Wis. killer might have been better off in prison

By DINESH RAMDE
Associated Press

WAUKESHA, Wis. (AP) - Alan Randall may have been better off going to prison for killing two Wisconsin police officers in 1975. He might have been freed in his early 30s, with most of his life still ahead of him.

Instead, Randall likely will be discharged from a Madison hospital Friday as a 55-year-old who has spent his entire adult life in psychiatric institutions for a mental illness he never had.

At age 16, Randall ambushed two officers outside the tiny police station in his rural southeast Wisconsin town of Summit. He had robbed the station, and later told investigators that the officers' arrival had startled him. Randall gunned down the two men, then drove off in their bloody, bullet-ridden squad car to commit another burglary before going home to bed.

Randall was tried as an adult and convicted of killing the officers, but during a second phase of the trial, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Randall's lawyers were prepared to introduce evidence that he was paranoid schizophrenic - evidence that has since been lost - but prosecutors allowed the claim to go unchallenged.

Randall was sent to a mental institution in northeastern Wisconsin, where doctors eventually concluded he wasn't mentally ill. Randall never required anti-psychotic medication, and several experts said that likely means he was never paranoid schizophrenic, which is a treatable but incurable condition.

Randall asked to be freed in 1989 and his doctors testified that he presented little danger, but his lack of mental illness worked against him. If he had been sick at the time of the killings but successfully treated, he could have argued that the risk was gone. But if the cause of his violent behavior wasn't a known mental illness, then the unknown homicidal trigger might still exist, the judge reasoned in denying the request.

The state Supreme Court upheld the decision on appeal, ruling that the state can keep a sane person committed to a psychiatric institution if it believes that person might become violent again.

Undeterred, Randall kept applying for his release, noting each time that doctors had given him a clean bill of health and that his good behavior had earned him privileges, including the opportunity to leave the facility during the day for a fulltime job at an art gallery.

His efforts were finally rewarded this spring, when a jury recommended that he should be freed. A judge was expected to sign off on his release Friday.

The widow and a sister of one of the officers Randall killed, Robert "Rocky" Atkins, said they're resigned to Randall's release.

"Have I forgiven him? No. I haven't forgiven him because he has not asked for forgiveness," said Atkins' sister, Diane Stojanovich. "I have to admit I wonder: If he's put in a corner would he ever do that again?"

Neither Randall nor his attorney responded to interview requests.

Bill Casper, who runs the Neenah gallery where Randall worked, described Randall as a gentle person who worked well with customers. He said Randall often expressed remorse about what he had done.

"Many times he said, 'I'm really sorry and sad about my situation,'" Casper said. "He never once tried to say, 'I was only a kid, I didn't know what I was doing.' He never tried to downplay what he did."

Casper said Randall was miserable in the institution. While perfectly sane, Randall was surrounded by people who were seriously mentally ill. So he spent a lot of time with staff members, the only people with whom he could have normal conversations, or in a greenhouse where he could be alone, Casper said.

Because Randall was only 16 when he killed the officers, had he shown the same exemplary behavior in prison that he did while he was committed, he might have been paroled in 17 to 20 years under the rules of the time, said Brad Schimel, the Waukesha County prosecutor currently handling Randall's case. That means he could have been freed as early as 1992, when he would have been 34 years old.

Instead he has remained in an institution.

"The public might think it's an easy life but I don't think anyone would choose to be here," said Greg Van Rybroek, the director of the Mendota Mental Health Institute where Randall is currently committed. "One would recognize that freedom is lost in coming here."

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Dinesh Ramde can be reached at dramde@ap.org

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Rat Invaders: Islands Fighting Back Against Killer Rodents

South Georgia Island, a lonely British Antarctic territory in the far South Atlantic, has a rat problem.

Since the furry stowaways landed here aboard sealing and whaling ships in the 19th century, they've been wreaking ecological havoc on the island and its ground-nesting seabirds by preying on the birds and their eggs.

Enter an international team of wildlife biologists, who have recently completed the second phase of history's largest rat-eradication program on the remote island.

Braving appalling weather in the run-up to the Antarctic winter, the group's helicopter pilots logged hundreds of hours in perilous flying conditions to spread nearly 200 tons of rat poison over 224 square miles (580 square kilometers) of South Georgia's coastline.

The ultimate goal: To rid this once supreme seabird habitat of its millions of rats once and for all. South Georgia was probably the richest seabird-breeding area in the world when British Captain James Cook visited it in 1775, according to Tony Martin of the University of Dundee, who leads the rat-eradication campaign on behalf of the South Georgia Heritage Trust. (See more pictures of South Georgia.)

Now the island has less than one percent of its original seabird population, he said. "And that is down to rats. This is a human-induced problem, and it is down to humans to do something about it."

And they are. This recent bait drop follows a successful trial two years ago, which cleared 10 percent of South Georgia of the invasive rodents. Next year, Martin said, the group plans to return and finish the job, hopefully rendering South Georgia rat-free by 2015.

"This is ten times bigger than anything that has ever been attempted anywhere else," Martin said.

Oh, Rats: Getting Rid of Rodents

South Georgia's ambitious rat-eradication campaign may be the world's biggest at the moment, but it's far from the only one. (Watch a video of rats at night.)

Many of the world's most biologically important island ecosystems have been invaded by rats. Many seabirds nest, breed, and raise their young on islands because they've been historically safe from predators—until rats came along.

What's more, while islands may represent only 5 percent of the world's land mass, they account for half of all the world's endangered species.

As of last count 435 islands around the world have been cleared of rats, according to Island Conservation, an organization that works to remove invasive species on islands. It's a number that is growing quickly, and so is the success rate.

The projects try their best not to hurt the species they're supposed to protect.

For one, the rat poison, brodifacoum, is not water soluble, so it can't leach into the groundwater or poison waterways.

Some seabird scavengers could eat stricken rats and become ill, though the rat carcasses are hard to find: The poison makes the rats photophobic, or shy of light, so the rodents usually retreat to their burrows before dying.

It's possible that a few duck or other birds may ingest the poisonous pellets, but since rats eat thousands and possibly millions of chicks a year overall, poison is still the better strategy, experts say.

"This is a war that is being won island by island," said Brad Keitt, the group's director of conservation. (Also see "Giant Killer Mice Decimating Rare Seabirds.")

Even so, "each island, of course, brings with it its own challenges," said veteran helicopter pilot Peter Garden, a New Zealander who worked on rat-eradication projects in Campbell Island, South Georgia, the Seychelles, the South Pacific, Alaska, and the Caribbean.

"South Georgia was especially tough," he said. "Its remote location in the South Atlantic made it a huge logistical challenge, and ... it receives some ferocious weather.

"The fact that it is also the largest breeding area in the South Atlantic for seabirds means that there are always lots of large birds sharing the airspace, and this creates quite a hazard for us. We are operating around 150 feet [46 meters] above the ground, where a lot of bird activity occurs."

Here are some islands that are aggressively ridding their homes of rats.

New Zealand

New Zealanders lead the field when it comes to getting rid of rats, according to Martin.

"They began focusing on rat eradication on their own islands back in the 1980s in order to try to preserve their native wildlife. Over the years they've had a lot of successes, developed a huge amount of expertise, and in the 1990s began perfecting the science of using helicopters to make aerial bait drops over large areas." (Also see "Drug-filled Mice Airdropped Over Guam to Kill Snakes.")

New Zealand's successful campaign to remove nearly a quarter of a million brown rats from Campbell Island—a 44-square-mile (114-square-kilometer) sub-Antarctic island—was the world's largest rat-eradication project when it was completed in 2001. Twelve years later the island is rat-free and the once critically endangered Campbell Island teal—a duck that fell victim to the rats—has bounced back. (See seabird pictures.)

Sophisticated poison-dispersal techniques using GPS guidance and specially designed spreader buckets slung under the helicopters were developed for the Campbell Island operation, and went on to pave the way for the much larger one on South Georgia.

Lord Howe Island, Australia

A U.S. $9 million program to eradicate an estimated 130,000 rats on the island, a subtropical paradise located 370 miles (595 kilometers) off Australia's eastern coast, was launched in July 2012.

Rats originally arrived aboard the S.S. Makambo, which ran aground on the north end of the island in June 1918. It was a catastrophe—at least 30 species of wildlife have since disappeared completely from the island, while another 13 species remain under threat. Lord Howe Island has often been cited as a worst-case example of rat devastation.

Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia

Sometimes described as the Galápagos of the north, the chain of islands in British Columbia has some of the largest remaining seabird colonies in Canada.

At one time these seabirds could be counted in the hundreds of thousands, but three centuries of rat infestation have whittled their numbers down to 20,000 or so.

Last September a rat-eradication program was launched, and so far two of the islands have been cleared of rats.

Galápagos Islands, Ecuador

The breathtaking island chain off Ecuador's coast, famous for its bird and reptile life, is home to an estimated 180 million rats—courtesy of the whalers who often stopped here in centuries past.

As elsewhere, the rodents have been an ecological disaster, devouring every single tortoise hatchling for the past hundred years.

Last November the Ecuadorian government set into motion South America's biggest rat-eradication scheme, hoping to have the island chain free of rats by 2020.

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