Small Town Noir

When he was twelve years old, Gerald McCluskey won an award for excellence in the YMCA cadet Bible club. His father died of a heart attack the following year. A few months later, he and an eighteen-year-old boy from his street, Donald Pontius, were walking through their neighborhood when they noticed a young girl, around Gerald’s age, walking alone on the road ahead of them. It was a dark winter’s evening. A light snow was […]

People often ask how I found these mug shots and why I chose to write about them, and I’ve usually given what I feel are rather inadequate answers (I suppose because I’m more interested in the stories behind the mug shots than the story behind the blog).  However, when the editors of the history journal, The Appendix, asked me to write an article for them about my research, I took the opportunity to set out my […]