{"id":2035,"date":"2015-11-18T15:36:54","date_gmt":"2015-11-18T23:36:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/?p=2035"},"modified":"2018-04-02T19:37:28","modified_gmt":"2018-04-03T02:37:28","slug":"the-devil-and-lorna-lax-and-then-there-was-one-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/the-devil-and-lorna-lax-and-then-there-was-one-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Devil and Lorna Lax: Sympathy for the Devil"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Clifford,<\/a>T<\/span>he Sheriff\u2019s task force was briefed on Lorna\u2019s murder twice daily. The leads all moved\u00a0down the same path and every time that\u00a0path led\u00a0back to Clifford Fortner. There were too many discrepancies in his story. Religious tracts from Clifford\u2019s home were found at the fort as were\u00a0Clifford\u2019s fingerprints on a teacup. On Saturday morning November 14, Lorna was seen meeting a tall pimply faced boy with a receding chin at Kent School. Inspectors suspected the boy\u00a0was Clifford.<\/p>\n

Clifford had previously admitted that he visited Lorna at her fort on Saturday morning. Among the items he described seeing at that time were the contents of her purse: two lipsticks; an eyebrow pencil; a mirror; and bus tickets. However, a high school girl who the sheriff did not identify, had the cosmetics in the purse she brought to the Tamalpais-Drake High School football game at College of Marin on Saturday evening. She unknowingly dropped the purse under the grandstands at about 8:00 p.m. The items were retrieved by Lorna. The\u00a0cosmetics could not have been at Lorna\u2019s fort on Saturday morning. The only way Clifford could have seen them in Lorna\u2019s possession is if he had been with her late Saturday night.<\/p>\n

On December 2, Inspectors Sears and Sargento went to the Fortner home and got Mrs. Fortner\u2019s permission to talk to Clifford once again at Kent School, where Clifford was in the 8th grade. Inspectors Melovich and Battaglia confronted Clifford with the fact that they had the knife and that his story had discrepancies. \u201cWe brought him to the principal\u2019s office at the school and asked him a few questions,\u201d Inspector Battaglia said. \u201cThen he just started talking about it, and we didn\u2019t have to do anymore except just listen. We just let him talk and talk until we had the whole story.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clifford met Lorna Saturday morning and had sex with her at the fort. She told him that she would be\u00a0at\u00a0the Tamalpais-Drake football game that night. He saw Lorna at the game and she told him that she would be staying at the fort for the night. Clifford\u2019s mother picked him up from the game and drove him the few short blocks home. The family watched Death Valley Days on television, and then Clifford and Norman went to bed. Still wearing his street clothes, Clifford slipped under the covers of the upper bunk in the bedroom he shared with Norman.<\/p>\n

About midnight he crept out of bed and left for Lorna\u2019s fort, unbeknownst to Norman or his parents. He said he had sex with Lorna again at about 1:00 or 2:00 a.m., Sunday morning. Clifford said, \u201cAll of a sudden something just came over me.\u201d He struck Lorna over the head with a flashlight until she was unconscious. Then he got a rope near the fig tree and strung her from an overhanging branch. \u201cHe checked her pulse,\u201d Melovich said, \u201cand found it was still beating, even though it was weak.\u201d He grabbed a steak knife from Lorna\u2019s set, which she had hidden at the fort, and plunged it into her abdomen twice. He threw the knife into the bushes as her pulse weakened. He went home\u00a0and crawled back into bed.<\/p>\n

That was key, because Inspector Melovich found the bloody serrated kitchen knife in thick blackberry bushes about 15-feet from Lorna\u2019s body the morning after the grisly discovery. The murder weapon belonged to a set of knives that Lorna had bought as a Christmas present for her parents. The Sheriff\u2019s Department did not share that information out of fear that full disclosure would hinder the investigation.<\/p>\n

The next morning the Fortner\u2019s got up around 8:00 a.m. Mr. Fortner went to work and Mrs. Fortner took the children to Church, leaving only Clifford behind because he was going to a friend\u2019s birthday party. At 10:00 a.m. he went back to see Lorna. He looked at her and knew she was dead. In a halting voice he told the Inspectors that \u2018rigor mortis\u2019 had set in. He went home, wrapped his birthday present and went to the party.<\/p>\n

\"Lorna's<\/a>

Lorna’s Parents John and Amy Lax<\/p><\/div>\n

On December 4, Lorna\u2019s parents held a press conference in the living room of their modest home on Kent Avenue. Seated side by side on dining room chairs, John Lax defended his little girl in a dry, factual voice. When asked if he felt animosity toward Lorna\u2019s admitted killer he responded quietly, \u201cThat wouldn\u2019t help bring our girl back. We just feel empty. The only thing we want to do now is clear her name, and I think we can. We have information that Lorna did not start the club. We believe Clifford forced her into it.\u201d Lax added bitterly, \u201cWe know that Clifford raped Lorna about four to six months ago.That was her introduction to sex.\u201d<\/p>\n

After a brief hesitation he continued, \u201cHe raped her, but she never told us a thing.\u201d They learned of the rape after Lorna\u2019s body was discovered on November 16. An 11-year-old playmate said Lorna told her about the assault, but said, \u201cDon\u2019t you tell anyone,\u201d and she did not. After Lorna\u2019s body was found the playmate\u00a0told her mother, and the mother told Lorna\u2019s parents. John and Amy, in turn, immediately reported the rape to Sheriff Mountanos.<\/p>\n

John Lax continued, \u201cShe was only 65 pounds and physically retarded \u2013 only a child. That\u2019s the important thing.\u201d Lax said Lorna knew the Fortner boy. \u201cShe knew everybody in the neighborhood. She was friendly and trusting.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m trying to tell you about my little girl, the bad and the good, just as she was,\u201d he continued. \u201cAfter Clifford raped Lorna he had a power over her. He didn\u2019t get into any trouble over it, and he was able to use the threat of exposure over Lorna.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then Amy Lax spoke for the first time. \u201cWe hold no grudge against him, because Lorna never held a grudge against anybody in her life.\u201d She added, \u201cThere are other little girls Lorna\u2019s age around here. We don\u2019t want other families to go through what we have gone through. They can\u2019t hurt us any more than we have been hurt, but other families could be hurt.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sheriff Mountanos responded that, \u201cThe report of Lorna\u2019s rape is all hearsay. We were unable to confirm it. It was just something an 11-year-old girl told her mother, and the mother told the Laxes.\u201d He continued, \u201cWhen the Laxes told us about it, they reported it as an attempted rape, and Clifford has denied raping Lorna.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marin County\u2019s first teen aged killer had found an unlikely ally in Sheriff Mountanos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

he Sheriff\u2019s task force was briefed on Lorna\u2019s murder twice daily. The leads all moved\u00a0down the same path and every time that\u00a0path led\u00a0back to Clifford Fortner. There were too many discrepancies in his story. Religious tracts from Clifford\u2019s home were found at the fort as were\u00a0Clifford\u2019s fingerprints on a teacup. On Saturday morning November 14, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[454,608],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crimes-against-children","category-lorna-lax"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2035"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3122,"href":"https:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2035\/revisions\/3122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.klaaskids.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}