True Crime Stories

  Once again I am talking about a case that I learned about on Fear thy Neighbor. If you are a regular reader then you know that I get into these spurts where I will focus on a type of crime. Even still I think these types of crimes are the most interesting to me. I know that the television show dramatizes things and not everything is fully based on fact. Because of that I generally try to dig a bit deeper for these cases. Even still finding clear answers is not always easy. Neighbor crimes are interesting to me because they are not stranger killings. But then again, they aren't intimate killings either. They are also crimes in which there is generally a trail of legal documentation of some kind, whether authorities were helpful or not. Most of these crimes turn into he said/she said, or a variation of that as neighbors accuse each other of doing things, most of the time without any proof. Then things continue and continue and neither side feel that authorities are of any h...

I am a little disappointed in my research on this case. This was another case that I saw on the television show Fear Thy Neighbor. Even if I did not write a blog this was a case I wanted to know more about. As I have often said I know that everything in these types of television shows are completely true. First of course they are always bias in one form or another. I have also often said that I like appeal papers because this is where I feel I can best find the truth. The problem here is not that I found more than one appeal paper, the problem is that they told different stories as to what happened. This is something I have never seen before although the answer to that may have been that there was a re-trial in this case and one appeal was written after the first trial and the second appeal was written after the second trial. Robert Hayes had been the chief of police in St. Joseph Missouri for about a decade. He had started at the police department in the 1960's and fo...

Lately I have been watching the latest season of Fear Thy Neighbor . I have always liked this show despite the fact that they do embellish some facts and even change some names sometimes. That being said I have never used any one source when I am researching a case. What I will say about this show in particular is that it will tell the story of how things lead to the ultimate crime. When you research these cases most of the time you will only hear about the last thing that happened between the neighbors. You may see it say that there had been feuding between the neighbors for years and that the police were familiar with the area because they had been called many times. Beyond that however most things simply revolve around the incident that more often than not ended in a murder. Before I start getting into this story I want to point out something that remained confusing in my research. The television show showed the victims surname as Robins. When doing my research sometimes th...

  Once again I have a blog to put together on a case I first heard about on the television show Fear Thy Neighbor. A lot of these types of cases, as is the case with a lot of murders, seem so senseless, and often preventable but for me I think this one is particularly senseless, if not preventable. But, the other strange thing about this case is that while there had been trouble between the neighbors years prior, it appears that there had not been a lot of issues in the two years leading up to the murders. Terrance Hough Jr. was a firefighter in the city of Cleveland Ohio. Due to a policy for city workers he was required to live within the city limits. This was mentioned several times in my research as if this was an issue for Hough, although he had obviously complied. He moved onto a street where other city workers, including at least one police officer lived. Terrance, his wife, Regina, and their children, at least one an infant when they moved, moved into a home next t...

Once again this is a case that I saw on the show Fear Thy Neighbor. While I mentioned in my previous post how the show can be quite bias, and that is true, I also believe that at least in this case they gave more factual information about things than a jury would later see. I say this because much of what they showed in the episode were video and audio recordings of things that occurred prior to the murder of Sheila Bonge. On December 27, 2017 the family of fifty-nine year old Sheila Bonge contacted authorities in Nunica Michigan, some twenty-five miles west of Grand Rapids. They were unable to get a hold of Sheila and that was unusual. For the next two days a search was made for Sheila. Her body would be found on the 28 th , naked, down a hill behind the home of her neighbor, Wendell Popejoy Jr. Police were familiar with the area, particularly Sheila and several of her neighbors. Between 2014 and 2017 they had been called to the area more than fifty times on cal...

  I think I have mentioned before that one of my favorite shows on the Investigation Discovery channel is Fear Thy Neighbor . That being said I have also discovered after watching episodes that the show actually leaves a lot out of their stories that in my opinion could be relevant, and like many documentary shows is generally a bit bias. I will admit though that not every episode tends to be bias for one side or another (the victim or perpetrator) I think it is based on which side could “bring” more “drama” to the situation and story. My next several blogs will be cases based on stories I saw on that show. Before I start pulling this all together I want to apologize if from time to time you see Jeffery Flaugher's name spelled incorrectly. I have a son named Jeffrey, r-e-y, and he has had issues with people all of his life spelling his name incorrectly. To be fair I see it r-e-y, much more often than the presumed e-r-y that Jeffery Flaugher actually carried. In fact, ...

I love the Investigation Discovery show Fear Thy Neighbor. But I do admit that I only use the show to hear about new cases to research because I have seen a lot of things that by all accounts are not correct. For example I was watching an episode last night in which one neighbor shot another. I often have my computer nearby, or at least my phone, and I will search the story before the end of the show. In the episode last night the neighbor that was shot was shot in the chest and was in critical condition. However, upon looking up the case everything I read indicated that the man was shot not in the chest but basically in his rear end. So, I do not like that they take liberties with facts but it does tell me stories that I know little or nothing about. The Fuller's and the Copeland's had an ongoing feud for several years. They lived next door to each other in Lovelady Texas, a very small town of about 600 people about a hundred miles north of Houston. Like most neig...