When True Crime Isn’t True

If you pick up a book marketed as "Nonfiction" or "True Crime," do you expect every word and thought to be rooted in fact? I recently read Vincent Green’s Extreme Justice and found an Author’s Note that stopped me cold:

“I have taken the liberty to fill in [witnesses'] thoughts and beliefs and to re-create their conversations...”

While researching Madeline, I found a counter-example to Extreme Justice in a 1977 interview tape. Madeline Webb was trying to help her biographer, Jack Rogers, with a gap in her memory regarding her 1933 elopement.

"You can build anything into it that you want," Madeline suggested. "You’ll have to create some, right?"

Rogers didn't flinch. "I’d rather not," he replied. "I’d still rather work from facts."

Rogers never finished his book, but we leaned on his tapes to ensure our biography remained grounded in reality.

Hit Reply and tell me where you draw the line. Do "recreated conversations" help the story, or do they make you trust the author less?

Valentine’s Day in Infamy

From domestic explosions to crimes of misguided passion, Valentine’s Day has a much darker history than Hallmark cares to admit. One story that really sticks with me involves two twenty-somethings and two notes…

Later that day, the bodies of the 26-year-old nurse and her suitor, Ralph Frazier, were found in a mangled car at the bottom of a ravine near Oakland, California. Police found a note Frazier had written to his parents: “This is the way we want it... We have had a long talk and we know just what we are doing.”

But the evidence tells a much darker, one-sided story. Frazier claimed they were in it together, yet he had shot Peg three times before wrapping her in a blanket and putting her in the back seat. He then got behind the wheel, sped toward the ravine, and turned the gun on himself.

If it were truly a mutual decision, why the three shots? Peg’s father never believed the story; she had recently moved out on Frazier and was returning his letters unopened. Neighbors said Frazier was so distraught he tried to poison himself.

I’m curious—do you think it was a suicide pact, or a final act of control? Reply and let me know your theory.

Learn about Lethal Letha, Lovesick Toni Jo, and one more Bloody Valentine on the Vintage Crime Vault blog.

The Massacre You Think You Know

Most true crime buffs remember the outlines of the mass shooting on Feb. 14, 1929, in Chicago. Mobsters dressed as policemen lined seven members of a rival gang against a garage wall and opened fire with Thompson submachine guns. The killers were working for Al Capone. The victims were members of Bugs Moran’s North Side Gang.

Here are some often-overlooked details:

- The brick wall, complete with blood-stained bullet holes, wound up in the men’s bathroom of a nightclub in Vancouver, Canada, after the garage was demolished in 1967. Plexiglas protected it from patrons who couldn’t, um, shoot straight. Now it stands in The Mob Museum in Las Vegas.

- Frank Gusenberg lived for three hours after the shooting despite suffering more than a dozen bullet wounds. True to form, he refused to tell police who was responsible. “Nobody shot me,” he reportedly told one cop.

- The prime suspect, hitman Jack McGurn, was never convicted of the crime. But in 1936, a day after the seventh anniversary, three men shot him dead in a bowling alley – and left behind a Valentine’s Day card.

- One victim was a gangster groupie of sorts. Reinhardt Schwimmer was an optometrist who liked hanging out with mobsters, but his bravado was his undoing that day. He was never linked to any gangland crimes but did claim he could have people “taken for a ride” – rubbed out.

Did You Know? George “Bugs” Moran was the intended target of the massacre and should have been at the garage that day. Running late, he saw what looked like a police car outside the garage and hid out at a nearby café.

Above: Chicago police load the bodies of massacre victims into wagons for the trip to the morgue.

What I’m Digging Into This Month

The Library: The Fifteen by William Geroux I’m still obsessed with the 1943 murder of a German POW by his own comrades in Tonkawa, Oklahoma. Geroux’s book, The Fifteen, is the definitive deep dive. He expands the scope beyond Tonkawa to cover all 15 German POWs sentenced to death in the U.S. during the war. The most chilling part? Germany retaliated by sentencing 15 American POWs to death in a failed attempt at a prisoner exchange. It’s a masterclass in clean, factual reporting on a forgotten domestic front.

The Screen: Nuremberg (The Movie) Despite a heavy-hitting cast (Russell Crowe and Rami Malek), Nuremberg was shut out of the Oscar nominations this year. Based on Jack El-Hai’s The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, the film is highly entertaining, though it certainly takes liberties with the facts. Interestingly, El-Hai told the Most Notorious podcast that he doesn't mind the Hollywood polish because it "captures the essence."

The Headphones: Most Notorious Podcast If you want to hear how a writer balances Hollywood's needs with historical reality, check out the Erik Rivenes interview with Jack El-Hai. It’s a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the detective work required to reconstruct the mental state of Hermann Göring.

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