True Crime Stories

I have several cases that I have researched and are ready to be put together at this point. A few of them are pretty cut and dry it seems and so while I have the time I am going to try and push a few out. On February 20, 2008 firefighters were called to the scene of a home in Old Orchard Beach Maine. The home belonged to Christopher and Carol Bolduc, owners of a local business called Blustery Day Flags. The only thing that I can determine is that the business fell under the category of “miscellaneous retail,” whatever that may mean. Inside first firefighters, and then investigators, would find the bodies of forty-two year old Chris, his wife, Carol, also forty-two, and their son Joshua who was fifteen. The three victims had not died in the fire, but had been stabbed to death multiple times. Also inside was the body of the family dog, Spike. He too had been stabbed. The only surviving member of the immediate family was twenty-one year old Matthew Cushing, Ca...

I am often amazed by the lengths that not only people will go to ensure someone remains in their life, but the fact that they do not think of the consequences of their actions. Most often you see this in cases involving child custody. One parent, or even sometimes a grandparent, will murder the other parent to ensure custody goes their way. I recently blogged about the case of Joanna Hayes who murdered her soon to be ex-daughter in law thinking her son would get custody of their son. Reality was Joanna's son did not want custody and the couple had already made an agreement. In the end the young child lost his mother, basically his father and his grandmother. Any time a parent is murdered, especially if they have young children, the long term affects can be devastating. Twenty-one year old Rose Goggins was living with her future in-laws, Steven and Sylvia Beersdorf in Beech Creek Tennesse, a small community about eighty miles northeast of Knoxville. In Januar...

When someone takes a plea deal it is generally for one of three reasons.... to avoid the death penalty, to get a much lighter sentence or to avoid putting the defendant's family through a trial. In today's world, as in this case, so often the defendant's family and the victim's family are one and the same. It is not unusual to see someone who is wanting to avoid the death penalty to make a plea and serve the rest of their life in prison. Nor is it unusual to see someone get a much shorter sentence than they were looking at. Sometimes this is done by lowering the charges or even changing them and allowing the court to sentence differently. This case involved a plea deal but the death penalty was never an option for prosecutors because the defendant was a minor when the crime was committed. The United States Supreme court had made this ruling in 2005, five years before the crime was committed. Whether the deal was very specific prior to entering the court is...

For the second time today I am faced with a case that I am unsure how I feel about. Just as in the one prior, I am left with many unanswered questions. The difference here however is that there will likely never be an appeal on the case, or one substantial enough that would give the details I am looking for, things that only a trial or court hearing would produce. In the end Jennifer Nibbe opted to plead guilty to the second degree murder of her husband and we are only left with the words of family and attorney as to what really went on. What we do know is that on August 31, 2010 James Nibbe lost his life. He was sleeping in his Crystal Lake Minnesota home when he was shot in his head. His wife, Jennifer was present in the home, as well as a sixteen year old son. Jennifer would call 9-1-1 and claim that a “masked intruder” came into the home, grabbed the family rifle that was positioned at the door, shot her husband and then met her outside the bathroom door at gunpo...

I often pride myself in knowing particular things about the law. In doing this blog of course I learn new things. Each case is specific and teach different things. Sometimes I may learn, as I recently have, that a state has abolished the death penalty, or maybe they seem close to doing so. Sometimes I may learn that a court has overturned a conviction that I was unaware of prior to researching deeper into a case. But, if someone would have asked me if there was a Statue of Limitations on murder I would have answered with a resounding no. I would have been wrong, although admittedly just barely. New Mexico is apparently the only state in which a statue of limitations exists on murder. And, it seems that until the early 2000's it applied to all degrees of murder. It was then that it was changed but only regarding first degree murder. What this meant was that any murder that was “solved” past the six year statue of limitations could only be tried in a court under the first...

One of the first things I came across in my research on one of the perpetrators of this crime was an appeal from 2014.  I love working with actual appeal papers. They condense down the events that occurred during the acting out of the crime as well as during any trial that took place and they deal solely with the legal aspects of things.  This appeal was different in many ways however. First, there had been no trial against Randal Crosley nor his accomplice, Jordan Buskirk so the fact that there was an appeal was quite unusual. Both Crosley and Buskirk had agreed to plea deals with the prosecutors and in general that prevents an appeal taking place.  However, in this case Crosley had filed an appeal based on the sentence that he had received.... an eighty-one year "aggravated" sentence.  This was a term that I had never heard before and to be honest even after a search to define the terms I was unsuccessful.  What seems a bit more confusing is that the pr...