First let me preface by saying nothing will take the blame off of the suspect in SXSW Red River vehicular murder which has claimed two lives, has eight still in the hospital, and injured 15 others. Nothing. But I wanted to clear up something that is being widely reported.   The morning after the incident, I went down to the site and spoke to the […]

Le Monde wrote it up in their daily round up. Scroll down, we are in between Oculus and Grumpy Cat.   The slides will be up shortly.   There was not a single law enforcement representative in the crowd of 125. Something to work on for next year’s panel.

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 […]

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 […]

  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 […]

  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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

  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 […]