New Lawyer Specialty: Representing Murderers' Girlfriends

One of the big stories in today's news was the arrest of the mother of Vitale murder suspect Scott Edgar Dyleski. CNN ran the headline with almost the same billing as the withdrawal of unqualified Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers's nomination. But the remarkable thing to me was in an almost throwaway line way down in the story.

The tale pieced together by police is that Dyleski killed Pamela Vitale on October 15, then stayed with a friend for a few hours because his momalled to warn him that cops were all over his neighborhood. Then he left with his girlfriend to go to her house and have sex.

If you think like me, at this point, you are mockingly explaining to your friends that we've reached the point in the story -- we have a young murderer, he has a girlfriend, and the word sex has filtered into the post-murder timeline -- that the girlfriend needs to hire an attention-seeking lawyer, just in case there will be TV cameras and book publishers following this girl around. We need ... Gloria Allred.

Then we all laugh hysterically and say "wouldn't it be funny if Gloria Allred really did come in to be the girlfriend's lawyer?" And we briefly debate whether it would be funny or pathetic, hypothetically speaking, of course.

Or not. Late in the story comes the punchline.

"Gloria Allred is representing Dyleski's girlfriend."

Can you imagine how that decision came to pass? Maybe she called her dad and said, "Dad, you know that guy I've been sleeping with lately? Well, it turns out, he's a cold-blooded murderer. What should I do?" And her dad responds. "First, you stop doing sexual favors for this guy. Second, you hire a lawyer, of course. I know of one who might be good. I think she specializes in murderer girlfriends."

So maybe he calls Allred and asks if she can do the job. What would she say? Well, for starters, she probably boasted that she is the most experienced lawyer in California when it comes to milking media attention out of the fortuitous circumstance of having your boyfriend whack a lady.

"Do you have any references?" he might ask.

"Well," she could say, "start with Amber Frey. If she doesn't tell you that I'm the best lawyer a girlfriend of a murderer can hope for, hire someone else." And the client is hooked.

At least ambulance chasers now have someone they can look down upon. They may be ambulance chasers, but at least they don't chase murderers' girlfriends.

Comments

[Cranky Greg]

AMEN!