For the Weekend Warriors, Weirdos & Whackjobs - Issue #6

Well holy shit, someone figured out the H.H. Holmes mystery.

Oh my sweet Mary Mother of God, did I get sick last week. I mean so sick I don’t even remember what horror or weird shit I watched. I know a lot of horrifying and weird things did come out of me, that’s for sure.

Even with death knocking at my door, the team was able to stomp out some excellent pieces this week. Our resident legal curmudgeon and I dropped another instalment in our ongoing serial “The Hunt”, this one titled: The Micron Man.

You should go read it. Before that, I also tried to eat a plateful of crow very unsuccessfully in: A Troll, A Parcel and a Plea to an Artificial Friend.

In our advocacy work, we sent some books to Calipatria State Prison and Valley State Prison, we lined up some seriously pissed off experts and our team did in fact continue to read, line by line, the thousands of pages of transcripts and exhibits as we prepare to present cases to an Innocence Project team in January.

Finally, after a month, the H.H. Holmes mystery has been solved thanks to a Bullshit Hunting subscriber! A subscriber whose Google skills are clearly better than your author’s.

What Justin (Re)-Listened to This Week

Having posted a brief reference to District Attorney, Birgit Fladager, on Twitter this week I decided to re-listen to this absolute doozy of a podcast from the LA Times: The Trials of Frank Carson. It is the incredible story of how DA Fladager and her associates, leveraged their power to try to ruin and wrongfully imprison an attorney that was running against her in the race for DA. It’s something else.

What Justin Read This Week

The Judge’s List by John Grisham (Amazon Affiliate Link) - Clare had picked this up for me some time ago but I had been struggling with reading throughout most of the pandemic and our daughter’s cancer the last few years so it had collected dust. I can tell you, it took me back to being a kid and reading The Pelican Brief or A Time to Kill. He is such a great author and I can’t put this one down!

Ps. Right when I was going to publish this, ProPublica ran a piece on how judges are governing themselves in problematic ways and it fits perfectly with Grisham’s book.

Side Quest Updates

Winner, winner chicken dinner! Jake Hazelip, with some serious top-tier Googling that is much better than my own, was able to find the source of the H.H. Holmes mystery:

I don't mean to presume you haven't found this URL as it came up pretty quickly, but it even has a fact about Schechter that contradicts ChatGPT's (gasp! AI can be wrong!?) mention of him in that he didn't write a sensational article, but he wrote a book about the sensationalist yellow journalism of the time.

https://www.history.com/news/murder-castle-h-h-holmes-chicago 

You know what, I didn’t find that article or spot that in my travels, so nicely done, Jake! This shows the importance of a diverse team that thinks and works in different ways and everyone gets stumped now and again.

Jake, we just comped you a full year of paid Bullshit Hunting goodness. What more could anyone ask for during the holiday season?

Thank you to everyone who has subscribed, sent words of encouragement this week and for reading all the way down here. We know that’s never an easy task on a Friday.

— Much Love From The Bullshit Hunting Crew

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