BREAKING NEWS

Madeline Gets Life has a release date! The true tale of love, murder, and redemption comes out May 11, 2027, from Level Best Books.

And Happy Birthday to Vintage Crime Gazette! Your favorite newsletter turns one year old this month.

We dedicate this issue to U.S. Route 66. The “Mother Road” — from Chicago to Santa Monica, California — is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. No century would be complete without its share of murder and mayhem, so buckle up.

Route 66 Disappearance

At 8:30 a.m. on May 23, 1935, a Nash sedan overturned south of Socorro, New Mexico. The driver — 25, dark complexion, tattoo on left arm — enlisted a trucker’s help to right the car, fueled up, and kept driving south.

Forty miles later, he crashed again. Undeterred, he reached El Paso for repairs, then drove east across Texas, abandoning the car in Dallas and leaving a trail of traveler’s checks in the name of George Lorius.

From left: George and Laura Lorius, and Albert and Tillie Heberer.

The real George Lorius, 50, had left St. Louis on May 19 with his wife, Laura, and friends Albert and Tillie Heberer. They intended to follow Route 66 to Los Angeles.

The group vanished on their fourth day after mailing postcards in Albuquerque. A month later, cowboys found their charred luggage in a dry creek bed.

Despite a massive search led by Governor Clyde Tingley, the travelers — and the tattooed man — were never found. Theories range from a hotel basement murder to an execution in a gold mine, but 90 years later, the road has kept its secret.

The rampage began weeks earlier when the pair walked away from the stockade at Fort Hood, Texas. Their trail of blood spanned Jacksonville, Florida (where they strangled two women), Tennessee, and eventually Kansas and Colorado, totaling seven victims.

Their run ended at a Salt Lake City roadblock on June 10. Unrepentant, York told police, “I’m kinda looking forward to hanging.”

Kansas won the jurisdictional race to try them. The pair spent four years on Death Row alongside Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, the killers immortalized in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

On June 22, 1965, York and Latham were hanged — the last execution carried out by the state of Kansas.

Tragedy — With an Alien Twist

A California convict named James Bentley was linked to the crime via an informant, but he was executed for another murder before the Welch case could come to trial.

The story took an otherworldly turn last year. One of the sons, Tom, told the Hard Times and True Crimes podcast that his parents weren't victims of a robbery, but a government cover-up.

Tom says his father, a trucker, had once let slip that he hauled a UFO to New Mexico. Tom also learned his dad was being surveilled by a neighbor with ties to Tinker Air Force Base outside Oklahoma City. The neighbor later disappeared.

Whether a tragic roadside robbery or a Cold War conspiracy, the Welch murders remain one of Route 66’s most haunting anomalies.

From left: Tom, Billy, Johnny, and Jimmy. Billy and Johnny died last year within three weeks of each other.

Madeline’s Route 66 Close Call

Madeline and her mother, Vera, took Route 66 north from Oklahoma to Missouri to visit brother Billy Webb, who attended a military academy outside Kansas City.

Most of the Mother Road in Oklahoma was still gravel in 1934, but a 15-mile stretch from Afton north to Miami (pronounced My-AM-uh) was paved. However, the roadway narrowed to just 9 feet wide outside Afton, earning it the nickname “Sidewalk Highway.”

Vera was driving the Chevrolet when a car clipped their rear fender trying to pass them. The Chevy’s back tires lost their grip, and the car swerved across the asphalt.

It came to a halt with its front wheels in a ditch and the rest of the vehicle jutting into the roadway. The other automobile kept going.

Shaken but unhurt, Vera and Madeline just had time to look at each other before another car, a Hudson Terraplane coming from the north, smashed into Madeline’s side of the car. The force slammed her face into the dashboard, costing her two teeth.

Vera was slumped over the steering wheel, bleeding from a fractured skull and cuts to her face. She required an 11-day hospital stay in Miami.

A short time before Vera’s discharge, a man undergoing detoxification at the hospital entered her room, stark naked, leaped over her bed and jumped out of the window to his death. Madeline would later say the incident seemed to shock her mother back to health.

Madeline’s missing teeth troubled her for years. She struggled with temperamental bridges that kept falling out — once at a dinner party in New York. She blamed them for ruining her modeling and acting chances.

A Legacy of Justice and Tragedy: Though the Heavens Fall

In 1979, Crumbley was a self-described “child-lawyer” fresh out of law school when he and two colleagues took on the appeal of Jerry Banks.

Banks had been twice convicted of the murders of a white high school band director, Marvin King, and his former student, Melanie Hartsfield. Crumbley’s book, Though the Heavens Fall, skillfully situates the case against the backdrop of the era's deep-seated prejudice.

Ironically, Crumbley believes that very prejudice may have inadvertently helped his client. “Nobody could believe he’d kill two white people and then call the sheriff” to report finding the bodies, he said.

The legal trio’s dogged investigation eventually unearthed suppressed evidence, leading the Georgia Supreme Court to order a new trial. Faced with a vanishing case, the District Attorney dropped the charges.

Banks was released, but the story doesn’t end with a simple walk into the sunset. Crumbley’s greatest legal victory was soon marred by a dark turn of events that proved justice sometimes comes too late to save everything.

Though the Heavens Fall serves as both a legal thriller and a haunting tribute to a man for whom justice arrived, but peace remained elusive.

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