Interesting article on gangster girlfriends

I found this excellent article on gangster girlfriends — ordinary, suburban girls who start dating a “bad boy” gangster, get involved in that life, and sometimes pay the ultimate price. The article focuses on one particular girl who was killed, probably by a rival gang to get back at her boyfriend. I think the interview with the mother was really good. The journalist isn’t trying to whitewash the victim here — both she and the girl’s mother say flat-out that she used drugs, she had a drug conviction, she knew her BF was a criminal before she started dating him. But she did not deserve to die, and there are a lot of women who would like to get out of that life and can’t figure out how to do so. If you go to this page you’ll see a lot of comments on the article. Many of them are very thoughtful. A lot of the people who are trashing the article don’t seem to have read it properly.

I am posting this because I’m sure that there are missing women on Charley who were in that situation. I can think of one case off the top of my head — Aislin Silva. She was only nineteen or twenty, I believe, and she got involved with a gangster/drug dealer boyfriend and got sort of absorbed in that culture generally, and wound up getting killed for it. They finally found her body, almost ten years after her death. She is in my resolved section somewhere.

Epic obstetric fail

I am presently reading Douglas Starr’s The Killer of Little Shepherds, about the 19th-century serial killer Joseph Vacher and the evolution of modern forensic science and medicine. Starr describes forensic medicine’s failures as well as its successes, and this paragraph caught my eye:

In another case, a woman named Adele Bernard was imprisoned for having an abortion. After three months in jail, she gave birth to a child. The court released her.

Whoops.