Shall we play a game?
I read a lot of True Crime. The first thing I do when I pick up a TC title is page to the middle and look at the pictures. Then, not knowing anything about the story, I play a game I call “Victim, Perp or Copper?” You know, look at the faces, not the captions, and see if I can tell who’s who in the melodrama.
Most murders involve lowlifes who kill other lowlifes, but those don’t tend to have books written about them. Unless it’s a serial killer of the hooker-slaying variety. So, you know, just because the picture is a mugshot, doesn’t mean it’s not a victim.
It’s axiomatic that murderers don’t look like the monsters they are, but it ain’t necessarily so. Some murderers do us all a favor and look explicitly batshit insane.
“Is the man you saw in this lineup?”
“Yes, sir. That’s the man. The hunchback with the pentagram tattoo. The one singing ‘I’m a Little Teapot’ while driving a salad fork into his temple. I never forget a piece of silverware.”
White collar mayhem is a little harder to pin down. Nice people keep their batshit crazy on the inside.
The three people pictured here are all Britons. Brits have a very low murder rate, but they make up for it in quality. British murders are either very twisted or weirdly pointless (well, not today — it’s mostly drug dealers shooting it out these days).
So, let’s play a short round of “Victim, Perp or Copper,” shall we? These three people are from three different incidents. I flipped through Ye Giante Booke of Murther and picked three that (as you may have guessed) look nothing like what they are.
When you’ve made up your mind who’s who, click on each picture to find the answer.
Posted: February 26th, 2007 under true crime.
Comments: 11
Comments
Comment from Enas Yorl
Time: February 26, 2007, 11:04 am
I got two out of three. I figured the guy in the police uniform to be a “victim”.
Firefly has some nice features to it, but it bugs out WAYYY too often. I stopped using it entirely a while back.
Comment from Alissa
Time: February 26, 2007, 12:01 pm
But the dude in the uniform looks totally insane to me.
Comment from S. Weasel
Time: February 26, 2007, 12:10 pm
Interesting. It doesn’t work if you try it from inside the comments, either.
I think it may be because the little piece of javascript I insert to do the picture change is in my post — therefore it’s technically in the body of the post rather than the header, where scripts are supposed to be. That may be a security thing, to prevent people tucking code where it shouldn’t be.
To put it in the header.php files means that every post has the script in it. But maybe that’s not bad. Maybe I can write a few simple, generic routines that get loaded every time, just in case I need them.
When I was building this site, I initially set up a little server/database thing on my laptop and built it locally. You know how it often takes a second to serve you a blog page? I always assumed that was a bandwidth issue. But, no, there was a noticeable pause when I was loading pages right off my own hard drive. That lag is the time it takes to assemble a document out of all its little .php parts, I guess.
Anyhow, I can’t access my .php files from work, so I’ll experiment later. But, yes Alissa: the dude in the uniform is indeed totally insane.
Comment from ombudsben
Time: March 3, 2007, 4:02 pm
I love it that the Crown’s executioner ends up against capital punishment.
do you know when he had his conversion? Was it after Nuremburg?
Comment from S. Weasel
Time: March 3, 2007, 4:40 pm
It’s been years since I read his autobiography, so I don’t recall exactly. I think he was not in favor for at least some of the time that he was performing the service. He was the last to hold the job.
It was a family business, see. His uncle was the hangman before him, and his father before him. His uncle lost the gig for drunkenness.
Comment from jwpaine
Time: March 5, 2007, 8:36 pm
Well, first of all, I only see TWO pix in your post, not three. That said, I tried both Firefox and IE; Firefox no workee. IE does, but that ain’t nearly enough impetus to get me to switch back.
Great site, though!
Comment from S. Weasel
Time: March 6, 2007, 6:21 am
You only see two pics? How many fingers am I holding up?
Yes, I’ve been meaning to get to the bottom of why Firefox won’t take this VERY simple piece of javascript. I’d like to do more of this, but the stats tell me FF has a pretty high market share.
In the meantime, it’s: state executioner, serial killer and axe murderess, for those of you who weren’t curious enough to switch over to IE for the answer.
Comment from lizardbrain
Time: March 15, 2007, 3:48 pm
Firefox here, and no pix at all.
I tried to embed the PJ Media Straw Voting Booth Thingy in my sidebar, but something kept scraping the JavaScript out. Maybe a WordPress thing? I dunno. I’m not as smart as I used to be.
And you can put that finger down, now.
Comment from Frit
Time: September 11, 2010, 8:13 am
Ok, I use FF, and now you have me curious as to who is who in those pics.
Was the female perhaps the infamous Lizzy Borden? And who was the nutcase in uniform?
(Trying to muffle gigglefits at Lizardbrain’s comment about Stoaty’s finger.)
Comment from S. Weasel
Time: September 11, 2010, 11:41 am
Top left: Albert Pierrepoint, state executioner. Bottom left: Dennis Nilsen, serial killer. Bottom right: axe murderesss, whose name escapes me.
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