Articles & Blog
Crime Scene Los Angeles: These Made-in-L.A. Authors Will Give You Chills
Los Angeles has no shortage of notorious crimes, nor of great writers. When true accounts of the former are penned by the latter, the results are some fascinating reads. In any good true crime book, the place where deadly deeds occur is not merely a background for the action but rather a vibrant...
Stranger with Candy: Why Did Teenager Chyrel Jolls Kidnap, and Allegedly Murder, Children?
“This is where I’m going to drown you and you’ll never see your mother or father again.” It’s been 55 years and Richard Edgington can still recall the words his kidnapper said once she had him in an isolated area near the railroad tracks. She was a stranger, a woman he later described “as old as...
The Man Who Murdered Kitty Genovese: An Intimate Look at a Dangerous Mind
Establishing a rapport with a serial killer is not for the faint of heart. It was far and away the most daunting hurdle for me in researching my book, Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and its Private Consequences. The killer in question, Winston Moseley, who died in prison on...
Imagine a black Kitty Genovese: Winston Moseley, her murderer, asked an important question about race and justice
“Would anybody remember or care about Kitty Genovese if she had been black?” That’s the very good question her just-deceased murderer, Winston Moseley, posed to me more than once in the scores of letters he wrote me. I first wrote to Moseley in 2009, care of Clinton Correctional Facility in...
Voodoo Ramblings: The Bizarre Case of Gail Trait
It was late on the night of Sunday, July 16, 1978 when neighbors began hearing terrible shrieks coming from the upper flat of a two-family home at 122 Montana Avenue in Buffalo, New York. One of them thought Gail Trait was “whipping the kids.” No one called police until after the screaming had...
The Truth About Kitty Genovese
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The 21st century revisionism of the iconic and infamous 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese, the young woman attacked on a street in Kew Gardens, Queens and slain in a hallway of her apartment building while her pleas for help went unanswered, gives a glaring...