entire well-documented book, so I tried again and received a few more rejections. The fact is, my conclusions were in direct contrast to those of most Eisenhower scholars. The academic consensus was that religion had little or nothing to do with the work and life of Eisenhower. I was confident of  my conclusions, though, so I decided to send a copy of my manuscript to the Eisenhower Foundation. Several months later, I received a phone call from Andrew Goodpaster when at the college where I was then teaching.

General Goodpaster worked closely with Eisenhower during World War II. He commanded the 48th Combat Engineer Battalion in North Africa and Italy. He also became the NATO commander, beginning a close working relationship with Eisenhower that carried through Eisenhower's two presidential terms and beyond.  He was the defense Liaison Officer to President Eisenhower from 1954 to 1961. He also was appointed Superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy from 1977 to 1981 to clean up the 1976 West Point cheating scandal involving 151 cadets.

Goodpaster explained that he read my manuscript and concluded that my conclusions were correct. He then offered the following endorsement of my book:

Having known and worked closely with Dwight Eisenhower for several decades, I have reviewed this book with much interest. Dr. Bergman has done a masterful job in accurately chronicling Eisenhower’s religious life and beliefs. This book fills in a very important, but often neglected, part of Ike’s life—a part of his life that was critical in Eisenhower’s military career and presidency. I commend him for his meticulous research and correctly arriving at a detailed picture of this important aspect of his life. Indeed, his spirituality, faith in God, and God’s role for him on Earth were all central to what Eisenhower achieved, and he achieved a great deal in his life.

My long struggle to get it published finally paid off. God in President Eisenhower’s Life, Military Career, and Presidency was published in 2019. The theme of my book on Eisenhower was that WWII was, at its core, a war between creation and evolution, and the creation side prevailed. A focus of the Bible student group that Ike was a member when growing up was apologetics, emphasizing the falsehood of human evolution, and promoting the view that God created the first man and woman from which we all descended. Thus there exists no inferior race.

Ike’s large, well-trained, intelligence-gathering team helped him to understand that the ultimate Nazi war goals were rooted in Social Darwinian doctrine.  He learned that the goal of Nazi rule was the genocide of the Jews, Slavs, and other persons that the Nazis deemed were inferior races. Eventually, the inferior races would all be annihilated, creating, or so they taught, a better world for all mankind.

One of the major reasons why Nazi Germany lost the war was this false belief that they could easily defeat the inferior Slavic race in Russia. Not long after the Nazis invaded Russia, the massive Nazi killing machine began its operation. The end Nazi goal was to murder millions of Slavs and force the rest into Nazi subjection for the glory of the superior German race.

Professor Holl writes that God was for Ike “First and foremost, a creator God. The Countless stars in the heavens were perhaps the greatest manifestation of God’s presence in the universe.” As a creationist, Eisenhower also believed all men were descended from Adam, thus only one race existed, the human race. This realization drove Ike to defeat the Nazis no matter what the cost. He once said he hated war, but he hated the Nazi evolutionary/racist belief even more. When Germany was finally defeated, Ike feared that the Holocaust would be denied by many. So he launched the most extensive documentation program in history to document what happened in Nazi Germany and why.

Thousands of interviews were completed, and several large film crews labored to carefully document the Holocaust travesties.  Eisenhower’s prediction that one day people would doubt the Nazi atrocities has been proven correct.  His program to testify to the horror of eugenics has given us the means to remember this historical conflict between good and evil, a major goal of my book as well.