Google News Archive

[Jason K]

Has anyone here used Google News Archive to look up old newspapers about crimes profiled on Unsolved Mysteries? Below is an example of Marie Hilley:

Police arrest Anniston woman in arsenic death

[Kane]

I have used the Google News Archive. Although I came across some articles related to UM, there was an article on Robert Stack that drew my attention. It was from 1980 (seven years before UM went on the air), and the one of the topics discussed in the article was Stack's autobiography, Straight Shooting.

Check it out.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id...rt-stack&hl=en

[Jason K]

I couldn't conceive of a stranger picture of Robert Stack than the one in that article.

[Kane]

Originally Posted by Jason K

I couldn't conceive of a stranger picture of Robert Stack than the one in that article.

I can't either. Or if there is a stranger RS photo than that, I haven't found it.

Anyway, I thought it was a good article. It opened with RS saying he did not want to write "one of those books in which the author claims to have slept with Marilyn Monroe." At one point, he also talked about President John F. Kennedy, since they both had access to the same apartment in the early '40s.

[Steve W.]

I thought it was kind of funny when he stated that he doesn't like labels but then the next thing in print was that he thought then-President Jimmy Carter was, "an a$$". I do like that he very much seemed to be a man who lived by his own principles.

The interview/article appeared in that newspaper on April 29, 1980: isn't that around the time the information of Michael Rosenblum's impounded car was finally known to his family? Too bad UM wasn't around yet, they might have been able to get right on that!

[Kane]

Originally Posted by Steve W.

I thought it was kind of funny when he stated that he doesn't like labels but then the next thing in print was that he thought then-President Jimmy Carter was, "an a$$". I do like that he very much seemed to be a man who lived by his own principles.

I noticed that, too. At the very least, he stated that he didn't like the way people insisted on using labels.

I share your consensus that Stack lived by his own principles. That was especially obvious in the aforementioned the quote that opened the article, the one about not wanting to write a book with potentially outrageous claims such as having slept with a specific celebrity. It seems to have been a matter of not wanting to come across as an opportunist.

In other words, while some people have legitimate reasons for writing a book, others do it for selfish reasons, such as wanting to make millions of dollars, or wanting to get attention. Apparently, Robert Stack wrote his autobiography because it was something he genuinely wanted to do. Chances are he had been considering it for some time before finalizing his decision to write it.

The interview/article appeared in that newspaper on April 29, 1980: isn't that around the time the information of Michael Rosenblum's impounded car was finally known to his family? Too bad UM wasn't around yet, they might have been able to get right on that!

It was probably close to it. I know that Michael Rosenblum went missing that February. If UM - or at the very least, a similar TV show - had existed in 1980, I think there's a good chance they would have been able to feature the case then.

[Oooga Chucka]

Originally Posted by Jason K

I couldn't conceive of a stranger picture of Robert Stack than the one in that article.

Best shirt ever.