What Happened to Mandy Matula?
Twenty-four-year-old Mandy Matula lived with her parents in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, a town of 60,000 12 miles southwest of Minneapolis. A graduate of the University of Minnesota at Duluth, she...
View ArticleWriting Quote: Elements of a Short Story
It is not hard to state what Edgar Allan Poe meant by a good short story; it is a piece of fiction, dealing with a single incident...that can be read at a setting. It is original, it must sparkle,...
View ArticleWriting Quote: Writing Fiction Versus Nonfiction
I speak about the limitation on a nonfiction writer's scope for invention as if it were a burden, when, in fact, it is what makes his work so much less arduous. Where the novelist has to start from...
View ArticleCrime Bulletin: Missing Person Brenda Heist Legally Dead But Still Alive
In 2002, forty-three-year-old Brenda Heist and her husband Lee were going through an amicable divorce. The couple had two children, a daughter who was eight, and a twelve-year-old son. They lived...
View ArticleCriminal Justice Quote: The Cause of Crime
Criminals cause crime--not bad neighborhoods, inadequate parents, television, schools, drugs, or unemployment. Crime resides within the minds of human beings and is not caused by social conditions....
View ArticleWriting Quote: Writing Versus Talking on TV
Gore Vidal...once languidly told me that one should never miss a chance...to appear on television. My efforts to live up to this maxim have mainly resulted in my passing many unglamorous hours on...
View ArticleCrime Bulletin: As Violent Crime Drops, Fear of Crime Increases
Violent crime has always been a staple of local television and newspaper news. Take out crime, sports and weather and there's nothing left. The old saying, "If it bleeds it leads," is accurate....
View ArticleWriting Quote: Tom Wolfe on Jimmy Breslin's Creative Nonfiction
In the introduction to his breakthrough 1973 anthology, The New Journalism, Tom Wolfe writes about how Jimmy Breslin, a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, captured the realistic intimacy...
View ArticleCriminal Justice Quote: Last Words of Executed Prisoners
I'm ready to roll. Time to get this party started.James Jackson, executed on February 7, 2007 in Texas
View ArticleWriting Quote: A Low Opinion of the Literary Critic
Critics are like eunuchs in a harem. They're there every night, they see it done every night, they see how it should be done every night, but they can't do it themselves.Brendan Behan in Rotten Reviews...
View ArticleCriminal Justice Quote: America the Medicated
In 1996, 13 million Americans were taking an antidepressant; nine years later, in 2005, that number had more than doubled... One in ten Americans over the age of six is now taking an antidepressant....
View ArticleDr. Jackson Dempsey: How Many Psychiatrists Are Crazy?
Over the years, numerous studies and surveys have confirmed the conventional wisdom that people who enter the fields of psychiatry and psychotherapy were mentally and emotionally disturbed as...
View ArticleWriting Quote: William Styron on Booze and Writing
I used alcohol as the magical conduit to fantasy and euphoria, and to the enhancement of the imagination. There is no need to either rue or apologize for my use of this soothing, often sublime agent,...
View ArticleCriminal Justice Quote: Culpability
In his brilliant book What is History?, Professor E. H. Carr asked about ultimate causation. Take the case of a man who drinks a bit too much, gets behind the wheel of a car with defective brakes,...
View ArticleWriting Quote: Science Fiction in the 1940s
To the American literary community--to the American arts establishment--the science fiction writers of the forties were invisible. There is no more graceful way to put this. There were, for the...
View ArticlePsychic Detective Sylvia Browne Pronounced Amanda Berry Dead on the Montel...
The biggest load of crap I can envision is a bus-full of psychic detectives en route to a charlatan convention in Las Vegas. Real detectives who give these frauds credibility by consulting them...
View ArticleCriminal Justice Quote: Keith Richards and Drugs
I've never had a problem with drugs. I did have a problem with cops.Keith Richards, "The Rolling Stones"
View ArticleCriminal Justice Quote: Crime in Black Communities
Experiencing a violent crime rate of 2,137 per 100,000 of the population, Detroit is the nation's most dangerous city. Rounding out Forbes Magazine's 2012 list of the 10 most dangerous cities are...
View ArticleWriting Quote: The Shared Experiences of Writers
Writers have helped me when members of my own family could not. Some writers have been closer than dear friends, even though I never have seen them in the flesh. For example, when I have read some of...
View ArticleCriminal Justice Quote: What Causes Schizophrenia?
There is no question that psychiatric problems can be inherited--we know this from studies comparing identical twins with fraternal twins. Identical twins are genetically the same, meaning that they...
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