#true crime review

[my-52-weeks-with-christie]

True Crime Review!

Murder At Teal’s Pond — David Bushman & Mark T. Givens with a Foreward by Mark Frost Did you know a true crime case helped inspire Twin Peaks? Neither did I! It turns out Mark Frost’s (who co-created the iconic series) early life intersected with a one-hundred-and-fourteen-year-old murder – first introduced to him by his Grandmother in the form of a ghost story. The name of Frost’s ghost and…

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#book #book cover #book photo #book pic #David bushman #hazel drew #Laura palmer #mark frost #mark t givens #murder at teal&039;s pond #my 52 weeks with christie #mystery #true crime #true crime review #twin peaks

[professionalyapper]

The story is about two high school students, Alex Frost and Eric Deulen, two close friends and students in a suburb of Portland, who calmly plan and perform a mass execution of their classmates and school administrators in the course of one day

Elephant (2003 film) is an American psychological drama film

#Zero day #elephant #2003 #American film #elephant 2003 #tc community #true crime #columbine #Tcc #Movie #movies #reviews #FYP FUP #FYP

[truecrimecrystals]

Cases with Major Updates in 2023, Part One.

Many cases featured on this page had major updates during 2023. While these cases still aren't resolved, these updates created movement in their investigations and more awareness to the case overall. Here's part one of the list of cases with major updates this year. Lots of you are already familiar with them so I provided a brief TL;DR description with each, but links to the full case write-up are there as well! Part two will be posted at a later date.

The Disappearance & Death of Cheyann Klus. TL;DR update: The remains of Cheyann Klus were identified in January 2023. Cheyann had been missing since December 2017; she vanished at the age of 22 from Chicago, Illinois. Her remains were reportedly found in 2020 but remained unidentified until January 2023.

The Disappearance & Murder of Katelyn Markham. TL;DR update: In March 2023, John Carter was charged with Katelyn's murder. Weeks earlier, Jonathan Palmerton was charged with perjury in relation to Katelyn's murder. Katelyn originally vanished in Fairfield, Ohio at the age of 21 during 2011. Her remains were found in 2013. Carter was Katelyn's fiancé and he had been a person of interest in the case since her disappearance. The cases against both men are currently pending.

The Murder of Courtney Phillips. TL;DR update: Isaac Estrada was finally charged with Courtney Phillips' murder after being captured by authorities in Eagle Pass, Texas. Courtney was found stabbed to death at a residence in San Antonio, Texas in April 2015. Estrada was a suspect early into the investigation, but police were unable to locate him. After 8 years on the run, Estrada was finally captured in March 2023. He is currently facing charges for evading arrest, first-degree aggravated robbery and first-degree murder. 

The Disappearance of Irene Gakwa. TL;DR update: During March 2023, Nathan Hightman was sentenced to six years in prison for using Irene Gakwa's credit cards, bank accounts, and Facebook/email accounts after she went missing in February 2022. Irene is still missing, and Hightman still denies knowledge of her whereabouts.

The Disappearance & Death of Madison Scott. TL;DR update: The remains of Madison Scott were found on a rural property east of Vanderhoof during May 2023. Madison vanished at the age of 20 nearly 12 years earlier during a party at Hogsback Lake. Since the discovery of her remains, detectives have remained quiet about the state of the investigation.

#2023 in review #end of 2023 #cheyann klus #katelyn markham #courtney phillips #irene gakwa #madison scott #ongoing case #true crime #true crime research #tcoriginal

[mywaysthehighway]

#cecil hotel #hotel cecil #funny #funny reviews #google reviews #haunting #haunted hotel #creepy #creepypasta #weird #weirdcore #oddcore #oddities #freaky #scary #horror #true crime #soft gore #cute gore #nightmare #spooky #halloween all year #serial killer #true crime fan #Ted bundy #the night stalker #Richard Ramirez

[trashmenace]

Startling Detective Yearbook 1966

Startling Detective Yearbook 1966, Vol 1, No 4

Blood Bath for a Baby-Sitter by Stanley Churchill - a babysitter is brutally stabbed with a bayonet

Rape and Murder Ends a Pep Pill Binge - A hairdresser on bennies kidnaps a couple teenagers in Dallas, raping and killing one, tormenting the other until he passed out and she escaped. Sentenced to death, but was commuted when the Supreme Court temporarily overturned the death penalty in 1972. The killer was alive as of at least 2019 and is still registered as a sex offender at his nursing home.

Bluebeard's Wife - Historical quickie of a career criminal who buried several people under cement

Cold Corpse in a Hot Car by Lawrence Gardner - capri pant wearing wife and her ex-con lover kill her doting husband

Love Had a Bitter Taste by Andre Connor

Heavily padded tale of an elderly arsenic wielding black widow.

Blue-Eyed Blonde Under the Bridge by Hal White

Multiple killings of women in Montana, though only one conviction is mentioned. An internet check shows the rest were unsolved as of a few years later.

Riddle of the Twisted Love Triangle by Keith Ramsey

A woman steps out, separates from her husband who promptly moves in with her lover. Hubby disappears while her boyfriend is shot to death by cops after a robbery.

When it Snows, It's Murder by Harold Edwards

A killer hires a teenage girl as a babysitter, posing as a client.

I Had To Kill by Ace Bushnell

Door to door salesman turned killer. Creepy detailed confession.

Murdered Teacher at Battle Mountain by D.L. Champion

A woman is killed after her car runs out of gas. The killer had a failed appeal, had his last parole hearing in 2009 and is now deceased.

None of the cases are particularly compelling, many of them invented narrative devices like internal monologues or details only known to the dead, and each story is compelled to describe the victims as attractive, or at least shapely, at every opportunity.

#true crime #book review

[therealstatechamp]

Hey friends, I'm Nessa (Tennessee when I'm in trouble), I'm a model, Beverly Hills born and bred, I have a tiny dog, and I watch way too much true crime.

@ imtheonlytenyousee

#k9s.intro #Do The Roar #body image #colored text #eye strain #death #murder #for the true crime mention #I gave up waiting for the label review and deleted and reposted

[darklyscanning]

devil house (john darnielle, 2022)

this book peeled me open. right off the bat, i want to say that i recommend this to anyone interested in analysing stories, subjects, and the ethical complications of true crime / biography / documentary / docudrama. it's a major interest of mine: whose story gets told, and how, and why, and what that says about the teller. but, if you couldn't care less about any of that, then this may not be the book for you.

i do have a small gripe with the bookstore i bought this in: this book was in the 'horror' section. that is certainly not the genre in which it should be situated, although i can see why someone might place it there. it's a fictional work about the real questions true crime writers have to reckon with, and there are certainly horrifying scenes, but it is far more sad than scary.

it's a fairly quick read, but i won't call it 'easy' - it asks quite a lot of its reader, from shifting characters and viewpoints, to shifting fonts. if you're at all familiar with john darnielle's other work (most famously, the mountain goats), you will recognise many things that he is fascinated by (locations, stories, times), and you will also recognise his love of obscure and lost things. hopefully, you acknowledge this with fondness or with a similar enthusiasm to darnielle himself; otherwise, you probably will not enjoy this book.

character, subject, reader, and writer - these categories are slippery in devil house, and so is time. in some moments, i found it difficult to determine who 'you' was referring to; who was telling the story? who was being addressed? and further, as the protagonist (or, the closest to a protagonist we are able to grasp) reconstructs the past and delves into his own, we are made aware of the blurred boundaries between memory and the stories we tell to fill in the gaps. this can be disorienting, but that's the point: the book is reflecting on the complicated nature of storytelling itself.

i love this book. i love its weird detour to medieval england, in order to make a point about castles and kings and defending your home. i love its characters-within-characters, its stories-within-stories. the fact that darnielle succeeds in making equally fictional characters feel more real than others is a feat in itself. well-written, though with a few difficult moments; somehow circular, but in a meaningful way. i feel the need to reread it already. personally, i think it's genius, but i know other people won't feel the same way. an acquired taste.

writing 8/10 • thinking 9/10 • loving 9/10

#bookblr #book review #devil house #john darnielle #rec #true crime #(not really)

[ninja-muse]

Another month, another book review coming weeks after I finished the book! Which is absolutely because I wanted to be sure this was the best thing I read this month, and not because I procrastinated and then forgot….

Lay Them to Rest by Laurah Norton is about Doe cases, specifically about one Doe case which the author and her friends work to solve, with asides into forensic techniques and other topics related to Does. (Does being unidentified remains, for the true crime uninitiated.)

I found it engaging and enlightening, for all that I already knew a fair bit about the techniques and the complications of Doe cases. The case was intriguing, one of those almost impossible mysteries, and following Norton as she shadows the scientists and other crime-adjacent folks was really interesting. There's an anthropologist, a dentist, a sketch artist, and a genetic genealogy lab, among others, and Norton takes care to show their day-to-day, what their workload is like, their personalities, all of that. For instance, the anthropologist isn't just looking into this Doe case; she's got a handful of others, which also get discussed as further examples of what unidentified remains can be like.

Norton talks pretty fairly too about why cases go unsolved. I'm so used to the true crime podcast polarizations—either the police are fantastic, or the police are at best incompetent—that having someone point out that it's actually really hard to solve a crime when all you have is, say, a decapitated head at a dump site, was refreshing, or at least injected a bit of perspective. There's not much you can do to solve a case with scant evidence, no matter how much you want to, especially in the days before DNA.

(This was also kind of a sad book, for that reason. I kept running up against reasons why this, and other, cases went cold, and wanting the same resolution for them as Norton does, while knowing why that wasn't likely to happen. And worrying about the families of Does, who're missing people and may never know they've been found.)

Lay Them to Rest isn't a dry book, despite the science, or a dark book, despite the subject matter, which is certainly gruesome in places. It feels very much like a thoughtful, caring, self-deprecating memoir with science added in to illuminate it, though it's clear explaining the science was one of Norton's goals. If you're interested in Does and missing persons, or in citizen detective work, and you're okay with some disturbing details and implications, I'd certainly recommend looking into this book.

And yes, I've now followed both Norton's podcasts, and her compassion, humour, and victim-focused perspective definitely carry over between those and the book.

#books #booklr #bookblr #book reviews #true crime #non-fiction #memoirs #lay them to rest #laurah norton #read in 2023 #my photos

[bookishlyvintage]

The Restless Dark, Erica Winters [x]

#book review #the restless dark #erica winters #bookstagram #ya suspense #ya thriller #thriller #suspense #true crime #whodunnit #flat lay #cozy #cozy reads #bookblr #booklr #bookish #books #review #mini review

[hannahsliteraryhaven]

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

by Dee Brown ★★★★☆

I feel as though the genocide of the Native Americans has been massively glossed over, in comparison to other mass genocides. Even this book was once banned in a US school because they didn't want to cause controversy! This gradual genocide began not too long after European settlers were originally welcomed and shown hospitality by the Native Americans when they first arrived on American soil.

I can't name a movie (other than the one made after this book, which I found only after I finished the book) that focuses exclusively on the experiences of the Native Americans. Every cowboy movie I've seen, the Native Americans are always a background nuisance; savages that will kill any white man they see. Brown gives you a much clearer picture of what happened, and why they behaved the way they did, often copying the atrocities committed against them by white soldiers, but that is, of course, wiped out in the white men's narrative. He shares how the whites created false narratives in order to gain support so that they could continue stealing land and sending the Native Americans to reservations.

This book is a good introduction to the main tribes and most notable chiefs during the period of 1860-1890, and what each tribe experienced. I found the book hard to read at times because there is a lot of information and names; quite a lot of names seemed thrown in and I felt like I was expected to know them from the get go, but over time, I got used to how Brown had laid out the chapters - each chapter is essentially a new tribe/massacre/fight and you have to accept that you might not remember all of the white army men's names and their positions, and that's okay because this is definitely a book to come back to, not least because of the many real photographs of the Chiefs and other notable Native Americans. It really helped to bring a face to the people you're reading about; a reminder that you're not reading fiction, but the lives of real people. I read this through my library but I'm tempted to buy my own copy in the future to look back on.

This book has encouraged me to learn even more about the true history of what these incredible people endured, and still endure. It blew me away when I learned that there are still Native American reservations and they experience horrendous poverty. What kind of a world do we live in? I hope for the day when the US government finally put their egos aside, accept their wrongdoings and give back to the Native Americans so that they can lead good lives in their own country. It took until 1978 for Native Americans just to be allowed to practice harmless ceremonies in public! I now see Mount Rushmore as nothing but a huge insult to Native Americans; calving 4 white men into their sacred mountains that they fought so hard to protect. I only recently learned that Native Americans were holding protests against it.

I hope that all of the Native American tribes still around today can continue to share their history, revel in their culture and be unapologetically proud of their heritage.

#book reviewer #booklr #books #bookblr #reading #goodreads #bookworm #books and reading #books & libraries #native americans #indigenous rights #native indians #the wild west #american history #true crime #non-fiction #review #book reviews #book blog #book blogger

[debussyandbooks]

19 Jumādā ath-Thāniya 1445 \\ 3 january 2024

💵 B O O K R E V I E W I S H 💵

perks of finding dead time when working in a library: i finished my first book of 2024, familjen ("the family") by johanna bäckström lerneby.

bäckström lerneby is a journalist who received recognition for an article she wrote about a clan associated with crime in gothenburg, sweden. she wrote this book about the same clan or family after the success of said article.

for legal causes names have been changed in the book, making it more difficult to tie characters in her book to actual people; but the book revolves around this lebanese clan/ family, very known and present in gothenburg, from which multiple young, teenage and grown up male family members have been involved in series of crime. things like selling drugs, cases of abuse, threats and even murder, some family members have been convicted of and others suspected of. it's an interesting book in the sense that bäckström lerneby interviewed both the clan leader, the police chief in the area and met and spoke to victims of crimes similar to those "the family" has been comitting. she covers many perspectives which gives a much needed depth to this kind of writing. maybe worth a 8/10? 🩵

#debussyandbooks #book review #books #bookblr #books & libraries #book photography #booklr #criminology #true crime

[sephirajo]

Netflix’s Dahmer - Monster Makes Me Uncomfortable - And Not in the Way the Authors Intended

So, I watched and finished Netflix’s “revolutionary” crime drama and I’m going to have to stop them right there.  The only thing really revolutionary about this crime drama is how they claimed to be supporting victims stories, while apparently not having asked for permission in order to add some of the more explosive memories everyone has from the ‘91 trial peppered in near the end to keep people watching.

Note, I’m not upset at the women who played Rita Isbell, she did a good job with what is an older sister breaking down in the face her brother’s killer, a scene really only added to be bombastic as several other less famous victim statements exist, some of whom I’m sure would have given permission for this, if asked.  This is, sadly, a side effect of a public trial, all of these victim statements are public record and with that permission isn’t a legal requirement.  Only a desire to put the pain of others on display.

Dahmer is in living memory, we had just moved in to my family’s first house when the case broke all over, and living in Minnesota we heard about it over and over, jokes made their way around my school as a way for a bunch of ten year olds to deal with what they were hearing every night on the news. And those statements are ones that not only do quite a few of us alive today still remember but weren’t even really necessary to show on screen for the story the REST of the series is trying to tell.

The rest of the series actually does do something I haven’t seen more than a handful of times, it lays the blame where it belongs, on racism and police incompetence and willingness to believe a white man over a black woman. It covers Rev. Jesse Jackson going to Milwaukee, it focused more than lightly on Glenda Cleveland, another thing I haven’t seen done outside a documentary.  The episode “Silenced” is another amazing stand out, being from the point of view of Tony, one of Dahmer’s victims.  A deaf, black, gay man in Milwaukee in the 90s and focuses on his community and trying to connect in a hearing world.  Then, that itself seems ruined as he’s dangled in front of Dahmer as hope at redemption, a soulmate, someone he could have bonded with before Dahmer does what Dahmer did. If only the other victims got more attention.

That aside there’s details I hadn’t heard before, one I’m sure is a change which... um why when you have so many young men to choose from would you have to add someone who lived in the Oxford Apartments?  Unless I’m misremembering, that didn’t happen.  Also a claim that Dahmer was digging up and sleeping with recently deceased men from the neighborhood, now, I admit I don’t know every detail of the case or how cemeteries in Milwaukee are, but I do think that would have been something that had come up in any other doc before if there was any evidence of it, which I can’t see how there wouldn’t be. Graves are not easily dug up.  It is not easily hidden, especially if, like the show has someone claim, he was doing it more than just once or twice.  I get making changes to a true story when putting it to screen because real life is messy and our brains can’t process it with the ease we do a good story, but it seems really disrespectful on top of everything else for the writers to do.

I don’t doubt they think they were telling all the victims stories, but I’m going to leave you with this news segment I found from a local Milwaukee news station:

Milwaukee LGBTQIA+ Community reacts to Jeffrey DHamer Netflix Series

#jeffrey dahmer #monster: the jeffrey dahmer story #true crime #reviews #evan peters #netflix #television #lgbtqia #milwaukee #rita isbell

[truecrimecrystals]

Resolved in 2022: Complete list

Here’s a complete list of the cases featured on this blog that were resolved in 2022. The links contain the full case write-ups. Shorter summaries of the cases can be found in part 1 and part 2.

The cases (listed by date in which the crime/case occurred - recent to oldest):

The murder of Jennifer Rothwell (2019)

The murder of Kaytlynn Cargill (2017)

The Sherri Papini abduction hoax (2016)

The murder of Anjelica ‘AJ’ Hadsell (2015)

The disappearance and murder of Megan Nichols (2014)

The disappearance and presumed murder of Morgan Martin (2012)

The disappearance and murder of Brittanee Drexel (2009)

The murder of Brittany Zimmermann (2008)

The murders of Amina & Sarah Said (2008)

#2022 in review #list series #true crime #true crime research #tcoriginal #end of 2022 #resolved case #2022

[crimesandcuriosities]

Current read, 10/10 would recommend 📖💭

#psychology #psychopathy #psychopaths #true crime #serial killers #book review #please always send book recs I am here for it x

[trashmenace]

Unsolved Mysteries ed Rose G. Mandelsberg

Unsolved Mysteries ed Rose G. Mandelsberg From the Files of True Detective Magazine 1992, Pinnacle

Twenty five articles from True Detective and associated true crime magazines. Ranges from well know serial killers like the Cleveland Torso Murderer and the Green River Killer to local cases. One of the traits of the unsolved reports is that they spend more time on dead end leads and the messy nature of investigation, while solved cases tend to report more of a straight line.

Mostly solid, though it slips briefly into tabloid territory - one British article refers to urban myths of widespread sex trafficking from Europe to the Middle East as well as child snuff film rackets. Another has an undercover vice detective navigating the Portland lesbian scene.

A handful have been solved in the subsequent thirty years, notably the Green River Killer Gary Ridgway and serial killer Patrick Baxter. The Green River article has an anonymous psychic who claims to have directly discovered skeletal remains in the woods, but I couldn't readily find another claim for this outside the book.

Available from Amazon

#true crime #book review

[livingscarypodcast]

We got a new episode! Check out #97 to hear us talk about the 2019 film Escape Room and a true crime survivor story! You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube!

#podcast #horror podcast #podcasts #horror #podcaster #true crime #horror movies #spooky #podcasting #october #escape room #movie review