True Crime Stories

I have put together over 800 blogs here. Most, although admittedly, not all involve murder. I have read countless appeals in cases and have almost exclusively true crime books for decades. I am in many true crime groups and even “death hag” groups on social media. I hear stories all the time. I read about them; I see pictures; I study them. It takes a lot to surprise when it comes to brutality; it takes even more to have gasp when I am reading about how a crime took place. This is one of those cases. I often talk about how I come across cases and how they make it to a list I have compiled. Initially I removed the cases from the list when I blogged about them but I found that that hindered me from realizing I may have already done a case. That being said, not every case I have blogged about is on it. I generally have a sub-list started that I add to the bigger list later and when I do that sometimes I will work off that list first and not add them to the larger one. When I...

This case made it to my list because while researching a few of the cases I have done recently his name was mentioned in an article. That is how come names make it to my list. The article was mentioning that he was asking for clemency from the Governor of Indiana. He was serving a sentence for murder. The article was on a site I use for archived newspaper articles from my area. There are times it seems here lately that is the only place I can find information on a case and while that was true about the murder of Linda Kearschner by Terry Drake in 1977, it did not mean that my Google search came up empty. He would serve his time for that murder, which I will obviously be going into, but that was not the last we heard from Terry Drake. The next time we heard from him was at a national level. On Thursday November 17, 1977 Michael Kearschner returned to his rural Vanderburgh Indiana home around 11:30 that night, after work, to find his wife, twenty-five year old Linda, missing....

When it comes to child abductions and murders, there are two that likely are first to come to mind to just about anyone who was alive and remembers them... Adam Walsh and Polly Klaas.  Why is that? Well part of it surely is because they seemed to especially gruesome crimes but there is another reason.  Both of the victim's fathers, John Walsh and Marc Klaas, not only fought for justice for their own children but they also proceeded to change policies in how abducted children are looked for as well as fought for justice in other missing/abducted/murdered children cases. When Adam Walsh was abducted and murdered in 1981 there was very little known in how to handle an abducted child and the Walsh family all but had to wing it.  In 1993 when Polly Klaas was abducted from inside her home, things had come a long way since 1981, but not nearly far enough. To add to this, the Internet was now available and there were many more ways to contact and reach people than there were in...

After a birthday dinner with her boyfriend, Matthew Heikkila on January 29, 1991 Marta Morales went to his home that he shared with his parents, Dawn and Richard. They had only been dating a few months and there had already been a few issues but until they reached the home things seemed to be going okay. However, they got to the home and Matthew pulled out handcuffs and put one on Marta and one on himself and led her into the house.  Once inside he proceeded to show her the body of his mother, whom he had shot hours earlier, before picking her up for their date.  Richard also laid in the home dead and Marta was likely shown his body too but most reports just state she saw Dawn's. Matthew then forced Marta to spend the night in the home handcuffed to him. He would waiver between sleeping and discussing how he was going to kill both her and himself.  Eventually, by morning plans had changed.  By this time he has decided they would both live but that they were going to ...

This was another case that I caught on 48 Hours so I had to do a little research. It was also another case in which I felt some vital information was left out of the story to possibly slant it one way or another.  After watching the 48 Hours I was totally left wondering how Toby Holt was found guilty.  While I still question his guilt, either through research, or maybe I just missed it on the show, I found a little more, but not much. Robert Wiles, the son of a wealthy business owner, disappeared on April 1, 2008.  Robert was a pilot and high up in ranks at his father's business National Flight Services (NFS) in Lakeland Florida. Two days after his disappearance Robert's father, Tom received a text message from Robert's phone to check his email.  When he did so he found an email asking for a ransom of $750,000.  The email was signed "Group X." Toby Holt was the last person to supposedly see Robert Wiles.  Toby Holt also worked for NFS.  He was ev...