The lust for true crime is generally fired by a notion that bad people are good fun, so long as one doesn’t have to share a dark alley with them.
-- Andrew O'Hagan, New York Times
Clews have been scarce lately, and I've two bouncing boys to blame. While I am working in my itsy bitsy free time on some interesting old murder stories to share with you, I've also come across some extraordinarily well written accounts of old cases elsewhere on the web. Here are a few.
First, Let's Eat the Dessert Lauded internet sleuth Steve Huff is writing historic true crime essays. He promises to introduce us to his favorite fixations (and maybe teach us a thing or two about how to tell a story) on the Huff Crime Blog.
The Author Who Solved a 1957 Murder -- in 2006 And he did it by reading old newspapers. From The L.A. Times:
Mack Ray Edwards (link added) walked into the Los Angeles Police Department's Foothill station on March 6, 1970, and said he wanted to clear his conscience....
[He confessed that he] killed 18 children....before they could get more information, Edwards hanged himself ... Thirty-five years later, detectives are taking a new look at Edwards, reopening four missing-child cases from nearly half a century ago that they believe are tied to him...
Police say their interest was sparked by the efforts of Pasadena author Weston DeWalt, who was researching the 1957 disappearance of 8-year-old Tommy Bowman in the Arroyo Seco.
While DeWalt was searching old newspapers, a photograph caught his attention. The black-and-white image, circa 1970, showed Edwards in handcuffs as he was led into court.
"I looked at it and I thought: This face looks familiar, but why?" DeWalt recalled. "I studied it for about five minutes and was struck by the resemblance to a sketch I had seen in a Pasadena Police Department file."
(Weston DeWalt is an interesting writer. I read his book The Climb about mountain climber Anatoli Boukreev - prose in high polish about a fascinating individual.)
Ivy League Murder And I thought Cornell University had skeletons in its closet. The woman who established Stanford University was poisoned by strychnine, and her murder was never solved. Stanford Alumni Magazine featured a nicely written story with many photos from the case, highlighting the publication of a book, The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford.
From the article: "Haunting the hallowed halls of Stanford for almost a century is a hushed-up whodunit that has reared its head only from time to time, and only in whispers. It concerns the mysterious death of the University’s co-founder, Jane Stanford...."
The old newspaper clipping (above) comes from the Honolulu Advertiser.
And more to come Once in a full moon my evening goes perfectly; my boys don't nap, eat big dinners, tire of fun in the tub, and zonk out. Then I get to spend a glorious evening reading old newspapers, or rereading a true crime classic like Murder and its Motives by Jesse or The Fatal Countess and Other Stories by William Roughead, and coming up with some fresh Clews. From this point forward though the posts here might not be as frequent (2 or 3 a week maybe, rather than daily) because I'm unable to resist spending spare moments indulging in fun with the beautiful pair of little creatures sharing my life with me now.
Enjoy your time with the boys now, Laura. I LOVE Spring and Summer with my kids! We flew kites today, and it wasn't even that windy. :-)
Posted by: Soobs | March 24, 2007 at 09:43 PM