True Crime Stories

I have been reading true crime books for as long as I can remember and without revealing my age, let us just say that has been a very long time. I went from books to television movies, to true crime documentaries. You name it I can probably tell you about it and yet from time to time I come across a case that not only I have not heard about but one that ignites my passion for true crime. This happens to be one of them and it came at a great time as I am attempting to get back into my blogging process. I have often said that cases make it to my list of cases to research in a variety of ways. Generally they come from books or shows I have seen but sometimes I will just see a reference to something when I am researching or I cannot tell you how many times someone has said “Hey, you need to look up …..” I am going to gander to guess that this case came in one of the latter two categories. But, I started my research like I do all other cases, with a simple search and read t...

I did a double check to see if I had already blogged about this case but it does not look like it. I try to appear organized and mark ones on my list I have done but then I find some that I check and sure enough I have already done them. There was also a time a while back where I thought I would be smart and research a bunch of cases at one time and basically write them out and post them when I got around to it. That was a bad idea. At my age I am lucky to remember what I researched yesterday, let alone any longer than that. I found myself doing double time by going back and reminding myself what a particular note in my research meant and in the end abandoned that way of doing things. In the process I had already researched many cases that I eventually just did not compose and decided I would just re-do them again later. I suspect this is one of those cases! One of the reasons that this case stuck with me was not so much how senseless and vicious the crime itself was (...

Just yesterday in my blog about Anthony Graves I discussed the issue of tunnel vision and gung ho investigators. Well, today here is a story that not only qualifies but in my opinion at a much higher degree despite the fact that Graves sat on death row for twelve years (sixteen years in prison total) and Julie Rea-Harper spent only about half of that in prison. This case involved two different trials and when that happens there tends to be less specifics found on each individual trial. Sometimes when you dig pretty deep you can find out more things and it becomes one of those cases that you have to start piecing things together and then try to weed out what information is true and what information is false although has gone down in legend. So we'll start with what we do know as fact and that is that on the night of October 13, 1997 in Lawrenceville Illinois, ten year old Joel Kirkpatrick lost his life. Joel was visiting with his mother Julie Rea (she would later marry...

When someone is exonerated for a crime they have been convicted of, but later found not to have committed (or at least enough evidence does not exist anymore to prove guilt), there are other injustices' aside from the incarceration of an innocent person. First of course there is the pain and suffering the innocent person's family has had to endure. There is the issue of public opinion of those convinced the defendant was guilty, with or without a conviction, or an exoneration. When the innocent person has children prior to being incarcerated, those children suffer not just generally financially but from the loss of having their parent in their lives. Many of those children move on, because let's be honest, what else can they do? But, there is always a void and many exonerated individuals have difficulty reconnecting with their children when they are released. But, even more than that I feel as if the victims of the crimes get lost in the shuffle as headlines domin...