true crime: an anthology

I just returned from a weeklong trip to chicago, which meant I was termporarily completely unavailable for post on the site, but I'm back.

I attended the Pitchfork music festival during this trip, which was awesome, but I am not ready to post about it yet (read: i haven't uploaded any of my pictures or video) so I am reduced to writing about my current read: True Crime, an anthology of the best crime writing from American History.

Amazon link here.

I've never been an avid reader of serial killer or crime stuff, though I am guilty of having read the occasional Mary Higgins Clark novel. When I picked this book up at my brother's apartment, though, I was instantly hooked. The first story I read was about the Black Dahlia, the media name given to Betty Short, a pretty girl drifter who was tortured for two days and murdered, given the Joker's smile and cut in half. This case was never solved, though most of these articles give the psychological profile of the killers.

So this book makes for good airplane reading. And good shock reading. And my weak gender analysis is, of course, that it's interesting how many of these killers are men and how many victims are female.

A list of some of the more interesting cases (And their respective wikipedia links) below.


1) The Black Dahlia: as described above
2) The Menendez Brothers: Two sons of a wealthy Cuban businessman who worked in Hollywood. They lived on Elm Drive in the Hills. They shot their parents until they were virtually unrecognizable.
3) Richard Speck: slayed 8 nurses in Chicago. Before being caught for the massacre, he was also probably responsible for some 8 other murders in the Great Lakes area.
4) Loeb and Leopold: two sons of wealth who wanted to commit the perfect crime: kidnapping and murder. They killed a younger boy by hitting him over the head with a chisel, and then poured acid over his body to make it difficult to ID the corpse.
5) Ed Gein: Gein, probably the most interesting case, is the basis for almost all horror movies. ever. More specifically, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Psycho, and both serial killers in Silence of the Lambs (geee-ross), though he erred more of the side of Buffalo Bill than Hannibal Lector.