Search Results for: crime

A Sister’s Sleuthing Unravels a Teenage Love Triangle Murder Mystery

Longreads Pick

A twisted tale of teenage love and cold-blooded murder in Hollywood, Florida.

For detectives, the killing at first glance must have seemed an all-too-common crime: another dead thug, likely felled by the same drug culture that had left him homeless and broke. Yet Savage’s life and death — as told through hundreds of pages of police records, text messages, and interviews with his family and itinerant friends — were far more complex.

Published: Jun 23, 2014
Length: 26 minutes (6,501 words)

The Near-Death of Grand Central Terminal

Longreads Pick

How we almost lost a New York landmark:

Many consider the destruction of New York’s original Pennsylvania Station in 1963 to have been the architectural crime of the twentieth century. But few know how close we came to also losing its counterpart, Grand Central Terminal, a hub every bit as irreplaceable. Grand Central’s salvation has generally been told as a tale of aroused civic virtue, which it was. Yet it was, as well, an affirming episode for those of us convinced that our political culture has become an endless clown-car act with the same fools always leaping out.

Published: Jun 24, 2014
Length: 11 minutes (2,963 words)

Twenty Years After Infamous Bronco Chase, O.J. Simpson Is Still a Mystery

Longreads Pick

After riveting the nation with the Bronco chase and dividing it with the Trial of the Century, O.J. Simpson settled into a strange life as a celebrity pariah and ended up behind bars on unrelated crimes.

Inmate No. 1027820 works at the gym. He supervises other prisoners who clean and set up for basketball games, during which he operates the clock and scoreboard. He also manages a slo-pitch softball team that plays in the yard. He can’t bat because of a balky elbow and bad knees, but he likes to taunt the opposition, yelling, “Sit your ass down!” after missed swings. He loves playing dominoes, watches SportsCenter and crime dramas such as Person of Interest, and telephones his lawyer and old friends. He reads USA Today and the Game of Thrones books. He works out, though not as vigorously as he used to. He misses golf. He plays fantasy football; last season his team included Peyton Manning, Robert Griffin III and Alfred Morris. He also admires Marshawn Lynch. The way the Seahawks’ running back plays reminds the inmate of another life. The life he once had.

Published: Jun 11, 2014
Length: 17 minutes (4,262 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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The Prisoner’s Daughter

Longreads Pick

What if your dad had been doing time for murder for as long as you’d known him?

She was a leader like her father, Amanda’s relatives told her. She’d inherited his forceful personality and his stubborn streak. She took gymnastics classes and sang in the school chorus — a natural performer, just like her father.

She took pride in the comments, but they wore on her, comparisons to a man she had never really met. As her 13th birthday approached, she resolved to see her father again. She told her mother, making it clear she didn’t believe the stories about him serving overseas.

Conceded Minerva: “Your father is in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.”

“Why is he there if he didn’t do it?”

Source: Village Voice
Published: Jun 10, 2014
Length: 19 minutes (4,856 words)

The Thin Blue Privatized Line

Longreads Pick

Unsettled by the reality that the cops can’t help them, Oakland residents are hiring private patrols. Crime is down. But is the cure worse than the disease?

Picking himself up, Ward was approached by Rico Thomas, the 26-year-old security guard who had stumbled upon the break-in—and would soon draw a gun and shoot the suspect with it. Thomas had become a beloved fixture to the Upper Dimond and Oakmore residents who had hired him to patrol their streets months earlier. He would later tell police that his scrap with Ward happened in a flash: Ward lunged at him with an iron pry bar, he said, and tried to kill him. The two men wrestled, and then Ward ran away. But instead of heading downhill, the easier escape route, Ward ran uphill after the SUV, perhaps hoping that it would stop.

Published: Jun 3, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,707 words)

Forget CSI

Longreads Pick

Faith in the forensic system—in large part due to Hollywood’s heroic portrayals of forensic investigators—is at an all time high. But despite its invincible aura, the actual system is deeply flawed and at times flat out fraudulent.

In San Francisco last year, a police technician pleaded guilty to stealing cocaine from a crime lab, leading to the dismissal of hundreds of criminal cases that depended on evidence analyzed at the unit. In 2012, a Minnesota lab was temporarily shut down after a report found deficiencies in virtually every aspect of its operation, including dirty equipment, inadequate documentation, and ignorance of basic scientific procedures. In Houston that same year, a lab technician was found to be fabricating results in drug cases; about one out of every three reports he submitted was found to be flawed. District attorneys in the area were told that up to 5,000 convictions in 36 counties could be in jeopardy. Similar failures were uncovered in Colorado Springs, Colorado; St. Paul, Minnesota; Chicago; and New York. Even the FBI has performed atrociously shoddy work.

Published: Apr 30, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,647 words)

Life in the Valley of Death

Longreads Pick

In Srebrenica, reconciliation between Muslims and Serbs have remained difficult nearly 20 years after the Bosnian Genocide:

Among the Muslims who have returned, the outspoken Fazila Efendic is the anomaly. Far more common is the case of Suleiman Mehmedovic, a 31-year-old laborer who lives with his wife and two children in a tiny apartment at the edge of the town of Srebrenica. Only 12 in July 1995, he left the enclave on a bus with his mother, but his father perished; his wife lost her father and all five brothers. “We just keep to ourselves,” Suleiman said of his life today. “I work alongside Serbs, and it’s O.K. We just never talk about what happened at all.”

To Milos Milanovic, a Serbian member of the Srebrenica City Council, that’s the best that can be hoped for. “There is never any discussion about these things, only arguing,” he told me. During the war, Milanovic, now 50, was a member of the Srspka armed forces and was present at the fall of Srebrenica. “It’s mostly propaganda,” he said of the numbers killed in the July 1995 massacre. “The Muslims have even presented our victims as their victims. They need to keep the death count high to present Serbs as the only criminals and to cover up their own war crimes.”

Published: May 29, 2014
Length: 32 minutes (8,008 words)

Breaking the Silence About Sexual Assault on Campus: Our College Pick

UCLA’s Daily Bruin published a comprehensive package about sexual assault on campus just days after the White House released a report outlining procedural guidelines for colleges to follow when dealing with such cases. In her thorough story about UCLA’s policies and procedures, Kate Parkinson-Morgan explains the intricacies of Title IX, the Clery Act, and other legislation that governs a college’s response to sexual crimes. But what makes the journalism so searing is Parkinson-Morgan’s delicate, angering chronicles of six survivors’ stories. The Daily Bruin also gave space for four women to tell their story in their own words. Parkinson-Morgan earned her subjects’ trust. In return she gave them the power of their own story.

Breaking the Silence

Kate Parkinson-Morgan | The Daily Bruin | May 5, 2014 | 12 minutes (3,051 words)

Alexander Woollcott and Harpo Marx: A Love Story

Ned Stuckey-French | culturefront | 1999 | 21 minutes (5,289 words)

Our latest Longreads Member Pick is “Alexander Woollcott and Harpo Marx: A Love Story,” by Ned Stuckey-French, originally published in 1999 in culturefront, the former magazine for the New York Council for the Humanities. It’s a story that takes a closer look at the dynamics of a friendship, and the roles we play in each other’s lives.

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Alexander Woollcott fell in love with Harpo Marx the first time he saw him. It was the evening of May 19, 1924, and the Marx Brothers were making their Broadway debut in the slyly titled musical comedy I’ll Say She Is. Woollcott was there, reluctantly, to review it for the Sun. Another show, a much-hyped drama featuring a French music-­hall star, had been scheduled to open the same night, but when it was postponed at the last minute, the first­line critics decided to take the night off. Except for Woollcott. His career was in the doldrums, and hoping against hope for a scoop, he dragged himself over to see what he assumed were “some damned acrobats.” Read more…