True Crime Stories

A movie based on this case is the first true crime movie I remember seeing. It was 1992 and a movie called "A Killer Among Friends."  I think this case struck me so because I was not much younger when Missy when she died, although a bit older when the movie came out.  I was not so far out of high school at the time to remember just how those times were.  The older I get the more fascinating the story seems to me.  As we age and look back to our younger years we think about the things that irritated us or bothered us in those years and it just seems so silly now that we even worried or stressed about some of those things.  But, at the time things like boys, movies, style and make up were the things you cared about most.  Sure, we all had arguments with people over a boy or a girl and we may have ended relationships over them but few took it as far as Karen Severson and Laura Doyle. Missy Avila had been friends with Karen since she was a young girl of seve...

I was born in Evansville Indiana and although I always had family in the area I only lived there until I was about four years.  In 2014 when I was, shall we say, older than 40, I moved back to the area but to a small town to the east of Evansville called Newburgh.  One of the first things that I learned once moving here was that when they call this the "Tri-State" area, they really mean it.  I have literally shopped in three states in one day without issue.  Although I visited the area often, admittedly I am still getting used to where things are as well as how things seem around here.  It seems that there are several fairly notorious cases that have at least ties to the area.  I will say however, this may just appear this way as first they are "new" cases to me but also because for thirteen years prior to moving back I lived in very small town in which not only was crime not a huge thing it was not super close to any major inner city.  I lived in Whit...

As I watched this case being discussed on an episode of 48 Hours recently I kept asking myself why I did not know this case, although the more I saw the picture of Amy Weidner I was convinced that I had in fact seen it several times.  I should have been very familiar and followed this case over the years.... why?  I lived in the same town as she did, Indianapolis, and although I went to a different high school she was close to my age.  Then I looked at the date and realized that although I have always, even at that age, tried to stay on top of the news, I had just entered my senior year of high school and with in a few days I started dating a guy I would eventually marry... and divorce.  It is possible that I have just blocked out that entire period of my life :).   At any rate on the day of November 13, 1989, sixteen year old Amy Weidner was home from school because her two year old daughter was sick.  Her mother, Gloria, had attempted to call her severa...

Hopefully you are already a reader of this blog so you know that most of the cases that I write about involve murder.  Sure, there have been a few in which that may not be a forgone conclusion but either there has been a death of some sort, or in cases of people who have disappeared they are most often presumed dead.  This case is different than those, and although there were apparently some deaths, possibly related, murder was never a word used, nor was it charged. No, because the crime here was almost bigger than murder. Bigger than murder you say? Yes, I know it seems impossible but this crime, perpetrated by one woman who was aided (some say unknowingly) by very influential people affected the lives of thousands of people.  In fact, the effects of these crimes are still evident today, nearly 65 years later.   Georgia (born Beulah George) Tann was born in 1891 in Mississippi.  It was a time of repression when it came to women.  Women did not ...

When I was doing my research on the case of Amy and Scott Fandel I came across this case and it sounded quite interesting.  The truth is that this case, may or may not even be a crime.  It really is unknown what happened to five of George and Jennie Sodder's ten children.  The difference in this case, as opposed to the Fandel case, there does seem to be more options, although many believe they are not reasonable ones.  While in the Fandel case, their mother came home to find a few odd things and the children simply gone, in this case there was a fire at the Sodder home in the middle of the night and no one ever saw five of the children again, at least not officially.  Keep in mind that it appears this case has almost become an urban legend in a sense so some of the facts are difficult to determine a bit, although admittedly I think they are easier than some of the other older cases I have covered, especially those in the yellow journalism era. In the middle of...