True Crime

I love true crime stuff -- yeah, married to a former cop/retired federal agent, I damn well better, or else my eyes would have rolled up in my head years ago and stayed there. If I ever quit writing romance/suspense, that's what I'd want to do -- delve deeply into real-life crime like Ann Rule etc. (Anne? Don't remember and too lazy to look it up.)

So I watch the murder mysteries on 48 Hours and Dateline and such. Last night, 48 Hours featured what surely has to be one of the most incompetent detectives in the country. He's investigating what starts as a homicide, with a second victim's life hanging in the balance (he later dies, too). The detective decides the couple's teenage son is the guilty one. Forget that he denies it. That there's no evidence linking him to the crime. That the motive the detective ascribes to him doesn't hold water. That common sense and logic and, hey, good police work (something he's obviously not familiar with) point to the father's business parter-turned-enemy.

The kid asks for a polygraph. The detective refuses because -- and I kid you not, he honestly said this to the reporter -- HE'S a better judge of whether someone's being truthful than a polygraph.

The family of the victims try to talk to the detective, but he refuses. After all, they have nothing to add to his investigation. {Not only more reliable than a polygraph but psychic, too. Hot damn, New York was lucky to have this guy!)

The last guy to see the victims alive -- the abovementioned business partner who's in debt to the tune of a half mil to his partner -- disappears and resurfaces later living under an assumed name on the West Coast, but that's no reason to be suspicious, Brilliant Detective says. After all, he's a nice guy. He's not capable of something like this.

But the couple's seventeen-year-old son is???

What a complete and total putz.

Sadly, the kid got convicted, but once a REAL cop got on the case (a retired NYPD detective, who clearly understood the process of investigating a crime -- following the evidence to the guilty party), the guy's conviction was overturned. Now the state's investigating the way the case was handled -- or mishandled.

Holy crap, it's enough to scare a person! Rachel12:06 PM