Is true crime unbelievable as fiction?

 While using some version of reality in a story adds relevancy and urgency, there are some real crime scenarios that are far too crazy to be credible. In Fatal Business, I used a possible deer hunting accident as the hook. For much of the US, that fall deer hunt is an annual occurrence, and accidental shootings are totally plausible. 

While perusing the news, others pop out that are just too crazy to put into a fictional mystery:

A few years ago, there was an article about an abused woman who'd killed her husband during a domestic dispute. Her abuse was well documented, and the neighbors reported frequent loud and apparently violent arguments coming from her residence. The district attorney said he was inclined to accept the defense's contention that the woman was acting in self-defense...if not for the fact that she'd killed two previous husbands under nearly the same circumstances. It sounds like a great fiction plot, but who'd believe that?

While doing research (I do A LOT of research, the topic of an earlier blog) I read an article about "Burking" as a murder technique. The term was coined when a pair of 1800s Scottish miscreants developed a business of supplying bodies to a medical school for dissection. The school, being upstanding and ethical, wouldn't accept the body of an obvious murder victim. So, our miscreants, Mr. Burke and his partner Mr. Hare, resorted to grave robbing. When the demand for cadavers outstripped the rate of "natural deaths", the partners devised a plan to procure more cadavers. They identified homeless people and drunks; people who wouldn't be readily missed. After Mr. Hare knocked them down, Mr. Burke, who was apparently a very large man, sat on their chests until they suffocated. The medical school apparently accepted these victims as natural deaths, providing Burke and Hare with a good business until their landlady found one of their victims stored under a bed. She alerted the police who arrested the pair. The official cause of the victim's death was traumatic asphyxia caused by pressure on the chest, but the verb "Burking" is now applied to deaths caused by manual asphyxiation.

As with the woman who had killed off three husbands, I balk at using Burking as a cause of death in my books. Who would believe a modern victim had been killed by a very large person sitting on the victim's chest? I mean really, does that even seem plausible?

Hmm? Maybe if the killers were parked outside a secluded bar at closing time....

Excuse me. I have a book outline to write.

Check out my books at:

Hovey, Dean - BWL Publishing Inc. (bookswelove.net)