Denise Noe
Denise Noe has written on true crime for Gauntlet,
Ménage, Comrades, Chrysalis Quarterly, Crime Library,
and The Lizzie Borden Quarterly.
She is the community editor for The Caribbean Star,
a monthly magazine. She has also published articles in The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, The Humanist, Newcomer, The
Brookhaven Buzz, Georgia Journal, Exquisite Corpse, The
Gulf War Anthology, and Light.
Updated:
The Attempted Assassination of George
Wallace.
(09/14/03; updated 09/19/07)
Arthur Bremer tried to fill the void in his miserable
life by taking the life of Gov. George Wallace in 1972. He failed on both
counts.
Updated:
Cold Case: The Murder of Emmett Till.
(11/27/06; updated 3/12/07)
The brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi
in 1955 galvanized the fledging civil rights movement like no other killing of a black
by white racists before it. After an all-white, all-male jury acquitted Till's two killers,
the case festered for 49 years until the U.S. Justice Department reopened it in 2004. In late
February of 2007, a Lefore County, Miss. grand jury declined to issue any new indictments,
effectively bringing the case to an abrupt and ignoble end.
Updated: Pedophile Priest: The Crimes of Father Geoghan.
(12/01/03, updated 01/25/06)
Father
John Geoghan sexually molested young boys for over three decades with the full
knowledge of the Archdiocese of Boston. By the time Cardinal Bernard Law got
around to having him defrocked in 1993, Geoghan had become the poster boy for
the priest-pedophilia scandal that racked every Catholic diocese in the United
States.
The Lynching of Leo Frank.
(03/14/05)
Virulent
anti-Semitism led directly to the arrest, prosecution, conviction, and
lynching of the innocent, but Jewish, Leo Frank. Police and prosecutors
fabricated evidence to win a death by hanging verdict. When the governor of
Georgia commuted Frank's sentence to life in prison, a resurgent Klan mob
stormed the prison and re-imposed the original sentence.
The Manson Myth.
(12/12/04)
Thirty-five years after the Tate-LaBianca
murders, it's time to demystify the would-be messiah that Vincent Bugliosi
portrayed in the best-selling true-crime book of all time, Helter Skelter.
The real Charles Manson was a semi-literate, petty criminal – car thief, check
forger, pimp, drug dealer – so insecure about his ability to cope in the real
world that on the day of the parole that plunged him into infamy he begged
prison officials not to release him.
Sirhan Sirhan: Assassin of Modern U.S. History.
(05/27/04)
Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert Kennedy on the first anniversary of
the Six-Day War "willfully, premeditatively, with 20 years of malice
aforethought." He also assassinated modern U.S. history.
Leopold and Loeb's
Perfect Crime. (02/29/04)
Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold were as unlikely a pair of cold-blooded
murderers as ever appeared in U.S. history. Privileged, brilliant, and coddled,
they conjured up the perfect crime – just for the hell of it – and then executed
it quite imperfectly. Only Clarence Darrow's virtuoso courtroom performance
saved these remorseless, self-styled "supermen" from being hanged.
The Murder of Sal Mineo. (05/01/03)
Residents of New York City’s
crime-ridden Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood predicted that Salvatore Mineo Jr. –
the slight boy who would grow up to set off "Mineo Mania" and become known as
"The Switchblade Kid" in the process –
would end up on the wrong end of a knife.
They were right, but not for the reasons they thought.
