What’s the deepest true-crime wiki-hole you’ve ever rolled ankles-over-ass down into? I talked about my wiki-hole neural pathway yesterday, and I don’t think I can top myself so soon after the Cadaver Synod, but I CAN tell you two things: 1) almost nothing on this here internet is going to murder your productivity for longer than the “See also” section of the Somerton Man Wikipedia page, which I am not linking, because I care about y’all hey HEY HEY don’t open another tab, what’d I just say??; and 2) finding out Tammy Wynette a) got kidnapped b) except not really had the tabs sprouting like mushrooms over here, as I tried to marshal enough other “faked an abduction to cover infidelity or intimate-partner violence” examples for a reading list. (And yes, Aimee and Agatha are top of mind.)
There’s no shame here, so if you had to leave yourself a trail of breadcrumbs to get back out of an Ancestry shoebox labeled Arthur Leigh Allen, here’s where you talk about it. — SDB
When my fascinations with archival video and cunning psychopaths dovetail: Michael Alig. There’s oddly so much footage of him that you can almost see what you want to see based on all your assorted identity baggage. I say that because most mainstream crime podcasts get it so wrong (IMHO).
This is dark, but: Sylvia Likens. I'm too much of a wuss to watch the movie adaptations but apparently not too much of a wuss to re-read every Wiki link?? I guess it's the combo of the detached prose style and the piecemeal info.
After the Unsolved Mysteries reboot, I spent about 2-3 weeks using all my free time to read what I could about the Xavier duPont de Ligonnes case, listening to random podcasts, reading articles in French, rewatching the episode. There isn't even that much out there, but for some reason that really stood out to me for "why have I never heard anything about this creepy story before, I need to know everything".
In 2006, I looked up the Erie Pizza Bomber case because I saw something in the news about a fictional property that was based on it and found Crime Library. I proceeded to read the entire Crime Library website on the clock at my government job without getting caught. I also read the Pizza Bomber book by Jerry Clark while on the clock.
…And wrote a Nanowrimo novel, and read all 100+ pages of the My Motivation Is This TWoP thread. And that was just in my first 6 months.
It's got to be the Diane Schuler Taconic State Parkway crash. Even before HBO released "There's Something Wrong with Aunt Diane" I was going down all kinds of rabbit holes on this case. In the summer of 2009 when the crash happened I was a new mom still very much in the throes of what was probably (undiagnosed) postpartum depression and I remember holding my baby and just sobbing watching news coverage. Anyway, I spent a lot of time reading theories though I never doubted she was drinking and smoking weed that day. I was more consumed by what pressures she may have been under leading up to the crash and what her loved ones may or may not have been aware of. The public face vs. the interior life. I still think about this case all the dang time.
The day after one of my COVID shots, I hunkered down on the sofa to ride out the fever by researching all of the major events that have happened in my lifetime ... because of boredom? I was startled to discover a person with my last name listed as a victim in a "unsolved" murder in the town where my father grew up. That lead to a long journey through death records and eventual conversation with my parents - dad has Alzheimer's, but we have a family genealogy book that mentions the death very obliquely. Long story short, T. Cullen Davis was acquitted of killing my first cousin once removed.
When my fascinations with archival video and cunning psychopaths dovetail: Michael Alig. There’s oddly so much footage of him that you can almost see what you want to see based on all your assorted identity baggage. I say that because most mainstream crime podcasts get it so wrong (IMHO).
This is dark, but: Sylvia Likens. I'm too much of a wuss to watch the movie adaptations but apparently not too much of a wuss to re-read every Wiki link?? I guess it's the combo of the detached prose style and the piecemeal info.
Less dark - Bre-X has sucked me in several times.
After the Unsolved Mysteries reboot, I spent about 2-3 weeks using all my free time to read what I could about the Xavier duPont de Ligonnes case, listening to random podcasts, reading articles in French, rewatching the episode. There isn't even that much out there, but for some reason that really stood out to me for "why have I never heard anything about this creepy story before, I need to know everything".
In 2006, I looked up the Erie Pizza Bomber case because I saw something in the news about a fictional property that was based on it and found Crime Library. I proceeded to read the entire Crime Library website on the clock at my government job without getting caught. I also read the Pizza Bomber book by Jerry Clark while on the clock.
…And wrote a Nanowrimo novel, and read all 100+ pages of the My Motivation Is This TWoP thread. And that was just in my first 6 months.
It's got to be the Diane Schuler Taconic State Parkway crash. Even before HBO released "There's Something Wrong with Aunt Diane" I was going down all kinds of rabbit holes on this case. In the summer of 2009 when the crash happened I was a new mom still very much in the throes of what was probably (undiagnosed) postpartum depression and I remember holding my baby and just sobbing watching news coverage. Anyway, I spent a lot of time reading theories though I never doubted she was drinking and smoking weed that day. I was more consumed by what pressures she may have been under leading up to the crash and what her loved ones may or may not have been aware of. The public face vs. the interior life. I still think about this case all the dang time.
The day after one of my COVID shots, I hunkered down on the sofa to ride out the fever by researching all of the major events that have happened in my lifetime ... because of boredom? I was startled to discover a person with my last name listed as a victim in a "unsolved" murder in the town where my father grew up. That lead to a long journey through death records and eventual conversation with my parents - dad has Alzheimer's, but we have a family genealogy book that mentions the death very obliquely. Long story short, T. Cullen Davis was acquitted of killing my first cousin once removed.