Real Crime

[Solace]

How about "Death's Acre" by Jefferson and Bass? Unfortunately, I am not allowed to link yet but I'm sure you won't have a problem looking it up..

Anyways, very compelling read IMHO.

 

[beer good]

I thought this was interesting in a slow down for car crashes kind of way (via bookslut):

Someone is self-publishing books claiming to have identified the Zodiac killer. The problem, of course, being that the guy he's identified is not the Zodiac killer. Read his blog post; it's an interesting look at how conspiracy theories work.

The surreal quality of Penn’s dialogue with the facts is captured by the matter of the phone number. At one time in Cambridge I had a phone number with the last four digits 6266. From this Penn, using some sort of gematria, extracted enormous meaning. But what does a number assigned by the phone company say about the person it was given to? Many of the other details Penn has used to launch his voyages of conjecture are equally beyond my control, like my birthday and my mother’s name.

My favorite episode was the phone calls. Sometime in the 1980s, I started getting them at two and three in the morning. When my wife or I answered, a male voice would say something vaguely threatening like "I’m coming north, and I’m going to get you soon!" We told the Brookline police about it, got them to drive by more frequently, and eventually it stopped.

I only discovered the reason for the calls much later, during one of my occasional trolls through the Internet to see if I’m still of interest to Zodiac amateurs. The calls were supposed to be transmitting coded messages via numbers—in particular, the time of the call! Apparently, Penn’s assumption was that when the average person is aroused by the phone in the middle of the night, the first thing he does, before woozily answering, is to note the time of the first ring on the digital clock he keeps by the bed—which is, of course, synchronized with the clock in the Naval Observatory. If your clock (or his) is off by just a couple of minutes, the call that was supposed to register as "2:14"—code for "Got you dead to rights this time"—will be misinterpreted as "2:16," which I think means "The Sox can’t make the playoffs without a closer." (Sadly, I’ve lost the magic decoder ring I got in exchange for cereal box tops as a child, so I can’t be sure.)

Luckily, of course, none of this will deter our intrepid investigator, who doesn't need any steenking fact checkers to keep putting up his books on Amazon. And hey, where there's smoke there's always fire, even if the person pointing it out owns a smoke machine.

 

[beer good]

...also, the reviews of that book bring this to mind:

 

[Hugh]

...also, the reviews of that book bring this to mind:

One of the reviewers suggests that the author is just pulling everyone's leg. Perhaps that is a possibility, but it seems more likely that the author is just an attention whore without enough foresight to see that he really justs comes off as a clown.

 

[beer good]

One of the reviewers suggests that the author is just pulling everyone's leg. Perhaps that is a possibility, but it seems more likely that the author is just an attention whore without enough foresight to see that he really justs comes off as a clown.

Possible, but a very persistent one in that case since he's been doing it since 1980.

 

[Gotlift]

In Cold Blood was a good book. I'd recommend it. I liked the movie too.