Everyone has or gets an award. The Oscars, Emmys, Grammys — the list goes on and on. Earlier this year, Gregg and Matt started taking notes to offer Crime Rant readers our take on just who or what deserves an award for the goings on in our little corner of the world.

But what to call them? We dug around the TC archives, consulted with those who know best (Laura James, for one) and after considerable debate, decided on honoring Henry Trickey.

Yes, welcome to The Crime Rant Trickey Awards.

So before the drum roll, we want you to meet our man, Trickey. Here’s a mini bio: Henry 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 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.

Ok, now that drum roll, please.

Crime Story of the Year

Iraq. Call it a war. An invasion. A civil war.  Whatever. We’ve had it with this debacle. The Iraq situation has got to be the crime story of the year for the simple reason that no other story has generated as much pain and produced as many victims as what is happening in Iraq. We don’t no where to send the Trickey, but a Pennsylvania Avenue address seems about right.

Runner up: The Duke Rape Case. One of these cases comes along every five to ten years, when race and status seem to work their way into a case that pits the American dream against everything that is wrong with this country, exposing the best and worst of our country.

Crime Media Disaster of the Year
 
Nancy Grace, the abominable motor mouth of the CNN Headline News show with her name attached, who has a lawsuit hanging over her head by the family of a former guest who later committed suicide. We like Nancy, but this time she’s gone too far. Wonder if she’ll be able to talk her self out of this mess?

Coming in a close second is Mary Lacy the Boulder, CO, prosecutor who went after John Mark Karr (and also refuses to prosecute anyone in the savage beating death of baby Jason Midyette). If there is a prosecutor in deeper trouble, he must be on the other side of the country – and another Trickey winner (Duke, anyone?).

Victims Rights Advocate of the Year

Janet Pelasara. Taylor Behl’s mother, Janet, has become a tireless advocate for victims’ rights, speaking out on behalf of Parents of Murdered Children, Violence Against Women, and other organizations. She is also working part-time for the American Association of Pastoral Counselors.

Runner-up: Mark Lunsford. Since his daughter Jessica’s death in 2005, Mark has gone on to speak out against the laws protecting child molesters and pedophiles in this country and fought for tougher laws protecting out children. The Jessica Lunsford Act was quickly drafted after Jessica’s death and was pushed through by lawmakers outraged that the man accused of killing her was a registered sex offender. It passed both the Senate and House unanimously.

True Crime Media Misdemeanor of the Year

Judith Reagan and OJ Simpson. We need not say anything more here.

True Crime Internet Site of the Year

Perverted Justice: (http://www.perverted-justice.com/) How can we ignore a website that has put so many pedophiles in jail and if not, at least made their faces recognizable. Any time we can promote the safety of children, we are glad to do it.

True Crime Book of the Year

AN INNOCENT MAN by John Grisham. We still think Robert Mayer’s THE DREAMS OF ADA is a better book about the case, but one can’t argue with success and the fact that the book has done a lot for true crime as a genre.

Hollywood Arrest of the Year

Mel Gibson. Need we say anything about a guy who claimed during the publicity of The Passion of the Christ that his movie had nothing to do with the persecution of Christ by Jews, but then went on an anti-Semite rage when arrested for a DUI.

Runner up: Rip Torn. Any idiot with money who gets arrested for DUI twice inside five years deserves more than just an award—but a pat on the back for giving us a really cool mug shot.

Dumbest Criminal of the Year
 
John Mark Karr. The creep who said he had murdered JonBenet Ramsey and had the media on him 24/7, deserves this award for, if nothing else, ordering the shrimp—instead of the lobster—while on his taxpayer financed trip in business class from Thailand back to America.

Runner up: Paris Hilton. Because as hot as she reportedly thinks she is, even she had to cool her heels in a police station this year.

That’s it for 2006! Did we get it right? Were there other books more deserving? A dumber criminal? What about crime of the year? Do you think the Amish school shooting or some other case should have been there? Let us know!

Tricia, one of Gregg and Matt’s MySpace friends, made this funny little image. Funny, in part, because she made Matt look tall! And she hid Gregg’s bald head under a hat. Nice! But what do you think is going on here?

And what are those CR guys saying?

[CR Note: In this guest blog, Las Vegas Review-Journal criminal justice reporter and true crime author Glenn Puit talks about his latest book, Fire in the Desert (Stephens Press), set to be published this week. On the morning of December 14, 2005, Las Vegas police and firefighters were called to the desert outside Las Vegas. A 2003 Jaguar was in flames. Inside the trunk of the vehicle was the badly burned body of a young Las Vegas woman named Melissa James. The 28-year-old had suffered a horrifying fate—she was restrained, her face covered with duct-tape. She had been set on fire. The photos accompanying this CR entry are courtesy getbig.com are featured in Puit’s book.]

Guest blog by Glenn Puit

In his prime, Craig Titus was a behemoth. From the mid-1990s to the early years of this decade, the blond-haired, blue-eyed bodybuilder had the perfect look for the bodybuilding industry’s coveted magazine-cover shoots. He was freakish in size, and his ability to craft his body into such a visual spectacle was due to a relentless workout regimen, a voracious appetite for steroids, and a meticulous diet of meat, fish and rice.

Titus also had an edge to him. He worked out in front of camera crews, bench pressing 550 pounds, and listened to the hardcore speed metal band Gorfest. He feuded constantly with fellow bodybuilders, including King Kamali, and he once trashed a trophy as an amateur during a bodybuilding show in an act earning him a suspension and the career label “the bad boy of bodybuilding.”

Despite his explosive behavior, though, Titus landed himself a true beauty of a wife. Womens’ fitness champion Kelly Ryan is perhaps the greatest womens’ fitness competitor ever in the sport. From 1991 to 2002, she won competition after national fitness competition, prompting her competitors to call her “the Flyin Ryan” and the Jerry Rice of womens’ fitness.

“Her fitness skills have always been the best of the best,” said fitness champion Brenda Kelly. “In my opinion, the greatest ever in our sport.”

By 2004, Titus and Ryan were living in a posh home in southwest Las Vegas—a city I’ve called home for 11 years now—and from a distance, they seemed to be living a dream. They were both endorsed by major fitness supplement companies, earning them hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, and they had a gym in their home that would make their on-stage competitors envious.

But in reality, behind closed doors, their lives were out of control. According to friends, the couple, with their perfectly polished, healthy, public fitness images, were secretly injecting cocaine, Nubane, methamphetamine, or OxyContin into their veins.

“They’re into swinging,” said Titus’ friend, Gregory Ruiz, 28, of Las Vegas. “They like having girlfriends over. He used to tell me all the time, ‘Bang my wife. Come and bang my wife if you want.’”

By 2006, Craig Titus and Kelly Ryan also had a personal assistant, and she was a sweetheart of a girl named Melissa James, 28. James was beautiful—she resembled actress Minnie Driver, and Titus had an apparent affinity for the girl that he didn’t tell his wife about.

On Dec. 14, 2006, everything officially went bad for Titus and Ryan. In the desert about 40 minutes outside of Las Vegas, police found Ryan’s Jaguar engulfed in flames, and in the trunk was James’ body. She’d been duct-taped and torched. According to a Las Vegas police homicide investigation, James was also jolted with a Taser, injected with morphine, and badly beaten in the minutes prior to her last breaths.

Police quickly linked the vehicle to Titus and Ryan, and during interviews at the couple’s home that morning, the two said they had no idea how James ended up dead in Ryan’s Jaguar.

The next day, the couple fled to Boston, and when apprehended by the FBI, they told the cops a completely different story. This time, they said James overdosed in their garage, and they panicked and torched her body instead of calling the cops.

“Found her in the fucking car dead, stinking up my fucking car,” Titus told the cops. “Stench, piss, shit all over the place. Well, I’m assuming that’s what it smelled like. I panicked. That gets in the newspaper, we’re ruined. Dead girl, car, OD’d, Craig Titus, Kelly Ryan. We’re fuckin’ ruined … so I think, okay, let’s put her in the trunk and burn it and play stupid. That’s what we did. Period. Finito. End of story.”

But Titus was wrong. It wasn’t the end of the story.

While the couple was housed in the Clark County Detention Center awaiting their April 2006 murder trial, police voiced suspicions Titus was trying to orchestrate a murder-for-hire plot to kill three witnesses in his case. Then, there was the revelation of a sex tape found in the couple’s home. Just this month, there was one more bombshell. Craig Titus was depicted on a jailhouse videotape being restrained in a chair, then stripped naked by jailers in a video seemingly out of the Hannibal Lecter series. You can check out the video for yourself at getbig.com where you can click on the Review-Journal’s prompt to load the video.

Could Melissa James have died of an overdose, as Ryan and Titus contend? Or, was she viciously murdered?

We’ll find out in April what a jury thinks.