True Crime Stories

  I debated on how to title this one. Generally I will have a victim or a perpetrator in the title. I am unsure if that makes it easier to find on the Internet or not but that is not necessarily why I do the titles as I do. I decided to use this title because this is the title used on a Wikipedia page so I know it can still be found that way. For those who may be wondering already as I am sure there are “Hamilton Avenues” all over, this crime took place in Indianapolis. I dug a bit deeper in this case and purposely went out of my way to find an appeal record because I have to say in my initial research I was a bit confused first at how police were so fast in determining who was involved and secondly, in just what evidence investigators and prosecutors had to obtain convictions considering I kept seeing that there was no physical evidence connecting the perpetrators to the crime. Not long after 10:00 pm on June 1, 2006 Indianapolis police received several 911 calls about s...

You know, as much as some may say I am “obsessed” with true crime and I have to admit that at some level they may be right, I have never been so obsessed that I wanted to know what it was like to commit a crime or be “famous” as some who have committed horrendous crimes have later said. Such is the case of Robert Benjamin Smith. Robert Smith's father was in the military and the family moved around quite often when he was young. The boy never had a lot of friends in school nor was he very athletic. This is often said of military children due to all of their moves to different places and schools. In 1963 when John F. Kennedy was assassinated the family lived in Baltimore and it was said that Robert begged his father to go to the funeral but it did not happen. It was said that later Robert's obsession with Kennedy manifested into an obsession with Lee Harvey Oswald. In 1965 Robert's father retired from the military and the family settled in Mesa Arizona...

This case contains a lot of things that I would say “push” my buttons. First there is a horrific crime that involves not just one child, but several. Then there is the fact that a case was built nearly solely on a confession that was questionable at best, illegally obtained at worse. There were no forensics that tied the person to the crime and lastly the prosecution presented a theory in court that in no way seems to be backed up by anything. As most of you know the prosecution in a case never has to present a motive, but the fact of the matter is that juries want to hear the “why.” Of course there are some defendants who will admit their motive and there are others who will leave a trail that makes the motive clear but in many cases there is never a clear motive. That does not mean that when a motive cannot be found against a defendant that they are innocent but I still take issue when a motive presented that does not match the known facts of the case or when a ...

I had intended to spend the day mainly doing research on cases and then spend the day tomorrow putting them together to publish. That is how I have been trying to do things lately... spend one day on research and one day on composing. Yesterday I did two very long blogs and then a short one and I started researching more late last night. I had researched two and then I started looking into this one. This case is a bit unique. We have seen family annihilators, those who murder their entire family, or at least those who live with them. We have also seen many of those annihilators then kill themselves. Then there are the annihilators like John List who murdered his family and then disappeared before being capture several decades later. In this case, after finishing what he considered to be his goals Ronald Gene Simmons had someone call the police and he waited patiently until they arrived and without resistance turned himself in even if he did not tell them abo...

After doing two very long and complicated cases I decided to do one that is very much not long, or complicated. At the time this case took place in Evansville Indiana in 1984 I lived in Indianapolis but still had family in the area. I knew approximately where this took place within the city and for years I would think about it as we drove on the main road near the home. On the morning of Thursday October 18, 1984 Candice Day returned home around 10:00 after working at her new job at the Post Office. When she walked in the door she found her husband, James, sitting in the front room in a chair with a gunshot wound to his head. She called 9-1-1 and then she went into each of her children's rooms and found that all six of her children were also dead. James had apparently shot fifteen year old Michael, fourteen year old Bartholomew, nine year old John, eight year old Stephen, seven year old Christopher and six year old Laura, all in the head while they lay sl...

This case involves one of the more interesting perpetrators. It is probably safe to say that most murderers believe that they can get away with the crime in one form or another. Some will admit to committing the crime and argue self defense while others will attempt to blame someone else, real or imagined. Vincent Brothers falls into the latter category. I would gander to guess that those in this category at least believe they go to great lengths to “cover” their tracks but rarely succeeds, especially in this day and age of DNA evidence and the like. Some, dare I say most, perpetrators are “ignorant” in their belief that they can outsmart investigators. I recently did the case of Ann Anastasi in which her husband was murdered with a gun that she provided and a gun was left near his body. The problem was that it was not the same gun and that was quickly discovered. In the Vincent Brothers case the science of bugs helped unravel his story and then it appears that like A...

When people get divorced it is often said they are divorcing a different person than they married. Many times they are divorcing an even worse person than made them want to get a divorce in the first place, if in fact it was they who wanted the divorce. Often when a divorce occurs one of the parties is either surprised that things had gotten that far or for one reason or another does not want the divorce. There are a variety of reasons that people do not want to got through a divorce from anything from status in the community, reputation to finances or simply for companionship. If we are to believe the stories that friends and family would later tell, Karen Kahler wanted out of her marriage for two reasons. First, she claimed to many that her husband, James, who went by his middle name of Kraig, was controlling and abusive. Secondly, Karen had found a new love in Sunny Reese. It would be the latter that defense attorneys would later say drove Kraig Kahler over t...

I think we can all agree that he deaths of seven people, especially all from one family, is tragic. Where we differ, may just be if we believe that one of those victims, a fourteen year old child no less, was buried in a grave and believed to be the murderer of the others, only later to be exonerated may be even more tragic. When the collective funeral of Julie Schnick, her brother, Steven Buckner, Steve's wife, Jan and their four children Kirk, Dennis, Timothy and Michael was conducted even the minister commented that Kirk was responsible. The minister stated “In mankind there's a breaking point. Something in Kirk had reached that point, and he just snapped.” So how did authorities come to this conclusion and how is it that the entire country would come to believe that a fourteen year old boy “snapped”? There are a few opinions on that but few argue that the original story came from James Schnick, Julie's husband. On the morning of September 25, 1987 a 911 cal...