Missourinet

KC's Union Station Massacre plays key role in early FBI history

Missourinet News Director Bob Priddy loves a good story. And he really loves a good story from Missouri's rich history. This past Saturday Robert Unger spoke to the annual meeting of the Friends of the Missouri State Archives about his book, "The Union Station Massacre: The Original Sin of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI."

Our Bob recorded the speech and we've posted it on our Death Row website. Why there? According to Unger, Hoover’s FBI turned the masscre case into a witch-hunt for "Pretty Boy" Floyd and Adam Richetti.  Floyd was gunned down in a field in Ohio, and Richetti convicted of murder and executed in Missouri's gas chamber, based on perjured testimony and manipulated evidence.

Crash Reports back online

The Missouri State Highway Patrol was unable to transmit crash reports to our website from Monday morning (6/5/06) until Wednesday morning (6/7/06) due to some sort of software glitch at MSHP headquarters in Jefferson City. The problem was related to a system upgrade prepartory to posting crash repforts on the official MSHP website.

The techies at MSHP finally got everything sorted out this morning and retransmitted the missed reports. Looks like everything is back to normal. Those of you paying close attention to the reports will notice a couple of minor changes:

• Reports now include gender.
• Street addresses have been removed. City and state only.
• Date of Birth (DOB) has been replaced with Age.
• Insurance company appears in a slightly different place on the report

Once the reports begin appearing on the MSHP website (July 10, 2006), we'll pull them from Missourinet.com. We will, however, continue to support our premium service until current subscriptions expire next spring.

Online crash reports have been wildly popular since day one. Last month (May) crash reports accounted for more than one million page views by 50,000+ unique visitors.

Newsroom renovation

For the past year, Learfield has been remodeling our Jefferson City offices and studios, including the Missourinet newsroom (Video: 4 min, 5 meg wmv). The space (shared by Brownfield and Learfield Data) has been gutted and Bob Priddy & Co. are working in temporary quarters. We'll have more stills and video when the make-over is complete.