Murder Most Foul

In 1990, Jens Soering, a German honors student at the University of Virginia, was sentenced to life after a spectacular televised trial for the 1985 murders of his lover’s Elizabeth’s parents, Derek and Nancy Haysom. In a classic example of “he said/she said,” at their trials the star-crossed lovers each pointed the finger at the other as the actual murderer. Were Jens and Elizabeth Romeo and Juliet or Macbeth and Lady Macbeth?  From his Virginia prison cell,Soering deployed his charm to create his

Crime movies, documentaries and literature come in several genres: True Crime (just the facts, Ma’am), “Non-Fiction Novel,” (made famous by Truman Capote with his masterpiece, In Cold Blood) and pure fiction. But even with fictitious crime novels, there are hybrid approaches. Some are “based on a true story,” or “inspired by a true story,” or “drawn from today’s headlines.” Mapping the Night by David Bethel, falls comfortably into that last category. Drawn from an actual murder case that took place

To all who knew him, Robert Hansen was a typical hardworking businessman, husband, and father. Buthidden beneath the veneer of mild respectability was a monster whose depraved appetites could not be sated. From 1971 to 1983, Hansen was a human predator, stalking women on the edges of Anchorage society—women whose disappearances would cause scant outcry, but whose gruesome fates would shock the nation. After his arrest, Hansen confessed to seventeen brutal murders, though authorities suspect there

On May 31,1985, two days before her high school graduation, Shari Faye Smith was abducted from the driveway of her family home in South Carolina. For several days after the abduction, the kidnapper called and sent letters to the family, taunting them with details of abduction and murder of Shari. Ultimately, he revealed the location of Shari’s body on a phone call to Shari’s older sister, Dawn. But he wasn’t finished. Two weeks to the day of Shari’s abduction, the murderer snatched another victim,

MISSISSIPPI BURNING is the name of a motion picture, released in 1988, starring Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe, loosely based on the murders of 3 civil rights workers in Mississippi, during the “Freedom Summer” of 1964.  James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were lured to Philadelphia, Mississippi, and executed by the Ku Klux Klan. No one was ever prosecuted for their murders, until over 40 years later when Jerry Mitchell, an investigative reporter with The Clarion-Ledger, in Jackson,

I saw her standin' on her front lawnJust a twirlin' her batonMe and her went for a ride, sirAnd ten innocent people diedFrom the town of Lincoln, Nebraska With a sawed off .410 on my lapThrough to the badlands of WyomingI killed everything in my path I can't say that I'm sorryFor the things that we doneAt least for a little while, sirMe and her we had us some fun Now the jury brought in a guilty verdictAnd the judge he

“A Murder in Hollywood” - the dark story behind the bright lights of Tinseltown.Before there was Jodie Foster and Brooke Sheilds, there was Judy Turner. You may know her by her stage name, Lana Turner.  Discovered at a malt shop in LA in her early teens and thrust before the cameras, she seemed to have it all―a thriving film career and the kind of fame and fortune that most people could only dream of. But she was soon physically abused by directors and studio honchos and sexually preyed upon by the