True Crime Stories

I do not often do cases that are what I call spouse on spouse crimes.  Sadly, for someone like me who reads a lot of true crime, a spouse on spouse crime just does not have the "excitement" I am looking for and in order to blog about something I need to be "into" it.  We all know that the spouse or partner is the first person the police look at when there is a murder and more often than not they are correct, hence why they look there first. Now of course not all spouse on spouse crimes are literally committed by the other spouse, as there are plenty of "murder for hire" cases involving spouses too.  This case caught my eye though, not just in the vastness of the crimes the defendant committed but also in the legalities in which they were allowed in front of a jury. On January 15, 2002 in the town of Galena Ohio at around 7:15 in the evening 911 dispatchers received a call from Gerald "Bob" Hand.  He was reporting that an intruder had come into ...

I am almost certain that the first time I heard about this case would have been back in the late 1980's. It was featured on the show "Unsolved Mysteries" and I was an avid viewer at that time.  However, in 1989 when it was aired on the television show it probably did not catch my interest because it was still a mysterious missing persons case. Then, several years ago I found the book Darker Than Night  by Tom Henderson.  If you do not know him as an author, I highly recommend him.  If you know anything about true crime authors you know that many of the stories from Ann Rule came from the California and the upper northwestern area of the country.  Kathryn Casey (another of my favorites) writes many of her stories out of Texas and the deep south.  Henderson does a lot of cases, mainly in Michigan, but the plain states.  As you will often hear me say about cases I do not rely on one source because of course everything you see or read is almost always bi...

In the early morning of Saturday, September 24, 1977 Doris Arndt was seen leaving a bar near her home of Midland Michigan and was never seen alive again.  I heard Doris described as the "Norma Rae of Midland."  If you do not know the reference, it refers to a movie called, of course, Norma Rae.  The movie was based off a book from 1975 written by a woman named Crystal Lee Sutton.  She worked in a textile factory and a fighter for unions, which was a rare thing for a woman, but apparently Doris Arndt had those qualities herself. Doris was married and had two children but she had a rather unconventional marriage it seemed. Doris and her husband John apparently loved each other but had discovered that one thing they could not do together was go out to bars.  They had been together for over a decade and it just seems that every time they went out together the night ended badly, so they each had their own set of friends that they went out with.  On the night o...

In my opinion you cannot call yourself a true True Crime fan and not know something about the DeFeo case.  The same can be true about horror fans and the movie The Amityville Horror.  But, then again, true True Crime fans know that while the Amityville Horror movies talk about the home in which the DeFeo murders occur and touch on the murders at least a bit, neither the book or the movies are in fact True Crime.  In fact, in the years since it was released in the late 70's nearly everything has been debunked and proven to be untrue. But, then again, as I said, The Amityville Horror and the DeFeo case are two separate issues.   But, let's pretend for a moment that you do not know the story or do not know the difference.  The DeFeo murders occurred on November 13, 1974 in Amityville, Long Island, New York.  It was on that evening that Ronald DeFeo Jr. ran into a local bar, just a few blocks from his home proclaiming that he thought his parents had been sho...

As I began to research this case two other cases came to mind, The DeFeo Murders (aka The Amityville Horror murders) and the case of Charles Starkweather and his 14 year-old girlfriend, Carol Ann Fugate.  In the DeFeo case, despite the fact that Ronald DeFeo Jr was the only one convicted of the murders of his parents, two brothers and two sisters, it has been speculated and sometimes said by DeFeo that his sister, Dawn, who he admits to killing was also in on the crime.  DeFeo has claimed that he and Dawn had in fact planned to murder at least their father, but not their mother, and that he murdered her after she had moved on to their siblings.  Of course criminals blame others all the time. In the Starkweather/Fugate case it is said that Starkweather murdered Carol Ann's mother, step-father and toddler sister and when she returned home she helped hide the bodies while the two of them went on a murder spree across the upper northwest.  Starkweather, who would be ex...

I  belong to several groups on Facebook relating to true crime. In one of them the book "Echoes in the Darkness" by Joseph Wambaugh was recommended.  I am in the process of reading it now.  One of the most surprising things to me was that I had never heard of this case what so ever.  There was even a mini-series made in 1987, back when mini-series' were big, and yet I've never seen that either.  I wonder if one of the reasons I have not is that in 1992 everything in the book came into question. On Monday, June 25, 1979 the body of Susan Reinert was found in the hatchback of her car in a hotel parking lot in Harrisburg Pennsylvania.  It appeared from all the bruises that she had been beaten prior to her death.  Her body was wrapped in chains.  An autopsy revealed that she had been dosed with a massive amount of morphine. Aside from determining who had done this to Susan, the bigger question became where were her children, Karen aged 11 and Michae...