Blood, Books, and the Broken System: Gregg Owen’s True Crime Crusade from Courtroom to Convergence

Chicago, 1976. A pair of bodies. A witness. A mountain of evidence. Slam dunk, right? Not in this town. Not when the streets run thick with corruption, and justice is just another name in the city directory.

In this no-holds-barred conversation, I sat down with Gregg Owen—former prosecutor, musician, and now a full-blown literary truth-teller—to talk about the case that never let him go. And the city that tried to pretend it never happened.

Owen’s new book, Convergence, reads like a crime thriller, except every brutal twist, every vanished file, every crooked judge—it’s all real. This is the story of Delphine Moore and Gio Messina, stabbed to death in a Gold Coast apartment on March 1st, 1976. The killer? Nabbed within days. There was a confession. There was a witness. It should have been open-and-shut.

But Chicago doesn’t do open-and-shut. It does payoffs and coverups, lost evidence and “misplaced” reports. The case that should’ve put a killer behind bars got swallowed by a system designed to protect itself.

And then—years later—Gregg Owen looked at the file again.

The justice system doesn’t usually get second drafts. But Owen gave it one. And what he found inside that dusty file box was a gut-punch: a case that had been gutted from the inside out. “You could fit the remaining evidence into a shoebox,” Owen tells me. “The rest? Gone. Disappeared. Like it never existed.”

Convergence is more than just a true crime story. It’s a time capsule cracked wide open—a descent into the underworld of 1970s Chicago, when cocaine came roaring into town and street gangs cashed in on the chaos. It’s crusader cops, wire-wearing informants, sleazy pornographers, FBI stings, and judges with dirt under their fingernails. It’s a courtroom drama smashed against the harsh reality of a city built on backroom deals and bicentennial lies.

And it’s just the beginning.

Now, through his indie imprint 26th Street Books, Owen plans to keep digging. He’s not interested in polite publishing or glossed-over narratives. “There are stories this city still doesn’t want told,” he says. “But I’m going to tell them anyway.”

If Convergence is any indication, he means it. This is a man who swapped guitar strings for gavel-swinging justice, and now he’s hitting the page with the same ferocity.

So here’s your warning: Convergence doesn’t go down easy. It’s raw. It’s brutal. It’s everything a true crime story should be. But more than that—it’s honest. In a city where truth is often the first casualty, that alone makes it worth the read.

And maybe, just maybe, it’ll make the system sweat a little.

For more Stories From The 78, follow @tombarnas78 on Instagram and @storiesfromthe78 on TikTok.