True Crime Stories

Once again I have decided to do a more unique crime. It does involve a death but the death itself was determined not to be a crime. The crime was embezzlement and money laundering but that did not come out until later. But, when Joe Gliniewicz died it was initially believed it was murder and because he was a police officer it entailed a full scale manhunt. Fox Lake Illinois is almost two hours northwest of Chicago and sits on near the Wisconsin border. When Joe Gliniewicz died in September of 2015 tensions were high all over the country between police officers and especially African Americans. It had been building for some time as it was but the murders of Eric Garner in July 2014 in New York and Michael Brown in August of 2014 in Missouri had truly brought the issue to the forefront. Garner and Brown had both died at the hands of police officers. They were both African Americans and the officers involved in their deaths were white men. Even today in 2018 you r...

It often amazes me not just that people think that they can get away with murder but their motives behind them. We all know that one of the number one motives for murder is simple greed. Somehow money becomes more important than a human life. The thing that is most amazing to me in those cases is that almost always the murder is committed by someone who had at least at some point claimed to love the person. Then there are the people like Lynn Turner, who after doing it once and getting away with it tempted fate by doing it again. In the end it was this second time that brought light to the first and in the end she was sentenced to two life sentences, all for less than $200,000. Although in fairness she thought it was about twice that amount when she committed the second murder. Lynn Turner would be convicted in 2004 for the murder of her husband Glenn Turner and in 2007 for the murder of her longtime boyfriend and father of her children, Randy Thompson. She had bee...

On January 4, 2009 the maintenance man, Michael Hedgepeth, at a Durham North Carolina apartment complex called 911 to report hearing shots fired. Just after hearing what he thought was a shot he had seen a woman come from the back of a building and get into a burgundy SUV. He drove towards that building and stopped the woman who was driving away to talk to her. Hedgepeth would later describe her as a bit hysterical saying she too had heard the shot and she was scared of guns. He asked her where she lived and she pointed out another building. Hedgepeth asked her to stay there while he called 911. Hedgepeth would later testify that he saw the woman still in the parking lot when he was talking to the police but not after he got off the phone. The police would come to the complex and while it does not sound as if they looked to awful hard around the area, they did not find anything and left. About an hour and a half after Hedgepeth had called the police a resident of the...

This became one of those cases in which I attempted to search deeper for things I wanted some answers to before coming here and putting things together. If you are a regular reader than you know I do not always agree with a verdict, although I respect a jury's decision. I have also often began composing a case in which I am uncertain how I feel about it. Many times I am still on the fence as far as things after I have put it all together. There are also the cases where I openly state I have questions about or issues where things did not seem clear. That is not necessarily the case here. This was a case where the specific facts were thin. I was able to find an appeal on record but it only gave me a few more specifics that I did not have. I was actually taken aback by not just how much little information it provided but the language in which was used. In general most appeals are very “bland” in their words which is fine because they should be in my opinion. An appeal ...

Once again I have chosen to blog about a case that was popular in my tri-state area at a time before I returned to the area. I am sure I am not alone in the fact that when I see a true crime show that is located in an area I know and and have at least a marginal knowledge about it always seems a bit more exciting. I particularly like the show The Shift, that was based out of Indianapolis Indiana considering I lived there for 24 years.  In this case, since I was from the area originally and had family that lived here I knew at least a little about the area. Since I have moved back as an adult and I read about these cases I have an even better view of where these crimes were committed. The last case that I did here I had attempted to rely on a local website that contained repeated articles that had been published in the local paper before moving on to other areas of research.  I was sorely disappointed in those as I felt that many were all but inaccurate and skewed i...

I am actually surprised that I have never blogged about this case.  This is one of those cases that have stuck with me from the moment I heard about it.  I am almost certain I have researched it in the past and have watched or read anything I could get my hands on about the case.  Why? Probably because Jessica McCord is simply the face of evil.  She is the reason ex-spouses (especially wives) get a bad reputation, and yet in the same breath she makes us thankful that while we too may be in stressful situations at least we are still alive to stress about it.  In the same respect, as I pointed out in another story, I have to give it to her,  unlike so many others, Jessica was not scared to get her hands dirty.  Then again that is because Jessica believed she was better than everyone else, her ideas were better, and in the end she believed everyone would believe her.  She thought being the "Mommy" and batting her little eyes to everyone, including ju...