by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
They say that fate is written in the stars, and if this is true, then Rayna Tom Carmen’s fate was sealed the night he slid into the passenger side of his friend Warren Kinsman’s automobile—for he would never be the same again.
by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
“I killed her because I hated her. I thought of killing her before, but I never had the guts until now.” --Alice Elizabeth Richard, 14, 1950
It was as plain and straight-forward a motive as there ever could be, but no one paid it any mind. There just had to be more to it than that—after all, what would a teenage bobbysoxer know, even if she was the killer in question?
This week we reviews of three more mysteries to start off February-Haunting and Homicide:A Ghost Tour Mystery, Book One by Ava Burke, The Matter of the Secret Bride by Darcie Wilde, Gathering Mist by Margaret Mizushima (this one got lost during the holidays which is why it is so late).
by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
The fog was otherworldly that morning, as if a ravenous ghost had swallowed the Central Valley whole. Blanketing California’s agricultural heartland in a spectral haze of bone-chilling mist, it swept over the dormant vegetation in swirling tendrils of unearthly murk.
by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
Sunday, November 2, 1986, Day of the DeadHalloween was on a Friday that year—a boon to schoolkids flying high on a candy-fueled sugar rush, and for those party-hardy adults who’d be nursing hangovers the next day. All had that entire weekend to recover.
by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
Like an emaciated ghost gliding through a neon haze of emerald static, an impossibly slender column of white ectoplasm swept across the frosty front lawn of a suburban residence in Fresno, California, its stick-like shadow knifing along beside it.
by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
What began as a joke by a San Francisco pundit in 1906—the earliest Joaquin Murrieta ghost reference I could find in the California press—would become a headless paranormal powerhouse by mid-century.
First appearing as a put-upon spirit placating the weepy wraith of Scottish pirate Captain Kidd in A.J. Waterhouse’s “Occidental Accidentals” humor column in The San Francisco Call and Post, the ghost of Joaquin Murrieta retained his head—but not his sense of humor—in Why Kidd’s Ghost Wept.
by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
“The Weekly Alta has recently begun the publication of the story of Joaquin Murrieta, revised. The story is more attractive in its new form than ever before, and the publishers have been unable to supply the demand for back numbers.” --The Santa Barbara Times, Saturday, November 26, 1870, p. 2
by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
Cordelia Brown Botkin was a woman of voracious and insatiable appetites: for sex, for sugar, for liquor, and gambling, and murder. And in time, she would become as well-known for her love of cheesecake photo shoots as she was for her love of the decadent dessert itself.
by Sarah Peterson-Camacho
Emma Theresa Cole Barrett Williams McVicar LeDoux was promptly charged with the premeditated, first-degree murder of one Albert Newton McVicar, and she pleaded not guilty to the charge.
