True Crime Stories

I have put together over 800 blogs here. Most, although admittedly, not all involve murder. I have read countless appeals in cases and have almost exclusively true crime books for decades. I am in many true crime groups and even “death hag” groups on social media. I hear stories all the time. I read about them; I see pictures; I study them. It takes a lot to surprise when it comes to brutality; it takes even more to have gasp when I am reading about how a crime took place. This is one of those cases. I often talk about how I come across cases and how they make it to a list I have compiled. Initially I removed the cases from the list when I blogged about them but I found that that hindered me from realizing I may have already done a case. That being said, not every case I have blogged about is on it. I generally have a sub-list started that I add to the bigger list later and when I do that sometimes I will work off that list first and not add them to the larger one. When I...

I came across this case when I was working on some genealogy. Where I live they have a local genealogy site and within that site they also have an archive of old newspaper articles. First I had come across a death card for Arthur Lindsey's victim. Basically these are cards that are compiled either by that particular local funeral home, or in later years compiled by obituaries that are listed in the newspaper. The older ones especially have some interesting information. For example the death card for Julia Zink told me not only that she was twenty-one years old and living in the nearby town of Mount Vernon, but it told me her relatives. Julia's card went on to say that she had been “killed and tossed into Ohio River nude.” A notation at the bottom said “accused: Arthur Lindsey, 25.” Arthur Lindsey was apparently from the Mount Vernon Indiana area but he had apparently spent some time in California. One report stated he lived there for two or three years. By November of...

I wanted to change courses a little bit from some of the cases that I have been blogging about recently. Doing old cases, such as one like this, can often prove to be difficult. Often the information is contradictory if not flat out false and it can sometimes be a challenge to determine what is the truth. So I end up looking at many more sites than I normally would, often just to clear up why one site said one thing and another said something else. And sometimes I do not even need to go further when even the same site shows me proof. For example in this case I had read that associates of D.C Stephenson were also charged with murder, among other things and were acquitted at trial. Then there was an article by a reputable news outlet that claimed differently. However, right there in the article were photos of the newspaper accounts in 1925 that stated the men had been acquitted. Now, I am going to be fair in saying that while there were several charges against ...

As a true crime book reader I first learned of the case of Jeffrey Gorton through the author Tom Henderson. There are several authors that do cases in regional areas. Ann Rule was known to concentrate many of her cases in the upper northwest of the United States area. Kathryn Casey reports on a lot of cases in the Texas area. Tom Henderson does cases in the Michigan area. The interesting thing about the crimes that Gorton committed is that they show that criminals have no way of knowing just what advances can be made in forensics that can come back and bite them. It also shows that there are cases that investigators never give up on and there is no statute of limitations on murder. Fifty-five year old Margarette Eby was murdered in her Flint Michigan home on November 9, 1986. She had been raped and left with her throat cut nearly to the point of decapitation. Investigators saved semen samples from the scene, as well as a latent fingerprint but until there were advances i...

I love hearing about cases that have been solved after many years, or decades. However, the problem with these cases is that the older they are, the more difficult it is to get all of the information and make sure that information is correct. Such is the case in the death of Sandra Howard in 1975. So, the question lies for me whether to tell the story at all without all of the facts. This is a case though that I have seen on crime shows over the years and while many murders are heartbreaking and senseless, this one seems more so for many reasons. It is one of those cases in which a simple sentence reminds you exactly what case it was. In this case it is the story that Sandra Howard was a newlywed and every month on their anniversary she and her new husband, David, shared a piece of wedding cake. They made it nearly five months but on this particular anniversary, David was going to be out of town. He took some cake with him and while they would not be together when they ate...