Undiluted Hocus Pocus

One of the most interesting things about Francine Da Sylva's murder on October 18, 1985, is that three days earlier, Frank Shoofey was gunned down, on October 15, 1985. And not only that, Shoofey's law office on the 5th floor of that apartment building on Rue Cherrrier is two blocks from the alley where Da Sylva was stabbed to death. Standing at the entrance to that alley on Saint Timothee, you can see the Shoofey building up the hill.https://johnallore.substack.com/

I have some follow-up thoughts on the 1985 murder of Francine Da Sylva, but in order to get there, I need to revisit two other unsolved murders we've covered: the 1979 death of Nicole Gaudreault and the 1975 strangulation and incineration of Diane Thibeault. Solving for x involves bringing an unknown variable to one side, then seeing how other elements line up with that variable - that's what we're going to do here – move and reconsider some variables.https://johnallore.substack.com/

There’s an interesting article in the New York Review of Books on the true crime writer, Sarah Weinman. If you don’t know Weinman, she’s had a newsletter for years called The Crime Lady. In 2018 she published her first book, The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World. In his review, Peddling Darkness, John J. Lennon writes about Weinman’s latest book, Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free.https://johnallore.substack.com/

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It's a little like the visual pun in Charles Allan Gilbert's All is Vanity, or those picture book games, which one is different. You know, where you have to look closely at a set of pictures of chickens or Alexander Hamilton to finally see that one of the chickens has a third toe or Hamilton has a spot on his brow. It's a very subjective exercise; the eye sees what it wants to see, that's the nature of cognitive blind spots.Problems, puzzles and sometimes murder.

Have you heard of Puzzle 15?I bet you have, you just don't know it. You know those 4 x 4 tile scrambles where you have to rearrange the sliding pieces into an image? Popeye? The Flinstones? That's the 15 puzzle, sometimes called Gem, Boss, or Mystic Square.Here's a puzzle. What happened to Marilyn Bergeron? This week marks the 15th anniversary of the disappearance of the 24-year-old girl who today would be thirty-nine. Bergeron left her family's home in Quebec City for a walk on the morning of February 17, 2008. She did not return.https://johnallore.substack.com/

Do you know bagatelle?You know bagatelle probably from the handheld pinball incantation from your childhood. The word "bagatelle" means a "trifle" or simply "child's play."I have a case that is child's play; the 1990 murder of 23-year-old Lise Brisebois. It's a wonder a suspect has never been mentioned as an obvious candidate has been geographically under the Surete du Quebec's nose for thirty years – a sort of criminal investigative bagatelle.httm/ps://johnallore.substack.com

Problems, puzzles, and sometimes murder. And sometimes Jack The Ripper.https://johnallore.substack.com

Do you remember Soma?Soma was a parlor game mass manufactured by Parker Brothers in the late 1960s. Its seven pieces, made up of geometrically shaped unit cubes, could be assembled into one elegant palm-sized cube. The Parker Brothers handbook claimed over a million solutions for the puzzle (there are 240), which arrived in our home the Christmas of 1969, shortly before the pet rock...Music: Murder She Said, Fun Boy ThreeFor more information: johnallore.substack.com