#guilty detective story magazine

[oakendesk]

Guilty Detective Story Magazine Sep 1958

Wil Hulsey

[dwellordream]

A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It?

Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker

“Last August, Lucy Letby, a thirty-three-year-old British nurse, was convicted of killing seven newborn babies and attempting to kill six others. Her murder trial, one of the longest in English history, lasted more than ten months and captivated the United Kingdom. The Guardian, which published more than a hundred stories about the case, called her “one of the most notorious female murderers of the last century.” The collective acceptance of her guilt was absolute. “She has thrown open the door to Hell,” the Daily Mail wrote, “and the stench of evil overwhelms us all.”

…The public conversation rushed forward without much curiosity about an incongruous aspect of the story: Letby appeared to have been a psychologically healthy and happy person. She had many close friends. Her nursing colleagues spoke highly of her care and dedication. A detective with the Cheshire police, which led the investigation, said, “This is completely unprecedented in that there doesn’t seem to be anything to say” about why Letby would kill babies. “There isn’t really anything we have found in her background that’s anything other than normal.”

The judge in her case, James Goss, acknowledged that Letby appeared to have been a “very conscientious, hard working, knowledgeable, confident and professional nurse.” But he also said that she had embarked on a “calculated and cynical campaign of child murder,” and he sentenced her to life, making her only the fourth woman in U.K. history condemned to die in prison. Although her punishment can’t be increased, she will face a second trial, this June, on an attempted-murder charge for which the jury could not reach a verdict.

Letby had worked on a struggling neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital, run by the National Health Service, in the West of England, near Wales. The case centered on a cluster of seven deaths, between June, 2015, and June, 2016. All but one of the babies were premature; three of them weighed less than three pounds. No one ever saw Letby harming a child, and the coroner did not find foul play in any of the deaths. (Since her arrest, Letby has not made any public comments, and a court order has prohibited most reporting on her case. To describe her experiences, I drew from more than seven thousand pages of court transcripts, which included police interviews and text messages, and from internal hospital records that were leaked to me.)

The case against her gathered force on the basis of a single diagram shared by the police, which circulated widely in the media. On the vertical axis were twenty-four “suspicious events,” which included the deaths of the seven newborns and seventeen other instances of babies suddenly deteriorating. On the horizontal axis were the names of thirty-eight nurses who had worked on the unit during that time, with X’s next to each suspicious event that occurred when they were on shift. Letby was the only nurse with an uninterrupted line of X’s below her name. She was the “one common denominator,” the “constant malevolent presence when things took a turn for the worse,” one of the prosecutors, Nick Johnson, told the jury in his opening statement. “If you look at the table overall the picture is, we suggest, self-evidently obvious. It’s a process of elimination.”

But the chart didn’t account for any other factors influencing the mortality rate on the unit. Letby had become the country’s most reviled woman—“the unexpected face of evil,” as the British magazine Prospect put it—largely because of that unbroken line. It gave an impression of mathematical clarity and coherence, distracting from another possibility: that there had never been any crimes at all.

Since Letby was a teen-ager, she had wanted to be a nurse. “She’d had a difficult birth herself, and she was very grateful for being alive to the nurses that would have helped save her life,” her friend Dawn Howe told the BBC. An only child, Letby grew up in Hereford, a city north of Bristol. In high school, she had a group of close friends who called themselves the “miss-match family”: they were dorky and liked to play games such as Cranium and Twister. Howe described Letby as the “most kind, gentle, soft friend.” Another friend said that she was “joyful and peaceful.”

Letby was the first person in her family to go to college. She got a nursing degree from the University of Chester, in 2011, and began working on the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital, where she had trained as a student nurse. Chester was a hundred miles from Hereford, and her parents didn’t like her being so far away. “I feel very guilty for staying here sometimes but it’s what I want,” she told a colleague in a text message. She described the nursing team at the Countess as “like a little family.” She spent her free time with other nurses from the unit, often appearing in pictures on Facebook in flowery outfits and lip gloss, with sparkling wine in her hand and a guileless smile. She had straight blond hair, the color washing out as she aged, and she was unassumingly pretty.

The N.H.S. has a totemic status in the British psyche—it’s the “closest thing the English have to a religion,” as one politician has put it. One of the last remnants of the postwar social contract, it inspires loyalty and awe even as it has increasingly broken down, partly as a result of years of underfunding. In 2015, the infant-mortality rate in England and Wales rose for the first time in a century. A survey found that two-thirds of the country’s neonatal units did not have enough medical and nursing staff. That year, the Countess treated more babies than it had in previous years, and they had, on average, lower birth weights and more complex medical needs.

Letby, who lived in staff housing on the hospital grounds, was twenty-five years old and had just finished a six-month course to become qualified in neonatal intensive care. She was one of only two junior nurses on the unit with that training. “We had massive staffing issues, where people were coming in and doing extra shifts,” a senior nurse on the unit said. “It was mainly Lucy that did a lot.” She was young, single, and saving to buy a house. That year, when a friend suggested that she take some time off, Letby texted her, “Work is always my priority.”

In June, 2015, three babies died at the Countess. First, a woman with antiphospholipid syndrome, a rare disorder that can cause blood clotting, was admitted to the hospital. She was thirty-one weeks pregnant with twins, and had planned to give birth in London, so that a specialist could monitor her and the babies, but her blood pressure had quickly risen, and she had to have an emergency C-section at the Countess. The next day, Letby was asked to cover a colleague’s night shift. She was assigned one of the twins, a boy, who has been called Child A. (The court order forbade identifying the children, their parents, and some nurses and doctors.)

A nursing note from the day shift said that the baby had had “no fluids running for a couple of hours,” because his umbilical catheter, a tube that delivers fluids through the abdomen, had twice been placed in the wrong position, and “doctors busy.” A junior doctor eventually put in a longline, a thin tube threaded through a vein, and Letby and another nurse gave the child fluid. Twenty minutes later, Letby and a third nurse, a few feet away, noticed that his oxygen levels were dropping and that his skin was mottled. The doctor who had inserted the longline worried that he had placed it too close to the child’s heart, and he immediately took it out. But, less than ninety minutes after Letby started her shift, the baby was dead. “It was awful,” she wrote to a colleague afterward. “He died very suddenly and unexpectedly just after handover.”

A pathologist observed that the baby had “crossed pulmonary arteries,” a structural anomaly, and there was also a “strong temporal relationship” between the insertion of the longline and the collapse. The pathologist described the cause of death as “unascertained.”

Letby was on duty again the night after Child A’s death. At around midnight, she helped the nurse who had been assigned to the surviving twin, a girl, set up her I.V. bag. About twenty-five minutes later, the baby’s skin became purple and blotchy, and her heart rate dropped. She was resuscitated and recovered. Brearey, the unit’s leader, told me that at the time he wondered if the twins had been more vulnerable because of the mother’s disorder; antibodies for it can pass through the placenta.

The next day, a mother who had been diagnosed as having a dangerous placenta condition gave birth to a baby boy who weighed one pound, twelve ounces, which was on the edge of the weight threshold that the unit was certified to treat. Within four days, the baby developed acute pneumonia. Letby was not working in the intensive-care nursery, where the baby was treated, but after the child’s oxygen alarm went off she came into the room to help. Yet the staff on the unit couldn’t save the baby. A pathologist determined that he had died of natural causes.

Several days later, a woman came to the hospital after her water broke. She was sent home and told to wait. More than twenty-four hours later, she noticed that the baby was making fewer movements inside her. “I was concerned for infection because I hadn’t been given any antibiotics,” she said later. She returned to the hospital, but she still wasn’t given antibiotics. She felt “forgotten by the staff, really,” she said. Sixty hours after her water broke, she had a C-section.

The baby, a girl who was dusky and limp when she was born, should have been treated with antibiotics immediately, doctors later acknowledged, but nearly four hours passed before she was given the medication. The next night, the baby’s oxygen alarm went off. “Called Staff Nurse Letby to help,” a nurse wrote. The baby continued to deteriorate throughout the night and could not be revived. A pathologist found pneumonia in the baby’s lungs and wrote that the infection was likely present at birth.

The senior pediatricians met to review the deaths, to see if there were any patterns or mistakes. “One of the problems with neonatal deaths is that preterm babies can die suddenly and you don’t always get the answer immediately,” Brearey told me. A study of about a thousand infant deaths in southeast London, published in The Journal of Maternal-Fetal & Neonatal Medicine, found that the cause of mortality was unexplained for about half the newborns who had died unexpectedly, even after an autopsy. Brearey observed that Letby was involved in each of the deaths at the Countess, but “it didn’t sound to me like the odds were that extreme of having a nurse present for three of those cases,” he said. “Nobody had any concerns about her practice.”

…At the end of January, 2016, the senior pediatricians met with a neonatologist at a nearby hospital, to review the ward’s mortality data. In 2013 and 2014, the unit had had two and three deaths, respectively. In 2015, there had been eight. At the meeting, “there were a few learning points, nothing particularly exciting,” Brearey recalled. Near the end, he asked the neonatologist what he thought about the fact that Letby was present for each death. “I can’t remember him suggesting anything, really,” Brearey said.

But Jayaram and Brearey were increasingly troubled by the link. “It was like staring at a Magic Eye picture,” Jayaram told me. “At first, it’s just a load of dots,” and the dots are incoherent. “But you stare at them, and all of a sudden the picture appears. And then, once you can see that picture, you see it every time you look, and you think, How the hell did I miss that?” By the spring of 2016, he said, he could not “unsee it.”

Many of the deaths had occurred at night, so Powell, the unit manager, shifted Letby primarily to day shifts, because there would be “more people about to be able to support her,” she said.

A week later, a mother gave birth to identical triplet boys, born at thirty-three weeks. When she was pregnant, the mother said, she had been told that each baby would have his own nurse, but Letby, who had just returned from a short trip to Spain with friends, was assigned two of the triplets, as well as a third baby from a different family. She was also training a student nurse who was “glued to me,” she complained to Taylor. Seven hours into Letby’s shift, one of the triplet’s oxygen levels dropped precipitously, and he developed a rash on his chest. Letby called for help. After two rounds of CPR, the baby died.

The next day, Letby was the designated nurse for the two surviving triplets. The abdomen of one of them appeared distended, a possible sign of infection. When she told Taylor, he messaged her, “I wonder if they’ve all been exposed to a bug that benzylpenicillin and gentamicin didn’t account for? Are you okay?”

“I’m okay, just don’t want to be here really,” Letby replied. The student nurse was still with her, and Letby told Taylor, “I don’t feel I’m in the frame of mind to support her properly.”

A doctor came to check on the triplet with the distended abdomen, and, while he was in the room, the child’s oxygen levels dropped. The baby was put on a ventilator, and the hospital asked for a transport team to take him to Liverpool Women’s Hospital. As they were waiting, it was discovered that the baby had a collapsed lung, possibly a result of pressure from the ventilation, which was set unusually high. “There was an increasing sense of anxiety on the unit,” Letby said later. “Nobody seemed to know what was happening and very much just wanted the transport team to come and offer their expertise.”

The triplets’ mother said that she was alarmed when she saw a doctor sitting at a computer “Googling how to do what looked like a relatively simple medical procedure: inserting a line into the chest.” She was also upset that one of the doctors who was resuscitating her son was “coughing and spluttering into her hands” without washing them. Shortly after the transport team arrived, the second triplet died. His mother recalled that Letby was “in pieces and almost as upset as we were.”

…Brearey, Jayaram, and a few other pediatric consultants met to discuss the unexpected deaths. “We were trying to rack our brains,” Brearey said. A postmortem X-ray of one of the babies had shown gas near the skull, a finding that the pathologist did not consider particularly meaningful, since gas is often present after death. Jayaram remembered learning in medical school about air embolisms—a rare, potentially catastrophic complication that can occur when air bubbles enter a person’s veins or arteries, blocking blood supply. That night, he searched for literature about the phenomenon.

He did not see any cases of murder by air embolism, but he forwarded his colleagues a four-page paper, from 1989, in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, about accidental air embolism. The authors of the paper could find only fifty-three cases in the world. All but four of the infants had died immediately. In five cases, their skin became discolored. “I remember the physical chill that went down my spine,” Jayaram said. “It fitted with what we were seeing.”

…After Letby returned from vacation, she was called in for a meeting. The deputy director of nursing told her that she was the common element in the cluster of deaths, and that her clinical competence would need to be reassessed. “She was distraught,” Powell, the unit manager, who was also at the meeting, said. “We were both quite upset.” They walked straight from the meeting to human resources. “We were trying to get Lucy back on the unit, so we had to try and prove that the competency issue wasn’t the problem,” Powell said.

But Letby never returned to clinical duties. She was eventually moved to an administrative role in the hospital’s risk-and-safety office. Jayaram described the office as “almost an island of lost souls. If there was a nurse who wasn’t very good clinically, or a manager who they wanted to get out of the way, they’d move them to the risk-and-safety office.”

…The Royal College team interviewed Letby and described her as “an enthusiastic, capable and committed nurse” who was “passionate about her career and keen to progress.” The redacted section concluded that the senior pediatricians had made allegations based on “simple correlation” and “gut feeling,” and that they had a “subjective view with no other evidence.” The Royal College could find no obvious factors linking the deaths; the report noted that the circumstances on the unit were “not materially different from those which might be found in many other neonatal units within the UK.” In a public statement, the hospital acknowledged that the review had revealed problems with “staffing, competencies, leadership, team working and culture.”

…In May, the police launched what they called Operation Hummingbird. A detective later said that Brearey and Jayaram provided the “golden thread of our investigation.” That month, Dewi Evans, a retired pediatrician from Wales, who had been the clinical director of the neonatal and children’s department at his hospital, saw a newspaper article describing, in vague terms, a criminal investigation into the spike in deaths at the Countess. “If the Chester police had no-one in mind I’d be interested to help,” he wrote in an e-mail to the National Crime Agency, which helps connect law enforcement with scientific experts. “Sounds like my kind of case.”

That summer, Evans, who was sixty-seven and had worked as a paid court expert for more than twenty-five years, drove three and a half hours to Cheshire, to meet with the police. After reviewing records that the police gave him, he wrote a report proposing that Child A’s death was “consistent with his receiving either a noxious substance such as potassium chloride or more probably that he suffered his collapse as a result of an air embolus.” Later, when it became clear that there was no basis for suspecting a noxious chemical, Evans concluded that the cause of death was air embolism. “These are cases where your diagnosis is made by ruling out other factors,” he said.

…Evans relied heavily on the paper in other reports that he wrote about the Countess deaths, many of which he attributed to air embolism. Other babies, he said, had been harmed through another method: the intentional injection of too much air or fluid, or both, into their nasogastric tubes. “This naturally ‘blows up’ the stomach,” he wrote to me. The stomach becomes so large, he said, that the lungs can’t inflate normally, and the baby can’t get enough oxygen. When I asked him if he could point me to any medical literature about this process, he responded, “There are no published papers regarding a phenomenon of this nature that I know of.” (Several doctors I interviewed were baffled by this proposed method of murder and struggled to understand how it could be physiologically or logistically possible.)

…Nearly a year after Operation Hummingbird began, a new method of harm was added to the list. In the last paragraph of a baby’s discharge letter, Brearey, who had been helping the police by reviewing clinical records, noticed a mention of an abnormally high level of insulin. When insulin is produced naturally by the body, the level of C-peptide, a substance secreted by the pancreas, should also be high, but in this baby the C-peptide was undetectable, which suggested that insulin may have been administered to the child.

The insulin test had been done at a Royal Liverpool University Hospital lab, and a biochemist there had called the Countess to recommend that the sample be verified by a more specialized lab. Guidelines on the Web site for the Royal Liverpool lab explicitly warn that its insulin test is “not suitable for the investigation” of whether synthetic insulin has been administered. Alan Wayne Jones, a forensic toxicologist at Linköping University, in Sweden, who has written about the use of insulin as a means of murder, told me that the test used at the Royal Liverpool lab is “not sufficient for use as evidence in a criminal prosecution.” He said, “Insulin is not an easy substance to analyze, and you would need to analyze this at a forensic laboratory, where the routines are much more stringent regarding chain of custody, using modern forensic technology.” But the Countess never ordered a second test, because the child had already recovered.

…The police consulted with an endocrinologist, who said that the babies theoretically could have received insulin through their I.V. bags. Evans said that, with the insulin cases, “at last one could find some kind of smoking gun.” But there was a problem: the blood sample for the first baby had been taken ten hours after Letby had left the hospital; any insulin delivered by her would no longer be detectable, especially since the tube for the first I.V. bag had fallen out of place, which meant that the baby had to be given a new one. To connect Letby to the insulin, one would have to believe that she had managed to inject insulin into a bag that a different nurse had randomly chosen from the unit’s refrigerator. If Letby had been successful at causing immediate death by air embolism, it seems odd that she would try this much less effective method.

In July, 2018, five months after the insulin discovery, a Cheshire police detective knocked on Letby’s door. …Inside, she was told that she was under arrest for multiple counts of murder and attempted murder. She emerged from the house handcuffed, her face appearing almost gray.

The police spent the day searching her house. Inside, they found a note with the heading “NOT GOOD ENOUGH.” There were several phrases scrawled across the page at random angles and without punctuation: “There are no words”; “I can’t breathe”; “Slander Discrimination”; “I’ll never have children or marry I’ll never know what it’s like to have a family”; “WHY ME?”; “I haven’t done anything wrong”; “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them”; “I AM EVIL I DID THIS.”

On another scrap of paper, she had written, three times, “Everything is manageable,” a phrase that a colleague had said to her. At the bottom of the page, she had written, “I just want life to be as it was. I want to be happy in the job that I loved with a team who I felt a part of. Really, I don’t belong anywhere. I’m a problem to those who do know me.” On another piece of paper, found in her handbag, she had written, “I can’t do this any more. I want someone to help me but they can’t.” She also wrote, “We tried our best and it wasn’t enough.”

After spending all day in jail, Letby was asked why she had written the “not good enough” note. A police video shows her in the interrogation room with her hands in her lap, her shoulders hunched forward. She spoke quietly and deferentially, like a student facing an unexpectedly harsh exam. “It was just a way of me getting my feelings out onto paper,” she said. “It just helps me process.”

“In your own mind, had you done anything wrong at all?” an officer asked.

“No, not intentionally, but I was worried that they would find that my practice hadn’t been good,” she said, adding, “I thought maybe I had missed something, maybe I hadn’t acted quickly enough.”

…After more than nine hours of interviews, Letby was released on bail, without being charged. She moved back to Hereford, to live with her parents. News of her arrest was published in papers throughout the U.K. “All I can say is my experience is that she was a great nurse,” a mother whose baby was treated at the Countess told the Times of London. Another mother told the Guardian that Letby had advocated for her and had told her “every step of the way what was happening.” She said, “I can’t say anything negative about her.” The Guardian also interviewed a mother who described the experience of giving birth at the Countess. “They had no staff and the care was just terrible,” she said. She’d developed “an infection which was due to negligence by a member of staff,” she explained. “We made a complaint at the time but it was brushed under the carpet.”

In September, 2022, a month before Letby’s trial began, the Royal Statistical Society published a report titled “Healthcare Serial Killer or Coincidence?” The report had been prompted in part by concerns about two recent cases, one in Italy and one in the Netherlands, in which nurses had been wrongly convicted of murder largely because of a striking association between their shift patterns and the deaths on their wards. The society sent the report to both the Letby prosecution and the defense team. It detailed the dangers of drawing causal conclusions from improbable clusters of events. In the trial of the Dutch nurse, Lucia de Berk, a criminologist had calculated that there was a one-in-three-hundred-and-forty-two-million chance that the deaths were coincidental.

But his methodology was faulty; when statisticians looked at the data, they found that the chances were closer to one in fifty. According to Ton Derksen, a Dutch philosopher of science who wrote a book about the case, the belief that “such a coincidence cannot be a coincidence” became the driving force in the process of collecting evidence against de Berk. She was exonerated in 2010, and her case is now considered one of the worst miscarriages of justice in Dutch history. The Italian nurse, Daniela Poggiali, was exonerated in 2021, after statisticians reanalyzed her hospital’s mortality data and discovered several confounding factors that had been overlooked.

Burkhard Schafer, a law professor at the University of Edinburgh who studies the intersection of law and science, said that it appeared as if the Letby prosecution had “learned the wrong lessons from previous miscarriages of justice.” Instead of making sure that its statistical figures were accurate, the prosecution seems to have ignored statistics. “Looking for a responsible human—this is what the police are good at,” Schafer told me. “What is not in the police’s remit is finding a systemic problem in an organization like the National Health Service, after decades of underfunding, where you have overworked people cutting little corners with very vulnerable babies who are already in a risk category. It is much more satisfying to say there was a bad person, there was a criminal, than to deal with the outcome of government policy.”

…For one baby, the diagram showed Letby working a night shift, but this was an error: she was working day shifts at the time, so there should not have been an X by her name. At trial, the prosecution argued that, though the baby had deteriorated overnight, the suspicious episode actually began three minutes after Letby arrived for her day shift. Nonetheless, the inaccurate diagram continued to be published, even by the Cheshire police.

Dewi Evans, the retired pediatrician, told me that he had picked which medical episodes rose to the level of “suspicious events.” When I asked what his criteria were, he said, “Unexpected, precipitous, anything that is out of the usual—something with which you are not familiar.” For one baby, the distinction between suspicious and not suspicious largely came down to how to define projectile vomiting.

…Toward the end of the trial, the court received an e-mail from someone who claimed to have overheard one of the jurors at a café saying that jurors had “already made up their minds about her case from the start.” Goss reviewed the complaint but ultimately allowed the juror to continue serving.

He instructed the twelve members of the jury that they could find Letby guilty even if they weren’t “sure of the precise harmful act” she’d committed. In one case, for instance, Evans had proposed that a baby had died of excessive air in her stomach from her nasogastric tube, and then, when it emerged that she might not have had a nasogastric tube, he proposed that she may have been smothered.

The jury deliberated for thirteen days but could not reach a unanimous decision. In early August, one juror dropped out. A few days later, Goss told the jury that he would accept a 10–1 majority verdict. Ten days later, it was announced that the jury had found Letby guilty of fourteen charges. The two insulin cases and one of the triplet charges were unanimous; the rest were majority verdicts. When the first set of verdicts was read, Letby sobbed. After the second set, her mother cried out, “You can’t be serious!” Letby was acquitted of two of the attempted-murder charges. There were also six attempted-murder charges in which the jury could not decide on a verdict.

…The public conversation about the case seemed to treat details about poor care on the unit as if they were irrelevant. In his closing statement, Johnson had accused the defense of “gaslighting” the jury by suggesting that the problem was the hospital, not Letby. Defending himself against the accusation, Myers told the jury, “It’s important I make it plain that in no way is this case about the N.H.S. in general.” He assured the jury, “We all feel strongly about the N.H.S. and we are protective of it.” It seemed easier to accept the idea of a sadistic “angel of death” than to look squarely at the fact that families who had trusted the N.H.S. had been betrayed, their faith misplaced.”

[eightfifteen]

Madcleradin Paranormal Investigators AU because i simply had to sit down and think about it after remembering this post by @dis-a-ppointment again for the millionth time.

Will went missing in 1983.

He was kidnapped for a week, but he managed to get away and Mike found him in the woods near the quarry after going out every night to look for him.

Will swears there was another girl there, even though they never actually found the perpetrator or any sign of a girl having gone missing.

Will and Mike start looking into it in High School - Will swore by it, and kept having nightmares about the girl, feeling guilty he'd left her behind.

So, Mike, to help Will, looks into it further - using the same detective skills he'd used while Will had been gone. He finds out about Jane Yves, and how she should be around the same age Will had said the girl should be.

It's a project they kept hidden from Lucas and Dustin, Will not wanting to burden anyone else with it. He talked to Hopper a million times though, and he insists he's looked into it but that there's nothing to lead him in any direction. Especially as Jane supposedly died in a miscarriage, and the lab had shut down ages ago.

In senior year, they start breaking into empty houses because Will wonders if he might recognize one of them, if he might remember the location of where he'd been kept it could be their first clue.

One day, they're breaking into an abandoned house near the trailer park when Max catches them. She joins them for their 'ghost hunt' - the best excuse they could come up with - and though she thinks it's bullshit, she's having a blast making fun of them whenever they flinch at a "scary noise".

AKA Will starts hearing things and insists they're ghosts, while Max just makes fun. Mike is a fence straddler - he doesn't actually believe ghosts are real but he's a 100 percent on Will's side. If Will says he heard a ghost than it's a ghost. period.

Eventually it becomes a bit of a hobby - going to "haunted houses".

Max is doing it for the ghost hunting, unaware of the Jane thing, but Mike and Will are still also investigating behind Max' back.

The summer after High School, when Dustin and Lucas are both going to an early summer program at their respective colleges, the three of them are left to spend their summer break road tripping around the state and "investigating". Both for fun and because they found a way to make money off of it - they end up selling their stories to a popular alternative magazine - Max takes pictures, Mike and Will write, and sometimes Will makes art of the ghosts they saw.

Along the way though, Will starts wondering if he might actually be going crazy with the voices he's hearing and the things he's seeing, but his best friend buddy pal Mike insists that if that's the case they'd go crazy together.

Eventually, they figure out that their "ghost proof" has a particular pattern, and they realize the "ghost" might be communicating with them - that it's strangely enough - not a different ghost for each house, but one ghost following them.

Long story short it was El communicating with them using her powers, and she leads them to where she's being kept.

Also, Mike and Will kiss.

[choicesmonthlychallenge]

July 24th is National and International Private Investigator day!

About: Since Crimes of Passion II is currently releasing and our MC is a private detective, I thought this could be a great day to celebrate the book and our detectives with @choicesbookclub. However, mysteries are a part of many Choices stories, making our MCs and fave characters private detectives even if unofficially, so this event is now OPEN TO ALL CHOICES BOOKS and characters

How to Participate:

Shadows & Deceptions: A Royal Murder Mystery + Giveaway with @bayleedrawsx

This is a very open to interpretation event as long as your submission has something do with a mystery, being an investigator, solving a crime, and/or something of that nature it's perfect. You probably have better ideas than I do about how to use this event in your stories/worlds! (Some prompts/ideas to think about below)

* Just tag the blog and I'll share your work: @choicesmonthlychallenge.

* If you are creating for COP, you may also share with @choicesbookclub

I proposed a murder mystery crossover story [here]. In my head it was going to be short and more like a puzzle for you to solve—like, here is the setting, here are the characters, this is the crime, here are the suspects, and this is what happened. When I posted about it initially it was about 1,000 words total. It kind of turned into a full fan fic story at about 5,500 words. I still am posting it as part of the event, but I'll be doing it on my personal blog (@storyofmychoices) since the story and this event kind of got away from me. I still hope it's good and you'll enjoy it!

It will still be posted in smaller sections over the 4 days of this event to give people time to read and hypothesis what happened and who is responsible

Some ideas to get you started

As mentioned initially, there is still a GIVEAWAY!!! (since in my head the first person to solve the mystery would "win"!) @bayleedrawsx has agreed to assist with the giveaway but now you don't have to correctly solve the mystery (especially since the ending has a twist now), you just have to enjoy the ride. Any one who comments on or reblogs with a comment with their theories, thoughts, ideas, ect. will be entered in the giveaway. You can get 1 entry for each part of the story you interact with. (Likes and reblogs without comments do not count).

There will be 3 winners: 1 (one) winner will get a 2 character minimalist commission with Baylee and 2 (two) seperate winners will get a 1 character minimalst commission with Baylee.

create a dossier for one of your characters [Template Here]

create a business card, social media edit, advertisement for your detective (whether they are official or it's just a hobby)

create a detective/investigation fic, moodboard, edit, etc.

create a crossover event [some ideas here]

explore the every day mysteries your character might investigate (friend's secret crush/relationship, who ate the last cookie, trying to find the missing items (sock, shoes, pen, keys, glasses, etc), tracking down a secret recipe)

are any of your MCs, OCs, and/or LIs addicted to the Hallmark Movies and Mysteries channel? If so, what's their guilty pleasure?

did mysteries or detective stories play a role in your MCs / OCs lives when they were children (or later)? Did they ever play pretend? Did they have a favorite author?

create a newspaper/magazine edit/article about a mystery in your characters world and how it was solved (maybe it's a real case, or maybe it's a medical case, or something else)

find a detective/investigation/mystery story to use as a basis for @choicesprompts 's Rewrite Challenge

Guidelines

All creative work is accepted (writing, text fics, social media posts, moodboards, edits, art, songs, head canons, etc)

Use the read more/keep reading tool to prevent long posts

Please tag anything that is NSFW and/or triggering appropriately

Minors, please be responsible and DNI with posts labeled 18+/NSFW

You can combine your submission for this event with the Book Club if it is COP related and with any other events happening in the fandom.

have fun

be kind

This event is kind of a hot mess and I apologize! I really don't know what I thought I was doing lol

Got ideas, prompts, suggestions? Please LMK!

All thoughts and additions welcome!

[starswheeledoverhead]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/01/oj-and-jeffrey-toobin-black-bogeyman-auctioneer/

I wish that ESPN would take my name off of their racist production “O.J.: Made in America”. I thought that Ezra Edelman, the black producer, would have some control over the project, but higher ups apparently decided to take Jeffrey Toobin’s racist line that blacks are “incapable of recognizing reality.”* He says that the black jurors in the criminal trial and elsewhere can’t think as well as whites, and shouldn’t receive “a pat on the head.” The late Norman Mailer, Mr. Incoherent, suggested something similar in New York magazine. This is a Eugenics line, which holds that blacks make decisions based on emotions, and not reason, which must come as a surprise to the black scientists who work at NASA.

The second part of Toobin’s pro-police, pro-prosecution theory was that the decision in the criminal case was the jury paying the LAPD back for its past brutality against blacks. (One of the jurors was white!) Bill Hodgman got sick and wasn’t able to try the case, yet there he was on “O.J.: Made In America,” voicing his theory of the case.

In the series, other prosecutors yammered on and on about theories that were disproven in court. A detective who might have planted evidence was allowed to take up time. In order to make the case that the decision in the criminal trial was based on black grievances about the LAPD, or Mark Furhman, they used a black juror whose opinion fit this marketable line instead of jurors who voted on the basis of evidence that had been tampered with. The late Philip Vanatter never explained why he carried a vial of the victim’s blood to O.J.’s estate.**

Of course, Toobin, who is Harvard trained and Harvard married and whose parents were well-off, refuses to believe that the police plant evidence, even when Mark Furhman had a history of such practices.

Those who are making money from black Bogeyman marketing, in this case O.J. is the commodity, neglect to mention that the jury in the criminal trial included a white and a Hispanic. Interviewed recently, the Hispanic juror said that he was convinced that the police had planted evidence. Are Hispanics prone to conspiracy theories or just blacks? He’s backed up by three of the top American forensic experts: Henry Lee, Michael Baden and Cyril Wecht. Wecht believes that O.J. Simpson was guilty, but believes that the police planted the blood on the sock found in O.J.’s bedroom. Other blood evidence was obviously taken from the lab because it was tainted with a chemical preservative.

One of the positive results of the trial was that it exposed the sloppy way that evidence is handled in the country’s crime labs, resulting in thousands of innocent people being sent to prison. Though much was made of O.J.’s shoes appearing at the crime scene, Michael Baden said that policemen, who refused to wear booties, made most of the prints.

Toobin’s idea of evidence is hair samples found at the crime scene, which he says belonged to O.J. Many scientists dismiss hair evidence as junk science. Moreover the hair found at the crime scene was dyed. O.J.’s barber said that O.J. didn’t dye his hair. The media neglected to mention that hair identified as Caucasian hair was also found at the crime scene and the DNA found under Nicole’s fingernails gathered there when she fought off her attacker or attackers didn’t belong to O.J. Instead of turning the blood evidence over to the lab, one of the detectives carried it around.

Toobin’s book, The Run Of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson, was used in both O.J. series.”O.J.,Made in America,” and Fox’s “The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story,” The book was used to cover up police and prosecutorial misconduct. He recently said that the idea of prosecutorial misconduct is “ridiculous.” Tell that to the thousands of black and Hispanic defendants in jail because of lying policemen and prosecutors withholding exculpatory evidence. Incidentally, one of the black jurors was a DNA scientist. She didn’t appear on either of the O.J. moneymakers because she would have upset the line promoted by ESPN and earlier Fox, that blacks played the “Race Card,” instead of being persuaded by the arguments made by Barry Scheck and the other forensic scientists. In order to stir media’s big money maker–The Racial Divide–ESPN showed the usual footage of blacks cheering the decision and whites expressing gloom. Whites in a Buffalo bar cheered the decision. O.J. played football in Buffalo.

As for the civil trial held in Santa Monica, 64% of the white jurors mostly*** believed in O.J. Simpson’s guilt before they were seated. They finally captured the coon in Las Vegas where he foolishly invaded a hotel room for the purpose of retrieving his own memorabilia. ESPN omitted the fact that the F.B.I. was informed of the sting weeks before it happened.**** The O.J. revenge sentence was delivered by Judge Jackie Glass, who had to insist that it had nothing to do with the Brentwood murders. She gave him 33 years. Some saw this as excessive. It was. It was meant to make up for the life sentence that the jury in the criminal case refused to deliver.

ESPN suggested that O.J. deserved the sentence by preceding the Las Vegas caper with scenes of a decadent O.J. partying with scantily clothed white women, a scene that has always been a big money maker for the perverse to leer at, which is why the porno movie genre called combo is a big hit even among KKK members. This porno angle has brought power to people like Tennessee’s Senator Corker, who won an election by pairing his black opponent Harold Ford, Jr. with white Playboy bunnies. Corker is on the short list to be Trump’s Vice Presidential nominee.

When the “producer” Ezra Edelman interviewed me, I made all of the points I’ve enumerated here. Moreover, James Poniewozik in The New York Times, June 20, 2016, made none of these important points in a friendly summary of the two O.J. entertainments. It was a Times reporter who agreed with Toobin that the murderer’s gloves fit O.J. He, like Toobin, didn’t witness the demonstration.

My interview wasn’t used because it would have disturbed this entertainment that was meant to comfort a white audience into believing that all of the questions about the Brentwood murders have been answered. They haven’t. 35 million people watched it. That’s why it faithfully supported the line of the prosecutors and the police, regardless of whether O.J. is guilty or innocent of the Brentwood murders.

Meanwhile Jeffrey Toobin, the black Bogeyman entrepreneur, has probably made more money pimping O.J. than all of the money made from Virginia slaves during a given year. He’s the new kind of slave trader. He wants more. Who is the next black Bogeyman that Toobin will deliver to an audience that can’t get enough of this garbage in, garbage out? It’s been announced. It’s Cinque of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Fox will make a film about Patty Hearst using Toobin’s point-of-view.*****

HOW AM I STILL GETTING OJ QUESTIONS

[pulpman2]

Jack’s Choice

Jack Bennett felt his eyes rise to the top of his head under his closed lids and colours began to explode in the darkness enveloping him. He was choking, that much he knew as the cord around his neck was pulled ever tighter. If he lost consciousness he might never come back… His left hand scrabbled towards his neck in a desperate attempt to prevent the thin rope from strangulating him still further. It was no use - the dark curtains were closing on his mind.

Then a breathless female voice insinuated its way into his foggy brain. He knew those dulcet tones anywhere! Kathy Kyle, private investigator, bounty hunter, part time cop, professional blonde and all round pain in the ass. “It’s your choice, Jack!” the woman standing behind his flailing form gasped, grunting from the effort of garrotting him. “I can use this cord to end your useless existence on this planet or, if you surrender to me, it will just be used to tie your hands behind your back! What’s it to be?” Jack knew it was no choice at all. He would take being tied up - even by a loud-mouthed, uppity, pantyhosed broad like Kathy - over leaving this veil of tears before he had even moved out the Lower East Side. “No contest, babe!” is what the minor league gangster intended to say before he slumped unceremoniously to the floor. What Kathy heard was “Nucb!” but she figured out the asshole’s meaning. She rolled the barely conscious Jack onto his front, looped the cord away from his neck and pulled his arms together behind his back. As the man choked back into life she began to tie his wrists together.

“I do this to you so often I’m beginning to think you enjoy it, Jack!” the sassy PI laughed. Jack coughed loudly. “I enjoy it a whole lot better than being strangled to death, ma’am!” he replied, a relieved tone in his voice.

My interpretation of the story behind the cover to Guilty Detective Story Magazine featuring Russian Roulette by Dan Malcolm (July 1958)

[voreinthehouse]

Mermay 2024 D17 - Anime

well L, lets not underplay how much of a fucking chubby chaser and feeder Kira clearly is too

in his endless pursuit of proof that Light is Kira, L has found a way to irrefutably prove the man's guilt; through a discreet and thorough search of Light's habitual internet searches, the detective found a particular site that was sparsely visited but that was still most telling about the young man's guilty pleasures.

FattyManTitties . com was a subscription based website like any other where a person would host their own blog and others would be able to comment on their photos, except it was specifically a gay site for fat men and men who were into fat men. Which apparently, Light was one of them.

This must have been the reason why he'd have so nonchalantly read a girl centered nudey magazine (seriously, he read it like he'd been reading a furniture catalogue! Even L knew fake desire when he saw it). So, the detective created a new experiment and put it to the test.

The results were almost immediately noticeable. L gained weight at an increased pace, his normal attire struggling to hold the tidalwave of soft skinned belly and chubby tits until it was impossible to hold them back, allowing everyone on the taskforce to get a perfect view of the greatest detective's fatness.

Including Light Yagami, who found himself becoming more and more infatuated with his coworker the more weight he put on. Worst of all, he was becoming clumsier with his plans! All because of L's new stupid sexy body! He couldn't let himself be defeated, much less by a sexy lardass!

-------------

KIRA REACTION VER PATREON AND SUBSCRIBESTAR EXCLUSIVE!

-------------

gonna be honest here, i forgot to tie this with mermay :v

just

pretend l has a tail. he aint wearing pants, no no, he has a tail! yes a merman tail! a fatty merman tail! :D

Death Note is hands down my absolute favorite anime in the fucking world (closely followed by Miss Kobayashi's Maid Dragon, take a wild fucking guess why I like it :,)), but I haven't made any death note fanart since I was a cringy teen :v it felt really good to do some L simping once more in my life, especially now that I can add my own feedism kinks to my fanart

-------------

COMMISSIONS ARE OPEN!

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SEE MY SUBSCRIBESTAR!

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BUY ME A MONSTER ENERGY DRINK :3!

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[the-happy-man]

“Part of why I got in a cult at all was because I had no idea how one finds a place to live in New York.”

Larry himself never seemed to get tired. He preached the benefits of prescription amphetamines and, according to multiple acquaintances, took them in such high doses he rarely needed sleep.

…

From the first time they’d heard about Larry, Claudia’s parents were suspicious of him. When they realized he was living in Slonim 9, they met with Allen Green, Sarah Lawrence’s dean of student life. Green told them he’d received other complaints about Larry but his hands were tied; a father had a right to visit his daughter on campus, he explained. A second meeting ended similarly. (Green did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Sarah Lawrence said it “had no record that Larry Ray lived on campus at any time.”)

…

Over the years, Larry would collect hundreds of pages of such confessions from the students. Many of them used almost identical language.

…

Of all Larry’s relationships with powerful people, one would prove the most significant in the years to come. In 1995, Larry met a young NYPD detective named Bernie Kerik. Kerik had recently been promoted from being Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s driver to the director of the New York City Department of Correction’s investigations division. Kerik was impressed by Larry, who exuded a macho, streetwise charisma and had valuable connections. The two became friends. A few years later, Larry served as Kerik’s best man at his wedding. For a time, Kerik would sign emails to Larry “Love, B.”

…

“Uher hates Ray for all of Ray’s lies,” one document reads. “The FBI was Larry’s biggest mark,” says one former law-enforcement official familiar with Larry’s role in the case.

…

If revenge was what Larry was after, he got it. Kerik was publicly humiliated. The city took his name off the jail; his affair with editor Judith Regan was made public; and he faced city, state, and federal investigations. Eventually, in 2009, Kerik pleaded guilty to felony tax and false-statement charges and served three years in prison.

…

The marshals pinned Larry to the ground and handcuffed him, breaking his arm.

… CHRONOLOGY OF THIS STORY? …

“In some ways, that’s the more dangerous thing; you could just lose contact altogether and have absolutely no lifeline.”

…

In front of the group, Larry ordered Daniel to wrap the contraption around his testicles and penis, then Larry began twisting it. The metal cut off circulation to his genitals and dug into his flesh.

…

Santos’s parents estimate that they gave Larry more than $200,000 over three years. They were forced to sell their house to cover the costs. They went to the NYPD three times with their story, but police told them there wasn’t much that could be done if their children were over 18. Claudia’s parents also alerted the police and were told the same thing. In 2017, the police conducted a wellness check on Claudia and determined that she was acting of her own free will. From her parents’ perspective, nothing could be further from the truth.

…

Daniel, Talia, and Isabella graduated in the spring of 2013. Santos never graduated. Claudia graduated a semester late, in the winter of 2013. Larry attended her commencement ceremony. According to Claudia’s mother, Green, the dean of students, approached her and Claudia’s father and said, “Well, I’m glad I won’t be seeing him anymore.”

…

Daniel tried talking to a psychologist, but Larry’s behavior had so closely mimicked therapy that the process felt impossible. Even the act of making friends felt unsafe. When Daniel went to parties he worried he wouldn’t be allowed to leave.

…

If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the April 29, 2019, issue of New York Magazine.

…

posted in Comments by dandan000:

Part 1 of 2

Sarah Lawrence College

Office of the President

May 9, 2019

Dear Members of the Sarah Lawrence Community,

Many of you may have seen media accounts regarding a group of former students and their alleged interactions with the parent of one of those students. My heart goes out to those, SLC alumni and otherwise, whose lives may have been impacted by this parent—indeed, I hope that the spotlight now shined on them does not contribute to further distress. Though I have been, and remain, deeply troubled by these accounts, I have thus far refrained from commenting to our community, both out of respect for the privacy and well-being of the former students involved and also because of the real limits imposed by federal law on the College’s ability to discuss current and former student education records. However, certain uninformed, inaccurate, and highly irresponsible media reports and commentary compel me to share with you what I can about the facts of this matter as they relate to the College.

First and foremost, the College did not knowingly allow this parent to inhabit his daughter’s dormitory apartment, as claimed in media reports. The College has conducted a thorough search of its records across many offices as well as interviewed current and former staff responsible for the safety and well-being of students who were at SLC at the time of the events alleged to have occurred on our campus. On the basis of that review, we have found no evidence to support the claim that this parent lived on the campus during the 2010-11 academic year, nor that college employees who were responsible for our students’ safety ignored such reports or any College policy impacting student health and safety in this regard.

Part 2 of 2 Continued:

I also am profoundly troubled by the demonstrably false claim that one of our long-serving campus leaders resigned as a result of these alleged events. This administrator first approached me in the summer of 2018 to share his plans to retire at the end of the 2018-19 academic year—his 20th year of dedicated service to a college he loves, and where he has steadfastly supported thousands of students. We announced his decision to retire last fall, for no reason other than to allow time to plan the search for his successor. Just before winter break, he suffered a terrible fall and has been on medical leave this spring as he recovers. I should not have to disclose personal information such as this to combat acts of irresponsible character assassination, but do so with his permission to quell uninformed media speculation as to why he is not now on campus.

I understand that these recent media allegations may have left you with many questions. With that in mind, I want to reaffirm above all that student health, safety, and well-being continue to be overarching priorities of the College. We regularly review our staffing, our policies, and our support systems in these critical areas, and will continue to do so proactively.

I thank you for your continued support and confidence in SLC.

Yours,

Cristle Collins Judd

President

…

posted by situationlefty in Comments:

In college, we weren't even allowed to have pets in the dorm. Somebody's dad sleeping for entire school years there? Where were the SLC administrators?

The malleability of these cocooned, protected, wealthy kids is very sad. I don't know what's worse - the sociopathic con man, or the privileged and completely vulnerable college students.

[seattlemysterybooks]

philsp

March 1959 issue

Seattle Mystery Bookshop  

[oakendesk]

Guilty Detective Story Magazine Mar 1957

Wil Hulsey

[cloverthirteen]

Was Ace Attorney made as a satire on Japan’s legal system? -- An analysis

I wouldn’t really call myself an Ace Attorney fan--I’ve never played any of the games, the closest I’ve come being watching other people’s let’s plays. I do like reading about the series on wikis and interacting with fan content for it, though, so I do know a fair amount about it.

One thing I see being said pretty often by fans is that the series was intended as a satire/parody of the Japanese legal system, which is why the courts are ridiculously biased towards the prosecution, prosecutors often care more about perfect win records more than putting actual guilty people behind bars, etc. If you’re familiar with this, you’ve probably heard of Japan’s 99% conviction rate. This interpretation of the games and the way they work definitely makes sense.

But after hearing this many times I eventually noticed something. There isn’t a single actual source (creator statement, interview, etc.) that backs up this claim. Every time I see someone online say “the series creator made Ace Attorney to parody Japan’s actual legal system” there is never a link to an interview or anything that proves their statement correct. If someone has an actual, verified source from Shu Takumi or someone else who had significant involvement with the series, please prove me wrong and show it to me. But according to all of the creator’s statement’s I’ve read, there’s no evidence of the series being an intentional parody.

So, what do we know about the creation of the Ace Attorney series? Well, it was created by Shu Takumi, who wrote and directed the first three games. After working on the dinosaur survival horror game Dino Crisis for Capcom, he was given the opportunity to make any kind of game he wanted. He really wanted to make mystery and adventure games, and from that came Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.

MC: Before developing Ace Attorney you worked on Dino Crisis. How does one go from dinosaur survival horror to virtual courtrooms?

ST: Dino Crisis was the brainchild of my then boss, Resident Evil creator, Shinji Mikami. Working on his projects taught me not only how to make games, but also how to think about them. After Dino Crisis 2 wrapped, Mr Mikami gave me six months in which to create any kind of game I wanted.

I was still pretty wet behind the ears, but as I'd originally joined Capcom with a desire to create mystery and adventure games, this was a huge chance for me to make my mark as a creator. In the end it took a team of seven 10 months to produce the first GBA Ace Attorney title. Having the freedom to create exactly the kind of game I wanted was amazing and it was a real pleasure to work on that project.

MC: Can you remember when the idea of Ace Attorney first came to you? How did your bosses respond to the idea of a lawyer-based adventure game when you first described it to them?

ST: It was in 2000 when Mr Mikami said I could make my own game and my original idea was a fairly typical adventure with a detective as the main character. Most mystery adventures have the player choose from a number of different dialogue options for their character in order to progress the story, but I wanted a new gameplay style that enabled players to deduce for themselves what was happening, rather than just selecting canned responses. I developed this into the concept of facing off against the suspect in a crime and exposing the contradictions in their statements.

I was sure my new idea would be a fun and original take on the genre, so I started to revise the main character, since a detective would be too traditional for such an original concept. I asked myself, "What kind of professional would face off against a suspect and expose their contradictory statements?" The answer, of course, was a lawyer and so the Ace Attorney concept was born.

(source, from an interview on the making of the series)

Takumi’s original concept for the game involved Phoenix as not a defense lawyer, but as a detective. The gameplay was to consist of “facing off against the suspect of a crime and finding the contradictions in their statements.” However, Takumi eventually realized that taking apart contradictions wasn’t really a detective’s job, and decided to change the protagonist to a lawyer and the setting to a courtroom instead. And thus, the game’s concept was finalized.

Janet: As you know, “Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy” is coming out world-wide this winter, and as I was brainstorming what to write about for this week’s blog, I remembered your tweets from 2010.

Takumi: Tweets from 2010?

Janet: …Well, it was a long time ago…

Takumi: ???

Janet: I-It’s OK if you don’t remember…

Takumi: …Oh, THOSE! Yes!

Janet: I remember reading them and being shocked by how different the original draft of the game’s story was – how Phoenix wasn’t even a lawyer, but a private eye!

Takumi: Yes, AA was originally supposed to be a detective game, so naturally, Phoenix was to be a private eye. But then, one day, I made a startling realization: the gameplay concept I was going for was for players to enjoy finding and taking contradictions apart, but that was hardly related to investigating or detective work at all. In that moment, I had it – I realized that the main setting for the game should be the courtroom.

Janet: That’s quite the jump, but you know, I can’t imagine this series being anything else at this point. 

(source, from an interview by Janet Hsu about the game’s early development)

During the development for the game, Takumi actually knew very little about the intricacies of the legal system--and in fact, he’s been very transparent about that fact in interviews. There’s even a story he talks about in a blog post where he was asked “shouldn’t we do some research on law before we make this game?” and agonized over it for a bit before deciding that being accurate about courtroom processes wasn’t important--what was important was that the game made the trials exciting and fun.

November, 2000. The characters were coming together, and I was working desperately on my first scenario (the current Turnabout Sisters). One day, I was asked about the one thing I didn’t want to be asked about.

“Mr. Takumi. Don’t we need to do some research on law?”

The knowledge I have about the law, pretty amounts to the one fact that in Japan we have the Roppō Zensho ('Complete Book of The Six Major Legal Codes').

“Don’t bother with that. This is a detective game. “

It should have been over with this one line, but…

“But this isn’t a detective game, it’s a lawyer game!”

“If it’s not going to be realistic, I don’t see why this should be about trials.”

“People who play this might get wrong knowledge from the game!”

“We might get sued by the Bar Association!”

“They’ll start complaining!”

…Gyakuten Saiban (Ace Attorney GBA) is simply a “mystery game.”　“Being realistic” is not what is important. What’s important is emphasizing, and recreating the unique “atmosphere” and “tension” of the courtroom. That is why the judge uses a gavel, even though no judge uses that, and why Naruhodō shouts "Objection!" even though nobody does that either.　This game does not need a “realistic courtroom”!

Chasing the true murderer down to the end, and then getting applauded for that in the courtroom. That feeling of thrill and excitement. It was only by February of the following year when we finally manage to recreate that in the game. The couple of months after this had happened, we looked around, got lost and troubled our minds in search for the answer of the big question of “How do we make a trial into a game?”.  Fall was passing by, and the cold winter was close upon us.

(source, from an archived blog post by Takumi)

So, realism and knowledge of law wasn’t important to Takumi during the development of the series. But there’s also the fact that Takumi has actually personally denied that the Ace Attorney series was an intentional satire or criticism of the court system at any point. In fact, according to a blog post (done as if Phoenix and Maya were reading the column and commenting on it), he actually dislikes people seeing his work this way, as he never intended the games to have any big political statements.

A major prerequisite for Gyakuten Saiban is it’s so simple “even my mother could play it”.  So there is only one point at the core of the game: “Seeing through lies”.

Naruhodō: It wasn’t even supposed to be a game about the trials at first. Mayoi: Eh! Really?! Naruhodō: “Simple” is basically all this game is about, according to TakuShū. Mayoi: What do you mean? Naruhodō: He didn’t want to add all kinds of elements for the player to think about, like alibis, tricks or about the culprit. It’d just confuse them. Mayoi: Really. Naruhodō: Basically, you can proceed in the game if you just think about where the contradiction is. He figured that with that, the controls of the game could also stay simple. Mayoi: But, but, why the trials then? Naruhodō: “A story about a detective seeing through lies” wouldn’t be any different from the other games out there. So that’s why he decided to have someone whose job is seeing through lies as the protagonist. Mayoi: So a defense attorney. Naruhodō: Occasionally  TakuShū sees magazines introducing the game as “a work that dared to take on the theme of trials”, and that actually hurts him. Mayoi: He never meant to be something as big as that…. 

(source, from the mentioned blog post)

Ultimately I see how easy it is, if you know a good amount about both Ace Attorney and Japan’s legal system, to come to the conclusion that the games were made as a dig against the latter. However, somewhere along the line, people apparently stopped seeing this as merely a theory and instead as a definite fact. Now, that doesn’t mean that the theory is entirely unfounded--given that Takumi focused only on making trials interesting and fun in the games, you could say that the games work as an light, comedic parody, not meant to make any political statements. And hey, maybe there’s something I missed--maybe there were other people working on the series who did have significant knowledge of law and wrote some parts of the games as intentional satire of the system. Again, if anyone has evidence of this, don’t hesitate to provide it. But with what I know, I don’t think going “well actually” to people who point out the ridiculousness and unfairness of Ace Attorney’s court system is necessary. It’s simply that way to make the games more fun.

[heyyylittlemo]

Small details in 19 Days that keep me up at night

((That I feel rarely gets talked about))

-Mo Guan Shan & The Zodiac Magazine

This chapter was pretty early on in 19days—So that must mean Mo Guan Shan has done this a lot more since, right??😳 and he didn’t even rlly know HT that well at this point so...he must be in heat on the low for HT by now 🥵🥵

So it canonically confirms at least a base physical attraction from the start—and c’mon if this isn’t the most relatable thing ever. Soon as I get an attraction to someone I’m a bit piqued to find out their zodiac. Mo Guan Shan’s hidden curiosity for HT is lwk so cute.

It def suggests that MGS has an under the surface lvl (where he can’t even detect it) pull to understand and get closer to HT.

Mo Guan Shan dreaming of He Tian

I know it was passed off like a “joke” and a “nightmare” but cmon this gay as hawlll

Who DOESN’T dream of their crush?? Dreams usually are about things we heavily think about and/or what we thought about before bed—and I can’t help but to think OX was onto smth

Not to mention, this has high bottom-denial energy. Literally. Like he was soooo trying to avoid getting a shot at the docs bc it was in his ass, why??? Like sir...ur fragile masculinity that was created from ur inner homophobia towards ur own bottom reality was def crashing at that second

N Why he got pain in his tushy??? In this dream?? N ppl bullying him like that abt it lmaoo who irl be saying those things?? Things like “aren’t in the guy who got a shot in ur ass” and “haha I’d like to see you with ur ass in the air~” even tho the translation and the way it was written can be said to mean that these bullies are literally finding it funny that his ass was in the air I have a feeling it was censored and rephrased to hint at its actual implications,, I feel like these guys were actually trying to jokingly solicit Mo in gay acts thru him bottoming—in reaction to the needle butt-scenario. I feel like OX wants us to read between the lines.

And if you see it that way, it really makes it seem like Mo is having a sexuality crisis here. And I think it’s what OX was building up to around that time bcuz it was around after the kiss happened.

It rlly makes me believe MGS genuinely thinks getting a shot in his ass will somehow societally and with unspoken words “expose” him and miraculously express to others that he likes it up the ass—bcuz u cannot tell me that dream and what those bullies were saying weren’t his damn paranoia demons talking

I think a dream interpreter could stretch it enough to say that the bullies are a metaphor of his own insecurities towards his homosexuality and particularly towards his upcoming bottoming feelings. Like he’s legit scared of a hospital needle in his butt—this is not straight behavior. And then we have He Tian to the rescue—(and do you see his look and his flirtatious line) and omg he’s gripping the shit out of his ass in the dream. He’s both being bullied for his bottom-ness and guilty-pleasure getting one rubbed out by He Tian. Like ok, have ur cake and eat it then bitch.

Mo Guan Shan Staring at He Tian

This was a moment leading up to the kiss. MGS was staring (probably admiring while also judging and heating up over HT) He Tian while he was playing BSKTBall—and As a BL writer myself can’t help but to think HT noticed MGS very not-straightly stare at him with a sort of sexual attraction he had towards him on the field.

Like cmon?? I doubt OX writes lines like these for no reason.

I feel like...at least irl...The eyes usually give it away if someone is interested in you or not. you can always see if someone is checking you out and noticing you in a different light like it just has different vibe and feel to it. OX was def trying to show and not tell with this panel that MGS has noticed HT and stares at him in the way we all hope he does. We don’t really get to see and (and I guess it keeps us on our toes and keeps us wondering if the little redhead could actually be falling for HT)—so it’s very subtle, but it is there, and once you notice it you’re like d a m n this makes the kiss scene so much more hopeful (at least for me).

I think this was the push that gave HT hopes to kiss MGS in the first place and it gets overlooked. How do you think HT own curiosity peeked? I think as a community we often think abt Mo and how he developed feelings or will develop feelings for HT but rarely do we ever questions The Who what when where and how He Tian came to like Mo himself. I have my own feelings about them that I can’t explain in this post, least it gets off-topic, but I think it’s very important.

I think his comment “Do I really disgust you that much” makes more sense in this context, of MGS giving HT some reassurance through non-verbal ques. HT was already under the impression that MGS was egging him on with his staring so it can warrant some of He Tian’s confusion. HT probably is pursuing MGS bc he probably senses some lvl of homosexual tension from Mo, and it’s exciting to him. Not only that, but MGS is exciting in his character. So I think HT was also relatively new to this venture and kinda spontaneously kissed Mo out of his own curioustes to explore their attractions and to get a grasp of what Mo was feeling.

It also makes me think HT and MGS experienced some undeniable pleasure or unspoken moment that could not be denied within the kiss as attraction and when MGS then decided to go agaisnt that with violence it only further hit HT, who knew MGS was lying to himself. I mean, it’s a classic BL moment. The two kiss, obviously feel smth (probably couldn’t show much of that due to censorship so had to pass it along as a 100% unsatisfactory exchange) and then one, feeling too much all at once and isn’t comfortable with their confirmed suspensions abt their sexuality—denies everything to the other causing further tensions especially sense both know how eachother really feel despite the others denial. And then the rejected one downplays the kiss’ seriousness to soothe their ego knowing full well the kiss meant smth. So they both internalize what the other said and both feel rejected, but both actually liked it. It’s a classic.

I truly feel that if it wasn’t due to censorship, that the kissing scene would’ve looked a lot more consensual than so forceful and wrong. Like it would’ve been taken as an tension filled “experimentation” that we see a lot in BLs and it only further ties into why MGS would be so bashful whenever the kiss is mentioned, and why HT can use it As a leverage over Mo (“don’t make me kiss you again”) bcuz it brings them back to thy moment where HT experienced some “answer” between Mo and that answer was fulfilling even tho it cannot be fulfilled and probably HT is hoping that maybe one day if he teases him enough about it they can share another kiss one that is a lot less rushed and now that they are closer, will lead to a better result.

Anyways those are my speculations. And I actually have written a short story based on these assumptions(focused on the kiss—and it’s also leading up to a jealously fic) but ofc I haven’t written it in ahwile haha. Just thought it was worth sharing since I noticed 19 days has been updating pretty “eh” lately.

[conradscrime]

Lizzie Borden: Guilty or Innocent?

October 03, 2021

Lizzie Andrew Borden was born on July 19, 1860 in Fall River, Massachusetts to mother Sarah Anthony Borden and father Andrew Jackson Borden. Lizzie was the youngest of two, having an older sister named Emma almost 10 years her senior, and Emma often acted as a mother figure to Lizzie, especially after their mother, Sarah, died in 1863 when Lizzie was just a baby. 

Andrew Borden had grown up as a descendant of wealthy and influential people in this area, however he had some money struggles when he was younger. He eventually became an extremely successful property developer and owned lots of property. At the time of his death his estate was estimated at $300,000 and that was in the 1890′s, in 2020 his estate was worth $9 million. 

Despite the Bordens being extremely wealthy for the time, Andrew was a frugal man, often not wanting to truly live like wealthy people. The Borden house did not have indoor plumbing, though they could afford it and most of Andrew’s cousins lived in a richer area of Fall River known as “The Hill.” 

Lizzie and Emma were brought up very religious and Lizzie even taught Sunday school to children of recent immigrants. Lizzie was involved in many organizations such as the Christian Endeavor Society and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). 

In 1866, Andrew married a woman named Abby Gray, to whom Lizzie did not like. Lizzie often referred to Abby as “Mrs Borden” and believed that Abby had only married Andrew for his money. Lizzie and Emma would rarely eat meals with the Bordens because of this dislike which Bridget “Maggie” Sullivan, their maid later testified. 

If you are into true crime than you must of heard the story of Lizzie Borden and her axe before, as this is quite a popular case. But if you do not know the case well, spoiler alert: Andrew and Abby Borden were murdered with an axe on August 4, 1892. Here, we are going to go over a couple of strange occurrences that took place in the Borden household leading up to the murders. 

In May 1892, a few months before Mr. and Mrs. Borden were brutally murdered, Andrew had killed some pigeons in his barn with a hatchet. It is believed that Lizzie had built a roost for those pigeons and was very upset to hear that her father had killed them, though some dispute that this ever happened. 

Another strange event that occurred just a month before the murders was that Lizzie and Emma ended up taking “extended vacations” in New Bedford after a supposed family argument. The two sisters returned only a week before the murders, and Lizzie even chose to stay in a local rooming house after returning to Fall River for 4 days before she eventually went back to the Borden residence.

Leading up to the murders, various arguments happened between Andrew and his daughters over the fact that he had chosen to gift some of Abby’s family real estate and had boughten Abby a house. John Vinnicum Morse, Lizzie and Emma’s uncle on their mother’s side, visited the Bordens on August 3, 1892, one day before the murders took place and had planned to stay for a few days to discuss business with Andrew. 

Some suspect that John and Andrew had been talking about property transfer, which added fuel to a fire between Lizzie and her father. 

Another strange unexplained occurrence was that in the days leading up the murders, the entire Borden household was becoming quite sick, and while a family friend believed it was just food poisoning, Abby had fear that it was actually poisoning.

John Morse, the uncle, arrived at the Borden house on August 3, and had slept in the guest bedroom that night. All Bordens, John and Maggie were present at breakfast and Andrew and John went into the sitting room and talked for about an hour. John left the house at 8:48 am to buy some oxen and visit his niece, he had planned to return to the Borden house around noon. Andrew Borden left for a morning walk sometime after 9 am.

It is worth mentioning that Emma Borden was out of town on August 4, 1892. Abby Borden went upstairs sometime between 9 am and 10:30 am to make the bed in the guest room, and according to the investigation it appeared that Abby had been facing her killer at the time of the attack. 

Abby Borden was first struck on the side of the head with a hatchet which cut her above her ear, causing her to turn and fall face down on the floor. The killer then struck her more times, hitting her 17 times in the back of her head. 

Andrew had returned home around 10:30 am from his walk, and when he tried to open the door with his key, it failed. He then knocked on the door and Maggie the maid unlocked it for him, though she found it jammed. While the door was jammed Maggie had cursed, and she later testified that she heard Lizzie laughing immediately after this from the top of the stairs, though she did not see Lizzie at this time. Abby Borden was already dead at this point and it is said that anyone would of been able to see her body laying on the floor on the second floor of the house, so if Lizzie was standing at the top of the stairs when the door was jammed than she would have known Abby was dead and had not yet said anything. 

Lizzie herself denied every being upstairs and said that Andrew had asked her where Abby was and she replied that she had been visiting a sick friend at the time. Lizzie had helped Andrew remove his boots and put him in slippers before he laid down on the couch for a nap. However, in the crime scene photos, Andrew is laying on the couch with his boots on, not slippers. 

At this time Maggie went to go take a nap in her bedroom on the third floor, taking a rest from cleaning the windows just before 11:10 am when she heard Lizzie call from downstairs, “Maggie, come quick! Father’s dead. Somebody came in and killed him.” 

Andrew was slumped on the couch in the sitting room, and had been struck 10 or 11 times with what appeared to be a hatchet or close to a hatchet. One of his eyeballs had been split cleanly in two, and it appeared as though he was sleeping when he was attacked. He was still bleeding, suggesting the murder happened very recently. Detectives determined that Andrew Borden died approximately at 11 am. 

When Lizzie was questioned many believe her answers were a little strange. She claimed she had heard a groan or a scraping noise or a distressed call before entering the house, and then two hours later she told police she heard nothing and entered the house. When asked where Abby was, Lizzie said she had received a note asking her to visit a sick friend but thought that Abby had returned and asked if someone could go upstairs and look for her. Maggie and a neighbour, Mrs. Churchill were halfway up the stairs when they saw Abby lying face down on the floor. 

Multiple officers reported that they did not like Lizzie’s attitude, they thought she was too calm during questioning. No one had checked Lizzie for bloodstains despite her strange behaviour, thought police did check her room but not properly because Lizzie said she was not feeling well. 

Police found two hatchets in the basement, two axes and a hatchet-head with a broken handle. The hatchet head was suspected of being the murder weapon as the break was fresh. Andrew and Abby had been tested for poison due to the recent illnesses that had been happening to the family, but none was found in their systems. 

Residents believed Lizzie had tried to purchase hydrocyanic acid in a diluted form from the local drugstore, but Lizzie said she had only inquired about it so she could clean her furs. 

On August 6, 1892, police searched the house more carefully, inspecting the sisters’ clothing and removing the broken handled hatchet-head. A police officer and the mayor visited the Borden house that evening and Lizzie was informed that she was a suspect in the murders. The next morning, Lizzie’s friend, Alice Russell, entered the kitchen to find Lizzie tearing up a dress. Lizzie said she was planning to burn the dress because it had paint stains on it. No one knows if this was the same dress Lizzie was wearing on the day of the murders. 

On August 8, Lizzie had an inquest hearing to which they had given her morphine to calm her nerves, which could have had an impact on her behaviour which was noted as very erratic and she refused to answer a lot of questions even if they were beneficial to her. Lizzie often contradicted herself and provided multiple accounts of the morning. At one point she said she was in the kitchen reading a magazine when her father came home, and then after she said she was in the dining room doing some ironing, and then at another time said she was coming down from the stairs. 

On August 11, Lizzie was served with a warrant of arrest and jailed. The inquest testimony provided most of the basis of whether Lizzie was guilty or innocent, though this was later ruled inadmissible at her trial. The testimony at the inquest also changed many of her friends’ opinions on her that she was innocent, questioning if she really had murdered her father and stepmother.

Lizzie’s trial began on June 5, 1893. On June 1, 1893, another axe murder had taken place in Fall River, with the victim being Bertha Manchester, found hacked to death in her kitchen. There were many similarities between Bertha’s murder and the Borden’s murder, though in 1894 a Portuguese immigrant named Jose Correa de Mello was convicted of Bertha’s murder and was not in the area at the time the Borden’s were murdered. 

Lizzie’s actual movements and where she was in the house was taken into account during the trial with many disputes. Maggie had entered the second floor of the home at around 10:58 am and left Lizzie and Andrew Borden downstairs. Lizzie told multiple people that she was in the barn at this time, for “20 minutes or possibly a half an hour.” Hyman Lubinsky testified that he witnessed Lizzie leaving the barn at 11:03 am and Charles Gardner confirmed this time as well. At 11:10 am Lizzie called to Maggie from downstairs that Andrew had been murdered and told Maggie not to enter the room, instead Maggie went to get the doctor. 

If Andrew Borden was murdered at exactly 11 am then Lizzie supposedly would have still been in the barn for another 3 minutes, but did that give the killer enough time to leave the house undetected? 

Both Andrew and Abby’s heads had been removed during the autopsy and the skulls were admitted as evidence during the trial. When seeing the heads at trial, Lizzie fainted. Evidence that Lizzie had been trying to purchase hydrogen cyanide the day before the murders was excluded, with the judge saying that incident was too remote to have any connection to the murders, though the local druggist did say Lizzie tried to buy it. 

The jury deliberated for an hour and a half on June 20, 1893 which is a very quick deliberation. They acquitted Lizzie Borden of the murders of Andrew and Abby Borden and when Lizzie was exiting the courthouse she told reporters that she was, “the happiest woman in the world.” 

Though Lizzie was acquitted, many believe that she is the prime suspect in her father and stepmother’s murders. Many theories have been brought forward of what Lizzie’s motive could be. Some believe Lizzie was physically and sexually abused by her father, but there has been little evidence to support this theory. 

Another popular theory is that Lizzie was in a relationship with Maggie the maid, and that perhaps Abby had caught the two in a sexual act so Lizzie decided to kill her. The theory then goes on to say Lizzie told Andrew what she had done to Abby and killed him when he also reacted in horror and disgust at the idea of a lesbian relationship. Some had speculated that Lizzie was a lesbian as she was in her 30′s at the time of the murders and had still been living in her father’s home unmarried, which was taboo in 1892. Maggie was never speculated as being a lesbian however, and she found other employment as a maid in Butte, Montana and married a man after the murders. 

Maggie Sullivan died in Butte in 1948 and supposedly gave her sister a deathbed confession, that she had changed her testimony at Lizzie’s trial to protect her. Many believe that Maggie helped Lizzie after and fully knew that Lizzie had committed the murders. Maggie herself was a suspect to some, as it was believed she was unhappy about washing the windows on the day of the murders because it was a very long and difficult task and it was extremely hot that day. Some believe she murdered the Borden’s because she had to wash the windows on a hot day and was still recovering from feeling ill.

Another suspect was John Morse, Lizzie’s uncle who they rarely saw but had been visiting and slept in the Borden house the night before. However, Morse had an alibi for Abby’s murder, which law enforcement said was almost too perfect and over detailed. He was considered a suspect by police for a period of time. 

A man named William Borden who was suspected to be Andrew Borden’s illegitimate son was a possible suspect as the theory believes he was trying to extort money from his father but failed. Author Leonard Rebello did lots of research in relation to this theory and proved that William was not Andrew Borden’s son. Emma Borden was also believed to have committed the murders, though she was out of town some think she came back to kill Abby and Andrew before returning to Fairhaven where she was staying to receive a telegram that the murders occurred. 

After Lizzie had been acquitted her and Emma moved into a large modern house in “The Hill” area of town, the one the girls wanted Andrew to live in. At this time Lizzie began going by “Lizbeth A. Borden” instead of Lizzie and the girls had live-in maids, a housekeeper and a coachman. Because Abby had died before Andrew, her estate first went to Andrew and then to Lizzie and Emma as part of his estate when he died. A considerable settlement was paid to Abby’s family, however Lizzie and Emma received a lot of money due to their father being quite wealthy at the time of his death. Many believe this was most of the motive for Lizzie killing her father, to gain money so she could live the luxurious life she always wanted. 

Lizzie was hated in Fall River, with many believing she had gotten away with murder. She was accused of shop-lifting in 1897 in Providence, Rhode Island, which Lizzie was known to have shoplifted a lot before her father died, as Andrew would pay for whatever Lizzie stole.

In 1905, Lizzie and Emma got in an argument and Emma moved out of the house and the two sisters never saw each other or spoke again. Lizzie began ill following the removal of her gallbladder, and died from pneumonia on June 1, 1927. Very few people attended her funeral and the details were not released.

Nine days later on June 10, 1927, Emma died from chronic nephritis at the age of 76 in a nursing home in Newmarket, New Hampshire which she had moved to in 1923. Lizzie and Emma were buried side by side in the family plot in Oak Grove Cemetery. 

The Borden house is now a museum and a bed and breakfast with 1890′s style. Pieces of evidence used in the trial, including the axehead are preserved at the Fall River Historical Society. 

The Lizzie Borden case is one of the most famous true crime cases in history, with many people split on whether they think Lizzie is guilty or innocent. Some of you have probably heard of the famous rhyming melody that many sing in relation to Lizzie and the axe murders, 

“Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done,

she gave her father forty-one.”

The rhyme has a less well-known second verse:

“Andrew Borden now is dead, Lizzie hit him on the head. Up in heaven he will sing, on the gallows she will swing.”

[96thdayofrage]

The Supreme Court agreed to review two aspects of the actor’s case.

The seven judges reviewed Montgomery County Judge Steven T. O’Neill’s decision to let prosecutors call five other accusers to testify about long-ago encounters that never resulted in charges or police reports.

And they reviewed the questionable judge’s decision to allow the jury to hear unsubstantiated testimony from two-decade old depositions taken out of context at trial.

Judge Steven O’Neill has never explained why he allowed five women to testify in the second Cosby trial after allowing only one to do so at his first trial in 2017.

On Dec. 1–when it came to the Commonwealth’s rebuttal of the defense’s points of appeal attorney—Adrianne Jappe did not get through her opening comments before the judges began interrupting and interrogating her on the relevance of the five prior bad acts witnesses.

Justice Dougherty pointed out that one of the women – Lise-Lotte Lublin – had ‘no actual recollection of sexual contact’ but merely of losing consciousness.

Bill Cosby to be Released from Prison After Pennsylvania Supreme Court Deems Trial Tainted

Cosby DA reaches level of desperation as Supreme Court decision nears, fines comic for unkept grass

Cosby DA accused of prosecutorial misconduct for charging YC reporter amid heated email battle

Cosby DA won’t release emails that may reveal ‘locker-room banter’ about Pa. Supreme Court

DA Under Fire for Admitting Bill Cosby Gave ‘Exculpatory Account’ to Cops, Tricked by Phony Immunity Deal

Jappe angered members of the court after instructing them not ‘to consider’ statistics in their decision making, according to an aide of one of the honorable justices.

Your Content exclusively revealed on Oct. 22 that Police in Arizona are stunned after a Pennsylvania prosecutor accommodated a fugitive prostitute to testify against the comedian in 2018.

Cosby, 83, has spent the past two years in a prison outside of Philadelphia after a jury convicted him in 2018 of three aggravated indecent assault counts—and the court deemed the elderly inmate a ‘sexually violent predator’ for posing an ‘imminent safety risk to women.’

From the moment the first witness took the stand, Your Content readers were spot-on in their questioning of trial tactics and backhanded deals cut amid the retrial—going as far as filing a motion to intervene in the trial after politicians tried to silence our publication and banish Your Content reporters from the proceedings.

But we conducted more than just research, providing game-changing scoops that impacted the trial to its core:

» Jun. 1, 17′: Bill Cosby to face a jury 13-years after allegations of sexual assault were made and ultimately debunked by investigating detectives.

» Jun. 5, 17′: Cosby arrives for his first day in court. Attorneys called the proceeding ‘an attack on human dignity.’

» Jun. 6, 17′: Jurors were drowned in reasonable doubt ‘on day two’ of the trial when attorneys revealed the motivation behind the ‘witness cult’s’ testimony: a $100 million payday.

» ‘One lie begets another lie begets another lie’: The judge finally cracked down on overzealous prosecutors after they tried tricking him by rephrasing the same question six times.

» Jun. 9, 17′: The trial’s briefest yet most powerful cross examination that derailed the questionable proceeding in just fifteen minutes.

» Jun. 12, 17′: Moments before the jury left to deliberate, Cosby’s lawyers moved for a mistrial on the grounds that the chief accuser had changed her story nearly two-dozen times.

» The ‘defining moment’ of the trial erupted as lawyers outed a hand-picked George Soros district attorney who prosecuted the funnyman solely to ‘bang on his throne.’

» Jun. 13, 17′: The chief Cosby accuser unleashed a tsunami of reasonable doubt upon jurors, who continually asked the court reread her testimony to weed out the conflicting statements.

» Jun. 15, 17′: Blockbuster revelations by Your Content funneled to our tipline by a juror claimed they would not be reaching a unanimous verdict.

» Despite a deadlocked jury, the hard-nosed court ordered they return after the weekend to continue deliberating until reaching a unanimous verdict.

» Jun. 17, 17′: After the jury informed the court once more of their deadlock, the judge declared a mistrial.

» Oct. 20, 17′: The former district attorney files a lawsuit against chief Cosby accuser Andrea Constand for working hand-in-glove with his competitor, Soros-funded Kevin Steele, in effort to secure an election and conviction.

» Nov. 9, 17′: An explosive report by Your Content reveals new information about Constand’s potential motivation behind the trial.

» Nov. 22, 17′: Your Content discovered Soros’ hand-picked district attorney worked closely with Constand to coordinate television commercials amid the heated election.

» How prosecutors initially claimed the former district attorney was ‘suing Contand more or less because he blames her for cooperating with police.’

» Jan. 11, 18′: Your Content attends a dinner with the funnyman for an exclusive tell-all before the retrial: ‘We’re Ready.’

» Jan. 28, 18′: Soros’ hand-picked district attorney is accused of destroying evidence and allowing perjury to secure a conviction. The FBI ‘cannot confirm nor deny’ an investigation into the accusations.

» Mar. 28, 18′: An exclusive Your Content investigation revealed that the presiding judge carried out an extramarital affair with a staffer of a key witness.

» Apr. 7, 18′: A juror is overheard by a Your Content reporter calling the comic ‘guilty’ immediately after being selected to serve on the panel.

» Apr. 10, 18′: Your Content exclusively reports that the prosecution intends to fly a wanted fugitive to testify, and they wined and housed the prostitute-turned-witness.

» Apr. 12, 18′: A key witness makes a bombshell revelation and confirms she previously sold Quaaludes to friends and never obtained the pill from Cosby.

» The moment Janice Dickinson revealed Robert De Niro partied at a nightclub that was full of ‘sex, drugs, cocaine and tea.’

» As their stories collided, accusers turned blame to magazine editors at New York Magazine of ‘condensing and editing’ their statements to publish on the cover.

» Your Content was first to report that the chief Cosby accuser claimed the comic tricked her into the situation by bribing her with ‘baked goods.’

» The powerful opening statement that painted the chief Cosby accuser as an ‘inconsistent money-hungry con artist.’

» How Gloria Allred’s representation of too many victims nearly derailed the case on day one.

» Apr. 15, 18′: Chief Cosby accuser Andrea Constand officially provides the sixth conflicting story as cross examination continued.

» Apr. 16, 18′: Constand is asked to reread all of her inconsistent statements back to the jury.

» When Hollywood’s heaviest-hitting private detective Scott Ross served Constand with a second subpoena as she left the courtroom.

» Apr. 16, 18′: At one point, testimony from the chief accuser became too confusing for the court and jurors, and Judge Steven O’Neill ordered she go home and do ‘homework’ over the weekend before returning to court Monday.

» Apr. 17, 18′: Your Content captured exclusive photographs of a staffer employed by the hand-picked Soros district attorney documenting each move Cosby made outside of the courtroom.

» Apr. 18, 18′: A key witness lost credibility when it’s discovered Cosby hadn’t been dubbed ‘America’s Dad’ until 1984, not 1982, as she claimed.

» It is discovered that Cosby never called Temple University to speak with chief accuser Constand, university staff reveal.

» Apr. 25, 18′: Closing arguments for the second trial begin. The defense drops a powerful remark: ‘A case that was rejected. A case that was revived. I’ll show you the sequence.’

» Jurors asked the court to re-play the testimony of Margo Jackson, who said the chief accuser confided in her and claimed she could accuse Cosby and ‘get money to go to school and open a business.’

» Unsatisfied jurors question the court: ‘We understand we could see things again?’ The judge allowed it and replayed the chilling testimony that accused Cosby’s accuser of falsifying her claims in pursuit of money.

» Prosecutors pulled an unprecedented stunt and compared Cosby to Casey Anthony in effort to hide the jurors from the media and public.

» Your Content flies the Canadian ex-boyfriend of chief Cosby accuser Andrea Constand to Philadelphia for an exclusive sit-down interview. He reveals the accuser’s family ‘despises black people’ and ‘used Cosby for revenge on all black people.’

» Soros’ hand-picked district attorney went through great lengths to keep his Florida father in the loop at all times—even divulging information about what jurors munched on during breaks.

» Oct. 10, 19′: Your Content obtains thousands of exclusive e-mails from the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office. Among the exclusive e-mail revelations:

» ‘First Order of Business, Lock Up That Creep Bill Cosby.’

» ‘Old Man’ Cosby’ Would Die If Jailed, Prosecutors Joked

» DA Mocked #MeToo Before, During & After Trial

» In 2015, DA Steele Claimed There Was An ‘Air-Tight’ Case Against Bill Cosby, Turns Out There Wasn’t

» Jun. 23, 20′: Bill Cosby is granted the opportunity to go before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in a first-ever virtual hearing.

» Aug. 26, 20′: Your Content makes a groundbreaking discovery that indicates the presiding judge assigned himself to the Cosby trial.

But we are not done. If the court has proven to be just, it has also reinforced how few voices in American media can be trusted to listen to you.

This exceptional moment serves as a call to action for Your Content. We refuse to fall in line with the out-of-touch media establishment—and we will not accept the ‘official’ version of events as told by news agencies that side with power and ignore the untold stories.

Your Content will continue to deliver the truth, and not the spin of politicians or those who failed you.

As the world of professional story-tellers spend the next several months trying to explain their embarrassment, while the lamestream media is held to the fire, we proudly declare: Your Content is the people’s paper, and the only publication that power fears.

Cosby, 83, has spent the past two years in a prison outside of Philadelphia after a jury convicted him in 2018 of three aggravated indecent assault counts—and the court deemed the elderly inmate a ‘sexually violent predator’ for posing an ‘imminent safety risk to women.’

As Your Content readers know, Judge Steven O’Neill assigned himself the privilege of presiding over the Cosby trial.

[pulpman2]

The Warning

Gina slowly and deliberately pulled her gun from out of her bag as the handle to the door to her darkened living room silently turned and the door edged open. Gina tucked herself behind, holding her breath, her mouth dry, her body tingling with fear and excitement as the adrenaline coursed through her. A male hand appeared, clutching a revolver. Gina immediately brought her gun down on the intruder’s wrist. He cried out with pain, his gun clattered to the floor and his arm withdrew. The woman wrenched the door open, snapped on the light and stood in the doorway, both hands pointing her weapon up the hallway, fully expecting it to be empty, but the blue suited housebreaker was standing there, clutching his wrist, looking guilty. “Don’t move!” the female PI said and advanced on the discomfited man, patting him down in search of additional weapons. “Who sent you?” she demanded. “Let me explain, Miss Kane,” the intruder replied, almost looking hurt, “you’ve got this all wrong.” Gina gazed at him hard. She had that before. “On your knees!” she ordered. “And put your hands behind your back!” The man wearily did as she instructed. Gina placed her gun on the hall table, pulled down a thin scarf from her cloak stand and knelt behind her prisoner and began to tie him up.

“I’m not even working on a case!’ the detective told the stranger as she bound him. “You must be a blast from the past!” To her surprise her captive gave a short laugh. “I didn’t come to harm or threaten you, Miss Kane,” he said, “I’ve been sent by a friend of yours. I came to warn you.”

My interpretation of the story behind the cover to The Brink of Death by CKM Scanlon, G-Men Detective magazine (Spring 1951, Volume 38, No 1)

[subarublue]

Where’s a Stud When You Need One?

One Shot

Fandom: Devil May Cry

Timeline: Not specified

Rating: Teen

Pairing: Dante x Reader (Reader’s gender not mentioned)

Word Count: 2255

Read on Ao3

Summary: “Babe, what’re you doing?”

“I’m trying to find a stud so I can hang this stupid thing up!”

“Well, there’s a stud right here that can hang it for ya!”

Notes: My attempt at humor. Hopefully, it’s at least somewhat funny. This was inspired in part by a discussion I saw on Reddit. I hope that’s okay. I’m still new to this whole writing bit and didn’t know if I needed to ask permission to use it as inspiration or not? Not sure who I would even ask anyway, lol. Oh well. I’ve given credit here so hopefully that’s enough. Not sure if all of it is true or not, but we’ll just pretend for the sake of this story, mkay?

You glared at the little device in your hand. It had been working properly the last time you used it, so why wasn’t it working now? Granted the last time you had used it was quite a while ago. In fact, it was probably about...okay, so you couldn’t exactly remember the last time you’d used it, but that couldn’t be the reason. No, of course not.

You placed the stud finder against the wall again, sliding it from left to right more slowly this time, waiting for that telltale “beep” that indicated the presence of a stud. You passed over the short length of the wall you were working with again for what felt like the one hundredth time. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. You let out a frustrated groan.

Your frustration finally caught the attention of the other person in the room. Dante looked up from the magazine he’d been reading at his desk. His feet were propped up on the wooden surface, which made it a bit awkward for him to turn around and look at you, but he managed.

“Babe, what’re you doing?” You could hear the confusion in his voice when he spoke. You glanced back over your shoulder at him to see his brows furrowed in a look of concern for you.

“I’m trying to find a stud so I can hang this stupid thing up!” You growled, gesturing at the large, heavy, framed mirror leaning against the couch. You turned back to the wall, staring it down as if you could see the studs inside it yourself with your nonexistent x-ray vision.

You heard the plop of the magazine landing on the desk and then your boyfriend’s boots hit the floor, followed by the screech of his chair sliding over wood as he stood.

Dante came up to stand next to you, first looking at the wall, then to the mirror, then at you. As soon as you saw the grin on his face, you knew something stupid was about to come out of his mouth. He gestured to himself, jabbing both his thumbs to his chest. “Well, there’s a stud right here that can hang it for ya!” he punctuated his statement with a wink.

“Not what I meant, Dante and you know it,” you practically growled at him. Normally, you would’ve laughed at your boyfriend’s cheesy one-liners, but you were just irritated enough that you didn’t find it funny this time and you simply glared at him. You really weren’t in the mood for this. Suddenly though, an idea on how to get back at him for his joke came to mind. A stud, huh? We’ll see about that.

Dante was unperturbed by your glaring expression, still smirking at you. That only made you more determined to poke a little fun at him. You still held the stud finder in your hand and you brought it up, holding it next to your face so it was now in his field of view.

Your glare morphed into a mischievous grin and he blinked in surprise at your sudden shift in mood. “So, think you’re a stud, do you? Why don’t we test that out?” You winked back at him.

To his credit, Dante didn’t budge when you suddenly shoved the seemingly defective device into his chest. Unfortunately, you didn’t even get a single moment of victory as the little device immediately let out that telltale “beep” you’d been trying to get for the past half hour on the wall. All you could do was gawk at the little gadget still held flush to his chest. The beeping continued as if it was mocking you; now you wanted to throw the stupid thing across the room.

“Soooo,” Dante drawled and you glanced up to look at him. You immediately regretted that when you saw the roguish grin now plastered on his handsome face and mentally prepared yourself for the teasing that was about to ensue. He paused for a moment, and wiggling his eyebrows at you, spoke over the incessant beeping of the little device, “Looks like it’s working, babe.”

You groaned again as you let your hand drop from his chest which cut short the stuff finder’s beep. There’ll be no living with him after this, you thought over-dramatically. You were back to glaring at him now. “No it’s definitely broken. Or maybe I just bought a moron finder on accident, instead.” You tried to get the ball back in your court for this, but the look on Dante’s face told you he wasn’t going to make it easy for you.

“No, I’m pretty sure it’s working perfectly.” He crossed his arms over his chest, still smirking, “And I can prove it to you.”

You scoffed at that, your tone haughty as you goaded him, “Oh, yeah? How?” You weren’t sure it was a good idea to take up his challenge, but you weren’t backing down either, so you were left with little choice.

Dante uncrossed his arms and held out a hand, silently asking you to hand over the device. You were almost reluctant, but you knew refusing would result in an automatic forfeit so you roughly plopped the little machine into his waiting palm. You weren’t sure how it was possible, but his grin got wider and it did nothing to quell the feeling of dread in your gut. “I’ll show you,” he said confidently.

He turned then and walked over to another section of wall nearby, stopping in front of it, then turned back to look at you. Smirk still in place, he held your gaze, eyes never leaving yours as he lifted the stud finder to the wall. He hadn’t moved it but an inch across the wall before the traitorous little thing started going off and your mouth fell open in surprise. “What the hell?!” Dante broke eye contact with you as he shook with laughter.

“Shit sweetheart, you should see your face right now!” He grinned triumphantly as his laughter settled down. “Guess you just don’t know a stud when you see one.” He wiggled his eyebrows at you again.

To say you were embarrassed was a bit of an understatement. You were pretty sure you were as red as his trademark jacket and you brought your hands up to hide your face from him in hopes of not giving him any more fodder for his teasing.

You heard the beeping of the stud finder come to a stop and then his footfalls as he strode back over to you. He set the device down somewhere (where, you didn’t know or really care at the moment), then felt his hands on yours, gently pulling them away from your red face.

“Don’t worry. I won’t hold it against you.” He was winking at you again. “I’ll just have to show you what a real stud is.” The wiggling eyebrows made a reappearance. You couldn’t help but laugh at it now, as ridiculous and cheesy as it was, realizing belatedly, that this was the end result he’d been going for the whole time. You’d been getting frustrated and he’d come over and put a smile back on your face, just like he always did.

As your laughter tapered off, you raised up on the tips of your toes to give him a peck on the cheek. “Thanks for that,” you said gently. His teasing grin softened into a warm smile at your gratitude. In the end, it seemed you were both winners.

You looked down and picked up the stud finder from where he’d laid it on the coffee table and stared at it with a resigned sigh, turning it over in your hand as you observed it. “I just don’t understand why it wasn’t working for me...” you were talking mostly to yourself, but that didn’t stop Dante from responding.

“Well, you see...” he trailed off, his hand coming up to scratch the back of his head with a sheepish look on his face, “You’re probably gonna have to find somewhere else to hang that if you need a stud.”

“Why?” You gave him a confused look.

He gestured to the area of wall you’d been working with as he spoke, “There’s not a stud in there.”

“WHAT?” He winced a bit as you raised your voice.

“Not sure why. Probably construction just cutting corners when they built the place and didn’t put any in. Or...well, it’s a pretty small section of wall so, maybe it didn’t matter?” he shrugged as he said this, like it was no big deal.

“You mean you knew that all along and you didn’t say anything!?” Your voice was still raised, though not as much as before. He had a bit of a guilty look on his face since, yes, he’d known from the start why your stud finder ‘wasn’t working properly.’

“Hey! You didn’t exactly tell me what you were doing.” He held his hands up in defense for a moment before continuing, “And, well, I think it’s kinda cute when you’re focused and working on a project like that,” he said as if it was a good excuse for not informing you of the problem sooner, “especially when you bend over.” He was back to grinning now and you rolled your eyes at that, annoyed. It didn’t deter him though, “Look at the bright side, babe...at least you know it’s not broken.” He cocked his head to the side with a smile and you found just couldn’t stay mad at him. He had cheered you up after all (even though he could have prevented your frustration in the first place).

“Gotta say though, I didn’t know those things could work on people.” he said curiously as he looked at the device in your hand.

“Well, it’s an electric one, not magnetic, so it makes sense that it would work on a person.” you said as you held it up.

When Dante didn’t respond at first, you looked from the stud finder to him, noting the confusion on his face. “What difference does that make?” The confusion was evident in his voice now too.

You dug into your mind to reach that well of useless knowledge lying around in there somewhere for a (hopefully) Dante-friendly explanation. “Electronic stud finders detect changes in the dielectric constant of the wall. It’s different when it’s over a stud rather than empty wall space.” At your statement, he only had a blank look on his face and you realized your explanation wasn’t as Dante-friendly as you’d hoped.

“So...does it measure the density of the wall, or something like that?” That was a fair assumption on his part, but not quite right.

“Not exactly. It measures how well an object allows an electric field to pass through itself.” You tried to explain it in the simplest way you could think of. There was a long moment of silence as you watched his face. He was no longer looking at you, staring at the floor instead, obviously trying to process that in his head.

Realization finally seemed to dawn on his face after a few moments, but whether it was from understanding or realizing he wasn’t going to understand, you weren’t sure yet. He finally looked up at you again. “Okay, I think I get what you’re saying, so yeah, makes sense why it would work on me. I am a big stud after all.” Dante just couldn’t stay serious for long, and you were fairly certain now that he didn’t get it all, but he had you laughing again, regardless.

“You’re such a dork! Of course it would work on you. Stud or not,” -he gave you mock hurt look at that- “you’re healthy so there’s no reason it wouldn’t.” Well, as healthy as a half-devil who ate almost nothing but pizza and strawberry sundaes could be. You were certain if he were completely human that his horrible diet would have killed him a long time ago.

“What does being healthy have to do with it?” His head was cocked to the side again with that same curious look on his face that you were coming to love more and more.

“Supposedly, if it doesn’t beep when you try it on someone, they could have a bone disorder.” You weren’t sure of the validity of that, but you’d heard it somewhere and it had stuck it your head like all the other tidbits of useless knowledge you had.

“Wait, really?” He looked surprised for a moment before his face slowly melted back into that roguish grin of his. “You mean like an erection lasting more than four hours?”

You groaned at him, “Not that kind of bone disorder!”

“What? I’m sure it’s a valid problem for a lot of guys out there.” He started to gesture to the stairs. “We could always go find out if it’s a problem for me.” He was winking at you again.

You gave him a deadpan look as he started backing away from you towards the stairs. He was throwing you what you assumed he thought was a sexy smirk. You couldn’t deny that it was working though, as you started following him, current project forgotten and out of mind. “Yeah, yeah, like I’d raise awareness for that disorder.” Your voice was dripping with sarcasm.

Dante remained unfazed, scooping you up bridal style and making his way up the stairs, not even missing a beat in his reply, “You’ll raise something, babe.”