True Crime Stories

This case proved a bit difficult from the start. When I find a case to add to my list I generally will put the state in which it occurred, or country, although admittedly I purposely tend to try and stay away with cases from other countries due to the differences in laws. Sometimes I add a year or something else to help me do a search when I am ready. This case was listed in notes as “head and hands murder-Indiana-1930's.” I had based this on seeing a list of men executed in Indiana and the nickname given. So when I began my search I started with those parameters. I immediately kept finding things that referred to Kentucky and Ohio and very little it seemed about Indiana. After several attempts, and double checking things I was wanting to make sure I was finding the case I intended to find. In the end I discovered that everything I was finding was in fact all the same case. On June 12, 1936 a Kentucky farmer found an axe and what was described as “bloody debr...

I both love and hate reading about very old crimes. First, I like hearing new stories but the information on them are very scarce unless it is one that has been handed down through generations. However, the problem with the latter is that much of the information gets skewed over the years with the re-telling of the story. Cases like Leopold and Loeb and The Bloody Benders are good examples of this. Then there are the cases like that against Robert Watts. Much of the information I was able to obtain came from excerpts of an appeal filed in this case and from later information when inmates in Indiana were executed. Robert Watts would be executed by the state in the electric chair in 1951. The next execution, which would be the last in the state before executions were halted from 1972-1976, took place in 1961. What I can tell you about this case was that a woman named Mary Lois Burney was murdered on November 14, 1947. All I could determine was that she had ...

I was born in Evansville Indiana in a year in which I will not mention.  I moved away before I started school but returned to the area several decades later in 2014.  I have always had family in the area and tried to keep up with the news here often.  From time to time I would see stories on crimes that had happened at some point in time in the area.  Once I moved back and started looking into things a bit more it seems that there have been several high profile cases in the literal "tri-state area."  Some I had heard about, others I had not.  This is one that I knew a little about before I sat down today to do my research.  As I recall, although the crime happened in 1994, I likely first heard about it in 2009 when convicted murderer, Matthew Eric Wrinkles, was to make an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show a month prior to his scheduled execution. As I sat down today and began my usual research as I do for each case, I expected this to be a fairly ...