The 1968 Willem de Kooning painting Donald Rasch kept in his bedroom for several years.

​Donald Rasch, the convicted art thief who was found unconscious in his Maplewood home in November and died four days later, has been declared a homicide victim by police.

Police had initially deemed Rasch's death suspicous, because there were no signs of a break-in or struggle, and his body had no outward signs of injury. Police have not released the cause of death.

Rasch, a devout art lover, referred to the theft of 113 modern art masterpiece as "a crime of passion" when former Riverfront Times writer Kristen Hinman profiled the heist in a 2005 feature, "Masterpiece Theatre."

​It's been a year since St. Louis's independent booksellers banded together to form the St. Louis Independent Bookstore Alliance in order to fight the threat of Amazon. It worked: The only bookstores that closed in St. Louis this year were part of the Borders chain. The Alliance sponsored bookstore bus tours and speed dating nights and, every week, put out a list of the bestselling books in the St. Louis area.

In many ways, the St. Louis bestsellers don't differ much from the rest of the country: We scooped up copies of The Help and Go the Fuck to Sleep and The Hunger Games just like everybody else. But local readers also pushed several local titles into the top ten: The Light Bringer by local cops Chris DiGiuseppe and Mike Force; First Kill, the first volume in Heather Brewer's Slayer Chronicles series; Amanda Doyle's amazingly comprehensive Finally, A Locally Produced Guidebook to St. Louis by and for St. Louisans, Neighborhood by Neighborhood; and, best of all, Noir at the Bar, a collection of crime stories edited by Jedidiah Ayres and Scott Phillips, who donated the profits to local indie Subterranean Books.

After the jump, the list of the year's bestsellers, based on sales at Left Bank Books, Main Street Books, Pudd'nhead Books, Subterranean Books and Sue's News.

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Somewhere out there Harry Caray is tipping his cups in appreciation.

​Good news, sports fans. The glory days of baseball broadcasting -- when a commentator could be forgiven for a bit of misbehavin' -- are alive and well.

Why's that? Because this week Fox Sports Midwest announced it will retain Cardinals play-by-play broadcaster Dan McLaughlin for the 2012 season. Last fall, Daily RFT opined that McLaughlin's career in St. Louis was finito after he was charged for his second DWI in just over a year's time.

We felt even more confident about that prediction when the embarrassing details of McLaughlin's arrests came out a few weeks later. When pulled over in August 2010 for the first DUI, McLaughlin was allegedly so shitfaced he'd wet his pants. When he crashed his car in the second DWI in September 2011, McLaughlin was apparently too drunk to unlock the car door and lied to the officer that he lived just a few blocks away and could safely drive home if she let him go.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, our speculation of the death of Dan McLaughlin's career was greatly exaggerated. 
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Students can purchase and wear these shirts on Monday.

​As reported earlier, the Westboro Baptist Church has scheduled a protest at Clayton High School on Monday, February 6. The WBC wants to publicly denounce the students and faculty for their inclusiveness and tolerance of others -- because they're dicks, you see -- and also because when the WBC do stuff like this it garners them media attention. They're such needy attention whores, aren't they?

Clayton High School intends to take the high road and treat this as a learning experience for the students. And if the idea of education was not already anathema to the hateful pricks, the WBC's protest will in fact raise funds for both the Gay-Straight Alliance and for Growing American Youth.

Ladies and gentlemen, that's how you rub shit in someone's nose while maintaining your own dignity.
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Jay Swoboda has good cause for his smile today.

​Today is the day of reckoning for Whats Up magazine. Earlier this month, Whats Up's founder and main main Jay Swoboda appealed to the public for moral and financial support. Without both, Swoboda planned to shut down the social justice publication after a decade as the voice of St. Louis' homeless population.

The magazine's financial goal was to raise $5,000, but generating a renewed human investment of dedicated volunteers to help write and operate Whats Up was much more vital for its long-term success. Late yesterday afternoon, Swoboda contacted us with the final numbers of the fundraiser, and the future looks very bright indeed.
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​A Michigan man who produced child pornography depicting young boys being sexually abused and shared it with one of the most notorious online pedophile groups ever busted by the federal government has been sentenced to 25 years in prison, the United States attorney for the Central District of California announced this week.

Joshua Boras, 34, of Lapeer, Michigan, and a member of the since-dismantled international child-porn trading group known as "Lost Boy" was one of just two American members of the group to have been charged with actually producing some of the content on the online message board. The secret pornography group, which operated under password protected codes prior to its dismantling, was the subject of our January 12 feature article, "The Scooby-Doo Files."

At the time of its existence in 2009, the group, whose three dozen members operated across four continents, was the largest child exploitation enterprise ever indicted by the U.S. government. An investigation that began in Los Angeles spun off into a major case in the Missouri Ozarks, where pedophile Jeffrey Greenwell was caught producing pornographic content that made its way to the Lost Boy group. He recently received a 100-year prison sentence for his misdeeds.

Boras, who operated under the screen name "Steel," is the second member of the Lost Boy group to be sentenced. (Authorities have caught and convicted all but three American members.)

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Jennifer Silverberg

A former meth maker shared his story (and his burn) with Riverfront Times in 2010.

​The Associated Press this morning followed-up a story the Riverfront Times first reported nearly two years ago, chronicling the toll meth (particularly the "shake and bake" method of producing the drug) is having on hospital burn units.

The AP reports that meth makers account for up to a third of all burn-unit patients in states such as Missouri that rank among the nation's biggest meth-producing states. Most those patients are uninsured and leave owing the hospital an average of $130,000. Those costs -- anywhere from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars annually -- get passed along to taxpayers.

Former RFT staff writer Keegan Hamilton cited similar information back in May 2010 when he wrote:
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​Looks like peaceful protest still works. On Saturday morning, St. Charles City Attorney Mike Valenti officially dropped charges against two Show-Me Cannabis Regulation volunteers who were cited by police for "soliciting without a permit" on Sunday, January 15. The two were in fact gathering signatures on a petition in support of a ballot initiation to legalize and regulate the sale of marijuana in Missouri, as we reported here.

The city's move comes on the heels of SMCR returning to North Main Street on Friday night to peacefully gather more signatures, and collectively exercise their First Amendment rights in a lawful and productive manner.

Valenti issued an official statement via email: "The City views this matter as an isolated incident and fully respects citizens' First Amendment right to lawfully collect petition signatures on public sidewalks."
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SNAP's David Clohessy

​Recently in both Kansas City and St. Louis, lawyers defending the Catholic Church against clerical sex abuse allegations have have tried to subpoena years worth of emails and records from their long-time adversary, SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests).

SNAP director David Clohessy often impugns the Church for failing to deal transparently with clerical sex abuse. Is it hypocritical for him to balk at releasing his group's correspondence with victims, journalists and others?

Catholic League president Bill Donahue apparently thinks so, suggesting in the Post-Dispatch last week that:

Clohessy never tires of lecturing the Catholic Church on the need for transparency, yet when he is in the hot seat, he rebels.

Daily RFT asked Clohessy by e-mail for his reaction.

He roundly rejects any moral equivalence. Here's what he wrote to us:
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​Remember Ronald Ball, the Illinois man who's been suing PepsiCo on a claim that he opened a can of Mountain Dew and found a dead mouse inside?

The Madison Record broke the story a year and a half ago, followed by the Daily RFT (here and here). But yesterday, websites from the Daily Mail in Great Britain to The Star in Canada to Fox News lit up with headlines announcing PepsiCo's rather macabre defense: That any mouse submerged in Mountain Dew that long would've completely disintegrated.

In a signed affidavit, a veterinary pathologist (who's studied just this sort of phenomenon) describes in gruesome detail what would befall such a mouse:
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