Bernie Goetz
On December 23, 1984, Bernhard Goetz, who shot four young black men on a subway car the previous day, flees New York City after becoming the central figure in a media induced frenzy. On the afternoon of December 22, Troy Canty, Barry Allen, Darrell Cabey, and James Ramseur reportedly approached Goetz as he was riding the subway and demanded $5. Goetz pulled out a .hand gun and shot each of the boys.
John Wayne Gacy
On December 22, 1978, John Wayne Gacy confesses to murdering over two dozen boys and young men and burying their bodies under his suburban Chicago home. In March 1980, Gacy was convicted of 33 sex-related murders, committed between 1972 and 1978, and given the death penalty. At the time, he was the worst serial killer in modern American history. George Ridgway, known as the Green River Killer, overtook Gacy in November 2003, when he admitted to murdering 48 women in the Pacific Northwest.
llich Ramirez Sanches aka Carlos the Jackal
On December 21, 1975, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez aka Carlos the Jackal led a six-person team in an attack of the meeting of OPEC leaders; they took more than 60 hostages and killed three: an Austrian policeman, an Iraqi OPEC employee and a member of the Libyan delegation. Carlos demanded that the Austrian authorities read a communiqué about the Palestinian cause on Austrian radio and television networks every two hours. To avoid the threatened execution of a hostage every 15 minutes, the Austrian government agreed and the communiqué was broadcast as requested.
Al Sharpton
On December 20, 1986, three black men are attacked by a group of white teenagers in Howard Beach, a predominately white, middle-class, Italian-American neighborhood in Queens, New York. Earlier that night, the men were driving from Brooklyn to Queens, when their car broke down near Howard Beach.
President Bill Clinton & Monica Lewinsky
On December 19, 1998, the House of Representatives approves two articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton, charging him with lying under oath to a federal grand jury and obstructing justice. Clinton, the second president in American history to be impeached, vowed to finish his term.
John Kehoe
On December 18, 1878, the last of the Molly Maguires, John Kehoe is executed in Pennsylvania. The Molly Maguires, an Irish secret society that had allegedly been responsible for some incidences of vigilante justice in the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania, defended their actions as attempts to protect exploited Irish-American workers. In fact, they are often regarded as one of the first organized labor groups.
Barbara Jane Mackle
On December 17, 1968, Barbara Jane Mackle, a student at Emory College and the 20-year-old daughter of a millionaire real-estate developer is kidnapped from the Rodeway Inn in Decatur, Georgia.
On the night of November 29, 1988, near the impoverished Marlborough neighborhood in south Kansas City, an explosion at a construction site killed six of the city’s firefighters. It was a clear case of arson, and five people from Marlborough were duly convicted of the crime. But for veteran crime writer and crusading editor J. Patrick O’Connor, the facts—or a lack of them—didn’t add up. Justice on Fire is OConnor’s detailed account of the terrible explosion that led to the firefighters’ deaths and the terrible injustice that followed. Also available from Amazon
