Many people believe that Alice Crimmins got away with the 1965 murder of her two children. (Read my views on the Crimmins case here.) But could the Crimmins case have provided fodder for a future child killer? Alice Crimmins always maintained her innocence, but the police and much of the press believed Alice Crimmins was…
When I was a kid, I loved to listen to the radio. I listened to whatever was on: the soap operas, the crime shows, the comedies, the variety series, and the westerns. Of them all, The Lone Ranger was my favorite. Maybe it was the theme music. As far as I’m concerned, there’s never been…
The first American writer to use fingerprints in solving crime was the famous Mark Twain in his perhaps-embellished memoir about life as a steamboat pilot, titled Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883. In chapter 31, “A Thumb-print and What Came of It,” he has a character, inspired by an old “French prison-keeper” use a…
