True Crime Tuesday

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
*****Mark Twain

HANK: So here we mystery authors sit, at our computers, madly making stuff up. Killers and victims and motives and weapons and poisons and generally the scariest possible suspenseful circumstances to chill the heart and puzzle the brain.

But I have it on good authority, from a best-selling author (not on JRW) who tells me that another best selling author--even MORE best-selling and also not on JRW--hasn't come up with an original plot idea in YEARS, she says. Perhaps, ever.

What this person (who will remain nameless in his/her madly well-deserved success) does is scour the news for stories. Actually, I should say, s/he scours the news for stories to steal. Then s/he dolls them up and works them over and voila, another best seller.

Why didn't we think of this?

To that end, Jungle Red announces True Crime Tuesday. Every Tuesday we'll be here to chat about the best mysteries and stories we've read recently--not fiction! But the real thing. And maybe you'll get an idea or two for your next novel or short story...or learn something new about motivation, or deception, or the depths of the human capability for rationalization. Or selfishness. Or desire. Or drama.

Like Phillip Markoff, the accused "Craigs List Killer" the medical student who found his alleged victims on Craigs List, remember? Killed himself in his prison cell. He had hidden his gun in a cut out book in his apartment. In Grey's Anatomy. (Your editor would say--no, way too obvious!)

But before he died, he wrote in his own blood on his cell's wall: Megan.( That's his ex-fiancee's name. Fine.) He also wrote: Pocket.

Pocket? Police say, oh, it's nothing. Probably a nickname he had for his girlfriend. I say: Are you kidding me? Did anyone look in his pockets? ALL of them? How about in his closet at home? How about in Megan's pockets? If they don't, you could in your book, I bet...

In Sunday's Times, a story so coincidental you couldn't possibly pass it off as plausible. And yet, there it is:

A nurse at a Bronx hospice went to greet her new patient and was stunned to find it was her estranged father who she hadn't seen in 41 years.

And here, from a Tampa TV station, what's certainly the beginnings of a great story.

REDINGTON BEACH - The empty million-dollar yacht that arrived on Redington Beach last week was stolen, investigators say.

According to the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, detectives in Mexico confirmed that the 43-foot Sea Ray Sundancer 48 was stolen from a marina in Cancun on Saturday, August 21. That's four days before the empty but still-running boat washed up on the Pinellas County beach.

Pinellas detectives say they searched the boat and found no evidence that it was being used for criminal activity.

The boat's apparent owner, Arturo Millet Reyes, has been in touch with detectives via email, and he is expected to follow up with proof of ownership to claim the vessel, which remains impounded.

There was never any sign of passengers from the boat in waters off the Bay Area.

(Who took the boat? Why? What happened to the passengers? And where did the bad guys go?)

RHYS: Reminds me immediately of Rosebud, doesn't it? And the boat--interesting. If it was used to run drugs, maybe the smugglers launched an inflatable, went ashore somewhere unnoticed with the shipment and ditched the yacht. Or ditto to smuggle in people. Or it ventured into the Bermuda Triangle and the crew were sucked into a parallel universe....

HANK: Love it! So. Read any good reality lately? Of course our pals who are true crime writers do it all the time. But for those of us in the fiction world--you cannot make up anything as amazing as reality.

What do you think Pocket could mean? And what happened to that boat?