Search Results for: crime

The Paramedic Murderer of Narrowsburg, N.Y.

Longreads Pick

A true crime story in a small town:

“He was gonna do this and save the children,” she testified. “I don’t remember exactly the conversation. He had me convinced that Catherine was the bad guy and he was the good parent and his kids were abused and his kids were miserable and we need to save the kids.”

“Did he tell you anything about what he needed to do about Catherine before Dec. 12?” the district attorney asked her.

“That he needed to kill her.”

Published: Apr 1, 2014
Length: 18 minutes (4,722 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

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Medellín: Latin America’s New Superstar

Longreads Pick

How Medellín went from crime-ridden cocaine capital to one of the world’s most innovative cities:

The Medellín Cartel, headed by Pablo Escobar, perhaps the only drug lord to become a worldwide household name, transported billions of dollars worth of cocaine, which had surpassed coffee as Colombia’s leading export by 1982. Arriving on U.S. shores, the exploits of cocaine cowboys made Miami the murder capital of the world in the early ’80s, an ignominious title Medellín itself stole in 1991, when it topped out at 381 murders per 100,000 residents, 40 times what the United Nations considers “epidemic.” That rate, if translated to New York

Source: Next City
Published: Mar 31, 2014
Length: 9 minutes (2,363 words)

The Murders at the Lake

Longreads Pick

In 1982 three teenagers were found savagely stabbed to death by a lake in Waco, Texas. Four men were found guilty and two were sentenced to death. Were they guilty? Michael Hall spent one year reporting this five-parts series for Texas Monthly:

This story examines the case through the viewpoint of five people: a patrol sergeant who investigated the crime; a police detective who became skeptical of the investigation; an appellate lawyer who tried to stop the execution; a journalist whose reporting has raised new doubts about the case; and a convict who pleaded guilty but now vehemently proclaims his innocence.

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Mar 28, 2014
Length: 99 minutes (24,844 words)

Examining the Religious, Economic, Architectural, and Cultural Facets of Gentrification: A Reading List

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Gif via Justin Blinder’s ‘Vacated’ project.

1. “Urban Church Planting Plantations.” (Christena Cleveland, March 2014)

White suburban churches invade urban spaces with no regard for the churches already in place.

2. “Gentrification Sparks Surge In Landlord Sabotage.” (Lauren Evans, Gothamist, Feb. 2014)

Setting fires, locking tenants out and willfully destroying a building’s infrastructure–evil landlords will go to great lengths to dispose of their rent-stabilized tenants in hopes of increasing rent and making thousands off new residents.

3. “Newburgh, N.Y., Seeks Renewal Without Gentrification.” (Lisa Selin Davis, The New York Times, November 2013)

Is a healthy future possible for “the murder capital of New York?”

4. “Gentrification and Its Discontents: Notes from New Orleans.” (Richard Campanella, New Geography, March 2013)

Gentrification might bring New York City or San Francisco to mind, but Campanella takes the reader to “the Williamsburg of the South”: Bywater, New Orleans. He delves into the history of gentrification in Louisiana, which dates back to the 1920s.

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Inside the Kafkaesque World of the US’s “Little Guantánamos”

Longreads Pick

Communication Management Units, or CMUs, are cloaked in secrecy. They segregate prisoners accused of terrorism, stripped of rights and held in isolation:

We sat together on her couch, her small, eight-year-old hands clutching a photo of her father, Yassin Aref. “My daddy only held me twice before I was five,” Dilnia told me. For the first five years of her life, she only knew him as the man on the other side of a plexiglass window in a communication management unit in an Indiana federal penitentiary.

Prisoners describe the communication management units, or CMUs, as “Little Guantánamos.” In 2006, the Bureau of Prisons created two of these units to isolate and segregate specific prisoners, the majority of them convicted of crimes related to terrorism. The bureau secretly opened these units without informing the public and without allowing anyone an opportunity to comment on their creation, as required by law. By September 2009, about 70 percent of the CMU prisoners were Muslim, more than 1,000 to 1,200 percent more than the federal prison average of Muslim inmates.

Source: m.vice.com
Published: Mar 20, 2014
Length: 17 minutes (4,300 words)

Joe McGinniss: 1942-2014

Nixon had refused the teleprompter from the start. He kept all the figures—crime rising nine times as fast … 300 cities … 200 dead … 7,000 injured … 43 percent of the American people afraid … He kept them all in his head, like the date of the Battle of Hastings.

Now he was starting again: “As we enter the last few days of the nineteen sixty-eight campaign, there is one issue on which there is a critical difference of opinion between the two candidates and that’s on the issue of law and order in the United States. Mr. Humphrey pledges that he will continue the policies of the last—”

He stopped.

“I don’t like that, either,” he said. “Let’s—We’ll do another one here.”

Again, three beeps from the machine. Richard Nixon sat at the edge of the desk, looking at the floor. He rested his chin on his fist.

-Journalist Joe McGinniss, from The Selling of the President 1968, hailed as one of the classic books about the modern marketing of a presidential candidate. McGinniss, who also wrote books including Fatal Vision, died Monday at age 71 from complications related to prostate cancer.

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Photo source

On Texas's 'Law of Parties' or Accomplices as Killers

In 1998 a district attorney sent a teenager to life in prison for his role in a murder of a 16-year-old girl. In Texas Monthly, Pamela Colloff revisits the case and looks at why the DA is questioning the life sentence years later:

The DA did not pull any punches once The State of Texas v. Randy Lee Wood began. “You know what the defense really boils down to in this case?” he asked jurors. “They want you to say, ‘He testified against Josh Bagwell, he said he was sorry, he’s not such a bad guy—let him go.’ ” But his acts of contrition, Cole told them, were irrelevant. “This is not television,” he reminded them. “This is not something where we wake up the next morning and we can say, ‘I wish I hadn’t done that,’ and it goes away. It’s real. Heather Rich was a real sixteen-year-old girl, and he helped take her life. And no matter how bad he feels about that, he is still responsible for it.”

According to the law, Cole continued, it did not matter that Randy had not fired the gun or had not wished Heather dead. In Texas, the “law of parties” erases the distinction between killers and accomplices, finding that a person can be held criminally responsible for the conduct of another if he participated in the crime. By virtue of the fact that Randy had assisted Curtis, he was guilty of capital murder. “He could stand here all day long and tell you that his intent was not to assist in the commission of this crime, and his actions cry out differently,” Cole insisted. “He’s guilty. He must pay the consequences of his choice.”

The jury agreed, and on August 25, 1998, Randy was convicted of capital murder and handed an automatic life sentence. Cole watched as Randy, then nineteen, was led from the courtroom in handcuffs and leg irons. As the DA gathered the papers at his table, he was relieved that the trial was over. Yet he hardly felt triumphant. “It was not a moment of celebration,” Cole told me. “There was no joy or happiness. I had a deep, deep sense that another young life had been senselessly wasted.”

Read the story.

Read more stories from Pamela Colloff

Photo: Julian Frost

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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

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