True Crime Stories

  Cases that involve police officers are some of the more interesting cases to me. I do not mean police shootings, although I have done several of those and those are interesting too, but I mean more of the cases in which police officers commit murder or other crimes that they have sworn to help prevent. If you watch a lot of true crime shows, which I would gander that you do, you will often hear how suspects or perpetrators seem to act or feel as if they are smarter than investigators. What I think is interesting about these statements is that when it comes to a police officer being a suspect they are even more confident that they can outsmart investigators. Not only do they think they know everything that investigators are going to do and look into but most believe they can explain things away. Many of them even show up at the scene when it is discovered. On June 5, 2004 the body of twenty-three year old Jesse Valencia was found laying on the ground in between two building...

  In 1986 Gregory Webb was the chief of police in the small town of Lyons Nebraska some sixty miles from Omaha. It seems though that despite most everyone believing he was a good police officer it seems that few people knew him very well on a personal level. In October of 1986 a woman named Anna Anton moved to Lyons. The building that Gregory lived in apparently was a house with two apartments in it. Gregory lived on the top floor and Anna moved into the apartment on the bottom floor. Unlike Gregory, people knew Anna on a personal level, well at least they believed they did. Anna was thirty-four years old. Ten years prior to moving to Lyons Anna had been in a car accident and had severely injured her leg. It had left her disabled and using a cane for the remainder of her life. Anna appeared to be a fairly social person who was very much involved in her faith. She soon had many friends in the area who would help her to get places as well as bring her groceries and...

This case took place in the Los Angeles area during what is basically known as the Daryl Gates era. Daryl Gates was the chief of police for the LAPD from 1978 to 1992. I will have to write another blog at some point just going through that era to fully explain what this means. I attempted to do that here and found myself on a tangent that lasted several pages and I still had not mentioned Stephanie Lazarus or the crime she was convicted of committing. With that said let me just sum up the Gates era as being one in which the officers of LAPD were encouraged to engage in police brutality and have little to do with members of the general community. Gates was known for his racist and arrogant comments and personality and it was said encouraged the officers under him to do the same. The Blue Code of Silence was likely never more prominent than it was during this era. It is this code that many people believe allowed Stephanie Lazarus to nearly get away with murder. It sh...

When the channel Investigative Discovery first came out it was, and remains my favorite station to watch.  Over the years I have changed cable companies and as it often happens it always seems that the next level of packages that they offer seem to only have a channel or two that you would care to watch and does not seem worth the many extra dollars that it costs so currently I do not have it. However, a few months ago I was given a free month and I am surprised that my DVR did not burn up with the literally hundreds of hours that I taped from that channel alone.  I spent that month, and the next trying to catch up and watch everything and when I found one with an interesting story I made a note of it so that I could research it more and possibly blog about it here.  This was one such story. It is not uncommon that I watch a television show based on a true crime and find that so much of the story was left out or sometimes it seems even fictionalized.  While admitte...

Not long ago I read the book "A Warrant to Kill" by Kathryn Casey.  It was about the shooting death of Susan White by Harris County Texas Sheriff deputy, Joseph Kent McGowen.  I had also seen several episodes of different shows pertaining to this case in the past such as 48 Hours and American Justice.  Per usual though I do not take a case to blog about solely based on one book or even a television show.  I do not simply use one website or one news article.  I dig, and dig until I find all of the information that I want or can find so that I can at least attempt to show all sides of a crime.  If you have read many of my blogs here, you know that I am not one to believe that all those convicted are guilty, but I also most definitely do not believe all that are convicted are innocent. There have been several cases in which I have expressed my views that the person convicted was in fact guilty as charged, however, I disagreed with the tactics taken i...