Susan Galbreath has a story to tell that would make one helluva good Meryl Streep-Angelina Jolie-type Oscar-bait vehicle. You can bet they'll figure out how to screw this one up, by bringing in romance, character flaws that insult her gender, and annoying plot holes.
In an extraordinary six-page Times (UK) story, which we'll summarize below, an English reporter discusses how this extraordinarily resilient person took on ineffective law enforcement, stalkers, killers, and-- worst of all-- failing marriages over a seven-year period to finally bring a psychotic killer and his conspirators to justice...
Back in 2000, Galbreath came across the body of a nineteen-year-old girl. The woman had been raped, strangled, and raped again repeatedly after her death, then burned beyond recognition. (Her parents identified her by her jewelry and other small indicators.) The initial police investigation failed to bring about a credible suspect and the story disappeared. Galbreath didn't care about her marriage, which was failing, and her general lack of interest in work and socializing. She befriended a reporter and lured him to Kentucky to help her investigate. The two interviewed suspects and fed their information to the police, who were either working closely with the gumshoes or ignoring them as a couple of crackpots, depending on who was in charge of the basically-forgotten case at the time.
Eventually, Galbreath was on her own. She set up a MySpace page as a tribute to the deceased and noticed that one MySpace user in the area was a person of interest-- a woman who had fled the area amid rumors she was involved in the murder. Galbreath played dumb and contacted her as if at random to ask her to contribute to the page as an area resident. It was the straw that whipped that camel's ass, and the person of the interest soon started spilling her guts out of nowhere. The MySpace user turned out to be an accomplice with a guilty conscience and later told the police how it all went down: the psycho had picked up his victim in a car full of drunk and drugged-out partiers, hit her over the head with a baseball bat, and had his conspiring female friends, of which the MySpace user was one, cover up the crime by dumping and burning the body.
18-year-old Jessica Currin had been walking home after a
dullish Saturday evening at her friend’s house when she was stopped and
given a lift in a car driven by Quincy Omar Cross, a 31-year-old layabout,
serial hard-drug user and sexual offender. Also in the car, in a heavily
drug-induced party mood, were four others – one man and three girls in their
late teens.
Once she was inside the large, white, old Cadillac, Cross immediately began to
sexually assault Jessica, aided by one of the girls. All four had been using
cocaine, Ecstasy and alcohol. When Jessica resisted, Cross smashed a small
baseball bat into the back of her head.
After several years on the (unpaid) job, Galbreath's work ultimately came down to the one chance MySpace message, but she wasn't fazed by all that lost time. Now the budding detective wants to get her PI license and has since found the love of her life and peace. At last.
Read the much more coherent (and epic) full tale here.
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