Denise Noe

June 25, 2010

Dr. Sam Sheppard

At his second trial, with young F. Lee Bailey as his defense attorney, Dr. Sam Sheppard was acquitted of his wife’s terrible murder. The famous case continues to fuel speculation more than a half century later.

by Denise Noe

December 12, 2004

by Denise Noe

Charles Manson is the most famous common criminal in the world, his name a synonym for evil. Thirty-five years after the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders, he continues to be regarded as one of the most devilish cult figures in U.S. history, the possessor of a charisma and sexual magnetism so extraordinary that he ruled a "Family" of fanatically devoted followers willing to kill at his command. This is the Charles Manson that prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, popularized in the best-selling true-crime book of all time, Helter Skelter.

May 1, 2003

(photo courtesy salmineo.com)

by Denise Noe

"He'll end up with a knife in him."

Residents of New York City's crime-ridden Hell's Kitchen neighborhood predicted that Salvatore Mineo Jr. would come to a bad end. The slight boy they called "Junior" in elementary school was a playground brawler, thief, and gang member, according to Marvin J. Wolf and Katherine Mader in Fallen Angels. The biographers wrote that acquaintances predicted he would wind up on the wrong end of a knife.

February 29, 2004

Richard Loeb with his arm around Nathan Leopold.

by Denise Noe

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.

November 27, 2006
(updated 3/12/07)

by Denise Noe

Mississippi Is Not Chicago

People in the Chicago neighborhood where Emmett "Bobo" Till lived knew the 14-year-old as an attention-getter. Despite the stutter left by a bout with polio in his infancy, he had a confident, even cocky, personality and relished pranks and jokes. In an interview that appeared in the PBS documentary, The Murder of Emmett Till, childhood acquaintance Richard Heard recalled how Emmett entertained his schoolmates one day in gym: "I remember Emmett raising his shirt up to about his navel and making his belly roll, waves of fat rolling and it just broke us up. The whole gym went crazy."

March 14, 2005

Leo Frank (photograph c. 1915)

by Denise Noe

At approximately 3 a.m. on Sunday, April 27, 1913, the night watchman of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta discovered a girl's brutally battered body in the factory's basement. Covered with sawdust, her skull was caked with dried blood, her eyes were bruised, her face scratched and bruised and some of her fingers out of joint. A piece of rope, along with a strip taken from her own underpants, encircled her neck.

December 1, 2003
updated January 25, 2006

by Denise Noe

The perception that child molesting was a rare crime perpetrated by a small number of raincoat-clad misfits crumbled in the 1970s and '80s when studies disclosed the astonishing prevalence of this crime and the outward ''normalcy'' of its perpetrators.

May 27, 2004

Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated
on the first anniversary of the Six-Day War in 1968.

by Denise Noe

Sirhan Sirhan did not set out with any grand plan to change U.S. history. He simply wanted to kill Robert F. Kennedy in revenge for Kennedy's support of Israel. As it turned out, Sirhan's assassination of Robert F. Kennedy -- on June 5, 1968, the first anniversary of the Six Day War -- would do more to alter the flow of U.S. history than even the assassination of President John Kennedy accomplished four years earlier. Although both assassinations would have profound and untold impact for decades to come, Sirhan's killing of Robert Kennedy would lead in a matter of months to the election of Richard Nixon as president, the escalation of the Vietnam War and eventually to the national nightmare of Watergate.

by Denise Noe

(Editor's Note: Arthur Bremer is scheduled for release from prison by the end of 2007.)

"Send them a message"