Sahara Sue, Poe's B-Day and Rum Pudding
Vol. 87: Maybe you can help solve a murder mystery from the 70s. Also, new book releases for creeps. But first, Edgar Allan Poe and jiggly cocktails.
The Birth of a Black Eyeliner: Edgar Allan Poe
January 19th, 1809 marked the day all this Gothic goodness entered the world. In his short lifetime he alienated his adopted father, got kicked out of a military academy, married his teen cousin, and made a nuisance of himself to Charles Dickens, but he had his bad points too.
He’s worried about Virginia. And his finances. And that one day John Cusack will play him in a lousy movie.
If you really want to go down a rabbit hole, research all the theories about his mysterious death at the age of forty. Come on, where did those ill-fitting clothes come from?
Here’s some nice camera work of a visit to Poe’s multiple cemetery memorials in Baltimore. Everybody claims him as their own these days.
This is my absolute favorite version of “The Tell-Tale Heart”. It’s a frantic animated version by Annette Jung:
New & Upcoming Book Releases
Out Now- The Lost Tomb: And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder by Douglas Preston and David Grann
Feb. 13- What Feasts At Night by T. Kingfisher
The Book of Love- the first novel by Kelly Link
The Hollow Dead by Darcy Coates
March 5- Murder Road by Simone St. James
March 26- Stitches by Hirokatsu Kihara and Junji Ito
May 21- You Like It Darker by Stephen King
Rum Pudding
from The Officer’s Wives Holiday Cookbook, 1981
This is a Victorian gelatin mold, because if I’m eating Jello, I want it to be fucking grand.
My mother collected cookbooks for decades, reading them like novels. She acquired so many that she couldn’t shelve them anymore, so my sister and I became the recipients of old church and fundraiser cookbooks, plus professional books from the 60s with disturbingly vibrant photos of oiled roasts and other Technicolor meals. Truly lurid. I was recently flipping through one of her spiral-bound books, wondering just how many recipes can have Red Hots cinnamon candies in the ingredients list (answer: more than you ever thought), when I came across this interesting recipe among so, so many strange and wondrous dishes. Seems like a good way to discreetly get your Vitamin A(lcohol). Grandma knew what she was doing.
2 tbsp unflavored gelatin
2 tbsp cold water
6 tbsp boiling water
1 c sugar
1/3 c rum
4 tbsp bourbon
2 egg whites, stiffly beaten
1 ½ pt heavy cream, whipped
½ c slivered almonds, toasted
Soften the gelatin in the cold water, then add the boiling water. Fold sugar, rum and bourbon into the egg whites. Add in the gelatin mixture, then fold in half of the whipped cream. Pour into a gelatin mold or bowl. Chill until firm.
Unmold and cover with the remaining whipped cream. Sprinkle with almonds. Yields 8 servings.
SPOOKY BOOKY
Eat, Brains, Love by Jeff Hart
HarperCollins, 2013
Amanda is at the top of the food chain at school: smart, beautiful, and with an equally good-looking and popular boyfriend, though they have their problems.
Jake is a smart stoner who is mostly invisible. He and Amanda would probably finish out high school without ever saying a word to each other, except that one day the two turn into flesh eating zombies during lunch period. After biting into some of their classmates, they need to escape together.
What follows is an epic zombie chase across the states that includes eating frenzies, romance, a secret government agency and a psychic teen.
Thanks to Gloriest Goriest member Judy for pointing this one out.
Scare Scale: 1.5
Lost & Found: The Mystery of Sahara Sue Doe
On the night of August 14, 1979, Las Vegas police were called to the intersection of Sahara Boulevard and Las Vegas Boulevard. It was a hot night, with Summer temperatures in the city still hovering around 100 degrees.
The body of a young woman had been found in a parking lot near the Sahara Casino. She had no id, no purse, no shoes, and investigations couldn’t turn up anybody who knew her. She had been stabbed multiple times in the stomach. Her identity would become a 44-year mystery, her murder a cold case that remains open to this day.
Called “Sahara Sue Doe”, the young woman wore a blue linen shirt that tied at her waist and hip hugger Levi’s. Police noted signs of her clothing having been rearranged but there was no sign of sexual assault. It’s believed that the killer took something she was wearing as a souvenir, though her metal and plastic jewelry remained. She was 5’6”, thin, with brown hair and eyes. That’s not much to go on when you’re working a missing person case, but “Sahara Sue” did have something unusual about her. Though clearly very young, she wore dentures. The upper palate remained in her mouth, but the bottom palate of dentures were missing. Was this taken by the killer?
An investigation into the murder brought little in the way of useful information. Instead, the police received lots of “maybes” to their questions: maybe the dead woman was calling herself “Shauna”. Maybe she was from Florida. Maybe she worked at one of the sketchy motels along LV Blvd. Maybe she lived in a local trailer park. There seemed to be no friends, no sure footing with this case, other than a few witnesses who admitted to seeing the unknown woman with a man in a liquor store a few hours before her body was discovered. When her blood was tested, it registered at .238.
A police artist produced a sketch from the witness accounts, showing a man in his late 20s, dark hair, and a Burt Reynolds-type mustache. Releasing this to the public brought no new information.
The police worked the case even after it had long gone cold. Sahara Sue’s fingerprints brought no matches in their data base, which meant she had never been arrested. Her body was exhumed in 2003, in the early days of DNA forensic data bases, but nothing new was discovered. Her DNA was tested again in 2011, but the police received false positive matches, six in all. The case went nowhere.
In 2016, researchers found pollen on the clothing she wore the night she was murdered, pollen that could only be picked up in two spots: Napa Valley or Central California, both agricultural areas.
The last DNA submission was in September 2022. This time, authorities sent the dwindling DNA samples to Othram Inc. a genealogy lab in Texas that specializes in victims of crime, disappearances and cold cases. Othram’s Chief Development Officer, Dr. Kristen Mittleman, worked on the Sahara Sue case, saying, “What was difficult about it was the way her body was left and all the non-human DNA component that was there. That had to be filtered out.”
By building a genome sequence on Sahara Sue’s DNA sample, Mittleman and her crew were able to create a family tree. “What you need to be able to see is a fifth cousin or a sixth cousin, and a fourth cousin, and another fourth cousin. What that allows you to do is find the most common ancestor, and that’s what our genealogy team does here, is pull down that family tree until you get a specific generation.”
“Sahara Sue Doe” was officially identified on December 19, 2023, after 44 years as an unknown murder victim. Her name was Gwenn Marie Story. She was from Cincinnati, Ohio and her family still lived there. Finally, they knew what had become of her.
Relatives told the police that Gwenn had left home in the summer of 1979 with two unnamed males, with Gwenn saying the three were going to California to find her biological father. Her family never saw or heard from Gwenn again, though the two men reappeared in Cincinnati in August and told people they had left Gwenn in Las Vegas. This brings up so many questions that were apparently never asked.
The pollen found on Story’s clothing indicates that she did make it to the north central area of California. Did she find her father?
If gambling was a draw on their way back to Ohio, why did they spend a day driving southeast to Las Vegas when the road east from Napa would have taken them to Reno? And Story wasn’t old enough to gamble. Did she really choose to stay behind in a place where she didn’t know anyone and wasn’t old enough to work in the casino and nightclub industries, or was she abandoned there? And why didn’t she call home?
On December 26th, the family released a statement in which they thanked the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police, noting “If it wasn’t for them, we would still be wondering where Gwenn is.” They also asked the public for help in identifying the two men Gwenn left home with. “Our family just wants some answers, we would really appreciate the help.”
The Las Vegas Police are asking for the public’s help with any information about the two men Gwenn drove with, and the man she was seen with the night of her death. The Homicide Unit can be contacted at homicide@lvpd.com
Wow, I really like your sweater. And your home décor is great too. You seem like an awesome person. Sooo…how ‘bout you return the compliment by hitting that ‘like’ heart there at the bottom? Better yet, make an honest woman of me and subscribe. Do you think this liquor cabinet is going to stock itself?
Next week: I’m introducing you to a really obscure horror film that starred a Hollywood fixture. Then I’m giving you an update of the legal wranglings of a double murder trial. But you have to be a Glorious Goriest member, so pony up $5 for a whole month of Autumn Lives Here, my beautiful little lizard heads.
I'm looking forward to that version if the Tell-Tale Heart , it's my favourite short story of all time!
I've seen and heard many versions, including one at a Halloween convention when the actor, without a stage, costume or backdrop, performed the whole thing from memory.
I really like this animated version because it captures the madness.