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Jury duty in trial of Boston mob boss Bulger a mix of tension, boredom and fear
• BOSTON (AP) -- They started out as 18 strangers seated in a jury box, stunned they'd been chosen to decide a case the government waited nearly two decades to try while the suspect was on the lam.
• Two months later, some were shaking as they stood in the jury box and heard their verdict read convicting Boston mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger in 11 slayings.
• Three jurors in interviews with The Associated Press said the weeks from start to finish were a mix of tension, boredom and fear.
• The trial testimony ran through years of vicious slayings and casual brutality. It featured testimony from corrupt FBI agents, admitted murderers and the children they made fatherless. Fear among gun-owning jurors prompted some to make sure their weapons were loaded before bed.
• In the end, the jury pored over every bit of evidence and made the only decision they could, said juror Janet Uhlar-Tinney.
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Mexican drug lord's release brings new pain for relatives of his forgotten victims
• MEXICO CITY (AP) -- On a sunny winter morning in 1984, two young American couples dressed in their Sunday best walked door to door in the western Mexican city of Guadalajara, trying to spread their faith as Jehovah's Witnesses. A few hours later they disappeared.
• The next month an American journalist went out with a friend at the end of a yearlong sabbatical writing a mystery novel. The two men also vanished.
• Within 10 days, Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena was kidnapped too, then tortured and killed by Mexico's most powerful drug cartel, setting off one of the worst episodes of U.S.-Mexico tension in recent decades. As DEA agents hunted for Camarena's killers, some witnesses told them that the cartel had mistaken the other six Americans for undercover agents and killed them just like Camarena.
• Cartel leader Rafael Caro Quintero walked free this month, 12 years early, after a local appeals court overturned his sentence for three of the murders. For the U.S. and Mexico, Caro Quintero's secretive, pre-dawn release has set off a frantic effort to get the drug lord back behind bars. For the families of the six Americans slain be (Continued on page 22)
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