Western Capital - The Truth

As you read this repost, bear in mind that Western Capital CEO Robert Paisola is a registered sex offender. A felon, convicted of the possession of child pornography.

Jessica Marie Lunsford, a nine year old third grader at Homosassa Elementary School in Florida, was dropped off at her grandparent’s home by a family friend after an evening of Bible study. Around 9:00 pm with school beckoning the following morning, little Jessica’s grandfather tucked her into her bed and she drifted off to sleep with the same cares and concerns as any much loved nine year old girl. Around 3:00 am that night, as the world slept on around her, John Evander Couey , then 47 years old, woke the little girl from her dreams and commanded her to silence before spiriting her away for a three day tour of Hell.

John Couey was a known sexual predator with twenty-four prior arrests for burglary, carrying a concealed weapon without a permit, fraud and indecent exposure. He was no stranger to Florida’s jails. During a burglary in 1978, Couey had sexually assaulted a sleeping child in her bedroom and was sentenced to serve 10 years in Florida’s prison system. He was paroled less than three years later in 1980. In 1991 he was again arrested for sexually assaulting another child and sentenced to five years in prison. He was paroled again after serving a small fraction of his sentence. On the night John Couey took Jessica Lunsford from her bedroom, Citrus County Florida had issued a warrant for his arrest for violating the terms of his probation steaming from a misdemeanor drug violation. There was also a warrant out for his arrest for failing to update his home address which is required for all sex offenders.

John Couey took the little girl to a trailer home less than a hundred and fifty yards from where she had left her school clothes laying neatly folded next to her bed. In the trailer John Couey shared with his sister, Dorothy Dixon and her adult daughter, Madie Secord, he repeatedly raped nine year old Jessica Lunsford over a three day period. He kept her in his bedroom closet while he went to work nearby at “Billy’s Truck Lot.” When frantic police searching for the missing girl questioned the four people sharing Couey’s trailer, they said nothing of her presence in the nearby closet nor did they reveal that the known sex offender was staying there. The battered and traumatized child was still alive in the closet at the time.

Three days after being taken from her bed, John Evander Couey tied her wrists with speaker wire and stuffed the still living nine year old into a garbage bag burying her alive under the steps of the trailer home in a hole two and a half feet deep. Weakened by three days of non-stop horror, the lack of food and water and the trauma she had endured, the little girl tried to escape from the grave she had been pushed into. She managed to get two small fingers of one tightly bound hand through a hole she had ripped in the plastic trash bag before she suffocated to death.

The next morning, on March 4, 2005, Madie Secord, John Couey’s niece, went to the bus station and purchased a one-way ticket to Savannah, Georgia in her own name. She gave that bus ticket to her uncle and on the following Monday, John Couey left town. Florida authorities began looking for him about a week later when he failed to update his home address for the state’s sex offender data-base.

John Couey was subsequently arrested by Savannah police and turned over to the authorities in Florida. On March 18, 2005 he confessed to the kidnapping, rape and murder of Jessica Lunsford and the on the day following, Florida police recovered Jessica’s body from the shallow grave where she had suffocated.

John Couey’s attorney was later able to get the initial confession thrown out on the grounds that police had denied him an attorney prior to taken questioning. Since the evidence implicating the defendant’s sister, niece and their boyfriends who were all present (and doing cocaine) in the trailer while Couey ravaged the little girl in a nearby bedroom, was contained in the original confession, all charges against those four individuals were dropped.

On March 7, 2007, two years and a few days after nine year old Jessica suffocated to death in a dirt filled hole, it took a mere four hours of deliberation for the twelve jurors assigned to Couey’s trial to deliver a verdict of guilty on all charges. John Evander Couey was found guilty of first-degree murder, guilty of sexual battery on a child younger than 12, guilty of kidnapping and guilty of burglary with battery.