I had read somewhere that Barbara Mackle's ransom note was the second-longest in U.S. records. This is incorrect. By word length, Barbara's RN actually beats out Jonbenet's significantly, 970 to 377 wordsThat link is to an IDI site because they were the resource that kept coming up again and again as I tried to find the text of Barbara's ransom ( Read more... )

Summerscale also wrote a bio I haven't seen (not in the true crime section of the library) about Joe Carstairs (born Marion).

Never really grokked before how useful a "non-consummation annulment" can be if you're going into a church marriage for legal/financial reasons...

Summoning Kate SummerscaleReddit thinks the parents were narcissists who raised another damaged narcissistic. The Telegraph (second link) definitely takes the line of "bad seed ( Read more... )

What an asshole.

In Old Chinese, Jupiter (the star) was named *skots, because it traveled in the sky to measure time with its passage. The original meaning is compatible with “wanderers,” which is the original meaning of “Scot”-any member of Gaelic tribes of Northern Ireland that migrated to Scotland in the 5th century. (Correspondences of the Basic Words between ( Read more... )