Murder

Oct. 15, 2012 Updated Feb. 25, 2013

Stacy and Drew Peterson

For over 25 years, Bolingbrook, Illinois, Police Officer Drew Peterson used his connections to the police department to intimidate, threaten, and abuse his successively younger wives. He was untouchable. When his fourth wife went missing in 2007, state police took another look at the “accidental death” of his third wife.

by Mark Pulham

Update: Former Police Officer Drew Peterson – now 59 years old – was sentenced on February 21, 2013 to 38 years in prison for the murder of his third wife, Kathleen Savio, in 2004.

Drew Peterson seemed to be unlucky with women. His first three marriages failed and ended in divorce, with his third wife dying in a tragic accident. And now his fourth wife had run away with another man. Not too surprising given their 30 year age difference.

But did that really happen? Things were not all they seemed in the Peterson household.

Drew Walter Peterson was born in 1954, and all his life he wanted to be a cop. After graduating from Willowbrook High School in Chicago, in 1972, he joined the U.S. Army where he was trained to be a military police officer.

At high school, he met Carol Hamilton and the two started dating. She described him as a person who was very outgoing and told lots of jokes. He was very confident. Carol fell in love with Peterson, and in 1974, the couple married.

In 1977, Drew Peterson got his wish when he joined the police department in Bolingbrook, Illinois. A year later, Peterson became part of the Metropolitan Area Narcotics Squad, and started going undercover. He was so good at his job that in 1979, he was named “Officer of the Year.”

April 16, 2012

Laxmibai Karve, a 45-year-old widow from Poona, was poisoned by her doctor on the train to Bombay.

by Randor Guy

The slow-crawling passenger night train from Poona to Bombay pulled into Victoria Terminus, Bombay after a weary stop-at-every station journey soon after dawn.  A middle-aged man, Anant Chintaman Lagoo, a Poona-based doctor, arranged for a stretcher to carry a 45-year old widow.  She was unconscious and obviously needed immediate medical help. Lagoo raced towards G. T. Hospital, some distance away, where the woman was admitted.  It was about 5:45 a.m.

Lagoo told the hospital doctors that the lady whom he had not known before had travelled in the same compartment with him on the Poona-Bombay night train.  He had gathered from the usual train journey chat that her name was Indumati Paunshe and she had a brother G. B. Deshpande, living in Calcutta.  She took ill during the journey and became unconscious on board.

The lady was treated for diabetic coma.  Glucose and insulin were administered along with other drugs, but she did not respond to the treatment.  Nor did she regain her senses and she passed away at 11:30 a.m.

She had neither jewelry nor ornaments on her.  No money either.  Except the clothes she had on her person, there was nothing.  She seemed a destitute.  And nobody came to claim her body nor did anyone turn up to see her, of course, besides the Good Samaritan Poona doctor, Lagoo.

April 9, 2012

Rhys Jones

Teenage gang warfare in Liverpool claimed the life of an 11-year-old boy who was shot to death by a stray bullet on his way home. 

by Joe Purshouse

On August 22, 2007, 11-year-old Rhys Jones was shot in the back by a stray bullet in the midst of a gang war that had plagued the Croxteth and Norris Green estates in Liverpool for almost a decade. Rhys Jones had no affiliation to the gangs in Liverpool and was merely making his way home from football practice when he and his friends made the fateful decision to cross the Fir Tree Pub car park.

Some time earlier in 2007, a “young scally,” as the locals would say, named Sean Mercer had received an Anti-Social Behaviour Order from the Courts for terrorising a security guard at a local Shopping Centre with close friend Dean Kelly, age 17. Mercer was 16 at this time and was keen to make a name for himself among the leaders of the “Crocky Crew” gang to whom he was affiliated. His desperation to escalate in the ranks of the Crocky Crew and his hatred of the rival Strand Gang member –Wayne Brady – is what eventually would lead to the untimely death of Rhys Jones.

March 19, 2012

One of the most sensational cases that Dr. C. B. Gopalakrishna investigated from the Forensic Science angle was the history-making Alavandar murder case. Even though more than half century has passed since the murder and its trial that shook South India, it is still being talked about and discussed as excitedly as it was 50-plus years ago. This writer wrote a TV serial based on this case in Tamil, which was produced by the Dhina Thanthi Group-owned TV Division, and telecast over Doordarshan some years ago. The serial turned out to be a major success.

by Randor Guy

The noted Madras morning daily, The Hindu, carried a short news item one morning during August 1952. It had a sensational headline that caught the reader’s attention at once. "CITY BUSINESSMAN MISSING!"

A complaint had been made at the Law College police station in Esplanade, Madras that a person named Alavandar was missing, and his whereabouts were unknown. The complainant was a well-known businessman of the city, a big dealer in fountain pens and the owner of the noted firm Gem & Company, M. C. Cunnan Chetty.

Who was Alavandar? A man in his early 40s, during World War II he had worked as sub-divisional officer at the Army Headquarters at Avadi near Madras. He belonged to the Hindu Vysya community to which M.C. Cunnan also belonged. Known as "Komati Chettis," the Telugu-speaking members of this community are traditionally businessmen and many of them wealthy. But Alavandar was not. After his discharge from the British Indian Army service he looked around for a living and chose to have a small business of his own. Plastic goods.

The age of plastics dawned in India, soon after the World War II and caught the fancy the Indian consumer. The articles were colorful, light, and not so expensive. Plastic articles became the fashion of the day and Alavandar thought that it was a good line of business. His fellow Vysya, Cunnan Chetty, kindly gave him a small space in the frontage of his pen company for him to display the goods and conduct his business. Gem & Company drew many customers and it seemed a fine venue of business for the novelty of the day.

Alavandar also had another line of business. Selling saris on installments. The installment business was something new in Madras during that period. With its easy terms of payments and possession of the goods it found ready acceptance and took firm roots. Though some criticized it as "buying on the never-never," it found its place in the economy of the country and the world too.  (According to law goods bought on the installment plan never really belonged to the user until and unless the last installment was paid. Until then the lessor was the legal owner and he had right to seize the property at any time for default in payment. That was why it was called buying on the "never-never" system of purchase because the article never legally belonged to one until the end.)

March 12, 2012

Joan, Michelle and Christe Rogers

On June 4, 1989, the bodies of Joan, Michelle and Christe Rogers were found floating in the serene waters of Tampa Bay. They were stripped below the waist, bound, and tied to concrete blocks. How could such a tragedy strike in paradise?

by Fred Shrum, III

They were going on vacation! It was a trip that may seem normal to some.  But to the Rogers family, it was the trip of a lifetime.  They were going to Florida to make some memories.  But Florida would literally become a tourist trap for Jo, Michelle and Christe.  They would not make it home alive.

The Rogers women were going to experience Florida in the classic fashion. They would color their days with beaches, attractions, and maybe even a visit to Mickey Mouse. This would be a welcome respite from their daily grind spent on a 300-acre dairy farm in Ohio. They were determined to enjoy every moment.

Why was Florida such a welcome change? Have you ever worked on a farm? Imagine an existence where no matter how tired or sick you are, or how cold or hot it is outside, there is work that has to be done. No exceptions. You awake in darkness to greet 80 cows that need to be milked.  By the time you are finished, it’s only first light.  You step out of the milking parlor and gaze at the fields that seem to go on forever.  There are crops that need constant attention.  Around late afternoon all 80 cows are calling out to be milked again.  You may have worked enough by nightfall.  Once you get in there is laundry, cooking, and other housework. Then you wake the next morning and start all over again.  You do this every single day.  How does Florida sound now?

Feb. 29, 2012

Ruth Ellis

It was a time of “no sex please, we’re British.”  Women, if they had to mention the three-letter word, preferred to spell it out in a whisper. As for men, they hypocritically joined private men’s clubs where sex was on the menu along with beer and French fries covered in salt and soaked in vinegar.  The girls who provided the sex – models they called themselves and club owners called them hostesses – dreamed of meeting a sugar daddy. One such girl – Ruth Ellis – saw her dream end on the gallows, a rope around her neck.

 By Marilyn Z. Tomlins

There is no sweet story to write about the childhood of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to hang in Britain.

Even the reminiscences of her sister, Muriel Jakubait, in her 2005 book, Ruth Ellis: My Sister’s Secret Life, could not pretend that the first years of the life of her little sister, six years her junior, were idyllic. 

Describing Ruth as dark-haired, skinny and quiet and wearing second-hand clothes, Mrs. Jakubait wrote of how the 11-year-old pre-menstrual Ruth screamed when their father abused her sexually. Muriel, also abused by their father and having borne his child, wrote: “I heard her scream … I knew what he was doing… I encouraged her not to come home straight from school … Most of the time I’d stand in front of her, screaming for him to leave her alone … Nothing stopped him …”

Ruth was born in Rhyl on the northeast coast of Wales on October 9, 1926, her parents, Bertha and Arthur, having moved to the resort not long before. Arthur – Nelson Arthur Hornby – was a cellist, working when and where he could which meant that he either provided the accompanying music to a silent movie, or he played the cello in the band of an ocean liner sailing between England and America. Bertha was half-Belgian half-French: Catholic nuns had evacuated her with other orphans from Belgium to England during the First World War. As for Arthur, he used the surname Neilson for professional reasons. This meant that Bertha also some days said that her surname was Neilson. Thus, some of the couple’s children were given the surname Neilson instead of Hornby. So was Ruth.