True Crime Stories

I am pretty sure this is one of the cases that I discovered while watching “Forensic Files,” which is in my opinion one of the best true crime shows. Unlike other shows this one is only thirty minutes long so there is little time to be bias and it fully sticks to the facts. They have portions where they interview people of course but again, it is full of facts. You can generally find the episodes fairly easy through different streaming apps, including YouTube so if you have not seen this show and you like true crime, which if you are here I suspect you do, it is worth checking out. Helen “Marlene” Oakes had been married to Bill Major for about nine years in 1980. They had married when she was sixteen and he was about twenty-seven. By 1980 they had two children, eight year old Donald and four year old LaLana and were living in Verona Kentucky. It was said that both Marlene and Bill were known to see other people through their marriage. In fact, it was well known that Marlene w...

This case took place in the Los Angeles area during what is basically known as the Daryl Gates era. Daryl Gates was the chief of police for the LAPD from 1978 to 1992. I will have to write another blog at some point just going through that era to fully explain what this means. I attempted to do that here and found myself on a tangent that lasted several pages and I still had not mentioned Stephanie Lazarus or the crime she was convicted of committing. With that said let me just sum up the Gates era as being one in which the officers of LAPD were encouraged to engage in police brutality and have little to do with members of the general community. Gates was known for his racist and arrogant comments and personality and it was said encouraged the officers under him to do the same. The Blue Code of Silence was likely never more prominent than it was during this era. It is this code that many people believe allowed Stephanie Lazarus to nearly get away with murder. It sh...

I was turned onto this case a few months ago by a friend who is also, like me, very much into true crimes and justice in and of itself. Neither of us had heard of this case and the more we looked into it, including watching a documentary on it, the more we were a little bit puzzled. Yesterday I did a blog on the JonBonet Ramsey case in which I stated that it is my belief due to the mistakes made in the investigation from the beginning that case will never be solved. This is another case in which appeared to be the same.  However, while the case is still considered open today due to the fact that according to the state there is at least one perpetrator that has not been linked through DNA on the loose, there are two people serving life sentences for this case.  Are they the right people?  I will leave that for you to decide. It is only on the rare occasion in my blogs where you will hear me speak of the race of the victims or the perpetrators.  For the most part tha...

I had to do a search to see if I had done this case already and part of me was surprised that I had not.  For a long time I read everything I could find on this case as it aggravated and intrigued me.  The other part of me was not so surprised that I had not blogged about it because I have feelings about this case that tend to be different than other cases that I research or hear about.  I have mentioned before about what I call my "icky" feeling and this is surely a case that gives it to me.  There is little doubt from anyone, no matter what you think of the case, that this case was sabotaged from the beginning.  I do not mean to say that in the sense that it was necessarily purposely sabotaged, although I cannot say for certain that it was not.  What I can say with almost complete certainty is that, beyond a legitimate confession, this case will never be solved.   I think what I struggle with most in this case is that in general, the evid...