#true.crime

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I picked this up from Skip Hollandsworth, my mentor here at the magazine, who is a wonderful writer. He’s done a lot of crime stories. I have one Word document that I dump everything into — all my notes, interesting quotes, references to documents, everything. It’s a master document that I can do a word search on, and hopefully everything’s at my fingertips. As I start to input information into the document, it starts to take its own organic shape. Information is grouped together spontaneously, and at some point it starts to take a shape. Now, admittedly, that’s not always the right shape to write the story in.

Pamela Colloff on storytelling, and on providing space within each story for the reader to think for himself

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What interests me about crime stories is they usually take your average people and put them in a very extreme situation. They’re never boring stories. Any great narrative has conflict, and you can’t have more conflict than a crime story—or especially a murder story. That just fascinates me—that sort of conflict and what people do in situations that they might not normally be in, or what pushes them to that extreme. Exploring that is fascinating. And then exploring wrongful convictions in particular is fascinating to me for obvious reasons. It’s just because I can’t imagine ever being in that position myself. It’s such a subversion of how our system’s supposed to work. So that’s fascinating. It’s fascinating on a policy level, and it’s fascinating on a personal level.

Pulitzer-winner Pamela Colloff on writing, true crime, and the tension-points between advocacy and accuracy

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Inside the Oscar Pistorius Murder Case: What Paths Took the Couple to That Final Night?

Mark Seal investigates the relationship of “Blade Runner” Oscar Pistorius and his model-girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp

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The Mormons settled this ominous country, and then they abandoned it but by the time they left the first orange tree had been planted and for the next hundred years the San Bernardino Valley would draw a kind of people who imagined they might live among the talismanic fruit and prosper in die dry air, people who brought with them Mid-western ways of building and cooking and praying and who tried to graft those ways upon the land. The graft took incurious ways. This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew. This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book. This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life's promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and return to hairdressers' school. “We were just crazy kids” they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past. Here is where the hot wind blows and the old ways do not seem relevant, where the divorce rate is double the national average and where one person in every thirty-eight lives in a trailer.

Oof -- true-crime and Joan Didion make a compelling mix

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A true-crime thriller that shades most things fiction could dream up.

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Time sink alert -- there are gems here

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Eyewitness testimony helped convict Wiley Fountain of rape. 15 years later, DNA evidence turned up to prove he was innocent, and the 'eyewitnesses' were wrong. Dallas News examines the pitfalls of eyewitness testimony

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Michael Hall tracks down 32 people who were convicted of crime, served prison sentences, and then were exonerated. And finds that for most, doing term was not the hard part -- the real hard part was coping with 'freedom'