Buster Archive

Monthly archive

  • A college professor who claims that a New Orleans police officer once raped his girlfriend used a fake Facebook profile to threaten and stalk the cop, federal investigators charge.

    The bizarre scheme allegedly hatched by Gary O’Bireck is detailed in a January 25 felony complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Louisiana. O’Bireck, a 57-year-old associate professor at Anna Maria College near Worcester, Massachusetts, is accused of threatening Brooke Duncan over a rape allegation reportedly lodged against the cop in September 2007.

    The alleged victim, now 23, is a Worcester native who briefly attended Loyola University in New Orleans. O’Bireck was arrested Monday by FBI agents.

    To transmit threats to the 32-year-old Duncan, investigators allege, O’Bireck created a Facebook page in the name “Michael LovesMayhem.” As seen above, the phony page, which remains online, includes a profile of a hulking tattooed man carrying a rifle with a bayonet. Another image purportedly shows the man’s brother manning a .50 caliber machine gun in Iraq.

    In messages sent from the Facebook account, O’Bireck allegedly indicated that he was a fellow law enforcement officer and claimed to be affiliated with Hells Angels members who would “chop you into pieces. Think chainsaws.”

  • After a brief stay in a county jail, convicted felon James Tyler Markle arrived last week at Texas’s notorious Huntsville prison to begin serving time for a telephone prank.

    The freshly shorn Markle, 20, is being held at Huntsville’s Holliday Unit, an intake facility where state inmates are assessed by corrections officials. Markle, seen in the new mug shot at right, could spend up to two years at Holliday before being transferred to his unit of assignment, according to a Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman.

    A blubbering Markle--who used the online handle “Prankster” when tormenting victims on the phone--was sentenced in late-November to five years in jail for criminal mischief in connection with a hoax call he placed to a McDonald’s restaurant. Markle was once a leading figure with Pranknet, the notorious confederation of online vandals.

    While Markle’s projected release date is in March 2013, he could be paroled as early as this June from Huntsville, Texas’s oldest prison and home to the state’s death chamber.