That Bloody Girl

In early February of 1981, authorities from Salem flew down the Interstate 5 corridor and assembled with detectives and law officials from northern California and southern Oregon. Each detective had a crime, or two, in their jurisdiction matching a particular modus operandi , and the list of incidents just kept growing. When they gathered, they had no idea the scope of the mystery they were unraveling or just far it was going to reach. It started with a robbery. On December 9, 1980, in Vancouver, Washington, a gas station was held up at gun point, the female attendant left alone in the store. A man entered wearing a brown coat and a fake beard. He demanded cash and brandished a small, silver gun to prove he was serious. The cashier obliged.  A few days later, in Eugene, Oregon, on December thirteenth, a Baskin-Robbins was robbed by a man holding a silver gun and wearing a fake beard and a band aid across his nose.  In Albany, Oregon, a drive-in was hit on December fou

On a chilly Sunday evening in mid-January, two young women rolled up to the TransAmerica Title Building on the outskirts of Salem, Oregon, just off Interstate 5, to clean the office. It was their usual Sunday job, though today they had gotten a bit of a late start, having to shower and stop for gas, so they didn't arrive to the business complex until after nine p.m. The office had wide, welcoming windows on every wall and, with the bright florescent lights flipped on, the effect was to create a fishbowl-like scene, the women bustling around in their duties like two busy, little fish. They'd left the door unlocked and entertained themselves by chatting to each other, the two of them best friends. They were Shari Hull, twenty-years-old and the daughter of the owner of the housekeeping company with which they were both employed, and Beth Wilmot, also twenty and a fairly recent transplant to Salem from Spokane, Washington. She'd come for work, and along with steady pay, she

On a chilly February night, five days after the start of the Chinese New Year, 1983, three young men walked into one of the most renowned, high-stakes gambling dens in the heart of Seattle's Chinatown International District and walked away with thousands of dollars of cash in their pockets and fourteen lives hanging in the balance in their wake.  The club was the Wah Mee, a sixty-year-old casino and bar that catered exclusively to Chinese clientele and hosted the highest-stakes illegal gambling in the Pacific Northwest. The men were 22-year-old Kwan Fai "Willie" Mak, 20-year-old Benjamin Ng, and 25-year-old Wai Chiu "Tony" Ng.  Willie Mak was born in Kwangtung Province in mainland China and immigrated to the US with his family in 1975 when he was fifteen. By 22, Willie was a high school drop out, working various jobs in and around Seattle, and had a penchant for gambling. He was well-known in the International District gambling clubs, including the Wah Me

Hey guys! Big announcement! I am turning this blog into a true crime blog!!! Fucking exciting. And kind of terrifying, because it is actually a big endeavor. There is a lot of responsibility in writing about true crime. Honoring the legacies and lives of the victims while detailing the crimes that brought an end to those lives is a heavy weight. But, I have been thinking about writing true crime now for a couple of years and I think now is absolutely the time to make the transition. So, coming soon will be the first story in my true crime series.  The blog will focus on Washington State murders and abhorrent crimes. Everyone knows about Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer, which I will be covering, of course--because how could I not?!--but Washington is a haven of heinous crimes and there is a lot to discuss. True crime is so popular, I believe, for two reasons. First, because we want to understand how someone could do something so incredibly horrific as take a life, or in

So, I started Without a Doubt , Marcia Clark's memoir of the Orenthal James Simpson murder trial, kind of thinking I had an idea of what went down. But, damn it, I was so, so wrong. First of all, let's address the negative media attention Marcia got throughout the trial. Oh, I'm sorry, a woman prosecutor is hard to swallow? What, can't comment on her questioning but oh, god, she changed her hair?!  Yeah, America. DEAL WITH IT. The most sickening part of all is that nothing has changed (see: media reaction to Hillary's pantsuits). It is unbelievable to me that something so benign as the reproductive organs of a particular person can completely paint the way the media portrays them. I guess it shouldn't be unbelievable. It's been happening this way for centuries. But, c'mon, aren't we all a little bit grossed-out by now? She is more than her hair or her clothes or her goddamn vagina. Get. Over. It. Anyway, moving on.  HOLY SHIT OJ

So, once again, I am behind. Blogging is something that I enjoy, but rarely make time for, and I am really going to try and rectify that for the rest of the year. I whittled down my reading list to sixty-eight books--I've read twenty-five so far--again, still hopelessly behind--which makes for about two books a week until New Years Day. I have plenty of books in my house to accomplish this, I just desperately need to make the time. I spent a lot of time at the beginning of the year chastising myself for not writing. And a lot of time in the middle of the year trying to find the motivation to write. Gonna be honest, friends, it isn't coming to me this time around. I have the whole book plotted out,  but when it comes to writing it, there is a lack of inspiration. It falls flat, and so I am thinking of setting it aside for a moment and focusing on my other great love--reading. Last time, I reacted to reading Jurassic Park . I seriously enjoyed reading Jurassic Park . If you h