UPDATE, December 16, 2011: Woman placed in first-offenders program for bomb threat to GOP state senators
A Cross Plains woman who emailed death threats to 15 Republican state senators pleaded guilty Thursday to making a bomb threat and was placed in a first-offenders program.
Dane County Circuit Judge Julie Genovese said that although the threats made by Katherine Windels, 27, were serious, she has no prior criminal record and had mental health issues that affected her actions.
According to letters written by mental health treatment providers, Windels suffers from anxiety and depression and had been largely housebound for a period including March 9, when she sent the emails to the GOP senators, upset over their support for legislation stripping most collective bargaining rights from most Wisconsin public workers.
"I am convinced that she never intended to truly threaten or disturb anyone," wrote Jennifer Branks, co-executive director of SOAR Case Management, which is involved in Windels' treatment.
Genovese did not enter judgment on Windels' plea and would formally find her guilty and sentence her only if she fails to get through the first-offenders program run by the Dane County District Attorney's Office.
If Windels gets through the program, the bomb threat charge would be dismissed and her record would remain clean.
This is justice? I don't think so.
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UPDATE, April 21, 2011: Woman charged in lawmaker threats can't be on Capitol grounds
Katherine Windels, 26, charged with sending threatening emails to 16 Republican senators cannot be on the State Capitol grounds.
On Thursday morning Windels made a court appearance where a judge released her on a signature bond. Conditions include she cannot possess a weapon, no computer use except for work, school and looking for work, as well as being on Capitol grounds.
She waived her preliminary hearing. Her next court appearance is May 16.
Windels, of Cross Plains, faces four charges including using a computer to send a threat and creating a bomb scare.
Two of the counts are felonies, two are misdemeanors.
...If convicted on all counts, she could face up to 7.5 years in prison.
________________
UPDATE, April 1, 2011: Investigators look into additional threats allegedly emailed by Cross Plains woman
Investigators on Friday looked into an additional violent threat by email — this one against Gov. Scott Walker — allegedly sent by the same Cross Plains child care provider already charged with emailing death threats to Republican state senators.
The threat against Walker, emailed Feb. 17, uses language including "watch your back Adolf Walker" and "we will not hesitate to punch where it hurts." It says it's from Katherine Windels.
Journalists discovered it as part of a review of thousands of emails sent to Walker's state account in response to his controversial budget repair bill. The Department of Justice was informed of the email — it apparently had gone unnoticed amid the electronic avalanche — and was investigating to verify its source, said spokesman Bill Cosh.
...News of the charges brought shock Friday to people who know the Windels family.
"You can't find finer people than those two," Pastor Rick Lund of St. Martin's Lutheran Church said of Bill and Karen Windels, Katherine Windels' parents. Her father is a mental-health nurse and her mother is a teacher, he said; both volunteer extensively at the church.
Of their daughter, Lund said: "Katherine is a good-hearted, bright young lady," while acknowledging that she "has had some struggles."
No one answered the door at the family's two-story yellow house at the end of a cul-de-sac in Cross Plains on Friday. Phone calls went unanswered.
Neighbor Kyle Roessler said the family moved into the new subdivision about four or five years ago and that their daughter always lived with her parents. He described the family as "really close," spending a lot of time in their garden in the warmer months and maintaining a cordial, if somewhat distant, relationship with neighbors.
An online profile lists Windels as a 2010 graduate of Madison Area Technical College with an associate's degree in early childhood education who's held multiple jobs as a home-care provider and teacher of young children.
At one of the jobs, Windels worked as a teacher's helper from 2007 to 2009 for an after-school program at St. Martin's called Jesus and Me. She left that job due to health problems that required surgery, said program director Virginia Diebold, but appeared healthy and happy the last time she saw her last Easter.
Notice that the language of the threat e-mailed to Governor Walker, "watch your back Adolf Walker" and "we will not hesitate to punch where it hurts," is typical of the stuff we saw and heard from the protesters in Madison when the Capitol was under siege.
________________
Katherine Windels, 26, is an early childhood teacher and a thug.
When protesters in Madison occupied the Capitol, they chanted, "This is what democracy looks like."
Here is what hate, violence, and thuggery looks like.
This is an ugly, ugly woman.
Photo of Katherine Windels:
PeekYou profile photo
Read her PeekYou profile.
She has an interest in psychology. What? No interest in criminology?
Good grief.
Finally, Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne got around to charging Windels for crimes she confessed to more than two weeks ago.
Ozanne had come under fire for failing to act on the case.
Did Ozanne think we were just going to forget about the horrific threats that Windels made?
From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
A 26-year-old woman was charged Thursday with two felony counts and two misdemeanor counts for allegedly making email threats against Wisconsin lawmakers during the height of the battle over Gov. Scott Walker's budget-repair bill.
Katherine R. Windels of Cross Plains was named in a criminal complaint filed in Dane County Criminal Court.
According to the criminal complaint, Windels allegedly sent an email threat to State Sen. Robert Cowles (R-Green Bay) March 9. Later that evening, she allegedly sent another email to 15 Republican legislators, including Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau).
The subject line of the second email was: "Atten: Death Threat!!!! Bomb!!!" In that email, she purportedly wrote, "Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your families will also be killed due to your actions in the last 8 weeks."
"I hope you have a good time in hell," she allegedly wrote in the lengthy email in which she purportedly listed scenarios in which the legislators and their families would die, including bombings and by "putting a nice little bullet in your head."
According to the criminal complaint, Windels told investigators “I sent out emails that I was
disgusted and very upset by what they were doing.”
Asked if she intended to follow through on any of her threats, Windels told the investigators "No," according to the complaint.
Windels was charged with two felony counts "bomb scare" and two misdemeanor counts of "computer message-threatening injury/bodily harm." If convicted, each felony count carries a maximum penalty of three years and six months in prison and a $10,000 fine, and each misdemeanor count carries a maximum penalty of 90 days in prison and a $1,000 fine.
This woman is dangerous. She is deranged. She confessed to being a criminal.
She's also incredibly stupid. Did she really think that an e-mail death threat couldn't be traced? Did she really think that she was anonymous?
According to the criminal complaint, Windels sent the threats from a Gmail account, user name "Lisa Patterson" with an e-mail account address of lessylisa@gmail.com.
The IP address from which the aforementioned e-mails were sent belonged to Karen and William Windels, who reside...in the village of Cross Plains, Dane County, Wisconsin.
...[During an interview with police at her home,] Windels confirmed that the email account nickydoodlebug@rocketmail.com belonged to her and Windels stated that she was the only one that used the account.
[Special Agent] Tijerino reports at 5:41 p.m., he received information from [Special Agent] King that the subscriber for email account: lessylisa@gmail.com had a secondary email account: nickydoodlebug@rocketmail.com.
Unbelievably stupid.
Windels had been investigated by police last fall for harassing Lisa Patterson.
From WKOW:
A Cross Plains woman charged with felony crimes for allegedly threatening state senators over the budget repair bill was investigated by Madison police officers last fall over text messages.
Police reports released to WKOW27 News show a Madison woman contacted police over concerning text messages from Katherine Windels.
Dane County district attorney Ismael Ozanne Thursday charged Windels for allegedly sending e-mails to all nineteen republican state senators, threatening to kill them over their actions on proposed public employee collective bargaining revisions. A criminal complaint states Windels set up an email address under the name of acquaintance Lisa Patterson and used that address to deliver the email threats.
Madison police reports show Patterson told police on Oct. 14, 2010 she had received text messages from Windels and wanted follow up from officers.
Madison police’s records custodian redacted all reference to the content of the text messages in reports released to WKOW27 News.
In the reports, an officer stated he tried to contact Windels, but was unsuccessful, and ultimately left a voice mail message telling her to cease any contact with Patterson.
That's a weird twist.
Is Windels out to harm Lisa Patterson?
From WMSN:
The same day the Department of Justice released a letter critical of the prosecution of a woman suspected of sending threatening emails to Republican Senators, the Dane County District Attorney's Office released a criminal complaint, detailing four charges against Katherine Windels of Cross Plains.
Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne really is a partisan hack. It's a disgrace that it took pressure for Ozanne to charge Windels. His failure to act quickly on the matter was a dereliction of duty, a disgrace.
Read the full criminal complaint.
More, from WKOW:
According to the complaint, Windels told the senators "you will be killed and your familes [sic] will also be killed due to your actions in the last 8 weeks." She threatened to "put a nice little bullet in your head," and made reference to several bombs.
Investigators visited Windels at her home the next day. According to the complaint, she told them she had sent the emails, and did so because she was very angry about what the senators had done. She also said she didn't intend to carry out the threats, and was not arrested.
Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne filed the charges Thursday. He says "it's odd" law enforcement never took Windels into custody.
"The reality is, the person was not placed into custody, so law enforcement didn't see her as an imminent threat," Ozanne said. "It's not that the case was not taken seriously by law enforcement or by this office."
This morning, the Justice Department sent a letter to the media, saying it was concerned about the "lack of action" on the case by the D.A.'s office. The Justice Department had referred the case to Ozanne two weeks prior.
Ozanne says his office filed charges in an appropriate amount of time.
"The file was reviewed as quickly as possible," he said.
He declined to comment on whether the letter could be the result of mounting tensions between his office, and the Justice Department. The two are pitted against each other in the lawsuit against the Governor's budget repair bill.
Windels is not in custody. The D.A.'s office says she won't be arrested.
The 26-year-old is expected to be served Friday and make her first court appearance in late April.
Windels is a flight risk. I don't know why she's not in custody. We know how opponents of Scott Walker, Republicans, and Wisconsin taxpayers act when they don't get what they want.
They run away. They head for the border. They go to a supposedly undisclosed location and do interviews on MSNBC.
Katherine Windels should not be teaching children. She should never have been a teacher. She's demented and not fit to be entrusted with children. Windels should not serve in the role of educator.
Her career as a teacher should be over.
Katherine Windels' actions are violent and disgusting and inexcusable.
Congratulations, Katherine! You're just 26 years old and you've achieved a lot. Everyone knows your name and your face. You've enlightened us about the sort of person you are. You've admitted to being a criminal.
Fame.
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Video from WISN, via Breitbart:
20 comments:
Nail, meet Hammer.
Great post. The saddest / scariest thing about this is the slow realization for me that there is not just a double standard in the media (re: Tea Party protesters vs. Anti-Walker protesters) but within law enforcement.
Amazingly, I agree with you. But wouldn't it be funny if she turned out to be a T-Partier that was trying to make the other side look bad? Wow, you'd sure look like you'd jumped the gun.
So what? She's pretty hot!
No, I wouldn't look like I jumped the gun.
If Windels is associated with the Tea Party and tried to pin some responsibility on union thugs for death threats toward Republicans, I would still condemn her.
Her behavior is reprehensible. Period.
Bill Brasky?
She is a teacher of small children with a history as a left wing thug. Google her.
Here's my bet on how this plays out:
Windels keeps her job after being suspended with pay to serve any jail time she may get. Then, the school district hires two more psychological counselors(at $91k/yr) to help her cope with her "problem".
She then writes a book, which is heavily promoted by the lefty press, about how the Tea Party causes stress in hard working, conscientious school employees and makes a couple million more.
Yep, life is good for these creeps.
Why is she not in jail? It's obvious w/ the inappropriate/illegitimate interference by Judge Maryann Sumi that the union's reach is amoung the judicial as well as the the law inforcement systems. They are corrupt/fraudulent liars and on the wrong side of society.
This disturbed person is nothing more than a worthless piece of trash that (sadly) represents the entitlement mentality of the public union mindset. She personifies all the things that regular folks detest about the union thugs who persist in demanding more and more of our money. Completely reprehensible and typical.
Funny thing is that she apparently fancies herself an educated woman when in fact she has demonstrated an utterly stupid approach to resolving an issue she has with the new law. Yet, why would we expect anything else from a naive, duped thug? I hope she gets a long term in jail. She'll can use the time to grow up.
Would someone please publish her home address, phone# and a description of her immediate family so we know where to picket/protest.
"If Windels is associated with the Tea Party and tried to pin some responsibility on union thugs for death threats toward Republicans, I would still condemn her. "
I have a hard time believing that, you definitely wouldn't have written this article if she was a tea partier.
My theory is that if she was a tea partier she would be cateogrized as a single actor, not represenative of the group. However, due to her being part of the teacher's union. She is obviously in the "out group", and thus easily generalizable. This creates "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity_bias" . My main point is don't let a single actor influence your perception of the whole group.
Omg! Big ugly girl.... Big ugly problems. She's a beast! Ugly & stupid see the two worst combs. How dumb could you be to not realize nearly everything can easily be traced online & even more crazy to use the girls name that you stalked last year as your fake name!!! How is the jumbo nut job even allowed around kids or 50feet near a school.... No wonder our nation is getting ..... Smarter lol! Not bright enough to train my dog let alone my genius good looking spawn.
"Would someone please publish her home address, phone# and a description of her immediate family so we know where to picket/protest."
I assume you're being sarcastic, but Windels' home address is in the criminal complaint. It's public record.
I chose not to include it in my post because I didn't want to personally direct any nutjobs and threats to her family.
It's ironic that in Windels' death threat she mentions that the addresses of the senators are public record.
Windels writes:
"We feel that you and the people that support the dictator have to die. We have tried many other ways of dealing with your corruption but you have taken things too far and we will not stand for it any longer. So, this is how it's going to happen: I as well as many others know where you and your family live, it's a matter of public records. We have all planned to assult you by arriving at your house and putting a nice little bullet in your head."
I hope that people will have the good sense and decency not to do to Windels and her family what she did to the senators and their families.
"I have a hard time believing that, you definitely wouldn't have written this article if she was a tea partier."
I condemn criminals. Period.
"Omg! Big ugly girl.... Big ugly problems. She's a beast!"
When I wrote that Windels is an "ugly, ugly woman," I was not commenting about her physical appearance in any way. I was referring only to her behavior, her inner ugliness.
After she is tried and convivcted, she will likely lose her job. Then she will really lose her mind and carry out her threats. After that it will be "Why didn't someone recognize how troubled she was? The system failed her..."
BS! She will be allowed to continue and be a loonie leftist martyr. The left doesn't tolerate people who won't follow their party line and relishes violent nutjobs like her, she is a delusional ticking time bomb.
Does anyone other than me see the gross irony of it all? For years we are told that the millions of people who listen daily Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, etc. are all being turned into little Timothy McVeighs (and no one never even bothered to prove that McVeigh was a right-wing talk-radio listener, but hey, why ruin a good politically-motivated myth?)
But in fact, it’s been the complete opposite. Only left-wing rhetoric has created violence in this country as of late:
It’s left-wing socialist class-warfare rhetoric—amplified and propagated by prominent liberal politicians and compliant mainstream media—that incite angry mobs to shatter store windows; vandalize private businesses and banks; and hurl paint, firecrackers, and lightbulbs filled with ammonia at police, just this past week in London’s Trafalgar Square.
It’s left-wing socialist class-warfare rhetoric—amplified and propagated by prominent liberal politicians and compliant mainstream media—that incite angry mobs to break store windows, vandalize buildings, and torch police cars during last June’s G20 summit in Toronto.
It’s left-wing socialist class-warfare rhetoric—amplified and propagated by prominent liberal politicians and compliant mainstream media—that caused union thugs and protestors of other liberal stripes to converge upon the private residences of individuals they don’t like and terrorizing their families trapped inside. Such victims have included Karl Rove, AIG executives, and, most recently, John Boehner and Wisconsin state Republicans.
It’s left-wing environ-mental-ist rhetoric—amplified and propagated by prominent liberal politicians and compliant mainstream media—that caused one James Jay Lee to hold hostages at the Discovery Channel’s Maryland headquarters because its environmental programming wasn’t alarmist enough in his view.
It’s left-wing environ-mental-ist rhetoric—amplified and propagated by prominent liberal politicians and compliant mainstream media—that inspired “Unibomber” Ted Kaczynski to hold hostages.
A combination of left-wing socialist class-warfare and environ-mental-ist rhetoric—amplified and propagated by prominent liberal politicians and compliant mainstream media—incited someone to send a mail bomb to an oil executive during the height of the BP oil spill, injuring his wife when she opened the package.
It’s left-wing anti-war rhetoric—amplified and propagated by prominent liberal politicians and compliant mainstream media—that caused the streets of major cities around the country to be fouled by the most vicious and hateful slurs toward George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condaleezza Rice.
It’s left-wing anti-war rhetoric—amplified and propagated by prominent liberal politicians and compliant mainstream media—that prompted “peace activists” to commit violence towards our brave military, such as vandilizing military recruitment centers, banning ROTC’s on college campuses, and even fragging (the act of subordinate military personnel to shoot their own superior officers.)
In my opinion, Katherine R. Windels did a stupid thing. And she should be punished for it. But let’s not pretend her actions are not the result of a mindset created by constant bombardment of left-wing ideas: Hatred toward “the rich,” hatred toward “traditional values,” hatred toward the Founders and Founding Documents, hatred toward war (unless it’s a war started by a Democrat).
In short, Windels is the result of what happens when left-wing rhetoric goes unchecked.
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This 26-year-old has never lived away from home. Not to attend school. Not to work at a job. Her father is a mental-health nurse and her mother is a teacher/psychologist. They are both public employees.
Who knows what this young woman has heard endlessly regarding it being a crime for public employees to be expected to pay a small sum toward their health care and retirement.
They are certainly the major influence in a young life that has had few other influences.
She sounds very ill to me, and very dangerous. She clearly believes and is willing to act on all the leftist and union baloney in her environment.
According the criminal complaint, she is 5' 4", and 180 lbs. Poor girl. That's fat. Probably has image problems, in spite of her pretty face.
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