True Crime Stories

I love reading about very old cases.... especially those in the late 1800's or early 1900's.  There is just a few very large problems with them.  Getting accurate information is often a huge challenge.  Of course ways of communication and keeping stories straight in those days often seems like playing a game of telephone.  Then as we get into the 1900's and even a few decades in you enter the time of "yellow journalism."  I have spoke of this era many times because it often frustrates me.  I liken it to The National Enquirer, but The National Enquirer of like the 80's.  Those of you who remember those days will remember how light on facts and big on exaggeration they were.  That was how the every day newspaper was in the early 1900's.  It was all about the headline to draw you in and then stories read more like novels than news stories.  Drama was added, usually falsely, to excite the reader.  It was not a time where facts mattered,...

This case was a rather quick case to research although I took a bit longer to not just get some statistics but to also add to my ever growing list of cases to look into.  This is case is considered to be more rare than most.  This is about a case not only of a woman in which was sentenced to death, but one in which the execution was enacted.  Sure we know the cases of Aileen Wurornos, Karla Faye Tucker, or even Mary Surratt but they really are rare, especially in what is considered to be the modern age of the death penalty.  For the record, the "modern age" of the death penalty is considered as beginning in 1976.  While during the 1940's and 50's support for the death penalty was waning and the numbers were coming down a bit it took until 1972 for the United State Supreme Court to officially abolish the death penalty.  It was then that anyone who was current on death row, some of the most famous were Charles Manson and his followers, were re-sentenced to li...

When I got up this morning and knew this was the day in which I would blog I kept feeling a pull to do this case.  I tried resisting a bit because this case has always bothered me.  It is not just that it involves the death of a child, which is always difficult to do but in all of the interviews and shows I have seen on this case it was Jessica's father, Mark, and her grandparents, Ruth and Archie that seemed to pull at my heart more than a lot of cases.  It is not that I do not have sympathy for people who have lost children, quite the contrary but these particular people just had a hold of sorts over me.  Once I finally decided there was no sense in trying to talk myself out of doing this case I started my research thinking it would be a fairly easy and quick case.  Boy, was I ever wrong. First, this case required more research than a lot of cases simply because there was so much on the crime itself that I had to dig deeper for other answers of things and it s...

Sunday is generally the day that I take the day, if I can, to sit down and do my blogging.  The rest of the week I am working on other things and usually adding to my list of cases to research.  From time to time a case will strike me and I feel the need to stop what I am doing to concentrate on that case here.  This is just such a case.  This is was not necessarily a new case for me, nor was the show (this time it was Dateline )a show I had not seen before today. It just happened to be the day that this case pulled at me.  When it comes to how things were handled in history I seem to be more lenient than a lot of people it seems.  I often find myself looking a comments made about "old" cases and defending the actions of others, whether I agreed with them or not, because we were a different society. A good example of this would be the Sylvia Likens case for a few reasons.  I have often seen arguments of posters who comment that they blame the ne...

When it is the day in which I have decided to sit down and blog I rarely have a case already picked out so the process begins with going through my list (at 400 plus at the moment) of names.  I compile these names from documentary shows, the news or even while doing research on other cases.  Sometimes the name is the victim and sometimes it is the suspect or perpetrator.  I will work down the list a bit and do a quick search on a name and find one that "jumps out" at me on that particular day.  Today as I worked my way down the list I came across the name David Alan Westerfield. I did not know who he was when I threw his name into Google but then I saw the name Danielle Van Dam and I remembered her name. I knew her name because I remember where I was when I heard that Westerfield was convicted and it was rather big news because at the time there were several cases across the country making news about abducted and/or murdered children.  At the time of Wester...