A Murder in Music City: Corruption, Scandal, and the Framing of an Innocent Man by Bishop Michael

Author:Bishop, Michael [Bishop, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781633883468
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2017-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

When Kay Masterson, one of Paula Herring's dorm mates at the University of Tennessee, had sent me a copy of a 1964 true detective–styled magazine, it was my first look at one of the most popular publications of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.1 What I might initially have described as a disturbing and morbid genre turned out to have been enormously popular with the public, to the tune of a couple of million subscribers per month during its heyday. But with the advent of competing pulp fiction paperbacks, such as the ones John Randolph Clarke read, the detective magazine genre began taking a nosedive in popularity and eventually ceased publication by the mid-1990s.2

The photographs inside the magazines were so graphic that multiple psychiatrists and forensic psychologists had determined that a high percentage of the perpetrators of sexual crimes comprised the main readership of such magazines. It was not a comforting thought. To put it simply, the detective magazine genre had been used as a type of sadistic pornography, but, with the advent of the Internet, the World Wide Web effectively replaced the magazine delivery model and ultimately provided a different source of even more graphic material for some of its disturbed readers.3

Unfortunately, I now had a need to discover what had been written in the genre about the Paula Herring murder case. After an extended search, I stumbled upon a source of archived detective magazines from the 1950s and 1960s, from a company known as Patterson Smith. I phoned the company, based in New Jersey, and explained that I needed to supplement my research into a 1964 murder case with any magazines that might have covered the crime in the same timeline. When asked about key words for indexing the search, I offered up a short list of names to use for cross-reference: Paula Herring, Jo Herring, John Randolph Clarke, and Red Clarke.

The Patterson Smith contact softened my view of the genre by noting that, in many cases, the old magazines had provided clues and comfort to family members researching past tragedies or themselves exploring cold murder cases. Two weeks later, the Patterson Smith representative let me know that they had found multiple sources of coverage of the Paula Herring slaying, and, for a reasonable fee, I could receive a handful of the original magazines in my mailbox. I didn't hesitate to place an order.

Three days later, I received the publications, each individually wrapped in plastic to protect pages that were now almost four decades old and yellowing. The magazines ran sixty-five to seventy-five pages each. Their dimensions were the size of any modern-day magazine, and when initially circulated ranged in price from twenty-five to thirty-five cents, published by companies based in New York, New Jersey, and Chicago. I noted that a three-year subscription could be had for the tidy sum of $11.00 for most of the publications.

Inside every magazine, the nostalgic advertisements of yesteryear were splashed from front to back. In 1964, one could become a fingerprint expert or

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.