Ron Franscell's Blog, page 8
June 12, 2021
You can pre-order ‘SHADOWMAN: An Elusive Psycho and the Birth of the FBI’s Profilers’
The pulse-pounding account of the first time in history that the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit created a psychological profile to help catch a serial killer
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April 21, 2021
Happy Earth Day! Ira Einhorn loves you to death
In the 1970s, smelly hippie guru Ira Einhorn called himself “The Unicorn” (because his German name translated “one horn”). He had been a radical protester during the Vietnam War and became one of the co-founders of Earth Day. The burly, unkempt college professor hung out with counterculture figures like Allen Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman, spewing…
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September 29, 2020
The Resurrection of Elmer McCurdy
Elmer McCurdy was a two-bit outlaw, a wannabe desperado who overshot the Wild West and landed in the 20th century. Nobody knew his name, and nobody in the Oklahoma Territory cared much. In 1911, Elmer was 31 years old, usually drunk, and flat broke when he decided to hold up a train. His booty: $46…
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September 2, 2020
Peace, love … and murder
How long did you think it would take me to find a good true-crime story in my new digs, the tiny village of Placitas in northern New Mexico? Yeah, well, I never bogart a good yarn. This’ll blow your mind. In the 1960s and ’70s, Placitas was a far-out satellite in the hippie universe, man.…
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August 24, 2020
How to recognize a toxic narcissist—and survive
According to the Mayo Clinic, narcissistic personality disorder — related to sociopathy under the umbrella term Antisocial Personality Disorders — is a mental condition in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, and a lack of empathy for others. But behind this mask of…
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July 28, 2020
Better Angels: No veteran should die alone
It was after 2am and the graveyard-shift nurses drifted like ghosts in the hallway, tending to the dead and dying. It wasn’t that Michael* couldn’t sleep, even with meds he refused to take. He fought sleep with every fiber of his fragile body. He had fought in a war he barely remembered. A crucifix hung…
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March 27, 2020
My Super-Secret Self-Quarantine Log That Everybody Can Read
Gentle Reader: Like all of you, Days 1-4 of my coronavirus self-quarantine were largely spent laughing at toilet-paper hoarders. Then I needed toilet paper. Sh*t got real. In case some future archaeologist or home invader finds my mummified corpse in the chimney, I decided to keep an epic journal of my experience so future self-quarantinees…
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January 21, 2020
The entangled histories of 'In Cold Blood' and narrative journalism
Lecture: 9:30am to 11am on Feb. 20Book-signing immediately afterwardCasper College (WY) Humanities FestivalMusic Building’s Wheeler HallAdmission is free Ron Franscell, who has been called one of the exciting voices in narrative nonfiction by some heavyweight authors like Ann Rule and Vincent Bugliosi, will deliver a lecture about how his particular style of crime journalism has…
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October 28, 2019
The best true-crime books of all time? Maybe not
Last weekend, USA Today published a Goodreads list of the “Best True Crime Books of All Time.” There are some truly great books on the list, compiled from various Goodreads features like reviews, lists, and ratings from 90 million members. Ninety million readers can’t be wrong, can they? In this case, sort of. The meaty…
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October 17, 2019
Murderabilia, the podcast: ‘Hey, buddy, want some Manson toenails?’
The term “murderabilia” was coined by my friend Andy Kahan, who advocates for crime victims for Crimestoppers of Houston. But the word is actually more innocuous than Kahan’s feelings about the weird, lurid, and occasionally baffling crap that true-crime collectors covet. In recent years, for example, you could buy a serial killer Angel Resendiz’s foot…
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