True Crime Stories

So, I walked into my research on this one thinking that at worse I would have the issues that I often face doing a very, very old crime where dates and stories conflicted from read to read. I thought this case was pretty cut and dry... there was a mass murder, there was a perpetrator... the end. But thankfully for both you and I, I do not just stop at just a few things. I will dig and dig, sometimes to the point that I have to force myself to stop, this is just such a case. This case happened in 1920 and is still considered to be the worse mass murder incident in North Dakota. It is also alleged that “this is believed to be the fastest administration of justice on record in any state” and I cannot be sure I disagree, at least from a legal sense. Whether justice was actually served is apparently up for debate. A book was released in 2010 called The Murder Family by Vernon Keel. I have checked my local library to see if I could manage to find this book and so far I have not ha...

  This case, like the last, involves an individual who was sentenced to death in Indiana. However, this case is very different from the previous one in many ways. I also found a lot of misinformation and confusion with this case when doing my research that I had to figure out. I find this case interesting in part because it is a case in which the defendant pleaded guilty, apparently without any sort of plea deal offered by the state. Now, doing is not unusual if the defendant is adamant, as some are, that they are guilty and either feel they deserve the death penalty or they claim they would rather be executed than spend the rest of their life in prison. Neither seems to be the case here with Trueblood although he claims that at least with the first guilty plea (he did this twice at separate times) he did so on the advice of his attorney saying that he would avoid the death penalty. Now, prosecutors will quite often offer plea deals to defendants to avoid a trial. In my o...

In 1992 the state of Virginia executed Roger Keith Coleman. Coleman had proclaimed his innocence right up to the end and there were many who believed after his execution that an innocent man had been killed by the state. There had been DNA testing done prior to his execution but through his defense attorney's Coleman had fought the results. Now of course at the time of his execution DNA was not what it is today so the results were not as conclusive as they could have been many years later. There was a push by those who believed he was innocent to have more modern DNA testing done after his execution, mainly to show the flaws in the death penalty. A decade later the Governor of Virginia allowed those tests to be done and it left absolutely no question that Coleman was guilty. There were many in high places left to “eat crow.” Coleman's case proved that no matter how staunchly someone claims their innocence it proves nothing. While the case of Wayne Kubsch is not as drama...