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.

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.