With Gina and some of the Press-Enterprise gang circa … back in the day.
As any scribe will attest, the best (and weirdest) stories from one’s career didn’t always make it into the newspaper. I collected a few of my favorites here.
The Perfect Murder? Prologue
One of the strangest stories I ever covered was the disappearance of industrialist Joe Derr in Acapulco, Mexico – and the ensuing tug of war between his prospective benefactors: Donald Baggett, his albino bodybuilder lover and accused killer, and the small Pennsylvania town that exiled him for being a homosexual when he was a boy.…
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Chapter 1: Red Room
This is a true story. It must be. It was in the newspaper. I put it there. So. One evening in 1987, someone called my newsroom to tip us that the tiny town of Benton, Pa., had inherited something close to a million dollars. It was bequeathed by a man no one in Benton at…
Keep readingChapter 2: Titanic Rising
I’d like to say that Cy Ruthenburg’s rich tale of Joseph Derr’s rake’s progress, which hinged, in part, on the unexpected but not unwelcome debut of Oklahoma oilfield gambler Titanic Thomas in Evansville society, wafted on a fuzzy atmosphere of scotch above a spreading Ohio River sunset just over his shoulder, but since Cy’s club…
Keep readingChapter 3: Enter the Albino
By the early seventies, Joe Derr’s need for deception had ebbed. If he needed to pass at a reception at the governor’s mansion up in Indianapolis he had a willing cadre of faded debs to take his arm and help him find his keys. Otherwise, if you wanted Joe Derr, you got Donald Baggett, too.…
Keep readingChapter 4: Hijinks at the Paradise and the Last Man to See Howard Hughes Alive
Unfreeze the frame and Donald Baggett and I are standing on a desolate Evansville street at 2 a.m. If he’s gone to all the trouble of killing his paramour, making his body vanish and confounding the Mexican Federales, the FBI, Interpol and Detective Clay Stinson of the Evansville P.D., I don’t really expect Don to…
Keep readingChapter 5: The Final Footfalls of Joseph Derr
So there we were, Jorge Camps and I, greeting gray daybreak with a couple of bottles of Negra Modelo after completing a strange and most unholy carnal via crucis along Acapulco’s notorious Condesa Beach. We’d chatted up transvestites, prostitutes, pederasts, boys on leashes, bondage buddies, sadists and masochists (like love and marriage, you can’t have…
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The Work of Allah
The fire mine fire that would eventually consume Centralia, Pa., started in 1962 in a garbage dump, ignited a coal seam, and slowly but inexorably spread. Smoke began to pour from spreading fissures and occasionally a sinkhole opened up and swallowed a child.
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The Last Detail
In the late 1980s, my shooter buddy Keith and I traveled to D.C. for what would become the largest public demonstration in American history to that point, far bigger than Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington. The occasion was a pro-choice rally. Hard to beat a gorgeous spring day in D.C. with a story…
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Get Me Rewrite! And a F**king Pastrami Sandwich!
Stuart looked behind him. But there was no one there. He looked at me but I quickly looked down. There was only one Stuart. And it was him. And he was fucked.
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Mike Dillon | In a Minor Key 