Frank Girardot

Last updated
Frank Girardot
BornFrancis Conway Girardot, Jr.
January 1961 (age 63)
Detroit, Michigan, United States
OccupationAuthor, journalist, victim advocate
Genre non-fiction
Subject True crime
Notable awardsSouthern California Press Association award for investigative journalism, 1995. Finalist for the 2015 University of Florida Award for Investigative Data Journalism
Children3
Website
www.pegasuscommunications-usa.com

Frank Girardot (born January 1961) is an American author, journalist, victim advocate, and radio host. He is best known for "Name Dropper" [1] his biography of serial imposter Christian Gerhartsreiter. He is communications director for BYD Auto's North American operations, [2] CEO of Pegasus Communications, LLC and the former editor and columnist for the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. [3]

Contents

Career

Girardot got his start in journalism as a copy boy at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner . [4] Subsequent to the newspaper's closing, he worked for the Ontario Daily Report, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune and the Pasadena Star-News . His 1994 story on the unsolved murder of Geneva Hilliker Ellroy, the mother of novelist James Ellroy, resulted in Ellroy's book My Dark Places . [5]

Girardot has won several writing awards, including the Southern California Press Association's award for Investigative Journalism 1995, the Los Angeles Press Club's First Place Award for sportswriting in 1998, and he was a finalist for the 2015 University of Florida Award for Investigative Data Journalism in 2015. [6] Girardot headed a project for the Los Angeles Newspaper Group titled "Getting Away with Murder." The effort chronicled 11,242 homicides that occurred in Los Angeles County between 2000 and 2010. Relying on data supplied by the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner the project found that less than 50 percent of all homicides that occurred countywide were ever solved. [7]

True crime

Girardot is the author of true crime non-fiction books, including Name Dropper, which was cited by author Walter Kirn in his book Blood Will Out. He is co-author with Burl Barer of A Taste For Murder, Betrayal in Blue with Barer and Ken Eurell and Burned, the biography of serial arsonist John Orr. Burned was co-written with Orr's daughter Lori Orr Kovach. All, except Name Dropper, are published by Wild Blue Press. In December 2020, Girardot and his wife Sarah Favot began hosting LA 85, an episodic contextual true crime podcast with a focus on the impact of serial killers including the Night Stalker, Grim Sleeper and Southside Slayer on Los Angeles in 1985. [8]

Internet/TV

Girardot has appeared on several true crime shows on various cable networks including Investigation Discovery. He has been a frequent guest on Crime Time with Allison Hope Weiner on LipTV. [9] He has also appeared on Fox News [10] [11] and Dateline NBC. [12] His topics of expertise include murder investigation, serial arson, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, Richard Ramirez, Clark Rockefeller [13] John Leonard Orr and 20th Century Los Angeles area true crime. [14]

Radio

In 2015, Girardot co-hosted the Randy Economy Show in Los Angeles on radio station KRLA. [15]

Personal life

Girardot resides in Pasadena, California. He has three children and is a Roman Catholic. He plays guitar in Thunderheart, a band he formed in Temecula, California, with actor Dean Norris. [16]

Related Research Articles

True crime is a nonfiction literary, podcast, and film genre in which the author examines a crime and details the actions of people associated with and affected by criminal events. It is a cultural phenomenon that can refer to the promotion of sensationalized and emotionally charged content around the subject of violent crime, for the general public. Many works in this genre recount high-profile, sensational crimes such as the killing of JonBenét Ramsey, the O. J. Simpson murder case, and the Pamela Smart murder, while others are devoted to more obscure slayings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Ellroy</span> American writer (born 1948)

Lee Earle "James" Ellroy is an American crime fiction writer and essayist. Ellroy has become known for a telegrammatic prose style in his most recent work, wherein he frequently omits connecting words and uses only short, staccato sentences, and in particular for the novels The Black Dahlia (1987) and L.A. Confidential (1990).

The Pasadena Star-News is a paid local daily newspaper for the greater Pasadena, California area. The Pasadena Star-News is a member of Southern California News Group, since 1996. It is also part of the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group, along with the San Gabriel Valley Tribune and the Whittier Daily News.

<i>My Dark Places</i> (book) Book by James Ellroy

My Dark Places: An L.A. Crime Memoir is a 1996 book, part investigative journalism and part memoir, by American crime-fiction writer James Ellroy. Ellroy's mother Geneva was murdered in 1958, when he was 10 years old, and the killer was never identified. The book is Ellroy's account of his attempt to solve the mystery by hiring a retired Los Angeles County homicide detective to investigate the crime. Ellroy also explores how being directly affected by a crime shaped his life - often for the worse - and led him to write crime novels. The book is dedicated to his mother.

<i>Crime Wave</i> (book) Book by James Ellroy

Crime Wave is a 1999 collection of eleven short works of fiction and non-fiction, all originally published in GQ, by American crime fiction writer James Ellroy. The collection, issued as a paperback original, includes a short story ("Hush-Hush"), two novellas, and eight pieces of crime reports, including "Sex, Glitz, and Greed: The Seduction of O. J. Simpson". More of Ellroy's GQ pieces can be found in the collection Destination: Morgue!.

<i>The Big Nowhere</i> Novel by James Ellroy

The Big Nowhere is a 1988 crime fiction novel by American author James Ellroy, the second of the L.A. Quartet, a series of novels set in 1940s and 1950s Los Angeles.

John Leonard Orr is an American convicted serial arsonist, mass murderer and former firefighter. A fire captain and arson investigator in Glendale, California, Orr was convicted of serial arson and four counts of murder; he is believed to have set nearly 2,000 fires in a thirty-year arson spree, most of them between 1984 and 1991, making him the most prolific serial arsonist in American history.

Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter is a German convicted murderer and impostor. Born in West Germany, he is currently serving a prison sentence in the U.S. state of California. After moving to the U.S. in his late teens, Gerhartsreiter lived under a succession of aliases while variously claiming to be an actor, a director, an art collector, a physicist, a ship's captain, a negotiator of international debt agreements, and an English aristocrat.

James Alan Fox is the Professor of Criminology, Law, and Public Policy and former dean at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States. Fox holds a bachelor's degree in sociology (1972), a master's degree in criminology (1974), a master's degree in statistics (1975), and a Ph.D. in sociology (1976), all from the University of Pennsylvania.

Steve Lillebuen is a Canadian author and journalist. He divides his time between Australia and Canada.

Puente 13 (P13) is a street gang in La Puente, California. They are Sureños. They are described as Mafia related or Mexican mafia related. They were formed c. 1953 as the Bridgetown Gentlemen, or "Old Town Puente". Then they dropped the "Old Town", later adding the "-13" that signifies allegiance to the Mexican Mafia. The gang is known for its violent criminal activities, drug smuggling and illicit contributions to the Mexican Mafia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Angelina Rodriguez</span> American murderer on death row

Angelina Rodriguez is an American woman from Montebello, California who was sentenced to death for the September 2000 murder of Jose Francisco "Frank" Rodriguez, her fourth husband. She also was accused of killing her infant daughter in 1993 by suffocating her with a pacifier. Rodriguez is incarcerated at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, California, where she is on death row awaiting execution.

<i>LAPD 53</i>

LAPD '53 is a historical non-fiction book by James Ellroy and Glynn Martin, about the laws, crimes, and the LAPD, during the year of 1953. Ellroy is a writer known mainly for crime fiction set in Los Angeles. Martin was the executive director for the Los Angeles Police Museum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">J. Warner Wallace</span> American homicide detective and Christian apologist

James Warner Wallace is an American homicide detective and Christian apologist. Wallace is a Senior Fellow at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview and an adjunct professor of Apologetics at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California. He has authored several books, including Person of Interest,Cold-Case Christianity,God's Crime Scene, and Forensic Faith, in which he applies principles of cold case homicide investigation to apologetic concerns such as the existence of God and the reliability of the Gospels. He has been featured as a cold case homicide expert on Fox 11 Los Angeles, truTV, and NBC.

<i>True Confessions</i> (novel) Novel by John Gregory Dunne

True Confessions is a noir novel by John Gregory Dunne and published in 1977. The novel was inspired by an actual event, the 1947 Black Dahlia murder.

<i>Dirty John</i> Investigative journalism podcast

Dirty John is a true crime podcast based on the life of John Michael Meehan. The podcast is hosted by Christopher Goffard and was created by Wondery and the Los Angeles Times. The first two chapters were launched on October 2, 2017; the following four chapters were released over the following days. The podcast was downloaded over 10 million times within six weeks of release.

Houston's murder rate in 2005 ranked 46th of U.S. cities with a population over 250,000 in 2005. In 2010, the city's murder rate was ranked sixth among U.S. cities with a population of over 750,000 according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Houston had over 400 homicides in 2020 and 473 by the end of December 2021 a predicted increase of 30% year on year.

References

  1. ↑ "Name Dropper: Investigating the Clark Rockefeller Mystery, published March 2014 by Ebookit.com" at Amazon.
  2. ↑ "BYD adds electric supercars to its repertoire".
  3. ↑ "Staff:Frank Girardot Editor". San Gabriel Valley Tribune . 2017-08-03. Archived from the original on 2017-08-03.
  4. ↑ "Frank Girardot Announces He is Leaving the Pasadena Star-News",Pasadena News Now, May 30, 2015.
  5. ↑ Mapping Generations of Traumatic Memory in American Narratives", Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
  6. ↑ Jeremiah Patterson, "2015 Online Journalism Awards finalists announced", Online News Association, August 11, 2015.
  7. ↑ "Disturbing New Data on LA County's Unsolved Homicides", Take Two, January 30, 2015.
  8. ↑ "L.A. 85 on Apple Podcasts".
  9. ↑ "Crime Time" http://thelip.tv/episode/call-to-my-rapist-porn-industry-vs-measure-b/ Archived 2016-03-05 at the Wayback Machine
  10. ↑ "Sohus, Rockefeller and the Greta Wire" [ permanent dead link ], CBS News, This Morning, August 6, 2008.
  11. ↑ "Rockefeller imposter incapable of murder?", CBS News, March 20, 2013.
  12. ↑ "The Many Faces of Clark Rockefeller", Dateline, NBC, June 14, 2009.
  13. ↑ Kirn, Walter (2015). Blood will out: the true story of a murder, a mystery, and a masquerade. Liveright Publishing Corporation. ISBN   978-1-63149-022-4. OCLC   880566268.
  14. ↑ "Revisiting the life and crimes of Night Stalker Richard Ramirez". Archived from the original on 2016-03-05. Retrieved 2016-01-25.
  15. ↑ "Mayor Sam Blog".
  16. ↑ "Remembering Thunderheart".
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.