. During the evening of July 7, a 1954 Nash Rambler station wagon driven by 28 year-old Lynn Baggett bore into the rear of a station wagon near Waring and Orlando Avenues in Los Angeles. The car she hit was filled with young boys returning from a day trip to a camp site. The force […]

Posted from: “Full Pardon Asked For One Who Paid For another Man’s Crime,” The Sunday News and Tribune, Jefferson City, MO, Nov. 2, 1947   Attorneys for Frank Werther, 47, who served nearly 15 years in the Missouri state penitentiary here and state mental hospitals after conviction of a crime he did not commit, are […]

. Skull in the Ashes: Murder, a Gold Rush Manhunt, and the Birth of Circumstantial Evidence in America, by Peter Kaufman On a February night in 1897, the general store in Walford, Iowa, burned down. The next morning, townspeople discovered a charred corpse in the ashes. Everyone knew that the store’s owner, Frank Novak, had […]

. Before I decided to major in journalism and creative writing two decades ago, I wanted to be an archeologist. Having been on some digs, there’s just something so incredible about digging up an artifact in which the last person who touched it was 300 to 1,000s of years ago. Well, I found a book […]

. Story #1: Child Brutally Slain in LA, Suspect is Hunted LOS ANGELES, CA, Nov. 15, 1949: The gashed and mutilated body of six year-old Linda Glucoft was found today in a rubbish heap, wrapped in a brightly colored Indian blanket. Police Sgt. Bill Brennan said he definitely had established that the blanket came from […]

Posted below is a short but interesting documentary about the murder of Sonja McCaskie in 1963. She skied for the British team during the 1960 Olympics. Her killer, 18 year-old Thomas Lee Bean, was tried and sentenced to die in the Nevada gas chamber in 1963.  In 1972,  the United State Supreme Court overruled all […]