Born to Lose

When I have one of my vomiting cycles, there’s not much I can do but lie in bed and try to be as still as possible. One of the few things I can do, is read, as long as it’s on my phone or a Kindle and not an actual paper book. (Holding the book up and turning pages takes enough movement that it makes the nausea worse.) During the most recent episode of the pukes, I read the Kindle edition of James G. Hollock’s Born to Lose: Stanley B. Hoss & the Crime Spree That Gripped a Nation.

Hoss was pretty much the worst of the worst. Like, I’m against the death penalty and I’ve said that many times, but Hoss is the kind of person the death penalty was made for.

In prison, doing a life sentence in the most secure part of the facility, having already killed a cop and presumably also Linda Mae and Lori Mae Peugeot, Hoss tortured a guard to death for no reason. I know that a malicious guard can make a prisoner’s life a misery, but Hoss and this particular guard didn’t have a problem with each other. Hoss and a few of his friends brutally murdered that poor man just because they could. What else can you do with such a person, besides kill them?

It’s kind of up in the air as to whether Hoss was created by nature, or nurture. I think some people ARE born bad. Hoss’s family were, for the most part, not criminals, and there’s no evidence that he was abused as a child. But there were indications that something was “off”. One of the few people Hoss cared about was his big sister Betty, and the way he and Betty were with each other gave rise to open speculation of incest from many people. We’ll never know the truth because both Hoss and his sister are dead now. But I wouldn’t be surprised.

The book had info about the kidnapping of the Peugeots and what Hoss told the cops about where he put their bodies. But I think it’s very unlikely they’ll ever be found, even if Hoss wasn’t jerking the police around, which he probably was. Crazy to think he traveled with them for days. He claims he took the baby all the way from Delaware to Kansas. Perhaps an Amber Alert, if it had existed in 1969, would have saved her and her mother.

Per the book, Linda’s mother suicided from grief. Hoss destroyed so many people’s lives.

It was a good book. I recommend it.

MP of the week: Cassandra LaLonde

This week’s featured missing person is Cassandra Ann LaLonde, aka Candy. On April 1, 1988, Cassandra ran away from her family’s home in Buras, Louisiana. She was fifteen at the time. In July, after her sixteenth birthday, her family got a call from a man who said he lived with Cassandra at a rural home in Alabama and that she had walked out on him. Her whereabouts after that are a mystery.

If still alive, Cassandra would be 50 today. She was 5’3 and 130 pounds in 1988, but may have grown taller since then, as she was only fifteen. She is white and has brown hair, brown eyes, pierced ears and a large scar on her leg from where she had stitches.

I hope everyone is well. I got sick with the pukes again but I’ve gotten better.