True Crime Blog

Corrina Smith was convicted of killing her husband, Michael Baines, by pouring boiling water mixed with sugar over him while he slept. She told police she had just learned that he had been sexually abusing their children.

The murder took place on 14 July, 2020, and the mixture of boiling water and sugar was likened to "napalm," causing severe burns that led to Michael Baines' death five weeks later in hospital. He had burns covering 36% of his body.

Smith initially fled the scene but later confessed to a neighbor, who called the police. She was arrested and charged with murder. In court, she pleaded not guilty, arguing that she acted out of sudden anger and distress upon hearing allegations about her husband.

According to Smith, her daughter had just told her that Baines had sexually abused her and her brother, who had taken his own life in 2007.

16-year-old Cheryl Pierson was a popular cheerleader from Long Island with numerous friends and a loving boyfriend, Robert Cuccio. But behind this facade of normality, she was harbouring a horrific secret. Since the tender age of 11, Cheryl’s father, James Pierson Sr., had been abusing her.

The first assault happened when James was driving Cheryl to visit her mother in hospital. As they drove, he fondled her. She later recollected how he would often force her to the bed and tell her to pretend that he was her boyfriend. She was subjected to “all kinds of sex” and was often being raped at least twice a day.

Whenever James felt as though Cheryl was acting out of place, he would beat her mercilessly and would even exact punishment on her dog, Cocoa: He kicked her so hard that she bounced off the wall and then cried for hours. “He wouldn’t let me go near her to comfort her. She kept crying and it made me feel so sad I wanted to die,” Cheryl said. He was a ticking time bomb. He had such a ferocious temper that he once punched Cheryl in the face when he learnt she had sent a Valentine’s Day card to a boy that he didn’t approve of. Cheryl often showed up to school riddled with bruises.

When Cheryl’s mother passed away in 1985, she hoped the abuse would cease but her hopes couldn’t have been further from the truth. In fact, the abuse became more frequent and Cheryl would be assaulted up to three times a day.

16-year-old Sean Pica sat beside Cheryl in their high school homeroom. As the duo chatted one day about a recent hitman murder, Cheryl confided in Sean that she wanted somebody to kill her father. After withstanding the abuse for years, Cheryl reached her final tether when her father threatened that he would assault her 8-year-old sister.

One afternoon when Cheryl came home from school, she found James and her younger sister “roughhousing” around on the carpet. She was seething; she didn’t want her sister to go through the same trauma she had been subjected to, so she decided to take things into her own hands...

𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐌𝐨𝐫𝐞:

June and Jennifer Gibbons are often referred to as "The Silent Twins." They were identical twins that were born on April 11, 1963, in Barbados and raised in Wales. Their unique and mysterious bond captivated public interest and psychological study for decades.

From an early age, the twins exhibited a deeply insular connection, communicating exclusively with each other in a private language that made them nearly unintelligible to others. This behavior, combined with their selective mutism around anyone else, led to them being labeled as "silent."

As they grew older, the twins became increasingly withdrawn, retreating into a world of their own making. They were eventually placed in a special school, but their behavior only became more erratic and detached. The Gibbons sisters began to engage in petty crime and acts of vandalism, leading to their arrest and subsequent confinement in Broadmoor Hospital, a high-security psychiatric institution, in 1982.

While at Broadmoor, the twins' mental health further deteriorated, but they continued to share an intense, almost telepathic bond. In 1993, after 11 years of confinement, Jennifer Gibbons suddenly died of acute myocarditis, a rare inflammation of the heart, shortly after the twins were transferred to a lower-security facility.

On the 23rd of May, 1996, a man was walking along a wooded canal bank on old U.S. 27 in Clewiston, Palm Beach County, Florida. As he was searching for scrap metal and cans, he came across a seemingly discarded maroon and white Indian or Mexican style blanket and a woman’s black and white sweater.

As he got closer to the blanket and sweater, it became apparent that there was a deceased baby girl wrapped inside. She was estimated to be around 3 to 5-weeks-old and was either white or Hispanic. She had black or dark brown hair and due to decomposition, it couldn’t be determined what colour her eyes were. An autopsy concluded that the baby girl had a fractured mandible and maxilla and that she had either died of accidental or intentional injuries.

It was announced that the death was being investigated as a murder. An investigation into the murder as well as the identity of the baby girl was soon underway. Since the body was so decomposed, fingerprints couldn’t be lifted. Footprints, however, could be lifted and investigators compared the footprints to hundreds of footprints of missing children that were available at hospitals. None were a match, however.

On 19 August, 1986, 44-year-old Patrick Henry Sherrill, who was employed as a mail carrier in Edmond, Oklahoma, got into an argument with two supervisors over his lousy work. 

Enraged by this encounter, he returned to his place of employment, the post office, the following morning with three pistols and his postal satchel filled  with ammunition. He entered the post office and blocked off all of the exits before opening fire on his co-workers. 

He ended up murdering 14 people and wounding another six. One victim was one of the supervisors who had  reprimanded Sherrill the previous day. The other supervisor was luckily late for work that morning due to oversleeping. Sherrill then turned the gun on himself. 

This is a developing story that is happening right now in my country and I thought it was my duty as somebody who has a slight platform to bring this up to the attention of as many people as possible. If we spread her image around the net, someone will hopefully be able to recognize her. I apologize in advance for any mistakes, as English is not my native language.

What we know so far: on Saturday the 11th, September of 2021, a local fisherman spotted a woman he didn't know on the rocks some distance away from a nearby popular beach. She didn't appear to be in bad spirits or in distress, and the area where she was at was not approachable to him by boat due to it being extremely rocky, but as she didn't call out to him he assumed she was just walking or relaxing there and paid it no mind.

However, the next day when he came back (Sunday the 12th), she yelled out to him asking for help in perfect English. As he could not get to her on his own due to the terrain making it impossible for him to dock there, he immediately called rescuers and a mission to save the unfortunate woman was underway. 12 members of HGSS Rijeka (Croatian alpine search and rescue organization) were dispatched to the scene and had to hike one mile to get to her.

They found the woman with some non-life threatening injuries, exhausted, dehydrated and disoriented. It was determined she spent the previous night there. She was unable to walk so they had to use a stretcher to carry her to the ambulance. She couldn't tell them who she was, as she could not remember and even today, over a week later, she can offer no answers to her identity and our police is asking the public for help.

The woman (and I can't stress it enough that I hate calling her 'the woman' because she has a name and identity and a life and deserves to be known as more than just "unknown woman found injured on the rocks") is estimated to be around 60 years of age, is of medium build, 165 cm tall, with blue eyes and blonde, short hair. I've seen it reported as shoulder-length but in the photos her hair looks a little shorter to me.

At the moment of discovery, she was dressed in a dark blue and white striped short-sleeve shirt with a hood, black Capri pants, white socks, dark blue and white sneakers and a magenta pick bucket hat. She had no ID or a mobile phone on her. The fisherman's wife who was also on the boat with him has said that they spoke in English and that to her it seemed that her accent could have been Scottish, but she wasn't sure.

I'd like to add that the fisherman should not be blamed for not helping her the day before, as she was not in distress, did not seem to be lost or injured from what he could tell and was not communicating with anyone nor asking for help, and only when he went back the day later, did she asked for help and make it known that something's not right. It's a good thing he went back because he likely saved her life.

She's currently still in the hospital in stable condition and recovering well, but the police are no closer to finding out who she is. Nobody knows how she got to where she was found or if there was any foul play involved, but there has to be somebody out there who knows who she is, that's why I implore you to share her photo wherever you can so we can help her reclaim her identity.

I'm including the photo of her face with the injuries she sustained because it's the only good photo of her we have right now, and of the rescue mission so you could get a better look at her clothes from when she was found.

In the end, I'd like to thank you all for taking your time to read this lengthy post and for caring about a woman you don't even know who needs our help.

Sources I used for information: CNN Index.hr HGSS Net.hr

Yeah, societal fascination with crime is hardly new. It’s just that true crime fans have an unfortunate tendency to approach violent crimes the same way a stan would a new episode of Criminal Minds and forget that the victims are very real people with families that are likely still in pain over what’s been done to them.

Letter Susan DeWitt wrote to Eric Harris after the massacre.

Susan DeWitt is the girl that Eric spent an evening with while Dylan was having the time of his life at prom. They watched a movie together and he kissed her on the cheek.

In the basement tapes Eric references Susan, saying she can have a CD of his (I forget which CD currently) and that he's "sorry, under different circumstances it would have been different."

On 23 May, 2014, 22-year-old Elliot Rodger went on a murder spree near the campus of University of California in Santa Barbara, killing six people and injuring another thirteen before taking his own life.

The spree began with the stabbing of three men in his apartment, two of whom were his roommates. He then drove to Alpha Phi, a nearby sorority house, and shot three female students standing outside. One managed to survive but the other two died from their wounds. 

From the sorority house, Elliot drove to a local deli and began shooting, killing one male student. He then drove off while shooting pedestrians from his car and striking several others with his car. The killing spree finally came to an end when Elliot crashed his car into a parked vehicle. He then shot himself in the head. 

Before Elliot began this brutal killing spree, he had uploaded a video to YouTube which he had titled “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution”. In this disturbing video, he revealed his motivation for his attack. He described his desire to punish women for rejecting him. He also blamed other men who were successful with women and therefore living a more enjoyable life than him. 

On the 25th of January, 2005, 10-year-old Katlyn “Katie” Collman departed her Crothersville, Indiana, home, to pick up some toilet paper from a Dollar Store just a couple of blocks away. When she didn’t come home, her parents reported her missing and an AMBER Alert was issued. A search team was quickly assembled but there was no sign of Katie.

Five days later, Katie’s lifeless body was discovered in a creek approximately 15 miles from her home. She had been raped before being forcibly drowned in the creek. Nearby, investigators found a discarded cigarette butt which they DNA tested and compared it to the DNA found on Katie’s body. It was a match; the DNA testing results led to Anthony Ray Stockelman. After pleading guilty in exchange for the death penalty being taken off the table, Stockelman was sentenced to life imprisonment.

While the story should have ended there, it certainly didn’t. Also incarcerated in the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility, where Stockelman was serving his sentence, was Katie’s cousin, Jared Harris. On 22 September, 2006, Harris slipped into Stockelman’s open cell. When Stockelman entered the cell, Harris slammed the locked door behind them. He then held Stockelman down and tattooed “KATIE’S REVENGE” on his forehead

Jessica Keen