The True Crime Thread (tw: all)

Necroposting, kind of, because HEY HOW 'BOUT THAT SERIAL KILLER IN SOUTH CAROLINA

The Amazon reviews he apparently wrote are especially…well, I guess if you were looking for gifts for the serial killer in your life, they'd be pretty helpful.

 

So listening to mfm has reminded me of the murder that I think about most personally. Namely the rape and murder of Sherric Iverson by Jeremy Strohmeyer at the Primm in 1997. It was told to me as a spooky story when wed go to nevada. Like a lot. I know that shit super well. Because its fun family story.

 

The Night Stalker is another one we talk about a lot because he operated around where my family lived. Particularly we focus on how somw Mexicans got bats and beat the ever living shit out of him ans thats hpw he got caught.

 

Mmm. My hometown is pretty chill; we have Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer in the state, of course, but this is a tiny university town. So the crimes that we heard about...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_Hall_bombing
During the Vietnam War, my town was a hotbed of protests and rage. So one day, four college students decided to blow up the Army Mathematics Research Center, and filled a van with explosives. They always said they weren't trying to hurt anyone, that they timed it for the middle of the night so no one would be there. But of course, there were a handful of people in the building. You can still see the scar on the building today, where it was rebuilt; it's as much a part of the story here as all the police beatings and teargassings.

http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/lo...cle_4186e1ad-ef30-5fe5-a043-d769ffa561b5.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/Unresolved...illed_university_of_wisconsinmadison_student/
Eight years back, a university student named Brittany Zimmermann was stabbed to death in her apartment; the 911 dispatcher dropped the call as she was screaming and being killed. Her murder has never been solved, and her parents have been really active, advocating and looking for information; there've been billboards seeking information for years. It might have led to a break; they've finally got a DNA match now, to a middle-aged sex offender who'd been in the area that day. But we'll see if it ever actually gets prosecuted.

http://host.madison.com/news/local/...cle_2705ecd1-cc1b-5b0d-b14c-99868bc594b6.html
That one always freaked me out in particular, because at almost the same time, my friend's dad was drinking on his anti-psychotics, and broke into a college student's apartment with ether and a knife.

... and then there's the police brutality cases in the last couple years, of "mentally ill/high person is killed by police", one of which blew up into a giant BLM touchstone in the area. -_- I... do not have the spoons to go into that, right now.

 

for crimes in my town, as a child everyone was told to avoid any camouflage-painted trucks because there was a dude who would drive around the square or the highschool and pick up girls, and they didn't have enough evidence to put him away, because rural towns are Hell.

for crimes my family was related to--an untreated, mentally ill man lived in the (house or apartment?) next to my parents before they had me, and they knew of him because he was always talking about how the 'time holes division' of the US government was after him. for some reason, and i'm not sure why exactly, police got called to where he lived and there was an altercation. iirc, he shot and killed one officer, shot another, and then i believe was either shot or killed himself. ):

 

i don't pay attention to local murders cause its bad for my depression, but we had some assholes going around burning churches in tucson about five or six years ago.

 

So listened to episode 20 of My Favorite Murder and they talked about the Night Stalker. And I really liked that episode because it's a story I'm very familiar with. People who lived through it talk about it a lot. I've grown up listening to my mom talk about how everyone was just fucking terrified. And the other detail that always, always gets talked about is how he got caught. Namely that an entire fucking neighborhood got up together. Just a couple hundred people got out there and started beating the ever living shit out of him. He was interviewed and stated that he was lucky the cops caught him because if they hadn't the crowd would have beaten him to death. And when he arrived at the station there were people chanting for his death.

Which all sounds pretty extreme and terrible, but for context this man had been going all up and down California murdering and raping. He could be anywhere and the news was constantly talking about him. People were fucking terrified and he managed to shake the entire state. He'll probably go on to become some sort of legend as will the people who caught him. And even though this was all terrible there's something oddly comforting to me about the fact that many years down the line we'll still be talking about the Night Stalker and how a bunch of Mexicans beat his fucking ass raw.

 

A case I keep coming back to is the unsolved 1997 murder of 12-year-old Georgia Lee Moses. This one just breaks my heart.

There's a reddit thread with slightly more info, and googling around will get you a handful of news stories, but there's not a lot of information out there. (Not sayin' that's because she was black, but, uh, that's because she was black.) There's also a really beautiful Tom Waits song about her:

(Some quotes from Waits about the song here.)

 

crime that just goes completely ignored always blows my fucking mind, like. how. (oh, racism, thats how, ok.png)

 

Finally started listening to this shit a while back and I have to say that yeah. They remind me heavily of my mother. Former goth. Grew up in California at the same time these two did. And I find their shit very relatable with how I talk about true crime and such too. The rambling makes me feel all safe and at home and normal. Like yeah giggling about someone getting bisected is just normal and good fun.

 

I just spent way too much time making a true crime television bingo card, so uh. Here 'tis.

(click to embiggen)

 

YES

 

Hello yes, reviving this thread because I just listened to episode 82 of Sword and Scale on early release and... yeah. Holy shit. It's about 911 dispatchers, and at the end they play the 911 call placed by Brandi Worley which was taken over by her mother, after Brandi murdered her two children. I've listened to a lot of 911 calls and am pretty well hardened to them by now, but I couldn't make it all the way through that one.

I've known one person in my life that worked as a dispatcher here in England. After listening to this episode I have even more respect for him because holy Christ. I could not do that job. Someone on a Reddit thread I read a while ago described it as a job that entails you being the person that listens to possibly the worst day in people's lives, all day, day after day.

The episode itself is a very good insight in to what it takes to be a dispatcher, and what the day to day experience would probably be like. But don't listen if you're not in a good headspace.

 

So it seems like I've developed a bad habit of necro-ing threads. Sorry!

So I have a really weird question and this was the only place I could think to put it:

Maybe like, two years ago I read a story. Now, it was supposedly true, but I didn't check the source because I'm a dumbass and thought I could find it again.

Basically, it was a girl in what I want to say was early 1900s France went missing. They found her clothes by the side of the road. I think they were folded neatly and didn't have any blood on them, which was kind of strange. Fast forward to like a year later when the girl is found. Weirdly enough, she's in a whole other country with the people who claim to be her birth parents. But the girl is brought back to her home in France anyway. She refused to speak French and only spoke the language of the other people who claimed to be her family.

During the time the girl was in their home, the father of the family had a strange encounter. A man came by the house and asked him, 'is it true they found the girl alive?'

So the father told him that yes, they had.

The man fell into a hysterical fit and kept repeating 'how can this be? I thought I'd done it, I thought I had.' He was taken away and put into a sanatorium.

Well, the family was trying to adjust to having the daughter back, but they wound up getting tragic news. The girl's 'other family' had managed to submit enough proof to conclude that they were definitely the girl's biological parents. She was returned to them, and the family's actual daughter was never seen again.

I have been trying to find some trace of this forever but I'm starting to think I just hallucinated it. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

 

Doing a quick search brought me to finding the mystery of the Disappearance of Pauline Picard.

Have a link to an old reddit post on it that gives a pretty good summary of what happened.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/2t3mil/

 

So is this the thread to talk about how I've been mainlining Forensic Files on Netflix lately? Because I have been, and it's awesome, and if you're interested in true crime stuff I would highly recommend it.

The episode I was just watched is about a guy who literally injected his mistress with AIDS when she tried to break up with him. Because apparently that is a thing that actually happens in real life, jfc

 

I forgot this thread existed! I'm so glad it popped up again because just last month the In Sight podcast did an episode on my hometown murder! http://www.insightpod.com/home-1/2017/1/22/episode-thirty-lyle-stevik-and-princess-doe

Princess doe is (I think?) the only murder that's ever happened in Blairstown, and also the only thing that's ever talked about. My town didn't have much going for it besides some of Friday the 13 being filmed in the area.

 

You're a lifesaver. I hope your toast never burns or, if you don't like toast, I hope your warm tea never goes cold and your iced tea never gets all room-temperature and weird.

 

lyle stevik! levity elks! (/reference)

also that story of pauline picard is wild and feels like it belongs on my favorite murder

 

Necroposting big time (again) to share this here piece from the BBC about a trans cop who worked the Robert Pickton case. Also, is it just me, or does Pickton look exactly like you'd picture a guy who'd murder 49 women and feed their bodies to pigs would look?