Oooh! Ooooh! Pug, it is your lucky day. I have sitting right here on my desk a 1938 hardback copy of “The Trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray,” from the American Trials series. I’ll be happy to drop it in the mail to you: get Tuba or Ike or Cajun to give you my e-mail address, so I can get your mailing address.
—Lady Bountiful
Get out! Do you really? I’d sure like to get a gander at your bookshelves, Eve – what a treasure trove! I’ll contact Ike and give you some leeway to change your mind, too. I wouldn’t want to part with some rare old tome like that.
Oh, no prob, hon—It’s the complete trial transcript, plus a 70-page background on the case, and several pages of photos. One of those books that’s fascinating to read ONCE, but I’m never going to read it again. I was just going to donate it to the library or something, so I’m delighted it can go to someone who really wants it.
Now . . . Did Hauptmann really kidnap the Lindbergh baby? Were Sacco & Vanzetti guilty? Sam Shepard? Barbara Graham?
P.S. Did anyone else read Pug’s sentence as, “Since I’m a legal secretary, I have access to a big law library full of coleslaw”?
So I picked up Trackdown: The Search For The Identity Of The Mad Trapper. I haven’t read the whole thing yet to see how Dick North put it together, but he’s saying that Albert Johnson looks to have been Johnny Johnson, a bank robber and all 'round Bad Man from North Dakota. 
I’ll get it started.
No. The guy was a German carpenter—a GERMAN carpenter. Do you KNOW any German carpenters? Did you SEE that ladder? Absolutely shameful :rolleyes:
Probably not. My money’s on the Morrelli gang.
No way. The blood evidence, both DNA and the spray pattern, argue against him being the murderer.
I’ll get back to you.
I like learning about true crime stories but rarely buy books on them. I’ve read some and many that I’ve come across just aren’t well-written. There’s one more recent one that I liked, Perfect Murder, Perfect Town by Lawrence Schiller - it focused on the ‘atmosphere’ of Boulder, the various law enforcement agencies involved, and so on. There’s also a certain Jack the Ripper book that I really enjoyed, very analytical, but the title and author escape me at the moment. For a rather conspiracy theory slant on it, the graphic novel From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell is excellent; the movie from last year of the same name was apparently based off it, but I never saw the film so I don’t know how faithful it was.
The above-mentioned Crime Library site is excellent; one of my guilty pleasures on the topic.
Oh, and this always weirds people out, but here goes - the boyfriend of one of my sisters-in-law is an artist, and he painted the picture of Ed Gein that I have in my living room. It looks like a funky piece of pop art unless you recognize the man in the portrait. It was one of a series of “hero”/“anti-hero” portraits that he’d done; we thought it was neat and he ended up giving it to us.
Denise—Ewwww. That’s almost as creepy as John Waters’ having a John Wayne Gacy painting and a portrait of Gertrude Baniszewski in his home.
Re: Sam Sheppard
Thanks for the reminder!
The last I had heard, SS was being exhumed for DNA testing, so I was glad to be reminded to do a little searching now and find out what had become of it.
So, the DNA points to the window washer after all? What a surprise! [irony] After all, Eberling had bludgeoned to death an elderly woman in 1989 and had a history of psychotic behavior. Seems he also boasted to other inmates that he had killed Mrs. Sheppard. It’s a pity that Dr. Sheppard’s son had to fight so hard to have this testing done.
-erk- I just had the windows washed by a service myself, and I was alone in the house at the time. gulp
Link, please?
Here are a few links:
http://www.crfc.org/americanjury/lessons/issues/sheppard_lesson4.html
http://instruction.jal.cc.il.us/wcb/schools/01/2/bmccabe/1/forums/forum4/messages/20.html
http://www.cnn.com/US/9803/05/dna.sheppard/
http://www.time.com/time/community/transcripts/chattr031298.html
Of course, I feel duty bound to mention the excellent staff report by John Corrado.
Actually, there was an…interesting little debate going on in the Baltimore CityPaper for a few weeks. See, on the cover of the Valentine’s Day edition, which featured childish hearts and arrows and scribbles, there was a little “Fatty (heart) Virginia” scribble at the bottom.
Well, of course someone wrote in positively angst-ridden that the editors had joked about a very serious murder, and filled his letter with the party line about Fatty being so fat he suffocated her during a rape. But then someone wrote in arguing that NO, actually Fatty was acquitted, and blah blah blah…it went on for a few weeks. Goes to show that some mysteries will just never be solved.
Alas, you misunderstood me, Eve: I never said I thought Mysteries & Scandals was good! I think it’s juicy and gossipy and campy and I love it for those reasons. However, I must have missed that “perversion” comment. I know a lot of things were alluded to, but I never heard AJ get downright judgemental.
Ann Rule did not set her daughter up with Ted Bundy. She mentioned in the book that “if my daughters had been older, or I had been younger.” Also, she signed the contract to write her first book on the “Ted” serial murders months before Bundy was arrested! So, she was researching a bunch of murders being committed by someone she knew before she knew that she knew the actual killer. She denied for years that Ted was guilty, but finally realized he was.
As for “Small Sacrifices,” it was a horribly biased book. If you read anything else on the case, there are too many discrepencies in the evidence to say if Diane Downs did it or not. How do you shoot your three children and yourself, then get rid of the gun so completely that it’s never found, and then show up at the hospital with no gun residue on your hands and no blood on your clothes? In Small Sacrifices, Rule never mentions any of the defense testimony. The prosecution had more holes than O.J.
Odd that we have seen four totally unsolved murders in five years–Nichole, Ron, JonBenet and probably Chandra.
Well, I need to make a library run this weekend anyway, so thanks to everyone in this thread who tossed out suggestions and especially to Eve for starting the whole thing.
“Odd that we have seen four totally unsolved murders in five years–Nichole, Ron, JonBenet and probably Chandra.”
—Hmmph. I am willing to listen to opinions about JonBenet, but the murders of Nicole, Ron and Chandra are hardly “unsolved.” Just “unpunished.”
I am a recovering true crime junkie. If you are interested in historical crimes John Douglas’s book “The Cases that Haunt Us”. It is very good. He says that Lizzie is definetly guilty. That Hauptmann probably didn’t act alone and the Black Dahlia was probably killed by that drifter who died in the fire.
At the crime library link there is a interview with a profiler who says that Shepard was guilty, it is very interesting, he says the crime scene was staged.
Having done some research I think that Sacco was guilty and Vanzetti probably innocent.
IMHO, the JonBenet case also qualifies as one of those “unpunished” murders. But I digress.
My question is about the Chandra Levy case. Why would you consider this case one of the “unpunished”? I was under the impression that Gary Condit was being investigated for initially lying about his relationship with Chandra, but I never heard that there was actually any evidence linking him in any way to her disappearance. Even the police department investigating the case have said that Condit is not a suspect. I haven’t heard of any other suspects being named, so I assumed that Chandra’s disappearance is in the “unsolved” category.
As for Ron and Nicole, we all know that O.J did it. He just got away with it. But I believe that his crime will not go unpunished forever. After all, he is going to have to answer to God or Buddha or whoever is up there in the heavens someday.
As for the OP, yep, I’m definitely a true crime buff. My mother made the mistake of allowing me to read “Helter Skelter” when I was 12 years old. I have been hooked ever since.
Shadowfox—I was actually willing to give Gary Condit the benefit of a doubt and assumed he was just the world’s unluckiest adulterer. UNTIL I saw his interview with Connie Chung: he came across as very guilty and shifty and downright creepy. He may very well be innocent of murder, but he came across as knowing SOMEthing.
As far as O.J. being punished in the “afterlife,” this is where I kinda envy you religious people. As an athiest, I feel that, unfortunately, bad people DO get away with bad things and are never called to account for 'em.
One of the worst/best out there is “Final Truth” by Peewee Gaskins. Peewee was a serial killer in South Carolina in the 1970s. This autoboigraphy was dictated by Peewee himself as he waited on Death Row. Peewee killed both acquaintences (he called these “Serious Murders”) and strangers (his “Coastal Kills”).
You won’t find much on him on the Internet, but the book is still in print. Libraries here in SC can’t keep the book - their copies keep turning up missing!