This is another interesting glimpse at a city in the United States. In this case, it's the "Iron City," a mixture of the oldest population in the U.S. with a revitalized downtown that has gone from steel to high-tech.
Like it's sports teams, Pittsburgh sure has run the gamut between good and bad times. Steel production made this place a Boom Town by the end of World War II but three decades later, things looked bleak....and it wasn't just the pollution from the steel mills. Hey, where I live we can relate - a lot of big steel mills went belly-up leaving the Steel City feeling like the last-place team the Steelers were for so long until the likes of Terry Bradshaw, Mean Joe Green, Jack Lambert, Lynn Swann and the like helped produce four Super Bowl winners.
Meanwhile, the crime story involves a Pittsburgh born-and-raised kid named Tim Buczkowski, a guy who wanted money and did what he had to, to get it, in a nutshell. Unfortunately, that meant drowning two wives in a bathtub or hot tub and cashing in on their life insurance policies. (No, he didn't get away with the second one, but he did the first and benefited from that for a long time.)
In the end, the saddest part of this story are the three kids who lost moms and horribly discovered their father was a killer. Imagine what that does to you. Buczkowski had moved to North Carolina to seek being a ice-cream king but that didn't work out. After killing his wife, he moved back to Pittsburgh, married another nice woman and raised the kids from his first marriage, only to have the same thing happen. He looked and acted so guilty on the second murder, doing it so amateurishly, that it was obvious from the start and the guy got what was coming to him. Unfortunately, two nice women were violently murdered and three kids will suffer forever with these memories.
Like it's sports teams, Pittsburgh sure has run the gamut between good and bad times. Steel production made this place a Boom Town by the end of World War II but three decades later, things looked bleak....and it wasn't just the pollution from the steel mills. Hey, where I live we can relate - a lot of big steel mills went belly-up leaving the Steel City feeling like the last-place team the Steelers were for so long until the likes of Terry Bradshaw, Mean Joe Green, Jack Lambert, Lynn Swann and the like helped produce four Super Bowl winners.
Meanwhile, the crime story involves a Pittsburgh born-and-raised kid named Tim Buczkowski, a guy who wanted money and did what he had to, to get it, in a nutshell. Unfortunately, that meant drowning two wives in a bathtub or hot tub and cashing in on their life insurance policies. (No, he didn't get away with the second one, but he did the first and benefited from that for a long time.)
In the end, the saddest part of this story are the three kids who lost moms and horribly discovered their father was a killer. Imagine what that does to you. Buczkowski had moved to North Carolina to seek being a ice-cream king but that didn't work out. After killing his wife, he moved back to Pittsburgh, married another nice woman and raised the kids from his first marriage, only to have the same thing happen. He looked and acted so guilty on the second murder, doing it so amateurishly, that it was obvious from the start and the guy got what was coming to him. Unfortunately, two nice women were violently murdered and three kids will suffer forever with these memories.