Tag: True Crime

True Crime Stories – Bag Murders and the Last Call Killer

“It’s a fluke that he got caught because once the task force in 1993 was over, a case like that goes to the bottom of the pile. This is not one of those situations where there’s a team of detectives that are still working on it. Reality is not like that,” Green said.

Green said that because of the push and persistence from Margaret Mulcahy, the wife of victim Thomas Mulcahy, cops looked at it again. Detectives involved in the case from in New Jersey utilized a new fingerprint technology that their counterparts at the Toronto Police Department had been using.

“Toronto Police Service was using a reasonably new technology called vacuum metal deposition. Because of the relationships that the New Jersey police had with the Canadian police, they were aware of this technology and called in a favor,” Green said.

The detectives sent fingerprints they were able to lift from the victims and sent them to Canada. Toronto Police were able to look to see what fingerprints matched from their massive database. And, as luck would have it, they found a match from someone who was fingerprinted in Maine in 1973.

How the Bag Murders and the Last Call Killer Put in Focus the Dangers the New York LGBTQ+ Community Faces
Sal Bono
Inside Edition

Gary Gilmore and Nike – Just Do it

TO the list of great copy writers in advertising, add an unlikely name: Gary Gilmore.

Mr. Gilmore, the notorious spree-killer, uttered the words “Let’s do it” just before a firing squad executed him in Utah in 1977. Years later, the phrase became the inspiration for Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign.

The episode might make you wonder about the genesis of some other offbeat ads over the years. Where does someone get the idea to write a jingle about Oscar Mayer wiener envy? And how exactly does one dream up a talking gecko selling car insurance?

The revelation about the “Just Do It” slogan is one of many fly-on-the-wall anecdotes that the famous names of the advertising world share in a new documentary by the filmmaker Doug Pray called “Art & Copy,” to be released in New York on Friday.

The Birth of ‘Just Do It’ and Other Magic Words
Jeremy W. Peters
August 19, 2009
NYTIMES

Creepy Crawling – Helter Skelter Excerpt

Q. “Did Charlie ask you to steal?”
A. “No, I took it upon myself. I was—we’d get programmed to do things.”
Q. “Programmed by Charlie?”
A. “By Charlie, but it’s hard for me to explain it so that you can see the way—the way I see. The words that would come from Charlie’s mouth would not come from inside him, [they] would come from what I call the Infinite.”

And sometimes, at night, they “creepy-crawled.”

Q. “Explain to these members of the jury what you mean by that.”
A. “Moving in silence so that nobody sees us or hears us…Wearing very dark clothing…”

Q. “Entering residences at night?”
A. “Yes.”

They would pick a house at random, anywhere in Los Angeles, slip in while the occupants were asleep, creep and crawl around the rooms silently, maybe move things so when the people awakened they wouldn’t be in the same places they had been when they went to bed. Everyone carried a knife. Susan said she did it “because everybody else in the Family was doing it” and she wanted that experience. These creepy-crawling expeditions were, I felt sure the jury would surmise, dress rehearsals for murder.

Q. “Did you call your group by any name, Susan?”
A. “Among ourselves we called ourselves the Family.” It was, Susan said, “a family like no other family.”

I thought I heard a juror mutter, “Thank God!”

Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders. Vincent Bugliosi, Curt Gentry