Each week, The Extraordinary Times catches up with friends in the local community. This week, it’s our pleasure to catch up with journalist and writer Richard O Jones. After a 25-year career working for his home-town newspaper, Richard took a buy-out from the grind of daily journalism in 2013 and turned to a life of true crime. He has written two books on historical murders in the area and has an international following for his podcast True Crime Historian, where he tells weekly stories culled from vintage newspaper accounts. You can also find his articles on local history in The Hamiltonian magazine.
* How have you been keeping lately? As well as can be expected, I suppose. This pandemic put a severe crimp on my plans to unfetter myself from the bondage of real estate and travel the country in my van, hunting down murders and good regional food. I came down with symptoms of Covid-19 way back in March, and have since been parked in front of my girlfriend’s house in Pleasant Ridge (a Cincinnati neighborhood). I have been fortunate in that I have still been able to work and only missed a couple of magazine articles when the libraries were closed, so I have been able to keep busy for the most part. I have also taken up sewing, first to create storage solutions for my van, but have also started making clothes for myself. And a friend recently challenged me to learn the harmonica, so I know two songs already, “Oh, Susannah” and “Turkey In The Straw.” Oh, and I’ve also given up pants and am starting to amass a nice collection of kilts. * What draws you to the dark side when it comes to true crime? Actually, it was my love of history that drew me to true crime. After I took the buy-out from the Journal-News in 2013, I started sending out queries to write books from local history, and it was the historical crime angle that got the best response from publishers, so I ended up with two books with History Press, one of them the story of Hamilton’s convicted wife murderer and alleged serial killer Alfred Knapp (“The First Celebrity Serial Killer”), and several shorter, novella-length ebooks that I self-published as “Two-Dollar Terrors”. In doing the research for the Knapp book, I fell in love with historical newspaper writing, and started doing the True Crime Historian podcast as a way of honoring and remembering the mostly un-named writers who documented the murder stories I was encountering. Evocative headlines are like shiny objects when you’re scrolling through old newspaper articles, so there are literally hundreds of forgotten stories out there, even though they may have been national front-page news for several weeks in their day. The newspaper writing back then--my “sweet spot” is from about 1870 to about 1940--was richer, more descriptive, more narrative, and more personal than newspaper writing today. I think I would have done better back then as a journalist myself. I’m in my fifth year of True Crime Historian, and I’m confident there is quite enough material to keep me going for another five. I’m also drawn to the human tragedy inherent in these stories, and that’s what I look for when I choose a case. Every murder has a back-story as well as the story of how justice is served or not, so I like that part of it, too. Every story is an epic, cautionary tale. Basically, though, true crime is just a niche of history that I’ve been able to find a market for, though I truly enjoy digging up the old stories. * From your most optimistic perspective, what is the future of local journalism? I wish you hadn’t asked that question. Frankly, there’s not much to bolster any optimism from what I see. The Internet and social media has killed local journalism, and with all due respect to my friends and colleagues still in the business, I don’t see any hope for real journalism on a local level, which is going to have a profound, negative effect on our social structures and institutions. Without getting into the politics of it, it already shows. Local governments are getting away with murder, sometimes literally, because they can carry on without anyone watching them. There’s a perception now that information is free, and people seem to only want to pay for information that bolsters their own view of the world. When I left the newspaper, I floated two projects, one to provide a truly local, home-grown source of news and information, and the other involving historical murders. No one wanted to pay me to do journalism, so murder won out. * What's on your bookshelf these days? Other than magazines and news, my choice of reading material has been purely escapist and veering toward the apocalyptic since the pandemic. I’ve been going through Stephen King’s Dark Tower series again and revisiting some of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels. A couple of years ago, when I told a friend that I’d been through just about everything Stephen King has written, some of it twice, she suggested Dean Koontz, so I’ve been working my way through his rather large canon. On the non-fiction side of the apocalypse, I’ve recently enjoyed reading Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. I have also been digging into my family tree and reading books related to that. In the spring, I read Benjamin Woolly’s Savage Kingdom: The True Story of Jamestown, 1607, and the Settlement of America as I visited the ruins in Jamestown. In fact, I was there when I started getting the symptoms of Covid-19. * What new projects are you working on? My free-lance work and my podcast work keeps me pretty busy, but I’ve been reworking some of my favorite podcast episodes to turn into a book of true crime short stories, and I have hopes of turning my magazine articles on Hamilton’s Prohibition era into a book on the Little Chicago Gangster Wars. I have also recently started a second podcast, Catastrophic Calamities, in the same vein as True Crime Historian but focusing on disasters rather than murders. I also have an old project that I want to pick up again. Actually, it was my research on the 1975 Ruppert murders that got me started on this true crime career, but the book I wrote has not yet been published. I just haven’t found the right partnership to make that happen, but I’ve got a draft of the manuscript and a nice collection of photos to go with. I may end up self-publishing it, just to get it out there, but I don’t have the capital at the moment.
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AuthorMatthew Smith, PhD (History). Public Programs at Miami University Regionals. Historian of Appalachia, the Ohio Valley, & the early American republic. Archives
February 2024
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