True Crime Blog
The highly-anticipated book 7 in the Dickie Floyd series, THE PROGRAM, is now available! “Nothing less than brilliant storytelling.” “Outstanding! Very Highly Recommended.” “Few writers can take you into the minds of police and criminals. None do so as well as Danny R. Smith.” The wait is finally over! It’s been more than two and a…
I HAVE A DEVIL INSIDE ME is the true story of a satanic murder that took place in Miami-Dade, Florida, in the year 2000.
After the Badge by Danny R. Smith was first published in Mystery Readers Journal: The Journal of Mystery Readers International (Volume 37, Number 4 – Winter 2021). Unsolved murders can haunt those who’ve been tasked with solving them. Though I retired from L.A. Sheriff’s Homicide seventeen years ago, many of my unsolved cases trouble…
Bad Dreams go with the territory of being a cop. Over the years, my dreaming of pursuits, foot chases, and shootouts with malfunctioning weapons and bulletproof bad guys have subsided, but it doesn’t take much to reawaken the demons. A good cop movie can do it, and so can a session of telling war stories…
L.A. Sheriff’s Homicide, April 2000. Joe Martinez and I were paired up in the rotation when a remarkably brazen murder occurred in the City of Carson. City of Carson It happened during broad daylight at arguably the busiest intersection in the city. Dozens of people arrived on a city bus just as the shooting occurred,…
The call had come in as a body dump. The media gathered in the parking lot among the spectators, many of them pressed against the yellow tape that had been strung from a corner of the building to a light pole fifty yards away, and then fifty yards across the parking lot to another pole…
I am writing this having just finished watching the press conference by the Idaho Falls Police Department announcing the arrest of Brian Leigh Dripps for the 1996 murder of Angie Dodge. Congratulations to them; it’s about time this case was solved. That may sound mean-spirited, but it’s not; it’s outrage.
The late eighties and early nineties saw the height of the crack cocaine epidemic. South Los Angeles, the epicenter of it all, experienced a colossal rise in violent crime. Gang members controlled the street level sales, and they were willing to kill for their piece of the pie.
Twenty-two years ago today, 18-year-old Angie Raye Dodge was killed as she slept in her upstairs apartment in the sleepy town of Idaho Falls, Idaho. At the time of Angie’s murder, DNA had become a household term thanks to the spectacle that was the O.J. Simpson murder trial in Los Angeles. Simpson’s 1995 acquittal should…
Baptism by Fire Before I had a chance to grab a cup of coffee or discover the location of my desk, I was given my first assignment as a homicide detective. A 16-year-old boy had been killed by a train in the City of Industry. It was a chilly fall morning, and I made the…