The American halls of justice seemed to let the predator roam for decades and find new victims, which could be in the 1000s.
Prosecutors say Giblin targeted vulnerable women, including widows, women with physical disabilities and single mothers — including at least one who had recently lost a child.
“Giblin went after the lonely, and broken hearted. Figured out their soft spots and attacked those when he didn’t get his money,” Kathy Waters, executive director of Advocating Against Romance Scammers, told CNN. “The victims are not only abused financially, but emotionally and psychologically as well. He is a master manipulator who has scammed an unknown amount of people, since some never come forward.”
Notably, he even continued the crimes while he was briefly in jail.
Despite convictions and serving prison time, he continued to defraud women, even after he was caught and twice escaped from federal custody.
Prosecutors say Giblin even scammed women from prison while he was serving time on similar charges, and after he became a fugitive for failing to show up at a halfway house in Newark, New Jersey.
Read that again: “…even scammed women from prison while he was serving time…”.
He ran the scam from inside the system that was allegedly working to prevent it.
One has to wonder why women were exposed to this over such a long time, given how obvious and odious his crimes were to the courts and police.
I am reminded of Texas, where it’s “unsolved” how young women are killed and dumped into an easily monitored oil company property.
…more than 30 bodies—of mostly young women and girls—were found in “The Killing Fields” between 1971 and 1999…
How? Texas basically ignored large numbers of young vulnerable people being targeted.
…for much of the history of the murders here, investigations were muddled and dispersed amongst 11 different departments.
A huge factor in this long tragedy is how vulnerable groups in America get treated by the justice system as though nobody cares or would miss them.
Terms like “runaway” or “disabled” are used as labels to deprioritize protection unless someone claims a high “asset” value, which is exactly backwards. But even then, asset value can backfire.
In other words America very purposefully allowed the country to become increasingly unsafe to those needing protection because it was founded upon and still harbors a very narrow view of power preservation (white men).
The Revolutionary War was primarily about profit making, not protection.
American history tells us even if someone did try to represent or defend a victim, the system had been overly designed to favor predators (e.g. violent extraction philosophy of oilmen).
In his new book, Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann describes how white people in the area conspired to kill Osage members in order steal their oil wealth, which could only be passed on through inheritance. “This was a culture of complicity,” he says, “and it was allowed to go on for so long because so many people were part of the plot. You had lawmen, you had prosecutors, you had the reporters who wouldn’t cover it. You had oilmen who wouldn’t speak out. You had morticians who would cover up the murders when they buried the body. You had doctors who helped give poison to people.”
A racist healthcare and legal system designed for wealth reallocation.
Wait, it gets worse.
It involved a level of calculation and a level of betraying the very people you pretended to love. And the way these murders would take place is that people would marry into the families and then begin to kill each member of the family.
That sounds just like General Lee to me, such that many Americans even put up statues of him to encourage widespread targeted victimization of women.
Giblin thus represents yet another sadly predictable chapter of women abused systematically in America, also as I’ve written about before in context of Missouri police directly implicated in the rape and murder of black girls.
Despite representing 12.85% of the population, black Americans accounted for nearly 226,000 — or 34% — of all missing persons reported in 2012.
[…]
“I spent six months at the Northern Virginia Criminal Justice Training Academy in Ashburn, Va., where we had only two hours of training on missing persons cases,” she told Essence. “In the field, I’ve seen a majority of black missing children classified as runaways, who don’t get Amber Alerts.”
Plus: “For black adults, police usually link their disappearances to criminal activity, so they aren’t valued as much.”
Devalued lives seems to be behind many of these stories where predators are able to strike repeatedly in America without consequences, sometimes even with the help of those supposedly sworn to stop them.
