The Sassy Gazette

Little Dickies Systemic Fracture The Life and Death of Zachary Andrew Turner, and the System That Allowed It Content Warning: This article discusses crimes against a child, filicide, and systemic failures within the justice and child welfare systems. Reader discretion is advised. Conception Bay South, Newfoundland. A place that looks quiet until you know what happened there. The Lines I Do Not Negotiate There are three lines I do not negotiate with. Crimes against children. Crimes against animals. Crimes against people with intellectual disabilities. Those aren’t opinions. They’re absolutes. Now sit with this. Andrew Bagby is shot and murdered in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Executed. Five times. His parents, David Bagby and Kathleen Bagby, bury their only child, and then discover there is a baby. Their grandson. The last living piece of their son. So they do the unthinkable. They uproot their lives. They cross a border. They move to Canada not ...

Little Dickies, This is where we document the truth, examine the systems that failed, and refuse the easy story. SYSTEMIC FRACTURE The Aurora Chuck E. Cheese Massacre, Re-examined Archival reporting from December 1993. This case is often misremembered. People recall it as a New Year’s Eve tragedy. A holiday horror. A chaotic, end-of-year rupture. That version is easier to hold because it feels exceptional. It wasn’t. The Aurora Chuck E. Cheese massacre happened on Tuesday, December 14, 1993 . A weeknight. After closing. During a routine shift at a family restaurant built on the assumption of safety. That distinction matters because this was not chaos. It was methodical. And it was preventable. THE NIGHT THE ROUTINE FAILED Shortly after closing, a former employee waited until the restaurant was empty of customers. The doors were locked. Chairs were being stacked. Floors were being cleaned. Then the violence began. Four employees were killed. One s...

Little Dickies, This is not a think piece. This is a charge sheet. Alabama’s prison system is not “under strain.” It is under indictment . What unfolds behind razor wire is not mismanagement but a sustained practice of cruelty protected by paperwork, delay, and a shared institutional shrug. Men are warehoused, sick men are ignored, violence is normalized, and death is treated as an administrative inconvenience. If this sounds familiar, it’s because the warnings have been issued for years. The bodies followed anyway. Below is this casefile rebuilt for impact: the words lead, the visuals testify. SECTION I: A SYSTEM DESIGNED TO HARM Alabama’s prisons are catastrophically overcrowded. Facilities built for far fewer people now hold bodies shoulder-to-shoulder with despair. Men sleep inches from toilets. Medical care is rationed. Mental illness is punished. Violence isn’t an anomaly; it’s the daily weather. State officials call this a “staffing crisis.” That...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

🕯️ 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...