“Write what you know” is such common advice for new writers that it has become a cliché. It sounds seductively simple: you just look at the life you’re living and the people you see and write a story about them. No need to imagine fantasy worlds or recreate life on a distant planet or in…
• Are you in the UK? Are you a fanatic for TV's Sherlock, Midsomer Murder, Miss Marple, Poirot, Inspector Morse, and Inspector Lewis? Then would you like to appear on a trivia segment for a TV show, The Crime Thriller Club? (insert shrieking here): “…each week we will be leading up to the Crime Thriller…
Texas Runs out of Lethal Injectables? Apparently, it's not a shortage, but an expiration of stock, still, the busiest death row's syringes are empty… There are military death sentences ordered, so why has it been more than 50 years since a military execution? More fascinating Death Row stories, from a man who's interviewed…
There’s a place in our society that holds a different breed of men. They are prisoners, true; but they are not the normal breed of arsonist, rapist, thief, junkie, or killer. These are men (statistically almost exclusively men) who have not only been determined to have killed with premeditation and received the charge of “Murder…
An excerpt from Death Row’s Oddest Inmates by Ty Treadwell (available March 21, 2012). Ty Treadwell has been researching death row for years. In fact, the 10th anniversary edition of his book, Last Suppers: Famous Final Meals from Death Row was released in 2011. In Death Row’s Oddest Inmates, he reveals the wild and crazy…
Movies and TV shows lead us to believe that all homicidal maniacs are like Hannibal Lecter; clever, refined, and with vocabularies that would put a college professor to shame. In reality, though, your average killer isn’t nearly as sharp as his murder weapon. No one knows for certain if these five death row inmates were…
Who among us hasn’t seen something sweet and gooey on a restaurant menu and thought about skipping the meal and going straight to dessert? The problem is, that type of unhealthy dining would make us feel guilty. But what if we were already guilty? Guilty enough to be sitting on death row, moments away from…
The West Memphis Three are free. Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley Jr.—who have been in jail in Arkansas for eighteen years for the murders of three little boys in 1993—were released from prison on August 19th. Baldwin and Misskelley were serving life sentences. Echols was on death row. Their case became famous, in…
Impending death can really curb a person’s appetite, but that didn’t stop these death row inmates from ordering enormous last meals. Were they hungry for one final feast? Sick of counting calories? Or did they hope to stall the Grim Reaper by giving him a hernia as he carried them off to the netherworld? Regardless…
What could possibly be nefarious about such delicious-looking strawberry cake? Well, this delight has the dubious distinction of having been chosen by the D.C. Sniper, spree killer John Allen Muhammed, as the dessert of his last meal (entree: chicken with red sauce), as documented by the extremely specific Dead Man Eating blog. One Death Row prisoner in…
