Among the most delicious of deliciously awful TV to ever emit organized pixels in my direction was a little-known E! reality show “Pretty Wild.” The original premise was based on a former Playboy model raising…
Posts tagged True Crime
Green River Killer
Like so many TV crime dramas, Green River Killer: A True Detective Story by Jeff Jensen and Jonathan Case starts with a gruesome scene. In this case it’s a young kid playing alone when a stranger…
The executioner’s super long song
What you suspect is wrong with the true crime two-pounder The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer is confirmed when you watch the movie adaptation: The purposely visible fingerprints of Lawrence Schiller, the man who worked…
People Who Eat Darkness
True crime almost always fails. A ripped-from-the-headlines moment hastily chucked together and packaged with the face of a pretty dead girl on the cover. A 20-page insert of glossy black and white photos: A tottering…
Lies, lies, lies yeah-eh …
Before the advent of Facebook stalking, there was a precocious teen named Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter who lit out of a small German town and made for the United States in the guise of an exchange…
Midnight in the garden of awesome
In one of the greatest instances of luck to ever rain on a writer with a bionic eye for detail and a canine sense for sniffing out bedazzled characters in absurd situations, journalist John Berendt…
Capote and Page Six lovechild
How does that old saying go: “Every time a writer dies, Christa buys one of his books?” Dominick Dunne’s death was like a magnet to the True Crime section, where I yanked the only Dunne…
Dear diary
The only way The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder could be more of a diary would be if it had a Yorkie on the cover and a glitter pen attached with…
Dear Diary: While they Slept
In late April, 1984, Billy Gilley,18, killed his parents with a baseball bat. And when his little sister Becky wouldn’t go upstairs while he finished, he beat her, too, which eventually killed her. Jody Gilley,…