The Vidocq Society, the Court of Last Resort, and Cold Cases

This 2013 article from Mental Floss focuses on the Vidocq Society, an amateur detecting club that considers "cold cases," and occasionally solves them. While the Society has no official status, its members have professional qualifications. The Vidocq Society is named for Francois-Eugene Vidocq, the world's first private detective, and model for such fictional detectives as Sherlock Holmes.

An organization like the Vidocq Society reminds me of the Court of Last Resort, set up by the last Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason. Gardner and some friends thought an informal "court of last resort," experts working to solve cases that seemed to be miscarriages of justice, would be a good use of their leisure time. They did manage to obtain reversals of fortune for some of those convicted and sentenced. Gardner wrote about the cases in The Court of Last Resort: The True Story of a Team of Crime Experts Who Fought To Save the Wrongfully Convicted. A new edition is available from Open Road Media (2017), in paperback and etext editions.

More here about the Court of Last Resort.

Killing Fields Focuses On Louisiana Cold Case @KillingFieldsTV @Discovery @hulu

Discovery's series Killing Fields focuses on the unsolved 1997 murder of Eugenie Boisfontaine. The series returns January 3, 2017.   The remains of Ms. Boisfontaine, an LSU graduate student, were found in a bayou in Iberville Parish. Here's more about this very sad case from a 2004 article in LSUNow.

One suspect in the case, convicted serial killer Derrick Todd Lee, died in 2016.

The Discovery series is also available via Hulu.

Re-Examining the Jon-Benet Ramsey Case

Via THR, CBS is working on a docuseries about the Jon-Benet Ramsey case. The six-year-old was found dead in the basement of her Boulder, Colorado, home on Christmas Day, 1996. Law enforcement has never charged anyone for the crime, although it has considered various suspects. The CBS series will begin airing September 18.

Lifetime has its own Jon-Benet project in the works, a TV movie starring Eoin Bailey. Because this year marks the 20th anniversary of little Jon-Benet's death, it's no surprise that there is renewed interest in this tragic unsolved murder.

In 2000, Kris Kristofferson starred in an adaptation of Lawrence Schiller's Perfect Murder, Perfect Town (HarperCollins, 1998).