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...

I told you I would get away from Kentucky this time!! Now I have moved on to Texas. I have seen this case covered on many crime shows including one of my favorites, Forensic Files. I am sure most of you have watched that show but for those of you who have not you should check it out. It is on several different streaming channels. It is a short thirty minute show that focuses solely on forensics. They do not have time to be overly bias one way or another in my opinion and is just long enough to give the facts. I am also in the middle of reading a book that was written in 2005. It was written by Scott Dunn's father Jim, in collaboration with Wanda Evans and is called Trail of Blood. I already know that the book ended technically I guess we can say before the case actually did. It was said that Jim reportedly said after writing the book he was giving up his “obsession” with finding his son's body and it was time to just accept the inevitable, that his son was dead an...

  Late in the night of October 11, 1989 Cathy Paternoster and her boyfriend, Carl Fuerst were returning to their Spring Valley Lake, California home with two of their three children after a quick run to a local video store. As soon as Carl got out of their vehicle he was confronted with a man dressed all in black and sporting a beard. Before he knew it there was a hail of gunfire. When it was all said and done Cathy lay dead in the driveway of their home and he had suffered three gunshot wounds. One of his wounds had occurred after the gunman had started to come after him again and Carl lunged at him, knocking him to the ground and the gun discharged. The one good thing was that the struggle had apparently startled the gunman and he took off running. Despite his wounds Carl was able to get to a neighbors house to make sure the police were contacted. Almost everyone interviewed had the same suspect in mind... Eric Fagan. Cathy Paternoster had three daughters. At the time o...

On February 26, 2007 two men saw what they believed to be charred legs of a body at the entrance of a vacant building in Gary Indiana. Law enforcement commenced on the area and began the investigation. If this case proves anything it is that experts are not always correct. The body that was found was only identified as a female between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. Many of the teeth had been broken out and the body had been burned so identification was not completely possible. However, it was thought that the female had likely died just the day before the body was found and it appeared that the body had been burned in the location in which it was found. More than eight years later investigators would learn that basically none of this was accurate. It appears that the body, while burned, was not complete as it was reported that there were over 170 distinct scars found on the body in different stages of healing which indicated that the victim had been abused or tortur...

Much like the last blog I posted about I am torn about this case also, just for different reasons. In the last case there was no question as to the perpetrators guilt and whether they deserved to be punished. My issue in that case centered around the age of the perpetrator and whether he deserved to have a chance to be out of prison. This case is different. This is a “no body” case that was not “solved” for forty years. I cannot say that I necessarily believe that John Bayerl is innocent but I do agree with the defense that the evidence for a conviction, despite getting one, was not there. Dona Bayerl was last seen on May 6, 1979. She lived in Muskego Wisconsin with her husband John and their two daughters, Jackie and Jodie who were four and seven back in 1979. John did not report her missing for three days. It was said that John kept changing his story as to what happened on that night but I must be fair in saying that nothing seemed to be clear about what those stories were...

This case was recently brought to my attention based on the fact that an episode of 48 Hours: Live to Tell was being re-aired. Now, if you know anything about this particular version of 48 Hours then you know it is often less about the crime and more about the survivors of a crime. Due to the fact that just this month was the re-air, and the fact that the person that the series focused on wrote a book that was published in 2019 it was difficult to get a lot of specifics when it came to this case and crime. I was also faced with a lot of conflicting information which is not necessarily unusual, but it did make it more difficult to sort through since there was seemingly so little information about the crime itself. This was also one of the few, but not the first, cases in which even appeal papers that I found seemed to be inconsistent not just to articles from the media but from known facts. For example in a 2009 appeal when going over the facts it stated that Jeff Pelley was co...