True Crime Campfire

In August of 2012, the family of an Irish woman named Elaine O’Hara reported her missing. Investigators located her car near the seashore, but found no sign of Elaine herself. She had been struggling with her mental health for most of her life; in fact, the day she disappeared was the day she got home from a five-week stay in a psychiatric hospital. So after a brief investiga...

In Part One of this story last week, we followed the rise to riches of hotel owner Ben Novack Sr. and his glamorous model wife Bernice, and the spoiled yet lonely life of their son Benji. When we left off, Ben and Bernice were divorced, and Benji’s own first marriage had just ended. He had just gotten together with an exotic dancer named Narcy, a choice that would eventually ...

It has sometimes been said that great wealth is a curse—usually by people who have never had to go hungry, but there is something to it. The idea of the miserable millionaire goes back much further than Ebeneezer Scrooge. If you dedicate everything you have to the pursuit of wealth, then what’s left over for the rest of your life? In particular, the children of the very wealt...

There are some crimes and schemes that must be just about as old as humanity itself. I’m sure handsome scammers have been wooing the daughters of wealthy families for about as long as the concepts of marriage and inheritance have existed. And I’m equally sure that every now and again, one of those handsome scammers got tired of waiting for nature to take its course, and decid...

In his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde tells the story of a handsome young man who makes a deal with the Devil—his soul, in exchange for eternal youth and beauty. But there is a portrait of Dorian in the attic of his house, and as he moves through the years with his handsome face not aging, the portrait ages—and it also begins to show the poison seeping through ...