Cold Cases Are Hot Again

Chula Vista, CA

In case you hadn't heard, crime's down. According to the FBI's latest report since 2008, murder's dropped 3.9%, aggravated assault 2.5%. Rape and robbery down 1.6% and .7% respectively.

Which means that the cops have a little more time to go digging into all those unsolved cases.

Like the murder of Cathy Paternoster, 32, and her partner, Carl Fuerst, 41, who were shot to death on October 11, 1989. Twenty years, almost to the day, and the San Bernardino County Sheriff's finally made an arrest.

Eric Fagan, 74, a lawyer in San Diego, was picked up this morning for the murders. His girlfriend at the time was Paternoster's mom and the cops think he committed the murders so that she could get custody of one of her grandkids.

Now that's devotion. Fucked up devotion, but still. I know I wouldn't kill a girlfriend's kid for her. That's kind of pushing it.

But what do I know? I didn't write a dating manual.

Is that in these days? Kill your date's kids? I thought it was still dinner and a movie.

Whatever happened to wooing? Whatever happened to romance?

Whatever happened to giving a fake name and sneaking out of her apartment but forget that she's got this really nasty Doberman who doesn't like you who sleeps in the foyer so you end up having to go out through the sliding glass door onto the balcony and realize that you're three stories up and have to shimmy down a drainpipe to the ground and then one of her neighbors sees you and thinks you're a burglar so they call the cops and then you're in the spotlights and on the evening news and your date pokes her head out, figures what you're doing and says, "Nope, officers, never seen him before. Bastard must be a rapist, or something," and then the cops taser your ass from the second floor and you spend the next month in traction and the six after in County because the judge won't grant you bail?

Not that I would know anything about that sort of thing. I'm just sayin'. It could happen. To, you know, a friend. Some guy. Who is totally not me.

Really.