Dion O'Bannion
On November 10, 1924, Chicago Mobster Dion O'Banion is murderd. He was born on July 8, 1892 in Maroa, Illinois and was an Irish-American bootlegger of the early 1920s, and organized crime boss. O'Banion was the leader of the notorious North Side Gang in Chicago, and was an arch rival of Johnny Torrio and Al Capone.
John List
On November 9, 1971, John Emil List murders his entire family in their Westfield, New Jersey home. Though police quickly identified List as the most likely suspect in the murders, it took 18 years for them to locate him and close the case.
Ted Bundy
On November 8, 1974, Carol DaRonch, narrowly escaped being abducted by serial killer Ted Bundy in Salt Lake City, Utah. DaRonch had been shopping at a mall when a man claiming to be a police detective told her that there was an attempted theft of her car and she needed to file a police report.
On November 7, 1983, David Hendricks, a businessman traveling in Wisconsin, calls police in Bloomington, Illinois, to request that they check on his house and family. According to Hendricks, no one had answered the phone all weekend and he was worried. When the police and neighbors searched the home the next day, they found the mutilated bodies of Hendricks' wife and three children, all of whom had been hacked to death with an ax and butcher knife.
On November 6, 1982, Shirley Allen is arrested for poisoning her husband, Lloyd Allen, with anti-freeze in Phelps County Missouri. Lloyd Allen was Shirley's sixth husband and the second to die from mysterious causes; the other four had divorced her.
Nov. 5, 2012
Major Nidal Hasan
On this date in 2009, army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan kills 13 people and wounds 32 in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood. Early in the afternoon of November 5, Major Hasan, armed with two pistols, allegedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” (Arabic for “God is great”) and then opened fire at a crowd inside a Fort Hood processing center where soldiers who were about to be deployed overseas or were returning from deployment received medical screenings. The massacre, which left 12 service members and one Department of Defense employee dead, lasted approximately 10 minutes before Hasan was shot by civilian police and taken into custody.
Nov. 4, 2012
Arnold Rothstein
On this date in 1928, notorious gambler Arnold Rothstein is shot and killed during a poker game at the Park Central Hotel in Manhattan. After finding Rothstein bleeding profusely at the service entrance of the hotel, police followed his trail of blood back to a suite where a group of men were playing cards. Reportedly, Rothstein had nothing good in his final hand. From an early age, Rothstein had a talent for playing numbers. As a teenager, he built a small fortune gambling in craps and poker games, and by age 20 he owned and operated his own casino. Rothstein became a legendary figure in New York because of his unparalleled winning streak in bets and card games. However, it is believed that he usually won by fixing the events. The most famous instance of this was in 1919 when the World Series was fixed. Abe Attell, a friend and employee of Rothstein, paid some of the key players on the Chicago White Sox to throw the games. When the scandal was uncovered, Rothstein fiercely denied any involvement to a grand jury and escaped indictment. In private, however, Rothstein never denied his role, preferring to enjoy the outlaw image. In the 1920's, Rothstein began purchasing nightclubs, racehorses, and brothels. He had such a formidable presence in the criminal underworld that he was reportedly once paid half a million dollars to mediate a gang war. As Rothstein's fortune grew to an estimated $50 million, he became a high-level loan shark, liberally padding the pockets of police and judges to evade the law. He is fabled to have carried around $200,000 in pocket money at all times. Rothstein's luck finally ran out in 1928 when he encountered an unprecedented losing streak. At a poker game in September, Rothstein lost $320,000 and then refused to pay on the grounds that the game had been rigged. Two months later, he was invited to play what would be his final poker game. Asked who had shot him before dying, Rothstein reportedly put his finger to his lips, keeping the gangsters' code of silence.
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
