The negative was almost ruined by light flooding into the camera because the body wasn’t shut properly, and Earl was seated too close to the lens, which meant that his head entirely obscured the board with his booking number on it. (No one noticed that until after the print had been developed, when they wrote the number on the photograph in blue ink.) Whoever took this picture wasn’t used to taking mug shots – an […]
Every Friday, the Harvard sandwich bar in Cleveland cashed thousands of dollars-worth of payroll checks for workers from the Fisher Body plant. The only security was provided by an auxiliary policeman who had been hired to watch over the money. On the sixteenth of April, 1937, Anthony DeCaprio drove Joseph Taylor and Theodore Slapik to the sandwich bar and sat outside with the engine running while they went in. Minutes later, he heard shots—the sound […]
Driving home on Taylor Street after spending Saturday night in a bar, Lamarr Warter lost control of his car, crashed through a cement-block wall and collided with a fruit tree in Mike Russo’s front yard. Lamarr survived, but the fruit tree did not. It was the second road accident on Taylor street that day. Shortly before six that evening, a car driven by a young man called Joseph McKee hit a nine-year-old boy called Matthew […]
Robert Watkins was six years old in April, 1934, when his sister Daisy was assaulted by a neighbor who she had to fight off with a butcher knife. He may have watched Daisy being beaten or seen her stabbing the man. He would certainly have seen the blood in the kitchen. If he had been old enough to read the short, lighthearted report that appeared in the paper the next day, he might have wondered […]
Small Town Noir 