As I've done from time to time, I'm starting another tutorial series. This one's for everyone, but specifically for crime writers and students of criminology, crim justice, and forensics. For writers, it's intended to help them incorporate fingerprint ID tactics in their novels. And, as they - and the teachers of students like you - know, it's a good way to introduce a topic is via a story. ID tactics So I'm starting off this series with a story. It's about how the FBI … [Read more...]
CRIME INVESTIGATION Tutorial—How True Crime Websleuths Do It – I
This is an introductory tutorial about true crime Websleuths, an online forum that allows all of us to play detective. In prior tutorials, I've tried to help both crime writers and criminal justice students understand how, say, the FBI goes about investigations. This blog shows you the basics of how to participate in true crime Websleuths. Later blogs will get into how the popular site has evolved and some of the hiccups it's experienced. The … [Read more...]
Bullies – how to respond to all sorts
Bullies come in all sorts of guises - from deceptively lightweight cyberbullies to the heavyweight Vladimir Putins and Xi Jinping's of this world. My friend and guest blogger today, Alain Gunn, has thought through the ways of how to respond to all sorts of bullies. Here's his essay on managing bullies. Bullies - how to respond to all sorts. How do you stop a bully? There are only two ways to do it: Convince the bully of the error of his ways Find a Bigger, Better … [Read more...]
The saga of the Titanium Rib and Dr. Mel Smith
I've had a lifelong interest in discrimination and birth-defects stemming from being bullied for my once-nasal cleft-palate speech. Hence I was interested when college classmate Alain Gunn wrote The Titanium Rib. The Discrimination Angle The book is about a device that allows infants born with defective chests and lung function to live. And it's a true story of two dedicated surgeons —one being a black man who endured discrimination as a trailblazer entering the lily white ranks of … [Read more...]
Appearances can be deceiving – President Kennedy’s health
As a '60s liberal, I swallowed whole the storyline about our new president, John F. Kennedy. If appearances could be trusted, he was young, vigorous, and courageous (rescuing a fellow sailor in WWII.) Just the man to usher in the so-called Camelot years. I was a high school junior with a surgically repaired cleft-lip-and palate, finally able to talk without tell-tale nasality. But I'd been restricted from PE thru middle-school and from competitive sports during high school. Thus, I … [Read more...]
Thoughts about “Clarice,” spinoff from “The Silence of the Lambs.”
I managed to catch the 2nd episode of the "Clarice" series recently. It channeled the Waco cult situation, also known as the Waco, Texas massacre. That was the controversial law enforcement siege of a compound that belonged to the Branch Davidian religious cult. In the 2nd episode, Clarice deals with Novak, the leader of a secessionist militia group, hoping to avoid the debacle that happened when the Waco cult compound caught fire during the G-men's … [Read more...]
Popular Culture and True Crime – Tutorial I – Serial Killer trading cards?
About the same time that Michael Aamodt, a professor at Radford University in Virginia, started cataloguing serial killers, trading cards popped up. Aamodt's Serial Killer Data Base, compiled with the help of students, is academic, respectable. See here for a prior blog re Aamodt's Radford work. Serial killer Trading cards are not respectable, at least they weren't back in 1992. They are still bought and sold on Amazon, Etsy, and Ebay. Aamodt's catalogue has over five thousand entries … [Read more...]