True Crime Stories

  This case and the one I plan to do after this one, are both cases in which the perpetrators were executed in the state of California. I do not think there is a question in either case whether the perpetrator was guilty of the crime that sent them to their deaths but I do question the mentality of them both. But, here I am, as usual getting ahead of myself. Few people will argue that Robert Alton Harris did not have a horrible childhood. It was repeatedly said that he was born in 1953 early (some say two months, some say three) due to the fact that his father, Kenneth, had kicked his mother, Evelyn, in the stomach. Both of his parents were alcoholics. Court reports would say that at birth Robert suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome. While I cannot necessarily dispute this officially and knowing the history I am unsure that it is not technically true, I do question that was a diagnosis in 1953. At the time of his birth the Harris family was living at Fort Bragg in North ...

Sadly today it seems that mass shootings are everywhere, especially in schools. Most of us think of Columbine as the first of these incidents but that is far from the truth. One of the earliest recorded was the Bath School Massacre in 1927. However, in 1979 Brenda Sue Spencer perpetrated what many consider to be the first modern day school shooting. In January of 1979 sixteen year old Brenda Sue Spencer lived across the street from Grove Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego California. As the children were arriving at school that day she opened fire using a rifle her father had bought her for Christmas just a month earlier. She sat in her window using a telescopic scope and having 500 rounds of ammo next to her. By the time she was done, two adults were dead with eight children and a police officer injured. The two men who died were fifty-three year old Burton Wragg, the principal and fifty-six year old custodian Mike Suchar. They were both attempting to sh...

I found this case interesting mostly because technically it did not occur in the United States and yet the perpetrator was being tried in a court in San Diego California. Initially he was charged in June of 2013, not for murder, but for charges such as obstruction of justice, giving false statements to a federal officer and falsifying records. In April of 2015 he would be indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of committing a foreign murder of a U.S. National. This is the first time that I had heard of this being done. When it comes to the legal system, whether it is criminal or civil, the number one issue is always jurisdiction. Of course you have cases that are moved to other counties when a change of venue is sought, usually due to fears of not being able to sit an impartial jury. But, I have rare, if ever, seen a case in which a murder occurred in another country and tried here in the United States. The initial charges in this case were however committed on U.S. soi...

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...