This has been slightly complicated to organize as many interviews are centered around the life of a person and not a specific event. If the interview revolves around a single murder, disaster or tragedy, the date it happened is listed on this timeline. If more than one murder happened, I chose a date significant to the case. If the subject is broader in scope, I chose a date significant to the subject. If I’ve gotten a date or a fact wrong, please leave a comment or email me at blueewemedia@gmail.com and I’ll address it.
March, 1375: Sir William Cantilupe is stabbed to death, likely by household servants in Lincolnshire, England. Included in the suspect list is his wife Maud and her alleged lover, Sir Thomas Kydale.
December 29, 1386: French king Charles VI presides over a duel to the death between Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris. Carrouges had accused LeGris of raping his wife, Marguerite.
November 23, 1407: Louis I, the Duke of Orleans and brother of France’s “Mad” King Charles VI is assassinated on a street near his home. His death sparks a civil war between the royal family and Burgundy.
September 15, 1440: Gille De Rais, French military hero and right-hand man to Joan of Arc, is arrested. He is accused of heresy, partaking in black magic and the serial murder of hundreds of children.
December, 1476: Wallachian ruler Vlad III, known as “Vlad the Impaler” or “Vlad Dracula” is allegedly assassinated while fighting a Turkish army.
Summer, 1483: Edward and Richard (sons of recently deceased King Edward IV) disappear from the Tower of London. Many theories will circulate about the fate of the “Princes in the Tower”. Some believe they escaped, and others believed they were murdered.
May 30, 1593: English playwright and spy Christopher Kit Marlowe is stabbed to death in a lodging house by Ingram Frizer. Authorities rule it as self-defense, but was he actually murdered instead?
June 4, 1629: The Dutch East India Company’s flagship Batavia wrecks off the western coast of Australia. Many of the survivors, including women and children, will be murdered under orders from a mutineer crew member named Jeronimus Cornelisz.
June 10, 1692: Bridget Bishop, one of the many accused of “afflicting with witchcraft”, is executed in Salem, Massachusetts. More executions will follow.
March 15, 1697: Hannah Duston, along with her newborn son, is taken captive by members of the Abenaki tribe during a raid on her home in Haverhill, Massachusetts. She will later take revenge on the tribe who captured her (and who she claimed murdered her baby) by killing ten of its members in their sleep.
May 23, 1701: Scottish pirate William Kidd, better known as “Captain Kidd”, after being charged with murder, is executed at Execution Dock in London.
November 22, 1718: Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, is killed while he and his pirate crew fight on the deck of a sloop they had boarded off the coast of present day North Carolina.
April 7, 1739: Notorious English highwayman Dick Turpin is executed in York for horse thievery, although he had committed at least one murder and countless other robberies in his short and violent life.
March 13, 1741: HMS Wager, a British ship searching for a Spanish galleon, wrecks near an island off the Chilean coast. The shipwrecked crew members will fight starvation, the cold and each other before attempting a harrowing journey back to England.
December 14, 1763: Fifty-seven Pennsylvania frontiersmen calling themselves “The Paxton Boys” attack Conestoga Town, a small village inhabited by a handful of Susquehannock Indians. They murder six people, but fourteen escape to Lancaster, where they are promised protection (and don’t receive it).
March 5, 1770: British soldiers occupying the city of Boston fire into a crowd of rioters. It becomes known in history as the Boston Massacre, and a rallying cry for the American Revolution.
October 3, 1779: Captain Jonathan Haraden, who commands the American privateer General Pickering, faces off against the much larger British privateer Achilles in the Spanish port of Bilbao, managing to hold his own despite being outmanned and outgunned.
August 24, 1799: Micajah Harpe, one half of a duo of serial killer river pirate brothers, is captured and beheaded by a posse. For years he and his brother Wiley terrorized travelers on the Natchez Trace and from their Cave-In-Rock hideout on the Ohio River.
December 27, 1803: William Buckley, an English convict, escapes from an Australian settlement he and other prisoners were being forced to work in. He later assimilates into the nearby indigenous Wallarranga tribe and lives with them for over thirty years.
March 27, 1814: Major General Andrew Jackson leads United States forces to victory against the Red Sticks (part of the Creek Indian nation) in the bloody Battle of Horseshoe Bend.
January 1, 1818: Mary Shelley publishes her horror classic Frankenstein.
January 28, 1829: William Burke, one half of the infamous Scottish serial killer duo of Burke and Hare, is hanged in front of a crowd of thousands. He and his partner William Hare murdered sixteen people in 1828 and sold their corpses to a doctor for use during anatomy lectures.
October 25, 1829: Eastern State Penitentiary opens in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It will become one of the most storied prisons in American history, housing the likes of Al Capone and Willie Sutton.
April 6, 1830: A wealthy slave trader named Joseph White is found murdered in bed in his Salem, Massachusetts home. Famed lawyer Daniel Webster will be hired to prosecute the accused killers, and the trial becomes so sensational that it inspires Nathanial Hawthorne’s “The Scarlett Letter”.
June 23, 1833: Sally Cochran is murdered by Abraham Prescott on a New Hampshire farm. Prescott claims he did it while he was “sleepwalking”.
December 14, 1834: French Poet Pierre Lacenaire, along with a henchman, murders Jean-Francois Chardon with an axe and suffocates his mother Charlotte in her bed. His murders will inspre the writings of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky.
November 1, 1843: A servant named Amelia Norman follows her ex-boyfriend Henry Ballard to the steps of the Astor House Hotel in New York City and stabs him with a folding knife. The newspapers and moral reformers use this as a chance to try and change seduction laws.
November 29, 1847: Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, missionaries near the present day Washington/Oregon state border, are murdered, along with others, by members of the Cayuse tribe in what is known as the “Whitman Massacre”. The Cayuse believe that the Whitmans stole their land and purposely poisoned them.
August 24, 1848: The Ocean Monarch, an American ship that had only hours earlier had left from England’s Port of Liverpool, catches fire and sinks – killing just under two hundred passengers.
August 12, 1849: Patrick O’ Connor, on his way to dinner with his former girlfriend Marie and her husband George Manning, is never seen alive again. A few days later his body will be found under the floor of the Manning home.
October 7, 1849: Famed horror and mystery writer Edgar Allan Poe dies under mysterious circumstances in a Baltimore hospital.
November 23, 1849: Dr. George Parkman, a wealthy Bostonian, is murdered at the Harvard Medical College. His remains will later be found buried under a privy near the office of a teacher named John Webster.
July 8, 1850: James Jesse Strang is crowned as “king” of the Kingdom of God in Beaver Island, Michigan. Strang is a con man who split from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and declared himself Joseph Smith’s successor. He will be assassinated six years later.
May 1, 1852: Martha Jane Cannary, later nicknamed Calamity Jane, is born in Missouri. She will become a famous frontierswoman, sharpshooter, and friend of legendary lawman Wild Bill Hickok.
May 3, 1853: An American sailing ship named the William and Mary, carrying 200 European immigrants, shipwrecks near the Bahamas. The captain and members of his crew will later be accused of murdering two passengers and leaving the rest to die order to save themselves.
January 14, 1858: Italian revolutionary Felipe Orsini, along with accomplices, hurl his newly designed bombs at the imperial carriage of Emperor Napoleon III outside of the crowded Paris Opera House. Although his assassination attempt fails, the Orsini Bomb will inspire fellow malcontents around the world to terrorize.
February 27, 1859: New York Congressman Daniel Sickles, having recently learned that his wife Teresa was having an affair with U.S. Attorney Philip Barton Key II, murders him in a Washington D.C. park.
January 27, 1861: Twelve-year-old Mickey Free is kidnapped by an Apache raiding party and is raised by an Apache family. He will later become a scout and interpreter for the U.S. Army’s Apache Scouts.
February 9, 1864: Over one hundred Union officers break out of the Confederacy’s notorious Libby Prison. A massive manhunt will follow.
May 25, 1866: A young woman named Laura Foster disappears after leaving her home on a horse to meet an ex-Confederate soldier named Tom Dula. Dula will be tried and hanged for her murder. This story is the basis for the popular folk song “Tom Dooley”.
January 19, 1870: Jean-Baptiste Troppman is executed for murdering Jean and Hortense Kinck and their six children in rural France.
April 30, 1871: A servant named Jane Clouson is found badly beaten on a London street. She will die days later, and police in turn focus their attention on the son of her employer, Edmund Pook.
October 8-10, 1871: The Great Chicago Fire decimates a third of the city, killing about three hundred people and making ninety thousand homeless.
January 7, 1872: “Jubilee Jim” Fisk is murdered on the stairway of New York City’s Grand Central Hotel by Ned Stokes. Stokes, along with Fisk’s former girlfriend Josie Mansfield, are battling Fisk in the courts after the couple tried to blackmail Fisk over some steamy letters.
March 6, 1873: A brutal double ax murder takes the lives of two Norwegian women living on Smuttynose Island, one of the Isles of Shoals near Maine and New Hampshire. A man named Louis Wagner will be tried for their deaths.
March 24, 1873: Mary Ann Cotton, one of England’s most notorious alleged serial killers, is executed after being convicted of poisoning her stepson. Some believe she killed as many as eleven people.
March 18, 1874: Ten-year-old Katie Curran walks into a store in Boston, and is lured to the basement by a fourteen-year-old boy named Jesse Pomeroy. Pomeroy slits her throat and hides her body. A month later Pomeroy will murder little Horace Millan and be caught for that crime.
April 16, 1874: A man named Alfred Packer walks out of the woods and into a Colorado Indian agency building and tells a startling story. He had been hired as a guide by a party of five men and abandoned in the middle of the wilderness, forced to subsist on his own. Those he told his story to were confused – as he didn’t appear to be emaciated or malnourished. It will later be discovered that Packer had eaten his dead companions after a confrontation between them all turned fatal.
May 19, 1876: Wyatt Earp becomes a deputy town marshal of Dodge City, Kansas. He serves as a lawman alongside his lifelong friend, Bat Masterson.
June 25, 1876: The Battle of the Little Bighorn is fought in what is now southeastern Montana. George Custer makes a fatal decision to split his forces, and Lakota warriors, inspired by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, take advantage of his mistake. American forces are completely routed, Custer’s men are annihilated and the Lakota are victorious.
August 26, 1876: Methodist minister William England, his wife Selena and their two children are slaughtered in their North Texas home. Mrs. England, on her deathbed, will claim that their neighbor Ben Cribs committed the brutal crime. But was it really him?
September 7, 1876: The James-Younger gang rides into Northfield, Minnesota, with the intent to rob the First National Bank. The robbery goes awry, however, after cashier Joseph Lee Heywood refuses to open the safe and is murdered. The gang attempts to escape, but a number are either shot or killed in a wild shootout with Northfield citizens.
November 5, 1877: George Hearst, along with his partners Lloyd Tevis and James Haggin officially take over the Homestake Mine in Deadwood, South Dakota. It is the largest gold mine in the United States.
April 12, 1878: William “Boss” Tweed dies from pneumonia while in police custody. He served as boss of New York City’s notorious Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party’s political machine for decades and was convicted for stealing tens of millions of dollars from taxpayers. When he passes away he is in the process of informing against other corrupt members of his “Tweed Ring”.
July 2, 1881: President James A. Garfield is assassinated in a Washington D.C. train station by a deranged office-seeker named Charles Guiteau.
July 14, 1881: Henry McCarty, aka William Bonney, aka “Billy the Kid” is ambushed and killed by lawman Pat Garrett in a house in Fort Sumter, New Mexico.
October 26, 1881: The infamous “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” takes place in Tombstone, Arizona. Wyatt, Morgan and Virgil Earp, along with Doc Holliday, face off against Tom and Frank McLaury, Billy Claiborne and Ike and Billy Clanton. Billy Clanton and both McLaury brothers are killed in the blaze of gunfire.
December 23, 1881: Three teenagers – Robert and Fannie Gibbons and Emma Carico – are murdered in an isolated Ashland, Kentucky farmhouse. A bricklayer named George Ellis confesses to the crime, implicating co-workers in the process. Investigations, trials, a lynching and a massacre of Ashland citizens by the state militia will follow.
October 17, 1882: The headless body of citrus farmer Sam McMillan is found submerged in a lake near Sanford, Florida. He’d been last seen walking towards the home of his neighbor, Archie Newton, who had shown interest in buying McMillan’s property.
January 10, 1883: The famous Newhall House hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin catches fire. Seventy people will ultimately lose their lives in this horrific disaster.
January 16, 1883: The Pendleton Act is passed by Congress. It’s a law designed to stop political patronage in the government, partly in response to the Star Route Scandal of the 1870s, which involved employees of the United States Postal Service selling lucrative government carrier contracts.
March 11, 1884: Gunfighters Ben Thompson and King Fisher are shot to death while attending a performance at the Turner Hall Opera House in San Antonio, Texas. They’d been set up by alleged friends.
September 30, 1885: Sarah Graham is shot in the chest by her husband George and left to die in a well in Brookline, Missouri. Sarah had recently learned that George had secretly married the daughter of a famous female Evangelist and temperance activist named Emma Molloy.
December 24, 1885: The last of a series of serial killings occurs in Austin, Texas, attributed to the “Midnight Assassin”, aka the “Servant Girl Annihilator”. Eula Phillips and Susan Hancock are both murdered in their beds on the same night.
May 4, 1886: A labor rally in Chicago’s Haymarket is interrupted by a column police. A bomb is then thrown from their crowd into their ranks. This event, with chaos and death that accompanies it, will become known in American history as the Chicago Haymarket Riot.
March 17, 1887: Three people, including a child and a prostitute, are found stabbed to death in a luxury apartment on Paris’s upscale Avenue Montaigne. Police will eventually set their sights on an immigrant gigolo named Enrico Pranzini as their number one suspect.
March 31, 1887: A gunfight takes place between members of the Texas Rangers and the outlaw Conner Family in San Augustine, Texas. Bill Conner and ranger Jim Moore are killed in the exchange. It’s known as the “Fight on the Sabine.”
October 16, 1887: The first of a two-part illustrated series called “Behind Asylum Bars” is published in the New York World. Journalist Nellie Bly, going under the alias Nellie Brown, had feigned “madness” weeks earlier and was admitted to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on New York City’s notorious Blackwell’s Island. Her experiences are detailed in the articles, and will later be published in book form as “Ten Days in a Mad-House”.
January 25, 1888: Annie Millwood is brought into Whitechapel Infirmary after suffering a brutal assault by some East London toughs. It is at the Infirmary where she may well have met Robert Mann, a mortuary attendant considered a suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders.
August 7, 1888: Martha Tabram is found murdered in George Yard, East London. She has been brutally stabbed dozens of times. While not a member of the Canonical Five, many believe she is one of Jack the Ripper’s first victims and part of a series of slayings that pre-date the Canonical Five known as the “Bank Holiday Murders”.
August 31, 1888: Charles Allan Lechmere reports finding the body of the first of Jack the Ripper’s victims (known as the Canonical Five) – Mary Ann Nichols – while walking through Buck’s Row in Whitechapel on his way to work. Many will later believe Lechmere is Jack the Ripper because his home, family and workplace are all in the vicinity of the Ripper murders.
November 7, 1888: “Doctor” Francis Tumblety, an American quack doctor, is arrested in London, England on charges of gross indecency with multiple men. He is released on bail just before the brutal November 9th murder of Mary Kelly, attributed to Jack the Ripper, and flees the country. Chief Inspector John Littlechild later suggests that Tumblety might have been the infamous serial killer.
November 9, 1888: Mary Jane Kelly, the last of the Canonical Five victims, is found murdered in her bed, naked and viciously mutilated.
December 29, 1888: The hacked-up body of a seven-year-old boy named Johnny Gill is discovered in Bradford, England. The murder happens as London is in full panic-mode over the Whitechapel killings, and it is compared to those committed by Jack the Ripper.
December 31, 1888: Montague John Druitt’s body is discovered floating in the River Thames in London. Assistant Chief Constable Sir Melville Macnaghten will privately names Druitt as a Jack the Ripper suspect in note in 1894. He points out the odd timing of Druitt’s death soon after the last of the Canonical Five murders.
May 4, 1889: Dr. Patrick Cronin, a member of a secret Irish society called Clan na Gael, is found murdered in Chicago. His enemies include the Clan’s leader Andrew Sullivan, whom he had accused of corruption.
April 28, 1890: Legendary African-American deputy U.S. marshal Bass Reeves arrives in Fort Smith, Arkansas with the notorious Seminole outlaw and murderer Greenleaf. Reeves in his decades long career will capture 3,000-4000 wanted men and women in Indian Territory.
August 23, 1890. Robert Ray Hamilton mysteriously dies in Yellowstone Park. He had been married to a con artist named Evangeline L. Mann, who had lied about having his son in order to get money from him.
September 16, 1890: French Inventor Louis LePrince, who had just perfected his motion picture camera, steps onto a train bound for Paris, and is never seen again. He was due in New York City to announce his invention to the world. Weeks later, Thomas Edison will unveil his own motion picture camera to great fanfare. Was LePrince killed, and if so, by whom?
October 16, 1890: New Orleans police chief David Hennessy is gunned down by assassins, his murder likely ordered by mob boss Charles Mantranga. A number of Italian-Americans will later be tried and acquitted of the murder, but nonetheless lynched by an angry mob.
December 20, 1890: Close to three hundred Lakota people are massacred by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry Regiment near Wounded Creek in southwestern South Dakota.
February 1, 1891: Helen Potts Harris, the cultivated nineteen-year-old wife of med student Carlyle Harris, dies in bed. It will later be learned that Carlyle had poisoned Helen with morphine.
February 7, 1891: Aaron Kosminski is committed to the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum. In later writings, high ranking London police officials will finger Kosminski as the man they believed was Jack the Ripper.
March 28, 1892: Richard James “Two-Gun” Hart, born Vincenzo Capone, is born in Salerno, Italy. After immigrating to the U.S. and New York City with his family he will run away from home at age 16, leaving his little brother Alphonse Capone behind. Hart will then completely transform his identity into a double gun wearing western lawman, operating primarily out of Nebraska, and distancing himself from the Capone crime family.
April 24, 1891: Carrie Brown, a Bowery prostitute known as “Old Shakespeare” is found mutilated and murdered in a seedy local hotel. A man named Ameer “Frenchy” Ben Ali will be tried but there are doubts about whether he really committed the crime.
September 4, 1891: The bodies of two women, Margaret and Sarah McQuillan, are found buried under hay in a barn on the property of Paul and Lizzie Halliday. Paul had gone missing a few weeks earlier. Lizzie Halliday, nicknamed “The Catskill Ripper” will eventually be accused of multiple murders, and go down as one of the most cold-blooded criminals in Upstate New York history.
June 3, 1892: Dr. Thomas Neill Cream is arrested for the murder of Matilda Clover in England. He will later be connected to the poisoning murders of men and women across Canada and the United States and nicknamed the “Lambeth Poisoner”.
July 6, 1892: The Homestead Strike Battle begins. Pinkerton detectives (hired by Henry Clay Frick on behalf of Andrew Carnegie) arrive at the Homestead steel mill, not far from Pittsburgh, on barges via the Monongahela River. They attempt to secure a hill so scabs hired by Frick to replace union strikers can later arrive safely. The strikers meet the Pinkertons with gunfire, however, and temporarily thwart Frick’s plans.
August 4, 1892: Andrew and Abby Borden are hacked to death by a hatchet in their Fall River, Massachusetts home. Daughter Lizzie Borden will be eventually tried for the double murder.
November 2, 1892. A boy named Anton Woode shoots a hunter in the back and kills him in a secluded area near Denver Colorado. He is dubbed by the press “The Boy Murderer”.
August 28, 1893: Little Maggie Sheffield is murdered by her father, Frank Sheffield, at Rocky Point Park in Rhode Island.
November 17, 1894: Chicago druggist Herman Webster Mudgett, better known as Dr. H. H. Holmes is arrested in Boston for horse theft, but police suspect that he has committed more nefarious crimes. Eventually it will be discovered that Holmes is responsible for multiple murders, including members of the Pitezel family.
May 6, 1895: Thirty-seven-year-old Theodore Roosevelt is appointed as a police commissioner in New York City by Mayor Strong, with instructions to clean up crime and corruption in the city.
July 8, 1895: A boy named Robert Coombs murders his mother, Emily Coombs, in her bed in their London home.
January 31, 1896. Twenty-two-year-old pregnant Pearl Bryan is found decapitated in rural Kentucky. A former boyfriend named Scott Jackson and his friend Alonzo Walling will be tried for her murder.
May 27, 1896: Six people are murdered at the home of Colonel Richard McGlincy in Campbell, Califorinia. The suspect is the colonel’s son-in-law, James Dunham, who flees and then disappears.
June 24, 1896: Celia “Ceely” Rose puts poison in her family’s breakfast cottage cheese. Her father David and brother Walter die immediately. Her mother will recover, but Ceely poisons her a second time weeks later.
January 9, 1897: Francis Newton, his wife and daughter are slaughtered with an axe in their farm home in West Brookfield, Massachusetts. Their farmhand, a man named Paul Mueller, not only becomes a suspect in these murders but will later be a suspect in a rash of murders across the country – and will be nicknamed “the Man from the Train”.
January 27, 1897: A former slave named George Dinning is visited on this day by a group of armed masked men, who accused him of stealing from neighbors. Dinning denied the accusations, and members of the mob began firing into his house. Dinning, protecting his home, runs into his house and began firing back. In the exchange of gunfire Dinning hits one of the mob, the son of a prominent local citizen. Things will escalate in horrific fashion from there.
May 1, 1897: Louisa Luetgert goes missing. She would be last seen that night entering the family’s sausage factory with her husband Adolph Luetgert. Chicago police will later find human remains in the factory’s furnace, and conclude her body had been partially dissolved in acid in a sausage vat.
February 28, 1898: Belgium’s ship The Belgica, while exploring the Antarctic, is trapped in the ice. It is poorly equipped and not supplied with enough food to properly feed the crew. Adrien de Gerlache is the commander, with future legendary Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen serving as first mate.
July 8, 1898: Alaskan crime boss and con-man Soapy Smith is killed in the “Shootout on Juneau Wharf” in Skagway.
May 30, 1899: Famed female outlaw Pearl Hart commits her most famous crime, robbing an Arizona stagecoach with boyfriend Joe Boot while dressed as a man.
June 2, 1899: Robert LeRoy Parker, aka Butch Cassidy, along other members of his “Wild Bunch” gang, rob the Union Pacific Overland Flyer passenger train near Wilcox, Wyoming. This notorious train robbery will lead to an extensive manhunt for the gang members, but they will all escape. At least temporarily.
January 16, 1900. Bitter enemies David Grant Colson and Ethelbert Scott square off with pistols in the crowded lobby of a Frankfort, Kentucky hotel. Only one will survive the day.
January 21, 1900: John Jeremiah Garrison Johnston, better known as “Liver-Eating Johnson” passes away. He was a mountain man whose wild and often violent actions, especially against members of the Crow Indians, will later be sensationally embellished in a popular biography of him.
October 19, 1900: A young woman named Jennie Bosschieter accompanies four men to a Patterson, New Jersey saloon. While there they not only get her drunk, but slip chloral hydrate into her wine. The men then take her to an isolated spot, rape her and murder her.
December 1, 1900: An Iowa farmer named John Hossack is murdered in his bed with an axe. His wife Margaret will later be arrested and charged with the crime.
December 24, 1900: Middle-aged store owner Frank Richardson is shot to death in his Savannah, Missouri house. Suspects include his wife and his teenage lover.
July 18, 1901: Fourteen-year-old Willie Nickell is gunned down at Iron Mountain, near Cheyenne, Wyoming, amidst an intense ranch war. Hired gunfighter Tom Horn will eventually be arrested after a drunken confession and convicted and executed for the murder, although many believe someone else was responsible.
October 29, 1901: Jane Toppan is arrested in Amherst, Massachusetts after a toxicologist’s examination of the body of Minnie Gibbs determined she’d been poisoned. Toppan had not only murdered Minnie, but also her sister and their parents. She will later confess to the murders of thirty one people.
November 20, 1901: Nell Cropsey disappears from the front porch of her house in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Her boyfriend Jim Wilcox will be arrested and tried for her murder when her body is discovered in a nearby river thirty-seven days later.
February 2, 1902: Walter Brooks, a member of a group of wealthy young men who call themselves the “Bedford Avenue Gang”, is murdered in a seedy New York City hotel. His girlfriend Florence Burns will be arrested for the crime.
February 27, 1903: Edwin Burdick is found murdered in his Buffalo, New York home. His head is bashed in and he is wrapped in a rug. Suspects will include his wife Alice, her lover and a family friend.
December 23, 1903: Hannah Knapp is murdered by her husband, Alfred Knapp. He strangles her, stuffs her body in a box and dumps it into a nearby river. Knapp will later be connected to other murders in Ohio and receive the nickname “The Hamilton Strangler”.
December 30, 1903: A fire starts in Chicago’s brand new Iroquois Theater. Almost six hundred people die in the blazing inferno, made far worse by the lack of basic safety measures.
June 15, 1904: A fire starts in the lamp room of the passenger steamer General Slocum in New York City’s East River. Over a thousand people will die in the worst fire in New York City history.
Feburary 13, 1905: Eight-year-old Kenneth Beasley wanders off into the woods during recess and is never found again. A political rival of the boy’s father will be tried for his murder months later.
October 5, 1905: The schooner Harry A. Berwind is intercepted off the coast of North Carolina. On board are four black sailors, three alive and one dead. The four white ship’s officers are nowhere to be found. The survivors tell conflicting stories of murder and self-defense, and an intense legal drama follows.
January 1, 1906. Cassie Chadwick, nicknamed “Queen of the Con”, is sent to Ohio State Penitentiary for fraud. She’d been caught pretending she was American steel magnate Andrew Carnegie’s illegitimate daughter, and bilking banks out of millions in loans in the process.
March 19, 1906. Ed Johnson, a black saloon worker, is given a stay of execution by the United States Supreme Court after he was convicted and sentenced to death by a Tennessee court for rape. A vigilante mob of Tennesseans, incensed that the execution has been stalled, break into the jail where he’s being held, drag him to a local bridge and hang him.
June 25, 1906: Famed architect Stanford White is murdered by millionaire Henry Thaw during a theatrical performance in New York City. White had seduced a sixteen-year-old model named Evelyn Nesbit years earlier. Evelyn then married the jealous Thaw, who would develop an intense hatred for White.
September 25, 1906: Cecelia Ludwig is beaten to death with a potato masher by her husband Albin in their Mishawaka, Indiana home. After killing her he puts her body in their bedroom closet and lights it on fire.
August 23, 1907: Mary Janina Mezek, a nun who served at the Holy Rosary Catholic Church in Isadore, Michigan, disappears. The remains of Sister Janina are found years later buried in the church basement.
April 18, 1908: Eighteen-year-old Charles Demar shoots his uncle Salvatore Cira in his fruit shop in Bellefontaine, Ohio. The police suspect the “Black Hand” – a group of Sicilian-American extortionists – is to blame.
April 28, 1908: Multiple bodies, including a headless woman, are discovered in the aftermath of a fire at a farmhouse in LaPorte, Indiana. The woman is believed to be Belle Gunness. As police investigate, they discover that Belle had lured multiple men to her home and murdered them for their money.
May 31, 1908: The mother and husband of Marguerite “Meg” Steinheil are found murdered in their Paris home. Meg, known for her many affairs with powerful French men, will later be nicknamed the “Red Widow”.
July 7, 1908: Twenty-year-old Hazel Drew’s lifeless body is found floating in a pond in Sand Lake, New York. The mystery surrounding who killed her will be so sensational that decades later it inspires the story of Laura Palmer in the televisions series Twin Peaks.
December 21, 1908: Marion Gilchrist, a wealthy Glasgow woman, is beaten to death. When an immigrant gambler named Oscar Slater is later convicted of her murder, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – creator of Sherlock Holmes – takes an interest in the case.
April 5, 1909: Della Reed is found murdered in a trash pile in Atlanta, Georgia’s Fourth Ward. She is generally considered to be the first victim of the Atlanta Ripper.
November 13, 1909: The Cherry Mine in Cherry, Illinois catches fire, killing 259 men and boys trapped inside.
December 26, 1910: A local Hot Springs ne’er-do-well named Oscar Chitwood, soon to go on trial for his alleged involvement in the murder of the sheriff, is murdered himself while being transported to another jail in the middle of the night by a deputy. The deputy says it’s a lynch mob that shot and killed him, but evidence suggests the deputy might be more intimately connected to his murder.
June 9 (or 10), 1912: The infamous “Villisca Axe Murders” take place in Villisca, Iowa. Josiah and Sarah Moore, their four children, and two neighbor girls are all brutally killed with an axe in the dead of night. It’s an unsolved murder mystery with an assortment of strange suspects.
August 23, 1912: Four-year-old Bobby Dunbar disappears near a Louisiana Lake. After an extensive search, a boy will be found in the company of an itinerant tinker that Bobby’s parents believe is their son. Another mother, however is certain that the boy is her son, Bruce Anderson.
November 21, 1912: Eighteen-year-old Ella Barham is found murdered and cut into pieces in rural Boone County, Arkansas. She had been walking home alone. The main suspect will be a neighbor named Odus Davidson, who had allegedly had a crush on the young Ella.
November 23, 1912: The Rouse Simmons, popularly known as “the Christmas Tree Ship”, sinks in a storm on Lake Michigan, taking its captain and crew with it. It was carrying Christmas trees to sell in downtown Chicago, as had been the tradition for many years.
April 26, 1913: Thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan is found strangled to death in the basement of the National Pencil Company. The factory manager, a Jewish man named Leo Frank, will eventually be arrested, tried and convicted of her murder. However with little evidence to support his guilt the governor commutes his sentence, and an angry mob in turn lynches Frank.
August 1, 1913: Sarah Feinstein is murdered in her sleep in Winnipeg home. The case remains unsolved.
January 11, 1914: The Karluk, a ship captained by Robert Bartlett, sinks after being caught in ice in the High Arctic, east of Wrangel Island. Many men will die in the ensuing months.
July 15, 1915: A steamship called the SS Eastland, docked on a wharf on the Chicago River in downtown Chicago, tilts over and sinks, killing over eight-hundred people.
January 30, 1916: Hannah Peck is poisoned to death with arsenic by her son-in-law, Arthur Warren Waite in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Two months later Hannah’s husband John will also die of arsenic poisoning at the hands of Waite.
July 12, 1916: Both twelve year old Lester Stillwell and rescuer Watson Fisher are killed by a rogue shark in Matawan Creek near the town of Keyport, New Jersey. It is the culmination of a series of shark attacks that happens along the Jersey Shore between July 1 and July 12 – which ends up killing four people and wounding one.
September 28, 1916: Florence Small is murdered in her Ossipee, New Hamsphire home. Her husband, Frederick Small is eventually convicted of the crime. He’d shot her and then set the house on fire to cover up the evidence.
December 30, 1916: Grigori Rasputin, the Russian mystic who ingratiated himself into the Imperial Romanov family’s inner-circle, is assassinated by a group of noblemen worried about his influence.
February 10, 1918: The Power family, holed up in their Arizona cabin, shoots it out with lawmen who had arrived to arrest two of the Power sons for draft evasion. Four people die in the exchange of bullets.
May 23, 1918: The first victims of the mysterious serial killer “The Axeman of New Orleans” are murdered. Joseph and Catherine Maggio, who run a grocery in their home, are killed in their beds with an axe.
July 16-17, 1918: The Russian Imperial Romanov family (Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, daughters Olga, Marie, Tatiana and Anastasia and son Alexei) are murdered by Bolshevik revolutionaries in the cellar of the house they are being held in.
September 21, 1919: Members of the Chicago White Sox meet in a New York City hotel room to discuss fixing the World Series.
February 17, 1920: A young woman, struggling to stay above water, is pulled out of a Berlin canal. She will later be known as Anna Anderson and claim that she is Grand Duchess Anastasia, the lone survivor of the Romanov massacre.
April 4, 1920: Two men transporting the Slater-Morrill Shoe Company’s payroll are robbed and then shot to death on a street in Braintree, Massachusetts. Two Italian immigrant anarchists named Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti will be later arrested for the crime, despite a lack of conclusive evidence.
April 22, 1920: Most of the Wolf family is brutally murdered by shotgun and hatchet at their farm in Turtle Lake, North Dakota. The only member to survive is Emma, an eight-month-old baby.
June 15, 1920: Three African-American circus workers are lynched in Duluth, Minnesota – accused of raping a white woman. Tens of thousands will gather downtown to watch their murders.
November 14, 1920: After two couples pull into a campsite in Central Park Montana, only one couple leaves alive. John and Florence Sprouse are murdered on this day, allegedly by Seth Danner, who will be convicted and executed for the crime. An inter-couple love affair is rumored to be a possible motive.
November 26, 1920: Oilman Jake Hamon is murdered in an Oklahoma hotel room by his mistress (and wife of his nephew) Clara Smith Hamon.
February 12, 1921: Nora Shea is shot to death next to some railroad tracks in Missoula, Montana. A hood named Joe Vuckovich will be the primary suspect – but evidence points to her husband, Jerry Shea, as the killer.
May 27, 1921: The body of Ana Brown is discovered in a ravine. She is one of sixty or more Osage Native Americans who have been or will be murdered in Osage County, Oklahoma, mostly in the 1920s. Many of the shooting and poisoning murders are committed by members of a crime ring led by a cattleman named William Hale, who want to profit from their oil-rich land.
May 30, 1921: Nineteen-year-old Dick Rowland, a black shoeshiner employed in a downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma shine parlor is accused of sexually assaulting a seventeen-year-old white elevator operator named Sarah Page. It is the catalyst for what will become a massive attack by an armed white mob on the predominantly black Greenwood District in Tulsa. Dozens will die and much of the Greenwood District will be burnt to the ground over two days in what is commonly known as the Tulsa Race Massacre, or Juneteenth.
February 2, 1922: Hollywood Director William Desmond Taylor is murdered in his Los Angeles bungalow. Suspects include film star Mabel Normand, ingenue Mary Miles Minter, and failed actress Margaret Gibson.
February 5, 1922: French serial killer Henri Landru is executed. Landru murdered at least seven women in the village of Gambais between December of 1915 and January of 1919.
June 21, 1922: A sheriff in Linn County, Oregon named Charles Kendall, along with Reverend Roy Healy, are killed in a gun battle with a moonshiner named Dave West. West kills himself the next day.
July 22, 1922: Frank Nitti disappears from his farm outside of Stickney, Illinois. His wife, Sabella Nitti, will be arrested and tried and convicted. Many believe her conviction was based on her haggard and unkempt appearance.
August 24, 1922: Denver D.A. Philip Van Cise, with the help of the Colorado Rangers, arrests almost three dozen members of the city’s “Million-Dollar Bunco Ring”.
September 16, 1922: The bodies of Reverend Edward Hall and his lover Eleanor Mills are found murdered on an abandoned farm near New Brunswick, New Jersey. Suspicions point to the pastor’s wife, Frances Hall and her brothers.
October 4, 1922: Percy Thompson is stabbed by Frederick Bywaters in Ilford, England. Bywaters had been having an affair with Percy’s wife, Edith. Edith and Bywaters will both be tried for his murder.
January 15, 1923: A young dancer named Fritzie Mann is found dead on a beach in Del Mar, California. She had apparently been thrown from the cliffs above. The mystery deepened when it was learned she’d been pregnant. Eventually two men – a Hollywood actor and a doctor – became the primary suspects in this disturbing case.
March 21, 1924: Bobby Franks, on his way home from school, is abducted and murdered by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. The case will become a sensation both in Chicago and across the country.
May 8, 1924: Sophie Lyons, known as the “Queen of the Burglars” for her decades of thievery and grifting, is murdered in her home at age seventy-six After a long life of crime, she spent her final years trying to reform wayward youths. Unfortunately three of the men whom she’d taken under her wing decided to do her in.
January 1, 1925: Sixteen-year-old Willa Rhoads dies from an untreated toothache. Police will later find her body under the floor of the Rhoads residence along with the bodies of seven dogs. Willa’s parents will admit to police that they had buried their daughter in this fashion on the suggestion of May Otis Blackburn. The Rhoads family are members of Los Angeles’s bizarre Divine Order of the Royal Arms of the Great Eleven – better known as the Blackburn Cult, started by Otis May.
July 24, 1925: Eight-year-old Buddy Schumaher is abducted while out playing with neighbor children in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. His body will be discovered weeks later.
January 11, 1926: The Whittemore Gang, which included Richard “The Candy Kid” Whittemore and his wife Margaret “Tiger Girl” Whittemore pull off their most successful robbery, robbing two Manhattan diamond merchants of $175,000 in gems. Richard Whittemore will later be tried and convicted for murdering prison guard Robert Holtman in a 1925 prison escape and executed.
July 16, 1926: Crusading journalist Don Mellett is gunned down by local gangsters in his Canton, Ohio home.
July 17, 1926: Controversial Fundamentalist pastor J. Frank Norris marches into businessman Dexter Chipps’ office and shoots him dead in Fort Worth, Texas.
May 18, 1927: A horrific school massacre kills thirty eight children in Bath, Michigan. It holds the unfortunate record of being deadliest act of mass murder in a school in United States history.
October 6, 1927: George Remus, a wealthy bootlegger, shoots and kills his wife, Imogene Holmes, in Cincinnati’s Eden Park. The couple had suffered a tumultuous marriage, especially after Remus had been sent to prison. Imogene had begun an affair with a prohibition agent, spent much of Remus’s fortune, and put a hit out on her husband.
October 27, 1927: Australian gangster Squizzy Taylor is mortally wounded in the home of former friend Snowy Cutmore, a member of the Razor Gang. Cutmore is also killed. It was likely a hit by a rival.
December 17, 1927: The mutilated body of twelve-year-old Frances Marion Parker, who had been abducted from her school two days earlier, is thrown out out of her kidnapper’s car after a ransom exchange.
December 23, 1927: The Helms-Ratliff gang holds up the First National Bank in Cisco, Texas. One of the gang members, Marshall Ratliff, wears a Santa Claus suit to the robbery as a disguise. It becomes known as the “Santa Claus Bank Robbery”.
August 31, 1928: Authorities visit the Wineville chicken ranch in Los Angeles, tipped off that a boy named Sanford Clark was being abused there. Police will discover that Clark’s uncle, a man named Gordon Stewart Northcutt had kidnapped and killed at least three boys and buried them on the premises. He had kept them captive in chicken coops before murdering them.
October 30, 1928: A young woman named Elfreida Knaak is found naked, burned and clinging to life next to a furnace in the Village Hall of a small community in Illinois called Lake Bluff. Days later she dies and investigators unravel a truly bizarre story of her death.
November 4, 1928: Arnold “The Brain” Rothstein, a New York underworld gambler, fixer and crime boss is shot during a Manhattan business meeting at Park Central Hotel. He will die two days later. It is believed he was murdered because he refused to pay the debts he accrued during a high-stakes poker game the month prior.
November 30, 1928: Three men are arrested for the murder of a hermit named Nelson Rehymeyer near Mt. Airy, Pennsylvania a few days earlier. They tell police they killed him because they believed he was practicing witchcraft.
February 13, 1929: Seven members and associates of George “Bugs” Moran’s North Side Gang are gunned down in the SMC Cartage Warehouse on Chicago’s North Clark Street. Al Capone and his brothers are suspected to be behind it, and their intended target was Moran, who was luckily running late. The event goes down in history as the “Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre”.
December 25, 1929: Sharecropper Charles Lawson systematically and brutally murders his entire family in Germantown, North Carolina on Christmas Day, including his four-month-old baby Mary Lou.
September 5, 1930. Carl Panzram is executed at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. He not only confesses to twenty-one brutal murders during his incarceration, but also kills a prison laundry foreman named Robert Warnke with an iron bar.
February 26, 1931. Vivian Gordon is found murdered in a Bronx park. As her case is investigated, police will discover she was not only involved in a tangled web of prostitution and blackmail, but had also been speaking to an anti-corruption commission.
April 27, 1931: Virginia Brennan, a hostess at New York City’s Primrose Club, is shot and killed in a stolen automobile driven by gangster Francis “Two-Gun” Crowley and his partner Rudolph “Fats” Durringer. She had spurned Durringer’s sexual advances and in frustration he’d murdered her. Durringer will later be tried and sentenced to death for his crime.
August 23, 1931: Steve Mak, the resident of a Detroit boarding house, falls from a ladder and dies. Police will hone in on the boarding house’s owner, Rose Veres, known in the neighborhood as the “Witch of Delray” because she was rumored to practice witchcraft.
September 16, 1931: Purple Gang gunmen Irving Milberg and Harry Keywell murder three local Jewish leaders who they’ve lured to an apartment in Detroit’s Collingwood Manor. Their escort, Sol Levine, is spared by the gang, but ends up turning state’s evidence. It marks the beginning of the Purple Gang’s eventual disintegration.
October 17, 1931: Al Capone is convicted on three counts of tax evasion. G-Man Elliot Ness helps to put Capone away.
December 11, 1931: Seven gangsters, aided by gangsters Frank “Jelly” Nash and George “Machine Gun” Kelly, escape from Leavenworth Prison after kidnapping Warden Tom White and using him as a hostage.
January 26, 1932: Howard Woolverton, a rich South Bend, Indiana businessman, is kidnapped while driving home. Future suspects in the kidnapping include George “Machine Gun” Kelly and his wife Kathryn Kelly as well as Verne Miller and Frank “Jelly” Nash.
February 1, 1932: Gangster Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll is gunned down by hitmen working for his rival, New York mobster Dutch Schultz.
February 17, 1932: Albert Johnson, known as the “Mad Trapper of Rat River” is finally shot to death after evading Mounties in the Yukon and Northwest Territories over eighty-five miles in brutal sub-zero temperatures. during the winter of 1931 and 1932.
March 1, 1932: Charles Lindbergh Junior is kidnapped from his second floor bedroom. He will later be found dead. The little boy is the son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, and the case will arguably become the most sensational of the entire twentieth century. (I’ve done two interviews on this subject – one that points to Bruno Hauptmann as the killer, and the other to Lindbergh himself).
July 6, 1932: Jealous ex-girlfriend Violet Popovich shoots star Chicago Cubs shortstop Billy Jurges in a hotel room.
August 4, 1932: Jennie Merrill is found dead in her Natchez, Mississippi mansion, her body punctured with bullets. The two main suspects will be her neighbors, Octavia “Goat Woman” Dockery and Dick “Wild Man” Dana, who live in a ramshackle mansion nearby known as the “Goat Castle”.
May 29, 1933: David Lamson calls police after finding his wife Allene dead in the bathroom in their Palo Alto California home. He tells them she slipped in the bathtub and hit her head on the sink. Investigators, however, are not convinced it was an accident.
July 22, 1933: George “Machine Gun Kelly”, an American gangster and bank-robber, kidnaps oil tycoon Charles Urschel from his Oklahoma City home. Kelly receives the $200,000 ransom and Urschel is released, unharmed.
January 24, 1934: John Dillinger, Harry Pierpont, Charles Makely and Russell Clark are each individually captured by Tucson, Arizona law enforcement.
March 31, 1934: John Dillinger and girlfriend Evelyn “Billie” Frechette escape from the Lincoln Court Apartments. Federal agents and a Saint Paul police officer surprise them at their apartment door, and Dillinger blasts his way out. They are able to jump into a car parked into a nearby garage and flee to Minneapolis.
May 23, 1934: Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker are gunned down in rural Louisiana. Lawman Frank Hamer is part of the ambush.
July 11, 1934: Helen Spence, who grew up as a houseboat dwelling “river rat” on Arkansas’ White River is killed while attempting to escape prison after being tortured by her captors. She was well-known for having shot to death the man charged with murdering her father and step-mother in a courtroom three years earlier.
July 22, 1934: Public Enemy No. 1 John Dillinger is gunned down by G-Men and Chicago police after strolling out of the Biograph Theater with Anna Sage and Polly Hamilton.
August 1934: Australian constable Bill McKinnon kills an unarmed aboriginal man named Yokununna at a sacred rock formation called Uluru.
October 22, 1934: Midwest bank-robbing gangster Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd is shot in an Ohio cornfield after a chase led by G-Man Melvin Purvis.
November 5, 1934: Pennsylvania political boss Joe Bruno, concerned that Republicans might lose in the following day’s elections, participates (along with family members) in the attack of a Democratic parade in the coal-mining village of Kelayres. Five are killed, and the event becomes known as the Kelayres Massacre.
January 21, 1935. Two employees of the Capital Transit Company, James Mitchell and Emory Smith, are gunned down near a car barn in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
March 25, 1935: George Weyerhaueser, the son of a wealthy Tacoma Washington millionaire, is kidnapped on his way home from school. A huge ransom is demanded and a massive manhunt ensues.
September 23, 1935: The first of the Cleveland Torso Killer’s (aka the Mad Butcher’s) victims, Edward Andrassy is found decapitated in the notorious area of Cleveland known as Kingsbury Run. Elliot Ness is eventually tasked with hunting for the killer, who goes on to kill more than ten people.
December 16, 1935: Hollywood actress Thelma Todd is found dead in her car, killed by carbon monoxide poisoning. But rumors have long circulated that she was murdered, and the long list of suspects even includes Charles “Lucky” Luciano.
May 1, 1936: The last member of the feared Depression-era bank-robbing Barker-Karpis gang and Public Enemy Number One is finally captured. J. Edgar Hoover himself arrives in New Orleans to personally take Alvin “Creepy” Karpis into custody.
June 18, 1936: New York mobster Charles “Lucky” Luciano is sent to prison for compulsory prostitution. He had run an extensive prostitution ring in New York City for years.
July 16, 1936: Nineteen year old college student Helen Clevenger is found murdered in Asheville, North Carolina’s Battery Park Hotel. A black bell hop named Martin Moore will eventually confess, but questions linger about whether he was coerced, as witnesses saw a white man flee the scene of the crime.
January 8, 1937: The mutilated body of Englishwoman Pamela Werner is found near the old Fox Tower in Beijing (Peking), China. Her father, a former British diplomat will work alongside British and Chinese police to find the killer, but the crime is never solved.
May 6, 1937: The Nazi-funded airship “Hindenburg” bursts into flames and crashes into a New Jersey airfield. Thirty-six people die.
June 10, 1937: New York heiress Alice Parsons disappears after getting in a car to check on a neighbor. Suspects include her husband and their Russian housekeeper.
June 27, 1937: Three little girls are lured away from a park in Inglewood, California and then assaulted and murdered. Their names are Melba Everett, Madeline Everett and Jeanette Stephens, and are known as “The Babes of Inglewood”. While someone will eventually be convicted of the murders, another more likely suspect seems to have been ignored by police.
December 21, 1937: Hollywood film star Ted Healy dies, just a few days after his son is born. The coroner later reports that he died of acute toxic nephritis, but others believe he was murdered – possibly by Los Angeles gangsters.
October 30, 1938: Orson Wells’ adaption of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds novel is broadcasted by radio to both thrilled and terrified listeners across America.
February 20, 1939: Fritz Kuhn, leader of the German American Bund, holds a massive rally at Madison Square Garden in support of Nazi Germany. Tens of thousands show up to listen to his anti-Semitic rhetoric.
August 8, 1940. Eleanor Jarman, nicknamed “the Blonde Tigress” by Chicago newspapers, escapes after serving seven years of a one-hundred-ninety-nine year sentence from an Illinois woman’s prison. She goes on the run and is never caught, and some believe she is the longest-running female fugitive in American history.
October 4, 1940: Railway worker Paul Ogorzow stabs Gertrude Ditter to death in her home in Nazi-era Berlin. This will be the first of eight murders for Ogorzow, who becomes known as the “S-Bahn Murderer” because he finds his victims on the S-Bahn train.
November 16, 1940: George Metesky, later known as the “Mad Bomber”, plants his first (of at least thirty-three) bombs on the window sill of Manhattan’s Con Edison power plant. He will terrorize New York City for years to come.
December 12, 1941: Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, leader of the New York City’s notorious Murder, Inc. is gunned down in a suite in the Half Moon Hotel. Reles had developed numerous enemies over time, especially once he’d agreed to turn government witness and gather evidence against his mobster bosses, who included “Lucky” Luciano, Lepke Buchalter and Albert Anastasia.
May 3, 1942: Ivy McLeod is discovered strangled and beaten to death in a Melbourne, Australia park. She will become the first of The Brownout Strangler’s three victims. The Brownout Strangler is Eddie Leonski, an American G.I. who was stationed at a nearby military base.
August 3, 1942: José Díaz is found dead, with two stab wounds and a skull fracture, at the Sleepy Lagoon reservoir in Los Angeles. Seventeen Mexican-American youths will be arrested, and twelve convicted of second degree murder.
Feb 2, 1943: Chicago Outfit girlfriend Estelle Carey is murdered in her hotel room. Suspects include New York Irish mobster Eddie McGrath, who had spent time with Florida days earlier. No one will ever be tried for the crime.
June 3-8, 1943: The Zoot Suit Riots take place in Los Angeles, California. American servicemen and others strip and attack Mexican-Americans who wear zoot suits – long, baggy bright-colored suits originally made fashionable through African-American culture.
August 24, 1943: Wartime British Serial killer John Reginald Christie murders the first of many women when he strangles to death a twenty-one-year-old Austrian munitions worker named Ruth Fuerst in his home. He buries her body in the backyard.
October 24, 1943: Patricia Burton Lonergan is found beaten to death in her New York City apartment by her estranged husband Wayne Lonergan. Rumors that Wayne was secretly homosexual kept the case on the front pages of city newspapers.
March 3, 1944: Herman Perry, a black army soldier serving in the China-Burma-Indian Theater, shoots and kills Lieutenant Harold Cady, who was attempting to arrest him for dereliction of duty. Perry had been suffering from mental issues, due in part to the abuses he’d suffered while incarcerated in the local prison. Perry then escapes into the jungle, and a massive manhunt ensues.
May 11, 1944: Mildred Gillars, aka “Axis Sally”, makes more most infamous radio broadcast from Nazi Germany. Called “Vision of Invasion”, it was an attempt to scare American G.I.s and other Allied soldiers about what might await them should they be involved in an invasion of occupied Europe.
May 3, 1945: The German ocean liner Cap Arcona, known as the “Nazi Titanic”, is sunk by British fighter-bombers in Lübeck Bay, Germany on one of the final days of World War II. Unbeknownst to the pilots, the ship is filled with Holocaust survivors and prisoners of war. Thousands die from the attack, and more are killed by Nazis who wait on the beach for those who swim to shore.
December 2, 1945: Thora Chamberlain, a fourteen-year-old student in Campbell, California, is lured into a car and never seen alive again. The prime suspect isThomas McMonigle, who will be tried for her murder.
December 24, 1945: A fire destroys the home of the Sodder family in Fayetteville, West Virginia. The parents, George and Jennie, along with four of their nine children, escape. Remains of the other five children, however, are not found in the ruins. The surviving Sodders will spend a lifetime believing that the missing children survived.
January 4, 1946: Killer James Wayburn “Red” Hall is executed in Arkansas. He murdered four people, including his wife Fayrene, in 1944 and 1945.
March 24, 1946: The first victims of the “Texarkana Phantom Serial Killer” are discovered. Richard Griffin and Polly Ann Moore have both been shot to death in a lover’s lane in rural Texas.
April 12, 1946: The torso of a dismembered female murder victim is found wrapped in a burlap sack and floating in the Willamette River south of Portland, Oregon.
October 14, 1946: A doctor named Willis Broadhurst is shot to death on a lonely Oregon country road. His wife Gladys will be tried for plotting the murder of her husband, which included dispatching her young cowhand lover to ambush and kill him.
January 14-15, 1947: Elizabeth Short is found mutilated and murdered in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Short will be nicknamed “The Black Dahlia”, and the case will become one of the most famous in American history. (I’ve done two interviews about the Black Dahlia case – one that fingers Dr. George Hodel as the killer, and the other Leslie Dillon).
February 18, 1949: Olive Durand Deacon, the final victim of serial killer John George Haigh, is shot to death in Haigh’s workshop in Sussex, England. He then attempts to dissolve her body in a vat of acid.
September 6, 1949: A World War 2 veteran named Howard Unruh walks out of his New Jersey apartment and murders thirteen people in his neighborhood in twelve minutes. It’s considered by many to be America’s “first recorded mass shooting”.
March 19, 1950: JoAnn Dewey is kidnapped in front of St. Joseph’s Hospital in Vancouver, Washington. Her beaten body will be located Wind River a week later, miles away. Two brothers – Turman and Utah Wilson – will eventually be arrested and tried for her murder.
July 19, 1952: Two General Motors executives, Albert Jones and Charles Culhane, are kidnapped at a scenic lookout in Oregon’s popular Crater Lake National Park. Two days later their bodies will be found, shot to death, in a remote spot not far away.
January 13, 1953: Emmanuel “Manny” Balestrero, a bass player in New York’s famous Stork Club, is arrested and charged with armed robbery, the result of a misidentification by eye-witnesses. He is eventually proven innocent, and his story becomes the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic semi-documentary “The Wrong Man”.
September 28, 1953: Six-year-old Bobby Greenlease, son of wealthy Kansas City car dealer Robert Greenlease, is kidnapped and murdered by two grifters.
October 17, 1953: Diane Wells reports that her husband, Alaska businessman Cecil Mills has been murdered. Diane becomes known in the press as the “blonde bombshell”, and is suspected in his death.
September 30, 1955: James Dean is killed in a horrific collision while driving his Porsche Spyder, nicknamed “the Little Bastard”. A curse will allegedly follow the car in years to come.
December 28, 1956: Two teenage Chicago girls, Patricia and Barbara Grimes, go to the local movie theater to see “Love Me Tender”, but never come home after the show. Three weeks later their bodies will turn up on a lonely road outside of the city.
July 18, 1957: An Amish father named Paul Coblentz is shot to death by two drunk ex-cons in his home in Sugarcreek, Ohio. Coblentz, a pacifist, does not attempt to fight back.
January 21, 1958: Charles Starkweather begins a ten-victim killing spree by murdering his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate’s mother, step-father and little sister in their Lincoln Nebraska home.
April 4, 1958: Johnny Stompanato, a henchman of Los Angeles gangland boss Mickey Cohen, is stabbed to death in the home of Hollywood Starlet Lana Turner. Stompanato had viciously abused her over the years. Her daughter Cheryl will eventually be tried for the killing.
December 21, 1958: A pregnant nurse named Olga Duncan is murdered by two hit men hired by her mother-in-law, Elizabeth Duncan.
February 18, 1959. Albert Lepard, along with his cousin Joe Edwards, murder 74-year-old Mary Young in her rural Mississippi home. Lepard will be tried and convicted for the murder, sentenced to life at Parchman, and escape six times in the next fourteen years.
July 18, 1959: Barbara Finch is murdered outside of her home in West Covina, California by her cheating husband, Dr. Bernard Finch. Dr. Finch had conspired with his mistress Carole Ann Tregoff to kill her by drugging her and pushing her car off of a cliff, but when Barbara fought back – Finch instead shot her in the back.
November 15, 1959: Four members of the Clutter family are murdered in their farmhouse home outside of Holcomb, Kansas. Ex-convicts Richard Hickock and Perry Smith will be be caught, convicted and executed – but is there a third culprit who got away?
February 9, 1960: Adolph Coors III, heir to the Coors Brewing Company, is murdered after his killers botch an attempt to kidnap him.
July 24, 1960: 49-year-old widow Frances Lacey is mysteriously murdered after a morning walk while on a visit to Michigan’s Mackinac Island.
July 1, 1961: Los Angeles underworld mob boss Meyer Harris “Mickey” Cohen is sentenced to fifteen years in Alcatraz for tax evasion.
October 24, 1961: Housewife Joan Risch mysteriously vanishes from her home, in what becomes one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in Massachusetts history. Police find her kitchen smeared with blood, and her son in his upstairs crib. Was it an accident, or was she murdered?
March 6, 1963: Saint Paul, Minnesota housewife Carol Thompson is murdered by a hitman in her home. It will later be learned that her husband, T. Eugene Thompson, had ordered the hit. While it’s never been confirmed, this crime is thought to be the inspiration for the film Fargo.
November 22, 1963: John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Lee Harvey Oswald is caught and arrested for his murder, and many believe in a larger conspiracy at play. But could it have just been Oswald, acting alone?
May 31, 1964: Charles Schmid murders his first of three victims, Alleen Rowe in an Arizona desert. He will later be nicknamed the “Pied Piper of Tucson”.
March 13, 1964: A twenty-eight-year-old bartender named Kitty Genovese is raped and murdered outside her Kew Gardens New Jersey apartment building. Despite her cries, no one comes to her aid. This case will introduce the term “bystander effect”.
August 24, 1965: An Ohio housewife named Mariann Colby shoots to death her neighbor boy, eight-year-old Cremer Young Jr.
November 8, 1965: Journalist Dorothy Kilgallen dies from a combination of drugs and alcohol in her Manhattan townhouse. Some, however, suspect that she might have been murdered, in part because of her investigation into the John F. Kennedy assassination.
July 6, 1967: Brenda Joyce Holland’s body is pulled from North Carolina’s Albermarle Sound. She had been strangled and apparently dumped. Police will fumble through the investigation, mishandling evidence and juggling multiple suspects including her boyfriend and an abusive dentist.
July 9, 1967: The first known victim of John Norman Collins, Eastern State Michigan University student Mary Terese Fleszar, is last seen alive. Her body will be found a month later. More student-aged murder victims are later connected to him. He is known as the Co-Ed Killer.
June 25, 1968: Richard and Shirley Robison, along with their four children, are murdered in their northern Michigan cabin while on vacation. The police will have their suspicions about who committed the murders, but never get the evidence for an arrest.
October 4, 1969: Jackie English is abducted in London, Ontario. She had just finished a shift at a local restaurant and was walking to a bus stop when she was picked up by a car near an overpass. Five days later her body will be discovered in a creek an hour’s drive from town. Other similar abduction-murders in the area are attributed to the same mysterious person, now known as the Forest City Killer.
November 28, 1969: Betsy Aardsma, a Penn State graduate student, is stabbed to death in Pattee Library. The prime suspect will be Richard Haefner, a fellow grad student.
December 6, 1969: A member of the Hell’s Angels biker gang stabs Meredith Hunter at a free concert at Altamont Speedway near San Francisco. The concert is headlined by the Rolling Stones.
June 17, 1970: VISTA worker Nancy Morgan is found murdered in a government car on Hot Spring Mountain in North Carolina. She had moved into the Appalachian community months earlier as an organizer, and had been looked on with suspicion by locals for her outgoing and independent personality. Local law enforcement botch the investigation as they protect one or more of the suspects. s
December 30, 1970: Professional boxer and former world heavyweight champion Sonny Liston is found dead in his home from a heroin overdose. Some believe, however, that he was murdered.
November 21, 1971: A man nicknamed D.B. Cooper hijacks Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305. He reveals on the flight he has a bomb, demands $200,000, and eventually parachutes from the plane with the money as it travels over Washington State. His identity remains a mystery to this day.
November 10, 1972: Country music legend David “Stringbean” Akerman” and his wife Estelle are murdered in their rural home outside of Nashville, TN.
September 27, 1972. Two teenage friends named Susan Carol Place and Georgia Marie Jessup are picked up in Place’s Port St. Lucie, Florida home by a man who will later be identified as murderer Gerard John Schaefer Jr (aka the Killer Cop). Their remains will be discovered the following year. Susan Place’s mother’s notation of Schaefer’s license plate number ultimately helps connect police connect him to the crime. He’ll later be convicted of murdering them and sentenced to two concurrent life sentences.
June 25, 1973: Little Suzie Jaeger is abducted from her tent while camping with her family in Montana and later murdered. A local man named David Meirhofer eventually confesses to four murders, including Suzie’s.
November 17, 1973: Four teenage boys are murdered by three sociopathic brothers while enjoying a campfire in Iowa’s Gitchie-Manitou State Park. The fifth member of their group, Sandra Chesky, is raped and released. She will become known from that point on as the “Gitchie Girl” and live a lifetime of trauma.
January 23, 1974: Athalia Ponsell Lindsley is murdered on the front step of her St. Augustine Florida mansion with a machete. Suspects include both her husband and her neighbor Alan Stanford, with whom she had been feuding.
April 26, 1974: Oxford-educated Rose Dugdale, along with three of her fellow Irish Republican Army cohorts, force their way in to the Russborough House, a sprawling Irish mansion owned by De Beers diamond heir Sir Alfred Beit. After tying up Beit and his wife (and beating him) they proceed to steal nineteen art masterpieces including Johann Vermeer’s famous Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid.
July 30, 1975: Former Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa disappears at a restaurant near Detroit Michigan. Frank “the Irishman” Sheeran will later confess to his murder.
May 26, 1977: Up-and-coming boxer Tyrone Everett is killed in his home. His girlfriend Carolyn McKendrick will be tried for his murder, but she’ll claim self-defense. But is there something more sinister behind his death? And was it actually murder?
June 18, 1977: The Reverend Willie Maxwell is killed while attending the funeral of his murdered step-daughter in Alabama. It will later be discovered that Maxwell had murdered five people, including his step-daughter.
June 27, 1977: Heiress Elizabeth Congdon is murdered at Glensheen Mansion, her Duluth Minnesota home. Her step-daughter, Marjorie (along with Marjorie’s husband Roger Caldwell) will be tried for the murder.
June 29, 1978: Hogan’s Heroes television star Bob Crane is found bludgeoned to death in his Scottsdale, Arizona apartment. His friend John Carpenter becomes the primary suspect.
May 9, 1980: Four armed men attempt to rob the Security Pacific Bank in Norco, California. It’s a massive shootout against a woefully underarmed local police department.
September 13, 1980. Gerald Uden’s ex-wife Virginia, along with her two sons Richard and Reagan, are reported missing. They were supposed to go bird hunting with Gerald. The police suspect not only Gerald but his new wife Alice.