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Bizarre Cases of the missing and murdered

Started by Brody, August 27, 2015, 10:36:43 AM

Brody



In this remarkable photo from 1853, a man named Joseph Avery can be seen desperately clinging to a log in the middle of the Niagara River. Avery was part of a group of three men that were boating along the river, their vessel losing control in the strong current and smashing into a rock.
Avery's two companions were carried straight to their death over the waterfall, but Avery was able to scramble onto a log that was caught between two rocks. After holding on for eighteen hours, Avery managed to climb onto a rescue boat that was guided downriver. Unfortunately, the boat capsized almost immediately, tossing Avery straight into the river and over the falls.
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http://murderpedia.org/female.K/k/knight-katherine.htm
Katherine Knight was the first Australian woman to ever be sentenced to life without parole, and for very good reason. One fateful night in the year 2000, Knight went to see her boyfriend, John Price, with whom she was currently having a fight. During the night, Price stabbed him at least 37 times with a butcher knife, as he bled out on the floor of his home. But, unfortunately, it didn't stop there.


Knight then skinned him and hung the skin on a meat hook in the lounge. She then butchered parts of his body and made an extravagant meal out of them, "serving up the meat with baked potato, pumpkin, zucchini, cabbage, yellow squash and gravy." When police discovered the dishes, they were set neatly at the table, with the names of his children on cards at each place setting. It appears that she was planning on serving his body parts to his own children.


Knight claimed to remember doing none of this, but a judge didn't buy it. She is still serving out her life imprisonment in New South Wales.

MBGGA


Brody

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WomDHmO12Ig

http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-santa-shooting28-2008dec28-story.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covina_massacre

At approximately 11:30 p.m. PST, Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, dressed in a Santa Claus suit, knocked on the door of his former in-laws' house, occupied by about 25 people, with a gift-wrapped package containing a homemade flamethrower in one hand and a 9mm semi-automatic handgun in the other hand; he also had three additional 9mm semi-automatic handguns in his possession. When the door opened, Pardo fired the handgun at the eight-year-old daughter of Leticia Yuzefpolsky, a sister of Sylvia Pardo,[6] as she ran to greet him, injuring her in the face. He then fired indiscriminately at fleeing party-goers. Police speculate that Pardo may have stood over and pointedly executed some of the victims, using the other handguns.[7]

After the shootings, Pardo unwrapped the package containing the homemade flamethrower, and used it to spray racing fuel gasoline to set the home ablaze.[8][9] Nine people died from either gunfire or flames, and three others were wounded: the eight-year-old girl who was shot in the face with severe but non-life-threatening injuries, a 16-year-old girl shot and wounded in the back, and a 20-year-old woman who suffered a broken ankle jumping out of the second-floor window.[9][10] There was one survivor who called the authorities during the attack, after escaping to a neighbor's house.[11] The resulting fire soared approximately 40 to 50 feet and took 80 firefighters an hour-and-a-half to extinguish. Due to the intensity of the fire, identification of the victims was done with dental and medical records.

Covina police Saturday released the names of the nine people they believe perished but who have not been officially identified by the coroner's office: Pardo's ex-wife, Sylvia Pardo, 43; her parents, Joseph and Alicia Ortega, 80 and 70 respectively; three of her four siblings, James Ortega, 52, Charles Ortega, 50, and Alicia Ortiz, 46; James' wife, Teresa Ortega, 51; and Charles' wife, Cheri Ortega, 45; and Michael Ortiz, 17, Alicia Ortiz's son. The slayings left 15 children without one or both parents.


Brody

On the last day of school in 1974, every kid in America was thinking of the fun they’d have on their Christmas break, including 5th grade Chris Carrier. But Chris’ Christmas holiday would not be filled with joy; instead, it would be rocked with terror.
On the walk home from school that afternoon, Chris was two doors away from his house when a strange man walked up to him and introduced himself as one of his father’s friends. The older man told Chris he was throwing a party for his dad, and asked if he wanted to help prepare the decorations. Chris eagerly agreed, and hopped into the back of the man’s motor home.
While little Chris made himself comfortable, the stranger sped past the Miami city limit sign. Reaching the outskirts of town, the man stopped the truck, pulled out a map, handed it to Chris, and asked him to find a particular road. While Chris busied himself with the search, the man excused himself “to get something.”
Moments later, as Chris leaned over the map, he felt a sharp stabbing pain in his back. He twirled to see the strange man standing over him holding an ice pick. The man grabbed Chris out of the vehicle and proceeded to stab the young boy in the chest several more times.
Through the pain, Chris pled with his abductor; if the man would only stop hurting him, he wouldn’t tell anybody.
The man threw Chris back into the motorhome, promising the boy he’d drop him off somewhere. From the floor of the vehicle, Chris asked the man why he was doing this to him. The only answer the older man gave him was that Chris’ dad “had cost him a lot of money.”
Roughly an hour later, the man pulled the vehicle over and led Chris into the Florida Everglades. The man told Chris to wait; his dad was coming to pick him up.
Of course, Chris’ father wasn’t coming. He didn’t even know where his son was.
It would be six terrible days in the wilderness before a hunter would find Chris. The little boy was not only hungry and weak, but had been stabbed several times, and even shot in the head, though he had no memory of it.
The tragedy left Chris blind in his left eye. Miraculously, he suffered no damage to his brain. The worst part of the whole ordeal in Chris’ mind was that his captor was still on the loose.
Police sketch artists put together a few drafts of what the assailant might look like based on Chris’ description of his attacker. Chris’ father and uncle immediately recognized the man in the drawing; David McAllister had been hired by the family to nurse a great-uncle after he suffered a stroke.
Even though a motor home and pistol matching the caliber of Chris’ wound were found at McAllister’s home, forensics were not what they are today, and McAllister was never brought to justice for the crime he committed.
Chris had a rough adolescence. He was acutely aware of his disfigured appearance, and he couldn’t play any of his favorite sports because of the harsh injuries he’d sustained.
But around the age of 13, Chris began to change. He was no longer consumed with animosity, bitterness, revenge, or self-pity. He realized he couldn’t stay angry forever.
22 years would pass between the date of the attack, and a life-changing phone call. A police officer on the other end of the line said McAllister, now blind from glaucoma and bed-ridden in a nursing home, had admitted to being Chris’ captor.
The next day, accompanied by a friend, Chris went to the facility where McAllister was, to meet the man who had changed his life.
Chris’ recollection of that encounter should challenge all of us:
When I first spoke to David, he was rather callous. I suppose he thought I was another police officer. A friend who had accompanied me wisely asked him a few simple questions that led to him admitting that he had abducted me. He then asked, “Did you ever wish you could tell that young boy that you were sorry for what you did?”
David answered empathetically, “I wish I could.”
That was when I introduced myself to him. Unable to see, he clasped my hand and told me he was sorry for what he had done to me. In return, I offered him my forgiveness and friendship.”
Chris meant what he said. He visited McAllister in the nursing home many more times, talking about both of their lives. Finally, one day, Chris got a chance to tell McAllister about the life-saving forgiveness that only Jesus Christ can offer. McAllister â€" in the presence of the one he’d tried to kill â€" bowed his heart to Christ.
Three weeks later, the elderly kidnapper and attempted murderer died. Forgiven.

Brody

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/07/07/brazil-soccer-referee-killed-during-match-his-head-displayed-on-stake-midfield.html
A soccer referee was beheaded and his head displayed atop a wooden stake at midfield after a match erupted in violence in Brazil.
On June 30, 2013, during a soccer game in northern Brazil, referee Otávio da Silva and player Josenir dos Santos got into a fist fight after dos Santos was expelled from the game. Dos Santos refused to leave the field, and the ensuing fight escalated until da Silva stabbed the player, who died on his way to the hospital. Friends and family of dos Santos rushed the field and stoned the referee to death before dismembering his body.
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Brody

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Marie_Hilley
http://articles.latimes.com/1987-02-27/news/mn-4087_1_arsenic-poisoning

A woman slowly poisons her son, then husband and daughter, ultimately killing her husband. She is eventually exposed, but avoids capture and begins a new life. After being re-married for a few years, she fakes her own death - only to return to her husband under the guise of being her own twin sister!
Authorities eventually catch on to her ruse and send her to prison. There she is granted several furloughs away from the penitentiary, finally escaping during one approved leave. She was apprehended four days later, suffering from exposure after being exposed to freezing rain for several days. She died of a heart attack in the hospital shortly after.

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http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/Northeast/03/01/girl.found.alive/

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (CNN) --A fire that authorities six years ago thought killed a 10-day-old girl was a ruse to kidnap the infant, Philadelphia police said Monday.

The baby, Delimar Vera, was sleeping in the upstairs front bedroom when a fire broke out at her family's two-story row house in north Philadelphia on December 15, 1997.

Luz Cuevas, her mother, could not find Delimar when she ran into the room. She eventually ran out of the house, overcome by smoke and burned on her face. Her two other children also survived, police said.

Remains of the infant's body were never found, and police concluded they had been incinerated in the flames.

The official cause of the fire was listed as an overheated extension cord attached to a space heater.

But Cuevas never fully believed her daughter died in the fire.

In January, she attended a birthday party for the child of an acquaintance and was struck by the resemblance of a 6-year-old girl to herself and her other children.

Telling the girl she had bubble gum in her hair, Cuevas was able to take strands of her hair in hopes a DNA test would prove she was right, according to Philadelphia police Lt. Michael Boyle of the special victims unit.

A state legislator helped put Cuevas in touch with police, who launched an investigation and had DNA tests performed that confirmed the girl is her daughter.

Police say Carolyn Correa, 41, a resident of Willingboro, New Jersey, a Philadelphia suburb, started the fire and kidnapped Delimar, whom she passed off as her own daughter.

Brody

https://nypost.com/2016/09/25/hoarder-may-not-have-known-sons-corpse-was-in-her-home/

It’s a plot twist not even Alfred Hitchcock would think of.

The elderly Brooklyn woman found this month living with the skeletal remains of her son, possibly for as long as 20 years, is a legally blind hoarder who may not have even known he was there, NYPD sources said.

The chilling discovery of the skeleton was made Sept. 15 when a relative showed up at Rita Wolfensohn’s Midwood home to fetch her belongings and take them to her in the hospital.

In a debris-choked second-floor bedroom, sister-in-law Josette Buchman found a “completely intact” skeleton, dressed in jeans, socks and a shirt, lying on its back on a thin mattress on the floor, police sources told The Post.

“It’s like some reverse ‘Psycho’ scene,” a law enforcement source said at the time, referring to Hitchcock’s 1960 horror flick in which a son, Norman Bates, keeps his dead mother’s remains in a basement.

But investigators now believe Wolfensohn may not have known she was living with the corpse of her son. Cobwebs and garbage filled the room where the body was found â€" as if “a garbage truck had dumped its load” inside, police sources said.

The room reeked of rotting food, but not of ­decaying flesh, the sources said.

When police questioned the ailing woman, she spoke about her son as if he had simply moved out.

Her brother, Joseph Buch­man, and his wife, Josette, would not say where Wolfensohn â€" whose husband, Jesse, died in 1987 â€" is staying, but they were seen Saturday visiting a Long Island assisted-living facility.

Joseph told The Post he hadn’t been close to Wolfensohn for years. Another relative said he wouldn’t comment on the grisly mystery until “after the funeral.”

The widow’s Brooklyn home, a well-appointed, two-story brick house worth about $700,000, had fallen into disrepair. Last week it was empty, with mail piling up. No one answered multiple calls to the home phone.

Authorities have not officially identified the body but believe the man was Wolfensohn’s son and that he died of natural causes. They would not provide a name.

According to public rec­ords, Wolfensohn had two sons, Michael and Louis. Relatives said they had not seen Louis â€" who today would be 49 years old â€" in 20 years.

Michael died in 2003 at the age of 38, according to court documents.
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https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mummified-body-missing-grandson_us_584098bbe4b0c68e047fe930

A Pennsylvania woman made a disturbing discovery on Wednesday when she found a badly decomposed body in the attic of her home. Authorities suspect it’s her grandson, who disappeared two years ago.

Zanobia Richmond, 65, heard something fall in the upstairs of her Erie home Wednesday afternoon, according to Erie’s WICU 12 News. When she went to investigate, she was shocked to discover a badly decomposed body had fallen against her attic door.

Erie County Coroner Lyell Cook is now working to confirm the identity of the body, but told The Erie Times-News officials are confident the body is Richmond’s missing grandson, Dyquain Rogers.

“That is where he lived,” Cook said.

The house where police found the body believed to be that of Dyquain Rogers.
Authorities will use dental records to make a positive identification. The coroner’s office has not provided a timeline as to how long that might take.

Rogers’ mother, Carol Rogers, told WICU 12 News she was shocked by the discovery.

“I just kept pretending like he just left Erie, so I just kept focusing on that, that he left here, that’s what I kept saying,” Carol Rogers said.

Dyquain Rogers, was 21 years old on Nov. 1, 2014 â€" the day he was last seen alive at his grandmother’s home. Later that night, he failed to show up for his management job at a local Little Caesar’s.

When family members discovered he’d left behind his cell phone, wallet and glasses, concern turned to panic. On Nov. 3, Rogers’ grandmother reported his disappearance, according to police reports.

Richmond reportedly told police she had seen her grandson talking on his cell phone before he went missing. However, when police dialed the last number he called, the individual on the other end of the line denied knowing Rogers.

Rogers’ family and friends told police it would be out of character for him to take off without notifying anyone and they did not know him to be upset or depressed prior to his disappearance.

Brody

http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_George_W._Bush_on_9/11

http://web.archive.org/web/20021209013255/http://www.longboatobserver.com/showarticle.asp?ai=2172

If three eyewitnesses are correct, terrorist hijacker Mohamed Atta came to the Holiday Inn Hotel & Suites-Longboat Key Sept. 7 â€" the day the media announced President George W. Bush would be coming to the area Sept. 11 to speak at a Sarasota school. Atta may have been there to meet a second hijacker, Marwan Al-Shehhi.
--
President George Bush began the morning of September 11, 2001 on Longboat Key, Florida. At about 6a.m. Longboat Key Fire Marshall Carroll Mooneyhan was at the front desk of the Colony Beach & Tennis Resort as Bush prepared for his morning jog. From his vantage point Mooneyhan overheard an exchange between a Colony receptionist and a security guard.

A van occupied by men of Middle Eastern descent had pulled up to the Colony stating they had a “poolside” interview with the president. The self-proclaimed reporters then asked for a Secret Service agent by name. Guards from security relayed the request to the receptionist, who had not heard of either the agent or plans for an interview. The receptionist gave the phone over to a nearby Secret Service agent who also was unwarned of any agent by that name or any planned poolside interview. The agent told the occupants of the van to contact the president’s public relations office in Washington, D.C. and turned them away form the premises.
The reported incident is significant due to the fact that Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance was assassinated in northern Afghanistan two days earlier on September 9 by two Al-Qaeda agents posing as reporters. During the interview they ignited their video camera that was filled with explosives killing themselves and severely wounding Massoud who died later.
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http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/New-CIA-documents-show-Jordans-King-Hussein-had-lovechild-with-American-Jewish-actress-533557

TL/DR: A dwarf injected with HGH like hormones kills his mother in a drug fueled rage. His father is believed to have been a Muslim king who had an affair with a Jew and was forced to hide his ties to his offspring due to the unrest and scandal it would cause.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - Recently declassified CIA documents show that King Hussein of Jordan had a child out of wedlock with an American Jewish actress, who was later beaten to death by their son.
The file reveals that the 24-year-old king, having divorced his first wife two years earlier,  “was especially desirous of female companionship during his Los Angeles visit and it was requested that appropriate arrangements be made through a controlled source of the Office in order to assure a satisfied visit.”

As Hussein sought to secure financial aid from the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration during the trip, the spy agency arranged a meet with a 32-year-old B-list movie actress named Susan Cabot.

The memo shows that the clandestine security service went through a ‘prominent’ LA attorney employed by eccentric Hollywood movie producer and aeronautics pioneer Howard Hughes, who invited Cabot to a party thrown by billionaire oilman Edwin Pauley. 

But before attending the tycoon’s festive affair, Cabot (born Harriet Shapiro) was told by her handler “We want you to go to bed with him.”

“The actress said that she rejected the proposal but finally went to [Hussein’s] party,” the memo states. She later ‘became quite taken with the foreign official and found him to be most charming.”

A few days later the king asked the CIA to arrange another meeting with Cabot, this time in New York City.
As the memo notes, the two struggled to keep rumors of their budding relationship at bay, with the Muslim monarch concerned his romance with a Jewish actress could cause political turmoil in his home country.
It remains unclear how long Cabot and the King maintained their relationship. But in 1961, she gave birth to a boy named Timothy, long-rumored to be Hussein’s son.

Born a dwarf, Timothy was later adopted by Cabot’s second husband, Michael Roman.

According to The Los Angeles Times, Cabot’s son eventually grew to 5’4” following “thrice-weekly injections of a hormone derived from the pituitary glands of cadavers. A former attorney once called him a ‘failed human experiment.’”

In 1986, Cabot was found bludgeoned to death with a weightlifting bar in her San Fernando Valley home, leading to her son’s arrest. Timothy was later charged with involuntary manslaughter, claiming his mother (who suffered from mental illness) had attacked him first.
He blamed his aggressive response to the incident on use of illegal narcotics.

During Timothy’s trial, it was revealed in court that Cabot had received a monthly payment of $1,500 from the Jordanian government.

An attorney in the trial wrote in court filings: “For better or worse, it looks like child support.”

Timothy Roman was sentenced to four years in prison and a minimum sentence of probation, dying of heart failure in 2003.

Brody

https://www.websleuths.com/forums/showthread.php?113600-TX-San-Angelo-WhtMale-966UMTX-70-90-Lived-Under-Multiple-ID-s-Mar-05

http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/966umtx.html

On March 31st, 2005, an elderly man, possibly a transient, was browsing the Christians in Action thrift store in San Angelo, Texas, when he suddenly collapsed. He was rushed to the hospital and died shortly afterwards of what was probably a heart attack. The cause of death was apparently so obvious, and the death so unsurprising, given the man's advanced age, that no autopsy was performed.

That's where the normal part of the story ends.

Obviously, in order to notify his next of kin, the man's identity needed to be established; this proved impossible to achieve, but not for the usual reason: instead of carrying no ID, this old, small, grandfatherly type carried IDs corresponding to five four different identities: Harold Frysinger, Roger S. Smith, Gerald Brown, and Peter Turner. He had also managed to damage the centre of his fingerpads to the point of deleting all of their characteristics, effectively rendering him impossible to identify through a fingerprint match. The tone of the investigation suddenly shifted: the most pressing question was no longer about who the man was, but rather about what the man had done.

What kind of past forces a person well into their golden years (the dates on the various IDs had him born in either '22 or '24) to keep up a charade of fake identities? Authorities didn't know if they were dealing with someone who was, or used to be, a career criminal, or if he was running from a single, terrible incident, but they suspected that the man's real identity had the strong potential to finally settle some old, long inactive case.

The man, unsurprisingly, had no natural teeth left. A sample of his DNA was taken, and his picture and story widely circulated. Some notable suggestions were made: the deceased bore a strong resemblance to former Boston Irish Mob boss (and FBI informant turned FBI Most Wanted) “Whitey” Bulger, but Bulger is alive and well and was arrested in California in 2011. DNA comparison proved â€" to general disappointment â€" that the man could not have been Elmer Crawford, who in 1970 murdered his pregnant wife and children and vanished from Victoria, Australia. People (who probably had recently revisited Apt Pupil) entertained the idea that he could have been Aribert Heim, Austrian SS doctor better known as “Doctor Death”, presumed to have died in 1992 in Cairo, Egypt (and subsequently found to have died in 1992 in Cairo, Egypt).

While the dead man in San Angelo most likely wasn't anybody truly infamous, the lengths to which he went to keep his true identity a secret so late in his life lead me to believe that he had indeed his reasons, likely nefarious, for not wanting to be found. I'd like to find that reason, because it could be essential in giving closure to those who are invested in another case. If I am wrong, and he was an innocent man running from someone who wanted to hurt him, his death already granted him the ultimate immunity.

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http://history.house.gov/HistoricalHighlight/Detail/36315?ret=True

Clement Vallandigham, a 19th century US lawyer, accidentally shot himself dead while defending a murder suspect â€" because he was trying to demonstrate that a supposed victim could have accidentally shot himself dead. (It worked, because his client was acquitted.)

--
http://www.campustimes.org/2011/11/17/chris-porco-a-tale-of-gruesome-uncertainty/

On 15 November 2004, Joan and Peter Porco had been found seemingly murdered. The was blood everywhere â€" a medical examiner later determined that 52-year-old Peter sustained massive head injuries causing his death. Joan was lying in the bed with severe head and facial trauma. She survived but lost the left eye, a portion of the skull and her face was left disfigured.

A fireman’s ax that was used in the attack was lying in the couple’s blood-drenched bedroom.

Bizarrely, after the father Peter was attacked, he went about his regular morning routine, unaware that he was dying. He walked into the kitchen, packed a lunch, signed a cheque to cover his son’s parking tickets and attempted to unload the dishwasher. The blow to the head cut off a part of his brain where the judgments are being made. Therefore, he couldn’t assess what was going on, and did everything he normally would as per memory. Finally, he collapsed on the floor and died, leaving the macabre but mind-boggling scene for police to discover.
There’s blood evidence that Peter walked outside to get the newspaper and locked himself out of the house, but remembered the hidden key under the potted plant to get himself back in.
The events started in the early morning hours of November. 15, 2004, when their son Christopher Porco decided to butcher them brutally with a fireman’s ax while at sleep.  His mother survived and was in total denial, believing her son was innocent of the charges despite the overwhelming evidence. Cristopher Porco lived with his mother during the trial and walked her to court every day until he was convicted on all counts.
On December 12, 2006, Christopher Porco was sentenced to 50 years to life on each count totaling a minimum of 50 years in prison.

Brody


https://www.thechronicle.com.au/news/vampire-gigolo-unexplained-murder-mystery-still-ba/3224794/

In August, 2002, a 27-year-old Shane Chartres-Abbott was working as a male prostitute, specialising in sex involving bondage, discipline, dominance and submission and masochism - better known as BDSM.
On August 17 of that year, Shane met up with another prostitute, a Thai woman given the pseudonym Penny for legal reasons, to have sex in a Melbourne hotel.

The podcast tells of how the night went - with everyone having a different tale to tell - but the fact of the matter was that when a worker entered room 307 of Hotel Saville the morning after, Penny had been the victim of a heinous crime.

Found in the hotel bath, Penny was barely conscious with blood dripping from her mouth.

She had been viciously raped, brutally assaulted and, the most harrowing part, her tongue had been nearly ripped from her mouth.

It didn't take police long to arrest Shane, he of course had been the only one to have spent the night with Penny, and swiftly charged him with numerous counts of assault and rape.

Everyone's minds were made up, Shane was an easy target and of course there was the "vampire" persona he assumed for his work.

The night of the assault, Penny claimed he had told her he was "a 200 year old vampire that needed blood to survive".

On the morning of June 4, 2003 Shane walked out of his Melbourne home with his girlfriend Kathleen Price and her father Jerry.

As they made it to the front fence, Jerry felt a blow to the back of his head and fell to the ground while Kathleen was forced to her knees.

Kathleen heard Shane utter a quiet "Oh my god", saw the flash of a handgun and heard two shots.

Shane had been executed by two bullets, one in his throat another in his arm, and was lying on the ground drowning in his own blood, dead before he hit the ground the coroner said.

The two men who had done it were sprinting away from the scene and to this day, still haven't been found.

Almost a decade and a half and $30 million dollars later, Shane's murder is still a mystery.

During Shane's rape trial, the former sex worker expressed on numerous times and to numerous people, his desire to blow the lid off Melbourne's entire corrupt network.

The early 2000s in Melbourne also happened to be the peak of the city's gangland war, where executions among opposing gangs were happening almost once a month.

And Shane promised names of judges, police anyone in positions of power that had a hand in the bloody war.
The day Shane was going to give that evidence as well as divulge a peculiar plot to kill him the night of Penny's rape in the witness box - evidence that would be disseminated to the whole of Australia - he was executed.

A 14 year and $30 million Victoria Police investigation later, the killers and accomplices still roam free.

The justice denied aspect of the case was mainly what inspired Shand to take on the mammoth case.

"I just want some proceeding in the court, be it the coroners or whatever, to round off things.

I think my faith in the court system is really shaken by this," he said.

"It's not really about truth, we as journalists want truth, this is about plausibility. It's about raising reasonable doubt.

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http://music.thomastruax.com/track/joe-meek-warns-buddy-holly

Joe Meek was a music producer from the 1950’s. While this did make him famous for his producing, it is was also on good accounts that he was very much involved in the occult. He was known for his weird warnings, one of which sort of came true. While talking to Buddy Holly, Joe Meek warned him that he would die on February 3rd, 1958. When the 4th of February 1958 came, Buddy told him that he was still kicking. I would say, don’t speak so soon. 364 days later, on February 3rd of 1959, Buddy Holly died in a plane crash. The day is now known as ‘The Day Music Died’.
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https://bestmystery.wordpress.com/2017/02/23/10-creepy-unsolved-mysteries-from-japan-thatll-keep-you-up-at-night/
On November 21, 1984, around 2:10 PM, a 2-year-old girl named Makiko Tsuchiyama was found fallen on her face in a drainage ditch in an alley behind her home in Higashi-osaka city.  Makiko was unconscious, and her neck seemed as though it had been strangled with a cord. Although she was rushed to the hospital, Makiko died 9 hours after being taken there.

The fact that Makiko had been playing outside by herself wasn’t unusual in the neighborhood, since other children and mothers were often outside too. Nobody, however, had seen Makiko’s murderer. Eerily, Makiko had been found unconscious on the same spot a month earlier. She had been strangled that time too, with the marks of a string around her neck. Unlike the second time, she had regained consciousness shortly after being taken to the hospital.
Immediately after this first incident, Makiko’s grandfather received a strange phone call from an unidentified woman. The woman was crying hard and speaking incomprehensibly. He tried talking to her for 2 minutes before she suddenly said “I’m sorry” and hung up. Makiko’s grandfather had not yet heard about Makiko’s incident, and thought the woman had gotten the wrong number. For the next few days, he received several more unexplained phone calls. Every time he answered, he heard only silence on the other end.

Police originally thought the first incident was an accident. They concluded that Makiko had gotten her neck hooked around a vinyl strap that had been attached to the door of her house. After Makiko died, however, they decided to launch a criminal investigation. It was strange that Makiko had been found in the alley, since she had refused to go anywhere near it since the first incident. Since there were no scratches on her face, it was suspected that somebody lured Makiko away and then strangled her in a different location. In the 30 years since Makiko’s death, neither her killer or the mysterious woman who called her grandfather have been identified.

Brody

http://kfor.com/2018/01/24/rat-chewed-skeleton-in-wall-suggests-fatal-misstep-solves-years-old-mystery/
http://www.newser.com/story/239348/new-homeowner-adjusts-attic-board-finds-bones.html

A years-old mystery in Texas has been solvedâ€"at least in part. Three years after Houston resident Mary Cerruti seemingly disappeared, authorities have confirmed it was her skeleton discovered in the wall of her former home by new tenants last March, alongside a pair of glasses that resembled those Cerruti often wore, reports the Houston Chronicle.

It isn’t clear how the positive identification was madeâ€"Cerruti’s closest living relatives are cousins, which made DNA comparisons difficult, per KTRKâ€"nor is it clear how Cerruti died and came to rest in a small space some 9 feet beneath an attic floor, perhaps not in that order.

The leading theory appears to be that Cerruti fell through a floorboard in the attic and became wedged in a 2-foot-wide space behind a bathroom wall, the Chronicle reported last June.

A cause of death couldn’t be determined from Cerruti’s decomposed remains, but police say foul play isn’t suspected. Still, Cerruti’s cousin, Nancy Stewart Stoddard, believes “somebody put her there” behind the wall around the time she vanished.

Whatever happened, Cerruti probably would’ve tried to figure it out because she loved mysteries, a friend tells the Chronicle. “I think she would have thought that was kind of cool that she created the mystery,” she says.
----
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/LATIN-AMERICA-Belize-in-Shock-Police-Baffled-2907858.php

On October 9, 1998 the body of 13 year old Sherilee Nichols was found along Belize’s Western Highway. She had been submerged in a pool of water with more than 40 stab wounds in her head and chest, and her body showed signs of rape. She had been reported missing 6 months earlier, but the clothes she was found in belonged to Jay Blades, a 9 year old girl who had disappeared two days before Sherilee’s body was found.

During the time that Jay was missing, three more girls disappeared. Samantha Gordon, 15, was found floating naked, with her back and knees covered with cuts, a few yards out to sea on November 8.

Jackie Malic, 12, didn't return from morning recess on her school playground; her body, with the left hand cut off, was found March 24 in the same area where Sherilee's remains had been located five months before.

About the same time, the first killing outside Belize City, in the north, occurred. Becky Gilharry, 13, was found dead on the grounds of the Santa Rita Mayan ruin in Corozal.

Brody

https://www.reddit.com/r/UnsolvedMysteries/comments/54rsa4/john_doe_found_in_a_chimney_wearing_female/
http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/crime_and_courts/chimney-skeleton-from-unidentified/article_2b8b84e6-64b4-11e1-bded-001871e3ce6c.html
On September 3rd, 1989, the owners of Good ‘n Loud Music store, located on University Avenue in Madison, Wisconsin, were doing repair work in their store. Either before or after noticing a leak, the owners removed a boiler in the basement of the store. One of the owners shined a light into the chimney that had been connected to the removed boiler, and discovered a skull through a pipe connecting the boiler to the chimney.

Police found the complete skeleton with rotting clothes inside of the chimney. The skeletal remains were determined to have been a white male between the ages 18-35 years old. He was determined to have been about 5'5-5'7" tall with brown hair, 4 inches long. He had a thin build and a pronounced overbite. The pelvic bones of the man had been severely fractured and those injuries appear to have been caused at the time of death. He was estimated to have died 2-24 months before being discovered.

At the time of his death, the man was wearing a sleeveless paisley dress, with a matching belt; a long-sleeved, button-down shirt that may have been made of Oxford-type cloth, a medium-size White Stag brand, shaggy-pile sweater, low-heeled, pointed shoes. He was wearing one pair of socks and carrying another pair. He was not wearing underwear. He also had with him a German iron cross medallion, a butter knife and a pocket comb.

It is said that there is no way the man could have gotten into the pipe from within the building (which makes sense since the pipe was connected to the boiler).

It is unknown why the man was wearing female clothing, but it is speculated that he was cross-dresser or had disguised himself as a woman.

Detectives have speculated that the man was a burglar who got stuck in the chimney and died, or a murder victim who was stuffed into the chimney.

The case remains unsolved and the man remains unidentified.
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http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2015/07/the-amazing-miracle-of-philadelphia/
A child fell ill and was near death, hanging on to life in what the doctor's figured was a vegetative state. His family turned to prayer. A Saint's picture is pinned to the child's pillow.  Soon after, a boy is seen in the waiting room and later in the ICU, but no one knows who he was or where he came from. After the visit, the sickly child awakes and tells his parents of a dream he had where a boy visited him, dressed just like the boy that was seen wandering the hospital. After the child makes a full recovery, his parents take him to  shrine to the Saint as a means of thanking him. The child sees a picture of the Saint as a boy and confirms it was the same boy who visited him in the hospital, sparking his recovery.

Brody

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVjTrJ1VMPw
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3752226/Baby-boy-Darren-Jason-Shannon-missing-father-died-car-crash.html
Darren Jason Shannon was 11 months old when he was taken from his grandparents' house, north of Adelaide, by his father, John, on June 9, 1973.

Just hours after the kidnapping, John, 25, was killed in a head-on collision nearby but Darren - who was dressed in a long white nightdress, a blue cardigan and a nappy - was not found in the wreckage.
John had a history of mental illness.

An extensive search of surrounding hotels, motels and petrol stations by police failed to find any trace of the baby boy.
---
https://nypost.com/2016/10/12/inside-saddam-husseins-secret-nyc-torture-chamber/
According to anonymous Iraqi officials, Saddam Hussein operated a secret torture chamber out of the Iraqi mission in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The palace of pain was located across the street from the residence of billionaire and former mayor Michael Bloomberg. Saddam’s Mukhabarat agents reportedly locked dissidents in the chamber for weeks at a time, usually to compel relatives to return to Iraq.
“It was a dark room. The doors were reinforced in a way that no one could break in or out,” noted one official. His colleague followed up, “You’re not going to hear anyone scream down there.” Removal of fingernails and beating with rubber hoses, wooden planks, and copper wires were standard. When victims died, they were packed in US customsâ€"exempt packages and shipped to Baghdad. “This is diplomaticâ€"nobody has the authority to open it or examine it.” In 2014, the chamber was converted into a kitchenette

Brody

http://www.mynbc5.com/article/missing-whiteface-skier-found-in-california/17764938

New York State Police said Constantinos “Danny” Filippidis, 49, of Toronto, was found 2,900 miles away Tuesday in Sacramento.

On Feb. 7, Constantinos “Danny” Filippidis was reported missing after he disappeared from a ski trip to Whiteface Mountain in upstate New York. Oddly, his car was still in the parking lot and all his belongings were intact at the ski lodge. Department of Environmental Conservation forest rangers, New York state police, and resort staff headed up the search that grew to include the New York state Emergency Management and Fire Prevention Department, several of Filippidis’s coworkers, the Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Yet nobody could find the Candian skier.

Until he turned up in Sacramento this Tuesday, alive and unharmed, six days after going missing. Sacramento County Sheriff’s deputies found Filippidis around 9:30 a.m. Tuesday morning by the car rental zone at Sacramento International Airport. He was wearing the same clothes he wore when he went missing, had a credit card and $1,000 in cash, did not know where he was or, and remembered very little about the previous few days. He said he thought he had sustained a head injury of some sort, and that he made his way across the country in a “big rig” before being dropped off by a “McDonald’s near a tall building” Monday night.
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http://abc7ny.com/archive/9534621/

At approximately 6:00 PM on February 14, 2014, 17-year-old Houston teen Antonio Saldivar borrowed his mother’s car to go visit his girlfriend. He was planning to deliver a teddy bear to her as a Valentine Day’s gift. Antonio wound up missing his curfew that night, which led his mother to repeatedly call and text his cell phone. At 4:00 AM, Antonio finally answered his phone and let his mother know he was on his way home. Within a half hour, Antonio totaled his mother’s vehicle by crashing into a concrete pillar. Antonio was nowhere to be found at the accident scene, but strangely, his shoes were left behind in the car.Antonio remained a missing person until February 27, when an employee from a Texas Port Recycling scrap metal plant discovered Antonio’s body, which was trapped underwater beneath a dock inside the Houston Ship Channel. He was found approximately 3 kilometers (2 mi) from the accident scene. It’s possible that Antonio became disoriented before wandering away from the scene and drowning, but a lot of strange details didn’t add up. Antonio never actually made it to his girlfriend’s house that night, and the Valentine’s Day teddy bear was found inside his pants between his legs.One witness told police they saw a dark SUV run Antonio’s car into the pillar. Antonio was also found inside a secure area near the scrap metal plant, which was inaccessible to the search volunteers who had been looking for him. So how did his body end up there?

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/31/iran-acid-woman-pardons-attacker

In 2004, Iranian Majid Movahedi threw acid over Ameneh Bahrami as she walked home from work, blinding her. Bahrami had previously turned down his offer of marriage, and in Movahedi’s disturbed mind, that slight apparently demanded a face full of acid. But here’s where things get interesting. Iran operates under strict sharia law, and sharia law allows “eye for an eye” style punishments. In Bahrami’s case, she took this literally.

When Movahedi came to trial, she asked the court for a special favor. She wanted Movahedi blinded by acid. And the court said yes.For the next three years, Movahedi lived knowing he was going to feel the exact same pain and fear that his victim had. In 2011, he was taken into Tehran hospital and sedated, knowing he’d be blind when he woke up. Before you think I’ve gone totally mad and started advocating cruel and unusual punishment, I should add that Bahrami called off the procedure at the last second, saying she’d never intended to actually go through with it and would rather forgive her attacker. Movahedi got to keep his sight, but crucially he got to understand exactly the sort of fear and misery his victim must have felt all those years before.

Gd5150

Good thread. These stories are creepy. Would make for great podcasts.

Brody

Quote from: Gd5150 on February 17, 2018, 12:07:36 PM
Good thread. These stories are creepy. Would make for great podcasts.
:D

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/21/us/death-in-a-jailhouse-the-ruling-a-suicide-the-fear-a-lynching.html?pagewanted=all
In the summer of 1992, Andre Jones was 18-years-old and about to start his freshman year of college.  His mother, Esther, was President of the Jackson Mississippi branch of the NAACP.  His stepfather, Charles X. Quinn, was a Nation of Islam minister.  In the early morning hours of Saturday, August 22nd, Andre and his girlfriend, Tanisha Love, were driving home when they approached a sobriety checkpoint.  At the time, Andre was driving a friend’s pick-up truck.
A half hour later, Andre’s parents were awakened by a phone call from Tanisha.  Andre had been arrested.  At 2:00 AM, Andre called his parents from the Brandon Police station.  He said he was unaware of what he’d been charged with.  At 4:00 AM, Andre telephoned again, this time to say he had been transferred to the Simpson County Jail, 40 miles south of Jackson.  According to Andre’s mother Esther, her son still didn’t know what the charges were against him.
Then at midnight on Saturday, the Quinns heard a knock on their door.  It was a Jackson police officer.  According to Esther, the officer handed her a piece of paper:

“It only had a phone number for the Simpson County Jail.  There was not a note.  There was not a message.  It was only a number.”

Esther immediately called the police station and received some devastating news:

“I was informed that Andre had committed suicide.  I was casually informed… as if they could’ve been talking to someone that didn’t even know who he was.”
According to Andre’s parents, he had never shown suicidal tendencies.  He had never even suffered from depression.  Andre had no previous arrest record, so when Esther and Charles Quinn started to look into his death, they naturally began with the circumstances of his arrest.
According to the police, Andre stopped just short of the checkpoint and tossed something out the window.  Police identified the object as a .38 caliber handgun.  Inside the truck, police said there was an open can of beer.  And finally, the truckâ€"which Andre had borrowed and driven for more than a weekâ€"turned out to be stolen.
However, Tanisha Love’s version of the events was quite different from the police report.  According to Tanisha, the moment that the officers heard Andre’s name, their attitude immediately changed:

“After they asked him his name, they all went to… a little huddle, you know a football huddle… I don’t know what they were talking about because they were talking low.  And after that, that’s when they came to the truck and asked Andre again, did he have his license and he said no sir, don’t have my license.  And they asked him to step out the truck and that’s when they handcuffed him.  They shackled his feet and they had him handcuffed at the same time. I didn’t understand what was going on.”

But according to the State Public Safety Commissioner Jim Ingram, Andre Jones was never shackled.  In fact, Ingram disagreed with Tanisha’s entire account:

“There was no confrontation whatsoever with young Andre Jones.  In fact, the officers were very amazed how cooperative he was.”

Charles Quinn, however, said that an inmate in Brandon told him that police used racial slurs to intimidate his son:

“One of the inmates who was transferred with Andre said that the officer said, ‘Do you know what happens to niggers for stealing a white man’s truck?’  And of course, other statements were said to put fear in Andre.”

The next day, Andre was transferred to the Simpson County Jail.  That night, his body was found in a shower stall at the end of a dimly lit corridor.  Authorities state that Andre tied his own shoelace to an iron grate above the showerhead and hung himself.  When Charles Quinn was allowed to visit the cell, he estimated the grate was about eight feet above the floor:
Dr. Steven Hayne, the state-approved pathologist who performed the autopsy, said investigators had demonstrated that it was possible for Andre to have hung himself unaided:

“That position was easily reached by a member of the sheriff’s office who was acting as the decedent.”

Less than a week after Andre’s death, his parents hired an independent pathologist, Dr. James Bryant, to examine the remains and review the case:

“I think that he was strangled.  Someone did this to him.  In the usual case of a suicide by hanging, the ligature mark is along the side of the neck and doesn’t go all the way around.  It’s in this fashion, whereas in the case of Andre Jones, the ligature marking went along the side of the neck and all the way into the back and criss-crossed in this fashion.  This suggests to me that… someone had to come behind and wrapped the ligature around his neck.”

The official autopsy report listed no evidence of bruising on Andre’s neck or anywhere else on his body.  However, Dr. Bryant’s observations were different:

“He had some bruising under one of his eyes and also he had some bruising on the shoulder of the same side.  The bruising could’ve been right at the time that he died or it could’ve been some time during the day, but apparently… he suffered some kind of blunt trauma some time during the time he was in the jail.”

In fact, evidence of homicide remains elusive. Dr. Bryant's finding of homicide relies largely on a jailer's description of the body and the condition of the cell, an account that is at odds with other reports from the scene. In interviews, neither investigators nor local reporters nor prisoners' lawyers related any reports of prisoners' seeing any jailers entering the cell or hearing a struggle. Dr. Bryant also agrees that there was no evidence of a struggle, like another person's skin beneath Andre Jones's fingernails.
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http://abcnews.go.com/News/ohio-women-boy-stabbed-dismembered/story?id=12204374

Tina Herrmann was a single mother of two who worked at a Dairy Queen in Ohio. On November 10, 2010, the typically reliable Herrmann failed to show up for her shift and wasn’t answering her phone. Her boss became concerned and notified authorities. Police arrived at Hermann’s house to discover it empty and covered in blood splatters.

A search led police to the home of Matthew Hoffman, where Herrmann’s 13-year-old daughter was found bound and gagged in the basement. Hoffman was arrested for kidnapping. While in custody, he provided the location of the girl’s mom and brother. The corpses of Herrmann, her son, and a close family friend were found inside a hollowed-out tree. The three bodies had been stabbed repeatedly and stuffed into plastic garbage bags. Even Herrmann’s miniature pinscher had been killed and hidden inside the tree.Hoffman was a tree trimmer. His neighbors described him as a strange man who built fires on his front lawn to roast squirrels before eating them. Hoffman committed the murders not long after being released from a Colorado prison. He had been serving a term for arson and burglary.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/manchester/3758209.stm

In 2004, a 14-year-old boy was stabbed in a frenzied attack in Manchester. His 15-year-old attacker plunged a kitchen knife once through his chest and again through his stomach, but didn’t quite manage to kill him. To the first cops on the scene, it must have sounded like a typical tragedy: both boys were former best friends who’d become involved with the same woman. But then other, atypical details began to emerge; like how the “woman” was a middle-aged spy they’d met in a chat room, or how the younger boy was secretly in love with his older friend.
And then things got really weird.It transpired that the woman had ordered the murder. It also transpired that she didn’t exist, despite having had frequent webcam sex with the older boy. In the subsequent investigation, detectives discovered a complex web of fiction spun around the older boy, with one purpose: to end its author’s life. It turns out the 50,000 messages the “three” had sent each other were nothing more than a perverse suicide bid on the part of the 14-year-old. At the end of the trial, the judge announced that “skilled writers of fiction would struggle to conjure up a plot such as that which arises here”.

Jojo

A Shoreline (Seattle) area cat shelter has kennels with 24/7 indoor/outdoor areas for each cat.  Pretty nice shelter for each cat.

Trauma warning, murder and violence on a cat.

Someone broke into one of the cat's completely encaged kennels an left angry graffiti about how the area had no homeless shelter for humans.  The cat was murdered.  Apparently no autopsy was done but the cat was heinously tortured either during or after being killed. 

The murder is still being investigated.  This homeless cat deserves justice.  It was innocent t and had nothing to do with the alleged lack of shelters for humans.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/

Update:
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017/09/21/25427459/the-mystery-of-stolen-cat-found-dead-in-a-dumpster


Brody

https://www.yahoo.com/news/son-plotted-parents-killed-went-160801926.html

Police in Russia have arrested the son of a wealthy family who tried to have his parents killed. Instead, the parents turned the tables on him, playing dead and covered in blood in pictures as if the hit the son had ordered went ahead.

According to reports in the Russian media, the 22-year-old man, who has not been named, was caught after he began making inquiries locally for a hitman to kill his parents in the hopes of cashing in early on the inheritance. He later confessed to police he had plotted their murder for some time, choosing to put out the hit because all his other attempts had ended without success.

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http://www.kcra.com/article/autopsy-girl-strangled-dismembered-on-10th-birthday-as-mom-watched/8592655

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. â€"
A New Mexico girl was strangled to death on her 10th birthday before she was dismembered and her remains set on fire, according to an autopsy released months after police uncovered the sexual abuse they say she suffered at the hands of her mother and others leading up to her killing.
The autopsy results, made public Monday, included evidence of prior sexual abuse and indicated that Victoria was raped and strangled before her body was dismembered Aug. 23. Her spine was fractured, and she suffered both blunt and sharp injuries. Some of her organs were removed.

The medical examiner's report also showed Victoria tested positive for human papillomavirus, or HPV, which is a sexually transmitted disease.

Police found Victoria's body in a bathtub, wrapped in a smoldering blanket. They were initially called to the apartment complex over a disturbance involving the suspects, unaware of what they would find inside the home.

Michelle Martens claimed that her daughter was drugged to relax her, but toxicology tests did not turn up any drugs, only alcohol. The amount of alcohol in Victoria's system would have been enough to cause cognitive and physical impairment, according to the autopsy report.

Brody

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/torture-at-the-back-forty-mike-dauplaise/1111115533
https://law.justia.com/cases/wisconsin/court-of-appeals/1987/86-0269-cr-5.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hzj9WsJsm4

Margaret Anderson was with her boyfriend at a biker bar in Green Bay around Christmas time in 1983. Anderson and many others got sloppy drunk, and Anderson started to get too mouthy for the men's taste. Eventually, even her own boyfriend was fed up and decided to leave telling the others: “Here you guys can have her, you can f**k her brains out”.
Four of the bar patrons then proceeded to attempt to gang rape Anderson, but they were so full of drugs and alcohol that they could not perform. They took to beating her with pool sticks, then stuck a cue ball deep inside her vagina. One of the men eventually took the battered woman to a factory manure pit and slashed her throat deeply, leaving her to die.
Anderson somehow managed to drag herself to a nearby road, where a semi driver attempted to give her aid. She ultimately died of her wounds though.  It took the police several years to round up all four of the main perps, but they eventually were properly sentenced.

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http://allthatsinteresting.com/terry-jo-duperrault
https://www.rd.com/true-stories/survival/orphaned-on-the-ocean-the-unbelievable-story-of-terry-jo-duperrault/

Due to a murderous plot, 11-year old Terry Jo Duperrault spent 84 grueling hours alone at sea until she was rescued.


In 1961, a picture was snapped of a young girl who was discovered adrift, alone, on a small lifeboat in the waters of the Bahamas. The story of how she ended up there is much more horrifying and bizarre than one can imagine.

The story begins when her father, a prominent optometrist from Green Bay, Wis. named Dr. Arthur Duperrault, chartered the luxury yacht the Bluebell from Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. to the Bahamas for a family trip.

He brought with him his wife, Jean, and his kids: Brian, 14, Terry Jo, 11, and Renee, 7.

He also brought his friend and former Marine and World War II veteran Julian Harvey as his skipper, along with Harvey’s new wife, Mary Dene.

On the fifth night of the cruise Terry Jo was awoken by “screaming and stamping” on the deck above the cabin in which she slept.

Talking to reporters later, Terry Jo recalled how she, “went upstairs to see what it was, and I saw my mother and brother lying on the floor, and there was blood all over.”

She then saw Harvey walking towards her. When she asked what happened he just slapped her in the face and told her to go down below deck.

Terry Jo once more went above deck, when the water levels began to rise on her level. She ran into Harvey again, and asked him if the boat was sinking, to which he replied, “Yes.”

Left alone, Terry Jo remembered the single life raft aboard the vessel and embarked on the tiny boat out into the ocean.

Without food, water, or any covering to protect her from the heat of the sun, Terry Jo spent 84 grueling hours before she was rescued by the Captain Theo.

Unbeknownst to Terry Jo, by the time she woke up on Nov. 12, Harvey had already drowned his wife and stabbed the rest of Terry Jo’s family to death.

He likely killed his wife to collect on her $20,000 double indemnity insurance policy. When Terry Jo’s father witnessed him killing her, he must have killed the doctor, and then proceed to kill the rest of her family.

He then sunk the yacht they were on and escaped on his dinghy with his wife’s drowned corpse as evidence. His dinghy was found by the freighter the Gulf Lion and brought to a U.S. Coast Guard site.

Harvey told the Coast Guard that the yacht had broken down while he was on the dinghy. He was still with them when he heard that Terry Jo had been discovered.

“Oh my god!” Harvey reportedly stammered when he heard the news. “Why that’s wonderful!”

The next day, Harvey killed himself in his motel room, slitting thigh, ankle, and throat with a double-edged razor.




Brody

UPDATE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
One of the most infamous cases featured on NBC's Unsolved Mysteries has been SOLVED!



"The case has since been "cleared" by police. They believe that Matt's killer was a gang member named David "Bear" Meza. Ironically, he was killed just two days after Matt vanished. When interviewed by police, Meza's girlfriend identified him as the man seen in the surveillance photographs. Other circumstantial evidence also linked him to the crime. However, the possibility still exists that there were accomplices involved."
http://unsolvedmysteries.wikia.com/wiki/Matthew_Chase

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https://www.twincities.com/2018/01/06/lake-elmo-teenager-vanished-susan-swedell-cold-case-1998-30-years-ago/

During a blizzard on Jan. 19, 1988, Susan Swedell finished her shift at Kmart in Oak Park Heights at 9 p.m. and headed home to Lake Elmo to watch a movie and eat popcorn with her mother and her sister.

A half-hour later, a gas-station attendant gave her permission to leave her overheated car at the K Station, a mile from home. The clerk said she saw Swedell get into another car with a man. She hasn’t been seen since.

“We don’t know what happened that night,” said Kathy Swedell, Sue’s mother. “She was telling us that she was going to come home because it was an all-out Minnesota blizzard. When I looked out our window, I could barely see across the street, and here she was driving home. We didn’t know if she had stopped someplace or tried to walk. It was terrible. No sign of Susan. No call. Nothing. Officers did go out and look for her, but by the time they found her car, there was no sign of Susan.

When Swedell had not arrived home by 11 p.m. on that Tuesday night, her mother and sister called the sheriff’s office to request that deputies search for her car â€" a 1975 maroon Oldsmobile Cutlass â€" in ditches between Kmart and the house they rented in downtown Lake Elmo.

Deputies found the car at the K Station, at the corner of Manning Avenue and Minnesota 5.

Thinking she might have tried to walk home â€" during a blizzard that dumped more than 7 inches of snow on the area â€" they searched for Susan between the gas station and the Swedells’ house on Lake Elmo Avenue.

“As the hours passed by, all I could think was that she was frozen in a ditch somewhere,” said Christine Swedell, who was 16 at the time. “So when whoever came to the house said they found the car but didn’t find her, that just completely threw me into a whirl. I just wanted to get out there and search for her.”

Investigators didn’t learn until the next day that she had left the gas station with a man.

The gas-station attendant said Swedell pulled up to the station around 9:30 p.m., followed by a “light-colored older model car with sport wheels that was in good shape, but dirty,” said Troy Ackerknecht, a detective with the sheriff’s office.

Swedell and the man talked for a few minutes, and then Swedell came into the station and said she was having car problems, Ellickson said. “She asked if she could leave her car at the station. The attendant said, ‘Well, they’re going to plow here. You’ll need to move it.’ She moved it, and they left westbound on Highway 5.”

Swedell was wearing a short skirt and sweater and no coat or boots, according to police reports. Her manager at Kmart told police that at the end of her shift Swedell changed out of the red pants outfit she had worn to work. “He made a comment that she wasn’t dressed appropriately for the blizzard,” Ackerknecht said.

When police searched her car the next day, they found her glasses, driver’s license and purse.

After the car was found, Kathy Swedell had it brought to the house.

It sat on the street until five days later, when she drove it to Cub Foods in Stillwater to buy groceries. As she was driving, the car started smoking and steaming, so she arranged to have it towed to Lake Elmo Repair.

A mechanic discovered that the car’s petcock â€" a small valve at the bottom of the radiator â€" had been loosened, and the water had leaked out.

Did someone deliberately tamper with her car and then follow her, waiting for the car to break down?

In the weeks before she disappeared, Susan Swedell had been using telephone chat lines to talk to boys, racking up a bill of more than $300, Kathy Swedell said.

Co-workers at Kmart reported that Swedell, a graduate of Stillwater Area High School, had been receiving numerous calls at work from a man. She also continued to talk to an ex-boyfriend and had reportedly made plans to see him the night she disappeared, but he called to cancel because of the weather.

A week after Susan disappeared, Kathy Swedell returned to her job as principal secretary for the University of Minnesota math department, and Christine Swedell went back to school.

When Christine got home from school that afternoon, she couldn’t find the key to get in the house.

“We normally kept it on a shelf, right next to the door, underneath something â€" that’s just the way it was in Lake Elmo,” Christine Swedell said. “I was looking all over for it. I couldn’t get into the house. It was locked. That was the key. I didn’t have an extra.”

She eventually located it under a box in a back corner of the shelf. When she entered the house, she said, she “felt like someone had been there.”

There were dirty dishes in the sink that hadn’t been there in the morning, and there was a “peculiar” smell of smoke, she said.

“It smelled of something sweet,” she said. “I’ve never done drugs or had a drink, but … it was very strong. People say it might have been marijuana, but I didn’t know. I didn’t touch anything. I didn’t go upstairs. I just called Mom. Of course, it felt like forever until she got home. I was freaking out.”

Later that night, Christine found the red outfit that Susan had worn to work on the day she disappeared; it had been balled up and jammed under Susan’s bed.

None of her daughter’s personal items, including clothing, makeup or grooming products, were taken, but “somebody had been there,” Kathy Swedell said.

Brody

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDJ_JM7uqFA
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3676725/Moscow-Batman-declared-war-Russian-drug-lords.html

A man claiming to be the Russian Batman has been captured on camera walking from a drug den and leaving dealers for police.

The masked vigilante, who wears a Batman costume and calls himself the Jnec Grim Reaper, has declared war on drug dealers doing business in the Khimki area outside Moscow.

So far, he claims to have captured 40 criminals and closed down a host of illegal drug labs. 

The Reaper's exploits started in June when a taxi driver witnessed a man dressed as Batman entering a building that later proved to be a drug den in the middle of the night, according to Krypton Radio.

The driver told police that he had heard people screaming and things being thrown around inside.

When the mysterious man then walked out, he threw a fire bomb at the ground disappeared into the night, captured by the witness known only as Slava.
------
https://kitchener.ctvnews.ca/who-was-baby-parker-case-still-unsolved-after-11-years-1.3162077

http://www.brantfordexpositor.ca/2015/07/27/baby-parker-police-release-full-letter-received-after-discovery-of-infants-body-in-2005brex-28-baby-parker

Ten years have passed since the remains of a full-term baby boy were found in a railside ravine in Brantford by a woman walking her dog.

The July 28, 2005, discovery shocked and saddened the community.

Detectives dubbed the unidentified infant Baby Parker because his body was found near Parkside Drive, not far from a municipal greenspace known as Lansdowne Park, where a group of youths is believed to have been partying days earlier.
A post mortem examination of the body, conducted at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto, noted trauma to the baby's skull and ribs. There was no evidence of alcohol or street drugs passed on to the baby, police said.

In addition, police have released the full text of a letter received several days after the body was found in 2005. Excerpts from the letter, received on Aug. 3, 2005. and purporting to be from the mother of the newborn and providing details of events surrounding the birth, were released at the time.

The author promised to contact police again, which then fuelled hope that the case would come to a swift conclusion. However, the letter writer was not heard from again.

"If you were with a group of youths in any of the parks or local hangout spots several days prior to the discovery of the lifeless infant's body, please come forward. You may hold key information without realizing the importance," she said.

The author of the letter indicated she had been "partying" at Lansdowne Park when she started having contractions. At least one other person (possibly female) was involved during the delivery and that person discarded the baby's body and the placenta, suggesting that person may be more involved with the death of the baby than the mother, police said.

It was on July 28, 2005, at about 11:15 a.m., that a woman walking her dog discovered the body of the newborn amid brush and weeds about 20 feet from the rail trail at Parkside Drive and Dufferin Avenue, near Lansdowne Park. The dog had picked up on a scent and pulled its owner toward the bushes where she made the discovery and immediately contacted police.

Police canvassed the neighbourhood and attended at more than 200 area homes. Numerous consent DNA samples were taken from males and females, which enabled investigators to rule out several persons of interest.

On July 29, 2005, at about 7:30 p.m., an area resident approached the police mobile command centre to report finding a bloodied item near his home on July 25. After learning of the discovery of the body, the resident suspected the item may be linked. Forensics officers seized the bloodied evidence, which was later identified as the placenta matching Baby Parker's DNA.


Brody

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-new-york-lightning/couple-fatally-struck-by-lightning-in-new-york-cemetery-media-idUSKCN10N25K
At 3:30 PM on an August day in 2016, Batavia Cemetery caretakers in Batavia, New York, stumbled upon two dead bodies lying in the midst of the graveyard headstones. Drug paraphernalia was strewn around their corpses. However, it was apparent by the physical state of the bodies that their demise was not related to drugs.        
About 12 hours earlier, a severe thunderstorm had blown through the region. Working jointly with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, investigators were able to determine that a lightning strike occurred in the area where the pair was found.
The autopsy revealed that the victims, 34-year-old Richard Garlock and 32-year-old Jenea Macleod, had sustained thermal injuries consistent with a lightning strike. Detective sergeant Todd Crossett explained, “It seems they had just gone to a back part of the cemetery and were just hanging out there.

-----
http://newsok.com/haunted-by-deathbrspan-classhl2unanswered-questions-leave-fatherspan/article/3173605
​​​​​​​
On Halloween night in 1977, the parents of 19-month-old Nima Louise Carter placed their child inside her crib at their Lawton, Oklahoma home. The next morning, Nima’s parents were shocked to discover that she was missing.
 Since the windows in Nima’s bedroom were locked, it’s theorized that her abductor had been hiding in the closet and sneaked the child out of the house while her parents were sleeping in the living room. A month later, a group of kids were playing in an abandoned house four blocks away from the Carter home. When they opened up the house’s refrigerator, they received a horrifying shock when the decomposed body of an infant came tumbling out. The child was identified as Nima Louise Carter, who died of suffocation.

George Carter is still haunted by the memory of his daughter's murder.

"My wife and I lived for years with the what-ifs,” said Carter, now 57 and a recovering alcoholic who has turned to ministering to others. "Nima cried that night when we put her down to sleep. We never got up to check on her.

"We figured we didn't want to spoil her; that she would eventually go to sleep. I now believe that person was already in her room, probably hiding in the closet. What if we had opened the closet? What if we had gotten up to check her that night? What if we had brought her in to sleep with us?

"What if? What if?”

Carter, whose wife died in 2000, is dogged by one other disturbing thought: No one was ever charged with his child's murder.
The passage of three decades has helped ease the pain for Carter, but unanswered questions still burn within. Long ago, police detectives became convinced they had identified Nima's killer, but they too were left with a sense of unfulfilled justice.

Then-Comanche County District Attorney Don Beauchamp did not file charges, explaining the evidence was too flimsy.



A terrified community
Lawton always has been a rough-and-tumble town, from its infancy in the aftermath of the 1901 Land Lottery to its steady growth as a military community. Bars and pool halls once dominated the downtown night life, as did an occasional bare-knuckle brawl, knifing or shooting.



But the abduction of children was unheard of in Lawton until April 8, 1976, when twin sisters Mary Elizabeth and Augustine "Tina” Jacqueline Carpitcher were stolen in broad daylight while they watched TV in their grandmother's home.

A young female the children knew unlatched a living room door and coaxed the children outside. The three and half years old twins followed the girl, at first blindly.

Then they became scared.

Area resident Thelma McCaig once described the scene that day in her neighborhood. McCaig noticed a teenager she would later identify as 16-year-old Jacqueline M. Roubideaux dragging two girls. McCaig said Roubideaux "had hold of the two girls by the wrists, and they were trying to pull loose.”

McCaig didn't report the incident to authorities, reasoning, "... I guess like other people, I didn't want to get involved.”

So the nightmare continued.

"She took us to a house ... It was white, near railroad tracks,” Tina Carpitcher would testify years later as a 10-year-old. "There was broken furniture inside. When we got inside she took us to the refrigerator and told us to get in. She said our aunt will be there to get us out and take us for ice cream later.”

The abductor shut the refrigerator door and left.

"I remember people were scared,” recalled Ray Anderson, then an investigator for the Comanche County district attorney who is now retired and living in Lawton. "How could this happen? Parents were going out and buying new locks for their doors.”

Two days later, children were playing in a deserted house when they heard the cries coming from a grungy refrigerator. Kathy Ford and another neighborhood child bravely opened the refrigerator door, and Tina Carpitcher miraculously jumped out alive.

Tina survived by breathing through a tiny hole in the refrigerator. Her twin sister died of asphyxia.

The then-11-year-old Kathy asked Tina who put her and her sister in the refrigerator, and she replied, "Jackie Boo or Jackie Burr,” meaning Jacqueline Roubideaux â€" the child's babysitter and friend of her aunt.

Roubideaux instantly became the target of a police investigation, but a lack of physical evidence and the youth of the survivor left authorities desperate for a confession. The investigation soon stalled.

Roubideaux remained free.

She maintained a quiet, shy demeanor around those who came in contact with her. She also found an occasional job as a babysitter. By 1977, she agreed to sit for a young American Indian couple known within her family circle. The husband and wife both held full-time jobs but on weekends, they liked to party.

The couple frequently called on Roubideaux to watch their baby girl â€" Nima.

"You know, I've learned to appreciate all the little things,” he said. "When Nima was a baby, I look back at all the time I wasted â€" partying and drinking.”

Carter often reflects on that wasted time whenever he recalls that Halloween night 30 years ago.

The intruder lifted Nima from her crib, and with the windows locked, crept into the hallway of the tiny Lawton home and boldly past the parents sleeping in the living room and out through a door.

"I remember the next morning,” Carter recalled. "It was one of those cool, crisp Oklahoma mornings â€" a day I might have otherwise enjoyed immensely.”

Instead, he and his wife lived every parent's nightmare. Their baby was gone.

George's heart raced. He and Rose checked the kitchen cabinets, the closets, outside by the doghouse, underneath the house, in the field behind the backyard fence.

Nima was not to be found.

Detectives immediately suspected George and Rose, given the high percentage of parental involvement in missing child cases.

"Naturally, we called them in for questioning,” recalled Cecil Davidson, a retired Lawton police detective who worked the case and now lives outside Meers. "They agreed to take lie-detector tests, and passed with flying colors.”

Everyone fell under the net of suspicion, including neighborhood babysitters Joy Smith and Jacqueline Roubideaux.

"Then someone remembered Roubideaux had been questioned in the Carpitcher case â€" almost identical circumstances,” Davidson said.

Davidson finally confronted Roubideaux about Nima's abduction and murder. Roubideaux said she was playing bingo the night Nima disappeared.

"She was very quiet,” Davidson recalled. "She never looked you in the eyes; her eyes were always somewhere else or looking at the ground. She would always get right close to telling you something critical, and then she'd back off.

"We could never get her to confess. The frustrating part was we had no physical evidence â€" no fingerprints, no footprints, no hair, no blood., nothing.”

Mostly Davidson remembers an odd response from Roubideaux.

"She was very angry about the fact that everybody got to play bingo, and she would get stuck babysitting,” said Davidson, scrunching his eyebrows.

"To this day, I'm convinced Jackie Roubideaux murdered Nima. But the DA never felt we had enough to prosecute.”

Not everyone is convinced Roubideaux abducted Nima, including George Carter.

Two months prior to Nima's abduction, the Carters found their dog poisoned. A few days later, they returned home to discover it trashed by vandals.

"I find it hard to think all those events were mere coincidence,” Carter said. "The Jackie Roubideaux we knew? No, it just doesn't add up. I never sensed that about her. Whenever Jackie came over, Nima would run up to her and give her a hug. But several years ago, I saw an interview with Jackie in a newspaper. She said she was on drugs at that time in her life.

"Was it someone we knew? I think so, someone who was familiar with our house. But I've never been fully convinced it was Jackie.”




Brody

 http://www.insideedition.com/woman-gets-2-years-prison-after-inmate-boyfriend-dies-meth-passed-through-their-kiss-38356

Inmate Anthony Powell was serving a life sentence for killing his mother-in-law. He met his new girlfriend, Melissa Ann Blair, through a friend named Brandy Pokovich.
Pokovich had used social media to hook him up with women who loved to date convicts. Melissa visited him at the Oregon State Penitentiary. At the end of their talk, Melissa and Anthony exchanged a passionate kiss.
Little did the guards know that Melissa was passing seven tiny balloons filled with meth into Anthony’s mouth. He swallowed them, planning to pass them in the bathroom later and retrieve them from the toilet.
Their plan backfired. The balloons ruptured in Powell’s stomach, and he died of an overdose. The judge ruled that Powell’s death was both of their faults and sentenced Melissa to two years of prison plus required treatments for her drug and mental health problems.

---
http://mynorthwest.com/144981/mother-of-missing-child-has-new-baby-declared-unfit-mother/?

On November 6, 2011, Julia V. Biryukova allegedly drove her two-year-old son, Sky, to Overlake Hospital Medical Center in Bellevue, Washington. His four-year-old sister was also in the car. Afterward, she said that Sky had fallen ill and that she had to take him to the hospital, but the car ran out of gas on the way there.[4]
Julia decided to leave Sky in the car, taking his sister along on a 1.6-kilometer (1 mi) walk to find a gas station. However, when she got there, she didn’t get gas. Instead, she phoned a friend to come and get her and her daughter. When she eventually got back to the car an hour later, Sky was missing.
Suspicion fell on Julia when police found that the car hadn’t run out of gas at all and was in perfect working order. She had called the police at 9:50 AM to report Sky missing, but witnesses said they saw the car as early as 8:00 AM with no children in it. On top of this, Julia refused to take a polygraph or speak to police directly. Later, it also came out that she often left her children at home by themselves, sometimes up to 11 hours at a time. Yet in spite of all the above, Julia was never named a suspect, and Sky remains missing.

---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Prepuce
​​​​​​​http://www.slate.com/articles/life/faithbased/2006/12/fore_shame.html

In 1983, as the residents of Calcata, a small town 30 miles north of Rome, prepared for their annual procession honoring a holy relic, a shocking announcement from the parish priest put a damper on festivities. "This year, the holy relic will not be exposed to the devotion of the faithful. It has vanished. Sacrilegious thieves have taken it from my home." Not since the Middle Ages, when lopped-off body parts of divine do-gooders were bought, sold, and traded, has relic theft been big news. But the mysterious disappearance of Calcata's beloved curio is different.
This wasn't just the residuum of any holy humanâ€"nor was it just any body part. It was the foreskin of Jesus Christ, the snipped-off tip of the savior's penis, the only piece of his body he supposedly left on earth.
Just what the holy foreskin was doing in the priest's houseâ€"in a shoebox at the back of his wardrobe, no lessâ€"and why and how it disappeared has been debated ever since the relic vanished. Some suspect the village priest sold it for a heavenly sum; others say it was stolen by thieves and ended up on the relics black market; some even suggest Satanists or neo-Nazis are responsible. But the most likely culprit is an unlikely one: the Vatican.
Even before its disappearance, the relic had a strange history. It was discovered in Calcata in 1557, and a series of miracles soon followed (freak storms, perfumed mists engulfing the village). The church gave the finding a seal of approval by offering a 10-year indulgence to those who came to venerate. Lines of pilgrims stretched from the church doors to beyond the walls of the fortress town. Nuns and monks from nearby villages and monasteries made candlelit processions. Calcata was a must-see destination on the pilgrimage map.
That is, until 1900. Facing increasing criticism after the "rediscovery" of a holy foreskin in France, the Vatican decreed that anyone who wrote about or spoke the name of the holy foreskin would face excommunication. And 54 years later, when a monk wanted to include Calcutta in a pilgrimage tour guide, Vatican officials didn't just reject the proposal (after much debate). They upped the punishment: Now, anyone uttering its name would face the harshest form of excommunicationâ€""infamous and to be avoided"â€"even as they concluded that Calcata's holy foreskin was more legit than other claimants'.
But that wasn't the end of the holy foreskin. In the late 1960s, government officials worried that crumbling cliffs and threatening earthquakes might doom the village, decided to build a new town. Hippies discovered the newly abandoned town, which was awaiting a government wrecking crew, and squatted in, then legally purchased, the vacated buildings. Some of the bohemian transplants were intrigued by Calcata's relic, which was now only shown to the public during the village's annual New Year's Day procession (even though the Vatican II reforms removed the Day of the Holy Circumcision from the church calendar). The new residents began writing about the quirky event and relic for newspapers in and around Rome, and Calcata's scandalous prepuce was isolated no more. And the church took notice.
Was this the reason Dario Magnoni, the local priest, brought the relic from the church to his home? Who knows. Magnoni refuses to speak about the relic, citing the 1954 threat of excommunication. Magnoni's predecessor, Mario Mastrocola, didn't want to talk about the relic, either, but when asked if he was surprised to hear it had been stolen, he shook his head. When pressed, he said, "The relic would not have been taken away from Calcata if I were still the priest there."
Mastrocola's ambiguous wordsâ€"while not directly incriminating anyoneâ€"hinted at underhanded church dealings (interview requests with the Vatican went unanswered). And later, I found myself sitting in a wine cellar halfway up the hill between the old and new villages of Calcata. Capellone, the cellar's owner and a lifelong Calcatese, told me about his close relationship with a former local bishop, Roberto Massimiliani. Ailing in bed, the bishop told Capellone that when he was gone, so too would be the relic. Bishop Massimiliani passed away soon after, in 1975. Eight years after that, the relic disappeared. "To me, it almost felt like a confession," said Capellone. "Like he needed to tell someone before he died."
Could the "sacrilegious thieves" Magnoni mentioned in his 1983 announcement about the relic's disappearance actually have been Vatican emissaries? The thought of masked, black-clad Vatican agents on a mission to steal Jesus' foreskin does sound alluring. But for residents like Capellone, who swear the Vatican now has the relic, the thief could be Magnoni himself. Some locals claim they saw him go to Rome the day before he made the announcement, generating speculation that the Vatican asked for it and Magnoni not only failed to stand up to them, he delivered the relic himself.
Sold, stolen, or delivered to the Vaticanâ€"or even all threeâ€"the holy foreskin of Calcata is probably gone for good, even as some residents persist in the hope that it will return. And the church is certainly breathing a sigh of relief. While most of the other copies of the relic were destroyed during the Reformation and the French Revolution, Calcata's holy foreskin lived long past its expiration date, like a dinosaur surviving the meteoric blast of the scientific revolution.


Brody

http://culturecrossfire.com/etc/crime-mystery/the-night-a-serial-killer-became-the-victim/

Two cases:
First up - Social media and texting help bring down a new mother and her boyfriend in a heart wrenching case of child abuse and exploitation.

Then we look at the life of a serial killer who spent nearly a decade on a killing spree, only to pick a couple who were ready and willing to fight back, ultimately ending his reign of terror after a night of violence that included knifes, guns, and mayhem.

Brody

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1042676/Businessman-uses-Aston-Martin-decapitate-horrific-suicide-revenge-ex-wife.html

A businessman decapitated himself in his sports car to get back at his younger wife for leaving him, an inquest has heard.

Gerald Mellin, 54, taunted his estranged wife Mirrielle, 33, with threats of suicide.

He even showed her the rope he was going to use, which he kept in the boot of his open-top Aston Martin DB7.

The court heard that the day before his death Mrs Mellin had been awarded an extra £100 a week in maintenance from her former husband.

Mr Mellin had then sent her a text message which read: 'Congratulations XXX.'

It was the last time she heard from him.

The businessman tied one end of the rope to a tree, then climbed into his Aston Martin and wrapped the other end around his neck.

He then drove the £90,000 car into a busy main road, forcing other drivers to watch his horrific death. Y

The inquest in Swansea heard that after her husband's death she discovered he had cancelled a life insurance policy which would have paid out to her.

She said: 'He ran up an extortionate amount of debt. I've got to sell the farmhouse now, just to pay the debts.'

A suicide note was found in Mr Mellin's pocket detailing his funeral wishes.

The cause of death was given as decapitation. Recording a verdict of suicide, Coroner Phillip Rogers said: 'I'm satisfied this was a deliberate attempt by Mr Mellin to kill himself.'

----
https://morbidology.com/the-unsolved-sawmill-murder-margaret-martin/

On the 21st of December, 1938, 19-year-old muskrat hunter, Anthony Rezykowski, made a gruesome discovery as he was laying traps alongside the icy cold water of Keelersburg Creek in Northmoreland Township, Wyoming County. As he approached a disused bridge, he spotted a burlap sack bobbing up and down with the flow of the water. Protruding from the burlap sack was a human hand.

The search was over: it was Margret Martin and she had been viciously abused.

She had been slashed across the abdomen and leg. It’s presumed that the killer had attempted to dismember her. In addition, she had been bludgeoned with a heavy rock. Her body was bound with a clothesline: both legs were jammed up underneath her chin. She was raped before being strangled.

Martin’s mother had the traumatising task of identifying her body.

50 State troopers were called in to search the isolated, snow-covered countryside where she was found. Within days, they expressed the belief that Martin had been murdered by a “sex maniac with a cruel, distorted mind.” They soon received an anonymous tip from somebody who claimed they had overheard the anonymous caller making the telephone call to Martin in which he offered her a job. He was described as being between 25 and 30-years-old with sandy hair. He was said to be “neat” and “suave.” This was the only tangible clue they had to go on. 3

While the search of the surrounding area was unfruitful, investigators reached a breakthrough several weeks later when they discovered the site where Martin had been tortured and murdered. Inside a steam boiler of an abandoned sawmill near Forkston, approximately 15 miles away, was a pile of burnt clothes. The burnt clothes matched what Martin was wearing on the day of her disappearance. Also discovered in the ash were several pieces of jewellery that Martin had been wearing on the day of her disappearance.

Outside the abandoned sawmill, investigators found footprints of a man and a woman in frozen mud. At one point in the track, the woman’s footprints disappeared and thereafter there were signs that some kind of object had been dragged.4

A man living nearby the sawmill reported seeing light from the sawmill fire as somebody opened the door at approximately 9PM on the same day Martin disappeared. He told investigators that he had fired several warning shots in the direction of the sawmill but didn’t think to investigate any further as he assumed it was just a trespasser. Was the killer disturbed as he attempted to dismember Martin and dispose of her body in the sawmill? Investigators believe so.
Four years after the murder, 21-year-old Orban Taylor from New York City handed himself into authorities and confessed that he had killed Martin. A former resident of Wilkes-Barre, Orban was brought in for extensive questioning and after 20 long hours, admitted that he had fabricated the confession. While some of what he had said matched the facts of the case, the majority contradicted evidence. Nevertheless, police had to investigate his claims. They could find no evidence to substantiate his claims and he wasn’t charged in relation to the murder of Martin. He was, however, charged with second degree assault in an unrelated crime. Two years later, he died in prison after drinking a cocktail of typewriter cleaning fluid, orange juice, sugar and water.6


The search for Martin’s murderer gripped the Wyoming Valley for years and even left many Kingston residents too terrified to venture outside. Pennsylvania authorities never close the cold cases in their archive. In fact, every year, unsolved murders are reopened and reviewed each and every year and Martin’s murder is no different. However, over the forthcoming years following her murder, tips and leads have dwindled significantly and police aren’t hopeful that this case will ever be solved.

Brody

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/couple-sentenced-sex-car-drunk-driving-bust-report-article-1.1966005

A Wisconsin man and woman were sentenced for allegedly having sex in the backseat of a cop car while being driven to jail.

Travis Husnik, 33, and Heather Basten, 29, had been pulled over for drunk driving in Oconto County on Aug. 3, the Green Bay Press Gazette reported Tuesday.

The deputy told the man to pull his pants up and ordered him to sit in the front seat, according to the local paper.

Both parties were charged with lewd and lascivious behavior and disorderly conduct.

"What do I sentence a guy who has sex in squad car to?" Conley asked during sentencing. "I'm getting to be (a) pretty old guy, and I've never seen that situation in my legal life."

=======

SAN DIEGO -- (KSWB) -- A downtown resident beat, raped and strangled a female friend after watching her have sex with another couple, then stuffed her body in a suitcase and put it out with the trash, a prosecutor said Monday, but a defense attorney said her client was "heartbroken'' and "humiliated'' when the woman he loved made fun of his sexual inadequacies.

In his opening statement, Deputy District Attorney Martin Doyle alleged that Joshua Matthew Palmer videotaped himself doing "unspeakable things'' to Shauna Haynes' body after he killed her at the Chadwick Hotel in San Diego on April 5, 2016.

Palmer, 34, then stuffed the 21-year-old victim's body into a suitcase and threw it in a hotel trash bin, Doyle alleged in his opening statement.

The prosecutor said Palmer went out the night of April 4, 2016, and met a woman, Chelsea Shea, who intended to have sex with him back in his room, but the defendant was unable to get aroused.

Haynes and a man she had met that night, Anthony Kern, arrived at Palmer's room and started having sex, and Shea eventually joined in, the prosecutor told the jury. At some point, Palmer sent Haynes a text saying, "I can't watch you have sex with another man.''

Doyle said Palmer got upset and kicked Kern and Shea out, but Haynes -- who worked with Palmer at a downtown restaurant and had a platonic relationship with the defendant -- stayed in the room.

The prosecutor said Palmer went out later on April 5, 2016, telling friends how proud he was of the "foursome'' he was in earlier.
he trash bin containing the victim's body was never picked up and two men saw the suitcase with what they thought were body parts sticking out and called 911, Doyle said.

The prosecutor said Palmer should be convicted of murder and murder during a rape, murder during sodomy and murder during a rape by an instrument. He faces life in prison without parole if he's found guilty.


Deputy Public Defender Katie Belisle said Palmer was "humiliated" when Haynes said "He can't get it up!" as she had sex with a random man she had just met.

----




Brody

https://ibb.co/jc1A5S

"Residents of two suburban Maryland counties were on the alert today for suspicious signs which might lead police to a masked rapist who has attacked 26 women over the last year. Officials of Prince George's County, which adjoins the District of Columbia, disclosed Friday that massive police efforts to trap the attacker had failed and the public was being called on for help. Police said the man's usual method of operation was to force his way into dwellings, threaten his victims with a knife or gun and assault them He wears Ku Klux Klan type hood, its color and material varying, according to his victims. Completely Clothed He has usually worn gloves and has been so completely clothed that until recently his race or age could not be determined, police said. But this sketchy description was finally compiled: White, in his late teens or early 20s, slender and of medium height. Police said the rapist's victims ranged in age from 18 to 50. When a victim's husband was at home, the husband was tied up and the woman assaulted in another room. Some of the women were beaten, officials said, and their homes burglarized."

----
https://melmagazine.com/arturo-alva-moreno-was-9-11-victim-2-754-or-was-he-987ab8e4a6f0

Arturo Alva-Moreno Was World Trade Center Victim #2,754. Or Was He?
His daughter is certain he died at the World Trade Center. But as far as the government is concerned, he never even existed
Her father said he worked at the top of the Tower, midway between the ground and the sky. So he must have been in there, somewhere, when the plane hit and the Tower vanished on September 11, 2001.

He wasn’t supposed to be there. Not really. He was an undocumented immigrant. He had no work permit. His papers were forged. But he was definitely there, right at the top. She was sure of it. Where else could he be?

Arturo had told her he washed dishes at Windows on the World, the fancy restaurant at One World Trade Center, up on the 106th floor. He made a few bucks an hour, but he sent cash to Mexico whenever he could. The cash stopped in the second week of September 2001, and there were no more stories from the restaurant at the top of the world. But there was another phone call. The man on the line was from the Mexican Consulate, the one opposite the Chrysler Building. Someone had found Arturo’s wallet in the rubble, hidden beneath the twisted metal and scattered debris. The call confirmed what Laura already knew: Her father died in the World Trade Center.

“Many Mexicans worked in the U.S. under a false name or with a fake ID, which made it difficult for their loved ones to claim them,” Padilla explains. They â€" the undocumented â€" worked menial jobs, had no Social Security numbers, got paid in cash, sacrificed their identities. Arturo was part of this underground labor force â€" one of the invisible, careful not to leave a paper trail. Now, the feds wanted proof he lived in New York â€" “A document with his name on it, or a witness,” Padilla remembers â€" or his family wouldn’t receive a death certificate.

Padilla chews over the few clues. “Maybe Arturo was living under a different name like many other illegal immigrants,” he says. “But maybe he didn’t live in New York. Maybe he didn’t die in the 9/11 attacks. Who knows! The family’s payment from the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund could’ve reached $7 million. Can you believe that?”

He wonders if Arturo seized an opportunity â€" the ultimate opportunity â€" to disappear; if he exploited an American tragedy. “Many people I talked to in New York thought he was alive and living in California,” Padilla says. “I was thinking of searching for him, but I need time and money to do that.”

ksm32

Quote from: Gd5150 on February 17, 2018, 12:07:36 PM
Good thread. These stories are creepy. Would make for great podcasts.

Agreed, and there seems to be more than enough content to get it going.

bellNwhistle

So, my big think lately is true crime podcasts. Can't get enough of them, though the last few weeks I haven't listened to many.  I've been listening to Michelle Macnamera's book about the Golden State Killer.

Is there a True Crime Podcast thread going, or is this pretty much it?

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