'Outlaw Poetry' Becomes Evidence in Unsolved Murder

Meagan Flynn tells Washington Post readers the story of Larry Via, whose poems published in 1980s magazines Outlaw Biker and Easyriders under the pseudonym "Jody Via" are now evidence in a previously unsolved murder. "He left a note saying he skipped town to clear his head, but Sharon Via knew her husband had run off with a go-go dancer," the tale begins. From there: 

Larry Via was a wannabe musician stuck working at a molding company. He’d been hanging around the Cleveland bars more often lately, trying to sell his amateur poetry as lyrics to rock bands coming through town that spring of 1972. But, Sharon Via told the Akron Beacon Journal that year, “I guess that’s where he met Charmaine.”

He left Sharon in the middle of the night on May 11, 1972, and hopped into Charmaine’s ’68 Cadillac DeVille, the beginning of a summer of mayhem that would span three states. The pair stopped at a bar in Bowling Green, Ky., where Charmaine bought a gun for $50.

By the end of the summer, two people would be dead. A third, a gas station attendant, would miraculously survive a bullet to the head — living to identify his attackers to police as they tracked down Larry Via and Charmaine. Via alone went to prison for life for the rape and murder of a 19-year-old woman who picked him up on the side of the road, while Charmaine was convicted of assisting in robberies, including of the gas station.

But it would take police 47 years to connect Via to the second murder victim. The help came in an unusual form. As Via sat in prison, he kept trying his hand at poetry. This time, he found a buyer: Outlaw Biker and Easyriders magazines. To police today, his stories sounded a lot closer to the facts of an actual crime than the racy fiction that the ’80s pornographic magazines claimed them to be.

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