Blogs

Natalie Holloway

by Michael Thomas Barry

On June 15, 2005, more than two weeks after Natalee Holloway vanished while on a high school graduation trip to the Caribbean island of Aruba, police search the home of 17-year-old Joran Van der Sloot, one of the last known people to see the young woman alive. Although Van der Sloot would emerge as a prime suspect in the case, he was never charged. Holloway’s disappearance generated massive media attention in the United States; however, her body never has been found, and in 2012 she was declared legally dead.

TWA Flight 847

by Michael Thomas Barry

On June 14, 1985, TWA Flight 847 from Athens to Rome is hijacked by terrorists who immediately demand to know the identity of ''those with Jewish-sounding names." Two of the Lebanese terrorists, armed with grenades and a 9-mm. pistol, then forced the plane to land in Beirut, Lebanon.

June 13, 2013 By Christine Byers St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The male shooter is among the four dead, police say. Officers recovered a semiautomatic handgun from the crime scene.

St. Louis Police Capt. Michael Sack said the dead were in their early 40s to mid-50s.

“We don’t know if this is a prior thing that carried over,” Sack said.

Michael Graff, who has a law office in the same building, said the health care business was owned and staffed by Somalian immigrants. He said he had heard heated arguing there on past occasions. Graff was not in the building Thursday when the shooting occurred.

Sack said the shooter appeared to be an employee or owner of the health care business, and that the victims were employees. No one else was injured.

June 13, 2013 By Annie Sweeney and Jason Meisner  Chicago Tribune

The top leaders of one of Chicago’s most violent street gangs have been charged in a sweeping racketeering case that alleges they controlled their West Side drug empire through pattern of intimidation, kidnappings, shootings and murder dating back to the mid-1990s, according to an affidavit unsealed today in Cook County Criminal Court.

Before sunrise today, police armed with "no knock" search warrants fanned out across the Chicago area surprising dozens of leaders of the Black Souls, including Cornel Dawson, known as the gang’s chief, and Teron Odum, described as Dawson’s second-in-command. Also arrested were a number of “top runners” and “supervisors” who authorities say control the gang’s street operations.

The 78-page affidavit alleges the Black Souls ran an $11 million-a-year drug operation and protected the enterprise with violence that included at least seven murders from 1994 to 2012. In all, 23 members of the gang have been charged with racketeering conspiracy, while 18 more face state drug or weapons charges, authorities said.

Susan Polk

by Michael Thomas Barry

On June 13, 2006, jurors began deliberations in the trial of Susan Polk, 48, for the October 2002 murder of her psychotherapist husband Felix Polk, 70, in a poolside cottage at the couple's Orinda, California home. Felix was stabbed and cut 27 times and had suffered blunt force trauma to the head. 

Medgar Evers

by Michael Thomas Barry

On June 12, 1963, civil rights leader Medgar Evers is shot to death in the driveway outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith.

June 12, 2013 Boston Herald

South Boston mob boss James J. “Whitey” Bulger was at the center of “murder and mayhem” for nearly three decades, killing 19 people in the 1970s and 1980s, extorting millions from drug dealers and other criminals, and corrupting police and FBI agents, prosecutors said today as the gangster’s trial got under way 18 years after his indictment.

“It’s a case about organized crime, public corruption and all sorts of illegal activities,” prosecutor Brian T. Kelly said. “At the center of all this murder and mayhem is one man — the defendant in this case, James Bulger.”

The government plans to show the jury a 700-page file they say shows Bulger, while committing a long list of crimes, was working as an FBI informant, providing information on the New England Mob — his gang’s main rivals — and corrupting FBI agents who ignored his crimes.

“No 1, James Bulger is of Irish descent,” Carney said. “And the worst thing an Irish person could consider doing is becoming an informant.”