While an Arizona jury hears testimony that may help it decide whether Shawna Forde should get a death sentence, the former Everett woman is getting the national media attention she once clearly craved.
On Tuesday, Forde’s story was featured by Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly. You can watch a clip as part of this report by Dave Neiwert, a Seattle journalist and author who is in Tucson covering Forde’s case. As Neiwert notes, O’Reilly’s piece is wildly flawed in the facts department. Seriously. It is hold-your-nose awful.
O’Reilly’s report focuses in large part on whether Forde really was a member of the Minutemen. She certainly thought so, and convinced others it was true.
The photo of the tattoo accompanying this post is of the ink that covers much of Forde’s back. It is the logo of her Minutemen American Defense group. The image was snapped in 2008 by photojournalist Andrew Ong. His was one of the dozens of interviews I conducted for an in-depth report on Forde’s Minuteman past. The article is illustrated with more of Ong’s great photography of Forde on patrol in the desert.
I left that story with zero doubt that Forde for years was a fellow traveler of Minutemen leaders, and was right up until her arrest for the Arivaca murders. A story Ong told me about her cruelty to her own supporters — once tricking them into thinking they were being shot at while on patrol in the desert — also spoke of her twisted connection to their cause.
So what makes Forde tick?Dave Ricker, reporting for the Green Valley News and Sun, says jurors in Tucson have been told Forde suffers from a personality disorder that makes her a spinner of lies, tall tales and interlocking deceits.
Forde told plenty of whoppers here in Everett. Within hours of her conviction Monday, she demonstrated her ability to crank out the lies is still intact. She met for a jailhouse interview with Arizona journalist and author Terry Greene Sterling. The story in The Daily Beast is fascinating stuff, replete with examples of a skilled journalist’s deftly calling out the obvious falsehoods.
At one point in the interview, Forde claimed her Minutemen American Defense group has 13,000 members, complete with people watching the coasts and skies. The facts would suggest her group was never much bigger than a couple dozen folks. Not long after the Arivaca killings, I obtained an e-mail Forde had sent out, listing 17 people in the U.S. she wanted contacted in the event of her arrest, or worse. One of those folks was a retiree in Oregon, whom Forde described as the leader of her coastal watch operation. When I asked about the coastal patrols, he said Forde had encouraged him to get something going there, but the idea never left the dock.
After Forde’s arrest in 2009, Bob Dameron of Yakima, who is among those in the Minutemen movement who has known Forde the longest, said she was driven to make a name for herself.
“I think she wanted to be famous,” he said at the time. “I think she made it to infamous.”
Forde’s fate now is in the hands of an Arizona jury. If her peers in Arivaca are any indication, the future is grim. Philip Franchine with the Green Valley News reports that people there are outraged by Forde’s crimes, particularly by the killing of 9-year-old Brisenia Flores.
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