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Lauren Smith-Fields Deserved Better | Dicking Around With Richie: A True Crime Feed

Dicking Around With Richie A True Crime Feed Lauren Smith-Fields Deserved Better A Casefile on Silence, Power, and the Cost of Being Overlooked Lauren Smith-Fields , photographed during a moment of everyday life. Images like this remind us that before headlines, she was living, moving, and fully herself. There are deaths that demand answers. And then there are deaths that expose who gets answers at all . The death of Lauren Smith-Fields is the latter. On December 12, 2021, Lauren was found dead in her Bridgeport, Connecticut apartment after a date. She was 23 years old. What followed was not a thorough, relentless pursuit of truth, but a slow unraveling of trust in systems meant to protect, investigate, and inform. This case did not become national news because institutions worked well. It became national news because they didn’t. And because people refused to let it disappear. Who Lauren Was Before the System Reduced Her ...
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The Thomas Young Christmas Day Murders (1958): Canada’s Black Christmas Casefile

Dicking Around With Richie: A True Crime Feed CASEFILE 1958-12-25: THE THOMAS YOUNG CHRISTMAS DAY MURDERS When the Holiday Meant Nothing, and Justice Moved Too Fast to Look Back Five lives reduced to a headline. Christmas Day, 1958. The arithmetic came easy. The reckoning did not. Christmas morning, 1958. Ear Falls, Ontario. A place where winter doesn’t simply arrive, it settles in. Snow dampens sound. Roads harden into risk. Distance stretches everything, including time. In towns like this, neighbors rely on one another not out of kindness, but necessity. Help exists, but never quickly. It was the kind of place where borrowing phonograph records on Christmas morning seemed unremarkable. Where danger was supposed to come from the wilderness, not from inside a home. That illusion collapsed before noon. By the end of the ...
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When Certainty Replaced Truth: The Case of William “Tommy” Zeigler | The Sassy Gazette

When Certainty Replaced Truth: The Case of William “Tommy” Zeigler By Richie D. Mowrey for The Sassy Gazette There are cases that trouble you because they’re unsolved. And then there are cases that trouble you because they were decided too quickly and defended for far too long. The case of William “Tommy” Zeigler belongs squarely in the second category. The Christmas Eve That Never Let Go On December 24, 1975, police were called to the W.T. Zeigler Furniture Store in Winter Garden, Florida. Inside, they found four victims: Eunice Zeigler, her parents Perry and Virginia Edwards, and customer Charles Mays. Tommy Zeigler himself was found alive but gravely wounded. Early media coverage raised questions the prosecution later dismissed. The narrative was never as settled as it appeared. Within hours, a story formed. Within months, it hardened. Within a year, a man was sentenced to death. A Community Under Pressure A stunned town ga...
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The Wholaver Murders: When Murder Became a Legal Strategy

🕯️ THE WHOLAVER MURDERS When Murder Became a Legal Strategy By Richie D. Mowrey for The Sassy Gazette The Wholaver home in Middletown, Pennsylvania. Christmas Eve, 2002. Silence where a family should have been. THE HOUSE THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN FULL “Christmas Eve Doesn’t Sound Like This” The snow fell quietly in Middletown, Pennsylvania, on Christmas Eve 2002. No shouting. No sirens. No neighbors pounding on doors. Just a white house sitting still, holding its breath. Inside that house, three women were already dead. And upstairs, a baby cried alone into the dark, surrounded by what was left of her family. This wasn’t a crime of passion. This wasn’t chaos. This was planning with a calendar . The Wholaver murders weren’t about rage. They were about control , silencing , and a man who decided the courtroom wasn’t going to get the last word. THE WOMEN HE NEEDED SILENCED “Witnesses with Heartbeats” Jean Wholaver, 43. Victoria Wholaver, 20. Elizabeth “I...
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The Sodder Family Tragedy: The Questions the Fire Never Answered

🔥 The Questions the Fire Never Answered The Sodder Family Case, Reopened by Evidence By Richie D. Mowrey for The Sassy Gazette Dicking Around With Richie: A True Crime File Hero Image. The Sodder children, photographed together before Christmas Eve 1945. Five of them vanished the night their home burned. No remains were ever found. Christmas Eve, 1945. A family home burned to the ground in Fayetteville, West Virginia. Five children vanished. And the official explanation arrived faster than the evidence ever did. For nearly eighty years, this case has been framed as a mystery. It isn’t. It’s a stack of unanswered questions that were never meant to be asked out loud. Let’s ask them anyway.
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The Covina Christmas Massacre: When Revenge Wore a Santa Suit

THE COVINA CHRISTMAS MASSACRE When Revenge Put on a Santa Suit and Set a Family on Fire Content Warning: This post discusses mass murder, domestic violence, arson, child victimization, and suicide. OPENING THE FILE: A HOLIDAY THAT NEVER CAME BACK There are crimes that announce themselves with sirens. And there are crimes that arrive quietly, wrapped in ritual, smiling at the door. On Christmas Eve 2008, in a quiet Covina neighborhood where families gathered the same way they had for decades, a man walked up a driveway dressed as Santa Claus. Inside the house, there was laughter. Food. Children darting between adults. A family doing what families do when the calendar tells them it’s time to be together. What followed was not chaos. It was intent. By the time the night was over, nine people were dead. A home was reduced to ash. Survivors fled barefoot into the street. And a holiday was permanently poiso...
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The Silent Spectator: The Disappearance of Patricia Meehan and the Mystery That Still Haunts America

THE SILENT SPECTATOR The Disappearance of Patricia Meehan By Richie D. Mowrey for The Sassy Gazette Patricia Bernadette Meehan. Missing since April 20, 1989. There are missing persons cases that end in violence. There are cases that end in remains. And then there are cases like Patricia Meehan’s cases that don’t end at all. On April 20, 1989, Patricia Meehan survived a violent car crash on a lonely stretch of Montana highway. She exited her vehicle. She spoke to no one. She climbed a fence. She stood still. Then she walked into the darkness and disappeared. Thirty-six years later, we are still standing on the other side of that fence, trying to understand what we witnessed. WHO PATRICIA MEEHAN WAS BEFORE EVERYTHING BROKE Patricia Bernadette Meehan was born on November 1, 1951, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She was raised in a stable, attentive, deeply connected family. Her parents, Thomas and Delores “Dolly” Meehan, sta...
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