Historical Crimes
New:
Daisy de Melker: South Africa's First Serial Killer
by Marilyn Z. Tomlins. (12/02/2007)
Daisy killed the old fashion way, with arsenic and
strychnine.
Dr. Petiot Will See You Now by
Marilyn Z. Tomlins,
(10/07/07).
Sixty-one years after Dr. Marcel Petiot, dubbed "Dr. Satan" by French
newspapers, was guillotined for the murder of 26 people, he remains France's
most prolific murderer.
Hunting Down Vito Genovese in WWII Italy by
Tim Newark
(06/01/07).
Tim Newark is
the author of the recently published Mafia Allies: the True Story of
America's Secret Alliance with the Mob (Zenith Press). This article is an
adapted extract from that book.
The
Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping by Lona
Manning. (3/04/07)
More than seven decades after his execution for committing "the crime of the
century," Bruno Richard Hauptmann still has his defenders and sympathizers.
Updated: Cold Case: The Murder of Emmett Till by
Denise Noe.
(11/27/06; updated 3/12/07)
The brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi
in 1955 galvanized the fledging civil rights movement like no other killing of a black
by white racists before it. After an all-white, all-male jury acquitted Till's two killers,
the case festered for 49 years until the U.S. Justice Department reopened it in 2004. In late
February of 2007, a Lefore County, Miss. grand jury declined to issue any new indictments,
effectively bringing the case to an abrupt and ignoble end.
9/16: Terrorists Bomb Wall Street by
Lona Manning. (01/15/06)
Long before 9/11 became the date most identified with terrorism, New York's
Wall Street District suffered through a massive bombing on September 16,
1920 that shocked the world. Italian anarchists orchestrated the bombing
five days after Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were indicted on
charges of first-degree murder.
Leopold and Loeb's
Perfect Crime by Denise Noe. (02/29/04)
Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold were as unlikely a pair of cold-blooded
murderers as ever appeared in U.S. history. Privileged, brilliant, and coddled,
they conjured up the perfect crime – just for the hell of it – and then executed
it quite imperfectly. Only Clarence Darrow's virtuoso courtroom performance
saved these remorseless, self-styled "supermen" from being hanged.
The Lynching of Leo Frank by Denise
Noe.
(03/14/05)
Virulent
anti-Semitism led directly to the arrest, prosecution, conviction, and
lynching of the innocent, but Jewish, Leo Frank. Police and prosecutors
fabricated evidence to win a death by hanging verdict. When the governor of
Georgia commuted Frank's sentence to life in prison, a resurgent Klan mob
stormed the prison and re-imposed the original sentence.
How
Lizzie Borden Got Away With Murder
by Denise M. Clark. When Lizzie Borden axed her stepmother and
father to death in 1892 it was unthinkable that a woman of such upbringing could
commit such vicious crimes. The savagery of the murders set her free.
Jack the Ripper’s Victims
by Denise M. Clark. Jack the Ripper lives in lore, an icon of butchery,
the most infamous murderer in history. But what of his hapless victims? Who were
they?
Murder
in the Brothel: The Courtesan and the Clerk by Doris
Lane.
Helen Jewett was famous in 1830s New York. Elegant and strikingly dressed, she
was known to every pedestrian along Broadway. Young Richard P. Robinson, one of
her regular clients at the brothel, became infamous by murdering her in bed and
getting away with it.
The Dumb-Bell Murder
by Doris Lane.
The 1927 murder of magazine editor Albert Snyder by his wife and her lover
generated more publicity than the sinking of the Titanic. A book and a
movie, Double Indemnity, and a Broadway play, Machinal, were based
on the case. But what is remembered most is a secret snapshot taken of the
electric-chair execution of "The Bloody Blonde." It remains one of the
most famous photos in tabloid history.
Phantom of the Ozarks: The Slicker
War by Ronald J. Lawrence. John Avy, the
"Phantom of the Ozarks," was a "godfather" a century before
his time. His criminal exploits in the 1830s – wholesale thievery,
counterfeiting, murder-for-hire and the political corruption to make it all
possible – marked the most lawless period in Missouri history, making Jesse
James’ gang a few decades later seem mild and inept by comparison. It took a
vigilante group known as the "Slickers" to bring him down.
America’s First Known Serial Killers: The Harps, Big
and Little
by Doris Lane. The first known
serial killers in American history were the Harp boys. During the years of the
Revolutionary War, the two cousins went on an indiscriminate killing rampage,
killing anyone who got in their way. They killed infants, including their own,
children, women and numerous men. They killed for the sake of killing.
The Original
"Dream Team" by Doris
Lane. Aaron Burr
and Alexander Hamilton, the most star-crossed political foes in U.S. history,
joined together in 1800 to defend a man accused – and all but convicted in the
court of public opinion – of the murder of his fiancée.
