True Crime Stories

On May 7, 1976 Elk Grove Illinois police went to the home of Frank Columbo to tell him that his vehicle, had been found abandoned in a bad area of town.  When the officer got to the door he noticed that there was a pile of newspapers on the step and the door was open.  As he opened it further he saw the body of Frank Columbo laying inside on the floor and back up was immediately called. Ultimately as officers arrived on the scene and examined the home they would be faced with an extremely brutal crime scene. They would find three bodies in which had not just been shot, but beaten, stabbed and tortured.  The bodies would belong to forty-three year old Frank Columbo, his forty-one year old wife, Mary and their thirteen year old son, Michael.  The only surviving member of the family was the Columbo's almost twenty year old daughter who no longer lived in the family home. Medical examinations and apparently evidence would find that the murders had actually occurre...

After a blog that I wrote a few weeks ago ( Jamie Snow ) and the one I did earlier today ( David Hendrick ), I have to ask myself..."Self... what the hell is going on in McLean County Illinois?"  As I said in my previous blog today after I had blogged about the Jamie Snow case someone commented telling me of some others to look into.  Quite often I look at cases that have been reversed or in some way, at least in my opinion, have been decided in a way in which I question the evidence or the legalities of things.  Of course this is not the situation in all the cases that I blog about but it is those that are most interesting to me.   Sometimes, such as the case of Drew Peterson, I completely agree with where he is at (i.e. prison) and totally believe that he is guilty. However, that was a case that I fear the laws made to get the evidence they needed to convict him could come back and bite innocent people.  The fact that his case is also in Illinois may or may ...

A few weeks ago I did the story of Jamie Snow, a resident of Bloomington Illinois whose case has been taken up by the Illinois Innocence Project.  Like many of the cases that I post about here, the Snow case had many twists and turns and has left many with many more questions than answers it seems.  Someone commented on that blog and told me of some other cases from the Bloomington Illinois area that I promised to look into.  Then just a few days after that on November 7th, I saw what I call a blurb about a family murder that took place in 1983 in Bloomington Illinois.  To be fair the person who commented on the Snow blog had mentioned this case also.   Many in the Jamie Snow case claim police corruption and prosecutor misconduct. While researching the case of the Hendricks Family Murders, as they have become known, I often thought back to the Snow case and some of the things said and done that were comparative to this case.  One of the things I found the...

This blog is going to vastly different than any blog that I have done before. When I found this name on my list I knew who it was, which is not always the case.  I knew there had been both a book, and a movie called Deadly Relations , based on this story.  However, when I sat down to do research like I always do I could find very little that was not associated with the book or the movie.  Even in those there was little more than basic reviews and summaries of the crimes committed.  I am hoping that readers will come and comment and give specifics. If you grew up or were around in the mid-1980s and the early 1990s then you know television was bombarded by two things.... movies based on true crimes and mini-series.  Sometimes if you were lucky you could get two for one.  It was around this time that I began liking all things true crime.  Two movies from that era have stuck with me, A Killer Among Friends,  based on the Missy Avila murder...