Police find New York gunman's threatening note but no motive

The New York felon who set a Christmas Eve trap for firefighters left a note saying he wanted to burn down the neighborhood and "do what I do best: killing people," police said Tuesday.

Investigators found human remains in the burned-out home of ex-con William Spengler, 62, a day after his rampage in Webster, a Rochester suburb. Officials said the remains probably were those of Spengler's missing sister, Cheryl, 67.

Spengler apparently set the blaze in or near his home and lay in wait, killing two firefighters and seriously wounding two more before taking his own life, officials said.

In his note, Spengler wrote, "I still have to get ready to see how much of the neighborhood I can burn down and do what I do best: killing people," police said at a Christmas Day news conference.

Officers characterized the note as "rambling" and said it did not include a motive. They declined to release more excerpts Tuesday.

"Motive is always the burning question, and I'm not sure we'll ever really know what was going through his mind," Webster Police Chief Gerald Pickering said.

Spengler appeared to have led an uneventful life for the last 14 years, but had a violent history: In 1980, he beat his grandmother to death with a hammer. He spent 18 years in prison and was released in 1998.

Monday's blaze — which officials think may have started as a vehicle fire — consumed seven homes and damaged two more in Webster, a sleepy community on the shores of Lake Ontario and Irondequoit Bay.

Police think Spengler used a military-style Bushmaster .223 rifle with a flash suppressor. They recovered the weapon along with a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver and a Mossberg pump-action 12-gauge shotgun.

As a felon, Spengler was barred from owning guns. Officials were unsure how he had obtained them, but said he was armed to the teeth.

"He was equipped to go to war and kill innocent people," Pickering said.

Spengler's attack would mark the third time in two weeks that a gunman had attempted a mass killing with an assault rifle. On Dec. 14, Adam Lanza killed 20 grade-school students and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., using a military-style Bushmaster .223 rifle. Lanza also killed his mother and himself. On Dec. 11, Jacob Tyler Roberts opened fire in a Clackamas, Ore., mall with an AR-15-style rifle, killing two and wounding one before taking his own life.

The discovery that Spengler had a Bushmaster is likely to intensify the outcry for tighter gun controls that followed the Newtown massacre. The gun, which looks like a military assault rifle, also was used in the 2002 sniper attacks that left 10 dead and three wounded in the Washington, D.C., area.

President Obama is expected to begin pushing for specific gun control measures, including bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, after he receives recommendations from Vice President Joe Biden in January. The National Rifle Assn., the nation's most powerful gun lobby, has vowed to fight any attempts to curtail gun ownership.

In Webster, during the first of two news conferences on Christmas Day, officials described Monday's chaotic "combat situation." Firefighters were targeted before getting out of their trucks, police said, and a Webster police officer used his duty rifle to trade fire with Spengler.

Rounds shattered the windshield of the firetruck that two of the firefighters were in; the wounded driver crashed trying to get away.

"Had that police officer not been there, more people would have been killed, because he immediately engaged the shooter," Pickering said of the officer, who has not been identified.

Another police officer from nearby Greece, N.Y., Jon Ritter, was driving behind the firetruck when he also came under fire. He was wounded by shrapnel from the bullets that struck his windshield and engine block, police said.

Ritter "tried to shelter some of the fallen firemen with his car when the other firefighters — that we later extracted from the location with the armored personnel carrier — had taken cover under the firetruck," Pickering said.

The two wounded firefighters remained in intensive care and were described as stable.

Officials said that 33 neighborhood residents had been displaced by the blaze and the investigation and that hotels had offered them places to stay.

"We all have been inundated from citizens, police agencies across the nation and really across the world, wanting to provide donations," Pickering said. The outpouring "has been incredible."

matt.pearce@latimes.com

Times staff writer John Hoeffel in Naples, N.Y., contributed to this report.

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A Look Inside Tarantino's <em>Django Unchained</em> Comic Book

Django Unchained opens in theaters today, but the big screen isn’t the only way to see the newest work by Quentin Tarantino. The issue of the Django Unchained comic book mini-series from DC/Vertigo Comics is available now in comic book stores (and online), and in advance of tomorrow’s film debut, Wired has a look at the Tarantino’s introduction to the comic, along with the original character sketches by artist R.M. Guéra and a six-page preview of the first issue.

The comic is an incredibly faithful adaptation of Tarantino’s movie script – the first issue is the first few scenes of the film, almost line for line. Drawing on the director’s story, the book’s interior art comes from Guéra, who made characters that hew closely to their actor counterparts but are their own characters entirely. The artist’s Django, the slave that becomes a bounty hunter, has a more steely cowboy vibe than smooth, cool Jamie Foxx; ruthless plantation owner Calvin Candie looks even more maniacal than Leonardo DiCaprio; and Candie’s house slave Stephen looks far more jowly and grizzled on the page than Samuel L. Jackson does on screen.

“Growing up I read the adventures of Kid Colt Outlaw, TOMAHAWK, The Rawhide Kid, BAT LASH, and especially, Yang (which was basically the Kung Fu TV show done as a comic), and Gunhawks featuring Reno Jones (a Jim Brown stand-in) and Kid Cassidy (a David Cassidy stand-in), which for my money was the greatest Blaxploitation Western ever made,” Tarantino says in the first issue’s intro. “And it’s in that spirit of cinematic comics literature that I present to you Django Unchained.”

Tarantino’s version of the story hits theaters Dec. 25.

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Britain’s royal family attends Christmas services

LONDON (AP) — Britain‘s royal family is attending Christmas Day church services — with a few notable absences.

Wearing a turquoise coat and matching hat, Queen Elizabeth II arrived at St. Mary Magdelene Church on her sprawling Sandringham estate in Norfolk. She was accompanied in a Bentley by granddaughters Beatrice and Eugenie.

Her husband, Prince Philip, walked from the house to the church with other members of the royal family.

Three familiar faces were missing from the family outing. Prince William is spending the holiday with his pregnant wife Kate and his in-laws in the southern England village of Bucklebury. Prince Harry is serving with British troops in Afghanistan.

Later Tuesday, the queen will deliver her traditional, pre-recorded Christmas message, which for the first time will be broadcast in 3D.

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Op-Ed Contributor: Our Failed Approach to Schizophrenia

TOO many pendulums have swung in the wrong directions in the United States. I am not referring only to the bizarre all-or-nothing rhetoric around gun control, but to the swing in mental health care over the past 50 years: too little institutionalizing of teenagers and young adults (particularly men, generally more prone to violence) who have had a recent onset of schizophrenia; too little education about the public health impact of untreated mental illness; too few psychiatrists to talk about and treat severe mental disorders — even though the medications available in the past 15 to 20 years can be remarkably effective.

Instead we have too much concern about privacy, labeling and stereotyping, about the civil liberties of people who have horrifically distorted thinking. In our concern for the rights of people with mental illness, we have come to neglect the rights of ordinary Americans to be safe from the fear of being shot — at home and at schools, in movie theaters, houses of worship and shopping malls.

“Psychosis” — a loss of touch with reality — is an umbrella term, not unlike “fever.” As with fevers, there are many causes, from drugs and alcohol to head injuries and dementias. The most common source of severe psychosis in young adults is schizophrenia, a badly named disorder that, in the original Greek, means “split mind.” In fact, schizophrenia has nothing to do with multiple personality, a disorder that is usually caused by major repeated traumas in childhood. Schizophrenia is a physiological disorder caused by changes in the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that is essential for language, abstract thinking and appropriate social behavior. This highly evolved brain area is weakened by stress, as often occurs in adolescence.

Psychiatrists and neurobiologists have observed biochemical changes and alterations in brain connections in patients with schizophrenia. For example, miscommunications between the prefrontal cortex and the language area in the temporal cortex may result in auditory hallucinations, as well as disorganized thoughts. When the voices become commands, all bets are off. The commands might insist, for example, that a person jump out of a window, even if he has no intention of dying, or grab a set of guns and kill people, without any sense that he is wreaking havoc. Additional symptoms include other distorted thinking, like the notion that something — even a spaceship, or a comic book character — is controlling one’s thoughts and actions.

Schizophrenia generally rears its head between the ages of 15 and 24, with a slightly later age for females. Early signs may include being a quirky loner — often mistaken for Asperger’s syndrome — but acute signs and symptoms do not appear until adolescence or young adulthood.

People with schizophrenia are unaware of how strange their thinking is and do not seek out treatment. At Virginia Tech, where Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people in a rampage shooting in 2007, professors knew something was terribly wrong, but he was not hospitalized for long enough to get well. The parents and community-college classmates of Jared L. Loughner, who killed 6 people and shot and injured 13 others (including a member of Congress) in 2011, did not know where to turn. We may never know with certainty what demons tormented Adam Lanza, who slaughtered 26 people at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, though his acts strongly suggest undiagnosed schizophrenia.

I write this despite the so-called Goldwater Rule, an ethical standard the American Psychiatric Association adopted in the 1970s that directs psychiatrists not to comment on someone’s mental state if they have not examined him and gotten permission to discuss his case. It has had a chilling effect. After mass murders, our airwaves are filled with unfounded speculations about video games, our culture of hedonism and our loss of religious faith, while psychiatrists, the ones who know the most about severe mental illness, are largely marginalized.

Severely ill people like Mr. Lanza fall through the cracks, in part because school counselors are more familiar with anxiety and depression than with psychosis. Hospitalizations for acute onset of schizophrenia have been shortened to the point of absurdity. Insurance companies and families try to get patients out of hospitals as quickly as possible because of the prohibitively high cost of care.

As documented by writers like the law professor Elyn R. Saks, author of the memoir “The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness,” medication and treatment work. The vast majority of people with schizophrenia, treated or untreated, are not violent, though they are more likely than others to commit violent crimes. When treated with medication after a rampage, many perpetrators who have shown signs of schizophrenia — including John Lennon’s killer and Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin — have recognized the heinousness of their actions and expressed deep remorse.

It takes a village to stop a rampage. We need reasonable controls on semiautomatic weapons; criminal penalties for those who sell weapons to people with clear signs of psychosis; greater insurance coverage and capacity at private and public hospitals for lengthier care for patients with schizophrenia; intense public education about how to deal with schizophrenia; greater willingness to seek involuntary commitment of those who pose a threat to themselves or others; and greater incentives for psychiatrists (and other mental health professionals) to treat the disorder, rather than less dangerous conditions.

Too many people with acute schizophrenia have gone untreated. There have been too many Glocks, too many kids and adults cut down in their prime. Enough already.

Paul Steinberg is a psychiatrist in private practice.

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Square Feet: Pier 17 Mall Has Upgrades Planned After Hurricane Sandy

SHoP Architects

A rendering shows plans to transform the Pier 17 shopping mall at South Street Seaport.

Nearly two months after Hurricane Sandy devastated the South Street Seaport on the East River in Lower Manhattan, Dumpsters still line its cobblestone streets and nearly all of the stores west of Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive remain closed.

But the storm surge largely spared Pier 17, the seaport’s long-maligned shopping mall to the east. The operators of the mall, the Howard Hughes Corporation of Dallas, say it escaped damage because it is three feet above the pier, which in turn sits well above the water. And so, the company, which holds the ground lease to the city-owned pier, is moving forward with its plans to transform its dated festival marketplace into an open and airy three-story retail and entertainment center.

The local community board voted last month to support the proposal, despite reservations about the signage and some other design features. Though the plan is still working its way through the city’s land use process, the developer’s agreement with the city Economic Development Corporation requires that construction begin on July 1. David R. Weinreb, the chief executive of Howard Hughes, said in a telephone interview that the company would meet that deadline.

After being blocked off by metal gates and closed until this month because of concerns about the stability of the pier, the mall is now open, though some stores are still closed. Inspectors from Halcrow, an international engineering company hired by Howard Hughes, recently determined that the structure was sound. The pier is south of the Brooklyn Bridge, just beyond Fulton Street.

“The pier got a solid rating,” Christopher J. Curry, a senior executive vice president at Howard Hughes, said in a recent interview at the company’s offices on Fulton Street. City officials confirmed that no problems were found at the pier.

In addition to Pier 17, the company controls 170,000 square feet of space farther inland at the seaport, including stores like Brookstone, Ann Taylor and Coach, which suffered extensive storm damage.

“We’re working diligently to remediate the shops,” Mr. Weinreb said. Asked whether the closed stores would remain at the seaport, he said, “We’re in discussions with our tenants about what is in their best interests. Many of those tenants enjoy very good sales and fully expect and want to be back open.”

From the mid-1980s to the early ’90s, the seaport was a big draw, especially for young people, who crowded its bars and restaurants. But then it fell out of favor with New Yorkers, though it has remained a must-see for visitors taking in other downtown sites, retail specialists said.

The operators of the mall at Pier 17 have long wanted to give it more cachet with city residents. Shortly before the economic crisis, a previous owner, General Growth Properties, a mall developer, introduced a much more ambitious plan for the seaport, including a 42-story tower, which was unpopular with residents.

The Howard Hughes Corporation, which is primarily known for its vast master-planned communities like Summerlin, near Las Vegas, acquired the shopping center in 2010, when it was spun off from General Growth as the mall company was emerging from bankruptcy.

Completed in 1985, the Pier 17 shopping center was developed by the Rouse Company, the creator of marketplaces in Boston and Baltimore. (General Growth bought Rouse in 2004.)

But by the time the mall opened, the marketplace concept may already have been outmoded. The existing mall “has basically been a disappointment to everyone over its life,” Hardy Adasko, a senior vice president for planning at the city Economic Development Corporation, testified last week at a City Planning Commission hearing. His agency sees the redevelopment of the pier as a way of advancing its long-term investment in the waterfront, he said.

In contrast to the marketplace design, which was intended to shield visitors from the grittiness of the port, the new structure will capitalize on its waterfront location, offering abundant views of the bridge. Outdoor space on either side of the pier also will be enhanced.

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Jack Klugman dies at 90; star of TV's 'The Odd Couple,' 'Quincy'

Jack Klugman, the three-time Emmy Award-winning actor best known for his portrayals of slovenly sportswriter Oscar Madison on TV's “The Odd Couple” and the title role of the murder-solving medical examiner on “Quincy, M.E.,” died Monday at his home in Woodland Hills. He was 90.

Klugman had been in declining health for the last year, his son Adam said.

He had withdrawn from a production of “Twelve Angry Men” at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, N.J., in Marchfor undisclosed health reasons. He had undergone successful surgery for cancer of the larynx in 1989.

PHOTOS: 2012 notable deaths

Klugman was the last surviving member of the cast that played the jury in “12 Angry Men,” the classic 1957 movie drama about deliberations in a first-degree murder trial. He was also a veteran of live TV dramatic anthology series in the 1950s and appeared in several episodes of “Twilight Zone.”

On Broadway, Klugman played Ethel Merman's boyfriend, Herbie, in the hit musical “Gypsy,” which earned him a 1960 Tony Award nomination. He won his first Emmy in 1964 for a guest appearance on “The Defenders.”

In 1965, he was back on Broadway, replacing Walter Matthau as Oscar Madison in the original production of “The Odd Couple,” Neil Simon's classic comedy about two friends with polar-opposite personalities who become roommates — one is divorced and the other just broke up with his wife.

PHOTOS: Jack Klugman -- 1922 - 2012

But that's not why Klugman landed the role of the casually sloppy Oscar Madison in the TV version of “The Odd Couple” opposite Tony Randall's fussy neat-freak Felix Unger.

Randall, who had appeared in a production of “The Odd Couple” with Mickey Rooney, had wanted Rooney to play Oscar in the TV series. But executive producer Garry Marshall fought for Klugman.

In his 2005 book “Tony and Me: A Story of Friendship,” Klugman wrote that during the first rehearsals for the TV series, Marshall told him he'd never seen him play Oscar on Broadway.

“What!” said Klugman. “Then why did you fight for me?”

“I saw you in ‘Gypsy,’ “ said Marshall. “You did a scene with Ethel Merman and I was impressed because as she was singing to you, she was spitting a lot and it was getting on your clothes and your face and in your eyes. You never even flinched. I said to myself, ‘Now that's a good actor.’ “

Although “The Odd Couple” was not a hit when it aired on ABC from 1970 to 1975, it has had a long life in syndication and forever cemented the reputation of its two stars as one of TV's great comedy teams.

In TV Guide's 1999 listing of “TV's Fifty Greatest Characters Ever,” Felix and Oscar ranked No. 12.

“Many acting tandems have played Neil Simon's testosterone-and-teacup duo over the years on stage and screen,” the magazine observed. “But Tony Randall and Jack Klugman are the Felix and Oscar we love most. For five unflaggingly creative seasons, they were the most evenly matched ‘Odd Couple' imaginable.”

Although Randall claimed he was “very little like” Felix, Klugman said in a 1996 interview with The Times, that he was “pretty close” to Oscar.

In fact, when members of the wardrobe department initially sought to outfit the unkempt Oscar, they looked no further than Klugman himself.

“They paid me $360 for everything in my closet, and I still made a profit on the deal,” he told Sports Illustrated in 2005.

As Oscar, Klugman won Emmys in 1971 and 1973 for outstanding continued performance by an actor in a leading role in a comedy series.

After “The Odd Couple” ended its run in 1975, Klugman said the last thing on his mind was doing another TV series.

Having “spent five years in the best situation comedy ever devised” and having worked with Randall, “the nicest guy in this business,” Klugman said, he turned down one pilot series script after another, particularly those for sitcoms.

But when he received the script for “Quincy, M.E.,” he said, he saw “potential in it — the gimmick of a doctor who solves crime for the police by medical and scientific deduction. It was not just another cop show.”

And with “Quincy, M.E.” which ran on NBC from 1976 to 1983 and earned Klugman four Emmy nominations, he saw a way to raise issues such as incest, child abuse, drunk driving and elderly abuse.

“I'm a muckraker,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1993. “I saw the possibilities in ‘Quincy': We could entertain with what was essentially a good murder mystery but also do important shows on important subjects. This was why I got into the business.”

One of six children, Klugman was born in Philadelphia on April 27, 1922. His father, a financially struggling house painter, died when Klugman was 12. A year later, after a stint selling newspapers, Klugman began taking horse bets to earn extra money.

“The dealer said, ‘These guys will give you slips of paper. Just put them in the tin,'“ he recalled in a 1971 interview with The Times. “Then I was taking bets on the phone.”

A lifelong track aficionado, Klugman later owned a horse farm in Temecula, and his racehorse, Jaklin Klugman, finished third in the 1980 Kentucky Derby.

Back home in 1945 after serving in the Army during World War II, Klugman lost the $3,000 he had saved in U.S. savings bonds by betting on baseball games. Worse, he owed $500 to a loan shark and faced serious bodily injury unless he made a payment within three days.

Unable to come up with the cash, Klugman skipped town and moved to Pittsburgh, where he was accepted into the drama department of what is now Carnegie Mellon University. A few years later he moved to New York, where he landed parts in off-Broadway and summer stock.

He appeared in films such as “Days of Wine and Roses” and “Goodbye, Columbus,” and also starred in two short-lived situation comedies: “Harris Against the World” and “You Again?”

In 1989, Klugman, a heavy smoker, underwent surgery for cancer of the larynx in which the center of his right vocal cord was removed. Afterward, the actor famous for his raspy growl initially was unable to speak above a whisper.

After going public with his story a year-and-a-half later, he worked with voice specialist Gary Catona who put Klugman on a regimen of daily vocal exercises to strengthen his left vocal cord so that it could stretch to touch what was left of his right vocal cord and produce a sound.

His old friend Randall also played a key role in his return to acting in 1991.

After beginning his vocal exercises, Randall called Klugman to suggest that they do a one-night benefit performance of “The Odd Couple” on Broadway for Randall's new National Actors Theatre.

“I said to Tony, ‘I can't even talk. I don't know how I can do it,' “ Klugman recalled in a 1993 interview with the Chicago Tribune.

But, as he wrote in his memoir, after six months of working on his voice “like Rocky worked on his body,” the whisper “became a sound, and in time, the sound became a little voice. But was it enough to perform on Broadway?”

Nervous about facing an audience and hating the way he sounded, Klugman, who wore a small microphone on stage, was encouraged after getting his first laugh.

At the end of the performance, he took his bow to a standing ovation.

“After that, I knew I was back,” he said.

Klugman married actress and comedienne Brett Somers in 1953. They had been separated for many years when she died in 2007.

In addition to son Adam, he is survived by his wife, Peggy; son David; and two grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements are pending.

McClellan is a former staff writer.

news.obits@latimes.com

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Army Goes Goth With 'Super-Black' Materials

Get ready to break out the eyeliner and the candelabras, because the Army is going goth.

In its latest round of solicitations for small businesses, the Army is asking for proposals for super-black material. That is, material so black that it absorbs 99 percent of all light. But it isn’t really black paint, exactly. The plan is to use either an “antireflective coating or surface treatment process for metals” to absorb stray light “in the ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and far-infrared regions.” This, the Army hopes, will boost the quality of high-resolution cameras, while also cooling down sensitive electronics. Or to put it another way: The Army needs the color black to reflect its icy-cold heart.

Another curious thing is that the program is being run out of the Army’s Program Executive Office Ammunition at the Picatinny Arsenal, a main center for the Pentagon’s experiments in all sorts of weapons: from rifles and tank cannons to directed-energy weapons. But the purpose of the solicitation isn’t much more specific than described. “Simply put, it’s too early yet to speculate on where the technology(s) will go,” Frank Misurelli, an Army spokesman at Picatinny said in a statement provided to Danger Room. ”Possibly in a few months, after an contract has been awarded, more information may become available.”

But for whatever the Army wants to fade to black, it seems that regular black isn’t good enough. This is because most black paint will absorb only around 90-95 percent of light, with the other 5-10 percent reflected back outwards. For a high-resolution camera, that stray light can bounce back into the lens and interfere with the quality of an image. It’s even a problem for NASA’s ultra-deep-space sensors. In the extreme coldness of space, black paint turns a silver-y color, which increases heat and can interfere with infrared-detecting instruments.

But wait, doesn’t black get really hot when hit with light, like wearing black clothes during the summer? The answer is: sorta. Black is really good at absorbing heat, but is also really good at radiating heat away. This is why cooling fins, radiators and engines for cars and trucks are often painted black. In 2011, NASA developed a carbon-nanotube coating that absorbed between 98-99.5 percent of light, depending on the wavelength. Nor do the coating’s thin layers of nanotubes change color in extreme cold. They absorb more light, and help radiate heat away from instruments, keeping them cold.

The Army could go another route. A second option uncovered by Britain’s National Physical Laboratory involves immersing an object in a solution of nickel and sodium for several hours, which blackens the color, and then taking it out and dunking it in nitric acid for a few seconds. According to New Scientist, this creates an alloy pock-marked with tiny microscopic craters that prevent light from bouncing away.

Finally, the Army also hopes to expand the materials to “optical glass surfaces” — camera lenses, in other words — while testing to see whether “it will be able to survive in a military environment.” The material should also come in “multiple surface colors” and be able to “selectively exhibit earth color instead of broadband absorption.” And another hope is to use the materials to absorb water to cool down equipment. See, it’s tough out there being goth, but it doesn’t mean you can’t do it in comfort.

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Holiday music stops at Irving Berlin’s NY door

NEW YORK (AP) — A caroling group that for 35 years has performed the Irving Berlin classic “White Christmas” on Christmas Eve outside the New York City home where he lived has cancelled the tradition.

A group spokesman says the plans were abruptly cancelled last week for lack of space at the Manhattan home, which now serves as the Luxembourg consulate.

The tradition started in the late 1970s with one cabaret singer outside the home. In 1983, Berlin invited the singers inside for cocoa and cookies.

Berlin died in 1989 at age 99.

Luxembourg Consul-General Jean-Claude Knebeler tells the New York Post the ballroom where the group performed is filled with office equipment because the consulate expanded. He says he hopes the tradition resumes in another year in the consulate’s library.

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News Analysis: Getting Polio Campaigns Back on Track

How in the world did something as innocuous as the sugary pink polio vaccine turn into a flash point between Islamic militants and Western “crusaders,” flaring into a confrontation so ugly that teenage girls — whose only “offense” is that they are protecting children — are gunned down in the streets?

Nine vaccine workers were killed in Pakistan last week in a terrorist campaign that brought the work of 225,000 vaccinators to a standstill. Suspicion fell immediately on factions of the Pakistani Taliban that have threatened vaccinators in the past, accusing them of being American spies.

Polio eradication officials have promised to regroup and try again. But first they must persuade the killers to stop shooting workers and even guarantee safe passage.

That has been done before, notably in Afghanistan in 2007, when Mullah Muhammad Omar, spiritual head of the Afghan Taliban, signed a letter of protection for vaccination teams. But in Pakistan, the killers may be breakaway groups following no one’s rules.

Vaccination efforts are also under threat in other Muslim regions, although not this violently yet.

In Nigeria, another polio-endemic country, the new Islamic militant group Boko Haram has publicly opposed it, although the only killings that the news media have linked to polio were those of two police officers escorting vaccine workers. Boko Haram has killed police officers on other missions, unrelated to polio vaccinations.

In Mali, extremists took over half of the country in May, declaring an Islamic state. Vaccination is not an issue yet, but Mali had polio cases as recently as mid-2011, and the virus sometimes circulates undetected.

Resistance to polio vaccine springs from a combination of fear, often in marginalized ethnic groups, and brutal historical facts that make that fear seem justified. Unless it is countered, and quickly, the backlash threatens the effort to eradicate polio in the three countries where it remains endemic: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

In 1988, long before donors began delivering mosquito nets, measles shots, AIDS pills, condoms, deworming drugs and other Western medical goods to the world’s most remote villages, Rotary International dedicated itself to wiping out polio, and trained teams to deliver the vaccine.

But remote villages are often ruled by chiefs or warlords who are suspicious not only of Western modernity, but of their own governments.

The Nigerian government is currently dominated by Christian Yorubas. More than a decade ago, when word came from the capital that all children must swallow pink drops to protect them against paralysis, Muslim Hausas in the far-off north could be forgiven for reacting the way the fundamentalist Americans of the John Birch Society did in the 1960s when the government in far-off Washington decreed that, for the sake of children’s teeth, all drinking water should have fluoride.

The northerners already had grievances. In 1996, the drug company Pfizer tested its new antibiotic, Trovan, during a meningitis outbreak there. Eleven children died. Although Pfizer still says it was not to blame, the trial had irregularities, and last year the company began making payments to victims.

Other rumors also spring from real events.

In Pakistan, resistance to vaccination, low over all, is concentrated in Pashtun territory along the Afghan border and in Pashtun slums in large cities. Pashtuns are the dominant tribe in Afghanistan but a minority in Pakistan among Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis and other ethnic groups. Many are Afghan refugees and are often poor and dismissed as medieval and lawless.

Pakistan’s government is friendly with the United States while the Pashtuns’ territory in border areas has been heavily hit by American Taliban-hunting drones, which sometimes kill whole families.

So, when the Central Intelligence Agency admitted sponsoring a hepatitis vaccination campaign as a ruse to get into a compound in Pakistan to confirm that Osama bin Laden was there, and the White House said it had contemplated wiping out the residence with a drone missile, it was not far-fetched for Taliban leaders to assume that other vaccinators worked for the drone pilots.

Even in friendly areas, the vaccine teams have protocols that look plenty suspicious. If a stranger knocked on a door in Brooklyn, asked how many children under age 5 were at home, offered to medicate them, and then scribbled in chalk on the door how many had accepted and how many refused — well, a parent might worry.

In modern medical surveys — though not necessarily on polio campaigns — teams carry GPS devices so they can find houses again. Drones use GPS coordinates.

The warlords of Waziristan made the connection specific, barring all vaccination there until Predator drones disappeared from the skies.

Dr. Bruce Aylward, a Canadian who is chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization, expressed his frustration at the time, saying, “They know we don’t have any control over drone strikes.”

The campaign went on elsewhere in Pakistan — until last week.

The fight against polio has been hampered by rumors that the vaccine contains pork or the virus that causes AIDS, or is a plot to sterilize Muslim girls. Even the craziest-sounding rumors have roots in reality.

The AIDS rumor is a direct descendant of Edward Hooper’s 1999 book, “The River,” which posited the theory — since discredited — that H.I.V. emerged when an early polio vaccine supposedly grown in chimpanzee kidney cells contaminated with the simian immunodeficiency virus was tested in the Belgian Congo.

The sterilization claim was allegedly first made on a Nigerian radio station by a Muslim doctor upset that he had been passed over for a government job. The “proof” was supposed to be lab tests showing it contained estrogen, a birth control hormone.

The vaccine virus is grown in a broth of live cells; fetal calf cells are typical. They may be treated with a minute amount of a digestive enzyme, trypsin — one source of which is pig pancreas, which could account for the pork rumor.

In theory, a polio eradicator explained, if a good enough lab tested the vaccine used at the time the rumor started, it might have detected estrogen from the calf’s mother, but it would have been far less estrogen than is in mother’s milk, which is not accused of sterilizing anyone. The trypsin is supposed to be washed out.

In any case, polio vaccine is now bought only from Muslim countries like Indonesia, and Muslim scholars have ruled it halal — the Islamic equivalent of kosher.

Reviving the campaign will mean quelling many rumors. It may also require adding other medical “inducements,” like deworming medicine, mosquito nets or vitamin A, whose immediate benefits are usually more obvious.

But changing mind-sets will be a crucial step, said Dr. Aylward, who likened the shootings of the girls to those of the schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn.

More police involvement — what he called a “bunkerized approach” — would not solve either America’s problem or Pakistan’s, he argued. Instead, average citizens in both countries needed to rise up, reject the twisted thinking of the killers and “generate an understanding in the community that this kind of behavior is not acceptable.”

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U.S. Tennis Assn. reinstates umpire who was suspended

Lois "Lolo" Goodman was reinstated last week as a professional tennis umpire in the wake of a decision by prosecutors to drop charges that she fatally bludgeoned her husband, her attorney said.

Goodman, a fixture on the U.S. Tennis Assn. circuit for a couple of decades, had been sidelined since October after her arrest in New York on suspicion of killing her husband, Alan Goodman, 80.

Last month, prosecutors decided to drop a murder charge against Goodman without revealing their reasons. The move was made before her defense attorneys submitted a pathology report disputing coroner's findings that her husband was deliberately killed and citing a heart attack as the cause of his death.

"This is a wonderful holiday gift for Lolo and her family," Kelly Gerner, one of her attorneys, said Friday after the announcement of her reinstatement. "Lolo thanks the USTA for their prompt action, and she wishes a happy holiday to her many friends and supporters."

Goodman's arrest in August made international headlines when police apprehended her in New York as she was on her way to referee qualifying matches for the U.S. Open.

Her lawyers said the USTA informed her Friday morning that they were lifting her suspension.

Although prosecutors have dropped the charges, Ed Winter, deputy chief of coroner's investigations, said Alan Goodman's April 17 death remains listed as a homicide and it remains an open police case.

Goodman, 70, said she found her husband dead at their Woodland Hills home. She told authorities that she came home and found a bloody trail up the stairs to their bedroom. She believed he had fallen, then made his way to bed. Responding officers believed her and the home was cleaned up.

But three days later, a coroner's investigator visited the mortuary to sign the death certificate and reported he found "deep penetrating blunt force trauma" on Alan Goodman's head and ears. The observations led to a homicide investigation. In a search warrant, a detective described how investigators had found blood throughout the home.

Lois Goodman's lawyers later revealed that the tennis umpire's DNA wasn't found on the alleged murder weapon, a coffee cup. She also passed a defense-arranged polygraph test conducted by a former FBI examiner, according to her lawyers.

On the day the case was dismissed, Goodman said: "I feel wonderful!"

"I want to thank my family and my attorneys, my friends. Their support has been wonderful. And I want to thank the D.A.'s office for doing the right thing. I have always maintained my innocence."

richard.winton@latimes.com

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