"Murder Book" explores a Highland Park story with chillingly familiar details
I started watching a new true-crime doc show a week or so ago -- new to me, anyway. It's called "Murder Book," and it was released in 2014, now streaming on Tubi . I'm a few episodes in and really liking it. The show has a very easy storytelling style, and the presentation centers around the "murder book" of information a cop uses to solve a cold case. Well, as the third episode of the show's first season unfolded for me, I was surprised to see it was exploring a case in an area I researched heavily for my own true-crime project , Highland Park, Michigan, the three-square-mile enclave of Detroit, site of most of the murders of convicted serial Benjamin ("Tony") Atkins. The case this episode was delving into wasn't the Atkins case, though -- it was the murder of a young man named Melvin at a home in Highland Park in December 1983. His cousin, Melissa Koontz (below), was interviewed about how she tenaciously worked to solve the case after it...
