On Feb. 9, 2004, Maura Murray sent her professors at UMASS Amherst an email explaining that there was a death in her family and she would be gone for a few days. The 21-year old nursing student then walked out of her dorm room, purchased $35 worth of alcohol and drove her black Saturn into the White Mountains of New Hampshire. She took a shaky turn on Rt. 112 in Haverhill and crashed her car into a snow bank. A passing motorist pulled up to the disabled car, and asked Maura if she needed help. She refused. Around fifteen minutes later, a police officer arrived at the scene and found the car locked, its windshield cracked, the airbags deployed—and not a soul in sight. In those fifteen minutes, Maura Murray had disappeared into the New Hampshire night.

Every day for the last ten years, each detail of the Maura Murray tale is analyzed, dissected and reconstructed with a Warren Commission-like attention to detail on blogs and online forums. The car accident two days earlier in Amherst. The father visiting with $4,000 cash in his pocket. The crying episode. The box of wine. The serial killer. The MapQuest print out. The school bus. The rag in the tailpipe. The sobbing voice mail. The clues are moved around the internet in a parlor game by armchair detectives, debated as either viable clues or vicious red herrings, along with the idea—the hope—that this may not be a crime at all, but rather an elaborate ruse by a young woman wanting to start a new life.

Read:

My feature in Boston Magazine on Maura Murray and the internet sleuths determined to find her.

My feature on Johnny Lewis, the Sons of Anarchy actor who killed his landlady and then either fell or jumped from her home last September, was just posted on the Los Angeles Magazine website. You can read the story here.

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the murder of RJ Lockwood, who was killed in his Miami apartment just after midnight on January 1, 2003. The murder is still unsolved.

I wrote a feature story about the murder in May of 2004 for Miami New Times. It is part internet love story, part murder mystery. The only thing it needed was an ending.

It went on to win Best in Show Best In Print at the Green Eyeshade Awards, the nation’s oldest regional journalism contest which covers Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia.

Read the story here.

On Christmas Day 2002, Brian Boothe was found dead in his apartment in Stuyvesant Town, in Manhattan, victim of a knife wound to the neck. “Police sources” tagged it a suicide in several newspapers.

Boothe’s brother Tommy had died by suicide. New York newspapers, and perhaps the police, connected those dots: A gay male spending Christmas Eve alone, whose brother had recently taken their own life…it had to be suicide. But Brian had not spoken to his brother in years. None of the Boothe family had.

“We kept saying ‘It’s got nothing to do with it,'” says Boothe’s mother, Kay, from her home in Patchogue. “Brian was the least affected by [Tommy’s] death.

And Brian Boothe, by all accounts, was happier than ever. He would be heading to Long Island for Christmas dinner the next day, relishing in giving his 3-year-old nephew and godson Owen another toy with plenty of loose pieces, a practice that annoyed his sister-in-law. When his friends talked about foregoing their beloved annual ski trip to Aspen, he fiercely objected, charging the $4,000 for the January 19 vacation to his credit card. His friend Lisa Steinbring, who had lunch with him the day before his death, recalls how Boothe was “gleeful [while] describing the soon-to-be arrival of [his brother’s baby girl] Cassidy.” Christmas cards he wrote to his family were full of hope for the new year. To everyone who knew him, Brian Boothe was loving life.

But that didn’t stop the New York tabloids from positing suicide. And it took the medical examiner four months to officially declare Brian’s death—the result of a vicious slice to the throat—a homicide. Still, the police are sharing none of the details of the investigation with the family. “They won’t tell me much about the crime scene,” says Boothe’s sister, Donna Kukura of Shirley, “because I’m a family member, and they think it was someone he knew, he trusted.”

Friends and family will converge on St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan this Saturday, wearing “JUSTICE for Brian” pins on their lapels, for a memorial. Maybe afterward they will caravan out to the Island, to the Ground Round on Montauk Highway in Bay Shore, where Booth #287 is dedicated to Boothe, who was a server there for five years. The family will look warily at the faces in the crowd, as they did at the funeral in December, to spot any odd people or odd behavior. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with,” says Kukura. “Everyone’s a suspect.” The police put that thought in the family’s heads. Regardless, people will be there to remember a Long Island boy who moved to the city and made good, only to be struck down in the prime of life.

A BAKER AND BEEKEEPER
Kay Boothe remembers her son putting on song-and-dance shows in the backyard of their house on Valley Road in Patchogue. She remembers his beekeeping phase, along with the day the bees got loose and flew away (Brian cried). She remembers Brian and his brothers Jimmy, Tommy and Sean going down to River Avenue Park to move turtles from the perimeter of the park back into the marshes, safe from encroaching civilization. She remembers him staying home on Thanksgiving while his family went to the parade—because he wanted to stay in the kitchen and help cook, and the time he waited anxiously as the family tried his fresh-baked cookies, only to see everyone spit them out, realizing too late that he had substituted baking soda for baking powder. Those are the kinds of stories Kay Boothe remembers.

“Anyone he touched remembered him,” Kay Boothe says through tears. “It’s a shame whoever did this, to snuff out his life. Because he loved life. And he loved the city. I used to live in the city [and] I kept telling him, times are different and he would say ‘Oh ma, people are out at all hours.'”

Boothe wasn’t out at all hours on Christmas Eve. A creature of habit, Boothe was always in by 2 a.m.

On Christmas Eve, he left 1 Penn Plaza, where he worked at Seabrook Consultants as a human resources strategist, and went to the Gap to buy presents for his two nieces. “I don’t know [what they are] yet. I haven’t opened the Christmas gifts,” says Kukura.

He stopped at a Rite-Aid drug store, then the dollar store to get wrapping paper, before returning to his apartment, where he presumably wrapped the presents. He called his mother to finalize plans for Christmas dinner, and then went out for a drink.

At 5:45am on October 21, an ex-con named Benjamin Frazier was trying to get into Drai’s After Hours club inside Bally’s Hotel and Casino. He reportedly objected to the $30 cover charge, and allegedly pulled out a gun and shot two security guards. He then walked through the lobby of the club, pistol in hand, seemingly ready to shoot again.

Kenneth “KD” Brown, a comic from Los Angeles living in Vegas, tackled the gunman before he could do any more damage. During the scuffle, Brown was shot in the neck and chest. He died on the floor of the lobby. The two security guards survived.

The video of the event was just released, and since Vegas has some of the most sophisticated surveillance systems in the world, the footage is disturbingly clear. Frazier’s lawyer is using the blackout defense, claiming his client remembers nothing of the shooting.

The New York Post tells a tale this morning of a man who was reading a comment string on facebook about a bagel shop closing and recognized the name of the man he mugged on the steps of the Museum of Natural History in NYC three decades ago.

The exchange went like this:

“@ Claude soffel, You may not remember this (about ’76 or ’77) but a long long time ago I walked up the steps of The Museum of Natural History one afternoon, trying to look like a tough guy to [somebody] & saw you standing there at the top of the steps, I walked up to you & (mugged) you for your bus pass. . . . Finally I can say ~ I”M VERY SORRY that you had to go through that crap that day long ago, I wish it had never happened but it did. Like I said I was trying to look tough to impress some guy who didn’t believe I was in a gang, pretty frickin’ stupid huh ? So once again I’m truly sorry for taking your bus pass back then – forgive me & thanks for reading this “strange” & very long message! Peace & love to you my brother…!!!”

And Claude Soffel replied:

When I was little, my father gave me a list of Lincoln – Kennedy Coincidences. It was printed on crinkly paper meant to look and feel like parchment. The Historical Documents Company makes a lot of these, from The Wanted Poster For Billy The Kid to The Raven By Edgar Allen Poe in his own handwriting. I always liked the feel of them and the way they smelled.

The Lincoln – Kennedy Coincidence? was my first. It ran down the similarities: Both men were succeeded by a Southern vice president named “Johnson,” Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy. Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln. It starts to lose steam towards the end “Both Johnsons were opposed for reelection by men whose name starts with ‘G,'” for instance. But the one that always stuck with me was that Kennedy’s assassin shot him from a warehouse and was captured in a theater, and Lincoln’s assassin shot him in a theatre and was captured in a warehouse (ok, it was a barn, but c’mon).

Searching through the reprint of the Nov. 23, 1963 edition of the Dallas Morning News, I found a somewhat weird coincidence that I am surprised the coincidence/conspiracy guys never jumped on.

Walk past the newspaper stand at your local supermarket this month and you might see bold broadsheet with the headline “Kennedy Slain On Dallas Street.”

Gannet has reproduced the Nov. 23, 1963 issue of the Dallas Morning News in its –advertisements, sports section, fashion columns and all. You can read many of the articles online in one form or another, but seeing how the entire package comes together is an experience that cannot be replicated digitally.

The first thing you are hit with is the breadth of information. AP, UPI and the Dallas Morning News staff put together an incredibly comprehensive portrait of the assassination, Oswald, Kennedy’s life, the background of LBJ. There is a crude drawing of the sniper’s lair, a story about how the Mexican border was closed Friday afternoon following the shooting, and jr. full ad for series, announcing “extra hours for joyous family shopping today.”

While reading the issue, you are in the middle of a story not yet completed. But there is a clue inside. When you turn to Page 19 of section 1–after the mammoth two page Kennedy obituary, the stories of the day give way to ads announcing “Only 2 More Week ends To Enjoy Six Flags” and an image of John Wayne spanking Maureen O’Hara in an ad for the United Artists movie McLintock!.

Then you see it—right above an ad for Johnny Cash, George Jones, and June Carter playing the Sportatorium on Saturday Night–an announcement that a club will be closed for “Friday, Sat. AND Sunday.”

I went to junior high school with Lee Harvey Oswald. He was a schmuck.

Doesn’t matter that he died nine years before I was born. We all went to junior high school with Lee Harvey Oswald—a confused, disenfranchised little schmuck who would grow up to be mad at the world and not amount to much at all. But every schmuck has his day. Lee Harvey’s just happened to be Nov. 22, 1963.

As the fortieth anniversary of the act that turned Lee Harvey the Loser into Lee Harvey the Icon approaches, I find myself in New Orleans, the birthplace of both the assassin and the jumbled ideas for a whacked-out conspiracy that has made a mockery of the judicial system.

But while Dallas has turned the explosion of a President’s head into a cottage industry, New Orleans has run away from its ties to its unfortunate son and his subsequent investigation. That still didn’t stop me from looking for any trace of the shmuck. In junior high, I had read every book I could find on Lee Harvey Oswald. And when you add that to a city with a major connection to that crime, times a city that allows you to carry open containers of alcohol on the street, something in me had to give a damn.

The first place I hit is 640 Magazine St. and the William B. Reilly coffee company, where Oswald worked for three months in the summer of 1963, his last job before the Texas School Book Depository gig. While not expecting to find Lee Harvey smiling down on me from the 1963 row of employee of the month plaques, when I mention the name Oswald to the receptionist, I’m met with a stare that could start a conspiracy of its own. Oswald was fired from Riley’s on July 19, 1963: “He was supposed to clean the roasters each night,” said his supervisor, Emmett Barbe, in 1993. “He would tend the front row and not even do the backrow, then stand and wait for the elevator. When I tried to talk with him, he gave me a lot of bullshit, so I fired him.”

If there is one thing I learned in How to Avoid Being an Assassin 101 (it was a survey course), it’s you have to clean the back row of the roasters. If Oswald cleans the back row of the roasters, he doesn’t get fired, doesn’t kill Kennedy, and goes on to launch a coffee empire out of Dallas, supplanting Seattle’s world domination in the process. I’m running this all through my head when I snap back and notice the receptionist is still staring at me. I try to break the ice by offering her a sip from my open container. No go.

I published this story in 2006 when I was editor of the Boston Phoenix. I recently went back to Boston and walked to the site where pieces of Karina Holmer’s body were dumped. With all of the new buildings going up around the Fens, the area is still intact. The alley behind the building is also the same: the Mass Pike below still humming, the sign reading “No Dumping: Police Take Notice” still posted, the bright safety light still shining. 

She didn’t need an excuse to go out that night.

For the four months she’d been in America, she went out most every weekend night.

But June 21 is Summer Solstice. The Americans might think nothing of it. But back in Sweden, the sun is as high in the sky as it ever gets. The day is a robust 18 hours long. Tradition calls for celebration. Party harder. Drink heavier. Dance longer.

Solstice. Feast of Epona. Litha. Vestalia. Midsommer. When the little girls in Skillingaryd dance around the Maypoles, pick flowers in the meadows, and put them under their pillows so they can dream that night about the man they will one day marry.

For the first part of that night back in 1996, 20-year-old Karina Holmer, who had come to Boston from Sweden to work as a nanny, donned a shiny gray sweater and tight shiny-silver pants, and went to Club Zanzibar on Boylston Place.

There she drank. She danced. She sang. She passed out on the bathroom floor. That was the first half of the night.

The next half of the night she was tortured, killed, and sawed in two. The top half of her body left in a dumpster in the Fenway. The bottom half deposited god knows where.

Karina Holmer came to Massachusetts for a better life and a better party. She wound up in two pieces.

Forty-nine years earlier, Elizabeth Short left Massachusetts for a better life and a better party in Hollywood. She wound up in two pieces too.

Elizabeth Short’s tale is by far the more famous. That’s because Short was the Black Dahlia, titular subject of James Ellroy’s noir classic, of “true Hollywood stories” and “unsolved mysteries.” Dahlia gets fan Web sites, videogames, and an Australian swing band named after her. This week, she’s getting a feature film directed by Brian DePalma with the tagline: “Inspired by the most notorious unsolved murder in California history” (presupposing that we all know OJ killed Nicole and Ron). She gets commercials airing in prime time and a wide release. She gets the fame she was looking for when she first went to Hollywood.

All Karina got was an answer on Jeopardy: “Boston cops were baffled by the murder of Karina Holmer, a Swede working as this French-named type of domestic.”

Stick around and I’ll give you the question.