Dana Rivers (born 1954 or 1955) [1] is an American transgender advocate and convicted murderer.
In 1999, Rivers was fired from her job as a teacher at Center High School in Antelope, California, after she revealed to the school that she soon intended to live her life as a woman. [2] Her subsequent suit brought national attention to the case.
In 2022, Rivers was convicted of the 2016 murders of Charlotte Reed, 56, and her wife Patricia Wright, 57, and their son Benny Diambu-Wright, 19.
Rivers grew up in the San Francisco area. She served three years in the US Navy before pursuing a career in education. [3]
Rivers was a labor leader in Orange County for the American Federation of Teachers, and in the 1980s was twice elected to the board of the Huntington Beach Union High School District. [4] She was also a baseball coach and a white-water rafting instructor. [2]
Rivers had problems with alcoholism and three failed marriages. She was diagnosed with gender dysphoria after moving to Antelope and becoming a teacher in 1990. [5] [4]
Rivers gained global attention in 1999 when she was fired as a teacher because she came out as a transgender woman to her students at Center High School. [3] Before coming out, she had been recognized as an outstanding teacher by the school. [3] When she started to discuss her transition, she was warned not to discuss such matters at the school, and ultimately the board voted 3–2 to fire her. [3] Rivers sued Center Unified School District for the dismissal; the case was eventually settled out of court, with Rivers agreeing to resign and receiving a $150,000 settlement. [3] [6] [7] She subsequently moved to the Bay Area to resume her teaching career. [6]
After settling her case, Rivers travelled the country to speak to groups about her experience. [8] In 2004, Rivers appeared on the news magazine program 20/20 . She discussed her discrimination case, as well as the gender confirming surgeries she received in 2000. [9]
On November 11, 2016, married couple Patricia Wright and Charlotte Reed and their nineteen-year-old son, Benny Toto Diambu-Wright, were killed at their house in Oakland, California. [3] Wright and Reed were both stabbed and "riddled with bullets" in their bed, though Reed was stabbed dozens more times than Wright, to the point of being "unrecognizable". [3] [6] Diambu was shot and was found lying in the street after leaving the house. [3] [10] When police arrived at the scene following 911 calls, they found Rivers running from the house, which was on fire, while covered in blood. She was in possession of knives, ammunition, and metal knuckles; when arrested, she "began to make spontaneous statements about her involvement in the murders", according to police. [3] [11]
Rivers was formally charged with three counts of murder, arson, and possession of metal knuckles on November 14, 2016. [3] In 2017, she pleaded not guilty to the charges; [1] in 2018 she was ordered to stand trial on the murder charges. [12] After years of delay, Rivers' jury trial on charges of murder began in late October 2022. [13] The prosecution alleged that, motivated by Reed's exit from the women's motorcycle club they had both been members of, Rivers had gained Reed's trust in order to be allowed to spend the night in her and Wright's home. Rivers then shot the couple to death in their sleep, stabbing the corpses afterwards; she set fire to the garage in an attempt to remove evidence of the crime. [6] [14] On November 16, 2022, a jury found Rivers guilty on all charges. [5] [6] In January 2023, a judge ruled that she had been legally sane at the time of the murders. [10] The same judge later sentenced Rivers to life in prison without the possibility of parole, calling it "the most depraved crime I ever handled in the criminal justice system in 33 years." [15]
Gwen Amber Rose Araujo was an American teenager who was murdered in Newark, California, at the age of 17. She was murdered by four men, two of whom she had been sexually intimate with, who beat and strangled her after discovering that she was transgender. Two of the defendants were convicted of second-degree murder, but not the requested hate-crime enhancements to the charges. The other two defendants pleaded guilty or no-contest to voluntary manslaughter. In at least one of the trials, a "trans panic defense"—an extension of the gay panic defense—was employed.
Elana Dykewomon was an American lesbian activist, author, editor, and teacher. She was a recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction.
The history of violence against LGBT people in the United Kingdom is made up of assaults on gay men, lesbians, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex individuals (LGBTQI), legal responses to such violence, and hate crime statistics in the United Kingdom. Those targeted by such violence are perceived to violate heteronormative rules and religious beliefs and contravene perceived protocols of gender and sexual roles. People who are perceived to be LGBTQI may also be targeted.
The history of violence against LGBT people in the United States is made up of assaults on gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender individuals (LGBTQ), legal responses to such violence, and hate crime statistics in the United States of America. The people who are the targets of such violence are believed to violate heteronormative rules and they are also believed to contravene perceived protocols of gender and sexual roles. People who are perceived to be LGBT may also be targeted for violence. Violence can also occur between couples who are of the same sex, with statistics showing that violence among female same-sex couples is more common than it is among couples of the opposite sex, but male same-sex violence is less common.
Susan Lucille Wright is an American convicted murderer from Houston, Texas, who made headlines in 2003 for stabbing her husband, Jeff Wright, 193 times in an act of mariticide and then burying his body in their backyard. She was convicted of murder in 2004, and was given a 20-year sentence at the Crain Unit in Gatesville, Texas. She was denied parole on June 12, 2014, and July 24, 2017. She was granted parole in July 2020 and released from prison on December 30, 2020.
Crime in Oakland, California began to rise during the late 1960s after the King assassination riots, and by the end of the 1970s Oakland's per capita murder rate had risen to twice that of San Francisco or New York City. In 1983, the National Journal referred to Oakland as the "1983 crime capital" of the San Francisco Bay Area. Crime continued to escalate during the 1980s and 1990s, and during the first decade of the 21st century Oakland has consistently been listed as one of the most dangerous large cities in the United States.
This article addresses the history of transgender people in the United States from prior to Western contact until the present. There are a few historical accounts of transgender people that have been present in the land now known as the United States at least since the early 1600s. Before Western contact, some Native American tribes had third gender people whose social roles varied from tribe to tribe. People dressing and living differently from the gender roles typical of their sex assigned at birth and contributing to various aspects of American history and culture have been documented from the 17th century to the present day. In the 20th and 21st centuries, advances in gender-affirming surgery as well as transgender activism have influenced transgender life and the popular perception of transgender people in the United States.
Dwayne Jones was a Jamaican 16-year-old boy who was killed by a violent mob in Montego Bay in 2013, after he attended a dance party dressed in women's clothing. The incident attracted national and international media attention and brought increased scrutiny to the status of LGBT rights in Jamaica.
The Peterborough ditch murders were a series of murders which took place in Cambridgeshire, England, in March 2013. All three victims were male and died from stab wounds. Their bodies were discovered dumped in ditches outside Peterborough. In Hereford, two other men were stabbed but survived. The perpetrator was Joanna Christine Dennehy, a Cambridgeshire woman, who was later sentenced to life imprisonment with a whole life order.
Diana Becton, also known as Diana Becton Smith, is a former trial judge and is currently both the first woman and first African American to be elected district attorney in the history of Contra Costa County in California.
Suzanne Arlene "Suzie" Bombardier was an American teenager who was kidnapped, raped, and stabbed to death on June 22, 1980. On June 27, her body was found by a fisherman, floating in the San Joaquin River east of Antioch, California near its bridge, 60 miles (97 km) east of San Francisco. On December 11, 2017, after extensive DNA profiling, 63-year-old Mitchell Lynn Bacom, a convicted sex offender, was arrested as the prime suspect. He was charged with and convicted of kidnapping, rape, oral copulation, murder, and murder with use of a deadly weapon. This was Antioch's oldest cold case murder. At the time of Bombardier's homicide, Bacom was known to her family.
On July 22, 2018, three sisters, Nia, Letifah and Tashiya Wilson, were attacked by a man wielding a knife, later identified as John Cowell, after exiting a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train at MacArthur station in Oakland, California. 18-year-old Nia Wilson died after her throat was slashed. Her older sister, Letifah, was stabbed in the neck but survived. Tashiya was not physically harmed.
In May 2020, a young transgender woman of color named Nina Pop was stabbed to death in her own Missouri apartment.
In late May and early June 2020, two ambush-style attacks occurred against security personnel and law enforcement officers in California. The attacks left two dead and injured three others.
Ashling Murphy was an Irish primary school teacher, traditional Irish musician and camogie player who was murdered in January 2022 while walking on the towpath of the Grand Canal at Cappincur, outside Tullamore, County Offaly. Her death gave rise to widespread public grief, as well as outrage over violence against women, and tens of thousands of people attended vigils in her memory. The President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, and other Irish government ministers attended her funeral in Mountbolus, County Offaly, on 18 January.
Sarah Jane Baker is a British transgender rights activist, author, convicted criminal, prison inmate, and artist. She created the Trans Prisoner Alliance to support trans people in prison, and was the UK's longest-serving transgender prisoner at the time of her release.
David Emery Misch is an American murderer and suspected serial killer who was convicted of the 1989 murder of a woman in California and later linked via DNA to three additional murders dating back to 1986. One of his accused victims is Michaela Garecht, a 9-year-old girl whose 1988 disappearance achieved notoriety in the San Francisco Bay Area.