Top Three Beatdowns of Guys Who Had it Coming

In the Wake of the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal, several public figures have weighed in on how they would have meted out justice if they had been the ones to catch Sandusky in the act.  Michelle Bachmann claims she would have "beat him to a pulp".  Meanwhile, college football legend Doug Flutie said on MSNBC's The Ed Show that he would have acted immediately to get the victim out of there and then proceeded to "get himself in to some trouble of [his] own" with Sandusky.  I have to say, I agree with both these sentiments.  So in the spirit of well-deserved beatdowns, I've compiled this list of my top 3 beatdowns of scum by private citizens.  Enjoy!

3) John Geoghan

Crime:  Geoghan was a catholic priest in various Massachusetts parishes from 1962 to 1991 (I think by now you know where this is going).  Over the course of his 30-year tenure, Geoghan was accused of sexually abusing over 130 children.  He was eventually convicted of assault and battery for inappropriately grabbing a 10-year-old boy in a swimming pool, and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Comeuppance:  While being housed in protective custody, Geoghan somehow found himself alone in a cell with Joseph Druce, a convicted murderer already serving a life-sentence without the possibility of parole.  When the opportunity arose, Druce proceeded to strangle and stomp Geoghan to death.  An autopsy of the former priest would later reveal the cause of death to be ligature strangulation and blunt chest trauma.  While I usually don't condone death for non-murderers, Geoghan's crimes were so hideous and plentiful as to make me, at the most, ambivalent about his murder.  Plus, since he was clearly such a devout catholic, his death is really just an early admission to heaven, according to his own beliefs.  So everybody wins.

2) Jeffrey Dahmer

Crime: Beginning in the summer of 1978 and continuing right up until his eventual arrest in 1991, Dahmer was one of the most horrific serial killers in American history.  Dahmer's m.o. was to pick up his male victims at gay bars and entice them to go back to his apartment.  Once there, he would generally have sex with them and bludgeon them to death, although not always in that order.  He would often keep his victims' body parts as souvenirs, sometimes in the fridge, sometimes not.  As a result, his neighbours noted that they could smell strange odours emanating from his apartment.  This was in addition to hearing frequent, loud thumping sounds and the occasional buzzing of a saw.  In addition to rape, murder, and necrophelia, Dahmer was a convicted child molester and part-time cannibal.  Toward the end of his reign of terror, Dahmer hypothesized that he could turn his victims into zombies who would serve as conveniently submissive sex partners.  In pursuit of this goal, Dahmer would drill holes into their skulls and inject hydrochloric acid or boiling water into their brains while they were still alive.

Comeuppance: In 1994, just three years into his 957-year prison sentence, Dahmer was assigned the task of cleaning the prison's gymnasium bathroom along with two other inmates, Jesse Anderson and Christopher Scarver, both of whom had also been convicted of murder.  When prison guards left the three men unsupervised, Scarver turned on his two colleagues, beating them both to death with his broomstick.  It is believed that Scarver, who is black, harboured a particular resentment toward Dahmer since the majority of Dahmer's victims were also black men.  Anderson had been in prison for stabbing his wife to death. That alone is enough to place an inmate near the bottom of the prison pecking order.  But this was compounded by the fact that Anderson had tried to claim that two unknown black assailants were the ones who had killed his wife.  Clearly Scarver wasn't havin' it.

Unlike the previous example, it's actually difficult to conceive of a punishment sufficiently gruesome that it would even begin to atone for Dahmer's crimes.  But what eventually befell Dahmer in prison is a small consolation.

3) Baruch Goldstein

Crime: Baruch Goldstein was a Right-Wing Jewish terrorist and a member of the radical settler movement.  A physician by trade, Goldstein was born and raised in Brooklyn, where he was introduced to the fascist ideology of Meir Kahane.  Goldstein became a member the Kahane-founded Jewish Defense League and was also active in the Kahane's Kach party, which is recognized by the Israeli and American governments as a terrorist organization.  He immigrated to Israel in 1983 and was conscripted into the army, where he served as an army doctor.  In 1994,  Goldstein entered a Hebron Mosque carrying his army-issued automatic weapon and dressed in his army uniform in order to appear as though he were a soldier on patrol.  Once inside, he opened fire on the crowd of worshippers killing 29 of them and wounding over 125.

Comeuppance: Eventually some members of the crowd got their hands on Goldstein and overpowered him.  The angry mob then beat him death.  Although it's not obvious that Goldstein's crime was anymore reprehensible than Dahmer's, what propels this beatdown to the top of the list is that it was carried out on the spot by the victims and would-be victims.  I personally can't think of a higher form of justice.