Boston's Combat Zone: The Scene Of One Of The City’s Most Brutal Murders

Anyone who has spent any time in or around the city of Boston knows The Combat Zone. Or at least knows enough not to go there. It’s just about the city’s most notorious neighborhood, and earned its name in the 1950s when brawls between local biker gangs and sailors frequently spilled out of the bars along lower Washington Street. As Don Strandley wrote in Crime Reads last week, despite the area’s reputation, it wasn’t merely a community of reprobates and drifters. In fact, it was common to see elderly women and conservative businessmen cutting through the area on their way to a bus or subway station, or strolling the streets to buy a slice of pizza. Disregarding the dangers, many of the regulars who lived and worked there were linked by a common good-humored attitude. Some of the strippers were friendly to customers, and many of the area sex workers were known by their first names. It was here that, in March of 1983, Tufts University professor William Douglas brutally murdered 21-year old Robin Benedict by striking her in the head with a 2-1/2 pound sledge hammer, dumping her blood-stained clothes in a trash barrel, discarding her body in a dumpster, and then abandoning her car…

The Long Kiss Goodnight Is A Great

Thriller That's Also A Christmas Film

The Long Kiss Goodnight is one of my favorite thrillers; the fact that it takes place during the holidays also makes it one of my favorite Christmas films. That’s not to say I watch it every year along with all the usual suspects that tend to be more associated with the season (e.g.: The Holiday, Christmas Vacation, Love Actually, etc.). But it’s a tightly constructed story of mystery and intrigue as we follow schoolteacher, wife, and mother Samantha Caine (Geena Davis), who lives an average suburban life—until she hits a deer with her car on an icy road and begins having strange memories of violence. Unable to explain what she’s experiencing, she hires private detective Mitch Hennessey (Samuel L. Jackson) to look into her past, and he quickly learns that she's a well-trained government assassin who went missing after suffering a bout of amnesia. The film’s director, Renny Harlin, has said it’s his favorite of all the movies he’s made, noting, “It had a really good screenplay, which meant that I was able to get really good actors … It's always challenging to make a movie, but it sure makes it easier when you have a good screenplay like that one.” The violence and language might make it hard for some viewers to take, but it’s in my queue to watch again before Santa arrives.

Truman Capote, The Millionaire’s Wife,

And The Murder Of The Century

In the early hours of Sunday, October 30, 1955, New York socialite Ann Woodward killed her husband with a shotgun she kept by the side of her bed in their mansion on the North Shore of Long Island. The previous evening, the couple had been at a party in honor of the Duchess of Windsor, and conversation had been peppered with stories about a recent clutch of break-ins in Oyster Bay Cove. As Jim Kelly wrote in Air Mail last week, “Both Ann and her husband, Billy, drank too much and had affairs, and talk of divorce was very much in the air. She insisted she thought the man she heard in the dark hallway was an intruder (Ann and Billy slept in separate bedrooms), and a grand jury declined to indict her. Off to Europe she went, at her mother-in-law’s insistence, and the couple’s two young boys departed for boarding school in Switzerland, to evade the harsh glare of publicity.” Then, two decades later, Truman Capote published a story titled “La Côte Basque, 1965” in Esquire magazine, in which Woodward was thinly disguised as Ann Hopkins, a “white-trash slut” who had killed her husband after he had asked for a divorce. “The details in Capote’s too-close-to-fact story were lurid, and someone had slipped an advance copy of his story to Woodward,” Kelly says. “Just before the magazine came out, Woodward put on her favorite dress, applied her makeup, took a handful of Seconal, and went to bed. Later, when informed of her daughter-in-law’s suicide, Billy’s mother said, ‘That’s that. She shot my son, and Truman just murdered her.’”

DNA COLD CASE

Baby Kidnapped 51 Years Ago In

Texas Found Safe In Texas

A Texas woman kidnapped as a baby 51 years ago was reunited with her family after they used a home DNA test kit to track her down. As reported by NBC News, Melissa Highsmith was 22 months old in August 1971 when she was allegedly abducted from her family's Fort Worth apartment by a babysitter. The toddler's mother, Alta Apantenco, was accused by police of possibly killing her daughter and hiding the crime, but the family insisted the baby was taken from the home by a woman who answered Apantenco's newspaper ad seeking help. Since the mother had to be at work, her roommate handed Melissa to the supposed sitter, who said her name was Ruth Johnson and was described as well-dressed and wearing white gloves. Johnson never returned little Melissa that evening, and could not be reached. Fort Worth police and the FBI soon became involved, but more than 50 years later, very few leads had surfaced. Family members recently organized a Facebook page named “Finding Melissa Highsmith,” and solicited help in finding their missing relative. Then, three months ago, they used the results of a 23andMe DNA test, a birthmark on Melissa, and her birthday to confirm that she indeed was the girl who had been taken from them 51 years ago. Melissa was reunited with her mother, her father, and two of her four siblings last week in Fort Worth. Authorities at this point don’t know what became of “Ruth Johnson,” the babysitter. The statute of limitations to criminally prosecute her expired 20 years after Highsmith’s 18th birthday.

Ten Of The Best Christmas Thrillers

To Watch This Holiday Season

With the festive holiday season upon us, what better way to welcome the Christmas spirit than by engaging in a full-on, pulse-quickening film-fest? As freelance film writer Matthew Thrift notes in an article in BFI, horror movies with a demented yuletide bent offer plenty of off-kilter fare to choose from during the holiday season, but the Christmas thriller is an even rarer beast. That said, “There are some bona fide gems that offer some deliciously alternative yuletide viewing, from film noir classics to big-budget action to the furthest extremes of French cinema.” To that end, he’s compiled this list of ten of the best Christmas suspense movies that either have either been relegated to the island of lost films, or whose holiday spirit is overshadowed by other cinematic elements. For instance, who remembers 1944’s Christmas Holiday, adapted from a W. Somerset Maugham novel, and starring Deanna Durbin (eager to escape the wholesome reputation earned from a career in musicals) and Gene Kelly in a rare bad-guy role? Or 1961’s Blast Of Silence, which features this classic line: “When the Better Business Bureau rings the Christmas bell, the suckers forget there’s such a business as murder, and businessmen who made it their exclusive line, like you, Baby Boy Frankie Bono out of Cleveland.”

Coming January 10, 2023:

Greenwich Mean Time

“A globe-spanning, mind-spinning thriller that will delight fans of Jason Bourne. Rōnin Phythian, an assassin with extraordinary powers and a code of his own, deserves a sequel. Make that sequels.” —Joseph Finder, New York Times bestselling author of House on Fire

“Greenwich Mean Time is a rollicking good time of thrills and skills.” —New York Times bestselling author Steve Berry

When photojournalist Monica Cross literally stumbles into the site of an old airplane crash at the edge of a Himalayan glacier, she is exposed to a dark and deadly secret that was meant to remain hidden forever. Unaware that her life is in grave danger, she attempts to get home to New York while the Greenwich Global Group—a dark-web, murder-for-hire outfit—pulls out all stops to make sure she never gets there. Spanning ten time zones, nine countries, and four continents, Greenwich Mean Time is a tightly spun thriller that plays out against a sinister plot designed to change the course of history for all time.