True Crime Blog
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…
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…
Suicide cases run the gamut: shooting, hanging, jumping, overdosing on pills, and slashing wrists. Carbon monoxide poisoning, drowning, asphyxia, suicide by train, suicide by cop, plummeting one’s car over a cliff.