(Pictured: Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd)
LAKELAND, Fla.—Ellen Beth Wachs had a problem: Noisy neighbors.
Seems the 10-year-old son of next-door neighbor Otto Lehman began playing basketball outside her window early one morning last week, and after Wachs opened her bedroom window, said that she was feeling sick, that the noise was bothering her, and asked him to stop, he did ... for a while.
But pretty soon, the boy was joined on the makeshift court by his dad, who, according to the story on ABC-7.com, "asserted his son's right to play the game."
But then, according to an affidavit filed with the Polk County Sheriff's Office, "Wachs then started making moans and other sounds that simulated sex until the boy and his father finally stopped playing basketball and went inside."
According to one report, "She repeated 'Oh, John,' gradually saying it louder and louder through an open window."
Of course, they called the cops, who came and arrested her for "simulating a sexual act in the presence of a child"—a second-degree felony that could earn Wachs 15 years in the slammer.
The problem was compounded by—some would say "caused by"—the fact that Wachs, a former attorney, is the legal coordinator for the Atheists of Florida and who, according to the ABC-7 news report, had earlier objected to Sheriff Grady Judd and his deputies digging up their station's old basketball hoops and donated them to the local church.
Judd—who's now infamous for the persecution of adult businesses in his county, and who recently flew deputies all the way to Colorado to arrest Philip Greaves, the man who published The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-Lover's Code of Conduct, on child porn charges—apparently put Wachs on his shit list, and in late March busted her for "the unauthorized practice of law" for putting "Esq." after her name when signing some letters. It's unlawful in Florida to use, without proper authorization, a "name, title, addition or description" to make it appear that someone is a practicing lawyer, though judges usually let first offenders off with a warning.
It's unclear whether Wachs did any jail time following her arrest for impersonating an attorney (even though she had been one), but after "Assistant State Attorney Brad Copley argued [at her bail hearing] that Wachs posed a threat to her neighbors, and Otto Lehman testified that her actions against him and his family have steadily escalated," Circuit Judge John K. Stargel set her bail at $6,000 and she spent the weekend in the local lock-up.
"I don't think this is going to stop," Lehman said at Friday's hearing. "Her behavior has gotten increasingly worse. I don't know what the next step will be."
Yeah; after you've orgasmed at somebody, can chopping off their heads with a machete in the middle of the night be far behind?
"Don't approach them," Stargel ordered. "Don't yell towards them, make any gestures towards them. Don't attempt to make any noises or anything that would be unusual for what somebody would do inside their own home."
Orgasms are "unusual" noises for someone to "do inside their own home"?
"I think at a fundamental level this is a reaction to her personal, political or religious positions, and I think that all of this flows from her speaking out in that context," her attorney, John Ligouri, told local news outlets. "No one observed any sexual activity occur. No one saw her engage in any illegal or illicit sexual activity."
As if that matters in Polk County!
