Just about everyone has (or gets) an award. The Oscars, Emmys, Grammys—the list goes on. Since our inaugural Trickey Awards last year, we’ve been making lists and watching crime news regarding just who or what deserves an award for the goings on in our little crime corner of the world. For those new readers to the site, we’d like to introduce you to a yearly event here at Crime Rant known as the Henry Trickey Awards, and just who the heck this Henry Trickey character is.

Here’s a mini bio:

Trickey was an investigative journalist when the term applied to no one in journalism. He had an inherent instinct to want the “inside,” or “exclusive” story that no other reporter could get. So important was his integrity as a journalist, soon after Trickey moved to Fall River and began covering the upcoming Lizzie Borden trial, he hired a private detective to obtain “insider information about the Borden investigation.” The information Trickey received seemed to explain the state’s case against Borden. According to the detective, Lizzie had a lover and was pregnant. When her father found out, he threatened to “throw her out of the house and disinherit her.” This, of course, would give Lizzie a motive to kill her parents. But it was found out that Trickey had been duped by the source (haven’t we all been?).

So, there you have it: In honor of True Crime’s tragic and unsung hero, we salute this year’s crime coverage, stories and major players with The Crime Rant Trickey Awards. We named award winners in ten categories, including sports, media, books, movies, pop culture and, last, but not least, our Crime Story of 2007.

Ok … ‘nuff of the intro … drum roll, please.

[CR note: Please notice that each award will have its own page, so we encourage comments on each of the TEN awards separately.] 

Michael Vick should win this one hands down, you’d think, for his role in torturing and fighting dogs like cocks. Or maybe, you’re thinking, Barry Bonds, the recently indicted baseball slugger, steroid abuser, liar, whatever else you want call this asterisk of a man.

But the winner at Crime Rant, without argument, is Chris Benoit, who murdered his wife and son, and then took the coward’s way out and killed himself. This story drew our largest ever audience and caused literal chaos here on Crime Rant, when the wrestling crowd got wind of us calling Benoit a coward and took us to task. Our four major posts on this story drew a whopping 1,000 comments, the most of any story we’ve ever had.

This one here is a toss up. Lisa Montgomery v. Curtis Allgier. To update both stories, Lisa Montgomery was found guilty in October of murdering Bobbie Jo Stinnett and cutting her unborn child (we apologize, but there’s no other way to put it) from her womb. Montgomery was sentenced to death for her crime and awaits a date with a needle and a dose of eternity juice.

Or should we choose neo-Nazi Allgier, an inmate from Utah, whose story we broke here on Crime rant when we ran an interview with Allgier’s lovely female friend, Jolene, who CR interviewed long before Allgier escaped from prison and went on a rampage.

Allgier shot and killed a prison guard while being examined at a local hospital. Authorities say he then carjacked a vehicle, led police on a high-speed chase and fled into an Arby’s, where a 59-year-old bystander wrestled the gun away from the tattooed killer and saved the day.

Whenever you have Arby’s, tattoos, murder and a big blond named Jolene involved, you know the story is going to end up on a list somewhere. Why not ours?

The Cowardly Lyin’, Drew Peterson is without a doubt one of 2007’s most vile, egotistical people. Remember how he invited the media into his house for coffee and then shunned them when the coffee pot ran empty? For those not listening over the past few months, Peterson is the cop who retired a few weeks after his fourth wife went missing (and he took off from his house with a large blue 55-gallon drum), a woman who was going to divorce the loser, whose previous wife, also divorcing him, was found dead in her bathtub of apparent, at least according to Dr. Michael Baden, homicide.

We ask one question here: How many people do you know who have two wives dead, or one wife dead and one wife missing? Statistics alone are stacked against this clown.

One update is that this shameless human being, Peterson has just recently set up a defense fund for himself, claiming he is going to lose his house over the mess he’s created for himself.

Runner-up in this category has to go to Bobbie Cutts Jr., the cop who allegedly murdered nine months pregnant Jesse Davis, who disappeared from her Ohio home in June, leaving her 2-year-old son behind. Jesse was due to give birth at the end of June.  Searchers recovered Jesse’s body a few weeks later and arrested Cutts, charging him with two counts of murder, including that of Davis’ unborn child, which he himself had fathered.