What True Crime Story Fascinates You Most?

Cafe Society
21

Some people also think he had ties to a sex ring that included John Wayne Gacy. I read both the book about Corll, “The Man With The Candy”, and a more recent book about Gacy called “Boys Enter The House” within the past few years.

I really don’t remember Corll’s arrest (I was 9 years old at the time) but I was in high school when Gacy was arrested, and some of the megajocks had some kind of weird obsession with him that actually did lead to some disciplinary actions because they were so disruptive in class because of it.

Jonestown’s 46th anniversary was a couple days ago, and new information continues to emerge about it. I read a few years ago that some people have wondered if Jim Jones’ fevers and paranoia towards the end of his life may have been due to AIDS, a disease that was not identified until 1981 but is now known to have existed in the Bay Area since the mid 1970s. Before he moved his compound to Guyana, he was extremely promiscuous, mostly with men, and was known to have raped a number of male followers. Of course, none of them reported it, because who would believe a story like that, especially back then?

22

One theory about Jack the Ripper is that they should actually have been looking for Jill the Ripper. At that time and place, many midwives, who were almost exclusively women, also did abortions, and one of the younger victims was pregnant. A lone woman may not have been able to do that herself, but if she had accomplices? It’s something to think about.

23

I’m reading a book right now, Eye of the Chickenhawk, that goes into that possible connection and the general nature of pedophile sex-trafficking in the '70s. It’s a self-published work that really could have used some proofreading, but it’s very extensively sourced and includes some really chilling things I wouldn’t have imagined could be real, like an excerpt from a New York Times Magazine article about a peepshow in Times Square that was showing super 8’s of child rape, or that Harry Connick Sr. may have been a closeted gay man with a thing for boys. It’s bewildering to imagine that such a loathsome business was operating practically in the open even before the days of the internet.

24

If I could travel back in time to find definitive evidence in an unsolved crime case, I’d set my time machine to Whitechapel in 1888 and set up so that Jack the Ripper could be identified.

Such bizarre violence, a wildly different cast of suspects, a variety of competent and asinine investigators and doctors - for me it’s a compelling mystery that will remain eternally unsolved.

The true crime story that fascinates me the least is possibly the most famous missing person case - that of the 1930 disappearance of Judge Crater. It’s hard to care exactly what happened, who likely did him in and for what reason.

25

The Black Dahlia. The police had tons of evidence (mostly mailed to newspapers by the killer) but could never come close to solving the case. When one looks at the multitude of similar unsolved murders in LA at the time, you get a real idea of just how bad the LAPD and other mid-century PDs were at catching sex killers.

26

It may not be true crime, per se, but I’d like to know what happened to the Yuba City Five the night they vanished. On February 24th, 1978, a group of five young men, ages 24-30, all of whom suffered from some variety of mental illness or were otherwise just considered “slow”, drove from their homes in Yuba City, CA, up to Chico to attend a college basketball game. They were seen at the game and buying snacks at a convenience store afterward, but never returned home, and several days later their car was found abandoned on a mountain road 50+ miles off course from their destination. There was nothing wrong with the car and there was gas in the tank, and there had been a few inches of snow but not enough that the car should’ve been stuck. Of the five men, however, there was no sign.

In June, a group of bikers travelling through the area spotted a disused forest service cabin with a broken window, about 17 miles from where the abandoned car had been found. Inside they found the emaciated body of one of the men wrapped up in several layers of blankets. It was estimated he’d died of starvation sometime in April. There was plenty of food in the cabin that hadn’t been touched, and the gas heater had never been turned on. His shoes were missing and the shoes of one of the other men were found in the cabin.

Subsequent searches turned up the skeletal remains of the other three men in the woods between the car and the cabin, where they had apparently died of exposure. The fifth man, the one whose shoes had been found in the cabin, was never found, also a flashlight and three blankets were later discovered nearby, implying that he’d put his friend’s larger shoes onto his own frostbitten feet and gone out looking for the other three only to succumb himself. There was a potential witness on the mountain road that night who thought he saw a crowd of people gathered around the car, implying that they may have been chased or otherwise forced up the mountain, but he had suffered a mild heart attack and was lying in his own car’s backseat just trying not to lose consciousness so it’s anyone’s guess if what he saw was real or not.

Why did they drive into the mountains? Why did they abandon the car? Nobody knows.

27

Assuming the father did sexually abuse them, why did they kill their mother? Do they think she knew and never did anything about it? If there is no evidence of sexual abuse how do we know it really happened?

28

I never followed the case so I can only speculate about the mother (I assume the matter was addressed during their trial, though).

However, the mother could very much have been complicit in what was happening. The boys were there - we were not. Perhaps they begged her for help and she dismissed them as “making stuff up.”

As to “no evidence of sexual abuse” - as I said, I didn’t follow the case. But I thought that evidence WAS brought out at trial? If there was literally no evidence at all, they either had piss-poor representation, a weird jury, a biased judge, or the prosecution was exceptionally talented - maybe some combination of all of those. Or, perhaps the story was entirely fabricated. I don’t know; perhaps you have researched the story enough to have a thoughtful opinion.

Still, dismissing abuse claims out of hand seems exceptionally cruel. How do you know for sure that the boys were NOT abused? (Not a rhetorical question; maybe you followed the prosecution’s case and found it very convincing.)

29

I watched a doc series a few months ago and they didn’t directly address the mother question, or perhaps I somehow missed it. As far as evidence goes, I think the only “evidence” of abuse they had was from their therapy sessions, and while that would be admissible in court, that’s not what I consider hard evidence. The abuse supposedly happened for essentially their entire childhood, but nobody saw anything or suspected anything. Perhaps the mother did know and refused to do anything, unfortunately we’ll never really know.

They were both old enough to report it to the authorities or run away, and they did neither. IMO, sexual abusers should be tried in a court of law, and not murdered in revenge.

The one thing going for them is if abuse wasn’t happening then what was their motive? Obviously they would inherit their money, but they admitted doing it so it wasn’t like they tried to get away and hide. There’s no way for them to get their parent’s money if they are on the run from the law, and that’s why this case fascinates me.

30

The Hall-Mills murders. It was the Trial of the Century until the Lindbergh kidnapping became the Trial of the Century. Dead Preacher. Dead choir lady. Pig Woman on a hospital bed. What more do you want?

31

I’m fascinated by a number of them. Here they are in no particular order:

  • The Mark Hoffman case. He was the forger and bomber who killed two people in Salt Lake City and he was likely going to murder a third but injured himself with the final bomb. He wasn’t a very accomplished bomber, the two killings notwithstanding, but it turned out he was a prolific and skilled forger.

  • The Blooding (as Wambaugh called the investigation into the Narborough Footpath murders.

  • The Aum Shinrikyo murders. These killing were not limited to just the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attacks. What got me interested in it was the fact I was stationed near Tokyo in 1995, and also Japan is not known for having a lot of murder cases, and certainly not many mass murder cases.

  • Then there’s South Korea’s own “Jack the Ripper”, aka Lee Chun-Jae, perpetrator of the Hwaseong Serial Murders. South Korea’s another country not known for having a lot of mass murders. It’s still counted as the largest criminal case in South Korean history.

That’s enough for now.

32

Abused children keep secrets, especially sexual abuse secrets. And adults look the other way.

Hell, I know this from personal experience - my junior high band instructor was … well, let’s just say he touched my genitals and leave it at that.

I was in 7th grade, relatively well adjusted, and … I SAID NOTHING. Years later, I spoke to a bandmate, who said, “yeah, he had his technique for different instruments; I was a clarinet player and he used to lift up my skirt on the pretext of drying reeds.” So it happened to her and she said nothing, and she was aware of other students who obviously said nothing. (How do you think pedophiles get away with their behavior? They capitalize on the natural tendency to say nothing.)

To top it all off, I was friends with the guidance counselor at that school, and stayed in touch for a few years after I graduated. While I was a college student (after the band instructor had retired), I told him, “You know, that Mr. X touched the girls inappropriately; I wish I’d said something at the time.”

And what did HE say? “Oh yeah, I got that vibe from him. I think he was handsy with the boys, too.” (Thus ending our friendship - I never spoke to him again.)

The above is 100% true, I assure you. And no one involved - me, my bandmate, the guidance counselor - was under particular duress. Yet none of us did a damn thing.

And that was pretty tame stuff compared to what the Menendez brothers apparently went through as children. I should think that any rational, compassionate person would concede the possibility that they were too intimidated to say anything. General evidence about human behavior certainly supports that this is an entirely credible explanation for what happened.

33

The Menendez boys have said that their mother was just as vicious as their father, albeit in different ways.

Another interesting true-crime story is that of Bobby Greenlease, who was kidnapped from his elementary school in Kansas City in the early 1950s by two people who said they were his aunt and uncle, and the school personnel had no reason to doubt them and released him to them. (His body was found a few days later.) As if that story wasn’t enough of a rabbit hole, what happened to the ransom money, and quite likely to the people who probably skimmed it for themselves, is equally interesting. I have a feeling this book just scratched the surface.

Equally fascinating to me, and also involving $600,000, was the murder of Madalyn O’Hair, her son, and her granddaughter whom she had adopted. That people as (in)famous as they were got almost no press after their disappearance until its first anniversary is curious, and the money was primarily in gold coins and stowed away in a suitcase in a storage unit. It was stolen by three young men who were looking for stereo equipment to fence (this was in the mid 1990s) and they treated their friends to, among other things, premier services at strip clubs and of course plenty of dope, and the only coin that was ever recovered by law enforcement was the one that one of these men had made into a necklace for his abuela who had raised him.

34

It being too cold in March for keggers in open fields on the Wisconsin/Illinois border, some of my classmates were exploring an off-season Boy Scout camp, where they discovered hanging there the nude the body of Joey Didier, a 15 year old mentally slow paperboy. The police were able to put together a list of truck drivers who ran a route that included both the abduction and discovery sites, and found among them a past sex offender. He died in prison in 2017.

For our part, a recent high school grad was able to rent a trailer on the edge of town, which became our party spot. Across the alley was a Frito Lay factory, where we’d trade a few joints for bushels of fresh, hot chips.

35

I recently read Yorkshire Ripper - The Secret Murders: The True Story of Serial Killer Peter Sutcliffe’s Reign of Terror . It is a really amazing recounting of Peter Sutcliffe’s crimes and provides compelling evidence that there were more crimes not slated to Sutcliffe than were. Amazingly the authors insist that 3 separate people were jailed for murders that they believe Sutcliffe committed.

In looking the book up to post here I discovered that there is TV documentary of the book. I will have to track that down.

36

I remember reading three or four different books about Kevin Mitnick 25-30 years ago. He was one of the first big name computer hackers, despite not coming from an IT background. All the books I remember were from the POV of the people tracking him. He was active in the Phone Phreak and Speed Seduction communities, and was regarded as more of a Social Engineer than a tech whiz. I just looked him up on Wiki and did not realize he had died recently.

37

It happened in my state, so when there was a TV movie about it, I watched because I couldn’t figure out how they thought they would get away with it. A minister’s wife dies in a “car accident” and the husband of the church secretary is murdered. It couldn’t have been a coincidence could it, that the secretary and the minister were having an affair?

38

And employees around the world are still required to view his cybersecurity training videos.

39

The disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight 370. I remember when the story first broke, how people were trying to find a logical explanation that didn’t involve some sort of great conspiracy or crime. And then as more and more details emerged, you reached the point where the most logical explanation involved a crime and deliberate cover-up.

40

The Black Dahlia case may be the one most responsible for launching the genre of “Daddy did it”, where children point fingers (or write books) claiming that their father was the killer. There have been at least two regarding the Black Dahlia - there was a 1966 book “Daddy Was The Black Dahlia Killer” and later, a retired Los Angeles homicide detective alleged that his father, George Hodel was not only the Black Dahlia killer but also connected to “dozens” of other murders (Steve Hodel authored “Black Dahlia Avenger”).

Gee thanks, kids!