True Crime Stories

  When I put names on my list of cases to research I try to put something on there with it to guide me to what kind of case it would be. For example I may put a name down and then say if it was a spousal murder I say the spouses name and sometimes I will add a state. This case was listed as “Jonathon Edington- Barry James- neighbor.” I assumed it was likely one of the cases that I had gathered on Fear Thy Neighbor and to be fair, I may have but not only was my memory not jogged when I started looking at the case, it was never jogged. To be fair I have no idea where I heard about this case for certain and I have no memory of hearing anything about it. I am a bit perturbed with myself because I think it is an important case. On August 28, 2006 Fairfield Connecticut patent attorney, Jonathon Edington returned home from Rhode Island where he, his wife and his two daughters had been visiting family. Jonathon, for reasons that I never found, returned home alone that evening. My ...

  Earlier this year I read the book Killer Show by John Barylick. It was written in 2015 about The Station nightclub fire. I had heard about the story but almost in passing. It was not something that I had gone great lengths to look into. In fact, it was not until I was reading the book that I realized or even saw that there was a video taken at the time of the fire. Maybe it was because while in high school I was only moderately into the rock group Great White . Like a lot of teenagers in the mid to late 1980's I owned their album Twice Shy with really the only song I can truthfully say I liked or even remembered by them (Once Bitten, Twice Shy). To me they were little more than a one hit wonder band although presumably they had at least some followers. Over the next several decades the lead singer, Jack Russell, had attempted to “revamp” the group. He recruited musicians, some who played in the original group; some who did not. They began touring the country but this wa...

  I debated on how to title this one. Generally I will have a victim or a perpetrator in the title. I am unsure if that makes it easier to find on the Internet or not but that is not necessarily why I do the titles as I do. I decided to use this title because this is the title used on a Wikipedia page so I know it can still be found that way. For those who may be wondering already as I am sure there are “Hamilton Avenues” all over, this crime took place in Indianapolis. I dug a bit deeper in this case and purposely went out of my way to find an appeal record because I have to say in my initial research I was a bit confused first at how police were so fast in determining who was involved and secondly, in just what evidence investigators and prosecutors had to obtain convictions considering I kept seeing that there was no physical evidence connecting the perpetrators to the crime. Not long after 10:00 pm on June 1, 2006 Indianapolis police received several 911 calls about s...

  This case has apparently been on my list for a very long time but I have to say that I do not remember hearing about it, even though it is obvious that I did at some point. In fact, my research stated that Ann Rule wrote a book called A Rose For Her Grave about it although admittedly it was apparently one of her books with several stories in in. When it comes to true crime books in reference to Ann Rule I am a bit in the minority when it comes to her. I admit that it was one of her early books that got me hooked on true crime reading and many of her books and stories are very good. However, I have always felt that as her popularity grew it affected her writing and that rather than give facts of a story she did a lot of interjecting herself and her feelings in her books. There are a few cases that she did where in my opinion she ignores the evidence collected and expressed her own conclusion, one that went against investigators. It has been said that Charles Campbell is t...

My recent television kick is watching old episodes of 48 Hours and Dateline . As is customary for me I often do a search on the case while I am watching the show. Most of these that I have watched recently are ones that I have seen in the past and some were already on my list, while others made their way to that ever growing list of cases to look over. I had seen this particular case more than once in the past but when I looked if there were any updates I was pleasantly surprised that there had been and some were rather recent. On the night of October 5, 2005 twenty-seven year old Christie Wilson disappeared after leaving a casino in Lincoln California. She was seen on surveillance video leaving the casino next to another man. Police were able to go back to the casino and were able to identify the man as fifty-three year old Mario Garcia. The video footage had shown Christie and Mario walking out of the building towards the parking lot. At one point Garcia attempted to put h...

  This case has me a bit perplexed on some things. Everyone that has been or continues to be held on death row in Indiana can be found on a particular website. The site is full of information about a case, but more particularly about the person. If they have already been executed it will add things such as what they had for their last meal or their last statement. One of the more interesting things that it often shows is the mitigating and aggravating circumstances of the case. It was here that I found one of the confusing things. The second thing revolved around issues with the jury in the sentencing phase. I will get into these issues as I tell the story but I will let you know that while Daniel Ray Wilkes was sentenced to death in December of 2007, after several appeals upholding this sentence, in 2011 he was subsequently re-sentenced to life without parole. Daniel Ray Wilkes met Donna Claspell when they were both residents at a rehabilitation center in Evansville Indi...