s&d: True Crime! books

Is that a spoiler? omg the details though.

Also some of the worst baddies, of those detected, live obscenely long lives duh)

Not into podcasts, but this is still a fave TAL, in its latest rebroadcast (stream/download/transcript)(it's worth hearing for the voices of family members)

Prologue
Ira Glass plays the song "Mystery of the Dunbar's Child" by Richard "Rabbit" Brown. It describes Bobby Dunbar's disappearance and recovery and the trial of his kidnapper, all of which was front page news from 1912 to 1914. Almost a century after it happened, Bobby Dunbar's granddaughter, Margaret Dunbar Cutright, was looking into her grandfather's disappearance and found that the truth was actually more interesting than the legend. And a lot more troubling. (1 minute)
...Margaret Dunbar Cutright and Tal McThenia co-authored a book about the Bobby Dunbar story called A Case For Solomon. Tal discusses his experience with creating the radio and book versions in this article in The Huffington Post.

Finally read “Acid King” by Jesse P Pollack, about Ricky Kasso

The level detail & research is excellent, and he really goes to great lengths to contextualize Ricky, and Gary Lauwyers thr murder victim. So much better than that plagiarized Say You Love Satan piece of crap by St Clair.

I will say style-wise it’s a bit lacking, but that’s maybe just a personal preference. He’s synthesizing a lot of transcripts & reports and it’s hard to make that artful at the best of times - certainly not a knock on the author.

Saddest detail to me was how ~young~ these kids were. Also Ricky’s parents, how how poorly they handled his behavior & how obviously ill-equipped they were. I’ve seen versions of that growing up. fear-based tough-love parenting can really backfire in terrible, unintended ways

Highly recommend the book if you have any knowledge of the case or interest in 80’s teen dirtbags

Still working my way through "Deconstructing Jack", a 900-page self-published tome and now the author has a follow-up.

His theory is that there isn't one ripper, that it was a bunch of guys. I'm reading it for the social history. Not sure I agree with it or not, but I used to read Ripper forums and Ripperologists really need the piss taken out of them. Every suspect is implausible bullshit, IMO and there won't be any new insights until someone puts the murders in a historic context - something ripperologists don't do.

Personally I think the guy had a beer with poor and immigrant women, whoever he was. Clearly a lot of the profiling is wrong.

Still working my way through "Deconstructing Jack", a 900-page self-published tome and now the author has a follow-up.

His theory is that there isn't one ripper, that it was a bunch of guys. I'm reading it for the social history. Not sure I agree with it or not, but I used to read Ripper forums and Ripperologists really need the piss taken out of them. Every suspect is implausible bullshit, IMO and there won't be any new insights until someone puts the murders in a historic context - something ripperologists don't do.

Personally I think the guy had a beer with poor and immigrant women, whoever he was. Clearly a lot of the profiling is wrong.

(Sorry about the double post)

"Beef with" although he probably also had a beer, or ten.

Other thing is I'm back to reading about Al Capone and have this new pet theory that Bugs Moran set his own guys up to be bumped off (he survived), but I have to do more reading.

There are still unresolved issues with the St. Valentines massacre after all this time and growing up I heard a lot of stories.

my grandmother lived pretty close to where the SVM occurred and heard all the commotion after the fact. she was 17 when it happened i think. it was a wild time to grow up in Chicago.

Yeah it was crazy. People being gunned down in respectable neighborhoods. Gangsters eating in fancy restaurants every night. SVM massacre was in Lincoln Park I think Capone preferred to do business in the burbs.

I heard so many stories growing up of perfectly respectable people getting their liquor - smuggled from Canada - through Capone.

I learn new things every day: Anthony DeAndrea- "priest, politician, translator, gangster."

https://i.postimg.cc/7ZMNkfDH/Screenshot-20231201-045346.jpg

Halfway through this:

https://i.postimg.cc/yxGMjnpL/slenderman.jpg

There are a couple of print pieces cited earlier in the thread. I didn't know anything about the book or the case--just turned up on a sale table at Indigo.

Definitely disturbing. Part of me wants to know more about "Slenderman" and creepypasta.com, but a much bigger part says "No, those are not things you want to be googling." So I'll make do with the book. I do encounter some very strange middle-schoolers these days.