There are no empty beer cans or cigarette butts that can guide you to his grave. No crowds. No security guard. No graffiti on the neighboring headstones. Walk past Fishman and Waldman in Section One-4 of Beth David cemetery in Elmont until you reach a small bush with those little red berries that our moms all told us were poison when we were kids. Look down and you’ll see it.

There is no bust of him in his Elvis getup, lip curled and hair coiffed. No statue of him standing awkwardly next to a phonograph, waiting to lip synch the Mighty Mouse theme song. No mention of his lounge-lizard alter ego Tony Clifton or the lovably incompetent Latka Gravas or the sword-swallowing fakir. No mention of his profession at all. No sign of what he was or who he was. Just a slab of granite, sticking six inches above the ground at the front of the Kaufman-Bernstein family plot, etched with the words “beloved son, brother and grandson.”

Andy Kaufman’s body is supposed to be lying six feet below this hunk of stone. Nobody’s sure whether to believe that or not.

The greatest prankster Hollywood had ever seen, Kaufman left every audience he played asking one question: “Was that for real?” He conned news agencies, press conferences, national television audiences. He hired cops to bust up his gigs. He stood outside Carnegie Hall in a mad-man-rags disguise holding a sign that read “Andy Kaufman=Antichrist.” The show sold out. He fooled David Letterman into thinking wrestler Jerry Lawler had really broken his neck and slapped him silly. Having the world think he was dead would be his greatest prank of all.

Fifteen years ago at the Nassau Funeral Home inGreat Neck, Bob Zmuda stood over the casket of his best friend and wondered the same thing. Well-wishers approached Kaufman’s longtime writing partner and begged Zmuda to let them in on the joke—Andy wasn’t really dead, and this gig in Great Neck would be the performance of his career.

But Zmuda, a guy who risked life and limb helping Andy execute pranks across the globe, was sitting this one out.

“He had talked about faking his death to me,” Zmuda recalls. “I told him, ‘Count me out. It’s illegal and this is one prank you have to do on your own.’ He got the hint from Elvis. He was always looking for the ultimate hoax. You don’t get better than faking your own death.”

Andy had often said he would fake his own death and come back when he was 50. He was born in 1949. What better time to return than when your name will be on the lips of everyone in Hollywood? That would be around Christmas, when Man on the Moon, a biopic of Kaufman directed by Milos Forman, starring Jim Carrey and featuring music by R.E.M., hits the theaters.

Zmuda says he never saw the body, fearing that a lasting image of his best friend’s cancer-ridden body, his shaved head and skin-and-bones stuffed in a box, would have freaked him out too much. He stayed in the back of the funeral parlor as his friend Joe Troiani poked the body. He says Troiani still wonders if the body he jabbed was real or wax because he didn’t know what a dead body was supposed to feel like.

If Kaufman isn’t lying underneath this pitch of earth in Elmont, then where would he be? Where would he have gone all these years? Elvis went to truck stops. Jim Morrison went to Africa. Maybe Andy went home.

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.

Our panel, Citizen Dicks: Solving Murders With Social Media, has been accepted for SXSW Interactive 2014.

From the wanted poster to reddit, citizens have been used to solve crimes and catch fiends. Expect examples of how normal citizens are using digital to help track down murders, find missing people, and solve crimes–along with what is sure to be a raucous debate.

We are part of the Global Impact and Policy portion of the program, which will take place on the third floor of the Austin Convention Center. No word yet on time, date or room number, but we will keep you posted.

Other panels we’re exited to see include The US Dept. of States’ Crowdsourcing Diplomancy, Madeleine Bair and Matt Stempeck‘s Hacking Attention: Media, Technology and Crisis, and perhaps the best title of the conference: Truth Will Set You Free But Data Will Piss You Off.

This summer, Jared Barris, the grandson of Batmobile creator George Barris, unveiled the Ford F-150 Crimefighter at San Diego Comic-con. Tuxedo black with Ferrari red striping and tail fins, the Crimefighter looks like a Bat truck, but unfortunately does not have a Bat Computer or other high tech advancements to help fight crime.

Enter the Vauxhall Astra Sports Tourer. On the outside, the British car looks like a low-slung minivan, but it’s what’s on the inside that matters.

Australian director Matthew Bate has created an excellent short film that combines animation, still photos, found videos, and interviews to try to answer the question of why you see shoes hanging from powerlines. He gets answers from across the globe, ranging from sex and death to religion and drugs.

The Mystery of Flying Kicks from Closer Productions on Vimeo.

Originally Published in January, 2005

Messiah Lovelady was killed by a hit and run driver in 2004.

For the family of Nine-year-old Messiah Lovelady, who was killed by a hit-and-run driver in May, 2004, it’s a light-colored mini van.

For Anthony Savarese, it’s every dark-colored sedan, his eyes darting to the grill in hopes of finding the telltale front-end damage that resulted from the impact of striking and killing his 14-year-old daughter Jessica on a road in Franklin Square.

In a hit-and-run crime, you don’t have a face to hate. Four wheels and an engine become your boogeyman.

Last year, three children were killed by hit-and-run drivers on the roads of Long Island. Only one arrest has been made.

The nature of the crime implies speed, blink-of-an-eye action that renders eyewitness accounts shaky at best. In Messiah’s case, he was killed by a light blue or green or champagne-colored van. With Jessica, it was just a large dark car. No one saw the license plate number. No one saw the driver.

Often the only clues are the remnants that break off from the car after it hits flesh. And for detectives, that is sometimes all they’ve got. For Messiah, pieces of a front grill and amber lens from the passenger-side turning signal/parking lamp point to a 1991-95 Chrysler/Plymouth/Dodge minivan. There are about 15,000 of these vans in western Suffolk/eastern Nassau alone. For Jessica, a piece of a headlight points to a 1989-91 Ford Taurus. There are more than 10,000 Ford Tauruses in Nassau and Queens.

At least it’s something.

In a study published in 2003 by the National Center For Statistics and Analysis and sponsored by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 18 percent of pedestrian fatalities in single-vehicle crashes from 1998 to 2001 were hit-and-run. In 2001, 4,882 pedestrians were struck and killed, 781 the result of a hit-and-run. You can see a running tally of hit-and-run victims in the United States on websites like www.deadlyroads.com. Some days, there have been three, four, five people left dying on a road as a car drove away into the horizon. The variety of the victims, as well as the variety of the drivers (when they’re caught), illustrates that this is a crime that can happen to anyone who crosses a street or gets in a car.

MESSIAH AND HIS SNACKS

Messiah Lovelady made everyone smile. Bursting with energy while still respectful of his elders, the third-grader at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School shared a room at home with his two brothers, Aquines, 11, and Christopher, 14. At 4:45 p.m. on May 12, Messiah and Aquines were walking home from Pete’s Deli, where Messiah had purchased $2.25 worth of cakes and cookies.

One block away from the crosswalk on Straight Path Road, a four-lane road with a 40 mph speed limit, the two decided to cross.