Florida (mostly) Crime News

by Leigh Lundin

Sometimes articles are contributed or suggested by readers. We owe most of today's articles to ABA, Yoshinori 'Josh' Todo, and the ever-popular anonymous. There's a lot here; let's get started, but first…

The Chowchilla Children

Livermore, Ca.  The word Chowchilla tugs at the memory, a word touching on one of the most bizarre crimes in North American history. On 15 July 1976, twenty-six children from the small town of Chowchilla, California and their schoolbus vanished off the face of the earth.

Fortunately, the good guys won and all the children and the driver survived. The driver organized the escape and was celebrated as an unassuming hero. This past week the driver, Ed Ray, died in his home town.

The event reminded readers of a Hugh Pentecost story published in the 1969 fiction anthology Alfred Hitchcock's Daring Detectives, "The Day the Children Vanished". The crime was dramatized in the 1993 ABC TV movie They've Taken Our Children: The Chowchilla Kidnapping.



Dirty Cop

AVALON, Pa.  From anon, just to prove not all the crazies live in Florida, a citizen thought his utility bills were unusually high. It turns out his neighbor, a Pittsburgh policeman, was breaking into his home to use his washing machine. I'm not sure soft-soaping the court will work in this case.

Hot Cop

Scottburgh, SA  From ABA, we have the tale of the lady cop who had the urgent need to conduct an 'in-depth investigation'… with a prisoner in a holding cell. I'd say 'under cover' investigation except there were no covers, only oral testimony. Stark naked in flagrante delicto, they were caught by fellow officers.

Donut Do-Not

Orlando, FL.  From Yoshinori Todo comes a couple of cons (in Florida, naturally) that seemed clever on the surface but fell short. First is the fellow who successfully convinced an Orlando Dunkin' Donuts that the corporate office had sent him to perform a surprise audit. They pulled the cash drawer so he could take it into a back room… so far, so good… I mean bad. Then he got into a bit of a rush, grabbed the cash and tried to take off, but customers foiled him before he got too far. My guess is he'll be spending time in the hole.

Debit Debut

Sarasota, FL.  If you or I were to steal a credit or debit card, we'd be screwed when the clerks realized the card was blocked. However, a party of five figured out a way around it. The 'customer' with the card pretended to phone the 'credit card center', which 'gave permission' for the clerk to complete the transaction 'off-line'.

Except this clerk remembered hearing of a similar scheme. She contacted police while stalling the customer. The cops picked up three scammers in the store and arrested two more in the parking lot, one who'd pretended to be the credit card 'call center'.

The $1 Crime

Naples, FL.  Normally if you commit a crime, even petty theft, you'd be wise to make haste outta there. But a Collier County man, somewhat inebriated, helped himself to free drink at a McDonald's soda machine. Employees called him on it, but instead of leaving when asked, he stuck around giving police time to arrive and arrest him. Word has it he's been arrested a second time. Still, he's not as crazy as the men who tried to steal an entire coke machine.

The $1,000,000,000 Crime

Fort Myers, FL.  Florida has long been notorious for its scammers, but a Lee County woman took matters to new depths. She claimed to have a billion dollar inheritance arriving any day now… she just needed a little help. Hey, I vote for sending her to Nigeria.

Time on His Hands

Panama City, FL.  Cops arrested two men in possession of a stolen shopping cart and what police believed was stolen camping equipment. While in police custody, one of the men stole a clock off the wall and tried to hide it in his back pack. I'll bet he'll be serving time.

Capital T Right Here in River City

Weston, FL.  Town fathers, sickened by all the rampant crime of soda-stealing and doughnut dipping figured out the solution of crime: They banned skating rinks, dinner-dance clubs, and just plain fun. They go a long way to proving Puritanism is alive and well in America, unlike the Hillsborough County Property Appraiser who sends porn to his Director of HR. But hey, this is the state where a Christian pirate radio station once interrupted air traffic control towers trying to blast music into Havana.

In Your Face

Miami, FL.  Some crimes are almost too awful to contemplate. It was bad enough when a high-school cross-country runner was partially blinded by an egg thrown by teens from a car at 50mph, leaving him with a fractured eye socket, a concussion, and fragments that punctured his pupil. But, our own mad Hannibal Lector wannabe took matters farther. A Miami Herald camera captured an 18-minute video of a naked Rudy Eugene who attacked Ronald Poppo, chewing off the victim's face until police arrived and shot the perpetrator. Before the week was out, HistoryMiami museum's Mystery, Mayhem, and Vice announced they're including this Zombie Attack venue in their crime tour.

Baltimore, Md.  Lest we conclude Florida is unique in cannibal attacks, a Maryland Morgan State University student apparently murdered his roommate and dined on his brain and heart.

Murderous Porn Queen

New Port Richey, FL.  And finally, tattoo parlor owner Dennis "Scooter" Abrahamsen hired porn actress Amanda Kaye Logue for a sex party. Unfortunately Logue, described as "an evil being" who "planned and schemed" texted her boyfriend, Jason Andrews, she wanted to have sex with Andrews "after we kill" their victim in their premeditated scheme. The court sentenced Andrews to life and gave a tearful Miss Logue a reduced sentence of forty years. With luck, she'll serve every day of it.

A Nod to Josh

Yoshinori Todo might shy away from being labelled an 'expert', but he's the closest thing I know to an Agatha Christie authority. With this in mind, ABA sent the following to share with Josh.

Greenway House, Devon Coast, UK  Mathew Prichard, "the only child of the only child of the prolific author known as the queen of crime" talks about his famous grandmother while revealing letters from her ten month world travel with her first husband, Archie Christie. Read on!

I've got to know the ending!

by Elizabeth Zelvin

When I was a kid, my parents frequently invited company for dinner. They had interesting friends. Long past our bedtimes, my sister and I used to sneak halfway down the stairs and hang over the banister so we could hear the conversation. This was back in the days before conversation became a spectator sport, something celebrities did on televised talk shows while everybody else just listened. (To this day, I don’t watch talk shows. When I hear a good conversation, I want to participate. And don’t get me started on reality TV....)

My father was a wonderful raconteur, as were some of their friends. They would tell stories—extended jokes that drew us in till we could hardly wait to hear the punch line. Finally it would come—in Yiddish. All the adults would howl with laughter. It always sounded hilarious, since Yiddish is an innately comical language to the anglophone ear. Mind you, neither of my parents spoke Yiddish. My father’s native language was Russian, my mother’s Hungarian. But everybody always understood the punch line—except us. “What does it mean? What does it mean?” we would clamor. They would invariably reply, “It’s untranslatable!”

This intensely frustrating experience left me with an imperative need to know the ending of any story. In mysteries, the ending is of crucial importance. In fact, it’s what distinguishes them from most literary novels. They start with a setup: a crime is committed, but we’re missing crucial information: we don’t know whodunit. Or in a thriller, something will happen if it isn’t stopped, and it’s a race with the clock—or an obstacle course—to prevent disaster. We keep reading—often long past our bedtimes—to find out how they’ll end.

Sometimes I have a dream that’s constructed like a thriller or an adventure story, except that my plotting is tighter and my dialogue more eloquent when I’m asleep than when I’m awake. I give the most stirring speeches in these dreams—out loud, according to my husband.

In one dream, for example, I was in West Africa (where in real life I spent two years in the Peace Corps), part of a group of Americans fighting “the oppressors”. We had just realized that once the locals had finished ousting the oppressors with our help, they planned to get rid of us as well. We were outraged. Each of us talked in turn about how betrayed we felt. I gave quite a speech, according to my husband.

We knew we had to leave at once, before our enemies arrived. A plane was waiting. As we began to board, a plane or helicopter landed. Armed men rushed out and headed toward us. We tried frantically to get everybody aboard. As they reached us, we slammed the doors shut, hoping desperately to take off before they could attack. Through a kind of transparent bubble, we could see them aiming their weapons at us.

At that moment, my husband woke me up.

“You were having a nightmare,” he said.

I was furious.

“No, I wasn’t. Why did you wake me?”

“You were,” he insisted. “You were saying, ‘Please don’t shoot us.”

“I was not! I was saying, ‘Please don’t hurt us.’ We just wanted them to let us leave.”

It wasn’t a nightmare. I felt a sense of intense urgency, rather than dread or terror. Readers feel that way at 3 am when they’re racing through the final pages of a thriller. The last thing I wanted was to be awakened that moment. I wanted to know if we made it into the air before they started shooting. Dammit, I wanted to know the ending!

Of Caliber and Detail

I admit it . . . 

I’m a sucker for those old hard-boiled mystery/suspense books. You know: the ones from the 30’s, 40’s or 50’s.  The Continental Op, Sam Spade, Phil Marlowe; how can a person resist?   Well, maybe you can. But, I can’t. The pace alone, in these books, usually picks me up and runs away with me.

 I do quite a bit of reading in doctors offices these days — often when driving my dad around and, lately, because my wife needed some surgery. Yesterday I finished Steve Fisher’s No House Limit originally published in the 1950’s.  My copy (the library's copy, really) is the Hard Case Crime release, put out in 2008, an edition with a cover that assures me the novel is “COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED”.

No House Limit is set during the time period in which it was written, and takes place (in case you can’t guess from the title) in Las Vegas. A cover blurb promises: “Sex, sadism, and action.” And the book delivers pretty well.

At just over 200 pages, I’m impressed by how much the author manages to fit in — without making the book seem cramped, or as if he’s reaching too much. Fisher not only wrote a whopping tale of a syndicate trying to smash a lone-wolf casino owner, he also managed to spin two love story subplots through those pages (three if you count the obvious love and loyalty felt between the casino owner and his security chief) without watering down the action and suspense.

Were there some cheesy spots? Sure. For instance, I always get a kick when two people fall in love and run off to get married after having first seen each other three days before, and having spent only two hours together during that time. On the other hand, the story IS set in Vegas — where I’m sure odder couplings have occurred. And, if it was cheese, well . . . it was very tasty cheese (at least to me): deftly drawn, springing naturally from the main plot-line, and ratcheting up both tension and action. Not the easiest thing for love story subplots to accomplish in an action/suspense novel.

I suppose, however, that I shouldn’t have been surprised. Steve Fisher was evidently nothing, if not a prolific writer. According to an afterward written by his son, Michael, Steve Fisher wrote 90 to 100 published novels, plus 900 short stories, and around 120 movies or television episodes.

 Frankly, I find such numbers daunting. 

 I always feel a little pang of sympathy when re-reading the essay in the back of my copy of the Big Sleep, in which Chandler is described as being “Never a prolific writer …”. I always wonder if he spent too much time thinking things through — the way I tend to. Thankfully, I don’t have to contend with major problems such as alcoholism. I just have to watch the kids 24/7 now that school is out, and I’m still running errands for my dad.  Plus: the cigar store’s new owner likes my work – so he’s scheduling me for more hours.  And (as usual) my Stay-at-Home-Dad chores keep calling loud and messily: The garbage in the kitchen can just keeps accumulating! The sink full of dishes over-floweth! My kids need rides to friends’ houses, and – now that it’s summer – pool maintenance begins in earnest.

Somewhere in here, I keep trying to shoe-horn in a little synopsis writing for my latest manuscript.

 It’s been taking a long time, because . . . . 

Well, quite possibly because I’m a bit of a bonehead.  And, as I mentioned above, I tend to dither around, trying to think things all the way through.

As I wrote earlier on SS: To me, writing the synopsis, blurb, or cover letter for a novel is the hardest part of the job. I’ve got a very thin window though which to “flash” a potential agent the important stuff inside my manuscript. But, that’s not enough. That flash has to be big and bright — eye-catching!

J. Jonah Jameson as I remember him in the comic books.

 And, even that’s not enough.


 I picture an agent (male or female, it doesn’t seem to make a difference in my mind’s eye) as looking like J. Jonah Jameson, Peter Parker’s editor in the Spider Man comics and films. I seldom read comic books, as a kid. But, I did read Spidey. I found myself drawn into the story, because having super powers complicated this boy’s life instead of simplifying it. Spider Man might have been a hero (to those who understood him), but poor Peter Parker still got kicked around and felt like a loser. Talk about your fertile literary ground!




As an aside: I really thought Jonathan "J.K." Simmons did a great job of portraying ol’ Tripple-J in the fairly recent Spider Man movies. Even his voice matched what I’d imagined, when reading the comics as a kid.

J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson

     Now, don’t get the idea I confuse editors with agents. 

I don’t. I’ve been writing for several years, have a J-School degree with Walter Cronkite’s name on it, have worked on newspapers and been published in magazines as well. I know the difference between agents and editors; believe me. Still, the two have a lot in common.

 They’re both what I was taught to call “Gatekeepers” back in school. Their job begins by separating the wheat from the chaff, and many of them accept this as a near-sacred duty — protecting the ramparts of publishing from scurrilous tomes that don’t meet those guidelines the New York Times might call “… Fit to Print”. And, then the job goes deeper.

Their time is valuable (which is why they employ First Readers, to take some of the slush load off their backs) and they’ve got limited resources. Just like the rest of us, they have a finite reserve of personal and/or corporate energy, plus a budget to watch. And — like writers — their jobs involve a certain amount of gambling.

We writers gamble our time and fortunes against the odds of making a sale that will pay off. Agents and Editors are looking for a payday, too, but their wagers are larger, the stakes are more cut-throat, and the playing area much more complex.

12-inch Naval Gun Battery   (Not me in the picture.)

So, it’s not enough that an agent thinks a manuscript is “good” or that the writing is “pretty decent.” Both editors and agents know that this limitation on time and resources means they can only really pull out the “Big Guns” for those projects that excite them. That's Big Guns!  You know: like 12-inch naval cannon -- the sort battleships used to carry.  Consequently, my synopsis has to generate excitement.

But, how am I supposed to do that?

40 mm Bofors

How can I be sure that, once an agent’s eye is caught by the bright flash my query sends through that thin window of opportunity, s/he then finds enough literary “meat” to sink sharp publishing-savvy “teeth” into.

And, that meat’s gotta be the right texture, coupled with the right flavor — intriguing to the mouth, for the particular agent I want to land.

I figure it's a certain type of detail.

I know they’re not going to fire off the publishing equivalent of a 12-inch naval gun, when my manuscript is for a first novel. And, frankly, I’d do Cheeta Flips if they just fired the equivalent of a 40-mm Bofors. But, I figure I’d better write as if I’m working to get cover fire from a battle ship. Otherwise, I think the response is likely to be a rejection slip, and no cover fire at all.

So, I'm working to be sure my synopsis clearly indicates that I've dotted every "i" and crossed every "T", that my plot-line is tight and hole-less, while throwing in a few quick strokes that show the workings of subplots or underlying theme.  Finally, I think the synopsis has to read well.  It has to set a hook, working by itself, so that -- even if s/he initially ignores the enclosed manuscript pages -- the agent feels compelled to read them after all, to see if the manuscript's writing stands up to the caliber of the synopsis writing.

All of this takes a lot of thinking.

But . . . I don't know.  I freely admit to being ignorant.  I've studied tons of books about agents, hunted through myriad agent lists trying to narrow down to the right names -- the folks who are out there looking for the book I'm trying to sell.  But I'm also up against a time clock; I need to get this thing done and out, start that glacial pace of publishing (if I'm lucky!) in motion.  I keep working, but I keep wondering: Am I over-thinking it?.

 So . . . 

Here I sit, writing a synopsis as if I expect somebody to get so excited s/he will want to pull out 12-inch naval guns, while knowing full-well that I’ll be lucky to receive a few rounds of 40-mm Bofors support fire.  (Or, more probably, a single volley of shotgun pellets.  Hopefully not rock salt!)

 But . . . I’m afraid I just don’t know what else to do.

 Any hot tips out there?

 See ya’ in two weeks!

 --Dix