Patricia Abbott (pattinase): What true crime case has always fascinated you?

Sunday, May 05, 2013

What true crime case has always fascinated you?

The death of Natalie Wood for me. I think most people need to find a connection to a case to be absorbed by it. And she was one of the Hollywood stars who caught my attention at the right time. She was never a great actress (IMHO) but she was a larger than life STAR.

How about you? What true crime interests you?

17 comments:

mybillcrider said...: The Ripper.; 8:32 AM
pattinase (abbott) said...: That one certainly has the most resonance throughout crime literature.; 8:39 AM
Anonymous said...: Bill, I was sure you'd say D. B. Cooper.

Yes, The Ripper.
Before my time but, what happened to Judge Crater?
Where is Jimmy Hoffa really buried?

Jeff M.; 8:49 AM
George said...: Jimmy Hoffa.; 8:58 AM
Anonymous said...: Yeah, we know he was murdered, but how and by whom and where did they bury him?

Although not an unsolved crime, per se, I'm always curious about "ghost ships" that are found floating--like the Mary Celeste that was found abandoned, food still on plates, captain's log entry halfway finished... but not a soul aboard. Very eerie and never explained.

Deb; 9:04 AM
Anonymous said...: One of the most interesting (although not the most plausible) thing I've read about the Ripper is that he didn't exist at all! According to this article, prostitutes were always dying in nasty ways in Whitechapel and police generally did the most cursory investigation and then closed the books. But there was a conflict between rival branches of the Freemasons (police versus press) and the editor of one paper decided to "show up" the police chief by highlighting some recent, unsolved deaths (at least one of which was a botched abortion). Whether the letters were fabricated by someone at the paper or written by someone as a joke once the Ripper thing started to snowball, we'll never know.

I agree, as a theory it has some holes, but, hey, ya gotta admit it makes more sense that Patricia Cornwell buying all those Walter Sickert canvases to cut them up for DNA samples to prove he was the Ripper!

Deb; 9:21 AM
pattinase (abbott) said...: If you live in Detroit, you hear rumors about where he's buried every few months. I always think of it when we drive by the former Machus Red Fos, the last place he was seen. Now it's another restaurant, of course.; 9:25 AM
Jerry House said...: Several years ago, a young girl was found wandering a couple of streets down from where we live. She was filthy and unkempt and had jumped from a second story window at a nearby house. Although the woman who rented the house had been in the neighborhood for some time, no one had ever seen the girl before. When police investigated, they found the bodies of two young children wrapped in plastic and stored in a freezer. All three children (I believe) had been adopted in D.C.; the woman moved to Virginia where the two children died; she then moved to our neighborhood, taking the corpses and the freezer with her. She is now serving a life sentence.

This is one of several cases that haunt me. First, because it was so close geographically. (The man who rescued the surviving girl happened to be a friend of my daughter's.) Then, too, I wonder how this happened. There's no question that the woman was disturbed, but what made her that way? How was she able to move from place to place with the bodies with such ease? How could the surviving girl have lived in this close neighborhood for so long with no one being aware of her existence? And, of course, there's the rage I feel that this had happened at all. Could no one have seen what was happening? As a former therapeutic foster parent for children at risk, and with a daughter who is currently fostering, I wonder how broken our system is. Children seem to be seen as commodities with little value. How could a system allow three children to go with this woman? And then lose them? For the D.C. agency who had placed these children had no idea (nor cared) where they were or what had happened to them. I know and have worked with many dedicated and overworked people whose primary concern is the welfare and safety of the children in their care. Which is worse: the woman who committed these atrocities, the system that failed these children, or the political environment that blithely allowed it to happen?

Some crimes hit just too close to home.; 9:42 AM
pattinase (abbott) said...: Hard to top that. Here is our neighborhood case. This doesn't give all the details-like the S & M club he was running in the basement of a bar he owned.

http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2013/04/bob_bashara_charged_with_murde.html; 9:50 AM
Anonymous said...: Several years ago my brotehr in law's aunt was brutally murdered in the D.C. suburbs. They never found the killer but now believe it was probably mistaken identity. She was a lovely, inoffensive woman.

Jeff M.; 10:08 AM
Charles Gramlich said...: True crime is usually just too much for me to handle. I suppose I'm most interested in old crimes, like the robberies of the James-Younger gang and the Dalton gang and those kinds of things. the great north Minnesota Raid is one I've been interested in.; 10:45 AM
Joe Barone said...: I immediately thought of the Bobby Greenlease kidnapping and murder in KC. We lived near there when I was growing up, and I remember reading the daily stories in the KC Star.; 12:54 PM
Anonymous said...: Patti - For me, the Claus/Sunny Von Bulow case has always been of interest. I still wonder exactly what happened, even though there have been official verdicts...; 2:09 PM
Rick Robinson said...: Two. It would be nice to know the whole D.B. Cooper story. Also the Black Dahlia.; 9:13 PM
Unknown said...: JonBenet Ramsey. Something not quite clean about her murder. The whole business of toddler beauty pageants is sordid to my way of thinking. It had to have been an inside job. As to which family member was ultimately involved, I'll leave to your conjecture. I worded that as delicately as possible. Remember. Lots of cash can eliminate a rash of evidence. Yours truly, Toe.; 11:11 PM
Todd Mason said...: The murders of my grandfather and my uncle.; 9:01 PM
Al Tucher said...: It's hard to beat O.J. Simpson for the very American, toxic mix of race and celebrity.

On a more personal level, I have used the cases of Paige Birgfeld in Colorado and Dana Ireland on the Big Island of Hawaii as starting points for fiction.; 11:53 AM