Summer S Almost Gone The Bricca Family Murders The Most Notorious Cold Case In Cincinnati History

Summer's Almost Gone The Bricca Family Murders...The Most Notorious Cold Case In Cincinnati History

It was an unbelievable crime - hideous, unexpected, baffling. A crime destined to become the most notorious and obsessive cold case in Cincinnati history.On that long ago day in September on the cusp of autumn, we were horrified by the blaring Bricca murder headlines. Jerry, his pretty wife Linda, and their young daughter Debbie were found stabbed to death in their home in the city's Bridgetown neighborhood. Striking between the 4th and 5th slayings of the Cincinnati Strangler in 1966, the Bricca killer plunged a city already on edge into an abyss. A half century later, the Bricca mystery lingers in cobwebs and survives on whispers. It's a terminal case with a fading pulse. Opening up any cold case is daunting. Evidence is lost, buried, or forgotten. Contradiction and hearsay muddy the waters. The truth is elusive, shrouded, or shameful. Bricca also defies our comfortable expectation that killers are always captured, victims will be avenged, and justice aligns with the truth.Enter Cincinnati crime writer JT Townsend. The author of Queen City Gothic was given unprecedented access to the Bricca case file - laden with information that never saw the light of print - evidence that might illuminate the relentless rumors that police "screwed up the crime scene" or "covered up for the suspect." As an armchair detective stalking a legendary murder mystery, Townsend is not shackled by presumption of innocence and reasonable doubt. ALL evidence is admissible - hearsay, rumors, gossip, and undertones. With this overdue excavation of the Bricca murders, JT Townsend will jettison the unworkable and the implausible scenarios until we arrive at the probable truth.And for those of us who preserved this slaughtered family in our memory, it will never be too late to learn that truth. There looms one huge, lasting question? Who killed the Bricca family?

Losing a loved one to murder is life’s ultimate tragedy. But when the killer is never captured, a family’s paralyzing grief only compounds. Years pass. Pain grows. Time heals nothing. Parents, spouses, and children of the victims never find peace. Investigators continue to lie awake night after night, year after year, thinking, “If only...” Cold cases fascinate us because of the endless possibilities. What if Alice Hochhausler hadn’t driven her daughter home from work while a strangler was running loose? What if Oda Apple’s wife hadn’t sent him to the corner drugstore? What if Linda Bricca hadn’t been so beautiful – and her husband not a workaholic? J. T. Townsend takes us on a sinister journey through thirteen cases, which took place in Cincinnati, Ohio, between 1904 and 1971. You’ll meet Frances Brady, a pretty bride-to-be gunned down at her own front door. Tommy Coby, age eight, who arrived home to an empty house, and learned later his parents were lying dead in their car. Patty Rebholz, a popular cheerleader, who was bludgeoned in a neighbor’s backyard while walking to break up with her teenage boyfriend. What do these cases have in common? A fleeting, irrational act of violence with no resolution. Somebody literally got away with murder. Each episode took place in sheer moments––but hundreds of innocent people still remember, still mourn, and are still haunted by horrible, unbearable images. Townsend’s riveting accounts include never-before-published details from police files and insights from both investigators and witnesses. Finally someone has managed to put all of the pieces together. Whodunit? We’ll never know for sure––but we can certainly make some informed, calculated guesses. Meanwhile, on these pages, each victim returns to vibrant life, becomes as real to us as to those loved ones they left behind––and still cries out for justice.

"The murder mystery that has confounded and fascinated people for over forty years has been given a whole new life. When Evil Came to Good Hart is a well-researched and well-written piece of nonfiction that holds the reader in its spell, just as it has the many writers, reporters, and law officers who have puzzled over it. My highest praise for Mardi Link's book is to say that it reads like a good novel, a real page-turner." —Judith Guest, author of Ordinary People and The Tarnished Eye In this page-turning true-life whodunit, author Mardi Link details all the evidence to date. She crafts her book around police and court documents and historical and present-day statements and interviews, in addition to exploring the impact of the case on the community of Good Hart and the stigma that surrounds the popular summer getaway. Adding to both the sense of tragic history and the suspense, Link laces her tale with fascinating bits of local and Indian lore, while dozens of colorful characters enter and leave the story, spicing the narrative. During the years of investigation of the murders, officials considered hundreds of tips and leads as well as dozens of sources, among them former secretaries who worked for murder victim Dick Robison; Robison's business associates; John Norman Collins, perpetrator of the "Co-Ed Murders" that took place in Washtenaw County between 1967 and 1969; and an inmate in federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, who said he knew who killed the Robison family. Despite the exhaustive investigative efforts of numerous individuals, decades later the case lies tantalizingly out of reach. It is still an unsolved cold case, yielding, in Link's words, forty years worth of "dead-end leads, anonymous tips, a few hard facts, and countless cockamamie theories."

In December 1958, Ken Martin, his wife Barbara, and their three young daughters left their home in Northeast Portland to search for Christmas greens in the Columbia River Gorge—and never returned. The Martins' disappearance spurred the largest missing persons search in Oregon history and the mystery has remained perplexingly unsolved to this day. For the past six years, JB Fisher (Portland on the Take) has pored over the case after finding in his garage a stack of old Oregon Journal newspaper articles about the story. Through a series of serendipitous encounters, Fisher obtained a wealth of first-hand and never-before publicized information about the case including police reports from several agencies, materials and photos belonging to the Martin family, and the personal notebooks and papers of Multnomah County Sheriff's Detective Walter E. Graven, who was always convinced the case was a homicide and worked tirelessly to prove it. Graven, however, faced real resistance from his superiors to bring his findings to light. Used as a trail left behind after his 1988 death to guide future researchers, Graven's personal documents provide fascinating insight into the question of what happened to the Martins—a path leading to abduction and murder, an intimate family secret, and civic corruption going all the way to the Kennedys in Washington, DC.

A son of a local sheriff provides an insider's view of small town life and crime. Also probes the tragic life of the victim during the decades leading up to her brutal end in 1948. It is a tale of wealth and prominence, and the curse of death.

Now updated, the New York Times bestseller about a horrifying Alaska massacre and a controversial trial: “Barer writes true crime at its best.” —Jack Olsen On March 15, 1987, police in Anchorage, Alaska, arrived at a horrific scene of carnage. In a modest downtown apartment, they found Nancy Newman’s brutally beaten corpse sprawled across her bed. In other rooms were the bodies of her eight-year-old daughter, Melissa, and her three-year-old, Angie, whose throat was slit from ear to ear. Both Nancy and Melissa had been sexually assaulted. After an intense investigation, the police focused on a principal suspect: twenty-three-year-old Kirby Anthoney, a troubled drifter who had turned to his uncle, Nancy’s husband John, for help and a place to stay. Little did John know that the nephew he took in was a murderous sociopath. These shocking, tragic events stunned Anchorage residents and motivated the Major Crimes Unit of the city’s police department to get everything right. Feeling the heat, Kirby bolted for the Canadian border. But he was caught in time—and the cops and a tenacious prosecutor began a long, bitter battle to convict him, up against an equally tough defense lawyer and the egomaniacal defendant himself. The tale reached its climax in a controversial trial, where for the first time an FBI profiler was allowed to testify and the pre-DNA science of allotyping was presented to a jury. But justice would not be served until after the psychopathic Kirby Anthoney took the stand in his own defense—and showed the world the monster he truly was.

When the Unabomber suspect was arrested at a cabin outside Lincoln, Montana, in 1996 no one was more surprised than his neighbor of 25 years, Chris Waits. Now Waits, whom ABC News described as the ''man who knew him best,'' has stepped forward with his significant portrait of Kaczynski. He teamed with veteran Montana newsman Dave Shors to write a riveting story about the secret years in Lincoln. Waits was the only person who could tell this story, which includes a compelling mix of personal observations. Waits shares copies of Kaczynski documents and personal journals obtained from the FBI, most of which have never been published before.