A friend posted an excellent article yesterday, To Fall In Love With Anyone, Do This.  The article is excellent, and so is the article linked from it, No. 37: Big Wedding or Small, which contains the 36 questions used in the scientific experiment which led to a couple of strangers falling in love in a lab.

But that’s not really what I’m sharing today. The mere title of that article reminded me of the title of an Okkervil River album, Don’t Fall In Love With Everyone You See, a cautionary title if I’ve ever heard one. There’s no title track per se, that you could play on repeat on your iPod Nano to keep you reminded not to fall into that trap, but there are some real gems on the album. It was released in January 2002, just a few months after 9/11.

The album is home to one of my favorite modern murder ballads, which is what I really wanted to talk about this morning.  Westfall, according to Wikipedia, comes from recollections of the Yogurt Shop Murders. I don’t remember reading about this horrible case before, but boy, was it a clusterfuck. Four teenaged girls shot, bound and gagged, then the shop they were in set on fire. And that’s how authorities found them. And somehow over fifty people confessed to the crime.  HOW?  I don’t care how good a detective you are, how to you get FIFTY PEOPLE to confess to a crime that they obviously did not commit????

Clearly there is more to this still-unsolved mystery.