Antonin Scalia

Antonin Gregory Scalia graduated first in his class from St. Francis Xavier High School, a Jesuit military academy, in Manhattan in 1953. In 1957 Scalia was valedictorian at Georgetown University. In 1960 he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. He was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 and confirmed by the Senate in a 98-0 vote.

Scalia went on to distinguish himself as the court's most voluble right-wing justice. Some critics consider his behavior on and off the bench as bullying. In 2004 Scalia found himself obligated to apologize to two Mississippi journalists who had had their tape recorders seized from them during one of the justice's speeches. The tapes of the speech had been erased causing an uproar among freedom of the press advocates.
 
Scalia is also known for being Clarence Thomas's main influence on the court and for being a scar-free hunting buddy of Dick Cheney's.

Clarence Thomas

Clarence Thomas graduated from St. John Vianney Minor Seminary in 1967. He was one of two African-American students at the otherwise all-white Savannah, Georgia school. He had come to the school from St. Pius, an all-African-American institution. In Thomas's 2007 memoir My Grandfather's Son, he describes his attitude during his St. John years in the caption that accompanies his 1964-1965 yearbook photo (seen above): "I was scared and serious - and determined to excel." The future conservative star and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court did excel in his education and became co-editor of the school newspaper, The Pioneer. It was in the editorial pages of the November-December 1966 issue of the paper that Thomas offered his only known contemporaneous thoughts on race relations during this period of his life:

Is it disastrous or auspicious? Well, looking back, I notice that the violence and hatred which developed from the acquisition of equality of all races seem to indicate that a disaster has gripped our country. Just to keep the records straight, I don't believe that one race is more to blame than the other. There are times when one ethnic group provokes the other until there is a violent eruption of anger and, consequently, more melees, picketing and rioting.

But why can't black and white live in harmony? This is quite a question. I am sure some Stokely Carmichaels would quite readily assert that if there were fewer George Wallaces, race could live together with no friction, while the George Wallaces would, of course, pay the same compliment to their accusers. These conclusions do not offer a solution, but on the contrary, make matters worse.

I think races would fare better if extremists would crawl back into their holes, and let the people, whome this will really affect, do just a little thinking for themselves, rather than follow the Judas goats of society into the slaughter pens of destruction. True, the intellectuals must start the ball rolling, but ignorance in the intelligengensia is not unheard of.

It's about time for the average American to rise from his easy chair and do what he really and truly believes God demands of him--time to peel off the veil of hate and contempt, and don the cloak of love (black for white and white for black). 

By the time Thomas arrived for his freshman year of college at Holy Cross in Worchester, Massachusetts in 1968, his views on racial issues were changing. A few months into his first year at Holy Cross, he helped organize the school's first Black Student Union, he started to wear army fatigues and he put a poster of Malcolm X on his dorm room wall. One of the planks of the Black Student Union charter asserted that "The Black Man does not want or need the white woman." Thomas wrote a poem around this time that called for black men to treat black women with respect - an ironic bit of verse in view of the later allegations by Anita Hill. It was also from this period of his life that the first accounts of Thomas's inappropriate discussions of sex emerge.

Several years later, at Yale Law School, Thomas's fascination with sex and pornography was even better known to his fellow students. In the 2007 biography of the justice entitled Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas, authors Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher quote several classmates on the subject of Thomas's X-rated movie fixation. Perhaps no recollection is as strong as Dan Johnson's. Johnson is featured on page 129 of the book conveying his memory of Thomas's revelation about his high regard for a certain landmark sex film: "My favorite movie of all time is Deep Throat," Johnson quotes Thomas as exclaiming. And if that weren't enough to get the point across, the future justice added, "I've seen that mother-fu**er six times." Other classmates told the authors about how Thomas would revel in descriptions of some of the things he had seen in films of the genre. Similar accounts are offered in Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson's definitive book on the Thomas confirmation drama, Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas.

Thomas's romance with porn was undiminished by the time he was a young Republican bureaucrat in Washington, D.C. in the 1980s. Indeed, it apparently flourished with the advent of inexpensive VCRs and video rental outlets. As told in Supreme Discomfort, Fred Cooke, a professional acquaintance of Thomas's, once saw the then-chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission at Graffiti, a video store near Dupont Circle, renting a particularly smutty title. Cooke told the story to his friends at the time, but despite pressure to do so, refrained from coming forward during the confirmation hearings. According to the book, Cooke felt that Thomas should have been rejected by the Senate for his judicial mediocrity, not the sideshow of his porn hobby.

Of course, Thomas managed to get through the sensational hearings of late 1991 by resolutely denying all of Anita Hill's explosive sexual harassment claims. The vote for his confirmation was an extremely close 52 to 48. Subsequent to his confirmation, Thomas and his wife, Virginia Lamp Thomas, began an image rehabilitation effort that struck some of his new colleagues on the bench as unseemly. A People magazine cover story written by Mrs. Thomas that depicted Anita Hill as a spurned, jealous woman was particularly offensive to Sandra Day O'Connor. As reported in Strange Justice, O'Connor was described by one clerk as being "aghast" at the immodest behavior.  

In 1994 Thomas broke with court decorum again by officiating right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh's marriage to an aerobics instructor (this was the third of, so far, four unions for Limbaugh). Present at the small wedding, which was held at the justice's home, were family members and two couples who served as witnesses: William and Elaine Bennett and Mary Matalin and James Carville. In 2010 Thomas settled for merely being a guest at the radio host's fourth wedding.

In the years that Thomas has been on the court, he has been an exceedingly dependable conservative voice. He is especially dismissive of cases claiming torture. This is noteworthy in part because one of Thomas's former clerks is none other than "Torture Memo" guru John C. Yoo. Professor Yoo is now shaping young legal minds at the University of California Berkeley Law School.

Towards the end of Strange Justice, the authors offer a quote from Thomas extracted from former Senator John C. Danforth's (Thomas's friend and adviser during the 1991 hearings) book Resurrection. The comment is telling in that it reflects Thomas's strategy to mask elements of his true philosophy during his confirmation battle: "if you are yourself, like [failed Supreme Court nominee] Bob Bork, you're dead."

Jeffrey R. MacDonald

Jeffrey Robert MacDonald graduated from Patchogue High School in Patchogue, New York in 1961. He was senior class president, football team co-captain and voted most likely to succeed. He won a scholarship to Princeton University and, in 1963, married his high school sweetheart, Colette Stevenson (who was pregnant with their first daughter). After earning his medical degree from Northwestern University and completing his internship, MacDonald decided he wanted to join the Army. He moved his family--he was by this time the father of two girls--to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. In 1969 MacDonald held the rank of Captain and was assigned as a Group Surgeon to the 3rd Special Forces Group (The Green Berets). It was in a house at Fort Bragg that McDonald's family would be massacred. As the sole survivor of the brutal attacks, the physician quickly became the lead suspect. 

On August 29, 1979, after nearly a decade of legal maneuvering and set-backs, Jeffrey MacDonald was convicted in a civilian court of the February 17, 1970 clubbing and stabbing murders of his pregnant wife and their two children. To this day, MacDonald claims a band of acid-crazed hippies committed the home invasion murders in which he was wounded (the prosecution contended that the Army surgeon self-inflicted his relatively superficial injuries). One of the factors that convinced MacDonald's initially supportive in-laws of his guilt was his arrogance and cavalier manner during an appearance on the Dick Cavett Show in 1970.

In 1984 Gary Cole chillingly portrayed the murderous Green Beret doctor in a TV-movie adaptation of Joe McGinniss's true crime best seller, Fatal Vision. The real Jeffrey MacDonald now resides at a federal prison in Cumberland, Maryland where he is serving three consecutive life terms (he is next up for parole in 2020 and his scheduled release date is April 5, 2071). In 2002 he married his most devoted pen-pal, Kathryn Kurichh, who runs a children's drama school in Howard County, Maryland.

Bruce Willis

Bruce Willis graduated from Penns Grove High School in Penns Grove, New Jersey in 1973. He was student council president for his senior year and was voted by his class to have "Most School Spirit." After his background role as "courtroom observer" in the 1982 Paul Newman film The Verdict, Willis went on to TV stardom in Moonlighting and to movie super-stardom in the Die Hard series. Along the way, he married actress Demi Moore and fathered three daughters with peculiar names (Rumer, Scout LaRue and Tallulah Belle). The couple is now very amicably divorced - Willis is friendly with Ashton Kutcher, his much younger replacement in the role of husband to Moore.

Willis is included on Most Likely to Kill primarily for his Soul-deadening musical alter ego, Bruno, and for his mostly awful films including Color of Night, The Jackal, Hudson Hawk and so many, many more. Oh, and for the Planet Hollywood theme restaurants, too!

Ashton Kutcher / Demi Moore

Ashton Kutcher graduated from Clear Creek-Amana High School in Tiffin, Iowa in 1996. He was active in student theater and played on the football team. He was studying biochemical engineering at the University of Iowa in 1997 when he was discovered by  a talent scout and subsequently entered the exciting world of male modeling. In 1998 he landed a long-running role on That '70s Show and quickly became a star.

In 2003 Kutcher became a latter-day Allen Funt as host of the hidden camera practical joke show Punk'd. The same year he began dating actress Demi Moore (who attended Redondo Union High School and Fairfax High in Southern California in the late 1970s, around the time Kutcher was born). The couple wed at the Los Angeles Kabbalah Centre in 2005.

In addition to being the ultimate cougar trophy, Kutcher is known for his ubiquitous Nikon camera ads, his once ceaseless Twitter promotion and a string of terrible movies including Just Married, My Boss's Daughter, What Happens In Vegas, Spread and The Killers.

Ken Starr

Kenneth Winston Starr, President Bill Clinton's chief antagonist in the 1990s, graduated from Sam Houston High School in San Antonio, Texas in 1964. Starr, the son of a Church of Christ minister, was president of his senior class and was a writer and photographer for the school's newspaper and yearbook. He was also active in theater and appeared on stage, at least once, in drag. A photograph of this youthful frivolty was resurrected by the National Enquirer during the height of the Clinton sex scandal which Starr investigated as Independent Counsel. From Duke University Law School, Starr went on to a distinguished legal career that included stints as a judge and as the Solicitor General in the George HW Bush administration. He was in private practice at the firm of Kirkland & Ellis when he was tapped to replace Robert B. Fiske as Independent Counsel in the Whitewater matter. Under Starr, and with the help of people like Linda Tripp, the Whitewater investigation turned into a salacious and extraordinarily detailed examination of Bill Clinton's sex life.

The fruits of the new Independent Counsel's snooping were presented in the sleazy tax-payer-funded page-turner known as The Starr Report. The report eventually led to Clinton's impeachment and Monica Lewinsky's short-lived careers as a best-selling author and handbag designer. Clinton survived removal from office and completed his term with record-high approval ratings. Starr became dean of the middling Pepperdine Law School and later argued in support of California's ban on same-sex marriage. He is now president of Baylor University in Waco, Texas. If anyone has the photo of Judge Starr in drag, please e-mail it to mostlikelytokill@gmail.com!

Linda Tripp

Linda Rose Carotenuto (she took her first husband Bruce M. Tripp's surname when they married in 1971) graduated from Hanover Park High School (home of the Hornets) in East Hanover, New Jersey in 1968. Ironically, the "pet peeve" she cites in her senior yearbook entry is a "certain fair-weather friend." According to Jeffrey Toobin's book on the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky saga, A Vast Conspiracy, Linda's adolescence, like Lewinsky's, was marred by the divorce of her parents. Her father, a high school teacher, had an affair with a co-worker which caused the break-up of the marriage. A year after her graduation from Hanover High, Linda was arrested for allegedly stealing cash and a watch from a Greenwood Lake, New York hotel room. When the arrest was publicized during the height of the Clinton scandal, Tripp's lawyer stated that his client was "set up" and that the charges against her had been subsequently dropped. However, according to the Smoking Gun, Tripp neglected to disclose the arrest on a 1987 Defense Department security clearance form.

It was, of course, her government secretarial jobs that allowed Ms. Tripp to meet President Clinton and, later, Monica Lewinsky. Tripp, divorced by the time she was working in the Clinton White House (she was seated just outside the office of George Stephanopoulos), became disgusted by the randy behavior of the president. In Ken Gormley's definitive account of the Clinton impeachment, The Death of American Virtue, Tripp claims that the president's adulterous liaisons in the White House were "common knowledge." Tripp was soon moved "upstairs" to work in the White House Counsel's office of Bernie Nussbaum. The impetus for this move, as recounted in Gormley's book, and perceived by Tripp, was that first lady Hillary Clinton wanted to remove temptation from her husband. Tripp, perhaps realizing the improbablity of this assertion, is quoted by Gormely as explaining: "In 1993 I looked significantly different than you've ever seen me... I was very tiny. I had long blond hair." Regardless of her appearance, Tripp, according to Gormley, was not well liked in the West Wing. She was viewed as a "woman with an attitude." By May of 1994 she was told by her supervisors that she would have to leave.

Tripp wound up in the Public Affairs office at the Pentagon where, in April of 1996, she would meet another White House cast-off, a certain lovelorn former intern. Tripp became the manipulative, conversation-taping confidante of Lewinsky, and, in time, the primary secret agent for Independent Counsel, Kenneth Starr. After the scandal broke, Tripp quickly became reviled by the majority of the American public. The pop cultural apogee of this hatred was reached when the obese actor John Goodman began portraying Tripp in a series of sketches on Saturday Night Live. In 1999 Tripp claimed to CNN's Larry King that she found most of these appearances very funny.

In the years since the impeachment, Tripp re-married, had extensive plastic surgery and now runs a year-round Christmas shop in Middleburg, Virginia.