s&d: True Crime! books

i wasn't totally convinced by the self-medication theory either. i thought she might have had some kind of psychotic episode or maybe a very severe migraine in combination with the alcohol and the marijuana exacerbating any mental symptoms she was experiencing. i can't remember if they said the level of THC in her system was consistent with having smoked marijuana that morning though.

This looks promising-:

Piper KermanVerified account ‏@Piper

#CJreform #OITNB MT @DebKilroy: @MichelleLA22: Tenacious - A magazine created by incarcerated women http://bit.ly/1AbdOqP #prison

And this:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/nov/20/why-innocent-people-plead-guilty/

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29835159

eeesh. got as far as the cat torture and stopped.

I should have flagged that. I'm sorry.

The author of that article wrote a book about her experience. Might be interesting?

http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/07/justice/mcstay-case/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

they arrested someone in the mcstay family murders and it was the guy who supposedly received a phone call from mcstay that night but 'didn't answer it' and 'regretted not picking up'

so he alone killed all 4 of them in their home & there were no signs of struggle.......will be interesting to know what evidence they have on this dude

i finished kitty genovese and started lost girls. true crime is my life now i guess.

:D

Reading Robert M. Lombardo, Organized Crime in Chicago. The author had an uncle in the Outfit. Starts with Chicago's beginnings as a gambling capital, goes on into Prohibition to the present day. Published in 2013, it has loads of colorful facts, lots of stuff that was taboo ( like mob neighborhoods and hang-outs) until now. I'm on the chapter about black gangsters. They had saloons and gambling houses and even white people went to them to hear the new "jazz" music. 200 pages, it's a quick read but packed with stuff esp. about gambling.

theres a cnn special on the mcstay case @ 9 est tnight

i'm pretty good at armchair crime solving sometimes, but i feel like this guy talking about a phone call he didn't answer an hour after the "family left" the house is such an obvious red flag i can't believe more people didn't notice it, like one of those details that with hindsight seems so false and wrong and too right for that particular guy,

w/ hindsight it def does but according to this guy, he and joey mcstay talked on the phone dozens or twenty times or w/e that day, and im assuming the phone logs back that up? so if there were calls all right up to the last faked one, its sensible it wouldn't stand out

also, not sure if mcstays cell was found still in his house? thats what im assuming. otherwise if it was found with the remains out in Victorville near where the arrested dude lives, then maybe the cops have the fake call pinging out there cuz it was in the killers possession and he called himself from his own home. thatd obv be p dumb but wouldn't surprise me really

reminds me that The Serial's convicted/maybe at least partially framed dude said to have called himself etc and much else re phone logs, incl. iffiness (xpost, but now w own thread)

yeah i'm sure the logs back that up, it just seems like....why would he call that guy? if he was in trouble (the speculated reason for the call from merritt himself iirc?) he had his brother and dad or, idk, 911.

i finished lost girls. i thought it was kinda meh. i think i'll read the hijacking book next.

great article on Texarkana's "Phantom Killer":
http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/the-story-of-the-phantom-killer-a-texarkana-murder-mystery

Totally fascinated by the story of Ann and John Bender. It's a real-life version of The Mosquito Coast
http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/Love-and-Madness-in-the-Jungle.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-death-of-john-bender-suicide-accident-or-murder/

I finally got around to reading "Lost Girls" and it made me depressed and angry. I posted on FB after reading it that for all the mystery-fan conjecture over the years about "How to commit the perfect murder," it's depressingly easy in this country: Kill transients and sex workers.

It seems like the Long Island police department is hopelessly corrupt and the locals are keeping their mouth shut, too, which isn't helping

haven't read any of these but you guys might like them http://longform.org/lists/best-of-2014#crime

The bank-robbing family article is the best one. Texas Monthly's crime writing is always A+

I guess it's kind of an obvious recommendation but carrere's The Adversary will knock your socks off.

not heard of this but buying now - don't be afraid to be obvious on this thread!

damn no ebook to buy, only thing out there is an unreadably blurred pdf scan

I watched the doc on this thing -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Cruces_Bowling_Alley_massacre

it was ok, didn't really truly quench my true crime thirst cuz theres really minimal info w/r/t suspects and it is mostly just very sad

i hadn't heard of it either. looks great. i'm buying a one cent copy on amazon. just watched "murder on a sunday morning" which was amazing, there's a high-enough resolution one on youtube from channel four. i'll get it for u all later.

(that pdf scan above is only unreadable on calibre, weirdly. works fine on olde style kindle, if a little small)

ashamed to admit that i never read in cold blood. started it after seeing discussion re: it's ethicalness on serial thread. also started manson book but stopped. it's good though. i just constantly start and don't finish books. i think i'll finish it. it's 2015 though and 2014 was my year of true crime. i need to read other types of books too.

i was obsessed with in cold blood in high school

Only TV, but Dateline tonight: re victim of his beating:"She was suffering like an animal. I had to put her out of her misery." New one on me

Not making light, I just never heard that before. Think he's about to claim he's victim of abuse (pleaded Not Guilty after confessing).
Yes, that's what he just did.

Charge is Second Degree Murder, don't know why not First, ffs

Been meaning to pick up The Good Nurse for a few months now, but reading that it was going to be the subject for Aronofsky's next film made me bump it up a little in the queue. Haven't cracked it yet, but I feel like I'll be digging into true crime in 2015 and this thread seems like it'll give me some good recs.

Think I already mentioned this, but been seeing more about it recently, reminding me I still need to read
Jill Leovy's Ghettoside. From NY Times review by Jennifer Gonnerman:
[
i]Leovy...started a blog at her newspaper {LA Times] in late 2006 called The Homicide Report, in which she attempted to cover every murder in Los Angeles County in a single year. It was a radical idea — at the time, her paper reported on only about 10 percent of homicides — and also a near-impossible task: In a 2008 article, Leovy acknowledged that the report “has merely skimmed a problem whose true depths couldn’t be conveyed.” So, she took the opposite tack, to convey more via narrowing the focus:
In “Ghettoside,” she tackles this “plague of murders,” as she calls it, with a book-length narrative that enables her to write about it with all the context and complexity it deserves. Her protagonist is John Skaggs, a Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective, whom she portrays as both compassionate and relentless...The narrative arc of “Ghettoside” traces one of Skaggs’s homicide cases: the murder of Bryant Tennelle.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/books/review/jill-leovys-ghettoside.html?nl=books&emc=edit_bk_20150123&_r=0

Messed up the formatting: from "Leovy...started" to "conveyed," the post quotes the reviewer.

ooh i heard her on frrrrrresh air this morning and preordered the ebook mid-interview
it sounds really interesting

Yeah, just now saw the download/stream on their site, didn't know!
http://www.npr.org/2015/01/26/381589023/ghettoside-explores-why-murders-are-invisible-in-los-angeles

i can't stop this true crime thing, i am just so voyeuristic about these ppl in these books it's bordering on gross. life is too short to worry about that though. i finished in cold blood. i started the good nurse. that one is already so insane and great. i am 10% done. like some commenter on amazon said don't read it on kindle because there are so many footnotes but i'm doing ok, just have to remember the location you left to go back.

did u like in cold blood?

i did but i didn't believe it was true? like is it a novel?

It's a true story that Truman Capote took a lot of artistic license with iirc.

otm

ok, i get it. the good nurse is so terrifying and amazing and fucked up, love it.

ok sold i am going to put it on my kindle for my trip next week :D

Ghettoside is really good. Story unfolds slowly and naturally, respectful of everyone involved imo. I'm only about 45% done but it's a solid book afaict.

I devoured "Cries in the Desert" by John Glatt about the "toy box" torturer / murderer in New Mexico. It was just fascinating, this scene in Truth or Consequences, NM with bikers and drinkers and meth abusers - a lot of people who just live cheaply in the desert and do drugs all of the time. It even has Satanism in it.

This book covers decades of tangled lives--families, lovers, friends, frenemies etc.--in and out of the projects, streets and prisons. Case in point: dealin' prodigy Boy George, a hero to some and sentenced to Life Without Parole by the time he turned 21 (the Rockefeller Laws, solution to drug epidemic uh-huh). So how does he deal with that? Better than I expected, but it's a long & winding road--ditto life in women's prison, which now seems like a prequel to Orange Is The New Black, the series more than the book. The author got to know these people as well as she could, seems like:
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc